CONTENTS
FOOTNOTES
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

THREE STUDIES IN
LITERATURE

THREE STUDIES IN
LITERATURE

BY

LEWIS E. GATES

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HARVARD
UNIVERSITY

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1899

All rights reserved


Copyright, 1899,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY


Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

NOTE

CONTENTS

FRANCIS JEFFREY

I

Who now reads Jeffrey? Only those, it may be feared, who are intent on some scholarly purpose or victims of sharp necessity. Yet in 1809 Jeffrey could boast that his articles in the Edinburgh Review were read by fifty thousand thinking people within a month after publication. Jeffrey’s reputation as a critic has run through a picturesquely varied course. During nearly the first half of the century he was, for many eminently intelligent Englishmen, an all but infallible authority in letters and whatever pertained to them. He was Horner’s and Sydney Smith’s “King Jamfray”; he was for Macaulay “more nearly a universal genius than any man of our time.” Even Carlyle declared no critic since Jeffrey’s day “worth naming beside him.” And when that half-national institution, the Encyclopædia Britannica, required in its columns a discussion of the theory of art, Jeffrey it was who was called in as an authority and wrote the article on “Beauty” that, down to 1875, stood as representing authentic English opinion in matters of taste.

Even those who hated Jeffrey admitted his power. “Birds seldom sing,” quoth Allan Cunningham, “when the kite is in the air, and bards dreaded the Judge Jeffrey of our day as much as political offenders dreaded the Judge Jeffreys of James the Second.” Talfourd, Lamb’s friend and editor, asserted of Jeffrey that “with little imagination, little genuine wit, and no clear view of any great and central principles of criticism, he ... continued to dazzle, to astonish, and occasionally to delight multitudes of readers, and at one time to hold the temporary fate of authors in his hands.”

By way of final testimony to the magnitude of Jeffrey’s fame, Macaulay and Carlyle may be quoted at length in his praise. One of Macaulay’s letters of 1828 deals wholly with his impressions of Jeffrey, at whose home he had just been staying; the tone of the letter is that of unmixed hero-worship; no details of the Scotch critic’s appearance or habits or opinions are too slight to be sent to the Macaulay household in London. “He has twenty faces almost as unlike each other as my father’s to Mr. Wilberforce’s.... The mere outline of his face is insignificant. The expression is everything; and such power and variety of expression I never saw in any human countenance.... The flow of his kindness is quite inexhaustible.... His conversation is very much like his countenance and his voice, of immense variety.... He is a shrewd observer; and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem to stand when in his company.”[1] These are only a few of Macaulay’s details and admiring comments. Nor did he outgrow this intense admiration. In April, 1843, he writes to Macvey Napier that he has read and reread Jeffrey’s old articles till he knows them by heart; and in December, 1843, on the appearance of Jeffrey’s collected essays, he expresses himself in almost unmeasured terms: “The variety and versatility of Jeffrey’s mind seem to me more extraordinary than ever.... I do not think that any one man except Jeffrey, nay that any three men, could have produced such diversified excellence.... Take him all in all, I think him more nearly an universal genius than any man of our time.”[2]

Macaulay, however, may not be wholly beyond suspicion as a witness in Jeffrey’s favour. He himself had much of Jeffrey’s dryness and positiveness of nature, was temperamentally limited in many of the same ways, and was, like Jeffrey, an ardent Whig of the Constitutional type; for all these reasons he may be thought prejudiced. In Carlyle, on the other hand, we have a witness who was as far as possible from sympathy with Jeffrey’s neat little formulas in art and in politics, and who has never been accused of registering unduly charitable opinions of even his best friends. Yet of Jeffrey he says, “It is certain there has no Critic appeared among us since who was worth naming beside him;—and his influence, for good and for evil, in Literature and otherwise, has been very great.... His Edinburgh Review [was] a kind of Delphic Oracle, and Voice of the Inspired, for great majorities of what is called the ‘Intelligent Public’; and himself regarded universally as a man of consummate penetration, and the facile princeps in the department he had chosen to cultivate and practise.”[3]

How has it happened that Jeffrey’s lustre, once so brilliant, has paled in our day into that of a fifth-rate luminary? Was his earlier reputation wholly undeserved? Or is the “dumb forgetfulness” that has overtaken him a real case of literary injustice? Probably Jeffrey is now oftenest remembered for his unluckily haughty reprimand to Wordsworth, “This will never do!”—a sentence which is popularly taken to be an incontestable proof of critical incapacity. Yet as regards the artistic worth of the Excursion, the poem against which Jeffrey was protesting, judges are at present nearer in agreement with Jeffrey than with Wordsworth. Ought not Jeffrey, the critic, then, to benefit somewhat from the latter-day reaction against overweening Romanticism?

Doubtless, Jeffrey’s fate is in part merely an illustration of the transiency of critical fame. Jeffrey, like Rymer and John Dennis, has gone the deciduous way of all writers of literature about literature, save the few who have been actually themselves, in their prose, creators of beauty. Yet probably there is also something exceptional in Jeffrey’s case,—in his earlier complete ascendency and in the later sorry disinheriting that has overtaken him. Jeffrey’s reputation was really a composite affair, due fully as much to the timely-happy establishment of the Edinburgh Review as to his own personal cleverness, great as that was. On Jeffrey, the editor, was reflected all the shining success of the first brilliant English Review. To understand, then, the waxing and the waning of Jeffrey’s literary reputation, a somewhat careful analysis will be needed not simply of his critical genius, but also of the methods for making that genius effective which fortune offered him and his own keen practical instincts worked out successfully. As for his individual worth as a critic, the truth will be found to lie, as so often happens, about midway between the eulogists and the cavillers. Judged even by present standards, Jeffrey was a notably effective critic; he made blunders not a few, but he was acute, entertaining, and suggestive, even when he went astray; he excelled in rapid analysis, apt illustration, and audacious satire. He developed critical method in two very important directions, and seized upon and applied, with at least partial success, two critical principles, hardly recognized in England before his day, but thereafter more and more widely and fruitfully employed. All these are points, however, that need to be minutely dealt with and illustrated.

II

It was on Jeffrey’s versatility—the universality of his genius—that Macaulay’s comments in 1843 laid special stress. That versatility remains noteworthy for good or for ill to-day. No modern literary critic would venture on the vast range of subjects that Jeffrey, even in the seventy or eighty of his essays that he thought worth preserving, has magisterially dealt with. His Collected Essays are arranged under the following seven headings: General Literature; History; Poetry; Philosophy of the Mind, Metaphysics, and Jurisprudence; Prose Fiction; General Politics; Miscellaneous. Under all these headings the works of distinguished specialists are discussed, and the reviewer declaims and dogmatizes like an expert, whether he be holding forth on philosophy to Dugald Stewart or on politics and law to Jeremy Bentham, or on poetry to Wordsworth or Scott. Such confident universality is nowadays sure to suggest shallowness, and yet the fact remains that for twenty-five years Jeffrey was able to write on this vast variety of topics so as to command the thorough respect even of his opponents, and so as not simply to avoid any scandalous misadventure through false information or inept judgments (unless in the case of Wordsworth), but to rule almost arbitrarily a great mass of public opinion in morals, in politics, and in literary and artistic theory. To carry through successfully so difficult a task is in itself a victory to be put to the credit of the audacious Scotch critic, even though his work prove not in all cases of permanent worth.

A rapid and pungent style and great adroitness and attractiveness in exposition were doubtless largely responsible for Jeffrey’s constant success with his public. But, in addition to these formal excellences, Jeffrey was remarkably well equipped and well trained for the part of a universal genius. Instinct had been beforehand with him and led him to prepare himself during a good many years of faithful study for just the part he was to play. When he had to choose a profession he decided for the bar, and he was called as a barrister in 1796. But both before this decision and during his actual legal studies, he read widely and systematically by himself in general literature, political theory, history, and philosophy; and during all this patient, private reading, at Glasgow University, at Edinburgh, and afterwards at Oxford, he was busy, with canny Scotch diligence, at note-books, in which facts and ideas and theorizings were recorded and worked out. His mind was conspicuously vivacious and alert,—swift to catch up and make its own new knowledge, whether about books or life. This keenness of intellectual scent was always characteristic of him. Even Matthew Arnold has conceded to him one trait of the ideal critic—curiosity. A very different commentator, Mrs. Carlyle, makes special mention, after a call from him, of his “dark, penetrating” eyes, that “had been taking note of most things in God’s universe.”

Besides the results of this patient self-discipline, and of this wide ranging and swiftly appropriating intellectual interest, Jeffrey had, in a very high degree, the barrister’s power of seizing, comprehending, and controlling, quickly and surely, a vast mass of new facts. He could “get up” an unfamiliar subject with unsurpassable readiness and completeness. His mastery of his subject in a review-article seems often like the successful barrister’s knowledge of his brief: he knows whatever he needs to know to carry the matter in hand triumphantly through.

His way of unfolding a subject is always deft and delightful to follow. He had a sure expository instinct. Point by point, the most complex problem takes on, under his treatment, at least a specious simplicity, and the most abstract theorem, alluring familiarity, and definiteness. He is generous with illustrations and examples and mischievous in giving them a satirical turn. Despite his Scotch bias towards theorizing, he knows and “hugs” his facts, and his discussions always keep close to experience.

His breadth of view is remarkable, if his work be compared with that of eighteenth-century critics. Whatever the book or question under discussion, Jeffrey lifts it into the region of general principles, and is not content with formal judgments of literary worth or with random comments on special points. He is really bent on setting up “a free play of ideas” over the literature and the modes of life that he criticises, and on orienting his readers as regards not simply the special work under discussion, but the whole field of art or of study to which it belongs. That his theories, at least in literary matters, were not always searching or profound, that they will not, in sweep and thoroughness, bear comparison with those, for example, of Coleridge, the great system-weaver of the Romanticists, is undoubtedly true. Yet even in literary theory Jeffrey, as will be presently shown, hit on some notable truths; he partially comprehended and applied the historical method for the study of literature; he worked out with Alison an interpretation of beauty, which, though false in its emphasis and distorted, recognized and illustrated with great acuteness one highly important and comparatively neglected source of æsthetic emotion; and, despite much mistaken ridicule of Romantic poetry and much insensibility to its quintessential power and charm, he showed his critical insight in his protests against certain radical defects alike in the ethical and in the æsthetic theory of the Romanticists,—defects which, as Jeffrey contended and as modern criticism admits, do much to invalidate Romantic poetry, both as a criticism of life and as a permanently invigorating imaginative stimulus. But even apart from the absolute correctness or finality of Jeffrey’s theorizing, his practice of raising criticism into the region of general principles and of examining the material worth of books even more searchingly than their barely formal qualities, was a renovating change in criticism, and at once gave new consideration and dignity to the work of the critic. Mind was at any rate fermenting in whatever Jeffrey wrote, and for the most part the writing of earlier reviewers had been a barren waste of words.

Finally, Jeffrey’s style startled and challenged and terrified and amused, and through its briskness and audacity, its swift sparkle and gay bravado, its satire and banter, its impetuous fulness and unfailing wealth of fact and illustration fairly captivated a public that was used to the humdrum, conventional speech of penny-a-lining critics. There is a fine vein of mischief in Jeffrey that leads continually to very grateful ridicule of pedantry, dulness, and all kinds of absurdity. Even the devoutest Wordsworthian will, if he be not an ingrained prig, relish Jeffrey’s raillery at the expense of Wordsworth’s occasional pompous ineptitude. And if Jeffrey’s vivacity still seems amusing, how much more irresistible must his style have seemed before the days of Hazlitt and Lamb and Macaulay and Carlyle. His dash and wit and audacity were new in literary criticism, and for the time being seemed to the public almost more than mortal.

Whether or no all these qualities of Jeffrey’s genius and style are those of the ideal literary critic, they were fitted to gain him success and renown as a brilliant, argumentative writer on literary topics. And, in point of fact, this is what Jeffrey really was; he was a typically well equipped and skilful middleman of ideas. He found an increasingly large Liberal or Whig public anxious to have its beliefs expressed plausibly, its feelings justified, and its taste made clear to itself and gently improved. The Whig “sheep looked up,” and Jeffrey fed them. He did much the same work in general literary, social, and political theory that Macaulay did later in history. Macaulay’s historical essays, also published in the Edinburgh Review, were, as Cotter Morison has pointed out, “great historical cartoons,” specially adapted for the popularization of history, and specially suited to the knowledge and aspirations of an intelligent middle-class public. Jeffrey’s essays in literature had much this same character and value. They interpreted the freshest, most vital thought of the time, so far as possible in harmony with Whig formulas, and judged it by Whig standards; they made happily articulate Whig prejudices on all subjects, from the French Revolution to Wordsworth’s peasant poetry. By their masterly exposition, their incisive argument, and their wit, they entertained even those whom they exasperated. Their success was prompt and unexampled.

III

It has already been hinted that the qualities of Jeffrey’s genius and style, great as may have been their value for the work he accomplished, are not, when judged from the modern point of view, altogether those of the ideal literary critic. This is particularly true if appreciation be included as a vital part of the critic’s task. Jeffrey rarely appreciates a piece of literature, interprets it imaginatively, lends himself to its peculiar charm, and expresses this charm through sympathetic symbolism. His readiness and his plausibility are not the only points in which Jeffrey the critic suggests Jeffrey the advocate. He has the defects as well as the merits of the lawyer in literature. He is always for or against his author; he is always making points. The intellectual interest preponderates in his critical work, and his discussions often seem, particularly to a reader of modern impressionistic criticism, hard, unsympathetic, searchingly analytical, repellingly abstract and systematic. He is always on the watch; he never lends himself confidingly to his author and takes passively and gratefully the mood and the images his author suggests. He never loiters or dreams. He is full of business and bustle, and perpetually distracts his readers with his sense of the need of making definite progress. He is one of those responsible folk who believe that

For delicate and subtle appreciation, then, of the best modern type it is useless to look in Jeffrey’s essays.

Of course, historically, such criticism could hardly have been expected in 1803. The critical tradition that Jeffrey fell heir to was that of the dogmatists,—the tradition that came down from Ascham, the pedagogue, through the hands of the would-be autocrats, Rymer and Dennis, to Dr. Johnson. The theories of the dogmatists suffered many changes, but remained nevertheless true to one fundamental principle: the critic was to be accepted as an infallible judge in literature because of his familiarity with certain models or certain abstract rules, the imitation or the observance of which was essential to good art. The dogmatic critic deemed himself lord of literature by a kind of divine right. Ascham believed in the plenary artistic inspiration of the Greek and Latin classics, and posed as the authentic interpreter of the sacred literary word. The pseudo-classical critics, Rymer and Dennis, based themselves also partly on authority, but even more upon reason; they pretended to rule by the divine right of pure logic. Their implicit postulate might be likened to Hobbes’s theory in politics; they substantially held that the strongest must keep order in the commonwealth, and that in the literary commonwealth this duty fell to the intellectually strongest. Accordingly, these critics administered justice magisterially in accordance with a strict code of laws; they had laws for the epic poet, laws for the writer of comedy, laws for the satirist, laws for the writer of tragedy; the author of every new piece of literature was called up to the bar and reprimanded for the least illegality. In short, the dogmatic critic regarded himself and was generally regarded as able to apply absolute tests of merit to all literary work, and as the final authority on all doubtful matters of taste.

Now, Jeffrey was the inheritor of this tradition in criticism, and naturally adopted at times its tyrannical tone and manner towards public and authors. Yet, following his temperamental fondness for compromises, for middle parties and mediating measures, Jeffrey never tried formally to defend this old doctrine or represented himself as an absolute lawgiver in literature. Nowhere does he lay down a complete set of principles, like the rules of Bossu for epic poetry, or those of Rapin for the drama, by which excellence in any form of literature may be absolutely tested. Such a high-and-dry Tory theory of criticism does not suggest itself to Jeffrey as tenable. He is a Whig in taste as in politics, and desires in both spheres the supremacy of a chosen aristocracy. In his essay on Scott’s Lady of the Lake he declares the standard of literary excellence to reside in “the taste of a few ... persons, eminently qualified, by natural sensibility and long experience and reflection, to perceive all beauties that really exist, as well as to settle the relative value and importance of all the different sorts of beauty.” Jeffrey regards himself as one of the choicest spirits of this chosen aristocracy, and it is as the exponent of the best current opinion that he speaks on all questions of taste.

It follows that, when Jeffrey is dealing with purely literary questions, he is less argumentative than at other times, and that what has been said of his viewing every subject in the light of general principles is least applicable to his dogmatic essays on literature. When, for example, he attacks Wilhelm Meister or the Excursion, he does so simply and frankly in terms of his temperament. Wordsworth’s mysticism baffles him, and he condemns it; Goethe’s sordid realism and sentiment offend his man-of-the-world taste and he anathematizes them. His custom in such hostile criticisms is to let his own taste masquerade as that of “the judicious observer” or “the modern public.” His faith in his own personal equation is unquestioning and devout. Whatever fails to fall in with his bias is a fair mark for his bitterest invective. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, for example, is “sheer nonsense,” “ludicrously unnatural,” full of “pure childishness or mere folly,” “vulgar and obscure,” full of “absurdities and affectations.” These terms are, for the most part, mere circumlocutions for Jeffrey’s dislike, mere roundabout ways of saying that the book is not to his taste. As for coming to an understanding with author or reader about the ends of prose fiction or the best methods of reaching those ends, Jeffrey never thinks of such an attempt. He simply takes up various passages and declares he does not comprehend them, or does not fancy the subjects they treat of, or does not like the author’s ideas or methods. He gives no reasons for his likes or dislikes, but is content to express them emphatically and picturesquely. This is, of course, dogmatism pure and simple, and a dogmatism, too, more irritating than the dogmatism that argues, for it seems more arbitrary and more challenging. Of this tone and method, Coleridge complains in the twenty-first chapter of his Biographia Literaria, when, in commenting on current critical literature, he protests against “the substitution of assertion for argument” and against “the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts.”

But, irritating as is this pragmatic, unreasoning dogmatism, it is nevertheless plainly a step forward from the view that makes the critic absolute lawgiver in art. As the Whig position in politics is midway between absolute monarchy and democracy, so what we may term the Whig compromise in criticism stands midway between the tyranny of earlier critics and our modern freedom. The mere recognition of the fact that the critic speaks with authority only as representing a coterie, only as interpreting public opinion, is plainly a change for the better. The critic no longer regards himself as by divine right lord alike of public and authors; he no longer measures literary success solely by changeless, abstract formulas of excellence; he admits more or less explicitly that the taste of living readers, not rules drawn from the works of dead writers, must decide what in literature is good or bad. He still, to be sure, limits arbitrarily the circle whose taste he regards as a valid test; but it is plain that a new principle has implicitly been accepted, and that the way is opened for the development and recognition of all kinds of beauty and power the public may require.

Jeffrey himself, however, seems never to have suspected the conclusions that might legitimately be drawn from the ideas that he was helping to make current. He seems to have had no qualm of doubt touching his right to dogmatize on the merits and defects of art as violently as a critic of the older school. In theory, he held that all artistic excellence is relative; but in practice, he never let this doctrine mitigate the severity of his judgments. He asserts in his review of Alison on Taste that “what a man feels distinctly to be beautiful, is beautiful to him”; and that so far as the individual is concerned all pleasure in art is equally real and justifiable. Yet this doctrine seems never to have paralyzed in the least his faith in the superior worth of his own kind of pleasure; and he upbraids Wordsworth and Coleridge just as indignantly for not ministering to that pleasure, as if he had some abstract standard of poetic excellence, of which he could prove they fell short.

When we try to define Jeffrey’s taste and to determine just what he liked and disliked in literature, we find an odd combination of sympathies and antipathies. Mr. Leslie Stephen has spoken of him as in politics an eighteenth-century survival;[4] but this formula, apt as it is for his politics, scarcely applies to his taste in literature. The typical eighteenth-century man of letters was a pseudo-classicist; and beyond the pseudo-classical point of view Jeffrey had passed, just as certainly as he had never reached the Romantic point of view. Of Pope, for example, he says: he is “much the best we think of the classical Continental school; but he is not to be compared with the masters—nor with the pupils—of that Old English one from which there had been so lamentable an apostasy.” Addison he condemns for his “extreme caution, timidity, and flatness,” and he declares that “the narrowness of his range in poetical sentiment and diction, and the utter want either of passion or of brilliancy, render it difficult to believe that he was born under the same sun with Shakespeare.” These opinions are proof patent of Jeffrey’s contempt for pseudo-classicism. Then, too, Jeffrey is, as he himself boasts, almost superstitious in his reverence for Shakespeare. More significant still is his admiration for other Elizabethan dramatists, like Beaumont, Fletcher, Ford, and Webster. “Of the old English dramatists,” he assures us in his essay on Ford, “it may be said, in general, that they are more poetical, and more original in their diction, than the dramatists of any other age or country. Their scenes abound more in varied images, and gratuitous excursions of fancy. Their illustrations and figures of speech are more borrowed from rural life, and from the simple occupations or universal feelings of mankind. They are not confined to a certain range of dignified expressions, nor restricted to a particular assortment of imagery, beyond which it is not lawful to look for embellishments.” Finally, he even commends Coleridge’s great favourite, Jeremy Taylor, as enthusiastically as Coleridge himself could do: “There is in any one of the prose folios of Jeremy Taylor,” he asserts, “more fine fancy and original imagery—more brilliant conceptions and glowing expressions—more new figures, and new applications of old figures—more, in short, of the body and the soul of poetry, than in all the odes and the epics that have since been produced in Europe.”

Such judgments as these mark Jeffrey as, at any rate, not an eighteenth-century survival; they must be duly borne in mind when a formula is being sought for his literary taste. Fully as significant, though in a different way, is the series of essays on the poet Crabbe. If the praise of the Elizabethans seems to argue an almost Romantic bias in Jeffrey and to suggest that after all his tastes are very like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Crabbe essays at once reveal his antipathy to the men of the new age and show how far he is from even being willing to allow its prophets to prophesy in peace and obscurity.

Throughout his praise of Crabbe, Jeffrey is by implication condemning Wordsworth; nor does he confine himself to this roundabout method of attacking Romanticism. In the very first essay on Crabbe (1807), he turns aside from his subject to ridicule by name, “the Wordsworths, and the Southeys, and Coleridges, and all that ambitious fraternity,” and contrasts at great length Crabbe’s sanity with Wordsworth’s mysticism. “Mr. Crabbe exhibits the common people of England pretty much as they are”; whereas “Mr. Wordsworth and his associates ... introduce us to beings whose existence was not previously suspected by the acutest observers of nature; and excite an interest for them—where they do excite any interest—more by an eloquent and refined analysis of their own capricious feelings, than by any obvious or intelligible ground of sympathy in their situation.” With Crabbe, Jeffrey feels he is on solid ground, dealing with a man who sees life clearly and sensibly, as he himself sees it; and in his enthusiastic praise of the minute fidelity of Crabbe, of his uncompromising truth and realism, and of his freedom from all meretricious effects, from affectation, and from absurd mysticism, we have at once the measure of Jeffrey’s poetic sensibility and the sure evidence of his inability to sympathize genuinely with “the Lakers.”

Of course, for the classic passages expressing his impatience of the new movement, we must go to the essays on Wordsworth’s Excursion and White Doe. Jeffrey’s objections to the Lakers fall under four heads: First, the new poets are nonsensically mystical; secondly, they falsify life by showing it through a distorting medium of personal emotion, i.e. they are misleadingly subjective; thirdly, they are guilty of grotesque bad taste in their democratic realism; fourthly, they are pedantically earnest and serious in their treatment of art, and inexcusably pretentious in their proclamation of a new gospel of life. Mysticism, intense individuality of feeling, naturalism, and “high seriousness,”—these were the qualities that in the new art particularly exasperated Jeffrey; and inasmuch as these were the very qualities to which, in the eyes of its devotees, the new art owed its special potency, the division between Jeffrey and the Romanticists was sufficiently deep and irreconcilable.

Wordsworth’s transcendentalism, his intense spiritual consciousness, his inveterate fashion of apprehending all nature as instinct with spiritual force and of converting “this whole Of suns and worlds and men” and “all that it inherits” into a series of splendid imaginative symbols of moral and spiritual truth,—these qualities of Wordsworth’s genius were for his admirers among his most characteristic sources of power, and tended to place him as an imaginative interpreter of life far above those Elizabethan writers whom Jeffrey, too, in opposition to the eighteenth century, pretended to reverence. But these were just the qualities in Wordsworth’s genius that seemed to Jeffrey most reprehensible. After quoting a typical passage where Wordsworth’s transcendentalism finds free utterance, Jeffrey exclaims: “This is a fair sample of that rapturous mysticism which eludes all comprehension, and fills the despairing reader with painful giddiness and terror.” Jeffrey’s woe is by no means feigned. We cannot doubt that his whole mental life was perturbed by such of Wordsworth’s poems as the great Ode, and that it was an act of self-preservation on his part to burst into indignant ridicule and violent protest. To find a man of Wordsworth’s age and literary experience deliberately penning such bewildering stanzas and expressing such unintelligible emotions, shook for the moment Jeffrey’s faith in his own little, well-ordered universe, and then, as he recovered from his earthquake, escaped from its vapours, and felt secure once more in the clear, every-day light of common sense, led him into fierce invective against the cause of his momentary panic.

Hardly less impatient is Jeffrey of Wordsworth’s subjectivity than of his mysticism. Why cannot Wordsworth feel about life as other people feel about it, as any well-bred, cultivated man of the world feels about it? When such a man sees a poor old peasant gathering leeches in a pool, he pulls out his purse, gives him a shilling, and walks on, speculating about the state of the poor law; Wordsworth, on the contrary, bursts into a strange fit of raving about Chatterton and Burns, and “mighty poets in their misery dead,” and then in some mysterious fashion converts the peasant’s stolidity into a defence against these gloomy thoughts. This way of treating the peasant seems to Jeffrey utterly unjustifiable, both because of its grotesque mysticism, and because it thrusts a personal motif discourteously into the face of the public and falsifies ludicrously the peasant’s character and life. Wordsworth has no right, Jeffrey insists, to treat the peasant merely as the symbol of his own peculiar mood. Here, as in his protest against Wordsworth’s mysticism, Jeffrey pleads for common sense and the commonplace; he is the type of what Lamb calls “the Caledonian intellect,” which rejects scornfully ideas that cannot be adequately expressed in good plain terms, and grasped “by twelve men on a jury.”

Crabbe’s superiority to the Lakers lies for Jeffrey chiefly in the fact that he has no idiosyncrasies, though he has many mannerisms; he expresses no new theories and no peculiar emotions in his portrayal of common life. Hence his choice of vulgar subjects is endurable—even highly commendable. His peasants are the well-known peasants of every-day England, with whose hard lot it behoves an enlightened Whig to sympathize—from a distance. But a realism that, like Wordsworth’s, professes to find in these poor peasants the deepest spiritual insight and the purest springs of moral life, is simply for Jeffrey grotesque in its maladroitness and confusion of values. Sydney Smith used to say, “If I am doomed to be a slave at all, I would rather be the slave of a king than a cobbler.” And this same prejudice against any topsy-turvy reassignment of values was largely responsible for Jeffrey’s dislike of Wordsworth’s peasants and of his treatment of common life. If peasants keep their places, as Crabbe’s peasants do, they may perfectly well be brought into the precincts of poetry; but to exalt them into types of moral virtue and into heavenly messengers of divine truth, is to “make tyrants of cobblers.” Jacobinism in art, as in politics, is to Jeffrey detestable.

In fact, all the pretensions of the new school to illustrate by its art a new gospel of life were intensely disagreeable to Jeffrey. As long as Romanticism seemed chiefly decorative, as in Scott or Keats, Jeffrey could tolerate it or even delight in it. But the moment it began, whether in Byron or Wordsworth, to take itself seriously, and to struggle to express new moral and spiritual ideals, Jeffrey protested. Just here lies the key to what some critics have found a rather perplexing problem,—the reasons for the varying degrees of Jeffrey’s sympathy with the poets of his day. Let the poet remain a mere master of the revels, or a mere magician calling up by his incantations in verse a gorgeous phantasmagoria of sights and sounds for the delectation of idle readers, and Jeffrey will consent to admire him and will commend his fertility of invention, his wealth of imagination, his “rich lights of fancy,” and “his flowers of poetry.” Keats’s luxuriant pictures of Greek life in Endymion, Jeffrey finds irresistible in the “intoxication of their sweetness” and in “the enchantments which they so lavishly present.” Moore and Campbell, he regards as the most admirable of the Romanticists, and their works as the very best of the somewhat extravagant modern school. Writing in 1829, he arranges recent poets in the following order, according to the probable duration of their fame: “The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber:—and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley,—and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth,—and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our view. The novels of Scott have put out his poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are fading into distance and dimness ... and the blazing star of Byron himself is receding from its place of pride.... The two who have the longest withstood this rapid withering of the laurel ... are Rogers and Campbell; neither of them, it may be remarked, voluminous writers, and both distinguished rather for the fine taste and consummate elegance of their writings, than for that fiery passion, and disdainful vehemence, which seemed for a time to be so much more in favour with the public.” Now a glance at Jeffrey’s list of poets makes it clear that those for whom he prophesies lasting fame are either pseudo-classicists or decorative Romanticists, and that those whose day he declares to be over are for the most part poets whose Romanticism was a vital principle. Rogers is, of course, a genuine representative of the pseudo-classical tradition, with all its devotion to form, its self-restraint, its poverty of imagination, and its distrust of passion. Moore, whom Jeffrey places late in his list of fading luminaries, and Campbell, whom he finds most nearly unchanging in lustre, are both in a way Romanticists; but they are alike in seeking chiefly for decorative effects and in not taking their art too seriously. So long, then, as the fire and the heat of Romanticism spent themselves merely in giving imaginative splendour to style, Jeffrey could tolerate the movement, and could even regard it with favour, as a return to that power and fervour and wild beauty that he had taught himself to admire in Elizabethan poetry. But the moment the new energy was suffered to penetrate life itself and to convert the conventional world of dead fact, through the vitalizing power of passion, into a genuinely new poetic material, then Jeffrey stood aghast at what seemed to him a return to chaos. Byron with his fiery bursts of selfish passion, Wordsworth with his steadily glowing consciousness of the infinite, and Shelley with his “white heat of transcendentalism,” were all alike for Jeffrey portentously dangerous forces and unhealthy phenomena.

For the most part, in his attacks upon Romantic poetry, Jeffrey indulges in little philosophizing; he is content with wit, satire, epigram, and clever self-assertion. And yet, in the last analysis, there is a vital connection between his rejection of Romanticism and his abstract theorizings on beauty,—small pains as he has taken to bring out this obscure relationship. A complete account of his temperament and taste ought to show how the same instincts that led to his hostility to Wordsworth and Coleridge expressed themselves formally, and tried to justify themselves, through the theory of Beauty which he worked out with Alison’s help.

According to Jeffrey’s account of the matter, a beautiful object owes its beauty to its power to call up in the observer latent past experiences of pleasure and pain. These little fragments of past joy and sorrow gather closely round the object and blend in a kind of blurred halo of delight which we call beauty. Suppose that an observer looks out upon a luxuriant country landscape; the winding road calls back to him (though without his conscious recognition of the fact) leisurely afternoon drives; the green meadows suggest (again obscurely) past sympathy with shepherds and grazing flocks and rustic prosperity; the cottages surreptitiously wake memories of home joys and content about the hearthstone. And so the imagination garners out of the summer landscape a myriad evanescent associations with past life, which, too slight and swift to be detected separately by thought, nevertheless unite like the harmonics of a musical note to produce the peculiar character that we call beauty. This being the nature of beauty, it follows that every individual’s past will limit and create for him his beauty in the present; his foregone pleasures and pains will alone make possible those echoes of intense feeling which in the present combine into the single chord of beauty. According to every man’s past, then, is his present sense of beauty; and as no two men have the same past, no two men can have the same perceptions of beauty in the present.

Jeffrey accepts unhesitatingly the conclusions involved in this doctrine, and asserts that beauty is wholly relative; that whatever seems to a man beautiful is for him beautiful; and that no sensible debate is possible over the legitimacy of the beauty that a man’s special temperament manufactures. So long as a man confines himself to enjoying beauty, he remains beyond criticism in the magic region of his own private experience. But the moment he offers himself as a creator or interpreter of beauty for others, he must take into account the scope and nature of common experience and try to appeal imaginatively to associations which are likely to be in the hearts of all. This is precisely, Jeffrey once or twice implies, what Romanticists like Wordsworth and Coleridge failed to do. They tried to impose on the public their own curiously whimsical associations of pleasure and pain; they were incredibly presumptuous in their belief that their own quaint, country-side blisses and sorrows and their own droll exaltations and despairs over peddlers and beggars and leech-gatherers must have universal value for mankind. Here for Jeffrey lay the wilful and colossal egotism of Romantic art; and once more we find him posing as the foe of idiosyncrasy and arbitrary whim, and as the representative of a cultivated aristocracy of intelligence and social experience and taste, who, after all, have something like a common fund of feelings and associations on which art can draw.

As for the actual worth of Jeffrey’s theory of beauty, its fault lies in trying to stretch into a universal formula what is really only a partial explanation of the facts. The beauty that Jeffrey lays stress on—the kind of beauty that comes from the suggestiveness of objects—is duly recognized nowadays under the name of beauty of expression. The possible origin of beauty through association of ideas had not been thoroughly considered before the days of Jeffrey and Alison, and their work was therefore new and historically important. But beside beauty that comes from this source,—beside beauty of expression,—there are beauty of form and beauty of material; neither of these is recognized by Jeffrey as an independent variety, and examples of each he tries, with really heroic ingenuity, to reduce to beauty of expression. The beauty of a Greek temple is explained as depending solely on a swift, unconscious recognition of the stability, costliness, splendour, and antiquity of the structure. The beauty of special colours or of chords of music is derived, not at all from the intrinsic quality of the sensations,—the hue or the musical sound,—but wholly from subtle associations with past pleasure and pain. Thus Jeffrey’s theory becomes distorted and misleading in spite of the truthfulness of much of his observation and the real subtlety and acuteness of many of his interpretations. The quintessential in art, the pleasure that art gives through pure form and the inexplicable ministry of sensation, Jeffrey is least sensitive to, and is continually looking askance at and trying to forget or to account for as merely disguised human sympathy.

Besides the light it throws on Jeffrey’s quarrel with Romanticism, his theory of beauty is of special significance because it emphasizes the genuineness and intensity of his ethical interest. All artistic pleasure is for Jeffrey merely human sympathy in masquerade—past love for one’s fellows, delicately revived in the music of art. The only man, then, who can have a wide range of artistic pleasure is he who in the past has shared generously in the lives of his comrades. Holding this theory of art, Jeffrey in his literary criticism naturally laid great stress on the ethical qualities of books and authors. Accordingly, in the preface to his Collected Essays, Jeffrey claims special credit for his frequent use of the ethical point of view. “If I might be permitted farther, to state, in what particular department, and generally, on account of what, I should most wish to claim a share of those merits, I should certainly say, that it was by having constantly endeavoured to combine Ethical precepts with Literary Criticism, and earnestly sought to impress my readers with a sense, both of the close connection between sound intellectual attainments and the higher elements of duty and enjoyment; and of the just and ultimate subordination of the former to the latter. The praise, in short, to which I aspire, and to merit which I am conscious that my efforts were most constantly directed, is, that I have, more uniformly and earnestly than any preceding critic, made the Moral tendencies of the works under consideration a leading subject of discussion.”

This “proud claim,” as Jeffrey calls it, seems amply justified when we compare Jeffrey’s essays either with the critical essays in the earlier Reviews, or with the more formal and elaborate critical essays of the eighteenth century. Even Dr. Johnson with all his didacticism had little notion of extracting from a piece of literature the subtle spirit of good or of evil by which it draws men this way or that way in conduct. An obvious infringement of good morals in speech or in plot he was sure to condemn, and a formal inculcation of moral truth he was sure to recognize and approve. But neither in Johnson, nor anywhere else before Jeffrey, do we find a critic constantly attempting to detect and define the moral atmosphere that pervades the whole work of an author, and to determine the relation between this moral atmosphere and the author’s personality as man and as artist. To have perceived the value of this ethical criticism, to have practised it skilfully, and to have fostered a taste for it, these are true claims to distinction; and Jeffrey’s services in these directions have been too often forgotten. The greater breadth of view of later critics and their surer appreciation of ethical values should not be allowed to deprive Jeffrey of his honour as a pioneer in ethical criticism.

For still another innovation in critical methods, Jeffrey was at least partly responsible. He was among the earliest English critics to see the importance for the study of literature of the historical point of view and to take into close account, in the study of an author or of a whole literature, the social environment. Not that Jeffrey was one of the original minds who first conceived of the historical method of study in its application to art, and worked out for themselves conceptions of literature as a growth and development and as dependent upon the spirit of the age and upon social conditions. Jeffrey, it can hardly be doubted, was merely a clever borrower. Long before his day, the principles underlying the historical conception of literature had been worked out in Germany, and had been applied by Herder and Goethe, and their disciples, for the solution of problems in criticism. Of this German theorizing Jeffrey can hardly have had direct knowledge. But to Madame de Staël, who was an adept in German speculation, Jeffrey probably owed much,—both to her teaching and to her example. Her De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales had appeared in France in 1800, and her De l’Allemagne, a study of German life and literature conceived throughout in strict harmony with the principles of the historical method, was published in 1810. Now it is in 1811 that an unmistakable broadening of method may be discerned in Jeffrey’s literary criticism. His essay on Ford’s Dramatic Works (August, 1811) is remarkable for its rapid survey of the whole development of English literature, its brilliant generalizations as regards the characteristics of such definite periods as that of the Restoration, and its fairly successful attempts to account for these characteristics as the outcome in each case of the social conditions of the time. Before 1811, or at any rate before 1810, Jeffrey never gets, in his study of an author, beyond the biographical point of view. He may consider psychological questions,—the characteristics of an author’s mind that have impressed themselves on his book, or the nature of the public taste to which literature of a certain kind caters. But the sociological origin of a literary school or a writer has not before that time troubled Jeffrey. After the Ford essay the historical and the sociological points of view are used rather frequently, though it must be admitted with uncertain success and not with entire loyalty.

Perhaps Jeffrey’s most interesting actual discussion of the historical method occurs in the introduction to his essay on Wilhelm Meister, written in 1825. In this introduction he tries to classify the influences that mould literature and guide its development, and his formulas are curiously suggestive of the much later and rather famous theorizing of the French critic, Taine. Jeffrey does not recognize race—the first of Taine’s forces; “human nature,” Jeffrey asserts, “is everywhere fundamentally the same.” But for Taine’s two other sets of forces which he groups under the names moment and milieu, close equivalents may be found in Jeffrey’s formulas. “The circumstances,” he asserts, “which have distinguished [literature] into so many local varieties ... may be divided into two great classes,—the one embracing all that relates to the newness or antiquity of the society to which they belong, or, in other words, to the stage which any particular nation has attained in that progress from rudeness to refinement, in which all are engaged; the other comprehending what may be termed the accidental causes by which the character and condition of communities may be affected; such as their government, their relative position as to power and civilization to neighbouring countries, their prevailing occupations, determined in some degree by the capabilities of their soil and climate.” Of these principles, Jeffrey goes on through a half-dozen paragraphs to make more special application; he describes certain kinds of literature, or certain characteristics of literature, that are apt to correspond to certain stages of civilization; he considers hastily some of the qualities impressed upon literature by different sorts of political institutions. All this general discussion, though decidedly in the air, is true and suggestive; it shows that by 1825 Jeffrey had a good deal of insight into the general theory of the dependence of literature on society. It must not be forgotten, however, in estimating Jeffrey’s originality, that even in England Coleridge and Hazlitt had, for a good many years before the date of this Wilhelm Meister essay, been applying the historical method with insight and power for the explanation of literary problems.

In point of fact, Jeffrey is usually much more impressive when he talks abstractly about the historical method than when he tries to apply it specifically. He is specially apt to be unhistorical when he treats of the beginnings either of literature or of institutions. He lacked the knowledge of facts which alone could render possible a fruitful historical conception. His construction of early periods is always a priori in terms of a cheap psychology. His account, in the essay on Leckie, of the origin of government, should be compared with his description of the earliest attempts at poetic composition. In both cases he has a great deal to say about what “it was natural” for the earliest experimenters in each kind of work to aim at and to effect, and substantially nothing to say of the actual facts as determined by investigation. Moreover, these earliest experimenters are for Jeffrey marvellously like eighteenth-century connoisseurs, confronting consciously, and trying to solve reflectively, intricate problems in art or in politics. This view is, of course, unhistorical, and illustrates the difficulty Jeffrey had in escaping from old ways of thought.

Finally, Jeffrey never applies the historical method successfully to the study of any contemporary piece of literature. In the essay on Wilhelm Meister, for example, the general account of the principles that underlie historical criticism is fluent and clear; but the change is abrupt and disastrous when Jeffrey turns to the particular discussion of Goethe’s novels. Far from being historical or scientific, or trying to trace out in Goethe’s work the significant forces that were shaping contemporary German life, Jeffrey merely gives himself over to railing at whatever jars on his personal taste. In short, half the essay is scientific and half purely dogmatic, and the two halves have scarcely any logical connection. Sad to say, Jeffrey nearly always bungled or faltered like this when trying to use the historical method, particularly when trying to interpret the literature of his own time. Other instances of his shortsightedness or clumsiness are to be found in his treatment of Byron and Wordsworth. He missed entirely the meaning of Byron’s savage revolt against the conventionalism of eighteenth-century moral ideals, and he was equally unable to understand Wordsworth’s high conservatism. Perhaps the most damaging accusation that can be brought against Jeffrey, as a critic, is inability to read and interpret the age in which he lived.

Jeffrey’s imperfect grasp of the historical method is shown in one other way: he never realized that there was any conflict between his work as a dogmatic critic and his work as a scientific student of literature, or had a premonition of the blighting effect that the spread of historical conceptions of literature was ultimately to have on the prestige of the dogmatic critic. More and more, since Jeffrey’s day, criticism has concerned itself with the scientific explanation and the interpretation of literature; less and less has it posed as the ultimate science of right thinking and right doing in literary art. This change has been brought about partly by the Romantic movement with its fostering of individualism in art, and partly through the development of historical conceptions in all departments of thought. Both these forces were in full play during Jeffrey’s life, and of neither did he at all measure the scope or significance.

Regarded, then, from a modern point of view, Jeffrey, as a literary critic, takes shape somewhat as follows: As an appreciator he is sadly to seek, owing largely to over-intellectualism and disputatiousness. As a dogmatic critic he is even yet thoroughly readable because of his dashing style, his deft and ready handling, his shrewd common sense, and his sincerity; he expressed brilliantly the tastes and antipathies of a large circle of cultivated people of considerable social distinction, who, while not peculiarly artistic or literary, read widely and intelligently, and felt keenly and delicately, though within a somewhat limited range. Even in his dogmatic criticism, however, his faults are obvious; his dogmatism is peremptory; his tone, often bitter; and his prejudices are as scarlet. On the other hand, for giving a strong ethical trend to literary criticism, he deserves all honour. His social sympathies were intense and alert; they fixed the character of his whole theory of beauty, and continually expressed themselves in his comments upon books and authors. Through his persistently ethical interpretations of literature, he really enlarged the borders of literary criticism. As for his historical criticism, it cannot be said to have much permanent value. Into the general theory on which the use of the historical method rests, Jeffrey shows considerable insight; but he was by nature and by training a dogmatist, not a scientific student of fact. Though his theorizings led him to believe speculatively in the relativity of beauty, and though he recognized abstractly that literature must vary from age to age as the time-spirit varies, yet he rarely let these convictions affect his tone or method in the treatment of literature; he is as round and intolerant in his blame of Addison or Pope as if he had never been within seeing distance of the historical point of view. In short, the disinterestedness of science was foreign to Jeffrey’s nature; he was primarily and distinctively, not an investigator or interpreter, but a censor bent on praise or blame.

These very characteristics of his criticism, however, were of a kind to bring Jeffrey, in 1803, great glory. With some disguise until 1809, when the Tory Quarterly Review was founded, undisguisedly thereafter, Jeffrey was the great Whig champion in all that pertained to letters. From a partisan critic, audacious and brilliant dogmatism was just what was sure to win the widest hearing. Moreover, in accounting for Jeffrey’s enormous popularity, the trashiness and insipidity of earlier review-writing must be kept in mind. Reviewing had been the pet occupation of Grub street; penny-a-liners had impressed upon criticism all their own unloveliness and feebleness; review articles seemed to issue from under-fed, torpid brains and anæmic bodies. Jeffrey’s reviewing was the very incarnation of health, vigour, and prosperity.

Finally, Jeffrey profited in name and fame more than it is easy now to compute from the happy opportuneness of a new literary form, a literary form that was made possible through the establishment of the Edinburgh Review. This Review differed in many of its business arrangements and in its mode of publication from preceding Reviews; it was established in accordance with a new conception of the scope of review-writing, and of the relation of reviewers to the public. As the result of this new conception and these new relations, literary criticism, which had hitherto been merely more or less ingenious talk about technical matters, was transformed into the earnest and vigorous discussion of literature as the expression of all that was significant and absorbing in the life of the time. And as still further results of the new policy, reviewing and reviewers came into hitherto unknown honour; the Edinburgh Review was adored or was hated and feared throughout the length and breadth of the land, and Jeffrey was universally regarded as demonic in his versatility, brilliancy, penetration, and vigour. Much of Jeffrey’s great prestige as a critic must be set down as due to his having long stood as the visible symbol of the success of the new style of reviewing.