Recollections of a Varied Life

by George Cary Eggleston

Anonymous Criticism

In these cases I was at a peculiar disadvantage—though I think it not at all an unjust one—in every indulgence in anything like adverse criticism. I may best explain this, perhaps, by telling of an incident that happened soon after I assumed my position. I had been lucky enough to secure from Richard Henry Stoddard a very brilliant review of a certain book which he was peculiarly the fittest man in all the land to write about. I had the review in type, when I mentioned to Mr. Bryant my good fortune in securing it.

"Is it signed?" he asked in his gentlest manner.

I answered that it was not, for the reason that Stoddard was under a certain assertion of obligation which he refused to recognize but which I could not ask him to repudiate, not to write things of that character for other than a particular publication.

"Then I request that you shall not use it," said Mr. Bryant.

"But really, Mr. Bryant, there is not the smallest obligation upon him in the matter. He is perfectly free——"

"It is not of that that I was thinking," he interrupted. "That is a matter between him and his own conscience, and you and I have nothing whatever to do with it. My objection to your use of the article is that I regard an anonymous literary criticism as a thing quite as despicable, unmanly, and cowardly as an anonymous letter. It is something that no honorable man should write, and no honorably conducted newspaper should publish."

"But my own reviews in the Evening Post are all of them anonymous," I suggested.

"Not at all," he answered. "When you were appointed literary editor the fact was communicated to every publisher in the country. I directed that and saw that it was done, so that every publisher and, through the publishers, every author, should know that every literary criticism in the Evening Post was your utterance. In veritable effect, therefore, everything you print in our literary columns is signed, just as every critical article in the great British reviews is. When Jeffrey ridiculed 'Hours of Idleness,' and later, when he seriously criticised 'Cain,' Byron had no need to inquire who his critic was. The work was responsibly done, as such work should be in every case. The reasons seem to me obvious enough. In the first place, anonymous literary criticism may easily become a cowardly stabbing in the back under cover of darkness. In the second place, the reader of such criticism has no means of knowing what value to place upon it. He cannot know whether the critic is a person competent or incompetent, one to whose opinions he should defer or one whose known incapacity would prompt him to dismiss them as unworthy of consideration because of their source. In the third place, anonymous literary criticism opens wide the door of malice on the one hand, and of undue favoritism on the other. It is altogether despicable, and it is dangerous besides. I will have none of it on the Evening Post."

I suggested that I had myself read the book that Stoddard had reviewed, and that I was ready to accept his criticism as my own and to hold myself responsible for it.