In addition to giving away volumes of the Classics by way of the Trivia Situation, I have been posting what I wrote about each volume as I read through the Classics in their entirety throughout 2007. Volume 51 is the last volume of the Classics, is a collection of lectures on the previous 50 Volumes. Here’s what I wrote about it at the time.
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
