The aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours of leisure;
it is to awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify
one's capacity for pleasure, for sympathy, and for comprehension.
It is not to affect one hour, but twenty-four hours.
It is to change utterly one's relations with the world.
An understanding appreciation of literature means an understanding
appreciation of the world, and it means nothing else. Not isolated
and unconnected parts of life, but all of life, brought together
and correlated in a synthetic map! The spirit of literature
is unifying; it joins the candle and the star, and by the magic
of an image shows that the beauty of the greater is in the less.
And, not content with the disclosure of beauty and the bringing together
of all things whatever within its focus, it enforces a moral wisdom
by the tracing everywhere of cause and effect. It consoles doubly--
by the revelation of unsuspected loveliness, and by the proof
that our lot is the common lot. It is the supreme cry of the discoverer,
offering sympathy and asking for it in a single gesture. In attending
a University Extension Lecture on the sources of Shakespeare's plots,
or in studying the researches of George Saintsbury into
the origins of English prosody, or in weighing the evidence for and against
the assertion that Rousseau was a scoundrel, one is apt to forget
what literature really is and is for. It is well to remind ourselves
that literature is first and last a means of life, and that the enterprise
of forming one's literary taste is an enterprise of learning how best
to use this means of life. People who don't want to live,
people who would sooner hibernate than feel intensely, will be wise
to eschew literature. They had better, to quote from the finest passage
in a fine poem, "sit around and eat blackberries."
The sight of a "common bush afire with God" might upset their nerves.