the old distinction, that if a dog bites a man it is very likely not
news, but that if a man bites a dog it is news beyond all cavil. Such a
generalization is useful and fairly harmless (like the generalization
we ourselves have just indulged in and are about proving) if--a big
if--the broad exception be noted. If a dog bites John D. Rockefeller,
Jr., it is not only news but rather more important, or certainly
more interesting, news than if John Jones of Howlersville bites a
dog. For the chances are that John Jones of Howlersville is a poor
demented creature, after all. Now the dog that bites Mr. Rockefeller
is very likely a poor, demented creature, too; but the distinction
lies in this: the dog bitten by John Jones is almost certainly not as
well-known or as interesting or as important in the lives of a number
of people as Mr. Rockefeller. Pair off the cur that puts his teeth
in the Rockefeller ankle, if you like, with the wretch who puts his
teeth in an innocent canine bystander (it’s the innocent bystander who
always gets hurt); do this and you still have to match up the hound of
Howlersville with Mr. Rockefeller. And the scale of news values tips
heavily away from Howlersville and in the direction of 26 Broadway.
So it is plain that not all that happens is news compared with some
that happens. The law of specific interest, an intellectual counterpart
of the law of specific gravity in the physical world, rules in the
world of events. Any one handling news who disregards this law does so
at his extreme peril, just as any one building a ship heavier than the
water it displaces may reasonably expect to see his fine craft sink
without a trace.
Since a new book is a thing happening it is news, subject to the broad
correction we have been discussing above, namely, that in comparison
with other new books it may not be news at all, its specific interest
may be so slight as to be negligible entirely.
But if a particular new book _is_ news, if its specific interest is
moderately great, then obviously, we think, the person best fitted to
deal with it is a person trained to deal with news, namely, a reporter.
Naturally we all prefer a good reporter.
11
The question will at once be raised: How is the specific interest of a
new book to be determined? We answer: Just as the specific interest of
any kind of potential news or actual news is determined--in competition
with the other news of the day and hour. What is news one day isn’t
news another. This is a phenomenon of which the regular reader of
every daily paper is more or less consciously aware. There are some
days when “there’s no news in the paper.” There are other days when
the news in the paper is so big and so important that all the lesser
occurrences which ordinarily get themselves chronicled are crowded
out. Granting a white paper supply which does not at present exist, it
would, of course, be possible on the “big days” to record all these
lesser doings; and consistently, day in and day out, to print nicely
proportioned accounts of every event attaining to a certain fixed
level of specific interest. But the reader who may think he would
like this would speedily find out that he didn’t. Some days he would
have a twelve page newspaper and other days (not Sundays, either) he
would have one of thirty-six pages. He would be lost, or rather, his
attention would be lost in the jungle of events that all happened
within twenty-four hours, with the profuse luxuriance of tropical
vegetation shooting up skyward by inches and feet overnight. His
natural appetite for a knowledge of what his fellows were doing would
be alternately starved and overfed; malnutrition would lead to chronic
and incurable dyspepsia; soon he would become a hateful misanthrope,
shunning his fellow men and having a seizure every time Mr. Hearst
brought out the eighth edition (which is the earliest and first) of the
New York _Evening Journal_. It is really dreadful to think what havoc
a literal adhesion to the motto of the New York _Times_--“All the news
that’s fit to print”--would work in New York City.
No mortal has more than a certain amount of time daily and a certain
amount of attention (according to his mental habit and personal
interest) to bestow on the perusal of a newspaper, or news, or the
printed page of whatever kind. On Sunday he has much more, it is
likely, but still there is a limit and a perfectly finite bound.
Consequently the whole problem for the persons engaged in gathering and
preparing news for presentation to readers sums up in this: “How many
of the day’s doings attaining or exceeding a certain level of public
interest and importance, shall we set before our clients?” Easily
answered, in most cases; and the size of the paper is the index of the
answer. Question Two: “_What_ of the day’s doings shall be served up in
the determined space?”
For this question there is never an absolute or ready answer,
and there never can be. On some of the affairs to be reported all
journalists would agree; but they would differ in their estimates of
the relative worth of even these and the lengths at which they should
be treated; about lesser occurrences there would be no fixed percentage
of agreement.
12
Now the application of all this to the business of giving the news of
books should be fairly clear. A new book is news--and so, sometimes, is
an old one, rediscovered. Since a new book is news it should be dealt
with by a news reporter. Not all that happens is news; not all the new
books published are news; new books, like new events of all sorts, are
news when they compete successfully with a majority of their kind.
There is no more sense in _reporting_--that is, describing individually
at greater or less length--all the new books than there would be in
reporting every incident on the police blotters of a lively American
city. _Recording_ new books is another matter; somewhere, somehow,
most occurrences in this world get recorded in written words that
reach nearly all who are interested in the happenings (as in letters)
or are accessible to the interested few (as the police records). The
difference between the reporter and the recorder is not entirely a
difference of details given. The recorder usually follows a prescribed
formula and makes his record conform thereto; the good reporter never
has a formula and never can have one. Let us see how this works out
with the news of books.
13
The recorder of new books generally compiles a list of _Books Received_
or _Books Just Published_ and he does it in this uninspired and
conscientious manner:
IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By William Allen White. A story of Kansas
in the last half-century, centered in a single town, showing its
evolution from prairie to an industrial city with difficult economic
and labor problems; the story told in the lives of a group of people,
pioneers and the sons of pioneers--their work, ambitions, personal
affairs, &c. New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.60.
That would be under the heading _Fiction_. An entry under the heading
_Literary Studies_ or _Essays_ might read:
OUR POETS OF TO-DAY. By Howard Willard Cook. Volume II. in a series
of books on modern American writers. Sketches of sixty-eight American
poets, nearly all living, including Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell,
Witter Bynner, Robert Service, Edgar Guest, Charles Divine, Carl
Sandburg, Joyce Kilmer, Sara Teasdale, George Edward Woodberry, Percy
Mackaye, Harriet W. Monroe, &c. New York: Moffat, Yard & Co. $1.60.
These we hasten to say would be unusually full and satisfactory
records, but they would be records just the same--formal and precise
statements of events, like the chronological facts affixed to dates
in an almanac. If all records were like these there would be less
objection to them; but it is an astonishing truth that most records
are badly kept. Why, one may never fathom; since the very formality
and precision make a good record easy. Yet almost any of the principal
pages or magazines in the United States devoted to the news of new
books is likely to make a record on this order:
IN THE HEART OF A FOOL. By William Allen White. Novel of contemporary
American life. New York, &c.
Such a record is, of course, worse than inadequate; it is actually
misleading. Mr. White’s book happens to cover a period of fifty years.
“Contemporary American life” would characterize quite as well, or quite
as badly, a story of New York and Tuxedo by Robert W. Chambers.
14
The reporter works in entirely another manner. He is concerned to
present the facts about a new book in a way sufficiently arresting
and entertaining to engage the reader. As Mr. Holliday says with fine
perception, the true function of the describer of new books is simply
to bring a particular volume to the attention of its proper public.
To do that it is absolutely necessary to “give the book,” at least to
the extent of enabling the reader of the article to determine, with
reasonable accuracy (1) whether the book is for him, that is, addressed
to a public of which he is one, and (2) whether he wants to read it or
not.
Whether the book is good or bad is not the point. A man interested in
sociology may conceivably want to read a book on sociology even though
it is an exceedingly bad book on that subject and even though he knows
its worthlessness. He may want to profit by the author’s mistakes;
he may want to write a book to correct them; or he may merely want
to be amused at the spectacle of a fellow sociologist making a fool
of himself, a spectacle by no means rare but hardly ever without a
capacity for giving joy to the mildly malicious.
The determination of the goodness or badness of a book is not and
should not be a deliberate purpose of the good book reporter. Why?
Well, in many cases it is a task of supererogation. Take a reporter
who goes to cover a public meeting at which speeches are made. He does
not find it necessary to say that Mr. So-and-So’s speech was good.
He records what Mr. So-and-So says, or a fair sample of it; which is
enough. The reader can see for himself how good or bad it was and reach
a conclusion based on the facts as tempered by his personal beliefs,
tastes and ideas.
In the same way, it is superfluous for the book reporter to say that
Miss Such-and-Such’s book on New York is rotten. All he need do is
to set down the incredible fact that Miss Such-and-Such locates the
Woolworth building at Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third street,
and refers to the Aquarium as the fisheries section of the Bronx Zoo.
If this should not appear a sufficient notice of the horrible nature
of the volume the reporter may very properly give the truth about
the Woolworth building and the Aquarium for the benefit of people
who have never visited New York and might be unable to detect Miss
Such-and-Such’s idiosyncrasies.
The rule holds in less tangible matters. Why should the book reporter
ask his reader to accept his dictum that the literary style of a writer
is atrocious when he can easily prove it by a few sentences or a
paragraph from the book?
15
Yet books are still in the main “reviewed,” instead of being given into
the hands of trained news reporters. Anything worse than the average
book “review” it would certainly be difficult to find in the length
and breadth of America. And England, despite the possession of some
brilliant talents, is nearly as badly off.
No one who is not qualified as a critic should attempt to criticise new
books.
There are but few critics in any generation--half a dozen or perhaps
a dozen men in any single one of the larger countries are all who
could qualify at a given time; that much seems evident. What is a
critic? A critic is a person with an education unusually wide either
in life or in letters, and preferably in both. He is a person with
huge backgrounds. He has read thousands of books and has by one
means or another abstracted the essence of thousands more. He has
perhaps travelled a good deal, though this is not essential; but he
has certainly lived with a most peculiar and exceptional intensity,
descending to greater emotional and intellectual depths than the
majority of mankind and scaling higher summits; he has, in some degree,
the faculty of living other people’s lives and sharing their human
experiences which is the faculty that, in a transcendent degree,
belongs to the novelist and storyteller. A critic knows the past and
the present so well that he is able to erect standards, or uncover old
standards, by which he can and does measure the worth of everything
that comes before him. He can actually show you, in exact and
inescapable detail, how De Morgan compares with Dickens and how Gilbert
K. Chesterton ranks with Swift and whether Thackeray learned more from
Fielding or from Daniel Defoe and he can trace the relation between a
period in the life of Joseph Conrad and certain scenes and settings in
_The Arrow of Gold_.
Such a man is a critic. Of course critics make mistakes but they are
not mistakes of ignorance, of personal unfitness for the task, of
pretension to a knowledge they haven’t. They are mistakes of judgment;
such mistakes as very eminent jurists sometimes make after years on the
bench. The jurist is reversed by the higher court and the critic is
reversed by the appellate decree of the future.
The mistakes of a real critic, like the mistakes of a real jurist,
are always made on defensible, and sometimes very sound, grounds;
they are reasoned and seasoned conclusions even if they are not the
correct conclusions. The mistakes of the 9,763 persons who assume
the critical ermine without any fitness to wear it are quite another
matter; and they are just the mistakes that would be made by a layman
sitting in the jurist’s seat. The jurist knows the precedents, the
rules of evidence, the law; he is tolerant and admits exceptions into
the record. So the critic; with the difference that the true critic
merely presides and leaves the verdict to that great jury of true and
right instincts which we call “the public.” The genuine critic is
concerned chiefly to see that the case gets before the jury cleanly.
Without presuming to tell the jury what its verdict must be--except
in extraordinary circumstances--he does instruct it what the verdict
should be on, what should be considered in arriving at it, what
principles should guide the decision.
But the near-critic (God save the mark!) has it in his mind that he
must play judge and jury too. He doesn’t like the writer’s style, or
thinks the plot is poor, or this bad or that defective. Instead of
carefully outlining the evidence on which the public might reach a
correct verdict on these points he delivers a dictum. It doesn’t go, of
course, at least for long; and it never will.
Let us be as specific as is possible in this, as specific, that is, as
a general discussion can be and remain widely applicable.
I don’t like the writer’s style. I am not a person of critical
equipment or pretensions. I am, we will say, a book reporter. I do not
declare, with a fiat and a flourish, that the style is bad; I merely
present a chunk of it. There is the evidence, and nothing else is so
competent, so relevant or so material, as the lawyers would say. I
may, in the necessity to be brief and the absence of space for an
excerpt, say that the style is adjectival, or adverbial, or diffuse,
or involved or florid or something of that sort, _if I know it to be_.
These would be statements of fact. “Bad” is a statement of opinion.
I may call the plot “weak” if it is weak (a fact) and if I know
weakness in a plot (which qualifies me to announce the fact). But if I
call the plot “poor” I am taking a good deal upon myself. Its poorness
is a matter of opinion. Some stories are spoiled by a strong plot
which dominates the reader’s interest almost to the exclusion of other
things--fine characterization, atmosphere, and so on.
And even restrictions of space can hardly excuse the lack of courtesy,
or worse, shown by the near-critic who calls the plot weak or the style
diffuse or involved, however much these may be facts, and who does not
at least briefly explain in what way the style is diffuse (or involved)
and wherein the weakness of the plot resides. But to put a finger on
the how or the where or the why requires a knowledge and an insight
that the near-critic does not possess and will not take the trouble to
acquire; so we are asking him to do the impossible. Nevertheless we can
ask him to do the possible; and that is to leave off talking or writing
on matters he knows nothing about.
16
The task of training good book reporters is not a thing to be easily
and lightly undertaken. And the first essential in the making of such
a reporter is the inculcation of a considerable humility of mind. A
near-critic can afford to think he knows it all, but a book reporter
cannot. Besides a sense of his own limitations the book reporter must
possess and develop afresh from time to time a mental attitude which
may best be summed up in this distinction: When a piece of writing
seems to him defective he must stop short and ask himself, “Is this
defect a fact or is it my personal feeling?” If it is a fact he must
establish it to his own, and then to the reader’s, satisfaction. If
it is his personal impression or feeling, merely, as he may conclude
on maturer reflection, he owes it to those who will read his article
either not to record it or to record it as a personal thing. There is
no sense in saying only the good things that can be said about a book
that has bad things in it. Such a course is dishonest. It is equally
dishonest, and infinitely more common, to pass off private opinions as
statements of fact.
When in doubt, the doubt should be resolved in favor of the author. A
good working test of fact versus personal opinion is this: If you, as a
reporter, cannot put your finger on the apparent flaw, cannot give the
how or where or why of the thing that seems wrong, it must be treated
as your personal feeling. A fact that you cannot buttress might as well
not be a fact at all--unless, of course, it is self-evident, in which
case you have only to state it or exhibit your evidence to command a
universal assent.
All that we have been saying respecting the fact or fancy of a
flaw in a piece of writing applies with equal force, naturally, to
the favorable as well as the unfavorable conclusion you, as a book
reporter, may reach. Because a story strikes you as wonderful it does
not follow that it is wonderful. You are under a moral obligation,
at least, to establish the wonder of it. The procedure for the book
reporter who has to describe favorably and for the book reporter who
has to report unfavorably is the same. First comes the question of
fact, then the citation, if possible, of evidence; and if that be
impossible the brief indication of the how, the where, the why of the
merit reported. If the meritoriousness remains a matter of personal
impression it ought so to be characterized but may warrantably be
recorded where an adverse impression would go unmentioned. The
presumption is in favor of the author. It should be kept so.
17
In all this there is nothing impossible, nothing millennial. But what
has been outlined of the work of the true book reporter is as far as
possible from what we very generally get to-day. We get unthinking
praise and unthinking condemnation; we do not expect analysis but
we have a right to expect straightaway exposition and a condensed
transliteration of the book being dealt with.
“Praise,” we have just said, and “condemnation.” That is what it is,
and there is no room in the book reporter’s task either for praise or
condemnation. He is not there to praise the book any more than a man is
at a political convention to praise a nominating speech; he is there
to describe the book, to describe the speech, to _report_ either. A
newspaperman who should begin his account of a meeting in this fashion,
“In a lamentably poor speech, showing evidences of hasty preparation,
Elihu Root,” &c., would be fired--and ought to be. No matter if a
majority of those who heard Mr. Root thought the same way about it.
18
The book reporter will be governed in his work by the precise news
value in the book he is dealing with at the moment he is dealing with
it. This needs illustration.
On November 11, 1918, an armistice was concluded in Europe, terminating
a war that had lasted over four years. In that four years books
relating to the war then being waged had sold heavily, even at times
outselling fiction. Had the war drawn to a gradual end the sales of
these war books would probably have lessened, little by little, until
they reached and maintained a fairly steady level. From this they would
doubtless have declined, as the end drew near, lower and lower, until
the foreseen end came, when the interest in them would have been as
great, but not much greater, than the normal interest in works of a
historical or biographical sort.
But the end came overnight; and suddenly the whole face of the world
was transformed. The reaction in the normal person was intense. In
an instant war books of several pronounced types became intolerable
reading. _How I Reacted to the War_, by Quintus Quintuple seemed
tremendously unimportant. Even _Mr. Britling_ was, momentarily, utterly
stale and out of date. Reminiscences of the German ex-Kaiser were
neither interesting nor important; he was a fugitive in Holland.
The book reporter who had any sense of news values grasped this
immediately. Books that a month earlier would have been worth 1,000
to 1,500 word articles were worth a few lines or no space at all.
On the other hand books which had a historical value and a place as
interesting public records, such as _Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story_,
were not diminished either in interest or in importance.
Some books which had been inconsequential were correspondingly exalted
by the unprecedented turn of affairs. These were books on such
subjects as the re-education of disabled fighters, the principles
which might underlie the formation of a league of nations, problems of
reconstruction of every sort. They had been worth, some of them, very
small articles a week earlier; now they were worth a column or two
apiece.
19
No doubt we ought to conclude this possibly tedious essay with some
observations on the one per cent. of books which call for swift
surgery. But such an enterprise is, if not impossible, extraordinarily
difficult for the reason that the same operation is never called for
twice.
In a sense it is like cutting diamonds, or splitting a large stone
into smaller stones. The problem varies each time. The cutter respects
certain principles and follows a careful technique. That is all.
We shall, for the sake of the curious, take an actual instance. In
1918 there was published a novel called _Foes_ by Mary Johnston, an
American novelist of an endowment so decided as fairly to entitle her
to the designation “a genius.”
Miss Johnston’s first novel had appeared twenty years earlier. Her
first four books--nay, her first two, the second being _To Have and to
Hold_--placed her firmly in the front rank of living romantic writers.
The thing that distinguished her romanticism was its sense of drama in
human affairs and human destiny. Added to this was a command of live,
nervous, highly poetic prose. History--romance; it did not matter. She
could set either movingly before you.
Her work showed steady progress, reaching a sustained culmination in
her two Civil War novels, _The Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_. She
experimented a little, as in her poetic drama of the French Revolution,
_The Goddess of Reason_, and in _The Fortunes of Garin_, a tapestry
of mediæval France. _The Wanderers_ was a more decided venture, but a
perfectly successful. Then came _Foes_.
Considered purely as a romantic narrative, as a story of friendship
transformed into hatred and the pursuit of a private feud under the
guise of wreaking Divine vengeance, _Foes_ is a superb tale. Considered
as a novel, _Foes_ is a terrible failure.
Why? Is it not sufficient to write a superb tale? Yes, if you have
essayed nothing more. Is a novel anything more than “a good story,
well told”? Yes, if the writer essays to make more of it.