FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Whether or not he admits their practical cogency, an attentive reader will not fail to be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury has made to give technical rules of metre for the production of the true prose rhythm.  Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied examples in this wide survey of what has been actually well done in English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly prosaic merit — their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a structure primarily reasonable.  Not that that reasonable prose structure, or architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been always, or even generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers here in evidence.  Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty and force which overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and incorrect with an incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate prose at all:  then, in reaction against that, the correctness of Dryden, and his followers through the eighteenth century, determining the standard of a prose in the proper sense, not inferior to the prose of the Augustan age in Latin, or of the “great age in France”:  and, again in reaction against this, the wild mixture of poetry and prose, in our wild nineteenth century, under the influence of such writers as Dickens and Carlyle:  such are the three periods into which the story of our prose literature divides itself.  And Mr. Saintsbury has his well-timed, practical suggestions, upon a survey of them.

That powerful poetry was twin-brother to a prose, of more varied, but certainly of wilder and more irregular power than the admirable, the typical, prose of Dryden.  In Dryden, and his followers through the eighteenth century, we see the reaction against the exuberance and irregularity of that prose, no longer justified by power, but cognizable rather as bad taste.  But such reaction was effective only because an age had come — the age of a negative, or agnostic philosophy — in which men’s minds must needs be limited to the superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a positive gift.  What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way of an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men’s moods and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and manners themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and harmonious, can be seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson’s Selections from Steele (Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful “Life.”  The well-known qualities of Mr. Dobson’s own original work are a sufficient guarantee of the taste and discrimination we may look for in a collection like this, in which the random lightnings of the first of the essayists are grouped under certain heads — “Character Sketches,” “Tales and Incidents,” “Manners and Fashions,” and the like — so as to diminish, for the general reader, the scattered effect of short essays on a hundred various subjects, and give a connected, book-like character to the specimens.

Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his way of taking the world — for this pioneer of an everybody’s literature had his subjectivities — into books.  What a survival of one long-past day, for instance, in “A Ramble from Richmond to London”!  What truth to the surface of common things, to their direct claim on our interest! yet with what originality of effect in that truthfulness, when he writes, for instance: 

“I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the discourse of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the charge, hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a link.”

The industrious reader, indeed, might select out of these specimens from Steele, a picture, in minute detail, of the characteristic manners of that time.  Still, beside, or only a little way beneath, such a picture of passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows really deal with is the least transitory aspects of life, though still merely aspects — those points in which all human nature, great or little, finds what it has in common, and directly shows itself up.  The natural strength of such literature will, of course, be in the line of its tendencies; in transparency, variety, and directness.  To the unembarrassing matter, the unembarrassed style!  Steele is, perhaps, the most impulsive writer of the school to which he belongs; he abounds in felicities of impulse.  Yet who can help feeling that his style is regular because the matter he deals with is the somewhat uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and unambitious in its speculative flight?  Even in Steele himself we may observe with what sureness of instinct the men of that age turned aside at the contact of anything likely to make them, in any sense, forget themselves.

No one indicates better than Charles Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred Ainger has done such good service, the great and peculiar change which was begun at the end of the last century, and dominates our own; that sudden increase of the width, the depth, the complexity of intellectual interest, which has many times torn and distorted literary style, even with those best able to comprehend its laws.  In Mrs. Leicester’s School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse (Macmillan), Mr. Ainger has collected and annotated certain remains of Charles and Mary Lamb, too good to lie unknown to the present generation, in forgotten periodicals or inaccessible reprints.  The story of the Odyssey, abbreviated in very simple prose, for children — of all ages — will speak for itself.  But the garland of graceful stories which gives name to the volume, told by a party of girls on the evening of their assembling at school, are in the highest degree characteristic of the brother and sister who were ever so successful in imparting to others their own enjoyment of books and people.  The tragic circumstance which strengthened and consecrated their natural community of interest had, one might think, something to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even of their most humorous writing, touching often the deepest springs of pity and awe, as the way of the highest humour is — a way, however, very different from that of the humorists of the eighteenth century.  But one cannot forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of Wordsworth:  of Wordsworth, the first characteristic power of the nineteenth century, his essay on whom, in the Quarterly Review, Mr. Ainger here reprints.  Would that he could have reprinted it as originally composed, and ungarbled by Gifford, the editor!  Lamb, like Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity, a precision, unsurpassed by the quietest essayist of the preceding age.  But it might have been foreseen that the rising tide of thought and feeling, on the strength of which they too are borne upward, would sometimes overflow barriers.  And so it happens that these simple stories are touched, much as Wordsworth’s verse-stories were, with tragic power.  Dealing with the beginnings of imagination in the minds of children, they record, with the reality which a very delicate touch preserves from anything lugubrious, not those merely preventible miseries of childhood over which some writers have been apt to gloat, but the contact of childhood with the great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which children can enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with a kind of simple, pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart.  Let the reader begin with the “Sea Voyage,” which is by Charles Lamb; and, what Mr. Ainger especially recommends, the “Father’s Wedding-Day,” by his sister Mary.

The ever-increasing intellectual burden of our age is hardly likely to adapt itself to the exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and limited, literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne.  Yet Mr. Saintsbury is certainly right in thinking that, as regards style, English literature has much to do.  Well, the good quality of an age, the defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and confusion, may well be eclecticism:  in style, as in other things, it is well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as possible — opposite excellences, it may be — those other beauties of prose.  A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness.  Let its writers make time to write English more as a learned language; and completing that correction of style which had only gone a certain way in the last century, raise the general level of language towards their own.  If there be a weakness in Mr. Saintsbury’s view, it is perhaps in a tendency to regard style a little too independently of matter.  And there are still some who think that, after all, the style is the man; justified, in very great varieties, by the simple consideration of what he himself has to say, quite independently of any real or supposed connection with this or that literary age or school.  Let us close with the words of a most versatile master of English — happily not yet included in Mr. Saintsbury’s book — a writer who has dealt with all the perturbing influences of our century in a manner as classical, as idiomatic, as easy and elegant, as Steele’s: 

“I wish you to observe,” says Cardinal Newman, “that the mere dealer in words cares little or nothing for the subject which he is embellishing, but can paint and gild anything whatever to order; whereas the artist, whom I am acknowledging, has his great or rich visions before him, and his only aim is to bring out what he thinks or what he feels in a way adequate to the thing spoken of, and appropriate to the speaker.”

17th February 1886