It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your own
faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with
lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young
friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the story) came to him in
an agony. 'This is too bad of you,' he cried. 'Willoughby
is me!' 'No, my dear fellow,' said the author; 'he is all of
us.'
I have read THE EGOIST five or six times myself, and I mean
to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the
anecdote - I think Willoughby an unmanly but a very
serviceable exposure of myself.
I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten
much that was most influential, as I see already I have
forgotten Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper 'On the Spirit of
Obligations' was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose
little book of aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me,
and Mitford's TALES OF OLD JAPAN, wherein I learned for the
first time the proper attitude of any rational man to his
country's laws - a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic
islands. That I should commemorate all is more than I can
hope or the Editor could ask. It will be more to the point,
after having said so much upon improving books, to say a word
or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as
I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally
understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast
intellectual endowment - a free grace, I find I must call it
- by which a man rises to understand that he is not
punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely
wrong.
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