The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1855-07-03 00:00:00

WHAT IS LITERATURE ?

THIS is a question not enough thought of ; the
answer to it is important, but by no means, I think,
difficult, when once we see the necessity of making the
discrimination. 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 ad-
dressed 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 the
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. It is the relation
to universal humanity which constitutes literature ; its
matters not how elevated, whether it-be history, phi-
losophy, or poetry, in its highest aspirations ; or how
humble, it may be the simplest rhyme or story that is
level to the unquestioning faith and untutored intel-
lect of childhood : let it but be addressed to our com-
mon human nature, it is literature in the true sense of
the term. No man can put it aside and say, "It
concerns not me :" no woman can put it aside and say,
"It concerns not me." The books which do not enter
into the literature of a language are limited in their
uses, for they hold their intercourse with something
narrower than human nature, while that which is
literature has an audience-chamber capacious as the
soul of man--enduring as his immortality. It has a
voice whose rhythm is in harmony with the pulses of
the human heart. It is this, and this alone—this
universality—which places a book in a nation's litera-
ture. It matters not what the subject, or what the
modes of treating—be there but one touch of nature
to make the whole world kin—it is enough to lift it
into the region of literature. 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 heart 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 birds, of milk-maid,
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 Isaak Walton has a
place of honour amid British authors, and has the love

,ARD

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::

I speak of this instance to show how a subject .which is
indifferent to many, and even repulsive to not a few,
may be redeemed and animated .by the. Author's
human-heartedness. Hoiv much deeper, thn, -must
be the interest of all the subjects, in the vast variety,
with which there is universal sympathy ! How lunch
mightier must be the agency of. literature as it passes
beyond and above that .which is local and limited,
temporary or conventional, into the region of the
spiritual and the eternal, when it enters into the very
soul of man, admonishing it of its weaknesses, and of
its strength, and of its immortality !—Lectures 'on
English Literature, by Henry Reed.