Essays in the Art of Writing
- Pages
- about 79
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 87 min at 250 wpm
From the opening
Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
The Editor {75b} has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his
correspondents, the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly
cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and
review that the writer awakes to find himself engaged upon something in
the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the
life of that little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we
have all lost and mourned, the man we ought to have been, the man we
hoped to be. But when word has been passed (even to an editor), it
should, if possible, be kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too
little, and sometimes weak and say too much, the blame must lie at the
door of the person who entrapped me.
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works
of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must
afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which
he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify
the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us
to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience,
not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change—that
monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To
be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work
that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our
education is answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe a
magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious characters.
Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had upon me an
influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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