she wrote during her busy life.

Wherever she had a character

Even where her knowledge

sketch to do, it was well done. was far from profound a kind of instinct seemed to lead her to what would be not only effective but really illuminative. She did not possess the creative gift in the highest degree; probably no creature of her imagination will permanently keep a place in the gallery of fiction. But she had the power of appreciation and of understanding, and she had also a wide range of sympathy. Her Edward Irving satisfied even so exacting a critic as Irving's friend Carlyle. It is indeed a striking portrait, especially in the earlier part, when Irving was still sane and sensible; yet perhaps still greater ability was needed for the treatment of the later phase. Mrs Oliphant did not share Irving's beliefs, but she handled the worst of his extravagances with comprehension and with delicate sympathy. It may have been merely a coincidence, or possibly such problems had a fascination for her and attracted her to write about them, but at any rate, in her biography of Laurence Oliphant (who was very distantly related to her family), she had, in his extraordinary subjection to the Prophet Harris, the same sort of problem to deal with, and she treated it with the same sympathetic delicacy.

In William Blackwood and his Sons Mrs Oliphant had very different material to handle; and here too, in spite of some diffuseness and occasional repetitions, she was successful. The portrait of William Blackwood, the founder of the house, is vivid. He died in 1834, and of course the biographer did not know him; but she had evidently penetrated beneath the documents to the heart of the man. Nor is this the only good portrait in the book. Lockhart and Wilson, who, with Blackwood himself, made the magazine, are admirably drawn and admirably contrasted; and the slighter sketches too are nearly all well done.

This history of a publishing firm had been preceded, in 1891, by a similar history of the other publishing house in Britain which most closely rivalled that of Blackwood, in that its members were not merely traders in books, but in no unimportant sense producers of literature. Samuel Smiles's (1812-1904) John Murray has less of the charm of portraiture than Mrs Oliphant's Blackwood, but it

is more concentrated; and it too deserves honourable mention as a most valuable contribution to the literary history of the nineteenth century. The two works are a monument to the great change which passed over the financial and material conditions of literature in the eighteenth century, and which reached maturity in the nineteenth. Though "Barabbas was a publisher," the publisher has been only one degree less necessary to the author than the author has been to the publisher, and the grumblings of authors have just the same degree and kind of foundation as the grumblings of producer and consumer at the costly but indispensable middleman. It was fortunate for literature that among its middlemen were two men not only so sane and sensible, but so high-spirited and liberal, as John Murray and William Blackwood.

Smiles, like Forster, was a veteran in the biographer's craft. His long literary life was devoted mainly to biographical studies. The works by which he is best known, Self-help and Thrift, are biographic in principle. Though the ideals they inculcate are not, perhaps, the loftiest, they are wholesome books, they have a practical bearing upon the lives of the toiling multitudes to whom primarily they are addressed, and they have had a wide influence for good. They are among the phenomena which accompany the widening of the class of readers through the cheapening of books and the diffusion of a certain measure of education. The deepest interest of Smiles lay in the problems suggested by the organisation of modern industry, and the greater part of his biographical work-Lives of the Engineers (1877), George Stephenson (1857), Industrial Biography (1863), &c.— bore upon this. Artistically however his greatest successes were achieved in the delineation of humble characters who, amidst their daily toil for daily bread, contrived to keep alive an interest in nature and science. His Life of a Scotch Naturalist (1876) and his Robert Dick, Baker, of Thurso, Geologist and Botanist (1878) are delightful sketches, as genuinely didactic as any of his books, and all the better for being less obtrusively didactic.

CHAPTER II

LITERARY AND AESTHETIC CRITICISM

§ 1. Literary Criticism.

IN most departments of literature the tendency is to depreciate the present and to look back to a golden age of great men in the past; but the critics as well as the historians of recent times have been exceptions to the rule. While they are not merely ready to acknowledge, but eager to proclaim on the house-tops, that the poets and the novelists of ancient days tower above their dwarfish successors, in respect of their own art of criticism they have had no doubt of their own superiority to their predecessors. In text-books on literature we are constantly reminded of Jeffrey's "This will never do," and of the Quarterly and Blackwood articles which were long supposed to have 'snuffed out' Keats; and there is a clear implication, if not an explicit claim, that such wild aberrations of critical judgment would be impossible in these more enlightened days. But, unless they are balanced with something else, such quotations and references give a one-sided and essentially false view of criticism in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Southey—a critic as well as a poet-met Jeffrey with the retort, "He crush The Excursion! Tell him he might as well fancy he could crush Skiddaw"; and while The Edinburgh and The Quarterly and Blackwood were vainly attempting to crush Skiddaw, Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt were doing critical work of a quality which has rarely been surpassed. If therefore there was much unsatisfactory criticism, there was also some of the very best.

Neither is it safe to assume that errors as gross as those which were made about Keats and Wordsworth have ever been, or are now, impossible. Sartor Resartus was as little to the taste of the new generation as The Excursion was to Jeffrey's; Tennyson at first received either censure or lukewarm praise; Arnold was neglected; and one of the grossest attacks ever made was directed against Rossetti. It is at least possible that similar blunders and oversights are being made now.

The critics who ruled the reviews and magazines in the early days of the nineteenth century were men of great ability and of wide reading; and the secret of their errors, monstrous and almost grotesque as they appear now, must be sought rather in the prepossessions with which they approached their subject than in their own deficiencies. It should be remembered that even Byron, though he was both a victim of the reviewers and one of the greatest of the new school of poets, was essentially in agreement with the more conservative critics. The BowlesPope controversy is symptomatic. In criticism, as in theology, in philosophy, in poetry, there existed side by side two opposite 'schools,' if we may thus call them. It would be more accurate to say that two contrasted types and tendencies of mind and character were illustrated. The division of 'romantic' and 'classic' is permanent and world-wide: as it showed itself at the opening of the last century, it is only a particular illustration of a divergence which never ends and which is always beginning anew. The revolution which is supposed to have taken place in literary criticism consists in the triumph of 'romantic' principles; but the triumph does not mean the complete disappearance, still less the permanent extinction, of the opposed 'classical' principles. Neither is it true that all critical merit belongs to the former set, or that nothing but error is to be found in the latter. Jeffrey and Gifford were simply critics who were thoroughly contented with the standards and the ideals of the past, and who were convinced beforehand that what was new must be wrong in so far as it did not conform to those ideals. The opposition between creative art and criticism is made to appear peculiarly sharp because the great and influential periodicals, The Edinburgh, The Quarterly

and Blackwood, were under the control of such men as these. It is easy to forget Hunt's Examiner, Indicator and Liberal, and even the admirable London Magazine; for their influence was far less wide.

Periodical literature was at that time practically a new development. Newspapers and other periodicals were still few in number. The Gentleman's Magazine and The Monthly Review had already run a long course. The Times existed; but it was infantile in proportions and limited in scope, compared with the great journal of the present day. When, in 1802, the famous four, Francis Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Henry Brougham and Francis Horner, along with some others less known, met in Edinburgh and determined to found a critical periodical, they were conscious that they were taking a new departure. Nothing which then existed filled the place they proposed to occupy. There was also about their meeting something of the spirit of conspiracy. It would be a good joke-so it evidently struck them--to air their wit at the expense of their elder and more solemn neighbours. Anonymity was the cloak of darkness under which they walked; and it tempted them to poke fun and satire when, perhaps, writing openly under their own names, they would have hesitated to do so. The editorial 'we' fostered also a tone of Olympian superiority. The individual contributor might have shrunk from pronouncing sentence like a judge upon a criminal in the dock; but we,' The Edinburgh Review, were above ordinary humanity. The shock must have been rude when, as occasionally happened, 'we' caught a Tartar, and were repaid in the coin of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

The Edinburgh Review soon became a more important periodical than its founders dreamed of at its inception. It grew to be a force in the country; power developed the sense of responsibility; the position of the editor became a great one, and his business was serious. The veil of anonymity soon wore thin; but its silent influence endured; and when the success of this first venture led to imitation, the same history was repeated in the case of other periodicals.

At the start, The Edinburgh Review did not profess to be