Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/263



Criticise the book before you, and don't write a parallel essay, for which the volume you have in hand serves only as a peg. This is No. VII of Twelve Rules For Good Reviewers, formulated by Brander Matthews in an essay on "The Whole Duty of Critics," 1892.

I should try to follow this rule if its maker himself had not led me astray by sub-announcing in "The Tocsin of Revolt" a theme which he does not develop. Here is the theme which lurks in the first short essay:

When a man finds himself at last slowly climbing the slopes which lead to the lonely peak of three-score-and-ten he is likely to discover that his views and his aspirations are not in accord with those held by men still living in the foothills of youth. He sees that things are no longer what they were half a century earlier and that they are not now tending in the direction to which they then pointed. If he is wise, he warns himself against the danger of becoming a mere praiser of past times; and if he is very wise he makes every effort to understand and to appreciate the present and not to dread the fu-