doesn't matter; music
doesn't matter very much. But "everyone is supposed to know" about
literature. Then, literature is such a charming distraction! Literary
taste thus serves two purposes: as a certificate of correct culture
and as a private pastime. A young professor of mathematics, immense
at mathematics and games, dangerous at chess, capable of Haydn on the
violin, once said to me, after listening to some chat on books, "Yes,
I must take up literature." As though saying: "I was rather forgetting
literature. However, I've polished off all these other things. I'll
have a shy at literature now."

This attitude, or any attitude which resembles it, is wrong. To him
who really comprehends what literature is, and what the function of
literature is, this attitude is simply ludicrous. It is also fatal
to the formation of literary taste. People who regard literary taste
simply as an accomplishment, and literature simply as a distraction,
will never truly succeed either in acquiring the accomplishment or in
using it half-acquired as a distraction; though the one is the most
perfect of distractions, and though the other is unsurpassed by any
other accomplishment in elegance or in power to impress the universal
snobbery of civilised mankind. Literature, instead of being an
accessory, is the fundamental _sine qua non_ of complete living. I am
extremely anxious to avoid rhetorical exaggerations. I do not think I
am guilty of one in asserting that he who has not been "presented
to the freedom" of literature has not wakened up out of his prenatal
sleep. He is merely not born. He can't see; he can't hear; he can't
feel, in any full sense. He can only eat his dinner. What more than
anything else annoys people who know the true function of literature,
and have profited thereby, is the spectacle of so many thousands of
individuals going about under the delusion that they are alive, when,
as a fact, they are no nearer being alive than a bear in winter.

I will tell you what literature is! No--I only wish I could. But I
can't. No one can. Gleams can be thrown on the secret, inklings given,
but no more. I will try to give you an inkling. And, to do so, I will
take you back into your own history, or forward into it. That evening
when you went for a walk with your faithful friend, the friend from
whom you hid nothing--or almost nothing ...! You were, in truth,
somewhat inclined to hide from him the particular matter which
monopolised your