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