ARTICLE V.

LITERATURE, ITS PLACE AND USES.

Literature in the true use and generic acceptance of the word treats of the elementary human emotions, and the common, never changing interests of man. It is not that which is

written for any class of men as such, but for each and for all. It is not that which is written for any specific purpose as a book of metaphysics or medicine. It does not address men as learners needing a knowledge of the rudiments, in order to a comprehension of the higher truths. It has no first principles for the child, and its higher generalizations for the man. It has no arithmetic for children, and its fluxions and calendars for mature minds. Like the truths of the kingdom of heaven it appeals at once to what is deepest in man; not to the intellect, not to the imagination, but to the spirit itself.

It matters but little whether it be in the garb of an ancient or a modern language, since it is conversant with the same primal interests of man. It matters little whether it be Greek or English, whether it be Tacitus or Clarendon, Livy's pictorial page, or Gibbon's stateliness and pomp; whether it be the Peloponesian war of Thucydides, or the thirty years' war of Schiller; whether it be the Gallic campaigns of Cæsar, or the Peninsular war of Napier; whether it be Plutarch's masterpieces, or Izaak Walton's modern biographies; whether it be Marathon, the Straits of Dover, or Hampton Roads; whether it be the Persian fleet, the Armada, or the Merrimac. These themes, these histories, these biographies relate to the few simple vital and fundamental interests of all time, and make their appeal to the same human and eternal sentiments and passions. No matter when it was written, it can not see corruption. Though it be buried in the grave of languages long dead, it pushes aside the stone at the grave's mouth; it breaks the seal and speaks to all who with affection and reverence can say, "My Master." Forgotten past all recovery may be the pronunciation of the syllables and the rhythm and accent of the periods where those universal thoughts are enshrined, yet all who will may hear them speak in the tongue in which they

were born. Individuals and nations may grow old, decay and die; but as the race is immortal in its youth, so its thoughts have a like youthful nature, imperishable in their freshness and perpetual in their power. Chaucer will always be as full of life and spring-verdure as when on that April of 1300), his nine and twenty pilgrims "toward Canterbury woulden ride." Shakespeare, "nature's darling," will never know decrepitude and age, but will "warble his native woodnotes wild," when the seventeenth century shall seem as far back in the past as does the times of Herodotus and Sophocles. Literature in its essential idea has a total independence of time and place. As these are the conditions of matter and of physical forces, they can have no connection with, and can place no limit to, that which Springing not from is spiritual and human, and yet divine. the understanding, but from the spirit itself, it is a spiritual power. Seeking to make its impressions on what is most divine in man, its aim is far higher than that of imparting instruction. To touch any or all of the countless sympathies of the heart, is nobler than to communicate a scientific fact. You can not place a Homer in the same category with an Aristotle. You can not the Ballad of Chevy Chace with a Newton's Principia. compare It may impart new knowledge, but it does it only indirectly, and through the materials it uses for another object. While it does not aim at developing the muscle and sinew of an athletic intellect, it is far removed from all tendency to produce an enervation of mind. We know very well the etiolating effect of its abuse, when the whole occupation of the man or woman is that of seeking for sensations, when the aim of life is solely to receive impressions from works of power, without an effort at transmission or reproduction. We know well that the habitual devotion of the indolent mind to what is called light literature We know well is sure to be followed by mental imbecility.

that the continual surrender of the whole being to sensuous poetry and to emasculated prose, is worse than opium eating on its enfeebled victim. We know that in every community, there are those who were born to better things, but who have grown to be monsters in selfishness and mental feebleness, through their guilty surrender to this mode of intoxication. Yet this is no argument against a deep and familiar acquaintance with true

literature; yea, the admiration of what God has wrought by the free instrument of human genius.

Literature is not to receive the first place in the life of any man. We have other objects for living than passively to receive impressions. We are to glorify God by being of use in the world, gaining our bread by the sweat of our brow in aiming to supply some of the great wants of men. From the divine arrangement, we must rigidly retain all literature in a subordinate position.

In our country, it is very evident that no one has a right to live a life of Sybaritic enjoyment, whether, it be animal, social, or intellectual. They who live merely to feel refined emotions, are to be classed with those who live for sensual pleasure, although the foul disfigurement may not be so plainly discernible. The past four years' sad history, with its ensanguined pages, has made this revelation, if nothing more, that men must throw the energies of their being into something of positive benefit to mankind; that we must rally to the world's help, and go out of ourselves to be of use to others. Many have been awakened from their selfish dreams of culture, by the piercing calls of some brother man. Sympathies that were wont to waste themselves on books, have had full vent on the battle-field, in the hospitals, or at home, in ministering to the necessities of the wounded hero, or in soothing the sorrow of those who have made the dearest sacrifice to their country. The very rebellion itself teaches that there can be no one class in our land living for itself; each must live for all, none were born to be lilies of the field, destined neither to toil nor spin. The highest literature must be cast aside when it begins to hedge us up in the circle of beauty and of æsthetic culture, so that the beckoning hands of our fellow-men can not meet our eye. Such culture is as false as it is destructive. Mere literary men and women, with nothing developed but the taste, the critics of sermons, of style, of language, the admirers of grace and elegance, and nothing more, are worse than the drones of a hive; while they are nonproducers, they all can sting. The influence of that great heathen poet, Goethe, has been an injury to the world, so far as any have adopted his chief end of life, and made intellectual and æsthetic culture the sole object of their being; choosing

books, acquaintances, and modes of life with these sole views. If the great library of Alexandria existed, and was used for the purposes that a Goethe, and some of our American transcendentalists would have used it, the bishop Theodosius and his monks from Nitria were public benefactors when they destroyed it.

In all true culture the moral must keep pace with the intellectual and æsthetic, or rather, form the foundation and permeate all that is developed with warm human love. The good of the whole must be deemed of more worth than the good of the individual. Secession is in direct opposition to the fundamental law of the race. No man nor body of men have a right to say, "leave us alone," whether it be to cultivate cotton, or to cultivate the intellect; to develop an aristocracy of idlers, on the corner-stone of slavery, or to develop the critical faculty, to the neglect of every other claim.

We are rapidly learning in this day that no man has a right to live unto himself, or to die unto himself. Like the mines of the earth, we were made to be worked, and the gold, silver, and precious stones are to be put in circulation and actual use. The granite, the marble, the sandstone, the limestone, are to take their places in the structure of society when they are wanted. None need set itself apart in misanthropical seclusion to polish itself into a Corinthian column. The Corinthian order of social architecture is going out of date. The ornaments of society are not your connoisseurs, your dilettanti, your bluestockings of either gender, or of none but those who believe with Milton that the end of all learning, whatever its extent and comprehension, is "to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him and to imitate Him." The highest culture is that which best fits a man "to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously to all, the offices, both public and private, of peace and war." The period of life when the energies of so many are given to the teachings of others, when we surrender ourselves to the mighty imaginations of the creators in literature, when we delight to grasp their colossal conceptions of beauty and power, and to stand in rapture and in awe before them, when we take them for our guides and wander with them into their

bowers of loveliness, where all things stand sunset-flushed and gorgeous with a glory not of earth; when we surrender ourselves to their full influence, thinking their thoughts and feeling profoundly what they have felt in the depths of their natures; this period must come to an end. If we strive to oppose the design of God in giving us life and a capacity for its duties, we do so at our peril; failing not only in the purpose of our existence, but in the accomplishment of what we seek, that is, the highest culture and the purest enjoyment. Basking in slothful indolence, like the lotos eaters, we shall become emasculated and incapable of manly, vigorous thought, and of manly, vigorous

action.

When a nation becomes dissolved in passive admiration for beauty of form, whether in marble or color, or in the higher art of verbal expression, it falls an easy prey to the healthy and the manly Goth or Vandal; and it deserves to fall. The man who has derived from literature that culture only which worship of the form of beauty gives, whether it comes from music, painting, or the soft harmonies of Spenser and Tennyson, ought to be shouldered aside by those who have the moral and intellectual cultivation which springs from the clear vision of reality and truth. The world needs men of a high style of training. It likes the lustre, the intellectual grace, the perfect polish, but it asks, and has a right to ask, that the polish shall be upon Damascus steel, and that the blade shall be drawn for service, not hung up for show. When it is tempered and polished, take it out of the forge, take it off from the grindstone, cease rubbing with emery, or soon there will be nothing left but the sheath and the handle. Apply the friction and the diamond dust when exposure and actual use in the service of men is diminishing its lustre and lessening its gleam.

Here then is the place of literature, in the high meaning of the word. It must be held subordinate to the classics of active life. It is a servant, not a master; but though a servant, it has no menial duties to perform. What Milton says of music, that it "has its religious, glorious and magnificent uses," is no less true of this the highest product of human genius, which speaks to man as man, and addresses itself to what elevates him above the brute and makes him what he is.

As the spirit