A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

Wilson's principal coadjutor in the early days of Blackwood, and his friend of all days (though the mania for crying down not so much England as London made "Christopher North" indulge in some girds at his old comrade's editorship of the Quarterly), was a curious contrast to Wilson himself. This contrast may may have been due partly, but by no means wholly, to the fact that there was ten years between them. John Gibson Lockhart was born at Cambusnethan, where his father was minister, on 14th July 1794. Like Wilson, he was educated at Glasgow and at Oxford, where he took a first-class at a very early age, and whence he went to Germany, a completion of "study-years" which the revolutionary wars had for a long time rendered difficult, if not dangerous. On returning home he was called to the Scottish Bar, where it would seem that he might have made some figure, but for his inability to speak in public. Blackwood gave him the very opening suited to his genius; and for years he was one of its chief contributors, and perhaps the most dangerous wielder of the pretty sharp weapons in which its staff indulged. Shortly afterwards, in 1819, he published (perhaps with some slight assistance from Wilson) his first original book (he had translated Schlegel's Lectures on History earlier), Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk. The title was a parody on Scott's account of his continental journey after Waterloo, the substance an exceedingly vivacious account of the things and men of Edinburgh at the time, something after the fashion of Humphrey Clinker. Next year, on 29th April, Lockhart married Sophia, Scott's elder daughter; and the pair lived for some years to come either in Edinburgh or at the cottage of Chiefswood, near Abbotsford, Lockhart contributing freely to Blackwood, and writing his four novels and his Spanish Ballads. At the end of 1825 or the beginning of 1826, just at the time when his father-in-law's financial troubles set in, he received the appointment of editor of the Quarterly Review in succession, though not in immediate succession, to Gifford. He then removed to London, where he continued to direct the Review, to contribute for a time to Fraser, to be a very important figure in literary and political life, and after Scott's death to write an admirable Life. Domestic troubles came rather thickly on him after Scott's death, which indeed was preceded by that of Lockhart's own eldest son, the "Hugh Littlejohn" of the Tales of a Grandfather. Mrs. Lockhart herself died in 1837. In 1843 Lockhart received the auditorship of the duchy of Lancaster, a post of some value. Ten years later, in broken health, he resigned the editorship of the Quarterly, and died towards the end of the year.

Lockhart's works, at present uncollected, and perhaps in no small proportion irrecoverable, must have been of far greater bulk than those of any one yet mentioned in this chapter except Wilson, and not inconsiderably greater than his. They are also of a remarkable variety, and of an extraordinary level of excellence in their different kinds. Lockhart was not, like Wilson, an advocate or a practitioner of very ornate or revolutionary prose. On the contrary, he both practised, preached, and most formidably defended by bitter criticism of opposite styles, a manner in prose and verse which was almost classical, or which at least admitted no further Romantic innovation than that of the Lake poets and Scott. His authorship of the savage onslaught upon Keats in Blackwood is not proven; but there is no doubt that he wrote the scarcely less ferocious, though much more discriminating and better-deserved, attack on Tennyson's early poems in the Quarterly. He was himself no mean writer of verse. His Spanish Ballads (1823), in which he had both Southey and Scott as models before him, are of great excellence; and some of his occasional pieces display not merely much humour (which nobody ever denied him), but no mean share of the feeling which is certainly not often associated with his name. But verse was only an occasional pastime with him: his vocation was to write prose, and he wrote it with admirable skill and a seldom surpassed faculty of adaptation to the particular task. It is indeed probable – and it would be no discredit to him – that his reputation with readers as opposed to students will mainly depend, as it depends at present, upon his Life of Scott. Nor would even thus his plumes be borrowed over much. For though no doubt the letters and the diary of Sir Walter himself count for much in the interest of the book, though the beauty and nobility of Scott's character, his wonderful achievements, the pathetic revolution of his fortune, form a subject not easily matched, yet to be equal to such a subject is to be in another sense on an equality with it. Admiration for the book is not chequered or tempered, as it almost necessarily must be in the case of its only possible rival, Boswell's Johnson, with more or less contempt for the author; still less is it (as some have contended that admiration for Boswell is) due to that contempt. The taste and spirit of Lockhart's book are not less admirable than the skill of its arrangement and the competency of its writing; nor would it be easily possible to find a happier adjustment in this respect in the whole annals of biography.

But this great book ought not to obscure the other work which Lockhart has done. His biography of Burns is of remarkable merit; it may be questioned whether to this day, though it may be deficient in a few modern discoveries of fact (and these have been mostly supplied in the edition by the late Mr. Scott Douglas), it is not the best book on the subject. The taste and judgment, the clear vision and sound sense, which distinguished Lockhart, are in few places more apparent than here. His abridgment of Scott's Life of Napoleon is no ordinary abridgment, and is a work of thorough craft, if not even of art. His novels, with one exception, have ceased to be much read; and perhaps even that one can hardly be said to enjoy frequent perusal. Valerius, the first, is a classical novel, and suffers under the drawbacks which have generally attended its kind. Reginald Dalton, a novel in part of actual life at Oxford, and intended to be wholly of actual life, still shows something of the artificial handling, of the supposed necessity for adventure, which is observable in Hook and others of the time, and which has been sufficiently noticed in the last chapter. Matthew Wald, the last of the four, is both too gloomy and too extravagant: it deals with a mad hero. But Adam Blair, which was published in the same year (1821) with Valerius, is a wonderful little book. The story is not well told; but the characters and the principal situation – a violent passion entertained by a pious widowed minister for his neighbour's wife – are handled with extraordinary power. Peter's Letters, which is half a book and half journalism, may be said to be, with rare exceptions (such as an obituary article on Hook, which was reprinted from the Quarterly), the only specimen of Lockhart's miscellaneous writing that is easily accessible or authentically known. He was still but in his apprenticeship here; but his remarkable gifts are already apparent. These gifts included a faculty of sarcastic comment so formidable that it early earned him the title of "the Scorpion"; a very wide and sound knowledge of literature, old and new, English and foreign; some acquirements in art and in other matters; an excellent style, and a solid if rather strait-laced theory of criticism. Except that he was, as almost everybody was then, too much given to violent personalities in his anonymous work, he was a very great journalist indeed, and he was also a very great man of letters.

Thomas de Quincey was not of the earliest Blackwood staff (in that respect Maginn should be mentioned before him), but he was the older as well as the more important man of the two, and there is the additional reason for postponing the founder of Fraser, that this latter periodical introduced a fresh flight of birds of passage (as journalists both fortunate and unfortunate may peculiarly be called) to English literature. De Quincey was born in 1785 (the same year as his friend Wilson) at Manchester, where his father was a merchant of means. He was educated at the Grammar School of his native town, after some preliminary teaching at or near Bath, whither his mother had moved after his father's death. He did not like Manchester, and when he had nearly served his time for an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford, he ran away and hid himself. He went to Oxford after all, entering at Worcester, where he made a long though rather intermittent residence, but took no degree. In 1809 he took up his abode at Grasmere, married after a time, and lived there, at least as his headquarters, for more than twenty years. In 1830 he moved to Edinburgh, where, or in its neighbourhood, he resided for the rest of his long life, and where he died in December 1859. He has given various autobiographic handlings of this life – in the main it would seem quite trustworthy, but invested with an air of fantastic unreality by his manner of relation.

His life, however, and his personality, and even the whole of his voluminous published work, have in all probability taken colour in the general thought from his first literary work of any consequence, the wonderful Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which, with the Essays of Elia, were the chief flowers of the London Magazine, and appeared in that periodical during the year 1821. He had acquired this habit during his sojourn at Oxford, and it had grown upon him during his at first solitary residence at the Lakes to an enormous extent. Until he thus committed the results of his dreams, or of his fancy and literary genius working on his dreams, or of his fancy and genius by themselves, to print and paper, in his thirty-sixth year, he had been, though a great reader, hardly anything of a writer. But thenceforward, and especially after, in 1825, he had visited his Lake neighbour Wilson at Edinburgh, and had been by him introduced to Blackwood, he became a frequent contributor to different magazines, and continued to be so, writing far more even than he published, till his death. He wrote very few books, the chief being a very free translation of a German novel, forged as Scott's, and called Walladmor; a more original and stable, though not very brilliant, effort in fiction, entitled Klosterheim; and the Logic of Political Economy. Towards the end of his life he superintended an English collection – there had already been one in America – of his essays, and this has been supplemented more than once since.

It may, indeed, fairly be doubted whether so large a collection, of miscellaneous, heterogeneous, and, to tell the truth, very unequally interesting and meritorious matter, has ever been received with greater or more lasting popular favour, a fresh edition of the fourteen or sixteen volumes of the Works having been called for on an average every decade. There have been dissidents: and recently in particular something of a set has been made against De Quincey – a set to some extent helped by the gradual addition to the Works of a great deal of unimportant matter which he had not himself cared to reproduce. This, indeed, is perhaps the greatest danger to which the periodical writer is after his death exposed, and is even the most serious drawback to periodical writing. It is impossible that any man who lives by such writing can always be at his best in form, and he will sometimes be compelled to execute what Carlyle has called "honest journey-work in default of better," – work which, though perfectly honest and perfectly respectable, is mere journey-work, and has no claim to be disturbed from its rest when its journey is accomplished. Of this there was some even in De Quincey's own collection, and the proportion has been much increased since. Moreover, even at his very best, he was not a writer who could be trusted to keep himself at that best. His reading was enormous, – nearly as great perhaps as Southey's, though in still less popular directions, – and he would sometimes drag it in rather inappropriately. He had an unconquerable and sometimes very irritating habit of digression, of divagation, of aside. And, worst of all, his humour, which in its own peculiar vein of imaginative grotesque has seldom been surpassed, was liable constantly to degenerate into a kind of laboured trifling, inexpressibly exasperating to the nerves. He could be simply dull; and he can seldom be credited with the possession of what may be called literary tact.

Yet his merits were such as to give him no superior in his own manner among the essayists, and hardly any among the prose writers of the century. He, like Wilson, and probably before Wilson, deliberately aimed at a style of gorgeous elaboration, intended not exactly for constant use, but for use when required; and he achieved it. Certain well-known passages, as well as others which have not become hackneyed, in the Confessions of an Opium Eater, in the Autobiography, in The English Mail Coach, in Our Ladies of Sorrow, and elsewhere, are unsurpassed in English or out of it for imaginative splendour of imagery, suitably reproduced in words. Nor was this De Quincey's only, though it was his most precious gift. He had a singular, though, as has been said, a very untrustworthy faculty of humour, both grim and quaint. He was possessed of extraordinary dialectic ingenuity, a little alloyed no doubt by a tendency to wire-drawn and over subtle minuteness such as besets the born logician who is not warned of his danger either by a strong vein of common sense or by constant sojourn in the world. He could expound and describe admirably; he had a thorough grasp of the most complicated subjects when he did not allow will-o'-the-wisps to lure him into letting it go, and could narrate the most diverse kinds of action, such as the struggles of Bentley with Trinity College, the journey of the Tartars from the Ukraine to Siberia, and the fortunes of the Spanish Nun, Catalina, with singular adaptability. In his biographical articles on friends and contemporaries, which are rather numerous, he has been charged both with ill-nature and with inaccuracy. The first charge may be peremptorily dismissed, the second requires much argument and sifting in particular cases. To some who have given not a little attention to the matter it seems that De Quincey was never guilty of deliberate fabrication, and that he was not even careless in statement. But he was first of all a dreamer; and when it is true of a man that, in the words of the exquisite passage where Calderon has come at one with Shakespeare, his very dreams are a dream, it will often happen that his facts are not exactly a fact.

Nevertheless, De Quincey is a great writer and a great figure in literature, while it may plausibly be contended that journalism may make all the more boast of him in that it is probable that without it he would never have written at all. And he has one peculiarity not yet mentioned. Although his chief excellences may not be fully perceptible except to mature tastes, he is specially attractive to the young. Probably more boys have in the last forty years been brought to a love of literature proper by De Quincey than by any other writer whatever.

Of other contributors to these periodicals much might be said in larger space, as for instance of the poisoner-critic Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the "Janus Weathercock" of the London, the original of certain well-known heroes of Bulwer and Dickens, and the object of a more than once recurrent and distinctly morbid attention from young men of letters since. Lamb, who was not given to think evil of his friends, was certainly unlucky in calling Wainewright "warm- as light-hearted"; for the man (who died a convict in Australia, though he cheated the gallows which was his due) was both an affected coxcomb and a callous scoundrel. But he was a very clever fellow, though indignant morality has sometimes endeavoured to deny this. That he anticipated by sixty years and more certain depravations in style and taste notorious in our own day is something: it is more that his achievement in gaudy writing and in the literary treatment of art was really considerable.

Wainewright, however, is only "curious" in more than one sense of that term: Leigh Hunt, who, though quite incapable of poisoning anybody, had certain points in common with Wainewright on the latter's more excusable sides, and whose prose must now be treated, is distinguished. He reappears with even better right here than some others of the more important constituents of this chapter. For all his best work in prose appeared in periodicals, though it is impossible to say that all his work that appeared in periodicals was his best work. He was for fourteen years editor of, and a large contributor to, the Examiner, which he and his brother started in 1808. After his liberation from prison he not merely edited, but in the older fashion practically wrote the Reflector (1810), the Indicator (1819-21), and the Companion (1828). His rather unlucky journey to Italy was undertaken to edit the Liberal. He was one of the rare and rash men of letters who have tried to keep up a daily journal unassisted – a new Tatler, which lasted for some eighteen months (1830-32); and a little later (1834-35) he supported for full two years a similar but weekly venture, in part original, in part compiled or borrowed, called Leigh Hunt's London Journal. These were not his only ventures of the kind: he was an indefatigable contributor to periodicals conducted by others; and most of his books now known by independent titles are in fact collections of "articles" – sometimes reprinted, sometimes published for the first time.

It was impossible that such a mass of matter should be all good; and it is equally impossible to deny that the combined fact of so much production and of so little concentration argues a certain idiosyncrasy of defect. In fact the butterfly character which every unprejudiced critic of Leigh Hunt has noticed, made it impossible for him to plan or to execute any work on a great scale. He never could have troubled himself to complete missing knowledge, to fill in gaps, to co-ordinate thinking, as the literary historian, whose vocation in some respects he might seem to have possessed eminently, must do – to weave fancy into the novelist's solid texture, and not to leave it in thrums or in gossamer. But he was, though in both ways a most unequal, a delightful miscellanist and critic. In both respects it is natural, and indeed unavoidable, to compare him with Lamb and with Hazlitt, whom, however, he really preceded, forming a link between them and the eighteenth century essayists. His greater voluminousness, induced by necessity, puts him at a rather unfair disadvantage with the first; and we may perhaps never find in him those exquisite felicities which delight and justify the true "Agnist." Yet he has found some things that Lamb missed in Lamb's own subjects; and though his prejudices (of the middle-class Liberal and freethinking kind) were sometimes more damaging than any to which Lamb was exposed, he was free from the somewhat wilful eclecticism of that inimitable person. He could like nearly all things that were good – in which respect he stands above both his rivals in criticism. But he stands below them in his miscellaneous work; though here also, as in his poetry, he was a master, not a scholar. Lamb and Hazlitt improved upon him here, as Keats and Shelley improved upon him there. But what a position is it to be "improved upon" by Keats and Shelley in poetry, by Hazlitt and Lamb in prose!

Hartley Coleridge might with about equal propriety have been treated in the last chapter and in this; but the already formidable length of the catalogue of bards perhaps turns the scale in favour of placing him with other contributors to Blackwood, to which, thanks to his early friendship with Wilson, he enjoyed access, and in which he might have written much more than he did, and did actually write most of what he published himself, except the Biographia Borealis.

The life of Hartley was a strange and sad variant of his father's, though, if he lacked a good deal of S. T. C.'s genius, his character was entirely free from the baser stains which darkened that great man's weakness. Born (1796) at Clevedon, the first-fruits of the marriage of Coleridge and Sara, he was early celebrated by Wordsworth and by his father in immortal verse, and by Southey, his uncle, in charming prose, for his wonderful dreamy precocity; but he never was a great reader. Southey took care of him with the rest of the family when Coleridge disappeared into the vague; and Hartley, after schooling at Ambleside, was elected to a post-mastership at Merton College, Oxford. He missed the Newdigate thrice, and only got a second in the schools, but was more than consoled by a Fellowship at Oriel. Unfortunately Oriel was not only gaining great honour, but was very jealous of it; and the probationary Fellows were subjected to a most rigid system of observation, which seems to have gone near to espionage. If ever there was a man born to be a Fellow under the old English University scheme, that man was Hartley Coleridge; and it is extremely probable that if he had been let alone he would have produced, in one form or another, a justification of that scheme, worthy to rank with Burton's Anatomy. But he was accused of various shortcomings, of which intemperance seems to have been the most serious, though it is doubtful whether it would have sunk the beam if divers peccadilloes, political, social, and miscellaneous, had not been thrown in. Strong interest was made in favour of mercy, but the College deprived him of his Fellowship, granting him, not too consistently, a solatium of £300. This was apparently in 1820. Hartley lived for nearly thirty years longer, but his career was closed. He was, as his brother Derwent admits, one of those whom the pressure of necessity does not spur but numbs. He wrote a little for Blackwood; he took pupils unsuccessfully, and school-mastered with a little better success; and during a short time he lived with a Leeds publisher who took a fancy to him and induced him to write his only large book, the Biographia Borealis. But for the most part he abode at Grasmere, where his failing (it was not much more) of occasional intemperance was winked at by all, even by the austere Wordsworth, where he wandered about, annotated a copy of Anderson's Poets and some other books, and supported himself (with the curious Coleridgean faculty of subsisting like the bird of paradise, without either foot or foothold) till, at his mother's death, an annuity made his prospects secure. He died on 6th January 1849, a little before Wordsworth, and shortly afterwards his work was collected by his brother Derwent in seven small volumes; the Poems filling two, the Essays and Fragments two, and the Biographia Borealis three.

This last (which appeared in its second form as Lives of Northern Worthies, with some extremely interesting notes by S. T. C.) is an excellent book of its kind, and shows that under more favourable circumstances Hartley might have been a great literary historian. But it is on the whole less characteristic than the volumes of Poems and Essays. In the former Hartley has no kind of souffle (or long-breathed inspiration), nor has he those exquisite lyrical touches of his father's which put Coleridge's scanty and unequal work on a level with that of the greatest names in English poetry. But he has a singular melancholy sweetness, and a meditative grace which finds its special home in the sonnet. In the "Posthumous Sonnets" especially, the sound – not an echo of, but a true response to, Elizabethan music – is unmistakable, and that to Shakespeare ("the soul of man is larger than the sky"), that on himself ("When I survey the course that I have run"), and not a few others, rank among the very best in English. Many of the miscellaneous poems contain beautiful things. But on the whole the greatest interest of Hartley Coleridge is that he is the first and one of the best examples of a kind of poet who is sometimes contemned, who has been very frequent in this century, but who is dear to the lover of poetry, and productive of delightful things. This kind of poet is wanting, it may be, in what is briefly, if not brutally, called originality. He might not sing much if others had not sung and were not singing around him; he does not sing very much even as it is, and the notes of his song are not extraordinarily piercing or novel. But they are true, they are not copied, and the lover of poetry could not spare them.