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Bob Wharton signaled frantically to his wife, but there was no stopping the discussion that had begun to rage back and forth. It lasted until the conclusion of the meal, and it was only with an effort that Adoree tore herself away. She was in her element, and in a little time had won the critic's undivided attention; he listened with absorption; he even made occasional notes.
Are there people who have never, in the course of anxious life, felt desire to be away, to fly away, from every thing, however good and dear to them, and rest a little, and think new thought, or let new thought flow into them, from the gentle air of some new place, where nobody has heard of them a place whose cares, being felt by proxy, almost seem romantic, and where the eyes spare brain and heart with a critic's self-complacence?
We Americans know with what moderate equipment diplomatic messages may be done. On poetry and poets Mr. Carlyle has written many of his best pages, pages penetrating, discriminative, because so sympathetic, and executed with the scholar's care and the critic's culture. His early papers on Goethe and Burns, published more than forty years ago, made something like an epoch in English criticism.
It is a cardinal doctrine of Hennequin and Robertson that, as the personal element plays the chief rôle in everything the critic writes, he himself should be the first to submit to a grilling; in a word, to be put through his paces and tell us in advance of his likes and dislikes, his prejudices and passions. Naturally, it doesn't take long to discover the particular bias of a critic's mind.
To such devices, in good earnest, were those compelled to resort who ventured upon the ticklish experiment of presenting heroic entertainments for king's palaces, where 'hanging was the word' in case of a fright; but, with a genius like this behind the scenes, so fertile in invention, so various in gifts, who could aggravate his voice so effectually, giving you one moment the pitch of 'the sucking dove, or 'roaring you like any nightingale, and the next, 'the Hercle's vein, with a genius who knew how to play, not 'the tyrant's part only, but 'the lover's, which is more condoling, and whose suggestion that the audience should look to their eyes in that case, was by no means a superfluous one; with a genius who had all passions at his command, who could drown, at his pleasure, the sharp critic's eye, or blind it with showers of pity, or 'make it water with the merriest tears, that the passion of loud laughter ever shed, with such resources, prince's edicts could be laughed to scorn.
I had as big a fee there only two days ago as ever I received when I was practising in London." The company looked up in astonishment, but like Brer Rabbit, I lay low to see if they cared for an explanation. I thought I saw a twinkle in my critic's eye as it caught mine. "Go ahead," was all that he said, however. Deep-Water "Crik," we call it. About half a dozen fishermen's families live there.
Zola, pitching overboard many friends, wrote his famous eulogy of Manet in the Evenement, and the row he raised was so fierce that he was forced to resign as art critic from that journal. The fight then began in earnest. The story is a thrice-told one. It may be read in Théodore Duret's study of Manet and, as regards Cézanne, in the same critic's volume on Impressionism.
Every censure, every sarcasm respecting a publication which the critic, with the criticised work before him, can make good, is the critic's right. The writer is authorized to reply, but not to complain. Neither can anyone prescribe to the critic, how soft or how hard; how friendly, or how bitter, shall be the phrases which he is to select for the expression of such reprehension or ridicule.
I am referring to the substitution of assertion for argument; to the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts, not seldom unsupported even by a single quotation from the work condemned, which might at least have explained the critic's meaning, if it did not prove the justice of his sentence.
Arnold's day, and French had much: he thought just the other way, and reserved his encomium of France for its prose, in which it was drooping and failing. But this did not matter: it is the general scope of the critic's advice which is valuable in such cases, and the general scope of Mr. Arnold's was sound. On the third party, however, himself, the effect was a little disastrous.
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