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- 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
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- qualities.
- 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
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- two, is its permanence. To achieve this, it should
- contain two elements: universal interest and personal
- style. Good 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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