Literature of Knowledge Essay Example for Free

literary productions of Knowledge EssayFirst 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 mean by lit? Popularly, and amongst the purposeless, it is held to complicate eitherthing that is printed in a book. Little logic is required to disturb that definition. The most thoughtless person is well made aw are that in the creative thinker of literature one essential element is, ? some analogy to a general and uncouth interest of cosmos, so that what applies altogether to a local or professional person or only if personal interest, til now though presenting itself in the shape of a book, will non belong to literature. So far the definition is easily narrowed and it is as easily expanded. For non unaccompanied is much that takes a station in books not literature, entirely, inversely, much that really is literature never reaches a station in books. The weekly sermons of Chri stendom, that vast pulpit literature which acts so extensively upon the popular mentality? to warn, to uphold, to renew, to comfort, to alarm? does not attain the sanctuary 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 through the audiences that witnessed their representation, some time before they were published as things to be read and they were published in this scenical mode of publication with much more effect 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 come into books, and much t hat does come into books may connect itself with no literary interest. But 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 sets which it fulfils.In that great social electric organ which, collectively, we callliterature, there may be distinguished two separate offices, that may blend and much do so, nevertheless capable, 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 move the first is a rudder the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding, or reason, but endlessly through affections of pleasure and sympathy.Remotely it may travel towards an ob ject seated in what Lord Bacon calls dry out get away but proximately it does and must 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 hu man figure passions, desires, and genial emotions. Men have so belittled 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 data. But this is a paradox solitary(prenominal) in the sense which makes it honorable to be paradoxical.Whenever we talk 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 verity which butt joint occupy a very high place 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, needing to be developed but nev er to be planted.To be capable of transplantation is the immediate measuring of a truth that ranges on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth, namely, power, or deep 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 sinlessness, and with the simplicity 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 reputation is answered by the higher literature, viz. , the literature of power. What do you learn from paradise Lost? Nothing at all. What do you l earn from a cookery-book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore identify the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the inspired poem?What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level what you owe is power, that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate inflow is a step upwards, a step ascending as upon a Jacobs ladders from earth to mysterious altitudes in a higher place the earth.All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on the same plane, but could never encourage you one foot above your ancient level of earth whereas the very first step in power is a flight, is an ascending movement into another element where earth is forgotten.Were it not that human sensibilities are ventilated and continually c alled out 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 certain that, like any puppet power or muscular energy 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 mere 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 intuitive (or non-discursive) organ, to be the interchangeable formula for man in his highest state of capacity for the infinite.Tragedy, romance, fairy tale, or epopee, all similar restore to mans mind the ideals of evaluator, of hope, of truth, of mercy, of retribution, which else (left to the support of daily life in its realities) would languish for want 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 jurisprudence for then it must be confessedly a very bad kind of justice but it means a justice that differs, from common forensic justice by the floor 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 certain that, were it not for the Literature of Power, these ideals would much remain amongst us as mere arid notional forms whereas, by the creative forces of man put forth in literature, they gain a ver nal life of restoration, and germinate into vital activities. The commonest novel, by piteous in alliance with human fears and hopes, with human instincts of wrong 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. allow its education be even partially revised, let it be but expanded, ? nay, even let its teaching be but placed in a better order, ? and instantly 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 north was a book warlike on earth from the first.In all stages of its progress it would have to fight for its existence 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 sunlight 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 byimparity, 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 immortal beauty and works of nature in one respect stand on the same footing they never absolutely restate 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 ill-defined 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 vulgar comparison.