orge Eliot, Hawthorne, Trollope,
Blackmore, Defoe, and Swift. All their books are readable, but they do
not take by the hand the person who has thought wrong or not thought at
all. When you want to teach a child history you do not dump upon its
desk Hume and Smollett, in forty volumes; you lead it by degrees, by
means of text-books, that is _according to plan_. That is how I conceive
literary education, but before suggesting a list, let us glance at
_Literary Taste and How to Form It_. In this book the author shows
himself much more unpractical and much less sympathetic than Sir William
Robertson Nicoll (whom Mr Bennett delighteth to revile). The book itself
is very interesting; it is bright, intelligent; it teaches you how to
read, and how to make allowances for the classics; it tells you how you
may woo your way to Milton, but, after all, when you have done, you find
that you have not wooed your way an inch nearer. That is because Mr
Arnold Bennett takes up to his public an attitude more highbrowed than I
could imagine if I were writing a skit on his book. Mr Bennett's idea of
a list for the aspirant to letters is to throw the London Library at his
head; he lays before us a stodgy lump of two or three hundred volumes,
many of them excellent, and many more absolutely penal. It is enough to
say that he seriously starts his list with the Venerable Bede's
_Ecclesiastical History_. Bede! the dimmest, most distant of English
chroniclers, who depicts the dimmest and most distant period of English
history; once, in an A.B.C., I saw a shopman reading _Tono-Bungay_,
which was propped against the cruet. Does Mr Bennett imagine that man
dropping the tear of emotion and the gravy of excitement upon the
Venerable Bede? And if one goes on with the list and discovers the
_Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury_, _Religio Medici_,
Berkeley's _Principles of Human Knowledge_, Reynold's _Discourses on
Art_, the works of Pope, _Voyage of the Beagle_ ... one comes to
understand how such readers may have been made by such masters. From the
beginning to the end of that list my mind is obsessed by the word
'stodge,' and the novels do not relieve it much. There are a good many,
but they comprise the usual Thackeray, Scott, Dickens ... need I go on?
Relief is found only in Fielding, Sterne, and in one book each of
Marryat, Lever, Kingsley, and Gissing. These authors are admitted
presumably because they are dead.

In all this, where is hope?