It appeared in 1776; and now, for the first time, in 1846, the Queen"s Speech, carefully concocted by a Conservative Ministry, embodies as great practical truths its free-trade principles. The shoot--a true dicotyledon--has fairly got its two vigorous lobes above the surface: freedom of trade in all that the farmer rears, and freedom of trade in all that the manufacturer produces; and there cannot be a shadow of doubt that it will be by and by a very vigorous tree. No Protectionist need calculate, from its rate of progress in the past, on its rate of progress in the future. Nearly three generations have come and gone since, to vary the figure, the preparations for laying the train began; but now that the train is fairly ready and fired, the explosion will not be a matter of generations at all. Explosions come under an entirely different law from the law of laying trains. It will happen with the rising of the free-trade agitation as with the rising of water against a dam-head stretched across a river. Days and weeks may pa.s.s, especially if droughts have been protracted and the stream low, during which the rising of the water proves to be a slow, silent, inefficient sort of process, of half-inches and eighth-parts; but when the river gets into flood,--when the vast acc.u.mulation begins to topple over the dam-d.y.k.e,--when the d.y.k.e itself begins to swell, and bulge, and crack, and to disgorge, at its ever-increasing flaws and openings, streams of turbid water,--let no one presume to affirm that the after-process is to be slow. In mayhap one minute more, in a few minutes at most, stones, sticks, turf, the whole dam-d.y.k.e, in short, but a dam-d.y.k.e no longer, will be roaring adown the stream, wrapped up in the womb of an irresistible wave. Now there have been palpable openings, during the last few months, in the Protectionist dam-head. We pointed years since to the rising of the water, and predicted that it would prevail at last. But the droughts were protracted, and the river low. Good harvests and brisk trade went hand in hand together; and the Protectionist dam-head--though feeble currents and minute waves beat against it, and the acc.u.mulation within rose by half-inches and eighth-parts--stood sure. But the river is now high in flood--the waters are toppling over--the yielding masonry has begun to bulge and crack. The Queen"s Speech, when we consider it as emanating from a Conservative Ministry, indicates a tremendous flaw; the speech of Sir Robert Peel betrays an irreparable bulge; the sudden conversions to free-trade principles of officials and place-holders show a general outpouring at opening rents and crannies: depend on it, Protectionists, your dam-d.y.k.e, patch or prop it as you please, is on the eve of destruction; yet a very little longer, and it will be hurtling down the stream.
For what purpose, do we say? Simply in the hope of awakening to a sense of their true interest, ere it be too late, a cla.s.s of the Scottish people in which we feel deeply interested,--we mean the tenant agriculturists of the kingdom. They have in this all-important crisis a battle to fight; and if they do not fight and win it, they will be irrevocably ruined by hundreds and thousands. The great Protectionist battle--the battle in which they may make common cause with their landlords if they will, against the League, and the Free-Trade Whigs, and Sir Robert Peel, and Adam Smith, and the Queen--is a battle in which to a certainty they will be beat. They may protract the contest long enough to get so thoroughly wearied as to be no longer fit for the other great battle which awaits them; but they may depend on it as one of the surest things in all the future, that they will have to record a disastrous issue. They _must_ be defeated. We would fain ask them--for it is sad to see men spending their strength to no end--to look fairly at the aspect things are beginning to wear, and the ever-extending front which is arraying against them. We would ask them first to peruse those chapters in Adam Smith which in reality form the standing-ground of their opponents,--chapters whose solid basis of economic philosophy has made anti-corn-law agitation and anti-corn-law tracts and speeches such formidable things. We would ask them next to look at the progress of the League, at its half-million fund, its indomitable energy and ever-growing influence. We would then ask them to look at the recent conversions of Whig and Tory to free-trade principles, at the resignation of Sir Robert Peel, and the proof the country received in consequence, that in the present extremity there is no other pilot prepared to take the helm; at the strangely marked Adam Smith cast of the Queen"s Speech; and at the telling facts of Sir Robert"s explanatory statement. We request them to take a cool survey of all these things, and to cogitate for themselves the issue which they so clearly foretell. It seems as certain that free-trade principles are at last to be established in Britain, as that there is a sun in the sky. Nor does there seem much wisdom in fighting a battle that is inevitably to be lost. The battle which it is their true interest to be preparing to fight, is one in which they must occupy the ground, not of agriculturists, but simply of tenants: it is a battle with the landlords, not with the free-traders.
We believe Dr. Chalmers is right in holding that, ultimately at least, the repeal of the corn-laws will not greatly affect the condition of our agriculturists. There is, however, a transition period from which they have a good deal to dread. The removal of the protective duties on meat and wool has not had the effect of lowering the prices of either; but the fear of such an effect did for a time what the repeal of the duties themselves failed to do, and bore with disastrous consequences on the sheep and cattle market. And such a time may, we are afraid, be antic.i.p.ated on the abolition of the corn-laws. Nay, it is probable that, even when the transition state shall be over, there will be a general lowering of price to the average of that of the Continent and America,--an average heightened by little more than the amount of the true protective duties of the trade,--the expense of carriage from the foreign farm to the British market. And woe to the poor tenant, tied down by a long lease to a money-rent rated according to the average value of grain under the protective duties, if the defalcation is to fall on him! If he has to pay the landlord according to a high average, and to be paid by the corn-factor according to a low one, he is undone. And his real danger in the coming crisis indicates his proper battle. It is not with his old protector Sir Robert that he should be preparing to fight; it is, we repeat, with his old ally the landholder. Nay, he will find, ultimately at least, that he has no choice in the matter. With Sir Robert he _may_ fight if it please him, and fight, as we have shown, to be beaten; but with the landlord he _must_ fight, whether he first enter the lists with Sir Robert or no. When his preliminary struggle shall have terminated unsuccessfully, he shall then without heart, without organization, without ally, have to enter on the inevitable struggle,--a struggle for very existence. We of course refer to landlords as a cla.s.s: there are among them not a few individuals with whom the tenant will have no struggle to maintain,--conscientious men, at once able and willing to adjust their demands to the circ.u.mstances of the new state of things.
But their character as a cla.s.s does not stand so high. Many of their number are in straitened circ.u.mstances,--so sorely burdened with annuities and mortgages, as to be somewhat in danger of being altogether left, through the coming change, without an income; and it is not according to the nature of things that the case of the tenant should be very considerately dealt with by them. When a hapless crew are famishing on the open sea, and the fierce cannibal comes to be developed in the man, it is the weaker who are first devoured. Now we would ill like to see any portion of our Scotch tenantry at the mercy of wild, unreasoning dest.i.tution in the proprietor. We would ill like to see him vested with the power to decide absolutely in his own case, whether it was his tenant that was to be ruined, or he himself that was to want an income, knowing well beforehand to which side the balance would incline. Nor would we much like to see our tenantry at the mercy of even an average cla.s.s of proprietors, by no means in the extreme circ.u.mstances of their poorer brethren, but who, with an unimpeachable bond in their hands, that enabled them to say whether it was they themselves or their tenant neighbours who were to be the poorer in consequence of the induced change, would be but too apt, in accordance with the selfish bent of man"s common nature, to make a somewhat Shylock-like use of it. Stout men who have fallen into reduced circ.u.mstances, and stout paw-sucking bears in their winter lodgings, become gradually thin by living on their own fat; and quite right it is that gross men and corpulent bears _should_ live on their own fat, just because the fat is their own. But we would not deem it right that our proprietors should live on their farmers" fats: on the contrary, we would hold it quite wrong, and a calamity to the country; and such, at the present time, is the great danger to which the tenantry of Scotland are exposed. Justice imperatively demands, that if some such change is now to take place in the value of farms, as that which took place on the regulation of the currency in the value of money, the ruinous blunder of 1819 should not be repeated. It demands that their actual rent be not greatly increased through the retention of the merely nominal one; that the tenant, in short, be not sacrificed to a term wholly unchanged in sound, but altogether altered in value. And such, in reality, is the object for which the farm-holding agriculturists of Scotland have now to contend. It is the only quarrel which they can prosecute with a hope of success.
We referred, in a recent number, when remarking on the too palpable unpopularity of the Whigs, to questions which, if animated by a really honest regard for the liberties of the subject, they might agitate, and grow strong in agitating, secure of finding a potent ally in the moral sense of the country. One of these would involve the emanc.i.p.ation of the tenantry of England, now sunk, through one of the provisions of the Reform Bill, into a state of va.s.salage and political subserviency without precedent since at least the days of Henry VIII. It has been well remarked by Paley, that the direct consequences of political innovations are often the least important; and that it is from the silent and un.o.bserved operation of causes set at work for different purposes, that the greatest revolutions take their rise. "Thus," he says, "when Elizabeth and her immediate successor applied themselves to the encouragement and regulation of trade by many wise laws, they knew not that, together with wealth and industry, they were diffusing a consciousness of strength and independency which could not long endure, under the forms of a mixed government, the dominion of arbitrary princes." And again: "When it was debated whether the Mutiny Act--the law by which the army is governed and maintained--should be temporal or perpetual, little else probably occurred to the advocates of an annual bill, than the expediency of retaining a control over the most dangerous prerogative of the Crown--the direction and command of a standing army; whereas, in its effect, this single reservation has altered the whole frame and quality of the British const.i.tution. For since, in consequence of the military system which prevails in neighbouring and rival nations, as well as on account of the internal exigencies of Government, a standing army has become essential to the safety and administration of the empire, it enables Parliament, by discontinuing this necessary provision, so to enforce its resolutions upon any other subject, as to render the king"s dissent to a law which has received the approbation of both Houses, too dangerous an experiment any longer to be advised." And thus the ill.u.s.tration of the principle runs on. We question, however, whether there be any ill.u.s.tration among them more striking than that indirect consequence of the Reform Bill on the tenantry of England to which we refer. The provision which conferred a vote on the tenant-at-will, abrogated leases, and made the tiller of the soil a va.s.sal. The farmer who precariously holds his farm from year to year cannot, of course, be expected to sink so much capital in the soil, in the hope of a distant and uncertain return, as the lessee certain of a possession for a specified number of years; but some capital he must sink in it. It is impossible, according to the modern system, or indeed any system of husbandry, that all the capital committed to the earth in winter and spring should be resumed in the following summer and autumn. A considerable overplus must inevitably remain to be gathered up in future seasons; and this overplus remainder, in the case of the tenant-at-will, is virtually converted into a deposit, lodged in the hands of the landlord, to secure the depositor"s political subserviency and va.s.salage. Let him but once manifest a will and a mind of his own, and vote, in accordance with his convictions, contrary to the will of the landlord, and straightway the deposit, converted into a penalty, is forfeited for the offence. It is surely not very great Radicalism to affirm that a state of things so anomalous ought not to exist--that the English tenant should be a freeman, not a serf--and that he ought not to be bound down by a weighty penalty to have no political voice or conscience of his own.
The simple principle of "No lease, no vote," would set all right; and it is a principle which so recommends itself to the moral sense as just, that an honest Whiggism would gain, in agitating its recognition and establishment, at once strength and popularity. But there are few Scotch tenants in the circ.u.mstances of va.s.salage so general in England. They are in circ.u.mstances in which they at least _may_ act independently; and the time is fast coming in which they must either make a wise, unbia.s.sed use of their freedom, or be hopelessly crushed for ever.
_January 28, 1846._
CONCLUSION OF THE WAR IN AFFGHANISTAN.
We trust we may now look back on by far the most disastrous pa.s.sage which occurs in the military history of Great Britain, as so definitively concluded, that in the future we shall be unable to trace it as still disadvantageously operative in its effects. A series of decisive victories has neutralized, to a considerable extent, the influence of the most fatal campaign in which a British army was ever engaged. But this is all. One of our poets, in placing in a strong light the extreme folly of war, describes "most Christian kings" with "honourable ruffians in their hire," wasting the nations with fire and sword, and then, when fatigued with murder and sated with blood, "setting them down just where they were before." It is quite melancholy enough that our most sanguine expectations with regard to the Affghan war should be unable to rise higher by a hair"s-breadth than the satiric conception of the poet. We can barely hope, after squandering much treasure, after committing a great deal of crime, after occasioning and enduring a vast amount of wretchedness, after a whole country has been whitened with the bones of its inhabitants, after a British army has perished miserably,--we can barely hope that our later successes may have had so far the effect of effacing the memory of our earliest disasters, that we shall be enabled to sit down under their cover on the eastern bank of the Indus, "just where we were before." And even this is much in the circ.u.mstances.
We have seen the British in India repeat the same kind of fatal experiment which cost Napoleon his crown, and from which Charles XII.
dated his downfall; and repeat it, in the first instance at least, with a result more disastrous than either the flight from Pultowa or the retreat from Moscow. And though necessarily an expedition on a similar scale, it seemed by no means improbable that its ultimate consequences might bear even more disastrously on British power in the East, than the results of the several expeditions into Russia, under Charles and Napoleon, bore on the respective destinies of Sweden and of France. That substratum of opinion in the minds of an hundred millions of Asiatics, on which British authority in India finds its main foundation, bade fair to be shivered into pieces by the shock.
There are pa.s.sages in all our better histories that stand out in high relief, if we may so speak, from the groundwork on which they are based. They appeal to the imagination, they fix themselves in the memory; and after they have got far enough removed into the past to enable men to survey them in all their breadth, we find them caught up and reflected in the fictions of the poet and the novelist.
But it is wonderful how comparatively slight is the effect which most of them produce at the time of their occurrence. It would seem as if the great ma.s.s of mankind had no ability of seeing them in their real character, except through the medium of some superior mind, skilful enough to portray them in their true colours and proportions. Who, acquainted with the history of the plague in London, for instance, can fail being struck with the horrors of that awful visitation, as described in the graphic pages of Defoe?
Who, that experienced the visitation of similar horrors which swept away in our own times one-tenth part of the human species, could avoid remarking that the reality was less suited to impress by its actual presence, than the record by its touching pictures and its affecting appeals? The reality appealed to but the fears of men through the instinct of self-preservation, and even this languidly in some cases, leaving the imagination unimpressed; whereas the wild scenes of Defoe filled the whole mind, and impressed vividly through the influence of that sense of the poetical which, in some degree at least, all minds are capable of entertaining.
On a nearly similar principle, the country has not yet been able rightly to appreciate the disasters of Affghanistan. It has been unable to bestow upon them what we shall venture to term the historic prominence. When one after one the messengers reach Job, bearing tidings of fatal disasters, in which all his children and all his domestics have perished, the ever-recurring "and I only am escaped alone to tell thee," strikes upon the ear as one of the signs of a dispensation supernatural in its character. The narrative has already prepared us for events removed beyond the reach of those common laws which regulate ordinary occurrences. Did we find such a piece of history in any of our older chronicles, we would at once set it down, on Macaulay"s principle, as a ballad thrown out of its original verse into prose, and appropriated by the chronicler, in the lack of less questionable materials. But finding it in the Record of eternal truth, we view it differently; for there the supernatural is not dissociated from the true. How very striking, to find in the authentic annals of our own country a somewhat similar incident; to find the "I only am escaped alone to tell thee" in the history of a well-equipped British army of the present day! There occurs no similar incident in all our past history. British armies have capitulated not without disgrace. In the hapless American war, Cornwallis surrendered a whole army to Washington, and Burgoyne another whole army to Gates and Arnold.
The British have had also their disastrous retreats.
The retreat from Fontenoy was at least precipitate; and there was much suffered in Sir John Moore"s retreat on Corunna. But such retreats have not been wholly without their share of glory, nor have such surrenders been synonymous with extermination. In the annals of British armies, the "I only have escaped alone to tell thee" belongs to but the retreat from Cabul. It is a terrible pa.s.sage in the history of our country--terrible in all its circ.u.mstances. Some of its earlier scenes are too revolting for the imagination to call up.
It is all too humiliating to conceive of it in the character of an unprincipled conspiracy of the civilised, horribly avenged by infuriated savages. It is a quite melancholy enough object of contemplation, in even its latter stages. A wild scene of rocks and mountains darkened overhead with tempest, beneath covered deep with snow; a broken and dispirited force, struggling hopelessly through the scarce pa.s.sable defiles,--here thinned by the headlong a.s.saults of howling fanatics, insensible to fear, incapable of remorse, and thirsting for blood,--there decoyed to destruction through the promises of cruel and treacherous chiefs, devoid alike of the sense of honour and the feeling of pity; with no capacity or conduct among its leaders; full of the frightful recollections of past ma.s.sacres, hopeless of ultimate escape; struggling, however, instinctively on amid the unceasing ring of musketry from thicket and crag, exhibiting mile after mile a body less dense and extended, leaving behind it a long unbroken trail of its dead; at length wholly wasting away, like the upward heave of a wave on a sandy beach, and but one solitary horseman, wounded and faint with loss of blood, holding on his perilous course, to tell the fate of all the others. And then, the long after-season of grief and suspense among anxious and at length despairing relations at home, around many a cheerless hearth, and in many a darkened chamber, and the sadly frequent notice in the obituaries of all our public journals, so significant of the disaster, and which must have rung so heavy a knell to so many affectionate hearts, "Killed in the Khyber Pa.s.s." To find pa.s.sages of parallel calamity in the history of at least civilised countries, we have to ascend to the times of the Roman empire during its period of decline and disaster, when one warlike emperor, in battle with the Goth,
"in that Serbonian bog, Betwixt Damieta and Mount Ca.s.sus old, With his whole army sank;"
or when another not less warlike monarch was hopelessly overthrown by the Persian, and died a miserable slave, exposed to every indignity which the invention of his ungenerous and barbarous conqueror could suggest.
Britain in this event has received a terrible lesson, which we trust her scarce merited and surely most revolting successes in China will not have the effect of wholly neutralizing. The Affghan war, regarded as a war of principle, was eminently unjust; regarded as a war of expediency, it was eminently imprudent. It seems to have originated with men of narrow and defective genius, not over largely gifted with the moral sense. We have had to refer on a former occasion to the policy adopted by Lord Auckland respecting the educational grants to Hindustan. An enlightened predecessor of his Lordship had decided that the a.s.sistance and patronage of the British Government should be extended to the exclusive promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India. His Lordship, in the exercise of a miserable liberalism, reversed the resolution, and diverted no inconsiderable portion of the Government patronage to the support of the old Hindustanee education,--a system puerile in its literature, contemptible in its science, and false in its religion. Our readers cannot have forgotten the indignant style of Dr. Duff"s remonstrance.
The enlightened and zealous missionary boldly and indignantly characterized the minute of his Lordship, through which this revolution was effected, as "remarkable chiefly for its omissions and commissions, for its concessions and compromises, for its education without religion, its plans without a Providence, and its ethics without a G.o.d." Such was the liberalism of Lord Auckland; and of at least one of the leading men whose counsel led to the Affghan expedition, and who perished in it, the _liberalism_, it is said, was of a still more marked and offensive character. What do we infer from the fact?
Not that Providence interfered to avenge upon them the sin of their policy: there would be presumption in the inference. But it may not be unsafe to infer, from the palpable folly of the Affghan expedition, that the _liberalism_ in which Lord Auckland and some one or two of his friends indulged is a liberalism which weak and incompetent men are best fitted to entertain. His scheme of education and his Affghanistan expedition are specimens of mental production, if we may so speak, that give evidence of exactly the same cast and tendency regarding the order and scope of the genius which originated them. We have been a good deal struck by the shrewdness of one of Prince Eugene of Savoy"s remarks, that seems to bear very decidedly on this case.
Two generals of his acquaintance had failed miserably in the conduct of some expedition that demanded capacity and skill, and yet both of them were unquestionably smart, clever men. "I always thought it would turn out so," said the Prince. "Both these men made open profession of infidelity; and I formed so low an opinion of their taste and judgment in consequence, that I made myself sure they would sooner or later run their heads into some egregious folly."
It is satisfactory in every point of view that Britain should be at peace with China and the Affghans. War is an evil in all circ.u.mstances. It is a great evil even when just; it is a great evil even when carried on against a people who know and respect the laws of nations. But it is peculiarly an evil when palpably not a just war, and when carried on against a barbarous people. It has been stated in private letters, though not officially, that a soldier of the 44th was burned alive by the Ghilzies in sight of the English troops, and that on the approach of the latter the throat of the tortured victim was cut to ensure his destruction. And it is the inference of an Indian newspaper from the fact, that such wretches are not the devoted patriots that they have been described by some, and that the war with them cannot, after all, be very unjust. We are inclined to argue somewhat differently. We believe the Scotch under Wallace were not at all devoid of patriotism, though they were barbarous enough to flay Cressingham, and to burn the English alive at Ayr. We believe further, that an unjust war is rendered none the less unjust from the circ.u.mstance of its being waged with a savage and cruel people. The barbarism of the enemy has but the effect of heightening its horrors, not of modifying its injustice. It is possible for one civilised man to fight with another, and yet retain his proper character as a man notwithstanding. But the civilised man who fights with a wild beast must a.s.sume, during the combat, the character of the wild beast. He cannot afford being generous and merciful; his antagonist understands neither generosity nor mercy.
The war is of necessity a war of extermination. And such is always the character of a war between wild and civilised men. It takes its tone, not from the civilisation of the one, but from the cruel savageism of the other.
_December 3, 1842._
PERIODICALISM.
The poet Gray held that in a neglected country churchyard, appropriated to only the nameless dead, there might lie, notwithstanding, the remains of undeveloped Miltons, Hampdens, and Cromwells,--men who, in more favourable circ.u.mstances, would have become famous as poets, or great as patriots or statesmen; and the stanzas in which he has embodied the reflection are perhaps the most popular in the language. One-half the thought is, we doubt not, just. Save for the madness of Charles, Cromwell would have died a devout farmer, and Hampden a most respectable country gentleman, who would have been gratefully remembered for half an age over half a county, and then consigned to forgetfulness. But the poets rarely die, however disadvantageously placed, without giving some sign. Rob Don, the Sutherlandshire bard, owed much less to nature than Milton did, and so little to learning that he could neither read nor write; and yet his better songs promise to live as long as the Gaelic language. And though both Burns and Shakespeare had very considerable disadvantages to struggle against, we know that neither of them remained "mute" or "inglorious," or even less extensively known than Milton himself. It is, we believe, no easy matter to smother a true poet. The versifiers, placed in obscure and humble circ.u.mstances, who for a time complain of neglected merit and untoward fate, and then give up verse-making in despair, are always men who, with all their querulousness, have at least one cause of complaint more than they ever seem to be aware of,--a cause of complaint against the nature that failed to impart to them "the divine vision and faculty." There are powers, however, admirably fitted to tell with effect in the literature of the country, for they have served to produce the most influential works which the world ever saw--works such as the _Essay_ of Locke, the _Peace and War_ of Grotius, and the _Spirit of Laws_ of Montesquieu--which, with all their apparent robustness, are greatly less hardy than the poetic faculty, and which, unless the circ.u.mstances favourable to their development and exercise be present, fail to leave behind them any adequate record of their existence. It is difficult to imagine a situation in life in which Burns would not have written his songs, but very easy to imagine situations in which Robertson would not have produced his _Scotland_ or his _Charles V._, nor Adam Smith his _Wealth of Nations_. We have no faith whatever in "mute, inglorious Miltons;"
but we do hold that there may be obscure country churchyards in which untaught Humes, guiltless of the _Essay on Miracles_, may repose, and undeveloped Bentleys and Warburtons, whose great apt.i.tude for acquiring or capacity for retaining knowledge remained throughout life a mere ungratified thirst.
It has remained for the present age to throw one bar more in the way of able men of this special cla.s.s than our fathers ever dreamed of; and this, curiously enough, just by giving them an opportunity of writing much, and of thinking incessantly. It is not, it would seem, by being born among ploughmen and mechanics, and destined to live by tilling the soil, or by making shoes or hobnails, that the "genial current of the soil is frozen," and superior talents prevented from accomplishing their proper work: it is by being connected with some cheap weekly periodical, or twice or thrice a week newspaper, and compelled to scribble on almost without pause or intermission for daily bread. We have been led to think of this matter by an interesting little volume of poems, chiefly lyrical, which has just issued from the Edinburgh press,--the production of Mr. Thomas Smibert, a man who has lived for many years by his pen, and who introduces the volume by a prefatory essay, interesting from the glimpse which it gives of the literary disadvantages with which the professionally literary man who writes for the periodicals has to contend. Periodical literature is, he remarks, "to all intents and purposes a creation of the nineteenth century, in its princ.i.p.al existing phases, from Quarterly Reviews to Weekly Penny Magazines.
Newspapers," he adds, "may justly be accounted the growth of the same recent era, the few previously published having been scarcely more than mere Gazettes, recording less opinions than bare public and business facts." The number of both cla.s.ses of periodicals is now immensely great; and "equally vast, of necessity, is the amount of literary talent statedly and unremittingly engaged on these journals, while a large additional amount of similar talent finds in them occasional and ready outlets for its working." "When one or two leading Reviews, Quarterlies, and Monthlies alone existed, they called for no insignificant individual efforts of mind on the part of their chief conductors and supporters, and those parties almost took rank with the authors of single works of importance. But within the last twenty years periodical literature has become extensively hebdomadal, and even diurnal; and, as a necessary consequence, the essays of those sustaining it in this shape have decreased in proportionate value, at once from the larger amount of work demanded, and from the shorter time allowed for its execution. Such essays may serve the hour fairly, but can seldom be of high worth ultroneously." "The extent and variety of the labours called for at the hands of those actively engaged on modern cheap periodicals can scarcely be conceived by the uninitiated public. If their eyes were opened on the subject, they would certainly wonder less why it is that the literary talent of the current generation does not tend to display itself by striking isolated efforts: they would also more readily understand wherefore parties in the situation of the present writer may well experience some unsatisfactory feelings in looking back on the labours of the past. Though years spent in respectable periodical writing can by no means be termed misspent, yet such a career presents in the retrospect but a mult.i.tude of disconnected essays on all conceivable themes, and such as too often prove their hurried composition by crudeness and imperfections." The consideration of such a state of things "may furnish a salutary lesson to the many among the young at this day, who, possessing some literary taste, imagine that the engagements of common life alone stand in the way of its successful development, and that to be enabled to pursue a life of professional writing in any shape would secure to them both fame and fortune to the height of their desires. They here err sadly. No doubt supereminent talents will sooner or later make themselves felt under almost any circ.u.mstances; but the position described a.s.suredly offers no peculiar advantages for the furtherance of that end. Ebenezer Elliot, leaving his forge at eve with a wearied body, could yet bring to his favourite leisure tasks a mind less jaded than that of the _litterateur_ by profession." "The regular periodicalist, too, of the modern cla.s.s has usually no more stable interest in his compositions than has the counting-house clerk in the cash-books which he keeps. To publishers and conductors fall the lasting fruits. Let those among the young who feel the ambition to seek fame and fortune in the walks of literature think well of these things, and, above all, ponder seriously ere they quit, with such views, any fixed occupation of another kind."
There is certainly food for thought here; and that, too, thought of a kind in which the public has a direct interest. If such be the dissipating effect of _writing_ for newspapers and the lighter periodicals, it is surely natural to infer that the exclusive _reading_ of such works must have a dissipating effect also. It is too obvious that the feverish mediocrity of overwrought brains becomes infectious among the cla.s.s who place themselves in too constant and unbroken connection with it, and that from the closets of over-toiled _litterateurs_ an excited superficiality creeps out upon the age. And hence the necessity to which we have oftener than once referred, that men should keep themselves in wholesome connection with the master minds of the past. Mr. Smibert"s remarks preface, as we have said, a volume of sweet and tasteful verse; and we find him saying that, "most of all, the operation of Periodicalism has been unfavourably felt in the domain of poetry."
"The position of literature," he adds, "in the times of the Wordsworths, Crabbes, and Campbells of the age just gone by, was more favourable than at present to the devotion of talent to great undertakings. These men were a.s.suredly not beset by the same seductive facilities as the _litterateurs_ of the current generation for expending their powers on petty objects,--facilities all the more fascinating, as comprising the pleasures of immediate publicity, and perhaps even of repute for a day, if not also of some direct remuneration. These influences of full-grown Periodicalism extend now to all who can read and write. But it entices most especially within its vortex those who exhibit an unusually large share of early literary promise, involves them in mult.i.tudinous and multifarious occupation, and, in short, divides and subdivides the operations of talent, until all prominent ident.i.ty is destroyed, both in works and workers. To the growth of this modern system, beyond question, is largely to be referred the comparative disappearance from among us of great literary individualities; or, to use other and more accurate words, by that system have men of capacity been chiefly diverted from the composition of great individual works, and more particularly great poems."
We are less sure of the justice of this remark of Mr. Smibert"s, than of that of many of the others. It is not easy, we have said, to smother a true poet; and we know that in the present age very genuine poetry has been produced in the offices of very busy newspaper editors. Poor Robert Nicoll never wrote truer poetry than when he produced his "Puir Folk" and his "Saxon Chapel," at a time when he was toiling, as even modern journalist has rarely toiled, for the columns of the _Leeds Times_; and James Montgomery produced his "World before the Flood," "Greenland," and "The Pelican Island,"
with many a sweet lyric of still higher merit, when laboriously editing the _Sheffield Iris_. The "Salamandrine" of Mr. Charles Mackay was written when he was conducting the sub-editorial department of a daily London paper; nor did he ever write anything superior to it. And we question whether Mr. Smibert himself, though he might have produced longer poems, would have written better ones than some of those contained in the present volume, even had his life been one of unbroken leisure. It seems natural to literary men, who fail in realizing their own conceptions of what they had wished and hoped to perform, to cast the blame upon their circ.u.mstances. Johnson could speak as feelingly, not much later than the middle of the last century, of the "dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer," as any literary man of the present time, who, while solicitously desirous to give himself wholly to the muses, is compelled to labour as a periodicalist for the wants of the day that is pa.s.sing over him. But perhaps the best solace for the dissatisfaction which would thus wreak itself on mere circ.u.mstances, is that which Johnson himself supplies. "To reach below his own aim," says the moralist, "is incident to every one whose fancy is active, and whose views are comprehensive; nor is any man satisfied with himself because he has done much, but because he can conceive little." But to labour and be forgotten is the common lot; and why should a literary man be more disposed to repine because his productions perish after serving a temporary purpose, than the gardener or farmer, whose vocation it is to supply the people with their daily food? If the provisions furnished, whether for mind or body, be wholesome, and if they serve their purpose, the producers must learn to be content, even should they serve the purpose only once, and but for a day. The danger of over-cropping, and of consequent exhaustion, is, of course, another and more serious matter; and of this the mind of the periodicalist is at least as much in danger as either field or garden when unskilfully wrought. But mere rest, which in course of time restores the exhausted earth, is often not equally efficient in restoring the exhausted mind; nor does mere rest, even were it a specific in the case, lie within the reach of the periodic writer. It is often the luxury for which he pants, but which he cannot command. One of the surest specifics in the case is, the specific of working just a little more,--of working for the work"s sake, whether at poem or history, or in the prosecution of some science, or in some antiquarian pursuit. There is an exquisite pa.s.sage in one of the essays of Washington Irving, in which he compares the great authors--Shakespeare, for instance--who seem proof against the mutability of language, to "gigantic trees, that we see sometimes on the banks of a stream, which, by their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a neighbouring plant to perpetuity." And such is the service rendered by some pervading pursuit of an intellectual character, prosecuted for its own sake, to the intellect of the journalist. It is the necessity imposed upon him of taking up subject after subject in the desultory, disconnected form in which they chance to arise, and then, after throwing together a few hastily collected thoughts upon each, of dismissing them from his mind, that induces first a habit of superficiality, and finally leaves him exhausted; and the counteractive course open to him is just to take up some subject on which the thinking of to-day may a.s.sist him in the thinking of to-morrow, and on which he may be as well informed and profound as his native capacity permits. All our really superior newspaper editors have pursued this course--more, however, we are disposed to think, from the bent of their nature than from the necessities of their profession; and the poetical volume of Mr. Smibert shows that he too has his engrossing pursuit. We recommend his little work to our readers, as one in which they will find much to interest and amuse. We have left ourselves little room for quotation; but the following stanzas, striking, both from their beauty and from the curious fact which they embody, may be regarded as no unfair specimen of the whole:--
THE VOICE OF WOE.
"The language of pa.s.sion, and more peculiarly that of grief, is ever nearly the same."
An Indian chief went forth to fight, And bravely met the foe: His eye was keen--his step was light-- His arm was unsurpa.s.sed in might; But on him fell the gloom of night-- An arrow laid him low.
His widow sang with simple tongue, When none could hear or see, _Ay, cheray me!_
A Moorish maiden knelt beside Her dying lover"s bed: She bade him stay to bless his bride; She called him oft her lord, her pride; But mortals must their doom abide-- The warrior"s spirit fled.
With simple tongue the sad one sung, When none could hear or see, _Ay, di me!_
An English matron mourned her son, The only son she bore: Afar from her his course was run-- He perished as the fight was done-- He perished when the fight was won-- Upon a foreign sh.o.r.e.
With simple tongue the mother sung, When none could hear or see, _Ah, dear me!_
A Highland maiden saw A brother"s body borne From where, from country, king, and law, He went his gallant sword to draw; But swept within destruction"s maw, From her had he been torn.
She sat and sung with simple tongue, When none could hear or see, _Oh, hon-a-ree!_
An infant in untimely hour Died in a Lowland cot: The parents own"d the hand of power That bids the storm be still or lour; They grieved because the cup was sour, And yet they murmured not.
They only sung with simple tongue, When none could hear or see, _Ah, wae"s me!_
_July 26, 1851._
"ANNUS MIRABILIS."
We have now reached the close of the most wonderful year the world ever saw. None of our readers can be unacquainted with the poem in which Dryden celebrated the marvels of the year 1666,--certainly an extraordinary twelvemonth, though the English poet, only partially acquainted with the events which rendered it so remarkable, restricts himself, in his long series of vigorous quatrains, to the description of the two naval battles with the Dutch which its summer witnessed, and of the great fire of London which rendered its autumn so remarkable.
He might also have told that it was a year of great fear and expectation among both Christians and Jews. The Jews held that their Messiah was to come that year; and, in answer of the expectation, the impostor Sabbatei Levi appeared to delude and disappoint the hopes of that unhappy nation. There was an opinion nearly equally general in the Roman Catholic world, that it would usher in the Antichrist of New Testament prophecy; while among English Protestants it was very extensively believed that it was to witness the end of the world and the final judgment. It was remarkable, too, as the year in which oppression first compelled the Scotch Presbyterians of the reign of Charles II. to a.s.sume the att.i.tude of armed resistance, and as forming, in the estimate of Burnet and other intelligent Protestants, the fifth great crisis of the Reformed religion in Europe. And such were the wonders of the _Annus_ _Mirabilis_ of Dryden: two b.l.o.o.d.y naval engagements; a great fire; the appearance of a false Messiah; a widely-spread fear that the end of the world and the coming of Antichrist were at hand; the revolt from their allegiance to the reigning monarch of a sorely oppressed body of Christians, maddened by persecution; and a perilous crisis in the general history of Protestantism.