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Mrs. Greyne smiled. The ignorance of the humbly born entertained her. It was so simple, so transparent. "You fail to understand me," she answered. "But never mind; others have done the same." She thought of her reviewers. Mrs. Forbes smiled. She also could be entertained. "Madam?" she inquired once more after a pause. "I shall leave for Africa to-morrow morning," said Mrs. Greyne.
Homer was seemingly blind to much simple truth; Vergil carries you away from earth; Horace was undone without his Mæcenas; Dante makes you an exile; Shakespeare was singularly silent concerning the doubts, difficulties and common lives of common people; Byron's corsair life does not help you in your toil, and in his fight with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers we crave neutrality; to be caught in the meshes of Pope's "Dunciad" is not pleasant; and Lowell's "Fable for Critics" is only another "Dunciad."
It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature. The difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels is the difficulty of sustaining any standard. Where there is no style a standard must be impossible. The poor reviewers are apparently reduced to be the reporters of the police-court of literature, the chroniclers of the doings of the habitual criminals of art.
Wall and his reviewers, in the late controversy about "phonetic signs," I could not have been more completely puzzled than by the contents of this note. "Make merry at his expense!" a great offence truly I suppose I have laughed at better men than ever he was; and I can only say of such innocent amusement, as Falstaff did of sack and sugar, if such be a sin, "then heaven help the wicked."
Joseph Ritson, the antiquary, who, though not a poet, was a great writer on poetry and our early English songs and ballads, complained bitterly of the ignorant reviewers, and described himself as brought to an end in ill- health and low spirits certain to be insulted by a base and prostitute gang of lurking assassins who stab in the dark, and whose poisoned daggers he had already experienced.
'The first duty of a novelist is to tell a story: the perpetual repetition of this phrase is a warning to all men who propose drawing from the life. Biffen only offered a slice of biography, and it was found to lack flavour. He wrote to Mrs Reardon: 'I cannot thank you enough for this very kind letter about my book; I value it more than I should the praises of all the reviewers in existence.
That seven-eighths of the town are led by the nose by this or that periodical work, having wholly lost sight of the fact, that reviews are far from being gospel. Indeed, I do not know any set of men so likely to err as reviewers.
Perry Wilkinson is not happier in citing her reply to his compliment on the reviewers' unanimous eulogy of her humour and pathos: the 'merry clown and poor pantaloon demanded of us in every work of fiction, she says, lamenting the writer's compulsion to go on producing them for applause until it is extremest age that knocks their knees.
Years afterward the reviewers always talked of Mizzi's walk. They called it her superb carriage. They didn't know that you have to walk very straight, on the balls of your feet, with your hips firm, your stomach held in flat, your shoulders back, your chest out, your chin out and a little down, if you are going to be at all successful in balancing a pail of mortar on your head.
Growing sore prematurely from much keelhauling for the reviewers of the period were patriotic, and the English public anti-Gallic Frank quitted his chambers at Lincoln's Inn, and came home to be comforted for Christmas. This was the wisest thing that he could do, though he felt that it was not Harmodian. In spite of all crotchets, he was not a bad fellow, and not likely to make a good lawyer.
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