A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895) Part 6

It was nearly ten years after the first success of Bulwer, and more than half as much after the death of Scott, that a novelist greater than any the century had seen, except Scott himself and Miss Austen, appeared.

Charles d.i.c.kens and Lord Lytton became rather intimate friends; but their origins and early experiences were curiously different. d.i.c.kens'

father had been in a government office; but after the Peace he took to the press, and his son (born in 1812), after some uncomfortable early experiences which have left their mark on _David Copperfield_, fled to the same refuge of the dest.i.tute in our times. He was a precocious, but not an extraordinary precocious writer; for he was four and twenty when the _Sketches by Boz_ were printed in a volume after appearing in the _Morning Chronicle_. But the _Sketches_ _by Boz_, though containing some very sprightly things, are but as farthing candles to sunlight when compared with the wonderful and wholly novel humour of _The Pickwick Papers_, which (d.i.c.kens having been first (1836) employed to write them as mere letter-press to the sporting sketches of the caricaturist Seymour) appeared as a book in 1838. From that time their author had a success which in money came second to that of Scott, and which both pecuniarily and otherwise enabled him to write pretty much as he pleased. So to the last the style of his novels never bore much reference to any public taste or demand; and he developed himself more strictly according to his own bent than almost any writer of English who was not born to fortune. During the last twenty years of his life, which ended suddenly on 9th June 1870, he was a newspaper editor--first of _Household Words_, then of _All the Year Round_; but these very periodicals were of his own making and design. He made two journeys to America: one very early in 1842, with a literary result (_American Notes_) of very sharp criticism of its people; the other late in 1867, when he made large sums by reading from his works--a style of entertainment which, again, was almost of his own invention, and which gave employment to a very strong dramatic and histrionic faculty that found little other vent. But his life was extremely uneventful, being for its last two and thirty years simply one long spell of hard though lavishly rewarded literary labour.

The brilliancy and the originality of the product of this can never be denied. True to his general character of independence, d.i.c.kens owes hardly anything to any predecessor except Smollett, to whom his debts are rather large, and perhaps to Theodore Hook, to whom, although the fact has not been generally recognised, they exist. He had had no regular education, had read as a boy little but the old novelists, and never became as a man one of either wide learning or much strictly literary taste. His temperament indeed was of that insubordinate middle-cla.s.s variety which rather resents the supremacy of any cla.s.sics; and he carried the same feeling into art, into politics, and into the discussion of the vague problems of social existence which have so much occupied the last three-quarters of the century. Had this iconoclastic but ignorant zeal of his (which showed itself in his second novel, _Nicholas Nickleby_, and was apparent in his last completed one, _Our Mutual Friend_) been united with less original genius, the result must have been infinitely tedious, and could not have been in any way profitable. For d.i.c.kens' knowledge, as has been said, was very limited; his logical faculties were not strong; and while constantly attempting to satirise the upper cla.s.ses, he knew extremely little about them, and has never drawn a single "aristocrat," high government official, or "big-wig" generally, who presents the remotest resemblance to a living being. But he knew the lower and lower middle cla.s.ses of his own day with wonderful accuracy; he could inform this knowledge of his with that indefinable comprehension of man as man which has been so often noted; and over and above this he possessed an imagination, now humorous, now terrible, now simply grotesque, of a range and volume rarely equalled, and of a quality which stands entirely by itself, or is approached at a distance, and with a difference, only by that of his great French contemporary Balzac. This imagination, essentially plastic, so far outran the strictly critical knowledge of mankind as mankind just mentioned that it has invested d.i.c.kens' books and characters with a peculiarity found nowhere else, or only in the instance just excepted.

They are never quite real: we never experience or meet anything or anybody quite like them in the actual world. And yet in their own world they hold their position and play their parts quite perfectly and completely: they obey their own laws, they are consistent with their own surroundings. Occasionally the work is marred by too many and too glaring tricks of mannerism: this was especially the case with the productions of the period between 1855 and 1865. The pathos of d.i.c.kens was always regarded as slightly conventional and unreal by critical judges. But his humour, though never again attaining the same marvellous flow of unforced merriment which the _Pickwick Papers_ had shown, was almost unfailing; and, thanks to the gift of projecting imaginative character, above noticed, it was never exactly the same.

These and other gifts were shown in a long line of novels covering just thirty years, from _Boz to Our Mutual Friend_; for the last few years of his life, disturbed by his American tour, by increasing ill-health, and other things, produced nothing but the beginnings of an unfinished novel, _Edwin Drood_. He attempted little besides novels, and what he did attempt outside of them was not very fortunate, except the delightful _Uncommercial Traveller_, wherein in his later days he achieved a sort of mellowed version of the _Boz_ sketches, subdued more to the actual, but not in the least tamed or weakened. Although a keen lover of the theatre and an amateur actor of remarkable merit, he had the sense and self-denial never to attempt plays except in an indirect fas.h.i.+on and in one or two instances, nor ever in his own name solely.

His _Child's History of England_ (1854) is probably the worst book ever written by a man of genius, except Sh.e.l.ley's novels, and has not, like them, the excuse of extreme youth. His _Pictures from Italy_ (1845), despite vivid pa.s.sages, are quite unworthy of him; and even the _American Notes_ could be dispensed with without a sigh, seeing that we have _Martin Chuzzlewit_. But his novels, despite their many faults, could not be dispensed with,--no one who understands literary value would give up even the worst of them,--while his earlier "Christmas Books" (during the fancy for these things in the forties) and his later contributions to the Christmas numbers of his periodicals contain some of his best fantastic and pathetic work. _Pickwick_ was immediately followed by _Oliver Twist_,--a very popular book, and in parts a very powerful one, but containing in germ most of the faults which afterwards developed themselves, and, with the exception of the "Artful Dodger,"

not bringing out any of his great character-creations. _Nicholas Nickleby_ (1838) is a story designed to fix a stigma on cheap private schools, and marred by some satire as cheap as the schools themselves on the fas.h.i.+onable and aristocratic society of which to his dying day d.i.c.kens never knew anything; but it is of great interest as a story, and full of admirable humoristic sketches, which almost if not quite excused not merely the defect of knowledge just referred to, but the author's unfortunate p.r.o.neness to attempt irony, of which he had no command, and argument, of which he had if possible less. His next two stories, _The Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Barnaby Rudge_, were enshrined (1840-41) in an odd framework of fantastic presentation, under the general t.i.tle of _Master Humphrey's Clock_,--a form afterwards discarded with some advantage, but also with some loss. _The Old Curiosity Shop_, strongly commended to its own public and seriously hampered since by some rather maudlin pathos, improved even upon _Nicholas Nickleby_ in the humoristic vein; and while d.i.c.k Swiveller, Codlin and Short, Mr. Chuckster, and others remain as some of the best of d.i.c.kens' peculiar characters of the lighter sort, the dwarf Quilp is perhaps his only thoroughly successful excursion into the grimmer and more horrible kind of humour. _Barnaby Rudge_ is in part a historical novel, and the description of the riots of Eighty is of extraordinary power; but the real appeal of the book lies in the characters of the Varden family, with the handmaid Miss Miggs and the ferocious apprentice Tappert.i.t. Sir John Chester, a sort of study from Chesterfield, is one of the most disastrous of this author's failures; but Dennis the Hangman may have a place by Quilp.

Then (1843) came _Martin Chuzzlewit_, which, as observed, embodied his American experiences in a manner which may or may not have been fair, but which was exquisitely funny. It also added the immortal figure of Mrs. Gamp (not unattended by any means) to the glorious list of his comic creations. It was in _Dombey and Son_ (1846-48) that the d.i.c.kens of the decadence first appeared; the maudlin strain of _The Old Curiosity Shop_ being repeated in Paul Dombey, while a new and very inauspicious element appeared in certain mechanical tricks of phrase, and in a totally unreal style of character exemplified in the Bagstocks, the Carkers, and so forth. Yet Captain Cuttle, his friend Bunsby, Miss Nipper, and the inestimable Toots put in ample bail for this also. And it was followed (1849-50) by _David Copperfield_, one of the capital books of English fiction. This was to some extent obviously autobiographic; but, setting some questions of taste aside, not unduly so. Even the hero is too real to be frigid; and of the two heroines, Dora, if an idiot, is saved by pathos different from that of Paul and Nell, while the insipidity of Agnes does not greatly spoil the story, and the commonplace theatricality of the Steerforth and Little Em'ly episode can be neglected. On the other hand, Miss Trotwood, David Copperfield's schools and schoolfellows, Uriah Heap (not wholly good as he is), and above all the priceless Mr. Micawber, would suffice to keep twenty books alive.

But this book, though by no means d.i.c.kens' Corunna or even his Malplaquet, was certainly the climax of his career, and no impartial and competent critic could ever give him the same praise again. In two long stories, _Bleak House_ and _Little Dorrit_, and in a shorter one, _Hard Times_, which appeared between 1852 and 1857, the mania of "purpose" and the blemish of mechanical mannerism appeared to a far worse degree than previously, though in the first named at any rate there were numerous consolations of the old kind. The _Tale of Two Cities_ (1859) has been more differently judged than any other of his works; some extolling it as a great romance, if not quite a great historical novel, while others see in it little more than mixed mannerism and melodrama. Something of the same difference prevails about _Great Expectations_ (1860-61), the parties as a rule changing sides, and those who dislike the _Tale of Two Cities_ rejoicing in _Great Expectations_, d.i.c.kens' closest attempt at real modern life (with a fantastic admixture of course), and in its heroine, Estella, his almost sole creation of a live girl. _Our Mutual Friend_ (1864-65), though not a return to the great days, brought these parties somewhat together again, thanks to the Doll's Dressmaker and Rogue Riderhood. And then, for it is impossible to found any sound critical judgment on the fragment of _Edwin Drood_, the building of the most extraordinary monument of the fantastic in literature ceased abruptly.

That exactly the same fate befell the great successor, rival, and foil of d.i.c.kens in novel writing during the middle of the century was due to no metaphysical aid but to the simple and prosaic fact that at the time publication in parts, independently or in periodicals, was the usual method. Although the life of William Makepeace Thackeray was as little eventful as d.i.c.kens' own, their origin and circ.u.mstances were as different as their work. d.i.c.kens, as has been said, was born in distinctly the lower section of the middle cla.s.s, and had, if any education, a very irregular one. Thackeray, who was born at Calcutta in 1811, belonged to a good family, regularly connected with English public schools and universities, inherited a small but comfortable fortune, and was himself educated at the Charterhouse and at Trinity College, Cambridge, though he took no degree. Unsuccessful as an artist (it is one of the chief pieces of literary anecdote of our times that he offered himself fruitlessly to d.i.c.kens as an ill.u.s.trator), and having by imprudence or accident lost his private means, he began to write, especially in the then new and audacious _Fraser's Magazine_. For this, for other periodicals, and for _Punch_ later, he performed a vast amount of miscellaneous work, part only of which, even with the considerable addition made some ten years ago, has ever been enshrined in his collected works. It is all very remarkable, and can easily be seen now to be quite different from any other work of the time (the later thirties); but it is very unequal and distinctly uncertain in touch.

These qualities or defects also appear in his first publications in volume--the _Paris_ (1840) and _Irish_ (1843) _Sketch Books_, and the novels of _Catherine_ and _Barry Lyndon_. The _Punch_ work (which included the famous _Book of Sn.o.bs_ and the admirable attempts in misspelling on the model of Swift and Smollett known as the _Memoirs of Mr. Yellowplush_, with much else) marked a distinct advance in firmness of handling and raciness of humour; while the author, who, though now a very poor man, had access to the best society, was constantly adding to his stock of observation as well as to his literary practice. It was not, however, till 1846, when he began _Vanity Fair_, that any very large number of persons began to understand what a star had risen in English letters; nor can even _Vanity Fair_ be said to have had any enormous popularity, though its author's powers were shown in a different way during its publication in parts by the appearance of a third sketch book, the _Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, more perfect than either of its forerunners, and by divers extremely brilliant Christmas books. _Vanity Fair_ was succeeded in 1849 (for Thackeray, a man fond of society and a little indolent, was fortunately never a very rapid writer) by _Pendennis_, which holds as autobiography, though not perhaps in creative excellence, the same place among his works as _Copperfield_ does among those of d.i.c.kens. Several slighter things accompanied or followed this, Thackeray showing himself at once an admirable lecturer, and an admirable though not always quite judicial critic, in a series of discourses afterwards published as a volume on _The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century_. But it was not till 1852 that the marvellous historical novel of _Esmond_--the greatest book in its own special kind ever written--appeared, and showed at once the fas.h.i.+on in which the author had a.s.similated the Queen Anne period and his grasp of character and story. He returned to modern times in _The Newcomes_ (1853-55), which some put at the head of his work as a contemporary painter of manners. After this he had seven years of life which were well filled. He followed up _Esmond_ with The _Virginians_ (1857-58), a novel of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, which has not been generally rated high, but which contains some of his very best things; he went to America and lectured on _The Four Georges_ (lectures again brilliant in their kind); he became (1860) editor of the _Cornhill Magazine_ and wrote in it two stories, _Lovel the Widower_ and _Philip_; while he struck out a new line in a certain series of contributions called _The Roundabout Papers_, some of which were among his very last, and nearly all of them among his most characteristic and perfect work. He had begun yet another novel, _Denis Duval_, which was to deal with the last quarter of the century he knew so well; but he died suddenly two days before Christmas 1863, leaving it a mere fragment. He had unsuccessfully attempted play writing in _The Wolves and the Lamb_, an earlier and dramatic version of _Lovel the Widower_.

And during almost his whole literary career he had been a sparing but an exquisite writer of a peculiar kind of verse, half serious half comic, which is scarcely inferior in excellence to his best prose. "The Ballad of Bouillabaisse" and "The Age of Wisdom," to take only two examples, are unmatched in their presentation of pathos that always keeps clear of the maudlin, and is wide-eyed if not dry-eyed in view of all sides of life; while such things as "Lyra Hibernica" and "The Ballads of Policeman X" have never been surpa.s.sed as verse examples of pure, broad, roaring farce that still retains a certain reserve and well-bred scholars.h.i.+p of tone.

But his verse, however charming and unique, could never have given him the exalted and ma.s.sive pedestal which his prose writings, and especially his novels, provide. Even without the novels, as without the verse, he would still occupy a high place among English writers for the sake of his singular and delightful style, and for the att.i.tude both to life and to letters, corresponding with that style, which his essays and miscellanies exhibit. This style is not by any means free from minor blemishes, though it discarded many of these as time went on. But it has an extraordinary vivacity; a manner entirely its own, which yet seldom or never approaches mannerism; a quality of humour for which no word would be so fit as the old-fas.h.i.+oned "archness," if that had not been so hopelessly degraded before even the present century opened; at need, an unsurpa.s.sed pathos which never by any chance or exception succ.u.mbs to the demon of the gus.h.i.+ng or maudlin; a flexibility and facility of adaptation to almost all (not quite all) subjects which is hard to parallel.

And this style reflects with more than common exactness, even in these minor works, the att.i.tude above spoken of, which is not less unique and not less inestimable than the style itself. Towards some of the "great subjects" Thackeray indeed adopts not quite a Shakespearian silence, but a slightly uneasy respect. Never irreligious as he was, there was something in him of his own beloved eighteenth century's dislike and discomfort in face of religious dogma and religious enthusiasm; he had no metaphysical head; his politics (he once stood for Parliament) were a little childish. It was his, in short, not so much to argue as to observe, to feel, to laugh with no unkindness but with infinite comprehension, to enjoy, to suffer. Of all the innumerable cants that ever were canted, the cant about Thackeray's "cynicism" was the silliest and the most erroneous. He knew the weakness of man, and laughed at it as the wise knows and laughs, "knowing also," as the poet says, "that he himself must die." But he did not even despise this weakness, much less is he harsh to it. On the contrary, he is milder not only than Swift, but even than Addison or Miss Austen, and he is never wroth with human nature save when it is not only weak but base.

All these good gifts and others, such as incomparable power of presenting scene and personage to the necessary extent and with telling detail, appear in his novels, with the addition of a greater gift than any of them--the gift most indispensable of all others to the novelist--the gift of creating and immortalising character. Of mere story, of mere plot, Thackeray was not a great master; and he has made himself appear a less great master than he was by his fancy for interlarding his narratives with long addresses to the reader, and by his other fancy for extending them over very great s.p.a.ces of time. The unities are no doubt in fiction, if not in drama, something of a caricature; but it is seldom possible to neglect them to the extent of years and decades without paying the penalty; and Thackeray is not of those who have evaded payment. But in the creation of living character he stands simply alone among novelists: above even Fielding, though his characters may have something less of ma.s.siveness; much above Scott, whose consummate successes are accompanied by not a few failures; and out of sight of almost every one else except Miss Austen, whose world is different, and, as a world, somewhat less of flesh and blood. In _Vanity Fair_ he is still in this respect not quite at his acme; and the magnificent character of Becky Sharp (the attempt to rival whom by her almost exact contemporary, Valerie Marneffe, is a singular critical error), supported as it is by the lesser successes of Jos and Rawdon, of George Osborne and Lord Steyne, does not find itself, save now and then, especially in the crowning scene of the scandal in Curzon Street, completely parted or completely put in scene. And so at the other end of the list, from _The Virginians_, fine as much of that is, onwards, it is permissible, without unreason or want of generosity, to discern a slight, a very slight, flagging, not in the quality or kind of the power, but in the vigour and freshness with which it is applied. But in _Pendennis_, in _Esmond_, and in _The Newcomes_, it appears as it does nowhere else in English, or in any literature. It is not so much the holding up of the mirror to life as the presentation of life itself.

Although the figures, the scheme of thought and sentiment and sense, differ from what we find in Shakespeare by the whole difference between poetry and prose, there is, on the lower level, a positive gain in vividness by the absence of the restraints and conventions of the drama and the measured line. Every act, every scene, every person in these three books is real with a reality which has been idealised just up to and not beyond the necessities of literature. It does not matter what the acts, the scenes, the personages may be. Whether we are at the height of romantic pa.s.sion with Esmond's devotion to Beatrix, and his transactions with the duke and the prince over diamonds and t.i.tle deeds; whether the note is that of the simplest human pathos, as in Colonel Newcome's death-bed; whether we are indulged with society at Baymouth and Oxbridge; whether we take part in Marlborough's campaigns or a.s.sist at the Back Kitchen--we are in the House of Life, a mansion not too frequently opened to us by the writers of prose fiction. It was impossible that Thackeray should live long or write very many novels when he had once found his way. The lesson of the greatest imagination of his great contemporary and master settles that. Not the "Peau de Chagrin" itself could have enabled any man to produce a long succession of novels such as _Vanity Fair_ and _Esmond_.

During the time before the century reached its middle, in which Bulwer and d.i.c.kens were the most popular of novelists, while Thackeray was slowly making his way to the place that was properly his, the demand for novels, thoroughly implanted in the public by the success of Scott, was constantly met by work of all sorts, very little of which survives except in country circulating libraries and on the shelves of houses the owners.h.i.+p of which has not changed hands for some considerable time.

Very little of it, indeed, much deserved to survive. Lockhart, an exceedingly judicious critic, thought it necessary not long after the appearance of _Vanity Fair_ to apologise for the apparent extravagance of the praise which he had given to his friend Theodore Hook by observing that, except d.i.c.kens, there was no novelist of the first cla.s.s between the death of Scott and the rise of Thackeray himself. But about the time of that rise, and for a good many years after it, what may be called the third generation of the novelists of the century began to make its appearance, and, as has been partly observed above, to devote itself to a somewhat different description of work, which will be noticed in a future chapter.

The historical novel, though some of its very best representatives were still to make their appearance, ceased to occupy the first place in popular esteem; and the later varieties of the novel of more or less humorous adventure, whether in the rather commonplace form of Hook or in the highly individual and eccentric form of d.i.c.kens, also ceased to be much cultivated, save by d.i.c.kens himself and his direct imitators. The vogue set in for a novel of more or less ordinary life of the upper middle cla.s.s, and this vogue lasted during the whole of the third quarter, if not of the second half, of the century, though about 1870 the historical novel revived, and, after some years of uncertain popular taste, seems in the last decade to have acquired almost as great popularity (with its companion study of purely fantastic adventure) as ever. Yet we must, before pa.s.sing to other departments, and interrupting the account of fiction, notice not a few other writers of the time previous to 1850.

The descent, in purely literary merit, from d.i.c.kens and Thackeray, and perhaps from Bulwer, to some of those who must now be mentioned, is great. Yet the chief naval and the chief military novelist of England need surely not appear by allowance; and if affection and frequent reading count for anything, it is not certain that some technically much greater names might not s.h.i.+ne with lesser l.u.s.tre than those of Marryat and Lever. Frederick Marryat, the elder of the pair, was born in 1792, early enough to see a good deal of service in the later years of the Great War, partly under the brilliant if eccentric leaders.h.i.+p of Lord Cochrane. His promotion was fairly rapid: he became a commander in 1815, and afterwards distinguished himself as a post captain in the Burmese War, being made a C.B. in 1825. But the increasing dearth of active service was not suitable to a character like that of Marryat, who, moreover, was not likely to be popular with "My Lords"; and his discovery of a faculty for writing opened up to him, both as novelist and magazine editor, a very busy and profitable literary career, which lasted from 1830 to 1848, when he died. Marryat's works, which are very numerous (the best being perhaps _Peter Simple_, _Mr. Mids.h.i.+pman Easy_, and _Jacob Faithful_, though there is hardly one that has not special adherents), resemble Smollett's more than those of any other writer, not merely in their sea-scenes, but in general scheme and character. Some of Smollett's faults, too, which are not necessarily connected with the sea--a certain ferocity, an over-fondness for practical jokes, and the like--appear in Marryat, who is, moreover, a rather careless and incorrect writer, and liable to fits both of extravagance and of dulness. But the spirit and humour of the best of his books throughout, and the best parts of the others, are unmistakable and unsurpa.s.sed. Nor should it be forgotten that he had a rough but racy gift of verse, the best, though by no means the only good example of which is the piece beginning, "The Captain stood on the carronade."

The range of Charles Lever, who was born in 1806, was as much wider than Marryat's as his life was longer and his experience (though in a purely literary view oddly similar) more varied. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and after some sojourn both on the Continent and in America became (1837) physician to the British Emba.s.sy at Brussels. At this time the Continent was crowded with veterans, English and other, of the Great War; while Lever's Irish youth had filled him with stories of the last generation of madcap Irish squires and squireens. He combined the two in a series of novels of wonderful _verve_ and spirit, first of a military character, the chief of which were _Harry Lorrequer_, _Charles O'Malley_ (his masterpiece), and _Tom Burke of Ours_. He had, after no long tenure of the Brussels appointment, become (1842) editor of the _Dublin University Magazine_, where for many years his books appeared. After a time, when his stores of military anecdote were falling low and the public taste had changed, he subst.i.tuted novels partly of Irish partly of Continental bearing (_Roland Cashel_, _The Knight of Gwynne_, and many others); while in the early days of d.i.c.kens'

_All the Year Round_ he adventured a singular piece ent.i.tled _A Day's Ride, a Life's Romance_, which the public did not relish, but which was much to the taste of some good judges. He had by this time gone to Florence, became Vice-Consul at Spezzia in 1852, whence, in 1867, he was transferred as British Consul to Trieste, and died there in 1872.

For some years before his death he had been industrious in a third and again different kind of novel, not merely more thoughtful and less "rollicking," but adjusted much more closely to actual life and character. Indeed Lever at different times of his life manifested almost all the gifts which the novelist requires, though unfortunately he never quite managed to exhibit them all together. His earlier works, amusing as they are and full of dash and a certain kind of life, sin not only by superficiality but by a reckless disregard of the simplest requirements of story-telling, of the most rudimentary attention to chronology, probability, and general keeping. His later, vastly amended in this respect, and exhibiting, moreover, a deeper comprehension of human character as distinguished from mere outward "humours," almost necessarily present the blunted and blurred strokes which come from the loss of youth and the frequent repet.i.tion of literary production. Indeed Lever, with Bulwer, was the first to exemplify the evil effects of the great demand for novels, and the facilities for producing them given by the spread of periodicals.

To descend to the third, or even the lower second cla.s.s in fiction is almost more dangerous here than a similar laxity in any other department; and we can no more admit Lord John Russell because he wrote a story called _The Nun of Arrouca_, than we can exhume any equally forgotten production of writers less known in non-literary respects. It can hardly, however, be improper to mention in connection with Marryat, the greatest of them all, some other members of the interesting school of naval writers who not unnaturally arose after the peace had turned large numbers of officers adrift, and the rise of the demand for essays, novels, and miscellaneous articles had offered temptation to writing.

The chief of these were, in order of rising excellence, Captains Glasc.o.c.k, Chamier, and Basil Hall, and Michael Scott, a civilian, but by far the greatest writer of the four. Glasc.o.c.k, an officer of distinction, was the author of the _Naval Sketch Book_, a curious olla-podrida of "galley" stories, criticisms on naval books, and miscellanies, which appeared in 1826. It is not very well written, and in parts very dull, but provides some genuine things. Chamier, who was born in 1796 and did not die till 1870, was a post captain and a direct imitator of Marryat, as also was Captain Howard, Marryat's sub-editor for a time on the _Metropolitan_, and the part author with him of some books which have caused trouble to bibliographers. Chamier's books--_Ben Brace_, _The Arethusa_, _Tom Bowling_, etc.--are better than Howard's _Rattlin the Reefer_ (commonly ascribed to Marryat), _Jack Ashton_, and others, but neither can be called a master.

Captain Basil Hall, who was born of a good Scotch family at Edinburgh in 1788 and died at Haslar Hospital in 1844, was a better writer than either of these three; but he dealt in travels, not novels, and appears here as a sort of honorary member of the cla.s.s. His _Travels in America_ was one of the books which, in the second quarter of the century, rightly or wrongly, excited American wrath against Englishmen; but his last book, _Fragments of Voyages and Travels_, was his most popular and perhaps his best. Captain Basil Hall was a very amiable person, and though perhaps a little flimsy as a writer, is yet certainly not to be spoken of with harshness.

A very much stronger talent than any of these was Michael Scott, who was born in Glasgow in 1789 and died in 1835, having pa.s.sed the end of his boyhood and the beginning of his manhood in Jamaica. He employed his experiences in composing for _Blackwood's Magazine_, and afterwards reducing to book shape, the admirable miscellanies in fiction ent.i.tled _Tom Cringle's Log_ and _The Cruise of the Midge_, which contain some of the best fighting, fun, tropical scenery, and description generally, to be found outside the greatest masters. Very little is known of Scott, and he wrote nothing else.

One unique figure remains to be noticed among novelists of the first half of the century, though as a matter of fact his last novel was not published till within twenty years of its close. Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, belongs, as a special person, to another story than this. But this would be very incomplete without him and his novels. They were naturally written for the most part before, in 1852, he was called to the leaders.h.i.+p of the House of Commons, but in two vacations of office later he added to them _Lothair_ (1870) and _Endymion_ (1881). It is, however, in his earlier work that his chief virtue is to be found.

It is especially in its first division,--the stories of _Vivian Grey_, _The Young Duke_, _Contarini Fleming_, _Alroy_, _Venetia_, and _Henrietta Temple_,--published between 1827 and 1837. They are more like Bulwer's than like anybody else's work, but _Vivian Grey_ appeared in the same year with _Falkland_ and before _Pelham_. Later novels--_Coningsby_ (1844), _Sybil_ (1845), and _Tancred_ (1847)--are more directly political; while certain smaller and chiefly early tales--_Ixion_, _The Infernal Marriage_, _Popanilla_, etc.--are pure fantasy pieces with a satirical intent, and the first of them is, with perhaps Bedford's _Vathek_ as a companion, the most brilliant thing of its kind in English. In these more particularly, but in all more or less, a strong Voltairian influence is perceptible; but on the whole the set of books may be said to be like nothing else. They have grave faults, being sometimes tawdry in phrase and imagery, sometimes too personal, frequently a little unreal, and scarcely ever finally and completely adjusted to the language in which and the people of whom they are written. Yet the attraction of them is singular; and good judges, differing very widely in political and literary tastes, have found themselves at one as to the strange way in which the reader comes back to them as he advances in life, and as to the marvellous cleverness which they display. Let it be added that _Henrietta Temple_, a mere and sheer love story written in a dangerous style of sentimentalism, is one of the most effective things of its kind in English, and holds its ground despite all drawbacks of fas.h.i.+on in speech and manners, which never tell more heavily than in the case of a book of the kind; while in _Venetia_ the story of Byron is handled with remarkable closeness, and yet in good taste.

Two other novelists belonging to the first half of the century, and standing even further out of the general current than did Disraeli, both of them also possessing greater purely literary genius than his, must also be mentioned here. Thomas Love Peac.o.c.k, the elder of them, born a long way within the eighteenth century (in 1785), pa.s.sed a studious though irregularly educated youth and an idle early manhood, but at a little more than thirty (1817) produced, after some verse, the curious little satirical romance of _Headlong Hall_. This he followed up with others--_Melincourt_, _Nightmare Abbey_, _Maid Marian_, _The Misfortunes of Elphin_, and _Crotchet Castle_--at no great intervals until 1830, after which, having in the meantime been appointed to a valuable and important office under the East India Company, he published no other book for thirty years. Then in 1860 he put forth _Gryll Grange_, and some five years later died, a very old man, in 1866. Peac.o.c.k at all times was a writer of verse, and the songs which diversify his novels are among their most delightful features; but his more ambitious poetical efforts, which date from his earlier years, _The Genius of the Thames_ and _Rhododaphne_, are not of much mark. The novels themselves, however, have a singular relish, and are written in a style always piquant and attractive and latterly quite admirable. They may all be described as belonging to the fantastic-satirical order of which the French tale-tellers (instigated, however, by an Englishman, Anthony Hamilton) had set the example during the previous century. Social, political, economic, and other fads and crazes are all touched in them; but this satire is combined with a strictly realistic presentation of character, and, except in the romances of _Maid Marian_ and _Elphin_, with actual modern manners. Peac.o.c.k's satire is always very sharp, and in his earlier books a little rough as well; but as he went on he acquired urbanity without losing point, and became one of the most consummate pract.i.tioners of Lucianic humour adjusted to the English scheme and taste. More than thirty years after date _Gryll Grange_ is not obsolete even as a picture of manners; while _Crotchet Castle_, obsolete in a few externals, is as fresh as ever in substance, owing to its close grasp of essential humanity. In verse Peac.o.c.k was the last, and one of the best, of the masters of the English drinking-song; and some of his examples are unmatched for their mixture of joviality, taste, sense, and wit.

George Borrow, who was eighteen years Peac.o.c.k's junior, and outlived him by fifteen, was a curious counterpart-a.n.a.logue to him. Like Peac.o.c.k, he was irregularly educated, and yet a wide and deep student; but, unlike Peac.o.c.k, he devoted himself not so much to the ancient as to the more out-of-the-way modern tongues, and became a proficient not merely in Welsh, the Scandinavian tongues, Russian, Spanish, and other literary languages, but in Romany or Gipsy, having a.s.sociated much with the "folk of Egypt" during his youth. After some very imperfectly known youthful experiences, which formed at least the basis of his later novels, _Lavengro_ (1851) and _The Romany Rye_ (1857), he received an appointment as colporteur to the Bible Society, first in Russia, then in Spain; and his adventures in the latter country formed the basis of a study called _The Gipsies of Spain_ (1840), which has much, and a volume of travel and autobiography, _The Bible in Spain_ (1843), which has unique interest. Returning home, he married a wife with some money, and spent the remainder of a long life in his native county of Norfolk, producing, besides the books just named, _Wild Wales_ (1862), and dying in 1881. There is, in fact, not very much difference between Borrow's novels and his travel-books. The former had at least some autobiographic foundation, and the latter invest actual occurrences with the most singular flavour of romance. For his mere style Borrow was a little indebted to Cobbett, though he coloured Cobbett's somewhat drab canvas with the most brilliant fantastic hues. But his att.i.tude, his main literary quality, is quite unique. It might be called, without too much affectation, an adjustment of the picaresque novel to dreamland, retaining frequent touches of solid and everyday fact. Peac.o.c.k's style has found a good many, though no very successful, imitators; Borrow's is quite inimitable.

Harriet Martineau, one of the numerous writers, of both s.e.xes, whom the polygraphic habits of this century make it hard to "cla.s.s," was born at Norwich in 1802, and belonged to one of the families that made up the remarkable literary society which distinguished that city at the end of the last century and the beginning of this. She began as a religious writer according to the Unitarian persuasion; she ended as a tolerably active opponent of religion. But she found her chief vocation (before, as she did in her middle and later days, becoming a regular journalist) in writing stories on political economy, a proceeding doubtless determined by the previous exercises in didactic story-telling of Miss Edgeworth and Mrs. Marcet. These _Ill.u.s.trations of Political Economy_ (1832) exactly hit the taste of their time and were very popular. Her less adulterated children's books (of which the best perhaps is _Feats on the Fiord_) and her novel _Deerbrook_ (1839), owing much to Miss Edgeworth in conception, display a good faculty of narrative, and she did a great deal of miscellaneous work. As she became less religious she became more superst.i.tious, and indulged in curious crazes. She lived latterly at the Lakes, and died on 27th June 1876. Harriet Martineau was the object of rather absurd obloquy from Conservative critics as an advanced woman in her day, and of still more absurd eulogy by Liberal sympathisers both in that day and since. Personally she seems to have been amiable and estimable enough. Intellectually she had no genius; but she had a good deal of the versatile talent and craftsmans.h.i.+p for which the literary conditions of this century have produced unusual stimulus and a fair reward.

There was something (though not so much as has been represented) of the masculine element about Miss Martineau; a contemporary Miss M. was delightfully feminine. Mary Russell Mitford, born at Alresford, the town of Wither, on 16th December 1786, was the daughter of a doctor and a rascal, who, when she was a child, had the incredible meanness to squander twenty thousand pounds which she won in a lottery, and later the constant courage to live on her earnings. She published poems as early as 1810; then wrote plays which were acted with some success; and later, gravitating to the _London Magazine_, wrote for it essays only second to those of Elia--the delightful papers collectively called _Our Village_, and not completed till long after the death of the _London_ in 1832. The scenery of these is derived from the banks of the Loddon, for the neighbourhood of Reading was in various places her home, and she died at Swallowfield on 10th January 1855. Latterly she had a civil-list pension; but, on the whole, she supported herself and her parents by writing. Not much, if anything, of her work is likely to survive except _Our_ _Village_; but this is charming, and seems, from the published _Life_ of her and the numerous references in contemporary biography, to express very happily the character and genius of its author--curiously sunny, healthy, and cheerful, not in the least namby-pamby, and coinciding with a faculty of artistic presentation of observed results, not very imaginative but wonderfully pleasing.

To these authors and books, others of more or less "single-speech" fame might be added: the vivid and accurate Persian tale of _Hajji Baba_ by James Morier, the _Anastatius_ of Thomas Hope, excellently written and once very much admired, the fas.h.i.+onable _Granby_ and _Tremaine_ of Lister, the famous _Frankenstein_ of Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, are examples. But even these, and much more other things not so good as they, compose in regard to the scheme of such a book as this the _numerus_, the crowd, which, out of no disrespect, but for obvious and imperative reasons, must be not so much neglected as omitted. All cla.s.ses of literature contribute to this, but, with the exception of mere compilations and books in science or art which are outgrown, none so much as prose fiction. The safest of life (except poetry) of all literary kinds when it is first rate, it is the most certain of death when it is not; and it pays for the popularity which it often receives to-day by the oblivion of an unending morrow.

CHAPTER IV

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS

Perhaps there is no single feature of the English literary history of the nineteenth century, not even the enormous popularisation and multiplication of the novel, which is so distinctive and characteristic as the development in it of periodical literature. For this did not, as the extension of novel writing did, concern a single department only.

The periodical--it may almost for shortness' sake be said the newspaper--not only became infinitely multiplied, but it gradually absorbed almost every department, or a share of almost every department, into itself. Very large numbers of the best as well as of the worst novels themselves have originally appeared in periodicals; not a very small proportion of the most noteworthy nineteenth century poetry has had the same origin; it may almost be said that all the best work in essay, whether critical, meditative, or miscellaneous, has thus been ushered into the world. Even the severer and more academic divisions of history, philosophy, theology, and their sisters, have condescended to avail themselves of this means of obtaining a public audience; and though there is still a certain conventional decency in apologising for reprints from periodicals, it is quite certain that, had such reprints not taken place, more than half the most valuable books of the age in some departments, and a considerable minority of the most valuable in others, would never have appeared as books at all.

The first division of our time, the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, though it witnessed a very great development of the mere newspaper, with which we have little to do, did not see very much of this actual "development of periodical literature" which concerns us.

These twenty years saw the last attempts in the line of the Addisonian essay; they saw the beginnings of some modern newspapers which exist at the present day; they beheld in the _Anti-Jacobin_ perhaps the most brilliant specimen of political persiflage in newspaper form that had or has ever been seen. But they did not see--though they saw some fumbling attempts at it--anything like those strangely different but mutually complementary examples of periodical criticism which were given just after the opening of the new age by _The Edinburgh Review_ (1802) and Cobbett's _Weekly Register_; and they saw nothing at all like the magazine, or combination of critical and creative matter, in which _Blackwood_ was, some years later, to lead the way. At the close of the eighteenth century such magazines were in an exceedingly rudimentary state, and criticism was mainly still in the hands of the old _Monthly_ and _Critical Reviews_, the respective methods of which had drawn from Johnson the odd remark that the _Critical_ men, being clever, said little about their books, which the _Monthly_ men, being "duller fellows," were glad to read and a.n.a.lyse. These Reviews and their various contemporaries had indeed from time to time enjoyed the services of men of the greatest talent, such as Smollett earlier and Southey just at the last. But, as a rule, they were in the hands of mere hacks; they paid so wretchedly that no one, unless forced by want or bitten by an amateurish desire to see himself in print, would contribute to them; they were by no means beyond suspicion of political and commercial favouritism; and their critiques were very commonly either mere summaries or sc.r.a.ppy "puffs" and "slatings," seldom possessing much grace of style, and scarcely ever adjusted to any scheme of artistic criticism.

This is a history of literature, not of the newspaper press, and it is necessary to proceed rather by giving account of the authors who were introduced to the public by--or who, being otherwise known, availed themselves of--this new development of periodicals. It may be sufficient to say here that the landmarks of the period, in point of the birth of papers, are, besides the two above mentioned, the starting of the _Quarterly Review_ as a Tory opponent to the more and more Whiggish _Edinburgh_ in 1809, of the _Examiner_ as a Radical weekly in 1808, of _Blackwood's Magazine_ as a Tory monthly in 1817, of the _London Magazine_ about the same time, and of _Fraser_ in 1830.

It was a matter of course that in the direction or on the staff of these new periodicals some of the veterans of the older system, or of the men who had at any rate already some experience in journalism, should be enlisted. Gifford, the first editor of the _Quarterly_, was in all respects a writer of the old rather than of the new age. Southey had at one time wholly, and for years partly, supported himself by writing for periodicals; Coleridge was at different times not merely a contributor to these, but an actual daily journalist; and so with others. But, as always happens when a really new development of literature takes place, new regiments raised themselves to carry out the new tactics, as it were, spontaneously. Many of the great names and the small mentioned in the last three chapters--perhaps indeed most of them--took the periodical s.h.i.+lling at one time or other in their lives. But those whom I shall now proceed to mention--William Cobbett, Francis Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, John Wilson, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt as a prose writer, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, John Gibson Lockhart, and some others--were, if not exactly journalists (an incorrect, but the only single designation), at any rate such frequent contributors to periodical literature of one kind or another that in some cases nothing, in most comparatively little, would be left of their work if contributions to newspapers, reviews, and magazines were to be excluded from it.

William Cobbett, not the greatest, but the most singular and original of the group, with the exception of Lamb, and as superior to Lamb in fertility and ma.s.sive vigour as he was inferior to him in exquisite delicacy and finish, was the son of a very small farmer little above the labouring rank, and was born near Farnham in 1762. He was first a ploughboy, next an attorney's clerk, and then he enlisted in the 24th regiment. He served very creditably for seven or eight years, became serjeant-major, improved himself very much in education, and obtained his discharge. But, by one of the extraordinary freaks which mark his whole career, he first took it into his head to charge the officers of his regiment with malversation, and then ran away from his own charge with his newly married wife, first to France and then to America. Here he stayed till the end of the century, and here he began his newspaper experiments, keeping up in _Peter Porcupine's Journal_ a violent crusade against French Jacobins and American Democrats. He returned to England in June 1800, and was encouraged by the Government to set up what soon became his famous _Weekly Register_--a paper which, after being (as Cobbett's politics had been up to this time) strongly Tory, lapsed by rapid degrees into a strange kind of fantastic Radicalism shot with Tory gleams. This remained Cobbett's creed till his death. The paper was very profitable, and for some time Cobbett was able to lead something like a country gentleman's life at Botley in Hamps.h.i.+re. But he met with two years' imprisonment for a violent article on flogging in the army, he subsequently got into money difficulties, and in 1817 he made a second voyage to America, which was in fact a flight both from his creditors and from the risk of another Government prosecution under the Six Acts.

Through all his troubles the _Register_, except for a month or two, had continued to appear; and so it did to the last. Its proprietor, editor, and in the main author, stood for Parliament several times, and, after a trial for sedition in 1831, was at last returned for Oldham in 1832. He was not much of a success there, and died on 18th June 1835 near Guildford; for he always clung to the marches of Surrey and Hamps.h.i.+re.

Some such details of Cobbett's life are necessary even in the most confined s.p.a.ce, because they are intimately connected with his singular character and his remarkable works. These latter are enormous in bulk and of the most widely diversified character. _Peter Porcupine_ fills twelve not small volumes; the mere selections from the _Register_, which are all that has been republished of it, six very bulky ones; with a wilderness of separate works besides--_Rural Rides_, a _History of the Reformation_, books on husbandry, gardening, and rural economy generally, some on the currency, an _English Grammar_, and dozens of others. Of these the _Rural Rides_ is the most interesting in matter and the most picturesque in style, while it affords a fair panorama of its author's rugged but wonderfully varied and picturesque mind and character; the _History of the Reformation_ is the most wrong-headed and unfair; the currency writings the most singular example of the delusion that strong prejudices and a good deal of mother-wit will enable a man to write, without any knowledge, about the most abstruse and complicated subjects; the agricultural books and the _English Grammar_ the best instances of genial humours, shrewdness, and (when crotchets do not come in too much) sound sense. But hardly anything that Cobbett writes is contemptible in form, however weak he may often be in argument, knowledge, and taste. He was the last, and he was not far below the greatest, of the line of vernacular English writers of whom Latimer in the sixteenth, Bunyan in the seventeenth, and Defoe in the eighteenth, are the other emerging personalities. To a great extent Cobbett's style was based on Swift; but the character of his education, which was not in the very least degree academic, and still more the idiosyncrasy of his genius, imposed on it almost from the first, but with ever-increasing clearness, a manner quite different from Swift's, and, though often imitated since, never reproduced. The "Letter to Jack Harrow," the "Letter to the People of Botley," the "Letters to Old George Rose," and that to "Alexander Baring, Loan Monger," to take examples almost at random from the _Register_, are quite unlike anything before them or anything after them. The best-known parody of Cobbett, that in _Rejected Addresses_, gives rather a poor idea of his style; exhibiting no doubt his intense egotism, his habit of half trivial divagation, and his use of strong language, but quite failing to give the immense force, the vivid clearness, and the sterling though not precisely scholarly English which characterise his good work. The best imitation to be found is in some of the anonymous pamphlets in which, in his later days, government writers replied to his powerful and mischievous political diatribes, and which in some cases, if internal evidence may be trusted, must have been by no mean hands.

Irrational as Cobbett's views were,--he would have adjusted the entire concerns of the nation with a view to the sole benefit of the agricultural interest, would have done away with the standing army, wiped out the national debt, and effected a few other trifling changes with a perfectly light heart, while in minor matters his crotchets were not only wild but simply irreconcilable with each other,--his intense if narrow earnestness, his undoubting belief in himself, and a certain geniality which could co-exist with very rough language towards his opponents, would give his books a certain attraction even if their mere style were less remarkable than it is. But it is in itself, if the most plebeian, not the least virile, nor even the least finished on its own scheme of the great styles in English. For the irony of Swift, of which, except in its very roughest and most rudimentary forms, Cobbett had no command or indeed conception, it subst.i.tutes a slogging directness nowhere else to be found equalled for combination of strength and, in the pugilistic sense, "science"; while its powers of description, within certain limits, are amazing. Although Cobbett's newspaper was itself as much of an Ishmaelite and an outsider as its director, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the effect which it had in developing newspapers generally, by the popularity which it acquired, and the example of hammer-and-tongs treatment of political and economic subjects which it set. The faint academic far-off-ness of the eighteenth century handling, which is visible even in the much-praised _Letters of Junius_, which is visible in the very ferocity of Smollett's _Adventures of an Atom_, which put up with "Debates of the Senate of Lilliput" and so forth, has been blown away to limbo, and the newspaper (at first at some risk) takes men and measures, politics and policies, directly and in their own names, to be its province and its prey.

It is a far cry from Cobbett to the founders of the _Edinburgh Review_, who, very nearly at the same time as that at which he launched his _Register_, did for the higher and more literary kind of periodical what he was doing for the lower and vernacular kind. I say the founders, because there is a still not quite settled dispute whether Francis Jeffrey or Sydney Smith was the actual founder of the famous "Blue and Yellow." This dispute is not uninteresting; because the one was as typically Scotch, with some remarkable differences from other Scotchmen, as the other was essentially English, with some points not commonly found in men of English blood. Jeffrey, the younger of the two by a couple of years, was still a member of the remarkable band who, as has been noticed so often already, were all born in the early seventies of the eighteenth century; and his own birthday was 23rd October 1773. He was an Edinburgh man; and his father, who was of a respectable though not distinguished family, held office in the Court of Session and was a strong Tory. Jeffrey does not seem to have objected to his father's profession, though he early revolted from his politics; and, after due study at the High School of his birthplace, and the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Oxford (at which latter, however, he only remained a year, deriving very little benefit or pleasure from his sojourn at Queen's College), he was called to the Scottish bar. He practised at first with very little success, and in 1798 had serious thoughts of taking up literary life in London. But he could obtain no footing, and, returning to Edinburgh and marrying a cousin, he fell into the company of Sydney Smith, who was there with a pupil. It seems to be admitted that the idea of a new _Review_--to be entirely free from the control or influence of publishers, to adopt an independent line of criticism (independent, but somewhat mistaken; for the motto _Judex d.a.m.natur c.u.m nocens absolvitur_ gives a very one-sided view of the critic's office), and to be written for fair remuneration by persons of more or less distinct position, and at any rate of education--originated with Sydney Smith. He is also sometimes spoken of as the first "editor,"

which would appear to be a mistake. At first (the original issue was in October 1802) the review appears to have been a kind of republic; the contributors being, besides Jeffrey and Sydney, a certain Francis Horner (who died too soon to demonstrate the complete falsity of the golden opinions entertained of him by his friends), Brougham, and some Professors of Edinburgh University. But no such plan has ever succeeded, though it has been more than once tried, and very soon accident or design showed that Jeffrey was the right man to take the command of the s.h.i.+p. The _Review_ was not ostensibly a political one at first, and for some years Tories, the greatest of whom was Scott, wrote in it. But the majority of the contributors were Whigs, and the whole cast of the periodical became more and more of that complexion, till at last, private matters helping public, a formidable secession took place, and the _Quarterly_ was founded.

From time to time students of literature turn to the early numbers of these famous periodicals, of the _Edinburgh_ especially, with the result, usually of a certain, sometimes of a considerable, disappointment. With the exception of a few things already known from their inclusion in their authors' collected works, the material as a whole is apt to seem anything but extraordinarily good; and some wonder is often expressed at the effect which it originally had. This arises from insufficient attention to a few obvious, but for that very reason easily neglected, truths. The inquirers as a rule have in their minds much more what has followed than what has gone before; and they contrast the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_, not with its jejune forerunners, but with such matured instances as Macaulay's later essays; the early numbers of the _Quarterly_, not with the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_, but with their own successors. Again it is apt to be forgotten that the characteristics of joint-stock periodical-writing make as much for general inequality as for occasional goodness. That which is written by many hands will seldom be as bad, but can never be as good, as that which is written by one; that which takes its texts and starting-points from suggested matters of the moment will generally escape the occasional dulness, but can rarely attain the occasional excellence, of the meditated and original sprout of an individual brain.

The _Edinburgh_ in its early years was undoubtedly surpa.s.sed by itself later and by its rivals; but it was a far greater advance upon anything that had gone before it. It had the refres.h.i.+ng audacity, the fly-at-all character of youth and of intellectual opposition to established ideas; it was, if even from the first not free from partisans.h.i.+p, at any rate not chargeable with the dull venal unfairness of the mere bookseller's hack who attacks Mr. Bungay's books because he is employed by Mr. Bacon, or _vice versa_. And it had a very remarkable staff, comprising the learning and trained intelligence of men like Leslie and Playfair, the unrivalled wit of Sydney Smith, the restless energy and occasional genius of Brougham, the solid profundity of Horner, the wide reading and always generous temper of Scott, and other good qualities of others, besides the talents of its editor Jeffrey himself.

Of these talents there is no doubt, though they were initially somewhat limited and not seldom misdirected afterwards. Jeffrey's entire energies were absorbed by the _Review_ between its foundation and his resignation of the editors.h.i.+p after nearly thirty years' tenure, soon after which, his party at last coming into power, he was rewarded first by the Lord Advocates.h.i.+p and then by a seat on the Bench. He made a very fair judge, and held the post almost till his death in 1850. But his life, for the purposes of literature, is practically comprised between 1802 and 1829, during which he was far more than t.i.tularly the guiding spirit of the _Review_. Recently, or at any rate until quite recently (for there has been some reaction in the very latest days), the conception of an editor has been of one who writes not very much, and, though choosing his contributors with the best care he can give, does not interfere very much with them when they are chosen. This was very far from being the Jeffreyan ideal. He wrote a great deal,--often in the earlier years as many as half a dozen articles in a number,--and he "doctored" his contributors' articles (except in the case of persons like Sydney Smith, who were of too unconquerable idiosyncrasy and too valuable) with the utmost freedom. At the present day, however, his management of the _Review_ is less interesting than his own work, which he himself in his later years collected and selected in an ample definitive edition. It is exceedingly interesting, and for a good many years past it has been distinctly undervalued; the common, though very uncritical, mistake having been made of asking, not whether Jeffrey made a good fight for his own conclusions from his own premises, but whether he approved or disapproved authors whom we now consider great. From this latter point of view he has no doubt small chance. He began by snubbing Byron, and did not change his tone till politics and circ.u.mstances combined made the change obligatory; he pooh-poohed and belittled his own contributor and personal friend Scott; he pursued Wordsworth with equal relentlessness and ill-success. And these three great examples might be reinforced with whole regiments of smaller ones. A more serious fault perhaps was the tone which he, more than any one else, impressed on the _Review_, and which its very motto expressed, as though an author necessarily came before the critic with a rope about his neck, and was only ent.i.tled to be exempted from being strung up _spec