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    ¦ T H E L E A D E R November 26, 1853.] ...

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    ¦ jCiterattift

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    Critics are not the legislators, but the...

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    The Americans have a most undignified su...

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    In the same review there is a remarkable...

• Transcript

  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

    Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.

    ¦ T H E L E A D E R November 26, 1853.] ...

    November 26 , 1853 . ] T H E L E A D E R . 1145

    ¦ Jciterattift

    ¦ jCiterattift

    Critics Are Not The Legislators, But The...

    Critics are not the legislators , but the judges and police of literature . They do not make laws—they interpret ana try to enforce them—Edinburgh Beview .

    The Americans Have A Most Undignified Su...

    The Americans have a most undignified susceptibility on the score of their nationality ; and although , it is true our writers , both in books and newspapers , have wounded that susceptibility by their cheap ridicule and ungenerous remarks , nevertheless , the readiness to take offence which they so frequently exhibit , is a weakness one would imagine such a nation ought long ago to have outlived . The French ridicule us , and declaim against us ; but we do not wince , we are not angry , we laugh , or turn aside in contempt . -

    Can you imagine the English newspapers being in the least occupied with a supposed insinuation emanating from one of Coopek ' s novels or Hawthoen ' s romances ? Yet American susceptibility is wounded by a supposed mark of disrespect on Thackeray ' s part towards Mr . Washington ; and the great satirist has to explain gravely through the Times that in speaking of " Mr . Washington heading the rebels with a courage worthy of a b etter cause , " he was not insulting the Union , nor throwing a doubt on Washington and his cause ! Anything more supremely ridiculous is not to be found among the long list of literary offences .

    Apropos of Thackeray , there is an article on his Humourists vx the Prospective Itevieto , which well deserves being looked for : it is mainly devoted to the much-vexed question of the Position and Rewards of literature . Respecting the rewards , in a pecuniary sense , the writer takes very much the same view as that advocated recently in this journal ; but there is manifest contradiction between one part of his argument and another . He contends that the employment of authors by Government is a ruinous mistake : it is yoking Pegasus to the plough , with the double result of bad ploughing and a crippled Pegasus . Yet , towards the conclusion of his article , he cites with approbation Scott ' s advice of not making Literature a profession , adding : —

    " There are few cases in which the public has not cause to regret the adoption of literature as a profession . There are few writers whose powers are eo various , so ready , so equable , as to work for money , as conscientiously as they work for fame ; and if a man depends upon his pen for his daily bread , he has a very strong temptation to degrade authorship into bookmaking . " It is very true ; but if it be true that few men can , with success , devote themselves wholly to Literature , and if , on the other hand , they are not to be employed hi official labours , because Comedies and Essays , which would enrich the world , are left unwritten during the long hours of such

    employment , we ask , —What is the proper position of men of Letters ? It seems to us that there are many offices which Government might reasonably and profitably bestow on men of letters ; and the more Literature becomes , as it is daily becoming , a refuge for unsuccessful professional men , and for the desire of cheap notoriety—the more the market is crowded with ' indifferent writers , who render it difficult for good literature to be adequately remunerated , the more imperative is it that those who can really advance tho progress of the world , should be facilitated as far as practicable , and not left wholly to battle with a " supply and demand " principle .

    Nevertheless , we wholly disagree with all those who would found a claim upon , their unsucccss ; wo cannot sympathise with " neglected genius" which sets up claims in no way related to its real deserts—which demands that the pudding should bo abundant and tho praise unstinted , -the case is simple : If a man wants to make money ho must pursue the monoy -making path ; to forsake that for some pleasanter path , and complain that lie has wandered from the goal , is unwise- The pleasures of Literature have their perils .

    If a man outer a profession for which Nature has not superominontlj endowed him , ho must bo satisfied with its leaner rewards : if , an is too often tho case with wteratur ' ts , hi . s own bcII-confidence hurries him into a , vocation for which ho jh radicall y unfit , lie need not « omplain of tho public , whoa the penalty duo to his folly recoils upon himsolf . There aro peculiar difficulties and a numerous host of "isappointmonts attendant upon tho literary profession : its rewards are unequally , HomuthnoH unfairly , distributed : itn remuneration often scanty , and always uncertain : but all this tho dinrippointod attpirant knew when ho ontered upon it in high diHdain agaiiiHt tho drudgeiy of the office or tho counting-houno . Ho only inado a falso estimate of his own powers , or , as ho porhups phrasun it , of tho public "aurhniimtioii . "

    There in ho much of this " false estimate" mining the prospects of men , 'Mid brooding literature- an carrion breeds maggots ! Vox the most part literar y men have no raison d ' etre ; have no justification in their talents l ° r the career they ntuml > lo through ! Their facile labours issue in un-»¦<• " Iterated mediocrity . Mol ' wt in their talent makes them evade the ln < 'xorable . law of labour which ensuroN success ; and the very evasion of •'" in law ih in itself a proof of want of talent . Lo tompH n'dpargno pan co qu ' on fait Hans lui . - '• inui spares nothing wrought without his aid . " Time and Hovero discipline preside over all genuine excellence . Genuine mastery , < ivou in the ' tfhtoHl ; and mo « t playful subjects , resiilfcn from the innumerable tonta-IV 'H of . an original talent . IT men have tho courage of their convictions , JJ' » d , ho to Hpeulc , the moral qualities of their talcufca ; if tl * oy will labour v "l 0 »» ko of the result , ^ ud not simply for the sake of money : if tho

    high and earnest aim of that reward always carried in the exaltation of the faculties and the inward sense of glory , as the mind long hovering round a truth finally clutches it in an exulting grasp , if that Reward be sought , then will the pleasures of Literature throw into insignificance all its pains j and if to these rewards there come the extraneous rewards of j pudding and of praise , do not let us mistake these pleasant results as ! the signs of real literary reward . No man is indifferent to money ;' but in proportion as he estimates the delights procurable by money ' over the deKghts procurable in his study , in exactly that ratio is his allegiance to Literature lessened . The fox-hunter would scarcely thank you for the brush he had not ridden for himself , because his real pleasure is in the chase and not in the result ; so , in a far higher sense , the rewards of Literature are in Literature itself . But all are not hunters at

    the meeting of the hounds ; there are more red jackets than courageous riders ; there are many more writers than men of letters . If , then , it be true that men of letters are not rewarded according to their claims , the reason is , because their claims are irrelevant . It is in their work , in the " still air of delightful studies , " in the pains and pleasures of intellectual travail and paternity , true reward resides . What lies beyond , is a mercantile question . They should ascertain the wants of the market before entering it . Then , again , as to the pleadings of improvidence , the reviewer well says : ¦ —

    "Why the man of letters ^ who relying on the proceeds of an eminently uncertain profession- —is yet profuse of time and money : eaten up by bad companions and evil habits : imprudent in the manifestation of his best feelings and his worst . desires alike—should wonder that his career ends in the Court for the relief of Insolvent Debtors : or the Meet , as would have been the case fift y years ago—it is impossible to conceive . And it is equally impossible to estimate his claim upon the justice of the public who has bought and paid for his book s , whatever plea he may put forth for its compassion ! Yet this , or something like this , has been the career of most , if not all of those men of letters , whose distresses have so often been used 'to point the moral' not of their own folly , but of the public ingratitude . What adventure was ever more wild , what imprudence

    could be more startling , than that of Ohatterton , in coming to ' London with no better reliance for a subsistence than his own genius and the Rowley fabrications ? Had he found a judicious patron : had Walpole—on whom , by the way , he had little claim or none—ehosen to have acted the part of a friend , the result mi ght have been different ; but what else could be expected when fortune was thus staked on one cast of the dice ? What declamations have not been expended on the melancholy death of Otway ! Yet Otway , the son of a beneficcd clergyman , left Christchurch without a degree , ineffectually tried his fortune upon the " stage , was known , though penniless , as one of the most dissolute of men about town ; lost

    by misconduct the commission in the army procured for him by the kindness of a friend ; earned in his disgrace a precarious livelihood by writing for the theatre , and died wretchedly , as has been described . There is no magic in genius which can prevent a , life like this from ending in the workhouse . Drunkenness and improvidence will have this appropriate retribution , though associated with genius which has charmed the world . Poor Steele would have been no richer than ho was had old Duchess Sarah made him her heir ; and there have been literary men , of whom we may select Southey as an honourable example , who would have pro-Berved a manly self-respect , and earned a decent com petence in straits greater than those of Steele . "

    In The Same Review There Is A Remarkable...

    In the same review there is a remarkable article in reply to Newman ' s new chapter in the Phases of Faith , on the Moral Perfection of Jesus . There is no mistaking the splendid eloquence of this writer , nor his strange ingenuity of indirect logic ; bright as a snake and shifty as an eel , he is fascinating and exasperating beyond all his contemporaries . There is a certain grandeur of plausibility about him ; he gives errors such a massive or elao such an alluring aspect ; , that you reject them almost with regret . What , for example , earn seem lnoi-o suicidal than the admission that we aro not to conceive the character of Christ as it is depicted in the Gospels , but as it has revealed itself in the great masses of Christian history ? Yet this he docs : —

    " Wo aro further willing to confess , that if wo were wholly strangers to tho transactions of this world , and , knowing nothing of its past and present , worn merely introduced to tho biography of Jesus among a mass of othor personal records and memorials of life and thought , it in doubtful whether we nhould single it out with anything approaching to the feeling we now attach to it . " This evidence , bciii £ direct , he sets aside , in favour of the following , which is vague , indirect : — . " But tho meaauro of tho grandest beings cannot bo takou by any private

    standards or contemporary memoirs : and hi dory is their bioyruphy writ large . Thopowor of their personality i « but incipient iii tfu'ir own generation ; and if , n quality , not lens than its intensity , grown clearer an fcho dinienHioiiH of its agency enlarge . Ay Plato thought it needful , in hiu investigation of Morals , to ntudy their embodiment in tho magnified houIo and conspicuous orders of tho State , ho in it impossible to apprehend aright tho poi-Hon of Jchiih without watching the ( spread of hit ) shadow over the ages , and throwing back upon him tho uharactoriHticu of tho ChriHtian faith . " '

    Now it requires little thought ; . steadily directed to this question to recognise at oneo a confusion betMeen 'influence and character . The position is wholly beside the bearings of the argument . We tent a , iiiiiii ' h influence through history ; we do not tent his character . It' innteatl of our vivid picture of Maktin Lvvnun we were to substitute an idoul of J ^ rotestaniJBin , and declare that to be tho truer portrait , would any one believe uh P Wo might # o through the article , and pick many holes in it , which , however , would not in the leant alter our opinion of its line qualities . We prefer citing a curiouw passage : — " That Chriatondom Usut boon in tho habit of giving very indifferent rcaaonm for ltd boU « f / j , wo » ro well , wwaro ; und , for tho mewt pent , tho mora curtain tho belief ,

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Nov. 26, 1853, page 17, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_26111853/page/17/