How do you get experience from reading? Isn’t it safer to learn human beings and their ways by studying them direct? Yes, and no. It depends on the book. Perhaps the author can tell you in a few hours more real truth about men and women than you can learn alone in years.
We have heard so many queer things about “literature” that we are likely to think of it as fancy things written by a lot of delicate, long-haired men and masculine women and having very little to do with our own everyday lives. Well, there are many over-cultured and over-educated people who would define literature that way. But they are mightily wrong! The best literature is generally simple, not “fancy.”
Literature is the spoken or written record by which each generation of mankind is enabled to preserve the knowledge and experience of the generations before it and to begin where the last one left off instead of having to begin all over again.
It doesn’t matter whether it is written or only spoken. Indeed, before man invented the alphabet or even learned to transmit his ideas and feelings by crude, rough pictures there wasn’t any literature except what was spoken or recited. The “Iliad” and “Odyssey” of Homer were sung or recited, long before they were put down on parchment. Our fairy-stories and legends generally date back hundreds and hundreds of years and were preserved only by each generation telling them to the next. In later days, especially during the Middle Ages, many valuable poems and stories, and even more of history, would have been lost to us forever if wandering bards and minstrels had not recited or sung them and taught them to others. There is no way, except literature, by which we can learn from the past. Did you ever think that our generation has, by itself, added only a very, very tiny bit to the knowledge existing in the world when our generation was born? All our great inventions would be impossible without this previous knowledge.
Of course, literature in its stricter sense is more limited than all the material covered by the definition above. A dictionary, for example, can hardly be called literature. A bit of writing or talking to be literature must show the imprint of the author’s personality and it must have in it something valuable enough to make it worth preserving. But, in general, the definition as given gets at the root of the matter, and that is all we need be concerned with. It shows that literature is not a fad or an amusement of too highly cultivated people, but one of the biggest and most valuable things in the world. We, no matter who or where we are or even whether we can read or write, are dependent on literature in our everyday lives.
How can we tell good literature from bad? Well, it is often pretty hard to tell about the books and stories of today, but there is a very easy way of telling about what was written a hundred or a thousand years ago. Nowadays, when most people can read and write and the printing-press makes it possible to produce great numbers of books and papers, there are thousands of people writing all the time and naturally a lot of them write very poor stuff. We talk about the “best selling books” and go wild over some new novel. We did the same last month and we’ll do the same next month.
“What is the most popular novel this month?”
“Oh, ‘So-and-so’ by So-and-so. It’s simply grand!”
“What was the most popular novel last month?”
“Let’s see. Oh, yes—‘So-and-so,’ by So-and-so. It’s a perfectly charming story.”