I care not one single curse for all the criticism that ever was canted
or decanted, or recanted. Neither does the world. The world takes a poet
as it finds him, and seats him above or below the salt. The world is as
obstinate as a million mules, and will not turn its head on one side or
another for all the shouting of the critical population that ever was
shouted. It is very possible that the world is a bad judge. Well, then--
appeal to posterity, and be hanged to you--and posterity will affirm the
judgment, with costs.--_Noctes Ambrosianae, Sept_., 1825.
Our current literature teems with thought and feeling,--with passion and
imagination. There was Gifford, and there are Jeffrey, and Southey ...
and twenty--forty--fifty--other crack contributors to the Reviews,
Magazines and Gazettes, who have said more tender, and true, and fine,
and deep things in the way of criticism, than ever was said before since
the reign of Cadmus, ten thousand times over,--not in long, dull, heavy,
formal, prosy theories--but flung off-hand, out of the glowing mint--a
coinage of the purest ore--and stamped with the ineffaceable impress of
genius.--_Noctes Ambrosianae_, April, 1829.
The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment.
EDMUND BURKE.
We must not underrate him who uses wit for subsistence, and flies from
the ingratitude of the age even to a bookseller for redress.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
The critical faculty is a _rara avis_; almost as rare, indeed, as the
phoenix, which appears only once in five hundred years. ARTHUR
SCHOPENHAUER.
The Supreme Critic ... is ... that Unity, that Oversoul, within which
every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other.
R. W. EMERSON.
Criticism's best spiritual work which is to keep man from a
self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarising, to lead him
towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in
itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
The whole history of criticism has been a triumph of authors over
critics.
R. G. MOULTON.
Our criticism is disabled by the unwillingness of the critic to learn
from an author, and his readiness to mistrust him.
D. H. HOWELLS.
We have too many small schoolmasters; yet not only do I not question in
literature the high utility of criticism, but I should be tempted to say
that the part it plays may be the supremely beneficent one when it
proceeds from deep sources, from the efficient combination of experience
and perception. In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of
mankind, a torch-bearing outrider, the interpreter _par excellence_.
HENRY JAMES.