As a reviewer of books, my experience has been lengthy rather than considerable. It is, indeed, precisely twenty-two years since I wrote my first review, which ended, naturally, with the words "a good book to read of a winter evening before a roaring fire." I remember them because the publishers, who are lovers of platitudes, quoted them, to my deep gratification, and perhaps because I had seen them before. Since then I have reviewed at least twice as many books as there are years in this record—about as many, I suppose, as a book-page war-horse in racing trim could do in a month, or a week. My credentials are not impressive in this category, but perhaps they will suffice.

As an author, my claim to enter upon this self-contained symposium which I am about to present is somewhat stronger. Authors, of course, read all the reviews of their books, even that common American variety which runs like the telegraphic alphabet: quote— summarize—quote—quote—summarize—quote, and so on up to five dollars' worth, space rates. I have read all the reviews of my books except those which clipping bureaus seeking a subscription or kind friends wishing to chastise vicariously have neglected to send me. As an author I can speak with mingled feelings, but widely, of reviews.

Editorially my experience has been equally poignant. For ten years I have read reviews, revised and unrevised, in proof and out of it. I have cut reviews that needed cutting and meekly endured the curses of the reviewer. I have printed conscientiously reviews that had better been left unwritten, and held my head bloody but unbowed up to the buffets of the infuriated authors. As an editor I may say that I am at home, though not always happy, with reviewing and reviewers.

And now, when in one of those rare moments of meditation which even New York permits I ask myself why does every man or woman with the least stir of literature in them wish to review books, my trinitarian self—critic, author, editor—holds high debate. For a long time I have desired to fight it out, and find, if it can be found, the answer.

As an author, I have a strong distaste for reviewing. 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 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 hand-hold 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 my sentences, and the moral I so carefully hid in the last chapter, he is helpless. Sometimes 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.

I recognize his usefulness. I take his hard raps meekly and even remember them when next I begin to write. I do not hate him much when he tells the public not to read me. There is always the chance that he is right for his public; not, thank heavens, for mine. I am furious only when it is clear that he has not read me himself. But I cannot envy him. It is so much more agreeable to make points than to find them. It is so much easier, if you have a little talent, to build some kind of an engine that will run than to explain what precise fault prevents it from being the best. When I am writing a book I cannot understand the mania for criticism that seems to infect the majority of the literary kind.

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. And then when you have eaten and digested, you must tell how you feel about it— briefly, cogently, and in words that cannot be misunderstood. Furthermore, your feelings must be typical, must represent what a thousand stomachs will feel, or should feel, or could feel if they felt at all, or instead of being hailed as a critic you will be accused of dyspepsia.

The mere mental labor of picking up the contents of a book as you proceed with your criticism, and tucking them in here and there where they fit, is so great that, speaking as a reviewer, I should give up reviewing if there were no more compelling reasons than requests to write criticism. There are, there must be; and still speaking as a reviewer I begin to glimpse one or two of them. Revenge is not one. Critics have written for revenge, quoting gleefully, "O that mine enemy would write a book!" Pope is our classic example. But publishers have made that form of literary vendetta unprofitable nowadays, and I am glad they have done so. Much wit, but little criticism, has been inspired by revenge. Furthermore, I notice in my own case, and my editorial self confirms the belief, that the reviewer craves books to extol, not books to condemn. He is happiest when his author is sympathetic to his own temperament. Antipathetic books must be forced upon him.

Which leads me to the further conclusion that the prime motive for reviewing is the creative instinct. We all of us have it, all of the literary folk who make up a most surprising proportion of every community in the United States. It works on us constantly. Sometimes it comes to a head and then we do a story or a poem, an essay or a book; but in the meantime it is constantly alive down below, drawn toward every sympathetic manifestation without, craving self-expression and, in default of that, expression by others. If a book is in us we write; if it is not, we seize upon another man's child, adopt it as ours, talk of it, learn to understand it, let it go reluctantly with our blessing, and depart vicariously satisfied. That is the hope, the ever-renewed hope, with which the besotted reviewer takes up reviewing.

The creative instinct indeed is sexed, like the human that possesses it. It seeks a mystical union with the imaginings of others. The poet, the novelist, the essayist, seek the mind of the reader; the critic seeks the mind of the writer. That we get so much bad reviewing is due to incompatibility of temperament or gross discrepancy in the mating intellects. Yet reviewers (and authors), like lovers, hope ever for the perfect match.

I know one critic who tore his review in pieces because it revealed the charlatanism of his beloved author. I know an author who burnt his manuscript because his friend and critic had misunderstood him. I see a thousand reviews (and have written several of them) where book and reviewer muddle along together like the partners of everyday marriages. But next time, one always hopes, it will be different.

As an editor, I confess that I view all this effusion with some distrust. One plain fact stands high and dry above the discussion: books are being published daily, and some one must tell the busy and none too discriminating public what they are worth—not to mention the librarians who are so engaged in making out triple cards and bibliographies and fitting titles to vague recollections that they have no time left to read. Furthermore, if reviewing is a chore at worst, and at best a desire to gratify a craving for the unappeasable, editing reviews is still more chorelike, and seeking the unobtainable—a good review for every good book—is quite as soul-exhausting as the creative instinct.

And, again as an editor, the perfect marriage of well attuned minds is well enough as an ideal, but as a practicable achievement I find myself more often drawn toward what I should call the liaison function of a reviewer. The desire to be useful (since we have excluded the desire to make money as a major motive) is, I believe, an impulse which very often moves the reviewer. The instinct to teach, to reform, to explain, to improve lies close to the heart of nine out of ten of us. It is commoner than the creative instinct. When it combines with it, one gets a potential reviewer.

The reviewer as a liaison officer is a homelier description than soul affinity or intellectual mate, but it is quite as honorable. Books (to the editor) represent, each one of them, so much experience, so much thought, so much imagination differently compounded in a story, poem, tractate on science, history, or play. Each is a man's most luminous self in words, ready for others. Who wants it? Who can make use of it? Who will be dulled by it? Who exalted? It is the reviewer's task to say. He grasps the book, estimates it, calculates its audience. Then he makes the liaison. He explains, he interprets, and in so doing necessarily criticizes, abstracts, appreciates. The service is inestimable, when properly rendered. It is essential for that growing literature of knowledge which science and the work of specialists in all fields have given us. Few readers can face alone and unaided a shelf of books on radio-activity, evolution, psychology, or sociology with any hope of selecting without guidance the best, or with any assurance that they dare reject as worthless what they do not understand. The house of the interpreter has become the literary journal, and its usefulness will increase.

A liaison of a different kind is quite as needful in works of sheer imagination. Here the content is human, the subject the heart, or life as one sees it. But reading, like writing, is a fine art that few master. Only the most sensitive, whose minds are as quick as their emotions are responsive, can go to the heart of a poem or a story. They need an interpreter, a tactful interpreter, who will give them the key and let them find their own chamber. Or who will wave them away from the door, or advise a brief sojourn. To an editor such an interpreter is an ideal reviewer. He will desire to be useful, and passionately attempt it. He will feel his responsibility first to art and next to the public, and then to his author, and last (as an editor I whisper it) to the publisher. Reviewers forget the author and the public. Their mandate comes from art (whose representative in the flesh is, or should be, the editor). But their highest service is to make a liaison between the reader and his book.

And the conclusion of this debate is, I think, a simple one. Reviewing is a major sport, fascinating precisely because of its difficulty, compelling precisely because it appeals to strong instincts. For most of us it satisfies that desire to work for some end which we ourselves approve, regardless of costs. The editor, sardonically aware of a world that refuses to pay much for what men do to please themselves or to reform others, sees here his salvation, and is thankful.