e 5000 odd books annually brought out in the United States
there are possibly not more than 100, including half a dozen novels,
which are worthy subjects for the professional critic. If this be
deemed an exaggeration, one has only to look over the Publishers' List
of twenty-five years ago and see how many books then published are
read to-day. Why, then, do the 4900 receive any attention?

Books, like every other commercial commodity, whether presented under
the guise of art or science, have their production regulated by the
law of supply and demand. The ability to read print in the United
States is pretty general, and this ability is diffused among all sorts
and conditions of people of vastly varied ideas as to what may give
instruction, satisfaction, or pleasure in the form of books. We know
that a large majority of the people who read do not read what is
considered the best. The enormous circulation of the "Yellow Press,"
the low literary value of books of rapidly succeeding phenomenal
editions, prove this. Criticism, except in acknowledged "literary"
reviews, has been obliged to take into account the mental limitations
and tastes of the readers of the 4900 books, and so it fixes its
standard of popular exposition and elucidation at a little above the
average taste, and does its best to explain according to the author's
own lights what to criticise would be remorselessly to condemn.

But do all the one hundred worthy and elect books receive correct
treatment according to the tenets of criticism? it may be asked.
Probably not at every hand and in all cases. And here may be
introduced another cause of the lack of proficient literary criticism
noticed by the literary foreigner in American magazines, and
especially in those pages of the daily and weekly press devoted to
books. The discussion of books which once occupied several pages in
American monthly magazines is now principally confined to the books
issued by the publishing house which also publishes the magazine. What
has come to be known as the "news value" of books cannot suffer a
review of a novel by a prominent author or of a book on a current
political or sociological topic to appear a month or two or three
after the publication of the book itself. The eagerness of the public
can hardly wait for an elaborate review in the press. Thus the
newspapers rival one another in setting before their readers the first
"news" of the book. It is usually impossible to expect