In the way of positive help, he should relieve of every commercial preoccupation, not only the editors and contributors of any magazines that he may control, but also those authors of criticism and critical biography whose volumes he may print. Having cleaned his own house, he should steadily demand of the publications in which he advertises, a higher grade of critical writing, and should select the periodicals to which to send his books for notice, not according to the partiality, but according to the ability of their reviews. Thus he would do much to make others follow his own good example.
II
What of the author? In respect of criticism, the publisher, of course, has no absolute rights, not even that of having his books noticed at all. His interests only have been in question, and, in the long run and in the mass, these will not be harmed, but benefited, by criticism honestly adverse. He has in his writers a hundred talents, and if his selection is shrewd most of them bring profit. Frank criticism will but help the task of judicious culling. But all that has been said assumes the cheerful sacrifice of the particular author who must stake his all upon his single talent. Does his comparative helplessness give him any right to tender treatment?
It does not; in respect of rights his, precisely, is the predicament of the publisher. If an author puts forth a book for sale, he obviously can be accorded no privilege incompatible with the right of the public to know its value. He cannot ask to have the public fooled for his benefit; he cannot ask to have his feelings saved, if to save them the critic must neglect to inform his readers. That is rudimentary. Nor may the author argue more subtly that, until criticism is a science and truth unmistakable, he should be given the benefit of the doubt. This was the proposition behind the plea, strongly urged not so long ago, that all criticism should be “sympathetic”; that is, that the particular critic is qualified to judge those writers only whom, on the whole, he likes. Love, it was declared, is the only key to understanding. The obvious value of the theory to the Silent Bargain accounts for its popularity with the commercial interests. Now, no one can quarrel with the criticism of appreciation—it is full of charm and service; but to pretend that it should be the only criticism is impertinent and vain. To detect the frivolity of such a pretension, one has only to apply it to public affairs; imagine a political campaign in which the candidates were criticised only by their friends! No; the critic should attack whatever he thinks is bad, and he is quite as likely to be right when he does so as when he applauds what he thinks is good. In a task wherein the interest of the public is the one that every time and all the time should be served, mercy to the author is practically always a betrayal. To the public, neither the vanity nor the purse of the author is of the slightest consequence. Indeed, a criticism powerful enough to curb the conceit of some authors, and to make writing wholly unprofitable to others, would be an advantage to the public, to really meritorious authors, and to the publisher.
And the publisher—to consider his interests again for a moment—would gain not merely by the suppression of useless, but by the discipline of spoiled, writers. For the Silent Bargain so works as to give to many an author an exaggerated idea of his importance. It leads the publisher himself—what with his complaisant reviewers, his literary notes, his personal paragraphs, his widely distributed photographs—to do all that he can to turn the author’s head. Sometimes he succeeds. When the spoiled writer, taking all this au grand sérieux, asks why sales are not larger, then how hard is the publisher pressed for an answer! If the author chooses to believe, not the private but the public statement of his merit, and bases upon it either a criticism of his publisher’s energy or a demand for further publishing favors,—increase of advertising, higher royalties, what not,—the publisher is in a ridiculous and rather troublesome quandary. None but the initiated know what he has occasionally to endure from the arrogance of certain writers. Here fearless criticism should help him much.
But if the conceit of some authors offends, the sensitiveness of others awakens sympathy. The author does his work in solitude; his material is his own soul; his anxiety about a commercial venture is complicated with the apprehension of the recluse who comes forth into the market-place with his heart upon his sleeve. Instinctively he knows that, as his book is himself, or at least a fragment of himself, criticism of it is truly criticism of him, not of his intellectual ability merely, but of his essential character, his real value as a man. Let no one laugh until he has heard and survived the most intimate, the least friendly comment upon his own gifts and traits, made in public for the delectation of his friends and acquaintances and of the world at large. Forgivably enough, the author is of all persons the one most likely to be unjust to critics and to criticism. In all ages he has made bitter counter-charges, and flayed the critics as they have flayed him. His principal complaints are three: first, that all critics are disappointed authors; second, that many are young and incompetent, or simply incompetent; third, that they do not agree. Let us consider them in turn.
Although various critics write with success other things than criticism, the first complaint is based, I believe, upon what is generally a fact. It carries two implications: the first, that one cannot competently judge a task which he is unable to perform himself; the second, that the disappointed author is blinded by jealousy. As to the first, no writer ever refrained out of deference to it from criticising, or even discharging, his cook. As to the second, jealousy does not always blind: sometimes it gives keenness of vision. The disappointed author turned critic may indeed be incompetent; but, if he is so, it is for reasons that his disappointment does not supply. If he is able, his disappointment will, on the contrary, help his criticism. He will have a wholesome contempt for facile success; he will measure by exacting standards. Moreover, the thoughts of a talented man about an art for the attainment of which he has striven to the point of despair are certain to be valuable; his study of the masters has been intense; his study of his contemporaries has had the keenness of an ambitious search for the key to success. His criticism, even if saturated with envy, will have value. In spite of all that partisans of sympathetic criticism may say, hatred and malice may give as much insight into character as love. Sainte-Beuve was a disappointed author, jealous of the success of others.
But ability is necessary. Envy and malice, not reinforced by talent, can win themselves small satisfaction, and do no more than transient harm; for then they work at random and make wild and senseless charges. To be dangerous to the author, to be valuable to the public, to give pleasure to their possessor, they must be backed by acuteness to perceive and judgment to proclaim real flaws only. The disappointed critic of ability knows that the truth is what stings, and if he seeks disagreeable truth, at least he seeks truth. He knows also that continual vituperation is as dull as continual praise; if only to give relief to his censure, he will note what is good. He will mix honey with the gall. So long as he speaks truth, he does a useful work, and his motives are of no consequence to any one but himself. Even if he speaks it with unnecessary roughness, the author cannot legitimately complain. Did he suppose that he was sending his book into a world of gentlemen only? Truth is truth, and a boor may have it. That the standard of courtesy is sometimes hard to square with that of perfect sincerity is the dilemma of the critic; but the author can quarrel with the fact no more than with the circumstance that in a noisy world he can write best where there is quiet. If he suffers, let him sift criticism through his family; consoling himself, meanwhile, with the reflection that there is criticism of criticism, and that any important critic will ultimately know his pains. Leslie Stephen was so sensitive that he rarely read reviews of his critical writings. After all, the critic is also an author.
The second complaint of writers, that criticism is largely young and incompetent,—or merely incompetent,—is well founded. The reason lies in the general preference of publishers for criticism that is laudatory even if absurd. Again we meet the Silent Bargain. The commercial publisher of book-reviews, realizing that any fool can praise a book, is apt to increase his profits by lowering the wage of his critic. At its extreme point, his thrift requires a reviewer of small brains and less moral courage; such a man costs less and is unlikely ever to speak with offensive frankness. Thus it happens that, commonly in the newspapers and frequently in periodicals of some literary pretension, the writers of reviews are shiftless literary hacks, shallow, sentimental women, or crude young persons full of indiscriminate enthusiasm for all printed matter.
I spoke of the magazines. When their editors say that literary papers are not popular, do they consider what writers they admit to the work, with what payment they tempt the really competent, what limitations they impose upon sincerity? Do they not really mean that the amiable in manner or the remote in subject, which alone they consider expedient, is not popular? Do they really believe that a brilliant writer, neither a dilettante nor a Germanized scholar, uttering with fire and conviction his full belief, would not interest the public? Do they doubt that such a writer could be found, if sought? The reviews which they do print are not popular; but that proves nothing in respect of better reviews. Whatever the apparent limitations of criticism, it actually takes the universe for its province. In subject it is as protean as life itself; in manner it may be what you will. To say, then, that neither American writers nor American readers can be found for it is to accuse the nation of a poverty of intellect so great as to be incredible. No; commercial timidity, aiming always to produce a magazine so inoffensive as to insinuate itself into universal tolerance, is the fundamental cause of the unpopularity of the average critical article; how can the public fail to be indifferent to what lacks life, appositeness to daily needs, conviction, intellectual and moral candor? At least one reason why we have no Brunetière is that there is almost no periodical in which such a man may write.