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In this brief survey of a thousand years or so of English literature--originally
published in 1965, two years before its companion
Introduccion a la literatura norteamericana--Borges and co-author
Vazquez manage both to confirm opinions many readers will already hold
and blow holes in other assumptions. What the book perhaps most confirms
is Borges' breadth as a reader and the idiosyncrasy of his views. Almost
as vividly, though, Borges impresses the reader with his good sense and
refusal (or inability) to approach good writing via jargon or theoretical
grandstanding.
 In his chapter on the fourteenth century, for example, Borges deals with
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" simply by summarizing the story in some
detail and pointing out the alliterative verse in which it is written.
Turning to Chaucer, on the other hand, he makes the delightful claim that
Chaucer's great stature as a poet can be proven by citing simply one
instance, his translation of the Latin proverb, "Ars longa, vita brevis."
Usually rendered as "Art is long, life is fleeting," the proverb
becomes, in Chaucer's hands, "The lyf so short, the craft so long to
lerne," which is, to be sure, not a translation at all, but rather a
recasting of the fairly trite dictum into a specific and unified notation
of the psyche of the artist. Or, as Borges puts it, "The dry Latin
sentence is transformed, through Chaucer, into a melancholic meditation."
Equally interesting is his statement that Chaucer's deepest, "but not
most famous," work is "Troilus and Cressida," and he points out--without
drawing the obvious conclusion--that it is the only one of his poems
that Chaucer finished.
Borges reduces the seventeenth century to four writers--Bacon, Donne,
Milton, and Thomas Browne. Of Bacon's work, he mentions only "The New
Atlantis" which he calls "the first example of science fiction in world
letters." To Thomas Browne, however, he devotes two pages, as much as he
gives to Donne, and emphasizes the importance of Browne's style by using
half of that space to include a long quote from Bioy Casares's
translation of Browne into Spanish. He also says that Browne "has been
judged the best prose-writer in English literature," by which passive
voice Borges would seem to be indicating his own opinion.
As regards Milton, he takes the uncommon stance that "Samson Agonistes"
is Milton's masterwork and, significantly, quotes Samuel Johnson's
description of "Paradise Lost" as a book the reader admires, abandons,
and never returns to.
Equally surprising is Borges's decision to dispense with all of the
poets and novelists of the eighteenth century's neo-classical movement
and instead attend to Edward Gibbon. Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," Borges
says, unites two characteristics which ought to be mutually exclusive--
irony and pomp. He exhibits this combination by noting Gibbon's
treatment of a comment by Roman author Tacitus. Tacitus wrote that the
German tribesmen, in their piety, preferred to worship the gods in the
solitude of the forests rather than to enclose them in temples. But
temples, Gibbon points out, can hardly be expected of men who can barely
erect huts. Borges goes on to call "Decline and Fall" the "most
important monument of English literature," and one has the distinct
impression that Borges has selected the word "monument" not to be pompous
himself, but rather to imply that Gibbon's masterpiece need not be
considered the most important or "best" work overall.
Borges begins his look at Romanticism in an unexpected place as well--
with a discussion of James MacPherson, the author (or collector?) of the
nowadays almost forgotten "Ossian" poems. While Borges allows two pages
for this summary, he breezes past Scott and Shelley in a single sentence,
and gives only one page a piece to Byron, Wordsworth and Keats.
Coleridge gets two pages, in which Borges examines the idea that
"Christabel," "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" form a
Romantic "Divine Comedy."
The chapter on nineteenth century prose includes not only the expected
figures of Carlyle, Dickens, Macauley, Ruskin and Arnold, but also Lewis
Carroll and W.H. Hudson, whose upbringing in and close links to South
America perhaps make him more significant to Borges and other
Argentinians than to most U.S. readers. An equally notable surprise is
the serious attention Borges gives to William Morris in his look at
nineteenth century, non-Romantic poetry. He cites "The Earthly Paradise"
as Morris's masterpiece, but goes on to mention Morris's translations--
including "The Odyssey" and "Beowulf"--and his one-time plan to write in
an English devoid of all Latin and French import words. Borges concludes
by asserting that, despite a slowness to his verse which critics deplore,
Morris is a great poet.
In the final two chapters of the survey, Borges covers the turn of the
twentieth century and the twentieth century itself. Here too he shows
himself willing to speak up for more recent neglected writers. He calls
R. L. Stevenson "one of the most lovable and heroic figures in English
literature" and suggests that his writing for children has weighed
against his reputation, a situation he also finds in regard to Kipling.
Borges also spends as much time discussing such writers as Kipling and H.
G. Wells as he gave to Wordsworth and devotes even more space to G. K.
Chesterton. Likewise his inclusion of T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and
Victoria Sackville-West may also raise a few eyebrows, and his take on
Joyce is certainly not the common one. Joyce's genius, Borges holds, is
purely verbal--"too bad that he wasted it on the novel, not--as a few
times he did--in the composition of beautiful poems." He claims,
correctly, I think, that "Finnegans Wake" and "Ulysses" are
untranslatable, though not "Dubliners" or "Portrait of the Artist."
Borges discusses quite a number of other writers in this brief work--
Shakespeare, of course, Marlowe, the "Beowulf" poet, Conrad, Yeats, and
others--and the great delight to be drawn from reading his views is not
in expecting to agree with all of them. Rather it is in the obvious
knowledge, good sense, and sensitivity which he brings to the enterprise,
as well as in the awareness that Borges can be reliably trusted to point
out a half-dozen or more writers the reader has never given much
attention to, but maybe should.
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