“We get no good
In being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits—so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong into a book’s profound
Impassion’d for its beauty and salt of truth—
’Tis then we get the right good from a book.”
Another fault which characterizes the literary studies of to-day is, that we grasp at too much, and not a little that we fain would compass is, as far as literary training and culture are concerned, entirely unimportant. A few great literary personages—epochal men—who have handed the intellectual torch down the centuries—these are worthy of a devoted study. We think it is Ruskin who says that he who knows the history of Rome, Venice, Florence, Paris and London has a full knowledge of medieval and modern civilization. Twenty authors are not many, still they largely cover the great masterpieces of poetic thought, both ancient and modern. Homer, Virgil and Dante, Calderon, Molière and Goethe, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Tennyson—these contain much of the best poetic thought in all ages, and yet we have but named little more than half of the twenty. There is a flood of ephemeral literature—chiefly novels—day by day deluging the land, which fashion and frivolity set up for literary study. How much harm these novels do, lashing with their waves the moral shores of life. God alone knows. To-day, in the minds of many, the novel has supplanted the Bible, and the ethics of George Eliot take precedence of the Sermon on the Mount. It is doubtful if either Cardinal Newman or John Ruskin ever read a line of Tolstoi, Ibsen or Kipling, and yet both hold respectable places in literature.
Passing now from the subject of literature in itself to a consideration of its interpretation, we desire to touch upon a subject of vital import: The Vocal Interpretation of Literature. The spiritual element in a poem is indefinite and cannot be formulated in terms of x and y. No examination on paper, be it ever so thorough, can satisfactorily reach it. The only full response to this spiritual element, this essential life of a poem, that can be secured by the teacher is through a vocal rendering of it. But before he is capable of doing so he must first have sympathetically assimilated the INFORMING life of the poem. This is why no person need hope to become a great reader without a deep and sympathetic study of literature, nor a great interpreter of literature—which means a great teacher of literature—without the vocal capabilities requisite for voicing the indefinite or spiritual element which constitutes the soul of an art product. A true literary scholar is one who grows soulward. It is not enough that he store his mind with intellectual facts, he should grow vitalized at every point of his soul in his literary studies.