Why Authors Go Wrong, and Other Explanations

ON the subject of Book “Reviewing” we feel we can speak freely, knowing all about the business, as we do, though by no means a practitioner, and having no convictions on the score of it. For we point with pride to the fact that, though many times indicted, a conviction has never been secured against us. However, it isn’t considered good form (whatever that is) to talk about your own crimes. For instance, after exhausting the weather, you should say pleasantly to your neighbor: “What an interesting burglary you committed last night! We were all quite stirred up!” It is almost improper (much worse than merely immoral) to exhibit your natural egoism by remarking: “If I do say it, that murder I did on Tuesday was a particularly good job!”

For this reason, if for no other, we would refrain, ordinarily, from talking about book “reviewing”; but since Robert Cortes Holliday has mentioned the subject in his Walking-Stick Papers and thus introduced the indelicate topic once and for all, there really seems no course open but to pick up the theme and treat it in a serious, thoughtful way.

2

Book reviewing is so called because the books are not reviewed, or viewed (some say not even read). They are described with more or less accuracy and at a variable length. They are praised, condemned, weighed and solved by the use of logarithms. They are read, digested, quoted and tested for butter fat. They are examined, evalued, enjoyed and assessed; criticised, and frequently found fault with (not the same thing, of course); chronicled and even orchestrated by the few who never write words without writing both words and music. James Huneker could make Irvin Cobb sound like a performance by the Boston Symphony. Others, like Benjamin De Casseres, have a dramatic gift. Mr. De Casseres writes book revues.

3

Any one can review a book and every one should be encouraged to do it. It is unskilled labor. Good book reviewers earn from $150 to $230 a week, working only in their spare time, like the good-looking young men and women who sell the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Country Gentleman but who seldom earn over $100 a week. Book reviewing is one of the very few subjects not taught by the correspondence schools, simply because there is nothing to teach. It is so simple a child can operate it with perfect safety. Write for circular giving full particulars and our handy phrasebook listing 2,567 standard phrases indispensable to any reviewer—FREE.

In reviewing a book there is no method to be followed. Like one of the playerpianos, you shut the doors (i.e., close the covers) and play (or write) by instinct! Although no directions are necessary we will suggest a few things to overcome the beginner’s utterly irrational sense of helplessness.

One of the most useful comments in dealing with very scholarly volumes, such as A History of the Statistical Process in Modern Philanthropical Enterprises by Jacob Jones, is as follows: “Mr. Jones’s work shows signs of haste.” The peculiar advantage of this is that you do not libel Mr. Jones; the haste may have been the printer’s or the publisher’s or almost anybody’s but the postoffice’s. In the case of a piece of light fiction the best way to start your review is by saying: “A new book from the pen of Alice Apostrophe is always welcome.” But suppose the book is a first book? One of the finest opening sentences for the review of a first book runs: “For a first novel, George Lamplit’s Good Gracious! is a tale of distinct promise.” Be careful to say “distinct”; it is an adjective that fits perfectly over the shoulders of any average-chested noun. It gives the noun that upright, swagger carriage a careful writer likes his nouns to have.

4

But clothes do not make the man and words do not make the book review. A book review must have a Structure, a Skeleton, if it be no more than the skeleton in the book closet. It must have a backbone and a bite. It must be able to stand erect and look the author in the face and tell him to go to the Home for Indigent Authors which the Authors’ League will build one of these days after it has met running expenses.

Our favorite book reviewer reviews the ordinary book in four lines and a semi-colon. Unusual books drain his vital energy to the extent of a paragraph and a half, three adjectives to the square inch.

He makes it a point to have one commendatory phrase and one derogatory phrase, which gives a nicely balanced, “on the one hand ... on the other hand” effect. He says that the book is attractively bound but badly printed; well-written but deficient in emotional intensity; full of action but weak in characterization; has a good plot but is devoid of style.

He reads all the books he reviews. Every little while he pounces upon a misquotation on page 438, or a misprint on page 279. Reviewers who do not read the books they review may chance upon such details while idly turning the uncut leaves or while looking at the back cover, but they never bring in three runs on the other side’s error. They spot the fact that the heroine’s mother, who was killed in a train accident in the fourth chapter, buys a refrigerator in the twenty-third chapter, and they indulge in an unpardonable witticism as to the heroine’s mother’s whereabouts after her demise. But the wrong accent on the Greek word in Chapter XVII gets by them; and as for the psychological impulse which led the hero to jump from Brooklyn Bridge on the Fourth of July they miss it entirely and betray their neglect of their duty by alluding to him as a poor devil crazed with the heat. The fact is, of course, that he did a Steve Brodie because he found something obscurely hateful in the Manhattan skyline. Day after day, while walking to his work on the Brooklyn Rapid Transit, he gazed at the saw-toothed outline of the buildings limned against the sky. Day by day his soul kept asking: “Why don’t they get a gold filling for that cavity between the Singer and Woolworth towers?” And he would ask himself despondently: “Is this what I live for?” And gradually he felt that it was not. He felt that it might be something to die about, however. And so, with the rashness of youth, he leaped. The George Meredith-Thomas Hardy irony came into the story when he was pulled out of the river by his rival in Dorinda’s affections, Gregory Anthracyte, owner of the magnificent steam yacht Chuggermugger.

So much for the anatomy of a book review. Put backbone into it. Read before you write. Look before you leap. Be just, be fair, be impartial; and when you damn, damn with faint praise, and when you praise, praise with faint damns. Be all things to all books. Remember the author. Review as you would be reviewed by. If a book is nothing in your life it may be the fault of your life. And it is always less expensive to revise your life than to revise the book. Your life is not printed from plates that cost a fortune to make and another fortune to throw away. “Life is too short to read inferior books,” eh? Books are too good to be guillotined by inferior lives—or inferior livers. Bacon said some books were to be digested, but he neglected to mention a cure for dyspeptics.

5

But when we say so much we have only touched the surface of a profound matter. The truth of that matter, the full depth of it, may as well be plumbed at once. A book cannot be reviewed. It can only be written about or around. It is insusceptible of such handling as is accorded a play, for example.

A man with more or less experience in seeing plays and with more or less knowledge of the drama goes to the first performance of a new comedy or tragedy or whatnot. There it is before him in speech and motion and color. It is acted. The play, structurally, is good or bad; the acting is either good or bad. Every item of the performance is capable of being resolved separately and estimated; and the collective interest or importance of these items can be determined, is, in fact, determined once and for all by the performance itself. The observer gets their collective impact at once and his task is really nothing but a consideration afterward in such detail as he cares to enter upon of just how that impact was secured. Did you ever, in your algebra days, or even in your arithmetically earnest childhood, “factor” a quantity or a number? Take 91. A little difficult, 91, but after some mental and pencil investigation you found that it was obtained by multiplying 13 by 7. Very well. You knew how the impact of 91 was produced; it was produced by multiplying 13 by 7. You had reviewed the number 91 in the sense that you might review a play.

Now it is impossible to review a book as you would factor a number or a play. You can’t be sure of the factors that make up the collective impact of the book upon you. There’s no way of getting at them. They are summed up in the book itself and no book can be split into multipliable parts. A book is not the author times an idea times the views of the publisher. A book is unfactorable, often undecipherable. It is a growth. It is a series of accretions about a central thought. The central thought is like the grain of sand which the oyster has pearled over. The central thought may even be a diseased thought and the pearl may be a very lovely and brilliant pearl, superficially at least, for all that. There is nothing to do with a book but to take it as it is or go at it hammer and tongs, scalpel and curette, chisel and auger—smashing it to pieces, scraping and cutting, boring and cleaving through the layers of words and subsidiary ideas and getting down eventually to the heart of it, to the grain of sand, the irritant thought that was the earliest foundation.

Such surgery may be highly skilful or highly and wickedly destructive; it may uncover something worth while and it may not; naturally, you don’t go in for much of it, if you are wise, and as a general thing you take a book as it is and not as it once was or as the author may, in the innocence of his heart or the subtlety of his experience, have intended it to be.

6

Surgery on a book is like surgery on a human being, for a book is alive; ordinarily the only justification for it is the chance of saving life. If the operator can save the author’s life (as an author) by cutting he ought to go ahead, of course. The fate of one book is nothing as against the lives of books yet unwritten; the feelings of the author are not necessarily of more account than the screams of the sick child’s parent. There have been such literary operations for which, in lieu of the $1,000 fee of medical practise, the surgeon has been rewarded and more than repaid by a private letter of acknowledgement and heartfelt thanks. No matter how hard up the recipient of such a letter may be, the missive seldom turns up in those auction rooms where the A. L. S. (or Autograph Letter with Signature) sometimes brings an unexpected and astonishingly large price.

7

There is a good deal to be said for taking a book as it is. Most books, in fact, should be taken that way. For the number of books which contain within them issues of life and death is always very small. You may handle new books for a year and come upon only one such. And when you do, unless you recognize its momentousness, no responsibility rests on you to do anything except follow a routine procedure. In this domain ignorance is a wholly valid excuse; no one would think of blaming a general practitioner of medicine for not removing the patient’s vermiform appendix on principle, so to say. Unless he apprehended conclusively that the man had appendicitis and unless he knew the technique of the operation he would certainly be blamed for performing it. Similarly, unless the handler of new books is dead sure that a fatality threatens Harold Bell Wright or John Galsworthy or Mary Roberts Rinehart, unless the new book of Mr. Wright or Mr. Galsworthy or Mrs. Rinehart is a recognizable and unmistakable symptom, unless, further, he knows what to uncover in that book and how to uncover it, he has no business to take the matter in hand at all. Though the way of most “reviewers” with new books suggests that their fundamental motto must be that one good botch deserves another.

Not at all. Better, if you don’t know what to do, to leave bad enough alone.

But since the book as it is forms 99 per cent. of the subject under consideration this aspect of dealing with new books should be considered first and most extensively. Afterward we can revert to the one percent. of books that require to go under the knife.

8

Now the secret of taking a book as it is was never very abstruse and is always perfectly simple; nevertheless, it seems utterly to elude most of the persons who deal with new books. It is a secret only because it is forever hidden from their eyes. Or maybe they deliberately look the other way.

There exists in the world as at present constituted a person called the reporter. He is, mostly, an adjunct of the daily newspaper; in small places, of the weekly newspaper. It is, however, in the cities of America that he is brought to his perfection and in this connection it is worth while pointing out what Irvin Cobb has already noted—the difference between the New York reporter and the reporter of almost any other city in America. The New York reporter “works with” his rival on another sheet; the reporter outside New York almost never does this. Cobb attributed the difference to the impossible tasks that confront reporters in New York, impossible, that is, for single-handed accomplishment. A man who should attempt to cover alone some New York assignments, to “beat” his fellow, would be lost. Of course where a New York paper details half a dozen men to a job real competition between rival outfits is feasible and sometimes occurs. But the point here is this: The New York reporter, by generally “working with” his fellow from another daily, has made of his work a profession, with professional ideals and standards, a code, unwritten but delicate and decidedly high rules of what is honorable and what is not. Elsewhere reporting remains a business, decently conducted to be sure, open in many instances to manifestations of chivalry; but essentially keen, sharp-edged, cutthroat competition.

Now it is of the reporter in his best and highest estate that we would speak here—the reporter who is not only a keen and honest observer but a happy recorder of what he sees and hears and a professional person with ethical ideals in no respect inferior to those of any recognized professional man on earth.

There are many things which such a reporter will not do under any pressure of circumstance or at the beck of any promise of reward. He will not distort the facts, he will not suppress them, he will not put in people’s mouths words that they did not say and he will not let the reader take their words at face value if, in the reporter’s own knowledge, the utterance should be perceptibly discounted. No reporter can see and hear everything and no reporter’s story can record even everything that the observer contrived to see and hear. It must record such things as will arouse in the reader’s mind a correct image and a just impression.

How is this to be done? Why, there is no formula. There’s no set of rules. There’s nothing but a purpose animating every word the man writes, a purpose served, and only half-consciously served, by a thousand turns of expression, a thousand choices of words. Like all honest endeavors to effect a purpose the thing is spoiled, annulled, made empty of result by deliberate art. Good reporters are neither born nor made; they evolve themselves and without much help from any outside agency, either. They can be hindered but not prevented, helped but not hurt. You may remember a saying that God helps those who help themselves. The common interpretation of this is that when a man gets up and does something of his own initiative Providence is pretty likely to play into his hands a little; not at all, that isn’t what the proverb means. What it does mean is just this: That those who help themselves, who really do lift themselves by their bootstraps, are helped by God; that it isn’t they who do the lifting but somebody bigger than themselves. Now there is no doubt whatever that good reporters are good reporters because God makes them so. They aren’t good reporters at three years of age; they get to be. Does this seem discouraging? It ought to be immensely encouraging, heartening, actually “uplifting” in the finest sense of a tormented word. For if we believed that good reporters were born and not made there would be no hope for any except the gifted few, endowed from the start; and if we believed that good reporters were made and not born there would be absolutely no excuse for any failures whatever—every one should be potentially a good reporter and it would be simply a matter of correct training. But if we believe that a good reporter is neither born nor made, but makes himself with the aid of God we can be unqualifiedly cheerful. There is hope for almost any one under such a dispensation; moreover, if we believe in God at all and in mankind at all we must believe that between God and mankind the supply of topnotch reporters will never entirely fail. The two together will come pretty nearly meeting the demand every day in the year.

9

Perhaps the reader is grumbling, in fact, we seem to hear murmurs. What has all this about the genesis and nature of good reporters to do with the publication of new books? Why, this: The only person who can deal adequately and amply with 99 new books out of a hundred—the 99 that require to be taken as they are—is the good reporter. He’s the boy who can read the new book as he would look and listen at a political convention, or hop around at a fire—getting the facts, getting them straight (yes, indeed, they do get them straight) and setting them down, swiftly and selectively, to reproduce in the mind of the public the precise effect of the book itself. The effect—not the means by which it was achieved, not the desirability of it having been achieved, not the artistic quality of it, not the moral worth of it, not anything in the way of a corollary or lesson or a deduction, however obvious—just the effect. That’s reporting. That’s getting and giving the news. And that’s what the public wants.

Some people seem to think there is something shameful in giving the public what it wants. They would, one supposes, highly commend the grocer who gave his customer something “just as good” or (according to the grocer) “decidedly better.” But substitution, open or concealed, is an immoral practice. Nothing can justify it, no nobility of intention can take it out of the class of deception and cheating.

But, they cry, the public does not want what is sufficiently good, let alone what is best for it; that is why it is wrong to give the public what it wants. So they shift their ground and think to escape on a high moral plateau or table land. But the table land is a tip-table land. What they mean is that they are confidently setting their judgment of what the public ought to want against the public’s plain decision what it does want. They are a few dozens against many millions, yet in their few dozen intelligences is collected more wisdom than has been the age-long and cumulative inheritance of all the other sons of earth. They really believe that.... Pitiable....

10

A new book is news. This might almost be set down as axiomatic and not as a proposition needing formal demonstration by the Euclidean process. Yet it is susceptible of such demonstration and we shall demonstrate accordingly.

In the strict sense, anything that happens is news. Everybody remembers the old distinction, that if a dog bites a man it is very likely not news, but that if a man bites a dog it is news beyond all cavil. Such a generalization is useful and fairly harmless (like the generalization we ourselves have just indulged in and are about proving) if—a big if—the broad exception be noted. If a dog bites John D. Rockefeller, Jr., it is not only news but rather more important, or certainly more interesting, news than if John Jones of Howlersville bites a dog. For the chances are that John Jones of Howlersville is a poor demented creature, after all. Now the dog that bites Mr. Rockefeller is very likely a poor, demented creature, too; but the distinction lies in this: the dog bitten by John Jones is almost certainly not as well-known or as interesting or as important in the lives of a number of people as Mr. Rockefeller. Pair off the cur that puts his teeth in the Rockefeller ankle, if you like, with the wretch who puts his teeth in an innocent canine bystander (it’s the innocent bystander who always gets hurt); do this and you still have to match up the hound of Howlersville with Mr. Rockefeller. And the scale of news values tips heavily away from Howlersville and in the direction of 26 Broadway.

So it is plain that not all that happens is news compared with some that happens. The law of specific interest, an intellectual counterpart of the law of specific gravity in the physical world, rules in the world of events. Any one handling news who disregards this law does so at his extreme peril, just as any one building a ship heavier than the water it displaces may reasonably expect to see his fine craft sink without a trace.

Since a new book is a thing happening it is news, subject to the broad correction we have been discussing above, namely, that in comparison with other new books it may not be news at all, its specific interest may be so slight as to be negligible entirely.

But if a particular new book is news, if its specific interest is moderately great, then obviously, we think, the person best fitted to deal with it is a person trained to deal with news, namely, a reporter. Naturally we all prefer a good reporter.

11

The question will at once be raised: How is the specific interest of a new book to be determined? We answer: Just as the specific interest of any kind of potential news or actual news is determined—in competition with the other news of the day and hour. What is news one day isn’t news another. This is a phenomenon of which the regular reader of every daily paper is more or less consciously aware. There are some days when “there’s no news in the paper.” There are other days when the news in the paper is so big and so important that all the lesser occurrences which ordinarily get themselves chronicled are crowded out. Granting a white paper supply which does not at present exist, it would, of course, be possible on the “big days” to record all these lesser doings; and consistently, day in and day out, to print nicely proportioned accounts of every event attaining to a certain fixed level of specific interest. But the reader who may think he would like this would speedily find out that he didn’t. Some days he would have a twelve page newspaper and other days (not Sundays, either) he would have one of thirty-six pages. He would be lost, or rather, his attention would be lost in the jungle of events that all happened within twenty-four hours, with the profuse luxuriance of tropical vegetation shooting up skyward by inches and feet overnight. His natural appetite for a knowledge of what his fellows were doing would be alternately starved and overfed; malnutrition would lead to chronic and incurable dyspepsia; soon he would become a hateful misanthrope, shunning his fellow men and having a seizure every time Mr. Hearst brought out the eighth edition (which is the earliest and first) of the New York Evening Journal. It is really dreadful to think what havoc a literal adhesion to the motto of the New York Times—“All the news that’s fit to print”—would work in New York City.

No mortal has more than a certain amount of time daily and a certain amount of attention (according to his mental habit and personal interest) to bestow on the perusal of a newspaper, or news, or the printed page of whatever kind. On Sunday he has much more, it is likely, but still there is a limit and a perfectly finite bound. Consequently the whole problem for the persons engaged in gathering and preparing news for presentation to readers sums up in this: “How many of the day’s doings attaining or exceeding a certain level of public interest and importance, shall we set before our clients?” Easily answered, in most cases; and the size of the paper is the index of the answer. Question Two: “What of the day’s doings shall be served up in the determined space?”

For this question there is never an absolute or ready answer, and there never can be. On some of the affairs to be reported all journalists would agree; but they would differ in their estimates of the relative worth of even these and the lengths at which they should be treated; about lesser occurrences there would be no fixed percentage of agreement.

12

Now the application of all this to the business of giving the news of books should be fairly clear. A new book is news—and so, sometimes, is an old one, rediscovered. Since a new book is news it should be dealt with by a news reporter. Not all that happens is news; not all the new books published are news; new books, like new events of all sorts, are news when they compete successfully with a majority of their kind.

There is no more sense in reporting—that is, describing individually at greater or less length—all the new books than there would be in reporting every incident on the police blotters of a lively American city. Recording new books is another matter; somewhere, somehow, most occurrences in this world get recorded in written words that reach nearly all who are interested in the happenings (as in letters) or are accessible to the interested few (as the police records). The difference between the reporter and the recorder is not entirely a difference of details given. The recorder usually follows a prescribed formula and makes his record conform thereto; the good reporter never has a formula and never can have one. Let us see how this works out with the news of books.

13

The recorder of new books generally compiles a list of Books Received or Books Just Published and he does it in this uninspired and conscientious manner:

That would be under the heading Fiction. An entry under the heading Literary Studies or Essays might read:

These we hasten to say would be unusually full and satisfactory records, but they would be records just the same—formal and precise statements of events, like the chronological facts affixed to dates in an almanac. If all records were like these there would be less objection to them; but it is an astonishing truth that most records are badly kept. Why, one may never fathom; since the very formality and precision make a good record easy. Yet almost any of the principal pages or magazines in the United States devoted to the news of new books is likely to make a record on this order:

Such a record is, of course, worse than inadequate; it is actually misleading. Mr. White’s book happens to cover a period of fifty years. “Contemporary American life” would characterize quite as well, or quite as badly, a story of New York and Tuxedo by Robert W. Chambers.

14

The reporter works in entirely another manner. He is concerned to present the facts about a new book in a way sufficiently arresting and entertaining to engage the reader. As Mr. Holliday says with fine perception, the true function of the describer of new books is simply to bring a particular volume to the attention of its proper public. To do that it is absolutely necessary to “give the book,” at least to the extent of enabling the reader of the article to determine, with reasonable accuracy (1) whether the book is for him, that is, addressed to a public of which he is one, and (2) whether he wants to read it or not.

Whether the book is good or bad is not the point. A man interested in sociology may conceivably want to read a book on sociology even though it is an exceedingly bad book on that subject and even though he knows its worthlessness. He may want to profit by the author’s mistakes; he may want to write a book to correct them; or he may merely want to be amused at the spectacle of a fellow sociologist making a fool of himself, a spectacle by no means rare but hardly ever without a capacity for giving joy to the mildly malicious.

The determination of the goodness or badness of a book is not and should not be a deliberate purpose of the good book reporter. Why? Well, in many cases it is a task of supererogation. Take a reporter who goes to cover a public meeting at which speeches are made. He does not find it necessary to say that Mr. So-and-So’s speech was good. He records what Mr. So-and-So says, or a fair sample of it; which is enough. The reader can see for himself how good or bad it was and reach a conclusion based on the facts as tempered by his personal beliefs, tastes and ideas.

In the same way, it is superfluous for the book reporter to say that Miss Such-and-Such’s book on New York is rotten. All he need do is to set down the incredible fact that Miss Such-and-Such locates the Woolworth building at Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third street, and refers to the Aquarium as the fisheries section of the Bronx Zoo. If this should not appear a sufficient notice of the horrible nature of the volume the reporter may very properly give the truth about the Woolworth building and the Aquarium for the benefit of people who have never visited New York and might be unable to detect Miss Such-and-Such’s idiosyncrasies.

The rule holds in less tangible matters. Why should the book reporter ask his reader to accept his dictum that the literary style of a writer is atrocious when he can easily prove it by a few sentences or a paragraph from the book?

15

Yet books are still in the main “reviewed,” instead of being given into the hands of trained news reporters. Anything worse than the average book “review” it would certainly be difficult to find in the length and breadth of America. And England, despite the possession of some brilliant talents, is nearly as badly off.

No one who is not qualified as a critic should attempt to criticise new books.

There are but few critics in any generation—half a dozen or perhaps a dozen men in any single one of the larger countries are all who could qualify at a given time; that much seems evident. What is a critic? A critic is a person with an education unusually wide either in life or in letters, and preferably in both. He is a person with huge backgrounds. He has read thousands of books and has by one means or another abstracted the essence of thousands more. He has perhaps travelled a good deal, though this is not essential; but he has certainly lived with a most peculiar and exceptional intensity, descending to greater emotional and intellectual depths than the majority of mankind and scaling higher summits; he has, in some degree, the faculty of living other people’s lives and sharing their human experiences which is the faculty that, in a transcendent degree, belongs to the novelist and storyteller. A critic knows the past and the present so well that he is able to erect standards, or uncover old standards, by which he can and does measure the worth of everything that comes before him. He can actually show you, in exact and inescapable detail, how De Morgan compares with Dickens and how Gilbert K. Chesterton ranks with Swift and whether Thackeray learned more from Fielding or from Daniel Defoe and he can trace the relation between a period in the life of Joseph Conrad and certain scenes and settings in The Arrow of Gold.

Such a man is a critic. Of course critics make mistakes but they are not mistakes of ignorance, of personal unfitness for the task, of pretension to a knowledge they haven’t. They are mistakes of judgment; such mistakes as very eminent jurists sometimes make after years on the bench. The jurist is reversed by the higher court and the critic is reversed by the appellate decree of the future.

The mistakes of a real critic, like the mistakes of a real jurist, are always made on defensible, and sometimes very sound, grounds; they are reasoned and seasoned conclusions even if they are not the correct conclusions. The mistakes of the 9,763 persons who assume the critical ermine without any fitness to wear it are quite another matter; and they are just the mistakes that would be made by a layman sitting in the jurist’s seat. The jurist knows the precedents, the rules of evidence, the law; he is tolerant and admits exceptions into the record. So the critic; with the difference that the true critic merely presides and leaves the verdict to that great jury of true and right instincts which we call “the public.” The genuine critic is concerned chiefly to see that the case gets before the jury cleanly. Without presuming to tell the jury what its verdict must be—except in extraordinary circumstances—he does instruct it what the verdict should be on, what should be considered in arriving at it, what principles should guide the decision.

But the near-critic (God save the mark!) has it in his mind that he must play judge and jury too. He doesn’t like the writer’s style, or thinks the plot is poor, or this bad or that defective. Instead of carefully outlining the evidence on which the public might reach a correct verdict on these points he delivers a dictum. It doesn’t go, of course, at least for long; and it never will.

Let us be as specific as is possible in this, as specific, that is, as a general discussion can be and remain widely applicable.

I don’t like the writer’s style. I am not a person of critical equipment or pretensions. I am, we will say, a book reporter. I do not declare, with a fiat and a flourish, that the style is bad; I merely present a chunk of it. There is the evidence, and nothing else is so competent, so relevant or so material, as the lawyers would say. I may, in the necessity to be brief and the absence of space for an excerpt, say that the style is adjectival, or adverbial, or diffuse, or involved or florid or something of that sort, if I know it to be. These would be statements of fact. “Bad” is a statement of opinion.

I may call the plot “weak” if it is weak (a fact) and if I know weakness in a plot (which qualifies me to announce the fact). But if I call the plot “poor” I am taking a good deal upon myself. Its poorness is a matter of opinion. Some stories are spoiled by a strong plot which dominates the reader’s interest almost to the exclusion of other things—fine characterization, atmosphere, and so on.

And even restrictions of space can hardly excuse the lack of courtesy, or worse, shown by the near-critic who calls the plot weak or the style diffuse or involved, however much these may be facts, and who does not at least briefly explain in what way the style is diffuse (or involved) and wherein the weakness of the plot resides. But to put a finger on the how or the where or the why requires a knowledge and an insight that the near-critic does not possess and will not take the trouble to acquire; so we are asking him to do the impossible. Nevertheless we can ask him to do the possible; and that is to leave off talking or writing on matters he knows nothing about.

16

The task of training good book reporters is not a thing to be easily and lightly undertaken. And the first essential in the making of such a reporter is the inculcation of a considerable humility of mind. A near-critic can afford to think he knows it all, but a book reporter cannot. Besides a sense of his own limitations the book reporter must possess and develop afresh from time to time a mental attitude which may best be summed up in this distinction: When a piece of writing seems to him defective he must stop short and ask himself, “Is this defect a fact or is it my personal feeling?” If it is a fact he must establish it to his own, and then to the reader’s, satisfaction. If it is his personal impression or feeling, merely, as he may conclude on maturer reflection, he owes it to those who will read his article either not to record it or to record it as a personal thing. There is no sense in saying only the good things that can be said about a book that has bad things in it. Such a course is dishonest. It is equally dishonest, and infinitely more common, to pass off private opinions as statements of fact.

When in doubt, the doubt should be resolved in favor of the author. A good working test of fact versus personal opinion is this: If you, as a reporter, cannot put your finger on the apparent flaw, cannot give the how or where or why of the thing that seems wrong, it must be treated as your personal feeling. A fact that you cannot buttress might as well not be a fact at all—unless, of course, it is self-evident, in which case you have only to state it or exhibit your evidence to command a universal assent.

All that we have been saying respecting the fact or fancy of a flaw in a piece of writing applies with equal force, naturally, to the favorable as well as the unfavorable conclusion you, as a book reporter, may reach. Because a story strikes you as wonderful it does not follow that it is wonderful. You are under a moral obligation, at least, to establish the wonder of it. The procedure for the book reporter who has to describe favorably and for the book reporter who has to report unfavorably is the same. First comes the question of fact, then the citation, if possible, of evidence; and if that be impossible the brief indication of the how, the where, the why of the merit reported. If the meritoriousness remains a matter of personal impression it ought so to be characterized but may warrantably be recorded where an adverse impression would go unmentioned. The presumption is in favor of the author. It should be kept so.

17

In all this there is nothing impossible, nothing millennial. But what has been outlined of the work of the true book reporter is as far as possible from what we very generally get to-day. We get unthinking praise and unthinking condemnation; we do not expect analysis but we have a right to expect straightaway exposition and a condensed transliteration of the book being dealt with.

“Praise,” we have just said, and “condemnation.” That is what it is, and there is no room in the book reporter’s task either for praise or condemnation. He is not there to praise the book any more than a man is at a political convention to praise a nominating speech; he is there to describe the book, to describe the speech, to report either. A newspaperman who should begin his account of a meeting in this fashion, “In a lamentably poor speech, showing evidences of hasty preparation, Elihu Root,” &c., would be fired—and ought to be. No matter if a majority of those who heard Mr. Root thought the same way about it.

18

The book reporter will be governed in his work by the precise news value in the book he is dealing with at the moment he is dealing with it. This needs illustration.

On November 11, 1918, an armistice was concluded in Europe, terminating a war that had lasted over four years. In that four years books relating to the war then being waged had sold heavily, even at times outselling fiction. Had the war drawn to a gradual end the sales of these war books would probably have lessened, little by little, until they reached and maintained a fairly steady level. From this they would doubtless have declined, as the end drew near, lower and lower, until the foreseen end came, when the interest in them would have been as great, but not much greater, than the normal interest in works of a historical or biographical sort.

But the end came overnight; and suddenly the whole face of the world was transformed. The reaction in the normal person was intense. In an instant war books of several pronounced types became intolerable reading. How I Reacted to the War, by Quintus Quintuple seemed tremendously unimportant. Even Mr. Britling was, momentarily, utterly stale and out of date. Reminiscences of the German ex-Kaiser were neither interesting nor important; he was a fugitive in Holland.

The book reporter who had any sense of news values grasped this immediately. Books that a month earlier would have been worth 1,000 to 1,500 word articles were worth a few lines or no space at all. On the other hand books which had a historical value and a place as interesting public records, such as Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, were not diminished either in interest or in importance.

Some books which had been inconsequential were correspondingly exalted by the unprecedented turn of affairs. These were books on such subjects as the re-education of disabled fighters, the principles which might underlie the formation of a league of nations, problems of reconstruction of every sort. They had been worth, some of them, very small articles a week earlier; now they were worth a column or two apiece.

19

No doubt we ought to conclude this possibly tedious essay with some observations on the one per cent. of books which call for swift surgery. But such an enterprise is, if not impossible, extraordinarily difficult for the reason that the same operation is never called for twice.

In a sense it is like cutting diamonds, or splitting a large stone into smaller stones. The problem varies each time. The cutter respects certain principles and follows a careful technique. That is all.

We shall, for the sake of the curious, take an actual instance. In 1918 there was published a novel called Foes by Mary Johnston, an American novelist of an endowment so decided as fairly to entitle her to the designation “a genius.”

Miss Johnston’s first novel had appeared twenty years earlier. Her first four books—nay, her first two, the second being To Have and to Hold—placed her firmly in the front rank of living romantic writers. The thing that distinguished her romanticism was its sense of drama in human affairs and human destiny. Added to this was a command of live, nervous, highly poetic prose. History—romance; it did not matter. She could set either movingly before you.

Her work showed steady progress, reaching a sustained culmination in her two Civil War novels, The Long Roll and Cease Firing. She experimented a little, as in her poetic drama of the French Revolution, The Goddess of Reason, and in The Fortunes of Garin, a tapestry of mediæval France. The Wanderers was a more decided venture, but a perfectly successful. Then came Foes.

Considered purely as a romantic narrative, as a story of friendship transformed into hatred and the pursuit of a private feud under the guise of wreaking Divine vengeance, Foes is a superb tale. Considered as a novel, Foes is a terrible failure.

Why? Is it not sufficient to write a superb tale? Yes, if you have essayed nothing more. Is a novel anything more than “a good story, well told”? Yes, if the writer essays to make more of it.

The novelist who has aimed at nothing beyond the “good story, well told” has a just grievance against any one who asks anything further. But against the novelist who has endeavored to make his story, however good, however well told, the vehicle for a human philosophy or a metaphysical speculation, the reader has a just grievance—if the endeavor has been unsuccessful or if the philosophy is unsound.

Now as to the soundness or unsoundness of a particular philosophy every reader must pronounce for himself. The metaphysical idea which was the basis of Miss Johnston’s novel was this: All gods are one. All deities are one. Christ, Buddha; it matters not. “There swam upon him another great perspective. He saw Christ in light, Buddha in light. The glorified—the unified. Union.” Upon this idea Miss Johnston reconciles her two foes.

This perfectly comprehensible mystical conception is the rock on which the whole story is founded—and the rock on which it goes to pieces. It will be seen at once that the conception is one which no Christian can entertain and remain a Christian—nor any Buddhist, and remain a Buddhist, either. To the vast majority of mankind, therefore, the philosophy of Foes was unsound and the novel was worthless except for the superficial incidents and the lovely prose in which they were recounted.

It might be thought that for those who accepted the mystical concept Miss Johnson imposed, Foes would have been a novel of the first rank. No, indeed; and for this reason:

Her piece of mysticism was supposed to be arrived at and embraced by a dour Scotchman of about the year of Our Lord 1750. It was supposed to transform the whole nature of that man so as to lead him to give over a life-long enmity in which he had looked upon himself as a Divine instrument to punish an evil-doer.

Now however reasonable or sound or inspiring and inspiriting the mystical idea may have seemed to any reader, he could not but be fatally aware that, as presented, the thing was a flat impossibility. Scotchmen of the year 1750 were Christians above all else. They were, if you like, savage Christians; some of them were irreligious, some of them were God-defying, none of them were Deists in the all-inclusive sense that Miss Johnston prescribes. The idea that Christ and Buddha might possibly be nothing but different manifestations of the Deity is an idea which could never have occurred to the eighteenth century Scotch mind—and never did. Least of all could it have occurred to such a man as Miss Johnston delineates in Alexander Jardine.

The thing is therefore utterly anachronistic. It is a historical anachronism, if you like, the history here being the history of the human spirit in its religious aspects. Every reader of the book, no matter how willing he may have been to accept the novelist’s underlying idea, was aware that the endeavor to convey it had utterly failed, was aware that Miss Johnston had simply projected her idea, her favorite bit of mysticism, into the mind of one of her characters, a Scotchman living a century and a half earlier! But the thoughts that one may think in the twentieth century while tramping the Virginia hills are not thoughts that could have dawned in the mind of a Scottish laird in the eighteenth century, not even though he lay in the flowering grass of the Roman Campagna.

... And so there, in Foes, we have the book in a hundred which called for something more than the intelligent and accurate work of the book reporter. Here was a case of a good novelist, and a very, very good one, gone utterly wrong. It was not sufficient to convey to the prospective reader a just idea of the story and of the qualities of it. It was necessary to cut and slash, as cleanly and as swiftly and as economically as possible—and as dispassionately—to the root of the trouble. For if Miss Johnston were to repeat this sort of performance her reputation would suffer, not to speak of her royalties; readers would be enraged or misled; young writers playing the sedulous ape would inflict dreadful things upon us; tastes and tempers would be spoiled; publishers would lose money;—and, much the worst of all, the world would be deprived of the splendid work Mary Johnston could do while she was doing the exceedingly bad work she did do.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the blunder in Foes was the fact that there was no necessity for it. The Christian religion, which was the religion of Alexander Jardine, provides for reconciliation, indeed, it exacts it. There was the way for Miss Johnston to bring her foes together. Of course, it would not have been intellectually so exciting. But there is such a thing as emotional appeal, and it is not always base; there are emotions in the human so high and so lofty that it is wiser not to try to transcend them....

The appearance of part of the foregoing in Books and the Book World of The Sun, New York, brought a letter from Kansas which should find a place in this volume. The letter, with the attempted answer, may as well be given here. The writer is head of the English department in a State college. He wrote:

20

“I hope that the mails lost for your college professors of English subscribers their copies of Books and the Book World [containing the foregoing observations on Book Reporting].... College professors do not like to be disturbed—and most of us cannot be, for that matter. The TNT in those pages was not meant for us, perhaps, but it should have been.

“When I read Book Reporting I dictated three pages of protest, but did not send it on—thanks to my better judgment.... Then I decided, since you had added so much to my perturbation, to ask you to help me.

“We need it out here—literary help only, of course. This is the only State college on what was once known as the ‘Great Plains.’ W. F. Cody won his sobriquet on Government land which is now our campus. Our students are the sons and daughters of pioneers who won over grasshoppers, droughts, hot winds and one crop farms. They are so near to real life that the teaching of literature must be as real as the literature—rather, it ought to be. That’s where I want you to help me.

“I am not teaching literature here now as I was taught geology back in Missouri. That’s as near as I shall tell you how I teach—it is bad enough and you might not help me if I did. (Perhaps, in fairness to you, I should say that for several years never less than one-third of those to whom we gave degrees have majored in English, and always as many as the next two departments combined.)

“Here’s what I am tired of and want to get away from:

“1. Testing students on reading a book by asking fact questions about what is in the book—memory work, you see.

“2. Demanding of students a scholarship in the study of literature that is so academic that it is Prussian.

“3. Demanding that students serve time in literature classes as a means of measuring their advance in the study of literature.

“Here’s what I want you to help me with in some definite concrete way: (Sounds like a college professor making an assignment—beg pardon.)

“1. Could you suggest a scheme of ‘book reporting’ for college students in literature classes? (An old book to a new person is news, isn’t it?)

“2. Give me a list of books published during the last ten years that should be included in college English laboratory classes in literature. I want your list. I have my own, but fear it is too academic.

“3. What are some of the things which should enter into the training of teachers of high school English? Part of our work, especially in the summer, is to give such training to men and women who will teach composition and literature in Kansas high schools.

“Your help will not only be appreciated, but it will be used.”

21

To answer adequately these requests would take about six months’ work and the answers would make a slender book. And then they would exhibit the defects inseparable from a one man response. None of which excuses a failure to attempt to answer, though it must extenuate failures in the attempt.

We shall try to answer, in this place, though necessarily without completeness. If nothing better than a few suggestions is the result, why—suggestions may be all that is really needed.

And first respecting the things our friend is tired of and wants to get away from:

1. Fact questions about what is in the book—memory work—are not much use if they stop with the outline of the story. What is not in the book may be more important than what is. Why did the author select this scene for narration and omit that other, intrinsically (it seems) the more dramatically interesting of the two? See The Flirt, by Booth Tarkington, where a double murder gets only a few lines and a small boy’s doings occupy whole chapters.

2. Scholarship is less important than wide reading, though the two aren’t mutually exclusive. A wide acquaintance doesn’t preclude a few profoundly intimate friendships. Textual study has spoiled Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton for most of us. Fifty years hence Kipling and Masefield will be spoiled in the same way.

3. Time serving over literature is a waste of time. There are only three ways to teach literature. The first is by directing students to books for voluntary reading—hundreds of books, thousands. The second is by class lectures—entertaining, idea’d, anecdoted, catholic in range and expository in character. The third is by conversation—argumentative at times, analytic at moments, but mostly by way of exchanging information and opinions.

Study books as you study people. Mix among them. You don’t take notes on people unless, perchance, in a diary. Keep a diary on books you read, if you like, but don’t “take notes.” Look for those qualities in books that you look for in people and make your acquaintances by the same (perhaps unformulated) rules. To read snobbishly is as bad as to practise snobbery among your fellows.

22

We go on to the first of our friend’s requests for help. It is a scheme for “book reporting” for college students in literature classes and he premises that an old book to a new reader is news. Of course it is.

Let the student take up a book that’s new to him and read it by himself, afterward writing a report of it to be read to the class. When he comes to write his report he must keep in the forefront of his mind this one thing:

To tell the others accurately enough about that book so that each one of them will know whether or not he wants to read it.

That is all the book reporter ever tries for. No book is intended for everybody, but almost every book is intended for somebody. The problem of the book reporter is to find the reader.

Comparison may help. For instance, those who enjoy Milton’s pastoral poetry will probably enjoy the long poem in Robert Nichols’s Ardours and Endurances. Those who like Thackeray will like Mary S. Watts. Those who like Anna Katharine Green will thank you for sending them to The Moonstone, by one Wilkie Collins.

Most stories depend upon suspense in the action for their main effect. You must not “give away” the story so as to spoil it for the reader. In a mystery story you may state the mystery and appraise the solution or even characterize it—but you mustn’t reveal it.

Tell ’em that Mr. Hergesheimer’s Java Head is an atmospheric marvel, but will disappoint many readers who put action first. Tell ’em that William Allen White writes (often) banally, but so saturates his novel with his own bigheartedness that he makes you laugh and cry. Tell ’em the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as well as you can make it out—and for heaven’s sake ask yourself with every assertion: “Is this a fact or is it my personal opinion?” And a fact, for your purpose, will be an opinion in which a large majority of readers will concur.

23

“Give me a list of books published during the last ten years that should be included in college English laboratory classes in literature. I want your list. I have my own, but fear it is too academic.”

The following list is an offhand attempt to comply with this request. It is offered merely for the suggestions it may contain. If the ten year restriction is rigid we ask pardon for such titles as may be a little older than that. Strike them out.

For Kansans: Willa Sibert Cather’s novels, O Pioneers! and My Antonia, chronicling people and epochs of Kansas-Nebraska. William Allen White’s A Certain Rich Man and In the Heart of a Fool, less for their Kansas-ness than for their Americanism and humanity.

For Middle Westerners: Meredith Nicholson’s The Valley of Democracy. Zona Gale’s Birth. Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems. Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Vachel Lindsay’s longer poems. Mary S. Watts’s Nathan Burke and Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family. Lord Charnwood’s life of Lincoln. William Dean Howells’s The Leatherwood God. Booth Tarkington’s The Conquest of Canaan (first published about fourteen years ago) and The Magnificent Ambersons. Gene Stratton-Porter’s A Daughter of the Land, her Freckles and her A Girl of the Limberlost. One or two books by Harold Bell Wright. The Passing of the Frontier, by Emerson Hough, and other books in the Chronicles of America series published by the Yale University Press.

For Americans: Mary S. Watts’s The Rise of Jennie Cushing. Owen Wister’s The Virginian (if not barred under the ten year rule). Booth Tarkington’s The Flirt. Novels with American settings by Gertrude Atherton and Stewart Edward White. Mary Johnston’s The Long Roll and Cease Firing. Willa Sibert Cather’s The Song of the Lark. Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. Alice Brown’s The Prisoner. Ellen Glasgow’s The Deliverance. Corra Harris’s A Circuit-Rider’s Wife. All of O. Henry. Margaret Deland’s The Iron Woman. Earlier novels by Winston Churchill. Ernest Poole’s The Harbor. Joseph Hergesheimer’s The Three Black Pennys, his Gold and Iron and his Java Head. Historical books by Theodore Roosevelt. American biographies too numerous to mention. From Isolation to Leadership: A Review of American Foreign Policy by Latané (published by the educational department of Doubleday, Page & Company). Essays, such as those of Agnes Repplier.

Each of these enumerations presupposes the books already named, or most of them. Don’t treat them as pieces of literary workmanship. Many of them aren’t. Those that have fine literary workmanship have something else, too—and it’s the other thing, or things, that count. Fine art in a book is like good breeding in a person, a passport, not a Magna Charta. “Manners makyth man”—yah!

24

We are also asked:

“What are some of the things which should enter into the training of teachers of high school English?”

We reply:

A regard for literature, not as it reflects life, but as it moulds lives. A profound respect for an author who can find 100,000 readers, a respect at least equal to that entertained for an author who can write superlatively well. For instance: Get it out of your head that you can afford to condescend toward a best seller, or to worship such a writer as Stevenson for his sheer craftsmanship.

An instinct for what will nourish the ordinary man or woman as keen as your perception of what will be relished by the fastidious reader. Don’t insist that people must live on what you, or any one else, declare to be good for them. It is not for nothing that they “don’t know anything about literature, but know what they like.”

A confidence in the greater wisdom of the greatest number. Tarkington got it right. The public wants the best it is capable of understanding; its understanding may not be the highest understanding, but “the writer who stoops to conquer doesn’t conquer.” Neither does the writer who never concedes anything. The public’s standard can’t always be wrong; the private standards can’t always be right.

Arnold Bennett says, quite rightly, that the classics are made and kept alive by “the passionate few.” But the business of high school teachers of English is not with the passionate few—who will look after themselves—but with the unimpassioned many. You can lead the student to Mr. Pope’s Pierian spring, but you cannot make him drink. Unless you can show him, in the Missourian sense, it’s all off. If you can’t tell what it is a girl likes in Grace S. Richmond how are you going to show her what she’ll like in Dickens? Unless you know what it is that “they” get out of these books they do read you won’t be able to bait the hook with the things you want them to read. Don’t you think you’ve got a lot to learn yourself? And mightn’t you do worse than sit down yourself and read attentively, at whatever personal cost, some of the best sellers?

It all goes back to the size of the teacher’s share of our common humanity. A person who can’t read a detective story for the sake of the thrills has no business teaching high school English. A person who is a literary snob is unfit to teach high school English. A person who can’t sense (better yet, share) the common feeling about a popular writer and comprehend the basis of it and sympathize a little with it and express it more or less articulately in everyday speech is not qualified to teach high school English.

25

A word about writing “compositions” in high school English classes. Make ’em write stories instead. If they want to tackle thumbnail sketches or abstracter writing—little essays—why, let ’em. Abstractions in thought and writing are like the ocean—it’s fatally easy to get beyond your depth, and every one else’s. Read what Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch says about this in his Studies in Literature. Once in a while a theologian urges us to “get back to the Bible.” Well, there is one sense, at least, in which the world would do well to get back to the Bible, or to the Old Testament, at any rate. As Gardiner points out in his The Bible as English Literature, it was the fortune or misfortune of ancient Hebrew that it had no abstractions. Everything was stated in terms of the five senses. There was no such word as “virtue”; you said “sweet smellingness” or “pleasant tastingness” or something like that. And everybody knew what you meant. Whereas “virtue” means anything from personal chastity to a general meritoriousness that nobody can define. The Greeks introduced abstract thinking and expression and some Germans blighted the world by their abuse.

What should enter into the training of high school teachers of English? Only humbleness, sanity, catholicity of viewpoint, humor, a continual willingness to learn, a continuous faith in the people—and undying enthusiasm. Only these—and the love of books.