I identify my classes of
reviewers by their habits, not their dogmas.
But in order to clear the ground let me make first a larger
distinction, into mythical reviewers, bad but useful reviewers,
bad and not useful reviewers, and good reviewers. Like the
nineteenth century preacher I will dispose of the false, dwell
upon the wicked, and end (briefly) with that heaven of literary
criticism where all the authors are happy and all the reviewers
excellent.
The reviewer I know best never, I profoundly believe, has existed,
and I fear never will exist. He is the familiar figure of English
novels--moderately young, a bachelor, with a just insufficient
income in stocks. Oxford or Cambridge is his background, and his
future is the death of a rich aunt or a handsome marriage. In the
meantime, there is always a pile of books waiting in his chambers
to be reviewed at "a guinea a page," when he has leisure, which is
apparently only once or twice a week. The urban pastoral thus
presented is one which Americans may well be envious of--_otium
cum dignitate_. But I have never encountered this reviewer in
London. I fear he exists only for the novelists, who created him
in order to have a literary person with enough time on his hands
to pursue the adventures required by the plot.
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