And the hack reviewer, when he likes a
book, likes everything and applies Shakespearian adjectives and
Tolstoyan attributes to creatures of dust and tinsel, or blunders
helplessly into dispraise of scholarship, restraint, subtlety, taste,
originality--anything that he does not understand.
There is no help except to set books upon their planes and assort
them into their categories--which is merely to define them before
beginning to criticize. This is elementary work as I have said,
which may lead the critic only so far as the threshold, and cannot
always give the reader that complete and sympathetic comprehension
of what he has read which is the final object of literary
criticism. However, in an age when overemphasis has been
commercialized, and where the powerful forces of print can be
mobilized and sent charging everywhere to bowl down contrary
opinions, it is indispensable.
Scholarly books have been dispraised because they were not
exciting; fine novels have been sneered at because they were hard
to read; cheap stories have been proclaimed great because they
wore a pretense of seriousness; sentimentality has been welcomed
because it was warm hearted; indecency has been condemned for
immorality; immorality has slipped through as romance; daring has
been mistaken for novelty; painstaking dulness, for careful art;
self-revelation, for world knowledge; pretty writing, for
literature; violence, for strength; and warped and unhealthy
egoism for the wise sincerity which is the soul of literature.
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