Literary Taste: How to Form It | Page 7

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