English literature will be to children as they grow up, what we have made it to them in the beginning.  There will always be the exceptional few, privileged ones, who seem to have received the key to it as a personal gift.  They will find their way without us, but if we have the honour of rendering them service we may do a great deal even for them in showing where the best things lie, and the way to make them one’s own.  But the greater number have to be taken through the first steps with much thought and discernment, for taste in literature is not always easy to develop, and may be spoiled by bad management at the beginning.  We are not very teachable as a nation in this matter—­our young taste is wayward, and sometimes contradictory, it will not give account of itself, very likely it cannot.  We have inarticulate convictions that this is right, and suits us, and something else is wrong as far as our taste is concerned, and that we have rights to like what we like and condemn what we do not like, and we have gone a considerable way along the road before we can stop and look about us and see the reason of our choice.  English literature itself fosters this independent spirit of criticism by its extraordinary abundance, its own wide liberty of spirit, its surpassing truthfulness.  Our greatest poets and our truest do not sing to an audience but to their Maker and to His world, and let anyone who can understand it catch the song, and sing it after them.  No doubt many have fallen from the truth and piped an artificial tune, and they have had their following.  But love for the real and true is very deep and in the end it prevails, and as far as we can obtain it with children it must prevail.

Their first acquaintance with beautiful things is best established by reading aloud to them, and this need not be limited entirely to what they can understand at the time.  Even if we read something that is beyond them, they have listened to the cadences, they have heard the song without the words, the words will come to them later.  If there is good ground for the seed to fall upon, and we sow good seed, it will come up with its thirtyfold or more, as seed sown in the mind seems always to come up, whether it be good or bad, and even if it has lain dormant for years.  There are good moments laid up in store for the future when the words, which have been familiar for years, suddenly awake to life, and their meaning, full-grown, at the moment when we need it, or at the moment when we are able to understand its value, dawns upon the mind.  Then we are grateful to those who invested these revenues for us though we knew it not.  We are not grateful to those who give us the less good though pleasant and easy to enjoy.  A little severity and fastidiousness render us better service.  And this is especially true for girls, since for them it is above all important that there should be a touch of the severe in their taste, and that they should be a little exacting, for if they once let themselves go to what is too light-heartedly popular they do not know where to draw the line and they go very far, with great loss to themselves and others.