Of What Use the Classics Today? by Jacques Barzun in 1987

From "A Jacques Barzun Reader." Copyright © 2002 by Jacques Barzun. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York, NY.

p. 412  Of What Use the Classics Today?

Obviously the first service that a classic does is to connect the past with the present by stirring up feelings akin to those that once moved human beings---people who were in part very much like ourselves and in part very unlike. That is an interesting experience in itself---as interesting as traveling to Tibet or studying the home life of the kangaroo.  It is in fact travel, travel in time as well as in space.

But before going on with the other uses of the classics, we should perhaps ask, "What 'is' a classic?"  Many definitions have been given, which involve such words as "universal" and "permanent." I distrust what they imply. The merest reflection shows that a classic in one country is hardly known in another---therefore not universal. Certainly the classics of the Far East do not exist as such in the Western world. And the Far East is not very far off---it begins in Russia, where, for instance, Pushkin's 'Eugen Onegin' is a very great classic. How many people know it over here? Only specialists, like those who know the classics of India, China, and Japan. So much for universality. As for permanence, history is there to tell us that over the centuries the great writers change in value like the dollar or the pound. Who today thinks of Cicero as a tremendous literary figure? Yet he was the idol of the Renaissance. And where was John Donne before T. S. Eliot and his followers made him their master? Shakespeare himself was canonized only 150 years ago by the Romantic poets and critics.

So our first notion about a classic should be that it is a variable designation: it is applied, or can be applied, to works that possess a certain potential of classicality. And it follows that there is no set number of classics---not one hundred or one thousand---no definitive list, even though today in the West a very small group of works have held their own for about four hundred years. This is what has given the illusion of permanence. But there are thousands of works in many languages that are or could be treated as classics.

The question, then, shifts to what makes a work potentially a classic. Here one can point with more assurance to certain features. The first is "thickness," as Henry James called it, referring not to the width of the book on the shelf, but rather to the density of its discourse: much is going on in every line or paragraph; every sentence contains an idea; the whole work covers acres of thought and feeling; whereas the ordinary book, no matter how thick in physical measurement, pegs away at one or two little matters---anything from 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' to any of the recent discussions of Japanese industry. Likewise, the poems and novels of our daily fare may be enjoyable or instructive, but they do not recast for us the whole world into a new shape. They throw a few glancing lights on what we already know or suspect.

A second mark of the classic might be called its adaptability. When first launched, it fits an existing situation, perhaps an existing demand. Homer's 'Iliad' was doubtless in request by the descendants of the conquerors of Troy. It entertained and flattered them to hear the tale of past glory, not too far in the past. Or, jumping to a much later book and a different situation, the English Civil Wars prompted Hobbes to write "The Leviathan' as a guide to political action. The work suited neither side in the struggle, but that doesn't matter---it did fit the actual predicament, though partisans could not see it.

Today, that same work fits the recurring situation of nationwide disorder and compels us to think not only about the nature of the state, but about the nature of man. For Hobbes begins with a short treatise on psychology. A classic's thickness makes it serve more than its original purpose. It is owing to this capacity that the classics come and go at different times. Shakespeare did not suit the Augustan age (relating to or denoting Latin literature of the reign of Augustus, including the works of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Livy), because he was irregular, wild, and ignorant of all that mattered to the Age of Reason.  But to the Romanticists who came next, these very defects became great qualities, and Shakespeare was rapidly promoted a classic.

The successive situations that a classic must fit are not of the same kind: the first time it is usually the state of society at the moment; later, it is probably the state of mind of artists and thinkers in search of what Coleridge called "elements that are wanted." These elements, to be sure, have some relation to society, but it is never the general public that digs out, or as we say, revives, the neglected, half-forgotten classic.

This fact leads us to the third requisite that a classic must have---another obvious one: it must gather to itself enough votes to be openly, publicly 'called' a classic. The number required is indefinite, of course, and the vote is never unanimous. There is always, about every classic, an unconvinced minority. For example, in each generation many scholars think Virgil's 'Aeneid' a feeble plagiarism of Homer, just as in the eighteenth century many believed Homer a barbaric sketch that Virgil had wonderfully perfected. Today, there are plenty of people who think Shakespeare a mediocre playwright, beginning with the theater people who produce him, since they cut, change, add, and generally spice up his plays with novelties before they let us see them on the stage. But an opposition, no matter how large, is usually silent.

One last point about classics; after a work or an author has been voted in, it is the academic community that records the vote and prolongs the term of office. Generally, one masterpiece is chosen as 'the classic' by the given author and it is made compulsory reading. Editions with notes and introductions are published and thrust into the hands of the young, who suffer or not, depending on the teacher. In either case, the label is fixed in the minds of the next generation; no doubt is possible: Shakespeare, Milton, Keats; Homer, Virgil, Dante; Twain, Melville, Poe; Dickens, Fielding, Swift are classics for the English-speaking world---today. By a further wrinkle, there is often a discrepancy between academic and what is called critical opinion. In my youth, Dickens was still read in high school, but leading critics thought him an inferior novelist. He has made a comeback, thanks to a few critics, followed by most, but not all, of the others. The main body is made up of sheep, led by a shepherd and a barking dog.

By now you are doubtless impatient to get to the further uses of the classics, beyond the first one I mentioned, that of establishing a live link with the past. To understand the next use required our going into the nature of a classic, because this second use is: to teach how to read. I mean "read" in the honorific sense of read intelligently and thoroughly. Because a classic is thick and full, and because it arose out of a past situation, it is hard to read. The mental attitude and attention that are good enough for reading the newspaper and most books will not work. We read ordinary matter by running the eye over the print at a steady rate, rarely stopping to think or wonder. The material was chosen and written precisely for this rapid, effortless pace. This easy progress is habit-forming and that is why the overwhelming majority everywhere, including most of the college educated, read only contemporary books, and of these only the read-as-you-run. In college these people may have struggled with a handful of classics and escaped unaffected, but more probably the curriculum was adapted to their tastes, and the readings in English and American literature were of the current sort. Then, once a B.A.---good-bye to all that!

But why, after all, learn to read differently by tackling the classics?  The answer is simple: in order to live in a wider world. Wider than what?  Wider than the one that comes through the routine of our material lives and through the paper and the factual magazines---Psychology Today, House and Garden, Sports Illustrated; wider also than friends' and neighbors' plans and gossip; wider especially than one's business or profession. For nothing is more narrowing than one's own shop, and it grows ever more so as one bends the mind and energies to succeed. This is particularly true today, when each profession has become a cluster of specialties continually subdividing. A lawyer is not a jurist, he is a tax lawyer, or a dab at trusts and estates. The work itself is a struggle with a mass of jargon, conventions, and numbers that have no meaning outside the specialty. The whole modern world moves among systems and abstractions superimposed on reality, a vast make-believe, though its results are real enough in one's life if one does not know and follow these ever-shifting rules of the game.

Since it is a game and a make-believe, anybody who wants access to human life and its possibilities---to thoughts and feelings as they occur natively or by deep reflection---must use another channel. One such channel can be cut by using the classics of literature and philosophy; a second can be made through the fine arts and music. I say "made" and "cut" not "found," because of that "thickness" to which I keep coming back. The great works do not yield their cargo on demand; but if one reads them with concentration (for one "reads" works of art too), the effort gives us possession of a vast store of vicarious (indirect) experience; we come face to face with the whole range of perception that mankind has attained and that is denied by our unavoidably artificial (manufactured) existence.  Through this experience we escape from the prison cell, professional or business or suburban.  It is like gaining a second life.  Dr. Johnson, who was not given to exaggeration, said that the difference between a lettered man and an unlettered was the difference between the living and the dead.  

(Johnson, Samuel (1709–84), British lexicographer, writer, critic, and conversationalist; known as Dr. Johnson.  A leading figure in the literary London of his day, he is noted particularly for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), his edition of Shakespeare (1765), and The Lives of the English Poets (1777). James Boswell's biography of Johnson records details of his life and conversation.

. . . . . . . . . . A famous anecdote makes the point. The poet Coleridge was once lecturing in London about English literature and happened to mention that Dr. Johnson, coming home one night, found a woman of the streets who had fainted and lay in the road. He picked her up and carried her on his back to his lodging, where he revived and fed her and housed her until she was well. Coleridge's fashionable audience snickered and clucked, the men amused, the women shocked. Coleridge stopped and said gravely: "I remind you of the parable of the Good Samaritan."  Ten quick words settled the murmuring. The appeal to a common cultural example, in this case from the Scriptures, had dispelled foolishness and made the crowd think and feel as one. An hour's preaching about charitableness and the virtue of forgetting conventions when human life is at stake would have had no such decisive force; it would have been explanation and apology, whereas the allusion to the Bible instantly evoked the right emotions in harness with the right ideas.

The need for a body of common knowledge and common reference does not disappear when a society is pluralistic. On the contrary, it grows more necessary, so that people of different origins and occupation may quickly find familiar ground and, as we say, speak a common language. It not only saves time and embarrassment, but it also ensures a kind of mutual confidence and goodwill. One is not addressing a stone wall, but a responsive creature whose mind is filled with the same images, memories, and vocabulary as oneself. Otherwise, with the unstoppable march of specialization, the individual mind is doomed to solitude and the individual heart to drying up. The mechanical devices that supposedly bring us together---television and the press, the telephone and the computer network---do so on a level and in a manner that are anything but nourishing to the spirit. Even the highbrow programs on television present literature and history in garbled forms; the medium requires that costume, scenery, and moving vehicles upstage philosophy. What is worth noting is that the public seems to be vaguely aware of this great void: programs high and low are falling in popularity and the suppliers are in trouble.

From one who feels deprived in this way, recourse to the classics requires nothing new; it does not call for superhuman powers. To earlier generations, books were as natural a source of information and entertainment as broadcasts are to the young today. It was the urge to learn from books that made the common people clamor for education; they were willing to pay for public schools so that everybody could read and write. Rising in the world was a strong motive, but the satisfaction of curiosity about life was another. William Dean Howells tells us in his autobiography how people felt about books in his native town on the Ohio around 1840. The river steamer would come up to the pier every so often---nobody knew exactly when---and amid goods of all kinds would unload a barrel of books. Within a few minutes these books would have been sold. The buyers were farmers and small tradesmen who had never been to high school, let alone college. Howells's self-education, like Lincoln's, came from these books.

What constitutes today the cultural heritage which formerly was automatically taken as known by people who were educated and who educated others? The quandary is real, because of the large number of classics piled up during the last five hundred years, and because the study of the languages needed to read the ancients has virtually ceased. Being troubled by this uncertainty, three thoughtful and learned persons have recently drawn up an inventory of nearly five thousand facts, names, ideas, and technical terms required for cultural literacy. that is their term for the minimum portion of the heritage they think adequate to maintain a national culture.

Having made and published the list, they are now at work on a dictionary that will explain the five thousand terms. This double effort is praiseworthy; it should call attention to the spread of a damaging ignorance. But the remedy seems more mechanical than educative. To learn "the facts" about Aristotle and Luther and Alexander Hamilton and 4,997 others, all in the air, so to speak, would be a gigantic feat of memorization, whereas to learn these facts and much else while studying history and reading the classics is by comparison very easy. The facts then stick in the mind like the names of the streets around your house: you never set out to learn them, they come as part of your direct acquaintance with the place. This difference seems to me all-important; and it points to another use of the classics: they educate you as you read---provided you read them in the right manner and at the right time. Consider this last condition: when and how should the classics enter our lives?  I have said that the classics cannot be read like a magazine article. It takes some form of compulsion to get started, and often the eager starter bogs down in difficulties. To give help, therefore, and to apply the steady pressure, coaching is necessary. Hence the classics must be met and conquered at latest in college.

At latest: the really appropriate time would be the last two years of high school, when the onset of maturing stirs feelings and thoughts about the meaning of life and the nature of society. Our obtuse (slow-witted) educational experts would be astonished to see how passionately a group of perfectly average fifteen-year-olds can be brought to discuss Machiavelli's 'Prince' or the 'Confessions of St. Augustine.'  But the opportunity is missed, and college offers the last chance of initiating the habit of reading and enjoying solid books.

Having so far sketched the advantages to be derived from the classics---their enlargement of the spirit by vicarious experience, their use as a medium of rapid and comprehensive communication, their influence in building a Self and strengthening the judgment---I am bound before closing to add a word of caution. Like all good things, the classics can be misused.

Studying the classics can wind up in mere bookishness. Their contents will have been absorbed faithfully and accurately, but the mind that holds them seems unable to get outside its acquisition and use it. If this is not due to an incurable flaw of the mind, it is due to teaching that has trained perception and left out imagination. By imagination I do not mean undirected fancy or daydreaming. I mean imagining the real, making a successful effort to reconstruct from words on a page what past lives, circumstances, and feelings were like. This ability does not come to everybody by nature, but any germ of it can be developed by practice after teaching has shown the way. It is anything but unchecked speculation.  To imagine---say---the life of a medieval serf, one's ideas must conform to a large number of facts found in the sources as well as catch somehow an impalpable (intangible, untouchable) atmosphere. Usually, one must first unlearn the many thought-cliches absorbed from miscellaneous reading, bad films, and cheap romances.

Imaginative understanding is what enables the mind to transfer its knowledge to new situations. The England of 'Tom Jones,' the Russia of 'War and Peace' are gone, but the tribulations of Tom and of Pierre can still serve as touchstones in the present, provided our imagination clearly sees how the growth of a young soul has been changed by a changed state of society and how it has remained the same.

Again, for this play of the imagination the works themselves must be read and read whole, not the summaries in reference books. Only at this price can the mind form true and distinct images. If, for example, one goes to essays or handbooks on "The Legacy of Greece," Homer, Plato, Thucydides, and the rest merge into an idyllic (Utopian) picture of a joyful pagan people, all connoisseurs of fine art and expert mathematicians. The developed imagination rejects such a picture at sight. It knows that such things cannot be, because it has acquired the power of seeing the world in three dimensions---fact, connotations (qualities), and general truth or probability.  The mind does not get stuck in the first or second position. [The mind goes all the way to the general truth or probability].

To develop in the young this power to move freely among perceptions, teachers must exhibit it themselves. They must of course know how to prevent misconceptions and how to coax and cheer the weaker spirits over the hurdles. But if they happen to be specialists, they must not abandon the readings to teach the scholarship that relates to them. Some of the results of scholarship may be brought in to shed occasional light on and around the work, but the work is there to shed its own light; it is not material for dissection or dissertation.  And everything in it may be usefully related to the world and to the Self (soul); it is the role of the imagination to forge the links.

No doubt there are dangers in this free open realm as in every other. It is easy to talk nonsense and make false connections. But the reward is not in doubt: it is pleasure, renewable at will.  That pleasure is the ultimate use of the classics. All the great judges of human existence have said so, from Milton, who called reading "conversation with the master spirits," to Virginia Woolf, who imagined the Almighty saying to St. Peter about some newcomers to heaven: "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. . . . They have loved reading."  I can only add one thing: it is always time to stop repeating the wise sayings and begin to believe them.