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The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals, says Socrates, in the Republic, is the ruin of democracy. They invent illegal modes of expenditure; and what do they or their wives care about the law?

“And then one, seeing another’s display, proposes to rival him, and thus the whole body of citizens acquires a similar character.

“After that they get on in a trade, and the more they think of making a fortune, the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.

“And in proportion as riches and rich men are honored in the state, virtue and the virtuous are dishonored.

“And what is honored is cultivated, and that which has no honor is neglected.

“And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money, and they honor and reverence the rich man and make a ruler of him, and dishonor the poor man.

“They do so.”

The object of a reasonable statesman (it is Plato who is really speaking in the Laws) is not that the state should be as great and rich as possible, should possess gold and silver, and have the greatest empire by sea and land.

The citizen must, indeed, be happy and good, and the legislator will seek to make him so; but very rich and very good at the same time he cannot be; not at least in the sense in which many speak of riches. For they describe by the term “rich” the few who have the most valuable possessions, though the owner of them be a rogue. And if this is true, I can never assent to the doctrine that the rich man will be happy: he must be good as well as rich. And good in a high degree and rich in a high degree at the same time he cannot be. Some one will ask, Why not? And we shall answer, Because acquisitions which come from sources which are just and unjust indifferently are more than double those which come from just sources only; and the sums which are expended neither honorably nor disgracefully are only half as great as those which are expended honorably and on honorable purposes. Thus if one acquires double and spends half, the other, who is in the opposite case and is a good man, cannot possibly be wealthier than he. The first (I am speaking of the saver, and not of the spender) is not always bad; he may indeed in some cases be utterly bad, but as I was saying, a good man he never is. For he who receives money unjustly as well as justly, and spends neither justly nor unjustly, will be a rich man if he be also thrifty. On the other hand, the utterly bad man is generally profligate, and therefore poor; while he who spends on noble objects, and acquires wealth by just means only, can hardly be remarkable for riches any more than he can be very poor. The argument, then, is right in declaring that the very rich are not good, and if they are not good they are not happy.

And the conclusion of Plato is that we ought not to pursue any occupation to the neglect of that for which riches exist–“I mean,” he says, “soul and body, which without gymnastics and without education will never be worth anything; and therefore, as we have said not once but many times, the care of riches should have the last place in our thoughts.”

Men cannot be happy unless they are good, and they cannot be good unless the care of the soul occupies the first place in their thoughts. That is the first interest of man; the interest in the body is midway; and last of all, when rightly regarded, is the interest about money.

The majority of mankind reverses this order of interests, and therefore it sets literature to one side as of no practical account in human life. More than this, it not only drops it out of mind, but it has no conception of its influence and power in the very affairs from which it seems to be excluded. It is my purpose to show not only the close relation of literature to ordinary life, but its eminent position in life, and its saving power in lives which do not suspect its influence or value. Just as it is virtue that saves the state, if it be saved, although the majority do not recognize it and attribute the salvation of the state to energy, and to obedience to the laws of political economy, and to discoveries in science, and to financial contrivances; so it is that in the life of generations of men, considered from an ethical and not from a religious point of view, the most potent and lasting influence for a civilization that is worth anything, a civilization that does not by its own nature work its decay, is that which I call literature. It is time to define what we mean by literature. We may arrive at the meaning by the definition of exclusion. We do not mean all books, but some books; not all that is written and published, but only a small part of it. We do not mean books of law, of theology, of politics, of science, of medicine, and not necessarily books of travel, or adventure, or biography, or fiction even. These may all be ephemeral in their nature. The term belles-lettres does not fully express it, for it is too narrow. In books of law, theology, politics, medicine, science, travel, adventure, biography, philosophy, and fiction there may be passages that possess, or the whole contents may possess, that quality which comes within our meaning of literature. It must have in it something of the enduring and the universal. When we use the term art, we do not mean the arts; we are indicating a quality that may be in any of the arts. In art and literature we require not only an expression of the facts in nature and in human life, but of feeling, thought, emotion. There must be an appeal to the universal in the race. It is, for example, impossible for a Christian today to understand what the religious system of the Egyptians of three thousand years ago was to the Egyptian mind, or to grasp the idea conveyed to a Chinaman’s thought in the phrase, “the worship of the principle of heaven”; but the Christian of today comprehends perfectly the letters of an Egyptian scribe in the time of Thotmes III., who described the comical miseries of his campaign with as clear an appeal to universal human nature as Horace used in his ‘Iter Brundusium;’ and the maxims of Confucius are as comprehensible as the bitter-sweetness of Thomas a Kempis. De Quincey distinguishes between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. The definition is not exact; but we may say that the one is a statement of what is known, the other is an emanation from the man himself; or that one may add to the sum of human knowledge, and the other addresses itself to a higher want in human nature than the want of knowledge. We select and set aside as literature that which is original, the product of what we call genius. As I have said, the subject of a production does not always determine the desired quality which makes it literature. A biography may contain all the facts in regard to a man and his character, arranged in an orderly and comprehensible manner, and yet not be literature; but it may be so written, like Plutarch’s Lives or Defoe’s account of Robinson Crusoe, that it is literature, and of imperishable value as a picture of human life, as a satisfaction to the want of the human mind which is higher than the want of knowledge. And this contribution, which I desire to be understood to mean when I speak of literature, is precisely the thing of most value in the lives of the majority of men, whether they are aware of it or not. It may be weighty and profound; it may be light, as light as the fall of a leaf or a bird’s song on the shore; it may be the thought of Plato when he discourses of the character necessary in a perfect state, or of Socrates, who, out of the theorem of an absolute beauty, goodness, greatness, and the like, deduces the immortality of the soul; or it may be the lovesong of a Scotch plowman: but it has this one quality of answering to a need in human nature higher than a need for facts, for knowledge, for wealth.