Page images
PDF
EPUB

lence of these men did not depend on their participation in that tendency to abstract thinking, which had already produced its special fruit in the Scottish Philosophy, it consisted in little more than a reflection or imitation of what was already common and acknowledged in the prior or contemporary literature of South Britain. To write essays such as those of the Spectator; to be master of a style which Englishmen should pronounce pure, and to produce compositions in that style worthy of being ranked with the compositions of English authors-such was the aim and aspiration of Edinburgh literati, between whom and their London cousins there was all the difference that there is between the latitude of Edinburgh and the latitude of London, between the daily use of the broad Scotch dialect, and the daily use of the classic English. For Scotland this mere imitation of English models was but a poor and unsatisfactory vein of literary enterprise. What was necessary was the appearance of some man of genius who should flash through all that, and who, by the application to literature, or the art of universal expression, of that same Scottish habit of emphasis which had already produced such striking and original results in philosophy, should teach the Scottish nation its true power in literature, and shew a first example of it. Such a man was Burns. He it was who, uniting emotional fervour with intellectual emphasis, and drawing his inspiration from all those depths of sentiment in the Scottish people which his predecessors, the philosophers, had hardly so much as touched, struck for the first time a new chord, and revealed for the first time what a Scottish writer could do by trusting to the whole wealth of Scottish resources. And from the time of Burns, accordingly, there has been a series of eminent literary Scotchmen quite different from that series of hard logical Scotchmen who had till then been the most conspicuous representatives of their country in the eyes of the reading public of Great Britain a series of Scotchmen displaying to the world the power of emphatic sentiment and emphatic expression as strikingly as their predecessors had displayed the power of emphatic reasoning. While the old philosophic energy of Scotland still remained unexhausted, the honours of Reid and Hume and Smith and Stewart passing on to such men as Brown and Mill and Mackintosh and Hamilton (in favour of the last of whom even Germany has resigned her philosophic interregnum), the specially literary energy which had been awakened in the country descended along another line in the persons of Scott, and Jeffrey, and Chalmers, and Campbell, and Wilson, and Carlyle. Considering the amount of influence exerted by such men upon the whole spirit and substance of British literature, considering how disproportionate a share of the whole literary produce of Great Merits of the Biography.

297

Britain in the nineteenth century has come either from them or from other Scotchmen, and considering what a stamp of peculiarity marks all that portion of this produce which is of Scottish origin, it does not seem too much to say, that the rise and growth of Scottish Literature is as notable a historical phenomenon as the rise and growth of the Scottish Philosophy. And considering, moreover, how lately Scotland has entered on this literary field, how little time she has had to display her powers, how recently she was in this respect savage, and how much of her savage vitality yet remains to be articulated in civilized books, may we not hope that her literary avatar is but beginning, and has a goodly course yet to run? From the Solway to Caithness we hear a loud Amen!

In thus connecting the name and the memory of Jeffrey with the history of the internal intellectual development and the external intellectual action of his native land, we have done a thing which he himself would have been the last to repudiate, and which, whether he would have repudiated it or not, is natural, just, and becoming. Everything is as it is possible for it to be; and that the new era of British criticism was inaugurated by a Scotchman is a proof that a Scotchman was the man to inaugurate it. What, then, was Jeffrey among Scotchmen, and what were the talents and circumstances that fitted him for his task?

The Life of Jeffrey by Lord Cockburn is a work of very great merit, intrinsically worth a hundred of such lives of distinguished men as are daily proceeding from the press. It is not, indeed, an artistic biography; it does not shape and mould the character of Jeffrey by a succession of descriptive touches, and deposit it finally as a finished conception of the man in the minds of distant readers; it contains no elaborate or subtle appreciation of Jeffrey's more intimate views and feelings, or of his place and function in the literary movement of his time. But the writer knew and loved his subject, and it was not for the purpose of making a book that he wrote his life. He had known him in m in youth, he had known him in old age; he had been his friend and daily companion ;-not a sentence, therefore, did he write, but the lineaments of the dead were before him, and the old familiar tones were present to his ear. It would be a miracle, then, if he had written untruly, and if some image of the man as he really was were not placed before the reader. Add to this, that the successive events of Jeffrey's life are duly recorded and explained; and that the appended selection from his letters is at once ample and judicious. In one portion of the Life, too, Lord Cockburn, as was to be expected, has acquitted himself in a manner quite masterly. This is where he describes the condition of Scotland in general, and of society in Edinburgh in particular, at the time when Jeffrey entered upon public and literary life. Nothing could be better than the sketches given of the state of Scottish politics at that period, and of the more prominent personages who were then connected with the Scottish Bar, or otherwise invested with importance in the public opinion of the country. Macaulay could have done this part of the book with finer literary art, but not with more clear and thorough insight. One is glad to see that, notwithstanding a certain tendency to euphuism, as if Lord Cockburn had throughout the book laid a restraint on the well-known vigour of his Scottish sense and humour, lest by indulging it he should Scotticize Jeffrey too much, the Scotchman nevertheless breaks through sufficiently to reinind all who know the author by repute, that a man more thoroughly Scotch at heart is not now known to the purlieus of the Parliament House, or familiar to the citizens of the New Town of Edinburgh. With Lord Cockburn for our guide, therefore, let us view Jeffrey for a little longer against his native background of Scottish manners and Scottish associations.

From his very boyhood, Jeffrey belonged to a rather peculiar type of the Scottish physique and character. The son of a genuine citizen of Edinburgh, attached as a clerk to its law courts, and described as a sensible, plodding, and somewhat morose man, Jeffrey, even at the High School, was noted as a sharp, nervous, swarthy little fellow, of a type and physiognomy different from that of the majority of Scottish boys. Walter Scott, though at first a sickly and lame scholar, almost always absent from the classes, grew up a stalwart fair-haired youth, capable of taking part in a row in the pit of a theatre, or in any other freak that required bone and sinew; Jeffrey, with plenty of spirit and alacrity, remained always sharp, incisive, and diminutive. Transferred at the age of fourteen to Glasgow College, where he received the better part of his academic training, and where he was one of the most distinguished pupils of one of the best professors that ever taught in a Scotch University-John Jardine, Professor of Logic-he became known there to his heavier class-fellows, as an extremely quick, fluent, petulant youth, unmercifully severe in his criticisms on the essays of other students; not very sparing in his comments even on the professors; and who, in spite of raillery and the Glasgow decorum of those days, persisted in the whim of cherishing a very black moustache, covering the whole of his upper lip. Even at this time he was a great reader, a rapid writer for his own amusement, and a favourite speaker in the College Clubs and Societies.

Juvenile Performances.

299

After two years at Glasgow, he returned to Edinburgh, where he spent two years more, partly in attending the law-classes at the University, partly in miscellaneous literary occupations prescribed by himself. The quantity of manuscript, in the form of essays, translations, orations, and even poems, produced by him at this period, or between his sixteenth and nineteenth year, was, as we learn from his biographer, something quite extraordinary; and it is curious to remark in the extracts which are given from some of these productions, the early and decided tendency of Jeffrey's mind to literary criticism. Almost all his own essays, it appears, had appended to them a paragraph or two of self-criticism,-generally a very slashing review of their merits and demerits on a retrospective perusal of them; and one manuscript of seventy folio pages is devoted to an elaborate analysis of his own character. A sample of Jeffrey at seventeen reviewing himself may not be uninteresting. The following is from a criticism appended to a collection of thirty essays :

"It was, I thought, and so far I surely did think justly, a very essential point for a young man to acquire the habit of expressing himself with ease upon subjects which he is unavoidably one time or another to talk of. This, to be sure, might perhaps have been attained, in a degree adequate to all common occasions, without being at the trouble to write down all that I said, or might have said, on them; and as the habit of writing and speaking are not reciprocal, the plan of accustoming myself to speak a great deal upon them may perhaps appear better calculated for this purpose. But besides that I thus avoid many inaccuracies, and, as I am in Scotland, many improprieties, I can spare auditors from the fatigue of being the tools and vehicles of my experiment, and save myself from the reputation of talkativeness and folly. But though the habit of speaking easily be a very valuable one, that of thinking correctly is undoubtedly much more so. This, too, cannot be attained by mere mechanical practice, and an earlier exertion of those powers, with which every one is endued, is absolutely necessary to confirm it. The human mind, at least mine, which is all I have to do with, is such a chaotic confused business, such a jumble and hurry of ideas, that it is absolutely impossible to follow the train and extent of our ideas upon any one topic, without more exertion than the conception of them required. To remedy this, and to fix the bounds of our knowledge and belief on any subject, there is no way but to write down, deliberately and patiently, the notions which first naturally present themselves on that point; or, if we refuse any, taking care it be such as have assumed a place in our minds merely from the influence of education or prejudice, and not those which the hand of reason has planted, and which have been nurtured by the habit of reflection. The only other object I had in view was, perhaps not the least important of the whole, to attempt an imitation of the style and manner of the principal persons who have exhibited their abilities in periodical and

VOL, XVII. NO. XXXIV.

X

short essays. Dr. Johnson, Addison, Mackenzie, and Steele, are the only personages I have attempted to ape, and these it would be absurd in me to cope with. I have at least this consolation, that my emulation can be called by no means little. Of these essays I have little more to say. I have, in truth, said perhaps already more than they deserve."-Life, pp. 30-33.

Here, for a youth of seventeen, we have certainly industry, ambition, a swift, sharp audacity of opinion, and a wonderful fluency of words. That much envied faculty, usually called "command of language," Jeffrey, if we may judge from this and similar specimens, certainly had from the first. In fact, it is not treating the thing too seriously to note, in connexion with such a specimen, the early appearance of what was all along Jeffrey's defect. We have spoken of emphasis as most specifically the quality of the Scottish mind; and we have described as the proper manifestation of this emphasis in the direction of thought, that resolute striving after first principles, that tendency to rest only on distinct and massive generalities, which has been conspicuously exhibited in the works of the Scottish thinkers. Now in this kind of emphasis, or at least in emphasis leading to this result, Jeffrey was certainly deficient. Nimble leaping from point to point, from commonplace to something better, and from something better back to commonplace, but always with a distinct and characteristic meaning in the end; a hawk-like ease of motion, and keenness of vision in the atmosphere of what may be called the proximate notions of educated men-this, rather than a sluggish attachment to certain propositions or maxims emphasised once for all, or than a tendency, in every individual case of intellectual exertion, to push through the object-matter, and carry all on to the terminus of some new proposition that might be emphasised and clung to, was the mental peculiarity of Jeffrey. As soon as he began to write, his acute mind darted along from conception to conception, seizing points of real truth and consequence, and insinuating itself with great delicacy into the longest and most winding intricacies; words, too, flowed in abundance, most apt for the expression of his meaning; but instead of stemming the words as they came, and damming them back, as it were by a mental resolve, till by their very accumulation and pressure the meaning to be finally expressed became deep and weighty, he suffered himself to be carried along in their flow, not completing the thought first, but thinking as he swam. This "command of language," indeed, so soon conspicuous in Jeffrey, is not an unfrequent sign of promising talent in early life; but we have generally found it give way, with men of real ability, before youth was over, under the influence of a newly-awakened tendency towards

« PreviousContinue »