The Scotch Plato

A. N. Wilson

By far the greater part of the readers of the Spectator have always been of a class that is not affected by partisan spleen: its circulation being chiefly, as it must always aim to be, among the men of culture, who like to listen to all sides of con- troversies, provided the argument is con- ducted with fairness and moderation.'

Those words were not written by Alex- ander Chancellor, but by our first editor, Robert Stephen Rintoul, who came to Lon- don from Dundee and founded the paper in 1828. He wrote them after he had been editor for 30 years. Whatever his Victorian readers made of Rintoul's political reasonableness, they would not always have found 'fairness and moderation' in the 'literary' pages of the paper. Under Rin- toul's editorship, and that of his redoubt- able successor Richard Holt Hutton, the Spectator published violently hostile reviews of Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Bronte, Carlyle, Dickens, Leigh Hunt and George Meredith.

Much of the splenetic tradition of early Spectator reviewing derived from the fact that its first editor was a Scot, who learnt his trade in the fierce old days of 'English bards and Scotch reviewers.' The Scottish Academic Press have lately published a selection of Francis Jeffrey's criticism (price £8.25), culled from his articles in the Edinburgh Review. It serves as a reminder of how harsh criticism used to be. Jeffrey hated the egocentricity of the Romantic poets. He attributed 'ideas of schoolboy imbecility' to Wordsworth; and of the Lyrical Ballads, he wrote that 'their peculiarities of diction are alone enough, perhaps, to render them ridiculous.'

Rendering people ridiculous is an impor- tant part of the journalist's function and the great writers of the Edinburgh Review were pioneers in the field. Sydney Smith who, with Francis Jeffrey, helped to found the Edinburgh in 1802, was once upbraided for having poured scorn on the sermons of Archdeacon Nares. He retorted, 'In these literary executions I do not care for justice or injustice a fig. My business is to make the archdeacon as ridiculous as possible.'

Jeffrey and Sydney Smith were staunch Whigs. The Quarterly was founded as a Tory counterblast to their outpourings. Much more conservative in politics than its rival, it borrowed from the Edinburgh the habits of critical asperity. Sir Walter Scott's future son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, became the editor when he was not much more than 20 and after he had published a few reviews, he was dubbed 'the Scorpion'. Lockhart mellowed in time. It is only fair to recall that he was barely out of his teens when he wrote his famous notice of John Keats: 'It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr John, back to the plasters, pills and ointments'.

It was that sentence which Shelley believ- ed had hastened the early demise of the author of Endymion. 'Poor Keats is dying of a review in the Quarterly', wrote Miss Mitford maliciously. Nasty as Lockhart's review obviously was, it is hard to work up any sympathy for Keats, or for any other thin-skinned author who fails to under- stand that no literary judgment can, or ought to be, lair'; and that the purpose of literary, as of any other sort of journalism, is to entertain. People rushed to buy the Quarterly rather in the spirit of modern crowds who huddle at the dangerous cor- ners of Brand's Hatch, agog for the next grisly casualty.

Lockhart was a mild reviewer in com- parison with his colourful friend John Wilson, who wrote under the pseudonym of 'Christopher North' and deserves to be more widely known today. 'Though averse to being cut up myself', he frankly averred, 'I like to abuse my friends.' Wilson rose to prominence with the appearance of Blackwood's Magazine in 1817. He was a big, athletic figure whose father had made a fortune out of gauze in Paisley. Wilson himself, after a brilliant career at Glasgow University, went.to Magdalen College, Ox- ford where it was alleged (probably falsely) that he had contracted a secret marriage with a gypsy woman. Confident of a leisured future, he settled on the shores of Lake Windermere, married the daughter of a rich Liverpool merchant and bought a few acres. He was driven to the desperate expe- dient of literary journalism when a wicked uncle somehow swindled him out of £50,000; and once he started writing for Blackwood's, he remained a prolific con- tributor until his death. He was also made Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

Sir Walter Scott was right to see Wilson as 'an eccentric genius'. Nobody in the history of journalism has written more rum- bustiously destructive reviews, but it is a mistake to believe that he did so out of malice. His pen ran away with him. The ob- ject of his ridicule became a figure of fan- -tasy who was fair game for any amount of insult. Once the words appeared in print, Wilson was frequently stung with extremes of remorse. And reading those words to- day, one can see why.

Wordsworth's Excursion is described as 'the worst poem of any character in the English language.' He suppressed the obituary of Wordsworth in which he called the poet 'a fat ugly cur', but he published the article in which he said, with an ad- mirably commercial judgment, that Words- worth could not be forgiven for encourag- ing swarms of tourists to infest the Lakes. 'Who does not shudder to think that they may have given ostentatious alms to "the old Cumberland beggar", as the Kendal coach was passing by with 20 outsides? These are the reptiles that, if not trod upon, will occasion a fall in the price of land in the northern counties.'

He had particular fun attacking the 'young poets' of his day and remarked that many people from the provinces would be surprised 'on their introduction to "one of the most promising of our young poets" at beholding a bald or bush-headed man of middle age, in spectacles, and if not with an indisputable pot belly, yet "corpulent ex- ceedingly" and, by rude guess fourteen stone avoirdupois.' Many of his generalisations are perfectlY sensible, as when he wrote that 'one of the saddest misfortunes that can befall a Young poet is to be the pet of a coterie'. This was what he believed had happened to the young Tennyson, and he dismissed Arthur Hallam's enthusiasm for 'The Lady 01; Shallot' as 'the purest mere matter ()I moonshine ever mouthed by an idiot - lunatic.' Hallam's mind might once have been human, he continued, warming to his theme, but now it was 'sensibly and auchblY reduced below the level of the Pongos'. (Le. Apes). Tennyson retaliated with a rather damp squib:

You did late review my lays, Crusty Christopher;

You did mingle blame and praise, Rusty Christopher;

When I learnt from whom it came, I forgave you all the blame, Musty Chistopher,

I could not forgive the praise,

Fusty Christopher.

Tennyson had originally written 'TIPSY Kit', which was a better nickname than 'Crusty Christopher'. Wilson was a jovial, boozy man. 'The animosities die, but the humanities live forever', he said, looking back on a lifetime of slanging matches. A1151 we can believe it, for his lasting memorial Is the little volume called Noctes Ambr°- sianae, transcribed pub conversations bet- ween himself, and James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd. The fact that they are written in dialect means that they are little known in England. But the light-hearted way which they discuss everything under the suit appealed to Wilson's compatriots wh° named him, with pardonable hyperbole, 'the Scotch Plato.'