Lancaster daily intelligencer. [volume] (Lancaster, Pa.) 1864-1928, 1890-05-03
Mistakes of Great Critics.

Archdeacon Farrar In the May Forum.
Horace Walpole called Dante "extrava-
giant, absurd, disgusting; in short Metho-
dist parson in Bedlam!" Samuel Pepys,
esq, thought "Othello" a "mean thing;"
and "Midsummei's Nights Dream" "the
most insipid, ridiculous play ! ever saw in
my life." Bacon's IaStdurdtiO Magma"
was described by an eminent contemporary
as "the silliest of printed books" Hacket,
in his "Lfe of Lord Keeper Williams"
calls Milton "a petty schoolboy scribbler :"
and another contemporary spoke of him as
the author of profane and iascivious
poem called Paradise Lost"
The critics have shown themselves very
poor judges of style, either in literature or
art. As general rule an author of any
merit or seriousness could not possibly do
more foolish thing than take their advice
Turner was incomparably the greatest
painter OF his age, yet his style during the
greater part of his life furnished common
joke to every scribbler, and tledged the
callow plumage of every would-be wit.
Carlyle's effect upon his age was produced
in great measures by his style; yet this
style was for some time denounced as a
trayesty of English which was perfectly in
tolerable. Mr.. Ruskin is now almost uni
versally regarded as the greatest living
master of English prose, yet many critics
at first re :eved his style with unmeasured
ridicule. When Mr.. Browning published
his first poem" Pauline some critic
or other called him overdose" Unfortu-
nately-as he has told us-he paid too much
attention To the remark, and in his desire
to use no superfiuous word, studied an
elliptic concentration of style which told
fatally against the ready intelligibility of
"Sordello" and other later poems.
Surely the re;ord of the past alterations
even of illustrious critics should teach
every earnest man that he need not be
afraid to hold his own. Dr. johnson was
looked up to as the literary dictator of his
day. yet he said of the author of San Elegy
| in Country Churchyard 4" Sir, he was
dull in new way, and that made many
people call him great" And, shrewd as
7 he was, Horace Walpole had nothing
better to say of DR.. johnson than that "he
was a babbing old woman. Prejudice and
bigotry, and pride and presumption and
arrogance are the hags that brew his ink"
OF Horace Walpole in his turn, and of his
play 'The Mysterious Mother" which
Byron so extrayagantly admired, Coleridge
remarked that "no one with spark of
true manliness, of which Horace Walpole
had none, could have written that most
disgusting and detestable composition that
ever came from the hand of man." OF
| Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" even his
friend Southey said 1t is the cumsiest at
tempt at German simplicity | ever saw"
| De Quincy was eloquent and learned, but
he thought that "even Caliban in his
drunkenness never shaped an idol more
weak and hollow than modern Germany
has set up for its worship in the person of
Goethe" We all know how Coleridge was
abused like pickpocket; how Shelley was
almost golded TO madness; how the
"Quarterly Review March, ls2sl said
that the poems of Keats had been received
"with an all but universal roar OF laughter -
aud how the young poe. was brutally told
"to 60 back to his gallipOts !" how Jeffrey
began his article on Wordsworth with
"rhis will never do" called his poems "a
tissue of moral and devotional rawlings" ("
Some OF us are old enough to remember
how the most powerful journal Of the