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 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.