Calamities and Quarrels of Authors. Disraeli Isaac
all the genius of the age faster than it could be produced; could make his own malignity look like wit, and turn the wit of others into absurdity, by placing it topsy-turvy. As thus, when he attacked “The Traveller” of Goldsmith, which he called “a flimsy poem,” he discussed the subject as a grave political pamphlet, condemning the whole system, as raised on false principles. “The Deserted Village” was sneeringly pronounced to be “pretty;” but then it had “neither fancy, dignity, genius, or fire.” When he reviewed Johnson’s “Tour to the Hebrides,” he decrees that the whole book was written “by one who had seen but little,” and therefore could not be very interesting. His virulent attack on Johnson’s Shakspeare may be preserved for its total want of literary decency; and his “Love in the Suds, a Town Eclogue,” where he has placed Garrick with an infamous character, may be useful to show how far witty malignity will advance in the violation of moral decency. He libelled all the genius of the age, and was proud of doing it.[100] 142 Johnson and Akenside preserved a stern silence: but poor Goldsmith, the child of Nature, could not resist attempting to execute martial law, by caning the critic; for which being blamed, he published a defence of himself in the papers. I shall transcribe his feelings on Kenrick’s excessive and illiberal criticism.
“The law gives us no protection against this injury. The insults we receive before the public, by being more open, are the more distressing; by treating them with silent contempt, we do not pay a sufficient deference to the opinion of the world. By recurring to legal redress, we too often expose the weakness of the law, which only serves to increase our mortification by failing to relieve us. In short, every man should singly consider himself as a guardian of the liberty of the press, and, as far as his influence can extend, should endeavour to prevent its licentiousness becoming at last the grave of its freedom.”[101]
Here then is another calamity arising from the calamity of undue severity of criticism, which authors bring on themselves by their excessive anxiety, which throws them into some extremely ridiculous attitudes; and surprisingly influences even authors of good sense and temper. Scott, of Amwell, the Quaker and Poet, was, doubtless, a modest and amiable man, for Johnson declared “he loved him.” When his poems were collected, they were reviewed in the “Critical Review” very offensively to the poet; for the critic, alluding to the numerous embellishments of the volume, observed that
“There is a profusion of ornaments and finery about this 143 book not quite suitable to the plainness and simplicity of the Barclean system; but Mr. Scott is fond of the Muses, and wishes, we suppose, like Captain Macheath, to see his ladies well dressed.”
Such was the cold affected witticism of the critic, whom I intimately knew—and I believe he meant little harm! His friends imagined even that this was the solitary attempt at wit he had ever made in his life; for after a lapse of years, he would still recur to it as an evidence of the felicity of his fancy, and the keenness of his satire. The truth is, he was a physician, whose name is prefixed as the editor to a great medical compilation, and who never pretended that he had any taste for poetry. His great art of poetical criticism was always, as Pope expresses a character, “to dwell in decencies;” his acumen, to detect that terrible poetic crime false rhymes, and to employ indefinite terms, which, as they had no precise meaning, were applicable to all things; to commend, occasionally, a passage not always the most exquisite; sometimes to hesitate, while, with delightful candour, he seemed to give up his opinion; to hazard sometimes a positive condemnation on parts which often unluckily proved the most favourite with the poet and the reader. Such was this poetical reviewer, whom no one disturbed in his periodical course, till the circumstance of a plain Quaker becoming a poet, and fluttering in the finical ornaments of his book, provoked him from that calm state of innocent mediocrity, into miserable humour, and illiberal criticism.
The effect, however, this pert criticism had on poor Scott was indeed a calamity. It produced an inconsiderate “Letter to the Critical Reviewers.” Scott was justly offended at the stigma of Quakerism, applied to the author of a literary composition; but too gravely accuses the critic of his scurrilous allusion to Macheath, as comparing him to a highwayman; he seems, however, more provoked at the odd account of his poems; he says, “You rank all my poems together as bad, then discriminate some as good, and, to complete all, recommend the volume as an agreeable and amusing collection.” Had the poet been personally acquainted with this tantalizing critic, he would have comprehended the nature of the criticism—and certainly would never have replied to it.
The critic, employing one of his indefinite terms, had said of “Amwell,” and some of the early “Elegies,” that “they had their share of poetical merit;” he does not venture to 144 assign the proportion of that share, but “the Amœbean and oriental eclogues, odes, epistles, &c., now added, are of a much weaker feature, and many of them incorrect.”
Here Scott loses all his dignity as a Quaker and a poet—he asks what the critic means by the affected phrase much weaker feature; the style, he says, was designed to be somewhat less elevated, and thus addresses the critic:—
“You may, however, be safely defied to pronounce them, with truth, deficient either in strength or melody of versification! They were designed to be, like Virgil’s, descriptive of Nature, simple and correct. Had you been disposed to do me justice, you might have observed that in these eclogues I had drawn from the great prototype Nature, much imagery that had escaped the notice of all my predecessors. You might also have remarked that when I introduced images that had been already introduced by others, still the arrangement or combination of those images was my own. The praise of originality you might at least have allowed me.”
As for their incorrectness!—Scott points that accusation with a note of admiration, adding, “with whatever defects my works may be chargeable, the last is that of incorrectness.”
We are here involuntarily reminded of Sir Fretful, in The Critic:—
“I think the interest rather declines in the fourth act.”
“Rises! you mean, my dear friend!”
Perhaps the most extraordinary examples of the irritation of a poet’s mind, and a man of amiable temper, are those parts of this letter in which the author quotes large portions of his poetry, to refute the degrading strictures of the reviewer.
This was a fertile principle, admitting of very copious extracts; but the ludicrous attitude is that of an Adonis inspecting himself at his mirror.
That provoking see-saw of criticism, which our learned physician usually adopted in his critiques, was particularly tantalizing to the poet of Amwell. The critic condemns, in the gross, a whole set of eclogues; but immediately asserts of one of them, that “the whole of it has great poetical merit, and paints its subject in the warmest colours.” When he came to review the odes, he discovers that “he does not meet with those polished numbers, nor that freedom and spirit, which that species of poetry requires;” and quotes half 145 a stanza, which he declares is “abrupt and insipid.” “From twenty-seven odes!” exclaims the writhing poet—“are the whole of my lyric productions to be stigmatised for four lines which are flatter than those that preceded them?” But what the critic could not be aware of, the poet tells us—he designed them to be just what they are. “I knew they were so when they were first written, but they were thought sufficiently elevated for the place.” And then he enters into an inquiry what the critic can mean by “polished numbers, freedom, and spirit.” The passage is curious:—
“By your first criticism, polished numbers, if you mean melodious versification, this perhaps the general ear will not deny me. If you mean classical, chaste diction, free from tautologous repetitions of the same thoughts in different expressions; free from bad rhymes, unnecessary epithets, and incongruous metaphors, I believe you may be safely challenged to produce many instances wherein I have failed.
“By freedom, your second criterion, if you mean daring transition, or arbitrary and desultory disposition of ideas, however this may be required in the greater ode, it is now, I believe, for the first time, expected in the lesser ode. If you mean that careless, diffuse composition, that conversation-verse, or verse loitering into prose, now so fashionable, this is an excellence