SNAP SHOTS

...How can any reviewer justify much of the personalities that creep into the columns of the newspapers and the magazines...

...here his own personality may color but not alter the essential justice which any author has the right to expect...

...But I am waxing sentimental...

...Would that all critics could really be able to contribute that necessary umbrella to the authors who need it...

...It is almost impossible and is the result of our over-capitalization in this field as in so many others...

...but he promises to take no offense—this time—if you don't...

...It seems to me that the fairest way, in the general run of novels, is to be, at heart, mainly interpretative...

...To others, however, there is great satisfaction in seeing some personal comment which shows, at least, that the book has been noticed and perhaps understood...

...The reviewer should not consider himself superior to any and he should soon choose his manner of criticism...

...Remember that something like 17,000 books are published a year and that the greater percentage of these are novels...

...Then, indeed, would the reviewer's lot be a grateful one and the author would feel some sympathy and kindliness towards his present ogre—the professional reviewer who pounds out his paragraphs and forgets them...

...for only in exceptional cases is the sale materially altered or his own opinion of his work changed...

...I started out to review the novels and I have reviewed the reviewer...

...To some of their authors what the reviewer may say is a matter of indifference...

...Would...

...The pile of books before me has made me maunder on...

...but to him so many of the novels come with only their own story that he must, of necessity, remain impersonal...

...Of course, a reviewer may be more than that, for in some of the greatest critics one finds a distinct creative tendency...

...The critic should endeavor first of all to see what the author has tried to do, make this clear, and then see if, in the reviewer's opinion, he has done it...

...Suppose he were to stop and think of the pain he caused —would he do it...

...How then can he afford to dismiss it flippantly, not with words which may condemn the story but with darts that may wound the author...

...Unless the reviewer himself has been a failure at creative work there must, to revert to a sentence above, come to him each time he reads a novel a questioning of what lay behind the author's impulse to tell that particular story, and also, perhaps, some little grain of sympathy at all the effort which may obviously have gone into its telling...

...Such criticism is rare now-a-days, partly because the standards of criticism are not over high and because many of the books do not encourage such criticism...

...There is so much opportunity for the professional reviewer of books to be sentimental were he to permit himself the luxury of thinking upon all the heartaches of authorship...

...Consider, in a year the books that will really live out their decade and count those worth re-reading...

...Does his dollar a foot for space...

...How can the field be adequately covered by even the most omniverous reader—and how can he know from reading the average review what to choose...

...Here his own peculiar philosophy of life—if he have one—may have full play...

...This does not take away the possibility of a further criticism as to whether what has been attempted or accomplished is worth while...

...In other words, the subject under review may be merely the excuse, through its own lack, for the presentation of an entirely contrary scheme of life...

...I recall Balzac's phrase that "a writer who is unprepared for criticism is like a person starting on a journey without his umbrella and expecting only clear weather...

...In fact, while it is to be regretted that cleverness is more desired than profundity, the average novel incites it...

...And yet there is something due to all books no matter how well done or how poorly...