Culture is not an accident of birth, although
surroundings retard or advance it; it is always a matter of individual
education.

This education finds no richer material than that which is contained
in literature; for the characteristic of literature, as of all the
arts, is its universality of interest, its elevation of taste, its
disclosure of ideas, its constant appeal to the highest in the reader
by its revelation of the highest in the writer. Many of the noblest
works of literature are intensely local in colour, atmosphere,
material, and allusion; but in every case that which is of universal
interest is touched, evoked, and expressed. The artist makes the
figure he paints stand out with the greatest distinctness by the
accuracy of the details introduced and by the skill with which they
are handled; but the very definiteness of the figure gives force and
clearness to the revelation of the universal trait or characteristic
which is made through it. Pere Goriot has the ineffaceable stamp of
Paris upon him, but he is for that very reason the more completely
disclosed as a typical individuality. Literature abounds in
illustrations of this true and artistic adjustment of the local to the
universal, this disclosure of the common humanity in which all men
share through the highly elaborated individuality; and this
characteristic indicates one of the deepest sources of its educational
power. So searching is this power that it is safe to say that no one
can know thoroughly the great books of the world and remain a
provincial or a philistine; the very air of these works is fatal to
narrow views, to low standards, and to self-satisfaction.

Chapter XIV.

Racial Experience.

There is a general agreement among men that experience is the most
effective and successful of teachers; that for many men no other form
of education is possible; and that those who enjoy the fullest
educational opportunities miss the deeper processes of training if
they fail of that wide contact with the happenings of life which we
call experience. To touch the world at many points; to come into
relations with many kinds of men; to think, to feel, and to act on a
generous scale,--these are prime opportunities for growth. For it is
not only true, as Browning said so often and in so many kinds of speech,
that a man's greatest good fortune is to have the opportunity of
giving out freely and powerfully all the force that is in him, but it
is also