138 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



view of the similar neglect of science, and I think that a principal cause of it is 

 the poor quality of much of our modern literary criticism. Thus a professor of 

 poetry at one of our universities, who is himself, mirabile dictu, one of our best 

 poets, recently complained in conversation with me of the manner in which our 

 leading review eulogises certain stuff and consigns good work to the kitchen- 

 midden of its "books received." On another occasion I heard a distinguished 

 artist maintain that reviewers of art, are ignorant of the elements of it; and one 

 of our greatest novelists who was present endorsed this opinion and described 

 how he himself, when he was a young man who knew nothing of literature, used 

 to " cut up " such men as Ruskin, Carlyle, and Tennyson in the pages of a 

 sixpenny weekly. We know that Swift described the malignant deity called 

 Criticism as living among the icy mountains of Nova Zembla on half-devoured 

 books; that Pope tells us 



Let such teach others who themselves excell, 

 And censure freely who have written well ; 



that he compared critics to apothecaries who, 



Bold in the practice of mistaken rules, 

 Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools ; 



and that Byron clinched the matter in his couplet, 



A man must serve his time to every trade 

 Save censure — critics all are ready made. 



But these strictures refer mostly to ignorant criticism ; while it is the learned 

 criticism which some think is more dangerous to poetry— precisely because it is 

 learned. 



For example, every modern work must necessarily touch older works at some 

 point or other, and the book-sated reviewer observes the similitudes, loathes the 

 familiar flavours, and often overlooks the merit of the whole — which is the main 

 thing. Weary of Parnassian simplicity and sameness — for there is really only one 

 beauty — he strives to supplant them by an idol of his making which he thinks the 

 world also should admire. This may be some particular god of his own, but is 

 more generally the image called Originality, or Novelty, or Eccentricity — what you 

 will. To his palled palate, beauty herself is not enough and he seeks the stimulus. 

 of some new quaintness which no one has seen before — and which therefore cannot 

 really be beauty ; just as the modern philosopher is not satisfied with the problems, 

 difficult enough, of the universe, but must go a-ghost-hunting as well. Hence it 

 often follows that for the modern reviewer (who is frequently learned) the new 

 aspirant for poetic fare must be eccentric in something — phrases, style, subject, or 

 metre. Without this he is a mere copyist, echo, or plagiarist. If he is musical 

 he imitates Swinburne ; if harsh, Browning ; if choice, Tennyson ; if epithetical, 

 Shakespeare ; if idealistic, Shelley ; if classical, Milton ; and so on. Now we see 

 from all the great masters that the first law of all the arts is to keep the feet 

 planted upon the commonplace, and that the second law is to imitate all previous 

 great masters ! Probably all the Greek sculptures were largely copied from earlier 

 ones ; as cathedrals from cathedrals, epics from epics, and sonatas from sonatas. 

 The modern reviewer would be horrified to hear it maintained that an artist should 

 plagiarise without scruple if the aesthetic rule of the best possible is to be obeyed. 

 Yet whole passages of Julius Casar (for instance) are taken bodily from Plutarch, 



