WHERE TO BEGIN
I wish particularly that my readers should not be intimidated by the
apparent vastness and complexity of this enterprise of forming the
literary taste. It is not so vast nor so complex as it looks. There
is no need whatever for the inexperienced enthusiast to confuse and
frighten himself with thoughts of "literature in all its branches."
Experts and pedagogues (chiefly pedagogues) have, for the purpose of
convenience, split literature up into divisions and sub-divisions--such
as prose and poetry; or imaginative, philosophic, historical; or
elegiac, heroic, lyric; or religious and profane, etc., _ad infinitum_.
But the greater truth is that literature is all one--and indivisible.
The idea of the unity of literature should be well planted and fostered
in the head. All literature is the expression of feeling, of passion,
of emotion, caused by a sensation of the interestingness of life. What
drives a historian to write history? Nothing but the overwhelming
impression made upon him by the survey of past times. He is forced
into an attempt to reconstitute the picture for others. If hitherto
you have failed to perceive that a historian is a being in strong
emotion, trying to convey his emotion to others, read the passage in
the _Memoirs_ of Gibbon, in which he describes how he finished the
_Decline and Fall_. You will probably never again look upon the
_Decline and Fall_ as a "dry" work.
What applies to history applies to the other "dry" branches. Even
Johnson's Dictionary is packed with emotion. Read the last paragraph
of the preface to it: "In this work, when it shall be found that
much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is
performed.... It may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to
observe that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have
only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto
completed...." And so on to the close: "I have protracted my work
till most of those whom I wish to please have sunk into the grave, and
success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with
frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or
from praise." Yes, tranquillity; but not frigid! The whole passage,
one of the finest in English prose, is marked by the heat of emotion.
You may discover the same quality in such books as Spencer's _First
Principles_. You may discover it everywhere in literature, from the
cold fire of Pope's irony to the blasting temperatures of Swinburne.
Literature does not begin till emotion has begun.
There is even no essential, definable difference between those two
great branches, prose and poetry. For prose may have rhythm. All
that can be said is that verse will scan, while prose will not. The
difference is purely formal. Very few poets have succeeded in being so
poetical as Isaiah, Sir Thomas Browne, and Ruskin have been in
prose. It can only be stated that, as a rule, writers have shown an
instinctive tendency to choose verse for the expression of the very
highest emotion. The supreme literature is in verse, but the finest
achievements in prose approach so nearly to the finest achievements in
verse that it is ill work deciding between them. In the sense in which
poetry is best understood, all literature is poetry--or is, at
any rate, poetical in quality. Macaulay's ill-informed and unjust
denunciations live because his genuine emotion made them into poetry,
while his _Lays of Ancient Rome_ are dead because they are not the
expression of a genuine emotion. As the literary taste develops, this
quality of emotion, restrained or loosed, will be more and more widely
perceived at large in literature. It is the quality that must be
looked for. It is the quality that unifies literature (and all the
arts).
It is not merely useless, it is harmful, for you to map out literature
into divisions and branches, with different laws, rules, or canons.
The first thing is to obtain some possession of literature. When
you have actually felt some of the emotion which great writers have
striven to impart to you, and when your emotions become so numerous
and puzzling that you feel the need of arranging them and calling them
by names, then--and not before--you can begin to study what has been
attempted in the way of classifying and ticketing literature. Manuals
and treatises are excellent things in their kind, but they are simply
dead weight at the start. You can only acquire really useful
general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas, and putting those
particular ideas together. You cannot make bricks without straw.
Do not worry about literature in the abstract, about theories as to
literature. Get at it. Get hold of literature in the concrete as a dog
gets hold of a bone. If you ask me where you ought to begin, I shall
gaze at you as I might gaze at the faithful animal if he inquired
which end of the bone he ought to attack. It doesn't matter in the
slightest degree where you begin. Begin wherever the fancy takes you
to begin. Literature is a whole.
There is only one restriction for you. You must begin with an
acknowledged classic; you must eschew modern works. The reason for
this does not imply any depreciation of the present age at the expense
of past ages. Indeed, it is important, if you wish ultimately to have
a wide, catholic taste, to guard against the too common assumption
that nothing modern will stand comparison with the classics. In every
age there have been people to sigh: "Ah, yes. Fifty years ago we had
a few great writers. But they are all dead, and no young ones are
arising to take their place." This attitude of mind is deplorable, if
not silly, and is a certain proof of narrow taste. It is a surety that
in 1959 gloomy and egregious persons will be saying: "Ah, yes. At
the beginning of the century there were great poets like Swinburne,
Meredith, Francis Thompson, and Yeats. Great novelists like Hardy and
Conrad. Great historians like Stubbs and Maitland, etc., etc. But they
are all dead now, and whom have we to take their place?" It is not
until an age has receded into history, and all its mediocrity has
dropped away from it, that we can see it as it is--as a group of men
of genius. We forget the immense amount of twaddle that the great
epochs produced. The total amount of fine literature created in a
given period of time differs from epoch to epoch, but it does not
differ much. And we may be perfectly sure that our own age will make a
favourable impression upon that excellent judge, posterity. Therefore,
beware of disparaging the present in your own mind. While temporarily
ignoring it, dwell upon the idea that its chaff contains about as much
wheat as any similar quantity of chaff has contained wheat.
The reason why you must avoid modern works at the beginning is simply
that you are not in a position to choose among modern works. Nobody
at all is quite in a position to choose with certainty among modern
works. To sift the wheat from the chaff is a process that takes an
exceedingly long time. Modern works have to pass before the bar of the
taste of successive generations. Whereas, with classics, which have
been through the ordeal, almost the reverse is the case. _Your taste
has to pass before the bar of the classics_. That is the point. If you
differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. If
you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you may be
right, but no judge is authoritative enough to decide. Your taste is
unformed. It needs guidance, and it needs authoritative guidance. Into
the business of forming literary taste faith enters. You probably will
not specially care for a particular classic at first. If you did care
for it at first, your taste, so far as that classic is concerned,
would be formed, and our hypothesis is that your taste is not formed.
How are you to arrive at the stage of caring for it? Chiefly, of
course, by examining it and honestly trying to understand it. But this
process is materially helped by an act of faith, by the frame of mind
which says: "I know on the highest authority that this thing is fine,
that it is capable of giving me pleasure. Hence I am determined to
find pleasure in it." Believe me that faith counts enormously in
the development of that wide taste which is the instrument of wide
pleasures. But it must be faith founded on unassailable authority.