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The Critical Sense
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (April 29, 1911) : 21
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Criticism has become one of the nicer modern sciences. It is governed by laws, delicately understood if seldom stated, and is so strictly defined in its outlines that the smallest of careless lapses — resulting sometimes from a blunt inability to feel the limits set — is regarded as a deep drop into those regions obscured by vulgar recrimination and the complacent, self-exposing scorn of the philistine.
The lack of the critical sense, or the refusal to use it, is one of the homely virtues which at one time were considered wholly praiseworthy; perhaps from the comfort found in mental dullness and perhaps for the grain of sweetness embedded in all large masses of insensible indiscrimination. To abstain from criticism in these days is to be an obstructionist, and if good feeling is presented as the quality which it is intended should dominate one’s social intercourse, one will, all inevitably, be shut off from the only social intercourse that can be said to count or be in the least worthy of the name. For if a man refrains, because of that slipshod virtue, good nature, from perceiving, probing, analyzing, tasting, and weighing — a process naturally resulting in final judgments open to those old-fashioned terms of opprobrium such as superior, snobbish, and unrighteous — what possible pleasure does the approval of such a man stand for? You are liked, but so loosely and numbly that it would have been of equal moment if dislike had been substituted instead. To refuse to apply a scale of subtle distinctions to all, with a frank putting aside of those who do not come up to the prescribed measurements, is to make one’s pronouncements valueless. If you do not dislike my neighbor you need not claim to like me, for my neighbor is the negation of me, and if my qualities give you actual pleasure his should give you actual pain.
When we are caught in this to us absorbingly educating occupation, of gazing at the humans nearest us through a microscope of our highest preferences, it is to be upbraided hotly with the cry of Late 18th century dialectal English snob (“cobbler”), of unknown origin.
wiktionary“snob,” and the reminder that those people whom we have declared non-existent to us are exactly as good as we. All surprised, we admit their goodness — it was never their goodness we had under consideration — and as for being expected to cower at the word “snob,” that is out of the question, as we had thought it too obvious to explain that “snob” used in the sense in which it is now being employed against us is precisely what we are and what we would feel heartily ashamed not to be. To place a person — we always grant freely the possible fallibility of our docketing — is not to have acted unkindly toward that person. We are taught to cultivate our every sense for the purpose of selection and differentiation in all other departments of life, and those who have learned in one line to recognize and thrill to the most beautiful are never accused of being unkind to what they have come to know as mediocre. They say no more than that it is to them mediocre. They do not deny it one of its mediocre virtues, they merely beg that, having found that which awes, delights, and enlightens them, they shall be permitted to devote themselves to it, and not be expected from a perverted sense of duty to be equally much with the mediocre thing, for it is insensible to the only communications they have to make, and would enjoy vastly more the society of its own kind to whom it is not in the least mediocre, for whom it may even be the most beautiful.
We are encouraged, envied, and permitted adequate working space, if we apply our critical and appreciative sense (for the latter is but the reverse side of the former), to pictures, books, furniture, houses, scenery, statuary, or any of the other things which crowd life so richly and possess the double power of dulling and depressing, or vivifying and exalting, us, according to the relation between their stage of development and our stage of comprehension. We eliminate, as far as lies in our power, all material things that we cannot feel to be by some connection attuned to us, and still the world commends us for our taste and erudition. But when we come to the thing so essential that all else seems the mere sand in the mortar, when we come to an analysis of the humans surrounding us, we are told that to use the antennæ of our subtlest needs, in this instance, is to act uncharitably. Knowing as we do and principally because of our former probings that here it is we can never be sure, and must always, when we have discarded a person as not what we were searching for, fear that what appeared as lacks and blanks in him were but the reflections of awkwardnesses and mistakes in us, we yet feel, with all the strength that is in us, that it is among humans, if anywhere, that we must be allowed a constant putting aside and a going on, even if it looks at times like a high-handed going over toward that which we consider finest, and with which alone we can dwell in unity.
that we are the stone on which our critical sense is oftenest sharpened, and that, once having found a person who calls for our hearty, admiring devotion, we criticize, or, to put it more clearly, analyze and search for flavors with a gusto possible at no other time As a final effort to prove that the modern cult of the critical sense is not a petty delight in pulling others to fragments so that they shall seem less than ourselves, whom we carefully preserve intact, it is sincerely, if hesitatingly, stated, for it is unlikely to be believed, that we are the stone on which our critical sense is oftenest sharpened, and that, once having found a person who calls for our hearty, admiring devotion, we criticize, or, to put it more clearly, analyze and search for flavors with a gusto possible at no other time. As the botanist walks with his eyes on the ground even when treading well-known paths, so does the relisher of character’s multiple shades turn and recognize and subdivide the complicated folk he loves best; loving for the interest of finding and classifying those blooms having but five petals when they should have six, poignantly thrilling to the tracery of the leaves — and only able to feel thus keenly because of the life of selection he has believed in and led. Just here enters one of the rules of criticism never to be disregarded. If one’s liking for a friend is known, admitted fully, and taken for granted before everything else, if it is the basis on which one talks of him at all, then there is almost no length of frankness one may not go in a discussion regarding him, for always the voiced recognition of his idiosyncrasies remains a hillock beside the mountain of one’s royal regard. But if any one going not on this basis of a liking over-balancing everything else presumes to agree with one tittle of what you have said, and offers so much as the faintest echo of what you have uttered, you are in arms, warm in defense of the person you were criticizing, wronged by the woman who did not understand that, having failed to perceive his paramount dearness, she had forfeited her right to speak to you of his quaint, mad incongruities.
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