by any better tenure than that of the chicanery upon which we have commented—will be asserted by none but the ignorant, or the parties who have best right to feel an interest in the “good old condition of things.” No two matters can be more radically different than the reputation of some of our prominent littérateurs, as gathered from the mouths of the people—who glean it from the paragraphs of the papers—and the same reputation as deduced from the private estimate of intelligent and educated men. We do not advance this fact as a new discovery. Its truth, on the contrary, is the subject, and has long been so, of every-day witticism and mirth.
Why not? Surely there can be few things more ridiculous than the general character and assumptions of the ordinary critical notices of new books. A back-woods editor, sometimes without the shadow of the commonest attainment—always without time—often without brains—does not hesitate to give the world to understand that he is in the daily habit of critically reading and deciding upon a flood of publications, one-tenth of whose title-pages he may possibly have turned over—three-fourths of whose contents would be Hebrew to his most desperate efforts at comprehension—an whose entire mass and amount, as might be mathematically demonstrated, would be sufficient to occupy, in the most cursory perusal, the attention of some ten or twenty readers for a month. What he wants in plausibility, however, he makes up in obsequiousness—what he lacks in time, he supplies in temper. He is the most easily pleased man in the world. He admires everything, from the big dictionary of NOAH WEBSTER, to the last diamond edition of TOM THUMB. Indeed his sole difficulty is in finding tongue to express his delight. Every pamphlet is a miracle—every book in boards is an epoch in letters. His phrases, therefore, grow larger and larger every day; and if it were not for talking “HARRISON AINSWORTH,” we might call him a “regular swell.”
Yet, in the attempt at getting definite information in regard tn any one portion of our literature, the merely general reader, or the foreigner, will turn in vain from the lighter to the heavier journals. But it is not our intention here to dwell upon our Magazines. Undoubtedly, one of the very best of them was “Arcturus.” It was edited by gentlemen of taste, of high talent, and of much general literary knowledge. Of the honesty of Arcturus we have a high opinion—but what even it did, or was likely to do, in tho cause of judicious criticism, may be gleaned from a passage in one of its most elaborate contributed papers. It says:—
“But now, criticism has a wider scope and a universal interest. It dismisses errors of grammar, and hands over an imperfect rhyme, or a false quantity, to the proofreader. It looks now to the heart of the subject, and the author’s design. It is a test of opinion. Good criticism may be well asked for, since it is the type of the literature of the day. A criticism, now, includes every form of literature, except, perhaps, the imaginative and the strictly dramatic. It is an essay, a sermon, an oration, a chapter in history, a philosophical speculation, a prose poem, an art-novel, a dialogue. It admits of humor, pathos, the personal feelings of auto-biography, the broadest views of statesmanship. As the ballad and the epic were the productions of the days of Homer, the review is the native characteristic growth of the nineteenth century.”
We must dissent from nearly all that is here said. The species of review which is designated as the “characteristic growth of the nineteenth century,” is only the growth of the last twenty or thirty years in GREAT BRITAIN. The French reviews, for example, which are not anonymous; preserve the unique spirit of true criticism. And what need we say of the Germans?—what of WINKLEMANN?—of SCHELLING?—of GÖTHE—of AUGUSTUS WILLIAM?—and of FREDERICK, SCHLEGEL?—that their magnificent critiques raisonnées, differ from those of JOHNSON, of ADDISON, and of BLAIR, in principle not at all,—for the principles of these artists will not fail until Nature herself expires—but solely in their more careful elaboration, their greater thoroughness, their more profound analysis and application of the principles themselves. To say that a criticism now should be different in spirit, from a criticism at any previous period, is to insinuate a charge of variability in laws that cannot vary—the laws of man’s heart and intellect—for here are the sole basis upon which the true critical art is established. And this art now, no more than in the days of the “Dunciad,” can, without neglect of its duty, “dismiss errors of grammar,” or “hand over imperfect rhymes to the proof-reader.” And all that which “Arcturus,” maintains a criticism to be, is all that which we sturdily maintain it is not. Criticism is not, we think, an essay, nor a sermon, nor an oration, nor a chapter in history, nor a philosophical speculation, nor a prose-poem, nor an art-novel, nor a dialogue. In fact, It can be nothing in the world but a—criticism. But if it were all that “Arcturus” imagines, it is not so very clear why it might not equally be “imaginative,” or dramatic—a romance or a melo-drama—or both. That it would be a farce cannot be doubted.
It is against this frantic spirit of generalization that we protest. We have a word, “criticism,” whose import is sufficiently distinct, through long usage, at least; and we have an art of high importance and clearly ascertained limit, which this word is quite well-enough understood to represent. Of that conglomerate science to which Arcturus’ correspondent so eloquently alludes, and of which we are instructed that it is anything and everything at once—of this peculiar science we are not particularly well qualified to speak; but we must object to the appropriation, in its behalf, of a term to which we, in common with a large majority of mankind, have been accustomed to attach a certain and very definitive idea. Is there no word but “criticism” which may be made to serve the purposes intended. Is there any objection to Orphicism, or Dialism, or Alcottism—or any other frequent compound indicative of confusion worse confounded?
But critical heresies such as these are but a softened expression, or reflection, of the ruling “cant of the day.” By the ruling cant of the day we mean the disgusting practice of putting on the airs of an owl, and endeavoring to look miraculously wise;—the affectation of second-sight—of a species of extatic prescience—of an intensely bathetic penetration into all sorts of mysteries, psychological ones in especial;—an orphic, an ostrich affectation, which buries its head in balderdash, and, seeing nothing itself, fancies, therefore, that its preposterous carcass is not a visible object of derision for the world at large; an affectation particularly in vogue, just now, among a knot of miserable bedlamites in BOSTON—a clique of pitiable dunderheads who go about babbling in parables, and swearing by CARLYLE, with a leer in one eye and a mass of lachrymose hair plastered carefully over the other—a set of thumb-sucking babies and idiots, who could not do a better thing for their own comfort and that of the community than blow out the exceedingly small modicum of hasty-pudding which they imagine to be their brains.
Let us, by way of exemplification, imagine one of these gentlemen reviewing—as he calls it—the Paradise Lost. He would discourse of it thus:
“The Paradise Lost is the earnest outpouring of the oneness of the psychological MAN. It has the individuality of the true singleness. It is not to be regarded as a poem—but as a work—as a multiple Theogony—as a manifestation of the Works and the Days. It is a pinion for the Progress—a wheel in the Movement that moveth ever and goeth alway—a mirror of Self-Inspection, held up by the Seer of the Age essential—of the Age in esse—for the Seers of the Ages possible—in posse. We hail a brother in the Work.”
Of the mere opinions of the donkeys who brag thus—of their mere dogmas and doctrines, literary, aesthetical, or what not—we know little, and, upon our honor, we wish to know less. Occupied, laputically, in their great work of a Progress that never progresses, we take it for granted, also, that they care as little about ours. But whatever the opinions of these people may be—however portentous the “IDEA” which they have been so long threatening to “evolve”—we still think it clear that they take a very roundabout way of evolving it. The use of language is in the promulgation of thought. If a man, or a SEER, or whatever else he may choose to call himself, while the rest of the world calls him an ass—if he have an idea which he does not understand himself, the least thing he can do is to say nothing about it; for, of course, he can entertain no hope that what he, the SEER cannot comprehend,
