Conan Doyle on Critics
From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia
This article was published in the New-York Tribune on 16 september 1894.
Article
Dr. Conan Doyle is wise enough to admit that injudicious praise is for a writer a much more dangerous thing than undeserved blame. "If I had to choose my own critic,"
he added, "I would always take the opinion of a brother novelist, for I believe that the creative and the critical faculties usually go together."
Dr. Doyle thinks that good work is seldom over-looked by the critics, but he does not believe in the system of anonymous criticism. What author does? Yet anonymity does not mean "slating"; no critic worth his salt uses it for purposes of abuse.
