laims of the rich and splendid
literature of the past are often slighted or ignored. The supreme
masters of an art ought to be the objects of constant study and
thought; there is more of life, truth, and beauty in them than in
their fellow-artists of narrower range of experience and artistic
achievement. For this reason these greatest interpreters of the human
spirit are in no sense exclusively of the past; they are of the
present and the future. To know them is not only to know the
particular periods in which they wrote, but to know our own period in
the deepest sense. No man can better prepare himself to enter into the
formative life of his time than by thoroughly familiarising himself
with the greatest books of the past; for in these are revealed, not
the secrets of past forms of life, but the secrets of that spirit
whose historic life is one unbroken revelation of its nature and
destiny. It is, therefore, no disparagement of the great company of
writers who have been the secretaries of the race in all ages to
fasten attention upon the claims of the four men of genius whom the
world has accepted as the supreme masters of the art of literature,
and to point out again the immense importance of their works in the
educational life of the individual and of society.

It cannot be said too often that literature is the product of the
continuous spiritual activity of the race; that it cannot be
arbitrarily divided into periods save for mere convenience of
arrangement; and that it is impossible to understand and value its
latest products unless one is able to find their place and discern
their value in the order of a spiritual development. To secure an
adequate impression of this highest expression of the human spirit one
must keep in view the work of the past quite as definitely as the work
of the present; in such a broad survey there is a constant deliverance
from the rashness of contemporary judgments, and from that narrowness
of feeling which limits one's vital contact with the life of the race
to the products of a single brief period.

In any attempt to indicate the fundamental significance of the art of
literature in the educational development of the individual and of
society there must also be a certain repetition of idea and of
illustration. This limitation, if it be a limitation, is inherent in
the very nature of the undertaking. Literature is, for purposes of
comment and exposition, practically inexhaustible; its