LITERATURE OF THE WORLD CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION When the term "literature" is properly used it denotes writings or records that are of permanent value, that have human interest, and that have beauty of form. Books, like plants and animals, must struggle for existence. Those that survive after perhaps hundreds of years have stood a supreme test, and back of them is the authority of generations. Such books are not often prosy or uninteresting. They are broad in their appeal, they touch us in a personal and intimate way, and they interpret to us the richest products of our civilization. We read them for their own sake, and when we go to them they do not turn us empty away. LITERATURE FOR INFORMATION AND UNDERSTANDING He who knows literature dwells in a large and beautiful world that has no limit in time or space. In actual life he may be unacquainted with his nearest neighbor, but in the world of books every door is opened by a magic more wonderful than that of Aladdin. With the much-enduring Ulysses he sails the seas, with Dante he explores the depths and mounts to highest heaven, with Don Quixote he rights wrongs, with Sigurd the Volsung he dares the wall of flame. Huxley teaches him nature; Gibbon, history; Ruskin, art. He listens to the sweet songs of Sappho and David and François Villon and Shelley. If it is philosophy that he craves, there are Socrates, Aristotle, and Carlyle. Everyday matters, such as the face of the sky, the greenness of the grass, and the prattle of little children, take on a new meaning. Through a thousand avenues he has knowledge of the great passions that sway the heart of man-of hate and despair and jealousy, of love and truth and beauty, of the problems of life and destiny. A single volume, like Browning's "The Ring and the Book," may give him rich and varied study, associated perhaps with the landscape of Italy, the forms of English poetry, the singular ways of justice, the blackness of evil, or the exquisite beauty of a woman's soul. Literature frees us from provinciality. No nation seems foreign or unfriendly when it is once disclosed to us in its literature. It is not knowledge but ignorance that makes us prejudiced. We laugh with Sancho Panza or Sam Weller or Tom Sawyer alike. Lear and Prometheus, Jean Valjean and Anna Karenina-do they belong to one nation or one time? All racial barriers disappear when we hear the agonizing cry, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" Through literature we become citizens of the world. LITERATURE FOR PLEASURE But books are needful not only to push back horizons, to impart information, and to increase understanding; one of their chief offices is to give pleasure. There is no other such enthusiast as the book enthusiast: he is termed a bibliomaniac. He thinks of books as he would of friends and companions. His grandfather may not have been born before the gentle Elia finished his life, but Elia is an intimate friend who is closer than a brother. The Roman Horace and the Norwegian Björnson are his friends; so are George Borrow and Walt Whitman and Montaigne and Omar Khayyám and Robert Louis Stevenson. In the flesh Thomas Carlyle or Henrik Ibsen may have repulsed him, but in the spirit they reveal to him their profoundest secrets. Edmund Gosse speaks in one of his essays of the inaccessibility of the English poetess Christina Rossetti even in a London drawing-room, but her deepest self is disclosed to us in this exquisite stanza: "My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a watered shoot; My heart is like an apple-tree Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit; That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these Because my love is come to me." As the years pass, the friends of the reader of literature form a great company: the nonne, the prioresse, is there, and Eugénie Grandet, and Andromache, and Beatrix Esmond; there are Joseph the dreamer, and Olaf Trygvesson, and Hamlet the Dane, and my Uncle Toby, and Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Dr. Johnson and Bozzy-and a host of others. Wordsworth was right, then, when he spoke of books as "a substantial world": "Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, LITERATURE FOR INSPIRATION In the picture gallery, so the story goes, a woman was looking at some views of Turner's. "I am sure I don't see such things in nature," she complained to the man at her side, who proved to be the artist himself. "Ah, yes, madam,” he replied, "but don't you wish to heaven you could?" Literature makes us see more and further. Inspiration is its finest gift. "Books of power"-that is the expressive phrase attached to the world's choicest masterpieces. Great literature is animated by a great purpose. It is universal in quality: its roots go down deep, its branches spread wide. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe (to mention no others), form a glorious company, and association with them will leave its impress upon us. "It is not possible," said Longinus, the Greek critic, "that men who live their lives with mean and servile aims and ideas should produce what is admirable and worthy of immortality." In the succeeding pages of this volume we are to explore the pleasant land of books, where countless pilgrims have gone before. Our guideposts are, after all, only guideposts. Those who enter the land will do well to linger on the way and to investigate for themselves its beauty, not overlooking the many trails and paths and winding roads that lead from the great highway. Reference List CRAWSHAW. The Interpretation of Literature. The Macmillan Company. HUDSON. An Introduction to the Study of Literature. Harrap and Company, London. QUILLER-COUCH. On the Art of Reading. The University Press, Cambridge, England. BURROUGHS. Literary Values. The Houghton Mifflin Company. BATES. Talks on the Study of Literature. The Houghton Mifflin Company. HARRISON. The Choice of Books. The Macmillan Company. CHAPTER II LITERATURE OF THE ORIENT The East conveys to our minds an impression of great antiquity. It is a region of vanished civilizations, and it carries with it an air of mystery and unreality. There is a remoteness also in its literature; the reader of English finds that only a portion of the vast literary stores of the Orient is open to him and that even that portion generally reveals modes of life and thought that can scarcely be recovered in our day. However, a glimpse of these Eastern peoples and of their literature will be informing. It will also furnish a useful background for the literature of Europe.1 EGYPTIAN LITERATURE For hundreds of thousands of years, as it now seems clear, man has lived on this earth, slowly becoming master of himself and of his surroundings, perfecting his weapons and domestic implements, evolving in time a system of agriculture, and patiently domesticating animals as companions and beasts of burden. By comparison the Egyptians and Babylonians, who have passed on to us the earliest written records, appear modern, their history being almost of our own day. At least five thousand years before Christ true and relatively advanced civilizations existed in the favored regions of the Nile and of Mesopotamia. The first king of united Egypt reigned approximately 3400 B.C. (by some authorities he is placed a thousand years earlier). After an interval of five hundred years 1 The literature of the Orient (apart from Hebrew literature, which calls for a separate treatment) does not bulk as large in our Western consciousness as the literature of a single country of Europe. It would be manifestly a mistake, therefore, to devote more than this one chapter to the study. The bibliography (page 32) may assist the reader in pursuing his studies in this interesting field. |