Books and Culture

Books and Culture

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Books and Culture, by Hamilton Wright Mabie This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Books and Culture
Author: Hamilton Wright Mabie
Release Date: September 23, 2005 [EBook #16736]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOOKS AND CULTURE ***

Produced by Alicia Williams and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

BOOKS AND CULTURE
By
HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE

NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
MDCCCCVII
_Copyright, 1896_,
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, _All rights reserved._
University Press: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.

To EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. MATERIAL AND METHOD 7
II. TIME AND PLACE 20
III. MEDITATION AND IMAGINATION 34
IV. THE FIRST DELIGHT 51
V. THE FEELING FOR LITERATURE 63
VI. THE BOOKS OF LIFE 74
VII. FROM THE BOOK TO THE READER 85
VIII. BY WAY OF ILLUSTRATION 95
IX. PERSONALITY 109
X. LIBERATION THROUGH IDEAS 121
XI. THE LOGIC OF FREE LIFE 132
XII. THE IMAGINATION 143
XIII. BREADTH OF LIFE 154
XIV. RACIAL EXPRESSION 165
XV. FRESHNESS OF FEELING 174
XVI. LIBERATION FROM ONE'S TIME 185
XVII. LIBERATION FROM ONE'S PLACE 195
XVIII. THE UNCONSCIOUS ELEMENT 204
XIX. THE TEACHING OF TRAGEDY 217
XX. THE CULTURE ELEMENT IN FICTION 229
XXI. CULTURE THROUGH ACTION 239
XXII. THE INTERPRETATION OF IDEALISM 250
XXIII. THE VISION OF PERFECTION 260
XXIV. RETROSPECT 271
Chapter I.
Material and Method.
If the writer who ventures to say something more about books and their uses is wise, he will not begin with an apology; for he will know that, despite all that has been said and written on this engrossing theme, the interest of books is inexhaustible, and that there is always a new constituency to read them. So rich is the vitality of the great books of the world that men are never done with them; not only does each new generation read them, but it is compelled to form some judgment of them. In this way Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and their fellow-artists, are always coming into the open court of public opinion, and the estimate in which they are held is valuable chiefly as affording material for a judgment of the generation which forms it. An age which understands and honours creative artists must have a certain breadth of view and energy of spirit; an age which fails to recognise their significance fails to recognise the range and splendour of life, and has, therefore, a certain inferiority.
We cannot get away from the great books of the world, because they preserve and interpret the life of the world; they are inexhaustible, because, being vitally conceived, they need the commentary of that wide experience which we call history to bring out the full meaning of the text; they are our perpetual teachers, because they are the most complete expressions, in that concrete form which we call art, of the thoughts, acts, dispositions, and passions of humanity. There is no getting to the bottom of Shakespeare, for instance, or to the end of his possibilities of enriching and interesting us, because he deals habitually with that primary substance of human life which remains substantially unchanged through all the mutations of racial, national, and personal condition, and which is always, and for all men, the object of supreme interest. Time, which is the relentless enemy of all that is partial and provisional, is the friend of Shakespeare, because it continually brings to the student of his work illustration and confirmation of its truth. There are many things in his plays which are more intelligible and significant to us than they were to the men who heard their musical cadence on the rude Elizabethan stage, because the ripening of experience has given the prophetic thought an historical demonstration; and there are truths in these plays which will be read with clearer eyes by the men of the next century than they are now read by us.
It is this prophetic quality in the books of power which silently moves them forward with the inaudible advance of the successive files in the ranks of the generations, and which makes them contemporary with each generation. For while the medi?val frame-work upon which Dante constructed the "Divine Comedy" becomes obsolete, the fundamental thought of the poet about human souls and the identity of the deed and its result not only remains true to experience but has received the most impressive confirmation from subsequent history and from psychology.
It is as impossible, therefore, to get away from the books of power as from the stars; every new generation must make acquaintance with them, because they are as much a part of that order of things which forms the background of human life as nature itself. With every intelligent man or woman the question is not, "Shall I