The difficulty must be fairly fronted, and the fronting of it
brings us to the very core of the business of actually forming the taste.
If your taste were classical you would discover in Lamb
a continual fascination; whereas what you in fact do discover
in Lamb is a not unpleasant flatness, enlivened by a vague humour
and an occasional pathos. You ought, according to theory,
to be enthusiastic; but you are apathetic, or, at best, half-hearted.
There is a gulf. How to cross it?


To cross it needs time and needs trouble. The following considerations
may aid. In the first place, we have to remember that,
in coming into the society of the classics in general
and of Charles Lamb in particular, we are coming into
the society of a mental superior. What happens usually
in such a case? We can judge by recalling what happens
when we are in the society of a mental inferior. We say things
of which he misses the import; we joke, and he does not smile;
what makes him laugh loudly seems to us horseplay or childish;
he is blind to beauties which ravish us; he is ecstatic over
what strikes us as crude; and his profound truths are for us
trite commonplaces. His perceptions are relatively coarse;
our perceptions are relatively subtle. We try to make him understand,
to make him see, and if he is aware of his inferiority
we may have some success. But if he is not aware of his inferiority,
we soon hold our tongues and leave him alone in his self-satisfaction,
convinced that there is nothing to be done with him. Every one of us
has been through this experience with a mental inferior, for there is
always a mental inferior handy, just as there is always a being
more unhappy than we are. In approaching a classic, the true wisdom