Literature, in the widest sense, is the record of the impressions made by external realities of every kind upon great men, and of the reflections which these men have made upon them.
VAST RANGE OF
LITERATURE
The subject matter of literature covers the whole range of human life and activity, as well as every known manifestation of physical nature. For not only are actual events and the doings and sayings of actual persons reproduced in it, but the rules deduced from the observation of the conditions of man’s life are included in its records. Similarly it presents to us not merely what individual men found to interest them in particular countries in a particular epoch, but also the general laws which have been gradually formulated by long-continued observation of the processes of nature.
Literature, therefore, plays a very important part in the life of man. It is the greatest of the secondary sources of knowledge, and it makes an immense contribution to the sum total of facts—the joint result of the experience of the individual and of the race—which gives to each one of us a wide outlook upon the world at large. But we must remember that literature—as literature—is concerned solely with the subjective outlook upon the world.
WHY WE STUDY
LITERATURE
In order to realize to how large an extent the subjective existence of man is made up of the material of books, we will pause a moment to consider what literature does for us. Through literature we converse with the great dead, with Plato, with Buddha, with Montaigne, with Addison; we walk the streets of Babylon, of Athens, of Rome, of Alexandria; we see great monuments, reared ages ago and long since crumbled to the dust; we recreate the life of distant epochs, and thus by comparison gauge the progress achieved by the men of today. Through literature we learn wisdom from Aristotle, geometry from Euclid, law from Justinian, morality from Christ and St. Paul. Literature makes the physical features, the inhabitants, the climate, the products of the antipodes as familiar as those of the neighboring county.
HOW IT HAS CREATED NEW
WORLDS AND PEOPLES
More than this, the masters of creative literature have made regions of their own which they have peopled with the children of their genius. Homer has given us an Ægean of sunlit islands and purple seas; Dante, a dark and mysterious Inferno; Milton, a Garden of Eden; Shakespeare, an Elizabethan England, with landscapes more brightly hued, and men and women more finely real, than the landscapes or the people of the England of Elizabeth; Molière, a France more natural and more vivid than the France of the Grand Monarque. And so it is that Odysseus, Antigone, Beatrice, Hamlet, Tartufe and the rest, these spiritual offspring of great souls, live side by side with Moses, Alexander, Cæsar, Joan of Arc, Henry VIII., and Washington: for literature has made the personalities of each almost as familiar to us as those of our dearest or most intimate friends.
HOW LITERATURE HELPS US
INTERPRET LIFE
There is one other important point which must be noticed. It is this: the subjective outlook reacts upon the objective. The knowledge of the world which we gain through our own previous experiences, and through literature, increases our capacity for understanding the objective world, and heightens and intensifies the pleasure which we derive from the contemplation of works of art or of nature. It is this principle which underlies the truth which Goethe states when he says that a traveler does not take anything out of Rome which he has not first brought into it.