Complete Essays, Literary Criticism, Cryptography, Autography, Translations & Letters. Эдгар Аллан По
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the subject of Romance-writing is, in itself, of too little moment to merit any serious notice. From such opinion we dissent in toto. The readers of the July Examiner will there see, that in regard to imaginative writing, we have assumed a position which we intend to adhere to. Even if this were not the case, and we stood uncompromised in the matter, or had expressed opinions adverse to those we allude to, the subject is still of present importance, and warrants, at least, investigation. The public have agreed, by the eagerness of their interest in this species of literature, to give it an adventitious importance, if no more. It may be urged, too, that the more frivolous the character of that which engages so much of our attention, and occupies so vast a portion of our time, the more imperious seems the necessity of its rigid investigation.
To all parties, moreover, a distinct conception of what any division of our literary absolutely is, would seem to be a desideratrum. And, perhaps, by the man of letters alone, is the difficulty of arriving at such conception, in the case of our lighter works especially, very fully and properly understood. In truth, the corrupt nature of our ordinary criticism has become a bye-word and a reproach. Its powers have been prostrated by its own arm. The intercourse between critic and publisher, as it now almost universally stands, is comprised either in the paying and pocketing of blackmail, as the price of a simple forbearance, or in a direct system of petty and contemptible bribery properly so called—a system even more injurious than the former to the true interests of the public, and more degrading to the buyers and sellers of good and evil opinion, on account of the more positive character of the service here rendered for the consideration received. We smile at the idea of any denial of our assertions upon this topic—they are even notoriously true. In the charge of general corruption, there are, undoubtedly, one or two noble exceptions to be made. There are, indeed, some very few editors who, maintaining an entire independence, will receive no book from the publishers at all, or receive them with the perfect understanding on the part of these latter that an utterly unbiassed critique will be given. But these rare cases are insufficient to have much influence upon the popular mistrust—a mistrust which is heightened by a knowledge of the chicaneries of certain northern literary cliques, which, at the bidding of leading booksellers, manufacture, as it is needed from time to time, a pseudo-public-opinion by wholesale, for the benefit of any little hanger-on of the body, or pettifogging protector of the firm. We speak of these things not at all in merriment, but in the bitterness of scorn. We speak, too, only of things painfully notorious. It is unnecessary to cite instances, where one is found in almost every issue of a book. It is needless to call to mind the desperate case of Fay—a case where the pertinacity of the effort to gull—where the obviousness of the attempt at forestalling a judgement—where the wofully overdone be-Mirror-ment of that man of straw, together with the pitiable platitude of his stupid production, proved a dose somewhat too potent for even the well-prepared stomach of the mob. We say it is supererogatory to dwell upon Norman Leslie, or any other by-gone follies, when we have to-day, before our eyes, an example of the full working of the machinations alluded to, in the numerous and simultaneous anticipatory puffments of Charles Vincent, and of his worthy coadjutor, Sydney Clifton. The grossness of these base attempts, however, has not escaped without many an indignant rebuke from the more honorable portion of the press; and we hail these symptoms of restiveness under the yoke of unprincipled ignorance and quackery (strong only in combination) as the harbingers of a better era for the interests of real merit, and of the national literature as a whole. It has become, indeed, the plain duty of each individual connected with our periodicals, heartily to give whatever influence he possesses to the good cause of integrity and the truth. The results thus attainable will be found worthy his closest attention and best efforts. We shall thus frown down all conspiracies to foist inanity upon the public consideration at the expense of every person of talent who is not a member of a coterie in power. We may even arrive, in time, at that desirable point, from which a distinct view of our men of letters may be obtained, and their several pretensions adjusted by the standard of a rigorous and self-sustaining criticism alone. That heir respective positions are as yet properly settled; that the posts which a vast number of them now hold are maintained by little better tenure than the chicanery upon which we have commented, will be asserted in full by none but the ignorant, or the parties who have the best right to feel an interest in the “good old condition of things.” No two matters can be more radically different than the reputation of some of our prominent litterateurs, as gathered from the mouths of the people, who glean it from the paragraphs of the papers, and the same reputation as deduced from the private estimate of intelligent and educated men. We do not advance this fact as a new discovery. Its truth, on the contrary, is the subject, and has been long so, of every-day witticism and mirth. Why not? Surely there can be few things more ridiculous than the general character and assumptions of the ordinary “critical notices” of new books! An editor, possibly without the shadow of the commonest attainments, often without brains, always without time, scruples not to give the world to understand that he is in the daily habit of critically reading and deciding upon a flood of publications, three-fourths of which would be Hebrew to his most desperate efforts at comprehension, one-tenth of whose title-pages he may probably have turned over, and whose whole mass and amount, as might be mathematically demonstrated, would be sufficient to occupy, in the most cursory perusal, the laborious attention of some ten or twenty men for a month! What he wants in plausibility, however, he makes up in obsequiousness—what in time, in temper. He is the most easily pleased man in the world. He admires every thing from the big Dictionary of Noah Webster, to the last little edition of Tom Thumb. Indeed his chief difficulty is to find tongue to express his delight. Every pamphlet is a miracle; every book in boards is an epoch in letters. His words, therefore, get bigger and bigger every day. If it were not for talking Cockney, we might call him “a regular swell.” But what is to become of him in the end? He will either go up like a balloon, or be mistaken for a pair of bellows, on account of the sonorous pertinacity of his puffs.
Should opinions thus promulgated be taken, in their wonderful aggregate, as an evidence of what American literature absolutely is, (and it may be said that, in general, they are really so taken,) we shall find ourselves the most enviable set of people upon the face of the earth. Our fine writers are legion. Our very atmosphere is redolent of genius; and we, the nation, are a huge well-contented chameleon, having grown pursy by inhaling it. We are teres et rotundus—enwrapped in excellence. All our poets are Miltons, neither mute nor inglorious; all our poetesses are “American Hemanses;” nor will it do to deny that all our novelists are either great Knowns or great Unknowns, and that every body who writes in every possible and impossible department, is the admirable Crichton, or the ghost of the admirable Crichton, or at least the admirable Crichton redivivus. We are thus in a glorious condition; and will remain so until forced to disgorge our ethereal honors. In truth, there is some danger that the jealousy of the old World will interfere. It cannot long submit to that outrageous monopoly of “all decency and all the talent” in which the gentlemen of the press give such undoubted assurance of our being so busily engaged.
But we feel angry with ourselves for the jesting tone of our observations upon this topic. The prevalence of the spirit of puffery is a subject far less for merriment than for disgust. Its truckling, yet dogmatical character—its bold, unsustained, yet self-sufficient and wholesale laudation—is becoming, more and more, an insult to the common sense of the community. Trivial as it essentially is, it has yet been made the instrument of the grossest abuse in the elevation of imbecility, to the manifest injury to the utter ruin, of true merit. It there any man of good feeling and of ordinary understanding—is there one single individual among our readers—who does not feel a thrill of bitter indignation, altogether apart from any sentiment of mirth, as he calls to mind instance after instance of the purest, of the most unadulterated quackery in letters, which as arisen to a high post in the apparent popular estimation, and which still maintains it, by the sole means of a blustering arrogance, or of a busy wriggling conceit, or even through the simple immensity of its assumptions—assumptions not only unopposed by the press at large, but absolutely supported in proportion to the vociferous clamor with which they are made—in exact accordance with their utter baselessness and untenability? We should have no trouble of pointing out, to-day, some twenty or thirty so-called literary personages, who, if not idiots as we half think them, or if not hardened to all sense of shame by a long course of disingenuousness, will now blush, in the perusal of these words, with a consciousness