Curiosities of Criticism

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. HYPERCRITICISM AND SLASHING CRITICISM. ]HE critic's responsibility is a serious one. He is armed with tremendous strength. It is in his power with a few strokes of a heedless pen to deface, if not to demolish, the fair fabric of a lifelong work, to bruise the anxious heart of struggling but unknown merit, to do a cruel wrong by disparaging a work which he has barely examined, and which he has not troubled himself to understand. He has a giant's strength, not altogether by virtue of his own skill, but by virtue of the influence and circulation of the journal or review for which he writes. Woe be unto him if he uses it tyrannously! That it has been used tyrannously one need only turn to the back numbers of the older reviews to prove. Cutting up at one time almost became a profession. There were reviewers who vied with each other in the production of destructive criticism. So savage, and in many cases so untruthful, were many of these reviews, that it came to be said of the writer of some of them, as a jeud'esprit, that he was always lying in a critical condition. These corrosive critics seemed to be? A spiteful race, on mischief bent, Making men's woes their merriment. Dr. Johnson has remarked that the diversion of baiting an author has the sanction of all ages and nations, and it is more lawful than the sport of teasing other animals, because, for the most part, he comes voluntarily to the stake, furnished, as he imagines, by the patron powers of Literature with resistless weapons and impenetrable armour, with the mail of the boar of Erymanth, and the paws of the lion of Nemea. In one of the late Lord Lytton's tales, a critic in distress extenuates the severity of his literary judgments by saying that the only thing the magazines will...