Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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