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.
How (you ask, unwillingly) can a man perform a mental stocktaking? How
can he put a 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
acutest 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 nuity 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.
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