to reading and loving great books, he must
disentangle influences; he must discern the historical importance of
writers, worthless in themselves, who form important links. In theology
and in philosophy it is much the same: he must not read the Bible and
say what he feels about it; he must unravel Rabbinical and Talmudic
tendencies; he must acquaint himself with the heretical leanings of a
certain era, and the shadow cast upon the page by apocryphal tradition.
In philosophy he is still worse off, because he must plumb the depths of
metaphysical jargon and master the criticism of methods.

Now, this is in a degree both right and necessary, because the blind
must not attempt to lead the blind; but it is treating the whole thing
in too strictly scientific a spirit for all that. The misery of it is
that the work of the specialist in all these regions tends to set a
hedge about the law; it tends to accumulate and perpetuate a vast amount
of inferior work. The result of it is, in literature, for instance,
that an immense amount of second-rate and third-rate books go on being
reprinted; and instead of the principle of selection being applied to
great authors, and their inferior writings being allowed to lapse into
oblivion, they go on being re-issued, not because they have any
direct value for the human spirit, but because they have a scientific
importance from the point of view of development. Yet for the ordinary
human being it is far more important that he should read great
masterpieces in a spirit of lively and enthusiastic sympathy than
that he should wade into them through a mass of archaeological and
philological detail. As a boy I used to have to prepare, on occasions,
a play of Shakespeare for a holiday task. I have regarded certain plays
with a kind of horror ever since, because one ended by learning up the
introduction, which concerned itself with the origin of the play, and
the notes which illustrated the meaning of such words as "kerns and
gallowglasses," and left the action and the poetry and the emotion
of the play to take care of themselves. This was due partly to the
blighting influence of examination-papers set by men of sterile,
conscientious brains, but partly to the terrible value set by British
minds upon correct information. The truth really is that if one begins
by caring for a work of art, one also cares to understand the medium
through which it is conveyed; but if one begins by studying the medium
fir