In this way the
very aim of science and art is directly frustrated.
The ideal journal could, to be sure, be written only by people who
joined incorruptible honesty with rare knowledge and still rarer power
of judgment; so that perhaps there could, at the very most, be one,
and even hardly one, in the whole country; but there it would stand,
like a just Aeropagus, every member of which would have to be elected
by all the others. Under the system that prevails at present, literary
journals are carried on by a clique, and secretly perhaps also by
booksellers for the good of the trade; and they are often nothing but
coalitions of bad heads to prevent the good ones succeeding. As
Goethe once remarked to me, nowhere is there so much dishonesty as in
literature.
But, above all, anonymity, that shield of all literary rascality,
would have to disappear. It was introduced under the pretext of
protecting the honest critic, who warned the public, against the
resentment of the author and his friends. But where there is one case
of this sort, there will be a hundred where it merely serves to take
all responsibility from the man who cannot stand by what he has said,
or possibly to conceal the shame of one who has been cowardly and base
enough to recommend a book to the public for the purpose of putting
money into his own pocket.
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