The Anglo-Saxon Review (Volume 7) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CAMPAIGN. BY ARTHUR WAUGH JHERE is, perhaps, no attitude of criticism at once so easy and so unsound as an undeviating pessimism towards the literature of our contemporaries. Many critical reputations have indeed been made by it; for people like, as Rochefoucauld long ago found out, to watch over the misfortunes of their friends; and there is, moreover, a certain showy air of superiority in the fatalism of the pessimist. And so a writer who is for ever setting out to kill reputations gets a certain popularity from the self-satisfaction of the survivors, and the credit for considerable wisdom in his recoil from popular idols. But the critic who seeks not only to do his duty to himself, but also to be of some help, however small, to the cause of the literature he is supposed to serve?such a critic will be very suspicious of any such facile and controvertible triumphs. Pessimism, he will remember, is never man's normal attitude; the human spirit is always primarily optimist; if it were not so, life, with its increasing complexities and recurring disappointments, would be impossible to any but the intellectually comatose. Pessimism is, in fact, a state of reaction, following upon expectations too roseate, and ambitions too heroic, for fulfilment. We all set out gaily, in the morning of life, eager to invade the fens of Lerna and slay the dragons in our path; the noon finds us with our sword broken and our way lost, and it is then that we exclaim, with the fool, that the ways are impassable and the toil a lost labour. True as this is of the life of action and ideals, it is doubly true of the interests of literature. There is indeed no moment so dangerous to criticism as that of the reaction from a first popular acclamation. The reader who is careful to follow the history of...