itself in the shape of a book, will not belong to Literature. So far the definition is easily narrowed; and it is as easily expanded. For not only is much that takes a station in books not literature; but inversely, much that really is literature never reaches a station in books. The weekly sermons of Christendom, that vast pulpit literature which acts so extensively upon the popular mind?to warn, to uphold, to renew, to comfort, to alarm?-does not attain the sanctuary of libraries in the ten-thousandth part of its extent. The Drama again?as, for instance, the finest of Shakespeare's plays in England, and all leading Athenian plays in the noontide of the Attic stage?operated as a literature on the public mind, and were (according to the strictest letter of that term) published through the audiences that witnessed2 their representation some time before they were published as things to be read; and they were published in this scenical mode of publication with much more effect than they could have had as books during ages of costly copying or of costly printing.
1. This section of a review of an 1847 edition of Pope's works (written in 1848, revised in 1858) has achieved independent status as a contribution to literary theory. In an earlier treatment of this topic in 'Letters to a Young Man' (1823), De Quincey wrote that 'the true antithesis to knowledge,' in defining the effects of literature, 'is not pleasure, but power'; then added in a footnote that he owed this distinction 'to many years' conversation with Mr. Wordsworth.' In his 'Essay Supplementary' to the Preface to his Poems (1815), Wordsworth had written that 'every great poet . . . has to call forth and communicate power' and that for an original writer 'to create taste is to call forth and bestow power, of which knowledge is the effect.'
2. Charles I, for example, when Prince of Wales, and many others in his father's court, gained their known familiarity with Shakespeare not through the original quartos, so slenderly diffused, nor through the first folio of 1623, but through the court representations of his chief dramas at Whitehall [De Quincey's note]. Whitehall was a royal palace in London. It was destroyed by fire in 1698.
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Books, therefore, do not suggest an idea coextensive and interchangeable with the idea of Literature; since much literature, scenic, forensic, or didactic3 (as from lecturers and public orators), may never come into books, and much that does come into books may connect itself with no literary interest.4 But a far more important correction, applicable to the common vague idea of literature, is to be sought not so much in a better definition of literature as in a sharper distinction of the two functions which it fulfills. In that great social organ which, collectively, we call literature, there may be distinguished two separate offices that may blend and often do so, but capable, severally, of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion. There is, first, the literature of knowledge; and, secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is?to teach; the function of the second is?to move: the first is a rudder; the second, an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding;5 the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy. Remotely, it may travel towards an object seated in what Lord Bacon calls dry light;6 but, proximately, it does and must operate?else it ceases to be a literature of power?on and through that humid light which clothes itself in the mists and glittering iris of human passions, desires, and genial7 emotions. Men have so little reflected on the higher functions of literature as to find it a paradox if one should describe it as a mean8 or subordinate purpose of books to give information. But this is a paradox only in the sense which makes it honorable to be paradoxical. Whenever we talk in ordinary language of seeking information or gaining knowledge, we understand the words as connected with something of absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests that it is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds: it exists eternally by way of germ or latent principle in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed, but never to be planted. To be capable of transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth that ranges on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth?namely, power, or deep sympathy with truth. What is the effect, for instance, upon society, of children? By the pity, by the tenderness, and by the peculiar modes of admiration, which connect themselves with the helplessness, with the innocence, and with the simplicity of children, not only are the primal affections strengthened and continually renewed, but the qualities which are dearest in the sight of heaven?the frailty, for instance, which appeals to forbearance, the innocence which symbolizes the heavenly, and the simplicity which is most alien from the worldly?are kept up in perpetual
3. Expository, designed to instruct. 'Scenic': dramatic. 'Forensic': argumentative, designed to persuade, especially in legal proceedings. 4. What are called The Blue Books?by which title are understood the folio reports issued every session of Parliament by committees of the two Houses, and stitched into blue covers?though often sneered at by the ignorant as so much wastepaper, will be acknowledged gratefully by those who have used them diligently as the main wellheads of all accurate information as to the Great Britain of this day. As an immense depository of faithful (and not superannuated) statistics, they are indispensable to the honest student. But no man would therefore class the Blue Boolts as literature [De Quincey's note]. 5. I.e., a way of understanding that proceeds by argumentation and by passing from premises to conclusions. The term is usually contrasted with intuitive understanding. 6. In his essay 'Of Friendship,' Francis Bacon quotes Heraclitus, the early Greek philosopher, as saying 'Dry light is ever the best,' then goes on to distinguish between dry light and the light of an understanding, which is 'ever infused and drenched' in an individual's own 'affections and customs.' 7. Pertaining to genius; creative. 'Iris': rainbow colors. De Quincey is here referring to the way colors are the effect of the refraction of light. 8. Low, vulgar.
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remembrance, and their ideals are continually refreshed. A purpose of the same nature is answered by the higher literature, viz. the literature of power. What do you learn from Paradise Lost? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power?that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards, a step ascending as upon a Jacob's ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth.9 All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth: whereas the very first step in power is a flight?is an ascending movement into another element where earth is forgotten.
Were it not that human sensibilities are ventilated1 and continually called out into exercise by the great phenomena of infancy, or of real life as it moves through chance and change, or of literature as it recombines these elements in the mimicries of poetry, romance, etc., it is certain that, like any animal power or muscular energy falling into disuse, all such sensibilities would gradually droop and dwindle. It is in relation to these great moral capacities of man that the literature of power, as contradistinguished from that of knowledge, lives and has its field of action. It is concerned with what is highest in man; for the Scriptures themselves never condescended to deal by suggestion or cooperation with the mere discursive understanding: when speaking of man in his intellectual capacity, the Scriptures speak not of the understanding, but of 'the understanding heart'2?making the heart, i.e. the great intuitive (or nondiscursive) organ, to be the interchangeable formula for man in his highest state of capacity for the infinite. Tragedy, romance, fairy tale, or epopee,3 all alike restore to man's mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of mercy, of retribution, which else (left to the support of daily life in its realities) would languish for want of sufficient illustration. What is meant, for instance, by poetic justice?4?It does not mean a justice that differs by its object from the ordinary justice of human jurisprudence; for then it must be confessedly a very bad kind of justice; but it means a justice that differs from common forensic justice by the degree in which it attains its object, a justice that is more omnipotent over its own ends, as dealing?not with the refractory elements
