"That is a large question," said Bolton, "and a matter beset with serious difficulties. While books are a matter of commerce and trade; while magazines which criticise books are the property of booksellers, and newspapers depend on them for advertising patronage, it is too much to expect of human nature, that we should always get wholly honest, unbiassed opinions. Then, again, there is the haste, and rush, and hurry of our times, the amount of literary drift-wood that is all the while accumulating! Editors and critics are but mortal men, and men kept, as a general thing, in the last agonies of weariness and boredom. There is not, for the most part, sensibility enough left to enable them to read through or enter into the purport of one book in a hundred; yet, for all this, you do observe here and there in the columns of our best papers carefully studied and seriously written critiques on books; these are hopeful signs. They show a conscientious effort on the part of the writers to enter into the spirit of the work, and to give their readers a fair account of it; and, if I mistake not, the number of such is on the increase."
"Well," said I, "do you suppose there is any prospect or possibility of a constructive school of criticism—honest, yet kindly and sympathetic, that shall lead young authors into right methods of perfecting themselves?"
"We have a long while to wait before that comes," said Bolton. "Who is appreciative and many-sided enough to guide the first efforts of genius just coming to consciousness? How many could profitably have advised Hawthorne when his peculiar Rembrandt style was just forming? As a race, we Anglo Saxons are so self-sphered that we lack the power to enter into the individuality of another mind, and give profitable advice for its direction.
"English criticism has generally been unappreciative and brutal; it has dissected butterflies and humming-birds with mallet and cleaver—witness the review that murdered Keats, and witness in the letters of Charlotte Bronté the perplexity into which sensitive, conscientious genius was thrown by obstreperous, conflicting criticism. The most helpful, because most appreciative reviews, she says, came to her from France."
"I suppose," said I, "that it is the dramatic element in the French character that fits them to be good literary critics. They can enter into another individuality. One would think it a matter of mere common sense, that in order to criticise justly you must put yourself for the time being as nearly as possible at the author's point of sight; form a sympathetic estimate of what he is striving to do, and then you can tell how nearly he attains his purpose. Of this delicate constructive criticism, we have as yet, it seems to me, almost no specimens in the English language. St. Beuve has left models in French, in this respect, which we should do well to imitate. We Americans are a good-natured set, and our criticism inclines to comity and good-fellowship far more than to the rude bluntness of our English neighbors; and if we could make this discriminating, as well as urbane, we should get about the right thing."
Our conversation was interrupted here by Jim Fellows, who came thundering up-stairs, singing at the top of his lungs—
"If an engine meet an engine
Coming round a curve,—
If it smash both train and tender,
What does It deserve?