Then I _played_, as the
children say, that it came in regular course before some well-meaning
doer of criticisms, who had never read the original, (no very wild
assumption, as things go,) and endeavored to conceive the kind of way in
which he would be likely to take it. I put myself in his place, and tried
to write such a perfunctory notice as I thought would be likely, in
filling his column, to satisfy his conscience. But it was a _tour de
force_ quite beyond my power to execute without grimace. I could not
arrive at that artistic absorption in my own conception which would
enable me to be natural, and found myself, like a bad actor, continually
betraying my self-consciousness by my very endeavor to hide it under
caricature. The path of Nature is indeed a narrow one, and it is only the
immortals that seek it, and, when they find it, do not find themselves
cramped therein. My result was a dead failure,--satire instead of comedy.
I could not shake off that strange accumulation which we call self, and
report honestly what I saw and felt even to myself, much less to others.
Yet I have often thought, that, unless we can so far free ourselves from
our own prepossessions as to be capable of bringing to a work of art some
freshness of sensation, and receiving from it in turn some new surprise
of sympathy and admiration,--some shock even, it may be, of instinctive
distaste and repulsion,--though we may praise or blame, weighing our
_pros_ and _cons_ in the nicest balances, sealed by proper authority, yet
we shall not criticise in the highest sense.
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