Agreez, Monsieur,

l’expression de mes sentiments distingues,

Comte Lasdberg,

Dr.-es-lettres.

After these preliminaries I proceed to notice the article (No. 335, of July ’86) in

The “Edinburgh Review”

and to explain its private history with the motives which begat it.

“This is the Augustan age of English criticism,” say the reviewers, who are fond of remarking that the period is one of literary appreciation rather than of original production that is, contemporary reviewers, critics and monograph-writers are more important than “makers” in verse or in prose.  In fact it is their aurea aetas.  I reply “Virgin ore, no!” on the whole mixed metal, some noble, much ignoble; a little gold, more silver and an abundance of brass, lead and dross.  There is the criticism of Sainte Beuve, of the late Matthew Arnold and of Swinburne, there is also the criticism of the Saturday Reviler and of the Edinburgh criticaster.  The golden is truth and honour incarnate:  it possesses outsight and insight:  it either teaches and inspires or it comforts and consoles, save when a strict sense of duty compels it to severity:  briefly, it is keen and guiding and creative.  Let the young beginner learn by rote what one master says of another:—­“He was never provoked into coarseness:  his thrusts were made with the rapier according to the received rules of fence, he firmly upheld the honour of his calling, and in the exercise of it was uniformly fearless, independent and incorrupt.”  The Brazen is partial, one-sided, tricksy, misleading, immoral; serving personal and interested purposes and contemptuously forgetful of every obligation which an honest and honourable pen owes to the public and to itself.  Such critiques bring no profit to the reviewed.  He feels that he has been written up or written down by a literary hireling who has possibly been paid to praise or abuse him secondarily, and primarily to exalt or debase his publisher or his printer.

My own literary career has supplied me with many a curious study.  Writing upon subjects, say The Lake Regions of Central Africa which were then a type of the Unknown I could readily trace in the journalistic notices all the tricks and dodges of the trade.  The rare honest would confess that they could say nothing upon the subject, they came to me therefore for information and professed themselves duly thankful.  The many dishonest had recourse to a variety of devices.  The hard worker would read-up voyages and travels treating of the neighboring countries, Abyssinia, the Cape and the African Coasts Eastern and Western; thus he would write in a kind of reflected light without acknowledging his obligation to my volumes.  Another would review my book after the easy American fashion of hashing up the author’s production, taking all its facts from me with out disclosing that one fact to the reader and then proceed to “butter” or “slash.”