There's Pippins and Cheese to Come

by Charles S. Brooks

The founding of the Review was casual. These men were accustomed to meet of an evening for general discussion and speculation. It happened one night as they sat together—the place was a garret if legend is to be believed—that Sydney Smith lamented that their discussions came to nothing, for they were all Whigs, all converted to the cause; whereas if they could only bring their opinions to the outside public they could stir opinion. From so slight a root the Review sprouted. Sydney Smith was made editor and kept the position until after the appearance of the first number, when Jeffrey succeeded him. The Review became immediately a power, appearing quarterly and striking its blows anonymously against a sluggish government, lashing the Tory writers, and taking its part, which is of greater consequence, in the promulgation of the Whig reforms which were to ripen in thirty years and convert the old into modern England. In the destruction of outworn things, it was, as it were, a magazine of Whig explosives.

The Quarterly Review was the next to come and it was Tory. John Murray, the London publisher, had been the English distributor of the Edinburgh Review. In 1809, two considerations moved him to found in London a review to rival the Scotch periodical. First the Tory party was being hard hit by the Edinburgh Review and there was need of defense and retaliation. In the second place, John Murray saw that if his publishing house was to flourish, it must provide this new form of literature that had become so popular. For the very shortness of the essays and articles, in which extensive conditions were summarized for quick digestion, had met with English approval as well as Scotch. People had become accustomed, says Bagehot, of taking "their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey." Murray appealed to George Canning, then in office, for assistance and was introduced to William Gifford as a man capable of the undertaking, who would also meet the favor of the government party. The rise of the Quarterly Review was not brilliant. It did not fill the craving for novelty, inasmuch as the Edinburgh was already in the field. Furthermore, there is not the opportunity in defense for as conspicuous gallantry as in offensive warfare.

It was eight years before another enduring review was started. William Blackwood of Edinburgh had grown like Murray from a bookseller to a publisher, and he, too, looked for a means of increasing his prestige. He had launched a review the year previously, in 1816, but it had foundered when it was scarcely off the ways. His second attempt he was determined must be successful. His new editors were John G. Lockhart and John Wilson, and the new policy, although nominally Tory, was first and last the magazine's notoriety. It hawked its wares into public notice by sensational articles and personal vilification. Wilson was thirty-two and Lockhart twenty-three, yet they were as mischievous as boys. In their pages is found the most abominable raving that has ever passed for literary criticism. They did not need any party hatred to fire them. William Blackwood welcomed any abuse that took his magazine out of "the calm of respectable mediocrity." Anything that stung or startled was welcome to a place in its pages.

So Blackwood's was published and Edinburgh city, we may be sure, set up a roar of delight and anger. Never before had one's friends been so assailed. Never before had one's enemies been so grilled. How pleasing for a Tory fireside was the mud bath with which it defiled Coleridge, who was—and you had always known it—"little better than a rogue." One's Tory dinner was the more toothsome for the hot abuse of the Chaldee Manuscript. What stout Tory, indeed, would doze of an evening on such a sheet! There followed of course cases of libel. The editors even found it safer, after the publication of the first number, to retire for a time to the country until the city cooled.

I choose now to turn to the pages of these three reviews and set out before you samples of their criticisms, in order that you may contrast them with our own literary judgments. I warn you in fairness that I have been disposed to choose the worst, yet there are hundreds of other criticisms but little better. Of the three reviews, Blackwood's was the least seriously political in its policy, yet its critical vilifications are the worst. The Edinburgh Review, the most able of the three and the most in earnest in politics, is the least vituperative. With this introduction, let us shake the pepperpot and lay out the strong vinegar of our feast!

In the judgment of the Edinburgh Review, Tom Moore, who had just published his "Odes and Epistles" but had not yet begun his Irish melodies, is a man who "with some brilliancy of fancy, and some show of classical erudition … may boast, if the boast can please him, of being the most licentious of modern versifiers, and the most poetical of those who, in our times, have devoted their talents to the propagation of immorality. We regard his book, indeed, as a public nuisance…. He sits down to ransact the impure places of his memory for inflammatory images and expressions, and commits them laboriously in writing, for the purpose of insinuating pollution into the minds of unknown and unsuspecting readers."

Francis Jeffrey wrote this, and Moore challenged him to fight. The police interfered, and as Jeffrey put it, "the affair ended amicably. We have since breakfasted together very lovingly. He has expressed penitence for what he has written and declared that he will never again apply any little talents he may possess to such purpose: and I have said that I shall be happy to praise him whenever I find that he has abjured these objectionable topics." It was Sydney Smith who said of Jeffrey he would "damn the solar system—bad light—planets too distant—pestered with comets. Feeble contrivance—could make a better with great ease."

Jeffrey reviewed Wordsworth and found in the "Lyrical Ballads" "vulgarity, affectation and silliness." He is alarmed, moreover, lest his "childishness, conceit and affectation" spread to other authors. He proposes a poem to be called "Elegiac Stanzas to a Sucking Pig," and of "Alice Fell" he writes that "if the publishing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted." When the "White Doe of Rylstone" was published—no prime favorite, I confess, of my own—Jeffrey wrote that it had the merit of being the very worst poem he ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume. "It seems to us," he wrote, "to consist of a happy union of all the faults, without any of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry. It is just such a work, in short, as some wicked enemy of that, school might be supposed to have devised, on purpose to make it ridiculous."

Lord Byron, on the publication of an early volume, is counselled "that he do forthwith abandon poetry … the mere rhyming of the final syllable, even when accompanied by the presence of a certain number of feet … is not the whole art of poetry. We would entreat him to believe," continued the reviewer, "that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem; and that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain at least one thought…." It was this attack that brought forth Byron's "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."

As long as Jeffrey hoped to enlist Southey to write for the Edinburgh Review, he treated him with some favor. But Southey took up with the Quarterly. "The Laureate," says the Edinburgh presently, "has now been out of song for a long time: But we had comforted ourselves with the supposition that he was only growing fat and lazy…. The strain, however, of this publication, and indeed of some that went before it, makes us apprehensive that a worse thing has befallen him … that the worthy inditer of epics is falling gently into dotage."