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