d never forgive myself if I forgot "The Egoist." It is art, if you
like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all the novels I
have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place by itself. Here is
a Nathan for the modern David. * * * "The Egoist" 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 haunted 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, 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 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 have 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