Some such reviewer, Eugenio thought, all journals pretending to literary authority ought to keep on their staff for the comfort of veteran authors and for the dispensation of that more delicate and sympathetic justice which their case required. It might be well enough to use a pair of ordinary steelyards, or even hay-scales, in weighing out the rewards and punishments of younger authors, but some such sensitive balance as only the sympathetic nerves of equal years, and, if possible, equal intelligence, could adjust ought to be used in ascertaining the merits of a veteran author.
In his frankest self-consciousness, Eugenio did not say a veteran author like himself, and he did not insist exclusively upon a veteran critic for his behoof. There were times when he thought that a young critic, coming in the glow of adolescence and the freshness of knowledge won from the recent study of all his works, might be better fitted to appreciate the qualities of the latest. He quite rejected the notion, when it came to business, with which he had sometimes played, of an author reviewing his own books, and this apart from his sense of its immodesty. In the course of his experience he had known of but one really great author who had done this, and then had done it upon the invitation of an editor of rare if somewhat wilful perspicacity, who invited the author to do it on the ground that no one else could do it so well. But though he would not have liked to be his own reviewer, because it was not seemly, he chiefly feared that if put upon his honor, as he would be in such a case, he must deal with his work so damagingly as to leave little or nothing of it. He might make the reputation of a great critic, but in doing execution upon his own shortcomings he might be the means of destroying himself as a great author.
After all, authors are not the self-satisfied generation they must often seem to the public which has tried to spoil them with praise. There is much in doing a thing which makes a man modest in regard to the way he has done it. Even if he knows that he has done it well, if the testimony of all his faculties is to that effect, there is somehow the lurking sense that it was not he who really did it, but that there is a power, to turn Matthew Arnold's phrase to our use, "not ourselves, that works for" beauty as well as righteousness, and that it was this mystical force which wrought through him to the exquisite result. If you come to the second-best results, to the gold so alloyed that you may confidently stamp it your own, do you wish to proclaim it the precious metal without alloy? Do you wish to declare that it is to all intents and purposes quite as good as pure gold, or even better? Do you hold yourself quit of the duty of saying that it is second-best, that it is something mixed with copper or nickel, and of the value of oroide, say? You cannot bring yourself to this extreme of candor, and what right, then, have you to recognize that something else is fine gold when it is really so? Ought not you to feign that it is only about thirteen carats when it is actually eighteen?
Considerations like these always stayed Eugenio when it came to the point of deciding whether he would care to be his own reviewer, but the desire to be adequately reviewed still remained with him, a fond longing amid repeated disappointments. An author often feels that he has got too much praise, though he never has got all he wants. "Why don't they clap?" Doctor Holmes once whimsically demanded, speaking of his audiences in those simple early days when he went about lecturing like Emerson and Alcott and other saints and sages of New England. "Do they think I can't stand it? Why don't they give me three times three? I can stand it very well." An author may sometimes think he is fulsomely praised and may even feel a sort of disgust for the slab adulation trowelled upon him, but his admirer need not fear being accused of insincerity. He may confidently count upon being regarded as a fine fellow who has at worst gone wrong in the right direction. It ought, therefore, to be a very simple matter to content a veteran author in the article of criticism, but somehow it is not.
Perhaps the trouble is in the nature of criticism, which, unwillingly enough, no doubt, assumes to be and to do more than it can. Its convention is that it is an examination of a book and a report upon its qualities. But it is not such a report, and it cannot be in the limits assigned it, which are the only tolerable limits with the reader. The author would not mind if the critic's report were physically commensurate with his book; but, of course, the reader could not stand that; and, generous as they are, other authors might complain. Sometimes, as it is, they think that any one of their number who gets something like a good report from a critic is getting more than his deserts. Yet authors, though a difficult, are not an impossible generation. Few of them would allow that they are even unreasonable with regard to criticism, and they would probably hail any improvement in its theories and methods with gratitude.
As criticism cannot be an adequate report upon the qualities of a book, even a book which has not been examined, why should it assume to do more than talk about it and talk all the better for being merely tentative and altogether unfinal? Nobody can really be authoritative concerning anything, for there is no one whose wisdom will not be disputed by others of the wise. The best way, then, might be for a reviewer to go round collecting sentiment and opinion about the book he means to talk of, and then to give as many qualifying varieties of impression as the general unhandsomeness of human nature will allow him to give when they differ from his own impression. On the terms of the old and still accepted convention of criticism, Eugenio had himself done a vast deal of reviewing, an amount of it, in fact, that he could not consider without amaze, and in all this reviewing he had not once satisfied himself with his work. Never once had he written a criticism which seemed to him adequate, or more than an approximation to justice, even when he had most carefully, almost prayerfully, examined the work he reported upon. He was aware of writing from this mood or that, of feeling hampered by editorial conditions, of becoming impatient or jaded, and finally employing the hay-scales when he ought to have used the delicate balances with which one weighs out life-giving elixirs or deadly poisons. But he used to imagine that if he could have put himself in the attitude of easy discussion or light comment, instead of the judicial pose he felt obliged to take, he could have administered a far finer and more generous measure of justice. In these moments he used to wonder whether something stated and organized in the way of intelligent talk about books might not be substituted for the conventional verdicts and sentences of the courts of criticism.
In this notion he proceeded upon a principle evolved from his own experience in fields far from the flinty and sterile ranges of criticism. He had not only done much reviewing in those days, but he had already written much in the kinds which he could not, in his modesty, bring himself to call "creative," though he did not mind others calling it so. Whatever had been the shortcomings of the conventional reports upon his work, it was his glad experience that nothing he said or meant, not the slightest intention or airiest intimation in his books, was ever wholly lost. Somewhere, some one, somehow had caught it, liked it, remembered it, and had by a happy inspiration written him of it, it might be diffident, it might be confident, of his pleasure in the recognition.
Such recognition was always more precious than the reports of the conventional critics, though if these were favorable the author was glad of them, as of any good that the gods gave. But what struck Eugenio was that such recognition was the real, the very, the vital criticism, and that if it could be evoked in behalf of others, in its sincerity, it might be helpful to the cause of literature far beyond anything that the courts of criticism could do or effect in its behalf. After all, as he said to himself, an author wrote for his readers and not for his critics, for pleasure and not for judgment; and if he could be assured publicly, as he sometimes was assured privately, that nothing he did was lost, he might be encouraged to keep on doing his best. Why, indeed, should not there be a critical journal embodying in a species of fragrant bouquet the flowers of thought and emotion springing up in the brains and bosoms of readers responsive to the influence of a new book? Such readers would have only to suppose themselves addressing the author direct, and the thing could be done. It might be done in another way by the authors contributing the praises privately sent him. In a time when personal letters to authors are constantly quoted in advertisements, this might not seem so immodest as in some earlier literary condition.
In the mean time the question of what shall be done for veteran authors who are always breaking new ground still remains, and it is complicated by a fact of psychological import for the reader as well as the author. What first gives an author his hold upon the reader is not the novelty of his theme, but a pleasing, it may be a painfully pleasing, quality which in its peculiar variation must be called his personal quality. It is the sense of this in each of his successive books which deepens his hold upon the reader, and not the style, or the characters, or the intrigue. As long as this personal quality delights, he is new whether he breaks new ground or not, or he is newly welcome. With his own generation, with the readers who began young with him and have grown old with him, he is always safe. But there is danger for him with the readers who begin young with him after he has grown old. It is they who find his tales twice told and himself hackneyed, unless they have been trained to like his personal quality by their elders. This might be difficult, but it is not impossible, and ought not it to be the glad, the grateful care of such elders?