I notice that in Mr. Seekers' _Art and Craft of Letters_ series no volume
on book-reviewing has yet been announced. A volume on criticism has been
published, it is true, but book-reviewing is something different from
criticism. It swings somewhere between criticism on the one hand and
reporting on the other. When Mr. Arthur Bourchier a few years ago, in the
course of a dispute about Mr. Walkley's criticisms, spoke of the dramatic
critic as a dramatic reporter, he did a very insolent thing. But there was
a certain reasonableness in his phrase. The critic on the Press is a
news-gatherer as surely as the man who is sent to describe a public
meeting or a strike. Whether he is asked to write a report on a play of
Mr. Shaw's or an exhibition of etchings by Mr. Bone or a volume of short
stories by Mr. Conrad or a speech by Mr. Asquith or a strike on the Clyde,
his function is the same. It is primarily to give an account, a
description, of what he has seen or heard or read. This may seem to many
people--especially to critics--a degrading conception of a book-reviewer's
work. But it is quite the contrary. A great deal of book-reviewing at the
present time is dead matter. Book-reviews ought at least to be alive as
news.
At present everybody is ready to write book-reviews. This is because
nearly everybody believes that they are the easiest kind of thing to
write. People who would shrink from offering to write poems or leading
articles or descriptive sketches of football matches, have an idea that
reviewing books is something with the capacity for which every man is
born, as he is born with the capacity for talking prose. They think it is
as easy as having opinions. It is simply making a few remarks at the end
of a couple of hours spent with a book in an armchair. Many men and
women--novelists, barristers, professors and others--review books in their
spare time, as they look on this as work they can do when their brains are
too tired to do anything which is of genuine importance. A great deal of
book-reviewing is done contemptuously, as though to review books well were
not as difficult as to do anything else well. This is perhaps due in some
measure to the fact that, for the amount of hard work it involves,
book-reviewing is one of the worst-paid branches of journalism. The hero
of Mr. Beresford's new novel, _The Invisible Event_, makes an income of
£250 a year as an outside reviewer, and it is by no means every outside
reviewer who makes as much as that from reviewing alone. It is not that
there is not an immense public which reads book-reviews. Mr. T.P. O'Connor
showed an admirable journalistic instinct when twenty years or so ago he
filled the front page of the _Weekly Sun_ with a long book-review. The
sale of the _Times Literary Supplement_, since it became a separate
publication, is evidence that, for good or bad, many thousands of readers
have acquired the habit of reading criticism of current literature.
But I do not think that the mediocre quality of most book-reviewing is due
to low payment. It is a result, I believe, of a wrong conception of what a
book-review should be. My own opinion is that a review should be, from one
point of view, a portrait of a book. It should present the book instead of
merely presenting remarks about the book. In reviewing, portraiture is
more important than opinion. One has to get the reflexion of the book, and
not a mere comment on it, down on paper. Obviously, one must not press
this theory of portraiture too far. It is useful chiefly as a protest
against the curse of comment. Many clever writers, when they come to write
book-reviews, instead of portraying the book, waste their time in remarks
to the effect that the book should never have been written, and so forth.
That, in fact, is the usual attitude of clever reviewers when they begin.
They are so horrified to find that Mr. William Le Queux does not write
like Dostoevsky and that Mrs. Florence Barclay lacks the grandeur of
Æschylus that they run amok among their contemporaries with something of
the furious destructiveness of Don Quixote on his adventures. It is the
noble intolerance of youth; but how unreasonable it is! Suppose a
portrait-painter were suddenly to take his sitter by the throat on the
ground that he had no right to exist. One would say to him that that was
not his business: his business is to take the man's existence for granted,
and to paint him until he becomes in a new sense alive. If he is
worthless, paint his worthlessness, but do not merely comment on it. There
is no reason why a portrait should be flattering, but it should be a
portrait. It may be a portrait in the grand matter, or a portrait in
caricature: if it expresses its subject honestly and delightfully, that is
all we can ask of it. A critical portrait of a book by Mr. Le Queux may be
amazingly alive: a censorious comment can only be dull. Mr. Hubert Bland
was at one time an almost ideal portrait-painter of commonplace novels. He
obviously liked them, as the caricaturist likes the people in the street.
The novels themselves might not be readable, but Mr. Bland's reviews of
them were. He could reveal their characteristics in a few strokes, which
would tell you more of what you wanted to know about them than a whole
dictionary of adjectives of praise and blame. One could tell at a glance
whether the book had any literary value, whether it was worth turning to
as a stimulant, whether it was even intelligent of its kind. One would not
like to see Mr. Bland's method too slavishly adopted by reviewers: it was
suitable only for portraying certain kinds of books. But it is worth
recalling as the method of a man who, dealing with books that were for the
most part insipid and worthless, made his reviews delightfully alive as
well as admirably interpretative.
The comparison of a review to a portrait fixes attention on one essential
quality of a book-review. A reviewer should never forget his
responsibility to his subject. He must allow nothing to distract him from
his main task of setting down the features of his book vividly and
recognizably. One may say this even while admitting that the most
delightful book-reviews of modern times--for the literary causeries of
Anatole France may fairly be classified as book-reviews--were the revolt
of an escaped angel against the limitations of a journalistic form. But
Anatole France happens to be a man of genius, and genius is a
justification of any method. In the hands of a pinchbeck Anatole France,
how unendurable the review conceived as a causerie would become! Anatole
France observes that "all books in general, and even the most admirable,
seem to me infinitely less precious for what they contain than for what he
who reads puts into them." That, in a sense, is true. But no reviewer
ought to believe it. His duty is to his author: whatever he "puts into
him" is a subsidiary matter. "The critic," says Anatole France again,
"must imbue himself thoroughly with the idea that every book has as many
different aspects as it has readers, and that a poem, like a landscape, is
transformed in all the eyes that see it, in all the souls that conceive
it." Here he gets nearer the idea of criticism as portraiture, and
practically every critic of importance has been a portrait-painter. In
this respect Saint-Beuve is at one with Macaulay, Pater with Matthew
Arnold, Anatole France (occasionally) with Henry James. They may portray
authors rather than books, artists rather than their work, but this only
means that criticism at its highest is a study of the mind of the artist
as reflected in his art.
Clearly, if the reviewer can paint the portrait of an author, he is
achieving something better even than the portrait of a book. But what, at
all costs, he must avoid doing is to substitute for a portrait of one kind
or another the rag-bag of his own moral, political or religious opinions.
It is one of the most difficult things in the world for anyone who happens
to hold strong opinions not to make the mind of Shakespeare himself a
pulpit from which to roar them at the world. Reviewers with theories about
morality and religion can seldom be induced to come to the point of
portraiture until they have enjoyed a preliminary half-column of
self-explanation. In their eyes a review is a moral essay rather than an
imaginative interpretation. In dissenting from this view, one is not
pleading for a race of reviewers without moral or religious ideas, or even
prepossessions. One is merely urging that in a review, as in a novel or a
play, the moral should be seated at the heart instead of sprawling all
over the surface. In the well-worn phrase it should be implicit, not
explicit. Undoubtedly a rare critic of genius can make an interesting
review-article out of a statement of his own moral and political ideas.
But that only justifies the article as an essay, not as a review. To many
reviewers--especially in the bright days of youth--it seems an immensely
more important thing to write a good essay than a good review. And so it
is, but not when a review is wanted. It is a far, far better thing to
write a good essay about America than a good review of a book on America.
But the one should not be substituted for the other. If one takes up a
review of a book on America by Mr. Wells or Mr. Bennett, it is in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in order to find out what the author
thinks, not what the reviewer thinks. If the reviewer begins with a
paragraph of general remarks about America--or, worse still, about some
abstract thing like liberty--he is almost invariably wasting paper. I
believe it is a sound rule to destroy all preliminary paragraphs of this
kind. They are detestable in almost all writing, but most detestable of
all in book-reviews, where it is important to plunge all at once into the
middle of things. I say this, though there is an occasional book-reviewer
whose preliminary paragraphs I would not miss for worlds. But one has even
known book-reviewers who wrote delightful articles, though they made
scarcely any reference to the books under review at all.
To my mind, nothing more clearly shows the general misconception of the
purpose of a book-review than the attitude of the majority of journalists
to the quotational review. It is the custom to despise the quotational
review--to dismiss is as mere "gutting." As a consequence, it is generally
very badly done. It is done as if under the impression that it does not
matter what quotations one gives so long as one fills the space. One great
paper lends support to this contemptuous attitude towards quotational
criticism by refusing to pay its contributors for space taken up by
quotations. A London evening newspaper was once guilty of the same folly.
A reviewer on the staff of the latter confessed to me that to the present
day he finds it impossible, without an effort, to make quotations in a
review, because of the memory of those days when to quote was to add to
one's poverty. Despised work is seldom done well, and it is not surprising
that it is almost more seldom that one finds a quotational review well
done than any other sort. Yet how critically illuminating a quotation may
be! There are many books in regard to which quotation is the only
criticism necessary. Books of memoirs and books of verse--the least
artistic as well as the most artistic forms of literature--both lend
themselves to it. To criticize verse without giving quotations is to leave
one largely in ignorance of the quality of the verse. The selection of
passages to quote is at least as fine a test of artistic judgment as any
comment the critic can make. In regard to books of memoirs, gossip, and so
forth, one does not ask for a test of delicate artistic judgment. Books of
this kind should simply be rummaged for entertaining "news." To review
them well is to make an anthology of (in a wide sense) amusing passages.
There is no other way to portray them. And yet I have known a very
brilliant reviewer take a book of gossip about the German Court and,
instead of quoting any of the numerous things that would interest people,
fill half a column with abuse of the way in which the book was written, of
the inconsequence of the chapters, of the second-handedness of many of the
anecdotes. Now, I do not object to any of these charges being brought. It
is well that "made" books should not be palmed off on the public as
literature. On the other hand, a mediocre book (from the point of view of
literature or history) is no excuse for a mediocre review. No matter how
mediocre a book is, if it is on a subject of great interest, it usually
contains enough vital matter to make an exciting half-column. Many
reviewers despise a bad book so heartily that, instead of squeezing every
drop of interest out of it, as they ought to do, they refrain from
squeezing a single drop of interest out of it. They are frequently people
who suffer from anecdotophobia. "Scorn not the anecdote" is a motto that
might be modestly hung up in the heart of every reviewer. After all,
Montaigne did not scorn it, and there is no reason why the modern
journalist should be ashamed of following so respectable an example. One
can quite easily understand how the gluttony of many publishers for
anecdotes has driven writers with a respect for their intellect into
revolt. But let us not be unjust to the anecdote because it has been
cheapened through no fault of its own. We may be sure of one thing. A
review--a review, at any rate, of a book of memoirs or any similar kind of
non-literary book--which contains an anecdote is better than a review
which does not contain an anecdote. If an anecdotal review is bad, it is
because it is badly done, not because it is anecdotal. This, one might
imagine, is too obvious to require saying; but many men of brains go
through life without ever being able to see it.
One of the chief virtues of the anecdote is that it brings the reviewer
down from his generalizations to the individual instances. Generalizations
mixed with instances make a fine sort of review, but to flow on for a
column of generalizations without ever pausing to light them into life
with instances, concrete examples, anecdotes, is to write not a
book-review but a sermon. Of the two, the sermon is much the easier to
write: it does not involve the trouble of constant reference to one's
authorities. Perhaps, however, someone with practice in writing sermons
will argue that the sermon without instances is as somniferous as the
book-review with the same want. Whether that it so or not, the book-review
is not, as a rule, the place for abstract argument. Not that one wants to
shut out controversy. There is no pleasanter review to read than a
controversial review. Even here, however, one demands portrait as well as
argument. It is, in nine cases out of ten, waste of time to assail a
theory when you can portray a man. It always seems to me to be hopelessly
wrong for the reviewer of biographies, critical studies, or books of a
similar kind, to allow his mind to wander from the main figure in the book
to the discussion of some theory or other that has been incidentally put
forward. Thus, in a review of a book on Stevenson, the important thing is
to reconstruct the figure of Stevenson, the man and the artist. This is
much more vitally interesting and relevant than theorizing on such
questions as whether the writing of prose or of poetry is the more
difficult art, or what are the essential characteristics of romance. These
and many other questions may arise, and it is the proper task of the
reviewer to discuss them, so long as their discussion is kept subordinate
to the portraiture of the central figure. But they must not be allowed to
push the leading character in the whole business right out of the review.
If they are brought in at all, they must be brought in, like moral
sentiments, inoffensively by the way.
In pleading that a review should be a portrait of a book to a vastly
greater degree than it is a direct comment on the book, I am not pleading
that it should be a mere bald summary. The summary kind of review is no
more a portrait than is the Scotland Yard description of a man wanted by
the police. Portraiture implies selection and a new emphasis. The synopsis
of the plot of a novel is as far from being a good review as is a
paragraph of general comment on it. The review must justify itself, not as
a reflection of dead bones, but by a new life of its own.
Further, I am not pleading for the suppression of comment and, if need be,
condemnation. But either to praise or condemn without instances is dull.
Neither the one thing nor the other is the chief thing in the review. They
are the crown of the review, but not its life. There are many critics to
whom condemnation of books they do not like seems the chief end of man.
They regard themselves as engaged upon a holy war against the Devil and
his works. Horace complained that it was only poets who were not allowed
to be mediocre. The modern critic--I should say the modern critic of the
censorious kind, not the critic who looks on it as his duty to puff out
meaningless superlatives over every book that appears--will not allow any
author to be mediocre. The war against mediocrity is a necessary war, but
I cannot help thinking that mediocrity is more likely to yield to humour
than to contemptuous abuse. Apart from this, it is the reviewer's part to
maintain high standards for work that aims at being literature, rather
than to career about, like a destroying angel, among books that have no
such aim. Criticism, Anatole France has said, is the record of the soul's
adventures among masterpieces. Reviewing, alas! is for the most part the
record of the soul's adventures among books that are the reverse of
masterpieces. What, then, are his standards to be? Well, a man must judge
linen as linen, cotton as cotton, and shoddy as shoddy. It is ridiculous
to denounce any of them for not being silk. To do so is not to apply high
standards so much as to apply wrong standards. One has no right as a
reviewer to judge a book by any standard save that which the author aims
at reaching. As a private reader, one has the right to say of a novel by
Mr. Joseph Hocking, for instance: "This is not literature. This is not
realism. This does not interest me. This is awful." I do not say that
these sentences can be fairly used of any of Mr. Hocking's novels. I
merely take him as an example of a popular novelist who would be bound to
be condemned if judged by comparison with Flaubert or Meredith or even Mr.
Galsworthy. But the reviewer is not asked to state whether he finds Mr.
Hocking readable so much as to state the kind of readableness at which Mr.
Hocking aims and the measure of his success in achieving it. It is the
reviewer's business to discover the quality of a book rather than to keep
announcing that the quality does not appeal to him. Not that he need
conceal the fact that it has failed to appeal to him, but he should
remember that this is a comparatively irrelevant matter. He may make it as
clear as day--indeed, he ought to make it as clear as day, if it is his
opinion--that he regards the novels of Charles Garvice as shoddy, but he
ought also to make it clear whether they are the kind of shoddy that
serves its purpose.
Is this to lower literary standards? I do not think so, for, in cases of
this kind, one is not judging literature, but popular books. Those to whom
popular books are anathema have a temperament which will always find it
difficult to fall in with the limitations of the work of a general
reviewer. The curious thing is that this intolerance of easy writing is
most generally found among those who are most opposed to intolerance in
the sphere of morals. It is as though they had escaped from one sort of
Puritanism into another. Personally, I do not see why, if we should be
tolerant of the breach of a moral commandment, we should not be equally
tolerant of the breach of a literary commandment. We should gently scan,
not only our brother man, but our brother author. The æsthete of to-day,
however, will look kindly on adultery, but show all the harshness of a
Pilgrim Father in his condemnation of a split infinitive. I cannot see the
logic of this. If irregular and commonplace people have the right to
exist, surely irregular and commonplace books have a right to exist by
their side.
The reviewer, however, is often led into a false attitude to a book, not
by its bad quality, but by some irrelevant quality--some underlying moral
or political idea. He denounces a novel the moral ideas of which offend
him, without giving sufficient consideration to the success or failure of
the novelist in the effort to make his characters live. Similarly, he
praises a novel with the moral ideas of which he agrees, without
reflecting that perhaps it is as a tract rather than as a work of art that
it has given him pleasure. Both the praise and blame which have been
heaped upon Mr. Kipling are largely due to appreciation or dislike of his
politics. The Imperialist finds his heart beating faster as he reads _The
English Flag_, and he praises Mr. Kipling as an artist when it is really
Mr. Kipling as a propagandist who has moved him. The anti-Imperialist, on
the other hand, is often led by detestation of Mr. Kipling's politics to
deny even the palpable fact that Mr. Kipling is a very brilliant
short-story teller. It is for the reviewer to raise himself above such
prejudices and to discover what are Mr. Kipling's ideas apart from his
art, and what is his art apart from his ideas.
The relation between one and the other is also clearly a relevant matter
for discussion. But the confusion of one with the other is fatal. In the
field of morals we are perhaps led astray in our judgments even more
frequently than in matters of politics. Mr. Shaw's plays are often
denounced by critics whom they have made laugh till their sides ached, and
the reason is that, after leaving the theatre, the critics remember that
they do not like Mr, Shaw's moral ideas. In the same way, it seems to me,
a great deal of the praise that has been given to Mr. D.H. Lawrence as an
artist ought really to be given to him as a distributor of certain moral
ideas. That he has studied wonderfully one aspect of human nature, that he
can describe wonderfully some aspects of external nature, I know; but I
doubt whether his art is fine enough or sympathetic enough to make
enthusiastic anyone who differs from the moral attitude, as it may be
called, of his stories. This is the real test of a work of art--has it
sufficient imaginative vitality to capture the imagination of artistic
readers who are not in sympathy with its point of view? The _Book of Job_
survives the test: it is a book to the spell of which no imaginative man
could be indifferent, whether Christian, Jew or atheist. Similarly,
Shelley is read and written about with enthusiasm by many who hold moral,
religious, and political ideas directly contrary to his own. Mr. Kipling's
_Recessional_, with its sombre imaginative glow, its recapturing of Old
Testament prides and fears, commands the praise of thousands to whom much
of the rest of his poetry is the abominable thing. It is the reviewer's
task to discover imagination even in those who are the enemies of the
ideas he cherishes. In so far as he cannot do this, he fails in his
business as a critic of the arts.
It may be said in answer to all this, however, that to appeal for
tolerance in book-reviewers is not necessary. The Press is already
overcrowded with laudations of commonplace books. Not a day passes but at
least a dozen books are praised as having "not a dull moment," being
"readable from cover to cover," and as reminding the reviewer of
Stevenson, Meredith, Oscar Wilde, Paul de Kock, and Jane Austen. That is
not the kind of tolerance which one is eager to see. That kind of review
is scarcely different from a publisher's advertisement. Besides, it
usually sins in being mere summary and comment, or even comment without
summary. It is a thoughtless scattering of acceptable words and is as
unlike the review conceived as a portrait as is the hostile kind of
commentatory review which I have been discussing. It is generally the
comment of a lazy brain, instead of being, like the other, the comment of
a clever brain. Praise is the vice of the commonplace reviewer, just as
censoriousness is the vice of the more clever sort. Not that one wishes
either praise or censure to be stinted. One is merely anxious not to see
them misapplied. It is a vice, not a virtue, of reviewing to be lukewarm
either in the one or the other. What one desires most of all in a
reviewer, after a capacity to portray books, is the courage of his
opinions, so that, whether he is face to face with an old reputation like
Mr. Conrad's or a new reputation like Mr. Mackenzie's, he will boldly
express his enthusiasms and his dissatisfactions without regard to the
estimate of the author, which is, for the moment, "in the air." What seems
to be wanted, then, in a book-reviewer is that, without being servile, he
should be swift to praise, and that, without being censorious, he should
have the courage to blame. While tolerant of kinds in literature, he
should be intolerant of pretentiousness. He should be less patient, for
instance, of a pseudo-Milton than of a writer who frankly aimed at nothing
higher than a book of music-hall songs. He should be more eager to define
the qualities of a book than to heap comment upon comment. If--I hope the
image is not too strained--he draws a book from the life, he will produce
a better review than if he spends his time calling it names, whether foul
or fair.
But what of the equipment of the reviewer? it may be asked. What of his
standards? One of the faults of modern reviewing seems to me to be that
the standards of many critics are derived almost entirely from the
literature of the last thirty years. This is especially so with some
American critics, who rush feverishly into print with volumes spotted with
the names of modern writers as Christmas pudding is spotted with currants.
To read them is to get the impression that the world is only a hundred
years old. It seems to me that Matthew Arnold was right when he urged men
to turn to the classics for their standards. His definition of the
classics may have been too narrow, and nothing could be more utterly dead
than a criticism which tries to measure imaginary literature by an
academic standard or the rules of Aristotle. But it is only those to whom
the classics are themselves dead who are likely to lay this academic dead
hand on new literature. Besides, even the most academic standards are
valuable in a world in which chaos is hailed with enthusiasm both in art
and in politics. But, when all is said, the taste which is the essential
quality of a critic is something with which he is born. It is something
which is not born of reading Sophocles and Plato and does not perish of
reading Miss Marie Corelli. This taste must illuminate all the reviewer's
portraits. Without it, he had far better be a coach-builder than a
reviewer of books. It is this taste in the background that gives
distinction to a tolerant and humorous review of even the most unambitious
detective story.