Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/16

2 Better than any of its sisters is it fitted to fulfil the duty of making man familiar with his fellows and of explaining him to himself. It may be called the most significant of the arts, because every one of us, before we can adjust ourselves to the social order in which we have to live, must understand the prejudices and desires of others, and also the opinions these others hold about the world wherein we dwell. Literature alone can supply this understanding. The other arts bring beauty into life and help to make it worth living; but since mankind came down from the family tree of its arboreal ancestors, it is Literature which has made life possible. It is the swiftest and the surest aid to a wide understanding of others and to a deep understanding of ourselves. It gives us not only knowledge but wisdom; and thereby it helps to free us from vain imaginings as to our own importance. Ignorance is always conceited, since it never knows that it knows nothing; and even knowledge may be puffed up on occasion, since it knows that it knows many things; but wisdom is devoid of illusion, since it knows how little it ever can know.

The poet Blake declared that we never know enough unless we know more than enough; and who of us is ever likely to attain to that altitude of comprehension? After all, even the most protracted investigation of fact and the most incessant meditation on truth must be circumscribed by the brief radius of human knowledge. What are threescore years and ten? What is a century even? And as time pulses by, ever quickening its pace, we are often tempted to echo Lowell's envious ejaculation, "What a lucky dog Methuselah was! Nothing to know, and nine hundred years to learn it in!"

If Literature is the most venerable of the arts, and if it is the most significant, it should be approached with the outward signs of reverence. When we stand up here to discuss it, to declare its importance and to consider its purpose, it is fit that we robe ourselves in stately academic costume