Art of Letters — Two English Critics: Mr. Saintsbury

XVIII. --TWO ENGLISH CRITICS

(1) MR.

SAINTSBURY

Mr. Saintsbury as a critic possesses in a high degree the gift of sending the reader post-haste to the works he criticizes.

His _Peace of the Augustans_ is an almost irresistible incitement to go and forget the present world among the poets and novelists and biographers and letter-writers of the eighteenth century.

His enthusiasm weaves spells about even the least of them.

He does not merely remind us of the genius of Pope and Swift, of Fielding and Johnson and Walpole.

He also summons us to Armory's _John Buncle_ and to the Reverend Richard Graves's _Spiritual Quixote_ as to a feast.

Of the latter novel he declares that "for a book that is to be amusing without being flimsy, and substantial without being ponderous, _The Spiritual Quixote_ may, perhaps, be commended above all its predecessors and contemporaries outside the work of the great Four themselves."

That is characteristic of the wealth of invitations scattered through _The Peace of the Augustans_.

After reading the book, one can scarcely resist the temptation to spend an evening over Young's _Night Thoughts_ and one will be almost more likely to turn to Prior than to Shakespeare himself--Prior who, "with the eternal and almost unnecessary exception of Shakespeare ...

is about the first to bring out the true English humour which involves sentiment and romance, which laughs gently at its own, tears, and has more than half a tear for its own laughter"--Prior, of whom it is further written that "no one, except Thackeray, has ever entered more thoroughly into the spirit of _Ecclesiastes_."

It does not matter that in a later chapter of the book it is _Rasselas_ which is put with _Ecclesiastes_, and, after _Rasselas_, _The Vanity of Human Wishes_.

One does not go to Mr. Saintsbury as an inspector of literary weights and measures.

His estimates of authors are the impressions of a man talking in a hurry, and his method is the method of exaggeration rather than of precise statement.

How deficient he is in the sense of proportion may be judged from the fact that he devotes slightly more space to Collins than to Pope, unless the pages in which he assails "Grub Street" as a malicious invention of Pope's are to be counted to the credit of the latter.

But Mr. Saintsbury's book is not so much a thorough and balanced survey of eighteenth-century literature as a confession, an almost garrulous monologue on the delights of that literature.

How pleasant and unexpected it is to see a critic in his seventies as incautious, as pugnacious, as boisterous as an undergraduate!

It is seldom that we find the apostolic spirit of youth living in the same breast with the riches of experience and memory, as we do in the present book.

One of the great attractions of the eighteenth century for the modern world is that, while it is safely set at an historical distance from us, it is, at the same time, brought within range of our everyday interests.

It is not merely that about the beginning of it men began to write and talk according to the simple rules of modern times.

It is rather that about this time the man of letters emerges from the mists of legend and becomes as real as one's uncle in his daily passions and his train of little interests.

One has not to reconstruct the lives of Swift and Pope from a handful of myths and references in legal documents.

There is no room for anything akin to Baconianism in their regard.

They live in a thousand letters and contemporary illusions, and one might as well be an agnostic about Mr. Asquith as about either of them.

Pope was a champion liar, and Swift spun mystifications about himself.

But, in spite of lies and Mystifications and gossip, they are both as real to us as if we met them walking down the Strand.

One could not easily imagine Shakespeare walking down the Strand.

The Strand would have to be rebuilt, and the rest of us would have to put on fancy dress in order to receive him.

But though Swift and Pope lived in a century of wig and powder and in a London strangely unlike the London of to-day, we do not feel that similar preparations would be needed in their case.

If Swift came back, one can without difficulty imagine him pamphleteering about war as though he had merely been asleep for a couple of centuries; and Pope, we may be sure, would resume, without too great perplexity, his attack on the egoists and dunces of the world of letters.

But Shakespeare's would be a return from legendary Elysian fields.

Hence Mr. Saintsbury may justly hope that his summons to the modern random reader, no less than to the scholar, to go and enjoy himself among the writers of the eighteenth century will not fall on entirely deaf ears.

At the same time, it is only fair to warn the general reader not to follow Mr. Saintsbury's recommendations and opinions too blindly.

He will do well to take the author's advice and read Pope, but he will do very ill to take the author's advice as regards what in Pope is best worth reading.

Mr. Saintsbury speaks with respect, for instance, of the _Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady_--an insincere piece of tombstone rhetoric.

"There are some," he declared in a footnote, "to whom this singular piece is Pope's strongest atonement, both as poet and man, for his faults as both."

It seems to me to be a poem which reveals Pope's faults as a poet, while of Pope the man it tells us simply nothing.

It has none of Pope's wit, none of his epigrammatic characterization, none of his bewigged and powdered fancies, none of his malicious self-revelation.

Almost the only interesting thing about it is the notes the critics have written on it, discussing whether the lady ever lived, and, if so, whether she was a Miss Wainsbury or a lady of title, whether she was beautiful or deformed, whether she was in love with Pope or the Duke of Buckingham or the Duc de Berry, whether Pope was in love with her, or even knew her, or whether she killed herself with a sword or by hanging herself.

One can find plenty of "rest and refreshment" among the conjectures of the commentators, but in the verse itself one can find little but a good example of the technique of the rhymed couplet.

But Mr. Saintsbury evidently loves the heroic couplet for itself alone.

The only long example of Pope's verse which he quotes is merely ding-dong, and might have been written by any capable imitator of the poet later in the century.

Surely, if his contention is true that Pope's reputation as a poet is now lower than it ought to be, he ought to have quoted something from the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ or _The Rape of the Lock_, or even _The Essay on Man_.

The two first are almost flawless masterpieces.

Here Pope suddenly becomes a star.

Here he gilds his age and his passions with wit and fancy; he ceases to be a mere rhymed moralist, a mechanician of metre.

Mr. Saintsbury, I regret to see, contends that the first version of _The Rape of the Lock_ is the best.

One can hardly forgive this throwing overboard of the toilet and the fairies which Pope added in the later edition.

We may admit that the gnomes are a less happy invention than the sylphs, and that their introduction lets the poem down from its level of magic illusion.

But in the second telling the poem is an infinitely richer and more peopled thing.

Had we only known the first version, we should, no doubt, have felt with Addison that it was madness to tamper with such exquisite perfection.

But Pope, who foolishly attributed Addison's advice to envy, proved that Addison was wrong.

His revision of _The Rape of the Lock_ is one of the few magnificently successful examples in literature of painting the lily.

One differs from Mr. Saintsbury, however, less in liking a different garden from his than in liking a different seat in the same garden.

One who is familiar as he is with all the literature he discusses in the present volume is bound to indulge all manner of preferences, whims and even eccentricities.

An instance of Mr. Saintsbury's whims is his complaint that the eighteenth-century essays are almost always reprinted only in selections and without the advertisements that appeared with them on their first publication.

He is impatient of J. R.

Green's dismissal of the periodical essayist as a "mass of rubbish," and he demands his eighteenth-century essayists in full, advertisements and all.

"Here," he insists, "these things fringe and vignette the text in the most appropriate manner, and so set off the quaint variety and the other-worldly character as nothing else could do."

Is not the author's contention, however, as to the great loss the Addisonian essay suffers when isolated from its context a severe criticism on that essay as literature?

The man of letters likes to read from a complete _Spectator_ as he does from a complete Wordsworth.

At the same time, the best of Addison, as of Wordsworth, can stand on its own feet in an anthology, and this is the final proof of its literary excellence.

The taste for eighteenth century advertisements is, after all, only literary antiquarianism--a delightful indulgence, a by-path, but hardly necessary to the enjoyment of Addison's genius.

But it is neither Pope nor Addison who is ultimately Mr. Saintsbury's idol among the poets and prose-writers of the eighteenth century.

His idol of idols is Swift, and next to him he seems most wholeheartedly to love and admire Dr. Johnson and Fielding.

He makes no bones about confessing his preference of Swift to Aristophanes and Rabelais and Molière.

Swift does not at once fascinate and cold-shoulder him as he does to so many people.

Mr. Saintsbury glorifies _Gulliver_, and wisely so, right down to the last word about the Houyhnhnms, and he demands for the _Journal to Stella_ recognition as "the first great novel, being at the same time a marvellous and absolutely genuine autobiography."

His ultimate burst of appreciation is a beautifully characteristic example of what has before been called Saintsburyese--not because of any obscurity in it, but because of its oddity of phrase and metaphor: Swift never wearies, for, as Bossuet said of human passion generally, there is in this greatest master of one of its most terrible forms, _quelque chose d'infini_, and the refreshment which he offers varies unceasingly from the lightest froth of pure nonsense, through beverages middle and stronger to the most drastic restoratives--the very strychnine and capsicum of irony.

But what, above all, attracts Mr. Saintsbury in Swift, Fielding and Johnson is their eminent manliness.

He is an enthusiast within limits for the genius of Sterne and the genius of Horace Walpole.

But he loves them in a grudging way.

He is disgusted with their lack of muscle.

He admits of the characters in _Tristrom Shandy_ that "they are ...

much more intrinsically true to life than many, if not almost all, the characters of Dickens," but he is too greatly shocked by Sterne's humour to be just to his work as a whole.

It is the same with Walpole's letters.

Mr. Saintsbury will heap sentence after sentence of praise upon them, till one would imagine they were his favourite eighteenth-century literature.

He even defends Walpole's character against Macaulay, but in the result he damns him with faint praise quite as effectively as Macaulay did.

That he has an enviable appetite for Walpole's letters is shown by the fact that, in speaking of Mrs. Toynbee's huge sixteen-volume edition of them, he observes that "even a single reading of it will supply the evening requirements of a man who does not go to bed very late, and has learnt the last lesson of intellectual as of other enjoyment--to enjoy _slowly_--for nearer a month than a week, and perhaps for longer still."

The man who can get through Horace Walpole in a month of evenings without sitting up late seems to me to be endowed not only with an avarice of reading, but with an avarice of Walpole.

But, in spite of this, Mr. Saintsbury does not seem to like his author.

His ideal author is one of whom he can say, as he does of Johnson, that he is "one of the greatest of Englishmen, one of the greatest men of letters, and one of the greatest of _men_."

One of his complaints against Gray is that, though he liked _Joseph Andrews_, he "had apparently not enough manliness to see some of Fielding's real merits."

As for Fielding, Mr. Saintsbury's verdict is summed up in Dryden's praise of Chaucer.

"Here is God's plenty."

In _Tom Jones_ he contends that Fielding "puts the whole plant of the pleasure-giver in motion, as no novel-writer--not even Cervantes--had ever done before."

For myself, I doubt whether the exaltation of Fielding has not become too much a matter of orthodoxy in recent years.

Compare him with Swift, and he is long-winded in his sentences.

Compare him with Sterne, and his characters are mechanical.

Compare him with Dickens, and he reaches none of the depths, either of laughter or of sadness.

This is not to question the genius of Fielding's vivid and critical picture of eighteenth-century manners and morals.

It is merely to put a drag on the wheel of Mr Saintsbury's galloping enthusiasm.

But, however one may quarrel with it, _The Peace of the Augustans_ is a book to read with delight--an eccentric book, an extravagant book, a grumpy book, but a book of rare and amazing enthusiasm for good literature.

Mr. Saintsbury's constant jibes at the present age, as though no one had ever been unmanly enough to make a joke before Mr. Shaw, become amusing in the end like Dr. Johnson's rudenesses.

And Mr. Saintsbury's one attempt to criticize contemporary fiction--where he speaks of _Sinister Street_ in the same breath with _Waverley_ and _Pride and Prejudice_--is both amusing and rather appalling.

But, in spite of his attitude to his own times, one could not ask for more genial company on going on a pilgrimage among the Augustans.

Mr. Saintsbury has in this book written the most irresistible advertisement of eighteenth-century literature that has been published for many years.