Facts You Should Know
About the Classics

This Little Blue Book is not for students of literature, but just for folks who have not time or opportunity to read the works of the great writers of earlier days. Every thoughtful man or woman would like to know a little about them. Almost every day you read or hear an allusion to Homer or Plato, Vergil or Horace, Chaucer or Dante, and so on. You would like, if it is possible to tell you in a few simple pages, to know who these men were, in what circumstances and on what themes they wrote, what special interest or distinction the most famous plays or poems or books of each of them possesses.

By the classics we mean in literature, not merely the old Greek or Roman works, but the literary masterpieces of every age which live forever on account of their supreme art or interest. It is not good to be entirely ignorant about them: it is easy and pleasant to have a few intelligent ideas about them. About a hundred writers of the last three thousand years have earned this kind of immortality, and we will take them in order. Hence, although this small book cannot be a history of literature—I may provide one later—it will give a kind of sketch of that history and the place in it of each of the great writers who is described.

Men learned the art of writing, or began to express their ideas to each other by (at first) drawing little pictures of objects, about six thousand years ago, but none of the works which we call “classics” goes back to more than three thousand years ago. We should not expect to find many writings surviving from a date earlier than that, and as a matter of fact, except for business purposes writing was chiefly left to the priests. From ancient Egypt alone we have a few specimens of small books written by laymen; especially the Maxims of Ptah-Hotep, a very interesting series of counsels and reflections on conduct by a middle-class Egyptian of four thousand or more years ago.

This, however, is not great literature. For the older civilizations we have to consider only their religious literature, as certain collections of ritual and other sacred writings which, on the analogy of the Hebrew collection, we may call their “bibles.” The oldest is what we call The Book of the Dead of the Egyptians, parts of which go back thousands of years before Christ. It is not what we should describe as fine literature, and, as it is mainly concerned[Pg 8] with the passage of the dead to another world, which to the Egyptians meant a tiresome story of devils and spells and magic, only scholars or special students read it today.

There is nothing corresponding to this in Babylonia, where men did not take an acute religious interest in death, but amongst the mass of writings (or inscribed clay tablets) that we have found we have fragments of a remarkable semi-sacred romance, now called The Story (or Epic) of Gilgamesch, into which are woven the early religious traditions of a creation, deluge, garden of bliss, etc. In substance the story goes back five or six thousand years.

The remaining “bibles” were all written after 1000 B. C., and at least in some of their pages they are really fine literature. The Old Testament, which is certainly a literary classic in its English translation, and has some notable poetry in the Hebrew, was written, as we have it, in the fifth century before Christ, but the pieces of which it was then composed spread over several centuries before that date.

The Persian sacred book, The Avesta, is a similar compilation of religious traditions and writings, covering much the same period. But it had not, like the Old Testament, the advantage of being translated in an age when men still wrote poetical English, and it is only of historical and religious interest, as an account of the high ideals and remarkable beliefs of the ancient Persians.

The oldest Hindu writings, The Vedas, mainly a collection of hymns, belong to the same[Pg 9] period; the oldest parts (especially of the Rig Veda) may go back to 1000 B. C. There is some fine poetic writing in the earlier parts, but in the later this is succeeded by very abstract and subtle speculation which few would care to read.

The Chinese collection is called the King (which means “books” or “bible”), and it includes what are known as the Chinese classics. These are five books written by Kung-fu-tse (Confucius) and his disciples in the sixth century B. C. They are included, with the Persian and Hindu books, in the collection of translations known as The Sacred Books of the East. A good deal of early Buddhist literature also is included. But the chief interest of all these works is historical and religious, not literary, and we must pass on to Greece for the earliest works which live because of their splendid literary qualities.

The works of ancient Greece which we have are only a tithe of the works written even by the greater Greek writers, yet almost every surviving play or poem is treasured as a classic. If you draw up a list of the fifty greatest writers from the dawn of civilization to the nineteenth century, you will find that at least ten of them are Greeks. However, it was only certain parts of Greece which produced these wonderful artists, and these regions, taken together, never had a population as large as that of Chicago.

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But we cannot here go into the historical reasons for their brilliance. It is enough for my purpose to say that the earliest Greeks were semi-barbarians who filtered down into what we call Greece from the north between 2000 and 1000 B. C. When they reached the Mediterranean they came into touch with the old civilizations and were refined. Large numbers of them crossed to Asia Minor, where they mingled with the polished Cretans and Persians, and it is here that the first great Greek poets and thinkers wrote.

Homer, their first poet, was regarded by the Greeks themselves in their most learned days as their greatest poet, a unique classic; and he is still one of the greatest poets of all time. Whether there ever was an individual named Homer is disputed. Most modern scholars have held for a long time that the poems to which his name is attached were slow growths contributed to by different poets of the tenth century B. C. But this is not at all settled, and many again think that Homer was an individual Greek of wonderful poetical power in or about the tenth century B. C.

His immortal works are the Iliad and the Odyssey. These are two long “epic” poems; that is to say long poems to be recited, not sung to music, telling of glorious deeds and romantic adventures. The first deals with the closing days of the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (or Ilium) in Asia Minor by the early Greeks. The hero is Achilles, the Greek prince, who sulks in his tent after a quarrel about a beautiful girl-captive, and is at last stung into[Pg 11] action by the reverses of the Greeks and leads them on to the final destruction of Troy. Another of the chief Greek princes was Ulysses, and the Odyssey describes his wanderings over the ancient world after the fall of Troy.

Exploration in Asia Minor has discovered the remains of the city of Troy, and there is now no doubt that early Greek princes did bring their men overseas and destroy it. In the south of Greece we have found the palaces and graves of these princes, their inlaid bronze swords and golden death-masks, and we recognize the vivid realism of Homer. This great victory of the early Greeks would be the chief theme of the bards at every princes’ court, and all sorts of picturesque legends would be added to the truth. Homer weaves all these together in two great epics with masterly skill. You can see the heroes, sharply and vividly sketched, fighting their great duels, the scenes in camp and court, the dawn or the blaze of the sun on the blue Mediterranean. Much of this powerful and beautiful description is lost in translation, though the old translations by poets like Pope, Cowper and Bryant, are very fine, and the current translations, chiefly by Andrew Lang and collaborators, are excellent. Homer is next to Shakespeare, who surpasses him and all others in beautiful imagery and allegory.

The epic poem remained for two or three centuries the chief writing of the Greeks. They were then royalists with numbers of small courts of chiefs or princes where these story-poems[Pg 12] were recited. As the race advanced in civilization, “lyric” poetry (short poems sung to the accompaniment of the lyre) developed. The most interesting writer of these is the female poet Sappho, who lived in the island of Lesbos in the seventh century. Between Sappho and Homer was the great poet Hesiod (9th century), whose chief poem, Works and Days, is full of moral and religious feeling; and in the sixth and fifth centuries Pindar won a high position in Greece and wrote great numbers of songs, hymns, odes, etc. Aesop’s famous Fables also appeared in the sixth century, though many doubt if there was such a person as Aesop.

But we must confine ourselves here to the greatest names, or this book would not get beyond Greece. Two other kinds of writers arose as Greek civilization moved on toward its most brilliant days. On the one hand was a series of scientists and philosophers, but we have none of the works of these. On the other hand tragedy was born, and Greece had, in a very short period, the three greatest tragedians the world has ever known: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Tragedy, like the epic before it, and the comedy which followed it, reflects the age in which it was born: just as we get snowdrops in the spring, roses in the summer, and berries in the autumn. King’s courts were by this time abolished and the crowd of citizens had to have their entertainments. At the same time a deeper religious mood passed over Greece, and[Pg 13] in Aeschylus (born 523 B. C.) this came to inspire tragic poetry which is artistically magnificent. There was an old custom of having, on the festival of Dionysos, the god of dance and wine, a group of men quaintly dressed who danced round his altar chanting old verses. Out of this the poets created the play, and Athens built the first great theater.

Aeschylus used ancient legends of tragic happenings that seemed to have a profound and somber moral significance. Only seven of his seventy tragedies have been preserved, and as Sir Gilbert Murray has in recent years superbly translated three of the best of these (Agamemnon, Cheophori, Eumenides) an English reader can get a very good idea of his tragic grandeur. These three plays form a trilogy, or connected series, founded on the terrible legend of the curse on the house of King Agamemnon. Behind it all Aeschylus sees the action of a great mysterious principle, Fate, greater than the gods, which brings the punishment of crime. “Eumenides” means the “Avenging Fates.” Prometheus Bound, from which Shelley took the title of his great “lyrical drama,” Prometheus Unbound, is another masterpiece of this “father of tragedy.”

His rival and successor Sophocles (495-405) is considered even greater: indeed, the greatest tragic poet of all time. In fact there are experts who regard some of the masterpieces of Sophocles, such as the Antigone (which ought to be read in one of the current translations), Oedipus the King, and Electra, as the finest works that were ever written. The theme of[Pg 14] them is, as in Aeschylus, that a semi-divine Fate rules gods and men and avenges crime. Both tragedians take crime on the grand scale—murder, rape, incest, etc., in the legends of the old royal families—and the characters they create will live forever. Sophocles, of whose one hundred and thirteen plays we have only seven, is a little less somber, more humane, more polished than Aeschylus. He creates tragic grandeur out of the moral and religious feelings of the time.

The contrast of the third and latest of the trio, Euripides (480-406), is interesting. He was a cultivated man and clearly did not believe the old legends in their religious side. Skepticism was growing in Greece. But the mass of the people were religious, and Euripides was not generally popular, though eighteen of his seventy-five plays have survived. Technically he improves on his predecessors but he has not the same glow of inspiration. He took similar themes to those of his predecessors—crimes and tragedies on the royal scale—but he was a more self-conscious artist and an intellectual. If you want to see how he wrote Greek tragedy, read a translation of the Medea, which is based upon the appalling crimes and tragic adventures of that legendary queen; and, incidentally, it is one of the first pleas for a more just treatment of women. Alcestis, Iphigenia, Orestes, etc., are other masterpieces of Euripides.

Comedy was the next form invented by the Greek poets, and Aristophanes (450-380), the[Pg 15] greatest of the comedians, was a contemporary and (being very conservative) a bitter enemy of Euripides and all innovators. He satirized the growing woman-movement mercilessly in his Lysistrate and Ecclesiazusae, the philosophers in his Clouds, the democrats in his Knights, the democratic judges in his Wasps, and so on. But his wit was irresistible, and the stubborn old conservative was an idol of the Athenian people for forty years. Of his fifty plays, of which eleven survive, the Clouds (against the intellectuals and skeptics) is perhaps the best, though most mischievous. Translations of all these ancient classics can be got in the Bohn, “Everyman,” and other collections of great books.

Aristophanes was as free of speech in regard to sex as he was zealous for old creeds. A refinement of comedy came after his time, and the ablest representative of this “New Comedy,” reflecting the real domestic life of the Greeks, was “the gentle Menander.” But we have only fragments of his comedies. Aristophanes, the loosest, is the only comedian of whom entire plays have been preserved, and we must now take their tone as typically Greek. The austere moralists Sophocles and Euripides, remember, lived at the same time and were played before the same audiences.

History was a third line of development at the time, and two of the Greek historians, Herodotus (“the Father of History,” 484-425) and Thucydides (471-400) are classics. The former, who had traveled all over the civilized[Pg 16] world, wrote mainly on the clash of the Greeks and the Persians, but he brings in the whole world which he has seen. The plan is imposing, but he is not critical, and not always reliable even about countries which he visited. Thucydides chiefly describes the Peloponnesian War (with Sparta) and is terser and more faithful to facts. His work is history in the modern sense and finely written.

A classic of a different kind is the orator Demosthenes (385-322), whose Philippics (or orations against King Philip of Macedon) are perhaps his best written speeches, and are models of oratory for all time. Philip was insidiously preparing to take over Greece, and Demosthenes fierily denounced him to the apathetic people. He does not use florid rhetoric, but a terse, strong, direct, and simple speech. This and his other speeches are literary masterpieces and are, in their plain, forcible style, considered “matchless eloquence.”

Before this a long series of philosophers had begun to use the now perfected Greek language, and the works of some of these are classics. Socrates wrote nothing—Plato gives us his ideas—and the books of the great majority of them have not been preserved. Epicurus, who comes nearest of them all to modern scientific thought, wrote three hundred works, but not one of them has been preserved. We have, in fact, only the writings of Plato and Aristotle.

Plato (427-347), a pupil of the famous Socrates, mainly expressed his ideas by means of dialogues between imaginary or real Athenian[Pg 17] characters. In the Greek some of these dialogues (the Phaedo, Phaedrus, Timaeus, Critias, Symposium, etc.) are considered to belong to the finest prose-literature of the world, and the famous Greek scholar Dr. Jowett has given us a wonderful translation (in five volumes) of them all. Plato usually writes about religion and morality, but he was also the first social idealist, with very advanced views, and in his Republic he sketches an ideal commonwealth.

While Plato is the finest writer of all philosophers—and by far the easiest to read—his successor Aristotle (384-322) was the most learned man (in his time) of all writers and possibly the greatest thinker of all time. These wonderful Greeks were pioneers in everything. While some created the epic, the lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, etc., Aristotle created philosophy as a system of knowledge. The titles of his greater works (Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, Logic, Poetics, etc.—he invented these divisions of knowledge) show the vast range of his learning and thought, but his books are scarce and are read only by students of philosophy.

After the days of the philosophers Greece degenerated. The only other Greeks who could be deemed classics are the moralist and philosopher Plutarch (died 106 A. D.) and the very unmoral and witty satirist Lucian, whom we treat a little later. Plutarch’s Lives (of famous Greeks and Romans) are a biographical classic, but he was a very religious priest of[Pg 18] Apollo and wrote much also on morals, and religion. After these the only great Greek writers were of Alexandria, but these are better known in mathematics and philosophy than as literary classics. Euclid’s Geometry, certainly a classic of its kind, also belongs to Alexandria, but was written in the third century before Christ.

From what we have now seen the reader will understand, and may learn with amazement, that one of the smallest nations which ever figured prominently in history produced a remarkable proportion of the world’s greatest literature, and indeed created nearly every branch of literature. Remember, too, that the Greek classics which we have are mere fragments of the whole. Literally thousands of important works of poets, dramatists, and thinkers have perished. Let us hope that we have the finest fragments. I have given as informing an account of these as my space allows, and will only add that if any reader who has access to a public library with collections of translations wishes to know a little more, without an extensive course of study, I would advise him to read a book of Homer’s Iliad, then the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the Antigone of Sophocles, the Medea of Euripides, the Clouds of Aristophanes, a few chapters of Herodotus, one of the orations of Demosthenes, and one (the Timaeus or the Phaedo) of Plato’s Dialogues.

The Roman literature is next in time to that[Pg 19] of the Greeks and, in spite of the common misstatement that the Romans were a wholly practical and not an artistic people, it is next to it in importance. The Romans learned the fine arts from the Greeks, and at first they were content with translations of Greek works. Comedy especially appealed to them, and the first classical Roman writers were the great comedians Plautus (254-184 B. C.) and Terentius, or Terence (190-159). Plautus, using Greek and other plots, composed a hundred and thirty comedies, but only a score have survived the literary massacre of the early Middle Ages. The type of comedy he wrote may be understood from Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, which is, like many plays of the Renaissance writers, based upon the Menaechmei (a story of twins) of Plautus. Terentius, of whom we have six plays, writes purer Latin than Plautus and has more technical skill, but he has a less rich vein of comedy. He is the author of the much quoted line: “I am a man, and nothing human is foreign to me.”

Apart from these there was no Roman writer who need be mentioned here—I wish to restrict the list of names as much as possible—until the first century before Christ, when what is called the Golden Age of Roman literature began. The art, as usual, reflects the economic conditions. Rome’s conquest of the world was almost over, and the Eternal City was congested with wealth and athirst for every luxury and refinement. Within two centuries there appeared the great poets Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus, the historians Caesar, Livy, Sallust,[Pg 20] Tacitus, the satirists Martial and Juvenal, the orator and thinker Cicero, and the famous moralists Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. These are all classics, but we must confine ourselves to the chief works of the greater writers.

Vergil (70-19 B. C.) is one of the six greatest poets of all time. His chief work is inspired by Homer. It is a long epic poem (a volume in itself) describing the wanderings of Aeneas of Troy after the destruction of that city, working up the legend that he eventually reached Italy and founded Rome and the Romans. It is therefore known as The Aeneid. Vergil was so polished and conscientious a scholar that at his death he ordered the destruction of the manuscript of the great poem, as he had wished to give three further years to perfecting it before publication. The Emperor overruled his will and gave the masterpiece to the world. Vergil wrote also two series of poems of pastoral life, the Eclogues and the Georgics. He has not the greatness of Homer, but his work is so impressive that the Catholic poet Dante, twelve centuries later, took Vergil as his guide through the underworld.

The next greatest Latin poet, Horace (65-8 B. C.), is the most difficult to translate, yet in his pure humanity and praise of the common pleasures of life he comes nearest to modern sentiments. Apart from a long poem On the Art of the Poet, which is now chiefly read in Latin classes, he wrote a large number of satires, odes and letters which are exquisite[Pg 21] poetical appreciations of a life of refined pleasure. It is generally said that he is Epicurean, but the phrase is misleading. Vergil also was a follower of Epicurus—most Roman gentlemen of that age were—yet he is sternly patriotic and speaks of the old Roman gods as if he accepted them.

Somewhere about the same time—we are not sure of the date—there lived a Latin poet of distinction named Lucretius who put into a poem called On the Nature of Things the serious philosophy of Epicurus about the world and human life. It is not strictly a literary classic, though a fine poem, but it is memorable as the only complete Epicurean work which we have and the nearest to modern thought. Mr. W. H. Mallock some years ago published a very free but admirable version of it in English verse.

Returning to the greater poets of the Golden Age, we have still to consider Catullus (87-54 B. C.) and Ovid (43 B. C.-18 A. D.). We have 116 exquisite lyrical poems of Catullus, a man of leisure and wealth who largely wrote verse about love for his lady-friends. Catullus is freer in his sentiments and expressions than Horace, but the fourth great Latin poet, Ovid, was the most outspoken of them all. In the gay society of Rome he published Songs of Love, The Art of Love, and Remedies of Love. But these are so far from reflecting the whole life of Rome that Ovid was exiled for his licentious poems—the real reason is said to have been an entanglement with the Emperor’s[Pg 22] daughter—and in exile he wrote his more serious works. His masterpiece is the Metamorphoses, a mixture of history, legend and mythology in rich and very accomplished verse. Another distinguished poet of the first century is Lucan, whose Pharsalia (a poem on the civil war) has a high place in literature.

Of the historians Julius Caesar (100-44 B. C.), a very cultivated man as well as a great general, has left us Commentaries on his campaigns, especially in Gaul; plain, straightforward accounts of his actions in one of the easiest of Latin styles. Sallust (86-34) is more of a literary man as well as historian, but his chief work is lost and his Conspiracy of Catiline and War Against Jugurtha are not masterpieces.

The two most famous historians of Rome are Livy (59-17 B. C.) and Tacitus (55-117 A. D.). Livy belongs to the older Roman world, and his immense history of Rome in 142 books (only 35 of which have come down to us) is more patriotic than critical. Tacitus, on the other hand, falls in the period when the Stoic emperors raised the tone of the declining Empire. His History and Annals (of later Roman times) are both historical and literary classics: severe and very condensed (and difficult to read) in style, austerely moral in sentiment, and based on precise documents. In the Annals there is a famous reference to Christ and Nero’s persecution of the Christians, the genuineness of which is disputed. It seems to me sound enough in style but too late in date to be important.

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Cicero, the greatest Roman orator, and a statesman and philosopher, belongs to the earlier period (106-43 B. C.), the close of the Republic. His style is a standard of Latin, yet it is comparatively easy to read. His speeches (chiefly delivered in the law-court) are models of oratory, avoiding florid rhetoric and relying, like those of Demosthenes, on force of language and skill of construction. He has left us also the best philosophical essays in the Latin language—the books On Duty are most interesting from the ethical point of view—and his many letters are excellent literature and afford valuable pictures of the time.

The moralist Seneca (4 B. C.-65 A. D.) is famous for the many long essays or books which he wrote, from the severe Stoic point of view, on every aspect of virtue and vice. He wrote in the time of Nero, and thus he reminds us that the corruption of that Emperor and his circle did not extend to all Rome. A little later was Epictetus, a Greek of the Roman Empire, whose very austere Stoic sentiments were collected by his pupils and published as his Encheiridion or Manual. Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A. D.), the most virtuous of the Stoic Emperors, compiled a little volume of moral Meditations, very austere in sentiment, which is still much read, though it was rather casually written. Another famous Stoic of the time (died 117 A. D.) was the Greek orator Dion Chrysostom (“Golden-mouthed”), whose eighty extant orations, mainly delivered in Rome, are fine literary expressions of the highest ideals of the time. There was a very[Pg 24] considerable output of this severe moral literature at Rome.

More brilliant from the literary point of view were the satirists Juvenal (60-140 A. D.), and Martial (40-104). Juvenal’s Satires (five books) are famous in literature, but as pictures of Roman morals they are not now trusted. He wrote, not only as a poor man flaying the rich, but he told of the wealthy Romans of the generation before his own time. Martial has left us fourteen books of Epigrams: sprightly verses, of two or three lines each, hitting off the characters and manners of his age. He was a wealthy as well as a witty man, and his mild satires are valuable.

Pliny is the name of two Roman writers who rank as classics. The older Pliny (23 A. D.-79 A. D.) gives us a summary of the slender scientific knowledge of the Romans in his Natural History. The younger Pliny, his nephew, was the governor of a province, and his Letters (ten books) are good literature and valuable documents.

Lucian, of the second century, is rarely read today, but his witty and pungent Dialogues and his stories and essays put him in the rank of great writers. Apuleius was another witty story-writer. His Golden Ass has always been deemed a classic, though modern authorities would not permit a literal translation of it. The hero imagines himself turned into an ass by the blunder of a sorcerer and having a series of most picturesque adventures.

After the middle of the second century Rome[Pg 25] was exhausted by war and literature ceased. There were several writers of some distinction in the fourth century, but their works are not classics. The great days of pagan literature were over. The pen passed to the hands of the new Christian writers.

This section is very short because since we are dealing with literary classics, not masterpieces of theological learning, it has to tell only of two books in a space of a thousand years, from the second century to the twelfth. These two books are St. Augustine’s Confessions and City of God. You will not find translations of any others in any modern collection of literary masterpieces. Even Clement of Alexandria, the most accomplished of the great fathers of the Church, is read only by theologians. St. Jerome, in my opinion, writes the best Latin, but his writings have a purely religious interest.

Augustine (354-430) was certainly the most learned, and probably the ablest, man of his age. His early philosophical essays are not now read, and the voluminous writings or dictated works—shorthand was common in his time—of his later years interest only theologians. But the small volume in which after his conversion to Christianity he describes and bemoans his earlier years, his Confessions, is a classical autobiography. He had really very little to “confess” beyond the fact that for a time he had a lady-companion (which was not[Pg 26] then considered immoral), and the fierce light of his new asceticism causes him to write with a singular art and feeling about his youth.

In later years Augustine despised style, as most of the Christian leaders did, out of religious feeling, but he once more exerted all his art of learning in writing The City of God. The Roman Empire was in ruins and Augustine set out to prove that it mattered relatively little what became of the City of Man: that the essential thing was to be a citizen of the City of God. This idea he expands into a vast plan which includes a wonderful mass of mythology, history, and philosophy.

The Latin language was already degenerate in Augustine’s time, the schools were being closed everywhere, zeal for letters and science grew rarer and rarer. The few Christian laymen who wrote prose or verse are not mentioned even in larger sketches than this of the history of literature, and in a few centuries most of the chronicles and treatises written were of a shocking literary quality, though everybody still wrote in a sort of Latin. The only noticeable work—by no means a masterpiece—is On the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, a sixth-century Italian statesman who was put in prison and recommends all sufferers to find consolation, as he did, in Aristotle.

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[Pg 28] 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[Pg 29] 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[Pg 30] 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[Pg 31] 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[Pg 32] 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[Pg 33] 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,[Pg 34] 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[Pg 35] 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),[Pg 36] 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[Pg 37] 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.

[Pg 39]

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[Pg 40] 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[Pg 41] 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[Pg 42] 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[Pg 43] 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.

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[Pg 45] 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[Pg 46] 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[Pg 47] 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,[Pg 48] 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.

[Pg 49]

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[Pg 50] 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[Pg 51] 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[Pg 53] (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[Pg 54] 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[Pg 55] 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[Pg 56] 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[Pg 57] 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[Pg 58] 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[Pg 59] 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[Pg 60] 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.