a novel, or an essay that does not please him as in the botanist’s grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find it pretty.  He does not conceive that it is his business rather to identify the species and then explain how and where the specimen is imperfect and irregular.  If he could once acquire this simple idea of his duty he would be much more agreeable company than he now is, and a more useful member of society; though considering the hard conditions under which he works, his necessity of writing hurriedly from an imperfect examination of far more books, on a greater variety of subjects, than he can even hope to read, the average American critic—­the ordinary critic of commerce, so to speak—­is even now very, well indeed.  Collectively he is more than this; for the joint effect of our criticism is the pretty thorough appreciation of any book submitted to it

VII.

The misfortune rather than the fault of our individual critic is that he is the heir of the false theory and bad manners of the English school.  The theory of that school has apparently been that almost any person of glib and lively expression is competent to write of almost any branch of polite literature; its manners are what we know.  The American, whom it has largely formed, is by nature very glib and very lively, and commonly his criticism, viewed as imaginative work, is more agreeable than that of the Englishman; but it is, like the art of both countries, apt to be amateurish.  In some degree our authors have freed themselves from English models; they have gained some notion of the more serious work of the Continent:  but it is still the ambition of the American critic to write like the English critic, to show his wit if not his learning, to strive to eclipse the author under review rather than illustrate him.  He has not yet caught on to the fact that it is really no part of his business to display himself, but that it is altogether his duty to place a book in such a light that the reader shall know its class, its function, its character.  The vast good-nature of our people preserves us from the worst effects of this criticism without principles.  Our critic, at his lowest, is rarely malignant; and when he is rude or untruthful, it is mostly without truculence; I suspect that he is often offensive without knowing that he is so.  Now and then he acts simply under instruction from higher authority, and denounces because it is the tradition of his publication to do so.  In other cases the critic is obliged to support his journal’s repute for severity, or for wit, or for morality, though he may himself be entirely amiable, dull, and wicked; this necessity more or less warps his verdicts.