CLASSICS OF THE MIDDLE AGES
The Middle Ages are, roughly, the period from about 500 to 1500,
though we must not take the limits too sharply. Here I propose to make
it cover the writers of the literary Renaissance period, or of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Europe was so demoralized after
the fall of Rome that art almost perished; and the Greek Empire was
too fossilized to produce great literature. From the second to the
thirteenth century no literary worth of the first, or even second, rank
appeared in Europe. Then art was reborn and the Renaissance in the
broader sense, the re-awakening of Europe, began.
§1. ARAB AND PERSIAN WRITERS
There are, however, two works belonging to that period which will
be known to every reader, at least by name: the _Rubaiyat_ of Omar
Khayyam and the _Arabian Nights_. Omar was a Persian poet-astronomer
of the twelfth century: one of very many gifted poets of the revived
civilization of Persia. The refined Epicurian creed of life in his
well-known poem reminds us that outside of Europe there was a brilliant
and artistic civilization. The _Arabian Nights_ reflects a similarly
brilliant civilization at Cairo and Bagdad and Damascus. This new
Mohammedan, though really very skeptical, culture spread from Persia to
Spain, and had much to do with the re-awakening of Europe.
The _Rubaiyat_, which took the modern world by storm in the nineteenth
century, is a unique case of a translation being superior to the
original. The current version, by the English poet Edward Fitzgerald,
is not, in fact, a translation, but to a very great extent a new poem
based on that of Omar. Sir Richard Burton’s translation (in 16 volumes)
of the _Arabian Nights_ is, on the other hand, so accomplished and
faithful a version of that immortal collection of oriental tales that
it is generally kept behind locked doors in a library. The current
translations are much pruned, and are therefore false. The tales
(by various authors) are generally said to be of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, but Burton held that many are earlier. The well
known stories of Sinbad and Aladdin come from this classic. It is a
rich reflection of Arab-Persian life.
§2. DANTE AND THE MIDDLE AGES
The immense literary activity and refined life of the Persians and
Arabs was bound, especially as their culture was carried to its
greatest height by the Moors in Spain, to affect Europe, and in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries literature began to reappear. From the
south of France, where there was contact with the Moors, the gay songs
of the troubadours spread. The _Song of Roland_ ran to four thousand
lines. The _Poem of the Cid_ was another long epic or warrior-song
that appeared in the Christian part of Spain. More notable still is
the _Romance of the Rose_, chiefly by Jehan de Meung, a long allegory
on love which appeared in France. In Germany some unknown poet of the
twelfth century gathered together the old pagan legends in the _Lay of
the Nibelungs_: the treasury of legends upon which Wagner has drawn for
his famous dramas about Siegfried, the Valkyries, etc.
A notable work of a very different kind is the _Love Letters of Abelard
and Heloise_. Abelard was the most brilliant writer of the twelfth
century, though his works are on philosophy or theology and do not
concern us here. Heloise was a remarkably gifted young woman of Paris,
who had a child by Abelard. Her uncle, however, had Abelard castrated,
and he became a somber abbot and she, very reluctantly, an abbess.
These Latin letters were written long after the outrage and are wrongly
called love-letters. Sentiment was dead in Abelard and it only peeps
out occasionally from the heart of Heloise. They are, however, known as
“the immortal lovers,” and the letters are included in all collections
of great works.
None of these ought properly to be included in this account of the
greatest writers, but they are now constantly referred to and they help
us to understand the revival of letters. These poets and chroniclers
were gradually beating the new European languages into shape and
preparing the way for the masters.
Dante is the first (1265-1321). His great poem _The Divine Comedy_
might be called an epic of religious thought. He imagines himself
conducted successively through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and though
the theme repels many of his readers--Goethe, Goldsmith, Landor, and
other distinguished critics speak very disparagingly of him--he is by
common consent numbered amongst the six greatest poets of all time.
There might be some difference of opinion about the sixth place, but
the five greatest are (omitting the Greek tragedians who wrote in
verse) Shakespeare, Homer, Goethe, Vergil, and Dante. I should call
Milton the sixth.
Dante’s “trilogy,” or three-part poem, has several thousand four-line
verses and is usually regarded as, on the literary side, the flower
of the Middle Ages. Longfellow wrote a beautiful poem in appreciation
of it, comparing it to a Gothic cathedral. But it is also interesting
as showing how Europe was at the time being awakened by the Arab
culture. Dante, who lived in Florence, where there was a great deal
of liberality of thought, speaks throughout with great respect of the
Arab and Greek philosophers, and in his ethical ideas he is deeply
influenced by them. He wrote in Italian and thus inaugurated the great
Italian literature of the Renaissance. His minor works, in prose, are
_The New Life_ and _The Banquet_.
§3. HERALDS OF THE RENAISSANCE
Dante died in 1321, and within two decades of that date were born the
great Italian writers Petrarch and Boccaccio, the French chronicler
Froissart, and the gifted English poet Chaucer. Dante himself may in
a sense, as I have said, be called a herald of the Renaissance or
re-birth of letters, but he is mainly medieval while these four are
predominantly characterized by the new spirit of humanity.
Petrarch (1304-74) is the first great figure in the revival of Greek
and Latin literature. He wrote mostly in Latin, but the _Sonnets_ he
composed in Italian are so beautiful that four hundred editions of them
have appeared. His contemporary Boccaccio (1313-75), also of Italy, is
best known as the author of the _Decameron_. The word means “The Ten
Days Work,” and the book consists of a hundred witty and skilful short
stories which are supposed to be told to each other, during ten days,
by a group of ladies and gentlemen. The stories reflect all the gaiety,
sparkle, and license of that early springtime of the new Europe.
In France about the same time Froissart (born 1338) wrote a _Chronicle_
which is regarded as a classic. He traveled very extensively and tells,
with bright coloring, the history of each leading country in Europe in
the fourteenth century.
The Re-Birth soon spread from Italy to the northern lands, as Europe
was now comparatively settled and men traveled and read. Chaucer
(1340-1400), the first great English poet, had met Petrarch and was
deeply influenced by him and Boccaccio. His famous _Canterbury Tales_
is a broad and wonderfully vivid picture of the life and characters of
his age. All the chief types of the time are introduced as pilgrims
on the way to Canterbury, and their tales they tell to each other
depict early English life graphically for us. The old English is rather
difficult to read, but the humor and shrewd observation make it worth
while to try.
§4. THE NEW AGE IN ITALY AND FRANCE
The seed sown by these artists of the fourteenth century led to a rich
crop of writers in the fifteenth and sixteenth and seventeenth; and we
must remember that there was at the same time a splendid development of
painting and a general enrichment of life, as well as a new liberality
of thought and feeling. Italy in particular had a crowd of writers as
well as great painters: writers on philosophy, writers on art (like
Vasari), writers on history (notably Guicciardini) and story-tellers,
poets, comedians, etc. To this period belongs the famous work of
the diplomatist Macchiavelli (1469-1527), _The Prince_, giving such
unscrupulous counsels to princes--a real reflection of the spirit of
the times--that we have ever since called such maxims “Macchiavellian.”
Another classic of the time is the _Autobiography_ of the sculptor and
goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71): a most interesting and candid
account of adventurous life in that gay age.
The chief Italian classics of the time are, however, the works of
the greatest Italian poets after Dante, Ariosto (1474-1533) and
Tasso. Both lived at the brilliant court of the Dukes of Ferrara
who patronized them, but they differ entirely in character. Ariosto
wrote comedies and satires and epic verse. He is chiefly known for
his _Orlando Furioso_, a poem of great length on the war against the
Saracens: which, by the way, no one reads today. Tasso had a more sober
and melancholic character. His writings fill forty volumes, but few
now read even his masterpiece, _Jerusalem Delivered_: an epic of the
Crusades, an attempt to adapt the Greek epic to a profoundly religious
theme. This inspired Milton’s _Paradise Lost_.
The above dates will show that these writers end at the time of the
change occasioned by the Reformation, and from that time there was no
great literature in Italy until the nineteenth century. The works of
Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Galileo (1564-1642), etc., belong rather to
philosophy and science.
Meantime the Renaissance or Re-Birth of Letters, had spread over
Europe. Erasmus (1467-1536), a very liberal theologian and humanist
of Holland, wrote brilliant and witty critical works on religion with
an immense circulation, of which the most readable are his _Praise of
Folly_ and his _Colloquies_ (or “Conversations,” his masterpiece).
In France there was in the fifteenth century an adventurous poet,
Francois Villon (born 1431), who has become very popular amongst
literary men in our time. He was a thief, vagabond, even a murderer,
and was often in prison. But he wrote beautiful ballads and rondels
expressing the strange melancholy which his defiant life gave him.
Swinburne calls him the “prince of sweet songs made out of tears and
fire.”
In the sixteenth century the great essayist Montaigne (1533-92)
published his three books of _Essays_: a prose-classic of profound
influence on thought, expressing the most liberal ideas--though he
professed to be a Catholic--about religion and pleading for tolerance
amidst the fierce controversies of the time. Montaigne was a universal
scholar and the whole of life is reflected in his pages.
Very different was Francois Rabelais (1495-1553), one of the greatest
of the Renaissance writers. Though a priest and a monk for thirty
years, his long rambling stories (chiefly _Pantagruel, King of the
Dipsodes_, and _The Heroic Deeds and Sayings of the Good Pantagruel_)
are so free that his name has given us the word “Rabelaisean” for
improper stories. I have a literal translation, in five volumes, by Sir
T. Urquhart (published in London in 1897), but it is rare. Rabelais
is, apart from sex, often filthy, but many critics forget that even in
this he is only expressing his world, the faults of which he sought
to expose by wit and caricature. He wanted frank mirth and laughter
substituted for hypocritical enjoyments.
A French classic of quite the opposite type is the _Discourse on
Method_ of the mathematician and philosopher Descartes (1596-1650).
His works, however, are now chiefly of interest in the evolution of
thought. In the sense in which we take “classics” here we turn rather
to the three great poets who supremely represent the Renaissance in
France: Corneille, Racine, and Molière.
Corneille (1606-84) and Racine (1630-99) are both best known for their
tragedies, which were directly inspired by those of the early Greek
tragedians and were written in a severe classical style. Corneille is
the more austere and dignified of the two, and he is seen at his best
in _Polyeucte_ (based upon the martyrdom of an early Christian) and
_Andromeda_ (a classical tragedy). Racine is, perhaps, a little less
severe and more human than Corneille. He also wrote classical tragedies
after the Greek model (_Iphigenia_, _Phaedra_, etc.), a biblical play
_Esther_, and a number of historical and other plays.
Molière (whose real name was Jean Baptiste Poqelin, 1622-73) is one of
the great comedians of the world. He took the name Molière because he
went on the stage. He is seen at his best in _Les Precieuses Ridicules_
(which pokes fun at pretentious ladies who talk literature), _Tartuffe_
(a satire of religious hypocrites), _The Misanthrope_, and _Don Juan_.
For the freedom of his attacks on the Church he was excommunicated, but
he was protected by the king, to whom his father had been valet.
Boileau, or Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636-1711), is added to these
three as the fourth great poet of the time. His masterpiece is _The
Poetic Art_. Like his contemporary Molière he was skeptical (though
he rather insincerely wrote a prose-work _On the Love of God_), while
Racine and Corneille were devout Catholics.
La Fontaine (1621-95), of the same generation, wrote _Stories_ and
_Select Fables_ (on the model of Aesop) in verse which rank as
classics. The familiar children’s stories of Red Ridinghood, Bluebeard,
The Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, etc., are
from his work. He collected them from popular circulation and expanded
them.
Blaise Pascal (1623-62), a famous mathematician as well as writer on
religion, gave the world two literary classics in his _Thoughts on
Religion_ and _Provincial Letters_ (an attack on the Jesuits, though
the author is a particularly pious Catholic). Montesquieu (1689-1755),
a wealthy noble and eminent lawyer, is chiefly known for his _Spirit
of the Laws_, a profound study of law from a humanitarian standpoint.
Among his many other works his _Persian Letters_, a caustic criticism
of contemporary life, long ranked as classic. Although few read it
today the same must be said of the novel _Gil Blas_, by A. R. Lesage
(1668-1747), a famous dramatist. It appeared in innumerable editions
and was the model for later novelists.
§5. CERVANTES AND THE NEW SPAIN
Spain was retaken by the Spaniards from the Moors (whose whole
immense literature was destroyed) in the Middle Ages, and for a time
it enjoyed its share of the Renaissance. _Don Quixote_, by Cervantes
(1547-1616), belongs to this period. It is a brilliant picture of the
life of the time as well as a masterly satire of the exaggerations and
eccentricities of Spanish romantic feeling. It should be regarded,
like several of the works I have just noticed and others in the next
section, as on the threshold between the Middle Ages and the Modern
Age. The Renaissance is a first breath of Modernism.
Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was a phenomenal Spanish playwright of the
time who is now not much read. He is said to have written eighteen
hundred plays (of which we have three hundred). He often wrote a play
in a day, yet his construction and verse are of such quality that the
Spaniards count him a classic. At the end of a long and very loose life
he became a friar and assisted at the burning of heretics.
Calderon (1601-81), the third great early Spanish writer, a poet and
dramatist, ranks far higher than Vega, though even his best tragedy,
_The Constant Prince_, is rarely read outside Spain. His name is one of
the most honored in Spanish literature. Like Vega he became a priest
in later life. With Calderon the short spell of fine writing in Spain
ended and nothing of great distinction appeared until the latter end of
the nineteenth century.
§6. SHAKESPEARE AND THE ENGLISH REBIRTH
Chaucer, we saw, died in 1400, and his _Canterbury Tales_ brought the
first taste of the new spirit to England. But constant war kept in
check the development of culture and during the next two hundred years
few writers appeared whom one could call classics. An obscure knight,
Sir Thomas Malory, is almost the only one now read. He collected
(chiefly from French literature) the old English legends about King
Arthur and his court, since made more familiar by Tennyson in his
_Idylls_, and wrought them in a poem of distinction called the _Morte
d’Arthur_ (“The Death of Arthur”). In the sixteenth century Sir Thomas
More (beheaded in 1535), at one time Lord Chancellor, wrote his famous
_Utopia_, which is based on Plato’s _Republic_. More was at the time
very liberal in his ideas. The _Utopia_ (a sketch of an ideal state),
however, had to be written in Latin and published abroad. It was not
translated into English until forty years later.
Then, within little more than ten years of each other, were born
Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and Ben Jonson, the five
giants of a wonderful literary age. Spenser’s (1552-99) great work
is _The Faery Queene_. It is an allegorical poem of remarkable grace
and beauty, though at times rather obscure in meaning, purporting to
represent the excellences of the English character.
Chris Marlowe (1564-93), “the father of English tragedy,” was, as
these dates show, a great poet who never reached his full development.
He shared the turbulent life of the time and was killed in a tavern
brawl. His chief tragedies, _Tamburlaine_ and _Dr. Faustus_ (a model for
Goethe’s famous work), reveal a poetical and dramatic genius of a high
order.
Born in the same year, Shakespeare (1564-1616) survived his early
robustness and gave the world the series of poems and plays which award
him still the first place in all literature. Alike in light verse,
comedy, tragedy, and moral play--you see his personal moral development
reflected in this order of production--he is the supreme master. It
is, in fact, needless to say much about him here. The little that I
should have space to say must be known to everybody, and even a short
appreciation or analysis of his work would fill a long chapter in this
book. Let me note two things. It is extremely interesting, as I have
already hinted, to take Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order: to
proceed from the loose comedies (suggested by the Italian Renaissance
comedians who imitated Plautus) to the historical plays and tragedies,
in which one may trace a half-conscious and gradually deepening moral
sentiment, to such later plays as _The Winter’s Tale_, _As You Like
It_, etc., in which he uses his genius to make character attractive.
The other point is that recent attempts to make Shakespeare less
titanic than tradition represents him are not soundly critical. Every
reader knows that he is unequal in his inspiration and one can select
lines and passages of no distinction. It is, moreover, a question if
some of the plays which bear his name were really written by him. Take
him as a whole, and in the essential qualities of the poet--which are
the expression of things in beautiful images and exquisite little
allegories and the use of language of a fitting tone--he surpasses
every other poet. I have read at least something of Homer, Hesiod,
Aeschylus, Euripides, Vergil, Horace, Dante, Tasso, Racine, Corneille,
Calderon, Goethe, and Schiller in their own tongues, and that is my
confident judgment. Some modern writers who attack Shakespeare’s
supremacy cannot, apparently, read his rivals in the original.
But Shakespeare requires a volume or nothing, and we will take him for
granted as the first classic. Of Francis Bacon also we must say little.
His chief works (_Novum Organon_, etc.) were written in Latin and
belong to the history of thought, not of letters. His English _Essays_
may be considered a classic. Ben Jonson (1574-1637), finally, though
called “rare Ben Jonson” in his time for his beautiful lyrics, pungent
comedies, and classical tragedies, is now rarely read.
English literature, in fact, now became a ceaseless and ever broadening
stream, and, with all the interests of our modern literature, we have
little time, unless we are special students, to read any but the
supreme writers of the earlier days. The Authorized Version of the
Bible itself is a wonderful monument of the artistic splendor of that
age. Fifty divines, not poets, were set to prepare the translation,
from 1605 to 1610, and, wherever the Hebrew text is itself poetic--the
far greater part of it (Pentateuch, historical books, etc.) is not at
all fine literature--they rendered it in magnificent, sonorous English.
The _Anatomy of Melancholy_ by Robert Burton (1577-1640) and the
_Religio Medici_ of Sir Thomas Browne, a distinguished physician
(1605-82), may be selected as the best classics. After these we get
poets like Vaughan and Herrick, who are scarcely great enough to be
included here, and then John Milton (1608-74), the second greatest poet
of the English tongue as well as a sound and deep thinker and a most
learned man for his age.
Milton’s masterpiece is, of course, _Paradise Lost_. Like Dante,
he would show that the Christian creed could inspire an epic as
effectively as pagan legends, and no doubt on that account he is, like
Dante, less read today than if he had remained purely secular. There
is, however, a further parallel which is often missed. Just as Dante
rationalizes Purgatory and is not orthodox on many points, so Milton
more or less rationalizes Satan and hell. His Prince of Darkness is
by no means the horned devil of ordinary believers, and we know that
he had, in fact, very liberal ideas. In any case, the poetry is as
magnificent as the conception, from the artistic point of view, is
grand. It certainly puts John Milton in the highest circle of the
immortals. One ought to read some of his other great poems to correct
the common idea that he was absorbed entirely in biblical stories, and
I would recommend every one to read, of his superb prose work, at least
the _Areopagitica_, an address to Parliament on the liberty of the
press. Milton was far from medieval in his social ideals.
As I have already said, we are here dealing with writers who are on the
turn from the medieval to the modern age. It is difficult to draw the
line, but for my purpose of giving just an idea of the position and
character of each classic I may take the spread of Deism in Europe as
the beginning of the modern period and carry this section as far as the
poet Pope.
One classic of Milton’s time that ought to be read is the _Hudibras_
of Samuel Butler (1612-80). Butler had the brilliant idea that the
sour Puritan was the Don Quixote of English life and this poem is a
delicious satire of the type. Royalty was by that time restored, and
everybody was prepared to laugh at the men who had made England sober
and dismal for a generation. The humor of _Hudibras_ is so rich that it
is always worth reading.
A very different classic of the age is John Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s
Progress_, perhaps the most widely read religious book, apart from the
Bible, that was ever written. Bunyan (1628-88) was a pious thinker,
but a literary genius. His allegorical figures will never cease to be
quoted. Izaak Walton’s _Compleat Angler_ is another work of the time
that comes near being a classic, and Milton’s friend, Andrew Marvell,
wrote some superb nature-poetry. More frequently quoted now are the
Diaries of Pepys (1633-1703) and Evelyn (1620-1706). The former was a
superior civil servant, and he most minutely and pleasantly records
nine years of his life in London. Evelyn was a country gentleman and he
reflects the life of his class. They are both valuable and interesting.
Dryden (1631-1700) may be taken as, in the broader sense, the last
classic of the medieval and Renaissance period. His best known poem
is _The Hind and the Panther_, a defense of Roman Catholicism. Not
many years before he had written a defense of the Church of England,
_Religio Laici_. His character is not regarded as very solid, but most
critics would esteem him the third English poet of this period. His
satires and odes are often of a very high quality.