Any other commerce between books and their readers smacks of Baconian “fruits” and University lectures.  It is a prostitution of pleasure to profit.

As with all the rare things in life, the most delicate flavor of our pleasure is found not exactly and precisely in the actual taste of the author himself; not, I mean, in the snatching of huge bites out of him, but in the fragrance of anticipation; in the dreamy solicitations of indescribable afterthoughts; in those “airy tongues that syllable men’s names” on the “sands and shores” of the remote margins of our consciousness.  How delicious a pleasure there is in carrying about with us wherever we go a new book or a new translation from the pen of our especial master!  We need not open it; we need not read it for days; but it is there—­there to be caressed and to caress—­when everything is propitious, and the profane voices are hushed.

I suppose, to take an instance that has for myself a peculiar appeal, the present edition—­“brought out” by the excellent house of Macmillan—­of the great Dostoievsky, is producing even now in the sensibility of all sorts and conditions of queer readers, a thrilling series of recurrent pleasures, like the intermittent visits of one’s well-beloved.

Would to God the mortal days of geniuses like Dostoievsky could be so extended that for all the years of one’s life, one would have such works, still not quite finished, in one’s lucky hands!

I sometimes doubt whether these sticklers for “the art of condensation” are really lovers of books at all.  For myself, I would class their cursed short stories with their teasing “economy of material,” as they call it, with those “books that are no books,” those checker boards and moral treatises which used to annoy Elia so.

Yes, I have a sneaking feeling that all this modern fuss about “art” and the “creative vision” and “the projection of visualized images,” is the itching vice of quite a different class of people, from those who, in the old, sweet, epicurean way, loved to loiter through huge digressive books, with the ample unpremeditated enjoyment of leisurely travelers wayfaring along a wonderful road.  How many luckless innocents have teased and fretted their minds into a forced appreciation of that artistic ogre Flaubert, and his laborious pursuit of his precious “exact word,” when they might have been pleasantly sailing down Rabelais’ rich stream of immortal nectar, or sweetly hugging themselves over the lovely mischievousness of Tristram Shandy!  But one must be tolerant; one must make allowances.  The world of books is no puritanical bourgeois-ridden democracy; it is a large free country, a great Pantagruelian Utopia, ruled by noble kings.