and such a reputation exists.”  Without that persistent memory-jogging the reputation would quickly fall into the oblivion which is death.  The passionate few only have their way by reason of the fact that they are genuinely interested in literature, that literature matters to them.  They conquer by their obstinacy alone, by their eternal repetition of the same statements.  Do you suppose they could prove to the man in the street that Shakespeare was a great artist?  The said man would not even understand the terms they employed.  But when he is told ten thousand times, and generation after generation, that Shakespeare was a great artist, the said man believes—­not by reason, but by faith.  And he too repeats that Shakespeare was a great artist, and he buys the complete works of Shakespeare and puts them on his shelves, and he goes to see the marvellous stage-effects which accompany King Lear or Hamlet, and comes back religiously convinced that Shakespeare was a great artist.  All because the passionate few could not keep their admiration of Shakespeare to themselves.  This is not cynicism; but truth.  And it is important that those who wish to form their literary taste should grasp it.

What causes the passionate few to make such a fuss about literature?  There can be only one reply.  They find a keen and lasting pleasure in literature.  They enjoy literature as some men enjoy beer.  The recurrence of this pleasure naturally keeps their interest in literature very much alive.  They are for ever making new researches, for ever practising on themselves.  They learn to understand themselves.  They learn to know what they want.  Their taste becomes surer and surer as their experience lengthens.  They do not enjoy to-day what will seem tedious to them to-morrow.  When they find a book tedious, no amount of popular clatter will persuade them that it is pleasurable; and when they find it pleasurable no chill silence of the street-crowds will affect their conviction that the book is good and permanent.  They have faith in themselves.  What are the qualities in a book which give keen and lasting pleasure to the passionate few?  This is a question so difficult that it has never yet been completely answered.  You may talk lightly about truth, insight, knowledge, wisdom, humour, and beauty.  But these comfortable words do not really carry you very far, for each of them has to be defined, especially the first and last.  It is all very well for Keats in his airy manner to assert that beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that that is all he knows or needs to know.  I, for one, need to know a lot more.  And I never shall know.  Nobody, not even Hazlitt nor Sainte-Beuve, has ever finally explained why he thought a book beautiful.  I take the first fine lines that come to hand—­

  The woods of Arcady are dead,
  And over is their antique joy—­