"Prolegomena to Ethics" upon the remark that 'an author who seeks to gain
general confidence scarcely goes the right way to work when he begins
with asking whether there really is such a subject as that of which he
proposes to treat.' In spite of--mark, pray, that I say _in spite
of_--the activity of many learned Professors, some doubt does lurk in
the public mind if, after all, English Literature can, in any ordinary
sense, be taught, and if the attempts to teach it do not, after all,
justify (as Wisdom is so often justified of her grandparents) the
silence sapience of those old benefactors who abstained from endowing
any such Chairs.

But that the study of English Literature can be promoted in young minds
by an elder one, that their zeal may be encouraged, their tastes
directed, their vision cleared, quickened, enlarged--this, I take it, no
man of experience will deny. Nay, since our two oldest Universities have
a habit of marking one another with interest--an interest, indeed,
sometimes heightened by nervousness--I may point out that all this has
been done of late years, and eminently done, by a Cambridge man you gave
to Oxford. This, then, Mr Vice-Chancellor--this or something like this,
Gentlemen--is to be my task if I have the good fortune to win your
confidence.

Let me, then, lay down two or three principles by which I propose to be
guided. (1) For the first principle of all I put to you that in studying
any work of genius we should begin by taking it _absolutely_; that is to
say, with minds intent on discovering just what the author's mind
intended; this being at once the obvious approach to its meaning (its
[Greek: to ti en einai], the 'thing it was to be'), and the merest duty
of politeness we owe to the great man addressing us. We should lay our
minds open to what he wishes to tell, and if what he has to tell be noble