Let us now take a brief inventory of our heritage. We can glance at only the most precious of these treasures, the crown jewels of the world's literature, which are all ours, whether we choose to wear them or not. But first let me make it plain that I am not assuming that all the great monuments of human genius are literary. I am not forgetful of the fact that literature is only one of the fine arts, that the Strassburg Cathedral, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Rembrandt's School of Anatomy, Michelangelo's Moses are all products of man's creative genius, records of the life of God in the soul of man. But I do insist that literature is the most inclusive and the most definite of all the arts, and that therefore books unlock to us a vaster world than obeys the spell of any other art. One man's soul may attain its transfiguration through architecture or music or painting or sculpture as another does through poetry; the great thing is to attain the transfiguration; and let us be thankful for the many ways in which God fulfills himself to man. I am not trying to make out a case for literature, but literature is my subject, and what I say of it must be taken as equally friendly to all the other great forms of human expression and often as equally applicable to them.
We will not talk of a five-foot or a three-foot shelf, or one of any other exact dimension, though I suspect that no very long range of space would be required to hold all the supremely great books for whose contents we should have room in our souls. The limitation will prove to be in us rather than in the material of literature. The Bible, while containing supremely great literature, has still higher claims, and for the present discussion may be left to its special advocates. But meanwhile our treasures are waiting for their inventory.
Literature for people of our race begins with Homer and is confined to Europe and English America. This means in a very true sense that all the literature which concerns us is modern, for the Greeks are the first and perhaps the greatest of the moderns. They present us as their first contribution the works that go under the name of Homer, and we need not disturb ourselves now with the question whether the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were both written by the same man, or even each written by a single hand. The point is that we have in them an imperishable picture of the life of a vanished world. Each is an epic of the natural man, the one national, the other personal. In the "Iliad" we are plunged into the thickening close of the ten years' war between the Greeks and Trojans, during which the beautiful cause of all the trouble, Helen, retains all her youthful bloom and, in fact, nobody seems to grow any older. We have a crowded stage with many episodes and interests. In the "Odyssey" we trace the fortunes of one man, Ulysses, during his return from the war, which occupies him ten years, so that he is away from home, as Rip Van Winkle was, twenty years; but, instead of finding everybody grown old or dead, as Irving's hero did, he finds his wife still young and attractive and beset by numerous suitors. We are very glad to have this so, because we are all children at heart and want just such an ending. The telling of these stories, while simple, is on a lofty plane; the gods themselves take part in the passions of the contestants and even in the warfare. The poet, no doubt, meant this for what it professes to be; but I cannot help seeing in the embroiling of Olympus a perhaps unrealized tribute of the poet to the greatness of the human soul in the scale of the universe, a suggestion that moral and spiritual values and powers outweigh the stars in their courses.
Great as are the works of Homer, we are not to suppose them the only masterpieces in Greek literature. Certainly the three great dramatists cannot be omitted, all so great, yet so unlike. These three, together with two pastoral poets, one lyric poet, and the greatest of prose poets, are vividly pictured by Mrs. Browning in the glowing stanzas of her "Wine of Cyprus."
Oh, our Æschylus, the thunderous!
How he drove the bolted breath
Through the cloud, to wedge the ponderous
In the gnarlèd oak beneath.
Oh, our Sophocles, the royal,
Who was born to monarch's place,
And who made the whole world loyal,
Less by kingly power than grace.
Our Euripides, the human,
With his droppings of warm tears,
And his touches of things common
Till they rose to touch the spheres!
Our Theocritus, our Bion,
And our Pindar's shining goals!—
These were cup-bearers undying
Of the wine that's meant for souls.
And my Plato, the divine one,
If men know the gods aright
By their motions as they shine on
With a glorious trail of light!—
It would not be surprising if some who read these lines should find more food for mind and soul in Plato than in any other of the Greek writers. Certainly those works of Plato and his contemporary, Xenophon, that relate to the life, teachings, and death of Socrates are contributions to a yet uncollected Bible of humanity, one more inclusive than that of Jew or Christian.
It is one of the great misfortunes of Roman literature that the works of its chief writers are used as textbooks for schools, a misfortune shared to some extent by the Greek. Yet Homer and Xenophon, Vergil and Cicero, did not write for children or callow youth. They belong to Longfellow's
grand old masters,
Whose mighty thoughts suggest
Life's endless toil and endeavor,
and their writings have no relation to adolescence. Yet it is to be feared that most people who have read their works remember them as seen through the cloudy medium of their own immaturity. Byron speaks of reading and hating Horace as a schoolboy, but no normal person can hate Horace any more than he can hate Washington Irving. It is possible, however, that pupils who have to read Irving's "Sketch Book" with the fear of a college entrance examination before their minds may have no affection even for him. So some of us may have something to unlearn in our reading of Vergil and Horace, for we must approach their works as strong meat for mature minds. Vergil's theme is nothing less than the glorification of the Roman state through its divinely ordered and heroic founding. School children seldom read more than the six books of the "Aeneid" required for college; but the other six, though of much less varied interest, are necessary for the appreciation of the poem. The whole is a work that no one can afford to pass over in his search for the burning words that keep alive the thought of other ages. Very different in theme and manner is the poetry of Horace. He is the most modern of all the men of old, far more modern than our own Puritan ancestors. His mixture of grace and shrewdness, poetic charm and worldly wisdom, we find nowhere else. The bulk of his work is not large, and this fact, as in the case of Gray and Keats and Poe, is rather in his favor, because the reader can easily become familiar with it all, though then he will sigh for more. Horace wears well; the older we grow the better we like him. He has love songs for youth, political poems for maturity, and satires for old age. After we have lived with him for half a century he becomes more real to us than most of our acquaintances in the flesh. Roman literature is not without other great names to attract the student; but these two must not be overlooked by the most general or the most selective reader.
With Vergil the world always associates the still greater figure of one who was proud to call him master—that of Dante. More than is true of almost any other writer, his work is a compendium of the life of his time. The "Divine Comedy" is first of all poetry, and poetry of the loftiest order; but it is also an embodiment of the learning, the philosophy, and the theology of his age. It mirrors at once the greatness and the limitations of the medieval mind. Dante is not modern in the sense that Horace is, though he is thrice as near to us in time. Leigh Hunt said that his great poem ought to be called an infernal tragedy; but that is true only of the Inferno; the spiritual atmosphere clears as we follow his footsteps through the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. Of all the masterpieces of human genius the "Divine Comedy" is perhaps the one that asks the most self-surrender of the modern reader and—shall I add?—that repays it most richly. Longfellow's marvelous sonnet sequence, written while he was translating Dante, portrays at once the spirit in which we should approach the reading of the "Divine Comedy" and the wonders that we shall find there. It is a book that we never can outgrow. To know it is to be made a citizen of the moral universe.
