gry picture of human
faults, is not great art; we can all be angry with our neighbour; what
we want is to be shown, not his defects, of which we are too
conscious, but his merits, to which we are too blind. And _The
Egoist_[19] is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a satire
of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious mote,
which is engaged from first to last with that invisible beam. It is
yourself that is hunted down; these are your own faults that are
dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel
cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the
story) came to him in an agony. "This is too bad of you," he cried.
"Willoughby is me!" "No, my dear fellow," said the author; "he is all
of us." I have read _The Egoist_ five or six times myself, and I mean
to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote--I
think Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself.

I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much
that was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten
Thoreau,[20] and Hazlitt, whose paper "On the Spirit of Obligations"
was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of
aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's
_Tales[21] of Old Japan_, wherein I learned for the first time the
proper attitude of any rational man to his country's laws--a secret
found, and kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I should commemorate all
is more than I can hope or the Editor could ask. It will be more to
the point, after having said so much upon improving books, to say a
word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I
have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It
consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment--a free
grace, I find I must call it--by which a man rises to understand that
he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely
wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately; and he may
know that others hold them but coldly, or hold them differently, or
hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of reading, these
others will be full of meat for him. They will see the other side of
propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not change his
dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma, and he
must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human truth,
which is