One does not trust youth enough, that is in short what is the matter
with our educational method, in this part of it at least, which
concerns "what one is to read." One teases oneself too much, and one's
infants, too, poor darlings, with what might be called the
"scholastic-veneration-cult"; the cult, namely, of becoming a superior
person by reading the best authors. It comes back, after all, to what
your young person emphatically is, in himself, independent of all this
acquiring. If he has the responsive chord, the answering vibration, he
may well get more imaginative stimulus from reading "Alice in
Wonderland," than from all the Upanishads and Niebelungenlieds in the
world. It is a matter of the imagination, and to the question "What is
one to read?" the best reply must always be the most personal:
"Whatever profoundly and permanently stimulates your imagination." The
list of books which follows in this volume constitutes in itself, in
the mere perusal of the titles, such a potential stimulation. A reader
who demands, for instance, why George Eliot is omitted, and Oliver
Onions included; why Sophocles is excluded and Catullus admitted, is
brought face to face with that essential right of personal choice in
these high matters, which is not only the foundation of all thrilling
interest in literature, but the very ground and soil of all-powerful
literary creation.
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