Concerning Reviewers of Sorts
I
I HAVE just finished reading an article in a recent review, a somewhat extended criticism of a new philosophical work. Neither the subject nor the discussion of it interested me greatly, I confess, and yet I followed to the end with growing eagerness and came to the conclusion with some regret. I was counting the mistakes in grammar, and, with the enthusiasm of one pursuing research of any kind, I wished to see result mounting to a maximum. There were only four, however, and with the baulked zeal of the faultfinder on my hands I was perhaps a little disappointed. I had scarcely found the quest fruitful enough to meet my expectation. But the grammatical erring was supplemented with a quality of diction, a warping past its aim, — what one might define as a general waviness of locution, — which blurred before the mental vision and which combined with the grammar to establish the typical quality of the writing.
I had a bad gratification finally. There was much use of ‘transcendental,’to be sure, and of ‘homiletic’ and ‘idealism’ and other terms which seem to belong to philosophy and which certainly always do give an air to writing. They impress me. But how can I be impressed with the writer’s ‘transcendental’ when a little three-lettered word like ‘due’ eludes his handling? And how can I be sure of his recognizing any relations in pure thought when a definite and logical matter like coördination of phrases is beyond his ability? I cannot at all be certain that he is qualified to speak of reasoning or of mental processes when mere correlative structure is too much for his management.
‘Methinks,’ as Boyle says, ‘this should suggest to me some reflection or other.’ And it does. It suggests a reflection on the body of reviewing of which this article is representative, and thus reminds me of sister grievances. For, however much pleasure there may be in having an opinion justified, there is not necessarily pleasure in forming that opinion initially. It may arise out of literary annoyances, out of the rasping and scraping of one’s mental surface and what one calls one’s taste. And there is nothing pleasurable in that. To be sure, we put ourselves in the way of irritation frequently. Few persons are really required to read book reviews. And yet we do it. We read them, I suspect, largely in the mood in which we listen to gossip about persons, diverted with the chitchat, tentatively half-acceptant, but intending to form our own opinions anyway. And yet, with no compulsion whatever, we continue to read them. Weekly we glance at three or four critical periodicals, with their offering of praise or blame; monthly or quarterly we read more carefully a more serious body of criticism. The quantity of comment on current books is steadily and zealously increasing. How many more weekly reviews are there than there were ten years ago? One must go cautiously in saying that we have no more critics of authority and seasoned judgment than we had two or three decades ago. But certainly we do increase enormously, with the fecundity which seems to belong to the unnecessary, the body of applied judgments. Criticism lingers, but reviewing comes — and comes often like Dian’s kiss. Is it possible that in time the marginal notes will exceed the text? Shall we see only a meander of books in a marshy meadow of criticism? One who wishes to turn confidently and occasionally to a guide which will help him to pick his steps among the publications of the season finds himself beset with clamorous mentors. He discovers it easier to choose among books than among opinions of books.
Some of all this we do take seriously. We often suspect that we are thought to take it all seriously. Somebody, somewhere, must think that he is assisting our opinions and directing our selections and omissions and perhaps forming our taste — nay, more than this, that he is lending encouragement to one meritorious or original development in literature or sternly and authoritatively frowning upon another less worthy. Well, no doubt he has his influence, whether for the good of literature or not. But often we criticize the critics. Judgment stimulates reciprocal judgment.
No one can say that there is anything novel in this. Since the pleasure of criticism was first discovered there has been known a corresponding pleasure in biting the biter. And it must be acknowledged that the critic has generally presented a more pachydermatous front to stings and fangs than his own subjects commonly do. It would be nothing new to point vindictively or restively to his errors of judgment, to his vagrant taste, to his limited scholarship and his faulty theory. That has been done, sometimes justly, somelimes unjustly. Several recent articles have discussed, more or less reasonably, the limitations of the reviewer. It is not really necessary for anyone to add to this body of lively retort. Yet temptation is always jogging one’s elbow with a ‘Now, while you feel like it!’ and thrusting a pen into one’s titillated fingers.
It is true that one does often feel like it, as for example when one reads such an article as I have cited. And there is satisfaction in yielding to temptation once in a way. But the objection which I wish to offer deals with a very plain and prosaic matter. I lift no exalted tone, I raise no question of poetic or dramatic theory, of free verse or rime, of plot or chaos, of realism or unrealism. My first plaint is on a very humble scale. I venture to find fault initially, not with the reviewer’s utterances, but with the medium through which he tries to express himself. I asperse his parts of speech.
II
For the reviewer logically turns our attention to matters of style and phrase, and opens our mind to the whole theme of rhetorical expression. While we read his judgment of a book, the writing which is under our eye becomes in turn, through the alert mood he causes, the subject of our own comment. The gods are just, and the easy and lazy vices of his composition in their turn furnish the material for remark upon himself. He hands us his own cat-o’-nine-tails. He provides us also with a warm impulse. We have been misled. Why are we reading judgments from the hand of one who perhaps line by line and sentence by sentence is writing himself down unskilled and unobservant — in style, in structure, perhaps even in diction? We know that we are not cast as critics, but the sharper his comment, or the more dogmatic, the more critical we in our humble turn become. That the matter of our objection lies in points which the reviewer perhaps despises does not make our exasperation the less irking, or the reading of his work the less difficult. After all, what constitutes a critic? Who gives him his warrant and to whom has he given bond for honesty and ability? Of course the answer to that is, no one. No warrant, no bond, is needed. The field is an open one, for the publisher or editor who wishes to establish a new critical journal as well as for the man who writes for it.
It is not fair to enter an arraignment without citation of misdemeanors, and complete and apt illustration takes much space. But to furnish sufficient would be easy. It is a pity to clutter a good page in a literary magazine with what looks like a list of phrases for correction in a disciplinary exercise. But I have said that my comment would begin with elementary matters and I must hope that the blameless page will bear with these trivialities. On one leaf, for example, of a longestablished and generally respectable review are to be found such utterances as the following: ‘To anyone interested in writers or present-day letters Be Good, Sweet Maid cannot fail to interest’ . . . ‘even when she is most ludicrous, which is often’ . . . ‘Just why she elected to write her story backward is not easy to guess or justify’ . . . ‘ While Miss Kelley achieves some interesting effects through the angularity of vision she employs’ . . . (Perhaps one should explain that the writer here means ‘angle’ of vision.) These seem trivial enough, as quotations, but I put them together because they occurred within two columns of one of the older reviews. In another number I discover: ‘A shell-shocked soldier whom the doctor thought should be put to farming’ . . . ‘the man who was kind of alien among them’. . . ' It is a plethora of astonishing images all based on a Gargantuan scale and which follow each other with a consistent rapidity.’ To illustrate the sensitive ear of the reviewer I might cite, ‘One has written this who has heard the tide’s sound along hollow wooden sides.’ It may not be important to mention such slips as ‘a modern phenomena,’ ‘onto,’ ‘most unique,’ ‘neither of them know,’ of a type which one may pick up in any highway. I am not quoting from obscure and provincial reviews, but from the best of metropolitan weeklies. In one half-hour of recent reading I came upon ‘fiction and otherwise,’ ‘satire which resembles annoyance,’ ‘a human.’ I read no more criticism that night!
Nor are these plain departures from accepted use more annoying than the frequently appearing inexactness of diction. Any reader might give sufficient illustrations of that. But to give them in their context would require too much space; and objection to them could not be established without the context. Whoever reads the articles I am citing knows how often the word is used out of its meaning, how often it is beside the mark instead of upon it, how often its placing has no warrant in accepted use. No higher degree of exasperation enters into one’s common moods than that which accompanies such reading. It is like being set down to face badly matched wall paper, like driving forever past crooked corn rows, like being housed with curtains hung askew. This inexactness, to be sure, is often accompanied by a pleasant — or labored — picturesqueness of phrasing or by a show of literary terms or figures. The most of us readers can be impressed momentarily with a ready and easy summoning of ‘colophon’ and ‘mordant’ and ‘macabre’ and ‘Marinism,’ with the pen that every moment seems to have ‘Gargantuan’ or ‘Rabelaisian’ near its tip. But such promising and flavored terms do not keep our eyes long from the hazy surface of the general statement of the criticism. There is a love of precision in language which is hardly separable from the love of truth. And should we be offered criticism which does not attempt, however fumblingly, to speak truth? Reverence for language is to the writer what expectation of pure tone is to the lover of music, what hope of the inalterable line is to the artist.
But we do not seek far before we find a logical reason for this slackness of speech; we discover it in the current utterances upon style, representative of the writer’s standards. When the present reviewer discusses style he usually means only phrase making. His comment is often only comment on striking phrases. Vivid adjective-noun combinations please him, borrowings of all forms and frames of the concrete,
— that visualization may pass for thought, — words jauntily poised on half-meanings, snatchings at borrowed connotations. These things have their sensational or impressionistic effect. They have their place, we readers all agree — sometimes an honest place. But pleasure in them should not set them too high. They are rarely actual conductors of the current of thought
— rather, striking floats upon its surface. Imagism seldom includes predication. A higher satisfaction in reading comes from recognizing clarity and precision in the statement of thought than from observing the ornaments of it. There is less gratification in saying ‘How striking!’ than in saying ‘How complete!' It is hardly fair that in critical comment the sensational, perhaps crudely sensational, style of one writer should so often be praised and the unhurried faithfulness of another be passed without mention. If the reviewer made sterner requirements of his own diction and his own phrasing, would he be more aware of the relative values of these widely differing styles which he discusses?
The cant terms of reviewing — how wearisomely well we know them! They move along in a steady procession in time, but each one takes far too long in passing a given point in our vision. There was ‘ intriguing ’ — how hard it was finally to restrain impatience at sight of it, and how long it remained in vogue! There was ‘flair,’ there was ‘nuance’ — faded flowers of yesteryear’s reviewing. To-day there is ‘gesture’ — what critic sits down to his desk without it! There is ‘cerebration ’ — one needs exclamation points in speaking of them! They go in flocks. The linotype knows them and rattles them off automatically: ‘outstanding,’— preferably ‘most outstanding,’ — ‘convincing, inevitable, ruthless, mid-Victorian, relentless, arresting, erotic, exotic, stark, impregnated.’ Folk poetry is not more fully composed of stock expressions. And its use of them is scarcely more ingenuous. I wish that — for example — everyone who avails himself of a scornful ‘Victorian’ could be challenged to define what in the history of society and literature ‘Victorian’ really stands for. Little does he seem to know, usually, of the great midnineteenth-century period. The word has slipped into his vague vocabulary, and when he reaches half-blindly for a term it rises to his hand. It is little wonder that the language of an author passes with but slight objection or with praise when the critic writes from the same dictionary.
Some men wish to write as if the language they use were their peculiar possession, as if they might neglect meanings or formations, or scorn established relations or history found in linguistic custom, or disregard the niceties of speech. A man may do so, as he may assert his originality or superiority by wearing his hat in company or performing the arts of the toilet in public. His assertiveness and consciousness do not make him the less a boor. Nor does one’s manhandling of language — which is by no means his to manhandle — make him less a churl in letters.
III
It is doubtful whether, in the matter of ordinary prose virtues, style is improving in current writing. Fecundity, of which we have enough, does not seem to mean excellence. Mere love of phrasing, in popular writing, is crowding out plain logical merits, the kind of merits which should be taken for granted in prose. If a man is a gentleman you do not tell him so, and in fact he is surprised if you do. He supposes that certain qualities or habits are mentioned only if their absence is notable. Likewise certain prose qualities should be so much a matter of course that the lack of them furnishes matter for remark. But organized sentence structure — to speak again, if I may be allowed, of a fundamental and elementary subject — is to many writers of the moment a negligible thing; mere coherence and unity are musty fetishes of the rhetorician. In Jacob’s Room Virginia Woolf speaks of the ‘sentences that will not budge though armies cross them.’ The favorite sentence of the current novelist, both British and American, will budge. It will open a gate at a complaisant comma and let all the world through. No composition can have the most satisfying and clearly defined movement if it proceeds by throwing two or three unrelated statements into one sentence, merely bunching predication. I apologize for introducing an utterance so purely didactic. But all that many a writer seems to require in his sentence is clubbable clauses; to him parallelism or dependence is unnecessary. Though armies cross it! Such a sentence flies asunder at a mere shake. And the sentence is the vehicle on which all statement must move.
But when do the critics of passing prose speak of this? And how often do they themselves err! There is no simpler or more practical test of a man’s logic and his organized thinking than his use of coördination in composition. Prosaic though it is, the placing of the semicolon is exponential of high virtue. It is a sign — in the present system of punctuation — of civilization and sophistication in writing. When this period of cluttered composition has passed, someone may well write an ode to the semicolon. A recent book of very wide publicity, and one might say notoriety, was discussed in almost every periodical which publishes criticism. Only one review, so far as I know, — my examination was very likely incomplete, — made any objection to the style. And the book reads like a first draft — executed, even at that, by an untrained writer. When it was discussed in conversation — I add this to show that I am not merely opposing my judgment to that of the reviewers — its slovenliness of language and of form was invariably mentioned. I have heard a dozen persons of letters condemn its quality. Why did the critics, at the very utmost, tacitly condone it? Whatever the final placing of the work may be, the initial handling of it is a blot on American criticism. But unfortunately such quality as this may often be paralleled in criticism itself. How often does the commentator make faith in him impossible by means of his own confused form of statement!
IV
One more matter gives an irking dissatisfaction. A reader does long for perspective in judgment, perhaps especially in admiration. Whoever utters it should recognize scales of expression. But where is scale to be found? If a book is praised, as it most frequently is, an experimental first novel may draw the same degree of commendatory terms as the solid work of Conrad or Hardy. ‘A wonderful book,’ you read, ‘a radiant book,’ ‘one finds fresh ecstasy on every page,’ ‘epoch-making,’ ‘the most outstanding book of the year.’ Superlatives crowd superlatives. Of a story by a current novelist, whose work inclines much to the sentimental and whose charm is in a certain slight quaintness, a reviewer says, ‘The story moves to its inevitable climax with all the starkness and beauty and majesty of a Greek tragedy.’ Now can you believe it? Has he really read the Greek tragedies? In another place I have found, thus worded, ‘The tragedy the writer depicts are the dark poignant emotions of an everyday existence.’ How long, I ask, does existence maintain everyday character if it is filled with dark poignant emotions?
At this point of writing I paused to examine two recent numbers of a very good periodical, one whose serious judgments are by no means to be scorned and whose purpose is in general honest and acceptable. In the first I looked at thirteen consecutive reviews. In five of these the books discussed proved to be of superlative or even of unique value. In the second number I read ten discussions, taking them as they came in order. Out of these ten, five dealt with works supreme in their class or at least in a supreme class. ‘One of the few greatest’ was as mild and judicial a term as was used of them. ‘One of the greatest novels ever written in America’ — ah, that saving ‘one of’! How it protects the critical integrity! I did not count ‘the best publisher’s success of the author’ among the ten. Mr. Louis Bromfield, writing on this point in a recent article, states that examination of reviews of novels in all American periodicals of one year shows that they pronounced one hundred and thirty-seven each to be ‘the best novel of the year,’ in some cases even the best of the decade or the century.
When one views the welter of adjectives and phrases that have been applied to the swarming poets of the young century, one wonders what would be available should a Shelley or Milton arise. How many of them have ‘pure lyric beauty’? How many more have ‘sheer stark loveliness’? Excellence has ceased to dwell among the rocks. It is underfoot everywhere. In ‘The Cunning Speech of Drumtochty,’ Jamie Soutar, the cautious and exact, reproves the extravagant Mr. ’Opps for calling the sunset ‘glorious.’ ‘Man,’ he says sternly, ‘ye ’ill surely keep ae word for the twenty-first o’ Revelation!’ Does the critic have ‘ae’ word in reserve in case a Shakespeare should return, or a new Apocalypse overtake him? What poverty would be upon him, and he with no language on deposit! He should have a few phrases laid by for the needy day when a new Dante or Browning descends.
The last question, of course, is, will he be able to recognize a Dante at all? That question one is inclined to leave with the jury. Criticism is not necessarily literature. The graces and charms of literature are not required of it. But what is required of it ? Of what value is it when by the very tools it uses it raises the question of its authority and its importance? What should be the equipment of him who places his dicta before the public?
I have not touched on the reviewer’s tastes and opinions in general. Many articles have been written, doubtless are now being written, which point out errors, crass or subtle, in taste and judgment and in the whole theory of reviewing. Many men, many women, many children, know just how reviews should be written and why they should be written. I am not venturing on that plane of discussion. As I said at the outset, my complaint is of the simplest and is not leading me into subtler literary theories. And yet even I am not without impulse, repressed impulse, to utter broader opinions. There are things I could say, if I were to allow myself the privilege. It would afford me almost equal gratification to hear someone else make the same suggestions. I should be pleased, for example, to have some critic of critics urge that the sweet one-time virtue of reticence, reserve, come into the light of praise again. It used to be a powerful as well as, at the best, a natural element in writing. It was not necessarily a moral element, but a literary one, even a literary device at times. We have much in current fiction about natural instincts and appetites and their gratification. We have comparatively little about the instinct for reserve and the appetite for privacy and the power of control. And yet those things have been an ideal slowly developed through many upward centuries. All at once we seem to want to throw it away. An avidity for completeness of statement and picturing possesses the current novelist, at least the one who has most praise in print. He finds anyone less explicit than himself finicky and mincing. In comparison with his shouting of particulars, even the Restoration writers were merely whispering in corners. He does n’t seem to know that shyness may be one of the loveliest things in the world, that omission may show power and control, that delicacy may be as great a literary element as the strongest grossness he can muster. Nor does his critic seem to know it either. While the author is struggling to announce himself completely, offering you the very scrapings of the bottom of his mind, the reviewer stands by congratulating. Greasy Joan only keeled the pot, but the writer thinks the world should have more and goes to the very dregs of it. If greasiness is communicated, why, let grease be!
Sometimes you think that the critic is going to protest. But your expectation is usually disappointed. For once that you find a protest at such method, ten times you find praise. The protest is more likely to be the opposite one. ‘He is afraid of his big scene,’ says a reviewer, of such a dramatic elision as Hardy would have made. I am avoiding implication of moral aspect here, out of regard for those who are convinced that art and morality cannot take shelter under the same shed. The great writers as well as the great critics have known that an art that is successful must have its reserves and its signs of control, which are signs of power. When will the juveniles in fiction writing and in criticism learn this?
That is a thing I should like to say myself if I were venturing on the broader view. I think I should wish to speak also of the critic’s view of the history of literature. In spite of his readiness with Rabelais and Greek plays, does n’t he often really think that literature began about the time he began to read, or perhaps to write reviews? I should be tempted also to ask — But those questions are not for me. It is better to keep only to the humbler part and to things well established. It requires less courage as well as less subtlety to deal only with what lies beyond dispute. It requires least courage of all to give evidence and leave deductions to the jury.