Part 4

The evil influence of the publisher’s despotism ran through the _Review_ and vitiated all its judgments. The editor-publisher prescribed to his hacks what treatment a book should receive. Sometimes this was with a view to the market. “I send also the _Horæ Bibilicæ_ at a venture,” writes Griffiths to Taylor, “... it signifies not much whether we notice it or not, as it is not _on sale_.”[10] The italics are Griffiths’s own. Sometimes, the publisher-editor merely wanted to favour a friend or injure an enemy. Griffiths’s dictation in the case of Goldsmith’s first book has already been noted. On another occasion Griffiths sent a copy of Murphy’s _Tacitus_ to Taylor with the following significant suggestion: “One thing I have to mention, _entre nous_, that Mr. M. is _one of us_, and that it is a rule in our society for the members to behave with due decorum toward each other, whenever they appear at their own bar as _authors_, out of their own critical province. If a kingdom (like poor France at present) be divided against itself, ‘how shall that kingdom stand’?”[11] If Griffiths ventured on this dictation with a man of Taylor’s standing and independence, his tyranny over his regular dependents must have been complete and relentless.

As a result, review-writing became purely hackwork. The reviewer had no voice of his own in his criticism; what little individuality he might, in his feebleness, have put into his work, had he been left to himself, disappeared under the eye of his taskmaster. He became a mere machine, praising and blaming perfunctorily and conventionally, at the bidding of the editor-publisher. Mawkish adulation or random abuse became the staple of critical articles; and in neither kind of work did the critic rise above the dead level of hopeless mediocrity.

A final result of this whole system of review-managing and hack-writing was unwillingness on the part of men of position to have anything to do with review-writing. If a man criticised books in a Review, he felt that he was putting himself on a level with Kenrick, Griffiths’s notorious hireling, who had been imprisoned for libel, with Kit Smart, who had bound himself to a bookseller for ninety-nine years, and with other like wretches. William Taylor of Norwich was one of the few gentlemen who, before 1802, ventured to write for Reviews.

With the establishment of the _Edinburgh Review_ all this was changed. The prime principle of the new _Review_ was independence of booksellers. The plan was not a bookseller’s scheme, but was the outcome of the ambitious fervour of half a dozen young adventurers in law, literature, and politics. From the start the bookseller was a “mere instrument,” as Brougham specially notes. The management of the _Review_ was at first in the hands of Sydney Smith. When he set out for London his last words to the publisher, Constable, were, “If you will give £200 per annum to your editor and ten guineas a sheet, you will soon have the best Review in Europe.” Accordingly, the editorship was at once offered to Jeffrey, at even a higher salary, £300, than Sydney Smith had named. Jeffrey hesitated because of “the risk of general degradation.” But he found the £300 “a monstrous bribe”; moreover, the other contributors were all planning to take their ten guineas a sheet; accordingly, after many qualms, he swallowed his scruples and became a paid editor. “The publication,” he wrote to his brother, in July, 1803, “is in the highest degree respectable as yet, as there are none but gentlemen connected with it. If it ever sink into the ordinary bookseller’s journal, I have done with it.”

So began Jeffrey’s “reign” of twenty-six years; and so ended the despotism of booksellers. Henceforth the editor, not the publisher, was master. It was Jeffrey who decided what books should be handled, or rather what subjects should be discussed; it was Jeffrey who determined the price to be paid for each article,--“I had,” he declares, “an unlimited discretion in this respect”; it was Jeffrey who pleaded with the dilatory, mollified the refractory, and reached out here and there after new contributors; in short, it was Jeffrey who shaped the policy of the _Review_ and impressed on it its distinctive character.

But there were several other hardly less important points in which the business policy of the _Edinburgh_ was a new departure. The pay for reviewing was greatly increased. The old price had been two guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages; the _Edinburgh Review_, after the first three numbers, paid ten guineas a sheet, and very soon sixteen guineas. Moreover, this was the minimum rate; over two-thirds of the articles were, according to Jeffrey, “paid much higher, averaging from twenty to twenty-five guineas a sheet on the whole number.”

Again, every contributor was forced to take pay; no contributor, however nice his honour, was suffered to refuse. This regulation was of the utmost importance; the rule salved the consciences of many brilliant young professional men, who were glad of pay, but ashamed to write for it, and afraid of being dubbed penny-a-liners. By Jeffrey’s clever arrangement they could write for fame or for simple amusement, and then have money “thrust upon them.” With high prices and enforced compensation the new _Review_ at once drew into its service men of a totally different stamp from the old hack-writers.

Finally, the _Edinburgh_ was published quarterly, whereas the old Reviews were published monthly. This change was for two reasons important: in the first place, writers had more time in which to prepare their articles and led less of a hand-to-mouth life intellectually; and, in the second place, the _Review_ made no attempt to notice all publications, and chose for discussion only books of real significance. Coleridge particularly commends this part of the policy of the _Review_: “It has a claim upon the gratitude of the literary republic, and, indeed, of the reading public at large, for having originated the scheme of reviewing those books only, which are susceptible and deserving of argumentative criticism.”[12]

VI

These, then, were the principal points in which the organization and policy of the _Edinburgh Review_ contrasted with those of its predecessors; and the influence of these changes on the tone and spirit of the articles in the new _Review_ can hardly be exaggerated. The _Edinburgh Review_ was not a catch-all for waste information; it was an organ of thought, a busy intellectual centre, from which the newest ideas were sent out in a perpetual stream through the minds of sympathetic readers. The _Review_ had opinions of its own on all public questions. In politics, it advocated the principles of the Constitutional Whigs, at first in a nonpartisan spirit, after 1808, fiercely and aggressively; it pleaded for reform of the representation, for Catholic emancipation, for a wise recognition of the just discontent of the lower classes, and for judicious measures to allay this discontent without violent Constitutional changes. In social matters, it urged reforms of all kinds, the repeal of the game-laws, the improvement of prisons, the protection of chimney-sweeps and other social unfortunates. In religion, it argued for toleration. In education, it attacked pedantry and tradition, ridiculed the narrowness of university ideals, and contended for the adoption of practical methods and utilitarian aims. In all these departments it criticised the existing order of things, always brilliantly and suggestively, and sometimes fiercely and radically, and stirred the public into a keener consciousness and more intelligent appreciation of the questions of the hour, social, political, and religious.

Now it is plain that, to accomplish all this, writers would find it necessary to go far outside of the old limits of book-reviewing, and to make their articles express their own independent ideas on various important topics, rather than simply their critical opinions of the merits of new publications. And this is precisely what happened. A book-review became in most cases merely a mask for the writer’s own ideas on some burning question of the hour. In other words, the establishment of the _Edinburgh Review_ really led to the evolution of a new literary form; the old-fashioned review-article was converted into a brief argumentative essay discussing some living topic, political or social, in the light of the very latest ideas. This kind of essay had been unknown in the eighteenth century, and was developed at the opening of the nineteenth century in response to the needs of the moment.

Nor was this change in the nature of the review-article unremarked at the time; Hazlitt noted it, and with his usual sourness protested against it. “If [the critic] recurs,” he says, “to the stipulated subject in the end, it is not till after he has exhausted his budget of general knowledge; and he establishes his own claims first in an elaborate inaugural dissertation _de omni scibili et quibusdam aliis_, before he deigns to bring forward the pretensions of the original candidate for praise, who is only the second figure in the piece. We may sometimes see articles of this sort, in which no allusion whatever is made to the work under sentence of death, after the first announcement of the title-page.”[13] Coleridge, on the other hand, approved of the change, and commended the “plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or mediocrity wisely left to sink into oblivion by their own weight, with original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time, religious or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition.”[14] The reviewers themselves recognized, of course, the change they were working, though they did not altogether realize its significance. In 1807, Horner writes Jeffrey, “Have you any good subjects in view for your nineteenth? There are two I wish you, _yourself_, would undertake, if you can pick up books that would admit of them.”[15] This quotation illustrates the fact that the important question in the minds of the reviewers was always, not “What new books have appeared?” but “What topics just now have the greatest actuality and are best worth discussing?”

This, then, was largely the cause of the success of the _Review_: it offered, in its articles, a literary form by means of which the most active and original minds could at once come into communication with “the intelligent public” on all vital topics; it made the best thought and the newest knowledge more readily available than ever before for readers who were every day becoming more alive to their value.

The times were plainly favourable. The French Revolution had stirred men’s imaginations as they had not been stirred for a century, and had shaken portentously in all directions the foundations of belief. Traditions in politics, in social organization, in religion, were violently assailed by men like Godwin, Horne Tooke, and Holcroft, and loyally defended by enthusiastic conservatives. The fever of Romanticism was already making itself felt and was quickening men’s hearts to new passions and firing their imaginations with new visions of possible bliss. The air was full of questions and doubts, of eager forecasts, and of ominous warnings. All this ferment of life and feeling demanded freer utterance than could be found through old literary forms and with old methods of publication.

Moreover, the increasing importance of the middle class and the spread of popular education were favourable to the development of the new literary form. The number of men who read and thought for themselves had been rapidly growing. These men were not scholars or deep thinkers, and had no leisure to puzzle out learned treatises. They were overworked professional men or business men, who were alive to the questions of the hour, who had thought over them and discussed them wherever and whenever they could, and who were anxious for guidance from “men of light and leading.” The essays of the new _Review_ gave them just what they wanted,--brief, clear, yet original and suggestive, dissertations by the best-trained minds on the most important current topics.

These, then, are some of the causes, over and beyond Jeffrey’s editorial skill, and the brilliancy and originality of his co-workers, that led to the unprecedented success of the _Edinburgh Review_. Their importance and their significance are shown by the fact that within a few years several other Reviews were founded on precisely the same plan with the _Edinburgh_, and soon rivalled it in popular favour. In 1809 the Tory _Quarterly Review_ was started with William Gifford as editor, and Scott, Southey, Canning, Ellis, and Croker among its contributors. In 1820 the _Retrospective Review_ was established, and in 1824 the _Westminster Review_, the organ of the Radicals; Bentham was its patron, Bowring its editor, and James Mill and John Stuart Mill were constant contributors. These Reviews were all quarterlies, and in the details of their organization were modelled after the famous _Edinburgh_. They all found a ready welcome, and, with the exception of the _Retrospective_, have continued to thrive down to our own day.

VII

The bearing of all this upon the history of Jeffrey’s literary reputation must be fairly obvious. Jeffrey profited from the conspiracy of a great many fortunate circumstances, and for a series of years enjoyed, as dictator of the policy of the _Edinburgh Review_, a reputation as critic that was really far beyond what his intrinsic merit justified. Leigh Hunt and Lamb were much more delicate and imaginative appreciators of literature than Jeffrey; Hazlitt, despite his waywardness and arrogance, was a subtler and more stimulating literary interpreter. Coleridge was incomparably Jeffrey’s superior in penetrating insight, in learning and scholarship, in philosophic scope, and in refinement and sureness of taste. Yet Jeffrey, by dint of his cleverness, versatility, brilliancy, readiness of resource, and, above all, because of his commanding position as the director of the new Whig _Review_, outstripped all these competitors and imposed himself on public opinion as the typically infallible critic of his day and generation. His personal charm, too, worked in his favour; his Whig following was enthusiastically loyal. Everything tended to increase, for the time being, his fame as a literary autocrat.

The later reaction, which has so nearly consigned Jeffrey to the region of unread authors, was in its turn extreme, and yet followed naturally. Wordsworth and Coleridge, whom Jeffrey had assailed persistently till he had become in the public mind the representative foe of Romanticism, had won their cause, and been received by wider and wider circles of the most cultivated and discerning readers as among the foremost poets of their age. Jeffrey, their arch-enemy, suffered correspondingly in public esteem. Time seemed to have proved him wrong in one of his most strenuously asserted prejudices. Moreover, this particular defeat was merely one special instance of the evil effect that far-reaching influences were having upon Jeffrey’s reputation. His modes of conceiving life were being outgrown. His genial, man-of-the-world wisdom and somewhat narrow range of feeling seemed more and more unsatisfactory, as the public gradually made their own the deeper spiritual experience of idealistic poets, like Shelley, and of transcendental prose-writers, like Carlyle. Jeffrey’s dry intellectuality and his shallow associational psychology seemed unequal to the vital problems in art and in ethics that the new age was canvassing. Moreover, his autocratic style and omniscient air had been caught up by all the quarterly Reviews, and no longer served to distinguish him; the methods and the tone of the _Edinburgh_ were copied far and wide, and the critics of the new generation were quite a match for Jeffrey in gay, domineering assurance and in easy, swift omniscience. Jeffrey had trained many followers into his own likeness; or, at any rate, the methods and the tone that he had hit upon “survived” and had been universally received as fit.

Finally, Jeffrey’s essays, even at their best, had many of the qualities of “occasional” writing, and too often seemed merely meant for the moment; the trail of the periodical was over them all. Their very rapidity, sparkle, and plausibility gave them an air of perishableness; they seemed clever and entertaining improvisations. Work of this sort could hardly hope to maintain itself permanently in public favour. Nor was the collection of his essays, that Jeffrey saw fit to publish in 1843, of a sort to make a stand against the general indifference that was clouding his fame. Two thousand pages of improvised comments on all manner of topics, from the _Memoirs of Baber_ to Dugald Stewart’s _Philosophical Essays_, could scarcely be expected to secure a fixed place for themselves in the affections of large masses of readers. A far smaller volume, that should have included only the essays, or portions of essays, that were best wrought in style, most vigorously thought out, and contained the most characteristic and final of Jeffrey’s opinions, would have been more likely--except in so far as Jeffrey based his claims on his versatility--to have insured him permanent remembrance as critic and prose-writer.

The reaction, then, against Jeffrey was necessary and, in some degree, just. Yet, now that the air is cleared of Romantic prejudices, Jeffrey’s real services to the causes both of criticism and of sound literature may be more accurately perceived and defined. Not for a moment can the student who aims at genuine insight into the history of literature and of literary opinion during the first quarter of our century afford to disregard Jeffrey and his _Edinburgh Review_ Essays, or to pass him by with a phrase as a mere unsuccessful opponent of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Jeffrey influenced public opinion decisively and beneficially on a vast range of subjects. He broadened the methods of literary criticism and won for it new points of view and new fields. He put the relations between critic and public on a sounder basis, and raised the profession of literary criticism into an honourable calling. Finally, he developed English style, added to its swiftness of play and brilliant serviceableness, and prepared the way for the dazzlingly effective, if somewhat mechanical, technique of Macaulay. All these good works are nowadays too often forgotten; and on the injustice of such neglect one cannot comment more aptly than through the quotation of Jeffrey’s own famous phrase--“This will never do.”

NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER

I

In these “uncanonical times,” it may seem somewhat grotesque to go for information about an author’s style to his patron saint. Yet no surer way exists for gaining an insight into the peculiar charm of Cardinal Newman’s writings than through an appeal to St. Philip Neri, the founder of the Congregation of the Oratory, whom Newman chose for his “own special Father and Patron.” In at least two of his discourses, or essays, Newman has analyzed the character and peculiar influence of St. Philip Neri. “Whatever was exact and systematic,” Newman tells us, “pleased him not; he put from him monastic rule and authoritative speech, as David refused the armour of his king. No; he would be but an ordinary individual priest as others; and his weapons should be but unaffected humility and unpretending love. All he did was to be done by the light, and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his personal character and his easy conversation.” In another essay, Newman describes St. Philip’s distrust of “the severity of the Regular” as a means for the control of those whom he sought to subjugate. “Influence,” adroit intimacy, winning intercourse, these were the means by which St. Philip preferred to work on those about him.

Newman’s loving regard for these traits of St. Philip’s genius is a revelation of some of the deepest instincts of his nature,--instincts which must at once be brought into view in any attempt to appreciate his style as a writer of prose. A peculiar personal charm is impressed on all the most characteristic of Newman’s prose-writings,--on whatever he wrote after he had, as an artist, found himself and realized his essential genius. Abstract as his subject may be, he gives it some colour of life and some of the beauty and grace of friendly discourse. Every one knows what charm there is in the talk of a man of the world who puts before his listeners, in picturesque phrases, the variable incidents of actual life as he himself has encountered them. The whim, the personal idiom, the glancing humour, the concrete image, the vivacious disorderliness, the skilful dealing at first hand with glowing human experience, give to talk of this sort a peculiarly winning quality. And the style that in literature mimics afar the colloquial rhythms and the idiom of such familiar talk has also, its peculiar charm. The writer seems to escape from the blank region of authorship, to realize himself before the reader as a friendly face and form, and to communicate himself through the hundred and one subtle signs of eye and voice and gesture and smile that give to actual human intercourse its delight and stimulating power. The extreme form of this colloquial style, where an author is merely amiably garrulous, is not to be found in Newman’s writings; Newman’s temper was, after all, too academic for this, and his subjects were too abstract and difficult. Rarely, however, have topics as speculative as are many of Newman’s been treated with so much of the wayward charm and pliant grace of friendly discourse as Newman reaches. His style, at its best, has the urbanity, the affability, the winning adroitness, even the half-careless desultoriness of the familiar talk of a man of the world with his fellows.

Yet it is not this colloquial grace by itself that gives to Newman’s discussions of abstract topics their peculiar distinction; it is rather his reconciliation of the charm of colloquial freedom with the demands of logical method and thoroughness of treatment. Garrulity to no purpose is usually easy enough. But the peculiarity of Newman’s style and method is that, with all their apparent casualness, they lead the reader to a complete and essentially logical command of the topic under discussion. When he chose, Newman was absolute master of the severe beauty of rational discourse,--of the beauty of that kind of discourse that disdains to follow any associations save those of logic,--discusses with fine economic precision just the aspects of truth that right reason detects as essential to the question in hand, and is everywhere formally correct, systematic, and dignified. His earliest work is often austerely wrought in accordance with this ideal. Ultimately, however, the essential charm that made him so winning in personal intercourse passed over into his prose, and conveyed into it the warmth, and elasticity, and colour of life. Yet this change involved no real sacrifice of structure or loss of firmness in the texture of his thought. And for the trained student of literary method much of the surpassing charm of Newman’s work is due to the possibility of finding in it, on analysis, a continual victorious union of logical strenuousness with the grace and ease and charm of a colloquial manner and idiom. This victory is so easily won as to seem something by the way; but the student and analyst knows that it is the result of rare tact, finely disciplined instinct, exquisite rhetorical insight and foresight, and extraordinary luminousness and largeness of thought.