OF FRENCH LITERATURE (FROM THE EARLIEST TEXTS TO THE CLOSE OF THE M.A. AND HON. D.LIT. OXON.; HON. LL.D. ABERDEEN; HON. D.LIT. DURHAM; IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH SEVENTH EDITION OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1917 PREFACE TO NEW EDITION WHEN a book has reached its seventh edition, and has been carefully revised at each of its reappearances (the revision extending in one case to considerable remodelling in part), not only its original Preface but even such intermediate additions as may have been made to it become more or less obsolete surplusage. One of these latter in the present case, the Preface to the remodelled [Fifth] edition, may deserve salvage as containing some useful explanations and as an appendix to this, the last commendation of the book likely to be made by the author. This Short History was originally undertaken-with whatever rashness considering the magnitude of the task-under safeguard at least of a well-known distinction between books written because the writer had read a good deal concerning his subject and books in order to write which he had read something about that subject. French Literature had been a favourite study of mine for some twenty years before I undertook even the Primer which served as a pilot boat to this: and, for very much the longer part of that time, I had had no idea of treating the subject at large, but had simply read in it ' overthwart and endlong' as Sir Lancelot rode. When, about ten years before this book's first appearance, I began to write on the press, it was almost accident that attached my name to reviews of French books in one of the then rare periodicals which had signed contributors. Other editors first accepted and then asked for contributions on this subject from me: and as I still continued to read for my own pleasure, and as it is impossible properly to get up" one author without diverging into others, my knowledge widened. I had luckily taken of my own accord very early to Old French at the same time that I was reading intermediate classics and contemporary novels and poems, and in this way escaped, I dare say more by luck than by merit, the one-sided view of the literature which-I think I may say it without illiberality-some French historians themselves have taken. At any rate my reading, if at first rather desultory, had been wide, and I had but little 'piecing' to do when I was successively asked to undertake the survey of French Literature as a whole in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in the Primer already referred to, and in this History itself. : I was able therefore from the first to write from reading in almost every case, and only in a few to read in order that I might write; and the book, I think, deserved the claim I made for it as un livre de bonne foi. Good faith of course does not confer, except in some very extreme cases, infallibility and I no doubt made a good many mistakes in fact. The utmost diligence has been used, in the successive revisions, to correct these. There remained the question to what extent there were sins of omission or incompleteness as well as of blunder. Not many omissions I think have been charged: and I only remember one (a note of which I made, but have unluckily mislaid) that deserved to be but is not made good. The problem of incompleteness, slightly touched upon in the Preface to the Fifth Edition, may raise its head again. Where is 'modern' French Literature? may be asked by those who judge modernity by decade, not to say annual, rules. It would be a feeble reply that the only English History of French Literature which can claim comparison with this, the late Professor Dowden's, though it was written many years later than this originally was, ceases at a period very much earlier. It is more to the point to state that, the question of extension having been duly considered by myself and by the authorities of the Clarendon Press, the reasons for stopping the story at the close of the nineteenth century-with a brief postscript on the subsequent work and fates of M. Zola and of others of the more distinguished writers left alive at that date-seemed very decidedly to preponderate. They are partly given in the Preface referred to; and nothing that has happened since has weakened them. In France, even more than in England, it may be said, without any discourtesy to the living writers of either, that no group or school of marked genius and originality has as yet established itself. In making what, as has been said already, is likely to be a final revision, I have once more endeavoured not only to correct errors of fact but to remove expressions of what may be called an ephemeral kind, such as recently', 'in progress', and the like. I hope to leave the book as a definite estimate of the great subject concerned, made towards and at the close of one of its most brilliant periods, on the basis of personal knowledge and direct judgement, not unassisted by acquaintance with literatures other than itself.1 GEORGE SAINTSBURY. Southampton, Michaelmas, 1916. 1 On one small point the present edition is, I think, decidedly improved. I have always felt that the account of the seventeenth-century romances was almost discreditably secondhand as compared with the rest of the book. I have at last been able to substitute a notice based strictly on direct reading. On the other hand, I have to acknowledge some valuable help from the staff of the Clarendon Press in regard to the notes on recent editions of texts. |