But the only thing that concerns the reader is the book he holds in his hand. He cannot derive inspiration from any other quarter. To the author the characters may be living, he may have lived amongst them for months; they may be inexpressibly dear to him, and his fine eyes may fill with tears as he thinks of Jane or Sarah, but this avails naught to the reader. Our authors are too apt to forget this, and to tell us what they think of their own figments, and how they came to write their books. The imitation of Carlyle cannot be generally recommended, but in one respect, at all events, his example should be followed. Though he made fuss enough whilst he was writing a book, as soon as he had done with it he never mentioned it again.
This sudden display of nervousness on the part of authors is perhaps partly due to their unreasonable confusion of the Reviewers with the Readers. The great mass of criticism is, delivered vivâ voce, and never appears in print at all. This spoken criticism is of far greater importance than printed criticism. It is repeated again and again, in all sorts of places, on hundreds of occasions, and cannot fail to make dints in people’s minds, whereas the current printed criticism of the week runs lightly off the surface. ‘Press notices,’ as they are called, have no longer ‘boodle’ in them, if I may use a word the genius of Mr. Stevenson has already consecrated for all delightful use. The pen may, in peaceful times, be mightier than the sword, but in this matter of criticism of our contemporaries the tongue is mightier than the pen. Authors should remember this.
The volume of unprinted criticism is immense, and its force amazing. Lunching last year at a chophouse, I was startled to hear a really important oath emerge from the lips of a clerkly-looking man who sat opposite me, and before whom the hurried waiter had placed a chump-chop. ‘Take the thing away,’ cried the man with the oath aforesaid, ‘and bring me a loin chop.’ Then, observing the surprise I could not conceal that an occurrence so trifling should have evoked an expression so forcible, the man muttered half to himself and half to me: ‘There is nothing I hate so much in the wide world as a chump-chop, unless indeed it be’ (speaking slowly and thoughtfully) ‘the poetry of Mr. ——,’ and here the fellow, unabashed, named right out the name of a living poet who, in the horrid phrase of the second-hand booksellers, is ‘much esteemed’ by himself, and some others. After this explosion of feeling the conversation between us became frankly literary, but I contrived to learn in the course of it that this chump-chop-hater was a clerk in an insurance office, and had never printed a line in his life. He was, as sufficiently appears, a whimsical fellow, full of strange oaths and stranger prejudice, but for criticism of contemporary authors—keen, searching, detached, genuine—it would be impossible to find his equal in the Press. The man is living yet—he was lately seen in Cheapside, elbowing his way through the crowd with a masterful air, and so long as he lives he criticises, and what is more, permeates his circle—for he must live somewhere—with his opinions. These are your gods, O Authors! It is these voices which swell the real chorus of praise or blame. These judges are untainted by hatreds, strangers to jealousy; your vanity, your egotism, your necktie, your anecdotes, do not prevent them from enjoying your books or revelling in your humour, be it new or old, for they do not know you by sight; but neither will the praise of the Athenæum, or of any newspaper, or the conventional respect of other authors save your productions, your poem, your novel, your drama, your collected trifles, from the shafts of their ridicule or the dust of their indifference.
But do we owe any duty to contemporary authors? Clearly we are at liberty to talk about them and their ‘work’ as much as ever we choose—at dinner-tables, in libraries and smoking-rooms, in railway carriages (if we like shouting and do not mind being inaudible), in boats, at balls, in Courts of Justice, and other places, ejusdem generis, at Congresses (before, during, and after the speeches), and, indeed, everywhere and at all times, if we are so disposed and can find anybody to listen, or even to seem to listen, to us. Of this liberty we can never be deprived even by a veto of authors ad hoc, and, as already stated, the free exercise of it is a far more important constituent in the manufacture of literary opinion than printed notices of books.
But though we are just as much entitled to express in conversation our delight in, or abhorrence of, a contemporary author as we are to bless or curse the weather, it cannot be said to be our duty to do so. No adult stands in a fiduciary relationship to another adult in the matter of his reading. If we like a book very much, it is only natural to say so; but if we do not like it, we may say so or hold our tongues as we choose.
Suppose one dreamt (gentle reader, remember this is nothing but a dream) that there was one woebegone creature alive at this moment in this Britain of ours who cordially disliked, and shrank from, the poetry of Sir Edwin Arnold, Mr. Lewis Morris, and Mr. Alfred Austin, who could not away with ‘Robert Elsmere,’ ‘The Wages of Sin,’ or ‘Donovan,’ who abhorred the writings of Mrs. Lynn Linton, Archdeacon Farrar, and Mr. Shorthouse, who hated ‘Amiel’s Journal,’ ‘Marie Bashkirtseff,’ and ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy,’ who found it easy, and even helpful, to live for six months at a time without reading a new novel by Mr. Hall Caine or Mr. Black, who failed to respond to the careful and often-repeated raptures of those wise critics who assured him that the author of ‘Amos Barton’ and ‘Middlemarch’ cowers and crouches by the side of Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith; who, when he wants to laugh very heartily indeed, does not take down the works of—— But my list is long enough for a dream—could you honestly advise that man to run amuck in print against all these powerful and delightful writers? What good could come of it? The good people who like a writer will not like him or her any the less because you don’t. Reading is a democratic pursuit, else why are children taught it—very badly, no doubt—out of the rates? Sensible men and foolish men alike resent being dictated to about their contemporaries. They are willing to learn about the dead, but they crave leave to lay their own hands upon the living.
‘Who set you up as a judge over us?’ they cry testily, when they are told by a perfect stranger that they ought not to like what they do like, and ought to like what they go to sleep over.
Schopenhauer, a man who hated much, in his ‘Parerga,’ fervently desires a literary journal which ‘should be a dam against the unconscionable scribbling of the age, the everlasting deluge of bad and useless books.’
He proceeds (I am quoting from Mr. Saunders’ translation):