Part 7

Indeed, the Professor’s critical dicta are as amazing as his facts. We have only space for one or two samples. Cowley’s _Anacreontics_ are “not very far below Milton”(!) Dr. Donne was “the most gifted man of letters next to Shakespeare.” Where Bacon, where Ben Jonson, where Milton are to stand is not indicated. Akenside’s stilted and frigid _Odes_ “fall not so far short of Collins.” We wonder what Mr. Saintsbury’s criterion of poetry can be. But we forget, with that criterion he has furnished us. On page 732, speaking of “a story about a hearer who knew no English, but knew Tennyson to be a poet by the hearing,” he adds that “the story is probable and valuable, or rather invaluable, for it points to the best if not the only criterion of poetry.” And this is a critic! We would exhort the Professor to ponder well Pope’s lines:

“But most by numbers judge a poet’s song,

* * * * *

In the bright muse, tho’ thousand charms conspire, Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire, Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear.”

On page 734 we are told Browning’s _James Lee_--the Professor probably means _James Lee’s Wife_--is amongst “the greatest poems of the century.” On Wordsworth’s line, judged not in relation to its context, but as a single verse--“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”--we have the following as commentary: “Even Shakespeare, even Shelley have little more of the echoing detonation, the auroral light of true poetry”; very “echoing,” very “detonating”--the rhythm of “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” Mr. Saintsbury’s notions of what constitutes detonation and auroral light in poetry appear to resemble his notions of what constitutes eloquence in prose. Nothing, we may add in passing, is more amusing in this volume than Mr. Saintsbury’s cool assumption of equality as a critical authority with such a critic as Matthew Arnold, whom he sometimes patronises, sometimes corrects, and sometimes assails. The Professor does not show to advantage on these occasions, and he leaves us with the impression that if “Mr. Arnold’s criticism is piecemeal, arbitrary, fantastic, and insane,” the criticism which appears, where it is not mere nonsense, to take its touchstones, its standards, and its canons from those of the average Philistine is, after all, a very poor substitute. But enough of Mr. Saintsbury’s “criticism,” which is, almost uniformly, as absurd in what it praises as in what it censures.

The style, or, to borrow an expression from Swift, what the poverty of our language compels us to call the style, in which this book is written, is on a par with its criticism. We will give a few examples. “It is a proof of the greatness of Dryden that he knew Milton for a poet; it is a proof of the smallness (and mighty as he was on some sides, on others he was very small) of Milton that (if he really did so) he denied poetry to Dryden.”[16] “What the _Voyage and Travaile_ really is, is this--it is, so far as we know, and even beyond our knowledge in all probability and likelihood, the first considerable example of prose in English dealing neither with the beaten track of theology and philosophy, nor with the, even in the Middle Ages, restricted field of history and home topography, but expatiating freely on unguarded plains and on untrodden hills, sometimes dropping into actual prose romance and always treating its subject as the poets had treated theirs in _Brut_ and _Mort d’Arthur_, in _Troy-book_ and _Alexandreid_, as a mere canvas on which to embroider flowers of fancy.”[17] Again, “With Anglo-Saxon history he deals slightly, and despite his ardent English patriotism--his book opens with a vigorous panegyric of England, the first of a series extending to the present day (from which an anthology _De Laudibus Angliæ_ might be made)--he deals very harshly with Harold Godwinson.”[18] “He had a fit of stiff Odes in the Gray and Collins manner.” “_The Hind and Panther_ (the greatest poem ever written in the teeth of its subject)”. “His voluminous Latin works have been _tackled_ by a special Wyclif Society.” These are a few of the gems in which every chapter abounds.

Of Professor Saintsbury’s indifference to exactness and accuracy in details and facts we need go no further for illustrations than to his dates. Such things cannot be regarded as trifles in a book designed to be a book of reference. We will give a few instances. We are informed on page 238 that Ascham’s _Schoolmaster_ was published in 1568; it was published, as its title-page shows, in 1570. Hume’s _Dissertations_ were first published, not in 1762, but in 1757. Bale’s flight to Germany was not in 1547, when such a step would have been unnecessary, but in 1540. Pecock was, we are told, translated to Chichester in 1550, exactly ninety years after his death! As if to perplex the readers of this book, two series of dates are given; we have the dates in the narrative and the dates in the index, and no attempt is made to reconcile the discrepancies. Accordingly we find in the narrative that Caxton was probably born in 1415--in the index that he was born in 1422; in the narrative that Latimer, Fisher, Gascoign and Atterbury were born respectively in 1489, in 1465, about 1537 and in 1672--in the index that they were born respectively in 1485, 1459, 1525 and 1662; in the narrative Gay was born in 1688--in the index he was born in 1685. In the narrative Collins dies in 1756, and Mrs. Browning is born in 1806--in the index Collins dies in 1759, and Mrs. Browning is born in 1809. The narrative tells us that Aubrey was born in 1626, and John Dyer _circa_ 1688--in the index that Aubrey was born in 1624 and Dyer _circa_ 1700. In the index Mark Pattison dies in 1884--in the narrative he dies in 1889. In Professor Saintsbury’s eyes such indifference to accuracy may be venial: in our opinion it is nothing less than scandalous. It is assuredly most unfair to those who will naturally expect to find in a book of reference trustworthy information.

We must now conclude, though we have very far from exhausted the list of errors and misstatements, of absurdities in criticism and absurdities in theory, which we have noted. Bacon has observed that the best part of beauty is that which a picture cannot express. It may be said, with equal truth, of a bad book, that what is worst in it is precisely that which it is most difficult to submit to tangible tests. In other words, it lies not so much in its errors and inaccuracies, which, after all, may be mere trifles and excrescences, but it lies in its tone and colour, its flavour, its accent. Professor Saintsbury appears to be constitutionally incapable of distinguishing vulgarity and coarseness from liveliness and vigour. So far from having any pretension to the finer qualities of the critic, he seems to take a boisterous pride in exhibiting his grossness.

If our review of this book shall seem unduly harsh, we are sorry, but a more exasperating writer than Professor Saintsbury, with his indifference to all that should be dear to a scholar, the mingled coarseness, triviality and dogmatism of his tone, the audacious nonsense of his generalisations, and the offensive vulgarity of his diction and style--a very well of English defiled--we have never had the misfortune to meet with. Turn where we will in this work, to the opinions expressed in it, to the sentiments, to the verdicts, to the style, the note is the same,--the note of the _Das Gemeine_.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: Page 37.]

[Footnote 13:

Eá lâ drihtenes þrym! eá lâ duguða helm! eá lâ meotodes miht! eá lâ middaneard! eá lâ däg leóhta! eá lâ dreám godes! eá lâ engla þreát! eá lâ upheofon! eá lâ þät ic eam ealles leás êcan dreámes, þät ic mid handum ne mäg heofon geræcan ne mid eágum ne môt up lôcian ne hûru mid eárum ne sceal æfre gehêran þære byrhtestan bêman stefne.

--_Satan._ edit. Grein, 164-172. ]

[Footnote 14: _Some Remarks on Lydgate._ Gray, Aldine Ed. v. 292-321.]

[Footnote 15: That Lydgate’s verse should occasionally be rough and halting is partly to be attributed to the wretched state in which his text has come down to us from the copyists, and partly to the arbitrary way in which he varies the accent. His heroic couplets in the _Storie of Thebes_ are certainly very unmusical. For the whole question of his versification see Dr. Schick, Introduction to his edition of _The Temple of Glas_, pp. liv.-lxiii., and Schipper, _Altenglische Metrik_, 492-500. But neither of these scholars does justice to the exquisite music of his verse at its best.]

[Footnote 16: Page 474.]

[Footnote 17: Page 150.]

[Footnote 18: Page 63.]

OUR LITERARY GUIDES

II. A SHORT HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE[19]

[Footnote 19: _A Short History of Modern English Literature._ By Edmund Gosse. London, 1898.]

The author of this work has plainly not pondered the advice of Horace, “Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, æquam viribus.” His ambitious purpose is “to give the reader, whether familiar with books or not, a feeling of the evolution of English Literature in the primary sense of the term,” and he adds that “to do this without relation to particular authors and particular works seems to me impossible.” This may be conceded; for, a feeling of the evolution of English or of any other literature, without reference to particular authors and particular books, would be analogous to the capacity for feeling without anything to feel. But, unfortunately, those of Mr. Gosse’s readers who wish to have the feeling to which he refers will merely find the conditions without which, as he so justly observes, the said feeling is impossible. In other words, references, in the form of loose and desultory gossip, to particular authors and particular works chronologically arranged, are all that represent the “evolution” of which he is so anxious “to give a feeling.”

Described simply, the work is an ordinary manual of English Literature in which, with Mr. Humphry Ward’s _English Poets_, Sir Henry Craik’s _English Prose Writers_, Chambers’ _Cyclopædia of English Literature_, the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and the like before him, the writer tells again the not unfamiliar story of the course of our Literature from Chaucer to the present time. But Mr. Gosse is no mere compiler, and brings to his task certain qualifications of his own, a vague and inaccurate but extensive knowledge of our seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century Belles Lettres; and here, as a rule, he can acquit himself creditably. Though far from a sound, he is a sympathetic critic; he has an agreeable but somewhat affected style, and can gossip pleasantly and plausibly about subjects which are within the range indicated. But at this point, as is painfully apparent, his qualifications for being an historian and critic of English Literature end. The moment he steps out of this area he is at the mercy of his handbooks; so completely at their mercy that he does not even know how to use them. And it is here that Mr. Gosse becomes so irritating, partly because of the sheer audacity with which mere inferences are substituted for facts and simple assumptions for deduced generalizations, and partly because of the habitual employment of phraseology so vague and indeterminate that it is difficult to submit what it conveys to positive test. These are serious charges to bring against any writer; and if they cannot be abundantly substantiated, a still more serious charge may justly be urged against the accuser.

To turn to the work. On page 85 Mr. Gosse favours us with the following account of the _Faerie Queene_: “A certain grandeur which sustains the three great Cantos of Truth, Temperance, and Chastity fades away as we proceed.... The structure of it is loose and incoherent when we compare it with the epic grandeur of the masterpieces of Ariosto and Tasso.” It would be difficult to match this; every word which is not a blunder is an absurdity. Where are “the three great Cantos”? Can Mr. Gosse possibly be ignorant that the poem is divided into books, each book containing twelve Cantos? Assuming, however, that he has confounded books with Cantos, where is the great book dealing with ‘Truth’? As he places it before ‘Temperance,’ we presume that he means the first book and that he has confounded ‘Truth’ with ‘Holiness.’ This is pretty well, to begin with. Where, we next ask in amazement, is the ‘grandeur’ which sustains the prolix farrago of the third book, and which ‘fades away’ as we proceed to the only book which almost rivals the first and second, the fifth, and the sublimest portion of the whole work, the superb Cantos which represent all that remains of the seventh? What, we gasp, is the meaning of the ‘epic grandeur’ of Ariosto? and “the loose and incoherent structure” of the _Faerie Queene_ when compared with that of the _Orlando Furioso_? Could any poem be more loose and incoherent in structure than the _Orlando_, or any term be less appropriate to its tone and style than ‘grandeur’? On page 80 he actually tells us that Fox’s well-known _Book of Martyrs_ was written in Latin and translated by John Day, and that it is John Day’s translation of the Latin original which represents that work, confounding Fox’s _Commentarii Rerum in Ecclesiâ gestarum_, etc., printed at Basil with the _Acts and Monuments of the Church_, and making John Day, the publisher of it, the translator of it into English! And this is his account of one of the most celebrated works in our language. Of Swift’s _Sentiments of a Church of England Man_, we have the following account: “That such a tract as the _Sentiments of a Church of England Man_, with its gusts of irony, its white heat of preposterous moderation, led on towards Junius is obvious.” This is an excellent example of the confidence which may be placed in Mr. Gosse’s assertions. Of this pamphlet, it may be sufficient to say that there is not a single touch of irony or satire in it; that it stands almost alone among Swift’s tracts for its perfectly temperate and logical tone; it is a calm appeal to pure reason. There is the same audacity of assertion in classing Feltham’s _Resolves_ with Hall’s and Overbury’s Character Sketches, and Earle’s _Microcosmogonie_ as “a typical example” of “a curious school of comic or ironic portraiture, partly ethical and partly dramatic.” In 1625, we are told that Bacon completed the _Sylva Sylvarum_. If Mr. Gosse knew anything of Bacon’s philosophical writings, he would have known that the _Sylva Sylvarum_ never was and never could have been completed, for it was in itself a fragment--a mere collection of materials to be incorporated in the _Phœnomena Universi_, a work which was to have been six times larger than Pliny’s _Natural History_. In giving an account of Tillotson, he speaks of “the serene and insinuating periods” of the elegant latitudinarian who “was assiduous in saying what he had to say in the most graceful and intelligible manner possible.” A more perfect description of the very opposite of Tillotson’s style could hardly be given. Those who are acquainted with Fuller’s writings will be equally surprised to find him classed with Jeremy Taylor and Henry More, and to learn that his style is ‘florid and involved,’ distinguished by its ‘long-windedness’ and ‘exuberance.’ Has Mr. Gosse no apprehension of his readers turning to the originals and testing his statements? We have another of these bold assertions in the account of Lydgate, derived, we suspect, from a hasty generalization from a remark made about him in Mr. Ward’s _British Poets_. “Lydgate,” says Mr. Gosse, “had a most defective ear; his verses are not to be scanned. His ear was bad and tuneless.” Any one who has read Lydgate knows that, if we except his heroic couplets, a more musical poet is not to be found in the fifteenth century, or, indeed, in our language; the softness and smoothness of his verse, wherever he writes in stanzas, as he generally does, is indeed his chief characteristic. These remarks are minor illustrations of an accomplishment in which Mr. Gosse has no rival.

The Euphuists of the sixteenth century drew, for purposes of simile and illustration, on a fabulous natural history which assumed the existence of certain animals, herbs, and minerals, and of certain properties and qualities possessed by them. This gave great point and picturesqueness to their style, and though it was certainly misleading and occasionally perplexing to those who went to them for natural history, it had a most charming and imposing effect. Mr. Gosse seems to have imported a similar fiction into criticism. Of this we have a most amusing illustration on page 155. Speaking of Herrick Mr. Gosse remarks, “In the midst of these extravagances, like Meleager winding his _pure white violets_”--the Italics are ours--“into the _gaudy garland of late Greek Euphuism_, we find Robert Herrick.” Meleager’s Anthology is not extant, but the dedication is, and from that dedication we know exactly from what poets it was compiled. It ranged from about B.C. 700 till towards the close of the Alexandrian Age, for, with the exception of Antipater of Sidon, it is very doubtful whether he inserted any epigrams by his contemporaries, but he admitted a hundred and thirty-one of his own. In other words his collection comprised epigrams composed by the masters preceding the Alexandrian Age from Archilochus downwards, and by those who, during that age and afterwards, cultivated with scrupulous care the simplicity and purity of the early models. Indeed, the poets represented in his Anthology are, with one exception, the artists of Greek epigram in its purest, simplest, and chastest form. That one exception is himself. In him are first apparent the _dulcia vitia_ of the Decadence; he is full of dainty subtleties, he is almost more Oriental than Greek, his style is luscious, elaborate and florid. Such, then, was the composition of “the gaudy garland of late Greek Euphuism,” and such the nature of the “pure white violets” wound into it by Meleager. It is amusing to trace Mr. Gosse’s rodomontade to its source. In the well-known dedication to which we have referred, Meleager prettily compares the various poets, from whose works he selects, to flowers, speaking modestly of his own contributions as “early white violets.” To critics like Mr. Gosse the rest is easy. Meleager, he no doubt argued, was an excellent poet; he belonged to a late age: ‘Euphuism’--a delightfully vague term, is likely to characterise a late age; a poet who compares his verses to white violets had evidently a taste for simplicity, and presumably, therefore, was no Euphuist; a gaudy garland is an excellent set off for pure white violets. And so, to the great perplexity of scholars, but to the great satisfaction of those who enjoy a pretty sentence, Meleager will continue “to wind his pure white violets into the gaudy garland of late Greek Euphuism.”

We have a similar illustration of the same thing in Mr. Gosse’s account of Shaftesbury. We are told that he “was perhaps the greatest literary force between Dryden and Swift”; that “he deserves remembrance as the first who really broke down the barrier which excluded England from taking her proper place in the civilization of literary Europe”; that “he set an example for the kind of prose which was to mark the central years of the century”; that “his style glitters and rings, and ... yet so curious that one marvels that it should have fallen completely into neglect”; that “he was the first Englishman who developed theories of formal virtue, who attempted to harmonize the beautiful with the true and the good”; that the modern attitude of mind seems to meet us first in the graceful cosmopolitan writings of Shaftesbury; that “without a Shaftesbury there would hardly have been a Ruskin or a Pater.” Such amazing nonsense almost confounds refutation by its sheer absurdity.