Literature in Its Social Aspects
IN AN AGE in which literature aspires to become universal, it is impossible for even the trifling not to perceive that nothing else connected with it is so momentous as the moral relations which it establishes with man. A serious tone of mind is forced upon any one who reflects on this great moral problem. There are many who look upon the subject with despondency. Knowing the manifold temptations connected with books—temptations from which, till lately, the great mass of mankind have been preserved by the urgency of daily toil and the absence of literary culture—they ask what is to be the consequence when the snares that assail the palace beset the cottage no less? Hitherto, they remark, the lot of the many has been one of physical toil, but of intellectual rest. It has lain in a valley thickset with fair households. On the one side has risen the great mountain range of inductive science, and on the other that of Christian Theology; but the poor man’s foot has tarried by the stream that turns his mill, and no one has challenged him to scale the crags. Is all this to be changed? Among books the supply of good and bad will depend on the demand. Which class will the many prefer? Will literature, on the whole, be a nurse of the virtues or a pander to vice? There is neither a rural village nor a mighty city the peace of which will not one day depend upon the answer which time must make to such questions. I can but offer a few suggestions on the subject. Let us begin with the more hopeful.
There are, then, virtues as well as vices which we commonly associate with the few, and which, notwithstanding, sound literature tends to impart to all men of good will. Let us name, for instance, magnanimity. One who ranges among the great men of all ages, and recognizes that far-reaching influence by which, silently, unostentatiously, and grasping at no power, they have built up the empire of thought, is less likely than another to join in the stress and strain of petty emulations. He does not need the lordship over a narrow circle. To him there are sceptres not made of iron or gold, and spiritual thrones, to rest at the foot of which is better than vulgar rule. The remote power, he knows, is the more permanent. The senate amid which he may, if he deserves it, sit as assessor, includes all the great men who have ever lived; yet within it there is no clamour and no pressure at the gate.
Nor should sound literature be less a promoter of unworldliness and self-sacrifice. It is the noble bequest of men who gathered up intellectual treasures while those around them snatched at gewgaws, or lay passive in listlessness. It denounces self-indulgence. “Who is he,” says the great Tuscan bard,
So pale with musing in Pierian groves?
Those whose ears were open to ‘‘the whispers of the lonely Muse” were supposed of old to have closed them against the “Lydian airs” of the frivolous or sensual. Literature was thus regarded as a manly art, the foe of luxury, and the inspirer of heroism; while in some languages the very term that denoted a life given to the imaginative arts was that word which meant “virtue.” If, in later times, literature has been cultivated but as a means to a selfish end—if vanity has been the student’s stimulus, if an intellectual voluptuousness, more insidious than coarse sensuality, has turned the haunt of the Muses into a garden of epicurean delights—the loss sustained by literature has punished the wrong. She possesses a healing power; but, like other physicians, she may catch the malady while she bends over the sickbed. Men of letters have often, and not always unjustly, charged the clergy with learning wordliness from the world they were sent to reform. Their own order bears no talisman against a similar infection. What sense of her genuine functions belongs to a literature which flatters where it should instruct, and flings itself in fawning dedications at the feet of a public more adulated than ever was Oriental despot? For excuse it can but take refuge in wit like Aristippus, who, on being reproved for falling at the feet of Dionysius while presenting a petition to him, replied, “That it was not his fault if Dionysius had ears in his feet.”
Servile men of letters are reproved by the very name of the “liberal arts.” Such arts are liberal, because, drawing us out from the false centre of self, and the narrow circle of merely conventional interests, they dilate our individual being to the dimensions of a world-wide humanity, imparting to us thus the freedom of “no mean city.” In this respect, as in some others, the loftiest literature is a shadow of religion, though the difference between the substance and the shadow is of course infinite, and though the shadow is often distorted by the inequalities of the surface along which it is projected. Contented ignorance is bounded by the senses: Literature breaks down that limit. A shelf stored with books of travel enables the artisan at his daily toil to send forth his thoughts through all lands. A few volumes of history, and Time is to him a grave that has given up its dead. Add a few volumes of poetry to a few of history, and the present catches all the radiance of the past. They remind us that if the things round us seem to us but little, so seemed to those who lived at an earlier day those things the fame of which has lasted for centuries. They tell us that in the present, too, virtue and genius retain that immortalising touch which changes dust into gems. It is through landscape-paintings that we learn best to appreciate nature, and perceive that weather-stain has its beauty as well as mountain and lake. Thus it is through a Homer or a Herodotus that we learn to understand life. In every parish there is a whole Iliad of action and of passion, if we have been taught to trace their workings by one of those men whom Nature has chosen for her expositors. Everywhere around us there spreads the Infinite, but we need the optic glass to bring it out. A true book is such a glass: and such a book is now a telescope, drawing the distant close—now a microscope, magnifying what is near. It is thus that nature’s largeness is made to break through the limits of our littleness; and that matter, subjecting itself to the interpretation of mind, becomes elevated, as it were, into spirit.
Influences such as these must ever be diffused in proportion as education—an education not based upon vanity—extends its sphere. They work for the many, because they work through those sympathies that exist in all. For the poor and the rich alike there is but one mode of being delivered from the thraldom of self: it is that of taking interest in things unconnected with self: the negative evil can only be obviated by the positive good. Can any one doubt that a cultivated Imagination helps a moral purpose? It is the ideal power that alone enables us to realise what belongs to the remote and the unseen, and by realising, to love it. If from the far distance of past time objects flash out as with a magic distinctness, like that which, in the evening of a rainy day, draws near to us the mountain-range till bush and scar leap forward to catch the “discriminating touch” of a setting sun, it is not wonderful that our affections too should attach themselves to beings thus suddenly made known to us—beings in whom we descry at once all that we are and all that we fain would be! Which of the virtues is not fostered by this noble emulation? Sophocles, it has been generally thought, can belong but to the few: but it was to the many that he addressed himself. In his most touching tragedy, Antigone is warned that whosoever buries the dead bodies of her brothers shall share their fate. She replies that this mandate is but the law of a tyrant, and that it has never issued from Jove nor from that sceptred Justice which reigns among the Shades—that she will be true to the dead, and bear her fate. Is her resolve more a lesson of fidelity to the nursling of the palace than to the son of the shepherd, the fisherman, or the artisan? Heroic arms of old cut down the Pelian pines, and dragged the oar all night long through the foam of an unknown sea. Is this more a lesson of courage and perseverance to the Arctic discoverer than to the village boy who finds a brave resolution checked by a trivial obstacle? Men read these things, and their physical aspect itself, mien, and step, are altered. A breath from far summits sends strength into their souls. Experience not their own is imparted to them; the heart is made more single; but the mind is made many-sided; and the faculties of the individual are multiplied into those of his kind.
The arts that do these things impart to man the noblest freedom, that of just dependence and true service. In conferring freedom on responsive minds, they confer empire also. We are told that ‘‘the meek inherit the earth.” They do so doubtless because humble hearts are large hearts, and possess, through love and through absence of pride and fear, the reality of those serene enjoyments which belong to our universal nature, and which are grasped but in shadow by those who make the world their prey. The enlarging influence of an imagination developed by the higher class of literature does for the intellect of man something analogous to that which a holier power does for him at the depths of his being. It creates a communion of intelligences; it abolishes isolation; it bestows on each what belongs to all: it cannot therefore but abate prejudice, break through narrowness, destroy littleness. All this, we are sometimes told, may yet but create a good the enemy of some higher good. Doubtless it not only may, but must do so if the gift be perverted; but the very adage, Corruptio optimi res pessima est, includes the confession that the gift is good, though the corruption of it be fatal. Fatal indeed is the influence of a literature, however able, which forgets its true vocation, and seeks its reward in what is below, not in what is above it. An allegiance broken is commonly an allegiance transferred. When literature ceases to be the servant of Truth, it becomes the slave of the world, and ministers but to bondage. A touch from the breath of vanity changes what was a “palace of the Humanities” into a splendid prison, and the pictures with which the walls of that palace were once hung are replaced by mirrors reflecting but self-love.
This item 12791 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
