r brain. Praise is the vice of the commonplace reviewer, just as
censoriousness is the vice of the more clever sort. Not that one wishes
either praise or censure to be stinted. One is merely anxious not to see
them misapplied. It is a vice, not a virtue, of reviewing to be lukewarm
either in the one or the other. What one desires most of all in a
reviewer, after a capacity to portray books, is the courage of his
opinions, so that, whether he is face to face with an old reputation like
Mr. Conrad's or a new reputation like Mr. Mackenzie's, he will boldly
express his enthusiasms and his dissatisfactions without regard to the
estimate of the author, which is, for the moment, "in the air." What seems
to be wanted, then, in a book-reviewer is that, without being servile, he
should be swift to praise, and that, without being censorious, he should
have the courage to blame. While tolerant of kinds in literature, he
should be intolerant of pretentiousness. He should be less patient, for
instance, of a pseudo-Milton than of a writer who frankly aimed at nothing
higher than a book of music-hall songs. He should be more eager to define
the qualities of a book than to heap comment upon comment. If--I hope the
image is not too strained--he draws a book from the life, he will produce
a better review than if he spends his time calling it names, whether foul
or fair.

But what of the equipment of the reviewer? it may be asked. What of his
standards? One of the faults of modern reviewing seems to me to be that
the standards of many critics are derived almost entirely from the
literature of the last thirty years. This is especially so with some
American critics, who rush feverishly into print with volumes spotted with
the names of modern writers as Christmas pudding is spotted with currants.
To read them is to get the impression that the world is only a hundred
years old. It seems to me that Matthew Arnold was right when he urged men
to turn to the classics for their standards. His definition of the
classics may have been too narrow, and nothing could be more utterly dead
than a criticism which tries to measure imaginary literature by an
academic standard or the rules of Aristotle. But it is only those to whom
the classics are themselves dead who are likely to lay this academic dead
hand on new literature. Besides, even the most academic standards are
valuable in a world in which chaos is hailed with enthusiasm both in art
and in politics