that all public school
boys are very much alike in character and outlook is a mere delusion.

Again, I propose, when I speak of literature, to mean literature, and
not a compendious term for anything that is not science. The
opposition that has in modern times been set up between science on the
one hand and a jumble of studies labelled either literary or
"humanistic" studies on the other is to my mind wholly unfounded in
the nature of things, and destructive of any liberal view of
education. It may perhaps be held that literature in its most literal
sense is a name for anything that is expressed by means of
intelligible language--a use of the word which certainly admits of no
comparison with the meaning of science, but which also leads to no
ideas of any educational interest. But I take the word literature in
its common acceptation; and, while admitting that I can give no
precise and exhaustive definition, I will venture to describe it as
the expression of thought or emotion in any linguistic forms which
have aesthetic value. Thus the subject-matter of literature is only
limited by experience: as Emile Faguet says somewhere--without
claiming to have made a discovery--_la litterature est une chose qui
touche a toutes choses_. And the tones of literature range from Isaiah
to Wycherley, from Thucydides to Tolstoy; its forms from Pindar to a
folk song, from Racine to Rudyard Kipling, from Gibbon to Herodotus or
Froissart. And while no two people would agree in drawing the line of
aesthetic value which should determine whether any given verbal
expression of thought or emotion was literature or not--a fact which
is not without importance in the choice of books for forming the taste
of our pupils--yet, for the purpose of discussing the place and
function of literature in education, we all know well enough what we
mean by the word in the general sense which I have attempted to
describe.

As this is not a tractate on education as a whole, I must risk
something for the sake of brevity, and will venture to lay down
dogmatically that the objects of literary studies as a part of
education are (1) the formation of a personality fitted for civilised
life, (2) the provision of a permanent source of pure and inalienable
pleasure, and (3) the immediate pleasure of the student in the process
of education. None of these objects is exclusive of either of the
others. They cannot in fact be separated in the concrete. But they are
sufficien