wretch! My wonder is not that reviewers are so often wrong about books, but so often right.

So true it is that in literature it is not the demand that creates the supply, but the supply that creates the demand. The purveyor of literary goods merely emphasizes the futility of his customers and the reaction of their futility upon him, by adopting the principle of number rather than of selection. In such a vicious circle what is the critic but a spoke within the wheel? Can anyone therefore wonder that the modern critic has been deprived of his ancient status and distinction in literature; that his loss in dignity has corresponded with his being the worstpaid of all professions, and that the good-humoured and nearly justifiable contempt in which he is commonly held has resulted in the prevailing opinion that the man who has taken to criticism is the man who has failed to make a creditable living in every other job?

I cannot illuminate my point better than by summarizing the abler, keener, more reflective and estimable contemporary opinion about reviewing. Its interest and relevance lie in the fact that it implies an intellectual apology for that change of attitude and function which, in recent years, has thrown the critic out of his seat of authority. At the outset, this attitude makes a significant differentiation between criticism amd book-reviewing. The office of the reviewer is somewhere between the office of the critic and that of the reporter. What then are the qualities and attributes of this hybrid animal—the reviewer? To put it briefly, he is there to portray a book and for no other purpose. His duty is to give, not an opinion, but a portrait of the book in question. must not stray into the irrelevant paths of opinion. That

He

"The

kind of commentator is literally opinionated. curse of comment,' ""unreasonable intolerance," the substitution for the portrait of a “rag-bag of the reviewer's own moral, political, or religious opinions," the "detestable" habit of "general remarks," and so on. I quote from a genuinely trained, fastidious and brilliant critic whose practice is vastly better than his word. Theorizing and the discussion of "abstract argument," sermonizing, in fact, are a vicious departure from the simple rules which should govern the reviewer in his occupation. To be quite fair to this very plausible exposition, I ought to say that, though the critic does not define exactly what a portraiture should be, he is careful to say that it should not be a summary of a book's contents-that summary, I may add, which often passes so insidiously into the publisher's advertisement and thence, preening its wings for still further flights, soars into the nebulous regions of hyperbole.

Now, what are the implications of this apology? It is, in the first place, to postulate your critic as a tradesman rather than an artist, to exile him from literature into "occasional" journalism. It is, in the second place, to throw the emphasis rather on his duty to the author than to the public; thirdly, to deprive him of principles, criteria, and doctrines ;* fourthly, to make the critical faculty an accidental rather than an essential qualification; fifthly, seriously to sap his individuality and independence; and lastly (an important point) to interpret him not as a professional and a lover, but as an amateur,

* I confess that I regard the prejudice against theory as lazy, foolish and pestilent. Darwin's discovery of the law of Natural Selection was but a theory. Every fact has its theory, as every book its printer and to air the wrong one is better than none at all.

an impressionist and dilettante. The meaning with which the whole Gallic and Saxon tradition have endowed the critic has become obsolete; in deference to modern demands, he is to march down from the judge's bench into the witness-box. A very different conception, for instance, from that of Hazlitt, who, according to Bagehot, started the question as to whether it would not be well to review books which did not appear, to escape the labour of perusing print, and to save his fellows from the slow torture of tedious extracts.

Where will be the kind of reviewer indicated in the above edict when confronted by a work of imaginative vision? Or with a bad book? Is the reviewer to give a portrait of it, as with a good? Well, in a way he may— always provided that he knows exactly where he stands with it, what kind of a bad book it is and by what artistic tests it fails. Denunciation, unless the book is pretentious (the worst of literary vices), in bad feeling or bad taste, tends to be a juvenile exercise. Let him then give his portrait, but let him make quite sure that his reader will realize it to be an exposure. For that, the reviewer must be acquainted with the ironic method, a method which postulates this very rag-bag of principles, knowledge and traditional example, a method which cannot be employed without them. Herbert Spencer (whom, by the way, all of us wrung dry of hope, freedom, happiness and virtue by state sovereignty, ought to read nowadays for the comfort of individualism) in the best book he wrote "Social Statics"—says finely, "Let him but duly realize the fact that opinion is the agency through which character adapts external circumstance to itself—that his opinion rightly forms part of this agency—is a unit of

force constituting with other such units the general power which works out social changes-and he will then perceive that he may properly give full utterance to his innermost convictions, leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and repugnances to others. He, with all his capacities and desires and beliefs, is not an accident but a product of the time. Influences that have acted upon preceding generations; influences that have been brought to bear upon him; the education that disciplined his childhood, together with the circumstances in which he has since lived, have conspired to make him what he is. And the result thus wrought out in him has a purpose." It will not do any harm to literature, surely, to substitute the critic for "him."

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It seems that what the heretics boggle at is that word opinion," tending to confuse it with the application of abstract principles. A passage in the fifth book of Plato's "Republic" is so pertinent, both as light upon their objections and as a positive assertion of the critic's proper ministry, that I am tempted to quote it. It bears upon the famous distinction between a genuine and counterfeit philosopher :

""I suppose that those who love seeing and hearing, admire beautiful sounds and colours and forms and all artistic products into which these enter; but the nature of beauty in itself their understanding is unable to behold and embrace.' 'Yes, it certainly is as you say.' 'But those who are capable of reaching to the independent contemplation of abstract beauty will be rare exceptions, will they not?' They will indeed.' 'Therefore, if a man recognizes the existence of beautiful things, but disbelieves in abstract beauty, and has not the power to follow

should another lead the way to the knowledge of it, is his life, think you, a dreaming or a waking one? Just consider. Is it not dreaming when a person, whether asleep or awake, mistakes the likeness of anything for the real thing of which it is a likeness?' I confess I should say that a person in that predicament was dreaming.' 'Take, again, the opposite case, of one who acknowledges an abstract beauty, and has the power to discern both this essence and the objects into which it enters, and who never mistakes such objects for the essence, nor the essence for the objects; does such a person, think you, live a dreaming or a waking life?' 'A waking life, undoubtedly.' 'If so shall we not be right in calling the mental process of the latter knowledge, because he really knows; and that of the former opinion, because he merely opines ? ""

Upon such a conception, I am inclined to pin my faith, and declare that what is right for Peter is also right for Paul. Criticism, indeed, is the art of discovering first principles, and the critics, to be adequately equipped, must formulate behind shifting and individual expressions of art, a centripetal, unifying theory, an abiding generalization. The critic must not be a huge and cavernous pot for all manner of literary fare. He will, and ought to form certain crystallizations which, though he will put Crashaw and Pope (who imitated him without acknowledgment and after exposing him) on a certain level, will not only prefer Crashaw to Pope, or Pope to Crashaw, without any doubt of the matter, but know why he does. An incompetent reviewer is one who adapts his critical apparatus to his book; a competent reviewer is one who brings to the study of every book, a genuine conviction, a revealing message, and an elucidated doctrine. The one sees a separate phenomenon in every book;

H