Nor would I have to stop at summarizing a few of those love affairs. There stretches open before us also the field of psychological theory. That youthful affair of Wordsworth's, which I have just alluded to-that, for instance, serves as the foundation of a piece of psychological theorizing. Wordsworth lived to a great age, but it is generally agreed that he wrote nearly all his best poetry during a comparatively short period of his long life -a period of about eight years while he was still young. The theory I have just mentioned, which is put forward by Mr. Herbert Read, seeks to explain how this happened. The affair with the French girl, Annette Vallon, occurred some years before his inspiration reached its summit, and Mr. Read has suggested that it was while the memory of Annette still suffused Wordsworth's spirit with a glow of enthusiasm that his muse made him eloquent, and that if presently Wordsworth ceased to be so happily inspired, it was because by then he had grown ashamed, or at least repentant, of his youthful indiscretion, and his heart had turned to ashes. According to Mr. Read, Wordsworth's reason told him that the recollection of the French girl must be obliterated from his mind and feelings, and he resolutely set himself to forget her. But it was only at the price of quenching the fires within him that he succeeded in doing so. Thereupon, though he went on composing verse, he could no longer make it living verse. That is Mr. Read's theory. And it is but one of a number of psychological theories about great writers which the popularity of psychology has recently tempted ingenious persons to work out and put before the world. In those theories, or at least in a selection of them, we again have a subject which seems to recommend itself.

Altogether it looks as if my only difficulty would be to decide what from among such a wealth of competing material I ought to choose. Should I deal with the mannerisms and eccentricities of grea: writers, with their vices, with the riches of some and the poverty of others, with literary frauds and impostures; or should I discuss the eventful and adventurous lives of certain authors, and the way in which some wrested success from the world in spite of unpropitious beginnings? Or, again, should I turn to the love affairs of certain great writers? Or, finally, should I concern myself with some of the psychological theories that have been advanced within recent years to account for this or that

great author's having written as he did and what he did? Those are our choices.

And, undeniably, they are all attractive. Before we commit ourselves, however, let us see how far any one of them would serve our purpose. As I have said, my intention is to assist us to read for profit. In order that we may win the profit it is requisite, I have also said, that we should come in some measure to possess a sense of the literature of the past and feel it as a living force. Hence we may first ask ourselves if a smattering of the history of English literature would result in our possessing that spirit and would lead us to have this sense and feeling. I am afraid it would not. It would in no way achieve this to have English literature neatly sectioned off in our heads into periods. Nor would it help us to consider so-called influences and tendencies. Likewise, it would be no good my referring to a selection of anthologies. And by the same token it would be equally sterile for me to deal with the eventful lives of certain great authors, or about the mannerisms, eccentricities, riches, or poverty of great authors, about their frauds or their love affairs; nor would it help to have an account of psychological theories that have been elaborated in order to account for this or that author's having written as he did and what he did.

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The reason why nothing of all that would really serve is that what we need to come to grips with is literature itself, and literature is not its history, nor "periods", "tendencies", or "influences"; literature is neither external events in the life of an author nor internal events which psychological theory may attribute to a writer: literature consists entirely of pieces of writing, and it is solely in pieces of writing that literature exists. If then it is required of us, in order to read for profit, that we should feel and understand the literature of the past as a living force, it is to literature itself that we must address ourselves; it is to some of those individual pieces of writing which together constitute literature that we must go.

We cannot rely on anthologies. Against anthologies in their place I of course have nothing to say. Anthologies may be of use to apprentice writers in that they are miniature source books

of style. Anthologies may be of use to the young, to whom they will give a foretaste of writings which the young may expect to come upon entire later in their reading. Anthologies may be of advantage to the sailor, the soldier, or the traveler, in that they will often provide him with many of his favorite short poems in a compact and handy form. But when our aim is to come to feel and to understand something of literature-that is to say, to come to feel and to understand something of a selection of individual works-then anthologies are useless. Generally speaking, it is only anthologies of poetry that contain any pieces of writing complete, and then only short poems. Most anthologies are made up of fragments-either fragments of works or else fragments of the work of various writers. And fragments, or, for that matter, complete short poems, are not what we now want. If we are going to address ourselves to some of the pieces of writing that constitute literature in order to come to feel and to understand the literature of the past as a living force, we need to take pieces of writing of a certain length and we need to have them before us entire.

Again, we cannot rely either upon certain biographies of writers or on psychological theories about particular authors. In order to read for profit, our business is to read and then to notice what happens to us. The most important thing about reading is its effect upon us; and our consciousness of the effect which the reading of any book has upon us will seldom be sharpened by reading of its author's life. Information about that life will be no substitute for the effect, nor will psychological theories concerning the author. No doubt we are all instinctively curious, or rather inquisitive, regarding the lives of other people and especially when we fancy, or have reason to suppose, that those lives have been excitingly eventful. The love affairs of a writer seem, because he is a writer, to be somehow more thrilling than the love affairs of a financier or a grocer. It is therefore hardly surprising that we should take pleasure in reading either accounts of the external events in some celebrated author's life or else accounts of the internal and emotional adventures which, years after he is dead, an ingenious theorist ascribes to him. And so long as we do not imagine that we are thereby getting to know how that particular author matters for literature, so long as we are aware of reading for

pleasure and in order to indulge our inquisitiveness, little or no harm can result. In a sense unconnected with the author's works, we may even be reading for profit. Sometimes a biography is a fine piece of literature, and later on I shall have something to say about the profitableness of reading biographies. If, however, when reading the account of an author's life, and especially when reading about some psychological theory concerning an author, we fancy that we are being helped the better to understand the place of that author's writings in literature, or how they come to be literature, we deceive ourselves. Who a particular author was, how he behaved, whom he loved, what he felt-none of that is then information of any use to us. Let us suppose one piece of writing we decide to read is a poem. The only thing that is going to matter for us is the effect which the reading has upon us. How the poet came to write it -that is a psychological and not a literary question. Whether or not the poet was impelled to write the poem through having undergone some definite emotion-through having been, for instance, in love—is utterly immaterial. Quite possibly, the actual writing of the poem may have occurred in a condition the reverse of emotional: that fact likewise is no concern of ours. Especially when we are considering poetry, we are apt to suppose that the poet is somehow communicating to us his own emotion; and certain poets, it is true, have made statements supporting this view. But others have said just the opposite. Wordsworth's saying that "poetry takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity" has come to be accepted as meaning that a poem is the communication of some emotion felt by its author. But really, all the words do not even describe how all poems originate. Wordsworth was in one respect a peculiar poet. He could find the material for his poetry only in his own emotional experience. That is why Keats called his kind of poetry "the egotistical sublime". It by no means follows that all poets have confined themselves to such material, or indeed that when we read a poem by Wordsworth we are having communicated to us some emotion which Wordsworth himself had undergone. In the urge to artistic production there may be traced two distinct impulses. One, possibly the more primitive of the two, is the impulse to make something, an impulse which has thus come to pass for a desire to express, to communicate.

The other, equally powerful and equally effectual, is the impulse to evoke a response from a spectator, auditor, or reader-that is to say, an impulse to play on the feelings of other people. It is alone with this second impulse that the reader of literature is concerned. Yet critics of a certain kind constantly speak and write as if they thought otherwise—as if the first impulse existed alone and needed to be studied in operation. Such critics tend to pay too much unreflecting respect to obiter dicta such as that of Milton's that the poet "ought himself to be a true poem", and not enough to statements such as that of Keats's, that "the poet is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures". When Wordsworth speaks of "emotion recollected in tranquillity", he is referring to what seemed to him to be the material of his early lyric poems, to what this material had been for him, and for him alone; he is not referring to what a poem is from the standpoint of its reader. It is not a matter of opinion, but an obvious matter of fact, that there is behind the production of a poem, whether the poet is aware of it or not, the impulse to arouse emotion in us who read the poem; and, because this effect upon us is achieved by means of words, what the poet himself may have felt, what may have happened to him, and what his material was, are no concern of ours as readers-no concern whatsoever.

Indeed, if a poet while in the very act of composition has felt anything like what he seeks to make us feel, he is likely to fail in moving us. In this respect, the poet may be compared with the actor. It has often been supposed-it has often been said— that an actor should think himself into his part, and in order to act most convincingly, should forget for the time being that he is not the man he impersonates. That, however, is no more than a popular delusion. It has been effectively dispelled by the great French actor Coquelin, in his book on the art of acting. In that book Coquelin tells the following anecdote.

Another great actor, Edwin Booth, was once in America taking the chief part in the play Le Roi s'amuse (I forget the title of the English version in which Booth appeared, and, after all, what the play was is of no consequence). The part was one in which Booth was conscious of having won great success. One evening he satisfied himself that he was acting even better than usual. The power of the situations, the pathos of his lines,