Wilson, the eldest of those just mentioned, though a younger man than any one as yet noticed in this chapter, and for many years the guiding spirit (there never has been any "editor" of Blackwood except the members of the firm who have published it) of Maga, must at some time or other have taken to literature, and would probably in any case have sooner or later written the poems and stories which exist under his name, but do not in the very least degree constitute its eminence. It was the chapter of accidents that made him a journalist and a critic. He was born in 1785, his father being a rich manufacturer of Paisley, was educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford, came early into a considerable fortune, married at twenty-six, and having established himself at Elleray on Windermere, lived there the life of a country gentleman, with more or less literary tastes. His fortune being lost by bad luck and dishonest agency, he betook himself to Edinburgh, and finding it impossible to get on with Jeffrey (which was not surprising), threw himself heart and soul into the opposition venture of Blackwood. He had, moreover, the extraordinary good luck to obtain, certainly on no very solid grounds (though he made at least as good a professor as another), the valuable chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, which of itself secured him from any fear of want or narrow means. But no penniless barrister on his promotion could have flung himself into militant journalism with more ardour than did Wilson. He re-created, if he did not invent, the Noctes Ambrosianæ—a series of convivial conversations on food, drink, politics, literature, and things in general, with interlocutors at first rather numerous, and not very distinct, but latterly narrowed down to "Christopher North" (Wilson himself), the "Ettrick Shepherd" (Hogg), and a certain "Timothy Tickler," less distinctly identified with Wilson's mother's brother, an Edinburgh lawyer of the name of Sym. A few outsiders, sometimes real (as De Quincey), sometimes imaginary, were, till the last, added now and then. And besides these conversations, which are his great title to fame, he contributed, also under the nom de guerre of Christopher North, an immense number of articles, in part collected as Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket, substantive collections on Homer, on Spenser, and others, and almost innumerable single papers and essays on things in general. From the time when Lockhart (see below) went to London, no influence on Blackwood could match Wilson's for some ten or twelve years, or nearly till the end of the thirties. Latterly ill-health, the death of friends and of his wife, and other causes, lessened his energy, and for some years before his death in 1854 he wrote little. Two years before that time his increasing ailments caused him even to resign his professorship.
Wilson—whose stories are merely mediocre, and whose poems, The Isle of Palms (1812) and The City of the Plague (1816), merely show that he was an intelligent contemporary of Scott and Byron, and a neighbour of the Lake poets—developed in his miscellaneous journalism one of the most puissant and luxuriant literary faculties of the time; and in particular was among the first in one, and perhaps the very first in another, kind of writing. The first and less valuable of the two was the subjection of most, if not all, of the topics of the newspaper to a boisterous but fresh and vigorous style of critical handling, which bears some remote resemblance to the styles of L'Estrange towards the end of the seventeenth century, and Bentley a little later, but is in all important points new. The second and higher was the attempt to substitute for the correct, balanced, exactly-proportioned, but even in the hands of Gibbon, even in those of Burke, somewhat colourless and jejune prose of the past age, a new style of writing, exuberant in diction, semi-poetical in rhythm, confounding, or at least alternating very sharply between, the styles of high-strung enthusiasm and extravagant burlesque, and setting at naught all precepts of the immediate elders. It would be too much, no doubt, to attribute the invention of this style to Wilson. It was "in the air"; it was the inevitable complement of romantic diction in poetry; it had been anticipated to some extent by others, and it displayed itself in various forms almost simultaneously in the hands of Landor, who kept to a more classical form, and of De Quincey, who was modern. But Wilson, unless in conversation with De Quincey, cannot be said to have learnt it from any one else: he preceded most in the time, and greatly exceeded all in the bulk and influence of his exercises, owing to his position on the staff of a popular and widely-read periodical.
The defect of both these qualities of Wilson's style (a defect which extends largely to the matter of his writings in criticism and in other departments) was a defect of sureness of taste; while his criticism was more vigorous than safe. Except his Toryism (which, however, was shot with odd flashes of democratic sentiment and a cross-vein of crotchety dislike not to England but to London), he had not many pervading prejudices. But at the same time he had not many clear principles: he was the slave of whim and caprice in his individual opinions; and he never seems to have been able to distinguish between a really fine thing and a piece of fustian, between an urbane jest and a piece of gross buffoonery, between eloquence and rant, between a reasoned condemnation and a spiteful personal fling. Accordingly the ten reprinted volumes of his contributions to Blackwood and the mass of his still uncollected articles contain the strangest jumble of good and bad in matter and form that exists anywhere. By turns trivial and magnificent, exquisite and disgusting, a hierophant of literature and a mere railer at men of letters, a prince of describers, jesters, enthusiasts, and the author of tedious and commonplace newspaper "copy," Wilson is one of the most unequal, one of the most puzzling, but also one of the most stimulating and delightful, figures in English literature. Perhaps slightly over-valued for a time, he has for many years been distinctly neglected, if not depreciated and despised; and the voluminousness of his work, coupled with the fact that it is difficult to select from it owing to the pervading inequality of its merits, may be thought likely to keep him in the general judgment at a lower plane than he deserves. But the influence which he exerted during many years both upon writers and readers by his work in Blackwood cannot be over-estimated. And it may be said without fear that no one with tolerably wide sympathies, who is able to appreciate good literature, will ever seriously undertake the reading of his various works without equal satisfaction and profit.
Wilson's principal coadjutor in the early days of Blackwood, and his friend of all days (though the mania for crying down not so much England as London made "Christopher North" indulge in some girds at his old comrade's editorship of the Quarterly), was a curious contrast to Wilson himself. This contrast may may have been due partly, but by no means wholly, to the fact that there was ten years between them. John Gibson Lockhart was born at Cambusnethan, where his father was minister, on 14th July 1794. Like Wilson, he was educated at Glasgow and at Oxford, where he took a first-class at a very early age, and whence he went to Germany, a completion of "study-years" which the revolutionary wars had for a long time rendered difficult, if not dangerous. On returning home he was called to the Scottish Bar, where it would seem that he might have made some figure, but for his inability to speak in public. Blackwood gave him the very opening suited to his genius; and for years he was one of its chief contributors, and perhaps the most dangerous wielder of the pretty sharp weapons in which its staff indulged. Shortly afterwards, in 1819, he published (perhaps with some slight assistance from Wilson) his first original book (he had translated Schlegel's Lectures on History earlier), Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk. The title was a parody on Scott's account of his continental journey after Waterloo, the substance an exceedingly vivacious account of the things and men of Edinburgh at the time, something after the fashion of Humphrey Clinker. Next year, on 29th April, Lockhart married Sophia, Scott's elder daughter; and the pair lived for some years to come either in Edinburgh or at the cottage of Chiefswood, near Abbotsford, Lockhart contributing freely to Blackwood, and writing his four novels and his Spanish Ballads. At the end of 1825 or the beginning of 1826, just at the time when his father-in-law's financial troubles set in, he received the appointment of editor of the Quarterly Review in succession, though not in immediate succession, to Gifford. He then removed to London, where he continued to direct the Review, to contribute for a time to Fraser, to be a very important figure in literary and political life, and after Scott's death to write an admirable Life. Domestic troubles came rather thickly on him after Scott's death, which indeed was preceded by that of Lockhart's own eldest son, the "Hugh Littlejohn" of the Tales of a Grandfather. Mrs. Lockhart herself died in 1837. In 1843 Lockhart received the auditorship of the duchy of Lancaster, a post of some value. Ten years later, in broken health, he resigned the editorship of the Quarterly, and died towards the end of the year.
Lockhart's works, at present uncollected, and perhaps in no small proportion irrecoverable, must have been of far greater bulk than those of any one yet mentioned in this chapter except Wilson, and not inconsiderably greater than his. They are also of a remarkable variety, and of an extraordinary level of excellence in their different kinds. Lockhart was not, like Wilson, an advocate or a practitioner of very ornate or revolutionary prose. On the contrary, he both practised, preached, and most formidably defended by bitter criticism of opposite styles, a manner in prose and verse which was almost classical, or which at least admitted no further Romantic innovation than that of the Lake poets and Scott. His authorship of the savage onslaught upon Keats in Blackwood is not proven; but there is no doubt that he wrote the scarcely less ferocious, though much more discriminating and better-deserved, attack on Tennyson's early poems in the Quarterly. He was himself no mean writer of verse. His Spanish Ballads (1823), in which he had both Southey and Scott as models before him, are of great excellence; and some of his occasional pieces display not merely much humour (which nobody ever denied him), but no mean share of the feeling which is certainly not often associated with his name. But verse was only an occasional pastime with him: his vocation was to write prose, and he wrote it with admirable skill and a seldom surpassed faculty of adaptation to the particular task. It is indeed probable—and it would be no discredit to him—that his reputation with readers as opposed to students will mainly depend, as it depends at present, upon his Life of Scott. Nor would even thus his plumes be borrowed over much. For though no doubt the letters and the diary of Sir Walter himself count for much in the interest of the book, though the beauty and nobility of Scott's character, his wonderful achievements, the pathetic revolution of his fortune, form a subject not easily matched, yet to be equal to such a subject is to be in another sense on an equality with it. Admiration for the book is not chequered or tempered, as it almost necessarily must be in the case of its only possible rival, Boswell's Johnson, with more or less contempt for the author; still less is it (as some have contended that admiration for Boswell is) due to that contempt. The taste and spirit of Lockhart's book are not less admirable than the skill of its arrangement and the competency of its writing; nor would it be easily possible to find a happier adjustment in this respect in the whole annals of biography.
But this great book ought not to obscure the other work which Lockhart has done. His biography of Burns is of remarkable merit; it may be questioned whether to this day, though it may be deficient in a few modern discoveries of fact (and these have been mostly supplied in the edition by the late Mr. Scott Douglas), it is not the best book on the subject. The taste and judgment, the clear vision and sound sense, which distinguished Lockhart, are in few places more apparent than here. His abridgment of Scott's Life of Napoleon is no ordinary abridgment, and is a work of thorough craft, if not even of art. His novels, with one exception, have ceased to be much read; and perhaps even that one can hardly be said to enjoy frequent perusal. Valerius, the first, is a classical novel, and suffers under the drawbacks which have generally attended its kind. Reginald Dalton, a novel in part of actual life at Oxford, and intended to be wholly of actual life, still shows something of the artificial handling, of the supposed necessity for adventure, which is observable in Hook and others of the time, and which has been sufficiently noticed in the last chapter. Matthew Wald, the last of the four, is both too gloomy and too extravagant: it deals with a mad hero. But Adam Blair, which was published in the same year (1821) with Valerius, is a wonderful little book. The story is not well told; but the characters and the principal situation—a violent passion entertained by a pious widowed minister for his neighbour's wife—are handled with extraordinary power. Peter's Letters, which is half a book and half journalism, may be said to be, with rare exceptions (such as an obituary article on Hook, which was reprinted from the Quarterly), the only specimen of Lockhart's miscellaneous writing that is easily accessible or authentically known. He was still but in his apprenticeship here; but his remarkable gifts are already apparent. These gifts included a faculty of sarcastic comment so formidable that it early earned him the title of "the Scorpion"; a very wide and sound knowledge of literature, old and new, English and foreign; some acquirements in art and in other matters; an excellent style, and a solid if rather strait-laced theory of criticism. Except that he was, as almost everybody was then, too much given to violent personalities in his anonymous work, he was a very great journalist indeed, and he was also a very great man of letters.
Thomas de Quincey was not of the earliest Blackwood staff (in that respect Maginn should be mentioned before him), but he was the older as well as the more important man of the two, and there is the additional reason for postponing the founder of Fraser, that this latter periodical introduced a fresh flight of birds of passage (as journalists both fortunate and unfortunate may peculiarly be called) to English literature. De Quincey was born in 1785 (the same year as his friend Wilson) at Manchester, where his father was a merchant of means. He was educated at the Grammar School of his native town, after some preliminary teaching at or near Bath, whither his mother had moved after his father's death. He did not like Manchester, and when he had nearly served his time for an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford, he ran away and hid himself. He went to Oxford after all, entering at Worcester, where he made a long though rather intermittent residence, but took no degree. In 1809 he took up his abode at Grasmere, married after a time, and lived there, at least as his headquarters, for more than twenty years. In 1830 he moved to Edinburgh, where, or in its neighbourhood, he resided for the rest of his long life, and where he died in December 1859. He has given various autobiographic handlings of this life—in the main it would seem quite trustworthy, but invested with an air of fantastic unreality by his manner of relation.
His life, however, and his personality, and even the whole of his voluminous published work, have in all probability taken colour in the general thought from his first literary work of any consequence, the wonderful Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which, with the Essays of Elia, were the chief flowers of the London Magazine, and appeared in that periodical during the year 1821. He had acquired this habit during his sojourn at Oxford, and it had grown upon him during his at first solitary residence at the Lakes to an enormous extent. Until he thus committed the results of his dreams, or of his fancy and literary genius working on his dreams, or of his fancy and genius by themselves, to print and paper, in his thirty-sixth year, he had been, though a great reader, hardly anything of a writer. But thenceforward, and especially after, in 1825, he had visited his Lake neighbour Wilson at Edinburgh, and had been by him introduced to Blackwood, he became a frequent contributor to different magazines, and continued to be so, writing far more even than he published, till his death. He wrote very few books, the chief being a very free translation of a German novel, forged as Scott's, and called Walladmor; a more original and stable, though not very brilliant, effort in fiction, entitled Klosterheim; and the Logic of Political Economy. Towards the end of his life he superintended an English collection—there had already been one in America—of his essays, and this has been supplemented more than once since.
It may, indeed, fairly be doubted whether so large a collection, of miscellaneous, heterogeneous, and, to tell the truth, very unequally interesting and meritorious matter, has ever been received with greater or more lasting popular favour, a fresh edition of the fourteen or sixteen volumes of the Works having been called for on an average every decade. There have been dissidents: and recently in particular something of a set has been made against De Quincey—a set to some extent helped by the gradual addition to the Works of a great deal of unimportant matter which he had not himself cared to reproduce. This, indeed, is perhaps the greatest danger to which the periodical writer is after his death exposed, and is even the most serious drawback to periodical writing. It is impossible that any man who lives by such writing can always be at his best in form, and he will sometimes be compelled to execute what Carlyle has called "honest journey-work in default of better,"—work which, though perfectly honest and perfectly respectable, is mere journey-work, and has no claim to be disturbed from its rest when its journey is accomplished. Of this there was some even in De Quincey's own collection, and the proportion has been much increased since. Moreover, even at his very best, he was not a writer who could be trusted to keep himself at that best. His reading was enormous,—nearly as great perhaps as Southey's, though in still less popular directions,—and he would sometimes drag it in rather inappropriately. He had an unconquerable and sometimes very irritating habit of digression, of divagation, of aside. And, worst of all, his humour, which in its own peculiar vein of imaginative grotesque has seldom been surpassed, was liable constantly to degenerate into a kind of laboured trifling, inexpressibly exasperating to the nerves. He could be simply dull; and he can seldom be credited with the possession of what may be called literary tact.
Yet his merits were such as to give him no superior in his own manner among the essayists, and hardly any among the prose writers of the century. He, like Wilson, and probably before Wilson, deliberately aimed at a style of gorgeous elaboration, intended not exactly for constant use, but for use when required; and he achieved it. Certain well-known passages, as well as others which have not become hackneyed, in the Confessions of an Opium Eater, in the Autobiography, in The English Mail Coach, in Our Ladies of Sorrow, and elsewhere, are unsurpassed in English or out of it for imaginative splendour of imagery, suitably reproduced in words. Nor was this De Quincey's only, though it was his most precious gift. He had a singular, though, as has been said, a very untrustworthy faculty of humour, both grim and quaint. He was possessed of extraordinary dialectic ingenuity, a little alloyed no doubt by a tendency to wire-drawn and over subtle minuteness such as besets the born logician who is not warned of his danger either by a strong vein of common sense or by constant sojourn in the world. He could expound and describe admirably; he had a thorough grasp of the most complicated subjects when he did not allow will-o'-the-wisps to lure him into letting it go, and could narrate the most diverse kinds of action, such as the struggles of Bentley with Trinity College, the journey of the Tartars from the Ukraine to Siberia, and the fortunes of the Spanish Nun, Catalina, with singular adaptability. In his biographical articles on friends and contemporaries, which are rather numerous, he has been charged both with ill-nature and with inaccuracy. The first charge may be peremptorily dismissed, the second requires much argument and sifting in particular cases. To some who have given not a little attention to the matter it seems that De Quincey was never guilty of deliberate fabrication, and that he was not even careless in statement. But he was first of all a dreamer; and when it is true of a man that, in the words of the exquisite passage where Calderon has come at one with Shakespeare, his very dreams are a dream, it will often happen that his facts are not exactly a fact.