Literature as Speech Made Permanent--All Written Speech Not Literature--The Essence of Literature for Its Own Sake--Prose as a Fine Art--Some Interesting Aspects of Literature as an End in Itself--Their Comparative Triviality--No Literature Great Which Is Not More Than Literature--Literature as a Vehicle of Religion--Lucretius--_The Reconstruction of Belief_.
If we go back to the beginning of things, literature, needless to say, is a development of ordinary speech. It is speech which has been made permanent, partly, indeed, by oral tradition, but mainly by the art of writing. Without speech no human co-operation, other than the rudest, would be possible. Some men at least must speak so as to organize the tasks of others, and the latter must understand speech so as to do what the former bid them. When the Deity determined to confound the builders of Babel, or, in other words, to render co-operative work impossible, he did not cut off their hands, but he virtually took speech away from them, by rendering the language of each unintelligible to all the rest. Moreover, in the case of tasks the nature of which is highly complex, it is necessary not only that the organizers should make use of speech, but also that what they speak should systematically be written down. The writing down, indeed, is often the most important part of the matter, as in the case of an Act of Parliament or of the delicate and elaborate formulæ on which depends the production of chemicals or of great ships.
If written speech, then, of kinds such as these is literature, literature is obviously not antithetic to action, but is, on the contrary, action in one of its most important forms. To state the case thus, however, is stating no more than half of it. As a matter of fact, laws and chemical formulæ, however carefully written, are not what is meant by literature in the common sense of the word. Though the writing down of speech may in such cases be a form of action, it does not follow that all such written speech is literature. Let us compare the compositions of a child, whether in prose or verse, with a page out of the _Nautical Almanac_ or a manual of household medicine. The child's compositions may intrinsically have no literary value, but they nevertheless represent genuine attempts at literature. A page from the _Nautical Almanac_ or the manual of household medicine may be, for certain purposes, of the highest value imaginable, but the test of literary beauty would be the last test we should apply to them.