The Art Of Letters Part 17

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 subst.i.tuted 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 att.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce. One great paper lends support to this contemptuous att.i.tude towards quotational criticism by refusing to pay its contributors for s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages.

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 a.s.sail 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 aesthete 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 att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude, 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, Sh.e.l.ley 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 pa.s.ses 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 k.o.c.k, 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt. 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 cla.s.sics for their standards. His definition of the cla.s.sics 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 cla.s.sics 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.