Says Coleridge: "No man was ever yet a great poet without being a profound philosopher." For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language; and Carlyle tells us of Goethe, "His resources have been accumulated from nearly all the provinces of human intellect and activity," while his culture was learned "not from art and literature alone, but also by action and passion in the rugged school of experience."
It is, therefore, not for nothing that Lowell declares—
I believe the poets; it is they
Who utter wisdom from the central deep.
Nor is it for nothing that Wordsworth declares poetry to be "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." The student of poetry may doubtless be studying æsthetics, but he is not merely dallying with æsthetics. If he is communing thoughtfully with mighty spirits like these—the penetrators to the central deep—is he not gaining, by the most royal road known to humanity, the most liberal education for the fullest life?
But we are not, it is true, always with the greatest poets. We are not always breathing the keen air of the very mountain tops. There is permanent value to be drawn also from writers in a rank below these greatest seers and creators. A Pope or a Dryden has packed into clear, rememberable, and serviceable shape considerable masses of wisdom and good sense—shrewd and enlightening, if not always lofty or original. The terse and pregnant essays of Bacon, the brusque, cant-hating wit and wisdom of Samuel Johnson, the critical sagacities of Hazlitt, the remorseless searchings of Carlyle, the brilliant expositions of Macaulay—to listen to these, to ponder and assimilate their best, is both to train the mind and to furnish it. Nay, even if a Plato or a Ruskin leave not one single dogma consciously grasped by the student's faith, they have, nevertheless, been in the highest degree invigorating and ennobling company. To associate with a Scott is to associate with high and wholesome character.
Such are the great writers of the first rank and second rank who form great literature; and to them the student has recourse when in quest of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." If what he gathers is not applied by him to life, then the fault is his own. If he does apply it, what then? Is there any such application, practical and living?
This is said to be a "practical" age. If I know anything whatever of history, I maintain that this age is no more "practical" than any other. All sensible ages are practical. The present age, it is true, possesses more ingenious and labour-increasing machinery, and, when it is minded to do what it euphoniously describes as "hustle," it can doubtless "hustle" with a more deplorable rapidity than in times ancient. But it is not one whit more "practical." If we ask for a practical application of literature to life, so did the Greeks and so did the Romans. The object of their literary study was to fit a man to play his part in affairs, to know his world, to know both himself and other men, and to train him for a distinguished social place. They knew that literary study did this; if it had not, they would have called it a pastime, and left it to provide for itself as such. A training for the living of a life—is that object not sufficiently practical for the modern man? Is, after all, the final cause of society to be simply manufacturing and underselling, eating, drinking, and sleeping? None of us really believe that. We cannot glance at our public libraries, our art-galleries and museums, and seriously assert that society even looks like believing it. Any one who maintains that there actually and consciously prevails such a basely materialistic meaning of "practical" is but a poor cynic maligning the world which tolerates him. When the world calls for a "practical" outcome of literary study, we mean what the Greeks meant, and what the Romans meant—some discoverable adaptation of the results of literary study to the various activities of human life—human life in its fulness—life of the helpful citizen, life of the partner in social intercourse, life in the silence of oneself.