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Updated: May 26, 2025
A Weekly Journal criticises the critic of the critic's critic, and a daily paper favors us with some critical remarks on the performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has criticised the critical notice in the Monthly of the critical essay in the Quarterly on the critical work we started with.
D'Alembert replied with a much more rational interpretation of the great comedy, but finding himself seized with the critic's besetting impertinence of improving masterpieces, he suddenly stopped with the becoming reflection "But I perceive, sir, that I am giving lessons to Molière."
If it is really liberal which means that training and disposition have made it free to move through both the past and the present it can cope with this Egyptian barbarism; for liberal-minded lovers of literature, by performing a very simple operation in psychoanalysis, can understand how love for the good old times may cause fear lest we lose their fruits, and how fear blinds the critic's eye, makes his tongue harsh, and his judgment rigid as death.
It is true that the critic has many temptations to go with the stream, to make one of the party movement, one of these terræ filii; it seems ungracious to refuse to be a terræ filius, when so many excellent people are; but the critic's duty is to refuse, or, if resistance is vain, at least to cry with Obermann: Périssons en résistant .
But it is not such a report, and it cannot be in the limits assigned it, which are the only tolerable limits with the reader. The author would not mind if the critic's report were physically commensurate with his book; but, of course, the reader could not stand that; and, generous as they are, other authors might complain.
'Short of Arctic, he had to say. 'But a gallop, after an Arctic bath, would soon spin the blood-upon an Esquimaux dog, of course, he pursued, to anticipate his critic's remark on the absence of horses, with a bow. She smiled, accepting the mental alertness he fastened on her. We must perforce be critics of these tear-away wits; which are, moreover, so threadbare to conceal the character!
We have merely the critic's opinion that Will could not write Hamlet, even if, like Wordsworth, "he had the mind," even if the gods had made him more poetical than Wilkins. The "Johannes Factotum," who could "bumbast out a blank verse," is taken from Robert Greene's hackneyed attack on an actor-poet, "Shake- scene," published in 1592.
Abramo Basevi, an Italian critic, who wrote a book of studies on Verdi's operas, following the fashion set by Lenz in his book on Beethoven, divides the operas which he had written up to the critic's time into examples of three styles, the early operas marking his first manner and "Luisa Miller" the beginning of his second.
In fact, they have the curious mania for the theatre which induces many people with no talent for acting to abandon comfortable careers and starve on the stage or at the stage door. That the critic's sufferings in the playhouse are considerable is incontestable, and they are keener at the performance of works of mediocrity than when watching very bad plays.
As I live, 'twas not ill-devised for a madman's brain! ... and so solemn a ranter should serve your Majesty to make merriment withal, in place of my poor Zabastes, whose peevish jests grow somewhat stale owing to the Critic's chronic want of originality!
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