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paper, a religious weekly, or a technical paper of some sort. He may be the literary editor, connected with the great city daily, whose sole business is to write book notices; he may be one of several who manage a newspaper of more modest pretensions in a smaller city; or he may even be the editor and proprietor of the village weekly, with its four or five thousand circulation.

The general critic is probably a very intelligent man, well educated, widely read, but he is not a trained literary critic. And yet he passes judgment on a new book that comes to hand for review, because it is part of the business of getting out a newspaper. What is his judgment worth? Is he a safe guide for the general reader?

If we assume that he is not only intelligent and well read, but also that he knows good English and is an independent thinker, can we not readily imagine that his opinion of a book is really worth having? It is true that the general critic will find many matters beyond his ken-technical points in science, history and theologyand these he should honestly decline to touch. He is not a specialist; he is a "generalist." He is not, like the university critic, full of preconceived ideas on all points nor is he, like the professional critic, inclined to be finical and to go out of his way to display his erudition. He is, rather, an intelligent editor who strives to put out a good paper that will be useful to the people. We are inclined to place his opinion of a book intended for the general reader above that of any other class of critics. Other critics may be more learned, more highly trained; but they do not so well understand the taste and wants of the people. The most scientific fruitgrower is no better judge of good apples or peaches than is the street urchin-probably not so good. The general critic understands the masses, he represents them, he mingles with them, lives among them, he is one of them, and his voice therefore is a voice from the crowd. It is he, rather than the specialist, from whom the author prefers to hear, and whom the people prefer to follow.

But too often the general critic may temporarily join the class who criticise a

book without reading it. This critic reads the preface, the chapter headings, the publisher's announcement, and perhaps two or three reviews by others, whereupon he dashes off half a column of "copy" and sends it forth as his own original ideas. It is true that one need not always read every page of a book in order to get a good critical knowledge of it, and it is also true that the busy editor is not always able to find time to read a book by the time he wishes to give it a notice; but in the latter case he should honestly indicate (as some do) that the opinions he is giving are not his own.

I have not considered literary criticism in its higher sense-as found in the works of Taine, Lamb, Lowell and many others-itself an important branch of literature, but rather the current criticism of a new book when thrown on the market. The late lamented Frank Norris once said that next to the pleasure of writing a book must be ranked the pleasure of reading what the critics say about it. But it is not only the author who is interested in what the critics say of his book; the reading public shares this interest with him, though in a qualified degree.

The relation of the book critic to the public is a serious and responsible one. The critic is, in an important sense, an appraiser of literary values, standing between the author and the reading public. He should be a man of extensive knowledge, of broad culture, endowed with the art of judging with correct taste, and while being candid with the public, he should be just to the author in interpreting his message for the public. In judging of literary values the critic should remember that, as John Burroughs says, "pure literature is incidental to the man with a message— the art in subjection to moral conviction;" he should remember that many a book which makes no pretense to literary excellence may contain an important message or useful information for the public, and he should interpret it according to the meaning and purpose of the author. If, however, a book is, in the opinion of the critic, worthless or pernicious, he should not hesitate to say so with candor and fearlessness.

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The Glade

By Norma K. Bright

EAVE on your spell, oh, forest tall and splendid,

W Sing your sweet lays for aye you murmuring stream;

Here on the rocks that your high, rugged banks build,
Let me in silence sit and dream!

Let my ear listen to the gentle whisper,

That the Wind-god sends in breezes through the leaves,

Let my eyes feel repose of sun sheen finely sifted

And my weariness the velvet rest of moss that cleaves.

Just a secluded glade by high trees bounded,

Only a few cool rocks in moist earth set,

Just a bright brooklet tumbling, stumbling

In foam-frost waves that grooves and pitfalls fret;

Just a gold gleam of sunlight sweetly stealing
Through lacy roof of leaves to kiss the stream,
Merely a fleeting bar of wood-bird's lyric,

Just a stray fragment of the great God's dream.

H

"Of Making Many Books"

By Clara E. Laughlin

Author of "Miladi,'

I

AVING been editor and reviewer for more than a dozen years, and publishers' adviser for nearly that length of time, I am frequently asked to generalize about the literary prospect. I could better comply with these requests if I had been similarly employed among more than one generation of writing folk. have a modest acquaintance with the best literature that has survived from other times, but no knowledge of what my predecessors in calling suppressed, or what they put forth in good faith and the public of their day would not "stand for." So I am not able to say, as I am invited to do, how the literary aspirant of to-day compares with the literary aspirant of days gone by. There are few persons now in my calling who could do this. Mr. Henry M. Alden, for thirty-five years editor of "Harper's Monthly," would doubtless be able to generalize most interestingly about the average quality of to-day's offerings to his pages compared with the average of a generation ago. Mr. George Haven Putnam and Mr. Frank Dodd have had as many years' experience as publishers of books. Mr. Gilder has been editorially connected with the "Century," first as "Scribner's Magazine," and later under its present name, for more than thirty years. Mr. Charles Scribner and Mr. Edward L. Burlingame would be able to speak for more than a quarter of a century of publishing. But besides these I do not know where one might look for an experience that covers more than twelve or fifteen years. Young people are the rule in the editorial offices and publishing houses to-day. The writer seeking publication with Houghton, Mifflin and Company is directed to Mr. W. B. Parker, a very able young man of thirty or thereabouts. The active head of the great Appleton business is J. H. Sears, who is under forty. Mr. James MacArthur, literary adviser of "Harper's," is in the thirties, and his publishing experience covers

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just a decade; his remarkable chief, Colonel Harvey, is forty, but an infant, though an infant prodigy, in the publishing world, where he has been but five years, unless one count his early adventures in the newspaper field.

And so it goes. The number of those who can compare the voice of to-day with the voice of yesterday is exceeding small. There are men who have seen the rise from obscurity of Kipling and Doyle and Barrie and Crockett and Hope and Weyman and Gilbert Parker, men who "discovered" their manuscripts and advised their publication. Here and there a reviewer is still in harness who dipped into "Plain Tales from the Hills" or into "Auld Licht Idylls" without warning or prejudice. But for the most part, even those days,-fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years ago, are as much part of an earlier generation to the majority of present reviewers, as the days when Meredith put out "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel" or Hardy courted favor with "Under the Greenwood Tree."

I have often wished I could know how a poor, weary manuscript reader felt when he stumbled on this or that thing gloriously fresh and full and fine. We read so many, many manuscripts which too obviously "won't do" or which just possibly "will do," that we wonder how it would feel to come upon something which we could pronounce "a hummer" and for which we could predict long life and wide. appreciation. Just as I write this paragraph there comes to my desk from New York a manuscript by a man who has made one of the few big, conspicuous successes of the past five or six years. Accompanying it is a letter from the very well-known literary adviser of the house now considering it. "I have read this story," he writes, "and find it interesting of its kind. It is melodramatic and all that, but it grips hold of you when you like that kind of thing." I am to see if it grips me,

or if I think there is "grip" enough in it to insure the house in making the large advance on royalties which the author will probably demand, and putting the book. out with a smart preliminary campaign of expensive advertising.

This seems to be the problem of the editor and "reader" to-day. Never before in the world's history have so many persons been in command of that undefined something called education. Practically everybody, nowadays, reads, something, -practically everybody can write,-something, if editor or proofreader will supply punctuation and correct wrong dates and smooth out the spelling. Practically everybody, from the publishers' point of view, tries his hand at writing a book. The average is really remarkable. At least eighty per cent. of all manuscripts submitted for publication may at once be classed as "impossible," but the remaining twenty per cent. affords a study in genteel mediocrity which may be either reassuring or utterly depressing, according as one looks at it. In the sifting of this twenty per cent. the question is not to find the pre-eminently good one and reject the rest, but to decide which of the whole number the public might like the best.

"You print lots of stories no better than mine," is the common accusation directed at editors and publishers.

"Doubtless," agree those gentlemen, without irony, "but we cannot print all the stories sent us, and we make our selection as best we can." Often there is more truth than the disgruntled author is willing to believe in the polite note saying that the refusal of his manuscript is no reflection on its merit. It probably had as much, or nearly as much, merit as the majority of manuscripts accepted, but the line had to be drawn somewhere, and so the decision regarding his was, "let it go."

Any shopper knows that once in a great while when he goes to buy he finds something so exactly suitable and perfectly pleasing that there can be no hesitation about his choice, except, perhaps, for motives of economy. But the times are far more frequent when he finds so many things any of which would "do,' that choice is difficult and the chance of complete satisfaction remote. The infinite pro

ductivity of our times extends to mental as well as to material things, and the average of workmanship in both is fairly high. There used to be a day when the material adornment of life within reach of the poor was very rude, and there was very little of it. At the same time there used to be available for the rich, who were extremely few, the elegant, enduring handicraft of artisans whose equals in skill it is now hard to find. It was a day of extremes.

Machinery put the poor man in possession of many of the luxuries of the rich and tended, for a while, to minimize differences. But another day has dawned. The rich despise machine products, now, and demand art handicraft; the highly skilled hand-carver and hand-sewer find their work at a premium.

May it not be so with literary productivity? The days when few books were printed and critics were stern and readers not many but demanding, have given place to these present times, when presses are swift and paper is wondrous cheap and colleges turn out each year their thousands of young people dizzy with their bird's-eye view of all the kingdoms of earth and the riches thereof. Intellectual differences are minimized, as against the days when only the few could read and only the very, very few essayed to write. Popular fiction has been a great leveler; a greater has been the popular press, where the magnate and the mechanic, the LL. D. and the laborer get the same news in the same style of presentation.

But the pendulum that swings one way will swing back, and we shall see men and women of taste despising machine-made literature as already they despise machinemade furniture and machine-made rugs and laces and embroideries.

It is all very well to talk of art being unquenchable and undaunted by neglect, but the student of art's history knows that the great art periods of the world have always been the periods when art was patronized and made fashionable and at least moderately lucrative. Here and there, no doubt, a lark will always sing, undismayed by the deafening chittering of sparrows, but you'll observe that when Maecenas wants to wake to the song of the

lark at Heaven's gate he is careful to employ under-gardeners or small boys with shotguns to drive off the sparrows. No one is doing this just now for the literary larks; the sparrows are gobbling all the biggest crumbs, and making such a fuss that a heap o' folks have forgotten there's any other kind of bird. But larks are not extinct, like the dodo bird; there's always enough of 'em alive to keep the species perpetuated, Barrie and Hewlett and Stephen Phillips and Margaret Deland and some others are singing, as full-throated and thrillingly sweet songs as one could

wish to hear, Ibsen is coming into his own. as a master dramatist, allusions to Wagner's music and boiler factories have ceased to employ the comic press, and there are not wanting other signs that encourage. By and by, I have faith to bevelop an inevitable aristocracy, there will lieve, our too-rampant democracy will de

be a demand for an aristocratic literature (aristocratic in perfection, not in theme) and the business of editing will become more exciting, it can never become more humorously diverting, but that, as one of the lustiest of our latter-day singers says, "is another story."

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