a fine old country gentleman, pleasantly located, affluent,
noble-minded, wise, and patriotic. This was to have been shown forth, in
wish at least, as somewhat akin to, or congenerous with '_The Doctor_,
&c.,'--that rambling wonder of strange and multifarious reading: or
'_The Rectory of Valehead_,' or '_Vicar of Wakefield_,' or '_The Family
Robinson Crusoe_,' still unwrecked; or many another hearty, cheerful or
pathetic tale of home, sweet home: and yet as to design and execution
strictly original and unplagiaristic. The first chapters (simple healthy
writing, redolent of green pastures, and linchened rocks, and dew-dropt
mountains,) might introduce localities; the beautiful home itself, an
Elizabethan mansion, with its park, lake, hill and valley scenery; a
peep at the blue mile-off sea, brawling brooks, oak-woods,
conservatories, rookery, and all such pleasant adjuncts of that most
fortunate of pleasure-hunters, a country squire, with a princely
rent-roll. Then should be detailed, circumstantially, the lord of the
beautiful home, a picture of the hospitable virtues; the wife of the
beautiful home, a portraiture of happy domesticity, admirable also as a
mother, a nurse, a neighbour, and the poor's best friend: children must
abound, of course, or the home is a heaven uninhabited; and shrewd hints
might hereabouts be dropped as to the judicious or injudicious in
matters educational: servants, too, both old and young, with discussions
on their modern treatment, and on that better class of bygones, whom
kindness made not familiar, and the right assertion of authority
provoked not into insolence; whose interest for the dear old family was
never merged in their own, and whose honesty was as unsuspected as that
of young master himself, or sweet little mistress Alice.
After all this, might we descant upon the squire's characteristics. Take
him as a politician: liberal, that is to say, (for his frown is on me at
a phrase so doubtful,) generous, tolerant, kind, and manly; but none of
your low-bred slanderers of that noble name, so generally tyrants at
home and cowardly abroad--mean agitating fellows, the scum of disgorging
society, raised by turbulence and recklessness from the bottom to the
surface: oh no, none of these; but, for all his just liberality, an
honest, honourable, loyal, church-going, uncompromising Tory: with a
detail of his reasons, notions, and practices thereabouts, inclusive of
his conduct at elections, his wholesome influence over an otherwise
unguided or ill-guided tenantry, and as concerning other miscalled
corruptions: his open argumentation of the representative doctrine, that
it ought to stop short as soon as ever the religion, the learning, and
the wealth of a country are fairly represented; that in fact the poor
man thinks little of his vote, unless indeed in worse cases looking for
a bribe; and that the principle is pushed into ruinous absurdities when
the destitution, the crime, and the ignorance of a nation demand their
proper representatives; that, almost as a consequence of human average
depravity, the greater the franchise's extension, the worse in all ways
become those who impersonate the enfranchised; and so, after due
condemnation of Whiggery, to stultify Chartism, and that demoralizing
lie, the ballot. Then as to the squire's religion; and certain
confabulations with his parson, his household, his harvest-home
tenantry, and local preachers of dissent and schism; his creed,
practice, and favourable samples of daily life. Moreover, our squire
should have somewhat to tell of personal history and adventures; a youth
of poor dependence on a miser uncle; a storm-tost early manhood,
consequent on his high uncompromising principles; then the miser's
death, without the base injustice of that cruel will, which an
eleventh-hour penitence destroyed: the squire comes to his property,
marries his one old flame, effects reformations, attains popularity,
happiness, and other due prosperities. Anecdotes of particular passages,
as in affliction or in joy; his son lamed for life, or his house half
burnt down, his attack by highwaymen, or election for parliament. The
squire's general confidence in man, sympathy with frailties, and success
in regenerating long-lost characters. His discourse on field sports,
displaying the amiable intellectuality of a Gilbert White as opposed to
the blood-thirsty Nimrodism and Ramrodism of a mad Mytton. A marriage; a
funeral; a disputed legacy of some eccentric relative; with its
agreeable concomitants of heartless selfish strife, rebuked by the
squire's noble example: the conventicle gently put down by dint of
gradual desertions, and church-going as tenderly extended; vestry
demagogues and parochial incendiaries chastised by our squire; and
divers other adventures, conversations, situations, and conditions,
illustrative of that grand character, a fine old English gentleman, all
of the olden time.
Altogether, if well managed, a book like this would be calculated to do
substantial good in these days of no principle or bad principle. A
captivating example well applied--witness the uses of biography--is
infectious among the well-inclined and well-informed. But--but--but--I
fancy there may exist, and do exist already, admirable books of just
this character. I have heard of, but not seen, '_The Portrait of a
Christian Gentleman_,' and another '_of a Churchman_:' doubtless, these,
combined with a sort of Mr. Dovedale in that clever impossible
'_Floreston_,' or an equally unnatural and charming Sir Charles
Grandison, with a dash of scenery and a sprinkle of anecdote, would
make up, far better than I could fabricate, the fair fine character that
once I thought to sketch. Moreover, to a plain gentleman, living in the
country, of perfectly identical ideas with those of the squire on all
imaginable topics, gifted too (we will not say with quite his princely
rent-roll, but at any rate) with sundry like advantages in the way of
decent affluence, pleasant scenery, an old house, a good wife, and fair
children--with plenty of similar adventures and circumstantials--and the
necessary proportion of highwaymen, radicals, rascals, and schismatics
dotted all about his neighbourhood, the idea would seem, to say the
least, somewhat egotistic. But why may not humble individualities be
generalized in grander shapes? why not glorify the picture of a cottage
with colouring of Turner's most imaginative palette? An author, like an
artist, seldom does his work well unless he has nature before him:
exalted and idealized, the Roman beggar goes forth a Jupiter, and
country wenches help a Howard to his Naiads. Nevertheless, let the
Squire and his train pass us by, indefinite as Banquo's progeny: let his
beautiful home be sublimely indistinct; even such are Martin's aetherial
cities: the thought shall rest unfructified at present--a mummied, vital
seed. The review is over, and the Squire's troop of yeomanry not
required: so let them wait till next year's muster.
* * * * *
Few novelties are more called for, in this halcyon age of authorship,
this summer season for the Sosii, this every-day-a-birth-day for some
five-and-twenty books, than the establishment of a recognised literary
tribunal, some judgment-hall of master spirits, from whose calm,
unhurried, unbiased verdict, there should be no appeal. Far, very far be
it from me to arraign modern reviewers either of partialities or
incapacity; indeed, it is probable that few men of high talent,
character, and station, have not, at some time or other, temporarily at
least contributed to swell their ranks: moreover, from one they have
treated so magnanimously, they shall not get the wages of ingratitude;
they have been kind to my dear book-children, and I--_don't be so
curious_--thank them for their courtesy with all a father's feeling
toward the liberal friends of his sons and daughters. Speaking
generally, (for, not to flatter any class of men, truly there are rogues
in all,) I am bold to call them candid, honest, clever men; quite
superior, as a body, to every thing like bribery and corruption, and,
with human limitations, little influenced by motives, either of
prejudice or favour. For indefatigable industry, unexampled patience,
and powers of mind very far above what are commonly attributed to them,
I, for my humble judgment, would give our periodical journalists their
honourable due: I am playing no Aberdeenshire game of mutual scratching;
I am too hardened now in the ways of print to be much more than
indifferent as to common praise or censure; that honey-moon is over with
me, when a laudatory article in some kindly magazine sent a thrill from
eye to heart, from heart to shoe-sole understanding: I no longer feel
rancorous with inveterate wrath against a poor editor whose faint
praise, impotent to d---, has yet abundant force to induce a hearty
return of the compliment: like some case-hardened rock, so little while
ago but soft young coral, the surges may lash me, but leave no mark; the
sun may shine, but cannot melt me. Argal, as the clown says, is my
verdict honest: and further now to prove it so, shall come the
limitations.
With all my gratitude and right good feeling to our diurnal and
hebdomadal amusers and instructors, I cannot but consider that gazette
and newspaper reviewers are insufficient and unsatisfactory judges of
literature, if not indeed sometimes erring guides to the public taste;
the main cause of this consisting in the essential rapidity of their
composition. There is not--from the multiplicity of business to be got
through, there cannot be--adequate time allowed for any thing like
justice to the claims of each author. Periodicals that appear at longer
intervals are in all reason more or less excepted from this objection;
but by the daily and weekly majority, the labours of a life-time are
cursorily glanced at, hastily judged from some isolated passage,
summarily found laudable or guilty; and this weak opinion, strongly
enough expressed as some compensation in solid superstructure for the
sandiness of its foundations, is circulated by thousands over all
corners of the habitable world. To say that the public (those so-called
reviewers of reviews, but wiser to be looked on only as perusers,)
balance all such false verdicts, might indeed be true in the long run,
but unfortunately it is not: for first, no run at all, far less a long
one, is permitted to the persecuted production; and next, it is
notorious, that people think very much as they are told to think. Now, I
have already stated at too much length that I have no personalities to
complain of, no self-interests to serve: for the past I have been well
entreated; and for the future, supposing such an unlikelihood as more
hypothetical books, I am hard, bold, sanguine, stoical; while, as for
the present, though I refuse not my gauntlet to any man, my visor shall
be raised by none. But I enter the list for others, my kinsmen in
composing. Authors, to speak it generally, are an ill-used race, because
judged hastily, often superciliously, for evil or for good. It is
impossible for the poor public, (who, besides having to earn daily
bread, have to wade through all the daily papers,) from mere lack of
hours in the day, to entertain any opinions of their own about a book or
books: the money to buy them is one objection, the time to read them
another; to say less of the capacity, the patience, and the will.
Without question, they are guided by their teachers; and the grand fault
of these is, their everlasting hurry.
At another necessary failing of reviewers I would only delicately hint.
The royal We is very imposing; for example, the king of magazines, No.
134, (need I name it?) informs us, p. 373, "We happen to have now in
wear a good long coat of imperial gray," &c.; and some fifteen lines
lower down, "We are now mending our pen with a small knife," and so
forth: now all this grandiloquence serves to conceal the individual; and
to reduce my other great objection to a single letter, let us only
recollect that this powerful, this despotic We, is, being interpreted,
nothing but an I by itself, a simple scribe, a single and plebeian
number one. A mere unit, an anonymous, irresponsible unit, dissects in a
quarter of an hour the grand result of some ten years; and this
momentary influence on one man's mind, (perhaps wearied, or piqued, or
biased, or haply unskilled in the point at issue, but at all events
inevitably in a hurry to jump at a conclusion,) this light accidental
impression is sounded forth to the ends of the earth, and leads public
opinion in a verdict of thunder. And as for yon impertinent
parenthesis--or pertinent, as some will say--give me grace thus blandly
to suggest a possibility. The mighty editorial We, upon whose
authoritative tones the world's opinion will probably be pivoted--whose
pen by casual ridicule or as casual admiration makes or mars the fortune
of some pains-taking literary labourer--whose dictum carelessly
dispenses local honour or disgrace, and has before now by sharp
sarcasms, speaking daggers though using none, even killed more than one
over-sensitive Keats--this monarchic We is but a frail mortal, liable at
least to "some of the imperfections of our common nature, gentlemen,"
as, for example, to be morose, impatient, splenetic, and the more if
over-worked. Neither should I waive in this place, in this my rostrum of
blunt, plain speech, the many censurable cases, unhappily too well
authenticated, where personal enmity has envenomed the reviewing pen
against a writer, and stabs in the dark have wounded good men's fame.
Neither, again, those other instances where reviewers, not being
omniscient, (yet is their knowledge most various and brilliant,) having
been from want of specific information incompetent to judge of the
matters in question, have striven to shroud their ignorance of the
greater topic in clamorous attacks of its minor incidents; burrowing
into a mound if they cannot force a breach through the rampart; and
mystifying things so cleverly with doubts, that we cannot see the
blessed sun himself for very fog.
Now really, good folk, all this should be amended: would that the
WE were actually plural; would that we had a well-selected
bench of literary judges; would that some higher sort of Stationers'
Hall or Athenaeum were erected into an acknowledged tribunal of an
author's merits or demerits; would that, to wish the very least, the
wholesome practice of a well-considered imprimatur were revived! Let
famous men, whose reputation is firm-fixed--our Wordsworths, Hallams,
Campbells, Crolys, Wilsons, Bulwers, and the like--decide in the case of
at least all who desire such decision. I suppose, as no one in these
selfish times will take trouble without pay, that either the judges
should be numbered among state pensioners, or that each work so
calmly examined must produce its regular fee: but these are
after-considerations; and be sure no writer will grudge a guinea for
calm, unbought, unsuspected justice bestowed upon his brain-child. Let
all those members of the tribunal, deciding by ballot, (here in an
assembly where all are good, great, and honest, I shrink not from that
word of evil omen,) judge, as far as possible, together and not
separately, of all kinds of literature: I would not have poets
sentencing all the poetry, historians all the history, novelists all the
novels, and theologists all the works upon religion; for humanity is at
the best infirm, and motives little searchable; but let all judge
equally in a sort of open court. The machinery might be difficult, and I
cannot show its workings in so slight an essay; but surely it is a
strange thing in civilization, and a stranger when we consider what
literature does for us, blessing our world or banning it--it is a wonder
and a shame that books of whatever tendency are so cast forth upon the
waters to sink or swim at hazard. I acknowledge, friend, your present
muttering, Utopian! Arcadian! Formosan! to be not ill-founded: the
sketch is a hasty one; but though it may have somewhat in common with
the vagaries of Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and that king in
impudence, George Psalmanazar, still I stand upon this ground, that many
an ill-used author wants protection, and that society, for its own sake
as well as his, ought to supply a court for literary reputation. Some
poor man the other day, and in a reputable journal too, had five
new-born tragedies strangled and mangled in as many lines: we need not
suppose him a Shakspeare, but he might have been one for aught of
evidence given to the contrary; at any rate, five at once, five mortal
tragedies, (so puppy-fashion born and drowned,) must, however carelessly
executed, have been the offspring of no common mind. Again, how often is
not a laborious historiographer, particularly if of contrary politics,
dismissed with immediate contempt, because, perchance, in his three full
volumes, he has admitted two false dates, or haply mistakes the
christened name of some Spanish admiral! Once more, how continually are
not critical judgments falsified by the very extracts on which they
rest! how often the pet passage of one review is the stock butt of
another! Here you will say is cure and malady together, like viper's fat
and fang: I trow not; mainly because not one man in a thousand takes the
trouble to judge for himself. But it is needless to enumerate such
instances; every man's conscience or his memory will supply examples
wholesale: therefore, maltreated authors, bear witness to your own
wrongs: jealously regarded by a struggling brotherhood, cruelly baited
by self-constituted critics, the rejected of publishers, the victimized
by booksellers, the garbled in statement, misinterpreted in meaning,
suspected of friends, persecuted by foes--"O that mine enemy would write
a book!" It is to put a neck into a noose, to lie quietly in the grove
of Dr. Guillot's humane prescription: or, if not quite so tragical as
this, it is at least to sit voluntarily in the stocks with Sir Hudibras,
and dare the world's contempt; while fashionable--or unfashionable
idiots, who are scarcely capable of a grammatical answer to a dinner
invitation, (those formidably confounded he's and him's!)--think
themselves privileged to join some inane laugh against a clever, but not
yet famous, author, because, forsooth, one character in his novel may be
an old acquaintance, or one epithet in a long poem may be weak,
indelicate, tasteless, or foolish, or one philosophical fact in an essay
is misstated, or one statistical conclusion seems to be exaggerated. It
is perfectly paltry to behold stupid fellows, whose intellects against
your most ordinary scribe vary from a rush-light to a "long four," as
compared with a roasting, roaring kitchen-fire, affecting contemptuously
to look down upon some unjustly neglected or mercilessly castigated
labourer in the brick-fields of literature, for not being--can he help
it?--a first-rate author, or because one reviewer in seven thinks he
might have done his subject better justice. Take my word for it--if
indeed I can be a fair witness--the man who has written a book, is above
the unwriting average, and, as such, should be ranked mentally above
them: no light research, and tact, and industry, and head-and-hand
labour, are sufficient for a volume; even certain stolid performances in
print do not shake my judgment; for arrant blockheads as sundry authors
undoubtedly are, the average (mark, not all men, but the average)
unwriting man is an author's intellectual inferior. All men, however
well capable, have not perchance the appetite, nor the industry, nor the
opportunity to fabricate a volume; nor, supposing these requisites, the
moral courage (for moral courage, if not physical, must form part of an
author's mind,) to publish the lucubration: but "I magnify mine office"
above the unnumbered host of unwriting, uninformed, loose, unlettered
gentry, who (as full of leisure as a cabbage, and as overflowing with
redundant impudence as any Radical mob,) mainly tend to form by their
masses the average penless animal-man, who could not hold a candle to
any the most mediocre of the Marsyas-used authors of haply this week's
journals. Spare them, victorious Apollos, spare! if libels that diminish
wealth be punishable, is there no moral guilt in those legalized libels
that do their utmost to destroy a character for wisdom, wit, learning,
industry, and invention?--Critical flayer, try thou to write a book;
learn experimentally how difficult, yet relieving; how nervous, yet
gladdening; how ungracious, yet very sweet; how worldly-foolish, yet
most wise; how conversant with scorn, yet how noble and ennobling an
attribute of man, is--authorship.
All this rhetoric, impatient friend--and be a friend still, whether
writer, reviewer, or unauthorial--serves at my most expeditious pace,
opposing notions considered, to introduce what is (till to-morrow, or
perhaps the next coming minute, but at any rate for this flitting
instant of time,) my last notion of possible, but not probable,
authorship: a rhodomontade oration, rather than an essay, after my own
desultory and yet determinate fashion, to have been entituled--so is it
spelled by act of parliament, and therefore let us in charity hope
rightly--to have been entituled then,