introduction” ought to be put at the end, and not at the beginning, of the book.  The classic should be allowed to make his own impression, however faint, on the virginal mind of the reader.  But afterwards let explanatory criticism be read as much as you please.  Explanatory criticism is very useful; nearly as useful as pondering for oneself on what one has read!  Explanatory criticism may throw one single gleam that lights up the entire subject.

My second consideration (in aid of crossing the gulf) touches the quality of the pleasure to be derived from a classic.  It is never a violent pleasure.  It is subtle, and it will wax in intensity, but the idea of violence is foreign to it.  The artistic pleasures of an uncultivated mind are generally violent.  They proceed from exaggeration in treatment, from a lack of balance, from attaching too great an importance to one aspect (usually superficial), while quite ignoring another.  They are gross, like the joy of Worcester sauce on the palate.  Now, if there is one point common to all classics, it is the absence of exaggeration.  The balanced sanity of a great mind makes impossible exaggeration, and, therefore, distortion.  The beauty of a classic is not at all apt to knock you down.  It will steal over you, rather.  Many serious students are, I am convinced, discouraged in the early stages because they are expecting a wrong kind of pleasure.  They have abandoned Worcester sauce, and they miss it.  They miss the coarse tang.  They must realise that indulgence in the tang means the sure and total loss of sensitiveness—­sensitiveness even to the tang itself.  They cannot have crudeness and fineness together.  They must choose, remembering that while crudeness kills pleasure, fineness ever intensifies it.

CHAPTER VIII

SYSTEM IN HEADING

You have now definitely set sail on the sea of literature.  You are afloat, and your anchor is up.  I think I have given adequate warning of the dangers and disappointments which await the unwary and the sanguine.  The enterprise in which you are engaged is not facile, nor is it short.  I think I have sufficiently predicted that you will have your hours of woe, during which you may be inclined to send to perdition all writers, together with the inventor of printing.  But if you have become really friendly with Lamb; if you know Lamb, or even half of him; if you have formed an image of him in your mind, and can, as it were, hear him brilliantly stuttering while you read his essays or letters, then certainly you are in a fit condition to proceed and you want to know in which direction you are to proceed.  Yes, I have caught your terrified and protesting whisper:  “I hope to heaven he isn’t going to prescribe a Course of English Literature, because I feel I shall never be able to do it!” I am not.  If your object in life was to be a University Extension Lecturer