I have cut reviews that needed cutting and meekly endured the
curses of the reviewer. I have printed conscientiously reviews
that had better been left unwritten, and held my head bloody but
unbowed up to the buffets of the infuriated authors. As an editor
I may say that I am at home, though not always happy, with
reviewing and reviewers.
And now, when in one of those rare moments of meditation which
even New York permits I ask myself why does every man or woman
with the least stir of literature in them wish to review books, my
trinitarian self--critic, author, editor--holds high debate. For a
long time I have desired to fight it out, and find, if it can be
found, the answer.
As an author, I have a strong distaste for reviewing. In the
creative mood of composition, or in weary relaxation, reviewing
seems the most ungrateful of tasks. Nothing comes whole to a
reviewer. Half of every book must elude him, and the other half he
must compress into snappy phrases. I watch him working upon that
corpus, which so lately was a thing of life and movement--my book--
and see that he cannot lift it; that he must have some hand-hold
to grip it by--my style or my supposed interest in the Socialist
Party, or the fact that I am a professor or a Roman Catholic.
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