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wise have taken; and I think there have been similar cases since. At any rate, to my mind, deliberately unfair and partisan reviewing does much less harm than the process known as "slating" for slating's sake, or than the old and constantly revived notion that an author is mainly, if not merely, something for the critic to be clever upon. But of that we shall speak presently: some other matters must come before it.

For it will probably not be undesirable to inquire before going any further what a review ought to be, as a not useless preliminary to the discovery what ought to be the nature of a reviewer, and whether reviewing is a benefit or a nuisance per se. And in this inquiry we may start by clearing up a slight confusion which, like other slight confusions, has caused no slight error. I take it that a review in the general sense is addressed to, and intended for the benefit of, the general congregation of decently educated and intelligent people. There may be a special kind of review which is addressed to specialists, and which must be written for them by themselves. A scientific monograph, which purports to tell what further progress has been made in some particular department of chemistry or physiology, cannot in the proper sense be "reviewed." Its results can be abstracted; its conclusions, if they are disputable, can be argued for or against; corollaries or riders can be indicated or suggested by the expert. But as such a thing is never, except by accident and once in a thousand times, literature-as even when it is literature its literary character is accidental-it does not lend itself to review. For, once more, a review, as I take it (and the taking is not a private crotchet but a

mere generalisation of actual practice and fact during the two centuries or a little more which make the life of the review), is a thing addressed to the general body of educated people, telling whether it is or is not worth their while to make further acquaintance with such and such a document purporting to bear their address. As the circle of knowledge which is supposed to be open to the general reader and to come within the range of literature widens, the circle of reviewing will widen too. But it will always remain true that the way in which the author has done his work is the main if not the sole province of the reviewer. Has he formed an allowable, an agreeable, a fairly orderly conception of his subject? Has he shown decent diligence and accuracy in carrying this conception out? Does his book, if it belongs to the literature of knowledge, supply some real want? Does it, if it belongs to the literature of power or art, show a result not merely imitated from something else? Has it, if a poem, distinct characteristics of metre, wordsound, style? Does it, if a work of argument or exposition, urge old views freshly, or put new ones with effect? If it is a novel, does it show grasp of character, ingenuity in varying plot, brilliancy of dialogue, felicity of description? Can you, in short, " recommend it to a friend" for any of these or any similar qualities? Or can you even recommend it the most disputable and dangerous of the grounds of recommendation, but still perhaps a valid ground in its way-because you like it, because it affects you pleasurably or beneficially, because you gain from it a distinct nervous impression, a new charm, or even, as Victor Hugo put it, a "new shudder"?

get an answer to any one or any combination of a large number of other questions which he has not asked and to which he does not care in the least to know the answer. He has asked, Do you as a judge think that I ought to read, or may at least with chance of profit and pleasure read, this book? He is in effect answered: I, not as a judge but as a most unjudicial advocate or even party to the other side of the cause, wish you not to read this book or to think badly of it if you read it. But I have put on the judge's robes, and deliver my opinion from the bench or a substitute for it, in hopes to make you accept my pleading as a sentence and my evidence or assertion as a verdict.

A review which observes these it intends to reach? He will only conditions will, whether it answers the questions in the negative or the affirmative, probably be a good review, always keeping in mind the inestimable caution of Hippothadée to Panurge, si Dieu plaist. On the contrary, there are certain other questions and conditions which will almost certainly make any review conducted under their influence a bad review. Such questions-for it would be more than ever impossible to put them all-are as follows. Do I to begin nearest to the debatable ground with which we finished the last list-Do I dislike this book, without being able to give myself or others any distinct and satisfactory reason why I dislike it? Do I like or dislike the author, his opinions, his party, his country, his University, or his grandmother? Does the book run counter to, or ignore, or slight some published or private opinion of mine? Is it, without being exactly contrary to, different from something which I might have written or should have liked to write on the subject? Is there something else that I like better? Does it display more knowledge than I have, and so make me feel uncomfortably at a disadvantage? Is it about something in which I take no particular interest? In such cases the proviso of Hippothadée will have to be turned round, and we shall have to say that unless Heaven pleases very specially, it is likely to be a very bad review indeed.

For the reader will not get and cannot get from it a trustworthy answer to his legitimate question, Is this on the whole and on the author's own conception of his task the said conception being not utterly idiotic-a fair addition to the literature of the class which

It is this danger which, not always in appropriate words or with very clear conceptions, is urged by the opponents of reviewing: and no doubt it is in a certain measure and degree a real one. We shall see better what this measure and degree is by shaking out the subject into some different shapes and lights.

Reviewing, like everything else, has a tendency to fall into certain vogues, into certain channels or ruts, where it continues for a time, and then shifts into others. The most common, the most obvious, and apparently to some views of the subject, friendly as well as unfriendly, the most natural, is that of "slating," as modern slang has it, though the thing is very far from modern. The principle or mock principle on which it depends was never put with a more innocent frankness than in the Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur of the Edinburgh Review'; and though when it is thus stated it becomes almost

ludicrous to a really critical critic himself, there is no doubt that it reflects the idea of the critical profession as conceived by outsiders, and even as practised by a large part of the profession itself. We have only, it is true, to carry out the analogy suggested by the phrase to see its absurdity. Her Majesty's judges do not deem it their duty to regard the entire body of her Majesty's subjects as guilty till they are proved innocent; nor even those who on prima facie suspicion are brought before them. The Edinburgh' motto would at least seem to infer that every book is to be regarded as bad until it is proved to be good. And further, as the functions of a judge of court are limited to condemnation or acquittal — as he is admittedly travelling rather beyond them even when he observes that the defendant leaves the court without a stain on his character so it would seem that positive praise, that the assignment of decorations or titles of honour, is not part of the function of the critic at all.

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Yet, absurd as this notion is, ill as it will stand the slightest examination, there can be no doubt that it is frequently entertained, and by no means uncommonly put in practice. We have all read - it would appear that even some of us have enjoyed, though I confess it always seemed to me from my youth up that there was no drearier readingmonotonous series of "slashing" reviews, in each of which some wretched novel, deserving at worst of a dozen lines of merciful and good-humoured raillery, was solemnly scourged round the town in two columns of laboured cavilling and forced horse - laughter. And we have all read likewise some of us let it be hoped with a devout prayer to be kept from

imitating it-the pert yet ponderous efforts at epigram; the twentieth-hand Macaulay ese of "will it be believed" and "every schoolboy knows"; the uplifting of hands and averting of eyes at a misprinted date, and an imperfectly revised false concord - in short, all the stale tricks and stock devices of the "slater."

Of course there are books which well deserve the utmost extremity of criticism; and nobody can have practised reviewing long without having-not in the least on his conscience but on his memory-instances in which he has had to do his duty, and has been well entitled to ejaculate Laissez passer la justice de Dieu! But the conception of the ideal reviewer as a Judge Jeffreys doubled with a Jack Ketch is, as has been said, quite ludicrously narrow; and it turns, like so many other things, upon a mere fallacy of equivocation, the double meaning of the word judge. The critic is a judge; but he is a judge of the games as well as of the courts, a caliph or cadi rather than a Lord Chief Justice or a Lord Chief Baron. He can administer sequins as well as lashes, and send a man to ride round the town in royal apparel as well as despatch him to the gallows. Or rather, to drop metaphor, his business is in the main the business of judging, not the man or the merits of the man so much as the work and the nature, rather than the merits or demerits, of the work. If he discern and expound that nature rightly, the exposition will sometimes be of itself high praise and sometimes. utter blame, with all blends and degrees between the two. But the blame and the praise are rather accidents than essentials of his function.

Partly from a dim conscious

ness of this, partly no doubt in reaction from the excesses of Jack Ketchishness, reviewing very often wanders into other excesses or defects which are equally far from the golden mean. It is sometimes openly asserted, and perhaps more often secretly held, that it is the critic's chief duty to praise that he ought to be generous, good-natured, eager to welcome the achievements of his own time, and so forth. This, no doubt, is a less offensive error than the other; it is even a rather amiable one, and it has the additional attraction that, as it is much more difficult to praise, at least to praise well, than to blame, there is the interest of seeing how the practitioner will do it. But, after all, it is an error; and I am afraid, though a less superficially offensive, it is a rather more dangerous, error than the other. It is seldom that real harm is done to any one-except perhaps to the critic himself by over-savage reviewing. Excessive praise does harm all round: to the critic (at least if he gives it sincerely), because it dulls and debauches his own critical perceptions; to the public, because the currency is debased, the standards of literary value tampered with and obscured; to the author most of all, because while his human weaknesses will of themselves prevent him from being injured by the blame, they will help the praise to spoil him. Especially dangerous is the form of praise-very common just now, as it is in all periods when a great literary generation is just fading away, and its successors are shining with rather uncertain light the form which insists that our side or our time is the equal of any other. I saw the other day that a critic in whose original work I take great delight, and whose criticism is always careful and

generous, speculated on the beatitude which future generations would attribute to him in that he had seen in one week, I think, the publication of four masterpieces. I shall say nothing of these masterpieces themselves; I have not read them all, and I defy anybody to outgo me in cordial appreciation of some of the work-I mean Mr Kipling's-to which "Q" referred. But I cannot help thinking that it is a little dangerous to indulge in such a "Nunc Dimittis." If the critic, say thirty years hence, finds his admiration of his Four Masters unchanged, or even heightened, it will be time to tempt Time himself by such an utterance. But Time is as dangerous a person to tempt as Providence; and that "wallet at his back" contains among its other alms for Oblivion (or, worse still, for an occasional memory of contempt) no small number of these admiring encomia on the unequalled happiness of particular periods, and the mastery of particular achievements.

Yet again, reviewers, afraid of or disinclined to mere blame, and having no taste or no opportunity for mere praise, very frequently take refuge in a sort of wishywashy, shilly-shally attempt to keep clear of either, or else in a mere "account rendered," which is rather an argument of the book than a review of it, and yet as different as possible from the argumentative exposition above commended. I have seen it frequently complained—sometimes by partisans of the "slating" or the "gushing" review respectively, but also by others - that the shillyshally kind is particularly prevalent nowadays. Perhaps it is, and for reasons of which more later. It is certainly not a good thing. If a man has not time, or knowledge, or ability, to sum up

decidedly what a book is, and how it is done, he had better be sent about his business, which is evidently not reviewing. If it is the fault, as no doubt happens sometimes, and perhaps in these days rather often, of the book itself, then that book had much better not be reviewed at all. But I confess I think myself that, except in the case of scientific works, as above referred to, with official reports and other books that are no books, the mere compte-rendu is the worst review of all. It argues in the reviewer either a total want of intellect in general or a total want of understanding of the particular matter; it fills up the columns of the paper to no earthly purpose; it disappoints the just expectations of author, reader, everybody, except, perhaps, the publisher, who may like to see a certain space occupied by a notice; and it is a distinct insult to the eyes before which it is put. If I were an editor I should ruthlessly refuse to insert reviews of this kind, no matter who wrote them.

And yet it is a question whether they are worse than another kind which is very popular with editors and the public, though it may be rather less so with authors. This is the kind, or rather group of kinds, for there are many subvarieties, of the review which is not what the Germans call eingehend at all, which simply makes the book a peg, as the old journalist slang, by this time almost accepted English, has it, on which to hang the reviewer's own reflections, grave or gay. To this practice in the longer Reviews, which appear at considerable intervals, there is no great objection. It has given us much of the best critical and general work of the century. Quarterlies at least can

never hope now, and could never hope to any great extent, to introduce books to readers for the first time; and, besides, the prefixing of the title of a book or books to such articles is a perfectly understood convention. But in a review proper, a review which, presumably, the reader is to see before he sees the book, and which is to determine him whether that book is worth seeing or not, the practice seems to me to be improper, impertinent, and very nearly impudent.

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When the late Mr Anthony Trollope made Post Office inquiries on horseback, simultaneously (or at least on the same day) using the horses which he kept for the pose as hunters, it was perhaps the furthest recorded instance of making the best of the two worlds of business and pleasure, duty and off-duty. But Mr Trollope did make the inquiries; nobody, I believe, ever charged him with remissness in that. The reviewer of the class to which I refer keeps the horse at the expense of the author, and uses him for the pleasure of himself and the reader only.

Nevertheless, in the more unfavourable examples of all these varieties, even of the first to some extent, I think we shall find that Ignorance as usual is more to blame than malice, and not Ignorance of fact so much as what we may call Ignorance of Art. I am sure that my late colleagues in that art, at least those of them who are worth considering, will not find fault with me for this admission, which indeed need gall no one who does not feel that he deserves galling. We have all been in the same boat, and I am only, so to speak, coaching from the bank. I do not think that reviewers deserve a good deal of the evil that is said of them; but I do think that something of

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