the metaphor, the whole truth about
criticism is contained in the Eastern proverb which declares that "Love is
the net of Truth." It is as a lover that the critic, like the lyric poet
and the mystic, will be most excellently symbolized.

XXIV.--BOOK REVIEWING

I notice that in Mr. Seekers' _Art and Craft of Letters_ series no volume
on book-reviewing has yet been announced. A volume on criticism has been
published, it is true, but book-reviewing is something different from
criticism. It swings somewhere between criticism on the one hand and
reporting on the other. When Mr. Arthur Bourchier a few years ago, in the
course of a dispute about Mr. Walkley's criticisms, spoke of the dramatic
critic as a dramatic reporter, he did a very insolent thing. But there was
a certain reasonableness in his phrase. The critic on the Press is a
news-gatherer as surely as the man who is sent to describe a public
meeting or a strike. Whether he is asked to write a report on a play of
Mr. Shaw's or an exhibition of etchings by Mr. Bone or a volume of short
stories by Mr. Conrad or a speech by Mr. Asquith or a strike on the Clyde,
his function is the same. It is primarily to give an account, a
description, of what he has seen or heard or read. This may seem to many
people--especially to critics--a degrading conception of a book-reviewer's
work. But it is quite the contrary. A great deal of book-reviewing at the
present time is dead matter. Book-reviews ought at least to be alive as
news.

At present everybody is ready to write book-reviews. This is because
nearly everybody believes that they are the easiest kind of thing to
write. People who would shrink from offering to write poems or leading
articles or descriptive sketches of football matches, have an idea that
reviewing books is something with the capacity for which every man is
born, as he is born with the capacity for talking prose. They think it is
as easy as having opinions. It is simply making a few remarks at the end
of a couple of hours spent with a book in an armchair. Many men and
women--novelists, barristers, professors and others--review books in their
spare time, as they look on this as work they can do when their brains are
too tired to do anything which is of genuine importance. A great deal of
book-reviewing is done contemptuously, as though to review books well were
not as difficult as to do anything else well. This is perhaps due in some
measure to the fact tha