judicial swagger strikes us now as rather absurd, and we feel that he is
passing sentence on bigger men than himself, he does fairly enough. But,
unluckily, the 'Edinburgh' wanted a butt. All lively critical journals,
it would seem, resemble the old-fashioned squires who kept a badger
ready to be baited whenever a little amusement was desirable. The rising
school of Lake poets, with their austere professions and real
weaknesses, was just the game to show a little sport; and, accordingly,
poor Jeffrey blundered into grievous misapprehensions, and has survived
chiefly by his worst errors. The simple fact is, that he accepted
whatever seemed to a hasty observer to be the safest opinion, that which
was current in the most orthodox critical circles, and expressed it with
rather more point than his neighbours. But his criticism implies no
serious thought or any deeper sentiment than pleasure at having found a
good laughing-stock. The most unmistakable bit of genuine expression of
his own feelings in Jeffrey's writings is, I think, to be found in his
letters to Dickens. 'Oh! my dear, dear Dickens!' he exclaims, 'what a
No. 5' (of 'Dombey and Son') 'you have now given us. I have so cried and
sobbed over it last night and again this morning, and felt my heart
purified by those tears, and blessed and loved you for making me shed
them; and I never can bless and love you enough. Since that divine Nelly
was found dead on her humble couch, beneath the snow and ivy, there has
been nothing like the actual dying of that sweet Paul in the summer
sunshine of that lofty room.' The emotion is a little senile, and most
of us think it exaggerated; but at least it is genuine. The earlier
thunders of the 'Edinburgh Review' have lost their terrors, because they
are in fact mere echoes of commonplace opinion. They are often clever
enough, and have all the air of judicial authority, but we feel that
they are empty shams, concealing no solid core of strong personal
feeling even of the perverse variety. The critic has been asking
himself, not 'What do I feel?' but 'What is the correct remark to make?'
Jeffrey's political writing suggests, I think, in some respects a higher
estimate of his merits. He has not, it is true, very strong convictions,
but his sentiments are liberal in the better sense of the word, and he
has a more philosophical tone than is usual with English publicists. He
appreciates the truths, now become commonplace, that the political
constitution of the country should be developed so as to give free play
for the underlying social forces without breaking abruptly with the old
traditions. He combats with dignity the narrow prejudices which led to a
policy of rigid repression, and which, in his opinion, could only lead
to revolution. But the effect of his principles is not a little marred
by a certain timidity both of character and intellect. Hopefulness
should be the mark of an ardent reformer, and Jeffrey seems to be always
decided by his fears. His favourite topic is the advantage of a strong
middle party, for he is terribly afraid of a collision between the two
extremes; he can only look forward to despotism if the Tories triumph,
and a sweeping revolution if they are beaten. Meanwhile, for many years
he thinks it most probable that both parties will be swallowed up by the
common enemy. Never was there such a determined croaker. In 1808 he
suspects that Bonaparte will be in Dublin in about fifteen months, when
he, if he survives, will try to go to America. In 1811 he expects
Bonaparte to be in Ireland in eighteen months, and asks how England can
then be kept, and whether it would be worth keeping? France is certain
to conquer the Continent, and our interference will only 'exasperate and
accelerate.' Bonaparte's invasion of Russia in 1813 made him still more
gloomy. He rejoiced at the French defeat as one delivered from a great
terror, but the return of the Emperor dejects him again. All he can say
of the war (just before Waterloo) is that he is 'mortally afraid of it,'
and that he hates Bonaparte 'because he makes me more afraid than
anybody else.' In 1829 he anticipates 'tragical scenes' and a sanguinary
revolution; in 1821 he thinks as ill as ever 'of the state and prospects
of the country,' though with less alarm of speedy mischief; and in 1822
he looks forward to revolutionary wars all over the Continent, from
which we may possibly escape by reason of our 'miserable poverty;'
whilst it is probable that our old tyrannies and corruptions will last
for some 4,000 or 5,000 years longer.
A stalwart politician, Whig or Tory, is rarely developed out of a Mr.
Much-Afraid or a Mr. Despondency; they are too closely related to Mr.
Facing-both-Ways. Jeffrey thinks it generally a duty to conceal his
fears and affect a confidence which he does not feel; but perhaps the
best piece of writing in his essays is that in which he for once gives
full expression to his pessimist sentiment. It occurs in a review of a
book in which Madame de Staël maintains the doctrine of human
perfectibility. Jeffrey explains his more despondent view in a really
eloquent passage. He thinks that the increase of educated intelligence
will not diminish the permanent causes of human misery. War will be as
common as ever, wealth will be used with at least equal selfishness,
luxury and dissipation will increase, enthusiasm will diminish,
intellectual originality will become rarer, the division of labour will
make men's lives pettier and more mechanical, and pauperism grow with
the development of manufactures. When republishing his essays Jeffrey
expresses his continued adherence to these views, and they are more
interesting than most of his work, because they have at least the merits
of originality and sincerity. Still, one cannot help observing that if
the 'Edinburgh Review' was an efficient organ of progress, it was not
from any ardent faith in progress entertained by its chief conductor.
It is a relief to turn from Jeffrey to Sydney Smith. The highest epithet
applicable to Jeffrey is 'clever,' to which we may prefix some modest
intensitive. He is a brilliant, versatile, and at bottom liberal and
kindly man of the world; but he never gets fairly beyond the border-line
which irrevocably separates lively talent from original power. There are
dozens of writers who could turn out work on the same pattern and about
equally good. Smith, on the other hand, stamps all his work with his
peculiar characteristics. It is original and unmistakable; and in a
certain department--not, of course, a very high one--he has almost
unique merits. I do not think that the 'Plymley Letters' can be
surpassed by anything in the language as specimens of the terse,
effective treatment of a great subject in language suitable for popular
readers. Of course they have no pretence to the keen polish of Junius,
or the weight of thought of Burke, or the rhetorical splendours of
Milton; but their humour, freshness, and spirit are inimitable. The
'Drapier Letters,' to which they have often been compared, were more
effective at the moment; but no fair critic can deny, I think, that
Sydney Smith's performance is now more interesting than Swift's.
The comparison between the Dean and the Canon is an obvious one, and has
often been made. There is a likeness in the external history of the two
clergymen who both sought for preferment through politics, and were
both, even by friends, felt to have sinned against professional
proprieties, and were put off with scanty rewards in consequence. Both,
too, were masters of a vigorous style, and original humourists. But the
likeness does not go very deep. Swift had the most powerful intellect
and the strongest passion as undeniably as Smith had the sweetest
nature. The admirable good-humour with which Smith accepted his position
and devoted himself to honest work in an obscure country parish, is the
strongest contrast with Swift's misanthropical seclusion; and nothing
can be less like than Smith's admirable domestic history and the
mysterious love affairs with Stella and Vanessa. Smith's character
reminds us more closely of Fuller, whose peculiar humour is much of the
same stamp; and who, falling upon hard times, and therefore tinged by a
more melancholy sentiment, yet showed the same unconquerable
cheerfulness and intellectual vivacity.
Most of Sydney Smith's 'Edinburgh' articles are of a very slight
texture, though the reader is rewarded by an occasional turn of
characteristic quaintness. The criticism is of the most simple-minded
kind; but here and there crops up a comment which is irresistibly comic.
Here, for example, is a quaint passage from a review of Waterton's
'Wanderings:'--
How astonishing are the freaks and fancies of nature! To
what purpose, we say, is a bird placed in the woods of
Cayenne, with a bill a yard long, making a noise like a
puppy-dog, and laying eggs in hollow trees? To be sure, the
toucan might retort, To what purpose were gentlemen in Bond
Street created? To what purpose were certain members of
Parliament created, pestering the House of Commons with
their ignorance and folly, and impeding the business of the
country? There is no end of such questions. So we will not
enter into the metaphysics of the toucan.
Smith's humour is most aptly used to give point to the vigorous logic of
a thoroughly healthy nature, contemptuous of all nonsense, full of
shrewd common-sense, and righteously indignant in the presence of all
injustice and outworn abuse. It would be difficult to find anywhere a
more brilliant assault upon the prejudices which defend established
grievances than the inimitable 'Noodle's Oration,' into which Smith has
compressed the pith of Bentham's 'Book of Fallacies.' There is a certain
resemblance between the logic of Smith and Macaulay, both of whom, it
must be admitted, are rather given to proving commonplaces and inclined
to remain on the surface of things. Smith, like Macaulay, fully
understands the advantage of putting the concrete for the abstract, and
hammering obvious truths into men's heads by dint of homely
explanation. Smith's memory does not supply so vast a store of parallels
as that upon which Macaulay could draw so freely; but his humorous
illustrations are more amusing and effective. There could not be a
happier way of putting the argument for what may be called the lottery
system of endowments than the picture of the respectable baker driving
past Northumberland House to St. Paul's Churchyard, and speculating on
the chance of elevating his 'little muffin-faced son' to a place among
the Percies or the highest seat in the Cathedral. Macaulay would have
enforced his reasoning by a catalogue of successful ecclesiastics. The
folly of alienating Catholic sympathies, during our great struggle, by
maintaining the old disabilities, is brought out with equal skill by the
apologue in the 'Plymley Letters' of the orthodox captain of a frigate
in a dangerous action, securing twenty or thirty of his crew, who
happened to be Papists, under a Protestant guard; reminding his sailors,
in a bitter harangue, that they are of different religions; exhorting
the Episcopal gunner to distrust the Presbyterian quartermaster; rushing
through blood and brains to examine his men in the Thirty-nine Articles,
and forbidding anyone to spunge or ram who has not taken the sacrament
according to the rites of the Church of England. It is quite another
question whether Smith really penetrates to the bottom of the dispute;
but the only fault to be found with his statement of the case, as he saw
it, is that it makes it rather too clear. The arguments are never all on
one side in any political question, and the writer who sees absolutely
no difficulty, suggests to a wary reader that he is ignoring something
relevant. Still, this is hardly an objection to a popular advocate, and
it is fair to add that Smith's logic is not more admirable than the
hearty generosity of his sympathy with the oppressed Catholic. The
appeal to cowardice is lost in the appeal to true philanthropic
sentiment.
With all his merits, there is a less favourable side to Smith's
advocacy. When he was condemned as being too worldly and facetious for a
priest, it was easy to retort that humour is not of necessity
irreligious. It might be added that in his writings it is strictly
subservient to solid argument. In a London party he might throw the
reins upon the neck of his fancy and go on playing with a ludicrous
image till his audience felt the agony of laughter to be really painful.
In his writings he aims almost as straight at his mark as Swift, and is
never diverted by the spirit of pure fun. The humour always illuminates
well-strung logic. But the scandal was not quite groundless. When he
directs his powers against sheer obstruction and antiquated
prejudice--against abuses in prisons, or the game-laws, or education--we
can have no fault to find; nor is it fair to condemn a reviewer because
in all these questions he is a follower rather than a leader. It is
enough if he knows a good cause when he sees it, and does his best to
back up reformers in the press, though hardly a working reformer, and
certainly not an originator of reform. But it is less easy to excuse his
want of sympathy for the reformers themselves.
If there is one thing which Sydney Smith dreads and dislikes, it is
enthusiasm. Nobody would deny, at the present day, that the zeal which
supplied the true leverage for some of the greatest social reforms of
the time was to be found chiefly amongst the so-called Evangelicals and
Methodists. For them Smith has nothing but the heartiest aversion. He is
always having a quiet jest at the religious sentiments of Perceval or
Wilberforce, and his most prominent articles in the 'Review' were a
series of inexcusably bitter attacks upon the Methodists. He is
thoroughly alarmed and disgusted by their progress. He thinks them
likely to succeed, and says that, if they succeed, 'happiness will be
destroyed, reason degraded, and sound religion banished from the world,'
and that a reign of fanaticism will be succeeded by 'a long period of
the grossest immorality, atheism, and debauchery.' He is not sure that
any remedy or considerable palliative is possible, but he suggests, as
hopeful, the employment of ridicule, and applies it himself most
unsparingly. When the Methodists try to convert the Hindoos, he attacks
them furiously for endangering the empire. They naturally reply that a
Christian is bound to propagate his belief. The answer, says Smith, is
short: 'It is not Christianity which is introduced (into India), but the
debased nonsense and mummery of the Methodists, which has little more to
do with the Christian religion than it has to do with the religion of
China.' The missionaries, he says, are so foolish, 'that the natives
almost instinctively duck and pelt them,' as, one cannot help
remembering, missionaries of an earlier Christian era had been ducked
and pelted. He pronounces the enterprise to be hopeless and cruel, and
clenches his argument by a statement which sounds strangely enough in
the mouth of a sincere Christian:--
Let us ask (he says), if the Bible is universally diffused
in Hindostan, what must be the astonishment of the natives
to find that we are forbidden to rob, murder, and steal--we
who, in fifty years, have extended our empire from a few
acres about Madras over the whole peninsula and sixty
millions of people, and exemplified in our public conduct
every crime of which human nature is capable? What matchless
impudence, to follow up such practice with such precepts! If
we have common prudence, let us keep the gospel at home, and
tell them that Machiavel is our prophet and the god of the
Manichæans our god.
We are to make our practice consistent by giving up our virtues instead
of our vices. Of course, Smith ends his article by a phrase about 'the
slow, solid, and temperate introduction of Christianity;' but the
Methodists might well feel that the 'matchless impudence' was not all on
their side, and that this Christian priest, had he lived some centuries
earlier, would have sympathised a good deal more with Gallio than with
St. Paul.
It is a question which I need not here discuss how far Smith could be
justified in his ridicule of men who, with all their undeniable
absurdity, were at least zealous believers in the creed which he--as is
quite manifest--held in all sincerity. But one remark is obvious; the
Edinburgh Reviewers justify, to a certain point, the claim put forward
by Sydney Smith; they condemned many crying abuses, and condemned them
heartily. They condemned them, as thoroughly sensible men of the world,
animated partly by a really generous sentiment, partly by a tacit
scepticism as to the value of the protected interests, and above all by
the strong conviction that it was quite essential for the middle
party--that is, for the bulk of the respectable well-bred classes--to
throw overboard gross abuses which afforded so many points of attack to
thoroughgoing radicals. On the other hand, they were quite indifferent
or openly hostile to most of the new forces which stirred men's minds.
They patronised political economy because Malthus began by opposing the
revolutionary dreams of Godwin and his like. But every one of the great
impulses of the time was treated by them in an antagonistic spirit. They
savagely ridiculed Coleridge, the great seminal mind of one
philosophical school; they fiercely attacked Bentham and James Mill, the
great leaders of the antagonist school; they were equally opposed to
the Evangelicals who revered Wilberforce, and, in later times, to the
religious party, of which Dr. Newman was the great ornament: in poetry
they clung, as long as they could, to the safe old principles
represented by Crabbe and Rogers: they, covered Wordsworth and Coleridge
with almost unmixed ridicule, ignored Shelley, and were only tender to
Byron and Scott because Scott and Byron were fashionable idols. The
truth is, that it is a mistake to suppose that the eighteenth century
ended with the year 1800. It lasted in the upper currents of opinion
till at least 1832. Sydney Smith's theology is that of Paley and the
common-sense divines of the previous period. Jeffrey's politics were but
slightly in advance of the true old Whigs, who still worshipped
according to the tradition of their fathers in Holland House. The ideal
of the party was to bring the practice of the country up to the theory
whose main outlines had been accepted in the Revolution of 1688; and
they studiously shut their eyes to any newer intellectual and social
movements.
I do not say this by way of simple condemnation; for we have daily more
reason to acknowledge the immense value of calm, clear common-sense,
which sees the absurd side of even the best impulses. But it is
necessary to bear the fact in mind when estimating such claims as those
put forward by Sydney Smith. The truth seems to be that the 'Edinburgh
Review' enormously raised the tone of periodical literature at the time,
by opening an arena for perfectly independent discussion. Its great
merit, at starting, was that it was no mere publisher's organ, like its
rivals, and that it paid contributors well enough to attract the most
rising talent of the day. As the 'Review' progressed, its capacities
became more generally understood, and its writers, as they rose to
eminence and attracted new allies, put more genuine work into articles
certain to obtain a wide circulation and to come with great authority.
This implies a long step towards the development of the present system,
whose merits and defects would deserve a full discussion--the system
according to which much of the most solid and original work of the time
first appears in periodicals. The tone of periodicals has been
enormously raised, but the effect upon general literature may be more
questionable. But the 'Edinburgh' was not in its early years a journal
with a mission, or the organ of an enthusiastic sect. Rather it was the
instrument used by a number of very clever young men to put forward the
ideas current in the more liberal section of the upper classes, with
much occasional vigour and a large infusion of common-sense, but also
with abundant flippancy and superficiality, and, in a literary sense,
without that solidity of workmanship which is essential for enduring
vitality.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] Scott's letter, stating that this overture had been made by Jeffrey
under terror of the 'Quarterly,' was first published in Lockhart's 'Life
of Scott.' Jeffrey denied that he could ever have made the offer, both
because his contributors were too independent and because he had always
considered politics to be (as he remembered to have told Scott) the
'right leg' of the 'Review.' Undoubtedly, though Scott's letter was
written at the time and Jeffrey's contradiction many years afterwards,
it seems that Scott must have exaggerated. And yet in Horner's 'Memoirs'
we find a letter from Jeffrey which goes far to show that there was more
than might be supposed to confirm Scott's statement. Jeffrey begs for
Horner's assistance in the 'day of need,' caused by the Cevallos article
and the threatened 'Quarterly.' He tells Horner that he may write upon
any subject he pleases--'only no party politics, and nothing but
exemplary moderation and impartiality on all politics. I have allowed
too much mischief to be done from my mere indifference and love of
sport; but it would be inexcusable to spoil the powerful instrument we
have got hold of for the sake of teasing and playing tricks.'--Horner's
_Memoirs_, i. 439. It was on the occasion of the Cevallos article that
the Earl of Buchan solemnly kicked the 'Review' from his study into the
street--a performance which he supposed would be fatal to its
circulation.
[22] See Mill's _Autobiography_, p. 92, for an interesting account of
these articles.
[23] It would appear, from one of Jeffrey's statements, that Brougham
selfishly hung back till after the third number of the 'Review,' and its
'assured success' (Horner's _Memoirs_, i. p. 186, and Macvey Napier's
_Correspondence_, p. 422); from another, that Brougham, though anxious
to contribute, was excluded by Sydney Smith, from prudential motives. On
the other hand, Brougham in his autobiography claims (by name) seven
articles in the first number, five in the second, eight in the third,
and five in the fourth; in five of which he had a collaborator. His
hesitation, he says, ended before the appearance of the first number,
and was due to doubts as to Jeffrey's possession of sufficient editorial
power.
_WORDSWORTH'S ETHICS_
Under every poetry, it has been said, there lies a philosophy. Rather,
it may almost be said, every poetry is a philosophy. The poet and the
philosopher live in the same world and are interested in the same
truths. What is the nature of man and the world in which he lives, and
what, in consequence, should be our conduct? These are the great
problems, the answers to which may take a religious, a poetical, a
philosophical, or an artistic form. The difference is that the poet has
intuitions, while the philosopher gives demonstrations; that the thought
which in one mind is converted into emotion, is in the other resolved
into logic; and that a symbolic representation of the idea is
substituted for a direct expression. The normal relation is exhibited in
the case of the anatomist and the sculptor. The artist intuitively
recognises the most perfect form; the man of science analyses the
structural relations by which it is produced. Though the two provinces
are concentric, they are not coincident. The reasoner is interested in
many details which have no immediate significance for the man of
feeling; and the poetic insight, on the other hand, is capable of
recognising subtle harmonies and discords of which our crude instruments
of weighing and measuring are incapable of revealing the secret. But the
connection is so close that the greatest works of either kind seem to
have a double nature. A philosophy may, like Spinoza's, be apparelled
in the most technical and abstruse panoply of logic, and yet the total
impression may stimulate a religious sentiment as effectively as any
poetic or theosophic mysticism. Or a great imaginative work, like
Shakespeare's, may present us with the most vivid concrete symbols, and
yet suggest, as forcibly as the formal demonstrations of a
metaphysician, the idealist conviction that the visible and tangible
world is a dream-woven tissue covering infinite and inscrutable
mysteries. In each case the highest intellectual faculty manifests
itself in the vigour with which certain profound conceptions of the
world and life have been grasped and assimilated. In each case that man
is greatest who soars habitually to the highest regions and gazes most
steadily upon the widest horizons of time and space. The logical
consistency which frames all dogmas into a consistent whole, is but
another aspect of the imaginative power which harmonises the strongest
and subtlest emotions excited.