became an extremely busy one. The _Review_ gave him not a little
occupation, and his practice increased rapidly. In 1803 the institution,
at Scott's suggestion, of the famous Friday Club, in which, for the
greater part of the first half of this century, the best men in
Edinburgh, Johnstone and Maxwell, Whig and Tory alike, met in peaceable
conviviality, did a good deal to console Jeffrey, who was now as much
given to company as he had been in his early youth to solitude, for the
partial breaking up of the circle of friends--Allen, Horner, Smith,
Brougham, Lord Webb Seymour--in which he had previously mixed. In the
same year he became a volunteer, an act of patriotism the more
creditable, that he seems to have been sincerely convinced of the
probability of an invasion, and of the certainty of its success if it
occurred. But I have no room here for anything but a rapid review of the
not very numerous or striking events of his life. Soon, however, after
the date last mentioned, he met with two afflictions peculiarly trying
to a man whose domestic affections were unusually strong. These were the
deaths of his favourite sister in May 1804, and of his wife in October
1805. The last blow drove him nearly to despair; and the extreme and
open-mouthed "sensibility" of his private letters, on this and similar
occasions, is very valuable as an index of character, oddly as it
contrasts, in the vulgar estimate, with the supposed cynicism and
savagery of the critic. In yet another year occurred the somewhat
ludicrous duel, or beginning of a duel, with Moore, in which several
police constables did perform the friendly office which Mr. Winkle
vainly deprecated, and in which Jeffrey's, not Moore's, pistol was
discovered to be leadless. There is a sentence in a letter of Jeffrey's
concerning the thing which is characteristic and amusing: "I am glad to
have gone through this scene, both because it satisfies me that my
nerves are good enough to enable me to act in conformity to my notions
of propriety without any suffering, and because it also assures me that
I am really as little in love with life as I have been for some time in
the habit of professing." It is needless to say that this was an example
of the excellence of beginning with a little aversion, for Jeffrey and
Moore fraternised immediately afterwards and remained friends for life.
The quarrel, or half quarrel, with Scott as to the review of "Marmion,"
the planning and producing of the _Quarterly Review, English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers_, not a few other events of the same kind, must be
passed over rapidly. About six years after the death of his first wife,
Jeffrey met, and fell in love with, a certain Miss Charlotte Wilkes,
great-niece of the patriot, and niece of a New York banker, and of a
Monsieur and Madame Simond, who were travelling in Europe. He married
her two years later, having gone through the very respectable probation
of crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic (he was a very bad sailor) in a
sailing ship, in winter, and in time of war, to fetch his bride. Nor had
he long been married before he took the celebrated country house of
Craigcrook, where, for more than thirty years, he spent all the spare
time of an exceedingly happy life. Then we may jump some fifteen years
to the great Reform contest which gave Jeffrey the reward, such as it
was, of his long constancy in opposition, in the shape of the Lord
Advocateship. He was not always successful as a debater; but he had the
opportunity of adding a third reputation to those which he had already
gained in literature and in law. He had the historical duty of piloting
the Scotch Reform Bill through Parliament, and he had the, in his case,
pleasurable and honourable pain of taking the official steps in
Parliament necessitated by the mental incapacity of Sir Walter Scott.
Early in 1834 he was provided for by promotion to the Scotch Bench. He
had five years before, on being appointed Dean of Faculty, given up the
editorship of the _Review_, which he had held for seven-and-twenty
years. For some time previous to his resignation, his own contributions,
which in early days had run up to half a dozen in a single number, and
had averaged two or three for more than twenty years, had become more
and more intermittent. After that resignation he contributed two or
three articles at very long intervals. He was perhaps more lavish of
advice than he need have been to Macvey Napier, and after Napier's death
it passed into the control of his own son-in-law, Empson. Long, however,
before the reins passed from his own hands, a rival more galling if less
formidable than the _Quarterly_ had arisen in the shape of _Blackwood's
Magazine_. The more ponderous and stately publication always affected,
to some extent, to ignore its audacious junior; and Lord Cockburn
(perhaps instigated not more by prudence than by regard for Lockhart and
Wilson, both of whom were living) passes over in complete silence the
establishment of the magazine, the publication of the Chaldee
manuscript, and the still greater hubbub which arose around the supposed
attacks of Lockhart on Playfair, and the _Edinburgh_ reviewers
generally, with regard to their religious opinions. How deep the
feelings really excited were, may be seen from a letter of Jeffrey's,
published, not by Cockburn, but by Wilson's daughter in the life of her
father. In this Jeffrey practically drums out a new and certainly most
promising recruit for his supposed share in the business, and inveighs
in the most passionate terms against the imputation. It is undesirable
to enter at length into any such matters here. It need only be said that
Allen, one of the founders of the _Edinburgh_, and always a kind of
standing counsel to it, is now acknowledged to have been something
uncommonly like an atheist, that Sydney Smith (as I believe most
unjustly) was often, and is sometimes still, regarded as standing
towards his profession very much in the attitude of a French _abbé_ of
the eighteenth century, that almost the whole staff of the _Review_,
including Jeffrey, had, as every Edinburgh man of position knew,
belonged to the so-called Academy of Physics, the first principle of
which was that only three facts (the words are Lord Cockburn's) were to
be admitted without proof: (1) Mind exists; (2) matter exists; (3) every
change indicates a cause. Nowadays the most orthodox of metaphysicians
would admit that this limitation of position by no means implied
atheism. But seventy years ago it would have been the exception to find
an orthodox metaphysician who did admit it; and Lockhart, or rather
Baron von Lauerwinkel, was perfectly justified in taking the view which
ordinary opinion took.
These jars, however, were long over when Jeffrey became Lord Jeffrey,
and subsided upon the placid bench. He lived sixteen years longer,
alternating between Edinburgh, Craigcrook, and divers houses which he
hired from time to time, on Loch Lomond, on the Clyde, and latterly at
some English watering-places in the west. His health was not
particularly good, though hardly worse than any man who lives to nearly
eighty, with constant sedentary and few out-of-door occupations, and
with a cheerful devotion to the good things of this life, must expect.
And he was on the whole singularly happy, being passionately devoted to
his wife, his daughter, and his grandchildren; possessing ample means,
and making a cheerful and sensible use of them; seeing the increasing
triumph of the political principles to which he had attached himself;
knowing that he was regarded by friends and foes alike, as the chief
living English representative of an important branch of literature; and
retaining to the last an almost unparalleled juvenility of tastes and
interests. His letters to Dickens are well known, and, though I should
be very sorry to stake his critical reputation upon them, there could
not be better documents for his vivid enjoyment of life. He died on 26th
January 1850, in his seventy-seventh year, having been in harness almost
to the very last. He had written a letter the day before to Empson,
describing one of those curious waking visions known to all sick folk,
in which there had appeared part of a proof-sheet of a new edition of
the Apocrypha, and a new political paper filled with discussions on Free
Trade.
In reading Jeffrey's work[11] nowadays, the critical reader finds it
considerably more difficult to gain and keep the author's own point of
view than in the case of any other great English critic. With Hazlitt,
with Coleridge, with Wilson, with Carlyle, with Macaulay, we very soon
fall into step, so to speak, with our author. If we cannot exactly
prophesy what he will say on any given subject, we can make a pretty
shrewd guess at it; and when, as it seems to us, he stumbles and shies,
we have a sort of feeling beforehand that he is going to do it, and a
decided inkling of the reason. But my own experience is, that a modern
reader of Jeffrey, who takes him systematically, and endeavours to trace
cause and effect in him, is liable to be constantly thrown out before he
finds the secret. For Jeffrey, in the most puzzling way, lies between
the ancients and the moderns in matter of criticism, and we never quite
know where to have him. It is ten to one, for instance, that the novice
approaches him with the idea that he is a "classic" of the old rock.
Imagine the said novice's confusion, when he finds Jeffrey not merely
exalting Shakespeare to the skies, but warmly praising Elizabethan
poetry in general, anticipating Mr. Matthew Arnold almost literally, in
the estimate of Dryden and Pope as classics of our prose, and hailing
with tears of joy the herald of the emancipation in Cowper. Surely our
novice may be excused if, despite certain misgiving memories of such
reviews as that of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," he concludes that
Jeffrey has been maligned, and that he was really a Romantic before
Romanticism. Unhappy novice! he will find his new conclusion not less
rapidly and more completely staggered than his old. Indeed, until the
clue is once gained, Jeffrey must appear to be one of the most
incomprehensibly inconsistent of writers and of critics. On one page he
declares that Campbell's extracts from Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" have
made him "quite impatient for an opportunity of perusing the whole
poem,"--Romantic surely, quite Romantic. "The tameness and poorness of
the serious style of Addison and Swift,"--Romantic again, quite
Romantic. Yet when we come to Jeffrey's own contemporaries, he
constantly appears as much bewigged and befogged with pseudo-classicism
as M. de Jouy himself. He commits himself, in the year of grace 1829, to
the statement that "the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the
fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth are melting fast from the field of
our vision," while he contrasts with this "rapid withering of the
laurel" the "comparative absence of marks of decay" on Rogers and
Campbell. The poets of his own time whom he praises most heartily, and
with least reserve, are Campbell and Crabbe; and he is quite as
enthusiastic over "Theodric" and "Gertrude" as over the two great
war-pieces of the same author, which are worth a hundred "Gertrudes" and
about ten thousand "Theodrics." Reviewing Scott, not merely when they
were personal friends (they were always that), but when Scott was a
contributor to the _Edinburgh_, and giving general praise to "The Lay,"
he glances with an unmistakable meaning at the "dignity of the subject,"
regrets the "imitation and antiquarian researches," and criticises the
versification in a way which shows that he had not in the least grasped
its scheme. It is hardly necessary to quote his well-known attacks on
Wordsworth; but, though I am myself anything but a Wordsworthian, and
would willingly give up to chaos and old night nineteen-twentieths of
the "extremely valooable chains of thought" which the good man used to
forge, it is in the first place quite clear that the twentieth ought to
have saved him from Jeffrey's claws; in the second, that the critic
constantly selects the wrong things as well as the right for
condemnation and ridicule; and in the third, that he would have praised,
or at any rate not blamed, in another, the very things which he blames
in Wordsworth. Even his praise of Crabbe, excessive as it may now
appear, is diversified by curious patches of blame which seem to me at
any rate, singularly uncritical. There are, for instance, a very great
many worse jests in poetry than,
Oh, had he learnt to make the wig he wears!
--which Jeffrey pronounces a misplaced piece of buffoonery. I cannot
help thinking that if Campbell instead of Southey had written the lines,
To see brute nature scorn him and renounce
Its homage to the human form divine,
Jeffrey would, to say the least, not have hinted that they were "little
better than drivelling." But I do not think that when Jeffrey wrote
these things, or when he actually perpetrated such almost unforgivable
phrases as "stuff about dancing daffodils," he was speaking away from
his sincere conviction. On the contrary, though partisanship may
frequently have determined the suppression or the utterance, the
emphasising or the softening, of his opinions, I do not think that he
ever said anything but what he sincerely thought. The problem,
therefore, is to discover and define, if possible, the critical
standpoint of a man whose judgment was at once so acute and so purblind;
who could write the admirable surveys of English poetry contained in the
essays on Mme. de Staël and Campbell, and yet be guilty of the stuff (we
thank him for the word) about the dancing daffodils; who could talk of
"the splendid strains of Moore" (though I have myself a relatively high
opinion of Moore) and pronounce "The White Doe of Rylstone" (though I
am not very fond of that animal as a whole) "the very worst poem he ever
saw printed in a quarto volume"; who could really appreciate parts even
of Wordsworth himself, and yet sneer at the very finest passages of the
poems he partly admired. It is unnecessary to multiply inconsistencies,
because the reader who does not want the trouble of reading Jeffrey must
be content to take them for granted, and the reader who does read
Jeffrey will discover them in plenty for himself. But they are not
limited, it should be said, to purely literary criticism; and they
appear, if not quite so strongly, in his estimates of personal
character, and even in his purely political arguments.
The explanation, as far as there is any, (and perhaps such explanations,
as Hume says of another matter, only push ignorance a stage farther
back), seems to me to lie in what I can only call the Gallicanism of
Jeffrey's mind and character. As Horace Walpole has been pronounced the
most French of Englishmen, so may Francis Jeffrey be pronounced the most
French of Scotchmen. The reader of his letters, no less than the reader
of his essays, constantly comes across the most curious and multiform
instances of this Frenchness. The early priggishness is French; the
effusive domestic affection is French; the antipathy to dogmatic
theology, combined with general recognition of the Supreme Being, is
French; the talk (I had almost said the chatter) about virtue and
sympathy, and so forth, is French; the Whig recognition of the rights
of man, joined to a kind of bureaucratical distrust and terror of the
common people (a combination almost unknown in England), is French.
Everybody remembers the ingenious argument in _Peter Simple_ that the
French were quite as brave as the English, indeed more so, but that they
were extraordinarily ticklish. Jeffrey, we have seen, was very far from
being a coward, but he was very ticklish indeed. His private letters
throw the most curious light possible on the secret, as far as he was
concerned, of the earlier Whig opposition to the war, and of the later
Whig advocacy of reform. Jeffrey by no means thought the cause of the
Revolution divine, like the Friends of Liberty, or admired Napoleon like
Hazlitt, or believed in the inherent right of Manchester and Birmingham
to representation like the zealots of 1830. But he was always dreadfully
afraid of invasion in the first place, and of popular insurrection in
the second; and he wanted peace and reform to calm his fears. As a young
man he was, with a lack of confidence in his countrymen probably
unparalleled in a Scotchman, sure that a French corporal's guard might
march from end to end of Scotland, and a French privateer's boat's crew
carry off "the fattest cattle and the fairest women" (these are his very
words) "of any Scotch seaboard county." The famous, or infamous,
Cevallos article--an ungenerous and pusillanimous attack on the Spanish
patriots, which practically founded the _Quarterly Review_, by finally
disgusting all Tories and many Whigs with the _Edinburgh_--was, it
seems, prompted merely by the conviction that the Spanish cause was
hopeless, and that maintaining it, or assisting it, must lead to mere
useless bloodshed. He felt profoundly the crime of Napoleon's rule; but
he thought Napoleon unconquerable, and so did his best to prevent him
being conquered. He was sure that the multitude would revolt if reform
was not granted; and he was, therefore, eager for reform. Later, he got
into his head the oddest crotchet of all his life, which was that a
Conservative government, with a sort of approval from the people
generally, and especially from the English peasantry, would scheme for a
_coup d'état_, and (his own words again) "make mincemeat of their
opponents in a single year." He may be said almost to have left the
world in a state of despair over the probable results of the Revolutions
of 1848-49; and it is impossible to guess what would have happened to
him if he had survived to witness the Second of December. Never was
there such a case, at least among Englishmen, of timorous pugnacity and
plucky pessimism. But it would be by no means difficult to parallel the
temperament in France; and, indeed, the comparative frequency of it
there, may be thought to be no small cause of the political and military
disasters of the country.
In literature, and especially in criticism, Jeffrey's characteristics
were still more decidedly and unquestionably French. He came into the
world almost too soon to feel the German impulse, even if he had been
disposed to feel it. But, as a matter of fact, he was not at all
disposed. The faults of taste of the German Romantic School, its
alternate homeliness and extravagance, its abuse of the supernatural,
its undoubted offences against order and proportion, scandalised him
only a little less than they would have scandalised Voltaire and did
scandalise the later Voltairians. Jeffrey was perfectly prepared to be
Romantic up to a certain point,--the point which he had himself reached
in his early course of independent reading and criticism. He was even a
little inclined to sympathise with the reverend Mr. Bowles on the great
question whether Pope was a poet; and, as I have said, he uses, about
the older English literature, phrases which might almost satisfy a
fanatic of the school of Hazlitt or of Lamb. He is, if anything, rather
too severe on French as compared with English drama. Yet, when he comes
to his own contemporaries, and sometimes even in reference to earlier
writers, we find him slipping into those purely arbitrary severities of
condemnation, those capricious stigmatisings of this as improper, and
that as vulgar, and the other as unbecoming, which are the
characteristics of the pseudo-correct and pseudo-classical school of
criticism. He was a great admirer of Cowper, and yet he is shocked by
Cowper's use, in his translation of Homer, of the phrases, "to entreat
Achilles to a calm" (evidently he had forgotten Shakespeare's "pursue
him and entreat him to a peace"), "this wrangler here," "like a fellow
of no worth." He was certainly not likely to be unjust to Charles James
Fox. So he is unhappy, rather than contemptuous, over such excellent
phrases as "swearing away the lives," "crying injustice," "fond of
ill-treating." These appear to Mr. Aristarchus Jeffrey too "homely and
familiar," too "low and vapid"; while a harmless and rather agreeable
Shakespearian parallel of Fox's seems to him downright impropriety. The
fun of the thing is that the passage turns on the well-known misuse of
"flat burglary"; and if Jeffrey had had a little more sense of humour
(his deficiency in which, for all his keen wit, is another Gallic note
in him), he must have seen that the words were ludicrously applicable to
his own condemnation and his own frame of mind. These settings-up of a
wholly arbitrary canon of mere taste, these excommunicatings of such and
such a thing as "low" and "improper," without assigned or assignable
reason, are eminently Gallic. They may be found not merely in the older
school before 1830, but in almost all French critics up to the present
day: there is perhaps not one, with the single exception of
Sainte-Beuve, who is habitually free from them. The critic may be quite
unable to say why _tarte à la crême_ is such a shocking expression, or
even to produce any important authority for the shockingness of it. But
he is quite certain that it is shocking. Jeffrey is but too much given
to protesting against _tarte à la crême_; and the reasons for his error
are almost exactly the same as in the case of the usual Frenchman; that
is to say, a very just and wholesome preference for order, proportion,
literary orthodoxy, freedom from will-worship and eccentric divagations,
unfortunately distorted by a certain absence of catholicity, by a
tendency to regard novelty as bad, merely because it is novelty, and by
a curious reluctance, as Lamb has it of another great man of the same
generation, to go shares with any newcomer in literary commerce.
But when these reservations have been made, when his standpoint has been
clearly discovered and marked out, and when some little tricks, such as
the affectation of delivering judgments without appeal, which is still
kept up by a few, though very few, reviewers, have been further allowed
for, Jeffrey is a most admirable essayist and critic. As an essayist, a
writer of _causeries_, I do not think he has been surpassed among
Englishmen in the art of interweaving quotation, abstract, and comment.
The best proof of his felicity in this respect is that in almost all the
books which he has reviewed, (and he has reviewed many of the most
interesting books in literature) the passages and traits, the anecdotes
and phrases, which have made most mark in the general memory, and which
are often remembered with very indistinct consciousness of their origin,
are to be found in his reviews. Sometimes the very perfection of his
skill in this respect makes it rather difficult to know where he is
abstracting or paraphrasing, and where he is speaking outright and for
himself; but that is a very small fault. Yet his merits as an essayist,
though considerable, are not to be compared, even to the extent to which
Hazlitt's are to be compared, with his merits as a critic, and
especially as a literary critic. It would be interesting to criticise
his political criticism; but it is always best to keep politics out
where it can be managed. Besides, Jeffrey as a political critic is a
subject of almost exclusively historical interest, while as a literary
critic he is important at this very day, and perhaps more important than
he was in his own. For the spirit of merely æsthetic criticism, which
was in his day only in its infancy, has long been full grown and
rampant; so that, good work as it has done in its time, it decidedly
needs chastening by an admixture of the dogmatic criticism, which at
least tries to keep its impressions together and in order, and to
connect them into some coherent doctrine and creed.
Of this dogmatic criticism Jeffrey, with all his shortcomings, is
perhaps the very best example that we have in English. He had addressed
himself more directly and theoretically to literary criticism than
Lockhart. Prejudiced as he often was, he was not affected by the wild
gusts of personal and political passion which frequently blew Hazlitt a
thousand miles off the course of true criticism. He keeps his eye on the
object, which De Quincey seldom does. He is not affected by that desire
to preach on certain pet subjects which affects the admirable critical
faculty of Carlyle. He never blusters and splashes at random like
Wilson. And he never indulges in the mannered and rather superfluous
graces which marred, to some tastes, the work of his successor in
critical authority, if there has been any such, the author of _Essays in
Criticism_.