Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; / or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkaes, Parish Advocate in the Burgh of Kuhschnappel.

LONDON: YORK ST., COVENT GARDEN NEW YORK 66 FIFTH AVENUE, AND BOMBAY: 53 ESPLANADE ROAD CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON BELL & CO.
This is how the question stands, and several consequences follow as matters of course; the indifferent class of readers consider the author incapable of making any critical emendations, while the enthusiastic class think none are necessary—their common point of agreement being the supposition that he absorbs and emits the whole thing with the same natural, matter of course, ease and absence of effort as the Aphides, the plant-lice, do the honey-dew, which is in such request with the bees, though, unlike the said bees, he is not very clever at making the wax for it.
Then there are a good many who think every line should be left in the condition in which it first flowed, or burst, spontaneously from its author’s fancy—just as if corrections were not themselves spontaneous outbursts as well as the other. Other readers prefer to belong to none of the above factions and consequently belong, to some extent, to all. Were it my object to express myself briefly, I should merely have to do so as follows:—firstly, they say, it would be much better if he simply spoke artlessly out whatever he finds it in his heart to say! and (if this is just what one happens to have done), secondly, how much better would be the effect of that which he finds it in that heart of his to say, and how much it would be improved, were it to be done according to the canons of taste and criticism! I can express these ideas likewise in a more roundabout form, as follows:—If a writer curbs himself too closely, if he thinks less about the strong throb of his heart than about the delicate arterial network and plexus of taste, and breaks up its broad stream into fine, minute, dew-drops of the invisible perspiration of criticism—then they say—“the fact is, that the thicker and more powerful a jet of water is, the higher it shoots, penetrating the atmosphere, and overcoming its resistance; whilst a more delicate jet is dissipated before it gets half as far.” But, when the author does just the reverse of the above; when he presses out all his overflowing heart in one gush, and lets the blood-billows flow when and how they will, then the critics point the following moral—doing it, however, in a metaphor other than I should have expected of them—“A work of art is like a paper kite, which rises the higher the more the boy pulls and holds back the string, but falls the moment he lets it go.”