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 does,
in actual practice, lead ultimately to the same judgments.
There is only the difference in width of interest. Some of the passionate few
lack catholicity, or, rather, the whole of their interest is confined
to one narrow channel; they have none left over. These men help specially
to vitalise the reputations of the narrower geniuses: such as Crashaw.
But their active predilections never contradict the general verdict
of the passionate few; rather they reinforce it.


A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority
which is intensely and permanently interested in literature.
It lives on because the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure,
is eternally curious and is therefore engaged in an eternal process