Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/19

Rh metropolitan birth would have softened them. But certain it is that if a man has the rare gift of humility, the provinces are the best place for it to thrive in.

Dixon Scott had this gift in ample measure; and it was the very core of his power. Not by humility alone can we critics excel; but the more we have of it, the better. Gone are the days when we dared bench ourselves aloft to acquit or condemn, according to a fixed code of laws, the shivering artist in the dock. Many of us, no doubt, would like to go on doing this; but wouldn't the laughter in court be unquenchable if we did? We may cast a wistful quarterly glance at that motto which still adorns the cover of The Edinburgh Review; but well we know that it is no longer a question of the judge being condemned if the guilty man is let off: the judge was condemned long ago on his own demerits. There is a letter in which Miss Charlotte Brontë wrote of her trepidation in meeting, at a dinner given for that purpose by her publisher, three leading critics. One can imagine them—grave, bald, whiskered men in broad-cloth, peering through their spectacles at the little woman of genius, and wondering whether she would be able to prove her innocence; immensely grave and self-important gentlemen, and yet—had they and she but known it—ghosts, empty and pathetic survivals from another century. At the coming of the romantic school in literature, at the passing of the classical school, the old criticism had ceased to exist; but it didn't know this; nobody knew this. It was in quite recent times that people, looking back, realized that the current judicial criticism of literature in the nineteenth century had been one long series of awful "howlers." The immediate result of this discovery was the laying of the ghost that had stalked and gibbered so long. The way was now clear for living criticism—criticism adaptable to the quality of its