Classicism

Dominique Secretan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351630566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1972, this book provides an overview of Classicism in literature. After an informative introduction to the term, it explores some of the periods and places in which Classicism has been prominent: the Italian Renaissance, England before and during the Restoration, Renaissance France and eighteenth-century Germany. In avoiding a rigid definition of Classicism, this book demonstrates its multiplicity and changeability across time periods, as well as its limits.

1

Introduction

In his Book of the Courtier (1528), Baldesar Castiglione shows how easy and natural it is for man to glorify the past, to say to himself that whatever his task, it could have been performed more readily in his grandfather’s time! I, too, feel tempted to think that, even fifty years ago, a clear-cut and relatively simple definition of classicism could have been offered to the reader of the day. We have become more wary of definitions; we take fewer things for granted, on trust; we tend to look ever farther back in time for the beginnings of any given literary movement, to analyse its components more thoroughly, to examine all those aspects which make it less pure. Thus we talk, for instance, of the classicism of the Romantics and the romanticism of the Classics. The picture may be said to grow at the same time more precise and less clear. Our truth is more complex than our fathers’ truth.

A further complication is added, artificially perhaps, by the decision to look at the classical periods of three countries, namely France, England and Germany (not to mention forerunners in Greece, Rome and Italy), to compare developments which were neither simultaneous, nor in any way identical, but which were nevertheless interrelated and which share a sufficient number of features for comparisons to be legitimate and worth while. This study is therefore meant to belong to the field of comparative literature.

Difficulty also arises in the choice to be made of material leading to some sort of definition of the terms classical, classicism and neo-classicism. Firstly, there is a vast amount of overlapping and repetition: it is therefore important to choose, in any given period and country, the most interesting and original utterances, such as are found in prefaces, essays, manifestos, and so on, as well as the most relevant pieces of creative writing (often plays) that either informed criticism or arose from it. Secondly, there is an equally vast amount of literature based on Greek and Roman themes, myths, plots, characters, and which can only be understood as modern variations (in the full sense of the term) on the live material of antiquity. For a writer to be inspired by Athens and Rome is not enough to be styled a classic, although most of the works we are about to scrutinize do explicitly or implicitly acknowledge these sources of inspiration.

Paradoxically, one could call nearly all Western European literature classical, for classical means first and foremost ordered and controlled, and all literature is an attempt at putting experience, large and small, in some sort of order, at rationalizing feelings, at systematizing random thought, at embellishing nature. Literature should help us understand nature, that is the world we live in, and ourselves. And yet, how much literature actually screens the reader from nature!

Traditional literary criticism teaches us to avoid over-large categories. Divide et impera, the Romans said and we comply by seeking a smaller field to which the term classical can be more meaningfully applied.

Classic, as we use it in everyday speech, means typical, exemplary (a classic case), of the highest class in its kind, and thus worthy of study and imitation, in school and otherwise; classical is chiefly used for the best writers of antiquity (as in classical scholarship); classicism: a way of writing or painting marked by serene beauty, taste, restraint, order and clarity. Sometimes the term neo-classicism is used to distinguish modern from Greek and Latin classicism. It might be preferable, as we shall see later, to reserve neo-classicism for the revival (or survival!) of classicism in the eighteenth century. Latin classis means class, group, sub-division; it is the rough equivalent of a word used by the scholars working in the famous library at Alexandria, namely canones, i.e. genres of writing, writers arranged in groups (orators, playwrights, lyric poets, etc.). French classique and classicisme are readily understood. When we say les classiques français, we normally mean the great writers who created their masterpieces in the second half of the seventeenth century, under the aegis of the Sun-King, Louis XIV. Classicism, we remember, has undertones: stale formalism, lack of spontaneity, coldness. The same can be said of the German Klassizismus. Klassisch presents no semantic problems; die grossen Klassiker denotes writers of the calibre of Goethe and Schiller. Whenever the terms just listed occur in literary history, we oppose them, mentally at least, to romantic and Romanticism, as well as to baroque (noun and adjective).

‘He who seeks to define Romanticism is entering a hazardous occupation which has claimed many victims’ (E. B. Burgum, quoted by Lilian Furst in Romanticism, ‘The Critical Idiom’). The same could be said of Classicism; and yet, there is no need for despondency. We must have definitions, even if they are hard to come by, even if they are not final or entirely satisfactory, even if they remain merely working hypotheses …

Classical is for us a convenient pointer-word for a particular attitude to life. There are, I think, two ways of looking at the human condition. The first starts with a number of questions: what is life about? where is it taking us? how can we go beyond what we already know? to what extremes can life go? how can I express the fullness of a full life? The attitude characterized by these questions and others we might call forward-looking, experimental, imaginative, fearless; it is often formless, because it does not rest anywhere, and because it is always looking for new forms of expressing new visions. It contains much of what is to be found in many traditional definitions or descriptions of Romanticism.

The other basic attitude begins with another set of questions: what has the past taught us? what do we share with the generations that have gone before us, with the nations around us? how best can we sum up what was, is and perhaps will be? what is unchanging Nature really like? We have here a mode of thinking more rational, more synthetic, more static, which tends to systematize, to accept what is of proven value, to make use of forms handed down from generation to generation. And for the purpose of this study, we shall call this second attitude classical.

In each of us there are classical and romantic elements: a sane person and one diseased (to retain Goethe’s terminology). To separate them in any individual may be a futile task, but as literature reflects these tendencies on a large scale, the distinction becomes meaningful: facets of our intimate life magnified and generalized, mirrors held up to the life of a nation. To distinguish, to grasp otherness, to become more tolerant….

Both movements under scrutiny have a past. The student of Romanticism cannot help reflecting on the impact made by the Middle Ages and the Gothic on pre-romantic and romantic writers, and, for that matter on the main stream of English literature which is not classical in essence. The student of Classicism, on the other hand, must perforce cast his eyes back to antiquity, for it is there, in Greece and Rome, that the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to a greater or lesser degree, found their sources of inspiration. Classicism always looks back, when it theorizes and when it creates. It is to the classical golden age and its lessons that we now turn.

La Bruyere, in the late seventeenth century, opened his famous Characters with the pithy statement: Tout est dit. ‘All is said (…) we can but glean after the ancients and the most skilful among the moderns’, implying the most skilful imitators of the great classics. Imitation is one of the key-words we shall come across frequently, a word our century despises, but to which, if it is correctly interpreted, we owe some very beautiful pieces of creative writing! For La Bruyere, imitation is no slavish aping, for it is possible to imitate nothing but a spirit of truth, a high degree of excellence, a faithfulness to a stable and reasonable philosophy of life. For a classic, only the fundamentals of the mind (reason, the sundry faculties, basic feelings, certain vices and virtues) remain unchanging throughout the course of time, whereas life-styles, factors external to man, moral climates, the sensitivity of successive generations, knowledge of the universe, all evolve, together with their modes of expression: ‘Horace and Despreaux (Boileau) said it before us; but I say it in my own way.’ (La Bruyere)

Many of the books we are about to encounter are not, in the words of Chesterton, ‘cold and monumental like a classical tomb’, in which might lie but an unfeeling heart!

To illustrate another important point, let us consider the fate of Theophrastus, the disciple and successor of Aristotle at the school of philosophy in Athens. From among Theophrastus’ voluminous works, only one, a slim collection of character sketches, has come down to us, but the story of the influence exerted by these Characters (written around 320 B.C.) is curious and relevant to our study.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of portrait a painter or writer can execute (omitting the further distinction between realistic, idealized and satirical portraits): the one portrays a particular and unique individual, the other describes a type. Artists in general (to introduce another very broad distinction) prefer the first kind, moralists the second, for the simple reason that the moralist (the psychologist) moves in a more overtly scientific way; he wants to pass on to his students, useful and generalized information concerning man. The same can be said of the preacher-moralist who castigates vice in general terms, by means of types: the Greedy man, the Boorish man, the Liar and so on. The characters of Theophrastus are all deviants, extremes, people who do not conform to the morality or the manners of their society, who do not conform to the Aristotelian mean of behaviour. They were meant to be studied in the class of rhetoric (rhetoric being the study of all the available means of influencing others). In other words they were to provide the orator with illustrative material, just as figures of speech, proverbs, etc., were studied for use at the appropriate moment. (The Characters is available in ‘Penguin Classics’.)

Theophrastus had many imitators and commentators both in Greece and in Rome. His method was passed on to the Scholastics in the Middle Ages, and then on to the moralists of the Renaissance. Character-writing was then known as Descriptio. Descriptio was practised in England before the first famous Latin version and commentary appeared in 1592, published in Geneva by Casaubon, a kind of latter-day Theophrastus. This was translated into English by John Healey and published in 1616. Now it could be claimed that the subsequent craze (in England and in France) for the portrait, the character, the

, was due to the mediation of Casaubon, and Healey. This however is not strictly true, for, as we have just seen, the tradition of the Descriptio had never been lost. Furthermore, the first great exponent of the genre in England, Joseph Hall, had in 1608 already brought out his Characters of Virtues and Vices.

Thus, ‘the Character, already familiar as a rhetorical form, was re-established in England as a definite gift of the ancient to the modern world, and when it entered on its hundred years of popularity, carried on it, definitely stamped, the name of Theophrastus’ (G. S. Gordon, ‘Theophrastus and his Imitators’, in English Literature and the Classics, Oxford 1912.)

My aim in mentioning the Characters is obviously not to write the history of the genre (as exemplified by Sir Thomas Overbury, John Earl, Cleveland, Butler, Addison and others (who did not necessarily all have first-hand knowledge of Theophrastus), and by La Bruyere (to whom we owe a French translation) and his predecessors and successors in France); nor to show the close links existing between the Characters and the obtaining moral theory (the Aristotelian ‘mean’, the ‘theory of humours’, the concept of ‘l’honnête homme’, of the ‘man of sense’); nor to point out the conjunction with comedy (Theophrastus–Menander; Roman moralists – Plautus and Terence; Hall and others – Ben Jonson; La Bruyère – Molière; Addison – Congreve); nor the obvious links with the essay (Bacon, Montaigne). What should be stressed is that filiations from ancient to modern are never simple or straightforward, that they simultaneously follow different routes: via texts extant, texts lost and recovered, commentaries, oral tradition, cross-fertilization, grafting of indigenous products on to classical themes. The problems of influence and filiation are always arduous, especially as writers often acknowledge unimportant sources, omit important ones and remain unaware of others. (The Romantic Maurice de Guerin never even mentioned Senancour, to whom he owed so much!)

A further point, however obvious, has to be made at this stage. In the movement under scrutiny, the classicism of the moderns, theory will appear to play an inordinately big part. The literary works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, of the Augustan age in England, of the eighteenth century in Germany, feed on the writings of theorists. Theory and practice go hand in hand, for better or worse, and many poets are also well known for their prefaces and critical essays (Dryden and Corneille, to mention but two). The reason for this marriage will become apparent as we proceed. It may be enough to say here, that what underlies classicism is partly a theory of imitation, partly an immoderate faith in Reason.

It is becoming apparent, as we circumscribe the notion of classicism, that its study is strewn with obstacles and can quite easily lead us up the proverbial garden path. The sequence of events may be misleading, with assumed filiations stated too categorically, others omitted, and works interpreted outside the moral climate which informs them or against which they stand.

Another difficulty can best be illustrated by the problems arising from what is called neo-platonism. According to J. A. Stewart (‘Platonism in English Poetry’, in English Literature and the Classics), Platonism is ‘the mood of one who has a curious eye for the endless variety of this visible and temporal world and a fine sense of its beauty, yet is haunted by the presence of an invisible and eternal world behind, or … within, the visible and temporal world, and sustaining both it and himself … from love of the visible and temporal, he is lifted up to love of the invisible and eternal world.’ This invisible world of ideas (Goodness, Truth and Beauty), this God, operates through a hierarchy of beings upon every particle of matter. Three of Plato’s works in particular, Phaedon, Symposium, and Timaeus, embody this deeply-felt idealism of the philosopher, who exerted a powerful influence on poets, thinkers, religious men, ‘Pagan, Jewish, Christian and Moslem, through the Alexandrine period and the early centuries of our era, through the dark ages – so called – through the two centuries of the dawning Renaissance, till in the latter half of the fifteenth century, with the foundation of the Platonic Academy at Florence, his personality became the object of a cult’. The dialogues ‘translated and commented on by the chief devotee of this cult, Marsilio Ficino … now began to be read in the West’. This influence is felt in Dante, Petrarch, the Renaissance poets, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne and in Wordsworth and the Romantics (perhaps even in Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes …). (It is appropriate at this point to refer the reader to Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The G...