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_ At the beginning a misconception must be removed from the path.
Many people, if not most, look on literary taste as an elegant accomplishment,
by acquiring which they will complete themselves, and make themselves
finally fit as members of a correct society. They are secretly ashamed
of their ignorance of literature, in the same way as they would be
ashamed of their ignorance of etiquette at a high entertainment,
or of their inability to ride a horse if suddenly called upon
to do so. There are certain things that a man ought to know,
or to know about, and literature is one of them: such is their idea.
They have learnt to dress themselves with propriety,
and to behave with propriety on all occasions; they are fairly "up"
in the questions of the day; by industry and enterprise
they are succeeding in their vocations; it behoves them, then,
not to forget that an acquaintance with literature is an indispensable part
of a self-respecting man's personal baggage. Painting doesn't matter;
music doesn't matter very much. But "everyone is supposed to know"
about literature. Then, literature is such a charming distraction!
Literary taste thus serves two purposes: as a certificate of correct culture
and as a private pastime. A young professor of mathematics,
immense at mathematics and games, dangerous at chess, capable of Haydn
on the violin, once said to me, after listening to some chat on books,
"Yes, I must take up literature." As though saying:
"I was rather forgetting literature. However, I've polished off
all these other things. I'll have a shy at literature now."
This attitude, or any attitude which resembles it, is wrong.
To him who really comprehends what literature is, and what the function
of literature is, this attitude is simply ludicrous. It is also
fatal to the formation of literary taste. People who regard
literary taste simply as an accomplishment, and literature
simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed either in acquiring
the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a distraction;
though the one is the most perfect of distractions, and though the other
is unsurpassed by any other accomplishment in elegance
or in power to impress the universal snobbery of civilised mankind.
Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental
*sine qua non* of complete living. I am extremely anxious to avoid
rhetorical exaggerations. I do not think I am guilty of one
in asserting that he who has not been "presented to the freedom"
of literature has not wakened up out of his prenatal sleep.
He is merely not born. He can't see; he can't hear;
he can't feel, in any full sense. He can only eat his dinner.
What more than anything else annoys people who know
the true function of literature, and have profited thereby,
is the spectacle of so many thousands of individuals going about
under the delusion that they are alive, when, as a fact,
they are no nearer being alive than a bear in winter.
I will tell you what literature is! No--I only wish I could.
But I can't. No one can. Gleams can be thrown on the secret,
inklings given, but no more. I will try to give you an inkling.
And, to do so, I will take you back into your own history,
or forward into it. That 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 hill-side,
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 against
the assertion that Rousseau was a scoundrel, one is apt to forget
what literature really is and is for. It is well to remind ourselves
that literature is first and last a means of life, and that the enterprise
of forming one's literary taste is an enterprise of learning how best
to use this means of life. People who don't want to live,
people who would sooner hibernate than feel intensely, will be wise
to eschew literature. They had better, to quote from the finest passage
in a fine poem, "sit around and eat blackberries."
The sight of a "common bush afire with God" might upset their nerves. _
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