Professor Whitney’s ideas of what is real criticism, and what is mere banter, personal abuse, or rudeness are indeed strange. He does not seem to be aware that his name has become a by-word, at least in Europe, and he defends himself against the charge of abusiveness with so much ardor that one sometimes feels doubtful whether it is all the mere rhetoric of a bad conscience, or a case of the most extraordinary self-deception. He declares in so many words that he was never personal (Ich bestreite durchaus, dass was ich schrieb, im geringsten persönlich war), and he immediately goes on to say that “Steinthal burst a two from anger and rancor, and his answer was a mere outpouring of abuse against his personality.”
Now I am the last person or personality in the world to approve of the tone of Steinthal’s answer, and if Professor Whitney asks why I had quoted it several times in public, it was because I thought it ought to be a warning to others. I think that all who are interested in maintaining certain civilized usages even in the midst of war, ought to protest against such a return to primitive savagery, and I am glad to find that my friend, Mr. Matthew Arnold, one of the highest authorities on the rules of literary warfare, entertains the same opinion, and has quoted what I had quoted from Professor Steinthal’s pamphlet, together with other specimens of theological rancor, as extreme cases of bad taste.
I frankly admit, however, that, when I said that Steinthal had defended himself with the same weapons with which his American antagonist attacked him, I said too much. Professor Whitney does not proceed to such extremities as Professor Steinthal. But giving him full credit so far, I still cannot help thinking that it was a fight with poisoned arrows on one side, with clubs on the other. As Professor Whitney calls for proofs, here they are:—
Page 332. Why does he call Professor Steinthal, Hajjim Steinthal? Is that personal or not?
Page 335. “Professor Steinthal startles and rebuffs a commonsense inquirer with a reply from a wholly different and unexpected point of view; as when you ask a physician, ‘Well, Doctor, how does your patient promise this morning?’ and he answers, with a wise look and an oracular shake of the head, ‘It is not given to humanity to look into futurity.’ The effect is not destitute of the element of bathos.” Is that personal?
Page 337. Steinthal’s mode of arguing is “more easy and convenient than fair and ingenuous.” Is that personal?
Page 338. “A mere verbal quibble.”
Page 346. “The eminent psychologist may show himself a mere blunderer.”
Page 356. “To our unpsychological apprehension, there is something monstrous in the very suggestion that a word is an act of the mind.”
Page 357. “Prodigious . . . . Chaotic nebulosity . . . . We should not have supposed any man, at this age of the world, capable of penning the sentences we have quoted.”