Literature and Life

        Literature has close connection with life. In fact, literature is the study of life. The subject-matter of literature is the presentation of life. Life provides the raw material by which literature interfuses an artistic pleasure, pattern and form. Literature is the communication of the writer’s novel and unique experiences of life. Thus, there is the vital and intimate connection between literature and life which is inseparable. Life is not a simple phase. It possesses both depth and comprehensiveness. So, literature manifests the subtle problems of life. “It used to be believed at one time that the deepest things in life are those that deal with what were called the eternal varieties of life. The idea of God, for example,’ or of certain moral virtues, were supposed to be eternal. But experience and a wider knowledge of the changing conditions of social life have shaken man’s faith in the unchangeableness of these concepts. It is found that ideas are rooted in the material conditions of life and the change with those conditions which are never static. Thus, different peoples have different ideas of the Godhead. The vengeful Jehovah of the Israelites is something essentially different from the benignant deity whom, for example, the Vaishnavas worship. The laws of morality again undergo changes from country to country and from age to age. Hence in modern times, our conception of the depth and profundity does not revolve round this doctrine of eternal varieties. We try to understand the forces behind these social changes; and we understand them as mainly economic forces. We try to understand the nature of these changes, and we understand them as the replacement of the old order by the new.

        Hence, with regard to literature, our idea or its value depends on the extent to which it has been able to express the changing conditions of social life; the emergent truths that supersede the discredited falsehoods of the past. Great literature always grasps and reflects these emergent truths that rise triumphant over the wreckage of the past. Indeed, literature as its deepest has a revolutionary content, and is violently condemned by unreasoning orthodoxy.

      Literature involves the objective and subjective outlook of the writer. He observes humanity and makes the subjective approach to it. Literature plays a vital part in the life of man. lt is the greatest of the secondary sources of sensation. lt makes an immense contribution to the sum total of fact, i.e., the joint result of the experience of the individual and of the fact. Thus there is subjective outlook of the writer upon the world at large. Through literature, we converse with the great dead, with Plato, with Buddha, with Montaigne with Addison. We walk the streets of Babylon, of Athens, of Rome, and of Alexandria. We see great monuments, reared ages ago and long since crumpled to the dust.

      We recreate the life of distant epochs, and thus by comparison gauge the progress achieved by the men of today.  Through literature, we learn wisdom from Aristotle, geometry from Euclid, law from Justinian, morality front Christ and St. Paul. Literature makes the physical features, the inhabitants, the climate the produce of the antipodes as familiar as those of the neighboring country. More than this, the masters of creative literature have made regions of their own which they have peopled with me children of their genius. Thus the subjective outlook reacts upon the objective. The knowledge which have gained through our own previous sensations and through literature increases our capacity for understanding the objective world, and heightens and intensifies the pleasure which we derive from the contemplation of work of art or the face of nature. it is only by and through the subjective aspect of the world that we can rightly appreciate the objective.

       ln conclusion, literature is the brain of humanity. Just as in the individual. The brain preserves he record of his previous sensations, ol` his experiences, and of his acquired knowledge, and it is in the light of this record that he interprets every fresh sensation and experience; so the race at large had a record of its past in literature, and it is in the light record alone that its present conditions and circumstances can be understood. The message of the senses is indistinct and valueless to the individual without the co-operation of the brain; the life of the race would be degraded to a mere animal existence without the accumulated stores of previous experience which literature places at its disposal.

 Source :

Classic English Literature Notes