ith a brush than to keep one's face
distorted by strength of will.

With the warning of the cheerful theatre before us, then, it would be
the stupidest folly to pay any heed to the new plea for cheerful
books. It is an extraordinary fact that thousands of people can be
serious to the point of bad temper over a political argument or a game
of cards or tennis; but if you asked them to take a book seriously,
they would regard the prospect as worse than a dry pharyngitis. They
put literature on a level not with their games, but with the
chocolates and drinks they consume when they are resting from their
games. It is of the chocolate kind of literature that ninety-nine out
of a hundred persons are thinking when they applaud phrases about the
books that cheer us all up. Or it might be nearer the mark to liken
the sort of literature they have in mind to one of those brands of
medicated port which innocent old ladies find grateful and comforting.
We live in an age of advertised brain-fag, and we demand of
literature that it shall be the literature of brain-fag. We ask of it
not friendship, but a drug. That is the heresy which must be killed if
letters are to live. Till it is killed they will not even be enjoyed.
I grant at once that it would be an impudence to expect an average
sensual man to regard books with the same profound interest as his
business affairs or his wife. On the other hand, persuade him that it
is pleasant to put as much of his heart into the enjoyment of a book
as he puts into the enjoyment of a football match, and you will
produce a revolution among the book-reading public. No man who is not
eccentric dreams of asking that a football match shall be amusing or a
game of chess cheerful. He goes to the one for its furious energy, for
the thrill of the rivalry of real people; he turns to the other for an
experience of intensity, of prescient skill. It is for energetic
experiences of a comparable kind, as Mr R. A. Scott-James suggestively
pointed out in a recent volume, that we go to literature. Literature
is not primarily meant to cheer us up when we are too tired to read
the paper, though incidentally it often does so, and to despise this
kind of literature would be as sinful as to despise Christmas pudding
and brandy sauce. But the purpose of literature is not to be an
epilogue to energy. It involves not a slackening, but a change, of
effort. That is why even the difficult authors like the Browning of
_Sordel