In the
popular conception, literature is as much a thing apart from life as
these boats on the stream of time were from the existence, the struggle,
the decay of the generations along the shore. I say in the popular
conception, for literature is wholly different from this, not only in its
effect upon individual lives, but upon the procession of lives upon this
earth; it is not only an integral part of all of them, but, with its
sister arts, it is the one unceasing continuity in history. Literature
and art are not only the records and monuments made by the successive
races of men, not only the local expressions of thought and emotion, but
they are, to change the figure, the streams that flow on, enduring, amid
the passing show of men, reviving, transforming, ennobling the fleeting
generations. Without this continuity of thought and emotion, history
would present us only a succession of meaningless experiments. The
experiments fail, the experiments succeed--at any rate, they end--and
what remains for transmission, for the sustenance of succeeding peoples?
Nothing but the thought and emotion evolved and expressed. It is true
that every era, each generation, seems to have its peculiar work to do;
it is to subdue the intractable earth, to repel or to civilize the
barbarians, to settle society in order, to build cities, to amass wealth
in centres, to make deserts bloom, to construct edifices such as were
never made before, to bring all men within speaking distance of each
other--lucky if they have anything to say when that is accomplished--to
extend the information of the few among the many, or to multiply the
means of easy and luxurious living.
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