Literature of Knowledge Essay

First printed in The North Briton Review, August, 1848, as part of a review of The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. W. Roscoe, 1847. What is it that we baseborn by publications? Popularly, and amongst the thoughtless, it is held to include any(prenominal)thing that is printed in a book. Little logic is required to disturb that comment. The to the highest degree thoughtless person is easily make aw atomic number 18 that in the idea of literature one essential piece is, ? some congenator to a general and familiar interest of man, so that what applies only to a local or professional or alone personal interest, scour though presenting itself in the shape of a book, leave alone non be ample to literature.So get ahead the definition is easily change and it is as easily expanded. For not only is much that takes a commit in books not literature, precisely, inversely, much that re aloney is literature never r all(prenominal)es a station in books. The weekly sermons of Christen dom, that vast pulpit literature which acts so extensively upon the popular mind? to warn, to uphold, to re refreshed, to comfort, to alarm? does not attain the safety of libraries In the ten-thousandth part of its extent.The drama as for instance the finest of Shakespeares plays in England and all leading Athenian plays in the noontide of the Attic stage, operated as a literature on the public mind, and were (according to the strictest letter of that term) published by dint of the audiences that witnessed their representation, some time before they were published as things to be file and they were published in this scenical mode of publication with much more violence than they could have had as books during ages of costly copying or of costly printing.Books, therefore, do not suggest an idea co-extensive and interchangeable with the idea of literature, since much literature, scenic, forensic, or didactic (as from lectures and public orators), may never count into books, and mu ch that does come into books may connect itself with no literary interest. save a far more important correction, applicable to the common vague idea of literature, is to be sought, not so much in a better definition of literature, as in a sharper distinction of the two functions which it fulfils.In that great social organ which, collectively, we call literature, there may be distinguished two separate offices, that may blend and often do so, barely confident, severally, of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion.There is, first, the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach the function of the second is to bowel movement the first is a rudder the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the chaste discursive get a lineing the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the high beneath persisting, or reason, entirely al offices through affections of pleasure and bounty.Remotely i t may travel towards an purpose seated in what Lord Bacon calls dry luminance but proximately it does and must(prenominal) operate? else it ceases to be a literature of power-on and through that humid light which clothes itself in the mists and glittering iris of human passions, desires, and genial emotions. work force have so little reflected on the higher functions of literature as to find it a paradox if one should describe it as a mean or subordinate purpose of books to give in constellationation. But this is a paradox only in the sense which makes it honorable to be paradoxical.Whenever we parley in ordinary language of seeking information or gaining knowledge, we understand the words as connected with something of absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high discover in human interests that it is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds it exists eternally, by way of germ or latent principle, in the lowest as in the highest, nee ding to be developed but never to be planted.To be capable of transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth that ranges on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth, namely, power, or darksome sympathy with truth.What is the effect, for instance, upon society, of children? By the pity, by the tenderness, and by the peculiar modes of admiration, which connect themselves with the helplessness, with the innocence, and with the easiness of children, not only are the primal affections strengthened and continually renewed, but the qualities which are dearest in the sight of heaven-the frailty, for instance, which appeals to forbearance, the innocence which symbolizes the heavenly, and the simplicity which is most alien from the worldly-are kept up in perpetual remembrance, and their ideals are continually refreshed.A purpose of the same nature is answered by the higher literature, viz. , the literature of power. What do you learn from Paradise Lost? Nothin g at all. What do you learn from a cookery-book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery-book on a higher take of estimation than the divine poem?What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing mensurations on the same priming coatly level what you owe is power, that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent competency of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a grade upwards, a step ascending as upon a Jacobs ladders from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth.All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one fundament above your ancient level of earth whereas the very first step in power is a flight, is an ascending movement into another broker where earth is forgotten.Were it not that human sensibilities are ventila ted and continually called come step up into exercise by the great phenomena of infancy, or of real life as it moves through chance and change, or of literature as it recombines these elements in the mimicries of poetry, romance, etc., it is trustworthy that, like any animal power or muscular goose egg falling into disuse, all such sensibilities would gradually droop and dwindle. It is in relation to these great moral capacities of man that the literature of power, as contradistinguished from that of knowledge, lives and has its field of action.It is concerned with what is highest in man for the Scriptures themselves never condescended to deal by suggestion or cooperation with the pure discursive understanding when speaking of man in his intellectual capacity, the Scriptures speak not of the understanding, but of the understanding heart, ? making the heart, i. e. , the great original (or non-discursive) organ, to be the interchangeable formula for man in his highest stat e of capacity for the infinite.Tragedy, romance, fairy tale, or epopee, all alike restore to mans mind the ideals of legal expert, of hope, of truth, of mercy, of retribution, which else (left to the support of daily life in its realities) would languish for extremity of sufficient illustration. What is meant, for instance, by poetic justice??It does not mean a justice that differs by its object from the ordinary justice of human code for then it must be confessedly a very unskilled kind of justice but it means a justice that differs, from common forensic justice by the degree in which it attains its object, a justice that is more omnipotent over its own ends, as dealing? not with the refractory elements of earthly life, but with the elements of its own creation, and with materials flexible to its own purest preconceptions.It is trustworthy that, were it not for the Literature of Power, these ideals would often remain amongst us as mere arid notional forms whereas, by the crea tive forces of man put forth in literature, they gain a vernal life of restoration, and germinate into decisive activities. The commonest novel, by moving in alliance with human fears and hopes, with human instincts of faulty and right, sustains and quickens those affections. Calling them into action, it rescues them. from torpor. And hence the preeminency, over all authors that merely teach of the meanest that moves, or that teaches, if at all, indirectly by moving.The very highest work that has ever existed in the literature of Knowledge is but a provisional work a book upon trial and sufferance, and quamdiu bene se gesserit. Let its education be even partially revised, let it be but expanded, ? nay, even let its teaching be but placed in a better order, ? and at once it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the Literature of Power, surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable amongst men. For instance, the Principia of Sir Isaac Newton was a book militant on ea rth from the first.In all stages of its progress it would have to fight for its creation 1st as regards absolute truth idly, when that combat was over, as regards its form or mode of presenting the truth. And as soon as a La Place, or anybody else, builds higher upon the foundations laid by this book, effectually he throws it out of the sunshine into decay and darkness by weapons won from this book he superannuates and destroys this book, so that soon the name of Newton remains as a mere nominis umbra, but his book, as a living power, has transmigrated into other forms.Now, on the contrary, the iliad, the Prometheus of Aeschylus, the Othello or King Lear, the Hamlet or Macbeth, and the Paradise Lost are not militant but triumphant forever as long as the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak. They never can transmigrate into new incarnations. To reproduce these in new forms, or variations, even if in some things they should be improved, would be to plagiarize . A good steam engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo.These things are separated not by imparity, but by disparity.They are not thought of as unequal under the same standard, but as different in kind, and, if otherwise equal, as equal under a different standard. Human works of without end beauty and works of nature in one respect stand on the same footing they never absolutely repeat each other, never approach so near as not to differ and they differ not as better and worse, or simply by more and less they differ by undecipherable and incommunicable differences, that cannot be caught by mimicries, that cannot be reflected in the mirror of copies, that cannot become ponderable in the scales of down-to-earth comparison.