o go in search of culture?
It is a great problem, this accumulation of literature; and it seems to
me a very irrational thing to do to republish the complete works of old
authors, who perhaps, in the midst of a large mass of essentially
second-rate work, added half-a-dozen lyrics to the literature of the
world. But surely it is time that we began to select? Whatever else
there is time for in this world, there certainly is not time to read
old half-forgotten second-rate work. Of course people who are making a
special study of an age, a period, a school of writers, have to plough
through a good deal that is not intrinsically worth reading; but, as a
rule, when a man has done this, instead of saying boldly that the
greater part of an author's writings may be wisely neglected and left
alone, he loses himself in the critical discrimination and the
chronological arrangement of inferior compositions; perhaps he rescues
a few lines of merit out of a mass of writing; but there is hardly time
now to read long ponderous poems for the sake of a few fine flashes of
emotion and expression. What, as a rule, distinguishes the work of the
amateur from the work of the great writer is that an amateur will
retain a poem for the sake of a few good lines, whereas a great writer
will relentlessly sacrifice a few fine phrases, if the whole structure
and texture of the poem is loose and unsatisfactory. The only chance of
writing something that will live is to be sure that the whole
thing--book, essay, poem--is perfectly proportioned, firm, hammered,
definite. The sign and seal of a great writer is that he has either the
patience to improve loose work, or the courage to sacrifice it.

But most readers are so irrational, so submissive, so deferential, that
they will swallow an author whole. They think dimly that they can
arrive at a certain kind of culture by knowledge; but knowledge has
nothing to do with it. The point is to have perception, emotion,
discrimination. This is where education fails so grievously, that
teachers of this independent and perceptive process are so rare, and
that teaching too often falls into the hands of conscientious people,
with good memories, who think that it benefits the mind to load it with
facts and dates, and forget, or do not know, that what is needed is a
sort of ardent inner fire, that consumes the debris and fuses the ore.

In that dry, ugly, depressing book, Harry and Lucy, which I used to
read in my youth