There cannot be too many lovers of the best things in these pessimistic days, when to have the power of loving anything is beginning to be a great and rare gift.
The word love in this connection is significant of a very definite attitude toward books,--an attitude not uncritical, since it is love of the best only, but an attitude which implies more intimacy and receptivity than the purely critical temper makes possible; an attitude, moreover, which expects and invites something more than instruction or entertainment,--both valuable, wholesome, and necessary, and yet neither descriptive of the richest function which the book fulfils to the reader.

To love a book is to invite an intimacy with it which opens the way to its heart.

One of the wisest of modern readers has said that the most important characteristic of the real critic--the man who penetrates the secret of a work of art--is the ability to admire greatly; and there is but a short step between admiration and love.

And as if to emphasise the value of a quality so rare among critics, the same wise reader, who was also the greatest writer of modern times, says also that "where keen perception unites with good will and love, it gets at the heart of man and the world; nay, it may hope to reach the highest goal of all." To get at the heart of that knowledge, life, and beauty which are stored in books is surely one way of reaching the highest goal.
That goal, in Goethe's thought, was the complete development of the individual life through thought, feeling, and action,--an aim often misunderstood, but which, seen on all sides, is certainly the very highest disclosed to the human spirit.

And the method of attaining this result was the process, also often and widely misunderstood, of culture.