only to be discovered in their several humble disguises,
and then we should see every-day people actuated by the fine frenzy of
the creatures of the poets. How false that notion was, few but the
critics, who are apt to be rather belated, need now be told. Some of
these poor fellows, however, still contend that it ought to be done, and
that human feelings and motives, as God made them and as men know them,
are not good enough for novel-readers.

This is more explicable than would appear at first glance. The critics
--and in speaking of them one always modestly leaves one's self out of
the count, for some reason--when they are not elders ossified in
tradition, are apt to be young people, and young people are necessarily
conservative in their tastes and theories. They have the tastes and
theories of their instructors, who perhaps caught the truth of their day,
but whose routine life has been alien to any other truth. There is
probably no chair of literature in this country from which the principles
now shaping the literary expression of every civilized people are not
denounced and confounded with certain objectionable French novels, or
which teaches young men anything of the universal impulse which has given
us the work, not only of Zola, but of Tourguenief and Tolstoy in Russia,
of Bjornson and Ibsen in Norway, of Valdes and Galdos in Spain, of Verga
in Italy. Till these younger critics have learned to think as well as to
write for themselves they will persist in heaving a sigh, more and more
perfunctory, for the truth as it was in Sir Walter, and as it was in
Dickens and in Hawthorne. Presently all will have been changed; they
will have seen the new truth in larger and larger degree; and when it
shall have become the old truth, they will perhaps see it all.

VI.

In the mean time the average of criticism is not wholly bad with us.
To be sure, the critic sometimes appears in the panoply of the savages
whom we have supplanted on this continent; and it is hard to believe that
his use of the tomahawk and the scalping-knife is a form of conservative
surgery. It is still his conception of his office that he should assail
those who differ with him in matters of taste or opinion; that he must be
rude with those he does not like. It is too largely his superstition
that because he likes a thing it is good, and because he dislikes a thing
it is bad; the reverse is quite possibly the case, but he is yet
indefinitely far fro