302THE POETS OF THE CHURCH.
It is not uninteresting to mark the rise and progress of certain branches of poetry and thebelles lettresin their connection with sects and Churches. They form tests by which at least the taste and literary standing of these bodies can be determined; and the degree of success with which they are cultivated within the same Church, in different ages, throws at times very striking lights on its condition and history. One wholly unacquainted with the recorded annals of the Church of Scotland might safely infer, from its literature alone, that it fared much more hardly in the seventeenth century, during which the literature of England rose to its highest pitch of grandeur, than in the previous sixteenth, in which its Knoxes, Buchanans, and Andrew Melvilles flourished; and further, that its eighteenth century was, on the whole, a quiet and tranquil time, in which even mediocrity had leisure afforded it to develope itself in its full proportions. Literature is not the proper business of Churches; but it is a means, though not an end. And it will be found that all the better Churches have been as literary as they could; and that, if at any time the literature has been defective, it has been rather their circumstances that were unpropitious, than themselves that were in fault. Their enemies have delighted to represent the case differently. Our readers must remember the famous instance inOld Mortality, so happily exposed by the elder M’Crie, in which Sir Walter, when he makes his Sergeant Bothwell a writer of verses, introduces Burley as peculiarly a verse-hater, and ‘puts into his mouth that condemnation of303elegant pursuits which he imputes to the whole party;’ ‘overlooking or suppressing the fact,’ says the Doctor, ‘that there was at that very time in the camp of the Covenanters a man who, besides his other accomplishments, was a poet superior to any on the opposite side.’ It is equally a fact, however, and shows how thoroughly the mind of even a highly intellectual people may be prostrated by a long course of tyranny and persecution, that Scotland had properly no literature after the extinction of its old classical school in the person of Drummond of Hawthornden, until the rise of Thomson. The age in England of Milton and of Cowley, of Otway, of Waller, of Butler, of Dryden, and of Denham, was in Scotland an age without a poet vigorous enough to survive in his writings his own generation. For even the greater part of the popular version of its Psalms, our Church was indebted to the English lawyer Rous. Here and there we may find in it the remains of an earlier and more classical time: its version of the hundredth Psalm, for instance, with its quaintly-turned but stately octo-syllabic stanzas, was written nearly a hundred years earlier than most of the others, by William Keith, a Scottish contemporary of Beza and Buchanan, and one of the translators of the Geneva Bible. But we find little else that is Scotch in it; the Church to which, in the previous age, the author of the most elegant version of the Psalms ever given to the world had belonged, had now––notwithstanding the exertions of its Zachary Boyds––to import its poetry. In the following century, the Church shared in the general literature of the time. She missed, and but barely missed, having one of its greatest poets to herself––the poet Thomson––who at least carried on his studies so far with a view to her ministry, as to commence delivering his probationary discourses. We fear, however, he would have made but an indolent minister; and that, though his occasional sermons, judging from the hymn which concludes304theSeasons, might have been singularly fine ones, they would have been marvellously few, and very often repeated. The greatest poet that did actually arise within the Church during the century was Thomson’s contemporary, Robert Blair,––a man who was not an idle minister, and who, unlike his cousin Hugh, belonged to the evangelical side. The author of theGravewas one of the bosom friends of Colonel Gardiner, and a valued correspondent of Doddridge and Watts. Curiously enough, though the great merit of his piece has been acknowledged by critics such as Southey, it has been regarded as an imitation of theNight Thoughtsof Young. ‘Blair’sGrave,’ says Southey in hisLife of Cowper, ‘is the only poem I can call to mind which has been composed in imitation of theNight Thoughts;’ and though Campbell himself steered clear of the error, we find it introduced in a note, as supplementary to the information regarding Blair given in hisEssay on English Poetryby his editor, Mr. Cunningham. It is demonstrable, however, that the Scotchman could not have been the imitator. As shown by a letter in the Doddridge collection, which bears date more than a twelvemonth previous to that of the publication of even the first book of theNight Thoughts, Blair, after stating that his poem, then in the hands of Isaac Watts, had been offered without success to two London publishers, states further, that the greater part of it had been written previous to the year 1731, ere he had yet entered the ministry; whereas the first book of Young’s poem was not published until the year 1744. Poetry such as that of Blair is never the result of imitation: its verbal happinesses are at least as great as those of theNight Thoughtsthemselves, and its power and earnestness considerably greater. ‘The eighteenth century,’ says Thomas Campbell, ‘has produced few specimens of blank verse of so powerful and simple a character as that of theGrave. It is a popular poem, not merely because it is religious, but because its305language and imagery are free, natural, and picturesque. The latest editor of the poets has, with singularly bad taste, noted some of the author’s most nervous and expressive phrases as vulgarisms, among which he reckons that of friendship, the “solder of society.” Blair may be a homely, and even a gloomy poet, in the eye of fastidious criticism; but there is a masculine and pronounced character even in his gloom and homeliness, that keeps it most distinctly apart from either dulness or vulgarity. His style pleases us like the powerful expression of a countenance without regular beauty.’ Such is the judgment on Blair––destined, in all appearance, to be a final one––of a writer who was at once the most catholic of critics and the most polished of poets. There succeeded to the author of theGrave, a group of poets of the Church, of whom the Church has not been greatly in the habit of boasting. Of Home, by a curious chance the successor of Blair in his parish, little need be said. He produced one good play and five enormously bad ones; and his connection with the Church was very much an accident, and soon dissolved. Blacklock, too, was as much a curiosity as a poet; and, save for his blindness, would scarce have been very celebrated in even his own day. Nor was Ogilvie, though more favourably regarded by Johnson than most of his Scottish contemporaries, other than a mediocre poet. He is the author, however, of a very respectable paraphrase––the sixty-second––of all his works the one that promises to live longest; and we find the productions of several other poets of the Church similarly preserved, whose other writings have died. And yet the group of Scottishliteratithat produced our paraphrases, if looking simply to literary accomplishment––we do not demand genius––must be regarded as a very remarkable one, when we consider that the greater number of the individuals which composed it were all at one time the ministers of a single Church, and that one of the smallest. We know306of no Church, either in Britain or elsewhere, that could now command such a committee as that which sat, at the bidding of the General Assembly, considerably more than sixty years ago, to prepare the ‘Translations and Paraphrases.’ Of the sixty-eight pieces of which the collection is composed, thirty are the work of Scottish ministers; and the groundwork of most of the others, furnished in large part by the previously existing writings of Watts and Doddridge, has been greatly improved, in at least the composition, by the emendations of Morrison and Logan. With all its faults, we know of no other collection equal to it as a whole. The meretricious stanzas of Brady and Tate are inanity itself in comparison. True, the later Blair, though always sensible, was ofttimes quite heavy enough in the pieces given to him to render––more so than in his prose; though, even when first introduced to that, Cowper could exclaim, not a little to the chagrin of those who regarded it as perfection of writing: ‘Oh, the sterility of that man’s fancy! if, indeed, he has any such faculty belonging to him. Dr. Blair has such a brain as Shakespeare somewhere describes, “dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.’” But the fancy that Blair wanted, poor Logan had; and the man who too severely criticises his flowing and elegant paraphrases would do well to beware of the memories of his children. A poet whose pieces cannot be forgotten may laugh at the critics. Altogether, our ‘Translations and Paraphrases’ are highly creditable to the literary taste and ability of the Church during the latter half of the last century; and it serves to show how very much matters changed in this respect in about forty years, that while in the earlier period the men fitted for such work were all to be found within the pale of the Church’s ministry, at a later time, when the late Principal Baird set himself, with the sanction of the General Assembly, to devise means for adding to the collection, and307for revising our metrical version of the Psalms, he had to look for assistance almost exclusively to poets outside the precincts of even its membership.
And yet, even at this later time, the Church had its true poets––poets who, though, according to Wordsworth, they ‘wanted the accomplishment of verse,’ were of larger calibre and greater depth than their predecessors. Chalmers had already produced hisAstronomical Discourses, and poor Edward Irving had begun to electrify his London audiences with the richly antique imagination and fiery fervour of his singularly vigorous orations. Stewart of Cromarty, too, though but comparatively little known, was rising, in his quiet parish church, into flights of genuine though unmeasured poetry, of an altitude to which minor poets, in their nicely rounded stanzas, never attain. Nor is the race yet extinct. Jeffrey used to remark, that he found more true feeling in the prose of Jeremy Taylor than in the works of all the second-class British poets put together; and those who would now wish to acquaint themselves with the higher and more spirit-rousing poetry of our Church, would have to seek it within earshot of the pulpits of Bruce, of Guthrie, and of James Hamilton. Still, however, it ever affords us pleasure to find it in the more conventional form of classic and harmonious verse. A Church that possesses her poets gives at least earnest in the fact that she is not falling beneath the literature of her age; and much on this account, but more, we think, from their great intrinsic merit, have we been gratified by the perusal of a volume of poems which has just issued from the press under the name of one of our younger Free Church ministers, the Rev. James D. Burns. We are greatly mistaken if Mr. Burns be not a genuine poet, skilled, as becomes a scholar and a student of classic lore, in giving to his verse the true artistic form, but not the less born to inherit the ‘vision and the faculty’ which cannot be acquired. Most men of great talent have308their poetic age: it is very much restricted, however, to the first five years of full bodily development, also particularly then a sterner and more prosaic mood follows. But recollections of the time survive; and it is mainly through the medium of these recollections that in the colder periods the feelings and visions of the poets continue to be appreciated and felt. It was said of Thomson the poet by Samuel Johnson, that he could not look at two candles burning other than poetically. The phrase was employed in conversation byoldJohnson; but it must have been the experience ofyoungJohnson, derived from a time long gone by, that suggested it. It is characteristic of the poetic age, that objects which in later life become commonplace in the mind, are then surrounded as if by a halo of poetic feeling. The candles were, no doubt, an extreme illustration; but there is scarce any object in nature, and there are very few in art, especially if etherealized by the adjuncts of antiquity or association, that are not capable of being thus, as it were, embathed in sentiment. With the true poet, the ability of investing every object with a poetic atmosphere remains undiminished throughout life; and we find it strikingly manifested in the volume before us. In almost every line in some of the pieces we find a distinct bit of picture steeped in poetic feeling. The following piece, peculiarly appropriate to the present time, we adduce as an illustration of our meaning:––
DISCOVERY OF THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE.‘Strait of Ill Hope! thy frozen lips at lastUnclose, to teach our seamen how to siftA passage where blue icebergs clash and drift,And the shore loosely rattles in the blast.We hold the secret thou hast clench’d so fastFor ages,––our best blood has earned the gift.––Blood spilt, or hoarded up in patient thrift,Through sunless months in ceaseless peril passed.309But what of daring Franklin? who may knowThe pangs that wrung that heart so proud and brave,In secret wrestling with its deadly woe,And no kind voice to reach him o’er the wave?Now he sleeps fast beneath his shroud of snow,And the cold pole-star only knows his grave.‘Alone, on some sharp cliff, I see him strain,O’er the white waste, his keen, sagacious eye,Or scan the signs of the snow-muffled sky,In hope of quick deliverance––but in vain;Then, faring to his icy tent again,To cheer his mates with a familiar smile,And talk of home and kinsfolk to beguileSlow hours which freeze the blood and numb the brain.Long let our hero’s memory be enshrinedIn all true British hearts! He calmly stoodIn danger’s foremost rank, nor looked behind.He did his work, not with the fever’d bloodOf battle, but with hard-tried fortitude;In peril dauntless, and in death resigned.‘Despond not, Britain! Should this sacred holdOf freedom, still inviolate, be assailed,The high, unblenching spirit which prevailedIn ancient days, is neither dead nor cold.Men are still in thee of heroic mould––Men whom thy grand old sea-kings would have hailedAs worthy peers, invulnerably mailed,Because by Duty’s sternest law controlled.Thou yet wilt rise and send abroad thy voiceAmong the nations battling for the right,In the unrusted armour of thy youth;And the oppressed shall hear it and rejoice:For on thy side is the resistless mightOf Freedom, Justice, and Eternal Truth!’
DISCOVERY OF THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE.
‘Strait of Ill Hope! thy frozen lips at lastUnclose, to teach our seamen how to siftA passage where blue icebergs clash and drift,And the shore loosely rattles in the blast.We hold the secret thou hast clench’d so fastFor ages,––our best blood has earned the gift.––Blood spilt, or hoarded up in patient thrift,Through sunless months in ceaseless peril passed.309But what of daring Franklin? who may knowThe pangs that wrung that heart so proud and brave,In secret wrestling with its deadly woe,And no kind voice to reach him o’er the wave?Now he sleeps fast beneath his shroud of snow,And the cold pole-star only knows his grave.‘Alone, on some sharp cliff, I see him strain,O’er the white waste, his keen, sagacious eye,Or scan the signs of the snow-muffled sky,In hope of quick deliverance––but in vain;Then, faring to his icy tent again,To cheer his mates with a familiar smile,And talk of home and kinsfolk to beguileSlow hours which freeze the blood and numb the brain.Long let our hero’s memory be enshrinedIn all true British hearts! He calmly stoodIn danger’s foremost rank, nor looked behind.He did his work, not with the fever’d bloodOf battle, but with hard-tried fortitude;In peril dauntless, and in death resigned.‘Despond not, Britain! Should this sacred holdOf freedom, still inviolate, be assailed,The high, unblenching spirit which prevailedIn ancient days, is neither dead nor cold.Men are still in thee of heroic mould––Men whom thy grand old sea-kings would have hailedAs worthy peers, invulnerably mailed,Because by Duty’s sternest law controlled.Thou yet wilt rise and send abroad thy voiceAmong the nations battling for the right,In the unrusted armour of thy youth;And the oppressed shall hear it and rejoice:For on thy side is the resistless mightOf Freedom, Justice, and Eternal Truth!’
This is surely genuine poetry both in form and matter; as just in its thinking as it is vivid in its imagery and classic in its language. The vein of strong sense which runs through all the poetry of Mr. Burns, and imparts to it310solidity and coherency, is, we think, not less admirable than the poetry itself, and is, we are sure, quite as little common. Let the reader mark how freely the thoughts arise in the following very exquisite little piece, written in Madeira, and suggested by the distant view of the neighbouring island of Porto Santo, one of the first colonized by the Portuguese adventurers of the fifteenth century. Columbus married a daughter of Bartolomeo Perestrillo, the first governor of the island, and after his marriage lived in it for some time with his father-in-law. And on this foundation Mr. Burns founds his poem:––
PORTO SANTO, AS SEEN FROM THE NORTH OF MADEIRA.‘Glance northward through the haze, and markThat shadowy island floating darkAmidst the seas serene:It seems some fair enchanted isle,Like that which saw Miranda’s smileWhen Ariel sang unseen.‘Oh happy, after all their fears,Were those old Lusian marinersWho hailed that land the first,Upon whose seared and aching eyes,With an enrapturing surprise,Its bloom of verdure burst.‘Their anchor in a creek, shell-paven,They dropped,––and hence “The HolyHaven”They named the welcome land:The breezes strained their masts no more,And all around the sunny shoreWas summer, laughing bland.‘They wandered on through green arcadeWhere fruits were hanging in the shades,And blossoms clustering fair;Strange gorgeous insects shimmeredAnd from the brakes sweet minstrelsyEntranced the woodland air.311‘Years passed, and to the island cameA mariner of unknown name,And grave Castilian speech:The spirit of a great empriseAroused him, and with flashing eyesHe paced the pebbled beach.‘What time the sun was sinking slow,And twilight spread a rosy glowAround its single star,His eye the western sea’s expanseWould search, creating by its glanceSome cloudy land afar.‘He saw it when translucent evenShed mystic light o’er earth and heaven,Dim shadowed on the deep;His fancy tinged each passing cloudWith the fine phantom, and he bowedBefore it in his sleep.‘He hears grey-bearded sailors tellHow the discoveries befellThat glorify their time;“And forth I go, my friends,” he cries,“To a severer enterpriseThan tasked your glorious prime.‘“Time was when these green isles that studThe expanse of this familiar flood,Lived but in fancy fond.Earth’s limits––think you here they are?Here has the Almighty fixed His bar,Forbidding glance beyond?‘“Each shell is murmuring on the shore,And wild sea-voices evermoreAre sounding in my ear:I long to meet the eastern gale,And with a free and stretching sailThrough virgin seas to steer.312‘“Two galleys trim, some comrades stanch,And I with hopeful heart would launchUpon this shoreless sea.Till I have searched it through and through.And seen some far land looming blue,My heart will not play free.”‘Forth fared he through the deep to rove:For months with angry winds he strove,And passions fiercer still;Until he found the long-sought land,And leaped upon the savage strandWith an exulting thrill.‘The tide of life now eddies strongThrough that broad wilderness, where longThe eagle fearless flew;Where forests waved, fair cities rise,And science, art, and enterpriseTheir restless aim pursue.‘There dwells a people, at whose birthThe shout of Freedom shook the earth,Whose frame through all the landsHas travelled, and before whose eyes,Bright with their glorious destinies,A proud career expands.‘I see their life by passion wroughtTo intense endeavour, and my thoughtStoops backwards in its reachTo him who, in that early time,Resolved his enterprise sublimeOn Porto Santo’s beach.‘Methinks that solitary soulHeld in its ark this radiant rollOf human hopes upfurled,––That there in germ this vigorous lifeWas sheathed, which now in earnest strifeIs working through the world.313‘Still on our way, with careworn face,Abstracted eye, and sauntering pace,May pass one such as he,Whose mind heaves with a secret force,That shall be felt along the courseOf far Futurity.‘Call him not fanatic or fool,Thou Stoic of the modern school;Columbus-like, his aimPoints forward with a true presage,And nations of a later ageMay rise to bless his name.’
PORTO SANTO, AS SEEN FROM THE NORTH OF MADEIRA.
‘Glance northward through the haze, and markThat shadowy island floating darkAmidst the seas serene:It seems some fair enchanted isle,Like that which saw Miranda’s smileWhen Ariel sang unseen.‘Oh happy, after all their fears,Were those old Lusian marinersWho hailed that land the first,Upon whose seared and aching eyes,With an enrapturing surprise,Its bloom of verdure burst.‘Their anchor in a creek, shell-paven,They dropped,––and hence “The HolyHaven”They named the welcome land:The breezes strained their masts no more,And all around the sunny shoreWas summer, laughing bland.‘They wandered on through green arcadeWhere fruits were hanging in the shades,And blossoms clustering fair;Strange gorgeous insects shimmeredAnd from the brakes sweet minstrelsyEntranced the woodland air.311‘Years passed, and to the island cameA mariner of unknown name,And grave Castilian speech:The spirit of a great empriseAroused him, and with flashing eyesHe paced the pebbled beach.‘What time the sun was sinking slow,And twilight spread a rosy glowAround its single star,His eye the western sea’s expanseWould search, creating by its glanceSome cloudy land afar.‘He saw it when translucent evenShed mystic light o’er earth and heaven,Dim shadowed on the deep;His fancy tinged each passing cloudWith the fine phantom, and he bowedBefore it in his sleep.‘He hears grey-bearded sailors tellHow the discoveries befellThat glorify their time;“And forth I go, my friends,” he cries,“To a severer enterpriseThan tasked your glorious prime.‘“Time was when these green isles that studThe expanse of this familiar flood,Lived but in fancy fond.Earth’s limits––think you here they are?Here has the Almighty fixed His bar,Forbidding glance beyond?‘“Each shell is murmuring on the shore,And wild sea-voices evermoreAre sounding in my ear:I long to meet the eastern gale,And with a free and stretching sailThrough virgin seas to steer.312‘“Two galleys trim, some comrades stanch,And I with hopeful heart would launchUpon this shoreless sea.Till I have searched it through and through.And seen some far land looming blue,My heart will not play free.”‘Forth fared he through the deep to rove:For months with angry winds he strove,And passions fiercer still;Until he found the long-sought land,And leaped upon the savage strandWith an exulting thrill.‘The tide of life now eddies strongThrough that broad wilderness, where longThe eagle fearless flew;Where forests waved, fair cities rise,And science, art, and enterpriseTheir restless aim pursue.‘There dwells a people, at whose birthThe shout of Freedom shook the earth,Whose frame through all the landsHas travelled, and before whose eyes,Bright with their glorious destinies,A proud career expands.‘I see their life by passion wroughtTo intense endeavour, and my thoughtStoops backwards in its reachTo him who, in that early time,Resolved his enterprise sublimeOn Porto Santo’s beach.‘Methinks that solitary soulHeld in its ark this radiant rollOf human hopes upfurled,––That there in germ this vigorous lifeWas sheathed, which now in earnest strifeIs working through the world.313‘Still on our way, with careworn face,Abstracted eye, and sauntering pace,May pass one such as he,Whose mind heaves with a secret force,That shall be felt along the courseOf far Futurity.‘Call him not fanatic or fool,Thou Stoic of the modern school;Columbus-like, his aimPoints forward with a true presage,And nations of a later ageMay rise to bless his name.’
There runs throughout Mr. Burns’s volume a rich vein of scriptural imagery and allusion, and much oriental description––rather quiet, however, than gorgeous––that bears in its unexaggerated sobriety the impress of truth. From a weakness of chest and general delicate health, Mr. Burns has had to spend not a few of his winters abroad, under climatal influences of a more genial character than those of his own country; and hence the truthfulness of his descriptions of scenes which few of our native poets ever see, and a corresponding amount of variety in his verse. But we have exhausted our space, and have given only very meagre samples of this delightful volume, and a very inadequate judgment on its merits. But we refer our readers to the volume itself, as one well fitted to grow upon their regards; and meanwhile conclude with the following exquisite landscape,––no bad specimen of that ability of word-painting which is ever so certain a mark of the true poet:––
‘Below me spread a wide and lonely beach,The ripple washing higher on the sands:A river that has come from far-off landsIs coiled behind in many a shining reach;But now it widens, and its banks are bare––314It settles as it nears the moaning sea;An inward eddy checks the current free,And breathes a briny dampness through the air:Beyond, the waves’ low vapours through the skiesWere trailing, like a battle’s broken rear;But smitten by pursuing winds, they rise,And the blue slopes of a far coast appear,With shadowy peaks on which the sunlight lies,Uplifted in aërial distance clear.
‘Below me spread a wide and lonely beach,The ripple washing higher on the sands:A river that has come from far-off landsIs coiled behind in many a shining reach;But now it widens, and its banks are bare––314It settles as it nears the moaning sea;An inward eddy checks the current free,And breathes a briny dampness through the air:Beyond, the waves’ low vapours through the skiesWere trailing, like a battle’s broken rear;But smitten by pursuing winds, they rise,And the blue slopes of a far coast appear,With shadowy peaks on which the sunlight lies,Uplifted in aërial distance clear.
November 8, 1854.
315THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA.
After the labour of years, the seventh edition of theEncyclopædia Britannicahas been at length completed. It is in every respect a great work––great even as a commercial speculation. We have been assured the money expended on this edition alone would be more than sufficient to build three such monuments as that now in the course of erection in Edinburgh to the memory of Sir Walter Scott. And containing, as it does, all the more valuable matter of former editions––all that the advancing tide of knowledge has not obliterated or covered up, and which at one time must have represented in the commercial point of view a large amount of capital––it must be obvious that, great as the cost of the present edition has been, it bears merely some such relation to the accumulated cost of the whole, as that borne by the expense of partial renovations and repairs in a vast edifice to the sum originally expended on the entire erection.
It is a great work, too, regarded as a trophy of the united science and literature of Britain. Like a lofty obelisk, raised to mark the spot where some important expedition terminated, it stands as it were to indicate the line at which the march of human knowledge has now arrived. We see it rising on the extreme verge of the boundary which separates the clear and the palpable from the indistinct and the obscure. The explored province of past research, with all its many party-coloured fields, stretches out from it in long perspective on the one hand,––luminous, well-defined,316rejoicing in the light. Theterra incognitaof future discovery lies enveloped in cloud on the other––an untried region of fogs and darkness.
The history of this publication for the last seventy years––for so slow has been its growth, that rather more than seventy years have now elapsed since its first appearance in the world of letters––would serve curiously to illustrate the literary and scientific history of Scotland during that period. The naturalist, by observing the rings of annual growth in a tree newly cut down, can not only tell what its exact bulk had been at certain determinate dates in the past––from its first existence as a tiny sapling of a single twelvemonth, till the axe had fallen on the huge circumference of perchance its hundredth ring––but he can also form from them a shrewd guess of the various characters of the seasons that have passed over it. Is the ring of wide development?––it speaks of genial warmth and kindly showers. Is it narrow and contracted?––it tells of scorching droughts or of biting cold. Now the succeeding editions of this great work narrate a somewhat similar story, in a somewhat similar manner. They speak of the growth of science and the arts during the various succeeding periods in which they appeared. The great increase, too, at certain times, in particular departments of knowledge, is curiously connected with peculiar circumstances in the history of our country. In the present edition, for instance, almost all the geography is new. The age has been peculiarly an age of exploration––a locomotive age: commerce, curiosity, the spirit of adventure, the desire of escaping from the tedium of inactive life,––these, and other motives besides, have scattered travellers by hundreds, during the period of our long European peace, over almost every country of the world. And hence so mighty an increase of knowledge in this department, that what the last age knew of the subject has been altogether overgrown. Vast317additions, too, have been made to the province of mechanical contrivance: the constructive faculties of the country, stimulated apparently by the demands of commerce and the influence of competition both at home and abroad, have performed in well-nigh a single generation the work of centuries.
Even theEncyclopædiaitself, regarded in a literary point of view, is strikingly illustrative of a change which has taken place chiefly within the present century in the republic of letters.
We enjoyed a very ample opportunity of acquainting ourselves with it in its infancy. More years have passed away than we at present feel quite inclined to specify, since our attention was attracted at a very early age to anEncyclopædia, the first we had ever seen, that formed one work of a dozen or so stored on the upper shelf of a press to which we were permitted access. It consisted of three quarto volumes sprinkled over with what seventy years ago must have been deemed very respectable copperplates, and remarkable, chiefly in the arrangement of its contents, for the inequality of the portions, if we may so speak, into which the knowledge it contained was broken up. As might be anticipated from its comparatively small size, most of the articles were exceedingly meagre. There were pages after pages in which some eight or ten lines, sometimes a single line, comprised all that the writers had deemed it necessary to communicate on the subjects on which they touched. And yet, set full in the middle of these brief sentences––these mere skeletons of information––there were complete and elaborate treatises,––whales among the minnows. Some of these extended over ten, twenty, thirty, fifty pages of the work. We remember there was an old-fashioned but not ill-written treatise onChemistryamong the number, quite bulky enough of itself to fill a small volume. There was a sensibly written treatise318onLaw, too; a treatise onAnatomynot quite unworthy of the Edinburgh school; a treatise onBotany, of which at this distance of time we remember little else than that it rejected the sexual system of Linnæus, then newly promulgated; a treatise onArchitecture, sufficiently incorrect, as we afterwards found, in some of its minor details, but which we still remember with the kindly feeling of the pupil for his first master; a treatise onFortification, that at least taught us how to make model forts in sand; treatises onArithmetic,Astronomy,Bookkeeping,Grammar,Language,Theology,Metaphysics, and a great many other treatises besides. The least interesting portion of the work was the portion devoted to Natural History: it named and numbered species and varieties, instead of describing instincts and habits, and afforded little else to the reader than lists of hard words, and lines of uninteresting numerals. But our appetite for books was keen and but ill supplied at the time, and so we read all of the work that would read,––some of it oftener than once. The character of the whole reminded us somewhat of that style of building common in some of the older ruins of the north country, in which we find layers of huge stones surrounded by strips and patches of a minute pinned work composed of splinters and fragments.
This Dictionary of the three quarto volumes was the first edition of theEncyclopædia Britannica,––the identical work in its first beginnings, of which the seventh edition has been so recently completed. It was published in 1771––in the days of Goldsmith, and Burke, and Johnson, and David Hume––several years ere Adam Smith had given hisWealth of Nationsor Robertson hisHistory of Americato the public, and ere the names of Burns or Cowper had any place inBritish Literature.
The world has grown greatly in knowledge since that period, and theEncyclopædia Britannicahas done much319more than kept pace with it in its merits of acquirement. The three volumes have swelled into twenty-one; and each of the twenty-one contains at least one-third more of matter than each of the three. The growth and proportions of a work of genius seem to be very little dependent on the period of its production. Shakespeare may be regarded as the founder of the English drama. He wrote at a time when art was rude, and science comparatively low. All agree, at least, that the subjects of Queen Victoria know a very great deal which was not known by the subjects of Queen Elizabeth. There was no gas burned in front of the Globe Theatre, nor was the distant roar of alocomotiveever heard within its dingy recesses; nor did ever adventurous aeronaut look down from his dizzy elevation of miles on its tub-like proportions, or its gay flag of motley. And yet we question whether even Mr. Wakley himself, with all his advantages, would venture to do more than assert his equality with the Swan of Avon. Homer, too, wrote in a very remote period,––so very remote and so very uncertain, that the critics have begun seriously to doubt whether the huge figure of the blind old man, as it looms through the grey obscure of ages, be in reality the figure of one poet, or of a whole school of poets rolled up into a bundle. But though men fight much more scientifically now than they did at Troy, and know much more about the taking and defending of walled towns, no poet of the present day greatly excels Homer,––no, not the Scotch schoolmaster even who wrote Wolfe’s Ode, or the gentleman who sends us abstruse verses which we unluckily cannot understand, and then scolds us in perspicuous prose for not giving them a place in our columns.
Works of genius bear no reference in their bulk and proportions, if we may so speak, to the period at which they are produced; but it is far otherwise with works of science and general information: they grow with the world’s growth;320the tomes from which the father derived his acquaintance with facts and principles, prove all inadequate to satisfy the curiosity of the son: almost every season adds its ring to the ‘tree of knowledge;’ and the measuring line which girthed and registered its bulk in one age, fails to embrace it in the succeeding one. And hence one element at least in the superiority of this edition of theEncyclopædia Britannicato every other edition, and every other Encyclopædia.
It appears at the period of the world’s greatest experience. But there are other very important elements, characteristic, as we have said, of a peculiarity in the literature of the age, which have tended also to this result. We have remarked that the first edition appeared in the days of Hume, Robertson, and Adam Smith. None of these men wrote for it, however.
In France the first intellects of the country were engaged on their National Encyclopædia, and mighty was the mischief which they accomplished through its means; but works of this character in Britain were left to authors of a lower standing. Smollett once conducted a critical review; Gilbert Stuart an Edinburgh magazine; Dr. Johnson drew up parliamentary debates for two years together; Edmund Burke toiled at the pages of an Annual Register; and Goldsmith, early in his career, wrote letters for the newspapers. But, like the apothecary in Shakespeare, it was their ‘poverty, not their will, that consented;’ and when their fortunes brightened, these walks of obscure laboriousness were left to what were deemed their legitimate denizens––mere mediocritists and compilers. A similar feeling seems to have obtained regarding works of an encyclopædiacal character. The authors of the first edition of theEncyclopædia Britannicawere merely respectable compilers,––we know not that any of their names would now sound familiar to the reader, with perhaps the exception of that of Smellie, an Edinburgh writer of the last century,321whose philosophical essays one sometimes meets with on our bookstalls.
But among the other great changes produced by the French Revolution, there was a striking and very important change effected in our periodical literature. The old foundations of society seemed breaking up, and the true nature of that basis of opinion on which they had so long rested came to be everywhere practically understood.
Minds of the larger order found it necessary to address themselves direct to the people; and the newspaper, the review, the magazine, the pamphlet, furnished them with ready vehicles of conveyance. Archimedes, during the siege of Syracuse, had to quit the sober quiet of his study, and to mix with the armed defenders of his native city, amid the wild confusion of sallies and assaults, the rocking of beleaguered towers, the creaking of engines, and the hurtling of missiles. It was thus with some of the greatest minds of the country during the distraction and alarm of the French Revolution. Coleridge conducted a newspaper; Sir James Mackintosh wrote for one; Canning contributed to theAnti-Jacobin; Robert Hall of Leicester became a reviewer; Southey, Jeffrey, Brougham, Scott, Giffard, all men in the first rank, appeared in the character of contributors to the periodicals.
The aspect of this department of literature suddenly changed, and the influence of that change survives to this day. Even now, some of our first literary names are known chiefly in their connection with magazines and reviews. Men such as Macaulay and Sidney Smith have scarce any place as authors dissociated from theEdinburgh; and Lockhart and Wilson are most felt in the world of letters in their connection withBlackwoodand theQuarterly. And this change affected more than the periodicals. Its influence extended to works of the encyclopædiacal character. The two great Encyclopædias of Edinburgh––that322which bears the name of the city, and that whose name we have placed at the head of this article––came to reckon among their contributors the first men of the kingdom, both in science and literature: they benefited as greatly by the change we describe as the periodicals themselves. The Revolution, in its reflex influence, seems to have drawn a line in the British encyclopædiacal field between the labours of mere compilers and the achievements of original authorship; and the peculiarity of plan in theEncyclopædia Britannica, to which we have already referred––that peculiarity which gives an art or science entire as a treatise, instead of breaking it down into as many separate articles as it possesses technical terms––enabled this work to avail itself to the fullest extent of the improvement. No author, however great his powers, can be profound in the compass of a few paragraphs.
Goldsmith could assert that in an essay of a page or two it is even a merit to be superficial; and few there are who possess, with Goldsmith, the pure literary ability of being superficial with good effect.
But it is not enough to say of this work that it is enriched by contributions from not a few of the ablest writers which the present century has produced. It should be added, further, that it contains some of the masterpieces of these men. No one ever excelled Sir James Mackintosh in philosophical criticism. It was peculiarly hisforte. He was rather a great judge of metaphysical power than a metaphysician. And yet it is this admirable critic who decides that the exquisitely classical dissertation of Dugald Stewart, written for thisEncyclopædia, is the most magnificent of that philosopher’s works; and remarks, in accounting for the fact, that the ‘memorable instances of Cicero and Milton, and still more those of Dryden and Burke, seem to show that there is some natural tendency in the fire of genius to burn more brightly, or to blaze more fiercely, in323the evening than in the morning of human life.’ We are mistaken if Sir James’s own contribution to this work does not take decidedly a first place among his productions. The present age has not produced a piece of more exquisitely polished English, or of more tasteful or more nicely discriminating criticism.
There is an occult beauty and elegance in some of his thoughts and expressions, on which it is no small luxury to repose,––lines of reflection, too, along which one must feel as well as think one’s way.
What can be finer, for instance, than his remarks on the poetry of Dr. Thomas Brown, or what more thoroughly removed from commonplace? He tells us how the philosophic poet ‘observed man and his wider world with the eye of a metaphysician;’ that ‘the dark results of such contemplations, when he reviewed them, often filled his soul with feelings which, being both grand and melancholy, were truly poetical;’ that ‘unfortunately, however, few readers can be touched with fellow-feeling;’ for that ‘he sings to few, and must becontent with sometimes moving a string in the soul of the lonely visionary, who, in the daydreams of youth, has felt as well as meditated on the mysteries of nature.’ The dissertation of Playfair is also pitched on the highest key to which that elegant writer ever attained. If we except the unjust and offensive estimate of the powers of Franklin, a similar judgment may be passed on the preliminary dissertation of Sir John Leslie. Jeffrey’s famous theory of beauty is, of all the philosophic pieces of that accomplished writer, by far the most widely known; and Sir Walter Scott’s essay on the drama is at least equal to any of the serious prose compositions of its great author. There is something peculiarly fascinating in the natural history of this edition,––a department wholly rewritten, and furnished chiefly by the singularly pleasing pen of Mr. James Wilson. It is not yet twenty years since Constable’s supplement324to the last edition appeared; and yet in this province, so mightily has the tide risen, that well-nigh all the old lines of classification have been obliterated or covered up. Vast additions have been also made. At no former time was there half the amount of actual observation in this field which exists in it now; and it is well that there should be so skilful a workman as Mr. Wilson to avail himself of the accumulating materials. His treatises show how very just is the estimate of his powers given to the public inPeter’s Lettersconsiderably more than twenty years ago, at a time when he was comparatively little known. But we cannot enumerate a tithe of the masterpieces of the British Encyclopædia.
Judging from the list of contributors’ names attached to the index, we must hold that Moderatism in the field of literature and science is very much at a discount. But there is no lack of data of very various kinds to force upon usthisconclusion. Among our sound non-intrusionists we find the names of Lord Jeffrey, Sir David Brewster, Professor John Fleming, Professor David Welsh, Professor Anderson, Dr. Irvine, the Rev. Mr. Hetherington, the Rev. Mr. Omond, Mr. Alexander Dunlop, and Mr. Cowan; whereas of all the opposite party who record their votes in our church courts, we have succeeded in finding the name of but a single individual, Dr. John Lee.
Why has Dr. Bryce thus left the field to the fanatics? had he nothing to insert on missions? Or could not Mr. Robertson of Ellon have been great on the article Beza?
Was there no exertion demanded of them to save the credit of the Earl of Aberdeen’s learned clergy? One of the main defects of omission in the work (of course we merely mention the circumstance) is the omission of the name of one very great non-intrusionist. Ethical and metaphysical philosophy are represented by Dugald Stewart and Sir James Mackintosh; mathematical and physical science325by Sir David Brewster, Sir John Leslie, Playfair, and Robinson; political economy by Ricardo, M’Culloch, and Malthus; natural history by James Wilson and Dr. Fleming; Hazlitt and Haydon discourse on painting and the fine arts; Jeffrey on the beautiful; Sir Walter Scott on chivalry, the drama, and romance; the classical pen of Dr. Irvine has illustrated what may be termed the biographical history of Scotland; physiology finds a meet expounder in Dr. Roget; geology in Mr. Phillips; medical jurisprudence in Dr. Traill. But in whom does theology find an illustrator? Does our country boast in the present age of no very eminent name in this noble department of knowledge––no name known all over Scotland, Britain, Europe, Christendom––a name whom we may associate with that of Dugald Stewart in ethical, or that of Sir David Brewster in physical science? In utter ignorance of the facts, we can, as we have said, but merely refer to the omission as one which will be assuredly marked in the future, when the din and dust of our existing controversies shall be laid, and when all now engaged in them who are tall enough to catch the eye of posterity, will be seen in their genuine colours and their true proportions. The article Theology in theEncyclopædia Britannicais written, not by Dr. Chalmers, but new-modelled from an old article by the minister of an Independent congregation in Edinburgh, Mr. Lindsay Alexander––we doubt not an able and good man, but not supereminently theonetheologian of Scotland.
We mark, besides, a few faults, ofcommissionin the work, apparently of a sub-editorial character, but which, unlike the defect just pointed out, the editor of some future edition will find little difficulty in amending. Works the production of a single mind, bear generally an individual character; works the productions of many minds, are marked rather by the character of the age to which they belong. We find occasional evidence in theEncyclopædiathat it belongs to326the age of Catholic Emancipation,––an age in which thetruein science was deemed a very great matter by men to whom thetruein religion seemed a much less one. One at least of the minds employed on the minor articles of the work had palpably a papistical leaning.
A blaze of eulogium, which contrasts ludicrously enough with the well-toned sobriety of what we may term its staple style, is made to surround, like the halo in old paintings, some of the men who were happy enough to be distinguished assertors of the Romish Church. We would instance, as a specimen, the biographical sketches of Bossuet and the Jesuit Bourdaloue, written by the late Dr. James Browne. These, however, are but comparatively minute flaws in a work so truly great, and of such immense multiplicity. They are some of the imperfections of a work to which imperfection is inevitable, and which, after all such deductions have been made, must be recognised as by much the least faulty and most complete of its class which the world has yet seen.
April 30, 1842.