Plum Pudding

On Christmas Eve, while the Perfect Reader sits in his armchair immersed in a book -- so absorbed that he has let the fire go out -- I propose to slip gently down the chimney and leave this tribute in his stocking. It is not a personal tribute. I speak, on behalf of the whole fraternity of writers, this word of gratitude -- and envy.

But the Perfect Reader, for whom all fine things are written, knows no such delicate anguish. When he reads, it is without any arrière pensée, any twingeing consciousness of self. I like to think of one Perfect Reader of my acquaintance. And now he is reading. I can see him reading. I know just how his mind feels! Oh, the Perfect Reader!

The enjoyment of literature is a personal communion; it cannot be outwardly instilled. The utmost the critic can do is read the marriage service over the reader and the book. The union is consummated, if at all, in secret. . . .