George Saintsbury

“ This poetry is even now not much known in England, and its defects—inequality, heaviness at times, pedantry, a strange and almost irritating inability to get the wings quite free save at rare moments—are undeniable. But there is something, in the Art itself, of the better qualities of its subjects: and to those who give themselves the trouble to make their acquaintance, these subjects have a strange and a peculiar charm, in their mixture of gravity and grace, of love and lore, of paganism and piety, yea, of Classic and Romantic themselves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Unjust things have been said about the poetry of the Augustan ages; just things may be said against the criticism which mainly controlled that poetry. But it is hardly excessive to say that every precept—not purely metrical—contained in the Arts of Boileau and of Pope, is just and true for Prose. You may fly in the face of almost every one of these precepts and be the better poet for it; fly in the face of almost any one of them in prose, and you must have extraordinary genius if you do not rue it. ”

“ But Kames embroils matters to an extent never surpassed, except by those, to be found in every day, who are incapable of taking the literary point of view at all, and who simply treat literature as something expressing agreement or disagreement with their moral, political, religious, or other views. He seems himself to have had, at least once, a slight qualm. “A treatise of ethics is not my province: I carry my view no farther than to the elements of criticism, in order to show that the fine arts are a subject of reasoning as well as of taste.” ”

“ We may venture indeed to suspect that Scaliger “had more wit than to be here.” One may frequently differ with him; but he seldom runs mad on mere theory. It is he, for instance, who, while, as we have seen, he lays down uncompromisingly that the material of poetry is verse, instances the Æthiopica as a perfect epic. Instead of confusing poetry and learning, as some have done, he holds the much more sensible position that learning is useful to a poet. He takes the hard-and-fast ethical view of the ends both of tragedy and of all poetry, and he believes firmly in the type. ”

“ For what is a poet? What do we mean by adopting that Greek title for him? We mean that he is a maker. All other arts and sciences limit themselves to nature; the poet alone transcends it, improves it, makes, nay, brings it (“let it not be deemed too saucy a comparison”) in some sort into competition with the Creator Himself whom he imitates.
The kinds of this imitation are then surveyed—“Divine,” “Philosophical,” and that of the third or right sort, who only imitate to invent and improve, which neither divine nor philosophic poets can do. ”

“ Dryden’s moly, an herb so powerful that—herein excelling its original—it not only prevented men like Addison from becoming beasts like Rymer, but had the virtue of turning beasts into men,—of replacing the neo-classic jargon by the pure language of criticism,—was that plan of actual comparison and examination of actual literature which is not merely the via prima but the via sola of safety for the critic. ”

“ But it is curious and instructive to notice how little appreciative criticism of contemporaries this active critical period gives. If you start a controversy of an ancient against a modern or a modern against a modern—of Homer against Ariosto, or of Ariosto against Tasso—there will be plenty of persons to take a hand. For a really appreciative study of any writer, modern or ancient, I do not know where to look. Men are so besotted, on the one hand, with their inquiries into general principles; on the other, with their sporadic annotations, that they cannot attempt anything of the kind. ”

“ There is nothing which one should be slower to impute, save on the very clearest evidence, than ignorance of a subject of which a writer professes knowledge; and one should be slow, not merely on general principles of good manners, but because there is nothing which the baser kind of critic is so ready to impute. But I own that, after careful reading and reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that La Harpe’s knowledge of the classics left a very great deal to desire. ”

“ He loves, as the American poet says, “not by allowance but with personal love”; and he can give reasons for the love that is in him. He seeks the poetic pleasure from the Muse; he obtains it from her; and he savours it, not merely with eagerness, but with acutely sensitive taste. Though he might not at some moments be averse to refining on the character of poetry generally, as well as on the character of this poetic pleasure, it is this itself that he seeks, finds, and rejoices in. Part at least of the spirit of Longinus is on him; he is transported, and he knows the power that transports. ”

“ The fact, the critical fact, remains that the faults of his time and his theory did the least harm to Dryden of all men whom we know, while they did the most to Boileau. And the reason of the fact is more valuable than the fact itself. Boileau, as we have seen, has not left us a single impartial and appreciative criticism of a single author, ancient or modern. Dryden simply cannot find himself in presence of a man of real genius, whether he belongs to his own school or another, without having his critical lips at once touched by Apollo and Pallas. ”

“ Not a few of them did great things for Criticism; all together they did a really mighty thing for her and for Literature: but they were not her sworn servants, as Lessing and Hazlitt, as Sainte-Beuve and Arnold, were later.
Let there be to them not the less but almost the more glory! It is something—nay, it is very much—to have created a Kind. Up to their time Criticism had been a mere Cinderella in the literary household. Aristotle had taken her up as he had taken all Arts and Sciences. The Rhetoricians had found her a useful handmaid to Rhetoric. ”

“ And if he was unjust to the great writers of the time just before his own, and savage to the small among his contemporaries, it was because the prevailing fashion, for two or three generations, had set in a direction which Good Sense alone must constantly disapprove. Now Good Sense is not a high tribunal, but a very low one,—we were better off with our old friend Furor Poeticus, though he did sometimes talk, and encourage the talking of, nonsense. The mere “Solifidian” of Good Sense knows nothing, and can know nothing, about poetry. ”

“ A cause of disquiet to some critics themselves, and a rallying-cry to most enemies of criticism, has been constantly found in the apparently floating and uncertain character of the completest critical orthodoxy. Longinus himself, perhaps the best exponent of that orthodoxy, has been and is charged with vagueness; and all those who follow him must lay their account with the same accusation. In the last resort we often cannot give a clear, definite, cut-and-dried reason for the faith that is in us, and we still oftener had better not try to do so. Scaliger and Scaligerism are in no such plight. ”

“ To literary a-priorists this is of course horrible; to those who take the facts of literature, as they take the facts of life, it is a welcome and reconciling discovery. The conditions of the Greek stage were admittedly such as can never be naturally reproduced, and therefore, however great and perfect the Greek Tragedy may be in its own way, it cannot usurp the position of “best in all ways”; and can still less pretend to dictate to other kinds that they shall not be good at all in ways different from its own. ”

“ When we pass from generals to particulars Pope’s cleverness at least appears more than ever. The sharply separated, neatly flying, and neatly ringing couplets deliver “one, two” in the most fascinating cut-and-thrust style, not without a brilliant parry now and then to presumed (and never very formidable) objections. The man’s perfect skill in the execution of his own special style of poetry raises, and in this case not delusively, the expectation that he will know his theory as well as his practice. The “good sense,” the “reason,” are really and not merely nominally present. ”

“ If Italy and Spain fail—even allowing for the remarkable Italian critical group at the beginning of the century—to justify their old reputation, Germany, on the other hand, begins that career of critical hard labour to which she has apparently sentenced herself in perpetuity, and relieves it with more excursions into the fairer letters than of late. The French, though subject more severely than men of any other country to the idols of the time, continue to justify themselves both in the lighter and the severer critical work. ”

“ But Du Bellay (half or all unawares, as is the wont of finders and founders) has seized a secret of criticism which is of the most precious, and which—with all politeness be it spoken—I venture to think that M. Brunetière himself rather acknowledges and trembles at, than really ignores. This free trade in language, in forms, in processes,—this resolute determination to convert all the treasures of antiquity and modernity alike into “food” for the literary organism, “blood” for the literary veins, marrow for the literary bones,—is no small thing. ”

“ Dryden, of course, is far—very far—from being a faultless monster of criticism. The application of his own process to his own theory will discover in it many mistakes, independent of the imperfect knowledge which has been already admitted, of the inconsistencies which are more of a virtue than of a defect, and of the concessions to tradition and fashion which are almost wholly unfortunate. Nay, more, it may be granted that Dryden did not escape the dangers of the process itself, the dangers of vagueness, of desultoriness, of dilettantism. ”

“ England is of more importance. I have tried to show that it is of very much more; but this importance belongs entirely to one man. This one man in his time played many parts: and as the main aim of literature is to give pleasure, and to produce original sources thereof, we cannot perhaps say that his critical part was the greatest. But we may almost say that it was the most important. We can imagine English literature without the poetry of Dryden: it would be wofully impoverished, but somebody would take up the burden, probably before Pope. ”

“ Unless the critic is utterly incompetent and bad—unless he is a very Rymer, I do not say a Dennis, much less a Boileau—his mere contact with a new work of art must result in something useful, in a critical datum and fact for the future. It is very unlikely—if he is a person of even rather more than average brains it is practically impossible—that the exact equation or conjunction of his temperament, and his equipment, and the character of the work, will ever recur. ”

“ Earlier, and in the neo-classics quand même later, the fact that a thing differs in kind from the accepted forms of poetry is proof that it is not poetry at all. Minturno cannot go this length. It is poetry inferior in kind, he still insists; but the excellence of those who have adopted it saves it, no matter to what extent. The concession is fatal. If Balbus builds a wall contrary to the laws of nature and architecture, it will not be an inferior wall; it will tumble down, and not be a wall at all. ”

“ The Greeks of the great age wrote with nothing but Greek literature before them; those of the decadence and the Romans with nothing but Greek literature and Roman, which was for the most part a pale copy of Greek. The men of the eighteenth century, had they chosen, could have compared, with the practice and the theory of these two literatures, not merely the vast, the interesting, and, as “correcting” classicism, the inestimable literature of the Middle Ages, but at least four substantive and important literatures of modern times, those of France, Italy, England, and Spain. ”

“ Truth is not the daughter of Ignorance; and it is really hard to say which party shows most ignorance in this matter. The defenders of the Ancients knew, as a rule, next to nothing of the Moderns; and the defenders of the moderns knew a great deal too little of the ancients. La Motte knew no Greek if Perrault [405] knew any; and with Boileau not only to all appearance was English literature a blank sheet, but almost the whole sheet of French literature before his own time was either blank or inscribed with fantastic fallacies. ”

“ In almost all arts and even sciences, but in Art even more than in Science, the task set before the human faculties is a gigantic “Rule of False,” as the older arithmetic books called it, in which, by following out certain hypotheses, and ascertaining how and to what extent you are led wrong by them, you at last discover the right way. The most grotesque error is thus a benefit to Humanity, which, indeed, sometimes shows itself conscious enough of the beneficial character to perform the experiment over and over again. ”

“ Nature was to be the test; but an artificialised Nature, arranged according to the fashion of a town-haunting society—a Nature which submitted herself to a system of convention and generalisation. In so far as there was any real general principle it was that you were to be like everybody else—that singularity, except in doing the usual thing best, was to be carefully avoided. Pope, being a man of genius, could not help transcending this general conception constantly by his execution, not seldom by his thought, and sometimes in his critical precepts. ”

“ If criticism does this it is the wrong criticism—the criticism à la Boileau, and not the criticism after the manner of Longinus. A man may have spent a lifetime in reading “overthwart and endlong” (as the Morte d’Arthur says) in every direction of literature, in reading always critically, and in reading for long years as professional reviewer, and yet feel as keenly as ever the literary charm which age cannot wither nor custom stale,—the “strong pleasure” of the beautiful word. ”

“ Johnson is quite as prejudiced; but his prejudice is not in the least insane. His critical calculus is perfectly sound on its own postulates and axioms; and you have only to apply checks and correctives (which are easily ascertained, and kept ready) to adjust it to absolute critical truth. And, what is more, he has not merely flourished and vapoured critical abstractions, but has left us a solid reasoned body of critical judgment; he has not judged literature in the exhausted receiver of mere art, and yet has never neglected the artistic criterion ”

“ By the eighteenth, in all countries, the tendency becomes irresistible. The interest in literature, the bent and occupations of men of letters great and small, the new institution of periodicals—all combine to strengthen it: and every kind of critical estimate, from the elaborate literary history to the brief review, begins to be written, and is written, ever more copiously.
This was what criticism wanted; and it could not but do good. Yet the results illustrated, as mere abstract treatises never could have done, the deficiencies of the common critical theory. ”

“ The temptation of the style to rhetoric, and, at the same time, “the solace of this sin,” could hardly be better shown than in Rivarol’s phrasing of the radical and inseparable clearness of French, as “une probité attachée à son génie.” [708] How happy is the admission that poets of other countries “give their metaphors at a higher strength,” “embrace the figurative style closer,” and are deeper and fuller in colour! Yet the history, both of French and English literature, given in each case at some length, is inadequate and incorrect, the comparisons are childish, and the vaticinations absurd. ”

“ Does Addison make “the appeal to the imagination” the test of poetry? It can only be answered that, by his own explicit words, he does nothing of the kind. If he advances anything, it is that the appeal to the imagination is the appeal of art generally—of prose (even of scientific) literary art as well as of poetry, of painting, sculpture, architecture, as well as of literature. ”