The best treatment of the critic by the author, as also, perhaps, of the author by the critic, is humourous. In "One of Our Conquerors," Meredith lays out the art critics:
He had relied and reposed on the dicta of newspaper critics; who are sometimes unanimous, and are then taken for guides, and are fatal.
Washington Irving, in a delightful little paper called "Desultory Thoughts on Criticism," quietly places the reviewer in the low seat where he belongs. I shall not quote from the essay, but merely refer the reader to it and especially to the introductory quotation from Buckingham's "Rehearsal," in which the critic is set in a still lower seat.
Finally—for these quotations—Dr. Holmes, who lived all his life surrounded by praise and comfort, puts his finger gently on the parasitism of the critic. The passage is in "The Poet at the Breakfast Table":
Our epizoic literature is becoming so extensive that nobody is safe from its ad infinitum progeny. A man writes a book of criticisms. A Quarterly Review criticises the critic. A Monthly Magazine takes up the critic's critic. A Weekly Journal criticizes the critic of the critic's critic, and a daily paper favours us with some critical remarks on the performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has criticised the critical notice in the Monthly of the critical essay in the Quarterly on the critical work we started with. And thus we see that as each flea "has smaller fleas that on him prey," even the critic himself cannot escape the common lot of being bitten.
To what extent is the critic parasitic? To this extent: he is dealing with ideas already expressed, with cooked and predigested food. It is easier for any mind to think of something to say about an idea that has already gone through cerebral processes than it is to take the raw material of life and make something. You may sit on a bench in the park and watch the people and never, for the life of you, conceive a good story. Then O. Henry comes along and makes twenty stories. After he has done it, you can write something very brilliant about what O. Henry saw from the same bench that you sat on. And you can make neat remarks about the resemblances and differences between O. Henry, Boccaccio, and H. C. Bunner. That may be worth doing, if your remarks are really neat. For then you may be readable.
And that is the function of the critic, to be readable, to make literature of a sort. The critic is always playing his own game, selfish, egotistical, expressive of his own will, and no more disinterested than was Arnold himself when he took his pen in hand to slay a Philistine or to sign a contract with his manager for a lecture tour in America. In playing his own game the critic may help the game of another author by crying him up and advertising him. But a hundred critics, clamouring in the fatal unanimity at which Meredith pokes fun, cannot make the fortunes of a book or influence at the creative source the work of a man sufficiently strong and original to be worth reading. And the same hundred critics with lofty hatred of bad writing cannot prevent bad books from being written and read. George Eliot made it a rule not to read criticisms of her work because she found it necessary to be preserved "from that discouragement as an artist which ill-judged praise no less than ill-judged blame tends to produce in me." The implication that criticism, favorable or unfavorable, is ill-judged gives us an addition to our notes on what authors think of critics. I doubt whether, if that strong-minded woman had read everything that was written about her before and after her death, she would have altered a single sentence. Did Hardy stop writing novels because of the ignorant attacks on "Jude"? I would not accept without question Hardy's own word for it. I suspect that it was his own inward impulse, not determined by the opinions of the other people, that turned his energy to that stupendous epic, "The Dynasts."
To what extent can the critic play the game of the reader, be guide and teacher, maintain standards, elevate taste, make the best ideas prevail? Not to a very great extent. Criticism, good or bad, is read only by the sophisticated, by people whose tastes are formed and who can take care of themselves in matters literary and intellectual. Who that had not already looked into Shakespeare and Plato ever heard of Pater? The journals that print intelligent articles about literature and art have a small circulation; they are missionaries to the converted; their controversial discussions of general principles or of the merits of an individual are only family feuds. Critics play with each other in a professional game. The few amateurs who sit as spectators are a select minority who have seen the game before and who, though not in the professional class, are instructed, cultivated, have some knowledge of the plays. The critical game is enjoyed by those who are themselves critical and least in need of enlightenment.
Nevertheless, it is a great game—when it is played well.
The author of a book on golf illustrates it with the stances and swings of better players than himself; he makes an anthology. A collection of essays by various authors would illustrate the game better than the plays of a single critic, a much more competent critic than I. I do not pretend that the essays in this book are first-rate specimens of how the strokes should be made. But even a small fellow may flatter himself that he has an individual way of looking at things which may give unity of interest to a collection of papers. At any rate he has a right to exhibit his methods, and nobody is obliged to watch him or play with him.