For my own part, I deprecate this behavior without being able to point to much better models. Critics are of course superior to most authors, yet I do not know many critics who like to be criticized. It does not matter whether they are thin-skinned literary critics or the hippopotami of sociology. They don’t like it, much. Some meet criticism with a sweet resourcefulness. They choke down various emotions and become, oh, so gently receptive. Others stiffen perceptibly, sometimes into a cautious diplomacy and sometimes into a pontifical dignity that makes criticism nothing less than a personal affront. And then there is the way of the combative man who interprets the least criticism as a challenge to a fight. The rare man even in so-called intellectual circles is the man who takes criticism on its merits and thinks it natural that he should not only criticize but be criticized.
The pontifical man is not necessarily secure in his ego. His frigid reception of criticism corresponds to something like a secret terror of it. His air of dignity is really an air of offended dignity: he hates being called on to defend himself in anything like a rough-and-tumble fight. He resents having his slow, careful processes hustled and harried in the duel of dispute.
To hand down judgments, often severe judgments, is part of the pontifical character. But the business of meeting severe judgments is not so palatable. As most men grow older and more padded in their armchair-criticism, they feel that they become entitled to immunity. The Elder Statesmen are notorious. The more dogmatic they are, the more they try to browbeat their critics. They see criticism as the critic’s fundamental inability to appreciate their position.
If you are going to be criticized, how take it? The best preparation for it is to establish good relations with your own ego first. If you interpose your ego between your work and the critic you cannot help being insulted and injured. The mere fact that you are being subjected to criticism is almost an injury in itself. You must get to the point where you realize the impregnability of your own admirable character. Then the bumblings of the critic cannot do less than amuse you, and may possibly be of use. He is not so sweet a partisan as yourself, yet he started out rather indifferent to you, and the mere fact that he is willing to criticize you is a proof that he has overcome the initial inhumanity of the human race. This alone should help, but more than that, you have the advantage of knowing he is an amateur on that topic where you are most expert—namely, yourself. Be kind to him. Perhaps if you are sufficiently kind he may learn that the beginning of the entente between you is that he should always start out by appeasing your ego.
BLIND
He was, in a manner of speaking, useless. He could tend the furnace and help around the house—scour the bath-tub and clean windows—but for a powerful man these were trivial chores. The trouble with him, as I soon discovered, was complete and simple. He was blind.
I was sorry for him. It was bad enough to be blind, but it was terrible to be blind and at the mercy of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Angier. Mrs. Angier ran the rooming-house. She was a grenadier of a woman, very tall and very bony, with a virile voice and no touch of femininity except false curls. She wore rusty black, with long skirts, and a tasseled shawl. Her smile was as forced as her curls. She hated her rooming-house and every one in it. Her one desire, insane but relentless, was to save enough money out of her establishment to escape from it. To that end she plugged the gaps in the bathroom, doled out the towels, scrimped on the furnace, scrooged on the attendance. And her chief sacrifice on the altar of her economy was Samuel Earp, her brother-in-law. Since he was blind and useless, he was dependent on her. When she called, he literally ran to her, crying, “Coming, coming!” He might be out on the window-sill, risking his poor neck to polish the windows that he would never see, but, “Do I hear my sister calling me? Might I—would you be so good—ah, you are very kind. Coming, Adelaide, just one moment....” and he would paddle down stairs. She treated him like dirt. Sometimes one would arrive during an interview between them. The spare, gimlet-eyed Mrs. Angier would somehow manage to compel Samuel to cringe in every limb. He was a burly man with a thick beard, iron-gray, and his sightless eyes were hidden behind solemn and imposing steel-rimmed spectacles. Usually, with head lifted and with his voice booming heartily, he was a cheerful, honest figure. I liked Samuel Earp, though he was a most platitudinous Englishman. But when Mrs. Angier tongue-lashed him, for some stupidity like spilling a water-bucket or leaving a duster on the stairs or forgetting to empty a waste-basket, he became infantile, tearful, and limp. Her lecturing always changed to a sugared greeting as one was recognized. “Good e-e-evening, isn’t it a pleasant e-e-evening?” But the only value in speaking to Mrs. Angier was that it permitted Samuel somehow to shamble away to the limbo of the basement.
Of course I wanted to know how, he became blind. Luckily, as Mrs. Angier had prosperous relatives in another part of Chicago, she sometimes could be counted on to be absent, and on those occasions or when she went to church, Samuel haunted my room. He was unhappy unless he was at work, and he managed to keep tinkering at something, but I really believe he liked to chatter to me: and he was more than anxious to tell me how his tragedy had befallen him.
“Oh, dear, yes,” he said to me, “it happened during the strike. They hit me on the head, and left me unconscious. And I have never seen since, not one thing.”
“Who hit you, Samuel?”