Lammermoore.

It was a pleasing and useful fiction that every piece of writing is worthy, that its author has complete control of his craft, and that its truths inhabit an achievable distance, when we had to write an essay about it. It was also an easy fiction, and comfortable, when the writing was by Shakespeare, or Milton, or Austen, or Woolfe, or Faulkner; – we could do a lot worse than trust them, it was thought. These are the authors, among others, against whom, in the fullness of time, we would suppose ourselves ready to judge those works in which we have not been in the habit of implicitly trusting. Intellectually, we could conceive that the canon is not above evaluation: I freely confess, though, I cannot begin to imagine not believing in Shakespeare's or Milton's or Austen's genius. It is the same with people, too: – there are certain people who would forever stand bastion in our estimation as paragons, as moral compasses, and whose memory would ensure the world is never without its fools and halfwits. However, it is these fools, these halfwits, these worse than senseless things, whose numbers seem to defy the laws of natural selection, who daily remind us, defy us, that our fiction, which had served us so well in our callowness, do not, cannot, serve us any more. While (yet) refusing to discard our faith in the things we already hold dear (upon which we depend for our discretion), we may no longer look at each new piece of writing with innocence, nor without offence to ourselves and the memory of our betters too easily trust the sense of either its author or partisans. The way to this knowledge was not, and will not be, without pain. The thing is, now, what do we tell those still in their minority, whom chance has placed in our power to guide and improve, – trust us? trust all? trust only some? whom? – who have not achieved, we suppose, the discrimination to correctly distrust? Are we obliged to deprive them of that illusion that had shielded our own minds, in their infancy, from the psychedelia of professional criticism, to protect them from fools? We fail those to whom we do not at least communicate what we hold to be good and true; but there will be as much goodness and truth as there is baseness and confusion to differ from and which need defence against. Confusion advances from every quarter: the dark tide consumes every shore: and the need for light increases with every light which is put out. But we stand in pause where to begin; to combat at any front, it seems, is to neglect others; and in the end, we fear, we shall be overwhelmed. We are limited creatures, who must not hope to accomplish the solutions to every problem; but that is not excuse enough to buoy us from despair. De profundis clamo ad te domine.