'The Milk of Fun Should Attract Him'

On the first page of ‘King of Critics’: George Saintsbury, 1845-1933, Critic, Journalist, Historian, Professor (University of Michigan Press, 1992) I learned a word appropriate to its subject that also manages, in four syllables, to articulate a readerly ideal: omnilegent. His biographer, Dorothy Richardson Jones, imagines the adolescent Saintsbury lingering over bookstalls in London, reading Lucretius or Pendennis:

“Oblivious of the people he bumps or nudges or barely misses, his nearsighted eyes devour the pages as he makes his way slowly home to Notting Hill, reading, reading, reading, as he was to do for the three-score years and ten to come. The omnilegent George Saintsbury is foreshadowed in this, his own description of the schoolboy he was.”

The OED defines omnilegent as an adjective that means “reading everything, familiar with all or a great amount of literature” – an impossibility that remains forever an inspiration. To neatly close the circle, the Dictionary cites Saintsbury’s usage in his essay on De Quincey (Essays in English Literature, 1890): “He was not exactly as Southey was, ‘omnilegent’; but in his own departments, and they were numerous, he went farther below the surface and connected his readings together better than Southey did.” Imagine having lived in an age when one might have realistically strived for “omnilegence.” The Victorians were stout fellows.

In Jones’ telling, Saintsbury’s lifelong reading regimen should not be attributed solely to Victorian hyper-industriousness. He was likewise driven by a craving for reliable pleasure and consolation in a pre-electronic, pre-digital world:

“Sunday reading, restricted as it was in many Victorian homes, focused upon a few books read and reread so as to become lifelong companions; among them, Bunyan, Scott’s poems, Lalla Rookh, the Essays of Elia, and Southey’s The Doctor. As Saintsbury saw it in 1923: ‘If a boy does not rejoice, however imperfectly, in The Knights, The True History, The Canterbury Tales, Gargantua and Pantagruel, L’Avare, Gulliver or Pickwick the first time he reads them in the original, there is no help or hope for him. The milk of fun should attract him: the meat of life—criticism, and the wine of art can wait.’”