Chapter III

It has already been hinted that the qualities of Jeffrey’s genius and style, great as may have been their value for the work he accomplished, are not, when judged from the modern point of view, altogether those of the ideal literary critic. This is particularly true if appreciation be included as a vital part of the critic’s task. Jeffrey rarely _appreciates_ a piece of literature, interprets it imaginatively, lends himself to its peculiar charm, and expresses this charm through sympathetic symbolism. His readiness and his plausibility are not the only points in which Jeffrey the critic suggests Jeffrey the advocate. He has the defects as well as the merits of the lawyer in literature. He is always for or against his author; he is always making points. The intellectual interest preponderates in his critical work, and his discussions often seem, particularly to a reader of modern impressionistic criticism, hard, unsympathetic, searchingly analytical, repellingly abstract and systematic. He is always on the watch; he never lends himself confidingly to his author and takes passively and gratefully the mood and the images his author suggests. He never loiters or dreams. He is full of business and bustle, and perpetually distracts his readers with his sense of the need of making definite progress. He is one of those responsible folk who believe that

“Nothing of itself will come
But we must still be seeking.”

For delicate and subtle appreciation, then, of the best modern type it is useless to look in Jeffrey’s essays.

Of course, historically, such criticism could hardly have been expected in 1803. The critical tradition that Jeffrey fell heir to was that of the dogmatists,--the tradition that came down from Ascham, the pedagogue, through the hands of the would-be autocrats, Rymer and Dennis, to Dr. Johnson. The theories of the dogmatists suffered many changes, but remained nevertheless true to one fundamental principle: the critic was to be accepted as an infallible judge in literature because of his familiarity with certain models or certain abstract rules, the imitation or the observance of which was essential to good art. The dogmatic critic deemed himself lord of literature by a kind of divine right. Ascham believed in the plenary artistic inspiration of the Greek and Latin classics, and posed as the authentic interpreter of the sacred literary word. The pseudo-classical critics, Rymer and Dennis, based themselves also partly on authority, but even more upon reason; they pretended to rule by the divine right of pure logic. Their implicit postulate might be likened to Hobbes’s theory in politics; they substantially held that the strongest must keep order in the commonwealth, and that in the literary commonwealth this duty fell to the intellectually strongest. Accordingly, these critics administered justice magisterially in accordance with a strict code of laws; they had laws for the epic poet, laws for the writer of comedy, laws for the satirist, laws for the writer of tragedy; the author of every new piece of literature was called up to the bar and reprimanded for the least illegality. In short, the dogmatic critic regarded himself and was generally regarded as able to apply absolute tests of merit to all literary work, and as the final authority on all doubtful matters of taste.

Now, Jeffrey was the inheritor of this tradition in criticism, and naturally adopted at times its tyrannical tone and manner towards public and authors. Yet, following his temperamental fondness for compromises, for middle parties and mediating measures, Jeffrey never tried formally to defend this old doctrine or represented himself as an absolute lawgiver in literature. Nowhere does he lay down a complete set of principles, like the rules of Bossu for epic poetry, or those of Rapin for the drama, by which excellence in any form of literature may be absolutely tested. Such a high-and-dry Tory theory of criticism does not suggest itself to Jeffrey as tenable. He is a Whig in taste as in politics, and desires in both spheres the supremacy of a chosen aristocracy. In his essay on Scott’s _Lady of the Lake_ he declares the standard of literary excellence to reside in “the taste of a few ... persons, eminently qualified, by natural sensibility and long experience and reflection, to perceive all beauties that really exist, as well as to settle the relative value and importance of all the different sorts of beauty.” Jeffrey regards himself as one of the choicest spirits of this chosen aristocracy, and it is as the exponent of the best current opinion that he speaks on all questions of taste.

It follows that, when Jeffrey is dealing with purely literary questions, he is less argumentative than at other times, and that what has been said of his viewing every subject in the light of general principles is least applicable to his dogmatic essays on literature. When, for example, he attacks _Wilhelm Meister_ or the _Excursion_, he does so simply and frankly in terms of his temperament. Wordsworth’s mysticism baffles him, and he condemns it; Goethe’s sordid realism and sentiment offend his man-of-the-world taste and he anathematizes them. His custom in such hostile criticisms is to let his own taste masquerade as that of “the judicious observer” or “the modern public.” His faith in his own personal equation is unquestioning and devout. Whatever fails to fall in with his bias is a fair mark for his bitterest invective. Goethe’s _Wilhelm Meister_, for example, is “sheer nonsense,” “ludicrously unnatural,” full of “pure childishness or mere folly,” “vulgar and obscure,” full of “absurdities and affectations.” These terms are, for the most part, mere circumlocutions for Jeffrey’s dislike, mere roundabout ways of saying that the book is not to his taste. As for coming to an understanding with author or reader about the ends of prose fiction or the best methods of reaching those ends, Jeffrey never thinks of such an attempt. He simply takes up various passages and declares he does not comprehend them, or does not fancy the subjects they treat of, or does not like the author’s ideas or methods. He gives no reasons for his likes or dislikes, but is content to express them emphatically and picturesquely. This is, of course, dogmatism pure and simple, and a dogmatism, too, more irritating than the dogmatism that argues, for it seems more arbitrary and more challenging. Of this tone and method, Coleridge complains in the twenty-first chapter of his _Biographia Literaria_, when, in commenting on current critical literature, he protests against “the substitution of assertion for argument” and against “the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts.”

But, irritating as is this pragmatic, unreasoning dogmatism, it is nevertheless plainly a step forward from the view that makes the critic absolute lawgiver in art. As the Whig position in politics is midway between absolute monarchy and democracy, so what we may term the Whig compromise in criticism stands midway between the tyranny of earlier critics and our modern freedom. The mere recognition of the fact that the critic speaks with authority only as representing a _coterie_, only as interpreting public opinion, is plainly a change for the better. The critic no longer regards himself as by divine right lord alike of public and authors; he no longer measures literary success solely by changeless, abstract formulas of excellence; he admits more or less explicitly that the taste of living readers, not rules drawn from the works of dead writers, must decide what in literature is good or bad. He still, to be sure, limits arbitrarily the circle whose taste he regards as a valid test; but it is plain that a new principle has implicitly been accepted, and that the way is opened for the development and recognition of all kinds of beauty and power the public may require.

Jeffrey himself, however, seems never to have suspected the conclusions that might legitimately be drawn from the ideas that he was helping to make current. He seems to have had no qualm of doubt touching his right to dogmatize on the merits and defects of art as violently as a critic of the older school. In theory, he held that all artistic excellence is relative; but in practice, he never let this doctrine mitigate the severity of his judgments. He asserts in his review of _Alison on Taste_ that “what a man feels distinctly to be beautiful, _is beautiful_ to him”; and that so far as the individual is concerned all pleasure in art is equally real and justifiable. Yet this doctrine seems never to have paralyzed in the least his faith in the superior worth of his own kind of pleasure; and he upbraids Wordsworth and Coleridge just as indignantly for not ministering to that pleasure, as if he had some abstract standard of poetic excellence, of which he could prove they fell short.

When we try to define Jeffrey’s taste and to determine just what he liked and disliked in literature, we find an odd combination of sympathies and antipathies. Mr. Leslie Stephen has spoken of him as in politics an eighteenth-century survival;[4] but this formula, apt as it is for his politics, scarcely applies to his taste in literature. The typical eighteenth-century man of letters was a pseudo-classicist; and beyond the pseudo-classical point of view Jeffrey had passed, just as certainly as he had never reached the Romantic point of view. Of Pope, for example, he says: he is “much the best we think of the classical Continental school; but he is not to be compared with the masters--nor with the pupils--of that Old English one from which there had been so lamentable an apostasy.” Addison he condemns for his “extreme caution, timidity, and flatness,” and he declares that “the narrowness of his range in poetical sentiment and diction, and the utter want either of passion or of brilliancy, render it difficult to believe that he was born under the same sun with Shakespeare.” These opinions are proof patent of Jeffrey’s contempt for pseudo-classicism. Then, too, Jeffrey is, as he himself boasts, almost superstitious in his reverence for Shakespeare. More significant still is his admiration for other Elizabethan dramatists, like Beaumont, Fletcher, Ford, and Webster. “Of the old English dramatists,” he assures us in his essay on _Ford_, “it may be said, in general, that they are more poetical, and more original in their diction, than the dramatists of any other age or country. Their scenes abound more in varied images, and gratuitous excursions of fancy. Their illustrations and figures of speech are more borrowed from rural life, and from the simple occupations or universal feelings of mankind. They are not confined to a certain range of dignified expressions, nor restricted to a particular assortment of imagery, beyond which it is not lawful to look for embellishments.” Finally, he even commends Coleridge’s great favourite, Jeremy Taylor, as enthusiastically as Coleridge himself could do: “There is in any one of the prose folios of Jeremy Taylor,” he asserts, “more fine fancy and original imagery--more brilliant conceptions and glowing expressions--more new figures, and new applications of old figures--more, in short, of the body and the soul of poetry, than in all the odes and the epics that have since been produced in Europe.”

Such judgments as these mark Jeffrey as, at any rate, not an eighteenth-century survival; they must be duly borne in mind when a formula is being sought for his literary taste. Fully as significant, though in a different way, is the series of essays on the poet Crabbe. If the praise of the Elizabethans seems to argue an almost Romantic bias in Jeffrey and to suggest that after all his tastes are very like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Crabbe essays at once reveal his antipathy to the men of the new age and show how far he is from even being willing to allow its prophets to prophesy in peace and obscurity.

Throughout his praise of Crabbe, Jeffrey is by implication condemning Wordsworth; nor does he confine himself to this roundabout method of attacking Romanticism. In the very first essay on Crabbe (1807), he turns aside from his subject to ridicule by name, “the Wordsworths, and the Southeys, and Coleridges, and all that ambitious fraternity,” and contrasts at great length Crabbe’s sanity with Wordsworth’s mysticism. “Mr. Crabbe exhibits the common people of England pretty much as they are”; whereas “Mr. Wordsworth and his associates ... introduce us to beings whose existence was not previously suspected by the acutest observers of nature; and excite an interest for them--where they do excite any interest--more by an eloquent and refined analysis of their own capricious feelings, than by any obvious or intelligible ground of sympathy in their situation.” With Crabbe, Jeffrey feels he is on solid ground, dealing with a man who sees life clearly and sensibly, as he himself sees it; and in his enthusiastic praise of the minute fidelity of Crabbe, of his uncompromising truth and realism, and of his freedom from all meretricious effects, from affectation, and from absurd mysticism, we have at once the measure of Jeffrey’s poetic sensibility and the sure evidence of his inability to sympathize genuinely with “the Lakers.”

Of course, for the classic passages expressing his impatience of the new movement, we must go to the essays on Wordsworth’s _Excursion_ and _White Doe_. Jeffrey’s objections to the Lakers fall under four heads: First, the new poets are nonsensically mystical; secondly, they falsify life by showing it through a distorting medium of personal emotion, _i.e._ they are misleadingly subjective; thirdly, they are guilty of grotesque bad taste in their democratic realism; fourthly, they are pedantically earnest and serious in their treatment of art, and inexcusably pretentious in their proclamation of a new gospel of life. Mysticism, intense individuality of feeling, naturalism, and “high seriousness,”--these were the qualities that in the new art particularly exasperated Jeffrey; and inasmuch as these were the very qualities to which, in the eyes of its devotees, the new art owed its special potency, the division between Jeffrey and the Romanticists was sufficiently deep and irreconcilable.

Wordsworth’s transcendentalism, his intense spiritual consciousness, his inveterate fashion of apprehending all nature as instinct with spiritual force and of converting “this whole Of suns and worlds and men” and “all that it inherits” into a series of splendid imaginative symbols of moral and spiritual truth,--these qualities of Wordsworth’s genius were for his admirers among his most characteristic sources of power, and tended to place him as an imaginative interpreter of life far above those Elizabethan writers whom Jeffrey, too, in opposition to the eighteenth century, pretended to reverence. But these were just the qualities in Wordsworth’s genius that seemed to Jeffrey most reprehensible. After quoting a typical passage where Wordsworth’s transcendentalism finds free utterance, Jeffrey exclaims: “This is a fair sample of that rapturous mysticism which eludes all comprehension, and fills the despairing reader with painful giddiness and terror.” Jeffrey’s woe is by no means feigned. We cannot doubt that his whole mental life was perturbed by such of Wordsworth’s poems as the great _Ode_, and that it was an act of self-preservation on his part to burst into indignant ridicule and violent protest. To find a man of Wordsworth’s age and literary experience deliberately penning such bewildering stanzas and expressing such unintelligible emotions, shook for the moment Jeffrey’s faith in his own little, well-ordered universe, and then, as he recovered from his earthquake, escaped from its vapours, and felt secure once more in the clear, every-day light of common sense, led him into fierce invective against the cause of his momentary panic.

Hardly less impatient is Jeffrey of Wordsworth’s subjectivity than of his mysticism. Why cannot Wordsworth feel about life as other people feel about it, as any well-bred, cultivated man of the world feels about it? When such a man sees a poor old peasant gathering leeches in a pool, he pulls out his purse, gives him a shilling, and walks on, speculating about the state of the poor law; Wordsworth, on the contrary, bursts into a strange fit of raving about Chatterton and Burns, and “mighty poets in their misery dead,” and then in some mysterious fashion converts the peasant’s stolidity into a defence against these gloomy thoughts. This way of treating the peasant seems to Jeffrey utterly unjustifiable, both because of its grotesque mysticism, and because it thrusts a personal _motif_ discourteously into the face of the public and falsifies ludicrously the peasant’s character and life. Wordsworth has no right, Jeffrey insists, to treat the peasant merely as the symbol of his own peculiar mood. Here, as in his protest against Wordsworth’s mysticism, Jeffrey pleads for common sense and the commonplace; he is the type of what Lamb calls “the Caledonian intellect,” which rejects scornfully ideas that cannot be adequately expressed in good plain terms, and grasped “by twelve men on a jury.”

Crabbe’s superiority to the Lakers lies for Jeffrey chiefly in the fact that he has no idiosyncrasies, though he has many mannerisms; he expresses no new theories and no peculiar emotions in his portrayal of common life. Hence his choice of vulgar subjects is endurable--even highly commendable. His peasants are the well-known peasants of every-day England, with whose hard lot it behoves an enlightened Whig to sympathize--from a distance. But a realism that, like Wordsworth’s, professes to find in these poor peasants the deepest spiritual insight and the purest springs of moral life, is simply for Jeffrey grotesque in its maladroitness and confusion of values. Sydney Smith used to say, “If I am doomed to be a slave at all, I would rather be the slave of a king than a cobbler.” And this same prejudice against any topsy-turvy reassignment of values was largely responsible for Jeffrey’s dislike of Wordsworth’s peasants and of his treatment of common life. If peasants keep their places, as Crabbe’s peasants do, they may perfectly well be brought into the precincts of poetry; but to exalt them into types of moral virtue and into heavenly messengers of divine truth, is to “make tyrants of cobblers.” Jacobinism in art, as in politics, is to Jeffrey detestable.

In fact, all the pretensions of the new school to illustrate by its art a new gospel of life were intensely disagreeable to Jeffrey. As long as Romanticism seemed chiefly decorative, as in Scott or Keats, Jeffrey could tolerate it or even delight in it. But the moment it began, whether in Byron or Wordsworth, to take itself seriously, and to struggle to express new moral and spiritual ideals, Jeffrey protested. Just here lies the key to what some critics have found a rather perplexing problem,--the reasons for the varying degrees of Jeffrey’s sympathy with the poets of his day. Let the poet remain a mere master of the revels, or a mere magician calling up by his incantations in verse a gorgeous phantasmagoria of sights and sounds for the delectation of idle readers, and Jeffrey will consent to admire him and will commend his fertility of invention, his wealth of imagination, his “rich lights of fancy,” and “his flowers of poetry.” Keats’s luxuriant pictures of Greek life in _Endymion_, Jeffrey finds irresistible in the “intoxication of their sweetness” and in “the enchantments which they so lavishly present.” Moore and Campbell, he regards as the most admirable of the Romanticists, and their works as the very best of the somewhat extravagant modern school. Writing in 1829, he arranges recent poets in the following order, according to the probable duration of their fame: “The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber:--and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley,--and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth,--and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our view. The novels of Scott have put out his poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are fading into distance and dimness ... and the blazing star of Byron himself is receding from its place of pride.... The two who have the longest withstood this rapid withering of the laurel ... are Rogers and Campbell; neither of them, it may be remarked, voluminous writers, and both distinguished rather for the fine taste and consummate elegance of their writings, than for that fiery passion, and disdainful vehemence, which seemed for a time to be so much more in favour with the public.” Now a glance at Jeffrey’s list of poets makes it clear that those for whom he prophesies lasting fame are either pseudo-classicists or decorative Romanticists, and that those whose day he declares to be over are for the most part poets whose Romanticism was a vital principle. Rogers is, of course, a genuine representative of the pseudo-classical tradition, with all its devotion to form, its self-restraint, its poverty of imagination, and its distrust of passion. Moore, whom Jeffrey places late in his list of fading luminaries, and Campbell, whom he finds most nearly unchanging in lustre, are both in a way Romanticists; but they are alike in seeking chiefly for decorative effects and in not taking their art too seriously. So long, then, as the fire and the heat of Romanticism spent themselves merely in giving imaginative splendour to style, Jeffrey could tolerate the movement, and could even regard it with favour, as a return to that power and fervour and wild beauty that he had taught himself to admire in Elizabethan poetry. But the moment the new energy was suffered to penetrate life itself and to convert the conventional world of dead fact, through the vitalizing power of passion, into a genuinely new poetic material, then Jeffrey stood aghast at what seemed to him a return to chaos. Byron with his fiery bursts of selfish passion, Wordsworth with his steadily glowing consciousness of the infinite, and Shelley with his “white heat of transcendentalism,” were all alike for Jeffrey portentously dangerous forces and unhealthy phenomena.

For the most part, in his attacks upon Romantic poetry, Jeffrey indulges in little philosophizing; he is content with wit, satire, epigram, and clever self-assertion. And yet, in the last analysis, there is a vital connection between his rejection of Romanticism and his abstract theorizings on beauty,--small pains as he has taken to bring out this obscure relationship. A complete account of his temperament and taste ought to show how the same instincts that led to his hostility to Wordsworth and Coleridge expressed themselves formally, and tried to justify themselves, through the theory of Beauty which he worked out with Alison’s help.

According to Jeffrey’s account of the matter, a beautiful object owes its beauty to its power to call up in the observer latent past experiences of pleasure and pain. These little fragments of past joy and sorrow gather closely round the object and blend in a kind of blurred halo of delight which we call beauty. Suppose that an observer looks out upon a luxuriant country landscape; the winding road calls back to him (though without his conscious recognition of the fact) leisurely afternoon drives; the green meadows suggest (again obscurely) past sympathy with shepherds and grazing flocks and rustic prosperity; the cottages surreptitiously wake memories of home joys and content about the hearthstone. And so the imagination garners out of the summer landscape a myriad evanescent associations with past life, which, too slight and swift to be detected separately by thought, nevertheless unite like the harmonics of a musical note to produce the peculiar character that we call beauty. This being the nature of beauty, it follows that every individual’s past will limit and create for him his beauty in the present; his foregone pleasures and pains will alone make possible those echoes of intense feeling which in the present combine into the single chord of beauty. According to every man’s past, then, is his present sense of beauty; and as no two men have the same past, no two men can have the same perceptions of beauty in the present.

Jeffrey accepts unhesitatingly the conclusions involved in this doctrine, and asserts that beauty is wholly relative; that whatever seems to a man beautiful is for him beautiful; and that no sensible debate is possible over the legitimacy of the beauty that a man’s special temperament manufactures. So long as a man confines himself to _enjoying_ beauty, he remains beyond criticism in the magic region of his own private experience. But the moment he offers himself as a creator or interpreter of beauty for others, he must take into account the scope and nature of common experience and try to appeal imaginatively to associations which are likely to be in the hearts of all. This is precisely, Jeffrey once or twice implies, what Romanticists like Wordsworth and Coleridge failed to do. They tried to impose on the public their own curiously whimsical associations of pleasure and pain; they were incredibly presumptuous in their belief that their own quaint, country-side blisses and sorrows and their own droll exaltations and despairs over peddlers and beggars and leech-gatherers must have universal value for mankind. Here for Jeffrey lay the wilful and colossal egotism of Romantic art; and once more we find him posing as the foe of idiosyncrasy and arbitrary whim, and as the representative of a cultivated aristocracy of intelligence and social experience and taste, who, after all, have something like a common fund of feelings and associations on which art can draw.

As for the actual worth of Jeffrey’s theory of beauty, its fault lies in trying to stretch into a universal formula what is really only a partial explanation of the facts. The beauty that Jeffrey lays stress on--the kind of beauty that comes from the suggestiveness of objects--is duly recognized nowadays under the name of beauty of _expression_. The possible origin of beauty through association of ideas had not been thoroughly considered before the days of Jeffrey and Alison, and their work was therefore new and historically important. But beside beauty that comes from this source,--beside beauty of expression,--there are beauty of form and beauty of material; neither of these is recognized by Jeffrey as an independent variety, and examples of each he tries, with really heroic ingenuity, to reduce to beauty of expression. The beauty of a Greek temple is explained as depending solely on a swift, unconscious recognition of the stability, costliness, splendour, and antiquity of the structure. The beauty of special colours or of chords of music is derived, not at all from the intrinsic quality of the sensations,--the hue or the musical sound,--but wholly from subtle associations with past pleasure and pain. Thus Jeffrey’s theory becomes distorted and misleading in spite of the truthfulness of much of his observation and the real subtlety and acuteness of many of his interpretations. The quintessential in art, the pleasure that art gives through pure form and the inexplicable ministry of sensation, Jeffrey is least sensitive to, and is continually looking askance at and trying to forget or to account for as merely disguised human sympathy.

Besides the light it throws on Jeffrey’s quarrel with Romanticism, his theory of beauty is of special significance because it emphasizes the genuineness and intensity of his ethical interest. All artistic pleasure is for Jeffrey merely human sympathy in masquerade--past love for one’s fellows, delicately revived in the music of art. The only man, then, who can have a wide range of artistic pleasure is he who in the past has shared generously in the lives of his comrades. Holding this theory of art, Jeffrey in his literary criticism naturally laid great stress on the ethical qualities of books and authors. Accordingly, in the preface to his _Collected Essays_, Jeffrey claims special credit for his frequent use of the ethical point of view. “If I might be permitted farther, to state, in what particular department, and generally, on account of what, I should most wish to claim a share of those merits, I should certainly say, that it was by having constantly endeavoured to combine Ethical precepts with Literary Criticism, and earnestly sought to impress my readers with a sense, both of the close connection between sound intellectual attainments and the higher elements of duty and enjoyment; and of the just and ultimate subordination of the former to the latter. The praise, in short, to which I aspire, and to merit which I am conscious that my efforts were most constantly directed, is, that I have, more uniformly and earnestly than any preceding critic, made the Moral tendencies of the works under consideration a leading subject of discussion.”

This “proud claim,” as Jeffrey calls it, seems amply justified when we compare Jeffrey’s essays either with the critical essays in the earlier Reviews, or with the more formal and elaborate critical essays of the eighteenth century. Even Dr. Johnson with all his didacticism had little notion of extracting from a piece of literature the subtle spirit of good or of evil by which it draws men this way or that way in conduct. An obvious infringement of good morals in speech or in plot he was sure to condemn, and a formal inculcation of moral truth he was sure to recognize and approve. But neither in Johnson, nor anywhere else before Jeffrey, do we find a critic constantly attempting to detect and define the moral atmosphere that pervades the whole work of an author, and to determine the relation between this moral atmosphere and the author’s personality as man and as artist. To have perceived the value of this ethical criticism, to have practised it skilfully, and to have fostered a taste for it, these are true claims to distinction; and Jeffrey’s services in these directions have been too often forgotten. The greater breadth of view of later critics and their surer appreciation of ethical values should not be allowed to deprive Jeffrey of his honour as a pioneer in ethical criticism.

For still another innovation in critical methods, Jeffrey was at least partly responsible. He was among the earliest English critics to see the importance for the study of literature of the historical point of view and to take into close account, in the study of an author or of a whole literature, the social environment. Not that Jeffrey was one of the original minds who first conceived of the historical method of study in its application to art, and worked out for themselves conceptions of literature as a growth and development and as dependent upon the spirit of the age and upon social conditions. Jeffrey, it can hardly be doubted, was merely a clever borrower. Long before his day, the principles underlying the historical conception of literature had been worked out in Germany, and had been applied by Herder and Goethe, and their disciples, for the solution of problems in criticism. Of this German theorizing Jeffrey can hardly have had direct knowledge. But to Madame de Staël, who was an adept in German speculation, Jeffrey probably owed much,--both to her teaching and to her example. Her _De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales_ had appeared in France in 1800, and her _De l’Allemagne_, a study of German life and literature conceived throughout in strict harmony with the principles of the historical method, was published in 1810. Now it is in 1811 that an unmistakable broadening of method may be discerned in Jeffrey’s literary criticism. His essay on Ford’s _Dramatic Works_ (August, 1811) is remarkable for its rapid survey of the whole development of English literature, its brilliant generalizations as regards the characteristics of such definite periods as that of the Restoration, and its fairly successful attempts to account for these characteristics as the outcome in each case of the social conditions of the time. Before 1811, or at any rate before 1810, Jeffrey never gets, in his study of an author, beyond the biographical point of view. He may consider psychological questions,--the characteristics of an author’s mind that have impressed themselves on his book, or the nature of the public taste to which literature of a certain kind caters. But the sociological origin of a literary school or a writer has not before that time troubled Jeffrey. After the _Ford_ essay the historical and the sociological points of view are used rather frequently, though it must be admitted with uncertain success and not with entire loyalty.

Perhaps Jeffrey’s most interesting actual discussion of the historical method occurs in the introduction to his essay on _Wilhelm Meister_, written in 1825. In this introduction he tries to classify the influences that mould literature and guide its development, and his formulas are curiously suggestive of the much later and rather famous theorizing of the French critic, Taine. Jeffrey does not recognize race--the first of Taine’s forces; “human nature,” Jeffrey asserts, “is everywhere fundamentally the same.” But for Taine’s two other sets of forces which he groups under the names _moment_ and _milieu_, close equivalents may be found in Jeffrey’s formulas. “The circumstances,” he asserts, “which have distinguished [literature] into so many local varieties ... may be divided into two great classes,--the one embracing all that relates to the newness or antiquity of the society to which they belong, or, in other words, to the stage which any particular nation has attained in that progress from rudeness to refinement, in which all are engaged; the other comprehending what may be termed the accidental causes by which the character and condition of communities may be affected; such as their government, their relative position as to power and civilization to neighbouring countries, their prevailing occupations, determined in some degree by the capabilities of their soil and climate.” Of these principles, Jeffrey goes on through a half-dozen paragraphs to make more special application; he describes certain kinds of literature, or certain characteristics of literature, that are apt to correspond to certain stages of civilization; he considers hastily some of the qualities impressed upon literature by different sorts of political institutions. All this general discussion, though decidedly in the air, is true and suggestive; it shows that by 1825 Jeffrey had a good deal of insight into the general theory of the dependence of literature on society. It must not be forgotten, however, in estimating Jeffrey’s originality, that even in England Coleridge and Hazlitt had, for a good many years before the date of this _Wilhelm Meister_ essay, been applying the historical method with insight and power for the explanation of literary problems.

In point of fact, Jeffrey is usually much more impressive when he talks abstractly about the historical method than when he tries to apply it specifically. He is specially apt to be unhistorical when he treats of the beginnings either of literature or of institutions. He lacked the knowledge of facts which alone could render possible a fruitful historical conception. His construction of early periods is always _a priori_ in terms of a cheap psychology. His account, in the essay on _Leckie_, of the origin of government, should be compared with his description of the earliest attempts at poetic composition. In both cases he has a great deal to say about what “it was natural” for the earliest experimenters in each kind of work to aim at and to effect, and substantially nothing to say of the actual facts as determined by investigation. Moreover, these earliest experimenters are for Jeffrey marvellously like eighteenth-century _connoisseurs_, confronting consciously, and trying to solve reflectively, intricate problems in art or in politics. This view is, of course, unhistorical, and illustrates the difficulty Jeffrey had in escaping from old ways of thought.

Finally, Jeffrey never applies the historical method successfully to the study of any contemporary piece of literature. In the essay on _Wilhelm Meister_, for example, the general account of the principles that underlie historical criticism is fluent and clear; but the change is abrupt and disastrous when Jeffrey turns to the particular discussion of Goethe’s novels. Far from being historical or scientific, or trying to trace out in Goethe’s work the significant forces that were shaping contemporary German life, Jeffrey merely gives himself over to railing at whatever jars on his personal taste. In short, half the essay is scientific and half purely dogmatic, and the two halves have scarcely any logical connection. Sad to say, Jeffrey nearly always bungled or faltered like this when trying to use the historical method, particularly when trying to interpret the literature of his own time. Other instances of his shortsightedness or clumsiness are to be found in his treatment of Byron and Wordsworth. He missed entirely the meaning of Byron’s savage revolt against the conventionalism of eighteenth-century moral ideals, and he was equally unable to understand Wordsworth’s high conservatism. Perhaps the most damaging accusation that can be brought against Jeffrey, as a critic, is inability to read and interpret the age in which he lived.

Jeffrey’s imperfect grasp of the historical method is shown in one other way: he never realized that there was any conflict between his work as a dogmatic critic and his work as a scientific student of literature, or had a premonition of the blighting effect that the spread of historical conceptions of literature was ultimately to have on the prestige of the dogmatic critic. More and more, since Jeffrey’s day, criticism has concerned itself with the scientific explanation and the interpretation of literature; less and less has it posed as the ultimate science of right thinking and right doing in literary art. This change has been brought about partly by the Romantic movement with its fostering of individualism in art, and partly through the development of historical conceptions in all departments of thought. Both these forces were in full play during Jeffrey’s life, and of neither did he at all measure the scope or significance.

Regarded, then, from a modern point of view, Jeffrey, as a literary critic, takes shape somewhat as follows: As an appreciator he is sadly to seek, owing largely to over-intellectualism and disputatiousness. As a dogmatic critic he is even yet thoroughly readable because of his dashing style, his deft and ready handling, his shrewd common sense, and his sincerity; he expressed brilliantly the tastes and antipathies of a large circle of cultivated people of considerable social distinction, who, while not peculiarly artistic or literary, read widely and intelligently, and felt keenly and delicately, though within a somewhat limited range. Even in his dogmatic criticism, however, his faults are obvious; his dogmatism is peremptory; his tone, often bitter; and his prejudices are as scarlet. On the other hand, for giving a strong ethical trend to literary criticism, he deserves all honour. His social sympathies were intense and alert; they fixed the character of his whole theory of beauty, and continually expressed themselves in his comments upon books and authors. Through his persistently ethical interpretations of literature, he really enlarged the borders of literary criticism. As for his historical criticism, it cannot be said to have much permanent value. Into the general theory on which the use of the historical method rests, Jeffrey shows considerable insight; but he was by nature and by training a dogmatist, not a scientific student of fact. Though his theorizings led him to believe speculatively in the relativity of beauty, and though he recognized abstractly that literature must vary from age to age as the time-spirit varies, yet he rarely let these convictions affect his tone or method in the treatment of literature; he is as round and intolerant in his blame of Addison or Pope as if he had never been within seeing distance of the historical point of view. In short, the disinterestedness of science was foreign to Jeffrey’s nature; he was primarily and distinctively, not an investigator or interpreter, but a censor bent on praise or blame.

These very characteristics of his criticism, however, were of a kind to bring Jeffrey, in 1803, great glory. With some disguise until 1809, when the Tory _Quarterly Review_ was founded, undisguisedly thereafter, Jeffrey was the great Whig champion in all that pertained to letters. From a partisan critic, audacious and brilliant dogmatism was just what was sure to win the widest hearing. Moreover, in accounting for Jeffrey’s enormous popularity, the trashiness and insipidity of earlier review-writing must be kept in mind. Reviewing had been the pet occupation of Grub street; penny-a-liners had impressed upon criticism all their own unloveliness and feebleness; review articles seemed to issue from under-fed, torpid brains and anæmic bodies. Jeffrey’s reviewing was the very incarnation of health, vigour, and prosperity.

Finally, Jeffrey profited in name and fame more than it is easy now to compute from the happy opportuneness of a new literary form, a literary form that was made possible through the establishment of the _Edinburgh Review_. This Review differed in many of its business arrangements and in its mode of publication from preceding Reviews; it was established in accordance with a new conception of the scope of review-writing, and of the relation of reviewers to the public. As the result of this new conception and these new relations, literary criticism, which had hitherto been merely more or less ingenious talk about technical matters, was transformed into the earnest and vigorous discussion of literature as the expression of all that was significant and absorbing in the life of the time. And as still further results of the new policy, reviewing and reviewers came into hitherto unknown honour; the _Edinburgh Review_ was adored or was hated and feared throughout the length and breadth of the land, and Jeffrey was universally regarded as demonic in his versatility, brilliancy, penetration, and vigour. Much of Jeffrey’s great prestige as a critic must be set down as due to his having long stood as the visible symbol of the success of the new style of reviewing.