"T HE BEST SELLING BOOKS CROSSING" still sells, though more quietly. "Tillie" and "The Lightning Conductor" hold on with remarkable tenacity. "Old Gorgon Graham" and "The Master's Violin" are too new to make much of a showing, but they promise well. In Miscellany "The Letters of a Chinese Official" and "Man and Superman" hold prominent places. Best-sellers nowadays are not numerous. There is no longer "the" popular novel. But names still sell and new books by old authors have at least a moderate run. At Wanamaker's, Philadelphia. FICTION: Old Gorgon Graham;-George Horace Lori mer. The Master's Violin;-Myrtle Reed. The President;-Alfred Henry Lewis. MISCELLANEOUS: Letters of a Chinese Official. Imperator et Rex;-By the author of "The Martyrdom of an Empress." Volume XXIII NOVEMBER, 1904 Number 267 Literary Critics and Criticism I By Henry William Elson Author of "Elson's History of the United States" T is agreed by all that the ultimate tribunal in judging the value of a book is the great public, if it be a book intended for the public. It is true that at times this great personage is capricious. He seizes on a catchy piece of fiction for his temporary amusement, but without any intention of adding it to his permanent treasures. Often he is dilatory in making up his mind as to the ultimate value of a piece of literature; but in the end he will render his decision, and it will be a correct one in nearly every case. Before a newly-published book reaches this final tribunal, however, it must pass through the lower court, composed of the critics, the book-reviewers, and it is these and their work that we wish to study briefly in this article. The verdict of the critics concerning a book may have much to do with its immediate reception by the public, but will not perhaps in the end greatly affect the verdict as to its permanent value. Ruskin's assertion, therefore, that "a bad critic is probably the most mischievous person in the world," must be accepted only with qualification. Yet it must be admitted that a bad critic is an abomination. He may mislead the ignorant by overpraising, by pronouncing mediocrity genius. More frequently he is of the other sort; he cuts and slashes in a most reckless and iconoclastic manner. And too often the editor encourages just this sort of thing, for the spice it gives his paper, shielding his irresponsible, anonymous reviewer behind his own authority. The editor of a well-known periodical once said to me: "I have a 'rattling good' review of " and he named a recentlypublished novel, one of the best of the season's output. He asked me to read the review. I did so, and found that it was little short of a tirade of abuse, no mention of the many good qualities of the book being made. I had read the novel also and considered it a strong one; but the editor, I who confessed that he had not read the book, apparently valued the review solely for its abusive qualities. While publishers of periodicals continue thus to encourage such reckless critics, there can be little hope of reform in current literary criticism. An author who is a strong, self-contained character, or whose sensitiveness has been dulled by previous experiences, will not be deeply hurt by the abusive critic, and especially is this true if the blame of one critic is balanced by the praise of another, as is usually the case. One writer has gone so far as to say that "in no other relation of life is so much brutality permitted by civilized society as in the criticism of literature and the arts." This might have been true a hundred years ago-in the days of such bullying swashbucklers as Jeffrey and Croker-but will scarcely apply to our own times. On the other hand, if a book is worthless, or weak at some points, it is the duty of the reviewer honestly and fearlessly to point out such facts to the public. It is not a timid, spiritless criticism for which we plead, but rather a competent, responsible, virile, conscientious criticism. It is a regrettable fact that the people have no standard of literary criticism, no competent criterion of judgment through which a reasonably correct estimate of a new book may be had. Such a thing as a syndicate of competent, disinterested book critics, covering the various branches of literature, is conceivable, but probably not attainable, and we must therefore continue in our extremely democratic methods. Let us for convenience divide the reviewers of current books into various classes, with a brief comment on each. We have the professional critic, the university critic, the general critic, and the— I scarcely know what name to give the last one he is the one who writes a review of a book which he has not read. The professional critic is the man who makes his living at the business. We usually find him in the most pretentious literary periodicals. He unhesitatingly passes judgment on every class of literature, from the esoteric scientific treatise to the popular novel and the child's primer. He may be a very wise and good critic who gives the public really useful information concerning the worth or worthlessness of a new book; but ordinarily he is nothing of the kind. Ordinarily, or at least in many cases, the professional critic is a hireling faultfinder, a penny-a-liner, probably a disappointed author reveling in his chance to get even with somebody. He bangs away like an ambushed foe from behind his screen of anonymity. Yes, he must find fault (and the critical eye can find some flaw in everything it looks upon, except natural law), he must prove to his employers that he has read the book and that he is quite competent to pass judgment on it. He must earn his money. If he is unable to find any serious defect in the book under review, he will pounce upon some trifle-a misprint, a wrong date, a grammatical error, an ill-constructed sentence-and this he will magnify into a great fault. This becomes the bur den of his article, and the reader gets no information concerning the real value and purpose of the book. Such critics were plentiful in the past; they are less so now. But we have some left. Happily, however, they are for the most part innocuous. The university critics comprise the next class, so called because they are usually university professors. They are not book critics by profession, but specialists, each in his own line, and are often employed to review books dealing with their respective subjects. For a book intended for his own class no better reviewer can be found than the university specialist-if the element of personal rivalry plays no part. But a specialist is not well fitted to pass judgment on a book intended for the general reader, for the masses, even though it treats of his own specialty. He may not be consciously unjust or unfair, but his judgment is warped. He forgets that he is a specialist and judges the public taste and capacity by his own standard. He has delved into hidden things until his field of thought has become narrow; he deals with books and things rather than with men. He lacks the power to read the multitude, and consequently the power to judge of a book that the multitude is expected to read. It is captious to judge a book from a standpoint foreign to the meaning and purpose of the writer. heart The delightful histories of the late John Fiske were severely handled by certain specialists of the "dryasdust" variety, and his critics seemed not to realize that his mission was higher than theirs, that it requires immeasurably greater genius to read the human and reach the multitude than that possessed by one who can boast only of industry and erudition. It is with ill grace that such persons sit and cry out against one who does what they are incapable of doing. However, the specialist may be just the one to judge of the technical correctness of a popular book in his line, though, as stated, he is not ordinarily capable of pronouncing upon its adaptability to the reading public. The third class, composed of the general critics, is by far the largest. The general critic is simply an editor of a news |