immy UmERSllY Of CALIFORNIA Ex Libris y ISAAC FOOT The Channels of English Literature THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS The Channels of English Literature Edited by Oliphant Smeaton, M.A. ENGLISH EPIC AND HEROIC POETRY. By Professor W. Macneile Dixon, M.A., University of Glasgow. ENGLISH LYRIC POETRY. By Ernest Rhys. THE ENGLISH DRAMA. By Professor F. E. Schelling, D.Litt., University of Pennsylvania. ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS and SCHOOLS OF PHILOSOPHY. By Professor James Seth, M.A., University of Edinburgh. THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS. By Professor Hugh Walker, LL.D., St. David's College, Lampeter. X THE ENGLISH NOVEL. By Professor George Saintsbury, D.Litt., University of Edinburgh. ENGLISH ELEGIAC, DIDACTIC, AND RELIGIOUS POETRY. By the Very Rev. H. C. Beeching, D.D., D.Litt., Dean of Norwich, and the Rev. Ronald Bayne, M.A. ENGLISH HISTORIANS AND SCHOOLS OF HISTORY. By Professor Richard Lodge, University of Edinburgh. THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS BY HUGH WALKER, M.A., LL.D. 1915 • LONDON AND TORONTO J. M. DENT & SONS LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. All rights reserved PREFACE It is hoped that in most respects this volume on The English Essay and Essayists will sufficiently explain itself without the aid of a preface. But there is one point with regard to which a word of explanation may perhaps be necessary. There is in Enghsh a great mass of literary criticism, of which much the greater part is in the form of eisays. If these critical essays had been here treated in accordance with their in- trinsic importance, they would have filled much more space than has been given to them. But in The Channels of English Literature there is a separate volume assigned to criticism. In the present volume, therefore, my purpose has been to touch upon the subject as lightly as the nature of my own task permitted. I could not entirely ignore it; for sometimes criticism has aided in the development of the essay, and sometimes reference to an essayist's critical work has been necessary to round off a general estimate of him. It is clear, for example, that Matthew Arnold could not be ignored in a book professing to discuss the English Essayists; and it is { equally clear that to speak of him as an essayist without re- | ference to his criticism would be absurd. No attempt, how- ' ever, has been made to discuss his critical principles in full. This, then, is the explanation if I seem to have said too little about the critics. If I have said too much, it is from failure to strike the just mean between full discussion and total silence. HUGH WALKER. December i8, 1914. CONTENTS CHAP. I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. Cen Introduction ...••• Anticipations of the Essay The Aphoristic Essayists .... The Character-Writers .... Miscellaneous Essayists of the Seventeenth tury ....••• The Queen Anne Essayists The Imitators of Steele and Addison The Transition from the Eighteenth Century The Early Reviewers of the Nineteenth Century Some of their Victims, and Others . The Early Magazines of the Nineteenth Century The Historian-Essayists ..... The Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century Some Essayists of Yesterday .... Index ......•• PAGE I 5 15 38 62 99 129 166 193 222 266 285 320 117 VU Not for the first time. The same device is found in Micrologia (1621), a collection described as " characters, or essays, of persons, trades and places, offered to the city and country by R. M." THE CHARACTER-WRITERS 55 were printed by him, and others have recently been published in the Cambridge Enghsh Classics series. Most of them, says Thyer, were drawn up between 1667 and 1669, and in the choice of subjects we see the mark both of the man and of the age, A modern Politician, An hypocritical Nonconformist, and A Republican are the first upon the hst. The tone is that of a man disappointed and disillusioned. He had Hved through the time of trouble and adversity to his party, only to find that its ultimate success brought, for him, httle either of honour or of reward. The author of Hudibras could hardly write a considerable volume without showing here and there wit and force. But the performance as a whole is tedious, and it is wholly unredeemed by that humanity which elevates Earle. While there is kindhness in even the most pungent pieces of the latter, Butler's wit is bitter, and he seems pleased that men are no better than they are. There remains one man, Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), who belongs chronologically to the period of decline, yet is himself no example of decay. On the contrary, with the exception of George Herbert, he is the greatest man who ever touched the character-sketch, and his Holy and Prof ane State (1641) is the most readable book that can by any stretch of the meaning be included under the class of books of characters. But The Holy and Profane State is a book of characters with a difference. Earle remains the most perfect exemplar of the school of Theophrastus; Fuller belongs to a school of his own. While others were straining after variety, and finding it sometimes at the cost of sense. Fuller attained it easily and naturally — by being himself. This is the vital secret which makes The Holy and Profane State so charming. With the exception of Earle, the other character-writers almost entirely banish themselves from their own pages; they are indeed so artificial that they may almost be said to banish humanity. But humanity is visible and Thomas Fuller is present in every 56 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS page of The Holy and Profane State. This has been his charm for every one who has ever fallen under his influence. It is attested, not only by the well-known criticisms of Coleridge and Lamb, but, it is safe to say, by all the critics who have ever written of Fuller appreciatively. For it is quite possible to be unappreciative; it is possible even to be repelled by his amiable garrulity. " The golden works of the dear, fine, silly old angel " is the phrase of Lamb in a letter to Gilman, and it suggests why the gold may be concealed from some eyes. Fuller was a man of many gifts, not all of which are fully revealed by The Holy and Profane State, though he is there seen at his best. He had wide though not particularly accurate scholarship, and his powerful memory enabled him to accumulate an extraordinary mass of information. He told.Pepys that he had dictated to four scholars in Latin, on subjects of their proposing, faster than they could write. It may be that the matter dictated would not stand a very searching investigation, but the power to do such a thing at all is remarkable. His wit is attested by Coleridge; but while the phrase about its being the " stuff and substance " of Fuller's intellect is always quoted, it is not so widely remembered that Coleridge further pronounces that Fuller's wit, " alike in quantity, quality, and perpetuity, surpassed that of the wittiest in a witty age." In some respects the character-sketch was very well adapted to Fuller. The conceits which it encouraged neither repelled him nor presented any difficulty to his ingenuity. On the contrary. Lamb has said that Fuller's natural bias to conceits was so pronounced that " it would have been going out of his way to have expressed himself out of them." But on the other hand Fuller was discursive and diffuse, not to say garrulous; and the style of charactery was condensed to excess and discouraged wandering. It was this combination THE CHARACTER-WRITERS 57 of qualities that made charactery in his hands almost a new thing. There is nothing new in his opposition between the holy and the profane states, for that is only the " characters of virtues and vices " over again; but it is probably not too fanciful to see a glimpse of the " old angel " in the fact that, for Fuller, the holy state bulks several times as large as the profane; and it is certainly not a fancy, but the obvious fact, that a mind more concrete than the mind of the typical char- acter-writer is revealed in his habit of illustrating the virtue or the vice by a specific example. Thus the Good Wife is illustrated by a biographical sketch of Monica, and the Good Husband, not without a certain quaintness (no one has ever written of Fuller without using the word), by one of Abraham. So too, when he comes to the profane state and deals with the Witch, we not only learn that formerly there were witches, that there are witches at present, that it is very hard to prove a witch, and that many are unjustly accused, but we have concrete examples in the Witch of Endor and, alas! Joan of Arc. The stories with which Fuller loved to garnish his essays are another characteristic in which he differs from the rest of the character-writers. The stories were plentifully supplied by his wide experience and his rich memory; and they give a flavour to the essay wholly different from the flavour of Overbury or Hall. " Many have been the wise speeches of fools, though not so many as the foolish speeches of wise men," is a sentence of Fuller's such as might be found in any of the character-writers. But Overbury or Hall would have left it there and gone on to some fresh conceit or epi- gram. Fuller makes it the opening of a paragraph the body of which consists of a string of amusing anecdotes illustrative of the wisdom of the fool. One is the story of a hungry man who stayed in a cook's shop till the smell made him fuU, and when the cook demanded payment was relieved by the judg- 58 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS ment of a feeble-minded fellow, who decided that the poor man's money should be put between two empty dishes, and the cook paid with the jingling. Or take that lively illustra- tion by contraries of the Good Parent: " Did not that mother show little wit in her great partiality, to whom when her neglected son complained that his brother (her darling) had hit and hurt him with a stone, she whipped him only for standing in the way where the stone went which his brother cast ? " At once the tension is relieved. Epigram upon epi- gram wearies as surely and as soon as " gaiety without eclipse," but there is no danger of weariness when we have such relief as this. The human element is back again; and it becomes evident that the typical character-writer is an acrobat tumbling and playing tricks, whereas Fuller is a well- built man walking easily and naturally. The gymnastic feats are surprisingly clever, but at the end of the performance the acrobat is on precisely the same spot on the carpet where he began, while the simple walker has made considerable pro- gress on the way to his destination. Ordinary charactery illustrates, not human life, but the writer's talent; Fuller devotes a greater talent, not to the exhibition of his own cleverness, but to throwing a real light upon some phase of human nature. Their wit ends in itself; Fuller's wit is also wisdom. Coleridge showed his customary sureness of touch when he added to his praise of Fuller's wit the remark that he had " equal superiority in sound, shrewd, good sense, and freedom of intellect." Sometimes the stories impart a pleasant personality; a quality without which Fuller would not be Fuller, and one also which removes him far from the ordinary character- writers. They are among the most impersonal of essayists, while Fuller has been compared to Charles Lamb, perhaps the most personal and intimate. Fuller is not afraid of the pronoun I, and his use of it deepens the sense of intimacy. THE CHARACTER-WRITERS 59 For example: "Mr. Cambden, in his Remains, presents us with examples of great men that had Httle epitaphs. And when once I asked a witty gentleman, an honoured friend of mine, what epitaph was fittest to be written on Mr. Cambden's tomb ? ' Let it be,' said he, ' Cambden's Remains.' " But the matter goes deeper than the mere use of a pronoun. Even when he speaks in the third person, even when he writes of far lands and of distant ages. Fuller's personality is always near. It imparts a tone, it is an essence, an atmosphere, an indefinable something which marks all he writes as unmistak- ably his. It was probably this quality more than anything else that won the love of Lamb. We shall see it presently when we come to illustrate Fuller in his closest approaches to the orthodox character-writers. The stories quoted hitherto have been of the amusing sort, and Fuller liked them so when they were to be had and would serve the purpose. But his was a richly " veined humanity," and he has stories and reflections of the most serious sort as well. Occasionally the mere passing of time has brought some change which causes a smile to break where Fuller never meant to provoke one. He was wholly serious when he wrote thus in the Life of Mr. Perkins, the concrete example of the Faithful Minister: "He would pronounce the word damn with such an emphasis as left a doleful echo in his auditors' ears a good while after. . . . But in his older age he altered his voice, and remitted much of his former rigidness, often professing that to preach mercy was the proper office of the ministers of the gospel." He was wholly serious when he wrote the story of Dr. Whitaker thanking Mr. West " for giving him correction when his young scholar; " and time has left the gravity unimpaired. It is impossible to mistake the heart-felt charity of the remarks in the essay Of Natural Fools : " Only God's pleasure put a difference betwixt you. And consider-that a fool and a wise man are alike both in the 6o THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS starting-place, their birth, and in the port, their death: only they differ in the race of their lives." Many single sentences might be quoted which would leave the impression that there was little or no difference between Fuller and the character-writers as a body, or at most only such difference as there is between a witty man and a super- latively witty one. Mere verbal quips are of this sort. Many men might have written that the Good Parent " observeth gavelkind in dividing his affections, though not his estate," for that is merely a ' conceited ' use of a technical term; or that the Good Physician prescribes cheap but wholesome medicines to poor people, " not removing the consump- tion out of their bodies into their purses;" or, "lest his apothecary should oversee, he oversees his apothecary." But it would not be easy to find in Fuller a paragraph which would not strike the reader as different from the paragraph of any other man; and sometimes even single sentences, though fashioned in the workshop of Theo- phrastus, seem to carry that stamp of personality which has already been referred to. " The most ancient nobility is junior to no nobility, when all men were equal," seems, somehow, to be as unmistakably Fuller's as the " grand old gardener " is Tennyson's. Certainly it is so with this remark about the Younger Brother: " Sometimes he raiseth his estate by applying himself to the court : a pasture wherein elder brothers are observed to grow lean, and younger brothers fat." But perhaps the best illustrations of that indefinable something of personality which Fuller imparts even to those passages where he most closely follows the style of charactery are to be found in the essay on The Degenerous Gentleman^ who is, of course, the profane analogue to The True Gentleman : — " Vacation is his vocation, and he scorns to follow any profession, and will not be confined to any laudable employ- THE CHARACTER-WRITERS 6i ment. But they who count a caUing a prison, shall at last make a prison their calHng." " Having lost his own legs, he relies on the staff of his kindred; first visiting them as an intermitting ague, but afterwards turns a quotidian, wearing their thresholds as bare as his own coat. At last, he is as welcome as a storm; he that is abroad shelters himself from it, and he that is at home shuts the door. . . . Sometimes he sadly paceth over the ground he sold, and is on fire with anger mth himself for his folly, but frequently quencheth it at the next alehouse." 62 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS CHAPTER IV MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY While, in the early part of the seventeenth century, the delineation of characters was the most popular exercise of the essayists, it was not the only one. The instrument which Bacon had introduced could be put to many uses, and among the writers of miscellaneous prose there were a few, apart from Jonson, who trod more closely in his footsteps than the artists of charactery. One such was Owen Felltham (1602-1668), author of Resolves : Divine, Moral, Political ; a man about the events of whose life little is known, while his opinions are patent to every reader of his works. He was a Royalist of the most extreme type; and to understand what a pohtical extreme is, we must go back to the writers of that age. Many have been surprised and pained by Fuller's adulation of Charles I. in the last essay of his Holy State : " His royal virtues are too great to be told, and too great to be concealed. All cannot, some must break forth from the full hearts of such as be his faithful subjects. But I must either stay or fall. My sight fails me, — dazzled with the light of majesty. All I can do is pray," — which accordingly he does. It seems hardly possible to surpass this, but Felltham contrives to do so. " Here Charles the First and Christ the Second lies " is the last line of his epitaph on the royal martyr. He intended no irreverence; he as well as Fuller was habitually reverent; and the fact that he was so makes these staggering words all themoreinstructive. Clearly such a man could not love the Puritans, and the essay upon them, under the guise of moderation, betrays a strong dislike. He says there are few who will own the name; and MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 63 the reason is that it is for the most part a name of infamy. He himself is ready to love a Puritan — with a difference: — " A man that submits to reverent order, that sometimes unbends himself in a moderate relaxation; and in all, labours to approve himself, in the sereneness of a healthful conscience: such a Puritan I will love immutably. But when a man, in things but ceremonial, shall spurn at the grave authority of the Church, and out of a needless nicety be a thief to himself, of those benefits which God hath allowed him: or out of a blind and uncharitable pride, censure, and scorn others, as reprobates: or out of obstinacy, fill the world with brawls, about undeterminable tenents : I shall think him one of those, whose opinion hath fevered his zeal to madness and dis- traction." The Resolves are divided into two ' centuries.' Of these the first in order of time, which afterwards became second in order of arrangement, was published when Felltham was only eighteen. The second edition, to which a new ' century ' was added, is dated 1628. The earlier essays are very short, the later ones are much fuller and altogether more mature. Ultimately the original ' century ' was thoroughly revised and much enlarged, while some of the papers were wholly omitted and others substituted for them. The book was extremely popular, going through twelve editions between its first publication and the year 1709. In the eighteenth century both Felltham and his writings were almost com- pletely forgotten, but a partial revival of interest in him took place early in the nineteenth century. In his preface to the reader the author is careful to explain that these essays were written not so much to please others as to gratify and profit himself. But this may safely betaken as an attempt to deprecate criticism, and to suggest that the author could have done better had he chosen to take pains. The Resolves are written, not without ease, but certainly with care. 64 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS It is the ease which comes from study, not from indifference. Felltham's discipleship to Bacon is clear; but so is the great- ness of the distance at which he follows his exemplar. " Too great a spirit in a man born to poor means, is like a high-heeled shoe to one of mean stature: it advanceth his proportion, but is ready to fit him with falls," is a simile with a Baconian smack. Felltham's essay on death is obviously founded upon and indebted to Bacon's essay on the same subject; but OJ MarCs Unwillingness to Die shows how much more rhetorical and how much less massive in thought the minor writer is. He loves ornate phrases — e.g., " the wise man learns to know himself as well by night's black mantle, as the scorching beams of day," to which there is no parallel in Bacon. Occasionally he paraphrases Bacon : " It was the fool that said. There is no God; for certainly no wise man ever thought it, and, yet, the fool had so much wit as not to prate on't : It was but in his heart he said it. Impudence was not so great, nor inward conviction so strong, as that he could with confidence declare it with his tongue. Nor did he seriously think it in his heart : so that it proceeded no farther than a bare and lazy wish, because he would be glad it were so. But, doubtless, he could no more believe there was no soul in this vast world than that there was no spirit to actuate his body." Obviously this is no more than an expanded and weakened version of a sentence or two in Bacon's Oj Atheism. There are well-marked differences, both of endowment and of purpose, between Felltham and the character-writers. The author of the Resolves had plenty of wit, though, apparently, not much humour. But in the Resolves, as a rule, his aim was not to display either. By far the most witty of his writings is that bright and lively performance, A Brief Character of the Low-Countries under the States, where, far more than in the Resolves, we are reminded that he was a contemporary of Earle. MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 65 There are other differences between the scholar Felltham and the master Bacon besides the enormous difference in force and genius. Bacon's subjects are, as we have seen, gene- rally political or ethical. Felltham's are more distinctively religious, or moral with a religious tinge. Among his themes are: That Man ought to be extensively Good; Of the Horror Sin leaves behind ; Of Man's Imperfection ; Of the Uncertainty of Life ; Of Prayer ; Wherein a Christian excels other Men. The hst might be greatly enlarged. The very subjects are suggestive of the pulpit, and the treatment is in accordance with the subjects. Now the vice of the pulpit has commonly been a tendency to truisms, a fatal proneness to take " ghmpses into the obvious." And it is Felltham's vice too. A good example is to be found in the essay Of Time's con- tinual Speed. It is written with more than usual care, and, so far as mere harmony of sound is concerned, the result is more than usually pleasing. Unfortunately the thought is trite and ordinary: — " In all the actions that a man performs, some part of his life passeth. We die with doing that for which only our sliding life was granted. Nay, though we do nothing. Time keeps his constant pace, and flies as fast in idleness as in employment. Whether we play, or labour, or sleep, or dance, or study, the Sun posteth, and the sand runs. An hour of vice is as long as an hour of virtue. But the difference which follows upon good actions is infinite from that of ill ones. The good, though it diminish our time here, yet it lays up a pleasure for eternity; and will recompense what it taketh away, with a plentiful return at last. When we trade with virtue, we do but buy pleasure with expense of time. So it is not so much a consuming of time, as an exchange. Or as a man sows his corn, he is content to want it a while, that he may, at the harvest, receive it with advantage." As a piece of writing, this is undeniably fine; and there is £ 66 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS something in the cadence of the sentences ^ which suggests that Felltham may have read the work of a man who deserves a place among the essayists for the sake of a single per- formance only, because in that he attained an excellence of style which makes him, for once, the rival of the greatest masters. William Drummond (i 585-1649) of Hawthornden is better known as the author of poems than as the writer of A Cypress Grove; but, excellent as are his sonnets, the latter work is equally deserving of remembrance, and it comes nearer the topmost heights of literature than anything else that came from the same pen. Drummond had a genius refined and elegant rather than robust. In his personal characteristics we may probably find the secret of that acerbity which marks his portrait of Ben Jonson. Jonson was emphatically robust, but not so conspicuously refined and elegant ; and he may well have rasped the nerves of the recluse of Hawthornden. Had he not been exceptionally fortunate in his circumstances, perhaps, in a rude age and country, the genius of Drummond would never have bloomed at all. The bloom certainly withered when he left his retreat and came out into the world. His best work, both in verse and in prose, is the expression of a spirit naturally reflective, thrown in upon itself by a solitary life, and rendered deeply melancholy by prolonged brooding about his lost love, Mary Cunningham. Drummond is not passionate, but there is evidence in his works of a genuine and deep affection, cherished until he falls in love with grief. Such is the tone of the best of his sonnets, with the exception of that on the Baptist, which sounds a deeper note. Such too is the tone of the Cypress Grove. This eloquent meditation upon death was first published in 1623. The immediate occasion of 1 The essay Of Time's continual Speed is in the second ' century ' (in the order of arrangement) ; but it is not one of those which appeared in the first edition. MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 6-] it was a severe illness from which Drummond had suffered, but the fulness and richness of tone attests years of reverie on cognate themes. There was in Drummond from the start a strain of mysticism, and his studies, the events of his life, and the absence of event in his retirement at Hawthornden, all alike served to foster and strengthen it. He is akin to the English Platonists and is enamoured of the Platonic doctrine of ideas. His favourite conception is the oneness of the universe, and the oneness of the soul with that from which it comes. It is this which inspires him to his highest flight of eloquence in A Cypress Grove : — " If on the great theatre of this earth amongst the number- less number of men, to die were only proper to thee and thine, then undoubtedly thou hadst reason to repine at so severe and partial a law: But since it is a necessity, from which never any age by-past hath been exempted, and unto which they which be, and so many as are to come, are thralled (no consequent of life being more common and familiar), why shouldst thou, with unprofitable and nought-availing stub- bornness, oppose so inevitable and necessary a condition? This is the highway of mortality, and our general home: Behold what millions have trod it before thee, what multi- tudes shall after thee, with them that at that same instant run. In so universal a calamity (if Death be one) private complaints cannot be heard : With so many royal palaces, it is no loss to see thy poor cabin burn. Shall the heavens stay their ever-rolling wheels (for what is the motion of them but the motion of a swift and ever-whirling wheel, which twineth forth, and again uproUeth our life) and hold still time to prolong thy miserable days, as if the highest of their working were to do homage unto thee? Thy death is a pace in the order of this All, a part of the life of this world; for while the world is the world, some creatures must die, and others take Ufe." 68 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS The stately English of this passage is unequalled by any- thing else in A Cypress Grove. The essay is not free from the faults of the time. The metaphors are sometimes far-fetched, and sometimes they are mere conceits. Drummond occasion- ally writes in order that he may display his ' wit ' : "To seek a reason, unless from the sparkling of God in the soul, or from the God-like sparkles of the soul, were to make reason unreasonable, by reasoning of things transcending her reach." — " Arches and stately temples, which one age doth raise, doth not another raze ? " But the general level is very high: nearly three-quarters of the essay might be quoted with warm approval. While the following passage is inferior to the preceding one, it still gives proof that Drummond possessed a rare gift of style: — " But that, perhaps, which anguisheth thee most, is to have this glorioias pageant of the world removed from thee in the spring and most delicious season of thy life; for though to die be usual, to die young may appear extraordinary. If the present fruition of these things be unprofitable and vain, what can a long continuance of them be ? If God had made life happier. He had also made it longer. Stranger and new halcyon, why would thou longer nestle amidst these uncon- stant and stormy waves? Hast thou not already suffered enough of this world, but thou must yet endure more? To live long, is it not to be long troubled ? But number thy years, which are now , and thou shalt find that whereas ten have outlived thee, thousands have not attained this age. One year is sufficient to behold all the magnificence of nature, nay, even one day and night; for more is but the same brought again. This sun, that moon, these stars, the varying dance of the spring, summer, autumn, winter, is that very same which the Golden Age did see. They which have the longest time lent them to live in, have almost no part of it at all, measuring it either by the space of time which is past, MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 69 when they were not, or by that which is to come. Why shouldst thou then care, whether thy days be many or few, which, when prolonged to the uttermost, prove, paralleled with eternity, as a tear is to the ocean ? To die young is to do that soon, and in some fewer days, which once thou must do; it is but the giving over of a game, that after never so many hazards must be lost." A Cypress Grove is perhaps the first conscious and sustained effort in English to write poetical prose. The style was well adapted to Drummond's habitual tone of thought, and he was tempted to retain it when he was writing upon subjects where the use of it is less defensible. What in A Cypress Grove is eloquence, in Irene becomes rhetoric. The latter, written in 1638, is a " remembrance for concord, amity and love, amongst his Majesty's subjects." Though the style is overcharged with ornament, there is force in this fervid appeal for moderation, at once to the country and to the king. The emphasis with which Drummond insists upon the blessings of peace to Britain betrays his fear that these blessings might soon be lost. Five years later he took up the subject again in ^Kiafxax'ta. But these later essays were not printed during his life, and had the author not also written A Cypress Grove, they would hardly be worth referring to now. Yet Drum- mond was by natural bent an essayist, and had he lived a century later he would, almost certainly, have shone in the company of Steele and Addison. As it was, he hardly realised his own gift. In all his prose writings except the Cypress Grove, he is too much dominated by the subject, and fails to leave that impression of personality which is the special charm of the essay. The path was as yet little trodden, and he imperfectly understood the nature of the art in which, never- theless, he achieved one signal triumph. We may perhaps take Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) to be the successor of Drummond as a practitioner of the *4 70 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS art of writing cadenced prose. That he studied that art profoundly, and mastered it as few, if any, have mastered it either before or since, most students of his works will agree. Neither will any one dispute that, by reason of the Miscellany Tracts and Miscellanies, if on no other grounds, he is entitled to a place among the essayists'. The question on which doubt may reasonably be entertained is whether his place among them is central, or merely on the outer fringe. The answer to that question must depend upon the view taken of the greater works of Browne; and it has hitherto been generally assumed rather than shown that these have more of the nature of treatises than of essays. But in point of length Browne's works certainly do not, with one exception, exceed the limits within which custom has confined the term essay. Few of Macaulay's essays are so short as Urn-Burial, and some of them are considerably longer than Religio Medici or The Garden of Cyrus. As to Vulgar Errors, it seems, no doubt, absurd to regard as an essay a work which, with notes, in Bohn's edition fills between 700 and 800 pages. But whoever looks below the surface will see that this formidable treatise has the character of a treatise only in the first book. There, indeed, we find a discussion of the causes of common errors, which is fairly orderly and as philosophical as it was in the nature of Browne to make it. But then, Browne was, in the judicious words of the judicious Hallam, " far removed from real philosophy, both by his turn of mind and by the nature of his erudition." In the subsequent books the unity is of the most superficial sort. Browne discourses about popular tenets concerning minerals and vegetables, concerning animals, concerning man, about popular customs, and about popular tenets cosmographical, geographical and historical. In short, if ever there was a book de omnibus rebus et quibusdani aliis, that book is the Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Real unity it has none; each chapter is independent of the rest, and any MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 71 one, or almost any group, of them might be omitted without leaving in the reader's mind the sense of incompleteness. How could he know that the third book would be incomplete without that omnium gatherum of Chapter XXVII., from the musical note of swans to the providence of pismires in biting off the ends of corn ? How could he guess that even after this the " sundry queries " of Chapter XXVIII. are still necessary? The truth is that each chapter is an essay in itself, virtually independent of the others with which it is grouped. For the unity and system which have sometimes been found in his works Browne is indebted to the critics who have discovered these quahties in him. He is essentially and always a desultory, though this does not mean a careless, writer, and his meditations are invariably ' dispersed.' Browne, then, is not to be excluded from the province of | the essay on the ground that he is the author of long and closely-articulated works. His only long work has hardly I any articulation at all. For the most part, it is a collection of independent papers which the author has chosen to head as chapters. Is he then to be excluded on the ground that his aim and temperament are not the aim and temperament of the essay-writer? On the contrary, he is in soul and sub- stance an essayist from start to finish; and if so he is certainly one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest of all. Take Religio Medici. Though so much shorter than Vulgar Errors, by reason of its superior unity, it of all Browne's works has, most nearly the character of a treatise. But, though Browne was a learned man of science, Religio Medici has none of the detached, impersonal, scientific spirit of a treatise. It is psychological, but not as the philosophers are psychological. Almost at the beginning the personal note is struck, the note which is characteristic of the essayist par excellence, the essayist of the school of Montaigne: — " I am, I confess, naturally inclined to that which mis- 72 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS guided zeal terms superstition: my common conversation I do acknowledge austere, my behaviour full of rigour, some- times not without morosity; yet, at my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions which may express or promote my invisible devotion. I should violate my own arm rather than a church; nor willingly deface the name of saint or martyr. At the sight of a cross, or crucifix, I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour. I cannot laugh at, but rather pity, the fruitless journeys of pilgrims, or contemn the miserable condition of friars; for, though misplaced in circumstances, there is something in it of devotion. I could never hear the Ave- Mary bell without an elevation, or think it a sufficient warrant, because they erred in one circumstance, for me to err in all — that is, in silence and dumb contempt. Whilst, therefore, they directed their devotions to her, I offered mine to God; and rectified the errors of their prayers by rightly ordering mine own. At a solemn procession I have wept abundantly, while my consorts, blind with opposition and prejudice, have fallen into an excess of scorn and laughter." What has this to do with system or science .? It would be appropriate in an autobiography, and there is much besides in the Religio Medici that is autobiographic. Yet it certainly cannot be ranked with the autobiography of Gibbon or the Confessions of Rousseau. We might almost be reading an earlier Charles Lamb, and we are reminded that Lamb claimed to be the first of the moderns to discover the beauty of one of Browne's works, that he never sought to conceal his debt to them all, and that Browne was one of tKe two men whom he would most have liked to meet. There is no place for the Religio Medici in the literary scheme, except among essays of the personal type. In Browne's case the type is pleasantly flavoured with the science in which he had been MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 73 trained, and is elaborated with the care of an artist in words. But scientific or systematic Religio Medici is not. Though Browne's life was prolonged considerably beyond the allotted span, his literary career, as measured by dates of publication within his own life, was short. It began with Religio Medici (1642) and ended with Urn-burial and The Garden of Cyrus (1658). In the interval was published Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), as Browne characteristically entitled his discussions of common errors and delusions. Christian Morals never received his final touches, and did not appear till 1 716. But though Religio Medici was not printed till 1642, and then surreptitiously, it was written considerably earlier. Browne himself dates it in characteristic fashion. *' If there be any truth in astrology, I may outlive a jubilee; as yet I have not seen one revolution of Saturn, nor hath my pulse beat thirty years, and yet, excepting one, have seen the ashes of, and left under ground, all the kings of Europe; have been contemporary to three emperors, four grand signiors, and as many popes: methinks I have outlived myself, and begin to be weary of the sun; I have shaken hands with delight in my warm blood and canicular days; I perceive I do anticipate the vices of age; the world to me is but a dream or mock-show, and we all therein but pantaloons and anticks, to my severer contemplations." In order to tell his own age Browne links himself with the stars and with the great ones of the earth. It is no small part of his charm, and another evidence of the discursive character of his mind, that with him every road leads to the end of the world. The second part of Religio Medici is even more exquisite than the first, mainly because of those intimate confidences, varying from the gossiping details at the beginning to the stately contemplation near the close, on his life as a miracle of thirty years. " I wonder not at the French for their dishes of frogs, 74 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS snails and toadstools, nor at the Jews for locusts and grass- hoppers; but, being amongst them, make them my common viands; and I find they agree with my stomach as well as theirs. I could digest a salad gathered in a church-yard as well as in a garden. I cannot start at the presence of a serpent, scorpion, lizard, or salamander; at the sight of a toad or viper, I find in me no desire to take up a stone to destroy them. I feel not in myself those common antipathies that I can discover in others: those national repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch; but where I find their actions in balance with my countrymen's, I honour, love, and embrace them, in the same degree. I was born in the eighth climate, but seem to be framed and constellated unto all. I am no plant that will not prosper out of a garden. All places, all airs, make unto me one country; I am in England everywhere, and under any meridian." " Surely it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as mere dreams to those of the next; as the phantasms of the night, to the conceit of the day. There is an equal delusion in both; and the one doth but seem to be the emblem or picture of the other. We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps; and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the ligation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps. At my nativity, my ascendant was the watery sign of Scorpio, I was born in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a piece of that leaden planet in me. I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardise of company; yet in one dream I can compose a whole comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceits thereof. Were my memory as faithful as my reason is then fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams, and this time MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 75 also would I choose for my devotions; but our grosser memories have then so little hold of our abstracted under- standings, that they forget the story, and can only relate to our awaked souls a confused and broken tale of that which hath passed." No wonder a work such as this was popular. The sale was so rapid that the first surreptitious edition seems to have been exhausted within a few months, and a second, also un- authorised, followed in the same year. In 1643 came the first authorised version; and in all there were fourteen or fifteen distinct issues, some of them accompanied by other works of Browne, before the close of the century — evidence of a popularity very extraordinary at that period. Nor was the popularity limited to England. Religio Medici was trans- lated into Latin, Dutch, German and French, and won the ardent admiration of the great French physician Guy Patin. The story is familiar how Lord Dorset was charmed with the book on its first appearance and recommended it to Sir Kenelm Digby; and the latter has himself recorded how he sent for it, received it in bed, and then — " I closed not my eyes till I had enriched myself with (or at least exactly surveyed) all the treasures that are lapped up in the folds of those fewsheets." This admiration gave rise to those Observations by Digby which it had been customary ever since to append to Religio Medici No other of Browne's works has ever enjoyed quite such wide favour as the first. One reason undoubtedly is that nowhere else is Browne so personal and confidential; and there is nothing in all Hterature more engaging than such egoism as his. But besides, most of his other works are inherently inferior to this first production. This is very obviously the case with the Miscellany Tracts and Miscellanies, The best of them all, that on dreams, contains nothing equal to the reflections on sleep and dreams towards the close of Religio Medici. In others, such as the tracts Of Garlansd 76 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS and Coronary or Garland Plants and Of Hawks and Falconry, Ancient and Modern, we have illustrations of Browne's pro- found and curious learning, and of his occasionally acute power of criticism, but nothing that is not in these respects surpassed in his more formal works. The miscellanies were in fact the gleanings of Browne's harvest, answers to queries addressed to him by his friends, odd papers which he had not been able to weave in with his longer writings. As to the rest, The Garden oj Cyrus goes far to justify Hallam's remark that the absence of " the controUing supremacy of good sense " deprives Browne of the place which would otherwise be his among the greatest writers. The famous passage beginning *' But the quincunx of heaven runs low " is, it is true, one of the finest that even Browne ever wrote; but as a whole The Garden of Cyrus is fantastic and whimsical to the point of weariness. Christian Morals is wise and lofty, but spiritually no richer than Religio Medici, while it is destitute of the delightful egoism of the latter work. And highly entertaining as Vulgar Errors is, there are parts of it which are dull and commonplace. Neither in style nor in moral depth is it equal to the earlier work. Only those who find in it an impor- tant contribution to scientific thought can put it at the head of Browne's works. There remains only Urn Burial ; for it is surely a somewhat perverse criticism that has raised almost to a level with it the Letter to a Friend. But Urn Burial contains some forty or fifty pages of the most beautiful English ever written, probably the greatest piece of sustained eloquence in the prose of the language. It is the concentrated essence of Browne's genius. The spirit is fundamentally the spirit of Religio Medici. In both there is the same brooding thought; though in the earlier work it is evoked by the contemplation of the author's own life, and in the later by the rehcs of long-dead humanity. Both are instinct with the melancholy of Browne, a melan- MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS ^^ choly of his own, " compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects." Both, too, are profoundly mystical; for Browne is one of the numerous stumbling-blocks in the way of those modern theorists in whose view mysticism is charac- teristic of the Celtic race and is alien from the Anglo-Saxon. The style, too, is essentially the same; but it has developed. On the one hand, it has lost something of ease, on the other it is far more highly-wrought, richer and more gorgeous. The temper of the artist in words is manifest in the characteristic epistle dedicatory, especially in the closing sentence, where Browne weaves into his phraseology the theme of the work thus dedicated: "Having long experience of your friendly conversation, void of empty formality, full of freedom, con- stant and generous honesty, I look upon you as a gem of the old rock, and must profess myself even to urn and ashes, your ever faithful friend and servant." The first book sketches slightly the burial customs of many nations. The recent dis- covery of urns in Norfolk leads in the second to the more specific consideration of the urns used to receive the ashes left after cremation; but again the discursive mind of Browne diverges to the question of the population of Britain in the time of Julius Caesar, and to other questions equally remote from the subject in hand. From time to time reference is made to some detail or other of the particular discovery which gave occasion to the essay; but the references are merely cursory, for the true subject of the essay is not the urns found in Norfolk, but the thoughts on mortality suggested by them. " Who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried ? who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered ? The relicks of many lie like the ruins of Pompeys, in all parts of the earth." These sentences in the epistle dedicatory strike the keynote of the whole. The opening chapters, with their curious lore, gradually work up to the reflections at the close, for which the whole has been 78 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS written. We have nearly reached the height in the closing paragraphs of Chapter IV : " Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended as the fehcities of this, it were a martyrdom to live; and unto such as consider none hereafter, it must be more than death to die, which makes us amazed at those audacities that durst be nothing and return into their chaos again." ..." It is the heaviest stone that melan- choly can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain." But it is in the fifth and last chapter that the climax to which Browne has been working comes. It is like a solemn music, and Milton in his grandest mood might have written a sonnet upon it. Every paragraph is an almost matchless model of musical prose. The very first teaches us what to expect : — " Now since these dead bones have already out-lasted the living ones of Methuselah, and in a yard under ground, and thin walls of clay, outworn all the strong and specious build- ings above it; and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests: what prince can promise such diuturnity unto his relicks, or might not gladly say. Sic ego componi verstis in ossa velim ? Time, which antiquates antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor monuments." And so through the paragraphs, all famous, about the songs the syrens sang, about the circles and right lines that limit and close all bodies, about the darkness and light that divide \ the course of time, about the epitaph of Gordianus. Where i is there finer English than the " Oblivion " paragraph ? — " Obhvion is not to be hired. The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 79 names make up the first story before the flood, and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox ? Every hour adds unto that current arith- metic, which scarce stands one moment. And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt, whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at right de- scensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementoes, and time that grows old in itself, bids us hope no long duration; — diuturnityis a dreamand follyof expectation." Flawlessness is even more rare in prose than it is in verse, and if all the pieces were collected which a reasonable criticism could praise wholly without reserve, they would make only a very small volume. But an extraordinary proportion would come from TJrn Burial — a proportion higher than any other work of equal length would yield, possibly higher than could be gleaned even from the longest works. The value of Browne now lies wholly in his style. In no other case is the style more emphatically the man, in none other is the attempt to sever substance from form more hope- less, or more unjust, where, in the most partial way, it can be done. The thought of Browne is in many points open to question. In Vulgar Errors he is divided between credulity and scepticism. He has no clue to guide him through the mazes of false opinion. There is little ground for surprise in the fact that some of his contemporaries saw only the scepticism; for their faith expressed itself in a series of propositions, and Browne doubted some of them. It is more astonishing that there have been moderns also who regarded him as sceptical in mind. Coleridge saw deeper, and rightly ranked him as " an Ultra-fidian." Hence Browne's acceptance of Tertullian's I 80 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS " credo, quia impossibile est." He has a vein of superstition, and believes in magic and witchcraft. In the latter case un- fortunately his was more than a passive belief; for as late as 1664 ^^ ^^^^ partly instrumental in bringing about the death of two wretched women charged with this crime. But when all this has been admitted, and the utmost has been said that can be said against Browne as a philosopher and a man of science, the value of his best work remains exactly the same. Reasoning cannot touch that paragraph on oblivion, any more than all the syllogisms since Aristotle can either lessen or increase the beauty of Beethoven's music. The appeal of music is to another range of being, a different faculty than that which the syllogism addresses. So too Browne's appeal is to the emotions rather than to the reason. Not what he asserts, but what he suggests, is important. Urn Burial proves nothing, any more than Paradise Lost does. But just as Paradise Lost kindles and elevates the imagination, so does Urn Burial. Great as were Browne's services to literature, they were not without drawback. The vice of learning is pedantry, and Browne had his share of it. In some forms it is harmless enough. If we get weary of the quincunx we cease to read The Garden of Cyrus, and there is an end. Browne was not the first pedant, and had he never written there would probably have been not one pedant less after him. But it was different with his choice of words. All who could judge perceived him to be a master of style, and some tried to imitate him. Un- fortunately, in his case, as in many another, the faults proved to be more easily reproduced than the beauties. Hence the judgment of Coleridge, which, harsh as it seems, is neverthe- less sound: " Sir Thomas Browne it was who, though a writer of great genius, first effectually injured the literary taste of the nation by his introduction of learned words, merely because they were learned." Johnson again speaksTof MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 8i Browne's style as " a tissue of many languages; " and John- son himself is said by Boswell to have based his style on Browne. But Johnson's Latinisms were moderate compared with Browne's. Words like ergotism, volutation, funambula- tory, innitency, orbity, show a perverse love of the word, not on its merits but for its outlandishness. Herein undoubtedly Browne set an example of the worst kind, and the evil he thus did has to be set in the balance against his services. But in this case at least the Shakespearean rule is reversed. The evil Browne did was not indeed interred with his bones, but it has gradually grown less. The good sense of the English people rejected the needless coinages. The value of Browne as a model for musical prose is perennial. Few would be capable of directly following him, but many have, even un- consciously, written more melodious English because he had written before them. Kinship with Felltham is shown by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (1609-1674), whose Contemplations and Rejiections upon the Psalms of David are virtually a collection of essays, full of the reflections of a man rich in experience and wise from contemplation,— a man also genuinely good in heart, or else singularly skilful in concealing evil. Clarendon's Essays, Divine and Moral deserve to be better known than they are. They have a considerable range. Of the Reverence due to Anti- quity is a very able essay. It is written in a sceptical spirit and gives a high opinion of Clarendon's historical acumen. Perhaps the best of all is the essay Of Peace, which is coloured by Clarendon's experiences, and reminiscent, though not ob- trusively so, of the civil troubles. Its fervour, rare in Claren- don, is obviously inspired by a lively recollection of the horrors of war. The beginning, like the beginning of several of the other essays, recalls Bacon: " It was a very proper answer to him who asked. Why any man should be delighted with beauty? that it was a question that none but a blind man F 82 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS could ask; since any beautiful object doth so much attract the sight, that it is in no man's power not to be pleased with it." Clarendon's sentences, however, have not the weighty sententiousness of Bacon's; on the contrary, the vice of his style is that they are apt to be at times far too long and loosely constructed. The personal note which is characteristic of all these writers connects them with Montaigne rather than with Bacon. But more deliberately than any of them Abraham Cowley (i6i8- 1667) cultivated a form of essay more intimate and confi- dential, though less profound, weighty and philosophical, than the Baconian. The style is less elaborate than Drummond's or Browne's. It is a form of the essay which can be traced, with intervals of partial oblivion, from Cowley's day to this; and in it have written the best-beloved, even if they be not the greatest, of all the essayists — Addison, Lamb, Thackeray, R. L. Stevenson. To have taken one of the longest steps towards this result is perhaps Cowley's best title to fame. The whole of Cowley's prose would fill but a very slender volume. It was his misfortune to live in an age of civil con- vulsion. He was torn from the university " by that violent public storm which would suffer nothing to stand where it did, but rooted up every plant, even from the princely cedars to me, the hyssop; " and in his opinion " a warlike, various, and tragical age is best to write q/", but worst to write m." It was his further misfortune to be early accepted as not merely a poet, but the greatest poet of his time, though Milton was a contemporary. To modern critical taste, no judgment seems more surprising than this. But naturally enough Cowley accepted it; and the consequence is that his admirable prose is limited to a mere handful of prefaces and discourses. The charm of these is largely due to their simple and sincere revela- tion of self. They are the friendly chat of a thoughtful and reflective spectator of life. Nothing Cowley has written is '•5 I MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 85 more delightful than what he has written directly about him- self. It is natural to turn for illustration to the essay Of Myself — perhaps the finest of his compositions. But whatever be the subject — whether greatness, or gardens, or solitude, or the dangers of an honest man in much company — Cowley loves to write in the first person; and his third person is but a little way removed from it. He is far happier in this mood than in the more ambitious ' vision ' concerning the govern- ' ment of Cromwell. '"'' Complete success in Cowley's particular form of essay is hardly compatible with greatness of the highest kind. " The solemn peaks but to the stars are known; " and here there is presupposed a certain familiarity and intimacy of relation with the reader. Cowley had just the proper gifts and the right disposition. He was retiring and unambitious. He compares himself with Montaigne in respect of his indifference to greatness. " I confess I love littleness almost in all things. A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a little com- pany, and a very little feast; and if I were ever to fall in love again (which is a great passion, and therefore I hope I have done with it i) it would be, I think, with prettiness rather than with majestical beauty. I would neither wish that my mis- tress, nor my fortune, should be a bona roba, nor, as Homer used to describe his beauties, like a daughter of great Jupiter, for the stateliness and largeness of her person, but, as Lucre- tius says, ' Parvula, pumilio, Xapirmv fiia, tota merum sal.' " " As far as my memory can return back into my past life, before I knew, or was capable of guessing, what the world, or glories, or business of it were, the natural affections of my soul gave me a secret bent of aversion from them, as some plants are said to turn away from others by an antipathy imperceptible to themselves and inscrutable to man's under- 1 Remembering the chronicle of the names of his mistresses, the reader may echo the hope. il \\ 84 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS standing. Even when I was a young boy at school, instead of running about on hohdays and playing with my fellows, I was wont to steal from them and walk into the fields, either alone with a book, or with some one companion, if I could find any of the same temper." This is not the temperament of the man who is born to move the world, either by the energy of his action or by the profundity and originality of his thought. The enthusiasm of a Napoleon and of an Aristotle alike is stirred by that great- ness to which Cowley deliberately prefers littleness. But this is the temperament of the born essayist; and it is because they display it with an easy grace that Cowley's essays pre- serve a perennial charm. Though his poetical reputation is gone, as an essayist his position is sure. Another development is best exemplified by the Epistolce Ho-Eliance. These are in form not essays at all; but of all the writings of the time, except Cowley's, they have most of the spirit of the essay; and they surpass even Cowley's in their power of illustrating the Addisonian essay, for they are far more varied than Cowley's essays. The Queen Anne essayists felt the kinship, and it is interesting to notice that there is in The Spectator a paper by Howell. James Howell (i594?-i666) was a man of more diversified activity than any of the essayists hitherto considered, except- ing Bacon. If, as may be suspected, he was something of a busybody, this failing makes him all the more effective as a miscellaneous writer. Like Cowley he was on the Royalist side. For a time he suffered imprisonment, but he was re- leased in 165 1, and on the Restoration he received some recompense for his sufferings in the office of Historiographer Royal. Of all Howell's voluminous compositions only the Episiolcv can be said still to live. They are described as familiar letters domestic and foreign, partly historical, political, philosophical. MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 85 " upon emergent occasions." They were published in four books between 1645 and 1655. On the threshold a question arises as to the authenticity of the letters — not their authen- ticity as the work of Howell; that is undisputed; but their claim to be accepted as compositions written at the time when they profess to have been written, and addressed to the persons with whom the author represents himself as corre- sponding. This question is vital to the historian ; but it is less important from the purely Hterary point of view, and it must suffice here to state in the briefest way the conclusion of experts. It is that very many of the letters are, in the sense indicated, certainly spurious, and that the historical value of the whole collection is small. As pieces of literature, however, the Epistolce Ho-Eliancs cannot be so summarily dismissed. The fact that the letters were in Howell's own day, and for about half a century after his death, extremely popular, is prima facie evidence of merit; and the further fact that the popularity has never been entirely lost greatly strengthens the presumption. The secret is not hard to find. Howell aimed at popularity, he had the knack of selecting interesting subjects, and the fact that he had no scruples about authenticity made his task all the easier. As a writer, he was not a great master of style. The grand eloquence of Milton was altogether beyond his reach. He could never have rivalled the harmonies of Browne; nor could he have written with the keen wit of Earle. But for all that Howell's style has very considerable, and indeed, having regard to the purposes he had in view, very great merits. He can be familiar and easy, rapid and clear in narrative, humorous or pathetic, or terse and pointed. His brief letter to his cousin Rowland Gwin shows no small power to turn a phrase : " Cousin, I was lately sorry, and I was lately glad, that I heard you were ill, that I heard you are well." His sentences are simple in structure: in this respect, as in 86 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS many others, he is a forerunner of the Queen Anne essayists. He has shed completely those poetical elements which are alternately the highest grace and the worst fault in the prose- writings of his contemporaries. He addresses himself to the understanding, and rarely fails to make himself intelligible. There are not many devices for securing popularity with which Howell does not show himself familiar. He has been spoken of as a journalist before the time of journalists; and few of his successors have equalled him in this essential of their art. His " bill of fare " is piquantly varied. The very names of his correspondents are attractive. Even to the present day, notwithstanding the doubts cast upon their trust- worthiness, a special interest attaches to letters which purport to be addressed to Charles I., Ben Jonson, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Buckingham, Sir Kenelm Digby, Archbishop Usher and Wentworth (Lord Strafford). There is attraction too in the variety of theme. The letters range from philo- sophy and the affairs of state to the most trivial gossip of the hour. One group is devoted to the religions and another to the languages of the world. The Hanseatic league is the sub- ject of one epistle; another gives a vivid description of the assassination of Buckingham. The condition of the Jews, the Inquisition, witches, the habitation of the moon, are all within Howell's range. A large number of letters are filled with news, domestic and foreign. When more solid matter fails him, Howell enlivens his correspondent with an anecdote. To Ben Jonson he addresses a variant on Boccaccio's story of the pot of basil. He feeds the appetite for the marvellous with a tale of a white bird fluttering about the bed of the dying. From this it is obvious to how great an extent, in all but form, Howell anticipated the periodical essayists. They too were newsmongers, though the purveying of intelligence soon became a subordinate phase of their activity. They too MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 87 ranged over a field whose boundaries were set only by their own ingenuity. The proportions of the ingredients in the mixture differ. Howell is much more poHtical than the Queen Anne writers, and they give closer attention than he to the minor morals, to fashions and the like. But many of the Epistolce Ho-Eliance might be mentioned which are just in the manner of Addison or of Steele. Such is the story of Captain Bolea and the sudden whitening of his hair. Such too are the letter to Captain Thomas B., and the " rambhng medita- tions " of Book II., 50. Though some of the writers who have been mentioned were not uninfluenced by the spirit of party politics, still their atmosphere is widely different from that of the pohtical pamphlet. Compositions of that class are rarely literature; .but, were it only for the sake of the Areopagitica, they cannot be ignored. The poHtical pamphlet proper has little in common with the political essays of Bacon. These are really essays on questions not of party or of the hour, but of the welfare of states. The author is a philosopher, not a con- troversialist. The accentuation of differences during the reign of Charles I. made the philosophic attitude difficult, and powerfully furthered the development of the contro- versial spirit. Much of the talent which in quieter times would have been devoted to art was given up to party, and the masses of pamphlets which are to be found in all great libraries were the result. The bulk of them are merely the raw ] material of history. The majority even of Milton's tracts | might without great loss to Hterature be forgotten, were it not | that they are documents in the history and evidences of the I character of Milton. There are, it is true, here and there passages of a grandeur which we have learnt to quahfy by the writer's name — Miltonic; and there is at least one invaluable revelation of the inner soul of the poet. It is that well-known passage in the Apology for Smectymnuus, where he tells how \ 88 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS if he became convinced that he who would write well " ought himself to be a true poem." But what the other tracts are only here and there one, the Areopagitica, is as a whole. In form a speech, this great outpouring" of a heroic soul is in essence an essay. Magnificent as it is, it is far from faultless. No one either before or since has used the English language in prose more majestically than Milton. But in prose he is not the assured master of style that he is in verse. The periodic style which was characteristic of the age is, in his handling of it, sometimes heavy and obscure: only in a few inspired passages does he overcome the difficulties of a prose style as yet imperfectly formed. But what distinguishes the Areo- pagitica from the other prose writings of Milton is not so much that the finest passages are finer than any in them, as that the whole piece is lofty in thought. Elsewhere, we have sometimes to regret that Milton wrote as he did: in the Areopagitica he is never unworthy of himself. For two centuries and a half it has remained the classical defence of liberty of thought; and though, for the time, the victory of the cause Milton fought for seems assured, the day may again come when this dauntless champion may be needed to inspire a new battle. Tyranny may be exercised by a multitude as well as by an individual. In the latter case there is always an ultimate remedy, for the many are stronger than the one: in the former case the remedy is less easily found. To argue that democracy is founded on the principle of liberty and is therefore incom- patible with tyranny, is unconvincing. The Christian Church is founded on the conception of the immeasurable importance of the individual soul, and the individual's responsibility for it; and yet one of the hardest battles ever fought by humanity was fought to secure that soul from the tyranny of an external power, the Popedom. The battle of freedom may have to be fought again, and, if it has, the Areopagitica will become, not merely an interesting landmark of history and a glorious piece MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 89 of eloquence, but a possession of practical value and im- portance. The ' organ voice ' of Milton will not easily be drowned. While the merely political pamphlet does not concern us, there were, after Milton, two writers who were at once politicians and men of letters, and whose writings helped forward the development of the essay. These were Sir William Temple (i 628-1 699), and one less famous in literature, but far greater aHke as writer and as pohtician — George Savile, Lord Hahfax (1633-1695). In respect of literary reputation, there are few men who are so far from having their deserts as the great Trimmer. In spite of the panegyric of Macaulay, he still remains merely a name to nearly all except those who are students of history as well as of literature; and though Miss Foxcroft's scholarly edition has done some- thing for his fame, and the more recent one by Sir Walter Raleigh will doubtless do more, they are still few who know how admirably he wrote. It is merely the name of The Character of a Trimmer that is generally known. Yet this famous essay is almost as masterly in style as it is in thought. It is poHtical, but with that detachment of mind which leaves it still a treasure of literature. It is often witty, and some- times eloquent. For political wisdom it would be hard to find its equal outside Burke. The noble passage on truth has been quoted as a specimen of HaHfax's style, and none better could be selected. But he is not a writer of purple patches. All through the essay is profound in thought, as well as care- fully written. Memorable sayings are frequent and pungent ones occasional: "Monarchy is liked by the people for the bells and tinsel, the outward pomp and gilding; and there must be milk for babes, since the greatest part of mankind are and || ever will be in that list." " He that feareth God only because i| there is an Hell, must wish there were no God; and he that feareth a King only because he can punish, must wish there 90 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS were no King," has, as Mr. Herbert Paul points out, a smack of Bacon. So has this: " He [the Prince] must not only be the first mover, and the fountain from whence all the great acts of state originally flow, but he must be thought so too by his people, that they may preserve their veneration for him." As an answer to the gross and absurd attacks of partisans upon Halifax this essay is conclusive. Naturally Halifax advocates the philosophy of the mean; a trimmer, if he be honest, is a trimmer just because he is in the mean. And to Halifax the political mean is that which lies between the two " barbarous extremes" of monarchy and commonwealth, both unrestricted. This is a type of philosophy which discourages enthusiasm; but on two or three points Halifax is enthusiastic, and his warmth gives life and vigour to the essay. " Our Trimmer adoreth the goddess truth " is the beginning of his most eloquent paragraph. The conception of law inspires him with a similar fervour. Laws, he says, " are to mankind that the sun is to plants." His patriotism is more fervid still. The Trimmer, he says, " doth not worship the sun, because it is not peculiar to us; it rambleth about the world, and is less kind to us than it is to other countries. But for the earth of England, though perhaps inferior to that of many places abroad, to him there is divinity in it, and he would rather die than see a spire of English grass trampled down by a foreign trespasser." The same profound reverence for law, combined with hatred and dread of Papacy, inspires the two essays which rank next in importance, J Letter to a Dissenter and The Anatomy of an Equivalent. The former, which was written on the occasion of the Declaration of Indulgence, earnestly insists upon the danger of accepting a violation of law as a favour. In the latter, the ' equivalent ' was the proposal by Papists of *' Some mighty nobody knows what " which should make Protestantism as secure as the penal laws made it. The essay MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 91 is a masterly examination, and rejection, of the idea. The fact that Halifax was opposed to the ' equivalent ' is itself a weighty reason against it, for few men have ever been by nature more free from bigotry. His deep dislike and distrust of Romanism had its root in statesmanship, not in sectarianism. These tracts are the greatest of Halifax's writings, but the most charming is The Lady's New Tear's Gift, or. Advice to a Daughter. It is also that in which he approaches nearest in spirit to the essayists of the eighteenth century. While there are here and there passages of wit and sarcasm, it is natural that in a composition addressed to his own daughter the salient characteristics should be goodness of heart and tender- ness of feeling. It is warm with the love of a most affectionate father, and luminous with the wisdom of an exceptionally wise one. This delightful letter was the most popular of all the compositions of Hahfax. Though the age of the Restora- tion is not credited with a large share of the domestic virtues, these virtues are never obsolete, and Halifax spoke to the heart of the best of his countrymen. The merit of Temple was both less than and different in kind from that ofTialifax. He too was master of a fine style, but he was far more diffuse than Halifax, and incapable of reaching the lofty height to which the latter occasionally soared. There was a world of difference between the intellects of the two men. Halifax was essentially a philosopher, Temple was helpless in the handling of abstract ideas. The Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government is the work of a man who has neither the scholarship nor the speculative power necessary for the treatment of the subject. The de- ficiencies of the essay Of Ancient and Modern Learning have been sufficiently exposed by Macaulay. Perhaps they have been exaggerated; but when he points out that among the great English writers whom Temple fails to mention are 92 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, it is evident that there can be no effective defence. The Temple of literature is seen, however, not in such ambitious compositions as these, but in the essays Of Gardening and Of Health and Long Life — easy and gossipy compositions, very discursive and some- what diffuse, but always pleasant. The former contains a famous commendation of the climate of England, which Temple quotes as having been tittered by the king: " He thought that was the best climate where he could be abroad in the air with pleasure, or at least without trouble and in- convenience, the most days of the year and the most hours of the day." The latter reveals the secret why, though Temple is inferior to Halifax as a writer, and unworthy to be even named with him as a thinker, he nevertheless comes closer than Halifax to the central citadel of the essay. " I have chosen those subjects of these essays," he says, " wherein I take human life to be most concerned, and which are of most common use and most necessary knowledge; and wherein, though I may not be able to inform men more than they know, yet I may perhaps give them the occasion to consider more than they do." The principle of selection is just that which guided Steele. Like Steele, Temple is confidential; he unfolds the stores of his memory and mingles them with the incidents of his daily life. The reminiscences of the re- tired statesman are interspersed among the trivial reflections and observations of the country gentleman. Even Temple's failings and limitations are rather helpful than hurtful. He is vain, but his vanity is harmless and good-natured, and it banishes all tendency to reserve. He shows a pleasant equability of mind which, to the essayist, is perhaps a more valuable gift than the force of a Swift. His own story of his three wishes throws a flood of light upon him. They were health, and peace, and fair weather; " which," he justly adds, " though out of the way among young men, yet perhaps MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 93 might pass well enough among old." They are precisely the wishes that the Ulysses of Plato's myth of Er would have framed. This combination of innate love of the quiet life with experience of the great world of courts and council- rooms constitutes the pecuHar charm of Temple. As the volume of miscellaneous essays swelled during the seventeenth century from the small beginnings of the EHzabethan period, so did the stream of critical essays. But few will dispute the justice of Professor Saintsbury's judgment, that between Jonson's Timber and Dryden's Essay there is nothing substantive save Davenant's letter and Hobbes's reply. Within the life of Dryden, however, there was one other critical writer who deserves more attention than he has hitherto received. This was Robert Wolseley, whose preface to Rochester's Valentinian (1685) is a strikingly able and well-written argument to prove that the question of morality is irrelevant to criticism. Jonson's Timber has been dealt with elsewhere, and Davenant and Hobbes and Wolseley are of Httle note in the history of the development of the essay. It is otherwise with Dryden; for he is not only the sole critic, down to his own time, who is fit to be compared with Sidney and Jonson, but he is the man who took perhaps the greatest single step towards the modernisation of English prose style. In the case of Dryden (1631-1700) prose ran along with verse through the greater part of his literary hfe. From the Epistle Dedicatory of the Rival Ladies (1664) to the Preface to the Fables (1700) in discourses, apologies, defences, prefaces, dedications and postscripts, Dryden was continually enunciat- ing and buttressing the critical principles which he beheved to underUe his own work and the work of other poets. The mass of his prose work is in the aggregate considerable, and its importance is great. Among the earHest of his essays was Of Dramatic Poesy (1668), which is still the best known, and 94 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS contains the most elaborate exposition of his critical prin- ciples, though it is surpassed in interest by the admirable Preface to the Fables. The dialogue Of Dramatic Poesy was occasioned by the preface to Sir Robert Howard's Four new Plays, in which Howard undertook to answer the defence of rhyme in the Epistle Dedicatory of the Rival Ladies ; but, though it is thus a document in a controversy, its thorough urbanity and dispassionate reasoning give it the value of a substantive work. Howard himself appears as one of the interlocutors ; but he did not enjoy the position and answered in the preface to The Duke of Lerma in a tone which drew from Dryden a Defence of the essay much sharper and more con- troversial than the dialogue. Naturally, therefore, it is of far less value. It shows fine gifts of keen satire and effective retort, but for critical principles we must turn to the essay itself. That is far from confining itself to the question of rhyme. The general principles of dramatic construction, the unities, the art of linking scene to scene, the differences be- tween ancients and moderns, English and French, are all discussed with admirable balance of judgment as well as in- dependence. In respect of the last quality it is difficult for a modern reader to do Dryden full justice. Like all his con- temporaries, he is hampered by the ' rules,' and is fully him- self only when he flings them aside, or diverges into some by-path where there are no rules to obstruct him. Yet even within the limits of the most authoritative rules there is enough independence to justify Professor Ker's description of him as " sceptical, tentative, disengaged, where most of his contemporaries, and most of his successors for a hundred years, are pledged to certain dogmas and principles." He accepts the unities, it is true, but it is with reservations and on reasoned principles; and he will not admit the superiority either of the ancients or of the French. He puts into the mouth of Eugenius (Sackville) some excellent remarks in MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 95 praise of the powerful scenes of passion in Shakespeare and Fletcher, and in his own person, as Neander, he pronounces a striking eulogy on the intermingling of tragedy with comedy. He " cannot but conclude, to the honour of our nation, that we have invented, increased, and perfected a more pleasant way of writing for the stage, than was ever known to the ancients or moderns of any nation, which is tragi-comedy." A similar independence of judgment is shown in the excellent comparison, in the Preface to the Fables, between Chaucer and Ovid. " The vulgar judges, which are nine parts in ten of all nations, who call conceits and jingles wit, who see Ovid full of them, and Chaucer altogether without them, will think me little less than mad for preferring the Englishman to the Roman. Yet, with their leave, I must presume to say, that the things they admire are only glittering trifles, and so far from being witty, that in a serious poem they are nauseous, because they are unnatural." Dryden's understanding was one of the most sound and masculine that have ever been applied to criticism, and where he trusts it he writes admirably. No one ever with a firmer hand brushed aside the unessential. This is con- spicuously seen in his treatment of the cliarge of plagiarism in the Preface to An Evenings Love (1671). He adduces excellent examples, of Virgil, Shakespeare, etc., and then by a few well-judged remarks reduces the charge to precisely its proper dimensions. " The employment of the poet is like that of a curious gunsmith, or watchmaker: the iron or silver is not his own; but they are the least part of that which gives the value; the price lies wholly in the workmanship." But sometimes Dryden's judgment was warped, as it probably was by patriotism when he pronounced Chaucer's Knighfs Tale " perhaps not much inferior to the Ilias, or the /Eneis.^^ And sometimes he did not trust his judgment. We must not look in Dryden for unwavering consistency. From time to 96 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS time he falls back on the rules which he has almost made up his mind to disregard, and then he seems to unsay his own wisest maxims. In the Preface to Troilus and Cressida {i(>J<)) (which he beheves to be probably one of Shakespeare's " first endeavours on the stage ")he is much fettered by this obsession. Speaking of the plots of Shakespeare and Fletcher he says that " we ought to follow them so far only as they have copied the excellencies of those who invented and brought to perfection Dramatic Poetry; those things only excepted, which religion, custom of countries, idioms of languages, etc., have altered in the superstructures, but not in the foundation of the design." From this it would seem that the whole structure of the drama is fixed and unalterable. But to in- terpret Dryden so is to take from him all meaning, and it is preferable to say that for the moment he yielded to the weight of authority and was inconsistent with himself. It is, however, in the Preface to the Fables that we get not only Dryden's most vivid and energetic criticism, but a unique revelation of his person. It is written with extra- ordinary spirit and brightness, and is still one of the best pieces of criticism in English. Here Dryden casts aside all the impedimenta of rules, writes exactly as he feels, and con- quers the reader by the force of his strong intelligence. He makes no attempt at system. " The nature of a preface is rambling, never wholly out of the way, nor in it. This I have learned from the practice of honest Montaigne." He is confidential. This Preface contains at the close the frank yet dignified plea of guilty to many of the charges brought by Jeremy Collier, and an expression of contrition. It is per- sonal also in other and hghter ways. He speaks to the reader as an old man, and teUs him his own conception of the state of his faculties : " I think myself as vigorous as ever in the faculties of my soul, excepting only my memory, which is not impaired to any great degree; and if I lose not more of it, I MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYISTS 97 have no great reason to complain. What judgment I had, increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only diffi- culty is to choose or to reject, to run them into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose: I have so long studied and practised both, that they are grown into a habit, and become familiar to me." There is much besides in Dryden that sweeps the reader along with the sense of power, but nowhere else, probably, does he feel so mvxch love of the writer. It is clear that the author of the passages quoted had studied " the other harmony of prose " to some purpose, and the impression these extracts give is greatly strengthened by a reading in full of the essays from which they come. The thought Dryden gave to the principles of composition bore good fruit in his own case. He is the first master of a prose which is adapted to the everyday needs of expression, and yet has dignity enough to rise to any point short of the topmost peaks of eloquence. Certainly the instrument Dryden forged is capable of producing no effect equal to that produced by Milton and Sir Thomas Browne in their finest passages. But then, Milton when uninspired is often clumsy in his prose, and Sir Thomas Browne's neologisms and ' aureate terms ' are ill-fitted for ordinary ends. The great merit of Dryden is that his style would have suited Solomon when he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall. No style written before is comparable to it in range. Its characteristics are lucidity and easy grace. It flowB on apparently without effort and with that perfect art which conceals art. But it is art, not chance. Evidently Dryden deliberately steered clear of the Scylla and Charybdis on one or other of which nearly all his predecessors were apt to strike. The eloquent passages of Milton's prose he would have judged to be adapted rather to the harmony of verse; and he has placed on record, in precise G 98 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS terms, his judgment of those conceits which were the bane of literature, both in verse and in prose, in the period im- mediately before his own day. He is speaking of verse, but the principle applies equally to prose: "As for the turn of words, in which Ovid particularly excels all poets, they are sometimes a fault, and sometimes a beauty, as they are used properly or improperly; but in strong passions always to be shunned, because passions are serious, and will admit no playing." Now character-writing rested almost whoUy on this turn of words; and when he adopted this view about " the turn of words " Dryden rejected the style which it en- couraged. He saw two deviations from what he would have called nature. It was a deviation to conceal meaning under verbal quibbles and by excessive condensation; it was equally a deviation to conceal it in the maze of long involved sentences. The first business of prose was to convey a plain meaning unmistakably; and this was best done by a style based upon that of conversation, yet differing from it as the permanent will differ from the temporary and the studied from the spontaneous. Such seem to be the principles that underlie the prose style of Dryden. THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 99 CHAPTER V THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS In the fulness of time the periodical essay was born of the brain of Richard Steele (1672-1729). Of course there had been anticipations. Attention has already been drawn to certain analogies between Cowley's essays and the E^istola Ho-Eliance on the one hand, and The Tatler and The Spec- tator on the other; but notwithstanding these, this most char- acteristic of the literary forms of the Queen Anne period was, in quite an exceptional measure, the creation of one mind. Daniel Defoe (1661 ?-i73i) has sometimes been described as the""prfedecessor of Steele, and no doubt Steele did take hints from Defoe, The association of the two men at this point is interesting. Though both were good writers, neither of them can be ranked with the greatest; but in one respect — power of origination — they are hardly equalled in their own period, or surpassed in the whole history of English literature. To Defoe, as a pioneer in journalism as well as in the novel, the palm in this respect must be awarded; but an injustice has sometimes been done to Steele by exaggerating Defoe's in- fluence on the periodical essay. It is perfectly true that the germ of that literary form is to be found in Defoe's Review ; but the Review contains little more than the germ. If the essayist may be distinguished from the journalist and the political pamphleteer, Defoe was, as essayist, more the disciple than the master of Steele. As essayist, his fame must rest principally on the two volumes of miscellaneous writings disinterred from forgotten journals by his biographer. 100 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS William Lee; and the contents of these volumes range from the year 1716 to 1729, after both The Tatler and The Spectator had run their course. Of all the literary men of the eighteenth century Defoe was perhaps the most extraordinary. To call his life a romance would be to misuse the word, for at every point the great realist touched the hardest reality. But, if not romantic, his life was certainly strange and unusual in the extreme, and in his case even the hardest reality could, on occasion, take a tinge of romance. He stood in the pillory, not to be pelted with rotten eggs and dead cats, but guarded by an admiring crowd and crowned with flowers. Such was the punishment and the reward for The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, when at last its real meaning came home to churchmen and to dissenters alike. Defoe's own words, in the preface to the eighth volume of the Review, best describe his life: — " I have gone through a life of wonders, and am the subject of a vast variety of providences; I have been fed more by miracle than Elija, when the ravens were his purveyors; I have some time ago summ'd up the scenes of my life in this distich: No man has tasted differing fortunes more. And thirteen times I have been rich and poor. In the school of affliction I have learnt more philosophy than at the academy, and more divinity than from the pulpit: In prison I had learnt to know that liberty does not consist in open doors, and the free egress and regress of locomotion. I have seen the rough side of the world as well as the smooth, and have in less than half a year tasted the difference between the closet of a king and the dungeon of Newgate." It is, fortunately, not necessary here to enter upon the complicated story of Defoe's life. Few of the tasks of the biographer are harder. There is room for the widest differ- ences of opinion, from Minto's (which, however, is given with THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS loi important qualifications), that " he was a great, a truly great liar, perhaps the greatest liar that ever lived," to that of his best biographer, Lee, who pronounces him to have been one of "the " most truly consistent of English authors." We need deal with Defoe's life only as it illustrates his writings, and in particular those writings which may be classed as essays. Defoe was too strenuous a man of affairs to have the tem- peraftlent of the essayist. Of his astonishingly voluminous miscellaneous writings by far the greater part belongs to the class of political pamphlets, or is merely ephemeral journalism. And yet there remains a residuum of the essay character which most men would have needed a lifetime to write. Take for example the Review. Though the great bulk of it is journalistic, or is raw material for the historian, there still remains an appreciable part which belongs to the domain of letters. There are few things in literature more astonishing than Defoe's Review of the Affairs of France. Though the belief that Defoe was, when he began it, a prisoner in New- gate has recently been shown to be mistaken, its successful prosecution for more than nine years was an unparalleled literary feat. There are over 5000 pages of the Review, all written by the hand of Defoe; and yet, according to Lee, he found time during those same years to write " no less than eighty other distinct works, containing 4727 pages." The Reviezv itself is little known, because it is almost inaccessible : there is said to be only one complete copy in existence. But the general plan has been repeatedly explained. At first the Review appeared weekly, then twice, and later still thrice a week. Its principal purpose was to bring before the English people the thoughts of Defoe on international politics and then on commerce. The principles which ought to guide a nation's foreign policy do not change so rapidly; and for the exposition of these the man who had I02 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS iDeen the confidential servant of King William was well equipped. There is no reason to doubt that Defoe was honest in intention and patriotic in spirit. That he frequently startled and shocked his readers by highly-coloured descrip- tions of the power and greatness of France is no evidence to the contrary; for he argued with force that the people needed to be startled, and that the true patriot was he who roused them from their excessive confidence. With all this portion of the Review, however, we have little to do. It is a vast collection of articles which are essays in the same sense as the leaders of a modern newspaper are essays. The point at which the Review touches the periodical essay proper is in the section called the Mercure Scandale ; or Advice from the Scandalous Club ; which is further described as being " a weekly history of Nonsense, Impertinence, Vice, and Debauchery," Such it was at the beginning; but before the Review was a year old this section became a monthly supplement. Later still it was separated from the main portion and distinguished by the title of The Little Review. Thus, in the Review, the element of news ousts gossip and moral criticism; while The Tatler followed a line of develop- ment precisely contrary. The difference is highly significant. On the whole the Scandalous Club is of no great literary value. Here and there we come upon vigorous essays on the vices and follies of society, on the minor morals, and sometimes on the great virtues and vices. But many of the papers have lost their flavour, the wit is often forced, and there is a want of the human touches which give charm to The Taller and The Spectator. Great as were his gifts, Defoe had not that light- ness of touch which distinguished Steele and Addison, and is almost essential to this type of essay. The Review as it then existed was brought to an end in 171 2 by the imposition of that stamp tax which ruined one half of Grub Street; but immediately a new series on a reduced scale THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 103 was started, and this was carried on till June of the following year. For more than a hundred years it was believed that Defoe's poHtical career ended in 171 5, but in 1864 his bio- grapher Lee came upon evidence that this belief was mistaken. Following up the clue he found that from 1716 to 1729 Defoe had been an active contributor to various journals; and the result of his researches was the publication of two volumes of miscellaneous writings, including " more than three hundred and fifty Essays and Letters, moral and religious — imaginative, — humorous, — amatory, — ironical, and miscellaneous." The two papers to which Defoe contributed most copiously were Mist's Journal and Applebee's Journal. His connexion with the former throws a curious light upon his enigmatical char- acter; for Mist was a Jacobite, and among the Jacobite associates of the Journal were men like Atterbury and Boling- broke. While he was a fellow-contributor with these men Defoe was secretly in the pay of the Government, and was doing his best to thwart the ends which the Journal was meant to serve. Such were the crooked courses which he conceived himself to be at liberty to take for a good end. We are however concerned with the Hterary aspects of these essays, rather than with the moral question which arises from their appearance where the discoverer found them ; and their special point of interest is the evidence they afford that if Defoe gave a hint to Steele he also took hints from him. Many of the essays in Mist and Applebee are of types rendered familiar by The Tatler and The Spectator, but hardly to be found in English before the appearance of these periodicals. Thus, the excellent character of Tom Oaken Plant, from Mist's Journal, is close akin to the character sketches of The Spectator. So too the caution of Lionel Lye-alone against love and the admirable essay on quacks are exactly in the spirit of The Spectator. Applebee's Journal contains a paper most skilfully worked out from the conception of the secrets 104 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS of the human heart revealed as the working of bees is revealed by a glass hive. The mere description of the plan again betrays the kinship. But while there is much in these periodicals that is suggestive of and was probably suggested by The Spectator, there is more still that is pure Defoe. The extraordinary variety of subject is characteristic {Applebee, for example, contains an essay on cryptography). The articles on party government and on the South Sea Company in Applebee^s Journal would have been out of place in the periodicals conducted by Addison and Steele, and so would the powerful ironical essay on the clemency of the Czar in Mist's Journal. Equally alien would have been those articles in Applebee in August and September, 1720, which may be described as a first sketch of the Religious Courtship, or that character-sketch in the same journal out of which sprang Moll Flanders. There is much ephemeral stuff in these essays, for no man could maintain uniform excellence along with such speed and volume of production as Defoe's. He wrote for the day, and great part of what he wrote is no longer worth preserving. But while this must be admitted, it is also true that both in the Review and in Lee's collection there is not a little good and some admirable work. If Defoe's essays were accessible, and if the gold were separated from the dross, he would take I a high place among a class of writers with whom until recent I years he has hardly been associated at all. His masterpiece is the grand essay on 7he Instability of Human Greatness, / which was suggested by the funeral of the Duke of Marlborough. That there was something in the subject which drew out the best that Defoe had to give is indicated by the grave eloquence of the reflections on death which appeared in the same journal {Applebee) about three years later. Nothing greater than the former, probably nothing so forcible, is to be found in Steele or Addison. Only Shakespeare and Oliver Wendell Holmes THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 105 have pointed the same moral with equal skill. Defoe borrows from the former; the latter had never seen Defoe's essay, but the conclusion of his description of the race of life is exactly in its spirit: "Race over. All that are on the ' course are coming in at a walk; no more running. Who is ahead? Ahead? What! and the winning-post a slab of white or grey stone standing out from that turf where there | is no more jockeying or straining for victory! " Of course Defoe could not fail to observe the kinship between his Review and The Tatler, and he expressed his pleasure at seeing the society honoured " by the succession of the Vener- able Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq." But the difference between the two periodicals was evident from the first, and grew conspicuous as time passed. It was due to a difference of design, accentuated by a contrast in character between the two writers. They were unlike in their failings as well as in - : * >> their merits. In the case of Steele, both merits and defects bore the stamp of his country and blood. That he was typically Irish was noticed by contemporaries. Dennis declared that Steele had testimony to the genuineness of his Irish pedigree more authentic than any human testimony; " for God has marked him more abundantly than he did Cain, and stamped his native country on his face, his understanding, his writings, his actions, his passions, and, above all, his vanity." Johnson believed that Steele " practised the lighter vices." Tn more recent times Macaulay has insisted upon the defects, and Thackeray, without disguising these, has set the virtues in an engaging light to all readers of Esmond and The English Humourists. Perhaps both sides of the truth are by none so well presented as by Theophilus Gibber, who declares Steele to have been " the most agreeable, and if we may be allowed the expression, the most innocent rake that ever trod the rounds of indulgence." Steele knew liis own failings, though he was powerless to cure them; and io6 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS he was doubtless consciously painting his own portrait in his picture of the rake in No. 27 of 'The Tatler. The depth of comprehension and the heartfelt sympathy betray personal experience. " With all the good intentions in the world," Steele declares, " this creature sins on against Heaven, himself, his friends, and his country, who all call for a better use of his talents. There is not a being under the sun so miserable as this : he goes on in a pursuit he himself disapproves, and has no enjoyment but what is followed by remorse; no relief from remorse but the repetition of his crime." This is the char- acter, seen from within, which Swift, after his quarrel with Steele, described with customary bitterness from without: " He has committed more absurdities, in economy, friendship, love, duty, good manners, politicks, religion, and writing, than ever fell to one man's share." Steele had made various literary ventures before he struck upon the form which has given him an assured position in English literature. The Christian Hero, in which he de- lineated the character he would fain have been, but could not emulate, was followed by several plays; and these were good enough to induce Lamb to contrast the pleasure of ex- pecting Steele or Farquhar with the pain of finding — Adam Smith. Steele's appointment as gazetteer in 1707 gave him employment which may by courtesy be called literary. But this task by no means demanded all his energies, and Defoe's Review supplied the hint so happily worked out in The Tatler, of which the first number appeared on April 12, 1709. Steele himself is the best expositor of his own design. In the dedication of the first volume to Mr. Maynwaring he says: " The general purpose of this paper is to expose the false arts of life, to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and affecta- tion, and to recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and our behaviour." This is supplemented by hints in the first number of The Tatler, in which the main THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 107 divisions of the work are set forth in connection with various coffee-houses. Hence it appears that the paper is to contain accounts of gallantry, pleasure and entertainment; poetry; learning; foreign and domestic news. There is a fifth and most comprehensive division — " what else I have to offer on any other subject," The original motto, " quicquid agunt homines . . . nostri est farrago libelh," is, in short, a per- fect description of the subject-matter of The Tatler. The name, Isaac Bickerstaff, was, as is well known, borrowed from Swift. Its familiarity helped to gain an audience for the new paper; and the need of a pseudonym of some sort is explained by Steele in a frank and manly passage of the con- cluding number. " The general purpose of the whole," he says, " has been to recommend truth, innocence, honour, and virtue, as the chief ornaments of life; but I considered, that severity of manners was absolutely necessary to him who would censure others, and for that reason, and that only, chose to talk in a mask. I shall not carry my humility so far as to call myself a vicious man, but at the same time must confess, my life is at best but pardonable. And, with no greater character than this, a man would make but an indifferent progress in attacking prevailing and fashionable vices, which Mr. Bickerstaff has done with a freedom of spirit, that would have lost both its beauty and efficacy, had it been pretended to by Mr. Steele." The Tatler appeared three times a week, and as at the begin- ning it was written practically by Steele alone, the strain of maintaining it was very great. Evidence of a certain dearth of matter appears at an early stage. Thus, No. 6 is padded with the first instalment of a " journal of the Iliad," and No. 35 with a long quotation from Hamlet's advice to the players; while No. 7 contains an appeal to any gentleman or lady to send " the grief or joy of their soul " to Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. The dearth seems to have been due partly to the novelty of io8 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS the undertaking, for there is less evidence of it in the later volumes. Nevertheless, Steele must have welcomed the occasional assistance he received, and especially the accession of Addison, who early discovered that Bickerstaff was Steele, and who wrote occasionally from the eighteenth number onwards, though it was not till some eighty or ninety papers had appeared that his contributions became frequent. At no time during the continuance of The Taller did Addison dethrone Steele from the leading position. Not only the design, but the majority of the contributions, were Steele's. It is impossible to ascertain with complete certainty and precision what he wrote, but between April 12, 1709, when The Tatler was begun, and January 2, 171 1, when it came to an end, he appears to , have contributed about one hundred and seventy papers. It I was a scale of production modest indeed in comparison with I Defoe's, but nevertheless remarkable enough. Gay, in the pamphlet entitled The Present State of Wit, which has been printed among the works of Swift, declared that " never man threw up his pen under stronger tempta- I tions to have employed it longer," and added some sentences 1 of eulogy as sound as anything that has ever been written I upon the subject : — " It would have been a jest some time since, for a man to have asserted that anything witty could be said in praise of a married state; or that devotion or virtue were any way necessary to the character of a fine gentleman. Bicker- staff ventured to tell the town, that they were a parcel of fops, fools, and vain coquettes; but in such a manner, as even pleased them, and made them more than half inclined to believe that he spoke the truth. " Instead of complying with the false sentiments or vicious tastes of the age, either in morahty, criticism, or good breed- ing, he has boldly assured them, that they were altogether in the wrong, and commanded them, with an authority which THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 109 perfectly well became him, to surrender themselves to his arguments for virtue and good sense. " It is incredible to conceive the effect his writings have had on the town; how many thousand follies they have either quite banished, or given a very great check to; how much countenance they have added to virtue and religion; how many people they have rendered happy, by showing them it was their own fault if they were not so; and, lastly, how entirely they have convinced our fops and young fellows of the value and advantages of learning." The appearance of The Spectator revealed the reason why The Tatler had been brought to an end. Barely two months intervened between the one paper and the other, the first issue of The Spectator appearing on March i, 171 1. The town, which had considered the production of three Tailers weekly something of a feat, was surprised to find that the new paper was to appear daily. This frequency was rendered possible only by the close union and perfect understanding between Steele and Addison. In The Tatler Addison had been an occasional, and latterly a frequent, contributor; in The Spectator they were coadjutors from the start. The plan was the outcome of deliberations held between them, but Drake, from the great deference always paid by Steele to Addison, conjectures that the scheme of the new paper was laid by the latter. Thegroundfor this conjecture seems unsafe. No doubt Steele would readily have yielded to any suggestions made by his friend; but on the other hand the evidence we possess points to the conclusion that Steele's was the more richly originative mind of the two. Without Addison he framed the plan of The Tatler ; without Addison he sketched the outline of the character of Sir Roger de Coverley — a fact too fre- quently forgotten. It seems therefore quite as probable that Steele suggested the idea of the Spectator and his Club, as that Addison did so. Possibly the idea was borrowed from ,rf-"' no THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS the machinery of The Athenian Gazette, which had run from 1690 to 1696. By whomsoever originated, it is certain that the human figure of the Spectator (which was drawn by Addison), surrounded by his club of representatives of various grades and classes of society, was an immense improvement on The Tatler's crude machinery of the coffee-houses, and its shadowy figure of Bickerstaff . Herein consists the superiority of The Spectator, so far as it is real. Take away Sir Roger, Sir Andrew, Will Honeycomb and the Spectator himself, and all must feel that the charm would be gone. The Tatler is a collection of disconnected essays, but these figures make of The Spectator a sort of unity, though a very imperfect one. It has often been pointed out that the creators of Sir Roger were almost novelists; and a moment's consideration shows that the gap between the De Coverley papers, when they are once gathered together, and the Vicar of Wakefield, is not great. But, though Sir Roger is the principal figure, the others are helpful as well, and together they illustrate and enforce the truth of Pope's line, " the proper study of man- kind is man." It was largely the presence of these human figures that caused The Spectator to be, by contemporaries as well as in later days, more highly esteemed than its pre- decessor. Its popularity was still great when, on December 6, 1712, it was temporarily suspended. After its resuscitation in June 1714 it appeared only three times a week; and even on this reduced scale it did not survive beyond the close of the year. The eighth volume of The Spectator is made up of papers contributed after this resuscitation; and the title was usurped for a ninth volume with which Steele and Addison had nothing to do. To The Spectator the contributions of Addison were slightly more numerous than those of Steele, and they are thought to be of much higher merit. But probably opinion has been influenced in some degree by Steele's depreciation of himself THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS iii in comparison with the friend whom he delighted to honour. Every one knows how, referring to the assistance he got from Addison in The Tatler, he spoke of himself as faring like a distressed prince who calls in to his aid a powerful neighbour; and too many have accepted this as an accurate account of the relative positions of the two men. No doubt Addison is • on the whole superior. He is a far more finished writer, more correct, more scholarly, more subtly humorous. Steel's style is like his life, as Thackeray said, " full of faults and careless blunders; and redeemed, like that, by his sweet and com- passionate nature." It was Thackeray too who pointed out the great service done by Steele in his reverence for the pieties of the home, his respect for women and his love of children. Here he is certainly a better morahst than Addison. The latter^ it is true, is incapable of the grossness which disfigures his predecessors the Restoration writers, and his contem- | porary Swift; but though not gross he is contemptuous. The' famous compHment which Steele paid to Lady Elizabeth Hastings under the unhappily-chosen name of Aspasia — " to love her was a liberal education " — could never have been paid by Addison. There is such a thing as tone in writing, as well as style, and Steele at his best is as much superior to Addison in the former quahty as he is inferior in the latter. Apart from their other moral qualities, there is in Steele's papers an open frankness which makes them extremely attractive. Hardly any form of literature is more fascinating than autobiography, when it is sincere; and, without pro- fessing to be so, Steele is habitually autobiographical. He is doubtless all the more sincere because frequently his self- revelation is unconscious. He does not often tell facts of his own life, but he constantly reveals the feelings of his heart; indeed his fault is not reticence but rather the opposite. It is startling to find him fiUing a gap in The Tatler wdth letters : which he had written to his own wife: but his literary ex- | 112 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS pedients were as ready, as various and as free from restraint as the shifts of his life. Just as he dressed up the bailiffs in livery to wait on his distinguished friends, so he was ready to press any scrap of writing into service in place of the paper which was unwritten because of the revel of the night before. Just as we cannot approve of the shifts of his life, so we may shrink from some of his literary expedients; but we must bear in mind that life and literary works are all of a piece, that virtues and vices, blemishes and beauties, are so inextri- cably bound together that Richard Steele's writings would have been impossible had Richard Steele himself been either a better man or a worse one. In the case of no other English writer, probably, does the written word more faith- fully depict the writer. Joseph Addison (1672-1719), whom Steele so readily and gladly welcomed as an associate in his enterprise, has carried away more than his share of the renown of the periodical essay. That he was, both as man and as writer, far less faulty than Steele is clear; but for more than a century after the death of both men few voices were raised to question whether it was equally clear that he had higher merits. There was much in the character as well as in the writings of Addison that appealed to the English sense of respectability. Everybody knew the story of his summoning his stepson to " see how a Christian could die " ; comparatively few had read Walpole's malicious comment, that " unluckily he died of brandy." He was universally regarded as an upright, clean-living, humane and pious man. He was more; he was gifted with great personal attractiveness. On the occasion of his re-election as M.P. for Malmesbury in 1710, Swift avowed his belief that if Addison " had a mind to be chosen king, he would hardly be refused " ; and Pope declared that he " had something more charming in his conversation than I ever knew in any other man." Power to inspire the deepest affection is testified by THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 113 the fine passage in Tickell's lines to the Earl of Warwick beginning, " Can I forget the dismal night, that gave My soul's best part for ever to the grave! " And yet there was another side. Pope's character of Atticus would be far less effective than it is were there no bed- rock of truth beneath it. Johnson, in his judgment on the | memorable friendship of the two great essayists, awards the palm to Steele; and if his story of the execution ordered by Addison to recover his -jfioo from Steele be true, it is certain that no such blow would ever have been struck by Steele against a friend,^ The truth is that Addison, the juster man of the two, was the less generous. While he was safe from Steele's lapses, he could never soar to the heights his friend occasionally reached. In Addison the head is dominant, in Steele the heart; and hence the former is far more typical of liis time than the latter. No one lived more eagerly in the present than Steele, no one was more fully absorbed in life as he found it and satisfied with art as the Augustans were making it; and yet, more than any contemporary, he reached back towards a higher art in the past, and on towards the romanticists of the future. This is why justice has tardily been done to Steele. This is why the question has come to be asked whether Addison was so unmistakably greater than Steele; and the answer has been unhesitatingly given that, at any rate, he was not greater in the degree in which both he himself and Steele believed him to be so. This is why Landor ^ The truth of the story has been doubted; but Johnson told Malone that he had it from Savage, who lived in intimacy with Steele, and who mentioned that Steele told him the story with tears in his eyes. John- son said to Boswell: " Sir, it is generally known, it is known to all who are acquainted with the literary history of that period. It is as well known as that he wrote Cato." H 114 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS praised Steele so highly as a critic, and Thackeray, though with hesitation and doubt, qualified the judgment of Macaulay. In the case of Addison the question of character is strictly relevant to a judgment on his literary work. Few English authors more accurately and exactly reveal themselves in their writings; and Addison has been so long accepted as the safest model for those who wish to learn how to write English prose, that this might seem to be almost the highest praise it is possible to bestow. But as in the man so in the writer, examination reveals not so much defects as limits, and compels qualification. The safest model is that which most surely teaches how to avoid error, not necessarily that which shows the highest beauties. Johnson's famous injunction to the student of style to " give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison," is too often remembered without John- son's qualification. It is addressed by him to " whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious." So quahfied, the advice is sound; but it leaves possible another judgment, which in fact Johnson has pronounced also. A style of which this may be said may yet be destitute of the highest beauties. And Addison's is destitute of the highest beauties. It is a far safer model than Johnson's; but Addison never wrote nor could have written anything equal to the letter to Chester- field. It is incomparably safer than Carlyle's; but there are passages in Carlyle as immeasurably beyond Addison's highest flight as the eagle's flight is beyond the sparrow's. The cause is obvious. The greatest style is the expression of the highest energy, intellectual and moral. This is the reason why our greatest poets, Shakespeare and Milton, are likewise, at their best, among our greatest prose-writers; and it is also the reason why Addison, who had not the energy to be more than a third-rate poet, might be a safe model for the learner, but could never rise to the highest rank. The separation of THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 115 form from substance leads to error, unless we constantly remind ourselves that this separation is only provisional, an analysis for our temporary convenience of things which are in fact inseparable. It is the forgetting this that has set Addison on a pedestal too lofty for him, and has led to the disappoint- ment of multitudes who have learnt, with astonishment, how unsubstantial is that to which their guides have advised them to give their days and nights. Here it is that Matthew Arnold finds in Addison " the note of provinciality." Addison's prose, says Arnold, " is Attic prose; " and he contrasts it, to its advantage, with the " Asiatic " prose of Burke, whom he thinks to be our greatest English prose-writer. But then, " it is comparatively a small matter to express oneself well, if one will be content with not expressing much, with expressing only trite ideas; the problem is to express new and profound ideas in a perfectly sound and classical style." It is here that Addison fails. His ideas are trite; at least they are not " the best ideas attainable in or about his time." If this judgment be sound, it is clear that Addison cannot stand high in the roll of fame. And yet, on the other hand, it should be recognised that the service he did to English litera- ture was great. There is a sense in which he may fairly be said to have perfected EngHsh prose style. He represents, in this matter, " our indispensable eighteenth century." ' How great was the need of him may be seenlfwe Took back into the preceding century, and observe a man so incomparably superior to Addison as Milton floundering, except in his moments of inspiration, in the tangle of a prose which hardly knows its own aim; or one so richly gifted as Sir Thomas Browne seriously injuring the literary taste of the nation by the freaks of his diction; or Jeremy Taylor, carried away by the Asiatic taste which is so irreconcilable with the Attic. It was not Addison alone who taught the lesson of neatness, lucidity and precision. Much had been done by Dryden,. ii6 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS much was done by Steele, much too by Defoe and Swift. But i no one did more than Addison. He and the Queen Anne , essayists have been a permanent force on the side of sanity .C and restraint of thought and clearness of expression. The form which Steele had created, or at least developed, was singularly well adapted to Addison. It brought out all that was best in him, and tended to conceal his deficiencies; and so it has helped to keep him in a place somewhat loftier than his merits entitle him to. Addison was a moralist; and The latter and The Spectator aimed at being moral forces. But Addison was, as we have seen, something lower than the greatest; and they lent themselves more readily to the minor morals than to the major. The want of force was not per- ceptible in a writer satirising good-naturedly the vanity of women or the follies of the town. On the contrary, it may have been an advantage — for the time at least. To have ■devoted great strength to such ends would have been like breaking a butterfly on the wheel. At a later date we shall see Johnson hampered in such work by that very force which Addison had not. It is this adaptation of the instrument to the performer which makes Addison on the whole the best of his class. Addison's principal literary gifts were a delicate though not highly original taste, a keen sense of humour, and an insight into character. They are all united in what is certainly his greatest achievement — the character of Sir Roger de Coverley ; for though Sir Roger was first sketched and was afterwards occasionally touched by Steele, he is in the main Addison's creation. And he is unquestionably one of the treasures of our literature. In nothing else has Addison shown such originality, in nothing else such exquisite skill. If Sir Roger were eliminated it might be possible to accept that judgment of Hazlitt's which sets The Tatler above The Spectator ; but then, to demand his elimination is not much more reasonable THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 117 than it would be to judge the play of Hamlet without regard to the Prince of Denmark. Some of the savour has evaporated from nearly all the rest of The Spectator, but the De Coverley papers are still fresh. Few, probably, now rank Addison's allegories as high as they were once ranked, such as The Vision ofMirza ; and many are conscious of a certain triteness in the Thoughts in Westminster Abbey. We may admire the skill of the dissection of a beau's head and of a coquet's heart, we may appreciate the humour of Tom Folio and The Political Upholsterer, or the delicate skill of A Fine Lad.y's Diary and The Exercise of the Fan. But the best of these papers leave the reader somewhat cold. They have not that fine humanity which Goldsmith and Lamb could impart to similar essays. This humanity we find occasionally in the essays of Steele; but hardly elsewhere in The Tatler or The Spectator, except in the De Coverley papers. In these the human characters of Sir Roger and of Will Wimble have been as salt to keep the humour sweet. Addison in the Abbey with Sir Roger is better, though less ambitious, than Addison meditating alone among the tombs. Sir Roger at church, Sir Roger at the play. Sir Roger in town, — wherever he appears he is perennially delightful. There remains one aspect of these periodical papers to which no reference has so far been made. They gave a great impetus to criticism, and most of the essayists, from Steele him- self to Johnson and Goldsmith and Mackenzie, used them for this purpose. Among other honours, Addison enjoys that of being the foremost critic of his time; and foremost he still remains among all the essayists of the eighteenth century; for we associate Johnson as critic not so much with The Rambler as with the Lives of the Poets and the excellent but too seldom read preface to Shakespeare. But even setting John- son aside Addison's position has not been unchallenged. Landor preferred his coadjutor Steele, and even expressed ii8 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS a doubt whether Steele had ever been surpassed as a critic. It is not always safe to accept Landor's judgments, and this one bears the mark of exaggeration. Still, he did good service in calling attention to the fact that, in respect of some of the functions of criticism, Steele was as highly gifted as any man of his time. In respect of some of the functions of criticism; for there is a sense in which it might be maintained that he was not a critic at all. Of reasoned and deliberate critical principles he probably had none; but for critical intuition he was unsurpassed and probably unequalled in his own day. Naturally therefore his criticisms are only occa- sional, but they show a fine instinct for what is good in litera- ture. Probably no contemporary was so free as he from the conventions of the time. Just because he trusted his instinct and cared little about reasoned critical principles, he was ready to admire what was admirable under whatever guise he found it. The ' rules ' which troubled Dryden troubled not Steele at all. Hence few men of his time so warmly loved Shake- speare. It mattered not to him whether the beauties were " native wood-notes wild," or the product of the nicest art. He was a moralist in his criticisms, as he was always, and he found Shakespeare to be a great moral teacher. It was impossible, he thought, to turn from the noble characters drawn by him without strong impressions of honour and humanity. " Distress is laid before us with all its causes and consequences, and our resentment placed according to the merit of the persons afflicted " — a doctrine, it is true, which is anathema to many. In other papers he quotes with high praise and just appreciation the dream of Richard III. and the speech of Hamlet on his mother's hasty marriage. He con- trasts with such works the licentious drama of the Restoration, of which so sincere a moralist could be no admirer. His loathing of its faults and the moral basis of his criticism are well shown in his fine remarks on The Man of Mod:;. He takes THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 119 for granted at the start " that a fine gentleman should be honest in his actions, and refined in his language," and dis- covering that Etherege's fine gentleman is neither the one nor the other, he draws the conclusion that " this whole cele- brated piece is a perfect contradiction to good manners, good sense, and common honesty." If the moralist-critic needs justification, it will be found by contrasting this judgment with that of so excellent a critic as Hazlitt on the same piece. While HazHtt has played upon the surface, Steele has pene- trated to the heart. For formal criticism, however, Addison is by far the greater of the two friends. After his accession the quantity of critical matter in The Sutler, and still more in The Spectator, largely increased, and the majority of the critical papers were Addison's. In The Spectator, for example, he wTote not only the elaborate critique on" "jP^miu^ Zoi-^, but the papers on tragedy, wit and imagination, and those on Chevy Chase as well. Of the two essayists, he certainly was the reasoned and dehberate critic, and the value of his criticism has been estimated at a very high rate by so thoughtful a writer as Mr, Worsfold. But to others, probably the majority, much of it seems antiquated. Just because he wished to be able to give a reason for his conclusions — a desire in itself most praise- worthy, — he was far more influenced by the accepted canons than Steele; and the influence of the accepted canons is always prejudicial. We no longer care to ask the questions about Paradise Lost which Addison tries to answer. His treat- ment of imagination is, however, more instructive; and even if his principles were not wholly new, they were principles which had before been implied rather than adequately expounded. They were moreover principles which were in practice much neglected, and consequently much in need of being insisted upon, in Addison's own day. Before the temporary cessation of The Spectator in December I20 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS 171 2, Steele had resolved to start a new paper; and accord- ingly the first number of The Guardian appeared in March of the following year. It was continued daily for rather more than six months. Why the change was deemed necessary is not obvious, for the differences between the two papers are mainly, first, that some part of the verve and sparkle is gone, and secondly, that there are traces of the influence of party spirit which had been foreign to The Spectator. Steele and Addison were still the principal writers; but in the beginning of the new venture Steele had no assistance from his friend, while in the latter half the contributions of Addison out- number those of Steele, who was then more absorbed in party politics. It was for party purposes that he started The Englishman in October 171 3. The action of Steele and Addison themselves, in thus start- ing periodical after periodical, shows that such literature was both popular and lucrative. If further evidence were needed it would be found in the frequency with which the flattery of imitation was paid to the initiators. Addison himself, in a paper in The Tatler, notices some of the imitations. There was a Re-Tatler, a Female Tatler, a Whisperer ; and after the demise of The Tatler, but during the life of The Spectator, there was a Scottish Tatler published at Edinburgh. The vogue continued long after Addison and Steele were dead, and was so great that Nathan Drake, in his Essays Illustrative of the Rambler, etc., was able to enumerate no fewer than 221 papers, more or less on the model of The Tatler, published between its appearance and the year 1 809. It would be idle to inquire how many Drake may have omitted. None of these papers equalled the two prototypes, and only a few demand some brief notice. Another evidence of the popularity of Steele's papers may be found in the distinguished names which are included among the occasional contributors. Among them are nearly THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 121 all the well-known writers of the time— Swift, Pope, Berkeley, Congreve, Tickell, Parnell, Gay, Philips^ The contributions- of some of these are neghgible in quantity; but to The Guardian Pope contributed eight papers and Berkeley four- teen. As regards quantity, the most considerable of the assistants was Eustace Budgell, a relation by marriage of Addison. He has also the distinction of having touched the character of Sir Roger, as he was the author of the paper which describes the knight at the sport of hare-hunting. Budgell, however, owed more to his relationship with Addison than to his intrinsic merits. Were they not an integral part of The Spectator his essays would long since have been lost in the rubbish heap of Hterature. Next to him in respect of quantity, and above him as regards the quaHty of his con- tributions, stands Thomas Hughes, a man who combined in greater perfection than any other of the occasional contri- butors those qualities which Steele and Addison stamped upon the periodical essay. Hughes seems to have been humorous, observant, amiable, and sincerely desirous of the moral ad- vancement of his fellow-men. His favourite subject was the whims and vanities of women, but he took part also in the serious crusade of the essayists against gaming and de- bauchery. All his subjects he touched in a style which has not a little of the grace and felicity of Addison. Alexander Pope (i 688-1 744) took no part in The Tatler and very Httle in The Spectator, but, as has been said, he con- tributed eight papers to The Guardian, and seems to have been deterred from writing more frequently by fear of being associated with the poHtics of Steele. This is much to be re- gretted, because the nature of Pope's gifts and the excellence of his other prose writings, such as the prefaces to his Homer and Shakespeare, strengthen the impression derived from his papers in The Guardian that he possessed in a remarkable, and possibly in an unequalled degree, the qualities of the •i* 122 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS periodical essayist. He was certainly a man of higher genius than either Steele or Addison, and not one of the qualities displayed in his verse would have been alien from the prose of the essays. Perhaps the only points in which he would have been inferior to the two chiefs of the tribe are urbanity and humour. Pope shone in wit, but Addison was certainly his superior in humour. Few as are his papers, they are sufficient to show that Pope was one of the best critics of his time. The satire on Bossu is a masterpiece, and the essay on pastorals is a most skilful piece of irony, though Steele and his friends must have been dense if they really believed that the writer preferred Ambrose Philips to Pope. Irony and satire, however, are just the qualities for which we look in Pope; and it is perhaps more important to observe how this small group of essays illustrates characteristics with which he is less commonly credited. No. 6i of The Guardian shows him in the part of a pioneer in the inculcation of humanity to animals; No. 4 is a manly protest against un- manly flattery in dedications; and Nos, 91 and 92, dealing with the Short Club, show a power, rare in men affiicted as Pope was, of laughing good-naturedly at his own physical deficiencies. He is himself the president of the club: — " The first of these, Dick Distich by name, we have elected president, not only as he is the shortest of us all, but because he has entertained so just a sense of the stature, as to go generally in black, that he may appear yet less. Nay, to that perfec- tion is he arrived, that he stoops as he walks. The figure of the man is odd enough; he is a lively little creature, with long arms and legs. A spider is no ill emblem of him. He has been taken at a distance for a small windmill. But indeed what principally moved us in his favour was his talent in poetry, for he hath promised to undertake a long work in short verse to celebrate the heroes of our size. He has enter- tained so great a respect for Statius, on the score of that line. THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 123-^ ' Major in exigno regnabat corpore virtus ' ^^ ' (' A larger portion of heroic fire Did his small limbs and little breast inspire '), that he once designed to translate the whole Thebaid for the sake of httle Tydeus." Though Berkeley ranks next after Addison and Steele in the numbeFoniis contributions to T^he Guardian^ the majority of his""essays are devoted to the defence of Christianity, and are, for the present purpose, less important than many com- positions by less eminent pens on less weighty themes. Most of the other occasional contributors may be passed over in . ■ silence. But Jonathan Swift (i 667-1 745) is a person not ^'^ to be so summarily dismissed. It is true his connexion with the periodical essay (if we set aside The Examiner. the purpose of which was poHtical, not literary) is extremely slight; and his contributions cannot be said to be remark- able for excellence any more than for bulk. He wrote a few papers, or parts of papers, for The Tatler, and one from The Spectator is printed among his works, though the passage from the Journal to Stella adduced in justification makes it clear that Swift claimed only to have supphed the ideas. Addison's was the pen that wrote the essay. Perhaps it may most fairly be regarded as a joint production; for the conception is decidedly Swiftian rather than Addisonian. A few papers of no very striking excellence in Sheridan's Dublin periodical, The Intelligencer, are also by Swift. In view of the friendship between him and Steele during the earher part of The Tatler's course, this meagreness of production may I seem surprising. But in truth Swift was not by nature j fitted for the work. " Swift," says Coleridge, " was the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place." His humour was far too grim and sardonic; he was not the man to deal with the minor morals, nor with the major morals either, ^ by such light touches as alone were appropriate to the i 124 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS periodical essay. Contrast him with Steele in his attitude towards women, and it is at once evident how greatly in- ferior, or at least how widely different, the periodical essay must have been had Swift been the guiding spirit. The coarse and discreditable Madonella papers in The Tatler are his. Or consider the Letter to a very young Lady on her Marriage^ which is practically an essay, though it appeared in no periodical. No one can be surprised that the letter is said to have been regarded by the recipient as no compliment either to herself or to her sex. It is arrogant and con- temptuous in the extreme. " To say the truth, I never yet knew a tolerable woman to be fond of her own sex. ... A rout of ladies, got together by themselves, is a very school of impertinence and detraction, and it is well if those be the worst." The most noteworthy of Swift's contributions to The Taller is the essay on style (No. 230). It is a good paper, and yet perhaps the most remarkable feature in it is the extent to which time has proved this great master of language wrong. He gives eight examples of polysyllables introduced by the war which, he says, " will never be able to live many more campaigns." And yet every one of the eight is stiU part of the literary language, though ' palisadoes ' has, like the Shakespearean ' hurricanoes,' lost its foreign termination. His examples of slang have also proved their vitality by sur- viving, though some of them certainly have no claim to be reckoned literary. It was, however, in his Predictions for the Year 1708 and in the Account of the Death of Mr. Partridge that Swift displayed most of the spirit of the periodical essayist, and, though they were not contributed to a periodical^ it is by these essays that he is most intimately associated with the periodicals; for, as we have seen, Steele borrowed from him the name Bickerstaff, and with it adopted his dispute with Partridge. These essays, the Meditation upon a Broornstick, an THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 125 excellent travesty of Boyle's Meditations, and the admirably humorous Scheme to make a Hospital for Incurables, prove that on occasion Swift could write well in the vein of the periodical essayists. But his intellect was too massive for the essay, and we look for the real Swift rather on the larger canvas of Gulliver or the Tale of a Tub. Even of the essays the most characteristic are not adapted to the periodical as planned by Steele. The Hints towards an Essay on Conversation might, it is true, have been condensed or cut in two. But the wonderful and terrible Modest Proposal could never have appeared in the company of Steele and Addison. Though it is a literary masterpiece, the horror would be unpardonable were it not redeemed by the sceva indignatio that underlies it; and this sceva indignatio, his habitual mood of mind, is the very thing that divides Swift from his essay-writing contemporaries. Even the less known but no less masterly Argument against abolishi7ig Christianity could hardly have appeared in The Spectator. The grave assurance that the writer is not so weak as to stand up in defence of real Christianity, the suggestion that the abolition of Christianity might possibly involve danger to the Church and would prove the readiest course to introduce Popery, and the argument that the Turks " believe a God; which is more than is required of us, even while we preserve the name of Chris- tians," are all thoroughly Swiftian, but too radical for the / periodical essay. f 7^'(P^^ V 'If Swift had but a slight connexion with the periodical j/^ essay John Arbuthnot (1667-1735) had none at all; yet so jr clearly in his place beside Swift that he will most conveniently ^'^ be treated here. Nearly all that he has written is imbued more or less with the essay spirit, and the few pieces by him that can be called essays show that his reputation for wit, humour and learning was well deserved. In Johnson's judg- ment Arbuthnot was the first man and the most universal 126 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS genius in the brilliant group to which he belonged, and Macaulay confessed his inability to distinguish between certain passages by Arbuthnot and Swift's best writing. But the universality of genius noted by Johnson told against Arbuthnot's permanent fame. Had he concentrated himself upon literature alone Johnson's judgment might have been confirmed by posterity; for the writings he has left are of the highest quality. But they are merely a handful, the by- products of a very busy mind. In respect of wit, Arbuthnot's fugitive writings are singularly brilliant. The Humble Petition of the Colliers, etc., is a very amusing piece of satirical humour, and so is the Brief Account of John Ginglicutfs Treatise con- cerning the Altercation or Scolding of the Ancients. But Arbuthnot's masterpiece is The Art of Political Lying, an essay, like the piece on altercation, in the form of a summary of a treatise dealing with the subject, which is supposed to be in the press. Of this piece Swift, in the Journal to Stella remarks, " 'Tis very pretty, but not so obvious to be under- stood." But Swift's opinion of the human mind, as of the human heart, was unflattering, and surely a very moderate intelligence might suffice for the enjoyment of Arbuthnot's ready and abundant wit. In its kind, The Art of Political Lying is supreme. Witty everywhere, it is perhaps most witty in the treatment of the proof-lie: " A proof-lie is like a proof-charge for a piece of ordnance, to try a standard credulity. Of such a nature he [the supposed author] takes transubstantiation to be in the Church of Rome, a proof- artice, which if any one swallows, they are sure he will digest everything else: therefore the Whig party do wisely to try the credulity of the people by swingers, that they may be able to judge to what height they may charge them afterwards. Towards the end of this chapter he warns the heads of parties against believing their own lies, which has proved of pernicious consequence of late, both a wise party and a wise nation THE QUEEN ANNE ESSAYISTS 127 having regulated their affairs upon lies of their own invention. The causes of this he supposes to be too great a zeal and intenseness in the practice of this art, and a vehement heat in mutual conversation, whereby they persuade themselves that what they wish, and report to be true, is really so." Or again, take the treatment of the miraculous, one species of which is the prodigious : " As to to xe/saTwSe?, or the prodigious, he has little to advise, but that their comets, whales, and dragons should be sizable; their storms, tempests, and earthquakes without the reach of a day's journey of a man and horse." Perhaps Macaulay had this essay as well as the History of John Bull in his mind. Certainly he would be a bold critic who should undertake to distinguish, unless it were, perhaps, by the use of the preposition without, between this and the best writing of Swift. -i Popular as the periodical essay was, there were not wantipg some who protested against the prevalent style of literature, even while they yielded to the fashion. Among these was Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671-1713), third Earl of Shaftes- bury". His Characteristics (171 1) consists'pfihcipally of short philosophical treatises; but appended to these is a remarkable collection of Miscellaneous Reflections which attests hardly less forcibly than The Tatler and The Spectator themselves the popularity of the essay. For it is clear that Shaftesbury was an essayist in his own despite. The Miscellaneous Reflections may be described as the treatises boiled down and popularised. But the process was evidently distasteful, and it was not carried through without repeated growls. In one passage Shaftesbury describes the INIiscellany, or common Essay, as a device for enabling the muddle-headed to become authors. It is a literary form " in which the most confused head, if fraught with a little invention, and provided with Common-place Book learning, might exert itself to as much advantage, as the most orderly and well-settled judgment." 128 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS And again: "The common amble or Canterbury is not, I am persuaded, more tiresome to a good rider than the see-saw of essay-writers is to an able reader. The just composer of a legitimate piece is like an able traveller, who exactly measures his ground, premeditates his stages, and intervals of relaxation and intention, to the very conclusion of his undertaking, that he happily arrives where he first professed when he set out. . . . But the post-way is become highly fashionable among modern authors. . . . When an author sits down to write he knows no other business he has, than to be witty, and take care that his periods be well turn'd, or (as they commonly say) run smooth. In this manner, he doubts not to gain the character of bright. When he has written as many pages as he likes, or as his run of fancy wou'd permit; he then perhaps considers what name he had best give to his new writing; whether he should call it Letter, Essay, Miscellany, or ought else." Thus the man of unpopular opinions and of rare tastes made his protest; but the futility of the protest is proved by the fact that even while Shaftesbury is making it he is yielding to the current. These protests are embodied in essays — the best attempt Shaftesbury could make to attain that very popularity which he half envied and half despised. How far his judgment may have been unconsciously influenced by personal considerations it is impossible to say; but at least it is clear that he had not in any great measure the gifts which the popular mode of writing demanded. His style was cumbrous, and he lacked the faculty of so treating little things as to make them great. It was for others, not for him, to write meditations on broomsticks. IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 129 CHAPTER VI THE IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON Reference has already been made to the crop of imitations which sprouted up in consequence of the extraordinary popularity of Steele and Addison. The Stamp Act of 171 2, which imposed a tax of a half-penny oiTevery half-sheet, temporarily checked them. Addison says that a facetious friend who loved a pun called the mortaHty among authors "the fall of the leaf"; and Swift's Journal to Stella notes that " The Observator is fallen; the Medleys are jumbled together with the Flying Post; the Examiner is deadly sick; the Spectator keeps up, and doubles its price." Ultimately, ? men made up their minds that they must pay the price neces- sary for the production of that which they desired to have; | and, though the Stamp Act remained, an unbroken stream of new periodicals flowed on through the eighteenth century. In the interval between The Spectator and The Rambler, how- ever, there was none which rivalled the two great originals, and there were few whose fame has survived to the present day. Further, the character of the periodicals changed. They became less Hterary, and attached themselves to party. In Steele's career The Englishman succeeds The Guardian. Swift busies himself with The Examiner and Addison with The Whig Examiner. In an early number of The Champion Fielding, under the disguise of a correspondent, expresses his surprise that The Champion, though a month old, has never yet dreamt. He himself has dreamt in The Spectator m his youth, but in later days has found no vehicle for such I I30 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS visionary scenes. He is pleased that ^he Champion, not being wholly devoted to politics, allows room for miscellaneous pieces. Then follows an entertaining vision of Helicon and the Muses. The only contemporary papers which The Champion finds worthy of praise are The Craftsman and Common Sense, both political, and both, of course, on the same side of politics as The Champion ; for there is no blindness so dark as that of party. It is evident that passages of this sort must not be pressed. The pohtical papers themselves admitted a certain amount of purely literary matter, as we have seen in the case of Defoe. Some of the familiar names of the Spectator period continue to appear on the hsts of the periodicals. Budgell practised in The Bee (173 3-1 73 5) the style of composition which Addison had taught him, and Ambrose Phihps, who had barely taken part in the greater periodicals, became the chief writer in The Freethinker {lyiS-ijig), in which he had the assistance of several of the most distinguished clergymen of the time. In The Plain Dealer (1724-1725) Aaron Hill collaborated with William Bond. The Female Spectator (i 744-1 746) and The Parrot (1746) are interesting because they were princi- pally, if not wholly, the work of a woman at a time when female writers were few. But the fame of EHza Haywood, once considerable, is not likely to revive. Some of the periodicals of those years are nearly inaccessible, all of them have sunk into oblivion, and no good purpose would be served by resuscitating them. Between the group already dealt with and Johnson, the only man who needs to be discussed is Fielding. Henry Fielding (i 707-1 754) the novehst has so completely overshadowed Henry Fielding the essayist that there are comparatively few who realise his greatness in the latter capacity; and yet to any one who thinks of the introductory chapters to the books of Tom Jones, and bears in mind that IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 131 they are really essays, it must be obvious that the author was a critic, both of life and of literature, of singular power and insight. The hope which this knowledge inspires is not disappointed when we turn to those half-forgotten periodicals, The Champion (i 739-1 741) and The Covent-Garden Journal (1752). The average level is not indeed equal to that of the Tom Jones essays. Many of the papers are careless, and it is evident that Fielding did not always exert his whole strength, as he seems to have done in those essays in Tom Jones ; but when he took trouble he wrote admirably. Though there is some doubt as to the extent of Fielding's share in The Champion, the internal evidence points to the conclusion that he was a frequent contributor. If they are not Fielding's, some of the papers are the work of an unknown genius who had Fielding's large humanity and who sym- pathised, at least, with his genial freedom of life. Captain Vinegar cools himself " as is his custom [and as was too much Fielding's], with a huge dram of brandy." He condemns " roasting," in the metaphorical sense, and pleads to a coarse and cruel age for humanity to animals. " A boy should, in my opinion, be more severely punished for exercising cruelty on a dog or a cat, or any other animal, than for stealing a few pence or shillings, or any of those lesser crimes which our courts of justice take notice of." The magistrate and lawyer speaks here, as well as in an earlier reference to " the impious severity of our laws." Some of the essays are weighty with the moral wisdom which Fielding possessed, though he could not always guide his own steps by it. Some seek to reform abuses by making them ridiculous. In one paper we have a very witty piece of raillery on the argumentum ad haculum ; another, in a style worthy of The Spectator, compares the art of politics to the art of fishing. Two continuous papers give an admirable vision of covetousness and the Palace of Wealth. There is a moral for the present 132 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS age as well as for the time of Fielding in the account of a fall from the Palace into the cave of poverty: — " There were very high and strong rails which prevented any possibility of the spectators falling from the gallery to the bottom of the cave, and yet I observed a great tremor and paleness to seize every one who durst venture to cast their eyes downwards; notwithstanding which, it was very remarkable, that not one of the company could prevail on himself to abstain from surveying the abyss. I had not been here long, when I perceived an old gentleman, whose face I thought I had some- where seen before, to raise himself with great agility to the top of the rail, whence endeavouring to lay hold on something a little out of his reach, it gave way, and he tumbled down back- wards into the cave. Not long after, I saw a very grave man, standing on the top of the rail, attempting to lift others up, whose packs he had before received, tumbling down into the cave, and pulling all those whom he had laid his hands on down with him. Upon this I heard several mutter to them- selves, ' Ay, ay, I warrant he will not hurt himself, we shall see him soon again; ' and indeed, I soon perceived they were in the right, for I shortly after found him in the gallery, look- ing much fresher and plumper than before, though the same did not, as I saw, happen to any of those whom he pulled down with him. This made me instantly conceive, that there was some very easy way of ascent from the bottom of this deep cave to the gallery whereon I stood. But I was soon delivered from this error, and informed, that from the bottom of the cave it was almost impossible for any one to ascend again, but that there was a resting-place in the descent, from whence issued a pair of private stairs up to the gallery; that the gentleman I had observed to fall, had a very particular knack of lighting on this place, this being the third time he had performed in this manner; and that he was so far from being hurt, that he grew visibly more lusty after IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 133 each fall. This feat of agihty, they informed me, was called breaking." The quahties which mark The Champion are shown once more in The Covent-Garden Journal. The paper on contempt is a good illustration of Fielding's force and soundness as a morahst; the dream about ants is a telhng satire, Swiftian in conception, on the vanity of human theories of the universe; the essay on the usurpation of the word ' betters ' by the rich throws a pleasing hght on a generous mind. But there are few if any fresh notes, and the faiUng health of the author betrays itself in the inferior vigour of some of the papers in the later journal. Both, however, deserve to be better known than they are; both are clearly the work of a great man. Prior to the pubHcation of The Covent-Garden Journal Samuel Johnson (i 709-1 784) had appeared upon the scene as essayist, and his Rambler (1750-1752) is usually ranked as the first of the classical periodicals after The Guardian. A few years later came The Idler (1758-1760); and in the interval Johnson had contributed a considerable number of papers to Hawkesworth's Adventtirer (175 2-1 754). From the very beginning The Rambler gave evidence of a heavier hand as well as of a more serious spirit than the earher periodicals. The popular conception of Johnson's style corre- sponds perhaps better with The Rambler than with any other of his works. The first paper supphes an excellent example : — " It is one among many reasons for which I purpose to endeavour the entertainment of my countrymen by a short essay on Tuesday and Saturday, that I hope not much to tire those whom I shall not happen to please; and if I am not commended for the beauty of my works, to be at least pardoned for their brevity. But whether my expectations are most fixed on pardon or praise, I think it not necessary to discover; for having accurately weighed the reasons for arrogance and submission, I find them so nearly equiponderant, that my 134 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS impatience to try the event of my first performance will not suffer me to attend any longer the trepidations of the balance." No one ever wrote like this before Johnson, and those who have done so since have consciously or unconsciously imitated him. Fortunately Johnson himself could write in another style too, and the vigorous English of the Lives of the Poets is neither so Latinised nor so antithetical as The Rambler. An- tithesis and a Latin diction were features of Johnson's style throughout; but, if we regard his works as a whole, far more than enough has been made of them. In The Rambler, however, whether through the influence of the dictionary on which he was labouring at the time or not, they are very strongly marked features, and the popular notion of the mean- ing of " Johnsonese " is so far right. The adoption of such a style carried with it other consequences, because such stateli- ness of language was peculiarly unsuited to the light subjects which had hitherto been the favourite themes of the essayists. Accordingly we find that the themes of The Rambler are almost as widely different from those of The Spectator as the style. Steele and Addison loved to suggest reform by raillery of paint and patches and hoop-petticoats, canes and wigs; Johnson trained heavy artillery direct upon the strongholds of vice. The spirit in which he did his work is indicated in the prayer in which he asks the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the com- position of The Rambler, and " that I may promote thy glory, and the salvation of myself and others." Notwithstanding the genuineness of Addison's moral purpose, he would probably have felt a certain incongruity between the lightness of his method and language so solemn as this. It is not surprising that The Rambler was never popular as a periodical. The sale was large when it was reprinted in volumes, but few of the original numbers reached a circulation of more than 500. In the closing number Johnson confesses that he has " never been much a favourite of the pubHc." It IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 135 is curious that the most popular paper of all, No. 97, was one of the very few that he did not write. Two reasons may be assigned for the superior popularity of the collected editions. Partly, we may suppose, it was due to the fact that these editions were in point of fact better; for, while Johnson wrote the original Ramblers rapidly and with little or no revision, he spent great care and pains upon the subsequent editions. According to Chalmers, the alterations made in the second and third editions " far exceed six thousand; " and while many of the changes were trifling, the total effect was considerable. The second reason, however, is more important. The Rambler has, as a whole, more the character of a book for serious medi- tation than for agreeable pastime. The Spectator was a natural adjunct to the breakfast-table, and many learnt to look upon it as a necessary one. The Rambler was more like what our fathers called Sunday reading; and reading for Sunday was probably shunned on Tuesday and Saturday in the eighteenth century, as it certainly was in the nineteenth. Serious-minded men therefore bought the volumes when they were reissued, and studied them in the hours they devoted to meditation. Those who wished to have the reputation of seriousness bought them also, and slept over them. It would be a mistake to leave the impression that the original issue of The Rambler was a failure. It won for John- son fit audience, though few. Young, the author of Night Thoughts, read it with a minute attention which pleased Johnson. There was too much solid sense and sound learn- ing in the papers to escape the notice or fail to win the admiration of men of powerful intellect. The weight and dignity of the paper on the superiority of patience to Stoicism, and the high-mindedness of the essay on dedications, showed that the writer was a man of no ordinary gifts. There were lighter touches too. The pungent essay on Prospero (Garrick) showed that the writer could, when he chose, wield the weapon 136 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS of satire. The paper on Suspirius the Screech-owl, from which Goldsmith drew his Croaker, is also of the old familiar type. Pieces of humour occasionally lightened the severity of moral disquisition and the constitutional melancholy which shone through the majority of the papers. But on the whole the impression is sombre, and it is evident that the periodical essay had been turned to purposes widely different from those of its founders. They are purposes for which it is less admirably fitted. Were he to be judged merely as an essayist, Johnson's place in literature would be far below that of Addison and Steele, and it is not clear that it would be as high as that of Fielding. Even apart from the Tom Jones essays there are papers in The Champion and The Covent-Garden Journal which show more of the true essay spirit than anything in The Rambler. Johnson himself seems to have felt that he had not quite caught the tone. He did not underrate the high merits of The Rambler ; but in the papers which he contributed to The Adventurer and to The Idler, of which he wrote by far the greater part, both the touch and the prevailing themes are lighter; and Boswell notes as a consequence that the immediate sale of the former was greater than that of The Rambler. In The Adventurer we have such papers as that on the companions of Misargyrus in the Fleet and the stage- coach journey; in The Idler we have on the one hand the pathetic paper suggested by the death of Johnson's wife (No. 41), and on the other, characters such as Betty Broom and Dick Minim, and the witty ridicule of the bargain hunter, Mrs. Plenty. The success of The Adventurer, which is one of the best of the whole series of periodical papers, was neither wholly nor even principally due to Johnson, but to John Hawkesworth (1715-1773), a man of multifarious literary activity, who is remembered now only as an essayist, and as part author, part ^r « IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 137 editor of the much-abused account of the voyages of Captain Cook. Considering the age he hved in and the position he ' won, Hawkesworth's personal history is singularly obscure; but at least by the time when The Adventurer was started he | was sufficiently prominent to be an 'acceptable coadjutor to Johnson. The plan of the paper seems to have been their joint work, and though at first Johnson wrote but seldom (he contributed only five of the first fifty papers), he helped to procure the assistance of others. It was through him that Joseph Warton was enlisted for the province of criticism and literature. There were to be three main divisions of the paper, the other two consisting of " pieces of imagination and dis- quisitions of literature." Warton for the most part confined himself to his province of criticism, and the twentieth century does not readily read the Hterary criticism of the eighteenth. Yet some of Warton's papers are worthy of attention. Those on the Odyssey would be so were it only for their historic interest. Though Thomson was recently dead and Gray and Collins were preparing material for a revolution in poetry, classicism still reigned supreme, and Johnson was its champion. Warton himself had not yet written that essay on the genius of Pope which caused Tyrwhitt to say that it was now possible to maintain that poetry was not confined to rhyming couplets. It is therefore peculiarly interesting to find him in these papers playing the part of champion of the Odyssey as against the Iliad, the superiority of which was then almost universally taken for granted. It is above all interesting to notice that what attracts Warton to the Odyssey is just its romanticism; for though he does not use the name he clearly feels the presence of the thing : " Greatness, novelty, and beauty are usually and justly reckoned the three principal sources of the pleasures that strike the imagination. If the Iliad be allowed to abound in objects that may be referred to the first species, yet the Odyssey may boast a greater number of images that are 138 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS beautiful and uncommon. The vast variety of scenes per- petually shifting before us, the train of unexpected events, and the many sudden turns in this diversified poem, must mo.e deeply engage the reader and keep his attention more alive and active than the martial uniformity of the Iliad. The continual glare of a single colour that unchangeably pre- dominates throughout a whole piece, is apt to dazzle and disgust the eye of the beholder. I will not, indeed, presume to say with Voltaire, that among the greatest admirers of antiquity there is scarce one to be found who could ever read the Iliad, with that eagerness and rapture, which a woman feels when she peruses the novel of Zayde ; but will, however, venture to afhrm, that the speciosa miracula of the Odyssey are better calculated to excite our curiosity and wonder, and to allure us forward with unextinguished impatience to the catastrophe, than the perpetual tumult and terror that reign through the Iliad. ''^ Johnson himself in The Rambler had carried on the critical tradition of the periodical essay. In one paper he discusses the comparative merits of ancient and modern romances, in another he examines the pauses in EngHsh poetry. He examines the versification of Milton, and reaches the surpris- ing conclusion that the great poet " has left our harsh cadences yet harsher "; and he analyses Samson Agonistes in order to discover whether it " is composed according to the indis- pensable laws of Aristotelian criticism." Evidently he pro- ceeded upon principles widely different from ours. But more than enough has been made of the limitations of Johnson's taste, and of his errors, sometimes gross and provoking enough, with regard to Milton and other poets with whom he was out of sympathy. It is more profitable to remember that there is much to set in the other scale, and that Johnson's criticism is by no means all negligible even now. Take for example the following passage from the preface to Shakespeare: — IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 139 " His adherence to general nature has exposed him to the censure of criticks, who form their judgment upon narrower principles. Dennis and Rymer think his Romans not suffi- ciently Roman; and Voltaire censures his kings as not com- pletely royal. Dennis is offended, that Menenius, a senator of Rome, should play the buffoon; and Voltaire perhaps thinks decency violated when the Danish usurper is repre- sented as a drunkard. But Shakespeare always makes nature predominate over accident; and if he preserves the essential character, is not very careful of distinctions superinduced and adventitious. His story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on men. He knew that Rome, like every other city, had men of all dispositions; and wanting a buffoon, he went into the senate-house for that which the senate-house would certainly have afforded him. He was inclined to show an usurper and a murderer not only odious, but despicable; he therefore added drunkenness to his other qualities, know- ing that kings love wine like other men, and that wine exerts its natural power upon kings. These are the petty cavils of petty minds; a poet overlooks the casual distinctions of country and condition, as a painter, satisfied with the figure, neglects the drapery." Nervous sense such as this never becomes antiquated. It is as needful now as it was when Johnson wrote. He answers critics who complained that Shakespeare had not done certain things, by showing that he need not do them. There are other critics of the present day who have forgotten the answer, and who therefore, in their anxiety to maintain the infalHbility of Shakespeare, contend that he has done that which Johnson knew he neither did nor required to do. Obsession is destruc- tive of criticism — even obsession by Shakespeare. As has been said already, it is to Hawkesworth himself that the success of The Adventurer is principally to be ascribed. The obscurity into'wBicIiTre has fallen is not due to lack of I40 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS merit in the essays, but rather to the fact that he has no capital work with which to support them; for his poems and dramas are deservedly forgotten, and in connexion with the voyages we think rather of Cook than of Hawkesworth. Now very few authors have succeeded in winning permanent fame by reason of fugitive essays. In The Adventurer, more- over, Hawkesworth is crushed under the weight of Johnson, though he shows himself, for the purpose in view, the better writer of the two. Hawkesworth deliberately imitated John- son, and this fact may have disposed the latter the more readily to collaborate with him. But, while he is Johnsonian in style, his touch is lighter and his themes more varied than Johnson's. He maintains the moral purpose of the earlier essayists, is the champion of religion, inculcates milder manners, and in the excellent paper (No. 5) on various forms of cruelty, advocates, like Fielding, kindness to the animal creation. The special feature of The Adventurer, however, is the frequency with which it resorts to the short story; and it was here, especially in the Eastern tale, that Hawkesworth particularly excelled. There were, of course, stories, Eastern and Western, in the earlier periodicals; Johnson himself introduces several Eastern ones into The Rambler ; but in none of the earlier papers were they so numerous as in The Adventurer, and none of the periodical essayists has excelled Hawkesworth in skill in the construction of them. All his Eastern tales are worthy of praise; but perhaps the best is that of the avaricious Carazan. While Hawkesworth has nothing that can be set beside the exquisite De Coverley papers, Carazan is quite worthy to be placed beside the Vision of Mirza. The condemnation pronounced by the Deity is impressive: — " ' Carazan, thy worship has not been accepted, because it was not prompted by love of God; neither can thy righteous- ness be rewarded, because it was not produced by love of IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 141 Man; for thy own sake only hast thou rendered to every man his due; and thou hast approached the Almighty only for thyself. Thou hast not looked up with gratitude, nor around thee with kindness. Around thee, thou hast indeed beheld vice and folly; but if vice and folly could justify thy par- simony, would they not condemn the bounty of Heaven ? If not upon the foolish and the vicious, where shall the sun diffuse his hght, or the clouds distil their dew ? Where shall the hps of the spring breathe fragrance, or the hand of autumn diffuse plenty? Remember, Carazan, that thou hast shut compassion from thine heart, and grasped thy treasures with a hand of iron: thou hast lived for thyself; and, therefore, henceforth for ever thou shalt subsist alone. From the light of heaven, and from the society of all beings, shalt thou be driven; sohtude shall protract the Ungering hours of eternity, and darkness aggravate the horrors of despair.' At this moment I was driven by some secret and irresistible power through the glowing system of creation, and passed innumer- able worlds in a moment. As I approached the verge of nature, I perceived the shadows of total and boundless vacuity deepen before me, a dreadful region of eternal silence, sohtude, and darkness ! Unutterable horror seized me at the prospect, and this exclamation burst from me with all the vehemence of desire: 'O! that I had beeix doomed for ever to the common receptacle of impenitence and guilt! their society would have alleviated the torment of despair, and the rage of fire could not have excluded the comfort of hght. Or if I had been condemned to reside in a comet that would return but once in a thousand years to the regions of Hght andhfe; the hope of these periods, however distant, would cheer me in the dread interval of cold and darkness, and the vicissitude would divide eternity into time.' While this thought passed over my mind, I lost sight of the remotest star, and the last glimmer- ing of Ught was quenched in utter darkness. The agonies of 142 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS despair every moment Increased, as every moment augmented my distance from the last habitable world. I reflected with intolerable anguish, that when ten thousand thousand years had carried me beyond the reach of all but that Power who fills infinitude, I should still look forward into an immense abyss of darkness, through which I should still drive without succour and without society, farther and farther still, for ever and for ever." This is thoroughly Johnsonian; but the subject suits the stately periods, and they are turned with a skill which the originator himself rarely surpassed. During and after the period of the three Johnsonian papers the stream of periodical essays flowed on, but the possibilities of the form, except in the hands of men of rare genius, were exhausted, and only two or three of these pubhcations de- mand notice. Among the exceptions was The World (1753- 1756), which was conspicuous both for its abihty and for the eminence in other spheres of one or two of the contributors. With respect to its tone and contents, The World may be regarded as a reaction from The Rambler. As the latter had scarcely anything corresponding to the fighter papers of 7he Spectator, so the former had very Httle answering to the more serious ones. And as regards immediate popularity the pro- jector and his assistants were justified by the results. Accord- ing to Drake, the circulation of fhe World in numbers was " unprecedentedly great "; but he adds that this was " owing, in a high degree, to the various titled and fashionable names that were known to assist in its composition," and that " it is now, if we except The Connoisseur, less read than any of what may be termed the Classical Essayists." The contributors to 7he World numbered over thirty, but between one-third and one-fourth of the total number of papers were written by its projector, Edward Moore. Moore, however, is not especially notable except for his IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 143 position and the number of his contributions. His papers are essentially imitative. R. O. Cambridge was also a toler- ably frequent contributor, and Horace Walpole wrote nine papers of no great merit. By far the most notable in this group was Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773). He had already written essays in Fog's Journal and in Common Sense ; and these, as well as his contributions to The World, show that if he had devoted himself to literature he might have won a high reputation. The two papers written to recommend Johnson's dictionary are best known because of the incomparable letter which they drew from the lexicographer. The essays on the Drinking Club are good examples of the lighter treatment of vice; and there are others which go some way towards prov- ing that Chesterfield's moral character was by no means in all respects so low as it has commonly been supposed to be. The essay on duelling is excellent. But above all, the character of the fashionable man of honour is delineated with a biting irony which shows that Chesterfield was capable of deep feel- ing and able to rise above the prejudices of his class. There are but two things, he says, which a man of the nicest honour may not do, " which are declining single combat and cheating at cards." Leader of ion as he was, Chesterfield could not consent to regard these as the whole duty of man. " Strange! that virtue should be so difficult, and honour, its superior, so easy to attain to." It is evident that Chesterfield was con- scious of the high merit of this essay; for the paper in The World is in substance a reproduction of one whichhad appeared many years before in Common Sense. The latter is in some respects the better of the two. After a series of imaginary letters from the typical man of honour, Belville, it contains an admirable summing up of the character, conceived in a spirit which would have done honour to the best and purest of the periodical essayists: — " It appears from these authentic pieces, that Mr. Belville, 144 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS filled with the noblest sentiments of honour, paid all debts but liis just ones; kept his word scrupulously in the flagitious sale of his conscience to a minister; was ready to protect, at the expense of his friend's life, his friend's wife, whom, by the opportunities that friendship had given him, he had corrupted; and punished truth with death, when it intimated, however justly, the want of it in himself. " This person of refined honour, conscious of his own merit and virtue, is a most unmerciful censor of the lesser vices and faihngs of others; and lavishly bestows the epithets of scoun- drel and rascal upon all those who, in a subordinate rank of life, seem to aspire to any genteel degree of immorahty. An awkward country gentleman, who sells his silent vote cheap, is with him a sad dog. The industrious tradesmen are a pack of cheating rascals, who should be better regulated, and not suffered to impose upon people of condition; and servants are a parcel of idle scoundrels, that ought to be used ill and not paid their wages, in order to check their insolence. " It is not to be imagined how pernicious the example of such a creature is to society; he is admired, and consequently imitated: he not only immediately corrupts his own circle of acquaintance, but the contagion spreads itself to infinity, as circles in water produce one another, though gradually less marked out, in proportion as they are remoter from the cause of the first. " To such practice and such examples in higher Hfe, may justly be imputed the general corruption and immorahty, which prevail through the kingdom. But, when such is the force of fashion, and when the examples of people of the first rank in a country are so prevalent as to dignify vice and im- morality, in spite of all laws divine and human, how popular might they make virtue, if they would exert their power in its cause ? and how must they, in their cooler moments, reproach themselves, when they come to reflect, that, by their fatal IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 145 examples, they have beggared, corrupted, and, it may be, enslaved, a whole nation ? " If this passage be sincere, it shows the need for revising the popular estimate of Chesterfield's character; if insincere, it is a masterpiece in the art of counterfeiting. The writer seems to be imbued with the love of truth ; yet Cowper called him her " polish'd and high-finished foe." It is commonly siipposed that his morality was nothing but the convention of his class, and that he was prepared to condone the deepest immorality, provided only it did not violate that convention; yet here we have an example of a power hardly to be surpassed of rising above convention, and viewing right and wrong in themselves. Churton Collins has given reasons for the view that judgment upon Chesterfield's letters to his son has been at best one-sided. It is necessary also to remember that there are letters to his godson as well as letters to his son, and that there are these essays and other documents as well, upon which to found an opinion. " The Rochefoucauld of England," as Sainte-Beuve called him, has had hard measure. We should at least remember that he was an admirable writer. The Connoisseur (1754-1756) started a little later and closed a little earlier than The World. It resembled the latter in general character, but was inferior in quality. The principal authors were George Colman and Bonnell Thornton, who usually wrote their essays jointly. Though they were able young men, the most memorable circumstance connected with their paper is the fact that at least three and probably five essays were contributed by the poet Cowper. These essays have the grace which Cowper never failed to impart to his subject, and one of them, on the state of country churches, clergy and congregations, is of great value as an authentic account of a condition of matters which would hardly be credible were it not so well attested. K 146 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS The political Monitor (1755-1759) may be named in passing for the sake of Beckford who projected it; but in the literary sense the next noteworthy publications are The Bee and The Public Ledger, in which appeared The Citizen of the World. These bring us into contact with a name greater, in the history of the essay, than any from Addison's day to his own. The name of OHver Goldsmith (i 728-1 774) used to suggest, and probably stiU suggests, to the minds of many ideas of the most extraordinary sort. One of his contemporaries called him an inspired idiot; another put the same judgment into rhyme, and declared that he " wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll," while one of the foremost writers of the century after Goldsmith's pronounced this judgment just. And yet we all know that Johnson himself, when he came to write the epitaph of his friend, declared that he had attempted nearly every species of composition, and adorned every one that he attempted; and we all know, further, that Johnson said no more than the truth. Now it is certain that genius is not incompatible with that sort of disorder of mind which leads to the madhouse; but it is far more difficult to conceive of genius united with imbecihty than to imagine it united with irregularity. Let it be granted, however, that some mysterious force called inspiration may produce, for once, even this astounding union, and we are still only at the beginning of the difficulty in the case of Goldsmith. We have to suppose the union so constant, while he has pen in hand, as to make Goldsmith one of the most charming poets, one of the best dramatists, and one of the greatest essayists of the eighteenth century. We have to suppose it so constant as to give even his hack-work a literary value. However worthless it may be as science. Goldsmith's history of Animated Nature is very pleasant reading, and, if it were possible to ignore the question of accuracy, would be better adapted for conveying IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 147 to young minds ideas on the subject treated than any other book we possess. It is remarkable that Boswell, who is largely responsible for this astonishing view of Goldsmith, has had almost the same fate, and that the critic who thought the phrase, an inspired idiot, appropriate to the Irishman, declared of the Scot that if he " had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer." Carlyle has made this opinion about Boswell impossible, and the simple process of reading Goldsmith's works ought to be fatal to the other opinion. A very little reflection suffices to show that Gold- smith's exquisite style is inseparable from soundness of intelligence. The steady and certain evolution of thought in The Traveller and The Deserted Village indicates not inferior but most exceptional intellectual power, and the humour of The Vicar of Wakefield and of the plays is surely an evidence of a mind remarkably sane and well balanced. If further evidence were needed, probably the most convincing of all would be found in the essays. These have been unduly neglected. In Drake's table of periodical papers such mediocre productions as The Connoisseur and The Observer are distinguished with capitals as standard works; while The Bee and The Citizen of the World appear in ordinary type; and to this day, when we think of Goldsmith, we usually call to mind The Vicar of Wakefield, or She Stoops to Conquer, or The Deserted Village. Probably not one in ten thinks for a moment of The Citizen of the World as one of the finest collec- tions of essays ever written, and a work quite worthy of a place beside its author's more popular writings. Goldsmith's literary greatness may be measured by the fact that he has equalled Addison on Addison's own ground, and greatly surpassed him elsewhere. Goldsmith contributed to The Monthly Review in 1757, and to several other periodicals as well; but his articles have 148 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS not been identified. The earliest periodical with which his name is permanently associated was The Bee (1759). It was published weekly, and contained, not a single essay, but a variety of papers, each number fiUing about twenty pages in Bohn's edition. If Goldsmith wrote the whole of the papers, as he is supposed to have done, his productiveness was sur- prising; and it was not gained at the expense of quality. Yet, excellent as was the matter he supphed, The Bee survived for only eight numbers. They were, however, sufficient to prove the greatness of the writer. There is keen observation in the paper on dress and in the admirable City Night Piece. A dehcate though hardly cathohc gift of criticism is shown in the remarks on the theatres, and in the exquisite reverie, The Fame Machine. The latter shows that Goldsmith was already one of those who understood the greatness of Johnson, and it probably helped to bring about the friendship between the two men which began soon afterwards. A few months subsequent to the close of The Bee, The Citizen of the World (1760-1761) began to appear in a journal called The Public Ledger. Whether Goldsmith from the first projected a lengthy series of letters is not clear; it seems probable rather that he proposed to act according to circumstances, and the design was of a very elastic sort. Undoubtedly one of the advantages of the new venture, as compared with The Bee, was that it did start with a clear and intelhgible design. This design was not original. Goldsmith himself had translated for The Bee the passage in which Voltaire comments upon the surprise with which an Asiatic visitor might contemplate the religion of Europe; and there were other sources from which he got hints, or might have got them. Horace Walpole had, a few years before, written the Letter from Xo-Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at Lo?tdon, to his Friend Lien Chi at Peking. Swift had long ago conceived the idea of an Indian visiting England, and Steele had used it. There were besides IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 149 Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes. Whatever was the source from which Goldsmith took the idea, he wore the disguise loosely enough. He has been severely blamed for not studying the Chinese point of view more carefully, and more consistently maintaining it; and if the matter were of any importance he would deserve censure. But it is never good criticism to blame an author for not doing what he does not propose to do; and assuredly Goldsmith never seriously proposed to criticise England from the point of view of the Chinaman. A conception imparting unity was important, just as it is important to have a string for a necklace of pearls ; consistency to the Chinese point of view was as completely subordinate as the question of the texture of the string. Goldsmith's letters were instantly popular, and their effect seems to have been to increase greatly the circulation of the journal in which they appeared. They also raised Goldsmith's own reputation, and encouraged him to further composition of the same sort. In 1765 there appeared a collection of his essays, which was enlarged in the following year. Some, but not all, of these had previously appeared in The Bee and The Citizen of the World. By these periodicals then, and by this collection, we must judge Goldsmith as essayist. Perhaps the most important thing to notice about them, in view of the " inspired idiot " theory, is the extraordinary power, boldness and originality of thought shown in them. In this respect Goldsmith is greatly superior to Addison or any other of the periodical essayists. Of Goldsmith it must be said, as it has been said already of Hawkesworth, that he has nothing of their kind equal to the De Coverley papers. It is true he gives us the Man in Black and Beau Tibbs, and in the delineation of vagabonds he is unequalled. The cheery philosophy of the maimed soldier seems to be an anticipation of Mark Tapley, and the StroUing Player (who may be com- pared with the rascal in The Vicar of Wakefield) is excellent. ISO THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS Perhaps a touch of fellow-feeling and personal experience, and certainly a kindly sympathy, inspired Goldsmith in these papers. But still, for an equal to Sir Roger we must go out- side the essays to The Vicar of Wakefield. So far, then, if we confine the view to the essays, the palm must be assigned to Addison. In point of style both are admitted to be masters, but Goldsmith is the greater of the two. He is greater just because style, in the last resort, is inseparable from thought; just because of that provinciality, that commonplaceness of idea, which Matthew Arnold detected in Addison, and which is not in Goldsmith. The point is so important that it deserves a somewhat care- ful examination. Wherever we test him, it will be found that Goldsmith is perhaps the most original man of his time. We do not commonly associate his name with pohtical ideas; and yet he gives expression to political conceptions more profound than any contemporary, except Burke, had grasped. In the first place, The Cittze?i of the World makes it evident that Goldsmith was a criminal-law reformer before the days of criminal-law reform; and the well-known prison-scenes in The Vicar of Wakefield show that his protest was not a mere passing thought, but the outcoming of a dehberate and fixed conviction. Again, Goldsmith saw the menace of the strength of Russia long before those who called themselves statesmen were awake to it. He detected the danger of the position of England in the American colonies, and analysed in a masterly fashion the pretensions of England and France to regions which belonged to neither: — " Wherever the French landed, they called the country their own; and the English took possession wherever they came, upon the same equitable pretensions. The harmless savages made no opposition; and, could the intruders have agreed together, they might peaceably have shared this desolate country between them; but they quarrelled about the boun- IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 151 daries of their settlements; about grounds and rivers to which neither side could show any other right than that of power, and which neither could occupy but by usurpation." In other spheres of thought we find almost equal depth and originality. The essay On the E?igltsh Clergy, and Popular Preachers, is unsurpassed of its kind, and the criticisrii of the attempt to make converts by appeals to reason shows sound psychology: " Reason is but a weak antagonist when head- long passion dictates, in all such cases we should arm one passion against another: it is with the human mind as in nature, from the mixture of two opposites the result is most frequently neutral tranquillity." We even find this " inspired idiot " in the sphere of economics. The orthodox economists of the nineteenth century taught that the way to advance was to implant new desires. Goldsmith knew it before them. Speaking of the benefits of luxury in making a people wiser and happier, he says: " Examine the history of any country remarkable for opulence and wisdom, you will find they would never have been wise had they not been first luxurious; you will find poets, philosophers, and even patriots, marching in luxury's train. The reason is obvious. We then only are curious after knowledge, when we find it connected with sensual happiness. The senses ever point out the way, and reflection comments on the discovery." It would be easy to carp at this, and to point out that it is untrue to say that we are curious after knowledge only when it is connected with sensual happiness. " Here is to our next discovery, and may it do no good to anybody," is said to have been the toast at a meeting of savants ; and whether the tale be true or not, it faithfully represents the intellectual detachment of the man of science. If Goldsmith had been writing a scientific treatise, he would doubtless have been more guarded; but though he has laid himself open to a superficial criticism, what 152 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS he says is sound at the core. It is true that the desire to gratify the senses was at the start, and remains still, one of the great causes of the activity of intellect. It must be admitted that Goldsmith was not always consistent. In a well-known couplet in The Deserted Village he insists upon the evil state of the land " Where wealth accumulates, and men decay." And though this particular line may be explained in a sense consistent with the meaning of the essay in The Citizen of the World, the whole passage can hardly be so explained; nor can the argument with Johnson on the same subject, which is reported by Boswell. Goldsmith then was inconsistent. He never harmonised the phases of truth which he saw succes- sively; but there were few men of his time who saw so many. Perhaps, however, the most remarkable essay of all is that which tells the Eastern tale of Asem, and in doing so antici- pates one of the profoundest philosophical theories of the nineteenth century. In all ages men have pondered the problem of evil, and it would be rash to say that they have solved it now. But at least it will be confessed that a solution which commended itself to Hegel, to Hawthorne and to Browning is worthy of attention. What, then, shall be said about the man who anticipated them all, and who, long before the earliest of them, taught the doctrine which marked them as among the most original minds of their time ? This is what Goldsmith has done in the extraordinary essay entitled Jsem, an Eastern Tale ; or a Vindication oj the Wisdom oj Providence in the Moral Government of the World. The fact that this essay seems to have attracted no great attention is probably to be explained by its very originality.^ Just as there were re- formers before the world w-as ripe for reformation, so there may * A reviewer in Blackwood' s Magazine, volume 67, devotes much space to the essay, but simply to disagree with it, though he is on the whole appreciative of Goldsmith. IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 153 be philosophers before there are minds ready to grasp their thoughts. Asem is an apologue inculcating the doctrine of the necessity of evil. Asem has spent a fortune in benevolence, and, reduced to poverty, he experiences the same ingratitude as Timon of Athens. He is about to destroy himself, when a Genius appears to him who conducts him to a world similar to the earth, except that it is peopled with rational beings free from vice. Asem finds these rational beings pursued by the in- ferior animals which they have deemed it unjust to destroy by force or fraud. There are no handsome houses or cities, because these would only increase their possessors' pride and the envy of others. Asem asks to be introduced to some of their wisest men : " ' Wisdom ! ' rephed his instructor, ' how ridiculous! We have no wisdom here, for we have no occasion for it; true wisdom is only a knowledge of our own duty and the duty of others to us; but of what use is such wisdom here ? each intuitively performs what is right in himself, and expects the same from others. If by wisdom you should mean vain curiosity and empty speculation, as such pleasures have their origin in vanity, luxury, or avarice, we are too good to pursue them.' " There is no society, for " all societies are made either through fear or friendship," and there is no cause for fear and no difference in merit. Asem finds a wretch dying for want, because the inhabitants have never a single meal more than is necessary. They have no patriotism, for that is founded on the same selfish prin- ciple which leads a man to prefer his own interest to that of others. Nothing less than universal benevolence is free from vice. " ' Strange ! ' cries the disappointed pilgrim, in an agony of distress; ' what sort of a world am I now introduced to? There is scarce a virtue, but that of temperance, which they practise; and in that they are no way superior to the very brute creation. There is scarce an amusement which they 154 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS enjoy; fortitude, liberality, friendship, wisdom, conversation, and love of country, all are virtues entirely unknown here: thus it seems, that, to be unacquainted with vice is not to know virtue. Take me, O my Genius, back to that very world which I have despised : a world which has Allah for its contriver is much more wisely formed than that which has been pro- jected by Mahomet [this is the origin of the viceless world — it is made by Allah, because Mahomet dishked the vice of the other]. Ingratitude, contempt, and hatred, I can now suffer, for perhaps I have deserved them. When I arraigned the wisdom of Providence, I only showed my own ignorance; henceforth let me keep from vice myself, and pity it in others.' " Surely this is far more profound than Addison's Vision of Mirza, or any other similar compo:ition of the eighteenth century. Goldsmith is two or three generations before his time : we seem to hear the voice of Browning welcoming " the blessed evil," and condemning the " neutral best " of Rephan. If triteness of idea be the test, we can see how Addison may be provincial and Goldsmith " of the centre." The massive sense of Johnson is worthy of all honour; but Johnson is in every fibre a man of his own time, his intellect rarely reaches out, like Goldsmith's, to the future. There is nothing in Rasselas to rival the originality of Asem. There is less need to demonstrate the other merits of Gold- smith, once the " inspired idiot " is out of the way, and the great original genius estabhshed in his stead. Everybody acknowledges the wonderful charm of his style. Everybody feels the humour of Beau Tibbs. There is but one opinion about the essay on Westminster Abbey, with its solemn beginning, its satire, embittered perhaps by personal reminis- cence, on the " answerers of books," its excellent ridicule of the monuments of nobodies, and of the contemptible demand for pay to see the show, with the gate-keeper's answer: " ' As for your questions,' replied the gate-keeper, ' to be sure they IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 155 may be very right, for I don't understand them; but, as for that there threepence, I farm it from one — who rents it from another — who hires it from a third — who leases it from the guardians of the temple, — and we must all live.' " It is im- possible to miss the humour of the Newgate prisoner's anxiety for the EngHshman's prerogative, Hberty, the porter's convic- tion that the French are only fit to carry burthens, and the soldier's zeal for religion, which is so impressive to the China- man : " May the devil sink me into flames, (such was the solemnity of his objurgation), if the French should come over, our rehgion would be utterly undone." It would be easy to multiply examples of this kind, to show that in his Hghter vein Goldsmith is the equal of the best; the difficulty is rather to find where there is anything fit to set in the balance against the political and philosophic wisdom of his weightier papers. It is the " inspired idiot " theory that has prevented the general recognition of this; and it may be that, as Mr. Frankfort Moore maintains, the origin of that most unfortunate and most objectionable theory is to be found in an Enghsh (and Scottish) misunderstanding of Irish humour. If so, Goldsmith hoodwinked his contemporaries to the serious detriment of his own fame. After Goldsmith the periodical essay was in dechne, and no man of first-rate abihty touched it — the periodical essay of the hterary type, that is to say; for party men were active enough, and the warfare between Smollett in The Briton and Wilkes in The North Briton shows that political feehng could still enlist in its service the most eminent names in Hterature. Some of the old hands continued to write. Colman, in The Genius (i 761-1762) and in Terrce Filius (1763), carried on the sort of work he had begun in The Connoisseur. New hands too were enlisted, and some of them were at least respectable. The Essays Moral and Literary (1778- 1779) of Vicesimus Knox, though they were issued in volumes, possess all the character- 156 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS istics of the periodical essay. Their popularity showed that they suited the taste of the time, and the fact that many of them may still be read with pleasure is a proof that they are compositions of distinct merit. The Mirror (i 779-1 780) brings us into contact with another new writer. Henry Mackenzie (i 745-1 831) is best known as the author of The Man of Feeling, the very name of which is apt to excite prejudice in an age which can hardly bear sentimentalism from any lesser men than Sterne and Goethe. But Scott tells us that Mackenzie was " gayest of the gay, though most sensitive of the sentimental;" and while The Man of Feeling is the work with which his name is usually associated, he is really at his best in his essays in The Mirror and its successor, The Lounger (i 785-1 787), to which also he was the principal contributor. To win success with a periodical paper in a narrow society like that of Edinburgh in the eighteenth century was far more difficult than it would have been to do so in London; and in the concluding number of The Mirror Mackenzie showed that he was fully aware of the disadvantages under which he laboured. The popularity of this paper, therefore, and of The Lounger, is all the better testimony to their merits. Though they are not, of course, equal to the best of the London papers, they deserve a high place in the second class, and of Mackenzie's contributions it is not too much to say that a few of them will bear comparison with the best essays by the best essayists. The character of the man who is no one's enemy but his own is excellent, and so is the letter of Homespun on the great lady's visit, though the debt to The Vicar of Wakefield is too great. The paper on Burns {Lounger, No. 97) is most honour- able to Mackenzie. But his masterpiece is the Godmother {Lounger, No. 87). Lamb himself could hardly have drawn more skilfully the picture of her home and character: " She had an excellent memory for anecdote; and her stories, though sometimes long, were never tiresome; for she had been a woman IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 157 of great beauty and accomplishment in her youth, and had kept such company as made the drama of her stories respect- able and interesting. She spoke frequently of such of her own family as she remembered when a child, but scarcely ever of those she had lost, though one could see she thought of them often. She had buried a beloved husband and four children. Her youngest, Edward, ' her beautiful, her brave,' fell in Flanders, and was not entombed with his ancestors. His picture, done when a child, an artless red and white portrait, smelling at a nosegay, but very like withal, hung at her bed- side, and his sword and gorget were crossed under it. When she spoke of a soldier, it was in a style above her usual sim- plicity; there was a sort of swell in her language, which some- times a tear, for her age had not lost the privilege of tears, made still more eloquent. She kept her sorrows, like the devotions that solaced them, sacred to herself. They threw nothing of gloom over her deportment; a gentle shade only, like the fleckered clouds of summer, that increase, not diminish, the benignity of the season." The Observer (1785-1790) held in its day the position in the south that The Lounger held in the north, and it introduces among the essayists the name of Richard Cumberland (1732- 181 1), who wrote it. Cumberland was famous in his time for plays which are now no longer read. Much of his Observer too is obsolete; but it is interesting in two ways. In the first place, it attests the reaction which was beginning against the style of Johnson. One of the papers is devoted to an ex- amination of his style and Addison's, and it awards the palm to the latter. The second noteworthy feature is the element of narrative. This, in fact, constitutes the chief merit of The Observer. The story is akin to the drama, and in the latter Cumberland was a practised hand His experience stood him in good stead, the less exacting conditions of the narrative suited him better than the more stringent ones of the stage. 158 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS and the result is that his tales are remarkably good. Perhaps the best is the story of Nicholas Pedrosa. Witness to the reaction in favour of a simpler style than Johnson's is borne also by The Microcosm (1786-1787), an Etonian paper which would be worthy "of note even apart from its quite considerable merits. In the opening number Gregory Griffin, as the editor called himself, says that in the miniature world of Eton the observer " may see the embryo statesman, who hereafter may wield and direct at pleasure the mighty and complex system of European Pohtics, now employing the whole extent of his abihties to circumvent his companions at their plays, or adjusting the important differ- ences which may arise between the contending heroes of his little circle; or a general, the future terror of France and Spain, now the dread only of his equals, and the undisputed lord and president of the boxing-ring." So true is this that one of the principal writers to The Microcosm was Canning, destined afterwards to wield the whole power of the state; and though Arthur Wellesley had left a few years before, he had fought there " Bobus " Smith, another of the contributors, and con- quered him as he afterwards conquered mightier foes. The Microcosm was not quite so happy in its assertion that " the Grays and Wallers of the rising generation here tune their httle lyres." The authors of the Lyrical Ballads were not reared at Eton, nor were the other leaders of the revolutions in poetry, except Shelley, who was unborn in the day of The Microcosm. Still, the man to whom Byron owed the stanza of Beppo and Don Juan is not altogether negligible in the history of poetry; and John Hookham Frere too was a contributor to the Eton paper. There was abundance of talent in these young writers, and their periodical shows a maturity both of thought and of style which is surprising in view of their boyish years. At the same time, it cannot be pretended that their own merit would give these papers a permanent place in IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 159 literature. After the lapse of a century they are interesting not so much in themselves as for the after-history of the writers. Drake continues his indispensable guidance till 1809; but of the fifty papers or more that he enumerates after The Observer only one had gained a place in the classical canon; and though Drake calls The Looker-on (1792- 1794), by William Roberts, an " elegant and instructive work," it is so entirely a weak imitation of The Spectator as to be hardly readable at the present day. The periodical essay was dying. It had survived for a hundred years, some new paper from time to time rising by the merit of an unusually brilliant contributor or group of contributors above the mass of mediocre stuff. But change of circumstances made the decay now permanent. The novel was displacing the short story, and a new class of periodicals was springing up, a class catering, by a more complex organisation, for more varied needs. Strictly, perhaps, it is only the writers of periodical essays who ought to be described as imitators of Steele and Addison; but in some degree all the essayists of the eighteenth century were indebted to them, and it will be convenient to notice here a few writers who have been passed over in tracing the line of the periodicals. The first in order is Henry St. John, Lord f>' BoHngbroke (1678-175 1). Like most writers'^'Milg' time, ^ Bohngbroke occasionally contributed to the periodical papers; but it is not for his essays in The Examiner and The Craftsman y^ that he is remembered. In all his works it must be confessed that he is exceedingly disappointing. His skill is indisputable, and yet the modern reader is left wondering at the reputation he once enjoyed. He has nothing to commend him but style; and style, somehow, refuses to be divorced from substance, and loses its power to charm when it is so divorced. BoHng- broke has been praised by no less a critic than Lord Morley as ranking, " in all that musicians call execution, only below i6o THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS the three or four highest masters of Enghsh prose." But the same writer adds that " of all the writing in our literature, his is the hollowest, the flashiest, the most insincere." And certainly the second pronouncement is required to qualify the first. As far as mere device of words and structure of sentence go, the praise, emphatic as it is, is probably deserved. But for really effective style something more is required. The decisive condemnation of BoHngbroke is that, faultless as his writings are when regarded analytically, hardly a sentence of his grips the mind and remains there — a thing which cannot be said of any writer who deserves to be called great. It can be said of none of Bolingbroke's more prominent contempo- raries. Swift, Addison, Steele, Fielding have all written many things that refuse to be forgotten. So have his successors, Johnson and Goldsmith. In Bolingbroke memorable phrases like that about Ben Jonson — " He invades authors like a i monarch; and what would be theft in other poets is only ii victory in him " — are the rarest things imaginable. The reasons why Bohngbroke is so unsatisfactory are two. His thought is platitude. He makes a parade of philosophy, but gives expression to not one memorable principle, even in that sphere of politics with which he ought to have been famiUar. Familiar with it in a sense he certainly was, but familiar with its trickery rather than its underlying principles. And hence he is best, not in a pretentious piece hke The Idea of a Patriot King, but in the Letter to Sir William Windham, with its caustic criticism of the Pretender, and in the three papers. The Occasional Writer, satirising Walpole. Super- ficiality in philosophy might, however, be alleged against many who have nevertheless been effective essayists : Addison was not particularly profound, and still less was Steele. A more serious defect is the insincerity of Bolingbroke. This precludes that sense of contact with the man which atones for simphcity of thought, and sometimes even for triteness. IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON i6i Under Bolingbroke's writings there beats no human heart at all. Take the Reflections upon Exile, founded upon and imitated from Seneca, or Of the True Use of Study and Retirement. Apart from all consideration of the life of Bolingbroke, the reader feels therri to be conventidn'al, hollow and insincere; but when the facts of his life are taken into account the sentiments professed become half ludicrous and wholly nauseous. It is astonishing to read the character of such a man described by such a hand as Swift's, even though it was at an early stage of their acquaintance: " I think Mr. St. John the greatest young man I ever knew; wit, capacity, beauty, quickness of apprehension, good learning, and an excellent taste; the best orator in the House of Commons, admirable conversation, good nature, and good manners; generous, and a despiser of money. His only fault is talking to his friends in way of complaint of too great a load of business, which looks a httle Hke affectation; and he endeavours too much to mix the fine gentleman and man of pleasure with the man of business. What truth and sincerity he may have I know not: he is now but thirty-two, and has been Secretary above a year." Surely this phoenix might have produced something better than he has left behind him. The younger Pitt too is said to have declared that of all lost pieces of literature he would most rejoice to recover a speech of Bolingbroke. As Boling- broke's style is of a rhetorical cast, and as his besetting sins are less offensive in an oratorical dress than when otherwise expressed, it may well be that his speeches were better than his writings. But it is inconceivable that they were com- parable in value to many of the lost treasures of literature. And the reason of the failure of a richly-gifted man was just the absence of that truth and sincerity concerning which Swift was unqualified to speak. From Bolingbroke the shallowest to David Hume (171 1- / THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS 1776) the profoundest of British philosophers in the eighteenth century is a long step. But the greatness of Hume cannot be adequately shown here; for, in spite of his admirably lucid style, it is a greatness in philosophy more than in literature; and though he possessed some of the most engaging qualities of the essayist, he was too formal in his essays to show them freely. That he possessed such qualities is evident chiefly from his letters and from his admirable autobiography. These show the loathed" and dreaded sceptic as one of the most amiable and honourably independent of men. In respect of independence he is not unworthy of comparison with Words- worth himself, for he was as resolute as the poet to preserve by frugality his intellectual freedom. Hume has put it on record that in his youth he was as much attracted towards belles lettres as towards philosophy; but, excellent as is his literary style, there can be little doubt that his choice of philosophy was fortunate. If he had devoted himself exclusively to pure literature, he would certainly have been far less original than he was in philosophy, and no revolution would have been associated with his name, as it is with that of the man who roused Kant from his " dog- matic slumber." Hume's literary tastes were wholly those of the eighteenth century. As regards appreciation' of Shake- speare he was a Philistine of the Philistines. He was a great admirer of the French, and held that " with regard to the stage they have excelled even the Greeks, who far excelled the English." He admired that extraordinary epic. The Epigoniad of Wilkie; and though friendship may in this instance have led his judgment astray, he is so purely ' classical,' in the eighteenth-century meaning of the word, that we who have been touched by romance can sympathise with Coleridge's contempt for his literary judgments. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to regret that Hume did not infuse a larger portion of the literary, in another sense IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 165 than the critical, into his essays. One great section of these are simply the Treatise of Human Nature boiled down and rewritten with the more skilful pen of a writer now experienced. They are an integral part of philosophy. Others are described as " moral, poHtical and literary." It is here principally that the Hume with whom we are concerned shows himself, and here we may legitimately regret that the hterary element is not predominant. The whole atmosphere is philosophical, and though the style is such as philosophers — Enghsh philo- sophers at least — have rarely written, we should hardly suspect that the essays were written by a man who had been at any time equally interested in things literary. They reveal a mind extraordinarily keen to detect fallacy and fertile of profound suggestions drawn from philosophy and history. A few sentences expose the fallacy of the arguments that friendship cannot be disinterested, and that the virtuous are virtuous for the sake of praise. A single sentence in the essay Of the Liberty of the Press condenses the result of much reading and much reflection; and it is a result worthy of attention in these days of triumphant and confident democracy: " It will be found, if I mistake not, a true observation in politics, that the two extremes in government, liberty and slavery, commonly approach nearest to each other." Sometimes Hume's illus- trations combine simplicity and aptness in a remarkable degree and clinch an argument so that there is no more to be said. In the essay Of Eloquence he is arguing that where a number of men are nearly equal the fact of their equality is probably due to their mediocrity, and he goes on: "A hundred cabinet- makers in London can work a table or a chair equally well, but no one poet can write verses with such spirit and elegance as Mr. Pope." Hume in a confidential moment explains his own method, and reveals the secret of his effectiveness in argument and of the great influence he exercised in several fields — in i64 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS metaphysics, in economics and in political speculation. " When I am present," he says, " at any dispute, I always con- sider with myself, whether it be a question of comparison or not that is the subject of the controversy; and if it be, whether the disputants compare the same objects together, or talk of things that are wholly different." The most famous of all Hume's essays is that on miracles. It was this, even more than the profoundly sceptical character of his philosophy, that made his a name of fear to his contemporaries; because com- paratively few could understand the argument about cause, while all could follow, more or less, the reasoning on miracles. It proceeds on precisely the principle laid down above. The matter is a question of comparison between the weight to be assigned to human testimony and that to be attributed to the conjoint experience of mankind as to the uniformity of the laws of nature. Hume's contention that the latter must always outweigh the former made a profound impression at the time. To the modern man of science it is less satisfactory. We may take Huxley as representative, and Huxley's view is that human testimony, if it be only sufficient in quantity and satisfactory in quality, will not only shake but overthrow any ' law ' based on experience. It is less generally recog- nised that the argument of the essay is inconsistent with the fundamental principle of Hume's own philosophy. If cause itself is only invariable sequence, how can we refuse to credit a concurrence of testimony to the fact that the sequence has ceased to be invariable? Unconsciously, Hume had gone back to that ' necessity ' which he had before rejected, and argued very much as if there was something in nature irrevoc- ably fixed and immutably certain. The storm that broke over Hume's head on one occasion threatened his life, if we may believe the story of the woman who refused to pull him out of a bog-hole until he had repeated the Lord's Prayer; but it produced nothing worth remember- IMITATORS OF STEELE AND ADDISON 165 ing in literature. James Beattie (1735-1803) was supposed to have refuted him by Ins' EssayorTTruth, and Johnson, as well as smaller men, lavished praise upon the author. But the Essay on Truth and the other essays collected under Beattie's name are hardly true essays, they are rather short treatises, chiefly on questions of rhetoric and criticism, and they are elegant — a favourite word of the time — rather than strong or very original. Except for The Minstrel, Beattie is practically forgotten. Not so Junius. But in his case it is mystery, not Hterary merit, that keeps the famous Letters aHve. Who was Junius ? Nobody knows, and, unless some new document is found and settles the question, nobody ever will know. Human ingenuity has been so lavishly spent upon the problem that it is safe to assume that mere reasoning will never solve it. All that can be said is that it is highly probable that Sir Philip Francis was the man. The problem of authorship is difhcult enough to satisfy any one who has a taste for such diihculties. But the student of literature who turns to the Letters which have occasioned all the argument is bitterly disappointed. The style is artificial and pre- tentious. The subjects dealt with have interest for the historian, but little for the lover of hterature as such; and the spirit in which they are treated can hardly be too strongly condemned. [66 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS CHAPTER VII THE TRANSITION FROM THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY " He inherits more of the spirit of Steele than any man since his time." Such is the opinion pronounced in Table-Talk by HazHtt about Leigh Hunt, and if there be any doubt about its soundness, it can only be with respect to the eighteenth- century imitators of Steele. If we Hmit ourselves to the nine- teenth century, it is clear that Leigh Hunt has more affinity to the Queen Anne essayists than any contemporary or suc- cessor. The close association of HazHtt himself with Hunt in some of the enterprises in which this affinity was shown makes it convenient to take the two together, and to treat them as the writers who illustrate the transition from the charac- teristic manner of the eighteenth century. Leigh Hunt (i 784-1 859) was a Hterary man-of-all-work, whose struggles for a hvehhood fiU an interesting and not un- important chapter in the history of Hterature. Like Steele, he was important not only, perhaps not even chiefly, for what he himself wrote, but also for what he occasioned others to write. Like Steele, he was extraordinarily and indeed culpably improvident. It is difficult to pardon his dealings with his friends in the matter of money. In one year he borrowed from Shelley ^^1400, which he never repaid. On the contrary, he borrowed further sums, and left these likewise unpaid. Yet the generous lender, in the dedication of The Cenci, calls him " gentle, honourable, innocent and brave." There were two sides to the character of Hunt; a side which won the love of such men as Shelley and Lamb, and another which is pardonable only on the supposition that he was in TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY 167 certain respects abnormal, and was hardly more responsible than a Wind man is for failure to see. It is well known that Dickens was supposed to have painted him in Harold Skim- pole, and that the novelist denied having done so. But Macaulay, who knew the facts of Hunt's Hfe, in some of the last lines he ever wrote, expressed his surprise at the denial. There is much truth in the judgment of Byron, lively and sarcastic, but not malignant: " Leigh Hunt is a"good man and a good father — see his Odes to all the Masters Hunt; — a good husband — see his sonnet to Mrs. Hunt; — a good friend — see his Epistles to different people; — and a great coxcomb and a very vulgar person in everything about him." Hunt brought upon himself the publication of this letter, which contains other severe things as well as the phrases just quoted; for < Moore notes that he had omitted the part dealing with Hunt, i but decided to restore it on account of the tone of Hunt's book ^ — that is to say. Lord Byron and his Contemporaries ; with | regard to which the best that can be said is that Hunt himself repented that he had written it. From 1808, when, in alliance with Hazlitt, he started The f^ p^f^ Examiner as a Sunday paper for the discussion of politics, domestic economy and theatricals, for about thirty years. Hunt was the most active of Hterary journalists, playing in his time many parts and editing many periodicals. About two years after The Examiner he started The Reflector (1810-1811), a quarterly magazine dealing with politics as well as literature, for which Lamb and others wrote as well as Hunt. But Hunt's politics were of a kind which in those days were not altogether safe. He was charged with libelhng the Prince Regent in The Examiner, and was imprisoned for two years. The most serious consequences of the case, however, were the expenses in which it involved Hunt and his brother; and these sat lightly enough on a person of Hunt's peculiar ideas on questions of meum and tuum. The imprisonment did not inter- fc".; IJ^ i68 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS •. rupt his literary work, while it gave him a prominence to attain which he must otherwise have worked for years. Some time after his release he made a notable new development in The Examiner. He planned a series of papers in conscious imita- tion of The Spectator and The Tatler, and these papers were pubHshed in The Examiner under the title of The Round Table. But circumstances caused the plan to be modified, and made the resemblance to the Queen Anne writers less close than it ' was meant to be. Hazlitt has related how the landing of Napoleon from Elba dissolved the Round Table and drew the attention of the editor from the characteristic part of the work to poHtics. Thus it came about that The Round Table, as it was actually executed, was mainly the work~of Hazlitt, and that it consists principally of literary criticism. Before the close of his editorship of The Examiner Hunt had started The Indicator, which lived for about a year and a half, from the autumn of 1819 to the spring of 1821. The title was taken from " a bird of that name, who shows people where to find wild honey," and it is a better guide to the contents than most titles. The editor flattered himself, with a charac- teristic touch of vanity, that there was " nothing temporary whatsoever in it." It was followed by The Liberal (i 822-1 823), in which Hunt was associated with Byron and Shelley. Then came The Literary Examiner (1823), and, after a few years, \ The Companion (1828), which was practically a revival of ' The Indicator. It is the two last-named periodicals which make Hunt pre-eminently the nineteenth-century embodi- ment of the Queen Anne spirit. A httle later still, Hunt figures as a sort of nineteenth-century Defoe, editing and himself writing for more than a year a daily paper. The Tatler (i 830-1 832). Even Defoe had at no time issued more than five numbers of the Review a week — great and little together. Hunt had not Defoe's marvellous abundance, the strain was too great, and his health was seriously shaken. TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY 169 Ke was never afterwards capable of such exertions, and for '■. the remaining twenty-one years of his hfe his writings were h at any rate less copious, whatever may be thought of their ^ quality. Besides all this activity in journalism on his own responsi- bility. Hunt was a contributor to several periodicals, in particular to The New Monthly Magazine and, after Macvey Napier had succeeded Jeffrey, to The Edinburgh Review. Napier was something of a pedant and objected to the collo- quialism of Hunt's style. The mediation of Macaulay, who had a kindly feeling for Hunt and thought that there was merit in the colloquialism, was needed to keep the peace between the editor and his contributor. The quality of Leigh Hunt's work may be judged from Men^ Women and Books, A Jar oj Honey jrom Mount Hyhla and ^ Imagination and Fancy, which are volumes gathered from his journalistic essays. A great deal remains uncollected, much of it, doubtless, not worth collecting; but some, especially what ^ appeared in The Indicator, is in its own way excellent. These papers are partly essays in literary criticism, and partly personal essays flavoured by reminiscences of the Queen Anne writers. As a critic Hunt presents those puzzling incongruities which so strongly marked the men of his time 'with liardly any exception but Lamb. On the one hand, it has often been claimed for him that he was perhaps the first critic to do justice to Shelley and Keats. And this Is true. Yet, on the f / other hand. It cannot be called less than strange that the editor of The Examiner allowed the death of Keats to pass ^ without notice. Further, It has to be remembered that Hunt Is not always to be judged by the final form of his utterances. Notwithstanding the admiration he afterwards professed for Wordsworth and Coleridge, in The Feast of the Poets, as it originally appeared In The Reflector, he declares that Words- I lyo THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS ' \. f worth's second childhood had followed close on the first, and \ '^ f makes Apollo, between anger and mirth, ask whether there were ever such asses on earth as the two of them. Scott was abused as well. Was it a pure accident that all the three f poets thus reviled were Tories ? It seems possible that when the chief of the Cockney School, as Hunt was thought to be, was attacked by Blackwood, he was only hoist with a petard similar to his own, though, it may be, even more evil-smelhng. i The virus of party would seem to have attacked Hunt as well as his opponents. There is one other faihng to remember as against the praise which some have showered upon Hunt's criticism. That vulgarity with which Byron charged him affected the mind as well as the manners, and it is the secret of the extraordinary coincidence of expression as well as feeling which Lang has noted between Keats, Hunt's friend, and Lockhart his enemy, as we may not unfairly call the Blackwood reviewer. Each, in identical words, and doubt- less without knowledge the one of the other, charges Hunt with making " beautiful things hateful." It is a very severe condemnation of any critic. The first impulse' is to recoil from it; for the edited and expurgated Hun^ is often highly attractive. But the second and better thought is to try to explain it; and the explanation seems to lie in Hunt's vulgarity. We can see traces of this even in tlie edited volumes; and the fault is more conspicuous in the unedited essays. Hunt was a sentimentaHst — there is a hint of this too in the quotation from Byron; and, like other senti- mentalists, he was apt to overdo things, to be mawkish. By the very type of his intellect he tended to reduce the beautiful to the pretty. We need not sympathise with the virulent con- demnation pronounced upon the poem by Lockhart in order to see something of this in The Story of Rimini. Contrast it with the stern simplicity of the passage in Dante on which it is founded, and at once the sentimentalist, the devotee of the TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY 171 pretty, is apparent. What Hunt exhibited in his own works he not unnaturally admired in the works of others. This jarred upon the fastidious mind of Lockhart and shocked the Greek ^ taste of Keats. ""^ Yet it would be unjust to leave the impression that Hunt ^ as a critic is deserving merely of censure. On the contrary, i within his own limits and for purposes simply of appreciation, i he is admirable. Those who have lavished praise on his criticism have been wrong only in neglecting the other side. In order to strike the just mean it is necessary to remember two things: first, that where any sort of prejudice is roused \ Hunt's judgment is worthless. Hence the censures of The I Feast of the Poets. He was no worse than his contemporaries, but neither was he any better. The second point to re- member is that in censure, even when it is unprejudiced, Hunt is seldom happy. The reason is that though he makes a show i of reasoning he merely feels. He was singularly sensitive, and so when he trusted feeling he was almost invariably right. This is the secret of the charm of such of his critical work as remains still easily accessible. Hunt communicates to the : reader his own happy enjoyment. He has an atmosphere of genial good-nature. The partisan is forgotten; he was never the real Hunt; it was the force of circumstances rather than | predilection that made him play the part. He does himself | justice only when he forgets that he has a part to play; and it is then that we get glimpses of the man whom Shelley and \ Lamb loved, and on whom Carlyle and Macaulay looked at j^ least with friendly eye. The other side of Leigh Hunt's work is more important for the present purpose. For the last century we have had many critics, but comparatively few essayists who could and would be confidential. Hunt was so always; it was his nature, and " nature will out," even in criticism. But there are degrees; and, while the man Hunt is never far in the background, there THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS are essays — many in The Indicator and The Companion, some in most of the collections — in which he comes prominently into the foreground. Such essays are his most pleasing pro- ductions. The Autobiography, so readable, so hkeable, some- times so unconsciously amusing, may be regarded as an enlarged essay of the sort. It is this intimacy which gives charm to those favourites of Lamb, the papers on Coaches and their Horses and the pathetic one on the Deaths of Little Children. There are reminders of Lamb himself in such papers. The likeness is very striking in that admirable one, the Inside of an Omnibus, in Men, Women, and Books. We seem to be reading Lamb himself when Hunt calls the omnibus " the man-of-war among coaches, — the whale's back in the metropolitan flood," and when he goes on, " We cannot say much for the beauty of the omnibus; but there is a certain might of utility in its very bulk, which supersedes the necessity of beauty, as in the case of the whale itself, or in the idea that we entertain of Dr. Johnson who shouldered porters as he went, and ' laughed like a rhinoceros.' " Hunt's kindly humanity is pleasantly illustrated in the remarks on an imprisoned eagle in A Visit to the Zoological Gardens ; the very spirit of the country is in The Month of May ; and it would be hard to con- ceive a better rendering in words of the impression produced by a hot day in summer than that which he gives in A Now. Evidently it was a sound instinct that turned Hunt for a model to the Queen Anne essayists; for the quahties he dis- plays are much the same as theirs. But there is a difference in the proportions in which the ingredients are mingled. Addison and Steele were almost wholly men of the town; Hunt was a man of the town too; but he was by nature, and he never ceased to be, a man of the country as well. Hence articles such as those last mentioned are far more frequent in his case than in theirs, while articles on the follies of the town and the fripperies of fashion are less frequent. TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY 173 One thing Hunt lacked which was requisite to make him a great essayist — mass and weight of thought. It is a defect which is apparent in every essayist of his class, but in Addison less than in Hunt. Pleasant as much of the latter's writing is, the texture is thin; and this weakness will probably in the long run be fatal to him. Light literature, Hke light wine, does not keep long. Nor will Hunt's style permanently save him. It is an easy and agreeable but not a great style. Sometimes its colloquialism, right enough for the purpose in view, verges on excess, and the reader is tempted to call it an illustration of Hunt's vulgarity. Napier actually used the word, but it was unjust; at least it would be unjust as apphed to Hunt's habitual style, however it might be defended as descriptive of particular phrases. Homely and chatty rather are the words descriptive of this facile talk in which the writer makes a friend of the reader and a companion in all the meanderings of his thought. A very different and a much greater man was Hunt's coad- jutor and friend William HazHtt (1778-1830), one of those who stand in the very front rank of English essayists, one who, but for the far larger proportion of ordinary matter he has left, might almost challenge comparison with Lamb himself. But because he is much less uniform in excellence, and still more because we often detect in Hazlitt a flavour of bitterness in place of the sweet humanity which gives Lamb that ineffable charm, his place must be decidedly lower. Decidedly lower, yet higher than that which he yet enjoys. In order to make it clear from the start that in Hazlitt we have to deal with a man hardly less emphatically an essayist by temperament than are Montaigne and Lamb, it may be well to quote from Hazlitt near the end of his career. In A Farewell to Essay-writing he embodies, probably of set purpose, the innermost essentials of that temperament. The personal note, the intimate confidence, the weaving of all elements. / 174 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS reading, observation, disposition, into one web of experience — all this is seen and heard in a single passage: — " What a walk is this to me! I have no need of book or companion — the days, the hours, the thoughts of my youth are at my side, and blend with the air that fans my cheek. Here I can saunter for hours, bending my eye forward, stop- ping and turning to look back, thinking to strike off into some less trodden path, yet hesitating to quit the one I am in, afraid to snap the brittle threads of memory. I remark the shining trunks and slender branches of the birch trees, waving in the idle breeze; or a pheasant springs up on whirring wing; or I recall the spot where I once found a wood-pigeon at the foot of a tree, weltering in its gore, and think how many seasons have flown since ' it left its little life in air.' Dates, names, faces come back — to what purpose ? Or why think of them now ? Or rather why not think of them oftener ? We walk through life, as through a narrow path, with a thin curtain drawn around it; behind are ranged rich portraits, airy harps are strung — yet we will not stretch forth our hand and lift aside the veil, to catch glimpses of the one, or sweep the chords of the other. As in a theatre, when the old- fashioned green curtain drew up, groups of figures, fantastic dresses, laughing faces, rich banquets, stately columns, gleaming vistas appeared beyond; so we have only at any time to ' peep through the blanket of the past,' to possess ourselves at once of aU that has regaled our senses, that is stored up in our memory, that has struck our fancy, that has pierced out hearts : yet to all this we are indifferent, insensible, and seem intent only on the present vexation, the future disappointment." It was long, however, before Hazlitt reached so high a point as this, where for wealth of intellect and imagination and for nervous English he is the rival of the greatest. He himself says, strangely, " an improving poet never becomes a TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY 175 great one." He forgets Shakespeare, though he criticised him so often and so well; for up to the middle of his career Shakespeare was an improving poet, if ever there was one. He forgets himself; for, though he was not a poet, there are poetic qualities all through the work of Hazlitt, as there are in the passage just quoted; and we have his own word for it that his power of expression was of slow growth. It is true he was precocious, and wrote well enough at thirteen to be accepted by a newspaper. But in the essay On Public Opinion he says with truth that his writings are not " so properly the works of an author by profession, as the thoughts of a meta- physician expressed by a painter; " and again: " Till I began to paint, or till I became acquainted with the author of The Ancient Mariner, I could neither write nor speak." Still more emphatic testimony to the influence of Coleridge is borne by My First Acquaintance with Poets.^ Such then is the genesis and such the character of the style of Hazlitt. He started a metaphysician, accustomed to meditate " on Fate, Free Will, Foreknowledge absolute." Encouraged by Coleridge he wrote his first book, a philo- sophical one; and it was as hard and dry as the hardest and driest treatise of the Scottish school — infinitely harder and drier than that Treatise of Human Nature, whose superiority to the essays of its author Hazlitt was one of the first to appreciate. The latter are by comparison, he says, " mere elegant trifling, light summer reading." Then the meta- physician becomes a painter, and colour and glow are added to the style. Most of this work had been done before Hazlitt began to write the essays by which he is now known; but still, within the period of the writings which are read to this day there is ample evidence of that improvement which he deemed ^ And yet it appears that Hazlitt wrote the highly objectionable article about Coleridge in The Edinburgh Review, 1816. Verily the ways of the critics of the early nineteenth century are past finding out. u^^ ^iy6 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS fe* * ^''' the mark of mediocrity, at least in poets. If a list of favourite essays were drawn out, a very large percentage of them would be found to belong to the last decade of Hazlitt's life. Early in his career Hazlitt was associated with Cobbett, to whose Register he contributed letters in reply to Malthus. The two men were united by common political principles, and both in particular hated and tried to despise Malthus. But the personal relations between them were shght: Hazlitt says that he saw Cobbett only once. Far more important was the connexion between Hazlitt and Hunt. Much of Hazlitt's best work was done for periodicals of which the latter was, or had been, editor. His connexion with The > Examiner, to which he continued to contribute after Hunt ^^ had ceased to be editor, was specially important. Among periodicals outside the Hunt group, he contributed to The New Monthly Magazine, The Edinburgh Review, and, from its foundation in 1820, to the memorable London Magazine. Hazlitt's essays, like Hunt's, are divisible into two classes — essays in literary criticism, and essays on miscellaneous subjects, the latter being often of an intimate and personal nature. In both spheres Hazlitt stands very high; in both he is distinguished above all for just that quality which Hunt lacked — virility. As a critic he is hardly surpassed in English, unless it be by Coleridge and Lamb, both of whom had the indescribable and incommunicable power of divination, the highest and rarest of all critical gifts, which Hazlitt lacked. He achieves his ends in criticism by virtue of a sound but not an inspired taste, an understanding of ultra-masculine strength, trained powers of reasoning and a most incisive style. He had thus the two gifts, of which Hunt possessed only one. These critical gifts are displayed in two volumes of essays — Characters of Shakespeare^ s Plays and The Spirit of the Age, and also in three volumes of lectures which have much the character of essays — Lectures on the English Poets TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY 177 Lectures on the English Comic Writers, and Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. In Elizabethan criticism Hazlitt must yield to both Lamb and Coleridge. He had not steeped himself in the literature as they had. Of course he knew Shakespeare thoroughly, and the Characters are drawn with penetrating skill; but he had far less of the illuminating sympathy in the light of which the other two worked. This, indeed, is Hazlitt's defect throughout, and not merely — naturally not even chiefly — in the criticism of the Elizabethans. There was acid in his nature, of which from time to time a drop exudes and blurs the lines. " No man," says Carlyle, " can pronounce dogmatically, with even a chance of being right, on the faults of a poem, till he has seen its very best and highest beauty." But this best and highest beauty is visible only to the sym- pathetic critic, never to the acidulous. Hazlitt's bitterness gives his criticism a hard tone. His sentences fall like blows of the hammer on the anvil. He is compelling, not winning. If he gains the victory, it is a victory of the intellect rather than the emotions; while, if the reader starts with a prepossession against the conclusion towards which he is working, the victory will probably not be gained at all. The sun and not the wind conquered the cloaked traveller. On the other hand, it is written that the violent take the kingdom of heaven by force; and Hazlitt's strength is so superb that not unfrequently he gains his end by violence. In some measure Hazlitt's Elizabethan criticism has been superseded by subsequent criticism, though much of the work of that powerful intellect can never be superseded. It is individual. Scholarship advances, and in mere knowledge the present is superior to the past; but only a new Hazlitt could do again and do better that into which HazHtt put himself. But among his critical writings we see this in the highest degree in the English Comic Writers and in The Spirit M I 4' 178 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS of the Age ; in the former because it was Hazlitt's special subject; in the latter, notwithstanding some blurs from the acid, because it was written by Hazlitt at the very acme of his powers and dealt with subjects his interest in which could not fail to be personal. No critical document more instructive has come down to us. Every judgment it contains is worthy of careful consideration, though not all are likely to be accepted now. But the instruction is hardly less from what is omitted than from what is in- / eluded. It is one of the enigmas of the criticism of the ' period that there is no essay on Shelley or on Keats. Had the author been Jeffrey or Lockhart there would have been little cause for surprise; but how are we to explain such omissions on the part of a leader of the romantic school of criticism — of a member, moreover, of that so-called Cockney School, to which Keats also was supposed to belong ? Judged by what it contains. The Spirit of the Age is open to the criticism that it shows the prejudice which is the special danger of the criticism of contemporaries, as well as that acidity already noted. For illustration of the former it is sufficient to contrast the articles on Gifford and on Jeffrey. The severity with which the former is treated was, in Hazlitt, natural and excusable. There is, moreover, much truth in the criticism. But assuredly the essay was not written in a judicial spirit. It is prejudiced, a personal grudge is as gall in the ink. Jeffrey certainly deserved better than Gifford; but from Hazlitt Jeffrey gets more generous treatment than is accorded to men who are unquestionably superior in turn to him. But, for the purposes of literature, Gifford was the Quarterly and Jeffrey was the Edinburgh, and the organs are contrasted as well as the men. Here it is that the obliquity of Hazlitt's vision is betrayed. " In 7he Edinburgh Reviezv the talents of those on the opposite side are always extolled plena ore, — in The Quarterly TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY 179 Review they are denied altogether, and the justice that is in this way withheld from them is compensated by a proportion- able supply of personal abuse. A man of genius who is a lord, and who publishes with Mr. Murray, may now and then stand as good a chance as a lord who is not a man of genius and who publishes with Messrs. Longman: but that is the utmost extent of the impartiality of the Quarterly. From its account you would take Lord Byron and Mr. Stuart Rose for two very pretty poets; but Mr. Moore's Magdalen Muse is sent to Bride- well without mercy, to beat hemp in silk stockings. In the Quarterly nothing is regarded but the political creed or external circumstances of a writer; in the Edinburgh nothing is ever adverted to but his literary merits. Or if there is bias of any kind, it arises from an affectation of magnanimity and candour in giving heaped measure to those on the aristo- cratic side in politics, and in being critically severe on others." The critic of the critics doth protest too much. It would have been wiser to admit the existence of a few spots in the sun; the reader is put upon his guard by the unmeasured praise for impartiality of an organ written almost wholly by Whigs, and an unqualified condemnation of a rival organ written almost wholly by Tories. It is the extreme of the partisan spirit to see nothing but stainless white on one side and only the blackness of the pit on the other. Clearly Hazlitt will prove no safe guide where party prejudice can enter. Evidences of the bitterness of Hazlitt are to be found every- where. They are so frequent as to give a tone to the whole of his criticism, and they leave the impression of a certain want of generosity. It is true he awards praise as well as censure, but there is hardly an essay in The Spirit of the Age which would be described as warm-hearted, unless it be the page or two devoted to Leigh Hunt. Even where HazHtt's prejudices incline him to favour the writer he is criticising, he usually qualifies his approval so as to make it hardly i8o THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS palatable to the subject of it. Thus he does more than justice to Sir James Mackintosh, but his panegyric is almost annulled by the remark that there was nothing original in him. " Mr. Mackintosh's Lectures," he says, " were after all but a kind of philosophical centos. They were profound, brilliant, new to his hearers; but the profundity, the brilliancy, the novelty were not his own. He was like Dr. Pangloss (not Voltaire's, but Coleman's), who speaks only in quotations; and the pith, the marrow, of Sir James's reasoning and rhetoric at that memorable period might be put within inverted commas." Or take again the essays on Coleridge and on Wordsworth. Though the critic is conscious that the poets are men of high endowment, there is something grudging in the acknowledg- ment, and there is no stint when he comes to pointing out defects. Even though most of the defects are real, a more generous man would either not have pointed them out at all, or he would have contrived a different way of doing so. Truth is good, but not all truth at all times; and allusions to Wordsworth as " the spoiled child of disappointment," or to Coleridge's opium habit, are in bad taste : " Alas ! ' Frailty, thy name is Genius ! ' — What is become of all tliis mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity ? It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing para- graphs in the CownVr.— Such and so little is the mind of man ! " He who wishes to understand why, notwithstanding draw- backs so serious, Hazlitt remains unsurpassed in English criti- cism except by Coleridge and Lamb — perhaps, if allowance be made for the mass of his work, unsurpassed by any — has only to turn to the splendid paragraph immediately preceding tliis quotation — where, through two pages before we reach a full stop, in English crystal-clear though loaded with thought and rich with colour, Hazlitt traces the history of Coleridge's mind from his absorption in the system of Hartley. Who else could have written it ? Here, in the proverbial nutshell, are the TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY i8i ingredients of Hazlitt's criticism, the secret of his greatness, notwithstanding the defect personal and the defect due to the time which have just been noted. In the first place, we see in the passage referred to the value of that training in philo- sophy with which HazHtt began. In this respect he had no rival but Coleridge; and while Coleridge lost himself in the maze Hazlitt remained master of himself and of his subject. A knowledge of philosophy is an accomplishment indispensable in the critic who would follow Coleridge; but it served Hazlitt well in many another case where the need was less obvious. To this training is due also at least a part of that copiousness of intellect which marks Hazlitt in all his work. The other side of his mind is seen in his mastery of metaphor and fertility in illustration. Here the artist joins hands with the meta- physician, and it is the union of the two which makes not only HazHtt the critic but Hazlitt in the whole of his literary compass. Even better than the critical essays are the miscellaneous essays of Hazlitt. Here, too, the aggregate bulk is great, and the quality of the best is excellent. Of The Round 7 able much is critical, but much also belongs to the miscellaneous class — part philosophical in the easy Addisonian fashion, part practical; for so no doubt Hazlitt would have considered the essay On the Causes of Methodism — a sect for which he shared Sydney Smith's dislike, and against which he wrote with wit more eflFective because more restrained than Smith's. But his best writings in this class are to be found in the collections now entitled Table Talk, Sketches and Essays and Winterslozc. One of the secrets of his charm is the variety of his interests, which is illustrated compendiously in Merry England. Books of all sorts, politics, sports and games, prize-fighting, pictures and the stage — Hazlitt knows about them all, likes them all, has wisdom and wit to utter with regard to all. He is as zealous about the champion of the games of fives as about a ,rf 182 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS J i' great poet, and in these days would have had an extensive knowledge of " records." He was alive to the shortcomings of the man who limited his interest to books, and wrote pun- gently on the ignorance of the learned. Were he living now, he would be among those educational reformers who insist that the most serious defect of our system is that it is too bookish. He liked to satirise men of one idea. A philo- sopher himself, he yet saw as clearly as any one the absurdity of dragging formal philosophy into everything. " Some," he says, " descant on the Kantean philosophy. There is a con- ceited fellow about town who talks always and everywhere on this subject. He wears the Categories round his neck like a pearl-chain; he plays off the names of the primary and transcendental qualities Hke rings on his fingers. He talks of the Kantean system while he dances ; he talks of it while he dines, he talks of it to his children, to his apprentices, to his customers." Elsewhere he remarks that " he must be a poor creature indeed whose practical convictions do not in almost all cases outrun his dehberate understanding." Hazhtt knew well the charm of snatches of autobiography, and has given many. My first Acquaintance with Poets is wholly of this character, and Of Persons one would wish to have seen, its successor among the Winterslow essays, partakes of it, though there we learn more about Lamb than about HazUtt. We have it again in the admirable essay On Living to One's Selfi and another phase in the no less admirable one On a Sun- Dial, as well as in that Farewell to Essay-writing, already quoted. Almost everywhere, in short, we have such revela- tions. He pictures his father, he tells us the reason why he himself is " irreclaimably of the old school in painting," he reveals tastes and pursuits in a quotation modified for his own ends — " if thou hast not seen the Louvre thou art damned." The most serious phases of his mind are brought to light in the more philosophical essays. His stubbornness TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY 183 and tenacity of view appear in the essay On Consistency of Opinion. " I would quarrel," he says, " with the best friend I have sooner than acknowledge the absolute right of the Bourbons. I see Mr. Northcote seldomer than I did, because I cannot agree with him about the Catalogue Raisonne. I re- member once saying to this gentleman, a great while ago, that I did not seem to have altered any of my ideas since I was sixteen years old." On the Past and Future reveals the man who, notwithstanding his intense interest in the present, lives in the past : " What is it in fact that we recur to oftenest ? What subjects do we think or talk of? Not the ignorant future but the well-stored past." Northcote had an effective retort to the extraordinary statement just quoted as to the fixity of HazHtt's ideas: " Why then, you are no wiser now than you were then; " and HazHtt's attempt at a reply is not very successful. No doubt what he said about himself indicated a real weakness; but if it had been the whole truth he would have been " a poor creature indeed." In point of fact it is true mainly of the understanding — opinions as to the absolute right of the Bourbons, and so on, — and Hazhtt himself bears witness that he who does not go beyond that is negligible. And if his opinions remained unchanged, his effective mastery of them and his power of expounding them were incomparably greater at forty than they were at sixteen. Hazhtt is one of the masters of aphorism. We see this power constantly in his essays — a pregnancy of expression, where a single sentence would bear expansion into an essay, as in the saying, " common sense is tacit reason." But of course the place where such condensed wisdom is most fre- quent is the Characteristics, a collection which gives its author a place beside Ben Jonson and Bacon and HaUfax, though somewhat lower than these. He could also be copious, though never verbose. When in the mood — though this was rare — THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS he could be extremely effective in grotesque portraiture. " Look at Sir William . Calipash and calipee are written in his face: he rolls about his unwieldy bulk in a sea of turtle-soup. How many haunches of venison does he carry on his back! He is larded with jobs and contracts; he is stuffed and swelled out with layers of bank-notes, and in- vitations to dinner! His face hangs out a flag of defiance to mischance : the roguish twinkle in his eye with which he lures half the city and beats Alderman hollow, is a smile re- flected from unsunned gold ! Nature and Fortune are not so much at variance as to differ about this fellow. To enjoy the good the Gods provide us is to deserve it. Nature meant him for a Knight, Alderman, and City-Member; and Fortune laughed to see the goodly person and prospects of the man ! " If this were read in Henry IV., it would be held worthy of the context. And yet one masterly touch of Sydney Smith's on the same character surpasses it all: "A cayman has some- times come out of the Oroonoque, at Angustura, near the public walks where the people were assembled, seized a full- grown man, as big as Sir William Curtis after dinner, and hurried him into the bed of the river for his food." It is obvious that the relations between HazHtt and Leigh Hunt were external, or at least that they did not imply similarity of mind and character. Hunt liked and admired Hazhtt, and Hazlitt liked Hunt well enough to suppress the contempt which probably mingled with his liking. They worked so much together that it is impossible to disjoin their names; but to speak of them as members of the same ' school ' is to misuse words even more seriously than they are misused in the similar conjunction of Southey with Wordsworth As a critic Hazlitt was nearly everything Hunt was not. He built, as we have seen, on a firm foundation of the intellect, while Hunt's criticism was essentially emotional, and was untrustworthy whenever it attempted to be something TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY 185 different. Nor could two styles well be more unlike than theifs^on the one hand, English easy, famihar, diffuse, almost garrulous; on the other, terse, strong, nervous sen- tences expressing the ideas of a trained thinker, and some- times by a single word getting to the heart of the subject. There was one other periodical which also carried on the spirit of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, with sufficient skill to deserve notice. This was The Etonian^ of which the mainstay was Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839), who was assisted by Henry Nelson Coleridge, John Moultrie, and several others who afterwards won some measure of fame. They, and especially Praed, take many hints from the Queen Anne essayists, both for subjects and for manner of treatment. On the Practical Bathos, Not at Home, and Mr. LozelVs Essay on Weathercocks are all essays in the old manner. They are bright with wit, and it might have been expected that their author, when he reached the maturity of his powers, would take high rank among essayists. It can hardly be said that Praed's subsequent contributions to Knight's Quarterly and The London Magazine quite redeem the promise of his boyhood. It is not as an essayist, nor as a writer of prose, but as the author of some of the most perfect vers de societe we possess, that he retains his place in literature. If we regard Defoe as the predecessor of Steele, we must look upon the eighteenth-century periodical as arising out of the political essay, to which also it drifted back. We may therefore illustrate another phase of the transition by reference to two or three of the few political writers of the period of the Revolution who still deserve consideration as men of letters. Of these one of the most remarkable was Thomas Paine (i 737-1 809), who, along with a natural gift of style, had that sincerity which gives vitality to writings much worse than his. " What I write," he says, " is pure nature, and my pen and my soul have ever gone together." The violence of i86 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS his politics and the virulence with which he wrote about England naturally enough blinded many contemporaries to his merits. At the distance of more than a century we can regard him dispassionately, and the result of such regard is that he is seen to be no inconsiderable man of letters, and one who, in spite of excesses, embodied in his writings much sound thought. By birth Paine was EngUsh, in his life and work he was mainly American. Like other Americans of his time he became partly French, and some of his pamphlets were written in the French language. He began his hterary career in the journals of Philadelphia. Some of his early papers are imita- tions of the Queen Anne essayists, and it seems probable that, had Paine lived in quiet times and earned his bread as a journaHst, he would have ranked among their later followers. For example, we find among his writings An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex, whose very title proclaims its affinity to them; and an imaginative paper entitled Cupid and Hymen, wherein the former is the champion of marriage for love, while the latter promotes the marriage of convenience, would have caused Steele to welcome him as a contributor. Nezo Anecdotes of Alexander the Great is of the class of dreams which figure in The Spectator ; but Paine's political interests are apparent in the degradation of Alexander, who is seen in the shades under the guise of a horse, and afterwards of a bug which is chopped up by a tom-tit. Horatio thought that to trace the noble dust of Alexander till it was found stopping a bung-hole was to consider too curiously. What would he have said about thus tracing the nobler soul of Alexander 1 The divinity that of old hedged kings was no longer a very efficient fence on the eve of American independence. What determined Paine's career was the movement which had that great result. He himself contributed not inconsider- ably to it. His pamphlet Common Sense, issued in 1776, TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY 187 had an extraordinary effect. It is forcible, lucid and acute; and, thougTi marred by an absurd straining of theory in obvious contradiction to facts, as in the assertion that in England the will of the king was as much the law of the land as in France, it contains much that is sound and true. At this stage in his career Paine found himself the ally of Burke, whose opposition to the American policy of the English government was, of course, welcome to the party to which Paine belonged. Afterwards, when Burke recoiled from the excesses of the Revolution, Paine's chief work, the Rights of Man, was written as a reply to the Rejlections. The Rights of Man, however, and The Age of Reason, a kind of theo- logical companion-piece, are not essays but treatises; and Paine's chief claim to rank as an English essayist rests upon the series of papers entitled The Crisis which he contributed to The Pennsylvania Journal between 1776 and 1783. They are poHtical in purpose, but they are also literary in style. There is no better example of Paine than the opening sentences, the first of which especially became famous; the paper is all the more worthy of note because at a critical juncture it was read by the command of Washington to his soldiers : — ' These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives anything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated." This has the ring of oratory. The note, though somewhat metalHc;ts highly effective; and, after all, the clash of metal i88 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS was in the air. It was right that the Uterary note should be in unison. The Marseillaise also is metallic; and here, as in the Marseillaise too, a tone of poetry softens the blare of the trumpet. The fervour of the love of freedom and hatred of tyranny is almost Miltonic. By such gleams of imagination Paine vindicates his position in literature. They are not very frequent, for the subjects with which he dealt were not usually of a kind to encourage them, but they are sufficient to reveal the man. A better illustration of this phase of Paine's mind may be found in the paper addressed to Sir WilHam Howe near the end of The Crisis : — " However men iriay differ in their ideas of grandeur or of government here, the grave is nevertheless a perfect republic. Death is not the monarch of the dead, but of the dying. The moment he obtains a conquest he loses a subject, and, like the foolish king you serve, wiU, in the end, war himself out of all his dominions." The prevalent atmosphere of The Crisis is, however, that of logical argument, satire and invective. The invective is powerful, and the satire pungent. Of the numerous " un- maskings " of Junius, more than one has " revealed " Thomas Paine; and if it were merely a matter of power of invective, Paine certainly had it in sufficient degree. It would be easier to match the most biting passages in Junius from Paine, than it would be to adduce from Junius passages showing the imaginative gift of Paine. In the same group may be put William Godwin (i 756-1 836). The author of Political Justice belongs^to the class of philo- sophers, and the author of Caleb Williams to that of novelists; but Godwin also wrote The Enquirer (1797), and for that reason he has a small place among the essayists. But the quaHties of Godwin were not such as to make the place a high one. He is far too much of a pedant and a doctrinaire, his manner is too dictatorial. He is rather a formal thinker than a wise man; TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY 189 and formalism gravitates towards the treatise. The errors to which the second-rate theorist is prone are evident in the essays as well as in Political Justice. They show themselves in Godwin's doctrine of education : " Punishment would find no place in a truly excellent system of education; even angry looks and words of rebuke would be wholly excluded " — a doctrine which would be sound were there no offending Adam to wliip out. They show themselves too in a love of liberty pushed to fanaticism, and beyond fanaticism even to silHness. Godwin thought the condition of a negro slave, " in many respects preferable to that of the youthful son of a free-born European;" and the reason for this sage opinion is that when the negro's labour was done, his master concerned himself no further, whereas " the watchful care of the parent is endless. The youth is never free from the danger of its grating inter- ference." How, it may be asked in wonder, " how did the ^ | fooHsh ever pass for wise " by reason of such solemn per- versity as tliis ? To this class belongs also Wilham Cobbett (i 762-1 835), a free-lance who in his own day was hiardly looked upon as entitled to any place in Uterature at all, but who is now recognised as the master of a style not unworthy to be named along with that of Swift, on which it is modelled. Cobbett's personal character colours this style. By his abusive pen he made two hemispheres too hot to hold him, though, fortunately for him, the maximum heat was not generated in both simul- taneously. English in almost everything, he was Irish in his tendency to be " agin the Government;" and the sharpness of his criticism kept him all through Hfe a persona ingrata to those in power. His poHtical writings are extraordinarily virulent. But allowance has to be made; it was the habit of the time; virulence prevailed, as we have seen, even in the calmer sphere of literature; and it may be that Cobbett's cUentele would have mistaken moderation for weakness. Not m /■ 190 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS that he was swayed by any such consideration; violence was natural to him. It has unfortunately spoilt as literature great part of the Political Register, and it may be said that it is only in the Rural Rides, extracted from the Register, that Cobbett still lives, and deserves to live. These are simple, idiomatic and racy to a rare degree. The short sentences, as a rule, contain the plainest statement of fact. But, unadorned as it is, the statement is always effective. Cobbett's earnestness makes him always respectable, his fervour of heart renders him effective. Indignation makes his prose, as it made Juvenal's verse. He rode abroad in the country, and turned upon it an eye made keen and intelligent by his own peasant upbringing. In spite of much violence and exaggeration and many inconsistencies, there is not a little in his writings that is praiseworthy in substance as well as in style. No one else in his time was so keenly alive to the danger which threatened the country from the disproportionate growth of cities. London was a foul wen; wholesome life demanded the fostering of the rural population, farmers and labourers alike. Whatever told against their interest he denounced, whether it was the action of a landlord who rack- rented his tenants, or of a statesman who imposed a tax that pressed heavily on the rural interest. What would he have said about Cobdenism and the decay of agriculture it has brought about ? There was a foundation of reality to nearly all his invective. He is loud in abuse of the " locusts called middlemen; " and however innocent the individual middle- man may be, no one will now dispute that the multitude of middlemen and the magnitude of their share in the product of industry are serious evils. He denounced tithes and parsons, too indiscriminately, but not always without reason. There is a telling satiric touch in his railing at pluralities, which he liked as little as he liked absenteeism in the landlord, " A journeyman parson comes," he says, " and TRANSITION FROM THE i8th CENTURY 191 works in three or four churches of a Sunday: but the master parson is not there." He would have dehghted (perhaps he did dehght) the heart of Ruskin with his scorn of much that the nineteenth century boasted of as progress. Visiting a rotten borough he meets a woman whom he ques- tions as to her travels. The utmost distance she has ever been from home proves to be two and a half miles. " Let no one laugh at her," he goes on, " and, above all others, let not me, who am convinced that the facilities, which now exist of moving human bodies from place to place, are among the curses of the country, the destroyers of industry, of morals, and, of course, of happiness. It is a great error to suppose that people are rendered stupid by remaining always in the same place. This woman was a very acute woman, and as well behaved as need to be." Cobbett was good-hearted, and the rage and violence which sometimes mar even the Rural Rides were generally caused by things in themselves deplorable. He was doubtless speaking the hteral truth when he declared that he was ashamed to ride a fat horse, to have a full belly and to wear a clean shirt, while he saw the wretched peasants reeHng with weakness and their faces reduced to skin and bone. This goodness of heart robs his egotism and self-satisfaction of offence, though it reveals itself naively enough on innumerable occasions. Thus, he revisits the haunts of his boyhood, describes some of his habits then, and proceeds to contrast himself with his inferiors in a higher rank : " This was the spot where I was receiving my education; and this was the sort of education; and I am perfectly satisfied that if I had not received such an education, or something very much Hke it; that, if I had been brought up a milksop, with a nurserymaid everlastingly at my heels, I should have been at this day as great a fool, as inefficient a mortal, as any of those frivolous idiots that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster School, or from any of 192 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS those dens of dunces called colleges and universities," Cobbett is not quite logical. He ought to have pitied those poor idiots who had received an education so vile that it would have ruined even him ; but it is his habit to be indignant with them, and this leads him astray. It is plain from these extracts that Cobbett's style is in a remarkable degree Saxon in its diction. It is plain also that he does not shrink from words and phrases that savour of slang. Sometimes he revels in them, and yet, by some singular skill, he keeps his slang free from vulgarity. It would not be easy to surpass his outburst about paper money: " What a false, what a deceptions, what an infamous thing, this paper-money system is! However, it is a pleasure, it is real, it is a great delight, it is boundless joy to me, to contem- plate this infernal system in its hour of wreck: swag here: crack there: scroop this way: souse that way: and such a rattling and such a squaUing: and the parsons and their wives looking so frightened, beginning, apparently, to think that the day of judgment is at hand! " EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 193 CHAPTER VIII THE EARLY REVIEWERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: SOME OF THEIR VICTIMS, AND OTHERS We have seen that before the close of the eighteenth century the periodical essay of the type initiated by Steele gave un- equivocal symptoms of decay, and that, though a consider- able number of papers continued to be produced, they were feeble and flaccid. The reason was that this kind of literary work no longer attracted the same class of intellect as it attracted jn the earlier part of the eighteenth century. Then, all the greater writers, whether of prose or verse, were more or less intimately associated with the periodical essay; Pope and Swift, as well as Addison and Steele, were contributors. But after the close of the eighteenth century it is exceptional to find men of more than the third rank writing to such papers. The reason was not a decline in productive capacity — the great outburst of poetry in the revolutionary period sufficiently disproves that, — but the opening up of other channels of expression. Two in particular require notice. The novel had sprung into being since the time of The Tatler, and drew to itself the more imaginative talent which had used the periodical essay as a medium for dreams, allegories, short stories and character sketches. The periodical essay had, therefore, been one of the means to its own undoing; for the De Coverley papers rank among the incunabula of the novel. Weakened in this way, the periodical had to find fresh strength elsewhere, or perish. In point of fact it did not die, but was transformed; and the model whereby the change was guided was supplied by The Gentleman^ s Magazine. 194 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS So great was the popularity of this periodical that, according to Johnson, its proprietor, Cave, used to sell ten thousand copies; while Hawkins declares that, during the period when Johnson was contributing those parliamentary reports in which he took care that " the Whig dogs should not have the best of it," the circulation rose to fifteen thousand. Success so brilliant provoked imitation, and within a few years many magazines arose and perished. The London Magazine, how- ever, survived to 1785. A northern imitator, The Scots Magazine, begun in 1739, had a still longer career; and as the original won such strong regard from Johnson that " when he first saw St. John's Gate, the place where that deservedly popular miscellany was originally printed, he * beheld it with reverence,' " so the imitation impressed Boswell with an affectionate regard which still survived when he wrote his great biography. Johnson contributed many papers to The Gentleman' s Maga- zine besides the parliamentary debates, and what Johnson wrote was invariably forcible. Still, it cannot be pretended that his contributions, so far as they are known, are on the same level of importance as The Rambler and The Idler. Far less did the papers of the other contributors rise to that level. Johnson himself, notwithstanding his " reverence," speaks of some of them in the preface to the volume of the magazine for 1738 with a vigorous frankness that is piquant in such a context. They deserve, he says, " no other fate than to be hissed, torn, and forgotten." Yet, though The Gentleman's Magazine was certainly not worthy to be set beside The Rambler, The Rambler died while The Gentleman' s Magazine lived on. In a way its very mediocrity was con- ducive to its longevity. The saying that there is no man who is necessary was true of it. If not Johnson, then some one else would supply parliamentary reports, not perhaps as good as his, not perhaps of the sort to keep the circulation up to EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 195 fifteen thousand, but still such as to satisfy many readers. But Steele and Addison were The Spectator, and Johnson was The Rambler. The design of these papers was such that certain men were indispensable, and if they flagged and grew weary the paper must stop. To this is due no small part of their literary charm. The Gentleman' s Magazine gets rid of this condition and thereby loses the charm, but becomes almost immortal — becomes at least capable of reaching an indefinite age. It may survive indefinite deterioration. By the year 1804 it had become, in the opinion of Southey, the Oldwomania. " It does amuse me," he writes, " by its exquisite inanity, and the glorious and intense stupidity of its correspondents; it is, in truth, a disgrace to the age and the country." It would clearly be absurd to explain the longevity of any periodical merely by its inferiority to others which have not lived so long. Men are not so stupid; they prefer the better; but, in hterature as in morals, they may sometimes follow the worse. They do so when the worse is convenient, when it supphes a need which the better does not meet. This The Gentleman' s Magazine did. The reports of debates in parliament are a case in point. No doubt the earlier political periodicals had partly satisfied the same need. But the basis of The Gentleman' s Magazine was far broader. The very pseudonym of the editor, Sylvanus Urban, hints as much. The intention was to appeal to both town and country. The newperiodicaltookupagain, and greatly widened and enlarged, a part of the work which Steele had originally designed to do in The Tatler, and had abandoned. It was work which could not very satisfactorily be done by the personal periodical, as we may call it. There was needed a variety of writers, an organised staff. The title-page of the first volume of The Gentleman^ s Maga- zine gives an insight into the design. On the side of news, 196 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS readers are promised an account of the most remarkable events, foreign and domestic; births, marriages, deaths, promotions and bankrupts (sic) ; the price of goods and stocks and bill of mortality. The country is specially catered for in observations on gardening. On the literary side there is to be a register of books; and eighty years later we find the Magazine contrasting itself in this matter to its own advantage with " certain anomalous competitors, who, under the novel allurement of appearing only once a quarter, assert their claims to curiosity and attention." The Magazine, we are told, exhibits a complete conspectus of the literature of the country, while the periodicals which thus vulgarly bid for popularity by appearing but once a quarter only make selections. Besides the register of books there are to be select pieces of poetry, and — what concerns us here — " essays con- troversial, humorous, and satirical; rehgious, moral, and political: collected chiefly from the pubhck papers." In its early days, therefore, The Gentleman's Magazine was, among other things, an eighteenth-century Review of Reviews, gather- ing to its own pages whatever seemed most likely to be interest- ing from contemporary periodicals. It attempted to be all things to all men. It discussed manners and monsoons, described battles and analysed beauty. It gave legal news, lists of sheriffs and circuits of judges. It advised unmarried ladies, and debated the question of the fall of man. No periodical had ever before attempted to occupy so much ground or to appeal to so many classes. It is the true original both of the modern review and of the modern magazine. The rise of these is one of the striking features of the early part of the nineteenth century, as their extraordinary multi- plication is of its later part and of the present day. They are of special importance in the history of the essay, because, while they have been used for many other purposes, they have been, and are, pre-eminently the medium of the essay; and EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 197 their development explains the fact that, during the last century, only the novel has surpassed the essay in bulk of output. So too, just as in the case of the novel, this enormous bulk confronts the critic with a pecuHar difficulty. He has to face the task of selection. To include all — even if it were possible — would be to lose the wood among the trees. Though the story of the foundation of The Edinburgh Review has often been told, it cannot be omitted in a volume dealing with the essay; for the famous " blue and yellow " was the first publication of its kind, and long wielded a power which probably no periodical will ever again possess. Its extra- ordinary success was due, not exclusively to its own merits, but partly also to the mediocrity of such predecessors as it had. Southey's opinion of The Gentleman's Magazine has already been quoted; and Scott, when he was helping to found the rival Quarterly, ascribed the popularity of The Edinburgh Review to the'fact that before its appearance the common reviews had become " extremely mawkish," and " gave a dawdling, mauldin sort of applause to everything that reached even mediocrity." They were also, he says, too much the organs of particular booksellers, whose wares they lauded indiscriminately.^ The birthplace of the new Review was Edinburgh, " in the eighth or ninth story or flat in Buccleuch-place, the elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey," says Sydney Smith. There in 1802 met four men, Sydney Smith himself, Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham and Francis Horner, and there it was determined to found a review. Smith edited the first number, but afterwards for many years Jeffrey was editor. The Review was critical, but critical of much besides hterature. In the preface to his works Sydney Smith sketches the state of England at the time when the Review started, and the sentences » The further opinion which he expresses, to the effect that Cumber- land's proposal that articles should be signed must necessarily be fatal, seems curious at the present day. ft'v ^ 198^ THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS are worth quoting as indicating what most influenced the mind of one at least of the founders and most active contributors : " The CathoHcs were not emancipated — the Corporation and Test Acts were unrepealed — the Game Laws were horribly oppressive — Steel Traps and Spring Guns were set all over the country — Prisoners tried for their Lives could have no Counsel — Lord Eldon and the Court of Chancery pressed heavily upon mankind — Libel was punished by the most cruel and vindic- tive imprisonments — the principles of PoHtical Economy were httle understood — the Law of Debt and of Conspiracy were upon the worst possible footing — the enormous wickedness of the Slave Trade was tolerated — a thousand evils were in exist- ence, which the talents of good and able men have since lessened or removed; and these effects have been not a Httle assisted by the honest boldness of the Edinburgh Review.'' This passage gives a sound general idea of the scope of Sydney Smith's (1771-1845) own contributions to the Review. He writes on prisons and prisoners, on game laws and spring guns, in a style all the more effective because it is generally moderate. He is not, for example, opposed to all game laws, but only to the injustice of the game laws as they then existed. He is the friend of the helpless and oppressed and the champion of unpopular causes. He is among the earhest advocates of a more hberal system of education for women, and writes with excellent sense on the subject. He condemns the poor laws, holding that they must be abolished, but, again with practical good sense, that they must be abolished very gradually; and the reason why they must be abohshed is, " not that they make the rich poor, but that they make the poor poorer." He takes up the cause of the chimney-sweepers, and by a series of quotations shows the horrible nature of the work which the poor boys had to do on whom Lamb's fancy played, humanely indeed, but not with that practical helpfulness which we find in Smith. Yet, while we respect the writer, it must EARLY REVIEWERS OF i9tH CENTURY 199 be admitted that the practical end he usually had in view has made much of his work ephemeral, while Lamb's is a possession for ever. Smith is liberal in reality as well as by profession. The essay entitled Mad Quakers, had it come from some other clerical pen, might have been a diatribe against a long- mahgned and persecuted sect. Smith's purpose is to praise the generosity and courage, the sense and humanity of the Quakers in their treatment of the insane. He is not prone to bow down in worship of a fetish. His criticism of pubHc schools is still worthy of attention, and the statement of his conviction that that education is the best which mingles a domestic with a school Hfe shows an attitude of mind which was rare in England then as it is rare still. To suppose that Smith was free from prejudices of his own would be a mistake. He pursues the Methodists, for example, with extraordinary malevolence. The liberality of mind with which he views the Quakers and the Roman Catholics seems in the case of Methodism wholly to desert him. Their faults were of a sort to which he could not be tolerant. He is able to quote from their journals passages of extraordinary non- sense; but nothing could justify the language in which he speaks of the sect. Much has been written, and with good reason, against the virulence and bad taste of the Hterary criticism of the time. But these faults were by no means confined to the literary critics. Neither Jeffrey nor Gifford nor any of the Blackwood group ever wrote with worse taste than Sydney Smith against the Methodists : — ^ " We are a good deal amused, indeed, with the extreme dis- relish which Mr. John Styles [who had answered a previous article in the Reviezv] exhibits to the humour and pleasantry with which he admits the Methodists to have been attacked; but Mr. John Styles should remember, that it is not the practice with destroyers of vermin to allow the Httle victims a veto upon the weapons used against them. If this were 200 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS otherwise, we should have one set of vermin banishing small- tooth combs; another protesting against mouse-traps; a third prohibiting the finger and thumb; a fourth exclaiming against the intolerable infamy of using soap and water." Smith's wit is his most valuable weapon in controversy and literature. We find it everywhere: the very first sentence of his first contribution to the Review is an example. The subject of the essay is Dr. Parr, and Parr's wig is made whim- sically to illustrate his method of construction. It is big in front, but " scorns even Episcopal limits behind, and swells out into boundless convexity of frizz, the j^eya davfia of barbers, and the terror of the literary world." So too, in the sermon under review, the Doctor subjoins to a discourse of no common length an immeasurable mass of notes on every learned man and thing. Smith's wit has usually, as here, a pungent application to the person dealt with. So it is again in the criticism of a certain Archdeacon (and Canon) Nares, who had preached a sermon condemning farmers for charging high prices for their grain and suggesting that penalties should be levied upon them. After an argument economic- ally faultless, Smith goes on : " The poor are not to be sup- ported, in time of famine, by abatement of price on the part of the farmer, but by the subscription of residentiary canons, archdeacons, and all men rich in public or private property; and to these subscriptions the farmer should contribute according to the amount of his fortune." Edgeworth on Bulls naturally gives scope for the witty manner of treatment, and the description of its style is excellent: " The Essay on Bulls is written much with the same mind, and in the same manner, as a schoolboy takes a walk : he moves on for ten yards on the straight road, with surprising perseverance; then sets out after a butterfly, looks for a bird's nest, or jumps backwards and forwards over a ditch." Smith seldom writes on purely literary subjects, and when EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 201 he does review a book he shows no great interest in it from the strictly critical point of view. He has lively articles on Waterton's Wanderings in South America, on the Memoirs of Captain Rock and on Madame d'Epinay. But his interest is in the substance rather than the manner and Hterary merits of the book he reviews. With Francis Jeffrey (i 773-1 850) it was otherwise. He was the literary critic of the group, and among the papers which he contributed to the Review from/| 1802 to 1840, literary subjects greatly preponderate over subjects relating to society and politics, such as those which ^ chiefly interested Sydney Smith. Injustice has been done ^ to Jeffrey through the reaction against the school of criticism to which he belonged. In his views of art he was essentially a man of the eighteenth century, and, unfortunately for him, the taste of the eighteenth century was passing away. But he cannot be judged fairly unless we examine what he can do within the limits of that which he understands. It is not enough to repeat for ever the famous " This will never do," pronounced upon The Excursion, or the scarcely less unjust judgment upon The White Doe of Rylstone : " This, we think, has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw im- printed in a quarto volume." These sentences show that Jeffrey was incapable of appreciating Wordsworth. It would be easy to show further, and it has been shown over and over again, that he was unjust to the whole Lake School, so called. Coleridge and Southey were outside his canon of poetry as well as Wordsworth. This incapacity to appreciate much of the best poetry of the time is unquestionably a serious blot upon Jeffrey's reputation, and it is only a partial excuse to say that he was no worse than most other critics of the time. He was worse than some, — for example. Lamb, Hazlitt and Coleridge himself. But it remains still possible that he may have done good work in the criticism of other schools. If we try to understand Jeffrey's point of view, we shall 202 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS soon find that this was the case. Of whatever partook of the eighteenth-century spirit, and so appealed to him personally, he was a generous as well as an acute critic. Campbell did so, and therefore he praises Campbell with a warmth which now appears excessive. For the same reason he over-estimates Rogers. But in both cases, though the modern critic would tone down his eulogies, he would hardly condemn them as inherently unsound. And, except as regards Wordsworth and Coleridge, Jeffrey's strictures upon contemporary poets do not seem now altogether unjust. To his own cost and to his regret he ran athwart of Byron; but the Hours of Idleness are not among the works of Byron that we still admire. It is more surprising that he irritated Scott, the least irritable of men of letters, by a criticism of Marmion which was at least ungenerous. But the general sketch of his opinions about a number of contemporary poets, which he gives in an article on Campbell's Specimens of the Poets, reads not so far amiss, except with regard to the position assigned to Campbell him- self: "There — if the future editor have anything like the indulgence and veneration for antiquity of his predecessor — there shall posterity still hang with rapture on the half of Campbell — and the fourth part of Byron — and the sixth of Scott — and the scattered tithes of Crabbe — and the three per cent, of Southey, — while some good-natured critic shall sit in our mouldering chair, and more than half prefer them to those by whom they have been superseded ! " " Caesar's pageant, shorn of Brutus' bust, Did but of Rome's best friend remind her more," and the absence of the names of Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats from this passage, written in 1 819, forcibly recalls these poets to us, and brings home more vividly than anything else could do the critical hmitations of Jeffrey. He did not understand the romantic revival. To a new poet he too often applied the EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 203 test of a bygone criticism, as a chemist drops an acid on the substance before him. If the poet ' reacted ' in one way, he was gold, if in another, pinchbeck. Allowance is seldom made for the possible something wholly new in the poet. Yet it would be unjust to press this to the extreme against Jeffrey. To the critics of that time the greatest stone of stumbling and rock of offence was Keats, and so it is worth while to ask how Jeffrey endures the test of his name. Not perfectly, it is true, for he did not think Hyperion worth completing; yet not altogether with discredit. Reviewing the Poems of 1820 he says that he has been " exceedingly struck with the genius they display, and the spirit of poetry which breathes through all their wild extravagance." And there is surely taste in the judgment he pronounces upon the ode To Autumn : " We know nothing at once so truly fresh, genuine, and English — and, at the same time, so full of poetical feeling and Greek elegance and simplicity." How many modern critics could improve upon this ? Jeffrey had detected the Greek element before it had become a critical commonplace. Scott expressed the doubt whether Jeffrey had 3.ny feeling of poetic genius, and Scott was rarely unjust. But the man who wrote thus about Keats was certainly not wholly destitute of such feeling. The just criticism and the skilful choice of extracts in the essay on ForcTs Dramatic Works support the same conclusion. As Macaulay said of himself that he was nothing if not historical, so it may be said of Jeffrey that he is nothing if not critical. Yet it must be added that a considerable part of the value of the essays lies in remarks suggested by a vigorous understanding and a wide experience of the world on points not strictly literary. It is this which makes him pronounce Burns's belief " in the dispensing power of genius and social feeling, in all matters of morality and common sense " his leading vice. And from the same source came the admirable 204 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS J ,; remarks on courage in the essay on Byron's Tragedies. ^ 4 \ /' " Courage," Jeffrey tells us, " is at least as necessary as genius I ^^'' to the success of a work of imagination ; since, without this, it * "" is impossible to attain that freedom and self-possession with- out which no talents can ever have fair play, and, far less, that ^ inward confidence and exaltation of spirit which must accom- pany all the higher acts of the understanding." He goes on to instance Scott as the supreme example in his time of this form of courage, and adds, " We are confident that no person can read any of his wonderful works, without feeling that their author was utterly careless of the reproach of small imper- fections; disdained the inglorious labour of perpetual correct- ness, and has consequently ^ imparted to his productions that spirit and ease and variety, which reminds {sic) us of better times, and gives lustre and effect to those rich and resplendent passages to which it left him free to aspire." That conse- quently is worth pages of ordinary criticism, and should be laid to heart by every critic of Scott who is not conscious of being already above the need of it. Critics of Shakespeare need it too, although the vice in their case is rather indis- criminate adulation. Many of those who praise the flaws due to carelessness are utterly blind to the fact that their sole justification is that the " brave translunary things " would have been beyond the reach of a pedantically correct writer. Among Jeffrey's faults are a somewhat diffuse style, and a tendency to dwell too much on trivialities and details, which swells still more the bulk of the essays. He was a busy man, he always wrote in haste, and it is surprising that, under the circumstances, what he wrote was so good. But posterity makes no allowance for circumstances, and this want of con- centration has contributed with the change of taste to depress his reputation almost as much below its proper level as it once stood above it. The famous sentence about The Excursion * The italics are Jeffrey's. EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 205 shows that he is chargeable also with the vices of undue asperity and of a dictatorial spirit. His mind had an innate pungency, and his practice at the bar tended to increase it. So did his position in the editorial chair. Yet he could be laudatory to excess, as we have already seen in the case of Campbell. We see it too in his extremely warm, if not ex- travagant, praise of Macaulay and of Dickens. There was, in short, another side to the character of Jeffrey. He was a man essentially amiable and generous, who won the warm affection of friends, hterary and legal. Perhaps this aspect is best seen in his relations with Carlyle, whose works were not of a kind to win Jeffrey's whole-hearted approval, and whose ' Germanism ' took the editor of the Review into very strange company. The section of the Reminiscences devoted to Jeffrey is far from being uncritical; but, read with the proper allowances which only those who understand Carlyle can make, it is a fine tribute to a fine character. "He invented the trade of editorship; before him an editor was a bookseller's drudge, he is now a distinguished functionary." Thus writes Bagehot with his customary insight. And perhaps this is the most memorable fact of all with regard to Jeffrey. In the history of literature it is a service comparable to that done by Johnson when he fought and won the battle against patronage. No doubt it is true that if Jeffrey had not done it some one else must have done it. But just the same may be said of Johnson. In each case the thing had to be. Yet the fact remains that the man who did the work was in the one instance Johnson and in the other Jeffrey. If they had never written a word that was worth reading, their names would still be memorable in literature. The other two who had a share in the creation of The Edinburgh Review are no longer popular as men of letters. Francis Horner is now merely nominis umbra, and it is diffi- cult to understand the extraordinary tribute which was paid % 2o6 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS to his memory in the House of Commons. There is nothing in his scanty literary remains that explains it. The case of Henry Brougham (i 779-1 868) is different. He was an active and 'voluminous contributor, writing about eighty articles in the first twenty volumes of the Review. But Brougham admirably illustrates the dangers attaching to the role of omniscience, and the defects of the Jack-of-all-trades. It was hinted of him that he knew most things better than he knew law; and certainly he knew too much law, too much science, too much of almost everything, to be a good man of letters. He always wrote in haste, and, in consequence, his style, though vigorous, is rough and careless. His great power of sarcasm was not always used in a spirit of justice. The dust of time has settled on his works, and there is no need to disturb it. One fault which was justly charged against the early Edinburgh Review has not yet been mentioned. It was poHtical, which it had every right to be, and it carried politics into literature, and pronounced critical judgment not solely according as books were good or bad, but partly as they were Whig or Tory, which it had no right to do. This was a natural enough consequence of the fact that the founders were all of the Whig party, that the interests of three of them were only in a secondary way Hterary, and that even Jeffrey had, as the phrase goes, several irons in the fire. The political preoccupa- tions of the Reviewers diminished the value of their criticism because, as Matthew Arnold insisted, the first obligation of criticism is to be disinterested. Unfortunately for English literature, the evil was combated, not by the estabHshment of a disinterested organ, but by setting up another partisan one. And so for many years nearly all EngHsh criticism was vitiated by the importation into it of " regards that stand aloof from the entire point." It would be dangerous to say that even now the evil has been completely eradicated. An ingrained habit of mind is not easily altered, and there are EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 207 journals still which are not above suspicion. But one interest- ing result of the development of periodicals may be noted. The mere multiphcation of them has in great measure pro- duced that reform which Matthew Arnold hoped might come from the estabhshment of a British Academy. When there were only two reviews that mattered, and these concerned themselves with party politics as well as with literature, there was some temptation to view even literature through spectacles of the party colour. If loaves and fishes could be got for the poet, why should not the good Whig reviewer do his best to get them for the good Whig poet ? and on the other hand why should not the Tory reviewer give to the " Whig dog " of a poet the treatment of a dog? But when the name of the reviews and magazines is legion, when many of them are of no party colour at all, but will welcome the advocates of both sides, if only they are able enough, why should even a party journal distort the truth by the importation of irrelevant considerations ? In those days it was a weighty matter that the author of The Story of Rimini was supposed to have libelled the Prince Regent and that the author of Adonais was a radical and an atheist. But who stopped before admiring The Everlasting Mercy to ask what were the politics or what was the religion of Mr. Masefield ? It had not been originally intended to give The Edinburgh Review a partisan character, and for a time the editor and the leading writers would have denied the charge of partisanship. They sought and obtained help from Tories hke Scott; but he soon saw reason to believe that he was not treated as he would have been treated had he belonged to their party in politics. It is impossible either to substantiate or to refute Scott's belief : as Gladstone once said of a criticism of Lecky's, the imputation of motives partakes too much of the business of the day of judgment. But Scott was not a suspicious man, and the fact that he entertained suspicion in ^ / 208 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS this case is itself impressive. Besides, there are so many concurrent circumstances, so many other cases, that it is hardly too dangerous to undertake, for once, the function of the day of judgment. Unfortunately, the way that was taken to right one wrong was, as has been explained, to commit an opposite one. The Quarterly Review was started as the organ of Toryism. In the first editor, William Gilford (1756- 1826), its founders were far less fortunate than was the rival review in Jeffrey. Gilford was a man who then enjoyed a reputation which has since become puzzling. Even Byron spoke with great respect of the author of The Baviad and The Maviad, satires which rouse no enthusiasm in the minds of the few who read them now, Gifford is said to have been personally a good-natured man; but, judged by his writings, he would be pronounced one of the worst tempered in the whole history of literature. Living and dead, friend and foe, all suffer, though in different degrees, from a virulence scarcely to be paralleled. His best work was done in editing the Elizabethan dramatists, and on Jonson he is particularly useful. But though the story of the alarums and battles of Jonson's life was two hundred years old, Gifford took sides and wrote with the violence of a man whose passions were roused and whose interests were threatened. He treated his own contributors with a high- handed discourtesy that seriously damaged the Review. Naturally, therefore, opponents and those who differed from him, whether on politics or on points of literary criticism, had little to hope for from his sense of fair play. They were personal enemies. No one ever carried to a greater extreme the vice of criticism on political grounds. No one was ever less sympathetic with new forms of art. Like Jeffrey's, his taste was the taste of the eighteenth century, but he expressed it with less than Jeffrey's wit and with far more than Jeffrey's brusqueness. He seems to be for ever addressing the author criticised in the phrase. Prisoner at the bar; and most EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 209 commonly his head is crowned with the black cap. The one thing in which his judgments differ from that pronounced upon the criminal is the absence of the appeal for mercy on the erring sovil. This was a strange result indeed to flow from the action of the genial and good-natured Scott. Though even Scott shared in the almost universal partisanship of the time, he knew that spite was a bad ingredient in the cup of criticism; and his correspondence with others of his own way of thinking, such as Southey, left him in no doubt as to the range of the errors Gifford was falling into. He himself was a tower of strength to the Quarterly, and his wide and generous humanity helped to redeem the faults of the editor. His fame as a poet and still more as a novelist has somewhat unduly obscured him as an essayist. Every one knows that he wrote a life of Napoleon which it is no longer necessary to read, a short treatise on Demonology and Witchcraft, lives of Swift, Dryden, and others, essays on chivalry, romance and the drama, and enough miscellaneous work besides to make quite a respectable literary output. But the great majority assume that in the poems and novels they have Scott complete. They are in the main right; yet something is lost by the omission to read the miscellaneous works. They too bear the stamp of that attractive character. They are Scott both in his strength and in his weakness — not certainly at his greatest, but showing qualities high and rare enough to make the hterary fortune of a smaller man. There is the same carelessness of style, the same diffuseness, the same sense of easy mastery which marks the novels, the same atmosphere of a great personality. Few literary men have judged themselves more dispassionately than Scott. In the essay on Gertrude of Wyoming there are some excellent remarks which show that he estimated as accurately as Jeffrey in the passage already quoted the effect of his headlong careless habit of composition; and if the o " ' 210 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS ■f interpretation were doubtful there is ample evidence on the point in Lockhart's Life. In this respect Campbell, whom he was criticising, was the exact contrary of Scott, and Scott points out with perfect justice, yet without the least suggestion of self-laudation, the evils of over-elaboration and strained revision. Scott's good-nature produced in his criticism a tendency to praise rather than censure. In his reviews this is naturally not so marked as it was in those personal recommendations which caused Constable to say, with good reason, that he " hked weU Scott's ain bairns,'''' but dreaded those of his father- ing. He could on occasion be severe, as we see in his caustic review of Godwin's absurd story Fleetwood. But as a rule the geniality of his tone contrasts very pleasantly with the bitterness and frequent malignity of so much of the criti- cism of the time. The review — excellent after the clumsy pleasantries at the start — of Maturin's Fatal Revenge is typical. It is clear-sighted as to defects, yet generous in the recognition of merits. The same may be said of the essay on Cromek's Reliques of Burns. No one was ever better fitted than Scott for the difficult task of commenting on the character of Burns. Calm good sense, clear vision and large charity were all necessary, and he possessed them all in a rare degree. The faults of Burns were not his, yet, while recognising their gravity, he handled them as sympathetically as if they had been his own. The essay is not nearly so brilliant and illu- minating as that of Carlyle on Burns, but in some important respects it approaches nearer to polar truth. The essays on chivalry, romance and the drama, all con- tributions to the supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica, are more careful and complete than those which were dashed off for The Quarterly Review. They are still worthy of study. Dealing with subjects which had engaged Scott's attention from his youth and on which he had read very widely, they EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 211 could hardly fail to illustrate some of the best qualities of his mind. But Scott's miscellaneous writings are varied as well as voluminous, and some of the best of them are in no way related to his own craft of authorship. Nowhere, perhaps, does he appear as essayist to more advantage than in the papers On Planting Waste Lands and On Landscape Garde?iingy — papers written towards the close of his life, after the crash of his fortunes, when he was labouring far beyond his strength. Yet they are singularly easy, fresh, and bright. The reason is that they are the natural outflow of Scott's own mind and taste. As he wrote, many a day spent with Tom Purdie in the woods with which he had surrounded Abbotsford rose in his mind, he regained the zest of happier years, and the joy he felt in writing is transmitted to the reader. Next in fame to Scott among the contributors to The Quarterly Review was Robert Southey (i 774-1 843), whose indefatigable industry found In the task of the reviewer suit- able occupation for those odds and ends of time which were not occupied with tasks more ambitious and, as Southey fondly believed, more likely, or rather more certain, to win immortahty for the author. But already Jeffrey's estimate of three per cent, is seen to err on the side of liberality. Southey's epics rest undisturbed on the upper shelf with his histories beside them; only his Life of Nelson and a few lyrics are still read. His voluminous works have never been collected, and most of his miscellaneous essays have still to be searched for in the pages of the periodicals to which they were originally con- tributed. In spite of his remarkable endowments and very great acquirements, this oblivion cannot be said to be un- merited. It is sometimes said that a maii can become what- ever he determines to be, if he only pursues his end with sufficient persistence; but Southey refutes the assertion. He injured his own reputation by aiming at things which were 212 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS beyond his reach. Great as were his gifts, he over-estimated them. Having no doubt that he was one of the foremost of poets and of historians, he accepted as a payment on account the respectable measure of fame he won from his contemporaries, and drew on posterity for the balance. Posterity has pronounced that the account is already over- drawn. Southey might have done better If he had limited himself to a less extensive field. But he tried everything, not always of his own free choice. The story of his unflagging struggle on behalf of wife and children is most honourable to him, but painful to read. The jaded mind sank beneath its own level. Southey would have written better had circum- stances allowed him more leisure; but necessity accentuated an inherent tendency to be too much of a bookworm; for in this respect Southey stood in strong contrast to his friend Wordsworth. The latter read too little, the former read too much. Nearly all that is valuable in Wordsworth comes from the world around him. Southey lived among the same lakes and mountains and had for neighbours the same '■ statesmen,' but they had little effect on his writings. The essays of Southey deal partly with literary and partly with social and political subjects. The latter section illus- trates his extraordinary dogmatism and self-confidence. On whatever point he touches he lays down the law with un- wavering assurance, although the recollection of his own days of belief in Pantisocracy might have suggested caution and moderation. But in truth Southey was one of the most intellectually arrogant of men, and his dogmatism is the outcome of that arrogance. For some of his views there is more to be said than the Whigs of his day would allow. We are no longer enamoured of the beauty of that manufacturing system which Southey denounced and Macaulay defended. Many now would agree with the view which Macaulay seems to think refuted by the mere statement of it, that the manu- EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 213 facturing system was then " a system more tyrannical than that of the feudal ages, a system of actual servitude, a system which destroys the bodies and degrades the minds of those who are engaged in it." Philanthropists from Lord Shaftesbury to Ruskin have been actuated by views much like Southey's, and legislation has been increasingly engaged in devising remedies for the evils which Southey denounced. But if he was sometimes right, it is equally certain that he was often wrong. No one was more frequently the victim of antiquated prejudice. He was reactionary on the Catholic question. He was prepared to defend anything and everything just because it existed. Even sinecures were sacred in his eyes, and the proposal to abolish them seemed to threaten, if not the foun- dation, at any rate the ornaments of the superstructure of society: "The abolition of sinecures would be, to say the least of it, a measure of doubtful utility." The truth is, Southey had swung from the extreme of revolutionism to the extreme of conservatism. In his literary essays Southey was generous in praise of unrecognised talent. He was one of those who stretched out a friendly hand to poor John Clare. In relation to contem- poraries more popular than Mtrtself there is perhaps here and there a trace of soreness not altogether unnatural, but there is always justice in intention. To such a man as Byron Southey was constitutionally incapable of being fair; but his sin in that instance was so fearfully punished that no more need be said about it. In spite of good intentions, however, Southey's criticism has little value. He had few if any principles, he only felt, and consequently he was right or wrong at haphazard. The value of Southey's essays lies mainly, indeed almost wholly, in their style. They have not sufficient depth of thought, nor have they now sufficient freshness of information to give them vitaHty for their substance. Neither do they convey that impression of a great personality which Scott's 214 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS far more faulty writings give. But they are written in limpid, graceful and easy prose. There are no purple patches, nor is there anything unworthy. No style, not even Goldsmith's, is more free from mannerism. Other poets besides Southey wrote prose as well as verse, and were not content to be taught their own trade, but pre- sumed to expound its principles. Shelley interested himself in public questions, in Ireland and in the prosecution of Eaton for publishing Paine's Age of Reason, as well as in literature. In the minor critical essays some of his opinions are curious enough. He was greatly influenced by personal considerations, ranking Frankenstein and Caleb Williams among the greatest of books. His only prose essay of real importance is the Defence of Poetry, and that belongs to the history of criticism %^ rather than to the history of the essay. Wordsworth's prose essays are more numerous and more varied, and in the mass more valuable than Shelley's. They are admirably written and extremely interesting — not only "" ' the celebrated preface, but the whole body of essays, and letters of the nature of essays, in the collected prose works. They show that, though Wordsworth's method was different ■ from Byron's, he was no more inclined than the fierier poet meekly to kiss the rod of the reviewers. The essay on Poetry as a Study contains some vigorous and just comments upon those who have applied themselves to the consideration of the laws of poetry. Among them are both those who are best and those who are worst qualified to judge it : — " As this Class comprehends the only judgments which are trustworthy, so does it include the most erroneous and per- verse. For to be mistaught is worse than to be untaught; and no perverseness equals that which is supported by system, no errors are so difficult to root out as those which the under- standing has pledged its credit to uphold. In this Class are contained censors, who, if they be pleased with what is good, EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 215 are pleased with it only by imperfect glimpses, and upon false principles; who, should they generalise rightly, to a certain point, are sure to suffer for it in the end; who, if they stumble upon a sound rule, are fettered by misapplying it, or by strain- ing it too far; being incapable of perceiving when it ought to yield to one of higher order. In it are found critics too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple with him ; men, who take upon them to report of the course which he holds whom they are utterly unable to accompany — confounded if he turn quick upon the wing, dismayed if he soar stately ' into the region ' — men of palsied imagination and indurated hearts; in whose minds all healthy action is languid, who therefore feed as the many direct them, or, with the many, are greedy after vicious provocatives; — judges, whose censure is auspicious, and whose praise is ominous! " The date of this essay is 181 5, and as the Edinburgh Review article on The Excursion appeared in November 18 14, there can be little doubt as to what was in Wordsworth's mind as he wrote, or in which section of the class of students of poetry he would have placed the author of the phrase, " this will never do." The Apology for the French Revolution and the paper on The Catholic Relief Bill are of great value as measuring the distance Wordsworth had travelled in the interval between them. The latter is highly conservative. The writer is very much afraid of Rome, and even his trust that " it is the intention of Providence that the Church of Rome should in due time disappear," gives only partial consolation. Clearly he would like to help Providence. The apology is a bold and powerfully-written expression of opinion in favour of the revolution. The poet was not to be frightened even by the execution of a king; and if Burke could wield the weapon of style on one side, Wordsworth had both the power and the will 11 / ^216/ THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS ^to do so on the other. It is, however, in the essays on literary and kindred subjects that he is at his best. There are other things besides criticism in them; nor is the excellence of the criticism itself confined to the widely-known Preface. The three essays Upon Epitaphs are all admirable. That which was contributed to 7he Friend in 1810 is so full of just and weighty reflection as to deserve the praise Lamb bestowed upon it : " Your Essay on Epitaphs is the only sensible thing which has been written on that subject, and it goes to the bottom." The discussion Of Literary Biography is also excellent. No one has written more powerfully than Words- worth against unsparing revelation. The paper (which is in the form of a letter) was evoked by the strictures in Currie's Life of Burns; and the living poet, who had so little of Burns's weakness to plead guilty to, generously defends the dead one. The biographer camiot, he insists, have known enough to justify him in his revelations. This essay is a criticism of Hfe rather than a criticism of literature; but it contains admirable criticism of the latter sort too, and shows a catholic taste and an open-minded tolerance in Wordsworth which may come as a surprise to some readers: — " The poet, treating of primary instincts, luxuriates among the felicities of love and wine, and is enraptured while he describes the fairer aspects of war: nor does he shrink from the company of the passion of love though immoderate — from convivial pleasure though intemperate — nor from the presence of war though savage, and recognised as the handmaid of desolation. Frequently and admirably has Burns given way to these impulses of nature; both with reference to himself and in describing the condition of others." Frequently and admirably! Perhaps Wordsworth's "standard of intoxica- tion " was not so " miserably low " after all; at any rate he was not incapable of appreciating " Willie brew'd a peck o' maut." EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 217 / The close association of the name of Wordsworth with that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) makes the tran-'' sition to the latter natural and easy. Coleridge too was a victim of the Reviewers as truly as Wordsworth or as Keats; and Coleridge as well as Wordsworth, by reason of The Watchman, The Friend, and the collection of aphorisms which he called Aids to Reflection, demands consideration as an essayist. Coleridge was unquestionably one of the most highly-gifted of Englishmen, and no part of the work of such a mind can be without value. Yet it must be admitted that Coleridge as essayist is in the main singularly disappoint- ing. There is abundant evidence that he exercised a wonder- fully quickening influence on the most thoughtful spirits of the generation immediately following his own, and none of his prose works probably contributed so much to that influence as the Aids to Reflection. Not seldom, it would seem, students found there the key to the author's poetry, whichhad previously seemed to them weird and incomprehensible. It is otherwise now. The four or five great poems have become part of our spiritual inheritance, but the tortuous phraseology and the technicahties of philosophy repel most readers from the Aids to Reflection. Certainly that book cannot be placed on an equaHty with the works of the aphoristic writers of the seventeenth century. The greater part of The Friend too is addressed to philo- sophers, and it likewise is spoilt by the vicious involution of Coleridge's prose style, and the discursiveness which combines with that involution to baffle the reader in his search for the central meaning. The Friend proposes to afford " help to the struggling, counsel to the doubtful, light to the blind, hope to the despondent, refreshment to the weary; " but it is to be feared that these, and especially the bhnd and the weary, have gone away disappointed. There are many references to a " system," but the system is very elusive. Though we / 2i8 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS find glimmerings of principles, ethical, political and aesthetic, ^ to reduce them to a coherent system would be almost to re- write Thg Friend. There are pregnant suggestions here and ,j? there on a great variety of subjects — the value of great men, the liberty of the press, rehgious toleration, the errors of the party system, and a hundred other things. The parts which come most strictly within the province of the essay are the various Landing-Places, or groups of " essays interspersed for amusement, retrospect and preparation." These are enriched with suggestive comparisons and contrasts, stories and biographical papers. They are brightened by occasional striking remarks. At one point we come upon Coleridge's well-known reply to the lady who asked him whether he believed in ghosts : " No, madam, I have seen far too many myself." At another w^e find his anticipation of Carlyle's retort to the saying that no man is a hero to his valet. It is Nelson's friend and captain. Sir Alexander Ball, whom Coleridge deems fit to stand the test, and it is of Ball that he tells a story admirably illustrative. of the power of law. The passage is so free from the vices of Coleridge's prose style and so nobly eloquent that it deserves to be rescued from a context where in the present day few probably will go to find it. Ball had been appointed captain of a man-of-war with a mutinous crew, and had restored order, not by exceptional severity, but by the promulgation of rules as to offences and their punish- ment as near as possible to those of the ordinary law, and with precautions against hasty or arbitrary action: — " Strength may be met with strength; the power of inflict- ing pain may be baffled by the pride of endurance; the eye of rage may be answered with the stare of defiance, or the downcast look of dark and determined resolve; and with all this there is an outward and determined object to which the mind can attach its passions and purposes, and bury its own disquietudes in the full occupation of the senses. But who EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 219 dares struggle with an invisible combatant ? with an enemy which exists and makes us know its existence — but where it is, we ask in vain. No space contains it; time promises no control over it; it has no ear for threats; it has no substance that my hands can grasp, or my weapons find vulnerable; it commands and cannot be commanded; it acts and is insus- ceptible of my reaction; the more I strive to subdue it, and the more I think of it, the more do I find it to possess a reality ■out of myself, and not to be a phantom of my own imagination; that all, but the most abandoned men, acknowledge its authority, and that the whole strength and majesty of my country are pledged to support it; and yet that for me its power is the same with that of my own permanent self, and that all the choice which is permitted to me consists in having it for my guardian Angel, or my avenging Fiend ! This is the spirit of law ! the lute of Amphion ! the harp of Orpheus ! This is the true necessity, which compels man into the social state, now and always, by a still-beginning, never-ceasing force of moral cohesion." Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849), though otherwise much inferior to his father, had as an essayist a far Hghter touch. His pleasantly-written Biographia Borealis stand in point of length midway between short biographies and biographical essays. The sketches of Marvell and Congreve give scope to the taste and critical faculty of their author, and all are char- acterised by a genial and attractive humanity. But it is in the miscellaneous papers that the essayist is best revealed. Like Hartley Coleridge's poetry — and, for that matter, hke his father's too, — they are exceedingly tantalising; there is so much promise and so little performance — just a handful of pieces in all, yet in these conclusive evidence of the capacity to have produced many essays of all but the highest quality had he been granted only one gift more. The missing gift was unfortunately that indispensable " stalk of carl hemp THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS in man," the lack of which leaves the whole character flaccid. This handful of essays ranges from gay to grave, but the " sun- faced little man " inclines to lightness. Books and. Bantlings and BrieJ thoughts upon Brevity are pleasant enough fooling. He can also hide real thought under the appearance of a light treatment, as in Atrabilious Reflections upon Melancholy ; or he can be wholly grave, as in Antiquity, an excellent essay, fertile in illustration and rich with literary allusions. The distinction drawn in Shakespeare a Tory and a Gentleman between " God Almighty's Gentleman " and the " very respectable Gentleman " is admirable. The former " may do just as he pleases, subject to no restrictions but those of honour, virtue, and religion." But " your very respectable gentlemanly man succeeds very well so long as he is quite correct and well with the world — so long as he preserves his gravity, keeps perfectly sober, out of love, and out of debt. But a sudden spring of laughter, a drappie in his e'e, a touch in the heart or on the shov;lder, dissolves the illusion at once, and leaves him worse than nothing — for he is too like a Gentleman to appear well in any other capacity." Linked with the elder Coleridge by the fact that they were his followers, and that they, too, had a philosophical aim, in their case unencumbered by any pretence to system, were the brothers Hare — Augustus William (1792-1834) and Julius (^795~^^55) — whose Guesses at Truth, first published in 1827 and afterwards enlarged, at one time powerfully influenced the minds of the more thoughtful young men. A curious little link with the younger Coleridge too may be noticed in passing. Just as he has happily discriminated between the true gentleman and the respectable imitation, so, in another way, have the authors of Guesses at Truth. " A Christian," they say, " is God Almighty's gentleman ; a gentleman, in the vulgar, superficial way of understanding the word, is the Devil's Christian." EARLY REVIEWERS OF 19TH CENTURY 221 The two brothers were men of no mean endowment, and Guesses at Truth is a work of soHd merit, containing some valuable essays on most diverse subjects — laughter, artifi- ciality, independence and freedom, the influence of the sea on nations dwelling near it, transportation for crime, etc. There are many wise remarks on language and the choice of words. But the writers adopt the aphoristic method, which demands the very highest endowment; and they are not quite great enough to follow in the steps of Bacon and Jonson. The following passage from an essay on the influence of sur- names gives a fair conception of their spirit and manner: *'The true spirit of an aristocracy is not personal, but corporate. He who is animated by that spirit would rather be a branch of a great tree than a sucker from it. The demagogue's aim and triumph is to be hf ted on the shoulders of the mob : when thus borne aloft, he exults, however unsteady his seat, how- ever rapidly he may be sure to fall. But the aristocrat is content to abide within the body of his order, and to derive his honour and influence from his order, more than from him- self. The glory of his ancestors is his. Another symptom of the all-engulphing whirl with which the feehng of personality has been swallowing up everything else for the last century, is the stale, flat ridicule lavisht by every witHng and dullard on those who take pride in an illustrious ancestry. We had become unable to understand any honour but that which was personal, any merit or claim but personal. We had dwindled and shrunk into a host of bare /i?^." 222 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS CHAPTER IX THE EARLY MAGAZINES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY For many years the two great quarterlies stood alone, and while periodicals of many sorts rose around them there was none that sought to invade their territory. To a certain extent, it is true, Leigh Hunt's publications, which have already been noticed, did so; as also, still more notably, did Blackwood'' s Magazine (1817). The younger Tories were by no means fully contented with The Quarterly Review as GiflFord had made it. They felt that it lacked some of the qualities which rendered its rival so effective an instrument of the Whig party. To some extent the difference was due to age. Jeffrey and Sydney Smith were, the one just under and the other just over thirty when their review was started; and their principal coadjutors were still younger. Gifford, on the other hand, was over fifty when he became editor of the Quarterly. Partly also it was a matter of endowment. Sydney Smith had no rival for wit, and the intellect of Jeffrey was altogether more nimble than that of the Tory editor. The more eager and fiery spirits therefore felt that the representative periodical of their party lacked the necessary verve and brilliancy, and they conceived the idea of making good the defect. As Edinburgh had delivered the first thrust, so it was left for Edinburgh to find the parry. It was the home at the time of two of the most recklessly brilhant of the younger men of letters, Wilson and Lockhart, and of two of the most daring publishers. Constable and Blackwood. The latter had just started a monthly magazine under the editorship of two local personages, Pringle and Cleghorn. Their failure gave an EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 223 opening to John Wilson (1785-1854) and John Gibson Lock- hart (i 794-1 854), and the result of this union of publisher- editor and critics was the celebrated Blackwood's Magazine. The commotion it caused is as well known as the story of the foundation of The Edinburgh Review. Locally at least this commotion was mainly due to The Chaldee Manuscript, an extremely amusing and in the main good-natured, but utterly reckless, skit directed against a number of the best-known men in Edinburgh, from Scott downwards. This article made the fortune yet threatened the existence of the magazine. So great was the outcry that The Chaldee Manuscript was not reprinted in the subsequent issue of the first number, which was due to the keen local interest aroused by it. Other early articles inherently more objectionable roused little comment, because the victims were distant and were less able to enforce respect for their just complaints. Such were the articles on Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and on The Cockney School, i.e., practically Leigh Hunt. Unfortunately the new magazine, whose raison d^etre, in part, was to protest against the partisan- ship and unfairness of the criticism in The Edinburgh Review, was itself following the worst form of a bad tradition. The blame must be shared by all concerned, but it seems only fair that the least weighty share should rest on the shoulders that bore the most, at least until the pubhcation of Lang's Life of Lockhart. Surely Lockhart, the youth of twenty-three, was less blameworthy than Wilson, the man of thirty-two. But further, only those who have read much of the periodical Uterature of that time can fairly award the censure. There is at least some truth in the view that moraHty varies with generations of time and degrees of latitude; and in this matter of the ethics of criticism, what would be intolerable now was the almost universal custom then. Not only the Blackwood and the Edinburgh men wrote thus, but Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt and Coleridge himself as well. It is doubtful if 224 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS any man of the time was wholly free from blame, unless it was Lamb, who never intervened in controversy except with his admirably dignified Letter to Robert Southey. And thus it comes that the same writer may exhibit the most inconsistent qualities according as his passions and prejudices are or are not engaged. Hence the puzzling diversity of the judgments pronounced upon those men. Thus, in William Blackwood and ,. his Sons, Mrs. Oliphant, who may be regarded as a sort of official defender of the Magazine, pronounces the victim of The Cockney School " as evil-tongued a critic as could be found; " while the writer of liis hfe in The Dictionary oj 'National Biography declares that he was as an appreciative critic hardly equalled, and that " his guidance is as safe as it is genial." And both judgments are essentially just, though 4 the latter is perhaps over-emphatic. As essayists the two Blackwood men are disappointing. Wilson indeed wrote nothing that is not disappointing. Yet Carlyle declared that he seemed to him " by far the most gijted of all our literary men either then or stiU." He added, however, that this most gifted of Hterary men " has written nothing that can endure," and he gave the reason — " the central tie-beam seemed always wanting." That is the precise truth about Wilson. He had fervid imagination, an irresistible flow of spirit, abundant intellect, but no backbone of intellectual principle. To the day of his death he was a boy of genius. Hence he is far better when condensed in The Comedy of the Noctes Amhrosiance than in his own full and over- flowing abundance. At times he is swept on by the rush of his feelings; and then he would be admirable, could he retain just a modicum of self-control. But the very thing which makes him good also makes him ineffective. We see this, for example, in his essay on The Genius and Character oj Burns. It sweeps the reader on with its fervour, and yet wearies him. Contrast it with Carlyle's magnificent essay, EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 225 where we have the fervour combined with the sense of re- straint. Probably we must explain in the same way the extra- ordinary irresponsibility of Wilson's criticisms. He was one of the earliest admirers of Wordsworth and the other Lake poets. He knew the men and had lived among them. In his collected works there are passages of praise not unworthy even of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Yet the first number of Black- wood contained an indefensible attack on Coleridge, and else- where the magazine abused Wordsworth also. It was Wilson who wrote the article on Coleridge; and Wilson in the Nodes called The Excursion " the worst poem of any character in the Enghsh language." To see Wilson at his best it is necessary to turn aside from the criticism and consider rather the more imaginative among the Essays Critical and Imaginative and in The Recrea- tions of Christopher North. Wherever he gives rein to his own tastes and portrays his own temperament, he imparts to his writings some, though only a small portion, of those high gifts which so impressed Carlyle. They show " his rich abundance of quick, generous, and expansive feeling," which Lockhart in Peter'' s Letters to his Kinsfolk picks out as the char- acteristic of his eloquence. Anglimania is breezy and fresh, Inch-Crum and The Moors show genuine love of nature as well as of sport, and Cottages is full of evidence of the interest the adventurous sportsman took in his own kind, and not least in those of the humbler ranks. But even these are second rate. The style is copious, as the writer's body was large; vivid, as his eye was bright; careless, like his dress. But it is altogether too florid and exclamatory. A little of it suffices. Wilson is not one of the authors to whom the reader readily goes back. Lockhart, unlike Wilson, has left works which are a per- manenF^ossession of literature. If he is surpassed as a biographer, it is only by Boswell : his Life of Burns is very p I 1/ 226 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS good, and his Life of Scott is great. Yet in his essays he is, except for two or three, even more disappointing than Wilson. He does not possess Wilson's extraordinary verve. In youth at least he was, hke Wilson, guilty of critical sins of extreme (gravity. After he became editor of The Quarterly Review the surprising thing about many of his papers is that they are dull. There are exceptions: the article on Tennyson's Poems of 1833 is irresistibly laughable; and if there is critical bhndness in it, there is also critical acuteness. In writing it he seems to have been, as it were, bHnd of one eye. But the impression given by his essays as a whole is one of dulness. Lang states as the reason that Lockhart had dehberately adopted the theory that the reviewer's function was to make the reader acquainted with the general purport of the book criticised. He therefore describes and summarises, instead of using the book after the fashion of Macaulay, as a peg on which to hang his own essay. There is evidence that Lockhart had formed this theory at the very outset of his career. It is embodied in one of the best of his essays, the Remarks on the Periodical Criticism of England. In that article the imaginary Baron von Lauerwinkel contrasts the German system with the Enghsh — the humdrum but painstaking and conscientious man of books who there gives his account, instructive though it may be dull, of the book he is reviewing, with the English editor, brilliant, smart, often flippant, who thinks of himself first and the book afterwards. He proceeds to give a very able though severe criticism of the critics, Gifford and " Jeffray," as the great Edinburgh Reviewer is called throughout. Lang's palliation of Lockhart's early criticisms, guarded as it is, is not wholly successful. He clears him of the guilt of the attacks upon Coleridge and Wordsworth, he condemns Wilson for his gross inconsistency, and he praises Lockhart for his admiration of Wordsworth and Coleridge. But un- fortunately he would not have been able to deny, had the EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 227 question been pressed against him, that in a minor degree Lockhart too is strangely inconsistent. Thus, in condemning the Blackwood attack on the Biografhia Liter aria he speaks in the warmest terms of Coleridge. " If," he says, " there be any man of grand and original genius alive at this moment in Europe, such a man is Mr. Coleridge." Yet in The Cockney School he had spoken of Coleridge as " a greater Quack still " than Hunt, the vilest, apparently, of all " that pestiferous crew." We can only once more note and wonder. Disappointment with Lockhart's essays is all the keener, because it is evident that he had in a high degree the requisite gifts. No reader of the Life of Scott needs to be told that the biographer was master of a style far more pure and effective though less showy than that of Wilson. The scene of Scott's death is a masterpiece. Further, Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk makes it evident that he had the gifts of humour andkeen observation and description, which are among the most valuable of the qualities of the essayist. Both with pencil and with pen Lockhart had a rare knack of hitting off a Hkeness. His caricature sketches, especially those of the Scotch minister and the Scotch judge, are admirable; but not more admirable than the contrast between the Scottish peasant and the Gloucestershire farmer in Peter's Letters : " A Scotch peasant with his long dry visage, his sharp prominent cheek-bones, his grey twinkling eyes, and peaked chin, would seem a very Argus, if set up close against the sleek and ponderous chubbiness of a Gloucestershire farmer." But though among the earlier periodicals it was the two great reviews that were the most influential, and Blackwood that made the greatest noise, there was a fourth periodical, comparatively obscure and short-lived. The London Magazine (i 820-1 829), which, during the period of its existence, made the largest contribution of permanent value to literature. The tragic connexion between it and Blackwood is well known. 228 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS Lockhart went to London in order to fight a duel with its editor, John Scott; who, however, evaded the meeting in what Lockhart thought a cowardly manner. Soon afterwards Scott fell by the hand of Lockhart's friend, Christie, though the latter was so anxious to prevent disaster that he fired his first shot in the air. The ill-starred Scott was a man who had the genius to attract genius, and the tact to discern that particular type of endowment which was suited for his purpose. Men as highly gifted have served upon the staff of other periodicals than his, but it may be questioned whether any English magazine has ever had the help of so many who possessed in an eminent degree that gift for essays which is so peculiarly serviceable to a periodical. Early in its career The London Magazine numbered among its contributors Charles Lamb, a host in himself, Hazlitt and De Quincey; while among the lesser lights were the poet Darley, Reynolds, the friend of Keats and of Hood, and Wainewright, afterwards notorious as a murderer. Even such a band as this was noticeably strengthened by the accession, a little later, of Mary Russell Mitford. Scott's death was a serious but not a fatal blow to the Magazine. He had already gathered his group of writers together, and they continued after his death to serve the periodical he had made. Though, however, it flourished for a while, even the very high literary merit of its contents was not enough to preserve it permanently. It would seem that at that time no periodical could long survive in England un- less it linked itself with a political party. Now The London Magazine was not indifferent to poHtics, but it appealed only to a small band of the most advanced Liberals. Tliis was in the literary sense its salvation. As the faithful were few, it was necessary to go in partes injidelium for material; and as Whig and Tory were alike outside the pale, to be just to EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 229 the literary productions of both was comparatively easy. But both Whig and Tory read for the sake of pohtics more than for the sake of Hterature; and so The London Magazine failed to retain permanently the indispensable support, and died in 1820 -■■■ ■ -i'-M,i wmj , . .. ^ . ,r ii rii^rn.w < <» <«»'* »«*» *«««''«>**'*^^ The greatest glory of The London Magazine is that it found a place for the prince of English essayists, Charles Lamb (1775- 1834). There are essayists, like Bacon, of more massive greatness, and others, hke Sir Thomas Browne, who can attain loftier heights of eloquence; but there is no other who has in an equal degree the power to charm. If an attempt be made to discover the secret of this power, it will be found that first and chief among the factors contributory to it is the incomparable sweetness of disposition which Lamb not only possessed but had a unique gift of communicating to lus writings. Facts in Lamb's life too well known to need repetition, prove how deep was the goodness of which this charm was the flower. They justify the emphatic praise of Wordsworth : — " Oh, he was good, if e'er a good man lived." But, though it is needless to recount the facts, it may not be amiss to note briefly the evidence his writings present of the depth of their influence on his life and of the greatness of the sacrifice he was called upon to make, and made without a a murmur. It is a pathetic fact, as Ainger has pointed out, that from the moment when the terrible catastrophe of 1 796 could be buried, as it were, from sight, though it could never be forgotten, the name of Lamb's mother never occurs in his writings. He who is so communicative, though with whim- sical elements of fiction, about himself, his relations and his friends, is as silent as the grave about the nearest relation of all. We have pictures of every one of his intimates and con- nexions, but of his mother not even a passing mention. The 230 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS blow had fallen too full on the heart, and for his own sake, as well as for the sake of the hapless sister who did the deed, Lamb closed his lips tight upon the tragedy and upon every- thing that could call it back to mind. Again, Lamb lived the life of a celibate ; yet there is no writer whose works bear more deeply the impress of a character sensitive to and capable of the fireside happiness of wife and children. It is not merely the exquisite reverie Dream Children, though that alone would be enough. The evidence is scattered every- where. Not only are there numerous references elsewhere to Alice W n, as he chose to call that Ann Simmons whose children called Bartrum father, but there is a flavour, an aroma, in essays where she is not named, as, for example, in every word he wrote about the daughters of Captain Jackson. Why did such a man remain single ? He is known to have made one proposal of marriage in the course of his life, appa- rently with the consent and approval of Mary Lamb. The danger of the taint in the blood, though it was not unknown then, was less clearly understood than it is now. But the obligation to his sister was never absent from Lamb's mind. It seems probable that after his boyish love of Ann Simmons, for her sake he put aside all other thoughts of marriage except that which led to the proposal to Miss Kelly. Yet no taint of gall passed into the nature so severely tried. In an age when the bitterness of the heart was allowed too often to distil from the pen, Lamb alone was never either wrong- headed or wrong-hearted. His only rival for almost perfect goodness of nature is Scott. Much has been written, and with good reason, about the humour of Lamb, his power of infinite jest, his exquisite sense of style. It may be well to begin, for once, by insisting upon his wisdom as the greatest of all his qualities ; for the sense of it has been dulled, partly by his own habit of hiding it by a jest, and partly by a misconception by contemporaries cognate EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 231 to, though less gross than, that from which Goldsmith had suffered before. Though Hazlitt in Table Talk calls him the most sensible as well as the wittiest of men, there is sometimes a trace of condescension in the references of Lamb's friends to him. He himself justly complained of Coleridge for the mawkish phrase " gentle-hearted Charles," and said roundly that he would rather be called " drunken dog." The phrase was no mere accident. It was the outcome of a habit of mind; and the friends of Lamb never wholly conquered the habit; to Wordsworth also it was " Lamb the frolic and the gentle" who in 1834 "vanished from his lonely hearth." Lamb's friends loved him and admired him; and yet they had more than a suspicion that in the weightier matters they were his superiors. They were not. Lamb v/as, among other things, one of the wisest men of his time. The evidences of this wisdom are to be met with every- ^^•here. It is the essence of Lamb's criticism. No one but a man endowed with the very genius of common sense could have been so uniformly right as he. Taste alone will not do, for taste is apt to have a bias — Lamb's certainly had for the quain: and the antique. But good sense makes him sub- stantially right even where his own preferences do not guide him; and where they do guide him he has, at his best, as in the essay On the Genius and Character of Hogarth, a marvellous power of comprehension and interpretation which can be explained only as the fruit of a rare wisdom. Again, The Old and the New Schoolmaster is the work of a man who has looked upon life with the shrewdest and most penetrating eye. There is a sound philosophy of life in Old China, and excellent prin- ciples of education are laid down in Recollections of Christ's Hospital. The author of Modern Gallantry had delved beneath shows to reality; and The Tombs in the Abbey is as just in thought as it is vigorous in style. Grace before Meat is from beginning to end instinct with wisdom. It also illus- ^ 232 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS '*" trates well the reason why this quality in Lamb has so often passed undetected. There is a playfulness in it that turns the mind from the expectation of serious thought. But the serious thought is there. He flings down a profound truth in a phrase — " true thankfulness (which is temperance)." And in this lies his whole philosophy of the grace, beautiful at a poor man's table, less beautiful at a rich man's, and not beautiful at all at a city banquet. " When I see a citizen in bib and tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice." " You are startled at the injustice of returning thanks— for what r — for having too much while so many starve ? " " The proper object of the grace is sustenance, not delicacies; the means of life, and not the means of pampering the carcass." It is un- answerable; the profoundest thinker could have taught no more. Take again the essay on A Quakers' Meeting — the Quakers, by the way, are pronounced to have more right to a grace than their neighbours, because " they are neither gluttons nor wine-bibbers as a people." Though Lamb in- cludes the Quaker with the Caledonian, the Jew and the Negro among his " imperfect sympathies," the Quaker essay is a model of comprehension, and sympathetic comprehension too. There is no better test of wisdom. To be able to com- prehend and do justice to that which is widely different from ourselves is one of the things most difficult of achievement. Lamb's own words in Imperfect Sympathies show how great for him the achievement was, how impossible to any but a mind most richly endowed with good sense, an eye most penetrating to detect reality: — " I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I venerate the Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the day when I meet any of their people in my path. When I am ruffled or disturbed by any occurrence, the sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a load from the bosom. But I cannot EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 233 like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) ' to live with them.' I am all over sophisticated — with humours, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet. My appetites are too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel, my gusto too excited To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse." Comprehension of that which is different from self is one test of Wisdom; self-knowledge is another — the last and highest, according to the Delphic motto as it is commonly interpreted. No one stands the test better than Lamb. There is evidence of that knowledge of self in the quotation just given. Much the same view of himself is given again in Mackery End : " Out-of-the-way humours and opinions — heads with some diverting twist in them — the oddities of authorship please me most." But the best evidence is to be found in the fine Character of the late Elia, in which Lamb, under the guise of " a friend of the late Elia," stands aloof and criticises himself with far subtler comprehension than any con- temporary ever showed. He, and he alone, knew exactly the significance of his own jests and apparent irrelevancies. He writes about EHa's conversation, but the words are applicable no less to his writings: " He would interrupt the gravest discus- sion with some light jest; and yet, perhaps not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it. . . . He would stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether senseless, perhaps, if rightly taken) which has stamped his character for the evening." Such was Lamb's way of hinting that there was method in his madness. But even his friends could not fully and at all times believe it. And how delicately in the same preface (as became a friend writing of the dead) he hints at the infirmity 234 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS which he exaggerates in the Confessions of a Drunkard : " He was temperate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness." A man may, however, be most sagacious and yet fail to win love, as Lamb won and still retains it. The secret of that is the nobihty of nature which the facts of Lamb's life so eloquently attest, the gentleness of heart which Coleridge praised, not in error, but in the wrong way, the goodness to which Wordsworth bore his emphatic testimony. This too is graven deep upon the essays. They are full of phrases that reveal it. What but the kindHest of hearts could have thought as Lamb did about a kindly face? "When a kindly face greets us, though but passing by, and never knows us again, nor we it, we should feel it an obligation." In his thoughts on his own childhood we see the genesis of this spirit of his manhood: "The sohtude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration." There are whole essays irradiated with it — the two just quoted, Grace before Meat, The Praise of Chimney- Sweepers, Captain Jackson. There is an unaffected gusto in the story of Jem White in the Chininey-Sweepers. The economic wisdom of A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars may be dubious : we know that Burn, the author of the history of the Poor-Law, would even have made it penal to give to beggars. But there can be no doubt of the charity of the heart that wrote : " Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes." But perhaps the most impressive of all proofs of the boundless kindhness of Lamb is to be found in Captain Jackson. If the character were read a little differently, what a subject for The Book of Snohs ! Notwithstanding his reputation for cyni- cism, Thackeray was no unkindly man; but he could never have looked upon a Captain Jackson with the large- hearted charity of Lamb. Genteel poverty is treated in EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 235 The Book of Snobs too; but what we see there is the pre- tentious host lifting the pretentious cover from the dish where he two or three lean chops. In Lamb, imagina- tion conquers reahty, the remnant rind of cheese becomes a generous meal, " the sensation of wine was there," though no wine, and " you reeled under the potency of his unperforming BacchanaHan encouragements." " You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag — cold savings from the foregone meal — remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from the door contented. But in the copious will — the revelling imagination of your host — the ' mind, the mind, Master Shallow,' whole beeves were spread before you — hecatombs — no end appeared to the profusion." Or again, is not the very soul of goodness in that passage in Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading where Lamb praises the Circulating Library copy of a novel ? — " How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the suUied leaves, and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not forget kind feehngs in fastidiousness, of an old ' Circulating Library ' Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield ! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with deHght! — of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered (miUiner, or harder- working mantua-maker) after her long day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill-spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelhng out their enchanting contents! Who would have them a whit less soiled ? What better condition could we desire to see them in ? " There is nothing affected or insincere about this. In his own way Lamb was a champion of the poor as well as Dickens, and one hardly less cathohc in his sympathies or less tolerant. The story of the beggar who left a legacy of five hundred pounds to the bank clerk who had given him alms for twenty 236 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS years had no power to dry up Lamb's charity : on the contrary, he saw in it " rather a beautiful moral of well-directed charity on the one part, and noble gratitude on the other." Had he lived to see London reproduced in all its complexity in Pick- zoick and its successors, what would he have thought ? He was a son of the great city, and for him too Nature was to be found in Fleet Street rather than in the Lakes. A character such as this, freely self-revealed, could not fail to be among the most attractive things in literature. And Lamb is constantly autobiographical. Not that it is safe to take his statements without examination as literal facts. He had a turn for mystifications, he delighted in weaving threads of fiction in a web of truth. But rarely if ever do the fictions seriously interfere with the genuineness of his confidences. It matters nothing that the real name of Mrs. Battle was Burney, and that of Alice W n Simmons, or that the Cousin Bridget was really a sister, or that when he says, " Brother or sister, I never had any to know them," his statement will not square with facts. Such deviations from precise truth, the disguises, usually transparent, which he chose to assume, do not alter the essential fact that throughout, to a degree almost unexampled in English, Lamb is personal and autobiographical. He is so not only in the essays just referred to, but in what he wrote about Christ's Hospital, in The Superannuated Man, in Oxford in the Vacation. But to be exhaustive would be almost to make a catalogue. Everywhere he takes the reader into his confidence. He is personal in his criticism almost as much as elsewhere. The Detached Thoughts are admirable criticism; but they are Lamb's, and they could not possibly belong to any one else. The same may be said of the famous essay on the artificial comedy of the eighteenth century. From childhood to old age he gives the reader the means of tracing him. Mackery End and Blakesmoor give the reminis- cences of early childhood, Recollections of Chrisfs Hospital EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 237 and Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Tears Ago carry on the tale to the years of school. The South-Sea House is based upon personal recollections following that period, and The Super- annuated Man tells how " at just ten minutes after eight," at the close of a long connexion with the East India Company, he " went home — for ever." Newspapers Thirty-jive Tears Ago records the beginnings of hterary experience — the toil- some manufacture, in that No Man's Time, which means " no time, in which a man ought to be, and awake, in," of six jests per day at sixpence per jest. Friendships are recorded, cherished pleasures indicated, tastes revealed. The love of the theatre is evident in many an essay, the love of books in still more. The folios, " midnight darlings," cheer the New Tear's Eve. But that essay is still more closely intimate, and Hfts the curtain that shrouds the innermost thoughts and fears of all. It is beautiful, and melancholy, and profoundly human, and absolutely sincere: — " I begin to count the probabiHties of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like miser's farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away ' Uke a weaver's shuttle.' Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural soHtudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. — Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in ,. ^238 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS " /■ lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me." This was probably one of the passages which caused Southey to lament the want in Elia of a sounder religion. Southey would doubtless have been quite contented had Lamb chanted, like hundreds of congregations, and with as little meaning as they, " O Paradise, O Paradise, 'Tis weary waiting here." Yet which is the more soundly religious — this silly insincerity, or that manly truth ? In the style of the passage just quoted there is a touch of Sir Thomas Browne, that " fantastic old great man " whom Lamb loved so well and so wisely. There are many other traces of the same influence elsewhere — traces in thought, in turn of expression, in the use of quaint and unusual words, such as periegesis. The matter is of some importance. In point of style Lamb is not wholly a modern. His exquisite but mannered English was based upon the prose masters of the seventeenth century, men like Browne, and Burton of the Anatomy, and Fuller. To them he was drawn by a natural kinship. Their thoughts were largely his, their quaintnesses and conceits fitted in with his humour, their antique flavour pleased his critical palate. This natural affinity, combined with the thoroughness of Lamb's knowledge of them, made the imitation — if a thing so natural can be called by that name — successful, and explains the genesis of a style at once unique and, for the purposes to which it is turned, unsurpassed in effectiveness. Though itself based upon models in the past, it is obviously an extremely unsafe style to imitate. No one could advise the student to give his days and his nights to EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 239 Lamb, if the purpose was to learn how to write English. An imitation of Lamb, to be successful, would require a con- junction of three quahties. First, there must be the same natural affinity to the seventeenth-century writers; and of this there has been probably no example for a hundred years except Lamb himself. Secondly, there must be the same thorough knowledge ; which, though attainable, is nevertheless both rare and difficult. Thirdly, there must be that unfaihng tact, that instinct for style which Lamb possessed; and where that is present the possessor will find his own way without advice. Lamb's style is inseparable from liis humour, of which it is the expression. His " whim-whams," as he called them, found their best expression in the quaint words and antique phrases and multiphed and sometimes far-fetched yet never forced comparisons in which he abounds. Strip Elia of these and he is nothing. Neither the brilHancy of Hazhtt, nor the harmony of De Quincey, nor the vigour of Macaulay, nor the eloquence of Ruskin, nor the purity of Goldsmith could for a moment be thought capable of expressing the meaning of Lamb. In argumentative passages no doubt one or other might suffice. Hazlitt might have maintained the thesis of The Artificial Comedy with equal skill. But when we come to the most characteristic essays, such as The Two Races of Men and Poor Relations and A Chapter on Ears, what style is con- ceivable except that in which they are couched ? Of no one else is the saying that the style is the man more true than of Lamb. In the deepest sense therefore his style is natural and all his own. Its basis in the seventeenth-century writers is, after all, not so much imitation as the expression of his natural affinity to them. What is the true character of Lamb's humour? It has been called American by an Enghshman, though there is a suggestion of Ireland in the comparison. But apart from the ^ THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS question of the propriety of attributing sonship to the elder, the comparison is superficial. It means no more than that there is an element of exaggeration in Lamb's humour as there is in American humour. We see it in A Chapter on Ears : *' Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken some pains) what a note of music is; or how one note should differ from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes the thorough bass can I contrive to guess at, from its being supereminently harsh and disagreeable." The exaggera- tion is evident. We know that we must not take quite literally this inability to distinguish a soprano from a tenor. We smile without believing when Lamb says he has been practising " God save the King " all his life, and has not arrived within many quavers of it. Exaggeration even greater is, of course, the most conspicuous quality in the humour we call American. But compare Mark Twain's advice to the serenaders to gag their tenor, lest his overweening conceit should tempt liim to let out too soon his insufferable screech, and it will be found that the manner is wholly different. Besides, exaggeration has by no means the prominence in Lamb's humour that it has in the American. What is there of it, what in the faintest degree suggestive of America, in the far more characteristic opening of the essay just quoted ? — " I have no ear. " Mistake me not, reader, — nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging orna- ments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital." Here we are closer to the real Lamb. Here are two characteristics which are far more general in his writings and, what is even more important, far more distinctive of him, than mere exaggeration. That he shares with many, English as well as American ; the others are his own. They are, first, EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 241 the flavour of antique style; and, secondly, that iteration, anything but damnable, which can be illustrated from a score of other passages. The phrase " handsome volutes to the human capital " is a playful conceit which a seventeenth- century writer might have used seriously and plumed himself upon. The iteration had better be illustrated by a few passages and references. We find it in The Praise of Chimney Sweepers. They are " innocent blacknesses " . . . " young Africans of our own growth " . . . " almost clergy imps." Their teeth are " white and shining ossifications." And then (another characteristic) the exquisite skill of the quotation. The display of these " ossifications " is as when " A sable cloud Turns forth her silver lining on the night." We find it again in The Two Races of Men — in the borrower with his careless, even deportment, his rosy gills, his beautiful reliance on Providence, taking no more thought than liHes, his contempt for money, his liberal confounding of meum and tuum, his noble simplification of language. But in Poor Relations Lamb bursts into a perfect riot of \vhimsical metaphors : — " A poor Relation — is the most irrelevant thing in nature, — a piece of impertinent correspondency, — an odious approxi- mation, — a haunting conscience, — a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity, — an unwelcome remembrancer, — a perpetually recurring mortification, — a drain on yovir purse, — a more intolerable drain on your pride, — a drawback upon success, — a rebuke to your rising, — a stain in your blood, — a blot on your 'scutcheon, — a rent in your garment, — a death's head at your banquet, — Agathocles' pot, — a Mordecai in your grate, — a Lazarus at your door, — a lion in your path, — a frog in your chamber, — a fly in your ointment — a mote in your eye, — a triumph to your enemy, — an apology Q 242 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS to your friends, — the one thing not needful, — the hail in harvest, — the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet." It is idle to compare this with anything else. It is unique. There is no humorist more original than Lamb. The element of the grotesque, which is present here, may be further illustrated by the description of Boyer's wigs in Christ's Hospital : " He had two wigs, both pedantic, but of differing omen. The one serene, smihng, fresh powdered, betokening a mild day. The other, an old discoloured, un- kempt, angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. Woe to the school, when he made his morning appearance in his passy, or passionate wig. No comet expounded surer." But there is something of the poetic as well as of the grotesque; and this, too, was characteristic of Lamb. Though he was not much of a poet in verse there is an unmistakable atmosphere of poetry about his more serious prose, and it shows occasion- ally even in the most humorous essays. There is a touch of the poet in the comparison of the borrower to " the true Propontic which never ebbeth; " there is more than a touch in the reference to " dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams " in The South-Sea House, and in that fine phrase in Distant Correspondents, referring to the changes that may have occurred in the space between the writing and the receipt of the letter — " this confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of two presents.''^ The whole of Dream Children is poetic, and much of A Quaker's Meeting. Frequently the poetic element is brought in under the shape of a literary allusion or quotation which no one could manage more skilfully than Lamb. He drew either from English or from Latin sources, and always with taste. Lamb must have been conscious that the essays were by far his greatest contribution to hterature, and it would have been strange if he had left so remarkable a faculty unused after discovering that he possessed it and finding an outlet for it. EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 243 In point of fact essay-writing was his principal literary occupa- tion from 1820, when he began to contribute to The London Magazine, to 1833, when the Last Essays of Elia appeared. All the essays by which we now know him were thus the pro- duct of his intellectual prime and of the fulness of his experi- ence. He was about forty-five when he first wrote under the name of EHa, and fifty-eight when he last used that name. And his days were then numbered. The death of Coleridge in the summer of 1834 shocked him terribly. He was heard to mutter from time to time, Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead; and just before the close of the year he himself followed his friend to the universal bourne. The season of Christmas has been peculiarly fatal to great essayists. Two later Christmases were destined to be darkened by the deaths of two others — Macaulay and Thackeray. In 1824, while Lamb was still writing for The London Magazine, there began, in the same periodical, a series of sketches which displayed no small portion of the grace and humour of the master himself. The writer, Mary Russell Mitford (1787-185 5), had already produced Jm/ww, ah^^wMle, for the nme years from 1824 to 1832, she was turning off those bright and easy descriptions of village Hfe and thinking Hghtly enough of them, she continued to batter with tragedies the gates of the temple of fame. She thought she had succeeded in opening them, and her contemporaries agreed with her. We know now that she was right, but that the gates opened, not to the heavy battering, but to the quiet voice of the sketches. Miss Mitford's tragedies are forgotten; her sketches of Our Village are among the permanent possessions of English literature. Their charm is woven of many threads. Miss Mitford had a keen eye for character and an equally keen eye for nature. She had humour, sympathy and animation. The whole group of qualities will be found illustrated in almost any of the essays. Take that excellent description of an old %J'f/yU THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS custom then still surviving — Bramley Maying. It is spirited from beginning to end, rich in atmosphere, humorous in the sketch of the friendly butcher, who gives " the proper, customary, and unintelhgible directions as to the lanes and turnings — first to the right, then to the left, then round Farmer Jennings' close, then across the Holy Brook, then to the right again." In The Wood, or in The Fall of the Leaf, indeed everywhere, we see evidence of her keen feehng for nature. Her eye was very alert in her country walks, and her mind active. Quiet as her themes are, her treatment of them is always animated. Description, which is often dreary, is never so in her, for it is so rapid. One point leads without pause to another; still life is enlivened with hfe that is any- thing but still; occasionally, but rarely, a great public ques- tion is touched in passing — just touched, for to dwell upon it would be to introduce the worst sort of irrelevance — a thing that is out of harmony with the spirit of the piece. A passage from Violeting illustrates all this variety and animation: — " We have the good fortune to live in an unenclosed parish, and may thank the wise obstinacy of two or three sturdy farmers, and the lucky unpopularity of a ranting madcap lord of the manor, for preserving the dehcious green patches, the islets of wilderness amidst cultivation, which form, perhaps, the pecuhar beauty of Enghsh scenery. The common that I am passing now — the lea, as it is called — is one of the lovehest of" these favoured spots. It is a little sheltered scene, retiring, as it were, from the village; sunk amidst higher lands — hiUs would be almost too grand a word : edged on one side by one gay highroad, and intersected by another; and sur- rounded by a most picturesque confusion of meadows, cottages, farms, and orchards; with a great pond in one corner, usually bright and clear, giving a dehghtful cheerfulness and daylight to the picture. The swallows haunt that pond; so do the EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 245 children. There is a merry group round it now; I have seldom seen it without one. Children love water; clear, bright, sparkling water; it excites and feeds their curiosity; it is motion and life." Men are children of a larger growth; they too love motion and life, and it is the description that seems to move and live that they will longest read. This love of movement naturally led Miss Mitford to blend the hving things of her village with its scenery. The grey- hound Mayflower, the " sort of a kind of a spaniel " Dash, a ewe with her lame lamb, all are noticed; and still more the human actors on the scene. She has her dramatis pcrsotKe as essayist, ho less than as tragedian. Her character-sketches are the most delightful of all her writings — Olive Hathaway, a charming picture of a little lame village mantua-maker; Old Master Green, " a veteran of the tap-room, one to whom strong beer had been for nearly seventy years the best friend and the worst enemy, making him happy and keeping him poor; " Modern Antiques, " two complete and remarkable specimens of the ladies of eighty years ago — ladies cased inwardly and outwardly in Addison and whalebone." These are three examples out of many, and if they are among the best, there are not a few others well worthy of comparison with them. And such sketches are to be found not only in the papers which bear human names or suggest human activity. The Dell is as much concerned with the farmer and his wife as with the scene, and The Hard Summer is more occupied with boys than with weather. Naturally Miss Mitford more frequently depicts her own sex than the other; but nothing in the village is alien to her, and it says much for her tolerance and broad humanity that she finds a good deal to say, both skilfully and wisely, about the boy: — " I plead guilty to a strong partiality towards that unpopular class of beings, country boys; I have a large 246 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS acquaintance amongst them, and I can almost say, that I know good of many and harm of none. In general, they are an open, spirited, good-humoured race, with a proneness to embrace the pleasures and eschew the evils of their condition, a capacity for happiness, quite unmatched in man, or woman, or girl. They are patient, too, and bear their fate as scape- goats (for all sins whatsoever are laid, as matters of course, to their door), whether at home or abroad, with amazing resigna- tion; and, considering the many lies of which they are the objects, they tell wonderfully few in return. The worst that can be said of them is, that they seldom, when grown to man's estate, keep the promise of their boyhood; but that is a fault to come — a fault that may not come, and ought not to be anticipated. It is astonishing how sensible they are to notice from their betters, or those whom they think such. I do not speak of money, or gifts, or praise, or the more coarse and common briberies — they are more delicate courtiers; a word, a nod, a smile, or the mere calling of them by their names, is enough to ensure their heart and their services." If any one requires a reason better than the pleasure of it for reading Our Village, he may find it in the fact that the book depicts a rural England which is to a considerable degree a thing of the past. The " haunts of ancient peace " are rarer now than they were when Tennyson was a boy and Miss Mitford a woman of middle age. But such as they were when industrialism was but half developed and railways were not yet, they will nowhere be found more charmingly dehneated than in that beautiful and wise and generously human book, Our Village. HazHtt has been dealt with elsewhere, and De Quincey soon became a member of the Blackwood, group; but as 7 he London Magazine was the medium of publication of the work for which he is still most famous, he may fairly be treated along with Lamb and Miss Mitford. Of Thomas de Quincey (1785- EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY V47 1859) i^ ^^y ^^ said that he has left little that is not close to, if not within, the province of the essay ; and yet he was a man whom nature did not intend for an essayist. It was his defects rather than his merits that made him one, and so, though the bulk of his writings can hardly be brought under any other head, there is scarcely anything he has left that can be regarded as a wholly satisfactory example of the essay form. The perfect essay is brief, and, though it may be discursive, it has nevertheless a unity of its own; but if any law guides the wanderings of De Quincey, it is often very hard to discover. De Quincey divided his own works into three sections, to one of wKcTTlie gave the general name of essays. But he uses the word in a sense in one way narrower, in another perhaps wider, than that in which it is employed in this book. The examples he chooses to comment upon are The Essenes, The C^sars, and Cicero. Now The Ccesars fills the greater part of a volume. It appears that De Quincey means by essay history or philosophy in the making; for there is no reason why the two former papers should not have been expanded, the one into a history of Rome in the imperial period, the other into a philosophical treatise on the nature of Christianity and its relation to the teaching of the Essenes. No reason, or rather none except that infirmity of will and instabiHty of purpose which forbade De Quincey, as it forbade Coleridge, his feUow-victim to opium, to realise more than a fraction of that which was within him. He had the scholarship, the intellectual interest and the speculative power necessary for the construction of massive works of either the historical or the philosophical sort ; but in him as in his friend John Wilson, " the central tie-beam " was wanting, and thus he was con- demned to produce merely fragments. His ' essays ' there- fore are literally attempts at the various subjects with which they deal. They bear the sort of relation to what he might have written that the essays of Macaylay bear to his history. h 248 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS of Carlyle's Diamond Necklace to his French Revolution. There is an incompleteness about them all. De Quincey further explains that he includes under the name of essays " those papers which address themselves purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty; or do so primarily; " and he adds that generally he claims " the merit of rectification applied to absolute errors, or to injurious limitations of the truth." The essay, then, so understood, is part of the literature of knowledge, and has nothing directly to do with the literature of power. The pure play of fancy or imagination, whether serious or humorous, is excluded; there is no room for Lamb's Dream Children or for his Roast Pig. But there is room for many of De Quincey's papers. There is room for such an exercise of critical ingenuity as Judas Iscariot. There is room for papers illustrative of his learning, like the essays on Bentley and on The Pagan Oracles ; for biographical papers, like his Goldsmith and Goethe ; for papers on the philosophy of literature, like his Style and his Theory of Greek Tragedy ; and for that pecuharly interesting group of criticisms on contemporaries — Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt — where the value imparted by De Quincey's native acumen is indefinitely increased by the fact that he is an authority at first hand and as such can never be superseded. Elsewhere his deplorable incapacity to concentrate enormously diminishes the value of his work; but students must always turn back to discover what impression these men produced on a contemporary so well qualified to understand them and so highly gifted with the power of expression. Even of those whom he did not personally know his criticisms, though marred by diffuseness, are worthy of careful consideration. Probably no contem- porary but Coleridge had given more thought to the principles of criticism, and none but Coleridge had, on occasion, more power of illuminative suggestion — witness The Knocking at EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 249 ihe Gate in Macbeth. We should owe him gratitude were it only for that admirable distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power, which was borrowed from him above. The De Quincey whom we commonly think of now, however, is rather the De Quincey of the other t\vo sections of his work, which are not essays according to his use of the word, but are partly so according to the meaning here assigned to it. One of these sections he describes as embracing those papers which propose primarily to amuse the reader, and he selects for illustration the Autobiographic Sketches, though he adds that these include parts which have a higher aim. The delightful Sketches are too extensive in scope to be classified under the heading of ' essay,' but among his works there are several papers which he would probably have placed in this section, and which seem to be essays in the wider accep- tation of the word. Such are those admirable narratives, The Revolt of the Tartars and The Spanish Military Nun. Both illustrate De Quincey's besetting sin of diffuseness, but both nevertheless show a masterly skill in marshalling events and presenting them to the reader's mind in their due gradation of importance, and both carry him along on a stream of musical sentences. Such too is the famous essay in the form of a lecture on Murder, considered as one of the Fine Arts, which Stevenson no doubt had in mind when he wrote The Suicide Club. De Quincey's essay has suffered at the hands of time, and will hardly be read now with the enthusiastic admiration it once inspired. The gruesome but impressive Postscript has worn better. Still, the essay itself, if not quite a masterpiece, is a fine thing; and it is especially interesting as one of the few examples of successful humour in De Quincey. Humour was a gift he evidently believed himself to possess, and he is constantly attempting to show it, with unfortunate results. Many an essay is at once needlessly enlarged and / 2sO THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS 'J^ J' m^fred by pages of thin jocularity, most commonly at the jDeginning, but frequently enough embedded in the body of the / paper too. There remains the third and last section, which De Quincey rightly considered to be a far higher class of com- position than the others. It embraces The English Opium- Eater and the Suspiria de Profundis. It embraces likewise parts of the Autobiographic Sketches — those parts to which the author himself refers as having a higher aim than the ordinary stream of the narrative. Clearly also it embraces parts of The English Mail-Coach. A portion at least of this division of his works falls within the province of the essay; and so De Quincey has to be considered as the re-creator for the nineteenth century of that impassioned prose which the seventeenth century had known and the eighteenth had for- gotten. It is by far his most memorable achievement. Not since Sir Thomas Browne had such effects as his been pro- duced; without him Ruskin as aesthetic critic would have been something different from the man we know. No one knew better than De Quincey himself where the excellence of his style lay, for he applied to his own work that talent for critical analysis which enabled him to detect both beauty and defect in others. But it is not given to any man to be a complete critic of himself, and while De Quincey understood perfectly well the excellence, it is certain that he was not so fully aware of the defect; otherwise he would have prurued away his redundancies and spared the reader many a page of matter so trivial and thought so superficial that even the most melodious English cannot conceal the inherent poverty. Still, he was partly aware of this defect too. There is a passage in his essay on Charles Lamb which throws an instructive light upon his conception of himself. After commenting upon Lamb's insensibility to music he proceeds : — EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 251 " It was a corollary from the same large substratum in his nature, that Lamb had no sense of the rhythmical in prose composition. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or sonorous ascent of clauses, in the structure of sentences, were effects of art as much thrown away upon him as the voice of the charmer upon the deaf adder. We ourselves, occupying the very station of polar opposition to that of Lamb, being as morbidly, perhaps, in the one excess as he in the other, naturally detected this omission in Lamb's nature at an early stage in our acquaintance." In the author's own view, then, De Quincey's style is based upon the use of the periodic sentence, and the grand object in the construction of the sentence is to secure volume of sound, pomp of cadence. The individual word is important, it is true. Every scholarly instinct in De Quincey cried out against the misuse of words in respect of meaning. Again and again he digresses to explain the accurate and scholarly use of a word which is suggested to him as he writes, just as Ruskin afterwards digressed for the same purpose and insisted upon the importance of knowing the history of words. So too every musical instinct was outraged by the use of a word ill-sounding either in itself or in the context, and he dilates upon the immeasurable pains he took to find just the right word for the place. Still, though all this was indis- pensable, it was only a means to an end — the harmonious, sonorous, swinging sentence. But the most interesting point in the passage quoted is the suggestion that he himself is perhaps as morbidly in the one excess as Lamb is in the other. And this is exactly the truth. Where De Quincey falls short of greatness is in the substance of his work. Pomp of language, merely as such, has a charm of its own. R. L. Stevenson found great comfort in the name Jehovah Tsidkenu, when he knew nothing about its meaning. Still, for most men, sound has to be supported by sense, and there must be a reasonable 252 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS proportion between the one and the other — the little fishes must not talk like whales. Pomp of speech is fitted for great occasions. Pericles pronouncing the funeral oration over the dead Athenians, Abraham Lincoln consecrating for all time the soil of Gettysburg already consecrated with blood, not only may but must be stately. But Pericles giving an inventory of the resources of Athens is simply business-like, and no one could be more homely then Lincoln habitually was. Now if De Quincey had preserved this perfect balance between sound and meaning he would have been equal to the greatest of English prose-writers; perhaps he would have been the greatest of all, for it is doubtful whether any one else, except Sir Thomas Browne, has written so much prose with the highest qualities of rhythm. But the balance is not perfectly kept. The opium dreams are gor- geous, but somewhat too vapoury. Bring him to the test of a comparison with the passages quoted in an earlier chapter from Browne. In the elder writer there is a back- bone of thought such as we do not find in De Quincey. Browne is a dreamer, it is true, but his dreams have a savour of reality. The ashes of an urn call up the whole pageant of human history. Contrast with this Dream-Fugue, or any part of it: — " Sweet funeral bells from some incalculable distance, wail- ing over the dead that die before the dawn, awakened me as I slept in a boat moored to some familiar shore. The morning twilight even then was breaking; and, by the dusky revelations which it spread, I saw a girl, adorned with a garland of white roses about her head for some great festival, running along the solitary strand in extremity of haste. Her running was the running of panic; and often she looked back as to some dreadful enemy in the rear. But when I leaped ashore, and followed in her steps to warn her of a peril in front, alas ! from me she fled as from another peril, and vainly I shouted to her EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 253 of quicksands that lay ahead. Faster and faster she ran; round a promontory of rocks she wheeled out of sight; in an instant I also wheeled round it, but only to see the treacherous sands gathering above her head. Already her person was buried; only the fair young head and the diadem of white roses around it were still visible to the pitying heavens; and, last of all, was visible one white marble arm. I saw by the early twihght this fair young head, as it was sinking down to darkness — saw this marble arm, as it rose above her head and her treacherous grave, tossing, faltering, rising, clutching, as at some false deceiving hand stretched out from the clouds — saw this marble arm uttering her dying hope, and then utter- ing her dying despair. The head, the diadem, the arm — these all had sunk; at last over these also the cruel quicksand had closed; and no memorial of the fair young girl remained on earth, except my own solitary tears, and the funeral bells from the desert seas that, rising again more softly, sang a requiem over the grave of the buried child, and over her bhghted dawn." Here certainly are rhythmus and pomp of cadence. For sheer skill in writing how many have lived who could equal it ? Very few; but Browne at least could, and Browne could, in addition, now express and now suggest thought such as we nowhere find in De Quincey. The latter falls short therefore of the greatest; but we must be thankful for what he could do and did. Such musical EngHsh is itself precious. And besides, on a lower plane of style, how surely, when he was fully himself, he could hit his mark. Instances have been mentioned already — The Revolt of the Tartars, The Spanish Military Nun. But further, in that essay. The English Mail- Coach, of which Dream-Fugue is a part, this power is admirably illustrated in the first section. The Glory of Motion. Where else is there such a vivid description of the effect of the swift rush of the horses ? Dickens has touched the theme, 254 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS but he is crude in comparison with De Quincey. And where else is such an impression conveyed of the suspense of England in those years of war; of the joy of the news of victory, and the grief from the sense of bereavement ? To him who pro- duced such effects we owe a debt of gratitude; and though he is not among the greatest, though he had grave faults, he is nevertheless among our benefactors. The year 1820 was memorable not only for The London Magazine biitlor the establishment of The Retrospective Review (l 820-1 828), to whose excellence in criticism Professor Saints- bury has borne emphatic testimony. Among the contributors was Lamb's friend and literary executor, Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), whose articles in it and in ThT New Monthly Magazine are marked alike by vigour of understanding and by generosity of spirit. These newer publications all reverted, as regards the periods of their publication, to the custom of the eighteenth-century magazines, the departure from which by the quarterlies was so curiously disturbing to the mind of an old-fashioned editor. The Athenceum and The Spectator, when they appeared iri 1828, still further shortened the in- terval between issues to one week. They addressed a class, however, not widely different from that to which the quarter- lies and the monthlies alike appealed — the upper and upper middle classes. But an important step, in that sense down- wards, was taken in 1832 by Chambers^ s Journal, the organ of the brothers William and Robert Chambers. Its establish- ment marks a distinct stage in the democratisation of litera- ture. As publishers the brothers worked for this end, and sometimes the very titles of their publications proclaimed their purpose — for example, Information for the People. They were a potent force in that movement which Peacock satirised in the phrase, the Steam Intellect Society. With reference to his contributions to the Journal itself, the younger and more literary of the brothers wrote that it was his design from the EARLY MAGAZINES OF iqth CENTURY 255 first to be the essayist of the middle class; and by that he meant a class which no essayist had yet addressed. Robert Chambers (i 802-1 871) was a person of remarkable gifts. Whefi"he-was still a young man he astonished Scott by the extent of his information about old Edinburgh, and in middle life he raised no small commotion by his Vestiges of Creation, a theory of evolution before the days of evolution. But besides substantive books he wrote some hundreds of essays to the Journal. They are of the most varied kinds — " gay, grave, sentimental, philosophical," — but Chambers rarely fails to be interesting. To be interesting was his de- liberate aim. " Everywhere," he says, " I have sought less to attain elegance or observe refinement, than to avoid that last of literary sins — dulness." His reward is that he may still be read with enjoyment and with profit. He had a great power of imparting interest through his knowledge of detail; and he had a surprising amount of information on many other subjects as well as on Edinburgh. A paper on Long Livers affords an example of this power. His pleasant humour is seen in The Innocent Railway, an amusing account of a journey from Edinburgh to Dalkeith; and again in Handles, an ingenious apphcation of the idea that the most peculiar and " difficult " men are most easily managed once the " handle " has been found. In Jonson's language, it is necessary to understand the humour. Thus, " A wife of any ingenuity might in great measure dress herself off her hus- band's hurricanes." The secret is, to submit and make him penitent. Humour is the essence likewise of the excellent X essay entitled The Struggles of Adolescence, for which search has to be made in the old volumes of the Journal; for it has been strangely omitted from the tolerably copious selections. Another notable periodical which also produced genuine and memorable literature was Hugh Miller's (1802-1856) . 256 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS ^^aper, The fVitness, which was the organ of the Scottish Dis- l| ruption. Rarely has a periodical founded for a purpose so polemical left anything of permanent value; but the editor was a man of notable literary gifts, and his own contributions, even if they stood alone, would entitle The Witness to a place in literary history. In its columns appeared both The Old Red Sandstone and My Schools and Schoolmasters, the works by which Miller is best remembered. These, though they have in part the character of essays, have collectively a wider range than the word can legitimately cover. But besides, Miller was the author of an extraordinary number of papers on miscellaneous subjects. He was a fertile as well as an in- flexibly honest journalist. He was the leader-writer of his own paper; and the volume of Leading Articles printed under his name is of a quality to which journalism rarely attains. The interest of many of the articles has waned with the pass- ing of the matters to which they refer; but there are others which are still fresh. There is pungent satire in the article entitled Criticism — Internal Evidence; and there is a touch of imagination in the comparison between the elaborate and formal sentences of the time of Dugald Stewart and the manner in which the writers wore their hair — •" the period is contemporary with the peruke — the period is the peruke of style." But naturally there is more material that is still in- teresting in the Essays, Historical and Biographical, Political and Social, Literary and Scientific. These, we are told, are the gleanings from about a thousand articles, contributed during ?ililler's sixteen years' editorship of The Witness ; and this in addition to the multitude of leading articles written during the same years. The Essays are journalistic; but it is the journaHsm of a man of Hterary genius, and of one who, like Scott, had as much sense as genius. They show that he possessed a keen and penetrating eye, wide sympathies and clear intelligence. The biographical ones display a just EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 257 appreciation of character, the critical ones genuine literary taste, and the social ones sound and balanced judgment. For humour combined with political wisdom it would be hard to beat the hypothesis, as instructive as it is amusing, in Crime-making Laws : " If there was a special law enacted against all red-headed men, and all six-feet high, red-headed men and men six feet high would in a short time become exceedingly dangerous characters." And Miller proceeds to prove his assertion. It is another aspect of the truth em- bodied in the quotation from Coleridge regarding Sir Alex- ander Ball.i If Hugh Miller had stood alone he would have made The Witness memorable. But he did not stand alone. To The Witness we owe the introduction to literature of one of the most exquisite of our later essayists — Dr. John Brown (i8io- 1882). In his case the professional title Is inseparable from the mail, though we think of him as man of letters, not as physician. He is one of that fortunate group of writers who, though not among the very great, are hardly less sure of per- manent fame, because they have done one thing supremely well. He is for all time the laureate of the dog. From Homer down to Scott the greatest writers have shown their love of the friend of man; but not one of them all has left proof in writing that he possessed such a profound knowledge of the psychology of the dog as Brown. To Brown we owe not only the great Rab. In that exquisite piece, half-story, half-essay, the dog shares the honours with his human friends, the noble old woman and her husband, rough, but noble too; and the reader thinks most perhaps of that touching scene where in her delirium the dying woman reveals her undying love of the child who had been " in the Kingdom forty years and mair." But in Our Dogs the creatures we call lower fill the field — nearly, not altogether; for there are delightful 'See ante, Chap. VIII. -W' 258 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS touches on Brown's father, his Rhadamanthine grandmother, and other members of the family. Still, the dogs are the prin- cipal figures — the inimitable Toby, Wylie " the wee fell yin," Wasp the marvellous mother, Jock, who " was insane from his birth," and John Pym, who must have been related to the dog whose " life was fu' o' sairiousness " because he could not get *' enuff o' fechtin'." There is no other dog in all Utera- ture equal to Toby. There have been many more beautiful, for Toby was " the most utterly shabby, vulgar, mean-look- ing cur" his owner ever beheld; and yet in a deeper sense there is none so beautiful, for none has found a vates sacer to delineate him with such loving care, from his ethics — he was " a dog of great moral excellence " — to his unique tail, of which we are told that it " was a tail per se ; it was of im- mense girth and not short, equal throughout like a policeman's baton; the machinery for working it was of great power, and acted in a way, as far as I have been able to discover, quite original." This is Brown in his lighter mood, whimsically humorous; but no reader of Rah and, his Friends can doubt that he had a graver mood as wellV '^Though he has written best on dogs, or on men and women in some relation to dogs, he had no inconsiderable range of interests and gifts. He was highly skilled in drawing character-sketches — witness his Letter to John Cairns about his own father, and his paper on Mr. Syme. Marjorie Fleming is a mosaic of quotations from the wonder- ful child herself, but they are put together with genius. Minchmoor and The Enterkin illustrate his feehng for nature and his power of conveying the impression of natural scenes, which is a better thing than describing them. His exquisitely delicate gift of literary criticism is shown in Oh, Fm wat, wat ; and 'Notes on Art proves that he had the same gift for the criticism of painting. Few have possessed such a power of transcribing a picture into words. Take for example his EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 259 description of the British Lion's head in Leech's "Disraeli measuring the British Lion " : — " What a leonine simpleton ! What a visage ! How much is in it, and how much not! Look at his shirt collar and chubby cheek! What hair! copious and rank as the son of Manoah's, each particular hair growing straight out into space, and taking its own noway particular way; his honest, simple eyes, well apart; his snub, infantile nose; his long upper lip, unreclaimed as No-man's-land, or the Libyan de- sert, unstubbed as ' Thornaby Waaste ' ; his mouth closed, and down at the corner, partly from stomach in discontent (Giles is always dyspeptic), partly from contempt of the same." An imagination akin to the poetic, humour, ready power of illustrating from literature and from art, and a sound psychology, are the qualities which give Brown's papers their value. His metaphors are illuminating — as when, in the paper on Mr. Syme, he speaks of Syme as " a solar man," who " had his planets pacing faithfully about him; " his illustrations are happy — as when, in the same paper, he describes the orchid " radiant in beauty, white, with a brown freckle, like Imogen's breast, and like it, ' right proud of that most delicate lodging.' " The fineness of his psychology is shown in the character-sketches; or the paper on John Leech may be quoted in illustration: "Like all true humourists, he had the tragic sense and power — for as is the height so is the depth, as is the mirth so is the melancholy; Loch Lomond is deepest when Ben dips into it." But over all is the im- pression of Brown himself, observant, sympathetic, sensitive; and the deepest debt of the reader is for the privilege of inter- course with a beautiful and pure mind, Fraser's Magazine had come into the field two years before Chambers's Journal. For sheer weight of genius its staff surpassed any that has ever gathered round an EngHsh magazine, for it included Coleridge, Carlyle and Thackeray; nWHKHMMiaMIIIMIIiV .^ Kp' THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS bu* it hardly equalled The London Magazine in respect of ^fhose gifts which make the essayist. Coleridge and Carlyle are treated elsewhere. Both, like Thackeray himself, are more eminent in other spheres of literature than as essayists; but, unlike them, Thackeray had in very liberal measure the temperament of the essayist. He has moreover practised the art of essay-writing to an extent which many hardly realise. Every one knows the Roundabout Papers, and every one looks upon them as a collection of essays. But The Book of Snobs is a collection of essays too, and, though it is thrown into the form of letters from an uncle to a nephew. Sketches and Travels in London is another. Further, it is one which should be read as a corrective to The Book of Snobs ; for the latter by itself leaves a somewhat painful impression. Not that The Book of Snobs is wholly without a corrective in itself. It is true the author preaches the universality of snobbery: " If you want to moralise on the mutability of human affairs, go and see the figure of Gorgius in his real, identical robes, at the wax-work. Admittance one shilling. Children and flunkeys sixpence. Go, and pay sixpence." But there are degrees of offensiveness in snobbery. About snobbery in high places Thackeray's satire is stinging. He writes bitterly of The Court Circular and all its meannesses. The German King-Consort of Portugal, he tells us, had a keeper to load his guns, who handed them to a nobleman, who handed them to the Prince, who blazed away. All concerned were snobs, but the keeper was the least snobbish. There is bitterness also in the satire of the " brutal, ignorant, peevish bully of an Englishman," who travels over the Conti- nent with his eyes blind and his ears deaf to all beauty, goes to church only to call the practices there degrading and super- stitious, " as if his altar was the only one that was acceptable," and is moved by nothing, " except when a very great man comes his way, and then the rigid, proud, self-confident, inflexible British Snob can be as humble as a flunkey and as supple as a EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 261 harlequin." Sometimes Thackeray's indignation is fierce, but sometimes again it is tempered with pity. There are char- acters and callings which he cannot touch without tenderness. The Clerical Snob is defended, not attacked. " May this pen," he exclaims, " never write a pennyworth more if it ever casts ridicule upon " him or his calling. Nevertheless, in order to see this other side of Thackeray in its real proportion we must go elsewhere than to The Book oj Snobs. The Sketches and Travels in London have plenty of satire, but most of the themes are lightly touched. It is full of worldly wisdom in the good sense of the phrase, and the easy chatty manner is delightful. That spirit of chivalry and that reverence for good women which lay deep down in the heart of Thackeray are freely revealed. On the Pleasures oj being a Fogy shows him in his lighter mood, and A Dinner in the City is bright with the half-playful, half-serious love of good cheer. " Next to eating good dinners," he says, " a healthy man with a benevolent turn of mind must like, I think, to read about them. When I was a boy, I had by heart the Barmecide's feast in the ' Arabian Nights '; and the culinary passages in Scott's novels (in which works there is a deal of good eating) always were my favourites. The Homeric poems are full, as everybody knows, of roast and boiled: and every year I look forward with pleasure to the newspapers of the loth of November for the menu of the Lord Mayor's feast, which is sure to appear in those journals. What student of history is there who does not remember the City dinner given to the Allied Sovereigns in 1814? It is good even now, and to read it ought to make a man hungry, had he had five meals that day." On the other hand, some of the papers are serious enough, and a few are sombre in the extreme. Waiting at the Station — thoughts suggested by the sight of thirty-eight women emigrants to Australia — is gloomy with the sense of an awful 262 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS poverty, and of the great gulf between the well-dressed and the poor. The Curate^s Walk, that sad contrast to A Dinner in the City, shows the same interest in social questions and close observation of the conditions of life, combined with a special tenderness towards the children of the poor. Going to see a Man Hanged is a powerful and impressive account of the actual emotions of the writer at an execution. The greater part of it would be almost too painful to quote, but, as a matter by the way, it embodies an effective satire of the party system in politics which is still worth bearing in mind: "Three hundred and ten gentlemen of good fortune, able for the most part to quote Horace, declare solemnly that unless Sir Robert comes in, the nation is ruined. Three hundred and fifteen on the other side swear by their great gods that the safety of the nation depends upon Lord John; and to this end they quote Horace too." A certain percentage of the gentlemen are no longer of good fortune, and comparatively few of them can quote Horace; but in essence there has been no change. In the Christmas Books and in the Sketch Books too there are essays; but unquestionably Thackeray the essayist is seen at his best in the delightful Roundabout Papers. The very title is felicitous. The author rambles both in his choice of theme and in his manner of treatment. Anything will serve him, from the death of a great general or a great author to a chalk mark on a door; and the range of tone is from heroism to boyish playfulness. The latter tone is audible in the pleasantly rambling paper On some late great Victories, with its gleeful delight over the success of The Cornhill Magazine, the former in Strange to say, on Club Paper, and in On a Joke I heard from the late Thomas Hood. The last-mentioned paper well illustrates Thackeray's method; for he does not tell the joke which the title proclaims to be the subject of his essay. His remark about Montaigne, that an essay might bear almost EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 263 any title, is not without its application to himself. But he himself has given the best description of his own method: " In these humble essaykins I have taken leave to egotize. I cry out about the shoes which pinch me, and, as I fancy, more naturally and pathetically than if my neighbour's corns were trodden under foot. I prattle about the dish which I love, the wine which I like, the talk I heard yesterday — about Brown's absurd airs — Jones's ridiculous elation when he thinks he has caught me in a blunder (a part of the fun, you see, is that Jones will read this, and will perfectly well know I mean him, and that we shall meet and grin at one another with entire politeness). This is not the highest kind of speculation, I confess, but it is a gossip which amuses some folks. A brisk and honest small-beer will refresh those who do not care for the frothy outpourings of heavier taps. A two of clubs may be a good handy little card sometimes, and able to tackle a king of diamonds, if it is a little trump. Some philosophers get their wisdom with deep thought, and out of ponderous libraries; I pick up my small crumbs of cogitation at a dinner- table; or from Mrs. Mary and Miss Louisa, as they are prattling over their five o'clock tea." All the leading characteristics of Thackeray could be illus- trated from the Roundabout Papers — his healthy scepticism, the warmth of heart and sensitiveness that corrected it, his tendency to preach — everything that specially characterises him as a novelist. There is a touch of the sardonic in his treatment of such popular sayings as have an optimistic cast: " You say. Magna est Veritas, et prcevalebit. Psha ! Great lies are as great as great truths, and prevail constantly, and day after day." And he proceeds to support his view with examples which are hardly to be denied. But the warmth of heart is abundantly evident in what he wrote about Macaulay and Hood and Lord Clyde; and Thorns in the Cushion is evidence of a sensitiveness that is even excessive. As to the 264 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS preacher, he is to be seen everywhere; but of all the innumer- able sermons Thackeray preached, there is none that more unmistakably bears his own stamp than On being Found Out : " Would you have your wife and children know you exactly for what you are, and esteem you precisely at your worth ? If so, my friend, you will live in a dreary house, and you will have but a chilly fireside. Do you suppose the people round it don't see your homely face as under a glamour, and, as it were, with a halo of love round it ? You don't fancy you are, as you seem to them ? No such thing, my man. Put away that monstrous conceit, and be thankful that they have not found you out." He who wishes, however, to find a compendium of the man Thackeray must turn to the paper entitled Ogres. Nowhere else probably is there so perfect a conspectus of his qualities in such brief compass. There is embodied in it both that which people call his cynicism, his hatred of shams, and what students know as his chivalrous tenderness. The more sardonic side of the man is seen in his remarks on the number and variety of ogres. They are as omnipresent as the snobs themselves. They are of many kinds, and are found in all ages and under all sorts of disguises. They are by no means all ugly — nor are the ugly the most dangerous. The ugly Polyphemus was an ogre. " But so were the Sirens ogres — pretty blue- eyed things, peeping at you coaxingly from out of the water, and singing their melodious wheedles. And the bones round their caves were more numerous than the ribs, skulls and thigh-bones round the cavern of hulking Polyphemus." This is one phase of Thackeray, more playfully revealed than it is in some other passages. The opposite phase is shown in the adjuration to men of his own profession : " Ah ye knights of the pen! May honour be your shield, and truth tip your lances! Be gentle to all gentle people. Be modest to women. Be tender to children. And as for the Ogre Humbug, out EARLY MAGAZINES OF 19TH CENTURY 265 sword and have at him." Through all his literary Hfe Thackeray with rare consistency did the very thing he here enjoins upon others. The picture of himself drawn by him- self charms the reader in all his writings; and it is this tendency to self-deHneation that makes him a great essayist — an essayist of the centre. 266 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS CHAPTER X THE HISTORIAN-ESSAYISTS There was no class of writers to whom the rise of the reviews and magazines proved more convenient than it did to the historians. Their subject, being human, was of wide interest, so that it commended itself to editors ; and the historians were practised in the art of expression, so that they could present it attractively. Further, it was a subject easily susceptible of subdivision. The man who has undertaken the history of a great period is not thereby precluded from discussing side issues as they arise, or delineating the great characters with whom his studies have made him familiar, or presenting con- clusions which he means afterwards to embody in the longer work. On the contrary, he is just the man who above all others is capable of doing this; and it may be desirable from every point of view that he should do it. A Gibbon might by choice as well as of necessity move alone on his stately march to the fall of the Roman Empire; but there were others who were not so circumstanced that they could thus postpone gain as well as fame for half a life-time. It was the difficulty of finding practicable alternatives that made the path of letters in the eighteenth century so rugged that even Johnson only just managed to live. It was this that made dedications so tumid and gave them a tone so fulsome that we can scarcely refrain from blushing as we read. The question of pot-boiling is one from which the literary man can no more escape than the laundry-woman ; and the machinery of publication whereby the indispensable fuel is supplied has to be seriously con- sidered in connexion with the history of literature. The THE HISTORIAN-ESSAYISTS 267 nineteenth century was as much subject to this necessity as the eighteenth; but it had resources which were undeveloped then, and these modified though they could not do away with the difficulties. Carlyle had to earn his bread, and it was a serious matter for the household in Cheyne Row when in 1835 ^^ recorded that it was now nearly two years since he had earned anything by literature. For some eight years before that he had lived mainly by contributions to periodicals. Had they not existed, could he ever have devoted himself to the French Revolution ? Macaulay too had to earn his bread; but he, more fortunate than Carlyle, was popular. The point, however, is that for some years reviewing was his mainstay. In a doggerel epistle addressed to his sisters — one of those which give such a charming view of the great author's home life — he enumerates as a principal item of his wealth the " ninety pounds at least " which the editor of the Yellow and Blue owes him for his last review. Of the historian-essayists Thomas Carlyle (i 795-1881) is by far the richest" and profoundest. But his essays have been overshadowed by his greater works, and though everybody is aware of the excellence of some of them, comparatively few appreciate the fact that almost the complete Carlyle could be reconstructed from the Miscellanies alone. They stretch across the whole of his literary life, from Richter in 1827 to Shooting Niagara in 1867; and though the papers are sparse after the first twenty years, still his occasional utterances help to link up the successive stages of his career. They touch upon all the great departments of his literary activity: they are critical, biographical, historical, social and political. Un- questionably the loss would be enormous if Sartor and the French Revolution and Frederick were gone, but all the char- acteristic dogmas and beliefs would still be found expressed in one or other of the essays. Thus, one of the greatest of Carlyle's services was his mediation between the mind of 268 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS Germany and the mind of England. Now the essays alone would make Carlyle the chief mediator. For the first eight years of his career as author his themes are nearly all German. His translation of Wilhelm Meister is followed by a Life of Schiller and German Romance ; and for the first five years of the Miscellanies nearly three-quarters of the subjects dealt with are German. The name of Goethe appears again and again, as is natural, seeing that to him Carlyle owed his spiritual re-birth. He criticises Schiller, whose life he had written. He discusses German literature at large, early and late and through its whole course. Twice he deals with Richter. But perhaps the most notable though certainly not the greatest name upon his list is that of Novalis — notable because Novalis is a mystic of the mystics, and it is just mysti- cism and the things akin to mysticism that Carlyle finds to discriminate Germany from England. The Germans (in those days) actually believed in a " light that never was on sea or land." In England, a poet might say such things, but if he believed in them England thought the worse of him. And so Wordsworth was left for many a long year to think as highly as he liked, and to live as plainly as the physical needs of humanity would let him. The important things were Steam Engines, and blessed was he who had many of them. It was the Age of Machinery, and the greatest of all machines was the Machine of Society. When Carlyle used these phrases and poured ridicule upon them in Signs of the Times — an essay of this period, — he was applying the principles he had learnt from Germany. Indeed all the essays of the period, even those which are not German in subject, are saturated with these principles. So, for that matter, are the works of Carlyle's whole life. He is applying them when in the essay on Burns he shows how unsatisfactory in the spiritual sphere is the law of supply and demand. That law finds a place for a gauger of beer-barrels, but not THE HISTORIAN-ESSAYISTS 269 for a singer of divine songs. He is applying them again when he insists that it was not external circumstances that ruined Burns, that external circumstances never can ruin a man, that the spiritual is greater than the material, good stronger than evil. A kindred doctrine drawn from the same source is that of the supreme importance of the silent forces. It recurs again and again, but perhaps it is nowhere more beautifully expressed than in Voltaire, another of the non-German essays of those earlier years: — " Truly it is a mortifying thing for your Conqueror to re- flect, how perishable is the metal which he hammers with such violence: how the kind earth will soon shroud-up his bloody footprints; and all that he achieved and skilfully piled together will be but like his own * canvas city ' of a camp, — this evening loud with life, to-morrow all struck and vanished, ' a few earth-pits and heaps of straw! ' For here, as always, it continues true, that the deepest force is the stillest; that, as in the Fable, the mild shining of the sun shall silently accomplish what the fierce blustering of the tempest has in vain essayed. Above all, it is ever to be kept in mind, that not by material, but by moral power, are men and their actions governed. How noiseless is thought! No rolling of drums, no tramp of squadrons, or immeasurable tumult of baggage-wagons, attend its movements: in what obscure and sequestered places may the head be meditating, which is one day to be crowned with more than imperial authority; for Kings and Emperors will be among its minister- ing servants; it will rule not over, but in, all heads, and with these its solitary combinations of ideas, as with magic formulas, bend the world to its will! The time may come, when Napoleon himself may be better known for his laws than for his battles; and the victory of Waterloo prove less moment- ous than the opening of the first Mechanics' Institute." Perhaps the most striking illustration of the truth of this 270 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS meditation upon the measureless power of thought is to be found in a remark of the greatest hving Danish critic. Speak- ing of his country and countrymen, he points out that small and poor as Denmark is, she can nevertheless boast a few sons whom not Denmark only but the whole world has agreed to rank among the great. And yet, he goes on, the Dane who counts for most to the world, he upon whom most thought is spent, who is most widely known, is not Tycho Brahe or Thorwaldsen, or any other man who was ever born in Den- mark, but a Dane who never lived at all — Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, the creature of the brain of William Shakespeare. And so airy nothing may be more real and more important than the most solid substance. The poet and dreamer builds more firmly and more enduringly than the man of action. If to be a philosopher means to be the disciple or apostle of a complete system of thought, then Carlyle was no philo- sopher. On the contrary, in Characteristics he pronounces metaphysics to be a " chronic malady," just as if he were the upholder of the commonest common sense, and ready, like Dr. Johnson, to demolish wire-drawn subtleties with the argumentum ad baculum. But, on the other hand, in ^he State of German Literature we see him at one with the Germans in the contention that this common sense affords no basis for ultimate belief at all. Good enough, in most cases, as a practical guide, it is useless for the discovery of truth. Com- mon sense tells us that the sun goes round the earth, and yet in this matter nobody believes common sense. The business of the thinker is just to sift these universal persuasions, and distinguish between the sound and the unsound among them. Now in this sense, in the sense that he has adopted from philo- sophy great wide-reaching principles and that he applies them always and in every sphere, Carlyle was not only a philosopher, but the most effective philosopher of his time. His whole literary life was one long warfare against popular THE HISTORIAN-ESSAYISTS 271 opinion, and his weapons in the struggle were drawn from the armoury of German philosophy. From this he derived his scorn of the " Machine of Society," this revealed to him the limits of the law of supply and demand. His measureless contempt of the " mud philosophy " springs from his under- lying idealism. The popular mind of England thought that there was one thing certain, matter, because a man might dash his foot or break his head against it; all other things were more or less doubtful. Carlyle, as the passage already quoted shows, was far more certain of thought and of force. Not a brick in London but thought had made it; not a leaf rotting on the highway but force enabled it to rot. The popular mind of England was convinced that the age of miracles was past. No, said Carlyle, " the age of miracles, as it ever was, now is." Popular conceptions of a negative sort had recently produced terrible convulsions in France. These popular conceptions had been drawn from the armoury of another philosophy deriving ultimately from the English. That philosophy had inferred from the premise that all things change the conclusion that there is no such thing as per- manence. Carlyle's answer in Diderot is an excellent example of his manner: — " Diderot has convinced himself, and indeed, as above became plain enough, acts on the conviction, that Marriage, contract it, solemnise it in what way you will, involves a solecism which reduces the amount of it to simple zero. It is a suicidal covenant; annuls itself in the very forming. ' Thou makest a vow,' says he, twice or thrice, as if the argu- ment were a clincher, ' thou makest a vow of eternal con- stancy under a rock, which is even then crumbling away.' True, O Denis! the rock crumbles away: all things are changing; man changes faster than most of them. That, in the mean while, an Unchangeable lies under all this, and looks forth, solemn and benign, through the whole destiny 272 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS and working of man, is another truth; which no Mechanical Philosophe, in the dust of his logic-mill, can be expected to grind-out for himself. Man changes, and will change: the question then arises. Is it wise in him to tumble forth, in headlong obedience to his love of change; is it so much as possible for him ? Among the dualisms of man's wholly dualistic nature, this we might fancy was an observable one: that along with his unceasing tendency to change, there is a no less ineradicable tendency to persevere. Were man only here to change, let him, far from marrying, cease even to hedge-in fields, and plough them; before the autumn season, he may have lost the whim of reaping them. Let him return to the nomadic state, and set his house on wheels; nay there too a certain restraint must curb his love of change, or his cattle will perish by incessant driving, without grazing in the intervals. O Denis! what things thou babblest, in thy sleep ! How, in this world of perpetual flux, shall man secure himself the smallest foundation, except hereby alone: that he take preassurance of his Fate; that in this and the other high act of his life, his Will, with all solemnity, abdicate its right to change: voluntarily become involuntary, and say once for all. Be there then no farther dubitation on it! " The same philosophy informs all Carlyle's work, critical, biographical, historical. It was by the application of prin- ciples that he so profoundly influenced criticism; for, though his influence has sometimes been exaggerated, it was pro- found. The defect of English criticism hitherto had been that much of it was the mere expression of unreasoned per- sonal preference, while another great part was built up by the application to an author of canons whose validity he would not have acknowledged. These faults cannot be charged against all of Carlyle's predecessors. Lamb never approached an author except in the spirit of sympathy, and Coleridge and Hazlitt were critics who believed in the necessity of having THE HISTORIAN-ESSAYISTS 273 reasons for their conclusions. Still, no one else so clearly enunciated and so consistently followed his principles as Carlyle. It was he who estabhshed the author's right to be judged in terms of what he attempted to do — with reservation, of course, of the critic's right to express his opinion as to whether the aim was worthy or not. If it was not, then pro- nounce sentence; but no sentence could be valid which did not take account of the aim. There was not even a chance, he declared, that a critic could be right unless he had seen the last and highest beauty of the author he criticised. In rela- tion to all foreigners, and to his own countrymen who were not contemporaries, Carlyle was unswervingly faithful to his own principles. It was not only Goethe and Richter whom he judged justly and generously. To do so in their case was easy, because he was already sympathetic. But we find the same justice, the same fidehty to the rule that the critic must understand the point of view of his subject, in the essays on Diderot and Voltaire, whose principles he rejected. So too the essays on Burns and on Boswell's Johnson are admirable because they are profoundly sympathetic. If we contrast Macaulay on Boswell we see the importance of this. Macaulay dismisses the matter Hghtly and easily. Boswell was a pry- ing fool, and by a strange chance his folly helped him to write the greatest book of the kind ever penned. Carlyle is not so easily satisfied. He sees and acknowledges the elements of folly; but there is the book, to him conclusive proof of the presence of something widely different from folly. His Boswell is a compound of highest and lowest, a man whose hero-worship itself is no mean thing, but on the contrary a very noble thing. In relation to contemporary fellow-countrymen, however, it must be confessed that Carlyle does show weakness and is false to his own principles. The essay on Scott remains a blot upon his name, and his ill-natured strictures on Lamb 274 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS and other contemporaries in the Reminiscences and in letters and journals show that Scott's case was not solitary. It is a painful conclusion to come to, but it would seem that there was a certain jealousy, wholly unworthy of so great a man, in Carlyle's nature. It is significant that perhaps the only thoroughly generous criticism of a contemporary EngHshman deals with one who could in no sense be a rival — Ebenezer EUiott. The Corn-Law Rhymer is praised, not extravagantly, but whole-heartedly. Among the other essays, the disquisitions on history and biography would be interesting were it only because they present the views of so great a master of both arts. But it^s not the essay on biography alone that illustrates his unwaver- ing contention that " history is the essence of innumerable biographies." That conviction is embodied in nearly every one of the essays. He conceives that he has done nothing until he has revealed the man. Johnson and his Boswell, Burns, Goethe, Richter, Mirabeau, — one and all are men. This is the great charm of the essays. In hands like Carlyle's history can never be dry, for it is living. No one had a keener appreciation of the value of facts; but neither did any one more heartily despise the man who thought the facts were all. Dryasdust was but a poor creature in his eyes, for he had for- gotten an indispensable point — to relate the fact to life. To Carlyle the most trivial fact about Johnson or about Mirabeau had an importance, but not in itself. The one threw hght upon Johnson, and through him on the spiritual condition — the inner reality — of England in the eighteenth century. The other fact threw hght upon the tremendous convulsion the history of which he was writing. Further, even the men themselves were of importance to him, mainly if not wholly for what their lives could teach his own time. Wherever he might turn for a subject, Carlyle always had one eye upon his own country and his own time. He wrote Frederick THE HISTORIAN-ESSAYISTS 275 because he foresaw the rise of Germany to the first position in Europe, and judged therefore that its past was not a dead past. This interest in the present comes to the surface in many of the essays. It is shown in a fashion pecuHarly Carlylean in Signs of the Times and in Characteristics ; in a way more commonplace in Shooting Niagara ; and less wisely in The Nigger Question. Chartism, again, is either a very long essay or a short treatise on contemporary social problems; and Latter-Day Pamfhlets is a group of essays on the same class of problems. They are somewhat turbid, yet essentially wise. At the distance of sixty years we can see that, generally speak- ing, in respect of the great points Carlyle was right. He rightly diagnosed the diseases of society, and though he had no cure to offer, it was still a great service to point out the nature of the ill. Some of the diseases have been cured; others, we may hope, are in process of cure; with respect to yet others progress has perhaps been more doubtful. It remains as true now as it was when he wrote it that the problem of problems is the organisation of labour. Much organising has been done, but we are still far from the goal Carlyle had in view. Macaulay says that he had a premonition, before he learnt German, that the end for which he " was sent into this vale of tears was to make game of certain Germans." The statement, though playful, is illuminating. No two contem- poraries could well stand in sharper and completer contrast than the apostle of ' Germanism ' and the great contemporary who, though his junior by five years, had won fame when Carlyle was known only as an obscure translator from the German. Thomas Babington Macaulay (i 800-1 859) for all practical purposes made lus entry into literature in 1825, when the essay on Milton, the earliest of the famous Critical and Historical Essays, appeared in The Edinburgh Review. The suddenness of the author's rise to fame is a common- 276 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS place of literary history. Christopher North compared him to " a burnished fly in pride of May," bursting suddenly upon the sight. Here was a new star in the firmament; and, at a time when the old leaders in literature were rapidly passing away, many thought that it was destined to become the most brilliant of all. The fame thus early won ^ was never eclipsed. Macaulay moved from success to success, I in a career which never suffered a reverse and hardly even a I check, until he died Baron Macaulay of Rothley. * As essayist, Macaulay is represented by his contributions to The Edinburgh Review from 1825 to 1844, ^^^ ^o these must be added the biographies written for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which stretch from 1853 to the year of his death. Thus they afford specimens alike of his early, his intermediate and his mature styles, and they deal with the whole range of subjects, critical, biographical, historical, philosophical, he Avas capable of writing about. They are all unmistakably the product of one mind ; but a notable development can be traced between the beginning and the end. When the printing of the essays in the United States compelled him in self-defence to gather his contributions together, Macaulay's own taste pronounced upon his Milton a condemnation as severe as the harshest critic could desire. It contains " scarcely a para- graph such as his matured judgment approves," it is " over- loaded with gaudy and ungraceful ornament." If we turn to the last and longest of the biographical essays, William Pitt, we can measure the extent of the difference; and it is great. In the latter essay there is no " gaudy and ungraceful orna- ment." It is a masterly narrative, for the most part as ad- mirable in its restraint as in its lucidity. Occasionally there is a flash of the old hyperbole, as when he is speaking of the life of Pitt by his Cambridge tutor Pretyman, " which enjoys the distinction of being the worst biographical work for its size in the world." But usually a surprising judgment is THE HISTORIAN-ESSAYISTS 277 given under reserve. " It may be doubted," he says of Pitt, " whether any scholar has ever, at twenty, had a more soUd and profound knowledge of the two great tongues of the old civiHsed world." Thirty years earUer there would have been no doubt at all about it. But though there is real develop- ment there is no fundamental difference; there is no such difference as that, for example, which separates Carlyle's Life of Schiller from his Sartor Resartus. It is a development along the Hnes laid down in the first essay. Macaulay as critic has since his death been generally de- preciated; and indeed he neither was nor conceived himself to be great in this sphere. " I am nothing," he says, " if not historical." But nothing in the language of Macaulay may be something considerable in the estimation of smaller men. That immense knowledge of literature could not be wholly ineffectual when turned upon a Hterary subject. The wealth of illustration would alone be valuable, and it remains valuable however much we may disagree with the judgment it is meant to reinforce. The truth is, Macaulay rarely even attempted to be critical. The majority of his essays speedily dismiss the books which serve them for pegs, and branch off into his- torical disquisition. But when he did choose to play the critic, he showed a mastery of the art as it was understood by the school of Jeffrey, which is unequalled by any member of that school. The paper on Montgomery is merciless; but of the attacks on Coleridge and Keats and Wordsworth, which is comparable to it in effectiveness ? Macaulay is in two points decisively superior to his rivals here: in the matter of his criticism he is right and they are wrong; and he has written with far more vivacity and real force — not violence. Destruc- tive criticism, however, is never great, though it may be amusing. But neither is Macaulay wanting on the construc- tive side. There is much that is true and helpful in what he says about Dryden, about Temple, about Addison, and about 278 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS the eighteenth-century writers generally. Where he is really weak is in his general principles, when he enunciates them. Unhke Carlyle he contributed none of the shghtest value. Sometimes he is almost ludicrously wrong. " Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays," he tells us; and the examples with which he supports the assertion are those of Ossian and Robinson Crusoe. The young reader, he explains, likes, but is unable to appreciate the latter; he probably thinks it not half so fine as Macpherson's rant. The mature man despises Mac- pherson, and he admires the skill of Defoe, but is no longer greatly interested in his story. Against the inference that imagination decays early is the staggering fact that Shake- speare was about forty-six when he wrote The Tempest, and Milton was nearly sixty when Paradise Lost was pubhshed. The ethical paradox of the essay on MachiaveUi, and the literary paradox about Boswell are other cases in point. But the most conclusive proof of Macaulay's poverty in the matter of general principles is to be found in the essay on Bacon, with its panegyric on the philosophy of fruit, and its utterly unsound contrast between Aristotle and Bacon. Here again he is far better as critic than as philosopher: the analysis of Bacon's style is admirable. We must recur to Macaulay's own judgment on himself: " I am nothing if not historical" ; and wherever we open his works we see evidence of its truth. Except Montgomery, there is hardly an essay that is not historical in essence; the speeches are historical; the Lays are historical. Thirty years ago the young lions of various periodicals thought they had demolished Macaulay the liistorian as well as Macaulay the poet — if indeed they condescended to notice the latter. But older lions were silent, or else they roared in another key. Freeman spoke most respectfully of Macaulay's command of facts; and in later days Lord Acton, who did not hke the man, spoke with astonishing warmth of the historian. Macaulay had pre- THE HISTORIAN-ESSAYISTS 279 judices and he fell into mistakes; and the prejudices were strong and some of the mistakes were serious. There is abundant evidence of both in the essays. In these days when there are few Whigs left, we can easily pull to pieces the gospel according to the apostle of the Whigs. Indian history, as it is presented in the essay on Warren Hastings, has had to be re- written. But when the fullest allowance for defects is made there remains an immense amount that is highly valuable. If Warren Hastings is superseded as history, it is still among ' the most spirited pieces of English prose, and the pictures of 5 Chatham, of WiUiam Pitt, and of Madame d'Arblay and the | society in which she lived are excellent. • The style of Macaulay has been criticised again and again as metallic. And the criticism is just — that is its defect. But criticism which stops short at defects is bad criticism; and so is criticism which demands of a man that which he did not try to give, or what, from his nature, he could not give. Now Macaulay had certain well-defined limits. His was not the still small voice, but a voice rather loud and insistent. He was compelling rather than persuasive, argumentative, not insinuating. He addressed himself almost exclusively to the understanding. In consequence there are no dim vistas in his writings; no man could be less of a mystic than he. His habit of mind was so positive that there could be no such thing as light and shade in his style. We know then what we need not look for in such a man ; but the facts ought to con- vince us that there is something for which we ought to look. If we do not find it we are probably at fault. All that im- mense reputation had a cause behind it. Jeffrey would not have lost his head over Macaulay's style if there had not been great merit in the style. And in truth there is great merit. It is energetic, vivid, picturesque. It has a boundless fertility of illustration. There is no style more rousing. The reader of Macaulay may be stirred to active opposition; the one 28o THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS thing that is hardly possible is that he should be left in- different. Examples in the essays are numerous — the pic- ture of the Black Hole of Calcutta, or that of the trial of Warren Hastings, or the passage on the Catholic Church which closes with the traveller from New Zealand sketching the ruins of St. Paul. It is vain to deny to the author of passages such as these the title of a great master of English prose. It is ungrateful to ignore the immense service he has done in stirring the minds of generation after genera- tion of boys and young men, and teaching them, as it has been truly said he did, more about the history of their country than anybody else has ever succeeded in teaching them. What we do not find in Macaulay — that the absence of which denies him a place among the essayists in the more esoteric meaning of the word, is intimacy of personal con- fidence. In a sense every line he wrote is instinct with his personality. The likes and dislikes, the certitudes and the rare incertitudes, are all Macaulay's. But they all come from what Carlyle called the argumentative region; and that, as we also learn from Carlyle, is merely the outer covering. We know from his writings how Macaulay argued and what opinions he held, but we know very little of how he felt. The biography shows a man of the warmest domestic affections; the writings show rather a man of strong dislikes and con- fident opinions, but suggest that he was somewhat cold of heart. He is merely, then, qua essayist, the essayist-his- torian. We have the writer, but not the man. When we pass from the two great Early Victorians to their successors who were destined to reign in the middle of the period, there is a distinct decline in the quality alike of the essays and of the histories. James Anthony Froude (1818- 1894) had, it is true, the gift of style, and his limpid Enghsh is always delightful to read, but when Short Studies of Great Subjects^ by reason of which he has a place among the THE HISTORIAN-ESSAYISTS 281 essayists, is put beside the Miscellanies of Carlyle, it is clear how immense is the inferiority in depth, in originality, in the quahties that are most profoundly human. Though Froude was a disciple of Carlyle, there was little real affinity between the minds of the two men. Froude had been dominated by the stronger character, but he came to wear the fetters of discipleship uneasily, and probably his strange treatment of the memory of his master was due to reaction. Froude's personal history has left a deep mark on all his writings, and for that reason it is necessary to refer to it. He began his literary career by writing for Newsman's Lives of the Saints ; but in his case, as in the case of several others, New- man's final influence was towards scepticism. Froude could not beheve the silly fables he found in his authorities. He had been destined for the Church, and went so far as to be ordained deacon. But doubts gathered thick about him, and there he stopped. The publication of his Nemesis of Faith in 1849 caused a tremendous outcry, which forced him to resign his fellowship and drove him from Oxford. It also brought about a breach with his father, who stopped his allowance. He was now dependent upon his pen, and a time of stress and difficulty followed. Gradually he made his way, writing to various periodicals, in particular The Westminster Review and Fraser's Magazine. With the latter his connection was par- ticularly intimate, and in 1861 he succeeded Parker as its editor. The influence of Froude's life is to be seen in the pre- dominance of theological and ecclesiastical subjects and in- terests among his works. The History of England itself is an illustration, for his main object in writing it was to illustrate the Protestant Reformation. But the Short Studies also amply illustrate the point. In 1850 he who, only a few years before, had been contributing to The Lives of the Saints, wrote a critique of that compilation. Many years later he 282 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS criticised his former chief, Newman himself, in an article on A Grammar of Assent. Close association with the New- manites had produced a profound distrust of their methods and serious doubt of their intellectual sincerity. There are among the Short Studies many other indications of interest in ecclesiastical and theological qviestions. Froude writes about the book of Job and gives a lecture on Calvinism and a series of lectures on Erasmus and Luther. He has a paper on The Philosophy of Catholicism, and discusses The Condition and Prospects of Protestantism on the one hand and The Revival of Romanism on the other; and it was almost inevitable that a man who had passed through his experiences should, sooner or later, discuss The Oxford Counter-Reformation. Soon after the ecclesiastical world had been shaken by Essays and Re- views he enters A Plea for the Discussion of Theological Diffi- culties, and himself discusses Criticism and the Gospel History. This interest indeed amounts almost to an obsession. Though Froude divested himself of his orders as soon as the law allowed him to do so, it was totally beyond his power to divest himself of the atmosphere created for him by his uni- versity and his family — for the Tractarian Hurrell Froude was his elder brother, and his father was a High Churchman, so bigoted that he would not suffer a copy of The Pilgrim's Progress to enter his house. In work of this sort Froude's weakness in philosophy tell? heavily against him. He had read Carlyle at Oxford, and soon after he left the university he came to know the man himself; and the books and the man combined turned him to the great thinkers of Germany. But his knowledge of them was superficial, they never penetrated his blood and his bones. The Life of Carlyle, though it is one of the most readable of books, proves how little he understood his master, and how imperfectly he comprehended Carlyle's spirit. Froude was at his best where no demand for original thought THE HISTORIAN-ESSAYISTS 283 was made upon him, in discussing forgotten worthies or bishops of far-off centuries. He could deal gracefully if not profoundly with figures of classical Hterature and history, and he loved to do so. More than one of the Short Studies show that interest in the colonies which afterwards inspired Oceana, and made Froude, after Seeley, the most efficient of the Hterary advocates of the policy of making the British Empire a reality and not merely a name. Only once or twice is he personal. A Fortnight in Kerry reveals at once the historian interested in the Irish problem, and the sportsman bent on pleasure. The curious dream or reverie, A Siding at a Railway Station, is after the manner of the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth. But Froude had not the gifts indispensable for the personal essay. The first and chief of all is humour, and of that he was more completely destitute than any contemporary author of equal eminence. Froude's virulent critic, Edward Augustus Freeman (1823- 1892), demands a passing mention also as essayist, but rather for the bulk of what he wrote in this form than for any literary excellence that can be ascribed to it. He marks the passing of the Hterary historian. He belonged to a school which believed that it had discovered a new method and was in- spired by a more scientific spirit than had animated the his- torians of the past. It was conceived to be possible to attain an almost flawless accuracy; nay more, that such accuracy had actually been attained by its members. Time has already written its commentary on that behef. Freeman's account of the battle of Hastings has been riddled with criti- cism, and the foundation of Stubbs's ecclesiastical history has been shattered to fragments. Meanwhile, the work of certain Cambridge men, in particular Seeley and Maitland, inspires the hope that it may even now be possible to be both literary and as scientific in the treatment of history as the nature of 284 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS the subject-matter allows. Man is somewhat intractable to science. The calipers have not yet been forged to take his measure, nor the formulae devised that will express his relation to the universe. The Oxford school, however, had boundless belief in the power of research and utterly distrusted imagina- tion. Freeman was one of its most distinguished members, and under its influence he wrote his essays. It is not sur- prising that as literature they are of no value. They are long, formless and dreary. It is a necessary consequence of the very theory on which they are based that they pass away as soon as their results are woven into the fabric of knowledge. The science of last year is out of date this year. Freeman is already antiquated; but Tacitus remains for ever, and that not merely because he is, for us, an original authority who can never be superseded. He would remain just the same if every fact he records were guaranteed by some other and un- questionable authority. LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 285 CHAPTER XI THE LATTER HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY In previous chapters the clue of the periodical has been followed down well beyond the middle of the nineteenth century. But it would be useless to pursue it farther; for there has been no development, other than the increase in number of the magazines, noticeably affecting the fortunes of the essay. In spite of that increase the later tendency, through the overwhelming popularity of the novel and the story, has probably been to depress them. Nevertheless, the number of those who have written essays is almost as great as that of writers of the EngHsh language, and it is necessary to make a somewhat rigid selection. Those who remain may, as usual, be divided into essayists of the inner and essayists of the outer circles. Among the essayists of the inner circle, the principal, of the period under review, are Alexander Smith (i 829-1 867) and Robert Louis Stevenson (i 850-1 894); while ill' a lower rank within the same group may be placed Sir John Skelton (1831-1897) and A. K. H. Boyd (1825-1899). Alexander Smith has had singularly ill fortune both as poet and as writer of prose. When his first volume of verse appeared, it was hailed as a work of high genius; but the critics afterwards balanced excess of praise by a still greater excess of depreciation. Soon after Smith's death friendly critics insisted upon the high merit of Dreamthorp, and prophesied that the author would ultimately rank below only the greatest of English essayists. Their faith was shown in a practical way by the publication of a posthumous volume 286 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS entitled Last Leaves, containing a selection from Smith's con- tributions to magazines, several of which — in particular An Essay on an Old Subject and On Dreams and Dreaming — were quite worthy of the author of Dreamthorp. But time has proved that the friendly critics were mistaken, at least as to the reputation Smith was to enjoy. There always have been some readers who have recognised the excellence, here and there supreme, of Smith's essays; but such readers have been few, and there neither is nor ever has been any indication that he would take his place in the general estimation as an essayist inferior only to the greatest masters. Yet that place is his by right. Though Dreamthorp is a small volume and the essays are only twelve in number, the range is wide. The quotations from Smith in the introduction to this volume show that he understood as well as any man ever did the essentials of his craft as essayist. The pleasant chat about the literary and artistic temperament in Men of Letters and the easy gossip of A Shelf in my Bookcase illustrate other phases of critical abihty. Art is joined with nature in Books and Gardens, and Vagabonds shows no less interest in that sort of nature which we qualify with the adjective human. The poet peeps out in the wealth of metaphor and illustration. There are numerous phrases so striking as to drive home the thought they illustrate. For example: " To denude death of its terrible associations were a vain attempt. The atmos- phere is always cold round an iceberg." The whole of the essay Of Death and Dying illustrates the truth of Smith's saying elsewhere, that " the world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new." Throughout Of Death and Dying Smith has that sort of originality, and it is just the sort which is proper to the essay. Many of the thoughts are trite enough, as are Montaigne's too, but they are re-minted LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 287 with the stamp of genius. So it is again in the essay On the Importance of a Man to Himself. " You cannot define the in- dividual." We all know this: it is a truth too familiar to be very impressive; yet Smith contrives to express it freshly: " The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality." The gems of the collection, however, are the title-essay Dreamthorp and A Lark's Flight. The former gives a charm- ing description, or rather impression, of the village of which the writer has become a denizen. We see the moss on the walls, hear the jackdaws chattering in the ruined castle, feel and share in an idleness which may have more meaning than bustle has : " Here I play with my own thoughts, here I ripen for the grave." Tennyson himself has hardly depicted more beautifully a " haunt of ancient peace." The theme of A Lark's Flight is not very promising. Men do not think with pleasure on death by public execution and its effect on the spectator — for, of course, when the essay was written the thing was still a public show. But the incident of the lark's flight is superb. In the knocking at the gate in Macbeth Shakespeare has imagined an incident comparable to it. Here nature provides the incident, and Alexander Smith describes and interprets it in a fashion that even Shakespeare need not have disdained: — " Whether the authorities were apprehensive that a rescue would be attempted, or were anxious merely to strike terror into the hundreds of wild Irishry engaged on the railway, I cannot say; in any case, there was a display of military force quite unusual. The carriage in which the criminals — Catholics both — and their attendant priests were seated, was guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets; indeed, the whole regiment then lying in the city was massed in front and 288 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS behind, with a cold, frightful glitter of steel. Besides the foot soldiers, there were dragoons, and two pieces of cannon ; a whole little army, in fact. With a slenderer force battles have been won which have left a mark in history. What did the prisoners think of their strange importance, and of the tramp and hurly-burly all around ? When the procession moved out of the city, it seemed to draw with it almost the entire population; and when once the country roads were reached, the crowd spread over the fields on either side, ruth- lessly treading down the tender wheat braird. I got a glimpse of the doomed, blanched faces which had haunted me so long, at the turn of the road, where, for the first time, the black cross-beam with its empty halters became visible to them. Both turned and regarded it with a long, steady look; that done, they again bent their heads attentively to the words of the clergyman. I suppose in that long, eager, fascinated gaze, they practically died — that for them death had no additional bitterness. Wlien the mound was reached on which the scaffold stood, there was immense confusion. Around it a wide space was kept clear by the military; the cannon were placed in position; out flashed the swords of the dragoons; beneath and around on every side was the crowd. Between two brass helmets I could see the scaffold clearly enough, and when in a little while the men, bareheaded and with their attendants, appeared upon it, the surging crowd became stiffened with fear and awe. And now it was that the in- cident so simple, so natural, and yet so frightful in its tragic suggestions, took place. Be it remembered that the season was early May, that the day was fine, that the wheat-fields were clothing themselves in the green of the young crop, and that around the scaffold, standing on a sunny mound, a wide space was kept clear. When the men appeared beneath the beam, each under his proper halter, there was a dead silence, — every one gazing too intently to whisper to his neighbour LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 289 even. Just then, out of the grassy space at the foot of the scaffold, in the dead silence audible to all, a lark rose from its happy nest, and went singing upward in its happy flight. O heaven! how did that song translate itself into dying ears? Did it bring in one wild burning moment father, and mother, and poor Irish cabin, and prayers said at bed-time, and the smell of turf fires, and innocent sweethearting, and rising and setting suns ? Did it — but the dragoon's horse has become restive, and his brass helmet bobs up and down, and blots everything; and there is a sharp sound, and I feel the great crowd heave and swing, and hear it torn by a sharp shiver of pity, and the men whom I saw so near but a moment ago are at immeasurable distance, and have solved the great enigma, — and the lark has not yet finished his flight : you can see and hear him yonder in the fringe of a white May cloud." Smith seems already to belong to the distant past, for he died at thirty-eight, while Skelton's longer life causes him, though he was only two years younger, to appear a man of yesterday. From Nugce Criticee, a volume of essays collected from various magazines and published in 1862, down to The Table-Talk of Shirley, which appeared shortly before his death, the name of Skelton, or rather the pseudonym Shirley, was among the most familiar to the readers of the day. He was gifted with a style so good that it won the ad- miration of all the greatest masters and the best judges. He was learned enough to be instructive and humorous enough to be amusing. He touched literature, and life, and nature, and all with skill. The odour of russia clings to many of his pages, the air of the heather and of the sea hangs about others; for he had a keen feeling for nature, and a happy knack of imparting his own sentiment. Sometimes in the Table-Talk the style is just a little too chatty, but in an essayist the fault is less than the vice of stiffness would be. A. K. H. Boyd was likewise an essayist by nature. The T 290 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS Recreations of a Country Parson and the Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson show much ingenuity and versatility of mind. The best of the papers have the character of pleasant chat; their weakness is that they betray at times a certain pettiness of mind, and also a remarkable want of self-knowledge. If we may judge from a passage in The Moral Influence of Dwellings, no author ever more seriously misunderstood him- self than Boyd. " If there be a thing which I detest," he says, " it is a diffuse and rambling style. Let any writer always treat his subject in a manner terse and severely logical. My own model is Tacitus, and the earlier writings of Bacon. Let a man say in a straight-forward way what he has got to say; and the more briefly the better." There could be nothing much less like Tacitus and Bacon than these essays. It is not that the words employed are too many, but the things treated are so often trivial. Compare the famous essay Of Studies, every sentence a thought, and every thought falling with the weight of a sledge-hammer, with the questions which concern the country parson : " ' Any one sick in the parish ? ' ' How was the church attended on the Sundays you were away? ' How is Jenny, who had the fever; and John, who had the paralytic stroke? how is the horse; the cow; the pig; the dog; how is the garden progressing ? how about fruit; how about flowers?" All this is legitimate enough, and the questions are put as directly and as briefly as Bacon himself could put them. But there is a world of difference between this sort of brevity and the tremendous sententiousness of the great Roman or the great Englishman. In suggesting such comparisons Boyd is his own worst enemy. In fairness to him we must forget what he would fain have been and take him as he was. Sometimes he is engagingly simple; occasionally it is difhcult to determine whether he is simple or sly. Is it simplicity or slyness when he writes of Norman Macleod that " he was a great jolly Christian Bohemian, LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 291 using the most unconventional language freely in his talk, sitting with the Prince of Wales in the smoking-room at Dunrobin Castle till half-past three in the morning, yet ^ never sinking below the highest level of the respect of even such as knew him most familiarly ? " Robert Louis Stevenson stands on a very much higher plane. Since Lamb there has been no more accomplished essayist than he. Nature made him an essayist, and he co-operated with nature, developing and strengthening the gifts with which he was endowed at birth. The training he gave himself, if it were generally followed, would probably in nine cases out of ten produce literary prigs of the most in- sufferable sort. There is wisdom as well as wit in Lewis Carroll's rendering of the popular proverb, " take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves." Some at least of the greatest stylists have followed it. Froude was impatient when he was questioned about his style, and gave the querist to understand that he said what he wanted to say, and there was no more secret about it. Matthew Arnold was of precisely the same opinion. " People think that I can teach them style," he said to Mr. G. W. E. Russell. " What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style." But Stevenson systematically and laboriously studied the sounds. Fortunately he did not make himself a prig, for he had none of the elements of priggishness to begin with ; while the habit of looking upon everything, even the most trivial scene or event in street or in country, as material for literature, fostered the spirit of the essayist. For, by the nature of the case, the essayist is the man who knows how to make use of small things. A stately Gibbon needs a stately Rome for theme. But Rome, because of its very greatness, is of small use to the essayist. Only now and then can he deal with a 1 The italics are mine. 292 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS stately theme directly; and yet, on the other hand, he has to remember that every road leads to Rome. The small things that remain small count for nothing in literature. The skill of the essayist lies in showing, or rather in hinting, how the village path leads to Rome. Of this skill Stevenson was master. There is an excellent illustration in An Inland Voyage, a book which, like Travels with a Donkey, is essentially a collection of essays wrought into a whole. The passage in question is the conclusion of La Fere of cursed Memory. The pretty domestic scene of the Bazins and the effect of it and of their politeness on the spirits of the hurt and sore travellers are matters simple and even trivial in themselves, yet sugges- tive of far-reaching reflections : — " Little did the Bazins know how much they served us. We were charged for candles, for food and drink, and for the beds we slept in. But there was nothing in the bill for the husband's pleasant talk; nor for the pretty spectacle of their married life. And there was yet another item uncharged. For these people's politeness really set us up again in our own esteem. We had a thirst for consideration; the sense of insult was still hot in our spirits; and civil usage seemed to restore us to our position in the world. " How Httle we pay our way in life ! Although we have our purses continually in our hand the better part of service goes still unrewarded. But I Hke to fancy that a grateful spirit gives as good as it gets. Perhaps the Bazins knew how much I liked them ? perhaps, they also, were healed of some slights by the thanks that I gave them in my manner ? " There is nothing more characteristic of Stevenson as essayist than, in the first place, the intimacy of this passage, and, in the second place, its moralising tone. Everywhere we get personal experiences — in The Amateur Emigrant, in Memories and Portraits, in Random Memories, in Fontaine- bleau. The writer himself is very frequently in the fore- LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 293 ground, he is never far in the background. He gives dehght- ful confidences, far more intimate than a mere record of events. We get charming glimpses of his childhood and youth. What a light is thrown upon boyhood by The Lan- tern-Bearers — a hght mental, not physical, for " it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognise a lantern-bearer, unless (like the polecat) by the smell." Some College Memories and A College Magazine are equally frank about a somewhat later stage. The Education of an Engineer also draws the curtain from off youthful literary ambitions, and we learn how Voces Fidelium remains unwritten, because the moths flew in and burned themselves in the poet's mid- night candle. All these essays and many more are based upon events in the writer's life. But it is equally characteristic of Steven- son that the event is rarely sufficient in itself. Story-teller as he was, he was still more a moralist. Henley's " some- thing of the Shorter Catechist " is an under-statement. There was not merely something but a great deal of the Shorter Catechist in Stevenson; fundamentally, if we take the phrase in a generous sense, there was little else. He quotes with approval Shairp's saying that Burns would have been no Scotsman if he had not loved to moralise; and, for himself, though he was far from accepting in all points the common view of morals, a view of morals that he did accept lies at the root of nearly everything he wrote. His purpose in The Dynamiter was to make crime ridiculous; and he and his wife prefixed to it a noble dedication to two police-ofiicers, because they held that honour should be paid to those who fight crime at the risk of their own lives. In The Foreigner at Home he seizes upon the opening question of the two national catechisms as the best illustration of the difference in environ- ment between the Scot and the EngHshman: — " About the very cradle of the Scot there goes a hum of 294 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two first questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquiring, ' What is your name ? ' the Scottish striking at the very roots of life with, ' What is the chief end of man ? ' and answering nobly, if obscurely, ' To glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.' " This " hum of metaphysics " is about Stevenson always. Concrete as his mind was, it was also speculative, and the speculation finds expression sometimes in the most unex- pected places. The Character of Dogs — a race of creatures that Stevenson, like his countrymen Scott and John Brown, handles with remarkable skill and sympathy — opens out into meditations of no narrow range, and shows the writer by no means convinced of the universal truth of Bacon's saying that man is the dog's deity. Generally, however, Stevenson's philosophy limits itself to man, and in the great majority of cases it is ethical in its nature. Thus the lantern-bearers, who are absurd enough in their action if the imagination behind it be left out, become the text for a discussion of the philosophy of literature, which leads to a decisive rejection of that realism which was dominant before Treasure Island. There is a " haunting and truly spectral unreality " in realistic books, because they miss the joy of life, " the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base." More purely ethical is Old Mortality, and, above all, the magnificent Christmas Sermon, one of the finest of modern essays, rich in wisdom, noble in feeling, transparent in sincerity: — " Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much : — surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field : defeated, ay, if he were Paul LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 295 or Marcus Aurelius ! — but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in his life-long bHndness and life-long disappointment wiU scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy — there goes another Faithful Failure! " Profoundly ethical, then, Stevenson is; but it has to be repeated that the ethics are not precisely the ethics of Puritan- ism. In order to correct any tendency to think that they are we have only to turn to A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas. There we see the Shorter Catechist " translated " almost as effectu- ally as Bottom ; but there, at the same time, we find the most conclusive evidence that Stevenson is always a moralist: — " There is no quite good book without a good morahty; but the world is wide, and so are morals. Out of two people who have dipped into Sir Richard Burton's Thousand and one Nights, one shall have been offended by the animal details; another to whom these were harmless, perhaps even pleasing, shall yet have been shocked in his turn by the rascahty and cruelty of all the characters. Of two readers, again, one shall have been pained by the morahty of a religious memoir, one by that of the Vicomte de Bragelonne. And the point is that neither need be wrong. We shall always shock each other both in life and art; we cannot get the sun into our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there be such a thing) into our books; enough if, in the one, there ghmmer some hint of the great hght that bhnds us from heaven; enough if, in the other, there shine, even upon foul details, a spirit of magnanimity." The closing words are inspired by a love of the heroic, another Stevensonian quality which ought never to be for^ gotten. It is the essence of the Christmas Sermon as well, and we detect it in all his frequent meditations upon death — for example, those in Ordered South and in Aes Triplex. They are 296 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS a touching reminder of Stevenson's history. They take us into his confidence with respect to subjects which circumstance brought closer to him than to most men. They show him building up that philosophy which nerved him to make his life active at whatever risk of ending it. " It is better," he says, " to lose health hke a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week." The same spirit inspires the saying in the title piece of the volume which contains these essays: " To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall." And in the Christmas Sermon he insists that this was the principle of the moraUty of Christ himself: " Thou shall was ever his word, with which he superseded thou shalt not." This is the philosophy of the invalid who is resolute not to sink to mere invahdism. It is the voice of a man who, forced to endure, is determined also to do. How gallantly Stevenson lived up to the spirit of his own philosophy is well known. If he had limited his admiration to heroism of this sort, such one-sidedness would have been easily pardonable. But he was far from doing so. No one more heartily admired the careless light-hearted heroism of the strong and active. All his romances proclaim that admiration, characters like Alan Breck are an embodiment of it. The essays manifest it too. Nowhere is there more of it than in The English Admirals. Stevenson had boundless admiration for Duncan, facing the whole Dutch fleet with his own flagship and only one other vessel, and saying to its captain, " I have taken the depth of the water, and when the Venerable goes down, my flag will still fly." He had written the story of the Revenge in prose before Tennyson published his great ballad on the same LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 297 story, and he estimates very highly the value of such exploits. Greenville chewing wine-glasses at table makes no very pleasant figure, he admits; " but his work of art, his finished tragedy, is an eloquent performance; and I contend it ought not only to enliven men of the sword as they go into battle, but send back merchant-clerks with more heart and spirit to their book-keeping by double entry." And with regard to another story of apparently needless sacrifice, he quotes Sir William Temple with approval: " Whether it be wise in men to do such actions or no, I am sure it is so in States to honour them." In short, heroism is something with a substantive value of its own. Though it may seem to be all sacrifice, and sometimes needless sacrifice, the heroic act cannot be confined within itself; it passes out to inspirit clerks and counter- jumpers. This man then, though he was an artist in words who had deliberately trained himself from boyhood with the view to become such, was anything but a mere dilettante. It is fitting to recognise in the first place that he was emphatically a man. But the training was not in vain, the artistry in words was won; and it is fitting to recognise this too, in the second place. Stevenson is among those writers who have mastered their caUing as a craft. Scott was one of the six authors ^ to whom he was able constantly to recur, and whose best works he could not read too often. But what he admired was the heroisms and " brave translunary things " that Scott's native genius suggested, not the carelessness and slovenly writing which mar many a page. He himself, with a far lower grade of native genius and a less catholic humanity, was an incom- parably more conscientious craftsman. What he writes is easy to read because it has cost himself an infinity of labour— 1 " One or two of Scott's novels, Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, The Egoist, and the Vicomtc de Bragelonne, form the inner circle of my acq\iaintance." 298 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS not, perhaps, in the composition of the actual essay before us, but in the years of training before it could be composed. It is this long training which enables Stevenson to impart that easy ghding movement to Fontainebleau, with its pleasant picture of the society of artists in the forest and their singular inn, and to the excellent Talk and Talkers. From boyhood onwards Stevenson observed nature with a view to the description of scenes in words; and thus he was enabled to im- part the sense of landscape to Roads, to The Coast of Fife and to many another essay. In this respect it may be doubted whether he has any equal. Sometimes a scene is painted in a sentence, as in the description of the little towns on the coast of Fife, " posted along the shore as close as sedges, each with its bit of harbour, its old weather-beaten church or public building, its flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying fish." Some great writers produce a profound effect by their work as a whole, but are not readily quotable; others have the gift of condensing their meaning into a striking phrase. The con- scious and dehberate literary artist will generally be found to belong to the latter class. Pope, for example, is the most quotable writer in English after Shakespeare. Stevenson stands intermediate. On the whole, he rather diffuses his meaning, and makes it an atmosphere enfolding everything; but at times his skiU in words concentrates itself in a sentence or phrase, or even in a word. The skilled artist is seen in the witty description of the effect of marriage upon generosity: "Yesterday he would have shared his last shiUing; to-day ' his first duty is to his family,' and is fulfilled in large measure by laying down vintages and husbanding the health of an invaluable parent." He is revealed in a sudden turn of ex- pression, as in the same essay: " Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords." An unexpected phrase may produce an extraordinary effect. He is speaking of the hght-hearted merriment of dwellers on the LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 299 slopes of a volcano: " It seems not credible that respectable married people, with umbrellas, should find appetite for a bit of supper within quite a long distance of a fiery mountain." Or again, take the description of the victor of Camperdown: " And you observe this is no naked Viking in a pre-historic period; but a Scotch member of ParHament, with a smatter- ing of the classics, a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and flannel vmderclothing." While it is true that Stevenson is, as has already been said, eminent for his skill in conveying the effect of scenes of nature — perhaps, relatively to others, more eminent for that than for anything else, — it would be a mistake to suppose that this is for him the principal point of interest. The opposite is im- plied in what has been already said of him as a moralist. His first interest is man. He found much in the country, but even more in the street. Like Scott, he loved nature, but above all nature associated with man. The principal, though by no means the only charm of Fontainebleau is its society of painters. He sees Magus Muir with the eye of historical imagination, and the central figure is not even the wounded Archbishop, but the enigmatical Hackston of Rathillet. It is man that he is perpetually weighing in the balance, and man's estimate of himself that he often pronounces wrong. Thus he examines the views of age and youth, and finds no good reason for believing that all wisdom is embodied in the former. The old man praises Prudence, but does he fully believe his own praise ? " If a man hves to any considerable age, it cannot be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation." Herein he agrees with the author of that excellent story David Harum, who makes his hero lament the good times he did not give himself in his youth. Again, in Jn Apology for Idlers he weighs the gospel of work and finds it wanting. " Perpetual devotion to what a man 300 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things." " The true business of life is living, and living in the full sense is impossible if a man is for ever occupied with one thing in which his whole nature cannot find expres- sion." " Many make a large fortune who remain pathetically stupid to the last. And meanwhile there goes the idler, who began life with them — by your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living ? " If we probe below the surface we find that Stevenson's view is at bottom the wise old Greek view, that the end of business is leisure. For what he desires is not really idleness, but occupation congenial to his own nature. In this respect his life was all of a piece. No one, he tells us, more perseveringly played truant in boyhood and youth. But he did it, not in order to be unoccupied, but that he might be congenially busy. It would be hard to conceive a man with the tastes of Stevenson and trained as Stevenson trained himself, who was not also a critic. Stevenson was a most accomplished one. In his letters as well as his essays we see the result of a life of thought about the principles of composition. As a critic, he is at once philosophical and intensely personal. He is at his best in papers like A Gossip on Romance, where the method is easy, informal and personal, and the principles are rather suggested than specifically stated; but from time to time he brings to the front one or other of the two convictions which underlie all his work — the conviction that truth of art is not identical with truth of fact, and the conviction that the first LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 301 of all duties and the greatest of all difficulties to the artist is to learn how to select. The former conviction set him in steadfast opposition to the realistic school and made him a romancer, the latter caused him to labour at shortening his books far more strenuously than others toil to spin them out. The former supplied him with a principle of division which served him in good stead many a time — as for example in his criticism of Victor Hugo's Romances : " If Shakespeare makes his ships cast anchor by some seaport of Bohemia, if Hugo imagines Tom-Tim-Jack to be a likely nickname for an EngHsh sailor, or if either Shakespeare, or Hugo, or Scott, for that matter, be guilty of ' figments enough to confuse the march of a whole history — anachronisms enough to overset all chronology,' the life of their creations, the artistic truth and accuracy of their work, is not so much as compromised. But when we come upon a passage Hke the sinking of the ' Ourque ' in this romance,^ we can do nothing but cover our face with our hands : the conscientious reader feels a sort of disgrace in the very reading. For such artistic falsehoods, springing from what I have called already an unprincipled avidity after effect, no amount of blame can be exaggerated; and above all, when the criminal is such a man as Victor Hugo." With regard to the second conviction, his reward for the labour it entailed upon him is that his writings are among the least ephemeral of the time in which they were produced. Of the essayists in the looser sense who still remain to be noticed the eldest was Sir Arthur Helps (18 13-1875), whose Friends in Council seems arid enough to most readers now. The subjects dealt with are such as demand either the weight of a Bacon or the delicacy of a Lamb, and Helps had neither the one nor the other. Yet some of the greatest men of his time beUeved in him and praised him highly. Hawthorne, however, seems to have gauged him accurately. " A thin, 1 Les Travailleurs de la Mer. 302 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS scholarly, cold sort of a man," he calls Helps; and thinness and coldness are exactly the words to indicate the defects of the essays. Next to Helps in age were Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) and John Ruskin (1819-1900); of whom the smaller man was the greater in this particular sphere. Not that Kingsley is wholly satisfactory as an essayist, any more than he is in any other of his manifold activities. Andrew Lang justly says of him that, hke R. L. Stevenson, he was always at heart a boy; and the inference which he draws, that no one who has read him after the age of 16 can be a fair critic of him, is also sound. But it must not be apphed to Steven- son. There is a subtle difference in the boyishness which makes it quite possible for the man of sixty to appreciate Stevenson, while he will be only tolerant of Kingsley. As essayist, Kingsley's merits are, in the critical essays, vigour, rapidity and decision, in the descriptive essays, the combina- tion of the heart of a poet with the high spirits of a sportsman. He is seen at his best in Chalk Stream Studies. The description of the climb to the mountain lake to fish is as fresh as the mountain breeze itself: "The pleasure lies not in the prize itself, but in the pains which it has cost; in the upward climb through the dark plantations, beside the rock-walled stream; the tramp over the upland pastures, one gay flower- bed of purple butter-wort; the steady breathless climb up the crags, which looked but one mile from where you started, so clear against the sky stood out every knoll and slab ; the first stars of the white saxifrage, golden-eyed, blood-bedropt, as if a fairy had pricked her finger in the cup, which shine upon some green cushion of wet moss, in a dripping crack of the cHff ; the first gray tufts of the Alpine club-moss, the first shrub of cran- berry, or sea-green rose-root, with its strange fleshy stems and leaves, which mark the two-thousand-feet line, and the begin- ning of the Alpine world." If Kingsley had often reached or long remained upon this level, his place would have been a LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 303 high one. But the Prose Idylls, from which the passage is taken, are hke everything else that Kingsley has written, only half satisfactory; and, unfortunately for the author, few men of the present age have read them before they were sixteen. With Ruskin the fault seems to be precisely the opposite. If Kingsley remained too young, Ruskin as essayist was from the first too old. If all he has written, more or less of the essay nature, could be accepted as genuine essays, his place must be a very high one. Many of his smaller volumes are groups of I essays, or of lectures, or of letters which might prove to be .,' essays — Unto this Last, Munera Pulveris, A Joy for Ever, , Sesame and Lilies, Time and Tide. But there was something in Ruskin's nature that did not fit in with the essay form. ,j. Not one of the volumes above named gives the impression of the essay even to the degree that essayists in the looser sense, such as Carlyle and Macaulay, give it. The reason seems to be that, instead of merging the letter in the essay, as Howell does, or the lecture in the essay, as Hazhtt does, Ruskin merges both letter and essay in lecture. He is invariably the master, and the reader must be content to be disciple. But this is utterly foreign to the spirit of the essay. The typical essayist treats the reader as a friend; even the stately essayist. Bacon, for example, allows him to see thought in process of formula- tion. Unless he is blessed with a singularly good conceit of himself, the reader is aware of his inferiority and voluntarily accepts the position of pupil; but he is not thrust into it. By Ruskin he is thrust into it. Ruskin lays down the law, and it is as absolute as the law of the Medes and Persians. The reader has no more freedom to dissent, or even to share in the pleasures of discovery, than the child who repeats the answers already provided in the Catechism. Of all values, including the value of what he has himself written, Ruskin is judge, and there is no appeal. The preface to the second edition of Unto this Last contains an instructive note, in which the author 304 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS declares that volume to be " the most precious, in its essential contents, of all that I have ever written; " and he makes this pronouncement the more impressive by calling attention to the fact that, after a certain foot-note, he prints it word for word and page for page, so as to make it as accessible as he can, to all. Its inspiration is plenary. Now this does not proceed from a silly and undiscriminating vanity: Ruskin was quite ready to condemn as unreservedly things he had formerly written but no longer believed to be true. What it does indicate is an overwhelming sense of a mission. The prophet may prophesy, and his prophesies may be divided into chapters, short and long; but none of them, whatever the length, can possibly have the characteristics of the essay. The papers in the collection entitled On the Old Road are essays in the sense in which Macaulay's Edinburgh Review articles are essays. They are interesting and highly char- acteristic, and, of course, being Ruskin's, they are admirably written. Yet even they, especially the series entitled Fiction^ Fair and Foul, are not merely dogmatic, as Macaulay also is, but pontifical. The best are those on art; and of these again the best are the delightful paper on Samuel Prout and that on Pre-Raphaelitism. Ruskin's strong expression of belief in the permanent value of Front's work may be quoted for the sake of its resemblance to, and difference from, one of the most famous sentences of Macaulay: "His works will be cherished with a melancholy gratitude when the pillars of Venice shall lie mouldering in the salt shallows of her sea, and the stones of the goodly towers of Rouen have become ballast for the barges of the Seine." Set this beside the celebrated New Zealander on the broken arch of London Bridge, study the difference in cadence and effect, and the means whereby the difference is produced, and the secret of two styles is in great part revealed. Perhaps Ruskin's disciple, Walter Pater (i 839-1 894), may LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 305 most conveniently be noticed immediately after his master, though chronologically he is of somewhat later date. His chief contributions to the essay are to be found in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and his Jppreciatiotis (1889). These essays are critical — critical of art as well as of Hterature — and, essentially, Pater belongs to the history of criticism. Nor did he often move beyond the bounds, as his master did, to criticise society. One of his characteristics indeed is a sense of the hopelessness of any such attempt. He did not share Ruskin's confidence; and while Ruskin, on the verge of fifty, was in Time and Tide criticising the social ideals of others and proposing to substitute for them a new ideal of his own. Pater, not yet thirty, was penning that remarkable revelation of self, the conclusion of The Renaissance : — " While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. . . The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot epter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us. u 3o6 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS . . . We are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve — les hommes sont tons condamnes a mort avec des sursis in- dejinis : we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ' the children of this world,' in art and song." Was anything more self-centred — which means anything more decadent — ever written ? No wonder that the next stage in evolution produced Oscar Wilde. A wiser and a deeper philosophy than Pater's — the philosophy of Greece as well as that of Judasa — teaches that man cannot be man with- out society, and that society involves giving as well as taking. In Pater, everything has to be identified with ourselves. This is the secret of the oppressiveness of Pater's atmosphere. The high-wrought English is indeed beautiful; but the beauty is artificial, and the sense it leaves is not a sense of happiness. In direct contrast to Ruskin, Matthew Arnold (i 822-1 888) tended to mould all his prose material into the form of essays. The letters in Friendship' s Garla?id are essays, the lectures On Translating Homer and the Discourses in America are essays too. Yet Arnold as well as Ruskin was conscious of a mission and was through life a preacher. But Arnold's method was ironic. Frequently he confesses his own in- feriority; he is humble before " the young lions of the Daily Telegraph,''^ and kisses the rod when he is chastised for the want of principles " coherent, interdependent, subordinate and derivative." It is possible that the wielder of the rod was not altogether happy after the submission. Though Arnold was only three years younger than Ruskin, it was nearly twenty years after Ruskin that he became a force in the prose literature of the country. In the main, his verse belongs to the former and his prose to the latter part of LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 307 his career. Except for prefaces to his poems he published no prose until 1859, ^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^°^ ^^^^ ^^^ sixties that he became an active contributor to periodicals. The admirable essays of the first series of Essays in Criticism had all, except the preface and the paper on The Literary Influence of Aca- demies, appeared during the years 1863 and 1864. The lec- tures On Translating Homer had preceded them in 1 86 1. These essays and lectures made Arnold the most influential of contemporary hterary critics and, by the many dicta not strictly hmited to Hterature, in no small measure moulded the minds of the young men of the time. The Study of Celtic Literature followed, and then came Culture and Anarchy. The former, for good or for evil, has been the parent of a whole school of criticism. All these volumes were critical, and the criticism was mainly Hterary; but alongside of the Hterary criticism there ran a vein of social criticism, and Culture and Anarchy is described as " an essay in social and poHtical criticism." Friendship' s Garland, though more ironical, is of similar character. But before the letters which make up Friendship's Garland had been coHected, Arnold's criticism had taken yet another turn. St. Paul and Protestantism was the first of the volumes in which he took the character of critic of popular conceptions of reHgion ; and it was foUowed by Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible. Mixed Essays, Irish Essays and Discourses in America were the product of Arnold's later years. Arnold then is a critic in a triple sense — a critic of Htera- ture, a critic of society, a critic of religion. It is unnecessary here to do more than allude to his services in the sphere of Hterary criticism — his insistence on the imperative need of dis- interestedness; the lesson of urbanity which he taught by example as weU as by precept ; his condemnation of the spirit of provinciaHty. But it is desirable to note that there is much besides purely Hterary criticism in the Hterary essays, and 3o8 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS that once and again they bear witness to the fact that Arnold possessed in a rare degree the special qualities of the essayist. His picture, in the essay on Wordsworth, of the speaker at a Social Science Congress reading from a manuscript written within and without, and producing in the heart of the poor child of nature lamentation and mourning and woe, illus- trates his manner. The delightful preface to the Essays in Criticism again and again reveals the man himself. The principle, " to try and approach truth from one side after another," was his guide through life and in all departments of his work. He expounds it again many years after in the speech to the Eton boys on the significance of eutrapelia, and the varying estimation in which the word has been held. There is a touch of sadness in the confession that " the world will soon be the Philistines'." There is playful sarcasm in the shyness he avows of assuming the honourable style of Professor. Arnold's sarcasm is all-pervading: it is present even in the nobly eloquent apostrophe to Oxford — "there are our young barbarians — all at play!" But it is perhaps the most good-natured sarcasm that ever was so effective. There is humour too in the consolation addressed to the travellers on the Woodford Branch, when they were agitated by a murder committed on a neighbouring railway: " Myself a transcendentalist (as the Saturday Review knows), I escaped the infection; and, day after day, I used to ply my agitated fellow-travellers with all the consolations which my transcendentalism would naturally suggest to me. I re- minded them how Caesar refused to take precautions against assassination, because Hfe was not worth having at the price of an ignoble solicitude for it. I reminded them what in- significant atoms we all are in the life of the world. ' Suppose the worst to happen,' I said, addressing a portly jeweller from Cheapside; 'suppose even yourself to be the victim; il rCy a pas (Thomme necessaire. We should miss you for a day or LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 309 two on the Woodford Branch; but the great mundane move- ment would still go on, the gravel walks of your villa would still be rolled, dividends would still be paid at the Bank, omnibuses would still run, there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street.' " The essays on religion have lost part of their importance by lapse of time, though the objection which was taken against them by professional theologians has less weight than the objectors imagined. It is true that Arnold was no Hebraist; but then, for the work attempted in St. Paul and Protestantism and in Literature and Dogma, a knowledge of Hebrew was of no great importance. It is even possible that such know- ledge would have been a hindrance rather than a help. Arnold quoted with approval the Duke of Wellington's saying that a certain person was too highly educated for his intellect, and feared that he himself, though he knew nothing but literature, and only a portion of that, might have read too much to retain the perfect flexibility of mind which was indispensable. But however that may be, the popular mind as well as the pro- fessional mind has moved far within the last forty years. In part Arnold's essays have been built into the fabric of thought, in part the questions he deals with have become obsolete. To a certain extent the same is true of the essays in social criticism; but, in the main, when we read these we are im- pressed with the sense that the same problems are before us still. As we have already seen, that is true even if we go farther back than Arnold, to Carlyle. So when, in Ecce, con- vertimur in Gentes, Arnold insisted upon three things that were necessary — " a reduction of those immense inequalities of condition and property amongst us, of which our land system is the base; a genuine municipal system; and public schools for the middle classes; " he was speaking of difh- culties which have still to be faced. Some progress has been made; but neither the municipal system nor the intermediate 310 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS schools are perfect; and least of all is the land question solved. The core of Arnold's social doctrine is in Culture and Anarchy. Every one of the essays it contains is significant, and still worth studying. Yet it seemed hopelessly unprac- tical to preach culture as a cure for such evils as force them- selves upon us in our slums. England is practical, and cries out for practical men. " But," retorts Arnold, " what if rough and coarse action, ill-calculated action, action without sufficient light, is, and has for a long time been, our bane ? " With a quietly sarcastic touch he pictures the result of such action in Porro meum est Necessarium : " If we are sometimes a little troubled by our multitude of poor men, yet we know the increase of manufactures and population to be such a salutary thing in itself, and our free-trade policy begets such an admirable movement, creating fresh centres of industry and fresh poor men here, while we were thinking about our poor men there, that we are quite dazed and borne away, and more and more industrial movement is called for, and our social progress seems to become one triumphant and enjoy- able course of what is sometimes called, vulgarly, outrunning the constable." This from a Liberal, in the days when the Manchester School was in its glory! Other sarcasms abound, for it was Arnold's way to point out, unmistakably though with all urbanity, the defects of the people he was addressing. When he went to America one of the subjects he chose was Numbers : or, The Majority and the Rem^iant ; and in treating it he pointed out to a people in- ordinately proud of their unprecedented growth in numbers and in material prosperity, that in the opinion of Plato the majority in Athens, and in the opinion of Isaiah the majority in Israel, had been unsound. In Culture and Anarchy he is addressing England; and he does not spare her. " The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 311 religion; " " preparing ourselves by the study of modern languages ... to fight the battle of life with the waiters in foreign hotels; " the doing into British of " the Divine In- junction, ' Be ye Perfect ' " in " the sentence Sir Daniel Gooch's mother repeated to him every morning when he was a boy going to work : ' Ever remember, my dear Dan, that you should look forward to being some day manager of that concern; ' " — these are specimens of the sarcasms he flings at his fellow- countrymen. It can hardly be denied that there was, and is, occasion for them. The Gospel of Getting On is still preached; a narrow and vulgar conception of what is " prac- tical " still underlies popular conceptions of education; the dissidence of dissent still flourishes, and still produces, though in diminished measure, the fruit Arnold saw springing from it. " I remember," he says in the preface to Culture and Anarchy, " I remember a Nonconformist manufacturer in a town of the Midland counties, telling me that when he first came there, some years ago, the place had no Dissenters; but he had opened an Independent chapel in it, and now Church and Dissent were pretty equally divided, with sharp contests between them. I said that this seemed a pity. 'A pity? ' cried he; ' not at all! Only think of all the zeal and activity which the collision calls forth ! ' ' Ah, but, my dear friend,' I answered, ' only think of all the nonsense which you now hold quite firmly, which you would never have held if you had not been contradicting your adversary in it all these years.' " We no longer boast of "our incomparable civilisation;" we admit that the evils to which Arnold pointed are real evils. Perhaps it might be worth while for the practical men, who have achieved no such brilliant success after all, to consider what the unpractical apostle of culture has to suggest by way of cure. In essence, it is " the Divine Injunction ' Be ye Perfect ' " done, not into British, but into Arnoldese. It is 312 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS the pursuit of perfection, and that is the pursuit of sweetness and hght. It is the assertion of self — in a sense, but not in any sense we please. The conception of freedom as a thing good in itself and indistinguishable from licence must be abandoned. " The great thing ... is to find our best self, and to seek to affirm nothing but that." But this is difficult. Perfection absolute may be an ideal, but certainly it can never be attained; and the best self is not altogether easy to be discovered, still less to be effectively affirmed. On the other hand, the creation of fresh poor men here while we are thinking of our poor men there has proved to be disastrously easy. It has been the same ever since the Choice of Hercules. Pleasure dwells near at hand, and the way is smooth and easy; but the way of virtue is hard, and the gods have ordained sweat of the brow to the traveller. Evidently Arnold had the endowment of an essayist of the most intimate sort, and it is only by reason of his choice of theme, necessitating a treatment in the main less intimate, that he has to be placed in the outer ring. The same is true of Walter Bagehot (i 826-1 877), whose most valuable essays are contained in Literary Studies and Biographical Studies. There is something personal in Bagehot's epigrammatic say- ings. When he says of Dickens that " he describes London like a special correspondent for posterity," or when he sums up Macaulay's indifference to contemporaries in the phrase, " he regards existing men as painful pre-requisites of great- grandchildren," the man himself seems to stand revealed. His wit smacks of his own personality. The sentence, " The English now and then produce a learned creature Hke a thistle, prickly with all facts, and incapable of all fruit," is more than the expression of a critical opinion : it throws a flood of light upon the writer. Clearly he does not admire this " learned creature ;" and if he is true to himself, in LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 313 treating subjects that demand learning, he will strip off the prickles and make sure of the fruit,— in short, he wiU do pre- cisely what the author of Lombard Street did. There is a philosophical basis underlying all Bagehot's work. It appears in his exposition of the reason why a con- stitutional statesman is a person with the powers of a first- rate man and the creed of a second-rate man; in his treat- ment of the three forms of art, pure, ornate and grotesque; in his explanation of Scott's eccentric and abnormal characters; in the psychology of his criticism of Sterne and Thackeray; in his division of men of genius into regular, Hke Plato, and irregular, Hke Shakespeare. This basis gives coherence to all his essays, both critical and biographical. But it is never allowed to make the treatment heavy. From ponderousness Bagehot is saved by his wit and humour. His habitual way of regarding men is humorous. His wit finds constant ex- pression in short crisp sentences, full of verve. In the struc- ture of sentences his style resembles Macaulay's; but the diction is more colloquial, and there is an occasional looseness of grammar against which Macaulay studiously guarded him self. No one has a happier knack than Bagehot of putting the gist of an argument into a phrase— ^.^., " Whiggism is not a creed, it is a character; " or his answer to the sceptics who doubt whether it is possible to deduce anything as to Shake- speare's character from his works : " Surely people do not keep a tame steam-engine to write their books." Vigorous common sense such as this is manifest all through the essays, and every reader of Bagehot's writings on economics and on the constitution is aware that it is the soul of these as well. It is this that enables him to penetrate through mists of words and to tear away veils woven by loose thinking. It is this that makes him one of the most helpful of men towards clarity of view on any subject that he discusses. 314 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS The literary characteristics of Thomas Henry Huxley (1825- 1895) were not dissimilar to those of Bagehot. Huxley too possessed the gifts of wit and humour. Huxley too built upon a foundation of philosophy. Huxley too had the knack of pregnant expression. His style was smoother than Bagehot's, and quite as effective. His scientific pursuits did not tend to the early development of his literary quaHties; and had circumstances not made him the " gladiator-general of science " and " Darwin's bull-dog," it is quite possible that they would never have been fully developed. As it was, he found himself called upon to do this work, and in the process made himself the most consummate controversialist that has ever written English. But in spite of his great merits both as man of science and as man of letters, Huxley's writings cannot long hold the position they deservedly held in his own day. In the first place, it is of the very nature of science that the work of every efficient contributor to it tends to supersede that of his predecessor. Of Man's Place in Nature Huxley himself, near the close of his life, wrote that it had " achieved the fate, which is the euthanasia of a scientific work, of being inclosed among the rubble of the foundations of later know- ledge, and forgotten." In the second place, there is a certain vice in controversy — and none was more fuUy aware of it than Huxley — which in no long time empties of interest even the most skilful of controversial writings. " If I may judge by my own taste," writes Huxley, " few literary dishes are less appetising than cold controversy." And again : " Of polemical writing, as of other kinds of warfare, I think it may be said, that it is often useful, sometimes necessary, and always more or less an evil." In Huxley's case it was perhaps necessary, and certainly both useful and in some degree an evil. He took to it with the delight which the " bonny fechter " takes in the play of his sword; and his controversies with Gladstone about Genesis and about the Gadarene swine will always LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 315 remain an intellectual delight to every man whose eye is quick enough to foUow the thrusts. But still, the stress of battle has shifted to other parts of the field, and it cannot be said that these papers are now of high intrinsic importance. Neverthe- less, even in the most controversial writings there are passages which reveal the great soul of Huxley, and set it in a light astonishing enough to those who know him only superficially. He is, or was, popularly supposed to be an enemy of the Bible, because he could not believe the legends of the deluge and the creation; yet he was the author of one of the strongest pleas for the study of the Bible: " Throughout the history of the western world, the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, have been the great instigators of revolt against the worst forms of clerical and political despotism. The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed; down to modern times, no State has had a constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken into account, in which the duties, so much more than the privileges, of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in Deuteronomy and Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that the welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the upright- ness of the citizen so strongly laid down. Assuredly, the Bible talks no trash about the rights of man; but it insists on the equality of duties, on the liberty to bring about that righteousness which is somewhat different from the struggle for 'rights'; on the fraternity of taking thought for one's neighbour as for one's self." Some of Huxley's most telling strokes at those whose interpretation of the Bible he challenged are drawn from the armoury of the Bible itself, and are de- livered in a manner which demonstrates his profound ad- miration of it. Speaking of " the great saying of Micah " — " And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ? " — he asks : " What extent of knowledge, what acuteness of 3i6 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS scientific insight, can touch this, if any one possessed of know- ledge, or acuteness, could be absurd enough to make the attempt ? Will the progress of research prove that justice is worthless and mercy hateful; will it ever soften the bitter contrast between our actions and our aspirations; or show us the bounds of the universe, and bid us say, Go to, now we comprehend the infinite? A faculty of wrath lay in those ancient Israelites, and surely the prophet's staff would have made swift acquaintance with the head of the scholar who had asked Micah whether, peradventure, the Lord further re- quired of him an implicit belief in the cosmogony of Genesis! " And peradventure, if the prophet had been reincarnated a millennium or two later, his staff would have made equally swift acquaintance with the head of the scholar who had asked whether the Lord required impHcit belief in apostolical succession likewise. In some of the essayists who came into prominence rather later than those who have just been discussed, there is a pre- dominance of literary criticism which in the main excludes them from treatment here. This is especially true of Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton (i 832-1914), who was unsurpassed and probably unequalled in his own generation as a literary pioneer, but whose multifarious interests outside literature are revealed rather in his poems and in his prose romance Aylwin than in his essays. In less degree it is true also of Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), the editor of the earlier volumes of the great Dictionary of National Biography. As essayist Stephen is best known for his sound and sane criticisms and his excellent biographical sketches. But he wrote also a few essays of a more personal sort. The intense emotion of An Agnostic^ s Apology is due to the quasi-persecution to which the holders of unpopular opinions are even now exposed. While it reveals Stephen in his gravest mood, The Playground of Europe (1871) shows him bent on holiday. These pleasant LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 317 sketches, from the essays on the old and the new schools of mountaineers to the concluding Regrets of a Mountaineer and Dangers of Mountaineering, give evidence that the man of letters was a very sincere and not merely a conventional lover of nature; and here and there a descriptive passage rises to an eloquence as unquestionable as that of Ruskin, though less ornate. Like Stephen, Henry Duff Traill (i 842-1900) mingled criticism with things more personal. His essays in the volume entitled The New Fiction (1897), his fables and fantasies in Number Twenty (1892), and his skits in The Israelitish Question (iSyS) prove that he possessed a literary gift which might have won him a permanent place in litera- ture had not so much of his energy been absorbed in work of an ephemeral character. All these were men of books, and they must go to the Alps, or to the gypsies, in order to get rid of the atmosphere of books. But Richard Jefferies (i 848-1 887) was a man of the country whom adverse fate made a journalist. His atmo sphere was the open air, and he carried it with him to the study and the newspaper-office. It was soon recognised that his work had in it a principle of life more lasting than that of the mere journal, and as early as 1873 his name began to appear on volumes. It was, however, through The Game- keeper at Home (1878), a collection of essays reprinted from The Pall Mall Gazette, that he first became widely known. In the following year appeared Wild Life in a Southern County and The Amateur Poacher. Then came a rapid succession of works down to the time of the author's death, and finally an aftermath of several posthumous volumes, including Field and Hedgerow (1889). Thus, during his short career of barely ten years (reckoning from The Gamekeeper at Home), JeflFeries was a very prolific writer. He was also a fairly varied one; for we find in him not only the vein of simple observation of nature, for which he is best known, but also that of poetry or 3i8 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS mysticism — however it may be described — which, though in the main a development of his later years, was evidently pre- sent in his heart from the beginning. It was fully expressed in Wood Magic, which appeared only three years after Thir Gamekeeper at Home. He paints " a dreamy, slumberous place, where the sedges slept, and the green flags bowed their painted heads. Under the bushes in the distant nook the moorhen, reassured by the silence, came out from the grey- green grass and the rushes. Surely Calypso's cave could not be far distant, where she with work and song the time divides And through the loom the golden shuttle guides. For the Immortals are hiding somewhere still in the woods; even now I do not weary searching for them." This is beautiful; but it is a sort of beauty of which prose is sus- ceptible only now and then, and which seems more appro- priate in romance or in autobiography, as in The Story of my Heart, than as the staple of the essay. In Jefferies as essayist it is another phase which is most prominent. He is the observer, chronicling patiently, minutely, and, as experts declare, with absolute fidelity the facts of nature. But it seems legitimate to doubt whether this part of Jefferies's work will long be read. No doubt he takes us, as Lowell said of White of Selborne, into the open air; and no doubt that is a service, and one which has long kept White's memory green. But there is a something in White that is not to be found in Jefferies. Bare facts are not science, nor yet are they literature, and in far too many passages Jefferies gives mere catalogues of things he has seen. Sometimes he saves himself by interweaving a human interest with his observation of nature; not so much in Hodge and his Master, where perhaps his observations as critic of society are less impressive than his observations as naturahst, but rather in LATTER HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY 319 The Amateur Poacher, where the human element is drawn from his own boyish experiences. The boys with their love of sport, their experiments with the old flint-lock in the garret, the ruth- less burning of it, the single-barrel with reduced charge that killed the wood-pigeon — these are things which give infinitely more interest than any but the naturahst can easily take in the mere catalogue of Wild Life in a Southern Country. No doubt it is accurate observation; but what other value does it possess ? A comparison of such a passage as the follow- { ing (one of many) with Our Village, shows how greatly the literary value of this part of the work of Jeiferies has been \ exaggerated : — " Such places, close to cultivated land yet undisturbed, are the best in which to look for wild flowers ; and on the narrow strip beside the hedge and on the crumbhng rubble bank of the rough track may be found a greater variety than by searching the broad acres beyond. In the season the large white bell-like flowers of the convolvulus will cHmb over the hawthorn, and the lesser striped kind will creep along the ground. The pink pimpernel hides on the very verge of the corn, which presently will be strewn with the beautiful ' bluebottle ' flower, than whose exquisite hue there is nothing more lovely in our fields. The great scarlet poppy with the black centre, and ' eggs and butter ' — curious name for a flower — will, of course, be there: the latter often flourishes on a high elevation, on the very ridges, provided only the plough has been there." ^ " He was a reporter of genius; and he never got beyond | reporting," is the judgment of Henley in a notice which, if it | errs,'does not err on the side of severity. The justification of the judgment appears in a hundred passages such as that above quoted. 320 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS CHAPTER XII SOME ESSAYISTS OF YESTERDAY There remain a few essayists who seem to stand closer to our own time than those who have just been reviewed. Yet in some cases the closer proximity is apparent rather than real. Andrew Lang was born before R. L. Stevenson and Lafcadio Hearn in the same year with him; while George Gissing and Francis Thompson belong to the same decade. It was, how- ever, later before they made their mark in literature, and later before they made their exit from it. Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a man who seemed to have all the qualities necessary to make a great essayist. The wider his knowledge the less likely is the essayist to exhaust himself; and few have surpassed Lang in width of information. He was a classical scholar, he had read extensively in history and in literature, he was at home in anthropology, he could discuss ghosts and the occult. He was, moreover, a sports- man, and was familiar with life in the open air as well as in the library. In all his many fields of intellectual activity tie was surpassed in knowledge, it may be, by a few, but only by a few. Two or three had read more widely, two or three had penetrated more deeply into the by-ways of Scottish history. But the specialists who occasionally corrected him could rarely make effective use of their superior knowledge. And, after all, if their knowledge was superior at one point it was in most cases incomparably inferior on the whole. Lang had what they mostly lacked — an easy and graceful style. Never, perhaps, did he show it to greater advantage SOME ESSAYISTS OF YESTERDAY 321 than in the latest work of his pen, the History of English Literature. To have condensed the story of that hterature into a single moderate volume, and to have done this in such a way that every page is bright and readable, is an extra- ordinary triumph. This volume proves further that Lang had the gift of humour, which also is so valuable to the essayist. And there is evidence everywhere that he did not object, but rather loved, to impart personal confidences. His reader is never left long in doubt as to his love of Scott and the Scott country, which was also his country, or as to his interest in apparitions. In short, it would seem that Lang had the essayist's endowments in their full range. And yet it has to be confessed that as essayist he is disappointing. Varied as are the themes and pleasant as is the style, there is always just something lacking to complete success. Whatever volume we take up, whether Essays in Little, or Angling Sketches, or Lost Leaders, or Letters to Dead Authors, the impression left is agreeable, but not deep. They are not the sort of literature that lives, and each in its own way has been surpassed by men of gifts apparently inferior to Lang's. Part of the reason, no doubt, was that he did too much. The essays are the by-product of a mind that was constantly busy with other things. They are journahstic rather than Hterary. It may be that even Lamb's would have been so too, if he had been as incessantly engaged upon larger works. The three younger men who have been named along with Lang were all essayists of a higher class than he. The eldest of them, Lafcadio Hearn (i 850-1904), stands by himself, one of the most remarkable, but in some ways by no means among the most attractive, figures in recent literature, an example perhaps unique of the interminghng of the lofty with the sordid, the ethereal with the grossly mundane. He who makes his entrance into literature as the writer of a most repulsive report of a murder case is yet the author of one of X 322 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS the noblest moral tales in the language — Karma; and the disciple of Herbert Spencer is the interpreter to England of the spirit of old Japan. Upon the value of this last phase of his work Hearn's position in literature, and especially among the essayists, will finally depend. His early journalistic work in America, so far as it can be judged from the fragments accessible, is better forgotten. Much of it seems to have been unwholesome in the extreme. The writings which were the outcome of his stay in the West Indies are greatly superior. Two Tears in the French West Indies is a collection of sketches of life in Martinique in which Hearn proves himself to be a rarely-gifted impressionist. And this was the part he was destined for. Like the film of the photographer, his mind absorbed whatever was presented to it; but it could rarely react upon its materials without spoiling them. Hence Hearn's earhest writings on Japan are the best. Nothing that he afterwards wrote quite equalled Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, where he simply allowed novel scenes and strange customs to play upon his mind, and reproduced in words their effect upon himself. In the art of doing this Hearn is unsurpassed. There are fine things in the later volumes as well, from Out of the East to Japan : An Attempt at Interpreta- tion, in the latter of which he attempted to sum up all that he had learnt from the East. But in all there is greater self-consciousness than in the first volume; and with Hearn self-consciousness means weakness. The very fact that he held the Spencerian philosophy along with so much that is irreconcilable with it is a proof that he had no capacity for systematic thinking. The character of his style, with its suggestion of dim vistas and vaguely-alluring colour, leads to the same conclusion. The fact that, though he lived for many years in Japan and married a Japanese wife, he never learnt the Japanese language, is itself sufficient proof that, though we may go to him for impressions, it would SOME ESSAYISTS OF YESTERDAY 323 be dangerous to trust his reasoned conclusions beyond the point where we see them guaranteed by impressions. An interesting feature of the recent intellectual history of England is the rise of the provincial universities, and George Gissing (i 857-1903) and Francis Thompson (i 859-1907) illustrate it ; for both were alumni of the Owen's College, which has since developed into the University of Manchester. Both were men of tragical lives, and both were exquisite writers. It is true we think of Thompson primarily as a poet and of Gissing as a novelist. In Thompson's case the view is right, but in Gissing's it is very questionable, and, if wrong, is most unjust to Gissing. Good as his novels are, they are certainly not of a quality to secure him a place in the first rank. But those who know Gissing's work well, know, from his admirable monograph on Dickens, that he was also a critic of rare insight; and above all they know, from his Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, that he was one of the foremost of recent essayists. Henry Ryecroft is fiction of a sort. But it is not a novel, for it has neither plot nor, pro- perly speaking, story, and only one character, unless we count the housekeeper as a second. Neither has it any unity, except that which the personality of Ryecroft, who in essentials is Gissing himself, imparts. Probably Gissing began with some more or less definite idea of making the book a unity. He hints as much in the preface, where he speaks of the papers of the imaginary Ryecroft: "I suspect that, in his happy leisure, there grew upon him a desire to write one more book, a book which should be written merely for his own satisfaction. Plainly, it would have been the best he had it in him to do. But he seems never to have attempted the arrangement of these fragmentary pieces, and probably because he could not decide upon the form they should take. I imagine him shrinking from the thought of a first-person volume; he would feel it too pretentious; he would bid himself wait for 324 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS the day of riper wisdom. And so the pen fell from his hand." And so, instead of an unreal unity, we have in this volume one of the most fascinating collections of " dispersed medita- tions " in the language; one of the most pathetic too, when we contrast Gissing's anxious and frustrated life in ' New Grub Street,' with the delicate sensitiveness here revealed to the beauty of sky and field and flower. Alone of all his books Henry Ryecroft was written " for his own satisfaction "; and it is so greatly superior to anything else he has written that we are tempted to speculate as to what has been lost through the untoward circumstances which denied him the liberty to write always for his own satisfaction. He himself asks what would have been the result upon him if he had achieved success early, and he answers, Nothing but good. We may accept the answer. The world would have been richer, had it made Gissing richer, Henry Ryecroft gives Gissing a place among that group of essayists of whom Lamb is chief, a place higher than that of any recent writer except Stevenson. He who knew so well the value of time, and who has written about it with unsurpassed wisdom, was con- demned to write for money, and to write what was not his best because his mind was not in tune. " Time is money — says the vulgarest saw known to any age or people. Turn it round about, and you get a precious truth — money is time. I think of it on these dark, mist-blinded mornings, as I come down to find a glorious fire crackling and leaping in my study. Suppose I were so poor that I could not afford that heartsome blaze, how different the whole day would be! Have I not lost many and many a day of my life for lack of the material comfort which was necessary to put my mind in tune ? Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman. Money is time, and, heaven be thanked, there needs so little of it for this sort of 1 SOME ESSAYISTS OF YESTERDAY 325 purchase. He who has overmuch is wont to be as badly off in regard to the true use of money, as he who has not enough. What are we doing all our lives but purchasing, or trying to purchase, time? And most of us having grasped it with one hand, throw it away with the other." The range of Henry Ryecroft is very wide. Its subject is, I not whatever men do, but whatever a singularly rich and ' thoughtful mind broods over. Nature, books, art, science, pohtics, the Enghsh Sunday, the ultimate problems of Hfe and death, morals, stoicism, all are touched upon, all are more or less fuUy discussed. There are Hghter things as well — sea-coal fires, tea, Enghsh cookery — discussed with a whole- some insular prejudice; for, though Gissing abhorred Jingoism, and looked upon the possible coming of conscription " with the sickness of dread and of disgust," he was genuinely and deeply patriotic. But perhaps the most wonderful feature of the book is the evidence it affords of a capacity for deep joy in the country on the part of this denizen of the city. His descriptions are always beautiful, and sometimes highly poetical. Winter is " Nature's annual slumber," and sun- shine at that season is " the soft beam which is Nature's smile in dreaming." Here is his praise of silence : — " Every morning when I awake, I thank heaven for silence. This is my orison. I remember the London days when sleep was broken by clash and clang, by roar and shriek, and when my first sense on returning to consciousness was hatred of the life about me. Noises of wood and metal, clattering of wheels, banging of implements, janghng of bells — all such things are bad enough, but worse still is the clamorous human voice. Nothing on earth is more irritating to me than a bellow or scream of idiot mirth, nothing more hateful than a shout or yell of brutal anger. Were it possible, I would never again hear the utterance of a human tongue, save from those few who are dear to me. 326 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS " Here, wake at what hour I may, early or late, I lie amid gracious stillness. Perchance a horse's hoof rings rhythmically upon the road; perhaps a dog barks from a neighbouring farm; it may be that there comes the far, soft murmur of a train from the other side of Exe; but these are almost the only sounds that could force themselves upon my ear. A voice, at any time of the day, is the rarest thing. " But there is the rustle of branches in the morning breeze; there is the music of a sunny shower against the window; there is the matin song of birds. Several times lately I have lain wakeful when there sounded the first note of the earliest lark; it makes me almost glad of my restless nights. The only trouble that touches me in these moments is the thought of my long Hfe wasted amid the senseless noises of man's world. Year after year this spot has known the same tranquillity; with ever so little of good fortune, with ever so little wisdom, beyond what was granted me, I might have blessed my man- hood with calm, might have made for myself in later hfe a long retrospect of bowered peace. As it is, I enjoy with some- thing of sadness, remembering that this melodious silence is but the prelude of that deeper stillness which waits to enfold us an." Of a man of this temperment we learn without surprise that every instinct of his being is anti-democratic; that he dreads " to think of what our England may become when Demos rules irresistibly; " that, to him, " democracy is full of menace to all the finer hopes of civiHsation; " that though there has been a day when he called himself a socialist, he is in reality in every fibre an individualist. So, surely, must the artist always be. Gissing's is no bad definition of art : " An expression, satisfying and abiding, of the zest of life." But each man must feel the zest himself, or for him it does not exist. And great part of the charm of Henry Ryecroft is due to the fact that it is a revelation of the temperament of an SOME ESSAYISTS OF YESTERDAY 327 artist. There are confidences as intimate and almost as delightful as those of Lamb. The story of the purchase of Heyne's Tibullus and the quarto Gibbon is not unworthy to set beside the essay on Old China. The essay in which Gissing describes the effect upon him of the room hung with prints after English landscape painters, where as a child he used to sleep, has not indeed all the charm of Blakesmoor in H shire, but it belongs to the same order of writings. With The Superannuated Man there is not resemblance, but contrast. Lamb represents himself as stunned and over- whelmed by his liberation. He misses his old chains, and has to go back and visit his old desk-fellows. Ryecroft's freedom contrasts with a harder and more grinding slavery than Lamb's had ever been. He chuckles over the sympathy offered to him in his supposed loneliness. Though the rich humour of Lamb is not to be found in Gissing, he has enriched the English language with a book which belongs to the same order as the immortal book of Elia. If Gissing is the most charming, his fellow-collegian Thompson is the most eloquent of recent essayists. Thompson has suffered from injudicious and excessive praise, but he is great enough to survive that, as well as the depreciation it provokes. The story of his Hfe, in which ill fortune and good are so strangely mingled (for surely it was the best of good fortune to find such friends as they who sheltered the latter part of his career), is too well known to need recounting; but it is not irrelevant to note that the ill fortune which dogged him so long is exemplified in the history of his principal prose work, the essay on Shelley, as well as in the events of his life. Written in 1889, it was sent to The Dublin Review, but was not published there till 1908, after the hapless poet's death; and, to heighten the irony, it was received with a burst of praise that was more than adequate to even its high merits. Full of insight and rich in striking sentences the essay certainly 328 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS is; and at the close it rises to a grand burst of eloquence. Yet, like most of the poems, it leaves an impression of excess. The style is somewhat too gorgeous. The bulk of Thompson's prose is, like the essay on Shelley, critical; and much of it has that special interest which belongs to the utterances of a poet on his own art. But Thompson was more than an occasional critic; he was an artist in prose as well as in verse. His own example helps to establish the truth of his saying that " it might almost be erected into a rule that a great poet is, if he please, also a master of prose." His own prose, always distinguished, though never free from faults, rises in a small group of essays nearly to the highest excellence. The faults might even, on a theory of his own^ be regarded as the last touch that made the style supreme. That remarkable essay, The Way of Imperfection, shows how paradox may be made not merely to titillate the mind, but to reveal truth. Thompson gives expression to the fear that " unless some voice be raised in timely protest . . . English art (in its widest sense) must soon dwindle to the extinction of unendurable excellence." Spoken by Oscar Wilde, this would probably have been merely a scintillation of wit dying as soon as born. To the graver and deeper mind of Thompson it has a profound meaning, and he wins his reader's assent to its truth: " This pure white light of style \i.&. style entirely free from mannerism] is as impossible as undesirable; it must be splintered into colour by the refracting media of the individual mind, and humanity will always prefer the colour. Theoretically we ought to have no mannerisms; practically we cannot help having them, and without them style would be flavourless — faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null." This is not only true, but it is a truth which has a wider application than Thompson was here concerned to show. It holds of the substance of thought as well as of the form of its expression. The historian free from prejudice is like the SOME ESSAYISTS OF YESTERDAY 329 stylist free from mannerism — at once impossible and undesir- able. If the end were attained he would be unreadable. But there are other things besides Hterary criticism in Thompson's essays. In Darkest England is a piece of social criticism suggested by General Booth's celebrated scheme. It is highly characteristic of Thompson, for it throbs with sensibiHty to the evils which he, partly by experience and partly by his poet's power of divination, knew hardly less well than General Booth himself. The contrast between the two aspects of England is at once just and beautiful and tragic: — " I see upon my right hand a land of lanes, and hedgerows, and meadowed green; whose people's casual tread is over blossoming yellow, white and purple, far-shining as the constellations that sand their nightly heaven ; where the very winter rains, into which the deciduous foliage rots, cover the naked boughs with a vividness of dusted emerald. " I look upon my left hand, and I see another region — is it not rather another universe? A region whose hedgerows have set to brick, whose soil is chilled to stone; where flowers are sold and women, where the men wither and the stars; whose streets to me on the most glittering day are black. For I unveil their secret meanings. I read their human hieroglyphs. I diagnose from a hundred occult signs the disease which perturbs their populous pulses. Misery cries out to me from the kerb-stone, despair passes me by in the ways; I discern limbs laden with fetters impalpable, but not imponderable; I hear the shaking of invisible lashes, I see men dabbled with their own oozing Hfe. This contrast rises before me; and I ask myself whether there be indeed an Ormuzd and an Ahriman, and whether Ahriman be the stronger of the twain. From the claws of the sphinx my eyes have risen to her coun- tenance which no eyes read." There are other essays no less characteristic in other ways; among them Moestitice Encomium, so redolent of De Quincey, 330 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS unless it be that both are redolent of opium. The subject is one on which both write beautifully, and with a wisdom born of pain. " I know her," says Thompson, " and praise knowing. Foolishly we shun this shunless Sadness; fondly we deem of her as but huntress of men, who is tender and the bringer of tenderness to those she visits with her fearful favours. A world without joy were more tolerable than a world without sorrow. Without sadness where were brotherliness ? For in joy is no brotherliness, but only a boon-companionship. She is the Spartan sauce which gives gusto to the remainder-viands of life, the broken meats of love." " That's what all the blessed evil's for," says Browning. Probably the Catholic Thompson would have hesitated to follow Browning the whole length; yet it seems to be all in a logical concatenation. The most intimate of all the essays, however, is that pro- foundly thoughtful and penetrating one entitled Health and Holiness, A Study of the Relations between Brother Ass the Body and his Rider the Soul. Here again we find the ascetic and mystic Thompson coming singularly near to Browning. " Let us not always say, ' Spite of this flesh to-day — I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole! ' As the bird wings and sings, Let us cry, ' All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul! Asceticism, Thompson holds, is wise and indeed necessary; but Brother Ass has rights too, and at times Brother Ass has been unmercifully ridden. Wise asceticism is that which will secure health in the deepest sense, the health of both body and soul, the health which is hohness. And such asceticism will vary with time and circumstance. " The weak, dastardly and selfish body of to-day needs an asceticism — never more," — but it must not be the asceticism which the robuster, undegenerate body of old bore. This essay is clearly the SOME ESSAYISTS OF YESTERDAY 331 product of the pen which always inscribed a cross on the top of the page before it wrote the poem or the essay. More than anything else he has written in prose, it is a revelation of the soul of Thompson. No essayist who has passed away in recent years can rival these three in importance. There have been several who have shown high gifts — for example, Hubert Bland of the Sunday Chronicle. But Bland provides the word which indicates his own Hmitation, He lacks " fundamentahty," the something which makes what is written interesting not only for the time but for a later generation. Mary E. Cole- ridge, however (i 861-1907), would deserve at least a passing notice were it only for the illustration she affords of that extraordinary power to transmit the Uterary faculty which the Coleridge family exhibits in a degree unrivalled by any other. She deserves notice for her own merits also. That she inherited the poetic gift her Httle volume of verses proves ; and indeed u-e see it in her prose as well. In this respect, it is true, she stands immeasurably below, not merely the great poet of her name, but his son Hartley as well. But she had other gifts, less great than this, yet valuable to the essayist, in which she surpassed them. She had humour, and she had lightness of touch. These qualities are well blended in the papers On Noises, More Worlds than One, and Travellers' Tales. Richard Middleton, who died recently at the age of twenty- nine, demands notice on another score. The Day before Yesterday is a charming volume of essays belonging to that class of books for children or about children for which the last two generations have been distinguished beyond all other periods, since that indefinite time when the fairy tales and the nursery stories of giant-killers were invented. It is the work of a man who retained the heart of childhood till his death, and whose poetic imagination kept open for him a world that closes for the great majority of " Olympians " almost before 332 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS they have become Olympian. The effect of the essays is cumulative; while all are pleasing, there is hardly one of such merit as to make it memorable in itself. But whoever reads the volume will find that he has gained an insight into the imaginative life of children such as is hardly to be obtained elsewhere. Thus Middleton's essays have a place of their own, where they have scarcely a rival, except the books of Mr. Kenneth Grahame. The point of view is the child's, to whom the Olympian is a tiresome being, who is always inter- fering with that which he does not understand. Even on the rare occasions when Middleton steps, as it were, outside, and takes up the position of the critic, his sympathy is with the child; as is clear from the closing sentences of the essay On Children's Gardens : — " When a child has wrought a fine morning's havoc in its little patch of ground it has added it may be an ocean, it may be only a couple of stars to the kingdom of imagination which we may no longer see. It only needs a sunny hour or two, a trowel, and a pair of dirty hands to change a few square yards of earth into a world. And the child may be considered for- tunate in being able to express itself in terms of dust. Our books and pictures cumber the earth, our palaces strike the skies, and yet it is our common tragedy that we have not found expression ; while down the garden behind the lilac-bushes at this very moment Milton may have developed Lycidas into a sticky marsh, and Shakespeare may have compressed Hamlet into a mud-pie. The works of the children end as they begin in dust; but we cannot pretend that ours are morepermanent." That imaginative sympathy, not critical, which is the special characteristic of these essays may be illustrated from almost any of them taken at random; but it is perhaps speciallv marked in The Magic Pool, A Repertory Theatre, and The Wool- Gatherer. The last-named deals with the dreamer of mature years, who is viewed with pitying contempt by the Olympians, SOME ESSAYISTS OF YESTERDAY 333 but with respect by the children who live in the same dream- world and see that the wool-gatherer realises in his life that for which they themselves long. " We saw that the wool- gatherer did no recognisable work, wore comfortably untidy clothes, walked in the mud as much as he wanted to, and, in fine, lived a life of enviable freedom." A Repertory Theatre is comparable with Stevenson's A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured; and The Magic Pool recalls to every reader that awe of the unknown which is probably universal in childhood. It is a perfect picture, that of the two small boys on their mid- night march to the pool — one little hand stealing out to the other and remaining clasped in it, one thinking that the other was breathing shortly and noisily and then finding that it was his own breathing that he heard, one pulling out his watch with a hand so unsteady that he could hardly tell the time, and finally the panic-flight just before the fateful moment. While Middleton affords pleasant reading, he is representa- tive of nothing in particular beyond himself; but John M. Synge (1871-1909), whether he wished it or not, was repre- sentative of a whole class and, in a sense, of a literary theory. He belongs to the Celtic group; and since Arnold wrote his Studv of Celtic Literature we have again and again been given to understand that practically all that makes poetry poetical comes from Celtic sources. This theory is somewhat shaken by the fact that all our poets who are indubitably of the first rank have been born in England, and not on the Celtic fringe; and the conception that mysticism in particular is a peculiarly Celtic quality is hardly reconcilable with the fact that some of the greatest mystics have borne such names as Swedenborg, Von Hardenberg and Boehme. Preconceptions of this sort have led to great exaggerations with regard to most writers by whom these supposed racial qualities are believed to have been exhibited; and Synge among others has suffered from praise ill-judged and unmeasured. His papers entitled In 334 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS Wicklow and In West Kerry, as well as his dramas, have fine literary and even poetic qualities. But to claim that he is almost, if not quite, the peer of the greatest, is to show want of critical balance. What is true is that Synge was a highly gifted man, and that nearly all he has written has the authentic stamp of genius. He was deHcately sensitive. He too, as well as Hearn, received impressions as surely as the photo- grapher's plate, and he had the specially literary gift of render- ing those impressions intelligible to others who themselves could receive them only imperfectly if at all. He seldom makes a description, but he does better, he gives the nearest literary equivalent to an instantaneous photograph — but that phrase is unjust to him, for the special characteristic of his papers is the something of Synge himself which they contain. Take for illustration a sentence from In West Kerry: "The procession along the olive bogs, between the mountains and the sea, on this grey day of autumn, seemed to wring me with the pang of emotion one meets everywhere in Ireland — an emotion that is partly local and patriotic, and partly a share of the desolation that is mixed everywhere with the supreme beauty of the world." How few and simple are the touches of description — the olive bogs, the grey day, the desolation, — and yet how surely they carry the impression he wished to convey. And then the glimpse of the poetic soul which has felt this and interpreted it for us. If we turn again to In Wicklow, we find in The Oppression of the Hills the same keen feeling for nature conveyed with the minimum of description, conveyed in a phrase or two, and with it the same sense of the companionship of a poet's soul: "Near these cottages little bands of half-naked children, filled with the excitement of evening, were running and screaming over the bogs, where the heather was purple already, giving me the strained feeling of regret one has so often in these places when there is rain in the air." In both there is manifest that sympathy with man which SOME ESSAYISTS OF YESTERDAY 335 is the essence of all truly poetic love of nature, is, in fact, the essence of the difference between the poet's love of nature and that of the man of science. Synge can throw a world of pathos into a phrase. No one else touches so surely as he the sadness of Ireland. The People of the Glens is full of pathos. He speaks of the emotions of the night, and in them his high- strung nature finds the secret of one phase of the sadness of his countrymen : " Among these emotions of the night one cannot wonder that the madhouse is so often named in Wicklow." It is one of " the three shadowy countries that are never for- gotten in Wicklow — America (their El Dorado), the Union and the Madhouse." There is something cognate in Mr. Filson Young's Ireland at the Cross-Roads, but it would be difficult to find a parallel elsewhere. The note is a sad one, but sorrow rather than mirth has in .all ages begotten great literature. "The pencil of the Holy Ghost," says Bacon, " hath laboured more in describing the afflictions of Job than the fehcities of Solomon." INDEX Abbott, E. A., 25 Acton, Lord, 278 Addison, Joseph, 27, 69, 82, 87, 104; and Steele, 108 ff., 112- 120; his character, 112 ff. ; his style, 114 f. ; his services to English literature, 114 f. ; as critic, 117 ff., 121 ff.; quoted, 129; 130, 136, 146 f., 149, 157, 159, 172 f-, 193. 195 Adventurer, The, 133, 136 ff. Aids to Reflection, 217 Ainger, Alfred, 229 Anatomy of an Equivalent, The, 90 f. Ancient and Modern Learning, Of, 91 Apology for Poetry, An, 8 S. Apology for Smectymnuus , An, 87 Apology for the French Revolution, An, 215 Applebee's Journal, 103 f. Arbuthnot, John, 125-127 Areopagitica, 87 f. Argument against abolishing Chris- tianity, 125 Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 115; 150, 206 f . ; quoted, 291; 306- 312; his irony, 306; his criti- cism, 307 f. ; his sarcasm, 308 f., 310 f. ; his essays on religion, 309; his criticism of society, 309 ff.; 333 Art of Political Lying, The, 126 f. AthencBUm, The, 254 Awdeley, John, 7 Bachelor's Banquet, The, 42 Bacon, Francis, 2, 5, 15-29; his conception of the essay, 16 f.; the development of his style, 1 6 ff . ; as a moralist, 21 ff . ; on the domestic relations, 23 f . ; his attitude towards religion, 24 f. ; on colonisation, 25 f. ; 30 f., 34 f., 38, 52 f., 62, 64 f., 82, 84, 87, 90, 183, 229, 290, 301, 303; quoted, 335 Bagehot, Walter, 205, 312-313 Beattie, James, 165 Beckford, William, 146 Bee, The, 146 ff. Bellman of London, The, 39, 42 Berkeley, George, 121, 123 Blackwood' s Magazine, 222 ff. Bland, Hubert, 331 Bliss, Philip, 39 Bolingbroke, Lord. See St. John Bond, William, 130 Book of Snobs, The, 260 f. Boswell, James, 81, 147, 152, 194, 225, 273. 278 Boyd, A. K. H., 285, 289-291 Brandes, Georg, 270 Breton, Nicholas, 52 f. Brief Character of the Low Coun- tries tinder the States, A, 64 Brougham, Henry, 197, 206 Brown, John, 257-259, 294 Browne, Sir Thomas, 69-81; his style, 69 f., yy, 79 ff.; as essay- ist, 70 ff. ; his literary career, 72, 75; his melancholy, 76 f. ; his mysticism, 77; 82, 85, 97, 115, 229, 238, 250, 252 f. Browning, Robert, 152; quoted, 330 Budgell, Eustace, 121, 130 Burke, Edmund, 89, 115, 150, 187 Burns, Robert, 210, 216, 293 Burton, Robert, 238 Butler, Samuel, 54-55 Byron, quoted. 167; 168, 170, 202 337 338 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS Cambridge, R. O., 143 Campbell, Thomas, 202, 205, 210 Campion, Thomas, 8 Canning, George, 158 Carlyle, Thomas, 114, 147, 171; quoted, 177; 205; quoted, 224; 248, 259 f., 267-275; variety of his essays, 267 f. ; his ' Ger- manism,' 268 f.; on the silent forces, 269 f. ; his philosophy, 270 ff. ; his criticism, 272 ff. ; his interest in his own time, 274 f.; 280 S., 303, 309 Casaubon, Isaac, 7 f. Castelain, M., 30 n. Catholic Relief Bill, The, 215 Caveat for Common Cursetors, 7, 39 Chaldee Manuscript, The, 223 Chalmers, Alex., quoted, 135 Chambers' s Journal, 254, 259 Chambers, Robert, 254-255 Champion, The, 129 ff., 136 Chapman, George, 11 Characteristics (Shaftesbury's), 127 Characteristics (Hazlitt's), 183 Character of a Trimmer (Coven- try's), 54 Character of a Trimmer (Halifax's), 89 f. Characters (Overbnry's) , 39, 45 ff. Characters of Shakespeare' s Plays, 176 f. Characters of Virtues and Vices, 42 ff. Characters upon Essays, Moral and Divine, 53 Chesterfield, Lord. See Stanhope, Philip Dormer Christian Hero, The, 106 Cibber, Theophilus, quoted, 105 Citizen of the World. The, 146 ff. Clare, John, 213 Clarendon, Lord. See Hyde, Ed- ward Cobbett, William, 176, 189-192 Cockney School, The, 227 Coleridge, Hartley, 219-220 Coleridge, H. N., 185 Coleridge, Mary E., 331 Coleridge, S. T., quoted, 58, 79, 80, 123; 163, 175 and n., 176 f.. 180 f.,2oif., 217-219, 223, 225ff.; quoted, 231; 234, 243, 247 f., 257, 259 f., 272 Collier, Jeremy, 9, 96 Collins, J. Churton, 145 Colman, George, 145, 155 Common Sense, 143 Companion, The, 168 Connoisseur, The, 145, 147 Constable, Archibald, quoted, 210 Contemplations and Reflections upon the Psalms of David, 81 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury, 127-128 Cornwallis, Sir William, 29 Country Parson, The, 51-52 Covent Garden Journal, The, 131 133. 136 Coventry, Sir William, 54 Cowley, Abraham, 82-84 Cowper, William, quoted, 145 Craftsman, The, 159 Crisis, The, 188 Culture and Anarchy, 307, 309 f- Cumberland, Richard, 157, 197 w- Cypress Grove, A, 66 ff. Daniel, Thomas, 8 Darley, George, 228 Davenant, Sir William, 93 David Harum, 299 Defoe, Daniel, 99-105, 106, 108, 116, 130, 168, 185 Dekker, Thomas, quoted, 13; 15, 39-42 Dennis, John, quoted, 105 De Quincey, Thomas, 228, 239, 246-254; his conception of the essay, 247 ff.; hiscriticism,248f. ; his style, 250 ff.; 329 f. Dickens, Charles, 167, 205, 235, 312 Dictionary of National Biography, The, quoted, 224 Digby, Sir Kenelm, quoted, 75 Drake, Nathan, 39. 109. 120; quoted, 142; 147; quoted, 159 Dramatic Poesy, Of, 93 ff. Dreamthorp, 285 ff. Drummond, William, 66-69, 82 Dryden, John, 31. 93-98, 115. "^ INDEX 339 Earle, John, 7, 38 f., 47-5'. 55. 64.85 Ecclesiastical Polity, Earle' s trans- lation of, 48 Edinburgh Review, The, 176, 197 ff., 215, 223 Englishman, The, 120, 129 Enquirer, The, 188 f. Epistolce Ho-EliancB, 84 ff., 99 Essay on Truth, 165 Essays and Characters of a Prison and Prisoners, 53 Essays Critical and Imaginative, 225 Essays, Divine and Moral, 81 Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government, 91 Etherege, Sir George, 1 1 9 Etonian, The, 185 Examiner, The, 123, 129, 159 Examiner, The (Leigh Hunt's), 167 ff., 176 Fantastics, 53 Feast of the Poets, The, 169 f., 171 Felltham, Owen, 62-66 Female Spectator, The, 130 Fielding, Henry, 129, 130-133' 136, 140 Fog's Journal, 143 Forde, Thomas, 54 Foxcroft, Miss, 89 Francis, Sir Philip, 165 Eraser's Magazine, 259 f. Fraternity of Vagabonds, The, 7 Freeman, E. A., 278, 283-284 Frere, J. H., 158 Freethinker, The, 130 Friend, The, 215 ff. Friendship' s Garland, 307 Froude, J. A., 2S0-283 Fuller, Thomas, quoted, 44; 45, 55-59; quoted, 62; 238 Gardening, Of, 92 Garden of Cyrus, The, 70, 73, 76, 80 Gascoigne, George, 8 Gay, John, quoted, loS Gentleman's Magazine, The, 193 fl. Gifford, William, 178, 199. 208- 209, 222, 226 Gissing, George, 320, 323-327 Gladstone, W. E., 207 Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 322 Godwin, William, 188-189, 210 Goldsmith, Oliver, 28, 117, 136, 146-155; the ' inspired idiot,' 146 {., 149 ff.; and Addison, 149 f. ; his political conceptions, 150; his economic principles, I 5 1 f . ; his tale of Asem, 1 52 ff. ; 231, 239 Good and the Bad, The, 53 Gordon, G. S., 7 Gosson, Stephen, 8 fE. Grahame, Kenneth, 332 Greene, Robert, 6 Guardian, The, 120 ff., 129, 133 Guesses at Truth, 219 f. Gull's Horn-book, The, 42 Hakluyt, Richard, 28 Halifax, Lord. See Savile, George Hall, Joseph, 7, 42-45, 46, 49 f. Hallam, Henry, quoted, 70 Hare, Augustus William, 220-221 Hare, Julius, 220-221 Harington, Sir John, 1 1 Harman, Thomas, 7, 39, 42 Harvey, Gabriel, 13 Hawkesworth, John, 136 f., 139- 142, 149 Hawkins, Sir John, 194 Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 152; quoted, 301 Haywood, Eliza, 130 Hazlitt, William, 116, 119, 166 ff., 173-185; an essayist by tempera ment, 173 f. I his development, i74ff. ; and Hunt, 176 f., 184 f.; his criticism, 1 76 ff. ; his bitter- ness, 179 f. ; his miscellaneous essays, 181 ff. ; the autobio- graphic element, 182 f. ; his aphorisms, 183; 201, 223, 228. 231, 239, 272, 303 Health and Long Life, Of, 92 Hearn, Lafcadio, 320, 321-323, 334 Hegel, 152 Helps, Sir A., 301-302 Henley, W. E., quoted, 293 Herbert, George, 51-52, 55 340 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS Hill, Aaron, 130 Hobbes, Thomas, 93 Holmes, O. W., quoted, 105 Holy and Profane State, The, 55 ff., 62 Hooker, Richard, 12, 27, 48 Homer, Francis, 197, 205 f. Howard, Sir Robert, 94 Howell, James, 84-87, 304 Hume, David, i, 36, 161 -164 Hunt, Leigh, 166-173; and Steele, 166 f. ; his imprisonment, 167 f. ; as critic, 169 ft.; the personal element, 171 ff. ; 179. 184 f., 222 f., 227 Huxley, T. H., 164, 314-316 Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, quoted, 48; 81-82 Idea of a Patriot King, The, 160 Idler, The, 133, 194 Indicator, The, 168 f.. 172 Intelligencer, The, 123 Irene, 69 James I., 2 Japan : An Attempt at Interpreta- tion, 322 Jefferies, Richard, 317-319 Jeffrey, Francis, 169, 179, 197, 199. 201-205, 206, 208 f., 211, 222, 226, 279 Jests to make you Merry, 39 Johnson, Robert, 29 Johnson, Samuel, quoted, i ; 28, 81; quoted, 105, 113 n., 114; 117, 126, 130, 133-139; his style, 133 f . ; his Rambler not popular, 134 ff. ; and The Ad- venturer, 136 f.; his criticism, 138 f.; 140, 143, 146, 152, 157; quoted 194; 195, 205, 266 Jonson Ben, 29-35; as moralist, 31 f.; as critic, 32 ff. ; his style, 34 f., 38, 62, 66, 93, 183, 208 Journal to Stella, 123; quoted, 129 Junius, 165, 188 Karma, 322 Keats, John, 169; quoted, 170; 202 f. Ker, W. P., quoted, 94 Kingsley, Charles, 302-303 Knox, Vicesimus, 155-156 Lady's New Year Gift, The, 91 Lamb, Charles, 2, 3, 20, 42, 58 f., 72, 82, 106, T17, 156, 166, 171 f., 173, 176 f., 180, 199, 201; quoted, 215; 224, 228, 229-243; his life, 229 f. ; his wisdom, 230 ff. ; his criticism, 231; his sympathy, 232, 235; his know- ledge of self, 233 f.; his nobility of nature, 234 f.; his revelation of self, 236 ff.; his humour, 238 ff.; his style, 238 f.; the gro- tesque, 242 ; the poetic, 242 ; 246, 248, 250 f., 272 f., 291, 301, 327 Landor, W. S., 113, 117 f. Lang, Andrew, 170, 223, 226, 320- 321 Last Leaves, 286 Lee, William, 100; quoted, loi, 103; 104 Letter to a Dissenter, A , 90 Letter to Sir William Windham, 160 Lettres Persanes, 149 Liberal, The, 168 Lincoln, Abraham, 252 Little Revietv, The, 102 Locke, John, i f. Lockhart, J. G., quoted, 170; 179, 222 ff. ; quoted, 225 ; 225-227, 228 Lodge, Thomas, 6, 9 f. London and the Country Car- bonadoed and Quartered, 54 London Magazine, The (Eighteenth Centurj'), 194 London Magazine, The, 176, 185, 227 ff., 254 Looker-on, The, 159 Lounger, The, 1 56 f. Lowell, J, Russell, quoted, 13; 318 Lupton, Donald, 54 Lyly, John, 6 Macaulay, T. B., 17, 70, 91, 105, 114, 126 f., 166, 171, 173, 203, 205, 212, 226, 239, 243, 247, 267, 273. 275-280; 303 f., 312 f. j\A^' OJ^ INDE ¥^'' 341 Mackenzie, Henry, 117, 156-157 Mackintosh, Sir James, 180 Mahan, Admiral, 27 Malthus, T. R., 176 Man of Feeling, The, 1 56 Marprelate tracts, The, 12 Maseiield, John, 207 Microcosm, The, 158 Microcosmography, 39, 47 ff. Micrologia, 54 n. Middleton, Richard, 331-333 Miller, Hugh, 255-257 Milton, John, 78, 85, 87-89, 97, 1 14!. Milward, Richard, 35 MiuLo, William, quoted, loi Mirror, The, 156 Miscellaneous Reflections (Shaftes- bury's), 127 f. Miscellanies (Sir T. Browne's), 70, 75 Miscellany Tracts (SirT. Browne's), 70, 75 f- Mist's Journal, 103 f. Mitford, M. R., 228, 243-246 Moll Flanders, 104 Monitor, The, 146 Montaigne, 3, 15, 20, 29, 71, 82 f., 96, 262, 2S6 Montesquieu, 149 Monthly Review, The, 147 Moore, Edward, 142 Moore, Thomas, 167 More, Sir Thomas, 26 Moultrie, John, 185 Mun, Thomas, 26 Mynshul, G affray, J3 Napier, Macvey, 169, 173 Nash, Thomas, 12-14, I5> 39- 4^ Nemesis of Faith, The, 28 1 Newman, J. H., 281 f. New Monthly Magazine, The, 169, 176, 254 News from Hell, 40 Nodes Ambrosiano!, 224 f. Northcote, James, quoted, 183 Novalis, 268 Observer, The, 147, 157 Occasional Writer, The, 160 Oliphant, Margaret, quoted, 224 Our Village, 243 ff. Overbury, Thomas, 7, 38 f., 45-47, 49 f- Paine, Thomas, 185-188, 214 Parrot, The, 130 Pater, Walter, 304-306 Paul, Herbert, 90 Peacock, T. L., 254 Pericles, 253 Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk, 225, 227 Philips, Ambrose, 121, 130 Pictures Loquentes, 53 Pitt, William, 161 Plato, 67, 93 Plutarch, 29 Pope, Alexander, quoted, 112; II ^, 121-12^, 193, 298 Praed, W. M.,"'i85 Preface to an Evening's Love (Dryden's), 95 Preface to the Fables (Dryden's), 93 ff- Preface to Troilus and Cressidn (Dryden's), 96 Present State of IV it. The, 108 Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, The, 323 ff. Pseudodoxia Epidemica. See Vul- gar Errors. Public Ledger, The, 146, 148 Puttenham, George, 1 1 Quarterly Review, The, 208 ff., 222, 226 Rabelais, 13 f. Raleigh, Sir Walter, 27 Raleigh, Professor Sir Walter, 89 Rambler, The, 129, 133 ff., 140, 142, 194 Recreations of Christopher North, The, 225 Reflections upon Exile, 161 Reflector, The, 167, 169 Religio Medici, 70 ff. Religious Courtship, 104 Remedies against Discontentment, 5 Resolves : Divine, Moral, Political, 62 ff. 342 THE ENGLISH ESSAY AND ESSAYISTS Retrospective Review, The, 254 Review of the Affairs of France, 99flf- Reynolds, J. H., 228 Reynolds, S. H., 26 Roberts, William, 159 Rogers, Samuel, 202 Roundabout Papers, 260 ff. Round Table, The. 168, 181 Rural Rides, 190 fi. Ruskin, John, 191, 213, 239, 250!., 303-304, 305, 317 Sainte-Beuve, quoted, 145 St. John, Henry, I-ord Boling- broke, 103, 1 59-161 Saintsbury, George, 93, 254 Saltonstall, Wye, 53 Savage, Richard, 113 n. Savile, George, Lord Halifax, 54, 89-91, 92, 183 .School of Abuse, The, 8 ff. Scots Magazine, The, 194 Scott, John, 228 Scott, Sir W., quoted, 156; 202 f., 207, 209-211, 213, 230, 255 ff., 273, 294, 297, 299, 321 Seeley, J. R., 283 Selden, John, 35-37, 38 Seven Deadly Sins of London, The, Shakespeare, 28, 104, 114, 287, 298 Shelley, P. B., quoted, 166; 168 f., 171, 214 Shirley. See Skelton, John Shortest Way with the Dissenters, The, 100 Short Studies of Great Subjects, 280 ff. Sidney, Sir Philip, 8 ff., 93 Skelton, John, 285, 289 Sketches and Essays, 181 f. Sketches and Travels in London, 261 f. 2/ctayaax^a, 69 Smith, Alexander, quoted, 3; 285- 289 Smith, Sydney, 181, 184, 197, 198- 201, 222 Smollett, Tobias, 155 Sou they, Robert, 201, 211 -21 4, 238 Spectator, The, 99 f., 102 ff., 129, 131, 134, 142, 159, 168, 186 Spectator, The (Nineteenth Cen- tury), 254 Spirit of the Age, The, 176 ff. Stanhope, Philip Dormer, Earl of Chesterfield, 143-145 Steele, Richard, 47, 69, 87, 92, 99, 103 f., 105-1 12; hischaracter, 105 f.. Ill f. ; plan of The Taller, 106 f. ; and Addison, 108 ff.; ii6ff., 124, 129, 136, 159, 166, 172, 185 f., 193, 195 Stephen, Leslie, 316 Stephens, John, 53 n. Stevenson, R. L., 82, 249, 251, 285, 291-301; his style, 291 f., 297 f. ; as moralist, 292 ff. ; his love of the heroic, 295 fif. ; his interest in man, 299 f. ; as critic, 300 f. ; 320,333 Story of Rimini, The, 1 70, 207 Strange Horse-Race, A, 39 f. Strange Metarviorphosis of Man, A, 54 Swift, Jonathan, 14, 27, 92; quoted, 106; 107; quoted, 112; 116, 123-125; quoted, 129, 161; 189, 193 Swinburne, A. C, 30 f., 34 Synge, J. M., 333-335 Table-Talk (Selden's), 35 ff. Table-Talk (Hazlitt's), 166, 181 Tacitus, 284, 290 Talford, T. N., 254 Taller, The, 99 ff., 168, 193 Taikr, The (T^eigh Hunt's), 169 Taylor, Jeremy, 115 Temple, Sir William, 89, 91-93; quoted, 297 Thackeray, W. M., 82, 105; quoted, 1 11; 114,234,243,259, 260-265 Theophrastus, 7 f., 38, 43, 49, 51 f., 55 Thompson, Francis, 320, 323, 327- 331 Thornton, Bonnell, 145 INDEX 343 Thucydides, 27 Thyer, Robert, 54 f. Tickell, Thomas, quoted, 113 Timber, or Discoveries, 30 ff., 93 Times Anatomized, The, 54 Tom Jones, i3of., 136 Traill, H. D., 317 True Use of Study and Retirement, Of the, 161 Twain, Mark, 240 Two Years in the French West Indies, 322 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 137 Uvn Burial, 70, 72,, 76 fif. Vestiges of Creation, 255 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 1 50 Vulgar Errors, 70 f., 72i> 79 Wainewright, T. G., 228 Walpole, Horace, quoted, 143, 148, 160 Walton, Isaac, quoted, 12 112; '^j) Warton, Joseph, 137-138 Watchman, The, 217 Watts-Dunton, W. T., 316 Webbe, William, 1 1 Whig Examiner, The, 129 White, Gilbert, 318 Wilde, Oscar, 306, 328 Wilkes, John, 155 Wilson, John, 7 f. Wilson, John (Christopher North), 222, 224-225, 226 f., 247 Winter slow, 181 Witness, The, 256 f. Wolseley, Robert, 93 Wonderful Year, The, 41 Wood, Anthony, 45, 48 Wordsworth, William, 180, 201 f., 212, 214-216, 225 f. ; quoted, 229, 231 ; 231 World, The, 142 fif. Worsfold, Basil, 119 Young, Edward, 135 Young, Filson, 335 THE TEMPLE PRESS, PRINTERS, LETCHWORTH, ENGLAND SOME INTERESTING BOOKS ESSAYS MODERN AND ELIZABETHAN By Prof. E. Dowden. Demy 8vo, 7s. 6(1. net. 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