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Its basal literatures are Arabic and Persian, "so numerous and in some cases so voluminous that it would hardly be possible for the most industrious student to read in their entirety even those which are accessible, a half dozen of the best known collections in Europe."
Garth, for her eldest son, Christy, her peculiar joy and pride, had come home for a short holiday Christy, who held it the most desirable thing in the world to be a tutor, to study all literatures and be a regenerate Porson, and who was an incorporate criticism on poor Fred, a sort of object-lesson given to him by the educational mother.
The subject-matter of education was indeed literature, and the very noblest literatures, mainly those of Greece and Rome: but there was little of literary or humane interest about the study of it; its meaning and spirit were concealed from all but the few who could surmount the fences of linguistic pedantry and artificial technique with which it was surrounded.
On the Continent, also, this new interest in the classics served to check the growth of native literatures. In Italy especially, for a full century after the brilliant age of Dante and Petrarch, no great literature was produced, and the Italian language itself seemed to go backward.
"Thought once awakened shall not again slumber." They begin to try all things; they visit Germany, France, Denmark, Holland, even England; learn their literatures, study in their universities, and contribute their quota to the apologetic, controversial, scientific, and philosophic investigations "with a candor and real love of improvement which give the best omens of a still higher success."
With the appreciation of this flavor comes the overpowering desire for it, the incessant and limitless search for it. To the desire for it whole literatures owe their continued existence, since, except for the universal genius-hunger of youth, the classics of almost all languages would have perished long ago.
Though these are generally composed by men not born in this country, in Yiddish, and so belong to the history of that most international of literatures, certain of them, having been translated, belong obviously as well as actually to the common treasure of the nation.
First, the Bible clearly indicates what the profoundest study of the earliest and most venerable literatures confirms, that man was not created at first in a brutish state, crawling with a slow and painful progress out of the dull slime of a half organic state into apehood, and from apehood painfully into manhood; but he was created perfect in the image of God, and has fallen from his primeval glory.
By instituting a new criticism and by opening new literatures to the French, she succeeded in emancipating art from fixed rules and in facilitating the sudden growth of romanticism in France. In her life, her great desire was to spread happiness and to obtain it, to love and to be loved in return.
It is not alone to facilitate intercourse and give a sense of solidarity that the possession of an universal language is to be desired. We think quite as much of the impetus thus given to the production of an universal literature, in which there will be expressed not only ideas about the world, but moods which will not be found expressed in national literatures at all.
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