Literary Taste: How to Form It | Page 2

evening when you
went for a walk with your faithful friend, the friend from whom you hid
nothing--or almost nothing ...! You were, in truth, somewhat inclined to
hide from him the particular matter which monopolised your mind that
evening, but somehow you contrived to get on to it, drawn by an
overpowering fascination. And as your faithful friend was sympathetic
and discreet, and flattered you by a respectful curiosity, you proceeded
further and further into the said matter, growing more and more
confidential, until at last you cried out, in a terrific whisper: "My boy,
she is simply miraculous!" At that moment you were in the domain of
literature.
Let me explain. Of course, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, she
was not miraculous. Your faithful friend had never noticed that she was
miraculous, nor had about forty thousand other fairly keen observers.
She was just a girl. Troy had not been burnt for her. A girl cannot be
called a miracle. If a girl is to be called a miracle, then you might call
pretty nearly anything a miracle.... That is just it: you might. You can.
You ought. Amid all the miracles of the universe you had just wakened
up to one. You were full of your discovery. You were under a divine
impulsion to impart that discovery. You had a strong sense of the
marvellous beauty of something, and you had to share it. You were in a
passion about something, and you had to vent yourself on somebody.
You were drawn towards the whole of the rest of the human race. Mark
the effect of your mood and utterance on your faithful friend. He knew
that she was not a miracle. No other person could have made him

believe that she was a miracle. But you, by the force and sincerity of
your own vision of her, and by the fervour of your desire to make him
participate in your vision, did for quite a long time cause him to feel
that he had been blind to the miracle of that girl.
You were producing literature. You were alive. Your eyes were
unlidded, your ears were unstopped, to some part of the beauty and the
strangeness of the world; and a strong instinct within you forced you to
tell someone. It was not enough for you that you saw and heard. Others
had to see and hear. Others had to be wakened up. And they were! It is
quite possible--I am not quite sure--that your faithful friend the very
next day, or the next month, looked at some other girl, and suddenly
saw that she, too, was miraculous! The influence of literature!
The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the
miraculous interestingness of the universe. And the greatest makers of
literature are those whose vision has been the widest, and whose feeling
has been the most intense. Your own fragment of insight was accidental,
and perhaps temporary. Their lives are one long ecstasy of denying that
the world is a dull place. Is it nothing to you to learn to understand that
the world is not a dull place? Is it nothing to you to be led out of the
tunnel on to the hillside, to have all your senses quickened, to be
invigorated by the true savour of life, to feel your heart beating under
that correct necktie of yours? These makers of literature render you
their equals.
The aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours of leisure; it is to
awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify one's capacity for pleasure,
for sympathy, and for comprehension. It is not to affect one hour, but
twenty-four hours. It is to change utterly one's relations with the world.
An understanding appreciation of literature means an understanding
appreciation of the world, and it means nothing else. Not isolated and
unconnected parts of life, but all of life, brought together and correlated
in a synthetic map! The spirit of literature is unifying; it joins the
candle and the star, and by the magic of an image shows that the beauty
of the greater is in the less. And, not content with the disclosure of
beauty and the bringing together of all things whatever within its focus,

it enforces a moral wisdom by the tracing everywhere of cause and
effect. It consoles doubly--by the revelation of unsuspected loveliness,
and by the proof that our lot is the common lot. It is the supreme cry of
the discoverer, offering sympathy and asking for it in a single gesture.
In attending a University Extension Lecture on the sources of
Shakespeare's plots, or in studying the researches of George Saintsbury
into the origins of English prosody, or in weighing the evidence for and