DeQuincey has made a very famous division of books, which I quote at length because though often referred to, it is seldom seen in its entirety. He says: “There is the literature of knowledge and there is the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move. The first is a rudder; the second, an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks, ultimately it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy.
“Remotely, it may travel towards an object seated in what Lord Bacon calls dry light; but, proximately, it does and must operate, else it ceases to be a literature of power, on and through that humid light which clothes itself in the mists and glittering iris of human passions, desire and genial emotions.
“Men have so little reflected on the higher functions of literature, as to find it a paradox if one should describe it as a mean or subordinate purpose of books to give information. But this is a paradox only in the sense which makes it honorable to be paradoxical. Whenever we talk in ordinary language of seeking information, or gaining knowledge, we understand the words as connected with something of absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth, which can occupy a very high place in human interests, that it is never absolutely novel in the meanest minds; it exists eternally by way of germ or latent principle in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed but never planted. To be capable of transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth that ranges on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth, namely, power, or deep sympathy with truth. What is the effect, for instance, upon society, of children? By the pity, by the tenderness, and by the peculiar modes of admiration, which connect themselves with the helplessness, with the innocence, and with the simplicity of children, not only are the primal affections strengthened and continually renewed, but the qualities which are dearest in the sight of heaven—the frailty, for instance, which appeals to forbearance, the innocence which symbolizes the heavenly, and the simplicity which is most alien from the worldly, are kept up in perpetual remembrance, and their ideals are continually refreshed. A purpose of the same nature is answered by the higher literature, viz:—the literature of power.
“What do you learn from Paradise Lost? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery-book? Something new—something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power, that is exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards—a step ascending as upon a Jacob’s ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth: whereas the very first step in power is a flight—is an ascending movement into another element where earth is forgotten.”
The verdict of time is never wrong. Books that delighted generations of men have done so because of real merit and these are the books that have embodied the life thought of great men. Shallow books no matter how brilliant they may be are short-lived. The best thoughts of the best men endure in books that are true to human experience irrespective of the century in which they were written. An author is great in proportion as he perceives the universally true in life.
The books which do us good are the sincere books, those which are true in the highest sense of the word which give noble and cheerful ideas of life, which make us respect human nature, books written by men who have a helpful message for their fellow strugglers.
There are books which mark epochs in the progress of the world just as the discovery of America and the invention of printing do, and the reading of a book sometimes marks an epoch in life. Great is the joy of meeting a real book by a thoughtful man. Keats wrote on first looking into Chapman’s Homer:—
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken
Or like stout Cortes when with eagle eyes