together reconceive its
office before it can be of use to literature. It must reduce this to the
business of observing, recording, and comparing; to analyzing the
material before it, and then synthetizing its impressions. Even then, it
is not too much to say that literature as an art could get on perfectly
well without it. Just as many good novels, poems, plays, essays,
sketches, would be written if there were no such thing as criticism in
the literary world, and no more bad ones.

But it will be long before criticism ceases to imagine itself a
controlling force, to give itself airs of sovereignty, and to issue
decrees. As it exists it is mostly a mischief, though not the greatest
mischief; but it may be greatly ameliorated in character and softened in
manner by the total abolition of anonymity.

I think it would be safe to say that in no other relation of life is so
much brutality permitted by civilized society as in the criticism of
literature and the arts. Canon Farrar is quite right in reproaching
literary criticism with the uncandor of judging an author without
reference to his aims; with pursuing certain writers from spite and
prejudice, and mere habit; with misrepresenting a book by quoting a
phrase or passage apart from the context; with magnifying misprints and
careless expressions into important faults; with abusing an author for
his opinions; with base and personal motives.

Every writer of experience knows that certain critical journals will
condemn his work without regard to its quality, even if it has never been
his fortune to learn, as one author did from a repentent reviewer, that
in a journal pretending to literary taste his books were given out for
review with the caution, "Remember that the Clarion is opposed to Mr.
Blank's books."

The final conclusion appears to be that the man, or even the young lady,
who is given a gun, and told to shoot at some passer from behind a hedge,
is placed in circumstances of temptation almost too strong for human
nature.

XII.

As I have already intimated, I doubt the more lasting effects of unjust
criticism. It is no part of my belief that Keats's fame was long delayed
by it, or Wordsworth's, or Browning's. Something unwonted, unexpected,
in the quality of each delayed his recognition; each was not only a poet,
he was a revolution, a new order of things, to which the critical
perceptions and habitudes had painfully to adjust themselves: But I have
no ques