It is an honest trade enough; he saves people a great
deal of trouble; he sells, no doubt, perfectly wholesome and
inexpensive things; but I am glad when he has turned the corner, and
when his raucous clamour is heard more faintly--glad when he is out of
sight, and still more when he is out of hearing. So with these authors;
if I take up one of their books, however brilliant and even true the
statements may be, I am sorry that the writer has laid hands upon a
thing I admire and value. He seems like a damp-handed auctioneer,
bawling in public, and pointing out the beauties of a mute and pathetic
statue.
I am thinking now of one writer in particular, a well-known man of
letters, a critic, essayist, and biographer; a man of great acuteness
and with strong and vehement preferences in literature. When I have
been forced by circumstances, as I sometimes have, to read one of his
books, I find myself at once in a condition of irritable opposition. He
writes sensibly, acutely, epigrammatically; but there is a vile
complacency about it all, an underlying assumption that every one who
does not agree with him in the smallest particular is necessarily a
fool--a sense that he feels that he has gone into the merits of a book,
and that there is exactly as much and as little in it as he tells you.
He is very often right; that is the misery of it. But this lack of
urbanity, this unnecessary insolence, is a very grave fault in a
writer--fatal, indeed, to his permanence.
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