No incident in the ruthless duty of the critical historian has given me more trouble, or been carried through with more reluctance, than this handling of De Quincey. I have to acknowledge a great, a very early, and a constantly continued indebtedness to him. I could, as was hinted at the beginning of this notice, compile a long and brilliant list of separate instances in which his old-man-of-the-sea caprices have left him free to give admirable critical pronouncements. His suggestive and protreptic[[915]] quality cannot be overrated. On a philosophical point of criticism he is very rarely wrong, though even here he is too apt to labour the point, as in his deductions in the Appraisal from the true and important caution that “sublime” is a defective and delusive word for the subject of Longinus. But he is of those critics, too commonly to be found in the present stage of our inquiry, who are eminently unsafe—who require to be constantly surrounded with keepers and guards. I do not remember that Mr Matthew Arnold often, or ever, refers to De Quincey. But I cannot help thinking that, in his strictures on the English critics of his earlier time, he must often have had him in mind. He could not have charged him with narrow reading. He could not have charged him with mere insularity, or with flattery of his co-insulars. But he might easily have produced him,—and it would have been very difficult to get him out of the Arnoldian clutches, as a victim of that “eternal enemy of Art, Caprice.”

Lockhart.

There are few critics of whom we have been less allowed to form a definite and well-grounded opinion, than of one of the most famous of the practitioners of the art in the first half of the nineteenth century. Some, I should hope, of the very unjust obloquy which used to rest on Lockhart for his “scorpion” quality has been removed by Mr Lang’s Life: but of his more than thirty years of criticism not much more is accessible than what was public the day after his death. It is true that this—the main articles of it being the Scott, the Burns, the Theodore Hook, and the earlier Peter’s Letters[[916]]—is a very goodly literary baggage indeed, and one which any man of letters might consent to have produced, at the cost of a large curtailment of his peau de chagrin. Difficulty of appraising his criticism. It is true, further, that great part of it puts Lockhart in the forefront of the critical army. But its criticism, like the mousquetaireship of Aramis, is but of an interim order; and of the necessarily great body of anonymous reviewing, wherein at once the sting and the strength of his critical powers must have been revealed, we have but a very few instances even indirectly authenticated, the chief being the famous Quarterly review of Tennyson’s early work. Eking this further with indications from letters and the like, we shall find in Lockhart a notable though a more accomplished instance of the class of critic to which, on the other side, Jeffrey also belonged. He is differentiated from Jeffrey by a harder, if clearer and stronger, intellect, by more critical system, and, no doubt, by less amiability of temper. He had formed his taste by a deeper and wider education, he possessed a better style, and he had, as his non-critical work shows, far more imagination.

The Tennyson review.

In the “Tennyson” paper, the authorship of which appears to be certain, we have an example of Lockhart himself and of the school of criticism which he represents, very far from at the best, but far also from at the worst. This worst would have been nearly reached by him, if we could believe the earlier “Keats” article in Blackwood to be his—a charge which, fortunately, is as yet Not Proven to any competent court, though there may be searchings of heart about it. Undoubtedly Lockhart was capable of indulging in that style of sneering insolence which, though it is intellectually at a higher level by far than the other style of hectoring abuse, is nearly as offensive, and less excusable because it requires and denotes this very intellectual superiority. But the author of the Tennyson article displays neither. He is merely polite and even good-tempered for the most part; and it is constantly necessary to remember, that if there were beauties which ought to have drawn his eyes away from the faults, there were, in the earlier versions of these early poems, faults enough to draw the eyes of any critic of his stamp away from the beauties. There were trivial and mawkish things which have disappeared entirely; flawed things which have been reforged into perfect ring and temper; things, in the main precious, which were marred by easily removable disfigurements. From unwillingness to accept the later stages of a movement of which he had joyfully shared the earlier, Lockhart cannot be cleared; but his guilt extends little further.

On Coleridge, Burns, Scott, and Hook.

And he has excellent compurgation to bring forward against it. Quite early, in Peter’s Letters, he had defended the genius of Coleridge against his detractors with admirable vigour and taste. He is extraordinarily good on Burns. The abundant critical remarks which he has interspersed in the Life of Scott itself, afford a wonderful exhibition of sensitiveness and fineness of taste, with nothing to be set on the other side except the very pardonable tendency to undervalue and grudge a little in the case of the non-Scottish novels. But an almost better instance of Lockhart’s critical power, on the biographical as well as the literary side, is to be found in his article on Theodore Hook, with its remarkable welcome of the new school of Victorian novelists, which shows that his want of receptivity, as regards new poetry, did not extend to prose fiction.