There's Pippins and Cheese to Come Part 6

It was eight years before another enduring review was started. William Blackwood of Edinburgh had grown like Murray from a bookseller to a publisher, and he, too, looked for a means of increasing his prestige. He had launched a review the year previously, in 1816, but it had foundered when it was scarcely off the ways. His second attempt he was determined must be successful. His new editors were John G. Lockhart and John Wilson, and the new policy, although nominally Tory, was first and last the magazine's notoriety. It hawked its wares into public notice by sensational articles and personal vilification. Wilson was thirty-two and Lockhart twenty-three, yet they were as mischievous as boys. In their pages is found the most abominable raving that has ever pa.s.sed for literary criticism.

They did not need any party hatred to fire them. William Blackwood welcomed any abuse that took his magazine out of "the calm of respectable mediocrity." Anything that stung or startled was welcome to a place in its pages.

So Blackwood's was published and Edinburgh city, we may be sure, set up a roar of delight and anger. Never before had one's friends been so a.s.sailed.

Never before had one's enemies been so grilled. How pleasing for a Tory fireside was the mud bath with which it defiled Coleridge, who was--and you had always known it--"little better than a rogue." One's Tory dinner was the more toothsome for the hot abuse of the Chaldee Ma.n.u.script. What stout Tory, indeed, would doze of an evening on such a sheet! There followed of course cases of libel. The editors even found it safer, after the publication of the first number, to retire for a time to the country until the city cooled.

I choose now to turn to the pages of these three reviews and set out before you samples of their criticisms, in order that you may contrast them with our own literary judgments. I warn you in fairness that I have been disposed to choose the worst, yet there are hundreds of other criticisms but little better. Of the three reviews, Blackwood's was the least seriously political in its policy, yet its critical vilifications are the worst. The Edinburgh Review, the most able of the three and the most in earnest in politics, is the least vituperative. With this introduction, let us shake the pepperpot and lay out the strong vinegar of our feast!

In the judgment of the Edinburgh Review, Tom Moore, who had just published his "Odes and Epistles" but had not yet begun his Irish melodies, is a man who "with some brilliancy of fancy, and some show of cla.s.sical erudition ... may boast, if the boast can please him, of being the most licentious of modern versifiers, and the most poetical of those who, in our times, have devoted their talents to the propagation of immorality. We regard his book, indeed, as a public nuisance.... He sits down to ransact the impure places of his memory for inflammatory images and expressions, and commits them laboriously in writing, for the purpose of insinuating pollution into the minds of unknown and unsuspecting readers."

Francis Jeffrey wrote this, and Moore challenged him to fight. The police interfered, and as Jeffrey put it, "the affair ended amicably. We have since breakfasted together very lovingly. He has expressed penitence for what he has written and declared that he will never again apply any little talents he may possess to such purpose: and I have said that I shall be happy to praise him whenever I find that he has abjured these objectionable topics." It was Sydney Smith who said of Jeffrey he would "d.a.m.n the solar system--bad light--planets too distant--pestered with comets. Feeble contrivance--could make a better with great ease."

Jeffrey reviewed Wordsworth and found in the "Lyrical Ballads"

"vulgarity, affectation and silliness." He is alarmed, moreover, lest his "childishness, conceit and affectation" spread to other authors. He proposes a poem to be called "Elegiac Stanzas to a Sucking Pig," and of "Alice Fell" he writes that "if the publishing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted." When the "White Doe of Rylstone" was published--no prime favorite, I confess, of my own--Jeffrey wrote that it had the merit of being the very worst poem he ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume. "It seems to us," he wrote, "to consist of a happy union of all the faults, without any of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry. It is just such a work, in short, as some wicked enemy of that, school might be supposed to have devised, on purpose to make it ridiculous."

Lord Byron, on the publication of an early volume, is counselled "that he do forthwith abandon poetry ... the mere rhyming of the final syllable, even when accompanied by the presence of a certain number of feet ... is not the whole art of poetry. We would entreat him to believe," continued the reviewer, "that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is necessary to const.i.tute a poem; and that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain at least one thought...." It was this attack that brought forth Byron's "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."

As long as Jeffrey hoped to enlist Southey to write for the Edinburgh Review, he treated him with some favor. But Southey took up with the Quarterly. "The Laureate," says the Edinburgh presently, "has now been out of song for a long time: But we had comforted ourselves with the supposition that he was only growing fat and lazy.... The strain, however, of this publication, and indeed of some that went before it, makes us apprehensive that a worse thing has befallen him ... that the worthy inditer of epics is falling gently into dotage."

Now for the Quarterly Review, if by chance it can show an equal spleen!

There lived in the early days of the nineteenth century a woman by the name of Lady Morgan, who was the author of several novels and books of travel.

Although her record in intelligence and morals is good, John Croker, who regularly reviewed her books, accuses her works of licentiousness, profligacy, irreverence, blasphemy, libertinism, disloyalty and atheism.

There are twenty-six pages of this in one review only, and any paragraph would be worth the quoting for its ferocity. After this attack it was Macaulay who said he hated Croker like "cold boiled veal."

The Quarterly reviewed Keats' "Endymion," although the writer naively states at the outset that he has not read the poem. "Not that we have been wanting in our duty," he writes, "far from it--indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it; but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books...." Finally he questions whether Keats is the author's name, for he doubts "that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody."

Leigh Hunt's "Rimini" the Quarterly finds to be an "ungrammatical, unauthorized, chaotic jargon, such as we believe was never before spoken, much less written.... We never," concludes the reviewer, "in so few lines saw so many clear marks of the vulgar impatience of a low man, conscious and ashamed of his wretched vanity, and labouring, with coa.r.s.e flippancy, to scramble over the bounds of birth and education, and fidget himself into the stout-heartedness of being familiar with a Lord." In a later review, Hunt is a propounder of atheism. "Henceforth," says the reviewer, "... he may slander a few more eminent characters, he may go on to deride venerable and holy inst.i.tutions, he may stir up more discontent and sedition, but he will have no peace of mind within ... he will live and die unhonoured in his own generation, and, for his own sake it is to be hoped, moulder unknown in those which are to follow."

Hazlitt belongs to a "cla.s.s of men by whom literature is more than at any period disgraced." His style is suited for washerwomen, a "cla.s.s of females with whom ... he and his friend Mr. Hunt particularly delight to a.s.sociate."

Sh.e.l.ley, writes the Quarterly, "is one of that industrious knot of authors, the tendency of whose works we have in our late Numbers exposed to the caution of our readers ... for with perfect deliberation and the steadiest perseverance he perverts all the gifts of his nature, and does all the injury, both public and private, which his faculties enable him to perpetrate." His "poetry is in general a mere jumble of words and heterogeneous ideas." "The Cloud" is "simple nonsense." "Prometheus Unbound" is a "great storehouse of the obscure and unintelligible." In the "Sensitive Plant" there is "no meaning." And for Sh.e.l.ley himself, he is guilty of a great many terrible things, including verbiage, impiety, immorality and absurdity.

Of Blackwood's Magazine the special victims were Keats and Hunt and Coleridge. "Mr. Coleridge," says the reviewer, "... seems to believe that every tongue is wagging in his praise--that every ear is open to imbibe the oracular breathings of his inspiration ... no sound is so sweet to him as that of his own voice ... he seems to consider the mighty universe itself as nothing better than a mirror in which, with a grinning and idiot self-complacency, he may contemplate the physiognomy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.... Yet insignificant as he a.s.suredly is, he cannot put pen to paper without a feeling that millions of eyes are fixed upon him...."

Leigh Hunt, says Blackwood, "is a man of extravagant pretensions ...

exquisitely bad taste and extremely vulgar modes of thinking." His "Rimini" "is so wretchedly written that one feels disgust at its pretense, affectation and gaudiness, ignorance, vulgarity, irreverence, quackery, glittering and rancid obscenities."

Blackwood's wrote of the "calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of Endymion," and elsewhere of Keats' "prurient and vulgar lines, evidently meant for some young lady east of Temple Bar.... It is a better and a wiser thing," it commented, "to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to 'plasters, pills and ointment boxes.'" And even when Sh.e.l.ley wrote his "Adonais" on the death of Keats, Blackwood's met it with a contemptible parody:

"Weep for my Tom cat! all ye Tabbies weep!"

Perhaps I have quoted enough. This is the parentage of our silken and flattering criticism.

The pages of these old reviews rest yellow on the shelves. From them there comes a smell of rotting leather, as though the infection spreads. The hour grows late. Like the ghost of the elder Hamlet, I detect the morning to be near.

The Pursuit of Fire

Reader, if by chance you have the habit of writing--whether they be sermons to hurl across your pews, or sonnets in the Spring--doubtless you have moments when you sit at your desk bare of thoughts. Mother Hubbard's cupboard when she went to seek the bone was not more empty. In such plight you chew your pencil as though it were stuff to feed your brain. Or if you are of delicate taste, you fall upon your fingers. Or in the hope that exercise will stir your wits, you pace up and down the room and press your nose upon the window if perhaps the grocer's boy shall rouse you. Some persons draw pictures on their pads or put pot-hooks on their letters--for talent varies--or they roughen up their hair. I knew one gifted fellow whose shoes presently would cramp him until he kicked them off, when at once the juices of his intellect would flow. Genius, I am told, sometimes locks its door and, if unrestrained, peels its outer wrappings. Or, in your poverty, you run through the pages of a favorite volume, with a notebook for a sly theft to start you off. In what dejection you have fallen! It is best that you put on your hat and take your stupid self abroad.

Or maybe you think that your creative fire will blaze, if instead of throwing in your wet raw thoughts, you feed it a few seasoned bits. You open, therefore, the drawer of your desk where you keep your rejected and broken fragments--for your past has not been prosperous--hopeful against experience that you can recast one of these to your present mood. This is mournful business. Certain paragraphs that came from you hot are now patched and shivery. Their finer meaning has run out between the lines as though these s.p.a.ces were sluices for the proper drainage of the page. You had best put on your hat. You will get no comfort from these stale papers.

One evening lately, being in this plight, I spread out before me certain odds and ends. I had dug deeper than usual in the drawer and had brought up a yellow stratum of a considerable age. I was poring upon these papers and was wondering whether I could fit them to a newer measure, when I heard a slight noise behind me. I glanced around and saw that a man had entered the room and was now seated in a chair before the fire. In the common nature of things this should have been startling, for the hour was late--twelve o'clock had struck across the way--and I had thought that I was quite alone. But there was something so friendly and easy in his att.i.tude--he was a young man, little more than a lanky boy--that instead of being frightened, I swung calmly around for a better look. He sat with his legs stretched before him and with his chin resting in his hand, as though in thought. By the light that fell on him from the fire, I saw that he wore a brown checked suit and that he was clean and respectable in appearance. His face was in shadow.

"Good evening," I said, "you startled me."

"I am sorry," he replied. "I beg your pardon. I was going by and I saw your light. I wished to make your acquaintance. But I saw at once that I was intruding, so I sat here. You were quite absorbed. Would you mind if I mended the fire?"

Without waiting for an answer, he took the poker and dealt the logs several blows. It didn't greatly help the flame, but he poked with such enjoyment that I smiled. I have myself rather a liking for stirring a fire. He set another log in place. Then he drew from his pocket a handful of dried orange peel. "I love to see it burn," he said. "It crackles and spits." He ranged the peel upon the log where the flame would get it, and then settled himself in the big chair.

"Perhaps you smoke?" I asked, pushing toward him a box of cigarettes.

He smiled. "I thought that you would know my habits. I don't smoke."

"So you were going by and came up to see me?" I asked.

"Yes. I was not sure that I would know you. You are a little older than I thought, a little--stouter, but dear me, how you have lost your hair! But you have quite forgotten me."

"My dear boy," I said, "you have the advantage of me. Where have I seen you? There is something familiar about you and I am sure that I have seen that brown suit before."

"We have never really known each other," the boy replied. "We met once, but only for an instant. But I have thought of you since that meeting a great many times. I lay this afternoon on a hilltop and wondered what you would be like. But I hoped that sometimes you would think of me. Perhaps you have forgotten that I used to collect railway maps and time-tables."

"Did you?" I replied. "So did I when I was a little younger than you are.

Perhaps if I might see your face, I would know you."

"It's nothing for show," he replied, and he kept it still in shadow. "Would you mind," he said at length, "if I ate an apple?" He took one from his pocket and broke it in his hands. "You eat half," he said.

I accepted the part he offered me. "Perhaps you would like a knife and plate," I said. "I can find them in the pantry."

"Not for me," he replied. "I prefer to eat mine this way." He took an enveloping bite.

"I myself care nothing for plates," I said. We ate in silence. Presently: "You have my habit," I said, "of eating everything, skin, seeds and all."

"Everything but the stem," he replied.

By this time the orange peel was hissing and exploding.

"You are an odd boy," I said. "I used to put orange peel away to dry in order to burn it. We seem to be as like as two peas."

"I wonder," he said, "if that is so." He turned in his chair and faced me, although his face was still in shadow. "Doubtless, we are far different in many things. Do you swallow grape seeds?"

"Hardly!" I cried. "I spit them out."

"I am glad of that." He paused. "It was a breezy hilltop where I lay. I thought of you all afternoon. You are famous, of course?"