Considering "The Limits of Art"

I bought The Limits of Art: Poetry and Prose Chosen by Ancient and Modern Critics at the Princeton University Store on October 25, 1978. I know because I wrote the date on the inside of the book. That’s just what I do.

After 40 years, I eyed the book for donation to a library sale as I consider how to trim the amount of literary stuff around me. Partings are difficult, be it from people or objects to which I’ve become attached. On the other hand, I’ve never shed a book or album and later regretted the decision.

The Limits of Art attracted me with its vast scope and imaginative idea: to select works from the canon of western literature based on critical commentary on them. The works appear in their original language and in translation to English, if not first written in English. The book also comes with a glossary of what appear to be Old English terms. At 1,400-plus pages, The Limits of Art provided me with plenty of material to consider. (Intriguing side note: the book was collected and edited by Huntington Cairns, who was the official part-time U.S. Censor within the Treasury Department.)

I found myself coming back to some pieces. The critics themselves were on target; some of the translations, such as Alexander Pope working through The Iliad, sound clunky to modern ears, but who am I to argue with Alexander Pope?

I struggled over whether to keep the book. The sharp printing and those hundreds of pages of Greek, Latin and Norse letters were tempting. In the great scheme of clutter, what’s just one more little book (like one more wafer thin)? True, I do also have the two-volume fifth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (5,194 pages), the one-volume shorter edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (2,648 pages), the complete Shakespeare and the complete William Butler Yeats, so I’m not bereft of classic reading material. Ultimately I decided to . . . well, read to the end to see what happened.

A final spin through The Limits of Art reminded me of why I found Cairns' collection so compelling: It brims with evocative short pieces—sometimes only a paragraph or phrase, but with their impact heightened by the critics’ observations. On their own, I might have skipped over the lines, or not noticed them in a longer piece, or missed their historical meaning. The Limits of Art gave full credit to snippets along with longer excerpts, along with full poems.

Over the decades my eye kept settling on the same selections. Something about them touched me every time I read them. In a salute to The Limits of Art, here are my favorites, with the critics:

Homer, The Iliad

Thetis to Achilles: My son, why are you weeping? What is it that grieves you? Keep it not from me, but tell me, that we may know it together. Iliad i, 362-363, translated by Samuel Butler.

There is nothing more moving in literature than the speeches of Thetis to Achilles her son; she knew what his doom is to be. Maurice Baring, Have You Anything to Declare? (1936)

Sappho, Fragment xlviii

I loved thee once, Atthis, long ago.

There is no sadder poem. Maurice Baring, Have You Anything to Declare? (1936)


Plato, Socrates to His Judges

But now the time has come to go away. I go to die, and you to live; but which of us goes to the better lot, is known to none but God. Apology, 42A

Perhaps the most beautiful prose sentence ever written, George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm (1922)

Anonymous, from Edda Sæmundar, Sigurth and I segment

Ever with grief          and all too long

Are men and women      born in the world;

But yet we shall live        our lives together,

Sigurth and I.

There was no rhythm ever conceived that encompasses such immensity of space and remoteness as this old Northern verse. Oswald Spengler, Der Undergang des Abendlandes (1918)


Christopher Marlowe, The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus (1601), scene xvi

O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!

FAUSTUS: Ah, Faustus.

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,

And then thou must be damn'd perpetually!

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,

That time may cease, and midnight never come;

Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make

Perpetual day; or let this hour be but

A year, a month, a week, a natural day,

That Faustus may repent and save his soul!

O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.

O, I'll leap up to my God!—Who pulls me down?—

See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!

One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ!—

Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!

Yet will I call on him: O, spare me, Lucifer!—

Where is it now? tis gone: and see, where God

Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!

Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,

And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!

No, no!

Then will I headlong run into the earth:

Earth, gape! O, no, it will not harbour me!

You stars that reign'd at my nativity,

Whose influence hath alotted death and hell,

Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist,

Into the entrails of yon labouring clouds,

That, when you vomit forth into the air,

My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths,

So that my soul may but ascend to heaven!

[The clock strikes the half-hour.]

Ah, half the hour is past! 'twill all be past anon.

O God,

If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,

Yet for Christ's sake, whose blood hath ransom'd me,

Impose some end to my incessant pain;

Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,

A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd!

O, no end is limited to damned souls!

Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?

Or why is this immortal that thou hast?

Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true,

This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd

Unto some brutish beast! all beasts are happy,

For, when they die,

Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements;

But mine must live still to be plagu'd in hell.

Curs'd be the parents that engender'd me!

No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer

That hath depriv'd thee of the joys of heaven.


[The clock strikes twelve.]

O, it strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,

Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!


[Thunder and lightning.]


O soul, be chang'd into little water-drops,

And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!


[Enter Devils.]


My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!

Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while!

Ugly hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer!

I'll burn my books!

Shakespeare himself has not surpassed, which is equivalent to saying that no other writer has equalled, the famous and wonderful passages in “Tamburlaine” and “Faustus,” which are familiar to every student of English literature as examples of the NE PLUS ULTRA of the poetic powers, not of the language but of language. George Saintsbury, A History of Elizabethan Literature (1887)


Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, The Battle of Valmy

Von hier und heute geht eine neue Epoche der Weltgeschichte aus und ihr könnt sagen, ihr seid dabei gewesen.

Here and now begins a new epoch of world history, and you, gentlemen, can say that you “were there.”

No general, no diplomat, let alone the philosophers, ever so directly felt history “becoming.” It is the deepest judgment that any man ever uttered about a great historical act in the moment of its accomplishment. Oswald Spengler, Der Undergang des Abendlandes (1918)

Rudyard Kipling, Epitaphs on the War, 1914-18 

An Only Son

I have slain none except my Mother. She

(Blessing her slayer) died of grief for me.


The Coward

I could not look on Death, which being known,

Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.


The Beginner

On the first hour of my first day

In the front trench I fell.

(Children in boxes at a play

Stand up to watch it well.)


Common Form

If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.


A Dead Statesman

I could not dig: I dared not rob:

Therefore I lied to please the mob.

Now all my lies are proved untrue

And I must face the men I slew.

What tale shall serve me here among

Mine angry and defrauded young?


Salonikan Grave

I have watched a thousand days

Push out and crawl into night

Slowly as tortoises.

Now I, too, follow these.

It is fever, and not the fight—

Time, not battle,—that slays.

The book provides a long analysis on Kipling by T.S. Eliot from 1941, concluding with this comment: I can think of a number of poets who have written great poetry, only of a very few whom I should call great verse writers. And unless I am mistaken, Kipling’s position in this class is not only high, but unique.


A Schoolboy’s Letter by Theon, second or third century A.D., Roman Egypt

Theon to Theon his father, greeting. That was a fine trick, not taking me to the city with you! If you don’t take me to Alexandria with you, I won’t write to you! I won’t speak to you! I won’t wish you good-morning! If you do go to Alexandria, I won’t hold your hand or have anything more to say to you. That’s what will happen if you don’t take me! Mother said to Archelaus, “Take him out of my way, he upsets me.” That was a fine thing you did, to send me that fine present of beans! They kept me in the dark at home on the 12th, when you sailed. Please send for me. If you don’t I won’t eat or drink. Goodbye. Oxyrhynchus Papyrim cxix

Room must be found for the schoolboy’s letter to his father. F.A. Wright, A History of Later Greek Literature, 1932.


After flipping through the book at my leisure to find these excerpts prior to tossing The Limits of Art in a box for the Katonah Village Library, I made my decision.

One more little literary wafer thin won’t hurt at all, will it? The book stays.