worked on him so strongly that he completely identified himself with the character he was representing. Real tears flowed from his eyes, his voice broke with emotion, real sobs choked him. Altogether, it seemed to him that he had never acted so well. The performance over, he saw his daughter hastening towards him. She, his most sincere and trustworthy critic, had been watching the stage from a box, and she was now anxious to inquire what was the matter and how it happened that that night he had acted so badly.

Coquelin does not tell this little story for its own sake. His object is to point a moral. In his own words, the moral is that in order to call forth feeling in others we ourselves must not experience it. He does not say that we must never have known it, but only that we must not be undergoing it while we are in the act of trying to arouse it in others. "In all circumstances the actor", he says, "must retain complete self-control."

What is thus true of the actor is likewise true of every artist. No artist can hope to succeed in his job if he tries to force the response of his spectator, his auditor, or his reader, by putting the latter in contact with a direct response of his own. Thus it is that the business of the poet is himself to remain impassive while he is intent on utilizing every means at his disposal for moving his reader. In order to arouse emotion in others, the poet himself must in all circumstances retain complete selfcontrol. That is why it is that when we are in the process of enjoying and appreciating a poem, all particulars regarding the poet must be irrelevant. They can only distract and confuse us. Even where it happens that what has impelled a poet to write is an emotion which he himself has undergone-as with Wordsworth-knowledge that this emotion has been experienced by him will in no way assist us in the appreciation of his work. I hope that makes it quite clear that we cannot equip ourselves to win profit as we read by gleaning biographical or psychological information about great writers. We have to go to literature itself; that is to say, to individual pieces of writing.

iv

In order to read for profit, we may make for ourselves five rough and ready rules, or guiding principles; and this is the first

of them: that, needing in the first place some acquaintance with the literature of the past, some consciousness of how the literature of the past is a living force, we should seek that acquaintance and consciousness from literature itself-not from histories of literature, not from anthologies, not from biographies or psychological theories concerning great writers, but from actual pieces of writing.

That is the first rule. And here is the second. Let us go to those actual pieces of writing which are a part of literature in an appropriate spirit of humility. In behalf of this second rule, here is a pregnant little passage:

The reading of all the good books is like having a conversation with the highly worthy persons of the past who wrote them; indeed, it is like having a prepared conversation in which those persons disclose to us only their best thinking.

These words-which remind us of Milton's expression, "the precious life-blood of a master spirit"-occur in the famous Discourse on Method of the great French philosopher, Descartes. Very likely, for all I know, Arnold Bennett the novelist never came across them. Yet it is Bennett who happens to have expounded them and to have drawn out their implication. Here is how he does so. He says that if we knew we were about to have an interview with some great man, and especially with one reputed for his wisdom, we would not dream of neglecting to prepare ourselves for the occasion. Moreover, during the actual conversation, when it took place, we would hang on the great man's lips and would carry away with us from it the indelible memory of his every word. It is, Arnold Bennett continues, in exactly the same way that we should approach a work of literature. A work of literature should be read in the same subdued spirit, with the same careful attention. With these words of Arnold Bennett's, reflection, I am sure, can only lead us fully to agree. We should never open a good book expecting it to conform to our favorite prepossessions and in readiness to reject it as soon as we find that it fails to do so. A university extension lecturer remarked the other day that his pupils were only too ready to be prejudiced against any particular piece of literature, and that in order to make them like it he had, as he put it, to spring it upon them. That attitude of, as it were, wanting to be

prejudiced may seem very smart, but, needless to say, it is utterly self-stultifying. And it is not the only attitude to writing that is so. Too many people are inclined to imagine that no piece of writing can have its raison d'être except in something extraneous to itself. They tend to imagine that writers are in the world solely in order to be made use of and that all writing is to be treated as being in some sense propaganda. This is misguided and self-defeating. Literature, and in fact not only acknowledged literature but all writing, is, in so far as it is itself, autonomous. Only thanks to its autonomy can it embrace, as it does, the whole of life and of human experience. The condition of its reaching out so widely is that it is free. No doubt there is plenty of writing for ends avowedly extraliterary. But from the standpoint of literature, from the standpoint of writing, those ends must always be secondary. It is the literary intention that we need always to consider first and foremost. Let us always ask ourselves, not what axe has the author had to grind, but what intention-what literary intention, has guided him; what effect -what literary effect, has he wanted to produce. We cannot ask ourselves this regarding a particular piece of writing, and still more we cannot obtain any answer, if we ask condescendingly and in a spirit of patronage. Whenever we are condescending or patronizing towards a poem or a novel, we can never enjoy it as it is meant to be enjoyed; we can never understand it to our best advantage. Therefore, let us invariably open a good book as if we were coming into the presence of one of our betters.

That is our second rule. I come to our third. It is: Let us read nothing that bores us. It should go without saying that if we are going to read deliberately for the sake of the profit which we may derive from our reading, we shall need to find the reading pleasurable. One reason for this is that the acquaintance with literature which we shall be pursuing is simply a consciousness and an understanding of our enjoyment of literature. But another and equally important reason is that for nobody can acquiring the acquaintance be easy. The acquisition can be neither easy nor brief. The number of works of literature which any of us need select to read and to think over in order to find himself reading with profit is doubtless small in proportion to the whole mass of literature. It is large in proportion to any

individual reader's powers of assimilation. They are works which require not only to be read, but to be read again. The greater their quality and the more solid their substance, the closer the attention which they exact. We need to read with all the alertness and concentration of which we are capable. It follows that to get to know anything of literature must require an effort on our part and that it must require time. And because both time and effort are demanded of us, we shall certainly do well to stop reading anything that we do not enjoy-to stop reading anything by which we find ourselves bored. For that would be to discourage our efforts just where, in order to succeed, they need to be sustained. Whenever we find ourselves in danger of being bored by some book or other piece of writing, I suggest we put it aside, no matter how tremendous the reputation it has in the world. Let us always remember that neither can we read, nor is there any call upon us to read, all the masterpieces in our tongue. If, however, the work by which we have been in danger of being bored is one which we feel we ought not to neglect, we can always return to it at some later date. Let us allow ourselves an interval in which our literary sympathies may be widened and deepened, our palate for reading made more appreciative of something that is for us unusual; and then, when we open the book again, it is quite likely that we shall find—possibly to our surprise-that it now holds us absorbed. Had we in the first place, in spite of the absence of pleasure, persevered with the reading of it, we might have come to dislike it irretrievably. Now, on the contrary, and thanks to the delay, it has won us over. The more we feel in advance that the book is one we should attend to, the more important it is for us that this should happen. For it is only the reading we enjoy that can be counted upon to affect and influence us durably and with our consent. It is only from the reading we enjoy that we can expect to obtain the best profit. For, as I said just now, to be acquainted with literature is simply to be conscious of, and to understand, our enjoyment of it. That is why I offer as our third rule: Let us read nothing that bores us.

Our fourth rule is: Let us organize our reading. It is a rule on the importance of which I cannot insist too strongly. The trouble with people who read a lot is that, as often as not, their reading is promiscuous, haphazard, confused. The books with

which we put the last touch to furnishing our guest room may combine extremes of the heterogeneous, because we do not always know in advance the tastes of our guests, but we do know that bedtime reading is a matter of mood. Nevertheless, the guest who gave his nights to reading them all in an indiscriminate succession would strike us as queer. I know I insisted just now on the desirability of not reading anything that bores us, and I know it may be urged that variety in our reading helps to avoid the danger of boredom and seems to ensure that our reading shall always be pleasurable. I know. I know that the expression "organized reading" has a forbidding sound. I know that it suggests turning our reading, which normally must be done in our leisure and which we like to think of as for relaxation, into a task. I know that if there may be a case for taking our pleasures sadly, there is apparently none for taking our pleasures systematically. Nevertheless, when all that is allowed for, it does not make it any the less regrettable that so many people should allow their reading to become a muddle. What can be the advantage or the satisfaction of mixing up our reading of economics, fiction, psychology, history, biography, travel, and theology, so that the result is mental confusion? At best it can only mean that we overtax our minds. Probably the most versatile and comprehensive brain known to European history is Leonardo da Vinci's; but not even he, we may be sure, would have been able to read as many people read and yet have made head or tail of what he read. At worst we shall get to the stage of reading with complete passivity. What we read will cease to impress itself upon us consciously, and we shall carry away from our reading not even likes and dislikes.

So it is that, as I say, it will profit us if our reading is organized. In the first place, let us be sure that we read the capital books themselves and do not remain content to take them on hearsay. Let us not, as many people do nowadays, read books about, say, Byron without having first read Byron's correspondence. Let us not, as many people do nowadays, read books about the reign of Charles II without having first read the Diaries of Pepys and of Evelyn. Let us not, as many people do nowadays, read biographies of Queen Victoria or of Keats without having first read the Letters of Queen Victoria or the Letters of Keats. Let us read Lady Blessington's Diary before we