قراءة كتاب One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature With Facsimiles of the Title-Pages
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With Facsimiles of the Title-Pages One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature
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One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature With Facsimiles of the Title-Pages
when some folio, like an ark, comes to the rescue of a Beaumont and Fletcher. This is cutting the diamond with itself. But within these limits, narrowing circle within circle, what a universe of man remains! Culture after culture, epoch by epoch, are laid bare as in geologic strata,—mediæval tale and history, humanistic form, the Shakespearian age, Puritan, Cavalier, man scientific, reforming, reborn into a new natural, political, artistic world, man modern; and in every layer of imagination and learning lies, whole and entire, a buried English age. It is by virtue of its copiousness that English literature is so representative, both of man's individual spirit in its restless forms of apprehension and embodiment, and of its historic formulation in English progress as national power.
The realization of this long-lived, far-gathering, abounding English literature, in these external phases, leaves untouched its original force. Whence is its germinating power,—what is this genius of the English? It is the same in literature as in all its other manifold manifestations, for man is forever unitary and of one piece. Curiosity, which is the distinction of progressive peoples, is perhaps its initial and moving source. The trait which has sent the English broadcast over the world and mingled their history with the annals of all nations is the same that has so blended their literature with the history of all tongues. The acquisitive power which has created the empire of the English, with dominion on dominion, is parallel with the faculty that assimilates past literatures with the body of their literary speech. But curiosity is only half the word. It is singular that the first quality which occurs to the mind in connection with the English is, almost universally and often exclusively, their practicality. They are really the most romantic of all nations; romanticism is the other half of their genius, and supplements that positive element of knowledge-hunting or truth-seeking which is indicated by their endless curiosity. Possibly the Elizabethan age is generally thought of as a romantic period, as if it were exceptional; and the romantic vigor of the late Georgian period, though everywhere acknowledged, is primarily regarded as more strictly a literary and not a national characteristic in its time; but, like all interesting history, English history was continuously romantic. The days of the crusaders, the Wars of the Roses and the French wars were of the same strain in action and character, in adventurous travel, in personal fate, in contacts, as were the times of Shakespeare's world or of the world of Waterloo. What a reinforcement of character in the English has India been, how restorative of greatness in the blood! It must be that romanticism should characterize a great race, and, when appealing to a positive genius, the greatest race; for in it are all the invitations of destiny. Futurity broods and brings forth in its nest. Romanticism is the lift of life in a people that does not merely continue, but grows, spreads and overcomes. The sphere of the word is not to be too narrowly confined, as only a bookish phrase of polite letters.
In the world of knowledge the pursuit of truth is romantic. The scientific inquirer lives in a realm of strangeness and in the presence of the unknown, in a place so haunted with profound feeling, so electric with the emotions that feed great minds, that whether awe of the unsolved or of the solved be the stronger sentiment he cannot tell; and the appeal made to him—to the explorer in every bodily peril, to the experimenter in the den of untamed forces, to the thinker in his solitude—is often a romantic appeal. The moments of great discoveries are romantic moments, as is seen in Keats's sonnet, lifting Cortez and the star-gazer on equal heights with the reader of the Iliad. The epic of science is a Columbiad without end. Nor is this less true of those branches of knowledge esteemed most dry and prosaic. Locke, Adam Smith, Darwin were all similarly placed with Pythagoras, Aristotle and Copernicus; the mind, society and nature, severally, were their Americas. Even in this age of the mechanical application of forces, which by virtue of the large part of these inventions in daily and world-wide life seems superficially, and is called, a materialistic age, romanticism is paramount and will finally be seen so. Are not these things in our time what Drake and Spanish gold and Virginia, what Clive and the Indies, were to other centuries? It is true that the element of commercial gain blends with other phases of our inventions, and seems a debasement, an avarice; but so it was in all ages. Nor are the applications of scientific discovery for the material ends of wealth other or relatively greater now than the applications of geographical discovery, for example, to the same ends were in Elizabeth's reign and later. In the first ages commercial gain was in league with the waves from which rose the Odyssey,—a part of that early trading, coasting world, as it was always a part of the artistic world of Athens. Gain in any of its material forms, whether wealth, power or rank, does not debase the knowledge, the courage of heart, the skill of hand and brain, from which it flows, for it is their natural and proper fruit; nor does it by itself materialize either the man or the nation, else civilization were doomed from the start, and the pursuit of truth would end in humiliation and ignominy. It is rather the attitude of mind toward this new world of knowledge and this spectacle of man now imperializing through nature's forces, as formerly through discovery of the earth's lands and seas, that makes the character of our age. Romanticism, being the enveloping mood in whose atmosphere the spirit of man beholds life, and, as it were, the light on things, changes its aspect in the process of the ages with the emergence of each new world of man's era; and as it once inhered in English loyalty and the piety of Christ's sepulchre, and in English voyaging over-seas and colonizing [pg xxxiii] of the lands, it now inheres in the conquest of natural force for the arts of peace. The present age exceeds its predecessors in marvel in proportion as the victories of the intellect are in a world of finer secrecy than any horizon veils, and build an empire of greater breadth and endurance than any monarch or sovereign people or domineering race selfishly achieves; its victories are in the unseen of force and thought, and it brings among men the undecaying empire of knowledge, as inexpugnable as the mind in man and as inappropriable as light and air. Here, as elsewhere, it is the sensual eye that sees the sensual thing, but the spiritual eye spiritually discerns. It is romance that adds this "precious seeing" to the eye. Openness to the call, capability of the passion, and character, so sensitized and moulded in individuals and made hereditary in a civilization and a race and idealized in conscience, constitute the motor-genius of a nation, which is its finding faculty; and the appreciation of results and putting them to the use of men make its conserving and positive power. These two, indistinguishably married and blended, are the English genius. A positive genius following a romantic lead, a romantic genius yielding a positive good, equally describe it from opposed points of view; yet in the finer spirits and in the long age the romantic temperament is felt to be the fertilizing element, to be character as opposed to performance. Greatness lies always in the unaccomplished deed, as in the lonely anecdote of Newton: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the