ngry reaction he may feel from such
suggestions, than by a dull academic chart--professing tedious
judicial impartiality--of all the continents, promontories, and
islands, marked on the official map.

One does not trust youth enough, that is in short what is the matter
with our educational method, in this part of it at least, which
concerns "what one is to read." One teases oneself too much, and one's
infants, too, poor darlings, with what might be called the
"scholastic-veneration-cult"; the cult, namely, of becoming a superior
person by reading the best authors. It comes back, after all, to what
your young person emphatically is, in himself, independent of all this
acquiring. If he has the responsive chord, the answering vibration, he
may well get more imaginative stimulus from reading "Alice in
Wonderland," than from all the Upanishads and Niebelungenlieds in the
world. It is a matter of the imagination, and to the question "What is
one to read?" the best reply must always be the most personal:
"Whatever profoundly and permanently stimulates your imagination." The
list of books which follows in this volume constitutes in itself, in
the mere perusal of the titles, such a potential stimulation. A reader
who demands, for instance, why George Eliot is omitted, and Oliver
Onions included; why Sophocles is excluded and Catullus admitted, is
brought face to face with that essential right of personal choice in
these high matters, which is not only the foundation of all thrilling
interest in literature, but the very ground and soil of all-powerful
literary creation. The secret of the art of literary taste, may it not
be found to be nothing else than the secret of the art of life
itself--I mean the capacity for discovering the real fatality, the
real predestined direction of one's intrinsic nature and the refusal,
when this is found, to waste one's energies in alien paths and
irrelevant junketings?

A list of books of the kind appended here, becomes, by the very reason
of its shameless subjectivity, a challenge to the intelligence
perusing it--a challenge that is bound, in some degree or another, to
fling such a reader back upon his own inveterate prejudices; to fling
him back upon them with a sense that it is his affair reasonably to
justify them.

From quite another point of view, however, might the appended list
find its excuse--I mean as being a typical choice; in other words, the
natural choice of a certain particular