* Talleyrand.
EXORDIUM
EXORDIUM
[Graham's Magazine, January, 1842]
IN Commencing, with the New Year, a New Volume, we shall be
permitted to say a very few words by way of exordium to our usual
chapter of Reviews, or, as we should prefer calling them, of
Critical Notices. Yet we speak not for the sake of the exordium, but
because we have really something to say, and know not when or where
better to say it.
That the public attention, in America, has, of late days, been
more than usually directed to the matter of literary criticism, is
plainly apparent. Our periodicals are beginning to acknowledge the
importance of the science (shall we so term it?) and to disdain the
flippant opinion which so long has been made its substitute.
Time was when we imported our critical decisions from the mother
country. For many years we enacted a perfect farce of subserviency
to the dicta of Great Britain. At last a revulsion of feeling, with
self-disgust, necessarily ensued. Urged by these, we plunged into
the opposite extreme. In throwing totally off that "authority,"
whose voice had so long been so sacred, we even surpassed, and by
much, our original folly. But the watchword now was, "a national
literature!"- as, if any true literature could be "national"- as if
the world at large were not the only proper stage for the literary
histrio.
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