So much for the anatomy of a book review. Put backbone into it. Read before you write. Look before you leap. Be just, be fair, be impartial; and when you damn, damn with faint praise, and when you praise, praise with faint damns. Be all things to all books. Remember the author. Review as you would be reviewed by. If a book is nothing in your life it may be the fault of your life. And it is always less expensive to revise your life than to revise the book. Your life is not printed from plates that cost a fortune to make and another fortune to throw away. “Life is too short to read inferior books,” eh? Books are too good to be guillotined by inferior lives—or inferior livers. Bacon said some books were to be digested, but he neglected to mention a cure for dyspeptics.
5
But when we say so much we have only touched the surface of a profound matter. The truth of that matter, the full depth of it, may as well be plumbed at once. A book cannot be reviewed. It can only be written about or around. It is insusceptible of such handling as is accorded a play, for example.
A man with more or less experience in seeing plays and with more or less knowledge of the drama goes to the first performance of a new comedy or tragedy or whatnot. There it is before him in speech and motion and color. It is acted. The play, structurally, is good or bad; the acting is either good or bad. Every item of the performance is capable of being resolved separately and estimated; and the collective interest or importance of these items can be determined, is, in fact, determined once and for all by the performance itself. The observer gets their collective impact at once and his task is really nothing but a consideration afterward in such detail as he cares to enter upon of just how that impact was secured. Did you ever, in your algebra days, or even in your arithmetically earnest childhood, “factor” a quantity or a number? Take 91. A little difficult, 91, but after some mental and pencil investigation you found that it was obtained by multiplying 13 by 7. Very well. You knew how the impact of 91 was produced; it was produced by multiplying 13 by 7. You had reviewed the number 91 in the sense that you might review a play.
Now it is impossible to review a book as you would factor a number or a play. You can’t be sure of the factors that make up the collective impact of the book upon you. There’s no way of getting at them. They are summed up in the book itself and no book can be split into multipliable parts. A book is not the author times an idea times the views of the publisher. A book is unfactorable, often undecipherable. It is a growth. It is a series of accretions about a central thought. The central thought is like the grain of sand which the oyster has pearled over. The central thought may even be a diseased thought and the pearl may be a very lovely and brilliant pearl, superficially at least, for all that. There is nothing to do with a book but to take it as it is or go at it hammer and tongs, scalpel and curette, chisel and auger—smashing it to pieces, scraping and cutting, boring and cleaving through the layers of words and subsidiary ideas and getting down eventually to the heart of it, to the grain of sand, the irritant thought that was the earliest foundation.
Such surgery may be highly skilful or highly and wickedly destructive; it may uncover something worth while and it may not; naturally, you don’t go in for much of it, if you are wise, and as a general thing you take a book as it is and not as it once was or as the author may, in the innocence of his heart or the subtlety of his experience, have intended it to be.
6
Surgery on a book is like surgery on a human being, for a book is alive; ordinarily the only justification for it is the chance of saving life. If the operator can save the author’s life (as an author) by cutting he ought to go ahead, of course. The fate of one book is nothing as against the lives of books yet unwritten; the feelings of the author are not necessarily of more account than the screams of the sick child’s parent. There have been such literary operations for which, in lieu of the $1,000 fee of medical practise, the surgeon has been rewarded and more than repaid by a private letter of acknowledgement and heartfelt thanks. No matter how hard up the recipient of such a letter may be, the missive seldom turns up in those auction rooms where the A. L. S. (or Autograph Letter with Signature) sometimes brings an unexpected and astonishingly large price.