Let’s Talk About | What is Literature?

Last updated on 9 May 2016

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Bit of a different post today. But as I was making my way through some old New Zealand newspapers for work the other day, I read this little extract, and I thought ‘hey, that’s pretty neat!’. It was written by a Mr. John Morely, and this section of his address was published in a 1905 newspaper/newsletter. Here it is:

What is Literature? 

“Literature consists of all the books – and they are not so many – where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form; and my notion of the literary student is one who through books explores the strange voyages of man’s moral reason, the impulses of the human heart, the chances and changes that have overtaken human ideals of virtue and happiness, of conduct and manners, and the shifting fortunes of great conceptions of truth and virtue.

Poets, dramatists, humourists, satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers, the character writers, the maxim writers, the great political orators, they are literature in so far as they teach us to know man, and know human nature. This is what makes literature, rightly sifted and selected and rightly studied, not the mere elegant trifling that it is so often and erroneously supposed, but a proper instrument for the systematic training of the imagination and sympathies and of a genial and moral sensibility.

Literature is one of the instruments, and most powerful instruments, for forming character, for giving us men and women armed with reason, braced by knowledge, clothed with a steadfastness and courage, and inspired by that public spirit and virtue of which it has been well said that they are the brightest ornaments of the mind of man.”

 

– Extract from an address by Mr. John Morely

 

Pretty neat, huh? It’s an interesting look at what literature and books meant to people over 100 years ago. I love the first line, “Literature consists of all the books – and they are not so many”. I know he’s talking about specifically books about human morality, but between 1905 and now…well, he might be surprised at the amount of books – moral or not – there are nowadays. Crazy!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did.

Original image from here.