eneral idea which has
little more basis than a good many other general ideas. But that a very
large amount of reviewing is determined by doubtless well-meaning
incompetence, there is no doubt whatever. It is on the whole the most
difficult kind of newspaper writing, and it is on the whole the most
lightly assigned and the most irresponsibly performed. I have heard of
newspapers where the reviews depended almost wholly on the accident of
some of the staff taking a holiday, or being laid for a time on the
shelf, or being considered not up to other work; of others, though this
I own is scarcely credible, where the whole reviewing was farmed out to
a manager, to be allotted to devils as good to him seemed; of many where
the reviews were a sort of exercising-ground on which novices were
trained, broken-down hacks turned out to grass, and invalids allowed a
little gentle exercise. And I know of not a few papers and not a few
reviewers in which and by whom, errors and accidents excepted, the best
work possible is given to one of the most important kinds of work. Of
common mistakes on the subject, which are not merely silly crazes, such
as the log-rolling craze and the five-pound note craze and the like, the
worst known to me, though it is shared by some who should know better,
is that a specialist is the best reviewer. I do not say that he is
always the worst; but that is about as far as my charity, informed by
much experience, can go. Even if he has no special craze or megrim, and
does not decide offhand that a man is hopeless because he calls Charles
the Great Charlemagne, or _vice versa_, he is constantly out of focus.
The perfect reviewer would be (and the only reviewer whose reviews are
worth reading is he who more or less approximates to this ideal) the
Platonic or pseudo-Platonic philosopher who is "second best in
everything," who has enough special knowledge not to miss merits or
defects, and enough general knowledge to estimate the particular subject
at, and not above, its relative value to the whole. There have been good
critics who were unable to bring themselves down to the mere reading of
ephemeral work, but I do not think they were the better for this; I am
sure that there never was a good reviewer, even of the lowest trash, who
was not _in posse_ or _in esse_ a good critic of the highest and most
enduring literature. The writer of funny articles, and the "slater," and
the intelligent _compte-rendu_ man, and the pe