Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 May 1895 — No More Slashing. [ARTICLE]

No More Slashing.

It is a noteworthy fact that the rapidly increasing number of new books, not of poetry only, at the .present hour is accompanied by a diminution, not an increase, of critical severity. One would have supposed that at such a period—when, to adapt the proverb of the wood and the trees, one can liardly see literature for the books—the critical standard would rise; that the critic would show himself morn, not less, exacting, and would be more careful, in the interest of the reader, to emphasize the distinction between the excellent and the mediocre. Yet no one can read much of the current periodical criticism without noting that it is rather the opposite that is happening. While it is an obvious and undeniable fact that the manufacture of books, as distinguished from authorship, exists on an enormous scale, yet apparently the

average critic becomes more easy to please, not less, than of old; as if he cried in sheer despair to the makers of books: “Well, if you can’t rise to my standard I must come down to yours,” and hardly six months pass without some prose romance appearing, by some fresh writer, and being received with such a chorus of welcome and such hecatombs of praise as (to borrow Macaulay’s phrase) would require some modification if applied to the masterpieces of Walter Scott—to “Old Mortality” or “The Heart of Midlothian.” Now, as I have said, no one wishes for a return of the criticism called slashing, but what I do think the intelligent reader often sighs for is some criticism that may be called discriminating, and if the value of such in literature of whatever kind is great, it is surely greatest where the literature in question is poetry, in which Horace has told us—and the cultivated sense of mankind has ratified his words—“mediocrity is not admissible.” —Macmillan's Magazine.