Johann Wolfgang VON Goethe

Goethe, the preeminent literary artist in Germany, is, in many ways, the last fully integrated literary figure for whom literature, art, science, scholarship, and public life came together over a long career as a writer, minister of state, man of science, theater director, and critic. A powerful influence on world literature, Goethe dominated his period as only a few others, such as DANTE [2], MILTON [8], and VOLTAIRE [69], have done. 

He achieved greatness in virtually every literary genre: lyrical poetry, drama, and fiction. In doing so, Goethe helped to define the romantic age in his groundbreaking novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, while in Faust he produced one of world literature’s greatest mythic fables that has, like Dante’s The Divine Comedy and CERVANTES’s [11]Don Quixote, fundamentally shaped our imaginative understanding of the human condition. A legend in his lifetime, Goethe is, in the critic Harold Bloom’s terminology, the archetypal “strong poet” who provides points of reference and a source of imitation and refutation to the generations that fol-lowed him.Born in Frankfurt, Goethe studied law, first at the University of Leipzig and, after an interruption from illness, at Strasbourg, where he received a law degree in 1771. 

His friendship with J. G. Herder, the principal exponent of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) literary movement, an early flower-ing of German romanticism and reaction to neoclassical thought and art, was a significant influence on Goethe’s first major work, Götz von Berlichingen (1773), a historical drama. A year later, the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther produced a furor of controversy and gave Goethe an international reputation.It is difficult to imagine another single book that has had the comparable impact and influence as Goethe’s epistolary confessions of the radically subjective Werther, whose deep feelings and disappointments lead to release in suicide. A victim of a hopeless love and a dangerously refined sensitivity, Werther is unable to escape his own torment, and Goethe records the progression of Werther’s world-weary suffering, a new subject for the novel. 

As Karl Viëtor has argued:Among European novels Werther is the first in which an inward life, a spiritual process and nothing else, is represented, and hence it is the first psychological novel—though naturally not the first in which the inner life in general is seriously dealt with. The conflict between an immoderately burgeoning passion and the ordered world of society is here described, as it were, “from within.” The scene is the soul of the hero. All events and figures are regarded only in the light of the significance they have for Werther’s emotion. All that happens serves but to nourish the absolution of Werther’s emotions—a fatal propensity which swells to a demonic possession and engulfs all other inward forces and possibilities.The novel, which has a strong basis in Goethe’s own experiences, diagnoses his generation’s romantic self-obsession with no social outlets in which to channel spiritual energies. “I am weary of bewailing the fate of our generation of human beings,” Goethe wrote, “but I will so depict them that they may understand themselves, if that is possible, as I have understood them.” As Goethe warned, “the end of this disease is death! 

The goal of such sentimental enthusiasm is suicide!” Despite his warning, the novel exposed a style and attitude of self-absorption that Goethe had detected as latent in his generation. In imitation of Werther’s world-weariness, young men began to dress like Goethe’s protagonist in blue cutaways and yellow vest and breeches, to adopt his attitudes, and, indeed, to take their own lives. Goethe felt the need to add to the second edition of the novel Werther’s own admonition, “Be a man, do not follow me.” The novel is remarkable for Goethe’s skill in presenting Werther’s tortured psychology and reflecting the milieu that produced him. 

Werther also set the pattern for the melancholy and striving romantic hero that would be echoed most noticeably in the lives and works of BYRON [83] and SHELLEY [77].In 1775, Goethe accepted an invitation from an admirer, Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar, to serve at court in Weimar. He became a cabinet minister of agriculture, finance, and mines, and was for 10 years the duke’s chief minister. In 1786, Goethe left Germany for a two-year stay in Italy, where he deepened his appreciation of classical art. His earlier romantic attitudes of individualism and freedom matured and led to a heightened awareness of the importance of discipline and universality. This creative tension is balanced in his mature work, including the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796) and its sequel Wilhelm Meister’s Travels (1829), which set the model for the bildungs roman, the novel of growth and development; the drama Iphigenie auf Tauris (1788); and Faust (part one was published in 1808; part two after Goethe’s death in 1832).

Besides his continual creative work, including some of the finest lyrical poetry in German literature, Goethe was the director of the state theater for more than 20 years; conducted scientific research in evolutionary botany, anatomy, and the theory of color; and undertook a serious study of non-Western literature. A polymath of extraordinary ability, Goethe was recognized during his lifetime as a sage. A host of visitors, including Napoleon, came to Weimar to pay their respects and to learn from the master. Admiration for Goethe and his works throughout Europe and America contributed greatly to the spread of German ideas and culture worldwide, with profound effects on scholarship, education, and philosophy, as well as literature, throughout the 19th century.Goethe’s greatest achievement, however, is the poetic drama Faust, the conception and composition of which occupied him from his early 20s to the year before he died, when he finally completed the second part of the work. Faust provides a synthesis of all of his works and skills as a poet. 

Adapting the medieval legend of the man of intellect who trades his soul for knowledge and power, Goethe turns man’s boundless yearning into the potentially damning but ultimately redeeming factor that earns his salvation, and he creates in the character of Faust a central romantic hero, like Werther, Shelley’s Prometheus, and Byron’s Manfred. Faust represents the individual’s aspiration for transcendence in defiance of all limits.In Goethe’s version, Faust’s demonic bargain, in which Mephistopheles can claim Faust’s soul at the moment of his contentment, turns on the realization that no single experience will be finally satisfying, that aspiration and striving will alone sustain Faust. Goethe further tests Faust’s assertion of the individual’s dominating will with the counterclaim of love in his relationship with Gretchen.Part one of Faust ends with the protagonist suspended between the seemingly irreconcilable poles of the need of self and the importance of the other. 

In part two of the drama, the tone shifts to the more directly allegorical and philosophical as Goethe attempts to find a way out of the dilemma and a synthesis between romantic and classical attitudes, between freedom and restraint, liberty and order. Faust discovers his eventual contentment in the continual aspiration of social improvement, in which the individual will finds a worthy object in the world to which to devote its striving energy. Because the improvements Faust desires are always in the process of becoming. 

Mephistopheles finally loses his bargain to possess Faust’s soul. Such a bald summary of Goethe’s masterpiece only sketches the barest outline of a work that Goethe created with genius through the complexity of his thinking and the mastery of his poetic expression.Goethe’s greatness as a writer stems from his ability to question his own assumptions and those of his age, and to recast them imaginatively into forms of inquiry. As William James summarized, “He was alive at every pore of his skin, and received every impression in a sort of undistracted leisure; which makes the movement of his mental machinery one of the most extraordinary exhibitions which this planet can ever have witnessed.”

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Virgil

Virgil, the supreme Latin poet, produced in the Aeneid an epic that has been one of the most revered and influential works of art in Western cultural history. Only HOMER [3], whose heroic poetry Virgil absorbed and transformed, has exerted a comparable, continual influence in Western thought and art. Virgil also set the prototype for the artist for whom poetry is both a way of life and a means for the deepest personal, cultural, and religious inquiry.

Like CATULLUS [82], Publius Vergilius Maro was a native of Cisalpine Gaul in northern Italy, and from a rural district not far from Mantua. His father was a landowner and farmer, prominent enough to provide Virgil with a solid education in Cremona, Milan, and finally Rome, where he arrived at the age of 17. Initially Virgil pursued a career in law, but he gave it up for the life of a professional poet and scholar. Shy and studious, Virgil took no part in public life, despite contact with prominent figures of his day, including Caesar Augustus, but the political background of his times is central to an understanding of his poetry. 

During his lifetime, as a result of the scramble for autocratic power between Pompey and Julius Caesar, and the civil war that followed Caesar’s assassination, the Roman Republic broke apart. Augustus was to emerge from the chaos with a political and cultural mission to restore order and the Roman values that had gained Rome its great empire. Virgil’s role as an apologist for the Augustan regime should be seen in the context of his fear of the violence and lawlessness that preceded Augustus’s reign. In his art, Virgil accepted his part in establishing a bulwark against the forces antithetical to Roman values and their principal contribution to civilization, law, and government. His poetry has, therefore, a strong didactic and nationalistic quality, though his sheer poetic brilliance and moral complexity transcend and expand these aims.Virgil’s poetic achievement is expressed in three monumental works. 

His earliest is the Eclogues, written 42–37 B.C., in which he set out to become the Roman Theocritus (the great Greek pastoral poet of the third century B.C.) by reviving the pastoral form. His celebration of idyllic rustic life, though in one sense escapist, is rooted in reality, with references to historical figures and cur-rent topics, and is clearly meant to contrast the present with the natural and the simple life. In the Georgics (36 to 29), considered by many his finest work, Virgil provides a Roman version of Hesiod’s Works and Days, a description of the agricultural life, in a didactic poem that is both a practical handbook on husbandry and a patriotic paean expressing his love of the land and the enduring wisdom of rural values. Virgil read the poem to Augustus on his return to Italy in 29 B.C., and it must have resonated with the new emperor, whose political and cultural goals coincided with the poem’s message. 

The Georgics is widely regarded as technically the most perfect of all Latin poems. Both poems show Virgil working toward the expansion of the epic, national and moral purposes of the Aeneid, which he composed during his last 10 years. The poem, one of the greatest verse narratives in world literature, follows the adventures of the Trojan Aeneas after the fall of Troy through his affair with Dido, queen of Carthage, and his descent into the underworld, to his arrival in Italy, where he defeats in combat the warrior Turnus and establishes the beginning of the Roman state. Virgil died before completing revisions and instructed that the poem should be destroyed. It is believed that Augustus himself overruled Virgil’s final wish and saved the Aeneid for posterity.It was natural for Virgil to turn to Homer when looking for a model for the great poem he aspired to write. 

The Homeric epics represented, for the Romans as well as for the Greeks, the highest poetic achievement and the appropriate form for a serious, monumental work. Unlike Homer, Virgil was a literary artist, not an oral performer, and he transformed the epic by both his unique genius and the opportunity that written composition represented. Although his meter (dactylic hexameter), structure (the first half of the Aeneid corresponds to the Odyssey and the second to the Iliad), elements like similes, catalogues, and phrases, and entire episodes, such as the visit to the underworld, are borrowed from Homer, Virgil achieves a great deal more in the Aeneid than a convincing imitation. 

The Aeneid fundamentally alters the Homeric worldview and shifts the purpose of the epic into a new direction that would have important implications for later writers like DANTE [2] and MILTON [8], who would take up the epic form again.In looking back to the heroic world of Homer, Virgil began to trace the possibilities of a grand, nationalistic poem for his own day. To celebrate Roman greatness, he located the origin of that greatness in the legendary journey of the Trojan prince Aeneas after the fall of Troy to found Lavinium, in Latium, which would eventually become Rome. 

The Homeric past therefore becomes a means for Virgil to explore his own present, offering an explanation of how the present was shaped by the past and suggesting the heroic elements that define the Roman character.Aeneas, the prototype of the Roman leader, is a different kind of hero than either Achilles or Odysseus, and one of the poem’s radical concepts is a fundamental redefinition of the essential qualities of heroism and its cost in self-sacrifice. Aeneas accepts his divine mission to found the Roman state, and his adventures are lessons in suffering as well as tests in the values necessary to become a true leader. Achilles exerts his skills as a warrior for his own glory and honor; Odysseus struggles to reestablish himself in Ithaca. 

The adventures of Aeneas, however, point to a much larger purpose, one that goes beyond personal fulfillment. His virtues of duty and responsibility run counter to the often self-centered preoccupations of Homer’s heroes.Aeneas has been called a puppet, a “shadow of a man,” and most memorably by Charles James Fox, as “always either insipid or odious,” but such interpretations miss Virgil’s intention in the Aeneid, which was his willingness to sacrifice Aeneas’s individuality and to place him in the context of Rome’s destiny. One of the signs of the poem’s greatness is Virgil’s recognition of the cost of leadership and the degree to which a proper hero must sacrifice self-fulfillment for the greater good. In Aeneas’s tragic affair with Dido, queen of Carthage, Virgil raises the stakes impossibly high. 

It would have been far easier for Virgil to turn Dido, once the queen of Rome’s bitterest enemy, into a far more resistible adversary for Aeneas. Dido is one of the most memorable and sympathetic character portraits in all classical literature, evidence of Virgil’s honesty and the complex moral tone of the Aeneid.

In the Aeneid, Virgil achieves an epic that is both nationalistic in purpose and deeply subjective in its probing of the inner meaning of heroism and man’s fate. For later generations, the poem served, like the Bible, as an important source for wisdom and guidance. The fact that readers would select passages at random for inspiration is a testimony to the multilayered tone and nuances of Virgil’s poetry, which reaches well beyond his patriotic nationalism to deeper reflections of human experience. The Aeneid is suffused with Virgil’s presence and persistent melancholy, which Matthew Arnold recognized as “the haunting, the irresistible self-dissatisfaction of his heart.” That the dramatic and objective epic form of Homer could be remade into a personal as well as a political poem of great sweep and depth is due to Virgil’s great genius. Later writers who took up the epic would have to contend with a second master of its form.

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John Milton

Towering seems the term best reserved for John Milton. In English poetry, no writers except SHAKESPEARE [1] and CHAUCER [5] have exerted such a lasting and powerful influence. In Lycidas, Milton wrote what many assert is the great-est English lyrical poem; Samson Agonistes has been judged the English poetic drama closest to the tragic greatness of the ancient Greeks; and in Paradise Lost Milton created the defining English epic.In a sense, Milton is the great hinge figure, joining the Renaissance with the modern world of increasing uncertainty, which was ushered in during the political and spiritual turmoil of his lifetime. 

Having read and absorbed virtually everything that had been written in the past, Milton synthesized his scholarship of classical forms into a great contemporary epic, consciously rivaling the achievements of HOMER [3], VIRGIL [9], and DANTE [2], and he helped redefine the epic tradition from the heroic to the spiritual, shifting the epic’s emphasis to the questions of the nature of good and evil. Paradise Lost, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy, is one of the touchstone documents of Western civilization. Milton’s sublime verse and the depth and grandeur of his poetic vision have few rivals.Milton’s preparation for his great achievement began with the best possible education. His father was a successful London businessman who provided his son with private tutors and schooling in London and Cambridge. 

At the university, Milton was nicknamed the Lady of Christ’s College for his good looks and seriousness. He received his B.A. degree in 1629 and his M.A. degree in 1632, then followed his formal schooling with five years of study on his father’s estate near Windsor. Milton was fluent in Latin, Greek, Italian, and Hebrew, and he committed the Bible to memory. Before age 30, Milton had written L’Allegro and Il Penseroso (companion poetic meditations on the active and the contemplative life), the masques Arcades and Comus, and the pastoral elegy Lycidas. In 1638 Milton left England for a 15-month tour of the continent, during which he visited Florence, Rome, and Naples, and met such important figures as Galileo and the Dutch jurist and humanist Hugo Grotius. He returned to England as the conflict over royal authority pushed the nation into civil war.For the next 20 years Milton aligned himself with the Puritan radicals and played a key role in the fortunes of the parliamentary forces opposed to Charles I. 

He was at the center of his age’s political debates and controversies, writing treatises that opposed the bishops’ control of the church, favored freedom of the press, and urged the sanctioning of divorce on grounds of incompatibility. (The first of his three marriages, to Mary Powell in 1642, led to an estrangement after six weeks, although she later returned to him and gave birth to three daughters.) Under Oliver Cromwell’s rule, Milton served as Latin secretary to the Council of State, with responsibility to justify the government’s actions at home and abroad. With the Restoration, Milton’s prospects and life were threatened. 

He was briefly imprisoned, lost the greater part of his fortune, and he retired to resume the literary aspirations that had been postponed during his years of public service. By 1651 his eyesight had deteriorated into total blindness, and he depended on his daughters to assist him in his writing and reading.Milton unfairly has been tarred as a Puritan apologist and associated with inflexible fanaticism and prejudice. He is better seen as a radical freethinker whose attempt to define Christian orthodoxy is both original and controversial. Beginning with the romantics, a revisionist view of Milton has dominated criticism, in which his artistic genius is seen at war with his intentions. 

In a famous pronouncement, WILLIAM BLAKE [29] declared that “the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” SHELLEY [77], recasting Milton and Paradise Lost in his own rebellious image, goes even further by asserting that Satan is the true hero of the poem. “Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged a violation),” Shelley argued, “as to have alleged no superiority of moral value to his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of Milton’s genius.” That such a skewed reading of Milton is possible at all is a testament to his artistry, which expressed his intention in Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to men” in a fair fight between the forces of good and evil. He also explored in profound ways the eternal conflict in human nature between faith and belief, and the assertion of self against unavoidable limitation.

Paradise Lost originally was conceived as a tragedy, but the theme of man-kind’s fall and redemption needed an epic of a very different kind from the classical models. In Milton’s poem, the heroic values of Homer and the nationalistic ideals of Virgil are subordinated to the grander theme of the Christian myth. In Book IX Milton defines his subject and his argument:

Not less but more heroic than the wrath 

Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued 

Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or  Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;

Or Neptune’s ire, or Juno’s, that so long 

Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea’s son:If answerable style 

I can obtain

Of my celestial 

Patroness, who deigns

Her nightly visitation unimplored,

And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires 

Easy my unpremeditated verse,

Since first this subject for heroic song

Pleased me, long choosing and beginning late,

Not sedulous by nature to indite

Wars, hitherto the only argument

Heroic deemed, chief mastery to dissect

With long and tedious havoc fabled knights

In battles feigned (the better fortitude Of patience and heroic martyrdom Unsung), or to describe races and games,

Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields,

Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds,Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights

At joust and tournament; then marshaled feast

Served up in hall with sewers and seneschals:

The skill of artifice or office mean;Not that which justly gives heroic name 

To person or to poem.

With its staggering range of classical reference, its long, packed, and com-plexly subordinated sentences, Milton’s epic, though imitative of the grand style and dignity of his classical predecessors, aims at a different message: man’s fall and God’s divine plan of order and redemption. In Milton’s scheme, Satan is the model for the classical hero whose ego denies the divine and plunges humankind into evil and separation from the wholeness that God represents. In one of the greatest portraits of villainy ever created, the poem traces Satan’s battle with God for the souls of Adam and Eve. Although Satan’s evil is rendered with tempting conviction, there should be no mistaking whose side Milton is on, as the Christian myth is developed in a richly patterned mosaic of allusions, associations, and structural parallels. In his study of Mil-ton’s life and poetry, Douglas Bush observed: “In its texture and structure, in all its imaginative variety and power, Paradise Lost is an inexhaustible source of aesthetic pleasure of a kind unique in English poetry. And, whatever theological elements some readers may choose to ignore, the essential myth, the picture of the grandeur and misery of man, remains ‘true,’ and infinitely more noble and beautiful than anything modern literature has been able to provide. The question is not how far the poem is worthy of our attention, but how far we can make ourselves worthy of it.”

For 200 years following the publication of Paradise Lost, Milton’s talent and presence dominated literature, with his masterpiece regarded as the pinnacle of what could be achieved in writing. It would take the romantic movement and the modernists, led by T. S. ELIOT [19], to break Milton’s control over poetic language and offer an alternative epic vision. Samuel Taylor Coleridge provides a fitting judgment of Milton’s contribution to the world’s culture: “Finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendent ideal.”

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James Joyce

James Joyce is as essential to an understanding of modern fiction as T. S. ELIOT[19]and W. B. YEATS [17] are to modern poetry and Pablo Picasso is to modern art. His achievement is nothing less than a great artistic explosion in which we are still sifting through the debris and dealing with the fallout. We are still learning how to read him, and novelists continue to show his influence, as the history of the novel can be divided with only slight exaggeration into two periods: before and after Joyce. Some writers in despair of ever surpassing him have lamented that Joyce took the novel as far as it can go, as SHAKESPEARE [1] took drama. 

Others have complained that Joyce stretched the form of fiction past a breaking point, and the aftermath is a chaos of meaning that many feel was Joyce’s principal legacy Joyce’s collected works are few: two collections of poetry, a play, a volume of short stories, and three novels. Although hardly an innovative or preeminent poet or dramatist, his achievement in fiction was to effect a revolution at literature’s core. Dubliners sets the pattern and technique for the modern short story. With A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Joyce took on the solidly traditional novel of education and development and re-imagined it in an absolutely new manner that has caused other treatments of this theme to seem shallow and routine. With Ulysses, Joyce created a modern epic out of the common place events of a single day in the life of Dublin with a modern Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, a Jew and a cuckold, as his hero. 

In Finnegans Wake, a novel shaped by dream logic and the destruction of the barriers of time and space, Joyce developed an entirely new literary language to write a universal history based on the life and times of a pub owner, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Each step in Joyce’s artistic development challenged previous assumptions and perfected new techniques to capture consciousness and the complexity of experience. To my mind, among the world’s novelists, only TOLSTOY [4] and DICKENS [6] have fashioned a richer imaginative world.Born on February 2, 1882, Joyce was the eldest of 10 children. His par-ents, who came from an upper-middle-class background, declined, due to the improvidence of Joyce’s father, into shabby gentility and eventually worse during Joyce’s youth. 

Between 1882 and 1902, when Joyce first left Ireland, he had resided at 14 different addresses, each one step lower on the ladder of respect-ability. Joyce’s father is captured in Stephen Dedalus’s catalogue of his father, Simon, in Portrait: “a medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past.” For Joyce, the forces opposing his growth and artistic development were a succession of fathers: his own, his fatherland Ireland, and God the father, represented by the Catholic Church. In his art, Joyce would confront and attempt to master each.At the age of six and a half Joyce was sent to a Jesuit boarding school, Clongowes Wood, where he was the youngest boy at the school. 

His experiences there are reflected in Portrait, in which Stephen Dedalus’s glasses are broken, and he is subsequently beaten, or “pandied,” for neglecting his school-work. There are obvious differences between the young Joyce and his fictional reflection, however. Joyce’s nickname at school was “Sunny Jim.” He excelled at sports, and unlike the dour and isolated Stephen Dedalus, he was well liked and generally fun-loving. 

When his father’s financial distress led to his withdrawal from Clongowes, he eventually continued his studies at a Jesuit school in Dublin. As Joyce later remarked, “You allude to me as Catholic. Now for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour of me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit.” Like Stephen in Portrait, Joyce followed a similar cycle of religious devotion, followed by a decline in religious faith, and a growth of faith in art.

As a student at University College, Dublin, Joyce studied languages and began to acquire a literary reputation when, as an early proponent of HENRIK IBSEN [36], he published a review of the Norwegian playwright’s work in an English magazine. In 1902, Joyce departed Ireland intent on becoming a doctor, but with the rather exotic notion of studying medicine in Paris. He returned after a few months because of the death of his mother and remained in Dublin until 1904. Joyce taught for a short time, began an autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, and wrote short stories for an Irish farmers’ magazine. His first date with a Galway born chambermaid, Nora Barnacle, on June 16, 1904, would be forever memorialized as “Bloomsday,” the day that encompasses the action of Ulysses. 

The couple left Dublin together in October 1904 to begin a life together in exile from their homeland, about which Joyce never stopped writing. They lived in Trieste, Rome, Paris, and Zurich, supported by Joyce’s occasional language teaching, infrequent earnings from his writings, and support from a variety of patrons. The couple raised two children and were finally married in 1931.Joyce began his writing career with lyrical poetry. He also collected what he called silhouettes: brief prose sketches of scenes, conversations, and incidents of observed Dublin life. From these Joyce developed his literary technique of the epiphany, the sudden “revelation of the whatness of a thing” in which the “soul of the commonest object . . . seems to be radiant.”Transformation, therefore, is the key function of the epiphany, and for Joyce the artist is “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of ever living life.” The technique of the epiphany, the foundation of Joyce’s art, shows him working out the central problem for the novelist in the 20th century, expressed in the choice between realism and symbolism. 

On the one hand, the novel was opening up new ter-ritory of reality rarely examined in fiction before; on the other, writers were searching for a way of penetrating reality to express its essential truths in symbolic patterns. Joyce is at the center of these tendencies. No realist has offered a more exhaustive and unsparing depiction of the immediacies of com-monplace life; no symbolist has spun a more subtle or complicated network of meanings.At their best, Joyce’s stories and novels work simultaneously on both levels, culminating in the extraordinary accomplishment of Ulysses, which attempts nothing less than a complete reconstruction of a day in the life of Dublin, underlaid with a correspondence of myth and symbol borrowed from HOMER[3].

Leopold Bloom is the modern Odysseus and everyman, defined by his ordinariness, whose spiritual son is the romantic and self-absorbed Stephen Dedalus. The novel arranges a conjunction of their experience into a grand and epic totality. Experience is fragmented and elusive, captured in the flow of consciousness of Joyce’s characters, in which sensory data form patterns of meaning shaped by the invisible but controlling vision of the novelist. 

Ulysses was published on Joyce’s 40th birthday in 1922 to a storm of controversy that surrounded virtually all of his published works. Banned in England­ and America as obscene for more than 10 years, the book asserted its influence in smuggled copies printed in France. Joyce devoted the rest of his life to the production of his “night” book, Finnegans Wake, a dream sequence of Earwicker’s unconscious associations through the course of one night, as a complement to the “day” book, Ulysses, the story of a typical Dublin day. With its dream logic, portmanteau words, and punning from multiple lan-guages, Finnegans Wake is even more experimental than the daring innovation of Joyce’s previous work, and to unlock its considerable riches in comedy and linguistic virtuosity, it requires far more labor than most readers are willing to devote. To the end, through two world wars, the mental breakdown of his daughter, and his own failing eyesight, as one of the greatest innovators in world literature, Joyce persisted in shaping a radical redefinition of fictional form, technique, and language to capture modern experience.

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Charles Dickens

Directly following CHAUCER [5], I have selected Charles Dickens, who, like the author of The Canterbury Tales, magnificently “numbered the classes of men.” Literary critic Edmund Wilson has called Dickens “the greatest dramatic writer that the English had had since Shakespeare who created the largest and most varied world.” Dickens’s enormous stature as a writer was acknowledged by his fellow Victorians, by TOLSTOY [4] and DOSTOEVSKY [14], and by such modern writers as GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [44] and GEORGE ORWELL [118]. With the exception of SHAKESPEARE [1], no writer in English literature has enjoyed a comparable degree of popular and critical acclaim. Dickens is sim-ply England’s greatest novelist and deserves to be ranked with the top literary artists of all time.

Despite such high praise, an appreciation of Dickens is not free from criticism. It is possible to charge him with sentimentality, of tugging too insistently at our heartstrings, and of reducing experience to idealized and overly melodramatic patterns. His power and singularity as a novelist more than compensate for his defects, however. His range and depth are enormous, while his imaginative power, energy, and intensity as a writer earn him a comparison with Shakespeare. Through the power of his imagination and skill, Dickens offers a unique view of the world, rich in comedy, horror, and pathos, and we live in a world that still can be described as Dickensian in many important ways.

The trajectory of Dickens’s career is a spectacular rise from what he considered the unspeakable degradation his family experienced in his youth. The second child and eldest son of John and Elizabeth Dickens, the novelist was born in Portsmouth, England, where his father worked as a clerk in the navy pay office. Both his parents came from lower-middle-class backgrounds of domestic service and clerical work. John Dickens, the inspiration for his son’s portrait of the tragicomic spendthrift Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield, could barely manage a respectable household, and Dickens’s childhood was disrupted by a series of moves to increasingly less genteel addresses, first in Chatham on the east coast of England and later in London.Charles was a slight, unathletic child who was extremely sensitive and a voracious reader. His early upbringing and imaginative habits explain much about his writing, particularly his love of theatrical blood-and-thunder scenes, with their dramatic confrontations between good and evil, the weak and the powerful. 

His earliest memories were the tales told by his nurse about a huge black cat that hunted small children and of “Captain Murderer,” who, like Sweeney Todd, converted his victims into meat pies. Remembering these stories, Dickens stated, “I suspect we should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we are forced to go back to, against our wills.” One of his favorite toys was a miniature theater in which he could act out his favorite stories. The theater, therefore, was the backdrop for his initial imaginary creations, and his lifelong dramatic interest helps explain his later statement that “every writer of fiction in effect writes for the stage.”Dickens’s developing imagination received a traumatic jolt when his father was arrested for debt and sent to debtor’s prison. Two days after his 12th birthday, separated from his family, who accompanied John Dickens to prison in the custom of the time, Charles was sent to work as a boy apprentice in a blacking factory, pasting labels on pots of dye for 12 hours a day in a rat-infested warehouse. 

Having been encouraged in his intellectual accomplishments and claims to gentility, Dickens felt as if he had fallen through the social hierarchy to the lowest depths of the laboring class, “utterly neglected and hopeless.” After four months he was rescued by his father and allowed to resume his education, but the humiliating stigma cast a permanent shadow on his psyche. Years later, when breaking the silence of this deep secret by preparing to re-experience it in David Copperfield, Dickens recalled, “My father said I should go back no more, and should go to school. I do not write resentfully or angrily; for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am: but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.” It is possible to view Dickens’s frantic assault on success and some of his darkest themes, particularly the victimization of children, as a response to the pain caused by this early experience.

Critical estimation of Dickens’s career generally divides his novels into two groups: the early novels, from his debut with The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) to David Copperfield (1849–50), and his later novels, beginning with Bleak House (1852–53). Admirers of all that is commonly meant by the term Dickensian— the novelist’s irrepressible vitality and inexhaustible supply of eccentrics, comic situations, sentiment, and humor—locate Dickens’s greatness in this first period. Modern critics, beginning with George Bernard Shaw, generally tend to emphasize the complexity, psychological subtlety, and profound social exploration of the later novels as the primary source of Dickens’s genius. Regardless of reader preference, Dickens’s entire canon shows amazing technical and artistic development.

Dickens began his career as a novelist almost by accident, when he was hired to write narrative connectives for a series of illustrations of Cockney sporting scenes that became The Pickwick Papers, but he quickly took control of the project, shifting his story to the primary interest, and Pickwick became one of the 19th century’s phenomenal best-sellers. Dickens’s early books were mostly written in the serialized installment form that The Pickwick Papers first popularized, a “detached and desultory form of publication,” as he described it in his 1837 preface, in which “no artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated plot can with reason be expected.”Improvised and with little pre-planning or attendance to a larger theme, Dickens’s early novels, such as Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Martin Chuzzlewit, show him working toward a more complex structure of characters who cause the drama rather than having it imposed on them, and much more elaborate and massive portraits of society supported by the most demanding narrative method of all, that of mystery and suspense. 

Dickens’s later novels—Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood—are all cut to the pattern of intrigue and detection that joins a vast network of relationships and social and psychological themes in a unified whole.Unlike most modern novelists, Dickens is a traditional storyteller who employs such theatrical techniques as secrets, surprises, and coincidences to heighten suspense and uncover universal patterns beneath the surface of things. His fictional formula, expressed in his preface to Bleak House, is to show the “romantic side of familiar things.” His novels are built on conflict, with dramatic action replacing authorial analysis and commentary. “My notion always is,” Dickens observed, “that when I have made the people to play out the play, it is, as it were, their business to do it, and not mine.” In the arranged collision of characters, Dickens reaches his desired illumination of increasingly more complex psychological and social themes. Through the combination of realism and symbolism, evident particularly in his later novels, Dickens anticipates the central dynamic of the modern novel, linking his work with later novelists such as THOMAS HARDY [43], JAMES JOYCE [7], FRANZ KAFKA [31], and WILLIAM FAULKNER [15].While working at a frenzied pace, Dickens still managed a full social and personal life. In 1836, he married Catherine Hogarth, who gave birth to 10 children. 

Although secure in his literary and financial success, Dickens remained restless and dissatisfied. He visited America, hoping to find an ideal democracy but discovering instead moral and political anarchy that helped confirm his own Englishness and increasing distrust of political solutions to social ills. Traveling and living abroad, busy as an editor of his own periodicals, acting in amateur theatricals and in dramatic readings from his books, Dickens channeled his restless energy into continual, often manic, activity. His later career was marked by domestic unhappiness, in which he separated from his wife and had an affair with Ellen Ternan, an actress 20 years his junior. 

In 1870, after a second tour of America and an exhausting series of public readings, and while at work on his last book, Dickens had a stroke and died in the grand house he had seen years before as a boy, with his father, as a symbol of material accomplishment impossibly beyond his reach.Dickens’s life is an amazing story of the power of the imagination to produce a seemingly inexhaustible supply of unforgettable characters—Pickwick, Sam and Tony Weller, Fagin, Bumble, Quilp, Scrooge, Pecksniff, Sairey Gamp, Micawber, Lady Dedlock, Mr. F’s Aunt, Miss Havisham, to name just a few—in an imaginary yet recognizable universe animated by the novelist’s great powers of visualization. Dickens remains the novelist nonpareil, capable of probing at the deepest level the light and dark elements of his mind and world.

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Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer’s greatness as a poet derives not only from his pride of place as Eng-land’s first major writer and his pioneering mastery of the expressive power of the English vernacular, but also from his fundamental redefinition of the possibility of poetic expression. That the English literary tradition starts with Chaucer is not simply a matter of history—the accidental conjunction of an artistic genius and a time and place. It also stems from the more essential recognition that with Chaucer, English literature became profoundly different from what it had been before. By redefining the literary canon, Chaucer affected the course of literature in fundamental ways. Only a handful of writers exerted this kind of gravitational pull, subsuming the past and altering the future of literature. Soon after Chaucer’s death, Thomas Hoccleve appropriately observed that he was “the first findere of our faire langage.” 

We know far more about Chaucer than we do about HOMER [3] or SHAKE-SPEARE [1]. At the center of the English court for most of his life, Chaucer survives in 493 documentary records that trace his career as a page, soldier, squire of the royal household, and governmental and civil servant. There is far less evidence about his life as a poet. Only one of his works, The Book of the Duchess, can be dated with any degree of certainty. The dis-junction between what is known about Chaucer’s public life and what is unknown about his writing life has contributed to the tradition of seeing him as a kind of rough diamond, an accidental progenitor of English literature, whose works say more about the era that produced them than the genius that defined his age. 

Yet Chaucer, like all great artists, is best seen in the complex relationship between the age that fashioned him and his art, which reshaped his world.Chaucer was the son of a well-to-do London wine merchant, a member of the increasingly important middle class. His father’s wealth provided him with an education and access to the world of the nobility and royalty. He served as a page in the household of Lionel of Antwerp, the second son of the monarch Edward III; later he became a member of the king’s household and formed a lifelong relationship with another of the king’s sons, John of Gaunt. From then on, Chaucer’s fortunes would be inextricably linked with those of England’s royals, including Edward’s nephew Richard II, who succeeded to the throne in 1377, and John of Gaunt’s son, Henry Bolingbroke, who seized the throne in 1399.Chaucer was a participant in and observer of the great events of the 14th century. 

As a child he survived the first and most lethal outbreak of the plague, from 1348 to 1349, in which 1.5 to 2 million of England’s population of 4–5 million died, most within eight months. When Chaucer was born, Edward III had reopened the war with France that would continue for the next century. The great English victories at Cricy and Poitiers occurred during Chaucer’s lifetime, and as a soldier he was captured by the French and ransomed by the king (for a lesser sum than the king was forced to pay for his favorite horse). Finally, the dynastic struggle that eventually cost Richard II his throne helped alter the absolute power of the monarch and shook the foundations of the medieval hierarchy. 

If there are few direct allusions to specific events in Chaucer’s poetry, the concerns of the age and Chaucer’s depiction of the life around him are at the center of his art. As a soldier, courtier, diplomat, government agent, and member of Parliament, Chaucer was well placed to convert his broad range of experience into poetry.

Chaucer’s poetry also represents a unique fusion of personal genius with the historical moment. During his lifetime, English was to emerge as the national language, replacing the French of the Norman conquerors as the language of culture and commerce, and codified in the Midland dialect of the important trading center, London. Chaucer’s poetic language is the first great flowering of an English vernacular that he helped shape into an expressive artistic form. That Chaucer was a layman, not a cleric, and that his poetry was performed before a court audience, are also important factors in the poetry he produced.The stages of Chaucer’s poetic development have been traditionally divided into three periods. His poetic apprenticeship during the 1360s shows him influenced by French forms. During this period, he produced a translation of the Roman de la Rose and The Book of the Duchess, an elegy for John of Gaunt’s wife, Blanche. 

In 1372, while on a trading mission for the crown, Chaucer visited Italy. There he encountered the works of DANTE [2], BOCCAC-CIO [68], and PETRARCH [51], whose influence is seen in his House of Fame, Par-liament of Fowls, and Troilus and Criseide. The final stage represents the work of his full maturity, beginning in 1386 with the distinctly English voice of The Canterbury Tales. A view that posits the synthesis of Chaucer’s native English expression from the influences of French and Italian sources is somewhat misleading. A high degree of originality, along with the reworking of borrowed sources, is present at every stage of Chaucer’s career. His achievement comes not from the absence of derived forms but from his remarkable animation of traditional elements into a fresh and unique artistic vision. His greatness as a poet is demonstrated most clearly in his masterpieces Troilus and Criseide and The Canterbury Tales.Troilus and Criseide, the greatest of Chaucer’s completed works, would have secured his place as one of the giants of English literature even if he never had written The Canterbury Tales. 

The poem, set during the Trojan War, has been described by Chaucerian scholar George Lyman Kittredge as “the first novel, in the modern sense, that ever was written in the world.” It tells the story of the “double sorwe of Troilus,” son of King Priam, first in loving Cri-seide, and then in losing her when Criseide, in a prisoner exchange, is taken by the Greeks and proves unfaithful. Chaucer’s principal source is Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato (The Love-Stricken), a shorter, cynical tale of frustrated passion that Chaucer expands into a psychologically rich exploration of the nature of love and its human costs set against the background of war, the conflict between private values and communal responsibility, and the opposition of will and destiny. 

His great innovation is in investing his characters with a naturalism that justifies Kittredge’s assessment. The poem also displays Chaucer’s virtuosity as a storyteller and demonstrates his readiness and skill to produce the vast human comedy that would become his most popular and enduring work.Everything about The Canterbury Tales is monumental, beginning with Chaucer’s original conception of a series of tales told by a group of 30 pilgrims journeying to Canterbury. Of the 120 tales originally projected for the series (two for each pilgrim on the way to Canterbury and two more from each on the way back), Chaucer actually completed only 22. 

He probably began The Canterbury Tales in 1386 and devoted the last 14 years of his life to the project. Collections of stories linked by a framing device were not original; early in the 14th century Boccaccio had arranged the 100 tales of his Decameron, delivered by 10 characters. What was original was the relationship established between the tellers and their tales and the intricate byplay among the pilgrims that establishes a comic and ironic context for many of the stories, as when the Miller’s silly and cuckolded carpenter offends the Reeve, who retaliates with his own story, using a miller as his comic target. 

The effect is a delightful double fiction, with multiple dramatic and literary effects.Through the agency of the pilgrimage, Chaucer not only produced a masterful literary compendium of medieval story genres—romance, fabliau, saint’s tale, beast story, and sermon—but also managed to collect a cross section of medieval society. Chaucer brings his characters to life through a series of colorful portraits in the General Prologue, then has them reveal themselves in all their delightful human frailty during their journey. As John Dryden aptly pointed out, “here is God’s plenty.”Chaucer’s greatness as a poet is most completely demonstrated in his skillful details, which create a complex and ironic texture to his verbal painting. 

In The Canterbury Tales, the static and the stylized elements of medieval literature are replaced by dynamic, living portraits of complex individuals—such as the Prioress, the Pardoner, and especially the Wife of Bath—who command our attention not for their high rank or deeds but for their humanity. Chaucer succeeds in creating a new realistic standard in poetry that redefined the subject and treatment of literature. The human behavior of ordinary individuals claims full artistic treatment for the first time, as Chaucer expands the range of poetic expression to embrace all aspects of life and experience.

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Leo Tolstoy

Paradox and contradiction surround the gigantic figure of Tolstoy. The author of two of the greatest novels ever written, Tolstoy repudiated both, as well as the works of SHAKESPEARE [1], as “bad art,” unworthy of the moral teaching that his later life demanded. A member of Russia’s aristocracy, Tolstoy trans-formed himself from an idle and dissolute creature of his class into a supreme novelist with unrivaled imaginative powers, and then became a prophetic sage who tried to conform to a comprehensive vision of primitive Christian simplicity. In a sense, Tolstoy’s determined search for meaning, which forms the core of his books, is the one constant in an otherwise tangled life. Few authors have embodied their discoveries as relentlessly as Tolstoy, but it is Tolstoy the artist, not Tolstoy the holy man, who continues to speak to us. As John Bayley, in his critical study Tolstoy and the Novel, observed, “No one who is not interested in himself can be interested in a great novel, and in Tolstoy we experience in greater measure than in any other novelist the recognition of ourselves that leads to increased self-knowledge.”

Tolstoy was born in 1828 into a wealthy, noble family and grew up on the Tolstoy estate of Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow. Both his parents died while he was a child, and he was reared by relatives and educated by private tutors. After three years as a student at Kazan University, he returned home to manage the estate and to live an aimless and pleasure-seeking life among upper-class circles in St. Petersburg and Moscow. At the age of 23, Tolstoy entered the army as an artillery officer and campaigned against the Caucasian hill tribes and helped defend Sevastopol during the Crimean War. While in the army, he developed an addiction to gambling as well as a determination to become a writer. His first works reflect his war experiences and his recollections of childhood. 

Published in Russian magazines, Tolstoy’s early fiction announced the arrival of promising liter-ary talent, part of the extraordinary flowering of Russian fiction in the 19th century, whose masters included Turgenev and DOSTOEVSKY [14]. Tolstoy traveled in Europe before marrying in 1862, then settled down to raise a family of 13 children. He reorganized his estate to reflect the principles of peasantry reform, including land ownership and improved education for his serfs, which interested him.

Between 1863 and 1877, Tolstoy wrote his two great masterpieces, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). The first is a grand Russian epic that depicts the events of Napoleon’s invasion through the affairs of several Russian families. War and Peace particularly concerns the search by two men, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezuhov, for significance and meaning in their lives. The second novel, one of the great love stories in world literature, traces the adulterous affair of Anna Karenina and Count Alexey Vronsky to Anna’s destruction when she refuses to conform to the hypocritical values of upper-class morality. Anna’s tragedy is paralleled by a search for an alternative to society’s values by Levin, who finds his answers domestically among the peasants on his estate.

The conflict Tolstoy explored in both novels between self-fulfillment and society, as well as history’s grip on the individual, produced a personal crisis and the beginning of a quest for answers that he discovered in a unique blend of primitive Christianity, faith in simple peasant values derived from a close relationship to the land, and the renunciation of government, private property, and organized religion. He spent the rest of his life attempting to live according to his precepts and writing books that embodied his philosophy. Although Tolstoy the moralist predominates over Tolstoy the artist during this period, with his great gift for capturing the vitality and variety of life and human experience, some of his works after his conversion are among his finest, particularly “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (1886) and “The Kreutzer Sonata” (1891). 

Tolstoy’s mysticism and asceticism attracted devoted followers but largely alienated him from his wife and family. He caught a chill and died in the house of a stationmaster while attempting to escape their control on a journey to a monastery.A fascination with Tolstoy’s remarkable life and philosophy has dominated the appreciation of his work. The genius that created such massive portraits of lived experience seems to dwarf and make irrelevant any consideration of his artistry and the means he used to create his novels. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT [30], in offering his opinion of War and Peace, provides a typical judgment. Complaining of the weakness of the novel’s conclusion, Flaubert observed: “The first two volumes are sublime, but the third goes downhill dreadfully. 

He repeats himself. And he philosophizes. In a word here one sees the gentle-man, the author, and the Russian, whereas hitherto one had seen only Nature and Humanity.” At his best, Tolstoy possessed an unprecedented capacity for entering the life around him to such an imaginative degree that the art that produces his effects dissolves, and the reader seems to directly perceive life itself.The standard that Tolstoy set, like that of Shakespeare, seems impossibly high. Additionally, in most instances Tolstoy’s novels defy the structural logic of other European novels with their aesthetic of tight control and authorial distancing. HENRY JAMES [38] called Tolstoy’s kind of novels “loose, baggy monsters,” and Tolstoy seems much closer stylistically to CHARLES DICKENS [6], whom Tolstoy greatly admired, than to Flaubert and James himself. 

Tolstoy’s novels are expansive, pushing outward toward the panoramic; they are novels of the social group, large enough to accommodate the widest possible vision of society and human experience.We come to know Tolstoy’s characters as intimates, far more real to us than most of the people we know in life. Isaiah Berlin has written that “no author who has ever lived has shown such a power of insight into the variety of life—the differences, the contrasts, the collisions of persons and things and situations, each apprehended in its absolute uniqueness and conveyed with a degree of directness and a precision of concrete imagery to be found in no other writer.” Perhaps fellow Russian writer Isaac Babel put it best when he asserted, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”If his novels contain multitudes, Tolstoy is no less adept at pushing the local and the temporal into universal relevance. With War and Peace, Tolstoy reconfigures the history of Russia’s patriotic resistance to Napoleon into a national epic that was embraced even by the Soviet regime, although Soviet leaders privately considered Tolstoy’s work to be counter revolutionary. 

During World War II and the Nazi invasion, Tolstoy was the most published author in Russia, and relevant sections of War and Peace were posted on Mos-cow’s streets for inspiration. Although both War and Peace and Anna Karenina are firmly rooted in their time and place, neither are restricted by them, as Tolstoy pursues larger truths of history and human nature. 

In the end, Tolstoy’s pursuit of truth led him beyond fiction and illusion to realize a version of his revelations about humanity and spirituality in his own life. As Vladimir Nabokov observed:What one would like to do, would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under his sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper—far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna’s white neck. 

But the thing cannot be done: Tolstoy is homogeneous. . . . Tolstoy was striving, in spite of all the obstacles, to get at the truth. As the author of Anna Karenina, he used one method of discovering truth; in his sermons, he used another; but somehow, no matter how subtle his art was and no matter how dull some of his other attitudes were, truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth— this truth was he and this he was an art.

Most will agree with Nabokov that it is Tolstoy the artist rather than Tolstoy the mystic philosopher who compels our attention, and that his sublime fram-ing of the expansive questions of life satisfy more than the narrower answers for which he eventually settled.

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