OUR LITERARY CORNER.

Press, Volume L, Issue 14889, 31 January 1914, Page 9

OUR LITERARY CORNER.

THE HOUSE OF BLACKWOOD : ITS CENTENARY.

(By Jas. Colmee.) (srBCIALLT WRITTEN- FOR "THE F-RESS.") A hundred years ago William Blackwood soon afterwards to he lastingly known as Old Ebony, was setting up business as a publisher in Edinburgh. Next year he removed to n less obscure site in the finest boulevard in Europe —the historic Princes street, and only a f e w years later ho finally established iho houso of Blackwood in that high and imposing street of business palaces and palatial mansions, such as Lord Roseberv's similarly yclept, by loyal Edinburgh, Georgo stroet. Never in our student-day ß did we pass the soberlooking establishment—no moro impres- - Bive than Murray's shop in Albemarle etreet, London—without experiencing a •thrill' There, in the back premises, we understood, for half a century had . _thered somo of the brightest, keenest, and strongest heads of their dayWalter Scott, perhaps, seldom, but his eon-in-law and biographer, Lockhart, often; the yet greater personality of John Wilson, alias "Christopher North," that colossal presence seeming •to fill'the place; that bustling busybody, but true poet, or at least with a vein of genuine poetry in him, James Hogg, the "Ettrick Shepherd"; Do Quincey, always behind with his work and always before with his demands for pay; and" Gait, father of the "kailyard _chool" that has been edifying us these last twenty years. In later days we heard of two sons-in-law of _ Processor Wilson—Professor Aytoun, father satirist than poet, but a genuine humourist, and Professor Ferrier, greatest of Scottish later-day philosophers, a writer and a wit. These -are but a few of the many who at different times made of tho "Old :_aloon" the literary centre of Conser- - native Scotland. •THE FIRM. > :-Like the Murrays and, in a less de- ; gree, the Longmans and the Macmil- : y dans,' William Blackwood founded a •dynasty of publishers that has extended to three or four generations. Sometimes it has withdrawn a son from tho ■'■" army in order to hold the fort in the book-mart, but most of tho family y have been-bred'to the trade, and have shown no inclination to join any of tho recognised professions. Thus brought Mp, they have given its history a singular unity* >F»rst of all, it is eminently Scottish. The land.and the law of 'Scotland, its history and historical personages, its universities, its teaching, and its preaching, have formed its chief stock-in-trade. .The university' staff, the CJuuodl. _ad .ho Bar-have been its chjeff «___rart«. The best books written by filar ; :*a_4 prominent Scotsmen of the 1 day haw been its literary output. The dressing - and shaping and marketing of these have formed its chief business. jThusithey.hayaAwbtless rendered im.pbrtairj_i_erjvice.'to "literature, and its .authors:"*. Tfiey y _ave at all times been ' ready; lay out their capital—slowly amassed-and never squandered—in putting forth books whose, very titles -were guarantees, of worth.. Few publishing firms hold a more honourablo record. ITS RESPECTABILITY. Next, "eminent respectability—that respectability of broadcloth and white necktie, or of gown and bands, which Scottish Presbyterian* .sometimes mistake for religion—-has been its guiding Btar. Authors belonging to the kirk (very.seldom to the Free Churches), to the!professorate, br to the Scottish Bar hare at all' times"been its' preferred clients.•••__.••..its unctuous respectability, which made rt refuse the contributions of Thackeray,., then somewhat of a Bohemian, but did not make it refuse Magirin. : : a jovial toper, or ►Wilson, a' glorious toper, a toper of genius, could be deliberately sacrificed when worldly considerations stood in tho way.* There aTe not very many cases of worse ill-usage than Lady Bulwer Lytton experienced at the hands of her distinguished, but sometimes savage, spouse, and the irregular marital arrangements which he substituted' for lawful monogamy can hardly have met with the approval of " the firm. "George Eliot"" was deservedly one of their -greatest writers, hut they chose to ignore the fact, justifiable though it. may have been, that she was living in 'illicit,;relations' with another woman's husband. • A strict code of publishers'- morals is evidently elastic at times, or else is not for'external, application.'" i : . ; r ITS OUTPUT—ALISON. Tne. results of their, activity have been .'. remarkable. . Few publishing houses have issued such philosophical. treatises.as Hamilton's "Discussions" or his lectures on Metaphysics and on . Logic, though the Logic lectures consisted largely of wholesale and unacknowledged plagiarisms from seventhrate German logicians, or as Ferrier's fascinating; "Institutes of Mctaphy-sic..-while'-William Smith's deeply re- - flec_._y"__c>r_dale" and "Gravenhurst'*: present the brightest side of philosoDhical. ethics. But if a son _°£the: House <jf Blackwood were asked of which of its. publications he was most proud, he might reply: Alison's 'History of Europe." And certainly the popularity.of that work was amazing. "It is beautiful," wrote one of 'them, "to 6ee the way Alison keeps tooling off." In London alone. 20 wmplete sets a week of the voluminous'work were at one time sold. Tho „ 3°o}_ resisted ; ridicule. Disraeli, Tory though'he was, -.rote of it as "Mr Word/s history of the late war in 20 Tolumes, written to prove that Providence is always on the side of the Tories." It resisted critical exposures. As a serious narrative of great events it is quite .inadequate, if it is not almost worthless. Compare his account of the battle of Waterloo with , General Cheshey's Masterly analysis, or even with George Hooper's more popular, narrative, and rt will bo seen to be confused, incorrect, and mendacious. Nevertheless, the great story is told with such contagious vigour, such a tidal wave of «uergy sweeps through the page, that we are carried along as on oceancrests. No one reads Alison now, but ho -filled a large place in the forties, and sixties. He supplied the average reader with the sole knowledge of modern history that he-pos-sessed. " y " KINGLAKE, ETC. After , Alison, the publishers are -possibly proudest of Kinglake's history of the Crimean war. As a literary composition it is, of course, immeasurably superior to Alison's .-'work—as a " military history it has not been surpassed : even by Thncydides or Napier —Outfit, too, is now'obsolete, because the jror it describes has sunk into

ORIGINAL AND SELECTED MATTER, NOTES ON BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

insignificance by the side of far greater subsequent wars. Over both hooks oblivion now reigns. Such, indeed, is the fate of too many of tho treatises published by the Blac-kwoods, who often mistook their own geese for swans. Did they not promise immortality to that short-lived classic, Poliok's "Course of Time' ? They were not without excuse; the Press and tho public were equally taken in. Forty or fifty years ago it was eagerly perused by aspiring young men; it is now as dead as the poems of Kirke White. CHRISTOPHER NORTH. But %ye should not soon end if wo expatiated on the very creditable publishing role of the firm. More interesting it will be to watch the procession of eminent writers pass across , the stage. ! First, and deservedly foremost, [ comes John Wilson, self-styled Christopher North, whom rising Tennyson saluted as "musty" and "fusty Christopher." He was a striking figurw on the streets of Edinburgh. "That is Wilson, of the 'Isle of Palms,' " whispered a fellow-student to young Carlyle, as they walked along ; the fashionable promenado of Princes street, and Carlyle looked with interest and some reverence at the grand .specimen of a man—disqualified for the Six-Foot Club by tho want of an inch or two in stature, but still a towering figure—with a mass of blonde hair falling down on his shoulders, like tho old northern jarl from whom he may have been descended, or the skald who sang of hi*, deeds. He was the power behind the throne of the Houso of Blackwood. He gave it momentum and clothed it with splendour. His poetical rhapsodies—no longer road, but still well worth reading—carried his readers up to—no, not the Seventh Heavens, where entrance was denied him—tho summit of Parnassus, where he jovially quaffed the nectar and poured forth tho inspired flood of his "Noctcs Ambrosiara. ' (nights spent at Ambrose's public-house) were a strango, dramatic symposium, where Christopher himself was ever the loading figure, with tho Ettrick Shepherd, the English opium-eater, and a few others less familiar as little better than his foils. Never beforo in literature, save perhaps in Aristophanes and Rabelais, had there been such an outpouring of poesy and description, criticism and satire, uproarious merriment, cataracts of fun, and peals of laughter. "His blustering and drunken 'Noctes,' " Carlyle called them in later years, when the Puritan had got the upper hand in him, and, indeed, there was something of the buffoonery of Silenus as well as the priest-1 hood of Apollo in those extraordinary effusions. Another Puritan, Emerson, was equally condemnatory of the lectures delivered in the moral philosophy class-room in Edinburgh University, where he found "not a trait, not a ray of Christopher North." '/Grand, ruined soul," Carlyle lamented, "with all his fine faculties drowned in an ocean of whisky-punch. The 'central tiebeam. which should have bound them together, was lacking from the first. O, Edinburgh, queen and temptress both, with thy traditions of hard drinking among the professional classes, if thou has reared many a pious 'son of the manse,' thou has bred far more—some of them finely tempered spirits, too — ■who have been wrecked and for ever lost by potations that seemed genial, but have proved as deadly to the soul as Circe's broth!" ', '; ... .THE SCORPION. A. dark figure, with sardonic countenance, the complete counterpart of our blonde Titan, now advances. Another giant (all Scott's friends but one, Erskiue, wcro big men like himself), with a dangerous temper, a rasping tongue that took the skin off whomsoever it touched, a razor-edged satire, and a deadly" thrust, was John Gibson Lockhart, son-in-law and Biographer of Scott. He was early and long imowr as "The Scorpion," but his powers of mischief far curpassed those of that somewhat mythical reptile. Ho began life with his enthusiasms, ■* too —bankrupt enthusiasms, they were to. become. In Weimar he enquired for "the poet Goethe.' "Ah, you mean,", they replied, "the! Privy Councillor yon Goethe." He wrote biographies of Burns and Scott — the latter one of the greatest in the language. He translated poems and ballads'.from the Spanish and the Ger"man. He composed romances. Later in life he edited the all-powerful "Quarterly Review." - As yet, he was still untamed, and tho cloudy pillar had hot yet turned. He wa? one of the chief supports ot Blackwood, his houso and his magazine. His, to a large extent, was the famous "Chaldee MSS._ ' of the magazine, where the diction and the Oriental iinagorv of the Old 1 Testament were—we will not say, mocked, but—very cleverly imitated, and that in a town that was lost in veneration of tho Hebrew Bible. There vivid portraits were painted of Blackwood (Old Ebony), of Wilson (the spotted leopard), of the Ettrick-Shepherd, of tho Opium-Eater, of Lockhart himself (the first called the Scorpion), and of many well-known dwellers in'Auld Reekie, some of whom were so deeply aggrieved that they sought a remedy in actions at law. Such an explosion of crackers set all Edinburgh on fire. It was Blackwood s first •and last outrage against the solemn ecclesiastical decencies. Having sown his intellectual wild oats, Lockhart, the son of a Lanarkshire laird, and himself an advocate, married Sophia Scott, the inheritrix of her august father's, personal, appearance and disposition, and settled down to a literary life, first iv Edinburgh, and latterly in' London. Afflictions fell on him like hailstones. Hi* elder son— the engaging boy of eleven, for whom Scott wrote the 'Tales of a Grandfather" —died a year or two later of spinal disease, and his younger son brought him no comfort. His sister-in-law. Anne Scott, who had nnr _d her mother, and then her father, through their long, last illnesses, died of a broker, heart, deserted by her lover. His brother-in-law, the second Sir Walter, with his wife, died before their time, and his, younger brother-in-law, Scott's second son, died. lie. too, .prematurely. Only one scion' of tf family stock 'that Scott had fought so-hard to plant and rear was left on earth—Lockhart s daughter, and to his great grief she with her husband. James Hone, a son of the Earl of Hopetonn, who was to call himself James Hope Scott, was converted to the Catbour rehcion. Tlie pillar of- cloud had indeed turned, and those who knew him said that his heart had been changed to ston*. . , It would be.a .reeable to brmg others of that remarkable Blackwood group on tL"scene. Hogg,, glorified by Wdson and degraded by himself, has but lately been Placed on life proper Postal. SamueL Warren, whose son called him ; self the son of 'Tm a £"£{._ as Mrs Fernery Wilson's elder daughter, called herself "daughter of the statue in Princes street you tamw deserves a crayon sketch. Lytton, Lewes, George Eliot, were other great of considerable figures. B«* *»?£ more lovable than Mrs Obptant Justorian of the House. For six years, aided by her sou, she 1 aboured at h«r task grappling with piles of corresobscurities, .gmg fallen greatness, casting down preten-

! tious nullity, and unrolling the panorama of the doings of a notable family and firm. "I rest my face on this book," she proudly said, and Miss Anna , Stoddart, daughter of the "Glasgow Herald," believed it would not "betray her dying hope." _-hay© the temerity to differ from both these charming ladies. I look in vain through the two massive volumes for one genuine portrait, such as Car'.yle would havo etched in a few burning lines. Perused two or three years ago, it has contributed not a single sentence to the foregoing sketch. And yet what opportunities sho had! Sho will live by her novels, not by this book. Early left a widow, with two young boys, she toiled as few men have toiled, producing biographies (of Montalembert, Edward Irving', Principal Tulloch, and Laurence Oliphant), histories of literature, sketches of travel, history, and art, any one of which would have brought fame to another —and a long roll of novels, none of tho highest rank, assuredly, but vivid, attractive, living, and real. I tako up one of her loss known tales— "Kirsteen"—and I find myself in contact with truly human and breathing personalities. One such book—and sho has written, a score of sueh —would outlast tho pyramid she has reared to tho memory of a publishing house, honest and upright indeed, but utterly destitute of genius. We may doubt whether it has contributed one really great work to tne world's literature.