ABSTRACT
The ingratitude of kings and the ingratitude of democracies have often supplied the text of historic or political sermons: the ingratitude of readers and spectators, from Shakespeare’s day to our own, is at least as notable and memorable. A man who has amused our leisure, relieved our weariness, delighted our fancy, enthralled our attention, refreshed our sympathies, cannot claim a place of equal honour in our grateful estimation with the dullest or the most perverse of historians who ever falsified or stupefied history, of metaphysicians who ever ‘darkened counsel’ and wasted time and wearied attention by the profitless lucubrations of pseudosophy. To create is nothing: to comment is much. The commentary may be utterly hollow and rotten, the creation thoroughly solid and alive: the one is nothing less than criticism, the other nothing more than fiction. ‘Un âne qui ressemble à monsieur Nisard’ takes precedence, in the judgment of his kind, of the men on whose works, inventive or creative, it is the business of a Nisard to pass judgment and to bray.
