CHAPTER XXIV. PROSE WRITERS AND ESSAYISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 8.1. The romantic movement and English_prose. § 2. The growth of periodicals. The Edinburgh Review: FRANCIS JEFFREY, SYDNEY SMITH, and LORD BROUGHAM. § 3. The Quarterly Review: WILLIAM GIFFORD. § 4. Blackwood's Magazine: JOHN WILSON and JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART. § 5. CHARLES LAMB and The London Magazine. § 6. WILLIAM HAZLITT and LEIGH HUNT. § 7. THOMAS DE QUINCEY. $8. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. § 9. THOMAS CARLYLE, 10. JOHN RUSKIN: Modern Painters, Stones of Venice, etc. 11. Life and work after 1860. § 12. WALTER PATER and JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. prose. § 1. THE history of English prose in the nineteenth century closely follows the history of the romantic movement in poetry. The attempt to throw off conventional restraint in The change one harmony was accompanied by a similar revolu in English tion in the other. At the end of the eighteenth century it was openly assumed that, in order to write prose, a man must lay aside his natural manner and twist his thoughts into a pompous and unelastic diction, which was considered the proper form of literary English. It was in faithful imitation of Johnson that this canon was observed; and the same discrepancy which we notice between the vivacity of Johnson's talk, as recorded by Boswell, and his sententiousness of writing, as exhibited in the Rambler, exists in all the early prose writers of the nineteenth century. The spell of Johnson rested even upon the novel, which was already making its way for itself. Miss Austen's neatness and cleanness of style were her own, but the primness and formality which they cannot conceal are of the eighteenth century. Scott cast almost every sentence of his novels into this laborious and artificial mould; his heroes and heroines talk like moral essayists bred on the Rambler and Mrs. Chapone. Johnson's services as a guide were past. Had they been retained much longer, English prose would have been landed in a hopeless desert of unlimited sterility. Fortunately, the influences at work on literature came to its aid. We have seen that most of the great romantic poets were prose writers. Wordsworth's prefaces to Lyrical Ballads, which keep so much of the eighteenth-century manner about them, are nevertheless an obvious sign of a new spirit in prose. Scott, maintaining all the pompous traditions of Georgian form, showed, in his criticisms and miscellaneous writings, appreciations and tastes which would have been incomprehensible to a previous generation. Southey freed himself more thoroughly from conventional triteness to use an excellent, if somewhat formal, prose style. Coleridge went still farther. Under the influence of German teaching his thought expanded and his style assumed individuality. He abandoned the conventional use of words and, to convey unusual thoughts, sought and found unexpected phrases, employing English as a handmaid to his ideas and not as an inanimate collection of words and rules. We see the same tendency in the letters of Byron, Shelley, and Keats; nor must we forget that Shelley's prose, although it marks no great epoch, is as transparently beautiful and original as his poetry. The influence of these men, the recognised apostles of nineteenth-century literature, has its practical bearing upon the great change in prose whose fruit is so evident at the present day. "The FRANCIS, § 2. The force which acted directly on the new prose is, however, to be traced to a different origin. Early in the nineteenth century the periodical began to assume a Periodicals: new shape, entirely different from the Addisonian essay or from the undistinguished criticisms of Edinburgh the late eighteenth century. In 1802 the estab- Review.” lishment of The Edinburgh Review, a quarterly LORD magazine which espoused Whig principles, marked JEFFREY the beginning of the great critical periodicals. Its (1773-1850). founder and, from 1803 to 1829, its editor, was FRANCIS JEFFREY, a young Edinburgh advocate, who, after a Scottish education at Edinburgh High School and Glasgow University, went for a year to Queen's College, Oxford. He returned to read law in Edinburgh, and was called to the bar in 1794. Some time later, he fell in with Sydney Smith, who was there as tutor to the son of an English squire, Mr. Hicks Beach of Netheravon, and, in conjunction with other writers, founded the new magazine. The idea seems to have been Sydney Smith's; but, before long, the conduct of the periodical was resigned to Jeffrey, who not only edited every number with his own personal corrections, but wrote numerous articles for it himself. He maintained his autocracy for twenty-six years, giving it up in 1829, when he was appointed Dean of Faculty. In 1830 his services to his party were further rewarded with the post of Lord Advocate, and in 1834 he was made a judge and received his life-peerage. When we take the early attitude of the Edinburgh into account we must remember that it was the organ of a political party and that it associated literature very closely with politics. Jeffrey Jeffrey's style and methods of had been brought up a Tory, and severed himself very gradually from his early connections; nor was it until a few years after its foundation that the Edinburgh pledged itself to Whiggism. When it did, the character of its criticism was hindered by the fact that it was chained criticism. to one point of view. Jeffrey was no obscurantist ; he had the utmost sympathy with the forward movement in literature, and very little in common with the stilted graces of the preceding century. He himself wrote in an eloquent and not unpicturesque style, which became Macaulay's chief model, and, although eminently literary and artificial, is never dreary or barren. But his criticism was founded upon a system which demanded a cut-and-dried respectability from every author; and while, on the one hand, he attacked all irregularity in literature from the standpoint of a severe moralist, he used, on the other, all the weapons of a politician to prove that everyone differing from his own opinions was insane or immoral. It is fairly certain that Brougham wrote the famous article on Byron, but it was Jeffrey who was directly responsible for that ridiculous piece of injustice, entirely out of proportion to the circumstances that provoked it. It is quite improbable that he would have attacked Wordsworth so often and so bitterly, or have refrained so long from praising Scott, had they been Whigs like himself. Nor is it unlikely that, had Jeffrey been anything but the voice of a powerful magazine with a well-defined attitude of its own, he would have been the soundest and greatest critic of his day. His articles, whose harshness was only natural in the Edinburgh, have, in the isolation of a separate volume, a certain short-sightedness and injustice, and on this account their merits are often misrepresented and their author's position misunderstood. SYDNEY (1771-1845). Jeffrey's great collaborator in the Edinburgh was SYDNEY SMITH, two years his senior. This very remarkable man possessed the qualities which formed the necessary complement to Jeffrey's critical faculty. Jeffrey was SMITH not remarkable for wit or humour, although, like many unhumorous people, he could be very sarcastic; and further, he was essentially a critic of books. Sydney Smith's wit and humour, on the contrary, were so inseparable from himself, and have come down to us in so many anecdotes, that we, who have left off the habit of reading his works, are apt to fall into the error of thinking him a clerical Joe Miller; while, again, he was a far more able critic of political measures and pamphlets than of literature. His father was an eccentric gentleman of property, who wandered restlessly over England, unable to find a house to his mind. Sydney, who was born at Woodford in Essex, went to Winchester, and, following the happy and unruffled career of a Wykehamist foundation scholar in those days of unreformed societies, proceeded to a scholarship and fellowship at New College, Oxford. Taking Holy Orders in 1794, he became curate of Netheravon on Salisbury Plain, and went with the local squire, Mr. Hicks Beach, to Edinburgh, where he met Jeffrey. After three years in London, during which he lectured on Moral Philosophy at the Royal Institution, the Whig government in 1806 gave him the living of Foston-le-Clay, near York. He did not go, however, to his parsonage until, in 1808, the Clergy Residence Bill obliged him to go north. Meanwhile, in 1807, he published his most famous work, Peter Plymley's Letters on the Subject of the Catholics, the best example of his wit and satire, and of a humour which could at one and the same time indulge in caustic personalities and yet preserve its unique delicacy. In 1828 he obtained a non-residentiary stall at Bristol, and exchanged Foston for the living of Combe Florey, near Taunton. Eventually, when Lord Grey came into office in 1831, he was given a canonry at St. Paul's, which he retained till his death. His later publications were his Letters to Archdeacon Singleton (1837-9), in which he supported, with all his customary wit, the principle of cathedral establishments, and a collection of the essays he had written for The Edinburgh Review (1839). As a militant champion of Whiggism and the dry, worldly Churchmanship which sets constitutional principles before spiritual considerations, he was singularly formidable. Among Englishmen, few have obtained such distinction by the mere force of exuberant wit and the faculty of making their opponents appear ludicrous. The third of the Edinburgh group, HENRY PETER, LORD BROUGHAM AND VAUX, was five years younger than Jeffrey and seven years than Sydney Smith. Like Jeffrey he was educated at the Edinburgh High School, and passed LORD through the University, eventually going to the Scots (1778-1868). bar. He wrote for the magazine from its beginning, and was for many years very fertile in essays and reviews; but, consumed with ambition, left Edinburgh in 1805 and settled in London. He made his name at the bar and as a Whig member of Parliament; and, had he possessed the gift of retaining popularity, his defence of Queen Caroline might have made him the most popular minister of the Crown during the nineteenth century. But he was unfortunately a victim to self-conceit and hatred of his rivals; and, although the Reform ministry which made Jeffrey Lord Advocate, and Sydney Smith a canon, made him Lord Chancellor, he proved himself so disagreeable a colleague that his party abandoned him, and his place in politics was gone a few years later. He lived to be ninety, busying himself with those schemes for popularising knowledge which, somewhat earlier, had called down on him Thomas Love Peacock's sarcasm, and now and then entering into politics as a free lance. His main contributions to literature are his Edinburgh articles, which deserve consideration not merely because they are so numerous, but on account of their weighty sense and the critical genius which, in a certain sense, they undoubtedly show. In addition to these there are the Speeches→→ BROUGHAM some of them violent and unreasonable, others, like the celebrated defence of Queen Caroline, splendid examples of forensic eloquence and the pleasant Sketches of Statesmen in the time of George III (1839-43). Brougham wrote what may be called an Edinburgh style, more ponderous than Jeffrey or Macaulay, but sharing many of their characteristics, and undeniably belonging to the same family. Like them, too, he was stronger in sarcasm than in genuine humour. His literary as well as his political career was spoiled by an incapacity for seeing things in their right proportions, and recognising anybody greater than himself. WILLIAM §3. For the first few years of its existence the Edinburgh had no rival; its authority in matters of literature and taste became almost paramount. But, as it exerted its "The influence entirely on behalf of the Whig party, then Quarterly." and for many years in opposition, the growth of a Tory review became only a matter of time. The Quarterly Review was founded in 1809 by John Murray, with the assistance of Canning and the leading Tory politicians, and was actually the result of a secession of Tory writers from the Edinburgh. From the first it answered all expectations. Such men as Scott, who had written for the rival magazine, and Southey, joined its staff and became habitual contributors to its numbers. Its first editor was WILLIAM GIFFORD, who held his post from 1809 to 1824. He was not altogether a (1756-1826). great man of letters, and, as a critic, has a very unfortunate reputation; but he was a skilful journalist with a bitter and satiric humour. He had been born, fifty-two years earlier, at the little Devonshire town of Ashburton, and might have ended life, as he began it, as a shoemaker's apprentice, had not his ability been recognised early. By the generosity of some Ashburton friends, he was sent to Exeter College, Oxford, where he acquired considerable scholarship and attracted more notice. His literary ideal was classical and Johnsonian, and he made his fame by a pair of brilliant Juvenalian satires, The Baviad (1794) and The Maviad (1795), utterly annihilating Robert Merry-the self-styled "Della Crusca"-and the worthless poets of The British Album. Later on he joined with Canning in The AntiJacobin (1797-8), published a translation of Juvenal (1802), and edited several of the Elizabethan dramatists. His zeal in the cause of good writing, and his scholarly work on the poets who became so popular with the chief romantic writers, go far to absolve him from the charge of obscurantism so often preferred against him; but his influence was mainly reactionary; and the bitter personalities with which he assailed Leigh Hunt, Keats, and the Cockney school, while their immediate effect has been exaggerated, have had a disastrous influence on his subsequent fame. Of the other names associated with the Quarterly at its start-of Scott, Southey, and Canning-we have already |