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The spiritual treasures of the nation were capitalized, and to this process of capitalization solely and alone generations of men have owed the possibility of resorting to them as a source of faith and knowledge. Without the work of compilation achieved by the Soferim, of which the uninstructed are apt to speak slightingly, mankind to-day had no Bible, that central sun in world-literature.
Finding none ready to his hand, he created it. Not that Whitman did not draw for his resources on the great treasury of world-literature; and he profited by the efforts and achievement of predecessors. But the form in his hands and as he uses it is new. Whatever we may think of the success of his total accomplishment, there are very many passages to which we cannot deny the name of poetry.
A fresh and strong sense of the power of the Hellenic world-literature, a sacred longing to transplant the marvellous tree to the foreign land, pervaded the whole poetry of the sixth century, and coincided in a peculiar manner with the thoroughly elevated spirit of that great age.
The three geniuses who have made permanent contributions to world-literature, who have either embodied in the completest degree the spirit of American democracy, or who have had the widest following of imitators and admirers in foreign countries, still await their final and just deserts at the hands of critical opinion in their own land.
The deeper interest in the expression of national qualities and in the representation of provincial peculiarities is to-day accompanied by an increasing cosmopolitanism which seems to be casting down the barriers of race and of language. More than fourscore years ago, Goethe said that even then national literature was "rather an unmeaning term" as "the epoch of world-literature was at hand."
There is no time to argue the question; this much we may say: the two poets who worked with the emperor, and wrote under his influence and sometimes at his suggestion, left work that endures in world-literature; that is noble and beautiful, and still interesting. I mean Virgil and Horace, of course.
Such a book, sprung from "no vain or shallow thought," holding in solution the hopes of many earnest souls, spreading before us the mighty spiritual conflict between Medievalism still triumphant and the young undaunted Powers of Light, showing us with wonderful lifelikeness the tragedy of man's baffled endeavour to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, and of woman's unquenchable love, is a great fact in the world-literature of our time.
His is really a book that belongs to world-literature; as good reading, for us now, as for any ancient Chinaman of them all. I think he worked more strenuously in the field of sheer intellect stirred the thought stuff more than most other Chinese thinkers, and so is more akin to the Western mind; he carves his cerebrations more definitely, and leaves less to the intuition.
Of the days before he withdrew from the Church he wrote: 'For two months I was a Protestant like a professor in Halle or Tübingen. French was at that time a language much better known in the world at large, particularly the English-speaking world, than was German. Renan's book had great art and charm. It took a place almost at once as a bit of world-literature.
It is beautiful, is it not, to think how various kinds of men and women can help to complete one another by giving and taking what each has to give, and each needs to take? It is the same with nations: each has its own gifts, its own needs; and for a great and noble world-literature we need the gifts of all. Prose-writing. St Bede the Venerable. His love of truth. His industry and carefulness.
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