Some Tory Critics.
Among those who sought with a delightsome pertinacity for flaws in the historic work of Macaulay, in his own time, was John Wilson Croker, to whom I have already alluded.[86] He was an older man than the historian; Irish by birth, handsome, well-allied by marriage, plausible, fawning on the great (who were of his party) wearing easily and boastfully his familiarity with Wellington, Lansdowne and Cumberland, airing daintily his literary qualities at the tables of Holland or Peel; proud of his place in Parliament, where he loved to show a satiric grace of speech, and the curled lips of one used to more elegant encounters. In short, he was the very man to light up the blazing contempt of such another as Macaulay; more than all since Croker was identified with the worst form of Toryism, and the other always his political antagonist.
Such being the animus of the parties, one can imagine the delight of Croker in detecting a blunder of Macaulay, and the delight of Macaulay when he was able to pounce upon the blunders in Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Johnson. This was on many counts an excellent work and—with its emendations—holds its ground now; but I think the slaps, and the scourgings, and the derisive mockery which the critic dealt out to the self-poised and elegant Croker have made a highly appetizing sauce piquante for the book these many a year. For my own part, I never enjoy it half so much as when I think of Macaulay’s rod of discipline “starting the dust out of the varlet’s [editor’s] jacket.”
It is not a question if Croker deserved this excoriation; we are so taken up with the dexterity and effectiveness with which the critical professor uses the surgeon’s knife, that we watch the operation, and the exceeding grace and ease with which he lays bare nerve after nerve, without once inquiring if the patient is really in need of such heroic treatment.
The Croker Papers[87]—two ponderous volumes of letters and diary which have been published in these latter years—have good bits in them; but they are rare bits, to be dredged for out from quagmires of rubbish. The papers are interesting, furthermore, as showing how a cleverish man, with considerable gifts of presence and of brain, with his re-actionary Toryism dominant, and made a fetich of, can still keep a good digestion and go in a respectable fashion through a long life—backwards, instead of “face to the front.”
In this connection it is difficult to keep out of mind that other Toryish administrator of the Quarterly bombardments of reform and of Liberalists—I mean Lockhart (to whom reference has already been made in the present volume), and who, with all of Croker’s personal gifts, added to these a still larger scorn than that of his elder associate in the Quarterly conclaves, for those whose social disabilities disqualified them for breathing the rarefied air which circulated about Albemarle Street and the courts of Mr. Murray. Even Mr. Lang in his apologetic but very interesting story of Lockhart’s life,[88] cannot forbear quiet reprehensive allusions to that critic’s odious way of making caustic allusion to “the social rank” of political opponents; although much of this he avers “is said in wrath.” Yet it is an unworthy wrath, always and everywhere, which runs in those directions. Lockhart, though an acute critic, and a very clever translator, was a supreme worshipper of “conditions,” rather than of qualities. He never forgave Americans for being Americans, and never preter-mitted his wrathy exposition of their ‘low-lived antecedents’ socially. The baronetcy of his father-in-law, Sir Walter Scott, was I think, a perpetual and beneficent regalement to him.