JEFFREY
“All ends in song,” and in song end Scotland’s sorrows for that fatal unforgotten fight, in which all was lost but honour. Scarce a great family but lost her sons, the yeomen and peasants died like paladins, and the strongest of the Stuart kings made the best end of all of them, rushing forth from the fighting “schiltrom” and falling, pierced with arrows and hacked with bills, not a lance’s length from the English general. For this we have Surrey’s own word, and true it is that if the Scots were never led with less skill, they never did battle with more indomitable courage. Had not every leader fallen, save Home, the next day would have seen a renewal of the battle—
Where shivered was fair Scotland’s Spear,
And broken was her shield.
Flodden secured the success of Marmion, and gave the laurels to the brow of Scott. But it is certain that our age could dispense with Clara and her lover! The fiend of party, detested by Lord Dalkeith, moved the Whigs to take umbrage because more moan was made for Pitt than for Fox in one of the Introductory pieces, where by an error of the press several lines of the lament for Fox were omitted in early copies. “All the Whigs here are in arms against Marmion,” wrote Scott (March 13, 1808). Jeffrey now complained of “the manifest neglect of Scottish feelings,” which had been so injuriously flattered in the Lay, to the indignation of the rest of the Empire! Lockhart justly remarks that it was the British patriotism which vexed Jeffrey, whose Edinburgh Review did its best to throw cold water on the spirit of national resistance to Napoleon. He professed that his stupid criticism was a well meant effort to draw Scott from “so idle a task” as that in which he displayed his “pedantry.” Scott could bear the spite till Jeffrey charged him with want of patriotism, and that arrow rankled. Jeffrey dined with him on the day when Scott read the critique, and was cordially received, but his host ceased to write in the Edinburgh Review, and raised up another like unto it, a rival, the Tory Quarterly.
CHAPTER III
QUARTERLY REVIEW, LADY OF THE LAKE, ROKEBY, BALLANTYNE AFFAIRS
As Scott had now become a professional man of letters, while remaining a well paid official, it may be convenient to glance at the state of the literary calling in 1808. Britain was not yet a wildly excitable and hysterical country. Rapidity of communication of news had not irritated the nerves of the community. We won or lost a battle, but as men knew nothing about it till long after the event, as they did not sit with their eyes on a tape, as there were not fresh editions of the evening newspaper every quarter of an hour, they could be engaged in war without wholly abandoning the study and purchase of books. A few years after Scott’s death, a Parliamentary Commission inquired into the financial conditions of publishers and authors. The Commission learned, from one of Messrs. Longmans’ firm, that it was not unusual for gentlemen to “form libraries” (the expression “every gentleman’s library” survives as a jest), but that the practice began to decline in 1814, and had now ceased to be.
The man who killed the formation of private libraries was Walter Scott. His Waverley appeared in 1814, and henceforth few people purchased any books except novels. Poetry soon became a “drug in the market,” and the taste for “the classics,” whether ancient or modern, died away: the novel was everything, and presently novels were procured from the circulating library.
“QUARTERLY REVIEW”
It was the fortune of Scott to take full advantage of the traditional usage of “forming libraries” in the years between the appearance of the Lay and of Waverley. He edited Dryden in many volumes, and was fairly well paid. By doubling the price, Constable induced him to edit Swift’s works, and to write the best extant Life of Swift. He also edited the important Sadleir Papers, the diplomatic correspondence of the agent of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, a most valuable book to the historian, and he was concerned in many antiquarian publications. These were undertaken partly from love of the past, partly for the purpose of gaining employment for needy men of letters like Henry Weber, a German who later became insane and challenged Scott to a pistol duel across a table! Constable was usually the publisher of the ventures, but Constable had a partner, a Mr. Hunter, a laird, no less, who bullied Weber, and behaved to Scott in a manner which he deemed insufferable.
Again, politics came between Constable and Scott. Constable was the publisher of the Edinburgh Review, which had filled up the measure of its iniquities. No man likes to be called an unpatriotic pedant, and Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review, had called Scott both pedantic and unpatriotic. Again, the year 1808 saw the Spanish national rising against Napoleon. Backed by Britain and Wellington, and by the infatuation of Bonaparte himself,[4] by the fatuous Moscow expedition, and the revenge of Germany, the rising of the Peninsula overthrew the French Emperor. But the Edinburgh Review and the Whigs had no taste for a national rising in the name of freedom. The Spanish, they observed, were a Catholic and intolerant people, not like the liberal French. The Spanish insurrections began in massacres of unpopular officials, and, at Valencia (June 6, 7, 1808), in the murder of the whole colony of French merchants in the town. That French Republican mobs should massacre uncounted victims was very well: it was intolerable to the Whigs that Spanish Catholic mobs should imitate them. The Spanish cause was both disreputable and desperate, said the Whigs. England, if she aided Spain, must perish in the same ruin. Such was the song of the Edinburgh Review, at that time the only critical journal conducted by educated men. Meanwhile Scott recognized the genius of Wellesley—“I would to God he were now at the head of the English in Spain!”