Politics & Power Quote by Herman Melville

A nation that can mass-produce opinions, Melville implies, still can not reliably manufacture judgment. “Hardly five critics” is classic Melvillean exaggeration: not a census but a sneer, a way of measuring America’s cultural self-confidence against its actual critical apparatus and finding it embarrassingly thin. The punchline - “and several of them are asleep” - turns scarcity into dereliction. Even the few capable gatekeepers are dozing at the switch, letting mediocrity pass and missing the strange, difficult work that needs alert eyes.

The subtext is personal as much as it is national. Melville knew what it meant to be reviewed by people who wanted moral uplift, tidy realism, or patriotic affirmations - and who treated formal risk and metaphysical ambition as defects. The line reads like an author watching the early machinery of American literary culture (newspapers, magazines, the quick-turnaround review) and recognizing its incentive structure: speed over scrutiny, consensus over curiosity, commercial taste over artistic seriousness. If criticism is supposed to be the public’s education in attention, Melville paints it as an understaffed night shift.

It also lands as a jab at a young country’s insecurity. Mid-19th-century America was hungry to prove it had “culture,” yet suspicious of the very expertise that might cultivate it. Melville’s wit exposes that contradiction: a republic of loud readers, few interpreters, and too many comfortable verdicts. The sentence is short, dry, and devastating - the kind of complaint that doubles as a diagnosis.