lmost invariably wasting paper. I
believe it is a sound rule to destroy all preliminary paragraphs of this
kind. They are detestable in almost all writing, but most detestable of
all in book-reviews, where it is important to plunge all at once into the
middle of things. I say this, though there is an occasional book-reviewer
whose preliminary paragraphs I would not miss for worlds. But one has even
known book-reviewers who wrote delightful articles, though they made
scarcely any reference to the books under review at all.

To my mind, nothing more clearly shows the general misconception of the
purpose of a book-review than the attitude of the majority of journalists
to the quotational review. It is the custom to despise the quotational
review--to dismiss is as mere "gutting." As a consequence, it is generally
very badly done. It is done as if under the impression that it does not
matter what quotations one gives so long as one fills the space. One great
paper lends support to this contemptuous attitude towards quotational
criticism by refusing to pay its contributors for space taken up by
quotations. A London evening newspaper was once guilty of the same folly.
A reviewer on the staff of the latter confessed to me that to the present
day he finds it impossible, without an effort, to make quotations in a
review, because of the memory of those days when to quote was to add to
one's poverty. Despised work is seldom done well, and it is not surprising
that it is almost more seldom that one finds a quotational review well
done than any other sort. Yet how critically illuminating a quotation may
be! There are many books in regard to which quotation is the only
criticism necessary. Books of memoirs and books of verse--the least
artistic as well as the most artistic forms of literature--both lend
themselves to it. To criticize verse without giving quotations is to leave
one largely in ignorance of the quality of the verse. The selection of
passages to quote is at least as fine a test of artistic judgment as any
comment the critic can make. In regard to books of memoirs, gossip, and so
forth, one does not ask for a test of delicate artistic judgment. Books of
this kind should simply be rummaged for entertaining "news." To review
them well is to make an anthology of (in a wide sense) amusing passages.
There is no other way to portray them. And yet I have known a very
brilliant reviewer take a book of gossip about the German Court a