"What," he asks, "is literature? … Books that are technical, that are professional, that are sectarian, are not literature in the proper sense of the term. The great characteristic of literature, its essential principle, is that it is addressed to man as man; it speaks to our common human nature; it deals with every element in our being that makes fellowship between man and man through all ages of man's history, and through all habitable regions of this planet. According to this view, literature excludes from its appropriate province whatever is addressed to men as they are parted into trades, and professions, and sects—parted, it may be, in the division for mutual good; or, it may be, by vicious and unchristian alienation.
"A London linendraper writes a treatise on angling, with no other thought, perhaps, than to teach an angler's subtle craft, but infusing into his art so much of Christian meekness, so deep a feeling for the beauties of earth and sky, such rational loyalty to womanhood, and such simple, child-like love of song—the songs of bird, of milkmaid, and of minstrel—that this little book on fishing has earned its life of two hundred years already, outliving many a more ambitious book, and Izaac Walton has a place of honour amid British authors, and has the love even of those who have learned the poet-moralist's truer wisdom:—
'Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.'"[1]
I can most earnestly commend the work from which this extract is taken to mothers for its purity and wisdom; it will be a real help to them as a guide in the selection of reading for their families.
Instead of adding any remarks of my own in illustration of the principle laid down by Professor Reed, I shall at once appeal to that fellowship between man and man which a writer must claim from his reader, or he writes in vain, by setting before my friends three pictures of humble life drawn from distant periods of our literature, but all agreeing in this, that those who painted them drew from nature, and expressed themselves in pure and unaffected English.
The first is the picture of a faithful household-servant from Shakspeare:—
| Adam. | What! my young master? my gentle master, |
| Orlando. | What, wouldst thou have me go and beg my food? |
| Adam. | … I have five hundred crowns, |
- ↑ 'Introduction to English Literature, from Chaucer to Tennyson, by H. Reed, late Professor in the University of Pennsylvania,' p. 12. Price 2s. Shaw. London.
