'A Frisk on Middle, Very Middle-earth'

Thirty years ago in an Albany, N.Y., bookstore I bought the Everyman’s Library edition of Tristram Shandy, the reprint from 1917. I had first read Laurence Sterne’s novel more than twenty years earlier, and again periodically every few years. At the front of the book is an Ex Libris bookplate from a previous owner, Clarence N. Smith, with this Latin tag: Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, sed magis amica veritas. Roughly: “Plato is my friend, Socrates is my friend, but truth is more my friend.” In other words, truth before authority. 

Also in the book I found a five-cent coupon for a long-defunct cleaning product called DIF. The coupon promises: “A recent scientific test showed that DIF removed grease 3.9 times faster than the best soap flakes—and removing grease is the chief problem in most cleaning.” I keep the coupon for sentimental reasons and for the audacity of its crackpot science, a Sterne specialty. Simply put, Tristram Shandy is a novel I love, one I’ve reread more often than almost any other. It never wears out, despite Dr. Johnson telling Boswell: “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.” I also cherish this edition for its introduction by George Saintsbury, the English literary critic and scholar.

 

How rare it is for a critic to develop a distinctive prose style, an inimitable way of writing that could be identified when his words are read aloud in a blindfold test. Johnson, Hazlitt, T.S. Eliot, J.V. Cunningham, a few others. How many can be read for pleasure, regardless of subject matter? How many invite rereading? The scarcity is ironic. For a critic to evaluate the work of others while possessing an ugly, inept or boring style is laughable. Saintsbury’s criticism can be enjoyed for its literary qualities, the pleasure of his prose. Here he is on Sterne:

 

“His forte is the foible; his cheval de bataille [war horse], the hobby-horse. If you want to soar into the heights, or plunge into the depths of humour, Sterne is not for you. But if you want what his own generation called a frisk on middle, very middle-earth, a hunt in curiosity-shops (especially of the technically ‘curious’ description), a peep into all manner of coulisses [backstage] and behind-scenes of human nature, a ride on a sort of intellectual switchback, a view of moral, mental, religious, sentimental dancing of all the kinds that have delighted man, from the rope to the skirt, then have with Sterne in any direction he pleases. He may sometimes a very little disgust you, but you will seldom have just cause to complain that he disappoints and deceives.”

 

Saintsbury was a late specimen of those Victorian prodigies of productivity such as Dickens, Darwin, Carlyle, et al. He was author, editor and translator of more than thirty volumes. His capacity for reading in multiple languages (especially English, Latin and French) was legendary. Dorothy Richardson Jones in her ‘King of Critics’: George Saintsbury, 1845-1933 (1992) writes:

 

“Pickwick, Peacock, Wuthering Heights, The Antiquary, Southey’s The Doctor, Jane Austen, Thackeray, and so forth, all these he reread once a year; [William Morris’] Earthly Paradise he read twenty times with unfading delight; Gulliver a hundred times; three hundred volumes of Gautier; all of the Anti-Jacobin; The Anatomy of Melancholy read twice through (it was ‘not easy.’)”

 

Just last week a longtime reader of Anecdotal Evidence left a comment saying he was reading Saintsbury’s three-volume History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day (1906-1910; second edition, 1923).