This awkward experience will in all
probability not happen to me, but it might happen to a writer younger than
me. At any rate it is a fine thought. The average critic always calls me,
both in praise and dispraise, "photographic"; and I always rebut the
epithet with disdain, because in the sense meant by the average critic I
am not photographic. But supposing that in a deeper sense I were?
Supposing a young writer turned up and forced me, and some of my
contemporaries--us who fancy ourselves a bit--to admit that we had been
concerning ourselves unduly with inessentials, that we had been worrying
ourselves to achieve infantile realisms? Well, that day would be a great
and a disturbing day--for us.
1911
BOOKS OF THE YEAR
[_12 Jan. '11_]
The practice of reviewing the literature of the year at the end thereof is
now decaying. Newspapers still give a masterly survey of the motor-cars of
the year. I remember the time when it was part of my duty as a serious
journalist to finish at Christmas a two-thousand word article, full of
discrimination as fine as Irish lace, about the fiction of the year; and
other terrifying specialists were engaged to deal amply with the remaining
branches of literature. To-day, one man in one column and one day will
polish off what five of us scarcely exhausted in seven columns and seven
days.
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