critics.  Our state is becoming a bewildered horror; and yet we cannot deny that Mr. Walkley was right, though we may regard his pessimism as exaggerated.  There are one or two cases on record in which criticism, or the fear of it, has really checked the production of peculiarly sensitive and fastidious minds.  I will not mention Keats, for after the savage and Tartarly article he went on producing in greater quantity and finer quality than ever before, and would have so continued but for a very natural death.  Robert Montgomery, whom Macaulay killed, is a happier instance.  And there may here and there also have been a poet or novelist like that “Pictor Ignotus” of Browning’s, who cried: 

  “I could have painted pictures like that youth’s
  Ye praise so!”

He would have had a painter’s fame: 

“But a voice changed it.  Glimpses of such sights Have scared me, like the revels through a door Of some strange house of idols at its rites!  This world seemed not the world it was, before:  Mixed with my loving, trusting ones, there trooped ...  Who summoned those cold faces that begun To press on me and judge me?  Though I stooped Shrinking, as from the soldiery a nun, They drew me forth, and spite of me ... enough!”

Unhappily, there are few souls so humble, so conventual as that.  George Eliot, as Mr. Walkley recalled, was terrified lest ill-judged blame or ill-judged praise should discourage her production; but then she made it a strict rule never to read any criticism, so that, of course, it had no restraining effect upon her.  Wordsworth seems to have read his critics, but though they did their utmost to restrain or silence him, he paid no heed.  “Too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet,” he called them: 

“Too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple with him;—­men of palsied imagination and indurated hearts; in whose minds all healthy action is languid, who therefore feed as the many direct them, or, with the many, are greedy after vicious provocatives;—­judges, whose censure is auspicious, and whose praise ominous!”

In them there was no restraining power for such a man, any more than in Christopher North for Tennyson: 

  “When I heard from whom it came,
  I forgave you all the blame;
  I could not forgive the praise,
    Rusty Christopher!”

On this line, then, there is not much to be hoped from the critics.  Over-sensitive writers are too rare, and the productive impulse of the others is too self-confident for prudence to smother.  Obviously, they care no more for the critics than Tom and Sal a century ago cared for Malthus.  They disregard them.  The most savage criticism only confirms their belief in the beauty and necessity of their progeny, just as a mother always fondles the child that its aunts consider plain.  Against such obstinacy, what headway can the critics make?  May we not advise them to drop the old method of frontal