ir ways, the affections and the will."

There are, of course, self-complacent human beings who cannot realize
that past literature has in this domain anything to teach them. They
imagine that the world was born when they were born. These persons we
must perhaps leave to the error of their ways. In earnest truth, there
is no real literature too foreign or too old--nor, for the matter of
that, too near or too young--to enlighten us concerning human feeling,
human thought, and human motive. In these things the world did not have
to wait for wisdom and insight until the modern scientific epoch. Age
cannot wither the essential truth nor stale the potency of great
literature in this respect. Aristophanes, Thucydides, Plato, Tacitus,
Dante, or Shakespeare would have nothing to learn of the human mind and
heart from Haeckel or from Herbert Spencer.

Nor, again, has human capacity--thinking capacity--appreciably advanced
since great literature first arose. "Telephones," says Mr. Frederic
Harrison, "microphones, pantoscopes, steam presses, and ubiquity
engines in general may, after all, leave the poor human brain no bigger
and no stronger than the brains of men who heard Moses speak and saw
Aristotle pondering over a few worn rolls of crabbed manuscript." One
assuredly cannot say of the twentieth-century man with more truth than
Shakespeare's Hamlet said it of man three centuries ago--certainly not
with more truth than it might have been said of Shakespeare
himself--"How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In apprehension
how like a god!" There was, indeed, none of the modern scientific
terminology in Thucydides, or AEschylus, or Aristotle, but, in respect of
sheer brain power and sanity, literature is at least as lofty in
AEschylus as in Browning, in Aristotle as in Spencer. That is why the
classics--classics of all languages, classics of Greece, of Italy, of
England--are for ever fresh, and can never die.

* * * * *

Literature, therefore, is a mass of written enlightenment concerning
human beings, human hearts, and human thought. Name, if you will, any
other study which could better fit a man for grappling with the problems
of humanity in that portion of his life which we call public.

But man is something more than a public instrument. We cannot separate
the man of citizen life, playing his part in the practical world, from
the man of private intercourse, and the man of inward culture