culture. One of the signs of real culture is the power of enjoyment
which goes with fresh feeling. All great art is full of this feeling;
its characteristic is the new interest with which it invests the most
familiar objects; and one evidence of capacity to receive culture from
art is the development of this feeling. The reader who is on the way
to enrich himself by contact with books cultivates the power of
feeling freshly and keenly the charm of every book he reads simply as
a piece of literature. One may destroy this power by permitting
analysis and criticism to become the primary mood, or one may develop
it by resolutely putting analysis and criticism into the secondary
place, and sedulously developing the power to enjoy for the sake of
enjoyment. The reader who does not feel the immediate and obvious
beauty of a poem or a play has lost the power, not only of getting the
full effect of a work of art, but of getting its full significance as
well. The surprise, the delight, the joy of the first discovery are
not merely pleasurable; they are in the highest degree educational.
They reveal the sensitiveness of the nature to those ultimate forms of
beauty and power which art takes on, and its power of responding not
only to what is obviously beautiful but is also profoundly true. For
the harmonious and noble beauty of "As You Like It" is not only
obvious and external; it is wrought into its structure so completely
that, like the blossom of the apple, it is the effluence of the life
of the play. To get delight out of reading is, therefore, the first
and constant care of the reader who wishes to be enriched by vital
contact with the most inclusive and expressive of the arts.




Chapter V.