Yet in so far as he
is intended as a portrait of a critic, he stands as an ideal of
the leisured view of books. There has been no leisured view of
books in America since Thoreau, or Washington Irving. Even Poe was
feverish. Our books are read on the subway, or after the theater,
and so I fear it is in London--in London as it is.
Coldly, palpably real is the next critic of my acquaintance, the
academic reviewer. He does not write for the newspapers, for he
despises them, and they are rather scornful of his style, which is
usually lumbering, and his idea that 1921 is the proper time in
which to review the books of 1920. But you will find him in the
weeklies, and rampant in the technical journals.
The academic reviewer is besotted by facts, or their absence. The
most precious part of the review to him is the last paragraph in
which he points out misspellings, bad punctuation, and
inaccuracies generally. Like a hound dog in a corn field, he never
sees his books as a whole, but snouts and burrows along the trail
he is following. If he knows the psychology of primitive man,
primitive psychology he will find and criticize, even in a book on
the making of gardens.
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