'Reading, Reading, Reading'

Over the last year or so, while not quite realizing at first what I was doing, I’ve been reading all the books by George Saintsbury (1845-1933) I can get my hands on. The first attraction was the enviable breadth of Saintsbury’s reading. Next came his elegant, conversational prose. At his best, he packs much into a small space. He wrote so well, in a blindfold test you would never guess he was a critic and a scholar. Every paragraph reflects his learning and love of literature. Now I’m reading the posthumously published A Last Vintage: Essays and Papers (Methuen, 1950). Included is “Trivia,” a sequence of fourteen aphorisms originally published in The Book of the Queen’s Dolls’ House (1924). Here’s a sample:

“Taste, like Style, ought to be the expression of Self; but it is difficult to say in which of the two this is most seldom the case.”

Both qualities are rare, but I’ll guess Taste. In literature alone, not to mention clothing and personal grooming, Taste is a vestigial organ, like the appendix.

“Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.”

Exhibit A: Twitter. Humor is the default mode of people of Taste and maturity. 

“When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.”

The minimum requirement for a critic is the ability to write well (concisely, precisely, with flair). If a critic can’t write, why should I listen to anything he has to say about anyone else’s writing?

“Fanatical and, as it were, monomaniacal efforts to prove a thing true often bring indifference to telling falsehoods about it.”

Just look around.

Helen Waddell contributes a remembrance of Saintsbury to A Last Vintage. For personal reasons, her presence is pleasing. In 1973, I worked in the kitchen of a restaurant with a guy who gave me a copy of The Wandering Scholars (1927). He was one of the first people I ever met who could talk knowledgeably about books in a non-academic fashion. He had read far more than I. Waddell writes:

“This is the man we knew: not the Johnsonian Saintsbury who loved to fold his legs and have his talk out: not the Meredithian Saintsbury, emerging from his cellar with a bearded Hermitage reverently and triumphantly bestowed: but the solitary scholar who was his own best company, ‘Lord not only of Joyous Gard but also of Garde Douleureuse,’ reading, reading, reading through the small hours in the familiar chair with two tall candlesticks behind it. And their light falls, not on his face, but on the open book.”

Carefully edited, that has the makings of a fine epitaph for any serious reader.