A group of English essayists of the early nineteenth century

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The New Essay — Jeffrey as Critic i

THE NEW ESSAY — JEFFREY AS CRITIC

II

It must be admitted that in all this early critical writing there are but very few papers that will find a place among English classics. Southey furnished to the Quarterly a body of solid and sensible prose writing, mostly on political subjects, and all of it now dusty and dead. Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly, was a dull-sighted, thick-skinned, heavyhanded critic, with little acumen and no delicacy, who richly deserved the flogging he got from Hazlitt. He liked to pose as a literary judge and executioner, but he wrote comparatively little himself, and that little was never of much value. Of the Edinburgh men, Brougham, though a vigorous and careless writer, was never ambitious of literary repute. Sydney Smith was unsurpassed as a wit, raconteur, letter-writer; but his papers in the Edinburgh are mostly on ecclesiastical and political topics, and only two or three of them show him at his best. The critic among the reviewers was Francis Jeffrey. From 1802 to about 1830 he was accounted beyond question the first of literary critics. As the century advanced, his fame declined. His obstinate and contemptuous depreciation of Wordsworth was remembered against him when the poet had come to his own. There were a good many irreverent people of the later generation who thought his criticism, when not commonplace, merely smart. Yet as late as 1867 Carlyle pronounced him "by no means supreme in criticism or in anything else ; but it is certain that no critic has appeared among us since worth naming beside him." And only the other day, in an able and discriminating study, Professor Gates * was protesting against the neglect of Jeffrey's good work in Jeffrey's own famous words "This will never do!"

It is easy to understand Jeffrey's contemporary popularity. In the first place, he wrote a clear, rapid, fluent English. Doubtless he is sometimes

1 Three Studies in Literature, 1899. II too fluent and makes a little philosophy go a long way ; but his style has a metallic brilliancy, not unlike that of his admirer, Macaulay. He knows how to say telling things, and he has infinite store of illustration. Then, too, like Macaulay, he is always cock-sure — which is pleasing in a critic. His sweeping assertions, his lavish use of the superlative and the unusual, give to his writing a magisterial air that most readers find very satisfying. Provided he agrees with us, — and Jeffrey never differed boldly with current opinion, — we like the critic to tell us authoritatively how we ought to feel about a book, and why we ought to feel so. We compliment ourselves on having reached substantially a sound judgment without his aid; and the loftier the critic, the greater the compliment of his agreement with us.

Then Jeffrey's criticism has always a certain hard common sense. It is clear and sane, level to the comprehension of everybody. There is nothing subtle in it. He never goes much below the surface, and cannot give you those penetrating glimpses that sometimes illuminate the whole of an author's work. He likes his meaning plain and his emotions familiar. Anything profound, mystical, or even strikingly original is likely to put him out. He emerges from the farther end of one of Wordsworth's long passages of transcendentalism blinking and angry. But the large, obvious excellences of thought and feeling, which all men perceive, he can state and appraise with intelligence and justice. He is best, therefore, on such objective writers as Scott; best of all, I think, on books like Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoirs or Pepys' Diary, that present no problems, and invite narrative treatment with copious illustrative quotations. But even in his most unsympathetic reviews, like those on the Lake School, his opinions, however blind, have a plausibility that recommends them to average prosaic common sense. He is never perverse or paradoxical of set purpose.

Jeffrey's method, unlike that of most recent critics, is dogmatic, never exactly what we have come to call impressionist. The modern critic strives to suggest the total effect upon himself of the work under review; to make you feel as the work has made him feel. He is the medium through which you are to be put en rapport with the author. Jeffrey's method is altogether different. He does not aim to give you an appreciation of the book, but an estimate of it. This is an intellectual process, a judicial process, the application of principles to reach a verdict. All Jeffrey's criticism is in this manner; he is always proving, expounding, defending. This method not only tends to conventional decisions, but it is unlikely to produce writing of the highest literary quality. For it does not appeal to our sympathy, but to our judgment ; and it gives to the critic little room for the play of imagination or the expression of his own personality.

It is this method that determines the favorite form of Jeffrey's critical articles; for they are nearly all built on the same plan. They begin with an elaborate introduction, which often takes up about a third of the paper. This introduction is devoted either to a re'sume" of some period of literary history or to a statement of general principles on which his specific critical judgments are to be based ; then follows, for the rest of the paper, a detailed estimate of the book, usually with copious excerpts to illustrate and enforce the verdict. These introductions, when of the historical sort, are usually correct in their facts, but they are superficial and show little sense of the deeper relations of literature to history. For instance, the sketch of the course of English poetry that precedes the review of Ford's Dramatic Works is an interesting sketch of the elementary external facts of English literary history for two centuries; but it is almost entirely without those illuminating glimpses that prove keen critical insight, and it gives you no clear notion of the ways in which the changing national life embodies itself in literature. In the instance mentioned, as in some others, the first part of the essay seems to have little connection with the rest — the introduction does not introduce. Similar comment might be made on the opening sections of the reviews of Campbell's English Poets and of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Such passages are of interest as showing that Jeffrey had some dawning conception of an historical method in criticism; but he hardly had more. And he seemed quite unable to apply any such method to the literature of his own day. One would have thought, for example, that in the poetry of Byron and its wonderful vogue all over Europe, Jeffrey might have seen and pointed out some significant expression of the spirit of the age ; but it cannot be said that he ever did.

The other kind of introduction, that is taken up with general critical principles, is often still more disappointing. For this formidable array of truths, which would seem to make the conclusion drawn from them quite irresistible, turns out on examination to be only the generalized expression of Francis Jeffrey's personal likes and dislikes, a set of high priori statements all out of his own head. He always assumes himself to be the representative of those instructed few who have authority on matters of taste, and he mistakes the limitations of his own appreciation for general laws. A good many critics, I am afraid, do that ; but Jeffrey shakes still more our confidence in the stability of his judgment, not merely by the jaunty facility with which he lays down general principles, but by his unlucky denial, now and

i5 then, of some statement assumed as an eternal truth only a little while before. Thus, writing in April, 1810, an elaborate review on the poetry of Crabbe, he declares that we are all "touched more deeply as well as more frequently in real life with the sufferings of peasants than of princes . . . and an effort to interest in the feelings of the humble and obscure will call forth more deep, more numerous, and more permanent emotions than can be excited by the fortunes of princesses and heroes"; but four months later, having to explain the wonderful popularity of Scott, he decides that it is mostly due to his subject, and that "kings, warriors, knights, outlaws, minstrels, secluded damsels and true lovers" are the sort of persons to appeal to the general poetic sense. And his whole a priori explanation of the conditions of poetic popularity was, two years later, overset by the meteoric fame of Byron on quite different grounds. In the essay on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Jeffrey declares that "human nature is everywhere fundamentally the same"; in the review of Baber's Memoirs , two years later, he decides that there is "a natural and inherent difference in the character and temperament of the European and Asiatic races." One who goes straight through his essays will come upon a considerable number of such contradictions. Jeffrey's general principles we suspect are mostly made to order. He first makes up his decision upon the work under review, quite empirically, and then frames a set of universal truths to justify his decision. Mr. Leslie Stephen, indeed, goes so far as to say that Jeffrey had no real taste of his own at all, and is always asking himself, not "What do I feel?" but "What is the correct remark to make?" But this seems to me unfair. Jeffrey, I should rather say, is always asking himself "Why ought I to feel as I do?" He has a very genuine, though limited, appreciation, and is bent on justifying it.

His various likes and dislikes are curious, and often apparently irreconcilable. Yet a little reflection will show how they all spring from a common ground of temperament. Jeffrey, if I understand him, was a singular combination — I can hardly say compound — of sense and sensibility. His emotions were easy to get at; but they were checked by anything improbable, by any shock to his prosaic sense of fact. He sincerely professed enthusiastic admiration for the romantic literature of the sixteenth century, especially the Elizabethan drama, which, he says, "I have long worshipped with a kind of idolatrous veneration"; but for the romantic literature of his own day, he had a very qualified liking. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner seems always to have been to him nothing better than an old sailor's foolish yarn; of Christabel he says — or, at all events, allowed the Edinburgh to say, in a review always attributed c 17 to him — that " the thing is utterly destitute of value, a mixture of raving and drivelling . . . beneath criticism." His estimate of Scott was forced up by the pressure of public opinion; but of Marmion he could say, in 1808 : " We must remind our readers that we never entertained much partiality for this sort of composition, and ventured on a former occasion to regret that an author endowed with such talents should consume them in imitation of obsolete extravagances. . . . To write a modern romance of chivalry seems to be much such a phantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda."

On the other hand, for the work of Crabbe, the most merciless of realists, he always had a great admiration. Here, he said, are the facts of life. These farmers and shopkeepers and workhouse folk are the real thing; they "represent the common people of England pretty much as they are" — not as Mr. Wordsworth's philosophical peddlers, and sententious leech-gatherers, and hysterical school masters. In a word, Jeffrey liked romanticism, — as he understood it, — and he liked realism ; but he did not like them mixed. The romantic writers, he would say, may fairly abandon the present and the actual; but to throw the hues of imagination on the facts of common life, as Wordsworth attempted to do, this was merely to falsify the facts without illuminating them. So, too, he objects to the conventional poetic dic- 18 tion of the eighteenth century on precisely the same grounds as Wordsworth in his famous preface, and sometimes in almost the same words. He praises Cowper without stint as the first to abandon that diction and to break away from all rigid poetic convention. Yet not the most finical classicist of the eighteenth century could have had greater dread of anything rude or undignified. Wordsworth's simplicity he accounts vulgar and puling; and he shudders politely over such very mild improprieties as the guard-room talk of the soldiers in the Lady of the Lake. One wonders how he would have survived a reading of — let us say — some of Rudyard Kipling's ballads. The one poet most entirely to his liking was Campbell, always proper and always sentimental. "We rejoice," he says, in opening his review of the Gertrude of Wyoming, "to see once more a polished and pathetic poem;" though he fears it may not appeal to the taste of an age "vitiated by babyishness" (i.e. of Wordsworth) "or antiquarism" (i.e. of Scott). In a famous passage in one of the very latest of his papers — quoted by everybody who has written anything on Jeffrey since Christopher North quoted it first in Blackwood — looking backward over a generation, he concludes that Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Crabbe, are already passing into oblivion; Scott's novels have put out his poetry; even the splendid strains of Moore are fading into distance and dimness, and the blazing star of Byron receding from its place of pride ; while the two poets who still keep the laurels fresh with no signs of fading are — Rogers and Campbell !

All of which proves, not that Jeffrey had no taste of his own, but that it was narrowed in its range, on the one hand by a hard common sense, and on the other by a rather prim sentimentality. It was his misfortune that, with his limited critical equipment, he had to deal with two or three very original poets, innovators who broke new paths for themselves. Of Shelley he never ventured any estimate at all. The great Edinburgh criticism of Shelley was written by Hazlitt. Byron for a time quite dazed him, as he dazed everybody. Before that overmastering genius, even Jeffrey's insistent common sense was blinded. He holds his breath over the magniloquence of Manfred, and avers that the dialogue which to so many of us now seems the veriest bathos is " so exquisitely managed that all sense of its impossibility is swallowed up in beauty." The worst fault of Manfred he declares to be, not that it is hollow and theatric, but that it "fatigues and overawes us with terror and sublimity." He has doubtless suffered most from his judgment of Wordsworth. Yet to-day the most enthusiastic Wordsworthian must admit that there is a good deal of solemn rubbish in Wordsworth, and not a little puerility. Nobody is obliged to read the whole of the Excursion; while as for Goody Blake and Harry Gill, Alice Fell, Peter Bell, and some dozen or more of that family, no one need much care to save them from the jaws of devouring Time. Our quarrel with Jeffrey is that he is not content to say of the Excursion, as Bottom says of the play, "There are things in this that will never please," but he must go on to pick out for special reprobation some of the very best passages in the poem. So in his flings at Wordsworth's simplicity, scattered through various essays, — as those on Crabbe and on Burns, — he points his ridicule by mentioning just the verses dearest to the lovers of Wordsworth, as the Leech-Gatherer, the Matthew poems, Michael, and what he calls "the stuff about dancing daffodils." The truth is that to the practical, mundane intelligence of Jeffrey all the most characteristic excellences of Wordsworth's poetry were quite invisible. Wordsworth's feeling of an all-pervading spiritual power in nature, his resulting conviction of the direct influence of nature upon character, his notion of the effect of the imagination on moral culture, — all this to Jeffrey was mere mystical nonsense. Wordsworth's subjective treatment of humble life, that, he thought, was a whimsical falsification of fact. There were no such plain people. He could not see it was not the peasant that made the poem, but Wordsworth's thought about the peasant. Wordsworth's poetical theories may have been right or may have been wrong; but before he condemned them Jeffrey should have understood them.

In briefest summary, then, we may admit that to Jeffrey, rather than to any other man, may be given the credit of raising the critical essay to the rank of a recognized literary form; that his writing is always brilliant and plausible; that his critical verdicts are always clear, and if upon matters within the range of his appreciation, sensible and just. On the other hand, it must also be admitted that his range of appreciation is limited; that his impressions are often worth more than the dogmas he invents to justify them; and that a considerable part of his fame was due to the immense and novel popularity of the Review which raised him for a time to literary dictatorship almost like that of Dryden or Johnson.

Ill

But important as was the service of the two great Reviews in calling out a new variety of literature, the most entertaining prose written in England between 1800 and 1825 is not to be found in their pages. The men whose work we have to consider in this volume contributed but little to the Reviews, and none of their best. The reason is obvious. The Review did not invite that kind of writing out , of which the best literature is made. It was not essays they wanted, but extended reviews of contemporary questions, suggested by some current book or books. Within such limitations there was little opportunity for original and creative work, or even for that play of personal feeling, that intimate and subjective note, which so often gives to writing permanent literary charm. The whimsical humors of Lamb, the causeries of Hazlitt, the rambling reminiscences of De Quincey, the jovial "Noctes" of Wilson, — they would each and all have been out of place in the dignified pages of the Edinburgh or Quarterly. Moreover, both Reviews had provoked the most violent antagonism of some of the best contemporary writers. Neither De Quincey nor Lamb could ever forgive the Edinburgh its vituperation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the gods of their early idolatry ; while to Hazlitt, the mere mention of GifTord and the Tory Quarterly was a red rag to set him roaring, and the Edinburgh, with its timid Whiggism and dread of all radicalism, seemed to him but little better. Much of the work of these men, therefore, found publication, not in the Reviews but in the new Magazines.

The father of all English Magazines was the Gentleman's Magazine, founded by Edward Cave in 1 73 1, and followed before 1800 by several other periodicals of similar character. All these Magazines, however, as their name implied, were repositories for miscellaneous matter — summaries of recent news with brief comment, excerpts from current literature or from rare or curious books, expositions of difficult or obscure passages in the classics or in Scripture, bits of odd and striking fact and incident. They afforded scanty room for original writing of any sort. Perhaps the most noteworthy contribution to them before 1800 was those famous reports of parliamentary debates written by Sam Johnson, mostly out of his own head. But in 18 14 the New Monthly Magazine was established under the editorship of the poet Campbell; three years later appeared that more famous periodical, Blackwood's Magazine, which at once rivalled the Reviews in popularity and influence. In 182 1 the London Magazine was started by John Scott, — the brilliant young critic who fell in a duel next year, — with Charles Lamb announced as one of its principal contributors. These new Magazines were entirely unlike the dreary publications of that name in the preceding century. The new Reviews had vastly raised the character and repute of periodical writing; to write for them now brought fame with the public and hard cash from the publisher. This high standard the new Magazines maintained. They commanded the pens of the most brilliant and ambitious young men. Published not quarterly but monthly, they were fresher and more vigorous than the Reviews; open to good writing on all subjects, they invited papers more varied, original, imaginative, than could find admission to the Reviews. Under such encouragement we get a new type of essay. The essays of Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Lamb combine the personal, intimate charm of Addison's best work with a more highly elaborated form and a much wider range of interest. There is no type of literature more altogether delightful; and there are no better specimens of the type than in the work of the writers we have to consider in the following pages.

Any sketch of William Hazlitt may fitly begin with an extract from his most familiar essay — the most delightful essay of personal reminiscence in the English language. It is the story of his spiritual birth.

" My father was a dissenting minister, at Wem, in Shropshire; and in the year 1798 (the figures that compose the date are to me like the ' dreaded name of Demogorgon') Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury to succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a Unitarian congregation there. He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to preach ; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the coach in a state of anxiety and expectation, to look for the arrival of his successor, could find no one at all answering the description but a round-faced man, in a short black coat (like a shooting jacket) which hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who seemed to be talking at a great rate to his fellowpassengers. Mr. Rowe had scarce returned to give an account of his disappointment, when the round-faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject by beginning to talk. He did not cease while he stayed; nor has he since, that I know of. He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense for three weeks that he remained there, 'fluttering the proud Salopians like an eagle in a dove-cote,' and the Welsh mountains that skirt the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have heard no such mystic sounds since the days of

" 'High-born Hoel's harp or soft Llewellyn's lay.'

As we passed along between Wem and Shrewsbury, and I eyed their blue tops seen through the wintry branches, or the red rustling leaves of the sturdy oak trees by the roadside, a sound was in my ears as of a Syren's song; I was stunned, startled with it, as from deep sleep; but I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's rays glittering in the puddles of the road."

And then follows the account of Coleridge's sermon, next day : —

"For myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together. Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still laboring, pale and wan, through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause; and the cold dank drops of dew, that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them ; for there was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature, that turned everything into good."

It is dangerous to begin quoting Hazlitt ; one never knows when to stop. Better even than these first paragraphs are the later portions of this charming essay, describing that visit of the following spring when the young Hazlitt tramped three days through mud and mire to see the god of his idolatry at home in the Nether-Stowey cottage ; was taken by Coleridge to see Wordsworth at the Alfoxden House hard by; discussed with Coleridge everything in heaven and earth, and heard Wordsworth read in solemn chant his yet unpublished Lyrical Ballads; lived for three exalted weeks in such companionship, returning often on evenings from Alfoxden to Stowey by the lovely wooded walk, when the nightingale sang in the leafage, the stream that slipped through the green glimmered in the moonlight, and Coleridge's voice sounded on

"Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute." 28

The whole picture still glows in Hazlitt's pages with the color of his early hope and dream. Nothing that the poets themselves wrote in that annus mirabilis, 1 798-1 799, not even the diary of Dorothy Wordsworth for those months, can bring the local habitation, the homely life and high thinking of Coleridge and Wordsworth, so vividly to the imagination as this paper of Hazlitt's.

At the time of this memorable visit Hazlitt was just completing his twentieth year. At first thought it may not be quite clear why he always acknowledged such great obligation to Coleridge; for his own mind had by this time already taken its bent, and he had a full set of radical opinions, if not yet quite made, at least in the making.

His radicalism he came honestly by. Dissent and revolt, both political and religious, ran in the blood of his family. An elder brother of his father had early migrated to America, heartily espoused the cause of the American rebels, and served with distinction through the Revolutionary War. Hazlitt's father had been educated in Glasgow University for a Presbyterian minister; but he soon developed a more pronounced liberalism, and before he began preaching he had become a Unitarian. A radical in politics also, he formed the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin, and during all the period of the American difficulties found himself in hearty sympathy with the cause his brother had espoused. After the conclusion of peace he came over to America himself with his family, minded to pass his life in the new republic where liberty had taken up her seat. He did reside for more than a year in Philadelphia, and gave a course of lectures in the University of Pennsylvania; thence he removed to the vicinity of Boston, in which city he is said to have organized the first Unitarian society in America. But Unitarianism could not yet make much headway against Puritan orthodoxy; and no congregation would quite venture to give the young English preacher a settlement. We may surmise, too, that his studious and retiring temper found the atmosphere of our New England society rather raw. At all events he returned to England in the summer of 1787, and shortly after settled in the little parish of Wem, in Shropshire. Here he lived all the rest of his days, "repining but resigned," says his son, "far from the only two things he loved — talk about disputed texts of Scripture, and the cause of civil and religious liberty." A fine type of the learned, rational dissenter, this elder Hazlitt, in the tiny study at Wem, surrounded by his tall folios, or in the garden gathering "broccoli plants and kidney beans of his own rearing," his imagination far away in dreams of patriarchal eld, yet now and then waking to some stout utterance in behalf of tolerance and liberty to-day. He survived to the venerable age of eighty-four ; and when the end came, says his daughter, "he made no complaint, nor did he give one groan, but went on talking of glory, honor, and immortality to the end." From him his son inherited, along with his speculative, introspective habit, a certain largeness of imagination and a sense of the high solemnities of life. When Hazlitt's writing is at its very best, we may feel in its stately rhythm and its sublime imagery the moving of his father's spirit.

It was, however, the father's love of civil and religious liberty that showed earliest in the young Hazlitt. His first printed article, a letter to a Shrewsbury newspaper in 1791, was an indignant rebuke of the intolerant churchmen who sympathized with the Birmingham mob that had just burned down the house of Dr. Priestley. The breadth of view and force of statement in this paper, by a boy of thirteen, was very remarkable. The years from fourteen to twenty-one are probably the determining period of every man's life. For Hazlitt they certainly were. Like so many men of generous temper, he had fallen under the spell of the French Revolution, which was unrolling its stupendous drama during just those years from 1792 to 1799, when his opinions were a-forming. Before he was seventeen he had drawn out a scheme of civil and criminal legislation based on the most doctrinaire notions of individual rights.

3 1

For three or four years, thereafter, he was striving in vain to put into satisfactory literary shape a treatise on the Principles of Human Action which should prove " the natural disinterestedness of human nature." The central thesis of this speculation he conceived to be an important discovery of his own — certainly it would be important, if true. But the course of history in those years, one thinks, must have strained his theory rather severely sometimes. The early excesses and atrocities of the Revolution, the worst of which occurred while he was in his early teens, could not change his convictions, but (though there is no record of his experience in those years) I suspect they did sometimes becloud his enthusiasm. Indeed, Hazlitt was always distrustful of enthusiasm. He had no liking for the raw multitude, and all his days had some trouble to keep his sympathies on good terms with his principles. He confessed, later in life, that he had been staggered in his devotion to republicanism and puritanism, when he reflected that, though there was plenty of both in America, it was yet doubtful whether in all the United States, from Boston to Baltimore, — his geography wouldn't let him go farther south, — we could produce a single head like one of Titian's noblemen, nurtured in all the pride of aristocracy and all the blindness of popery. He never shared Wordsworth's interest in humble folk, and declared that those Cumberland ploughmen and peddlers were low company that, for himself, he did not care to meet. Ignorance is always bad enough, he said, but rustic ignorance is intolerable. Nor did the fact that common folk were hardly treated suffice to make them interesting. " Never pity people," he says, "because they are illused; they only wait the opportunity to use others just as ill." Hate the oppressor and prevent the evil if you can, but do not fancy there is any virtue in being oppressed. The unfortunate are not a jot more amiable than their neighbors. Such cynical sentiments, to be sure, come from the later years of disillusion; but Hazlitt was never really a democrat. He always hated the kings more than he loved the peoples.