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 sympathetic temperament; and his finest achievements
are simple and very short. Moreover, he may usefully lead to other
and more complex matters, as will appear later. Now, your natural tendency
will be to think of Charles Lamb as a book, because he has arrived
at the stage of being a classic. Charles Lamb was a man, not a book.
It is extremely important that the beginner in literary study
should always form an idea of the man behind the book.
The book is nothing but the expression of the man. The book is nothing but