The young author of "The Gates Ajar" was only put to the question. Heresy was her crime, and atrocity her name. She had outraged the church; she had blasphemed its sanctities; she had taken live coals from the altar in her impious hand. The sacrilege was too serious to be dismissed with cold contempt.
Opinion battled about that poor little tale as if it had held the power to overthrow church and state and family.
It was an irreverent book--it was a devout book. It was a strong book--it was a weak book. It was a religious book--it was an immoral book (I have forgotten just why; in fact, I think I never knew). It was a good book--it was a bad book. It was calculated to comfort the comfortless--it was calculated to lead the impressionable astray. It was an accession to Christian literature--it was a disgrace to the religious antecedents of the author; and so on, and so forth.
At first, when some of these reviews fell in my way, I read them, knowing no better. But I very soon learned to let them alone. The kind notices, while they gave me a sort of courage which by temperament possibly I needed more than all young writers may, overwhelmed me, too, by a sense of my own inadequacy to be a teacher of the most solemn of truths, on any such scale as that towards which events seemed to be pointing. The unfair notices put me in a tremor of distress. The brutal ones affected me like a blow in the face from the fist of a ruffian. None of them, that I can remember, ever helped me in any sense whatsoever to do better work.
I quickly came to the conclusion that I was not adapted to reading the views of the press about my own writing. I made a vow to let them alone; and, from that day to this, I have kept it. Unless in the case of something especially brought to my attention by friends, I do not read any reviews of my books. Of course, in a general way, one knows if some important pen has shown a comprehension of what one meant to do and tried to do, or has spattered venom upon one's poor achievement. Quite fairly, one cannot sit like the Queen in the kitchen, eating only bread and honey--and venom disagrees with me.
I sometimes think--if I may take advantage of this occasion to make the only reply in a working life of thirty years to any of the "slashers" with whose devotion I am told that I have been honored--I sometimes think, good brother critics, that I have had my share of the attentions of poisoned weapons.