Classicist

“ He holds with the classicists that the proper study of mankind is man. He traverses in each book territory of world-wide interest. He describes what meets his eye with rapid, vivid, unconventional eloquence. ”

“ Instead of having original thoughts, and a style of their own to express them in, these high classicists are left with a profound knowledge of the style and usage of ancient authors, a thing not to be undervalued as a step in a progress, but still essentially an anteroom of the mind. ”

“ Now it is generally recognised that men are born classicists or romanticists, as they have been said to be born Platonists or Aristotelians, and that the right course for every author is to cultivate his powers in whatsoever direction Nature has assigned to them, and for every reader to strive to appreciate excellence whencesoever it comes. ”

“ I believe that the modern tendency is toward something which, for want of a better name, we may call classicism. I use the term with hesitation, for it is hardly more than analogical: we must scrupulously guard ourselves against measuring living art and mind by dead laws of order. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the beginning of his career he recognised, in common with his associates, that the contemporary classicism had run to seed, and that, beyond an effort after perfection of technique, the art of the period was all but devoid of purpose, of thought, imagination, or spirituality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The constant generality of classical expression, and the objectivity of attitude which it indicates in the worker, cannot but strike the modern student, especially if he contrasts them with the exactly opposite features of contemporary art. The classical masters aim, not at particularity and minuteness of expression, but at the congruous setting forth of certain broad types of feeling. They are jealous of proportion, vigilant to maintain the balance of the whole work, rigorous in the exclusion of any single feature that might through undue prominence distort or mar its outlines. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Growth of a feeling for ancient art.Thus the literary development of the century has been such as to draw Greek and Latin studies more and more out of scholastic isolation, and to bring them more and more into the general current of intellectual interests. A change, not less significant, has meanwhile been passing over the English appreciation of classical art. This has been, in its larger aspect, merely one branch of a movement dating from about the middle of the century, and tending to raise the level of English education in regard to art of every kind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet in these gnarled times, the classical spirit would be so inimical to the spirit of modern business that when all its ramifications have been followed through we learn that classicism would be nothing other than howling rebellion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 great difference, then, which we find between the classical and the romantic style, between ancient and modern poetry, is, that 84the one more frequently describes things as they are interesting in themselves,—the other for the sake of the associations of ideas connected with them; that the one dwells more on the immediate impressions of objects on the senses—the other on the ideas which they suggest to the imagination. ”

“ Let us rule out the enemies of the classics—those ignorant of them or prejudiced against them—and appeal to men whose sympathies and predilections are on the other side, but who have had large opportunities of observing the results of classical study eminent educators, college presidents, experienced teachers, and professors of Latin and Greek, and those who have systematically and under responsibility inquired into the general working of this kind of education. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Moreover, between the ancient times which produced the classic literature and the Carolingian period there intervened centuries of degeneracy and transition, when the Classics were used pedagogically to teach grammar and rhetoric. Then grammars were composed or revised, and other handbooks of elementary instruction. The Classics still were loved; but how shall men love beyond their own natures? Gifted Jerome, great Augustine, loved them with an ardour bringing its own misgivings. ”

“ This definition presents Classicism as the regulative and conservative principle in the history of the art, and Romanticism as the progressive, regenerative, and creative principle. It is easy to see how the notion of contest between them grew up, and the only harm which can come from [Pg 69] such a notion will ensue only if we shut our eyes to the fact that it is a contest between two elements whose very opposition stimulates life, and whose union, perfect, peaceful, mutually supplemental, is found in every really great art-work. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Is it not notorious that in each generation, from Spenser to Tennyson, from More to Froude, our leading poets and prose writers have been, with very few exceptions, men nourished on classical literature and saturated with its influence? Many entire masterpieces, much, and in some cases the greater portion, of other masterpieces, particularly in our poetry, are simply unintelligible—we are speaking, of course, of serious critical students—except to classical scholars. ”

“ 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. ”