was never, with him, a mere cover to bare thought. Overpraise and
mispraise him as anybody may, he cannot be overpraised for this. Mistake
as he chose to do, and as others have chosen to do, the relative value
of his gift, the absolute value of it is unmistakable. What other
Englishman, from Sir Thomas Browne downwards, has written a sentence
surpassing in melody that on Our Lady of Sighs: "And her eyes, if they
were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read
their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams and with
wrecks of forgotten delirium"? Compare that with the masterpieces of
some later practitioners. There are no out-of-the-way words; there is no
needless expense of adjectives; the sense is quite adequate to the
sound; the sound is only what is required as accompaniment to the sense.
And though I do not know that in a single instance of equal length--even
in the still more famous, and as a whole justly more famous, _tour de
force_ on Our Lady of Darkness--De Quincey ever quite equalled the
combined simplicity and majesty of this phrase, he has constantly come
close to it. The _Suspiria_ are full of such passages--there are even
some who prefer _Savannah la Mar_ to the _Ladies of Sorrow_. Beautiful
as it is I do not, because the accursed superfluous adjective appears
there. The famous passages of the _Confessions_ are in every one's
memory; and so I suppose is the _Vision of Sudden Death_. Many passages
in _The Cæsars_, though somewhat less florid, are hardly less good; and
the close of _Joan of Arc_ is as famous as the most ambitious attempts
of the _Confessions_ and the _Mail Coach_. Moreover, in all the sixteen
volumes, specimens of the same kind may be found here and there,
alternating with very different matter; so much so, that it has no doubt
often occurred to readers that the author's occasional divergence into
questionable quips and cranks is a deliberate attempt to set off his
rhetoric, as dramatists of the noblest school have often set off their
tragedy, with comedy, if not with farce. That such a principle would
imply confusion of the study and the stage is arguable enough, but it
does not follow that it was not present. At any rate the contrast,
deliberate or not, is very strong indeed in De Quincey--stronger than in
any other prose author except his friend, and pupil rather than master,
Wilson.
The great advantage that De Quincey has, not only over this friend of
his but over all practitioners of the ornate style in this century, lies
in his sureness of hand in the first place, and secondly in the
comparative frugality of means which perhaps is an inseparable
accompaniment of sureness of hand. To mention living persons would be
invidious; but Wilson and Landor are within the most scrupulous critic's
right of comparison. All three were contemporaries; all three were
Oxford men--Landor about ten years senior to the other two--and all
three in their different ways set themselves deliberately to reverse the
practice of English prose for nearly a century and a half. They did
great things, but De Quincey did, I think, the greatest and certainly
the most classical in the proper sense, for all Landor's superior air of
Hellenism. Voluble as De Quincey often is, he seems always to have felt
that when you are in your altitudes it is well not to stay there too
long. And his flights, while they are far more uniformly high than
Wilson's, which alternately soar and drag, are much more merciful in
regard of length than Landor's, as well as for the most part much more
closely connected with the sense of his subjects. There is scarcely one
of the _Imaginary Conversations_ which would not be the better for very
considerable thinning, while, with the exception perhaps of _The English
Mail Coach_, De Quincey's surplusage, obvious enough in many cases, is
scarcely ever found in his most elaborate and ornate passages. The total
amount of such passages in the _Confessions_ is by no means large, and
the more ambitious parts of the _Suspiria_ do not much exceed a dozen
pages. De Quincey was certainly justified by his own practice in
adopting and urging as he did the distinction, due, he says, to
Wordsworth, between the common and erroneous idea of style as the
_dress_ of thought, and the true definition of it as the _incarnation_
of thought. The most wizened of coxcombs may spend days and years in
dressing up his meagre and ugly carcass; but few are the sons of men who
have sufficient thought to provide the soul of any considerable series
of avatars. De Quincey had; and therefore, though the manner (with
certain exceptions heretofore taken) in him is always worth attention,
it never need or should divert attention from the matter. And thus he
was not driven to make a little thought do tyrannous duty as lay-figure
for an infinite amount of dress, or to hang out frippery on a
clothes-line with not so much as a lay-figure inside it. Even when he is
most conspicuously "fighting a prize," there is always solid stuff in
him.
Few indeed are the writers of whom so much can be said, and fewer still
the miscellaneous writers, among whom De Quincey must be classed. On
almost any subject that interested him--and the number of such subjects
was astonishing, curious as are the gaps between the different groups of
them--what he has to say is pretty sure, even if it be the wildest
paradox in appearance, to be worth attending to. And in regard to most
things that he has to say, the reader may be pretty sure also that he
will not find them better said elsewhere. It has sometimes been
complained by students, both of De Quincey the man and of De Quincey the
writer, that there is something not exactly human in him. There is
certainly much in him of the dæmonic, to use a word which was a very
good word and really required in the language, and which ought not to be
exiled because it has been foolishly abused. Sometimes, as has also been
complained, the demon is a mere familiar with the tricksiness of Puck
rather than the lightness of Ariel. But far oftener he is a more potent
spirit than any Robin Goodfellow, and as powerful as Ariel and Ariel's
master. Trust him wholly you may not; a characteristic often noted in
intelligences that are neither exactly human, nor exactly diabolic, nor
exactly divine. But he will do great things for you, and a little wit
and courage on your part will prevent his doing anything serious against
you. To him, with much greater justice than to Hogg, might Wilson have
applied the nickname of Brownie, which he was so fond of bestowing upon
the author of "Kilmeny." He will do solid work, conjure up a concert of
aerial music, play a shrewd trick now and then, and all this with a
curious air of irresponsibility and of remoteness of nature. In ancient
days when kings played experiments to ascertain the universal or
original language, some monarch might have been tempted to take a very
clever child, interest him so far as possible in nothing but books and
opium, and see whether he would turn out anything like De Quincey. But
it is in the highest degree improbable that he would. Therefore let us
rejoice, though according to the precepts of wisdom and not too
indiscriminately, in our De Quincey as we once, and probably once for
all, received him.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] See Appendix A--De Quincey.
[17] _The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey_; edited by David
Masson. In fourteen volumes; Edinburgh, 1889-90.
XI
LOCKHART
In every age there are certain writers who seem to miss their due meed
of fame, and this is most naturally and unavoidably the case in ages
which see a great deal of what may be called occasional literature.
There is, as it seems to me, a special example of this general
proposition in the present century, and that example is the writer whose
name stands at the head of this chapter. No one, perhaps, who speaks
with any competence either of knowledge or judgment, would say that
Lockhart made an inconsiderable figure in English literature. He wrote
what some men consider the best biography on a large scale, and what
almost every one considers the second best biography on a large scale,
in English. His _Spanish Ballads_ are admitted, by those who know the
originals, to have done them almost more than justice; and by those who
do not know those originals, to be charming in themselves. His novels,
if not masterpieces, have kept the field better than most: I saw a very
badly printed and flaringly-covered copy of _Reginald Dalton_ for sale
at the bookstall at Victoria Station the day before writing these words.
He was a pillar of the _Quarterly_, of _Blackwood_, of _Fraser_, at a
time when quarterly and monthly magazines played a greater part in
literature than they have played since or are likely to play again. He
edited one of these periodicals for thirty years. "Nobody," as Mr.
Browning has it, "calls him a dunce." Yet there is no collected edition
of his works; his sober, sound, scholarly, admirably witty, and, with
some very few exceptions, admirably catholic literary criticism, is
rarely quoted; and to add to this, there is a curious prepossession
against him, which, though nearly a generation has passed since his
death, has by no means disappeared.[18] Some years ago, in a periodical
where I was, for the most part, allowed to say exactly what I liked in
matters literary, I found a sentence laudatory of Lockhart, from the
purely literary point of view, omitted between proof and publication. It
so happened that the editor of this periodical could not even have known
Lockhart personally, or have been offended by his management of the
_Quarterly_, much less by his early _fredaines_ in _Blackwood_ and
_Fraser_. It was this circumstance that first suggested to me the notion
of trying to supply something like a criticism of this remarkable
critic, which nobody has yet (1884) done, and which seems worth doing.
For while the work of many of Lockhart's contemporaries, famous at the
time, distinctly loses by re-reading, his for the most part does not;
and it happens to display exactly the characteristics which are most
wanting in criticism, biographical and literary, at the present day. If
any one at the outset desires a definition, or at least an enumeration
of those characteristics, I should say that they are sobriety of style
and reserve of feeling, coupled with delicacy of intellectual
appreciation and æsthetic sympathy, a strong and firm creed in matters
political and literary, not excluding that catholicity of judgment which
men of strong belief frequently lack, and, above all, the faculty of
writing like a gentleman without writing like a mere gentleman. No one
can charge Lockhart with dilettantism: no one certainly can charge him
with feebleness of intellect, or insufficient equipment of culture, or
lack of humour and wit.
His life was, except for the domestic misfortunes which marked its
close, by no means eventful; and the present writer, if he had access to
any special sources of information (which he has not), would abstain
very carefully from using them. John Gibson Lockhart was born at the
Manse of Cambusnethan on 14th July 1794, went to school early, was
matriculated at Glasgow at twelve years old, transferred himself by
means of a Snell exhibition to Balliol at fifteen, and took a first
class in 1813. They said he caricatured the examiners: this was,
perhaps, not the unparalleled audacity which admiring commentators have
described it as being. Very many very odd things have been done in the
Schools. But if there was nothing extraordinary in his Oxford life
except what was, even for those days, the early age at which he began
it, his next step was something out of the common; for he went to
Germany, was introduced to Goethe, and spent some time there. An odd
coincidence in the literary history of the nineteenth century is that
both Lockhart and Quinet practically began literature by translating a
German book, and that both had the remarkably good luck to find
publishers who paid them beforehand. There are few such publishers now.
Lockhart's book was Schlegel's _Lectures on History_, and his publisher
was Mr. Blackwood. Then he came back to Scotland and to Edinburgh, and
was called to the bar, and "swept the outer house with his gown," after
the fashion admirably described in _Peter's Letters_, and referred to by
Scott in not the least delightful though one of the most melancholy of
his works, the Introduction to the _Chronicles of the Canongate_.
Lockhart, one of whose distinguishing characteristics throughout life
was shyness and reserve, was no speaker. Indeed, as he happily enough
remarked in reply to the toast of his health at the farewell dinner
given to celebrate his removal to London, "I cannot speak; if I could, I
should not have left you." But if he could not speak he could write,
and the establishment of _Blackwood's Magazine_, after its first
abortive numbers, gave him scope. "The scorpion which delighteth to
sting the faces of men," as he or Wilson describes himself in the
_Chaldee Manuscript_ (for the passage is beyond Hogg's part), certainly
justified the description. As to this famous _Manuscript_, the late
Professor Ferrier undoubtedly made a blunder (in the same key as those
that he made in describing the _Noctes_, in company with which he
reprinted it) as "in its way as good as _The Battle of the Books_." _The
Battle of the Books_, full of mistakes as it is, is literature, and the
_Chaldee Manuscript_ is only capital journalism. But it is capital
journalism; and the exuberance of its wit, if it be only wit of the
undergraduate kind (and Lockhart at least was still but an undergraduate
in years), is refreshing enough. The dreadful manner in which it
fluttered the dovecotes of Edinburgh Whiggism need not be further
commented on, till Lockhart's next work (this time an almost though not
quite independent one) has been noticed. This was _Peter's Letters to
his Kinsfolk_, an elaborate book, half lampoon, half mystification,
which appeared in 1819. This book, which derived its title from Scott's
account of his journey to Paris, and in its plan followed to some extent
_Humphrey Clinker_, is one of the most careful examples of literary
hoaxing to be found. It purported to be the work of a certain Dr. Peter
Morris, a Welshman, and it is hardly necessary to say that there was no
such person. It had a handsome frontispiece depicting this Peter Morris,
and displaying not, like the portrait in Southey's _Doctor_, the occiput
merely, but the full face and features. This portrait was described, and
as far as that went it seems truly described, as "an interesting example
of a new style of engraving by Lizars." Mr. Bates, who probably knows,
says that there was no first edition, but that it was published with
"second edition" on the title-page. My copy has the same date, 1819, but
is styled the _third_ edition, and has a postscript commenting on the
to-do the book made. However all this may be, it is a very handsome
book, excellently printed and containing capital portraits and
vignettes, while the matter is worthy of the get-up. The descriptions of
the Outer-House, of Craigcrook and its high jinks, of Abbotsford, of the
finding of "Ambrose's," of the manufacture of Glasgow punch, and of many
other things, are admirable; and there is a charming sketch of Oxford
undergraduate life, less exaggerated than that in _Reginald Dalton_,
probably because the subject was fresher in the author's memory.
Lockhart modestly speaks of this book in his _Life of Scott_ as one that
"none but a very young and thoughtless person would have written." It
may safely be said that no one but a very clever person, whether young
or old, could have written it, though it is too long and has occasional
faults of a specially youthful kind. But it made, coming as it did upon
the heels of the _Chaldee Manuscript_, a terrible commotion in
Edinburgh. The impartial observer of men and things may, indeed, have
noticed in the records of the ages, that a libelled Liberal is the man
in all the world who utters the loudest cries. The examples of the
Reformers, and of the eighteenth-century _Philosophes_, are notorious
and hackneyed; but I can supply (without, I trust, violating the
sanctity of private life) a fresh and pleasing example. Once upon a
time, a person whom we shall call A. paid a visit to a person whom we
shall call B. "How sad," said A., "are those personal attacks of the
---- on Mr. Gladstone."--"Personality," said B., "is always disgusting;
and I am very sorry to hear that the ---- has followed the bad example
of the personal attacks on Lord Beaconsfield."--"Oh! but," quoth A.,
"that was _quite_ a different thing." Now B. went out to dinner that
night, and sitting next to a distinguished Liberal member of Parliament,
told him this tale, expecting that he would laugh. "Ah! yes," said he
with much gravity, "it is _very_ different, you know."
In the same way the good Whig folk of Edinburgh regarded it as very
different that the _Edinburgh Review_ should scoff at Tories, and that
_Blackwood_ and _Peter_ should scoff at Whigs. The scorpion which
delighted to sting the faces of men, probably at this time founded a
reputation which has stuck to him for more than seventy years after Dr.
Peter Morris drove his shandrydan through Scotland. Sir Walter (then
Mr.) Scott held wisely aloof from the extremely exuberant Toryism of
_Blackwood_, and, indeed, had had some quarrels with its publisher and
virtual editor. But he could not fail to be introduced to a man whose
tastes and principles were so closely allied to his own. A year after
the appearance of _Peter's Letters_, Lockhart married, on 29th April
1820 (a perilous approximation to the unlucky month of May), Sophia
Scott, the Duke of Buccleuch's "Little Jacobite," the most like her
father of all his children. Every reader of the _Life_ knows the
delightful pictures, enough for interest and not enough for vulgar
obtrusion, given by Lockhart of life at Chiefswood, the cottage near
Abbotsford which he and his wife inhabited for nearly six years.
They were very busy years for Lockhart. He was still active in
contributing to _Blackwood_; he wrote all his four novels, and he
published the _Spanish Ballads_. _Valerius_ and _Adam Blair_ appeared in
1821, _Reginald Dalton_ and the _Ballads_ in 1823, _Matthew Wald_ in
1824.
The novels, though containing much that is very remarkable, are not his
strongest work; indeed, any critic who speaks with knowledge must admit
that Lockhart had every faculty for writing novels, except the faculty
of novel-writing. _Valerius_, a classical story of the visit of a
Roman-Briton to Rome, and the persecution of the Christians in the days
of Trajan, is, like everything of its author's, admirably written, but,
like every classical novel without exception, save only _Hypatia_ (which
makes its interests and its personages daringly modern), it somehow
rings false and faint, though not, perhaps, so faint or so false as most
of its fellows. _Adam Blair_, the story of the sudden succumbing to
natural temptation of a pious minister of the kirk, is unquestionably
Lockhart's masterpiece in this kind. It is full of passion, full of
force, and the characters of Charlotte Campbell and Adam Blair himself
are perfectly conceived. But the story-gift is still wanting. The reader
finds himself outside: wondering why the people do these things, and
whether in real life they would have done them, instead of following the
story with absorption, and asking himself no questions at all. The same,
in a different way, is the case with Lockhart's longest book, _Reginald
Dalton_; and this has the additional disadvantage that neither hero nor
heroine are much more than lay-figures, while in _Adam Blair_ both are
flesh and blood. The Oxford scenes are amusing but exaggerated--the
obvious work of a man who supplies the defects of a ten years' memory by
deepening the strokes where he does remember. _Matthew Wald_, which is a
novel of madness, has excellent passages, but is conventional and wooden
as a whole. Nothing was more natural than that Lockhart, with the
example of Scott immediately before him, should try novel-writing; not
many things are more indicative of his literary ability than that,
after a bare three years' practice, he left a field which certainly was
not his.
In the early autumn of 1825, just before the great collapse of his
affairs, Scott went to Ireland with Lockhart in his company. But very
early in the following year, before the collapse was decided, Lockhart
and his family moved to London, on his appointment as editor of the
_Quarterly_, in succession to Gifford. Probably there never was a better
appointment of the kind. Lockhart was a born critic: he had both the
faculty and the will to work up the papers of his contributors to the
proper level; he was firm and decided in his literary and political
views, without going to the extreme Giffordian acerbity in both; and his
intelligence and erudition were very wide. "He could write," says a
phrase in some article I have somewhere seen quoted, "on any subject
from poetry to dry-rot;" and there is no doubt that an editor, if he
cannot exactly write on any subject from poetry to dry-rot, should be
able to take an interest in any subject between and, if necessary,
beyond those poles. Otherwise he has the choice of two undesirables;
either he frowns unduly on the dry-rot articles, which probably interest
large sections of the public (itself very subject to dry-rot), or he
lets the dry-rot contributor inflict his hobby, without mercy and
unedited, on a reluctant audience. But Lockhart, though he is said (for
his contributions are not, as far as I know, anywhere exactly
indicated) to have contributed fully a hundred articles to the
_Quarterly_, that is to say one to nearly every number during the
twenty-eight years of his editorship, by no means confined himself to
this work. It was, indeed, during its progress that he composed not
merely the _Life of Napoleon_, which was little more than an abridgment,
though a very clever abridgment, of Scott's book, but the _Lives_ of
Burns and of Scott himself. Before, however, dealing with these, his
_Spanish Ballads_ and other poetical work may be conveniently disposed
of.
Lockhart's verse is in the same scattered condition as his prose; but it
is evident that he had very considerable poetical faculty. The charming
piece, "When youthful hope is fled," attributed to him on Mrs. Norton's
authority; the well-known "Captain Paton's Lament," which has been
republished in the _Tales from Blackwood_; and the mono-rhymed epitaph
on "Bright broken Maginn," in which some wiseacres have seen ill-nature,
but which really is a masterpiece of humorous pathos, are all in very
different styles, and are all excellent each in its style. But these
things are mere waifs, separated from each other in widely different
publications; and until they are put together no general impression of
the author's poetical talent, except a vaguely favourable one, can be
derived from them. The _Spanish Ballads_ form something like a
substantive work, and one of nearly as great merit as is possible to
poetical translations of poetry. I believe opinions differ as to their
fidelity to the original. Here and there, it is said, the author has
exchanged a vivid and characteristic touch for a conventional and feeble
one. Thus, my friend Mr. Hannay points out to me that in the original of
"The Lord of Butrago" the reason given by Montanez for not accompanying
the King's flight is not the somewhat _fade_ one that
Castile's proud dames shall never point the finger of disdain,
but the nobler argument, showing the best side of feudal sentiment, that
the widows of his tenants shall never say that he fled and left their
husbands to fight and fall. Lockhart's master, Sir Walter, would
certainly not have missed this touch, and it is odd that Lockhart
himself did. But such things will happen to translators. On the other
hand, it is, I believe, admitted (and the same very capable authority in
Spanish is my warranty) that on the whole the originals have rather
gained than lost; and certainly no one can fail to enjoy the _Ballads_
as they stand in English. The "Wandering Knight's Song" has always
seemed to me a gem without flaw, especially the last stanza. Few men,
again, manage the long "fourteener" with middle rhyme better than
Lockhart, though he is less happy with the anapæst, and has not fully
mastered the very difficult trochaic measure of "The Death of Don
Pedro." In "The Count Arnaldos," wherein, indeed, the subject lends
itself better to that cadence, the result is more satisfactory. The
merits, however, of these _Ballads_ are not technical merely, or rather,
the technical merits are well subordinated to the production of the
general effect. About the nature of that effect much ink has been shed.
It is produced equally by Greek hexameters, by old French assonanced
_tirades_, by English "eights and sixes," and by not a few other
measures. But in itself it is more or less the same--the stirring of the
blood as by the sound of a trumpet, or else the melting of the mood into
or close to tears. The ballad effect is thus the simplest and most
primitive of all poetical effects; it is Lockhart's merit that he seldom
fails to produce it. The simplicity and spontaneity of his verse may, to
some people, be surprising in a writer so thoroughly and intensely
literary; but Lockhart's character was as complex as his verse is
simple, and the verse itself is not the least valuable guide to it.