Through the Magic Door by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good / books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first. / You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure. You / may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull days / come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to fill up the / chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait so patiently / for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which marks an epoch in / your life, you understand the difference. You see, like a flash, how / the one stands for nothing, and the other for literature. From that day / onwards you may return to your crudities, but at least you do so with / some standard of comparison in your mind. You can never be the same as / you were before. Then gradually the good thing becomes more dear to / you; it builds itself up with your growing mind; it becomes a part of / your better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the / old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past. Yes, / it was the olive-green line of Scott's novels which started me on to / rhapsody. They were the first books I ever owned-long, long before I / could appreciate or even understand them. But at last I realized what a / treasure they were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious / candle-ends in the dead of the night, when the sense of crime added a / new zest to the story. Perhaps you have observed that my "Ivanhoe" is / of a different edition from the others. The first copy was left in the / grass by the side of a stream, fell into the water, and was eventually / picked up three days later, swollen and decomposed, upon a mud-bank. I / think I may say, however, that I had worn it out before I lost it. / Indeed, it was perhaps as well that it was some years before it was / replaced, for my instinct was always to read it again instead of / breaking fresh ground.

I remember the late James Payn telling the anecdote that he and two / literary friends agreed to write down what scene in fiction they / thought the most dramatic, and that on examining the papers it was / found that all three had chosen the same. It was the moment when the / unknown knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past the pavilions of the / lesser men, strikes with the sharp end of his lance, in a challenge to / mortal combat, the shield of the formidable Templar. It was, indeed, a / splendid moment! What matter that no Templar was allowed by the rules / of his Order to take part in so secular and frivolous an affair as a / tournament? It is the privilege of great masters to make things so, and / it is a churlish thing to gainsay it. Was it not Wendell Holmes who / described the prosaic man, who enters a drawing-room with a couple of / facts, like ill-conditioned bull-dogs at his heels, ready to let them / loose on any play of fancy? The great writer can never go wrong. If / Shakespeare gives a sea-coast to Bohemia, or if Victor Hugo calls an / English prize-fighter Mr. Jim-John-Jack-well, it _was_ so, and that's / an end of it. "There is no second line of rails at that point," said an / editor to a minor author. "I make a second line," said the author; and / he was within his rights, if he can carry his readers' conviction with / him.