Fashions in Literature | Page 8

which upon cool reflection we find is false in
ethics and weak in construction. We find this because we have
standards outside ourselves.
I am not concerned to define here what is meant by literature. A great
mass of it has been accumulated in the progress of mankind, and,
fortunately for different wants and temperaments, it is as varied as the
various minds that produced it. The main thing to be considered is that
this great stream of thought is the highest achievement and the most
valuable possession of mankind. It is not only that literature is the
source of inspiration to youth and the solace of age, but it is what a
national language is to a nation, the highest expression of its being.
Whatever we acquire of science, of art, in discovery, in the application
of natural laws in industries, is an enlargement of our horizon, and a
contribution to the highest needs of man, his intellectual life. The
controversy between the claims of the practical life and the intellectual
is as idle as the so-called conflict between science and religion. And the
highest and final expression of this life of man, his thought, his emotion,
his feeling, his aspiration, whatever you choose to call it, is in the
enduring literature he creates. He certainly misses half his opportunity
on this planet who considers only the physical or what is called the
practical. He is a man only half developed. I can conceive no more
dreary existence than that of a man who is past the period of business
activity, and who cannot, for his entertainment, his happiness, draw
upon the great reservoir of literature. For what did I come into this
world if I am to be like a stake planted in a fence, and not like a tree
visited by all the winds of heaven and the birds of the air?
Those who concern themselves with the printed matter in books and
periodicals are often in despair over the volume of it, and their actual
inability to keep up with current literature. They need not worry. If all
that appears in books, under the pressure of publishers and the ambition
of experimenters in writing, were uniformly excellent, no reader would

be under any more obligation to read it than he is to see every
individual flower and blossoming shrub. Specimens of the varieties
would suffice. But a vast proportion of it is the product of immature
minds, and of a yearning for experience rather than a knowledge of life.
There is no more obligation on the part of the person who would be
well informed and cultivated to read all this than there is to read all the
colored incidents, personal gossip, accidents, and crimes repeated daily,
with sameness of effect, in the newspapers, some of the most widely
circulated of which are a composite of the police gazette and the comic
almanac. A great deal of the reading done is mere contagion, one form
or another of communicated grippe, and it is consoling and even
surprising to know that if you escape the run of it for a season, you
have lost nothing appreciable. Some people, it has been often said,
make it a rule never to read a book until it is from one to five years old,
By this simple device they escape the necessity of reading most of them,
but this is only a part of their gain. Considering the fact that the world
is full of books of the highest value for cultivation, entertainment, and
information, which the utmost leisure we can spare from other pressing
avocations does not suffice to give us knowledge of, it does seem to be
little less than a moral and intellectual sin to flounder about blindly in
the flood of new publications. I am speaking, of course, of the general
mass of readers, and not of the specialists who must follow their
subjects with ceaseless inquisition. But for most of us who belong to
the still comparatively few who, really read books, the main object of
life is not to keep up with the printing-press, any more than it is the
main object of sensible people to follow all the extremes and whims of
fashion in dress. When a fashion in literature has passed, we are
surprised that it should ever have seemed worth the trouble of studying
or imitating. When the special craze has passed, we notice another
thing, and that is that the author, not being of the first rank or of the
second, has generally contributed to the world all that he has to give in
one book, and our time has been wasted on his other books; and also
that in a special kind of writing in a given period--let us say,