“A figure as of one of Charles Lamb’s dream-children haunts the little beck at Chiefswood, and on that haugh at Abbotsford, where Lockhart read the manuscript of theFortunes of Nigel, fancy may see ‘Hugh Little John,’ ‘throwing stones into the burn,’ for so he called the Tweed. While children study theTales of a Grandfather, he does not want friends in this world to remember and envy the boy who had Sir Walter to tell him stories.”—P. 75, vol. ii.
“A figure as of one of Charles Lamb’s dream-children haunts the little beck at Chiefswood, and on that haugh at Abbotsford, where Lockhart read the manuscript of theFortunes of Nigel, fancy may see ‘Hugh Little John,’ ‘throwing stones into the burn,’ for so he called the Tweed. While children study theTales of a Grandfather, he does not want friends in this world to remember and envy the boy who had Sir Walter to tell him stories.”—P. 75, vol. ii.
A younger son of Lockhart, Walter Scott by name, became, at the death of the younger Walter Scott, inheritor of all equities in the landed estate upon Tweed-side, and the proper Laird of Abbotsford. His story is a short and a sad one; he was utterly unworthy, and died almost unbefriended at Versailles in January, 1853.
His father, J. G. Lockhart, acknowledging a picture of this son, under date of 1843, in a letter addressed to his daughter Charlotte—(later Mrs.Hope-Scott,[23]and mother of the present proprietress of Abbotsford), writes with a grief he could not cover:—
“I am not sorry to have it by me, though it breaks my heart to recall the date. It is of the sweet, innocent, happy boy, home for Sunday from Cowies [his school].… Oh, God! how soon that day became clouded, and how dark its early close! Well, I suppose there is another world; if not, sure this is a blunder.”
“I am not sorry to have it by me, though it breaks my heart to recall the date. It is of the sweet, innocent, happy boy, home for Sunday from Cowies [his school].… Oh, God! how soon that day became clouded, and how dark its early close! Well, I suppose there is another world; if not, sure this is a blunder.”
I have not spoken—because there seemed no need to speak—of the way in which those marvellousromantic fictions of Sir Walter came pouring from the pen, under a cloud of mystery, and of how the great burden of his business embarrassments—due largely to the recklessness of his jolly, easy-going friends, the Ballantynes—overwhelmed him at last. Indeed, in all I have ventured to say of Scott, I have a feeling of its impertinence—as if I were telling you about your next-door neighbor: we all know that swift, brilliant, clouded career so well! But are those novels of his to live, and to delight coming generations, as they have the past? I do not know what the very latest critics may have to say; but, for my own part, I have strong belief that a century or two more will be sure to pass over before people of discernment, and large humanities, and of literary appreciation, will cease to read and to enjoy such stories as that of theTalisman of Kenilworthand ofOld Mortality. I know ’tis objected, and with much reason, that he wrote hastily, carelessly—that his stories are in fact (what Carlyle called them) extemporaneous stories. Yet, if they had been written under other conditions, could we havecounted upon the heat and the glow which gives them illumination?
No, no—we do not go to him for word-craft; men of shorter imaginative range, and whose judgments wait on conventional rule, must guide us in such direction, and pose as our modellers of style. Goldsmith and Swift both may train in that company. But this master we are now considering wrote so swiftly and dashed so strongly into the current of what he had to say, that he was indifferent to methods and words, except what went to engage the reader and keep him always cognizant of his purpose. But do you say that this is the best aim of all writing? Most surely it is wise for a writer to hold attention by what arts he can: failing of this, he fails of the best half of his intent; but if he gains this by simple means, by directness, by limpid language, and no more of it than the thought calls for, and by such rhythmic and beguiling use of it as tempts the reader to follow, he is a safer exemplar than one who by force of genius can accomplish his aims by loose expressions and redundance of words.
Next it is objected to these old favorites of ours, that they are not clever in the exhibit and explication of mental processes, and their analysis of motives is incomplete. Well, I suppose this to be true; and that he did, to a certain extent (as Carlyle used to allege grumblingly), work from the outside-in. He did live in times when men fell straightforwardly in love, without counting the palpitations of the heart; and when heroes struck honest blows without reckoning in advance upon the probable contractile power of their biceps muscles. Again, it is said that his history often lacks precision and sureness of statement. Well, the dates are certainly sometimes twisted a few years out of their proper lines and seasons; but it is certain, also, that he does give the atmosphere and the coloring of historic periods in a completer and more satisfying way than many much carefuller chroniclers, and his portraits of great historic personages are by common consent—even of the critics—more full of the life of their subjects, and of a realistic exhibit of their controlling characteristics, than those of the historians proper. Nothingcan be more sure than that Scott was not a man of great critical learning; nothing is more sure than that he was frequently at fault in minor details; but who will gainsay the fact that he was among the most charming and beneficent of story-tellers?
There may be households which will rule him out as old fashioned and stumbling, and wordy, and long; but I know of one, at least, where he will hold his place, as among the most delightful of visitors—and where on winter nights he will continue to bring with him (as he has brought so many times already) the royal figure of the Queen Elizabeth—shining in her jewels, or sulking in her coquetries; and Dandie Dinmont, with his pow-wow of Pepper and Mustard; and King Jamie, with Steenie and jingling Geordie; and the patient, prudent, excellent Jeanie Deans; and the weak, old, amiable mistress of Tillietudlem; and Rebecca, and the Lady in the Green Mantle, and Dominie Sampson, and Peter Peebles, and Di Vernon, and all the rest!
They tell us Scott loved kings: why not? Romanticism was his nurse, from the days when he kicked up his baby heels under the shadows of Smailholme Tower, and Feudalism was his foster-parent. Always he loved banners and pageantry, and always the glitter and pomp which give their under or over tones to his pages of balladry. And if he stood in awe of titles and of rank, and felt the cockles of his heart warming in contact with these, ’twas not by reason of a vulgar tuft-hunting spirit, nor was it due to the crass toadyism which seeks reflected benefit; but it grew, I think, out of sheer mental allegiance to feudal splendors and traditions.
Whether Scott ever personally encountered the old king, George III., may be doubtful; but I recall in some of his easy, family letters (perhaps to his eldest boy Walter), most respectful and kindly allusions to the august master of the royal Windsor household—who ordered his home affairs so wisely—keeping “good hours;” while, amid the turbulences and unrest which belongedto the American and French Revolutions—succeeding each other in portentous sequence—he was waning toward that period of woful mental imbecility which beset him at last, and which clouded an earlier chapter[24]of our record. The Prince Regent—afterward George IV.—was always well disposed toward Scott; had read theMinstrel, andMarmion, with the greatest gratification (he did sometimes read), and told Lord Byron as much; even comparing the Scot with Homer—which was as near to classicism as the Prince often ran. But Byron, in hisEnglish Bards, etc., published in his earlier days, had made his little satiric dab at theMinstrel—finding a lively hope in its beingthe Last!
Murray, however, in the good Christian spirit which sometimes overtakes publishers, stanched these wounds, and brought the poets to bask together in the smiles of royalty. The first Baronetcy the Prince bestowed—after coming to Kingship—was that which made the author of Waverley Sir Walter; the poet had witnessedand reported the scenes at the Coronation of 1820 in London; and on the King’s gala visit to Edinboro’—when all the heights about the gray old city boomed with welcoming cannon, and all the streets and all the water-ways were a-flutter with tartans and noisy with bagpipes—it was Sir Walter who virtually marshalled the hosts, and gave chieftain-like greeting to the Prince. Scott’s management of the whole stupendous paraphernalia—the banquets, the processions, the receptions, the decorations (of all which the charming water-colors of Turner are in evidence)—gave wonderful impressions of the masterful resources and dominating tact of the man; now clinking glasses (of Glenlivet) with the mellow King (counting sixty years in that day); now humoring into quietude the jealousies of Highland chieftains; again threading Canongate at nightfall and afoot—from end to end—to observe if all welcoming bannerols and legends are in place; again welcoming to his home, in the heat of ceremonial occupation, the white-haired and trembling poet Crabbe; anon, stealing away to his Castle Street chamber for a new chapter inthePeveril of the Peak(then upon the anvil), and in the heat, and fury, and absorption of the whole gala business breaking out of line with a bowed head and aching heart, to follow his best friend, William Erskine (Lord Kinnedder),[25]out by Queensferry to his burial.
It was only eight years thereafter, when this poet manager of the great Scotch jubilee—who seemed good for the work of a score of years—sailed, by royal permission (an act redeeming and glorifying royalty) upon a Government ship—seeking shores and skies which would put new vigor (if it might be) into a constitution broken by toil, and into hopes that had been blighted by blow on blow of sorrow.
Never was a royal favor more worthily bespoken; never one more vainly bestowed. ’Twas too late. No human eye—once so capable of seeing—ever opened for a first look so wearily upon the blue of the Mediterranean—upon the marvellous fringed shores of lower Italy—uponRome, Florence, and the snowy Swiss portals of the Simplon.
Royalty (in person of William IV., then on the throne) asked kindly after the sick magician—who was established presently on a sick bed in London; while the cabmen on street corners near by talked low of the “great mon” who lay there a-dying. A little show of recovery gave power to reach home—Abbotsford and Tweed-side—once more. There was no hope; but it took time for the great strength in him to waste.
Withal there was a fine glint of royalty at the end. “Be virtuous, my dear,” he said to Lockhart; “be a good man.” And that utterance—the summing up of forty years of brilliant accomplishment, and of baffled ambitions—emphasized by the trembling voice of a dying man—will dwell longer in human memories, and more worthily, than the empty baronial pile we call Abbotsford, past which the scurrying waters of the Tweed ripple and murmur—as they did on the day Sir Walter was born, and on the day he was buried at Dryburgh.
Our last chapter was opened by a rather full sketch of Professor Wilson, and a briefer one of Thomas Campbell—who though of higher repute as a poet, was a far less interesting man. We then entered upon what may have seemed a very inadequate account of the great author of Waverley—because I presumed upon the reader’s full and ready knowledge; and because the Minstrel’s grand stride over all the Scottish country that is worth the seeing, and over all that domain in English Lands and Letters, which he made his own, has been noted by scores of tourists, and by scores of admiring commentators. You may believe me in saying—that his story was not scrimped for lack of love; indeed, it would have been easy to riot in talk about the lively drum-beat of his poems, or thelivelier and more engaging charms of his prose Romance—through two chapters or through ten. But we must get on; there is a long road before us yet.
It was somewhere about the year 1798, that a sharp-faced, youngish Englishman—who had been curate of a small country parish down in Wiltshire—drove, upon a pleasant June day, on a coach-top, into the old city of Edinboro’. This clergyman had a young lad seated beside him, whom he was tutoring; and this tutoring business enabled the curate to take a respectable house in the city. And by reason of the respectable house, and his own pleasant humor and intelligence, he came after a year or two to know a great many of the better folk in Edinboro’, and was invited to preach an occasional sermon at a small Episcopal chapel in his neighborhood. But all the good people he met did not prevent his being a-hungered after a young person whom he had left in the south of England. So he took a vacation presently and fetched herback, a bride, to the Scottish capital—having (as he said) thrown all his fortune in her lap. This fortune was of maternal inheritance, and consisted of six well-worn silver teaspoons. There was excellent society in Edinboro’ in that day, among the ornaments of which was Henry Mackenzie,[26]a stately gentleman—a sort of dean of the literary coteries, and the author of books which it is well to know by name—The Man of FeelingandJulia de Roubigné—written with great painstaking and most exalted sentiment, and—what we count now—much dreariness. Then there was a Rev. Archibald Alison—he too an Episcopal clergyman, though Scotch to the backbone—and the author of an ingenious, but not very pregnant book, still to be found in old-fashioned libraries, labelled,Alison on Taste. Dugald Stewart was then active, and did on one or two occasions bring his honored presence to the little chapel to hear the preaching of the young English curate I spoke of. And this young curate, poor as he is and with a young wife, hasan itch for getting into print; and does after a little time (the actual date being 1800) publish a booklet, which you will hardly find now, entitledSix Sermons preached at Charlotte Chapel, Edinboro, by Rev. Sydney Smith.[27]But it was not so much these sermons, as his wit and brightness and great range of information, which brought him into easy intimacy with the most promising young men of the city. Walter Scott he may have encountered odd whiles, though the novelist was in those days bent on his hunt after Border Minstrelsy, and would have been shy of the rampant liberalism ingrained with Smith.
But the curate did meet often, and most intimately, a certain prim, delicate, short-statured, black-eyed, smug, ambitious, precocious young advocate named Francis Jeffrey; and it was in a chamber of this latter—up three pair of stairs in Buccleugh Place—that Sydney Smith, on a certain occasion, proposed to the host and two or three other friends there present, the establishment of a literary journal to be publishedquarterly; and out of that proposition grew straightway that famousEdinburgh Reviewwhich in its covers of buff and blue has thrived for over ninety years now—throwing its hot shot into all opposing camps of politics or of letters. I have designated two of the arch plotters, Sydney Smith and Jeffrey. Francis Horner[28]was another who was in at the start; he, too, a young Scotch lawyer, who went to London on the very year of the establishment of the journal, but writing for its early issues, well and abundantly. Most people know him now only by the beautiful statue of him by Chantrey, which stands in Westminster Abbey; it has a noble head, full of intellect—full of integrity. Sydney Smith said the Ten Commandments were writ all over his face. Yet the marble shows a tenderness of soul not common to those who, like him, had made a profession of politics, and entered upon a parliamentary career. But the career was short; he died in 1817—not yet forty—leaving a reputation that was spotless; had he lived, he would have come, without adoubt, to the leadership of liberal opinion in England. The mourning for him was something extraordinary in its reach, and its sincerity; a remarkable man—whose politics never up-rooted his affections, and whose study of the laws of trade did not spoil his temper, or make him abusive. His example, and his repeated advices, in connection with the early history of theReview, were always against the personalities and ugly satire which were strong features of it in the first years, and which had their source—very largely—in the influences and pertinacity of another member of theReviewSyndicate; I mean Henry Brougham.
This was another young lawyer—of Scottish birth, but of Cumberland stock; ambitious like Jeffrey and equally clever, though in a different line; he was ungainly and lank of limb; with a dogmatic and presuming manner, and a noticeably aggressive nose which became afterward the handle (and a very good handle it made) for those illustrative caricatures of Mr. Punch, whichlasted for a generation. Brougham[29]was always a debater from his boy-days—and not a little of a bully and outlaw; precocious too—a capital Latinist—writing a paper on Optics at eighteen, which found publishment in the Philosophical Transactions; member of the Speculative Society where Jeffrey and Mackintosh, and Alison were wont to go, and where his disputatious spirit ran riot. He didn’t love to agree with anybody; one of those men it would seem who hardly wished his dinner to agree with him.
Yet Brougham was one of the master spirits in this new enterprise, and became a great historic personage. His reputation was indeed rather political and forensic, than literary, and in his writings he inclined to scientific discussion. He had, however, a streak of purely literary ambition, and wrote a novel at one period of his life—after he had reached maturity—which he called a philosophic Romance.[30]Indeed this bantling was soswaddled, in philosophic wrappings that it could have made no noise. Very few knew of it; fewer still ever read it. He said, “It had not enough of indecency and blasphemy in it to make it popular” (it was written when Byron was in high repute). But the few who did read it thought there were other reasons for its want of success.
He drifted quickly away from Edinboro’, though long keeping up his connection with theReview; became famous as an advocate—notably in connection with Queen Caroline’s trial; went into Parliament; was eventually Lord High Chancellor, and won a place in the Peerage. He was associated intimately, too, with great beneficent schemes—such as the suppression of the slave trade, the establishment of the London University, the founding of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and the urgence of the great Reform measures of 1832. Yet in all these, he arrogated more than his share of thehonor, wearying his associates by incessant bickering and scolding, picking flaws in everything not entirely his own; jealous, suspicious, conceited to the last degree; never generous in praise of one living beside him; an enormous worker, with sinews of iron, and on occasions (which are of record) speaking and wrangling in the House of Commons until two of the morning, and then going home—not to sleep—but to write a thirty-page article for theEdinburgh Review. Such men make a place for themselves, and keep it. He was an acrid debater, but a most thorough one—holding all aspects of a case in view; never getting muddled; ready with facts; ready with fallacies (if needed); ready for all and any interruptions; setting them on fire by the stress of his argumentation—like carbons in an electric circuit; ready with storms of irony and running into rough-edged sarcasm with singular ease and sharpest appetite.
On a May evening of 1845 the present writer had the pleasure of watching him for an hour or more in the House of Lords. He was lank, as I have said; awkward, nervous, restless; twisting thegreat seals at his watch-chain; intent upon everything; now and then sniffing the air, like a terrier that has lost the scent; presenting a petition, in the course of the session, in favor of some Newfoundland clients who were anxious for more direct postal communication—who objected that their mails were sent in a roundabout wayviaHalifax. Whereupon Lord Stanley (afterward Earl Derby), then Secretary for the Colonies, rose in explanation, “regretting that his Lordship had not communicated with the Colonial Office, which had considered the question raised; there was no communication by land; the harbor was often closed by ice; therefore present methods were followed,” etc. All of which was set forth with most charming grace and suavity; but Lord Stanley was no sooner ended than the irascible Scotch peer, nettled, as would seem, by the very graciousness of the explanation, was upon his feet in an instant, with a sharp “M’ Lards,” that promised fun; and thereafter came a fusillade of keenest, ironical speech—thanking the honorable Secretary for “the vera impartant information, that as St. John’s was upon an island, there could be no communicationby land; and perhaps his learnedLardshipsupposes, with an acumen commensurate with hisgreatgeographic knowledge, that the sending of the mails by the way of Halifax will have a tendency tothawthe ice in the Harbor of St. John’s,” and so on, for a ten minute’s storm of satiric and witty banter. And then—an awkward plunge backward into his seat—a new, nervous twirling of his watch-seals, a curious smile of self-approval, followed by a lapse into the old nervous unrest.
There was no serenity in Brougham—no repose—scarce any dignity. His petulance and angry sarcasm and frequent ill-nature made him a much hated man in his latter days, and involved him in abusive tirades, which people were slow to forgive.
As for Mr. Jeffrey, his associate on theReview, and for many years its responsible editor, he was a very different man—of easy address, courteous, gentlemanly—quite a master of deportment. Yet it was he who ripped open with his critical knife Southey’sThalabaand the earlypoems of Wordsworth. But even his victims forgot his severities in his pleasantly magnetic presence and under the caressing suavities of his manner. He was brisk,débonnaire, cheery—a famous talker; not given to anecdotes or storytelling, but bubbling over with engaging book-lore and poetic hypotheses, and eager to put them into those beautiful shapes of language which came—as easily as water flows—to his pen or to his tongue. He said harsh things, not for love of harsh things; but because what provoked them grated on his tastes, or his sense of what was due to Belles Lettres. One did not—after conversing with him—recall great special aptness of remark or of epithet, so much as the charmingly even flow of apposite and illustrative language—void of all extravagances and of all wickednesses, too. Lord Cockburn says of his conversation:—
“The listeners’ pleasure was enhanced by the personal littleness of the speaker. A large man [Jeffrey was very small] could scarcely have thrown off Jeffrey’s conversational flowers without exposing himself to ridicule. But the liveliness of the deep thoughts and the flow of bright expressions that animated his talk, seemed so natural andappropriate to the figure that uttered them, that they were heard with something of the delight with which the slenderness of the trembling throat and the quivering of the wings make us enjoy the strength and clearness of the notes of a little bird.”[31]
“The listeners’ pleasure was enhanced by the personal littleness of the speaker. A large man [Jeffrey was very small] could scarcely have thrown off Jeffrey’s conversational flowers without exposing himself to ridicule. But the liveliness of the deep thoughts and the flow of bright expressions that animated his talk, seemed so natural andappropriate to the figure that uttered them, that they were heard with something of the delight with which the slenderness of the trembling throat and the quivering of the wings make us enjoy the strength and clearness of the notes of a little bird.”[31]
The first Mrs. Jeffrey dying early in life, he married for second wife a very charming American lady, Miss Wilkes;[32]having found time—notwithstanding his engrossment with theReview—for an American journey, at the end of which he carried home his bride. Some of his letters to his wife’s kindred in America are very delightful—setting forth the new scenes to which the young wife had been transported. He knew just what to say and what not to say, to make his pictures perfect. The trees, the church-towers, the mists, the mosses on walls, the gray heather—all come into them, under a touch that is as light as a feather, and as sharp as a diamond.
His honors in his profession of advocate grew, and he came by courtesy to the title of Lord Jeffrey—(not to be confounded with that other murderous Lord Jeffreys, who was judicial hangman for James II.). He is in Parliament too; never an orator properly; but what he says, always clean cut, sensible, picturesque, flowing smoothly—but rather over the surface of things than into their depths. Accomplished is the word to apply to him; accomplished largely and variously, and with all his accomplishments perfectly in hand.
Those two hundred papers which he wrote in theEdinburgh Revieware of the widest range—charmingly and piquantly written. Yet they do not hold place among great and popular essays; not with Macaulay, or Mackintosh, or Carlyle, or even Hazlitt. He was French in his literary aptitudes and qualities; never heavy; touching things, as we have said, with a feather’s point, yet touching them none the less surely.
Could he have written a book to live? His friends all thought it, and urged him thereto. He thought not. There would be great toil, he said,and mortification at the end; so he lies buried, where we leave him, under a great tumulus of most happyReviewwriting.
I return now to the clever English curate who was the first to propose the establishment of that great NorthernReview, out of which Lord Jeffrey grew. Smith had written very much and well, and had cracked his jokes in a way to be heard by all the good people of Edinboro’. But he was poor, and his wife poor; he had his fortune to make; and plainly was not making it there, tutoring his one pupil. So, in 1804, he struck out for London, to carve his way to fortune. He knew few there; but his clever papers in theReviewgave him introduction to Whig circles, and a social plant, which he never forfeited. Lord and Lady Holland greatly befriended him; and he early came to a place at the hospitable board of that famous Holland House—of whose green quietudes we have had glimpses, in connection with Addison, and in connection with Charles Fox—and whose mistress in the days we are nowupon, showed immense liking for the brilliant and witty parson.
All this while, the Rev. Sydney was seeking preaching chances; but was eyed doubtfully by those who had pulpits in their gift. He was too independent—too witty—too radical—too hateful of religious conventionalisms—tooEdinburgh Reviewish. Neither was he a great orator; rather scornful of explosive clap-trap or of noisy pulpit rhetoric; yet he had a resonant voice—earnest in every note and trill; often sparkling to his points in piquant, conversational way, but wanting quick-witted ones for their reception and comprehension. He lacked too, in a measure—what is another great resource for a preacher—the unction which comes of deep, sustained, devotional feeling, and a conviction of the unmatchable importance and efficacy of sacerdotal influences. I think there was no time in his life when he would not rather beguile a wayward soul by giving him a good, bright witticism to digest than by exhibit of the terrors of the Law. His Gospel—by preference—was an intellectual gospel; yet not one that reposed on creeds and formulas. Hisheart was large, and his tolerance full. He was a proud Churchman indeed, and loved to score dissenters; but delighted in the crack of his witticisms, more than he mourned over their apostasy. Among the “evening meetings” that he knew very much of, and specially relished, were those at his own little homestead, with closed blinds, and a few friends, and hot-water, and—lemons!
I do not at all mean to imply that he had habits of dissipation, or was ever guilty of vulgar excesses. Of all such he had a wholesome horror; but along with it, he had a strong and abiding fondness for what he counted the good things of life, and the bright things, and the play of wit, and the encounter of scholarly weapons.
One beautiful priestly quality, however, always shone in him: that was his kindliness for the poor and feeble—his sympathy with them—his working for their benefit; and though he trusted little in appeals to the mere emotional nature, yet in his charity sermons he drew such vivid pictures of the suffering poor folk who had come under his eye, as to put half his auditors in tears.
His preaching in London at this early periodwas for the most part at an out-of-the-way chapel, in connection with a Foundling Hospital; but he gave a series of Philosophic Lectures at the Royal Institution—never reckoned by himself with his good work—which were besieged by people who came to enjoy his witty sayings. In a few years, however, he secured a valuable church gift in Yorkshire, where he built a rectory—the ugliest and “honest-est house” in the county—and entertained London and Scottish friends there, and grew to enjoy—much as he could—the trees, flowers, and lawns which he planted, and with which he coquetted, though only in a half-hearted way. His supreme love was for cities and crowds; he counting the country at its best only a kind of “healthy grave”; flowers, turf, birds are very well in their way, he says, but not worth an hour of the rational conversation only to be had where a million are gathered in one spot.[33]
And he does at last come to the million—getting, after his Whig friends came into power, and after the Reform revolution was over, the royalappointment to a canonry in connection with St. Paul’s Cathedral.[34]
He also has the gift of a new country “living” in Somersetshire, where he passes his later summer in another delightfully equipped home; and between these two church holdings, and certain legacies conveniently falling due, he has a large income at command, and enjoys it, and makes the poor of his parishes enjoy it too.
He has taken a lusty hand in that passage of the Reform bill (1832), and while its success seemed still to be threatened by the sullen opposition of the House of Lords, he made that famous witty comparison in which he likened the popular interest in Reform to a great storm and tide which had set in from the Atlantic, and the opposition of the Lords, to the efforts of Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, and—
“who was seen at the door of her house with mops and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, andvigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused. Mrs. Partington’s spirit was up. But I need not tell you the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. She was excellent at a slop or a puddle, but she should not have meddled with a tempest.”
“who was seen at the door of her house with mops and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, andvigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused. Mrs. Partington’s spirit was up. But I need not tell you the contest was unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. She was excellent at a slop or a puddle, but she should not have meddled with a tempest.”
And this happy and droll comparison was met with a great roar of laughter and of applause that ran all over England. The same tactics of witty ridicule belonged also to his attacks upon Tractarianism and Puseyism, which made stir in his latter days. Indeed, his bump of veneration was very small; and his drollery creeps into his letters as into his speech. He writes of a visit to Edinboro’:
“My old friends were glad to see me; some were turned Methodists, some had lost their teeth, some had grown very fat, some were dying, and, alas! many were dead. But the world is a coarse enough place; so I talked away, comforted some, praised others, kissed some old ladies, and passed a very riotous week.”[35]
“My old friends were glad to see me; some were turned Methodists, some had lost their teeth, some had grown very fat, some were dying, and, alas! many were dead. But the world is a coarse enough place; so I talked away, comforted some, praised others, kissed some old ladies, and passed a very riotous week.”[35]
He writes to Moore, the poet:
“Dear Moore: I have a breakfast of philosophers at ten, punctually, to-morrow—‘muffins and metaphysics, crumpets and contradiction.’ Will you come?”
“Dear Moore: I have a breakfast of philosophers at ten, punctually, to-morrow—‘muffins and metaphysics, crumpets and contradiction.’ Will you come?”
When Mrs. Smith is ailing at her new home in Somersetshire he says:
“Mrs. S—— has eight distinct illnesses, and I have nine. We take something every hour, and pass the mixture between us.”
“Mrs. S—— has eight distinct illnesses, and I have nine. We take something every hour, and pass the mixture between us.”
One part of his suffering comes of hay fever, as to which he says:
“Light, dust, contradiction—the sight of a dissenter—anything sets me sneezing; and if I begin sneezing at twelve, I don’t leave off till two, and am heard distinctly in Taunton (when the wind sets that way), a distance of six miles.”
“Light, dust, contradiction—the sight of a dissenter—anything sets me sneezing; and if I begin sneezing at twelve, I don’t leave off till two, and am heard distinctly in Taunton (when the wind sets that way), a distance of six miles.”
This does not show quite so large a reserve and continence of speech as we naturally look for in the clerical profession; but this, and other such do, I think, set the Rev. Sydney Smith before us, with his witty proclivities, and his unreserve, and his spirit of frolic, as no citations from his moral and intellectual philosophy could ever do. And I easily figure to myself this portly, well-preserved gentleman of St. Paul’s, fighting the weaknesses of the gout with a gold-headed cane, and picking his way of an afternoon along the pavements of Piccadilly, with eye as bright as a bird’s, and beak assharp as a bird’s—regaling himself with the thought of the dinner for which he is booked, and of the brilliant talkers he is to encounter, with the old parry and thrust, at Rogers’s rooms, or under the noble ceiling of Holland House.
Another writer—whose sympathies from the beginning were with the Liberalism of theEdinburgh Review(though not a contributor till some years after its establishment) was Sir James Mackintosh.[36]A Highlander by birth—he was at Aberdeen University—afterwards in Edinboro’, where he studied medicine, and getting his Doctorate, set up in London—eking out a support, which his medical practice did not bring, by writing for the papers.
This was at the date when the recent French Revolution and its issues were at the top of all men’s thoughts; and when Burke had just set up his glittering bulwark of eloquence and of sentiment in his famous “Reflections”; andour young Doctor (Mackintosh)—full of a bumptious Whiggism, undertook a reply to the great statesman—a reply so shrewd, so well-seasoned, so sound—that it brought to the young Scotchman (scarce twenty-five in those days) a fame he never outlived. It secured him the acquaintance of Fox and Sheridan, and the friendship of Burke, who in his latter days invited the young pamphleteer, who had so strongly, yet respectfully, antagonized his views, to pass a Christmas with him at his home of Beaconsfield. Of course, such a success broke up the doctoring business, and launched Mackintosh upon a new career. He devoted himself to politics; was some time an accredited lecturer upon the law of nations; was knighted presently and sent to Bombay on civil service. His friends hoped he might find financial equipment there, but this hope was vain; red-tape was an abomination to him always; cash-book and ledger represented unknown quantities; he knew no difference between a shilling and a pound, till he came to spend them. He was in straits all his life.
His friendship for Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, andBrougham was maintained by correspondence, and on his return from India he became an occasional contributor to the great ScotchReviewon various subjects.
His range of acquirements was most wide—too wide and too unceasing for the persistency which goes with great single achievements. His histories are fragments. His speeches are misplaced treatises; his treatises are epitomes of didactic systems. When we weigh his known worth, his keenness of intellect, his sound judgment, his wealth of language, his love for thoroughness—which led him to remotest sources of information—his amazing power in colloquial discourse, we are astonished at the little store of good things he has left. There was a lack in him, indeed, of the salient and electrical wit of Sydney Smith; a lack of the easy and graceful volubility of Jeffrey; lack of the abounding and illuminating rhetoric of Macaulay; but a greater lack was of that dogged, persistent working habit which gave to Brougham his triumphs.
Yet Mackintosh was always plotting great literary designs; but his fastidious taste, and his criticalhunger for all certainties, kept him forever in the search of new material and appliances. He was dilatory to the last degree; his caution always multiplied delays; no general was ever so watchful of his commissariat—none ever so unready for a “Forward, march!” Among his forecasts was that of a great history of England. Madame de Staël urged her friend to take possession of her villa on Lake Geneva and, like Gibbon, write his way there to a great fame. He did for awhile set himself resolutely to a beginning at the country home of Weedon Lodge in Buckinghamshire—accumulated piles of fortifying MSS. and private records; but for outcome we have only that clumsy torso which outlines the Revolution of 1688.[37]
His plans wanted a hundred working years, instead of the thirty which are only allotted to men. What Jeffrey left behind him marks, I think, the full limit of his powers; the same is true of Brougham, and true probably of Macaulay; and I think no tension and no incentive would havewrought upon Sydney Smith to work greater and brighter things than he did accomplish. A bishopric would only have set his gibes into coruscation at greater tables, and perhaps given larger system to his charities. But Mackintosh never worked up to the full level of his best power and large learning, except in moments of conversational exaltation.
Before closing our chapter we take one more swift glimpse at that arch-plotter for Whiggism—in the early days of theEdinburgh Review—whom we left fidgetting in the House of Lords, on a May evening of 1845. He had a longer life by far than most of those who conspired for the maintenance of the great blue and buff forerunner of British critical journals. He was only twenty-three when he put his shoulder to the quarterly revolutions of theEdinburgh—youngest of all the immediate founders;[38]and he outlivedthem all and outvoiced them all in the hurly-burly of the world.
He survived Macaulay too—an early contributor of whom we shall have more to say—and though he was past eighty at the death of the historian, he was alert still, and his brain vagrantly active; but the days of his early glory and fame—when the young blusterer bolstered up Reform, and slew the giants of musty privilege and sent “the schoolmaster abroad,” and antagonized slavery, were gone;[39]so, too, were thosepalmy times when he made the courts at Westminster ring with his championship of that poor Queen (who, whatever her demerits—and they were many—was certainly abominably maltreated by a husband far worse than she); times when the populace who espoused her cause shouted bravos to Harry Brougham—times when he was the best known and most admired man in England; all these, and his chancellorship, and his wordy triumphs in the House of Lords, were far behind him, and the inevitable loss of place and power fretted him grievously. He quarrelled with old coadjutors; in Parliament he shifted from bench to bench; in the weakness of age, he truckled to power; he exasperated his friends, and for years together—his scoldings, his tergiversations, and his plaid trousers made a mine of mockery for Mr. Punch. As early as 1835-40, Lord Brougham had purchased an estate in the south of France, in a beautiful nook of that mountain shore which sweeps eastward from the neighborhood ofMarseilles—along the Mediterranean, and which so many travellers now know by the delights of the Cornice Road and Monaco, and Mentone, and San Remo. The little fishing village where years ago Lord Brougham set up his Villa of Louise Eléonore (after a darling and lost child) is now a suburb of the fashionable resort of Cannes. At his home there, amongst the olives, the oleanders and the orange-trees, the disappointed and petulant ex-chancellor passed most of the later years of his life.
Friends dropping in upon him—much doubting of their reception—found him as the humors changed, peevish with strong regrets and recriminations, or placid under the weight of his years, and perhaps narcotized by the marvellous beauty of the scenes around him.
He was over ninety at his death in 1868. To the very last, a man not to be reckoned on: some days as calm as the sea that rippled under his window; other days full of his old unrest and petulancies. There are such men in all times and in all societies—sagacious, fussy, vain, indefatigable, immensely serviceable, cantankerous;wecan’tget on without them; we are for ever wishing that we could.
In our next chapter we shall come upon a critic, who was a famous editor—adroit, strong, waspish, bookish, and ignoble. We shall encounter a king, too—of whom we have thus far only had glimpses—who was jolly—excellently limbed and conditioned physically—a man “of an infinite jest,” too, and yet as arrant a dastard—by all old-fashioned moral measures of character—as Falstaff himself. Again we shall follow traces of a great poet—but never a favorite one—who has left markings of his career, strong and deep; a man who had a Greek’s delight in things of beauty, and a Greek’s subtlety of touch; but one can fancy a faun’s ears showing their tips upon his massive head, and (without fancy) grow conscious of a heathenism clouding his great culture. Other two poets of lighter mould we shall meet;—more gracious, lighter pinioned—prettily flitting—iridescent—grace and sparkle in their utterances, but leaving no strong markings “upon the sands of time.”
We have wandered much in our two last chapters beyond what may be reckoned strictly English lands, into that pleasant region lying between the Tweed and the Firth of Forth; and it was north of the heights of Lammermuir and of the Pentland Hills, and in that delightful old city which is dominated by the lesser heights of the Salisbury crags, the Castle Rock, and Calton Hill, that we found the builders of that greatReview, which in its livery of buff and blue still carries its original name. I traced the several careers of Sydney Smith, Lord Brougham, and Judge Jeffrey; the first of these, from a humble village curacy, coming to be one of the most respected literary men of England, and an important official of St. Paul’s Cathedral; if his wit had been less lively hemight have risen to a bishopric. Brougham was, first, essayist, then advocate, then Parliamentary orator, then Reformer, then Lord High Chancellor—purging the courts of much legal trumpery—always a scold and quarreller, and gaining in the first year of William IV. his barony of Brougham and Vaux: hence the little squib of verse, which will help to keep his exact title in mind: