Classic English Literature Notes

Chief Qualities of Literature

How literature can be evaluated? In other words, literature has main characteristics which can be differentiated by science. Science uses words as the mere vehicles of things. Scientific words are not concerned with human feelings and emotions. These words are dry and cold as reason. Science deals with things which exist independently of the mind. In other

Words, science has the objective outlook. Metaphysics, ethics, law, political economy; chemistry, physics have an objective approach to truth. Thus they are distinct from literature. In other words, science has to do with things and literature with thoughts. According to William J. Long, literature is based upon three qualities———artistic, suggestive and permanent. Without these characteristics literature cannot exist. Literature has aesthetic and moral values. Literature does not please by moralizing us; it moralizes us because it pleases. The main qualities of literature are enumerated below which are adapted from English Literature: William J. long.

Artistic Quality: The first significant thing is the essentially artistic quality of all literature. All art is the expression of life in forms of truth and beauty; or rather, the reflection of some truth and beauty which are in the world, but which remain unnoticed until brought to our attention by some sensitive human soul, just as the delicate curves of the shell reflect sound and harmonics too faint to be otherwise noticed. A hundred men may pass a hayfield and see only the sweaty toil and the stocks of dried grass and potential savings for the farmer; but here is one who pauses by a Roumanian meadow, where girls are making hay and singing as they work, He looks deeper, sees truth and beauty where we see only dead grass, and he reflects what he sees in a little poem in which the hay tells its own story: ”

Yesterday’s flowers am l,

And I have drunk my last sweet draught of dew,

Young maidens came and sang me to my death;

The sun looks down and sees me in my shroud,

The shroud of my last dew.

One who reads only that first exquisite line, ‘Yesterday`s flowers am l,’can never again see hay without recalling the beauty that was hidden from his eyes until the poet found it.

ln the same pleasing, surprising way, all artistic work must be a kind of revelation. Thus architecture is probably the oldest of the arts; yet we still have many builders but few architects, that is, men whose work in wood or stone suggests some hidden truth and beauty to the human senses. So in literature, which is the art that expresses life in words that appeal to our own sense of the beautiful, we have many writers but few artists. ln the broadest sense, perhaps, literature means simply the written records of the race, including all its history and sciences, as well as its poems and novels, in the narrower sense, literature is the artistic record of life, and most of our writing is excluded from it, just as the mass of our buildings, mere shelters from storm and from cold, are excluded from architecture. A history or a work of science may be and sometimes is literature, but only as we forge the subject-matter and the presentation of facts in the simple beauty of its expression.

Suggestiveness: The second quality of literature is its suggestiveness, its appeal to our emotions and imagination rather than to our intellect. lt is not so much what it says at what it awakens in us that constitutes its charm. When Milton makes Satan say, ‘Myself am Hell,` he does not state any fact but rather opens up in these three tremendous words a whole world of speculation and imagination. When Faustus in the presence of Helen asks, `Was this the face that launched a thousand ships`?` he does not state a fact or expect an answer. He opens a door through which our imagination enters a new world, a world of music, love, beauty, heroism-—the whole splendid world of Greek literature. Such magic is in words when Shakespeare describes the young Biron as speaking

ln such apt and gracious words

That aged ears play truant at his tales,

He has unconsciously given not only an excellent description of himself, but the measure of all Literature, which makes us play truant with the present world and run away to live awhile in the pleasant realm of fancy. The province of all art is not to instruct but to delight; and only as literature delights us, causing each reader to build in his own soul that ‘lordly pleasure house` of which Tennyson dreamed in his ‘Palace of Art`, is it worthy of its name.

Permanence: The third characteristic of literature, arising directly from the other two, is its permanence. The world does not live by bread alone. Notwithstanding its hurry and bustle and apparent absorption in material things, it does not willingly let any beautiful thing perish. This is even more true of its songs than of its painting and sculpture; though permanence is a quality we should badly expect in the present deluge of books and magazines pouring day and night from our presses in the name of literature. But this problem of too many books is not modern, as we suppose. lt has been a problem ever since Caxton brought the first printing press from Flanders. four hundred years ago and in the shadow of Westminster Abbey opened his little shop and advertised his wares as ‘good and chepe.’ Even earlier, a thousand years before Caxton and his printing press, the busy scholars of the great library of Alexandria found that the number of parchments was much too great for them to handle; and now, when we print more in a week than all the Alexandrian scholars could copy in a century, it would seem impossible that any production could be permanent; that any song or story could live to give delight in future ages. But literature is like a river in flood, which gradually purifies itself two ways,—the mud settles to the bottom, and the scum rises to the top. When we examine the writings than by common consent constitute our literature, the clear stream purified of its dross, we find at least two more qualities, which we call the tests of literature, and which determine its permanence.