A few hours ago Tony posted this as well . . .
Yesterday I posted a list of the works — besides the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare — that have most deeply influenced me over the years, shaping how I see the world and man’s place in it, in past cultures and in this whatever-it-is of ours.
Now, not one of the works I listed that were written before 1900 was particularly arcane. That is, they were the kinds of things that any educated person in 1900 might well have read, or in some cases would almost certainly have read. But it occurred to me that that is not true anymore, and not because the works in question were overrated at that time. In many ways, a few of them were UNDERRATED: scholarship dealing with the Middle Ages was much more thorough in 1970 than it was in 1870.
What’s strange is this. You can easily graduate with an advanced degree in English, and know next to nothing about the Bible or the plays of Shakespeare. And as for The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, The Life of Johnson, Tom Jones, the poetry of Herbert, and Bleak House, I’d say that odds are next to zero that a PhD in English will have read all of them, and somewhere about even up that the PhD will have read NONE of them.
The Faerie Queene — the single greatest literary influence upon C. S. Lewis, and a poem of endless intellectual and poetical fascination, one that repays reading many times over — is almost wholly neglected now. I doubt that it is taught in its entirety at more than a handful of colleges across the country. Tom Jones, and this is no idiosyncratic opinion of mine, is an excellent choice for Greatest English Novel ever (with Moby-Dick, that epic poem in prose, and Bleak House being two close competitors), but I rarely meet anyone who has read it, and the 18th century always gets shorted in English departments.
Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed is generally regarded as the greatest of all Italian novels, and as an historical novel it is easily superior to anything that Victor Hugo or Walter Scott ever did in that vein; but outside of Italy it is not known. The Life of Johnson is the gold standard for biography, but what literature professors would want to get near that old Tory?
Nathanael Hawthorne used to read The Faerie Queene to his wife and daughters in the evening by the fireside. Tastes do change; but when entire ranges of literature disappear from the consciousness of people whose business it ostensibly is to study literature, then something very strange is going on. Or maybe it is not very strange. Maybe it is an old and familiar thing, called decay and death....
It’s hard for me to imagine anyone looking back in 100 years and thinking to themselves that the advent of electronic screen media was this great invention and a really positive thing for society.
Freegards
Excellent observations by the professor.
Our civilization is dying. We have let liberal termites infest our educational system from top to bottom. The structure is crumbling. There is not one solid support left. It looks OK on the outside, but a little gust of wind will knock it down.