types had been to reveal the
infinite variety of character which lay hid in each and every human
type.

Some such reviewer, Eugenio thought, all journals pretending to literary
authority ought to keep on their staff for the comfort of veteran
authors and for the dispensation of that more delicate and sympathetic
justice which their case required. It might be well enough to use a pair
of ordinary steelyards, or even hay-scales, in weighing out the rewards
and punishments of younger authors, but some such sensitive balance as
only the sympathetic nerves of equal years, and, if possible, equal
intelligence, could adjust ought to be used in ascertaining the merits
of a veteran author.

In his frankest self-consciousness, Eugenio did not say a veteran author
like himself, and he did not insist exclusively upon a veteran critic
for his behoof. There were times when he thought that a young critic,
coming in the glow of adolescence and the freshness of knowledge won
from the recent study of all his works, might be better fitted to
appreciate the qualities of the latest. He quite rejected the notion,
when it came to business, with which he had sometimes played, of an
author reviewing his own books, and this apart from his sense of its
immodesty. In the course of his experience he had known of but one
really great author who had done this, and then had done it upon the
invitation of an editor of rare if somewhat wilful perspicacity, who
invited the author to do it on the ground that no one else could do it
so well. But though he would not have liked to be his own reviewer,
because it was not seemly, he chiefly feared that if put upon his honor,
as he would be in such a case, he must deal with his work so damagingly
as to leave little or nothing of it. He might make the reputation of a
great critic, but in doing execution upon his own shortcomings he might
be the means of destroying himself as a great author.

After all, authors are not the self-satisfied generation they must
often seem to the public which has tried to spoil them with praise.
There is much in doing a thing which makes a man modest in regard to the
way he has done it. Even if he knows that he has done it well, if the
testimony of all his faculties is to that effect, there is somehow the
lurking sense that it was not he who really did it, but that there is a
power, to turn Matthew Arnold's phrase to our use, "not ourselves, that
works for" beauty as well as right