Last Essays.
As nearly always, too, this critic’s last work is of his best. The “Gray” we have noticed. The “Landor” is mainly, though not wholly, personal; and the “Walton,” as a “Walton” must be and ought to be, rather of life rather than of literature. But the paper on the Areopagitica is an admirable piece, and “On the Study of Modern Languages” stands, I think, alone among the arguments on its side, distinguished at once by competent knowledge and judicial fairness in regard to ancient and modern alike.
So much critical gift, indeed, of so wide a range and so happy in its display, is seldom to be found. And though nothing is more impertinent than to recommend a representative to a constituency to which you do not yourself belong, I think that perhaps these volumes may give me the right to say that if I were an American I should vote for Mr Lowell, and that whatever might be my nationality I should say “Well done!” if he were elected.
O. W. Holmes.
To pass to yet another of the same distinguished group. There is, though a great deal of indirect, not much direct criticism in the omniform and (when the writer could keep the cant of anti-cant out) almost always agreeable trilogy of the Breakfast-Table. But there is one passage[[1160]] in the last of the three which, with hardly an alteration, is so admirable and final a description of the duty of the critic himself that I must borrow it with some slight interlineations. These, I am sure, Dr Holmes—if only as to a brother member of the Rabelais Club of pleasant memory—would not have refused me:—
The whole duty of critics stated by him in alia materia.
“Now the present case, as the (critic)
doctor sees it, is just exactly such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was before—a snarl and tangle of special conditions out of which it is his business to wind as much thread as he can. It is a good deal as when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to send for him. He has seen just such noses, and just such eyes, and just such mouths: but he never saw exactly such a face before, and his business is with that and no other person’s—with the features of the worthy father of a family before him, and not with the portraits he has seen in galleries, or books, or Mr Copley’s grand pictures of the fine old Tories, or the Apollos and Jupiters of Greek sculpture. It is the same with (critic’s subject)
the patient. His (production)
disease has features of its own; there never was and never will be another case in all respects exactly like it. If a (critic)
doctor has science without common-sense he treats a (book)
fever, but not this man’s (book)
fever. If he has common-sense without science he treats this man’s (book)
fever without knowing the general laws that govern (books and all literature)
all fevers and all vital movements.”
Which thing let it be frontlet and wristlet to whosoever meddles with criticism.