CHAPTER X.

THE REVIEWER.

IN the connection with "Blackwood's Magazine," which began in 1839, William Smith found what proved to be the chief external business of his life. For a few years longer there continued some formal allegiance to the law, but writing for the magazine, principally in the form of literary reviews, soon became his main occupation. It was a work and a place which admirably suited him. His contributions brought a modest income, which came ere long to be his main dependence. For such a man literature in any shape could never be a lucrative profession, and it was much to find in it a resource sufficient for bread-winning and for independence. The work was in the direct line of his tastes and powers, it dealt with congenial and beloved themes, yet it lay apart from those fundamental problems of thought whose fascination had so strong an element of disquiet. There would seem at first an incompatibility between a speculator so daring and heterodox, and the organ of staunch conservatism; all the more, since the articles in "Blackwood" were unsigned, and stood in the name of the editorial "we." But William Smith's articles dealt neither with current politics nor with theology, and in the fields of general literature, poetry, history, and metaphysics, as well as romance and travel, the magazine gave all the scope he required.

The obituary notice of him in "Blackwood" (October, 1872) shows in what high estimation he was held by its conductors, who, it is equally plain, were at a wide remove from that attitude in religion and philosophy which

characterizes "Thorndale" and "Gravenhurst."

The

more noticeable therefore is the recognition of his personal traits.

In his youth, the circle of young men who surrounded him expected for him the highest fame; he was to be their leader, the foremost in all intellectual progress, always the superior, in those visions of the future which are often so widely apart from reality. But if others passed him in the race, pressed on higher, and won more dazzling prizes, it was because the finer qualities of his mind outweighed the coarser, and fastidious taste and a retiring disposition withdrew him from the common arena, where, amid shouts and cheers and commonplace din, the ordinary competitors for fame take their places, disregarding all its vulgar circumstances. He could not disregard them. His nature was so constituted that he shrank from the noises, whether applausive or otherwise.

No better type could be found of the true man of letters, the student, scholar, and critic of our days, who is already beginning to yield to a hastier and more shallow class of modern commentators. He was not of those who dash off a breathless criticism on the spur of the moment, or arrogantly pretend to judge of subjects upon which they have the merest smattering of knowledge. He belonged to the older fashion of man, who had the habit of mastering a subject before speaking of it, and of bringing a richly cultivated understanding, a mind and memory full of all that is excellent in the past, to the consideration of the affairs and productions of the present. That charm of culture which, next to genius, is almost the most delightful of mental conditions, was his in an eminent degree.

In finding at last a vocation so well fitted to his inclination and his powers, he had gained one of the prime conditions of happiness and content. If we have been right in discerning in "Wild Oats" the traces of a self-mastery and recall from undisciplined brooding and idleness, we may find one of the evidences of a more concentrated and purposeful life, as well as a great aid to it, in this entry upon periodical literature as a profession. Fame there

was none from anonymous contributions, but there was outlet for the eager faculties, there was that consciousness of a worthy and an attentive audience which is the best spur to a true author; and that absorption of the writer's personality by the magazine which deprived him of personal credit weighted his words to the world's ear with the sanction of a great authority.

He was inherently a judge and not an advocate, and the wool-sack to which he was predestined was in the courts not of law but of literature. The most striking feature of his reviews is the quality of even-handed justice. He makes it his business to give a frank and discriminating award upon each book's merits and faults; to instance to the reader its quality by free quotation, —— a matter in which he is far more generous than is now the usual practice of reviewers; and, also, to discuss somewhat from his own standpoint the ground which the book traverses. The easy and lucid style seldom rises into brilliance; there is a generous but tempered ardor; the constant purpose to be just does not often allow the sparkle of epigram; but now and then there occurs a passage of delicate and melodions grace. The contributions of the earlier years are diversified by brief tales and romances, sometimes with an underlying moral, sometimes of pure amusement, showing the mind unbent and the fancy in free play.

From this broad and tempting field we can gather here only the merest handful, so choosing as to illustrate how some phases of life were received and interpreted by this observer. Let us take first a scene ("Mildred," December, 1846) from a region where as yet we have had no glimpse of him, — in a ball-room.

Found where it is, it is certainly a remarkable phenomenon, this waltz. Look now at that young lady-how cold, formal, stately! how she has been trained to act the little queen amongst her admirers and flatterers! See what a reticence in

all her demeanour. Even feminine curiosity, if not subdued, has been dissimulated; and though she notes everything and everybody, and can describe, when she returns home, the dress of half the ladies in the room, it is with an eye that seems to notice nothing. Her head has just been released from the hairdresser, and every hair is elaborately adjusted. To the very holding of an enormous bouquet, "round as my shield," which of itself seems to forbid all thoughts of motion - everything has been arranged and rearranged. She sits like an alabaster figure; she speaks, it is true, and she smiles as she speaks; but evidently the smile and the speech have no natural connection with one another; they coexist, but they have both been quite separately studied, prepared, permitted. Well, the waltz strikes up, and at a word from that bowing gentleman, himself a piece of awful formality, this pale, slow, and graceful automaton has risen. Where is she now? She is gone vanished -transformed. She is nowhere to be seen. But in her stead there is a breathless girl, with flushed cheeks, ringlets given to the wind, dress flying all abroad, spinning round the room, darting diagonally across it, whirling fast as her little feet can carry her faster, faster for it is her more powerful cavalier, who, holding her firmly by the waist, sustains and augments her speed.

To his experience in the law we owe some striking passages, of which one may be given from "Giacomo da Valencia" (September, 1847).

"Science!" said the young enthusiast, "can conclusions wrested often with perverted ingenuity from artificial principles and arbitrary axioms be honoured with the name of science? And the law, to obtain this fictitious resemblance to a science, leaves justice behind and unthought of. I will study it, my father, as I would practise any mechanical art, if you should prescribe it as a means of being serviceable to my family; but you who are a scholar―ah! place not a tissue of technicalities, however skilfully interwoven, on a level with truth which has its basis in the nature of things. I would help my fellow-man to justice; but must I spend my life, and dry up and impoverish my very soul, in regulating his disputes according to rules that are something very different from justice? often mere logical deduc

tions from certain legal abstractions, in which all moral right and wrong, all substantial justice between man and man, is utterly forgotten? "

"My son," said the father, "you are young, and therefore rash. You think it, perhaps, an easy thing to do justice between man and man. We cannot do justice between man and man. No combination of honesty and intelligence can effect it; the whole compass of society affords no means for its accomplishment. To administer moral justice, each case must be decided on its own peculiar merits, and those merits are to be found in the motives of the human heart. We cannot promise men justice. But we must terminate their disputes. Therefore it is we have a system of law- our only substitute for justice - by which men are contented to be governed because it is a system, and applicable to all alike. Believe me, that wise and able men of all countries are well occupied in rendering more symmetrical, more imposing, and as little immoral and unjust as possible, their several systems of jurisprudence."

The most remarkable of the contributions inspired by the reviewer's legal experience is the story entitled "Manner and Matter" (October, 1845). The interest of the narrative holds the attention, and suggests no suspicion of a moral, till the catastrophe sends it home with startling force. The story is that of a rich man who forces one of small means into a chancery suit, and completely ruins him by legal expenses. "The only remedy" for such mischiefs "would be this: That the State administer civil justice, at its own expense, to rich and poor alike; that, as it protects each man's life and limb, so it should protect each man's property which is the means of life, which is often as essential to him as the limbs by which he moves. This is the only mode of realizing that 'equal justice' which at present is the vain boast of every system of jurisprudence, when the suitor has to pay for tection to his property.

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Rarely does our author appear to better advantage than when he is dealing with the giants who in their