About forty years ago, The Washington Post published a review of a biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton, I suppose the one by Edward Rice. The reviewer was Anthony Burgess, the review was informative and readable. Presently the Post's book section carried a letter praising the quality of Burgess's sketch of Burton's life, and remarking on his graciousness in making a passing mention of Rice's book.
Today I went to the Gutenberg Project to check on something Macaulay wrote, and having found it, read on in the Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays, Volume III. In part this was a hunt for typographical errors to be sent in as errata: the text appears to have been created through optical character recognition (OCR), which is pretty good but here and there subject to error. In part this was because (of course) Macaulay is very readable.
The essays in the volume are mostly reviews, and reviews of the sort that the Post's correspondent complained of. The author is often enough dismissed in the first couple of paragraphs, usually with dispraise:
There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy, who was suffered to make his choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa was too much for him. He changed his mind, and went to the oar. Guicciardini, though certainly not the most amusing of writers, is a Herodotus or a Froissart, when compared with Dr. Nares.
After that one gets Macaulay's own thoughts on the subject of the book. He has more than a few, and if not always convincing, they are usually entertaining. I suppose that a close criticism of Dr. Nares's work would make for much duller reading than Macaulay's harsh account of Lord Burleigh.
Still I wonder that he didn't consider the application his readers might make of
Almost all the distinguished writers who have treated of English history are advocates. Mr. Hallam and Sir James Mackintosh alone are entitled to be called judges. But the extreme austerity of Mr. Hallam takes away something from the pleasure of reading his learned, eloquent, and judicious writings. He is a judge, but a hanging judge, the Page or Buller of the High Court of Literary Justice. His black cap is in constant requisition. In the long calendar of those whom he has tried, there is hardly one who has not, in spite of evidence to character and recommendations to mercy, been sentenced and left for execution.
After reading your post, I went looking for Auden's exact words about reviewing and avoiding being negative and I found something new (to me) from him - this template for reviewing, which I like very much:
ReplyDelete"1. I can see this is well done and I like it.
2. I can see this is well done but I don’t like it.
3. I can see this is well done and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it.
4. I can see that this is poorly done but I like it.
5. I can see that this is poorly done and I don’t like it."
A useful template.
ReplyDeleteRandall Jarrell made a name as (Wilfrid Sheed's words) a boy gunslinger, a merciless reviewer. But in his first collection of criticism, Poetry and the Age he left most of the negative criticism out, and what I remember of it is chiefly his advocacy for Whitman. John Simon reviewed movies for many years, often harshly; but of the fifty or one hundred of his reviews that I read, I remember one positive one and one negative one, and I remember the name only of the positive one.