A Saintsbury Miscellany: Selections From His Essays and Scrap Books
Selections
OXFORD, $3.50
THE ubiquitous figure of George Saintsbury has turned up so often and for so long in the field of English letters that it is time to look for the man behind the voice. He has been met at many crossroads, up endless alleys, and round the most surprising corners. “No one I have known,”says Sir Herbert Grierson in one of the five excellent memoirs which occupy some seventy pages of the present collection, “no one I have ever known had anything like the range of Saintsbury’s knowledge,”In the age of Shaw, Wells, and Lawrence, we may take that to begin with. “Reading,” said Saintsbury himself, “is to me like mental breathing.” We may take that for granted. The American layman, who knows him best perhaps only — through the three square little Scrap Books or from Notes on a Cellar-Book (as good as the '51 Port can ever have been), is aware of one side of Saintsbury at least, the man of taste, of gusto, of salty word; his father s son, with “some knowledge of good wine and an unlimited horror of bad.” As Professor A. Biyth Webster of St. Andrews, leaning adroitly on Meredith, puts it, he combined “piety and epicurism, learning and gcntlemanliiiess. with good room for each, and a seat at one another’s table.”How true that is! Full of the “minute sparkle,” Professor Saintsbury came to life on every page that he ever wrote. He approached every subject with a fresh, unclouded mind. An incorrigible Tory, a man of “conditioned pessimism,”an untraveled Oxonian for whom the arts held but slight interest, it is incredible, however, that the legend of this learned man should interest the literate of America adrift from Boston to Hollywood. I believe it will.
“There was something Victorian in him, much of the Regency, and something [I think a great deal] of the eighteenth century. But he was not a period man, belated or misplaced. . . . Strong rather than delicate, humorous, sensitive, and proud . . . with profound patience and great power of will, he was English in solid weight, in self-trust and sufficiency, and in the reticent expression of feeling. . . . He did not spend time on the ‘literature’ of the subject. Where doctors differ he was content not to know. . . . When theories change, as change they do, he will not easily be out of fashion for he was never merely in.” Thus Professor Webster in a masterly analysis of the man.
If I have said nothing of the essays and studies by the critic himself, it is because the curtain goes up on a character and not on a scene. This is wide-ranging and comprehensive selection, however. All the delights of that foraging mind, all the strange elemental quality of that style, all the exasperating aptness of conclusions drawn are here. One misses a section from the monumental History of Prosody and a wineglass from the Cellar-Book; but no matter. This is much more than a string of valuable aperçus. It is a welcome composite portrait of a very great man.
DAVID McCORD