316 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 



When I first saw these words on the slab covering Herder's tomb, 

 inside the church, they seemed to me, like bits of that wondrous 

 chemical, radium, to become positively luminous in the twilight dim- 

 ness of the old church; and they have shone in my memory as self- 

 luminous bodies ever since. 



When I was called upon by the Committee of the International 

 Congress of Arts and Science to prepare a short paper on the vital 

 principles, ideas, and methods underlying modern literature and all 

 literature, I could not get these words out of my mind; they lay 

 phosphorescent there, unquenched by any substitute I could devise 

 to take their place. 



LIGHT, LOVE, LIFE, rang in the writer's ear with incessant and 

 insistent murmur as the characteristic, the indispensable, the abso- 

 lutely essential key-words of the theme. 



In the city of Weimar itself " light " had been the last word of the 

 expiring Goethe: may it not have slipped into the august sufferer's 

 memory at this supreme hour from the scroll of Herder, and thence 

 into the heart of the civilized world as its literary bequest and watch- 

 word, gathered from the lips of two of its finest representatives? 



The vitality of all literature is supremely dependent upon the mass 

 of light in it. Without light it is mere darkness. A moment's contem- 

 plation of the great historic literatures Oriental, Greek, Germanic 

 will settle this beyond a perad venture : each is a well of light from 

 which, on lonely heights of Himalaya, of Judaea, of Parnassus, of 

 Apennines, of Saxon hills and Anglo-Saxon uplands, the forebears 

 and forerunners of the Indo-Aryan and Semitic races have kindled 

 their fires and lighted their lamps and started on their torch-bearing 

 Panathenaic Procession down the ages. 



The light crystallized in a literature may be as manifold as that into 

 which a prism of clear glass dissects the blended ray that pierces the 

 eye-hole of the heliostat the one indispensable thing being that it 

 be light: moral, intellectual, aesthetic. It is a significant fact that the 

 basic beginnings of all the greater modern literatures go back to some 

 fountain-source of moral light some Bible some divine or semi- 

 divine book recognized as the supreme logos of some Divine Being. 

 The Vedas, the cosmic theogonies, St. Jerome, Ulfilas, Cyril, Luther, 

 the King James Version mark moral milestones all along the literary 

 highways; and each is a mittiarium aureum. 



The mass of this moral light permeating the literatures of civiliz- 

 ation has been very great and has proved to be the antiseptic, the 

 anti-toxin, that has kept them from rotting. The intense vitality of 

 the Hebrew Scriptures, of the mighty words of Luther, of the creed 

 and catechisms drawn from Christian, Confucian, or Buddhistic 

 sources, reveals a root-principle that has sunk deep into the sub-soil 

 of human nature, and draws from it exhaustless stores of strength and 



