It is very true that to know
mankind only through books is no knowledge of mankind at all; but ever
since man discovered how to perpetuate his utterances in writing it
has been increasingly true that literature is the principal means of
widening and deepening such knowledge.
This object of literary studies, the formation of a personality
fitted for civilised life, may be summed up in the familiar graceful
words of Ovid, who was thinking almost entirely of literature when he
wrote
ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros.
And it is only the lack, in so many of the greatest writers, and the
neglect, in so many educators and educational systems, of that due
balance of qualities and acquirements of which I spoke just now, which
have induced in superficial minds a distrust and often a contempt of
literature as a subject of education. The good citizen or man of the
world--in the best sense of the phrase--must not be the slave of
literary proclivities to the ruin of his functions as father or
husband or friend or man of action and affairs. The world of letters,
if lived in too exclusively, is an unreal world, though without it the
actual world is almost meaningless. Now the _genus irritabile vatum_,
even when their thoughts, as Carlyle put it, "enrich the blood of the
world," have very generally appeared to the plain man of goodwill as
very defective in the art of living.
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