XVIII.—­TWO ENGLISH CRITICS

(1) MR. SAINTSBURY

Mr. Saintsbury as a critic possesses in a high degree the gift of sending the reader post-haste to the works he criticizes.  His Peace of the Augustans is an almost irresistible incitement to go and forget the present world among the poets and novelists and biographers and letter-writers of the eighteenth century.  His enthusiasm weaves spells about even the least of them.  He does not merely remind us of the genius of Pope and Swift, of Fielding and Johnson and Walpole.  He also summons us to Armory’s John Buncle and to the Reverend Richard Graves’s Spiritual Quixote as to a feast.  Of the latter novel he declares that “for a book that is to be amusing without being flimsy, and substantial without being ponderous, The Spiritual Quixote may, perhaps, be commended above all its predecessors and contemporaries outside the work of the great Four themselves.”  That is characteristic of the wealth of invitations scattered through The Peace of the Augustans.  After reading the book, one can scarcely resist the temptation to spend an evening over Young’s Night Thoughts and one will be almost more likely to turn to Prior than to Shakespeare himself—­Prior who, “with the eternal and almost unnecessary exception of Shakespeare ... is about the first to bring out the true English humour which involves sentiment and romance, which laughs gently at its own, tears, and has more than half a tear for its own laughter”—­Prior, of whom it is further written that “no one, except Thackeray, has ever entered more thoroughly into the spirit of Ecclesiastes.”  It does not matter that in a later chapter of the book it is Rasselas which is put with Ecclesiastes, and, after Rasselas, The Vanity of Human Wishes.  One does not go to Mr. Saintsbury as an inspector of literary weights and measures.  His estimates of authors are the impressions of a man talking in a hurry, and his method is the method of exaggeration rather than of precise statement.  How deficient he is in the sense of proportion may be judged from the fact that he devotes slightly more space to Collins than to Pope, unless the pages in which he assails “Grub Street” as a malicious invention of Pope’s are to be counted to the credit of the latter.  But Mr. Saintsbury’s book is not so much a thorough and balanced survey of eighteenth-century literature as a confession, an almost garrulous monologue on the delights of that literature.  How pleasant and unexpected it is to see a critic in his seventies as incautious, as pugnacious, as boisterous as an undergraduate!  It is seldom that we find the apostolic spirit of youth living in the same breast with the riches of experience and memory, as we do in the present book.