WE congratulate Mr. Saintsbury on reaching the final volume, of
his monumental work. For whatever our views of the method employed and of many of the particular judgments, we must readily admit the courage which undertook such a task and the amazing diligence which is disclosed in its execution. He has forestalled Teutonic industry in one of its most natural manifestations. Mr. Saintsbury's mental vigour is, indeed, most remarkable and praiseworthy, since, after a full life of many volumes, he still contemplates, so he tells us, no less an enterprise than a history of English prosody. No work by an author so well equipped and so intellectually alert can be without value; and we cheerfully confess that we have learned much from the reading of the three volumes, have been often amused, and not infrequently delighted. But as an historian of criticism we cannot say that we have found him wholly satisfactory. Though he explains his attitude in many digressions, we still have some difficulty in understanding, and, in so far as we understand, approving it. A true history of criticism should be a history of critical principles and methods, with particular examples used only as illustrations. A history of chemistry, shall we say is not necessarily a chronicle of every chemical experi- ment. But these volumes tend always to become a kind of lexicon of critical dicta. The difficulty of this practice is that the work becomes in large part unintelligible to any one less widely read than the author. For the ordinary man to read criticisms of works with which he is imperfectly acquainted is a sufficiently barren pursuit, but to read a criticism of such criticisms is sheer waste of time. Another objection is that such a method must resolve itself into a personal judgment of value on the part of the writer. A. critic decides that a line of Milton is bad which Mr. Saints- bury thinks immortal. Mr. Saintsbury is probably perfectly right, but a judgment condemning the critic is out of place in a history of criticism unless his blunder is not an isolated exercise of taste, but the application of a critical principle. A true history of criticism must be a history of critical attitudes, and Mr. Saintsbury is ready enough to recognise this, in theory if not always in practice. But he considers it necessary to indulge in frequent tirades against aesthetics. No one desired from him a history of aesthetic theory, any more than we should ask from an historian of railway construction a treatise on the principles of dynamics. But clearly all criticism is based on some theory of the beautiful, of what constitutes excellence in literature, and it is impossible to criticise a critic except on the basis of the adequacy or inadequacy of his • it History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day. By George. Saintsbury, MA., LL.D. 3 vols. Vol. III., "Modena Criticism." Loildon W. Blackwood and Sons. [Ws; net.] particular aesthetic theory. There is no need to embark on metaphysics, but if a history of criticism is to have any meaning, it must deal with the canons which guided a critic as well as the method which he adopted. Mr. Saintsbury constantly admits this, and in practice acts upon it ; except that he substitutes for theory knowledge, which comes to the same thing, since true knowledge must consciously or uncon- sciously flower into principles. His judgment of Zola, for example, is strictly an aesthetic criticism, a criticism of the French novelist's theory of literature and life, which, to our mind, is going too far in the very recognition of aesthetics which he elsewhere deprecates. Mr. Saintsbury's dislike of aesthetics is merely a dislike of the terminology. In an admirable interchapter on the meaning of the Romantic movement he describes the change with insight and accuracy. The student of aesthetics would call it a transition from the mechanical to the organic; Mr. Saintabury says the same thing in more popular and pleasing language. He attacks aesthetics because Leasing, who dabbled in the science, was guilty of a shallow and formal verdict on one of Shakespeare's heroines. But no one ever supposed aesthetics to be an infallible science. Bad aesthetics are ousted by good; philosophy cures the wounds which philosophy has made ; bad theory is not driven out by good practice, but by better theory ; and theory of some kind is essential so long as mankind has the instinct to reason as well as to perceive.
A less serious but more obvious fault is the manner of writing which Mr. Saintsbury has seen fit to adopt. " Vivacity," he says himself, " is apt to play her sober friend Criticism something like the tricks that Madge Wildfire played Jeanie Deans." In his efforts to be vivacious he is often merely skittish, and skittishness in a serious and elaborately learned work suggests, as some one said of Renan, " an elderly and erudite butterfly." There are pages in the book which it would be hard to better, acute criticism expressed in clear and delicate prose. Unfortunately, there are also pages which suggest the inferior journalist with their galvanised witticisms, their strings of trivial quotations, their constant recourse to a foreign tongue for phrases which have excellent English equivalents, and, above all, their painful neologisms. Mr. Saintsbury has much humour, but obviously the stream of humour cannot flow consistently through a history of criticism; and that he should think its presence necessary, and labour to provide it, argues an imperfect taste. His learning is so indubitable that it was surely needless to have recourse to the allusive style characteristic of cheap literary journalism. Nor does the lack of all form in the chapters, the impression that the writer is talking to himself and putting down everything that comes into his head, inspire confidence in the soundness of the writer's critical judgment. Above all, in a subject where style is so vital a matter, how is a man to be trusted who deals in new compounds and creations which are intrinsically hideous and wholly un- necessary ?
It is a book of many blemishes, but none the less it is a remarkable and valuable achievement, for Mr. Saintsbury's inconsistency has the merit of its defects, and he provides constantly the corrective to his faults. On one page he has a captious attack on a sound doctrine, and in the next chapter we find him stating the same doctrine lucidly and logically himself. A true critic has two separate functions. In the first place, he must be an interpreter, capable of seeing to the deeps of meaning in a writer's mind, quick to respond to all the subtle harmonies of genius. He must have the creative mind without the creative aptitude. " Every good poet includes a critic," said Shenstone ; " the reverse will not hold." But it is precisely the reverse which is true. Every good critic must have to some extent the poet's song without the poet's gift of singing. In the second place, he must be able to compare the work of an author with the beat of its kind ; that is to say, he must have a wide knowledge of literature, and, as a consequence, a clear under- standing of the eternal principles of excellence. A critic who says simply that this is good and that is bad will be a worthless critic, though no one of his judgments is ever overruled. For a good critic must elucidate, and not merely praise or condemn. It is the depth of his insight and the breadth of his knowledge that determine his value. If this be so, no great criticism can ever be obsolete, for its greatness is in essence the greatness of creation. From this point of
and Longinus, with an acumen and catholicity of temper worthy of these great critics themselves. When he passes from a general excursus on criticism to an examination of the work of particular critics, we find that he has no quarrel with principles, and that he is far from being the dogmatic individualist which certain utterances would lead one to suppose. What he dislikes is the jargon of a false scientific criticism, the perquisite of a long school from Leasing to the late M. Hennequin, which would eliminate individual insight altogether, and establish a mechanical critical organon, which a Tupper could apply as well as a Coleridge. He combats, too,
the equally false view that a philosophy of literary excellence can be set down in a dozen commandments which have a Sinaitic sanction. The criterion of judgment must vary from age to age, it must be rethought by each critic for him- self, and translated into the idiom of his generation. No
sounder guide to the practice of a difficult art could be found than Mr. Saintsbury's closing words, though they will seem to many hard counsels of perfection. The critic-
" must read, and, as far as possible, read everything—that is the first and great commandment. If he omits one period of a litera- ture, even one author of some real, if ever so little, importance in a period, he runs the risk of putting his view of the rest out of focus ; if he fails to take at least some account of other literatures as well, his state will be nearly as perilous. Secondly, he must constantly compare books, authors, literatures indeed, to see in what each differs from each, but never in order to dislike one because it is not the other. Thirdly, he must, so far as he possibly can, divest himself of any idea of what a book ought to be, until he has seen what it is. In other words, and to revert to the old simile, the plate to which he exposes the object cannot be too carefully prepared and sensitised, so that it may take the exactest possible reflection : but it cannot also be too carefully protected from even the minutest line, shadow, dot, that may affect or predetermine the impression in the very slightest degree."
Excellent good sense : though it should be added that the quality of the critic's equipment is more important than the quantity, and a man who truly understands and loves half-a- dozen of the great writers of an epoch will be better furnished than one who has a dull textual acquaintance with all.
Mr. Saintsbury's verdicts on the judgments as opposed to the methods of particular critics must, as we have said, be criticisms founded on private inclinations, and are, therefore, open to similar criticisms on the part of the reviewer. On Leasing he is admirable,—"not a king of criticism, but grand-duke of not a few critical provinces which he never can consolidate into a universal monarchy of critical wit." To Hurd, that remarkable pioneer of the Romantics, he does tardy but ample justice. Perhaps it is on the minor practitioners that he is at his best,—men like Novalis and Barbey d'Aurevilly, who stand outside the main march of critical history. But the passages on Chateaubriand and Coleridge are all that could be desired ; that on Goethe is scarcely less good ; and the discussion of that difficult ques- tion, the place of Walter Pater in the hierarchy of critics, is one of the best things yet written on the subject. Mr. Saintsbury seems to us to be unfair to Bagehot, and wholly unjust to R. H. Hutton ; on the other hand, we know few more acute and discriminating studies than his chapters on the criticism of Carlyle and Matthew Arnold. In such appreciations he loses the whimsicality and critical nihilism which are apt to mar his expositions of theory, and shows himself a sane, serious, and, if be will permit the epithet,
philosophic exponent of the art. He argues, not against rules, but in favour of the inner and spiritual criterion as against the arbitrary formula. "It is not the Rule that does the harm, but its exclusive and disfranchising application a priori
—not even the Kind, but its elevation into a caste, with the correlative institution of pariandom."
THE COMPLETE MOTORIST.*
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