Literature

“ 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, aspirations; 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. ”

“ If we follow him here, we shall carefully distinguish between literature as an object of life and literature as a means of living, between the real love of truth and beauty, and that detestable false love which looks to the price it will fetch in the market. ”

“ It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression. ”

“ Good literature portrays and interprets human life, its activities, its ideas and emotions, and those things about which human interest and emotion cluster. It gives breadth of view, supplies high ideals of conduct, cultivates the imagination, trains the taste, and develops an appreciation of beauty of form, fitness of phrase, and music of language. ”

“ It matters because Literature, the clearing of minds, the release of minds, the food and guidance of minds, is the way, Literature is illumination, the salvation of ourselves and of every one from isolations.... ”

“ Now, in literature,— I will limit myself to literature, for it is about literature that the question arises,—the elements with which the creative power works are ideas; the best ideas on every matter which literature touches, current at the time. ”

“ Aphorism or maxim, let us remember that this wisdom of life is the true salt of literature; that those books, at least in prose, are most nourishing which are most richly stored with it; and that it is one of the main objects, apart from the mere acquisition of knowledge, which men ought to seek in the reading of books. ”

“ But literature is a progressive art, and soon the writers of the age developed two marked tendencies of their own,--the tendency to realism, and the tendency to that preciseness and elegance of expression which marks our literature for the next hundred years.
RealismIn realism--that is, the representation of men exactly as they are, the expression of the plain, unvarnished truth without regard to ideals or romance--the tendency was at first thoroughly bad. ”

“ For these rich interpretations we must turn to art, and especially to the art of literature; and in literature we must turn especially to the small group of works which, by reason of the adequacy with which they convey and illustrate these interpretations, hold the first places,—the books of life. ”

“ In contrast with the orderly phenomena of speech and writing, which are amenable to scientific processes of examination and classification, and which take rank with the orderly successions of change in nature, we have what, for want of a more exact term, we call “mere literature,”—the literature6 which is not an expression of form, but an expression of spirit. ”

“ I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand, and by itself, of itself, and for itself; ”

“ Under their authority we see introduced into literary work an habitual grace and perfection, a clearness and directness, a light and pliable strength, and a fine shading of expression, such as no other tongue can even define. We see the same high standard in their criticism, in their works of research, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and in short throughout literature. ”

“ The writing of essays and conversations, set in a framework of scenery and incident, and delineating character admirably though only incidentally, is the field of literature in which the author stands without a rival. ”

“ Response to impressions, correlation of those impressions into a connected body of phenomena, and final interpretation of them as a whole are, have been, and always will be the marks of the enduring in all literature, whether poetry or prose. ”

“ The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. ”

“ These aim to preserve or to systematize the discoveries of men; they appeal chiefly to the intellect and they are known as the literature of knowledge. There remains another large class of writings, sometimes called the literature of power, consisting of poems, plays, essays, stories of every kind, to which we go treasure-hunting for happiness or counsel, for noble thoughts or fine feelings, for rest of body or exercise of spirit,—for almost everything, in fine, except information. ”

“ Since good literature is also an interpretation or “criticism” of life, it presents life in its true relations and shows their significance. The author’s interpretation of life, his judgment upon its various phases, and the emotional coloring which he gives it, are all to be considered in a manner best adapted to the maturity and understanding of the pupils. ”

“ We have now writings in several departments of literature, and in both prose and verse, which are characterized by a breadth and largeness of suggestion, by a spirituality and a prophetic adherence to the moral sentiment, which justify all that has here been affirmed or reasoned. And our deepest thought finds a popular reception which proves it not foreign or exceptional. ”

“ Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without. ”

“ Ours is a conscious age, and every man is made the most of. We believe a conscious greatness inseparable from a critical literature; and such, therefore, we look for in this country;—a literature and art based on thorough criticism, and thorough knowledge of what already exists in the world ”

“ In place of a mental output, rigidly confined within unbending modes of thought and expression, we have a literature that reflects the varied phases of human life, that can discard romance and look upon the commonplace ”

“ This study in turn should aim first at an understanding of the literature as an expression of the authors' views of life and of their personalities and especially as a portrayal and interpretation of the life of their periods and of all life as they have seen it; it should aim further at an appreciation of each literary work as a product of Fine Art, appealing with peculiar power both to our minds and to our emotions, not least to the sense of Beauty and the whole higher nature. ”

“ This literature proper was likely to take the form of verse in the eleventh century. A practical matter would be put in prose; but the effervescence of the soul, or the intended literary effort, would fall into rhyme or resort to metre. ”

“ Finally, I have recorded the names of a small group of stories which possess, I believe, an even finer distinction—the distinction of uniting genuine substance and artistic form in a closely woven pattern with a spiritual sincerity so earnest, and a creative belief so strong, that each of these stories may fairly claim, in my opinion, a position of some permanence in our literature as a criticism of life. Stories of such quality are indicated in the year-book index by three asterisks prefixed to the title, and are also listed in a special “Roll of Honor.” ”

“ These relations of sound to idea may, moreover, partially explain two facts exceedingly interesting in the development of literature, the growth of poetic diction and the decadence of poetry in an age of analytic thought—facts in which we shall find further illustrations of the relativity of literature to social life. ”

“ As he said in an after-dinner speech at a meeting in aid of the Literary Fund, "Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing." ”

“ But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets. ”

“ The causes just named in literature and philosophy respectively, are some of those which have contributed to create or to foster the change in the character of the literature, and in the spirit of the age, which has produced the alteration of tone which exists in the modern sceptical literature. ”

“ Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. ”

“ The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse. ”

“ If the bit of literature be a story, it is likely to be matters of character-growth, motives of conduct, interplay of personal influence, social, philosophical, and ethical interpretation and influence, that lie within this region and are subjects of disagreement and uncertainty. ”

“ Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of countless generations ( [Greek: oiae per phullon geneae] ) , and not from any top-dressing capriciously scattered over the surface at some master's bidding. ”

“ The vice goes so far, indeed, that you may divide literature into two great classes of books. The smaller class of the two consists of the books written by people who had something to say. They had in life learned something, or seen something, or done something, which they really wanted and needed to tell to other people. They told it. And their writings make, perhaps, a twentieth part of the printed literature of the world. It is the part which contains all that is worth reading. The other nineteen-twentieths make up the other class. ”

“ In addition to the poetic fancy and the idealism of art and literature generally, we must distinguish the work of imagination in the æsthetic, in the moral, in the religious, in the scientific, and in the political life. ”

“ These principles pertain to diction, structure, matter, and spirit or purpose. No one will deny [4] that the diction should be well chosen; that the structure of the sentences should be correct and clear; and that, in the case of poetry, the laws of versification should be observed. These elements contribute to excellence of form. In addition to these external elements there should be unity of thought, symmetry of presentation, truth of statement, and sincerity and self-restraint in sentiment. These elements give substantial worth to the matter or content of literature. ”

“ This is true not only of poetry and essentially imaginative writing, but also of the writing which seeks nothing more than to penetrate the meaning of actual affairs,—the writing of the greatest historians and philosophers, the utterances of orators and of the great masters of political exposition. Their narratives, their analyses, their appeals, their conceptions of principle, are all dipped deep in the colors of the life they expound. Their minds respond only to realities, their eyes see only actual circumstance. ”

“ We enjoy a beautiful book with a fine moral, set in exquisite prose, with consummate literary resources, full of fine thoughts, true, ennobling thoughts, and with no weak side at all, unless it be the sense of being over-wrought, like a picture which has been stippled over in every surface. ”

“ The end of this work being to give a view of modern literature, I, conformably to fact, represent several men of extraordinary talents and erudition; many more of respectable, but not extraordinary talents and erudition, and a considerable number of literary and other book-makers, without either talents or erudition. ”

“ In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought. ”

“ It is distinguished from poetry not only by more commonplace thought but also by the absence of regular metrical structure. Prose and poetry together constitute the great body of literature; but at the present time, which is characterized by the predominance of material and commercial interests, prose forms by far the larger part. In our popular magazines, poetry is relegated to a very subordinate place.
The forms of prose are various. They may be approximately classified under history, essays, oratory, fiction, science, philosophy, and epistolary correspondence. ”

“ one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or "pure English, undefiled," wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought. ”

“ It holds through all literature, that our best history is still poetry. ”

“ So the novel was born, expressing, though in a different way, exactly the same ideals of personality and of the dignity of common life which were later proclaimed in the American and in the French Revolution, and were welcomed with rejoicing by the poets of the romantic revival. To tell men, not about knights or kings or types of heroes, but about themselves in the guise of plain men and women, about their own thoughts and motives and struggles, and the results of actions upon their own characters,--this was the purpose of our first novelists. ”

“ Thus they have become a precious literary possession, telling us something of the life, the history, and the standards, superstitions, and beliefs of distant times, and thrilling us with their stirring stories. ”

“ He found his true field, however, in the novel of modern life, in which his power lies chiefly in the construction of a skilful plot, which holds the attention of the reader and baffles his curiosity to the last. ”