ivity.

The conclusion of any critical essay must in large measure be lame
and halting; must indeed be a whispered warning to the reader to
take what has gone before, however ardently expressed, with that
wise pinch of true Attic salt which mitigates even a relative finality
in these high things.

One comes to feel more and more, as one reads many books, that
judicial decisions are laughable and useless in this rare atmosphere,
and that the mere utterance of such platitudinous decrees sets the
pronouncer of them outside the inner and exclusive pale.

One comes to feel more and more that all that any of us has a right
to do is to set down as patiently and tenderly as he may the
particular response, here or there, from this side or the other, as it
chances to happen, that is aroused in his own soul by those historic
works of art, which, whatever principle of selection it is that places
them in our hands, have fallen somehow across our path.

It might seem that a direct, natural and spontaneous response, of the
kind I have in my mind, to these famous works, were easy enough of
attainment. Nothing, on the contrary, is more difficult to secure or
more seldom secured.

One might almost hazard the paradox that the real art of criticism
only begins when we shake ourselves free of all books and win
access to that locked and sealed and uncut volume which is the book
of our own feelings.

The art of self-culture--one learns just that when youth's
outward-looking curiosity and passion begin to ebb--is the art of freeing
oneself from the influence of books so that one may enjoy what one
is destined to enjoy without pedantry or scruple. And yet, by the
profound law of the system of things, when one has thus freed
oneself from the tyranny of literary catchwords and the dead weight
of cultivated public opinion, one comes back to the world of books
with an added zest. It is then, and only then, that one reads with real
unscrupulousness, thinking solely of the pleasure, and nothing of the
rectitude or propriety or adequacy of what we take up.

And it is then that the great figures of the master-writers appear in
their true light; the light--that is to say--in which we, and not another,
have visualised them, felt them, and reacted from them.

It is wonderful what thrilling pleasures there are in store for us in
literature when once we have cut ourselves adrift from all this
superfluity of cultured opinion, and have given ourselv