(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.
(2) MR. GOSSE
Mr. Gosse and Mr. Saintsbury are the two kings of Sparta among English
critics of to-day. They stand preeminent among those of our contemporaries
who have served literature in the capacity of law-givers during the past
fifty years. I do not suggest that they are better critics than Mr.
Birrell or Sir Sidney Colvin or the late Sir E.T. Cook. But none of these
three was ever a professional and whole-time critic, as Mr. Gosse and Mr.
Saintsbury are. One thinks of the latter primarily as the authors of books
about books, though Mr. Gosse is a poet and biographer as well, and Mr.
Saintsbury, it is said, once dreamed of writing a history of wine. One
might say of Mr. Gosse that even in his critical work he writes largely as
a poet and biographer, while Mr. Saintsbury writes of literature as though
he were writing a history of wine. Mr. Saintsbury seeks in literature,
above all things, exhilarating qualities. He can read almost anything and
in any language, provided it is not non-intoxicating. He has a good head,
and it cannot be said that he ever allows an author to go to it. But the
authors whom he has collected in his wonderful cellar unquestionably make
him merry. In his books he always seems to be pressing on us "another
glass of Jane Austen," or "just a thimbleful of Pope," or "a drop of '42
Tennyson." No other critic of literature writes with the garrulous gusto
of a boon-companion as Mr. Saintsbury does. In our youth, when we demand
style as well as gusto, we condemn him on account of his atrocious
English. As we grow older, we think of his English merely as a rather
eccentric sort of coat, and we begin to recognize that geniality such as
his is a part of critical genius. True, he is not over-genial to new
authors. He regards them as he might 1916 claret. Perhaps he is right.
Authors undoubtedly get mellower with age. Even great poetry is, we are
told, a little crude to the taste till it has stood for a few seasons.
Mr. Gosse is at once more grave and more deferential in his treatment of
great authors. One cannot imagine Mr. Saintsbury speaking in a hushed
voice before Shakespeare himself. One can almost hear him saying, "Hullo,
Shakespeare!" To Mr. Gosse, however, literature is an almost sacred
subject. He glows in its presence. He is more lyrical than Mr. Saintsbury,
more imaginative and more eloquent. His short history of English
literature is a book that fills a young head with enthusiasm. He writes as
a servant of the great tradition. He is a Whig, where Mr. Saintsbury is an
heretical old Jacobite. He is, however, saved from a professorial
earnestness by his sharp talent for portraiture. Mr. Gosse's judgments may
or may not last: his portraits certainly will. It is to be hoped that he
will one day write his reminiscences. Such a book would, we feel sure, be
among the great books of portraiture in the history of English literature.
He has already set Patmore and Swinburne before us in comic reality, and
who can forget the grotesque figure of Hans Andersen, sketched in a few
lines though it is, in _Two Visits to Denmark_? It may be replied that Mr.
Gosse has already given us the best of his reminiscences in half a dozen
books of essay and biography. Even so, there were probably many things
which it was not expedient to tell ten or twenty years ago, but which
might well be related for the sake of truth and entertainment to-day. Mr.
Gosse in the past has usually told the truth about authors with the
gentleness of a modern dentist extracting a tooth. He keeps up a steady
conversation of praise while doing the damage. The truth is out before you
know. One becomes suddenly aware that the author has ceased to be as
coldly perfect as a tailor's model, and is a queer-looking creature with a
gap in his jaw. It is possible that the author, were he alive, would feel
furious, as a child sometimes feels with the dentist. None the less, Mr.
Gosse has done him a service. The man who extracts a truth is as much to
be commended as the man who extracts a tooth. It is not the function of
the biographer any more than it is that of a dentist to prettify his
subject. Each is an enemy of decay, a furtherer of life. There is such a
thing as painless biography, but it is the work of quacks. Mr. Gosse is
one of those honest dentists who reassure you by allowing it to hurt you
"just a little."
This gift for telling the truth is no small achievement in a man of
letters. Literature is a broom that sweeps lies out of the mind, and
fortunate is the man who wields it. Unhappily, while Mr. Gosse is daring
in portraiture, he is the reverse in comment. In comment, as his writings
on the war showed, he will fall in with the cant of the times. He can see
through the cant of yesterday with a sparkle in his eyes, but he is less
critical of the cant of to-day. He is at least fond of throwing out saving
clauses, as when, writing of Mr. Sassoon's verse, he says: "His temper is
not altogether to be applauded, for such sentiments must tend to relax the
effort of the struggle, yet they can hardly be reproved when conducted
with so much honesty and courage." Mr. Gosse again writes out of the
official rather than the imaginative mind when, speaking of the war poets,
he observes:
It was only proper that the earliest of all should be the Poet
Laureate's address to England, ending with the prophecy:
Much suffering shall cleanse thee!
But thou through the flood
Shall win to salvation,
To Beauty through blood.
Had a writer of the age of Charles II. written a verse like that, Mr.
Gosse's chortles would have disturbed the somnolent peace of the House of
Peers. Even if it had been written in the time of Albert the Good, he
would have rent it with the destructive dagger of a phrase. As it is, one
is not sure that Mr. Gosse regards this appalling scrap from a bad hymnal
as funny. One hopes that he quoted it with malicious intention. But did
he? Was it not Mr. Gosse who early in the war glorified the blood that was
being shed as a cleansing stream of Condy's Fluid? The truth is, apart
from his thoughts about literature, Mr. Gosse thinks much as the
leader-writers tell him. He is sensitive to beauty of style and to
idiosyncrasy of character, but he lacks philosophy and that tragic sense
that gives the deepest sympathy. That, we fancy, is why we would rather
read him on Catherine Trotter, the precursor of the bluestockings, than on
any subject connected with the war.
Two of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Gosse's _Diversions of a Man
of Letters_ are the essay on Catherine Trotter and that on "the message of
the Wartons." Here he is on ground on which there is no leader-writer to
take him by the hand and guide him into saying "the right thing." He
writes as a disinterested scholar and an entertainer. He forgets the war
and is amused. How many readers are there in England who know that
Catherine Trotter "published in 1693 a copy of verses addressed to Mr.
Bevil Higgons on the occasion of his recovery from the smallpox," and that
"she was then fourteen years of age"? How many know even that she wrote a
blank-verse tragedy in five acts, called _Agnes de Cestro_, and had it
produced at Drury Lane at the age of sixteen? At the age of nineteen she
was the friend of Congreve, and was addressed by Farquhar as "one of the
fairest of her sex and the best judge." By the age of twenty-five,
however, she had apparently written herself out, so far as the stage was
concerned, and after her tragedy, _The Revolution in Sweden_, the theatre
knows her no more. Though described as "the Sappho of Scotland" by the
Queen of Prussia, and by the Duke of Marlborough as "the wisest virgin I
ever knew," her fame did not last even as long as her life. She married a
clergyman, wrote on philosophy and religion, and lived till seventy. Her
later writings, according to Mr. Gosse, "are so dull that merely to think
of them brings tears into one's eyes." Her husband, who was a bit of a
Jacobite, lost his money on account of his opinions, even though--"a
perfect gentleman at heart--'he always prayed for the King and Royal
Family by name.'" "Meanwhile," writes Mr. Gosse, "to uplift his spirits in
this dreadful condition, he is discovered engaged upon a treatise on the
Mosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher to print. He reminds
us of Dr. Primrose in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and, like him, Mr.
Cockburn probably had strong views on the Whistonian doctrine." Altogether
the essay on Catherine Trotter is an admirable example of Mr. Gosse in a
playful mood.
The study of Joseph and Thomas Warton as "two pioneers of romanticism" is
more serious in purpose, and is a scholarly attempt to discover the first
symptoms of romanticism in eighteenth-century literature. Mr. Gosse finds
in _The Enthusiast_, written by Joseph Warton at the age of eighteen, "the
earliest expression of full revolt against the classical attitude which
had been sovereign in all European literature for nearly a century." He
does not pretend that it is a good poem, but "here, for the first time, we
find unwaveringly emphasized and repeated what was entirely new in
literature, the essence of romantic hysteria." It is in Joseph Warton,
according to Mr. Gosse, that we first meet with "the individualist
attitude to nature." Readers of Horace Walpole's letters, however, will
remember still earlier examples of the romantic attitude to nature. But
these were not published for many years afterwards.
The other essays in the book range from the charm of Sterne to the
vivacity of Lady Dorothy Nevill, from a eulogy of Poe to a discussion of
Disraeli as a novelist. The variety, the scholarship, the portraiture of
the book make it a pleasure to read; and, even when Mr. Gosse flatters in
his portraits, his sense of truth impels him to draw the features
correctly, so that the facts break through the praise. The truth is Mr.
Gosse is always doing his best to balance the pleasure of saying the best
with the pleasure of saying the worst. His books are all the more vital
because they bear the stamp of an appreciative and mildly cruel
personality.