Sir James was an exceedingly busy man, and he was not professedly a man of letters like Macaulay; but we may, if we like, read between the lines in these excuses and find a little pique there, as well as a just sense of an editor’s difficulties.
Another point which lies broadly and prominently upon the surface in these letters is a very unpleasant one. It is scarcely credible how much dull conceit and sheer ignorant arbitrariness there often is in the minds of able and cultivated men. It does not seem even to occur to them that their own range may be limited, and their judgments upon many (or even a few) topics not worth ink or breath. It should hardly be offensive to an ordinary man to be told, or at least to find it tacitly assumed, that he could not have invented fluxions, painted like Rembrandt, or sung like Pindar. Why, then, should it be difficult for any cultivated specialist, of more than ordinary faculties, to make the reflection that he must be deficient in some direction or other? Yet we find in practice that it is not only difficult, but impossible, in the majority of cases. Mr. Napier seems to have invited, or at all events not to have repelled, free criticisms on his Review from the contributors in general, and the outcome is little short of appalling. If ever there was an able man it was Mr. Senior, yet these are the terms in which he allows himself to speak of an article on Christopher North—or rather of Christopher North himself:—“The article on Christopher North is my abomination. I think him one of the very worst of the clever bad writers who infest modern literature; full of bombast, affectation, conceit, in short, of all the vitia, tristia, as well as dulcia. I had almost as soon try to read Carlyle or Coleridge.” Now Mr. Senior was, of course, entitled to dislike Christopher North, and there is plenty to be said against him in the way of criticism; but the charge of “affectation” is foolish, and the whole passage pitched in the most detestable of all literary key-notes. John Wilson was a man of genius, whose personal likings and rampant animal spirits led him most mournfully astray. He was wanting also in love of truth for its own sake; but he was as much superior to Mr. Senior as Shakspeare was to him. And the addition about Carlyle or Coleridge—or Coleridge!—is just the gratuitous insolence of one-eyed dulness. There is enough and to spare of blame ready in any balanced mind for either of these great writers, but they can do without the admiration of wooden-headed prigs, however able. The point, however, is that it never dawns upon the mind of even so clever and cultivated a man as Mr. Senior, that his head may have gaps in it.
Another instance to the same purport may be selected from a letter from Mr. Edwin Atherstone, the poet—for it would perhaps be hard and grudging to deny him the title, since he found an audience, and I have a vague recollection of having once read verses of his about Nineveh or Babylon which had in them power of the picturesque-meditative order. Now, this is the way in which Mr. Edwin Atherstone speaks of Dr. Thomas Brown, the metaphysician:—“For myself, I know not a writer, with the exception of Shakspeare, Milton, Homer, and Scott, from whom I have derived such high delight as from Dr. Brown.”
Was ever such a category put on paper before? It is as if a man should say his favourite musical instruments were the organ, the harp, the trumpet, the violin, and the sewing-machine. Brown was one of the most readable of metaphysicians; he made some acute hits, and he wrote elegant verses; but his position in Mr. Atherstone’s list is as inexplicably quaint as that of “Burke, commonly called the Sublime,” in the epitaph on the lady who “painted in water-colours,” and “was first cousin to Lady Jones.”
The worst examples of all, however, come from the letters of Francis Jeffrey himself. Jeffrey has been underrated, and he was a most amiable man; but some of the verdicts he thought fit to pronounce upon articles in the Edinburgh, when edited by Mr. Napier, are saugrenus. In one case he is about suggesting a contributor, to deal with a certain topic, and is so polite as to say that the name of Mr. John Stuart Mill had struck him:—“I once thought of John Mill, but there are reasons against him too, independent of his great unreadable book and its elaborate demonstrations of axioms and truisms.”
There might be weighty “reasons against” Mr. Mill, but what his “Logic” could have to do with the question is not clear. It never seems to have crossed Jeffrey’s mind that he might be totally disqualified for forming an opinion of a book like that; and, having called it “unreadable” (though to a reader with any natural bent towards such matters it is deeply interesting), he actually puts forward the fact that Mill had written it as a reason against his being entrusted with the treatment of a political topic in a Whig Review. Editors are human, and the editorial position is a very troublesome one. An editor may lose his head, as an overworked wine-taster may lose his palate. In a word, allowances must be made; but, after a disclosure or two like this, it is difficult not to conclude that the Review owed no more of its success to its former editor than it might have owed to any intelligent clerk. But we cannot let Jeffrey go yet. The following passage relates to an article on Victor Cousin:—
“Cousin I pronounce beyond all doubt the most unreadable thing that ever appeared in the Review. The only chance is, that gentle readers may take it to be very profound, and conclude that the fault is in their want of understanding. But I am not disposed to agree with them. It is ten times more mystical than anything my friend Carlyle ever wrote, and not half so agreeably written. It is nothing to the purpose that he does not agree with the worst part of the mysticism, for he affects to understand it, and to explain it, and to think it very ingenious and respectable, and it is mere gibberish. He may possibly be a clever man. There are even indications of that in his paper, but he is not a very clever man, nor of much power; and beyond all question he is not a good writer on such subjects. If you ever admit such a disquisition again, order your operator to instance and illustrate all his propositions by cases or examples, and to reason and explain with reference to these. This is a sure test of sheer nonsense, and moreover an infinite resource for the explication of obscure truth, if there be any such thing.”
Now, the writer of the article in question was Sir William Hamilton. “He may possibly be a clever man, but beyond all question he is not a good writer on such subjects.” So much for Jeffrey.
“Nec sibi cœnarum quivis temere arroget artem,
Non prius exacta tenui ratione saporum.”
Poor Mr. Carlyle is again dragged in, and Sir William is pronounced “ten times more mystical” than he—“mystical” in italics. When a writer, using the word mystical opprobriously, prints it in italics, it is usually safe to decide that he knows nothing of metaphysics. The concluding sentences are instructive examples of editorial self-confidence: “If ever you admit such a disquisition again, order your operator to” do so-and-so. Thus, the treatment of Mill and Hamilton being equally ignorant and inept, there is no escape for the ex-editor. Both verdicts were after the too-celebrated “this-will-never-do” manner, and that is all.