a curious but little known book that i chanced upon one day is “william shakespeare” by victor hugo. it concerns shakespeare to some extent but consists largely of hugo’s windy pronouncements about “genius” and “men of genius”.
in the second chapter of the book hugo gives us a list of fourteen “men of genius” - in effect, his list of favorite authors.
the book was published in 1864, when the author was 62 yeas old.
the fourteen are:
2 greeks: homer and aeschylus
5 authors of books of the bible: the author of the book of job, the prophets ezekiel and isaiah, st paul, and “st john” (the author of the book of revelations)
3 romans: lucretius, tacitus, and juvenal
dante, rabelais, cervantes and shakespeare round out the list.
why he chose these particular authors over others - aeschylus rather than euripides, lucretius rather than vergil or ovid, rabelais instead of chaucer or ariosto, he does not say.
the interesting thing to me is the ages of the books/authors relative to hugo’s own time, and the way he discusses them.
the book of job is impossible to date. 9 of the remaining 13 date from 1700 to 2600 years before hugo’s life, and the other 4 between 250 and 600 years. but he writes about them very much the way a mid 20th century man of letters - somebody like auden or lionel trilling - might write about 18th and 19th century writers - goethe, balzac, tolstoi, henry james. to hugo in 1864 his “men of genius” from 2000 or so years ago were still living literature in the same way that melville or jane austen or dostoevski would be living literature to a writer or critic or literary minded reader in the mid 20th century.
obviously, things have changed, and changed even more since the mid twentieth century - the last fading days of “serious” literature. when giants like hemingway and faulkner and beckett still walked the earth, when a writer like norman mailer enjoyed the same type of fame that movie directors like martin scorsese or quentin tarantino enjoy today, and the beat writers could provoke genuine outrage in the long vanished “literary establishment”.
one obvious reason is the decline and virtual elimination of “classical education” - i e, teaching latin and greek to schoolboys - in the western world. i do not know if hugo read the old testament in the “original” hebrew ( he might have!) but he almost surely read the greek and roman authors in greek and latin, and maybe the new testament in greek too. he probably read shakespeare in english. did he read dante in italian, cervantes in spanish? maybe. again, the point is that it was all “living literature” to him, about a century and a half ago.
in 1864, the industrial revolution had been in full flower and full blast for at least a century. empires had risen and fallen for millennia in a “cyclical” pattern, without “the world” changing much. empires - like the british empire, the soviet union, and the united states - would still rise and fall, but now the world really was changed, at least as it had not been since the agricultural revolution.
but it was not that obvious, not only not to “the man in the street”*, but to classically educated literary gentlemen like hugo, who saw themselves as walking the same earth as aeschylus and juvenal.
if history had progressed, to hugo, it was because of a belief in “liberty” (championed by “men of genius” like himself ) rather than from technology.
now consider the 21st century. how many people, except literary scholars, really read anything, anything at all, from before the 19th century, from before the industrial revolution?
in 2013, the bbc issued a list of “100 books to read before you die”
unless i missed something, it included only two books from before the 19th century - the works of shakespeare , and the bible, i e, the king james bible written in english. my quick count showed 89 books in english, 6 in french, 3 in russian, and 2 in spanish. i have seen similar lists on line - i think this one is pretty typical. maybe a little extreme - most lists of this type would at least include homer and dante and cervantes..
as the technological/information revolution progresses, and assuming that “literature” survives at all in the immediate future, this trend will surely increase.
i think it it is a natural development from technological change. technology has changed what it means to be human. the “humans” of the 21st century are not the humans of the 19th century., let alone the humans of pre-industrial times.
in any time or place, there may be revered “classics” that almost nobody really reads, any more than they stop and look at statues in public parks or squares. but for something to be actually read it has to have something contemporary readers can identify with.
well, that is enough on the classics, for now.
*who was himself the product of the new age, as he at least “read the news” by the new electric light, instead of living completely outside of history, like the peasant telling time-honored tales in his hut, when the sun went down.
