I hold in my hand an extract from Taine which expresses that which I desire to express better than I can perhaps express it myself. Let me read it: “What is your first remark on turning over the great leaves of a folio, the yellow sheets of a manuscript, a poem, a code of laws, a confession of faith? This, you say, did not come into existence all alone, it is but a mould like a fossil-shell, an imprint, like one of the shapes embossed in stone by an animal which lived and perished. Under the shell there was an animal; and behind the document there was a man. Why do you study the shell, except to bring before you the animal? So you study the document only to know the man. The shell and the document are lifeless wrecks, valuable only as a clue to the entire and living existence. We must get hold of this existence and endeavor to re-create it. It is a mistake to study the document as if it were isolated. This were to treat things as a simple scholar, to fall into the error of the bibliomaniac.”
You do not need to have traversed the ocean beach or climbed the mountain-top and gathered the shells; you may go into the museum where they have already been gathered, and study their history there. You do not need, with dictionary and grammar, to work out the secrets of the language; you may take the products of those who have thus wrought, and learn the man that lies behind the document.
Not only is it not necessary that a man should study language in order to study literature; in innumerable cases the study of the language has absolutely interfered with the study of the literature. In innumerable cases, men at college have ground away, day after day, and month after month, and year after year, over cases and nouns and parts of speech, and rules of syntax and rules of grammar—working only at the grammar, and utterly oblivious of the great light that lay behind it. Mr. Adams, of Massachusetts, has recently told us how hard a man may study Greek and how little he may know of it after he gets through with it, for he assures us that he does not know the Greek alphabet to-day, although he studied Greek six years, four years before college and two in it. I confess I should not have thought it possible for a man to have studied so much and yet know so little when he got through; but I am very certain of this, that my own experience reflects the experience of many college students. I learned more of Homer—of his life, of his character, of the lessons he has to teach, of the man himself—from reading in the “Ancient Classics for English Readers,” the Iliad and the Odyssey, and from reading Bryant’s translation, than I ever received from reading Homer himself in the original Greek in my college class. That which is highest, and supremest, and best in literature, you may obtain without a college education. You may learn the life, you may learn the man, you may learn the sacred truth; and you can not do that without broadening your sympathies and developing your charity. When you have read Homer and Virgil and Horace; when you have read Dante and Milton; when you have read Molière and Shakspere; when you have read Wordsworth and Tennyson, and when, out of all this reading, you have gathered their fruits, you will find this to be true, that, though you have one picture of Greek life, one of Italian life, one of French life, one of English life, one portraying the life of four centuries before Christ, and one portraying the life of eighteen centuries after; yet in all these languages, in all these epochs, in all these civilizations the great heart of hope and joy and love and fear and reverence and faith was one. And you will learn to know that humanity, in all its nationalities, in all its epochs, in all its civilizations,—aye, and under all the varied forms of its religions, true and false—that humanity is one in all its brotherhood, and one in its great Father in heaven.