Now suppose you read in the New York This, a daily paper, that Such-and-Such a book was the best thing of its kind since Adam.  And suppose you found the same opinion to be that of the New York Weekly That and of the New York Weekly Other.  Notwithstanding that the New York Something-Else declared that this was the rottenest hook that ever came from the press, you would be inclined to accept the conclusion of the majority of critics, would you not?  Well, I’ll tell you this:  the man who “does” the fiction week by week for the New York This and for The That and for The Other, is one and the same industrious person.  I know him well.  He has a large family to support (which is continually out of shoes) and his wife just presented him with a new set of twins the other day.  He is now trying to add the job on The Something-Else to his list.

Let us farther suppose that you are a magazine editor.  You wrote this Such-and-Such book yourself.  You are a very disagreeable person (we will imagine).  You rejected three of my stories about my experiences as a vagabond.  Farthermore, when I remonstrated with you about this over the telephone, you told me that you were very busy.  When your book came out I happened to review it for three papers.  I tried to do it justice although I didn’t think much of the book, or of anything else that you ever did.

Now, reflecting upon the vast frailty of human nature, and considering the power of the reviewer to exercise petty personal pique, I think there is little dishonesty of this nature in reviews.  The prejudice is the other way round, in “log rolling,” as it is called, among little cliques of friends.  Though I have known more than one case more or less like that of a reviewer man, otherwise fairly well balanced, who had a rabid antipathy to the work of Havelock Ellis.  Whenever he got hold of a book of Havelock Ellis’s he became blind and livid with rage.

In the period when I was a free lance reviewer, I used to review generally only books that I was particularly interested in, books on subjects with which I was familiar, books by authors whom I knew all about.  And in writing my reviews I used to wait now and then for an idea.  Those were happy, innocent, amateur days.  That is:  when my thoughts got stalled I would throw myself on a couch for a bit, or I would look out at my window, or I took a turn about Gramercy Park for a breath of air.  Reviews sometimes had to be in by the following day, or, so my editor would declare to me with much vigour over the telephone, the paper would go to smash; and then he would hold them in type for three weeks.  But they rarely had to be done within a couple of hours or less.