means an
understanding heart.

I promised to deal with your case, O man who hates art and literature,
and I have dealt with it. I now come to the case of the person,
happily very common, who does "like reading."

XI

SERIOUS READING

Novels are excluded from "serious reading," so that the man who, bent
on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes three
times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will
be well advised to alter his plans. The reason is not that novels are
not serious--some of the great literature of the world is in the form
of prose fiction--the reason is that bad novels ought not to be read,
and that good novels never demand any appreciable mental application on
the part of the reader. It is only the bad parts of Meredith's novels
that are difficult. A good novel rushes you forward like a skiff down
a stream, and you arrive at the end, perhaps breathless, but
unexhausted. The best novels involve the least strain. Now in the
cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely
the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you
is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and
that feeling cannot be got in facing a novel. You do not set your
teeth in order to read "Anna Karenina." Therefore, though you should
read novels, you should not read them in those ninety minutes.

Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It
produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is
the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of
pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is
nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of the
fact that the majority of people do not read poetry.

I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted
with the alternatives of reading "Paradise Lost" and going round
Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, would choose
the ordeal of public ridicule. Still, I will never cease advising my
friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

If poetry is what is called "a sealed book" to you, begin by reading
Hazlitt's famous essay on the nature of "poetry in general." It is the
best thing of its kind in English, and no one who has read it can
possibly be under the misapprehension that poetry is a mediaeval
torture, or a mad elephant, or a gun t