Hold the hye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede.
Chaucer's Truth
On, on, you noblest English, ...
Follow your spirit.
Shakespeare's Henry V
The Shell and the Book. A child and a man were one day walking on the seashore when the child found a little shell and held it to his ear. Suddenly he heard sounds,--strange, low, melodious1 sounds, as if the shell were remembering and repeating to itself the murmurs2 of its ocean home. The child's face filled with wonder as he listened. Here in the little shell, apparently4, was a voice from another world, and he listened with delight to its mystery and music. Then came the man, explaining that the child heard nothing strange; that the pearly curves of the shell simply caught a multitude of sounds too faint for human ears, and filled the glimmering5 hollows with the murmur3 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 enjoyment6 and appreciation7, 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 analyze8 and explain them is a less joyous9 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.
ArtisticQualities of Literature. The first significant thing is the essentially11 artistic10 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 toil12 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 draught13 of dew.
Young maidens14 came and sang me to my death;
The moon looks down and sees me in my shroud15,
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
Laden16 with fragrance17 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 maidenhood18.
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 prattle19 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 exquisite20 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, mere21 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.
SuggestiveThe 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 awakens23 in us that constitutes its charm. When Milton makes Satan say, "Myself am Hell," he does not state any fact, but rather opens up in these three tremendous words a whole world of speculation24 and imagination. When Faustus in the presence of Helen asks, "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?" he does not state a fact or expect an answer. He opens a door through which our imagination enters a new world, a world of music, love, beauty, heroism,--the whole splendid world of Greek literature. Such magic is in words. When Shakespeare describes the young Biron as speaking
In such apt and gracious words
That aged25 ears play truant26 at his tales,
he has unconsciously given not only an excellent description of himself, but the measure of all literature, which makes us play truant with the present world and run away to live awhile in the pleasant realm of fancy. The province of all art is not to instruct but to delight; and only as literature delights us, causing each reader to build in his own soul that "lordly pleasure house" of which Tennyson dreamed in his "Palace of Art," is it worthy27 of its name.
PermanentThe third characteristic of literature, arising directly from the other two, is its permanence. The world does not live by bread alone. Notwithstanding its hurry and bustle28 and apparent absorption in material things, it does not willingly let any beautiful thing perish. This is even more true of its songs than of its painting and sculpture; though permanence is a quality we should hardly expect in the present deluge29 of books and magazines pouring day and night 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 harried30 and plundered31. 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 reverenced32 in God and man. Then we turn from history to the literature which they themselves produced, and instantly we become acquainted. These hardy33 people were not simply fighters and freebooters; they were men like ourselves; their emotions awaken22 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 patriotic34 at their deathless loyalty35 to their chief, whom they chose for themselves and hoisted36 on their shields in symbol of his leadership. Once more we grow respectful in the presence of pure womanhood, or melancholy37 before the sorrows and problems of life, or humbly38 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 philosophical39 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 preservation40. The Greeks were a marvelous people; yet of all their mighty41 works we cherish only a few ideals,--ideals of beauty in perishable42 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 determined43 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 legislative44 halls, but the lovely and immortal45 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 overestimate46 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 devout47 Mussulman, who picks up and carefully preserves every scrap48 of paper on which words are written, because the scrap may perchance contain the name of Allah, and the ideal is too enormously important to be neglected or lost.
Summary of the Subject. We are now ready, if not to define, at least to understand a little more clearly the object of our present study. Literature is the expression of life in words of truth and beauty; it is the written record of man's spirit, of his thoughts, emotions, aspirations49; it is the history, and the only history, of the human soul. It is characterized by its artistic, its suggestive, its permanent qualities. Its two tests are its universal interest and its personal style. Its object, aside from the delight it gives us, is to know man, that is, the soul of man rather than his actions; and since it preserves to the race the ideals upon which all our civilization is founded, it is one of the most important and delightful50 subjects that can occupy the human mind.
Bibliography51. (NOTE. Each chapter in this book includes a special bibliography of historical and literary works, selections for reading, chronology, etc.; and a general bibliography of texts, helps, and reference books will be found at the end. The following books, which are among the best of their kind, are intended to help the student to a better appreciation of literature and to a better knowledge of literary criticism.)
General Works. Woodberry's Appreciation of Literature (Baker & Taylor Co.); Gates's Studies in Appreciation (Macmillan); Bates's Talks on the Study of Literature (Houghton, Mifflin); Worsfold's On the Exercise of Judgment52 in Literature (Dent); Harrison's The Choice of Books (Macmillan); Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, Part I; Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism.
Essays. Emerson's Books, in Society and Solitude53; Dowden's The Interpretation54 of Literature, in Transcripts55 and Studies (Kegan Paul & Co.), and The Teaching of English Literature, in New Studies in Literature (Houghton, Mifflin); The Study of Literature, Essays by Morley, Nicolls, and L. Stephen, edited by A.F. Blaisdell (Willard Small).
Criticism. Gayley and Scott's An Introduction to the Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism (Ginn and Company); Winchester's Principles of Literary Criticism (Macmillan); Worsfold's Principles of Criticism (Longmans); Johnson's Elements of Literary Criticism (American Book Company); Saintsbury's History of Criticism (Dodd, Mead).
Poetry. Gummere's Handbook of Poetics (Ginn and Company); Stedman's The Nature and Elements of Poetry (Houghton, Mifflin); Johnson's The Forms of English Poetry (American Book Company); Alden's Specimens56 of English Verse (Holt); Gummere's The Beginnings of Poetry (Macmillan); Saintsbury's History of English Prosody57 (Macmillan).
The Drama. Caffin's Appreciation of the Drama (Baker & Taylor Co.).
The Novel. Raleigh's The English Novel (Scribner); Hamilton's The Materials and Methods of Fiction (Baker & Taylor Co.).
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1
melodious
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| adj.旋律美妙的，调子优美的，音乐性的 | |
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murmurs
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| n.低沉、连续而不清的声音( murmur的名词复数 )；低语声；怨言；嘀咕 | |
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murmur
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| n.低语，低声的怨言；v.低语，低声而言 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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glimmering
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| n.微光，隐约的一瞥adj.薄弱地发光的v.发闪光，发微光( glimmer的现在分词 ) | |
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enjoyment
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| n.乐趣；享有；享用 | |
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appreciation
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| n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨 | |
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analyze
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| vt.分析，解析 (=analyse) | |
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9
joyous
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| adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的 | |
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artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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12
toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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draught
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| n.拉，牵引，拖；一网（饮，吸，阵)；顿服药量，通风；v.起草，设计 | |
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14
maidens
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| 处女( maiden的名词复数 )； 少女； 未婚女子； （板球运动）未得分的一轮投球 | |
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15
shroud
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| n.裹尸布，寿衣；罩，幕；vt.覆盖，隐藏 | |
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laden
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| adj.装满了的；充满了的；负了重担的；苦恼的 | |
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fragrance
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| n.芬芳，香味，香气 | |
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18
maidenhood
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| n. 处女性, 处女时代 | |
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prattle
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| n.闲谈；v.（小孩般）天真无邪地说话；发出连续而无意义的声音 | |
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20
exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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awaken
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| vi.醒，觉醒；vt.唤醒，使觉醒，唤起，激起 | |
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awakens
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的第三人称单数 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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truant
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| n.懒惰鬼，旷课者；adj.偷懒的，旷课的，游荡的；v.偷懒，旷课 | |
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27
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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bustle
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| v.喧扰地忙乱，匆忙，奔忙；n.忙碌；喧闹 | |
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29
deluge
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| n./vt.洪水，暴雨，使泛滥 | |
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30
harried
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| v.使苦恼( harry的过去式和过去分词 )；不断烦扰；一再袭击；侵扰 | |
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31
plundered
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| 掠夺，抢劫( plunder的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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32
reverenced
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| v.尊敬，崇敬( reverence的过去式和过去分词 )；敬礼 | |
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hardy
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| adj.勇敢的，果断的，吃苦的；耐寒的 | |
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patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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hoisted
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| 把…吊起，升起( hoist的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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humbly
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| adv. 恭顺地，谦卑地 | |
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philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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preservation
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| n.保护，维护，保存，保留，保持 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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perishable
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| adj.（尤指食物）易腐的，易坏的 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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legislative
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| n.立法机构，立法权；adj.立法的，有立法权的 | |
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immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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overestimate
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| v.估计过高，过高评价 | |
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devout
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| adj.虔诚的，虔敬的，衷心的 (n.devoutness) | |
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scrap
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| n.碎片；废料；v.废弃，报废 | |
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aspirations
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| 强烈的愿望( aspiration的名词复数 )； 志向； 发送气音； 发 h 音 | |
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50
delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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bibliography
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| n.参考书目；(有关某一专题的)书目 | |
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52
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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transcripts
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| n.抄本（ transcript的名词复数 ）；转写本；文字本；副本 | |
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specimens
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| n.样品( specimen的名词复数 )；范例；（化验的）抽样；某种类型的人 | |
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prosody
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| n.诗体论，作诗法 | |
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