Famous Reviews by Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

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Independently therefore of their value as poems, these compositions are
a real service rendered to historical literature; and the author has
made this service greater by his prefaces, which will do more than the
work of a hundred dissertations in rendering that true conception of
early Roman history, the irrefragable establishment of which has made
Niebuhr illustrious, familiar to the minds of general readers. This is
no trifling matter, even in relation to present interests, for there is
no estimating the injury which the cause of popular institutions has
suffered, and still suffers from misrepresentations of the early
condition of the Roman and Plebs, and its noble struggles against its
taskmasters. And the study of the manner in which the heroic legends of
early Rome grew up as poetry and gradually became history, has important
bearings on the general laws of historical evidence, and on the many
things which, as philosophy advances, are more and more seen to be
therewith connected. On this subject Mr. Macaulay has not only
presented, in an agreeable form, the results of previous speculation,
but has, though in an entirely unpretending manner, thrown additional
light upon it by his own remarks: as where he shows, by incontestible
instances, that a similar transformation of poetic fiction into history
has taken place on various occasions in modern and sceptical times....

We are more disposed to break a lance with our author on the general
merits of Roman literature, which, by a heresy not new with him, he
sacrifices, in what appears to us a most unfair degree, on the score of
its inferior originality to the Grecian. It is true the Romans had no
Aeschylus nor Sophocles, and but a secondhand Homer, though this last
was not only the most finished but even the most original of imitators.
But where was the Greek model of the noble poem of Lucretius? What,
except the mere idea, did the Georgics borrow from Hesiod? and whoever
thinks of comparing the two poems? Where, in Homer or the Euripides,
will be found the original of the tender and pathetic passages in the
Aeneid, especially the exquisitely told story of Dido? There is no
extraordinary merit in the "Carmen Secculare" as we have it, the only
production of Horace which challenges comparison with Pindar; although
we are not among those who deem Pindar one of the brightest stars in the
Greek heaven. But from whom are the greater part of Horace's _Carmina_
borrowed (they should never be termed Odes), any more than those of
Burns or Beranger, the analogous authors in modern times? and by what
Greek minor poems are they surpassed? We say nothing of Catullus, whom
some competent judges prefer to Horace. Does the lyric, then, or even
the epic poetry of the Romans, deserve no better title than that of "a
hot-house plant, which, in return for assiduous and skilful culture,
yielded only scanty and sickly fruits?" The complete originality and
eminent merit of their satiric poetry, Mr. Macaulay himself
acknowledges. As for prose, we give up Cicero as compared with
Demosthenes, but with no one else; and is Livy less original, or less
admirable, than Herodotus? Tacitus may have imitated, even to
affectation, the condensation of Thucydides, as Milton imitated the
Greek and Hebrew poets; but was the mind of the one as essentially
original as that of the other? Is the Roman less an unapprochable
master, in his peculiar line, that of sentimental history, than the
Grecian in his? and what Greek historian has written anything similar or
comparable to the sublime peroration of the _Life of Agricola_? The
Latin genius lay not in speculation, and the Romans did undoubtedly
borrow all their philosophical principles from the Greeks. Their
originality _there_, as is well said by a remarkable writer in the most
remarkable of his works,[1] consisted in taking these principles _au
serieux_. They _did_ what the others talked about. Zeno, indeed, was not
a Roman; but Poetus Thrasea and Marcus Antoninus were.

[1] Mr. Maurice, in the essay on the history of moral speculation and
culture, which forms the article "Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy"
in the _Encyclopaedia Metropolitana._

JOHN STERLING ON CARLYLE

[From _London and Westminster Review_ October, 1839]

All countries at all times require, and England perhaps at the present
not less than others, men having a faith at once distinct and large, the
expression of what is best in their times, and having also the courage
to proclaim it, and take their stand upon it....

But in our day such visionaries are less and less possible. The spread
of shallow but clear knowledge, like the cold snow-water issuing from
the glaciers, daily chills and disenchants the hearts of millions once
credulous. Daily, therefore, does it become more probable that millions
will follow in the track of those who are called their betters. Thus
will they find in the world nothing but an epicurean stye, to be
managed, with less dirt and better food, by patent steam-machinery; but
still a place for swine, though the swine may be washed, and their
victuals more equally divided.

Is it not then strange that in such a world, in such a country, and
among those light-hearted Edinburgh Reviewers, a man should rise and
proclaim a creed; not a new and more ingenious form of words, but a
truth to be embraced with the whole heart, and in which the heart shall
find as he has found, strength for all combats, and consolation, though
stern not festal, under all sorrows? Amid the masses of English printing
sent forth every day, part designed for the most trivial entertainment,
part black with the narrowest and most lifeless sectarian dogmatism,
part, and perhaps the best, exhibiting only facts and theories in
physical science, and part filled with the vulgarest economical projects
and details, which would turn all life into a process of cookery,
culinary, political, or sentimental--how few writings are there that
contain like these a distinct doctrine as to the position and calling of
man, capable of affording nourishment to the heart, and support to the
will, and in harmony at the same time with the social state of the
world, and with the most enlarged and brightened insight which human
wisdom has yet attained to?

We have been so little prepared to look for such an appearance that it
is difficult for us to realize the conception of a genuine coherent view
of life thus presented to us in a book of our day, which shall be
neither a slight compendium of a few moral truisms, flavoured with a few
immoral refinements and paradoxes, such as constitute the floating
ethics and religion of the time; nor a fierce and gloomy distortion of
some eternal idea torn from its pure sphere of celestial light to be
raved about by the ignorant whom it has half-enlightened, and half made
frantic. But here, in our judgment--that is, in the judgment of one man
who speaks considerately what he fixedly believes--we have the thought
of a wide, and above all, of a deep soul, which has expressed in fitting
words, the fruits of patient reflection, of piercing observation, of
knowledge many-sided and conscientious, of devoutest awe and
faithfullest love....

The clearness of the eye to see whatever is permanent and substantial,
and the fervour and strength of heart to love it as the sole good of
life, are, in our view, Mr. Carlyle's pre-eminent characteristics, as
those of every man entitled to the fame of the most generous order of
greatness. Not to paint the good which he sees and loves, or see it
painted, and enjoy the sight; not to understand it, and exult in the
knowledge of it; but to take his position upon it, and for it alone to
breathe, to move, to fight, to mourn, and die--this is the destination
which he has chosen for himself. His avowal of it and exhortation to do
the like is the object of all his writings. And, reasonably considered,
it is no small service to which he is thus bound. For the real, the
germinal truth of nature, is not a dead series of physical phenomena
into the like of which all phenomena are cunningly to be explained away.
This pulseless, rigid iron frame-work, on which the soft soil of human
life is placed, and above which its aerial flowers and foliage rise,
does not pass with him for the essential and innermost principle of all.
It is rather that which, being itself poorest, the poorest of faculties
can apprehend. As physical mechanism, it is that which is most palpable,
and undeniable by any, because it is that which lies nearest the
nothingness whence it has been hardly rescued, and is therefore, most
akin to minds in whose meanness of structure or culture, even human
existence might seem scarce better than nothingness. He knows, few in
our nation so well, that of a world of new machinery, the highest king
and priest would be the neatest clockwork figure. And in such a world, a
being feeling ever towards or somewhat beyond what he can weigh and
measure, and looking up to find above himself that which is too high for
him to understand, would be an anomaly as lawless and incredible as the
wildest fabled monster, the Minotaur or the Chimera, the Titan--the
Sphynx itself--nay a more delirious riddle than any that in dreams it
proposes to us.

On the other hand, neither is for him the solid, abiding, inexhaustible,
that merely which is received as such by the popular acquiescence. It
must needs be a truth which the spirit, cleared and strengthened by
manifold knowledge and experience, and above all by steadfast endeavour,
can rest in and say: This I mean; not because it is told me, were my
informants all the schools of Rabbins or a hierarchy of angels; but
because I have looked into it, tried it, found it healthful and
sufficient, and thus know that it will stand the stress of life. We may
be right or wrong in our estimate of Mr. Carlyle, but we cannot be
mistaken in supposing that on this kind of anvil have all truly great
men been fashioned, and of metal thus honest and enduring.

Further it must be said that, true as is his devotion to the truth, so
flaming and cordial is his hatred of the false, in whatever shapes and
names delusions may show themselves. Affectations, quackeries, tricks,
frauds, swindlings, commercial or literary, baseless speculations, loud
ear-catching rhetoric, melodramatic sentiment, moral drawlings and
hyperboles, religious cant, clever political shifts, and conscious or
half-conscious fallacies, all in his view, come under the same hangman's
rubric,--proceed from the same offal heart. However plausible, popular,
and successful, however dignified by golden and purple names, they are
lies against ourselves, against whatever in us is not altogether
reprobate and infernal. His great argument, theme of his song, spirit of
his language, lies in this, that there is a work for man worth doing,
which is to be done with the whole of his heart, not the half or any
other fraction. Therefore, if any reserve be made, any corner kept for
something unconnected with this true work and sincere purpose, the whole
is thereby vitiated and accurst. So far as his arm reaches he is undoing
whatever in nature is holy: ruining whatever is the real creation of the
great worker of all. This truth of purpose is to the soul what life is
to the body of man; that which unites and organises the mass, keeping
all the parts in due proportion and concord, and restraining them from
sudden corruption into worthless dust....

Anyone who should take up the writings themselves with no other
preconception than that which we have attempted to give him, would
doubtless be startled at the strangeness of the style which prevails
more or less throughout them. They are not careless, headstrong,
passionate, confused; but they bear a constant look of oddity which
seems at first mere wilful wantonness, and which we only afterwards find
to be the discriminating stamp of original and strong feeling. This--
this feeling, rooted in profound susceptibility and matured into a
central vivifying power--is, we should say, the author's most
extraordinary distinction. For it is not the ostentatious, impetuous
sentiment, which calls, a sufficient audience being by, on heaven and
earth for sympathy, and would wish for that of Tartarus too, as an
additional acknowledgment of its sublime sincerity. Here, on the
contrary, the feeling is not that which the man is proud of, and would
fain exhibit. He shrinks from the profession, nay from the sense of it;
even painfully labours to trifle, and be at ease, that he may hide from
others, and may for himself forget, the thorny fagot load of his own
emotions. Yet make them known he must; for they are not those of some
private personal grief or passion, from which he may escape into
literature or science, and leave his pains and longings behind him; but
his sensibilities are burning with a slow, immense fire, kindled by the
very theme on which he writes, and compelling him to write. The
greatness and weakness, the infinite hopes and unquenchable reality of
human life; the aching pressure of the body and its wants on the myriads
of millions in whom celestial force sleeps and dreams of hell; the sight
of follies, frauds, cruelties, and lascivious luxury in the midst of a
race then endowed and thus suffering; and the unconquerable will and
thought with which the few work out the highest calling of all men;
these it is, and not self-indulging distresses and theatrical
aspirations of his own, which boil and storm within. Therefore does he
speak with the solid strength and energy, which gives so serious and
rugged an aspect to his sentences; while, perpetually checking himself,
from a wise man's shame at excessive emotion, and from the knowledge
that others will but half sympathise with him, he adds to his most
weighty utterances a turn of irony which relieves the excessive
strain.... Add to this, that Mr. Carlyle's resolution to convey his
meaning at all hazards, makes him seize the most effectual and sudden
words in spite of usage and fashionable taste; and that, therefore, when
he can get a brighter tint, a more expressive form, by means of some
strange--we must call it--Carlylism; English, Scotch, German, Greek,
Latin, French, Technical, Slang, American, or Lunar, or altogether
superlunar, transcendental, and drawn from the eternal nowhere--he uses
it with a courage which might blast an academy of lexicographers into a
Hades, void even of vocables....

Here must end our remarks on the admirable writings of a great man.
Could it be hoped, that by what has been said, any readers, and
especially any thinkers, will be led to give them the attention they
require, but also deserve, in this there would be ample repayment, even
were there not at all events a higher reward, for the labour, which is
not a slight one, of forming and assorting distinct opinions on a matter
so singular and so complex. For few bonds that unite human beings are
purer or happier than a common understanding and reverence of what is
truly wise and beautiful. This also is religion. Standing at the
threshold of these works, we may imitate the saying of the old
philosopher to the friends who visited him on their return from the
temples--Let us enter, for here too are gods.

FRASER'S MAGAZINE

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

(1811-1863)

There can be no occasion to enlarge upon this generous tribute of one of
the greatest of our Victorian novelists to another. Considering how
inevitably the critic is driven to compare these two, if not to set one
up against the other, we can experience no feeling but pleasure and
pride in humanity, before the evidence of their mutual appreciation.
_The Cornhill_ "In Memoriam" article of Charles Dickens may well stand
beside this burst of glowing enthusiasm.

We have retained, by way of illustrating our general subject, a
paragraph from the earlier part of the article, in which Thackeray falls
foul of reviewers in general, for characteristics from which he himself
was singularly free.

CHARLES KINGSLEY

(1819-1875)

The brilliant versatility of Kingsley's work will prepare us, in some
measure, for his virile impatience, here revealed, with elements in the
romantic revival of poetry among his contemporaries, which were an
offence to his "muscular" morality. "There are certain qualities which
may be called moral in all his work, evincing a literary faculty of the
highest kind. Always instructive without being exactly instructed,
always argumentative without being very guarded in argument, he yet
displays a marvellously contagious enthusiasm for his own creeds, and
surrounds his own ideals with an atmosphere of passionate nobility. We
forgive the partisanship for the sincerity of the partisan."

* * * * *

Alexander Smith (1830-1867) was a poet and essayist of some distinction;
though A. H. Clough also criticises his exclusive devotion to the
"writers of his own immediate time"; and calls him "the latest disciple
of the school of Keats." The volume of essays entitled _Dreamthorp_
"entitles him to a place among the best writers of English prose."

ANONYMOUS

There is a similarity, and a difference, between this summary of
Christmas literature and Thackeray's. The personal criticism lacks his
special geniality, revealing rather a tone which would have perfectly
suited Blackwood or the _Quarterly_. Lytton was a favourite subject of
abuse to his contemporaries.

THACKERAY ON DICKENS

[From "A Box of Novels," _Fraser's Magazine_, February, 1844]

MR. TITMARSH, in Switzerland, to MR. YORKE

...This introduction, then, will have prepared you for an exceedingly
humane and laudatory notice of the packet of works which you were good
enough to send me, and which, though they doubtless contain a great deal
that the critic would not write (from the extreme delicacy of his taste
and the vast range of his learning) also contain, between ourselves, a
great deal that the critic _could_ not write if he would ever so; and
this is a truth which critics are sometimes apt to forget in their
judgments of works of fiction. As a rustical boy, hired at twopence a
week, may fling stones at the blackbirds and drive them off and possibly
hit one or two, yet if he get into the hedge and begin to sing, he will
make a wretched business of the music, and Labin and Colin and the
dullest swains of the village will laugh egregiously at his folly; so
the critic employed to assault the poet.... But the rest of the simile
is obvious, and will be apprehended at once by a person of your
experience.

The fact is, that the blackbirds of letters--the harmless, kind singing
creatures who line the hedge-sides and chirp and twitter as nature bade
them (they can no more help singing, these poets, than a flower can help
smelling sweet), have been treated much too ruthlessly by the watch-boys
of the press, who have a love for flinging stones at the little
innocents, and pretend that it is their duty, and that every wren or
sparrow is likely to destroy a whole field of wheat, or to turn out a
monstrous bird of prey. Leave we these vain sports and savage pastimes
of youth, and turn we to the benevolent philosophy of maturer age.

* * * * *

And now there is but one book left in the box, the smallest one, but oh!
how much the best of all. It is the work of the master of all the
English humourists now alive; the young man who came and took his place
calmly at the head of the whole tribe, and who has kept it. Think of all
we owe Mr. Dickens since these half-dozen years, the store of happy
hours that he has made us pass, the kindly and pleasant companions whom
he has introduced to us, the harmless laughter, the generous wit, the
frank, manly, human love which he has taught us to feel! Every month of
these years has brought us some kind token from this delightful genius.
His books may have lost in art, perhaps, but could we afford to wait?
Since the days when the _Spectator_ was produced by a man of kindred
mind and temper, what books have appeared that have taken so
affectionate a hold of the English public as these? They have made
millions of rich and poor happy; they might have been locked up for nine
years, doubtless, and pruned here and there, and improved (which I
doubt) but where would have been the reader's benefit all this time,
while the author was elaborating his performance? Would the
communication between the writer and the public have been what it is
now--something continual, confidential, something like personal
affection? I do not know whether these stories are written for future
ages; many sage critics doubt on this head. There are always such
conjurors to tell literary fortunes; and, to my certain knowledge, Boz,
according to them, has been sinking regularly these six years. I doubt
about that mysterious writing for futurity which certain big wigs
prescribe. Snarl has a chance, certainly. His works, which have not been
read in this age, _may_ be read in future; but the receipt for that sort
of writing has never as yet been clearly ascertained. Shakespeare did
not write for futurity, he wrote his plays for the same purpose which
inspires the pen of Alfred Bunn, Esquire, viz., to fill his Theatre
Royal. And yet we read Shakespeare now. Le Sage and Fielding wrote for
their public; and through the great Dr. Johnson put his peevish protest
against the fame of the latter, and voted him "a dull dog, sir,--a low
fellow," yet somehow Harry Fielding has survived in spite of the critic,
and Parson Adams is at this minute as real a character, as much loved by
us as the old doctor himself. What a noble, divine power of genius this
is, which, passing from the poet into his reader's soul, mingles with
it, and there engenders, as it were, real creatures; which is as strong
as history, which creates beings that take their place besides nature's
own. All that we know of Don Quixote or Louis XIV we got to know in the
same way--out of a book. I declare I love Sir Roger de Coverley quite as
much as Izaak Walton, and have just as clear a consciousness of the
looks, voice, habit, and manner of being of the one as of the other.

And so with regard to this question of futurity; if any benevolent being
of the present age is imbued with a desire to know what his
great-great-grandchild will think of this or that author--of Mr. Dickens
especially, whose claims to fame have raised the question--the only way to
settle it is by the ordinary historic method. Did not your
great-great-grandfather love and delight in Don Quixote and Sancho Panza?
Have they lost their vitality by their age? Don't they move laughter and
awaken affection now as three hundred years ago? And so with Don Pickwick
and Sancho Weller, if their gentle humours and kindly wit, and hearty
benevolent natures, touch us and convince us, as it were, now, why should
they not exist for our children as well as for us, and make the
twenty-fifth century happy, as they have the nineteenth? Let Snarl console
himself, then, as to the future.

As for the _Christmas Carol_, or any other book of a like nature which
the public takes upon itself to criticise, the individual critic had
quite best hold his peace. One remembers what Buonaparte replied to some
Austrian critics, of much correctness and acumen, who doubted about
acknowledging the French republic. I do not mean that the _Christmas
Carol_ is quite as brilliant or self-evident as the sun at noonday; but
it is so spread over England by this time, that no sceptic, no _Fraser's
Magazine_,--no, not even the godlike and ancient _Quarterly_ itself
(venerable, Saturnian, big-wigged dynasty!) could review it down.
"Unhappy people! deluded race!" One hears the cauliflowered god exclaim,
mournfully shaking the powder out of his ambrosial curls, "What strange
new folly is this? What new deity do you worship? Know ye what ye do?
Know ye that your new idol hath little Latin and less Greek? Know ye
that he has never tasted the birch at Eton, nor trodden the flags of
Carfax, nor paced the academic flats of Trumpington? Know ye that in
mathematics, or logic, this wretched ignoramus is not fit to hold a
candle to a wooden spoon? See ye not how, from describing law humours,
he now, forsooth, will attempt the sublime? Discern ye not his faults of
taste, his deplorable propensity to write blank verse? Come back to your
ancient, venerable, and natural instructors. Leave this new, low and
intoxicating draught at which ye rush, and let us lead you back to the
old wells of classic lore. Come and repose with us there. We are your
gods; we are the ancient oracles, and no mistake. Come listen to us once
more, and we will sing to you the mystic numbers of _as in presenti_
under the arches of the _Pons asinorum_." But the children of the
present generation hear not; for they reply, "Rush to the Strand, and
purchase five thousand more copies of the _Christmas Carol_."

In fact, one might as well detail the plot of the _Merry Wives of
Windsor_ or _Robinson Crusoe_, as recapitulate here the adventures of
Scrooge the miser, and his Christmas conversion. I am not sure that the
allegory is a very complete one, and protest, with the classics, against
the use of blank verse in prose; but here all objections stop. Who can
listen to objections regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a
national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal
kindness. The last two people I heard speak of it were women; neither
knew the other, or the author, and both said, by way of criticism, "God
bless him!" A Scotch philosopher, who nationally does not keep
Christmas, on reading the book, sent out for a turkey, and asked two
friends to dine--this is a fact! Many men were known to sit down after
perusing it, and write off letters to their friends, not about business,
but out of their fulness of heart, and to wish old acquaintances a happy
Christmas. Had the book appeared a fortnight earlier, all the prize
cattle would have been gobbled up in pure love and friendship, Epping
denuded of sausages, and not a turkey left in Norfolk. His royal
highness's fat stock would have fetched unheard of prices, and Alderman
Bannister would have been tired of slaying. But there is a Christmas for
1844 too; the book will be as early then as now, and so let speculators
look out.