it of reading for results,
such as it is, has taken such a grim hold on the modern American mind
that the greatest result of all in reading, the result in a book that
cannot be spoken in it, or even out of it, is being unanimously missed.

The fact seems to need to be emphasised that the novel which gives
itself to one to be breathed and lived, the novel which leaves a man
with something that he must finish himself, with something he must do
and be, is the one which "gets a man somewhere" most of all. It is the
one which ends the most definitely and practically.

When a novel, instead of being hewn out, finished, and decorated by the
author,--added as one more monument or tomb of itself in a man's
memory,--becomes a growing, living daily thing to him, the wondering,
unfinished events of it, and the unfinished people of it, flocking out
to him, interpreting for him the still unfinished events and all the
dear unfinished people that jostle in his own life,--it is a great
novel.

It seems to need to be recalled that the one possible object of a human
being's life in a novel (as out of it) is to be loved. This is definite
enough. It is the novel in which the heroine looks finished that does
not come to anything. I always feel a little grieved and frustrated--as
if human nature had been blasphemed a little in my presence--if a novel
finishes its people or thinks it can. It is a small novel which finishes
love--and lays it away; which makes me love say one brave woman or
mother in a book, and close her away for ever. The greater novel makes
me love one woman in a book in such a way that I go about through all
the world seeking for her--knowing and loving a thousand women through
her. I feel the secret of their faces--through her--flickering by me on
the street. This intangible result, this eternal flash of a life upon
life is all that reading is for. It is practical because it is eternal
and cannot be wasted and because it is for ever to the point.

Life is greater than art and art is great only in so far as it proves
that life is greater than art, interprets and intensifies life and the
power to taste life--makes us live wider and deeper and farther in our
seventy years.

III

Athletics

"The world is full," Ellery Charming used to say, "of fools who get
a-going and never stop. Set them off on another tack, and they are
half-cured." There are grave reasons to believe that, if an archangel
were to come to this eart