Introduction: Is Dryden a Classic?

Abstract When H. A. Mason in r 962 asked Latinists the question, ‘Is Juvenal a Classic?’,’ he was challenging them to lift their eyes above the minutiae of philological and historical scholarship to address the large issues which affect human and humane living. Does Juvenal, he wondered, deserve a place amongst those writers who enlarge and refine our understanding of human nature and society? Is he a classic in the sense that Homer and Shakespeare are classics? Mr Mason’s question was framed by a humanism which he learned from long study of Greek and Latin literature, of Dante, of More and Erasmus, and of Shakespeare, Dryden, and Pope; and his pursuit of ‘the classic’ was repeatedly inflected by invocations of Matthew Arnold and Arnold’s search for the ‘central, truly human point of view’. Looking back now at Mason’s generation—the generation of Scrutiny, and in America the generation of men like Lionel Trilling and Walter Jackson Bate—I am tempted to say, as Dryden did of his predecessors, ‘Theirs was the Gyant Race, before the Flood’.