Nevertheless, De Quincey is a great writer and a great figure in literature, while it may plausibly be contended that journalism may make all the more boast of him in that it is probable that without it he would never have written at all. And he has one peculiarity not yet mentioned. Although his chief excellences may not be fully perceptible except to mature tastes, he is specially attractive to the young. Probably more boys have in the last forty years been brought to a love of literature proper by De Quincey than by any other writer whatever.
Of other contributors to these periodicals much might be said in larger space, as for instance of the poisoner-critic Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the "Janus Weathercock" of the London, the original of certain well-known heroes of Bulwer and Dickens, and the object of a more than once recurrent and distinctly morbid attention from young men of letters since. Lamb, who was not given to think evil of his friends, was certainly unlucky in calling Wainewright "warm- as light-hearted"; for the man (who died a convict in Australia, though he cheated the gallows which was his due) was both an affected coxcomb and a callous scoundrel. But he was a very clever fellow, though indignant morality has sometimes endeavoured to deny this. That he anticipated by sixty years and more certain depravations in style and taste notorious in our own day is something: it is more that his achievement in gaudy writing and in the literary treatment of art was really considerable.
Wainewright, however, is only "curious" in more than one sense of that term: Leigh Hunt, who, though quite incapable of poisoning anybody, had certain points in common with Wainewright on the latter's more excusable sides, and whose prose must now be treated, is distinguished. He reappears with even better right here than some others of the more important constituents of this chapter. For all his best work in prose appeared in periodicals, though it is impossible to say that all his work that appeared in periodicals was his best work. He was for fourteen years editor of, and a large contributor to, the Examiner, which he and his brother started in 1808. After his liberation from prison he not merely edited, but in the older fashion practically wrote the Reflector (1810), the Indicator (1819-21), and the Companion (1828). His rather unlucky journey to Italy was undertaken to edit the Liberal. He was one of the rare and rash men of letters who have tried to keep up a daily journal unassisted—a new Tatler, which lasted for some eighteen months (1830-32); and a little later (1834-35) he supported for full two years a similar but weekly venture, in part original, in part compiled or borrowed, called Leigh Hunt's London Journal. These were not his only ventures of the kind: he was an indefatigable contributor to periodicals conducted by others; and most of his books now known by independent titles are in fact collections of "articles"—sometimes reprinted, sometimes published for the first time.
It was impossible that such a mass of matter should be all good; and it is equally impossible to deny that the combined fact of so much production and of so little concentration argues a certain idiosyncrasy of defect. In fact the butterfly character which every unprejudiced critic of Leigh Hunt has noticed, made it impossible for him to plan or to execute any work on a great scale. He never could have troubled himself to complete missing knowledge, to fill in gaps, to co-ordinate thinking, as the literary historian, whose vocation in some respects he might seem to have possessed eminently, must do—to weave fancy into the novelist's solid texture, and not to leave it in thrums or in gossamer. But he was, though in both ways a most unequal, a delightful miscellanist and critic. In both respects it is natural, and indeed unavoidable, to compare him with Lamb and with Hazlitt, whom, however, he really preceded, forming a link between them and the eighteenth century essayists. His greater voluminousness, induced by necessity, puts him at a rather unfair disadvantage with the first; and we may perhaps never find in him those exquisite felicities which delight and justify the true "Agnist." Yet he has found some things that Lamb missed in Lamb's own subjects; and though his prejudices (of the middle-class Liberal and freethinking kind) were sometimes more damaging than any to which Lamb was exposed, he was free from the somewhat wilful eclecticism of that inimitable person. He could like nearly all things that were good—in which respect he stands above both his rivals in criticism. But he stands below them in his miscellaneous work; though here also, as in his poetry, he was a master, not a scholar. Lamb and Hazlitt improved upon him here, as Keats and Shelley improved upon him there. But what a position is it to be "improved upon" by Keats and Shelley in poetry, by Hazlitt and Lamb in prose!
Hartley Coleridge might with about equal propriety have been treated in the last chapter and in this; but the already formidable length of the catalogue of bards perhaps turns the scale in favour of placing him with other contributors to Blackwood, to which, thanks to his early friendship with Wilson, he enjoyed access, and in which he might have written much more than he did, and did actually write most of what he published himself, except the Biographia Borealis.
The life of Hartley was a strange and sad variant of his father's, though, if he lacked a good deal of S. T. C.'s genius, his character was entirely free from the baser stains which darkened that great man's weakness. Born (1796) at Clevedon, the first-fruits of the marriage of Coleridge and Sara, he was early celebrated by Wordsworth and by his father in immortal verse, and by Southey, his uncle, in charming prose, for his wonderful dreamy precocity; but he never was a great reader. Southey took care of him with the rest of the family when Coleridge disappeared into the vague; and Hartley, after schooling at Ambleside, was elected to a post-mastership at Merton College, Oxford. He missed the Newdigate thrice, and only got a second in the schools, but was more than consoled by a Fellowship at Oriel. Unfortunately Oriel was not only gaining great honour, but was very jealous of it; and the probationary Fellows were subjected to a most rigid system of observation, which seems to have gone near to espionage. If ever there was a man born to be a Fellow under the old English University scheme, that man was Hartley Coleridge; and it is extremely probable that if he had been let alone he would have produced, in one form or another, a justification of that scheme, worthy to rank with Burton's Anatomy. But he was accused of various shortcomings, of which intemperance seems to have been the most serious, though it is doubtful whether it would have sunk the beam if divers peccadilloes, political, social, and miscellaneous, had not been thrown in. Strong interest was made in favour of mercy, but the College deprived him of his Fellowship, granting him, not too consistently, a solatium of £300. This was apparently in 1820. Hartley lived for nearly thirty years longer, but his career was closed. He was, as his brother Derwent admits, one of those whom the pressure of necessity does not spur but numbs. He wrote a little for Blackwood; he took pupils unsuccessfully, and school-mastered with a little better success; and during a short time he lived with a Leeds publisher who took a fancy to him and induced him to write his only large book, the Biographia Borealis. But for the most part he abode at Grasmere, where his failing (it was not much more) of occasional intemperance was winked at by all, even by the austere Wordsworth, where he wandered about, annotated a copy of Anderson's Poets and some other books, and supported himself (with the curious Coleridgean faculty of subsisting like the bird of paradise, without either foot or foothold) till, at his mother's death, an annuity made his prospects secure. He died on 6th January 1849, a little before Wordsworth, and shortly afterwards his work was collected by his brother Derwent in seven small volumes; the Poems filling two, the Essays and Fragments two, and the Biographia Borealis three.
This last (which appeared in its second form as Lives of Northern Worthies, with some extremely interesting notes by S. T. C.) is an excellent book of its kind, and shows that under more favourable circumstances Hartley might have been a great literary historian. But it is on the whole less characteristic than the volumes of Poems and Essays. In the former Hartley has no kind of souffle (or long-breathed inspiration), nor has he those exquisite lyrical touches of his father's which put Coleridge's scanty and unequal work on a level with that of the greatest names in English poetry. But he has a singular melancholy sweetness, and a meditative grace which finds its special home in the sonnet. In the "Posthumous Sonnets" especially, the sound—not an echo of, but a true response to, Elizabethan music—is unmistakable, and that to Shakespeare ("the soul of man is larger than the sky"), that on himself ("When I survey the course that I have run"), and not a few others, rank among the very best in English. Many of the miscellaneous poems contain beautiful things. But on the whole the greatest interest of Hartley Coleridge is that he is the first and one of the best examples of a kind of poet who is sometimes contemned, who has been very frequent in this century, but who is dear to the lover of poetry, and productive of delightful things. This kind of poet is wanting, it may be, in what is briefly, if not brutally, called originality. He might not sing much if others had not sung and were not singing around him; he does not sing very much even as it is, and the notes of his song are not extraordinarily piercing or novel. But they are true, they are not copied, and the lover of poetry could not spare them.
It is improbable that Hartley Coleridge would ever have been a great poet: he might, if Fate or even if the Oriel dons had been a little kinder, have been a great critic. As it is, his essays, his introduction to Massinger and Ford, and his Marginalia, suffer on the one side from certain defects of reading; for his access to books was latterly small, and even when it had been ample, as at Oxford, in London, or at Southey's house, he confesses that he had availed himself of it but little. Hence he is often wrong, and more often incomplete, from sheer lack of information. Secondly, much of his work is mere jotting, never in the very least degree intended for publication, and sometimes explicitly corrected or retracted by later jottings of the same kind. In such a case we can rather augur of the might-have-been than pronounce on the actual. But the two volumes are full of delicate critical views on literature; and the longest series, "Ignoramus on the Fine Arts," shows how widely, with better luck and more opportunity, he might have extended his critical performances. In short, Hartley Coleridge, if a "sair sicht" to the moralist, is an interesting and far from a wholly painful one to the lover of literature, which he himself loved so much, and practised, with all his disadvantages, so successfully.
All the persons hitherto mentioned in this chapter appear by undoubted right in any history of English Literature: it may cause a little surprise to see that of Maginn figuring with them. Yet his abilities were scarcely inferior to those of any; and he was kept back from sharing their fame only by infirmities of character and by his succumbing to that fatal Bohemianism which, constantly recurring among men of letters, exercised its attractions with special force in the early days of journalism in this century. William Maginn (1793), who was the son of a schoolmaster at Cork, took a brilliant degree at Trinity College, Dublin, and for some years followed his father's profession. The establishment, however, and the style of Blackwood were an irresistible attraction to him, and he drifted to Edinburgh, wrote a great deal in the earlier and more boisterous days of Maga under the pseudonym of Ensign O'Doherty, and has, as has been said, some claims to be considered the originator of the Noctes. Then, as he had gone from Ireland to Edinburgh, he went from Edinburgh to London, and took part in divers Tory periodicals, acting as Paris correspondent for some of them till, about 1830, he started, or helped in starting, a London Blackwood in Fraser. He had now every opportunity, and he gathered round him a staff almost more brilliant than that of the Edinburgh, of the London, of the Quarterly, or of Blackwood itself. But he was equally reckless of his health and of his money. The acknowledged original of Thackeray's Captain Shandon, he was not seldom in jail; and at last, assisted by Sir Robert Peel almost too late, he died at Walton on Thames in August 1842, not yet fifty, but an utter wreck.
The collections of Maginn's work are anything but exhaustive, and the work itself suffers from all the drawbacks, probable if not inevitable, of work written in the intervals of carouse, at the last moment, for ephemeral purposes. Yet it is instinct with a perhaps brighter genius than the more accomplished productions of some much more famous men. The Homeric Ballads, though they have been praised by some, are nearly worthless; and the longer attempts in fiction are not happy. But Maginn's shorter stories in Blackwood, especially the inimitable "Story without a Tail," are charming; his more serious critical work, especially that on Shakespeare, displays a remarkable combination of wide reading, critical acumen, and sound sense; and his miscellanies in prose and verse, especially the latter, are characterised by a mixture of fantastic humour, adaptive wit, and rare but real pathos and melody, which is the best note of the specially Irish mode. It must be said, however, that Maginn is chiefly important to the literary historian as the captain of a band of distinguished persons, and as in a way the link between the journalism of the first and the journalism of the second third of the century. A famous plate by Maclise, entitled "The Fraserians," contains, seated round abundant bottles, with Maginn as president, portraits (in order by "the way of the sun," and omitting minor personages) of Irving, Gleig the Chaplain-General, Sir Egerton Brydges, Allan Cunningham, Carlyle, Count D'Orsay, Brewster, Theodore Hook, Lockhart, Crofton Croker of the Irish Fairy Tales, Jerdan, Dunlop of the "History of Fiction," Gait, Hogg, Coleridge, Harrison Ainsworth, Thackeray, Southey, and Barry Cornwall. It is improbable that all these contributed at one time, and tolerably certain that some of them were very sparing and infrequent contributors at any time, but the important point is the juxtaposition of the generation which was departing and the generation which was coming on—of Southey with Thackeray and of Coleridge with Carlyle. Yet it will be noticed (and the point is of some importance) that these new-comers are, at least the best of them, much less merely periodical writers than those who came immediately before them. In part no doubt this was accident; in part it was due to the greater prominence which novels and serial works of other kinds were beginning to assume; in part it may be to the fact that the great increase in the number of magazines and newspapers had lowered their individual dignity and perhaps their profitableness. But it is certain that of the list just mentioned, Thackeray and Carlyle, of the contemporary new generation of the Edinburgh Macaulay, of the nascent Westminster Mill, and others, were not, like Jeffrey, like Sydney Smith, like Wilson, and like De Quincey, content to write articles. They aspired to write, and they did write, books; and, that being so, they will all be treated in chapters other than the present, appropriated to the kinds in which their chief books were designed.