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perhaps because he is, as we have said, a self-appointed censor. Yet there was a time when his censorship was, if not always accepted, at least thought deserving consideration. The judgment of certain men on every new work of art was eagerly expected by the public, and in even more eager if less acquiescent spirit by the artist. From many causes, some of which it were not easy, and others it were superfluous, to define, criticism has lost this general respect. Whether the critic had ever really the power with which he was often complimented, and perhaps sometimes believed himself to possess, must be doubtful. It is certain that he has it not now. At his best he is but the mouthpiece of the educated few; for the most part, as Goethe said, he but instils a sort of half-culture into the masses, teaching them to look alike for faults and for beauties which they cannot appreciate, and to ignore those which they can. But malice or ignorance never really injured a good work, nor did flattery ever succeed in permanently establishing a bad one. Criticism as a rule has done no more than give utterance to the taste of the time. In the days of our fathers fewer people thought it necessary to have a taste, there were fewer varieties of taste, and as a consequence there were fewer critics. Within the last generation the number of labourers in the great field of art has wonderfully increased and is increasing every day: the number of people interested in their productions, or who wish to be thought interested, has increased and is increasing in almost the same proportion; it is inevitable that the number of critics should also have increased. A critic is now as necessary an appanage of a newspaper as the printer or the editor, and the number of newspapers is beyond all power of guessing. In such conditions it is obvious that there must be a vast quantity of careless criticism, and not a little that must be ignorant, though with the best intention to be neither. Dishonest or spite

ful criticism has of course always existed in more or less degree, but the opportunities for its exercise must at least be more abundant now than they have ever been before. It is idle to say that such criticism does not exist, or to throw the charge upon wounded vanity or disappointed hopes. It is natural that a young artist should attribute censure to anything rather than his own faults, and in the general cry against the critics this must always be taken into the account. But neither great age nor great experience is needed to show that in the current criticism of our press there is much at work foreign to what should be its true purpose. We are far from saying that it is always of an evil kind. The sweet influences of friendship prevail doubtless as often as the baser instincts of our frail nature, let us think that they prevail more often; but the one can be as inimical to the truth as the other. Indeed of the two, the foolish face of praise is probably more baleful than the "stare tremendous of the threatening eye". For the public, being persuaded that critics are as a rule ill-natured, pay little heed to any real or supposed con firmation of their belief; whereas the nauseous flatteries in which criticism occasionally indulges attract notice by their very unexpectedness, and the public is easily cajoled into taking the unexpected seriously. These things are of course no great calamity; they may be trusted to right themselves in time, for, as we have said, no reputation, for good or ill, has ever lasted, or will last, on such foundations. Still they exist, and 'tis pity that they should; and if criticism has to set its house in order, no corner should be left unswept. Many of the critics of our æsthetic journals are themselves producers. Is it humanly possible that they should view their fellow-workers with absolutely clear impartial eyes? Must they not, how honestly soever they may strive against the natural man in them, be somewhat in the position of the polite tradesman, thankful for past

favours and solicitous for their continuance? We have often thought it were a good thing that no editor should allow in his columns the review of a work done by one of his own contributors. To be sure this would seriously check the flow of criticism; but that were in itself perhaps no very bad thing.

There is no doubt something ludicrous in the thought of a British juryman being required to decide æsthetic questions; but in fact he is very rarely if ever required to do SO. In one of the cases we have alluded to, for instance, an actor sued a critic for finding fault with his performance of the part of Romeo, and won his suit. It is probable that the jury had no very exact idea of Romeo's character, but they learned that the dissatisfied critic had a personal grudge against the actor, and they very properly gave the latter the benefit of the doubt. It is at least possible that the plaintiff did not make a first rate Romeo; it is a part very easily played badly. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the defendant said anything contrary to what he believed to be the truth, though the expression he gave to his belief seems to have been thought unnecessarily emphatic. But the moral of the case lies in the fact that he was considered by the jury to have been in a condition unfavourable to impartial judgment he conceived himself to have been discourteously used by the actor whose performance he was judging, and the least intellectual rate-payer who ever got into a jury-box is as competent to see that criticism should not be exercised under these conditions as the best trained and most finely gifted nature. And with this decision at any rate no right-minded person, be he twenty times a critic, will be disposed to quarrel.

It is indeed possible that in these particular cases the critics have been playing the part of scapegoats, and that the blows apparently struck against their unpopular profession

were in reality aimed at the growing license of our newspaper press. There is undoubtedly a strong suspicion afoot in all classes of society that the freedom of the press is rapidly developing into something very like a tyranny. It is not only among the notoriously disreputable journals that this may be seen; even our well-ordered and wellwritten journals, the majority, let us be thankful to say, sometimes permit themselves a freedom of comment, to say nothing of a freedom of speech, which certainly appears to some people to exceed that fair discussion advocated by Lord Ellenborough. Newspapers are the voice of the time, and the time is undoubtedly to blame. The memory of no living man can probably recall any such scandal as our Parliament has lately exhibited in its comments on a case still before the judges, the most flagrant offender being moreover an individual whose knowledge of the law should at least have been sufficient to keep him from so wanton a breach of its first principles. Nor is it only in matters of such high importance that the offence is seen. It may be seen in a hundred different ways, not only in our desire to know all about our neighbours, but in our neighbour's desire to tell us all about himself. The newspaper appears now to be regarded not only as a court of appeal but also as the touchstone of honour. Nothing in the new order is perhaps more disturbing to the few and faded survivals from the old than the eagerness with which a correspondence which would once have been considered private is now forwarded to the papers, no matter how unimportant the subject or the correspondents,-for it is not only the King of Syria whose morning meditations must now be known of all men before sundown. Indeed it appears to be the last, and the unfailing, resource of those unfortunate individuals who have not yet attained the distinction of publicity-not even by imprisonment for conscience' sakeand are unable in any other way to gratify their consuming thirst for noto

riety, to enter into a correspondence for the sole purpose of printing it in the newspapers. Whether the partner of their fulfilled renown be consenting or not, matters nothing; he has put his hand to the pen, and may not look back if he will. We were mightily indignant, and justly indignant, at the trick played last year by an unscrupulous American upon our Minister at Washington; but we could find as righteous subjects for our indignation many times without looking across the Atlantic.

Should this feeling, then, be at the bottom of this onslaught on the unfortunate critic, it may be suffered with some complacency. He might indeed congratulate himself, if he were both patriotic and modest, on having for once in his life been of use to his

generation. And if it be merely another proof that in an age of freedom no man has a right to say what he pleases, and any man has a right to knock him down, or, as perhaps we should rather say, pull him up, for saying it, even then no great harm will have been done. It is true that if this ruling be pushed to its logical conclusion the critic's occupation, so far as his contemporaries are concerned, will be for ever gone, unless he be content, unlike a departed poet, to praise the rose that all are praising; yet even that result may be trusted not to imperil the safety of the nation nor to eclipse its gaiety. If, as we have heard it boasted, Christianity has been abolished by a novelist, we can surely endure that criticism should be abolished by a judge.

THE "POOR WHITES" OF THE SOUTHERN STATES.

THE Blue Ridge Mountains, running nearly parallel with the Atlantic coast and at an average distance from it of about one hundred and fifty miles, divide the State of Virginia into two somewhat distinct portions. The larger and eastern one may be called the Virginia of history and tradition, of large planters, negroes, tobacco, everything in short that the popular idea connects with the name of the Old Dominion. The smaller and western division bears the impress of a much later settlement. A strong stream of Ulster and German blood flows in the veins of a thriftier but less generous population. Negroes are scarcer, cattle are more numerous : tobacco and maize give precedence to abundant crops of grass and wheat, while a colder climate and a more generally mountainous surface still further accentuate the differences of race and age. When Virginia stood alone as England's greatest colony, and presented to the emigrant of the seventeenth or eighteenth century a counterpart to the mother country in manners and

customs such as could not be found elsewhere, political and social life was bounded almost as completely by the Blue Ridge upon the west as it was upon the east by the ocean. It was the first outwork of the Alleghanies, and civilization, after creeping cautiously to its base, halted for half a century before it gathered strength and courage to cross the mighty wall into the fertile lands beyond it. The Blue Ridge indeed may claim no small place in history, since for two at least if not three generations it was practically the western boundary of the civilized world. Upon the one side of it was the broad-acred Virginian squire as vestryman, magis

trate, burgess, fox-hunter, champion of Church and King and all the rest of it, ruling benignly over a community of English and African dependants. Upon the other the hated Indian roamed through a trackless wilderness, dashing from time to time through the mountain passes in fierce raids on the frontiersmen whose shanties formed, as it were, an unpaid line of defence for the aristocracy of the eastern settlements.

Time has long robbed the Blue Ridge of all significance but the surpassing beauty of its form and colouring. Hundreds of miles beyond the blue peaks that were once the Ultima Thule of Anglo-Saxons have arisen some of the most populous centres upon earth; and the scream of the iron horse dragging its heavy freights eastward wakes strange echoes in wild upland glens whose solitudes have otherwise defied the march of civilization. The traveller of to-day on his way south by one at least of the great trunk-lines from Washington will for many hours see the Blue Ridge filling the horizon upon his right hand. He will pass innumerable streams that either bear the names or swell the waters of those eastern rivers that the civil war made famous. Rumbling Creek is one of these, and I mention it particularly for two reasons. The first is that, after crossing the river on a tressel-bridge, the train stops at the station of Tucker's Mills, from which I think the passing traveller gets the best distant view of the mountains to be had from the railway. The second, because it is upon the head-waters of this tortuous and noisy stream that I purpose to introduce the reader to that strange specimen of humanity-the Southern Mountaineer.

So far, however, as the station at Tucker's Mills and its surroundings are concerned, the mountaineer population might be in another planet. The river, it is true, races under the railway-bridge with something of the life that marks its earlier career as a foaming trout-stream in some dark ravine of the great Appalachian rampart that towers so wonderfully blue into the distant sky. But the landscape all around is of a lowland character; fat cornfields and green meadows and big farm-houses, halfhidden in apple orchards and groves of oak and tobacco-fields just planted, and through all the roseate blush of the red soil from lane and fallow glowing against the rich greenery of crop or woodland. Perfect in outline, and of that marvellous hue which caused the simple name it still bears to burst naturally from the lips of the adventurers of two centuries and a half ago, the Blue Ridge rolls wave after wave along the western sky. It is full twenty miles away, though you would not think the distance to be half so great. The road leading thither is of the true old Virginian type, full in winter of mudholes that have absorbed, and absorbed apparently in vain, waggon-loads of fence-rails and tons of rock: in summer rough and bony, with ruts worn into chasms and slabs of freestone cropping up above the dusty clay. On the subject of roads even the patriotic eloquence of good Virginians remains dumb; though old man Pippin, who lives on the hill-top yonder and is a firm believer in the superiority of the district watered by Rumbling Creek to every other part of the known world, has been heard to maintain the advantages of even a really bad road: "I tell you, sir, them ar' 'cademized roads is mighty hard on a horse; when thar ain't no mudholes and no rocks a man don't know when to pull up, and is mighty apt to go bust'n his horse along till he drap under him."

There is no fear of any one pursuing such a reckless course between Tucker's

mills and the mountains. The road bristles with impediments over which an uneducated steed would probably

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drap ", though not from exhaustion, if he consented to face them at all. But upon a small active horse to the manner born, the traveller would be indeed hard to please who could not forget the ruggedness of the road in the beauty of the scenes through which it passes. If the pace be somewhat slow, and particularly should the season of the year be May or early June, who would wish to hurry through such an Arcady? The wheat on the hillsides is just heading; the early corn in the low grounds is knee-high, and the negro labourers shout their queer spasmodic melodies as they drive their one-horsed ploughs along the rows. At one turn the road enters some forest of primeval oaks and chestnuts through whose tops the sunbeams shyly flicker on the fresh green leaves of shrubs and saplings. At another it will be separated from the ceaseless babble of the river by narrow clover-fields ripe for the scythe, or long stretches of clean red soil in which the young tobacco-plants are making their first struggle for existence. The log-cabin of the negro is ubiquitous, on the slopes of the hills, by the roadside, in the depths of the forest. Unpretentious homesteads, suited to the needs of the times, look peacefully down from wood-crowned hills, while here and there some spacious mansion, with its brick walls and pillared porticoes, stands among aged and branching oaks as a memorial of the days of slavery. Again and again the road plunges into the gradually narrowing river and, as your horse pauses in midstream to slake that unquenchable thirst which the Virginian nag so uniformly affects, rare vistas of wood and water opening to the sight cause you to encourage the bad habits of the cunning quadruped. All the familiar trees that love the banks of running streams are here. The sycamore and the beech, the ash, the alder and the willow, spread their branches above the stream, while un

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