one, was certainly not a narrow critic, just as he certainly was not a
feeble one. In the before-mentioned _Peter's Letters_ (which, with all
its faults, is one of his best, and particularly one of his most
spontaneous and characteristic works) the denunciation of the "facetious
and rejoicing ignorance" which enabled contemporary critics to pooh-pooh
Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Coleridge is excellent. And it must be
remembered that in 1819, whatever might be the case with Coleridge,
Wordsworth and Lamb were by no means taken to the hearts of Tories on
their merits, and that in this very passage _Blackwood_ is condemned not
less severely than the _Edinburgh_. Another point in which Lockhart made
a great advance was that he was one of the first (Lamb himself is, in
England, his only important forerunner) to unite and combine criticism
of different branches of art. He never has the disgusting technical
jargon, or the undisciplined fluency, of the mere art critic, any more
than he has the gabble of the mere connoisseur. But it is constantly
evident that he has a knowledge of and a feeling for the art of line and
colour as well as of words. Nothing can be better than the fragments of
criticism which are interspersed in the Scott book; and if his estimate
of Hook as a novelist seems exaggerated, it must be remembered, as he
has himself noted, that Thackeray was, at the time he spoke, nothing
more than an amusing contributor of remarkably promising trifles to
magazines, and that, from the appearance of _Waverley_ to that of
_Pickwick_, no novelist of the first class had made an appearance. It
is, moreover, characteristic of Lockhart as a critic that he is, as has
been noted, always manly and robust. He was never false to his own early
protest against "the banishing from the mind of a reverence for feeling,
as abstracted from mere questions of immediate and obvious utility." But
he never allowed that reverence to get the better of him and drag him
into the deplorable excesses of gush into which, from his day to ours,
criticism has more and more had a tendency to fall. If he makes no
parade of definite æsthetic principles, it is clear that throughout he
had such principles, and that they were principles of a very good kind.
He had a wide knowledge of foreign literature without any taint of
"Xenomania," sufficient scholarship (despite the unlucky false quantity
of _Janua_, which he overlooked) in the older languages, and a thorough
knowledge and love of English literature. His style is, to me at any
rate, peculiarly attractive. Contrasted with the more brightly coloured
and fantastically-shaped styles, of which, in his own day, De Quincey,
Wilson, Macaulay, and Carlyle set the fashion, it may possibly seem tame
to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in
tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately
gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson's welter of words, now
bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and
heartbreaking antitheses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called
"Tom's snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. The conclusion of the
essay on Theodore Hook is not easily surpassable as an example of solid
polished prose, which is prose, and does not attempt to be a hybrid
between prose and poetry. The last page of the Tennyson review is
perfect for quiet humour.
But there is no doubt that though Lockhart was an admirable critic
merely as such, a poet, or at least a song-writer, of singular ability
and charm within certain limits, and a master of sharp light raillery
that never missed its mark and never lumbered on the way, his most
unique and highest merit is that of biographer. Carlyle, though treating
Lockhart himself with great politeness, does not allow this, and
complains that Lockhart's conception of his task was "not very
elevated." That is what a great many people said of Boswell, whom
Carlyle thought an almost perfect biographer. But, as it happens, the
critic here has fallen into the dangerous temptation of giving his
reasons. Lockhart's plan was not, it seems, in the case of his _Scott_,
very elevated, because it was not "to show Scott as he was by nature, as
the world acted on him, as he acted on the world," and so forth. Now,
unfortunately, this is exactly what it seems to me that Lockhart,
whether he meant to do it or not, has done in the very book which
Carlyle was criticising. And it seems to me, further, that he always
does this in all his biographical efforts. Sometimes he appears (for
here another criticism of Carlyle's on the _Burns_, not the _Scott_, is
more to the point) to quote and extract from other and much inferior
writers to an extent rather surprising in so excellent a penman,
especially when it is remembered that, except to a dunce, the extraction
and stringing together of quotations is far more troublesome than
original writing. But even then the extracts are always luminous. With
ninety-nine out of a hundred biographies the total impression which
Carlyle demands, and very properly demands, is, in fact, a total absence
of impression. The reader's mind is as dark, though it may be as full,
as a cellar when the coals have been shot into it. Now this is never the
case with Lockhart's biographies, whether they are books in half a dozen
volumes, or essays in half a hundred pages. He subordinates what even
Carlyle allowed to be his "clear nervous forcible style" so entirely to
the task of representing his subject, he has such a perfect general
conception of that subject, that only a very dense reader can fail to
perceive the presentment. Whether it is the right or whether it is the
wrong presentment may, of course, be a matter of opinion, but, such as
it is, it is always there.
One other point of interest about Lockhart has to be mentioned. He was
an eminent example, perhaps one of the most eminent, of a "gentleman of
the press." He did a great many kinds of literary work, and he did all
of them well; novel-writing, perhaps (which, as has been said, he gave
up almost immediately), least well. But he does not seem to have felt
any very strong or peculiar call to any particular class of original
literary work, and his one great and substantive book may be fairly
taken to have been much more decided by accident and his relationship to
Scott than by deliberate choice. He was, in fact, eminently a
journalist, and it is very much to be wished that there were more
journalists like him. For from the two great reproaches of the craft to
which so many of us belong, and which seems to be gradually swallowing
up all other varieties of literary occupation, he was conspicuously
free. He never did work slovenly in form, and he never did work that was
not in one way or other consistent with a decided set of literary and
political principles. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the
unprincipled character of journalism, no doubt; and nobody knows better
than those who have some experience of it, that if, as George Warrington
says, "too many of us write against our own party," it is the fault
simply of those who do so. If a man has a faculty of saying anything, he
can generally get an opportunity of saying what he likes, and avoid
occasions of saying what he does not like. But the mere journalist
Swiss of heaven (or the other place), is certainly not unknown, and by
all accounts he was in Lockhart's time rather common. No one ever
accused Lockhart himself of being one of the class. A still more
important fault, undoubtedly, of journalism is its tendency to slovenly
work, and here again Lockhart was conspicuously guiltless. His actual
production must have been very considerable, though in the absence of
any collection, or even any index, of his contributions to periodicals,
it is impossible to say exactly to how much it would extend. But, at a
rough guess, the _Scott_, the _Burns_, and the _Napoleon_, the
_Ballads_, the novels, and _Peter_, a hundred _Quarterly_ articles, and
an unknown number in _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_, would make at least
twenty or five-and-twenty volumes of a pretty closely printed library
edition. Yet all this, as far as it can be identified, has the same
careful though unostentatious distinction of style, the same admirable
faculty of sarcasm, wherever sarcasm is required, the same depth of
feeling, wherever feeling is called for, the same refusal to make a
parade of feeling even where it is shown. Never trivial, never vulgar,
never feeble, never stilted, never diffuse, Lockhart is one of the very
best recent specimens of that class of writers of all work, which since
Dryden's time has continually increased, is increasing, and does not
seem likely to diminish. The growth may or may not be matter for
regret; probably none of the more capable members of the class itself
feels any particular desire to magnify his office. But if the office is
to exist, let it at least be the object of those who hold it to perform
its duties with that hatred of commonplace and cant and the _popularis
aura_, with, as nearly as may be in each case, that conscience and
thoroughness of workmanship, which Lockhart's writings uniformly
display.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] See Appendix B--Lockhart.
XII
PRAED
It was not till half a century after his death that Praed, who is loved
by those who love him perhaps as sincerely as most greater writers, had
his works presented to the public in a form which may be called
complete.[19] This is of itself rather a cautious statement in
appearance, but I am not sure that it ought not to be made more cautious
still. The completeness is not complete, though it is in one respect
rather more than complete; and the form is exceedingly informal. Neither
in size, nor in print, nor in character of editing and arrangement do
the two little fat volumes which were ushered into the world by Derwent
Coleridge in 1864, and the one little thin volume which appeared in
1887 under Sir George Young's name with no notes and not much
introduction, and the very creditable edition of the political poems
which appeared a year later under the same care but better cared for,
agree together. But this, though a nuisance to those who love not a set
of odd volumes, would matter comparatively little if the discrepancies
were not equally great in a much more important matter than that of mere
externals. Only the last of the four volumes and three books just
enumerated can be said to have been really edited, and though that is
edited very well, it is the least important. Sir George Young, who has
thus done a pious work to his uncle's memory, was concerned not merely
in the previous cheap issue of the prose, but in the more elaborate
issue of the poems in 1864. But either his green unknowing youth did not
at that time know what editing meant, or he was under the restraint of
some higher powers. Except that the issue of 1864 has that well-known
page-look of "Moxon's," which is identified to all lovers of poetry with
associations of Shelley, of Lord Tennyson, and of other masters, and
that the pieces are duly dated, it is difficult to say any good thing of
the book. There are no notes; and Praed is an author who is much in need
of annotation. With singular injudiciousness, a great deal of album and
other verse is included which was evidently not intended for
publication, which does not display the writer at his best, or even in
his characteristic vein at all, while the memoir is meagre in fact and
decidedly feeble in criticism. As for the prose, though Sir George Young
has prefixed an introduction good as far as it goes, there is no index,
no table even of contents, and the separate papers are not dated, nor is
any indication given of their origin--a defect which, for reasons to be
indicated shortly, is especially troublesome in Praed's case.
Accordingly anything like a critical study of the poet is beset with
very unusual difficulties, and the mere reading of him, if it were less
agreeable in itself, could not be said to be exactly easy. Luckily Praed
is a writer so eminently engaging to the mere reader, as well as so
interesting in divers ways to the personage whom some one has politely
called "the gelid critic," that no sins or shortcomings of his editors
can do him much harm, so long as they let him be read at all.
Winthrop Mackworth was the third son of Serjeant Praed, Chairman of the
Board of Audit, and, though his family was both by extraction and by
actual seat Devonian, he was born in John Street, Bedford Row, on 26th
June 1802, the year of the birth of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps about
as unlike Praed in every conceivable point, except metrical mastery, as
two men possessing poetic faculty can be unlike one another. John Street
may not appear as meet a nurse for a poetic child as Besançon,
especially now when it has settled down into the usual office-and-chambers
state of Bloomsbury. But it is unusually wide for a London street; it
has trees--those of the Foundling Hospital and those of Gray's Inn--at
either end, and all about it cluster memories of the Bedford Row
conspiracy, and of that immortal dinner which was given by the Briefless
One and his timid partner to Mr. Goldmore, and of Sydney Smith's sojourn
in Doughty Street, and of divers other pleasant things. In connection,
however, with Praed himself, we do not hear much more of John Street. It
was soon exchanged for the more cheerful locality of Teignmouth, where
his father (who was a member of the old western family of Mackworth,
Praed being an added surname) had a country house. Serjeant Praed
encouraged, if he did not positively teach, the boy to write English
verse at a very early age: a practice which I should be rather slow to
approve, but which has been credited, perhaps justly, with the very
remarkable formal accuracy and metrical ease of Praed's after-work.
Winthrop lost his mother early, was sent to a private school at eight
years old, and to Eton in the year 1814. Public schools in their effect
of allegiance on public schoolboys have counted for much in English
history, literary and other, and Eton has counted for more than any of
them. But hardly in any case has it counted for so much with the general
reader as in Praed's. A friend of mine, who, while entertaining high
and lofty views on principle, takes low ones by a kind of natural
attraction, says that the straightforward title of _The Etonian_ and
Praed's connection with it are enough to account for this. There you
have a cardinal fact easy to seize and easy to remember. "Praed? Oh!
yes, the man who wrote _The Etonian_; he must have been an Eton man,"
says the general reader. This is cynicism, and cannot be too strongly
reprehended. But unluckily, as in other cases, a kind of critical
deduction or reaction from this view has also taken place, and there are
persons who maintain that Praed's merit is a kind of coterie-merit, a
thing which Eton men are bound, and others are not bound but the
reverse, to uphold. This is an old, but apparently still effective
trick. I read not long ago a somewhat elaborate attempt to make out that
the people who admire Mr. Matthew Arnold's poems admire them because
they, the people, are Oxford men. Now this form of "ruling out" is
undoubtedly ingenious. "You admire Mr. Arnold's poems?"--"Yes, I
do."--"You are an Oxford man?"--"Yes, I am."--"Ah! I see." And it is
perfectly useless for the victim to argue that his admiration of the
poet and his allegiance to the University have nothing to do with each
other. In the present case I, at least, am free from this illogical but
damaging disqualification. I do not think that any one living admires
Praed more than I do; and neither Eton nor Cambridge, which may be said
to have divided influence on him, claims any allegiance from me. On
Praed himself, however, the influence of Eton was certainly great, if
not of the greatest. Here he began in school periodicals ("Apis Matina"
a bee buzzing in manuscript only, preceded _The Etonian_) his prose and,
to some though a less extent, his verse-exercises in finished
literature. Here he made the beginnings of that circle of friends
(afterwards slightly enlarged at Cambridge by the addition of
non-Etonians and including one or two Oxford men who had been at Eton)
which practically formed the staff of _The Etonian_ itself and of the
subsequent _Knight's Quarterly_ and _Brazen Head_. The greatest of them
all, Macaulay, belonged to the later Trinity set; but the Etonians
proper included divers men of mark. There has been, I believe, a
frequent idea that boys who contribute to school-magazines never do
anything else. Praed certainly could not be produced as an instance. He
was not a great athlete, partly because his health was always weak,
partly because athletics were then in their infancy. But he is said to
have been a good player at fives and tennis, an amateur actor of merit,
expert at chess and whist, and latterly a debater of promise, while, in
the well-known way of his own school and University, he was more than a
sufficient scholar. He went to Trinity in October 1821, and in the three
following years won the Browne Medals for Greek verse four times and
the Chancellor's Medal for English verse twice. He was third in the
Classical Tripos, was elected to a Fellowship at his college in 1827,
and in 1830 obtained the Seatonian Prize with a piece, "The Ascent of
Elijah," which is remarkable for the extraordinary facility with which
it catches the notes of the just published _Christian Year_. He was a
great speaker at the Union, and, as has been hinted, he made a fresh
circle of literary friends for himself, the chief ornaments whereof were
Macaulay and Charles Austin. It was also during his sojourn at Cambridge
that the short-lived but brilliant venture of _Knight's Quarterly_ was
launched. He was about four years resident at Trinity in the first
instance; after which, according to a practice then common enough but
now, I believe, obsolete, he returned to Eton as private and particular
tutor to Lord Ernest Bruce. This employment kept him for two years. He
then read law, was called to the Bar in 1829, and in 1830 was elected to
Parliament for the moribund borough of St. Germans. He was re-elected
next year, contested St. Ives, when St. Germans lost its members, but
was beaten, was elected in 1834 for Great Yarmouth, and in 1837 for
Aylesbury, which last seat he held to his death. During the whole of
this time he sat as a Conservative, becoming a more thorough one as time
went on; and as he had been at Cambridge a very decided Whig, and had
before his actual entrance on public life written many pointed and some
bitter lampoons against the Tories, the change, in the language of his
amiable and partial friend and biographer, "occasioned considerable
surprise." Of this also more presently: for it is well to get merely
biographical details over with as little digression as possible.
Surprise or no surprise, he won good opinions from both sides, acquired
considerable reputation as a debater and a man of business, was in the
confidence both of the Duke of Wellington and of Sir Robert Peel, was
made Secretary of the Board of Control in 1834, married in 1835, was
appointed Deputy-High Steward of his University (a mysterious
appointment, of the duties of which I have no notion), and died of
disease of the lungs on 15th July 1839. Not very much has been published
about Praed personally; but in what has been published, and in what I
have heard, I cannot remember a single unfriendly sentence.
Notwithstanding his reputation as an "inspired schoolboy," I do not know
that sober criticism would call him a really precocious writer,
especially in verse. The pieces by which he is best known and which have
most individuality, date in no case very early, and in almost all cases
after his five-and-twentieth year. What does date very early (and
unluckily it has been printed with a copiousness betokening more
affection than judgment, considering that the author had more sense
than to print it at all) is scarcely distinguishable from any other
verses of any other clever boy. It is impossible to augur any future
excellence from such stuff as
Emilia often sheds the tear
But affectation bids it flow,
or as
From breasts which feel compassion's glow
Solicit mild the kind relief;
and, for one's own part, one is inclined to solicit mild the kind relief
of not having to read it. Even when Praed had become, at least
technically, a man, there is no very great improvement as a whole,
though here and there one may see, looking backwards from the finished
examples, faint beginnings of his peculiar touches, especially of that
pleasant trick of repeating the same word or phrase with a different and
slightly altered sense which, as Mr. Austin Dobson has suggested, may
have been taken from Burns. The Cambridge prize poems are quite
authentic and respectable examples of that style which has received its
final criticism in
Ply battleaxe and hurtling catapult:
Jerusalem is ours! _Id Deus vult_,--
though they do not contain anything so nice as that, or as its great
author's more famous couplet respecting Africa and the men thereof. The
longer romances of the same date, "Gog," "Lilian," "The Troubadour,"
are little more than clever reminiscences sometimes of Scott, Byron,
Moore, and other contemporaries, sometimes of Prior and the _vers de
société_ of the eighteenth century. The best passage by far of all this
is the close of "How to Rhyme with Love," and this, as it seems to me,
is the only passage of even moderate length which, in the poems dating
before Praed took his degree, in the least foretells the poet of "The
Red Fisherman," "The Vicar," the "Letters from Teignmouth," the
"Fourteenth of February" (earliest in date and not least charming fruit
of the true vein), "Good-night to the Season," and best and most
delightful of all, the peerless "Letter of Advice," which is as much the
very best thing of its own kind as the "Divine Comedy."
In prose Praed was a little earlier, but not very much. _The Etonian_
itself was, even in its earliest numbers, written at an age when many,
perhaps most, men have already left school; and the earlier numbers are
as imitative, of the _Spectator_ and its late and now little read
followers of the eighteenth century, as is the verse above quoted. The
youthful boisterousness of _Blackwood_ gave Praed a more congenial
because a fresher cue; and in the style of which Maginn, as Adjutant
O'Doherty, had set the example in his Latinisings of popular verse, and
which was to be worked to death by Father Prout, there are few things
better than the "Musæ O'Connorianæ" which celebrates the great fight of
Mac Nevis and Mac Twolter. But there is here still the distinct
following of a model the taint of the school-exercise. Very much more
original is "The Knight and the Knave:" indeed I should call this the
first original thing, though it be a parody, that Praed did. To say that
it reminds one in more than subject of _Rebecca and Rowena_, and that it
was written some twenty years earlier, is to say a very great deal. Even
here, however, the writer's ground is rented, not freehold. It is very
different in such papers as "Old Boots" and "The Country Curate," while
in the later prose contributed to _Knight's Quarterly_ the improvement
in originality is marked. "The Union Club" is amusing enough all
through: but considering that it was written in 1823, two years before
Jeffrey asked the author of a certain essay on Milton "where he got that
style," one passage of the speech put in the mouth of Macaulay is
positively startling. "The Best Bat in the School" is quite delightful,
and "My First Folly," though very unequal, contains in the introduction
scene, between Vyvian Joyeuse and Margaret Orleans, a specimen of a kind
of dialogue nowhere to be found before, so far as I know, and giving
proof that, if Praed had set himself to it, he might have started a new
kind of novel.
It does not appear, however, that his fancy led him with any decided
bent to prose composition, and he very early deserted it for verse;
though he is said to have, at a comparatively late period of his short
life, worked in harness as a regular leader-writer for the _Morning
Post_ during more than a year. No examples of this work of his have been
reprinted, nor, so far as I know, does any means of identifying them
exist, though I personally should like to examine them. He was still at
Cambridge when he drifted into another channel, which was still not his
own channel, but in which he feathered his oars under two different
flags with no small skill and dexterity. Sir George Young has a very
high idea of his uncle's political verse, and places him "first among
English writers, before Prior, before Canning, before the authors of the
'Rolliad,' and far before Moore or any of the still anonymous
contributors to the later London press." I cannot subscribe to this.
Neither as Whig nor as Tory, neither as satirist of George the Fourth
nor as satirist of the Reform Bill, does Praed seem to me to have been
within a hundred miles of that elder schoolfellow of his who wrote
All creeping creatures, venomous and low,
Still blasphemous or blackguard, praise Lepaux.
He has nothing for sustained wit and ease equal to the best pieces of
the "Fudge Family" and the "Two-penny Postbag"; and (for I do not know
why one should not praise a man because he happens to be alive and one's
friend) I do not think he has the touch of the true political satirist
as Mr. Traill has it in "Professor Baloonatics Craniocracs," or in that
admirable satire on democracy which is addressed to the "Philosopher
Crazed, from the Island of Crazes."