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: