BOOKS.
THE LIFE OF LOCKHART.*
MR. LANG and his publishers have taken time by the forelock in boldly claiming next year for their date of publication, in advance upon the early methods growing more in favour every day. We wonder if the first instance of the new fashion was when Punch first began by coming out on Wednesday and announcing himself for the Saturday to follow, and Shirley Brooks disposed of inconvenient inquirers by answering, " Mr. Punch is always being asked why he is dated on Saturday and appears on the previous Wednesday. Why shouldn't he if he likes ? " We do not know if the publishers of Lockhart's life have a similar answer to make to the undoubted fact that their book has come out in this same stormy end of 1896 ; but these increasing mysteries of the trade are likely to cause confusion some time hence. It might become material in some case of literary inquiry—on some Janian or similar investigation—to ascertain exact dates, of publication or of other occurrences, and it is possible that complications might rise out of these rather meaningless mysti. fications. If we do not anticipate anything of the kind in connection with the book before us, it is because we really cannot understand why it should have been written at all. John Gibson Lockhart, to give him the full style which is so often presumed to lend dignity to its subject, practically sur- vives to us only as the son-in-law and biographer of Walter Scott. He is the author of one of the three best biographies in the language ; for we believe that the general verdict has already allowed Sir George Trevelyan to stand by the side of Boswell and Lockhart by right of his Life of Macaulay. He has not yet received the sanction of a succeeding age, though the qualities seem to be there. But there is nothing parti- cularly attractive about the biography of a biographer, save on the proverbial principle of the driver of fat oxen. And Lockhart left behind him nothing of his own, except the Spanish Ballads, which have made for him any place in letters. He was successful enough in his time as editor and journalist and essayist, and he tried his hand at a novel, alled Valerius, which did not win for him any of the spare laurels of his famous father-in-law. The ballads are of a different stamp, and we remember them as delightful reading in a ballad-loving boyhood. Bavieca and the Cid, Xarifa and the golden cushion, the fair lady who refused so flatly- " To gaze on false Abdullah with all the gazing town," • The Life and Letter,. of John GPmon Lockhart. By Andrew Lang. London : J. 0. Nimmo; New York: Scribner. 1897. Oh Church ! the village ghosts and the band of loving brothers "slain by Quadros' hand," have fled were all among our favourite figures. But Lockhart's ballads, good as they are, could not take a place with Scott and with Macaulay, or even with Aytoun in his ringing " Lays of the Scotch Cavaliers." Mr. Lang's strong predilection in favour of the ballad-writers of the world—who, notwithstanding the comparative humbleness of their occupation in critical esteem, can be numbered upon the fingers in comparison with great poets of the reflective cast—goes some way to justify, or at all events to explain, his belief in Lockhart. Lockhart's Life of Scott itself would have been none the worse for con- siderable compression. Like Boswell and Trevelyan, he was a great biographer through intimate connection with, and close affection for, his original, but for that very reason he was apt to become diffuse. As a writer apart, he was really naught ; that he should live, we mean. He was eminent as an editor of the Quarterly, and there is always something rather attractive in reading of the difficulties and the controversies which beset the way of men who live with and amongst the foremost literary figures of their time. Of course we have plenty and to spare as usual in the present book of Wilson and of Jeffrey, and Coleridge and Wordsworth ; and poor Croker can be brought forward again to be condemned for his frivolity. Bnt the dish had lost much of its flavour, and we fear that his present chronicler will scarcely galvanise Lockhart into an individual life.
Mr. Andrew Lang's versatility and industry are both in- exhaustible, and the opening note of his preface throws ample and rather amusing light both upon work and subject. The book, he says, grew out of the publisher's wish that he should prepare an edition of Mr. Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott. An introductory chapter on the author of that great work seemed desirable, and the chapter swelled into a biography of Mr. Lockhart. The two bulky volumes before us do, very assuredly, form the most portentous introductory chapter ever known. Quid feret hoc tanto dignum prontissor hiatu? We have hinted that condensation is the process which Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter the most requires. If we are to judge and estimate by proportion, it is scarcely the one which it is most likely to receive. At present we are equally impressed by the editor's industry and the pub- lisher's acquiescence. At the close of his preface Mr. Lang says that his book reads rather like a speech for the defence, pleading that Lockhart was so vehemently attacked and so unjustly misrepresented, that it was not to be avoided. This almost amounts to an admission on the part of the advocate that his speech is in reality superfluous. It must have been from the researches necessary for the preliminary chapter that he learnt of Lockhart's imputed crimes, which we venture to say had been mercifully but completely forgotten, and might as well have been left alone. Apart from his having made himself (setting aside the exception) no individual name as an author, Lockhart has not, on the other hand, like many other men not more famous in themselves, left behind him the memory of a remarkable individuality. Boswell somehow did, though it may have been something of a figure pour rire. Lockhart was an admirable son-in-law, and Sir Walter was deeply attached to him ; but in spite of detractors and de- fenders alike, he was, with a corner for the Spanish Ballads, Sir Walter's biographer and no more. How much Mr. Lang has tried to make of him may be gathered from the fact that he speaks of a collection of caricatures of his which are preserved at Abbotsford, of which one or two specimens are given ; and takes occasion to compare him to Thackeray as a caricaturist. Thackeray seems to have become of late a kind of general standard of comparison for every- thing and everybody ; but except in the want of finish we can find no resemblance here. The extraordinary humour of Thackeray's sketches was at least as remarkable as any imperfection in the drawing, which alone, we should say, gives Mr. Lockhart's sketches the right to be seen outside the albums they were harmlessly intended for. It does seem rather severe measure to an innocent biographer, so many years after his domestic sin, to have such a caricature brought into the public light as that of Charles II. and Fenella in St. James's Park. Let us, at all events, give the better side of him, as a man for whom even Carlyle had words of praise, and of whom Lady Eastlake recorded how many kind and good "things I remember from his lips,—how unfailing his tribute to worth and duty, though under the homeliest garb." It was as a critic, however, that he worked most and was best known in his day, and very few critics are amongst the immortals. Lockhart said of them himself, that no mere reviewer could be a good critic, while the perfect reviewer must be, like Shakespeare, universal, impartial, national. Mr. Lang concludes of him that he was himself
116 formed for " gentle and universal criticism of the masters of literature, not of cotemporaries," but that he had to take the world and the Press as he found them, and " with a stoical disdain that verged on cynicism, subdued his hand to that it worked in." We fear, with all respect to Mr. Lang, that the same description would apply to a good many critics of their cotemporaries, and that it is not in itself a very strong plea for literary attacks that a man should feel himself too good for his place; but in days of vehement literary animosities Lockhart was at all events not a truculent sword-player. If Valerius had succeeded he need not perhaps have "subdued his hand ; " but the Press appears to have needed more apologies in those days than it is prepared to admit now. " Your connection with any newspaper," wrote Sir Walter to his son-in-law," would be disgrace and degrada- tion. I would rather sell gin to the poor people and poison them that way."
It is from the parts of the volume that relate to Sir Walter Scott, we fear, that Mr. Lang's readers will derive their main interest in his work, anticipating thereby their enjoyment of his forthcoming edition of the Life. Many of his letters are very pleasant reading, though even there there is, as is in- evitable in such cases, a good deal that is so purely private and domestic that one scarcely sees the use of publishing it. But we never tire of Sir Walter Scott,—those of us at all events who still set his novels in the forefront of the battle, and can feel something more than sympathy with the stirring verse which an unwilling world will not nowadays admit to be poetry, tracing in it the most direct of the influences which he brought to bear on his son-in-law, as he is the man whom we are bound to regard as the figure-head of Mr. Lang's labours. He certainly was no sparing critic of his own work, and no diffuse one either, if his " Ann of Geieratein, d— her !" is to be accepted as a specimen. For the rest, the usual good company to be met with in literary chronicles figures freely in these pages. We have notes of everybody, from Napoleon to Thackeray, Keats, and Jowett, and Sheridan Knowles, Disraeli and Manning, and Dr. Maginn and Macaulay, all figuring promiscuously in the index. As to the much-vexed Cardinal, this is the cotemporary verdict of Lockhart, writing to Professor Wilson :—" Manning is, on the whole, next if not equal to Newman for importance as a convert ; his influence very great in society at large, as well as among the younger clergy. He is a very agreeable and polished gentleman—a fine ascetical coxcomb (and tuft- hunter)—the image of a Jesuit Cardinal of the sixteenth century, and I expect him to be followed by a long train of ladies." Nothing is so stimulating as diversity of opinion ; but whatever else may have been said of him, a tuft-hunting coxcomb is about the very last of all possible descriptions which the world is likely to endorse. As a set-off to such a piece of imperception let us record Lockhart's prophecy of the revival of the Napoleonic traditions round the name of the great Napoleon, which is being so curiously realised in the France of to-day. There is plenty in the result of Mr. Lang's labours for readers to take interest in, but the subject does not strike us as adequate to the labour. And such remarks as those on Manning, with similar utterances about Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli and others, Mr. Lang might as well have left out.
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