Our Literary Heritage

By S.T. (written circa 1938)

The struggle to find and to fill one’s place in the amazing welter of forces in the modern world is so insistent that little time is left to consider the forces themselves. We are thrust into such a world without our will or knowledge. We enjoy good roads and schools, parks and transportation. With the slightest expenditure, we have conveniences and pleasures that wealth could not purchase in the days of our fathers. And we have burdens which have come from their misdeeds, or bungling, or possibly from no fault of theirs—poverty, disease, and the continual threat of world catastrophes.

Such is the world we come to at birth. It is our inheritance as truly as is the fortune handed down from father to son. We cannot escape this inheritance but must make the best of it. We may improve it. We may make greatest use of its goods and strive to remedy its evils. We may leave the greatest estate enlarged for those who come after if only we will enter wholeheartedly into possession of what the untold ages have given us.

This heritage from the past is of many kinds. That which first impresses us is perhaps the material conquest of nature which our ancestors have accomplished and which they have handed on to us. Not to speak of the great recent developments whereby time and space and drudgery and disease are conquered—railways, steam power, electricity, immunity—we are likewise heirs of the man who first learned to plow, to thresh, to sail a ship, to mine and work in iron. To only the slightest degree can we call our present physical comforts our own work. They come to us from the past.

The greatest inheritance we enter into from those who have gone before us, however, is not these physical comforts. For thousands of years our ancestors have been thinking and feeling and have gradually built up a great tradition of the finest of these thoughts and emotions. They have evolved great religious systems. They have worked out political and philosophical principles. They have sung and played on instruments and have left us a great heritage of music. They have striven to catch beauty of form and color and have slowly learned the secret of sculpture and painting. They have told tales and chanted poems and through long centuries have recorded for us their thoughts and feelings. They have, also, through all these means and many others, established age long mental and emotional habits. All these activities and tendencies together we call a people’s culture.

We are all born into some type of cultural surroundings. As children we think and feel as our parents do and usually as our community does. We are little Americans or Englishmen or Russians. Thousands of years of tradition have gone to make us what we are. Such general patterns of thought and feeling come to us unconsciously. They are the very air we breathe as children.

But there are other parts of our culture—in many ways the most precious parts—which we may never come to possess. We have inherited them, but they are like a fortune which is held in trust till the heir is able to spend it profitably. Such is true of music, of art, of literature. Bach and Beethoven and Wagner may be had for the asking, but the full possession of their marvelous gift to us comes only as we ourselves grow in appreciation and understanding. Watch any true music lover and see how the greatest music becomes a lasting passion that grows always stronger and adds a beauty to all his days. It is the same with great art. At first the taste may be for the garish, the sensational, or the tawdry, but with time and loving study, one comes to know his values and to be satisfied only with the best. And when this happens, one has truly entered into his inheritance and his life has been made rich.

It is literature that needs most of all to be made one’s own if one is ever to possess it. Symphonies may come to us over the radio and great statues and pictures may surround us or look down at us daily. They may gradually and imperceptibly influence us until we come to cherish them. But books are on shelves and between covers, and unless they are taken from the shelves and the covers are opened and the words read and understood, they are lifeless. When one approaches them, however, with good intelligence and sympathetic feeling, they may well be the most valuable inheritance that has come from the past.

“A good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit,” wrote one of the greatest of these masters. As I see this inscription facing me each day over the portal of my own university library, I think of the hundreds of thousands of books ranged in the long rows of stacks inside. After all, it is only the great book that Milton meant, and most books are not great. They give information, or facts, or pile up records. But on those same shelves are, nevertheless, many books of many kinds that are truly great. They give us the very best in thought or imagination or observation or emotion that the greatest spirits of the past have left us. They have enriched the lives of readers for many generations.

Happy is the man who truly comes under the spell of great books. His enjoyment continually increases. Each time he makes real contact with a masterpiece, his capacity for appreciation grows. His thought, usually sluggish, may be stirred by one of the world’s thinkers and he thrills to see light appearing in many a region that was dark before. Such an experience leads him to long for its repetition, and soon a passion for clear thinking brings him to seek the guidance of others and still others. Or he may have been seeing the earth with half-closed eyes, little aware of its wealth of shapes and colors, and of its interesting beasts and men. And then for a little, with the aid of a book, he sees all with new eyes. What was dull and commonplace is now filled with wonder and fascination. Other writers will carry him with them because of their exuberant imagination or their power to understand or express emotions, or their habit of seeing the humor of life. When once a man has learned the joy of such companionship, he seeks it more and more. Life becomes too short for its full enjoyment.

Even in the hurry of the modern world, the great books have never lost their power. With Homer we may still give ourselves up to the glory of adventure and noble achievement in a heroic world. We may go with Herodotus and see Egypt of twenty-five centuries ago. We may explore the depths of human tragedy with Sophocles or Shakespeare. We may join Plato and Socrates and discuss the great problems of life and death, of right and wrong, of soul and the after life. With Theocritus we may make an afternoon call and attend a great festival in Alexandria and marvel how little change twenty-two centuries have wrought in our manners and actions. We may stand with Ruth amid the alien corn or wonder at the dignity and profound beauty of scripture, hallowed as it has been by a thousand sacred associations. We may give ourselves up to the witchery of Deirdre and luxuriate in its imaginative richness. Chaucer and Don Quixote and Milton and Emerson, and a hundred others, need only to be taken from the shelves and read. There they stand, those silent books, waiting. They are our literary heritage. Shall we not go and take possession, like heirs who have come of age?


Via Ron McVan

Source Article from http://www.renegadetribune.com/our-literary-heritage/

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