Chapter 4 THE REVIEWING OF BOOKS

A PROSPECTUS FOR CRITICISM

Criticism, in one respect, is like science: there is pure science, so-called, and applied science; there is pure criticism and applied criticism, which latter is reviewing. In applied science, principles established elsewhere are put to work; in reviewing, critical principles are, or should be, put to work in the analysis of books, but the books, if they are really important, often make it necessary to erect new critical principles. In fact, it is impossible to set a line where criticism ceases and reviewing begins. Good criticism is generally applicable to all literature; good reviewing is good criticism applied to a new book. I see no other valid distinction.

Reviewing in America has had a career by no means glorious. In the early nineteenth century, at the time of our first considerable productivity in literature, it was sporadic. The great guns- Lowell, Emerson-fired critical broadsides into the past; only occasionally (as in "A Fable for Critics") were they drawn into discussions of their contemporaries, and then, as in the Emerson- Whitman affair, they sometimes regretted it. Reviewing was carried on in small type, in the backs of certain magazines. Most of it was verbose and much of it was worthless as criticism. The belated recognition of the critical genius of Poe was due to the company he kept. He was a sadly erratic reviewer, as often wrong, I suppose, as right, but the most durable literary criticism of the age came from his pen, and is to be found in a review, a review of Hawthorne's short stories.

After the Civil War the situation did not immediately improve. We had perhaps better reviewing, certainly much better mediums of criticism, such, for example, as The Nation, and, later, The Critic, but not more really excellent criticism. The magazines and newspapers improved, the weekly, as a medium of reviewing, established itself, though it functioned imperfectly; the individuals of force and insight who broke through current comment into criticism were more plentiful, but not more eminent.

The new era in reviewing, our era, began with two phenomena, of which the first had obscure beginnings and the second can be exactly dated.

The first was modern journalism. Just when journalism became personal, racy, and inclusive of all the interests of modern life, I cannot say. Kipling exhibits its early effects upon literature, but Kipling was an effect, not a cause. No matter when it began, we have seen, in the decade or two behind us, reviewing made journalistic, an item of news, but still more a means of entertainment.

The journalistic reviewer, who is still the commonest variety, had one great merit. He was usually interesting. Naturally so, since he wrote not to criticize the book that had been given him, but to interest his readers. Yet by the very nature of the case he labored under a disadvantage which forever barred him from calling himself critic as well as reviewer. He was a specialist in reporting, in making a story from the most unpromising material, and also in the use of his mother tongue, but a specialist, usually, in no other field whatsoever. Fiction, poetry, biography, science, history, politics, theology-whatever came to his mill was grist for the paper, and the less he knew of the subject and the less he had read and thought, the more emphatic were his opinions.

The club and saber work of Pope's day and Christopher North's has gone-advertising has made it an expensive luxury, and here at least commercialism has been of service to literature. It was wholesale and emphatic praise that became a trademark of journalistic reviewing. First novels, or obscure novels, were sometimes handled roughly by a reviewer whose duty was to prepare a smart piece of copy. But when books by the well known came to his desk it was safer to praise than to damn, because in damning one had to give reasons, whereas indiscriminate praise needed neither knowledge nor excuse. Furthermore, since the chief object was to have one's review read, excessive praise had every advantage over measured approval. Who would hesitate between two articles, one headed "The Best Book of the Year," and the other, "A New Novel Critically Considered"!

Thus, journalism per se has done little for the cause of American reviewing, and directly or indirectly it has done much harm, if only by encouraging publishers who found no competent discussions of their wares to set up their own critics, who poured out through the columns of an easy press commendations of the new books which were often most intelligent, but never unbiased.

The newspapers, however, have rendered one great service to criticism. In spite of their attempts to make even the most serious books newsy news, they, and they alone, have kept pace with the growing swarm of published books. The literary supplement, which proposed to review all books not strictly technical or transient, was a newspaper creation. And the literary supplement, which grew from the old book page, contained much reviewing which was in no bad sense journalistic. Without it the public would have had only the advertisements and the publishers' announcements to classify, analyze, and in some measure describe the regiment of books that marches in advance of our civilization.

We were not to be dependent, however, upon the budding supplements and the clever, ignorant reviewing, which, in spite of notable exceptions, characterized the newspaper view of books. The technical critic of technical books had long been practising, and his ability increased with the advance in scholarship that marked the end of the nineteenth century. The problem was how to make him write for the general intelligent reader. For years the old Nation, under the editorship of Garrison and of Godkin, carried on this struggle almost single-handed. For a generation it was the only American source from which an author might expect a competent review of a serious, non-technical book. But the weight of the endeavor was too much for it. Fiction it largely evaded, as the London Times Literary Supplement does to-day. And with all the serious books in English awaiting attention in a few pages of a single weekly, it is no wonder that the shelves of its editorial office held one of the best modern libraries in New York! Or that Christmas, 1887, was the time chosen to review a gift edition of 1886! The old Dial had a like struggle, and a resembling difficulty.

It was in 1914 that The New Republic applied a new solution to the problem, and from its pages and from the other "intellectual weeklies" which have joined it, has come not merely some of the best reviewing that we have had, but also a distinct lift upwards in the standard of our discussion of contemporary books of general interest. After 1914 one could expect to find American reviews of certain kinds of books which were as excellent as any criticisms from England or from France.

But the solution applied was of such a character as to limit definitely its application. The New Republic, the present Nation, The Freeman, The Weekly Review, and, in a little different sense, The Dial, were founded by groups held together, with the exception of The Dial coterie, not by any common attitude towards literature, or by any specific interest in literature itself, but rather by a common social philosophy. These journals, again with the one exception, were devoted primarily to the application of their respective social philosophies. Even when in reviews or articles there was no direct social application, there was a clear irradiation from within. When The New Republic is humorous, it is a social-liberal humor. When The Freeman is ironic there is usually an indirect reference to the Single Tax. And The Dial will be modern or perish.

As a result of all this the space given to books at large in the social-political journals was small. And in that space one could prophesy with some exactness the reviewing to be expected. Books of social philosophy, novels with a thesis, poetry of radical emotion, documented history, and the criticism of politics or economic theory have had such expert reviewing as America has never before provided in such quantity. But there was a certain monotony in the conclusions reached. "Advanced" books had "advanced" reviewers who approved of the author's ideas even if they did not like his book. Conservative books were sure to be attacked in one paragraph even if they were praised in another. What was much more deplorable, good, old-fashioned books, that were neither conservative nor radical, but just human, had an excellent chance of interesting no one of these philosophical editors and so of never being reviewed at all. Irving, Cooper of the Leatherstocking Series, possibly Hawthorne, and quite certainly the author of "Huckleberry Finn" would have turned over pages for many a day without seeing their names at all.

Thus the intellectual weekly gave us an upstanding, competentcriticism of books with ideas in them-when the ideas seemed important to the editors; a useful service, but not a comprehensive one; the criticism of a trend rather than a literature; of the products of a social group rather than the outspeaking of a nation. Something more was needed.

Something more was needed; and specifically literary mediums that should be catholic in criticism, comprehensive in scope, sound, stimulating, and accurate.

To be catholic in criticism does not mean to be weak and opinionless. A determination to discuss literature honestly and with insight, letting conclusions be what they must, may be regarded as a sufficient editorial stock in trade. It is fundamental, but it is not sufficient. Just as there is personality behind every government, so there should be a definite set of personal convictions behind literary criticism, which is not a science, though science may aid it. Sterilized, dehumanized criticism is almost a contradiction in terms, except in those rare cases where the weighing of evidential facts is all that is required. But these cases are most rare. Even a study of the text of Beowulf, or a history of Norman law, will be influenced by the personal emotions of the investigator, and must be so criticized. Men choose their philosophy according to their temperament; so do writers write; and so must critics criticize. Which is by no means to say that criticism is merely an affair of temperament, but rather to assert that temperament must not be left out of account in conducting or interpreting criticism.

Ideally, then, the editors of a catholic review should have definite convictions, if flexible minds, established principles, if a wide latitude of application. But although a review may thus be made catholic, it cannot thus attain comprehensiveness. There are too many books; too many branches upon the luxuriant tree of modern knowledge. No editorial group, no editorial staff, can survey the field competently unless they strictly delimit it by selection, and that means not to be comprehensive. Yet if the experts are to be called in, the good critics, the good scholars, the good scientists, until every book is reviewed by the writer best qualified to review it, then we must hope to attain truth by averages as the scientists do, rather than by dogmatic edict. For if it is difficult to guarantee in a few that sympathy with all earnest books which does not preclude rigid honesty in the application of firmly held principles, it is more difficult with the many. And if it is hard to exclude bias, inaccuracy, over- statement, and inadequacy from the work even of a small and chosen group, it is still harder to be certain of complete competence if the net is thrown more widely.

In fact, there is no absolute insurance against bad criticism except the intelligence of the reader. He must discount where discount is necessary, he must weigh the authority of the reviewer, he must listen to the critic as the protestant to his minister, willing to be instructed, but aware of the fallibility of man.

Hence, a journal of comprehensive criticism must first select its reviewers with the greatest care and then print vouchers for their opinions, which will be the names of the reviewers. Hence it must open its columns to rebuttals or qualifications, so that the reader may form his own conclusions as to the validity of the criticism, and, after he has read the book, judge its critics.

All this is a world away from the anonymous, dogmatic reviewing of a century ago, But who shall say that in this respect our practice is retrograde?

It is a great and sprawling country, this America, with all manner of men of all manners in it, and the days of patent medicines have passed, when one bottle was supposed to contain a universal cure. But in this matter of reading, which must be the chief concern of those who support a critical journal, there is one disease common to most of us that can be diagnosed with certainty, and one sure, though slow-working, remedy, that can be applied. We are uncritical readers. We like too readily, which is an amiable fault; we dislike too readily, which is a misfortune. We accept the cheap when we might have the costly book. We dislike the new, the true, the accurate, and the beautiful, because we will not seek, or cannot grasp, them. We are afflicted with that complex of democracy-a distrust of the best. Nine out of ten magazines, nine out of ten libraries, nine out of ten intelligent American minds prove this accusation.

And the cure is more civilization, more intellectuality, a finer and stronger emotion? One might as well say that the cure for being sick is to get well! This, indeed, is the cure; but the remedy is a vigorous criticism. Call in the experts, let them name themselves and their qualifications like ancient champions, and then proceed to lay about with a will. Sometimes the maiden literature, queen of the tournament, will be slain instead of the Knight of Error, and often the spectators will be scratched by the whir of a sword. Nevertheless, the fight is in the open, we know the adversaries, and the final judgment, whether to salute a victor or condemn an impostor, is ours.

Thus, figuratively, one might describe the proper function in criticism of a liberal journal of catholic criticism to-day. One thing I have omitted, that its duty is not limited to criticism, for if it is to be comprehensive, it must present also vast quantities of accurate and indispensable facts, the news of literature. And one prerequisite I have felt it unnecessary to dwell upon. Unless its intent is honest, and its editors independent of influence from any self-interested source, the literary tournament of criticism becomes either a parade of the virtues with banners for the favorites, or a melee where rivals seek revenge. Venal criticism is the drug and dishonest criticism the poison of literature.

THE RACE OF REVIEWERS

As a reviewer of books, my experience has been lengthy rather than considerable. It is, indeed, precisely twenty-two years since I wrote my first review, which ended, naturally, with the words "a good book to read of a winter evening before a roaring fire." I remember them because the publishers, who are lovers of platitudes, quoted them, to my deep gratification, and perhaps because I had seen them before. Since then I have reviewed at least twice as many books as there are years in this record-about as many, I suppose, as a book-page war-horse in racing trim could do in a month, or a week. My credentials are not impressive in this category, but perhaps they will suffice.

As an author, my claim to enter upon this self-contained symposium which I am about to present is somewhat stronger. Authors, of course, read all the reviews of their books, even that common American variety which runs like the telegraphic alphabet: quote- summarize-quote-quote-summarize-quote, and so on up to five dollars' worth, space rates. I have read all the reviews of my books except those which clipping bureaus seeking a subscription or kind friends wishing to chastise vicariously have neglected to send me. As an author I can speak with mingled feelings, but widely, of reviews.

Editorially my experience has been equally poignant. For ten years I have read reviews, revised and unrevised, in proof and out of it. I have cut reviews that needed cutting and meekly endured the curses of the reviewer. I have printed conscientiously reviews that had better been left unwritten, and held my head bloody but unbowed up to the buffets of the infuriated authors. As an editor I may say that I am at home, though not always happy, with reviewing and reviewers.

And now, when in one of those rare moments of meditation which even New York permits I ask myself why does every man or woman with the least stir of literature in them wish to review books, my trinitarian self-critic, author, editor-holds high debate. For a long time I have desired to fight it out, and find, if it can be found, the answer.

As an author, I have a strong distaste for reviewing. In the creative mood of composition, or in weary relaxation, reviewing seems the most ungrateful of tasks. Nothing comes whole to a reviewer. Half of every book must elude him, and the other half he must compress into snappy phrases. I watch him working upon that corpus, which so lately was a thing of life and movement-my book- and see that he cannot lift it; that he must have some hand-hold to grip it by-my style or my supposed interest in the Socialist Party, or the fact that I am a professor or a Roman Catholic. Unless he can get some phrase that will explain the characters of my women, the length of my sentences, and the moral I so carefully hid in the last chapter, he is helpless. Sometimes I find him running for a column without finding a gate to my mind, and then giving it up in mid-paragraph. Sometimes he gets inside, but dashes for the exit sign and is out before I know what he thinks. Sometimes he finds an idea to his liking, wraps up in it, and goes to sleep.

I recognize his usefulness. I take his hard raps meekly and even remember them when next I begin to write. I do not hate him much when he tells the public not to read me. There is always the chance that he is right for his public; not, thank heavens, for mine. I am furious only when it is clear that he has not read me himself. But I cannot envy him. It is so much more agreeable to make points than to find them. It is so much easier, if you have a little talent, to build some kind of an engine that will run than to explain what precise fault prevents it from being the best. When I am writing a book I cannot understand the mania for criticism that seems to infect the majority of the literary kind.

As a reviewer I must again confess, although as an editor I may bitterly regret the confession, that the passion for reviewing is almost inexplicable. Reviewing has the primal curse of hard labor upon it. You must do two kinds of work at once, and be adequately rewarded for neither. First you must digest another man's conception, assimilate his ideas, absorb his imagination. It is like eating a cold dinner on a full stomach. And then when you have eaten and digested, you must tell how you feel about it- briefly, cogently, and in words that cannot be misunderstood. Furthermore, your feelings must be typical, must represent what a thousand stomachs will feel, or should feel, or could feel if they felt at all, or instead of being hailed as a critic you will be accused of dyspepsia.

The mere mental labor of picking up the contents of a book as you proceed with your criticism, and tucking them in here and there where they fit, is so great that, speaking as a reviewer, I should give up reviewing if there were no more compelling reasons than requests to write criticism. There are, there must be; and still speaking as a reviewer I begin to glimpse one or two of them. Revenge is not one. Critics have written for revenge, quoting gleefully, "O that mine enemy would write a book!" Pope is our classic example. But publishers have made that form of literary vendetta unprofitable nowadays, and I am glad they have done so. Much wit, but little criticism, has been inspired by revenge. Furthermore, I notice in my own case, and my editorial self confirms the belief, that the reviewer craves books to extol, not books to condemn. He is happiest when his author is sympathetic to his own temperament. Antipathetic books must be forced upon him.

Which leads me to the further conclusion that the prime motive for reviewing is the creative instinct. We all of us have it, all of the literary folk who make up a most surprising proportion of every community in the United States. It works on us constantly. Sometimes it comes to a head and then we do a story or a poem, an essay or a book; but in the meantime it is constantly alive down below, drawn toward every sympathetic manifestation without, craving self-expression and, in default of that, expression by others. If a book is in us we write; if it is not, we seize upon another man's child, adopt it as ours, talk of it, learn to understand it, let it go reluctantly with our blessing, and depart vicariously satisfied. That is the hope, the ever-renewed hope, with which the besotted reviewer takes up reviewing.

The creative instinct indeed is sexed, like the human that possesses it. It seeks a mystical union with the imaginings of others. The poet, the novelist, the essayist, seek the mind of the reader; the critic seeks the mind of the writer. That we get so much bad reviewing is due to incompatibility of temperament or gross discrepancy in the mating intellects. Yet reviewers (and authors), like lovers, hope ever for the perfect match.

I know one critic who tore his review in pieces because it revealed the charlatanism of his beloved author. I know an author who burnt his manuscript because his friend and critic had misunderstood him. I see a thousand reviews (and have written several of them) where book and reviewer muddle along together like the partners of everyday marriages. But next time, one always hopes, it will be different.

As an editor, I confess that I view all this effusion with some distrust. One plain fact stands high and dry above the discussion: books are being published daily, and some one must tell the busy and none too discriminating public what they are worth-not to mention the librarians who are so engaged in making out triple cards and bibliographies and fitting titles to vague recollections that they have no time left to read. Furthermore, if reviewing is a chore at worst, and at best a desire to gratify a craving for the unappeasable, editing reviews is still more chorelike, and seeking the unobtainable-a good review for every good book-is quite as soul-exhausting as the creative instinct.

And, again as an editor, the perfect marriage of well attuned minds is well enough as an ideal, but as a practicable achievement I find myself more often drawn toward what I should call the liaison function of a reviewer. The desire to be useful (since we have excluded the desire to make money as a major motive) is, I believe, an impulse which very often moves the reviewer. The instinct to teach, to reform, to explain, to improve lies close to the heart of nine out of ten of us. It is commoner than the creative instinct. When it combines with it, one gets a potential reviewer.

The reviewer as a liaison officer is a homelier description than soul affinity or intellectual mate, but it is quite as honorable. Books (to the editor) represent, each one of them, so much experience, so much thought, so much imagination differently compounded in a story, poem, tractate on science, history, or play. Each is a man's most luminous self in words, ready for others. Who wants it? Who can make use of it? Who will be dulled by it? Who exalted? It is the reviewer's task to say. He grasps the book, estimates it, calculates its audience. Then he makes the liaison. He explains, he interprets, and in so doing necessarily criticizes, abstracts, appreciates. The service is inestimable, when properly rendered. It is essential for that growing literature of knowledge which science and the work of specialists in all fields have given us. Few readers can face alone and unaided a shelf of books on radio-activity, evolution, psychology, or sociology with any hope of selecting without guidance the best, or with any assurance that they dare reject as worthless what they do not understand. The house of the interpreter has become the literary journal, and its usefulness will increase.

A liaison of a different kind is quite as needful in works of sheer imagination. Here the content is human, the subject the heart, or life as one sees it. But reading, like writing, is a fine art that few master. Only the most sensitive, whose minds are as quick as their emotions are responsive, can go to the heart of a poem or a story. They need an interpreter, a tactful interpreter, who will give them the key and let them find their own chamber. Or who will wave them away from the door, or advise a brief sojourn. To an editor such an interpreter is an ideal reviewer. He will desire to be useful, and passionately attempt it. He will feel his responsibility first to art and next to the public, and then to his author, and last (as an editor I whisper it) to the publisher. Reviewers forget the author and the public. Their mandate comes from art (whose representative in the flesh is, or should be, the editor). But their highest service is to make a liaison between the reader and his book.

And the conclusion of this debate is, I think, a simple one. Reviewing is a major sport, fascinating precisely because of its difficulty, compelling precisely because it appeals to strong instincts. For most of us it satisfies that desire to work for some end which we ourselves approve, regardless of costs. The editor, sardonically aware of a world that refuses to pay much for what men do to please themselves or to reform others, sees here his salvation, and is thankful.

THE SINS OF REVIEWING

I have known thousands of reviewers and liked most of them, except when they sneered at my friends or at me. Their profession, in which I have taken a humble share, has always seemed to me a useful, and sometimes a noble one; and their contribution to the civilizing of reading man, much greater than the credit they are given for it. We divide them invidiously into hack reviewers and critics, forgetting that a hack is just a reviewer overworked, and a critic a reviewer with leisure to perform real criticism. A good hack is more useful than a poor critic, and both belong to the same profession as surely as William Shakespeare and the author of a Broadway "show."

The trouble is that the business of reviewing has not been sufficiently recognized as a profession. Trades gain in power and recognition in proportion as their members sink individuality in the mass and form a union which stands as one man against the world. Professions are different. They rise by decentralization, and by specializing within the group. They gain distinction not only by the achievements of their individual members but by a curious splitting into subtypes of the species. Law and medicine are admirable examples. Every time they develop a new kind of specialist they gain in prestige and emolument.

A reviewer, however (unless he publishes a collected edition and becomes a critic), has so far remained in the eyes of the public just a reviewer. In fiction we have been told (by the reviewers) of romancers and realists, sociologists and ethicists, naturalists and symbolists, objectivists and psychologists. Are there no adjectives, no brevet titles of literary distinction for the men and women who have made it possible to talk intelligently about modern fiction without reading it?

My experience with reviewers has led me to classify them by temperament rather than by the theories they possess; and this is not so unscientific as it sounds, for theories usually spring from temperaments. No man whose eliminatory processes function perfectly is ever a pessimist, except under the compulsion of hard facts. No sluggish liver ever believes that joy of living is the prime quality to be sought in literary art. And by the same eternal principle, moody temperaments embrace one theory of criticism; cold, logical minds another. I identify my classes of reviewers by their habits, not their dogmas.

But in order to clear the ground let me make first a larger distinction, into mythical reviewers, bad but useful reviewers, bad and not useful reviewers, and good reviewers. Like the nineteenth century preacher I will dispose of the false, dwell upon the wicked, and end (briefly) with that heaven of literary criticism where all the authors are happy and all the reviewers excellent.

The reviewer I know best never, I profoundly believe, has existed, and I fear never will exist. He is the familiar figure of English novels-moderately young, a bachelor, with a just insufficient income in stocks. Oxford or Cambridge is his background, and his future is the death of a rich aunt or a handsome marriage. In the meantime, there is always a pile of books waiting in his chambers to be reviewed at "a guinea a page," when he has leisure, which is apparently only once or twice a week. The urban pastoral thus presented is one which Americans may well be envious of-otium cum dignitate. But I have never encountered this reviewer in London. I fear he exists only for the novelists, who created him in order to have a literary person with enough time on his hands to pursue the adventures required by the plot. Yet in so far as he is intended as a portrait of a critic, he stands as an ideal of the leisured view of books. There has been no leisured view of books in America since Thoreau, or Washington Irving. Even Poe was feverish. Our books are read on the subway, or after the theater, and so I fear it is in London-in London as it is.

Coldly, palpably real is the next critic of my acquaintance, the academic reviewer. He does not write for the newspapers, for he despises them, and they are rather scornful of his style, which is usually lumbering, and his idea that 1921 is the proper time in which to review the books of 1920. But you will find him in the weeklies, and rampant in the technical journals.

The academic reviewer is besotted by facts, or their absence. The most precious part of the review to him is the last paragraph in which he points out misspellings, bad punctuation, and inaccuracies generally. Like a hound dog in a corn field, he never sees his books as a whole, but snouts and burrows along the trail he is following. If he knows the psychology of primitive man, primitive psychology he will find and criticize, even in a book on the making of gardens. If his specialty is French drama, French drama he will find, even in a footnote, and root it out and nuzzle it. I remember when a famous scholar devoted the whole of his review of a two volume magnum opus upon a great historical period, to the criticism of the text of a Latin hymn cited in a footnote! The academic reviewer (by which I do not mean the university reviewer, since many such are not academic in the bad sense which I am giving to the word) demands an index. His reviews usually end with, "There is no index," or, "There is an excellent index." The reason is plain. The index is his sole guide to reviewing. If he finds his pet topics there he can hunt them down remorselessly. But if there is no index, he is cast adrift helpless, knowing neither where to begin nor where to end his review. I call him a bad reviewer, but useful, because, though incapable of estimating philosophies or creations of the imagination, he is our best guarantee that writers' facts are facts.

My acquaintance with the next bad, but occasionally useful, reviewer is less extensive, but, by the circumstances of the case, more intimate. I shall call him the ego-frisky reviewer. The term (which I am quite aware is a barbarous compound) I am led to invent in order to describe the phenomenon of a critic whose ego frisks merrily over the corpus of his book. He is not so modern a product as he himself believes. The vituperative critics of the Quarterlies and, earlier still, of Grub Street, used their enemies' books as a means of indulging their needs for self- expression. But it was wrath, jealousy, vindictiveness, or political enmity which they discharged while seated on the body of the foe; whereas the ego-friskish critic has no such bile in him.

He is in fact a product of the new advertising psychology, which says, "Be human" (by which is meant "be personal") "first of all." He regards his book (I know this, because he has often told me so) as a text merely, for a discourse which must entertain the reader. And his idea of entertainment is to write about himself, his tastes, his moods, his reactions. Either he praises the book for what it does to his ego, or damns it for what it did to his ego. You will never catch him between these extremes, for moderation is not his vice.

The ego-frisky reviewer is not what the biologist would call a pure form. He (or she) is usually a yellow journalist, adopting criticism as a kind of protective coloration. The highly personal critic, adventuring, or even frolicking among masterpieces, and recording his experiences, is the true type, and it is he that the ego-friskish imitate. Such a critic in the jovial person of Mr. Chesterton, or Professor Phelps, or Heywood Broun, contributes much to the vividness of our sense for books. But their imitators, although they sometimes enliven, more often devastate reviewing.

Alas, I am best acquainted among them all with the dull reviewer, who is neither good nor useful. The excellent books he has poisoned as though by opiates! The dull books he has made duller! No one has cause to love him unless it be the authors of weak books, who thank their dull critics for exposing them in reviews so tedious that no one discovers what the criticism is about.

The dull reviewer has two varieties: the stupid and the merely dull. It is the stupid reviewer who exasperates beyond patience the lover of good books. He is the man who gets a book wrong from the start, and then plods on after his own conception, which has no reference whatsoever to the author's. He is the man who takes irony seriously, misses the symbolism when there is any, and invariably guesses wrong as to the sources of the characters and the plot.

There are not many really stupid reviewers, for the most indolent editor cleans house occasionally, and the stupid are the first to go out the back door. But merely dull reviewers are as plentiful as fountain pens. The dull reviewer, like Chaucer's drunken man, knows where he wants to go but doesn't know how to get there. He (or she) has three favorite paths that lead nowhere, all equally devious.

The first is by interminable narrative. "When Hilda was blown into the arms of Harold Garth at the windy corner of the Woolworth building, neither guessed at what was to follow. Beginning with this amusing situation, the author of 'The Yellow Moon' develops a very interesting plot. Garth was the nephew of Miles Harrison, Mayor of New York. After graduating from Williams, etc., etc., etc." This is what he calls summarizing the plot.

Unfortunately, the art of summary is seldom mastered, and a bad summary is the dullest thing in the world. Yet even a bad summary of a novel or a book of essays is hard to do; so that when the dull reviewer has finished, his sweaty brow and numbed fingers persuade him that he has written a review. There is time for just a word of quasi-criticism: "This book would have been better if it had been shorter, and the plot is not always logical. Nevertheless, 'The Yellow Moon' holds interest throughout." And then, finis. This is botchery and sometimes butchery, not reviewing.

The dullest reviewers I have known, however, have been the long- winded ones. A book is talk about life, and therefore talk about a book is one remove more from the reality of experience. Talk about talk must be good talk, and it must be sparing of words. A concise style is nearly always an interesting style: even though it repel by crudity it will never be dull. But conciseness is not the quality I most often detect in reviewing. It is luxurious to be concise when one is writing at space rates; and it is always harder to say a thing briefly than at length, just as it is easier for a woman to hit a nail at the third stroke than at the first.

I once proposed a competition in a college class in English composition. Each student was to clip a column newspaper article of comment (not facts) and condense it to the limit of safety. Then editorials gave up their gaseous matter in clouds, chatty news stories boiled away to paragraphs, and articles shrank up to their headlines.

But the reviews suffered most. One, I remember, came down to "It is a bad book," or to express it algebraically, it is a bad book. Another disappeared entirely. On strict analysis it was discovered that the reviewer had said nothing not canceled out by something else. But most remained as a weak liquor of comment upon which floated a hard cake of undigested narrative. One student found a bit of closely reasoned criticism that argued from definite evidences to a concrete conclusion. It was irreducible; but this was a unique experience.

The long-winded are the dullest of dull reviewers, but the most pernicious are the wielders of cliches and platitudes. Is there somewhere a reviewer's manual, like the manual of correct social phrases which some one has recently published? I would believe it from the evidence of a hundred reviews in which the same phrases, differently arranged, are applied to fifty different books. I would believe it, except for the known capacity of man to borrow most of his thoughts and all of his phrases from his neighbor. I know too well that writers may operate like the Federal Reserve banks, except that in literature there is no limit to inflation. A thousand thousand may use "a novel of daring adventure," "a poem full of grace and beauty," or "shows the reaction of a thoughtful mind to the facts of the universe," without exhausting the supply. It is like the manufacture of paper money, and the effect on credit is precisely the same.

So much for the various types of reviewers who, however interesting they may be critically, cannot be called good. The good reviewers, let an uncharitable world say what it will, are, thank heaven! more numerous. Their divisions, temperamental and intellectual, present a curious picture of the difficulties and the rewards of this profession. Yet I cannot enter upon them here, and for good reasons.

The good reviewer is like the good teacher and the good preacher. He is not rare, but he is precious. He has qualities that almost escape analysis and therefore deserve more than a complimentary discussion. He must hold his book like a crystal ball in which he sees not only its proper essence in perfect clarity, but also his own mind mirrored. He must-... In other words, the good reviewer deserves an essay of his own. He is a genius in a minor art, which sometimes becomes major; a craftsman whose skill is often exceptional. I will not put him in the same apartment with reviewers who are arid, egoistic, or dull.

MRS. WHARTON'S "THE AGE OF INNOCENCE"

America is the land of cherished illusions. Americans prefer to believe that they are innocent, innocent of immorality after marriage, innocent of dishonesty in business, innocent of incompatibility between husbands and wives. Americans do not like to admit the existence (in the family) of passion, of unscrupulousness, of temperament. They have made a code for what is to be done, and what is not to be done, and whatever differs is un-American. If their right hands offend them they cut them off rather than admit possession. They believed in international morality when none existed, and when they were made to face the disagreeable fact of war, cast off the nations of the earth, and continued to believe in national morality.

In America prostitution is tolerated in practice, but forbidden in print. All homes are happy unless there is proof to the contrary, and then they are un-American. In its wilful idealism America is determined that at all costs we shall appear to be innocent. And a novel which should begin with the leaders in social conformity, who keep hard and clean the code, and should sweep through the great middle classes that may escape its rigors themselves, but exact them of others, might present the pageant, the social history, the epic of America.

Of course, Mrs. Wharton's novel does nothing of the sort. This is how Tolstoy, or H. G. Wells, or Ernest Poole would have written "The Age of Innocence." They would have been grandiose, epical; their stories would have been histories of culture. It would have been as easy to have called their books broad as it is to call Mrs. Wharton's fine novel narrow. Tendencies, philosophies, irrepressible outbursts would have served as their protagonists, where hers are dwellers in Fifth Avenue or Waverly Place-a cosmopolitan astray, a dowager, a clubman yearning for intellectual sympathy.

And yet in the long run it comes to much the same thing. The epic novelists prefer the panorama: she the drawing-room canvas. They deduce from vast philosophies and depict society. She gives us the Mingotts, the Mansons, the Van der Luydens-society, in its little brownstone New York of the '70's-and lets us formulate inductively the code of America. A little canvas is enough for a great picture if the painting is good.

Indeed, the only objection I have ever heard urged against Mrs. Wharton's fine art of narrative is that it is narrow-an art of dress suit and sophistication. And this book is the answer. For, of course, her art is narrow-like Jane Austen's, like Sheridan's, like Pope's, like Maupassant's, like that of all writers who prefer to study human nature in its most articulate instead of its broadest manifestations. It is narrow because it is focussed, but this does not mean that it is small. Although the story of "The Age of Innocence" might have been set in a far broader background, it is the circumstances of the New York society which Mrs. Wharton knows so well that give it a piquancy, a reality that "epics" lack. They are like the accidents of voice, eye, gesture which determine individuality. Yet her subject is America.

This treating of large themes by highly personal symbols makes possible Mrs. Wharton's admirable perfection of technique. Hers is the technique of sculpture rather than the technique of architecture. It permits the fine play of a humor that has an eye of irony in it, but is more human than irony. It makes possible an approach to perfection. Behold Mrs. Manson Mingott, the indomitable dowager, Catherine:

The immense accretions of flesh which had descended on her in middle life, like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her... into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the center of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.... Around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.

Her art is restrained, focussed upon those points where America, in its normality and in its eccentricity, has become articulate. Therefore it is sharp and convincing.

Who is the central figure in this story where the leaven of intellectual and emotional unrest works in a society that has perfected its code and intends to live by it? Is it Newland Archer, who bears the uncomfortable ferment within him? Is it his wife, the lovely May, whose clear blue eyes will see only innocence? Is it the Countess Olenska, the American who has seen reality and suffered by it, and sacrifices her love for Newland in order to preserve his innocence? No one of these is the center of the story, but rather the idea of "the family," this American "family," which is moral according to its lights, provincial, narrow-but intensely determined that its world shall appear upright, faithful, courageous, in despite of facts, and regardless of how poor reality must be tortured until it conforms. And the "family" as Mrs. Wharton describes it is just the bourgeois Puritanism of nineteenth century America.

Was May right when, with the might of innocence, she forced Newland to give up life for mere living? Was the Countess right when, in spite of her love for him, she aided and abetted her, making him live up to the self-restraint that belonged to his code? The story does not answer, being concerned with the qualities of the "family," not with didacticism.

It says that the insistent innocence of America had its rewards as well as its penalties. It says, in so far as it states any conclusion definitely, that a new and less trammeled generation must answer whether it was the discipline of its parents that saved the American family from anarchy, or the suppressions of its parents that made it rebellious. And the answer is not yet.

"The Age of Innocence" is a fine novel, beautifully written, "big" in the best sense, which has nothing to do with size, a credit to American literature-for if its author is cosmopolitan, this novel, as much as her earlier "Ethan Frome," is a fruit of our soil.

November 6, 1920.

MR. HERGESHEIMER'S "CYTHEREA"

Mrs. Wharton found the age of innocence in the 1870's; Mr. Hergesheimer discovers an age of no innocence in the 1920's. In "The Age of Innocence," the lovely May, a creature of society's conventions, loses her husband and then regains the dulled personality left from the fire of passion. In "Cytherea" the less lovely, but equally moral Fanny loses her Lee because she cannot satisfy his longings and nags when she fails. But she does not regain him when his love chase is over, because he is burned out. Athene and Aphrodite, the graces of the mind, the seductions of the person of the Countess Olenska, together draw Newland Archer, husband of May; but it is Aphrodite only, Cytherean Aphrodite, who, being sex incarnate, is more than mere temptations of the flesh, that wrecks Fanny's home.

In the '70's the poor innocents of society believed their code of honor impregnable against sex. They dressed against sex, talked against sex, kept sex below the surface. The suppression froze some of them into rigidity and stiffened all. But they had their compensations. By sacrificing freedom for personal desire they gained much security. Good husbands required more than a lure of the body to take them off. And when they gave up a great romance for respectability, like Newland Archer, at least they remained gentlemen. There was a tragedy of thwarted development, of martyred love, of waste; but at least self-respect, however misguided, remained.

Not so with this trivial, lawless country club set of the 1920's, drunk part of the time and reckless all of it, codeless, dutiless, restless. For the virtuous among them Aphrodite, a vulgar, shameless Aphrodite, was a nightly menace; for the weak among them (such as Peyton Morris), a passion to be resisted only by fear; for the wayward, like Lee, she was the only illusion worth pursuing. To resist for a woman was to become "blasted and twisted out of her purpose," to be "steeped in vinegar or filled with tallow"; to resist for a man was to lose the integrity of his personality. There were no moral compensations, for there is no morality but self-development, at least in Mr. Hergesheimer's town of Eastlake. There is no god for a man in love but Cytherea.

And this is one way of describing Mr. Hergesheimer's study of love in idleness in the 1920's. Another way would be to call it an essay upon insecurity, although the word essay is too dry to use in a story which is fairly awash with alcohol. The war, the story seems to say, sapped our security of property and comfort and life. But insecurity is an insidious disease that spreads, like bacteria, where strength is relaxed. It infects the lives of those who have lost their certainties and become doubtful of their wills. In this relaxed society of the 1920's, where nothing seemed certain but the need of money and a drink, insecurity spread into married life. Not even the well-mated were secure in the general decline of use and wont. A home wrecked by vague desires running wild-that is the theme of "Cytherea."

Or take a third view of this provocative book. The triangle we have had tiresomely with us, but it is woman's love that is, perversely, always the hero. Hergesheimer studies the man, studies him not as will, or energy, or desire a-struggle with duty or morality, but merely as sex. Man's sex in love, man's sex dominated by Cytherea, is his theme. This is new, at least in fiction, for there man is often swept away, but seldom dominated by sex. And indeed Hergesheimer has to find his man in the relaxed society to which I have referred, a society wearied by unchartered freedom, where business is profitable but trivial, where duty and religion exist only as a convention, disregarded by the honest, upheld by the hypocritical, a society where Cytherea marks and grips her own. Even so, it is an achievement.

Cytherea in the story is a doll with a glamorous countenance, bought and cherished by Lee Randon as a symbol of what he did not find in his married life, what no man finds and keeps, because it is an illusion. Cytherea is Lee Randon's longing for emotional satisfaction, a satisfaction that is not to be of the body merely. And when he meets Savina Grove, a pathological case, whose violent sex emotions have been inhibited to the bursting point, he thinks (and fears) that he has found his heart's desire. In the old, old stories their elopement would have been their grand, their tragic romance. In this cruel novel it is tragic, for she dies of it; but she is not Cytherea; she is earthly merely; it is felt that she is better dead.

It is a cruel story, cruel in its depiction of an almost worthless society with just enough of the charm of the Restoration to save it from beastliness; cruel in its unsparing analyses of man's sex impulses (by all odds the most valuable part of the story); cruel particularly because the ruined Lee Randon is a good fellow, honester than most, kinder than he knows to individuals, although certain that there is no principle but selfishness, and that it is folly to limit desire for the sake of absolutes, like righteousness, or generalities, like the human race. It is a cruel study of women, for Fanny, the model of the domestic virtues, has lost her innocent certainties of the triumph of the right and at the first conflict with Cytherea becomes a common scold; cruel to Savina Grove, who, in spite of her exquisiteness, is only a psychoanalyst's problem; cruel to us all in exposing so ruthlessly how distressing it is to live by stale morality, yet how devastating to act with no guide but illusory desire.

All this is not new in outline. One can find the essence of this story in monkish manuals. There the menace of Cytherea was not evaded. There the weaknesses of man's sex were categoried with less psychology but more force. What is new in Hergesheimer's book is merely the environment in which his characters so disastrously move and an insight into the mechanism of their psychology which earlier writers lacked. I have called it a story of the age of no innocence, but that would be the author's term, not mine; for indeed his characters seem to display as naive an innocence as Mrs. Wharton's of the laws of blood and will, and they know far less of practical morality. The "Age of Moral Innocence" I should rechristen Hergesheimer's book.

Critics will raise, and properly, a question as to the worth of his materials. He is not studying a "ripe" society, as was Mrs. Wharton, but the froth of the war, the spume of country clubs, the trivialities of the strenuous but unproductive rich. This is a just criticism as far as it goes, and it lessens the solidity, the enduring interest, of his achievement. True, it was in such a society that he could best pursue the wiles of Cytherea. He has a right to pitch his laboratory where he pleases, and out of some very sordid earth he has contrived some beauty. Nevertheless, you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, skilled though you may be.

I should be more inclined, however, in a comparison with Mrs. Wharton, to criticize his lack of detachment. That able novelist, who is bounded so exclusively in her little social world, nevertheless stands apart from it and sees it whole. Mr. Hergesheimer has his feet still deep in the soil. He is too much a part of his country club life. He means, perhaps, to be ironical, but in truth he is too sympathetic with the desires, emotional and aesthetic, that he expresses to be ironical until the close. There is a surprise, too sharp a surprise, at the end of his novel, when one discovers that the moral is not "do and dare," but "all is vanity." He is so much and so lusciously at home with cocktails, legs, limousine parties, stair-sittings, intra-matrimonial kissings (I mention the most frequent references) that one distrusts the sudden sarcasm of his finale. It would have been better almost if he had been a Count de Gramont throughout, for he has a flair for the surroundings of amorous adventure and is seldom gross; better still to have seen, as Mrs. Wharton saw, the picture in perspective from the first. His book will disgust some and annoy others because its art is muddied by a lingering naturalism and too highly colored by the predilections of the artist.

It is a skilful art, nevertheless, and "Cytherea" confirms a judgment long held that Mr. Hergesheimer is one of the most skilful craftsmen in English in our day. And this I say in spite of his obvious failure to grasp inevitably the structure of the English sentence. He is one of the most honest analysts of a situation, also; one of the most fearless seekers of motives; one of the ablest practisers of that transmutation of obscure emotion into the visible detail of dress, habit, expression, which is the real technique of the novelist. His fault is a defect in sympathy, a lack of spiritual appreciation, if I may use and leave undefined so old-fashioned a term. His virtue lies in the rich garment of experience which careful observation and skilful writing enable him to wrap about his imaginative conceptions. It is this which makes his novels so readable for the discriminating at present, and will make them useful historical records in the future. One aspect of a troublesome period when the middle generation achieved the irresponsibility without the earnestness of youth he has caught in "Cytherea." It is unfortunate that it is a partial portrait of important motives in people who themselves are of little importance; and it is doubly unfortunate that he has been too much a part of his muddy world to be as good an interpreter as he is a witness of its life.

January 21, 1922.