The Press.
London, England, 1858-08-07 00:00:00

I

f ittr a t ur t.

Novels and Novelists, from Elizabeth to Victoria.
By J. Cordy Jeaffreson. Two Vols. London :
Hurst and Blackett.
A rAnisii beadle aping the dignity of the
Sivaker of the House of Commons is hardly
more ludicrous than a minor author assuming
the airs of an Aristarchus. The dogmatism and
arrogance which the world might reluctantly
endure from a Warburton, a Johnson, or a
Macaulay, are most ridiculous when exhibited by
a literary man who has his laurels still to win;
and though activity in censure, and energy in
attack, count for something in politics, the world
of letters demands attainments, and style, and
judicial candour from a writer who ventures to
pronounce in a peremptory manner upon great
literary names. A few years since an author
of considerable talents (who has since emigrated
to Australia) did no little injury to his reputation
by publishing a censorious work " criticizing "
all his contemporaries, assailing some, and
panegyrizing others. We cannot help thinking
that " The Police of Literature " have in ge-
neral been far too lenient to writers with the
flippancy of Lord Jeffrey, but wanting his grace,
neatness, and philosophic power. The reading
public has a right to be protected ,against the
errors of ambitious novices, who in measuring
genius with their two-foot rule " might bring
the critical department of Belles Lettres into
general disrepute, if their superficiality VI as not
exposed.
The subject taken by Mr. Jeaffreson in this
work is one of the best that could be chosen for
a writer who could unite critical capacity with a
brilliant style. The Novel has gradually ex-
panded from an idle toy into an intellectual tool ;
it was the amusement of the frivolous in former
times—it is now a sort of actual necessity for all
classes. How so great and rapid a change came
about in one department of literature, and what
further developments might be expected in fiction,
would be a good theme for a philosophic writer ;
but Mr. Jeaffreson cannot rise with the importance
of his subject, nor is he oral to the variety of
illustrations required by it. He has produced
two volumes whose anecdotic matter and miscel-
laneous contents may suit them for the shelves
of a circulating-library, but there is nothing
weighty or sterling in the text of his work. He
has no style, nor does he appreciate the
merits of finished composition. There is no
depth in his literary views, and his critical
excursions arc only of the empirical, as opposed
to the scientific method. lie has no profound
views upon fiction, and his knowledge of it is
entirely confined to the English school. His first
volume contains epitomized biographies of twenty-
one novelists from Robert Greene to William
Beckford; and in his second volume there are no
less than eighty-eight ( ! ) "novelists " from Anne
Radcliffe to Miss Yonge ! There are 407 pages
of the second volume assigned to these "eighty-
eight," of which Dickens gets 31, Bulwer 22,
Thackeray 19, Sir Walter Scott 53, Disraeli
40, Harrison Ainsworth one page, Shirley Brooks
12 lines, Mr. henry Chorley nine lines and a
half, Wilkie Collins half a page, Dudley Costello
not six lines, Mrs. Gaskell a page and a half; Mrs.
Gore two pages ' • Lady Blessington receives
thirty pages (!), Miss Landon (L.E.L.) fifteen,
and Jane Austen less than four pages, while Mr.
Charles Meade receives exactly as much space as
is assigned to Miss Marguerite A. Power—just
half a page ! Mr. Warren is squeezed into two
and a half pages; Maxwell gets fourteen lines;
and so on. In short, the mere figures of arith-
metic, without regard to the quality of the text,
show a case of reckless bookmaking. To do
justice to his subject, Mr. Jeaffreson should
either have given a third volume to his work, or
else he should have greatly retrenched the space
assigned to some of his subjects. Miss Landon is
recollected as a poetess, but is entirely forgotten
as a "novelist.' English society does not care
to
remember Lady Blessington, who never wrote
a hook that will live, and whose personal associa-
tions were melancholy and worse than equivocal.
Mary Wolstonecraft gets twenty pages, though
People would like sooner to know something of
Irs. Gore, or to be told new particulars about