Classics

“ There is no better recreation for the mind than the study of the ancient classics. Take any one of them into your hand, be it only for half an hour, and you will feel yourself refreshed, relieved, purified, ennobled, strengthened; just as though you had quenched your thirst at some pure spring. Is this the effect of the old language and its perfect expression, or is it the greatness of the minds whose works remain unharmed and unweakened by the lapse of a thousand years? Perhaps both together. But this I know. ”

“ We have had another dish of the classics served up,—classic allusions, each one only distinguished for its lasciviousness and obscenity,—each one drawn from those portions of the classics which all decent professors in respectable colleges cause to be suppressed, as unfit for decent young men to read. ”

“ All who have at heart the best interests of literature, and welcome further the spread of a taste for the world’s classics, will welcome the appearance of this series, which will place a complete, rich and uniform library of the highest character within the reach of all. ”

“ 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 ”

“ We can understand the Sixteenth century, with its vernaculars hardly yet fully formed, with their greatest literature coming and to come, with an almost excusable distaste for the immediate past, and with the full eagerness—the honeymoon intoxication—of their intercourse with the classics upon them—we can understand this being excessive in admitting, in continuing, in caricaturing, 570the critical principles of the classics themselves. ”

“ No apologue addressed to the mature intelligence alone, or framed to fit the society of his day, is here included.
Many books which men have agreed to call classics are seldom taken down from the shelves. ”

“ "The classics are only primitive literature. They belong in the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine,"—and then throw it through the windows of a University and hide behind a fence to see the professors buzz!! ”

“ The moment we take a longer masterpiece and examine it as a representative piece of human life, or as a typical portraiture of a historical epoch, it becomes the converging point for much lively and suggestive knowledge, deep and strong social interests, and convincing personification of moral impulses. ”

“ Though the instinct for a good story, on which the interest in fiction is based, is of immemorial antiquity, and may well be as old as human speech, the novel, as we understand it, is comparatively modern. ”

“ But the essential conditions of freedom cannot be established through education; only the love of it, the understanding of it, and the power and will to use it for service can be gained from the most liberalizing of curricula. The possibility and the extension of freedom are the work of direct social and political reform. It is futile, meanwhile, to insist that liberal studies shall be all that schools shall offer. It is simple error to insist that a traditional range of studies—the classics, science, mathematics, even history, or English—provide the only possible culture for freedom. ”

“ The life of the ode is ideal, that of the epic grandiose, that of the drama real. In fine, this triple poetry springs from three grand sources—the Bible, Homer, Shakspere. Such are the diverse aspects of thought at different eras of man and society. Here are its three faces—youth, manhood, old age. Examine a single literature by itself or all literatures en masse, and you will always reach the same fact—the lyric poets before the epic, the epic before the dramatic. ”

“ The charm, then, of what is classical in art or literature is that of the well-known tale, to which we can nevertheless listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty of its form is added the accidental, tranquil charm of familiarity. ”

“ In that perfect justice, over and above the many contingent and removable beauties with which beautiful style may charm us, but which it can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availing itself of them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point, from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific, indispensable, very intellectual, beauty of literature, the possibility of which constitutes it a fine art. ”

“ This historic value of the tales, however, great as it is to the student of manners, is secondary to their poetic value, which lies in the sentiment, feeling, and pathos with which the experience of life embodied in them, the workings of simple human nature, in however debased surroundings, is set forth. ”

“ A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply the main substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions and circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with—these are the great requirements of Fiction in life and character. You must mix prose and poetry to get a good romance or even novel. The consciences of the ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no such revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own mediæval forefathers. ”

“ In any case the classic is necessarily subordinate to the new literature, the literature of pioneering and discovery, the literature of ourselves. It is the school which prepares for the stepping forth on the untrodden ways. ”

“ Finally, I have recorded the names of a small group of stories which possess, I believe, an even finer distinction—the distinction of uniting genuine substance and artistic form in a closely woven pattern with a spiritual sincerity so earnest, and a creative belief so strong, that each of these stories may fairly claim, in my opinion, a position of some permanence in our literature as a criticism of life. Stories of such quality are indicated in the year-book index by three asterisks prefixed to the title, and are also listed in a special “Roll of Honor.” ”

“ Say that the new methods in literature concentrate all styles, comedy and tragedy, description, character-drawing and dialogues, in a series of pictures set in the brilliant frame of a plot which holds the reader's interest. The Novel, which demands sentiment, style, and imagery, is the greatest creation of modern days ”

“ In two words—and we shall not object to have judgment passed in accordance with this observation on the two kinds of literature that are called classic and romantic,—regularity is the taste of mediocrity, order is the taste of genius. ”

“ Upon a thorough mental culture sit gracefully, and quite at home, philosophy, history, poetry, eloquence, music, painting—all in literature and the arts that can refine the taste, refresh the heart, and lead the fancy captive. ”

“ Not slowly to build up a grand poem of continuous ideal action, not quietly and at leisure to weave forth tissues of fantastic imagery, not perseveringly and laboriously to prosecute one track of speculation and bring it to a close, not earnestly and courageously to throw one’s whole soul into a work of moral agitation and reform, was now what was regarded as natural in literature. ”

“ These are the epic poem, the drama, and the novel. Each purports to be, in some sort, a reflex of human life and action, as obeying certain laws and tending to a certain end. In each men are represented, not as at rest, or in contemplative isolation, but in co-operation or collision. In each there is a combination of two elements, an outer element of incident, an inner of passion and character. ”

“ If it is not epoch-making, it should be. It treats in charming style and convincing manner a theme of vital and universal interest. The thoughtful man who reads it will feel that a new classic has been added to the world's literature. ”

“ It is exposed to the attractions of all kinds of subordinate and partial literature,—the fairy story, the conventional romance, the pathetic legend,—and it escapes them all by taking them all up as moments, as episodes and points of view, governed by the conception, or the comprehension, of some of the possibilities of human character in a certain form of society. ”

“ The flow is easy, the style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to prose is substantial as well as formal; the imagination is ossified, and we exchange the exuberance of legendary creativeness for the dogmatic record of fact without reality, and fiction without grace. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the drama of our time it must always remain the model. The interest of the story, the quiet art with which it is unfolded, the naturalness and soberness of the means that are used, and by which great effects are produced, the brilliancy and richness of the dialogue—all these things make it a singularly perfect and interesting work. ”

“ Such occasions, however, are the exceptions which prove the rule. Have you noticed how often there comes in the greatest literature, after the surge and passion of a mighty theme, the contrasted beauty of a quiet and measured close? ”

“ The book, itself, with all its wildness of style, is one of the most fascinating works of the century—full of splendid imagination, deep thought, and humorous insight into life, character and manners. ”

“ But there is more than the subject in our "Heroic Ballads" or our "Romances of the Round Table": there is the sentiment of the subject; and nothing, to tell the truth, is lacking to them but the sentiment of form and art. I cannot devote less than three lectures to the French poetry of the Middle Ages. ”

“ Yet truth to the conditions of man's nature and the conditions of man's life, the truth of literary art, is free of the ages. It may be told us in a carpet comedy, in a novel of adventure, or a fairy tale. ”

“ So the novel was born, expressing, though in a different way, exactly the same ideals of personality and of the dignity of common life which were later proclaimed in the American and in the French Revolution, and were welcomed with rejoicing by the poets of the romantic revival. To tell men, not about knights or kings or types of heroes, but about themselves in the guise of plain men and women, about their own thoughts and motives and struggles, and the results of actions upon their own characters,--this was the purpose of our first novelists. ”

“ The drama and the choicest forms of prose and poetry in their literary aspects furnish means of presenting great thoughts and high ideals, and, thus combined with the beauty of expression, not only furnish the best evidence of moral and intellectual progress but make a perennial source of information in modern social life. ”

“ Intelligences and emotions, relieved of all the imbecile preoccupations of civilised life, move in intricate and subtle dances, crossing and recrossing, advancing, retreating, impinging. An immense erudition and an immense fancy go hand in hand. All the ideas of the present and of the past, on every possible subject, bob up among the Tales, smile gravely or grimace a caricature of themselves, then disappear to make place for something new. ”

“ When the dramatic feeling warrants it, the humblest rise to the highest poetry. The renaissance was an age of deeper, mightier feelings than our own, and this intense life speaks in verse, for only thus can it adequately express itself. ”

“ There are many such,—dramas on the stage of history, life scenes that are pictures in action, tales pathetic, stirring, enlivening, full of the element of the unusual, of the stuff the novel and the romance are made of, yet with the advantage of being actual fact. ”

“ But the pleasures which we receive from the elegant arts, from music, sculpture, painting, and poetry, are much more various and complicated. In them (besides greatness and beauty, or forms proper to the imagination) we find interwoven frequent representations of truth, of virtue and vice, of circumstances proper to move us with laughter, or to excite in us pity, fear, and the other passions. ”

“ A wonderful literature had come into existence, not stately and classic as in the age preceding, but instinct with a new sort of life. The profoundest themes which can occupy the mind of man were handled with marvellous lightness of touch and clothed with prismatic brilliancy of speech ”

“ All beauties of language, all flights of poetry, all particular scenes and speeches, powerful and impressive as they may be, are merely subordinate. No character, how exquisitely or elaborately soever conceived and finished, is drawn for itself ”

“ The lower kinds of literature admit of more apparent and striking freshness of exterior. And perhaps the most strikingly fresh, some might even say the distinctive, product of the nineteenth century, is its prose fiction. ”

“ But it must always be remembered that in such writing as Comedy and Romance the strict rules of motivation must be relaxed, and indeed in all literature, even in Tragedy, the idealization, condensation, and heightening which are the proper methods of Art require them to be slightly modified. ”

“ In the enlightened motive, in the station of the actors, in the character of the action itself, and in its beautiful consummation, there is nothing in the archives of history, ancient or modern, nor even in the volumes of the boldest and wildest imagination, that will bear a comparison. ”

“ The classical dramatist is too sensitive to the beautiful, the sublime, the essential, and the universal to admit into his conception of fine art either moral and physical deformity or the accidental and particular aspects of life. ”

“ The complete mastery of technique, the dignity and dramatic force of the characters, the beauty of the language and clear directness of the style together with the vivid imagination needed to portray so strikingly the renaissance spirit and atmosphere, make the work one that should last. ”

“ They were the extravagances and confusions that always attend a revival, whether in art or religion. And by the general public, who can never get but one idea, and never more than one side of that idea, into its head at a time, these extravagances and side-shoots are taken for the very heart of the movement. ”