It is no use saying those people are lost. They are not lost, but they have gone astray, or rather, nobody has ever tried to turn their faces the right way. Certainly Mr Arnold Bennett does nothing for them. If they could read _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ they would, but they cannot. People cannot plunge into old language, old atmospheres; they have no links with these things; their imagination is not trained to take a leap; many try, and nearly all fail because their literary leaders go to sleep, or march them into bogs. No crude mind can jump into ancient literature; modern literature alone can help it, namely cleanse its _nearest_ section, and prepare it for further strain. The limits of literary taste can, in each person, be carried as far as that person's intellectual capacity goes, but only _by degrees_. In other words, limit your objective instead of failing at a large operation. I am not prepared to lay down a complete list, but I am prepared to hint at one. If I had to help a crude but willing taste, I would handle its reading as follows:-- FIRST PERIOD Reading made up exclusively of recent novels, good, well-written, thoughtful novels, not too startling in form or contents. I would begin on novels because anybody can read a novel, and because the first cleansing operation is to induce the subject to read good novels instead of bad ones. Here is a preliminary list:-- _Tony-Bungay_ (Wells) _Kipps_ (Wells) _The Custom of the Country_ (Wharton) _The Old Wives' Tale_ (Bennett) _The Man of Property_ (Galsworthy) _Jude the Obscure_ (Hardy) _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ (Hardy) _Sussex Gorse_ (Kaye-Smith) and say twenty or thirty more of this type, all published in the last dozen years. It is, of course, assumed that interest would be maintained by conversation. SECOND PERIOD After the subject (victim, if you like) had read say thirty of the best solid novels of the twentieth century, I think I should draw him to the more abstruse modern novels and stories. In the first period he would come in contact with a general criticism of life. In the second period he would read novels of a more iconoclastic and constructive kind, such as:-- _The Island Pharisees_ (Galsworthy) _The New Machiavelli_ (Wells) _Sinister Street_ (Mackenzie) _The Celestial Omnibus_ (Forster) _The Longest Journey_ (Forster) _Sons and Lovers_ (Lawrence) _The White Peacock_ (Lawrence) _Ethan Frome_ (Wharton) _Round the Corner_ (Cannan) Briefly, the more ambitious kind of novel, say thirty or forty altogether. At that time, I should induce the subject to browse occasionally in the _Oxford Book of English Verse_. THIRD PERIOD Now only would I come to the older novels, because, by then, the mind should be supple enough to stand their congestion of detail, their tendency to caricature, their stilted phrasing, and yet recognise their qualities. Here are some:--