expect? With an illiterate reading mob howling at our doors, and a tribe of pressmen scribbling at our tables, what, in the name of the universe, should we expect? What we get; not so? And the poor "gentleman and scholar," where he survives, is exposed to full many risks and full many sorrows. If he reads his penny daily in the morning, he is in danger of seeing his own critical vision obscured or distorted for the rest of the day, as his palate would be blunted should he breakfast off raw red herring. If he wants to write a book, he knows that there is no public to buy or read or understand it: and what's the use of casting pearls before animals that prefer acorns? If he wants to read a book, he knows that the entire output of decent literature in England during a year he might easily learn by heart in a fortnight. So he must read a foreign book or an old book, or else fall back, for fiction, upon our Stanley Weymans and our J. M. Barries; for poetry, upon our Sir Lewis Morrises or our Sir Edwin Arnolds; and for criticism . . . shall I say upon our Mr. Harry Quilters?
The critical periodicals of Great Britain make it a practice to review, notice, praise, or slate almost everything in the guise of a book or booklet which, by hook or crooklet, contrives to get itself put forth in print. They manage these affairs better in furrin' parts. In furrin' parts, your critical periodical silently ignores ninety-and-nine in every hundred of the books that are printed, and then—criticises the hundredth.
The fact is, Mr. Editor, that in order to criticise you must have certain endowments—you must have a certain equipment. You must have eyes and ears, you must have taste; you must have the analytic faculty and the knack of nice expression; you must have the habit of getting at close quarters with your thought and your emotion—you must be able to explain why, for what qualities, for what defects, you cherish Mr. Henry James (for
