is not chiefly to them that it is offered. It is to that great mass of
writers, whose business is to fill the columns of the newspapers and
the pages of the review, and to produce the ton of novels that appear
every year. Now that almost everyone who can hold a pen aspires to be
called an author, it is well to emphasize the fact that literature is
an art in some respects more important than any other. The problem of
this art is the discovery of those qualities of style and treatment
which entitled any work to be called good literature.

It will be safe to warn the reader at the very outset that, if he
wishes to avoid being led astray, he should in his search for these
qualities turn to books that have stood the test of time.

For such an amount of hasty writing is done in these days that it is
really difficult for anyone who reads much of it to avoid contracting
its faults, and thus gradually coming to terms of dangerous
familiarity with bad methods. This advice will be especially needful
if things that have little or no claim to be called literature at
all--the newspapers, the monthly magazine, and the last new tale of
intrigue or adventure--fill a large measure, if not the whole, of the
time given to reading. Nor are those who are sincerely anxious to have
the best thought in the best language quite free from danger if they
give too much attention to the contemporary authors, even though these
seem to think and write excellently. For one generation alone is
incompetent to decide upon the merits of any author whatever; and as
literature, like all art, is a thing of human invention, so it can be
pronounced good only if it obtains lasting admiration, by establishing
a permanent appeal to mankind's deepest feeling for truth and beauty.

It is in this sense that Schopenhauer is perfectly right in holding