Grolier Club

“ In the literature of knowledge, what branch is unfruitful, and in the literature of power, what fountainhead is unstruck by the rod? Only the Italian genius in its prime shows such supreme equality in diversity. How many human interests are exemplified, and how many amply illustrated, exhibiting in a true sense and not by hyperbole myriad-minded man! In the English genius there seems something correspondent to this marvellous efficacy of faculty and expression; it has largeness of power. ”

“ The literature of a nation, however, including, as here, books of knowledge, is so nearly synonymous with the mind in all its operations in the national life, as to be coextensive with civilization, and hardly separable from it. Civilization is cast in the mould of thought, and retains the brute necessity of nature only as mass, but not as surface; it is the flowering of human forces in the formal aspect of life, and of these literature is one mode, reflecting in its many phases all the rest in their manifestations, and inwardly feeding them in their vital principle. ”

“ At yet another remove, the ideas of liberty—and the mind acquainted with English books is dazzled by the vast comprehensiveness of such a phrase—are again poured through the nation's life-blood by all her poets, and well-nigh all her writers in prose, in one or another mode of the Promethean fire. These ideas are never silent, never quiescent; they work in the substance, they shape the form and feature, of English thought; they are the necessary element of its being; they constitute the race of freemen, and are known in every language as English ideas. ”

“ Race lasts; those who are born in the eyrie find eagles' food. This has planted iron resolution and all-hazarding courage in epic-drama and battle-ode, and, as in the old riddle, feeds on what it fed. English literature is brave, martial, and brings forth men-children. It has the clarion strength of empire; like Taillefer at Hastings, Drayton and Tennyson still lead the charge at Agincourt and Balaclava. As Shakespeare's Henry was nourished, so was the English spirit in all ages bred. ”

“ To particularize is an endless task; for the sense of duty toward man and God is of the bone and flesh of English books in every age, being planted in the English nature. This vast mass of experience and counsel, of praise and prayer, of insight and leading, variously responding to every phase of the religious consciousness of the historic people, has been, like the general harvest, the daily food of the nation in its spiritual life. If Shakespeare is the greatest of our writers, the English Bible is the greatest of our books ”

“ The dependence of all men on thought, and of thought on speech, is a profound matter, though as little considered as gravitation that keeps the world entire; and the speech on which such a strain of life lies is the speech of books. How has Longfellow consoled middle life in its human trials, how has Carlyle roused manhood, and Emerson illumined life for his readers at every stage! Scott is a benefactor of millions by virtue of the entertainment he has given to English homes and the lonely hours of his fellow-men, now for three generations, to an extent hardly measurable in thought ”

“ In the presence of the greater works of authors there is no room for personal criticism; they constitute in themselves the perpetual mind of the race, and dispense with any private view. The eye rests on these hundred titles of books famous in English literature, as it reads a physical map by peak, river and coast, and sees in miniature the intellectual conformation of a nation. ”

“ An author is not rightly to be reckoned among immortals until he has been forgotten as a man, and become a shade in human memory, the myth of his own work. The anecdote lingering in the Mermaid Tavern is cocoon-stuff, and left for waste; time spiritualizes the soul it released in Shakespeare, and the speedier the change, so much the purer is the warrant of a life above death in the minds of men. The loneliness of antique names is the austerity of fame, and only therewith do Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, seem nobly clad and among equals ”

“ Culture after culture, epoch by epoch, are laid bare as in [pg xxix] geologic strata,—mediæval tale and history, humanistic form, the Shakespearian age, Puritan, Cavalier, man scientific, reforming, reborn into a new natural, political, artistic world, man modern; and in every layer of imagination and learning lies, whole and entire, a buried English age. It is by virtue of its copiousness that English literature is so representative, both of man's individual spirit in its restless forms of apprehension and embodiment, and of its historic formulation in English progress as national power. ”

“ Is the satirist of Vanity Fair admired in high places?—They say he is like Fielding; they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does. His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius that the mere lambent sheet-lightning, playing under the edge of the summer cloud, does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb. ”

“ Curiosity, which is the distinction of progressive peoples, is perhaps its initial and moving source. The trait which has sent the English broadcast over the world and mingled their history with the annals of all nations is the same that has so blended their literature with the history of all tongues. The acquisitive power which has created the empire of the English, with dominion on dominion, is parallel with the faculty that assimilates past literatures with the body of their literary speech. ”

“ I know of no writings which combine, as Cardinal Newman's do, so penetrating an insight into the realities of the human world around us in all its details, with so unwavering an inwardness of standard in estimating and judging that world; so steady a knowledge of the true vanity of human life with so steady a love for that which is not vanity or vexation of spirit. ”

“ The present age exceeds its predecessors in marvel in proportion as the victories of the intellect are in a world of finer secrecy than any horizon veils, and build an empire of greater breadth and endurance than any monarch or sovereign people or domineering race selfishly achieves; its victories are in the unseen of force and thought, and it brings among men the undecaying empire of knowledge, as inexpugnable as the mind in man and as inappropriable as light and air. ”

“ They give sublimity to the figure of Milton; they are the feeding flame of Shelley's mind; they alone lift Tennyson to an eagle-flight of song. In the unceasing celebration of ideal liberty, and its practical life in English character and events, the literature of England has, perhaps, done a greater service than in the positive advancement of knowledge, for it is more fundamental in the national life. Touching the subject almost at random, such are a few of the points of contact between English books and the civilization of men. ”

“ This spiritual breath of the nation in all its activities through centuries is the breath of its literature, there embodied in its finer being and applied to the highest uses for the civilization and culture of the nation by truth and art. In English literary history, and in its men of genius taken individually, the positive or the romantic may predominate, each in its own moment ”

“ The most intense example of national inspiration in a book is Uncle Tom's Cabin; but in quieter ways Scotland feels the pulse of Burns, and England the many-mingled throbbing of the poets in her blood. ”

“ I know not indeed of any work on the principles of free government that is to be compared, in instruction, and intrinsic value, to this small and unpretending volume of The Federalist, not even if we resort to Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavel, Montesquieu, Milton, Locke, or Burke. It is equally admirable in the depth of its wisdom, the comprehensiveness of its views, the sagacity of its reflections, and the fearlessness, patriotism, candor, simplicity, and elegance with which its truths are uttered and recommended. ”

“ The exceptions are only seemingly such; it is Johnson's thought and the style of a great mind that preserve Boswell, not his human grossness; and in Pepys it is the mundane and every-day immortality of human nature, this permanently curious and impertinent world, not his own scandal and peepings, that yield him allowance in libraries. In all books to which a nation stands heir, it is man that survives,—the aspect [pg xviii] of an epoch, the phase of a religion, the mood of a generation, the taste, sentiment, thought, pursuit, entertainment, of a historic and diversified people. ”

“ Gain in any of its material forms, whether wealth, power or rank, does not debase the knowledge, the courage of heart, the skill of hand and brain, from which it flows, for it is their natural and proper fruit; nor does it by itself materialize either the man or the nation, else civilization were doomed from the start, and the pursuit of truth would end in humiliation and ignominy. ”

“ To me Massinger is one of the most interesting as well as one of the most delightful of the old dramatists, not so much for his passion or power, though at times he reaches both, as for the love he shows for those things that are lovely and of good report in human nature, for his sympathy with what is generous and high-minded and honorable and for his equable flow of a good every-day kind of poetry, with few rapids or cataracts, but singularly soothing and companionable. ”

“ Great literatures, or periods in them, have usually marked the culmination of national power; and if they "look before and after," as Virgil in the Æneid, they gather their wisdom, as he too did, by a gaze reverted to the past. The paradox of progress, in that the laudator temporis acti is always found among the best and noblest of the elders, while yet the whole world of man ever moves on to greater knowledge, power and good, continues like the riddle of the Sphinx; but time seems unalterably in favor of mankind through all dark prophecies. ”

“ The mystery of genius is unsolved; and the Messianic hope that a child may be born unto the people always remains; but the greatness of a nation dies only with that genius which is not a form of human greatness in individuals, but is shared by all of the blood, and constitutes them fellow-countrymen. The genius of the English shows no sign of decay ”

“ It is natural to inquire, after dwelling so much on the practical power of English literature in society and life, what is its value in the world of art, in that sphere where questions of perfection in the form, of permanence in the matter, and the like, arise. If the standards of an academic classicism be applied, English literature will fall below both Latin and Greek, and the Italian and French, and take a lower place with German and Spanish, to which it is most akin. ”

“ No praise can make Gray seem more than a remnant of genius, and no qualification of the verdict can deprive Dryden and Jonson of largeness. It belongs to genius to tire not in creation, thereby imitating the excess of nature flowing from unhusbanded sources. Yet among these hundred books, as in scientific classification, one example must stand for all, except when some folio, like an ark, comes to the rescue of a Beaumont and Fletcher. ”

“ Sidney adds lustre to the Arcadia; an exception among men, in this as in all other ways, by virtue of that something supereminent in him which dazzled his own age. But who else of famous authors is greater in his life than in his book? It is the book that gives significance to the man, not the man to the book. These authors would gain by oblivion of themselves, and that in proportion to their greatness, thereby being at once removed into the impersonal region of man's permanent spirit and of art. ”

“ As on the broad scale English literature is distinguished by its general assimilative power, being hospitable to all knowledge, it is most deeply and intimately, because continuously, indebted to humane studies, in the strictest sense, and has derived from them not, as in many other cases, transitory matter and the fashion of an hour, but the form and discipline of art itself. In assimilating this to English nature, literary genius incurred its greatest obligation, and in thereby discovering artistic freedom found its greatest good. ”

“ The common law of England in Blackstone is a mighty legacy. On the large public scale, and as involved in the constitutional making of a great nation, the Federalist is a document invaluable as setting forth essentials of free government under a particular application; and for comment on social liberty, Burke, on the conservative, and Paine, on the radical side, exhibit the scope, the weight and fire of English thought. ”

“ This integrity of English nurture, seen in these two great modes of life turned toward God in the soul and toward the world in action, is as plainly to be discerned in details as in these generalities; and to state only one other broad aspect of the facts governing the continuity of literary genius in the English, but one that goes to the foundations, the condition that both vivifies and controls that genius in law, metaphysics, science, in all political writing, whether history, theory, or discussion, as well as in the creative and artistic modes of its development, is freedom. ”

“ The dependence of the present on the past, of a younger on an older people, of one nation on another, is often misinterpreted and misleads; life cannot be given, but only knowledge, example, direction—influence, but not essence; and the impact of one literature upon another, or of an old historic culture upon a new and ungrown people, is more external than is commonly represented. The genius of a nation born to greatness is irresistible, it remains itself, it does not become another. [pg xxiii] The Greeks conquered Rome, men say, through the mind ”