The Conservative (Lovecraft)/July 1918/Criticism of Amateur Journals
Criticism of Amateur Journals
By Philip B. McDonald
Assistant Professor of Engineering English, University of Colorado
Someone has said that what the American people need is more and better critics. We are an optimistic, exuberant nation, interested more in quantity than in quality. Constructiveness appeals to us - getting ahead, progress, and quick results. Individuals who criticise are termed "knockers"; people who are conservative are called pessimists.
Yet our nation has got to a stage of development where quality is becoming as important as quantity. We are beginning to see the need for a more intensive training of the refinements, a cultivation of the "great imponderables." Americans are being brought to a stage of introspection and self-analysis; we are comparing ourselves with the Europeans with whom we are coming in contact.
Moderate criticism is valuable. It should, however, be liberal, kindly, and suggestive, rather than opinionated, rigid, and inflexible. Adverse criticism of one phase should be tempered with praise of another. We all like helpful criticism that points out our faults in a tactful manner, but we also like occasional praise -- particularly if it seems spontaneous.
In writing, it is more important to be interesting than to be correct. Often as a writer becomes more correct, he ceases to be interesting. Almost anyone prefers to read an interesting journal, in spite of faults in grammar, to a dull paper that is correct. A touch of humanness that appeals to the readers, does more good than a wooden remark that is only rhetoric.
In matters of taste and opinion, there are as great differences as the world is wide. One man's hobby is another's pet aversion. A likes fat girls, B prefers them slender, C likes none at all, while D loves them all, and so it goes. This being a free country, it is well to be broadminded in matters of opinion. Democracy should not mean mediocrity at the expense of everyone agreeing with everyone else.