Not so,
however, with our present follies. We are becoming boisterous and
arrogant in the pride of a too speedily assumed literary freedom. We
throw off, with the most presumptuous and unmeaning hauteur, all
deference whatever to foreign opinion- we forget, in the puerile
inflation of vanity, that the world is the true theatre of the
biblical histrio- we get up a hue and cry about the necessity of
encouraging native writers of merit- we blindly fancy that we can
accomplish this by indiscriminate puffing of good, bad, and
indifferent, without taking the trouble to consider that what we
choose to denominate encouragement is thus, by its general
application, rendered precisely the reverse. In a word, so far from
being ashamed of the many disgraceful literary failures to which our
own inordinate vanities and misapplied patriotism have lately given
birth, and so far from deeply lamenting that these daily puerilities
are of home manufacture, we adhere pertinaciously to our original
blindly conceived idea, and thus often find ourselves involved in
the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure
enough, its stupidity is American.*
* This charge of indiscriminant puffing will, of course, only
apply to the general character of our criticism- there are some
noble exceptions. We wish also especially to discriminate between
those notices of new works which are intended merely to call public
attention to them, and deliberate criticism on the works themselves.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25