66 They send out the same orders happily yet unfinished, through to a hundred printing-presses, the world, he likes better and they keep those whom than others. Even those whom they call their editors dangling he dislikes, even puritans and upon the ends of telephone "pussyfoots," he treats with wires. But happily for the a light-handed contempt. The country they have overdone one man upon whom he passes the business, and if they reflect a harsh sentence justifies the calmly upon the results of the harshness. But Mark PattiElection they will see that son," says he, "to speak withtheir influence is dead. As out meal on mouth or not we have said, they did their enfarinhadamente, was rather a best to extinguish the Labour brute. Excuses or explanaParty, which has prospered tions of his want of amiability marvellously. They hoped for have, of course, been lodged— a coalition, in which Messrs one may say by himself,-the Lloyd George and Churchill rankle of the gorcen rifuto of should once more engulf the his desertion, not like that of Tories, and if they see any Newman, but, in a different coalition at all, it will be a direction, of the principles coalition of Mr Asquith, Mr which Newman himself deRamsay Macdonald, and their serted: the fact that he was dangerous followers. not made Rector as soon as he ought to have been," &c., &c. For the rest Professor Saintsbury has been a fortunate man, making the friends he liked, dancing with the women he liked, reading the books he liked. It is pleasant in these days of plannings and plottings to turn from the confusion of politics to the ripe and amiable gossip of Professor Saintsbury. His second 'Scrap Book' (London: Macmillan & Co.) is of the same ripe and amiable quality as the first. It discourses seriously of seriously of serious things. Professor Saintsbury is never flippant where eating and drinking are being dis cussed. His knowledge of wine is familiar to us all, and he has much of value to say about the composition of a good dinner. He looks back upon life with a cheerful pleasure, as upon a friend who has served him well. Some of those whom he has met in his passage, Whatever he writes about, he does it with a certain joy in the writing. His account of Oxford in the 'sixties is a piece of history of great worth and substance. A picture of life as it was lived at Merton College, it will increase in value as time goes on. Professor Saintsbury sketches the hopes and fears of an ambitious undergraduate, whose one failing was the profitable failing of a love of discursive reading, with a lively pen and an accurate memory. The one sorrow which darkened his early days was a Second in Greek, and he still seems to feel the mishap with a strange poignancy. It irked him as bitterly as a similar failure irked Mark Pattison, the one don at Oxford of whom he keeps an unhappy remembrance. In Professor Saintsbury's defence it may be said that he came far nearer to Pattison in getting a first. They expressed their disappointment each after his own fashion. "I wonder," says Professor Saintsbury, "if there is anything not involving severe bodily pain, utter financial ruin, real disgrace, or the death of a dear friend, which hurts so abominably and lasts so long as getting a Second." Mark Pattison thought it was an occasion for a harsh piece of self abnegation. "Passing through London on my way," thus he wrote, "I saw advertised, 'Steam to Hull for 5s.,' and immediately went on board: 5s. were as much as a wretched second class ought to pay for his fare to Yorkshire." No doubt he regarded the foul passage and the terrible seasickness which followed as a proper punishment, and both the failure and the suffering were burnt into his mind. Professor Saintsbury's Second is his sole recorded misfortune, except his failure which Mark Pattison shared, until Lincoln College gave him shelter, to get a fellowship. For the rest he has faced and still faces life with a gay courage. There is a gaiety even in his assaults upon the foolish ones of the earth. He does not easily bear the modern canonisation of the Working - Man, whose numerousness has persuaded many to fall down before him in worship. He takes Bishop Ryle severely to task for defending the revision of the Prayer - book, on the ground "that the working-man,'' the uneducated,'' the lower classes' -all the pets and spoilt children of the present day-are so puzzled by the dreadful old words, the strange constructions, &c., &c.!" Of course the educated classes are not worth considering. The modern philanthropists do not believe in the text: To them that have shall be given." And yet we have done not a little for the working-man without much result. "Now for more than fifty years,' says Professor Saintsbury, we have been expending at first several hundreds of thousands a year, and at last something nearer hundreds of millions on the education of these poor dears ; and what have we taught them? The answer is not readily forthcoming; but we seem to have untaught them a good deal. They can't, it seems, understand quick,' so we must make it alive,' and sacrifice one of the in English, the quick and the dead." " In other words, the taste and the sense of propriety of the educated must be sacrificed to the ignorance of 6 greatest phrases those who refuse to learn, and are not likely in any case to ponder very deeply the simple phrases of the Prayer-book which baffle their idle minds. In the same spirit of ridicule he exposes the folly of those who would prevent others from doing what they pretend they don't want to do, or do themselves in secret. He castigates the lady who talks about America's magnificent effort of Prohibition." The magnificence of Prohibition rightly seems to him to be "going far." He loves the busybodies who would suppress gambling in others no more than he loves those who directly encourage the enterprise of the "boot-leggers." Not for nothing was he born in a house called Lottery Hall, because it was built out of winnings under that system of public lotteries which our more intelligent and less canting forefathers permitted and utilised. He has never been able to perceive any moral harm in what is called gambling, unless you lose what you can't pay. His defence of betting is as good an attack as we know upon the busy bodies who compound for sins that they're inclined to by damning those they have no mind to." He asserts that, as usual, it is by sideways of "example," consequence," "temptation," &c., that the attack is made, and then asks, most pertinently, "How often is one to point out that pretty nearly everything in this world 66 is capable of abuse, or of being combined with something that is bad?" And thus he concludes an excellent argument: "To set up sham Satans, for the mere purpose of extinguishing or trying to extinguish them, is surely folly of the foolishest, if it is not something even worse.' 66 Among his pieces of literary criticism criticism there is none nearer to the point than that which he calls "Laughing at Tennyson." He recalls an excellent phrase, we have been laughing at Tennyson for a good many years," and makes it the text of an engaging discourse. He accuses the detractors of Tennyson of imitating Rymer, who was angry with Iago for being a traitor, and of criticising Tennyson on a false ground. We may not like the blameless prig, as Mallock called King Arthur many years ago; we may not be sorry for the May Queen; we may not love Dora at all. "But," asks Professor Saintsbury, "what has all this to do with poetry? For similar reasons, it is very easy to condemn the greatest, the austerest of poets. We may say of Dryden, for instance, that he was a turncoat, of Milton that he was a rebel against his king. But these sins do not touch their poetry. "No," says Professor Saintsbury, brushing away irrelevancies with a large gesture, "a poet's opinions, tastes, principles, actions, ideals, character, and so forth matter absolutely nothing when he is considered as a poet. You may hang him as a poet for his bad verses,' but for nothing else." These are wise words, and yet in another place Professor Saintsbury throws their wisdom overboard, as though it were nothing worth. He is replying to those who reproached him for having left out from his "panel of greatest "Virgil and Chaucer, Rabelais and Cervantes, Molière and Dickens, and the rest, and for having admitted Thackeray. In attempting to justify what seems to us a strange aberration, he writes a few pages upon Virgil which belie his own deliberate teaching. He confesses that Virgil's power over phrase and metre is that of a most accomplished craftsman, that his narrative power is remarkable, that his 'Georgics' are about as good as didactic poetry can be. In brief, he acclaims him a great poet, and then hangs him not for his bad verses, which, in writing of Tennyson, he asserts to be the only excuse for a hanging, but for something else. It is the fatal and ubiquitous presence of the hero of the Eneid' that troubles him. Eneas has the same effect upon his mind as "the blameless prig" has had upon the minds of the critics of Tennyson. When he writes of Æneas, he might be one of the younger generation denouncing King Arthur. paint the portrait of Æneas out of villainy or misunderstanding, but because he saw it in the colours which he used. Yet this is what Professor Saintsbury writes: "A more disgusting hero than Eneas there is not in the range of epic. And in some astonishing manner he combines uninterestingness with disgust. He is such a poor creature that you would almost be ashamed to kick him, as he deserves, because he would begin complaining to his mother, and you wouldn't like to annoy her. I should like to hear her private opinion of her offspring, also the remarks both of Vulcan and of Mars on the subject." Even if it be true, is it not wholly irrelevant? Professor Saintsbury has taught us that "a poet's opinions, tastes, principles, actions, ideals, character, and so forth matter absolutely nothing when he is considered as a poet." In other words, we appeal with confidence from Professor Saintsbury discoursing of Virgil to Professor Saintsbury discoursing of Tennyson, and we have no doubt what the verdict will be. And where are the bad verses in Virgil's works for which alone you may hang him? We do not know them. Like all great poets, Virgil was secure in the great tradition. There is nothing second-hand in his debt to Homer. He He would have been but an anarforgets that Virgil did not chist if he had rebelled against the influence of the father of word "serious" puzzles us. epic poetry. The charge of stealing was brought against him in his lifetime, and he knew how to repel it. "Why," he asked pertinently, "don't these gentry attempt the same thefts themselves? And again," said he of his detractors, "they will find that it is easier to rob Hercules of his club than Homer of a single line." At this hour it is idle to praise the various harmony of his verse, the splendour of his diction, his seeing eye, which simplifies which simplifies impressions and finds the essential in every scene; his mastery of landscape, which enables him in two lines to sketch a land-locked harbour, or paint a village fading in the evening light. An eminent professor of the ancient tongues once said that if he could persuade his pupils to learn the Fourth Georgic by heart, and to appreciate all its beauty, he had done all he could for them. His paradox points the way to the truth, and whatever view we may take of the character of Eneas, we shall refuse still to hang Virgil on an irrelevant charge. In one other argument we should like to engage Professor Saintsbury. In justifying his exclusions from his "panel of greatest," he says that "the twelve he mentioned are expressly described as the 'serious' writers, who have appeared to him as such, and as such consummately." The We do not know what precise meaning Professor Saintsbury attaches to it. It is not altogether a pleasant word. It may suggest long sermons, written for our good. Malvolio was serious-serious in his lack of humour. The dictionary does not help us much when it defines serious as grave in feeling, manner, or disposition; not light, gay, or volatile.' None of these definitions support Professor Saintsbury in putting Thackeray among his first twelve, and excluding the others. In literary criticism, "serious" must have a literary sense far away from "gravity or "weight." It should, we think, be applied to writers who contemplate large issues, who are determined to work for all time, to whom the fickle appreciation of the moment means nothing, if it be compared with an eternity of fame and influence. The finest jester of them all may be "serious" if he be properly inspired. Would anybody withhold the epithet "serious" from Aristophanes, who mingled the song of nightingales with the chatter of apes? Chaucer and Cervantes, Rabelais and Molière, Dickens himself are "serious," both for the mastery of their art and their lasting effect upon the world. Whether we wish it or not, they are part of our inheritance and of ourselves. But Thackeray ? He achieved an eminence in his own little |