Chapter VI

These, then, were the principal points in which the organization and policy of the _Edinburgh Review_ contrasted with those of its predecessors; and the influence of these changes on the tone and spirit of the articles in the new _Review_ can hardly be exaggerated. The _Edinburgh Review_ was not a catch-all for waste information; it was an organ of thought, a busy intellectual centre, from which the newest ideas were sent out in a perpetual stream through the minds of sympathetic readers. The _Review_ had opinions of its own on all public questions. In politics, it advocated the principles of the Constitutional Whigs, at first in a nonpartisan spirit, after 1808, fiercely and aggressively; it pleaded for reform of the representation, for Catholic emancipation, for a wise recognition of the just discontent of the lower classes, and for judicious measures to allay this discontent without violent Constitutional changes. In social matters, it urged reforms of all kinds, the repeal of the game-laws, the improvement of prisons, the protection of chimney-sweeps and other social unfortunates. In religion, it argued for toleration. In education, it attacked pedantry and tradition, ridiculed the narrowness of university ideals, and contended for the adoption of practical methods and utilitarian aims. In all these departments it criticised the existing order of things, always brilliantly and suggestively, and sometimes fiercely and radically, and stirred the public into a keener consciousness and more intelligent appreciation of the questions of the hour, social, political, and religious.

Now it is plain that, to accomplish all this, writers would find it necessary to go far outside of the old limits of book-reviewing, and to make their articles express their own independent ideas on various important topics, rather than simply their critical opinions of the merits of new publications. And this is precisely what happened. A book-review became in most cases merely a mask for the writer’s own ideas on some burning question of the hour. In other words, the establishment of the _Edinburgh Review_ really led to the evolution of a new literary form; the old-fashioned review-article was converted into a brief argumentative essay discussing some living topic, political or social, in the light of the very latest ideas. This kind of essay had been unknown in the eighteenth century, and was developed at the opening of the nineteenth century in response to the needs of the moment.

Nor was this change in the nature of the review-article unremarked at the time; Hazlitt noted it, and with his usual sourness protested against it. “If [the critic] recurs,” he says, “to the stipulated subject in the end, it is not till after he has exhausted his budget of general knowledge; and he establishes his own claims first in an elaborate inaugural dissertation _de omni scibili et quibusdam aliis_, before he deigns to bring forward the pretensions of the original candidate for praise, who is only the second figure in the piece. We may sometimes see articles of this sort, in which no allusion whatever is made to the work under sentence of death, after the first announcement of the title-page.”[13] Coleridge, on the other hand, approved of the change, and commended the “plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or mediocrity wisely left to sink into oblivion by their own weight, with original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time, religious or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition.”[14] The reviewers themselves recognized, of course, the change they were working, though they did not altogether realize its significance. In 1807, Horner writes Jeffrey, “Have you any good subjects in view for your nineteenth? There are two I wish you, _yourself_, would undertake, if you can pick up books that would admit of them.”[15] This quotation illustrates the fact that the important question in the minds of the reviewers was always, not “What new books have appeared?” but “What topics just now have the greatest actuality and are best worth discussing?”

This, then, was largely the cause of the success of the _Review_: it offered, in its articles, a literary form by means of which the most active and original minds could at once come into communication with “the intelligent public” on all vital topics; it made the best thought and the newest knowledge more readily available than ever before for readers who were every day becoming more alive to their value.

The times were plainly favourable. The French Revolution had stirred men’s imaginations as they had not been stirred for a century, and had shaken portentously in all directions the foundations of belief. Traditions in politics, in social organization, in religion, were violently assailed by men like Godwin, Horne Tooke, and Holcroft, and loyally defended by enthusiastic conservatives. The fever of Romanticism was already making itself felt and was quickening men’s hearts to new passions and firing their imaginations with new visions of possible bliss. The air was full of questions and doubts, of eager forecasts, and of ominous warnings. All this ferment of life and feeling demanded freer utterance than could be found through old literary forms and with old methods of publication.

Moreover, the increasing importance of the middle class and the spread of popular education were favourable to the development of the new literary form. The number of men who read and thought for themselves had been rapidly growing. These men were not scholars or deep thinkers, and had no leisure to puzzle out learned treatises. They were overworked professional men or business men, who were alive to the questions of the hour, who had thought over them and discussed them wherever and whenever they could, and who were anxious for guidance from “men of light and leading.” The essays of the new _Review_ gave them just what they wanted,--brief, clear, yet original and suggestive, dissertations by the best-trained minds on the most important current topics.

These, then, are some of the causes, over and beyond Jeffrey’s editorial skill, and the brilliancy and originality of his co-workers, that led to the unprecedented success of the _Edinburgh Review_. Their importance and their significance are shown by the fact that within a few years several other Reviews were founded on precisely the same plan with the _Edinburgh_, and soon rivalled it in popular favour. In 1809 the Tory _Quarterly Review_ was started with William Gifford as editor, and Scott, Southey, Canning, Ellis, and Croker among its contributors. In 1820 the _Retrospective Review_ was established, and in 1824 the _Westminster Review_, the organ of the Radicals; Bentham was its patron, Bowring its editor, and James Mill and John Stuart Mill were constant contributors. These Reviews were all quarterlies, and in the details of their organization were modelled after the famous _Edinburgh_. They all found a ready welcome, and, with the exception of the _Retrospective_, have continued to thrive down to our own day.