imulant which excites without giving active play to
their faculties; it presents nothing which connects with life or
ideas, nothing even to call forth the effort demanded by their
practical affairs.

There are others, for the most part women not of the working class,
who support with apparent earnestness the purveyors of popular fiction
and biography, and even patronise poetry and genteel social
philosophy. Amongst them are to be found those to whom the sterner
actualities of life are unfamiliar and repugnant, for whom the
practice of trifling with books is rather an ornament than an
occupation, a mode of killing time rather than using it. They, too,
read to be distracted, choosing an emasculate literature which panders
to their essential dilettantism.

Now those who regard literature as an important thing, playing a
significant part in the life of a nation, must, as I have already
indicated, seek in it something more positive than a _distraction_
from life; for them it must be an _addition to life_. It must provide
experience compounded of the same stuff as other experience; but not
having the vividness which the direct impact of life carries with it,
it must gain its vividness by an intensity, a fineness, an interest of
its own--by a distinctive quality distilled into it from the
personality of the writer. It is imagination which achieves this, the
faculty so apprehensive of life that it can fashion life into images
which are projections of the artist, his own stamp upon the stuff of
life. To such an author literature cannot be a mere amusement or
profession. It deals with what he conceives to be the most essential
things in the world; it is his rendering of the world, his
perspective; and it is just in so far as he has made this, his ideal
and real world, appreciable also to us, that he has succeeded in his
art. Such imaginative reconstruction of the facts of life, such
impregnation of life with fineness, calls for alertness of faculty in
the reader, demands from him something of that eagerness to perceive
which characterises the artist himself. But how can the tired worker
seeking distraction, or the idle dilettante seeking only a drug or a
stimulant, muster that alertness of faculty and that eagerness to
perceive which are needed for the appreciation of art? It is not to be
expected. A coarser appeal will produce all that such minds are able
to assimilate. For good reading, like good writing, requires the
energy