Chapter I

Who now reads Jeffrey? Only those, it may be feared, who are intent on some scholarly purpose or victims of sharp necessity. Yet in 1809 Jeffrey could boast that his articles in the _Edinburgh Review_ were read by fifty thousand thinking people within a month after publication. Jeffrey’s reputation as a critic has run through a picturesquely varied course. During nearly the first half of the century he was, for many eminently intelligent Englishmen, an all but infallible authority in letters and whatever pertained to them. He was Horner’s and Sydney Smith’s “King Jamfray”; he was for Macaulay “more nearly a universal genius than any man of our time.” Even Carlyle declared no critic since Jeffrey’s day “worth naming beside him.” And when that half-national institution, the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, required in its columns a discussion of the theory of art, Jeffrey it was who was called in as an authority and wrote the article on “Beauty” that, down to 1875, stood as representing authentic English opinion in matters of taste.

Even those who hated Jeffrey admitted his power. “Birds seldom sing,” quoth Allan Cunningham, “when the kite is in the air, and bards dreaded the Judge Jeffrey of our day as much as political offenders dreaded the Judge Jeffreys of James the Second.” Talfourd, Lamb’s friend and editor, asserted of Jeffrey that “with little imagination, little genuine wit, and no clear view of any great and central principles of criticism, he ... continued to dazzle, to astonish, and occasionally to delight multitudes of readers, and at one time to hold the temporary fate of authors in his hands.”

By way of final testimony to the magnitude of Jeffrey’s fame, Macaulay and Carlyle may be quoted at length in his praise. One of Macaulay’s letters of 1828 deals wholly with his impressions of Jeffrey, at whose home he had just been staying; the tone of the letter is that of unmixed hero-worship; no details of the Scotch critic’s appearance or habits or opinions are too slight to be sent to the Macaulay household in London. “He has twenty faces almost as unlike each other as my father’s to Mr. Wilberforce’s.... The mere outline of his face is insignificant. The expression is everything; and such power and variety of expression I never saw in any human countenance.... The flow of his kindness is quite inexhaustible.... His conversation is very much like his countenance and his voice, of immense variety.... He is a shrewd observer; and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem to stand when in his company.”[1] These are only a few of Macaulay’s details and admiring comments. Nor did he outgrow this intense admiration. In April, 1843, he writes to Macvey Napier that he has read and reread Jeffrey’s old articles till he knows them by heart; and in December, 1843, on the appearance of Jeffrey’s collected essays, he expresses himself in almost unmeasured terms: “The variety and versatility of Jeffrey’s mind seem to me more extraordinary than ever.... I do not think that any one man except Jeffrey, nay that any three men, could have produced such diversified excellence.... Take him all in all, I think him more nearly an universal genius than any man of our time.”[2]

Macaulay, however, may not be wholly beyond suspicion as a witness in Jeffrey’s favour. He himself had much of Jeffrey’s dryness and positiveness of nature, was temperamentally limited in many of the same ways, and was, like Jeffrey, an ardent Whig of the Constitutional type; for all these reasons he may be thought prejudiced. In Carlyle, on the other hand, we have a witness who was as far as possible from sympathy with Jeffrey’s neat little formulas in art and in politics, and who has never been accused of registering unduly charitable opinions of even his best friends. Yet of Jeffrey he says, “It is certain there has no Critic appeared among us since who was worth naming beside him;--and his influence, for good and for evil, in Literature and otherwise, has been very great.... His _Edinburgh Review_ [was] a kind of Delphic Oracle, and Voice of the Inspired, for great majorities of what is called the ‘Intelligent Public’; and himself regarded universally as a man of consummate penetration, and the _facile princeps_ in the department he had chosen to cultivate and practise.”[3]

How has it happened that Jeffrey’s lustre, once so brilliant, has paled in our day into that of a fifth-rate luminary? Was his earlier reputation wholly undeserved? Or is the “dumb forgetfulness” that has overtaken him a real case of literary injustice? Probably Jeffrey is now oftenest remembered for his unluckily haughty reprimand to Wordsworth, “This will never do!”--a sentence which is popularly taken to be an incontestable proof of critical incapacity. Yet as regards the artistic worth of the _Excursion_, the poem against which Jeffrey was protesting, judges are at present nearer in agreement with Jeffrey than with Wordsworth. Ought not Jeffrey, the critic, then, to benefit somewhat from the latter-day reaction against overweening Romanticism?

Doubtless, Jeffrey’s fate is in part merely an illustration of the transiency of critical fame. Jeffrey, like Rymer and John Dennis, has gone the deciduous way of all writers of literature about literature, save the few who have been actually themselves, in their prose, creators of beauty. Yet probably there is also something exceptional in Jeffrey’s case,--in his earlier complete ascendency and in the later sorry disinheriting that has overtaken him. Jeffrey’s reputation was really a composite affair, due fully as much to the timely-happy establishment of the _Edinburgh Review_ as to his own personal cleverness, great as that was. On Jeffrey, the editor, was reflected all the shining success of the first brilliant English _Review_. To understand, then, the waxing and the waning of Jeffrey’s literary reputation, a somewhat careful analysis will be needed not simply of his critical genius, but also of the methods for making that genius effective which fortune offered him and his own keen practical instincts worked out successfully. As for his individual worth as a critic, the truth will be found to lie, as so often happens, about midway between the eulogists and the cavillers. Judged even by present standards, Jeffrey was a notably effective critic; he made blunders not a few, but he was acute, entertaining, and suggestive, even when he went astray; he excelled in rapid analysis, apt illustration, and audacious satire. He developed critical method in two very important directions, and seized upon and applied, with at least partial success, two critical principles, hardly recognized in England before his day, but thereafter more and more widely and fruitfully employed. All these are points, however, that need to be minutely dealt with and illustrated.