Third Gallery of Portraits

Excerpt from Third Gallery of Portraits

For about five years (1849-1854) George Gilfillan's position as a critic was one of very great influence. It may be doubted whether even Carlyle had more power over young minds. These years were the period of a movement. There was a thrill in the air, a belief that the new world was at hand. This was felt beyond his immediate circle; it stirred in the books of the Brontes, the socialism of Kingsley, and the passionate preaching of Kossuth and Mazzini. Of course it appealed chiefly to young minds.

Still are they equal - fit for weeping or for laughter.
The flight they still admire; the flash with pleasure see.

There was something, perhaps much of fever in it, but it helped Gilfillan to break into the depths of his genius. Almost every literary aspirant in the country sent his manuscripts to the Dundee critic; wherever he went to lecture or preach he was followed by admiring crowds. Such moods cannot last; their tension was manifest in Kingsley with his steady "ambition to die," and in Gilfillan and Dobell with their anticipation of the speedy return of Christ. Aytoun's Firmilian: a Spasmodic Tragedy was the literary death-blow to the movement, but even if that brilliant satire had never been written, the movement would have gone the way of dreams. It ended as a matter of fact with Thackerayism in literature and with Palmerstonianism in politics. Mr. Gilfillan went on writing till the last, and he never wrote better than in the closing years of his life; but his empire was over. Since his death his books have been almost forgotten, and he is not so much as named by Professor Saintsbury in his History of Criticism. Still he can never be ignored in any full record of Victorian literature.

George Gilfillan was the son of a Secession minister at Comrie, where he was born in 1813. When he was thirteen years old his father died, and he entered Glasgow College, where he became a class fellow of Archibald Campbell Tait, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury.

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