The reason why you must avoid modern works at the beginning is simply that you are not in a position to choose among modern works.  Nobody at all is quite in a position to choose with certainty among modern works.  To sift the wheat from the chaff is a process that takes an exceedingly long time.  Modern works have to pass before the bar of the taste of successive generations.  Whereas, with classics, which have been through the ordeal, almost the reverse is the case. Your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics.  That is the point.  If you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book.  If you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you may be right, but no judge is authoritative enough to decide.  Your taste is unformed.  It needs guidance, and it needs authoritative guidance.  Into the business of forming literary taste faith enters.  You probably will not specially care for a particular classic at first.  If you did care for it at first, your taste, so far as that classic is concerned, would be formed, and our hypothesis is that your taste is not formed.  How are you to arrive at the stage of caring for it?  Chiefly, of course, by examining it and honestly trying to understand it.  But this process is materially helped by an act of faith, by the frame of mind which says:  “I know on the highest authority that this thing is fine, that it is capable of giving me pleasure.  Hence I am determined to find pleasure in it.”  Believe me that faith counts enormously in the development of that wide taste which is the instrument of wide pleasures.  But it must be faith founded on unassailable authority.

CHAPTER V

HOW TO READ A CLASSIC

Let us begin experimental reading with Charles Lamb.  I choose Lamb for various reasons:  He is a great writer, wide in his appeal, of a highly sympathetic temperament; and his finest achievements are simple and very short.  Moreover, he may usefully lead to other and more complex matters, as will appear later.  Now, your natural tendency will be to think of Charles Lamb as a book, because he has arrived at the stage of being a classic.  Charles Lamb was a man, not a book.  It is extremely important that the beginner in literary study should always form an idea of the man behind the book.  The book is nothing but the expression of the man.  The book is nothing but the man trying to talk to you, trying to impart to you some of his feelings.  An experienced student will divine the man from the book, will understand the man by the book, as is, of course, logically proper.  But the beginner will do well to aid himself in understanding the book by means of independent information about the man.  He will thus at once relate the book to something human, and strengthen in his mind the essential notion of the connection between literature and life.  The earliest literature was delivered orally direct by the artist to the recipient.  In some respects this arrangement was ideal.  Changes in the constitution of society have rendered it impossible.  Nevertheless, we can still, by the exercise of the imagination, hear mentally the accents of the artist speaking to us.  We must so exercise our imagination as to feel the man behind the book.