English Literature: Its History and Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World | Page 4

of
innumerable echoes. It was not a new world, but only the unnoticed
harmony of the old that had aroused the child's wonder.
Some such experience as this awaits us when we begin the study of
literature, which has always two aspects, one of simple enjoyment and
appreciation, the other of analysis and exact description. Let a little
song appeal to the ear, or a noble book to the heart, and for the moment,
at least, we discover a new world, a world so different from our own
that it seems a place of dreams and magic. To enter and enjoy this new
world, to love good books for their own sake, is the chief thing; to
analyze and explain them is a less joyous but still an important matter.
Behind every book is a man; behind the man is the race; and behind the
race are the natural and social environments whose influence is
unconsciously reflected. These also we must know, if the book is to
speak its whole message. In a word, we have now reached a point
where we wish to understand as well as to enjoy literature; and the first
step, since exact definition is impossible, is to determine some of its

essential qualities.
QUALITIES OF LITERATURE. The first significant thing is the
essentially artistic quality of all literature. All art is the expression of
life in forms of truth and beauty; or rather, it is the reflection of some
truth and beauty which are in the world, but which remain unnoticed
until brought to our attention by some sensitive human soul, just as the
delicate curves of the shell reflect sounds and harmonies too faint to be
otherwise noticed. A hundred men may pass a hayfield and see only the
sweaty toil and the windrows of dried grass; but here is one who pauses
by a Roumanian meadow, where girls are making hay and singing as
they work. He looks deeper, sees truth and beauty where we see only
dead grass, and he reflects what he sees in a little poem in which the
hay tells its own story:
Yesterday's flowers am I, And I have drunk my last sweet draught of
dew. Young maidens came and sang me to my death; The moon looks
down and sees me in my shroud, The shroud of my last dew.
Yesterday's flowers that are yet in me Must needs make way for all
to-morrow's flowers. The maidens, too, that sang me to my death Must
even so make way for all the maids That are to come. And as my soul,
so too their soul will be Laden with fragrance of the days gone by. The
maidens that to-morrow come this way Will not remember that I once
did bloom, For they will only see the new-born flowers. Yet will my
perfume-laden soul bring back, As a sweet memory, to women's hearts
Their days of maidenhood. And then they will be sorry that they came
To sing me to my death; And all the butterflies will mourn for me. I
bear away with me The sunshine's dear remembrance, and the low Soft
murmurs of the spring. My breath is sweet as children's prattle is; I
drank in all the whole earth's fruitfulness, To make of it the fragrance
of my soul That shall outlive my death.[1]
One who reads only that first exquisite line, "Yesterday's flowers am I,"
can never again see hay without recalling the beauty that was hidden
from his eyes until the poet found it.
In the same pleasing, surprising way, all artistic work must be a kind of
revelation. Thus architecture is probably the oldest of the arts; yet we

still have many builders but few architects, that is, men whose work in
wood or stone suggests some hidden truth and beauty to the human
senses. So in literature, which is the art that expresses life in words that
appeal to our own sense of the beautiful, we have many writers but few
artists. In the broadest sense, perhaps, literature means simply the
written records of the race, including all its history and sciences, as
well as its poems and novels; in the narrower sense literature is the
artistic record of life, and most of our writing is excluded from it, just
as the mass of our buildings, mere shelters from storm and from cold,
are excluded from architecture. A history or a work of science may be
and sometimes is literature, but only as we forget the subject-matter
and the presentation of facts in the simple beauty of its expression.
The second quality of literature is its suggestiveness, its appeal to our
emotions and imagination rather than to our intellect. It is not so much
what it says as what it awakens in us