The Whole Five Feet

Volume 47

The Shoemakers Holiday by Thomas Dekker

The Alchemist by Ben Jonson

A New Way to Pay Old Debts by Philip Massinger

Philaster by Beaumont and Fletcher

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

It's not really fair to any writer to judge him against Shakespeare, but it's probably inevitable that I would measure this second volume of English drama against the first volume, which I read last week. Most immediately, it struck me that three of the five plays in this volume are set in Elizabethan or Jacobean England. Shakespeare set only one of his plays in contemporary England. That was The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is among his weakest plays and may have been written on demand for Queen Elizabeth. Famously, Shakespeare offers little of himself in his plays; he offers equally little of his time and place. If you want a dramatic representation of Shakespeare's time, you need to turn to plays like The Shoemaker's Holiday, The Alchemist, and A New Way to Pay Old Debts.

All of these plays -- like Shakespeare's Windsor -- are comedies.  All involve cheats and cons and imposters.  The best of them is Ben Jonson's The Alchemist. In it, a man flees London to avoid the plague, and his servant and invites a charlatan and a prostitute to set up the house as an alchemist's shop. Together, the three cheat a number of Londoners -- most of them greedy or hypocritical and therefore deserving of the con. This set up allows for satirical portraits of figures from various stations of London society. In the end, everyone makes it out more or less unscathed, and the audience has a great time. But even this great comedy looks a bit trifling beside the monument of Shakespeare's tragedies, all of them set in far off times or places (as are the two tragedies in this volume).

I suspect it may have been impossible at that time to write a local, contemporary tragedy. Tragedy, in the Aristotelian sense, involves a reversal suffered by a great figure. In Elizabethan drama, great usually meant royal. It would not have done to dramatize the fall of contemporary royalty, not least because they were likely to be in the audience. One innovation of the modern era is the notion that tragedy can befall the otherwise common life, which means that an author can work with the present day without closing himself off from half the range of narrative possibilities. But the fact remains that the vast majority of the great works of narrative literature -- from the Odyssey to War and Peace -- are historical in some sense; at least, they're marked by settings that differ, in time or place or both, from the setting of their composition.

I've been thinking about this issue lately, for a number of reasons. One of them is the death of Norman Mailer, who set out so resolutely to create a picture of twentieth century America. Another is the growing genre of 9/11 novels, novels that take on the event or its aftermath in direct fashion. Both phenomenons -- the 9/11 novel and Mailer's career -- seem predicated on the idea that there is something unprecedented about our moment, and that it's part of a serious writer's job to help us make sense of it. And perhaps there is truth to the idea. But there are many things that are permanent about humanity, and these may be the most important. Certainly, they're the things that mattered to Shakespeare, which is why his plays tell us almost nothing about Elizabethan but tell us more about ourselves than a dozen contemporary novels.

--CRB, December 6, 2007

Volume 48

Thoughts, Letters, & Minor Works by Blaise Pascal

Pascal's Thoughts is one of the strangest works in the Classics.  To begin with, there is its form -- the Thoughts are really a set of notes, published posthumously, for Pascal's planned but never written Apology for the Christian Religion -- which gives the whole thing a fractured, almost Modernist feel:

60: First part: Misery of man without God.
Second part: Happiness of man with God.
Or, First part: That nature is corrupt. Proved by nature itself.
Second part: That there is a Redeemer. Proved by Scripture.

61: Order. -- I might well have taken this discourse in an order like this; to show the vanity of all conditions of men, to show the vanity of ordinary lives, and then the vanity of philosophic lives, sceptics, stoics; but the order would not have been kept. I know a little what it is, and how few people understand it. No human science can keep it. Saint Thomas did not keep it. Mathematics keep it, but they are useless on account of their depth.

62: Preface to the first part. -- To speak of those who have treated of the knowledge of self; of the divisions of Charron, which sadden and weary us; of the confusion of Montaigne; that he was quite aware of his want of method, and shunned it by jumping from subject to subject; that he sought to be fashionable.
His foolish project of describing himself! And this not casually and against his maxims, since every one makes mistakes, but by his maxims themselves, and by first and chief design. For to say silly things by chance and weakness is a common misfortune; but to say them intentionally is intolerable, and to say such as that�

63:  Montaigne. -- Montaigne's faults are great. Lewd words; this is bad, notwithstanding Mademoiselle de Gournay. Credulous; people without eyes. Ignorant; squaring the circle, a greater world. His opinions on suicide, on death. He suggests an indifference about salvation, without fear and without repentance. As his book was not written with a religious purpose, he was not bound to mention religion; but it is always our duty not to turn men from it. One can excuse his rather free and licentious opinions on some relations of life (730, 231); but one cannot excuse his thoroughly pagan views on death, for a man must renounce piety altogether, if he does not at least wish to die like a Christian. Now, through the whole of his book his only conception of death is a cowardly and effeminate one.

64:  It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.

Often such discontinuity (which, of course, wasn't ultimately intended here) can mask surprisingly banal material. But in this case, the strangeness in form is matched by a strangeness of content. Pascal is a highly unusual thinker, an odd mix of modern and ancient. He's rational and systematic like the mathematician he was, but the aim of his system is to push beyond reason. His famous wager argues logically the need to abandon logic:

If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is. This being so, who will dare to undertake the decision of the question? Not we, who have no affinity to Him...
Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separates us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions...
--Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that He is.

Pascal's Wager has become a common enough idea that we can forget what a strange thing it is, a kind of proof from belief in God that begins with the admission that there's insufficient evidence for belief. Pascal believed that reason had a place in these matters, but he believed that place was limited:

There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration. The Christian religion, which alone has reason, does not acknowledge as her true children those who believe without inspiration. It is not that she excludes reason and custom. On the contrary, the mind must be opened to proofs, must be confirmed by custom, and offer itself in humbleness to inspirations.

Pascal's belief is ultimately psychological.  He believes because, he says, The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. He was one of the first modern writers to identify that silence. But in the face of such a thing, the smart bet on a coin flip can only be so much comfort. Sometimes it seems that the very fragility of Pascal's belief combines with his terror of the alternative to cause his great fervency, not to mention his religious chauvinism. The brief aside above -- which alone has reason -- only hints at Pascal's attitudes towards Jews (the enemy), Muslims and atheists.  Finding these attitudes side-by-side with such an inspired sensibility makes reading Pascal's Thoughts a troubling experience.

But he is one of those thinkers who is more interesting, more valuable, for his faults. He writes sometimes as if from a defensive crouch, and this pose has something to teach us about the psychology of belief. (I know that William James was among the editors of the Classics, and one suspects he played a part in the choice to give Pascal a volume to himself.) It seems proper that his great work should come down to us unfinished, for the excitement of reading Pascal is in watching the process of a mind at work. He doesn't tell us truths, he embodies them.

--CRB, December 22, 2007

Volume 49

Beowulf

The Song of Roland 

The Destruction of Da Dergas Hostel 

The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs

While reading this volume of Epic and Saga, I found myself thinking how interesting it was that the Classics would essentially end -- the last two volumes are comprised of secondary material -- with some of its oldest works. But of course, these aren't anything like the oldest works in the Classics. Beowulf was written in the ninth or tenth century -- closer to the modern age than to the ancient. So why does it feel older than a work like the Aeneid, written perhaps a thousand years earlier?

In part, I'd guess, because the Aeneid came out of a literary culture, a culture that was modelled on its Greek predecessor, just as the Aeneid itself was consciously modelled after the Iliad and the Odyssey.  If anything, Beowulf bears most resemblance to the Odyssey, which is in fact the oldest work in the Classics.  Like the Homeric epics, Beowulf is of doubtful authorship and was likely compiled from oral traditions that long pre-dated it.  Indeed, the world of Beowulf -- with its epic heroes, its bonds of clan and kin, its sea-faring adventure and its intervention from monsters and giants -- bears a striking resemblance to the world of Achilles and Odysseus. If one ignores the Anglo-Saxon muscularity of the prose, many passages might have come straight from Homer.

A warrior proud
asked of the heroes their home and kin.
Whence, now, bear ye burnished shields,
harness gray and helmets grim,
spears in multitude? Messenger, I,
Hrothgar's herald! Heroes so many
ne'er met I as strangers of mood so strong.
'Tis plain that for prowess, not plunged into exile
for high-hearted valor, Hrothgar ye seek!
Him the sturdy-in-war bespake with words,
proud earl of the Weders answer made,
hardy 'neath helmet:--Hygelac's, we,
fellows at board; I am Beowulf named.
I am seeking to say to the son of Healfdene
this mission of mine, to thy master-lord,
the doughty prince, if he deign at all
grace that we greet him, the good one, now.

Of course, there's another similarity between Beowulf and the Homeric epics.  Just as the latter were the national poems of the ancient Greeks, Beowulf was (and remains) the national epic of the English people. While the Greeks form the intellectual foundation for the cultural history compiled within the Classics, the majority of the history itself is Anglo-American. (To be clear, this isn't a value judgment, but simple book-keeping: 26 of 51 volumes were originally written in English.) So it's fitting that the Classics should end here. And that this poem, which seems in so many ways primitive, should have been written centuries after the refinements of Plato or Aurelius says something at once frightening and wonderful about the cycles of human development. It warns us how much can be lost, but also reminds us of culture's incredible power to regenerate.

--CRB, December 27,  2007

Volume 50

Introduction, Reader's Guide, Index

The penultimate volume of the Classics contains Charles Eliot's introduction, a Reader's Guide, and an impressively comprehensive index. The introduction is just 12 pages, and I'd read it many times before I started reading the Classics. In fact, it was reading these few pages that made me want to take on the Shelf in the first place, so it was exciting to return to it now that I'm finishing this project up. But I was more interested in the Reader's Guide, which though also quite short I hadn't really looked at before.

There's something a little perverse about reading a guide to something as vast as the Classics after you've finished reading the thing itself. The order of the volumes was often baffling, achronological, with little continuity of theme or form. The guide leads the reader chronologically through various topics (history, religion and philosophy, education, science, politics, voyages and travels, and criticism of literature and the fine arts) and literary forms (drama, biography and letters, essays, narrative poetry and prose fiction, and poems, songs and choruses, hymns and songs) to be found in the Classics. A brief summary of each provides a context for the works listed, as well as offering a minimal sense of what the reader can expect:

With Kant and his successors philosophy becomes more a professional subject, and with an increase in depth and subtlety it loses in breadth of appeal to the world at large. Yet the treatises mentioned in this list will yield to the reader who cares to apply his mind an idea of a view of ethics of immense possibilities for influence over his thought and contact.

All of this would be extremely useful for a reader looking to pick and choose his way through the Shelf. But I was glad I held out. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster famously discouraged chronological criticisms of novels, saying that one should read as if all the novelists are at work together in a circular room. This is precisely how it felt while I was reading this year. Week by week, I jumped from Augustine to Aeschylus, from Vergil to Cervantes, and the literary tradition came to feel like a vast space through which I was moving almost at random, mapping it out as I went. The process wouldn't have been nearly as exciting if I'd studied the atlas before setting out.

--CRB, December 28, 2007

Volume 51

Lectures on the Harvard Classics 

Much of what I wrote a few days ago about the Reader's Guide applies to the lectures that comprise the last volume of the Harvard Classics. They are a kind of roadmap -- in this case, a more detailed one -- to a place I had been exploring on my own. I must say that tracing the lines of my past twelve months of reading has been a nice way to spend the few days leading up to New Year's. The best of these lectures make me eager to go back to my favorite volumes, and a few of them rise to the level of literature themselves. Here is Carleton Noyes in his introductory lecture on poetry:

A poem is a fragment of life rounded into momentary completeness. It compels the chaos of immediate sense impressions into forms of beauty, and so it builds a fairer world. It catches the rhythms that pulse at the mighty heart of things and weaves them into subtle and satisfying patterns; its verbal melodies waken in the soul dim echoes of the desired music of the spheres. It floods life with unaccustomed light. But it is illusion only in that it sees beyond the changing shows of nature and discerns the loveliness which the human spirit would fain believe is the vesture of the Eternal. Poetry is not illusion, but rather the express image of a higher reality. The poet would compass life and utterly possess it. Not as a patient observer of nature's processes, not a passive spectator of the moving play of human fate, he loves what he beholds. To him, as to a lover, the world yields something of its secret. By force of imaginative, creative vision, he sees life in its wholeness, though but for an illumined moment. Emotion and insight fuse into an image of perfection. To the poet truth reveals itself as beauty. But the revelation is never finished. Therefore all great and true poetry is the utterance of an inspiration. It is the dream of a world ever realized and yet ever to be won. In the words of one of its prophets: Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge--it is as immortal as the heart of man.

Elsewhere, in a lecture about the three volume anthology of English poetry included in the Classics, Noyes articulates something I've often thought about all of the best writing in the Shelf: For the poet is not final; nor is poetry, with the appreciator, an end in itself. In the result it sends us back to life, to possess the world more abundantly in ourselves.

Apart from these few moments, I was most interested by the extent to which these lectures are documents of their own time. They provided a picture not just of the Classics themselves but of the world -- northeastern America in the first decade of the 20th Century -- that compiled them.

Throughout my reading, I've been surprised at how much of what's essential about humanity has remains the same after three thousand years, how many of the needs and hopes and confusions of the modern age aren't especially modern at all. Perhaps there's a tendency, when reading about the distant past, to ignore the difference precisely because they are expected and to be struck instead by the similarities. But I read these lectures not as historical documents but as critical apparati that might have been written by my own college professors, and so I was struck instead by how much has changed in the past century. For example, one lecture is mostly given over to defending the fairly new practice of publically funded schools and the goal of universal education. And lectures on Economics and Political Science make not even passing mention of Marxism.

I was also interested to get a picture of the actual men who did the work of choosing the Classics and few hints at some of their prejudices. It was said several times by Eliot that he avoided 19th Century fiction only because it was more readily available to the common reader. But in a lecture on Biography by a man named William Roscoe Thayer, one reads the following:

As to the larger question of the relative value of fiction and biography, we would not dogmatize. We would no more promote biography by abolishing fiction--if it were possible--than we would magnify sculpture by dwarfing painting. And yet ... if all other records except the novels of the past century were to be destroyed, posterity five hundred years hence would have slight means of knowing the men and women through whom human evolution has really operated in our age. In no art has the process of vulgarization gone so far as in fiction. The novelist to-day dares not paint goodness or greatness; his upper limit is mediocrity; his lower is depravity, and he tends more and more to exploit the lower.

An art which, pretending to mirror life, instinctively shuts out a large province of life--an art which boasts that it alone can display human personality in all its varieties and yet becomes dumb before the highest manifestations of personality--has no right to rank among the truly universal arts--painting and sculpture, the Elizabethan drama and biography.

All the myriad novelists writing in English since 1850 have not created one character comparable to Abraham Lincoln or to Cavour nor have the romances imagined any hero to match Garibaldi. Or, to take contemporary examples, what novelist would venture to depict, even if his imagination could have conceived, a Theodore Roosevelt or a J. P. Morgan? For myself, if it were necessary, in a shipwreck, to choose between saving the Georgian novelists and Boswell's Life of Johnson, I would unhesitatingly take Boswell.

For a partisan of the novel like myself, the irony here is the dismissal -- on the grounds of being insufficiently universal -- of precisely the literary genre that first rendered the whole spectrum of human life, including the people that Thayer, with his Great Man theories of human evolution, would ignore. And I must say that if I were to modify the Classics in any way, besides updating them, my first step would be to replace a few of the memoirs and biographies with something by Jane Austen or George Eliot.

Or perhaps I wouldn't change a thing. Now that I've read all 22,000 pages of the Classics -- the whole five feet of the Five Foot Shelf -- I wouldn't wish away its eccentricities, its particular emphases and lacunae. Of course it's an incomplete picture, but it isn't final, isn't an end in itself; I can only hope that it sends me back to life, to possess the world more abundantly in myself.

--CRB, December 31, 2007