THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS

(HOMER, DANTE, CERVANTES, GOETHE SHAKESPEARE)

The study of literature, that it may be fruitful, that it may not result in a mere gathering of names and dates and phrases, must be a study of ideas and not of words, of periods rather than of men, or only of such men as are great enough or individual enough to reflect as much light upon their age as they in turn receive from it.  To know literature as the elder Disraeli knew it is at best only an amusement, an accomplishment, great, indeed, for the dilettante, but valueless for the scholar.  Detached facts are nothing in themselves, and become of worth only in their relation to one another.  It is little, for example, to know the date of Shakespeare:  something more that he and Cervantes were contemporaries; and a great deal that he grew up in a time fermenting with reformation in Church and State, when the intellectual impulse from the invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while the New World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promise and its temptations to daring adventure.  Facts in themselves are clumsy and cumbrous—­the cowry-currency of isolated and uninventive men; generalizations, conveying great sums of knowledge in a little space, mark the epoch of free interchange of ideas, of higher culture, and of something better than provincial scholarship.

But generalizations, again, though in themselves the work of a happier moment, of some genetic flash in the brain of man, gone before one can say it lightens, are the result of ideas slowly gathered and long steeped and clarified in the mind, each in itself a composite of the carefully observed relations of separate and seemingly disparate facts.  What is the pedigree of almost all great fortunes?  Through vast combinations of trade, forlorn hopes of speculation, you trace them up to a clear head and a self-earned sixpence.  It is the same with all large mental accumulations:  they begin with a steady brain and the first solid result of thought, however small—­the nucleus of speculation.  The true aim of the scholar is not to crowd his memory, but to classify and sort it, till what was a heap of chaotic curiosities becomes a museum of science.

It may well be questioned whether the invention of printing, while it democratized information, has not also levelled the ancient aristocracy of thought.  By putting a library within the power of every one, it has taught men to depend on their shelves rather than on their brains; it has supplanted a strenuous habit of thinking with a loose indolence of reading which relaxes the muscular fiber of the mind.  When men had few books, they mastered those few; but now the multitude of books lord it over the man.  The costliness of books was a great refiner of literature.  Men disposed of single volumes by will with as many provisions and precautions as if they had been great landed estates.  A mitre would hardly have overjoyed Petrarch as much as did the finding of a copy of Virgil.  The problem for the scholar was formerly how to acquire books; for us it is how to get rid of them.  Instead of gathering, we must sift.  When Confucius made his collection of Chinese poems, he saved but three hundred and ten out of more than three thousand, and it has consequently survived until our day.