Background

George Saintsbury was born on October 23, 1845, in Southampton, Hampshire, United Kingdom. He was a son of George Saintsbury, a railroad dock superintendent and general secretary, and Elizabeth Wright Saintsbury who died around 1876.

Education

George Saintsbury was educated at King's College School in London and at Merton College, Oxford where he earned a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in Classical Mods in 1865. It was followed by a second class in literae humaniores two years later.

He tried to obtain a fellowship to Oxford University four times but failed.

Career

George Saintsbury took up teaching at a grammar school in Manchester, United Kingdom and later at colleges in Guernsey after failing four times to obtain a fellowship to Oxford University. He then served as a senior classical master at Elizabeth College, Guernsey for six years. He eventually left the teaching profession to become a journalist, writing literary and political columns for such magazines as the Academy, Manchester Guardian, and the Saturday Review.

Saintsbury came back for a while to his teaching activity in the middle of the 1870s. From 1874 to 1876, he headed the Elgin Educational Institute. He briefly contributed to the Manchester Guardian during this period of time.

As a literary critic, he soon earned a reputation for his great erudition and informal, though at times distractingly parenthetical, writing style. In 1880, Saintsbury issued his first volume of criticism, A Primer of French Literature, for which he prepared by reading an entire French novel every morning for several years. He continued to write critical works and literary histories, and in 1895 became a Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University, the position he held until he reached the mandatory age of retirement in 1915.

During his years at Edinburgh Saintsbury wrote prolifically and produced his most important works, including A Short History of English Literature, A History of English Prosody, and A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe which encompassed ancient Greek, Latin, German, French, English, Russian, Spanish, Italian, and Icelandic literatures.

George Saintsbury continued to write after his retirement, but be increasingly turned away from the multivolume literary histories for which he had become famous, producing collections, or ‘Scrap Books’, of essays, as well as extended critical studies of single authors.

In addition to his own writings, Saintsbury also tried himself as a contributor and editor. He edited and wrote an introduction for an English version of Honoré de Balzac’s novels La Comédie humaine, Periods of European Literature for the William Blackwood and Sons, and contributed an introduction for the lost and rediscovered recipe book by Anne Blencoe.

Achievements

• George Saintsbury was considered the greatest literary critic of his time. He has been praised for the enthusiasm and insight he brought to the study of literature.
  
  Although some critics dismiss him from time to time as a somewhat antiquated figure, his literary histories remain unequaled in scope, and he is considered important for the insight his works afford into nineteenth-century literary attitudes. As J. B. Priestly wrote in Figures in Modern Literature, Saintsbury’s "almost unique combination of extraordinarily wide reading and research and unflagging appreciation, gusto (call it what you will), that makes him so rare a critic, so delightful a guide and companion in letters, for these and any other times."

Works

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  • Sir Walter Scott

    (Sir Walter Scott's own 'autobiographic fragment,' printed...)

    1897
  • Notes on a Cellar-Book

    (Since its first publication in 1920, George Saintsbury's ...)

    1920
  • A history of nineteenth century literature, 1780-1895

    (A history of nineteenth-century literature, 1780-1895 is ...)

    1895
  • A Short History of French Literature

    (A succinct history of the course of French literature com...)

    1897
  • A History of English Prose Rhythm 1912
  • A Short History of English Literature 1898
  • The Plays of Molière in French. Volume 4 2017
  • George Saintsbury. The Memorial Volume: a New Collection of His Essays and Papers. 1945
  • Elizabethan & Jacobean Pamphlets 1892
  • A History of English Prosody: From the Twelfth Century to the Present Day 1906
  • Primer of French Literature 1880
  • A Consideration of Thackeray: A Study of William Makepeace Thackeray's Life and Works 1931

Views

The views that George Saintsbury expressed throughout his life remained constant and extreme: concerning literature, he was a dogmatic aestheticist, concerning religion, a High Church Anglican, and concerning politics, a monarchist very critical to democracy.

One of the most distinctive qualities of Saintsbury's works is the profound love for literature they convey. "Reading" was "like mental breathing" for him. The achievement to which this love led him is legendary. Saintsbury read all of the major and many of the minor creative writers of Western civilization from the Homeric era to his own time, most in their native languages.

Few critics have disputed the extent of Saintsbury's reading, although some have objected that his knowledge was too inclusive to be very penetrating in any single area, and that his criticism exhibits only surface concerns. Defenders of Saintsbury maintain that he chose to restrict himself to the role of a literary historian who was concerned purely with the aesthetic quality of work, rather than its subject matter.

Although Saintsbury was never officially associated with the aestheticist or "art for arts sake" movement that developed around such figures as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, he espoused the essential philosophy of this movement: that the value of literature lay in its artistic form and not in its moral, political, psychological or philosophical significance. Saintsbury was one of the most outspoken defenders of the concept of separating a work's style from its content, a critical stance that enabled him to praise works that clashed violently in their political or religious implications with his unyielding conservatism. For example, he championed the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which proclaimed their author's atheism and progressive ideology. Saintsbury also refused to rate writers as superior or inferior based on the type of writing they practiced.

Saintsbury frequently celebrated minor authors, although his praise was always judiciously qualified. In this way, he attempted to inspire interest in neglected writers whose works he considered worthy of attention.

Quotations: "B is not bad because it is not A, however good A may be."

"Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world."

"Historians may lie, but History cannot."

"We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire."

"Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare."

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

"One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name."

"The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in."

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

"But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat – it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older – as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast."

"It is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times."

Membership

George Saintsbury was a Fellow of the British Academy.

Personality

While George Saintsbury attached great importance to an author's style, he has frequently been criticized for stylistic flaws in his own writing. His style has been especially derided for its overuse of parenthetical structure, which often becomes so involved that essential points are obscured. Those who knew Saintsbury contend that he wrote not in an artificially difficult style, but rather transcribed his manner of speech, in which qualifications and asides often intruded and became a part of his train of thought. Saintsbury himself never made any apologies for or defenses of his style.

Connections

George Saintsbury married Emily Fern King in 1868.

Father:

George Saintsbury

Mother:

Elizabeth Wright Saintsbury

Wife:

Emily Fern King