John Chilton Scammell

“ The greatest treasures of Greek literature had been jealously hidden away there for centuries. Now that the scholars had to fly for their lives they let loose a store of new thought on the nations of western Europe. Taking refuge in Italy they brought with them these rich volumes. The Italian enthusiasm and the ardor with which these discoveries were published to the world spread like fire through France and Germany and England.
Everywhere mankind awoke; never before or since have people lived so strenuously. ”

“ Truly, herein lies one of life's chief joys, in encountering what others have thought and achieved—in meeting the actors in the great world drama, the scenes in which they played their parts, the deeds by which they have won fame and fortune; still more delectable is the pleasure of whiling away leisure hours with those folk who are but products of the fancy, children of the poet's brain, dreams of the teller of tales: Odysseus, who, for the last three thousand years, as Sir Philip Sidney has put it, "held children from play and old men from the chimney corner" ”

“ Like poetry and fiction, history emerges from the darkness of the unknown ages, at first no more than a boastful record of slaughter and usurpation, such as shows through the gloss and splendor of epic poetry. The sagas in "Norse Literature," the crisp record of invasion and conquest by Cæsar, and that of Josephus on the Roman conquest of the Jews are all of this type, a chronicle by an eyewitness of the succession of deeds that made up some event in a nation's life.
An improvement came with Herodotus in ancient times and again with Froissart in the Middle Ages. ”

“ In these and "Macbeth," "Hamlet," and "King Lear" the mastery of plot and action is superb; the play gathers force and momentum until the catastrophe sweeps down upon the evil-doers and unfortunates like a tidal wave. Yet each step in its progress, even the least trifle, is so natural as to seem unavoidable. Here is the proof of the poet's genius, in that he selects the message to be presented to his audience or readers, chooses his characters, and outlines his plot, then combines the three elements with such skill and with such inspiration as to leave an effect of perfect truth and actuality. ”

“ In work and in play, at home and abroad, our undoubted ideal is that of finding perpetual joy in life. The Fountain of Youth, which Ponce de Leon vainly sought, is the quest of us all—we no longer seek to lengthen our lives, but instead we strive with might and main to fill them to the very brim with joyous thoughts and deeds. To be happy is to be forever young. ”

“ The practice of telling tales of love and heroism is older than history itself. Ever since men sat about the fire of an evening and recited the deeds of their chieftains or extolled the beauty of their princesses, in other words, ever since the days when poetry first began, stories and tales have been handed down, first by word of mouth, then by carvings and inscriptions and at last by writing and printing. The first fiction was a simple, imaginative invention of adventure, told to pass the time. ”

“ To see such a man at his work, at his play, thinking, dreaming, attaining greatness little by little or in a flash, to spend hours with him in thought, learning from him or from his friends and critics wherein he proved his power and how he labored to express it: to be in such close touch with one of the giants of the earth is a privilege which we must not dare to neglect. The opportunity is ours, ours be the blame and the failure if we neglect it. ”

“ For those who wrote and those who read there was no struggle for existence, they were waited on by their slaves, they had no faith in a life after death; whether thinkers or heedless wasters, they were selfishly living for to-day and not for the morrow. The bulk of the people were ignorant, even when not enslaved. As their literature was the product of an aristocracy, leading a life of leisure, it was inevitably stately, reserved, and formal in its tone, except in the earliest productions before society had emerged completely from barbarism. ”

“ The measure of a successful life is surely the amount of happiness, of true lasting pleasure which it has contained and which it has passed on to others. We do not count our years in terms of sorrow or vexation; we do not recall again and again our moments of failure or folly; only the bright and golden hours remain fast emblazoned in our memories, those days of sunshine and delight, when beauty and laughter sang in our hearts and the air was filled with music. ”

“ Perhaps one man in a hundred thousand can find time to learn to read more than four languages fluently. If he is to get in touch with the great writers of other tongues than those which he knows, he must perforce read translations. And for most of us translations are the only resource. The modern writers have been translated with but slight difficulty, mainly because their views of life are so closely akin to ours that their thoughts may be put into English with slight trouble. But the ancients, the masters of Greek and Roman Literature, regarded life from other standpoints than ours. ”

“ Dramatic poetry, in which the form of a play or drama is used, has always been chosen for the deepest and most majestic presentations of the problems and wonders of human life. The dramatic poets of the ancients as well as those of modern times rank among the most far-seeing thinkers and ablest writers of the world. No philosopher or historian has ever been able to reach the people or express the profoundest reflections so readily and forcibly.
The tragedies of Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, with those of Shakespeare and the "Faust" of Goethe, are the highest achievements in literature ”

“ Yet Christianity rests upon the life and teachings of one Personality, nation after nation has been saved or ruined by the deeds of one individual, wisdom and contentment have been found by the great minds of the world. By considering their lives, their principles, their virtues, and their failings we can get an extraordinary insight into the problems of happiness and wholesome living. Carlyle rightly called a Great Man "the most precious gift that Heaven can give to the Earth; a man of 'genius' as we call it; the Soul of a Man actually sent down from the skies with a God's-message to us." ”

“ None the less, though he has gone from us, the pictures of hope and courage that leap and laugh at us from his pages are as vivid to-day as when they first brought their new joy to the delighted world. Read once more that dainty sketch—that etching rather—"A Night among the Pines," and see for yourself how that great master of words has voiced our modern appreciation of the great outdoors. For each great author is an individual, no two of them are alike, any more than you are like your next-door neighbor. ”

“ John Milton was another such hero. As a young man he won great distinction as a poet and a scholar; so much so that when he went to Italy the greatest Italian authors and critics praised his Italian and Latin poetry as the best of that day, superior to anything written during that time in Italy itself. He was received there with boundless enthusiasm and was having the time of his life, so to speak, when the news reached him of the Puritan rebellion against Charles the First. Without a moment's hesitation he abandoned his tour and came back to England. ”

“ In the same way Dickens and Thackeray, not very long after, supplied unending amusement and fun for the world and at the same time did far more by making the nations sit up and think, pointing out with almost brutal clearness the need of unselfish action and the love of truth and simplicity. There is not a novel of high rank but contains more than meets the eye at first glance. ”

“ It was through this power to read and understand and enjoy that Lincoln learned to penetrate to the very soul of mankind, the deep recesses of the thoughts and feelings of his fellow men.
The will to try, the simple decision to make the effort, is all that is needed in order to grasp what an infinite fund of amusement and delight lies stored away in books. No unusual imaginative powers are requisite to get us on horseback with Dumas's swashbuckling, duelling musketeers, or to place us beside Poe's heroes in their dread predicaments. ”

“ The lives of great men have always been of interest not merely for the sake of satisfying curiosity, but because of the value of further knowledge about their habits, thoughts, and actions. The personality of a great man attracts us; perhaps through reading an intimate account of his life we may see [46] into the reasons for his superiority, possibly we may find the key to the secret of power. So much can be learned from biography that it seems absurd how little importance is given to the subject even in our best colleges. ”

“ His writings are distinguished by a wonderful power of analysis, and a singularly graceful diction. He seems in a way the incarnation of the old Puritan spirit, probes the innermost recesses of the heart, and appears to take a strange delight in the darker side of life. But he is in no sense morbid; his musings are merely the offspring of a solitary but eminently manly spirit. All through his works one realizes the dominating and all-pervading supremacy of conscience. ”

“ Sculpture, with all its dignity and grace, is cold and cheerless in the main; and Architecture is too bulky and ponderous to stir personal appreciation at a moment's notice.
In fact, Literature, and Literature alone, possesses the power of meeting our every mood and desire, for comfort, for excitement, for exaltation, for pathos, for laughter. ”

“ However, the true test of poetry has always been the value of its imaginative power; no matter how accurate or elaborate its form, unless it expresses great ideas it cannot rank as great poetry, but merely as good verse. Like all art, poetry is the expression of genuine feeling in beautiful form. ”

“ The Revolution in America, soon followed by that in France, is the historical sign of the passing of the aristocratic spirit of classicism. Freedom, equality, the destruction of the bondage that had held the common people back from education and advancement, these are the new ideas. In literature as in life a reaction broke out against the formal, stilted, unemotional style of classicism. ”

“ In his youth he showed extraordinary talent, but he fell a victim to opium and the greater part of his life was wasted in a series of unfinished efforts. No opium was necessary to stimulate his imagination, as his weird ballad of "The Ancient Mariner" plainly shows. Indeed his genius even worked during his sleep, for "Kubla Khan" is but a fragment of a poem which he dreamed and then began to write down as soon as he awoke. If he had not been interrupted by a visitor, a man of no importance, we might have had the whole instead of a scanty portion of this unique masterpiece. ”

“ The most brilliant, the most lovable, the most sincere, the most thoughtful authors would gather round us and talk to us; they would bring their very best to entertain and delight us; they would offer us their guidance and companionship into every field of thought. Emerson's calm reflective tones reveal the answers to many of life's most pressing and significant problems; Swift, in "Gulliver's Travels," jestingly, yet bitterly, strips mankind of its pride and conceit, and lays bare the greed and selfishness that have ruined not individuals alone, but whole nations and empires ”

“ In every nation the beginnings of its literature have been poems. This highest form of literary expression is also the oldest; it is not the final triumphant product of a highly civilized age, after centuries of slow development and gradual growth of power and art in the use of words. It is exactly the opposite; the earliest authors are the poets who sang and chanted the brave deeds of the leaders of their nation ”

“ His character was noble and lovable, and his work possesses a high finish in style and a lofty vein of idealism which gives it a resemblance to those passages and plays of Shakespeare in which princes and potentates appear. He was a lover of the Bard of Avon and translated several of his plays into German. But Schiller did not attempt the many-sided portrayal of life that was Shakespeare's forte; for him the presentation of high ideals and a majestic plot involving the great motives of human action was sufficient. ”

“ His hero, Christian, changes in character, becoming a stronger, better man as the story goes on. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe goes through much of the same evolution. And this is the underlying principle of the novel, that it has a purpose beyond simple story-telling, possessing a plot or unified succession of incidents, with actors whose characters develop. It is a picture of human life, with strength and weakness, happiness and misery, all bound together and forming a united and well-proportioned whole. ”