George Saintsbury

“ It is in the former respect that Miss Austen stands apart from most, if not from all, women who have written novels. Irony is by no means a frequent feminine gift; and as women do not often possess it in any great degree, so they do not as a rule enjoy it. Miss Austen is only inferior among English writers to Swift, to Fielding, and to Thackeray—even if it be not improper to use the term inferiority at all for what is after all not much more than difference—in the use of this potent but most double-edged weapon. ”

“ But the hackneyed comparison of amber does something gall this remarkable poet and writer. Everything, great and small, is enshrined in an imperishable coating of beautiful style; but the small things are somewhat out of proportion to the great, and, what is more, the amber itself always has a certain air of being deliberately and elaborately produced—not of growing naturally. Landor—much more than Dryden, of whom he used the phrase, but in the same class as Dryden—is one of those who "wrestle with and conquer time." ”

“ But when, at the end of the eighteenth century, writers, of secondary powers at best, engaging in a new and unengineered way, endeavoured to write historical novels, they all, from Godwin and Mrs. Radcliffe to Miss Reeves and the Misses Lee, made the merest gallimaufries of inaccurate history, questionable fiction, manners heedlessly jumbled, and above all dialogue destitute of the slightest semblance of verisimilitude, and drawn chiefly from that of the decadent tragic and comic drama of the time. ”

“ And their occasional efforts, their experiments in the half-kinds they affected, have a curious charm. English poetry would be undeniably poorer without the unearthly snatches of Beddoes, the exquisitely urbane verse-of-society of Praed, the pathetic-grotesque of Hood, even the stately tirades of Horne and Taylor. Some of them, if not all, may at this or that time have been exaggerated in value, by caprice, by reaction, by mere personal sympathy. But no universal critic will refuse admiration to them in and for themselves. ”

“ In fact the butterfly character which every unprejudiced critic of Leigh Hunt has noticed, made it impossible for him to plan or to execute any work on a great scale. He never could have troubled himself to complete missing knowledge, to fill in gaps, to co-ordinate thinking, as the literary historian, whose vocation in some respects he might seem to have possessed eminently, must do—to weave fancy into the novelist's solid texture, and not to leave it in thrums or in gossamer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And worse than all this, the abundance of reading has created an altogether artificial habit—a habit quite as artificial as any that can ever have prevailed at other periods—of regarding the main stuff and substance of literature. Much reading of novels, which are to the ordinary reader his books, and his only books, has induced him to take their standards as the standards of both nature and life. ”

“ It may seem that mere or main archaism is not a very charming or powerful thing, and in weaker hands it would not have been either one or the other; but it so happened that these hands were very strong indeed. Mr. Rossetti had one of the most astonishing combinations ever known of artistically separate gifts, as well as a singular blend of passion and humour. His sister was one of the great religious poets of the world. Mr. Swinburne has never been surpassed, if he has ever been equalled, by any poet in any language for command of the more rushing and flowing forms of verse. ”

“ It does not matter what the acts, the scenes, the personages may be. Whether we are at the height of romantic passion with Esmond's devotion to Beatrix, and his transactions with the duke and the prince over diamonds and title deeds; whether the note is that of the simplest human pathos, as in Colonel Newcome's death-bed; whether we are indulged with society at Baymouth and Oxbridge; whether we take part in Marlborough's campaigns or assist at the Back Kitchen—we are in the House of Life, a mansion not too frequently opened to us by the writers of prose fiction. ”

“ The extraordinary greatness of Scott—who in everything but pure style, and the expression of the highest raptures of love, thought, and nature, ranks with the greatest writers of the world—is not better indicated by any single fact than by the fact that it is impossible to describe his novels in any simple formula. He practically created the historical novel; and, what is more, he elaborated it to such an extent that no really important additions to his scheme have been made since. But not all his novels are historical. ”

“ They may be shockingly lacking in bulk, in organisation, in proper choice of subject, in intelligent criticism of life; but they are like the summer lightning or the northern aurora, which, though they shine only now and then, and only it may be for a few moments, shine, when they do shine, with a beauty unapproachable by gas or candle, hardly approached by sun or moon, and illuminate the whole of their world. ”

“ Instead of instances of advance amid a mass of inertia or aimless wandering we have instances of reaction amid a mass of advance. The work of the revolutionary time is done; the scholar, contrary to Goethe's dictum, has now not merely to exercise himself but to perfect.
The phenomena of the time in fiction are of the same character, but they lead as yet to no such distinct turn. The tale-telling of Beckford is like the singing of Burns, not uncoloured by the time, but still in the main purely individual; the purpose of the novels of Holcroft, Godwin, and Bage is groping in the dark ”

“ His verse was so little facile, it paid so little regard to any of the common allurements of narrative-interest or varied subject, it was so necessary for it to reach the full white heat, the absolute instant of poetic projection, that when it was not very good it was apt to be scarcely tolerable. It is nearly impossible to be duller than Wordsworth at his dullest, and unluckily it is as impossible to find a poet of anything like his powers who has given himself the license to be dull so often and at such length. ”

“ Nevertheless it is necessary to lay our account with this new style of history, and it is fortunately possible to admit that the gains of it have not been small. Thanks to its practitioners, we know infinitely more than our fathers did, though it may not be so certain that we make as good a use of our knowledge. And the evil of multiplication of particulars, like other evils, brings its own cure. The work of mere rough-hewing, of examination into the brute facts, is being done—has to no small extent actually been done—as it never was done before. ”

“ Yet it seems to me impossible, on any just theory of poetry or of literature, to rank him low as a poet. He can afford to take his trial under more than one statute. To those who say that all depends on the subject, or that the handling and arrangement of the subject are, if not everything, yet something to be ranked far above mere detached beauties, he can produce not merely the first long narrative poems in English, which for more than a century had honestly enthralled and fixed popular taste, but some of the very few long narrative poems which deserve to do so. ”

“ The uprightness and beauty of his character, his wonderful helpfulness to others, and the uncomplaining way in which he bore what was almost poverty,—for, high as was his reputation, his receipts were never a tithe of the rewards not merely of Scott or Byron or Tom Moore, but of much lesser men—are not more generally acknowledged than the singular and pervading excellence of his English prose style, the robustness of his literary genius, and his unique devotion to literature. But when we leave these accepted things he becomes more difficult if not less interesting. ”

“ There are, however, more thoughtful reasons for regarding the development of periodicals as not an unmixed boon to letters. The more evanescent kinds of writing are, putting fiction out of the question, so much the more profitable in journalism that it certainly may tempt—that it certainly has tempted—men who could produce, and would otherwise have produced, solid literature. And there is so much more room in it for light things than for things which the average reader regards as heavy, that the heavy contributor is apt to be at a discount, and the light at a premium. ”

“ To speak on the best things in an original way, in a distinguished style, is the privilege of the elect in literature; and none of those who were born within, or closely upon, the beginning of the century has had these gifts in English as have the authors of The Lotos Eaters and Sartor Resartus.
Only one other writer of history during the century, himself the latest to die of his generation except Mr. Ruskin, deserves, for the union of historical and literary merit, to be placed, if not on a level with Macaulay and Carlyle, yet not far below them ”

“ George Gilfillan, an amiable and fluent critic of the middle of the century, who loved literature very much and praised its practitioners with more zeal than discrimination, procured the publication of the Life Drama. It sold enormously; it is necessary to have been acquainted with those who were young at the time of its appearance to believe in the enthusiasm with which it was received; but a little intelligence and a very little goodwill will enable the critic to understand, if not to share their raptures. ”

“ Nor would any one contend that they are exactly great literature. But for inexhaustible fun that never gets flat and scarcely ever simply uproarious, for a facility and felicity in rhyme and rhythm which is almost miraculous, and for a blending of the grotesque and the terrible which, if less fine than Praed's or Hood's, is only inferior to theirs—no one competent to judge and enjoy will ever go to Barham in vain. ”

“ It is perhaps the clearest style in English that does not, like those of Swift and Cobbett, deliberately or scornfully eschew rhetorical ornament. What Macaulay means you never, being any degree short of an idiot, can fail to understand; and yet he gives you the sense, equipped with a very considerable amount of preparation and trimming. It would not merely have been ungrateful, it would have been positively wrong, if his audience, specially trained as most of them were to his standpoint of Whig Reformer, had failed to hail him as one of the greatest writers that had ever been known. ”

“ Adopting to the full, and something more than the full, the modern doctrine of the all-importance of art, of manner, of style in literature, Mr. Stevenson early made the most elaborate studies in imitative composition. There is no doubt that he at last succeeded in acquiring a style which was quite his own: but it was complained, and with justice, that even to the last he never attained complete ease in this style; that its mannerism was not only excessive, but bore, as even excessive mannerism by no means always does, the marks of distinct and obvious effort. ”

“ Until late in his own life the general tendency was not to take Mr. Arnold very seriously as a poet; and there are still those who reproach him with too literary a character, who find fault with him as thin and wanting in spontaneity. On the other hand, there are some who not only think him happier in verse than in prose, but consider him likely to take, when the "firm perspective of the past" has dispelled mirages and false estimates, a position very decidedly on the right side of the line which divides the great from the not great. ”

“ To give some history of English philosophy and theology in the nineteenth century, by noticing its literary expression, was possible, though it had to be done, so to speak, in shorthand. To do the same thing with science, or even with what is technically called scholarship, would be simply impossible. Much of their expression is hardly susceptible of literary form at all, hardly any ever receives such form, while the subdivision of the branches of physical science is now so great and their shadow so wide that no systematic sketch of them is to be thought of. ”

“ Were we distinctly on the mounting hand, it is, on the general calculation of the liabilities of human life, certain that we must have had our Shelley or our Keats side by side with our Wordsworth and our Coleridge. That we have much excellent work is certain; that we have much of the absolutely first class not so. And if we examine even the good work of our younger writers we shall find in much of it two notes or symptoms—one of imitation or exaggeration, the other of uncertain and eccentric quest for novelty—which have been already noted above as signs of decadence or transition. ”

“ For this style, however, in perfection we must still go back to the Studies of the Renaissance, which is what Mr. Arnold liked to call a point de repère. The style, less exuberant, less far-reaching and versatile, and, if any one pleases to say so, less healthy than Mr. Ruskin's, is much more chastened, finished, and exquisite. It never at its best neglects the difference between the rhythm of prose and the metre of verse; if it is sometimes, and indeed usually, wanting in simplicity, it is never overloaded or gaudy. ”

“ Not, as has been said, that the general taste is too refined, but that there is a too indiscriminate appetite in the general; not that the actual original force of our writers is, with rare exceptions, at all alarming, but that a certain amount of literary craftsmanship, a certain knowledge of the past and present of literature, is with us in a rather inconvenient degree. The public demands quantity, not quality; and it is ready, for a time at any rate, to pay for its quantity with almost unheard of returns, both, as the homely old phrase goes, in praise and in pudding. ”