English Literature: Its History and Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World | Page 6

his own soul. It is this intensely personal element that
constitutes style. Every permanent book has more or less of these two
elements, the objective and the subjective, the universal and the
personal, the deep thought and feeling of the race reflected and colored
by the writer's own life and experience.
THE OBJECT IN STUDYING LITERATURE. Aside from the
pleasure of reading, of entering into a new world and having our
imagination quickened, the study of literature has one definite object,
and that is to know men. Now man is ever a dual creature; he has an
outward and an inner nature; he is not only a doer of deeds, but a
dreamer of dreams; and to know him, the man of any age, we must
search deeper than his history. History records his deeds, his outward
acts largely; but every great act springs from an ideal, and to
understand this we must read his literature, where we find his ideals
recorded. When we read a history of the Anglo-Saxons, for instance,
we learn that they were sea rovers, pirates, explorers, great eaters and
drinkers; and we know something of their hovels and habits, and the
lands which they harried and plundered. All that is interesting; but it
does not tell us what most we want to know about these old ancestors
of ours,--not only what they did, but what they thought and felt; how
they looked on life and death; what they loved, what they feared, and
what they reverenced in God and man. Then we turn from history to the
literature which they themselves produced, and instantly we become
acquainted. These hardy people were not simply fighters and

freebooters; they were men like ourselves; their emotions awaken
instant response in the souls of their descendants. At the words of their
gleemen we thrill again to their wild love of freedom and the open sea;
we grow tender at their love of home, and patriotic at their deathless
loyalty to their chief, whom they chose for themselves and hoisted on
their shields in symbol of his leadership. Once more we grow respectful
in the presence of pure womanhood, or melancholy before the sorrows
and problems of life, or humbly confident, looking up to the God whom
they dared to call the Allfather. All these and many more intensely real
emotions pass through our souls as we read the few shining fragments
of verses that the jealous ages have left us.
It is so with any age or people. To understand them we must read not
simply their history, which records their deeds, but their literature,
which records the dreams that made their deeds possible. So Aristotle
was profoundly right when he said that "poetry is more serious and
philosophical than history"; and Goethe, when he explained literature
as "the humanization of the whole world."
IMPORTANCE OF LITERATURE. It is a curious and prevalent
opinion that literature, like all art, is a mere play of imagination,
pleasing enough, like a new novel, but without any serious or practical
importance. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Literature
preserves the ideals of a people; and ideals--love, faith, duty, friendship,
freedom, reverence--are the part of human life most worthy of
preservation. The Greeks were a marvelous people; yet of all their
mighty works we cherish only a few ideals,--ideals of beauty in
perishable stone, and ideals of truth in imperishable prose and poetry. It
was simply the ideals of the Greeks and Hebrews and Romans,
preserved in their literature, which made them what they were, and
which determined their value to future generations. Our democracy, the
boast of all English-speaking nations, is a dream; not the doubtful and
sometimes disheartening spectacle presented in our legislative halls,
but the lovely and immortal ideal of a free and equal manhood,
preserved as a most precious heritage in every great literature from the
Greeks to the Anglo-Saxons. All our arts, our sciences, even our
inventions are founded squarely upon ideals; for under every invention

is still the dream of Beowulf, that man may overcome the forces of
nature; and the foundation of all our sciences and discoveries is the
immortal dream that men "shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
In a word, our whole civilization, our freedom, our progress, our homes,
our religion, rest solidly upon ideals for their foundation. Nothing but
an ideal ever endures upon earth. It is therefore impossible to
overestimate the practical importance of literature, which preserves
these ideals from fathers to sons, while men, cities, governments,
civilizations, vanish from the face of the earth. It is only when we
remember this that we appreciate the action of the devout Mussulman,
who picks up and carefully preserves every scrap of paper on which
words are written, because the scrap may perchance