The novels, though containing much that is very remarkable, are not his strongest work; indeed, any critic who speaks with knowledge must admit that Lockhart had every faculty for writing novels, except the faculty of novel-writing. _Valerius_, a cla.s.sical story of the visit of a Roman-Briton to Rome, and the persecution of the Christians in the days of Trajan, is, like everything of its author"s, admirably written, but, like every cla.s.sical novel without exception, save only _Hypatia_ (which makes its interests and its personages daringly modern), it somehow rings false and faint, though not, perhaps, so faint or so false as most of its fellows. _Adam Blair_, the story of the sudden succ.u.mbing to natural temptation of a pious minister of the kirk, is unquestionably Lockhart"s masterpiece in this kind. It is full of pa.s.sion, full of force, and the characters of Charlotte Campbell and Adam Blair himself are perfectly conceived. But the story-gift is still wanting. The reader finds himself outside: wondering why the people do these things, and whether in real life they would have done them, instead of following the story with absorption, and asking himself no questions at all. The same, in a different way, is the case with Lockhart"s longest book, _Reginald Dalton_; and this has the additional disadvantage that neither hero nor heroine are much more than lay-figures, while in _Adam Blair_ both are flesh and blood. The Oxford scenes are amusing but exaggerated--the obvious work of a man who supplies the defects of a ten years" memory by deepening the strokes where he does remember. _Matthew Wald_, which is a novel of madness, has excellent pa.s.sages, but is conventional and wooden as a whole. Nothing was more natural than that Lockhart, with the example of Scott immediately before him, should try novel-writing; not many things are more indicative of his literary ability than that, after a bare three years" practice, he left a field which certainly was not his.
In the early autumn of 1825, just before the great collapse of his affairs, Scott went to Ireland with Lockhart in his company. But very early in the following year, before the collapse was decided, Lockhart and his family moved to London, on his appointment as editor of the _Quarterly_, in succession to Gifford. Probably there never was a better appointment of the kind. Lockhart was a born critic: he had both the faculty and the will to work up the papers of his contributors to the proper level; he was firm and decided in his literary and political views, without going to the extreme Giffordian acerbity in both; and his intelligence and erudition were very wide. "He could write," says a phrase in some article I have somewhere seen quoted, "on any subject from poetry to dry-rot;" and there is no doubt that an editor, if he cannot exactly write on any subject from poetry to dry-rot, should be able to take an interest in any subject between and, if necessary, beyond those poles. Otherwise he has the choice of two undesirables; either he frowns unduly on the dry-rot articles, which probably interest large sections of the public (itself very subject to dry-rot), or he lets the dry-rot contributor inflict his hobby, without mercy and unedited, on a reluctant audience. But Lockhart, though he is said (for his contributions are not, as far as I know, anywhere exactly indicated) to have contributed fully a hundred articles to the _Quarterly_, that is to say one to nearly every number during the twenty-eight years of his editorship, by no means confined himself to this work. It was, indeed, during its progress that he composed not merely the _Life of Napoleon_, which was little more than an abridgment, though a very clever abridgment, of Scott"s book, but the _Lives_ of Burns and of Scott himself. Before, however, dealing with these, his _Spanish Ballads_ and other poetical work may be conveniently disposed of.
Lockhart"s verse is in the same scattered condition as his prose; but it is evident that he had very considerable poetical faculty. The charming piece, "When youthful hope is fled," attributed to him on Mrs. Norton"s authority; the well-known "Captain Paton"s Lament," which has been republished in the _Tales from Blackwood_; and the mono-rhymed epitaph on "Bright broken Maginn," in which some wiseacres have seen ill-nature, but which really is a masterpiece of humorous pathos, are all in very different styles, and are all excellent each in its style. But these things are mere waifs, separated from each other in widely different publications; and until they are put together no general impression of the author"s poetical talent, except a vaguely favourable one, can be derived from them. The _Spanish Ballads_ form something like a substantive work, and one of nearly as great merit as is possible to poetical translations of poetry. I believe opinions differ as to their fidelity to the original. Here and there, it is said, the author has exchanged a vivid and characteristic touch for a conventional and feeble one. Thus, my friend Mr. Hannay points out to me that in the original of "The Lord of Butrago" the reason given by Montanez for not accompanying the King"s flight is not the somewhat _fade_ one that
Castile"s proud dames shall never point the finger of disdain,
but the n.o.bler argument, showing the best side of feudal sentiment, that the widows of his tenants shall never say that he fled and left their husbands to fight and fall. Lockhart"s master, Sir Walter, would certainly not have missed this touch, and it is odd that Lockhart himself did. But such things will happen to translators. On the other hand, it is, I believe, admitted (and the same very capable authority in Spanish is my warranty) that on the whole the originals have rather gained than lost; and certainly no one can fail to enjoy the _Ballads_ as they stand in English. The "Wandering Knight"s Song" has always seemed to me a gem without flaw, especially the last stanza. Few men, again, manage the long "fourteener" with middle rhyme better than Lockhart, though he is less happy with the anapaest, and has not fully mastered the very difficult trochaic measure of "The Death of Don Pedro." In "The Count Arnaldos," wherein, indeed, the subject lends itself better to that cadence, the result is more satisfactory. The merits, however, of these _Ballads_ are not technical merely, or rather, the technical merits are well subordinated to the production of the general effect. About the nature of that effect much ink has been shed.
It is produced equally by Greek hexameters, by old French a.s.sonanced _tirades_, by English "eights and sixes," and by not a few other measures. But in itself it is more or less the same--the stirring of the blood as by the sound of a trumpet, or else the melting of the mood into or close to tears. The ballad effect is thus the simplest and most primitive of all poetical effects; it is Lockhart"s merit that he seldom fails to produce it. The simplicity and spontaneity of his verse may, to some people, be surprising in a writer so thoroughly and intensely literary; but Lockhart"s character was as complex as his verse is simple, and the verse itself is not the least valuable guide to it.
It has been said that his removal to London and his responsible office by no means reduced his general literary activity. Whether he continued to contribute to _Blackwood_ I am not sure; some phrases in the _Noctes_ seem to argue the contrary. But he not only, as has been said, wrote for the _Quarterly_ a.s.siduously, but after a short time joined the new venture of _Fraser_, and showed in that rollicking periodical that the sting of the "scorpion" had by no means been extracted. He produced, moreover, in 1828, his _Life of Burns_, and in 1836-37 his _Life of Scott_. These, with the sketch of Theodore Hook written for the _Quarterly_ in 1843, and separately published later, make three very remarkable examples of literary biography on very different scales, dealing with very different subjects, and, by comparison of their uniform excellence, showing that the author had an almost unique genius for this kind of composition. The _Life of Scott_ fills seven capacious volumes; the _Life of Burns_ goes easily into one; the _Life of Hook_ does not reach a hundred smallish pages. But they are all equally well-proportioned in themselves and to their subjects; they all exhibit the same complete grasp of the secret of biography; and they all have the peculiarity of being full of facts without presenting an undigested appearance. They thus stand at an equal distance from biography of the fashion of the old academic _Eloge_ of the last century, which makes an elegant discourse about a man, but either deliberately or by accident gives precise information about hardly any of the facts of the man"s life; and from modern biography, which tumbles upon the devoted reader a cataract of letters, doc.u.ments, and facts of all sorts, uncombined and undigested by any exercise of narrative or critical skill on the part of the author. Lockhart"s biographies, therefore, belong equally (to borrow De Quincey"s useful, though, as far as terminology goes, not very happy distinction) to the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. They are storehouses of information; but they are, at the same time, works of art, and of very great art. The earliest of the three, the _Life of Burns_, is to this day by far the best book on the subject; indeed, with its few errors and defects of fact corrected and supplemented as they have been by the late Mr. Douglas, it makes all other Lives quite superfluous. Yet it was much more difficult, especially for a Scotchman, to write a good book about Burns then than now; though I am told that, for a Scotchman, there is still a considerable difficulty in the matter. Lockhart was familiar with Edinburgh society--indeed, he had long formed a part of it--and Edinburgh society was still, when he wrote, very sore at the charge of having by turns patronised and neglected Burns. Lockhart was a decided Tory, and Burns, during the later part of his life at any rate, had permitted himself manifestations of political opinion which Whigs themselves admitted to be imprudent freaks, and which even a good-natured Tory might be excused for regarding as something very much worse. But the biographer"s treatment of both these subjects is perfectly tolerant, judicious, and fair, and the same may be said of his whole account of Burns. Indeed, the main characteristic of Lockhart"s criticism, a robust and quiet sanity, fitted him admirably for the task of biography. He is never in extremes, and he never avoids extremes by the common expedient of see-sawing between two sides, two parties, or two views of a man"s character. He holds aloof equally from _engouement_ and from depreciation, and if, as a necessary consequence, he failed, and fails, to please fanatics on either side, he cannot fail to please those who know what criticism really means.
These good qualities were shown even to better advantage in a pleasanter but, at the same time, far more difficult task, the famous _Life of Scott_. The extraordinary interest of the subject, and the fashion, no less skilful than modest, in which the biographer keeps himself in the background, and seems constantly to be merely editing Scott"s words, have perhaps obscured the literary value of the book to some readers. Of the perpetual comparison with Boswell, it may be said, once for all, that it is a comparison of matter merely; and that from the properly literary point of view, the point of view of workmanship and form, it does not exist. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that, even in moments of personal irritation, any one should have been found to accuse Lockhart of softening Scott"s faults. The other charge, of malice to Scott, is indeed more extraordinary still in a certain way; but, being merely imbecile, it need not be taken into account. A delightful doc.u.ment informs us that, in the opinion of the Hon. Charles Sumner, Fenimore Cooper (who, stung by some references to him in the book, attacked it) administered "a proper castigation to the vulgar minds of Scott and Lockhart." This is a jest so pleasing that it almost puts one in good temper with the whole affair. But, in fact, Lockhart, considering his relationship to Scott, and considering Scott"s greatness, could hardly have spoken more plainly as to the grave fault of judgment which made a man of letters and a member of a learned profession mix himself up secretly, and almost clandestinely, with commercial speculations. On this point the biographer does not attempt to mince matters; and on no other point was it necessary for him to be equally candid, for this, grave as it is, is almost the only fault to be found with Scott"s character. This candour, however, is only one of the merits of the book. The wonderfully skilful arrangement of so vast and heterogeneous a ma.s.s of materials, the way in which the writer"s own work and his quoted matter dovetail into one another, the completeness of the picture given of Scott"s character and life, have never been equalled in any similar book. Not a few minor touches, moreover, which are very apt to escape notice, enhance its merit. Lockhart was a man of all men least given to wear his heart upon his sleeve, yet no one has dealt with such pitiful subjects as his later volumes involve, at once with such total absence of "gush" and with such n.o.ble and pathetic appreciation. For Scott"s misfortunes were by no means the only matters which touched him nearly, in and in connection with the chronicle. The constant illness and sufferings of his own child form part of it; his wife died during its composition and publication, and all these things are mentioned with as little parade of stoicism as of sentiment. I do not think that, as an example of absolute and perfect good taste, the account of Scott"s death can be surpa.s.sed in literature. The same quality exhibits itself in another matter. No biographer can be less anxious to display his own personality than Lockhart; and though for six years he was a constant, and for much longer an occasional, spectator of the events he describes, he never introduces himself except when it is necessary. Yet, on the other hand, when Scott himself makes complimentary references to him (as when he speaks of his party "having Lockhart to say clever things"), he neither omits the pa.s.sage nor stoops to the missish _minauderie_, too common in such cases, of translating "spare my blushes" into some kind of annotation. Lockhart will not talk about Lockhart; but if others, whom the public likes to hear, talk about him, Lockhart does not put his fan before his face.
This admirable book, however, is both well enough known (if not so well known as it deserves) and large enough to make it both unnecessary and impossible to criticise it at length here. The third work noticed above, the sketch of the life of Theodore Hook, though it has been reprinted more than once, and is still, I believe, kept in print and on sale, is probably less familiar to most readers. It is, however, almost as striking an example, though of course an example in miniature only, of Lockhart"s apt.i.tude for the great and difficult art of literary biography as either of the two books just mentioned. Here the difficulty was of a different kind. A great many people liked Theodore Hook, but it was nearly impossible for any one to respect him; yet it was quite impossible for Lockhart, a political sympathiser and a personal friend, to treat him harshly in an obituary notice. There was no danger of his setting down aught in malice; but there might be thought to be a considerable danger of over-extenuation. The danger was the greater, inasmuch as Lockhart himself had certainly not escaped, and had perhaps to some extent deserved, one of Hook"s reproaches. No man questioned his integrity; he was not a reckless spendthrift; he was not given to excesses in living, or to hanging about great houses; nor was he careless of moral and social rules. But the scorpion which had delighted to sting the faces of men might have had some awkwardness in dealing with the editor of _John Bull_. The result, however, victoriously surmounts all difficulties without evading one. Nothing that is the truth about Hook is omitted, or even blinked; and from reading Lockhart alone, any intelligent reader might know the worst that is to be said about him. Neither are any of his faults, in the unfair sense, extenuated. His malicious and vulgar practical jokes; his carelessness at Mauritius; the worse than carelessness which allowed him to shirk, when he had ample means of discharging it by degrees, a debt which he acknowledged that he justly owed; the folly and vanity which led him to waste his time, his wit, and his money in playing the hanger-on at country houses and town dinner-tables; his hard living, and the laxity which induced him not merely to form irregular connections, but prevented him from taking the only step which could, in some measure, repair his fault, are all fairly put, and blamed frankly. Even in that more delicate matter of the personal journalism, Lockhart"s procedure is as ingenuous as it is ingenious; and the pa.s.sage of the sketch which deals with "the blazing audacity of invective, the curious delicacy of persiflage, the strong caustic satire" (expressions, by the way, which suit Lockhart himself much better than Hook, though Lockhart had not Hook"s broad humour), in fact, admits that the application of these things was not justifiable, nor to be justified. Yet with all this, the impression left by the sketch is distinctly favourable on the whole, which, in the circ.u.mstances, must be admitted to be a triumph of advocacy obtained not at the expense of truth, but by the art of the advocate in making the best of it.
The facts of Lockhart"s life between his removal to London and his death may be rapidly summarised, the purpose of this notice being rather critical than biographical. He had hardly settled in town when, as he himself tells, he had to attempt, fruitlessly enough, the task of mediator in the financial disasters of Constable and Scott; and his own share of domestic troubles began early. His eldest son, after repeated escapes, died in 1831; Scott followed shortly; Miss Anne Scott, after her father"s death, came in broken health to Lockhart"s house, and died there only a year later; and in the spring of 1837 his wife likewise died. Then Fortune let him alone for a little, to return in no better humour some years later.
It is, however, from the early "thirties" that one of the best known memorials of Lockhart dates; that is to say, the portrait, or rather the two portraits, in the Fraser Gallery. In the general group of the Fraserians he sits between Fraser himself and Theodore Hook, with the diminutive figure of Crofton Croker half intercepted beyond him; and his image forms the third plate in Mr. Bates"s republication of the gallery.
It is said to be the most faithful of the whole series, and it is certainly the handsomest, giving even a more flattering representation than the full-face portrait by Pickersgill which serves as frontispiece to the modern editions of the _Ballads_. In this latter the curious towzled mop of hair, in which our fathers delighted, rather mars the effect; while in Maclise"s sketch (which is in profile) it is less obtrusive. In this latter, too, there is clearly perceivable what the Shepherd in the _Noctes_ calls "a sort of laugh aboot the screwed-up mouth of him that fules ca"d no canny, for they couldna thole the meaning o"t." There is not much doubt that Lockhart aided and abetted Maginn in much of the mischief that distinguished the early days of _Fraser_, though his fastidious taste is never likely to have stooped to the coa.r.s.eness which was too natural to Maginn. It is believed that to him is due the wicked wresting of Alaric Watts" second initial into "Attila," which gave the victim so much grief, and he probably did many other things of the same kind. But Lockhart was never vulgar, and _Fraser_ in those days very often was.
In 1843 Lockhart received his first and last piece of political preferment, being appointed, says one of the authorities before me, Chancellor of the Duchy of Cornwall, and (says another) Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Such are biographers; but the matter is not of the slightest importance, though I do not myself quite see how it could have been Lancaster. A third and more trustworthy writer gives the post as "Auditorship" of the Duchy of Lancaster, which is possible enough.
In 1847, the death of Sir Walter Scott"s last surviving son brought the t.i.tle and estate to Lockhart"s son Walter, but he died in 1853.
Lockhart"s only other child had married Mr. Hope--called, after his brother-in-law"s death, Mr. Hope Scott, of whom an elaborate biography has been published. Little in it concerns Lockhart, but the admirable letter which he wrote to Mr. Hope on his conversion to the Roman Church.
This step, followed as it was by Mrs. Hope, could not but be, and in this letter is delicately hinted to be, no small grief to Lockhart, who saw Abbotsford fall under influences for which certainly neither he nor its founder had any respect. His repeated domestic losses, and many years of constant work and excitement, appear to have told on him, and very shortly after his son"s death in April 1853 he resigned the editorship of the _Quarterly_. He then visited Italy, a visit from which, if he had been a superst.i.tious man, the ominous precedent of Scott might have deterred him. His journey did him no good, and he died at Abbotsford on the 25th of November. December, says another authority, for so it is that history gets written, even in thirty years.
The comparatively brief notices which are all that have been published about Lockhart, uniformly mention the unpopularity (to use a mild word) which pursued him, and which, as I have remarked, does not seem to have exhausted itself even yet. It is not very difficult to account for the origin of this; and the neglect to supply any collection of his work, and any authoritative account of his life and character, will quite explain its continuance. In the first place, Lockhart was well known as a most sarcastic writer; in the second, he was for nearly a lifetime editor of one of the chief organs of party politics and literary criticism in England. He might have survived the _Chaldee Ma.n.u.script_, and _Peter"s Letters_, and the lampoons in _Fraser_: he might even have got the better of the youthful imprudence which led him to fix upon himself a description which was sure to be used and abused against him by the "fules," if he had not succeeded to the chair of the _Quarterly_.
Individual and, to a great extent, anonymous indulgence of the luxury of scorn never gave any man a very bad character, even if he were, as Lockhart was, personally shy and reserved, unable to make up for written sarcasm with verbal flummery, and, in virtue of an incapacity for gushing, deprived of the easiest and, by public personages, most commonly practised means of proving that a man has "a good heart after all." But when he complicated his sins by editing the _Quarterly_ at a time when everybody attacked everybody else in exactly such terms as pleased them, the sins of his youth were pretty sure to be visited on him. In the first place, there was the great army of the criticised, who always consider that the editor of the paper which dissects them is really responsible. The luckless Harriet Martineau, who, if I remember rightly, gives in her autobiography a lurid picture of Lockhart "going down at night to the printer"s" and inserting dreadful things about her, and who, I believe, took the feminine plan of revenging herself in an obituary article, was only one of a great mult.i.tude.
Lockhart does not seem to have taken over from Gifford quite such a troublesome crew of helpers as Macvey Napier inherited from Jeffrey, and he was also free from the monitions of his predecessor. But in Croker he had a first lieutenant who could not very well be checked, and who (though he, too, has had rather hard measure) had no equal in the art of making himself offensive. Besides, those were the days when the famous "Sc.u.m condensed of Irish bog" lines appeared in a great daily newspaper about O"Connell. Imagine the _Times_ addressing Mr. Parnell as "Sc.u.m condensed of Irish bog," with the other amenities that follow, in this year of grace!
But Lockhart had not only his authors, he had his contributors. "A"
contributors," says the before-quoted Shepherd, in a moment of such preternatural wisdom that he must have been "fou," "are in a manner fierce." They are--it is the nature and essence of the animal to be so.
The contributor who is not allowed to contribute is fierce, as a matter of course; but not less fierce is the contributor who thinks himself too much edited, and the contributor who imperatively insists that his article on Chinese metaphysics shall go in at once, and the contributor who, being an excellent hand at articles on the currency, wants to be allowed to write on dancing; and, in short, as the Shepherd says, all contributors. Now it does not appear (for, as I must repeat, I have no kind of private information on the subject) that Lockhart was by any means an easy-going editor, or one of that kind which allows a certain number of privileged writers to send in what they like. We are told in many places that he "greatly improved" his contributors" articles; and I should say that if there is one thing which drives a contributor to the verge of madness, it is to have his articles "greatly improved." A hint in the _Noctes_ (and it may be observed that though the references to Lockhart in the _Noctes_ are not very numerous, they are valuable, for Wilson"s friendship seems to have been mixed with a small grain of jealousy which preserves them from being commonplace) suggests that his friends did not consider him as by any means too ready to accept their papers. All this, added to his early character of scoffer at Whig dignities, and his position as leader _en t.i.tre_ of Tory journalism, was quite sufficient to create a reputation partly exaggerated, partly quite false, which has endured simply because no trouble has been taken to sift and prove it.
The head and front of Lockhart"s offending, in a purely literary view, seems to be the famous _Quarterly_ article on Lord Tennyson"s volume of 1832. That article is sometimes spoken of as Croker"s, but there can be no manner of doubt that it is Lockhart"s; and, indeed, it is quoted as his by Professor Ferrier, who, through Wilson, must have known the facts. Now I do not think I yield to any man living in admiration of the Laureate, but I am unable to think much the worse, or, indeed, any the worse, of Lockhart because of this article. In the first place, it is extremely clever, being, perhaps, the very best example of politely cruel criticism in existence. In the second, most, if not all, of the criticism is perfectly just. If Lord Tennyson himself, at this safe distance of time, can think of the famous strawberry story and its application without laughing, he must be an extremely sensitive Peer.
And n.o.body, I suppose, would now defend the wondrous stanza which was paralleled from the _Groves of Blarney_. The fact is that criticism of criticism after some time is apt to be doubly unjust. It is wont to a.s.sume, or rather to imagine, that the critic must have known what the author was going to do, as well as what he had actually done; and it is wont to forget that the work criticised was very often, as it presented itself to the critic, very different from what it is when it presents itself to the critic"s critic. The best justification of Lockhart"s verdict on the volume of 1832 is what Lord Tennyson himself has done with the volume of 1832. Far more than half the pa.s.sages objected to have since been excised or altered. But there are other excuses. In the first place, Mr. Tennyson, as he then was, represented a further development of schools of poetry against which the _Quarterly_ had always, rightly or wrongly, set its face, and a certain loyalty to the principles of his paper is, after all, not the worst fault of a critic.
In the second, no one can fairly deny that some points in Mr. Tennyson"s early, if not in his later, manner must have been highly and rightly disgustful to a critic who, like Lockhart, was above all things masculine and abhorrent of "gush." In the third, it is, unfortunately, not given to all critics to admire all styles alike. Let those to whom it is given thank G.o.d therefor; but let them, at the same time, remember that they are as much bound to accept whatever is good in all kinds of critics as whatever is good in all kinds of poets.
Now Lockhart, within his own range, and it was for the time a very wide one, was certainly not a narrow critic, just as he certainly was not a feeble one. In the before-mentioned _Peter"s Letters_ (which, with all its faults, is one of his best, and particularly one of his most spontaneous and characteristic works) the denunciation of the "facetious and rejoicing ignorance" which enabled contemporary critics to pooh-pooh Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Coleridge is excellent. And it must be remembered that in 1819, whatever might be the case with Coleridge, Wordsworth and Lamb were by no means taken to the hearts of Tories on their merits, and that in this very pa.s.sage _Blackwood_ is condemned not less severely than the _Edinburgh_. Another point in which Lockhart made a great advance was that he was one of the first (Lamb himself is, in England, his only important forerunner) to unite and combine criticism of different branches of art. He never has the disgusting technical jargon, or the undisciplined fluency, of the mere art critic, any more than he has the gabble of the mere connoisseur. But it is constantly evident that he has a knowledge of and a feeling for the art of line and colour as well as of words. Nothing can be better than the fragments of criticism which are interspersed in the Scott book; and if his estimate of Hook as a novelist seems exaggerated, it must be remembered, as he has himself noted, that Thackeray was, at the time he spoke, nothing more than an amusing contributor of remarkably promising trifles to magazines, and that, from the appearance of _Waverley_ to that of _Pickwick_, no novelist of the first cla.s.s had made an appearance. It is, moreover, characteristic of Lockhart as a critic that he is, as has been noted, always manly and robust. He was never false to his own early protest against "the banishing from the mind of a reverence for feeling, as abstracted from mere questions of immediate and obvious utility." But he never allowed that reverence to get the better of him and drag him into the deplorable excesses of gush into which, from his day to ours, criticism has more and more had a tendency to fall. If he makes no parade of definite aesthetic principles, it is clear that throughout he had such principles, and that they were principles of a very good kind.
He had a wide knowledge of foreign literature without any taint of "Xenomania," sufficient scholarship (despite the unlucky false quant.i.ty of _Janua_, which he overlooked) in the older languages, and a thorough knowledge and love of English literature. His style is, to me at any rate, peculiarly attractive. Contrasted with the more brightly coloured and fantastically-shaped styles, of which, in his own day, De Quincey, Wilson, Macaulay, and Carlyle set the fashion, it may possibly seem tame to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson"s welter of words, now bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and heartbreaking ant.i.theses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called "Tom"s snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. The conclusion of the essay on Theodore Hook is not easily surpa.s.sable as an example of solid polished prose, which is prose, and does not attempt to be a hybrid between prose and poetry. The last page of the Tennyson review is perfect for quiet humour.
But there is no doubt that though Lockhart was an admirable critic merely as such, a poet, or at least a song-writer, of singular ability and charm within certain limits, and a master of sharp light raillery that never missed its mark and never lumbered on the way, his most unique and highest merit is that of biographer. Carlyle, though treating Lockhart himself with great politeness, does not allow this, and complains that Lockhart"s conception of his task was "not very elevated." That is what a great many people said of Boswell, whom Carlyle thought an almost perfect biographer. But, as it happens, the critic here has fallen into the dangerous temptation of giving his reasons. Lockhart"s plan was not, it seems, in the case of his _Scott_, very elevated, because it was not "to show Scott as he was by nature, as the world acted on him, as he acted on the world," and so forth. Now, unfortunately, this is exactly what it seems to me that Lockhart, whether he meant to do it or not, has done in the very book which Carlyle was criticising. And it seems to me, further, that he always does this in all his biographical efforts. Sometimes he appears (for here another criticism of Carlyle"s on the _Burns_, not the _Scott_, is more to the point) to quote and extract from other and much inferior writers to an extent rather surprising in so excellent a penman, especially when it is remembered that, except to a dunce, the extraction and stringing together of quotations is far more troublesome than original writing. But even then the extracts are always luminous. With ninety-nine out of a hundred biographies the total impression which Carlyle demands, and very properly demands, is, in fact, a total absence of impression. The reader"s mind is as dark, though it may be as full, as a cellar when the coals have been shot into it. Now this is never the case with Lockhart"s biographies, whether they are books in half a dozen volumes, or essays in half a hundred pages. He subordinates what even Carlyle allowed to be his "clear nervous forcible style" so entirely to the task of representing his subject, he has such a perfect general conception of that subject, that only a very dense reader can fail to perceive the presentment. Whether it is the right or whether it is the wrong presentment may, of course, be a matter of opinion, but, such as it is, it is always there.
One other point of interest about Lockhart has to be mentioned. He was an eminent example, perhaps one of the most eminent, of a "gentleman of the press." He did a great many kinds of literary work, and he did all of them well; novel-writing, perhaps (which, as has been said, he gave up almost immediately), least well. But he does not seem to have felt any very strong or peculiar call to any particular cla.s.s of original literary work, and his one great and substantive book may be fairly taken to have been much more decided by accident and his relationship to Scott than by deliberate choice. He was, in fact, eminently a journalist, and it is very much to be wished that there were more journalists like him. For from the two great reproaches of the craft to which so many of us belong, and which seems to be gradually swallowing up all other varieties of literary occupation, he was conspicuously free. He never did work slovenly in form, and he never did work that was not in one way or other consistent with a decided set of literary and political principles. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the unprincipled character of journalism, no doubt; and n.o.body knows better than those who have some experience of it, that if, as George Warrington says, "too many of us write against our own party," it is the fault simply of those who do so. If a man has a faculty of saying anything, he can generally get an opportunity of saying what he likes, and avoid occasions of saying what he does not like. But the mere journalist Swiss of heaven (or the other place), is certainly not unknown, and by all accounts he was in Lockhart"s time rather common. No one ever accused Lockhart himself of being one of the cla.s.s. A still more important fault, undoubtedly, of journalism is its tendency to slovenly work, and here again Lockhart was conspicuously guiltless. His actual production must have been very considerable, though in the absence of any collection, or even any index, of his contributions to periodicals, it is impossible to say exactly to how much it would extend. But, at a rough guess, the _Scott_, the _Burns_, and the _Napoleon_, the _Ballads_, the novels, and _Peter_, a hundred _Quarterly_ articles, and an unknown number in _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_, would make at least twenty or five-and-twenty volumes of a pretty closely printed library edition. Yet all this, as far as it can be identified, has the same careful though unostentatious distinction of style, the same admirable faculty of sarcasm, wherever sarcasm is required, the same depth of feeling, wherever feeling is called for, the same refusal to make a parade of feeling even where it is shown. Never trivial, never vulgar, never feeble, never stilted, never diffuse, Lockhart is one of the very best recent specimens of that cla.s.s of writers of all work, which since Dryden"s time has continually increased, is increasing, and does not seem likely to diminish. The growth may or may not be matter for regret; probably none of the more capable members of the cla.s.s itself feels any particular desire to magnify his office. But if the office is to exist, let it at least be the object of those who hold it to perform its duties with that hatred of commonplace and cant and the _popularis aura_, with, as nearly as may be in each case, that conscience and thoroughness of workmanship, which Lockhart"s writings uniformly display.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] See Appendix B--Lockhart.
XII
PRAED
It was not till half a century after his death that Praed, who is loved by those who love him perhaps as sincerely as most greater writers, had his works presented to the public in a form which may be called complete.[19] This is of itself rather a cautious statement in appearance, but I am not sure that it ought not to be made more cautious still. The completeness is not complete, though it is in one respect rather more than complete; and the form is exceedingly informal. Neither in size, nor in print, nor in character of editing and arrangement do the two little fat volumes which were ushered into the world by Derwent Coleridge in 1864, and the one little thin volume which appeared in 1887 under Sir George Young"s name with no notes and not much introduction, and the very creditable edition of the political poems which appeared a year later under the same care but better cared for, agree together. But this, though a nuisance to those who love not a set of odd volumes, would matter comparatively little if the discrepancies were not equally great in a much more important matter than that of mere externals. Only the last of the four volumes and three books just enumerated can be said to have been really edited, and though that is edited very well, it is the least important. Sir George Young, who has thus done a pious work to his uncle"s memory, was concerned not merely in the previous cheap issue of the prose, but in the more elaborate issue of the poems in 1864. But either his green unknowing youth did not at that time know what editing meant, or he was under the restraint of some higher powers. Except that the issue of 1864 has that well-known page-look of "Moxon"s," which is identified to all lovers of poetry with a.s.sociations of Sh.e.l.ley, of Lord Tennyson, and of other masters, and that the pieces are duly dated, it is difficult to say any good thing of the book. There are no notes; and Praed is an author who is much in need of annotation. With singular injudiciousness, a great deal of alb.u.m and other verse is included which was evidently not intended for publication, which does not display the writer at his best, or even in his characteristic vein at all, while the memoir is meagre in fact and decidedly feeble in criticism. As for the prose, though Sir George Young has prefixed an introduction good as far as it goes, there is no index, no table even of contents, and the separate papers are not dated, nor is any indication given of their origin--a defect which, for reasons to be indicated shortly, is especially troublesome in Praed"s case.
Accordingly anything like a critical study of the poet is beset with very unusual difficulties, and the mere reading of him, if it were less agreeable in itself, could not be said to be exactly easy. Luckily Praed is a writer so eminently engaging to the mere reader, as well as so interesting in divers ways to the personage whom some one has politely called "the gelid critic," that no sins or shortcomings of his editors can do him much harm, so long as they let him be read at all.
Winthrop Mackworth was the third son of Serjeant Praed, Chairman of the Board of Audit, and, though his family was both by extraction and by actual seat Devonian, he was born in John Street, Bedford Row, on 26th June 1802, the year of the birth of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps about as unlike Praed in every conceivable point, except metrical mastery, as two men possessing poetic faculty can be unlike one another. John Street may not appear as meet a nurse for a poetic child as Besancon, especially now when it has settled down into the usual office-and-chambers state of Bloomsbury. But it is unusually wide for a London street; it has trees--those of the Foundling Hospital and those of Gray"s Inn--at either end, and all about it cl.u.s.ter memories of the Bedford Row conspiracy, and of that immortal dinner which was given by the Briefless One and his timid partner to Mr. Goldmore, and of Sydney Smith"s sojourn in Doughty Street, and of divers other pleasant things. In connection, however, with Praed himself, we do not hear much more of John Street. It was soon exchanged for the more cheerful locality of Teignmouth, where his father (who was a member of the old western family of Mackworth, Praed being an added surname) had a country house. Serjeant Praed encouraged, if he did not positively teach, the boy to write English verse at a very early age: a practice which I should be rather slow to approve, but which has been credited, perhaps justly, with the very remarkable formal accuracy and metrical ease of Praed"s after-work.
Winthrop lost his mother early, was sent to a private school at eight years old, and to Eton in the year 1814. Public schools in their effect of allegiance on public schoolboys have counted for much in English history, literary and other, and Eton has counted for more than any of them. But hardly in any case has it counted for so much with the general reader as in Praed"s. A friend of mine, who, while entertaining high and lofty views on principle, takes low ones by a kind of natural attraction, says that the straightforward t.i.tle of _The Etonian_ and Praed"s connection with it are enough to account for this. There you have a cardinal fact easy to seize and easy to remember. "Praed? Oh!
yes, the man who wrote _The Etonian_; he must have been an Eton man,"
says the general reader. This is cynicism, and cannot be too strongly reprehended. But unluckily, as in other cases, a kind of critical deduction or reaction from this view has also taken place, and there are persons who maintain that Praed"s merit is a kind of coterie-merit, a thing which Eton men are bound, and others are not bound but the reverse, to uphold. This is an old, but apparently still effective trick. I read not long ago a somewhat elaborate attempt to make out that the people who admire Mr. Matthew Arnold"s poems admire them because they, the people, are Oxford men. Now this form of "ruling out" is undoubtedly ingenious. "You admire Mr. Arnold"s poems?"--"Yes, I do."--"You are an Oxford man?"--"Yes, I am."--"Ah! I see." And it is perfectly useless for the victim to argue that his admiration of the poet and his allegiance to the University have nothing to do with each other. In the present case I, at least, am free from this illogical but damaging disqualification. I do not think that any one living admires Praed more than I do; and neither Eton nor Cambridge, which may be said to have divided influence on him, claims any allegiance from me. On Praed himself, however, the influence of Eton was certainly great, if not of the greatest. Here he began in school periodicals ("Apis Matina"
a bee buzzing in ma.n.u.script only, preceded _The Etonian_) his prose and, to some though a less extent, his verse-exercises in finished literature. Here he made the beginnings of that circle of friends (afterwards slightly enlarged at Cambridge by the addition of non-Etonians and including one or two Oxford men who had been at Eton) which practically formed the staff of _The Etonian_ itself and of the subsequent _Knight"s Quarterly_ and _Brazen Head_. The greatest of them all, Macaulay, belonged to the later Trinity set; but the Etonians proper included divers men of mark. There has been, I believe, a frequent idea that boys who contribute to school-magazines never do anything else. Praed certainly could not be produced as an instance. He was not a great athlete, partly because his health was always weak, partly because athletics were then in their infancy. But he is said to have been a good player at fives and tennis, an amateur actor of merit, expert at chess and whist, and latterly a debater of promise, while, in the well-known way of his own school and University, he was more than a sufficient scholar. He went to Trinity in October 1821, and in the three following years won the Browne Medals for Greek verse four times and the Chancellor"s Medal for English verse twice. He was third in the Cla.s.sical Tripos, was elected to a Fellowship at his college in 1827, and in 1830 obtained the Seatonian Prize with a piece, "The Ascent of Elijah," which is remarkable for the extraordinary facility with which it catches the notes of the just published _Christian Year_. He was a great speaker at the Union, and, as has been hinted, he made a fresh circle of literary friends for himself, the chief ornaments whereof were Macaulay and Charles Austin. It was also during his sojourn at Cambridge that the short-lived but brilliant venture of _Knight"s Quarterly_ was launched. He was about four years resident at Trinity in the first instance; after which, according to a practice then common enough but now, I believe, obsolete, he returned to Eton as private and particular tutor to Lord Ernest Bruce. This employment kept him for two years. He then read law, was called to the Bar in 1829, and in 1830 was elected to Parliament for the moribund borough of St. Germans. He was re-elected next year, contested St. Ives, when St. Germans lost its members, but was beaten, was elected in 1834 for Great Yarmouth, and in 1837 for Aylesbury, which last seat he held to his death. During the whole of this time he sat as a Conservative, becoming a more thorough one as time went on; and as he had been at Cambridge a very decided Whig, and had before his actual entrance on public life written many pointed and some bitter lampoons against the Tories, the change, in the language of his amiable and partial friend and biographer, "occasioned considerable surprise." Of this also more presently: for it is well to get merely biographical details over with as little digression as possible.
Surprise or no surprise, he won good opinions from both sides, acquired considerable reputation as a debater and a man of business, was in the confidence both of the Duke of Wellington and of Sir Robert Peel, was made Secretary of the Board of Control in 1834, married in 1835, was appointed Deputy-High Steward of his University (a mysterious appointment, of the duties of which I have no notion), and died of disease of the lungs on 15th July 1839. Not very much has been published about Praed personally; but in what has been published, and in what I have heard, I cannot remember a single unfriendly sentence.
Notwithstanding his reputation as an "inspired schoolboy," I do not know that sober criticism would call him a really precocious writer, especially in verse. The pieces by which he is best known and which have most individuality, date in no case very early, and in almost all cases after his five-and-twentieth year. What does date very early (and unluckily it has been printed with a copiousness betokening more affection than judgment, considering that the author had more sense than to print it at all) is scarcely distinguishable from any other verses of any other clever boy. It is impossible to augur any future excellence from such stuff as
Emilia often sheds the tear But affectation bids it flow,
or as
From b.r.e.a.s.t.s which feel compa.s.sion"s glow Solicit mild the kind relief;
and, for one"s own part, one is inclined to solicit mild the kind relief of not having to read it. Even when Praed had become, at least technically, a man, there is no very great improvement as a whole, though here and there one may see, looking backwards from the finished examples, faint beginnings of his peculiar touches, especially of that pleasant trick of repeating the same word or phrase with a different and slightly altered sense which, as Mr. Austin Dobson has suggested, may have been taken from Burns. The Cambridge prize poems are quite authentic and respectable examples of that style which has received its final criticism in
Ply battleaxe and hurtling catapult: Jerusalem is ours! _Id Deus vult_,--
though they do not contain anything so nice as that, or as its great author"s more famous couplet respecting Africa and the men thereof. The longer romances of the same date, "Gog," "Lilian," "The Troubadour,"
are little more than clever reminiscences sometimes of Scott, Byron, Moore, and other contemporaries, sometimes of Prior and the _vers de societe_ of the eighteenth century. The best pa.s.sage by far of all this is the close of "How to Rhyme with Love," and this, as it seems to me, is the only pa.s.sage of even moderate length which, in the poems dating before Praed took his degree, in the least foretells the poet of "The Red Fisherman," "The Vicar," the "Letters from Teignmouth," the "Fourteenth of February" (earliest in date and not least charming fruit of the true vein), "Good-night to the Season," and best and most delightful of all, the peerless "Letter of Advice," which is as much the very best thing of its own kind as the "Divine Comedy."
In prose Praed was a little earlier, but not very much. _The Etonian_ itself was, even in its earliest numbers, written at an age when many, perhaps most, men have already left school; and the earlier numbers are as imitative, of the _Spectator_ and its late and now little read followers of the eighteenth century, as is the verse above quoted. The youthful boisterousness of _Blackwood_ gave Praed a more congenial because a fresher cue; and in the style of which Maginn, as Adjutant O"Doherty, had set the example in his Latinisings of popular verse, and which was to be worked to death by Father Prout, there are few things better than the "Musae O"Connorianae" which celebrates the great fight of Mac Nevis and Mac Twolter. But there is here still the distinct following of a model the taint of the school-exercise. Very much more original is "The Knight and the Knave:" indeed I should call this the first original thing, though it be a parody, that Praed did. To say that it reminds one in more than subject of _Rebecca and Rowena_, and that it was written some twenty years earlier, is to say a very great deal. Even here, however, the writer"s ground is rented, not freehold. It is very different in such papers as "Old Boots" and "The Country Curate," while in the later prose contributed to _Knight"s Quarterly_ the improvement in originality is marked. "The Union Club" is amusing enough all through: but considering that it was written in 1823, two years before Jeffrey asked the author of a certain essay on Milton "where he got that style," one pa.s.sage of the speech put in the mouth of Macaulay is positively startling. "The Best Bat in the School" is quite delightful, and "My First Folly," though very unequal, contains in the introduction scene, between Vyvian Joyeuse and Margaret Orleans, a specimen of a kind of dialogue nowhere to be found before, so far as I know, and giving proof that, if Praed had set himself to it, he might have started a new kind of novel.
It does not appear, however, that his fancy led him with any decided bent to prose composition, and he very early deserted it for verse; though he is said to have, at a comparatively late period of his short life, worked in harness as a regular leader-writer for the _Morning Post_ during more than a year. No examples of this work of his have been reprinted, nor, so far as I know, does any means of identifying them exist, though I personally should like to examine them. He was still at Cambridge when he drifted into another channel, which was still not his own channel, but in which he feathered his oars under two different flags with no small skill and dexterity. Sir George Young has a very high idea of his uncle"s political verse, and places him "first among English writers, before Prior, before Canning, before the authors of the "Rolliad," and far before Moore or any of the still anonymous contributors to the later London press." I cannot subscribe to this.
Neither as Whig nor as Tory, neither as satirist of George the Fourth nor as satirist of the Reform Bill, does Praed seem to me to have been within a hundred miles of that elder schoolfellow of his who wrote
All creeping creatures, venomous and low, Still blasphemous or blackguard, praise Lepaux.
He has nothing for sustained wit and ease equal to the best pieces of the "Fudge Family" and the "Two-penny Postbag"; and (for I do not know why one should not praise a man because he happens to be alive and one"s friend) I do not think he has the touch of the true political satirist as Mr. Traill has it in "Professor Baloonatics Craniocracs," or in that admirable satire on democracy which is addressed to the "Philosopher Crazed, from the Island of Crazes."
Indeed, by mentioning Prior, Sir George seems to put himself rather out of court. Praed _is_ very nearly if not quite Prior"s equal, but the sphere of neither was politics. Prior"s political pieces are thin and poor beside his social verse, and with rare exceptions I could not put anything political of Praed"s higher than the shoe-string of "Araminta."
Neither of these two charming poets seems to have felt seriously enough for political satire. Matthew, we know, played the traitor; and though Mackworth ratted to my own side, I fear it must be confessed that he did rat. I can only discover in his political verse two fixed principles, both of which no doubt did him credit, but which hardly, even when taken together, amount to a sufficient political creed. The one was fidelity to Canning and his memory: the other was impatience of the cant of the reformers. He could make admirable fun of Joseph Hume, and of still smaller fry like Waithman; he could attack Lord Grey"s nepotism and doctrinairism fiercely enough. Once or twice, or, to be fair, more than once or twice, he struck out a happy, indeed a brilliant flash. He was admirable at what Sir George Young calls, justly enough, "political patter songs" such as,
Young widowhood shall lose its weeds, Old kings shall loathe the Tories, And monks be tired of telling beads, And Blues of telling stories; And t.i.tled suitors shall be crossed, And famished poets married, And Canning"s motion shall be lost, And Hume"s amendment carried; And Chancery shall cease to doubt, And Algebra to prove, And hoops come in, and gas go out Before I cease to love.
He hit off an exceedingly savage and certainly not wholly just "Epitaph on the King of the Sandwich Islands" which puts the conception of George the Fourth that Thackeray afterwards made popular, and contains these felicitous lines: