theories as sombre as its forests, its rigid notions of duty as difficult
to make bloom into sweetness and beauty as the stony soil, would have
been unendurable if they had not been touched with the ideal created by
the poet. There was in creed and purpose the virility that creates a
state, and, as Menander says, the country which is cultivated with
difficulty produces brave men; but we leave out an important element in
the lives of the Pilgrims if we overlook the means they had of living
above their barren circumstances. I do not speak only of the culture
which many of them brought from the universities, of the Greek and Roman
classics, and what unworldly literature they could glean from the
productive age of Elizabeth and James, but of another source, more
universally resorted to, and more powerful in exciting imagination and
emotion, and filling the want in human nature of which we have spoken.
They had the Bible, and it was more to them, much more, than a book of
religion, than a revelation of religious truth, a rule for the conduct of
life, or a guide to heaven. It supplied the place to them of the
Mahabharata to the Hindoo, of the story-teller to the Arab. It opened to
them a boundless realm of poetry and imagination.
What is the Bible? It might have sufficed, accepted as a book of
revelation, for all the purposes of moral guidance, spiritual
consolation, and systematized authority, if it had been a collection of
precepts, a dry code of morals, an arsenal of judgments, and a treasury
of promises. We are accustomed to think of the Pilgrims as training their
intellectual faculties in the knottiest problems of human responsibility
and destiny, toughening their mental fibre in wrestling with dogmas and
the decrees of Providence, forgetting what else they drew out of the
Bible: what else it was to them in a degree it has been to few peoples
many age. For the Bible is the unequaled record of thought and emotion,
the reservoir of poetry, traditions, stories, parables, exaltations,
consolations, great imaginative adventure, for which the spirit of man is
always longing. It might have been, in warning examples and commands,
all-sufficient to enable men to make a decent pilgrimage on earth and
reach a better country; but it would have been a very different book to
mankind if it had been only a volume of statutes, and if it lacked its
wonderful literary quality. It might have enabled men to reach a better
country, but not, while on earth, to rise into and live in that better
country, or to live in a region above the sordidness of actual life. For,
apart from its religious intention and sacred character, the book is so
written that it has supremely in its history, poetry, prophecies,
promises, stories, that clear literary quality that supplies, as
certainly no other single book does, the want in the human mind which is
higher than the want of facts or knowledge.
The Bible is the best illustration of the literature of power, for it
always concerns itself with life, it touches it at all points. And this
is the test of any piece of literature--its universal appeal to human
nature. When I consider the narrow limitations of the Pilgrim households,
the absence of luxury, the presence of danger and hardship, the harsh
laws--only less severe than the contemporary laws of England and
Virginia--the weary drudgery, the few pleasures, the curb upon the
expression of emotion and of tenderness, the ascetic repression of
worldly thought, the absence of poetry in the routine occupations and
conditions, I can feel what the Bible must have been to them. It was an
open door into a world where emotion is expressed, where imagination can
range, where love and longing find a language, where imagery is given to
every noble and suppressed passion of the soul, where every aspiration
finds wings. It was history, or, as Thucydides said, philosophy teaching
by example; it was the romance of real life; it was entertainment
unfailing; the wonder-book of childhood, the volume of sweet sentiment to
the shy maiden, the sword to the soldier, the inciter of the youth to
heroic enduring of hardness, it was the refuge of the aged in failing
activity. Perhaps we can nowhere find a better illustration of the true
relation of literature to life than in this example.
Let us consider the comparative value of literature to mankind. By
comparative value I mean its worth to men in comparison with other things
of acknowledged importance, such as the creation of industries, the
government of States, the manipulation of the politics of an age, the
achievements in war and discovery, and the lives of admirable men. It
needs a certain perspective to judge of this aright, for the near and the
immediate always assume importance. The work that an age has on hand,
whether it be discovery, conquest, the wars that determine boundaries or
are fought for policies, the industries that develop a country or affect
the character of a people, the wielding of power, the accumulation of
fortunes, the various activities of any given civilization or period,
assume such enormous proportions to those engaged in them that such a
modest thing as the literary product seems insignificant in comparison;
and hence it is that the man of action always holds in slight esteem the
man of thought, and especially the expresser of feeling and emotion, the
poet and the humorist. It is only when we look back over the ages, when
civilizations have passed or changed, over the rivalries of States, the
ambitions and enmities of men, the shining deeds and the base deeds that
make up history, that we are enabled to see what remains, what is
permanent. Perhaps the chief result left to the world out of a period of
heroic exertion, of passion and struggle and accumulation, is a sheaf of
poems, or the record by a man of letters of some admirable character.
Spain filled a large place in the world in the sixteenth century, and its
influence upon history is by no means spent yet; but we have inherited
out of that period nothing, I dare say, that is of more value than the
romance of Don Quixote. It is true that the best heritage of generation
from generation is the character of great men; but we always owe its
transmission to the poet and the writer. Without Plato there would be no
Socrates. There is no influence comparable in human life to the
personality of a powerful man, so long as he is present to his
generation, or lives in the memory of those who felt his influence. But
after time has passed, will the world, will human life, that is
essentially the same in all changing conditions, be more affected by what
Bismarck did or by what Goethe said?
We may without impropriety take for an illustration of the comparative
value of literature to human needs the career of a man now living. In the
opinion of many, Mr. Gladstone is the greatest Englishman of this age.
What would be the position of the British empire, what would be the
tendency of English politics and society without him, is a matter for
speculation. He has not played such a role for England and its neighbors
as Bismarck has played for Germany and the Continent, but he has been one
of the most powerful influences in molding English action. He is the
foremost teacher. Rarely in history has a nation depended more upon a
single man, at times, than the English upon Gladstone, upon his will, his
ability, and especially his character. In certain recent crises the
thought of losing him produced something like a panic in the English
mind, justifying in regard to him, the hyperbole of Choate upon the death
of Webster, that the sailor on the distant sea would feel less safe--as
if a protecting providence had been withdrawn from the world. His mastery
of finance and of economic problems, his skill in debate, his marvelous
achievements in oratory, have extorted the admiration of his enemies.
There is scarcely a province in government, letters, art, or research in
which the mind can win triumphs that he has not invaded and displayed his
power in; scarcely a question in politics, reform, letters, religion,
archaeology, sociology, which he has not discussed with ability. He is a
scholar, critic, parliamentarian, orator, voluminous writer. He seems
equally at home in every field of human activity--a man of prodigious
capacity and enormous acquirements. He can take up, with a turn of the
hand, and always with vigor, the cause of the Greeks, Papal power,
education, theology, the influence of Egypt on Homer, the effect of
English legislation on King O'Brien, contributing something noteworthy to
all the discussions of the day. But I am not aware that he has ever
produced a single page of literature. Whatever space he has filled in his
own country, whatever and however enduring the impression he has made
upon English life and society, does it seem likely that the sum total of
his immense activity in so many fields, after the passage of so many
years, will be worth to the world as much as the simple story of Rab and
his Friends? Already in America I doubt if it is. The illustration might
have more weight with some minds if I contrasted the work of this great
man--as to its answering to a deep want in human nature--with a novel
like 'Henry Esmond' or a poem like 'In Memoriam'; but I think it is
sufficient to rest it upon so slight a performance as the sketch by Dr.
John Brown, of Edinburgh. For the truth is that a little page of
literature, nothing more than a sheet of paper with a poem written on it,
may have that vitality, that enduring quality, that adaptation to life,
that make it of more consequence to all who inherit it than every
material achievement of the age that produced it. It was nothing but a
sheet of paper with a poem on it, carried to the door of his London
patron, for which the poet received a guinea, and perhaps a seat at the
foot of my lord's table. What was that scrap compared to my lord's
business, his great establishment, his equipages in the Park, his
position in society, his weight in the House of Lords, his influence in
Europe? And yet that scrap of paper has gone the world over; it has been
sung in the camp, wept over in the lonely cottage; it has gone with the
marching regiments, with the explorers--with mankind, in short, on its
way down the ages, brightening, consoling, elevating life; and my lord,
who regarded as scarcely above a menial the poet to whom he tossed the
guinea--my lord, with all his pageantry and power, has utterly gone and
left no witness.