The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 17, March, 1859. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
between the two. He was neither a statesman, philosopher, nor poet; but while the heavens and the earth threatened to rush in confusion together, he was an admirable cicerone to the troubled and wandering wits of men. He had no inherent qualities, and, if other people had not existed, would not have been alive himself; his faculty was simply an eye for relations, and his mental life began when some one threw a series of thoughts across his line of vision. He could tell all about those thoughts,—how large each was, what complexion they had, how they stood in order with each other, and how they compared with other thoughts which he remembered having seen before. Such a mind might have achieved success among the technicalities of the law, but nowhere else, had not the "Edinburgh Review" been created. Jeffrey's critical articles have little value when regarded according to their aim and as integral compositions; the arguments which they contain are often insufficient, and the literary judgments wrong. But they are full of the scattered elements of thought. Many of the best ideas of the books and men of which they treat are stated in them with admirable clearness and piquancy, and they are, therefore, pleasant secondary sources of information.
Francis Horner died of consumption in Italy before he was forty years of age, and there is nothing of surpassing brilliancy or power in any of his writings. Yet he made a most extraordinary impression upon his contemporaries. His name is never mentioned by his associates except with unusual respect. Brougham, when he alludes to him, even in a letter, seems to check his pen into soberness, and to be as cautious as if he were speaking on a religious subject. Search through the published correspondence of Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, and Mackintosh, and Horner is found uniformly mentioned, not with peculiar affection or kindness, not with any intention of doing him honor, but as a man whose qualities were quite superior to those of other men, and whose destiny it was to be the first statesman of his country. Lord Cockburn, who was a schoolmate of Horner, relates that the latter was at one time selected by his class to present a book to the master, and adds: "As he stepped forward at the close of a recitation, and delivered the short Latin presentation-address, I thought him to be a god." This fascination is hard to be explained. The great seriousness of Horner's character may in part account for it. He could not bear trifling on important subjects, and could not help frowning on all jests which were not more wise than witty. The calm determination, the unvarying earnestness of his character, may aid in explaining it. From a boy, he never swerved from great purposes, pursued the most useful though difficult knowledge, and cultivated with equal zeal the ornaments of taste and those recondite historical and statistical studies which are the roots of political science. He was as far from being flighty as Immanuel Kant. Everything that he did was marked both by temperance and sagacity. Philosophically speaking, a personality, any personal being, is undoubtedly the most mysterious thing in the universe. How abstract ideas come together to grow and bloom in a young bosom is wholly past the comprehension of philosophy. As personality in the abstract fascinates a philosopher by its mystery, so a personality of uncommon purity, intensity, and completeness fascinates all men, and thus, perhaps, is explained the high estimation in which Horner was held. He was regarded by those who knew him, as Pythagoras was by his disciples, with the deference commanded by a superior person.
The indefatigable character of Lord Brougham, the only survivor of this group, cannot yet be sketched in a paragraph. To Sydney Smith we shall presently return.
The second group of young men was formed fifteen years later. They were the antagonists of the Edinburgh reviewers, the authors of the "Noctes Ambrosianae," the main support of "Blackwood's Magazine," almost from its beginning. Their names were John Wilson, J.G. Lockhart, James Hogg, and, for a time, William Maginn. These were very high, as well as, excepting Hogg, very young Tories. It would be an apotheosis of loyalty to say that they were also eminently religious, though they drank many bumpers to their religion. When they meet in the third of the "Noctes" and have taken their places at the table, North proposes: "A bumper! The King! God bless him!" and three times three are given. Then Tickler proposes: "A bumper! The Kirk of Scotland!" and the rounds of cheers are repeated. These indispensable ceremonies being over, the Blackwood council proceeds to discuss men and things over nectar and ambrosia.
Wilson was the centre and best representative of this group. At Oxford, he had been so democratic that he blacked his own boots on principle. On leaving Oxford, he had roamed for a time as a wild man in a band of gypsies. He next took a cottage in the lake district in the North of England, where he associated with Wordsworth, and occupied himself alternately with desperate gymnastic exercises and composing slight descriptive poems. Even after connecting himself with the magazine and becoming the symposiarch of the "Noctes," and perhaps the greatest Tory in all broad Scotland, he did not renounce his home among the lakes. He was a lover of scenery, and an enthusiast and master in manly sports. He is said to have fished in every trout-brook north of the Clyde, and he wandered every season over the Highlands. In his sportsman's accomplishments he took a truly English pride, and made fun of the Edinburgh Whigs by representing a company of them as getting by chance into the same room with himself and his associates, and then, pipes and tobacco being brought, as being fairly smoked out, sickened, and obliged to retreat by the superior smoking capacities of the Tories. He ridiculed Leigh Hunt for fancying in one of his poems that he should like a splendid life on a great estate, when (as Wilson says) he couldn't even ride without being thrown. Yet, of all the men of this time, there was probably no one who had wider sympathies or more delightful prejudices than Professor Wilson, or who made more sagacious reflections. The centre of a literary clique, he loved to associate with all the other cliques, and was one of the first to recognize and proclaim the great merits of Wordsworth.
The third group was larger than either of the preceding, retained its esprit de corps longer, and may be most conveniently defined as the associates of Charles Lamb. Beside Lamb, there were Coleridge, Southey, Lovel, Dyer, Lloyd, and Wordsworth, among the earlier members of it,—and Hazlitt, Talfourd, Godwin, De Quincy, Bernard Barton, Procter, Leigh Hunt, Gary, and Hood, among the later. This group, unlike the others, did not make politics, but literature, its leading object. It was composed of literary men,—a title of doubtful import, but which certainly in civilized society will always designate a class. Political life has more of outward importance, religious life is holier, but literary life is the most humane of all the avocations. It is to the professions what pastoral occupations are to the trades. Politics and religion both have something to do with institutions. A mechanical man can play a part in them not very well, but passably well. But the literary man is sheer humanity, with nothing to help him but his thoughtfulness and sensibility. He is the unfelled tree, not the timber framed into the ship of state or carved into ecclesiastic grace. He lives as Nature lives, putting on the splendor of green when the air is sunny, and of crystal when the blasts sweep by; and while his roots reach down into the earth, there rises nothing above him but the heavens. Past experience shows that he may be harsh, prejudiced, and unhappy; but it shows also that the richest human juices are within him, and that not only the most peculiar and most sensitive, but also the most highly-endowed characters are named in the list of authors. The central and most admirable figure in this particular group of literary men is Charles Lamb; and as each of the other groups clustered around an organ, so at a later period Lamb and his associates supported the "London Magazine," in which the "Essays of Elia" first appeared.
If it be asked what gave that strong coherence to these associates which constituted them groups, a wise man would answer,—congeniality of character. A wiser man, however, would not overlook the element of suppers. The "Edinburgh Review" seems to have been first suggested over a quiet bottle of wine; and at a later day the Edinburgh reviewers, increased in number by the accession of Mackintosh and one or two others, formed an honored clique by themselves in the splendid society of Holland House. The "Noctes Ambrosianae" is the enduring monument of the way in which the Blackwood men passed their nights, and not the less so from the fact that they were for the most part written out by Wilson in sober solitude. Charles Lamb began his career of suppers with Coleridge, as the latter came up to London from the University to visit him, and the famous Wednesday-evening parties given by him and his sister Mary would occupy a large space in the literary history of this epoch. It is a true proverb, that people are but distant acquaintances till they have eaten salt together.
The sketches which we have thus given will indicate the leading tendencies that were operating in English literature, though the groups themselves did not include all the eminent literary men. Campbell,