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 this mere business precaution, it may well
be that you, too, without knowing it, are little by little joining
the triflers who read only because eternity is so long. 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--