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!