“The enormous responsibility of anonymous criticism is seen in every line contributed by the Maurice and Sterling group who spoke through its columns. Even for those who are behind the scenes and know that the critique expresses the opinion of only one writer, it is difficult not to be impressed by the accent of authority in the editorial ‘we.’ But with regard to the general public, the reader of a review article finds it impossible to escape from the authority of the ‘we,’ and the power of a single writer to benefit or to injure an author is so great that none but the most deeply conscientious men ought to enter the ranks of the anonymous reviewers. These were the views of Maurice and Sterling; and that they are shared by all the best writers of our time there can be no doubt. Some very illustrious men have given very emphatic expression to them. On a certain memorable occasion, at a little dinner-party at 16 Cheyne Walk, one of the guests related an anecdote of his having accidentally met an old acquaintance who had deeply disgraced himself, and told how he had stood ‘dividing the swift mind’ as to whether he could or could not offer the man his hand. ‘I think I should have offered him mine,’ said Rossetti, ‘although no one detests his offence more than I do.’ And then the conversation ran upon the question as to the various kinds of offenders with whom old friends could not shake hands. ‘There is one kind of miscreant,’ said Rossetti, ‘whom you have forgotten to name—a miscreant who in kind of meanness and infamy cannot well be beaten, the man who in an anonymous journal tells the world that a poem or picture is bad when he knows it to be good. That is the man who should never defile my hand by his touch. By God, if I met such a man at a dinner-table I must not kick him, I suppose; but I could not, and would not, taste bread and salt with him. I would quietly get up and go.’ Tennyson, on afterwards being told this story, said, ‘And who would not do the same? Such a man has been guilty of sacrilege—sacrilege against art.’ Maurice, Sterling, and the other writers in the first volume of the ‘Athenæum’ worked on the great principle that the critic’s primary duty is to seek and to bring to light those treasures of art and literature that the busy world is only too apt to pass by. Their pet abhorrence was the cheap smartness of Jeffrey and certain of his coadjutors; and from its commencement the ‘Athenæum’ has striven to avoid slashing and smart writing. A difficult thing to avoid, no doubt, for nothing is so easy to achieve as that insolent and vulgar slashing which the half-educated amateur thinks so clever. Of all forms of writing, the founders of the ‘Athenæum’ held the shallow, smart style to be the cheapest and also the most despicable. And here again the views of the ‘Athenæum’ have remained unchanged. The critic who works ‘without a conscience or an aim’ knows only too well that it pays to pander to the most lamentable of all the weaknesses of human nature—the love that people have of seeing each other attacked and vilified; it pays for a time, until it defeats itself. For although man has a strong instinct for admiration—else had he never reached his present position in the conscious world—he has, running side by side with this instinct, another strong instinct—the instinct for contempt. A reviewer’s ridicule poured upon a writer titillates the reader with a sense of his own superiority. It is by pandering to this lower instinct that the unprincipled journalist hopes to kill two birds with one stone—to gratify his own malignity and low-bred love of insolence, and to make profit while doing so. Although cynicism may certainly exist alongside great talent, it is far more likely to be found where there is no talent at all. Many brilliant writers have written in this journal, but rarely, if ever, have truth and honesty of criticism been sacrificed for a smart saying. One of these writers—the greatest wit of the nineteenth century—used to say, in honest disparagement of what were considered his own prodigious powers of wit, ‘I will engage in six lessons to teach any man to do this kind of thing as well as I do, if he thinks it worth his while to learn.’ And the ‘Athenæum,’ at the time when Hood was reviewing Dickens in its columns, could have said the same thing. The smart reviewer, however, mistakes insolence for wit, and among the low-minded insolence needs no teaching.”
Of course, in the office of an important literary organ there is always a kind of terror lest, in the necessary hurry of the work, a contributor should ‘come down a cropper’ over some matter of fact, and open the door to troublesome correspondence. As Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, the mysterious ‘we’ must claim to be Absolute Wisdom, or where is the authority of the oracle? When a contributor ‘comes down a cropper,’ although the matter may be of infinitesimal importance, the editor cannot, it seems, and never could (except during the imperial regime of the ‘Saturday Review’ under Cook) refuse to insert a correction. Now, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, ‘the smaller the intelligence, the greater joy does it feel in setting other intelligences right.’ I have been told that it was a tradition in the office of the ‘Examiner,’ and also in the office of the ‘Athenæum,’ that Theodore Watts had not only never been known to ‘come down a cropper,’ but had never given the ‘critical gnats’ a chance of pretending that he had to. One day, however, in an article on Frederick Tennyson’s poems, speaking of the position that the poet Alexander Smith occupied in the early fifties, and contrasting it with the position that he held at the time the article was written, Mr. Watts-Dunton affirmed that once on a time Smith—the same Smith whom ‘Z’ (the late William Allingham) had annihilated in the ‘Athenæum’—had been admired by Alfred Tennyson, and also that once on a time Herbert Spencer had compared a metaphor of Alexander Smith’s with the metaphors of Shakespeare. The touchiness of Spencer was proverbial, and on the next Monday morning the editor got the following curt note from the great man:—
‘Will the writer of the review of Mr. Frederick Tennyson’s poems, which was published in your last number, please say where I have compared the metaphors of Shakspeare and Alexander Smith?
Herbert Spencer.’
The editor, taking for granted that the heretofore impeccable contributor had at last ‘come down a cropper,’ sent a proof of Spencer’s note to Mr. Watts-Dunton, and intimated that it had better be printed without any editorial comment at all. Of course, if Mr. Watts-Dunton had at last ‘come down a cropper,’ this would have been the wisest plan. But he returned the proof of the letter to the editor, with the following footnote added to it:—
“It is many years since Mr. Herbert Spencer printed in one of the magazines an essay dealing with the laws of cause and effect in literary art—an essay so searching in its analyses, and so original in its method and conclusions, that the workers in pure literature may well be envious of science for enticing such a leader away from their ranks—and it is many years since we had the pleasure of reading it. Our memory is, therefore, somewhat hazy as to the way in which he introduced such metaphors by Alexander Smith as ‘I speared him with a jest,’ etc. Our only object, however, in alluding to the subject was to show that a poet now ignored by the criticism of the hour, a poet who could throw off such Shakspearean sentences as this—
—My drooping sails
Flap idly ’gainst the mast of my intent;
I rot upon the waters when my prow
Should grate the golden isles—had once the honour of being admired by Alfred Tennyson and favourably mentioned by Mr. Herbert Spencer.”
Spencer told this to a friend, and with much laughter said, ‘Of course the article was Theodore Watts’s. I had forgotten entirely what I had said about Shakspeare and Alexander Smith.’
If I were asked to furnish a typical example of that combination of critical insight, faultless memory, and genial courtesy, which distinguishes Mr. Watts-Dunton’s writings, I think I should select this bland postscript to Spencer’s letter.
Another instance of the care and insight with which Mr. Watts-Dunton always wrote his essays is connected with Robert Louis Stevenson. It occurred in connection with ‘Kidnapped.’ I will quote here Mr. Watts-Dunton’s own version of the anecdote, which will be found in the ‘Athenæum’ review of the Edinburgh edition of Stevenson’s works. The playful allusion to the ‘Athenæum’s’ kindness is very characteristic:—
“Of Stevenson’s sweetness of disposition and his good sense we could quote many instances; but let one suffice. When ‘Kidnapped’ appeared, although in reviewing it we enjoyed the great pleasure of giving high praise to certain parts of that delightful narrative, we refused to be scared from making certain strictures. It occurred to us that while some portions of the story were full of that organic detail of which Scott was such a master, and without which no really vital story can be told, it was not so with certain other parts. From this we drew the conclusion that the book really consisted of two distinct parts, two stories which Stevenson had tried in vain to weld into one. We surmised that the purely Jacobite adventures of Balfour and Alan Breck were written first, and that then the writer, anxious to win the suffrages of the general novel-reader (whose power is so great with Byles the Butcher), looked about him for some story on the old lines; that he experienced great difficulty in finding one; and that he was at last driven upon the old situation of the villain uncle plotting to make away with the nephew by kidnapping him and sending him off to the plantations. The ‘Athenæum,’ whose kindness towards all writers, poets and prosemen, great and small, has won for it such an infinity of gratitude, said this, but in its usual kind and gentle way. This aroused the wrath of the Stevensonians. Yet we were not at all surprised to get from the author of ‘Kidnapped’ himself a charming letter.’
This letter appears in Stevenson’s ‘Letters,’ and by the courtesy of Mr. Sidney Colvin and Mr. A. M. S. Methuen I am permitted to reprint it here:—