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U4Reading
- The wonder of literature
- A child and a man were walking on the beach when the child
- found a shell and held it to his ear. Suddenly he heard
- strange, low, musical sounds. These sounds seemed to be
- from another world and the child listened to them with
- wonder. Then the man explained that the child heard
- nothing strange, and that the shell caught a range of
- sounds too faint for human ears. What amazed the child was
- not a new world, but the unnoticed music of the old.
- Some such experience as this lies in store for us when we
- begin the study of literature. Let a little song appeal to
- the ear, or a great book to the heart, and we discover a
- new world, a world of dreams and magic. To enter and enjoy
- this new world, we need to love literature, and make an
- effort to explain it. Behind every book is a man, behind
- the man is the race, and behind the race are the natural
- and social environments. We must know all these, if the
- book is to speak its whole message. In a word, we have now
- reached a point where we wish to enjoy and understand
- literature. The first step is to determine some of its
- significant qualities.
U4Reading
- The first quality of literature is its description of
- truth and beauty. Some truth and beauty remain unnoticed
- until a sensitive human soul brings them to our attention,
- just as the shell reflects the unnoticed sounds. A hundred
- men may pass a field and see only dead grass; but a poet
- stops, looks deeper, sees truth and beauty, and writes,
- “Yesterday's flowers am I.” One who reads it is
- capable of seeing the beauty that was hidden from his eyes
- before.
- The second quality of literature is its appeal to our
- feelings and imagination. Its attraction lies more in what
- it awakens in us than what it says. When Christopher
- Marlowe's Doctor Faustus asks in the presence of Helen,
- “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” he
- opens a door through which our imagination enters a new
- world, a world of love, beauty and heroism.
- The third quality of literature, coming out of the other
- two, is its permanence. To achieve this, it should contain
- two elements: universal interest and personal style. Good
U4Reading
- literature reflects the most basic of human nature—love
- and hate, joy and sadness, fear and hope. It also takes on
- a personal style—no writer can describe human life
- without reflecting his own life and experiences.
- In summary, literature is the expression of life in forms
- of truth and beauty, the written record of man's thoughts
- and feelings, and the history of the human soul.
- (Adapted from William J. Long's English Literature: Its
- History and Its Significance for the Life of the
- English-Speaking World)
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