(HOMER, DANTE, CERVANTES, GOETHE SHAKESPEARE)

The study of literature, that it may be fruitful, that it may not result in a mere gathering of names and dates and phrases, must be a study of ideas and not of words, of periods rather than of men, or only of such men as are great enough or individual enough to reflect as much light upon their age as they in turn receive from it. To know literature as the elder Disraeli knew it is at best only an amusement, an accomplishment, great, indeed, for the dilettante, but valueless for the scholar. Detached facts are nothing in themselves, and become of worth only in their relation to one another. It is little, for example, to know the date of Shakespeare: something more that he and Cervantes were contemporaries; and a great deal that he grew up in a time fermenting with reformation in Church and State, when the intellectual impulse from the invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while the New World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promise and its temptations to daring adventure. Facts in themselves are clumsy and cumbrousthe cowry-currency of isolated and uninventive men; generalizations, conveying great sums of knowledge in a little space, mark the epoch of free interchange of ideas, of higher culture, and of something better than provincial scholarship.

But generalizations, again, though in themselves the work of a happier moment, of some genetic flash in the brain of man, gone before one can say it lightens, are the result of ideas slowly gathered and long steeped and clarified in the mind, each in itself a composite of the carefully observed relations of separate and seemingly disparate facts. What is the pedigree of almost all great fortunes? Through vast combinations of trade, forlorn hopes of speculation, you trace them up to a clear head and a self-earned sixpence. It is the same with all large mental accumulations: they begin with a steady brain and the first solid result of thought, however smallthe nucleus of speculation. The true aim of the scholar is not to crowd his memory, but to classify and sort it, till what was a heap of chaotic curiosities becomes a museum of science.

It may well be questioned whether the invention of printing, while it democratized information, has not also levelled the ancient aristocracy of thought. By putting a library within the power of every one, it has taught men to depend on their shelves rather than on their brains; it has supplanted a strenuous habit of thinking with a loose indolence of reading which relaxes the muscular fiber of the mind. When men had few books, they mastered those few; but now the multitude of books lord it over the man. The costliness of books was a great refiner of literature. Men disposed of single volumes by will with as many provisions and precautions as if they had been great landed estates. A mitre would hardly have overjoyed Petrarch as much as did the finding of a copy of Virgil. The problem for the scholar was formerly how to acquire books; for us it is how to get rid of them. Instead of gathering, we must sift. When Confucius made his collection of Chinese poems, he saved but three hundred and ten out of more than three thousand, and it has consequently survived until our day.

In certain respects the years do our weeding for us. In our youth we admire the verses which answer our mood; as we grow older we like those better which speak to our experience; at last we come to look only upon that as poetry which appeals to that original nature in us which is deeper than all moods and wiser than all experience. Before a man is forty he has broken many idols, and the milestones of his intellectual progress are the gravestones of dead and buried enthusiasms of his dethroned gods.

There are certain books which it is necessary to read; but they are very few. Looking at the matter from an aesthetic point of view, merely, I should say that thus far one man had been able to use types so universal, and to draw figures so cosmopolitan, that they are equally true in all languages and equally acceptable to the whole Indo-European branch, at least, of the human family. That man is Homer, and there needs, it seems to me, no further proof of his individual existence than this very fact of the solitary unapproachableness of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” The more wonderful they are, the more likely to be the work of one person. Nowhere is the purely natural man presented to us so nobly and sincerely as in these poems. Not far below these I should place the “Divina Commedia” of Dante, in which the history of the spiritual man is sketched with equal command of material and grandeur of outline. Don Quixote stands upon the same level, and receives the same universal appreciation. Here we have the spiritual and the natural man set before us in humorous contrast. In the knight and his squire Cervantes has typified the two opposing poles of our dual naturethe imagination and the understanding as they appear in contradiction. This is the only comprehensive satire ever written, for it is utterly independent of time, place, and manners. Faust gives us the natural history of the human intellect, Méphistophélès being merely the projected impersonation of that scepticism which is the invariable result of a purely intellectual culture. These four books are the only ones in which universal facts of human nature and experience are ideally represented. They can, therefore, never be displaced. Whatever moral significance there may be in certain episodes of the “Odyssey,” the man of the Homeric poems is essentially the man of the senses and the understanding, to whom the other world is alien and therefore repulsive. There is nothing that demonstrates this more clearly, as there is nothing, in my judgment, more touching and picturesque in all poetry, than that passage in the eleventh book of the “Odyssey,” where the shade of Achilles tells Ulysses that he would rather be the poorest shepherd-boy on a Grecian hill than king over the unsubstantial shades of Hades. Dante’s poem, on the other hand, sets forth the passage of man from the world of sense to that of spirit; in other words, his moral conversion. It is Dante relating his experience in the great camp-meeting of mankind, but relating it, by virtue of his genius, so representatively that it is no longer the story of one man, but of all men. Then comes Cervantes, showing the perpetual and comic contradiction between the spiritual and the natural man in actual life, marking the transition from the age of the imagination to that of the intellect; and, lastly, Goethe, the poet of a period in which a purely intellectual culture reached its maximum of development, depicts its one-sidedness, and its consequent failure. These books, then, are not national, but human, and record certain phases of man’s nature, certain stages of his moral progress. They are gospels in the lay bible of the race. It will remain for the future poet to write the epic of the complete man, as it remains for the future world to afford the example of his entire and harmonious development.

I have not mentioned Shakespeare, because his works come under a different category. Though they mark the very highest level of human genius, they yet represent no special epoch in the history of the individual mind. The man of Shakespeare is always the man of actual life as he is acted upon by the worlds of sense and of spirit under certain definite conditions. We all of us may be in the position of Macbeth or Othello or Hamlet, and we appreciate their sayings and deeds potentially, so to speak, rather than actually, through the sympathy of our common nature and not of our experience. But with the four books I have mentioned our relation is a very different one. We all of us grow up through the Homeric period of the senses; we all feel, at some time, sooner or later, the need of something higher, and, like Dante, shape our theory of the divine government of the universe; we all with Cervantes discover the rude contrast between the ideal and real, and with Goethe the unattainableness of the highest good through the intellect alone. Therefore I set these books by themselves. I do not mean that we read them, or for their full enjoyment need to read them, in this light; but I believe that this fact of their universal and perennial application to our consciousness and our experience accounts for their permanence, and insures their immortality.