This attitude, or any attitude which resembles it, is wrong.
To him who really comprehends what literature is, and what the function
of literature is, this attitude is simply ludicrous. It is also
fatal to the formation of literary taste. People who regard
literary taste simply as an accomplishment, and literature
simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed either in acquiring
the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a distraction;
though the one is the most perfect of distractions, and though the other
is unsurpassed by any other accomplishment in elegance
or in power to impress the universal snobbery of civilised mankind.
Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental
*sine qua non* of complete living. I am extremely anxious to avoid
rhetorical exaggerations. I do not think I am guilty of one
in asserting that he who has not been "presented to the freedom"
of literature has not wakened up out of his prenatal sleep.
He is merely not born. He can't see; he can't hear;
he can't feel, in any full sense. He can only eat his dinner.
What more than anything else annoys people who know
the true function of literature, and have profited thereby,
is the spectacle of so many thousands of individuals going about
under the delusion that they are alive, when, as a fact,
they are no nearer being alive than a bear in winter.


I will tell you what literature is! No--I only wish I could.
But I can't. No one can. Gleams can be thrown on the secret,
inklings given, but no more. I will try to give you an inkling.
And, to do so, I will take you back into your own history,