His breadth of view is remarkable, if his work be compared with that of eighteenth-century critics. Whatever the book or question under discussion, Jeffrey lifts it into the region of general principles, and is not content with formal judgments of literary worth or with random comments on special points. He is really bent on setting up “a free play of ideas” over the literature and the modes of life that he criticises, and on orienting his readers as regards not simply the special work under discussion, but the whole field of art or of study to which it belongs. That his theories, at least in literary matters, were not always searching or profound, that they will not, in sweep and thoroughness, bear comparison with those, for example, of Coleridge, the great system-weaver of the Romanticists, is undoubtedly true. Yet even in literary theory Jeffrey, as will be presently shown, hit on some notable truths; he partially comprehended and applied the historical method for the study of literature; he worked out with Alison an interpretation of beauty, which, though false in its emphasis and distorted, recognized and illustrated with great acuteness one highly important and comparatively neglected source of æsthetic emotion; and, despite much mistaken ridicule of Romantic poetry and much insensibility to its quintessential power and charm, he showed his critical insight in his protests against certain radical defects alike in the ethical and in the æsthetic theory of the Romanticists,—defects which, as Jeffrey contended and as modern criticism admits, do much to invalidate Romantic poetry, both as a criticism of life and as a permanently invigorating imaginative stimulus. But even apart from the absolute correctness or finality of Jeffrey’s theorizing, his practice of raising criticism into the region of general principles and of examining the material worth of books even more searchingly than their barely formal qualities, was a renovating change in criticism, and at once gave new consideration and dignity to the work of the critic. Mind was at any rate fermenting in whatever Jeffrey wrote, and for the most part the writing of earlier reviewers had been a barren waste of words.
Finally, Jeffrey’s style startled and challenged and terrified and amused, and through its briskness and audacity, its swift sparkle and gay bravado, its satire and banter, its impetuous fulness and unfailing wealth of fact and illustration fairly captivated a public that was used to the humdrum, conventional speech of penny-a-lining critics. There is a fine vein of mischief in Jeffrey that leads continually to very grateful ridicule of pedantry, dulness, and all kinds of absurdity. Even the devoutest Wordsworthian will, if he be not an ingrained prig, relish Jeffrey’s raillery at the expense of Wordsworth’s occasional pompous ineptitude. And if Jeffrey’s vivacity still seems amusing, how much more irresistible must his style have seemed before the days of Hazlitt and Lamb and Macaulay and Carlyle. His dash and wit and audacity were new in literary criticism, and for the time being seemed to the public almost more than mortal.
Whether or no all these qualities of Jeffrey’s genius and style are those of the ideal literary critic, they were fitted to gain him success and renown as a brilliant, argumentative writer on literary topics. And, in point of fact, this is what Jeffrey really was; he was a typically well equipped and skilful middleman of ideas. He found an increasingly large Liberal or Whig public anxious to have its beliefs expressed plausibly, its feelings justified, and its taste made clear to itself and gently improved. The Whig “sheep looked up,” and Jeffrey fed them. He did much the same work in general literary, social, and political theory that Macaulay did later in history. Macaulay’s historical essays, also published in the Edinburgh Review, were, as Cotter Morison has pointed out, “great historical cartoons,” specially adapted for the popularization of history, and specially suited to the knowledge and aspirations of an intelligent middle-class public. Jeffrey’s essays in literature had much this same character and value. They interpreted the freshest, most vital thought of the time, so far as possible in harmony with Whig formulas, and judged it by Whig standards; they made happily articulate Whig prejudices on all subjects, from the French Revolution to Wordsworth’s peasant poetry. By their masterly exposition, their incisive argument, and their wit, they entertained even those whom they exasperated. Their success was prompt and unexampled.
[III]
It has already been hinted that the qualities of Jeffrey’s genius and style, great as may have been their value for the work he accomplished, are not, when judged from the modern point of view, altogether those of the ideal literary critic. This is particularly true if appreciation be included as a vital part of the critic’s task. Jeffrey rarely appreciates a piece of literature, interprets it imaginatively, lends himself to its peculiar charm, and expresses this charm through sympathetic symbolism. His readiness and his plausibility are not the only points in which Jeffrey the critic suggests Jeffrey the advocate. He has the defects as well as the merits of the lawyer in literature. He is always for or against his author; he is always making points. The intellectual interest preponderates in his critical work, and his discussions often seem, particularly to a reader of modern impressionistic criticism, hard, unsympathetic, searchingly analytical, repellingly abstract and systematic. He is always on the watch; he never lends himself confidingly to his author and takes passively and gratefully the mood and the images his author suggests. He never loiters or dreams. He is full of business and bustle, and perpetually distracts his readers with his sense of the need of making definite progress. He is one of those responsible folk who believe that
“Nothing of itself will come
But we must still be seeking.”
For delicate and subtle appreciation, then, of the best modern type it is useless to look in Jeffrey’s essays.
Of course, historically, such criticism could hardly have been expected in 1803. The critical tradition that Jeffrey fell heir to was that of the dogmatists,—the tradition that came down from Ascham, the pedagogue, through the hands of the would-be autocrats, Rymer and Dennis, to Dr. Johnson. The theories of the dogmatists suffered many changes, but remained nevertheless true to one fundamental principle: the critic was to be accepted as an infallible judge in literature because of his familiarity with certain models or certain abstract rules, the imitation or the observance of which was essential to good art. The dogmatic critic deemed himself lord of literature by a kind of divine right. Ascham believed in the plenary artistic inspiration of the Greek and Latin classics, and posed as the authentic interpreter of the sacred literary word. The pseudo-classical critics, Rymer and Dennis, based themselves also partly on authority, but even more upon reason; they pretended to rule by the divine right of pure logic. Their implicit postulate might be likened to Hobbes’s theory in politics; they substantially held that the strongest must keep order in the commonwealth, and that in the literary commonwealth this duty fell to the intellectually strongest. Accordingly, these critics administered justice magisterially in accordance with a strict code of laws; they had laws for the epic poet, laws for the writer of comedy, laws for the satirist, laws for the writer of tragedy; the author of every new piece of literature was called up to the bar and reprimanded for the least illegality. In short, the dogmatic critic regarded himself and was generally regarded as able to apply absolute tests of merit to all literary work, and as the final authority on all doubtful matters of taste.
Now, Jeffrey was the inheritor of this tradition in criticism, and naturally adopted at times its tyrannical tone and manner towards public and authors. Yet, following his temperamental fondness for compromises, for middle parties and mediating measures, Jeffrey never tried formally to defend this old doctrine or represented himself as an absolute lawgiver in literature. Nowhere does he lay down a complete set of principles, like the rules of Bossu for epic poetry, or those of Rapin for the drama, by which excellence in any form of literature may be absolutely tested. Such a high-and-dry Tory theory of criticism does not suggest itself to Jeffrey as tenable. He is a Whig in taste as in politics, and desires in both spheres the supremacy of a chosen aristocracy. In his essay on Scott’s Lady of the Lake he declares the standard of literary excellence to reside in “the taste of a few ... persons, eminently qualified, by natural sensibility and long experience and reflection, to perceive all beauties that really exist, as well as to settle the relative value and importance of all the different sorts of beauty.” Jeffrey regards himself as one of the choicest spirits of this chosen aristocracy, and it is as the exponent of the best current opinion that he speaks on all questions of taste.
It follows that, when Jeffrey is dealing with purely literary questions, he is less argumentative than at other times, and that what has been said of his viewing every subject in the light of general principles is least applicable to his dogmatic essays on literature. When, for example, he attacks Wilhelm Meister or the Excursion, he does so simply and frankly in terms of his temperament. Wordsworth’s mysticism baffles him, and he condemns it; Goethe’s sordid realism and sentiment offend his man-of-the-world taste and he anathematizes them. His custom in such hostile criticisms is to let his own taste masquerade as that of “the judicious observer” or “the modern public.” His faith in his own personal equation is unquestioning and devout. Whatever fails to fall in with his bias is a fair mark for his bitterest invective. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, for example, is “sheer nonsense,” “ludicrously unnatural,” full of “pure childishness or mere folly,” “vulgar and obscure,” full of “absurdities and affectations.” These terms are, for the most part, mere circumlocutions for Jeffrey’s dislike, mere roundabout ways of saying that the book is not to his taste. As for coming to an understanding with author or reader about the ends of prose fiction or the best methods of reaching those ends, Jeffrey never thinks of such an attempt. He simply takes up various passages and declares he does not comprehend them, or does not fancy the subjects they treat of, or does not like the author’s ideas or methods. He gives no reasons for his likes or dislikes, but is content to express them emphatically and picturesquely. This is, of course, dogmatism pure and simple, and a dogmatism, too, more irritating than the dogmatism that argues, for it seems more arbitrary and more challenging. Of this tone and method, Coleridge complains in the twenty-first chapter of his Biographia Literaria, when, in commenting on current critical literature, he protests against “the substitution of assertion for argument” and against “the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts.”