DEFINITIONS.*

Tins is a very delightful book. I am obliged to say this, though it is quite opposed to all my predilections, all my safe and simple rules as to what makes a good book. It is packed

much too full of good things. It is both gay and severe. At one and the same moment Mr. Canby is " sly " and frank—

here the coquette of literature, there the downright hoyden, the country girl of the Intellectual Main Street. It is a fascinating, if a bewildering, almost breathless, mixture. But there is another quality in the book which is even more perturbing, though at the same time I admit extremely attractive. It deals with what the Hangman in Measure for Measure calls "our mystery" in a way that will alarm the heart of every literary journalist in Fleet Street. After reading the essays "A Prospectus for Criticism," "The Race of Reviewers," "The Sins of Reviewing," and "Flat Prose," one feels as uncomfortable, as much found out and "exposed to view," as a Roman matron after "that horrid man" had smuggled himself into, and then given away, the mysteries of Bona Dea I It is really shocking to have all the

doubts and difficulties of the profession, and all our little arts and dodges for getting over them, turned inside out and then left with the ugly, unfinished, untidy side showing shamefully.

The " gives-away " in the Reviewing Essays make one thoroughly uncomfortable, and will force such explanations from our matrons of both sexes as " It oughtn't to be allowed, indeed it oughtn't" ; "Just fancy if this book were to get into the hands of young people I " "What a scandal an enemy to literature could make of it if he wanted to be nasty," "What Shaw might say of it is a horror to think of." In a word, many journalistic readers of the book will feel just as Mr. Pepys did when he read Robert Barclay's Apology for the Quakers. He was so much upset by reading it that he declared the book ought not to have been published. As Stevenson pointed out, the trouble was that he felt that there was a considerable risk of his being " converted " by the Apology. But that was an appalling thought. If he got " religion " after this fashion, what would become of the fiddling on the leads, the singing of "Speak not of Swans" with Mercer, the chambermaid, and all the other delights of life ? It was a terrible, uninsurable risk, and it quite un- manned him to dwell on it. So when the journalistic reviewer reads this book and all the things it says about the duties of the writer, reviewer, and editor, he feels inclined to say, "Where shall I be if all these standards are enforced as to thought and style ? I shall never be able to write after this. It simply means putting the shutters up, that is what it means ! These deadly truths ought to be kept under lock and key like poisons. Mr. Canby is a traitor to his trade." In fine, we get back to the old Shakesperean aphorism, "All which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down."

But, seriously, Mr. C,anby's hook is a most admirable piece of criticism, good for all of us to read and ponder, and we are very grateful. Especially should we thank him for not doing the schoolmaster too much, and for letting us feel all the time that he is the brother of the delinquent and fellow-sinner. If he sthl. us, one knows that he is also stinging himself. Besides, he has in him a touch of humour and of slightly sar- donic gaiety which acts like a true emollient. Take the following delightful passage from "The Race of Reviewers" :—

"As an author. I have a strong distaste for revkwing. In the creative mood of composition, or in weary relaxation, reviewing seems the most ungrateful of tasks. Nothing comes whole to a reviewer. Half of every book must elude him, and the other half he must compress into snappy phrases. I watch him working

• Desnitione, By Henry Seidel Canby. London : Harem% Brace and Co,

upon that corpus, which so lately was a thing of life and movement —my book—and see that he cannot lift it ; that he must have some handhold to grip it by—my style or my supposed interest in the Socialist Party, or the fact that I am a professor or a Roman Catholic. Unless he can get some phrase that will explain the characters of my women, the length of ray sentences, and the moral I so carefully hid in the last chapter, he is helpless. Some- times I find him running for a column without finding a gate to my mind, and then giving it up in mid-paragraph. Sometimes he gets inside, but dashes for the exit sign and is out before I know what he thinks. Sometimes he finds an idea to his liking, wraps up in it, and goes to sleep."

That is excellent. Here is another and neighbouring passage, which is full of zest :— " As a reviewer I must again confess, although as an editor I may bitterly regret the confession, that the passion for reviewing is almost inexplicable. Reviewing has the primal curse of hard labor upon it. You must do two kinds of work at once, and be adequately rewarded for neither. First you must digest another man's conception, assimilate his ideas, absorb his imagination. It is like eating a cold dinner on a full stomach."

Another extraordinarily interesting passage, and one which I fear must be at the moment harassing the mind of my Literary Editor, is the attempt to hold the balance between catholicity in reviewing and selection—between trying to say something about every book and only picking out the really good books for notice. Here is Mr. Canby on the two methods, a passage which, as will be seen, ends rather rashly in trust- ing "the intelligence of the reader." I confess that I have my doubts as to the wisdom of this calling in of a new world to

redress the balance of the old.

"Ideally, then, the editors of a catholic review should have definite convictions, if flexible minds, established principles, if a wide latitude of application. But although a review may thus be made catholic, it cannot thus attain comprehensiveness. There are too ninny books ; too many branches upon the luxuriant tree of modern knowledge. No editorial group, no editorial staff, can survey the field competently unless they strictly delimit it by selection, and that means not to be comprehensiVe. Yet if the experts are to be called in, the good critics, the good scholars, the good scientists, until every book is reviewed by the writer best qualified to review it, then we must hope to attain truth by averages as the scientists do, rather than by dogmatic edict. For if it is difficult to guarantee in a few that sympathy with all earnest books which does not preclude rigid honesty in the application of firmly held principles, it is more difficult with the many. And if it is hard to exclude bias, inaccuracy, over-statement, and inade- quacy from the work even of a small and chosen group, it is still harder to be certain of complete competence if the net is thrown more widely. In fact, there is no absolute insurance against bad criticism except the intelligence of the reader. He must discount where discount is necessary, he must weight the authority of the reviewer, he must listen to the critic as the Protestant to his minister, willing to be instructed, but aware of the fallibility of man. Hence, a journal of comprehensive criticism must first select its reviewers with the greatest care and then print vouchers for their opinions, which will be the names of the reviewers. Hence, it must open its columns to rebuttals or qualifications, so that the reader may form his own conclusions as to the validity of the criticism, and, k ftcr he has read the book, judge its critics."

We have only one serious objection to this admirable untrussing of the humorous editor and reviewer, and that is in the following passage, or rather sentence : "We are afflicted with that complex of democracy—a distrust of the best." As a whole-souled Democrat I indignantly protest and deny. Why should poor Democracy be loaded up with such a flagrant crime as the distrust of the best ? If by Democracy you mean the majority—and if you don't mean that I don't know what you mean—what proof is there that the majority has any greater distrust of the best than the minority ? As a matter of fact, I hold minorities to be, on the whole, much less wide- minded and much more hide-bound than majorities. Carlyle misled the world when he said that the majorities were always wrong, and that it was the voice of the majorities which yelled " Crucify him I Crucify Him ! " It was nothing of the kind. It was the voice of cruel, hard-hearted, immobile Pharisees. The poor majority was bewildered ; but that was all. That majorities are not very active I admit ; but they never kick and scold and scream at things as the minorities do. It was not the heart of the American people which refused tgiecognize or even to tolerate Walt Whitman, but the cogifies—the people who said, like the Royal Academicians in Charles Keene's drawing, "Take it away ! If this fellow's right, we're all wrong."

It would be quite easy to go on all day and all night reviewing Mr. Canby's stimulating and suggestive book. But, after all, the worst and most useless thing in the world is a long review. It carries with it Bacon's cynical description of Kings' speeches. He did not want Kings to upset the world by epigrams and

"slogans," and therefore forbade them making short speeches. He had, however, little objection to long harangues because they were tiresome things and little noted. All the same, we must find an inch or two in which to record the fact that Mr. Canby has the real sense of literature in him and, when he is not making us uncomfortable on the professional side, can be a delightful critic. His article on Conrad and Melville is not only thoroughly good reading, but very illuminating. He hits off the difference between the two men absolutely when he says that Conrad has remained much more of a Slav than he or any of us have been willing to admit, and then he goes on to tell a story which really opens a window into the Slav mind and the Slav way of living and thinking. "A friend of mine, married to a Slav, told me of her husband, how, with his cab at the door, and dinner waiting somewhere, he would sit brooding (so he said) over the wrongs of his race. It is dangerous to generalize in racial characteristics, but no one will dispute a tendency to brood as a characteristic of the Slay." Next Mr. Canby tells us how Henry James, though he was so patient and minute an analyst, did not brood. "His mind was Occidental. He wished to know why the wheels went round." This distinction between brooding and microscopic examination is admirable. Our only quarrel, indeed, with this essay is that Mr. Canby does not speak quite highly enough of Melville and his prose. No doubt it is uncritical of me, but, all the same, I do like to see the brazen trumpet blown in front of the great verbal artificer who sailed the South Pacific.

We have left to the last the perfectly gorgeous chapter "Flat Prose." One feels inclined to say of it the sort of things that Charles Lamb said about Walter Savage Landor's poem, "Rose Aylmer." He said he lived upon it for six weeks. I shall live upon "Flat Prose" probably for six months and maybe for six years.

I wish I could dwell upon the knocks, or rather half-knocks, that Mr. Canby gives to what he calls "flat, colourless prose." But I cannot. I have only space to note that, like Dr. South, when lie begins to write about "plainness of speech" and the fatal imposture of words" and so on, he falls into the position of the lady analysed by Congreve. "She is the thing that she despises." He professes to despise artful prose, and then sets off full gallop down that flowery and fascinating road. Well ! Well ! Understanding the written word is a terribly difficult business, and being of an entirely uncritical nature I sometimes feel inclined to say that I am

"Contented if I may enjoy,

The things that others understand."

Yet after all I realize that this is a weak, cowardly, almost criminal act of self-indulgence and that I ought to play the man, pull myself together, and wrestle with the meanings of things and what somebody in Macbeth calls "understood relations," a dreadful and dangerous "advance agent" dive after Einstein. The fact is, I yield almost instantly to the hypnosis of beautiful verse or the enchantments of rhythmical prose. I am " off " long before I begin to ask myself what it means. I daresay I shall be hanged for it in some future life or in that past upside down which we call the future, but till the scaffold is in sight I mean to enjoy myself.

.1. ST. Lou STRACHEY.