Interludes | Page 4

is a want of perspective, or perhaps a want of what artists call value. His mountains are mole-hills, and his mole-hills are mountains. His colouring is so badly managed that the effect of distance, light, and shade are lost. Thus a man will so insist upon the use of difficult words by George Elliot that a person unacquainted with her writings would think that the whole merit or demerit of that author lay in her vocabulary. A man will so exalt the pathos of Dickens or Thackeray that he will throw their wit and humour into the background. Some person's only remark on seeing Turner's Modern Italy will be that the colours are cracked, or, upon reading Sterne, that he always wrote "you was" instead of "you were." "Did it ever strike you," said a friend of mine, "that whenever you hear of a young woman found drowned she always is described as having worn elastic boots?" Such persons look at all things through a distorting medium. Important things become unimportant and vice versa. The foreground is thrust back, the distance brought forward, and the middle distance is nowhere. The effect of an exaggerated praise generally is that an unfair reaction sets in. Mr. Justin M'Carthy, in his History of Our Own Times, points out how much the character of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe has suffered from the absurd devotion of Kinglake. Kinglake writes (he says) of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe "as if he were describing the all-compelling movements of some divinity or providence." What nonsense has been talked about Millais' landscapes, Whistler's nocturnes, Swinburne poetry--all excellent enough in their way, and requiring to be praised according to their merits, with a reserve as to their faults. The practice of puffing tends to destroy all sort of proportion in criticism. When single sentences or portions of sentences of apparently unqualified praise are detached from context, and heaped together so as to induce the public to think that all praise and no blame has been awarded, of course all proportion is lost. Macaulay lashed this vice in his celebrated essay on Robert Montgomery's poems. "We expect some reserve," he says, "some decent pride in our hatter and our bootmaker. But no artifice by which notoriety can be obtained is thought too abject for a man of letters. Extreme poverty may indeed in some degree be an excuse for employing these shifts as it may be an excuse for stealing a leg of mutton."
Upon the other hand, how unfair is exaggerated blame. I am not speaking here of that which is intentionally unfair, but of blame fairly meant and in some degree deserved, but where the language is out of all proportion to the offence.
Ruskin so belaboured the poor ancients about their landscapes that when I was a youth he had taught me to believe that Claude and Ruisdael were mere duffers. So when he speaks of Whistler, as we shall presently see, his blame is so exaggerated that it produces a revulsion in the mind of the reader. He said Whistler's painting consisted in throwing a pot of paint in the public's face. Well! we may say Whistler is somewhat sketchy and careless or wanting in colour, but it is quite possible to keep our tempers over it.
"This salad is very gritty," said a gentleman to Douglas Jerrold at a dinner party. "Gritty," said Jerrold, "it's a mere gravel path with a few weeds in it." That was very unfair on the salad.
3. Criticism should be appropriate.
I mean by this something different from proportionate. Sometimes the language of criticism is not that of exaggeration, but yet it is quite as inappropriate. The critic may have taken his seat too high or too low for a proper survey, or he may, by want of education or by carelessness, use quite the wrong words to express his meaning. You will hear a man say, "I was enchanted with the Biglow Papers," or "I was charmed with the hyenas at the Zoological Gardens." I think one of the distinguishing characteristics of a gentleman, and what makes the society of educated gentlemen so pleasant, is that their language is appropriate without effort. "'What a delicious shiver is creeping over those limes!' said Lancelot, half to himself. The expression struck Argemone; it was the right one." This is what makes some people's conversation so interesting. It is full of appropriate language. This is perhaps even more the case with educated ladies. I think it is Macaulay who says that the ordinary letter of an English lady is the best English style to be found anywhere.
"It would be bad grammar," said Cobbett, "to say of the House of Commons, 'It is a sink of iniquity, and they are a set of rascally swindlers.'" Of course, the bad