taste of successive generations. Whereas, with classics, which have
been through the ordeal, almost the reverse is the case. _Your taste
has to pass before the bar of the classics_. That is the point. If you
differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. If
you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you may be
right, but no judge is authoritative enough to decide. Your taste is
unformed. It needs guidance, and it needs authoritative guidance. Into
the business of forming literary taste faith enters. You probably will
not specially care for a particular classic at first. If you did care
for it at first, your taste, so far as that classic is concerned,
would be formed, and our hypothesis is that your taste is not formed.
How are you to arrive at the stage of caring for it? Chiefly, of
course, by examining it and honestly trying to understand it. But this
process is materially helped by an act of faith, by the frame of mind
which says: "I know on the highest authority that this thing is fine,
that it is capable of giving me pleasure. Hence I am determined to
find pleasure in it." Believe me that faith counts enormously in
the development of that wide taste which is the instrument of wide
pleasures. But it must be faith founded on unassailable authority.




CHAPTER V

HOW TO READ A CLASSIC


Let us begin experimental reading with Charles Lamb. I choose Lamb for
various reasons: He is a great writer, wide in his appeal, of a highly