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14THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS

TE R E was a very famous and very long-drawn-out dispute inthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which agitated notonly the world of literature but the worlds of science, religion,philosophy, the fine arts, and even classical scholarship. It wasnever decided; it involved a number of comparatively trivialpersonal enmities, temporary feuds between men and women andpedants who are now forgotten; the issues were not always clearlystated on either side; some of the protagonists missed their aim,like the Player King's Priam, 'striking too short at shadows'; andthere w as far too much emotion involved, so that the entire disputebecame a subject for laughter, and is now remembered under thesatiric titles of LA Q U E R E L L E D E S A N C I E N S ET DeS M O D E R N E S andTHE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS.1

Nevertheless, it was an important dispute. In the first place, itwas remarkable that an argument about taste should have lastedmany years and occupied much attention, for that meant that thestandards of criticism, and therefore of literature, were pitchedvery high. In the second place, the personalities interested wereamong the greatest of the time: Pascal, Boileau, Bentley, Swift.In the third place, the issues debated were of deep significance,and continue to be significant at the present day. They recur(although often disguised or misunderstood) in nearly every con-temporary discussion of education, of aesthetic criticism, and ofthe transmission of culture. The battle waged in France andEngland at the turn of the seventeenth century was only oneconflict in a great war which has been going on for 2,000 years andis still raging. It is the war between tradition and modernism;between originality and authority.

T he chronology of the affair is not of the chiefest importance.Nor are the books that marked its various stages. There were manyviolent skirmishes on minor issues; sometimes important victoriesseemed at the moment to be defeats, and the losers built a trophyand went away rejoicing. But as a test of the vitality of taste invarious European nations during the baroque age it is worthobserving that the battle started in Italy, or rather that the early

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262 14. T HE BATTLE OF THE BOOKSfrontier encounters occurred there; that the real fighting took placein France; that an interesting but secondary struggle went on inEngland; and that no other European or American country playedany part except that of spectator. Yet though the part played byEnglish writers was secondary, the works they produced were morepermanently interesting than anything which came out of France:for they included Bentley's Dissertation upon th e Epistles of Phalarisand Swift's Battle of the Books.

Later we shall survey the authors who appeared as championson one side or the other, and describe the phases of the battle.First, it is essential to analyse the issues which were being debatedand the arguments used on both sides.

The question was this. Ought modern writers to admire andimitate the great Greek and Latin writers of antiquity ? or have theclassical standards of taste now been excelled and superseded?Must we only follow along behind the ancients, trying to emulatethem and hoping at most to equal them? or can we confidentlyexpect to surpass them? The problem can be put much morebroadly. In science, in the fine arts, in civilization generally, havewe progressed beyond the Greeks and Romans ? or have we goneahead of them in some things, and fallen behind them in others ? orare we inferior to them in every respect, half-taught barbariansusing the arts of truly civilized men ?

Since the Renaissance many admirers of classical literature,charmed by the skill, beauty, and power of the best Greek andRoman writing, had assumed that it could never be really sur-passed, and that modern men should be content to respect itwithout hope of producing anything better. After the rediscoveryof Greco-Roman architecture this assumption was broadened toinclude the other arts; and it took in law, political wisdom, science,all culture. It was now attacked by the moderns on many grounds.The most important of the arguments they used were four innumber.1. The ancients were pagans; we are Christians. Therefore ourpoetry is inspired by nobler emotions and deals with nobler subjects.Therefore it is better poetry.This is a far less simple argument than it sounds. Stated inthese terms, it appears excessively naive; yet it is a thesis whichshallow minds might well accept or deny without question, anddeeper thinkers might ponder for years. Obviously the fact that

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14. THE B A T T L E OF THE BOOKS 263a bad writer is a Christian does not make him a better writer,although it should m ake him a better man. S ome books andbuildings and pictures produced by devout Christians and full ofdevout feeling have been artistically indefensible. J. K. Huys-mans, himself an ardent Catholic, believed that much Catholic artof the nineteen th century was directly inspired by the D evil, inorder to tu rn sensitive souls away from the true religion. A nd yet,in great works of art, the presence of the spirit of Christ, with itsintense psychical sensitivity, its rejection of so much human un-worthiness and inadequacy, and its moral nobility, must addgreatness; its absence leaves a spiritual lacuna which no artisticskill can compensate or conceal.T he three greatest modern heroic poems are all blends o f pag anand Christian thought, dominated by Christian ideals D ante'sComedy, Tasso's The Liberation of Jerusalem, and Milton'sParadise Lost. In them all, the Christian religion is the essentialmoving factor. But in none of them could Christianity have beenso well expressed w ithou t the pag an vehicle. D an te found noChristian teacher able to conduct him through the terrors of helland the disciplines of purgatory tow ards his spiritual love Beatricein heaven. He w as guided by the pag an poet Vergil, to w hom hispoem owes more than to any other mortal except the pagan philo-sopher A ristotle. Milton makes Jesus say, in Paradise Regained,that Greece derived its poetry and its music from the Hebrews ;2but that is not true, nor did Milton himself believe it. A t theopening of his own Paradise Lost and again later in the poem, hesummoned the aid of a Heavenly Muse, who was really the spiritof Christianity, but embodied in a pagan shape.3 There are noMuses in the psalms of D avid or the songs of the pro phe ts; nordoes Milton, except in minor details, ever copy Hebrew poetry,while Greek and Ro man literature is a constant inspiration to him .T he Rom an Catholic church and the Protestant churches havelong been internally divided on the question: D o the pagan poetsteach no thing but evil, so that they should be cast out ? or do theyteach some good, so that they can be accepted and fitted into thepattern of Christian education? S t. A ugustine thought theirbeauties were not all bad, and their wisdom not all deceit, so thatthey could be used to broaden the mind and enlarge the soul ofChristians. In A ristotelian terms, his answ er mean s tha t some ofthe pagans were potentially good, and could be formed into real

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264 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOK Sgood by being put to a Christian use. And that is how manymedieval teachers took them. Others, like St. Jerome, thought allthe pagans were bad; they were the voices of the world which Jesuscame to destroy; their very charms were evil, and Vergil was abeautiful vase full of poisonous snakes. This belief recurs againand again throughout modern history: in Savonarola, in FatherRanee, founder of the Trappists, and in many a fundamentalistpreacher to-day. (In essence, it goes back to Plato; and the counter-view goes back at least to Aristotle.) The churches, however,usually inclined towards the broader opinion, that many paganwriters were potentially valuable. The baroque period was markedby the work of many brilliant Jesuit teachers who used the classicsas 'hooks to draw souls', as well as by the steady expansion ofclassical education in Protestant countries.

2. The second argument is the most popular nowadays. It isthis. Human knowledge is constantly advancing. We live in a laterage than the Periclean Greeks and Augustan Romans: therefore w eare wiser. Therefore anything w e write, or make, is better than th ethings written and m ade by the ancient Greeks and Romans.The emotional pressure towards accepting this argument wasstrong in the Renaissance, when worlds which the ancients hadnever seen were being discovered every generation, every decade:worlds in the far west, in the antipodes, in the sky. But in theRenaissance the discovery of the great classical books was still toonew to allow men to vaunt one achievement of thought and willabove the other. All the discoveries were equally wonderful: thenew world of unknown nations and strange animals found byColumbus, the new worlds revealed by science, and the new worldof subtle writing and trenchant psychology and glorious mythcreated by antiquity. In the baroque age, on the other hand, theclassics were growing familiar, especially the Latin classics, lessdaring than the Greeks. Their thoughts had so long been currentthat their majesty had become customary and their daring hadbeen equalled. Meanwhile, the science of the ancients, Vitruviusthe architect, Hippocrates the doctor, and the few others, had beenexamined, equalled, surpassed, and discarded; while the self-perpetuating fertility of modern experimental science was assertingitself more emphatically every year. Men forgot that Lucretius andhis master Epicurus and Epicurus' master Democritus had knownthat matter was constructed of atoms; men forgot that the Greeks

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1 4 . T HE B A T T L E OF T HE BOOKS 265had inferred, by thought alone, that the planets revolved roundthe sun; men forgot that Hippocrates had laid the foundat ions ofmedicine. They saw that, by experiments which had never beenconceived before, modern men had found out things which hadnever been proved or believed possible of proof. They concludedtherefore that civilized humanity as a whole had become better,and that their moral conduct, their arts, and their political intelli-gence had improved also. This is now the commonest attitude tothe question, and looks like being the most persistent. Thediagram of hum an history which most E uropean an d A mericanschoolchildren have in their heads is simple. It is a line, like theline on a graph, rising continuously at a 45 angle, from the cave-men, through ancient Egypt, past Greece and Rome, through anebulou s M iddle A ge, past the Renaissance, upw ards , ever up-wards , to the ult imate splendour of to-day. Much of this belief,however, is false. Sir Richard Livingstone sums it up thus: wethink we are better than the Greeks, because, although we couldnot write the superb tragic trilogy, the Oresteia, we can broad-cast it.Yet part of this modern optimism is true and justified. Theancients never believed in the noblest and most ennobling ideal ofmodern sciencethat man can change and improve nature. Theabolition of disease; the curtailment of labour ; the suppression ofphysical pain; the conquest of distance, planetary and inter-plan etary; pen etrat ion of the heights and the depths, the desertsand the poles; interrogation of nature far beyond the limits of ourown senses, and the construction of machinery to continue thatquestioning and then change the answers into actsthese magni-ficent achievements have given mo dern man a new freedom w hichraises him higher above the animals, and allows him, with justice,to boast of being wiser than his ancestors.But the argument is false when applied to art, and particularlyfalse when applied to literature. (In philosophy it is highlyquestionable, and in politics and social science it cannot beaccepted without careful examination.) Great works of art are notproduced by knowledge of the type which can be accumulatedwith the lapse of time, can grow richer with succeeding genera-tions, and can then be assimilated by each new generation withoutdifficulty. T he material and the media of art are the human souland its activities. The human soul may change, but it does not

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366 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKSappear to grow any greater or more complex from generation togeneration, nor does our knowledge of it increase very markedlyfrom age to age. One proof of this is that the ordinary problemsof living, which have been faced by every man and woman, are noless difficult to-day than they were 2,000 years ago: although, ifthe argument from scientific progress were universally true, weought to have enough knowledge at our disposal to enable us tosolve the great questions of education, and politics, and marriage,and moral conduct generally, without anything like the per-plexities of our forefathers. In one of his finest poems Housmancomforts himself by the same sad reflection.4 Watching the stormblowing over Wenlock Edge, he remembers that the Romans oncehad a city there.

Then, 'twas before my time, the RomanA t yonder heaving hill would stare:T he blood that warms an English yeoman,T he thoughts that hurt him, they were there.There, like the wind through woods in riot,Through him the gale of life blew high;T he tree of man was never quiet:Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

And is it not truer to say that to-day our scientific progress hasmade the problems of life not easier, but more difficult ? Now thatwe have learnt to change the world, the world has become lessstable, so that it is more difficult to understand: new problems areconstantly arising, for which no clear precedents exist. And ournaive confidence in applied science has to some extent dissuadedthe common man from thinking out problems of conduct asearnestly as our forefathers did, in conversation, in public debate,in meditation, and in prayer.

To the assertion that man has progressed through the accumu-lation of scientific knowledge there is a counter-argument whichis sometimes overlooked. This is that many arts and crafts havebeen forgotten during the past centuries, crafts of great value, sothat our scientific advance has been partly offset by the loss ofuseful knowledge. Some such crafts were the property of skilledtradesmen, who never wrote their secrets down; others were partof the mass of folk-lore which has only recently perished; othersagain were the result of generations of skilled practice in work that

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1 4. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 267is now done, more copiously but not always more satisfactorily,by machinery. For example, the pharmacopoeia could be greatlyenlarged if some of the valuable herbal remedies known to countryfolk a few generations ago were available;but many have been lost.The art of oratory was studied by the ancients for many centuries.During that time they discovered thousands of facts about appliedpsychology, about propaganda, about the relation between thought,artifice, and emotion, about the use of spoken languagefactswhich became part of a general tradition of rhetorical training, andwere lost in the Dark Ages. Men make speeches to-day, and stillmove their hearers; but they cannot calculate their results sosurely, and the speeches themselves have a narrower influencethan those of the great classical orators because the rules of thecraft have been forgotten.5

Even if we know more than the ancients, does that prove thatwe are better ? Does it not mean that they did the great work, andthat we only use it, adding a little here and there ? This objectionw as put very forcefully by the twelfth-century philosopher Bernardof Chartres, in the famous phrase, 'We are dwarfs standing on theshoulders of giants.'6 However, it was taken up and turned round,wittily though falsely, by the partisans of the modern side in theBattle of the Books. They pointed out that we ought not to callPlato and Vergil 'ancients' and think of ourselves as their youngsuccessors. Compared with us, Plato and Vergil and their con-temporaries are young. We are the ancients. The world isgrowingup all the time.7

Now, this is the commonest modern assumption, and it is onein which the deepest fallacy lies. The assumption is that the wholeof human civilization can be compared to the life of a man or ananimalas a continuous process in which one single organismbecomes steadily more mature.8 It is the great merit of Spenglerto have shown, in The Decline and Fall of the West, that this isfalse, because it is over-simplified. Toynbee, in his Study ofHistory, has elaborated and strengthened the view which Spenglerstated. This view is that civilization all over the world, or for thatmatter civilization in Europe, is not one continuous process buta number of different processes. D ifferent societies, groups ofraces, grow up at different times, forming separate civilizations(he calls them 'cultures', but he means the set of activities we callcivilizations). At any given moment there may be three or four

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268 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKSdifferent civilizations alive at once, all of different ages. Therehave been several in the past, which have died or been destroyed.One civilization can come into contact with another, can destroyit or imitate it or learn from it. But one civilization does not growout of another and surpass it, any more than one full-size treegrows out of the top branches of another. Spengler proceeds toinfer that the growth, maturity, and decay of all the differentcivilizations follow the same rhythmic pattern, and manifest them-selves in comparable intellectual, social, and artistic phenomena.Thus he says that our present time is preparing for 'the era ofwarring Caesarisms'a name he devised as early as the FirstWorld War, before the emergence of Mussolini, Hitler, and thoseothersand says it is contemporary with the Hyksos period inEgypt (c. 1680 B.C.), the Hellenistic period in Greco-Romancivilization (300-100 B.C.), and the age of the contending states inChina (480-230 B.C.). (One of the smaller, but not less striking,aspects of this theory is that it helps to explain the sympathy whichmen of one civilization often feel for their 'contemporaries' inanother, and the repulsion or lack of understanding with whichthey confront art or thought of a period too early or too late forthem to grasp. For instance, Tacitus was a great historian; but wehave not yet arrived at the period when we can fully appreciate hisspiritual attitude and his strange style, because he belonged to anage later than ourselves; while the mystery religions of antiquity,the stories of the saints in primitive Christianity, and the religiousbeliefs of more recent 'primitives' such as the founders of Mor-monism are too early for most of us to understand nowadays.)If this theory is true, the moderns in the Battle of the Books weremistaken in saying that they were later than the Greeks andRomans, and therefore wiser. They were later in absolute time,but not in relative time. Spengler holds that, on the chart of thegrowth of civilizations, they were at an earlier stage. Louis XIVlooks l ike Augustus Caesar; his poets read like the Augustan poets;and the Louvre corresponded to Augustus' reconstruction ofcentral Rome. But both the monarch and the arts of seventeenth-century France look less mature than those of Augustan Rome.

And apart from theories, the cold facts of history are enough todisprove the argument. The development of civilization has notbeen continuous since the flourishing of Greco-Roman culture.It has been interrupted. It has been set back many centuries by

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14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 269wars, savages, and plagues. T he European of the tenth centuryA . D . was not ten centuries in advance of the European of the firstcentury B . C . , but, in everything but religion, many centuries behindhim.3. Some of the participants in the battle used a third argument,which dovetails with the second. It was put succinctly by Per-rault, in the sentence Nature does not change.9 T he lions of to-dayare no less fierce than those of the days of A ugustus Caesar; rosessmell no less sweetly; men are no taller nor shorter. Therefore theworks of men are as good to-day as they were in classical times.This argument also is at least half-true . T he great things of life,out of which art arises, change very little: love, sin, the quest fo rhonour, the fear of death, the lust fo r power, the pleasures of thesenses, the admiration of nature , and the awe of God . Yet thatdoes not prove that, in all times and places, men are equally skilfulat making works of art out of this material. A rt is a function ofsociety. T he ability of men to create works of art out of theseuniversal subjects depends largely on the character of the societiesin which they live: their economic structure, their intellectualdevelopment, their political history, their contacts with othercivilizations, their religion and their morality, the distribution oftheir population between various classes and occupations and typesof dw elling-p lace, even the clim ate they enjoy . E veryone has avoice and can sing; people are always singing; but the art of song,and the craft of writing solo or choral music, take long to develop,and reach a high level only in special periods and places. Through-out history men have enjoyed looking at beautiful women (andbeautiful women have enjoyed being looked at). But in Islam it isagainst the law of the Prophet to make a representation of anyliving thing, so there are no A rabian artists com para ble to Gior-gione or Rubens. In colonial A merica it was indecent to pain tnudes, money was not plentiful enough to support schools of art,and life was often ha rd : so there are no colonial A merican picturesof women comparable to those by the contemporary Frenchpainters Boucher and Fragonard. At al l times men can producegreat works of art ; but sometimes the impulse and often thenecessary social conditions and skills are absent, and w ithout themit is impossible. T he argument therefore neither proves nor dis-proves the primacy of classical art and literature.4. The fourth argument is the argument from taste. Many

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27 0 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKSmodernists, as well as defending contemporary art, reversed thecharge and attacked the classics, saying that they were badlywritten and fundamentally illogical.

This is a consequence of, and a natural reaction to, an exag-gerated admiration of the classics. It is painful to be told thatHomer is absolutely above criticism, that Vergil's Aeneid is theperfect poem; and such assertions always provoke a revolt. Asearly as the fourth century Plato was breaking down the belief thatHomer's teachings were always right and always noble.10 OrthodoxGreek thinkers declared Homer to be a repository of all knownwisdom (a theory amusingly burlesqued by Swift in A Tale of aTub); and among them up rose Zoilus, who tore the Iliad and theOdyssey to pieces for bad taste and improbability. A commonexpression of this reaction is parody. Parody was common inantiquity, particularly among the Sceptic and Cynic philosophers,who used, by parodying Homer's greatest lines, to attack hisauthority, and through him the inviolability of tradition and con-vention. Epic parody began again in the Renaissance as soon asmen became really familiar with the Aeneid, and has continueduntil very recently. One of the earliest -attacks on the authority ofthe classics, introducing the Battle of the Books, was Tassoni'sMiscellaneous Thoughts . Now, Tassoni (1565-1635) was the authorof a good and celebrated epic parody, The Ravished Bucket (Lasecchia rapita), a mock-heroic poem about a war between Modenaand Bologna which broke out in the thirteenth century, and whichwas actually caused by the theft of a bucket belonging to a Bolo-gnese. This was copied by Boileau in The Lectern and then throughhim by Pope in The Rape of the Lock. Just before the battle beganin France, Scarron had a considerable success with two suchparodies, Typhon or the Battle of the Giants (1644) and Vergiltravestied (1648-53, on an Italian model), and he was followed byothers. Two of the most amusing books produced during thedispute were similar epic parodies: Francois de Callieres's PoeticHistory of the War lately declared between the Ancients and theModerns (1688), and Jonathan Swift's The Battle of the Books(1697-8, published in 1704).This attack on the classics has two chief aspects, which aresometimes confused. Briefly, it consists in saying that the Greekand Roman writers are either silly, or vulgar, sometimes both.

For example, their dramatic conventionssuch as the introduc-

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14. T HE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 271tion of gods into human conflictsare described as stupid. Lucanthought so as early as the first century A.D. , and (to outdo Vergil)wrote an epic which makes no use of divine characters. It will berecalled that the forger who produced 'Dares Phrygius' said it wasauthentic because no gods appeared and intervened in the .action(pp. 51-2). In this part of the argument the moderns seem to havethe advantage. Still, it is difficult to write on sublime subjectswithout introducing the supernatural, and in a critical age theappearance of tangible and audible divinities can always be madeto look ridiculous. The most ambitious works on this scale pro-duced in modern times already look a good deal the worse for wear:Hardy's The Dynasts and Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelungs.Again , the early history and legends of Greece and Rome, whenread without historical and imaginative perspective, contain manyabsurd inconsistencies. In an age of myths, when an exceptionallybrave man or beautiful woman becomes famous, stories from thelives of other people are soon attached to the name of the hero orheroine, whether they fit in with the rest of the facts or not. Littlelocal deities are, through time, identified with well-known gods andgoddesses, who thus acquire many different and often paradoxicalcharacters. When all the legends are written down, some of themare obviously contradictory. It is easy for a strict rationalist toconclude therefore that they are all nonsense. Pierre Bayle wasamong those who took this view. He calculated that (on theassumption that all the legends about Helen of Troy were true)she must have been at least sixty, and probably 100, at the time ofthe Trojan warscarcely worth fighting for.11Similarly, the stylistic mannerisms of the classical poets can becriticized: Perrault and his friends used to have great fun parody-ing the long Homeric similes, with their irrelevant conclusions.And the sequence of ideas in classical poetry can sometimes bedescribed as naive or unreasonable. Perrault in his Parallelbetweenth e Ancients and the Moderns12 tells an excellent story about anadmirer of the classics who was praising Pindar with enormousenthusiasm, and recited the first few lines of the first Olympianode, with great feeling, in Greek. His wife asked him what it wasall about. He said it would lose all its nobility in translation, butshe pressed him. So he translated:

'Water is indeed very good, and geld which shines like blazing firein the night is far better than all the riches which make men proud.

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272 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKSBut, my spirit, if you desire to sing of contests, do not look for any starbrighter than the sun during the day in the empty heavens, nor let ussing any contest more illustrious than Olympia.'She listened to this, and then said 'You are making fun of me.You have made up all this nonsense for a joke ; but you can't foolme so easily.' A nd although her husband kept trying to explainthat he was giving her a plain literal translation, she insisted thatthe ancients were not so stupid as to write stuff like that.But are the ancients vulgar ? The second aspect of the argumentis one of much interest and importance. In brief it is this. T heclassical poets are vulgar, because they describe common thingsand use undignified w ord s; their heroes and heroines give way toviolent emotions, and even work with their hands. Modern poets,of the age of Louis XIV, do not write of such things: thereforemodern poets are superior. Perrault scoffs at Homer for describinga princess going dow n to the river w ith her ma ids-of-ho nour to doher brothers' laundry;13 Lord Chesterfield, a most gentlemanlypersonage, raised his eyebrows at 'the porter-like language ofHomer's heroes' ;

14readers of refined taste and aristocratic sensi-bilities were deeply and genuinely shocked at the very mention ofsuch things as domestic animals and household utensilsor, toput it with Homeric bluntness, cows and cooking-pots.15 One ofthe passages mo st generally objected to was the fam ous simile inHomer where the hero Ajax , slowly retreating un der heavy T rojanattacks, is compared with a donkey which has strayed into a fieldand is stubbornly eating the grain, while boys beat it with

sticks to make it move on.16 The very word 'donkey', said themodernists, could not be admitted into heroic poetry; and it wasineffably vulgar to compare a prince to an ass. The poet of theOdyssey was even worse when he described Odysseus' palace ashaving a du ng hill at its gate.17 T he general attitude of these criticsresembled that of the old Victorian lady who went to see SarahBernhardt in Antony and Cleopatra, and, after watching herlanguish with love, storm with passion, and rave with despair,murmured 'How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!'The answer to this argument is twofold. In the first place (asT asso observed), 'those who are accustomed to the refinem ents ofthe present day despise these customs as old-fashioned and obso-lete'.18 There is really nothing disgraceful for a princess in super-intending the washing particularly since Nausicaa is not described

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14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 273as doing any dirty work, but rather making a trip to the riversidewith her maidens as a sort of gay picnic, more real and not lesscharming tha n A rcadia. T he manners and customs of the Homericepics are indeed primitive, but they are nobly primitive, and onlya very limited mind can despise them as gross.On the other hand, words and images drawn from ordinary lifeare sometimes used in classical literature ; altho ug h not in all of it.(The historian Tacitus, fo r instance, deliberately avoids calling aspade a spade, and uses the periphrasis ' things by which earth isextracted'; he will not even use the common word 'taverns' for thepubs where Nero went on his night excursions, but calls them'resorts' or 'restaurants'19) . But what th e baro que critics did notrealize is that, even in Homer, the vulgar words to which theyobjected were carefully chosen and sparingly used. For instance,'donk ey' occurs only once in all the Homeric epics, in the image ofAjax retreating; and immediately before it the poet compares Ajaxto a lion at bayalthough he seldom uses double comparisons.W hat Homer m eant, therefore, was that Ajax was as brave as a lionand as stubborn as an ass; that his bravery and his stubbornnesswere closely connected aspects of his personality. This is comic.Hom er meant it to be so. But it is true to life. T o omit such bravestubborn soldiers from a poem about war would be to falsify thepoem. Ajax is a comic hero, the only one in the epicalthoughboth Nestor and Paris have a hum oro us side. A s for Odysseus, hisadventures during his return go far beyond anything in the Iliad.Odysseus is extremely clever, and utterly determ ined . He will gethome in spite of every kind of temptation and trial; he will regainpossession of his own house, wife, and wealth, although they areall claimed by younger rivals. To do this, he has to suffer. He isshipwrecked naked on a strange island . He escapes from a cannibalgiant by hanging on to the underside of a ram. In order to get nea rhis own house, he has to disguise himself as a ragged beggar, andhave bones thrown at his head; but he endures. S ometimes durin gthese trials he is pathetic, and sometimes he is grotesqueaswhen, during a sleepless night of anxiety, he is compared to ablack-pudding which is being turned over and over before ablazing fire. But his humiliation and grotesquerie are part of histrials, and his endurance of them is necessary, to make him moretruly heroic.A t bottom, the question is whether humo ur and the heroic can

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274 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKSgo together. Can the sublime emotions admit comic relief withoutbeing weakened ? If they cannot, Dante's Comedy, Shakespeare'sMacbeth and Hamlet, Tolstoy's War and Peace, along with manyother great works, must be purified or discarded. And it must beremembered that at the supreme crises in the Homeric epics, thereare no images and no words except those of the utmost nobility.

Behind these attacks on the art of the classical poets lay a numberof preconceptions, which deserve examination, since the partici-pants in the battle were not always aware of them.The first was the assumption that contemporary tastethetaste of the baroque age, or rather of France, or rather of theFrench aristocracy, or rather of a small group within the Frencharistocracywas the supreme judge of all art. It was a monarchas absolute as Louis. It could judge even things beyond the pro-vince of art. The Marechale de Luxembourg is said to haveexclaimed, after a shuddering glance at the Bible, 'What manners!what frightful manners! what a pity that the Holy Spirit shouldhave had so little taste!'20 Yet, although believed impeccable, thistaste had certain limitations. Its standards were partly made bywomen, and by women who did not read with much care: so thatthey were apt to pronounce a book or a play barbarous if it did notpay much attention to love, and they could damn even the mostimportant work by calling it tedious.21 Again, taste was over-whelmingly dominated by reason, and almost ignored the irra-tional beauties of poetry. Assuming that poetry was merely anelaborate method of saying what might be clearer in prose, itexpected a prose translation to contain all the beauties of the poeticoriginal. And, most important, it was fearfully snobbish. It couldscarcely bear the mention of anyone beneath the rank of marquis.No person worth writing about (it held) ever does any work, orexperiences anything but the grandest emotions. From this it isan easy step to a limitation of language that makes it impossibleeven to mention everyday things, because ordinary means common,and common means vulgar. There was an uproar once in a Frenchtheatre, long after this, when a translation of Othello actually usedthe word mouchoir for the object which is the key of the plot;while a baroque poet avoided the word chien by calling the animal

de la fidelite le respectable appui.22

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1 4 . THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 275This habit was largely responsible for the growing cult of poeticcliches which ruined French poetry in the eighteenth century: itcarried the chill upward, and upward, until even love began tosound common, and it was better to say fires or flam e. Some of thiswas originally attributab le to Spanish influence, for in aristocraticdetachment from the ordinary w orld no one (at least in westerncivilization) has ever excelled the Spanish nobles of the seventeenthcentury. Certainly, it produced a drastic limitation of the vocabu-lary and syntax of French drama, and helped to kill a promisingliterary form. D oubtless these conventions were, as Hug o and theother revolutionary writers who attacked them believed, part ofthe old social system; but they took longer to destroy than themonarchy itself. They outlasted the revolution and the Terror:it was a generation later that

with breasts bare, the nine Muses sang the Carmagnole.23T he second assumption behind the modern a ttack w as national-ism. From the time of Alfred in England, from the time of Dante

in Italy, we have seen that the national language of each countryis used as a tonic to strengthen patriotism. Statesmen and thinkerswho are eager to increase the solidarity of their own people vaun ttheir lang uage as equal or superior to G reek and L atin. This wasthe inspiration of Dante's essay On Vernacular Style.24 In Frenchit had already a ppeared in Du Bellay's Defence and Ennoblement ofthe French Language.25 After him it was restated by Malherbe(who, although a purist and a 'classicist', despised much of thebest of classical literature) , and then in 1683 by Francois Char-pentier, who argued in his treatise On the Excellence of the FrenchLanguage that to admire the Greeks and Romans would keep theFrench from cultivating their ow n tongue. A t the time this seemedreasonable enough. It was impossible to foresee tha t it was part ofthe general movement towa rds nationalism which, in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, was to have such disastrous results, notonly in politics but in literature, and occasionally in art and music.It would be a darkening of the light if any European or Americancountry were to fall victim to the delusion that it has its ow nliterature and its ow n culture. Politicians can be nationalistsalthough the greatest are something more. But artists, likescientists, work in a tradition which covers many countries andhistories, transcending them all. The finest creative artists are

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276 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKSthose who live most fully both within their own nation and time,and within the much larger cultural stream of civilization, towhich even the most powerful state is only a small channel, a singletributary.A third impulse behind the modernists' attack was their opposi-tion to traditional authority.26 They felt that the prestige of theancients was a dead hand, which kept the rising age from develop-ing its full power, kept men from thinking clearly and boldly,discouraged aspiration and invention. In this they were speakingfor the Renaissance, and they represented the best of its spirit.When first discovered and when properly used, the great achieve-ments of classical antiquity were challenges to generous rivalry,not commands to laborious imitation. In the age of revolution,early in the nineteenth century, they became so again. But in thisperiod they too often acted as a chilling weight on the imagination.The scientists and philosophers in particular attacked them forthis narcosis, and boasted of ignoring all tradition in the advanceof their own work. Bacon had been the first aggressor here. Someof his successors, supporters of the Royal Society, 'went so far asto express the opinion that nothing could be accomplished unlessall ancient arts were rejected . . . everything that wore the face ofantiquity should be destroyed, root and branch'.27 Descartes,who prided himself on thinking out philosophy on his own account,boasted that he had forgotten all his Greek; and although heactually wrote two of his works in Latin, he had them carefullytranslated later.

The moderns also wished to assert naturalism, as opposed to theconventional loftiness and highly stylized unreality of classicizingliterature. One of the leaders on the modern side was CharlesPerrault, who gave us some of the most famous fairy-tales in thewestern world: Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard,and Cinderella. In this also the modernists had more right thanwrong on their side. The greatest works of baroque literature arethose in which, even when the language is correct and the settingformal and symmetrical, the eternal realities of the human heartfind their most direct and complete expression. This conflict hasbeen immortalized in a famous scene from Moliere's Misanthrope,where Alceste bitterly attacks a formal elegiac love-poem, and sayshe far prefers a pretty little folk-song because it is closer to nature.28(And yet, in the same play, an admirable speech on the blindness

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1 4 . THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 277of lovers is translated by Molierewho had an excellent classicaleducationpractically word for word from Lucretius.) 29T he weakest of the modernist preconceptions was the fifth.Most of the moderns knew little or no Greek. A nd they allassumed that translations were amply sufficient to allow them toestimate the best works of ant iqui tytranslat ions which wereoften in prose, and often (as we now know) positively incorrect.Perrault himself wrote a four-volume comparison of the ancientsand the moderns although he could not read Greek at all, andknew little Latin literature outside the works of Cicero, Horace,Ovid, and Vergil.3 0 It is true that good translations of classicalbooks are few, but that does not mean we can take bad ones as ourauthority, any more than we should judge a picture by a blurredmonochrome photograph. It is also arguable that, consciously orunconsciously, th e moderns were asserting a preference for theL atin over the G reek trad it ion. Hom er w as attacked dozens oftimes more often than Vergil; the chief defenders of the ancients(Racine, D acier, Boileau) were good G reek scholars; and when theregeneration of classical studies came, in the late eighteenthcentury, it was through a deepened understanding of Greek. Bythat time (see Ch apter 20) a new Battle of the Books was a bout tobegin.Phases of the Battle

A s full of confusion, uproar, false boasts, missed blows, andunexpected defeats as any Homeric battle, the Dispute of theA ncients and Moderns in France is difficult to describe in anyeasily intelligible and memorable sequence. It was complicatedby the facts that irrelevant personal feuds, such as that betweenBoileau and the Jesuits, and those which set the supporters ofCorneille against Racine, often clouded th e issues; that second-ratemen sometimes brought out first-rate arguments to prove wrongconclusio ns; and that really imp orta nt critics such as Boileau neverdid themselves and their cause full justice. Ho wever, if the chiefarguments are kept clearly in view, the course of the actual battlewill be easier to follow.The first blows were struck in Italy at the beginning of theseventeenth century. Homer and his Greek adm irers w ere attackedby the brilliant A lessandro Tassoni, author of the mock-epic,The Ravished Bucket. In his Miscellaneous Thoughts (1620), he