The token by which the creative reader can best be known is his lack of the pedantic expectation with which many readers of considerable taste begin to read. For instance, there was that professorial critic, for whom no pillory can be too high or naked or windy, who declared he could not approve of _The Playboy of the Western World_ because it was neither tragedy nor comedy nor tragi-comedy. He did not create as he read; he could not even follow a free representation of human life; he was tied brain and mood to a prejudice which shut him in from any liberation by novel wit or beauty. Like many better men, he was a victim of an obsession for the classics into which creative readers never allow themselves to fall. They may have formed their literary principles upon the strictest canon and they may be richly responsive to the great traditions of style and structure; but they have not been made timid by their training and they know that the heartiest reader, like the heartiest spectator of human affairs, must occasionally have his fling outside narrow circles or must begin to stifle. It is as snobbish to feel at home only among the “best” books as to feel at home only among the “best” people. After all, the best books have been made up out of diverse elements, transmuted by some creative spirit from the raw materials which lay around. The reader who in some degree can share that spirit’s vision can share also its delight in the same sort of original stuff. Imagine, for example, the state of mind of a person who can argue that it is a weakness, if not a literary impropriety, to prefer Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann at times to _Faust_.