Criticism and Fiction | Page 5

of that droll little eighteenth-century world, when philosophy had got
the neat little universe into the hollow of its hand, and knew just what it
was, and what it was for; but it is quite without arrogance. "As for those
called critics," the author says, "they have generally sought the rule of
the arts in the wrong place; they have sought among poems, pictures,
engravings, statues, and buildings; but art can never give the rules that
make an art. This is, I believe, the reason why artists in general, and
poets principally, have been confined in so narrow a circle; they have
been rather imitators of one another than of nature. Critics follow them,
and therefore can do little as guides. I can judge but poorly of anything
while I measure it by no other standard than itself. The true standard of
the arts is in every man's power; and an easy observation of the most

common, sometimes of the meanest things, in nature will give the
truest lights, where the greatest sagacity and industry that slights such
observation must leave us in the dark, or, what is worse, amuse and
mislead us by false lights."
If this should happen to be true and it certainly commends itself to
acceptance--it might portend an immediate danger to the vested
interests of criticism, only that it was written a hundred years ago; and
we shall probably have the "sagacity and industry that slights the
observation" of nature long enough yet to allow most critics the time to
learn some more useful trade than criticism as they pursue it.
Nevertheless, I am in hopes that the communistic era in taste
foreshadowed by Burke is approaching, and that it will occur within the
lives of men now overawed by the foolish old superstition that
literature and art are anything but the expression of life, and are to be
judged by any other test than that of their fidelity to it. The time is
coming, I hope, when each new author, each new artist, will be
considered, not in his proportion to any other author or artist, but in his
relation to the human nature, known to us all, which it is his privilege,
his high duty, to interpret. "The true standard of the artist is in every
man's power" already, as Burke says; Michelangelo's "light of the
piazza," the glance of the common eye, is and always was the best light
on a statue; Goethe's "boys and blackbirds" have in all ages been the
real connoisseurs of berries; but hitherto the mass of common men
have been afraid to apply their own simplicity, naturalness, and honesty
to the appreciation of the beautiful. They have always cast about for the
instruction of some one who professed to know better, and who
browbeat wholesome common-sense into the self-distrust that ends in
sophistication. They have fallen generally to the worst of this bad
species, and have been "amused and misled" (how pretty that quaint old
use of amuse is!) "by the false lights" of critical vanity and
self-righteousness. They have been taught to compare what they see
and what they read, not with the things that they have observed and
known, but with the things that some other artist or writer has done.
Especially if they have themselves the artistic impulse in any direction
they are taught to form themselves, not upon life, but upon the masters
who became masters only by forming themselves upon life. The seeds

of death are planted in them, and they can produce only the still-born,
the academic. They are not told to take their work into the public
square and see if it seems true to the chance passer, but to test it by the
work of the very men who refused and decried any other test of their
own work. The young writer who attempts to report the phrase and
carriage of every-day life, who tries to tell just how he has heard men
talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and
unworthy by people who would like to have him show how
Shakespeare's men talked and looked, or Scott's, or Thackeray's, or
Balzac's, or Hawthorne's, or Dickens's; he is instructed to idealize his
personages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of them, and put the
book-likeness into them. He is approached in the spirit of the pedantry
into which learning, much or little, always decays when it withdraws
itself and stands apart from experience in an attitude of imagined
superiority, and which would say with the same confidence to the
scientist: "I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which you
have found in the grass, and I suppose you intend to describe it. Now
don't waste your time and sin against