How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Page: 31

Hazlitt's famous essay on the nature of "poetry in general." It is the
best thing of its kind in English, and no one who has read it can possibly
be under the misapprehension that poetry is a mediaeval torture, or a
mad elephant, or a gun that will go off by itself and kill at forty paces.
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the mental state of the man who, after
reading Hazlitt's essay, is not urgently desirous of reading some poetry
before his next meal. If the essay so inspires you I would suggest that
you make a commencement with purely narrative poetry.

There is an infinitely finer English novel, written by a woman, than
anything by George Eliot or the Brontes, or even Jane Austen, which
perhaps you have not read. Its title is "Aurora Leigh," and its author
E.B. Browning. It happens to be written in verse, and to contain a
considerable amount of genuinely fine poetry. Decide to read that
book through, even if you die for it. Forget that it is fine poetry.
Read it simply for the story and the social ideas. And when you
have done, ask yourself honestly whether you still dislike poetry.
I have known more than one person to whom "Aurora Leigh" has
been the means of proving that in assuming they hated poetry they
were entirely mistaken.

Of course, if, after Hazlitt, and such an experiment made in the light
of Hazlitt, you are finally assured that there is something in you which
is antagonistic to poetry, you must be content with history or philosophy.
I shall regret it, yet not inconsolably. "The Decline and Fall" is not to be
named in the same day with "Paradise Lost," but it is a vastly pretty thing;
and Herbert Spencer's "First Principles" simply laughs at the claims of
poetry and refuses to be accepted as aught but the most majestic product
of any human mind. I do not suggest that either of these works is suitable
for a tyro in mental strains. But I see no reason why any man of average
intelligence should not, after a year of continuous reading, be fit to assault
the supreme masterpieces of history or philosophy. The great convenience
of masterpieces is that they are so astonishingly lucid.