Famous Reviews by Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

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It would be scarcely possible for a man of Mr. Southey's talents and
acquirements to write two volumes so large as those before us, which
should be wholly destitute of information and amusement. Yet we do not
remember to have read with so little satisfaction any equal quantity of
matter, written by any man of real abilities. We have, for some time
past, observed with great regret the strange infatuation which leads the
Poet Laureate to abandon those departments of literature in which he
might excel, and to lecture the public on sciences of which he has still
the very alphabet to learn. He has now, we think, done his worst. The
subject which he has at last undertaken to treat is one which demands
all the highest intellectual and moral qualities of a philosophical
statesman, an understanding at once comprehensive and acute, a heart at
once upright and charitable. Mr. Southey brings to the task two
faculties which were never, we believe, vouchsafed in measure so copious
to any human being, the faculty of believing without a reason, and the
faculty of hating without a provocation.

It is, indeed, most extraordinary, that a mind like Mr. Southey's, a
mind richly endowed in many respects by nature, and highly cultivated by
study, a mind which has exercised considerable influence on the most
enlightened generation of the most enlightened people that ever existed,
should be utterly destitute of the power of discerning truth from
falsehood. Yet such is the fact. Government is to Mr. Southey one of the
fine arts. He judges of a theory, of a public measure, of a religion or
a political party, of a peace or a war, as men judge of a picture or a
statue, by the effect produced on his imagination. A chain of
associations is to him what a chain of reasoning is to other men; and
what he calls his opinions are in fact merely his tastes....

Now in the mind of Mr. Southey reason has no place at all, as either
leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to
know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never
troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never
occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account
of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions than merely that it
is his will and pleasure to hold them. It has never occurred to him that
there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumour
does not always prove a fact, that a single fact, when proved, is hardly
foundation enough for a theory, that two contradictory propositions
cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to
settle it, or that when an objection is raised, it ought to be met with
something more convincing than "scoundrel" and "blockhead."

It would be absurd to read the works of such a writer for political
instruction. The utmost that can be expected from any system promulgated
by him is that it may be splendid and affecting, that it may suggest
sublime and pleasing images. His scheme of philosophy is a mere
day-dream, a poetical creation, like the Domdaniel cavern, the Swerga,
or Padalon; and indeed it bears no inconsiderable resemblance to those
gorgeous visions. Like them, it has something of invention, grandeur,
and brilliancy. But, like them, it is grotesque and extravagant, and
perpetually violates even that conventional probability which is
essential to the effect of works of art.

The warmest admirers of Mr. Southey will scarcely, we think, deny that
his success has almost always borne an inverse proportion to the degree
in which his undertakings have required a logical head. His poems, taken
in the mass, stand far higher than his prose works. His official Odes,
indeed, among which the Vision of Judgement must be classed, are, for
the most part, worse than Pye's and as bad as Cibber's; nor do we think
him generally happy in short pieces. But his longer poems, though full
of faults, are nevertheless very extraordinary productions. We doubt
greatly whether they will be read fifty years hence; but that, if they
are read, they will be admired, we have no doubt whatever....

The extraordinary bitterness of spirit which Mr. Southey manifests
towards his opponents is, no doubt, in a great measure to be attributed
to the manner in which he forms his opinions. Differences of taste, it
has often been remarked, produce greater exasperation than differences
on points of science. But this is not all. A peculiar austerity marks
almost all Mr. Southey's judgments of men and actions. We are far from
blaming him for fixing on a high standard of morals and for applying
that standard to every case. But rigour ought to be accompanied by
discernment; and of discernment Mr. Southey seems to be utterly
destitute. His mode of judging is monkish. It is exactly what we should
expect from a stern old Benedictine, who had been preserved from many
ordinary frailties by the restraints of his situation. No man out of a
cloister ever wrote about love, for example, so coldly and at the same
time so grossly. His descriptions of it are just what we should hear
from a recluse who knew the passion only from the details of the
confessional. Almost all his heroes make love either like Seraphim or
like cattle. He seems to have no notion of any thing between the
Platonic passion of the Glendoveer who gazes with rapture on his
mistress's leprosy, and the brutal appetite of Arvalan and Roderick. In
Roderick, indeed, the two characters are united. He is first all clay,
and then all spirit. He goes forth a Tarquin, and comes back too
ethereal to be married. The only love scene, as far as we can recollect,
in Madoc, consists of the delicate attentions which a savage, who has
drunk too much of the Prince's excellent metheglin, offers to Goervyl.
It would be the labour of a week to find, in all the vast mass of Mr.
Southey's poetry, a single passage indicating any sympathy with those
feelings which have consecrated the shades of Vaucluse and the rocks of
Meillerie.

Indeed, if we except some very pleasing images of paternal tenderness
and filial duty, there is scarcely any thing soft or humane in Mr.
Southey's poetry. What theologians call the spiritual sins are his
cardinal virtues, hatred, pride, and the insatiable thirst of vengeance.
These passions he disguises under the name of duties; he purifies them
from the alloy of vulgar interests; he ennobles them by uniting them
with energy, fortitude, and a severe sanctity of manners; and he then
holds them up to the admiration of mankind. This is the spirit of
Thalaba, of Ladurlad, of Adosinda, of Roderick after his conversion. It
is the spirit which, in all his writings, Mr. Southey appears to affect.
"I do well to be angry," seems to be the predominant feeling of his
mind. Almost the only mark of charity which he vouchsafes to his
opponents is to pray for their reformation; and this he does in terms
not unlike those in which we can imagine a Portuguese priest interceding
with Heaven for a Jew, delivered over to the secular arm after a
relapse.

We have always heard, and fully believe, that Mr. Southey is a very
amiable and humane man; nor do we intend to apply to him personally any
of the remarks which we have made on the spirit of his writings. Such
are the caprices of human nature. Even Uncle Toby troubled himself very
little about the French grenadiers who fell on the glacis of Namur. And
Mr. Southey, when he takes up his pen, changes his nature as much as
Captain Shandy, when he girt on his sword. The only opponents to whom
the Laureate gives quarter are those in whom he finds something of his
own character reflected. He seems to have an instinctive antipathy for
calm, moderate men, for men who shun extremes, and who render reasons.
He treated Mr. Owen of Lanark, for example, with infinitely more respect
than he has shown to Mr. Hallam or to Dr. Lingard; and this for no
reason that we can discover, except that Mr. Owen is more unreasonably
and hopelessly in the wrong than any speculator of our time.

Mr. Southey's political system is just what we might expect from a man
who regards politics, not as matter of science, but as matter of taste
and feeling. All his schemes of government have been inconsistent with
themselves. In his youth he was a republican; yet, as he tells us in his
preface to these Colloquies, he was even then opposed to the Catholic
Claims. He is now a violent Ultra-Tory. Yet, while he maintains, with
vehemence approaching to ferocity, all the sterner and harsher parts of
the Ultra-Tory theory of government, the baser and dirtier part of that
theory disgusts him. Exclusion, persecution, severe punishments for
libellers and demagogues, proscriptions, massacres, civil war, if
necessary, rather than any concession to a discontented people; these
are the measures which he seems inclined to recommend. A severe and
gloomy tyranny, crushing opposition, silencing remonstrance, drilling
the minds of the people into unreasoning obedience, has in it something
of grandeur which delights his imagination. But there is nothing fine in
the shabby tricks and jobs of office; and Mr. Southey, accordingly, has
no toleration for them. When a Jacobin, he did not perceive that his
system led logically, and would have led practically, to the removal of
religious distinctions. He now commits a similar error. He renounces the
abject and paltry part of the creed of his party, without perceiving
that it is also an essential part of that creed. He would have tyranny
and purity together; though the most superficial observation might have
shown him that there can be no tyranny without corruption.

It is high time, however, that we should proceed to the consideration of
the work which is our more immediate subject, and which, indeed,
illustrates in almost every page our general remarks on Mr. Southey's
writings. In the preface, we are informed that the author,
notwithstanding some statements to the contrary, was always opposed to
the Catholic Claims. We fully believe this; both because we are sure
that Mr. Southey is incapable of publishing a deliberate falsehood, and
because his assertion is in itself probable. We should have expected
that, even in his wildest paroxysms of democratic enthusiasm, Mr.
Southey would have felt no wish to see a simple remedy applied to a
great practical evil. We should have expected that the only measure
which all the great statesmen of two generations have agreed with each
other in supporting would be the only measure which Mr. Southey would
have agreed with himself in opposing. He has passed from one extreme of
political opinion to another, as Satan in Milton went round the globe,
contriving constantly to "ride with darkness." Wherever the thickest
shadow of the night may at any moment chance to fall, there is Mr.
Southey. It is not every body who could have so dexterously avoided
blundering on the daylight in the course of a journey to the antipodes.

* * * * *

It is not by the intermeddling of Mr. Southey's idol, the omniscient and
omnipotent State, but by the prudence and energy of the people, that
England has hitherto been carried forward in civilisation; and it is to
the same prudence and the same energy that we now look with comfort and
good hope. Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by
strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving
capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price,
industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their
natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by
diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every
department of the state. Let the Government do this: the People will
assuredly do the rest.

ON CROKER'S "BOSWELL"

[From _The Edinburgh Review_, September, 1831]

_The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Including a Journal of a Tour to the
Hebrides, by James Boswell, Esq. A new Edition, with numerous Additions
and Notes._ By JOHN WILSON CROKER, LL.D., F.R.S. 5 vols., 8vo. London,
1831.

This work has greatly disappointed us. Whatever faults we may have been
prepared to find in it, we fully expected that it would be a valuable
addition to English literature; that it would contain many curious
facts, and many judicious remarks; that the style of the notes would be
neat, clear, and precise; and that the typographical execution would be,
as in new editions of classical works it ought to be, almost faultless.
We are sorry to be obliged to say that the merits of Mr. Croker's
performance are on a par with those of a certain leg of mutton on which
Dr. Johnson dined, while travelling from London to Oxford, and which he,
with characteristic energy, pronounced to be "as bad as bad could be,
ill fed, ill killed, ill kept, and ill dressed." This edition is ill
compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed.

Nothing in the work has astonished us so much as the ignorance or
carelessness of Mr. Croker with respect to facts and dates. Many of his
blunders are such as we should be surprised to hear any well educated
gentleman commit, even in conversation. The notes absolutely swarm with
misstatements, into which the editor never would have fallen, if he had
taken the slightest pains to investigate the truth of his assertions, or
if he had even been well acquainted with the book on which he undertook
to comment.

We will give a few instances--

* * * * *

We will not multiply instances of this scandalous inaccuracy. It is
clear that a writer who, even when warned by the text on which he is
commenting, falls into such mistakes as these, is entitled to no
confidence whatever. Mr. Croker has committed an error of five years
with respect to the publication of Goldsmith's novel, an error of twelve
years with respect to the publication of part of Gibbon's History, an
error of twenty-one years with respect to an event in Johnson's life so
important as the taking of the doctoral degree. Two of these three
errors he has committed, while ostentatiously displaying his own
accuracy, and correcting what he represents as the loose assertions of
others. How can his readers take on trust his statements concerning the
births, marriages, divorces, and deaths of a crowd of people, whose
names are scarcely known to this generation? It is not likely that a
person who is ignorant of what almost everybody knows can know that of
which almost everybody is ignorant. We did not open this book with any
wish to find blemishes in it. We have made no curious researches. The
work itself, and a very common knowledge of literary and political
history, have enabled us to detect the mistakes which we have pointed
out, and many other mistakes of the same kind. We must say, and we say
it with regret, that we do not consider the authority of Mr. Croker,
unsupported by other evidence, as sufficient to justify any writer who
may follow him in relating a single anecdote or in assigning a date to a
single event.

Mr. Croker shows almost as much ignorance and heedlessness in his
criticisms as in his statements concerning facts. Dr. Johnson said, very
reasonably as it appears to us, that some of the satires of Juvenal are
too gross for imitation. Mr. Croker, who, by the way, is angry with
Johnson for defending Prior's tales against the charge of indecency,
resents this aspersion on Juvenal, and indeed refuses to believe that
the doctor can have said anything so absurd. "He probably said--some
_passages_ of them--for there are none of Juvenal's satires to which the
same objection may be made as to one of Horace's, that it is
_altogether_ gross and licentious."[1] Surely Mr. Croker can never have
read the second and ninth satires of Juvenal.

[1] I. 167.

Indeed the decisions of this editor on points of classical learning,
though pronounced in a very authoritative tone, are generally such that,
if a schoolboy under our care were to utter them, our soul assuredly
should not spare for his crying. It is no disgrace to a gentleman who
has been engaged during near thirty years in political life that he has
forgotten his Greek and Latin. But he becomes justly ridiculous if, when
no longer able to construe a plain sentence, he affects to sit in
judgment on the most delicate questions of style and metre. From one
blunder, a blunder which no good scholar would have made, Mr. Croker was
saved, as he informs us, by Sir Robert Peel, who quoted a passage
exactly in point from Horace. We heartily wish that Sir Robert, whose
classical attainments are well known, had been more frequently
consulted. Unhappily he was not always at his friend's elbow; and we
have therefore a rich abundance of the strangest errors. Boswell has
preserved a poor epigram by Johnson, inscribed "Ad Lauram parituram."
Mr. Croker censures the poet for applying the word puella to a lady in
Laura's situation, and for talking of the beauty of Lucina. "Lucina," he
says, "was never famed for her beauty."[1] If Sir Robert Peel had seen
this note, he probably would have again refuted Mr. Croker's criticisms
by an Appeal to Horace. In the secular ode, Lucina is used as one of the
names of Diana, and the beauty of Diana is extolled by all the most
orthodox doctors of the ancient mythology, from Homer in his Odyssey, to
Claudian in his Rape of Proserpine. In another ode, Horace describes
Diana as the goddess who assists the "laborantes utero puellas." But we
are ashamed to detain our readers with this fourth-form learning.

* * * * *

A very large proportion of the two thousand five hundred notes which the
editor boasts of having added to those of Boswell and Malone consists of
the flattest and poorest reflections, reflections such as the least
intelligent reader is quite competent to make for himself, and such as
no intelligent reader would think it worth while to utter aloud. They
remind us of nothing so much as of those profound and interesting
annotations which are penciled by sempstresses and apothecaries' boys on
the dog-eared margins of novels borrowed from circulating libraries;
"How beautiful!" "Cursed Prosy!" "I don't like Sir Reginald Malcolm at
all." "I think Pelham is a sad dandy." Mr. Croker is perpetually
stopping us in our progress through the most delightful narrative in the
language, to observe that really Dr. Johnson was very rude, that he
talked more for victory than for truth, that his taste for port wine
with capillaire in it was very odd, that Boswell was impertinent, that
it was foolish in Mrs. Thrale to marry the music-master; and so forth.

We cannot speak more favourably of the manner in which the notes are
written than of the matter of which they consist. We find in every page
words used in wrong senses, and constructions which violate the plainest
rules of grammar. We have the vulgarism of "mutual friend," for "common
friend." We have "fallacy" used as synonymous with "falsehood." We have
many such inextricable labyrinths of pronouns as that which follows:
"Lord Erskine was fond of this anecdote; he told it to the editor the
first time that he had the honour of being in his company." Lastly, we
have a plentiful supply of sentences resembling those which we subjoin.
"Markland, _who_, with Jortin and Thirlby, Johnson calls three
contemporaries of great eminence."[2] "Warburton himself did not feel,
as Mr. Boswell was disposed to think he did, kindly or gratefully _of_
Johnson."[3] "It was _him_ that Horace Walpole called a man who never
made a bad figure but as an author."[4] One or two of these solecisms
should perhaps be attributed to the printer, who has certainly done his
best to fill both the text and the notes with all sorts of blunders. In
truth, he and the editor have between them made the book so bad, that we
do not well see how it could have been worse.

[2] IV. 377.
[3] IV. 415.
[4] II. 461.

When we turn from the commentary of Mr. Croker to the work of our old
friend Boswell, we find it not only worse printed than in any other
edition with which we are acquainted, but mangled in the most wanton
manner. Much that Boswell inserted in his narrative is, without the
shadow of a reason, degraded to the appendix. The editor has also taken
upon himself to alter or omit passages which he considers as indecorous.
This prudery is quite unintelligible to us. There is nothing immoral in
Boswell's book, nothing which tends to inflame the passions. He
sometimes uses plain words. But if this be a taint which requires
expurgation, it would be desirable to begin by expurgating the morning
and evening lessons. The delicate office which Mr. Croker has undertaken
he has performed in the most capricious manner. One strong, old-fashioned,
English word, familiar to all who read their Bibles, is
changed for a softer synonyme in some passages, and suffered to stand
unaltered in others. In one place a faint allusion made by Johnson to an
indelicate subject, an allusion so faint that, till Mr. Croker's note
pointed it out to us, we had never noticed it, and of which we are quite
sure that the meaning would never be discovered by any of those for
whose sake books are expurgated, is altogether omitted. In another
place, a coarse and stupid jest of Dr. Taylor on the subject, expressed
in the broadest language, almost the only passage, as far as we
remember, in all Boswell's book, which we should have been inclined to
leave out, is suffered to remain.

We complain, however, much more of the additions than of the omissions.
We have half of Mrs. Thrale's book, scraps of Mr. Tyers, scraps of Mr.
Murphy, scraps of Mr. Cradock, long prosings of Sir John Hawkins, and
connecting observations by Mr. Croker himself, inserted into the midst
of Boswell's text.

* * * * *

The _Life of Johnson_ is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is
not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not more
decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the
first of orators than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no
second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not
worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.

We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human
intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men
that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest
men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to
give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who
knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described
him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not
having been alive when the _Dunciad_ was written. Beauclerk used his
name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of
the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater
part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some
eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was
always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a crown
unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself,
at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled
Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription
of
Corsica Boswell. In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at
Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and
impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with
family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born
gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common
butt in the taverns of London, so curious to know everybody who was
talked about, that, Tory and High Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we
have been told, for an introduction to _Tom Paine_, so vain of the most
childish distinctions, that when he had been to court he drove to the
office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and
summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and sword;
such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be. Everything
which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which
would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and
clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. What silly things he
said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was troubled
with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how at another place, on
waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayerbook and took a hair of
the dog that had bitten him, how he went to see men hanged and came away
maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his
babies because she was not scared at Johnson's ugly face, how he was
frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as
they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at Lady Cork's one
evening and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies, how impertinent
he was to the Duchess of Argyle and with what stately contempt she put
down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his
impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom
laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he proclaimed to
all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious
rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his
vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he
displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that
he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a
parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill;
but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself.