We do not mean simply printed books. The vaster proportion of what is printed is not literature. It may be statements of fact and items of information; it may be sound science and unimpeachable record; it may be truism; it may be plat.i.tude; it is often sheer bathos or doggerel. We do not count these things as literature. A good deal of singing, piano-beating and tin-whistling is not music. It is only in virtue of a certain fine quality that books are literature. According to Emerson, literature is "a record of the best thoughts." According to Matthew Arnold it is "the best that has been thought and said in the world." If literature is a collection of great books, then we may recall Milton"s description of a great book, as "the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." And so literature becomes a store of inexhaustible vials, filled with the most generous elixir decanted from the world"s master-spirits.
Listen again to Vauvenargues: "Good literature is the essence of the best minds, the abstract of their knowledge, the fruit of their long vigils." Or let us drop metaphor, and accept, as entirely satisfying and luminous, the account given by Mr. John Morley, that "literature consists of all books ... where moral truth and human pa.s.sion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form."
Such is the sense in which we interpret the term "literature."
The range and variety of such true literature are as wide and varied as human genius. It includes, for instance, the novel, whenever the novel, as in Balzac, Thackeray, and Fielding, shows this fine, large, sane, attractive touch; it includes verse, when, and only when, moral truth and human pa.s.sion are touched finely or n.o.bly in this way. Its forms are manifold, and its themes include--
All thoughts, all pa.s.sions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame.
In its shape and form literature may be a hard-headed essay of Bacon or an impa.s.sioned lyric of Sh.e.l.ley; its sound may be the majestic organ-peal of Milton or the sumptuous flute music of Keats; its mood may be the scathing fervour of Carlyle or the genial humour of Lamb; its manner may be the rugged strength of Browning or the fastidious grace of Arnold; but, whatever it be, it everywhere contains this high distinction; it touches some vital truth or human pa.s.sion with "a certain largeness and sanity and attraction of form." What is not sane and large and expressive is not the literature which we meet to study and absorb.
Literature, then, is no mere "elegant trifling." It is no mere _belles lettres_. We do not, indeed, pretend, and none but a human machine will pretend, to despise the graces and charms of _belles lettres_. That would be as ridiculous and inhuman as to despise the delights of music or architecture. But literature is more than _belles lettres_; it is something of far superior intellectual weight and dignity, of far superior moral force and energy. In its contents it is a body of the wisest, most suggestive, most impressive utterance of the world"s best minds, at their best moments, from the Psalmist to Wordsworth, from the _Iliad_ to _The Ring and the Book_. Meanwhile its outward vesture is full of art and beauty.
And without going further we ask, how can one stand in habitual communion with wise, seminal and impressive speech; how can one saturate oneself with its wisdom and energy, without being the better equipped for the demands of both the life within and the life without?
"Consider," says Emerson, "what you have in the smallest chosen library.
A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries have set in their best order the results of their wisdom and learning." Well, let us keep company like that, and what is the result? The value of great literature is that it conveys an endless number of eternal truths for the use and enrichment of human life: moreover it conveys them by a medium of language of such peculiar power and beauty that those truths penetrate keenly into the heart and brain, and, at least in some measure, and often in very large measure, they find a fixed and perennial lodgment there. They enter the blood which reddens our whole mental complexion.
This is true of literature in general, but, though the wisdom and the wit and the pa.s.sion are found in both prose and verse, the crowning form of literature--and that which all literary societies inevitably study most--is great poetry. The supreme mastery and our supreme interest lie with Dante or Shakespeare or Goethe. It is astounding how commonly the function and the brain power of the great poet are misconceived and underrated. The supreme poets are no dainty or fragile sentimentalists; in reality they are the very flower of human penetration. Not because they write in splendid verse. That, indeed, is the appropriate vehicle of their power; the harmonies and melodies of verse represent and reproduce the tone and colour vibrations of their singularly rich natures; but verse is only their vehicle. These great writers are supreme, not for this versification, however magnificent, but because that utterance of theirs is the voice of the seer, the voice of a marvellous insight into vital truths, of a sane and ripe philosophy of life, of a wide and profound sympathy with the myriad thoughts and emotions of mankind. They write in verse simply because, as Hazlitt describes it, poetry is "the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything." They write in verse because Nature herself insists on having--
High and pa.s.sionate thoughts To their own music chanted.
Their verse alone is a charm and a joy. But their primary value to us is that they are among the rare beings who have possessed "the vision and the faculty divine," who, to quote Ruskin, can "startle our lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of astonishment." There is about them nothing incomprehensibly transcendental, nothing "unpractical," nothing aloof from the life we live--if we live it fully--but wholly the contrary. Those who say otherwise are but exposing their own short sight, their own creeping imagination, their own narrowness of sympathy.
Take Shakespeare. What he possesses is not only the most stupendous eloquence ever owned by man. It is profound knowledge of humanity, gathered by a keen and open-eyed Olympian contemplation of all sorts and conditions of men, from the egregious Bottom, and Dogberry the muddled, up to Hamlet and Imogen; it is the broad myriad-minded understanding which feels with every cla.s.s, and, withal, suffers even fools gladly.
His prime value is that he saw--saw life steadily and saw it whole--saw clearly into and round that thought, that sentiment, that pa.s.sion, that apparent contradiction, which commoner minds have only perceived as a vague nebula. It is so that Carlyle describes the poet: "An inspired soul, once more vouchsafed to us direct from Nature"s own fire heat, to see the truth and speak it." The sovereign poets do this with such G.o.dlike ease that we seldom realize their vast achievement.
It is not the greatest masters who surround their expression with a haze, even with a glory haze. It is not the greatest masters who express things vaguely because they see them dimly. They see the thing and speak it.
But the supreme poet not only sees thus with his intellect; he experiences with his feelings. He possesses "the experiencing nature."
Emerson declares that "among partial men he stands for the complete man, the representative of man, in virtue of having the largest power to receive and impart." This is, of course, said of the best; it is not to be said of the scribblers and the poetasters in their thousands; it is not to be said of the innumerable warblers whose feeble songs "grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw"; it is not true even of a canorous rhetorician, such as Swinburne, or a dreamy teller of tales like William Morris; but it is beyond question true of a Shakespeare or a Goethe. These were men of three-storied brain and also of thrice capacious soul.
Says Coleridge: "No man was ever yet a great poet without being a profound philosopher." For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human pa.s.sions, emotions, language; and Carlyle tells us of Goethe, "His resources have been acc.u.mulated from nearly all the provinces of human intellect and activity," while his culture was learned "not from art and literature alone, but also by action and pa.s.sion in the rugged school of experience."
It is, therefore, not for nothing that Lowell declares--
I believe the poets; it is they Who utter wisdom from the central deep.
Nor is it for nothing that Wordsworth declares poetry to be "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." The student of poetry may doubtless be studying aesthetics, but he is not merely dallying with aesthetics. If he is communing thoughtfully with mighty spirits like these--the penetrators to the central deep--is he not gaining, by the most royal road known to humanity, the most liberal education for the fullest life?
But we are not, it is true, always with the greatest poets. We are not always breathing the keen air of the very mountain tops. There is permanent value to be drawn also from writers in a rank below these greatest seers and creators. A Pope or a Dryden has packed into clear, rememberable, and serviceable shape considerable ma.s.ses of wisdom and good sense--shrewd and enlightening, if not always lofty or original.
The terse and pregnant essays of Bacon, the brusque, cant-hating wit and wisdom of Samuel Johnson, the critical sagacities of Hazlitt, the remorseless searchings of Carlyle, the brilliant expositions of Macaulay--to listen to these, to ponder and a.s.similate their best, is both to train the mind and to furnish it. Nay, even if a Plato or a Ruskin leave not one single dogma consciously grasped by the student"s faith, they have, nevertheless, been in the highest degree invigorating and enn.o.bling company. To a.s.sociate with a Scott is to a.s.sociate with high and wholesome character.
Such are the great writers of the first rank and second rank who form great literature; and to them the student has recourse when in quest of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." If what he gathers is not applied by him to life, then the fault is his own. If he does apply it, what then? Is there any such application, practical and living?
This is said to be a "practical" age. If I know anything whatever of history, I maintain that this age is no more "practical" than any other.
All sensible ages are practical. The present age, it is true, possesses more ingenious and labour-increasing machinery, and, when it is minded to do what it euphoniously describes as "hustle," it can doubtless "hustle" with a more deplorable rapidity than in times ancient. But it is not one whit more "practical." If we ask for a practical application of literature to life, so did the Greeks and so did the Romans. The object of their literary study was to fit a man to play his part in affairs, to know his world, to know both himself and other men, and to train him for a distinguished social place. They knew that literary study did this; if it had not, they would have called it a pastime, and left it to provide for itself as such. A training for the living of a life--is that object not sufficiently practical for the modern man? Is, after all, the final cause of society to be simply manufacturing and underselling, eating, drinking, and sleeping? None of us really believe that. We cannot glance at our public libraries, our art-galleries and museums, and seriously a.s.sert that society even looks like believing it.
Any one who maintains that there actually and consciously prevails such a basely materialistic meaning of "practical" is but a poor cynic maligning the world which tolerates him. When the world calls for a "practical" outcome of literary study, we mean what the Greeks meant, and what the Romans meant--some discoverable adaptation of the results of literary study to the various activities of human life--human life in its fulness--life of the helpful citizen, life of the partner in social intercourse, life in the silence of oneself.
Go and fetch in the first respectable-looking man from the street, and prove to him that literary study tends, as Bacon requires, "to civilize the life of man"; prove to him that, as Montesquieu requires, it "increases the excellence of our nature, and makes an understanding being yet more understanding," and the man--type though he may be of the modern practical age--will admit your claim and applaud your effort.
Well, literary study, to be worth anything beyond entertainment, ends in application to life, and to that end it is admirably fitted. I am not intending to compare in detail the value of one study with that of another. I make no pretence at estimating their relative potentialities.
That proceeding may be left to the ignorance or the intolerance of the man of one idea. He will settle it for us, and we will duly disregard him. It is, for example, not the cultivated scientist, not the wise scientist, who urges those huge and exorbitant claims which are sometimes advanced for physical science in these days--for electricity and chemistry and _ologies_. The true scientist may perhaps prefer that his kine should be the fat kine--for he is but human--but he does not desire them to be the only kine and to eat up all the rest.
But, though we are not to compare all the possibilities of this and that study, we can appeal to one unquestionable fact. When it comes to the tasks of citizenship, to settling human questions for legislation and the arguments of justice, to intelligent voting and the like, the student of those human doc.u.ments which we call literature is found more often to the front than the student of anything else whatsoever. It would be worth while, if we had the time, to make a list of the great statesmen and great initiators who have been men of letters or of literary culture. Not physical science, not the region of mathematics, seem to have equipped the mind so fully for this complex, this motive-determined department of life.
Literature deals with man and the mind of man, and, whether it be right or no to hold that "the proper study of mankind is man," we must acknowledge that man, and the workings of his mind and spirit, play the preponderating part in the region of social order and social happiness.
It is literature and no other study which embraces the wide, the all-round, the long-practised survey "of man, of nature, and of human life" necessary for a luminous intelligence.
A Huxley will remind us that, in any case, what we are bound to study is "not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways, and the fashioning of the affections and the will." Doubtless we must observe as well as read. But our own observation of life, however shrewd, is insufficient; it is narrow and partial. We see but the minutest fraction of time and the minutest fraction of humanity. It is from literature that we learn most vividly and most efficaciously all that can really be known "of men and their ways, the affections and the will."
There are, of course, self-complacent human beings who cannot realize that past literature has in this domain anything to teach them. They imagine that the world was born when they were born. These persons we must perhaps leave to the error of their ways. In earnest truth, there is no real literature too foreign or too old--nor, for the matter of that, too near or too young--to enlighten us concerning human feeling, human thought, and human motive. In these things the world did not have to wait for wisdom and insight until the modern scientific epoch. Age cannot wither the essential truth nor stale the potency of great literature in this respect. Aristophanes, Thucydides, Plato, Tacitus, Dante, or Shakespeare would have nothing to learn of the human mind and heart from Haeckel or from Herbert Spencer.
Nor, again, has human capacity--thinking capacity--appreciably advanced since great literature first arose. "Telephones," says Mr. Frederic Harrison, "microphones, pantoscopes, steam presses, and ubiquity engines in general may, after all, leave the poor human brain no bigger and no stronger than the brains of men who heard Moses speak and saw Aristotle pondering over a few worn rolls of crabbed ma.n.u.script." One a.s.suredly cannot say of the twentieth-century man with more truth than Shakespeare"s Hamlet said it of man three centuries ago--certainly not with more truth than it might have been said of Shakespeare himself--"How n.o.ble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In apprehension how like a G.o.d!" There was, indeed, none of the modern scientific terminology in Thucydides, or aeschylus, or Aristotle, but, in respect of sheer brain power and sanity, literature is at least as lofty in aeschylus as in Browning, in Aristotle as in Spencer. That is why the cla.s.sics--cla.s.sics of all languages, cla.s.sics of Greece, of Italy, of England--are for ever fresh, and can never die.
Literature, therefore, is a ma.s.s of written enlightenment concerning human beings, human hearts, and human thought. Name, if you will, any other study which could better fit a man for grappling with the problems of humanity in that portion of his life which we call public.
But man is something more than a public instrument. We cannot separate the man of citizen life, playing his part in the practical world, from the man of private intercourse, and the man of inward culture and resource. There is a sufficiently "practical" outcome of literary study if it makes the man wiser in himself, if it makes him truer in his judgment, richer and broader in his feelings, makes him put forth antennae of tact and sympathy, if also it supplies him with such inward resources that he can dispense with unattainable luxuries or with vulgar methods of pa.s.sing his time. Such results are surely a profoundly useful application of the results of study to life.
Take a human being in the loneliness--the absolute isolation or the intellectual isolation--of the bush; take one who is disabled by illness or disease; take one who is perforce environed all his days by company which is ign.o.ble and dull; take one who can ill afford any of the distractions of the wealthy. How shall he keep alive his higher part, or fill his leisure with contentment and delight, except by constant intercourse with the mightiest minds in the history of the thinking world? Said Rousseau: "Let one destine my pupil to the army, to the church, the bar, or anything else; yet, before his parents have chosen his vocation, nature has called him to the vocation of human life; living is the trade I want to teach him." All the rest is but means to an end. "We live," a.s.serts the poet, "by admiration, hope, and love."
And nothing can stimulate these sensations like great literature.
In this connexion I must insist for a few minutes upon the relations of literature to the intellectual idol of to-day--to wit science--science in the popular, if inaccurate, sense. I have to maintain that literature--and particularly poetry--is the indispensable ally and complement of science; that it is, in the end, the means by which the essential truths of science will reach their application to life; that it supplies the force by which the great facts of science are made to operate for good upon our thinking and our feeling. Literature supplies that which science alone cannot supply.
I am aware there are those who fancy that science itself is sufficient guide and equipment for human existence. Huxley, if I remember rightly, a.s.serted in his nonage that science would even afford us a newer and more enlightened morality. But I have never heard any scientist repeat that doctrine; I have never heard any scientist claim that the altruism of the Sermon on the Mount or of Buddha had been superseded by the dry light of scientific conclusions. Physical science and its inventions have not obviously advanced the delicacy of sentiments or of ethical ideas. Chaucer"s notion of a "parfit gentil knight," and his "poure parsoun of a toun" could not be bettered for anything discovered in all the five centuries since. It is not easy to see how science can stimulate us to warm-hearted charity, to self-sacrificing love and loyalty, to patriotism, and other manifestations of qualities which we universally recognize as virtues, and as things without which human life would be a dreary and intolerable waste. Without them suicide were almost best. And the cultivation of the emotions belongs to literature, not to objective science.
Will you pardon me if I repeat an ill.u.s.tration which has been used before, though I forget where? There are two ways of regarding tears.
They may be the infinitely appealing outward and visible signs of some great inward troubling of the spirit. They may "rise in the heart and gather to the eyes" from "the depths of some divine despair." On the other hand they may be what they were to a certain character in Balzac.
The physicist Baltazar retorts in answer to an outburst of tears, "Ah!
tears! I have a.n.a.lysed them; they contain a little phosphate of lime, chloride of sodium, mucin, and water!" I do not happen to know if that is a correct a.n.a.lysis, but I do know that both these aspects of tears are true aspects. There is nothing contradictory about them. The one is the aspect of objective science; the other--the human and moral aspect--is that of literature. Is there any doubt which aspect ultimately concerns us the more as human beings, livers of human lives?
There is no conflict between science and literature, especially between science and poetry.
The astronomer tells us the immense distances and immense sizes of the stars--great facts, most interesting facts; but the imagination of literature gets hold of all the vastness and wonder and suggestion of such a universe, and by the gift of expression it makes us realize them, makes us feel an awe and admiration, which may at least lend some chastening to minds which sorely need it. I believe that all true men of science recognise this power of literature, and that they are no more satisfied than the veriest poet with the mere facts of nature without the beauty and marvel and moral stimulation. They do not wish that a flower should be rendered less beautiful because they dissect it and cla.s.sify it under a hard dog-Latin name. "A primrose by the river"s brim a dicotyledon was to him, and it was nothing more." That is not their att.i.tude.