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The Illinois War Savings Bulletin speaks of "personal self-interest."
This means you!
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"Graduation from the worst to the best stuff," is Mr. W. L. George's
method of acquiring literary taste. Something can be said for the
method, and Mr. George says it well, and we are sorry, in a manner of
speaking, not to believe a word of it; unless, as is possible, we both
believe the same thing fundamentally. Taste, in literature and music,
and in other things, is, we are quite sure, natural. It can be trained,
but this training is a matter of new discoveries. A taste that has to be
led by steps from Owen Meredith to George Meredith, which could not
recognize the worth of the latter before passing through the former, is
no true taste. Graduation from the simple to the complex is compatible
with a natural taste, but this simple may be first class, as much music
and literature is. New forms of beauty may puzzle the possessor of
natural taste, but not for long. He does not require preparation in
inferior stuff.
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Speaking of George Meredith, we are told again (they dig the thing up
every two or three years) that, when a reader for Chapman & Hall, he
turned down "East Lynne," "Erewhon," and other books that afterward
became celebrated. What of it? Meredith may not have known anything
about literature, but he knew what he liked. Moreover, he was a marked
and original writer, and as that tolerant soul, Jules Lemaitre, has
noted, the most marked and original of writers are those who do not
understand everything, nor feel everything, nor love everything, but
those whose knowledge, intelligence, and tastes have definite
limitations.
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