One who loves
books, like one who loves a particular bit of a country, is always
eager to make others see what he sees; that there have been other
lovers of books and views before him does not put him in an apologetic
mood. There cannot be too many lovers of the best things in these
pessimistic days, when to have the power of loving anything is
beginning to be a great and rare gift.
The word love in this connection is significant of a very definite
attitude toward books,--an attitude not uncritical, since it is love
of the best only, but an attitude which implies more intimacy and
receptivity than the purely critical temper makes possible; an
attitude, moreover, which expects and invites something more than
instruction or entertainment,--both valuable, wholesome, and
necessary, and yet neither descriptive of the richest function which
the book fulfils to the reader. To love a book is to invite an
intimacy with it which opens the way to its heart. One of the wisest
of modern readers has said that the most important characteristic of
the real critic--the man who penetrates the secret of a work of
art--is the ability to admire greatly; and there is but a short step
between admiration and love.
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