Classic English Literature Notes

Literature is a criticism of life seen through a temperament, hence the study of literature is a study of various temperaments, life is variegated, its facets and problems are multifarious and a study of literature gives us life freely and abundantly. The questions about the technical side of this study, the methods of study, etc. do not concern us. We approach the subject on a broader basis. Thus regarded, literature is a pleasant pastime, an enjoyable companion in all ages and conditions of health. When we relax in an armchair after the day’s work, a story or a poem soon lulls our fagged brains to refreshing ease and slumber. We are hurrying in an express train, a novel is our companion. Out on a picnic we soon are a-piece with Nature. A book is our tonic in attacks of illness and despondence when life hangs heavy on our hands. Books have become an integral part of modern life; we do not know what we shall do without them. Time is money but even then sometimes it becomes irksome.

The ingenuity of man has discovered in Literature the talisman that provides him wings to fly. Life is a bed of thorns; Shelly calls it a dim vale of tears. In reading literature we find an escape from the fever, the fret and the weariness of this world. A commonplace thing acquires new shapes. Our fancy roams from the earth to the skies and on the wings of poesy we flit from flower to flower forgetting the thorns below. Poets and writers have sought this escape and we read their works and we seek it in them. While does not feel elated while reading Keats’s poems ‘ Ode to Nightingale’ and ‘ Ode to the Grecian Urns, two of the finest poems of escapes? Works of romance bewitch our minds and brains in no time. The writer carries us far into his utopian land where love is rewarded, where wealth is in plenty and where pain and sickness do not intrude. Reading books is thus a pleasure and the best writers are those who please us the mot. “Literature exists to please—– to lighten the burden of men’s liver, to make them for a short while forget their sorrows and their sins, their silenced hearts, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures.

Literature not only pleases us but instructs us also. The authors who attain to the eminence of the classics are those who exercise their imagination on the serious problems of life and explain or elucidate them through fiction. Such are the problems of the good and the evil in life, love, duty, beauty, truth, etc. the reader too in the course of his life comes to grips with one or the other of these problems. He is baffled and perhaps would give up but for the guidance from the classics but for the guidance from the classics. They give him not a tangible solution but the heroic temper that enables him to pass through the ordeal and survive brutal shocks. Our tragedies show us how to preserve the emotional balance which is the sign of a healthy man. In this respect biographies and autobiographies are most useful. If we fail to find a kindred soul in actual life we can find any number of them amongst the dead. Carlyle was not far wrong when he said, “History is the biography of great men.” Literatures thus widen our contact and we enjoy life more abundantly. Private journals, diaries, memories and letters takes us to the heart of their authors.

Literature provides a common platform for discussion and exchange of thoughts and social or political reforms through exposition. Those writings with a purpose have played their part in the eradication of a number of ills to which we are heirs. Dickens launched a crusade against slumps. Thackerary exposed the orgies of society; Mrs. Gaskell brought to light the squalor of the rising industrial towns. Carlyle denounced the whole mechanical age devoid of blessedness if not happiness, Ruskin preached the creation and love of beauty in works done by hand and Newman discussed the returns to the fold of the Catholic religion.

In our own times George Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy utilized the stage for purpose of conveying their messages to the people Satire, irony, rhetoric, parable, fable—–these are the coatings in which the messages are wrapped. Literature does not openly preach like the man in the pulpit. It adopts the politer method of insinuations by showing the existing conditions which are to be removed and leaving us dross and brings up the deeply buried gold. Literature works silently and produces a mental revolution which precedes social and political revolution. The germs of the French Revolution are to be found in Rousseau’s Confessions.

Literature elevates our minds, and ennobles our character. It is a criticism of life and its high seriousness servers to mould our minds. From the pettiness of life we pass over to the natural beauties or the domain of fundamental emotions mirrored in the lyrics, the pure and spontaneous forms of literature. Wordsworth’s nature poems, Shelly’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and Keats’ ‘ A thing of Beauty’ appeal to us through their lyrical emotions and by their sweep and rush carry us alone. Sacred literature, hymns and songs are a class apart and their utility is unquestioned. They have sustained many a grieved heart. Their power is akin to the power of David’s hymns, e.g ‘Song to Soul’ by Browning. The ethereal realm of ecstasy only poets can touch. Having once touched it, they trail clouds of glory for their readers. Good poetry induces that mood in us in which we no longer dread the mystery of existence or care for the “ burthen of the mystery” of this “unintelligible world.”

Literature, next to life, provides the stage for conflict of human personality against its opponents—-another human body, circumstances or some other force. Novelists can indulge in psychological studies of their characters, but it is in drama that we see this conflict at its interest. We identify ourselves with the characters after our choice, we rejoice with them in their triumphs and we weep with them in moments of agony. Literature in this way cures us of our selfishness and narrow sympathies and antipathies. During the periods of our study or seeing of these plays we lead exalted lives and when we go away to our homes we carry with us the memory of what we had read or seen. Books, as Stevenson remarks, are a valuable substitute for life.

Literature also exists for the specialist who studies it in order to know a people, an age or language. Here the layman need not enter it he does not care for such things but even the layman is curious. How do people think and dream in Norway? Here is Dbsen to tell us how. What are the feelings of a Red Indian father when his child is dead? Hiawatha tells us. And so on endlessly. Literature is like the air or the ether—-the property of no one people or race. Its universality is the universality of life. Whenever men live and think and dream they live and think and dream with the whole world. As the Latin Poet said, “I am a man; nothing human is alien to me.”