es when we are too weary to remain
attentive and thankful under the improving eye, kindly but severe, of
the seers. There are times when we do not wish to be any better than we
are. We do not wish to be elevated and improved. At midnight, away with
such books! As for the literary pundits, the high priests of the Temple
of Letters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an acolyte
to swinge them a good hard one with an incense-burner, and cut and run,
for a change, to something outside the rubrics. Midnight is the time
when one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the Great
Works which every gentleman ought to have read, but which some of us
have not. For there is almost as much clotted nonsense written about
literature as there is about theology.

* * * * *

There are few books which go with midnight, solitude, and a candle. It
is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly
right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning
fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness,
anyhow, is the level of mediocrity today; we are all too infernally
clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only
the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns to drink. The
late candle throws its beams a great distance; and its rays make
transparent much that seemed massy and important. The mind at rest
beside that light, when the house is asleep, and the consequential
affairs of the urgent world have diminished to their right proportions
because we see them distantly from another and a more tranquil place in
the heavens where duty, honour, witty arguments, controversial logic on
great questions, appear such as will leave hardly a trace of fossil in
the indurated mud which presently will cover them--the mind then
certainly smiles at cleverness.

For though at that hour the body may be dog-tired, the mind is white
and lucid, like that of a man from whom a fever has abated. It is bare
of illusions. It has a sharp focus, small and star-like, as a clear and
lonely flame left burning by the altar of a shrine from which all have
gone but one. A book which approaches that light in the privacy of that
place must come, as it were, with honest and open pages.

* * * * *

I like Heine then, though. His mockery of the grave and great, in those
sentences whi