George Saintsbury Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury was born in Southampton on 23 October 1845, the son of a middle-class English family whose circumstances allowed him a thorough education and early immersion in books. He attended King's College School in London, where his facility for languages, especially French and Latin, revealed itself in precocious reading rather than formal prizes. At Merton College, Oxford, he read classics with a seriousness that would later ground his criticism in historical method and textual precision. The young Saintsbury acquired a taste for wide comparative reading, and by the time he took his degree in 1868 he already held the conviction that literature should be approached as a long, continuous conversation across nations and centuries rather than as a sequence of isolated masterpieces.

Schoolmaster and Journalist
Upon graduating, Saintsbury taught for several years at Elizabeth College in Guernsey. The Channel Islands, with their close ties to France, enabled him to deepen his engagement with French literature beyond the classroom, laying the foundations for one of his lifelong specialties. In the mid-1870s he moved to London and remade himself as a man of letters. He became a prolific reviewer and essayist for leading journals and weeklies, notably the Saturday Review and the Athenaeum, and later contributed to the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. These years honed the tone that would make him influential and sometimes contentious: learned but unpedantic, opinionated yet capacious, and guided by a keen ear for style and rhythm. He moved among fellow critics and writers such as Edmund Gosse and Andrew Lang, exchanging views on the canon and the claims of new writing. The working world of publishers and editors, including figures like John Morley in the orbit of Macmillan, turned Saintsbury into a recognized authority whose judgments, whether warmly appreciative or firmly dismissive, were read with respect.

Scholarship, Range, and Major Works
Saintsbury's intellectual ambition was to map the large contours of European literature and the underlying principles of taste. Early books such as A Primer of French Literature (1880) and A Short History of French Literature (1882) displayed his gift for synthesis without oversimplification. His monograph Dryden (1881), written for a popular series, restored the poet-critic's critical stature at a moment when Augustan literature was often undervalued. A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780, 1895), published in 1896, captured the sweep of British literary culture from the late Enlightenment through Romanticism to the twilight of Victorianism, surveying figures as different as Jane Austen, Walter Scott, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy. He was never merely cataloging; he consistently looked for how formal experiment and tradition interacted.

Two monumental trilogies secured his place among the era's major historians of criticism. A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day (1900, 1904) gathered ancient, medieval, and modern thinkers into a single narrative about how readers learn to judge. Saintsbury ranged from Aristotle to Boileau and Lessing, from Longinus to Sainte-Beuve, placing English criticism in a truly European frame and acknowledging, among others, the philological work of scholars like Gaston Paris. A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day (1906, 1910) was equally ambitious in form, attempting to chart the changing meters and rhythms of English verse over seven centuries. Here he engaged with a tradition of scansion that reached back to the grammarians while arguing, against some contemporaries, that prosody was both a technical and an aesthetic matter that shaped the reader's whole experience.

Besides these large projects, he wrote a Short History of English Literature (1898) for general readers, produced anthologies of English prose and verse coupled with stylistic commentary, and published studies such as The Peace of the Augustans (1916), a reevaluation of the eighteenth century as an age of poise and intellectual play rather than mere decorum. The English Novel (1913) distilled decades of reviewing into a compact history of the form from its early modern beginnings to the high Victorians. Across these works he balanced broad historical arcs with attention to individual styles: Dryden's energetic precision, Scott's narrative sweep, Balzac's architectural plotting, Flaubert's exacting prose, and Rabelais's exuberant abundance.

Professor at Edinburgh
In 1895 Saintsbury was appointed Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, succeeding the formidable David Masson. The post confirmed his academic authority and brought him before generations of students who encountered in his lectures a mix of chronology, close reading, and a lively sense of debate. He sustained a cosmopolitan outlook in a Scottish setting that valued historical scholarship and philology, and he maintained ties with critics and scholars across Britain, including Andrew Lang and W. P. Ker, whose medievalist interests overlapped with his own historical preoccupations. His classroom manner, as former students later recalled, avoided pedantry while insisting that literary judgment required both knowledge and taste. He retired in 1915, free to devote himself to writing at the pace and scale he preferred.

Taste, Method, and Stance
Saintsbury's criticism occupies a distinctive point between the professional scholar and the general man of letters. He favored large surveys, but they were never purely institutional histories. He looked for the contact points where form meets feeling: the way stanzaic pattern becomes pathos, or how the musical line of a sentence turns into narrative momentum. His view of the canon was broad but not indiscriminate. He admired romance, narrative energy, and stylistic character; he was drawn to the boldness of Rabelais and the structural genius of Balzac, cherished the versatility of Dryden, and valued the narrative experiment of Scott. He respected Wordsworth and Coleridge for their revolution in poetic language, yet he remained skeptical of some modern innovations, especially free verse, which to his ear forfeited too much of poetry's organizing music. As new movements gained attention in the early twentieth century, he continued to argue against mistaking novelty for substance, a stance that placed him at a revealing angle to contemporaries and near-contemporaries such as Henry James and, later, T. S. Eliot. Even when he dissented, he did so from a position grounded in comprehensive reading and a lifelong dialogue with Europe's critical tradition.

Journalism, Editing, and Public Presence
While his professorship gave him institutional standing, his journalism kept him engaged with the day's literature. He reviewed fiction, poetry, and scholarship, and he provided introductions and notes for editions of writers he valued, thereby shaping how non-specialists approached earlier authors. He wrote many of the more technical entries on literary subjects for encyclopedias and reference works, and he corresponded with editors and publishers at Macmillan and other houses about series that brought classic literature to a widening reading public. The network of reviewers, editors, and scholars around him included Edmund Gosse, whose social grace complemented Saintsbury's more forthright manner, and Andrew Lang, with whom he shared a fascination for folklore and the older narrative forms that fed the modern imagination.

Wine, Friendship, and the Art of Living
In later life Saintsbury achieved an unexpected second fame as a writer on wine and the rituals of hospitality. Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920) combined memory, anecdote, and practical judgment, and it quickly became a classic in the literature of taste. The book reflects the same principles that governed his literary criticism: tradition, discrimination, and pleasure informed by knowledge. Its pages memorialize convivial evenings and friendly rivalries among fellow connoisseurs and writers, and it contributed to a culture of serious but unpretentious appreciation that later gastronomes acknowledged. Readers who had admired his essays on Dryden or his studies of French verse now met him in a more intimate register, where his erudition was leavened by wit and a humane sense of measure.

Later Years and Legacy
After retiring from Edinburgh, Saintsbury divided his time between scholarly projects, journalism, and private life, eventually settling in Bath, where he died on 28 January 1933. He had lived long enough to see new schools arise and challenge many of his assumptions, yet his influence persisted in two durable ways. First, he modeled a generous conception of literary history that crossed national borders and refused parochial limits; his keen attention to French literature made him a crucial bridge for English readers and students. Second, he left tools, prosodic knowledge, historical framing, lucid exposition, that later critics found indispensable even when their judgments diverged from his. Writers and scholars as varied as Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang, and W. P. Ker valued his companionship and argument. Generations of students encountered him through A Short History of English Literature, while specialists continued to consult the vast compendia of his History of Criticism and his History of English Prosody.

Saintsbury's reputation has inevitably shifted with critical fashions, but his best pages retain their vitality: a cultivated voice that prizes style, form, and the long memory of literature. He stands as one of the last great Victorian-Edwardian men of letters, a figure whose scholarship and journalism were inseparable from the social life of books, and whose attachment to conversation, whether about Dryden's couplets or a Burgundy's vintage, made criticism, in the fullest sense, a civil art.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by George, under the main topics: Wisdom - Writing - Book - Sadness - Wine.