What Can Literature 
 Do For Me? 
 
 BY 
 
 C. ALPHONSO SMITH 
 
 Poe Professor of English in the University of Virginia 
 
 jJ{UuU4-/€7* 
 
 
 Garden City New York 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 1913 
 

 Copyright, 1913, by 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 All rights reserved, including that of 
 
 translation into foreign languages, 
 
 including the Scandinavian 
 

 TO MY MOTHER 
 
 IN WHOSE LETTERS HER CHILDREN FIND THE UN- 
 CONSCIOUS REFLECTION OF LITERATURE THAT 
 IS LIFE AND LIFE THAT 
 IS LITERATURE 
 
 THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 
 
 261769 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. It Can Give You an Outlet . . 3 
 
 II. It Can Keep Before You the Vision 
 
 of the Ideal 35 
 
 III. It Can Give You a Better Knowledge 
 
 of Human Nature ... 68 
 
 IV. It Can Restore the Past to You • . 125 
 
 V. It Can Show You the Glory of the 
 
 Commonplace . . . 154 
 
 VI. It Can Give You the Mastery of 
 
 Your Own Language . . .182 
 
 Index 225 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME? 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 It Can Give You an Outlet 
 
 I CAN remember," says Abraham Lincoln, 
 "going to my little bedroom after hearing the 
 neighbours talk of an evening with my father, 
 and spending no small part of the night walking 
 up and down and trying to make out what was 
 the exact meaning of their, to me, dark sayings. 
 I could not sleep, though I often tried to, when I 
 got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had 
 caught it; and when I thought I had got it, I 
 was not satisfied until I had repeated it over 
 and over, until I had put it into language plain 
 enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to 
 comprehend." 
 
 Of all the incidents in Lincoln's life this has 
 always seemed to me the most remarkable. That 
 a boy of his years should have felt so keenly the 
 burden of the inexpressible and should have spent 
 sleepless hours in attempting to free himself from 
 this burden seems at first glance to remove Lin- 
 
 3 
 
4 "WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 coin from the class of normal men. We think of 
 him as peculiar, as apart from other boys, as not 
 so representative as he would have been if he had 
 gone straight to bed and riot bothered himself 
 about putting into definite words the thoughts 
 that were busy in his brain. 
 
 But, explain it as we may, the desire for self- 
 expression in clear words is universal. Lincoln 
 had it to a greater degree than most boys or most 
 men. But all have it. We are often not conscious 
 of it, but as soon as we read or hear our own 
 thoughts better expressed than we could express 
 them, we realize at once that they are our own 
 thoughts and that we are the better and stronger 
 for their adequate expression. 
 
 It was this passion for self-expression that made 
 Lincoln one of the great spokesmen of his age. 
 It enabled him to say in many letters and speeches 
 what others were beginning to feel but could not 
 express. It made him one of the great masters 
 of English prose. He became a leader of men 
 because he interpreted them to themselves. He 
 gave back as rain what he received as mist. 
 
 Take his Gettysburg speech: "Fourscore and 
 seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon 
 this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 5 
 
 and dedicated to the proposition that all men are 
 created equal. 
 
 "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, 
 testing whether that nation, or any nation so 
 conceived and so dedicated, can long endure- We 
 are met on a great battlefield of that war. We 
 have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a 
 final resting place for those who here gave their 
 lives that that nation might live. It is altogether 
 fitting and proper that we should do this. 
 
 "But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we 
 cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. 
 The brave men, living and dead, who struggled 
 here, have consecrated it far above our power to 
 add or detract. The world will little note, nor 
 long remember, what we say here, but it can 
 never forget what they did here. It is for us, 
 the living, rather to be dedicated here to the 
 unfinished work which they who fought here have 
 thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us 
 to be here dedicated to the great task remaining 
 before us, that from these honoured dead we take 
 increased devotion to that cause for which they 
 gave the last full measure of devotion; that we 
 here highly resolve that these dead shall not have 
 died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall 
 
6 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 have a new birth of freedom, and that government 
 of the people, by the people, and for the people, 
 shall not perish from the earth." 
 
 Why is this literature and why is Edward 
 Everett's two-hour speech on the same occasion 
 not literature? Let us picture the scene: There 
 were men, women, and children in that audience 
 who had lost brothers, sons, husbands, and fathers 
 on the very ground on which they now stood. 
 It was to them a holy place. It did not suggest 
 to their minds vexed political questions; it sug- 
 gested memories that were almost too sacred for 
 words. What these people needed was a spokes- 
 man who should put into fitting words the dumb 
 emotions that filled every heart, and this is what 
 Lincoln did. He put their emotions into language 
 "plain enough for any boy I knew to compre- 
 hend." But he did more. He expressed what 
 all of us feel when we stand on a spot hallowed by 
 heroic self-sacrifice. It may be a battlefield of 
 victory or an equally glorious battlefield of defeat; 
 it may be the birthplace or the grave or the home 
 of a great man. The important thing for us is to 
 feel anew the ennobling, the dedicating influence 
 of the place itself. The man who can put this 
 universal feeling into universal words not only 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 7 
 
 creates universal literature, but becomes a uni- 
 versal benefactor. 
 
 This~is just what Edward Everett did not do. 
 He did not speak for the audience, but to them. 
 He entered into a long argument as to the relation 
 of the federal government to the state govern- 
 ments. "Your argument," wrote Lincoln, "was 
 new to me, and, as I think, is one of the best 
 arguments for the national supremacy." Everett 
 replied: "I should be glad if I could flatter my- 
 self that I came as near to the central idea of 
 the occasion in two hours as you did in two 
 minutes." 
 
 Now what Lincoln did for the Gettysburg 
 audience, the great poets and prose writers, the 
 masters of literature, have done for mankind at 
 large. A poet is _a man w ho feels as we feel bu t 
 has the gift of expression. [ Literature includes all"] 
 writings that express for us what we consciously 
 or unconsciously feel the need of saying but* 
 cannot. : It includes the prose and verse that find 
 us at most points, that take our half-formed 
 thoughts, our suppressed moods, our stifled de- 
 sires, and lead them out into harmony and 
 completeness. 
 
 It is different with arithmetic or geometry. 
 
8 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 The multiplication table, for examplc^is as valu- 
 able a piece of information as was ever compressed 
 into so small a space. But compare it with these 
 lines: 
 
 So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
 
 So near is God to man, 
 When Duty whispers low, Thou must, 
 
 The youth replies, I can! 
 
 All of us have felt that when we have to do a 
 thing we seem to be given a new power with which 
 to do it. Young people especially, as Emerson 
 implies in his last line, have had this experience. 
 Perhaps one reason is that when we know we must 
 perform a certain duty we stop wasting thought on 
 how to escape it and so concentrate all our powers 
 on actually doing it. Perhaps also we had never 
 consciously thought of the reason for this prin- 
 ciple of human nature but had nevertheless been 
 vaguely conscious that the principle was true. > At 
 any rate when we read Emerson's lines we feel 
 that he confirms and expands and elevates a mere 
 impression into a definite thought, gloriously ex- 
 pressed! He has turned the light on our own 
 nature and we know ourselves better. We begin 
 to realize that whenever "I can" follows "You 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 9 
 
 must," it is an evidence not of weakness but of the 
 native nobility of human nature. 
 
 Now the multiplication table is just as true as 
 anything ever said by a poet. Perhaps it is truer, 
 but it is true in a different way. We do not feel 
 like saying: "Why, this table merely expresses 
 what I had already felt or been dimly coming to, 
 but expresses it with a beauty and force and com- 
 pleteness that give me a new sense of its truth." 
 No one ever said that of the multiplication table 
 and no one ever will. Emerson's lines, in other -p 
 words, meet you halfway; the multiplication table ' 
 does not. Emerson's lines are an outlet througl 
 which your own thought and feeling flow, and 
 deepen as they flow; the multiplication table has 
 to be put into you from the outside. 
 
 Let us take one other illustration: Here is what 
 is called a right-angled triangle* 
 
 A 
 
 If you take the longest side of the triangle and 
 construct a square based upon it, you will find 
 that the square will be exactly equal to the sum of 
 
io WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 the two squares you could construct on the basis 
 of the two shorter sides of the triangle. Thus: 
 
 However large or small your right-angled tri- 
 angle may be, this law holds good. Why? No- 
 body knows. You can prove the truth of the law 
 as often as you please by experiment. But intui- 
 tion would never have hinted it to you; common 
 sense would never have suggested it; a lifetime 
 of experience would never have arrived at it. 
 When the student of geometry comes to this great 
 theorem he will not be heard to say: "That's a 
 truth that I have felt a hundred times, but never 
 saw expressed so vividly before." 
 
 Pit the truth of the triangle now against the 
 truth of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. This great 
 poem may seem at a first reading to be a jumble 
 of impossible facts set to haunting music. But it 
 is nothing of the sort. It is the story of a man 
 who, by an act of cruelty done to a harmless bird, 
 came to feel himself an outcast. He had cut all 
 the cords of sympathy that bound him to the liv- 
 ing things about him — to man and bird and 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME n 
 
 beast. He was so miserable that it was a small 
 matter to him whether he lived or died. At 
 last his sympathy with living things came back to 
 him because, almost without knowing it, he found 
 himself rejoicing in the joy of the water-snakes 
 that played around the ship. Everything is re- 
 stored now as it was, and the law of love is so 
 burned into his soul that, as long as he lives, 
 he must buttonhole others and tell them his ex- 
 perience. 
 
 All the so-called facts in the poem, all the events, 
 bear directly on this experience. Did you never 
 have an experience like it? Whether you are old 
 or young, did you never kill or strike or hurt an 
 innocent thing and feel mean and lonely for it? 
 If so, you have lived The Ancient Mariner without 
 knowing it. The poem is a part of yourself. 
 Coleridge might have written from your expe- 
 rience as well as from an imaginary mariner's. 
 But you have never knowingly or unknowingly 
 proved by your own experience that the square 
 of the longest side of a right-angled triangle is 
 equal to the squares of the other two sides. 
 
 Do not approach literature, then, from the fact- 
 side, but from the heart-side. Strike first for what 
 it has in common with yourself. See in it an 
 
12 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 outlet, not an inlet. Unfortunately it is still 
 taught — you may be sure not learned — from 
 the fact-side. I have before me three editions of 
 The Ancient Mariner. They all have long intro- 
 ductions telling the facts about Coleridge's life, 
 when and where the poem was written, when and 
 where it was added to, what kind of line and 
 stanza the poet used, what book or books he 
 probably read before writing the poem, but not a 
 word as to what the poem has in it for you and me 
 or of you and me. Now the life of a poet, the 
 date of his work, the kind of metre employed, all 
 have something to do with a poem. But they 
 are secondary, not primary. Thejirstjthing^tojlo 
 is to find yourself in the poem itself. When you 
 do this, when the~poem means something to you, 
 when you see in it a reflection or extension of 
 yourself, when it becomes a real outlet for you, 
 you will want to know something about the 
 writer. Seek first, however, yourself in the poem,\ 
 and all these other things will be added unto you. 
 You can no more learn literature from the history 
 of literature than you can learn arithmetic from 
 the history of arithmetic. 
 
 If you could summon before you the makers 
 of literature they would tell you that they found 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 13 
 
 their inspiration not in introductions to great 
 books, not in discussions of great books, not in 
 learned notes about great books, but in great 
 books themselves, They found themselves in 
 these books, for these books were a voice from 
 within, not a fact from without. Listen to some 
 of the men who have put their experience on 
 record : 
 
 Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Walter Scott's 
 Ivanhoe, and Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution 
 are very different sorts of books. But they have 
 one thing in common: they grip_ huma n life with 
 the open hand. Here is what these books meant 
 to a famous Scotch writer in his boyhood and 
 young manhood: "I have cause," said Robert 
 Chambers, who was an intimate friend of Walter 
 Scott, "to revere the name of Defoe, who reached 
 his hand down through a century and a half to 
 wipe away bitter tears from my childish eyes. The 
 going back to school was always a dreadful woe 
 to me, casting its black shadow far into the latter 
 part of my brief holidays. I have had my share 
 of suffering and sorrow since, like other men, but 
 I have seldom felt so absolutely wretched, as 
 when, a little boy, I was about to exchange my 
 present homelife for the hardships and uncon- 
 
i 4 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 genialities of school. . . . And yet, I protest, 
 I had but to take up Robinson Crusoe, and in a 
 very few minutes I was out of all thought of the 
 approaching calamity. ... I had travelled 
 over a thousand leagues of sea; I was in my snug, 
 well-fortified cave, with the ladder upon the right 
 side of it, 'so that neither man nor beast could get 
 at me,' with my half-a-dozen muskets loaded, 
 and my powder distributed into separate parcels, 
 so that not even a thunderbolt should do me any 
 irreparable injury. Or, if not quite so secure, I 
 was visiting my summer plantation among my 
 goats and corn, or shooting, in the still, astonished 
 woods, birds of marvellous beauty; or lying upon 
 my stomach upon the top of the hill, watching 
 through my spyglass the savages putting to sea, 
 and not displeased to find myself once more alone 
 in my own little island. 
 
 "During that agonizing period which inter- 
 vened between my proposal of marriage by letter 
 to Jemima Anne, and my reception of her reply, 
 how should I have ever kept myself alive, save 
 for the chivalrous aid of the Black Knight in 
 Ivanhoe ? To him, mainly, assisted by Rebecca, 
 and (I am bound to say) by that scoundrel Brian 
 de Bois Guilbcrt, are my obligations due, that I 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 15 
 
 did not — through the extremities of despair and 
 hope suffered during that interval — become a 
 drivelling idiot. 
 
 "When her answer did arrive — in the negative 
 — what was it which preserved me from the 
 noose, the razor, or the stream, but Mr. Carlyle's 
 French Revolution ?. In the woes of poor Louis 
 Capet I forgot my own. . . . Who, having 
 a grateful heart, can forget these things, or deny 
 the blessedness of books?" 
 
 Plato is usually thought to be very dry reading. 
 There is an impression that he wrote only for 
 specialists in Greek or philosophy. The truth is 
 that he wrote for everybody, young and old, 
 learned and unlearned. Try his Phcsdrus, or 
 Symposium, or Phcsdo, or Crito, especially the 
 last, in Jowett's translation. Four more fascinat- 
 ing dialogues were never written or imagined. 
 To find yourself in these or in any one of them 
 will be the beginning of a lifelong education in 
 wonderful thinking and wonderful expression. 
 Here is what J. A. Symonds, who became a great 
 interpreter of Greek thought, says of the influence 
 of Plato upon him when he was a schoolboy at 
 Harrow: "My hostess, a Mrs. Bain, who lived in 
 Regent's Park, treated me to a comedy at the 
 
1 6 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 Haymarket. I forget what the play was. When 
 we returned from the play I went to bed and 
 began to read my Cary's Plato. It so happened 
 that I stumbled on the Phtxdrus. I read on and 
 on, till I reached the end. Then I began the 
 Symposium; and the sun was shining on the 
 shrubs outside the ground floor on which I slept 
 before I shut the book up. I have related these 
 unimportant details because that night was one 
 of the most important nights of my life. . . . 
 Here in the Phcedrus and the Symposium I dis- 
 covered the revelation I had been waiting for, 
 the consecration of a long-cherished idealism. It 
 was just as though the voice of my own soul spoke 
 to me through Plato. Harrow vanished into un- 
 reality. I had touched solid ground. Here was 
 the poetry, the philosophy of my own enthusiasm 
 expressed with all the magic of unrivalled 
 style." 
 
 Edmund Burke was probably the greatest orator 
 that ever lived. Certainly no orator of the Eng- 
 lish-speaking race was his equal. How much he 
 owed to inborn talent and how much to training 
 can never be told. But his own opinion was +hat 
 the study of Cicero first waked his dormant power.: 
 to activity. I was only a boy, said Burke, but 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 17 
 
 the great Roman became at once "the model on 
 which I laboured to form my own character in 
 eloquence, in policy, in ethics, and in philosophy." 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of the greatest 
 American novel, used to say that his awakening 
 came from the reading in early boyhood of Spen- 
 ser's Faerie Queene and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Prog- 
 ress. "Unquestionably," says Walter Besant, 
 the popular English novelist, "the book which 
 most seized my imagination was the immortal 
 Pilgrim's Progress. It still seems to me the book 
 which has influenced the minds of Englishmen 
 more than any other outside the covers of the 
 Bible." 
 
 "Shakespeare," says Robert Louis Stevenson, 
 the author of Kidnapped, "has served me best. 
 Few living friends have had upon me an influence 
 so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The 
 next book, in order of time, to influence me, was 
 the New Testament, and in particular the Gospel 
 According to St. Matthew. I believe it would 
 startle and move any one if they could make a 
 certain effort of imagination and read it freshly 
 like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion 
 of the Bible." 
 
 You will notice that Stevenson does not refer 
 
1 8 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 to a particular passage or verse or chapter from 
 the Bible; he refers to a whole book. He evidentlv 
 read the Bible not by fragments, but by books. 
 No masterpiece of world-literature has suffered 
 so much by piecemeal reading as the Bible. On 
 Sundays it is read aloud by select chapters or 
 parts of chapters, and expounded by select verses; 
 in Sunday-schools it is taught with an equal dis- 
 regard of book divisions; and even in home study 
 and private reading the same hop-skip-and-jump 
 method is generally followed. Suppose we should 
 read Shakespeare the same way — one day a few 
 passages from Romeo and Juliet, the next day an 
 act from Hamlet, the third day a scene from The 
 Merry Wives of Windsor. It has been practically 
 overlooked that each book of the Bible, like each 
 play of Shakespeare, is a unit in itself. The 
 authors of these books wrote not because they 
 had to say something but because they had some- 
 thing to say; when they had said it they stopped, 
 or began another book. Try reading each book 
 at a sitting and as if you had to furnish a subtitle 
 for each, giving the main content of each book 
 as you understand it. Thus, Job, or Piety without 
 Prosperity; Ecclesiastes, or Prosperity without Piety. 
 Ecclesiastes recalls another writer who recognized 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 19 
 
 the book units in the Bible. "There is one im- 
 mortal work that moves me still more," says 
 Rider Haggard, whom we do not think of as owing 
 much to the Bible, "a work that utters all the 
 world's yearning anguish and disillusionment in 
 one sorrow-laden and bitter cry, and whose stately 
 music thrills like the voice of pines heard in the 
 darkness of a midnight gale; and that is the book 
 of Ecclesiastes." 
 
 Philip Gilbert Hamerton, the well-known writer 
 on art, found a lasting delight in the poetry of 
 Walter Scott because he and Scott were both 
 lovers of lakes, hills, and streams. "I began with 
 the poems, and read them so often that I almost 
 knew them by heart before I had read a single 
 page of the prose tales. The Lady of the Lake was 
 my especial favourite, and I have no doubt that 
 my early enthusiasm for that delightful poem 
 implanted in me a love for beautiful lakes with 
 romantic islands in them which had practical 
 consequences afterward. Even to this day these 
 feelings are as lively in me as ever, so that nothing 
 in the world seems to me so completely delightful 
 as a lake if one has a sailing-boat to wander over it. 
 Scott, too, had the same love for hills and streams 
 that I had imbibed from nature in my youth, and 
 
20 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 in his narratives of adventure he suited my temper 
 so exactly, that to read him was a complete satis- 
 faction, without any drawback whatever. I am 
 still a reader of Scott, and never appreciated the 
 qualities of Ivanhoe so completely as on reading 
 that masterpiece last year. Of all authors it is 
 Scott who has given me the greatest sum of pleas- 
 ure, and that of a very healthy kind." 
 
 Hamerton's own preferences remind us that it 
 will not do to lay down hard and fast rules for 
 ( reading. The main t hing is to find the writer or 
 writers, the book or books", that enrich your think- 
 ing by interpreting it. Sometimes the right book 
 startles or warns you, sometimes it takes issue 
 squarely with you, sometimes it reveals new 
 powers latent in you, but in every case it reveals 
 something in common with you, and on this 
 common basis you rise toward its level. One 
 would think that if Hamerton loved lakes, streams, 
 and hills, he might have found a congenial spirit 
 in the gre^t nature poet, William Wordsworth. 
 "But there was something in Wordsworth," says 
 Hamerton, "that I found repellent, perhaps his 
 belief in his own moral and intellectual excel- 
 lence." When our own nature poet, William 
 Cullcn Bryant, first read Wordsworth, he said: 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 21 
 
 "A thousand springs seemed to gush up at once 
 into my heart, and the face of nature changed of a 
 sudden into a strange freshness and life." He had 
 found a mind greater than his own, but thoroughly 
 in sympathy with him. Like had met like. It 
 was Lincoln and the Gettysburg audience 
 again. 
 
 "When I was fifteen," says W. T. Stead, the 
 great journalist who went down with the Titanic, 
 "Dicks's Shakespeare was published in penny 
 weekly numbers. I had never read any of his 
 plays, and as I have never to this day witnessed 
 the performance of any stage play, I was then in 
 absolute ignorance of what Shakespeare meant. 
 The first number contained two plays, Hamlet and 
 Othello, at a halfpenny each. I shall never forget 
 the shock — the bewildering shock — which I 
 received from the last scene in Hamlet. So in- 
 variably had novelists, and even romantic poets 
 like Scott, brought their heroes and heroines 
 happily together before they left the stage, that 
 it was some time before I could realize that in 
 Hamlet all was different. The death of Ophelia 
 had startled me; that was irretrievable, no doubt; 
 but Hamlet might still be saved. But when at 
 last death swept the board, and the curtain fell on 
 
22 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 a universal shambles, I was dazed, angry, and 
 incredulous. I read the play over again, not for 
 the story this time; and then read Othello. It was 
 one of the turning-points of my life. I was fasci- 
 nated. Every week, until the series was com- 
 plete, I devoured the two new plays contained 
 in each numbcr.(f_Thcy enormously widened the 
 horizon of life; they added new and vivid colour to 
 existence/! and they intensified my perception of 
 the tragic issues of love and of death that are 
 bound up in every human heart. But that 
 was not all; Shakespeare was to me the key 
 to all literature." He was the key to all lit- 
 erature because he was the key to Mr. Stead's 
 own heart. 
 
 But I like to consider the service that great 
 writers have rendered to mankind at large, and not 
 merely to those who were to become great writers 
 themselves. The Gettysburg speech has doubtless 
 helped thousands of orators and would-be orators, 
 but it has helped tens of thousands of people who 
 are not orators and who have never given expres- 
 sion to their indebtedness by tongue or pen. The 
 greatest service of literature has been in behalf, 
 not of professional writers and speakers, but of 
 those who feel the need of a spokesman all the 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 23 
 
 more keenly because they lack the ability them- 
 selves to voice their own feelings. Great singers 
 help other singers, but the pleasure that they give 
 to those who are themselves unable to sing is many 
 times greater than the service rendered to the few 
 professionals. Most of us are songs without words, 
 only the few know the words, but all feel the thrill 
 when the words are sung. It may be sorrow, or 
 joy, or mere perplexity, or dull indifference, but, 
 whatever it is, it craves expression. 
 
 A poor woman, whose childhood had been the 
 only happy period of her life, was struggling to 
 make an honest living for herself, but had almost 
 lost hope. She had moved to a little village in a 
 far-off frontier state and was supporting herself 
 by taking in washing. A preacher who had heard 
 of her condition called and left some religious 
 tracts. A few weeks later he called again and 
 noticed a great change. "Before I entered the 
 house," he said, "I detected a neatness and order- 
 liness in the little front yard that I had not 
 observed before. The woman herself seemed a. 
 different person. Instead of listlessness and de- 
 spair there was hope and good cheer in her voice as 
 she bade me enter. I asked her which one of the 
 tracts she had found most helpful. 'Oh,' she re- 
 
a | WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 plied, 'I haven't read any of them yet. There 
 
 • hat I have been reading till I kncr- 
 heart,' " and she pointed to a newspaper clipr g 
 which she had pasted on the wall just above her 
 washtub. The clipping contained Longfell: 
 poem Maidenhood. She had found it in a m - 
 paper which had been used to wrap soiled clothing 
 which had been sent to her to wash. The thoughts 
 seemed to be her own but fuller and sweeter. 
 whole poem seemed to have been written by I 
 self in some mood of exaltation that had : 
 become but a memory. It recalled her ear/ 
 made clear to her the meaning of her early life, 
 and thus restored her early ideals. 
 
 It is said that Longfellow was once dri- 
 closed carriage near -tie, England, when the 
 
 carriage was suddenly halted and the door violently 
 opened. Looking out the poet saw that he was sur- 
 rounded by a group of coal-begrimed miners. His 
 first thought was that he was about to be robbed. 
 '*I= this Mr. Longfellow?" asked one of the men. 
 " It is," was the reply. " Well, sir, some of us heard 
 that you were to pass here about this time and we 
 got permission to come up out of the mine and see 
 you. We just want to shake your hand and - 
 'God bless the man that wrote The Psalm of Life. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 25 
 
 There was a time when men did not feel the 
 burden of the inexpressible, but that was before 
 the dawn of civilization. They lived a primitive 
 life, and emotion was so simple that it found a 
 sufficient outlet in a shout, a groan, a laugh, a cry, 
 a sigh, a gesture, or the movement of the whole 
 body. This is true to-day of infants and savages. 
 The Botocudos of South America have but one 
 word to express both song and dance, and the only 
 song they sing on great occasions is 
 
 Calani-a-a 
 Calani-a-ha. 
 
 This they repeat over and over again. Nobody 
 knows what it means, but it evidently means very 
 little of anything. The Botocudos like it, how- 
 ever, because it is the satisfying expression of a 
 simple emotion. 
 
 Now, however, emotion has become very com- 
 plex, and expression has not kept pace with it. 
 Almost all modern poets have some reference to 
 the relief that we feel in expression. Shakespeare, 
 whom nothing seems to have escaped, says that 
 words are "windy attorneys to their client woes." 
 That is a very original way of saying that men 
 need the services of competent lawyers for the 
 
26 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 same reason that they need the services of com- 
 petent words, namely, to help them out of trouble. 
 Again, when Macduff, in Macbeth, is told that his 
 wife and babies have been murdered, Shakespeare 
 makes Malcolm say to him: 
 
 Give sorrow words : the grief that does not speak 
 Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break. 
 
 In his famous poem called Intimations of Immor- 
 tality. Wordsworth says: 
 
 To me alone there came a thought of grief, 
 ^"timely utterance gave that thought relief, 
 And I again am strong. 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes goes a step further. He 
 reminds us that however pathetic a man's life may 
 have been, if that man succeeded in expressing 
 his life in poetry, if he was able to tell the mystery 
 and the tragedy of it all to others, he had his 
 reward. The deeper grief is the grief of "the 
 voiceless": 
 
 Nay, grieve not for the dead alone 
 
 Whose song has told their hearts' sad story — 
 
 Weep for the voiceless, who have known 
 The cross without the crown of glory! 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 27 
 
 Emerson expresses it in prose: "For all men live 
 by truth, and stand in need of expression. In 
 love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labour, in 
 games, we study to utter our painful secret. The 
 man is only half himself, the other half is his 
 expression." 
 
 But the strongest statement of the principle is 
 given by a man who learned it through bitter 
 experience, experience which he could never have 
 endured if he had not had the gift of expression. 
 Our Ladies of Sorrow, says Thomas De Quincey, 
 are three. He means that grief (your grief and 
 mine) has three stages of intensity. He thinks 
 of these three stages as three realms or kingdoms 
 presided over by our three "Ladies of Sorrow." 
 The eldest, the Madonna, is named Mater Lachry- 
 marum, Our Lady of Tears. She represents the 
 kind of grief that finds easy, natural expression in 
 tears. The second Sister is called Mater Sus- 
 piriorum, Our Lady of Sighs. She represents the 
 grief that is too deep for tears but that finds a 
 partial outlet in sighs. 
 
 "But the third Sister, who is also the youngest 
 — hush! whisper whilst we talk of her! Her 
 kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; 
 but withL. that kingdom all power is hers. Her 
 
28 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost 
 beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and 
 her eyes, rising so high, might be hidden by dis- 
 tance. But, being what they are, they cannot be 
 hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she 
 wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that 
 rests nor for matins or for vespers, for noon of day 
 or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, 
 may be read from the- very ground. She is the 
 defter of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, 
 and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the 
 roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that 
 she rules. For she can approach only those in 
 whom a profound nature has been upheaved by 
 central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles 
 and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest 
 from without and tempests from within. Ma- 
 donna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, 
 but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs 
 creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest 
 Sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, 
 and with tiger's leaps. She carries no key; for, 
 though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all 
 doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. 
 And her name is Mater Te?iebraru??i, Our Lady of 
 Darkness." 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 29 
 
 Just as grief is relieved by expression, so joy is 
 heightened. This is what Tennyson means in the 
 following familiar lines. The italics are my own: 
 
 Break, break, break, 
 
 On thy cold gray stones, Sea! 
 And I would that my tongue could utter 
 The thoughts that arise in me. 
 
 O well for the fisherman's boy, 
 
 That he shouts with his sister at play! 
 
 O well for the sailor lad, 
 
 That he sings in his boat on the bay! 
 
 Why does Tennyson envy the sea? Because the 
 sea can voice its grief. Like the wind it has a 
 thousand moods but a voice for each. The sea 
 and the wind, therefore, have from the earliest 
 times been regarded by poets as possessors of a 
 peculiar joy and freedom. Why is it well with the 
 fisherman's boy and^the sailor lad? Because in 
 them, too, there is perfect correspondence between \ 
 feeling and expression. The shout and the song 
 are the adequate outlets of simple joy, just as the 
 roar of the sea against its rocky shore is the 
 adequate voice of an oceanic grief, 
 
 Macaulay has said: "As civilization advances, 
 poetry almost necessarily declines." Do we not 
 see now that the reverse is true? Is it not evident 
 
30 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 that as civilization advances, our thoughts, our 
 feelings, our moods, our ideals all become more and 
 more complex and therefore stand more in need 
 of literature to express them? One might as well 
 say that as civilization advances, inventions nec- 
 essarily decline. Inventions increase as our needs 
 increase. It is otherwise with discoveries. A 
 discovery may be made accidentally and may 
 have no relation to human need, as, for example, 
 the discovery of the mechanism of a fly's eye. 
 But an invention always presupposes a felt want. 
 So does poetry. It satisfies fir?t a want in the soul 
 of the writer, and if this be a national want, the 
 poem becomes a national possession; if it be a uni- 
 versal want, the poem becomes a universal pos- 
 session. The Star-Spangled Banner is an example 
 of the first, Hamlet of the second. As civiliza- 
 tion advances, the demand for poetry will increase, 
 though the supply may not equal the demand, 
 \, The poets then have done more than all others 
 to restore the equi librium b etween feeling and 
 expression. They have not succeeded — they will 
 never succeed. There are emotions and moods 
 that are so fleeting or so complex or so far from 
 the surface that they defy the photography of 
 words. The poet can only approximate, but 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 31 
 
 there is balm and uplift in the approximation. If 
 he felt completely satisfied with his work, stagna- 
 tion would result, but his ideal recedes and 
 beckons to him as it recedes. And so with the 
 reader. An ideal overtaken is no longer an ideal. 
 But when it is nearly overtaken it seems suddenly 
 to loom larger and fairer, and thus to suggest a 
 higher and more distant ideal. Perhaps Milton 
 preferred Paradise Regained to Paradise Lost be- 
 cause he came.nearer to doing what he wanted to 
 do in Paradise Regained, while in Paradise Lost 
 there was a wider space between what he did and 
 what he hoped to do. 
 
 ^But whatever you read remember that it is your 
 own personality that you are trying to unlocks 
 The poem or story or book, if it is the right one, 
 should seem a sort of extension of yourself. You 
 must carry, therefore, a large share of self-confi- 
 dence and self-respect into your reading. You 
 are looking for an outlet of your own soul rather 
 than the inflow of another's. As a general thing 
 you will find such an outlet in works written near 
 your own time. But when the process of finding 
 yourself has begun, you will be carried through 
 many centuries and into many lands. 
 
 As wide and as varied, however, as the domain 
 
32 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 of literature seems, the greatest works can be 
 divided into only two classes. You often hear it 
 said that a man or an event is famous in "song and 
 story." Now this expression, "song and story," 
 really means the whole realm of literature. It 
 includes (i) lyric poetry, that is, the short poems 
 that men in their joy or grief used to sing, and (2) 
 the longer works, prose or verse, that tell a story. 
 The other kinds of literature are modifications or 
 combinations of these two. 
 
 The two best small collections of English lyric 
 poems or song-literature are Palgrave's Golden 
 Treasury, with Additional Poems to the End of the 
 Nineteenth Century and The Oxford Book of English 
 Verse 1250-iQOO chosen and edited by Sir Arthur 
 Quiller-Couch. The first is the better known, 
 but the second has the advantage of building on 
 the first, and contains more than twice as many 
 poems. You are not expected to like every poem 
 in cither of these collections, but if you will start 
 with Burns or Campbell or Cowper or Scott or 
 Tennyson you will be pretty sure to find a friend 
 whose comradeship will mean a new era in your 
 life. To these volumes should be added also a 
 good collection of American short poems, such as 
 is found in Augustus White Long's American 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 33 
 
 Poems 1776-1900 or in Edmund Clarence Sted- 
 man's American Anthology 1787-1900. You will 
 find in either of these volumes every American 
 poem that in school or home has made itself a part 
 of the lyric heritage of the American people. 
 
 In story-literature, the literature that tells a 
 tale, the best poems are those by Tennyson and 
 Longfellow. Try Locksley Hall and Enoch Arden 
 by Tennyson; Evangeline, Hiawatha, the Court- 
 ship of Miles Standish, and Paul Revere' \s Ride by 
 Longfellow. In short prose tales America leads. 
 The American short story is known all over the 
 world for the skill with which it is told and the 
 human appeal of its content. In fact French and 
 American writers have brought the short story to 
 such perfection that it has been proposed to join 
 the two words with a hyphen and thus make a 
 visible distinction between the short-story and the 
 story that is merely short. Many excellent col- 
 lections of short stories, American and foreign, 
 have been made. Among them may be men- 
 tioned The Short-Story: Specimens Illustrating Its 
 Development, by Professor Brander .Matthews, 
 which contains stories from many lands, and The 
 Best American Tales, by Professor William P. 
 Trent and Professor John B. Henneman. From 
 
34 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 the charm of these short stones you will be led to 
 the longer stories which we call novels and dramas 
 and epic poems. 
 
 Whenever you get really interested in a great 
 piece of literature one revelation will surely come 
 to you. You will find that the element of beauty 
 is never lacking. You will find it hard to say 
 whether it is in the thought or in the language or 
 in the suggestions prompted by both. But there 
 it is. See deep enough or high enough or wide 
 enough and you see beauty. This is the greatest 
 lesson that art has to teach, and it is a lesson 
 taught by every literary masterpiece whether it 
 be one line or a whole book. 
 
 Literature, then, is within you. The masters 
 only bring it out. It is to your soul that they cry 
 "Open Sesame." Whenever you say of a poem 
 or story, "That's what I have dimly felt before — 
 or felt a thousand times before — but could never 
 say," freedom through expression has begun. The 
 masters have found you and you have begun to 
 find yourself. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 7/ Can Keep Before You the Vision of the Ideal 
 
 IT IS said that when Thorwaldsen, the great 
 Danish sculptor, unveiled his statue of Christ 
 he was seen to weep. His friends who had 
 come to congratulate him were astonished to hear 
 him say: "My genius is decaying." "What do 
 you mean?" they asked. "This statue," he re- 
 plied, "is the first of my works that I have ever 
 felt completely satisfied with. Till now my ideal 
 has always been far beyond what I could execute, 
 but it is so no longer. I can never create a great 
 work of art again." The principle that the great 
 artist here expressed is true for all time. , When- 
 ever a man catches up with his ideal, whenever he 
 is completely satisfied with his work, he is doomed/]/ 
 He cannot climb higher because he cannot imagine 
 a height beyond that which he has already at- 
 tained. He cannot reach another round on his 
 ladder because for him there are no other rounds. 
 He must either stand still or descend, and standing 
 still is a kind of descent. 
 
 35 
 
36 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 Robert Browning has written a great poem 
 about Andrea del Sarto, the man who was called 
 " the faultless painter." Andrea says that he does 
 not have to make first sketches or outlines before 
 beginning a new painting — all that is past. He 
 has become so skilful with his brush that to 
 imagine is to achieve. He can put "perfectly" 
 upon the canvas any picture that comes into his 
 mind. Is such a man to be envied? Andrea's 
 friends think so, but Andrea himself envies his 
 brother artists whose ideals march always in 
 advance of actual achievement. They have some- 
 thing to strive for, something that eludes them, 
 but is always beckoning to them. Andrea sums 
 up the difference when he says: 
 
 Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
 Or what's a heaven for? 
 
 These eloquent words contain almost the whole 
 philosophy of idealism. A man's reach should 
 exceed his grasp not only in art, but in all that he 
 does or thinks. 
 
 In another poem, The Last Ride Together, 
 Browning makes a rejected young lover find com- 
 fort in the thought that if his suit had been 
 successful he would have stood upon the highest 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 37 
 
 imaginable round of happiness and achievement. 
 Success would have meant failure because there 
 would have been nothing beyond to spur him 
 on. He calls to mind the great poets, sculptors, 
 and musicians, but not one of them was com- 
 pletely satisfied with his work. Indeed the joy 
 that each felt in his work was a joy that sprang 
 from the thought that he was every day getting 
 nearer the goal though the goal itself loomed 
 fairer and further the nearer he came to it. This 
 particular lover believed not only that a man's 
 reach should exceed his grasp, but that in every 
 case where a man had done worthily the world's 
 work his reach had exceeded his grasp. It is no 
 wonder that these noble lines, in which he sums 
 up his survey, are treasured in the memory of 
 thousands to-day who do their work better be- 
 cause they remember them: 
 
 
 What hand and brain went ever paired? 
 What heart alike conceived and dared? 
 What act proved all its thought had been ', 
 What will but felt the fleshly screen? 
 
 Whatever else you memorize in this book, do not 
 fail to memorize these two quotations from Brown- 
 ing. They will stand you in good stead in many 
 
3 8 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 an hour of temporary despondency and will help 
 to turn many a stumbling-block into a stepping- 
 stone. 
 
 In Tennyson's poem, The Voyage, there is one 
 ideal, "one fair Vision," but it assumed a fivefold 
 shape. When far off it seemed unreal, merely the 
 product of Fancy; but on a nearer view it was 
 Virtue, then Knowledge, then Hope, then Liberty. 
 Are not these the four most magnetic forms in 
 which the ideal appears? Notice, too, the fate 
 of the man who could not or would not see the 
 vision : 
 
 For one fair Vision ever fled 
 
 Down the waste waters day and night, 
 And still we follow'd where she led, 
 
 In hope to gain upon her flight. 
 Her face was evermore unseen, 
 
 And fixed upon the far sea-line; 
 But each man murmur'd, "O my queen, 
 
 I follow till I make thee mine!" 
 
 And now we lost her, now she gleam'd 
 
 Like Fancy made of golden air. 
 Now nearer to the prow she seem'd 
 
 Like Virtue firm, like Knowledge fair, 
 Now high on waves that idly burst 
 
 Like Heavenly Hope she crown'd the sea, 
 And now, the bloodless point reversed, 
 
 She bore the blade of Liberty. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 39 
 
 And only one among us — him 
 
 We pleased not — he was seldom pleased: 
 
 He saw not far: his eyes were dim: 
 But ours he swore were all diseased. 
 "A ship of fools," he shriek'd in spite, 
 
 "A ship of fools," he sneer'd and wept, 
 
 And overboard one stormy night 
 He cast his body, and on we swept. 
 
 W^H 
 
 Rudyard Kipling, the greatest living English 
 writer, is sometimes thought of chiefly as a drum 
 and trumpet poet. Kipling undoubtedly believes 
 in a fight, but he has written one great poem in 
 which he plainly says that it is not the fight in 
 itself that thrills him, but the nobleness of the ideal 
 that nerves the fighter. It is enough, says Kip- 
 ling, to see the ideal in dreams; it will never be 
 reached till death. Elusive as it is, however — 
 or, rather, because it is elusive — it has been the 
 inspiration of every noble thought and deed, even 
 when these are seemingly cancelled by death. 
 Here are the first and third stanzas of his poem, 
 To The True Romance: 
 
 Thy face is far from this our war, 
 
 Our call and counter-cry, 
 I shall not find Thee quick and kind, 
 
 Nor know Thee till I die. 
 
WHAT C v\ R ^R ME 
 
 ... 
 
 I 
 
 B 
 
CAM Lit;.;- 41 
 
 the i jpleten ess. 
 
 han any t; a], such as the so' 
 
 ideal, or the educational ideal, or the- polit 
 
 ;ustrial ideal, o- 
 I' may, according to the theme . of 
 
 these, but its essence is visit. n of a 
 
 possible whole suggested by a part 
 poet simply completes the tend 
 
 IS all. When, now, this 
 passion for teness becomes an ingrained 
 
 his thinl • ;■ -:nd 
 •his doing, he fl be sure that the ideal in ah 
 beauty and power has come to dwell with I 
 
 'I -. : I to br:- it, j 
 
 .' - js glance at the es that litera- 
 
 ls alwa . it. The* are 
 
 rid about us, and per- 
 rld within US, We 
 b of either of these I 
 d us or the nature with'- it \ 
 
 and feel far lets about 
 o, had it not been for - 
 
 In many ta^ 
 
 mit from the base, and thus ;•' a whole 
 
 'y a part was v look first 
 
 at natun added 
 
 / 
 
42 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 anything to our knowledge of this great realm, or 
 have the scientists been our only teachers? 
 
 John Tyndall, the great physicist, once said: 
 "The greatest discoveries of science have been 
 made when she has left the region of the seen and 
 known, and followed the imagination by new 
 paths to regions before unseen." "The most 
 epoch-making discoveries," wrote recently Dr. 
 Archibald Henderson, "find their origin in the 
 fortunate conjunction of intuition and experience. 
 And the whole history of science is the history of 
 the struggle of man's intuition, fortified by ex- 
 perience, to read the inscrutable riddle of nature." 
 It is also true that science has often verified what 
 had already been fore-announced by the idealizing 
 or completing faculty of the poet. Seventy-five 
 years before Newton astonished the world with 
 the law of gravitation, Shakespeare in his Troilus 
 and Cressida wrote: 
 
 But the strong base and building of my love 
 Is as the very centre of the earth, 
 Drawing all things to it. 
 
 ] In 1859 Darwin published his epoch-making 
 work, The Origin of Species. This was the first 
 time that the law of evolution was ever clearly 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 43 
 
 stated as a scientific theory, but the poets had 
 long before been busy with the thought of evolu- 
 tion as an ideal. Tennyson's In Memoriam, pub- 
 lished in 1850 but written earlier, contains this 
 
 passage: 
 
 They say, 
 The solid earth whereon we tread 
 
 In tracts of fluent heat began, 
 And grew to seeming-random forms, 
 The seeming prey of cyclic storms, 
 Till at the last arose the man. 
 
 In Browning's Paracelsus, written in 1834, there is 
 a long and eloquent passage about evolution 
 which ends with these lines: 
 
 Thus He dwells in all, 
 From life's minute beginnings, up at last 
 To man — the consummation of this scheme 
 Of being, the completion of this sphere 
 Of life: whose attributes had here and there 
 Been scattered o'er the visible world before, 
 Asking to be combined, dim fragments meant 
 To be united in some wondrous whole, 
 Imperfect qualities throughout creation, 
 Suggesting some one creature yet to make, 
 Some point where all those scattered rays should meet 
 Convergent in the faculties of man. 
 
 Navigation of the air and the settlement of 
 international difficulties by arbitration have made 
 
44 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 more progress in the last ten years than in all the 
 preceding centuries. The vision that Tennyson 
 saw in 1842 and sketched in Locksley Hall will yet 
 be realized: 
 
 For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, 
 Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would 
 be; 
 
 Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, 
 Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly- 
 bales; 
 
 Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a 
 
 ghastly dew 
 From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue; 
 
 Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing 
 warm, 
 
 With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder- 
 storm; 
 
 Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags 
 
 were furl'd 
 In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. 
 
 When Jules Verne, a prose poet, wrote in 1872 
 Around the World in Eighty Days, the book was 
 not taken seriously. But with steamers crossing 
 the Atlantic in less than six days, with Pacific 
 liners making the trip from San Francisco to 
 Yokohama in three weeks, and transcontinental 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 45 
 
 railroads spanning the intervening distances, forty 
 days are now enough for the diligent globe-trotter 
 where eighty days seemed incredibly short to 
 Phileas Phogg. When Professor Rontgen was 
 perfecting his discovery of the x-rays, but before 
 any results had been announced, Charles S. Hin- 
 ton published a prose romance called Stella, the 
 plot of which is based on the possibility of seeing 
 through the human body. Stella appeared in 
 November, 1895, and a few months later the x- 
 ray became a demonstrable fact. 
 
 The greatest inventor of delicate and accurate 
 scientific instruments, especially electrical instru- 
 ments, was Sir William Thomson, known since 
 1892 as Lord Kelvin. His inventions were all 
 illustrations of the saying already quoted from 
 Tyndall : "The greatest discoveries of science have 
 been made when she has left the region of the seen 
 and known, and followed the imagination by new 
 paths to regions before unseen." Lord Kelvin's 
 genius was the genius of vision. He did not take 
 an old instrument and by ceaseless experimenta- 
 tion try to make it better. He let his imagina- 
 tion construct a perfect instrument and then put 
 his scientific knowledge to work to build it. When 
 he died in 1907 the London Times said of him: 
 
 ) 
 
46 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 "When he is done with a problem, there is no more 
 to be done. The problem is solved once and for 
 all. Say a thing is not delicate enough; most 
 inventors proceed to make it a little more delicate, 
 and are rather proud of doing so much. Lord 
 Kelvin would ascertain by a masterly analysis of 
 the whole case what was the maximum of possible 
 delicacy, and would then bring to bear wide and 
 various knowledge and singular fertility of me- 
 chanical resource in order to reach that maximum. 
 His siphon-recorder, his compass, and his elec- 
 trometers are instances of that thoroughness, alike 
 in conception and execution, which marked his 
 work. It flowed from that highest of intellectual 
 qualities, the constructive scientific imagination, 
 which 'bodies forth the forms of things unknown'* 
 with such definition and precision that the me- 
 chanical faculties work up to the conception as 
 to a visible model." 
 
 *Notice that these words describing Lord Kelvin's method are taken 
 from Shakespeare's famous description of the poet's method. See A Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream, Act V, Scene i, lines 12-17: 
 
 The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 
 
 Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; 
 
 And as imagination bodies forth 
 
 The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
 
 Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing 
 
 A local habitation and a name. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 There is no antagonism, therefore, between 
 poetry and natural science. The poets believe 
 that nature's reach exceeds her grasp. They study 
 her reach, therefore, while the scientists study her 
 grasp. But both poet and scientist are dependent 
 on vision. 
 
 Let us turn now to the second theme that 
 literature loves to treat, personality or human 
 nature. The quotations already made from the 
 English poets, Browning, Tennyson, and Kipling, 
 might lead the reader to infer that American 
 literature is deficient in poems of high human 
 idealism. On the contrary there is no modern 
 literature that is more nobly idealistic than our 
 own. A German scholar, Eduard Engel, who has 
 written an excellent little history of American 
 literature, has this to say about our idealism: 
 "The fundamental characteristic of American 
 literature is its idealism. All really great Ameri- 
 can writers, all whom the Americans themselves 
 consider great, have without exception been ideal- 
 ists, almost extreme idealists. American poets 
 have been the real preachers of the nation. Poetry 
 is to the Americans a sacred thing, and it is 
 no accident that from an American poet, from 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the world received 
 
4 S WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 that beautiful poem, whose refrain, 'Excelsior!' 
 has become the watchword of idealists in all 
 lands." 
 
 This is high praise, but it is abundantly justified 
 by the facts. Ex-President Eliot of Harvard goes 
 still farther. "We are," he says, "the most 
 idealistic people who have thus far inherited the 
 planet. We are more idealistic in our conception 
 of man, of God, and of the universe than any 
 other people." It is at least a striking fact that 
 the poets who best represent American life, Long- 
 fellow, Emerson, Poe, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, 
 and Lanier, have each written a poem which 
 might justly be called "My Creed of Idealism." 
 And Hawthorne's greatest story, The Great Stone 
 Face, may well bear the same title. The poems 
 are Longfellow's Excelsior, Emerson's The Fore- 
 runners, Poe's Eldorado, Lowell's V Envoi to the 
 Muse, Holmes's Chambered Nautilus, Whittier's 
 The Vanishers, and Lanier's Song of the Chatta- 
 hoochee. Each of these treatments of the ideal 
 has won its deserved popularity because it gives 
 outlet to a feeling common to us all. "Where 
 there is no vision," said a philosopher three thou- 
 sand years ago, "the people perish," and the proof 
 of his saying is that, while all nations without a 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 49 
 
 literature have perished, the nations with a litera- 
 ture still live in their ideals. It is not ideas that 
 make a people's civilization, it is ideals.. Ideas 
 are what people think, ideals are what they strive 
 for. An idea is a ladder on the ground; an ideal 
 is a ladder set up. If America should be suddenly 
 blotted from the map the masterpieces that follow 
 would still live to testify to future ages that the 
 vanished Americans kept before them the vision 
 of the ideal. 
 
 Excelsior is almost too well known to be repro- 
 duced in full. But Engel's remark about the 
 international service that it has performed and 
 Longfellow's own explanation of its meaning 
 make it worth reading and re-reading till we know 
 every stanza of it by heart. 
 
 The shades of night were falling fast, 
 As through an Alpine village passed 
 A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice, 
 A banner with the strange device, 
 Excelsior! 
 
 His brow was sad; his eye beneath, 
 Flashed like a falchion from its sheath, 
 And like a silver clarion rung 
 The accents of that unknown tongue, 
 Excelsior! 
 
50 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 In happy homes he saw the light 
 Of household fires gleam warm and bright; 
 Above, the spectral glaciers shone, 
 And from his lips escaped a groan, 
 Excelsior! 
 
 "Try not the Pass!" the old man said; 
 
 "Dark lowers the tempest overhead, 
 The roaring torrent is deep and wide!" 
 And loud that clarion voice replied, 
 Excelsior! 
 
 "Oh stay," the maiden said, "and rest 
 Thy weary head upon this breast!" 
 A tear stood in his bright blue eye, 
 But still he answered, with a sigh, 
 Excelsior! 
 
 "Beware the pine-tree's withered branch! 
 Beware the awful avalanche!" 
 This was the peasant's last Good-night, 
 A voice replied, far up the height, 
 Excelsior! 
 
 At break of day, as heavenward 
 The pious monks of Saint Bernard 
 Uttered the oft-repeated prayer, 
 A voice cried through the startled air, 
 Excelsior! 
 
 A traveller, by the faithful hound, 
 Half-buried in the snow was found, 
 Still grasping in his hand of ice 
 That banner with the strange device, 
 Excelsior! 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 51 
 
 There in the twilight cold and gray, 
 Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay, 
 And from the sky, serene and far, 
 A voice fell, like a falling star, 
 Excelsior! 
 
 Poe said that Excelsior depicted "the earnest 
 upward striving of the soul — an impulse not to be 
 subdued even in death." Longfellow himself, in 
 a letter to C. K. Tuckerman, explained the mean- 
 ing of his poem as follows: "I have had the 
 pleasure of receiving your note in regard to the 
 poem Excelsior, and very willingly give you my 
 intention in writing it. This was no more than to 
 display, in a series of pictures, the life of a man of 
 genius, resisting all temptations, laying aside all 
 fears, heedless of all warnings, and pressing right 
 on to accomplish his purpose. His motto is 
 Excelsior, 'higher.' He passes through the Al- 
 pine village — through the rough, cold paths of 
 the world — where the peasants cannot under- 
 stand him, and where the watchword is an 'un- 
 known tongue.' He disregards the happiness of 
 domestic peace and sees the glaciers — his fate — 
 before him. He disregards the warning of the 
 old man's wisdom and the fascinations of woman's 
 love. He answers to all, 'Higher yet.' The 
 
52 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 monks of Saint Bernard are the representatives of 
 religious forms and ceremonies, and with their 
 oft-repeated prayer mingles the sound of his voice, 
 telling them there is something higher than forms 
 and ceremonies. Filled with these aspirations, he 
 perishes, without having reached the perfection 
 he longed for; and the voice heard in the air is the 
 promise of immortality and progress ever upward." 
 The name of Emerson's poem, The Forerunners, 
 is self-explanatory. The forerunners are those 
 eternal mysteries that forever beckon but forever 
 elude. Emerson, like Browning, emphasizes the 
 unseizableness of the ideal. An ideal overtaken, 
 an ideal realized, ceases to be an ideal, though it 
 may become the stepping-stone to another and 
 still higher ideal. Emerson's poetry is not usually 
 as easy reading as Longfellow's, but no one can 
 miss the meaning and message of The Forerunners: 
 
 Long I followed happy guides, 
 I could never reach their sides; 
 Their step is forth, and, ere the day, 
 Breaks up their leaguer, and away. 
 Keen my sense, my heart was young, 
 Right good-will my sinews strung, 
 But no speed of mine avails 
 To hunt upon their shining trails. 
 On and away, their hasting feet 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 53 
 
 Make the morning proud and sweet; 
 
 Flowers they strew — I catch the scent; 
 
 Or tone of silver instrument 
 
 Leaves on the wind melodious trace; 
 
 Yet I could never see their face. 
 
 On eastern hills I see their smokes, 
 
 Mixed with mist by distant lochs. 
 
 I met many travellers 
 
 Who the road had surely kept; 
 
 They saw not my fine revellers — 
 
 These had crossed them while they slept. 
 
 Some had heard their fair report, 
 
 In the country or the court. 
 
 Fleetest couriers alive 
 
 Never yet could once arrive, 
 
 As they went or they returned, 
 
 At the house where these sojourned. 
 
 Sometimes their strong speed they slacken, 
 
 Though they are not overtaken; 
 
 In sleep their jubilant troop is- near — 
 
 I tuneful voices overhear; 
 
 It may be in wood or waste — 
 
 At unawares 'tis come and past. 
 
 Their near camp my spirit knows 
 
 By signs gracious as rainbows. 
 
 I thenceforward and long after 
 
 Listen for their harp-like laughter, 
 
 And carry in my heart, for days, 
 
 Peace that hallows rudest ways. 
 
 Poe's little poem, Eldorado, appeared only a few 
 months before his death. In it he tells of his 
 
54 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 ceaseless search for the beautiful. No man 
 ever lived in whom the passion for pure beauty 
 burned more consumingly than in Edgar Allan 
 Poe. Whatever his other failings he never com- 
 promised his ideals of poetic beauty. The ad- 
 vice that he gives in the last stanza — "Ride, 
 boldly ride" even to death — is advice that he 
 himself followed unfalteringly. "With me," he 
 says, "poetry has been not a purpose, but a 
 passion; and the passions should be held in 
 reverence." To his friend, F. W. Thomas, he 
 writes at the very time when Eldorado was stir- 
 ring in his brain: "Depend upon it after all, 
 Thomas, literature is the most noble of profes- 
 sions. In fact, it is about the only one for a 
 man. For my own part there is no seducing 
 me from the path. I shall be a litterateur at least, 
 all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which 
 still lead me on for all the gold in California." 
 In this farewell poem Poe bequeaths his ideal to 
 posterity : 
 
 Gaily bedight, 
 
 A gallant knight, 
 In sunshine and in shadow, 
 
 Had journeyed long, 
 * Singing a song, 
 
 In search of Eldorado. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 55 
 
 But he grew old — 
 
 This knight so bold — 
 And o'er his heart a shadow 
 
 Fell as he found 
 
 No spot of ground 
 That looked like Eldorado. 
 
 And, as his strength 
 Failed him at length, 
 He met a pilgrim shadow — 
 "Shadow," said he, 
 "Where can it be — 
 This land of Eldorado?" 
 
 "Over the Mountains 
 Of the Moon, 
 Down the Valley of the Shadow, 
 Ride, boldly ride," 
 The shade replied, 
 "If you seek for Eldorado." 
 
 In Longfellow's Journal, May 3, 1855, occurs 
 the following entry: "Passed an hour with Lowell 
 this morning. He read me a poem, The Muse — 
 very beautiful. It reminded me of Emerson's 
 Forerunners." The exact name of the poem is 
 U Envoi to the Muse. It treats, as Longfellow im- 
 plies, the same great theme that Emerson had 
 treated in The Forerunners. Longfellow might 
 have added, if modesty had not forbidden, that it 
 treated also the same great theme that he himself 
 
56 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 had made popular in Excelsior. The first twenty- 
 four lines of Lowell's poem will give an idea of the 
 whole: 
 
 Whither? Albeit I follow fast, 
 
 In all life's circuit I but find, 
 Not where thou art, but where thou wast, 
 
 Sweet beckoner, more fleet than wind! 
 I haunt the pine-dark solitudes, 
 
 With soft brown silence carpeted, 
 And plot to snare thee in the woods; 
 
 Peace I o'ertake, but thou art fled! 
 I find the rock where thou didst rest, 
 The moss thy skimming foot hath prest; 
 
 All Nature with thy parting thrills, 
 Like branches after birds new-flown; 
 
 Thy passage hill and hollow fills 
 With hints of virtue not their own; 
 In dimples still the water slips 
 Where thou has dipt thy finger-tips; 
 
 Just, just beyond, forever burn 
 
 Gleams of a grace without return; 
 
 Upon thy shade I plant my foot, 
 And through my frame strange raptures shoot; 
 All of thee but thyself I grasp; 
 
 I seem to fold thy luring shape, 
 And vague air to my bosom clasp, 
 
 Thou lithe, perpetual Escape! 
 
 The last line, "Thou lithe, perpetual Escape," 
 is an admirable definition of a lofty ideal, worthy 
 to be put with anything that Browning has said 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 57 
 
 on the subject. Lowell, too, you observe, puts the 
 emphasis on the unattainableness of the ideal. He 
 finds the footprints of the ideal everywhere, "In 
 all life's circuit,"but the ideal itself he cannot clasp. 
 " The Chambered Nautilus" says Holmes, "was 
 suggested by looking at a section of one of those 
 chambered cells to which is given the name of 
 Pearly Nautilus." A recent biographer of Holmes 
 says : " The Chambered Nautilus is perhaps the 
 only bit of his verse which has the artistic com- 
 pleteness which enables it to stand alone." In 
 what does its artistic completeness consist? It 
 consists in the skilful way in which Holmes has 
 taken a bit of scientific knowledge and humanized 
 it for daily need. The splendid idealism of the 
 last stanza has made it the most enduring shrine 
 of its author's name and fame. There is perhaps 
 no other single stanza in our literature that is 
 known by heart by more Americans than the last 
 stanza of The Chambered Nautilus: 
 
 This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, 
 
 Sails the unshadowed main — 
 
 The venturous bark that flings 
 On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings 
 In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, 
 
 And coral reefs lie bare, 
 Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair. 
 
58 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; 
 
 Wrecked is the ship of pearl! 
 
 And every chambered cell, 
 Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, 
 As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, 
 
 Before thee lies revealed — 
 Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed! 
 
 Year after year beheld the silent toil 
 
 That spread his lustrous coil; 
 
 Still, as the spiral grew, 
 He left the past year's dwelling for the new, 
 Stole with soft step its shining archway through, 
 
 Built up its idle door, 
 Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. 
 
 Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, 
 
 Child of the wandering sea, 
 
 Cast from her lap, forlorn! 
 From thy dead lips a clearer note is born 
 Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn! 
 
 While on mine ear it rings, 
 Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings: 
 
 Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 
 
 As the swift seasons roll! 
 
 Leave thy low-vaulted past! 
 Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
 Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 
 
 Till thou at length art free, 
 Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! 
 
 There are those who say that Holmes borrowed 
 some of his thoughts from a poem called An Elegy 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 59 
 
 on a shell: The Nautilus, by Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill. 
 Here are the three best stanzas of Doctor Mit- 
 chill's poem. Judge for yourself* 
 
 Thou wast a house with many chambers fraught, 
 
 Built by a Nautilus or Argonaut, 
 
 With fitness, symmetry, and skill, 
 
 To suit the owner's taste and sovereign will. 
 
 In curves of elegance thy shape appears, 
 Surpassing art through centuries of years, 
 By tints and colours brilliant made, 
 And all, — the finished workman has displayed. 
 
 So man erects in sumptuous mode 
 A structure proud for his abode, 
 But knows not, when of life bereft, 
 Who'll creep within the shell he left. 
 
 Is it not evident that Mitchill's poem has not a 
 ray of idealism? Compare his last stanza with 
 Holmes's. To Mitchill the nautilus suggests not 
 human life but a house, and he concludes by re- 
 minding us that men do not know who will move 
 into their houses when they are dead. There's 
 truth of a sort but no poetry, no uplift, no chal- 
 lenge in that thought. Indeed Mitchill's whole 
 poem lives to-day only in the reflected fame of 
 Holmes's lines. 
 
 The name of Whittier's poem, The Fanishers, 
 
60 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 also suggests Emerson's Forerunners. Whittier, 
 however, took the suggestion of his lines not from 
 Emerson but from an Indian legend. "I take the 
 liberty," he writes to a friend, "of enclosing a little 
 poem of mine which has beguiled some weary 
 hours. 1 hope thee will like it. How strange it 
 seems not to read it to my sister! If thee have 
 read Schoolcraft* thee will remember what he says 
 of the Puck-wud-jinnies or 'little vanishers.' The 
 legend is very beautiful and I hope I have done it 
 justice in some sort." The first two and last two 
 stanzas will give an idea of the whole: 
 
 Sweetest of all childlike'dreams 
 
 In the simple Indian lore 
 Still to me the legend seems 
 
 Of the shapes who flit before. 
 
 Flitting, passing, seen and gone, 
 Never reached nor found at rest, 
 
 Baffling search, but beckoning on 
 To the Sunset of the Blest. 
 
 * The reference is to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1703-1S64) who at the re- 
 quest of Congress edited his Historical and Statistical Information Respecting 
 the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States 
 (5 volumes, 1851-1855). There are more than 300 illustrations in these 
 volumes and the cost to Congress was about $30,000 a volume. Schoolcraft 
 added a sixth volume in 1857. Longfellow also drew from Schoolcraft for 
 his Hiawatha. Congress never made an appropriation that yielded better 
 returns. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 61 
 
 Guided thus, friend of mine! 
 
 Let us walk our little way, 
 Knowing by each beckoning sign 
 
 That we are not quite astray 
 
 Chase we still, with baffled feet, 
 Smiling eye and waving hand, 
 
 Sought and seeker soon shall meet, 
 Lost and found, in Sunset Land! 
 
 In spite of the general resemblance between this 
 poem and Emerson's Forerunners, The Vanishers 
 could hardly have been written by Emerson. The 
 religious faith and hope of the Quaker poet have 
 made his name a household word among thousands 
 of readers to whom Emerson is still a sealed book. 
 With Whittier all high ideals will find their full 
 realization in Heaven, "the Sunset Land of Souls." 
 His idealism drew its chief inspiration and support 
 from that world-fountain of idealism, the Bible. 
 It is an idealism not essentially different from 
 Emerson's, but it is differently expressed. 
 
 The last poem that I shall mention, The Song of 
 the Chattahoochee by Sidney Lanier, sprang into 
 immediate popularity and remains the best known 
 short poem that its author wrote. The Chatta- 
 hoochee River, it should be said, rises in Haber- 
 sham County, in northeastern Georgia, and in its 
 
62 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 southwesterly course flows through the adjoining 
 Hall County. Its length is about five hundred 
 miles. In melody and meaning this poem is 
 characteristic of Lanier at his best: 
 
 Out of the hills of Habersham, 
 
 Down the valleys of Hall, 
 I hurry amain to reach the plain, 
 Run the rapid and leap the fall, 
 Split at the rock and together again, 
 Accept my bed, or narrow or wide, 
 And flee from folly on every side 
 With a lover's pain to attain the plain 
 
 Far from the hills of Habersham, 
 
 Far from the valleys of Hall. 
 
 All down the hills of Habersham, 
 
 All through the valleys of Hall, 
 The rushes cried Abide, abide, 
 The wilful waterweeds held me thrall, 
 The laving laurel turned my tide, 
 The ferns and the fondling grass said Stay, 
 The dewberry dipped for to work delay, 
 And the little reeds sighed Abide, abide, 
 
 Here in the hills of Habersham, 
 
 Here in the valleys of Hall. 
 
 High o'er the hills of Habersham, 
 
 Veiling the valleys of Hall, 
 The hickory told me manifold 
 Fair tales of shade, the poplar tall 
 Wrought me her shadowy self to hold, 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 63 
 
 The chestnut, the oak, the walnut, the pine, 
 Overleaning, with nickering meaning and sign, 
 Said, Pass not, sg cold, these manifold 
 
 Deep shades of the hills of Habersham, 
 
 These glades in the valleys of Hall. 
 
 And oft in the hills of Habersham, 
 
 And oft in the valleys of Hall, 
 The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone 
 Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl, 
 And many a luminous jewel lone — 
 Crystals clear or a-cloud with mist, 
 Ruby, garnet, and amethyst — 
 Made lures with the lights of streaming stone 
 
 In the clefts of the hills of Habersham, 
 
 In the beds of the valleys of Hall. 
 
 But, oh, not the hills of Habersham, 
 
 And, oh, not the valleys of Hall 
 Avail: I am fain for to water the plain. 
 Downward the voices of Duty call — 
 Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main, 
 The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn, 
 And a myriad flowers mortally yearn, 
 And the lordly main from beyond the plain 
 
 Calls o'er the hills of Habersham, 
 
 Calls through the valleys of Hall. 
 
 The Song of the Chattahoochee has often been 
 compared with Tennyson's Brook, but there is no 
 resemblance between them except that water 
 flows through both. The best poem with which 
 to compare it is Longfellow's Excelsior. Both are 
 
64 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 treatments of idealism in action, but it is a differ- 
 ent kind of action. Longfellow pictures the search 
 for the ideal under the form of a young mountain 
 climber who moves upward but away from men, 
 while Lanier sees in the course of the Chattahoochee 
 the type of the idealist who hurries down from the 
 hills to serve in the plain. Personal perfection is 
 the goal of the one, social service of the other. 
 Thirty-six years (1841 to 1877) intervene between 
 the two poems, and these years mark a steady 
 national progress from the individual ideal of the 
 first poem to the communal ideal of the second. 
 
 But the best philosophy of idealism was given 
 by St. Paul when he said: "But we all, with open 
 face beholding as in a glass the glory of the 
 Lord, are changed into the same image from glory 
 to glory," and the best commentary on these 
 words is Hawthorne's Great Stone Face. This 
 wonderful story can only be summarized here: 
 There is in the White Mountains of New Hamp- 
 shire a freak of nature known as the Great Stone 
 Face. The expression of the Face is kind and 
 noble, and there was a tradition in the valley that 
 there would some day appear a great man with 
 the very countenance of the Great Stone Face. 
 This man was to be a sort of saviour of the people. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 65 
 
 Ernest, a little boy living in the valley, heard from 
 his mother's lips the tradition of the Great Stone 
 Face and lived in eager expectation of the coming 
 of the great man thus foretold. The changing 
 but always noble look of the Great Stone Face had 
 an increasing influence upon the development of 
 Ernest's character. By looking and longing he 
 was being slowly "changed into the same image." 
 
 Three times, as the years went by, it was con- 
 fidently proclaimed in the valley that the great 
 man so long foretold was about to come. Ernest 
 goes out each time to welcome him but returns 
 disappointed. The people believed the resem- 
 blance complete but Ernest did not. "Old Mr. 
 Gathergold," a type of the merely rich man, 
 "Old Blood-and-Thunder," a type of the military 
 hero, and "Old Stony Phiz," a popular type of the 
 statesman, though they possessed some admirable 
 qualities and had done some service for their 
 country, did not have, as Ernest thought, "the 
 gentle wisdom, the deep, broad, tender sym- 
 pathies" of the Great Stone Face. 
 
 At length, after Ernest had become an old man, 
 a poet visited the valley. He too had been born 
 in the valley and had felt the influence of the Great 
 Stone Face. He was a poet (1) of nature and (2) 
 
66 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 of personality: (i) "If he sang of a mountain, the 
 eyes of all mankind beheld a mightier grandeur 
 reposing on its breast, or soaring to its summit, 
 than had before been seen there. If his theme 
 were a lovely lake, a celestial smile had now been 
 thrown over it, to gleam forever on its surface. 
 If it were the vast old sea, even the deep im- 
 mensity of its dread bosom seemed to swell the 
 higher, as if moved by the emotions of the song. 
 Thus the world assumed another and a better 
 aspect from the hour that the poet blessed it with 
 his happy eyes. The Creato;- had bestowed him, 
 as the last best touch to his own handiwork. 
 Creation was not finished till the poet came to 
 interpret, and so complete it. (2) The effect was 
 no less high and beautiful, when his human breth- 
 ren were the subject of his verse. The man or 
 woman, sordid with the common dust of life, who 
 crossed his daily path, and the little child who 
 played in it, were glorified, if he beheld them in his 
 mood of poetic faith. He showed the golden 
 links of the great chain that intertwined them 
 with an angelic kindred; he brought out the hid- 
 den traits of a celestial birth that made them 
 worthy of such kin." 
 
 He and Ernest talked long together and Ernest 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 67 
 
 hoped that the great man had at last come. The 
 poet, however, confessed to Ernest that his deeds 
 were not in harmony with his words. "Suddenly 
 the poet, by an irresistible impulse, threw his arms 
 aloft, and shouted, 'Behold! Behold! Ernest is 
 himself the likeness of the Great Stone Face!' 
 Then all the people looked and saw that^what the 
 deep-sighted poet said was true. The prophecy 
 was fulfilled. But Ernest, having finished what 
 he had to say, took the poet's arm and walked 
 slowly homeward, still hoping that some wiser and 
 better man than himself would by and by appear, 
 bearing a resemblance to the Great Stone Face." 
 Hawthorne's story sets forth all that this chap- 
 ter has tried to suggest. Ernest had set his ideal 
 high and was thus saved from being the victim 
 of the popular and passing ideals of money, war, 
 and politics. Though he still looked for a better 
 man, his own recognition and reward had come. It 
 was a poet, however, who founcf him and crowned 
 him, and thus made him one of the world's 
 torch-bearers of idealism. Painting, sculpture, 
 and music are also outlets of the ideal within us. 
 But not one of them equals literature in the 
 clearness with which it speaks or in the numbers 
 whom it has helped to the higher life. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 It Can Give You a Better Knowledge of Human 
 Nature 
 
 HUMAN nature can be learned from every, 
 kind of literature. Even lyric poetry, 
 which does not attempt to create charac- 
 ter, reflects at least the chaiacter of the writer. 
 Take, for example, William Cullen Bryant's great 
 lyric poem, Thanatopsis. Suppose, now, that you 
 knew absolutely nothing about Bryant except that 
 he was the author of this poem. How much of his 
 human nature could you infer from this poem 
 alone? Read it very carefully with this end in 
 view and see if you agree with these findings: 
 First, he was not only an observer but a lover of 
 nature, at least of nature's "visible forms," the 
 sun, the sky, the ocean, woods, meadows, and 
 mountains. His descriptions, in other words, are 
 not only accurate but affectionate. Second, he 
 seems to have been either a very young man or a 
 very old man when he wrote Thanatopsis because 
 
 68 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 69 
 
 the poem is chiefly about the fear of death, or 
 rather about nature as an antidote to the fear of 
 death. Is it not chiefly to the young or to the old 
 that "thoughts of the last bitter hour come like 
 a blight"? I should incline to the guess that the 
 author was a very young man because his philoso- 
 phy is immature and thin. As we grow older, 
 nature means a great deal more to us than that at 
 death we shall lie down in good company and have 
 a glorious sepulchre. Third, there is a dignity 
 and simplicity and sincerity in the words and 
 thoughts that seem to be the reflection of the 
 author's character. If he was not himself noble 
 and genuine he was a master in the art of making 
 the style conceal the writer. Fourth, whether 
 young or old his use of beautiful vowel-combina- 
 tions and sonorous words and phrases marks him 
 out as peculiarly gifted in his feeling for the 
 musical qualities of language. Read almost any 
 of the lines of Thanatopsis aloud and you cannot 
 help feeling that the author's ear for word music 
 was almost perfect. As this quality is well sus- 
 tained from the beginning of the poem to the end 
 I should expect to find it reappear in every poem 
 that the author wrote. Fifth, the close of the 
 poem shows that the author was not unwilling to 
 
7 o WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 have his poems end with a formal moral, a sort of 
 "This-fable-tcaches-us." As the moral, though 
 beautiful in itself, is not closely connected with 
 what precedes, I should say that the author had 
 the habit of moralizing. 
 
 Try the same method with other poems by 
 other authors. There is always the autobio- 
 graphical element and the attempt to find it will 
 show you that style, as Carlyle puts it, is not the 
 coat of a writer but his skin. Then take poems 
 that are national favourites — The Star-Spangled 
 Banner by Francis Scott Key, Home, Sweet Home 
 by John Howard Payne, America by Samuel 
 Francis Smith, The Bivouac of the Dead by Theo- 
 dore O'Hara, The Blue and the Gray by Francis 
 Miles Finch, Little Boy Blue by Eugene Field — 
 and study in them the character of the nation 
 that has taken them to heart. There is danger 
 here that you may overrate the nation's real 
 approval of the poems selected. But you will 
 learn at any rate that just as a man expresses 
 himself in what he writes, so a whole people 
 expresses itself in what it likes. It is to be hoped, 
 too, that the historians of literature will take more 
 pains to find out how popular or unpopular a poem 
 really is before they hold it up to us as a mirror of 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 71 
 
 national taste. Popularity is not a high test of 
 literary excellence but it is a sure test of a people's 
 taste. 
 
 /"All literature, then, reveals unconsciously some- 
 thing of the men who made it and something also 
 of the people who like or dislike it. But w^wish 
 now to study human nature not as it is uncon- 
 sciously revealed in literature, but as it is con- 
 sciously created in literature^ We have in mind 
 not lyric poetry but great epics, dramas, novels, 
 and short stories. We are thinking not of the 
 men who wrote these but of the men and women 
 who move through their pages, who give them 
 interest and immortality, and who are themselves 
 more alive than their creators. JA study of these 
 men and women, we hold, will greatly widen and 
 deepen your knowledge of human natureT^ There 
 is no chair of human nature in any of o~ur schools 
 or colleges, though it must be a dmitte d that a 
 kn owledge of human ri P t11rp w '^ yield better 
 returns__t han a kn owIHg f nf anyt h iag p1gp In 
 most professions .success is not only conditioned 
 on, but is in almost exact proportion to, a wide 
 and sympathetic knowledge of our fellow-men. 
 No one can expect to be a useful teacher, preacher, 
 doctor, editor, lawyer, business-man, employer, 
 
72 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 or employee who is ignorant of the motives that 
 govern men in the ordinary affairs of life. Knowl- 
 edge here is power and opportunity, ignorance is 
 weakness and inefficiency. J The knowledge that 
 we get from everyday experience may be good 
 as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. 
 It is neither broad enough nor deep enough.' To 
 make it broader and deeper we must go to the 
 great laboratory of character creation that the 
 masters have fitted up and made accessible to us 
 in literature. 
 
 What a strange company it is — these men and 
 women who were not born but made! They are 
 not ghosts, for they never wore flesh. They are 
 alive, actively and increasingly alive. Try them 
 by the tests of real life: Do they not influence 
 others? Are they not talked about and written 
 about and thought about? Do they show signs 
 of weakness hr old age? Have they not become 
 a part of the very consciousness of men? Do not 
 some of them keep alive the memory of nations 
 otherwise forgotten? Are not many of them found 
 in that "choir invisible whose music is the gladness 
 of the world " ? Have they not linked man to man, 
 and nation to nation, and century to century by 
 furnishing a common theme of thought and a com- 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 73 
 
 mon centre of association? Of one of these made 
 characters Dr. Horace Howard Furness says: "No 
 one of mortal mould (save Him 'whose blessed feet 
 were nailed for our advantage on the bitter cross') 
 ever trod this earth, commanding such absorbing 
 interest as this Hamle t, this mere creation of a 
 poet's brain." 
 
 To create character, to give immortality to a 
 name, to send a human being down the ages as a 
 comrade to all sorts and conditions of men, re- 
 quires genius of the highest order. It demands a 
 blend of heart and head, of observation and 
 experience, of self-knowledge and self-effacement 
 that would hardly be believed if the' characters 
 themselves were not here to vouch for it. Yet, 
 even if we omit Shakespeare's* minor men and 
 women, he alone is the author of two hundred 
 and forty-six distinct and well-known characters. 
 When we consider the variety of these characters 
 and also the perfect clearness with which they 
 are protrayed, we are compelled to give Shake- 
 speare the preeminence over all other authors, 
 ancient and modern. In George Eliot's novels 
 the distinct characters number one hundred and 
 seven; in the novels of Dickens, one hundred and 
 two; and in the novels of Thackeray, forty. Thus 
 
74 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 Shakespeare has created almost as many characters 
 as the three nineteenth-century novelists com- 
 bined.* 
 
 A list of some of the best known characters 
 created in world-literature will help us to realize 
 what a wealth of material for the study of human 
 nature this kind of literature affords. No two 
 lists would be alike. Mine at least is brief. It is 
 arranged also in chronological order and contains 
 only such comment as, it is hoped, may lead 
 you to the original sources themselves. Of every 
 character mentioned it may be said that he or she 
 is better known from the inside than the creator 
 of the character himself. If you follow out this 
 course of reading, whether alone or with others, 
 do not do it as an imposed task. Above all do 
 not read as if you had to stand an examination 
 on the result. Read to find and to enrich yourself 
 in a larger knowledge of human nature. Use 
 translations when necessary and do not hesitate, 
 if you so desire, to skip the passages or pages 
 
 *He has really created more. "The number [two hundred and forty-six] 
 is made up by counting only those which have in the reader's mind a dis- 
 tinct individuality, and omitting the following plays entirely: RicRard III, 
 Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Henry VIII, and the three parts oi 
 Henry VI, either by reason of some doubt of Shakespeare's entire author- 
 ship or because his manner of sharply outlining a character and definitely 
 filling it out is not evident in them." — Charles F. Johnson's Elements of 
 Literary Criticism. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 75 
 
 from which your hero or heroine is absent. Read 
 as many pages as possible at a sitting, keep close 
 to the trail of the hunted character, and then try 
 to carry the knowledge and sympathy thus gained 
 into the life about you. 
 
 My list of fifteen includes Ulysses in Homer's 
 Iliad and especially in his Odyssey* King Arthur 
 in Malory's Morte d 1 Arthur\ and Tennyson's 
 Idylls of the King, Beatrice in Dante's Divine 
 Comedy,% Don Quixote in Cervantes's Don 
 Quixote** Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry IF 
 (Parts I and II) and Merry Wives of Windsor, 
 Hamlet in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of 
 Denmark, Robinson Crusoe in Daniel Defoe's 
 Robinson Crusoe, Faust in Goethe's Faust, \% 
 Leatherstocking in James Fenimore Cooper's 
 
 * William Cullen Bryant's translations of d^e Iliad and the Odyssey are 
 the simplest translations in verse. But the prose translation of the Iliad by 
 Leaf, Lang, and Myers and of the Odyssey by Butcher and Lang are better 
 still. The Story of the Iliad and The Story of the Odyssey by Alfred J. Church 
 are helpful introductory books. 
 
 fThere is a good edition in two volumes with an introduction by Sir 
 John Rhys in Everyman's Library. The best introductory volume is 
 Sidney Lanier's The Boy's King Arthur. 
 
 |The standard translation is by Henry F. Cary, "to whom," says Ma- 
 caulay, "Dante owes more than ever poet owed to translator." This 
 translation has now been edited and brought up to date by Oscar Kuhns. 
 
 ** An excellent edition is Don Quixote for Use in Homes and Schools by 
 Clifton Johnson. The standard translation is by Peter Anthony Motteux. 
 It is published in two volumes in Bohn's Standard Library and in Every- 
 man's Library. 
 
 X\ The standard English translation is by Bayard Taylor. 
 
76 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 Leather stocking Tales, Pippa in Robert Brown- 
 ing's Pippa Passes, Becky Sharp in Thackeray's 
 Vanity Fair, David Copperfield in Dickens's 
 David Copperfield, Silas Alarner in George Eliot's 
 Silas Marner, Jean \ aljean in Victor Hugo's 
 Les Miserables, and Uncle Remus in Joel Chandler 
 Harris's Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, 
 and Nights with Uncle Remus. 
 
 I. In range and permanence of influence upon 
 mankind in general, the character and career of 
 Ulysses remain unrivalled. Of the two types of 
 character represented by Ulysses and Achilles, 
 Ulysses seems to me plainly Homer's favourite. 
 Achilles is the type of the warrior-hero cut down 
 in his prime before physical prowess had begun 
 to yield to years and reflection. Ulysses is the 
 eternal type of the roving hero, familiar with 
 strange lands and stranger folk, wise, patient, 
 eloquent, and, above all, resourceful. "In the 
 Odyssey," says Jebb, "we find a riper moral sense 
 than in the Iliad, and a much larger number of 
 words to express moral distinctions." But it was 
 not the morality or the immorality of Ulysses 
 that enthroned him in the Greek consciousness. 
 It was his ability to shift for himself. It was his 
 fertility in devising and executing things. He 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 77 
 
 became the permanent chairman of the Greek 
 ways and means committee. He was the first 
 great Greek that saw life steadily and saw it 
 whole. Hebrew righteousness was not his nor 
 the Christian ideal of service to others. But he 
 had in him the stuff on which efficient righteous- 
 ness must build. Every year of his wandering 
 deprived him of friends and helpers till at last he 
 fronted the world naked and alone. But neither 
 gods nor men nor sirens could unsphere him. 
 His resourcefulness was not only unfailing but 
 cumulative, and the goal that beckoned him on — 
 the thought of wife and son — invests him with 
 a human interest far beyond that of the mere 
 fighter. 
 
 It is no wonder that this heroic figure helped to 
 mould the character and institutions of Greece. 
 He was the Great Stone Face to which young and 
 old, artists and statesmen, looked for inspiration. 
 His strength prophesied greater strength, his 
 wisdom deeper wisdom, his victories a nation's 
 victories. To read the Odyssey is to read Greek 
 history in prophecy, and human nature in sum- 
 mary. All that he did has become represen- 
 tative and has wrought itself into world-speech. 
 "The lotus-eaters," "the Cyclops," "the bag of 
 
78 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 winds," "Circe's enchantments," "the Sirens' 
 island," "Scylla and Charybdis," "Phaeacian hos- 
 pitality," "the bow of Ulysses" — these have 
 become channels of universal thought. The 
 wandering Jew became a rover because he had 
 violated a divine law, Ulysses is a world-traveller 
 because he represents an eternal quest, of the 
 human spirit. 
 
 2. King Arthur is not a wanderer — he is not 
 a person at all. He is a cause, re-shaped by every 
 century to meet its own needs. All through the 
 Middle Ages poets and prose writers vied with one 
 another in exalting Alexander the Great, Charle- 
 magne, and King Arthur. About each of these 
 names there gathered vast story-cycles. After 
 the Crusades, however, the desire was felt for a 
 character that would express in a popular way 
 the knightly ideals of Christian chivalry. Alex- 
 ander the Great was too purely pagan for this 
 service, and Charlemagne's career was too well 
 known. By a kind of spiritual instinct the poets 
 and romancers of Christendom seemed to unite 
 upon King Arthur. Not much was known about 
 him. If he ever lived he was a Welshman, not 
 an Englishman. The tradition is that he fought 
 a losing fight against the incoming Saxons, but 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 79 
 
 about the year 520 A. D. gained a notable victory. 
 Peace followed, then insurrection, then the defeat 
 and death of the King. 
 
 The English-speaking world owes its knowledge 
 of King Arthur to Sir Thomas Malory, an English 
 knight, who prepared a prose edition of these 
 stories in 1469. It was called Morte d* Arthur 
 {The Death of Arthur), and was printed by the 
 first English printer, William Caxton, in 1485. 
 Caxton disliked the title and added in his quaint 
 English: "Thus endeth this noble and joyous 
 book, entitled Le Morte d' Arthur, notwithstanding 
 it treateth of the birth, life, and acts of the said 
 King Arthur, of his noble knights of the Round 
 Table, their marvellous enterprises and advent- 
 ures, the achieving of the Holy Grail, and, in the 
 end, the dolorous death and departing out of this 
 world of them all." Numerous re-shapings of 
 Malory's material have appeared since 1485', 
 some in drama, some in opera, some in short story, 
 some in epic poetry, some in lyric poetry. The 
 best known is Tennyson's Idylls of the King. 
 Tennyson's contribution to the legends was not a 
 clearer portrait of the King but a more modern 
 interpretation of knightly duty. Arthur was 
 made the mouthpiece of the new ideals, but he 
 
So WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 remains a trifle cold and impersonal. In fact the 
 character of the King still waits its adjustment 
 to modern needs. His tomb at Glastonbury 
 contains the words, "Here lies King Arthur, 
 a King that was, a King that shall be." His real 
 coronation will come later. He may be made to 
 sum up a past, to interpret a present, or to hint a 
 future. His last battle may be transferred to 
 alien soils, but if he comes into his own he will 
 typify, I think, the immortality of lost causes 
 when faith and honour are not lost. This was the 
 idea that was stirring dimly in Malory's imagina- 
 tion when he named his book not The Life but 
 The Death of King Arthur. In other words, the 
 King's last battle was a victorious defeat. 
 
 3. King Arthur and Beatrice are both of the 
 Middle Ages, but there the resemblance ends. 
 King Arthur represents a conception only partly 
 worked out, Beatrice an ideal completely worked 
 out. King Arthur belongs to no author, but if 
 Dante be taken literally, Beatrice inspired him 
 no less than he immortalized her. The close- 
 ness and spiritual beauty of the relationship 
 between the two find no parallel in literature. 
 Boccaccio, who, as a little boy, may have seen 
 the great poet, tells us that Dante ^ first met 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 81 
 
 Beatrice at a May festival in the year 1274. 
 "From that time forward" says Dante, "love 
 quite governed my soul. . . . And here it is 
 fitting for me to depart a little from this present 
 matter, that it may be rightly understood of what 
 surpassing virtue her salutation was to me. To 
 the which end I say that when she appeared in any 
 place, it seemed to me, by the grace of her excellent 
 salutation, that no man was my enemy any longer; 
 and such warmth of charity ^came upon me that 
 most certainly in that moment I would have 
 pardoned whosoever had done me an injury; and 
 if one should then have questioned me concerning 
 any matter, I could only have said unto him 
 'Love,' with a countenance clothed in humble- 
 ness." He bids farewell to her in Paradise in 
 these words: 
 
 O lady! thou in whom my hopes have rest, 
 Who, for my safety, didst not scorn to leave 
 In Hell the traces of thy footsteps marked, — 
 For all mine eyes have seen I to thy power 
 And goodness, virtue owe and grace. From slave 
 Thou hast to freedom brought me, and no means, 
 For my deliverance apt, hast left untried. 
 Thy liberal graciousness still to me keep, 
 That, when my spirit, which thou madest whole, 
 Is loosened from this body, it may find 
 Favour with thee. 
 
82 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 Between the meeting and the farewell lie the 
 beginning and the end of Dante's life work. 
 She was the inspiration both of The New Life 
 and of The Divine Comedy. It was at Beatrice's 
 request that Virgil, who represents reason, guided 
 Dante through Hell and Purgatory as far as 
 unaided reason could lead, and it was Beatrice 
 herself that led him through Paradise. The chief 
 difference between the punishments in Hell and in 
 Purgatory is that in Hell they are accompanied by 
 loud outcries and blasphemies, while in Purgatory 
 the sufferers sing the sweet old hymns of hope and 
 praise. In the highest circle of Paradise is the 
 Virgin Mary, in the second circle Eve, in the third 
 Rachel with Beatrice. Longfellow, in his beautiful 
 sonnet on the Divina Commedia, the "mediaeval 
 miracle of song," whose lines 
 
 Are footpaths for the thought of Italy, 
 
 compares Dante's work to a dim, restful cathedral: 
 
 So, as I enter here from day to day 
 
 And leave my burden at this minster gate, 
 
 Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray, 
 
 The tumult of the time disconsolate 
 
 To inarticulate murmurs dies away, 
 
 While the eternal ages watch and wait. 
 
 But the most radiant figure in the great cathe- 
 dral, as in the life of its builder, is Beatrice Por- 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 83 
 
 tinari. She is still the most spiritual presence in 
 the world's picture-gallery, the incarnation of that 
 romantic conception of ideal love that etherealized 
 and ennobled the aspirations of the Middle Ages. 
 
 4. The variety of creative achievement that 
 world-fiction presents could hardly be better shown 
 than in the contrast between Beatrice and Don 
 Quixote. The latter, however, is as safely im- 
 mortal as the former. If Beatrice sums up the 
 ideals of the Middle Ages, Don Quixote announces 
 the passing of the Middle Ages and the coming 
 of our own time. If in Ulysses we study a race, 
 in Don Quixote we study an institution. If King 
 Arthur stands for chivalry in flower, Don Quixote 
 stands for its decline and fall. Cervantes published 
 the first part of Don Quixote in 1605, the second 
 part in 161 5. His purpose was "to render ab- 
 horred of men the false and absurd stories con- 
 tained in books of chivalry." Not the spirit of 
 chivalry but the perversion of that spirit was the 
 point of attack with Cervantes. 
 
 Don Quixote himself is one of the most lovable 
 men in fiction. He is gentle, true, brave, pure, 
 and considerate of others. But he is a mono- 
 maniac. "At last," says Cervantes, "he gave 
 himself up so wholly to the reading of romances 
 
84 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 that at night he would pore over them until it was 
 day, and by day he would read on until it was 
 night. Thus by sleeping little and reading much, 
 the moisture of his brain was exhausted to that 
 extent that at last he lost the use of his reason. 
 A world of disorderly notions, picked out of his 
 books, crowded into his imagination, and now his 
 head was full of nothing but enchantments, 
 quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, complaints, 
 amours, tournaments, and abundance of stuff 
 and impossibilities, insomuch that all the fables 
 and fantastical tales which he read seemed to him 
 as true as the most authentic histories. 
 Having thus lost his understanding, he unluckily 
 stumbled upon the oddest fancy that ever entered 
 unto a madman's brain; for now he thought it 
 proper and necessary, as well for the increase 
 of his own honour as for the service of the public, 
 to turn knight-errant and roam through the 
 whole world, armed cap-a-pie and mounted on his 
 steed, in quest of adventures." 
 
 After many years spent with his squire, Sancho 
 Panza, in foolish contests with windmills, inn- 
 keepers, funeral processions, goat-herds, lions, 
 prisoners, and what not, he falls sick and shortly 
 before death recovers his reason. In the last 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 85 
 
 chapter he is made to say: "My judgment is 
 now free and clear, and themurky clouds of igno- 
 rance are dissipated which my continual reading 
 of those detestable books of knight-errantry cast 
 over me. Now I perceive their nonsense and 
 deceit and am only sorry the discovery happens 
 so late, when I lack time to make amends by read- 
 ing others that might enlighten my soul. I find, 
 niece, that I am at the point of death and I would 
 meet it in such a manner as to show that my life 
 has not been so evil as to leave me the reputation 
 of a madman. ... I am now an enemy to 
 Amadis de Gaul* and all the endless crowd of his 
 descendants. All the profane stories of knight- 
 errantry are hateful to me. I have a sense of my 
 folly and the danger I have run by reading them. 
 And now, through heaven's mercy and my own 
 experience, I abhor them." 
 
 The government of Spain had long considered 
 the propriety of burning all knight-errantry 
 romances, but after the appearance of Don Quixote 
 no others were published. The book attained a 
 popularity unequalled by any other book up to 
 that time. Its hero and his squire represent two 
 
 * When Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, the chivalric adventures of Amadis 
 de Gaul had been spun out to a length of fifty volumes. 
 
86 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 unchanging types of character. Don Quixote 
 is the man of imagination without common sense, 
 while Sancho Panza is the man of common sense 
 without imagination. Never before had these two 
 types been so appealingly portrayed. To read 
 between the lines in this book is to understand the 
 old conflict of the impossible-sublime with the 
 commonplace-possible and to feel anew the pity 
 and the pathos of one-sidedness. 
 
 No one knows when Cervantes was born, but 
 he and Shakespeare both died on April 23, 1616. 
 Cervantes lives chiefly by one character, Shake- 
 speare by so many that it is difficult to make 
 choice. Two, however, stand out above the rest: 
 F«JstafT and Hamlet. Brunetiere declared a few 
 years ago that great creative writers usually por- 
 tray one or more "sympathetic characters," the 
 sympathetic character being the character that 
 best represents the author's own point of view. 
 Falstaff and Hamlet, he thought, were the two 
 characters with whom, whether consciously or not, 
 the dramatist was most in sympathy. This is 
 an interesting theory, though for myself I should 
 name Hamlet and Prospero* as the two most 
 Shakespearean characters. ' Falstaff and Hamlet, 
 
 *See Shakespeare's Tempest. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 87 
 
 however, are undoubtedly the best illustrations 
 of Shakespeare's range. They are illustrations also 
 of the wealth of material that the student of human 
 nature may find in fiction. 
 
 5. Falstaff and Don Quixote have often been 
 bracketed together as the most laughter-provoking 
 characters in modern literature. So they are, 
 doubtless, but with a difference. Cervantes him- 
 self does not seem to me a humourist at heart. 
 I think of him as one who remembered easily and 
 used aptly all the good stories that he had heard, 
 but I do not believe that he could create humour 
 at will. He could combine and adapt with effort- 
 less facility, but creation [s something essen- 
 tially different. Certainly Don Quixote is not at 
 bottom a humourist; he is funny only when under 
 the mad obsession of an outworn institution. In 
 his normal stay-at-home moods he is at the utmost 
 remove from humour or wit or brilliancy of *any 
 kind. He is not a complex character at all. But 
 Falstaff is more complex than Hamlet. He has 
 about him the suggestion of a gentleman and the 
 instincts of a scholar, but when his hair is white 
 he is the leader of a crew of ignorant and lawless 
 tavern roisterers. His very essence, however, 
 is humorous vivacity. He does not suggest 
 
88 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 repetitions or adaptations: he can create humour 
 at any time, in any society, at any crisis. "If 
 anybody," says Walter Bagehot, "could have any 
 doubt about the liveliness of Shakespeare, let 
 them consider the character of Falstaff. When 
 a man has created that without a capacity for 
 laughter, then a blind man may succeed in de- 
 scribing colours. Intense anuria]^ spirits, are the 
 single sentiment (if they be a sentiment) of the 
 entire character. If most men were to save up ah 
 the gaiety of their whole lives, it would come about 
 to the gaiety of one speech in Falstaff. A morose 
 man might have amassed mary jokes, might have 
 observed many details of jovial society, might 
 have conceived a Sir John, marked by rotundity 
 of body, but could hardly have imagined what we 
 call his rotundity of mind. We mean that the 
 animal spirits of Falstaff give him an easy, vague, 
 diffusive sagacity which is peculiar to him." 
 
 And yet, singularly enough, the word honour 
 unites and explains the diverse careers and char- 
 acters of Don Quixote and Falstaff. Don Quixote 
 sees life through the convex mirror of an utterly 
 fantastic sense of honour. This and this alone 
 makes him funny. Falstaff is funny because he 
 believes and practises the theory that there is 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 89 
 
 no such thing as honour. "Can honour set-to 
 a leg?" he asks. "No. Or an arm? No. Or take 
 away the grief of a wound ? No. Honour hath no 
 skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A 
 word. What is in that word honour? What is that 
 honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? 
 He that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? 
 No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible, 
 then. Yea, to the dead But will it not live 
 with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not 
 suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honour is a 
 mere scutcheon: and so ends my catechism." 
 
 Falstaff' s creed, in other words, is the creed of 
 the five senses. Beyond them he sees nothing in 
 life and practises nothing in conduct. He is not 
 only an out-and-out materialist but denies defiantly 
 the existence of the moral law. Against it he 
 levels all the batteries of his wit, but the moral 
 law wins out in the end. In spite of the fascina- 
 tion which Falstaff exercises over those whom he 
 meets, he fails utterly with Henry V as soon as 
 responsibility has developed in the young monarch 
 a real sense of honour. Their meeting is now the 
 meeting of opposites and the result is inevitable. 
 Henry V does not so much throw off Falstaff as 
 rise beyond his reach. And yet Falstaff con- 
 
9 o WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 tributes something worth while to morality as well 
 as to humour. He looked on himself not only 
 as witty, but as "the cause that wit is in other 
 men." So he was, but he was more. "Humour," 
 says Moulton, "is an essential for a censor of mor- 
 als; no one is in a state to discuss literary moral- 
 ity unless he can lay his hand on his heart and 
 vow that he loves Shakespeare's Falstaff. " 
 
 6. We are not all Falstaffs or Don Quixotes, but 
 we are all, at times, Hamlets. Indeed the character 
 of Hamlet is far better understood to-day than 
 when Shakespeare created it. It at least ought 
 to be, for it has not lacked for students. The dis- 
 tinguishing thing about Hamlet is that he broke no 
 moral law, violated none of the Ten Command- 
 ments, but yet vastly enlarged the area of wrong- 
 doing. All the bloodshed in the play, except the 
 original crime that precedes the rise of the curtain, 
 is due to Hamlet — not to what he does but to 
 what he does not do. Hamlet takes Hood's lines, 
 
 Evil is wrought by want of thought 
 As well as want of heart, 
 
 and makes them read, 
 
 Evil is wrought by too much thought 
 As well as want of heart. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 91 
 
 And yet Hamlet is the most variously gifted 
 man that Shakespeare has portrayed. He is 
 eloquent in speech, profound in thought, a rare 
 revealer of individuality in others, a man of virtue 
 and integrity, "the glass of fashion and the mould 
 of form." He sees so deeply into things and has 
 such a gift of phrase that almost all of his utter- 
 ances pass still as current coin in the marts of the 
 world's thought. He is thirty years old, is fresh 
 from the great Protestant University of Witten- 
 berg, and eager to return. 
 
 But just here lies the special challenge of Ham- 
 let's character: out of the two hundred and forty- 
 six men and women that Shakespeare has created 
 Hamlet is the only scholar, and at the same time 
 the only character that brings about the final 
 tragedy by i nactio n. Did the great dramatist 
 mean nothing by this combination of scholarship 
 and inefficiency? Did he not mean to say that 
 he saw from the life about him that there was an 
 education that did not educate, a culture that 
 ministered to the reflective and emotional faculties 
 but, leaving the will flaccid and impotent, rendered 
 prompt action impossible? Dryden describes 
 Hamlet when he makes one of the characters in 
 The Conquest of Grenada say, 
 
92 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 I scarcely understand my own intent, 
 
 But, silkworm-like, so long within have wrought 
 
 That I am lost in my own web of thought. 
 
 Men of this type — and they are usually teachers, 
 writers, bookmen, men of sedentary life — cannot 
 do because they see so many possible ways of 
 doing. It is easier to plan, to intend, to dream, 
 because mere thinking requires no fitting of 
 awkward tools: it is complete in itself. Action, 
 however, is always incomplete, always a few steps 
 behind the master, thought. We may say of Ham- 
 let what Emerson said of Thoreau: "Wherever 
 there is knowledge, wherever-there is virtue, wher- 
 ever there is beauty, he will find a home." But 
 wherever there is the body of action as well as 
 the wing of thought, wherever life is viewed not 
 as a problem to be forever probed but as a duty 
 to be instantly done, there will Hamlet be for- 
 ever barred. 
 
 7. It used to be thought that Hamlet was in- 
 tended only for mature minds, Robinson Crusoe 
 only for immature. But both make their appeal 
 to young and old alike, for both are revelations of 
 life, and life is a continuous process, Robinson Cru- 
 soe was written by Daniel Defoe in 17 19, and 
 is now the most popular boy book in literature. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 93 
 
 Coleridge once said that "the three most perfect 
 plots ever planned" were the CEdipus Tyrannus 
 by Sophocles, The Alchemist by Ben Jonson, and 
 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. In modern 
 literature the three most suggestive situations 
 seem to me Robinson Crusoe, Faust, and The 
 Leather stocking Tales. There is little or no plot 
 in any of these. The interest is in the leading 
 character, who is placed in a situation that appeals 
 powerfully.to our interest in human nature. 
 
 Robinson Crusoe is the story of a man who has 
 to start life over again without the help of social 
 institutions, civil institutions, educational institu- 
 tions, industrial institutions, or institutions of any 
 kind. He falls back and • down through the 
 centuries till he finds himself face to face with 
 nature. He has to fight for bare existence. He 
 is Adam without an Eve for a helpmeet or a garden 
 ready made to his hand. Can a man live under 
 these conditions? If so, what can he get out of 
 life? Ulysses found himself for a short time in 
 a similar plight, but he was aided by gods and 
 goddesses. Robinson, it is true, saves a few things 
 from the wreck, but not enough to alter the 
 problem. He is still individualism battling with- 
 out the aid of institutionalism. Rousseau was so 
 
94 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 impressed by the educative qualities of Robinson 
 Crusoe that he thought boys should read no other 
 book till they were fourteen years of age. No one, 
 he contended, could be a useful member of society 
 or cooperate helpfully with others until by devel- 
 oping his own individuality he had learned to 
 stand alone. Hence, "Emile" — he is Rousseau's 
 model pupil — "exacts nothing from others and 
 never thinks of owing anything to them. He 
 is alone in human society and depends solely on 
 himself." 
 
 Education, however, does not mean isolation. It 
 does not mean self-development away from society. 
 Education ought to make a man good company for 
 himself, but it ought also to relate him to the best 
 company anywhere. Huxley's ideal is the right 
 one: "Since each child is a member of a social and 
 political organization of great complexity, and has, 
 in future, to fit himself into that organization or 
 be crushed by it, it is needful not only that boys 
 and girls should be made acquainted with the ele- 
 mentary laws of conduct, but that their affections 
 should be trained so as to love with all their hearts 
 that conduct which tends to the attainment of 
 the highest good for themselves and their fellow- 
 men, and to hate with all their hearts that opposite 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 95 
 
 course of action which is fraught with evil." 
 Robinson had no opportunity to shape his conduct 
 with regard to others. There were no others, 
 
 ut he remains none the less one of the great 
 figures in the world's fiction. He is a constant 
 reminder that we underrate what we can do for 
 ourselves and overrate what others can do for us. 
 Every chapter in Robinson Crusoe is and has been 
 for nearly two hundred years a challenge to 
 courage, to initiative, to self-reliance, to self- 
 development — in a word, to constructive individ- 
 ualism. Many, imitations of Defoe's book have 
 been published, but not one of them has stated the 
 problem so well or illustrated it so convincingly. 
 
 8. The situation in Goethe's Faust is entirely 
 different except that in both books the two heroes 
 are subjected to a long and severe testing and come 
 out of it victoriously. Goethe's masterpiece marks 
 not only thejiighest reach of its author's genius but 
 the highest reach of modern thought about human 
 nature. The situation, however, and the problem 
 presented are simple enough for any child to under- 
 stand. Faust is a scholar and investigator who 
 cannot find satisfaction for his spirit. His ideals 
 of happiness and attainment are far beyond what 
 he has been able to achieve. At last he enters 
 
96 what can literature do for me 
 
 into a contract with Satan. "Take me in charge," 
 
 he says, " and tempt me with all the pleasures of 
 
 mind and body at your disposal. If you can 
 
 satisfy my innate desires, if you can make me say 
 
 to any passing moment, 'Stay, thou art so fair,' 
 
 then bind my soul in your bonds" Hamlet's 
 
 testing, after receiving the message from the 
 
 ghost, extended through two and a half months; 
 
 Robinson Crusoe remained on his lonely island 
 
 twenty-seven years; Faust journeys with Satan 
 
 for fifty years. "The little world and then the 
 
 great we'll see," Satan had said. During this 
 
 time he enjoys every delight that his imagination 
 
 craves — banquetings, revellings, woman's love, 
 
 the revelations of magic, comradeship with nature, 
 
 the achievements of intellect, and the witchery 
 
 of all forms of beauty. But in every experience 
 
 Faust is either disgusted or in the moment of 
 
 enjoyment feels the call to something higher. 
 
 He might well have said, as Tennyson makes 
 
 Ulysses say: 
 
 Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough 
 Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades 
 Forever and forever when I move. 
 
 But broadened and ennobled by his struggles, 
 Faust enters at last upon the joy of serving 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 07 
 
 others. Though blind and a hundred years old, 
 the climbing mood is still dominant within him. 
 Having obtained a bit of seashore, he redeems it 
 from the waves and colonizes it with happy la- 
 bourers. He had begun this work merely to 
 exhibit the victory of mind over nature. But 
 as it progresses he is conscious of a happiness 
 unknown before. His spirit glows at the thought 
 of the good that he is doing and of the millions 
 who in after ages will labour fruitfully and grate- 
 fully on the land that he has rescued. He has 
 passed from the ideal of Longfellow's Excelsior to — 
 the ideal of Lanier's Song of the Chattahoochee. If 
 he could only look down the ages and see this free 
 people on a free soil, he would be willing to say 
 to the moment, "Stay, thou art so fair." But the 
 time will come 
 
 And in sure prospect of such lofty bliss, 
 I now enjoy the highest moment — this ! 
 
 He falls dead, Satan orders his minions to seize 
 
 the ascending soul, but the angels bear it aloft 
 
 singing: 
 
 The noble spirit now is free 
 And saved from evil scheming. 
 Whoe'er aspires unweariedly 
 Is not beyond redeeming. 
 
o8 what can literature do for me 
 
 And if he feels the grace of love 
 That from on high is given, 
 The blessed hosts that wait above 
 Shall welcome him to heaven. 
 
 "In these lines," said Goethe, "the key to 
 Faust's rescue may be found — in Faust himself 
 an ever higher and purer form of activity to the 
 end, and the eternal love coming down to his aid 
 from above. This is entirely in harmony with 
 our religious ideas, according to which we are 
 saved not by our own strength alone but by and 
 through the freely bestowed grace of God." 
 
 In the old Faust legends the compact was that 
 Faust should have whatever he desired for twenty 
 years and then surrender body and soul to Satan. 
 What a wealth of spiritual truth and stimulating 
 idealism Goethe has poured into the old mould of 
 the fable! There was no invisible goal in the old 
 legend. The reader or spectator knew in advance 
 what was coming. He had only to wait in shud- 
 dering awe till at the end of twenty years the 
 Devil claimed his own. But in Goethe's hands 
 the story becomes a new gospel. Mankind is 
 Faust. Satan is a spirit that "always wills the 
 bad and always works the good." What an 
 illuminating thought that is! Many solutions 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 99 
 
 of the problem were possible. Faust might have 
 said "Stay" (1) to some moment of physical 
 pleasure, (2) to some moment of intellectual 
 achievement, (3) to some moment of artistic 
 enjoyment, or (4) to some moment of victory for 
 others. He said "Stay" to none of these. His 
 ideal was still in the ascendant. He said "Stay" 
 not to a present moment but to a moment of 
 unselfish achievement yet to be. Tennyson at- 
 tempted to characterize Goethe's work in these 
 lines: 
 
 I held it truth, with him who sings 
 To one clear harp in divers tones, 
 That men may rise on stepping-stones 
 Of their dead selves to higher things. 
 
 A better summary would be: 
 
 Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
 Or what's a heaven for? 
 
 9. Faust is the best known character that Ger- 
 man literature has produced, and Leatherstocking 
 is the best known character that American litera- 
 ture has produced.* Both are types, the one of life 
 
 * American literature has produced only a few characters well known 
 beyond our own borders. The best known seem to me Washington Irving's 
 Rip Van Winkle, Cooper's Leatherstocking, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle 
 Tom, Harris's Uncle Remus, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Tom 
 Sawyer. Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard is more a piece of practical 
 advice than a bit of human nature. 
 
ioo WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 in its universal aspects, the other of life in its ele- 
 mental aspects. If Faust found his highest pleasure 
 in making a " clearing" for coming generations to 
 colonize, it is well to remember that this was 
 Leatherstocking's life work. If Faust stands more 
 distinctively for the spirit of idealism^that has 
 made Germany what it is, Leatherstocking stands 
 for the pioneer spirit, and the pioneer spirit has 
 done more than anything else to make our country 
 what it is. Cooper used to say: "If anything 
 from the pen of the author is at all to outlive him- 
 self, it is unquestionably the series of The Leather- 
 stocking Tales." He called these stories — The 
 Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Path- 
 finder, The Pioneers, and The Prairie — "a drama 
 in five acts." And so they are — the greatest 
 drama that America has to show. They drama- 
 tize the westward movement of American civiliza- 
 tion and cover the years from 1743 to 1804. These 
 sixty years were the romantic period of American 
 history, and Cooper has made them a part of the 
 inspirational heritage not only of the American 
 people but of all civilized people. "He has earned 
 a fame wider, I think," said William Cullen 
 Bryant, "than any author of modern times; 
 certainly than any author of any age ever enjoyed 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME ioi 
 
 in his lifetime." Time has confirmed this judg- 
 ment. There is now no geographical frontier on 
 our map and therefore no leatherstockinged 
 pioneer. The geographical frontier ceased to be 
 in 1890. But there were never so many frontiers 
 of thought or of national effort. A geographical 
 meridian has become an intellectual meridian and 
 Cooper's pioneer has become the type of those 
 elemental qualities that give distinctive promise 
 to American history. 
 
 All this is summed up in the single character 
 of Leatherstocking. "I am not sure," said Balzac, 
 "if the entire work of Walter Scott furnishes a 
 creation as noble [grandiose] as this hero of the 
 plains and forests." Thackeray was of the same 
 opinion. Compare Leatherstocking with other 
 characters standing on national horizons. If the 
 Greeks had followed lap the actual trail of Ulysses 
 and colonized in his wake, he would be to Greek 
 history what Leatherstocking is to our history. 
 If England had moved over to Trinidad and built 
 upon Robinson Crusoe's foundations, he would 
 have been the English prototype of Leatherstock- 
 ing. If Robin Hood had been less of a buccaneer 
 and had not owed his popularity (as Dowden 
 reminds us) to the fact that he was "the reputed 
 
102 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 Earl of Huntingdon," he would bear democratic 
 comparison with Leatherstocking. If Scott's 
 border-chieftains had seen life through a some- 
 what wider angle, if they had looked upon border- 
 lines as something more than petty battle-lines 
 of inherited enmities, they too would have been 
 predecessors of Leatherstocking. But Scott's 
 border-line points backward, Cooper's forward. 
 The significance of Leatherstocking will increase 
 in exact proportion as America increases. He 
 reproduces the past, but he belongs to the future. 
 
 10. Leatherstocking can be identified in part 
 at least with Daniel Boone. Our next character, 
 Browning's Pippa, is a pure product of the imagi- 
 nation. "Mr. Browning," says Mrs. Orr, "was 
 walking alone in a wood near Dulwich, when the 
 image flashed upon him of some one walking thus 
 alone through life, one apparently too obscure 
 to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising 
 a lasting though unconscious influence at every 
 step of it; and the image shaped itself into the 
 little silk-winder of Asolo, Felippa or Pippa." 
 This is the motive, the unconscious influence of 
 good over evil, that gives unity to Pippa Passes, 
 but Pippa herself is more, far more, than the 
 embodiment of this one idea. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 103 
 
 It is New Year's day and Pippa springing out 
 of bed determines to spend her one holiday in the 
 year singing through the streets, as if she were in 
 turn "the happiest four in our Asolo. " But these 
 happiest four are, at the moment Pippa passes, 
 the four most miserable or perplexed in Asolo. 
 Her four joyous songs, sung at morning, noon, 
 evening, and night, find "the happiest four" at 
 the critical moment of their lives — find them and 
 save them. This is the framework of a little 
 drama as perfect in its symmetry as it is beautiful 
 in its unfolding. Notice, if you have not, that in 
 every case Pippa's songs are not merely external 
 influences. They blend with the better nature, 
 already half awakened, of the person that hears 
 them. They are not causative but cooperative. 
 They are like the ghosts and dreams in Shakes- 
 peare: they do not compel action, they only help 
 it to crystallize. No one can read this poem with- 
 out realizing more deeply the radiating and trans- 
 forming power of mere joyousness. Joy like 
 Pippa's is as good as goodness and more contag- 
 ious. No one can read it without realizing, too, 
 the influence in his life — in all life — of certain 
 significant, tidal, malleable moments v In these 
 moments the thoughts and feelings and tendencies 
 
io 4 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 of years seem suddenly to mature. The best 
 introduction to Pippa Passes is found in Emerson's 
 Over-Soul: "There is a vast difference between 
 one and another hour of life in their authority and 
 subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; 
 our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those 
 brief moments which constrains us to ascribe 
 mor p reality to them than to all other experiences. 
 For this reason the argument which is always 
 forthcoming to silence those who conceive extra- 
 ordinary hopes of man, namely, the appeal to 
 experience, is forever invalid and vain. A might- 
 ier hope abolishes despair. We give up the past 
 to the objector, and yet we hope. He must 
 explain this hope." Pippa Passes is the drama- 
 tization of the tidal moment, and Pippa is the 
 little alchemist who transmutes the metal of the 
 moment into gold. 
 
 1 1 . Pippa is the least complex and Becky Sharp 
 the most complex character that we have to con- 
 sider. Indeed Thackeray intended Vanity Fair as 
 a protest against the novels, and Becky Sharp as 
 a protest against the heroines, that could be con- 
 ventionally classed. To know her is not to under- 
 stand her, but it is to understand phases of society 
 that had never before been so subtly probed. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 105 
 
 "Vanity Fair" said Lord Rosebery recently, " is 
 the most full and various novel in the English 
 language," and Becky Sharp gives it both its ful- 
 ness and its variety. You do not know what she 
 is going to do next, and Thackeray confessed that 
 he did not know what she had already done. But 
 you do know that she is a touchstone by which 
 the other characters of Vanity Fair are tested. 
 With all her duplicity she is the best mirror that 
 Thackeray ever held up to English society .'^Tf 
 the modern novel, as Walter Besant said, is "the 
 only way in which people can learn what other men 
 and women are like/jthe world owes a debt to 
 Vanity Fair and to its unheroic heroine, Becky 
 Sharp. The proportion and completeness of her 
 portrayal were a revelation in 1848 and are a 
 revelation still. What I want, " wrote Thackeray 
 to his mother, "is to make a set of people living 
 without God in the world (only that is a cant 
 phrase), greedy, pompous men, perfectly self- 
 satisfied for the most part, and at ease about 
 their superior virtue." Near the beginning of 
 the story he writes: "And this I set down 
 as a positive truth: ^a woman with fair oppor- 
 tunities, and without an absolute hump, may 
 marry whom she likes." On Becky Sharp falls 
 
106 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 the responsibility of illustrating this questionable 
 foreword. 
 
 False, selfish, cunning, and covetous but always 
 successful, Becky Sharp plays her role consistently 
 to the end. "There are women," says Trollope, 
 "to whom nothing is nasty, either in person, 
 language, scenes, actions, or principle, and Becky 
 is one of them; and yet she is herself attractive. 
 A most wonderful sketch, for the perpetration of 
 which all Thackeray's power of combined indigna- 
 tion and humour was necessary." But it was not 
 indignation and humour that made Becky Sharp. 
 It was rather the revolt from the sentimental fiction 
 of the day. It was the determination to_rjaintJ]fe 
 as it occasionally was and is rather than as it might 
 be or ought to be. Thackeray's sympathy was not 
 with but for this unheroic heroine. Taine was right 
 in calling him above all a moralist. He does not 
 confuse good and bad in man or woman. There 
 is a large tolerance for all, and for none more than 
 for Becky Sharp. The best explanation of our in- 
 terest in her is not that given by Trollope. It is 
 given by Browning in Bishop BlougratrCs Apology: 
 
 You see lads walk the street 
 Sixty the minute; what's to note in that? 
 You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack; 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 107 
 
 Him you must watch — he's sure to fall, yet stands! 
 
 Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things, 
 
 The honest thief, the tender murderer, 
 
 The superstitious atheist, demirep 
 
 That loves and saves her soul in new French books — 
 
 We watch while these in equilibrium keep 
 
 The giddy line midway: one step aside, 
 
 They're classed and done with. 
 
 Becky Sharp and all of her kind keep 
 
 The giddy line midway: one step aside, 
 They're classed and done with. 
 
 12. Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, and Silas 
 Marner are all historical novels in the new sense 
 of the term. They do not introduce great histori- 
 cal characters, but they are transcripts of English 
 life at definite periods and in definite places. 
 The historians of the future may well turn to them 
 for local colour, for accurate details, and for a 
 knowledge of how the men and women of the time 
 really lived. But David Copperfield has an added 
 interest: it is in part an autobiography. In an 
 after-dinner speech Dickens once made an affect- 
 ing plea for four kinds of children: "the dear 
 child you love, the dearer child you have lost, 
 the child you might have had, the child you cer- 
 tainly have been." David Copperfield is the story 
 
io8 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 of the child that Charles Dickens certainly had 
 been. Thackeray could never be prevailed upon 
 to say which of his own characters was his favorite, 
 but Dickens had his answer ready: "It will be 
 easily believed that I am a fond parent of every 
 child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love 
 that family as dearly as I love them. But, like 
 many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts 
 a favorite child, and his name is David Copper- 
 field." When he was within three pages of the 
 end, he wrote to John Forster, his future biog- 
 rapher: "Oh, my dear Forster, if I were to say 
 half of what Copperfield makes me feel to-night, 
 how strangely even to you I should be turned 
 inside out! I seem to be sending some part of 
 myself into the Shadowy World. " 
 
 But David Copperfield is more than Charles 
 Dickens. He is every normal boy and youth. 
 The warm mother-love, the quaint old servant, 
 the solitude of childhood, the significance of 
 joyousness in child life, the incisiveness of youth- 
 ful sorrows, the susceptibility to hero-worship, 
 the readiness for impulsive attachments,- the 
 ambition to be a man and to do a man's work, the 
 memory of the first applause — these things 
 belong not only to the autobiography of Dickens 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 109 
 
 but to the biography of universal childhood. 
 The autobiographical facts are only the materials 
 for larger interpretative treatment. "It is to 
 the wisdom of that running comment which 
 Dickens makes upon them," says Peter Bayne, 
 "that they owe their best value." 
 
 As an I-novel David Copperfield has often been 
 classed with Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson 
 Crusoe. But the last two are not novels proper. 
 They are stories, moreover, of manhood. David 
 Copperfield begins: "Whether I shall turn out 
 to be the hero of rny own life, or whether that 
 station will be held by anybody else, these pages 
 must show. To begin my life with the beginning 
 of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been 
 informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock 
 at night. It was remarked that the clock began 
 to strike and I began to cry, simultaneously." 
 It ends : "My lamp burns low, and I have written 
 far into the night, but the dear presence, without 
 which I were nothing, bears me company. Oh, 
 Agnes, Oh, my soul! so may thy face be by me 
 when I close my life indeed; so may I, when 
 realities are melting from me like the shadows 
 which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, 
 pointing upward!" David Copperfield, in other 
 
no WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 words, is the only I-novel that begins with infancy, 
 carries you without serious break to early man- 
 hood, impresses you on every page with a sense 
 of unmistakable reality, and makes you feel that 
 you are reading your own life in its normal and 
 essential emotions. It is the great I-novel in 
 which "I" stands for the fiyiiversal element 
 in every reader. "~7 
 
 13. Some literary statistician has figured out 
 that David Copperfield contains 340,000 words, Silas 
 Marner 75,000. A first reading of the two books 
 would leave the impression that the difference in 
 length was even greater. Silas Marner is a tale 
 or extended short story rather than a novel, its 
 symmetry and unity of structure making it appear 
 even shorter than it is. Unity of structure, how- 
 ever, and even sameness of theme, are character- 
 istic of all George Eliot's novels. The theme that 
 she prefers to treat has been well phrased by 
 Sidney Lanier. It is "that of a hungering life, 
 at first balked by adverse circumstances, wasting 
 itself on something unworthy — often from pure 
 ignorance as to where anything nobler is to be 
 found — but after struggling, finally finding better 
 and larger life and love." This outline fits per- 
 fectly the story of Silas Marner, but George Eliot 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME in 
 
 has expressed her purpose in the story still more 
 concisely: she intended it to emphasize "the 
 remedial influences of pure, natural human rela- 
 tions," and she placed upon the title-page these 
 lines from Wordsworth : 
 
 A child, more than all other gifts 
 That earth can offer to declining man, 
 Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts. 
 
 For fifteen years Silas Marner, the weaver of 
 Raveloe, worshipped the gold coins that he had 
 painfully amassed. For fifteen years he had been 
 growing less and less human and more and more 
 miserly and money-mad. People meant nothing 
 to him. His all was the gold heap in the hole 
 underneath the brick floor, by the side of his 
 loom. Then came the robbery. "He put his 
 trembling hands to his head and gave a wild 
 ringing scream f " The hole was empty. New 
 Year's Eve came and "Turning toward the 
 hearth, where the two logs had fallen apart, and 
 sent forth only a red uncertain glimmer, Silas 
 seated himself on his fireside chair, and was 
 stooping to push his logs together, when, to his 
 blurred vision, it seemed as if there were gold in 
 the floor in front of the hearth. Gold! — his 
 
ii2 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 own gold — brought back to him as mysteriously 
 as it had been taken away! He felt his heart 
 begin to beat violently, and for a few moments 
 he was unable to stretch out his hands and grasp 
 the restored treasure. The heap of gold seemed to 
 glow and get larger beneath his agitated gaze. 
 He leaned forward at last, and stretched forth 
 his hand; but instead of the hard coin with the 
 familiar resisting outline, his fingers encountered 
 soft warm curls. In utter amazement, Silas fell 
 on his knees and bent his head low to examine the 
 marvel: it was a sleeping child — a round, fair 
 thing, with soft yellow rings all over its head. " 
 
 Now begins the slow but steady restoration of 
 Silas to the normal life. His spirit, "dried up and 
 closely furled," began to feel "the freshness of 
 the early world." A little "golden head" had 
 taken the place of gold. "The gold had kept his 
 thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to 
 nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object 
 compacted of changes and hopes that forced his 
 thoughts onward, and carried them far away from 
 their old eager pacing toward the same blank 
 limit." George Eliot's final summary joins the 
 story with those eternal processes of redemrjtion 
 that pass daily and unheeded before us, but less 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 113 
 
 unheeded now that Silas and Eppie have become 
 a part of them: "In old days there were angels 
 who came and took men by the hand and led 
 them away from the city of destruction. We see 
 no white-winged angels now. But yet men are 
 led away from threatening destruction: a hand is 
 put into theirs, which leads them forth gently 
 toward a calm and bright land, so that they look 
 no more backward; and the hand may be a little 
 child's." 
 
 14. Silas Marner is the story of a man who 
 was saved by substituting the humanizing love of 
 a little girl for the dehumanizing love of gold. 
 In much the same way two outcasts of Parisian 
 society, F antine_and Cosette , help on the reforma-, 
 tion of Jean Valjean. "A little child shall lead 
 them" might be a subtitle for both books. In 
 both books, too, it is the opportunity to minister, 
 not to be ministered to, that makes the change. 
 But Les Miserables is a vaster book than Silas 
 Marner* and Jean Valjean a vaster character 
 than the weaver of Raveloe. Never till Les 
 Miserables appeared, in 1862, had the submerged 
 classes found so powerful a representation in 
 literature, and never had their oppressors been 
 so pilloried. Their oppressors, thinks Hugo, are 
 
ii 4 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 not so much men as men-administered institutions. 
 It is these that perpetuate ignorance and misery, 
 and " So long as ignorance and misery remain upon 
 the earth, so long," says Hugo, "will books of this 
 kind be demanded. " In another eloquent passage 
 he exclaims: " Destroy the cave, Ignorance, and 
 you destroy the mole, Crime. . . . The sole 
 social evil is darkness; humanity is one, for all 
 men are of the same clay, and in this nether world 
 at least there is no difference in predestination; 
 we are the same shadow before, the same flesh 
 during, and the same ashes afterward. But 
 ignorance, mixed with the human paste, blackens 
 it, and this incurable blackness enters man and 
 becomes Evil there. " 
 
 Jean Valjean, the hero, receives the maximum 
 penalty for the minimum offence. He had 
 stolen a loaf of bread to give his starving sister 
 and her seven children. He received five years 
 in the galleys for robbery, and fourteen more for 
 trying to escape. He comes out of the galleys a 
 hardened criminal, aged forty-six. "It is sad to 
 say that after trying society, which had caused, 
 his misfortunes, he tried Providence, which had 
 made society, and condemned it also." He 
 receives his first kindness from a good Bishop, 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 115 
 
 whom he requites by stealing his silver plate. 
 When an officer hales him before the Bishop, the 
 Bishop speaks first: "Ah! there you are. I am 
 glad to see you; but I gave you the candlesticks, 
 too, which are also silver and will bring you two 
 hundred francs. Why did you not take them 
 away with the rest of the plate?" When the 
 officer had gone, the Bishop turned again to Jean 
 Valjean: "My brother, you no longer belong to 
 evil but to good. I have bought your soul of you. 
 I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit 
 of perdition, and give it to God. " 
 
 Jean Valjean is stunned, but the better nature 
 has been reached. Still, in a strange fit of absent- 
 mindedness, he takes two francs from a child and 
 then, overtaken by remorse, tries to find the little 
 fellow and restore his money. Years afterward, 
 when under a different name Jean Valjean has 
 become rich and honoured, he hears that another 
 is to be sent to the galleys for his own theft of the 
 two-franc piece. A terrible mental struggle 
 follows. This struggle, not the Battle of Water- 
 loo, is the master description in the book. He 
 reaches the place of trial just in time to have an 
 innocent man acquitted and himself condemned 
 to the galleys for life % After rescuing a sailor 
 
n6 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 from drowning, Jean Valjcan again escapes, but he 
 is a hunted man for the rest of his life. From his 
 hiding places, however, he is a ministering angel 
 to Cosette. This little outcast had been com- 
 mitted to him by her mother, Fantine, into whose 
 life he had brought the only sunlight that ever 
 penetrated there. Only at the last does he 
 receive some measure of the love that he had 
 poured out to others. "I know not what is the 
 matter with me," he said just before death, "but. 
 I see light. " 
 
 The publication of Les Miserables was an event 
 in the history of social reform. It is an unequalled 
 and unanswered indictment of the therT~existing 
 social order. It is not constructive, except in 
 that high sense in which all works are constructive 
 that discipline the faculties of moral indignation 
 and purify and enlarge the sympathies. In the 
 outcasts of earth, in the disinherited and con- 
 demned, in the lowest dregs of society, men have 
 since learned to see possible Jean Valjeans. "Is 
 there not," asks the author, "in every human soul, 
 was there not in that of Jean Valjean especially, 
 a primary spark, a divine element, incorruptible 
 in this world, and immortal for the other, which 
 good can develop, illumine, and cause to gleam 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 117 
 
 splendidly, and which evil can never entirely 
 extinguish?" To ask this question is not to 
 answer it, but, after Les Miserables, it is to see new 
 possibilities in human nature, to hold all law and 
 custom to a juster account^ and to think thoughts 
 that in themselves are not far from deeds. 
 
 15. Two qualities stand out supreme in Hugo's 
 masterpiece: flaming indignation and tender sym- 
 pathy. In Uncle Remus: His Songs and his Sayings, 
 there is only sympathy, but it is a sympathy so 
 sure in its insight, so wide in its range, so wise in 
 its expression, that it has enabled the author to 
 typify a race, and thus to perpetuate a civil- 
 ization. What Cooper did for the Indian, Joel 
 Chandler Harris has done for the negro. Just as 
 Chingachgook is the last of the Mohicans, so 
 Uncle Remus is the last of the old-time negroes. 
 In literature he is also the first* These stories, 
 moreover, reproduce a dialect so accurately that 
 it may now be studied like any other form of 
 primitive English. They brought also the folk- 
 tales of a race into literature, and thus laid the 
 foundation for the scientific study of negro folk- 
 lore. Uncle Remus himself, however, is more 
 interesting than his stories. 
 
 Twenty-eight years before the appearance of 
 
7R£ DO FOR ML 
 
 . ■ 
 
 a negro. He is the 
 
 :'jod man subjected to inhnman treat- 
 
 :.::. :'-;-; :v. v :: _.-:.-.:--._- ?'»;: .: -;.~ 
 
 negro of the oomic minstrel show, the negro of 
 
 Loflins Foster, a real interpretation. 
 
 deserved]}- popular as Foster's songs are, 
 
 - :~ : 
 nannting melody — is a vague sentimentality. 
 i_: '.:■: :.i-'.".-: - ." - : :.:: \t:.\~.t:.'^.. 
 is religious, musical, humorous, loyal, 
 -: ~ :::::. =.'.. -__ = :-*_ - :.-•.;:. ioiii":!-:. !~ ; :;\ 'it:. *„ 
 :::'.:~r.!:. :\... :• :^ — ^~: *. tvt--.:..:.? 
 fact except sentimental. Harris's portrayal, 
 :;•:-■:::-•:. :'.i~L~i i - i.v:r. n:: .: -.-;- i : -- 
 -.;-_!-. ;r. K .-- i-.z . i -11; :r. *.;.-; ::- 
 acter of an individual- Uncle Renins has also a 
 ft*rt: :!:-r.!f.:ir.:t. i : :rr..f. :;- :: :!-.*: -■;.; i>;;. -* 
 clearer the more the character is studied: in the 
 knowledge of negro life, and in the sympathy with 
 negro character shown in the po rtraya l of Lode 
 Remus, there is suggested a better method for the 
 _*.:-.' -.:' *.;.•: "--.: -- : r . z-:'z>.~ -.:. = - -_ = -. 
 be found in all the political platforms and merely 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 119 
 
 legal enactments that American statesmanship 
 has yet devised. Jean Yaljean represents a class, 
 Uncle Remus a race. The creators of both teach 
 that the understanding that comes through 
 sympathy must precede the knowledge that seeks 
 its ends through legislation. 
 
 Let us attempt now to relate these characters 
 as a whole to the problem of learning "what other 
 men and women are like. " [Tt is at least evident 
 that from Homer to the present time interest in 
 other men and women has been an absorbing 
 interest/^ Is it not evident also that a study of 
 human nature as the masters have portrayed it is 
 a means of widening and deepening our knowledge 
 of human nature? Let us see. 
 
 One reason,, wh^Fuman nature is a sealed book 
 to so man> is that their range of character-interests 
 is too limited. You cannot measure a man's knowl- 
 edge of animals by the number of animals that 
 he has seen, but by the number that he has seen 
 and is interested in. We learn not by contact, 
 but by contact plus interest. A man may spend 
 his life among trees and not know the names or 
 natures of a half-dozen of them. But if you can 
 increase his range of tree-interests you increase 
 
120 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 permanently his tree-knowledge, or at least put 
 him in the way of increasing it for himself. It is 
 so with our knowledge of our fellow-men. We 
 shut ourselves up to a few types and are blind to 
 the others, or measure the others solely by these 
 types. We have never realized the greatness, 
 the variety, or the possibilities of human nature. 
 Our lens is too contracted. What is needed is to 
 multiply our human-nature interests. Will not 
 great fiction do this for us? Is it possible to look 
 at human nature through the eyes of the great 
 character-creators and then see no more in the 
 life about us than we saw before? 
 
 (But great fiction not only broadens our range 
 of character-interests, it directs our attention to 
 the essentials of character^ As complex as human 
 nature is, the central factors are not many. Love, 
 growth, honour, sympathy, idealism, faith, forti- 
 tude, truth, tolerance, cooperation — these are the 
 fundamentals, and it is on these or their opposites 
 that the masters put the stress. Sometimes they 
 take only one great trait and build the char- 
 acter on_or around this, though usually they take 
 more. But whether one or more, it is the essen- 
 tials with which they deal. Men do not differ 
 from one another so much in the possession 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 121 
 
 of different qualities as in the relative accent that 
 they put upon the qualities that they have in 
 common. Goethe said that he never read of a 
 criminal without feeling that he might have been 
 that criminal. The same latencies were there, but 
 in Goethe these qualities were differently arranged 
 and differently stressed. Individ uality is in arrent ) 
 notmj^idlmg; and the study of great fiction is the 
 study not of character-spelling but of character- 
 accent. Our fifteen characters are as different' 
 as fifteen characters could well be, but each one 
 of them is a study in essentials. A few qualities 
 give the key, and the result is a revelation. To 
 see how needful this lesson of the essentials is, 
 ask the average man to analyze and interpret 
 the character of some one whom you both know. 
 See if he does not talk all around the character, 
 giving age, dress, colour of hair and eyes, and ending 
 with some vague generality as impersonal as air. 
 rBut great fiction not only presents character 
 in its variety and vitality, but presents it more 
 completely than we can see it in the men and 
 women about us/) Compare a biography with 
 a good novel of equal size. The biographer 
 states facts and dates, tells the things that were 
 known about the man, arranges them in chrono- 
 
122 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 logical order, perhaps makes wise comments upon 
 them. But he is working from the outside. 
 The central springs of motive and action are 
 never near the surface. The man's life, moreover, 
 was not planned to lay bare his inmost soul, and 
 the biography follows far behind the life. But in 
 the case of fictive characters the biography is the 
 life. The story is all. The character may have 
 been sketched in part from one or more characters 
 in real life, but when it is put upon the printed page, 
 it must bear its credentials with it. It must be a 
 creation that validates itself, an interpretation that 
 interprets itself. Achievements in character- 
 creation may be complex, may be hard to decipher, 
 but there is no place for fragmentariness. There 
 must be oneness and wholeness or there is no life. 
 With all the obscurity that Thackeray loved to 
 throw about Becky Sharp, we know her better than 
 we know any historical character of her time and 
 better than her own lovers knew her. She cannot 
 lie to us. We know her unspoken thoughts. 
 We know not only what others said of her to her 
 back, but what they thought of her in secret. 
 We can, in fact, never know men and women in 
 real life as we know them in fiction, because 
 in real life their Creator does not visibly direct 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 123 
 
 their actions toward a preordained end or by a 
 preordained chart. But to know even a few of 
 the great characters of fiction gives a direction 
 and wholeness to our observation of real life that 
 we can get nowhere else. There are no perfect 
 circles in nature; but to see a perfect circle, 
 though a made one, is necessary to the accu- 
 rate observation of an imperfect one. We must 
 presuppose completeness before we can measure 
 incompleteness. 
 
 Is it necessary now to answer the old question: 
 Why study human nature in books when you can 
 study it in the flesh? Why waste time on paper 
 folks when there are real folks all about you? 
 This chapter has been written to no purpose if 
 this question has not been already answered. 
 The study of human nature in books is solely to 
 the end that it may be better studied in life. \ 
 A mere book-knowledge of men and women will 
 avail little — may be permanently narrowing — 
 unless it is used as a means of seeing more in and 
 more deeply into the life about us and within us. 
 Great fiction is a laboratory course in human 
 nature.. It is to real life what botany is to flowers, 
 what astronomy is to stars, what the world of the 
 microscope and telescope is to the world of the 
 
i2 4 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 naked eye. It is not a substitute for real life, but 
 an introduction to real life. 
 
 We hear much to-day about "a shrewd knowl- 
 edge of human nature." The phrase means, 
 when men brag about it, not a knowledge of 
 human nature at all, but only a "shrewd" way 
 of dealing w r ith human nature. Literature will 
 not give this, but it will give a knowledge of 
 human nature that partakes more of wisdom than 
 of shrewdness. It will give you freedom and 
 enrichment. You will laugh with the great 
 laughers, love with the great lovers, dream with 
 the great dreamers, see with the great seers, and 
 do with the great doers. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 It Can Restore the Past to You 
 
 WHEN literature holds before us the vision 
 of the ideal, it points us to the future; 
 when it gives us a more sympathetic in- 
 sight into the men and women with whom our 
 lot is cast, it points us to the present; when it 
 restores to us the men and events long since 
 vanished, it points us to the past. Literature, 
 then, anticipates the future, interprets the present, 
 and recalls the past. It has three tenses, because 
 human nature has three tenses. Each tense is 
 an outlet. 
 
 No power of the poet gives me a greater feeling 
 of awe than that by which he says to oblivion: 
 "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and 
 here shall thy proud waves be stayed." The 
 enemies that man has fought most persistently 
 from the beginning are death and oblivion, He 
 fights death with science; he fights oblivion, most 
 successfully, with literature. The historian may 
 
 125 
 
i 2 6 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 galvanize the past, but the poet vitalizes it. The 
 great deeds of the heroic dead are preserved in 
 annals and chronicles, but they live in song and 
 story. Enshrine history in literature and you 
 give it both currency and permanency. We often 
 speak of "the irrevocable past," but to literature 
 there is no irrevocable past. Literature can not 
 only recall the past, but can make of it an ever- 
 living present. 
 
 On September 15, 1833, there died in Vienna, 
 at the age of twenty-two, one of the most promis- 
 ing young Englishmen of his century. That, at 
 least, was the opinion of Tennyson, of Gladstone, 
 of Lord Houghton, of Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, 
 of every one in fact who knew him and wrote of 
 him. His name was Arthur Henry Hallam. His 
 father, Henry Hallam, a distinguished historian, 
 erected a handsome tablet to his son, had a marble 
 bust of him made, and published at once his 
 Remains in Prose and Verse with an affectionate 
 memoir. The latter is peculiarly pathetic. There 
 runs through it the thought that his son was cut 
 down before he had a chance to make a name for 
 himself, but that he would have made a name for 
 himself, a great name, with the coming years. 
 This thought is expressed on the marble tablet: 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 127 
 
 "And now in this obscure and solitary Church 
 repose the mortal remains of 
 one too early lost for public fame 
 but already conspicuous among his contemporaries 
 for the brightness of his genius, 
 the depth of his understanding, 
 the nobleness of his disposition, 
 the fervour of his piety 
 and the purity of his life." 
 
 Note the words, "too early lost for public 
 fame. " It seemed so, though wealth and affection 
 had done all they could do. Literature, however, 
 had not spoken. But in the year 1850, a great 
 poet, Alfred Tennyson, published a great poem, 
 In Memoriam, the theme of which is Tennyson's 
 friendship for Hallam. And to-day Arthur Henry 
 Hallam is known wherever English literature is 
 studied. His "public fame" already far surpasses 
 that of his father, though the historian lived to 
 the age of eighty-two and was honoured by a 
 statue in St. Paul's Cathedral. The readers who 
 know of the historian because he was the father 
 of his son are already more in number than those 
 who know of Arthur Henry Hallam merely be- 
 cause he was the son of his father. And this 
 number will increase, for the name of Arthur 
 Henry Hallam is linked forever with a poem 
 
128 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 that is one of the world's most beautiful trib- 
 utes to friendship. It is more than this. "In 
 Memoriam," said Tennyson, "is rather the cry 
 of the whole human race than mine. In 
 the poem altogether private grief swells out 
 into thought of, and hope for, the whole world. 
 It begins with a funeral and ends with a 
 marriage — a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful at 
 the close." In Memoriam is a ladder reaching 
 from abject despair to triumphant hope, and 
 the spirit of Hallam, like Beatrice of old, is 
 our guide and comrade on its ascending 
 rounds. 
 
 Could a painting, a monument, a statue, a 
 memorial building have rescued Hallam as suc- 
 cessfully from oblivion as this poem has done? 
 Could they have given him so secure a position 
 in the thoughts and affections of those who never 
 saw him? Could they have reached or helped 
 as many people? Great memorials have to be 
 visited, they will not come to you as a poem does. 
 You may see pictures of them, but the picture is a 
 mere copy, and a copy of a work of art is a poor 
 thing except a copy of a great writing. The copy of 
 this is as good as the original — contains, in fact, all 
 of the original that was meant to be seen. Take 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 129 
 
 the case of Helen Fourment. She was the second 
 wife of the great portrait painter, Rubens. He 
 painted her portrait so frequently that a recent 
 biographer says: "We know her charms as we 
 know the charms of no other woman that ever lived 
 in all the eons of time." It is not a question here 
 of copies, for these portraits of Helen Fourment 
 are all originals. But which has the more success- 
 fully defied time, the poet or the painter? Who is 
 the more truly alive, Arthur Hallam or Helen 
 Fourment? 
 
 Let us take another character, as different from 
 Arthur Henry Hallam as could well be imagined. 
 Isaac Newton Giffen was the son of a blacksmith 
 in the mountains of east Tennessee. He was a 
 lean, homely, freckle-faced little fellow who could 
 neither read nor write. In one of the battles of 
 the Civil War — for he was a soldier — young 
 GifFen was desperately wounded but was tenderly 
 nursed by Dr. and Mrs. Francis O. Ticknor, of 
 Torch Hill, Georgia. "His part in eighteen bat- 
 tles," says Doctor Ticknor's granddaughter, "and 
 freedom from injury except in the last, the story 
 of his march, wounded and ill, how he and others 
 would lie down in the road to drink the water 
 from mud-puddles, and other events of his war 
 
i 3 o WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 career, were sources of untiring entertainment to 
 the children, and by amusing them he was a great 
 help to Mrs. Ticknor. Giffen came to Torch Hill 
 in September, 1863, and left in March, 1864. 
 On the day of his departure he and Douglas 
 Ticknor started from Torch Hill to Columbus, 
 riding an old gray army horse; at Bull Creek the 
 water was unusually high and the horse lost the 
 road, fell into a washout, and both boys were 
 thrown. Douglas and the horse came ashore on 
 the Torch Hill side, while the current carried 
 Giffen across the creek. From there he waved 
 his last good-bye, and climbed wet and muddy 
 into the wagon of a negro going to town. Nothing 
 further was ever heard of him, and there is no 
 doubt that he met death in some immediate 
 encounter. " Nothing here for painter or sculptor. 
 But Doctor Ticknor was a poet, and in 1867 these 
 lines appeared: 
 
 LITTLE GIFFEN 
 
 Out of the focal and foremost fire, 
 Out of the hospital walls as dire, 
 Smitten of grape-shot and gangrene, 
 (Eighteenth battle, and he sixteen!) 
 Spectre! such as you seldom see, 
 Little Giffen, of Tennessee! 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 131 
 
 "Take him and welcome!" the surgeon said: 
 "Little the doctor can help the dead!" 
 
 So we took him, and brought him where 
 
 The balm was sweet in the summer air; 
 
 And we laid him down on a wholesome bed — 
 
 Utter Lazarus, heel to head! 
 
 And we watched the war with abated breath, 
 Skeleton boy against skeleton death. 
 Months of torture, how many such? 
 Weary weeks of the stick and crutch; 
 And still a glint of the steel-blue eye 
 Told of a spirit that wouldn't die. 
 
 And didn't. Nay, more! in death's despite 
 
 The crippled skeleton learned to write. 
 "Dear Mother," at first, of course; and then 
 "Dear Captain," inquiring about the men. 
 
 Captain's answer: "Of eighty and five, 
 
 Giffen and I are left alive." 
 
 Word of gloom from the war, one day; 
 Johnston pressed at the front, they say. 
 Little Giffen was up and away; 
 A tear — his first — as he bade good-bye, 
 Dimmed the glint of his steel-blue eye. 
 "I'll write, if spared!" There was news of the fight; 
 But none of Giffen. He did not write. 
 
 I sometimes fancy that were I king 
 
 Of the princely knights of the Golden Ring,* 
 
 *Why is this reference to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round 
 Table peculiarly appropriate in the case of Little Giffen? See page 80. 
 
i 3 2 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 With the song of the minstrel in mine ear, 
 And the tender legend that trembles here, 
 I'd give the best on his bended knee, 
 The whitest soul of my chivalry, 
 For Little Giffen, of Tennessee. 
 
 Over these lines, as over a bridge stretching 
 from death to life, Little Giffen has come back 
 to dwell among men. Has he not lived a larger 
 life since 1867 than he lived before? Thousands 
 knOw him now where one knew him before. He 
 has not lost his individuality, but he has become 
 a symbol, not of partisanship but of loyalty — 
 fearless, unswerving, death-defying loyalty. 
 
 Literature is full of triumphs of this sort. 
 Read Milton's Lycidas, William Douglas's Annie 
 Laurie, Burns's To Mary in Heaven, Charles 
 Lamb's Hester, Wordsworth's Lucy Gray, Walter 
 Savage Landor's Rose Aylmer, John Hay's Jim 
 Bludso of the Prairie Belle. Each of these poems, 
 brief as it is, has rescued a name from oblivion by 
 attaching it to a thought or mood or emotion 
 common to us all. None of the persons thus 
 celebrated would have been mentioned by the 
 historian, because, though real, they were, not 
 historical. They affected in no way the course 
 of history in their respective countries or centuries, 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 133 
 
 and thus did not come within the province of the 
 historian. In most cases, however, the characters 
 that literature revitalizes are those that have an 
 historical interest. We already know something 
 of them, but not enough to bring them vividly 
 before us. We know them by name perhaps but 
 not by heart. In such cases the poet and the 
 historical novelist supplement the work of the 
 historian. They restore to us, however, not only 
 men and women but historical events, historical 
 periods, and even whole races that have vanished 
 or are vanishing. 
 
 Few persons realize how much of our knowledge 
 of the past is due to literature rather than to 
 history proper. Boys thrill to-day over a battle 
 fought between the French and the Austrians in a 
 far-off village in Bavaria not because the histori- 
 ans have rescued it, but because Thomas Campbell 
 wrote The Battle of Hohenlinden. Over a chasm 
 of more than eighteen centuries we applaud the 
 heroism of a heathen queen not because annals 
 and chronicles have brought her to us, but because 
 Cowper made an appeal for her in his Boadicea. 
 We know and love Scotch history not because we 
 have gone to Burton's or Mackintosh's learned 
 volumes, but because the history of Scotland has 
 
134 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 come to us in the prose and poetry of Walter 
 Scott and Robert Burns. Men talk familiarly 
 to-day of D'Artagnan, Louis XIII, Richelieu, 
 Anne of Austria, and Mazarin, not because they 
 have studied French history, but because in The 
 Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The 
 Vicomte de Bragelonne Alexander Dumas has made 
 this period of French history more familiar than 
 any other unless it be the period of the French 
 Revolution. If the French Revolution is better 
 known it is because Dumas and Victor Hugo and 
 a host of others have found their material in it. 
 
 Who that has once read it can ever forget the 
 passage in Les Miser ables beginning, "One half 
 light, one half shade, Napoleon felt himself 
 protected in good and tolerated in evil"? Or 
 this comment on the Battle of Waterloo? "Was 
 it possible for Napoleon to win the battle? We 
 answer in the negative. Why? On account of 
 Wellington, on account of Bliicher? No; on ac- 
 count of God. Bonaparte, victor at Waterloo, did 
 not harmonize with the law of the nineteenth 
 century. Another series of facts was preparing, in 
 which Napoleon had no longer a place: the iH-will 
 of events had been displayed long previously. 
 It was time for this vast man to fall; his excessive 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 135 
 
 weight in human destiny disturbed the balance. 
 This individual alone was of more account than the 
 universal group: such plethoras of human vitality 
 concentrated in a single head — the world, mount- 
 ing to one man's brain — would be mortal to 
 civilization if they endured. The moment had 
 arrived for the incorruptible supreme equity to 
 reflect, and it is probable that the principles and 
 elements on which the regular gravitations of 
 the moral order as of the material order de- 
 pend, complained. Streaming blood, overcrowded 
 graveyards, mothers in tears, are formidable 
 pleaders. When the earth is suffering from an 
 excessive burden, there are mysterious groans 
 from the shadow, which the abyss hears. Napo- 
 leon had been denounced in infinitude, and his 
 fall was decided. Waterloo is not a battle, but a 
 transformation of the universe. " 
 
 The Du ke of Mar lborough spoke for more than 
 himselTwhen he said: "All the English history 
 that I know, I learned from Shakespeare." 
 James Russell Lowell expressed more than his 
 own opinion when he pronounced Hawthorne's 
 House of the Seven Gables "the most valuable con- 
 tribution to New England history that has yet 
 been made." Ralph Waldo Emerson did more 
 
i 3 6 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 in one poem to make the Concord Fight known at 
 home and abroad than any historian had done. 
 Nothing better was ever said or sung about the 
 Revolutionary War than the first stanza of the 
 Concord Hymn, sung at the completion of the 
 Battle Monument on April 19, 1836: 
 
 By the rude bridge that arched the flood, 
 Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, 
 
 Here once the embattled farmers stood 
 And fired the shot heard round the world. 
 
 The foe long since in silence slept; 
 
 Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; 
 And Time the ruined bridge has swept 
 
 Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. 
 
 On this green bank, by this soft stream, 
 
 We set to-day a votive stone; 
 That memory may their deed redeem, 
 
 When, like our sires, our sons are gone. 
 
 Spirit, that made those heroes dare 
 To die, and leave their children free, 
 
 Bid Time and Nature gently spare 
 The shaft we raise to them and thee. 
 
 We have always doubted, however, whether the 
 shot was really "heard round the world" till 
 Emerson wrote his poem.* The carrying power 
 
 *"Tous at Oxford Emerson was but a voice speaking from three thousand 
 miles away. But so well he spoke that from that time forth Boston Bay 
 and Concord were names invested to my ear with a sentiment akin to that 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 137 
 
 of a noble deed is to be measured not solely by the 
 nobleness of the deed, but by the nobleness of the 
 deed plus the nobleness of the form in which the 
 deed is expressed. Wordsworth recalls a great 
 truth when he asks: 
 
 And what for this frail world were all 
 
 That mortals do or suffer, 
 Did no responsive harp, no pen, 
 
 Memorial tribute offer? 
 
 Those who heard the Concord Hymn sung 
 must have felt that the deed had never before 
 been so worthily expressed, for the first stanza 
 was forthwith engraved on the very monument at 
 whose completion the hymn was sung. 
 
 But Longfellow outranks them all in restoring 
 our American past to us. Just when the critics 
 had made up their minds that the day of the long 
 poem was over, Longfellow wrote Evangeline, The 
 Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, 
 and followed them with Paul Revere' s Ride. 
 These poems alone prove his right to be called our 
 best historian in verse. He succeeded in making 
 not only characters but events, periods, and 
 
 which invests for me the names of Oxford and Weimar; and snatches of 
 Emerson's strain fixed themselves in my mind as imperishably as any of the 
 eloquent words which I have been just now quoting." — Matthew Arnold, 
 Discourses in America. 
 
138 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 peoples live again. There are Acadian children 
 in Louisiana, descendants of the people about 
 whom Longfellow wrote, who know Evangeline by 
 heart before they reach their teens. The poem 
 is to the Acadians what the Iliad and Odyssey were 
 to the ancient Greeks. Its_interest, however, is 
 confined to no state or country. It was the first 
 successful long poem in our literature that dealt 
 with an event in our own history. "Eureka!" 
 cried Whittier when he first read it. "Here, 
 then, we have it at last — an American poem, 
 with the lack of which British reviewers have so 
 long reproached us." Thirty years after its ap- 
 pearance in 1847 it had been translated into Ger- 
 man, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, 
 Portuguese, Spanish, Polish, and Bohemian. 
 
 Hiawatha was even more popular at home and 
 abroad. The best comment on it was made by 
 two Ojibway chiefs who in the year 1900 invited 
 Longfellow's family to witness an Indian repro- 
 duction of Hiawatha on a rocky little island in 
 Lake Huron: "We loved your father. The 
 memory of our people will never die as long as 
 your father's song lives, and that will live forever." 
 Of The Courtship of Miles Standish, a description 
 of the early days of the Plymouth Colony in 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 139 
 
 Massachusetts, ten thousand copies were sold in 
 London on the first day of publication. The 
 poem became at once an American classic, but, as 
 its narrative is confined to New England, it has 
 not carried our history into as many foreign lands 
 as did Evangeline and Hiawatha. 
 
 Paul Revere' ' s Ride leaped at once to a popularity 
 that is still unequalled by any other narrative 
 poem of the Revolutionary War. It was written 
 in i860, and the last six lines, prophesying the 
 patriotic service of Paul Revere "through all our 
 history, to the last," are true not only because of 
 what Paul Revere did but because this very poem 
 was written: 
 
 So through the night rode Paul Revere; 
 
 And so through the night went his cry of alarm 
 
 To every Middlesex village and farm, — 
 
 A cry of defiance and not of fear, 
 
 A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, 
 
 And a word that shall echo forevermore! 
 
 For, borne on the night-wind of the Past, 
 
 Through all our history, to the last, 
 
 In the hour of darkness and peril and need, 
 
 The people will waken and listen to hear 
 
 The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed, 
 
 And the midnight message of Paul Revere. 
 
 Paul Revere has ridden better since i860 than 
 he ever rode before. 
 
i 4 o WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 But the two great masters to whom the civil- 
 ized world is most indebted for its knowledge of 
 the past are Shakespeare and Scott. Blot these 
 men out and think how much of our interest in 
 the past would go with them. Do the words 
 Caesar, Brutus, Antony, Cleopatra, Coriolanus, 
 Troilus, Cressida recall a definite character to 
 you? If so, unless you are a special student of 
 ancient history, the probabilities are that you got 
 your knowledge from Shakespeare. Y ou may 
 not have read all or any of the plays in which 
 these names occur; you may have received your 
 information from text-books of history, from biog- 
 raphy, from general reading, or from a sort of 
 infiltration that you can hardly describe. In any 
 case, the original source of your idea of these 
 characters was almost certainly William Shake- 
 speare. It was he that lifted them out of the dead 
 past and set them in the living present. The 
 historian or biographer whom you have read may 
 not have written with Shakespeare before him, 
 but it would have taken a tremendous effort on 
 his part to free himself from Shakespeare's influ- 
 ence. Thus if you have never read a line of 
 Shakespeare — and the same is true of Scott — 
 you nevertheless look at the past partly through 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 141 
 
 his eyes because you share in the historical thought 
 of your age and country, and the historical 
 thought of your age and country finds one of its 
 central sources in the work of Shakespeare. 
 
 Think, too, how much history clusters about 
 these names for you. When you recall the names 
 you recall deeds, scenes, centuries, countries, 
 movements, passions that you can never separate 
 from the names. When you think of Mark An- 
 tony, for example, you think of a great oration, 
 the greatest ever written. Caesar's dead body 
 is before you and a multitude of sullen or shouting 
 Romans around you. Nineteen centuries have 
 stood aside that you might attend the funeral of 
 Caesar and witness for yourself the beginning of 
 the downfall of imperial Rome. Shakespeare did 
 not make the facts, but he did more than any other 
 one man to make the associations that cluster 
 forever about the facts. 
 
 "But," you ask, "am I reading true history? 
 Did Mark Antony really deliver that oration?" 
 Well, here is what Shakespeare had before him :* 
 "And therefore, when Caesar's body was brought 
 to the place where it should be buried, he made a 
 
 * North's translation of Plutarch's Life of Marcus Antonius (Skeat's 
 edition), page 165. 
 
i 4 2 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 funeral oration in commendation of Caesar, 
 according to the ancient custom of praising noble 
 men at their funerals. When he saw that the 
 people were very glad and desirous also to hear 
 Caesar spoken of, and his praises uttered, he 
 mingled his oration with lamentable words; and 
 by amplifying of matters did greatly move their 
 hearts and affections unto pity and compassion. 
 In fine, to conclude his oration, he unfolded before 
 the whole assembly the bloody garments of the 
 dead, thrust through in many places with their 
 swords, and called the malefactors cruel and 
 cursed murtherers." 
 
 Shakespeare knew, then, that Antony spoke 
 "in commendation of Caesar," that he "mingled 
 his oration with lamentable words," that he moved 
 his hearers "unto pity and compassion," that he 
 held up "the bloody garments of the dead," and 
 called the malefactors "cruel and cursed mur- 
 therers." What a mountain of eloquence Shake- 
 speare has reared out of this molehill of facts! Is it 
 false history that he teaches us? By no means. 
 It is real history illuminated. Light does not lie. 
 To say that Antony made a great speech is only 
 a part of the truth. Before I can assimilate this 
 bare fact I must know what is meant by a great 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 143 
 
 speech at that particular world crisis. Shake- 
 speare tells me, and no man has lived who could 
 have told me with equal power and truth. 
 
 Cleopatra's name suggests to-day a certain 
 Oriental magnificence that no one had phrased till 
 Shakespeare phrased it. Plutarch describes her 
 meeting with Antony thus:* "Therefore, when 
 she was sent to by divers letters, both from 
 Antonius himself and also from his friends, she 
 made sq light of it, and mocked Antonius so 
 much, that she disdained to set forward other- 
 wise, but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus; 
 the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, 
 and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing 
 after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, 
 cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as 
 they played upon in the barge. And now for the 
 person of herself, she was laid under a pavilion of 
 cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like 
 the goddess Venus, commonly drawn in picture: 
 and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair 
 boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, 
 with little fans in their hands, with the which they 
 fanned wind upon her." 
 
 * North's translation of Plutarch's Life of Marcus Antonius (Skeat's 
 edition), pages 174-175. 
 
144 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 That is a brilliant description, but it is overdone. 
 It would never have lived. The picture is too 
 crowded. It dazzles rather than illuminates. 
 Note now how the master lets his imagination 
 play swiftly about this scene, how he removes its 
 superfluities, how he interprets its parts, and sets 
 it at last in the world's picture gallery: 
 
 The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, 
 
 Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; 
 
 Purple the sails, and so perfumed that 
 
 The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver, 
 
 Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made 
 
 The water which they beat to follow faster, 
 
 As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, 
 
 It beggar'd all description: she did lie 
 
 In her pavilion — cloth-of-gold of tissue — 
 
 O'er-picturing that Venus where we see 
 
 The fancy outwork nature: on each side her 
 
 Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, 
 
 With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem 
 
 To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, 
 
 And what they undid did. 
 
 I like to remember that Shakespeare and Scott 
 as interpreters of the past did not begin with 
 ancient history. They began nearer home and 
 nearer their own time. Shakespeare's appren- 
 ticeship was served in English history and in a 
 period of that history in which he could supple- 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 145 
 
 ment the old chronicles by consulting old men and 
 living traditions. He has made the Wars of the 
 Roses the most romantic period of English history 
 and a stepping-stone over which he passed to more 
 remote periods. Here is his phrasing, and now the 
 traditional phrasing, of how these wars began. 
 Richard Plantagenet, leader of the faction of the 
 White Rose and afterward Duke of York, says: 
 
 * Let him that is a true-born gentleman 
 And stands upon the honour of his birth, 
 If he suppose that I have pleaded truth, 
 From off this brier pluck a white rose with me. 
 
 John Beaufort, leader of the faction of the Red 
 Rose and afterward Duke of Somerset, replies: 
 
 Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer, 
 But dare maintain the party of the truth, 
 Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me. 
 
 The Earl of Warwick then prophesies: 
 
 This brawl to-day, 
 Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden, 
 Shall send between the red rose and the white 
 A thousand souls to death and deadly night. 
 
 Now the decisive battles of the Wars of the 
 Roses were fought in Warwickshire, and War- 
 
 • Henry VI, Part I, Act II, Scene IV. 
 
146 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 wickshire was Shakespeare's home county. A 
 wealth of material had been handed down from 
 lip to lip and Shakespeare made the best use of it. 
 Much of the history, therefore, on which he began 
 to work was history that he had heard narrated 
 in his youth and early manhood. The battle 
 of Bosworth Field, in which Richard III was 
 killed and which ended the Wars of the Roses by 
 bringing together again the two rival factions, 
 was fought only seventy-nine years before Shake- 
 speare was born. In the preface to The Houses 
 of York and Lancaster, James Gairdner, the his- 
 torian, says: 
 
 "For this period of English history we are 
 fortunate in possessing an unrivalled interpreter 
 in our great dramatic poet Shakespeare. Follow- 
 ing the guidance of such a master mind, we realize 
 for ourselves the men and actions of the period in 
 a way we cannot do in any other epoch. . . . 
 The doings of that stormy age, the sad calamities 
 endured by kings, the sudden changes of fortune 
 endured by great men, the glitter of chivalry, 
 and the horrors of civil war, all left a deep impres- 
 sion upon the mind of the nation, which was- kept 
 alive by vivid traditions of the past at the time 
 that our great dramatist wrote. " 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 147 
 
 Shakespeare's English historical plays are a 
 treasure house of historical interpretation more 
 valuable than that possessed by any other nation. 
 Wherever they are translated — and all foreign 
 languages know them — a bit of England's past 
 goes with them. They are valuable, however, 
 not so much for their facts as for the setting and 
 interpretation of the facts which the dramatist 
 has made. They are valuable also because they 
 remind us that in English life Shakespeare saw 
 hints of all life. In the near he glimpsed the 
 remote. In the present he saw the vision of the 
 past. He was to look far behind him, but he 
 looked around him first. 
 
 As painter and spokesman of the past Scott is 
 the only other writer of modern times whose range 
 and appeal put him in the class with Shakespeare, 
 "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," Shake- 
 speare makes one of his characters say; and the 
 reply is: 
 
 Why, so can I, or so can any man; 
 
 But will they come when you do call for them? 
 
 They come when Shakespeare and Scott "call 
 for them," as they come at the call of no others. 
 There have been excellent historical novels writ- 
 
148 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 ten since Scott's time. Bulwer-Lytton's Last 
 Days of Pompeii, Thackeray's Henry Esmond 
 and The Virginians, Charles Kingsley's Hypalia 
 and Westward Ho! Charles Reade's The Cloister 
 and the Hearth, George Eliot's Romola, and Dick- 
 ens's ^ale of Two Cities have each called a defi- 
 nite and interesting portion of history from "the 
 vasty deep," and thus enlarged our historical 
 retrospect. But these authors came after Scott, 
 they built upon Scott, and they admitted or would 
 have to admit their indebtedness to Scott, as 
 Scott admitted his indebtedness to Shakespeare. 
 Of none of them could it be said, as Goethe said 
 of Scott: "He is equal to his subject in every 
 direction in which it takes him. The king, the 
 royal brother, the prince, the head of the clergy, 
 the nobles, the magistracy, the citizens and 
 mechanics, the Highlanders, are all drawn with 
 the same sure hand and hit off with equal truth." 
 
 What had been dry bones sprang at the touch 
 of this Wizard of the North into living forms. All 
 nations have gone to school in history to Walter 
 Scott. He was more than the founder of the his- 
 torical novel. His coming meant a new appeal for 
 history, a new attitude toward the past, a new 
 source of knowledge and sympathy, a new realiza- 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 149 
 
 tion of the oneness of human life. He did not 
 venture into Shakespeare' s realm of Roman or 
 Greek history, but, beginning with Scotland in 
 the eighteenth century, the century in which he 
 was born, he went as far back as the eleventh. 
 Only once, in St. Ronan's Well, did he touch the 
 nineteenth century. To the eighteenth century 
 belong twelve of his novels, to the seventeenth 
 seven, to the sixteenth four, to the fifteenth three, 
 to the fourteenth one, to the twelfth three, and to 
 the eleventh one. Twenty-one of his thirty-two 
 novels have their scenes laid wholly or partly in 
 Scotland. The other places over whose past he 
 has stretched his magic wand are England, Wales, 
 France, Germany, Flanders, Switzerland, the 
 Orkney and Shetland Islands, Turkey, Palestine, 
 and India. In the number of centuries and coun- 
 tries traversed and in the variety and vividness 
 of his work no other novelist is his equal. 
 
 Like Shakespeare, Scott was more "folksy" 
 than bookish. He tramped about the country so 
 much in search of historical places and of people 
 who could tell him of historical places that his 
 father said he was better fitted for a peddler than 
 a lawyer. He is careful to tell us in his notes and 
 prefaces that though he does not copy landscapes 
 
ISO WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 and castles, those that he had actually seen fur- 
 nished him with the main outlines. Writing of his 
 boyhood, Scott once said : " Show me an old castle 
 or field of battle and I was at home at once, filled 
 it with its combatants in their proper costume, 
 and overwhelmed my hearers by the enthusiasm 
 of my description." One of his precepts was: 
 "Never neglect to talk to people with whom you 
 are casually thrown. " His biographer, Lockhart, 
 says of him: "He conversed with his coachman 
 if he sat by him — as he often did, on the box — 
 with his footman, if he chanced to be in his rumble. 
 Indeed, he did not confine Lis humanity to his 
 own people; any steady-going servant of a friend 
 of his was soon considered as a sort of friend too, 
 and was sure to have a kind little colloquy to 
 himself at coming or going." 
 
 Almost every one who in his mature years has 
 lived for any length of time in a foreign land begins 
 by thinking foreigners radically different from 
 himself and from his own people. But a longer 
 stay and a deeper knowledge lead him to see that 
 the real differences are few and that human nature 
 is essentially one everywhere. This is the testi- 
 mony of the masters in all lands. But Shake- 
 speare and Scott tell us more than that: they 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 151 
 
 tell us that human nature is not only the same 
 in different lands but in different and far-distant 
 centuries. They are our most vivid historians, 
 because, from reading books of the past and men 
 of the present, they had come to the conclusion 
 that human nature, though of many patterns, is 
 of one substance. Montaigne's Essays was one 
 of the few books that we know both Shakespeare 
 and Scott read. We can be equally sure that 
 they both applauded this saying of Montaig e's: 
 " 'Tis one and the same nature that rolls on her 
 course, and whoever has sufficiently considered 
 the present state of things might certainly con- 
 clude as to both the future and the past." 
 
 We hear much to-day of "the national memory." 
 The phrase is a vague but suggestive one. What 
 is the national memory? What do nations 
 remember? The question can never be accurately 
 answered, because different nations remember dif- 
 ferent things and the things that any one nation 
 remembers to-day may be differently interpreted 
 and therefore differently remembered as the years 
 go by. But are we not now in a position to 
 look at the question from a definite and helpful 
 point of view? People do not remember their 
 national history or the world's history in its 
 
152 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 orderly sequence. They do not have a text- 
 book memory. Names, dates, facts, events of the 
 past are not in their nature adhesive. They 
 adhere, at least, not in exact ratio to their impor- 
 tance, but more nearly in ratio to the interest and 
 breadth and vision with which they are told. To 
 be remembered, they must be made to fit not only 
 into the framework of the nation's history, but 
 into the framework of the human heart. Books, 
 talk, and newspapers are the most active agencies 
 in bringing facts to the door of memory. It is 
 literature that lets them in. A nation remembers 
 only a small part of its past, but that part is the 
 part in which literature has helped to get the fact 
 ready for the people and the people ready for the 
 fact. 
 
 It is writers like those about whom we have 
 spoken that have done most to store the national 
 memories. They have said to the past: "You 
 have certain things that need to be a part of the* 
 present. Give them to us and we will so write \ 
 them on the tablets of the heart that to know them 
 will be to cherish them." And the past has 
 yielded them. Whatever men and events of the 
 past you can afford to neglect, these rescued men 
 and events are not of them, for these are making 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 153 
 
 history. "Each deed thou hast done," Browning 
 makes young David say to Saul, "dies, revives, 
 goes to work in the world." These are the men 
 and events that have died, that have revived, that 
 have gone to work in the world. They are train- 
 ing the will and the imagination of young and olcu 
 They are Bringing the people of each nation and 
 the people of all nations closer together. They 
 are building up century by century the inter- 
 national mind^frimied— out of common_ heroisms 
 and common admirations. They are making the 
 nation's memory a part of the world's memory. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 It Can Show You the Glory of the Commonplace 
 
 THERE is a widespread feeling that litera- 
 ture, especially poetry, has little to do with 
 thought of any kind, and even less to do 
 with our thoughts about common everyday things. 
 Some one has phrased this feeling as follows: 
 
 In penning a rhyme, said a Poet, 
 Have a plenty of ink and then go it — 
 With an uplifting rune, a maid and a moon, 
 Some theeing and thouing, and maying in June, 
 But never a thought if you know it. 
 
 No poet ever used such language as that. A 
 poetaster may have written that stanza, but not 
 a poet. In fact, poetasters often refer to poetry 
 as nothing more than an entertainment, a 
 diversion, a pastime. Now, if poetry, if litera- 
 ture in general, is a mere pastime, a refined 
 means of idling away a tedious hour, an orna- 
 mental accomplishment admitting to society, 
 then it is doomed. There are so many more 
 
 154 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 155 
 
 valuable disciplines knocking at the door to-day 
 that poetry, if it has no higher claim, might just 
 as well quit the field. iThe things that men are 
 going to read in the coming age are the things that 
 broaden and hearten and energize themJ 
 |_The appreciation of poetry is a diversion, but 
 it is a vast deal more. It is the most effective and 
 the most accessible of all the means whereby a 
 man may vitalize his thinking about the common, 
 elemental things of life."] And to do this, to feel 
 the greatness and the wide relationships of every- 
 day things, is to receive a new access of power 
 and happiness. "Genius," said Professor James 
 Frederick Ferrier, "i s nothing else than the power 
 of seeing wonders in common t hin gs." 
 
 But the difficulty lies here: so many people 
 think that, while prose may mean something, 
 poetry is mere prettiness. They are convinced 
 at least that the poet, even the great poet, did not 
 write for them, but for readers whose tastes and 
 needs are utterly different from theirs. When 
 they read poetry, if they deign to read it, their 
 first thought is, "Why did not the author put 
 what he had to say into fewer and plainer words?" 
 Now the readers who adopt this attitude toward 
 poetry are just as sensible and sincere as any other 
 
156 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 readers. In this matter, however, they are merely 
 drifting with the current. They have adopted 
 or inherited a popular misconception without 
 stopping to ask what the poet or poem really 
 means. They are thus depriving themselves not 
 only of a source of unfailing stimulus but of the 
 best means by which they can make their own 
 thinking effective. 
 
 Let us recur for a moment to a phrase used on 
 page 7. In his note to Lincoln, written after the 
 Gettysburg address, you remember that Everett 
 said: "I should be glad if I could flatter myself 
 that I came as near to the central idea of the 
 occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." 
 }LIhe central idea of the occasion" — that phrase 
 sums up admirably the goal of the true poet. He 
 has a passion for central ideajy He interprets life 
 in terms of central ideas, and he has also the genius 
 so to express these central ideas that they take a 
 fresh hold on the thought of the reader and become 
 central also in his thinking. These central ideas 
 are of right the common property of all, but they 
 have become dulled and dimmed by neglect or 
 misuse. J^The poets are those who in every age\ 
 keep the fires lighted on the altars of the common 
 and the central] * 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 157 
 
 In reading poetry, then, remember that the 
 central thing is the central thought. It was a 
 great English poet, Coleridge, who said: "No 
 man was ever yet a great poet without being at 
 the same time a profound philosopher." It was 
 a great American poet, Lowell, who said: "No 
 poem ever makes me respect its author which does 
 not in some way convey a truth of philosophy. " 
 There will be beauty, of course, but the beauty 
 came because the thought was thought out so 
 deeply, so intensely, so completely, so relatedly. 
 Beauty in literature is not something added from 
 the outside. It is in the framework of the whole. 
 It is the product of adequate thinking. It is 
 thought intensified. In reading a poem do not 
 begin with a search for beauty or striking phrases 
 or rare words or fine figures of speech or the struc- 
 ture of sentences or the build of stanzas^ Get 
 hold of the central thought. Turn it over and 
 over. Try to put it into your own words. Find 
 illustrations of it in things that you have seen or 
 heard or experienced. Try to see it as a whole, 
 then in its parts, then in the relation of the parts to 
 the whole, then in its radiations into other realms, 
 but stick to the thought. Whenever a man says 
 "How beautiful!" before he knows what a poem 
 
158 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 means, he does violence to beauty as well as to 
 sense. 
 
 What, now, are some of these common elemental 
 things about which we think so frequently but 
 so fruitlessly? No list can be exhaustive and, 
 besides, each reader will have his own list. But 
 if you will analyze the objects of your thinking 
 for even one day they will probably be found 
 to fall into some such threefold classification as 
 this: 
 
 I. There will be certain simple visible things 
 that claim your attention. It may be a flower, a 
 bird, a flag, a picture, a house, a street. It may 
 be almost anything that nature shows us or that 
 man has made. "At bottom," said Goethe, 
 "no real object is unpoetical if the poet knows 
 how to use it properly." About most objects, 
 whether in nature or art, wholeJigoks have been 
 written. There are books on birds and on almost 
 every kind of bird, as there are books on pictures 
 and on almost every single great picture. But 
 the poet proceeds differently. He follows Flau- 
 bert's advice: "Look at a tree until it appears to 
 you just as it appears to every one else; then look 
 at it till you see what no man has ever seen before." 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 159 
 
 Wordsworth had this service of the poet in mind 
 when he wrote: 
 
 • 
 
 The outward shows of sky and earth, 
 Of hill and valley, he has viewed; 
 
 And impulses of deeper birth 
 Have come to him in solitude. 
 
 In common things that round us lie 
 Some random truths he can impart; 
 
 The harvest of a quiet eye 
 
 That broods and sleeps on his own heart. 
 
 Mrs. Browning had the same idea in mind when 
 she spoke of Euripides as: 
 
 Our Euripides, the human, 
 
 With his droppings of warm tears, 
 
 And his touches of things common 
 Till they rose to touch the spheres. 
 
 Tennyson once found a flower growing not in 
 the solid earth but in the dust that vagrant winds 
 had swept into the crack of a wall. The very 
 frailty and insignificance of such a flower led 
 Tennyson to take it as the best illustration of how 
 the little things contain the great: 
 
 Ekay er in the crannied wall , 
 
 I pluck you out of the crannies, 
 
 I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
 
 Little flower — but if I could understand 
 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 
 I should know what God and man is. 
 
160 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 These lines do not tell us much about the flower, 
 but, if I mistake not, they at least suggest the 
 ministry of common things when common things 
 are viewed sympathetically. They at least put one 
 to thinking about the little-big things or the big- 
 little things of life. They remind us that the 
 smallest things are ladders stretching straight to 
 the greatest, and that to know one thing perfectly 
 we should have to know all things. But might not 
 Tennyson have taken a grain of sand or a particle 
 of dust instead of a flower? Hardly. These are not 
 growing things. He wanted to illustrate the one- 
 ness of life rather than the oneness of matter. He 
 took, therefore, not only a tiny growing object but 
 one that appealed to man by its beauty. To under- 
 stand this little flower we should have to under- 
 stand its divine cause and its human effect — 
 that is, "what God and man is." 
 
 We have seen how Oliver Wendell Holmes and 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sidney Lanier took, 
 respectively, a chambered nautilus, a huge rock 
 in the mountains, and a river in Georgia and made 
 teachers of idealism out of them. William Words- 
 worth has perhaps done more than any one else 
 to invest the common things of nature with new 
 meaning and beauty, just as Kipling in modern 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 161 
 
 times has surpassed all others in interpreting the 
 things that man has made. Read Kipling's Song 
 of the Banjo and you will never again think that 
 a banjo is nothing but a banjo. Here is the second 
 stanza: 
 
 In the silence of the camp before the fight, 
 
 When it's good to make your will and say your prayer, 
 You can hear my strum pty-tumpty overnight, 
 
 Explaining ten to one was always fair. 
 I'm the Prophet of the Utterly Absurd, 
 
 Of the Patently Impossible and Vain — 
 And when the Thing that Couldn't has occurred, 
 
 Give me time to change my leg and go again. 
 
 Was the influence of music on a scared soldier, 
 who knows that the odds are ten to one against 
 him in the coming fight, ever better expressed? 
 Of course the banjo does the talking: no one else is 
 supposed to know that the banjo is "the Prophet 
 of the Utterly Absurd. " The I-method is the only 
 method possible in poems of this sort, and Kipling 
 is its poet-laureate. The same power of illumina- 
 tion is shown in his poems called The Derelict, 
 The Coastwise Lights, Dee f -Sea Cables, The 
 English Flag, and many others. | The poet does 
 not merely describe; if that were all, a kodak 
 would be mightier than the pen. The poet inter- 
 prets; or, if he describes, he describes only enough 
 
1 62 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 to enable you so to visualize the object that his 
 interpretation may be effective] 
 
 Now it would not help you greatly if you learned 
 the particular interpretation or thought-content 
 of all of the poems mentioned or to be mentioned, 
 if you went no farther. But suppose you learned 
 from poetry the habit of interpreting common 
 things, the habit of getting out of them new 
 meaning, new beauty, new guidance. Such an 
 acquisition would not only put you in a position 
 to judge the work of poets wisely and well but 
 would make the world you live in a larger and 
 richer world. It would mean a permanent and 
 ever-enlarging addition to your life force. 
 
 Let us take an illustration from two poets who 
 interpreted the same thing. Because the sky- 
 lark flies straight skyward before it sings or as it 
 sings, Wordsworth sees in it a 
 
 Type of the wise who soar, but never roam, 
 True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home! 
 
 His whole poem is : 
 
 Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky! 
 Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound? 
 Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye 
 Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground? 
 Thy nest which thou canst d\;>p into at will, 
 Those quivering wings composed, that music still! 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 163 
 
 Leave to the nightingale her shady wood; 
 
 A privacy of glorious light is thine; 
 
 Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood 
 
 Of harmony, with instinct more divine; 
 
 Type of the wise who soar, but never roam; 
 
 True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home! 
 
 Because the skylark, singing high above us, is 
 almost invisible, Shelley compares it to hidden or 
 half-hidden things. Note the ecstasy and aptness 
 of these similes: 
 
 Like a poet hidden 
 
 In the light of thought, 
 Singing hymns unbidden, 
 Till the world is wrought 
 To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: 
 
 Like a high-born maiden 
 
 In a palace tower, 
 Soothing her love-laden 
 
 Soul in secret hour 
 With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower: 
 
 Like a glowworm golden 
 
 In a dell of dew 
 Scattering unbeholden 
 Its aerial hue 
 Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view: 
 
 Like a rose embowered 
 
 In its own green leaves, 
 By warm winds deflowered, 
 
 Till the scent it gives 
 Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves. 
 
i6 4 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 The secret of it all, thinks Shelley, is not loyalty 
 to "the kindred points of Heaven and Home," but 
 gladness, mere gladness. The last stanza is: 
 
 Teach me half the gladness 
 That thy brain must know, 
 
 Such harmonious madness 
 From my lips would flow, 
 The world should listen then — as I am listening now. 
 
 But if the last few lines in each case summarize 
 the poet's interpretation, why not omit the rest? 
 Why, in other words, did the poet talk so long 
 around his subject before saying what he had to 
 say? The reader who asks this question is on the 
 highway to a real feeling for great poetry. He has 
 at least confronted poetic art with a query that 
 goes to the very heart of the matter. If he will 
 stick to that point of view, if he will maintain the 
 same sort of skepticism in the presence of every 
 poem, however praised the poem may be in books, 
 he will soon see poetry in a new light. Let us 
 look a little more closely. Does not every line, 
 every figure of speech, every word that precedes 
 the concluding lines contribute its part toward 
 making those lines clear and effective? Read 
 \\ ordsworth's lines again and see if every stream- 
 let of thought does not flow directly or indirectly 
 

 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 165 
 
 into the last two lines. Omit the last two lines 
 and see if the preceding lines do not fall to pieces 
 — beautiful pieces, perhaps, but without cohesion. 
 Shelley's first stanza is: 
 
 Hail to thee, blithe spirit! 
 
 Bird thou never wert, 
 That from heaven, or near it, 
 Pourest thy full heart 
 In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 
 
 If you changed the two beginnings would you 
 not have to change the endings? Does not the 
 word "pilgrim," in Wordsworth's first line, strike 
 at once the keynote of all the rest just as the words 
 "blithe spirit" strike the keynote of Shelley's? A 
 pilgrim is not an aimless wanderer: he has his two 
 "kindred points": he goes straight to his sacred 
 shrine and then returns home. A blithe spirit is 
 another name for "unbodied joy," and this 
 thought of blitheness, of joy, so intense but in- 
 visible that it challenges a host of radiant compari- 
 sons, shines through Shelley's poem from beginning 
 to end. It only culminates in the last stanza. 
 
 When we speak, then, of the central thought or 
 central idea of a poem, we do not mean a thought 
 or idea that summarizes all that has been said 
 We mean only such a thought or idea as furni r 
 
1 66 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 the foundation on which the poetic structure rests. 
 It is a sort of nucleus or core. It gives also the 
 best vantage ground on which to stand and survey 
 the poem as a whole and the best angle from which 
 to see how beauty and meaning are blended to 
 produce the culminating effect* 
 
 II. But instead of a visible object your daily 
 thought turns often about some incident or event 
 that has happened to you or to others. /Poetry 
 and prose are full of the simplest incidents 
 glorified by interpretation?) Robert Burns once 
 upturned a mountain daisy with his ploughshare, 
 but the little flower lives and blooms to-day as it 
 never lived and bloomed before, and all because 
 the poet made the incident the bearer of a univer- 
 sal appeal. After a few stanzas of tender, exquisite 
 thought, preparing the reader for an appeal to 
 mind and heart, Burns drops the Scotch dialect, 
 adopts the more universal English, and crowns 
 the incident thus: 
 
 Such is the fate of artless maid, 
 
 Sweet flow'rct of the rural shade! 
 
 By love's simplicity bctray'd 
 
 And guileless trust; 
 \ . Till she, like thee, all soil'd, is laid 
 
 let £ , Low i' the dust. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 167 
 
 Such is the fate of simple bard, 
 
 On life's rough ocean luckless starr'd! 
 
 Unskilful he to note the card 
 
 Of prudent lore, 
 Till billows rage and gales blow hard, 
 
 And whelm him o'er! 
 Such fate to suffering Worth is giv'n, 
 Who long with wants and woes has striv'n, 
 By human pride or cunning driv'n 
 
 To mis'ry's brink; 
 Till, wrench'd of ev'ry stay but Heav'n, 
 
 He ruin'd sink! 
 Ev'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, 
 That fate is thine — no distant date; 
 Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives elate, 
 
 Full on thy bloom, 
 Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight 
 
 Shall be thy doom. 
 
 He pursues the same method in his equally well 
 
 known lines To a Mouse, on turning up her nest 
 
 with the plough. After dwelling on the "foresight" 
 
 of the mouse in laying by a store for winter, the 
 
 poet makes the human appeal in these stanzas: 
 
 But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane* 
 In proving foresight may be vain: 
 The best laid schemes o' mice an' men 
 
 Gang aft a-gley,f 
 An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain 
 ________ For promis'd joy. 
 
 *Thou are not alone. 
 fGo often wrong. 
 
1 68 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me! 
 The present only toucheth thee: 
 But, och! I backward cast my ee 
 
 On prospects drear! 
 An' forward, tho' I canna see, 
 
 I guess an' fear! 
 
 The two applications, you see, are entirely 
 different, though both are made first to mankind 
 in general, then to the poet himself. But both 
 are equally apt, equally prepared for, and equally 
 suggested by the nature of the incident that the 
 poem treats. 
 
 Francis Scott Key and Francis Miles Finch 
 hold each a secure place in the hearts of the 
 American people because each interpreted an 
 incident in terms of national appeal. Francis 
 Scott Key was on an American ship in September, 
 1 814, while the British were bombarding Fort 
 McHenry, which protected Baltimore. He was 
 not allowed by the British to land, but remained 
 on deck during the night, watching the course of 
 every British shell that was fired. "While the 
 bombardment continued," wrote his brother-in- 
 law, afterward Chief Justice R. B. Taney, "it 
 was proof that the fort had not surrendered. . But 
 it suddenly ceased some time before day; and as 
 they had no communication with any of the 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 169 
 
 enemy's ships, they did not know whether the fort 
 had surrendered, or the attack upon it had been 
 abandoned. They paced the deck for the residue 
 of the night in painful suspense, watching with 
 intense anxiety for the return of day, and looking 
 every few minutes at their watches, to see how 
 long they must wait for it; as soon as it dawned, 
 and before it was light enough to see objects at a 
 distance, their glasses were turned to the fort, 
 uncertain whether they should see there the stars 
 and stripes or the flag of the enemy. At length 
 the light came, and they saw that 'our flag was 
 still there.' . . . He then told me that, under 
 the excitement of the time, he had written a 
 song, and handed me a printed copy of The Star- 
 Spangled Banner." 
 
 In the spring of 1867, Francis Miles Finch, of 
 New York, afterward a judge and for a time 
 dean of the law school of Cornell University, read 
 in a daily paper that the women of Columbus, 
 Mississippi, had decorated alike the graves of 
 Federal and Confederate soldiers. Touched by 
 the beauty of such an act he wrote The Blue and 
 the Gray, a poem that more than any other helped 
 to heal the scars of war and to usher in the era of 
 complete reconciliation. Note in the last three 
 
i 7 o WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 stanzas how the refrains, like the women of 
 Columbus, 
 
 With a touch impartially tender, 
 
 award equal honours to both sides. Indeed the 
 refrains carry the central thought: 
 
 So, when the summer calleth, 
 On forest and field of grain, 
 With an equal murmur falleth 
 The cooling drip of the rain: 
 Under the sod and the dew, 
 
 Waiting the judgment day; 
 Wet with the rain, the Blue, 
 Wet with the rain, the Gray. 
 
 Sadly, but not with upbraiding, 
 The generous deed was done, 
 In the storm of the years that are fading 
 No braver battle was won: 
 Under the sod and the dew, 
 
 Waiting the judgment day; 
 Under the blossoms, the Blue, 
 Under the garlands, the Gray. 
 
 No more shall the war cry sever, 
 
 Or the winding rivers be red; 
 They banish our anger forever 
 
 When they laurel the graves of our dead! 
 Under the sod and the dew, 
 
 Waiting the judgment day: 
 Love and tears for the Blue, 
 Tears and love for the Gray. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 171 
 
 James Russell Lowell was once in a railroad car 
 when some one began to talk about the great poet 
 whose example we cited a few pages back. The 
 result was Lowell's famous poem, An Incident in a 
 Railroad Car: 
 
 He spoke of Burns: men rude and rough 
 Pressed round to hear the praise of one 
 Whose heart was made of manly, simple stuff, 
 As homespun as their own. 
 
 Lowell learned from the incident a new ideal 
 of poetry: 
 
 Never did Poesy appear 
 So full of heaven to me, as when 
 I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear 
 To the lives of coarsest men. 
 
 It may be glorious to write 
 Thoughts that shall glad the two or three 
 High souls, like those far stars that come in sight 
 Once in a century; 
 
 But better far it is to speak 
 One simple word, which now and then 
 Shall waken their free nature in the weak 
 And friendless sons of men; 
 
 To write some earnest verse or line, 
 Which, seeking not the praise of art, 
 Shall make a clearer faith and manhood shine 
 In the untutored heart. 
 
i 7 2 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 He who doth this, in verse or prose, 
 May be forgotten in his day, 
 But surely shall be crowned at last with those 
 Who live and speak for aye. 
 
 Now this ability to vitalize passing incidents by 
 interpreting them humanly is possessed to a 
 degree by every one, but it is capable of indefinite 
 cultivation. Public speakers who use apt anec- 
 dotes have this power. Every one who in public 
 or private narrates an incident to illustrate a 
 point must first, if the application is original, 
 have interpreted the incident and got hold of its 
 central idea. Otherwise he could not attach the 
 incident, for central ideas are the only hooks by 
 which proper attachments can be made. Ben- 
 jamin Franklin's fund of apt incident and illus- 
 tration was due not to breadth of reading but 
 to disciplined practice in making ordinary incidents 
 yield their full measure of everyday truth. T^ajte 
 such an incident as that told in The Whistle, frem 
 which we get the expression "to pay dear for your 
 whistle." This widely current saying is mereLy. 
 the interpretation by a wise man of a childhood 
 experience. But the poet's interpretation is 
 deeper and more many-sided. It touches the 
 heart as well as the head. It brings beauty arid>, 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 173 
 
 imagination to bear on life. It finds us at more 
 points. It is not prudential but inspirational. 
 Franklin's interpretations are admirable in their 
 way, but it is not the way of Burns in the poems 
 already cited. It is not the way of Cowper in his 
 lines On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture, or of 
 Keats in his poem On First Looking Into Chap- 
 man's Homer, or of Wordsworth in his poem called 
 / Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, or of Browning in 
 his Incident of the French Camp. 
 
 Compare the two methods for yourself; or, 
 better still, take some incident in your own life 
 and try to make a purely practical application of 
 it in the Franklin way and then a more humane 
 interpretation of it in the spirit, if not in the form, 
 of the poets just cited* 
 
 III. Instead of an incident, however, you find 
 yourself frequently thinking about a situation. 
 A situation bears the same relation to an incident 
 that still water bears to running water. In other 
 words, an incident is a story, a narrative, while a 
 situation is more like a picture. In telling a story 
 that you have read or heard, did you ever notice 
 that you use past tenses, while in describing a 
 picture you use present tenses? For example, you 
 
174 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 say: "It was the story of a man who left home 
 and took with him only a dog," etc. But if it is a 
 picture that you are describing you say: "It was 
 the picture of a man leaving home and taking with 
 him only a dog," etc. The situation is like the 
 picture in that you think of it in present tenses. 
 There is nearly always some narrative in poems 
 that treat a situation because something usually 
 takes place, but the narrative is incidental or 
 preparatory. The essential thing is the resultant 
 situation. Interesting examples are The Cotter's 
 Saturday Night by Burns, Snow-Boimd by Whittier, 
 Riipah by Tennyson, The Bell Buoy by Kipling, 
 and The Man with the Hoe by Edwin Markham. 
 
 To make a situation give up its full yield of 
 suggestion or of guidance you must have the 
 facts well in hand. Observation, as elsewhere, 
 must precede interpretation. The poets and 
 short-story writers usually unlock a difficult 
 situation by the same instrument that they used 
 in constructing it — that is, by imagination. But 
 imagination does not, even with them, take the 
 place of a close scrutiny of the facts: it is built on 
 such a scrutiny. If the}' make up the situation, 
 they put in nothing that they do not use, and use 
 nothing that they have not deliberately put in. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 175 
 
 No building was ever erected so closely compacted 
 or with every part doing so perfectly its work as is 
 the case in the best short poems or short stories. 
 These are models for training in accuracy of 
 observation and therefore in truth of interpreta- 
 tion. Kipling's Bell Buoy, for example, is of 
 course purely fanciful. But no one could make 
 a bell buoy talk as this bell buoy talks unless he 
 had observed minutely the construction and the 
 work both of bell buoys and of church bells, and 
 unless he had at the same time a profound sym- 
 pathy with certain elements of human nature. 
 The central thought in the poem is the contrast 
 between a service that actually saves people and 
 one that merely summons them to church to be 
 saved. The bell buoy, it is true, brags outra- 
 geously of his superiority to the church bell, but he 
 is egged on to it by human nature, yours and mine, 
 which Kipling is only reporting and interpreting. 
 
 Among American authors, the man_wliCi§e_j^ork 
 furnishes the fairest field for the study of situations 
 is Nathaniel Hawthorne. The question with 
 Hawthorne was usually not, "How may I tell an 
 interesting story?" but "How may I get out of an 
 interesting situation all there is in it?" In his 
 American Note-Book, which contains jottings for 
 
176 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 future short stories, we find entries like these: 
 "An odd volume in a large library. Every one 
 to be afraid to unclasp and open it, because it was 
 said to be a book of magic." "A man, virtuous 
 in his general conduct, but committing habitually 
 some monstrous crime, as murder, and doing this 
 without the sense of guilt, but with a peaceful con- 
 science, habit, probably, reconciling him to it; but 
 something (for instance, discovery) occurs to make 
 him sensible of his enormity. His horror then. " 
 Out of the following jotting came Hawthorne's 
 story of The White Old Maid: "A change from a 
 gay young girl to an old woman; the melancholy 
 events, the effects of which have clustered around 
 her character, and gradually imbued it with their 
 influence, till she becomes a lover of sick-chambers, 
 taking pleasure in receiving dying breaths and in 
 laying out the dead; also leaving her mind full of 
 funeral reminiscences, and possessing more ac- 
 quaintances beneath the burial turf than above 
 it." 
 
 But the greatest master of the situation is 
 Robert Browning. He is the Shakespeare of the 
 situation, the man who first gave it an adequate 
 voice. It is true that many of his situations are 
 not usual or ordinary, but the habit of getting out 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 177 
 
 of an everyday situation all there is in it for 
 you can be acquired in his pages better, I think, 
 than in the pages of any other writer. Almost all 
 of his shorter poems are dramatic monologues, 
 and a dramatic monologue is nothing but a poem 
 that illuminates a condensed situation. There are 
 only three things to consider in a dramatic mono- 
 logue: (1) The situation itself; (2) the speaker 
 — there is never more than one — who unfolds 
 the situation; and (3) the person or persons 
 spoken to. The latter never speak, but they are 
 an essential part of the poem. The following 
 is one of Browning's characteristic dramatic mono- 
 logues: 
 
 THE PATRIOT 
 
 An Old Story 
 
 It was roses, roses, all the way, 
 
 With myrtle mixed in my path like mad: 
 
 The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway, 
 The church-spires flamed, such flags they had, 
 
 A year ago on this very day. 
 
 The air broke into a mist with bells, 
 
 The old walls rocked with the crowd and cries. 
 
 Had I said, "Good folk, mere noise repels — 
 But give me your sun from yonder skies!" 
 
 They had answered, "And afterward, what else?" 
 
i 7 3 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 Alack, it was I who leaped at the sun, 
 
 To give it my loving friends to keep! 
 Naught man could do, have I left undone: 
 
 And you see my harvest, what I reap 
 This very day, now a year is run. 
 
 There's nobody on the house-tops now — 
 
 Just a palsied few at the windows set; 
 For the best of the sight is, all allow, 
 
 At the Shambles' Gate — or, better yet, 
 By the very scaffold's foot, I trow. 
 
 I go in the rain, and, more than needs, 
 
 A rope cuts both my wrists behind; 
 And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds, 
 
 For they fling, whoever has a mind, 
 Stones at me for my year's misdeeds. 
 
 Thus I entered, and thus I go! 
 
 In triumphs, people have dropped down dead, 
 "Paid by the world, what dost thou owe 
 
 Me?" — God might question; now, instead, 
 'Tis God shall repay: I am safer so. 
 
 At a first reading this poem will doubtless seem 
 to you vague or perhaps meaningless. But it is 
 neither. (i) The situation here is the crisis 
 in a man's life. A year ago he was the popular 
 idol and might have asked even the impossible 
 of the "good folk" who could not do .enough for 
 him. Now, bound and stoned, he is being hurried 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 179 
 
 to the scaffold. The same crowd that applauded 
 him a year ago has gone exultantly to see the 
 execution, except "a palsied few" who have asked 
 to be wheeled to the windows. (2) The speaker 
 is a hero and fronts death philosophically. There 
 is not a word of complaint. He even prefers death 
 now to death a year ago. Had it come then, in 
 triumph, God would have required much, for 
 much had been given. Now, however, the injus- 
 tice of it all puts God in his debt. That, at least, 
 is the way the patriot feels about it. (3) The 
 person addressed is referred to in only one line, 
 "And you see my harvest." He is doubtless the 
 sheriff, an officer who had witnessed many similar 
 revulsions of public feeling and who was also near 
 enough to the patriot to hear what was said. He 
 knew better than any one else that it was "an old 
 story," though he says nothing. 
 
 Was the fickleness of the mob ever portrayed 
 more vividly? Yet not a word is said about 
 fickleness. You have to make your own inter- 
 pretation, but, as in real life, your interpretation 
 will be valid in exact proportion to your mastery 
 of all the details that make the situation what 
 it is. 
 
 Do we not begin to see now how and why the 
 
i So WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 poets make their appeal? They do not argue. 
 They take common objects or incidents or situa- 
 tions and let the central thought out. Every great 
 piece of literature is a sort of emancipation proc- 
 lamation. The "imprisoned splendour" was 
 already there: it needed only to be liberated. 
 Sometimes this imprisoned splendour, when it is 
 released, takes the form of patriotism as in Burns's 
 Scots, wha hae zvi* Wallace bled; sometimes of love 
 as in Coleridge's Genevieve; sometimes of the hom- 
 ing instinct as in John Howard Payne's Home, 
 Sweet Home; sometimes of mournful remembrance 
 as in Poe's Raven; sometimes of a call to service 
 in a never-ending conflict as in Lowell's lines on 
 The Present Crisis; sometimes of a plea for the 
 poor who, perhaps with unfulfilled renown, lie in 
 unhonoured graves as in Gray's Elegy. 1 But there 
 is always a central thought and this thought is 
 usually the heart of some unrealized object or 
 incident or situation. 
 
 Men are learning every day the greatness of 
 what used to be called the commonplace. But 
 they have not yet learned that the glory of the 
 commonplace was itself a commonplace to Burns, 
 
 'The central thought in Gray's Elegy is the country churchyard versus 
 Westminster Abbey. The poem is not a rambling meditation on death 
 in general. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 1S1 
 
 Goethe, Browning, Emerson, and men of their 
 kind. Emerson spoke for them all when he said: 
 
 'Tis not in the high stars alone, 
 Nor in the cup of budding flowers, 
 Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone, 
 Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, 
 But in the mud and scum of things 
 There alway, alway something sings. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 It can give you the mastery of your own language 
 
 IT WILL be taken for granted in this chapter 
 that "your own language" is the English 
 language. Illustrations will, therefore, be 
 drawn only from English. But the principle 
 holds good for all languages: the only way to 
 master a language is to get at it through litera- 
 ture, not through text-books on language. 
 
 Hitherto we have spoken of literature as 
 thought and mood. We are now to speak of 
 it as fgj;m. Thought and mood cannot be com- 
 municated till they are put into some sort of 
 form. But when they are clothed or "fleshed," 
 as Carlyle would have us say, in written words, we 
 can communicate them to others, we can keep 
 them by us, we can talk about them as easily as 
 we talk about trees or houses. | Form is not only 
 the dress or flesh of thought: it is the net in which 
 we capture and keep thought for futpre useT] 
 One of the most astonishing things about 
 182 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 183 
 
 literature is the fewness of the forms or nets 
 necessary to hold it. From Homer to Kipling 
 there stretch about three thousand years. Books 
 have been written in all of these years, but when 
 we come to sum up the forms that literature has 
 taken we find they are only eleven. Every great 
 thought that has come down to us has been 
 housed in one of these eleven forms or types. 
 They include, in p_oelry, epi c poems or epic s, 
 lyric poems or" lyrics, dramatid poems or dramas, 
 and bal fads; they include, in^prose, histories, 
 orations, biograpnies, letters, essays, novels, and 
 short stories. Many books have been written 
 about each of these types of literature, but the 
 best way to learn them is not from books about 
 them but from specimens of them. If you will 
 read only a few standard specimens of each of 
 these types and then try to put into plain language 
 how each type differs from every other type, you 
 will have taken an important step in understand- 
 ing and appreciating the whole question of literary 
 form. In fact, this way of studying literature — ■ 
 by types, I mean, instead of by nations or literary 
 epochs — is becoming more and more popular 
 every year. Let us glance rapidly at these types 
 in English and American literature. 
 
1 84 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 In epic poetry the English-speaking world 
 has nothing equal to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey 
 or Virgil's Aeneid. These are long narrative 
 poems dealing with a nation's heroic past. Mil- 
 ton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are 
 long narrative poems and are therefore epics. 
 But they are not national epics. They deal 
 with events that did not concern England any 
 more than they concerned other nations. In 
 American literature our best epics are minor epics. 
 The narrative poems of Longfellow, Evangeline, 
 Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, 
 and Paul Revere's Ride, are the best known of 
 these. 
 
 In lyric poetry — that is,, in short poems that 
 express personal emotions — the literature of the 
 English-speaking race is as rich as the literature 
 of any nation in history. The four volumes of 
 select poetry mentioned on pages 32-33 contain 
 hardly anything except lyric poetry. All hymn- 
 books are made up of lyric poems, because they ex- 
 press personal emotions — the joys and sorrows, 
 the faith and hope of those that wrote them and of 
 those that sing them. But if a poem tells a story, 
 like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, or Clement 
 Clarke Moore's The Night Before Christmas, or 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 185 
 
 Fitz-Greene Halleck's Marco Bozzaris, it is epic, 
 not lyric. 
 
 The drama, like the epic, is a narrative and a 
 rather long narrative. But it is written not to be 
 read but to be seen. The question in the drama- 
 tist's mind is not "How would this read?" but 
 "How would this look on the stage?" Shake- 
 speare, of course, gives England first rank in the 
 drama. In America we have no natio nal dra ma. 2 
 American history furnishes excellent themes, 
 however, for dramatic treatment, and there is a 
 prospect just now for better dramas than we have 
 ever had. But as yet it is only a prospect. 
 
 There are two kinds of ballads. The first are 
 the old ballads which nobody wrote but which just \ 
 grew up around some heroic or pathetic event. 
 Of course somebody must have made a beginning, 
 but as the ballad passed down from sire to son 
 and from century to century it grew so in the 
 handling that it is customary now to say that the 
 people made it. England and Scotland have 
 three hundred and five of these. The best known 
 are perhaps Sir Patrick Spens, Bonny Barbara 
 Allen, and The Hunting of the Cheviot, sometimes 
 called Chevy Chase. America is not old enough 
 for this sort of ballad, though Yankee Doodle 
 
1 86 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 almost belongs here. The second kind of ballad 
 is the modern or imitation ballad. The two best 
 in American literature seem to me Longfellow's 
 Wreck of the Hesperus, and George Henry Boker's 
 Ballad of Sir John Franklin. Read the three 
 folk-ballads just mentioned and see if you cannot 
 tell why these two American poems are called 
 imitation ballads. 
 
 In the writing of history the greatest genius 
 that England has produced is Edward Gibbon. 
 His History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Empire has held its own better and has had more 
 influence upon other writers of history than any 
 other single history written by an Englishman. 
 The history of England has been written with 
 most charm by the Earl of Clarendon, David 
 Hume, Macaulay, and Froude. Each has treated, 
 however, only a section of English history. The 
 most widely read and the most readable history 
 of England from the beginning to the present 
 time is J. R. Green's History of the English People. 
 Our American classics — those about which there 
 can be least dispute — are George Bancroft's 
 History of the United States, though it ends with 
 the Revolutionary Period; William Hickling Pres- 
 cott's History of the Reign of Ferdinand and 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 187 
 
 Isabella; John Lothrop Motley's Rise of ike Dutch 
 Republic; Francis Parkman's France and England 
 in North America, and John Fiske's The Critical 
 Period of American History. In both England 
 and America the cooperative method of writing 
 history is now coming more and more into vogue. 
 There is usually one editor-in-chief with a number 
 of associates under his general direction. There 
 are excellencies and defects in the cooperative 
 method. The variety of the parts is sometimes 
 greater than the oneness of the whole. It is a 
 case where the whole may not be equal to the 
 sum of all its parts. 
 
 In oratory the two English-speaking peoples 
 have for a century and a half taken the lead. 
 This is due partly to the nature of the English 
 language, which lends itself easily to the uses of 
 public address, partly to the freedom of speech 
 which the two countries have enjoyed, and partly 
 to the bigness of the subjects which they have 
 had to discuss. In both countries great orations 
 have marked the pathway of advancing democ- 
 racy. The average American is a better public 
 speaker than the average Englishman, but Eng- 
 land has had a few orators whose speeches have 
 stood the test of time better than the speeches 
 
1 88 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 of American orators. Oratory is diffused through- 
 out America; it tends more to crystallize in Eng- 
 land. Judged by the test of time, Edmund 
 Burke was the greatest orator of the English- 
 speaking race, and Daniel Webster was the great- 
 est orator of America. You can find no better 
 examples of modern oratory than Burke's speech 
 on Conciliation with America and Webster's 
 Reply to Hayne. Read also the speech of Hayne 
 to which Webster was replying. These speeches 
 deal with issues long since dead, but they deal 
 with them in a spirit and method that can be 
 applied equally as well to issues of to-day and 
 to-morrow. 
 
 In biography Englishmen have been peculiarly 
 successful with Englishmen, while Americans have 
 succeeded best with those who were not Americans. 
 Boswell's Life of Johnson remains the supreme 
 classic, but worthy of a place on the shelf with it 
 are Southey's Life of Nelson, Lockhart's Life of 
 Scott, Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, and Morley's 
 Life of Gladstone. Among the greatest biogra- 
 phies of Americans by Americans may be men- 
 tioned John Marshall's Life of Washington, 
 Samuel Longfellow's Life of Longfellow, and 
 Alexander V. G. Allen's Life of Phillips Brooks. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 189 
 
 Each of these covers a distinct period of our 
 history and appeals to a wide but different range 
 of interests. Mention should be made also of 
 Lounsbury's admirable though brief Life of 
 James Fenimore Cooper in the American Men of 
 Letters Series. The three works, however, that 
 have best represented American scholarship and 
 narrative skill in foreign lands are Irving's Life 
 and Voyages of Columbus, Motley's Life and 
 Death of John of Barneveldt, and Parkman's Mont- 
 calm and Wolfe. Autobiography is, of course, a 
 kind of biography, and a most interesting kind. 
 With the exception of Boswell's Life of Johnson it 
 is probable that The Autobiography of Benjamin 
 Franklin has found more readers than any book 
 mentioned in this paragraph. It is a model of 
 its kind, though it ends with the year 1757. 
 Franklin died in the year 1790. Thus thirty- 
 three years of his life, years of the greatest inter- 
 national renown, are left unaccounted for. For 
 these years we must go to Franklin's letters. 
 
 The best letters are found in biographies. In 
 fact, it is impossible to write a man's life unless 
 you let his letters speak for him. The letter is 
 one of the oldest forms of literature. Cicero has 
 left more than eight hundred letters. St. Paul's 
 
iqo WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 letters number fourteen and make up about one 
 fifth of the New Testament. English and Ameri- 
 can literature is very rich in letters, perhaps 
 richer than any other literature except that of 
 France. Some of these are narrative letters, 
 while others — and these are usually the most 
 entertaining — give only the writer's own feelings 
 about men and things. Two of the most famous 
 of the second kind are Lincoln's letter to Mrs. 
 Bixby (November 21, 1864), and Robert E. Lee's 
 letter accepting conditionally the presidency of 
 Washington College (August 24, 1865). You will 
 notice that no letter ever yet found its way into 
 literature that began, "Yours of 30th ult. rec*d 
 and contents noted. In reply would say," or that 
 ended, "Yours resp.," or "Yours aff." 
 
 The essay is one of the glories of English 
 literature. Bacon, Addison, Lamb, Macaulay, 
 Matthew Arnold, and Huxley are some of those 
 who have made the essay the delight and the 
 power that it is to-day among English-speaking 
 people. There are two kinds of essay — the 
 chatty, entertaining, pastime kind, and the more 
 serious essay that seeks to inform and convince. 
 Addison and Lamb lead the list in the first kind; 
 Bacon, Macaulay, Arnold, and Huxley in the 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 191 
 
 second kind. Our two greatest American essay- 
 ists, Emerson and Lowell, belong also to the last 
 named class. The essayists who write to enter- 
 tain deal chiefly with a mood or fancy; those 
 who write to convince deal more with what they 
 feel to be the unsettled problems of life. But 
 no writer, however witty or however learned, 
 deserves the name of essayist unless he can use 
 familiarly and effectively the resources of the 
 English language, for the essay marks the pin- 
 nacle of English prose style. Whether the essayist 
 entertains or informs, or whether, as usual, he does 
 both, he must show himself a consummate master 
 of his craft. If he does not, we may call his 
 work a treatise but not an essay. 
 
 The novel and the short story belong together, 
 though they did not start together. They are 
 the two youngest children in the family of liter- 
 ature and both have epic blood in their veins. 
 The short story is'not a condensed novel and the 
 novel is not an expanded short story. They have 
 to be planned differently from the start, just as 
 a cathedral and a chapel have to be planned 
 differently; an architect cannot begin with the 
 one and end with the other without making a 
 botch of it. In novel writing England has led 
 
1 92 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 the world. Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, and 
 Thackeray, though they did not found the novel, 
 have done most to show its possibilities. But 
 till the coming of Robert Louis Stevenson and 
 Rudyard Kipling, England was weak in short 
 stories. It had nothing to compare with the 
 best short stories of Washington Irving, Edgar 
 Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bret Harte, 
 Mark Twain, or 0. Henry. James Fenimore 
 Cooper was the founder of the American novel 
 and Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The Scarlet Letter, 
 proved himself our greatest artist in the novel. 
 Our genius for narration, however, still finds its 
 natural channel in the short«.story. The short 
 story is narration reduced to its essentials. It is 
 the old epic stripped for its last race. 
 
 As soon as you begin to think in these eleven 
 units of literature you will find your feeling for 
 form getting more and more disciplined. But 
 begin with these units. The smallest units are 
 words; the largest units are the types just men- 
 tioned. To begin with words, is like beginning 
 the study of architecture by studying single 
 bricks or stones. Dr. Samuel Johnson does tell 
 us of a man who carried a brick around with him 
 as a specimen of a house that he wanted to sell. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 193 
 
 But his mistake was no greater than that of the 
 man who thinks that mastery of language should 
 begin with words. Words are dead things till they 
 are combined into one of our eleven structures. 
 
 When you have read a few specimens of each 
 of these types you will find yourself comparing 
 them and noting likenesses and differences. You 
 remember that it was said on page 32 that "song 
 and story" really include all types of literature. 
 Let us consider the story element first. How 
 many of our eleven types tell a story? They are 
 epics, dramas, ballads, histories, biographies, 
 letters given over to incidents, novels, and short 
 stories. All of these tell in different ways what 
 has happened or what is happening. We need no 
 other testimony to prove to us that mankind has 
 always been interested in events and incidents, 
 in things that take place. We want to absorb 
 the lesson of these haps or mishaps but cannot 
 get hold of them till some one makes clear and 
 vivid the human appeal in them. The remaining 
 types belong to the song element in literature. 
 They have to do not with happenings so much as 
 with our own thoughts, moods, hopes, ideals, 
 impressions, and convictions. We may body 
 these forth in short poems if we are poets, or, if 
 
i 9 4 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 we are not poets, in letters to our friends, in 
 addresses before an audience, or in essays for the 
 general reader. Modern writers have found that 
 the essay is the best means of reaching a wide 
 audience if they wish to inform or to convince, 
 just as they have found that the short story is 
 the best means of reaching a wide audience if 
 they wish to narrate. The modern essay is 
 explanation reduced to its essentials, just as the 
 modern short story is narration reduced to its 
 essentials. 
 
 Now these two processes, explanation^and nar- 
 ration, are the processes that confront you at 
 every stage. Pick up a newspaper and see if 
 its contents, its readable contents, do not fall 
 into these two divisions. It is filled chiefly with 
 happenings, local happenings or national hap- 
 penings, or world happenings; the telegraph lines 
 are talking and they prefer narration. But you 
 find a column or more devoted not to happenings 
 but to comment, to explanation, to drawing and 
 enforcing a lesson. It is the editorial. Try the 
 same plan with a magazine. See how many 
 pages are devoted to events, real or imagined. 
 If they are imagined, we have a shor^ story, and 
 some magazines contain nothing else. Then count 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 195 
 
 the pages that explain things or happenings, the 
 interpretative part. How many pages remain? 
 Recall, if you can, all that has been said to you 
 to-day. Was it not either incident or comment? 
 Recall what you yourself have said. Is there 
 anything left over after the two pigeon-holes, 
 explanation and narration, have been filled? 
 
 If this is true, then the way to master your own j 
 language is to master it not as it lies dead and 
 dismembered in text-books but as it climbs the 
 two central peaks of explanation, and narration. 
 These are the uses to which you will have to 
 put language every day that you live. Perhaps 
 it seems to you that I ought to say description 
 and narration rather than explanation and narra- 
 tion. But description is a kind of explanation, 
 a kind that has to do chiefly with the outside 
 of things. When you try to make me see the 
 outside of a machine, you describe it; when you 
 try to make plain to me its workings, you explain 
 it. Description is one of the treasure houses of 
 literature, but it is situated on the premises of 
 explanation. 
 
 There is language discipline, of course, in all 
 types of literature, but there is the most helpful 
 discipline in the types that fit most accurately 
 
1 9 6 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 our everyday thoughts. We give ourselves daily 
 exercise in explaining things and in narrating 
 things. We do this in prose, not in poetry. The 
 road leading to mastery, then, starts from prose, 
 and from the kinds of prose that best meet our 
 daily needs. We may pass from these to other 
 types — these, in fact, include the other types 
 — but the shortest and surest road begins in 
 the prose essay and the prose short story. 
 
 A few specimen collections of short stories have 
 already been mentioned. 1 There are equally good 
 collection of essays. Among these are English 
 Essays, collected and edited by Walter C. Bronson; 
 The GreaU English Essayists, with introductory 
 essays and notes by William J. Dawson and Con- 
 ingsby W. Dawson; and A Book of English Essays 
 (1600-1900), selected by Stanley V. Alakower and 
 Basil H. Blackwell. The main objection, however, 
 to compilations of this sort is that they do not con- 
 tain in every case the whole of each essay included. 
 The editors omit parts, though they try to omit 
 only such parts as will not leave the rest scrappy. 
 You will find it best, far best, I think, to begin 
 with the essays of Macaulay, Arnold, and Huxley. 
 These are models of clear thinking and effective 
 
 'See page 33 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 197 
 
 writing. Each essay discusses one big theme, and 
 the essay is built around that theme as closely as 
 a walnut is built around its kernel. These writers 
 had a genius for essentials and an equal genius for 
 cutting out unsparingly the things that do not 
 count. Each is a living force in the world to-day 
 — Macaulay in history and biography, Arnold in 
 our ideas of culture, and Huxley in the meaning 
 and service of science. But each is a force not 
 only in what he says but in the way he says it. 
 They are the three men who did more than any 
 other three of their time to make the art of ex- 
 planation both interesting and effective. You 
 cannot follow them or any one of them long with- 
 out finding your own power to explain growing 
 by what it feeds on. 
 
 It is easy enough, however, to point to the right 
 authors. It is easy to read them. More im- 
 portant than either is so to read them as to get 
 power from their pages. There are thousands 
 of readers of good literature whose power of_self- 
 expression shows no improvement from year to 
 year. But it is well to remember also that wh< 
 ever successful writers have expressed their in- 
 debtedness, whenever they have named the source 
 or the first impulse from which their power came, 
 
1 98 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 it was always to literature that they pointed 
 us, never to a dictionary, or a grammar, or a 
 rhetoric. 
 
 Why? Are dictionaries, grammars, and rhetorics 
 useless? By no means. They are useful as step- 
 ping-stones but not as final resting-places. They are 
 useful in calling attention to the speech of the mas- 
 ters, in telling us what to look for and what not to 
 look for, in making the search interesting and the path 
 straight. But whenever they satisfy or blunt 
 our desire to go beyond them they are worse 
 than useless; they rob rather than enrich. They 
 are then like the bayous along the Mississippi. 
 These streams flow from the great river instead 
 of into it: they are tributaries turned wrong end 
 foremost. When Goethe was accused of being a 
 skeptic he replied that his was "the active skep- 
 ticism, whose sole aim is to conquer itself." That 
 is exactly the motive with which all language- 
 helps should be used. Your dependence on them 
 should conquer itself as soon as possible. They 
 should create a thirst, but this thirst -should be 
 not for more of them but for the speech of the 
 masters from which they derive every jot and 
 tittle of the authority that they possess. 
 
 If you were to approach Macaulay or Arnold 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 199 
 
 or Huxley through the dictionary, you would 
 approach them through their words — that is, 
 through the words unfamiliar to you. You would 
 say: "These writers know a great many words 
 that I do not know. I will not let one of them 
 escape me. With the aid of a good up-to-date 
 dictionary, I am going to look up every word un- 
 known to me and so add it to my speech-utensils." 
 That sounds reasonable, but it is not. At least 
 it is not the right motive or method with which to 
 begin the systematic study of an author if you 
 are studying him for language mastery. Suppose 
 you were to read all the essays of Macaulay and 
 Arnold and Huxley and should make a list of all 
 the words found in them that you did not know. 
 If you memorized the meanings of these words 
 perfectly, would your daily speech show a notice- 
 able improvement? I do not think so. These 
 words would be added to your word-collection, 
 but not necessarily to your speech-utensils. Per- 
 haps you do not need these words except to under- 
 stand passages in which they occur? That is 
 something, of course, but it is a mere by-product. 
 Unless your daily thought demands these words, 
 unless you need them in your work, it will do you 
 little good to list and learn them. 
 
200 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 If you will think a moment about your own 
 vocabulary — that is, about the stock of words 
 whose meanings you know — you will find that it 
 may be divided into two distinct parts. You 
 have really two vocabularies. There is, first, the 
 vocabulary that you actually use. There is, 
 second, the vocabulary that you know but never 
 use. The first is your writing and speaking vocab- 
 ulary; it contains the words so thoroughly mas- 
 tered that they do immediately the bidding of 
 your thought. This is your dynamic vocabulary, 
 your vocabulary of power. The second is your 
 reading and hearing vocabulary; it contains the 
 words which you know when you read them or 
 hear them but which have hitherto refused to do 
 the bidding of your thought. You have never 
 used them. This is your static vocabulary, your 
 vocabulary of knowledge. Knowledge is not 
 power in this case — it is only possible power; 
 it becomes actual power only when a passive 
 word steps over into the list of active words and 
 does work there for which it is better fitted than 
 the word that you have been using in its place. 
 Every man does well to increase his knowledge- 
 vocabulary; he does vastly better to increase his 
 power- vocabulary. Knowledge words are lumber 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 201 
 
 waiting in the factory; power words are furniture 
 used in the home. 
 
 The masters of language at the present time, 
 those whose works carry farthest, are not those 
 whose pages would furnish you with the longest list 
 of new words. They are those who use familiar 
 words in apt but unexpected places; they show 
 you old friends with new powers; they know not 
 only the first meanings of everyday words but 
 the wider service that these words can do if 
 properly harnessed to other words. Literature, 
 not the dictionary, is a storage-battery and the 
 only storage-battery for this kind of word-power, 
 the word-power that comes from the known but 
 unused, from the familiar but unrealized. Ma- 
 caulay, Arnold, and Huxley, if rightly used, can 
 double your word-power without adding a new 
 word to your vocabulary. But, whether known 
 or unknown, words do not furnish the right method 
 of approach. We must begin with a larger unit, 
 with a cluster of words, and go from the cluster 
 to the individual word. A word is not alive till 
 it finds itself in company. 
 
 If you approach our three writers from the side 
 of grammar, you approach them through their 
 sentences. The sentence is to grammar what the 
 
202 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 word is to the dictionary. But is the sentence 
 the right unit? There are undoubtedly many 
 brilliant sentences to be found in the pages of 
 our three essayists. Here are a few that circulate 
 as current coin. From Macaulay: "Men are 
 never so likely to settle a question rightly as when 
 they discuss it freely." "He [Byron] had a head 
 which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the 
 deformity of which the beggars in the street 
 mimicked." "An acre in Middlesex* is better 
 than a principality in Utopia." "The Puritan 
 hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to 
 the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spec- 
 tator." From Arnold: "Culture looks beyond 
 machinery, culture hates hatred: culture has one 
 great passion, the passion for sweetness and light." 
 "Genius is mainly an affair of energy." "Poetry 
 is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and 
 widely effective mode of saying things, and hence 
 its importance." "When we are asked further, 
 'What is conduct?' let us answer, 'Three fourths 
 of life.' " From Huxley: "If a little knowledge 
 is dangerous, where is the man who has so much 
 as to be out of danger?" "Logical consequences 
 
 *Middlesex is next to the smallest county in England, but has next to 
 the largest population. Utopia, or Nowhere, is the/name given by Sir 
 Thomas More (1478-1535) to the imaginary island about which he wrote. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 203 
 
 are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of 
 wise men." "Veracity is the heart of morality." 
 "The great end of life is not knowledge, but 
 action." 
 
 Suppose we did with these sentences all that 
 grammar asks us to do. Suppose we classified 
 them, took them to pieces, put them together 
 again, learned to name and know all their parts — 
 should we be much better fitted to explain every- 
 day matters to others? Should we even have 
 found the real thought-gait of our writers? 
 Brilliant sentences do not make a great writer. 
 A great writer is a builder, and the sentence, like 
 the word, is not the building unit. Sentences 
 are not the links of prose composition. Even if 
 we learn how to construct a few brilliant sentences, 
 if we learn how to make and analyze all the kinds 
 of sentences that grammar calls for, we need 
 something around which to build them, something 
 to practise them on. We learn to shoot not by 
 shooting but by shooting at a target. 
 
 Putting grammar aside, let us try rhetoric. If 
 you approach our three writers through one of 
 the old rhetorics written a generation ago, you 
 will find yourself plunged into figures of speech, 
 into metaphors, similes, and the like. If you 
 
2o 4 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 approach our writers through a good modern 
 rhetoric, you will find the emphasis put not upon 
 figures of speech, not upon words or sentences, 
 but upon the paragraph. The paragraph meets 
 all the requirements that good writing demands. 
 It is the real unit of authorship. The paragraph 
 is a cluster of cooperative sentences making clear 
 a single thought. It is like the numeral ioo: 
 if you can count ioo, you can count 1,000,000,000 
 if you live long enough. Every prose type of 
 literature is a chain in which the successive links 
 are paragraphs. If it is a paragraph that explains, 
 it is an essay in miniature; if it is a paragraph 
 that narrates, it is a short story in miniature. 
 The art of using language effectively is the art 
 of building and joining paragraphs. Here are 
 two successive paragraphs from each of our chosen 
 essayists: 
 
 FROM MACAULAY* 
 
 "The perfect historian is he in whose work 
 the character and spirit of an age is exhibited 
 in miniature. He relates no fact, he attrib- 
 utes no expression to his characters which 
 is not authenticated by sufficient testimony. 
 
 *£ssay on History. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 205 
 
 But by judicious selection, rejection, and 
 arrangement, he gives to truth those attrac- 
 tions which have been usurped by fiction. 
 In his narrative a due subordination is ob- 
 served: some transactions are prominent; 
 others retire. But the scale on which he 
 represents them is increased or diminished, 
 not according to the dignity of the persons 
 concerned in them, but according to the 
 degree in which they elucidate the condition 
 of society and the nature of man. He shows 
 us the court, the camp, and the senate. But 
 he shows us also the nation. He considers 
 no anecdote, no peculiarity of manner, no 
 familiar saying, as too insignificant for his 
 notice which is not too insignificant to illus- 
 trate the operation of laws, of religion, and 
 of education, and to mark the progress of 
 the human mind. Men will not merely be 
 described, but will be made intimately 
 known to us. The changes of manners will 
 be indicated, not merely by a few general 
 phrases or a few extracts from statistical 
 documents, but by appropriate images pre- 
 sented in every line* 
 
 "If a man, such as we are supposing, 
 
2o6 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 should write the history of England, he 
 would assuredly not omit the battles, the 
 sieges, the negotiations, the seditions, the 
 ministerial changes. But with these he 
 would intersperse the details which are the 
 charm of historical romances. At Lincoln 
 Cathedral there is a beautiful painted window 
 which was made by an apprentice out of the 
 pieces of glass which had been rejected by 
 his master. It is so far superior to every 
 other in the church that, according to the 
 tradition, the vanquished artist killed him- 
 self from mortification. Sir Walter Scott, in 
 the same manner, has used those fragments 
 of truth which historians have scornfully 
 thrown behind them in a manner which may 
 well excite their envy. He has constructed 
 out of their gleanings works which, even con- 
 sidered as histories, are scarcely less valuable 
 than theirs. But a truly great historian 
 would reclaim those materials which the 
 novelist has appropriated. The history of 
 the government and the history of the people 
 would be exhibited in that mode in which 
 alone they can be exhibited justly — in in- 
 separable conjunction and intermixture. We 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 207 
 
 would not then have to look for the wars and 
 votes of the Puritans in Clarendon* and for 
 their phraseology in Old Mortality; for one 
 half of King James in Hume,f and for the 
 other half in The Fortunes of Nigel." 
 
 Let us look now at these two paragraphs. 
 Whether one agrees with Macaulay or not, he 
 cannot read even this short selection without \ 
 feeling that the great essayist illuminated what- 
 ever he touched. He had ideas and he had the 
 constructive talent that was needed to put them 
 clearly and memorably before his readers. What 
 we want to do, however, is not primarily to learn 
 facts frorn Macaulay or Arnold or Huxley, but 
 to learn "how to express facts. We do not want 
 to borrow their torches, but only to light from 
 them our own torches. We may never have to 
 explain what they are explaining, but they can 
 
 *See page 186. The Earl of Clarendon (1608-1674) took the side of Charles 
 I and Charles II and was opposed to the Puritans. In his great work, 
 History of the Rebellion in England, while there is a great deal about the 
 Puritans, he does not attempt to imitate their "phraseology" as Scott does 
 in Old Mortality. 
 
 tSee page 186. David Hume (1711-1776), author of a History of England, 
 is after Clarendon the second historian of England whose work is marked 
 by a distinct charm of style. His portrayal of James I is exceptionally 
 brilliant, but not equal to that found in Scott's The Fortunes of Nigel. "No 
 historical portrait that we possess," says R. H. Hutton, "will take prece- 
 dence, as a mere portrait, of Scott's brilliant study of James I." 
 
208 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 help us because they illustrate the principles of 
 all explanation that is clear and effective. 
 
 To train yourself in the mastery of language 
 by the study of the paragraph two things are 
 necessary: First, find the subject of the para- 
 graph; second, build a paragraph of your own with 
 the same subject, but without having the printed 
 page before you. Sometimes you may find it 
 difficult to find the exact subject of a paragraph; 
 if so, blame the author, not yourself. The search, 
 at any rate, will prove an education in accurate 
 thinking. There is no difficulty, however, in 
 these two paragraphs. The subject of the first 
 is "The perfect historian," of the second, "How 
 the perfect historian would write the history of 
 England." The two paragraphs are admirably 
 joined; the second is naturally suggested by the 
 first. If Macaulay had been an American he 
 would have taken as the subject of his second 
 paragraph, "How the perfect historian would 
 write the history of the United States." That, 
 however, is for you to think about, as indeed you 
 can hardly help doing if you begin to think about 
 "The perfect historian." 
 
 Perhaps you are a very busy person and have 
 but a few spare moments for self-training in 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 209 
 
 language. Well, the paragraph is the best lan- 
 guage-guide a busy person ever had. Take the 
 subject of the paragraph with you. Turn it over 
 and over. The spare moments that you snatch 
 from your work or that you have in going to and 
 from your work are enough. Let the thought 
 grow in your own soil. Imagine that you have 
 to write a paper or make a speech on the subject. 
 You will find — I care not what your work may 
 be — that new points of view will continually be 
 suggested by your surroundings and by what you 
 are doing. You know a great many things that 
 Macaulay did not know, and some of these he 
 would undoubtedly have used if he had known 
 them. Truth has no walls or barbed-wire fences: 
 little truths and big truths help each other at 
 every turn, wander at will in each other's territory, 
 and laugh at the boundaries which man thinks 
 that he has established. "The perfect historian" 
 is a big theme — any theme is big that has "per- 
 fect" attached to it — but after a while you will 
 have thought yourself into it and through it. 
 Then come back to the original paragraph. How 
 does your paragraph compare with Macaulay's? 
 You may think about words and sentences 
 now, because you need them; they are no longer 
 
210 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 unrelated to what you are doing. Are there not 
 some words in Macaulay's paragraph which you 
 did not use, but which are better than those that 
 you did use? The words "authenticated," "selec- 
 tion, rejection, and arrangement," "usurped," 
 "elucidate" — these perhaps belong already to 
 your knowledge-vocabulary. Is not this a good 
 time to add them to your power- vocabulary? 
 Note that fine trinity of words, "the court, the 
 camp, and the senate." Most writers would have 
 beat it out into something like "royal intrigues, 
 military achievements, and political rivalries." 
 Did you notice how fond Macaulay is of "not — 
 but?" He has done more than any other writer 
 to add clearness to explanation by the use of 
 these two words. 
 
 Are your sentences as short and direct as his? 
 Have you one sentence, as he has, that includes 
 all the rest? Where did you place it in your para- 
 graph? Macaulay placed his most important 
 sentence first. This sentence is really a definition 
 of "The perfect historian," the other sentences 
 being illustrations of the definition. But Macau- 
 lay often places his most important sentence near 
 the middle of the paragraph and sometimes at the 
 end. Try these positions here. Begin with 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 211 
 
 "The perfect historian relates no fact, he attri- 
 butes no expression to his characters which is 
 not authenticated by sufficient testimony." Now 
 place the omitted first sentence just before "He 
 shows us the court, the camp, and the senate." 
 Take it out now and place it last, so that instead 
 of introducing the whole paragraph it will sum 
 up the whole paragraph. There is, as you see, 
 the widest liberty in placing your most important 
 sentence. We are not looking for rules — there 
 are no rules — we are looking for freedom, clear- 
 ness, naturalness, and effectiveness. You may 
 write an excellent paragraph that has no most 
 important sentence. There is none in the first 
 paragraph from Huxley on page 217. Or you may 
 take two sentences instead of one to present the 
 substance of your paragraph, as Macaulay does 
 in his second paragraph.* But Macaulay usually 
 has one most important sentence, and he usually 
 places it first. 
 
 Do not let details, however, swallow up your 
 main purpose. You are taking the phrase "The 
 
 *It is often only a question of punctuation. Most writers would have 
 written "But" with a small letter and so have thrown the two sentences 
 into one. Thus: "If a man, such as we are supposing, should write the 
 history of England, he would assuredly not omit the battles, the sieges, the 
 negotiations, the seditions, the ministerial changes; but with these he 
 would intersperse the details which are the charm of historical romances." 
 
2i2 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 perfect historian" and trying to express your 
 thoughts about it so clearly that the reader or 
 hearer will not only understand you but cannot 
 misunderstand you. You are using Macaulay's 
 paragraph not as a perfect paragraph but as a 
 means of making your own paragraph more com- 
 pact and effective. You took a paragraph for 
 this purpose because a paragraph is a whole 
 composition in miniature. You see also how 
 important words and sentences are when studied 
 as parts of a paragraph. It is not till we begin 
 to fit sentences into paragraphs that we are in 
 a position to judge of the fitness either of sen- 
 tences or of words. 
 
 FROM ARNOLD* 
 
 "Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting 
 danger; often in machinery most absurdly 
 disproportioned to. the end which this machin- 
 ery, if it is to do any good at all, is to serve; 
 but always in machinery, as if it had a value 
 in and for itself. What is freedom but 
 machinery? < What is population but machin- 
 ery? What is coal but machinery? What 
 are railroads but machinery? WJiat is wealth 
 
 ^Culture and Anarchy, first chapter. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 213 
 
 but machinery? What are, even, religious 
 organizations but machinery? Now almost 
 every voice in England is accustomed to 
 speak of these things as if they were precious 
 ends in themselves, and therefore had some 
 of the characters of perfection indisputably 
 joined to them. I have before noticed Mr. 
 Roebuck's stock argument for proving the 
 greatness and happiness of England as she is, 
 and for stopping the mouths of all gainsayers. 
 Mr. Roebuck is never weary of reiterating 
 this argument of his, so I do not know why 
 I should be weary of noticing it. 'May not 
 every man in England say what he likes?' 
 — Mr. Roebuck perpetually asks; and that, 
 he thinks, is quite sufficient, and when every 
 man may say what he likes our aspirations 
 ought to be satisfied. But the aspirations 
 of culture, which is the study of perfection, 
 are not satisfied, unless what men say, when 
 they may say what they like, is worth say- 
 ing — has good in it, and more good than 
 bad. In the same way the Times, replying 
 to some foreign strictures on the dress, looks, 
 and behavior of the English abroad, urges 
 that the English ideal is that every one should 
 
214 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 be free to do and to look just as he likes. But 
 culture indefatigably tries, not to make what 
 each raw person may like the rule by which 
 he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer 
 to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, 
 and becoming, and to get the raw person to 
 like that. 
 
 "And in the same way with respect to 
 railroads and coal. Every one must have 
 observed the strange language current during 
 the late discussions as to the possible failures 
 of our supplies of coal. Our coal, thousands 
 of people were saying, is the real basis of our 
 national greatness; if our coal runs short, 
 there is an end of the greatness of England. 
 But what is greatness? — culture makes us 
 ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy 
 to excite love, interest, and admiration; and 
 the outward proof of possessing greatness is 
 that we excite love, interest, and admiration. 
 If England were swallowed up by the sea 
 to-morrow, which of the two, a hundred years 
 hence, would most excite the love, interest, 
 and admiration of mankind — would most, 
 therefore, show the evidences of having pos- 
 sessed greatness — the England of the last 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 215 
 
 twenty years, or the England of Elizabeth, 
 of a time of splendid spiritual effort, but when 
 our coal, and our industrial operations de- 
 pending on coal, were very little developed? 
 Well, then, what an unsound habit of mind 
 it must be which makes us talk of things like 
 coal or iron as constituting the greatness of 
 England, and how salutary a friend is culture, 
 bent on seeing things as they are, and thus 
 dissipating delusions of this kind and fixing 
 standards of perfection that are real!" 
 
 Arnold is on very familiar ground here. He is 
 talking about culture, and no one of his generation 
 thought so persistently about culture as he or 
 succeeded in making his views prevail so widely. 
 His manner is wholly different from Macaulay's. 
 Arnold likes to define in few words the problem 
 he is discussing, and then to repeat the definition 
 so often that you cannot help remembering it. He 
 has said time and again that "culture is the study 
 of perfection" but finds a chance of repeating it 
 in our first paragraph. When he defines greatness 
 in our second paragraph as "a spiritual condition 
 worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration," 
 he repeats the words "love, interest, and admira- 
 
c 
 
 216 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 tion" till you can hardly help associating greatness 
 with "love, interest, and admiration." These 
 two methods, definition and repetition, are power- 
 ful weapons, and Arnold is our best teacher in 
 their use. 
 
 The subject of the first paragraph is " Culture 
 versus machinery," of the second "Culture versus 
 coal." The two paragraphs are well joined, the 
 second being a continuation of the thought of 
 the first; but they are not so compact as Macau- 
 lay's. Instead of filling his paragraph with short 
 jinging statements, Arnold likes to ask questions 
 jmd then answer them. You and he seem to 
 be talking leisurely about the subject together. 
 There is always in Arnold's pages this suggestion 
 of leisurely well-bred conversation. It is very ef- 
 fective, but it is a looser method than Macaulay's. 
 Macaulay is a hard downpour, Arnold a slow 
 drizzle; but you will get just as soaked by the one 
 as by the other. Each method brings out a new 
 resource in the effective use of language. If you 
 will carry the two seed-thoughts, "Culture versus 
 machinery" and "Culture versus coal," around 
 with you for a few days and then compare your 
 two paragraphs with Arnold's, you will have added 
 power and method to your use of English. 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 217 
 
 FROM HUXLEY* 
 
 "That man, I think, has had a liberal 
 education who has been so trained in youth 
 that his body is the ready servant of his will, 
 and does with ease and pleasure all the work 
 that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose 
 intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all 
 its parts of equal strength, and in smooth 
 working order; ready, like a steam engine, 
 to be turned to any kind of work, and spin 
 the gossamers as well as forge the anchors 
 of the mind; whose mind is stored with a 
 knowledge of the great and fundamental 
 truths of Nature and of the laws of her opera- 
 tions; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of 
 life and fire, but whose passions are trained 
 to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant 
 of a tender conscience; who has learned to 
 love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, 
 to hate all vileness, and to respect others as 
 himself. 
 
 " Such an one and no other, I conceive, has 
 had a liberal education; for he is, as com- 
 pletely as a man can be, in harmony with 
 Nature. He will make the best of her, and 
 
 *A Liberal Education: and where to find it. 
 
2i8 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 she of him. They will get on together rarely; 
 she as his ever beneficent mother; he as her 
 mouthpiece, her conscious self, her minister 
 and interpreter." 
 
 "A liberally educated man" and "Why?"— 
 these words indicate the topics of the two para- 
 graphs. The first is a famous paragraph, famous 
 for its breadth, clearness, force, and beauty. The 
 second paragraph clinches the first by telling us 
 that our liberally educated man is, after all, only 
 "in harmony with Nature." That, says Huxley, 
 is the supreme test. But the two paragraphs are 
 perfect examples of clear thought and of effective 
 method. Huxley is talking about a liberal edu- 
 cation. Macaulay would have said: "A liberal 
 education is an education which" — and, like a 
 train of captives behind a triumphal car, there 
 would have followed a brilliant series of "which" 
 clauses telling us what a liberal education does. 
 An admirable method for Macaulay and for all 
 those who have learned to drive a long line of 
 "which" clauses with a sure hand on the reins 
 and a sure eye on the goal. Arnold would have 
 defined a liberal education in a few carefully chosen 
 abstract words like "conduct," "disinterestedness," 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 219 
 
 "sweetness and light," "love, interest, and ad- 
 miration," and would then have repeated the 
 definition so adroitly that, whether you liked 
 it or not, you would have to carry it with you. 
 An admirable method for Arnold and for all those 
 who have learned to make new pathways for 
 thought out of abstract terms. Huxley defines a 
 liberal education in terms of a liberally educated 
 man. He says: "Let's not talk about an ab- 
 straction, something that we cannot see or touch 
 or sympathize with. Let's talk about a man." 
 Immediately you begin to test yourself and others 
 by this liberally educated man. You take stock 
 of your own "body," "intellect," "mind," "pas- 
 sions." You are thinking very intently about a 
 liberal education, but you are looking not at a 
 word ending in "ation" but at a human being. 
 
 Try this method now with other abstract sub- 
 jects. Instead of attempting to explain to people 
 your ideal of a practical education, give them 
 your idea of the man who has had a practical 
 education. Instead of talking about patriotism, 
 illiteracy, honesty, statesmanship, efficiency, as 
 shadows, talk about them first as folks. Your 
 thought will flow more freely and will go into 
 many more hidden corners of your subject. Then 
 
22o WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 go back to Huxley and see if there is not still 
 more to learn. Are your divisions as clear-cut 
 as his? Are your words as pictorial? "Mechan- 
 ism," "logic engine," "steam engine," "gossamers," 
 "anchors," "stunted ascetic," "trained to come to 
 heel" — do not these words picture the thought 
 better than the words you have used? 
 
 Sentences, then, like bananas, grow in bunches. 
 These bunches are paragraphs. As the shape 
 of each banana is partly determined by its place 
 in the bunch, so the build of each sentence will 
 depend upon what it has to do in the paragraph. 
 And this is true of the paragraph that narrates 
 as well as of the paragraph that explains. Each 
 has a unity of its own, but each is part of a larger 
 unity, the unity of the whole essay or of the whole 
 story. To study any sort of paragraph we must 
 catch it by its stem, its subject, and hold it up. 
 As we look at it thus hanging down, we can judge 
 of the fitness of its parts and learn how to make 
 our own paragraphs hang well together. 
 
 A word now about the narrative paragraph as 
 found in the short story. You are so familiar 
 with Irving's Rip Van Winkle that it is needless 
 to quote in full any paragraphs frqm it for nar- 
 rative exercise. Let me give, however, the begin- 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 221 
 
 nings and topics of two paragraphs in this story, 
 the one following the other: (1) "On awakening, 
 he found himself on the green knoll from whence 
 he had first seen the old man of the glen." (2) 
 "He looked round for his gun, but in place of the 
 clean, well-oiled fowling piece, he found an old 
 firelock lying by him, the barrel incrusted with 
 rust, the lock failing off, and the stock worm- 
 eaten." The topics of the two paragraphs begin- 
 ning with these sentences are (1) "What Rip first 
 thought on awakening" and (2) "What Rip first 
 did on awakening." Can you complete these two 
 paragraphs without referring to the story? If 
 not, read the story once more, then write out your 
 own paragraphs and compare them with Irving's. 
 Have you not left out something? This is a very 
 important part of the story. If you do not grip 
 the attention of the reader from the very moment 
 that Rip wakes, you will not get it later on. 
 Irving succeeds by putting himself in Rip's place 
 and imagining what a poor fellow would think 
 and then what he would do in his first efforts to 
 right himself in such baffling surroundings. It is 
 all very simple, but it is all very fine art. Every 
 paragraph is pointing and moving now toward 
 something decisive that will happen a little later 
 
V 
 
 222 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 on. Rip is stumbling up a steeper mountain now 
 than before, but at the top of it he will find com- 
 plete recognition and happy restoration. Get the 
 paragraph topics well in hand and with book 
 closed see if you can lead Rip up and out as 
 connectedly and as interestingly as Irving has 
 done. If not, where did you omit something that 
 ought to have been put in, and where did you put 
 in something that does not fit? Perhaps you 
 omitted nothing essential as far as the skeleton 
 of the story is concerned, and yet you are aware 
 that your story lacks charm and vividness. Con- 
 gratulate yourself. To feel the incompleteness 
 of your story in these finer details is an achieve- 
 ment that points pretty surely to larger triumphs 
 yet to be. 
 
 In conclusion, then, take a few great essays and 
 a few great stories and use them as guides, as 
 companions, in finding and training the best that 
 is in you of explanation and narration. Take a 
 whole essay and a whole story. Pit yourself 
 against the author, but do not confine yourself 
 to a particular author. Aim at a habit — the 
 habit of constructive reading, which means con- 
 structive thinking and constructive writing. Read, 
 if possible, a whole essay or a whole story at a 
 
WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 223 
 
 sitting. Then turn to the paragraphs. Read 
 them carefully, string them by their topics, take 
 one or more of these topics with you in your work, 
 think through them, put flesh on them, weigh 
 them now in the scales of the originals, and try 
 again. If a paragraph leads you into strange 
 realms of thought, go with it cheerfully; it doubt- % 
 less gave its author a rarer chase than it is giving 
 you. Remember that the supreme teacher of 
 literature and of language is literature itself. As 
 soon as you part company with handbooks and 
 establish a teacher-and-pupil relation with the 
 masters themselves, you are drinking at the origi- 
 nal source. You have exchanged the spigot for 
 the fountain, and every page will mean power 
 Tand mastery. — —1 
 
 Literature can thus become~an""outIet not onlyV 
 to your unspoken thoughts and moods but to the . 
 choked passage-way of your own speech, through 
 which your thoughts and moods have tried to 
 pass; it can keep before you the vision of the ideal 
 not only in the dreams of great idealists but in 
 the shining structures in which their dreams have 
 found sanctuary; it can give you a better knowl- 
 edge of human nature not only as human nature 
 is stored in human deeds but as it is stored in the 
 
224 WHAT CAN LITERATURE DO FOR ME 
 
 varied forms of language that express human 
 deeds; it can restore the past to you not only as 
 the past lives in the vanished centuries but as it 
 is crystallized in the speech of those who gave 
 character and direction to the vanished centuries \, 
 and it can show you the glory of the commonplace 
 not only in the common things about you but in* 
 the commonest words through which the glory 
 of the commonplace is flashed upon you. 
 
 THE END 
 
 /' 
 
INDEX OF AUTHORS 
 
 Addison, Joseph, 190. 
 
 Allen, A. V. G., 188 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 137, 190, 
 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 
 202, 207, 212, 215, 216, 
 219 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 190 
 Bagehot, Walter, 88 
 Balzac, 101 
 Bancroft, George, 186 
 Bayne, Peter, 109 
 Besant, Walter, 17, 105 
 Blackwell, Basil H., 196 
 Boccaccio, 80 
 
 Boker, George Henry, 186 
 Boswell, James, 188, 189 
 Bronson, Walter C, 196 
 Browning, Elizabeth Bar- 
 rett, 159 
 Browning, Robert, 36, 37, 
 43, 47, 52, 56, 76, 102, 106, 
 153, .173, 176, 181 
 Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 86 
 Bryant, William Cullen, 20, 
 
 68, 75, 100 
 Bulwer-Lytton, 148 
 Bunyan, John, 17 
 Burke, Edmund,i6, 188 
 Burns, Robert, 32, 132, 134, 
 
 166, 174, 180 
 Burton, J. H., 133 
 
 Campbell, Thomas, 32, 133 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 13, 15, 70, 
 
 182 
 Cary, H. F. 16, 75 
 Caxton, William, 79 
 Cervantes, Miguel de, 75, 83, 
 
 85, 86, 87 
 Chambers, Robert, 13 
 Church, Alfred J., 75 
 Cicero, 16, 189 
 Clarendon, Earl of, 186, 207 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 
 
 10, n, 12,93, 157, 180, 184 
 Cooper, James Fenimore, 75, 
 
 99, 100, 101, 102, 117, 192 
 Cowper, William, 32, 133, 
 
 173 
 
 Dante, Alighieri, 75, 80," 81, 
 
 82 
 Darwin, Charles, 42 
 Dawson, Coningsby W., 196 
 Dawson, William J., 196 
 Defoe, Daniel, 13, 75, 92, 95 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 27 
 Dickens, Charles, 73, 76, 
 
 107, 108, 109, 148, 192 
 Douglas, William, 132 
 Dowden, Edward, 101 
 Doyle, Francis Hastings, 126 
 Dryden, John, 91 
 Dumas, Alexander, 134 
 
 225 
 
226 
 
 INDEX OF AUTHORS 
 
 Eliot, Charles W., 48, 148 
 
 Eliot, George, 73, 76, no, 
 112, 192 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 8, 
 9, 27, 48, 52, 55, 60, 61, 
 92, 104, 135, 136, 181,191 
 
 Engel, Eduard, 47, 49 
 
 Euripides, 159 
 
 Everett, Edward, 6, 7, 156 
 
 Ferrier, J. F., 155 
 Field, Eugene, 70 
 Fielding, Henry, 93 
 Finch, Francis Miles, 70, 
 
 168, 169 
 Fiske, John, 187 
 Flaubert, Gustave, 158 
 Forster, John, 108 
 Foster, Stephen Collins, 118 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 99, 172, 
 
 173, 189 
 Froude J. A., 186 
 Furness, Horace Howard, 73 
 
 Gairdner, James, 146 
 Gibbon, Edward, 186 
 Gladstone, William E., 126 
 Goethe, 75, 95, 98, 99, 121, 
 
 148, 158, 181, 198 
 Gray, Thomas, 180 
 Green, J. R., 186 
 
 Haggard, Rider, 19 
 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 126, 
 
 127, 128, 129 
 Hallam, Henry, 126 
 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 185 
 Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 
 
 19, 20 
 
 Harris, Joel Chandler, 76, 
 
 99, 117, 118 
 Harte, Bret, 192 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 17, 
 
 48, 64, 67, 135, 160, 175, 
 
 176, 192 
 Hay, John, 132 
 Hayne, Robert Y., 188 
 Henderson, Archibald, 42 
 Henneman John B., 33 
 Hinton, Charles S., 45 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 26, 
 
 48, 57, 58, 59, 160 
 Homer, 75, 76, 119, 183-, 184 
 Hood, Thomas, 90 
 Houghton, Lord, 126 
 Hugo, Victor, 76, 113, 114, 
 
 117, 134 
 Hume, David, 186, 207 
 Hutton, R. H, 207 
 Huxley, Thomas H., 94, 190, 
 
 196, 197, 199, 201, 202, 
 
 207, 211, 217, 218, 219, 
 
 220 
 
 Irving, Washington, 99, 189, 
 192, 220, 221, 222 
 
 Jebb, R. C, 76 
 Johnson, Charles F., 74 
 Johnson, Clifton, 75 
 Johnson, Samuel, 192 
 Jonson, Ben, 93 
 Jowett, Benjamin, 15 
 
 Keats, John, 173 
 
 Kelvin, Lord, see Thomson, 
 
 Sir William '' 
 Key, Francis Scott, 70, 168 
 Kingsley, Charles, 148 
 
INDEX OF AUTHORS 
 
 227 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 39, 47, 
 160,161,174,175, 183, 192 
 Kuhns, Oscar, 75 
 
 Lamb. Charles, 132, 190 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 132 
 Lang, Andrew, 75 
 Lanier, Sidney, 48, 61, 64, 
 
 75, 97, no, 160 
 Lee, Robert E., 190 
 Lincoln, Abraham 3, 4, 6, 7, 
 
 21, 156, I90 
 
 Lockhart, J. G., 150, 188 
 Long, Augustus White, 32 
 Longfellow, Henry Wads- 
 worth, 24, 33, 47, 48, 49, 
 51, 52, 55, 60, 63, 64, 82, 
 97, 137, 138, 184, 186 
 Longfellow, Samuel, 188 
 Lounsbury, Thomas, R., 189 
 Lowell, James Russell, 48, 
 
 55, 56, 57, 135, 157, 171, 
 180, 191 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Babing- 
 ton, 29, 75, 186, 190, 196, 
 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 
 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 
 211, 212, 215, 216, 218 
 Mackintosh, John, 133 
 Makower, Stanley V., 196 
 Malory, Sir Thomas, 75, 79 
 Markham, Edwin, 174 
 Mark Twain, 99, 192 
 Marshall, John, 188 
 Matthews, Brander, 33 
 Milton, John, 31, 132, 184 
 Mitchill, Samuel L., 59 
 Montaigne, 151 
 Moore, Clement Clarke, 184 
 
 More, Thomas, 202 
 Morley, John, 188 
 Motley, J. L., 187, 189 
 Motteux, Peter Anthony, 75 
 Moulton, Richard G., 90 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 42 
 
 O'Hara, Theodore, 70 
 
 O. Henry, 192 
 
 Orr, Mrs. Sutherland, 102 
 
 Palgrave, Francis T., 32 
 
 Parkman, Francis, 187, 189 
 
 Payne, John Howard, 70, 180 
 
 Plato, 15, 16 
 
 Plutarch, 141, 143 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 48, 51, 53, 
 
 54, 180, 192 
 Prescott, W. H., 186 
 
 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 32 
 
 Reade, Charles, 148 
 Rhys, John, 75 
 Rontgen, W. K., 45 
 Rosebery, Lord, 105 
 Rousseau, J. J., 94 
 
 St. Paul, 64, 189 
 
 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 60 
 
 Scott, Walter, 13, 19, 20, 32, 
 101, 102, 134, 140, 147, 
 148, 149, 150, 151, 192, 206 
 
 Shakespeare, William, 17, 18, 
 21, 22, 25, 26, 42, 46, 73, 
 74, 75, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 
 103, 140, 141, 142, 143, 
 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 
 150, 151, 176, 185 
 
221 
 
 INDEX OF AUTHORS 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 163, 
 
 164, 165 
 Smith, Samuel Francis, 70 
 Sophocles, 93 
 Southey, Robert, 188 
 Spenser, Edmund, 17 
 Stead, W. T., 21, 22 
 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 
 
 33 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 17, 
 
 192 
 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 99, 
 
 118 
 Symonds, J. A., 15 
 
 Taney, R. B., 168 
 
 Taylor, Bayard, 75 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, 29, 32, 33, 
 38, 43, 44, 47, 63, 75, 79, 
 96, 99, 126, 127, 128, 159, 
 160, 174 
 
 Thackeray, William Make- 
 peace, 73, 76, 104, 105, 
 106, 108, 122, 148, 192 
 Thomas, F. W., 54 
 Thomson, Sir William, 45, 46 
 Thoreau, Henry David, 92 
 Ticknor, Francis O., 129, 130 
 Trent, William P., 33 
 Trevelyan, G. O., 188 
 Trollope, Anthony, 106 
 Tuckerman, C. K., 51 
 Tyndall, John, 42 
 
 Verne, Jules, 44 
 Virgil, 184 
 
 Webster, Daniel, 188 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 
 
 48, -59, 61, 138, 174 
 Words vvorth,. William, 20, 
 
 26, in, 132, 137, 159, 160, 
 
 162, 164, 165, 173 
 
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