CHAPTER XIV

MENTAL STOCKTAKING

Great books do not spring from something accidental in the great men who wrote them.  They are the effluence of their very core, the expression of the life itself of the authors.  And literature cannot be said to have served its true purpose until it has been translated into the actual life of him who reads.  It does not succeed until it becomes the vehicle of the vital.  Progress is the gradual result of the unending battle between human reason and human instinct, in which the former slowly but surely wins.  The most powerful engine in this battle is literature.  It is the vast reservoir of true ideas and high emotions—­and life is constituted of ideas and emotions.  In a world deprived of literature, the intellectual and emotional activity of all but a few exceptionally gifted men would quickly sink and retract to a narrow circle.  The broad, the noble, the generous would tend to disappear for want of accessible storage.  And life would be correspondingly degraded, because the fallacious idea and the petty emotion would never feel the upward pull of the ideas and emotions of genius.  Only by conceiving a society without literature can it be clearly realised that the function of literature is to raise the plain towards the top level of the peaks.  Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterwards live finely.  It is a means of life; it concerns the living essence.

Of course, literature has a minor function, that of passing the time in an agreeable and harmless fashion, by giving momentary faint pleasure.  Vast multitudes of people (among whom may be numbered not a few habitual readers) utilise only this minor function of literature; by implication they class it with golf, bridge, or soporifics.  Literary genius, however, had no intention of competing with these devices for fleeting the empty hours; and all such use of literature may be left out of account.

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 not of those who read because the clock has just struck nine and one can’t go to bed till eleven.  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 ever pause to make a valuation, in terms of your own life, of that which you are daily absorbing, or imagine you are absorbing?  Do you ever satisfy yourself by proof that you are absorbing anything at all, that the living waters, instead of vitalising you, are not running off you as though you were a duck in a storm?  Because, if you omit this mere business precaution, it may well be that you, too, without knowing it, are little by little joining the triflers who read only because eternity is so long.  It may well be that even your alleged sacred passion is, after all, simply a sort of drug-habit.  The suggestion disturbs and worries you.  You dismiss it impatiently; but it returns.