Classicism

“ In the second of these processes the classic is superior.' Classicism is only the organ of a certain reason, the raison raisonnante; that which insists upon thinking with as little preparation and as much ease as possible; which is contented with what it has acquired, and takes no thought about augmenting or renewing it; which either cannot or will not embrace the plenitude and the complexity of things as they are. ”

“ This critic, then, would not confine the terms classic and classicism to the literature of Greece and Rome and to modern works conceived in the same spirit, although he acknowledges that there are certain ages of the world in which the classical tradition predominates, i.e., in which the respect for authority, the love of order and decorum, the disposition to follow rules and models, the acceptance of academic and conventional standards overbalance the desire for strangeness and novelty. ”

“ The Revolution in America, soon followed by that in France, is the historical sign of the passing of the aristocratic spirit of classicism. Freedom, equality, the destruction of the bondage that had held the common people back from education and advancement, these are the new ideas. In literature as in life a reaction broke out against the formal, stilted, unemotional style of classicism. ”

“ In the literary world these impulses have come to be known, somewhat absurdly, as romanticism and classicism. Both impulses are necessary, both must be present in every artist, and either without the other is futile. Paul Elmer More spoke for the classical tradition and carried it to the extreme of condemning everything in his own time that had real vitality. ”

“ Such an intellectual feat is likely to produce what, in the most obvious sense, one would call highly artificial work. Modern classicism must be fine-spun, and smell rather of the hothouse than the open air. ”

“ When one of the Universities undertakes to provide our colleges and schools with comments and notes on a poem so saturated with classicism as Adonais, the least that could be expected from bodies who are, as it were, the guardians of classical literature, is the provision that the classical part of the work should be done at least competently ”

“ The love of traditional forms, for example, which we have seen to be the base of classicism, exists in a certain measure in every poet, for the reason that every [Pg 45] poet employs, re-lives and renews the words of a given language, which has been historically formed, and is therefore charged with a literary tradition and full of historical meaning. ”

“ Now, come to stalwart manhood, that mighty generation, eager to speed the coming of red-blooded Romanticism and the going of cold and correct Classicism, showed itself alert in many directions, notably prolific in literature and the arts, after the sterility of so many years. ”

“ In a less question-begging proposition of single terms, classicism might be said to be method and romanticism energy. But in fact sharp distinctions of the kind do much more harm than good. It is true that the one tends to order, lucidity, proportion ”

“ He, though imbued to some extent with the old spirit of classicism, was a deep lover of nature, and the story of the struggle for the mastery between those two opposing tendencies is the story of his art and life. ”

“ The nineteenth century, having discarded the dogmas and ‘rules’ of Neo-classicism, had perforce to investigate afresh the Theory of Poetry, and though no systematic treatment of the subject in all its bearings appeared, some valuable contributions were made, the most notable of which came from the poets themselves. ”

“ To define the meaning of classicism is as difficult as it is to fix the date of its beginning. By contrasting, as we usually do, the style of that period with a later one, usually called the Romantic, by comparing the ideal of classicism with the romantic ideal of subjective expression, we get a negative rather than a positive definition ”

“ In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the canon of beauty. ”

“ This resulted in a rejection of the rules and models of neo-classicism, a new interest in the literature and manners of the Middle Ages, a conception of poetry as the expression of individuality, attention to the individual man in all orders of society, a fresh concern for external nature, an emphasis on the emotions rather than mere reason, a desire for wonder and mystery, and an exaltation of natural instincts and intuitions as opposed to general truths or social conventions. ”

“ But to keep proportion, and observe the plan, is one of those critical warnings to which Classic and Romantic alike had much better attend. In the division which I have adopted of eighteenth-century writers into those who, as adherents of Neo-Classicism, are to be treated here, and those who, as forerunners or actual exponents of Modern Criticism, are to be reserved for our next, there must necessarily be much which invites cavil, and not a little which excuses objection. ”

“ The philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and the Greek and Latin classics were the foundation of the Renaissance. The revival of learning was the revival of Athens and Sparta and of the Imperial City. Modern science is their product. To be included with the classics are modern history and literature, the philosophers, the orators, the statesmen, and poets,—Milton and Shakespeare, Lowell and Whittier,—the Farewell Address, the Reply to Hayne, the Speech at Gettysburg,—it is all these and more that I mean by the classics. They give not only power to the intellect, but direct its course of action. ”

“ Ancient literature was now welcomed, not only as supplying standards of form, but as disclosing a new conception of life; a conception freer, larger, more rational, and more joyous, than the medieval; one which gave unfettered scope to the play of the human feelings, to the sense of beauty, and to all the activities of the intellect. ”

“ Humanistic Realism.—For, even before objects were regarded as the true realities, there seems to have been an effort among some later humanists to seek for the ‘Real things’ in ideas, rather than words. ‘real things’ in the ideas that were represented by the written words. This broader type of humanism, in consequence, tended to break from a restriction to words and set forms and return to the interest in the content of classical literature that marked the Renaissance before its decline into formalism. ”

“ A literature like classical Latin, which is from first to last in statu pupillari, which, with whatever strength, deftness, elegance, even originality at times, follows in the footsteps of another literature, must for the very life of it have a critical creed of order, discipline, moderation. ”

“ The literatures of classical antiquity are no longer the only ones in which great creations of poetry in perfect beauty of form are found, or models of historical writing, or of oratorical eloquence, or of philosophical reasoning. ”

“ This realization, coinciding as it does with the entire notional concept of the beautiful, towards which the symbolic form of art strove in vain, first becomes apparent in classical art. We have already, in our previous consideration of the Idea of the beautiful and of art, outlined the general character of classic art. The Ideal supplies a content and form to classical art, which in this adequate mode in which it is embodied reveals that which true art is according to its notion. ”

“ Until quite lately, indeed, the student of history has had his attention too narrowly confined to the ages that have been preeminent for literature and art—the so-called classical ages—and thus his sense of historical perspective has been impaired. ”

“ And this fresh living stream of mythic fictions and heroic traditions which has flowed, and continues to flow, through all ages and nations in the West, proves to us, by a mighty historical experience, which determines even the most difficult problems (and this has been universally acknowledged in Christian Europe) , that all classical education—all high intellectual refinement, is and should be grounded on poetry—that is to say, on a poetry which, like the Homeric, springs out of natural feelings, and embraces the world with a clear, intuitive glance. ”

“ It means that classical literature was found best to imitate for its form. The greater classical writers had described the life of man, as they saw it, in direct and simple language, carefully ordered by art. After a long apprenticeship of translation and imitation, modern writers adopted the old forms, and filled them with modern matter. The old mythology, when it was kept, was used allegorically and allusively. Common-sense, pointedly expressed, with some p. 27traditional ornament and fable, became the matter of poetry. ”

“ Would any competent scholar deny that the history of English Literature, in its mature expression, is little less than the history of the modifications of native genius and characteristics by classical influence, that the development and peculiarities of our epic, dramatic, elegiac, didactic, pastoral, much of our lyric, of our satire and of other species of [59] our poetry is, historically speaking, unintelligible without reference to ancient classical literature? ”

“ That is why the classics—classics of all languages, classics of Greece, of Italy, of England—are for ever fresh, and can never die.
Literature, therefore, is a mass of written enlightenment concerning human beings, human hearts, and human thought. Name, if you will, any other study which could better fit a man for grappling with the problems of humanity in that portion of his life which we call public. ”

“ Certain of the arts are the nearly pure emanation and property of national genius; whilst others, in various degrees, become the property of individuals. Among the former we may reckon, first, Language, which, as far as we can judge, was more perfect in times beyond the record of literature than in later days, so that what languages we possess have been called the pieced fragments of antiquity; second, Literary forms, which also carry back their highest perfection nearly to the age of their invention ”

“ What is the knowledge of the present school-boy, in what is called classical literature, when compared with a useful instruction 'in Chemistry and the laws of Nature? Of what use to society at large is a classical scholar? or one well versed in the ancient mythologies, for this, after all, is the chief part of classical knowledge? It neither gives a polish to manners nor teaches morality. ”

“ A classical education is not now, as heretofore, the only education given; and through an honest and intense sympathy with the life of their own experience, and through a dislike to vicious associations, though clothed in classical language and classical forms, thence is it that the people have turned with a sense of relief from gods and goddesses, Ledas and Antiopes, to shepherds and shepherdesses, groups of Charity, and young ladies in the character of Innocence,—harmless, picturesque inanities, bearing the same relation to classical sculpture that Watts’s hymns bear to Homer and Sophocles. ”

“ What is permanent and universal in literature lives by the aid of no fashion of the day, but by virtue of its truth to nature. And hence is derived the authority of the ancient classics, which have been tried by time and have endured ”

“ Searching after beauty, no longer under the stern school-mistress ‘tradition’, but led by that will-o’-the-wisp ‘literary instinct’, the poets and authors under the influence of the Renaissance gradually turned from the use of Latin and Greek to that more natural medium of expression, their own language. ”

“ The classical art-type solves both these difficulties. It is, in fact, the free and adequate embodiment of the Idea in the shape which, according to its notional concept, is uniquely appropriate to the Idea itself. The Idea is consequently able to unite in free and completely assonant concord with it. For this reason the classical type of art is the first to present us with the creation and vision of the complete Ideal, and to establish the same as realized fact. ”

“ Otherwise every copy from nature, and every type of countenance, every landscape, flower, or scene, etc., which forms the purport of any representation, would be at once made classical by the agreement which it displays between form and content. On the contrary, in classical art the peculiarity of the content consists in being itself concrete idea, and, as such, the concrete spiritual; for only the spiritual is the truly inner self. ”

“ A young man just entering the domain of classical philology, and getting his first ranges over the fields of classical literature, is sure to have a distorted idea of the relative superiority of those literatures, from comparative ignorance both of other ancient and of modern literatures. ”

“ His extraordinary Voltairean production embodies all the learning of the time; and its scholar-author was a man of genius, who incorporated his learning and the fruit thereof very organically in his poem.
But here, at the close of our consideration of the mediaeval appreciation of the Classics, and the relations between the Classics and mediaeval Latin literature, we are not occupied with the very loose and general question of the amount of classical learning to be found in the vernacular literatures of western Europe. ”

“ The term Classical, used in its narrow sense, implies a servile adherence to the Unities, but in its wide and best sense, it means such a simplicity of plan, selection of actors and events, such judicious limitations on time and range of subject, as may concentrate the interest, perfect the illusion, and make the impression most distinct and forcible. ”

“ It describes classical authors as those "who have become models in any language whatever," and in all the articles which follow, the expressions, models, fixed rules for composition and style, strict rules of art to which men must conform, continually recur. That definition of classic was evidently made by the respectable Academicians, our predecessors, in face and sight of what was then called romantic—that is to say, in sight of the enemy. ”