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 eyes that see it, in all the souls that conceive it.”  Here he gets nearer the idea of criticism as portraiture, and practically every critic of importance has been a portrait-painter.  In this respect Saint-Beuve is at one with Macaulay, Pater with Matthew Arnold, Anatole France (occasionally) with Henry James.  They may portray authors rather than books, artists rather than their work, but this only means that criticism at its highest is a study of the mind of the artist as reflected in his art.