(HOMER, DANTE, CERVANTES, GOETHE SHAKESPEARE)
The study of literature, that it may be fruitful, that it may not result
in a mere gathering of names and dates and phrases, must be a study of
ideas and not of words, of periods rather than of men, or only of such
men as are great enough or individual enough to reflect as much light
upon their age as they in turn receive from it. To know literature as
the elder Disraeli knew it is at best only an amusement, an
accomplishment, great, indeed, for the dilettante, but valueless for the
scholar. Detached facts are nothing in themselves, and become of worth
only in their relation to one another. It is little, for example, to
know the date of Shakespeare: something more that he and Cervantes were
contemporaries; and a great deal that he grew up in a time fermenting
with reformation in Church and State, when the intellectual impulse from
the invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while the
New World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promise
and its temptations to daring adventure. Facts in themselves are clumsy
and cumbrous--the cowry-currency of isolated and uninventive men;
generalizations, conveying great sums of knowledge in a little space,
mark the epoch of free interchange of ideas, of higher culture, and of
something better than provincial scholarship.
But generalizations, again, though in themselves the work of a happier
moment, of some genetic flash in the brain of man, gone before one can
say it lightens, are the result of ideas slowly gathered and long
steeped and clarified in the mind, each in itself a composite of the
carefully observed relations of separate and seemingly disparate facts.
What is the pedigree of almost all great fortunes? Through vast
combinations of trade, forlorn hopes of speculation, you trace them up
to a clear head and a self-earned sixpence. It is the same with all
large mental accumulations: they begin with a steady brain and the first
solid result of thought, however small--the nucleus of speculation. The
true aim of the scholar is not to crowd his memory, but to classify and
sort it, till what was a heap of chaotic curiosities becomes a museum of
science.
It may well be questioned whether the invention of printing, while it
democratized information, has not also levelled the ancient aristocracy
of thought. By putting a library within the power of every one, it has
taught men to depend on their shelves rather than on their brains; it
has supplanted a strenuous habit of thinking with a loose indolence of
reading which relaxes the muscular fiber of the mind. When men had few
books, they mastered those few; but now the multitude of books lord it
over the man. The costliness of books was a great refiner of literature.
Men disposed of single volumes by will with as many provisions and
precautions as if they had been great landed estates. A mitre would
hardly have overjoyed Petrarch as much as did the finding of a copy of
Virgil. The problem for the scholar was formerly how to acquire books;
for us it is how to get rid of them. Instead of gathering, we must sift.
When Confucius made his collection of Chinese poems, he saved but three
hundred and ten out of more than three thousand, and it has consequently
survived until our day.
In certain respects the years do our weeding for us. In our youth we
admire the verses which answer our mood; as we grow older we like those
better which speak to our experience; at last we come to look only upon
that as poetry which appeals to that original nature in us which is
deeper than all moods and wiser than all experience. Before a man is
forty he has broken many idols, and the milestones of his intellectual
progress are the gravestones of dead and buried enthusiasms of his
dethroned gods.
There are certain books which it is necessary to read; but they are very
few. Looking at the matter from an aesthetic point of view, merely, I
should say that thus far one man had been able to use types so
universal, and to draw figures so cosmopolitan, that they are equally
true in all languages and equally acceptable to the whole Indo-European
branch, at least, of the human family. That man is Homer, and there
needs, it seems to me, no further proof of his individual existence than
this very fact of the solitary unapproachableness of the "Iliad" and the
"Odyssey." The more wonderful they are, the more likely to be the work
of one person. Nowhere is the purely natural man presented to us so
nobly and sincerely as in these poems. Not far below these I should
place the "Divina Commedia" of Dante, in which the history of the
spiritual man is sketched with equal command of material and grandeur of
outline. Don Quixote stands upon the same level, and receives the same
universal appreciation. Here we have the spiritual and the natural man
set before us in humorous contrast. In the knight and his squire
Cervantes has typified the two opposing poles of our dual nature--the
imagination and the understanding as they appear in contradiction. This
is the only comprehensive satire ever written, for it is utterly
independent of time, place, and manners. Faust gives us the natural
history of the human intellect, Mephistopheles being merely the
projected impersonation of that scepticism which is the invariable
result of a purely intellectual culture. These four books are the only
ones in which universal facts of human nature and experience are ideally
represented. They can, therefore, never be displaced. Whatever moral
significance there may be in certain episodes of the "Odyssey," the man
of the Homeric poems is essentially the man of the senses and the
understanding, to whom the other world is alien and therefore repulsive.
There is nothing that demonstrates this more clearly, as there is
nothing, in my judgment, more touching and picturesque in all poetry,
than that passage in the eleventh book of the "Odyssey," where the shade
of Achilles tells Ulysses that he would rather be the poorest
shepherd-boy on a Grecian hill than king over the unsubstantial shades
of Hades. Dante's poem, on the other hand, sets forth the passage of man
from the world of sense to that of spirit; in other words, his moral
conversion. It is Dante relating his experience in the great
camp-meeting of mankind, but relating it, by virtue of his genius, so
representatively that it is no longer the story of one man, but of all
men. Then comes Cervantes, showing the perpetual and comic contradiction
between the spiritual and the natural man in actual life, marking the
transition from the age of the imagination to that of the intellect;
and, lastly, Goethe, the poet of a period in which a purely intellectual
culture reached its maximum of development, depicts its one-sidedness,
and its consequent failure. These books, then, are not national, but
human, and record certain phases of man's nature, certain stages of his
moral progress. They are gospels in the lay bible of the race. It will
remain for the future poet to write the epic of the complete man, as it
remains for the future world to afford the example of his entire and
harmonious development.
I have not mentioned Shakespeare, because his works come under a
different category. Though they mark the very highest level of human
genius, they yet represent no special epoch in the history of the
individual mind. The man of Shakespeare is always the man of actual life
as he is acted upon by the worlds of sense and of spirit under certain
definite conditions. We all of us _may_ be in the position of Macbeth or
Othello or Hamlet, and we appreciate their sayings and deeds
potentially, so to speak, rather than actually, through the sympathy of
our common nature and not of our experience. But with the four books I
have mentioned our relation is a very different one. We all of us grow
up through the Homeric period of the senses; we all feel, at some time,
sooner or later, the need of something higher, and, like Dante, shape
our theory of the divine government of the universe; we all with
Cervantes discover the rude contrast between the ideal and real, and
with Goethe the unattainableness of the highest good through the
intellect alone. Therefore I set these books by themselves. I do not
mean that we read them, or for their full enjoyment need to read them,
in this light; but I believe that this fact of their universal and
perennial application to our consciousness and our experience accounts
for their permanence, and insures their immortality.