to consider too curiously, or on too many sides. Besides his inimitable
felicity of expression (the Singleton Letters are simply crammed with
epigram), he had the sturdiest possible common sense and the liveliest
possible humour. I have known his claim to the title of "humourist"
called in question by precisians: nobody could deny him the title of
good-humourist. Except that the sentimental side of Toryism would never
have appealed to him, it was chiefly an accident of time that he was a
polemical Liberal. He would always and naturally have been on the side
opposite to that on which most of the fools were. When he came into the
world, as the straitest Tory will admit, there were in that world a
great many abuses as they are called, that is to say, a great many
things which, once useful and excellent, had either decayed into
positive nuisances, or dried up into neutral and harmless but
obstructive rubbish. There were also many silly and some mischievous
people, as well as some wise and useful ones, who defended the abuses.
Sydney Smith was an ideal soldier of reform for his time, and in his
way. He was not extraordinarily long-sighted--indeed (as his famous and
constantly-repeated advice to "take short views of life" shows) he had a
distinct distrust of taking too anxious thought for political or any
other morrows. But he had a most keen and, in many cases, a most just
scent and sight for the immediate inconveniences and injustices of the
day, and for the shortest and most effective ways of mending them. He
was perhaps more destitute of romance and of reverence (though he had
too much good taste to be positively irreverent) than any man who ever
lived. He never could have paralleled, he never could have even
understood, Scott's feelings about the Regalia, or that ever-famous
incident of Sir Walter's life, when returning with Jeffrey and other
Whig friends from some public meeting, he protested against the
innovations which, harmless or even beneficial individually and in
themselves, would by degrees destroy every thing that made Scotland
Scotland. I am afraid that his warmest admirers, even those of his own
political complexion, must admit that he was, as has been said, more
than a little of a Philistine; that he expressed, and expressed
capitally in one way, that curious middle-class sentiment, or denial of
sentiment, which won its first triumph in the first Reform Bill and its
last in the Exhibition of twenty years later, which destroyed no doubt
much that was absurd, and some things that were noxious, but which
induced in England a reign of shoddy in politics, in philosophy, in art,
in literature, and, when its own reign was over, left England weak and
divided, instead of, as it had been under the reign of abuses, united
and strong. The bombardment of Copenhagen may or may not have been a
dreadful thing: it was at any rate better than the abandonment of
Khartoum. Nor can Sydney any more than his friends be acquitted of
having held the extraordinary notion that you can "rest and be thankful"
in politics, that you can set Demos at bishops, but stave and tail him
off when he comes to canons; that you can level beautifully down to a
certain point, and then stop levelling for ever afterwards; that because
you can laugh Brother Ringletub out of court, laughter will be equally
effective with Cardinal Newman; and that though it is the height of
"anility" (a favourite word of his) to believe in a country gentleman,
it is the height of rational religion to believe in a ten-pound
householder.
But however open to exception his principles may be, and that not merely
from the point of view of highflying Toryism, his carrying out of them
in life and in literature had the two abiding justifications of being
infinitely amusing, and of being amusing always in thoroughly good
temper. It is, as I have said, impossible to read Sydney Smith's _Life_,
and still more impossible to read his letters, without liking him warmly
and personally, without seeing that he was not only a man who liked to
be comfortable (that is not very rare), that he was not only one who
liked others to be comfortable (that is rarer), but one who in every
situation in which he was thrown, did his utmost to make others as well
as himself comfortable (which is rarest of all). If the references in
_Peter Plymley_ to Canning were unjustifiable from him, there is little
or no reason to think that they were prompted by personal jealousy; and
though, as has been said, he was undoubtedly sore, and unreasonably
sore, at not receiving the preferment which he thought he had deserved,
he does not seem to have been personally jealous of any man who had
received it. The parson of Foston and Combe Florey may not have been
(his latest biographer, admiring though he be, pathetically laments that
he was not) a spiritually minded man. But happy beyond almost all other
parishioners of the time were the parishioners of Combe Florey and
Foston, though one of them did once throw a pair of scissors at his
provoking pastor. He was a fast and affectionate friend; and though he
was rather given to haunting rich men, he did it not only without
servility, but without that alternative of bearishness and freaks which
has sometimes been adopted. As a prince of talkers he might have been a
bore to a generation which (I own I think in that perhaps single point),
wiser than its fathers, is not so ambitious as they were to sit as a
bucket and be pumped into. But in that infinitely happier system of
conversation by books, which any one can enjoy as he likes and interrupt
as he likes at his own fireside, Sydney is still a prince. There may be
living somewhere some one who does not think so very badly of slavery,
who is most emphatically of opinion that "the fools were right," in the
matters of Catholic emancipation and Reform, who thinks well of public
schools and universities, who even, though he may not like spring-guns
much, thinks that John Jones had only himself to blame if, after ample
warning and with no business except the business of supplying a London
poulterer with his landlord's game, he trespassed and came to the worst.
Yet even this monster, if he happened to be possessed of the sense of
fun and literature, (which is perhaps impossible), could not read even
the most acrid of Sydney's political diatribes without shrieking with
laughter, if, in his ogreish way, he were given to such violent
demonstrations; could certainly not read the _Life_ and the letters
without admitting, in a moment of unwonted humanity, that here was a man
who, for goodness as well as for cleverness, for sound practical wisdom
as well as for fantastic verbal wit, has had hardly a superior and very
few equals.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] To speak of him in this way is not impertinence or familiarity. He
was most generally addressed as "Mr. Sydney," and his references to his
wife are nearly always to "Mrs. Sydney," seldom or never to "Mrs.
Smith."
[9] See next Essay.
IV
JEFFREY
"Jeffrey and I," says Christopher North in one of his more malicious
moments, "do nothing original; it's porter's work." A tolerably
experienced student of human nature might almost, without knowing the
facts, guess the amount of truth contained in this fling. North, as
North, had done nothing that the world calls original: North, as Wilson,
had done a by no means inconsiderable quantity of such work in verse and
prose. But Jeffrey really did underlie the accusation contained in the
words. A great name in literature, nothing stands to his credit in
permanent literary record but a volume (a sufficiently big one, no
doubt[10]) of criticisms on the work of other men; and though this
volume is only a selection from his actual writings, no further gleaning
could be made of any different material. Even his celebrated, or once
celebrated, "Treatise on Beauty" is but a review article, worked up into
an encyclopædia article, and dealing almost wholly with pure criticism.
Against him, if against any one, the famous and constantly repeated gibe
about the fellows who have failed in literature and art, falls short and
harmless. In another of its forms, "the corruption of a poet is the
generation of a critic," it might be more appropriate. For Jeffrey, as
we know from his boyish letters, once thought, like almost every boy who
is not an idiot, that he might be a poet, and scribbled verses in
plenty. But the distinguishing feature in this case was, that he waited
for no failure, for no public ridicule or neglect, not even for any
private nipping of the merciful, but so seldom effective, sort, to check
those sterile growths. The critic was sufficiently early developed in
him to prevent the corruption of the poet from presenting itself, in its
usual disastrous fashion, to the senses of the world. Thus he lives (for
his political and legal renown, though not inconsiderable, is
comparatively unimportant) as a critic pure and simple.
His biographer, Lord Cockburn, tells us that "Francis Jeffrey, the
greatest of British critics, was born in Edinburgh on 23d October 1773."
It must be at the end, not the beginning, of this paper that we decide
whether Jeffrey deserves the superlative. He seems certainly to have
begun his critical practice very early. He was the son of a depute-clerk
of the Court of Session, and respectably, though not brilliantly,
connected. His father was a great Tory, and, though it would be
uncharitable to say that this was the reason why Jeffrey was a great
Liberal, the two facts were probably not unconnected in the line of
causation. Francis went to the High School when he was eight, and to the
College at Glasgow when he was fourteen. He does not appear to have been
a prodigy at either; but he has an almost unequalled record for early
work of the self-undertaken kind. He seems from his boyhood to have been
addicted to filling reams of paper, and shelves full of note-books, with
extracts, abstracts, critical annotations, criticisms of these
criticisms, and all manner of writing of the same kind. I believe it is
the general experience that this kind of thing does harm in nineteen
cases, for one in which it does good; but Jeffrey was certainly a
striking exception to the rule, though perhaps he might not have been so
if his producing, or at least publishing, time had not been unusually
delayed. Indeed, his whole mental history appears to have been of a
curiously piecemeal character; and his scrappy and self-guided education
may have conduced to the priggishness which he showed early, and never
entirely lost, till fame, prosperity, and the approach of old age
mellowed it out of him. He was not sixteen when his sojourn at Glasgow
came to an end; and, for more than two years, he seems to have been left
to a kind of studious independence, attending only a couple of law
classes at Edinburgh University. Then his father insisted on his going
to Oxford: a curious step, the reasons for which are anything but clear.
For the paternal idea seems to have been that Jeffrey was to study not
arts, but law; a study for which Oxford may present facilities now, but
which most certainly was quite out of its way in Jeffrey's time, and
especially in the case of a Scotch boy of ordinary freshman's age.
It is painful to have to say that Jeffrey hated Oxford, because there
are few instances on record in which such hatred does not show the hater
to have been a very bad man indeed. There are, however, some special
excuses for the little Scotchman. His college (Queen's) was not perhaps
very happily selected; he had been sent there in the teeth of his own
will, which was a pretty strong will; he was horrified, after the free
selection of Scotch classes, to find a regular curriculum which he had
to take or leave as a whole; the priggishness of Oxford was not his
priggishness, its amusements (for he hated sport of every kind) were not
his amusements; and, in short, there was a general incompatibility. He
came up in September and went down in July, having done nothing except
having, according to a not ill-natured jest, "lost the broad Scotch, but
gained only the narrow English,"--a peculiarity which sometimes brought
a little mild ridicule on him both from Scotchmen and Englishmen.
Very soon after his return to Edinburgh, he seems to have settled down
steadily to study for the Scotch bar, and during his studies
distinguished himself as a member of the famous Speculative Society,
both in essay-writing and in the debates. He was called on 16th December
1794.
Although there have never been very quick returns at the bar, either of
England or Scotland, the smaller numbers of the latter might be thought
likely to bring young men of talent earlier to the front. This
advantage, however, appears to have been counterbalanced partly by the
strong family interests which made a kind of aristocracy among Scotch
lawyers, and partly by the influence of politics and of Government
patronage. Jeffrey was, comparatively speaking, a "kinless loon"; and,
while he was steadily resolved not to put himself forward as a candidate
for the Tory manna of which Dundas was the Moses, his filial reverence
long prevented him from declaring himself a very violent Whig. Indeed,
he gave an instance of this reverence which might serve as a pretty text
for a casuistical discussion. Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of
Advocates, was in 1796 deprived by vote of that, the most honourable
position of the Scotch bar, for having presided at a Whig meeting.
Jeffrey, like Gibbon, sighed as a Whig, but obeyed as a son, and stayed
away from the poll. His days were certainly long in the land; but I am
inclined to think that, in a parallel case, some Tories at least would
have taken the chance of shorter life with less speckled honour.
However, it is hard to quarrel with a man for obeying his parents; and
perhaps, after all, the Whigs did not think the matter of so much
importance as they affected to do. It is certain that Jeffrey was a
little dashed by the slowness of his success at the bar. Towards the end
of 1798, he set out for London with a budget of letters of introduction,
and thoughts of settling down to literature. But the editors and
publishers to whom he was introduced did not know what a treasure lay
underneath the scanty surface of this Scotch advocate, and they were
either inaccessible or repulsive. He returned to Edinburgh, and, for
another two years, waited for fortune philosophically enough, though
with lingering thoughts of England, and growing ones of India. It was
just at the turn of the century, that his fortunes began, in various
ways, also to take a turn. For some years, though a person by no means
given to miscellaneous acquaintances, he had been slowly forming the
remarkable circle of friends from whose combined brains was soon to
start the _Edinburgh Review_. He fell in love, and married his second
cousin, Catherine Wilson, on 1st November 1801--a bold and by no means
canny step, for his father was ill-off, the bride was tocherless, and he
says that he had never earned a hundred pounds a year in fees. They did
not, however, launch out greatly, and their house in Buccleuch Place
(not the least famous locality in literature) was furnished on a scale
which some modern colleges, conducted on the principles of enforced
economy, would think Spartan for an undergraduate. Shortly afterwards,
and very little before the appearance of the Blue and Yellow, Jeffrey
made another innovation, which was perhaps not less profitable to him,
by establishing a practice in ecclesiastical causes; though he met with
a professional check in his rejection, on party principles, for the
so-called collectorship, a kind of reporter's post of some emolument and
not inconsiderable distinction.
The story of the _Edinburgh Review_ and its foundation has been very
often told on the humorous, if not exactly historical, authority of
Sydney Smith. It is unnecessary to repeat it. It is undoubted that the
idea was Sydney's. It is equally undoubted that, but for Jeffrey, the
said idea might never have taken form at all, and would never have
retained any form for more than a few months. It was only Jeffrey's
long-established habit of critical writing, the untiring energy into
which he whipped up his no doubt gifted but quite untrained
contributors, and the skill which he almost at once developed in editing
proper,--that is to say in selecting, arranging, adapting, and, even to
some extent, re-writing contributions--which secured success. Very
different opinions have been expressed at different times on the
intrinsic merits of this celebrated production; and perhaps, on the
whole, the principal feeling of explorers into the long and dusty
ranges of its early volumes, has been one of disappointment. I believe
myself that, in similar cases, a similar result is very common indeed,
and that it is due to the operation of two familiar fallacies. The one
is the delusion as to the products of former times being necessarily
better than those of the present; a delusion which is not the less
deluding because of its counterpart, the delusion about progress. The
other is a more peculiar and subtle one. I shall not go so far as a very
experienced journalist who once said to me commiseratingly, "My good
sir, I won't exactly say that literary merit hurts a newspaper." But
there is no doubt that all the great successes of journalism, for the
last hundred years, have been much more due to the fact of the new
venture being new, of its supplying something that the public wanted and
had not got, than to the fact of the supply being extraordinarily good
in kind. In nearly every case, the intrinsic merit has improved as the
thing went on, but it has ceased to be a novel merit. Nothing would be
easier than to show that the early _Edinburgh_ articles were very far
from perfect. Of Jeffrey we shall speak presently, and there is no doubt
that Sydney at his best was, and is always, delightful. But the
blundering bluster of Brougham, the solemn ineffectiveness of Horner (of
whom I can never think without also thinking of Scott's delightful
Shandean jest on him), the respectable erudition of the Scotch
professors, cannot for one single moment be compared with the work
which, in Jeffrey's own later days, in those of Macvey Napier, and in
the earlier ones of Empson, was contributed by Hazlitt, by Carlyle, by
Stephen, and, above all, by Macaulay. The _Review_ never had any one who
could emulate the ornateness of De Quincey or Wilson, the pure and
perfect English of Southey, or the inimitable insolence, so polished and
so intangible, of Lockhart. But it may at least claim that it led the
way, and that the very men who attacked its principles and surpassed its
practice had, in some cases, been actually trained in its school, and
were in all, imitating and following its model. To analyse, with
chemical exactness, the constituents of a literary novelty is never
easy, if it is ever possible. But some of the contrasts between the
style of criticism most prevalent at the time, and the style of the new
venture are obvious and important. The older rivals of the _Edinburgh_
maintained for the most part a decent and amiable impartiality; the
_Edinburgh_, whatever it pretended to be, was violently partisan,
unhesitatingly personal, and more inclined to find fault, the more
distinguished the subject was. The reviews of the time had got into the
hands either of gentlemen and ladies who were happy to be thought
literary, and only too glad to write for nothing, or else into those of
the lowest booksellers' hacks, who praised or blamed according to
orders, wrote without interest and without vigour, and were quite
content to earn the smallest pittance. The _Edinburgh_ started from the
first on the principle that its contributors should be paid, and paid
well, whether they liked it or not, thus establishing at once an
inducement to do well and a check on personal eccentricity and
irresponsibility; while whatever partisanship there might be in its
pages, there was at any rate no mere literary puffery.