The literary problem--the problem of possessing or appreciating or
teaching a literary style--resolves itself at last into a pure problem
of personality. A pupil is being trained in literature in proportion as
his spiritual and physical powers are being brought out by the teacher
and played upon until they permeate each other in all that he does and
in all that he is--in all phases of his life. Unless what a pupil is
glows to the finger tips of his words, he cannot write, and unless what
he is makes the words of other men glow when he reads, he cannot read.

In proportion as it is great, literature is addressed to all of a man's
body and to all of his soul. It matters nothing how much a man may know
about books, unless the pages of them play upon his senses while he
reads, he is not physically a cultivated man, a gentleman, or scholar
with his body. Unless books play upon all his spiritual and mental
sensibilities when he reads he cannot be considered a cultivated man, a
gentleman, and a scholar in his soul. It is the essence of all great
literature that it makes its direct appeal to sense-perceptions
permeated with spiritual suggestion. There is no such thing possible as
being a literary authority, a cultured or scholarly man, unless the
permeating of the sense-perceptions with spiritual suggestion is a daily
and unconscious habit of life. "Every man his own poet" is the
underlying assumption of every genuine work of art, and a work of art
cannot be taught to a pupil in any other way than by making this same
pupil a poet, by getting him to discover himself. Continued and
unfaltering disaster is all that can be expected of all methods of
literary training that do not recognise this.

To teach a pupil all that can be known about a great poem is to take the
poetry out of him, and to make the poem prose to him forever. A pupil
cannot even be taught great prose except by making a poet of him, in his
attitude toward it, and by so governing the conditions, excitements,
duties, and habits of his course of study that he will discover he is a
poet in spite of himself. The essence of Walter Pater's essays cannot be
taught to a pupil except by making a new creature of him in the presence
of the things the essays are about. Unless the conditions of a pupil's
course are so governed, in college or otherwise, as to insure and
develop the delicate and strong response of all his bodily senses, at
the time of his life when nature decre