of great significance. The fact that it is actually there and that no
particular comment is excited by its being there, is significant. It
betrays not only what the general, national, academic attitude toward
literature is, but that that attitude has become habitual, that it is
taken for granted.

One would be inclined to suppose, looking at the matter abstractly, that
all students and teachers of literature would take it for granted that
the practice of making a dispassionate criticism of a passion would be a
dangerous practice for any vital and spontaneous nature--certainly the
last kind of practice that a student of the art of poetry (that is, the
art of literature, in the essential sense) would wish to make himself
master of. The first item in a critic's outfit for criticising a passion
is having one. The fact that this is not regarded as an axiom in our
current education in books is a very significant fact. It goes with
another significant fact--the assumption, in most courses of literature
as at present conducted, that a little man (that is, a man incapable of
a great passion), who is not even able to read a book with a great
passion in it, can somehow teach other people to read it.

It is not necessary to deny that analysis occasionally plays a valuable
part in bringing a pupil to a true method and knowledge of literature,
but unless the analysis is inspired nothing can be more dangerous to a
pupil under his thirtieth year, even for the shortest period of time, or
more likely to move him over to the farthest confines of the creative
life, or more certain, if continued long enough, to set him forever
outside all power or possibility of power, either in the art of
literature or in any of the other arts.

The first objection to the analysis of one of Shakespeare's plays as
ordinarily practised in courses of literature is that it is of doubtful
value to nine hundred and ninety-nine pupils in a thousand--if they do
it. The second is, that they cannot do it. The analysing of one of
Shakespeare's plays requires more of a commonplace pupil than
Shakespeare required of himself. The apology that is given for the
analysing method is, that the process of analysing a work of
Shakespeare's will show the pupil how Shakespeare did it, and that by
seeing how Shakespeare did it he will see how to do it himself.

In the first place, analysis will not show how Shakespeare did it, and
in the second place, if it does, it will show