There are critics who severally think that it rests with each one of
them what shall be accounted good, and what bad. They all mistake
their own toy-trumpets for the trombones of fame.
A drug does not effect its purpose if the dose is too large; and it
is the same with censure and adverse criticism when it exceeds the
measure of justice.
The disastrous thing for intellectual merit is that it must wait for
those to praise the good who have themselves produced nothing but what
is bad; nay, it is a primary misfortune that it has to receive its
crown at the hands of the critical power of mankind--a quality of
which most men possess only the weak and impotent semblance, so that
the reality may be numbered amongst the rarest gifts of nature. Hence
La Bruyere's remark is, unhappily, as true as it is neat. _Apres
l'esprit de discernement_, he says, _ce qu'il y a au monde de plus
rare, ce sont les diamans et les perles_. The spirit of discernment!
the critical faculty! it is these that are lacking. Men do not know
how to distinguish the genuine from the false, the corn from the
chaff, gold from copper; or to perceive the wide gulf that separates
a genius from an ordinary man. Thus we have that bad state of things
described in an old-fashioned verse, which gives it as the lot of the
great ones here on earth to be recognized only when they are gone:
_Es ist nun das Geschick der Grossen fiier auf Erden,
Erst wann sie nicht mehr sind; von uns erkannt zu werden.
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