It is
time to define what we mean by literature. We may arrive at the meaning
by the definition of exclusion. We do not mean all books, but some books;
not all that is written and published, but only a small part of it. We do
not mean books of law, of theology, of politics, of science, of medicine,
and not necessarily books of travel, or adventure, or biography, or
fiction even. These may all be ephemeral in their nature. The term
belles-lettres does not fully express it, for it is too narrow. In books
of law, theology, politics, medicine, science, travel, adventure,
biography, philosophy, and fiction there may be passages that possess, or
the whole contents may possess, that quality which comes within our
meaning of literature. It must have in it something of the enduring and
the universal. When we use the term art, we do not mean the arts; we are
indicating a quality that may be in any of the arts. In art and
literature we require not only an expression of the facts in nature and
in human life, but of feeling, thought, emotion. There must be an appeal
to the universal in the race. It is, for example, impossible for a
Christian today to understand what the religious system of the Egyptians
of three thousand years ago was to the Egyptian mind, or to grasp the
idea conveyed to a Chinaman's thought in the phrase, "the worship of the
principle of heaven"; but the Christian of today comprehends perfectly
the letters of an Egyptian scribe in the time of Thotmes III.
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