is one of the greatest novels in the world—­a new Kipling, or even a new number of a magazine, will cause you to neglect Clarissa Harlowe, just as though Kipling, etc., could not be kept for a few days without turning sour!  So that you have to ordain rules for yourself, as:  “I will not read anything else until I have read Richardson, or Gibbon, for an hour each day.”  Thus proving that you regard a classic as a pill, the swallowing of which merits jam!  And the more modern a classic is, the more it resembles the stuff of the year and the less it resembles the classics of the centuries, the more easy and enticing do you find that classic.  Hence you are glad that George Eliot, the Brontes, Thackeray, are considered as classics, because you really do enjoy them.  Your sentiments concerning them approach your sentiments concerning a “rattling good story” in a magazine.

I may have exaggerated—­or, on the other hand, I may have understated—­the unsatisfactory characteristics of your particular case, but it is probable that in the mirror I hold up you recognise the rough outlines of your likeness.  You do not care to admit it; but it is so.  You are not content with yourself.  The desire to be more truly literary persists in you.  You feel that there is something wrong in you, but you cannot put your finger on the spot.  Further, you feel that you are a bit of a sham.  Something within you continually forces you to exhibit for the classics an enthusiasm which you do not sincerely feel.  You even try to persuade yourself that you are enjoying a book, when the next moment you drop it in the middle and forget to resume it.  You occasionally buy classical works, and do not read them at all; you practically decide that it is enough to possess them, and that the mere possession of them gives you a cachet.  The truth is, you are a sham.  And your soul is a sea of uneasy remorse.  You reflect:  “According to what Matthew Arnold says, I ought to be perfectly mad about Wordsworth’s Prelude.  And I am not.  Why am I not?  Have I got to be learned, to undertake a vast course of study, in order to be perfectly mad about Wordsworth’s Prelude?  Or am I born without the faculty of pure taste in literature, despite my vague longings?  I do wish I could smack my lips over Wordsworth’s Prelude as I did over that splendid story by H.G.  Wells, The Country of the Blind, in the Strand Magazine!"....  Yes, I am convinced that in your dissatisfied, your diviner moments, you address yourself in these terms.  I am convinced that I have diagnosed your symptoms.