INTRODUCTION TO

THE STUDY OF LITERATURE

CHAPTER I

LITERATURE IN GENERAL

THE SOURCES OF INTEREST IN LITERATURE

Many people cannot understand why men and women spend time, money, and energy on Shakespeare's Macbeth, Scott's The Lady of the Lake, or Dickens's David Copperfield. These works are old; the facts which they contain are long out of date. Modern histories give a more accurate account of Scottish history than Macbeth, guide books give more definite information about the Scottish highlands than The Lady of the Lake, and special accounts of English social life contain more information about Englishmen than David Copperfield. Yet these books are bought, read, and studied by thousands of men and women, boys and girls, and, in addition, Macbeth still draws large audiences at the theater. Books of fact which were written in the time of Shakespeare, Scott, and Dickens have long since been forgotten. Who would study seriously a book on medicine written in 1600, or an encyclopedia compiled in 1800, or a book on electricity published in 1850?

Why do people read literature? Why do students spend years in school and college in the study of the great masters of literature? Why do publishing houses publish each year thousands of novels, plays, essays, and poems? Why do

magazines give so much space to short stories and poems? Why do people read volumes of literary criticism and literary biography?

In the first place, though one does not use literature to secure a knowledge of facts, one can use it to find how, in a certain period, men looked at facts. Macbeth is not a text-book of Scottish history, but it shows how Shakespeare used facts from Scottish history to interpret life for the men of Elizabethan England. Paradise Lost is not an authentic account of the creation of the earth, but it shows how a great Puritan of the seventeenth century who tried to

'assert Eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to man'

looked upon the problem of the origin of sin. A Tale of Two Cities may not satisfy students of history as an account of the French Revolution, but it is highly interesting as Dickens's interpretation of human nature under the old French régime and during the storm and stress of the Reign of Terror. Literature, then, though it is not the best source from which to secure a knowledge of facts, is our best source for a vivid and interesting interpretation of facts as they affect people's lives. When we wish to catch the spirit of '76, we read Paul Revere's Ride; when we wish to understand the complexities of society in England in the mid-nineteenth century, we read Thackeray's The Newcomes; when we wish to understand the qualities which have made heroes of English sailors, we read Tennyson's The Revenge.

Perhaps the primary instinct which leads men to literature, however, is the natural human love of a story. From primitive man crouching about a fire in a cave listening with delight to the story of the killing of the hairy mammoth with stone-tipped arrows to the boy curled in an armchair by the fireplace reading with delight the story of Custer's last

stand as the Redskins circled ever nearer and nearer-from that day to this a good story has been able "to hold children from play and old men from the chimney corner." Robert Louis Stevenson, himself a master of story-telling, says:

"The desire for knowledge, I had almost added the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit and striking incident. . . . A friend of mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was twenty-five years old and could neither read nor write, when he heard a chapter of Robinson Crusoe read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that moment he had sat content, huddled in his ignorance, but he left that farm another man. There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine day-dreams, written and printed and bound, and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure. Down he sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to borrow the book. It had been lost, nor could he find another copy but one that was in English. Down he sat once more, learned English, and at length, and with entire delight, read Robinson. It is like the story of a love-chase."

The satisfaction of this desire for "fit and striking incident" is one of the most delightful results of literary study. The well-read man knows a world which never grows old, a world where he can choose his own friends, where he can see the life he would like to lead, where he can travel at will without trouble or expense. The reader never has "nothing to do." Life is all too short, time all too scant for reading all the books he would like to read.

Delightful as literature is, however, it has more lasting values than as a source of pleasure, amusement, and relaxation. It is, especially for the young reader, the most important source of ideas and ideals. Literature is the record of what men have thought and felt about life, and from that record the modern reader can enrich his own meager experience with the thoughts and emotions of the past. Espe

cially important in this respect is contemporary literature, for as our modern life becomes more complex and diverse no single person can hope himself to experience all life. Yet every man wants to know more of life than lies within his grasp. The eternal spirit of youth is eagerness for experience, a great curiosity about life in the past and in the present. Three hundred and fifty years ago Christopher Marlowe expressed this spirit of youth:

"Nature that framed us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds;
Our souls whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,

And always moving as the restless spheres,
Will us to wear ourselves and never rest."

For this eagerness for knowledge, this "divine discontent" of youth, there is no better satisfaction than the quest for and understanding of the ideas and ideals expressed in literature of the past and of the present.

Still another value of literature lies in the fact that it is, for the ordinary man, the most accessible source of beauty. Α picture may be found only in a museum, a statue may be found only in a foreign city, but a book can be multiplied indefinitely and bought by anybody. In literature shines

through

"The light that never was on sea or land"

"Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

One may never look upon the perfect form of a Grecian urn, but he can see the clear beauty that Keats pictured in his ode: