Furthermore, if reviewing is
a chore at worst, and at best a desire to gratify a craving for
the unappeasable, editing reviews is still more chorelike, and
seeking the unobtainable--a good review for every good book--is
quite as soul-exhausting as the creative instinct.
And, again as an editor, the perfect marriage of well attuned
minds is well enough as an ideal, but as a practicable achievement
I find myself more often drawn toward what I should call the
liaison function of a reviewer. The desire to be useful (since we
have excluded the desire to make money as a major motive) is, I
believe, an impulse which very often moves the reviewer. The
instinct to teach, to reform, to explain, to improve lies close to
the heart of nine out of ten of us. It is commoner than the
creative instinct. When it combines with it, one gets a potential
reviewer.
The reviewer as a liaison officer is a homelier description than
soul affinity or intellectual mate, but it is quite as honorable.
Books (to the editor) represent, each one of them, so much
experience, so much thought, so much imagination differently
compounded in a story, poem, tractate on science, history, or
play.
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