if all the men in it, instead of doing and singing in
it, had spent their days in delivering lectures to it, there would be
every reason, in a universe arranged for lectures, why we should exact
of those who give them, that they should make the truth plain to us--so
plain that there would be nothing left for us to do, with truth, but to
read it in the printed book, and then analyse the best analysis of
it--and die.

It seems to be quite generally true of those who have been the great
masters of literature, however, that in proportion as they have been
great they have proved to be as ungracious and as tantalisingly elusive
as the universe itself. They have refused, without exception, to bear
down on the word "how." They have almost never told men what to do, and
have confined themselves to saying something that would make them do it,
and make them find a way to do it. This something that they have said,
like the something that they have lived, has come to them they know not
how, and it has gone from them they know not how, sometimes not even
when. It has been incommunicable, incalculable, infinite, the
subconscious self of each of them, the voice beneath the voice, calling
down the corridors of the world.

If a boy from the country were to stand in a city street before the
window of a shop, gazing into it with open mouth, he would do more in
five or six minutes to measure the power and calibre of the passing men
and women than almost any device that could be arranged. Ninety-five out
of a hundred of them, probably, would smile a superior smile at him and
hurry on. Out of the remaining five, four would look again and pity him.
One, perhaps, would honour and envy him.

The boy who, in a day like the present one, is still vital enough to
forget how he looks in enjoying something, is not only a rare and
refreshing spectacle, but he is master of the most important
intellectual and moral superiority a boy can be master of, and if, in
spite of teachers and surroundings, he can keep this superiority long
enough, or until he comes to be a man, he shall be the kind of man whose
very faults shall be remembered better and cherished more by a doting
world than the virtues of the rest of us.

The most important fact--perhaps the only important fact--about James
Boswell--the country boy of literature--is that, whatever may have been
his limitations, he had the most important gift that life can give to a
man--the gift of forgetting