It is sufficiently evident that the natural inclinations of the ordinary man are not toward imaginative literature, and that unless there were strong and tangible reasons why it is worth while to cultivate an appreciation and a fondness for them, the classics would be so little read that they might as well be sent to the junk-shop at once, save for the occasional mortal whom the gods from his birth have endowed with the precious gift of understanding high speech. These reasons, moreover, must apply especially to the classics as distinguished from books in general. Briefly stated, some of them are as follows:—

The need of a knowledge of the classics for the understanding of literary language has already been spoken of at some length. This is, of course, a minor and comparatively extraneous consideration, but it is one not to be left wholly out. It is not difficult, however, to get a superficial familiarity with famous writings by means of literary dictionaries and extract books; and with this a good many persons are apparently abundantly content. The process bears the same relation to the actual study of the originals that looking at foreign photographic views does to traveling abroad. It is undoubtedly better than nothing, although it is by no means the real thing. It gives one an intellectual understanding of classic and literary allusions, but not an emotional one. Fully to appreciate and enjoy the allusions with which literature is filled, it is essential to have gained knowledge directly from the originals.

One reason why references to the classics are so frequent in literary language, is that in these writings are found thought and emotional expression in their youth, so to say. Even more important than learning the force of these allusions is the coming in contact with this fresh inspiration and utterance. That into which a man steps full grown can never be to him the same as that in which he has grown up. We cannot have with the thing which we have known only in its complete form the same intimate connection as with that which we have watched from its very beginnings. To that with which we have grown we are united by a thousand delicate and intangible fibres, fine as cobweb and strong as steel. The student who attempts to form himself solely upon the literature of to-day misses entirely the childhood, the youth, the growth of literary art. He comes full grown, and generally sophisticated, to that which is itself full grown and sophisticated. It is not possible for him to become himself a child, but he may go back toward the childhood of emotional expression and as it were advance step by step with the race. He may feel each fresh emotional discovery as if it were as new to him as it was in truth new for the author who centuries ago expressed it so well that the record has become immortal.

I do not know whether what I mean is fully clear, and it is of course difficult to give examples where the matter is so subtle. It is certain, however, that any reader of early literature must be conscious how in the simplicity and naÏvetÉ of the best old authors we find things which are now hackneyed and all but commonplace said with a freshness and conviction which makes them for the first time real to us. Many emotions have been so long recognized and expressed in literature that there seems hardly to be a conceivable phase in which they have not been shown, and hardly a conceivable phrase in which they have not been embodied. It appears impossible to express them now with the freshness and sincerity which belonged to them when they were first imprisoned in words. So true is this that were it not that the personal impress of genius and the experience of the imaginative writer always give vitality, literature would cease from the face of the earth, and become a lost art.

It is the persuasion and vividness of first discovery which impart to the folk-song its charm and force. The early ballads often put to shame the poetry of later days. The unsophisticated singers of these lays had never been told that it was proper for them to have any especial emotions; they had never heard talk about this feeling or that, and art did not consciously exist for them as other than the spontaneous and sincere expression of what really moved them. That which they felt too strongly to repress, they said without any self-consciousness. Their artistic forms were so simple as to impose no hindrance to the instinctive desire for revealing to others what swelled in their very hearts. The result is that impressiveness and that convincingness which can come from nothing but perfect sincerity. Innumerable poets have put into verse the sentiments of the familiar folk-song, "Waly, waly;" yet it is not easy to find in all the list the same thing said with a certain childlike directness which goes to the heart that one finds in passages like this:—

What later singer is there who has surpassed in pathos that makes the heart ache the exquisite beauty of "Fair Helen"?

The directness and simplicity which are the charm of folk-song and ballad are far more likely to be found in early literature than in that which is produced under conditions which foster self-consciousness. They belong, it is true, to the work of all really great writers. No man can produce genuinely great art without being completely possessed by the emotions which he expresses; so that for the time being he is not wholly removed from the mood of the primitive singers. Singleness of purpose and simplicity of expression, however, are the birthright of those writers who have been pioneers in literature. It is chiefly in their work that we may hope to experience the delight of finding emotions in the freshness of their first youth, of gaining something of that realization of perception which is fully only his who first of mortal men discovers and proclaims some new possibility of human existence.

Another quality of much importance in primitive writings and the early classics is complete freedom from sentimentality. As certain parasites do not attack young trees, so sentimentality is a fungus which never appears upon a literature until it is well grown. It is not until a people is sufficiently cultivated to appreciate the expression of emotions in art that it is capable of imitating them or of simulating that which it has learned to regard as a desirable or noble feeling. As cultivation advances, there is sure to be at length a time when those who have more vanity than sentiment begin to affect that which it has come to be considered a mark of high cultivation to feel. We all know this vice of affectation too well, and I mention it only to remark that from this literature in its early stages is far more apt to be free than it is in its later and more consciously developed phases.

The blight which follows sentimentality is morbidity; and one of the most important characteristics of the genuine classics is their wholesome sanity. By sanity I mean freedom from the morbid and the diseased; and the quality is one especially to be prized in these days of morbid tendencies and diseased eccentricities. There is much in many of the classics which is sufficiently coarse when measured by later and more refined standards; but even this is free from the gangrene which has developed in over-ripe civilizations. Rabelais chose the dung-hill as his pulpit; in Shakespeare and Chaucer and Homer and in the Bible there are many things which no clean-minded man would now think of saying; but there is in none of these any of that insane pruriency which is the chief claim to distinction of several notorious contemporary authors. Neither is there in classic writers the puling, sentimental, sickly way of looking at life as something all awry. The reader who sits down to the Greek poets, to Dante, to Chaucer, to MoliÈre, to Shakespeare, to Cervantes, to Montaigne, to Milton, knows at least that he is entering an atmosphere wholesome, bracing, and manly, free alike from sentimentality and from all morbid and insane taint.

Besides a knowledge of literary language, we must from the classics gain our standards of literary judgment. This follows from what has been said of temporary and permanent interest in books. Only in the classics do we find literature reduced to its essentials. The accidental associations which cluster about any contemporary work, the fleeting value which this or that may have from accidental conditions, the obscurity into which prejudice of a particular time may throw real merit, all help to make it impossible to learn from contemporary work what is really and essentially bad or good. It is from works which may be looked at dispassionately, writings from which the accidental has been stripped by time, that we must inform ourselves what shall be the standard of merit. It is only from the classics that we may learn to discriminate the essential from the incidental, the permanent from the temporary; and thus gain a criterion by which to try the innumerable books poured upon us by the inexhaustible press of to-day.

Nor do we gain only standards of literature from the classics, but standards of life as well. In a certain sense standards of literature and of life may be said to be one, since our estimate of the truth and the value of a work of art and our judgment of the meaning and value of existence can hardly be separated. The highest object for which we study any literature being to develop character and to gain a knowledge of the conditions of being, it follows that it is for these reasons in especial that we turn to the classics. These works are the verdicts upon life which have been most generally approved by the wisest men who have lived; and they have been tested not by the experiences of one generation only, but by those of succeeding centuries. For wise, wholesome, and comprehensive living there is no better aid than a familiar, intimate, sympathetic knowledge of the classics.