Kitabı oku: «A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)», sayfa 13
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 surpassed by itself later and by its rivals; but it was a far greater advance upon anything that had gone before it. It had the refreshing 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 partisanship, 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 editorship after nearly thirty years' tenure, soon after which, his party at last coming into power, he was rewarded first by the Lord Advocateship 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 titularly 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 circumstances 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 entitled to be exempted from being strung up speciali gratia. This notion, as presumptuous as it is foolish, is not extinct yet, and has done a great deal of harm to criticism, both by prejudicing those who are not critical against critics, and by perverting and twisting the critic's own notion of his province and duty.
Nevertheless, Jeffrey had great merits. His literary standpoint was a little unfortunate. Up to a certain extent he had thoroughly sympathised with the Romantic movement, and he never was an advocate for the Augustan period in English. But either some curiosity of idiosyncrasy, or the fact that Scott and the Lake Poets were all in different ways pillars of Toryism, set him against his own Romantic contemporaries in a very strange fashion. Still, in some ways he was a very great critic. His faculty of summarising a period of literature has rarely been equalled, and perhaps never surpassed; he had, when prejudice of some sort did not blind him, an extraordinary faculty of picking out the best passages in a book; and, above all, he arranged his critical judgments on something like a regular and co-ordinated system. Even his prejudices and injustices were systematic: they were linked to each other by arguments which might sometimes be questionable, but which were always arguments. And though, even when, as in the cases of Keats and Shelley, his extra-literary bias was not present to induce him wrong, he showed a deplorable insensibility to the finer strokes of poetry, he was in general, and taking literature all round, as considerable a critic as we have had in English.
Sydney Smith was a curious contrast to Jeffrey in almost every respect except in politics, and even there the resemblance was rather fortuitous than essential. The second son of a man of eccentric character and some means, he was born in 1771, was sent to Winchester, and proceeded thence to New College, Oxford, where he became Fellow and resided for a considerable time; but unusually little is recorded either of his school or of his college days. He took orders and was appointed to a curacy on Salisbury Plain, where the squire of the parish took a fancy to him and made him tutor to his eldest son. Tutor and pupil went to Edinburgh, just then in great vogue as an educational centre, in 1798; and there Sydney, besides doing clerical duty, stumbled upon his vocation as reviewer. He abode in the Scottish capital for about five years, during which he married, and then removed to London, where he again did duty of various kinds, lectured on Moral Philosophy, and, when the Grenville administration came in, received a fairly valuable Yorkshire living, that of Foston. Here, after a time, he had, owing to new legislation about clerical absentees, to take up his residence, which involved building a parsonage. He had repaid his Whig patrons by writing the exceedingly brilliant and passably scurrilous Letters of Peter Plymley on Catholic Emancipation, and he reviewed steadily for the Edinburgh, as indeed he did during almost the whole editorship of Jeffrey. At last Lord Lyndhurst, a Tory, gave him a stall at Bristol, and he was able to exchange Foston for Combe-Florey, in the more genial latitude of Somerset. The rest of his life was fortunate in worldly ways; for the Reform Ministry, though they would not give him a bishopric, gave him a canonry at St. Paul's, and divers legacies and successions made him relatively a rich man. He died five years before Jeffrey, in February 1845.
Besides the differences of their Scotch and English nationality and education, the contrast between the two friends and founders of the "Blue and Yellow" was curiously pervading. Jeffrey, for all his supposed critical savagery, was a sentimentalist, and had the keenest love of literature as literature; Sydney cared very little for books as books, and had not a grain of sentiment in his composition. Jeffrey had little wit and no humour; Smith abounded in both, and was one of the very wittiest of Englishmen. Even in his Review articles he constantly shocked his more solemn and pedagogic editor by the stream of banter which he poured not merely upon Tories and High Churchmen, but on Methodists and Non-conformists; his letters are full of the most untiring and to this day the most sparkling pleasantry; and his two chief works outside his reviews, the earlier Peter Plymley's Letters and the later Letters to Archdeacon Singleton (written when the author's early Whiggism had crystallised into something different, and when he was stoutly resisting the attempts of the reformed government to meddle with cathedral establishments), rank among the capital light pamphlets of the world, in company with those of Pascal and Swift and Courier. The too few remnants of his abundant conversation preserve faint sparks of the blaze of impromptu fun for which in his day he was almost more famous than as a writer. Sydney Smith had below the surface of wit a very solid substratum of good sense and good feeling; but his literary appeal consisted almost wholly in his shrewd pleasantry, which, as it has been observed, might with even more appropriateness than Coleridge said it of Fuller, have been said to be "the stuff and substance of his intellectual nature." This wit was scarcely ever in writing – it seems to have been sometimes in conversation – forced or trivial; it was most ingeniously adjusted to the purpose of the moment, whether that purpose was a political argument, a light summary of a book of travels, or a mere gossiping letter to a friend; and it had a quality of its own which could only be displayed by extensive and elaborate citation. But if it be possible to put the finger on a single note, it is one distinguishing Sydney Smith widely from Fuller himself, bringing him a little nearer to Voltaire, and, save for the want of certain earnestness, nearer still to Swift – the perfect facility of his jokes, and the casual, easy man-of-the-worldliness with which he sets them before the reader and passes on. Amid the vigorous but slightly ponderous manners of the other early contributors to the Review, this must have been of inestimable value; but it is a higher credit to Sydney Smith that it does not lose its charm when collected together and set by itself, as the more extravagant and rollicking kinds of periodical humour are wont to do. It was probably his want of serious preoccupations of any kind (for his politics were merely an accident; he was, though a sincere Christian, no enthusiast in religion; and he had few special interests, though he had an honest general enjoyment of life) which enabled Sydney Smith so to perfect a quality, or set of qualities, which, as a rule, is more valuable as an occasional set-off than as the staple and solid of a man's literary fare and ware. If so, he points much the same general moral as Cobbett, though in a way as different as possible. But in any case he was a very delightful person, an ornament of English literature, such as few other literatures possess, in his invariable abstinence from unworthy means of raising a laugh, and, among the group of founders of the new periodical, the representative of one of its most important constituents – polished persiflage.
The other contributors of the first generation to the Edinburgh Review do not require much notice here; for Brougham was not really a man of letters, and belongs to political and social, not to literary history, while Mackintosh, though no one would contest his claims, will be better noticed under the head of philosophy. Nor do many of the first staff of the Edinburgh's great rival, the Quarterly, require notice; for Gifford, Canning, Ellis, Scott, Southey have all been noticed under other heads.
Two, however, not of the absolutely first rank, may be mentioned here more conveniently than anywhere else – Sir John Barrow and Isaac Disraeli. The former had a rather remarkable career; for he was born, in 1764, quite of the lower rank, and was successively a clerk in a workshop, a sailor, a teacher of mathematics, and secretary to Macartney on his famous embassy to China. After following the same patron to South Africa, Barrow, at the age of forty, became Secretary of the Admiralty, which post he held with one short break for more than forty years longer. He was made a baronet in 1835, and died in 1848. Barrow was a considerable writer on geography and naval history; and one of the pillars of the Quarterly. Isaac Disraeli, son of one Benjamin of that name and father of another, seems to have been as unlike his famous offspring as any father could be to any son. Born at Enfield in 1766, he showed absolutely no taste for business of any kind, and after some opposition was allowed to cultivate letters. His original work was worth little; indeed, one of the amiable sayings attributed to his friend Rogers was that Isaac Disraeli had "only half an intellect." He fell, however, pretty early (1791) into an odd but pleasant and profitable course of writing which amused himself during the remainder of a long life (he died blind in the same year with Barrow), and has amused a vast number of readers for more than a century. The Curiosities of Literature, the first part of which appeared at the date above mentioned, to be supplemented by others for more than forty years, were followed by the Calamities of Authors and the Quarrels of Authors (1812-14), a book on Charles I., and the Amenities of Literature (1840). Of these the Curiosities is the type, and it is also the best of them. Isaac Disraeli was not a good writer; and his original reflections may sometimes make the reader doubt for a moment whether Rogers was not more wrong in granting him half an intellect than in denying him a whole one. But his anecdotage, though, as perhaps such anecdotage is bound to be, not extremely accurate, is almost inexhaustibly amusing, and indicates a real love as well as a wide knowledge of letters.
The next periodicals, the founding of which enlisted or brought out journalists or essay-writers of the true kind, were Blackwood's Magazine, founded at Edinburgh in 1817, and the London Magazine, of about the same date, the first with one of the longest as well as the most brilliant careers to run that any periodical can boast of, the latter as short-lived as it was brilliant. Indeed, the two had an odd and – in the Shakespearian sense – metaphysical opposition. Scotland and England, the country and the Cockney schools, Toryism and Liberalism (though the London was by no means so thoroughgoing on the Liberal side as Blackwood was on the Tory, and some of its most distinguished contributors were either Tory, as De Quincey, or neutral, as Lamb) fought out their differences under the two flags. And by a climax of coincidence, the fate of the London was practically decided by the duel which killed John Scott, its editor, this duel being the direct result of an editorial or contributorial quarrel between the two periodicals.
Both these magazines, besides being more frequent in appearance than the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, attempted, as their very title of "magazine" expressed, a much wider and more miscellaneous collection of subjects than the strict "review" theory permitted. From the very first Blackwood gave a welcome to fiction, to poetry, and to the widest possible construction of the essay, while, in almost every respect, the London was equally hospitable. Both had staffs of unusual strength, and of still more unusual personality; and while the London could boast of Charles Lamb, of Hazlitt, of De Quincey, of Hood, of Miss Mitford, besides many lesser names, Blackwood was practically launched by the triumvirate of Wilson, Lockhart, and the Ettrick Shepherd, with the speedy collaboration of Maginn.
The eldest of these, and if not the most vigorous, if very nearly the least prolific, yet the most exquisite and singular in literary genius, was Charles Lamb. He also was of the "Seventy Club," as we may call it, which founded the literature of the nineteenth century, and he was born in London on 18th February 1775. He was of rather lower birth than most of its other members (if membership can be predicated of a purely imaginary body), being the son of a lawyer's clerk and confidential servant; but he was educated at Christ's Hospital, and, through the interest of his father's employer, obtained, at the age of seventeen, a berth in the East India House, which assured his modest fortunes through life. But there was the curse of madness in his family, and though he himself escaped with but one slight and passing attack of actual lunacy, and at the cost of an eccentricity which only imparted a rarer touch to his genius, his elder sister Mary was subject to constant seizures, in one of which she stabbed her mother to the heart. She was more gently dealt with than perhaps would have been the case at present, and Lamb undertook the entire charge of her. She repaid him by unfailing care and affection during her lucid intervals (which were long and frequent), and by a sympathy with his own literary tastes, which not seldom made her a valuable collaborator as well as sympathiser. But the shadow was on his whole life: it made it impossible for him to marry, as he evidently would have done if it had not existed; and it perhaps had something to do with a venial but actual tendency on his part to take, rather fully, the convivial license of the time. But Lamb had no other weakness, and had not this in any ruinous degree. The quality of his genius was unique. He had from the first been a diligent and affectionate student of sixteenth and seventeenth century writers, and some of his first literary efforts, after some early sonnets (written with Coleridge and their friend Lloyd, and much fallen foul of by the Tory wits of the Anti-Jacobin), were connected with these studies. He and his sister wrote Tales from Shakespeare, which, almost alone of such things, are not unworthy of the original. He executed an Elizabethan tragedy, John Woodvil, which is rather better than it has been generally said to be; and he arranged a series (or rather two) of scenes from the Elizabethan drama itself, the short, interspersed, critical remarks of which, though occasionally a very little fanciful, contain the most exquisitely sympathetic criticism to be found anywhere in English literature.
It was not, however, till he had well reached middle age that the establishment of the London, the later publishers of which, Taylor and Hessey, were his friends, gave him that half accidental, and yet it would seem necessary, opening which has so often made the fame of men of genius, and which apparently they are by no means often able to make for themselves. Lamb's poems have occasionally an exquisite pathos and more frequently a pleasant humour, but they would not by themselves justify a very high estimate of him; and it is at least possible that, if we had nothing but the brief critical remarks on the dramatists above noticed, they would, independently of their extreme brevity, have failed to obtain for him the just reputation which they now hold, thanks partly to the fact that we have, as comments on them, the Essays of Elia and the delightful correspondence. This latter, after being first published soon after Lamb's death in 1834 (nine years after he had been pensioned off from the India House), by Mr., afterwards Serjeant and Sir Thomas Talfourd, has been gradually augmented, till it has at last found an excellent and probably final editor in Canon Ainger.
It is in these two collections that Lamb presents himself in the character which alone can confer on any man the first rank in literature, the character of unicity – of being some one and giving something which no one before him has given or has been. The Essays of Elia (a nom de guerre said to have been taken from an Italian comrade of the writer's elder brother John in the South Sea House, and directed by Lamb himself to be pronounced "Ell-ia") elude definition not merely as almost all works of genius do, but by virtue of something essentially elvish and tricksy in their own nature. It is easy to detect in them – or rather the things there are so obvious that there is no need of detection – an extraordinary familiarity with the great "quaint" writers of the seventeenth century – Burton, Fuller, Browne – which has supplied a diction of unsurpassed brilliancy and charm; a familiarity with the eighteenth century essayists which has enabled the writer to construct a form very different from theirs in appearance but closely connected with it in reality; an unequalled command over that kind of humour which unites the most fantastic merriment to the most exquisite pathos; a perfect humanity; a cast of thought which, though completely conscious of itself, and not in any grovelling sense humble (Lamb, forgiving and gentle as he was, could turn sharply even upon Coleridge, even upon Southey, when he thought liberties had been taken with him), was a thousand miles removed from arrogance or bumptiousness; an endlessly various and attractive set of crotchets and whimsies, never divorced from the power of seeing the ludicrous side of themselves; a fervent love for literature and a wonderful gift of expounding it; imagination in a high, and fancy almost in the highest degree. But when all this has been duly set down, how much remains both in the essays and in the letters, which in fact are chiefly distinguished from one another by the fact that the essays are letters somewhat less discursive and somewhat in fuller dress, the letters essays in the rough. For the style of Lamb is as indefinable as it is inimitable, and his matter and method defy selection and specification as much as the flutterings of a butterfly. One thing he has always, and that is charm; as for the rest he is an epitome of the lighter side of belles lettres, and not always of the lighter side only.
No one who studies Lamb can fail to see the enormous advantage which was given him by his possession of an official employment which brought him a small but sufficient income without very hard labour. Such literary work as his could never be done (at any rate for a length of time) as "collar-work," and even if the best of it had by chance been so performed, it must necessarily have been mixed, as that of Leigh Hunt is, with a far larger quantity of mere work to order. No such advantage was possessed by the third of the great trio of Cockney critics, or at least critics of the so-called Cockney school; for William Hazlitt, as much the greatest of English critics in a certain way as Lamb is in another and Jeffrey in a third (though a lower than either), was a Cockney neither by extraction nor by birth, nor by early sojourn, nor even by continuous residence in later life. His family was Irish, his father a Unitarian minister; he was born at Maidstone in 1778. When his father was officiating at Wem in Shropshire, in Hazlitt's twentieth year, Coleridge, who at times affected the same denomination, visited the place, and Hazlitt was most powerfully impressed by him. He was, however, divided between art and literature as professions, and his first essays were in the former, which he practised for some time, visiting the Louvre during the peace, or rather armistice, of Amiens, to copy pictures for some English collectors, and to study them on his own account. Returning to London, he met Lamb and others of the literary set in the capital, and, after some newspaper work, married Miss Stoddart, a friend of Mary Lamb's, and a lady of some property. He and his wife lived for some years at her estate of Winterslow on Salisbury Plain (long afterwards still a favourite resort of Hazlitt's), and then he went in 1812 once more to London, where abundant work on periodicals of all kinds, on the Liberal side, from daily newspapers to the Edinburgh Review, soon fell into his hands. But after a time he gave up most kinds of writing except literary, theatrical, and art criticism, the delivery of lectures on literature, and the composition of essays of a character less fanciful and less purely original than Lamb's, but almost as miscellaneous.
He lived till September 1830, the first of those early thirties of the nineteenth century which were to be as generally fatal to his generation of great English men of letters as the seventies of the eighteenth had been prolific of them; and his dying words, "Well, I have had a happy life," are noteworthy. For certainly that life would hardly have seemed happy to many. He quarrelled with his first wife, was divorced from her in Scotland, discreditably enough; published to the world with astounding lack of reticence the details of a frantic passion for Sarah Walker, a lodginghouse-keeper's daughter, who jilted him; and after marrying a second time, was left by his second wife. He had never been rich, and during the last years of his life was in positive difficulties, while for almost the whole period of his second sojourn in London he was the object of the most virulent abuse from the Tory organs, especially the Quarterly and Blackwood– abuse which, it must be confessed, he was both ready and able to repay in kind with handsome interest. He appears to have played the part of firebrand and makebate in the John Scott duel already referred to. Even with his friends he could not keep upon good terms, and the sincere gentleness of Lamb broke down at least once, as the easy good-nature of Leigh Hunt did many times, under the strain of his perverse and savage wrong-headedness.
But whether the critical and the unamiable temper are, as some would have it, essentially one, or whether their combination in the same person be mere coincidence, Hazlitt was beyond all question a great, a very great, critic – in not a few respects our very greatest. All his work, or almost all that has much merit, is small in individual bulk, though the total is very respectable. His longest book, his Life of Napoleon, which was written late and as a counterblast to Scott's, from the singular standpoint of a Republican who was an admirer of Bonaparte, has next to no value; and his earliest, a philosophical work in eighteenth century style on The Principles of Human Action, has not much. But his essays and lectures, which, though probably not as yet by any means exhaustively collected or capable of being identified, fill nine or ten volumes, are of extraordinary goodness. They may be divided roughly into three classes. The first, dealing with art and the drama, must take the lowest room, for theatrical criticism is of necessity, except in so far as it touches on literature rather than acting, of very ephemeral interest; and Hazlitt's education in art and knowledge of it were not quite extensive enough, nor the examples which in the first quarter of this century he had before him in England important enough, to make his work of this kind of the first importance. The best of it is the Conversations with Northcote, a painter of no very great merit, but a survivor of the Reynolds studio; and these conversations very frequently and very widely diverge from painting into literary and miscellaneous matters. The second class contains the miscellaneous essays proper, and these have by some been put at the head of Hazlitt's work. But although some of them, indeed, nearly all, display a spirit, a command of the subject, and a faculty of literary treatment which had never been given to the same subjects in the same way before, although such things as the famous "Going to a Fight," "Going a Journey," "The Indian Jugglers," "Merry England," "Sundials," "On Taste," and not a few more would, put together and freed from good but less good companions, make a most memorable collection, still his real strength is not here.
Great as Hazlitt was as a miscellaneous and Montaignesque essayist, he was greater as a literary critic. Literature was, though he coquetted with art, his first and most constant love; it was the subject on which, as far as English literature is concerned (and he knew little and is still less worth consulting about any other), he had acquired the largest and soundest knowledge; and it is that for which he had the most original and essential genius. His intense prejudices and his occasional inadequacy make themselves felt here as they do everywhere, and even here it is necessary to give the caution that Hazlitt is never to be trusted when he shows the least evidence of dislike for which he gives no reason. But to any one who has made a little progress in criticism himself, to any one who has either read for himself or is capable of reading for himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of neglecting what is not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any language. He will sometimes miss – he is never perhaps so certain as his friends Lamb and Hunt were to find – exquisite individual points. Prejudice, accidental ignorance, or other causes may sometimes invalidate his account of authors or of subjects in general. But still the four great collections of his criticism, The Characters of Shakespeare, The Elizabethan Dramatists, The English Poets, and The English Comic Writers, with not a few scattered things in his other writings, make what is on the whole the best corpus of criticism by a single writer in English on English. He is the critics' critic as Spenser is the poets' poet; that is to say, he has, errors excepted and deficiencies allowed, the greatest proportion of the strictly critical excellencies – of the qualities which make a critic – that any English writer of his craft has ever possessed.
