.
They want only highly colored characters from which every mellow shade
of fault has been obliterated. One cannot say that they have a real love
of human nature, because they do not know what human nature is. They are
ready to take up arms with it at every turn. Such people cannot see that
ridicule, or gossip, can be either innocent or malignant; that history
can be either prejudiced or unbiased.

With many, refusing to hear adverse criticism is a mere pose, while with
others it is cynicism. In intercourse with the uneducated, any well-bred
person is properly shocked by their pleasure in detraction and in bad
news of all sorts. But the detestable people who seek every occasion to
vilify, and who wish to hear only harm of the world, are so exceptional
as to be negligible. These rare villains are eliminated when one speaks
of inability to distinguish between detraction and adverse criticism.
Those who can praise well are always adepts at criticizing adversely.
They never carry their criticism too far, nor give purposely an acrid
touch to it.

There is a grim tradition that a person should never say anything behind
another's back which he would not say before his face. This is all very
well so far as it relates to venomous tales repeated purposely to
injure; but how colorless are the people who never have critical
opinions on anything or anybody; or people who, having them, never
express them! Criticism and cavil are two very different things. Absence
of criticism is absence of the power of distinction. This age of science
has taught people to look truth straight in the face and learn to
discriminate. That person to whom everything is sweet does not know what
sweet is. The sophisticated world, unlike the unsophisticated, is not
afraid of "passing remarks." There is no doubt that criticism, whether
it comes directly or roundabout, adds a terror to life as soon as one
goes below a certain level of cultivation. The uneducated are frightened
at the mere thought of criticism; the cultivated are not. Perhaps the
reason for this difference is that ordinary people have a brutal and
entirely uncritical criticism to fear. In that society sensitiveness is
not very common. They are not dishonorable; they are merely hardy and
can see no distinctions. It is not given to these people to praise
rationally and to censure discriminatingly. Vilifying remarks are made
and repeated among them which clever people would be incapable of
utteri