You, O serious student of many volumes, believe that you have a sincere passion for reading. You hold literature in honour, and your last wish would be to debase it to a paltry end. You are animated by a real desire to get out of literature all that literature will give. And in that aim you keep on reading year after year, and the grey hairs come. But amid all this steady tapping of the reservoir do you ever take stock of what you have acquired$%: Do you pause to make a valuation, in terms of your own life, of that which you are daily absorbing, or imagine you are absorbing$%:
How can a man perform a mental stocktaking$%: How can he put value on what he gets from books$%: How can he effectively test in cold-blood, whether he is receiving from literature all that literature has to give him$%:
The test is not so vague, nor so difficult, as might appear.
If a man is not thrilled by intimate contact with nature: with the sun, with the earth, which is his origin and the arouser of his acute emotions -
If he is not troubled by the sight of beauty in many forms -
If he is devoid of curiosity concerning his fellow men and his fellow animals -
If he does not have glimpses of the unity of all things in an orderly progress -
If he is chronically 'querulous, dejected and envious'-
If he is pessimistic -
If he is of those who talk about 'this age of shams', 'this age without ideals', 'this hysterical age', and this heaven-knows-what-age -
Then that man, though he reads undisputed classics for twenty hours a day, though he has a memory of steel, though he rivals Porson in scholarship and Sainte-Beuve in judgment, is not receiving from literature what literature has to give. Indeed, he is chiefly wasting his time. Unless he can read differently, it were better for him if he sold all his books, gave to the poor, and played croquet. He fails because he had not assimilated into his existence the vital essences which genius put into the books that have merely passed before his eyes; because the genius has offered him faith, courage, vision, noble passion, curiosity, love, a thirst for beauty, and he has not taken the gift; because genius has offered him the chance to live fully, and he is only half alive, for it is only in the stress of fine ideas and emotions that a man may be truly said to live.
You hear Marcus Aurelius' cadences, "whoever he be, is my kinsman, not by the same blood and seed, but by participation of the same reason and of the same divine particle - how can I be hurt$%:" ......And with these cadences in your ear you go and quarrel with a cabman!
You read with an aesthetic delight the Bible, especially the Apocrypha! You remember:
Whatever is brought upon thee, take cheerfully, and be patient when thou art changed to a low estate. For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
And yet you are ready to lie down and die because a woman has 'scorned' you!
You think some of my instances approach the ludicrous$%: They do. They are meant to do so. But they are no more ludicrous than life itself. And they illustrate in the most workaday fashion how you can test whether your literature fulfils its function of informing and transforming your existence.
This is not a moral invention, but a simple fact, which will be attested by all who know.
If you so feel, please leave a comment or "rating" as to how you find the article$%: Thank you all.
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