[35] See Edda den Eldra, Grimnismâl 44, and Edda Snorra, D. 15. That Bifröst did not tremble through weakness we may gather from the fact that it is the “best of bridges,” “the strongest of all bridges” (Simrock, D.M. 28), and that it will only be broken at the day of judgment.
[36] By E. Keary: Evening Hours, vol. iii.
MR. MACVEY NAPIER AND THE EDINBURGH REVIEWERS.
Selection from the Correspondence of the late Macvey Napier, Esq. Edited by his son, Macvey Napier. London: Macmillan & Co.
Mr. Macvey Napier, who succeeded Francis Jeffrey in the editorship of the great Whig Review, had, of course, a perfect right to preserve the letters which are published in this volume, and to study them in private as much as he pleased. Indeed, for anything that appears to the contrary in the “Introduction” by his son, the present Mr. Macvey Napier, they may have been bequeathed by the original recipient with instructions that they should some day be published. An edition, privately circulated a short time ago, led to “representations that a correspondence of so much interest ought to be made more accessible,” and the present volume is the result; but it might be maintained that the writers of such letters would, if they could have been consulted, have objected to their publication; and that to send them forth to the world in all their nakedness was, at all events, not a delicate or magnanimous thing to do. “Much might be said on both sides.” Paley, in his chapter on the original character of the Christian Morality, remarked that though a thousand cases might be supposed in which the use of the golden rule might mislead a person, it was impossible in fact to light on such a case. That was a hazardous observation, for the truth is that when we once get beyond elementary conditions of being and doing, we find human beings differ so very widely, and in such utterly incalculable ways, that it is in vain to poll the monitor in the breast on questions that do in fact arise daily—five hundred in a thousand will vote one way, and five hundred in another. “How would you like it yourself?” is a question that elicits the most discordant replies. I have a very positive feeling that I should have left many of these letters in the portfolio, or put them into the fire; but when I look about me for a standard which I could take in my hand to Mr. Napier, I am baffled—he might produce one of his own that would silence me on the spot. And when one has taken up a book to comment upon it with as little reserve as may be, it seems idle, if not Irish, to begin by saying that the most amusing or most fertile things in it ought never to have seen the light.
This point may recur before we have done; and in the meantime it should be remarked that nothing very momentous, either to the honour or the disgrace of human nature in general, or literary human nature in particular, can be extracted from this correspondence. A late essayist used to tell a true anecdote of a distinguished statesman who had lived many years and seen as many changes as Ulysses. A friend asked him something like this: “Well, now, you have had a great deal to do with mankind, and you have outlived the heats and prejudices of youth; what do you think of men in general?” And the veteran replied: “Oh, I like them—very good fellows; but”—and here we shall mollify his language a little—“but condemnably vain, you know.” And really that is about the worst thing you can find it in your heart to say of literary men after running through these letters—“very good fellows, but very vain, you know.”
Another point which lies less near the surface, and has at least the look of novelty, would perhaps be this. It is the most frequent and most voluminous of the writers who unconsciously tell us the most about themselves; and who, with the pleasing exception of Jeffrey, show us the most of their unamiable sides. But there is comfort for impulsive people in the fact that it is not always the most self-controlled and inoffensive of the writers who win upon us. The Brougham-Macaulay feud runs sprawling through these pages till we are tired of it; and some of poor Brougham’s letters are downright venomous. But the total absence of disguise and the blundering boyish inconsistency disarm us. Taking the letters one by one, the moral superiority is with Macaulay on Brougham as against Brougham on Macaulay, but taking the correspondence in the lump, it is something like Charles Surface against Joseph Surface, in another line—only, of course, there is no hypocrisy. While you come to feel for Brougham in his spluttering rages, you feel also that Macaulay, in his too-admirable self-continence, can do very well without your compassion, whatever he may have to complain of. It is easy to discern that Brougham honestly believed in his own superiority to the young rival who outshone him, and yet that he was inwardly tormented. Macaulay’s forbearance was of the kind qui coûte si peu au gens heureux. The editor, Mr. Napier, was, we may conjecture, the greatest sufferer of the three. Much was owed to Brougham as a man of enormous intellectual force; to which, apart from his past services, great respect was due: but Macaulay was by far the best writer, and (to employ a bull which is common enough) incomparably the most attractive contributor. The strength of his hold upon the Review and its editor is apparent on every tenth page of the book, and comes out forcibly enough in a letter from Sir James Stephen to Mr. Napier. Mr. Napier had written to Sir James, expressing some delicate surprise that no article from his pen had reached the Review for a long time. Sir James excuses himself in this fashion:—
“I know that many of your contributors must be importunate for a place; that you must be fencing and compromising at a weary rate; that there are many interests of the passing day which you could not overlook; and that we should all have growled like so many fasting bears if denied the regular return of the Macaulay diet, to which we have been so long accustomed.”