Magazines and Essayists.
Magazines, critical, literary, social, and antiquarian magazines, had flourished in the later years of the eighteenth century. With the nineteenth, in 1802, appeared "The Edinburgh Review," critical and political, edited by Francis Jeffrey (born at Edinburgh, 1773, died 1850). Though a man of ability and of a crackling kind of cleverness, Jeffrey was wholly incompetent to criticize the works of the great romantic poets, the chief glories in literature of an age so rich in the renowns of war. Scott aided Jeffrey at first, but partly vexed by the coxcombry of his review of "Marmion," more by the pro-French tone of his Whig review, the Sheriff deserted the "Blue and Buff," and helped to found the Tory "Quarterly Review," published by Murray, and edited by the learned but crabbed and dilatory Gifford. Both magazines had esteemed contributors: the "Edinburgh" was enlivened by the high spirits and wit of Sydney Smith (1771-1845), qualities not always controlled by good taste when he made merry with Nonconformists—Bishops, of course, were reckoned fair game—and with squires, old familiar butts of every wit. Henry Brougham, later Lord Brougham (1778-1868), was always ready to write the whole magazine, if needful; what Macaulay thought of him, much later, may be read in the letters of the historian. Edinburgh professors and Francis Horner helped. Horner died young; much had been expected of him. The modern reader of the old "Edinburghs" will not find in them much entertainment, except from Sydney Smith's gaiety and Jeffrey's exhibitions of conceited incompetence as a judge of poetry. Both the "Edinburgh" and the "Quarterly," carried political rancour into literary criticism; both dealt in insolent personal bludgeon-work. From such matter the contributions in the "Quarterly" of Southey and Scott were free, and as Scott dealt with topics of permanent literary and historical interest, his essays retain their value: though Canning and other contributors to the "Anti-Jacobin" wrote for the "Quarterly," their buoyant humour of parody and their high spirits did not lighten up its august pages. As the younger poets, Shelley, Byron, and Keats, were either revolutionary or, in Keats's case, supposed to be, at least, Whigs and associates of Whigs, the "Quarterly" was more frequently disgraced by political abuse of poetical works than the "Edinburgh".
"Blackwood's Magazine," after a few months of stagnation, came into the hands of Mr. Blackwood, a bookseller of sound sense and masterful character, who was practically his own editor, though he allowed John Wilson (1785-1854) and John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) to play their pranks. Wilson, of Magdalen College, Oxford, was a splendid athlete, and excelled in country sports; Lockhart, of Balliol, very young in 1817, was of remarkable beauty, with a strongly sarcastic pen ("The Scorpion"), and as sardonic as his far-away cousin in the past, Lockhart of Carnwath, the manager of Jacobite affairs under James VIII. and III., and the author of valuable Memoirs. These two, on a night of claret and mirth, composed "The Chaldee Manuscript," a jape written in Scriptural style on all the notables of Scottish literary society. To persons who understand the allusions, it is still full of very mirthful matter, but many grave sufferers were as little amused as John Knox was by a delightful parody of himself and his associates by young Thomas Maitland, brother of Maitland of Lethington, Secretary of State to Queen Mary. Thenceforth, "Blackwood's," was for several years engaged in broils, which culminated in the death of John Scott, then Editor of "The London Magazine" in which Lamb often wrote. In this serial Scott attacked Lockhart, who went to London to fight him. Scott kept advancing reasons for not meeting Lockhart, who "posted" him and went home. Scott then entangling himself in a dispute with Lockhart's college friend, Christie, put himself in the hands of Horace Smith of "The Rejected Addresses," and of Mr. Patmore. Mr. Patmore's ignorance of the laws of the duello made it necessary for Christie (who had fired once in the air, and thereby legally ended the duel) to shoot in the direction of Scott, who fell mortally wounded. The brawls of "Blackwood's" were detested by Sir Walter Scott, whose daughter Lockhart had married. Wilson, who had no connexion with this tragedy, was an early devotee of Wordsworth's poetry, and himself wrote "The Isle of Palms," "The City of the Plague," and two or three "Kailyard" novels. His memory is best preserved by the high spirits and occasional sentiment and humour of his "Noctes Ambrosianæ," dialogues in which the Ettrick Shepherd is the most conspicuous hero; not always with his own good will or to his own advantage. Wilson was of a most mercurial temperament; his fiery style was apt to be too florid; his caprices of temper were unaccountable; and probably his most permanent work is found in his descriptions of nature and of sport. He was for long Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. Lockhart is seen to most advantage in his immortal "Life of Sir Walter Scott," a noble union of perfect candour with passionate affection for the great man of whom he wrote. His social fastidiousness must always have been vexed by Scott's intimacy with the Ballantyne brothers, who, again, had been incapable of controlling Scott's tendency to large expenditure; indeed, the books of the firm were in a state of chaos. The strictures on these Ballantynes were a blemish in a book which, with Boswell's "Johnson," holds the highest place in English literary biography. It is even more in a few pieces of original verse (such as Carlyle's favourite, "It is an Old Belief") than in the best of his "Spanish Ballads" that Lockhart reveals the poetry within him, and the tenderness of a heart on which he laid the fetter lock of his ancient scutcheon. Of his novels, as we have said, "Adam Blair" is by far the best. He became Editor of the "Quarterly Review" in 1825; his death (1854) took him from a world darkened for him by many bereavements and other sorrows. His body sleeps in Dryburgh Abbey, "at the feet of Sir Walter Scott".
We now turn to the great essayists of the early nineteenth century.
Charles Lamb.
He who would write briefly of Charles Lamb is under this disadvantage: to open a volume of Lamb's essays or letters is to remain absorbed in them, and in wondering affectionate admiration. A man is fascinated by the book, however often read before, and cannot take up the pen.
Born in Crown Office Row, in the Temple (10 February, 1775), Lamb was the son of the clerk of a barrister, Samuel Salt, a Lincolnshire man; his maternal grandmother was housekeeper at the ancient house of Blakesware, in Herts. Lamb has described these people and that place in his essays, "Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," "Blakesmoor in H——shire," and his own infantile mental state (much like that of R. L. Stevenson in some ways), in "Witches and Other Night Fears," while his own and Coleridge's school days are commemorated in "Recollections of Christ's Hospital," and (here he assumes the part of Coleridge), in "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago". To begin the study of Lamb with these essays is in part to understand him, and is wholly to fall in love with him. We see his father, with his honesty, courtesy, and courage; with his "merriest quips and conceits" and many little artistic accomplishments, "a brother of the angle, moreover," devoted to the theatre, an enthusiast for Garrick, and, too early, "in the last sad state of human weakness," babbling of his boyhood. Lamb inherited the "merry quips," and was an inveterate punster. The "conceits" derived from constant reading of Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, and the then neglected early dramatists, abound in his style. The love of the stage he also inherited, and constantly expresses; and, he says, "from my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch stories," and fond of a picture in a great book on the Bible "of the Witch Raising of Samuel, which I wish I had never seen". (The present writer's childhood was dominated by the same picture.) He never laid his head on the pillow, from his fourth to his eighth year, "without an assurance which realized its own prophecy" of seeing some frightful spectres. He supposed that these imaginations might date from "our ante-mundane condition". They were, in fact, proofs of his imaginative genius in infancy, for any child may have the fears, yet never fancy that it sees the phantasms. Conceivably the strain of madness in Lamb's blood, the madness which made his sister Mary slay her own mother, and affected her at frequent intervals, was also for something in his childish terrors. In later life his dreams wandered in great cities never visited by him, which he saw "with a map-like distinctness of trace, a daylight vividness of vision". He thought that "the degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in the same soul waking". His verses, like "When maidens such as Hester die," though exquisite, give less proof of his poetical faculty than his essay on "Dream Children," and on his lost love, which is perhaps the most beautiful example of his peculiar pathos.
Thus, throughout his essays, Lamb is constantly studying and revealing himself, his sister, his friends, with varying disguises and alterations of circumstance. In his "Character of the Late Elia," (his pseudonym) he is his own critic. "Better it is that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him." Unnatural it would have been to him, even in the briefest note to a friend, to write in a plain forthright style, but his quaintnesses and his conceits are never obscure. Elia "gave himself too little concern about what he uttered and in whose presence". That this is too true appears in the famous scene where he desired "to feel the bumps" of a very stupid comptroller of stamps, and was not to be restrained by Wordsworth's mild "My dear Charles!" What pranks, with his confessed "imperfect sympathy" with Scots, he may have played before the avenging Carlyle, no man knows. His friends "were, for the most part, persons of uncertain fortune ... a ragged regiment". "He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people." "The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood." Passing all his best hours at a desk in the India Office, he returned to his gambols when free. His essays were part of his playtime; in them he was his real self.