ous minds. I will not mention Keats, for
after the savage and Tartarly article he went on producing in greater
quantity and finer quality than ever before, and would have so continued
but for a very natural death. Robert Montgomery, whom Macaulay killed,
is a happier instance. And there may here and there also have been a
poet or novelist like that "Pictor Ignotus" of Browning's, who cried:

"I could have painted pictures like that youth's
Ye praise so!"

He would have had a painter's fame:

"But a voice changed it. Glimpses of such sights
Have scared me, like the revels through a door
Of some strange house of idols at its rites!
This world seemed not the world it was, before:
Mixed with my loving, trusting ones, there trooped
... Who summoned those cold faces that begun
To press on me and judge me? Though I stooped
Shrinking, as from the soldiery a nun,
They drew me forth, and spite of me ... enough!"

Unhappily, there are few souls so humble, so conventual as that. George
Eliot, as Mr. Walkley recalled, was terrified lest ill-judged blame or
ill-judged praise should discourage her production; but then she made it
a strict rule never to read any criticism, so that, of course, it had no
restraining effect upon her. Wordsworth seems to have read his critics,
but though they did their utmost to restrain or silence him, he paid no
heed. "Too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet," he called them:

"Too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too
feeble to grapple with him;--men of palsied imagination and
indurated hearts; in whose minds all healthy action is languid,
who therefore feed as the many direct them, or, with the many,
are greedy after vicious provocatives;--judges, whose censure
is auspicious, and whose praise ominous!"

In them there was no restraining power for such a man, any more than in
Christopher North for Tennyson:

"When I heard from whom it came,
I forgave you all the blame;
I could not forgive the praise,
Rusty Christopher!"

On this line, then, there is not much to be hoped from the critics.
Over-sensitive writers are too rare, and the productive impulse of the
others is too self-confident for prudence to smother. Obviously, they
care no more for the critics than Tom and Sal a century ago cared for
Malthus. They disregard them. The most savage criticism only confirms
their belief in the beauty and necessity of their progeny, just as a