Jeffrey’s imperfect grasp of the historical method is shown in one other way: he never realized that there was any conflict between his work as a dogmatic critic and his work as a scientific student of literature, or had a premonition of the blighting effect that the spread of historical conceptions of literature was ultimately to have on the prestige of the dogmatic critic. More and more, since Jeffrey’s day, criticism has concerned itself with the scientific explanation and the interpretation of literature; less and less has it posed as the ultimate science of right thinking and right doing in literary art. This change has been brought about partly by the Romantic movement with its fostering of individualism in art, and partly through the development of historical conceptions in all departments of thought. Both these forces were in full play during Jeffrey’s life, and of neither did he at all measure the scope or significance.
Regarded, then, from a modern point of view, Jeffrey, as a literary critic, takes shape somewhat as follows: As an appreciator he is sadly to seek, owing largely to over-intellectualism and disputatiousness. As a dogmatic critic he is even yet thoroughly readable because of his dashing style, his deft and ready handling, his shrewd common sense, and his sincerity; he expressed brilliantly the tastes and antipathies of a large circle of cultivated people of considerable social distinction, who, while not peculiarly artistic or literary, read widely and intelligently, and felt keenly and delicately, though within a somewhat limited range. Even in his dogmatic criticism, however, his faults are obvious; his dogmatism is peremptory; his tone, often bitter; and his prejudices are as scarlet. On the other hand, for giving a strong ethical trend to literary criticism, he deserves all honour. His social sympathies were intense and alert; they fixed the character of his whole theory of beauty, and continually expressed themselves in his comments upon books and authors. Through his persistently ethical interpretations of literature, he really enlarged the borders of literary criticism. As for his historical criticism, it cannot be said to have much permanent value. Into the general theory on which the use of the historical method rests, Jeffrey shows considerable insight; but he was by nature and by training a dogmatist, not a scientific student of fact. Though his theorizings led him to believe speculatively in the relativity of beauty, and though he recognized abstractly that literature must vary from age to age as the time-spirit varies, yet he rarely let these convictions affect his tone or method in the treatment of literature; he is as round and intolerant in his blame of Addison or Pope as if he had never been within seeing distance of the historical point of view. In short, the disinterestedness of science was foreign to Jeffrey’s nature; he was primarily and distinctively, not an investigator or interpreter, but a censor bent on praise or blame.
These very characteristics of his criticism, however, were of a kind to bring Jeffrey, in 1803, great glory. With some disguise until 1809, when the Tory Quarterly Review was founded, undisguisedly thereafter, Jeffrey was the great Whig champion in all that pertained to letters. From a partisan critic, audacious and brilliant dogmatism was just what was sure to win the widest hearing. Moreover, in accounting for Jeffrey’s enormous popularity, the trashiness and insipidity of earlier review-writing must be kept in mind. Reviewing had been the pet occupation of Grub street; penny-a-liners had impressed upon criticism all their own unloveliness and feebleness; review articles seemed to issue from under-fed, torpid brains and anæmic bodies. Jeffrey’s reviewing was the very incarnation of health, vigour, and prosperity.
Finally, Jeffrey profited in name and fame more than it is easy now to compute from the happy opportuneness of a new literary form, a literary form that was made possible through the establishment of the Edinburgh Review. This Review differed in many of its business arrangements and in its mode of publication from preceding Reviews; it was established in accordance with a new conception of the scope of review-writing, and of the relation of reviewers to the public. As the result of this new conception and these new relations, literary criticism, which had hitherto been merely more or less ingenious talk about technical matters, was transformed into the earnest and vigorous discussion of literature as the expression of all that was significant and absorbing in the life of the time. And as still further results of the new policy, reviewing and reviewers came into hitherto unknown honour; the Edinburgh Review was adored or was hated and feared throughout the length and breadth of the land, and Jeffrey was universally regarded as demonic in his versatility, brilliancy, penetration, and vigour. Much of Jeffrey’s great prestige as a critic must be set down as due to his having long stood as the visible symbol of the success of the new style of reviewing.
[IV]
The story of the foundation of the Edinburgh Review has been told so often as hardly to bear repeating. Enough of the facts, however, must be gone over again to make clear the change that the new periodical wrought in reviewing and in the relations between critics and the public.
The classical account of the origin of the Review is Sydney Smith’s and is to be found in the Preface to his collected Works; it has been reproduced in Lord Cockburn’s Life of Jeffrey[5] and in the Life and Times of Lord Brougham.[6] With his usual crabbedness Brougham disputes a few minor details, but he leaves the substantial accuracy of “Sydney’s” story unimpeached.
The idea of the new Review was Sydney Smith’s. The most important conspirators were Sydney, Jeffrey, Francis Horner, and Brougham. The plot was discussed and matured in Jeffrey’s house in Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh. Sydney Smith’s famous proposal of a motto, Tenui musam meditamur avena, “We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal,” was rejected; the “sage Horner’s” suggestion was adopted,—a line from Publius Syrus, Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur, which foretold the righteous severity of tone that was to characterize the Review. The first number was to have appeared in June, 1802, but, owing to dilatory contributors and Jeffrey’s faintheartedness, was seriously delayed; it finally appeared in October, 1802, under the supervision of Sydney Smith. After the publication of the first number Jeffrey was formally appointed editor, and, with some hesitation, accepted the post.
The success of the Review was from the start beyond all expectation. “The effect,” says Lord Cockburn, “was electrical. And instead of expiring, as many wished, in their first effort, the force of the shock was increased on each subsequent discharge. It is impossible for those who did not live at the time, and in the heart of the scene, to feel, or almost to understand the impression made by the new luminary, or the anxieties with which its motions were observed.” Lord Brougham’s account of the matter is no less emphatic. “The success was far beyond any of our expectations. It was so great that Jeffrey was utterly dumbfounded, for he had predicted for our journal the fate of the original Edinburgh Review, which, born in 1755, died in 1756, having produced only two numbers! The truth is, the most sanguine among us, even Smith himself, could not have foreseen the greatness of the first triumph, any more than we could have imagined the long and successful career the Review was afterwards to run, or the vast reforms and improvements in all our institutions, social as well as political, it was destined to effect.”
The subscription list of the Review grew within six years from 1750 to 9000; and by 1813 it numbered more than 12,000. The importance of these figures will be better understood when the reader recollects that in 1816 the London Times sold only 8000 copies daily. Moreover, it should be remembered that one copy of a magazine went much further then than it goes now, and did service in more than a single household. In 1809 Jeffrey boasted that the Review was read by 50,000 thinking people within a month after it was printed; doubtless this was a perfectly sound estimate.