In the communications from literary men there are some fine instances of just self-consciousness. Tom Campbell writes, with great warmth and alertness, to promise an article upon a new work about the Nerves; but shortly afterwards writes again, candidly confessing that he had found, upon looking again at the work, that his aptitude for scientific detail was not great enough to enable him to do justice to the subject. A letter from William Hazlitt is so striking, both for its truthfulness and its clear-headedness, as to deserve quoting in full. He had been written to by Mr. Napier for some contributions to the Encyclopædia Britannica, and he replies, from his well-known retreat at Winterslow Hut, in these terms:—
“I am sorry to be obliged, from want of health and a number of other engagements, which I am little able to perform, to decline the flattering offer you make me. I am also afraid that I should not be able to do the article in question, or yourself, justice, for I am not only without books, but without knowledge of what books are necessary to be consulted on the subject. To get up an article in a Review on any subject of general literature is quite as much as I can do without exposing myself. The object of an Encyclopædia is, I take it, to condense and combine all the facts relating to a subject, and all the theories of any consequence already known or advanced. Now, where the business of such a work ends, is just where I begin—that is, I might perhaps throw in an idle speculation or two of my own, not contained in former accounts of the subject, and which would have very little pretensions to rank as scientific. I know something about Congreve, but nothing at all of Aristophanes, and yet I conceive that the writer of an article on the Drama ought to be as well acquainted with the one as the other.”
The honesty of this is quite refreshing. There is one more letter, of a similar order, which deserves to be signalized. In August, 1843, Macaulay, being pressed for more frequent contributions, writes from the Albany that he can promise, at the very utmost, no more than two articles in a year:—
“I ought to give my whole leisure to my History; and I fear that if I suffer myself to be diverted from that design as I have done, I shall, like poor Mackintosh, leave behind me the character of a man who would have done something if he had concentrated his powers instead of frittering them away. There are people who can carry on twenty works at a time. Southey would write the history of Brazil before breakfast, an ode after breakfast, then the history of the Peninsular War till dinner, and an article for the Quarterly Review in the evening. But I am of a different temper. I never write so as to please myself until my subject has for the time driven away every other out of my head. When I turn from one work to another a great deal of time is lost in the mere transition. I must not go on dawdling and reproaching myself all my life.”
There is something melancholy in this, admirable as it is. Macaulay had begun to watch the shadow on the dial too closely to permit him to do much miscellaneous work with an easy mind. There is an important lesson for men of letters in the sentence,—“When I turn from one work to another, a great deal of time is lost in the mere transition.” Here lies the great difference between serious literary work and that of ordinary business, where the mind is solicited by one thing after another in rapid succession. In the first case, time and energy have to be expended in evolving from within a fresh impulse for every topic. The most readable writings of Southey are those which he produced fragment by fragment, on topics for which little renewal of impulse was required. To write a great poem in scraps, all by the clock, was a task which only a very conceited and rather wooden man would have attempted; and the result we know, though there are fine things in Southey’s longer poems. A powerful passage by Cardinal Newman on the difficulties of literary work is almost too well known to bear quoting, but a living poet, Mrs. Augusta Webster, has put the case so fairly that Macaulay’s shade—which is, of course, a shade that reads everything—may be gratified by seeing in a handy way a few of her sentences:—
“Occupations of study, scientific research, literary production—of brain-work of any kind that is carried on in the worker’s private home with no visible reminder of customer or client—are taken to be such as can lightly be done at one time as well as another, and resumed after no matter what interruptions, like a lady’s embroidery, which she can take up again at the very stitch she left her needle in. Professions of this sort not only admit, but in many instances require, considerable variation in the amount of daily time directly bestowed on them,—directly, for the true student is not at his work only when he is ostensibly employed, but whenever and wherever he may have his head to himself,—and there is no measure of visible quantity for the more or less results of application.... The literary man probably fares the worst of all. He is not merely not protected by the manual part of his processes, but it is his danger. It is so easy—what anybody can do at any time!... Of course the simple fact is that it is more difficult for this class of persons to practise their vocations under the drawback of perpetual breaks, actual and (what comes to nearly the same thing) expected, than it is for ‘business men.’ Let the attention of the solicitor, for instance, busied on the points of an intricate case, be perforce diverted to another matter, there is lost from that case just the time diverted, and a little extra to allow for the mind which returns to any interrupted course of thought, never returning to it exactly at the point at which it was forced to leave it. But there are the recorded facts; the direct conclusions to be drawn remain unaltered; nothing has disappeared, nothing has lost its identity. But suppose, let us say, a dramatist, devising his crisis after hours, perhaps days, of gradual growth, to the moment when he sees it before him as a reality.... Force his attention away, and he has lost, not merely the time he needed to complete a spell of works, with something over for the difficulty of resuming, but the power of resuming. All has faded into a haze; and the fruit of days, may be, has been thrown away at the ripening, for such moments do not come twice.”
There are but few of Mr. Napier’s own letters in this volume, so that we have only indirect means of measuring his idea of his editorial rights or duties as against contributors. There is one case in which Macaulay complains strongly of certain excisions, and there is another in which he defends certain phrases of his own which appear to have offended the taste of Mr. Napier, who found them undignified, if not slightly vulgar. He submits of course—all the mutilated ones submit—and he says he submits “willingly;” but all the while we can too plainly see the wry faces he is making. Mr. Napier was, apparently, a purist in the matter of style; but there is something almost grotesque in the spectacle of a man of his quality correcting Macaulay. It reminds one of cet imbécile Buloz.[37] The case of Leigh Hunt was very different, for he sometimes went to the extreme verge of decorum—quarterly review decorum, that is—and beyond it. But we may safely conclude that Macaulay knew much better than his editor how to turn a sentence, or when the use of a French locution was desirable for ends of literary effect. Upon this subject of imported phrases Mr. Napier was, it seems, very punctilious, for with Mr. G. H. Lewes he must have had a brisk correspondence about it. Mr. Lewes, who was then a young writer, anxious to get his feet well planted, submits, with every possible expression of acquiescence, one might almost say, of abject agreement; but it is easy to see that his compliance was forced. Macaulay in his discussion of this little matter with Napier, easily and decisively lays down the true guiding principle:—“The first rule of all writing,—that rule to which every other rule is subordinate,—is that the words used by the writer shall be such as most fully and precisely convey his meaning to the great body of his readers. All considerations about the purity and dignity of style ought to bend to this consideration.”
This, indeed, exhausts the subject; and leaves the editor only one question to solve—namely, whether the writer whom he employs has presumably a meaning fit to be conveyed to the readers of his periodical. Upon that point he must use his own judgment; but it was idle for a man like Mr. Napier to criticize the phrasing of a man like Macaulay, who had ten thousand times his reading. For it is upon the “reading” that the matter very largely turns. The force of a quotation or a phrase imported from a foreign tongue depends, not upon the bare meaning of the words, but upon the suggestiveness of certain associations. This does not necessarily imply that the precise context is recalled, or certain hackneyed trifles from Lucretius and Horace, and a score of such chips in porridge, would be indecent. If it be said that all this implies that an editor should be omniscient, or at lowest an omnivorous reader, the reply is, that it certainly does—unless the principle adopted in the conduct of the periodical be the more recent one of choosing contributors largely on account of their names, and then leaving them to answer for their own sins, if any. One thing is clear, that if a man like Jeffrey—or like Napier—could be shown the number of blunders he made in mutilating the writings of his contributors, he would feel very much humiliated. Thackeray complains very bitterly of the suppression of some of his touches of humour, and his sufferings at the hands of a critic like Mr. Napier (able man as he was) must have been terrible indeed.
The system recently adopted of having every article signed, has not yielded the results which were predicted or expected by those who so long struggled to get it introduced. It has led to “starring” more outrageous and more audacious than any that was ever seen upon the stage, and to mischief far more serious. The worst of these is the substitution of a spurious sort of authority for the natural influence or weight of the writing, even upon some of the most important topics which can engage the human mind. The opinion, for example, of a versatile politician, or traveller, or physicist, on a question of religion or morals may be of no more value than that of the first man you meet on passing into the streets. But it will attract attention in proportion to the notoriety of the author, and though wise men may know that it is weak or foolish, they may wait a long while for the chance of saying so from any pulpit worth preaching in, because the platforms are pre-engaged; and also because, the “organs of opinion” being bound to live by keeping up a succession of attractive names in their pages, it will not do to offend the owners of such names. One other result of the recent system (not everywhere and always, of course, but generally and most frequently) is a want of freshness in periodical literature. This evil our American friends manage to escape; only they are much bolder than we are, and do not stand in terror of the charge of levity. But, as a rule, writers who are fit for starring purposes lose freshness in a very short time; and then they do a still farther mischief by striking that key-note of second-hand thought which is so prevalent, or at least so common in even our better literature.