The blight which follows sentimentality is morbidity; and one of the most important characteristics of the genuine classics is their wholesome sanity. By sanity I mean freedom from the morbid and the diseased; and the quality is one especially to be prized in these days of morbid tendencies and diseased eccentricities. There is much in many of the classics which is sufficiently coarse when measured by later and more refined standards; but even this is free from the gangrene which has developed in over-ripe civilizations. Rabelais chose the dung-hill as his pulpit; in Shakespeare and Chaucer and Homer and in the Bible there are many things which no clean-minded man would now think of saying; but there is in none of these any of that insane pruriency which is the chief claim to distinction of several notorious contemporary authors. Neither is there in classic writers the puling, sentimental, sickly way of looking at life as something all awry. The reader who sits down to the Greek poets, to Dante, to Chaucer, to Molière, to Shakespeare, to Cervantes, to Montaigne, to Milton, knows at least that he is entering an atmosphere wholesome, bracing, and manly, free alike from sentimentality and from all morbid and insane taint.
Besides a knowledge of literary language, we must from the classics gain our standards of literary judgment. This follows from what has been said of temporary and permanent interest in books. Only in the classics do we find literature reduced to its essentials. The accidental associations which cluster about any contemporary work, the fleeting value which this or that may have from accidental conditions, the obscurity into which prejudice of a particular time may throw real merit, all help to make it impossible to learn from contemporary work what is really and essentially bad or good. It is from works which may be looked at dispassionately, writings from which the accidental has been stripped by time, that we must inform ourselves what shall be the standard of merit. It is only from the classics that we may learn to discriminate the essential from the incidental, the permanent from the temporary; and thus gain a criterion by which to try the innumerable books poured upon us by the inexhaustible press of to-day.
Nor do we gain only standards of literature from the classics, but standards of life as well. In a certain sense standards of literature and of life may be said to be one, since our estimate of the truth and the value of a work of art and our judgment of the meaning and value of existence can hardly be separated. The highest object for which we study any literature being to develop character and to gain a knowledge of the conditions of being, it follows that it is for these reasons in especial that we turn to the classics. These works are the verdicts upon life which have been most generally approved by the wisest men who have lived; and they have been tested not by the experiences of one generation only, but by those of succeeding centuries. For wise, wholesome, and comprehensive living there is no better aid than a familiar, intimate, sympathetic knowledge of the classics.
[XI]
THE GREATER CLASSICS
There are, then, clear and grave reasons why the classics are worthy of the most intelligent and careful attention. The evidence supports cultivated theory rather than popular practice. We are surely right in the most exacting estimate of the place that they should hold in our lives; and in so far as we neglect them, in so far we are justly condemned by the general if vague opinion of society at large. They are the works to which apply with especial force whatever reasons there are which give value to literature; they are the means most efficient and most readily at hand for the enriching and the ennobling of life.
It is impossible here to specify to any great extent what individual books among the classics are of most importance. This has been done over and over, and it is within the scope of these talks to do little more than to consider the general relation to life of the study of literature. Some, however, are of so much prominence that it is impossible to pass them in silence. There are certain works which inevitably come to the mind as soon as one speaks of the classics at all; and of these perhaps the most prominent are the Bible, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. The Greek tragedians, Boccaccio, Molière, Cervantes, Montaigne, Spenser, Milton, Ariosto, Petrarch, Tasso, and the glorious company of other writers, such as the Elizabethan dramatists and the few really great Latin authors, it seems almost inexcusable not to discuss individually, yet they must be passed over here. The simple lists of these men and their works give to the mind of the genuine book-lover a glow as if he had drunk of generous wine. No man eager to get the most from life will pass them by; but in these talks there is not space to consider them particularly.
Although it is only with its literary values that we have at present any concern, it is somewhat difficult to speak of the Bible from a merely literary point of view. Those who regard the Bible as an inspired oracle are apt to forget that it has too a literary worth, distinct from its religious function, and they are inclined to feel somewhat shocked at any discussion which even for the moment leaves its ethical character out of account. On the other hand, those who look upon the Scriptures as the instrument of a theology of which they do not approve are apt in their hostility to be blind to the literary importance and excellence of the work. There is, too, a third class, perhaps to-day, and especially among the rising generation, the most numerous of all, who simply neglect the Bible as dull and unattractive, and made doubly so by the iteration of appeals that it be read as a religious guide. Undoubtedly this feeling has been fostered by the injudicious zeal of many of the friends of the book, who have forced the Scriptures forward until they have awakened that impulse of resistance which is the instinctive self-preservation of individuality. In all these classes for different reasons praise of the Bible is likely to awaken a feeling of opposition; yet the fact remains that from a purely literary point of view the Bible is the most important prose work in the language.
The rational attitude of the student toward the Scriptures is that which separates entirely the religious from the literary consideration. I wish to speak on the same footing to those who do and those who do not regard the Bible as a sacred book, with those who do and those who do not receive its religious teachings. Let for the moment these points be waived entirely, and there remains the splendid literary worth of this great classic; there remains the fact that it has shaped faith and fortune for the whole of Europe and America for centuries; and especially that the English version has been the most powerful of all intellectual and imaginative forces in moulding the thought and the literature of all English-speaking peoples. One may regard the theological effects of the Scriptures as altogether admirable, or one may feel that some of them have been narrowing and unfortunate; one may reject or accept the book as a religious authority; but at least one must recognize that it is not possible to enter upon the intellectual and emotional heritage of the race without being acquainted with the King James Bible.