I think it would be safe to say that in no other relation of life is so much brutality permitted by civilized society as in the criticism of literature and the arts.  Canon Farrar is quite right in reproaching literary criticism with the uncandor of judging an author without reference to his aims; with pursuing certain writers from spite and prejudice, and mere habit; with misrepresenting a book by quoting a phrase or passage apart from the context; with magnifying misprints and careless expressions into important faults; with abusing an author for his opinions; with base and personal motives.

Every writer of experience knows that certain critical journals will condemn his work without regard to its quality, even if it has never been his fortune to learn, as one author did from a repentent reviewer, that in a journal pretending to literary taste his books were given out for review with the caution, “Remember that the Clarion is opposed to Mr. Blank’s books.”

The final conclusion appears to be that the man, or even the young lady, who is given a gun, and told to shoot at some passer from behind a hedge, is placed in circumstances of temptation almost too strong for human nature.

XII.

As I have already intimated, I doubt the more lasting effects of unjust criticism.  It is no part of my belief that Keats’s fame was long delayed by it, or Wordsworth’s, or Browning’s.  Something unwonted, unexpected, in the quality of each delayed his recognition; each was not only a poet, he was a revolution, a new order of things, to which the critical perceptions and habitudes had painfully to adjust themselves:  But I have no question of the gross and stupid injustice with which these great men were used, and of the barbarization of the public mind by the sight of the wrong inflicted on them with impunity.  This savage condition still persists in the toleration of anonymous criticism, an abuse that ought to be as extinct as the torture of witnesses.  It is hard enough to treat a fellow-author with respect even when one has to address him, name to name, upon the same level, in plain day; swooping down upon him in the dark, panoplied in the authority of a great journal, it is impossible.  Every now and then some idealist comes forward and declares that you should say nothing in criticism of a man’s book which you would not say of it to his face.  But I am afraid this is asking too much.  I am afraid it would put an end to all criticism; and that if it were practised literature would be left to purify itself.  I have no doubt literature would do this; but in such a state of things there would be no provision for the critics.  We ought not to destroy critics, we ought to reform them, or rather transform them, or turn them from the assumption of authority to a realization of their true function in the civilized state.  They are no worse at heart, probably, than many others, and there are probably good husbands and tender fathers, loving daughters and careful mothers, among them.