PART IV LITERATURE AND LIFE IN THE HOMELAND Look to the work the times reveal! Give thanks and clasp thy heritage To be alive in such an age! -Angela Morgan. From one point of view, literature knows. neither place nor time. The succession of the seasons, the relation of men to the forces of nature, the mysteries of life and death, are the same to all peoples and in all times. Plato wrote in ancient Greece about love, justice, and ideal government, and what he wrote has direct application to our thought more than twenty centuries after his death. Shakespeare wrote dramas for his countrymen three hundred and more years ago; we still see his plays performed in our theaters, study them in our schools, read them in our homes; while they have been translated into other languages and have become a part of the literature of a dozen peoples. English daffodils were lovely in the seventeenth century, and an English poet named Robert Herrick wrote some lovely lines about them. Daffodils were lovely a century ago, and an English poet named William Wordsworth made them also the subject of a song. Both of these poems we read here in America when the first spring flowers come, and find them as fresh and new as the flowers themselves. Through translations, great novels and poems and dramas at first written in German, French, Russian, and other foreign languages have become part of English literature. Literature knows no bounds of nationality or of the centuries. It has an immortality of continuing life here on earth, and speaks to us, if we so desire, as if it had been written, in our language, the day before yesterday. But in another sense, literature is a form of the history of a race and of a definite period of time. Men do certain things, make and unmake governments, win prosperity for their nations, or watch their nations sink into decay. The record of these achievements and failures is set down in history. But we find the reasons for these deeds not in the chronicles of events but in letters, speeches, poems, dramas-in literature. Literature reveals the soul of a people. It shows what were the ideals of justice, brotherhood, love, religion, government, in any period. It is one thing to know the facts about the life and deeds of Napoleon; it is another thing to find out what the career of Napoleon meant, and for this we often find a poem more full of meaning than a historical chronicle. It is one thing to know the facts about the Boston Tea Party: the date, the men who took part, the value of the tea destroyed. But to understand why men who were law-abiding and loyal to constituted government should have done these things we need to read poems and speeches and pamphlets of that period. Thomas Paine, a writer, not a soldier, expressed in burning words the spirit that filled American patriots with courage during the darkest hours of the Revolution, and Washington ordered that some things he wrote should be read at the head of every company of soldiers, saying that such words were of more value for inspiring courage in the hearts of discouraged men than the addition of a regiment to their forces. "We hold these truths to be self-evident"-do you remember where these words occur, and what follows? "Rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Now compare with these words the verses written by a Scottish plowhoy, Robert Burns— "A man's a man for a' that." The poem shows clearly the thoughts that were moving men's minds at that Revolutionary period, in Great Britain as well as in America, so that the poem becomes a way of understanding the soul of a past time. Literature, then, has a twofold province: one that has nothing to do with space and time; the other presenting a form of history of a people. From the one point of view you have your fairy tales, which belong to no one language or century but to the children of every race and color. You have Ulysses, a Greek hero of ancient times, and Beowulf, a hero of the early Germanic tribes along the North sea, whose story was first written down in English, though in a language that we hardly recognize as English today. Both of these you add to your group of heroes who are independent of time and nationality. You have Shakespeare's lovely fairy play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, written in England more than three centuries ago; but the world to which the fairy drama leads you is of no special place or time-it comes into being, as by a magic wand, whenever you take your book and give yourself up to its power. On the other hand, you read in your history about the period of American colonization, and you find in literature poems and stories that help you to realize what were the hardships, the manner of life, the types of manhood and womanhood that produced the colonies. You have your history of the Revolution; you may fill in the records of men and battles by reading what literature offers you. A history account of Concord and Lexington finds fuller meaning when you read Emerson's poem about the Concord Monument and Whittier's poem about Lexington. You read about the great westward movement, by which the millions of acres in the Louisiana Purchase were populated (the date and the price paid and the seller and the constitutional questions involved you study in your history, along with the dates of the admission of Missouri and Kansas as members of the sisterhood of states); and you also read Cooper's stories of Indian life, or Parkman's stories of Oregon, or Longfellow's story of Hiawatha, or Eggleston's Hoosier Schoolmaster, and many, many others, and the historical facts take on new meaning. And you look out at America today, busy and prosperous, and you find in stories of American workers and their work a means for understanding the scenes in which you will soon be an actor-a farmer, or a mechanic, or a governor, or a captain of industry in the America of tomorrow. In this section of your book some materials are given for acquiring an understanding of what America means and how her present grows out of the past. These are only examples of a sort of study that you may carry as far as you wish. There is no lack of material. It will help you understand America, so that you may give loyal service to America when you grow up. And then, when you are older, you may study England, or France, or any other great people in this way, so that you may know their ideals and what they have added to civilization! So doing, wars shall cease; for we do not hate people when we know their best instincts and desires; and the instincts and desires of a people are recorded in Aeir songs, their stories, their expression of the meaning of life. |