The Art of Letters

"What seems to be wanted, then, in a book-reviewer is that, without being servile, he should be swift to praise, and that, without being censorious, he should have the courage to blame." The sentence is from Mr. Robert Lynd's "The Art of Letters". It contains nothing novel, but the reiteration of the fact that criticism and reviewing do not consist solely of the expression of unfavorable opinion, is always useful. Mr. Lynd has written good sense about book reviewing before this. His present volume consists chiefly of reviews of various books about Bunyan, Donne, Horace Walpole, Cowper, Shelley, Wilde, Tennyson, Meredith, and others. He is a foe to the sort of biography which conceals the weaknesses of the great, and there is an unsparing recital of the faults, great and small, and the eccentricities of all these men. It is an honest attempt to combat the old-style muffled biography-the "reticent" kind of writing, which is all reticence and nothing else. He calls Pepys's Diary a "shocking" book, not so much because of Samuel's philanderings, perhaps, as because of his mixing them with psalm-singing and other holy exercises. To me, the discovery that Meredith had a snobbish fear that someone should discover that his father was a tailor, is a more shocking thing than all the intrigues of Pepys. -The Weekly Review, Vol. 4