Even those who hated Jeffrey admitted his power. “Birds seldom sing,” quoth Allan Cunningham, “when the kite is in the air, and bards dreaded the Judge Jeffrey of our day as much as political offenders dreaded the Judge Jeffreys of James the Second.” Talfourd, Lamb’s friend and editor, asserted of Jeffrey that “with little imagination, little genuine wit, and no clear view of any great and central principles of criticism, he ... continued to dazzle, to astonish, and occasionally to delight multitudes of readers, and at one time to hold the temporary fate of authors in his hands.”
By way of final testimony to the magnitude of Jeffrey’s fame, Macaulay and Carlyle may be quoted at length in his praise. One of Macaulay’s letters of 1828 deals wholly with his impressions of Jeffrey, at whose home he had just been staying; the tone of the letter is that of unmixed hero-worship; no details of the Scotch critic’s appearance or habits or opinions are too slight to be sent to the Macaulay household in London. “He has twenty faces almost as unlike each other as my father’s to Mr. Wilberforce’s.... The mere outline of his face is insignificant. The expression is everything; and such power and variety of expression I never saw in any human countenance.... The flow of his kindness is quite inexhaustible.... His conversation is very much like his countenance and his voice, of immense variety.... He is a shrewd observer; and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem to stand when in his company.”[1] These are only a few of Macaulay’s details and admiring comments. Nor did he outgrow this intense admiration. In April, 1843, he writes to Macvey Napier that he has read and reread Jeffrey’s old articles till he knows them by heart; and in December, 1843, on the appearance of Jeffrey’s collected essays, he expresses himself in almost unmeasured terms: “The variety and versatility of Jeffrey’s mind seem to me more extraordinary than ever.... I do not think that any one man except Jeffrey, nay that any three men, could have produced such diversified excellence.... Take him all in all, I think him more nearly an universal genius than any man of our time.”[2]
Macaulay, however, may not be wholly beyond suspicion as a witness in Jeffrey’s favour. He himself had much of Jeffrey’s dryness and positiveness of nature, was temperamentally limited in many of the same ways, and was, like Jeffrey, an ardent Whig of the Constitutional type; for all these reasons he may be thought prejudiced. In Carlyle, on the other hand, we have a witness who was as far as possible from sympathy with Jeffrey’s neat little formulas in art and in politics, and who has never been accused of registering unduly charitable opinions of even his best friends. Yet of Jeffrey he says, “It is certain there has no Critic appeared among us since who was worth naming beside him;—and his influence, for good and for evil, in Literature and otherwise, has been very great.... His Edinburgh Review [was] a kind of Delphic Oracle, and Voice of the Inspired, for great majorities of what is called the ‘Intelligent Public’; and himself regarded universally as a man of consummate penetration, and the facile princeps in the department he had chosen to cultivate and practise.”[3]
How has it happened that Jeffrey’s lustre, once so brilliant, has paled in our day into that of a fifth-rate luminary? Was his earlier reputation wholly undeserved? Or is the “dumb forgetfulness” that has overtaken him a real case of literary injustice? Probably Jeffrey is now oftenest remembered for his unluckily haughty reprimand to Wordsworth, “This will never do!”—a sentence which is popularly taken to be an incontestable proof of critical incapacity. Yet as regards the artistic worth of the Excursion, the poem against which Jeffrey was protesting, judges are at present nearer in agreement with Jeffrey than with Wordsworth. Ought not Jeffrey, the critic, then, to benefit somewhat from the latter-day reaction against overweening Romanticism?
Doubtless, Jeffrey’s fate is in part merely an illustration of the transiency of critical fame. Jeffrey, like Rymer and John Dennis, has gone the deciduous way of all writers of literature about literature, save the few who have been actually themselves, in their prose, creators of beauty. Yet probably there is also something exceptional in Jeffrey’s case,—in his earlier complete ascendency and in the later sorry disinheriting that has overtaken him. Jeffrey’s reputation was really a composite affair, due fully as much to the timely-happy establishment of the Edinburgh Review as to his own personal cleverness, great as that was. On Jeffrey, the editor, was reflected all the shining success of the first brilliant English Review. To understand, then, the waxing and the waning of Jeffrey’s literary reputation, a somewhat careful analysis will be needed not simply of his critical genius, but also of the methods for making that genius effective which fortune offered him and his own keen practical instincts worked out successfully. As for his individual worth as a critic, the truth will be found to lie, as so often happens, about midway between the eulogists and the cavillers. Judged even by present standards, Jeffrey was a notably effective critic; he made blunders not a few, but he was acute, entertaining, and suggestive, even when he went astray; he excelled in rapid analysis, apt illustration, and audacious satire. He developed critical method in two very important directions, and seized upon and applied, with at least partial success, two critical principles, hardly recognized in England before his day, but thereafter more and more widely and fruitfully employed. All these are points, however, that need to be minutely dealt with and illustrated.
[II]
It was on Jeffrey’s versatility—the universality of his genius—that Macaulay’s comments in 1843 laid special stress. That versatility remains noteworthy for good or for ill to-day. No modern literary critic would venture on the vast range of subjects that Jeffrey, even in the seventy or eighty of his essays that he thought worth preserving, has magisterially dealt with. His Collected Essays are arranged under the following seven headings: General Literature; History; Poetry; Philosophy of the Mind, Metaphysics, and Jurisprudence; Prose Fiction; General Politics; Miscellaneous. Under all these headings the works of distinguished specialists are discussed, and the reviewer declaims and dogmatizes like an expert, whether he be holding forth on philosophy to Dugald Stewart or on politics and law to Jeremy Bentham, or on poetry to Wordsworth or Scott. Such confident universality is nowadays sure to suggest shallowness, and yet the fact remains that for twenty-five years Jeffrey was able to write on this vast variety of topics so as to command the thorough respect even of his opponents, and so as not simply to avoid any scandalous misadventure through false information or inept judgments (unless in the case of Wordsworth), but to rule almost arbitrarily a great mass of public opinion in morals, in politics, and in literary and artistic theory. To carry through successfully so difficult a task is in itself a victory to be put to the credit of the audacious Scotch critic, even though his work prove not in all cases of permanent worth.
A rapid and pungent style and great adroitness and attractiveness in exposition were doubtless largely responsible for Jeffrey’s constant success with his public. But, in addition to these formal excellences, Jeffrey was remarkably well equipped and well trained for the part of a universal genius. Instinct had been beforehand with him and led him to prepare himself during a good many years of faithful study for just the part he was to play. When he had to choose a profession he decided for the bar, and he was called as a barrister in 1796. But both before this decision and during his actual legal studies, he read widely and systematically by himself in general literature, political theory, history, and philosophy; and during all this patient, private reading, at Glasgow University, at Edinburgh, and afterwards at Oxford, he was busy, with canny Scotch diligence, at note-books, in which facts and ideas and theorizings were recorded and worked out. His mind was conspicuously vivacious and alert,—swift to catch up and make its own new knowledge, whether about books or life. This keenness of intellectual scent was always characteristic of him. Even Matthew Arnold has conceded to him one trait of the ideal critic—curiosity. A very different commentator, Mrs. Carlyle, makes special mention, after a call from him, of his “dark, penetrating” eyes, that “had been taking note of most things in God’s universe.”
Besides the results of this patient self-discipline, and of this wide ranging and swiftly appropriating intellectual interest, Jeffrey had, in a very high degree, the barrister’s power of seizing, comprehending, and controlling, quickly and surely, a vast mass of new facts. He could “get up” an unfamiliar subject with unsurpassable readiness and completeness. His mastery of his subject in a review-article seems often like the successful barrister’s knowledge of his brief: he knows whatever he needs to know to carry the matter in hand triumphantly through.
His way of unfolding a subject is always deft and delightful to follow. He had a sure expository instinct. Point by point, the most complex problem takes on, under his treatment, at least a specious simplicity, and the most abstract theorem, alluring familiarity, and definiteness. He is generous with illustrations and examples and mischievous in giving them a satirical turn. Despite his Scotch bias towards theorizing, he knows and “hugs” his facts, and his discussions always keep close to experience.