ANYONE WHO HAS READ this far will perhaps agree that the study of literary genesis is not a pedantic unpicking of literary masterpieces but an approach that enhances the understanding and enjoyment of a text as it stands. These responses remain intact, and are simply enriched by a sense of origin and process, as thought and feeling are seen taking their eventual shape.

So Goethe was exaggerating when he gave the genetic view an absolute priority, declaring—no doubt from the feel of his own writing—that “you don't get to know works of nature and art when they’re completed, you have to catch them as they come into being in order in some measure to grasp them.”

There have been exaggerations in the other direction too. Rousseau: “To say whether a book is good or bad, what does it matter how it was made?” And Nietzsche: “Insight into a work's origin is only a matter for the physiologists and vivisectors of the mind, never ever for aesthetic people, for artists.”

An anthology could be put together of writers’ utterances pro et contra. But why set the two perspectives against each other when they can be married? Genetic understanding, like everything else in literature, is not an obligation but an offer—a freely available extra. If the taste is acquired, there will be materials to hand for any work or author, from critical editions and any number of essays.

But isn't there a problem about how far it can be taken? The possible objects of study are endless, so that not even scholars, let alone the Common Reader, can follow through the genesis of every admired work. Yet that is no more than a truism of a familiar kind. There are too many mountains for the mountaineer to climb, too many countries for the traveler to visit, too many languages for the linguist to learn. A few symbolic instances have to suffice for most people's lifetimes. But even if we can only get to know a few works in genetic detail, we can see in these the embodiment of a constant principle that alters our feeling for whatever we read. Every text will come to life in a fresh way.