The Study of Literature.

I confess that it is with more and more diffidence that I rise every year to have my little talk with you about books and the men that have written them. If I remember my terrestrial globe rightly, one gets into his temperate zone after passing the parallel of forty, and arrives at that shall I call it Sheltered Haven of Middle Age, when, in proportion as one is more careful of the conclusions he arrives at, he is less zealous in his desire that all mankind should agree with him. Moreover, the longer one studies, the more thoroughly does one persuade himself that till he knows everything, he knows nothing,-that after twenty years of criticism one is still a mere weigher and gauger:-skilled only to judge what he may chance to have been in the habit of inspecting at his own little provincial customhouse. And as one gets older he is apt to allow more for personal idiosyncrasy, and to have less certainly that the truth he has reached is not a one-sided one, and that there are not fifty others equally important, and (perhaps) equally unsatisfactory. Every bait is not for every fish. We begin by admitting the old Doctor's apothegm that Art is long; we gradually become persuaded that it is like the Irishman's rope, the other end of which was cut off. So different is Art, whose concern is with the ideal and potential, from Science, which is limited by the actual and positive.

Life is so short that it may be fairly doubted whether any man has a right to talk an hour, and I have learned at least so much,-that I hope less to teach than to suggest.

Whether Mr. Buckle be right or wrong in affirming that the progress of the race has been purely intellectual and not moral, it is certain that the imagination and conscience of men are stronger motives of action, and lead to greater results than any mere intellectual convictions. The lever of the great English Rebellion was the Conscience of England, and though Lord Bacon has said that all revolutions begin in the belly, this is in no wise true of such as bring about enduring political changes. So during our own Revolution, though the quarrel certainly began about a point of law, yet the enthusiasm which carried it through disaster and privation to success was kindled and kept alive by the few pregnant abstractions into which the genius of Jefferson had condensed the principles of Bodin and Sidney and the eloquence of Rousseau. No wiser man, according to the wisdom of the world, ever lived than Goethe, and he said, "Woe to the man who has trampled on the dreams of his youth;" that is, the power of surrendering himself to a purely abstract enthusiasm. The imagination always asserts its place in history, for it is inseparable from the nature of man, and the story of Colonel Goffe at Deerfield is but a modern version of the Dioscuri and of St. James of Compostella. In my walk the other day, I saw a man sitting in the sun in front of a little cottage which commanded a pretty landscape. "You have a charming view here," said I. "Yes," he answered, "I take a great deal of pleasure in it though I cannot see it. I have long ago lost my sight, but I love to sit here and recall it, and think that it is all there." It lies in our own choice with what pictures we may fill our minds, whether our inward eye shall command noble prospects over the whole domain of human thoughts, or shall be bounded by the narrow alley of a merely utilitarian training.

I believe that the study of imaginative literature tends to sanity of mind, and to keep the Caliban Common Sense, a very useful monster in his proper place from making himself King over us. It is the study of order, proportion, arrangement, of the highest and purest Reason. It teaches that chance has less to do with success than forethought, will and work.

In a lower sense it is also practically useful. For it is also a study of style. We win from it the secret of expression, we learn how shallow artifice is and how wearisome it becomes, we learn also how profound is Art, and how it is able to eternize the thought, the fancy, the feeling of some man who has been dust for centuries.

There is something in the bearing of the men of two centuries ago which marks them as different from ourselves, nay, as superior to us. It was simply that they were used to better society and have the air of the great world, of the world, that is, which makes fashions and is not made by them. They opened their Homer, their Sophocles, their Tacitus, their Horace, where we take up our newspaper or our novel. What an old Gascon prig would Montaigne have been but for the ancients, especially Plutarch. Yet his library did not swamp him, and though his essays are pockmarked all over with quotations, his temper is essentially modern, indeed, he is the first of the properly modern writers. It is not as ladders to the languages in which they are written that I would commend these books, but the languages as ladders to them, where by we may climb to a larger outlook over men and things, to a retreat lifted above the noises of the world. It is not the scholarship I look at, but the sympathy with their higher mood, with that sweetness that comes with age to good books as to good men. Mere scholarship is as useless as the collecting of old postage stamps. Kant used to say that there was nothing in the world so dreary as the company of mere scholars. With nothing but Lemprire's Dictionary and Chapman's Homer, Keats at twenty was

more imbued with the spirit of antiquity than Swinburne with all his Greek. And why? Because he read, not to become Greek, but drawn by a passion for the same ideal beauty that made the Greeks themselves Greek. The advice of Cato, cum bonis ambula, holds as good of books as of men. If the mind, like the dyer's hand, becomes insensibly subdued to what it works in, so also may it steep itself in a noble and victorious mood, may sweeten itself with a refinement that feels a vulgar thought like a stain, and store up sunshine against darker days. It is the books which heighten and clarify the character, whose seciety I would bid you seek. I think they tend to keep us pure. They disinfect the imagination; they fill the memory with light and fragrance. Whatever a man's station, whatever his other opportunities, there is one Company from which he can never be excluded, and it is that of the master-spirits of all the centuries. When one reads Boswell, he cannot help thinking what a privilege it would have been to belong to Johnson's set, but only consider of what a Club every scholar may be admitted a member. "Study," said Montesquieu, "has been for me a sovereign remedy against the disgusts of life, and I have never had a vexation that an hour's reading has not dissipated." But a man could not say that, who should choose Paul de Kock for his bosom friend rather than Milton, or prefer Miss Braddon's society to that of Vittoria Colonne.

The students of physical geography, as the horizon of observation and comparison gradually widens, are enabled to settle certain principles which are immutable in their relation; those, for example, of the distribution of mountain ranges, and of the climatic diversity of the eastern and western sides of continents. In just the same way, as the range of our study of literature widens, and the terra incognita diminishes to a few obscure points here and there, we are enabled to construct a tolerably perfect map of the globe of intellectual achievement and adventure and to color its boundaries, if only theoretically, yet with some approach to accuracy in the distinction of certain primary characteristics. In these lectures, it has been my desire, however inadequately in the nature of things I have been able to fulfil it, to keep these lines of psychical and aesthetic distinction more or less clearly in view; to grasp as well as I could and to illustrate such laws of criticism as seemed to me perennial in their application, and to leave aside as rubbish that dead leafage of deciduous facts which is swept rustling to and fro in the avenues of thought by the shifting breath of opinion.