Why Authors Go Wrong, and Other Explanations

by Grant M. Overton

15

Yet books are still in the main “reviewed,” instead of being given into the hands of trained news reporters. Anything worse than the average book “review” it would certainly be difficult to find in the length and breadth of America. And England, despite the possession of some brilliant talents, is nearly as badly off.

No one who is not qualified as a critic should attempt to criticise new books.

There are but few critics in any generation—half a dozen or perhaps a dozen men in any single one of the larger countries are all who could qualify at a given time; that much seems evident. What is a critic? A critic is a person with an education unusually wide either in life or in letters, and preferably in both. He is a person with huge backgrounds. He has read thousands of books and has by one means or another abstracted the essence of thousands more. He has perhaps travelled a good deal, though this is not essential; but he has certainly lived with a most peculiar and exceptional intensity, descending to greater emotional and intellectual depths than the majority of mankind and scaling higher summits; he has, in some degree, the faculty of living other people’s lives and sharing their human experiences which is the faculty that, in a transcendent degree, belongs to the novelist and storyteller. A critic knows the past and the present so well that he is able to erect standards, or uncover old standards, by which he can and does measure the worth of everything that comes before him. He can actually show you, in exact and inescapable detail, how De Morgan compares with Dickens and how Gilbert K. Chesterton ranks with Swift and whether Thackeray learned more from Fielding or from Daniel Defoe and he can trace the relation between a period in the life of Joseph Conrad and certain scenes and settings in The Arrow of Gold.

Such a man is a critic. Of course critics make mistakes but they are not mistakes of ignorance, of personal unfitness for the task, of pretension to a knowledge they haven’t. They are mistakes of judgment; such mistakes as very eminent jurists sometimes make after years on the bench. The jurist is reversed by the higher court and the critic is reversed by the appellate decree of the future.

The mistakes of a real critic, like the mistakes of a real jurist, are always made on defensible, and sometimes very sound, grounds; they are reasoned and seasoned conclusions even if they are not the correct conclusions. The mistakes of the 9,763 persons who assume the critical ermine without any fitness to wear it are quite another matter; and they are just the mistakes that would be made by a layman sitting in the jurist’s seat. The jurist knows the precedents, the rules of evidence, the law; he is tolerant and admits exceptions into the record. So the critic; with the difference that the true critic merely presides and leaves the verdict to that great jury of true and right instincts which we call “the public.” The genuine critic is concerned chiefly to see that the case gets before the jury cleanly. Without presuming to tell the jury what its verdict must be—except in extraordinary circumstances—he does instruct it what the verdict should be on, what should be considered in arriving at it, what principles should guide the decision.

But the near-critic (God save the mark!) has it in his mind that he must play judge and jury too. He doesn’t like the writer’s style, or thinks the plot is poor, or this bad or that defective. Instead of carefully outlining the evidence on which the public might reach a correct verdict on these points he delivers a dictum. It doesn’t go, of course, at least for long; and it never will.

Let us be as specific as is possible in this, as specific, that is, as a general discussion can be and remain widely applicable.

I don’t like the writer’s style. I am not a person of critical equipment or pretensions. I am, we will say, a book reporter. I do not declare, with a fiat and a flourish, that the style is bad; I merely present a chunk of it. There is the evidence, and nothing else is so competent, so relevant or so material, as the lawyers would say. I may, in the necessity to be brief and the absence of space for an excerpt, say that the style is adjectival, or adverbial, or diffuse, or involved or florid or something of that sort, if I know it to be. These would be statements of fact. “Bad” is a statement of opinion.

I may call the plot “weak” if it is weak (a fact) and if I know weakness in a plot (which qualifies me to announce the fact). But if I call the plot “poor” I am taking a good deal upon myself. Its poorness is a matter of opinion. Some stories are spoiled by a strong plot which dominates the reader’s interest almost to the exclusion of other things—fine characterization, atmosphere, and so on.

And even restrictions of space can hardly excuse the lack of courtesy, or worse, shown by the near-critic who calls the plot weak or the style diffuse or involved, however much these may be facts, and who does not at least briefly explain in what way the style is diffuse (or involved) and wherein the weakness of the plot resides. But to put a finger on the how or the where or the why requires a knowledge and an insight that the near-critic does not possess and will not take the trouble to acquire; so we are asking him to do the impossible. Nevertheless we can ask him to do the possible; and that is to leave off talking or writing on matters he knows nothing about.