y is the patience of the beauty in it,
and truth can always be known by the fact that it is the only thing in
the wide world that can afford to wait. A true book does not go about
advertising itself, huckstering for souls, arranging its greatness small
enough. It waits. Sometimes for twenty years it waits for us, sometimes
for forty, sometimes sixty, and then when the time is fulfilled and we
come at length and lay before it the burden of the blind and blundering
years we have tried to live, it does little with us, after all, but to
bring these same years singing and crying and struggling back to us,
that through their shadowy doors we may enter at last the confessional
of the human heart, and cry out there, or stammer or whisper or sing
there, the prophecy of our own lives. Dead words out of dead
dictionaries the book brings to us. It is a great book because it is a
listening book, because it makes the unspoken to speak and the dead to
live in it. To the vanished pen and the yellowed paper of the man who
writes to us, thy soul and mine, Gentle Reader, shall call back, "This
is the truth."

If a book has force in it, whatever its literary form may be, or however
disguised, it is biography appealing to biography. If a book has great
force in it, it is autobiography appealing to autobiography. The great
book is always a confession--a moral adventure with its reader, an
incredible confidence.

The Fourth Interference: The Habit of Not Letting One's Self Go

I

The Country Boy in Literature

"Let not any Parliament Member," says Carlyle, "ask of the Present
Editor 'What is to be done?' Editors are not here to say, 'How.'"

"Which is both ungracious and tantalisingly elusive," suggests a
Professor of Literature, who has been recently criticising the
Nineteenth Century.

This criticism, as a part of an estimate of Thomas Carlyle, is not only
a criticism on itself and an autobiography besides, but it sums up, in a
more or less characteristic fashion perhaps, what might be called the
ultra-academic attitude in reading. The ultra-academic attitude may be
defined as the attitude of sitting down and being told things, and of
expecting all other persons to sit down and be told things, and of
judging all authors, principles, men, and methods accordingly.

If the universe were what in most libraries and clubs to-day it is made
to seem, a kind of infinite Institution of Learning, a Lecture Room on a
larger scale, and