Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/21

ONE ASPECT OF VICE ^ faculties, each with its own specially maintained agency of stimulation. To the man whose mind is one, to whom the whole world supplies stimuli, there is still no lack. Had not social conditions and social sanctions divided work off from pleasure, there had never been a labor problem nor special means to overcome the human dwarfing thus produced. Feeling had not been forcibly separated from effort, nor would special forms for its production have been necessary. The theater as it exists today is then a social necessity, but it is more necessary in certain conditions than in others.

In approaching the subject of the novel, a layman may be pardoned if he would escape the sharp edge of censure by repeating the statement of a critic that the mission of literature is to please. Certain it is that, if it were solely to instruct, the whole world had been thoroughly instructed long since, so prodigious is the effort expended in this direction. At any rate, it is possible to use much that is written as the occasion for the production of a series of easy, graceful images before the mind. Thus one may read without thinking deeply, or even feeling deeply. The mission of the book then becomes that of substituting another's day-dream for my own. This is not a form of intellectual effort that can be commended; but much reading is doubtless of this kind. Reading in which the effort is followed for its own sake—reading to keep from thinking how dull it is, and to relieve the tense energy of one's brain in a play of images which the text releases through the medium of the eyes—one may get this out of books; he may also get something more; but there are situations innumerable in which he is happy to attain even this result. "There are books that thus draw you out of yourself, and for the time put you in that no-man's land which is east of the sun and west of the moon," and in which you are caused "to repeat, parrot-like, the imagination of the author." But there are other books, the reading of which calls forth your own thoughts and causes your mind to undertake an alert search through all its corners for facts which will substantiate or disprove that which is written. Reading them is a more serious business; for it is both a struggle to comprehend and a