li)14] on A Criticism on Critics 145 



it speaks — in spite, too, of the crowning glory of the lately -constituted 

 English Academy, which sheds its halo round the heads of so many 

 of our prominent critics. They adopt, however, the attitude that 

 prize sheep might be supposed to assume if turned out to jejune 

 pastures. " How fat and well liking we should be," they seem to say, 

 "if only there was anything to browse upon." They may be perfectly 

 right, but we cannot help remembering how often before they have 

 said that, when, as a matter of fact, the meadows where they were 

 turned loose were, as subsequently proved to be the case, abounding 

 in nutriment. 



Did they browse on the wondrous pastures opened by Keat?, those 

 who in that day had some authority ? Or did they find him a 

 " writer of uncouth language, a cockney versifier, negligible as 

 vermin ? " It is true that since then they have lost their authority, 

 so that even that hyper-sensitive soul would not to-day suffer those 

 utmost pangs of mortification ; but has their loss of authority led to 

 any gain in acumen ? Too often have they shown themselves eager 

 to hehttle instead of to appreciate new forms of beauty, though too 

 often they have been extravagant in their applause of the mildly 

 incompetent. But when have they been the first to recognize a great 

 personality in the world of arr, when to lead the public up some new 

 and royal road ? 



Indeed, if we examine quite cursorily the record of the achieve- 

 ments of English criticism as won by our leading critics, it is a 

 poor tale. Time was when a review in the " Quarterly " or the 

 "Edinl)urgh'" could, if not make or unmake a reputation, give an 

 artist the chance of being heard, or withhold that chance. And 

 how, in the main, was that authority used ? What chance did they 

 give to Keats, and who, but they, made it possible that the genius 

 of Shelley was not recognized in his life-time ? Xo doubt it is diffi- 

 cult to recognize fresh forms of beauty at first sight, when the 

 vehicle — the idiom — is a new one ; but the critics, whose business 

 that happens to be, have always found it not difficult merely, but 

 impossible. To read the criticisms with which the leading musical 

 lights of the day hailed the advent of Wagner, when he gave the 

 recitals from his operas in the Albert Hall, is to make one doubt the 

 evidence of one's own eyes. Or, take the strange case of Mr. 

 Robert Montgomery's poems. Literary critics in those days of 

 poetry and their own authority had puffed his lines on the Omni- 

 potence of the Deity into eleven editions. That was bad enough, 

 but worse was to come when Macaulay killed him dead by his review 

 in the " Edinburgh," which must remain for all time as one of the 

 most monstrous crimes in criticism. In order to show the unbiased 

 and judicial character of his attack, he prefaces his review by saying 

 that he knows nothing about him, " except what he has learned from 

 his books and from the portrait prefixed to one of them, in which 

 he appears to be doing his best to look like a man of genius and 

 Vol. XXI. (No. 108) l 



