Literature as Speech Made Permanent--All Written Speech Not Literature--The Essence of Literature for Its Own Sake--Prose as a Fine Art--Some Interesting Aspects of Literature as an End in Itself--Their Comparative Triviality--No Literature Great Which Is Not More Than Literature--Literature as a Vehicle of Religion--Lucretius--_The Reconstruction of Belief_ INDEX 373 ILLUSTRATIONS ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE _Frontispiece_ ROBERT BROWNING _Facing p. 30_ THOMAS CARLYLE " 64 JOHN RUSKIN " 86 OUIDA " 126 CARDINAL MANNING " 134 HERBERT SPENCER " 266 THEODORE ROOSEVELT " 318 MEMOIRS OF LIFE AND LITERATURE CHAPTER I FAMILY ANTECEDENTS The Mallocks of Cockington--Some Old Devonshire Houses--A Child's Outlook on Life "Memoirs" is a word which, as commonly used, includes books of very various kinds, ranging from St. Augustine's _Confessions_ to the gossip of Lady Dorothy Nevill. Such books, however, have all one family likeness. They all of them represent life as seen by the writers from a personal point of view; and in this sense it is to the family of Memoirs that the present book belongs. But the incidents or aspects of life which a book of memoirs describes represent something more than themselves. Whether the writer is conscious of the fact or no, they represent a circle of circumstances, general as well as private, to which his individual character reacts; and his reactions, as he records them, may in this way acquire a meaning and unity which have their origin in the age--in the general conditions and movements which his personal recollections cover--rather than in any qualities or adventures which happen to be exclusively his own. Thus if any writer attempts to do what I have done myself--namely, to examine or depict in books of widely different kinds such aspects and problems of life--social, philosophical, religious, and economic--as have in turn engrossed his special attention, he may venture to hope that a memoir of his own activities will be taken as representing an age, rather than a personal story, his personal story being little more than a variant of one which many readers will recognize as common to themselves and him.