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A review of Mr. Longfellow's poem. EUREKA! Here, then, we have it at last, an American poem, with the lack of which British reviewers have so long reproached us.
And Blackwood's Magazine, which the Ruskins, as Edinburgh people and admirers of Christopher North, read with respect, spoke about Turner, in a review of the picture-season, with that freedom of speech which Scotch reviewers claim as a heritage from the days of Jeffrey. Young Ruskin at once dashed off an answer.
While we were still in Columbus I began to read them, but I did not read so much of them as could have helped me to a truer and freer ideal. I read "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," and I liked its vulgar music and its heavy-handed sarcasm.
She took away the reproach which lay on a most useful and delightful species of composition. Prejudice, however, dies hard; and the same writer tells us in another essay that seventy years later, some reviewers were still of opinion that a lady who dares to publish a book renounces by that act the franchises appertaining to her sex, and can claim no exemption from the utmost rigour of critical procedure.
In their scientific objections the two reviewers take somewhat different lines; but their philosophical and theological arguments strikingly coincide.
We must say we think little of our author's turn for satire. His "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is dogmatical and insolent, but without refinement or point.
In another article, after speaking in the most enthusiastic terms of Chopin's trio, in which "every note is music and life," he exclaims, "Wretched Berlin critic, who has no understanding for these things, and never will have poor fellow!" And seven years later, in 1843, he writes, with fine contempt for his critical colleagues, that "for the typical reviewers Chopin never did write, anyway."
Yet the publication of "Rome," was the signal for a general outcry on the part of English and American reviewers that Zolaism, as typified by the Rougon-Macquart series, was altogether a thing of the past. To my thinking this is a profound error. M. Zola has always remained faithful to himself.
The reviewers refused to notice, and the public to buy, the 'Rural Muse. There was no critic in all England to say one word in its recommendation; nor one of all the old friends and patrons who sent a cheering note of praise to the author. Of the ill success of his book Clare, however, heard soon enough.
This is a wild dream, but it would be a grand thing for American reviewing if every one of our young reviewers could have for an hour each week the moral benefit of the society of such a man. I know one who now has been active in New York literary journalism for something like thirty years a fine intellectual figure of a man.
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