Review writing exemplifies the casual character of modern literature:
everything about it is temporary and fragmentary. Look at a railway
stall: you see books of every color,--blue, yellow, crimson,
"ring-streaked, speckled, and spotted,"--on every subject, in every
style, of every opinion, with every conceivable difference, celestial or
sublunary, maleficent, beneficent--but all small. People take their
literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey....
And the change in appearance of books has been accompanied--has been
caused--by a similar change in readers. What a transition from the
student of former ages! from a grave man with grave cheeks and a
considerate eye, who spends his life in study, has no interest in the
outward world, hears nothing of its din and cares nothing for its
honors, who would gladly learn and gladly teach, whose whole soul is
taken up with a few books of 'Aristotle and his Philosophy,'--to the
merchant in the railway, with a head full of sums, an idea that tallow
is "up," a conviction that teas are "lively," and a mind reverting
perpetually from the little volume which he reads to these mundane
topics, to the railway, to the shares, to the buying and bargaining
universe. We must not wonder that the outside of books is so different,
when the inner nature of those for whom they are written is so changed.
In this transition from ancient writing to modern, the review-like essay
and the essay-like review fill a large space. Their small bulk, their
slight pretension to systematic completeness,--their avowal, it might be
said, of necessary incompleteness,--the facility of changing the
subject, of selecting points to attack, of exposing only the best corner
for defense, are great temptations. Still greater is the advantage of
"our limits." A real reviewer always spends his first and best pages on
the parts of a subject on which he wishes to write, the easy comfortable
parts which he knows. The formidable difficulties which he acknowledges,
you foresee by a strange fatality that he will only reach two pages
before the end; to his great grief, there is no opportunity for
discussing them. As a young gentleman at the India House examination
wrote "Time up" on nine unfinished papers in succession, so you may
occasionally read a whole review, in every article of which the
principal difficulty of each successive question is about to be reached
at the conclusion. Nor can any one deny that this is the suitable skill,
the judicious custom of the craft.