grand matter, or a portrait in
caricature: if it expresses its subject honestly and delightfully, that is
all we can ask of it. A critical portrait of a book by Mr. Le Queux may be
amazingly alive: a censorious comment can only be dull. Mr. Hubert Bland
was at one time an almost ideal portrait-painter of commonplace novels. He
obviously liked them, as the caricaturist likes the people in the street.
The novels themselves might not be readable, but Mr. Bland's reviews of
them were. He could reveal their characteristics in a few strokes, which
would tell you more of what you wanted to know about them than a whole
dictionary of adjectives of praise and blame. One could tell at a glance
whether the book had any literary value, whether it was worth turning to
as a stimulant, whether it was even intelligent of its kind. One would not
like to see Mr. Bland's method too slavishly adopted by reviewers: it was
suitable only for portraying certain kinds of books. But it is worth
recalling as the method of a man who, dealing with books that were for the
most part insipid and worthless, made his reviews delightfully alive as
well as admirably interpretative.

The comparison of a review to a portrait fixes attention on one essential
quality of a book-review. A reviewer should never forget his
responsibility to his subject. He must allow nothing to distract him from
his main task of setting down the features of his book vividly and
recognizably. One may say this even while admitting that the most
delightful book-reviews of modern times--for the literary causeries of
Anatole France may fairly be classified as book-reviews--were the revolt
of an escaped angel against the limitations of a journalistic form. But
Anatole France happens to be a man of genius, and genius is a
justification of any method. In the hands of a pinchbeck Anatole France,
how unendurable the review conceived as a causerie would become! Anatole
France observes that "all books in general, and even the most admirable,
seem to me infinitely less precious for what they contain than for what he
who reads puts into them." That, in a sense, is true. But no reviewer
ought to believe it. His duty is to his author: whatever he "puts into
him" is a subsidiary matter. "The critic," says Anatole France again,
"must imbue himself thoroughly with the idea that every book has as many
different aspects as it has readers, and that a poem, like a landscape, is
transformed in all the eye