Part 1

THREE STUDIES IN LITERATURE

[Illustration: colophon]

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

These Studies were originally introductory essays in volumes of selections from the prose writings of Jeffrey, Newman, and Arnold. The essay on Jeffrey has been rewritten and expanded. My thanks are due to Messrs. Ginn and Co. for the use of the essay on Jeffrey, and to Messrs. Henry Holt and Co. for leave to reprint the essays on Newman and Arnold.

DECEMBER 15, 1898.

CONTENTS

PAGE

FRANCIS JEFFREY 1

I. Jeffrey’s Reputation 1

II. General Characteristics 6

III. Literary Criticism 12

IV. _The Edinburgh Review_ 41

V. The New Editorial Policy 46

VI. The New Literary Form 54

VII. Conclusion 59

NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 64

I. Newman’s Manner and its Critics 64

II. The Rhetorician 72

III. Methods 82

IV. Irony 88

V. Style 92

VI. Additional Characteristics 98

VII. Relation to his Times 108

MATTHEW ARNOLD 124

I. Arnold’s Manner 124

II. Criticism of Life 129

III. Theory of Culture 139

IV. Ethical Bias 151

V. Literary Criticism 163

VI. Appreciations 171

VII. Style 180

VIII. Relation to his Times 200

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

“Nothing of itself will come But we must still be seeking.”

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.”