7. Oliver Elton (1861–1945): an obituary
‘Carlyle and Mill had different ideas of justice . . . and a real divergence on such a point wrecks any friendship worthy of the name.’ That is one sentence from Oliver Elton. Here is another: ‘I for one would sooner, any time, read a good book on what I think the wrong side than a bad one on my own.’ The two together give us roughly the measure of the man. The first was written in 1920, during the very nadir of kittenish antinomianism, when everyone almost was desperately concerned to be unacademic, not to be a prig. Of a hundred writers then chosen at random, perhaps ninety would have made the opposite point. One can easily imagine all the breezy, or flippant, or cynical, or ‘full-blooded’ declarations that a friendship worthy of the name would not be troubled by ‘academic’ quibbles about ‘abstract’ justice. Against that background Elton's sentence stands out like a rock of granite. But it is balanced by the other. He holds dogmas without being ‘dogmatic’ in the popular sense of the word. His sensibility is not in the least hampered by his integrity: he can be as catholic and sensitive as the pococurantists without having paid their price. The range of his learning was so wide that few men – certainly not the present writer – can speak adequately of him: but I am inclined to think that it is by his great Surveys that he will live. Literary history is a difficult, almost an impossible, art. If written by a mere critic it ceases to be history, and becomes merely a series of appreciations arranged in chronological order. If written by one whose main interest is in the ‘becoming’ it may lose sight of those aesthetic standards which are, after all, the chief reason for studying literature. No man held the balance better than Elton. The Surveys are equally satisfying whether you sit down fairly to follow the story or open them for half an hour to sharpen your vision of a favourite novelist or poet. Chesterton (or was it Raleigh?) once defined a German as ‘the opposite of an Englishman.’ In the same way, we might almost describe Elton as ‘the opposite of Saintsbury’, thus setting off one good thing by another. He had none of Saintsbury's mischievousness and perhaps little of his brilliance. He was at once more serious and more cheerful; and – it is rarer praise than it should be for literary historians – he never wrote of what he had not well and truly read. We have never had work in this kind which is more reliable, more manly, and, after repeated readings, more satisfying. He recalled literary history to the dignity it had in Warton. Clio was approached with proper piety and accepted the offering ‘deliberately pleased.’