Facts you should know about the classics

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.