nowhere else fun so keen, humor so exquisite, or sprightliness so
enchanting. It is only that human existence is a solemn thing if viewed
with a realization of its actualities and its possibilities; and that
the great aim of real literature is the presentation of life in its
essentials. It is not possible to be vividly conscious of the mystery in
the midst of which we live and not be touched with something of awe.
From this solemnity the feeble soul shrinks as a silly child shrinks
from the dark. The most profound feeling of which many persons are
capable is the instinctive desire not to feel deeply. To such readers
real literature means nothing, or it means too much. It fails to move
them, or it wearies them by forcing them to feel.
Yet another reason for the neglect of the classics is the irresistible
attractiveness which belongs always to novelty, which makes a reader
choose whatever is new rather than anything which has been robbed of
this quality by time. Every mind which is at all responsive is sensitive
to this fascination of that which has just been written. What is new
borrows importance from the infinite possibilities of the unknown. The
secret of life, the great key to all the baffling mysteries of human
existence, is still just beyond the bound of human endeavor, and there
is always a tingling sense that whatever is fresh may have touched the
longed-for solution to the riddle of existence. This zeal for the new
makes the old to be left neglected; and while we are eagerly welcoming
novelties which in the end too often prove to be of little or no value,
the classics, of tried and approved worth, stand in forlorn
dust-gathering on the higher shelves of the library.
A. Conan Doyle is reported as saying in a speech before a literary
society:--
It might be no bad thing for a man now and again to make a literary
retreat, as pious men make a spiritual one; to forswear absolutely for
a month in the year all ephemeral literature, and to bring an
untarnished mind to the reading of the classics.--_London Academy_,
December 5, 1896.
The suggestion is so good that if it does not seem practical, it is so
much the worse for the age.
X
THE VALUE OF THE CLASSICS
It is sufficiently evident that the natural inclinations of the ordinary
man are not toward imaginative literature, and that unless there were
strong and tangible reasons why it is worth while to cultivate an
appreciation and a fondness for them, the classics would be so little
read that they might as well be sent to the junk-shop at once, save for
the occasional mortal whom the gods from his birth have endowed with the
precious gift of understanding high speech. These reasons, moreover,
must apply especially to the classics as distinguished from books in
general. Briefly stated, some of them are as follows:--
The need of a knowledge of the classics for the understanding of
literary language has already been spoken of at some length. This is, of
course, a minor and comparatively extraneous consideration, but it is
one not to be left wholly out. It is not difficult, however, to get a
superficial familiarity with famous writings by means of literary
dictionaries and extract books; and with this a good many persons are
apparently abundantly content. The process bears the same relation to
the actual study of the originals that looking at foreign photographic
views does to traveling abroad. It is undoubtedly better than nothing,
although it is by no means the real thing. It gives one an intellectual
understanding of classic and literary allusions, but not an emotional
one. Fully to appreciate and enjoy the allusions with which literature
is filled, it is essential to have gained knowledge directly from the
originals.
One reason why references to the classics are so frequent in literary
language, is that in these writings are found thought and emotional
expression in their youth, so to say. Even more important than learning
the force of these allusions is the coming in contact with this fresh
inspiration and utterance. That into which a man steps full grown can
never be to him the same as that in which he has grown up. We cannot
have with the thing which we have known only in its complete form the
same intimate connection as with that which we have watched from its
very beginnings. To that with which we have grown we are united by a
thousand delicate and intangible fibres, fine as cobweb and strong as
steel. The student who attempts to form himself solely upon the
literature of to-day misses entirely the childhood, the youth, the
growth of literary art. He comes full grown, and generally
sophisticated, to that which is itself full grown and sophisticated. It
is not possible for him to become himself a child, but he may go back
toward the childhood of emotional expression and as it were advance step
by step with the race. He may feel each fresh emotional discovery as if
it were as new to him as it was in truth new for the author who
centuries ago expressed it so well that the record has become immortal.
I do not know whether what I mean is fully clear, and it is of course
difficult to give examples where the matter is so subtle. It is certain,
however, that any reader of early literature must be conscious how in
the simplicity and naïveté of the best old authors we find things which
are now hackneyed and all but commonplace said with a freshness and
conviction which makes them for the first time real to us. Many emotions
have been so long recognized and expressed in literature that there
seems hardly to be a conceivable phase in which they have not been
shown, and hardly a conceivable phrase in which they have not been
embodied. It appears impossible to express them now with the freshness
and sincerity which belonged to them when they were first imprisoned in
words. So true is this that were it not that the personal impress of
genius and the experience of the imaginative writer always give
vitality, literature would cease from the face of the earth, and become
a lost art.
It is the persuasion and vividness of first discovery which impart to
the folk-song its charm and force. The early ballads often put to shame
the poetry of later days. The unsophisticated singers of these lays had
never been told that it was proper for them to have any especial
emotions; they had never heard talk about this feeling or that, and art
did not consciously exist for them as other than the spontaneous and
sincere expression of what really moved them. That which they felt too
strongly to repress, they said without any self-consciousness. Their
artistic forms were so simple as to impose no hindrance to the
instinctive desire for revealing to others what swelled in their very
hearts. The result is that impressiveness and that convincingness which
can come from nothing but perfect sincerity. Innumerable poets have put
into verse the sentiments of the familiar folk-song, "Waly, waly;" yet
it is not easy to find in all the list the same thing said with a
certain childlike directness which goes to the heart that one finds in
passages like this:--
O waly, waly, but love be bonny
A little time while it is new;
But when 'tis auld, it waxeth cauld,
And fades awa' like morning dew!
What later singer is there who has surpassed in pathos that makes the
heart ache the exquisite beauty of "Fair Helen"?
I would I were where Helen lies;
Night and day on me she cries;
Oh, that I were where Helen lies
On fair Kirconnell Lea!...
I would I were where Helen lies;
Night and day on me she cries;
And I am weary of the skies,
Since my love died for me.
The directness and simplicity which are the charm of folk-song and
ballad are far more likely to be found in early literature than in that
which is produced under conditions which foster self-consciousness. They
belong, it is true, to the work of all really great writers. No man can
produce genuinely great art without being completely possessed by the
emotions which he expresses; so that for the time being he is not wholly
removed from the mood of the primitive singers. Singleness of purpose
and simplicity of expression, however, are the birthright of those
writers who have been pioneers in literature. It is chiefly in their
work that we may hope to experience the delight of finding emotions in
the freshness of their first youth, of gaining something of that
realization of perception which is fully only his who first of mortal
men discovers and proclaims some new possibility of human existence.
Another quality of much importance in primitive writings and the early
classics is complete freedom from sentimentality. As certain parasites
do not attack young trees, so sentimentality is a fungus which never
appears upon a literature until it is well grown. It is not until a
people is sufficiently cultivated to appreciate the expression of
emotions in art that it is capable of imitating them or of simulating
that which it has learned to regard as a desirable or noble feeling. As
cultivation advances, there is sure to be at length a time when those
who have more vanity than sentiment begin to affect that which it has
come to be considered a mark of high cultivation to feel. We all know
this vice of affectation too well, and I mention it only to remark that
from this literature in its early stages is far more apt to be free than
it is in its later and more consciously developed phases.
The blight which follows sentimentality is morbidity; and one of the
most important characteristics of the genuine classics is their
wholesome sanity. By sanity I mean freedom from the morbid and the
diseased; and the quality is one especially to be prized in these days
of morbid tendencies and diseased eccentricities. There is much in many
of the classics which is sufficiently coarse when measured by later and
more refined standards; but even this is free from the gangrene which
has developed in over-ripe civilizations. Rabelais chose the dung-hill
as his pulpit; in Shakespeare and Chaucer and Homer and in the Bible
there are many things which no clean-minded man would now think of
saying; but there is in none of these any of that insane pruriency which
is the chief claim to distinction of several notorious contemporary
authors. Neither is there in classic writers the puling, sentimental,
sickly way of looking at life as something all awry. The reader who sits
down to the Greek poets, to Dante, to Chaucer, to Molière, to
Shakespeare, to Cervantes, to Montaigne, to Milton, knows at least that
he is entering an atmosphere wholesome, bracing, and manly, free alike
from sentimentality and from all morbid and insane taint.
Besides a knowledge of literary language, we must from the classics gain
our standards of literary judgment. This follows from what has been said
of temporary and permanent interest in books. Only in the classics do we
find literature reduced to its essentials. The accidental associations
which cluster about any contemporary work, the fleeting value which
this or that may have from accidental conditions, the obscurity into
which prejudice of a particular time may throw real merit, all help to
make it impossible to learn from contemporary work what is really and
essentially bad or good. It is from works which may be looked at
dispassionately, writings from which the accidental has been stripped by
time, that we must inform ourselves what shall be the standard of merit.
It is only from the classics that we may learn to discriminate the
essential from the incidental, the permanent from the temporary; and
thus gain a criterion by which to try the innumerable books poured upon
us by the inexhaustible press of to-day.
Nor do we gain only standards of literature from the classics, but
standards of life as well. In a certain sense standards of literature
and of life may be said to be one, since our estimate of the truth and
the value of a work of art and our judgment of the meaning and value of
existence can hardly be separated. The highest object for which we study
any literature being to develop character and to gain a knowledge of the
conditions of being, it follows that it is for these reasons in especial
that we turn to the classics. These works are the verdicts upon life
which have been most generally approved by the wisest men who have
lived; and they have been tested not by the experiences of one
generation only, but by those of succeeding centuries. For wise,
wholesome, and comprehensive living there is no better aid than a
familiar, intimate, sympathetic knowledge of the classics.
XI
THE GREATER CLASSICS
There are, then, clear and grave reasons why the classics are worthy of
the most intelligent and careful attention. The evidence supports
cultivated theory rather than popular practice. We are surely right in
the most exacting estimate of the place that they should hold in our
lives; and in so far as we neglect them, in so far we are justly
condemned by the general if vague opinion of society at large. They are
the works to which apply with especial force whatever reasons there are
which give value to literature; they are the means most efficient and
most readily at hand for the enriching and the ennobling of life.
It is impossible here to specify to any great extent what individual
books among the classics are of most importance. This has been done over
and over, and it is within the scope of these talks to do little more
than to consider the general relation to life of the study of
literature. Some, however, are of so much prominence that it is
impossible to pass them in silence. There are certain works which
inevitably come to the mind as soon as one speaks of the classics at
all; and of these perhaps the most prominent are the Bible, Homer,
Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. The Greek tragedians, Boccaccio,
Molière, Cervantes, Montaigne, Spenser, Milton, Ariosto, Petrarch,
Tasso, and the glorious company of other writers, such as the
Elizabethan dramatists and the few really great Latin authors, it seems
almost inexcusable not to discuss individually, yet they must be passed
over here. The simple lists of these men and their works give to the
mind of the genuine book-lover a glow as if he had drunk of generous
wine. No man eager to get the most from life will pass them by; but in
these talks there is not space to consider them particularly.
Although it is only with its literary values that we have at present any
concern, it is somewhat difficult to speak of the Bible from a merely
literary point of view. Those who regard the Bible as an inspired oracle
are apt to forget that it has too a literary worth, distinct from its
religious function, and they are inclined to feel somewhat shocked at
any discussion which even for the moment leaves its ethical character
out of account. On the other hand, those who look upon the Scriptures as
the instrument of a theology of which they do not approve are apt in
their hostility to be blind to the literary importance and excellence of
the work. There is, too, a third class, perhaps to-day, and especially
among the rising generation, the most numerous of all, who simply
neglect the Bible as dull and unattractive, and made doubly so by the
iteration of appeals that it be read as a religious guide. Undoubtedly
this feeling has been fostered by the injudicious zeal of many of the
friends of the book, who have forced the Scriptures forward until they
have awakened that impulse of resistance which is the instinctive
self-preservation of individuality. In all these classes for different
reasons praise of the Bible is likely to awaken a feeling of opposition;
yet the fact remains that from a purely literary point of view the Bible
is the most important prose work in the language.
The rational attitude of the student toward the Scriptures is that which
separates entirely the religious from the literary consideration. I wish
to speak on the same footing to those who do and those who do not regard
the Bible as a sacred book, with those who do and those who do not
receive its religious teachings. Let for the moment these points be
waived entirely, and there remains the splendid literary worth of this
great classic; there remains the fact that it has shaped faith and
fortune for the whole of Europe and America for centuries; and
especially that the English version has been the most powerful of all
intellectual and imaginative forces in moulding the thought and the
literature of all English-speaking peoples. One may regard the
theological effects of the Scriptures as altogether admirable, or one
may feel that some of them have been narrowing and unfortunate; one may
reject or accept the book as a religious authority; but at least one
must recognize that it is not possible to enter upon the intellectual
and emotional heritage of the race without being acquainted with the
King James Bible.
"Intense study of the Bible," Coleridge has said most justly, "will keep
any writer from being vulgar in point of style." He might almost have
added that appreciative study of this book will protect any reader from
vulgarity in literature and life alike. The early sacred writings of any
people have in them the dignity of sincere conviction and imaginative
emotion. The races to which these books have been divine have revered
them as the word of the Deity, but it is the supreme emotion which
thrills through them that has touched their readers and made possible
and real the claim of inspiration. Every responsive reader must vibrate
with the human feeling of which they are full. We are little likely to
have anything but curiosity concerning the dogmas of the ancient Hindoo
or Persian religion, yet it is impossible to read the ecstatic hymns of
the Vedas or the exalted pages of the Zend-Avesta without being
profoundly moved by the humanity which cries out in them. Of the Bible
this is especially true for us, because the book is so closely connected
with the life and development of our branch of the human family.
If it were asked which of the classics a man absolutely must know to
attain to a knowledge of literature even respectable, the answer
undoubtedly would be: "The Bible and Shakespeare." He must be
familiar--familiar in the sense in which we use that word in the phrase,
"mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted"--with the greatest plays
of Shakespeare, and with the finer portions of the Scriptures. I do not
of course mean all of the Bible. Nobody, no matter how devout, can be
expected to find imaginative stimulus in strings of genealogies such as
that which begins the Book of Chronicles, or in the minute details of
the Jewish ceremonial law. I mean the simple directness of Genesis and
Exodus; the straightforward sincerity of Judges and Joshua; the
sweetness and beauty of Ruth and Esther; the passionately idealized
sensuousness of Canticles; the shrewdly pathetic wisdom of Ecclesiastes;
the splendidly imaginative ecstasies of Isaiah; the uplift of the
Psalms; the tender virility of the Gospels; the spiritual dithyrambics
of the Apocalypse. No reader less dull than a clod can remain unreverent
and unthrilled in the presence of that magnificent poem which one
hesitates to say is surpassed by either Homer or Dante, the Book of Job.
The student of literature may be of any religion or of no religion, but
he must realize, and realize by intimate acquaintance, that, taken as a
whole, the Bible is the most virile, the most idiomatic, the most
imaginative prose work in the language.
The appearance of literary editions of portions of the Bible for general
reading is an encouraging sign that there is to-day a reaction from the
neglect into which the book has fallen. Unfortunately, these editions
follow for the most part the text of the Revised Version, which may be
excellent from a theological point of view, but which from a literary
one stands in much the same relation to the King James version as the
paraphrases of Dryden stand to the original text of Chaucer. The
literary student is concerned with the book which has been in the hands
and hearts of writers and thinkers of preceding generations; with the
words which have tinctured the prose masterpieces and given color to the
poetry of our tongue. To attempt to alter the text now is for the
genuine literary student not unlike modernizing Shakespeare.
The Bible is a library in itself, so great is its variety; and it is
practically indispensable as a companion in literary study. To neglect
it is one of the most grave errors possible to the student. It has, it
is true, its serious and obvious defects, and from a literary point of
view the New Testament is infinitely less interesting than the Old; but
taken all in all, it is a great and an enchanting book, permanent in its
worth and permanent in its interest.
To go on to talk of Homer is at once to bring up the much-vexed question
of reading translations. It seems to me rather idle in these days to
take time to discuss this. Whatever decision be arrived at, the fact
remains that the general reader will not read the classics in the
original. However great the loss, he must take them in the English
version, or let them alone. Even the most accomplished graduates of the
best colleges are not always capable of appreciating in Greek the
literary flavor of the works which they can translate pretty accurately.
There is no longer time in these busy and over-crowded days for the
student so to saturate himself with a dead language that it shall be as
familiar to him as his own tongue. The multiplicity of present
impressions renders it all but impossible to get completely into the
atmosphere of a civilization bygone. A few of the men trained in foreign
schools in the most scholarly fashion have probably arrived at the power
of feeling sensitively the literary quality of the classics in the
original; but for the ordinary student, this is entirely out of the
question. It is sad, but it is an inevitable human limitation. Emerson,
as is well known, boldly commended the practice of reading translations.
His sterling sense probably desired the consistency of having theory
agree with practice where there is not the slightest hope of making
practice agree with theory. Whether we like it or do not like it, the
truth is that most persons will take the Greek and Latin authors in
translation or not at all.
And certainly they must be read in some tongue. No genuine student of
literature will neglect Homer or the Greek tragedians. The old Greeks
were by no means always estimable creatures. They not infrequently did
those things which they ought not to have done, and left undone those
things which they ought to have done; but the prayer-book did not then
exist, so that in spite of all there was plenty of health in them. They
were not models in morals, while they were entirely unacquainted with
many modern refinements; but they were eminently human. They were sane
and wholesome beings, manly and womanly; so that a reader is in far
better company with the heroes of Homer in their vices than he is with
the morbid creations of much modern fiction in their moments of the most
conscious and painfully elaborated virtue. Herein, it seems to me, lies
the greatest value of Greek literature. Before he can be anything else
thoroughly and soundly, a man must be healthily human. Hot-house virtue
is on the whole about as dangerous a disease as open-air vice; and it is
far more difficult to cure. Unless a man or a woman be genuine, he or
she is nothing, and the mere appearance of good or evil is not of
profound consequence. To be sane and human, to think genuine thoughts,
and to do genuine deeds, is the beginning of all real virtue; and
nothing is more conducive to the development of genuineness than the
company of those who are sound and real. If we are with whole-souled
folk, we cannot pose, even to ourselves; and it seems to me that the
reader who, with full and buoyant imagination, puts himself into the
company of the Greeks of Homer or Æschylus or Euripides or Sophocles
cannot be content, for the time being at least, to be anything but a
simply genuine human creature himself.