英语翻译
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; 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; 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 genial 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 mean 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 remembrance,and their ideals are continually refreshed.A purpose of the same nature is answered by the higher literature,viz.the literature of power.