The French Revolution: A History, Thomas Carlyle, 1834-7: I’d never read it and kept hearing and reading about it. I asked a colleague whose judgment I trusted whether he’d read it; when he replied, ‘Oh, yes,’ as if that went without saying, I decided the time had come, so (being retired) I read it, twice.
But it took some doing. What I found on opening the book was profoundly discouraging and it took will-power to keep reading. The first chapter seems to assume that the reader already knows a great deal about the reign of Louis XV: names are mentioned without explanation and mysterious incidents alluded to. (In the end I was able to understand all this, but only by re-reading carefully and looking things up.) A more seriously impediment, though, because it pervaded the whole book, was Carlyle’s style, which seemed overblown and ham-rhetorical in the worst Victorian manner (the book was written between 1834 and 1837 -- and there’s quite a story about the writing, involving John Stuart Mill).
Here, as an example, is a passage from the sixth page of my edition (Chapter 1.1.II: what I'm giving here is taken from the free Gutenberg Project download version):
Sovereigns die and Sovereignties: how all dies, and is for a Time only; is a 'Time-phantasm, yet reckons itself real!' The Merovingian Kings, slowly wending on their bullock-carts through the streets of Paris, with their long hair flowing, have all wended slowly on,—into Eternity. Charlemagne sleeps at Salzburg, with truncheon grounded; only Fable expecting that he will awaken. Charles the Hammer, Pepin Bow-legged, where now is their eye of menace, their voice of command? Rollo and his shaggy Northmen cover not the Seine with ships; but have sailed off on a longer voyage. The hair of Towhead (Tête d'étoupes) now needs no combing; Iron-cutter (Taillefer) cannot cut a cobweb; shrill Fredegonda, shrill Brunhilda have had out their hot life-scold, and lie silent, their hot life-frenzy cooled. Neither from that black Tower de Nesle descends now darkling the doomed gallant, in his sack, to the Seine waters; plunging into Night: for Dame de Nesle now cares not for this world's gallantry, heeds not this world's scandal; Dame de Nesle is herself gone into Night. They are all gone; sunk,—down, down, with the tumult they made; and the rolling and the trampling of ever new generations passes over them, and they hear it not any more forever.
And yet withal has there not been realised somewhat? Consider (to go no further) these strong Stone-edifices, and what they hold! Mud-Town of the Borderers (Lutetia Parisiorum or Barisiorum) has paved itself, has spread over all the Seine Islands, and far and wide on each bank, and become City of Paris, sometimes boasting to be 'Athens of Europe,' and even 'Capital of the Universe.' Stone towers frown aloft; long-lasting, grim with a thousand years. Cathedrals are there, and a Creed (or memory of a Creed) in them; Palaces, and a State and Law. Thou seest the Smoke-vapour; unextinguished Breath as of a thing living. Labour's thousand hammers ring on her anvils: also a more miraculous Labour works noiselessly, not with the Hand but with the Thought. How have cunning workmen in all crafts, with their cunning head and right-hand, tamed the Four Elements to be their ministers; yoking the winds to their Sea-chariot, making the very Stars their Nautical Timepiece;—and written and collected a Bibliotheque du Roi; among whose Books is the Hebrew Book! A wondrous race of creatures: these have been realised, and what of Skill is in these: call not the Past Time, with all its confused wretchednesses, a lost one.
“And yet withal has there not been realised somewhat?” -- what sort of English was that? It wasn’t, I was sure, the normal English of the 1830s. (I had one answer: it was the sort of English into which our pompous grammar school headmaster would translate the Greek texts we were studying: ‘Yet would she not brook it’ etc.)
How had my colleague managed to plough through this stuff and come away from it with, evidently, respect? Consider: the trite generalisation that ‘all dies’ (really?), all passes on -- dramatic dash: ‘--into Eternity’ (capitalised); semi-colons where we would have commas, separating main and subordinate clauses; inversions -- ‘cover not the Seine with ships’; rhetorical questions: ‘where now is their eye of menace…?’. And what of: ‘…have had out their hot life-scold, and lie silent, their hot life-frenzy cooled’? those strange hyphenated double nouns (elsewhere double adjectives), some of them seeming to belong more to Anglo-Saxon than to 19th century English, or at least to the liberties that Milton took with the language. ‘Neither’ for ‘nor’ at the beginning of that strange sentence, ‘Neither from that black Tower de Nesle descends now darkling the doomed gallant’, with inversion and over-the-top alliteration. ‘They are all gone; sunk,—down, down’: it could be a Kenneth Williams line from a Carry On film. And so it goes on: ‘Thou seest…; the strange italics; the exclamation marks. Excessive to the point of self-parody, it all seems.
Well, I can report that one gets used to the style and before long takes it for granted, as one does the conventions of opera; in time Carlyle’s neologisms, syntactic contortions and rhetorical figures come to seem appropriate for the scale and ambition of the work. In his review, Mill said The French Revolution was ‘an epic poem’, as well as being ‘the truest of histories’: he seems right on the first point and scholarship appears to have concluded that he was on the second too: Carlyle can be faulted for missing some sources he might have consulted but his use of what he had was sound and accurate.
As time allows I’m thinking I'll post a number of entries with extracts that show the characteristics of the book that make it worth reading -- twice, in my case: what I got out of it was vastly increased the second time. Behind this intention is in part a general conviction that what English (in schools) counts as ‘literature’ ought to broadened to include--as it once did--books like this one. If I were teaching now (a phrase I'm aware I've used before) I'd try bits of Carlyle on them.
But mainly I want to persuade you is that Carlyle is worth our reading.
I'll reserve for another posting some of the reasons why I'm glad I read the book--apart from the huge influence he is said to have had on later 19th century writers, including novelists. Meanwhile, here’s another opinion. George Saintsbury (I've written about him before--consult the ‘labels’) in his History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1896) describes Carlyle’s overall opus as ‘thirty volumes of the most brilliant, the most stimulating, the most varied, the most original work in English literature’ (p.238):
Carlyle's style is not seldom spoken of as compact of tricks and manners; and no doubt these are present in it. Yet a narrow inspection will show that its effect is by no means due so much in reality as in appearance to the retaining of capital letters, the violent breaches and aposiopeses, the omission of pronouns and colourless parts of speech generally, the coining of new words, and the introduction of unusual forms. These things are often there, but they are not always ; and even when they are, there is something else much more important, much more characteristic, but also much harder to put the finger on. There is in Carlyle's fiercer and more serious passages a fiery glow of enthusiasm or indignation, in his lighter ones a quaint felicity of unexpected humour, in his expositions a vividness of presentment, in his arguments a sledge-hammer force, all of which are not to be found together anywhere else, and none of which are to be found anywhere in quite the same form. And despite the savagery both of his indignation and his laughter, there is no greater master of tenderness. Wherever he is at home, and he seldom wanders far from it, the weapon of Carlyle is like none other--it is the very sword of Goliath.
The French Revolution has to be considered as a work of Romantic literature: there was such a thing as Romantic history, about which good stuff has been written. More of that, and of what Carlyle thought he was doing, another time.
Showing posts with label Saintsbury. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saintsbury. Show all posts
Monday, 18 August 2008
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
George Saintsbury in an unorthodox education
A friend and former colleague who had taught for many years in Montreal / Canada but who grew up, taught in a school and got his degrees in Karachi, picked up my comments on the literary critic and historian George Saintsbury and writes as follows:
"Thanks for those words about George Saintsbury. I may not have told you that I never went to college or university in Karachi where I obtained my BA and MA as what was called a "private student," a privilege afforded to teachers who had as I only their basic teaching qualifications. In fact because my family could not afford to send any of us to college, I took up teaching so I could further my education within some framework or other. And of course I chose to major in English and Philosophy simply because I was a reader. All we were offered was a copy of the university syllabus, and the right to appear for the annual university examinations each year, and if we passed, move up to the next year of study.
Actually, four of my teaching colleagues and with the encouragement of our Principal, formed a college of our own, and thus met during term each weekday late into the night (after a full day of teaching, several games of badminton, and supper) to share our readings and research. The British Council library was a great help, but I could find only whatever, full time students from the various colleges had not noticed ; so that much of my reading in terms of commentary/ criticism was from outside the recommended lists set by college English profs. Saintsbury's History of Englit was my introduction and guide to finding my way through English literature. I was also told about Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Lit as well, and it was of particular interest to me because if offered a non-English perspective. Both Saintsbury and L and C were accessible to a stranger who had to make sense of what he read several screens apart from the actual living English world.. But that effort at least engaged our creative imagination and no one had to tell us anything about universal appeal and all that. In retrospect, I came to understand why I was so much focused on reader response and respect for the reader; however outlandish their readings might seem, that was all they had on offer. And I also learned how collaboratively we made up our accounts of what we had read. So as you can see, your mention of Saintsbury did take me back a long way."
"Thanks for those words about George Saintsbury. I may not have told you that I never went to college or university in Karachi where I obtained my BA and MA as what was called a "private student," a privilege afforded to teachers who had as I only their basic teaching qualifications. In fact because my family could not afford to send any of us to college, I took up teaching so I could further my education within some framework or other. And of course I chose to major in English and Philosophy simply because I was a reader. All we were offered was a copy of the university syllabus, and the right to appear for the annual university examinations each year, and if we passed, move up to the next year of study.
Actually, four of my teaching colleagues and with the encouragement of our Principal, formed a college of our own, and thus met during term each weekday late into the night (after a full day of teaching, several games of badminton, and supper) to share our readings and research. The British Council library was a great help, but I could find only whatever, full time students from the various colleges had not noticed ; so that much of my reading in terms of commentary/ criticism was from outside the recommended lists set by college English profs. Saintsbury's History of Englit was my introduction and guide to finding my way through English literature. I was also told about Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Lit as well, and it was of particular interest to me because if offered a non-English perspective. Both Saintsbury and L and C were accessible to a stranger who had to make sense of what he read several screens apart from the actual living English world.. But that effort at least engaged our creative imagination and no one had to tell us anything about universal appeal and all that. In retrospect, I came to understand why I was so much focused on reader response and respect for the reader; however outlandish their readings might seem, that was all they had on offer. And I also learned how collaboratively we made up our accounts of what we had read. So as you can see, your mention of Saintsbury did take me back a long way."
Sunday, 8 June 2008
Saintsbury: second thoughts
I'm beginning to see why the 20th century went off George Saintsbury (see a couple of recent entries). I've been looking at another book of his essays, in which he writes on literary figures about whom I know nothing, like John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1853) and Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839). Among Praed’s poems ‘the peerless Letter of Advice…is as much the very best thing of its kind as the Divine Comedy.’ Rashly, since I haven’t read Praed beyond Saintsbury’s extracts, I'd say that was unlikely.
It’s passages like the following, with enough quotation from Saintsbury’s admired works for us to get an idea of his judgement, that are really are a let-down. Is it just a change of taste since the Victorians (and some of my own English teachers) that makes this sort of poem seem childish and uninteresting?
I haven’t checked to see if F.R. Leavis commented on Saintsbury but I think he would have said S. was a dilettante, not serious. I 'm afraid such a judgement might have been partly fair. Saintsbury romps through the whole of literature, English and French, giving marks. ‘X is better than Y but not quite up to Z or his own later a.’ What often seems to count for him is that a work is the right length for its content, expressed without awkwardness, well-managed in prosody, well-balanced, moderate and sane; that the writer, in fact, writes like a gentleman (a criterion he explicitly invokes here and there). He sees reading as a source of pleasure and cultivation, a central aspect of the good life--the good life of leisure, that is--but not, perhaps, of anything more fundamental—such as life, or the quality of human relations, as Leavis would have it. But Leavis’s puritan criteria excluded a great deal of literature that most of us, and most critics, value.
Saintsbury in the end was prepared to violate all his gentlemanly criteria in valuing Hazlitt, about whom he was in a minority in being right. He was terrifically perceptive on pre-19th century writers, such as Milton (no gentleman); and in his judgment the best poet of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was another non-gent, Blake. Those were not the judgements of a dilettante.
It’s passages like the following, with enough quotation from Saintsbury’s admired works for us to get an idea of his judgement, that are really are a let-down. Is it just a change of taste since the Victorians (and some of my own English teachers) that makes this sort of poem seem childish and uninteresting?
I haven’t checked to see if F.R. Leavis commented on Saintsbury but I think he would have said S. was a dilettante, not serious. I 'm afraid such a judgement might have been partly fair. Saintsbury romps through the whole of literature, English and French, giving marks. ‘X is better than Y but not quite up to Z or his own later a.’ What often seems to count for him is that a work is the right length for its content, expressed without awkwardness, well-managed in prosody, well-balanced, moderate and sane; that the writer, in fact, writes like a gentleman (a criterion he explicitly invokes here and there). He sees reading as a source of pleasure and cultivation, a central aspect of the good life--the good life of leisure, that is--but not, perhaps, of anything more fundamental—such as life, or the quality of human relations, as Leavis would have it. But Leavis’s puritan criteria excluded a great deal of literature that most of us, and most critics, value.Saintsbury in the end was prepared to violate all his gentlemanly criteria in valuing Hazlitt, about whom he was in a minority in being right. He was terrifically perceptive on pre-19th century writers, such as Milton (no gentleman); and in his judgment the best poet of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was another non-gent, Blake. Those were not the judgements of a dilettante.
Monday, 2 June 2008
Saintsbury again
I recommended Saintsbury in my last entry so here are a couple of chunks. One of my recent discoveries is the pleasure of essays, 18th and 19th century style. These extracts are from Saintsbury's 1895 essay on William Cobbett, whose Rural Rides I've read parts of long ago, and greatly enjoyed, and his Grammar, recently reissued, which is opinionated and often wrong but very readable. I offer these less as affording unusual insight than as a good read.
"...Let it be added that this vast mass [74 works] is devoted almost impartially to as vast a number of subjects, that it displays throughout the queerest and (till you are well acquainted with it) the most incredible mixture of sense and nonsense, folly and wit, ignorance and knowledge, good temper and bad blood, sheer egotism and sincere desire to benefit the country. Cobbett will write upon politics and upon economics, upon history ecclesiastical and civil, upon grammar, cookery, gardening, woodcraft, standing armies, population, ice houses, and almost every other conceivable subject, with the same undoubting confidence that he is and must be right. In what plain men still call inconsistency there never was his equal. He was approaching middle life when he was still writing cheerful pamphlets and tracts with such titles as The Bloody Buoy, The Cannibal’s Progress, and so on, destined to hold up the French Revolution to the horror of mankind; he had not passed middle life when he discovered that the said Revolution was only a natural and necessary consequence of the same system of taxation which was grinding down England. He denied stoutly that he was anything but a friend to monarchical government, and asseverated a thousand times over that he had not the slightest wish to deprive landlords or any one else of their property. Yet for the last twenty years of his life he was constantly holding up the happy state of those republicans, the profligacy, injustice, and tyranny of whose government he had earlier denounced. …
… Only mention Jews, Scotchmen, the National Debt, the standing army, pensions, poetry, tea, potatoes, larch trees, and a great many other things, and Cobbett become a mere, though a very amusing, maniac. Let him come across in one of his peregrinations, or remember in the course of a book or article, some magistrate who gave a decision unfavourable to him twenty years before, some lawyer who took a side against him, some journalist who opposed his pamphlets, and a torrent of half humorous but wholly vindictive Billingsgate follows; while if the luckless one has lost his estate, or in any way come to misfortune meanwhile, Cobbett will jeer and whoop and triumph over him like an Indian squaw over a hostile brave at the stake. Mixed with all this you shall find such plain shrewd common sense, such an incomparable power of clear exposition of any subject that the writer himself understands, such homely but genuine humour, such untiring energy, and such a hearty desire for the comfort of everybody who is not a Jew or a jobber or a tax eater, as few public writers have ever displayed. And (which is the most important thing for us) you shall also find sense and nonsense alike, rancorous and mischievous diatribes as well as sober discourses, politics as well as trade puffery (for Cobbett puffed his own wares unblushingly), all set forth in such a style as not more than two other Englishmen, whose names are Defoe and Bunyan, can equal." (40-42)
The other, later extract is about Cobbett’s views:
"It is evident that if he possibly could have it, he would have a society purely agricultural, men making what things the earth does not directly produce as much as possible for themselves in their own houses during the intervals of field labour. He quarrels with none of the three orders,--labourer, farmer, and landowner--as such; he does not want 'the land for the people,' or the landlord's rent for the farmer. Nor does he want any of the lower class to live in even mitigated idleness. Eight hours' days have no place in Cobbett's scheme; still less relief of children from labour for the sake of education. Everybody in the labouring class, women and children included, is to work and work pretty hard; while the landlord may have as much sport as ever he likes provided he allows a certain share to his tenant at times. But the labourer and his family are to have 'full bellies' (it would be harsh but not entirely unjust to say that the full belly is the beginning and end of Cobbett's theory) plenty of good beer, warm clothes, staunch and comfortably furnished houses. And that they may have these things they must have good wages; though Cobbett does not at all object to the truck or even the 'Tommy' system. He seems to have, like a half socialist as he is, no affection for saving, and he once, with rather disastrous consequences, took to paying his own farm labourers entirely in kind. In the same way the farmer is to have full stack yards, a snug farm house, with orchards and gardens thoroughly plenished. But he must not drink wine or tea, and his daughters must work and not play the piano.
…But though there is to be plenty of game, there are to be no game-laws. There is to be no standing army, though there may be a navy. There is to be no, or the very smallest, civil service. It stands to reason that there is to be no public debt; and the taxes are to be as low and as uniform as possible. Commerce, even on the direct scale, if that scale be large, is to be discouraged, and any kind of middleman absolutely exterminated. There is not to be any poetry (Cobbett does sometimes quote Pope, but always with a gibe), no general literature (for though Cobbett's own works are excellent, and indeed indispensable, that is chiefly because of the corruptions of the times), no fine arts--though Cobbett has a certain weakness for church architecture, mainly for a reason presently to be explained. Above all there is to be no such thing as what is called abroad a rentier. No one is to "live on his means," unless these means come directly from the owning or the tilling of land. The harmless fund holder with his three or four hundred a year, the dockyard official, the half-pay officer, are as abhorrent to Cobbett as the pensioner for nothing and the sinecurist. This is the state of things which he loves, and it is because the actual state of things is so different, and for no other reason, that he is a Radical Reformer." (59-61)
Saintsbury, George (1895). ‘William Cobbett’ in Essays in English literature 1780-1860, second series, London: Dent.
Sunday, 1 June 2008
In praise of Old Man Saintsbury
‘Orwell observes that “at that time [the 1920s] there was, among the young, a curious hatred of ‘old men’…every accepted institution, from Scott’s novels to the House of Lords, was derided because ‘old men’ were in favour of it”.’ (Jane Stevenson, Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye, p.58). That attitude to Scott etc took until the 1960s to get into exam syllabuses (in the 1950s Scott’s Old Mortality was still an O level text), but it seems to have dominated the ideas of intellectuals, and students, ever since the '20s.
Rarely since I was an undergraduate did I, till recently, read anything pre-1800, except some drama and poetry. Recently I found myself having to teach an existing course called ‘Analysing Written Discourse’. Since ‘discourse analysis’ in linguistics—the intended content--seemed (and seems) thin fare, not least because it largely confines itself to dreary media and political writing of no lasting interest, I thought I'd include literary prose, which got me reading about its history and then going back and reading Bacon, Addison and Steele, Gibbon, Burke, Paine, Macaulay and Lamb. (Hazlitt I had already discovered, no thanks to my education.) I was surprised at the pleasure I got from the feel and texture and flow and flare of this stuff, and realised what people—including our abler school students—were missing in not reading such older texts. Unlike, say, Shakespeare, they don’t present great difficulties to the reader, except sometimes in syntactical complexity.
If I never for many years went to prose literature of the 18th century and earlier, in literary criticism I read nothing before 1920. So I missed an actual 1920s old man (then in his seventies and eighties) who earlier had been a most important writer on literature, George Saintsbury: 1845-1933, professor of rhetoric and English literature at the University of Edinburgh, author of innumerable books on English and French literature, a man who had read everything and no fool. A few years ago I bought his Short (818 pages!) History of English Literature in a second-hand bookshop and ever since have been in the habit, whenever I want to know about some English author or period before 1900, of looking there first and often finding perceptive criticism as well as the facts. For my course on analysing literary prose he was invaluable, in a way that I don’t know any subsequent critic would have been. Since then I've had other books of his from the library, one of the pleasures being the volumes’ history:
That's another Saintsbury book. Sir Sidney Lee, it must be said, did not deface his books with marginalia.
For all that Saintsbury was a Victorian when he wrote his Short History (1898), I have no difficulty in accepting many of his views and observations. I think he’s a good guide, and English teachers would find him a more useful source of insight into the older literature they teach than recent guides which focus on authors’ ideologies and class, race and gender positionings. Saintsbury is interested above all in the quality of the writing in a work, its style, the effects it achieves and what is to be had by reading it. And his own writing, if not always elegant, is often sharp.
Going to Saintsbury is a way of escaping from the academic pedantry of recent times-- as A.C. Grayling, writing about Hazlitt, explains. Saintsbury, he says, was able to appreciate Hazlitt because he (and A.C. Bradley)
"wrote before the twentieth-century turn to academic criticism… which, in making and continually widening the gulf between ‘the world of journalism, where new literature is fostered or starved, and the world of scholarship, where old literature is interpreted and canonized,’ is not concerned with taste, but with technique; not with the common readers’ or viewers’ response to books read or plays or paintings seen, and their connection with life as lived, but with specialist academic interest in methods and classifications, schools and ‘-isms’, unconscious influences, supposed hidden meanings, patriarchal oppressions, deconstruction of texts, and multiple readings. For Hazlitt this latter enterprise would have seemed futile pedantry. Literature, theatre, art and philosophy were in his view matters of direct concern to the experience of life; they made a practical difference; therefore they were to be encountered, and evaluated, and responded to, not only with discrimination and thought, but with feeling. They were to be tested on the pulses, and everything they taught of character and the human condition made a difference to the perceiver’s heart and mind." (Grayling, 2000, The quarrel of the age: the life and times of William Hazlitt, 250)
A great rant. Whatever university courses choose to do, English teaching in schools should side with Grayling, Saintsbury and Hazlitt. In doing so it will find Saintsbury a help in being rigorous in a different way. He’s able to write about style and the way that sentences go in a way that no modern critics do that I know of, except Tom Paulin (who, not coincidentally, has also written a book on Hazlitt). I know there’s more to prose literature than style, but unconsciously at least style has a big effect on us, and it does no harm to bring that sense into consciousness. In this Saintsbury’s learning is a great support.
He’s also good on style in poetry, where he understands metre and rhythm, e.g. in Milton, the scope of whose Paradise Lost called for spacious verse paragraphs. Again, it’s only in the last five years that I've read Milton—how he got missed at university I don’t recall; he is, of course, terrific (except when he’s awful), and I wish someone had made me read him earlier, e.g. for O level. You do have to work a bit at Saintsbury, and look things up; when necessary he’s quite prepared to get technical (I did mention ‘rigorous’):
“… with these… provisos, every line of his can be scanned with perfect strictness as an iambic of five feet in which the following feet are admissible, strictly speaking, in any place--iambus, trochee, anapaest, dactyl, and tribrach while a redundant syllable is allowed in the last. With such precision, and on the whole such judgment, did he apply these principles, that in a certain sense English prosody up to the present time has gone no farther.”
(In his big book on English prosody--the sound and rhythm of poetry—he really goes to town on feet, caesuras, enjambements etc. His original readers with their classical educations would have known the specialist terms.)
Here’s an example that shows one sort of thing Saintsbury does well; it’s a summary of Milton’s contribution to the development of English verse:
“He represents -and almost exhausts--the fourth great influence in English prosody. We have already seen how Chaucer gathered together and put, with an immense contribution of his own, the results of the struggles of Middle English towards such a prosody, and how his example, followed blindly and with a tongue as stammering as the eyes were dim, lasted for more than a century till the changes of the language put it for the moment aside ; how Spenser, partly returning to it, partly gathering up de novo the results of the experiments of his immediate forerunners and the general influences of the Renaissance, gave poetry a fresh start; and, lastly, how the dramatists, and especially Shakespeare, suppled and shook out the texture of the decasyllabic line, varied its cadence, stocked it (on the principles of equivalence or slur) with a great number of new foot combinations, while the lyric and stanza poetry of the fifty years between the Calendar and Milton's “Three and twentieth year” sonnet almost exhausted the possibilities of less uniform verse….
Just at this time came Milton, a poet with an exquisite ear and extraordinary science of form, great learning in his own and other languages, and a predilection for the special form of non dramatic blank verse which, managed as he manages it, at once counteracts the effect of the sharp snip snap couplet and of the wandering, involved, labyrinthine stanza. He tightened up the metre without unduly constricting it; he refined the expression without making it jejune. And in particular his need of an extremely varied line to construct his paragraphs and supply the want of rhyme music, made him, without adopting the sheer abandonment of the late dramatic verse, resort to every artifice of metrical distribution to avoid monotony.”
‘Suppled [sic] and shook out’ – good, eh? And what about ‘the sharp snip snap couplet and [] the wandering, involved, labyrinthine stanza’—though better still without ‘involved’. I didn’t know about the four great influences in English prosody, and now I'm glad to know.
Or is it just me that doesn’t find this stuff intolerably dry and boring?
Rarely since I was an undergraduate did I, till recently, read anything pre-1800, except some drama and poetry. Recently I found myself having to teach an existing course called ‘Analysing Written Discourse’. Since ‘discourse analysis’ in linguistics—the intended content--seemed (and seems) thin fare, not least because it largely confines itself to dreary media and political writing of no lasting interest, I thought I'd include literary prose, which got me reading about its history and then going back and reading Bacon, Addison and Steele, Gibbon, Burke, Paine, Macaulay and Lamb. (Hazlitt I had already discovered, no thanks to my education.) I was surprised at the pleasure I got from the feel and texture and flow and flare of this stuff, and realised what people—including our abler school students—were missing in not reading such older texts. Unlike, say, Shakespeare, they don’t present great difficulties to the reader, except sometimes in syntactical complexity.
If I never for many years went to prose literature of the 18th century and earlier, in literary criticism I read nothing before 1920. So I missed an actual 1920s old man (then in his seventies and eighties) who earlier had been a most important writer on literature, George Saintsbury: 1845-1933, professor of rhetoric and English literature at the University of Edinburgh, author of innumerable books on English and French literature, a man who had read everything and no fool. A few years ago I bought his Short (818 pages!) History of English Literature in a second-hand bookshop and ever since have been in the habit, whenever I want to know about some English author or period before 1900, of looking there first and often finding perceptive criticism as well as the facts. For my course on analysing literary prose he was invaluable, in a way that I don’t know any subsequent critic would have been. Since then I've had other books of his from the library, one of the pleasures being the volumes’ history:
That's another Saintsbury book. Sir Sidney Lee, it must be said, did not deface his books with marginalia.
For all that Saintsbury was a Victorian when he wrote his Short History (1898), I have no difficulty in accepting many of his views and observations. I think he’s a good guide, and English teachers would find him a more useful source of insight into the older literature they teach than recent guides which focus on authors’ ideologies and class, race and gender positionings. Saintsbury is interested above all in the quality of the writing in a work, its style, the effects it achieves and what is to be had by reading it. And his own writing, if not always elegant, is often sharp.
Going to Saintsbury is a way of escaping from the academic pedantry of recent times-- as A.C. Grayling, writing about Hazlitt, explains. Saintsbury, he says, was able to appreciate Hazlitt because he (and A.C. Bradley)
"wrote before the twentieth-century turn to academic criticism… which, in making and continually widening the gulf between ‘the world of journalism, where new literature is fostered or starved, and the world of scholarship, where old literature is interpreted and canonized,’ is not concerned with taste, but with technique; not with the common readers’ or viewers’ response to books read or plays or paintings seen, and their connection with life as lived, but with specialist academic interest in methods and classifications, schools and ‘-isms’, unconscious influences, supposed hidden meanings, patriarchal oppressions, deconstruction of texts, and multiple readings. For Hazlitt this latter enterprise would have seemed futile pedantry. Literature, theatre, art and philosophy were in his view matters of direct concern to the experience of life; they made a practical difference; therefore they were to be encountered, and evaluated, and responded to, not only with discrimination and thought, but with feeling. They were to be tested on the pulses, and everything they taught of character and the human condition made a difference to the perceiver’s heart and mind." (Grayling, 2000, The quarrel of the age: the life and times of William Hazlitt, 250)
A great rant. Whatever university courses choose to do, English teaching in schools should side with Grayling, Saintsbury and Hazlitt. In doing so it will find Saintsbury a help in being rigorous in a different way. He’s able to write about style and the way that sentences go in a way that no modern critics do that I know of, except Tom Paulin (who, not coincidentally, has also written a book on Hazlitt). I know there’s more to prose literature than style, but unconsciously at least style has a big effect on us, and it does no harm to bring that sense into consciousness. In this Saintsbury’s learning is a great support.
He’s also good on style in poetry, where he understands metre and rhythm, e.g. in Milton, the scope of whose Paradise Lost called for spacious verse paragraphs. Again, it’s only in the last five years that I've read Milton—how he got missed at university I don’t recall; he is, of course, terrific (except when he’s awful), and I wish someone had made me read him earlier, e.g. for O level. You do have to work a bit at Saintsbury, and look things up; when necessary he’s quite prepared to get technical (I did mention ‘rigorous’):
“… with these… provisos, every line of his can be scanned with perfect strictness as an iambic of five feet in which the following feet are admissible, strictly speaking, in any place--iambus, trochee, anapaest, dactyl, and tribrach while a redundant syllable is allowed in the last. With such precision, and on the whole such judgment, did he apply these principles, that in a certain sense English prosody up to the present time has gone no farther.”
(In his big book on English prosody--the sound and rhythm of poetry—he really goes to town on feet, caesuras, enjambements etc. His original readers with their classical educations would have known the specialist terms.)
Here’s an example that shows one sort of thing Saintsbury does well; it’s a summary of Milton’s contribution to the development of English verse:
“He represents -and almost exhausts--the fourth great influence in English prosody. We have already seen how Chaucer gathered together and put, with an immense contribution of his own, the results of the struggles of Middle English towards such a prosody, and how his example, followed blindly and with a tongue as stammering as the eyes were dim, lasted for more than a century till the changes of the language put it for the moment aside ; how Spenser, partly returning to it, partly gathering up de novo the results of the experiments of his immediate forerunners and the general influences of the Renaissance, gave poetry a fresh start; and, lastly, how the dramatists, and especially Shakespeare, suppled and shook out the texture of the decasyllabic line, varied its cadence, stocked it (on the principles of equivalence or slur) with a great number of new foot combinations, while the lyric and stanza poetry of the fifty years between the Calendar and Milton's “Three and twentieth year” sonnet almost exhausted the possibilities of less uniform verse….
Just at this time came Milton, a poet with an exquisite ear and extraordinary science of form, great learning in his own and other languages, and a predilection for the special form of non dramatic blank verse which, managed as he manages it, at once counteracts the effect of the sharp snip snap couplet and of the wandering, involved, labyrinthine stanza. He tightened up the metre without unduly constricting it; he refined the expression without making it jejune. And in particular his need of an extremely varied line to construct his paragraphs and supply the want of rhyme music, made him, without adopting the sheer abandonment of the late dramatic verse, resort to every artifice of metrical distribution to avoid monotony.”
‘Suppled [sic] and shook out’ – good, eh? And what about ‘the sharp snip snap couplet and [] the wandering, involved, labyrinthine stanza’—though better still without ‘involved’. I didn’t know about the four great influences in English prosody, and now I'm glad to know.
Or is it just me that doesn’t find this stuff intolerably dry and boring?
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