Facts you should know about the classics

As we approach our own time it becomes more difficult to choose our classics. For the earliest period time itself has made the selection very ruthlessly. Nearly every Greek and Latin work left to us is a classic. Then there is the long blank of the early Middle Ages ending in the luxuriant artistic growth of the Renaissance. By the time we have reached, however, the output of distinguished literature becomes very great. Not only have the introduction of paper and printing and the spread of education to a much larger class encouraged writing, but we must remember that now there are a dozen civilizations, not one or two as in ancient times. John Drinkwater in his Outline of Literature devotes one volume to the period from Homer to the middle of the eighteenth century (nearly 5,000 years) and one volume to the literature of the last 150 years! It does not mean that we are so very much richer in classics. The reader must, therefore, not expect to find here a mention of every poet whom some professor or other calls “a classic,” but I have gone carefully over Drinkwater’s work and Richardson and Owen’s Literature of the World (which the reader will find more useful if he wants a larger sketch), and give here a short notice of the men about whose high distinction in letters there is a common agreement.

After the age of Racine and Molière French literature rarely rose to the height of great distinction—the chief cause, as elsewhere, being the bitter sectarian struggle—until Voltaire appeared. Seeing, however, that Voltaire, was born just before the death of La Fontaine and Mme. de Sévigné (whose letters are very elegant literature) the interval was not long.

Francois Marie Arouet (1694-1778), who took the pen-name of Voltaire, is one of the most remarkable writers of Europe. Competent critics pronounce him the best poet of his age—an age not rich in great poets, however—and in history (The Age of Louis XIV), tragedy, and treatment of actual problems (Letters on the English, Philosophical Dictionary, etc.) he had no superior. But it is as a prose-writer, particularly as a caustic critic of the creed of his country, that he made a reputation which filled the world and has made his name one of the most familiar even in our own time. Such sparkling wit as he had when allied with high poetic talent, profound knowledge of human nature, and rare power of construction formed an ideal equipment for the work to which he chiefly devoted his life. As in the case of Shakespeare, it is useless to write a few paragraphs about him. What little one could write would be known to the reader. Voltaire has to be read, for you cannot adequately describe the flash and sparkle of his prose. I have translated a few of his smaller pieces (Selections from Voltaire) so as to give the general reader an idea of his versatility, and several of his stories (read, especially, Candide, a satire on foolish optimism) can be had in the Big Blue Book series (Nos. B-6 and B-30). The world will never tire of reading Voltaire.

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), his contemporary (but not friend), was a constructive thinker and emotional writer. His Social Contract is a classic of sociological literature, and his Confessions is one of the most masterly autobiographies ever written, as well as one of the most candid. His Émile and The New Heloise, a treatise on education, are hardly less distinguished though now little read.

Two such writers at one time would enrich any country, but Count Buffon (1707-88) must be associated with them as a great writer as well as the most learned naturalist of his time. His Natural History, in twenty-four volumes, is a literary masterpiece as well as a scientific encyclopedia. At the same time lived Denis Diderot (1713-84) and a group of writers associated with him. Though none of these is a classic in the literary sense, the great Encyclopedia which they jointly wrote is very notable in the history of letters and thought.

A little later, during the Revolution, were Mme. de Stael, a French woman married to a Swede, whose novels were long considered to be great literature, and Chateaubriand, an orthodox Catholic, who (though I find his name omitted from most literary histories) was a writer of great power and often of rare beauty. His Genius of Christianity was certainly esteemed a classic for the next half century.

In the nineteenth century the elder Dumas (1802-70), author of The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, The Count of Monte Cristo, etc., and Victor Hugo (1802-85) inaugurated the great period of modern French literature. Hugo was an astounding literary genius, both in prose and poetry. His formidable novels, Les Miserables (an epic of the poor), The Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc., may contain all the defects which critics find in them, but they are superb conceptions and the world still reads them as classics. “George Sand” (1804-76) is not, perhaps, read outside France today, but her position in letters is very high. I might recommend her Consuelo, but it is of such length that the modern reader would despair of getting through it. Her real name was the Baroness Dudevant, though she lived apart from her husband, a woman of passionate adventures. Her friend Alfred de Musset (1810-57) wrote lyric poems of the highest quality as well as literary plays and stories.

With the activity of these we reach the period of the second Revolution in France, the middle of the nineteenth century and the list of distinguished names is long. While it is premature to say which, if any, of their works will rank as classics, Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863) wrote, besides dramas and novels, exquisite poetry of the Romantic school. “Stendhal” (really Henri Beyle, 1783-1842) had a very high reputation as writer of novels (The Chartreuse of Parma, etc.) and essays. Baudelaire (1821-67) was the second best (if not the best) French poet of the century: his book of verse Flowers of Evil is certainly a classic. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) wrote ninety powerful novels (especially the series called The Human Comedy, a natural history of contemporary life) and was a master of the short story. Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) was so high and conscientious an artist that he wrote only four perfect novels. Guy de Maupassant, Prosper Mérimée, the de Goncourt brothers (Jules and Edmond), T. Gautier, A. Daudet, Sainte-Beuve, Verlaine (poet), Zola, Rostand (dramatist), and the recently deceased Anatole France, the prince of modern story-writers, make up—without mentioning living writers—a group of brilliant writers who will long be remembered; and to these we ought to add scholars like Renan, Taine, Thiers, Michelet, etc., who were little less distinguished in literature.

Apart from Luther, we have no German writer whom we would call a classic until the second half of the nineteenth century. At the time when the influence of the Renaissance might be expected to reach and stimulate it the country was desolated by a hundred years of warfare about religion. It recovered in the years before the French Revolution and immediately there appeared two poets, Goethe and Schiller, who belong to the highest company.

Goethe (1749-1832) takes rank with Shakespeare. Intellectually—he was an ardent scientist and deep thinker as well as a great poet—he surpassed Shakespeare and, perhaps on that account, is inferior to him in the strictly poetic faculty of exquisite imagery. No other poet could have conceived the vast design of Faust, at which he worked for seventy years, and at least the opening soliloquy of Faust will always be read. His earlier or romantic style is beautifully seen in his story, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and the long novel (or pair of novels) of his later years, Wilhelm Meister, is a masterpiece. With his encyclopedic knowledge and his profound intellect Goethe gives the whole epic of humanity, as known in his day, in his work. In mid-life he came under the influence of the Greek and Roman classics, and the result may be read in his stately and beautiful long poems Tasso, Iphigenia, Hermann and Dorothea, etc. But he was masterly in all that he touched, sonnet or tragedy, story or art-criticism or scientific essay.

Schiller (1759-1805), his younger friend and contemporary, is in the stricter sense a poet and dramatist, not a thinker, though he studied philosophy and wrote a famous history of the Thirty Years War. His chief plays (Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, Don Carlos, etc.,) are classics, and his lyrics are superb. Goethe befriended and influenced him, and they composed together some brilliant satirical verses or epigrams on contemporary shams. Like Goethe he began to write in the Romantic vein, but his later and finer work shows the chaste influence of the Greek and Roman classics.

Notable amongst the predecessors or early contemporaries of Goethe was Lessing (1729-80), whose works on art (Laocoon, etc.), comedies, tragedies, and essays gave him a very high rank. Klopstock, Wieland and others, took a great part in the revival of letters in Germany, but I must be content with only a few of the great names. The works of the long and impressive line of German philosophers from Kant to Schopenhauer, cannot be treated here. They are classics of philosophy, but Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was one of the most brilliant writers of his time. He was the best German lyric writer after Goethe (see his Book of Songs), wrote superb books of travel, and had a fund of delicate irony and caustic wit that makes his prose always a delight. Greater still—the greatest German writer after Goethe—was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose volcanic and often beautiful prose-poetry is of a unique order. His best work is Thus Spake Zarathustra, a malicious choice of the austere Persian moralist Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), as the mouthpiece of his own fiery indictment of conventional moral ideas.

Italy in this period produced Count Leopardi (1798-1837), an exquisite poet of pessimism, Casanova (or Giovanni Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1803), a poet and adventurer whose memoirs (written in French) are a classic, and Mazzini, the genius of the Italian rebellion. But reaction kept back Italy until the latter part of the nineteenth century and it is no part of my plan to notice recent works. The same must be said of Spain, Portugal and Austria.

Switzerland had in H. F. Amiel (1821-81), a poet and essayist whose diary, or Intimate Journal, is a classic of its kind: a rare and beautiful expression of a mystic mind struggling with modern doubt. In the far north Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), brought Norway into the field of letters by a series of plays which made him at the time the greatest dramatist of the world. They are modern problem-plays, of advanced thought and rather somber atmosphere. Björnsen (1832-1910), his compatriot and contemporary, also made a world-reputation by his novels, dramas and poems, and won the Nobel Prize. His work does not live as that of Ibsen does, yet there were distinguished literary critics who at his death ranked him with Victor Hugo. In Denmark, a classic of a kind was produced by Hans Andersen (1805-75), the great fairytale writer.

At the same time Russia opened its literary age, with a number of brilliant novelists. Pushkin (1799-1837), Nikolai Gogol (1800-52), Ivan Turgenieff (1818-83), Feodor Dostoeffsky (1821-81), and Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), were a group of realistic novelists, poets and essayists who commanded the attention of the world. Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, at least, is another Russian work of the classic order, and Maxim Gorki sustained the brilliant tradition of story-writing in recent times.

The crowd of writers of distinction in every country now becomes embarrassing, and I must either be content with a mere list of names or omit many whom one or other critic chooses to regard as classics. The reader must bear in mind, however, that this is not a history of literature, even in outline, and for the modern period we will choose a compromise, including the names of some who will certainly not live as Vergil and Horace live today, yet omitting many quite familiar names.

I chose to begin the “modern” period with the poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), because in his work modern ideas begin to show a marked influence. There was at the time a brilliant group of Deistic writers in England, but Pope alone (who vaguely embodies their ideas in his Essay on Man, the source of countless quotations), can be called a literary classic. The Rape of the Lock was regarded by his contemporaries as his masterpiece.

Another classic of the period is the immortal boys’ story Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1659-1730). None of his other stories has lived, but his Journal of the Plague is a work of great importance. Later in the seventeenth century and early in the eighteenth, Addison and Steele were the leading English writers, and their periodicals, The Tatler and The Spectator, are classics of journalism: a very dignified and stately sort of journalism in magnificent English. Richardson (1689-1761) was the first great English novelist, and his Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison, had a high reputation. A little later, H. Fielding wrote Tom Jones, which ranked as a classic until recent times. L. Sterne (1715-68), whom some ventured to compare to Cervantes, is equally distinguished in his chief novel Tristram Shandy, and his Sentimental Journey.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), one of the most brilliant satirists, is chiefly remembered by his Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, which still circulates. He was not, as is commonly said, an Irish wit but was born in Ireland of English parents. Coarse as Gulliver is in many pages, Swift was a Dean of the Church of England. But the same looser taste is seen in most of the literature of the time: in Smollett (whose famous novel Roderick Random is based on Gil Blas); in the dramatist Sheridan (The Rivals, School for Scandal, etc.), and Beaumont and Fletcher. The poet James Thomson, author of The Seasons, and the novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), whose Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice still stand very high, and the poets Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74), author of the Deserted Village, and Thomas Gray (1716-71), author of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, show the more refined feeling of the time.

A unique place must be given to Robert Burns (1759-96), the Scottish poet and the finest lyric poet of the time in spite of his notorious intemperance. Burns is assuredly an immortal and such pieces as Tam and The Cotter’s Saturday Night are classics. Auld Lang Syne is also his. And a very different work of the eighteenth century which is unquestionably a classic of highest rank is the great work of the historian Gibbon (1757-94), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the product of twenty years of incessant labor.

The chronicle of English literature now becomes so congested with distinguished names that we must notice only the higher peaks. Classics beyond any question are the two great poets of rebellion who opened the modern period in the stricter sense of the word, Byron and Shelley. Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), was, as his title indicates, the aristocratic poet, yet owing to his critical revolt and his sympathy with rebels like the Greeks, he was ostracised by his own class (a generally immoral class, by the way), and his work has a tinge of melancholy. Childe Harold, The Prisoner of Chillon, and Manfred, his best works, are classics. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), was almost equally aristocratic in origin, yet he became the prophet of the democratic and humanitarian movement. His Prometheus Unbound is not only a magnificent expression of modern thought, but it is one of the greatest poems in literature from the purely artistic standpoint. While Byron remained romantic, Shelley, like Goethe, felt the spell of the Greek and Roman classics.

Next to these, or even above them or next to Milton, some critics put William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the leading poet of the more conservative school (with Cowper and Southey). I doubt if many English readers now read his masterpiece, The Excursion, while thousands treasure the beautiful work of John Keats (1795-1821), whose classic, Endymion, Wordsworth patronizingly called a “pretty piece of paganism.” Keats never saw Greece, and had never left London when he wrote his wonderful poems of Greek legend and life (Hyperion, Lamia, etc.). Of the British poets of the early nineteenth century, it is impossible, even in a list of classics, to ignore the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, etc., of S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834), the Lalla Rookh and Irish Melodies of T. Moore (1779-1852), and the Songs of Experience of that strange mystic-skeptic William Blake (1757-1827).

Classics of the first order are the novels (if not some of the poems) of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), of the romantic school, and Charles Dickens of early date, one of the greatest of all masters of fiction. The novels of Thackeray (1811-63), would be put by many as classics of a secondary rank, and at least the autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater of DeQuincey (1785-1859), is a classic: a unique expression of drug-inspired dreams and reveries.

We now, however, reach the Victorian Age of letters in England, and it is difficult to select. Whether Tennyson’s smooth and careful verse and Robert Browning’s rugged and intellectual poems ought to be included here may be disputed, but much of the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1857-1909), especially his Poems and Ballads and Songs Before Sunrise, has a glow of passion and a beauty of language that puts it in the highest category. The Essays of Lord Macaulay (1800-59), the Sartor Resartus (a unique philosophical diatribe), and The History of the French Revolution of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the noble prose of the Seven Lamps, Stones of Venice and Modern Painters of John Ruskin (1819-1900), the Marius the Epicurean of Walter Pater (1839-94), some of the novels of George Eliot (or Mary Ann Cross, 1819-1850), of George Meredith (1828-1909), the Way of All Flesh and Erewhon of Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Huxley’s Essays (on science and religion), and Froude’s History of England, and Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), may be selected out of the mass of fine or notable works. I again refrain from noticing living writers, but one wonders if any living British author will be read fifty years from now. Possibly, in fact, half or two-thirds of the works I have noticed in this section will gradually pass out of that select circle which contains the world’s classics. Already some whom contemporaries considered as likely to live—Trollope, Southey, Lamb, Hazlitt, Cobbett, the Bronté sisters, etc.—are mere names in the history of English literature.

This difficulty of selection presses particularly upon one when we turn to American literature. Few great American writers are old enough to have endured and passed the test of time, and American literature as a whole appears under peculiar circumstances. The reader will have noticed throughout this sketch how great poetry, especially, belongs to definite periods. We talk of the Golden Age of Greek and Latin letters, the art of the Renaissance, the Elizabethan Age, the Storm and Stress Period in Germany, and so on. These artistic periods mark a point where a new civilization has reached its full development yet has not yet become fully intellectualized, or a time when a revolution of some kind or other has entered its blood. All this was over when the United States was born. Its vast population in the nineteenth century was made up from European nations which had long since passed through their feverish periods.

The Revolution itself might be expected to inspire poetry, but a close consideration of the conditions of the time would explain why it did not. The only notable writers of the latter part of the eighteenth century are Franklin (1706-90) and Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Paine remained an Englishman and is not included in chronicles of American literature, but his spirited and superb first work, Common Sense, is essentially an expression of the American sentiment, and I prefer to include it here. His Rights of Man and Age of Reason count rather as English classics, but Paine was a cosmopolitan and would doubtless prefer to be numbered amongst American writers.

Washington Irving (1783-1859) really opens the period of distinguished American literature. His Knickerbocker History of New York, Sketch Book, and Alhambra take rank in world literature. J. Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was for decades read throughout the English-speaking world, and even beyond it, for his stories of the war with the Indians, though one would hardly call them classics of fiction. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) is the first poet of distinction, and his Thanatopsis, though early, has every mark of great poetry.

By the middle of the century America had a group of writers to compare with those of any country. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) even in his prematurely closed career achieved poetry of a very high order, especially The Raven and Other Poems. A prose-poem, Eureka, which he wrote shortly before his death should be read for the interest of his opinions. Bayard Taylor (1825-78) also wrote fine poetry (Poems of the Orient, etc.) and gave us one of the most satisfactory versions of Goethe’s Faust, a most difficult achievement.

Two early historians also must be included here: William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859), whose Ferdinand and Isabella, Conquest of Mexico, and Conquest of Peru would distinguish any writer, and are remarkable when we reflect that the author was blind, and John Lothrop Motley (1814-77), whose History of the Rise of the Dutch Republic and History of the United Netherlands are finely written works.

Of the great crowd of American writers of the next generation I would select Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) and Walt Whitman (1819-92) as the greatest from the literary point of view. Emerson’s Essays are written generally in a noble English which no English writer of the nineteenth century has surpassed. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, on the other hand, is indisputably an American classic. Even Emerson, whose moral dignity must have been shocked by many of Whitman’s sentiments, pronounced the book “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” After these, as great and distinctive writing I would give Bret Harte’s stories, Mark Twain’s works, Lowell’s Bigelow Papers, and Thoreau’s Walden and In the Maine Woods.

Amongst the poets the highest place is usually awarded to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), though the simplicity of his work which charms one critic causes others to hesitate to put him in the company of the greater poets. There is, naturally, more fire in the verse of J. G. Whittier (1807-92) who became a passionate prophet of the Abolitionist party (especially in Voices of Freedom). I prefer some of the short poems—one might almost say hymns—of Whittier and of James Russell Lowell (1818-91) to anything of Longfellow’s; though Lowell is very unequal as a poet and is, perhaps (after his historic Bigelow Papers), best known as a literary essayist.

Of the novelists of the time Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and W. D. Howells (1837-1920) are confessedly the greatest. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is a classic of American fiction. Dr. O. W. Holmes (1809-94) was not a brilliant success as a novelist, but the general thought and excellent writing of his Autocrat, Poet and Professor at the Breakfast Table keep his work on the shelves of every book-lover. Of the great orators, from Webster to Ingersoll, and the scientific and philosophical writers, we cannot give any account here.

And into the merits of more recent and living writers I, as in other sections, decline to enter. Taste changes so rapidly in our time that already our critics seem to believe that no classic was written before the twentieth century. H. G. Wells once in a conversation with me ridiculed the idea that the style of the historian Gibbon was superior to the English we write today. There is much to be said for the directness and flexibility of the modern style, when a master writes it, but on those tests few of the great works I have recorded would maintain their high positions. There are, however, objective standards of art and I have given some idea of the world’s masterpieces in all ages which rank highest by those standards.