English Lands Letters and Kings 10
harbor was often closed by ice; therefore present methods were followed,”
etc. All of which was set forth with most charming grace and suavity; but
Lord Stanley was no sooner ended than the irascible Scotch peer, nettled,
as would seem, by the very graciousness of the explanation, was upon his
feet in an instant, with a sharp “M’ Lards,” that promised fun; and
thereafter came a fusillade of keenest, ironical speech--thanking the
honorable Secretary for “the vera impartant information, that as St.
John’s was upon an island, there could be no communication by land; and
perhaps his learned _Lardship_ supposes, with an acumen commensurate with
his _great_ geographic knowledge, that the sending of the mails by the way
of Halifax will have a tendency to _thaw_ the ice in the Harbor of St.
John’s,” and so on, for a ten minute’s storm of satiric and witty banter.
And then--an awkward plunge backward into his seat--a new, nervous
twirling of his watch-seals, a curious smile of self-approval, followed by
a lapse into the old nervous unrest.
There was no serenity in Brougham--no repose--scarce any dignity. His
petulance and angry sarcasm and frequent ill-nature made him a much hated
man in his latter days, and involved him in abusive tirades, which people
were slow to forgive.
_Francis Jeffrey._
As for Mr. Jeffrey, his associate on the _Review_, and for many years its
responsible editor, he was a very different man--of easy address,
courteous, gentlemanly--quite a master of deportment. Yet it was he who
ripped open with his critical knife Southey’s _Thalaba_ and the early
poems of Wordsworth. But even his victims forgot his severities in his
pleasantly magnetic presence and under the caressing suavities of his
manner. He was brisk, _débonnaire_, cheery--a famous talker; not given to
anecdotes or storytelling, but bubbling over with engaging book-lore and
poetic hypotheses, and eager to put them into those beautiful shapes of
language which came--as easily as water flows--to his pen or to his
tongue. He said harsh things, not for love of harsh things; but because
what provoked them grated on his tastes, or his sense of what was due to
Belles Lettres. One did not--after conversing with him--recall great
special aptness of remark or of epithet, so much as the charmingly even
flow of apposite and illustrative language--void of all extravagances and
of all wickednesses, too. Lord Cockburn says of his conversation:--
“The listeners’ pleasure was enhanced by the personal littleness of
the speaker. A large man [Jeffrey was very small] could scarcely
have thrown off Jeffrey’s conversational flowers without exposing
himself to ridicule. But the liveliness of the deep thoughts and the
flow of bright __EXPRESSION__s that animated his talk, seemed so natural
and appropriate to the figure that uttered them, that they were
heard with something of the delight with which the slenderness of
the trembling throat and the quivering of the wings make us enjoy
the strength and clearness of the notes of a little bird.”[31]
The first Mrs. Jeffrey dying early in life, he married for second wife a
very charming American lady, Miss Wilkes;[32] having found
time--notwithstanding his engrossment with the _Review_--for an American
journey, at the end of which he carried home his bride. Some of his
letters to his wife’s kindred in America are very delightful--setting
forth the new scenes to which the young wife had been transported. He knew
just what to say and what not to say, to make his pictures perfect. The
trees, the church-towers, the mists, the mosses on walls, the gray
heather--all come into them, under a touch that is as light as a feather,
and as sharp as a diamond.
His honors in his profession of advocate grew, and he came by courtesy to
the title of Lord Jeffrey--(not to be confounded with that other murderous
Lord Jeffreys, who was judicial hangman for James II.). He is in
Parliament too; never an orator properly; but what he says, always clean
cut, sensible, picturesque, flowing smoothly--but rather over the surface
of things than into their depths. Accomplished is the word to apply to
him; accomplished largely and variously, and with all his accomplishments
perfectly in hand.
Those two hundred papers which he wrote in the _Edinburgh Review_ are of
the widest range--charmingly and piquantly written. Yet they do not hold
place among great and popular essays; not with Macaulay, or Mackintosh, or
Carlyle, or even Hazlitt. He was French in his literary aptitudes and
qualities; never heavy; touching things, as we have said, with a feather’s
point, yet touching them none the less surely.
Could he have written a book to live? His friends all thought it, and
urged him thereto. He thought not. There would be great toil, he said,
and mortification at the end; so he lies buried, where we leave him, under
a great tumulus of most happy _Review_ writing.
_Sydney Smith._
I return now to the clever English curate who was the first to propose the
establishment of that great Northern _Review_, out of which Lord Jeffrey
grew. Smith had written very much and well, and had cracked his jokes in a
way to be heard by all the good people of Edinboro’. But he was poor, and
his wife poor; he had his fortune to make; and plainly was not making it
there, tutoring his one pupil. So, in 1804, he struck out for London, to
carve his way to fortune. He knew few there; but his clever papers in the
_Review_ gave him introduction to Whig circles, and a social plant, which
he never forfeited. Lord and Lady Holland greatly befriended him; and he
early came to a place at the hospitable board of that famous Holland
House--of whose green quietudes we have had glimpses, in connection with
Addison, and in connection with Charles Fox--and whose mistress in the
days we are now upon, showed immense liking for the brilliant and witty
parson.
All this while, the Rev. Sydney was seeking preaching chances; but was
eyed doubtfully by those who had pulpits in their gift. He was too
independent--too witty--too radical--too hateful of religious
conventionalisms--too _Edinburgh Reviewish_. Neither was he a great
orator; rather scornful of explosive clap-trap or of noisy pulpit
rhetoric; yet he had a resonant voice--earnest in every note and trill;
often sparkling to his points in piquant, conversational way, but wanting
quick-witted ones for their reception and comprehension. He lacked too, in
a measure--what is another great resource for a preacher--the unction
which comes of deep, sustained, devotional feeling, and a conviction of
the unmatchable importance and efficacy of sacerdotal influences. I think
there was no time in his life when he would not rather beguile a wayward
soul by giving him a good, bright witticism to digest than by exhibit of
the terrors of the Law. His Gospel--by preference--was an intellectual
gospel; yet not one that reposed on creeds and formulas. His heart was
large, and his tolerance full. He was a proud Churchman indeed, and loved
to score dissenters; but delighted in the crack of his witticisms, more
than he mourned over their apostasy. Among the “evening meetings” that he
knew very much of, and specially relished, were those at his own little
homestead, with closed blinds, and a few friends, and hot-water,
and--lemons!
I do not at all mean to imply that he had habits of dissipation, or was
ever guilty of vulgar excesses. Of all such he had a wholesome horror; but
along with it, he had a strong and abiding fondness for what he counted
the good things of life, and the bright things, and the play of wit, and
the encounter of scholarly weapons.
One beautiful priestly quality, however, always shone in him: that was his
kindliness for the poor and feeble--his sympathy with them--his working
for their benefit; and though he trusted little in appeals to the mere
emotional nature, yet in his charity sermons he drew such vivid pictures
of the suffering poor folk who had come under his eye, as to put half his
auditors in tears.
His preaching in London at this early period was for the most part at an
out-of-the-way chapel, in connection with a Foundling Hospital; but he
gave a series of Philosophic Lectures at the Royal Institution--never
reckoned by himself with his good work--which were besieged by people who
came to enjoy his witty sayings. In a few years, however, he secured a
valuable church gift in Yorkshire, where he built a rectory--the ugliest
and “honest-est house” in the county--and entertained London and Scottish
friends there, and grew to enjoy--much as he could--the trees, flowers,
and lawns which he planted, and with which he coquetted, though only in a
half-hearted way. His supreme love was for cities and crowds; he counting
the country at its best only a kind of “healthy grave”; flowers, turf,
birds are very well in their way, he says, but not worth an hour of the
rational conversation only to be had where a million are gathered in one
spot.[33]
And he does at last come to the million--getting, after his Whig friends
came into power, and after the Reform revolution was over, the royal
appointment to a canonry in connection with St. Paul’s Cathedral.[34]
He also has the gift of a new country “living” in Somersetshire, where he
passes his later summer in another delightfully equipped home; and between
these two church holdings, and certain legacies conveniently falling due,
he has a large income at command, and enjoys it, and makes the poor of his
parishes enjoy it too.
He has taken a lusty hand in that passage of the Reform bill (1832), and
while its success seemed still to be threatened by the sullen opposition
of the House of Lords, he made that famous witty comparison in which he
likened the popular interest in Reform to a great storm and tide which had
set in from the Atlantic, and the opposition of the Lords, to the efforts
of Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, and--
“who was seen at the door of her house with mops and pattens,
trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously
pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused. Mrs.
Partington’s spirit was up. But I need not tell you the contest was
unequal. The Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington. She was excellent
at a slop or a puddle, but she should not have meddled with a
tempest.”
And this happy and droll comparison was met with a great roar of laughter
and of applause that ran all over England. The same tactics of witty
ridicule belonged also to his attacks upon Tractarianism and Puseyism,
which made stir in his latter days. Indeed, his bump of veneration was
very small; and his drollery creeps into his letters as into his speech.
He writes of a visit to Edinboro’:
“My old friends were glad to see me; some were turned Methodists,
some had lost their teeth, some had grown very fat, some were dying,
and, alas! many were dead. But the world is a coarse enough place;
so I talked away, comforted some, praised others, kissed some old
ladies, and passed a very riotous week.”[35]
He writes to Moore, the poet:
“DEAR MOORE: I have a breakfast of philosophers at ten, punctually,
to-morrow--‘muffins and metaphysics, crumpets and contradiction.’
Will you come?”
When Mrs. Smith is ailing at her new home in Somersetshire he says:
“Mrs. S---- has eight distinct illnesses, and I have nine. We take
something every hour, and pass the mixture between us.”
One part of his suffering comes of hay fever, as to which he says:
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