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He must say to himself that Balzac, when he imagined these monsters, was not Balzac, he was Dumas; he was not realistic, he was romanticistic. Such a critic will not respect Balzac's good work the less for contemning his bad work. He will easily account for the bad work historically, and when he has recognized it, will trouble himself no further with it.
But as soon as the critic betrays, that he knows more of his author, than the author's publications could have told him; as soon as from this more intimate knowledge, elsewhere obtained, he avails himself of the slightest trait against the author; his censure instantly becomes personal injury, his sarcasms personal insults.
It is evident that he was a born critic, and his private correspondence is full of expressions showing that if he had been conducting a journal in England, his criticism of certain phases of English policy would have been as severe as those which he indulged in weekly at the expense of this country. "How Ireland sits heavy on your soul!" he wrote to James Bryce.
"Bob has always had a martial look!" cried Maud, quickly "He got that in garrison, when a boy." "If so, I hope he may never lose it!" said the subject of the remark, himself, who had entered the room unperceived, and overheard this speech. "Being a soldier, one would wish to look like what he is, my little critic."
To confound the reasoning of the mature man, by pointing to what he did at twenty-two, is, I submit, irrelevant, immaterial, inconsequent, unrelated and uncalled for. When a critic has nothing to say of a man's work, but calls attention to the errors of the author's youth, he is running short of material.
But the critic is himself only a trower; and if the whole process of experience should terminate at that instant, there would be no otherwise known independent reality with which HIS thought might be compared. The immediate in experience is always provisionally in this situation.
Jack Meredith saw that fact and noted it as soon as he came into the room. Moreover, it gratified him, and he was pleased to reflect that he was no mean critic in such matters. There could be no doubt about it, because he KNEW as well as any woman there.
I think that he was especially resentful toward any one who volunteered criticism based on a legal provision, precept, or precedent, apparently assuming that the critic opposed his purpose on the merits and in order to defeat it interposed needless legal objections. It is unnecessary to comment on the prejudice which such an attitude of mind made evident.
"The best and most generous of men! He's a critic all critics are large-minded and generous, we know, but he happens to be remarkably so. He did me the kindest turn I ever had in my life. When my first book came out, he fell upon it tooth and claw, mangled it, tore it to ribbons, metaphorically speaking, and waved the fragments mockingly in the eyes of the public.
A critic who found "no nice discriminations of character in Macbeth," and defended Tate's "happy family" ending of Lear, was not unnaturally dismissed or ignored by those who had sat at the feet of Coleridge or Lamb. There is still one other thing which told against him. No one influenced the course of English literature in the nineteenth century so much as Wordsworth.
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