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This unpleasant discovery was presently followed by another that the rudest and most contemptuous personal remark was founded on an ignorant misapprehension of the reviewer's own; while in ridicule of a mere misprint which happened to carry a comic suggestion on the face of it, the reviewer surpassed himself.
Thanks to modern fecundity, critics rarely molest authors with demands for the raison d'être of a new book. The reviewer's question used to be, "Why did the man publish? What need was there? What is he trying to show?" One pontiff is said to have suggested burning up all the different books in the world, except six thousand, so that the rest might be read. There used to be pleas for condensations, as if people were still fondly hoping to compass the realm of literature and science, the blessed era of hopelessness having not yet dawned. But it is idle to plead against diffuseness now, when writers are paid by the page or line. "I want," said the editor of "La Situation" to Dumas, "a story from you, entitled 'Terreur Prussienne
They should not mind the reviewer's jeer; he doesn't remember any of the worn old things until the book which he is reviewing has retold them to him. I have made the quoted remark myself, at one time and another, but I was not doing it to flatter the reader; I was merely doing it to save work.
No keen-witted reader would ever confound the active, rosy, domestic Phoebe Pyncheon with the dreamy, sensitive, and strongly subjective Hilda of "The Marble Faun;" and Hawthorne might have sent a communication to the Athenaeum to refresh the reviewer's memory, for it was not Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance" who was dogged by a mysterious persecutor, but her half-sister Priscilla.
Women ought, perhaps, always to make the best critics at once more quicksighted, more tasteful, more sympathetic than ourselves, whose proper business is creation. Perhaps in Utopia they will take the reviewer's business entirely off our hands, as they are said to be doing already, by-the-bye, in one leading periodical.
The Investigator, as Harviss phrased it, "set the pace," and the other journals followed, finding it easier to let their critical man-of-all-work play a variation on the first reviewer's theme than to secure an expert to "do" the book afresh.
Dear Darwin, I am very glad you approve of my article on "Creation by Law" as a whole. The "machine metaphor" is not mine, but the North British reviewer's. I merely accept it and show that it is on our side and not against us, but I do not think it at all a good metaphor to be used as an argument either way.
Meantime, I had sufficiently indicated that, whatsoever street was concerned in that affair, Oxford-street was not; and it is remarkable enough, as illustrating this amiable reviewer's veracity, that no one street in London was absolutely excluded but one; and that one, Oxford-street. I will now add that this house was in Greek-street: so much it may be safe to say.
Mivart can be said to have damaged Darwinism whatever else they have injured this is what their criticisms come to. They confound a struggle for some rifle-pits with an assault on the fortress. In some respects, finally, I can only characterize the Quarterly Reviewer's treatment of Mr. Darwin as alike unjust and unbecoming.
He also watched the nearest entrance with some anxiety, for the reviewer's presence did not fit well with his plans. As he finished ordering he heard Pope say: "I was sorry the story got out, Miss Knight; but it was pretty well smothered in this evening's papers. Of course, you were dragged in by the hair to afford a Roman spectacle: we all saw what it meant when it came to us."
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