uncandid to the verge of dishonesty. He seems
not to mind misstating the position of any one he supposes
himself to disagree with, and then attacking him for
what he never said, or even implied; he thinks this
is droll, and appears not to suspect that it is immoral.
He is not tolerant; he thinks it a virtue to be intolerant;
it is hard for him to understand that the same thing
may be admirable at one time and deplorable at another;
and that it is really his business to classify and
analyze the fruits of the human mind very much as the
naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather
than to praise or blame them; that there is a measure
of the same absurdity in his trampling on a poem,
a novel, or an essay that does not please him as in
the botanist’s grinding a plant underfoot because
he does not find it pretty. He does not conceive
that it is his business rather to identify the species
and then explain how and where the specimen is imperfect
and irregular. If he could once acquire this
simple idea of his duty he would be much more agreeable
company than he now is, and a more useful member of
society; though considering the hard conditions under
which he works, his necessity of writing hurriedly
from an imperfect examination of far more books, on
a greater variety of subjects, than he can even hope
to read, the average American critic—the
ordinary critic of commerce, so to speak—is
even now very, well indeed. Collectively he is
more than this; for the joint effect of our criticism
is the pretty thorough appreciation of any book submitted
to it
VII.
The misfortune rather than the fault of our individual
critic is that he is the heir of the false theory
and bad manners of the English school. The theory
of that school has apparently been that almost any
person of glib and lively expression is competent
to write of almost any branch of polite literature;
its manners are what we know. The American, whom
it has largely formed, is by nature very glib and
very lively, and commonly his criticism, viewed as
imaginative work, is more agreeable than that of the
Englishman; but it is, like the art of both countries,
apt to be amateurish. In some degree our authors
have freed themselves from English models; they have
gained some notion of the more serious work of the
Continent: but it is still the ambition of the
American critic to write like the English critic,
to show his wit if not his learning, to strive to
eclipse the author under review rather than illustrate
him. He has not yet caught on to the fact that
it is really no part of his business to display himself,
but that it is altogether his duty to place a book
in such a light that the reader shall know its class,
its function, its character. The vast good-nature
of our people preserves us from the worst effects
of this criticism without principles. Our critic,
at his lowest, is rarely malignant; and when he is
rude or untruthful, it is mostly without truculence;