lecture. For, though the parallel is not exact in detail,
there are among lovers of literature, as among lovers of
politics, some who like it for all sorts of other reasons,
and some who demand of it nothing less than a kind of
revelation. Most people of culture, I believe, belong to
the first class. They like literature because they like to
be amused, or because the technique of expression interests
them and rouses their strongest faculties, or because a
book stands to them for society and conversation, or
because they just happen to like the smell and feel of a
book and the gentle exercise of cutting pages with a paper-
knife. Or they like to study the varieties of human nature
as shown in books, and to amass the curious information
that is to be found there. Those are the really cultured
people. You will find that they like Lamb's Essays and
Lavengro, and Burton's Anatomy, and Evelyn's Diary,
and the Religio Medici, and the Literary Supplement. And
the other class to which I certainly belonged all through
my youth and perhaps on the whole still belong does not
really much like the process of reading, but reads because
it wants to get somewhere, to discover something, to find
a light which will somehow illumine for them either some
question of the moment or the great riddles of existence.
I believe this is the spirit in which most people in their
youth read books ; and, considering their disappointments,
it is remarkable, and perhaps not altogether discreditable,



LITERATURE AS REVELATION 127

how often they cling to this hope far on into the region of
grey hairs or worse than grey hairs.

Now, in putting before you the case for these over-
sanguine or over-youthful people, I believe, as I have
said, that I shall have the persons of culture and the con-
noisseurs against me ; but the artists and writers themselves
will be really on my side. Almost all the writers and
they are pretty numerous whom I have known intimately
are, I believe, subject to a secret sadness when they are
praised for being amusing or entertaining or readable or
the like. What really delights them, especially the novelists
and writers of light comedy, is to be treated as teachers
and profound thinkers. Nobody is quite content to think
that the serious business of his own life makes merely the
fringe and pastime of other people's. There is a well-
known story of an essay written on the poet Keats by a
stern young Nonconformist at a certain university, in
which he said that after all the important question to ask
was whether Keats had ever saved a soul. He answered
it, I regret to say, in the negative, and condemned Keats
accordingly. Now this essayist is generally ridiculed by
persons of culture for having set up for the poor poet a
perfectly absurd and irrelevant test. " Keats," says the
man of culture, " was no more trying to save souls than
to improve railway locomotives. He was simply trying
to write beautiful poetry, which is an entirely different
thing."

Now I do not believe that the man of culture is right.
I suspect that the young Nonconformist was perfectly cor-
rect in the test he applied ; that a really great poet ought
to save souls and does save souls ; and, furthermore, that
he will not be at all grateful to you if you tell him that
souls are not his business, and he can leave them to the
parson. I think, if the essayist went wrong and if he
concluded that Keats was a bad poet I take it as certain
that he did go wrong it was partly that he took the saving
of a soul in too narrow and theological a sense, and partly
that he had not really sunk himself deep enough into
Keats's thought to know whether he could save a soul
or not. That is, in the first place I would have asked him



128 LITERATURE AS REVELATION

to consider whether it is not in some sense " saving a soul "
to enable a living man to rise up above himself and his
personal desires, and to see beauty and wonder in places
where hitherto he had seen nothing ; in the second place,
I would have asked him whether, before condemning Keats,
he had really considered and really understood what Keats
meant when, for example, in the climax of one of his
greatest poems, he sums up the message to mankind of
the Grecian Urn :

" Beauty is truth, truth beauty," that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I do not say that that message is true. I do not myself
fully understand what Keats meant by it. But I am sure
that to him, and to many people who learnt it from him,
that thought has come as a revelation.

Let me speak of another case in my own experience.
I remember when I was a boy of fifteen in Paris, sitting
down on a bench in the garden of the Tuileries with a
copy of Rousseau's book on the Contrat Social, which I
had just bought for twopence-halfpenny. I knew it was
a celebrated book, and sat down in a sober mood to read
it, partly from a sense of duty. And the first sentence
of the first chapter ran : " Man was born free, and he is
everywhere in chains."

" Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains."
I remember the thrill with which I read and re-read those
words. As a matter of fact, I quite misunderstood their
place in Rousseau's argument. But so did other people,
and I can realize now the thrill with which, when they
were first published, they ran through Europe, awakening,
unforgettable, stirring the seeds of fire that blazed out in
the Great Revolution.

Take a third instance, the passage in Milton's great
pamphlet pleading for the freedom of the Press, where
Milton seems gradually, with increasing intensity, to realize
what a book really at its best is, something greater than
a living man : how to kill a man is, of course, a sin. It is
to slay God's image ; but to kill a good book is to kill
the very essence of a man's thought, " to slay God's image,



LITERATURE AS REVELATION 129

as it were, in the eye." For the particular man is but
human and will in any case die before long ; " but a good
book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, treasured
up for a life beyond life." When you take in your hand
some of the great immortal books of the past, how that
sentence conies back to your mind and illumines them !
My thoughts turn naturally to some of those Greek tragedies
on which I especially work ; the Agamemnon of Aeschylus,
say, or the Trojan Women of Euripides. What is it, that
one should read it and re-read it now, two thousand odd
years after it was written? What is it, that it should
still have the power to stir one's whole being ? That is
the answer : it is simply what Milton has said, nothing
more and nothing less, " the precious life-blood of a master-
spirit, treasured up for a life beyond life."

I have taken three instances of the kind of writing
that has an element of what I venture to call " revelation,"
but before going further I will stop to answer some criti-
cisms about them. In the first place, the person of culture,
to whom we were a little disagreeable at the beginning of
this lecture, will interpose. " You appear," he will say,
"to be basing your admiration of Keats on the truth of
one exceedingly obscure and questionable proposition
about Beauty being the same as Truth. Personally, I do
not care a straw whether it is .true or hot ; I only care
whether it is suitable in its place in the poem ; but even
supposing it is true, it is only one tiny fragment of Keats's
work. What about all the rest of his work, which, to his
credit be it said, contains hardly any of these dogmatic
sentences which you choose to describe as revelation ?
Is Keats's greatness to rest on the very few apophthegms
about life which his work contains they are far more
numerous and probably more true in Martin Tupper or
Ella Wheeler Wilcox or is it to rest frankly on the sheer
beauty of the mass of his work ? You know quite well
it must rest on the latter."

How are we to answer this ? Well, in the first place
we must explain that I only chose those isolated sentences
for convenience' sake. It was easier to explain what I
meant by revelation if I could find it expressed in a single

9



130 LITERATURE AS REVELATION

sentence. But as a rule the writers who have most of the
element of revelation about them do not crystallize their
revelation into formulae. It is something that radiates
from all their work, as in practical life there is generally
far more inspiration radiating from the example of a man's
whole activity than from the moral precepts that he happens
to utter. Shelley is simply bursting with this power of
revelation. To a man who has once read himself into
Shelley, the world never looks the same again. The same
is true of Goethe, the same is emphatically true of certain
Greek poets, like Aeschylus and Euripides. But it would
be hard to select any particular sentences from their works
as summing up the essence of their doctrine. Even Tolstoy,
who has this power of revelation to an extraordinary degree,
and who was always trying, trying consciously and in-
tensely, to put into clear words the message that was
burning inside him, even Tolstoy never really gets it ex-
pressed. He lays down, in his religious books, lots and
lots of rules, some of them sensible, some of them less so,
some of them hopelessly dogmatic and inhuman, many
of them thrilling and magnificent, but never, never getting
near to the full expression of the main truth he had dis-
covered about the world and was trying to teach. The
message of Keats, whatever it is, lies in all Keats, though
by accident a great part of it may be summed up in a
particular sentence. The message of Plato is in all Plato,
the message of Tolstoy in all Tolstoy. There is a beautiful
passage in Kenan's Life of Jesus where he points out that
when Jesus Himself was asked what His doctrine was,
what exact dogmatic truth He had to declare, He
could give no direct answer. He certainly could not pro-
duce a series of doctrinal texts ; He could only say " Follow
me." The message a man has to give radiates from him ;
it is never summed up in a sentence or two.

So, if we go back to Keats and the person of culture,
we will say to him not in the least that the greatness of
Keats depends on the truth or importance of one or two
statements he made ; but that it does depend very greatly
on a certain intense power of vision and feeling which runs
through the whole of his work and which happens to express



LITERATURE AS REVELATION 131

itself almost in the form of a religious dogma in one or two
places say in the opening passage of Endymion and the
last stanza of the Ode to a Grecian Urn.

Now let me notice another curious thing about these
revelations in literature. They are never statements of
fact. They are never accurately measured. I am not
sure that you might not safely go further and say they
are never really discoveries ; they are nearly all of them
as old as the hills, or at least as old as the Greek philosophers
and the Book of Job. Their value is not in conveying
a new piece of information ; their value lies in their power
of suddenly directing your attention, and the whole focus
of your will and imagination, towards a particular part of
life. " Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains."
That is only true to a limited extent ; and so far as it is
true it is not in the least new. Everybody knew it, as a
bare fact. But Rousseau expressed it more vividly, per-
haps felt it more keenly, believed it to be more important,
than other people had. What is more, he meant to
draw conclusions from it ; and I think what thrills one
especially in reading or thinking of the words is the thought
of those conclusions that are to be drawn. They are not
defined ; they are left vague ; that makes them all the more
tremendous.

Think of life as a vast picture gallery, or museum ; or
better, perhaps, as a vast engineering workshop. It is all
those things, among others. Then think of oneself walking
through it. You know how the average man walks through
a museum or a workshop when he knows nothing particular
about it. You try hard to be intelligent ; failing in that,
you try to conceal your lack of intelligence. You would
like to be interested, but you do not know what is interesting
and what is not. Some of the specimens strike you as
pretty ; some of the engines seem to you very powerful ;
you are dazzled and amused by the blaze of the fires, you
are secretly interested in the men and wish you could talk
to them. But in the main you come out at the other
end tired and lather dispirited and having got remarkably
little out of it. That is the way a stupid and uneducated
man, with no cne to help him, goes through life.



132 LITERATURE AS REVELATION

Next, suppose you go through the same museum, or
the same workshop, with a thoroughly competent guide.
In the museum he knows what all the specimens are, which
are rare and which ordinary, and why they are interesting ;
he makes you look at things ; makes you understand
things ; makes you see a hundred details, every one of them
significant, that you would never have noticed by yourself.
In the workshop, he shows how the various machines
work, tells how they were invented and what difference
their invention made ; he takes you to see a particularly
skilled workman and makes you realize where his skill
comes in ; he makes you feel the cleverness and the beauty
of the machinery. That is like going through life with
the help and guidance of a proper average educator, what
one calls a person of culture.

Now thirdly, suppose on the day of your visit the ordinary
guide is not available. Instead you are taken by a man
who is not a regular guide to the institution but is working,
so they tell you, at certain parts of it. And you find very
likely as you go with him that there are large parts that
he does not know or at least has nothing to say about, but
when you get to his particular subject he tells you not
only what the other guide told, but also various things
which the other guide thought not worth mentioning,
but which, as now explained to you, seem searching and
deep and new ; and you gradually realize that you are
talking to a man who has made, or is on the point of making,
a great discovery. In the museum he takes specimens
that seemed to have nothing to do with each other and
shows that when you put them together there comes a
sudden flood of suggestion, a stream of questions never
yet asked, but when once asked sure to find an answer.
And you go away not so much filled with knowledge, but
all alive with interest and the sense of movement ; feeling
that your feet have been set on a road into the future.
You have seen some one thing or set of things with an
intensity that has revealed what was before unsuspected
and made, as it were, an illumination in one part of life.
That, I think, is like going through under the guidance
of the sort of literature that gives inspiration.



LITERATURE AS REVELATION 188

The great difference, intellectually speaking, between one
man and another is simply the number of things they can
see in a given cubic yard of world. Do you remember
Huxley's famous lecture on A Piece of Chalk, deli vered to
the working men of Norwich in 1868, and how the piece
of chalk told him secrets of the infinite past, secrets of the
unfathomed depths of the sea ? The same thing happens
with a book. I remember once picking up a copy of
Macbeth belonging to the great Shakespearian scholar,
Andrew Bradley, and reading casually his pencilled notes
in the margin. The scene was one which I knew by heart
and thought I understood ; but his notes showed me that
I had missed about half a dozen points on every page.
It seems to me that the writers who have the power of
revelation are just those who, in some particular part of
life, have seen or felt considerably more than the average
run of intelligent human beings. It is this specific power
of seeing or feeling more things to the cubic yard in some
part of the world that makes a writer's work really inspiring.

To have felt and seen more than other people in some
particular region of life : does that give us any sort of
guarantee that the judgments which a man passes are
likely to be true ? Not in the least. Suppose a man has
seen and experienced some particular corner of, say, the
Battle of the Somme and can give you a thrilling and terrific
account of it, that is no particular reason for expecting
that his views about the war as a whole will be true. It
is on the whole likely that he will see things in a wrong
proportion. The point in his favour is only that he does
really know something, and, whatever his general views
are, he can help you to know something. I will confess
my own private belief, which I do not wish anyone to
share, that of all the books and all the famous sayings
that have come as a revelation to human beings, not one
is strictly true or has any chance of being true. Nor, if
you press me, do I really think it is their business to be
strictly true. They are not meant to be statements of
fact. They are cries of distress, calls of encouragement,
signals flashing in the darkness ; they seem to be statements
in the indicative mood, but they are really in the imperative



134 LITERATURE AS REVELATION

or the optative the moods of command or prayer or
longing ; they often make their effect not by what they
say but by the tone in which they say it, or even by the
things they leave unsaid.

Do you remember Garibaldi's speech to his men when his
defence of Rome had proved fruitless, and the question
was whether to make terms with the Austrians or to follow
him ? " Let those who wish to continue the War against
the stranger come with me. I offer neither pay nor quarters
nor provisions. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches,
battles and death." J The force of that appeal was in
what he did not say. He obviously offered them something
else too ; something so glorious that as a matter of fact
most of them followed him ; but he did not mention it.

Sometimes the word of revelation is a metaphor ; the
speaker knows he cannot attain exact truth, he can only,
as it were, signal in the direction of it. There is a wonderful
story in a little-read Saxon historian, who wrote in Latin,
the Venerable Bede, about the conversion of the Saxons
to Christianity. The King was debating whether or no
to accept the new religion, and consulted his counsellors.
And one old Pagan warrior said : " Do you remember
how last midwinter King Edwin held festival in the great
hall, with brands burning and two huge fires on the hearths,
while outside there was storm and utter darkness ? And
the windows by the roof being open, a bird flew suddenly
from the darkness outside into the warm and lighted place
and out on the other side into the outer darkness. Like
that bird is the life of man." a

Or what again shall we say of the following ? A message
sent many years ago by the famous Russian revolutionary,
Katherine Breshkovsky the grandmother of the Revolu-
tion as she is called ; a message smuggled out of prison
and sent to her friends and followers bidding them not to
despair or to think that nothing was being accomplished.
" Day and night we labour ; instead of meat, drink and
sleep we have dreams of Freedom. It is youth calling to
youth through prison walls and across the world " It

1 Garibaldi's Defence of Rome, G. M. Trevelyan, p. 231.
* Bede's Chronicle, Bk. 2, cap. 14.



LITERATURE AS REVELATION 135

seems like a series of statements, statements which it is
hard to describe as either true or not true. Yet I doubt
if it is really a statement ; it is more like a call in the night.

Or take the saying of one of the ancient rabbis after the
fall of Jerusalem, when the heathen had conquered the
holy places and to a pious Jew the very roots of life seemed
to be cut : " Zion is taken from us ; nothing is left save
the Holy One and His Law." Nothing is left save the
Holy One and His Law. Does it not seem at the same
time to say two things : that nothing is left, and that
everything is left that really matters ? All is lost, and
nothing that matters is lost. The message has just that
quality of self-contradiction which shows that it is not
saying all it means, that it is pointing to something beyond
itself, calling the hearer's attention not to a fact but to a
mystery.

Or take one of the greatest and simplest of all these
burning words, the word of a Greek philosopher of a late
and decadent period, who has nevertheless made a great
stir in the world : " Though I speak with the tongues of
men and of angels, and have not charity, I am but a sounding
brass or a tinkling cymbal. Though I give my body to
be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing."
Who can analyse that into a statement of fact ?

By now, I think, we have reached a point where we can
formulate a further conclusion about these words of in-
spiration or revelation. They never are concerned with
direct scientific fact or even with that part of experience
which is capable of being expressed in exact statement.
They are concerned not with that part of our voyage which
is already down in the Admiralty charts. They are con-
cerned with the part that is uncharted ; the part that is
beyond the mist, whither no one has travelled, or at least
whence no one has brought back a clear account. They
are all in the nature of the guess that goes before scientific
knowledge ; the impassioned counsel of one who feels
strongly but cannot, in the nature of things, prove his
case. This fact explains three things about them : their
emotional value, their importance, and their weakness.
Their weakness is that they are never exactly true, because



136 LITERATURE AS REVELATION

they are never based on exact knowledge. Their impor-
tance is that they are dealing with the part of the journey
that is just ahead of us, the hidden ground beyond the
next ridge which matters to us now more than all the
rest of the road. Their emotional value is intense just
because they are speaking of the thing we most long to
know, and in which the edge of the emotion is not dulled
by exact calculations. A good Moslem believes in Moham-
med far more passionately than any one believes in the
multiplication table. That is just because in the case of
the multiplication table he knows and is done with it ;
in the case of Mohammed he does not know, and makes
up for his lack of knowledge by passionate feeling.

The same consideration explains why young people in
each generation are so specially fond of the writers who
have this quality of revelation about them. Young people,
if they are normally ambitious and full of vitality, as one
expects them to be, are always on the look out for a revela-
tion. For purely physical or biological reasons, they are
hopeful ; they expect that the time coming, which will be
their own time, is sure to be much better than the present,
in which they hardly count, or the past, in which they did
not count at all. (It is amusing to note in passing that,
when there is a difference of opinion between young and
old, each tends to reject the other for the same reason
because he seems to represent the superseded past. The
young man listens impatiently to the old, thinking : Yes,
of course ; that is what they thought when people wore
whiskers, in the time of Queen Victoria. And the old
man listens impatiently to the young, thinking : Yes, of
course ; that is just the sort of nonsense I used to talk
when my whiskers were just sprouting, in the reign of
Queen Victoria.) I am inclined to think in general that
the typical attitude of a young man a fairly modest and
reasonable young man towards his elders is to feel that
they evidently know a great deal and have read a sur-
prising quantity of books, but how strangely they have
contrived to miss the one thing that matters ! And the
one thing that matters, where will he find it ? Clearly
in some teacher whom his elders have not heard, or have



LITERATURE AS REVELATION 137

not listened to. It may be a personal acquaintance whose
conversation inspires him. It may be a new writer with a
message, or an older writer whom his elders might have
read but did not. It may even be some quite ancient
writer, in whom a new message has been discovered. There
are two requirements only for the prophet or rather for
entrance to the competition for rank as a prophet. You
must have been neglected by the last generation, and
you must have the prophetic style. You must have some
strong conviction, however vague and however dispro-
portionate, about those parts of life which are imperfectly