Why Declined?

WE who have had our ambitious attempts to contribute to current literature returned to us with courteous notes intended to soothe the pain they inflict, remember distinctly the precise formulas used, especially the ‘not without merit,’ — ‘damned faint praise,’ some of us have thought, — or the ‘not adapted to our needs at present,' and the ‘ thanks for the privilege of examining,’ and so forth. Rarely, if ever, is the true reason for rejection given.

In old Egypt, some three thousand years ago, editors were more generously frank if less polite: — ‘Thou tearest the words to tatters, just as they come into thy mind. Thou dost not take pains to find out their force for thyself. I have struck out for thee the end of thy composition, and return to thee thy descriptions. It is a confused medley when one hears it; an uneducated person could not understand it. It is like a man from the lowlands speaking to a man from Elephantiné.’

That young author knew what was the matter with his article, at least he had been plainly told; but it might have been a superior production in spite of that, — some forerunner of Sordello, or Leaves of Grass, that the critic had not been ‘educated’ enough to understand.

Which, then, is really the belter, the false courtesy of the present, or the bald brutality of the ‘XIXth Dynasty’?