Uneasy Compromise

If style maketh the man, then the critic bent on understanding Professor Crane Brinton’s A History of Western Morals (Harcourt, $7.50) ought to look first and foremost to the style in which it is written. Witty; brutal; urbane; tender; never eloquent.

Confessing himself a child of his own age, Dr. Brinton occupies a mean position between Christianity and the Enlightenment. Maintaining throughout an uneasy compromise, he does so with irony because he is well aware that such a compromise, simply in being a compromise, is not likely to satisfy for long the Western world that gave it birth.

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Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

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If style maketh the man, then the critic bent on understanding Professor Crane Brinton’s A History of Western Morals (Harcourt, $7.50) ought to look first and foremost to the style in which it is written. Witty; brutal; urbane; tender; never eloquent.

Confessing himself a child of his own age, Dr. Brinton occupies a mean position between Christianity and the Enlightenment. Maintaining throughout an uneasy compromise, he does so with irony because he is well aware that such a compromise, simply in being a compromise, is not likely to satisfy for long the Western world that gave it birth.