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 class, 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 passion, 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
godlike 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 passions, emotions, language;
and Carlyle tells us of Goethe, "His resources have been accumulated
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 passion 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 masses 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 assimilate 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 ennobling company. To associate with a Scott is to associate 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 assert 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 documents 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 manuscript." One
assuredly 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 noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In apprehension
how like a god!" 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
classics--classics of all languages, classics of Greece, of Italy, of
England--are for ever fresh, and can never die.
* * * * *
Literature, therefore, is a mass 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 passing 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 ignoble 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," asserts 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,
asserted 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 illustration 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 analysed 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 analysis, 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
classify 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
attitude.
There is not much influence on the higher side of life to be got from a
study of nothing else but metals, or nothing else but triangles, or
nothing else but germs. But literature exerts a most potent influence on
this higher side of life; for it not only supplies thoughts and
expresses feelings, but it is in itself--thanks to its expression--a
force to make them felt and to give them effective life. It not only
instructs--it moves. For, remember, great literature was never produced
by cynicism nor by affectation: men of weak convictions or feelings have
never been supreme writers. As at Athens, at Rome, or in Elizabethan
England, great literature belongs to periods full of animation, of
enterprise, of high ideals, of strong aims or strong beliefs. In that
prevailing spirit the great writers share, and they impart it forever to
us who read. There exhales from what they write an inspiring power of
earnestness. As Longinus phrases it, we seem to be possessed by a divine
effluence from those mighty minds.
It is often complained, in regard to our schools, that moral teaching
without religious stimulation is futile. The reason assents, but the
will is unmoved. "We want," says Shelley, "the generous impulse to act
that which we perceive." Great literature lends this impulse. Let us
have plenty of great literature in our schools.
I do not, indeed, claim that literature always and completely conveys
the requisite impulsion, but I claim that, in its impressiveness or its
charm, by its appeal to the imagination and the sensibilities, it can go
far, as Heine thought of Schiller's poetry, to "beget deeds." "Let me,"
said Fletcher, "make the songs of a people, and let who will make its
laws." "Certainly," declares that flower of chivalry, Sir Philip Sidney,
"I must confess ... I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that
I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." Bare psychology
teaches us; bare history teaches us; but great literature both teaches
and inspires; it gives not only light, but warmth. "Reading good books
of morality," Bacon sadly confesses, "is a little flat and dead." Great
literature puts the breath of life into this deadness. Not merely to
peruse, but to assimilate, the _King Lear_ of Shakespeare or the _Vita
Nuova_ of Dante cannot fail to turn the current of our minds strongly
towards right feeling--in the one case of duty and compassion, in the
other of purest loyalty in love.
The most vivid conception of high conduct--the one which we can least
shake off--is hardly to be gathered from the didactic moral treatise; it
is hardly ever derived from set sermons, unless the preacher impose it
upon us by some magnetism of his personality; it is more often impressed
by some literary embodiment which has been made to live and move and
have a being--by a Cordelia or a Jeanie Deans, by a Galahad or a Parson
Adams. Such embodiments as these are instruments for that which Matthew
Arnold holds to be the object of poetry, namely, the powerful and
beautiful application of "ideas to life."
But, it may be objected, the influence of a writer may indeed thus
stimulate, but what if it stimulates irrationally and amiss? Yet
herein, precisely, lies one great superiority of the study of
literature. It is the best means known to humanity of encouraging
breadth of mind, many-sidedness of comprehension. That is, of course,
with the proviso that your literary worship is not a monotheism. The
genuine literary student is not a student of one author, much less of
one book. It is true that Shakespeare is in himself almost a compendium
of humanity, and that to study Shakespeare alone is as profitable as to
study a score of less comprehensive mortals. Nevertheless, even
Shakespeare has his limitations. He could not wholly escape the
limitations of his times, spacious though these were.
Literary study in the proper sense is as wide as time and opportunity
can make it. It includes alike the _Divine Comedy_ and the human comedy.
As far as possible it ignores differences of nationality, of language,
of date. It seeks to know the best that has been thought and said in the
world, wherever and whenever. It ransacks the Hebrew mind, the Greek
mind, the Roman mind, the Italian, French, German and English mind. It
gathers opinions, suggestions, points of view, elements of culture from
all sources. If Shakespeare holds the mirror up to nature as she shows
herself in human actions and passions, Wordsworth reflects the
manifestations of her spirit as seen in her physical works. If Homer
gives us the naive and simple grandeur of pagan life, Dante gives us the
mystic grandeur of the Catholic conception, Milton the severer grandeur
of the semi-Puritan. The literary student thus approaches truth from
every side. He approaches it variously with Bacon, with Johnson, with
Voltaire, with Goethe, with Wordsworth, with Carlyle, with Newman. He
feels the various emotions of a hundred lyrists. Led by a score of
dramatists and novelists he sees into the complexities of human
character, motive and mood. Getting away from the narrow and biassed
bickerings, gropings, and caprices of the day, he associates with
hundreds of the best minds of the past, whose interests were altogether
outside the temporary prejudices and passions which now surround us. And
what preparation for life could surpass that of the student who has thus
taken all literature for his province? He is in reality better equipped
with practical psychology than many a professed psychologist.
The professional student of history studies history from books in which
long series of facts and their possible relations are presented in the
light in which they are seen by Mommsen or Gibbon or Macaulay or Froude.
Meanwhile the student of literature sees incidentally, but, so far as he
goes, more vividly, into the actual life of breathing men through the
legend of _Beowulf_ or the _Vision of Piers Plowman_, through Chaucer or
the _Spectator_, through Ben Jonson's _Humours_ or Horace Walpole's
Letters, through _Clarissa Harlowe_ or _Pride and Prejudice_.
I know, of course, full well one frequent consequence of the
broad-mindedness which results. I realize how promptly the unread man,
filled to the lips with the frothy spirit of his own infallibility, will
condemn him whose knowledge of men and motives makes him pause and
suspend his judgment. But what of that? Some one has said that thinking
makes you wise but weak, while action makes you narrow but strong. A
terse sentence, but one which will not bear inspection. The man of
half-lights who acts with a promptitude often disastrous, is indeed
narrow, but I deny that he is strong. He is opinionated and audacious.
Far stronger, in a more reasonable world, is the man who can withhold
his yea or nay, when neither yea nor nay happens to be the one answer
of that truth which is great and will prevail.
* * * * *
These, then, are the virtues which we claim for the study of literature.