The Literature Society of Melbourne meets monthly in order to assimilate true literature and to study its principles. If its President is entitled to speak its corporate mind, it approaches this task in a grateful and docile spirit.
There is, I believe, no necessity to defend the existence and aims of a Literature Society. It would be enough if we simply confessed that we meet for the enjoyment of a rational and not unelevating pleasure. It would be enough if we said that literature, like pictorial art and music, is one of the recognized resources for the gladdening of life, and that we meet in order to get as much of that high refreshment as possible in each other's company. And this, indeed, we do so far frankly acknowledge and confess.
But we also claim that there is a more serious aspect of our association. We believe that great literature and its zealous study produce most powerful effects, both upon our inner selves and upon the value and happiness of our lives; that they supply us with a rich equipment, both for our private thinking and feeling and also for social action and social intercourse; that from great literature we derive indefeasible resources, which form glorious company in the midst of solitude, abundant wealth in the midst of poverty, and an unfailing refuge from the too frequent harshness of circumstance.
Our objects are not those of mere dilettanti, although for my part I should blame no association which boldly inscribed "dilettanti" on its breezy flag. Our "literature" is not mere elegant trifling—although men who do choose to spend an occasional evening in trifling with elegance are men whom we can still afford to respect and perhaps to envy. But literature, as we understand it, is no trifling, however elegant. By literature we mean what Milton has called the "seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books"; and the seasoned life of man is no trifle. We mean something of which the influence—or the effluence—may profoundly determine the quality of our lives, both as they affect others and as they affect ourselves.
We do not mean simply printed books. The vaster proportion of what is printed is not literature. It may be statements of fact and items of information; it may be sound science and unimpeachable record; it may be truism; it may be platitude; it is often sheer bathos or doggerel. We do not count these things as literature. A good deal of singing, piano-beating and tin-whistling is not music. It is only in virtue of a certain fine quality that books are literature. According to Emerson, literature is "a record of the best thoughts." According to Matthew Arnold it is "the best that has been thought and said in the world." If literature is a collection of great books, then we may recall Milton's description of a great book, as "the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." And so literature becomes a store of inexhaustible vials, filled with the most generous elixir decanted from the world's master-spirits. Listen again to Vauvenargues: "Good literature is the essence of the best minds, the abstract of their knowledge, the fruit of their long vigils." Or let us drop metaphor, and accept, as entirely satisfying and luminous, the account given by Mr. John Morley, that "literature consists of all books ... where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form."
Such is the sense in which we interpret the term "literature."
The range and variety of such true literature are as wide and varied as human genius. It includes, for instance, the novel, whenever the novel, as in Balzac, Thackeray, and Fielding, shows this fine, large, sane, attractive touch; it includes verse, when, and only when, moral truth and human passion are touched finely or nobly in this way. Its forms are manifold, and its themes include—
All thoughts, all passions, all delights
Whatever stirs this mortal frame.