There are certain great writers probably with whom we shall never be on the right terms. I have heard people say, 'I cannot admire Shakespeare.' If they say it in a humble way like a confession of sin, with contrition and tears, they are to be pitied, not to be blamed. It would not be right to say such a thing in any other fashion. If we cannot admire the great lords of the imagination, we must be sorry for ourselves, but we may be quite sure that there is at least one whom we have the power of admiring and loving if we only gave ourselves the chance.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Saturday, June 02, 2012
Confessing One's Sins
W. Robertson Nicoll (1851-1923), A Bookman's Letters (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913), p. 221: