"Bennett, Arnold - Literary Taste. (How To Form It)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bennett Arnold)

sincerity of your own vision of her, and by the fervour
of your desire to make him participate in your vision,
did for quite a long time cause him to feel that he had been blind
to the miracle of that girl.


You were producing literature. You were alive. Your eyes were unlidded,
your ears were unstopped, to some part of the beauty and the strangeness
of the world; and a strong instinct within you forced you
to tell someone. It was not enough for you that you saw and heard.
Others had to see and hear. Others had to be wakened up.
And they were! It is quite possible--I am not quite sure--
that your faithful friend the very next day, or the next month,
looked at some other girl, and suddenly saw that she, too,
was miraculous! The influence of literature!


The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt
the miraculous interestingness of the universe. And the greatest
makers of literature are those whose vision has been the widest,
and whose feeling has been the most intense. Your own fragment of insight
was accidental, and perhaps temporary. *Their* lives are one long ecstasy
of denying that the world is a dull place. Is it nothing to you
to learn to understand that the world is not a dull place?
Is it nothing to you to be led out of the tunnel on to the hill-side,
to have all your senses quickened, to be invigorated
by the true savour of life, to feel your heart beating
under that correct necktie of yours? These makers of literature
render you their equals.


The aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours of leisure;
it is to awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify
one's capacity for pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension.
It is not to affect one hour, but twenty-four hours.
It is to change utterly one's relations with the world.
An understanding appreciation of literature means an understanding
appreciation of the world, and it means nothing else. Not isolated
and unconnected parts of life, but all of life, brought together
and correlated in a synthetic map! The spirit of literature
is unifying; it joins the candle and the star, and by the magic
of an image shows that the beauty of the greater is in the less.
And, not content with the disclosure of beauty and the bringing together
of all things whatever within its focus, it enforces a moral wisdom
by the tracing everywhere of cause and effect. It consoles doubly--
by the revelation of unsuspected loveliness, and by the proof
that our lot is the common lot. It is the supreme cry of the discoverer,
offering sympathy and asking for it in a single gesture. In attending
a University Extension Lecture on the sources of Shakespeare's plots,
or in studying the researches of George Saintsbury into