George Saintsbury

“ I believe that every human being is capable of poetry, though I should admit that the exhibition of the capability would be in most cases—I am sure it would be in my own—"highly to be deprecated." But with a sober prose fiction of some scope and room and verge it is different. The face of Helen; the taste of nectar; the vision of the clouds or of the sea; the passion of a great action in oneself or others; the infinite poignancy of suffering or of pleasure, may draw—once and never again—immortal verse from an exceedingly mortal person. ”

“ Indeed, it seems to be a mistake to call Molière a poet at all, despite his extraordinary creative faculty. He was too positive, too much given to literal transcription of society, too little able to convey the vague suggestion of beauty which, as cannot be too often repeated, is of the essence of poetry. But, if we are content to regard drama as a middle term between poetry and prose, he, with the two poets just named, must be appointed to the first place in it among modern authors. In brilliancy of wit he is, among dramatists, inferior only to Aristophanes and Congreve. ”

“ It would be cruel, and is quite unnecessary, to insist on the too certain fact that, in this instance at any rate, these excellent qualities were accompanied by a distinct weakness of will, by a mania for sitting between two stools, and by that—it may be lovable, it may be even estimable—incapacity to think, to speak, to behave like a man of this world, which besets the conscientious idealist who is not a fanatic. On the contrary, let us not grudge Mr Arnold a hero so congenial to himself, and so little repulsive to any of us. ”

“ Byron, then, seems to me a poet distinctly of the second class, and not even of the best kind of second, inasmuch as his greatness is chiefly derived from a sort of parody, a sort of imitation, of the qualities of the first. His verse is to the greatest poetry what melodrama is to tragedy, what plaster is to marble, what pinchbeck is to gold. He is not indeed an impostor; for his sense of the beauty of nature and of the unsatisfactoriness of life is real, and his power of conveying this sense to others is real also. ”

“ At that very time France, besides the chansons de geste—as native, as original, as the sagas, and if less rich, far more artistic in form—France has to show the great romances proper, which Iceland herself, like all the world, copied, a lyric of wonderful charm and abundance, the vast comic wealth of the fabliaux, and the Fox-epic, prose not merely of laws and homilies and rudimentary educational subjects, but of every variety, drama, history, philosophy, allegory, dream. ”

“ But there is throughout something like a confession, stoutly avoided in words, but hinted in tone and current of quotation and sentiment, that the strength, though not the courage, is hardly equal to the day. The Diary, both here and elsewhere, is full of good things, pleasant wit still, shrewd criticism of life, quaint citation of wise old Scots saws and good modern instances, happy judgment of men and books,—above all, that ever-present touch of literature, without mere bookishness, which is as delightful to those who can taste it as any of Scott's gifts. ”

“ Poetry after all, like all other human things, has a body and a soul. The body must be fashioned by art—perhaps the body is art; but the soul is something else. The best poetry will not come without careful consideration of form and subject, of kind and style; but it will not necessarily come with this consideration. There must be the inspiration, the enthusiasm, the afflatus, the glow; and they are here in Sidney’s tractate. Nor must we fail to draw attention, once more, to the difference of the English critical spirit here shown as regards both Italian and French. ”

“ With such colour and form of locality to serve, not merely as inspiration but as actual scene and setting, such genius as Hugo's could hardly fail. The thing is sad and delightful and great. As life, you may say, it could not have happened; as literature it could not but have happened, and has happened, at its best, divinely well. The contrast of the long agony of effort and its triumph on the Douvres, with the swift collapse of any possible reward at St. Samson, is simply a windfall of the Muses to this spoiled and, it must be confessed, often self-spoiling child of theirs. ”

“ This Hampshire parson's daughter had found the philosopher's stone of the novel: and the very pots and pans, the tongs and pokers of the house, could be turned into novel-gold by it.
But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do. Miss Austen's art excludes (it has been said) tragedy; it does not let in much pure romance; although its variety is in a way infinite, yet it is not various in infinite ways, but rather in very finite ones. ”

“ The charm of Rabelais, of Amyot, of Montaigne, and of the numerous writers of tales and memoirs whom we have noticed, was a charm of exuberance, of naïveté, of picturesque effect—in short, of a mixture of poetry and prose, rather than of prose proper. Sixteenth-century French prose is a delightful instrument in the hands of men and women of genius, but in the hands of those who have not genius it is full of defects, and indeed is nearly unreadable. Now, prose is essentially an instrument of all work. The poet who has not genius had better not write at all ”

“ Of this there is no danger, essentially at least, under the application of that definition of the Grand Style which I prefer. It makes its appearance when it is wanted, and when the hour is come; at other times it abides apart, and possesses its strength in quietness and in confidence, not frittering it away. Of its display in this fashion I cannot remember any one in literature—not Homer, not Dante himself, not Milton certainly—who can produce such constant, such varied, such magnificent instances as Shakespeare. ”

“ Pages after pages on the old aporia whether Rhetoric is an art or not, sheets after sheets on the welldoing of the Four, on Plato’s evil-speaking, we have. But, unless I have missed it, never a passage on the magnificent literature with which Rhetoric has enriched Greece, on the more magnificent rhetoric which the accuser of the brethren has himself displayed in accusing her. To a man of the subtlety of Aristides, of his enthusiasm for literature, of his flair for a popular and striking paradox, one would imagine that this beating up of the enemy’s quarters would be irresistibly tempting. ”

“ The Shoemaker's Holiday is one of those innumerable and yet singular pieces in which the taste of the time seems to have so much delighted, and which seem so odd to modern taste,—pieces in which a plot or underplot, as the case may be, of the purest comedy of manners, a mere picture of the life, generally the lower middle-class life of the time, is united with hardly a thought of real dramatic conjunction to another plot of a romantic kind, in which noble and royal personages, with, it may be, a dash of history, play their parts. ”

“ To the study, not in a frivolous or even merely satirical, but in a gravely ironic mode, of the nature of humanity he addicted himself throughout: and the results of his studies undoubtedly enlarge humanity's conscious knowledge of itself in the way of fictitious exemplification. In a certain sense no higher praise can be given. To acknowledge it is at once to estate him, not only with Cervantes and Fielding themselves, but with Thackeray, with Swift, with Moliere, with Shakespeare. It places him well above Dickens, and, in the opinion of the present writer, it places him above even Balzac. ”

“ Malebranche cannot indeed, like his great master, claim absolute originality. But his excellence as a writer is as great as, if not greater than, that of Descartes, and the Recherche remains to this day the one philosophical treatise of great length and abstruseness which, merely as a book, is delightful to read—not like the works of Plato and Berkeley, because of the adventitious graces of dialogue or description, but from the purity and grace of the language, and its admirable adjustment to the purposes of the argument. Yet, for all this, philosophy hardly flourished in France. ”

“ They are full of anecdote, agreeably and crisply told, yet they never descend to mere gossip: their criticism of life is almost always just and sound, grave without being precise, animated by the same melancholy as that of the Vanity of Human Wishes, but in milder mood and with touches of brightness. Their criticism of literature is all the more valuable for being the criticism of their time. When we read Johnson’s remarks on Milton’s minor poems it is foolish to rave, and it is ignoble to sneer. The wise will rejoice in the opportunity to understand. ”

“ But the charm of precision, of elegance, of expressing what is expressed in the best possible manner, belongs to it in a supreme degree. There are not many things in literature more absolutely incapable of improvement in their own style, and as far as they go, than a scene of Molière, a tirade of Racine, a maxim of La Rochefoucauld, a letter of Madame de Sévigné, a character of La Bruyère, a peroration of Massillon, when each is at his or her best. The reader may in some cases feel that he likes something else better, but he is incapable of pointing out a blemish. ”

“ The charm is so powerful, the grace so stately, that it is impossible for any one to miss it who has the faculty of recognising charm and grace at all. In particular, Landor is remarkable—and, excellent as are many of the prose writers whom we have had since, he is perhaps the most remarkable—for the weight, the beauty, and the absolute finish of his phrase. Sometimes these splendid phrases do not mean very much; occasionally they mean nothing or nonsense. But their value as phrase survives, and the judge in such things is often inclined and entitled to say that there is none like them. ”

“ Only philologists out of England (and I fear not too many besides philologists in it) read Alisaunder and Richard Cœur de Lion, Arthour and Merlin, or the Brut; the early Italian poets shine but in the reflected light of Dante; and if any one knows the Cid, it is usually from Corneille, or Herder, or Southey, rather than from his own noble Poem. But no one who does study these forgotten if not disdained ones, no one who with a love for literature bestows even the most casual attention on them, can fail to see their meaning and their promise, their merit and their charm. ”

“ From the moment of its appearance to the present day, this piece has been an unceasing joy to all who love literature with a sane devotion. Its composition is excellent; it selects just the right points, dwells on them in just the right way, and drops them just when we have had enough. In mere style it yields to nothing of its author’s, and is conspicuously and quite triumphantly free from his repetitions and other mannerisms. No English writer—indeed one may say no writer at all—has ever tempered such a blend of quiet contempt with perfect good-humour and perfect good-breeding. ”

“ Some form of the Ideal Theory is indeed necessary to the critic: the beauty of literature is hardly accessible, except to one who is more or less a Platonist. No system so well accounts for the ineffable poetic pleasure, the sudden “gustation of God” which poetry gives, as that of an archetypal form of every possible thought and passion, as well as person and thing, to which as the poet approaches closer and closer, so he gives his readers the deeper and truer thrill. But Plato’s unfortunate impatience of anything but the idea pure and simple, led him all wrong in criticism. ”

“ But these things, done and evidently thought fine by the doer, almost put to rout the most determined and expert sifter of the faults and merits of genius. You cannot enjoy a Garden of Eden when at every other step you plunge into a morass of mire. You cannot drink a draught of nectar, arranged on the plan of certain glasses of liqueur, in superimposed layers of different savour and colour, when every other layer is "stummed" folly or nauseous bad taste. A novel is not like a book of poems, where, as you see that you have hit on a failure, you turn the page and find a success. ”

“ It is equally impossible to imagine any one being "enthralled" by Euphues. Admiration, of a kind, must have been the only passion excited by it. In the Arcadia there is a certain charm, but it belongs to the inset verse—to the almost Spenserian visionariness of parts—to the gracious lulling atmosphere of the whole. If it had been published in three volumes, one cannot imagine the most enthusiastic novel-reader knocking up a friend late at night for volume two or volume three. ”

“ It will be seen that I am not for my part afraid to avow myself a thoroughgoing Shakesperian, who accepts the weak points of his master as well as the strong. It is often forgotten (indeed I do not know where I have seen it urged) that there is in Shakespere's case an excuse for the thousand lines that good Ben Jonson would have liked him to blot,—an excuse which avails for no one else. No one else has his excuse of universality; no one else has attempted to paint, much less has painted, the whole of life. ”