could
not help seeing that the poor old master was repeating himself, though
he would not have phrased the case in such brutal terms. Then the chill
wonder how long he could hope to escape the like fate pierced him, and
for a moment he could not silence the question whether it might not have
already befallen him. In another moment he knew better, and was justly
aggrieved with the next reviewer who took things in him for granted,
quite as offensively if they were merits as if they were defects. It was
vital to him to be always breaking new ground, and, if at times it
seemed to him that he had turned this or that furrow before, he said to
himself that it was merely one of those intimations of pre-existence
which are always teasing us here with the sense of experience in
circumstances absolutely novel; and he hoped that no one else would
notice the coincidence.

He was, indeed, tolerably safe from the chance, for it is one of the
conditions of literary criticism that the reviewers shall be nearly
always young persons. They, if they alone are capable of the cruelties
they sometimes practise, are alone capable of the enthusiasms which
supply publishers with quotable passages for their advertisements, and
which lift authors' hearts in pride and joy. It is to their advantage
that they generally bring to the present work of a veteran author an
ignorance of all that he has done before, and have the zest for it which
the performance of a novice inspires. They know he is not a novice, of
course, and they recognize his book as that of a veteran, but they
necessarily treat it as representative of his authorship. Of course, if
it is his twentieth or thirtieth book, or his fortieth or fiftieth, it
is merely one of a long series which fully represents him. Even these
collectively represent him inadequately as long as he is adding to them,
if he has the habit, like Eugenio, of always breaking new ground. The
reviewer, however, is probably much newer than the ground which the
established author breaks in his last book, and, coming to it in his
generous ignorance, which he has to conceal under a mask of smiling
omniscience, he condemns or praises it without reference to the work
which has gone before it and which it is merely part of, though of
course it has entirety enough of a sort to stand alone. If the author
has broken ground in the direction of a new type of heroine, the
reviewer, by the conditions of his calling, is all but oblige