Atlantic Monthly | Page 3

everywhere, in spite of a certain combative turn and an admiration of heroes which also belonged to him. To the last, he had an interest in sea matters, and spoke with enthusiasm of Lord Nelson. But the literary use he made of his nautical experience ended with "Black-eyed Susan." He was a boy when he came ashore and threw himself on the very different sea of London; and it is the influence of London that is most perceptible in his mature works. Here his work was done, his battles fought, his mind formed; and you may observe in his writings a certain romantic and ideal way of speaking of the country, which shows that to him it was a place of retreat and luxury, rather than of sober, practical living. This is not uncommon with literary men whose lot has been cast in a great city, if they possess, as Jerrold did, that poetic temperament which is alive to natural beauty.
He now became an apprentice in a printing-office, and went through the ordinary course of a printer's life. He felt genius stirring in him, and he strove for the knowledge to give it nourishment, and the field to give it exercise. He read and wrote, as well as worked and talked. It would be a task for antiquarian research to recover his very earliest lucubrations scattered among the ephemeral periodicals of that day. Plays of his might be dug out, whose very names are unknown to his most intimate friends. He scattered his early fruit far and wide,--getting little from the world in exchange. Literature was then a harder struggle than in our days. Jerrold did not know the successful men who presided over it. He had no patrons; and he had few friends. The isolation and poverty in which he formed his mind and style deepened the peculiarity which was a characteristic of these. They gave to his genius that intense and eccentric character which it has; and no doubt (for Fortune has a way of compensating) the chill they breathed on the fruits of his young nature enriched their ripeness, as a touch of frost does with plums. The grapes from which Tokay is made are left hanging even when the snow is on them;--all the better for Tokay!
His youth, then, was a long and hard struggle to get bread in exchange for wit;--a struggle like that of the poor girls who sell violets in the streets. He was wont to talk of those early days very freely,--passionately, even to tears, when he got excited,--and always bravely, heartily, and with the right "moral" to follow. When Diderot had passed a whole day without bread, he vowed that if he ever got prosperous, he would save any fellow-creature that he could from such suffering. Jerrold had learned the same lesson. Through life, he took the side of the poor and weak. It was the secret, at once, of his philosophy and his politics. He got endless abuse for his eternal tirades against the great and the "respectable,"--against big-wigs of every size and shape. But the critics who attacked him for this negative pole of his intellectual character overlooked the positive one. He had kindness and sympathy enough; but he always gave them first to those who wanted them most. And as humorist and satirist he had a natural tendency to attack power,--to play Pasquin against the world's Pope. In fact, his radicalism was that of a humorist. He never adopted the utilitarian, or, as it was called, "philosophical," radicalism which was so fashionable in his younger days;--not, indeed, the Continental radicalism held by a party in England;--but was an independent kind of warrior, fighting under his own banner, and always rather with the weapons of a man of letters than those of a politician. For the business aspect of politics he never showed any predilection from first to last.
Well, then,--picture him to yourself, reader, a small, delicate youth, with fair, prominent features,--long, thin hair,--keen, eager, large, blue eyes, glancing out from right to left, as he walks the streets of Babylon,--and seizing with a quick impulsiveness every feeling of the hour. Still young,--and very young,--he has married for love. He is living in a cottage or villakin on the outskirts of town, where there is just a peep of green to keep one's feelings fresh; and he is writing for the stage. It is hard work, and sometimes the dun is at the door, and contact is inevitable with men who don't understand the precious jewel he weareth in his head;--but the week's hard work is got through somehow; and on Sundays he sallies forth for rural air with a little knot of friends, and the talk is of art, and letters, and the world. So quick and keen