IV

The lasting regret that we cannot know more of the bright, sincere,

and genuine people of the world is increased by the fact that they

are all different from each other. Was it not Madame de Sevigne who

said she had loved several different women for several different

qualities? Every real person--for there are persons as there are

fruits that have no distinguishing flavor, mere gooseberries--has a

distinct quality, and the finding it is always like the discovery of

a new island to the voyager. The physical world we shall exhaust

some day, having a written description of every foot of it to which

we can turn; but we shall never get the different qualities of people

into a biographical dictionary, and the making acquaintance with a

human being will never cease to be an exciting experiment. We cannot

even classify men so as to aid us much in our estimate of them. The

efforts in this direction are ingenious, but unsatisfactory. If I

hear that a man is lymphatic or nervous-sanguine, I cannot tell

therefrom whether I shall like and trust him. He may produce a

phrenological chart showing that his knobby head is the home of all

the virtues, and that the vicious tendencies are represented by holes

in his cranium, and yet I cannot be sure that he will not be as

disagreeable as if phrenology had not been invented. I feel

sometimes that phrenology is the refuge of mediocrity. Its charts

are almost as misleading concerning character as photographs. And

photography may be described as the art which enables commonplace

mediocrity to look like genius. The heavy-jowled man with shallow

cerebrum has only to incline his head so that the lying instrument

can select a favorable focus, to appear in the picture with the brow

of a sage and the chin of a poet. Of all the arts for ministering to

human vanity the photographic is the most useful, but it is a poor

aid in the revelation of character. You shall learn more of a man's

real nature by seeing him walk once up the broad aisle of his church

to his pew on Sunday, than by studying his photograph for a month.

No, we do not get any certain standard of men by a chart of their

temperaments; it will hardly answer to select a wife by the color of

her hair; though it be by nature as red as a cardinal's hat, she may

be no more constant than if it were dyed. The farmer who shuns all

the lymphatic beauties in his neighborhood, and selects to wife the

most nervous-sanguine, may find that she is unwilling to get up in

the winter mornings and make the kitchen fire. Many a man, even in

this scientific age which professes to label us all, has been cruelly

deceived in this way. Neither the blondes nor the brunettes act

according to the advertisement of their temperaments. The truth is

that men refuse to come under the classifications of the pseudo-

scientists, and all our new nomenclatures do not add much to our

knowledge. You know what to expect--if the comparison will be

pardoned--of a horse with certain points; but you wouldn't dare go on

a journey with a man merely upon the strength of knowing that his

temperament was the proper mixture of the sanguine and the

phlegmatic. Science is not able to teach us concerning men as it

teaches us of horses, though I am very far from saying that there are

not traits of nobleness and of meanness that run through families and

can be calculated to appear in individuals with absolute certainty;

one family will be trusty and another tricky through all its members

for generations; noble strains and ignoble strains are perpetuated.

When we hear that she has eloped with the stable-boy and married him,

we are apt to remark, "Well, she was a Bogardus." And when we read

that she has gone on a mission and has died, distinguishing herself

by some extraordinary devotion to the heathen at Ujiji, we think it

sufficient to say, "Yes, her mother married into the Smiths." But

this knowledge comes of our experience of special families, and

stands us in stead no further.

If we cannot classify men scientifically and reduce them under a kind

of botanical order, as if they had a calculable vegetable

development, neither can we gain much knowledge of them by

comparison. It does not help me at all in my estimate of their

characters to compare Mandeville with the Young Lady, or Our Next

Door with the Parson. The wise man does not permit himself to set up

even in his own mind any comparison of his friends. His friendship

is capable of going to extremes with many people, evoked as it is by

many qualities. When Mandeville goes into my garden in June I can

usually find him in a particular bed of strawberries, but he does not

speak disrespectfully of the others. When Nature, says Mandeville,

consents to put herself into any sort of strawberry, I have no

criticisms to make, I am only glad that I have been created into the

same world with such a delicious manifestation of the Divine favor.

If I left Mandeville alone in the garden long enough, I have no doubt

he would impartially make an end of the fruit of all the beds, for

his capacity in this direction is as all-embracing as it is in the

matter of friendships. The Young Lady has also her favorite patch of

berries. And the Parson, I am sorry to say, prefers to have them

picked for him the elect of the garden--and served in an orthodox

manner. The straw-berry has a sort of poetical precedence, and I

presume that no fruit is jealous of it any more than any flower is

jealous of the rose; but I remark the facility with which liking for

it is transferred to the raspberry, and from the raspberry (not to

make a tedious enumeration) to the melon, and from the melon to the

grape, and the grape to the pear, and the pear to the apple. And we

do not mar our enjoyment of each by comparisons.

Of course it would be a dull world if we could not criticise our

friends, but the most unprofitable and unsatisfactory criticism is

that by comparison. Criticism is not necessarily uncharitableness,

but a wholesome exercise of our powers of analysis and

discrimination. It is, however, a very idle exercise, leading to no

results when we set the qualities of one over against the qualities

of another, and disparage by contrast and not by independent

judgment. And this method of procedure creates jealousies and heart-

burnings innumerable.

Criticism by comparison is the refuge of incapables, and especially

is this true in literature. It is a lazy way of disposing of a young

poet to bluntly declare, without any sort of discrimination of his

defects or his excellences, that he equals Tennyson, and that Scott

never wrote anything finer. What is the justice of damning a

meritorious novelist by comparing him with Dickens, and smothering

him with thoughtless and good-natured eulogy? The poet and the

novelist may be well enough, and probably have qualities and gifts of

their own which are worth the critic's attention, if he has any time

to bestow on them; and it is certainly unjust to subject them to a

comparison with somebody else, merely because the critic will not

take the trouble to ascertain what they are. If, indeed, the poet

and novelist are mere imitators of a model and copyists of a style,

they may be dismissed with such commendation as we bestow upon the

machines who pass their lives in making bad copies of the pictures of

the great painters. But the critics of whom we speak do not intend

depreciation, but eulogy, when they say that the author they have in

hand has the wit of Sydney Smith and the brilliancy of Macaulay.

Probably he is not like either of them, and may have a genuine though

modest virtue of his own; but these names will certainly kill him,

and he will never be anybody in the popular estimation. The public

finds out speedily that he is not Sydney Smith, and it resents the

extravagant claim for him as if he were an impudent pretender. How

many authors of fair ability to interest the world have we known in

our own day who have been thus sky-rocketed into notoriety by the

lazy indiscrimination of the critic-by-comparison, and then have sunk

into a popular contempt as undeserved! I never see a young aspirant

injudiciously compared to a great and resplendent name in literature,

but I feel like saying, My poor fellow, your days are few and full of

trouble; you begin life handicapped, and you cannot possibly run a

creditable race.

I think this sort of critical eulogy is more damaging even than that

which kills by a different assumption, and one which is equally

common, namely, that the author has not done what he probably never

intended to do. It is well known that most of the trouble in life

comes from our inability to compel other people to do what we think

they ought, and it is true in criticism that we are unwilling to take

a book for what it is, and credit the author with that. When the

solemn critic, like a mastiff with a ladies' bonnet in his mouth,

gets hold of a light piece of verse, or a graceful sketch which

catches the humor of an hour for the entertainment of an hour, he

tears it into a thousand shreds. It adds nothing to human knowledge,

it solves none of the problems of life, it touches none of the

questions of social science, it is not a philosophical treatise, and

it is not a dozen things that it might have been. The critic cannot

forgive the author for this disrespect to him. This isn't a rose,

says the critic, taking up a pansy and rending it; it is not at all

like a rose, and the author is either a pretentious idiot or an

idiotic pretender. What business, indeed, has the author to send the

critic a bunch of sweet-peas, when he knows that a cabbage would be

preferred,--something not showy, but useful?

A good deal of this is what Mandeville said and I am not sure that it

is devoid of personal feeling. He published, some years ago, a

little volume giving an account of a trip through the Great West, and

a very entertaining book it was. But one of the heavy critics got

hold of it, and made Mandeville appear, even to himself, he

confessed, like an ass, because there was nothing in the volume about

geology or mining prospects, and very little to instruct the student

of physical geography. With alternate sarcasm and ridicule, he

literally basted the author, till Mandeville said that he felt almost

like a depraved scoundrel, and thought he should be held up to less

execration if he had committed a neat and scientific murder.

But I confess that I have a good deal of sympathy with the critics.

Consider what these public tasters have to endure! None of us, I

fancy, would like to be compelled to read all that they read, or to

take into our mouths, even with the privilege of speedily ejecting it

with a grimace, all that they sip. The critics of the vintage, who

pursue their calling in the dark vaults and amid mouldy casks, give

their opinion, for the most part, only upon wine, upon juice that has

matured and ripened into development of quality. But what crude,

unrestrained, unfermented--even raw and drugged liquor, must the

literary taster put to his unwilling lips day after day!