Now, it is upon this imperishable food which the past has stored up through the genius of great artists that later generations feed and nourish themselves.  It is through intimate contact with these fundamental conceptions, worked out with such infinite pain and patience, that the individual experience is broadened to include the experience of the race.  This contact is the mystery as it is the source of culture.  No one can explain the transmission of power from a book to a reader; but all history bears witness to the fact that such transmissions are made.  Sometimes, as during what is called the Revival of Learning, the transmission is so general and so genuine that the life of an entire society is visibly quickened and enlarged; indeed, it is not too much to say that an entire civilisation feels the effect.  The transmission of power, the transference of vitality, from books to individuals are so constant and common that they are matters of universal experience.  Most men of any considerable culture date the successive enlargements of their intellectual lives from the reading, at successive periods, of the books of insight and power,—­the books that deal with life at firsthand.  There are, for instance, few men of a certain age who have read widely or deeply who do not recall with perennial enthusiasm the days when Carlyle and Emerson fell into their hands.  They may have reacted radically from the didactic teaching of both writers, but they have not lost the impulse, nor have they parted with the enlargement of thought received in those first rapturous hours of discovery.  There was wrought in them then changes of view, expansions of nature, a liberation of life which can never be lost.  This experience is repeated so long as the man retains the power of growth and so long as he keeps in contact with the great writers.  Every such contact marks a new stage in the process of culture.  This means not merely the deep satisfaction and delight which are involved in every fresh contact with a genuine work of art; it means the permanent enrichment of the reader.  He has gained something more lasting than pleasure and more valuable than information:  he has gained a new view of life; he has looked again into the heart of humanity; he has felt afresh the supreme interest which always attaches to any real contact with the life of the race.  And all this comes to him not only because the life of the race is essentially dramatic and, therefore, of quite inexhaustible interest, but because that life is essentially a revelation.  A series of fundamental truths is being disclosed through the simple process of living, and whoever touches the deep life of men in the great works of art comes in contact also with these fundamental truths.  Whoever reads the “Divine Comedy” and “Faust” for the first time discovers new realms of truth for himself, and gains not only the joy of discovery, but an immense addition of territory as well.