The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, October 1884, No. 1

by Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle; Chautauqua Institution

First, then, as regards the breadth, the diffusiveness, of the blessing that literature ministers to mankind.

But since the present comparison is naturally between literature and science, it may be well, at this point, that we pause to take our bearings. What is literature? And what is science? Let us clearly understand the terms and ideas with which we deal. Literature then may be defined as the record of what men have thought, felt, fancied, done, in the world. Science is reasoned and classified knowledge respecting the facts and laws of nature or the physical universe. Our question is not, Which is the greater good, literature or science? Our question is, Is not literature, as compared with science, at least an equal good?

Now we, that is, men and women in general, who ask this question, may have either one or the other of two quite different relations to literature or to science. These two different relations we may name and distinguish. In the first place, you—any man or any woman, I mean—may be either, on the one hand a producer of literature, or a promoter of science; or, on the other hand, you may be simply one to enjoy literature or to reap the fruits of science. Since, however, those who make literature also enjoy literature, and those who advance science also reap the fruits of science, we may as well disregard entirely the productive relation which belongs in either case to the few, and consider only the fruitional relation, which belongs in both cases to the many—in fact, to all.

Just here, however, I am met with a warning. I am bidden take heed. I am told that exactly because literature is not to all a good, but a good only to the select and favored few, because literature is aristocratic, not democratic; because it is a luxury, not a necessity; because it concerns not the average man, but the picked man, one in a thousand, not the thousand—exactly because of this, I am told, it is that literature has got to give way and let science, which is a universal interest, take its too long usurped place. Well, I stop to answer this challenge. I admit at once that, if such be the fact, if literature be a monopoly, and not a common good, then I lose my case. And I say more, then I ought to lose my case, and I am glad to lose my case. For I avow myself a democrat in this matter. I go with the people. I belong with the majority. I stand up for the benefit of the most. But is it true that literature is an exclusive, a seclusive thing? Is it true that the many can not enjoy it, do not enjoy it? Is not literature a general, a diffusive good? If not, then however great a good it may be to a few, I am not here to defend its cause. We are a popular association, this C. L. S. C., or we are nothing. If I did not believe literature to be a thing for everybody, I, as one among the Counselors of this organization, should favor a dismissal of literature from our plan and plead for the substitution of something else in its place that should be a thing for everybody. What is the fact?

Why, the fact is that literature is the very atmosphere, the intellectual atmosphere, in which we all, not some of us, but all of us, live and breathe and have our being. We drew in this air as soon as we began to think. Long before we could read for ourselves, before even we could listen understandingly to the reading of others, we felt unconsciously, but most really, and most profoundly, the effect, the beneficial effect of literature. The home in which you were reared, the character and the spirit of the mother that gave you birth, that nurtured and tended your infancy—these were different, and they were better, because literature had done something to make them and mold them. And were they not literature, those lullabies that quieted us in our cradle, the fairy tales that fed the fancy of our wondering childhood, the stories from the Bible that expanded our infant minds to embrace the idea of a God, of a Savior, of a future life, of heaven, and of hell? Those men seem not to know what their words mean; those men who talk of expunging literature, and bringing up the new generations of mankind on science. Really to do what they say, but what surely they never could intelligently mean, would be to destroy for the whole civilized race of mankind the very grace and glory of life.

I know very well that comparatively few out of any human generation ever become widely or deeply conversant with literature. It is but the one person out of ten, or a hundred, or out of a thousand it may be, that reads books. This I freely acknowledge. Nay, this I loudly proclaim. It is because this is so that the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle exists—because this is so, and because it ought not to be so, and because there are at least a few of us that do not mean to have it continue to be so. Such, however, is undeniably at present the fact. Readers of books, take the civilized world at large, are few and far between. But no matter for that. What I have maintained is nevertheless true. Literature is a universal good. How many of you spend time in gazing heavenward at the sun? But you see by the light of the sun none the less. The sun lights the world in thousands and ten thousands of places where he does not directly shine. And literature is a sun. It blazes high in the heavens and spreads its beneficent illumination everywhere abroad among the haunts of civilized mankind. There are coverts, it is true, into which its rays can not immediately pierce. But even into such coverts its rays enter. There is such a thing as diffusion of light by refraction and reflection and transmission. In this way literature becomes a light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. A light, I say—for I use those sacred words with reverence. One is the light that lighteth every man. And, by the way, let us remember that it is greatly through literature, that is, through a book, the book, the Bible, that Jesus himself shines hither, across seas and continents of space and across centuries of time, to light us here as in a city in the wilderness to-day.

Of the hundreds of thousands of Englishmen of the present generation that have from time to time listened to the noble eloquence of that great orator, John Bright, perhaps not one in a hundred has ever read, for example, the “Paradise Lost” of Milton. But does it therefore follow that to these of the overwhelming majority the “Paradise Lost” of Milton is nothing? Far from it. John Bright has acknowledged his vast debt to the poetry of Milton for the enrichment of his own gift of speech; and through John Bright, Milton’s poetry has thus become a real, an appreciable good to all the hundreds of thousands of men that have fed on John Bright’s eloquence, though they may never have read for themselves a line of Milton’s magnificent and inspiring verse.

This is but a single, and it is of course a very inadequate illustration. Every sermon you hear, every lecture, every speech, every newspaper you read, owes something, and something that it could by no means spare, to the beneficence of literature. Take away the light of literature from the world of mind—why, it would be like putting out the sun in the heavens. The very men who talk of such a vandalism, such an unspeakable, such an anachronistic vandalism, these very men would grope as in Cimmerian darkness. I will tell you what the effect would be like. It would be like suddenly annihilating all the civilized inhabitants of the world and endowing the unreclaimed savages of waste and wild with the powers and appliances that centuries of science have accumulated for the service of mankind. Imagine, if you can, the Hottentots and Caffirs and Ojibways remaining uncivilized in character, but equipped with the material apparatus of civilization. Would you like to live among them? What sort of use, think you, would they be likely to make of their magnificent acquisitions? But a thought like this is associated rather with the second than with the first of our reasons for regarding literature as a true good of human life. To this second reason we presently make our transition; first, however, let us fix it firmly in our thought that literature is no narrow, no exclusive interest, but an interest as broad and as expansive as is civilization itself. The fact that literature is in character such, is capable of being made clear by additional illustration. The city of New York is supplied with water from the Croton river. Every inhabitant of the city enjoys the benefit of this water supply. There is a system of aqueducts ramifying from Croton river to every street, to every dwelling, to almost every room, in the great metropolis. You have but to apply your hand, and instantly at that silent sign, Croton river flows to meet your demand. For it is not water simply, it is Croton river that is brought thus within the reach of every one that will have of it. So it is with the distribution of effect from literature. The conduits of literature run everywhere. The current flows to every mind within the bounds of civilization. Men may not know this, but they share the blessing all the same without knowing it. There are, I suppose, plenty of people in New York, who, when they turn the faucet to their water-pipe, not once dream that the fountain which they see springing as if by magic under their touch, is a true river brought from forty miles away. But true river it is nevertheless. Certainly not one in a hundred thousand of New Yorkers has ever tasted of Croton river where it flows in its natural bed. But they taste Croton river for all that, every time they drink water in New York. And thus it is that, however little men think of it, they still do share the benefits of literature with almost every breath of larger intellectual life that they draw. To the original sources of literature, the great books, ancient or modern, they may never have directly resorted, never even have seen them from afar, nay, never so much as heard of them; but they drink from them all the same, every time they take in a thought or a fancy, however brought within their reach, that once sprang up first in some great human brain, and was then immortalized in a tale, an essay, a history, a poem.

Thus much for the extent or quantity of the influence for good to men exerted by literature. It certainly is not too much to claim for literature that it is an interest broad enough in its range and reach of power to be called a general, if not a universal interest of civilized mankind.

We have next and last to consider the kind or quality of this expansive influence. As I have said, it is not to most men a material good. Only to those who live by literature, to those who make books, to our men and women of letters distinctively so-called, is literature a material interest. To the vast majority of us all, literature is chiefly a spiritual, an intellectual, a sentimental good. This I fully admit.