t, for the amount of hard work it involves,
book-reviewing is one of the worst-paid branches of journalism. The hero
of Mr. Beresford's new novel, _The Invisible Event_, makes an income of
L250 a year as an outside reviewer, and it is by no means every outside
reviewer who makes as much as that from reviewing alone. It is not that
there is not an immense public which reads book-reviews. Mr. T.P. O'Connor
showed an admirable journalistic instinct when twenty years or so ago he
filled the front page of the _Weekly Sun_ with a long book-review. The
sale of the _Times Literary Supplement_, since it became a separate
publication, is evidence that, for good or bad, many thousands of readers
have acquired the habit of reading criticism of current literature.

But I do not think that the mediocre quality of most book-reviewing is due
to low payment. It is a result, I believe, of a wrong conception of what a
book-review should be. My own opinion is that a review should be, from one
point of view, a portrait of a book. It should present the book instead of
merely presenting remarks about the book. In reviewing, portraiture is
more important than opinion. One has to get the reflexion of the book, and
not a mere comment on it, down on paper. Obviously, one must not press
this theory of portraiture too far. It is useful chiefly as a protest
against the curse of comment. Many clever writers, when they come to write
book-reviews, instead of portraying the book, waste their time in remarks
to the effect that the book should never have been written, and so forth.
That, in fact, is the usual attitude of clever reviewers when they begin.
They are so horrified to find that Mr. William Le Queux does not write
like Dostoevsky and that Mrs. Florence Barclay lacks the grandeur of
AEschylus that they run amok among their contemporaries with something of
the furious destructiveness of Don Quixote on his adventures. It is the
noble intolerance of youth; but how unreasonable it is! Suppose a
portrait-painter were suddenly to take his sitter by the throat on the
ground that he had no right to exist. One would say to him that that was
not his business: his business is to take the man's existence for granted,
and to paint him until he becomes in a new sense alive. If he is
worthless, paint his worthlessness, but do not merely comment on it. There
is no reason why a portrait should be flattering, but it should be a
portrait. It may be a portrait in the