. It seems to be the one
great unobserved retreat, where all the sons of men may go, may be seen
flocking day and night, to get the experiences they would not have, to
be ready for those they cannot help having. It is the Rehearsal Room of
History. The gods watch it--this Place of Books--as we who live go
silent, trooping back and forth in it--the ceaseless, heartless, awful,
beautiful pantomime of life.

It seems to be the testimony of human nature, after a somewhat
immemorial experience, that some things in us had better be expressed by
being lived, and that other things had better be expressed--if
possible--in some other way.

There are a great many men, even amongst the wisest and strongest of us,
who benefit every year of their lives by what might be called the
purgative function of literature,--men who, if they did not have a
chance at the right moment to commit certain sins with their imaginary
selves, would commit them with their real ones. Many a man of the larger
and more comprehensive type, hungering for the heart of all experience,
bound to have its spirit, if not itself, has run the whole gamut of his
possible selves in books, until all the sins and all the songs of men
have coursed through his being. He finds himself reading not only to
fill his lungs with ozone and his heart with the strength of the gods,
but to work off the humour in his blood, to express his underself, and
get it out of the way. Women who never cry their tears out--it is
said--are desperate, and men who never read their sins away are
dangerous. People who are tired of doing wrong on paper do right. To be
sick of one's sins in a book saves not only one's self but every one
else a deal of trouble. A man has not learned how to read until he reads
with his veins as well as his arteries.

It would be useless to try to make out that evil passions in literature
accomplish any absolute good, but they accomplish a relative good which
the world can by no means afford to overlook. The amount of crime that
is suggested by reading can be more than offset by the extraordinary
amount of crime waiting in the hearts of men, aimed at the world and
glanced off on paper.

There are many indications that this purgative function of literature is
the main thing it is for in our present modern life. Modern life is so
constituted that the majority of people who live in it are expressing
their real selves more truly in their reading than they are in their
l