It may be thought that an attitude of criticism like this may easily sink into Pharisaism—­a sort of “superior-person” aloofness from other people.  And no doubt the critic, like other people, needs to beat his breast and pray, “God be merciful to me, a—­critic.”  On the whole, however, the critic is far less of a professional faultfinder than is sometimes imagined.  He is first of all a virtue-finder, a singer of praise.  He is not concerned with getting rid of the dross except in so far as it hides the gold.  In other words, the destructive side of criticism is purely a subsidiary affair.  None of the best critics have been men of destructive minds.  They are like gardeners whose business is more with the flowers than with the weeds.  If I may change the metaphor, the whole truth about criticism is contained in the Eastern proverb which declares that “Love is the net of Truth.”  It is as a lover that the critic, like the lyric poet and the mystic, will be most excellently symbolized.

XXIV.—­BOOK REVIEWING

I notice that in Mr. Seekers’ Art and Craft of Letters series no volume on book-reviewing has yet been announced.  A volume on criticism has been published, it is true, but book-reviewing is something different from criticism.  It swings somewhere between criticism on the one hand and reporting on the other.  When Mr. Arthur Bourchier a few years ago, in the course of a dispute about Mr. Walkley’s criticisms, spoke of the dramatic critic as a dramatic reporter, he did a very insolent thing.  But there was a certain reasonableness in his phrase.  The critic on the Press is a news-gatherer as surely as the man who is sent to describe a public meeting or a strike.  Whether he is asked to write a report on a play of Mr. Shaw’s or an exhibition of etchings by Mr. Bone or a volume of short stories by Mr. Conrad or a speech by Mr. Asquith or a strike on the Clyde, his function is the same.  It is primarily to give an account, a description, of what he has seen or heard or read.  This may seem to many people—­especially to critics—­a degrading conception of a book-reviewer’s work.  But it is quite the contrary.  A great deal of book-reviewing at the present time is dead matter.  Book-reviews ought at least to be alive as news.

At present everybody is ready to write book-reviews.  This is because nearly everybody believes that they are the easiest kind of thing to write.  People who would shrink from offering to write poems or leading articles or descriptive sketches of football matches, have an idea that reviewing books is something with the capacity for which every man is born, as he is born with the capacity for talking prose.  They think it is as easy as having opinions.  It is simply making a few remarks at the end of a couple of hours spent with a book in an armchair.  Many men and women—­novelists, barristers, professors and others—­review books in their spare