Art of Letters — Book Reviewing Part I from beginning through "without ever being able to see it."

XXIV. --BOOK REVIEWING

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.