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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 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 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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