Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine

Biography, Celebrity, Politics

David Higgins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415335560
• eBook ISBN: 9781134309016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

In early nineteenth-century Britain, there was unprecedented interest in the subject of genius, as well as in the personalities and private lives of creative artists. This was also a period in which literary magazines were powerful arbiters of taste, helping to shape the ideological consciousness of their middle-class readers. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine considers how these magazines debated the nature of genius and how and why they constructed particular creative artists as geniuses.

Romantic writers often imagined genius to be a force that transcended the realms of politics and economics. David Higgins, however, shows in this text that representations of genius played an important role in ideological and commercial conflicts within early nineteenth-century literary culture. Furthermore, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine bridges the gap between Romantic and Victorian literary history by considering the ways in which Romanticism was understood and sometimes challenged by writers in the 1830s. It not only discusses a wide range of canonical and non-canonical authors, but also examines the various structures in which these authors had to operate, making it an interesting and important book for anyone working on Romantic literature.

1 Literary genius, transgression and society in the early nineteenth century

‘The LITERARY CHARACTER’, announced Isaac D’Israeli in 1795, ‘has, in the present day, singularly degenerated in the public mind. The finest compositions appear without exciting any alarm of admiration’.¹ The reason for this, he argued, was that the massive amount of literature produced in the eighteenth century and its wide availability, even to ‘the lowest of artisans’, meant that authors were no longer viewed as exceptional individuals worthy of veneration.² And yet D’Israeli was writing at the beginning of a period in which the figure of creative artist, particularly the writer, was celebrated as never before, largely through the valorization of genius as the highest form of human subjectivity.³ His popular works contributed to this phenomenon but, like many other Romantic writings on genius, they were written as a defensive response to the perceived degradation of literary production in contemporary Britain. In particular, the increasing popularity and cultural power of the periodical press was the cause of much anxiety. Was the reading public’s obsession with magazines and newspapers, it was frequently asked, responsible for the neglect suffered by poets and dramatists? This anxiety contributed to the growth of literature based on the theme of ‘neglected genius’, which used figures like Chatterton and Burns in order to argue that the sufferings that so often seemed to afflict men of genius were caused by the failure of their contemporaries to recognize and reward their achievements. ⁴ However, this was frequently countered by the claim that such men reaped the harvest of their own improvidence and eccentric behaviour. This in turn gave rise to a further important question, which was whether or not such behaviour was the natural concomitant of the possession of genius. Although the notion of the ‘artistic temperament’ had classical antecedents, it was given new force by the rise of the idea of original genius during the eighteenth century. In the Romantic period, it was frequently argued that the aesthetic rule-breaking associated with genius was reflected in the transgressive conduct of its possessors in private life.

This chapter examines debates on genius in literary magazines during the early nineteenth century, and the relationship between these debates and changing representations of the literary marketplace. Attempts to describe the (male) genius author as a figure who, ideally, stood apart from the literary and political maelstrom were put under pressure by a developing model of literary professionalism, which claimed that writers should be fully engaged with contemporary society. But the attempt to constitute writing as a respectable profession was itself vitiated by contemporary accounts of the ‘man of genius’ as an eccentric Bohemian, or even a transgressive hero, who did not respect middle-class mores. The results of this clash of different models of authorship can be seen in the extreme positions taken up by writers in the 1830s, ranging from the elevation of the genius author – particularly the poet – into a morally perfect, Christ-like figure, to a suspicion that ‘genius’ was little more than a code word for vice and madness.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Reviews

Although the aim of the Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character was to improve the status of writers, D’Israeli himself argued that genius was peculiarly antisocial and often subject to ‘infirmities and defects’: ‘degrading vices and singular follies have dishonoured men of the highest genius. Than others, their passions are more effervescent and their relish for enjoyment more keen. It is a perilous gift of Nature’.⁵ This was a common claim in the Romantic period, but it was resisted by some writers who believed that literature was threatened by society’s maltreatment or neglect of the most able authors, and who thought that to associate genius with vice was to suggest that society was not responsible for its sufferings. Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems to have taken this view in the second chapter of the Biographia Literaria (1817), which is on ‘the supposed irritability of men of genius’.⁶ His discussion is typically free-wheeling and digressive, but can be summarized as follows: the mass of readers, taking the side of critics, believe geniuses to be innately ‘irritable’, by which Coleridge means ‘readily excited to anger and impatience’ and also, though with less emphasis, ‘excessively or morbidly excitable or sensitive’ (Oxford English Dictionary (OED)). There are some men who have something more than talent, but something less than ‘absolute Genius’, and although ‘in tranquil times’ these men of ‘commanding genius’ can greatly benefit mankind, in ‘times of tumult’ they are ruinous and disruptive – Napoleon is the obvious example. However, men of the greatest genius are of ‘a calm and tranquil temper’, at least in what relates to their own interests.⁷ The ‘prejudice’ that genius is irritable is caused by: (a) the irritability of talented men who are not geniuses (and who are jealous of those who are); (b) the excesses of men without talent or genius (periodical writers in particular); and (c) the false distinction popularly made between literature and other forms of property, because if other manufacturers were attacked in the same way, geniuses would not appear particularly irritable.⁸ Coleridge’s argument is typical of Romantic writing on the nature of genius in that it quickly becomes an account of the degraded nature of modern literature. Furthermore, and this is also typical, although the discussion implies the link between genius and virtue that he puts forward elsewhere in the Biographia,⁹ he is more concerned here with contemporary representations of genius, than he is with genius itself. Men of genius are imagined as being under threat from literary manufacturers like the ex-shoemaker William Gifford, the editor of the powerful Quarterly Review (QR), who supposedly misrepresents them in his writings, and also through his own ‘ungenial’ nature.

The Quarterly, and its main rival, the Edinburgh Review (ER), dominated British literary culture in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ The Edinburgh was founded in 1802 by a small group of Whiggish Scottish lawyers; sceptical, highly trained professionals, with a great interest in new learning. This was reflected in the subjects covered by the new journal, which also quickly differentiated itself from the Reviews of the late eighteenth century by its selective approach to the works it dealt with and the long length of its review articles. Its editor and main critic, Francis Jeffrey, is best known now for his attacks on the ‘Lake School’: in general, he tended to treat authors as the accused, who had to be judged against what he saw as fixed standards of polite taste and social decorum.¹¹ The Quarterly was founded in 1808 by a group of Tories – including Walter Scott, George Canning, and the publisher John Murray – who were concerned by the Edinburgh’s increasingly reformist stance. As Marilyn Butler puts it, the Quarterly ‘conducted a comprehensive campaign on behalf of conservative, Christian and family values . . . [it] hunted down “infidel”, irreligious, or sexually explicit subject-matter in texts of all kinds’.¹² It is not surprising, therefore, that it strongly attacked ‘second generation’ Romantics such as Shelley, Hazlitt and Keats.¹³

Although it is no doubt true that the two Reviews took a punitive attitude to what they saw as the excesses of genius, some of the attitudes they expressed were much closer to Coleridge’s than he might have liked to imagine. Consider, for example, Jeffrey’s controversial 1809 review of R. H. Cromek’s Reliques of Burns. Although he describes Burns as ‘a great and original genius’,¹⁴ he spends some time discussing the unfortunate ‘peculiarities’ of the poet’s works, by which Jeffrey means anything that reminds the reader of ‘the lowness of [Burns’s] origin’.¹⁵ In particular, he states that

the leading vice in Burns’s character, and the cardinal deformity indeed of all his productions, was his contempt, or affectation of contempt, for prudence, decency and regularity; and his admiration of thoughtlessness, oddity, and vehement sensibility;- his belief, in short, in the dispensing power of genius and social feeling, in all matters of morality and common sense. This is the very slang of the worst German plays, and the lowest of our town-made novels; nor can any thing be more lamentable, than that it should have found a patron in such a man as Burns, and communicated to a great part of his productions a character of immorality, at once contemptible and hateful.¹⁶

Burns’s belief in ‘the dispensing power of genius and social feeling’ is, Jeffrey goes on to argue, a form of cant which seeks to disguise or validate selfishness and criminal behaviour, but which has fortunately ‘never found much favour in the eyes of English sense and morality’. He then refers to a group of German students who were inspired by the noble character of the bandit leader Charles Moor in Schiller’s play Die Räuber (1782) to ‘rob on the highway’, but states that in England ‘a predilection for that honourable profession must have preceded this admiration of the character’, and thus that ‘the style we have been speaking of, accordingly, is now the heroics only of the hulks and the house of correction’.¹⁷

Jeffrey was not the first critic to attack Burns for seeking to palliate moral transgression by claiming that genius was naturally eccentric. A stanza in ‘The Vision’, first published in the Kilmarnock edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), was often seen as particularly offensive. The speaker is Burns’s Muse:

I saw thy pulse’s maddening play

Wild-send thee Pleasure’s devious way

Misled by Fancy’s meteor-ray

By Passion driven;

But yet the light that led astray

Was light from Heaven.¹⁸

Jeffrey was probably unconcerned about the arguably blasphemous content of the stanza, but saw Burns’s argument about the transgressive nature of genius as an example of the latent Jacobinism that he had also identified in the work of the Lake Poets.¹⁹ His reference to ‘the worst German plays’, and specifically to Schiller’s Die Räuber, harks back to the anti-Jacobin rhetoric of the 1790s.²⁰ We should also note that he associates Burns’s argument with the ‘lowness of his origins’, ‘slang’ and the ‘lowest of our town-made novels’. Thus it is represented as essentially vulgar.

Now it may seem that Coleridge and Jeffrey are talking about very different things. Coleridge describes the claim that genius tends to be irritable as an unfair calumny provoked by ignorant critics, whereas Jeffrey suggests that the claim that ‘genius and social feeling’ are a justification for defying ‘morality and common sense’ is normally to be found in low-quality literature but, unfortunately, has also been used by a man of genius. There are, however, two crucial links between these descriptions. First, both men are disagreeing with characterizations of genius that emphasize its incompatibility with normal society.²¹ And second, both link the claim that genius is naturally eccentric or ‘irritable’ to the degradation of the modern literary marketplace, and in particular, to the increased diffusion of literature. Significantly, both displace this claim to a readership which they believe to be below their own – in Coleridge’s case, the audience for periodical criticism, and in Jeffrey’s, the consumers of the ‘worst’ plays and the ‘lowest’ novels.

Jeffrey’s antagonistic attitude towards Burns (and many other poets) and the Quarterly’s attacks on Shelley and Keats support Coleridge’s assertions about the oppositional stance that the Reviews took towards authors. In both the Edinburgh and Quarterly, critics represented themselves as mediators between authors and the public, mediators whose main task was to control the excesses of genius in order to make it fit in with prevailing social and artistic norms. But the years surrounding 1820 saw the emergence of a counter-discourse in magazine literature, which sought, at least ostensibly, to emphasize the autonomy of the aesthetic from the socio-political realm. New magazines such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (BEM) (1817), the London Magazine (LM) (1820), and the New Monthly Magazine (NMM) (1814; ‘relaunched’ in 1820) emphasized their difference from the Reviews by claiming that they took a non-partisan attitude to criticism and that they celebrated and supported genius. In the process of making these claims, the reviewing practices of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly were often caricatured, but this second generation of Romantic journals certainly tended to give genius much more emphasis and importance than did the Reviews, and in some cases, represented it as a reason or alibi for an author’s personal and/or textual flouting of the rules that govern polite society. These new journals proved Jeffrey’s judgement that the belief in ‘the dispensing power of genius’ had not found favour in England to have been premature.

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine

In The Economy of Literary Form, Lee Erickson argues that the ‘poetry boom’ of the first two decades of the nineteenth century ended due to developments in printing technology and a decrease in the price of paper. This made possible economies of scale, which meant that ‘diffuse prose was no longer at a comparative economic disadvantage with compressed poetry’.²² Erickson’s argument is open to the charge of economic determinism, but it seems to me to be a good, if partial, explanation for the large increase in the numbers of periodicals published after the end of the Napoleonic wars, although the poetry market itself did not peak until 1820. During this period, a number of monthly miscellanies appeared in direct competition with the older quarterlies. The relatively high rates of pay offered by these magazines offered new opportunities for writers who were unable to subsist by writing in other genres. For example, towards the end of his life, John Keats, in severe financial difficulties, which could not be alleviated by the very poor sales of his poetry, was seriously considering becoming a magazine writer and planned to consult William Hazlitt for advice: ‘I will write, on the liberal side of the question, for whoever will pay me’. Although some writers may have felt that they had little choice other than to turn to periodical writing, they did of course have a measure of autonomy in which journals they wrote for; Keats was determined to do ‘any thing but Mortgage my Brain to Blackwood’.²³

This was a reference to William Blackwood, proprietor of BEM, which had recently contained a series of articles entitled ‘The Cockney School of Poetry’ attacking London writers such as Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and Keats himself. Blackwood had founded the periodical early in 1817 in order to counteract the commercial success of his local rival, Archibald Constable, proprietor of the ER and the Scots Magazine, who had taken on Walter Scott after Blackwood had fallen out with the author during the publication of Tales of my Landlord.²⁴ Blackwood was also politically motivated, a staunch Tory who was concerned by what he saw as the Whig dominance of Edinburgh’s cultural life. Unfortunately, under the editorship of Thomas Pringle and James Cleghorn, his magazine was not only dull – it even praised the ER. So Blackwood got rid of his editors, enlisted John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart – both young, briefless barristers – to help him, and relaunched the periodical in October 1817. This edition contained t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Literary genius, transgression and society in the early nineteenth century
• 2 Literary biography and its discontents
• 3 Magazine biography in the late Romantic period
• 4 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the construction of Wordsworth’s genius
• 5 William Hazlitt and the degradation of genius
• 6 ‘The Quack Artist’
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography