(1) Hardly anyone would deny that some knowledge and appreciation of literature is an indispensable part of a complete education.  The full member of a civilised society must be able to subscribe to the familiar Homo sum; nihil humanum a me alienum puto.  And literature is obviously one of the greatest, most intense, and most prolific interests of humanity.  There have always been thinkers, from Plato downwards, who for moral or political reasons have viewed the power of literature with distrust:  but their fear is itself evidence of that power.  Thus literature is a very important part both of the past and of contemporary life, and no one can enter fully into either without some real knowledge of it.  A man may be a very great man or a very good man without any literary culture; he may do his country and the world imperishable services in peace or war.  But the older the world grows, the rarer must these unlettered geniuses become.  Literature in one form or another—­too often no doubt put to vile uses—­has become so much part of the very texture of civilised life that a wide-awake mind can scarcely fail to take notice of it.  And in any case we need not consider that kind of special genius which education does little either to make or mar.  No one is likely seriously to deny that for taking a full and intelligent part in the normal life of a civilised community—­in love and friendship, in the family and in society, in the study and practice of citizenship of all degrees—­some literary culture is absolutely necessary; nor indeed that, subject to a due balance of qualities and acquirements, the wider and deeper the literary culture the more valuable a member of society the possessor will be.  The lubricant of society in all its functions, whether of business or leisure, is sympathy, and a sufficient quantity, as it were, of sympathy to lubricate the complex mechanism of civilised life can only be supplied by a widespread knowledge of the best, and a great deal more than the best, of what has been and is being thought and said in the world.  Personal intercourse with one another and a common apprehension of God as our Father are even more powerful sources of sympathy; but literature provides innumerable channels for the intercommunication and distribution of these sources, without which the sympathies of individuals may be strong and lively, but will almost always be narrowly circumscribed.  It is very true that to know mankind only through books is no knowledge of mankind at all; but ever since man discovered how to perpetuate his utterances in writing it has been increasingly true that literature is the principal means of widening and deepening such knowledge.

This object of literary studies, the formation of a personality fitted for civilised life, may be summed up in the familiar graceful words of Ovid, who was thinking almost entirely of literature when he wrote

            ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes
  Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros.