Literary Taste: How to Form It | Page 6

understand themselves. They
learn to know what they want. Their taste becomes surer and surer as
their experience lengthens. They do not enjoy to-day what will seem
tedious to them to-morrow. When they find a book tedious, no amount
of popular clatter will persuade them that it is pleasurable; and when
they find it pleasurable no chill silence of the street-crowds will affect
their conviction that the book is good and permanent. They have faith
in themselves. What are the qualities in a book which give keen and
lasting pleasure to the passionate few? This is a question so difficult
that it has never yet been completely answered. You may talk lightly
about truth, insight, knowledge, wisdom, humour, and beauty. But
these comfortable words do not really carry you very far, for each of
them has to be defined, especially the first and last. It is all very well
for Keats in his airy manner to assert that beauty is truth, truth beauty,
and that that is all he knows or needs to know. I, for one, need to know
a lot more. And I never shall know. Nobody, not even Hazlitt nor
Sainte-Beuve, has ever finally explained why he thought a book
beautiful. I take the first fine lines that come to hand--
The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy--
and I say that those lines are beautiful, because they give me pleasure.
But why? No answer! I only know that the passionate few will, broadly,
agree with me in deriving this mysterious pleasure from those lines. I
am only convinced that the liveliness of our pleasure in those and many
other lines by the same author will ultimately cause the majority to
believe, by faith, that W.B. Yeats is a genius. The one reassuring aspect
of the literary affair is that the passionate few are passionate about the
same things. A continuance of interest does, in actual practice, lead
ultimately to the same judgments. There is only the difference in width
of interest. Some of the passionate few lack catholicity, or, rather, the
whole of their interest is confined to one narrow channel; they have

none left over. These men help specially to vitalise the reputations of
the narrower geniuses: such as Crashaw. But their active predilections
never contradict the general verdict of the passionate few; rather they
reinforce it.
A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is
intensely and permanently interested in literature. It lives on because
the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure, is eternally
curious and is therefore engaged in an eternal process of rediscovery. A
classic does not survive for any ethical reason. It does not survive
because it conforms to certain canons, or because neglect would not kill
it. It survives because it is a source of pleasure, and because the
passionate few can no more neglect it than a bee can neglect a flower.
The passionate few do not read "the right things" because they are right.
That is to put the cart before the horse. "The right things" are the right
things solely because the passionate few like reading them. Hence--and
I now arrive at my point--the one primary essential to literary taste is a
hot interest in literature. If you have that, all the rest will come. It
matters nothing that at present you fail to find pleasure in certain
classics. The driving impulse of your interest will force you to acquire
experience, and experience will teach you the use of the means of
pleasure. You do not know the secret ways of yourself: that is all. A
continuance of interest must inevitably bring you to the keenest joys.
But, of course, experience may be acquired judiciously or injudiciously,
just as Putney may be reached via Walham Green or via St. Petersburg.


CHAPTER IV
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