Notes on printing for authors : literary etiquette / by Victor G. Plarr.

  • Victor Plarr
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Notes on printing for authors : literary etiquette / by Victor G. Plarr. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    and, indeed, in all you write, avoid whatever savours of partisanship, class hatred, odium theologicum, and so forth. Do not damn a writer because authors or journals of an opposite persuasion in politics to yours happen to praise. Never condemn an author in perpetuity without a hearing, or, more correctly, a reading. Do not say,« This is by Miss So-and-so,” and proceed to cry anathema, as do certain superior persons. Eead the works of those you criticise. Do not set up as a critic of poetry because you have a particular dislike to the Muse. Do not damn people because they are young, or, when young yoitrself, make a petulant war on the deserving old. A tried contributor of forty-five turned off, without a moment’s warning, by an uppish editor of twenty, who has bought himself into a chair of office, is a sight to make the angels weep, if, indeed, the celes- tials concern themselves in matters literary. Avoid ‘ scarification ” and “ log-rolling.” Remember that in a few years all your “ grandezzas ” will be judged at their proper value. Remember the fate of the merciless critic of Keats, one Grifford, now so con- temptible in just men’s eyes. Avoid malevolent cliches. Do not, for instance, commit the vulgarity of always referring to some statesman as “ the fine flower of Oxford culture,” when you most condemn him. The sneer does not hurt an ancient University, and suggests sour grapes. The cliche, after all, is only an outcome of suggestionisation, that curse of an age which idolises short cuts in thought and its