This sufficiently brilliant political career was complicated by literary production and success in a manner not equalled by any Englishman of his time, and only approached by Macaulay and by Mr. Disraeli. Falkland was succeeded by Pelham, which was published with his name, and which was the first, perhaps the most successful, and by far the most brilliant, of the novels in which authors have endeavoured to secure the rank of man of the world even more than that of man of letters, taking the method chiefly of fashionable, and therefore somewhat ephemeral, epigram. Nor did Bulwer (as he was known in the heyday of his popularity) ever cease novel writing for the forty-five years which were left to him, while the styles of his production varied with fashion in a manner impossible to a man of less consummate versatility and talent, though perhaps equally impossible to one of a very decided turn of genius. The fashionable novel, the crime novel, the romance of mystery, the romance of classical times, the historical novel, by turns occupied him; and it is more easy to discover faults in Paul Clifford, Eugene Aram, The Pilgrims of the Rhine, The Last Days of Pompeii, Ernest Maltravers, Zanoni, Rienzi, The Last of the Barons, and Harold, than to refuse admiration to their extraordinary qualities. Then their author, recognising the public taste, as he always did, or perhaps exemplifying it with an almost unexampled quickness, turned to the domestic kind, which was at last, more than thirty years after Miss Austen's death, forcing its way, and wrote The Caxtons, My Novel, and What will he do with it?—books which to some have seemed his greatest triumphs. The veering of that taste back again to tales of terror was acknowledged by A Strange Story, which, in 1861, created an excitement rarely, if ever, caused by the work of a man who had been writing for more than a generation; while The Haunted and the Haunters, a brief ghost-story contributed to Blackwood's Magazine, has always seemed to the present writer the most perfect thing that he ever did, and one of the most perfect things of its kind ever done. In the very last years of his life, the wonderful girouette of his imagination felt other popular gales, and produced—partly as novels of actual society, partly as Janus-faced satires of what was and what might be—The Coming Race, Kenelm Chillingly, and the posthumous Parisians.
But this list of novels, which does not include by name much more than two-thirds of his actual production, by no means exhausts Lord Lytton's literary work. For some years, chiefly before he had passed middle life, he was an active dramatist, and at least three of his plays—The Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, and Money—had a success (not merely passing, and in the first case at least permanent) which few if any other plays of the century have had. He was always returning to verse, though never with real poetical success; the exceptions which may be urged most forcibly being his translations from Schiller, a congenial original. He was at one time editor of the New Monthly Magazine. He translated freely, he wrote much criticism,—which is often in isolated passages, if not so often in general drift and grasp, extremely good,—and he was a constant essayist in very various kinds. It is probable that if his entire works were ever collected, which is not likely, few, if any, authors of the nineteenth century, though it be one of unbridled writing and printing, could equal him in volume; while it is certain that very few indeed could produce more numerous testimonials of the kind given by the immediate, and not merely immediate, success of separate works.
Yet it has been sometimes complained, sometimes boasted, that "with the critics Bulwer is dead"; and it is not very certain that with the faithful herd of uncritical readers the first Lord Lytton keeps any great place. Even many years ago he had ceased to be, if he ever was, a general favourite with those who specially loved literature; and it is rather doubtful whether he will ever regain even a considerable vogue of esteem. Perhaps this may be unjust, for he certainly possessed ability in bulk, and perhaps here and there in detail, far surpassing that of all but the very greatest of his contemporaries. Even the things which were most urged against him by contemporary satirists, and which it is to be feared are remembered at second-hand when the first-hand knowledge of his work has declined, need not be fatal. A man may write such things as "There is an eloquence in Memory because it is the nurse of Hope" without its being necessary to cast up his capital letters against him in perpetuity, or to inquire without ceasing whether eloquence is an inseparable property of nurses. But he had two great faults—want of concentration and want of reality; and the very keenness, the very delicacy of his appreciation of the shiftings of popular taste may seem without unfairness to argue a certain shallowness of individual soil, a literary compost wherein things spring up rapidly because they have no depth of earth, but also because they have no depth of earth, rapidly vanish and wither away. The novel and the magazine have beyond all doubt given us much admirable work which without them we should not have had; they have almost as certainly, and in no case much more certainly than in Bulwer's, over-forced and over-coaxed into hasty and ephemeral production talents which, with a little more hardening and under less exacting circumstances, might have become undoubted genius. Sentimental grandiloquence is not by itself fatal: the fashion which tempts to it, which turns on it, may return to it again; and it is never impossible to make allowance for its excesses, especially when, as in the case under discussion, it is accompanied by a rare and true satiric grasp of life. In these early externals of his, Bulwer was only the most illustrious of the innumerable victims of Byron. But his failure to make his figures thoroughly alive is more serious; and this must be put down partly to incapacity to take pains.
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 Dickens and Lord Lytton became rather intimate friends; but their origins and early experiences were curiously different. Dickens' 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 destitute 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 (Dickens 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, Dickens 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-class variety which rather resents the supremacy of any classics; 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 Dickens' knowledge, as has been said, was very limited; his logical faculties were not strong; and while constantly attempting to satirise the upper classes, 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 classes 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 Dickens' 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 Dickens 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 fashion 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 Shelley's novels, and has not, like them, the excuse of extreme youth. His Pictures from Italy (1845), despite vivid passages, 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 fashionable and aristocratic society of which to his dying day Dickens 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 proneness 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 title 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 Dick Swiveller, Codlin and Short, Mr. Chuckster, and others remain as some of the best of Dickens' 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 Tappertit. 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 Dickens 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 Dickens' 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, Dickens' 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 Dickens 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 Dickens' own, their origin and circumstances were as different as their work. Dickens, as has been said, was born in distinctly the lower section of the middle class, 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 Dickens as an illustrator), 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 Snobs 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 Dickens. 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 fashion in which the author had assimilated 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 surpassed as verse examples of pure, broad, roaring farce that still retains a certain reserve and well-bred scholarship of tone.
But his verse, however charming and unique, could never have given him the exalted and massive 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 attitude 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-fashioned "archness," if that had not been so hopelessly degraded before even the present century opened; at need, an unsurpassed pathos which never by any chance or exception succumbs to the demon of the gushing 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 attitude 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 spaces 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 massiveness; 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 passion with Esmond's devotion to Beatrix, and his transactions with the duke and the prince over diamonds and title 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 assist 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 Dickens 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 ownership 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 Dickens, there was no novelist of the first class 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 Dickens, also ceased to be much cultivated, save by Dickens himself and his direct imitators. The vogue set in for a novel of more or less ordinary life of the upper middle class, 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 passing 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 Dickens 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 shine with lesser lustre 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 leadership 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. Midshipman 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 unsurpassed. 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 Embassy 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 substituted novels partly of Irish partly of Continental bearing (Roland Cashel, The Knight of Gwynne, and many others); while in the early days of Dickens' All the Year Round he adventured a singular piece entitled 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 repetition 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 class 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 Glascock, Chamier, and Basil Hall, and Michael Scott, a civilian, but by far the greatest writer of the four. Glascock, 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 class. 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 passed 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 entitled 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 leadership 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 fashion 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 Peacock, the elder of them, born a long way within the eighteenth century (in 1785), passed 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. Peacock 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. Peacock'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 practitioners 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 Peacock 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 Peacock's junior, and outlived him by fifteen, was a curious counterpart-analogue to him. Like Peacock, he was irregularly educated, and yet a wide and deep student; but, unlike Peacock, 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 associated 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 attitude, 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. Peacock'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 sexes, whom the polygraphic habits of this century make it hard to "class," 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 Illustrations 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 superstitious, 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 craftsmanship 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 fashionable Granby and Tremaine of Lister, the famous Frankenstein of Mrs. Shelley, 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 classes 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.
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 analyse. 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 scrappy "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 shilling 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 massive 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 Hampshire. 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 Hampshire.
Some such details of Cobbett's life are necessary even in the most confined space, 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 substitutes 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 damnatur cum 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 ship. 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 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.