THREE STUDIES IN
LITERATURE
[Illustration: colophon]
THREE STUDIES IN
LITERATURE
BY
LEWIS E. GATES
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HARVARD
UNIVERSITY
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1899
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1899,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
NOTE
These Studies were originally introductory essays in volumes of
selections from the prose writings of Jeffrey, Newman, and Arnold. The
essay on Jeffrey has been rewritten and expanded. My thanks are due to
Messrs. Ginn and Co. for the use of the essay on Jeffrey, and to Messrs.
Henry Holt and Co. for leave to reprint the essays on Newman and Arnold.
DECEMBER 15, 1898.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FRANCIS JEFFREY 1
I. Jeffrey’s Reputation 1
II. General Characteristics 6
III. Literary Criticism 12
IV. _The Edinburgh Review_ 41
V. The New Editorial Policy 46
VI. The New Literary Form 54
VII. Conclusion 59
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 64
I. Newman’s Manner and its Critics 64
II. The Rhetorician 72
III. Methods 82
IV. Irony 88
V. Style 92
VI. Additional Characteristics 98
VII. Relation to his Times 108
MATTHEW ARNOLD 124
I. Arnold’s Manner 124
II. Criticism of Life 129
III. Theory of Culture 139
IV. Ethical Bias 151
V. Literary Criticism 163
VI. Appreciations 171
VII. Style 180
VIII. Relation to his Times 200
FRANCIS JEFFREY
I
Who now reads Jeffrey? Only those, it may be feared, who are intent on
some scholarly purpose or victims of sharp necessity. Yet in 1809
Jeffrey could boast that his articles in the _Edinburgh Review_ were
read by fifty thousand thinking people within a month after publication.
Jeffrey’s reputation as a critic has run through a picturesquely varied
course. During nearly the first half of the century he was, for many
eminently intelligent Englishmen, an all but infallible authority in
letters and whatever pertained to them. He was Horner’s and Sydney
Smith’s “King Jamfray”; he was for Macaulay “more nearly a universal
genius than any man of our time.” Even Carlyle declared no critic since
Jeffrey’s day “worth naming beside him.” And when that half-national
institution, the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, required in its columns a
discussion of the theory of art, Jeffrey it was who was called in as an
authority and wrote the article on “Beauty” that, down to 1875, stood as
representing authentic English opinion in matters of taste.
Even those who hated Jeffrey admitted his power. “Birds seldom sing,”
quoth Allan Cunningham, “when the kite is in the air, and bards dreaded
the Judge Jeffrey of our day as much as political offenders dreaded the
Judge Jeffreys of James the Second.” Talfourd, Lamb’s friend and editor,
asserted of Jeffrey that “with little imagination, little genuine wit,
and no clear view of any great and central principles of criticism, he
... continued to dazzle, to astonish, and occasionally to delight
multitudes of readers, and at one time to hold the temporary fate of
authors in his hands.”
By way of final testimony to the magnitude of Jeffrey’s fame, Macaulay
and Carlyle may be quoted at length in his praise. One of Macaulay’s
letters of 1828 deals wholly with his impressions of Jeffrey, at whose
home he had just been staying; the tone of the letter is that of unmixed
hero-worship; no details of the Scotch critic’s appearance or habits or
opinions are too slight to be sent to the Macaulay household in London.
“He has twenty faces almost as unlike each other as my father’s to Mr.
Wilberforce’s.... The mere outline of his face is insignificant. The
expression is everything; and such power and variety of expression I
never saw in any human countenance.... The flow of his kindness is quite
inexhaustible.... His conversation is very much like his countenance and
his voice, of immense variety.... He is a shrewd observer; and so
fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem
to stand when in his company.”[1] These are only a few of Macaulay’s
details and admiring comments. Nor did he outgrow this intense
admiration. In April, 1843, he writes to Macvey Napier that he has read
and reread Jeffrey’s old articles till he knows them by heart; and in
December, 1843, on the appearance of Jeffrey’s collected essays, he
expresses himself in almost unmeasured terms: “The variety and
versatility of Jeffrey’s mind seem to me more extraordinary than
ever.... I do not think that any one man except Jeffrey, nay that any
three men, could have produced such diversified excellence.... Take him
all in all, I think him more nearly an universal genius than any man of
our time.”[2]
Macaulay, however, may not be wholly beyond suspicion as a witness in
Jeffrey’s favour. He himself had much of Jeffrey’s dryness and
positiveness of nature, was temperamentally limited in many of the same
ways, and was, like Jeffrey, an ardent Whig of the Constitutional type;
for all these reasons he may be thought prejudiced. In Carlyle, on the
other hand, we have a witness who was as far as possible from sympathy
with Jeffrey’s neat little formulas in art and in politics, and who has
never been accused of registering unduly charitable opinions of even his
best friends. Yet of Jeffrey he says, “It is certain there has no Critic
appeared among us since who was worth naming beside him;--and his
influence, for good and for evil, in Literature and otherwise, has been
very great.... His _Edinburgh Review_ [was] a kind of Delphic Oracle,
and Voice of the Inspired, for great majorities of what is called the
‘Intelligent Public’; and himself regarded universally as a man of
consummate penetration, and the _facile princeps_ in the department he
had chosen to cultivate and practise.”[3]
How has it happened that Jeffrey’s lustre, once so brilliant, has paled
in our day into that of a fifth-rate luminary? Was his earlier
reputation wholly undeserved? Or is the “dumb forgetfulness” that has
overtaken him a real case of literary injustice? Probably Jeffrey is now
oftenest remembered for his unluckily haughty reprimand to Wordsworth,
“This will never do!”--a sentence which is popularly taken to be an
incontestable proof of critical incapacity. Yet as regards the artistic
worth of the _Excursion_, the poem against which Jeffrey was protesting,
judges are at present nearer in agreement with Jeffrey than with
Wordsworth. Ought not Jeffrey, the critic, then, to benefit somewhat
from the latter-day reaction against overweening Romanticism?
Doubtless, Jeffrey’s fate is in part merely an illustration of the
transiency of critical fame. Jeffrey, like Rymer and John Dennis, has
gone the deciduous way of all writers of literature about literature,
save the few who have been actually themselves, in their prose, creators
of beauty. Yet probably there is also something exceptional in Jeffrey’s
case,--in his earlier complete ascendency and in the later sorry
disinheriting that has overtaken him. Jeffrey’s reputation was really a
composite affair, due fully as much to the timely-happy establishment of
the _Edinburgh Review_ as to his own personal cleverness, great as that
was. On Jeffrey, the editor, was reflected all the shining success of
the first brilliant English _Review_. To understand, then, the waxing
and the waning of Jeffrey’s literary reputation, a somewhat careful
analysis will be needed not simply of his critical genius, but also of
the methods for making that genius effective which fortune offered him
and his own keen practical instincts worked out successfully. As for his
individual worth as a critic, the truth will be found to lie, as so
often happens, about midway between the eulogists and the cavillers.
Judged even by present standards, Jeffrey was a notably effective
critic; he made blunders not a few, but he was acute, entertaining, and
suggestive, even when he went astray; he excelled in rapid analysis, apt
illustration, and audacious satire. He developed critical method in two
very important directions, and seized upon and applied, with at least
partial success, two critical principles, hardly recognized in England
before his day, but thereafter more and more widely and fruitfully
employed. All these are points, however, that need to be minutely dealt
with and illustrated.
II
It was on Jeffrey’s versatility--the universality of his genius--that
Macaulay’s comments in 1843 laid special stress. That versatility
remains noteworthy for good or for ill to-day. No modern literary critic
would venture on the vast range of subjects that Jeffrey, even in the
seventy or eighty of his essays that he thought worth preserving, has
magisterially dealt with. His _Collected Essays_ are arranged under the
following seven headings: General Literature; History; Poetry;
Philosophy of the Mind, Metaphysics, and Jurisprudence; Prose Fiction;
General Politics; Miscellaneous. Under all these headings the works of
distinguished specialists are discussed, and the reviewer declaims and
dogmatizes like an expert, whether he be holding forth on philosophy to
Dugald Stewart or on politics and law to Jeremy Bentham, or on poetry to
Wordsworth or Scott. Such confident universality is nowadays sure to
suggest shallowness, and yet the fact remains that for twenty-five
years Jeffrey was able to write on this vast variety of topics so as to
command the thorough respect even of his opponents, and so as not simply
to avoid any scandalous misadventure through false information or inept
judgments (unless in the case of Wordsworth), but to rule almost
arbitrarily a great mass of public opinion in morals, in politics, and
in literary and artistic theory. To carry through successfully so
difficult a task is in itself a victory to be put to the credit of the
audacious Scotch critic, even though his work prove not in all cases of
permanent worth.
A rapid and pungent style and great adroitness and attractiveness in
exposition were doubtless largely responsible for Jeffrey’s constant
success with his public. But, in addition to these formal excellences,
Jeffrey was remarkably well equipped and well trained for the part of a
universal genius. Instinct had been beforehand with him and led him to
prepare himself during a good many years of faithful study for just the
part he was to play. When he had to choose a profession he decided for
the bar, and he was called as a barrister in 1796. But both before this
decision and during his actual legal studies, he read widely and
systematically by himself in general literature, political theory,
history, and philosophy; and during all this patient, private reading,
at Glasgow University, at Edinburgh, and afterwards at Oxford, he was
busy, with canny Scotch diligence, at note-books, in which facts and
ideas and theorizings were recorded and worked out. His mind was
conspicuously vivacious and alert,--swift to catch up and make its own
new knowledge, whether about books or life. This keenness of
intellectual scent was always characteristic of him. Even Matthew Arnold
has conceded to him one trait of the ideal critic--_curiosity_. A very
different commentator, Mrs. Carlyle, makes special mention, after a call
from him, of his “dark, penetrating” eyes, that “had been taking note of
most things in God’s universe.”
Besides the results of this patient self-discipline, and of this wide
ranging and swiftly appropriating intellectual interest, Jeffrey had, in
a very high degree, the barrister’s power of seizing, comprehending, and
controlling, quickly and surely, a vast mass of new facts. He could “get
up” an unfamiliar subject with unsurpassable readiness and completeness.
His mastery of his subject in a review-article seems often like the
successful barrister’s knowledge of his brief: he knows whatever he
needs to know to carry the matter in hand triumphantly through.
His way of unfolding a subject is always deft and delightful to follow.
He had a sure expository instinct. Point by point, the most complex
problem takes on, under his treatment, at least a specious simplicity,
and the most abstract theorem, alluring familiarity, and definiteness.
He is generous with illustrations and examples and mischievous in
giving them a satirical turn. Despite his Scotch bias towards
theorizing, he knows and “hugs” his facts, and his discussions always
keep close to experience.
His breadth of view is remarkable, if his work be compared with that of
eighteenth-century critics. Whatever the book or question under
discussion, Jeffrey lifts it into the region of general principles, and
is not content with formal judgments of literary worth or with random
comments on special points. He is really bent on setting up “a free play
of ideas” over the literature and the modes of life that he criticises,
and on orienting his readers as regards not simply the special work
under discussion, but the whole field of art or of study to which it
belongs. That his theories, at least in literary matters, were not
always searching or profound, that they will not, in sweep and
thoroughness, bear comparison with those, for example, of Coleridge, the
great system-weaver of the Romanticists, is undoubtedly true. Yet even
in literary theory Jeffrey, as will be presently shown, hit on some
notable truths; he partially comprehended and applied the historical
method for the study of literature; he worked out with Alison an
interpretation of beauty, which, though false in its emphasis and
distorted, recognized and illustrated with great acuteness one highly
important and comparatively neglected source of æsthetic emotion; and,
despite much mistaken ridicule of Romantic poetry and much
insensibility to its quintessential power and charm, he showed his
critical insight in his protests against certain radical defects alike
in the ethical and in the æsthetic theory of the Romanticists,--defects
which, as Jeffrey contended and as modern criticism admits, do much to
invalidate Romantic poetry, both as a criticism of life and as a
permanently invigorating imaginative stimulus. But even apart from the
absolute correctness or finality of Jeffrey’s theorizing, his practice
of raising criticism into the region of general principles and of
examining the material worth of books even more searchingly than their
barely formal qualities, was a renovating change in criticism, and at
once gave new consideration and dignity to the work of the critic. Mind
was at any rate fermenting in whatever Jeffrey wrote, and for the most
part the writing of earlier reviewers had been a barren waste of words.
Finally, Jeffrey’s style startled and challenged and terrified and
amused, and through its briskness and audacity, its swift sparkle and
gay bravado, its satire and banter, its impetuous fulness and unfailing
wealth of fact and illustration fairly captivated a public that was used
to the humdrum, conventional speech of penny-a-lining critics. There is
a fine vein of mischief in Jeffrey that leads continually to very
grateful ridicule of pedantry, dulness, and all kinds of absurdity.
Even the devoutest Wordsworthian will, if he be not an ingrained prig,
relish Jeffrey’s raillery at the expense of Wordsworth’s occasional
pompous ineptitude. And if Jeffrey’s vivacity still seems amusing, how
much more irresistible must his style have seemed before the days of
Hazlitt and Lamb and Macaulay and Carlyle. His dash and wit and audacity
were new in literary criticism, and for the time being seemed to the
public almost more than mortal.
Whether or no all these qualities of Jeffrey’s genius and style are
those of the ideal literary critic, they were fitted to gain him success
and renown as a brilliant, argumentative writer on literary topics. And,
in point of fact, this is what Jeffrey really was; he was a typically
well equipped and skilful middleman of ideas. He found an increasingly
large Liberal or Whig public anxious to have its beliefs expressed
plausibly, its feelings justified, and its taste made clear to itself
and gently improved. The Whig “sheep looked up,” and Jeffrey fed them.
He did much the same work in general literary, social, and political
theory that Macaulay did later in history. Macaulay’s historical essays,
also published in the _Edinburgh Review_, were, as Cotter Morison has
pointed out, “great historical cartoons,” specially adapted for the
popularization of history, and specially suited to the knowledge and
aspirations of an intelligent middle-class public. Jeffrey’s essays in
literature had much this same character and value. They interpreted the
freshest, most vital thought of the time, so far as possible in harmony
with Whig formulas, and judged it by Whig standards; they made happily
articulate Whig prejudices on all subjects, from the French Revolution
to Wordsworth’s peasant poetry. By their masterly exposition, their
incisive argument, and their wit, they entertained even those whom they
exasperated. Their success was prompt and unexampled.
III
It has already been hinted that the qualities of Jeffrey’s genius and
style, great as may have been their value for the work he accomplished,
are not, when judged from the modern point of view, altogether those of
the ideal literary critic. This is particularly true if appreciation be
included as a vital part of the critic’s task. Jeffrey rarely
_appreciates_ a piece of literature, interprets it imaginatively, lends
himself to its peculiar charm, and expresses this charm through
sympathetic symbolism. His readiness and his plausibility are not the
only points in which Jeffrey the critic suggests Jeffrey the advocate.
He has the defects as well as the merits of the lawyer in literature. He
is always for or against his author; he is always making points. The
intellectual interest preponderates in his critical work, and his
discussions often seem, particularly to a reader of modern
impressionistic criticism, hard, unsympathetic, searchingly analytical,
repellingly abstract and systematic. He is always on the watch; he never
lends himself confidingly to his author and takes passively and
gratefully the mood and the images his author suggests. He never loiters
or dreams. He is full of business and bustle, and perpetually distracts
his readers with his sense of the need of making definite progress. He
is one of those responsible folk who believe that
“Nothing of itself will come
But we must still be seeking.”
For delicate and subtle appreciation, then, of the best modern type it
is useless to look in Jeffrey’s essays.
Of course, historically, such criticism could hardly have been expected
in 1803. The critical tradition that Jeffrey fell heir to was that of
the dogmatists,--the tradition that came down from Ascham, the
pedagogue, through the hands of the would-be autocrats, Rymer and
Dennis, to Dr. Johnson. The theories of the dogmatists suffered many
changes, but remained nevertheless true to one fundamental principle:
the critic was to be accepted as an infallible judge in literature
because of his familiarity with certain models or certain abstract
rules, the imitation or the observance of which was essential to good
art. The dogmatic critic deemed himself lord of literature by a kind of
divine right. Ascham believed in the plenary artistic inspiration of the
Greek and Latin classics, and posed as the authentic interpreter of the
sacred literary word. The pseudo-classical critics, Rymer and Dennis,
based themselves also partly on authority, but even more upon reason;
they pretended to rule by the divine right of pure logic. Their implicit
postulate might be likened to Hobbes’s theory in politics; they
substantially held that the strongest must keep order in the
commonwealth, and that in the literary commonwealth this duty fell to
the intellectually strongest. Accordingly, these critics administered
justice magisterially in accordance with a strict code of laws; they had
laws for the epic poet, laws for the writer of comedy, laws for the
satirist, laws for the writer of tragedy; the author of every new piece
of literature was called up to the bar and reprimanded for the least
illegality. In short, the dogmatic critic regarded himself and was
generally regarded as able to apply absolute tests of merit to all
literary work, and as the final authority on all doubtful matters of
taste.
Now, Jeffrey was the inheritor of this tradition in criticism, and
naturally adopted at times its tyrannical tone and manner towards public
and authors. Yet, following his temperamental fondness for compromises,
for middle parties and mediating measures, Jeffrey never tried formally
to defend this old doctrine or represented himself as an absolute
lawgiver in literature. Nowhere does he lay down a complete set of
principles, like the rules of Bossu for epic poetry, or those of Rapin
for the drama, by which excellence in any form of literature may be
absolutely tested. Such a high-and-dry Tory theory of criticism does not
suggest itself to Jeffrey as tenable. He is a Whig in taste as in
politics, and desires in both spheres the supremacy of a chosen
aristocracy. In his essay on Scott’s _Lady of the Lake_ he declares the
standard of literary excellence to reside in “the taste of a few ...
persons, eminently qualified, by natural sensibility and long experience
and reflection, to perceive all beauties that really exist, as well as
to settle the relative value and importance of all the different sorts
of beauty.” Jeffrey regards himself as one of the choicest spirits of
this chosen aristocracy, and it is as the exponent of the best current
opinion that he speaks on all questions of taste.
It follows that, when Jeffrey is dealing with purely literary questions,
he is less argumentative than at other times, and that what has been
said of his viewing every subject in the light of general principles is
least applicable to his dogmatic essays on literature. When, for
example, he attacks _Wilhelm Meister_ or the _Excursion_, he does so
simply and frankly in terms of his temperament. Wordsworth’s mysticism
baffles him, and he condemns it; Goethe’s sordid realism and sentiment
offend his man-of-the-world taste and he anathematizes them. His custom
in such hostile criticisms is to let his own taste masquerade as that of
“the judicious observer” or “the modern public.” His faith in his own
personal equation is unquestioning and devout. Whatever fails to fall in
with his bias is a fair mark for his bitterest invective. Goethe’s
_Wilhelm Meister_, for example, is “sheer nonsense,” “ludicrously
unnatural,” full of “pure childishness or mere folly,” “vulgar and
obscure,” full of “absurdities and affectations.” These terms are, for
the most part, mere circumlocutions for Jeffrey’s dislike, mere
roundabout ways of saying that the book is not to his taste. As for
coming to an understanding with author or reader about the ends of prose
fiction or the best methods of reaching those ends, Jeffrey never thinks
of such an attempt. He simply takes up various passages and declares he
does not comprehend them, or does not fancy the subjects they treat of,
or does not like the author’s ideas or methods. He gives no reasons for
his likes or dislikes, but is content to express them emphatically and
picturesquely. This is, of course, dogmatism pure and simple, and a
dogmatism, too, more irritating than the dogmatism that argues, for it
seems more arbitrary and more challenging. Of this tone and method,
Coleridge complains in the twenty-first chapter of his _Biographia
Literaria_, when, in commenting on current critical literature, he
protests against “the substitution of assertion for argument” and
against “the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts.”
But, irritating as is this pragmatic, unreasoning dogmatism, it is
nevertheless plainly a step forward from the view that makes the critic
absolute lawgiver in art. As the Whig position in politics is midway
between absolute monarchy and democracy, so what we may term the Whig
compromise in criticism stands midway between the tyranny of earlier
critics and our modern freedom. The mere recognition of the fact that
the critic speaks with authority only as representing a _coterie_, only
as interpreting public opinion, is plainly a change for the better. The
critic no longer regards himself as by divine right lord alike of public
and authors; he no longer measures literary success solely by
changeless, abstract formulas of excellence; he admits more or less
explicitly that the taste of living readers, not rules drawn from the
works of dead writers, must decide what in literature is good or bad. He
still, to be sure, limits arbitrarily the circle whose taste he regards
as a valid test; but it is plain that a new principle has implicitly
been accepted, and that the way is opened for the development and
recognition of all kinds of beauty and power the public may require.
Jeffrey himself, however, seems never to have suspected the conclusions
that might legitimately be drawn from the ideas that he was helping to
make current. He seems to have had no qualm of doubt touching his right
to dogmatize on the merits and defects of art as violently as a critic
of the older school. In theory, he held that all artistic excellence is
relative; but in practice, he never let this doctrine mitigate the
severity of his judgments. He asserts in his review of _Alison on Taste_
that “what a man feels distinctly to be beautiful, _is beautiful_ to
him”; and that so far as the individual is concerned all pleasure in art
is equally real and justifiable. Yet this doctrine seems never to have
paralyzed in the least his faith in the superior worth of his own kind
of pleasure; and he upbraids Wordsworth and Coleridge just as
indignantly for not ministering to that pleasure, as if he had some
abstract standard of poetic excellence, of which he could prove they
fell short.
When we try to define Jeffrey’s taste and to determine just what he
liked and disliked in literature, we find an odd combination of
sympathies and antipathies. Mr. Leslie Stephen has spoken of him as in
politics an eighteenth-century survival;[4] but this formula, apt as it
is for his politics, scarcely applies to his taste in literature. The
typical eighteenth-century man of letters was a pseudo-classicist; and
beyond the pseudo-classical point of view Jeffrey had passed, just as
certainly as he had never reached the Romantic point of view. Of Pope,
for example, he says: he is “much the best we think of the classical
Continental school; but he is not to be compared with the masters--nor
with the pupils--of that Old English one from which there had been so
lamentable an apostasy.” Addison he condemns for his “extreme caution,
timidity, and flatness,” and he declares that “the narrowness of his
range in poetical sentiment and diction, and the utter want either of
passion or of brilliancy, render it difficult to believe that he was
born under the same sun with Shakespeare.” These opinions are proof
patent of Jeffrey’s contempt for pseudo-classicism. Then, too, Jeffrey
is, as he himself boasts, almost superstitious in his reverence for
Shakespeare. More significant still is his admiration for other
Elizabethan dramatists, like Beaumont, Fletcher, Ford, and Webster. “Of
the old English dramatists,” he assures us in his essay on _Ford_, “it
may be said, in general, that they are more poetical, and more original
in their diction, than the dramatists of any other age or country. Their
scenes abound more in varied images, and gratuitous excursions of fancy.
Their illustrations and figures of speech are more borrowed from rural
life, and from the simple occupations or universal feelings of mankind.
They are not confined to a certain range of dignified expressions, nor
restricted to a particular assortment of imagery, beyond which it is
not lawful to look for embellishments.” Finally, he even commends
Coleridge’s great favourite, Jeremy Taylor, as enthusiastically as
Coleridge himself could do: “There is in any one of the prose folios of
Jeremy Taylor,” he asserts, “more fine fancy and original imagery--more
brilliant conceptions and glowing expressions--more new figures, and new
applications of old figures--more, in short, of the body and the soul of
poetry, than in all the odes and the epics that have since been produced
in Europe.”
Such judgments as these mark Jeffrey as, at any rate, not an
eighteenth-century survival; they must be duly borne in mind when a
formula is being sought for his literary taste. Fully as significant,
though in a different way, is the series of essays on the poet Crabbe.
If the praise of the Elizabethans seems to argue an almost Romantic bias
in Jeffrey and to suggest that after all his tastes are very like those
of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Crabbe essays at once reveal his
antipathy to the men of the new age and show how far he is from even
being willing to allow its prophets to prophesy in peace and obscurity.
Throughout his praise of Crabbe, Jeffrey is by implication condemning
Wordsworth; nor does he confine himself to this roundabout method of
attacking Romanticism. In the very first essay on Crabbe (1807), he
turns aside from his subject to ridicule by name, “the Wordsworths, and
the Southeys, and Coleridges, and all that ambitious fraternity,” and
contrasts at great length Crabbe’s sanity with Wordsworth’s mysticism.
“Mr. Crabbe exhibits the common people of England pretty much as they
are”; whereas “Mr. Wordsworth and his associates ... introduce us to
beings whose existence was not previously suspected by the acutest
observers of nature; and excite an interest for them--where they do
excite any interest--more by an eloquent and refined analysis of their
own capricious feelings, than by any obvious or intelligible ground of
sympathy in their situation.” With Crabbe, Jeffrey feels he is on solid
ground, dealing with a man who sees life clearly and sensibly, as he
himself sees it; and in his enthusiastic praise of the minute fidelity
of Crabbe, of his uncompromising truth and realism, and of his freedom
from all meretricious effects, from affectation, and from absurd
mysticism, we have at once the measure of Jeffrey’s poetic sensibility
and the sure evidence of his inability to sympathize genuinely with “the
Lakers.”
Of course, for the classic passages expressing his impatience of the new
movement, we must go to the essays on Wordsworth’s _Excursion_ and
_White Doe_. Jeffrey’s objections to the Lakers fall under four heads:
First, the new poets are nonsensically mystical; secondly, they falsify
life by showing it through a distorting medium of personal emotion,
_i.e._ they are misleadingly subjective; thirdly, they are guilty of
grotesque bad taste in their democratic realism; fourthly, they are
pedantically earnest and serious in their treatment of art, and
inexcusably pretentious in their proclamation of a new gospel of life.
Mysticism, intense individuality of feeling, naturalism, and “high
seriousness,”--these were the qualities that in the new art particularly
exasperated Jeffrey; and inasmuch as these were the very qualities to
which, in the eyes of its devotees, the new art owed its special
potency, the division between Jeffrey and the Romanticists was
sufficiently deep and irreconcilable.
Wordsworth’s transcendentalism, his intense spiritual consciousness, his
inveterate fashion of apprehending all nature as instinct with spiritual
force and of converting “this whole Of suns and worlds and men” and “all
that it inherits” into a series of splendid imaginative symbols of moral
and spiritual truth,--these qualities of Wordsworth’s genius were for
his admirers among his most characteristic sources of power, and tended
to place him as an imaginative interpreter of life far above those
Elizabethan writers whom Jeffrey, too, in opposition to the eighteenth
century, pretended to reverence. But these were just the qualities in
Wordsworth’s genius that seemed to Jeffrey most reprehensible. After
quoting a typical passage where Wordsworth’s transcendentalism finds
free utterance, Jeffrey exclaims: “This is a fair sample of that
rapturous mysticism which eludes all comprehension, and fills the
despairing reader with painful giddiness and terror.” Jeffrey’s woe is
by no means feigned. We cannot doubt that his whole mental life was
perturbed by such of Wordsworth’s poems as the great _Ode_, and that it
was an act of self-preservation on his part to burst into indignant
ridicule and violent protest. To find a man of Wordsworth’s age and
literary experience deliberately penning such bewildering stanzas and
expressing such unintelligible emotions, shook for the moment Jeffrey’s
faith in his own little, well-ordered universe, and then, as he
recovered from his earthquake, escaped from its vapours, and felt secure
once more in the clear, every-day light of common sense, led him into
fierce invective against the cause of his momentary panic.
Hardly less impatient is Jeffrey of Wordsworth’s subjectivity than of
his mysticism. Why cannot Wordsworth feel about life as other people
feel about it, as any well-bred, cultivated man of the world feels about
it? When such a man sees a poor old peasant gathering leeches in a pool,
he pulls out his purse, gives him a shilling, and walks on, speculating
about the state of the poor law; Wordsworth, on the contrary, bursts
into a strange fit of raving about Chatterton and Burns, and “mighty
poets in their misery dead,” and then in some mysterious fashion
converts the peasant’s stolidity into a defence against these gloomy
thoughts. This way of treating the peasant seems to Jeffrey utterly
unjustifiable, both because of its grotesque mysticism, and because it
thrusts a personal _motif_ discourteously into the face of the public
and falsifies ludicrously the peasant’s character and life. Wordsworth
has no right, Jeffrey insists, to treat the peasant merely as the symbol
of his own peculiar mood. Here, as in his protest against Wordsworth’s
mysticism, Jeffrey pleads for common sense and the commonplace; he is
the type of what Lamb calls “the Caledonian intellect,” which rejects
scornfully ideas that cannot be adequately expressed in good plain
terms, and grasped “by twelve men on a jury.”
Crabbe’s superiority to the Lakers lies for Jeffrey chiefly in the fact
that he has no idiosyncrasies, though he has many mannerisms; he
expresses no new theories and no peculiar emotions in his portrayal of
common life. Hence his choice of vulgar subjects is endurable--even
highly commendable. His peasants are the well-known peasants of
every-day England, with whose hard lot it behoves an enlightened Whig to
sympathize--from a distance. But a realism that, like Wordsworth’s,
professes to find in these poor peasants the deepest spiritual insight
and the purest springs of moral life, is simply for Jeffrey grotesque in
its maladroitness and confusion of values. Sydney Smith used to say, “If
I am doomed to be a slave at all, I would rather be the slave of a king
than a cobbler.” And this same prejudice against any topsy-turvy
reassignment of values was largely responsible for Jeffrey’s dislike of
Wordsworth’s peasants and of his treatment of common life. If peasants
keep their places, as Crabbe’s peasants do, they may perfectly well be
brought into the precincts of poetry; but to exalt them into types of
moral virtue and into heavenly messengers of divine truth, is to “make
tyrants of cobblers.” Jacobinism in art, as in politics, is to Jeffrey
detestable.
In fact, all the pretensions of the new school to illustrate by its art
a new gospel of life were intensely disagreeable to Jeffrey. As long as
Romanticism seemed chiefly decorative, as in Scott or Keats, Jeffrey
could tolerate it or even delight in it. But the moment it began,
whether in Byron or Wordsworth, to take itself seriously, and to
struggle to express new moral and spiritual ideals, Jeffrey protested.
Just here lies the key to what some critics have found a rather
perplexing problem,--the reasons for the varying degrees of Jeffrey’s
sympathy with the poets of his day. Let the poet remain a mere master of
the revels, or a mere magician calling up by his incantations in verse a
gorgeous phantasmagoria of sights and sounds for the delectation of idle
readers, and Jeffrey will consent to admire him and will commend his
fertility of invention, his wealth of imagination, his “rich lights of
fancy,” and “his flowers of poetry.” Keats’s luxuriant pictures of Greek
life in _Endymion_, Jeffrey finds irresistible in the “intoxication of
their sweetness” and in “the enchantments which they so lavishly
present.” Moore and Campbell, he regards as the most admirable of the
Romanticists, and their works as the very best of the somewhat
extravagant modern school. Writing in 1829, he arranges recent poets in
the following order, according to the probable duration of their fame:
“The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than
lumber:--and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley,--and the
fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth,--and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe,
are melting fast from the field of our view. The novels of Scott have
put out his poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are fading into
distance and dimness ... and the blazing star of Byron himself is
receding from its place of pride.... The two who have the longest
withstood this rapid withering of the laurel ... are Rogers and
Campbell; neither of them, it may be remarked, voluminous writers, and
both distinguished rather for the fine taste and consummate elegance of
their writings, than for that fiery passion, and disdainful vehemence,
which seemed for a time to be so much more in favour with the public.”
Now a glance at Jeffrey’s list of poets makes it clear that those for
whom he prophesies lasting fame are either pseudo-classicists or
decorative Romanticists, and that those whose day he declares to be over
are for the most part poets whose Romanticism was a vital principle.
Rogers is, of course, a genuine representative of the pseudo-classical
tradition, with all its devotion to form, its self-restraint, its
poverty of imagination, and its distrust of passion. Moore, whom Jeffrey
places late in his list of fading luminaries, and Campbell, whom he
finds most nearly unchanging in lustre, are both in a way Romanticists;
but they are alike in seeking chiefly for decorative effects and in not
taking their art too seriously. So long, then, as the fire and the heat
of Romanticism spent themselves merely in giving imaginative splendour
to style, Jeffrey could tolerate the movement, and could even regard it
with favour, as a return to that power and fervour and wild beauty that
he had taught himself to admire in Elizabethan poetry. But the moment
the new energy was suffered to penetrate life itself and to convert the
conventional world of dead fact, through the vitalizing power of
passion, into a genuinely new poetic material, then Jeffrey stood aghast
at what seemed to him a return to chaos. Byron with his fiery bursts of
selfish passion, Wordsworth with his steadily glowing consciousness of
the infinite, and Shelley with his “white heat of transcendentalism,”
were all alike for Jeffrey portentously dangerous forces and unhealthy
phenomena.
For the most part, in his attacks upon Romantic poetry, Jeffrey indulges
in little philosophizing; he is content with wit, satire, epigram, and
clever self-assertion. And yet, in the last analysis, there is a vital
connection between his rejection of Romanticism and his abstract
theorizings on beauty,--small pains as he has taken to bring out this
obscure relationship. A complete account of his temperament and taste
ought to show how the same instincts that led to his hostility to
Wordsworth and Coleridge expressed themselves formally, and tried to
justify themselves, through the theory of Beauty which he worked out
with Alison’s help.
According to Jeffrey’s account of the matter, a beautiful object owes
its beauty to its power to call up in the observer latent past
experiences of pleasure and pain. These little fragments of past joy and
sorrow gather closely round the object and blend in a kind of blurred
halo of delight which we call beauty. Suppose that an observer looks out
upon a luxuriant country landscape; the winding road calls back to him
(though without his conscious recognition of the fact) leisurely
afternoon drives; the green meadows suggest (again obscurely) past
sympathy with shepherds and grazing flocks and rustic prosperity; the
cottages surreptitiously wake memories of home joys and content about
the hearthstone. And so the imagination garners out of the summer
landscape a myriad evanescent associations with past life, which, too
slight and swift to be detected separately by thought, nevertheless
unite like the harmonics of a musical note to produce the peculiar
character that we call beauty. This being the nature of beauty, it
follows that every individual’s past will limit and create for him his
beauty in the present; his foregone pleasures and pains will alone make
possible those echoes of intense feeling which in the present combine
into the single chord of beauty. According to every man’s past, then, is
his present sense of beauty; and as no two men have the same past, no
two men can have the same perceptions of beauty in the present.
Jeffrey accepts unhesitatingly the conclusions involved in this
doctrine, and asserts that beauty is wholly relative; that whatever
seems to a man beautiful is for him beautiful; and that no sensible
debate is possible over the legitimacy of the beauty that a man’s
special temperament manufactures. So long as a man confines himself to
_enjoying_ beauty, he remains beyond criticism in the magic region of
his own private experience. But the moment he offers himself as a
creator or interpreter of beauty for others, he must take into account
the scope and nature of common experience and try to appeal
imaginatively to associations which are likely to be in the hearts of
all. This is precisely, Jeffrey once or twice implies, what Romanticists
like Wordsworth and Coleridge failed to do. They tried to impose on the
public their own curiously whimsical associations of pleasure and pain;
they were incredibly presumptuous in their belief that their own quaint,
country-side blisses and sorrows and their own droll exaltations and
despairs over peddlers and beggars and leech-gatherers must have
universal value for mankind. Here for Jeffrey lay the wilful and
colossal egotism of Romantic art; and once more we find him posing as
the foe of idiosyncrasy and arbitrary whim, and as the representative of
a cultivated aristocracy of intelligence and social experience and
taste, who, after all, have something like a common fund of feelings and
associations on which art can draw.
As for the actual worth of Jeffrey’s theory of beauty, its fault lies in
trying to stretch into a universal formula what is really only a partial
explanation of the facts. The beauty that Jeffrey lays stress on--the
kind of beauty that comes from the suggestiveness of objects--is duly
recognized nowadays under the name of beauty of _expression_. The
possible origin of beauty through association of ideas had not been
thoroughly considered before the days of Jeffrey and Alison, and their
work was therefore new and historically important. But beside beauty
that comes from this source,--beside beauty of expression,--there are
beauty of form and beauty of material; neither of these is recognized by
Jeffrey as an independent variety, and examples of each he tries, with
really heroic ingenuity, to reduce to beauty of expression. The beauty
of a Greek temple is explained as depending solely on a swift,
unconscious recognition of the stability, costliness, splendour, and
antiquity of the structure. The beauty of special colours or of chords
of music is derived, not at all from the intrinsic quality of the
sensations,--the hue or the musical sound,--but wholly from subtle
associations with past pleasure and pain. Thus Jeffrey’s theory becomes
distorted and misleading in spite of the truthfulness of much of his
observation and the real subtlety and acuteness of many of his
interpretations. The quintessential in art, the pleasure that art gives
through pure form and the inexplicable ministry of sensation, Jeffrey is
least sensitive to, and is continually looking askance at and trying to
forget or to account for as merely disguised human sympathy.
Besides the light it throws on Jeffrey’s quarrel with Romanticism, his
theory of beauty is of special significance because it emphasizes the
genuineness and intensity of his ethical interest. All artistic pleasure
is for Jeffrey merely human sympathy in masquerade--past love for one’s
fellows, delicately revived in the music of art. The only man, then, who
can have a wide range of artistic pleasure is he who in the past has
shared generously in the lives of his comrades. Holding this theory of
art, Jeffrey in his literary criticism naturally laid great stress on
the ethical qualities of books and authors. Accordingly, in the preface
to his _Collected Essays_, Jeffrey claims special credit for his
frequent use of the ethical point of view. “If I might be permitted
farther, to state, in what particular department, and generally, on
account of what, I should most wish to claim a share of those merits, I
should certainly say, that it was by having constantly endeavoured to
combine Ethical precepts with Literary Criticism, and earnestly sought
to impress my readers with a sense, both of the close connection between
sound intellectual attainments and the higher elements of duty and
enjoyment; and of the just and ultimate subordination of the former to
the latter. The praise, in short, to which I aspire, and to merit which
I am conscious that my efforts were most constantly directed, is, that I
have, more uniformly and earnestly than any preceding critic, made the
Moral tendencies of the works under consideration a leading subject of
discussion.”
This “proud claim,” as Jeffrey calls it, seems amply justified when we
compare Jeffrey’s essays either with the critical essays in the earlier
Reviews, or with the more formal and elaborate critical essays of the
eighteenth century. Even Dr. Johnson with all his didacticism had little
notion of extracting from a piece of literature the subtle spirit of
good or of evil by which it draws men this way or that way in conduct.
An obvious infringement of good morals in speech or in plot he was sure
to condemn, and a formal inculcation of moral truth he was sure to
recognize and approve. But neither in Johnson, nor anywhere else before
Jeffrey, do we find a critic constantly attempting to detect and define
the moral atmosphere that pervades the whole work of an author, and to
determine the relation between this moral atmosphere and the author’s
personality as man and as artist. To have perceived the value of this
ethical criticism, to have practised it skilfully, and to have fostered
a taste for it, these are true claims to distinction; and Jeffrey’s
services in these directions have been too often forgotten. The greater
breadth of view of later critics and their surer appreciation of ethical
values should not be allowed to deprive Jeffrey of his honour as a
pioneer in ethical criticism.