s the
book-review with the same want. Whether that it so or not, the book-review
is not, as a rule, the place for abstract argument. Not that one wants to
shut out controversy. There is no pleasanter review to read than a
controversial review. Even here, however, one demands portrait as well as
argument. It is, in nine cases out of ten, waste of time to assail a
theory when you can portray a man. It always seems to me to be hopelessly
wrong for the reviewer of biographies, critical studies, or books of a
similar kind, to allow his mind to wander from the main figure in the book
to the discussion of some theory or other that has been incidentally put
forward. Thus, in a review of a book on Stevenson, the important thing is
to reconstruct the figure of Stevenson, the man and the artist. This is
much more vitally interesting and relevant than theorizing on such
questions as whether the writing of prose or of poetry is the more
difficult art, or what are the essential characteristics of romance. These
and many other questions may arise, and it is the proper task of the
reviewer to discuss them, so long as their discussion is kept subordinate
to the portraiture of the central figure. But they must not be allowed to
push the leading character in the whole business right out of the review.
If they are brought in at all, they must be brought in, like moral
sentiments, inoffensively by the way.

In pleading that a review should be a portrait of a book to a vastly
greater degree than it is a direct comment on the book, I am not pleading
that it should be a mere bald summary. The summary kind of review is no
more a portrait than is the Scotland Yard description of a man wanted by
the police. Portraiture implies selection and a new emphasis. The synopsis
of the plot of a novel is as far from being a good review as is a
paragraph of general comment on it. The review must justify itself, not as
a reflection of dead bones, but by a new life of its own.

Further, I am not pleading for the suppression of comment and, if need be,
condemnation. But either to praise or condemn without instances is dull.
Neither the one thing nor the other is the chief thing in the review. They
are the crown of the review, but not its life. There are many critics to
whom condemnation of books they do not like seems the chief end of man.
They regard themselves as engaged upon a holy war against the Devil and
his works. Horace complained that it was only poet