rs you go and quarrel with a cabman!

You would be ashamed of your literary self to be caught in ignorance
of Whitman, who wrote:

Now understand me well--it is provided in the essence of
things that from any fruition of success, no matter what,
shall come forth something to make a greater struggle
necessary.

And yet, having achieved a motor-car, you lose your temper when it
breaks down half-way up a hill!

You know your Wordsworth, who has been trying to teach you about:

The Upholder of the tranquil soul
That tolerates the indignities of Time
And, from the centre of Eternity
All finite motions over-ruling, lives
In glory immutable.

But you are capable of being seriously unhappy when your suburban
train selects a tunnel for its repose!

And the A.V. of the Bible, which you now read, not as your forefathers
read it, but with an aesthetic delight, especially in the Apocrypha!
You remember:

Whatsoever is brought upon thee, take cheerfully, and be
patient when thou art changed to a low estate. For gold
is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of
adversity.

And yet you are ready to lie down and die because a woman has scorned
you! Go to!

You think some of my instances approach the ludicrous? They do. They
are meant to do so. But they are no more ludicrous than life itself.
And they illustrate in the most workaday fashion how you can test
whether your literature fulfils its function of informing and
transforming your existence.

I say that if daily events and scenes do not constantly recall and
utilise the ideas and emotions contained in the books which you have
read or are reading; if the memory of these books does not quicken the
perception of beauty, wherever you happen to be, does not help you to
correlate the particular trifle with the universal, does not smooth
out irritation and give dignity to sorrow--then you are, consciously
or not, unworthy of your high vocation as a bookman. You may say that
I am preaching a sermon. The fact is, I am. My mood is a severely
moral mood. For when I reflect upon the difference between what
books have to offer and what even relatively earnest readers take the
trouble to accept from them, I am appalled (or should be appalled, did
I not know that the world is moving) by the sheer inefficiency, the
bland, complacent failure of the earnest reader. I am like yourself,
the spectacle of inefficiency rouses my holy