* There is a little unlicked anonymuncule going scribbling about,
whose creed seems to be that a little camel, to be known, must be
examined and compared with other quadrupeds, but that the great arts
can be judged out of the depths of a penny-a-liner's inner
consciousness, and to be rated and ranked need not be compared
_inter se._ Applying the microscope to the method of the
novelist, but diverting the glass from the learned judge's method in
Biography, the learned historian's method in History, and the daily
chronicler's method in dressing _res gestoe_ for a journal, this
little addle-pate has jumped to a comparative estimate, not based on
comparison, so that all his blindfold vituperation of a noble art is
chimera, not reasoning; it is, in fact, a retrograde step in science
and logic. This is to evade the Baconian method, humble and wise, and
crawl back to the lazy and self-confident system of the ancients, that
kept the world dark so many centuries. It is [Greek] versus
Induction. "[Greek]," ladies, is "divination by means of an ass's
skull." A pettifogger's skull, however, will serve the turn, provided
that pettifogger has been bitten with an insane itch for scribbling
about things so infinitely above his capacity as the fine arts. Avoid
this sordid dreamer, and follow, in letters as in science, the
Baconian method! Then you will find that all uninspired narratives are
more or less inexact, and that one, and one only, Fiction proper, has
the honesty to antidote its errors by professing inexactitude.
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