THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS
Perhaps there is no single feature of the English literary history of
the nineteenth century, not even the enormous popularisation and
multiplication of the novel, which is so distinctive and characteristic
as the development in it of periodical literature. For this did not, as
the extension of novel writing did, concern a single department only.
The periodical--it may almost for shortness' sake be said the
newspaper--not only became infinitely multiplied, but it gradually
absorbed almost every department, or a share of almost every department,
into itself. Very large numbers of the best as well as of the worst
novels themselves have originally appeared in periodicals; not a very
small proportion of the most noteworthy nineteenth century poetry has
had the same origin; it may almost be said that all the best work in
essay, whether critical, meditative, or miscellaneous, has thus been
ushered into the world. Even the severer and more academic divisions of
history, philosophy, theology, and their sisters, have condescended to
avail themselves of this means of obtaining a public audience; and
though there is still a certain conventional decency in apologising for
reprints from periodicals, it is quite certain that, had such reprints
not taken place, more than half the most valuable books of the age in
some departments, and a considerable minority of the most valuable in
others, would never have appeared as books at all.
The first division of our time, the last twenty years of the eighteenth
century, though it witnessed a very great development of the mere
newspaper, with which we have little to do, did not see very much of
this actual "development of periodical literature" which concerns us.
These twenty years saw the last attempts in the line of the Addisonian
essay; they saw the beginnings of some modern newspapers which exist at
the present day; they beheld in the _Anti-Jacobin_ perhaps the most
brilliant specimen of political persiflage in newspaper form that had or
has ever been seen. But they did not see--though they saw some fumbling
attempts at it--anything like those strangely different but mutually
complementary examples of periodical criticism which were given just
after the opening of the new age by _The Edinburgh Review_ (1802) and
Cobbett's _Weekly Register_; and they saw nothing at all like the
magazine, or combination of critical and creative matter, in which
_Blackwood_ was, some years later, to lead the way. At the close of the
eighteenth century such magazines were in an exceedingly rudimentary
state, and criticism was mainly still in the hands of the old _Monthly_
and _Critical Reviews_, the respective methods of which had drawn from
Johnson the odd remark that the _Critical_ men, being clever, said
little about their books, which the _Monthly_ men, being "duller
fellows," were glad to read and analyse. These Reviews and their various
contemporaries had indeed from time to time enjoyed the services of men
of the greatest talent, such as Smollett earlier and Southey just at the
last. But, as a rule, they were in the hands of mere hacks; they paid so
wretchedly that no one, unless forced by want or bitten by an amateurish
desire to see himself in print, would contribute to them; they were by
no means beyond suspicion of political and commercial favouritism; and
their critiques were very commonly either mere summaries or scrappy
"puffs" and "slatings," seldom possessing much grace of style, and
scarcely ever adjusted to any scheme of artistic criticism.
This is a history of literature, not of the newspaper press, and it is
necessary to proceed rather by giving account of the authors who were
introduced to the public by--or who, being otherwise known, availed
themselves of--this new development of periodicals. It may be sufficient
to say here that the landmarks of the period, in point of the birth of
papers, are, besides the two above mentioned, the starting of the
_Quarterly Review_ as a Tory opponent to the more and more Whiggish
_Edinburgh_ in 1809, of the _Examiner_ as a Radical weekly in 1808, of
_Blackwood's Magazine_ as a Tory monthly in 1817, of the _London
Magazine_ about the same time, and of _Fraser_ in 1830.
It was a matter of course that in the direction or on the staff of these
new periodicals some of the veterans of the older system, or of the men
who had at any rate already some experience in journalism, should be
enlisted. Gifford, the first editor of the _Quarterly_, was in all
respects a writer of the old rather than of the new age. Southey had at
one time wholly, and for years partly, supported himself by writing for
periodicals; Coleridge was at different times not merely a contributor
to these, but an actual daily journalist; and so with others. But, as
always happens when a really new development of literature takes place,
new regiments raised themselves to carry out the new tactics, as it
were, spontaneously. Many of the great names and the small mentioned in
the last three chapters--perhaps indeed most of them--took the
periodical shilling at one time or other in their lives. But those whom
I shall now proceed to mention--William Cobbett, Francis Jeffrey, Sydney
Smith, John Wilson, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt as a prose writer, William
Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, John Gibson Lockhart, and some others--were,
if not exactly journalists (an incorrect, but the only single
designation), at any rate such frequent contributors to periodical
literature of one kind or another that in some cases nothing, in most
comparatively little, would be left of their work if contributions to
newspapers, reviews, and magazines were to be excluded from it.
William Cobbett, not the greatest, but the most singular and original of
the group, with the exception of Lamb, and as superior to Lamb in
fertility and massive vigour as he was inferior to him in exquisite
delicacy and finish, was the son of a very small farmer little above the
labouring rank, and was born near Farnham in 1762. He was first a
ploughboy, next an attorney's clerk, and then he enlisted in the 24th
regiment. He served very creditably for seven or eight years, became
serjeant-major, improved himself very much in education, and obtained
his discharge. But, by one of the extraordinary freaks which mark his
whole career, he first took it into his head to charge the officers of
his regiment with malversation, and then ran away from his own charge
with his newly married wife, first to France and then to America. Here
he stayed till the end of the century, and here he began his newspaper
experiments, keeping up in _Peter Porcupine's Journal_ a violent crusade
against French Jacobins and American Democrats. He returned to England
in June 1800, and was encouraged by the Government to set up what soon
became his famous _Weekly Register_--a paper which, after being (as
Cobbett's politics had been up to this time) strongly Tory, lapsed by
rapid degrees into a strange kind of fantastic Radicalism shot with Tory
gleams. This remained Cobbett's creed till his death. The paper was very
profitable, and for some time Cobbett was able to lead something like a
country gentleman's life at Botley in Hampshire. But he met with two
years' imprisonment for a violent article on flogging in the army, he
subsequently got into money difficulties, and in 1817 he made a second
voyage to America, which was in fact a flight both from his creditors
and from the risk of another Government prosecution under the Six Acts.
Through all his troubles the _Register_, except for a month or two, had
continued to appear; and so it did to the last. Its proprietor, editor,
and in the main author, stood for Parliament several times, and, after a
trial for sedition in 1831, was at last returned for Oldham in 1832. He
was not much of a success there, and died on 18th June 1835 near
Guildford; for he always clung to the marches of Surrey and Hampshire.
Some such details of Cobbett's life are necessary even in the most
confined space, because they are intimately connected with his singular
character and his remarkable works. These latter are enormous in bulk
and of the most widely diversified character. _Peter Porcupine_ fills
twelve not small volumes; the mere selections from the _Register_, which
are all that has been republished of it, six very bulky ones; with a
wilderness of separate works besides--_Rural Rides_, a _History of the
Reformation_, books on husbandry, gardening, and rural economy
generally, some on the currency, an _English Grammar_, and dozens of
others. Of these the _Rural Rides_ is the most interesting in matter and
the most picturesque in style, while it affords a fair panorama of its
author's rugged but wonderfully varied and picturesque mind and
character; the _History of the Reformation_ is the most wrong-headed and
unfair; the currency writings the most singular example of the delusion
that strong prejudices and a good deal of mother-wit will enable a man
to write, without any knowledge, about the most abstruse and complicated
subjects; the agricultural books and the _English Grammar_ the best
instances of genial humours, shrewdness, and (when crotchets do not come
in too much) sound sense. But hardly anything that Cobbett writes is
contemptible in form, however weak he may often be in argument,
knowledge, and taste. He was the last, and he was not far below the
greatest, of the line of vernacular English writers of whom Latimer in
the sixteenth, Bunyan in the seventeenth, and Defoe in the eighteenth,
are the other emerging personalities. To a great extent Cobbett's style
was based on Swift; but the character of his education, which was not in
the very least degree academic, and still more the idiosyncrasy of his
genius, imposed on it almost from the first, but with ever-increasing
clearness, a manner quite different from Swift's, and, though often
imitated since, never reproduced. The "Letter to Jack Harrow," the
"Letter to the People of Botley," the "Letters to Old George Rose," and
that to "Alexander Baring, Loan Monger," to take examples almost at
random from the _Register_, are quite unlike anything before them or
anything after them. The best-known parody of Cobbett, that in _Rejected
Addresses_, gives rather a poor idea of his style; exhibiting no doubt
his intense egotism, his habit of half trivial divagation, and his use
of strong language, but quite failing to give the immense force, the
vivid clearness, and the sterling though not precisely scholarly English
which characterise his good work. The best imitation to be found is in
some of the anonymous pamphlets in which, in his later days, government
writers replied to his powerful and mischievous political diatribes, and
which in some cases, if internal evidence may be trusted, must have been
by no mean hands.
Irrational as Cobbett's views were,--he would have adjusted the entire
concerns of the nation with a view to the sole benefit of the
agricultural interest, would have done away with the standing army,
wiped out the national debt, and effected a few other trifling changes
with a perfectly light heart, while in minor matters his crotchets were
not only wild but simply irreconcilable with each other,--his intense if
narrow earnestness, his undoubting belief in himself, and a certain
geniality which could co-exist with very rough language towards his
opponents, would give his books a certain attraction even if their mere
style were less remarkable than it is. But it is in itself, if the most
plebeian, not the least virile, nor even the least finished on its own
scheme of the great styles in English. For the irony of Swift, of which,
except in its very roughest and most rudimentary forms, Cobbett had no
command or indeed conception, it substitutes a slogging directness
nowhere else to be found equalled for combination of strength and, in
the pugilistic sense, "science"; while its powers of description, within
certain limits, are amazing. Although Cobbett's newspaper was itself as
much of an Ishmaelite and an outsider as its director, it is almost
impossible to exaggerate the effect which it had in developing
newspapers generally, by the popularity which it acquired, and the
example of hammer-and-tongs treatment of political and economic subjects
which it set. The faint academic far-off-ness of the eighteenth century
handling, which is visible even in the much-praised _Letters of Junius_,
which is visible in the very ferocity of Smollett's _Adventures of an
Atom_, which put up with "Debates of the Senate of Lilliput" and so
forth, has been blown away to limbo, and the newspaper (at first at some
risk) takes men and measures, politics and policies, directly and in
their own names, to be its province and its prey.
It is a far cry from Cobbett to the founders of the _Edinburgh Review_,
who, very nearly at the same time as that at which he launched his
_Register_, did for the higher and more literary kind of periodical what
he was doing for the lower and vernacular kind. I say the founders,
because there is a still not quite settled dispute whether Francis
Jeffrey or Sydney Smith was the actual founder of the famous "Blue and
Yellow." This dispute is not uninteresting; because the one was as
typically Scotch, with some remarkable differences from other Scotchmen,
as the other was essentially English, with some points not commonly
found in men of English blood. Jeffrey, the younger of the two by a
couple of years, was still a member of the remarkable band who, as has
been noticed so often already, were all born in the early seventies of
the eighteenth century; and his own birthday was 23rd October 1773. He
was an Edinburgh man; and his father, who was of a respectable though
not distinguished family, held office in the Court of Session and was a
strong Tory. Jeffrey does not seem to have objected to his father's
profession, though he early revolted from his politics; and, after due
study at the High School of his birthplace, and the Universities of
Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Oxford (at which latter, however, he only
remained a year, deriving very little benefit or pleasure from his
sojourn at Queen's College), he was called to the Scottish bar. He
practised at first with very little success, and in 1798 had serious
thoughts of taking up literary life in London. But he could obtain no
footing, and, returning to Edinburgh and marrying a cousin, he fell into
the company of Sydney Smith, who was there with a pupil. It seems to be
admitted that the idea of a new _Review_--to be entirely free from the
control or influence of publishers, to adopt an independent line of
criticism (independent, but somewhat mistaken; for the motto _Judex
damnatur cum nocens absolvitur_ gives a very one-sided view of the
critic's office), and to be written for fair remuneration by persons of
more or less distinct position, and at any rate of education--originated
with Sydney Smith. He is also sometimes spoken of as the first "editor,"
which would appear to be a mistake. At first (the original issue was in
October 1802) the review appears to have been a kind of republic; the
contributors being, besides Jeffrey and Sydney, a certain Francis Horner
(who died too soon to demonstrate the complete falsity of the golden
opinions entertained of him by his friends), Brougham, and some
Professors of Edinburgh University. But no such plan has ever succeeded,
though it has been more than once tried, and very soon accident or
design showed that Jeffrey was the right man to take the command of the
ship. The _Review_ was not ostensibly a political one at first, and for
some years Tories, the greatest of whom was Scott, wrote in it. But the
majority of the contributors were Whigs, and the whole cast of the
periodical became more and more of that complexion, till at last,
private matters helping public, a formidable secession took place, and
the _Quarterly_ was founded.
From time to time students of literature turn to the early numbers of
these famous periodicals, of the _Edinburgh_ especially, with the
result, usually of a certain, sometimes of a considerable,
disappointment. With the exception of a few things already known from
their inclusion in their authors' collected works, the material as a
whole is apt to seem anything but extraordinarily good; and some wonder
is often expressed at the effect which it originally had. This arises
from insufficient attention to a few obvious, but for that very reason
easily neglected, truths. The inquirers as a rule have in their minds
much more what has followed than what has gone before; and they contrast
the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_, not with its jejune forerunners,
but with such matured instances as Macaulay's later essays; the early
numbers of the _Quarterly_, not with the early numbers of the
_Edinburgh_, but with their own successors. Again it is apt to be
forgotten that the characteristics of joint-stock periodical-writing
make as much for general inequality as for occasional goodness. That
which is written by many hands will seldom be as bad, but can never be
as good, as that which is written by one; that which takes its texts and
starting-points from suggested matters of the moment will generally
escape the occasional dulness, but can rarely attain the occasional
excellence, of the meditated and original sprout of an individual brain.
The _Edinburgh_ in its early years was undoubtedly surpassed by itself
later and by its rivals; but it was a far greater advance upon anything
that had gone before it. It had the refreshing audacity, the fly-at-all
character of youth and of intellectual opposition to established ideas;
it was, if even from the first not free from partisanship, at any rate
not chargeable with the dull venal unfairness of the mere bookseller's
hack who attacks Mr. Bungay's books because he is employed by Mr. Bacon,
or _vice versa_. And it had a very remarkable staff, comprising the
learning and trained intelligence of men like Leslie and Playfair, the
unrivalled wit of Sydney Smith, the restless energy and occasional
genius of Brougham, the solid profundity of Horner, the wide reading and
always generous temper of Scott, and other good qualities of others,
besides the talents of its editor Jeffrey himself.
Of these talents there is no doubt, though they were initially somewhat
limited and not seldom misdirected afterwards. Jeffrey's entire energies
were absorbed by the _Review_ between its foundation and his resignation
of the editorship after nearly thirty years' tenure, soon after which,
his party at last coming into power, he was rewarded first by the Lord
Advocateship and then by a seat on the Bench. He made a very fair judge,
and held the post almost till his death in 1850. But his life, for the
purposes of literature, is practically comprised between 1802 and 1829,
during which he was far more than titularly the guiding spirit of the
_Review_. Recently, or at any rate until quite recently (for there has
been some reaction in the very latest days), the conception of an editor
has been of one who writes not very much, and, though choosing his
contributors with the best care he can give, does not interfere very
much with them when they are chosen. This was very far from being the
Jeffreyan ideal. He wrote a great deal,--often in the earlier years as
many as half a dozen articles in a number,--and he "doctored" his
contributors' articles (except in the case of persons like Sydney Smith,
who were of too unconquerable idiosyncrasy and too valuable) with the
utmost freedom. At the present day, however, his management of the
_Review_ is less interesting than his own work, which he himself in his
later years collected and selected in an ample definitive edition. It is
exceedingly interesting, and for a good many years past it has been
distinctly undervalued; the common, though very uncritical, mistake
having been made of asking, not whether Jeffrey made a good fight for
his own conclusions from his own premises, but whether he approved or
disapproved authors whom we now consider great. From this latter point
of view he has no doubt small chance. He began by snubbing Byron, and
did not change his tone till politics and circumstances combined made
the change obligatory; he pooh-poohed and belittled his own contributor
and personal friend Scott; he pursued Wordsworth with equal
relentlessness and ill-success. And these three great examples might be
reinforced with whole regiments of smaller ones. A more serious fault
perhaps was the tone which he, more than any one else, impressed on the
_Review_, and which its very motto expressed, as though an author
necessarily came before the critic with a rope about his neck, and was
only entitled to be exempted from being strung up _speciali gratia_.
This notion, as presumptuous as it is foolish, is not extinct yet, and
has done a great deal of harm to criticism, both by prejudicing those
who are not critical against critics, and by perverting and twisting the
critic's own notion of his province and duty.
Nevertheless, Jeffrey had great merits. His literary standpoint was a
little unfortunate. Up to a certain extent he had thoroughly sympathised
with the Romantic movement, and he never was an advocate for the
Augustan period in English. But either some curiosity of idiosyncrasy,
or the fact that Scott and the Lake Poets were all in different ways
pillars of Toryism, set him against his own Romantic contemporaries in a
very strange fashion. Still, in some ways he was a very great critic.
His faculty of summarising a period of literature has rarely been
equalled, and perhaps never surpassed; he had, when prejudice of some
sort did not blind him, an extraordinary faculty of picking out the best
passages in a book; and, above all, he arranged his critical judgments
on something like a regular and co-ordinated system. Even his prejudices
and injustices were systematic: they were linked to each other by
arguments which might sometimes be questionable, but which were always
arguments. And though, even when, as in the cases of Keats and Shelley,
his extra-literary bias was not present to induce him wrong, he showed a
deplorable insensibility to the finer strokes of poetry, he was in
general, and taking literature all round, as considerable a critic as we
have had in English.
Sydney Smith was a curious contrast to Jeffrey in almost every respect
except in politics, and even there the resemblance was rather fortuitous
than essential. The second son of a man of eccentric character and some
means, he was born in 1771, was sent to Winchester, and proceeded thence
to New College, Oxford, where he became Fellow and resided for a
considerable time; but unusually little is recorded either of his school
or of his college days. He took orders and was appointed to a curacy on
Salisbury Plain, where the squire of the parish took a fancy to him and
made him tutor to his eldest son. Tutor and pupil went to Edinburgh,
just then in great vogue as an educational centre, in 1798; and there
Sydney, besides doing clerical duty, stumbled upon his vocation as
reviewer. He abode in the Scottish capital for about five years, during
which he married, and then removed to London, where he again did duty of
various kinds, lectured on Moral Philosophy, and, when the Grenville
administration came in, received a fairly valuable Yorkshire living,
that of Foston. Here, after a time, he had, owing to new legislation
about clerical absentees, to take up his residence, which involved
building a parsonage. He had repaid his Whig patrons by writing the
exceedingly brilliant and passably scurrilous _Letters of Peter Plymley
on Catholic Emancipation_, and he reviewed steadily for the _Edinburgh_,
as indeed he did during almost the whole editorship of Jeffrey. At last
Lord Lyndhurst, a Tory, gave him a stall at Bristol, and he was able to
exchange Foston for Combe-Florey, in the more genial latitude of
Somerset. The rest of his life was fortunate in worldly ways; for the
Reform Ministry, though they would not give him a bishopric, gave him a
canonry at St. Paul's, and divers legacies and successions made him
relatively a rich man. He died five years before Jeffrey, in February
1845.
Besides the differences of their Scotch and English nationality and
education, the contrast between the two friends and founders of the
"Blue and Yellow" was curiously pervading. Jeffrey, for all his supposed
critical savagery, was a sentimentalist, and had the keenest love of
literature as literature; Sydney cared very little for books as books,
and had not a grain of sentiment in his composition. Jeffrey had little
wit and no humour; Smith abounded in both, and was one of the very
wittiest of Englishmen. Even in his _Review_ articles he constantly
shocked his more solemn and pedagogic editor by the stream of banter
which he poured not merely upon Tories and High Churchmen, but on
Methodists and Non-conformists; his letters are full of the most
untiring and to this day the most sparkling pleasantry; and his two
chief works outside his reviews, the earlier _Peter Plymley's Letters_
and the later _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_ (written when the
author's early Whiggism had crystallised into something different, and
when he was stoutly resisting the attempts of the reformed government to
meddle with cathedral establishments), rank among the capital light
pamphlets of the world, in company with those of Pascal and Swift and
Courier. The too few remnants of his abundant conversation preserve
faint sparks of the blaze of impromptu fun for which in his day he was
almost more famous than as a writer. Sydney Smith had below the surface
of wit a very solid substratum of good sense and good feeling; but his
literary appeal consisted almost wholly in his shrewd pleasantry,
which, as it has been observed, might with even more appropriateness
than Coleridge said it of Fuller, have been said to be "the stuff and
substance of his intellectual nature." This wit was scarcely ever in
writing--it seems to have been sometimes in conversation--forced or
trivial; it was most ingeniously adjusted to the purpose of the moment,
whether that purpose was a political argument, a light summary of a book
of travels, or a mere gossiping letter to a friend; and it had a quality
of its own which could only be displayed by extensive and elaborate
citation. But if it be possible to put the finger on a single note, it
is one distinguishing Sydney Smith widely from Fuller himself, bringing
him a little nearer to Voltaire, and, save for the want of certain
earnestness, nearer still to Swift--the perfect facility of his jokes,
and the casual, easy man-of-the-worldliness with which he sets them
before the reader and passes on. Amid the vigorous but slightly
ponderous manners of the other early contributors to the _Review_, this
must have been of inestimable value; but it is a higher credit to Sydney
Smith that it does not lose its charm when collected together and set by
itself, as the more extravagant and rollicking kinds of periodical
humour are wont to do. It was probably his want of serious
preoccupations of any kind (for his politics were merely an accident; he
was, though a sincere Christian, no enthusiast in religion; and he had
few special interests, though he had an honest general enjoyment of
life) which enabled Sydney Smith so to perfect a quality, or set of
qualities, which, as a rule, is more valuable as an occasional set-off
than as the staple and solid of a man's literary fare and ware. If so,
he points much the same general moral as Cobbett, though in a way as
different as possible. But in any case he was a very delightful person,
an ornament of English literature, such as few other literatures
possess, in his invariable abstinence from unworthy means of raising a
laugh, and, among the group of founders of the new periodical, the
representative of one of its most important constituents--polished
_persiflage_.
The other contributors of the first generation to the _Edinburgh Review_
do not require much notice here; for Brougham was not really a man of
letters, and belongs to political and social, not to literary history,
while Mackintosh, though no one would contest his claims, will be better
noticed under the head of philosophy. Nor do many of the first staff of
the _Edinburgh's_ great rival, the _Quarterly_, require notice; for
Gifford, Canning, Ellis, Scott, Southey have all been noticed under
other heads.
Two, however, not of the absolutely first rank, may be mentioned here
more conveniently than anywhere else--Sir John Barrow and Isaac
Disraeli. The former had a rather remarkable career; for he was born, in
1764, quite of the lower rank, and was successively a clerk in a
workshop, a sailor, a teacher of mathematics, and secretary to Macartney
on his famous embassy to China. After following the same patron to South
Africa, Barrow, at the age of forty, became Secretary of the Admiralty,
which post he held with one short break for more than forty years
longer. He was made a baronet in 1835, and died in 1848. Barrow was a
considerable writer on geography and naval history; and one of the
pillars of the _Quarterly_. Isaac Disraeli, son of one Benjamin of that
name and father of another, seems to have been as unlike his famous
offspring as any father could be to any son. Born at Enfield in 1766, he
showed absolutely no taste for business of any kind, and after some
opposition was allowed to cultivate letters. His original work was worth
little; indeed, one of the amiable sayings attributed to his friend
Rogers was that Isaac Disraeli had "only half an intellect." He fell,
however, pretty early (1791) into an odd but pleasant and profitable
course of writing which amused himself during the remainder of a long
life (he died blind in the same year with Barrow), and has amused a vast
number of readers for more than a century. The _Curiosities of
Literature_, the first part of which appeared at the date above
mentioned, to be supplemented by others for more than forty years, were
followed by the _Calamities of Authors_ and the _Quarrels of Authors_
(1812-14), a book on _Charles I._, and the _Amenities of Literature_
(1840). Of these the _Curiosities_ is the type, and it is also the best
of them. Isaac Disraeli was not a good writer; and his original
reflections may sometimes make the reader doubt for a moment whether
Rogers was not more wrong in granting him half an intellect than in
denying him a whole one. But his anecdotage, though, as perhaps such
anecdotage is bound to be, not extremely accurate, is almost
inexhaustibly amusing, and indicates a real love as well as a wide
knowledge of letters.
The next periodicals, the founding of which enlisted or brought out
journalists or essay-writers of the true kind, were _Blackwood's
Magazine_, founded at Edinburgh in 1817, and the _London Magazine_, of
about the same date, the first with one of the longest as well as the
most brilliant careers to run that any periodical can boast of, the
latter as short-lived as it was brilliant. Indeed, the two had an odd
and--in the Shakespearian sense--metaphysical opposition. Scotland and
England, the country and the Cockney schools, Toryism and Liberalism
(though the _London_ was by no means so thoroughgoing on the Liberal
side as _Blackwood_ was on the Tory, and some of its most distinguished
contributors were either Tory, as De Quincey, or neutral, as Lamb)
fought out their differences under the two flags. And by a climax of
coincidence, the fate of the _London_ was practically decided by the
duel which killed John Scott, its editor, this duel being the direct
result of an editorial or contributorial quarrel between the two
periodicals.
Both these magazines, besides being more frequent in appearance than the
_Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly_, attempted, as their very title of
"magazine" expressed, a much wider and more miscellaneous collection of
subjects than the strict "review" theory permitted. From the very first
_Blackwood_ gave a welcome to fiction, to poetry, and to the widest
possible construction of the essay, while, in almost every respect, the
_London_ was equally hospitable. Both had staffs of unusual strength,
and of still more unusual personality; and while the _London_ could
boast of Charles Lamb, of Hazlitt, of De Quincey, of Hood, of Miss
Mitford, besides many lesser names, _Blackwood_ was practically
launched by the triumvirate of Wilson, Lockhart, and the Ettrick
Shepherd, with the speedy collaboration of Maginn.
The eldest of these, and if not the most vigorous, if very nearly the
least prolific, yet the most exquisite and singular in literary genius,
was Charles Lamb. He also was of the "Seventy Club," as we may call it,
which founded the literature of the nineteenth century, and he was born
in London on 18th February 1775. He was of rather lower birth than most
of its other members (if membership can be predicated of a purely
imaginary body), being the son of a lawyer's clerk and confidential
servant; but he was educated at Christ's Hospital, and, through the
interest of his father's employer, obtained, at the age of seventeen, a
berth in the East India House, which assured his modest fortunes through
life. But there was the curse of madness in his family, and though he
himself escaped with but one slight and passing attack of actual lunacy,
and at the cost of an eccentricity which only imparted a rarer touch to
his genius, his elder sister Mary was subject to constant seizures, in
one of which she stabbed her mother to the heart. She was more gently
dealt with than perhaps would have been the case at present, and Lamb
undertook the entire charge of her. She repaid him by unfailing care and
affection during her lucid intervals (which were long and frequent), and
by a sympathy with his own literary tastes, which not seldom made her a
valuable collaborator as well as sympathiser. But the shadow was on his
whole life: it made it impossible for him to marry, as he evidently
would have done if it had not existed; and it perhaps had something to
do with a venial but actual tendency on his part to take, rather fully,
the convivial license of the time. But Lamb had no other weakness, and
had not this in any ruinous degree. The quality of his genius was
unique. He had from the first been a diligent and affectionate student
of sixteenth and seventeenth century writers, and some of his first
literary efforts, after some early sonnets (written with Coleridge and
their friend Lloyd, and much fallen foul of by the Tory wits of the
_Anti-Jacobin_), were connected with these studies. He and his sister
wrote _Tales from Shakespeare_, which, almost alone of such things, are
not unworthy of the original. He executed an Elizabethan tragedy, _John
Woodvil_, which is rather better than it has been generally said to be;
and he arranged a series (or rather two) of scenes from the Elizabethan
drama itself, the short, interspersed, critical remarks of which, though
occasionally a very little fanciful, contain the most exquisitely
sympathetic criticism to be found anywhere in English literature.
It was not, however, till he had well reached middle age that the
establishment of the _London_, the later publishers of which, Taylor and
Hessey, were his friends, gave him that half accidental, and yet it
would seem necessary, opening which has so often made the fame of men of
genius, and which apparently they are by no means often able to make for
themselves. Lamb's poems have occasionally an exquisite pathos and more
frequently a pleasant humour, but they would not by themselves justify a
very high estimate of him; and it is at least possible that, if we had
nothing but the brief critical remarks on the dramatists above noticed,
they would, independently of their extreme brevity, have failed to
obtain for him the just reputation which they now hold, thanks partly to
the fact that we have, as comments on them, the _Essays of Elia_ and the
delightful correspondence. This latter, after being first published soon
after Lamb's death in 1834 (nine years after he had been pensioned off
from the India House), by Mr., afterwards Serjeant and Sir Thomas
Talfourd, has been gradually augmented, till it has at last found an
excellent and probably final editor in Canon Ainger.
It is in these two collections that Lamb presents himself in the
character which alone can confer on any man the first rank in
literature, the character of unicity--of being some one and giving
something which no one before him has given or has been. The _Essays of
Elia_ (a _nom de guerre_ said to have been taken from an Italian comrade
of the writer's elder brother John in the South Sea House, and directed
by Lamb himself to be pronounced "Ell-ia") elude definition not merely
as almost all works of genius do, but by virtue of something essentially
elvish and tricksy in their own nature. It is easy to detect in them--or
rather the things there are so obvious that there is no need of
detection--an extraordinary familiarity with the great "quaint" writers
of the seventeenth century--Burton, Fuller, Browne--which has supplied a
diction of unsurpassed brilliancy and charm; a familiarity with the
eighteenth century essayists which has enabled the writer to construct a
form very different from theirs in appearance but closely connected with
it in reality; an unequalled command over that kind of humour which
unites the most fantastic merriment to the most exquisite pathos; a
perfect humanity; a cast of thought which, though completely conscious
of itself, and not in any grovelling sense humble (Lamb, forgiving and
gentle as he was, could turn sharply even upon Coleridge, even upon
Southey, when he thought liberties had been taken with him), was a
thousand miles removed from arrogance or bumptiousness; an endlessly
various and attractive set of crotchets and whimsies, never divorced
from the power of seeing the ludicrous side of themselves; a fervent
love for literature and a wonderful gift of expounding it; imagination
in a high, and fancy almost in the highest degree. But when all this has
been duly set down, how much remains both in the essays and in the
letters, which in fact are chiefly distinguished from one another by the
fact that the essays are letters somewhat less discursive and somewhat
in fuller dress, the letters essays in the rough. For the style of Lamb
is as indefinable as it is inimitable, and his matter and method defy
selection and specification as much as the flutterings of a butterfly.
One thing he has always, and that is charm; as for the rest he is an
epitome of the lighter side of _belles lettres_, and not always of the
lighter side only.
No one who studies Lamb can fail to see the enormous advantage which was
given him by his possession of an official employment which brought him
a small but sufficient income without very hard labour. Such literary
work as his could never be done (at any rate for a length of time) as
"collar-work," and even if the best of it had by chance been so
performed, it must necessarily have been mixed, as that of Leigh Hunt
is, with a far larger quantity of mere work to order. No such advantage
was possessed by the third of the great trio of Cockney critics, or at
least critics of the so-called Cockney school; for William Hazlitt, as
much the greatest of English critics in a certain way as Lamb is in
another and Jeffrey in a third (though a lower than either), was a
Cockney neither by extraction nor by birth, nor by early sojourn, nor
even by continuous residence in later life. His family was Irish, his
father a Unitarian minister; he was born at Maidstone in 1778. When his
father was officiating at Wem in Shropshire, in Hazlitt's twentieth
year, Coleridge, who at times affected the same denomination, visited
the place, and Hazlitt was most powerfully impressed by him. He was,
however, divided between art and literature as professions, and his
first essays were in the former, which he practised for some time,
visiting the Louvre during the peace, or rather armistice, of Amiens, to
copy pictures for some English collectors, and to study them on his own
account. Returning to London, he met Lamb and others of the literary set
in the capital, and, after some newspaper work, married Miss Stoddart, a
friend of Mary Lamb's, and a lady of some property. He and his wife
lived for some years at her estate of Winterslow on Salisbury Plain
(long afterwards still a favourite resort of Hazlitt's), and then he
went in 1812 once more to London, where abundant work on periodicals of
all kinds, on the Liberal side, from daily newspapers to the _Edinburgh
Review_, soon fell into his hands. But after a time he gave up most
kinds of writing except literary, theatrical, and art criticism, the
delivery of lectures on literature, and the composition of essays of a
character less fanciful and less purely original than Lamb's, but almost
as miscellaneous.
He lived till September 1830, the first of those early thirties of the
nineteenth century which were to be as generally fatal to his
generation of great English men of letters as the seventies of the
eighteenth had been prolific of them; and his dying words, "Well, I have
had a happy life," are noteworthy. For certainly that life would hardly
have seemed happy to many. He quarrelled with his first wife, was
divorced from her in Scotland, discreditably enough; published to the
world with astounding lack of reticence the details of a frantic passion
for Sarah Walker, a lodginghouse-keeper's daughter, who jilted him; and
after marrying a second time, was left by his second wife. He had never
been rich, and during the last years of his life was in positive
difficulties, while for almost the whole period of his second sojourn in
London he was the object of the most virulent abuse from the Tory
organs, especially the _Quarterly_ and _Blackwood_--abuse which, it must
be confessed, he was both ready and able to repay in kind with handsome
interest. He appears to have played the part of firebrand and makebate
in the John Scott duel already referred to. Even with his friends he
could not keep upon good terms, and the sincere gentleness of Lamb broke
down at least once, as the easy good-nature of Leigh Hunt did many
times, under the strain of his perverse and savage wrong-headedness.
But whether the critical and the unamiable temper are, as some would
have it, essentially one, or whether their combination in the same
person be mere coincidence, Hazlitt was beyond all question a great, a
very great, critic--in not a few respects our very greatest. All his
work, or almost all that has much merit, is small in individual bulk,
though the total is very respectable. His longest book, his _Life of
Napoleon_, which was written late and as a counterblast to Scott's, from
the singular standpoint of a Republican who was an admirer of Bonaparte,
has next to no value; and his earliest, a philosophical work in
eighteenth century style on _The Principles of Human Action_, has not
much. But his essays and lectures, which, though probably not as yet by
any means exhaustively collected or capable of being identified, fill
nine or ten volumes, are of extraordinary goodness. They may be divided
roughly into three classes. The first, dealing with art and the drama,
must take the lowest room, for theatrical criticism is of necessity,
except in so far as it touches on literature rather than acting, of very
ephemeral interest; and Hazlitt's education in art and knowledge of it
were not quite extensive enough, nor the examples which in the first
quarter of this century he had before him in England important enough,
to make his work of this kind of the first importance. The best of it is
the _Conversations with Northcote_, a painter of no very great merit,
but a survivor of the Reynolds studio; and these conversations very
frequently and very widely diverge from painting into literary and
miscellaneous matters. The second class contains the miscellaneous
essays proper, and these have by some been put at the head of Hazlitt's
work. But although some of them, indeed, nearly all, display a spirit, a
command of the subject, and a faculty of literary treatment which had
never been given to the same subjects in the same way before, although
such things as the famous "Going to a Fight," "Going a Journey," "The
Indian Jugglers," "Merry England," "Sundials," "On Taste," and not a few
more would, put together and freed from good but less good companions,
make a most memorable collection, still his real strength is not here.
Great as Hazlitt was as a miscellaneous and Montaignesque essayist, he
was greater as a literary critic. Literature was, though he coquetted
with art, his first and most constant love; it was the subject on which,
as far as English literature is concerned (and he knew little and is
still less worth consulting about any other), he had acquired the
largest and soundest knowledge; and it is that for which he had the most
original and essential genius. His intense prejudices and his occasional
inadequacy make themselves felt here as they do everywhere, and even
here it is necessary to give the caution that Hazlitt is never to be
trusted when he shows the least evidence of dislike for which he gives
no reason. But to any one who has made a little progress in criticism
himself, to any one who has either read for himself or is capable of
reading for himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of
neglecting what is not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any
language. He will sometimes miss--he is never perhaps so certain as his
friends Lamb and Hunt were to find--exquisite individual points.
Prejudice, accidental ignorance, or other causes may sometimes
invalidate his account of authors or of subjects in general. But still
the four great collections of his criticism, _The Characters of
Shakespeare_, _The Elizabethan Dramatists_, _The English Poets_, and
_The English Comic Writers_, with not a few scattered things in his
other writings, make what is on the whole the best corpus of criticism
by a single writer in English on English. He is the critics' critic as
Spenser is the poets' poet; that is to say, he has, errors excepted and
deficiencies allowed, the greatest proportion of the strictly critical
excellencies--of the qualities which make a critic--that any English
writer of his craft has ever possessed.
_Blackwood's Magazine_, the headquarters, the citadel, the _place
d'armes_ of the opposition to the Cockney school and of criticism and
journalism that were Tory first of all, enlisted a younger set of
recruits than those hitherto mentioned, and the special style of writing
which it introduced, though exceedingly clever and stimulating, lent
itself rather less to dispassionate literary appreciation than even the
avowedly partisan methods of the _Edinburgh_. In its successful form
(for it had a short and inglorious existence before it found out the
way) it was launched by an audacious "skit" on the literati of Edinburgh
written by John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart, and James Hogg, while very
soon after its establishment it was joined by a wild and witty Bohemian
scholar from the south of Ireland, William Maginn, who, though before
long he drifted away to other resorts, and ere many years established in
_Fraser_ a new abode of guerilla journalism, impressed on _Blackwood_
itself, before he left it, several of its best-known features, and in
particular is said to have practically started the famous _Noctes
Ambrosianae_. Of Hogg, enough has been said in a former chapter. For the
critical purpose of "Maga," as _Blackwood's Magazine_ loved to call
itself, he was rather a butt, or, to speak less despiteously, a
stimulant, than an originator; and he had neither the education nor
indeed the gifts of a critic. Of each of the others some account must
be given, and Maginn will introduce yet another flight of brilliant
journalists, some of whom, especially the greatest of all, Carlyle,
lived till far into the last quarter of the present century.
Wilson, the eldest of those just mentioned, though a younger man than
any one as yet noticed in this chapter, and for many years the guiding
spirit (there never has been any "editor" of _Blackwood_ except the
members of the firm who have published it) of _Maga_, must at some time
or other have taken to literature, and would probably in any case have
sooner or later written the poems and stories which exist under his
name, but do not in the very least degree constitute its eminence. It
was the chapter of accidents that made him a journalist and a critic. He
was born in 1785, his father being a rich manufacturer of Paisley, was
educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford, came early into a
considerable fortune, married at twenty-six, and having established
himself at Elleray on Windermere, lived there the life of a country
gentleman, with more or less literary tastes. His fortune being lost by
bad luck and dishonest agency, he betook himself to Edinburgh, and
finding it impossible to get on with Jeffrey (which was not surprising),
threw himself heart and soul into the opposition venture of _Blackwood_.
He had, moreover, the extraordinary good luck to obtain, certainly on no
very solid grounds (though he made at least as good a professor as
another), the valuable chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of
Edinburgh, which of itself secured him from any fear of want or narrow
means. But no penniless barrister on his promotion could have flung
himself into militant journalism with more ardour than did Wilson. He
re-created, if he did not invent, the _Noctes Ambrosianae_--a series of
convivial conversations on food, drink, politics, literature, and things
in general, with interlocutors at first rather numerous, and not very
distinct, but latterly narrowed down to "Christopher North" (Wilson
himself), the "Ettrick Shepherd" (Hogg), and a certain "Timothy
Tickler," less distinctly identified with Wilson's mother's brother, an
Edinburgh lawyer of the name of Sym. A few outsiders, sometimes real
(as De Quincey), sometimes imaginary, were, till the last, added now and
then. And besides these conversations, which are his great title to
fame, he contributed, also under the _nom de guerre_ of Christopher
North, an immense number of articles, in part collected as _Christopher
North in his Sporting Jacket_, substantive collections on Homer, on
Spenser, and others, and almost innumerable single papers and essays on
things in general. From the time when Lockhart (see below) went to
London, no influence on _Blackwood_ could match Wilson's for some ten or
twelve years, or nearly till the end of the thirties. Latterly
ill-health, the death of friends and of his wife, and other causes,
lessened his energy, and for some years before his death in 1854 he
wrote little. Two years before that time his increasing ailments caused
him even to resign his professorship.
Wilson--whose stories are merely mediocre, and whose poems, _The Isle of
Palms_ (1812) and _The City of the Plague_ (1816), merely show that he
was an intelligent contemporary of Scott and Byron, and a neighbour of
the Lake poets--developed in his miscellaneous journalism one of the
most puissant and luxuriant literary faculties of the time; and in
particular was among the first in one, and perhaps the very first in
another, kind of writing. The first and less valuable of the two was the
subjection of most, if not all, of the topics of the newspaper to a
boisterous but fresh and vigorous style of critical handling, which
bears some remote resemblance to the styles of L'Estrange towards the
end of the seventeenth century, and Bentley a little later, but is in
all important points new. The second and higher was the attempt to
substitute for the correct, balanced, exactly-proportioned, but even in
the hands of Gibbon, even in those of Burke, somewhat colourless and
jejune prose of the past age, a new style of writing, exuberant in
diction, semi-poetical in rhythm, confounding, or at least alternating
very sharply between, the styles of high-strung enthusiasm and
extravagant burlesque, and setting at naught all precepts of the
immediate elders. It would be too much, no doubt, to attribute the
invention of this style to Wilson. It was "in the air"; it was the
inevitable complement of romantic diction in poetry; it had been
anticipated to some extent by others, and it displayed itself in various
forms almost simultaneously in the hands of Landor, who kept to a more
classical form, and of De Quincey, who was modern. But Wilson, unless in
conversation with De Quincey, cannot be said to have learnt it from any
one else: he preceded most in the time, and greatly exceeded all in the
bulk and influence of his exercises, owing to his position on the staff
of a popular and widely-read periodical.
The defect of both these qualities of Wilson's style (a defect which
extends largely to the matter of his writings in criticism and in other
departments) was a defect of sureness of taste; while his criticism was
more vigorous than safe. Except his Toryism (which, however, was shot
with odd flashes of democratic sentiment and a cross-vein of crotchety
dislike not to England but to London), he had not many pervading
prejudices. But at the same time he had not many clear principles: he
was the slave of whim and caprice in his individual opinions; and he
never seems to have been able to distinguish between a really fine thing
and a piece of fustian, between an urbane jest and a piece of gross
buffoonery, between eloquence and rant, between a reasoned condemnation
and a spiteful personal fling. Accordingly the ten reprinted volumes of
his contributions to _Blackwood_ and the mass of his still uncollected
articles contain the strangest jumble of good and bad in matter and form
that exists anywhere. By turns trivial and magnificent, exquisite and
disgusting, a hierophant of literature and a mere railer at men of
letters, a prince of describers, jesters, enthusiasts, and the author of
tedious and commonplace newspaper "copy," Wilson is one of the most
unequal, one of the most puzzling, but also one of the most stimulating
and delightful, figures in English literature. Perhaps slightly
over-valued for a time, he has for many years been distinctly neglected,
if not depreciated and despised; and the voluminousness of his work,
coupled with the fact that it is difficult to select from it owing to
the pervading inequality of its merits, may be thought likely to keep
him in the general judgment at a lower plane than he deserves. But the
influence which he exerted during many years both upon writers and
readers by his work in _Blackwood_ cannot be over-estimated. And it may
be said without fear that no one with tolerably wide sympathies, who is
able to appreciate good literature, will ever seriously undertake the
reading of his various works without equal satisfaction and profit.
Wilson's principal coadjutor in the early days of _Blackwood_, and his
friend of all days (though the mania for crying down not so much England
as London made "Christopher North" indulge in some girds at his old
comrade's editorship of the _Quarterly_), was a curious contrast to
Wilson himself. This contrast may may have been due partly, but by no
means wholly, to the fact that there was ten years between them. John
Gibson Lockhart was born at Cambusnethan, where his father was minister,
on 14th July 1794. Like Wilson, he was educated at Glasgow and at
Oxford, where he took a first-class at a very early age, and whence he
went to Germany, a completion of "study-years" which the revolutionary
wars had for a long time rendered difficult, if not dangerous. On
returning home he was called to the Scottish Bar, where it would seem
that he might have made some figure, but for his inability to speak in
public. _Blackwood_ gave him the very opening suited to his genius; and
for years he was one of its chief contributors, and perhaps the most
dangerous wielder of the pretty sharp weapons in which its staff
indulged. Shortly afterwards, in 1819, he published (perhaps with some
slight assistance from Wilson) his first original book (he had
translated Schlegel's _Lectures on History_ earlier), _Peter's Letters
to his Kinsfolk_. The title was a parody on Scott's account of his
continental journey after Waterloo, the substance an exceedingly
vivacious account of the things and men of Edinburgh at the time,
something after the fashion of _Humphrey_ _Clinker_. Next year, on 29th
April, Lockhart married Sophia, Scott's elder daughter; and the pair
lived for some years to come either in Edinburgh or at the cottage of
Chiefswood, near Abbotsford, Lockhart contributing freely to
_Blackwood_, and writing his four novels and his _Spanish Ballads_. At
the end of 1825 or the beginning of 1826, just at the time when his
father-in-law's financial troubles set in, he received the appointment
of editor of the _Quarterly Review_ in succession, though not in
immediate succession, to Gifford. He then removed to London, where he
continued to direct the _Review_, to contribute for a time to _Fraser_,
to be a very important figure in literary and political life, and after
Scott's death to write an admirable _Life_. Domestic troubles came
rather thickly on him after Scott's death, which indeed was preceded by
that of Lockhart's own eldest son, the "Hugh Littlejohn" of the _Tales
of a Grandfather_. Mrs. Lockhart herself died in 1837. In 1843 Lockhart
received the auditorship of the duchy of Lancaster, a post of some
value. Ten years later, in broken health, he resigned the editorship of
the _Quarterly_, and died towards the end of the year.
Lockhart's works, at present uncollected, and perhaps in no small
proportion irrecoverable, must have been of far greater bulk than those
of any one yet mentioned in this chapter except Wilson, and not
inconsiderably greater than his. They are also of a remarkable variety,
and of an extraordinary level of excellence in their different kinds.
Lockhart was not, like Wilson, an advocate or a practitioner of very
ornate or revolutionary prose. On the contrary, he both practised,
preached, and most formidably defended by bitter criticism of opposite
styles, a manner in prose and verse which was almost classical, or which
at least admitted no further Romantic innovation than that of the Lake
poets and Scott. His authorship of the savage onslaught upon Keats in
_Blackwood_ is not proven; but there is no doubt that he wrote the
scarcely less ferocious, though much more discriminating and
better-deserved, attack on Tennyson's early poems in the _Quarterly_. He
was himself no mean writer of verse. His _Spanish Ballads_ (1823), in
which he had both Southey and Scott as models before him, are of great
excellence; and some of his occasional pieces display not merely much
humour (which nobody ever denied him), but no mean share of the feeling
which is certainly not often associated with his name. But verse was
only an occasional pastime with him: his vocation was to write prose,
and he wrote it with admirable skill and a seldom surpassed faculty of
adaptation to the particular task. It is indeed probable--and it would
be no discredit to him--that his reputation with readers as opposed to
students will mainly depend, as it depends at present, upon his _Life of
Scott_. Nor would even thus his plumes be borrowed over much. For though
no doubt the letters and the diary of Sir Walter himself count for much
in the interest of the book, though the beauty and nobility of Scott's
character, his wonderful achievements, the pathetic revolution of his
fortune, form a subject not easily matched, yet to be equal to such a
subject is to be in another sense on an equality with it. Admiration for
the book is not chequered or tempered, as it almost necessarily must be
in the case of its only possible rival, Boswell's _Johnson_, with more
or less contempt for the author; still less is it (as some have
contended that admiration for Boswell is) due to that contempt. The
taste and spirit of Lockhart's book are not less admirable than the
skill of its arrangement and the competency of its writing; nor would it
be easily possible to find a happier adjustment in this respect in the
whole annals of biography.
But this great book ought not to obscure the other work which Lockhart
has done. His biography of Burns is of remarkable merit; it may be
questioned whether to this day, though it may be deficient in a few
modern discoveries of fact (and these have been mostly supplied in the
edition by the late Mr. Scott Douglas), it is not the best book on the
subject. The taste and judgment, the clear vision and sound sense, which
distinguished Lockhart, are in few places more apparent than here. His
abridgment of Scott's _Life of Napoleon_ is no ordinary abridgment, and
is a work of thorough craft, if not even of art. His novels, with one
exception, have ceased to be much read; and perhaps even that one can
hardly be said to enjoy frequent perusal. _Valerius_, the first, is a
classical novel, and suffers under the drawbacks which have generally
attended its kind. _Reginald Dalton_, a novel in part of actual life at
Oxford, and intended to be wholly of actual life, still shows something
of the artificial handling, of the supposed necessity for adventure,
which is observable in Hook and others of the time, and which has been
sufficiently noticed in the last chapter. _Matthew Wald_, the last of
the four, is both too gloomy and too extravagant: it deals with a mad
hero. But _Adam Blair_, which was published in the same year (1821) with
_Valerius_, is a wonderful little book. The story is not well told; but
the characters and the principal situation--a violent passion
entertained by a pious widowed minister for his neighbour's wife--are
handled with extraordinary power. _Peter's Letters_, which is half a
book and half journalism, may be said to be, with rare exceptions (such
as an obituary article on Hook, which was reprinted from the
_Quarterly_), the only specimen of Lockhart's miscellaneous writing that
is easily accessible or authentically known. He was still but in his
apprenticeship here; but his remarkable gifts are already apparent.
These gifts included a faculty of sarcastic comment so formidable that
it early earned him the title of "the Scorpion"; a very wide and sound
knowledge of literature, old and new, English and foreign; some
acquirements in art and in other matters; an excellent style, and a
solid if rather strait-laced theory of criticism. Except that he was, as
almost everybody was then, too much given to violent personalities in
his anonymous work, he was a very great journalist indeed, and he was
also a very great man of letters.
Thomas de Quincey was not of the earliest _Blackwood_ staff (in that
respect Maginn should be mentioned before him), but he was the older as
well as the more important man of the two, and there is the additional
reason for postponing the founder of _Fraser_, that this latter
periodical introduced a fresh flight of birds of passage (as journalists
both fortunate and unfortunate may peculiarly be called) to English
literature. De Quincey was born in 1785 (the same year as his friend
Wilson) at Manchester, where his father was a merchant of means. He was
educated at the Grammar School of his native town, after some
preliminary teaching at or near Bath, whither his mother had moved after
his father's death. He did not like Manchester, and when he had nearly
served his time for an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford, he ran
away and hid himself. He went to Oxford after all, entering at
Worcester, where he made a long though rather intermittent residence,
but took no degree. In 1809 he took up his abode at Grasmere, married
after a time, and lived there, at least as his headquarters, for more
than twenty years. In 1830 he moved to Edinburgh, where, or in its
neighbourhood, he resided for the rest of his long life, and where he
died in December 1859. He has given various autobiographic handlings of
this life--in the main it would seem quite trustworthy, but invested
with an air of fantastic unreality by his manner of relation.
His life, however, and his personality, and even the whole of his
voluminous published work, have in all probability taken colour in the
general thought from his first literary work of any consequence, the
wonderful _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_, which, with the
_Essays of Elia_, were the chief flowers of the _London Magazine_, and
appeared in that periodical during the year 1821. He had acquired this
habit during his sojourn at Oxford, and it had grown upon him during his
at first solitary residence at the Lakes to an enormous extent. Until he
thus committed the results of his dreams, or of his fancy and literary
genius working on his dreams, or of his fancy and genius by themselves,
to print and paper, in his thirty-sixth year, he had been, though a
great reader, hardly anything of a writer. But thenceforward, and
especially after, in 1825, he had visited his Lake neighbour Wilson at
Edinburgh, and had been by him introduced to _Blackwood_, he became a
frequent contributor to different magazines, and continued to be so,
writing far more even than he published, till his death. He wrote very
few books, the chief being a very free translation of a German novel,
forged as Scott's, and called _Walladmor_; a more original and stable,
though not very brilliant, effort in fiction, entitled _Klosterheim_;
and the _Logic of Political Economy_. Towards the end of his life he
superintended an English collection--there had already been one in
America--of his essays, and this has been supplemented more than once
since.
It may, indeed, fairly be doubted whether so large a collection, of
miscellaneous, heterogeneous, and, to tell the truth, very unequally
interesting and meritorious matter, has ever been received with greater
or more lasting popular favour, a fresh edition of the fourteen or
sixteen volumes of the _Works_ having been called for on an average
every decade. There have been dissidents: and recently in particular
something of a set has been made against De Quincey--a set to some
extent helped by the gradual addition to the _Works_ of a great deal of
unimportant matter which he had not himself cared to reproduce. This,
indeed, is perhaps the greatest danger to which the periodical writer is
after his death exposed, and is even the most serious drawback to
periodical writing. It is impossible that any man who lives by such
writing can always be at his best in form, and he will sometimes be
compelled to execute what Carlyle has called "honest journey-work in
default of better,"--work which, though perfectly honest and perfectly
respectable, is mere journey-work, and has no claim to be disturbed from
its rest when its journey is accomplished. Of this there was some even
in De Quincey's own collection, and the proportion has been much
increased since. Moreover, even at his very best, he was not a writer
who could be trusted to keep himself at that best. His reading was
enormous,--nearly as great perhaps as Southey's, though in still less
popular directions,--and he would sometimes drag it in rather
inappropriately. He had an unconquerable and sometimes very irritating
habit of digression, of divagation, of aside. And, worst of all, his
humour, which in its own peculiar vein of imaginative grotesque has
seldom been surpassed, was liable constantly to degenerate into a kind
of laboured trifling, inexpressibly exasperating to the nerves. He could
be simply dull; and he can seldom be credited with the possession of
what may be called literary tact.
Yet his merits were such as to give him no superior in his own manner
among the essayists, and hardly any among the prose writers of the
century. He, like Wilson, and probably before Wilson, deliberately aimed
at a style of gorgeous elaboration, intended not exactly for constant
use, but for use when required; and he achieved it. Certain well-known
passages, as well as others which have not become hackneyed, in the
_Confessions of an Opium Eater_, in the _Autobiography_, in _The English
Mail Coach_, in _Our Ladies of Sorrow_, and elsewhere, are unsurpassed
in English or out of it for imaginative splendour of imagery, suitably
reproduced in words. Nor was this De Quincey's only, though it was his
most precious gift. He had a singular, though, as has been said, a very
untrustworthy faculty of humour, both grim and quaint. He was possessed
of extraordinary dialectic ingenuity, a little alloyed no doubt by a
tendency to wire-drawn and over subtle minuteness such as besets the
born logician who is not warned of his danger either by a strong vein of
common sense or by constant sojourn in the world. He could expound and
describe admirably; he had a thorough grasp of the most complicated
subjects when he did not allow will-o'-the-wisps to lure him into
letting it go, and could narrate the most diverse kinds of action, such
as the struggles of Bentley with Trinity College, the journey of the
Tartars from the Ukraine to Siberia, and the fortunes of the Spanish
Nun, Catalina, with singular adaptability. In his biographical articles
on friends and contemporaries, which are rather numerous, he has been
charged both with ill-nature and with inaccuracy. The first charge may
be peremptorily dismissed, the second requires much argument and sifting
in particular cases. To some who have given not a little attention to
the matter it seems that De Quincey was never guilty of deliberate
fabrication, and that he was not even careless in statement. But he was
first of all a dreamer; and when it is true of a man that, in the words
of the exquisite passage where Calderon has come at one with
Shakespeare, his very dreams are a dream, it will often happen that his
facts are not exactly a fact.
Nevertheless, De Quincey is a great writer and a great figure in
literature, while it may plausibly be contended that journalism may make
all the more boast of him in that it is probable that without it he
would never have written at all. And he has one peculiarity not yet
mentioned. Although his chief excellences may not be fully perceptible
except to mature tastes, he is specially attractive to the young.
Probably more boys have in the last forty years been brought to a love
of literature proper by De Quincey than by any other writer whatever.
Of other contributors to these periodicals much might be said in larger
space, as for instance of the poisoner-critic Thomas Griffiths
Wainewright, the "Janus Weathercock" of the _London_, the original of
certain well-known heroes of Bulwer and Dickens, and the object of a
more than once recurrent and distinctly morbid attention from young men
of letters since. Lamb, who was not given to think evil of his friends,
was certainly unlucky in calling Wainewright "warm- as light-hearted";
for the man (who died a convict in Australia, though he cheated the
gallows which was his due) was both an affected coxcomb and a callous
scoundrel. But he was a very clever fellow, though indignant morality
has sometimes endeavoured to deny this. That he anticipated by sixty
years and more certain depravations in style and taste notorious in our
own day is something: it is more that his achievement in gaudy writing
and in the literary treatment of art was really considerable.
Wainewright, however, is only "curious" in more than one sense of that
term: Leigh Hunt, who, though quite incapable of poisoning anybody, had
certain points in common with Wainewright on the latter's more excusable
sides, and whose prose must now be treated, is distinguished. He
reappears with even better right here than some others of the more
important constituents of this chapter. For all his best work in prose
appeared in periodicals, though it is impossible to say that all his
work that appeared in periodicals was his best work. He was for fourteen
years editor of, and a large contributor to, the _Examiner_, which he
and his brother started in 1808. After his liberation from prison he not
merely edited, but in the older fashion practically wrote the
_Reflector_ (1810), the _Indicator_ (1819-21), and the _Companion_
(1828). His rather unlucky journey to Italy was undertaken to edit the
_Liberal_. He was one of the rare and rash men of letters who have tried
to keep up a daily journal unassisted--a new _Tatler_, which lasted for
some eighteen months (1830-32); and a little later (1834-35) he
supported for full two years a similar but weekly venture, in part
original, in part compiled or borrowed, called _Leigh Hunt's London
Journal_. These were not his only ventures of the kind: he was an
indefatigable contributor to periodicals conducted by others; and most
of his books now known by independent titles are in fact collections of
"articles"--sometimes reprinted, sometimes published for the first time.
It was impossible that such a mass of matter should be all good; and it
is equally impossible to deny that the combined fact of so much
production and of so little concentration argues a certain idiosyncrasy
of defect. In fact the butterfly character which every unprejudiced
critic of Leigh Hunt has noticed, made it impossible for him to plan or
to execute any work on a great scale. He never could have troubled
himself to complete missing knowledge, to fill in gaps, to co-ordinate
thinking, as the literary historian, whose vocation in some respects he
might seem to have possessed eminently, must do--to weave fancy into the
novelist's solid texture, and not to leave it in thrums or in gossamer.
But he was, though in both ways a most unequal, a delightful
miscellanist and critic. In both respects it is natural, and indeed
unavoidable, to compare him with Lamb and with Hazlitt, whom, however,
he really preceded, forming a link between them and the eighteenth
century essayists. His greater voluminousness, induced by necessity,
puts him at a rather unfair disadvantage with the first; and we may
perhaps never find in him those exquisite felicities which delight and
justify the true "Agnist." Yet he has found some things that Lamb missed
in Lamb's own subjects; and though his prejudices (of the middle-class
Liberal and freethinking kind) were sometimes more damaging than any to
which Lamb was exposed, he was free from the somewhat wilful eclecticism
of that inimitable person. He could like nearly all things that were
good--in which respect he stands above both his rivals in criticism. But
he stands below them in his miscellaneous work; though here also, as in
his poetry, he was a master, not a scholar. Lamb and Hazlitt improved
upon him here, as Keats and Shelley improved upon him there. But what a
position is it to be "improved upon" by Keats and Shelley in poetry, by
Hazlitt and Lamb in prose!
Hartley Coleridge might with about equal propriety have been treated in
the last chapter and in this; but the already formidable length of the
catalogue of bards perhaps turns the scale in favour of placing him with
other contributors to _Blackwood_, to which, thanks to his early
friendship with Wilson, he enjoyed access, and in which he might have
written much more than he did, and did actually write most of what he
published himself, except the _Biographia Borealis_.
The life of Hartley was a strange and sad variant of his father's,
though, if he lacked a good deal of S. T. C.'s genius, his character was
entirely free from the baser stains which darkened that great man's
weakness. Born (1796) at Clevedon, the first-fruits of the marriage of
Coleridge and Sara, he was early celebrated by Wordsworth and by his
father in immortal verse, and by Southey, his uncle, in charming prose,
for his wonderful dreamy precocity; but he never was a great reader.
Southey took care of him with the rest of the family when Coleridge
disappeared into the vague; and Hartley, after schooling at Ambleside,
was elected to a post-mastership at Merton College, Oxford. He missed
the Newdigate thrice, and only got a second in the schools, but was
more than consoled by a Fellowship at Oriel. Unfortunately Oriel was not
only gaining great honour, but was very jealous of it; and the
probationary Fellows were subjected to a most rigid system of
observation, which seems to have gone near to espionage. If ever there
was a man born to be a Fellow under the old English University scheme,
that man was Hartley Coleridge; and it is extremely probable that if he
had been let alone he would have produced, in one form or another, a
justification of that scheme, worthy to rank with Burton's _Anatomy_.
But he was accused of various shortcomings, of which intemperance seems
to have been the most serious, though it is doubtful whether it would
have sunk the beam if divers peccadilloes, political, social, and
miscellaneous, had not been thrown in. Strong interest was made in
favour of mercy, but the College deprived him of his Fellowship,
granting him, not too consistently, a _solatium_ of L300. This was
apparently in 1820. Hartley lived for nearly thirty years longer, but
his career was closed. He was, as his brother Derwent admits, one of
those whom the pressure of necessity does not spur but numbs. He wrote a
little for _Blackwood_; he took pupils unsuccessfully, and
school-mastered with a little better success; and during a short time he
lived with a Leeds publisher who took a fancy to him and induced him to
write his only large book, the _Biographia Borealis_. But for the most
part he abode at Grasmere, where his failing (it was not much more) of
occasional intemperance was winked at by all, even by the austere
Wordsworth, where he wandered about, annotated a copy of Anderson's
_Poets_ and some other books, and supported himself (with the curious
Coleridgean faculty of subsisting like the bird of paradise, without
either foot or foothold) till, at his mother's death, an annuity made
his prospects secure. He died on 6th January 1849, a little before
Wordsworth, and shortly afterwards his work was collected by his brother
Derwent in seven small volumes; the _Poems_ filling two, the _Essays and
Fragments_ two, and the _Biographia Borealis_ three.
This last (which appeared in its second form as _Lives of Northern
Worthies_, with some extremely interesting notes by S. T. C.) is an
excellent book of its kind, and shows that under more favourable
circumstances Hartley might have been a great literary historian. But it
is on the whole less characteristic than the volumes of _Poems_ and
_Essays_. In the former Hartley has no kind of _souffle_ (or
long-breathed inspiration), nor has he those exquisite lyrical touches
of his father's which put Coleridge's scanty and unequal work on a level
with that of the greatest names in English poetry. But he has a singular
melancholy sweetness, and a meditative grace which finds its special
home in the sonnet. In the "Posthumous Sonnets" especially, the
sound--not an echo of, but a true response to, Elizabethan music--is
unmistakable, and that to Shakespeare ("the soul of man is larger than
the sky"), that on himself ("When I survey the course that I have run"),
and not a few others, rank among the very best in English. Many of the
miscellaneous poems contain beautiful things. But on the whole the
greatest interest of Hartley Coleridge is that he is the first and one
of the best examples of a kind of poet who is sometimes contemned, who
has been very frequent in this century, but who is dear to the lover of
poetry, and productive of delightful things. This kind of poet is
wanting, it may be, in what is briefly, if not brutally, called
originality. He might not sing much if others had not sung and were not
singing around him; he does not sing very much even as it is, and the
notes of his song are not extraordinarily piercing or novel. But they
are true, they are not copied, and the lover of poetry could not spare
them.
It is improbable that Hartley Coleridge would ever have been a great
poet: he might, if Fate or even if the Oriel dons had been a little
kinder, have been a great critic. As it is, his essays, his introduction
to Massinger and Ford, and his _Marginalia_, suffer on the one side from
certain defects of reading; for his access to books was latterly small,
and even when it had been ample, as at Oxford, in London, or at
Southey's house, he confesses that he had availed himself of it but
little. Hence he is often wrong, and more often incomplete, from sheer
lack of information. Secondly, much of his work is mere jotting, never
in the very least degree intended for publication, and sometimes
explicitly corrected or retracted by later jottings of the same kind. In
such a case we can rather augur of the might-have-been than pronounce on
the actual. But the two volumes are full of delicate critical views on
literature; and the longest series, "Ignoramus on the Fine Arts," shows
how widely, with better luck and more opportunity, he might have
extended his critical performances. In short, Hartley Coleridge, if a
"sair sicht" to the moralist, is an interesting and far from a wholly
painful one to the lover of literature, which he himself loved so much,
and practised, with all his disadvantages, so successfully.
All the persons hitherto mentioned in this chapter appear by undoubted
right in any history of English Literature: it may cause a little
surprise to see that of Maginn figuring with them. Yet his abilities
were scarcely inferior to those of any; and he was kept back from
sharing their fame only by infirmities of character and by his
succumbing to that fatal Bohemianism which, constantly recurring among
men of letters, exercised its attractions with special force in the
early days of journalism in this century. William Maginn (1793), who was
the son of a schoolmaster at Cork, took a brilliant degree at Trinity
College, Dublin, and for some years followed his father's profession.
The establishment, however, and the style of _Blackwood_ were an
irresistible attraction to him, and he drifted to Edinburgh, wrote a
great deal in the earlier and more boisterous days of _Maga_ under the
pseudonym of Ensign O'Doherty, and has, as has been said, some claims to
be considered the originator of the _Noctes_. Then, as he had gone from
Ireland to Edinburgh, he went from Edinburgh to London, and took part in
divers Tory periodicals, acting as Paris correspondent for some of them
till, about 1830, he started, or helped in starting, a London
_Blackwood_ in _Fraser_. He had now every opportunity, and he gathered
round him a staff almost more brilliant than that of the _Edinburgh_, of
the _London_, of the _Quarterly_, or of _Blackwood_ itself. But he was
equally reckless of his health and of his money. The acknowledged
original of Thackeray's Captain Shandon, he was not seldom in jail; and
at last, assisted by Sir Robert Peel almost too late, he died at Walton
on Thames in August 1842, not yet fifty, but an utter wreck.
The collections of Maginn's work are anything but exhaustive, and the
work itself suffers from all the drawbacks, probable if not inevitable,
of work written in the intervals of carouse, at the last moment, for
ephemeral purposes. Yet it is instinct with a perhaps brighter genius
than the more accomplished productions of some much more famous men. The
_Homeric Ballads_, though they have been praised by some, are nearly
worthless; and the longer attempts in fiction are not happy. But
Maginn's shorter stories in _Blackwood_, especially the inimitable
"Story without a Tail," are charming; his more serious critical work,
especially that on Shakespeare, displays a remarkable combination of
wide reading, critical acumen, and sound sense; and his miscellanies in
prose and verse, especially the latter, are characterised by a mixture
of fantastic humour, adaptive wit, and rare but real pathos and melody,
which is the best note of the specially Irish mode. It must be said,
however, that Maginn is chiefly important to the literary historian as
the captain of a band of distinguished persons, and as in a way the link
between the journalism of the first and the journalism of the second
third of the century. A famous plate by Maclise, entitled "The
Fraserians," contains, seated round abundant bottles, with Maginn as
president, portraits (in order by "the way of the sun," and omitting
minor personages) of Irving, Gleig the Chaplain-General, Sir Egerton
Brydges, Allan Cunningham, Carlyle, Count D'Orsay, Brewster, Theodore
Hook, Lockhart, Crofton Croker of the Irish Fairy Tales, Jerdan, Dunlop
of the "History of Fiction," Gait, Hogg, Coleridge, Harrison Ainsworth,
Thackeray, Southey, and Barry Cornwall. It is improbable that all these
contributed at one time, and tolerably certain that some of them were
very sparing and infrequent contributors at any time, but the important
point is the juxtaposition of the generation which was departing and
the generation which was coming on--of Southey with Thackeray and of
Coleridge with Carlyle. Yet it will be noticed (and the point is of some
importance) that these new-comers are, at least the best of them, much
less merely periodical writers than those who came immediately before
them. In part no doubt this was accident; in part it was due to the
greater prominence which novels and serial works of other kinds were
beginning to assume; in part it may be to the fact that the great
increase in the number of magazines and newspapers had lowered their
individual dignity and perhaps their profitableness. But it is certain
that of the list just mentioned, Thackeray and Carlyle, of the
contemporary new generation of the _Edinburgh_ Macaulay, of the nascent
_Westminster_ Mill, and others, were not, like Jeffrey, like Sydney
Smith, like Wilson, and like De Quincey, content to write articles. They
aspired to write, and they did write, books; and, that being so, they
will all be treated in chapters other than the present, appropriated to
the kinds in which their chief books were designed.
The name of John Sterling is that of a man who, with no great literary
claims of his own, managed to connect it durably and in a double fashion
with literature, first as the subject of an immortal biography by
Carlyle, secondly as the name-giver of the famous Sterling Club, which
about 1838, and hardly numbering more members than the century did
years, included a surprising proportion of the most rising men of
letters of the day, while all but a very few of its members were of
literary mark. John Sterling himself was the son of a rather eccentric
father, Edward Sterling, who, after trying soldiering with no great, and
farming with decidedly ill, success, turned to journalism and succeeded
brilliantly on the _Times_. His son was born in the Isle of Bute on 20th
July 1806, was educated, first privately, then at Glasgow, and when
about nineteen went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he fell in with
a famous and brilliant set. He migrated from Trinity College to Trinity
Hall, took no degree, wrote a little for the then young _Athenaeum_, was
engaged in a romantic and in all ways rather unfortunate business of
encouraging a rebellion in Spain, but married instead of taking active
part in it, and went to the West Indies. When he came home he, it is
said under Coleridgean influence, took orders, but soon developed
heterodox views and gave up active duty. He lived, though under sentence
of death by consumption, till 1843, spending much time abroad, but
writing a little, chiefly for periodicals.
The chief characteristic of Sterling in life and thought appears to have
been a vacillating impulsiveness, while in letters his production, small
in bulk, is anything but strong in substance or form. But, like some
other men who do not, in the common phrase, "do much," he seems to have
been singularly effectual as a centre of literary friendship and
following. The Sterling Club included not merely Tennyson, John Stuart
Mill, Carlyle, Allan Cunningham, Lord Houghton, Sir Francis Palgrave,
Bishop Thirlwall, who all receive separate notice elsewhere, but others
who, being of less general fame, may best be noticed together here.
There were the scholars Blakesley, Worsley, and Hepworth Thompson
(afterwards Master of Trinity); H. N. Coleridge, the poet's nephew,
son-in-law, and editor; Sir Francis Doyle, afterwards Professor of
Poetry at Oxford, the author of some interesting reminiscences in prose,
and in verse of some of the best songs and poems on military subjects to
be found in the language, such as "The Loss of the Birkenhead," the
"Private of the Buffs," and above all the noble and consummate "Red
Thread of Honour"; Sir Edmund Head, Fellow of Merton and
Governor-General of Canada, and a writer on art (not to be confounded
with his namesake Sir Francis, the agreeable miscellanist, reviewer, and
travel writer, who was also a baronet and also connected with Canada,
where he was Governor of the Upper Province at the time of the Rebellion
of 1835). There was Sir George Cornewall Lewis, a keen scholar and a
fastidious writer, whose somewhat short life (1806-63) was chiefly
occupied by politics; for he was a Poor-Law Commissioner, a Member of
Parliament, and a holder of numerous offices up to those of Chancellor
of the Exchequer and Secretary of State. Lewis, who edited the
_Edinburgh_ for a short time, wrote no very long work, but many on a
great variety of subjects, the chief perhaps being _On the Influence of
Authority in Matters of Opinion_, 1850 (a book interesting to contrast
with one by a living statesman forty-five years later), the _Inquiry
into the Credibility of the Ancient Roman History_ (1855), and later
treatises on _The Government of Dependencies_ and the _Best Form of
Government_. He was also an exact verbal scholar, was, despite the
addiction to "dry" subjects which this list may seem to show, the author
of not a few _jeux d'esprit_, and was famous for his conversational
sayings, the most hackneyed of which is probably "Life would be
tolerable if it were not for its amusements."
But even this did not exhaust the Sterling Club. There was another
scholar, Malden, who should have been mentioned with the group above;
the second Sir Frederick Pollock, who wrote too little but left an
excellent translation of Dante, besides some reminiscences and other
work; Philip Pusey, elder brother of the theologian, and a man of
remarkable ability; James Spedding, who devoted almost the whole of his
literary life to the study, championship, and editing of Bacon, but left
other essays and reviews of great merit; Twisleton, who undertook with
singular patience and shrewdness the solution of literary and historical
problems like the Junius question and that of the African martyrs; and
lastly George Stovin Venables, who for some five and thirty years was
the main pillar in political writing of the _Saturday Review_, was a
parliamentary lawyer of great diligence and success, and combined a
singularly exact and wide knowledge of books and men in politics and
literature with a keen judgment, an admirably forcible if somewhat
mannered style, a disposition far more kindly than the world was apt to
credit him with, and a famous power of conversation. All these men,
almost without exception, were more or less contributors to periodicals;
and it may certainly be said that, but for periodicals, it is rather
unlikely that some of them would have contributed to literature at all.
Not as a member of the Sterling Club, but as the intimate friend of all
its greatest members, as a contributor, though a rather unfrequent one,
to papers, and as a writer of singular and extraordinary quality but
difficult to class under a more precise head, may be noticed Edward
FitzGerald, who, long a recluse, unstintedly admired by his friends but
quite unknown to the public, became famous late in life by his
translation of Omar Khayyam, and familiar somewhat after his death
through the publication of his charming letters by Mr. Aldis Wright. He
was born on 31st March 1809, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, the
neighbourhood which was his headquarters for almost his entire life,
till his death on a visit to a grandson of the poet Crabbe at Merton in
Norfolk, 14th June 1883. He went to school at Bury, and thence to
Cambridge, where he laid the foundation of his acquaintance with the
famous Trinity set of 1825-30. But on taking his degree in the last
named year and leaving college, he took to no profession, but entered on
the life of reading, thinking, gardening, and boating, which he pursued
for more than half a century. Besides his Trinity contemporaries, from
Tennyson and Thackeray downwards, he had Carlyle for an intimate friend,
and he married the daughter of Bernard Barton, the poet-Quaker and
friend of Lamb. He published nothing till the second half of the century
had opened, when _Euphranor_, written long before at Cambridge, or with
reference to it, appeared. Then he learnt Spanish, and first showed his
extraordinary faculty of translation by Englishing divers dramas of
Calderon. Spanish gave way to Persian, and after some exercises
elsewhere the famous version, paraphrase, or whatever it is to be
called, of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam appeared in 1859, to be much
altered in subsequent editions.
FitzGerald's works in the collected edition of 1889 fill three pretty
stout volumes, to which a considerable number of letters (he was first
of all and almost solely a letter-writer and translator) have been
added. In his prose (no disrespect being intended to _Euphranor_, a
dialogue Berkeleian in form and of great beauty, and other things) he
interests us doubly as a character and as a critic, for the letters
contain much criticism. Personally FitzGerald was a man of rather few
and not obtrusive, but deep and warm sympathies, slow to make new
friends but intensely tenacious of and affectionate towards the old,
with a very strong distaste for crowds and general society, and
undoubtedly somewhat of what the French call a _maniaque_, that is to
say, a slightly hypochondriac crotcheteer. These characteristics, which
make him interesting as a man, are still more interestingly reflected in
his criticism, which is often one-sided and unjust, sometimes crotchety
(as when he would not admit that even his beloved Alfred Tennyson had
ever been at his best since the collection of 1842), but often also
wonderfully delicate and true.
As a translator he stands almost alone, his peculiar virtue, noticeable
alike in his versions from the Spanish and Greek, being so capitally and
once for all illustrated in that of Omar Khayyam that in narrow space it
is not necessary to go beyond this. From the purist and pedantic point
of view FitzGerald, no doubt, is wildly unfaithful. He scarcely ever
renders word for word, and will insert, omit, alter, with perfect
freedom; yet the total effect is reproduced as perhaps no other
translator has ever reproduced it. Whether his version of the Rubaiyat,
with its sensuous fatalism, its ridicule of asceticism and renunciation,
and its bewildering kaleidoscope of mysticism that becomes materialist
and materialism that becomes mystical, has not indirectly had
influences, practical and literary, the results of which would have been
more abhorrent to FitzGerald than to almost any one else, may be
suggested. But the beauty of the poem as a poem is unmistakable and
altogether astounding. The melancholy richness of the rolling quatrain
with its unicorn rhymes, the quaint mixture of farce and solemnity,
passion and playfulness, the abundance of the imagery, the power of the
thought, the seduction of the rhetoric, make the poem actually, though
not original or English, one of the greatest of English poems.
Of the periodical too, if not entirely, was Richard Harris Barham,
"Thomas Ingoldsby," the author of the most popular book of light verse
that ever issued from the press. His one novel, _My Cousin Nicholas_,
was written for _Blackwood_; the immortal _Ingoldsby Legends_ appeared
in _Bentley_ and _Colburn_. Born at Canterbury in 1788, of a family
possessed of landed property, though not of much, and educated at St.
Paul's School and Brasenose College, Barham took orders, and, working
with thorough conscience as a clergyman, despite his light literature,
became a minor canon in St. Paul's Cathedral. He died in 1845. Hardly
any book is more widely known than the collected _Ingoldsby Legends_,
which originally appeared in the last eight years of their author's
life. Very recently they have met with a little priggish depreciation,
the natural and indeed inevitable result, first of a certain change in
speech and manners, and then of their long and vast popularity. Nor
would any one contend that they are exactly great literature. But for
inexhaustible fun that never gets flat and scarcely ever simply
uproarious, for a facility and felicity in rhyme and rhythm which is
almost miraculous, and for a blending of the grotesque and the terrible
which, if less _fine_ than Praed's or Hood's, is only inferior to
theirs--no one competent to judge and enjoy will ever go to Barham in
vain.
The same difficulty which beset us at the end of the last chapter recurs
here, the difficulty arising from the existence of large numbers of
persons of the third or lower ranks whose inclusion may be desired or
their exclusion resented. At the head, or near it, of this class stand
such figures as that of Douglas Jerrold, a sort of very inferior Hook on
the other side of politics, with a dash (also very inferior) of Hood,
whose _Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures_ and similar things were very
popular at and a little before the middle of the century, but whose
permanent literary value is of the smallest, if indeed it can be said to
exist. But of these--not a few of them more worthy if less prominent in
their day than Jerrold--there could be no end; and there would be little
profit in trying to reach any. The successful "contributor," by the laws
of the case, climbs on the shoulders of his less successful mates even
more than elsewhere; and the very impetus which lands him on the height
rejects them into the depths.