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Title: Charles Dickens and other Victorians

Author: Arthur Quiller-Couch

Release date: December 21, 2023 [eBook #72466]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHARLES DICKENS AND OTHER VICTORIANS ***





Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.




_By Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch_


  On the Art of Writing
  On the Art of Reading
  Studies in Literature
    (first series)
  Studies in Literature
    (second series)
  Adventures in Criticism
  Charles Dickens and Other Victorians




                            Charles Dickens
                          And Other Victorians




                            Charles Dickens
                          And Other Victorians


                                   By
                     Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, M.A.

                        Fellow of Jesus College
            King Edward VII Professor of English Literature
                     in the University of Cambridge


                             [Illustration]


                           G.P. Putnam’s Sons
                           New York & London
                        The Knickerbocker Press
                                  1925




                            Copyright, 1925
                                   by
                        Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch


[Illustration:

  The
  Knickerbocker
  Press
  New York
]

Made in the United States of America




PREFACE


All save one of the papers here collected were written as lectures
and read from a desk at Cambridge; the exception being that upon
Trollope, contributed to _The Nation and the Athenaeum_ and pleasantly
provoked by a recent edition of the “Barsetshire” novels. To these
it almost wholly confines itself. But a full estimate of Trollope
as one of our greatest English novelists--and perhaps the raciest
of them all--is long overdue, awaiting a complete edition of him.
His bulk is a part of his quality: it can no more be separated from
the man than can Falstaff’s belly from Falstaff. He will certainly
come to his own some day, but this implies his coming with all his
merits and all his defects: and this again cannot happen until some
publisher shows enterprise. The expensive and artificial vogue of the
three-volume-novel did wonders for Trollope in one generation, to kill
him for another: since no critic can talk usefully about books to
many of which his hearers have no access. But we shall see Trollope
reanimated.

The papers on Dickens and Thackeray attempt judgment on them as full
novelists. Those on Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell merely take a theme, and
try to show how one theme, taking possession, will work upon two very
different minds. Much more could have been said generally upon both
authors, and generically upon the “idea” of a novel.

As usual, with a few corrections, I leave these lectures as they were
written and given, at intervals and for their purpose. They abound
therefore with repetitions and reminders which the reader must try to
forgive.

                                               ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH.

January 5, 1925.




CONTENTS


                               PAGE

  PREFACE                         v

  DICKENS

      I                           3

     II                          24

    III                          42

     IV                          62

      V                          81

  THACKERAY

      I                         100

     II                         119

    III                         137

  THE VICTORIAN BACKGROUND      158

  DISRAELI                      180

  MRS. GASKELL                  199

  ANTHONY TROLLOPE
    THE BARSETSHIRE NOVELS      219

  INDEX                         235




                            Charles Dickens
                         and Other Victorians




DICKENS (I)


I

If anything on this planet be great, great things have happened in
Westminster Hall: which is open for anyone, turning aside from London’s
traffic, to wander in and admire. Some property in the oak of its
roof forbids the spider to spin there, and now that architects have
defeated the worm in beam and rafter it stands gaunt and clean as when
William Rufus built it: and I dare to say that no four walls and a
roof have ever enclosed such a succession of historical memories as do
these, as no pavement--not even that lost one of the Roman Forum--has
been comparably trodden by the feet of grave men moving towards grave
decisions, grand events.

The somewhat cold interior lays its chill on the imagination. A
romantic mind can, like the spider, spin its cobwebs far more easily in
the neighbouring Abbey, over the actual dust to which great men come--

    Here the bones of birth have cried--
    “Though gods they were, as men they died.”
    Here are sands, ignoble things
    Dropt from the ruin’d sides of kings.

But in the Abbey is _finis rerum_, and our contemplation there the
common contemplation of mortality which, smoothing out place along
with titles, degrees and even deeds, levels the pyramids with the low
mounds of a country churchyard and writes the same moral over Socrates
as over our Unknown Soldier--_Vale, vale, nos te in ordine quo natura
permittet sequamur_. In Westminster Hall (I am stressing this with a
purpose) we walk heirs of events in actual play, shaping our destiny as
citizens of no mean country: in this covered rood of ground have been
compacted from time to time in set conflict the high passions by which
men are exalted to make history. Here a king has been brought to trial,
heard and condemned to die; under these rafters have pleaded in turn
Bacon, Algernon Sidney, Burke, Sheridan. Here the destinies of India
were, after conflict, decided for two centuries. Through that great
door broke the shout, taken up, reverberated by gun after gun down the
river, announcing the acquittal of the Seven Bishops.


II

So, if this tragic comedy we call life be worth anything more than a
bitter smile: if patriotism mean anything to you, and strong opposite
wills out of whose conflict come great issues in victory or defeat,
the arrest, the temporary emptiness of Westminster Hall--a sense of
what it has seen and yet in process of time may see--will lay a deeper
solemnity on you than all the honoured dust in the Abbey.

But, as men’s minds are freakish, let me tell you of a solitary figure
I see in Westminster Hall more vividly even than the ghosts of Charles
I and Warren Hastings bayed around by their accusers: the face and
figure of a youth, not yet twenty-two, who has just bought a copy of
the Magazine containing his first appearance in print as an author. “I
walked down to Westminster Hall,” he has recorded, “and turned into it
for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride
that they could not bear the street and were not fit to be seen there.”

Now the paper which opened the fount of these boyish tears (here, if
you will, is bathos) was entitled _A Dinner at Poplar Walk_. You may
find it to-day under another title, “Mr. Minns and his Cousin” among
_Sketches by Boz_: reading it, you may pronounce it no great shakes;
and anyhow you may ask why anyone’s imagination should select this
slight figure, to single it out among the crowd of ghosts. Well,
to this I might make simple and sufficient answer, saying that the
figure of unbefriended youth, with its promise, a new-comer alone in
the market-place, has ever been one of the most poignant in life,
and, because in life, therefore in literature. Dickens himself,
who had been this figure and remembered all too well the emotion
that choked its heart, has left us a wonderful portrait-gallery of
these lads. But indeed our literature--every literature, all legend,
for that matter--teems with them: with these youngest brothers of
the fairy-tales, these Oedipus’s, Jasons, these Dick Whittingtons,
Sindbads, Aladdins, Japhets in search of their Fathers; this
Shakespeare holding horses for a groat, that David comely from the
sheepfold with the basket of loaves and cheeses. You remember De
Quincey and the stony waste of Oxford Street? or the forlorn and
invalid boy in Charles Lamb’s paper on _The Old Margate Hoy_ who “when
we asked him whether he had any friends where he was going,” replied,
“he _had_ no friends.” Solitariness is ever the appeal of such a
figure; an unbefriendedness that “makes friends,” searching straight to
our common charity: this and the attraction of youth, knocking--so to
speak--on the house-door of our own lost or locked-away ambitions. “Is
there anybody there?” says this Traveller, and he, unlike the older one
(who is oneself), gets an answer. The mid-Victorian Dr. Smiles saw him
as an embryonic Lord Mayor dazed amid the traffic on London Bridge but
clutching at his one half-crown for fear of pick-pockets. I myself met
him once in a crowded third-class railway carriage. He was fifteen and
bound for the sea: and when we came in sight of it he pushed past our
knees to the carriage window and broke into a high tuneless chant, all
oblivious of us. Challenge was in it and a sob of desire at sight of
his predestined mistress and adversary. For the sea is great, but the
heart in any given boy may be greater: and

              these things are life
    And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse.


III

But I am a Professor, and ought to have begun by assuring you that this
figure in Westminster Hall has a real historical interest in connexion
with your studies “on the subject of English Literature.”

Well, then, it has. The date of the apparition is New Year’s Day, 1834,
and by New Year’s Day, 1838, Charles Dickens was not only the most
popular of living authors, but in a fair way to become that which he
remained until the end in 1870--a great National Institution.

I use no exaggerated term. Our fathers of the nineteenth century had a
way (and perhaps not altogether a bad way) of considering their great
writers as national institutions; Carlyle was one, Ruskin another. It
was a part of their stout individualism, nowadays derided. And it was,
if you will consider, in the depths of its soul [say, if you will,
its Manchester Soul] a high-polite retort upon such a sworn enemy
as Ruskin. “Curse us, Sir: but _we_ and no _Government_ make you a
demigod.” You will never understand your fathers, Gentlemen, until you
understand their proud distrust of Government save by consent. Take
a favourite term of theirs--say “The Liberty of the Press.” By that
_they_ meant liberty from interference by _Government_. _We_, using
that term to-day, should mean nothing of the sort. _We_ should mean
“liberty from control by capitalists.”

I interrogate my youthful memories and am confident that, in a modest
country household these men--Carlyle, Ruskin--were, with decent
reverence, though critically, read for prophets. Tennyson, too, and
Browning had their sacred niches; and Darwin and Huxley, and Buckle,
who perished young attempting a _History of Civilisation in Europe_:
John Stuart Mill, also, and Kingsley, Maurice, George Eliot, and
Thackeray. These names leap to memory as names of household gods. A few
weeks ago, rummaging over some family papers I came upon the following
entry:

    1848, June 20. I received a visit from Mr. Alfred Tennyson, the
    Poet. He came into Cornwall along the North Coast, and from about
    Camelford crossed over to Fowey, where I called on him on the 19th.
    He came to Polperre in a boat, with Mr. Peach and others; and
    after viewing our scenery in all directions and taking tea at our
    house, they all rowed back to Fowey late in the evening. I find
    him well-informed and communicative. I believe a good Greek scholar
    with some knowledge of Hebrew. His personal appearance is not
    prepossessing; having a slouch in his gait and rather slovenly in
    his dress tho’ his clothes were new and good. He confesses to this.
    He admired the wildness of our scenery, deprecated the breaking in
    of improvements, as they are termed. He enquired after traditions,
    especially of the great Arthur: his object in visiting the County
    being to collect materials for a poem on that Chief. But he almost
    doubted his existence. He show’d me a MS. sketch of a history of
    the Hero: but it was prolix and modern.

You see, hinted in this extract from a journal, how our ancestors, in
1848 and the years roundabout, and in remote parts of England, welcomed
these great men as gods: albeit critically, being themselves stout
fellows. But above all these, from the publication of _Pickwick_--or,
to be precise, of its fifth number, in which (as Beatrice would say)
“there was a star danced” and under it Sam Weller was born--down to
June 14, 1870, and the funeral in Westminster Abbey, Dickens stood
exalted, in a rank apart. Nay, when he had been laid in the grave upon
which, left and right, face the monuments of Chaucer, Shakespeare
and Dryden, and for days after the grave was closed, the stream of
unbidden mourners went by. “All day long,” wrote Dean Stanley on the
17th, “there was a constant pressure on the spot, and many flowers were
strewn on it by unknown hands, many tears shed from unknown eyes.”

Without commenting on it for the moment, I want you to realise this
exaltation of Dickens in the popular mind, his countrymen’s and
countrywomen’s intimate, passionate pride in him; in the first place
because it is an historical fact, and a fact (I think) singular
in our literary history; but also because, as a phenomenon itself
unique--unique, at any rate, in its magnitude--it reacted singularly
upon the man and his work, and you must allow for this if you would
thoroughly understand either.


IV

To begin with, you must get it out of your minds that it resembled
any popularity known to us, in our day: the deserved popularity of
Mr. Kipling, for example. You must also (of this generation I may be
asking a hard thing, but it is necessary) get it out of your minds
that Dickens was, in any sense at all, a cheap artist playing to
the gallery. He was a writer of imperfect, or hazardous, literary
education: but he was also a man of iron will and an artist of the
fiercest literary conscience. Let me enforce this by quoting two
critics whom you will respect. “The faults of Dickens,” says William
Ernest Henley,

    were many and grave. He wrote some nonsense; he sinned repeatedly
    against taste; he could be both noisy and vulgar; he was apt to be
    a caricaturist where he should have been a painter; he was often
    mawkish and often extravagant; and he was sometimes more inept than
    a great writer has ever been. But his work, whether good or bad,
    has in full measure the quality of sincerity. He meant what he did;
    and he meant it with his whole heart. He looked upon himself as
    representative and national--as indeed he was; he regarded his work
    as a universal possession; and he determined to do nothing that for
    lack of pains should prove unworthy of his function. If he sinned,
    it was unadvisedly and unconsciously; if he failed it was because
    he knew no better. You feel that as you read....

    He had enchanted the public without an effort: he was the best
    beloved of modern writers almost from the outset of his career.
    But he had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the
    middle-class Englishman; and if all his life he never ceased from
    self-education, but went unswervingly in pursuit of culture, it was
    out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist
    would not let him do otherwise.

Now let me add this testimony from Mr. G. K. Chesterton:

    Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when
    a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the
    community. For the kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not
    like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write
    what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted....
    Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked up to the
    people. He approached the people like a deity and poured out his
    riches and his blood. He had not merely produced something they
    could understand, but he took it seriously, and toiled and agonised
    to produce it. They were not only enjoying one of the best writers,
    they were enjoying the best he could do. His raging and sleepless
    nights, his wild walks in the darkness, his note-books crowded,
    his nerves in rags, all this extraordinary output was but a fit
    sacrifice to the ordinary man.

“The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens,”
wrote Carlyle of him, on hearing the news of his death,--“every inch of
him an honest man.” “What a face it is to meet,” had said Leigh Hunt,
years before; and Mrs. Carlyle, “It was as if made of steel.”


V

I shall endeavour to appraise with you, by and by, the true worth of
this amazing popularity. For the moment I merely ask you to consider
the fact and the further fact that Dickens took it with the seriousness
it deserved and endeavoured more and more to make himself adequate to
it. He had--as how could he help having?--an enormous consciousness
of the power he wielded: a consciousness which in action too often
displayed itself as an irritable conscientiousness. For instance,
_Pickwick_ is a landmark in our literature: its originality can no
more be disputed than the originality (say) of the _Divina Commedia_.
“I thought of Pickwick”--is his classical phrase. He thought of
Pickwick--and Pickwick was. But just because the ill-fated illustrator,
Seymour--who shot himself before the great novel had found its
stride--was acclaimed by some as its inventor, Dickens must needs
charge into the lists with the hottest, angriest, most superfluous,
denials. Even so, later on, when he finds it intolerable to go on
living with his wife, the world is, somehow or other, made acquainted
with this distressing domestic affair as though by a papal encyclical.
Or, even so, when he chooses (in _Bleak House_) to destroy an
alcoholised old man by “spontaneous combustion”--quite unnecessarily--a
solemn preface has to be written to explain that such an end is
scientifically possible. This same conscientiousness made him (and
here our young novelist of to-day will start to blaspheme) extremely
scrupulous about scandalising his public--I use the term in its literal
sense of laying a stumbling-block, a cause of offence. For example,
while engaged upon _Dombey and Son_, he has an idea (and a very good
idea too, though he abandoned it) that instead of keeping young Walter
the unspoilt boyish lover that he is, he will portray the lad as
gradually yielding to moral declension, through hope deferred--a theme
which, as you will remember, he afterwards handled in _Bleak House_:
and he seriously writes thus about it to his friend Forster:

    About the boy, who appears in the last chapter of the first
    number--I think it would be a good thing to disappoint all the
    expectations that chapter seems to raise of his happy connection
    with the story and the heroine, and to show him gradually and
    naturally trailing away, from that love of adventure and boyish
    light-heartedness, into negligence, idleness, dissipation,
    dishonesty and ruin. To show, in short, that common, every day,
    miserable declension of which we know so much in our ordinary life:
    to exhibit something of the philosophy of it, in great temptations
    and an easy nature; and to show how the good turns into the bad, by
    degrees. If I kept some notion of Florence always at the bottom of
    it, _I think it might be made very powerful and very useful. What
    do you think? Do you think it may be done without making people
    angry?_

George Gissing--in a critical study of Dickens which cries out for
reprinting--imagines a young writer of the ’nineties (as we may imagine
a young writer of to-day) coming on that and crying out upon it.

    What! a great writer, with a great idea, to stay his hand until he
    has made grave enquiry whether Messrs. Mudie’s subscribers will
    approve it or not! The mere suggestion is infuriating.... Look
    at Flaubert, for example. Can you imagine _him_ in such a sorry
    plight? Why, nothing would have pleased him better than to know
    he was outraging public sentiment! In fact, it is only when one
    _does_ so that one’s work has a chance of being good.

All which, adds Gissing, may be true enough in relation to the speaker.
As regards Dickens, it is irrelevant. And Gissing speaks the simple
truth; “that he owed it to his hundreds of thousands of readers to
teach them a new habit of judgment Dickens did not see or begin to
see.” But that it lay upon him to deal with his public scrupulously he
felt in the very marrow of his bones. Let me give you two instances:

When editing _Household Words_ he receives from a raw contributor a MS.
impossible as sent, in which he detects merit. “I have had a story,” he
writes to Forster, “to hack and hew into some form this morning, which
has taken me four hours of close attention.” “Four hours of Dickens’
time,” comments Gissing, “in the year 1856, devoted to such a matter as
this!--where any ordinary editor, or rather his assistant, would have
contented himself with a few blottings and insertions, sure that ‘the
great big stupid heart of the public,’ as Thackeray called it, would be
no better pleased, toil how one might.”

For my second instance. The next year, 1857, was Mutiny Year, and
closed upon an England raging mad over the story of Cawnpore. Dickens
and Wilkie Collins, on a tour together in the north of England, had
contrived a Christmas Number for _Household Words_, announced and
entitled _The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and their Treasures
in Women, Children, Silver and Jewels_. The public expected a red-hot
account of the Nana Sahib, the treacherous embarkation, the awful
voyage down the Ganges. It was all there, to the man’s hand, with
illimitable applause for his mere inviting. But it might inflame--and,
inflaming, hurt--the nation’s temper, and therefore he would have none
of it: he, Dickens, the great literary Commoner; lord over millions of
English and to them, and to right influence on them, bounden. Therefore
the public got something more profitable than it craved for: it got
a romantic story empty of racial or propagandist hatred; a simple
narrative of peril and adventure on a river in South America.


VI

But now let us see what a light this conscious popularity throws upon
two important events in Dickens’ career: his visit to the United States
in 1842, and his invention, the next year, of the “Christmas Book.”

Dickens went over to America as a great personage: securely, but
neither immodestly nor overweeningly conscious of it. He went over also
as a great and genuine early-Victorian radical; something better than
any politician; an unbribed and unbribable writer, immensely potent,
with a pen already dedicated to war against social abuses. He landed
at Boston, fully expecting to see Liberty in realisation under the
star-spangled banner. He found Colonel Diver and Mr. Jefferson Brick,
Mr. La Fayette Kettle and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. He found, of
course, a fervent and generous hospitality that sprang, in Forster’s
words, “from feelings honourable both to giver and receiver,” and was
bestowed sincerely, if with a touch of bravado and challenge--“We of
the New World want to show you, by extending the kind of homage that
the Old World reserves for kings and conquerors, to a young man with
nothing to distinguish him but his heart and his genius, what it is we
think in these parts worthier of honour than birth or wealth, a title
or a sword.” These are Forster’s words again, and they do well enough.
The hospitality included no doubt a good deal of the ridiculous: food
for innocent caricature of the kind provided in the great Pogram levee
where the two Literary Ladies are presented to the Honourable Elijah by
the Mother of the Modern Gracchi.

    “To be presented to a Pogram,” said Miss Codger, “by a Hominy,
    indeed a thrilling moment is it in its impressiveness on what we
    call our feelings. But why we call them so, and why impressed
    they are, or if impressed they are at all, or if at all we are,
    or if there really is, oh gasping one! a Pogram or a Hominy, or
    any active principle to which we give those titles is a topic,
    Spirit searching, light-abandoned, much too vast to enter on, at
    this unlooked-for Crisis.” “Mind and Matter,” said the lady in the
    wig, “glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime,
    and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of
    Imagination. To hear it, sweet it is. But then outlaughs the stern
    philosopher, and saith to the Grotesque, ‘What ho! arrest for me
    that agency! Go bring it here! And so the vision fadeth.’”

I will not take oath that I have not heard faint echoes of that sort of
talk at literary gatherings within a mile or so of this very spot. But
if it be not to some extent endemic in America even to-day, then all I
can say is that certain American authors (Mrs. Edith Wharton for one)
have misrepresented it far more cruelly than ever did Charles Dickens,
or certainly than I, with no knowledge at all, have any wish to do.

But what brought Dickens up with a round turn was his discovery (as
he believed) that in this land of freedom no man was free to speak his
thought.

    “I believe,” he wrote to Forster on Feb. 24th, “there is no country
    on the face of the earth where there is less freedom of opinion on
    any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference of
    opinion than in this.... There!--I write the words with reluctance,
    disappointment and sorrow: but I believe it from the bottom of my
    soul.”

He did believe it, and it shocked him inexpressibly. “Very well,”
it may be answered; “but there were obligations. A man should not
publicly criticise a country in which he is an honoured guest.” Yes,
but he had gone out to the States with intent to discuss the question
of copyright, or rather of literary piracy, in which American law
and practice were so flagrantly immoral that he had never a doubt of
getting both rectified by a little heart-to-heart talk (as we call it
now) with some of their public men and lawgivers. Dickens was always a
good man of business. As the most widely-read of British authors, and
therefore the chief of sufferers, he could speak authoritatively on
behalf of his poorer brethren. He went, and received on a grand scale
that shock which on a far modester scale many of us have experienced
in our time, with the sort of embarrassment one feels (let us say)
in sitting down to Bridge with a very delightful person whose code
in the matter of revoking is rather notoriously “off colour.” Let
me illustrate this by the remark of a just man at Washington in the
debate preceding the latest copyright enactment. A member of Congress
had pleaded for the children of the backwoods--these potential Abraham
Lincolns devouring education by the light of pine-knot fires--how
desirable that these little Sons of Liberty should be able to purchase
their books (as he put it) “free of authorial expenses!” “Hear, hear!”
retorted my just man. “And the negroes of the South too--so fond of
chicken free of _farmer-ial_ expenses!”--A great saying!

And yet Dickens was wrong: in my opinion wrong as an English Gentleman,
being America’s Guest. On the balance I hold that he should have
thought what he thought and, thinking it, have shortened his visit and
come silently away.

Well, Dickens discussed the matter with Washington Irving, Prescott,
Hoffman, Bryant, Dana and others, and found that while every writer
in America was agreed upon the atrocious state of the law, not a man
of them dared to speak out. The suggestion that an American could be
found with temerity enough to hint that his country was possibly wrong
struck the boldest dumb. “Then,” said Dickens, “I shall speak out”: and
he did. “I wish you could have seen,” he writes home, “the faces that
I saw, down both sides of the table at Hartford, when I began to talk
about Scott.” [Remember, please, this is my interjection, Gentlemen,
that, on a small portion of his dues, on a 10 per cent. (say) of his
plundered sales, the great Sir Walter Scott would have died in calm of
mind and just prosperity.] “I wish you could have heard how I gave it
out. My blood so boiled as I thought of the monstrous injustice that I
felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their throats.”

The violence of the reaction upon Dickens you can of course study in
_American Notes_ and _Martin Chuzzlewit_. But the real import of these
two books and the violence of resentment they raised, we shall not
understand without realising that Dickens went over, was feasted: was
disappointed, then outraged, and spoke his mind, from first to last _as
a representative of the democracy of this country_, always conscious
of a great, if undefined, responsibility and, under disappointment,
resolute to be brave, at whatever cost of favour.


VII

The same grand consciousness seems to me to have been the true
inspiration of his “Christmas Books.” For a private confession,
I dislike them: I find them--_A Christmas Carol_, _The Chimes_,
_The Cricket on the Hearth_, _The Battle of Life_, _The Haunted
Man_--grossly sentimental and as grossly overcharged with violent
conversions to the “Christmas Spirit.” For a further confession I
greatly prefer several of his later Christmas Stories in _Household
Words_ and _All the Year Round_--_The Wreck of the “Golden Mary”_ for
instance, or _Dr. Marigold’s Prescriptions_ or _The Holly-Tree Inn_--to
this classic five which are still separated in the collected editions
under the title of “Christmas Books.” He himself confessed, in a
general preface of less than a dozen lines, his inability to work out
character in the limits he assigned himself--a hundred pages or so. “My
chief purpose,” he says of _A Christmas Carol_, “was, in a whimsical
kind of masque which the good humour of the season justified, to awaken
some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian
land.” But he took it as a mission, and quite seriously. Christmas to
England had always meant, and should mean, a festival of neighbourly
goodwill and robust hospitality. Listen to the old Carols:

    Now thrice welcome, Christmas,
      Which brings us good cheer,
    Minced pies and plum porridge,
      Good ale and strong beer;
    With pig, goose and capon,
      The best that may be,
    So well doth the weather
      And our stomachs agree.

Or

    Now that the time is come wherein
      Our Saviour Christ was born,
    The larders full of beef and pork,
      The garners fill’d with corn....

Or

    Bring us in good ale, and bring us in good ale;
    For our blessed Lady’s sake, bring us in good ale.

These out of a score or more verses I might quote from _Poor Robin’s
Almanack_ and the like. But take Campion’s more aristocratic Muse:

    Now winter nights enlarge
      The number of their hours,
    And clouds their storms discharge
      Upon the airy towers.
    Let now the chimneys blaze
      And cups o’erflow with wine;
    Let well-attuned words amaze
      With harmony divine.
      Now yellow waxen lights
      Shall wait on honey love,
    While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
      Sleep’s leaden spell remove.

Carry this again down to Frederick Tennyson’s _The Holy Tide_:

    The days are sad, it is the Holy tide;
      The Winter morn is short, the Night is long;
    So let the lifeless Hours be glorified
      With deathless thoughts and echo’d in sweet song:
    And through the sunset of this purple cup
      They will resume the roses of their prime,
    And the old Dead will hear us and wake up,
      Pass with dim smiles and make our hearts sublime.

“An Englishman’s house is his Castle,” said an immortal farmer at a Fat
Stock Dinner. “The storms may assail it and the winds whistle round it,
but the King himself cannot do so.” Dickens saw always the Englishman’s
house as his castle, fortified and provisioned against the discharge
of snow and sleet: always most amply provisioned! Witness his picture
of Christmas at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell--Old Wardle with his friends,
neighbours, poor relations, and his farm-labourers too, all sitting
down together to a colossal supper “and a mighty bowl of wassail
something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which the hot
apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look and jolly sound that
were perfectly irresistible.”

Old Wardle, in fact, is in the direct line of succession to Chaucer’s
Frankeleyne--

    Withoute bake mete was never his hous,
    Of fish and flesh, and that so plenteous,
    It snewed in his hous of mete and drink.

Dickens, I repeat to you, was always, in the straight line of Chaucer,
Ben Jonson, Dryden, Fielding, a preacher of man’s dignity in his full
appetite; and quite consciously, as a national genius, he preached the
doctrine of Christmas to his nation.


VIII

But you will say perhaps “Granted his amazing popularity--granted, too,
his right to assume on it--was it really deserved?” To this question
I oppose for the moment my opinion that, were I asked to choose out
of the story of English Literature a short list of the most fecund
authors, I should start with Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne,
Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Dickens, Browning. If compelled to reduce the
list to three, choosing the three most lavishly endowed by God with
imagination for their fellows’ good, I almost think that among all
God’s plenty I should choose, as pre-eminent stars, Shakespeare, Burke
and Dickens. Milton, of course, will stand apart always, a solitary
star: and Chaucer for his amazing invention, less even for what he did
than for that he did it at all; Keats for infinity of promise; and to
exclude Scott seems almost an outrage on human kindness. Yet if it
come to the mere wonder-work of genius--the creation of men and women,
on a page of paper, who are actually more real to us than our daily
acquaintances, as companionable in a crowd as even our best selected
friends, as individual as the most eccentric we know, yet as universal
as humanity itself, I do not see what English writer we can choose to
put second to Shakespeare save Charles Dickens. I am talking of sheer
creative power, as I am thinking of Tasso’s proud saying that, next to
God himself, no one but the poet deserves the name of Creator. You
feel of Dickens as of Shakespeare that anything may happen: because
it is not with them as with other authors: it is not they who speak.
Falstaff or Hamlet or Sam Weller or Mr. Micawber: it is the god
speaking:

                        Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα.

They are as harps upon which the large wind plays: and as that is
illimitable there is no limit to their utterances. It was so with
Charles Dickens from the Sam Weller of his lost youth down to the last
when, in pain and under the shadow of death, he invented the Billickin.

In another lecture I propose to show you (if I can) that Dickens’
characters belong to a world of his own, rather than to this one. But
if he also created that world of his own, so much the grander creator
he!--As if he made men and women walk and talk in it, compelling us to
walk with them, and listen, and, above all, open our lungs and laugh,
suffer within the tremendous illusion, so much is he the more potent
magician! I also feel, in reading Shakespeare, or Dickens--I would
add Burke--as I feel with no fourth that I am dealing with a scope of
genius quite incalculable; that while it keeps me proud to belong to
their race and nation and to inherit their speech, it equally keeps
me diffident because, at any turn of the page may occur some plenary
surprise altogether beyond my power or scope of guessing. With these
three writers, as with no fourth, _I_ have the sensation of a certain
_faintness_ of enjoyment, of surrender, to be borne along as on vast
wings. Yet of Dickens, as of Shakespeare, the worst work can be
incredibly bad. Sorrier stuff could scarcely be written, could scarcely
conceivably have ever been written, than the whole part of Speed in
_The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ unless it be the first chapter of _Martin
Chuzzlewit_. Yet in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ you get Mrs. Gamp: and I ask
you, How much the poorer should we not all be, lacking Mrs. Gamp?

I grant you that he has not yet passed--as he has not yet had time to
pass--the _great_ test of a classical writer; which is that, surviving
the day’s popularity and its conditions, his work goes on meaning
more, under quite different conditions, to succeeding ages; the great
test which Shakespeare has passed more than once or twice, remaining
to-day, though quite differently, even more significant than he was to
his contemporaries. I grant--as in another lecture I shall be at pains
to show--that Dickens’ plots were usually incredible, often monstrous.
But he invented a world: he peopled it with men and women for our joy:
and my confidence in the diuturnity of his fame rests even on more than
this--on the experience that, test this genius by whatever standard a
critic may, he has by and by to throw down his measure and admit that,
while Dickens was always a learner, out of his prodigality he could
have at any moment knocked the critic over by creating a new world with
new and delectable lasting characters to take it in charge.




DICKENS (II)


I

I take up my parable for a few words more upon the point at which
I broke off last week--the essential _greatness_ of Dickens. For
greatness is a quality in some few men: indefinable perhaps, but
yet to be recognised; a certain thing and, by those of us who would
traffic with life or literature, not to be overlooked or denied save
at our soul’s peril, no matter what standard of artistry or of refined
scholarship we may set up: a _quality_ in itself, moreover, and not
any addition or multiplication or raising of talent by industry. For
an illustration of the peril: I was reading, the other day, a history
of French Literature by the late M. Ferdinand Brunetière, and, coming
to the time of Alexandre Dumas the elder, I found that the historian,
disapproving of Dumas, has just left him out! Now that, I contend
(saving M. Brunetière’s eminence), is to write oneself down a pedant,
outside the catholic mind. Dumas lived a scandalous life, wrote much
execrable French, and encouraged--even employed--some of his fellows
to write worse. But the author of _The Three Musketeers_, _Le Vicomte
de Bragelonne_, _La Reine Margot_--Dumas, “the seven-and-seventy times
to be forgiven,” is not to be treated so, by your leave: or only so,
I repeat, at the critic’s peril. Or let me take an Englishman--John
Dryden. I suspect I shall not misrepresent or misreport the attitude
of many in this room towards Dryden when I say that we find a world
of slovenly sorry stuff in his dramas, and in his poems a deal of
wit and rhetoric which our later taste--such as it is, good or bad,
true or false--refuses to pass for poetry at all. Now if I merely
wanted to prove to you that Dryden at his best could write finely,
exquisitely--that out of the strong could come forth sweetness--I could
content myself with asking you to listen to these verses:

    No, no, poor suffering heart, no change endeavour,
    Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her;
    My ravish’d eyes behold such charms about her,
    I can die with her, but not live without her
    One tender sigh of her, to see me languish,
    Will more than pay the price of my past anguish;
    Beware, O cruel fair, how you smile on me,
    ’Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me.

    _Love_ has in store for me one happy minute,
    And she will end my pain, who did begin it;
    Then no day, void of bliss, of pleasure, leaving,
    Ages shall slide away without perceiving:
    _Cupid_ shall guard the door, the more to please us,
    And keep out _Time_ and _Death_, when they would seize us:
    _Time_ and _Death_ shall depart, and say in flying,
    “Love has found out a way to live--by dying.”

There, obviously, is a _virtuoso_ who commands his keyboard. But if I
were talking about Dryden to you for your soul’s good, I should rather
show you the man with all his imperfections on his head, then turn
and challenge you to deny his greatness. Why, you can scarcely read a
page, even of his prose--say, for choice, the opening of his _Essay of
Dramatic Poesy_--without recognising the tall fellow of his hands, the
giant among his peers,

                          ψυχἠ ...
    ... μακρὰ βιβᾶσα κατ’ ἀσφοδελὸν λειμῶνα,

“pacing with long stride the asphodel meadow” where, let us say, Samuel
Johnson walks, and Handel, and Hugo, nor are they abashed to salute the
very greatest--Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare.

I repeat, Gentlemen, that at all risk of appearing exorbitant I should
preach this to you for your souls’ good. For I do most earnestly want
you, before all else, to recognise this _quality_ of greatness and
respond to it. In so far as, in your fleeting generation, you give me
your confidence and honour me (shall I say?) with a personal hope for
A or B or C, I would warn you of what I have experimentally proved to
be true of my contemporaries--that the man is most fatally destined to
be great himself who learns early to enlarge his heart to the great
masters; that those have steadily sunk who cavilled at Caesar with
Cassius, or over a cigarette chatted admiringly of the rent which
envious Casca made: that anyone with an ear learns very surely to
distinguish the murmur of the true bee from the morose hum of the drone
who is bringing no honey, nor ever will, to the hive. In my own time
of apprenticeship--say in the ’nineties--we were all occupied--after
the French novelists--with style: in seeking the right word, _le mot
juste_, and with “art for art’s sake,” etc. And we were serious enough,
mind you. We cut ourselves with knives. To-day, if I may diagnose
your more youthful sickness, you are occupied rather with lyricism,
curious and recondite sensations, appositions of unrelated facts with
magenta-coloured adjectives. The craze has spread to the shop-fronts,
to curtains, bedspreads, as the craze for Byronic collars spread in
its day: and “Hell is empty!” cried Ferdinand, plunging overboard: but
you can still find psycho-analysis rampant, with any amount of Birth
Control, among the geese on Golder’s Green. But if from this desk
I have preached incessantly on a text, it is this--that all spirit
being mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually attractive, is an
ultimate fact: and that therefore we shall grow the greater and better
critics as we surrender ourselves to the great writers and without
detraction, at least until we have, in modesty of mind, proved them:
since, to apply a word of Emerson’s:

    Heartily know--
    When half-gods go,
      The gods arrive.


II

So I broke off, or almost, upon a saying of Tasso’s--you may find it
repeated in Ben Jonson’s _Timber, or Discoveries_--that in this world
none deserves the name of Creator save God himself and the Poet--by
“Poet” meaning, of course, the great imaginative artist whether working
in restricted verse or in “that other harmony of prose.”

And you may be thinking--I don’t doubt, a number will be thinking--that
in a discourse on Dickens, I am putting the claim altogether too high.
I can feel your minds working, I think--working to some such tune as
this “Dickens and Virgil, now--Dickens and Dante--Oh, heaven alive!”

You cannot say that I have shirked it--can you?

Well now, fair and softly! If I had said “Dickens and Shakespeare,” it
would have given you no such shock: and if I had said “Shakespeare and
Dante,” or “Dickens and Molière,” it would have given you no shock at
all. I am insisting, you understand, that the first test of greatness
in an imaginative writer is his power to create: and I propose to begin
with that which, if there should by any chance happen to be a fool in
this apparently representative gathering, he will infallibly despise
for the easiest thing in the world, the creation of a fool. I beg to
reassure him and, so far as I can, restore his self-respect. It is
about the hardest thing in the world, to create a fool and laugh at
him. It is a human, nay, even a Godlike function (so and not by others
shared) to laugh. Listen, before we go further, to these stanzas on
divine laughter:

    Nay, ’tis a Godlike function; laugh thy fill!
    Mirth comes to thee unsought:
    Mirth sweeps before it like a flood the mill
    Of languaged logic: thought
    Hath not its source so high;
    The will
    Must let it by:
    For, though the heavens are still,
    God sits upon His hill
    And sees the shadows fly:
    And if He laughs at fools, why should He not?
    “Yet hath the fool a laugh”--Yea, of a sort;
    God careth for the fools;
    The chemic tools
    Of laughter He hath given them, and some toys
    Of sense, as ’twere a small retort
    Wherein they may collect the joys
    Of natural giggling, as becomes their state:
    The fool is not inhuman, making sport
    For such as would not gladly be without
    That old familiar noise:
    Since, though he laugh not, he can cachinnate--
    This also is of God, we may not doubt.

Shakespeare, as we know, delighted in a fool, and revelled in creating
one. (I need hardly say that I am not talking of the professionals,
such as Touchstone or the Fool in _Lear_, who are astute critics
rather, ridiculing the folly of their betters by reflexion by some odd
facet of common sense, administering hellebore to minds diseased and so
in their function often reminding us of the Chorus in Greek tragedy.) I
mean, of course, the fool in his _quiddity_, such as Dogberry, or Mr.
Justice Shallow, or Cousin Abraham Slender. Hearken to Dogberry:

    _Dog._ Come hither, neighbour Seacole. God hath blessed you with a
    good name: to be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to
    write and read comes by nature.

    _Sec. Watch._ Both which, master Constable--

    _Dog._ You have: I knew it would be your answer. Well, for your
    favour, sir, why, give God thanks, and make no boast of it; and for
    your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of
    such vanity.

Why, it might be an extract from the Geddes Report--or so much of it as
deals with Education!

And now to Slender, bidden in by sweet Anne Page to her father’s
dinner-table:

    _Anne._ Will it please your worship to come in, sir?

    _Slender._ No--I thank you, forsooth--heartily. I am very well.

    _Anne._ The dinner attends you, sir.

    _Slender._ I am not a-hungry, I thank you, forsooth....

    _Anne._ I may not go in without your worship; they will not sit
    till you come.

    _Slender._ I’faith, I’ll eat nothing: I thank you as much as though
    I did.

    _Anne._ I pray you, sir, walk in.

    _Slender._ I had rather walk here--I thank you. I bruised my shin
    th’ other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of
    fence--three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes--and, I with my
    ward defending my head, he shot my shin, and by my troth, I cannot
    abide the smell of hot meat since.... Why do your dogs bark so? Be
    there bears in town?

    _Anne._ I think there are, sir. I heard them talked of.

    _Slender._ I love the sport well, but I shall as soon quarrel at
    it as any man in England.... _You_ are afraid, if you see a bear
    loose, are you not?

    _Anne._ Ay, indeed, sir.

    _Slender._ That’s meat and drink to me, now: I have seen Sackerson
    loose--twenty times, and have taken him by the chain.... But women,
    indeed, cannot abide ’em--they _are_ very ill-favoured rough things.

“Othello,” as Hartley Coleridge noted, “could not brag more amorously”:
and, as I wrote the other day in an introduction to _The Merry Wives_,
when Anne finally persuades him to walk before her into the house, my
fellow-editor and I had written (but afterwards in cowardice erased)
the stage-direction, _He goes in: she follows with her apron spread, as
if driving a goose._ Yes, truly, Slender is a goose to say grace over
and to be carved “as a dish fit for the gods.” “A very potent piece of
imbecility,” writes Hazlitt, and adds, “Shakespeare is the only writer
who was as great in describing weakness as strength.”

Well, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens came after, to confirm Hazlitt’s
observation. No one seeks in Jane Austen for examples of strength: and
you will find none in Dickens to compare with Othello or Cleopatra or
(say) with Mr. Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. But, like Charles Lamb,
Jane Austen and Dickens both “loved a fool”: Jane Austen delicately,
Dickens riotously: witness the one’s Miss Bates, the other’s Mr. Toots.
But observe, pray: the fools they delight in are always--like Slender,
like Miss Bates, like Mr. Toots--simple fools, sincere fools, good at
heart, good to live with, and in their way, the salt of the earth.
Miss Bates herself bears unconscious witness to this in one of her
wisest foolishest remarks--“It is such a happiness when good people get
together--and they always do.” (Consoling thought for you and me at
this very moment.) With the fool who is also a humbug, a self-deceiver,
Dickens could find no patience in his heart; and this impatience of his
you may test again and again, always to find it--if I may say so with
reverence--as elementary as our Lord’s. I am not speaking of conscious,
malignant hypocrites--your Stiggins’s, Pecksniffs, Chadbands--on whom
Dickens waged war, his life through; but of the self-deceiving fool
whom we will agree with him in calling an “ass”--Uncle Pumblechook,
for instance, in _Great Expectations_, Mr. Sapsea in _Edwin Drood_;
on whom, or on whose kind, as he grew older, he seems (most of all
in his last book, whenever handling Mr. Sapsea) to lose his artistic
self-control, to savage them. But of kind fools, lovable fools, good
fools, God’s fools, Dickens’ heaven will open any moment at call
and rain you down half-a-dozen, all human, each distinct. You may
count half-a-dozen in his most undeservedly misprised book, _Little
Dorrit_, omitting Mr. F.’s Aunt: who is an eccentric, rather, though
an unforgettable one and has left her unforgettable mark on the world
in less than 200 words. She stands apart: for the others, apart from
foolishness, share but one gift in common, a consanguinity (as it were)
in flow of language or determination of words to the mouth. Shall we
select the vulgar, breathless, good-natured widow, Flora Finching,
ever recalling the past (without so much pause as a comma’s) to her
disillusioned first lover?--

    In times for ever fled Arthur pray excuse me Doyce and Clennam (the
    name of his firm) infinitely more correct and though unquestionably
    distant still ’tis distance lends enchantment to the view, at
    least I don’t mean that and if I did I suppose it would depend
    considerably on the nature of the view, but I’m running on again
    and you put it all out of my head.

    She glanced at him tenderly and resumed:

    In times for ever fled I was going to say it would have sounded
    strange indeed for Arthur Clennam--Doyce and Clennam naturally
    quite different--to make apologies for coming here at any time, but
    that is past and what is past can never be recalled except in his
    own case as poor Mr. F. said when in spirits Cucumber and therefore
    never ate it.... Papa is sitting prosingly, breaking his new laid
    egg over the City article, exactly like the Woodpecker Tapping, and
    need never know that you are here....

    The withered chaplet is then perished the column is crumbled and
    the pyramid is standing upside down upon its what’s-his-name call
    it not giddiness call it not weakness call it not folly I must now
    retire into privacy and looking upon the ashes of departed joys no
    more but taking the further liberty of paying for the pastry which
    has formed the humble pretext for our interview, will for ever say
    Adieu!

    Mr. F’s Aunt who had eaten her pie with great solemnity ... and who
    had been elaborating some grievous scheme of injury in her mind,
    took the present opportunity of addressing the following sibyllic
    apostrophe to the relict of her late nephew: “Bring him for’ard,
    and I’ll chuck him out o’ winder!”


III

Mr. Chesterton, selecting another fool from the gallery--Young Mr.
Guppy, of _Bleak House_--observes very wisely, that we may disapprove
of Mr. Guppy, but we recognise him as a creation flung down like a
miracle out of an upper sphere: we can pull him to pieces, but we
could not have put him together. And this (says he) is the pessimists’
disadvantage in criticising any creation. Even in their attacks on the
Universe they are always under this depressing disadvantage.

“A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard the
hippopotamus as an enormous mistake: but he is also bound to confess
that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such a
mistake.”

Well, that is, of course, our difficulty in criticising all
creative genius. We tell ourselves how we could have suggested to
Shakespeare--or to Dickens--his doing this or that better than he did;
but the mischief is, _we_ could not have done it at all. And in this
matter of Mr. Guppy, Mr. Chesterton continues: “Not one of us could
have invented Mr. Guppy. But even if we could have stolen Mr. Guppy
from Dickens, we have still to confront the fact that Dickens would
have been able to invent another quite inconceivable character to take
his place.”


IV

Here we get to it. I have instanced his fools only, and but a select
two or three of these for a test: but you may take, if you will,
shrewd men, miserly men, ruffians, doctors, proctors, prisoners,
schoolmasters, coachmen, licensed victuallers, teetotallers, thieves,
monthly nurses--whatever the choice be, Dickens will shake them out of
his sleeve to populate a world for us. For, like Balzac, he has a world
of his own and can at call dispense to us of its abundance.

What sort of a world is it out of which Dickens so enriches ours?

Well, to begin with, it is a crowded world, a world that in his
imagination positively teems with folk going, coming, hurrying: of
innumerable streets where you may knock in (and welcome) at any chance
door to find the house in accumulated misery, poverty, woe, or else in
a disorder of sausages and squalling children, with a henpecked husband
at one end of the table, a bowl of punch in the middle, and at the
other end a mortuary woman whose business in life is to make a burden
of life to all who live near her and would have her cheerful. (There
was never such a man as Dickens for depicting the blight induced by one
ill-tempered person--usually a woman--upon a convivial gathering.) The
henpecked husband dispensing the punch is, likely as not, a city clerk
contriving a double debt to pay, a slave during office hours, bound
to a usurious master: a sort of fairy--a Puck, a Mr. Wemmick, as soon
as he sheds his office-coat and makes for somewhere in the uncertain
gaslight of the suburbs, “following darkness like a dream.”

Yes, this world is of the streets; in which Dickens was bred and
from which he drew the miseries and consolations of his boyhood. A
world “full of folk,” but not, like Piers Plowman’s, a “_field_ full
of folk.” His understanding of England is in many ways as deep as
Shakespeare’s; but it is all, or almost all, of the urban England
which in his day had already begun to kill the rural. I ask you to
consider any average drawing of Phiz’s; the number of figures crowded
into a little room, the many absurd things all happening at once, and
you will understand why Phiz was Dickens’ favourite illustrator. A
crowded world: an urban world, largely a middle-class and lower-class
London world--what else could we expect as outcome of a boyhood spent
in poverty and in London? Of London his knowledge is indeed, like Sam
Weller’s, “extensive and peculiar”: with a background or distance
of the lower Thames, black wharves peopled by waterside loafers or
sinister fishers in tides they watch for horrible traffic; rotting
piles such as caught and held the corpse of Quilp. Some sentiment,
indeed, up Twickenham-way: a handful of flowers, taken from the breast
and dropped at the river’s brink, to be floated down, pale and unreal,
in the moonlight; “and thus do greater things that once were in our
breasts and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal seas.” But
before they reach the eternal seas they must pass Westminster Bridge
whence an inspired dalesman saw the City wearing the beauty of dawn as
a garment.

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples ... and Waterloo Bridge,
Hood’s dark arch of tragedy; and London Bridge, hymned of old by
Dunbar. Dickens’ bridge is the old Iron one by Hungerford, and under it
the Thames runs down to ghastly flats, convict-haunted, below Woolwich.

Shakespeare knew his London, his Eastcheap, its taverns. But when
you think of Shakespeare you think (I will challenge you) rather of
rural England, of Avon, of Arden, of native wood-notes wild. I hold
it doubtful that Falstaff on his death-bed babbled o’ green fields:
but I will take oath that when he got down to Gloucestershire he smelt
the air like a colt or a boy out of school. And Justice Shallow is
there--always there!

    _Silence._ This Sir John, cousin, that comes hither anon about
    soldiers?

    _Shallow._ The same Sir John, the very same. I saw him break
    Skogan’s head at the court-gate, when a’ was a crack not thus high:
    and the very same day did I fight with one Sampson Stockfish, a
    fruiterer, behind Gray’s Inn. Jesu, Jesu, the mad days I have
    spent! and to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead!

    _Silence._ We shall all follow, cousin.

    _Shallow._ Certain, ’tis certain; very sure, very sure: death, as
    the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die. How a good
    yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair?

    _Silence._ By my troth, I was not there.

    _Shallow._ Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet?

    _Silence._ Dead, sir.

    _Shallow._ Jesu, Jesu, dead! a’ drew a good bow: and dead! a’ shot
    a fine shoot: John a Gaunt loved him well, and betted much money
    on his head. Dead!--a’ would have clapped i’ the clout at twelve
    score; and carried you a forehand shaft a fourteen and fourteen and
    a half, that it would have done a man’s heart good to see. How a
    score of ewes now?

    _Silence._ Thereafter as they be: a score of good ewes may be worth
    ten pounds.

    _Shallow._ And is old Double dead?

You get little or none of that solemn, sweet rusticity in Dickens: nor
of the rush of England in spring with slow country-folk watching it:

    The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
    Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit;
    In every street these tunes our ears do greet--
      _Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!_
        Spring, the sweet Spring!

You will remember that _Pickwick_, in its first conception, was to
deal with the adventures and misadventures of a Sporting Club after
the fashion of the _Handley Cross_ series by Surtees. Now Surtees--not
a great writer but to this day (at any rate to me) a most amusing
one--was, although like Dickens condemned to London and the law, a
north-country sportsman, and could ride and, it is reported, “without
riding for effect usually saw a deal of what the hounds were doing.”
The Pickwickian sportsmen had to decline _that_ competition very soon.


V

But they, and a host of Dickens’ characters, are very devils for
post-chaises.

“If I had no duties, and no deference to futurity, I would spend
my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman,”
said Dr. Johnson. “There are milestones on the Dover Road,” and we
spin past them. You will remember that Dickens in his apprenticeship
spent a brief but amazingly strenuous while as reporter for the
_Morning Chronicle_, scouring the country after political meetings by
road-vehicles in all weathers. As he told his audience, twenty years
later, at the annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund:

    I have often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes,
    important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was
    required, and a mistake in which would have been, to a young man,
    severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light
    of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four galloping through a
    wild country, and through the dead of night, at the then surprising
    rate of fifteen miles an hour.... Returning home from exciting
    political meetings in the country (and it might be from Exeter
    west, or Manchester north) to the waiting press in London, I do
    verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of
    vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated in
    miry by-roads, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less
    carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got
    back in time for publication....

So, you see, this world Dickens imagined was more than crowded; it was
a hurrying, a breathless one. This sense of speed in travel, of the
wind in one’s face; of weight and impetus in darkness, with coach lamps
flaring through the steam from your good horses’ hindquarters, runs as
an inspiration through much of the literature of the early nineteenth
century. De Quincey has hymned it magnificently in _The English
Mail Coach_, and you may enjoy a capital drive of the sort in _Tom
Brown’s School Days_: and always the rush of air whets your appetite
for the hot rum-and-water at the stage hostelry or the breakfast of
kidney-pie. Dickens saw the invasion of the railway train, and lived
to be disastrously mixed up in a railway collision. But railway-train
travelling at sixty miles an hour or over, has a static convenience.
For the pleasures of inconvenient travel, without a time-table,
I have recourse to a sailing-boat: but I can well understand my
fellow-creature who prefers a car or a motor-bicycle to the motion of
four horses at a stretch gallop. With the wind of God in his face he
gets there (wherever it is) before the dew is dry, does his business,
swallows his bun and Bovril and is home again with an evening paper for
the cosy gas-cooked meal, ere yet Eve has drawn over his little place
in the country her gradual dusky veil.

Rapid travel, as Dickens well knew it and how to describe it--with
crime straining from what it fears--is one of his most potent
resources. Read the flight of Carker in _Dombey and Son_.


VI

His is a crowded world then, tumultuous and full of fierce hurry: but
a world (let us grant it) strangely empty of questioning ideas, subtle
nuisances that haunt many thoughtful men’s souls, through this pass of
existence “still clutching the inviolable shade.” He wrote far better
novels than _John Inglesant_, novels far, far, better than _Robert
Ellesmere_; but you cannot conceive him as interested in the matter of
these books--which yet is serious matter. Still less, or at least as
little, can you imagine him pursuing the track of so perplexed a spirit
as Prince André in Tolstoy’s _War and Peace_. Churches annoyed him. He
will, of a christening or a marriage service (let be a funeral), make
the mouldiest ceremony in the world. We offer the baby up; we give the
blushing bride away; but in the very act we catch ourselves longing
for that subsequent chat with the pew-opener which he seldom denies us
for reward. Dickens, in short, had little use for religious forms or
religious mysteries: for he carried his own religion about with him and
it was the religion of James--so annoying alike to the mystic and the
formalist--“to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and
to keep himself unspotted from the world.” This again belongs to his
“universality.” Is it not the religion of most good fellows not vocal?
It is observable how many of his heroes and heroines--his child heroes
and heroines especially--pass through his thronged streets and keep
themselves unspotted.

But, if careless of mysteries, Dickens had a hawk’s eye for truth of
morals. You never find him mocking a good or condoning an evil thing:
here his judgment and its resultant passion of love or of hate, I dare
to say, never went wrong. Sinners--real sinners--in Dickens have the
very _inferno_ of a time: the very forces of Nature--“fire and hail,
snow and vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling God’s word”--hunt the
murderer to the pit that yawns; till he perishes, and the sky is clear
again over holy and humble men of heart. Again, witness, here, the
elemental flight of Jonas Chuzzlewit. Carlyle never said an unjuster
thing (and that is saying a deal) than when he accused Dickens’ theory
of life as entirely wrong. “He thought men ought to be buttered up ...
and all sorts of fellows have turkey for their Christmas dinner.” It is
false. Dickens had a keener eye for sin than Carlyle ever had; and a
relentless eye: “a military eye,” said Henry James of it, recalling his
first introduction to the great man--“a _merciless_ military eye.” “A
field-punishment eye,” _I_ say!


VII

But this world of Dickens, you may object, was an unreal world,
a phantasmagoric world. Well, I hope to discuss that--or rather
the inference from it--in my next lecture, which shall deal, in
Aristotelian order, with his plots first and his characters next. But,
for the moment, if you will, Yes: his world was like nothing on earth:
yes, it is liker to Turner’s sunset to which the critic objected “he
never saw a sunset like that,” and was answered, “Ah, but don’t you
wish you could?” Yes, for Dickens made his world--as the proud parent
said of his son’s fiddle--“he made it, sir, entirely out of his own
head!”

“Night is generally my time for walking” (thus begins Master Humphrey,
in _The Old Curiosity Shop_) “although I am an old man.”

So in that crowded phantasmagoric city of London, which is in his
mind, Dickens walks by night--not like Asmodeus, lifting the roofs
and peering into scandals: but like the good Caliph of his favourite
_Arabian Nights_, intent to learn the life of the poor and oppressed,
and as a monarch to see justice done them: a man patterning his work on
the great lines of Fulke Greville, sometime of Jesus College, in this
town; with which let me conclude to-day:

    The chief use, then, in man, of that he knows,
    Is his painstaking for the good of all:
    Not fleshly weeping for our own-made woes,
    Not laughing from a melancholy gall,
    Not hating from a soul that overflows
      With bitterness, breath’d out from inward thrall:
        But sweetly rather to ease, loose, or bind,
        As need requires, this frail, fall’n humankind.




DICKENS (III)


I

I left you, Gentlemen, with a promise to say something on Dickens’
plots and Dickens’ characters, taking them in that Aristotelian order.
Now why Aristotle, speaking of drama, prefers Plot to Character; if his
reasons are sound; if they are all the reasons; and, anyhow, if they
can be transferred from drama and applied to the Novel; are questions
which some of you have debated with me “in another place,” and, if
without heat, yet with all the vigour demanded by so idle a topic.
But, for certain, few of you will dissent when I say of Dickens that
he is memorable and to be loved (if loved at all) for his characters
rather than for his plots. You have (say) a general idea of _Dombey and
Son_, a vivid recollection of Captain Cuttle, Mr. Toots, Susan Nipper,
perhaps a vivid recollection of Carker’s long, hunted flight and its
appalling end, when the pursuer, recovering from a swoon--

    saw them bringing from a distance something covered ... upon a
    board, between four men, and saw that others drove some dogs away
    that sniffed upon the road, and soaked his blood up, with a train
    of ashes.

Or you have a general idea of _Our Mutual Friend_, and your memory
preserves quite a sharp impression of Silas Wegg, Mr. Boffin, the
Doll’s Dressmaker. But if suddenly asked how Carker’s flight came
about, why Boffin practised his long dissimulation, and what precisely
Wegg or the Doll’s Dressmaker had to do with it--could you, off-hand,
supply a clear answer? Some votaries can, no doubt: but I ask it of the
ordinary reader. Myself indeed may claim to be something of a votary,
with an inexplicably soft spot in my heart for _Little Dorrit_: yet,
and often as I have read that tale, I should be gravelled if asked, at
this moment, to tell you just what was the secret of the old house, or
just what Miss Wade and Tattycoram have to do with the story. Somehow,
in retrospect, such questions do not seem to matter.

In truth, as I see it--and foresee it as a paradox, to be
defended--Dickens was at once, like Shakespeare in the main, careless
of his plots, and, unlike Shakespeare, over-anxious about them. I shall
stress this second point, which stabs (I think) to the truth beneath
the paradox, by and by.

But first I ask you to remember that Dickens habitually published a
novel in monthly numbers or instalments; starting it, indeed, upon a
plan, but often working at white heat to fulfil the next instalment,
and improvising as he went. Thackeray used the same method, with the
printer’s devil ever infesting the hall when the day for delivery
came around. This method of writing masterpieces may well daunt their
successors, even in this journalistic age of internal combustion with
the voice of Mr. H. G. Wells insistent that the faster anyone travels
the nearer he is _ex hypothesi_ to that New Jerusalem in which there
shall be no night (and therefore, I presume, not a comfortable bed
to be hired), but the eternal noise of elevators and daylight-saving
made perfect. It did not daunt our forefathers: who were giants of
their time, undertook a _Pendennis_ or a _Dombey and Son_, and having
accomplished a chapter or so, cheerfully went to bed and slept under
that dreadful imminent duty. You all know, who have studied _Pickwick_,
that _Pickwick_ began (so to speak) in the air; that it took the
narrative, so desultory in conception, some numbers before it found
a plot at all. But how admirable is the plot, once found or--to say
better--once happened on! For a double peripeteia who could ask better
art than the charitable turn of Pickwick on Jingle in the debtor’s
prison, and the incarceration and release of Mrs. Bardell? Consider the
first. Insensibly, without premonition of ours and I dare to say, of no
long prepared purpose in the author, the story finds a climax:

    “Come here, Sir,” said Mr. Pickwick, trying to look stern, with
    four large tears running down his waistcoat. “Take that, Sir.”

    Take what? In the ordinary acceptation of such language, it should
    have been a blow. As the world runs, it ought to have been a sound
    hearty cuff: for Mr. Pickwick had been duped, deceived, and wronged
    by the destitute outcast who was now wholly in his power. Must we
    tell the truth? It was something from Mr. Pickwick’s waistcoat
    pocket which chinked as it was given into Job’s hand....

But this admirable plot, with all the Bardell _versus_ Pickwick
business, and the second most excellent “reversal of fortune” when Mrs.
Bardell, the prosecutrix, herself gets cast into prison by Dodson and
Fogg whose tool she has been, and there, confronted by her victim and
theirs, finds herself (O wonder!) pardoned--with the simple, sudden,
surprising, yet most natural and (when you come to think of it) most
Christian story of Sam Weller’s loyalty and Mr. Weller’s aiding and
abetting, so absurdly and withal so delicately done--all this grew, as
everyone knows, with the story’s growth and grew out of fierce, rapid,
improvisation. You can almost see the crucible with the fire under it,
taking heat, reddening, exhaling fumes of milk-punch; and then, with
Sam Weller and Jingle cast into it for ingredients, boiling up and
precipitating the story, to be served

              as a dish
    Fit for the gods

--“served,” not “carved.” You cannot carve the dish of your true
_improvisatore_. You cannot _articulate_ a story of Dickens--or, if you
can, “the less Dickens he”: you may be sure it is one of his worst.
_A Tale of Two Cities_ has a deft plot: well-knit but stagey: and, I
would add, stagey _because_ well-knit, since (as we shall presently
see) Dickens, cast back upon plot, ever conceived it in terms of the
stage; of the stage, moreover, at its worst--of the early-Victorian
stage, before even a Robertson had preluded better things. So, when I
talk to any man of Dickens, and he ups with his first polite concession
that _A Tale of Two Cities_ is a fine story, anyhow, I know that man’s
case to be difficult, for that he admires what is least admirable in
Dickens. Why, Gentlemen, you or I could with some pains construct as
good a plot as that of _A Tale of Two Cities_; as you or I could with
some pains construct a neater plot than Shakespeare invented for _The
Merry Wives of Windsor_ or even hand out some useful improvements on
the plot of _King Lear_. The trouble with us is that we cannot write a
_Merry Wives_, a _Lear_; cannot touch that _it_ which, achieved, sets
the _Merry Wives_ and _Lear_, in their degrees, above imperfection,
indifferent to imperfections detectable even by a fool. Greatness is
indefinable, whether in an author or a man of affairs: but had I to
attempt the impossibility, no small part of my definition would set
up its rest on indifference--on a grand carelessness of your past
mistakes, involving a complete unconcern for those who follow them, to
batten on the bone you have thrown over your shoulder.


II

Dickens was a great _novelist_--as I should contend, the greatest
of English novelists--and certainly among the greatest of all the
greatest European novelists. His failing was that he did not quite
trust his genius for the novel, but was persuaded that it could be
bettered by learning from the drama--from the bad drama of his time.
But I want you to see, Gentlemen, how honourable was the artist’s
endeavour; how creditable, if mistaken, to the man. He was a born
_improvisatore_. _Pickwick_, under your eyes, takes a shape--conceives
it, finds it--as the story goes on. Then shape he must struggle for;
the idea of “shape” has, against his genius, taken hold on him. So
_Pickwick_ is not finished before he begins a new story, never thinking
to repeat, by similar methods, _Pickwick’s_ overwhelming success.
No, the responsibility of that success weighs on him; but it is a
responsibility to improve. The weakness of _Pickwick_, undertaken as
a series of mock-sporting episodes, lies in its desultoriness. This
time we will have a well-knit plot. And so we get _Oliver Twist_ and
_Nicholas Nickleby_, each with any amount of plot, but of plot in
the last degree stagey; so stagey, indeed, that in _Nickleby_ the
critic gasps at the complacency of an author who, having created that
“nurseling of immortality” Mr. Vincent Crummles, together with a world
and the atmosphere of that world in which Crummles breathes and moves
and has his being, can work the strings of the puppet with so fine a
finger, detect its absurdities with so sure an instinct and reveal them
with so riotous a joy; yet misses to see that he himself is committing
absurdities just as preposterous, enormities of the very same category,
on page after page. The story of Lord Frederick Verisopht and Sir
Mulberry Hawke, for example, is right Crummles from beginning to end.
Crummles could have composed it in his sleep,--and to say this, mind
you, is to convey in the very censure an implicit compliment--or,
shall I use a more modest word and say implicit homage? Crummles could
have written a great part of _Nickleby_: but Crummles could only have
written it after Dickens had made him. I seem to hear the two arguing
it out in some _Dialogue of the Dead_.

    _Auctor._ “My dear Crummles, however _did_ you contrive to be what
    you are?”

    _Crummles._ “Why, don’t you see, Mr. Dickens? You created me in
    your image.” (_sotto voce_) “And, he doesn’t know it, poor great
    fellow, but it seems to me I’ve been pretty smart in returning the
    compliment.”


III

I have said, in a previous lecture, that Dickens, from first to last,
strove to make himself a better artist; quoting to you a sentence
of Henley’s, which I repeat here because you have almost certainly
forgotten it:

    He had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the
    middle-class Englishman; and if in all his life, he never ceased
    from self-education, but went unswervingly in the pursuit of
    culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience
    as an artist would not let him do otherwise.

“Unswervingly”?--no, not unswervingly. No great genius that ever
was has marched unswervingly on. As a condition of becoming a great
artist he must be more sensitive than his fellows; as a result of that
sensitiveness he will doubt, hesitate, draw back to leap the better.
The very success of his latest book, his latest picture, alarms him.
“Oh yes,” the true artist says to his heart, “popularity is sweet;
money is sweet; and I can hold both in my hand by the simple process
of repeating myself.” And the temptations are many and great. You have
on the profits of your first and second books, and a reasonable hope
of continuance, enlarged your way of life, incurred responsibilities,
built a charming house not yet paid for, married a wife who adores you
(shall we say?) and is proud of your celebrity, but for these very
reasons--and chiefly for love--will on any diminution of your fame,
fret secretly even if she does not nag actively. Against this we have,
opposed, the urge in the true artist who--having done a thing--tosses
it over his shoulder and thinks no more of it; can only think of how to
do something further and do it better. I indicate the strength of the
temptation. There are, of course, sundry ways of getting round it. For
instance, as _I_ read the life of Shakespeare from the few hints left
to us, Shakespeare dodged it by the Gordian-knot solution of leaving
his wife and bolting to London: a solution in this particular instance
happy for us, yet not even on that account to be recommended in general
to young literary aspirants. I mention Shakespeare here less for this,
than as an exemplar of the true artist, never content with his best,
to repeat it. Why, having written a _Hamlet_, an _Othello_, did he,
instead of reproducing _Hamlets_ and _Othellos_, go on to have a shy at
a _Cymbeline_? For the self-same reason, Sirs, why Ulysses--if I may
quote a poet none too popular just now--could not bide at home after
even such tribulations of wandering as had become a proverb:

                              I am become a name;
    For always roaming with a hungry heart
    Much have I seen and known; cities of men
    And manners, climates, councils, governments,
    Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
    And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
    Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
    I am a part of all that I have met;
    Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
    Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
    For ever and for ever when I move.
    How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
    To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
    As tho’ to breathe were life.  Life piled on life
    Were all too little, and of one to me
    Little remains: but every hour is saved
    From that eternal silence, something more,
    A bringer of new things--

You may read the mere yearning of this, if you will, in Defoe, opening
_The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe_; or, if you will, in
Kipling’s

    For to admire an’ for to see,
      For to be’old this world so wide--
    It never done no good to me,
      But I can’t drop it if I tried

--and these express the _instinct_. The sanction, for us, lies in the
words

          but every hour is saved
    From that eternal silence, something more,
    A bringer of new things.

And the desire for that--as I am sure you know--operates with no less
force of prompting in the spiritual world than in the world of commerce
and sea-travel. It carried Shakespeare at the last to that Ariel’s isle
which no commentator has ever (thank heaven!) been able yet to locate;
and it brought him home at the very last

    A bringer of new things.


IV

Now if you accept no more than a much lower estimate of Dickens than I
am preaching, you will be apt to dismiss what I have just been saying
as “tall talk”: and you will be quite mistaken, because it applies from
Shakespeare down to men of infinitesimally less desert than Dickens; to
every small artist, in fact, whose conscience will not cease harrying
him until he improves on his best: a process which obviously--and, as a
matter of history, with the great authors--never stops until they come
to the grave.

At which point my now notorious discursiveness, Gentlemen, also stops
and gets back to Dickens. You see, the trouble of the matter is that
in these experiments an author can never be sure. He takes an infinite
risk, it may be _against his own true genius_. Where is the critic to
correct him?


V

Well, with Dickens, his own adoring public corrected him sharply and,
on the whole, with true instinct. To them he was the wand-waving
magician, the _improvisatore in excelsis_ who had caught up out of
their midst an elderly small gentleman in spectacles and gaiters and
shot him suddenly out of Goswell Street into the firmament, to be a
star equal with Hercules--

                  sic fratres Helenae, lucida sidera--

“instead of which” he had turned to making plots so patently theatrical
(and of the theatre of Crummles) that the man himself was helping
everybody to see through them. So came the revenge; over-proved by the
opening chapter of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, which I suppose to be about the
sorriest piece of writing ever perpetrated by a great English writer.
Its perusal induces on _me_ at any rate, something like physical
misery, not unmixed with the sort of shame any one of us might feel if
a parent behaved unbecomingly in public. I want to obey the exhortation
on Mrs. Sapsea’s monument and “with a blush retire.”

But, note you, the general reader--that entity often abused, seldom
quite the fool that he looks--was quick to mark and punish. Listen to
Forster:

    _Chuzzlewit_ had fallen short of all the expectations formed of
    it in regard to sale. By much the most masterly of his writings
    hitherto, the public had rallied to it in far less numbers than
    to any of its predecessors.... The primary cause of this, there
    is little doubt, had been the change to weekly issues in the form
    of publication of his last two stories.... The forty and fifty
    thousand purchasers of _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, the sixty and
    seventy thousand of the early numbers of the enterprises in which
    _The Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Barnaby Rudge_ appeared had fallen
    to little over twenty thousand. They rose, somewhat on Martin’s
    ominous announcement, at the end of the fourth number, that he’d go
    to America....

They rose at once by a couple of thousand: but a serial of course can
never be easily lifted out of a rut into which it has once dropped.
The reasons for this are obvious, and the serial sales of _Chuzzlewit_
never over-topped twenty-three thousand. There was a very different
story when _Chuzzlewit_ came to book form. “Its sale, since,” writes
Forster, “has ranked next after _Pickwick_ and _Copperfield_.” In
short, Dickens had been, quite conscientiously, in the opening chapters
of _Chuzzlewit_, working against the grain of his genius. His public
recalled him to it in the brutal way the public uses. When he sat down
to write _Chuzzlewit_ he had never an idea of carrying Martin off to
America. Suddenly, in fear of falling sales and many challenges to make
good his _American Notes_, he became the _improvisatore_ again and
switched his hero across the Atlantic. Who will deny that the American
chapters of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ are its best and, save for any given
chapter upon which Sarah Gamp knocks in, its most memorable?


VI

None the less, and to the end, Dickens the artist is hag-ridden by
this business of “plot,” which for him meant “stage-plot.” It hampers
him in book after book, as its silly exigencies perpetually get in
the way of the reader’s pleasure, even of the reader’s understanding.
His genius did not lie that way, any more than did Shakespeare’s. I
put in this comparison, for it can never be untimely for a Professor
of English Literature to get in a word to damn the school-books
which present Shakespeare to you as chasing along his shelves for
some Italian novel to provide him with a new plot. Oh, believe me,
Gentlemen--after _The Comedy of Errors_ and that sort of thing,
Shakespeare never bothered any more about his plots or whence he took
them. It is very right indeed for a young author to sweat his soul over
“plot” structure. But, through practice, there comes a time--suddenly,
it may be, but as sure in his development as puberty in his physical
growth--when lo! he has a hundred plots to his hand, if heaven would
but grant him time to treat them. I often wonder why men blame the
elder Dumas so severely, accepting the allegation that he employed
hirelings--viciously termed by the critic his “ghosts” or his “devils.”
Why, if you have an imagination teeming, like Dumas’, with stories to
make men happier--_why_, knowing how short is life and that you cannot,
on this side of the grave, tell one-fifth of these with your own
pen--why go to that grave leaving the world, through that scruple, so
much imaginatively the poorer? Only the thing should be done frankly,
openly, of course.


VII

I just raise that question. It applies to Dumas and (I think) to most
great novelists. But it applies less to Dickens than to most--than to
Trollope for instance. And in this very inapplicability lies a secret
of Dickens’ weakness which I am to suggest.

His plots are not merely stagey, melodramatic. Carefully examined, they
are seen to repeat themselves, under a wealth of disguise, with an
almost singular poverty of invention. Let us take one most favourite
trick of his--the trick of “the masked battery” as I shall call it:
the discomfiture of the villain by the betrayal of his supposed
confederate. The characters are artfully assembled for the bad man’s
triumph. Of a sudden the confederate rounds on him, gives him away
before the audience--usually in a long story, at the end of which
the baffled schemer creeps away, usually again to destroy himself.
We get this _coup_ as early as in _Oliver Twist_ where Monks blurts
out his story. It is repeated in _Nickleby_ when Ralph Nickleby is
confronted with the man “Snawley” and by Squeers. In the next novel,
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, we get a double dose; Jonas “given away” by an
accomplice; Pecksniff explosively denounced by Old Chuzzlewit after a
long course of watchful dissimulation. This idea of a long and careful
dissimulation so catches hold of Dickens that he goes on to rope into
its service in subsequent stories two men who, on his own showing of
them, are about the very last two in the world capable of carrying
through a strategy so patient--Mr. Micawber in _David Copperfield_ and
Mr. Boffin in _Our Mutual Friend_. As a portrait, Mr. Boffin ranks
pretty high even in Dickens’ gallery, while Micawber ranks with the
very best of his best. But who will assert that either of them could
have found it in his nature to behave as the plot compels them to
behave? To continue--by just the same trick Quilp gets his exposure in
_The Old Curiosity Shop_, Harewood forces the revelation in _Barnaby
Rudge_, Lady Dedlock is hunted down in _Bleak House_. The more the
peripeteia--the reversal of fortune--disguises itself, the more it is
the same thing.


VIII

George Santayana--he is so excellent a writer that I dispense with
“Doctor” or “Professor” or other prefix to his name--tells us that:

    Dickens entered the theatre of this world by the stage door; the
    shabby little adventures of the actors in their private capacity
    replace for him the mock tragedies which they enact before a
    dreaming public. Mediocrity of circumstance and mediocrity of
    soul for ever return to the centre of his stage; a more wretched
    or a grander existence is sometimes broached, but the pendulum
    swings back, and we return, with the relief with which we put
    on our slippers after the most romantic excursion, to a golden
    mediocrity--to mutton and beer, and to love and babies in a
    suburban villa with one frowsy maid.

Yes, that is true enough, but not all the truth. Dickens entered the
theatre by the stage door; but he passed through to the front, to turn
up the lights, wave his wand and create a new world--a fairy world, let
us agree: a theatrical world, as I have been attempting to show. Yet
consider--

Most of us in this room have childish recollections of green fields,
running brooks, woods in leaf, birds’ nests, cattle at pasture, all
that pageant of early summer which is going on at this moment a few
furlongs from this desk--this dead piece of timber--and at the thought
of which (if you will not think me impolite) I long to be somewhere
else at this moment. With some of us elders, not specially imaginative,
the early habit persists even after long servitude to city life: so
that still by habit our first instinct on rising from bed is to go
to the window and con the weather--how the day is making, from what
quarter the wind sets--“Is it too strong for the fruit blossom?” “Will
it be a good day for the trout?” Again, of my experience I appeal
to some of you--to those who, aware in childhood or boyhood (quite
suddenly, it may be, made aware) of the beauty underlying this world
(yes, and clothing it too), have been as suddenly afflicted with the
hopeless yearning to express it, was not that yearning awakened,
quickened in you, you knew not how, by some casual sight--an open glade
between woods, a ship with all canvas spread, or, through the hazels,

                  the nesting throstle’s shining eye,

or the fish darting in the deep of a pool? Was it not some similar
moment that, though you have never yet arrived at putting it and its
underthought into words, yet so touched you that for the rest of your
days you will understand what was in Coleridge’s heart when he wrote:

    O happy living things! no tongue
      Their beauty might declare:
    A spring of love gush’d from my heart,
      And I blessed them unaware.

Yes, and I dare say your first visit to the theatre brought you a like
delicious shock. (I can recall to this day, very distinctly, the gods
and goddesses who, between the acts of my first pantomime, danced on
the blue ceiling with baskets and festoons of roses.)

But now, bethink you that Dickens struggled through a childhood to
which green fields, trees, birds, cattle, brooks and pools, were all
denied: that the child was condemned to a squalid lodging; to spend his
days washing bottles in a dreadful blacking factory, his hours “off”
in visiting his parents in the yet more dreadful Marshalsea prison to
which his father had been committed for debt: and you will understand
not only that he had to enter the theatre of this world by the stage
door, but that the lighted theatre, when he could pay a few pence and
get to the gallery, was his one temple of beauty: that only there--if
we except a hint or two picked up in the street--from a shabby acrobat
or a stray Punch and Judy show--could he drink the romance for which
his young spirit thirsted. You have all read, I doubt not, Charles
Lamb’s paper on “_My First Play_,” first contributed to the _London
Magazine_ in December, 1821, afterwards reprinted in _Elia_:

    But when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled
    a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed--the
    breathless anticipations I endured! I had seen something like
    it in the plate prefixed to _Troilus and Cressida_ in Rowe’s
    Shakespeare--the tent scene with Diomede--and a sight of that
    plate can always bring back in a measure the feeling of that
    evening--The boxes at that time, full of well-dressed women of
    quality, projected over the pit; and the pilasters reaching down
    were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under
    glass (as it seemed), resembling--a homely fancy--but I judged
    it to be sugar-candy--yet, to my raised imagination, divested
    of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy!--The
    orchestra lights at length arose, those ‘fair Auroras’! Once the
    bell sounded. It was to ring out yet once again--and, incapable of
    anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in a sort of resignation upon
    the maternal lap. It rang the second time. The curtain drew up--I
    was not past six years old--and the play was Artaxerxes!

There we have the confession of a Cockney-bred boy, more happily placed
than was Dickens at the same age or for many years later. Lamb had his
hardships, his tragedy or tragedies, in life: but in the childhood of
Dickens, most sensitively resentful, penury and shameful occupation bit
down to the bone. What other vision of beauty had he--a born actor, as
all contemporaries report--but that which Drury Lane or Covent Garden
supplied? Love, says a late Roman singer, was born in a _field_:

    _Ipse Amor, puer Dionae, rure natus dicitur_--
    Pleasure planteth a field; it conceives under Pleasure, the pang of
            its joy:
    In a field was Dione in labour delivered of Cupid the boy:
    And the field to her lap, to her fostering breast, took the rascal;
            he drew
    Mother’s milk from the delicate kisses of flowers and he prospered
            and grew--
    Now learn ye to love who loved never: now ye who have loved, love
            anew!

The bad early and mid-Victorian stage hurt more than one Victorian
novelist of genius. It seriously hurt Charles Reade, for example, who
habitually sought the advice of Egeria from a fourth-rate actress:
and that should bring tears to the eyes of any critic who knows
Reade’s strong country nurture and has sized his genius. But, with
Dickens--think of that forlorn child, plotting to snatch his soul’s
sustenance in the shilling gallery of Drury Lane--at intervals how
rare! Is it any wonder that--to convert a famous phrase--coming to
power, he invoked out of the theatre a new world, to redress the
balance of his old?


IX

Moreover--and mind you this--you will never understand Charles Dickens
until you realise how exquisitely, how indignantly the genius in this
child of the blacking-warehouse felt the shame of its lot. Dickens was
never a snob: but a prouder spirit never inhabited flesh. This shepherd
boy was not one to sing in the Valley of Humiliation. For years after
success came to him he kept his mouth closed like a steel trap upon
past agonies. At length he confided something to Forster (_Life_,
Volume 1, Chapter 2), and few sadder reflections have ever been implied
by a grown man upon his parents:

    It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away
    at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent
    into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no
    one had compassion on me--a child of singular abilities, quick,
    eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally--to suggest that
    something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been,
    to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were
    tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite
    satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been
    twenty years of age, distinguished at a Grammar School, and going
    to Cambridge.

Terrible words those: the more terrible for being, after long
repression, uttered so judicially.

And again:

    I suppose my lodging was paid for by my father: I certainly
    did not pay it myself, and I certainly had no other assistance
    whatever--the making of my clothes, I think, excepted--from
    Monday morning until Saturday night. No advice, no counsel, no
    encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone that I can
    call to mind, so help me God!

Nor did his parents’ neglect end with starving his heart’s affection,
his brain’s activity. It starved the weak little body into spasms
through malnutrition. He had a boy friend in the warehouse, one Bob
Fagin. Dickens writes of this time:

    Bob Fagin was very good to me on the occasion of a bad attack of my
    old disorder. I suffered such excruciating pain that they made a
    temporary bed of straw in my old recess in the counting-house, and
    I rolled about on the floor, and Bob filled empty blacking-bottles
    with hot water, and applied relays of them to my side half the
    day. I got better and quite easy towards evening; but Bob (who was
    much bigger and older than I) did not like the idea of my going
    home alone, and took me under his protection. _I was too proud to
    let him know about the prison_; and after making several efforts
    to get rid of him, to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was
    deaf, shook hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark
    Bridge on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there. As a
    finishing piece of reality, in case of his looking back, I knocked
    at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman opened it, was
    that Mr. Robert Fagin’s house?

_O caeca pectora!_ Dickens had hard streaks in him, and I confess to
a curious wonderment how, afterwards, he could have used that name of
Fagin--how he _could_ have used it as he did--_in Oliver Twist_.

But I end by repeating my question--Is it any wonder that this
street-boy of genius, coming to his own, invoked out of the theatre a
new world, to redress the balance of his old?

Of that new world I propose to say something, Gentlemen, a fortnight
hence.




DICKENS (IV)


PREFACE

I think it meet, Gentlemen, that before we resume our subject to-day,
a word should be said on a loss that has befallen English letters in
general and our sister-University in particular, since I last addressed
you.

Walter Raleigh was an authentic son of Cambridge: and although he spent
the most of his life teaching in other places the better understanding
of a literature--our own literature--which in his undergraduate days
had not found adequate recognition here, yet Cambridge had been his
pasture, and he carried everywhere the mettle of that pasture: yes, and
unmistakably, and although by the gay sincerity of his nature he would
win men to like him, wherever he went.

Personal affection may count for too much in my faith that he will
some day be recognised, not only for a true son of Cambridge, but for
a great one in his generation. I put, however, that reckoning on one
side. He did, very gaily and manfully and well, all the work that
fell to his hand; and his end was in this wise. He had, in the first
and second weeks of August, 1914, been eye-witness at Oxford of one
of two amazing scenes--the other simultaneously passing here--when in
these precincts, in these courts of unconscious preparation, by these
two sacred streams, all on a sudden the spirit of youth was a host
incorporate.

                Χρυσῷ δ’ ἄρα Δῆλος ἅπασα
    ἤνθησ’, ὡς ὅτε τε ῥίον οὔρεος ἄνθεσιν ὕλης.

    “Then Delos broke in gold, as a mountain spur is canopied in season
    with the flowering bush.”

“The mettle of your pasture” ... “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley
of decision” ... and the host, so suddenly gathered, as suddenly in
motion, gone, for their country’s sake challenging the scythe. Raleigh
saw that with his eyes, and could not forget.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Dean of St. Paul’s returned, the other day, to a rightly respectful
Cambridge, to deliver a Rede Lecture to us on _The Victorian Age_. Now
he is a fool who denies or doubts Dean Inge to be a great man of our
time--though he may now and then be a little too apt to regard himself
as the only widow of another. Dean Inge, at any rate, felt himself
strong enough to tell you he had no doubt that, to the historian of the
future, the Elizabethan and Victorian Ages will appear as “the twin
peaks in which English civilisation culminated.”

Now I have been talking to you--already through three lectures--upon
the best-beloved writer of that Victorian Age--its most representative
writer, perhaps--and preaching his eminence. But I should be nervous
of claiming quite all that! It seems to me, if I may put it so without
offence, a somewhat complacent view for _us_ to take of an Age in which
we were born--he, to unseal the vials of prophecy, I, just to happen
along with the compensation of a more sanguine temperament. He admits
that he has “no wish to offer an unmeasured panegyric on an age which
after all cannot be divested of the responsibility for making our own
inevitable.” He admits that “the twentieth century will doubtless be
full of interest, and may even develop some elements of greatness.” But
as regards this country, “the signs are that our work on a grand scale,
with the whole world as our stage, is probably nearing its end.” Well,
I dare to say that such talk from a man of the Dean’s age or mine is
more than unhopeful; is ungrateful:

            Difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti....

Would he but go back in memory to the _tempus actum_ of August, 1914,
it may dawn upon him that “fears may be liars” and the likelier for
that some hopes were not dupes: that some men less gifted, less
eloquent, than he, in those August days of 1914 saw this vision as of a
farther Pacific:

                     Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Raleigh at any rate saw it: I would not use extravagant language, but
I verily believe Raleigh, from that hour, saw the assembled chivalry
of those boys of 1914 as a meadow of cloth-of-gold spreading past all
known or prophetical horizons--a prairie, the scent over which was a
scent of sacrifice, at once holy and intolerable. Let me repeat--for
one does not ring changes on the loss of a friend--the mourning bell
strikes once and repeats itself--let me repeat some words written, the
other night, under durance on returning from his funeral:

    In his last few years, under an invincible inward compulsion, he
    turned from his life’s trade, in which he had vindicated himself
    as one of the best few, to become a child again and learn to be a
    valiant soldier. The sacrifice of the young in 1914–18, about which
    so many talk so easily, was a torture to him: it cut to the bone,
    the marrow. It was matter for indignation that he should survive
    these many boys.... Some of us, who noted, almost from the first,
    the operation of the War upon Raleigh’s soul, foreboded that in
    some way or other it would cut short his span, or, at least, that
    it menaced him. His converse again and again would wander away from
    the old writers, once his heart-fellows, to machinery, air-fights,
    anything.... When I last talked with him he was full of his History
    of the Air Service in the War, the first volume of which is in
    the press, I believe. For the second he went out to survey, from
    the air, the fields of campaign in Mesopotamia, took typhoid in
    Baghdad, and came home just in time to die.

It is a purely simple story: of a great teacher who saw his pupils go
from him on a call more instant than his teaching, and followed their
shades with no thought of

                 So were I equall’d with them in renown

but the thought only to overtake them in service.

       *       *       *       *       *

Forgive the length of my discourse, Gentlemen. It is right, I think,
that our sister-Universities should feel one for the other’s pride, one
for the other’s wound.


I

To take up our tale--

It has already been objected against these lectures on Dickens--or
against such parts of them as the newspapers honour me by
quoting--that they treat Dickens as a genius of the first class. That
term has little meaning for me who seldom or never think--can hardly
bring myself to think--of great men in class-lists, in terms of a
Tripos. (I reserve that somewhat crude method of criticism to practise
it upon those who are _going to be_ great men; and even so--if you
will credit me--derive scant enjoyment from it.) But I foresaw the
objection, and forestalled it by quoting a famous saying of Tasso,
and I take my stand on that: as I take not the smallest interest in
weighing Chaucer against Pope, Shakespeare against Milton, Scott
against Burns, or Dickens against Thackeray. Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Scott, Dickens--their other qualities apart--are grand creators, lords
of literature all, by this specific virtue; and, were there sense in
challenging, with this _quadriga_ alone we could securely challenge
any literature in any living tongue. Note you, moreover: it is to
this creative power that other artists less creative, but great and
therefore generous, instinctively pay homage: Dryden, for instance, or
Byron:

    ’Tis to create, and in creating live
      A being more intense that we endow
    With form our fancy, gaining as we give
      The life we image, even as I do now.
    What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,
      Soul of my thought!...

    (_Childe Harold_, III. 6.)

Or again:

                          The mind can make
    Substance, and people planets of its own
    With beings brighter than have been, and give
    A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh....

    (_The Dream_, st. 1.)

Note you particularly, if you will, the words “planets of its own....”
We talk too often, perhaps (I have talked in this fashion myself
unheedingly), as if these men had been makers of picture-galleries,
lining their walls with lively characters, brilliant portraits. But
in truth neither Chaucer’s _Prologue_ nor Shakespeare’s succession of
women, neither _Redgauntlet_ nor _David Copperfield_, is a gallery of
characters; but a planet rather, with its own atmosphere which the
characters breathe; in which as proper inhabitants they move easily
and have their natural being: while for us all great literature is
a catholic hostelry, in which we seat ourselves at the board with
Falstaff, Dugald Dalgetty, Sam Weller, the Wife of Bath, Mrs. Gamp and
Mrs. Quickly, and wonder how soon Don Quixote, My Uncle Toby, or The
Three Musketeers will knock in to share the good meat and the wine.


II

So, between a discussion of Dickens’ plots--which we examined a
fortnight ago and found wanting--at once stagey and ill-knit and, at
that, repetitive, poor in invention; and of his characters, which
teemed from his brain in a procession closed only by their author’s
death, so inexhaustibly various and withal so individual, vivid and
distinct, that the critic can scarcely help telling himself, “Here,
and only here, _must_ lie the secret of the man’s genius”; I shall
interpose to-day a few words upon this world of Dickens, with its
atmosphere.

For it is a strange world, with an atmosphere of its own, as strange as
itself.

I have already noted some things of that world of his--that it was a
crowded world: a world of the city, of the streets; that his novels,
when they visit the country, take us at a violent rate in post-chaises
to find, with Shenstone,

                     The warmest welcome at an inn.

For one moment, at the term of Little Nell’s wanderings, in the quiet
of the old schoolmaster’s garden, we almost touch a sense of country
rest and repose. But of _real_ country, of solid growth in rest, of
sport, of gardens, of farms and tenantry, of harvests, of generations
rooted, corroborated in old grudges, old charities; of all that England
stood for in Dickens’ day and, of its sap, fed what Cobbett had already
called the “Great Wen” of London, our author had about as much sense as
Mr. Winkle of a horse, or a snipe.

Now I wish to be rather particularly scrupulous just here: for we are
dealing with a peculiarly, an unmistakably genuine, English writer;
who, himself a child of the streets, acquainted, by eyesight and daily
wont, with an industrial England into which the old agricultural
England--what with railway and factory, gas, and everything extractible
from coal--was rapidly converting itself; did yet by instinct seize
on the ancient virtues. Take away the hospitality, the punch and
mistletoe, from Dingley Dell, and what sort of a country house is
left? Why, the _Handley Cross_ series, for which Messrs. Chapman and
Hall intended _Pickwick_ as a stale challenge, could give _Pickwick_
ten and a beating from the first. As the season comes round you play
cricket at Dingley Dell, or you skate, or you mix the bowl and turn
the toe. But the stubble-fields are not there, nor the partridges; nor
the turnips, nor the gallops to hounds, nor the tillage and reaping,
nor the drowsed evenings with tired dogs a-stretch by the hearth. Of
all this side of England Dickens knew, of acquaintance, nothing. I am
not speaking, you will understand, of any Wordsworthian intimacy with
natural scenery tender or sublime, of anything imparted or suggested to
the imagination by a primrose or in the “sounding cataract” haunting
it “like a passion.” I am speaking rather of human life as lived in
rural England in Dickens’ time and in some corners yet surviving the
week-end habit. Of these Sabine virtues, of these Sabine amenities and
hardships, of the countryman’s eye on the weather-glass for “snow and
vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling His word,” Dickens (I repeat) had
no sense, having no tradition, of field life, of that _neighbourliness_
which existed in quiet places and persisted around ancient houses:

    The summer air of this green hill
    ’Va-heaved in bosoms now all still,
    And all their hopes and all their tears
    Be unknown things of other years....
    So, if ’twere mine, I’d let alone
    The great old House of mossy stone.

Dickens loved the old stage-coaches and travel by them. What he thought
of the new railways and their effect upon landscape, you may read
in _Dombey and Son_. He lived, moreover, to undergo the chastening
experience of a railway collision. But his actual sense of the country
you may translate for yourself from the account, in _Bleak House_, of
the country life of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock. It is worse than
stupid: it is vapid: or, rather, it is not there at all. Will you
conceive Dickens, closing one of those Adelphi-Dedlock chapters and
running his head suddenly into Mr. Wilfrid Blunt’s ballad of _The Old
Squire_?

    I like the hunting of the hare
      Better than that of the fox;
    The new world still is all less fair
      Than the old world it mocks....

    I leave my neighbours to their thought;
      My choice it is, and pride,
    On my own lands to find my sport,
      In my own fields to ride....

    Nor has the world a better thing
      Though one should search it round,
    Than thus to live, one’s own sole king
      Upon one’s own sole ground.

    I like the hunting of the hare;
      It brings me, day by day,
    The memory of old days as fair
      With dead men past away.

    To these, as homeward still I ply
      And pass the churchyard gate
    Where all are laid as I must lie,
      I stop and raise my hat.

    I like the hunting of the hare;
      New sports I hold in scorn.
    I like to be as my fathers were
      In the days e’er I was born.

For a figure like that--hopelessly conservative, if you will, but
conceived of truth, Dickens could only substitute a week-ender (as
we should say nowadays) and make him a pompous ass. By one touch or
two, of understanding what “the stately homes of England” really
stood for--their virtue along with their stupidity--by one touch of
Jane Austen’s wit, shall we say?--Dickens might have made some sort
of a fist of it. As it is, when he wanders anywhere into the country,
he is a lost child, mooning incuriously along the hedgerows with an
impercipience rivalling that of a famous Master of Trinity who once
confessed that his ignorance of botany was conterminous with all
Solomon’s knowledge, since it ranged from the cedar of Lebanon to the
hyssop that grows in the wall. Dickens’ favourite flower (we have it on
record) was a scarlet geranium!

Still, I would be fair, and must mention a fact which I have
experimentally discovered for myself and tested of late in the slow
process of compiling a Book of English Prose (an “Oxford Book,” if you
will forgive me), that, while our poetry from the very first--from
“Sumer is icumen in; Lhude sing cuccu!”--positively riots in country
scenes, sounds, scents, country delights:

                      --all foison, all abundance,

and soothes us with the deep joy of it, with music and “the herb called
heart’s-ease,” of all such joy, even of all such perception, our prose,
until we come to the middle of the last century, is correspondently
barren. Consider what a unique thing, and unique for generations, was
_The Compleat Angler_! Try of your memory to match it. An Essay of
Temple’s? a few pages of Bunyan, of Evelyn? The Sir Roger de Coverly
papers?--charming; but of the town, surely, and with something of
Saturday-to-Monday patronage not only in pose but in _raison d’être_?
Fielding understood the country better--witness his Squire Allworthy.
But on the whole, and in fairness, if Dickens’ pages exhibit--and
they do--a thin theatrical picture of rural England, without core or
atmosphere, against his childhood’s disinheritance--against the mean
streets and the Marshalsea--we must balance (if I may use a paradoxical
term) the weight of traditional vacuity.


III

But I fear we have a great deal more to empty out of this world of his.

To begin with, we must jettison religion; or at any rate all religion
that gets near to definition by words in a _Credo_. Religious formulae
I think we may say that he hated; and equally that he had little use
for ministers of religion. I can recall but one sympathetic portrait of
an Anglican parson--the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle, Minor Canon of
Cloisterham--and that in his last book, and with scarcely a shadow of a
quality impinged upon it by his vocation, by Holy Orders: Crisparkle,
Minor Canon and muscular Christian, well visualised, is a good fellow
just as Tartar in the same story is a good fellow: nothing more. George
Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, who disliked ecclesiastics, have to give
them understanding, even sympathy, in some degree. Dickens merely
neglects them. Unaccredited missionaries of the Gospel are humbugs all,
in Dickens; uneducated Pharisees, Stiggins’s, Chadbands; devourers of
widows’ (and widowers’) houses; spongers on the kindness and credulity
of poor folk just a little more ignorant than they, while far more
innocent. As for sacred edifices--cathedrals, churches--Dickens uses
them as picturesque, romantic, mouldy, just as suits his convenience--a
last harbourage for Little Nell or an object with a steeple suggesting
to Mr. Wemmick--“Hullo! here’s a church!... let’s get married!” If
Dickens ever conceives of a church as a tabernacle of any faith, I have
yet to find the passage.

You must remember that, while Dickens wrote, Tractarian Movements,
Unitarian Movements, Positivist Movements--Wiseman’s claim, Newman’s
secession, the Gorham judgment, Bishop Colenso’s heresies--Darwin’s
hypothesis, Huxley’s agnostic rejection of doctrine, and so on--that
all these were agitating men’s thoughts as with a succession of shocks
of earthquake. But all these passed Dickens by, as little observed as
felt by him: simply disregarded.


IV

Of political thought, again, his world is almost as empty. He was, in
his way, an early-Victorian Radical. When he saw a legal or political
hardship which hurt or depressed the poor, conventions injurious
to the Commonwealth--the Poor Laws, Debtors’ Prisons, the Court of
Chancery, the Patent (or Circumlocution) Office and so forth, with
the people who batten on such conventions, taking them for granted as
immutable--Dickens struck hard and often effectively. But he struck
at what he saw under his own eyes. Beyond this immediate indignation
he had no reasoned principles of political or social reform. I
have to hand, at this moment, no evidence to confirm a guess which
I will nevertheless hazard, that he hated Jeremy Bentham and all
his works. Certainly the professional, bullying, committee-working
philanthropists--Mrs. Jellaby and Mr. Honeythunder, whose successors
pullulate in this age--were the very devil to him. His simple formula
ever was--in an age when Parliament carried a strong tradition of
respect--“Yes, my Lords and Gentlemen, look on this waif, this corpse,
this broken life. Lost, broken, dead, my Lords and Gentlemen, and all
through your acquiescence, your misfeasance, your neglect!” To the
immediate reader his message ran simply, “Take into your heart God’s
most excellent gift of Charity: by which I mean let Charity begin at
home, in that kingdom of God which is within you, let it operate in
your own daily work; let it but extend to your own neighbours who need
your help; and so--and only so--will the city of God be established on
earth.”


V

I perceive, Gentlemen, that in my hurry I have let slip a great part
of the secret, and so will add but this in hasty summary, catching up,
before retreat, my cloak of _advocatus diaboli_:

(1) In the first place, Dickens’ world was not a world of ideas at all,
but a city “full of folk.” Compared with the world as Carlyle saw it,
or Clough, or Martineau, or Newman, or Arnold, it is void of ideas, if
not entirely unintellectual.

(2) Moreover, and secondly, it is a vivid hurrying world; but
the characters in it--until you come to Pip, say, in _Great
Expectations_--are all quite curiously static; and, as the exception
proves the rule, I am not afraid to back this assertion against _Martin
Chuzzlewit_, for example, in which young Martin is, of set purpose,
to be converted out of the family selfishness. Things happen to Mr.
Pecksniff, to Little Nell, to Mr. Micawber, to Mr. Dombey, to Bradley
Headstone and Eugene Wraybourne, to Sally Brass and her brother: but,
_as the rule_, these things do not happen _within them_, as such
things happen in the soul of any protagonist in a novel by Tolstoy or
Dostoievsky, or as they are intended and traced as happening (say)
in _Romola_. Dombey’s conversion is a mere stage-trick; and, for
Micawber’s apotheosis as a prosperous colonist, let him believe it who
will.


VI

Further--and to conclude on this point--over and beyond its infertility
of thought, Dickens’ is a world in which technical or professional
skill never comes into play to promote anything on earth. We have
spoken of his clergy. His innumerous lawyers, from the Lord Chancellor
to Messrs. Dodson and Fogg (assisted by his own personal experience
in the Law’s service), draw their money for exculpating the guilty or
slowly killing the righteous through hope deferred:

    The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
    The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
    The insolence of office--

Equally with lawyers (readers of epitaphs and of _David Copperfield_
will take the allusion) “physicians are in vain.” It would be
interesting [I do not suggest it as a subject of research for a Ph.D.
degree] to count the number of births in Dickens’ novels and discover
an _accoucheur_ who did not contrive to lose either the mother or the
child, or both.


VII

What remains, then, of a world thus emptied of religion, thought,
science?

I reserve the answer for a minute or two.

But I start my approach to it thus: Be the world of Dickens what you
will, he had the first demiurgic gift, of entirely believing in what he
created. The belief may be as frantic as you will: for any true artist
it is the first condition. Well, this remains: nobody has ever doubted
that, in the preface to _David Copperfield_, he wrote the strict truth:

    It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how
    sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the end of a two-years’
    imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing
    some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of
    all the creatures of his brain are going from him forever. Yet I
    had nothing else to tell, unless indeed I were to confess (which
    might be of less moment still) that no one can ever believe this
    Narrative in the reading more than I believed it in the writing.

Well, there, Gentlemen--just there, and so simply--you have the first
condition of a work of art--its own creator is so possessed that he
thoroughly believes in it. As Henry James once said to me (I recall the
words as nearly as I can), “Ah, yes, how jollily the little figures
dance under the circle of the lamp, until _Good-bye_, and off they go,
to take their chance of the dark!”


VIII

Having that, you have artistic sincerity: of which I wonder, as
experience enlarges, how many faults it cannot excuse--or indeed _what
is the fault it cannot excuse_.

All that remains of the merely artistic secret has been summarised by
Mr. Saintsbury:

    It cannot have taken many people of any competence in criticism
    very long to discover where, at least in a general way, the secret
    of this “new world” of Dickens lies. _It lies, of course, in the
    combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-tale
    unrealism of general atmosphere._ The note of one or the other or
    both, is sometimes forced and then there is a jar: in the later
    books this is frequently the case. But in _Pickwick_ it hardly ever
    occurs; and therefore, to all happily fit persons, the “suspension
    of disbelief,” to adopt and shift Coleridge’s great dictum from
    verse to prose fiction, is, except in the case of some of the short
    inset stories, never rudely broken. Never, probably, was there a
    writer who knew or cared less about Aristotle than Dickens did. If
    he had spoken of the father of criticism, he would probably have
    talked--one is not certain that he has not sometimes come near to
    talking--some of his worst stuff. But certainly, when he did master
    it (which was often) nobody ever mastered better than Dickens, in
    practice, the Aristotelian doctrine of the impossibility rendered
    probable or not improbable.

Well, there you have the artistic secret of Dickens’ world accurately
given, and not by me. _It lies in the combination of the strictest
realism of detail with a fairy-tale unrealism of general atmosphere._

Let me give you, to illustrate this, a single instance out of many.
In his Christmas story, _The Perils of Certain English Prisoners_--an
adventurous story of the sort that Stevenson loved and some of you make
the mistake of despising--a handful of a British garrison with their
women and children in a stockaded fort in South America tensely await
an attack of pirates hopelessly outnumbering them. Now listen to one
paragraph:

(It is a corporal of Marines who tells it.)

    “Close up here, men, and gentlemen all!” said the sergeant. “A
    place too many in the line.”

    The pirates were so close upon us at this time that the foremost
    of them were already before the gate. More and more came up with a
    great noise, and shouting loudly. When we believed from the sound
    that they were all there, we gave three English cheers. The poor
    little children joined, and were so fully convinced of our being at
    play, that they enjoyed the noise, and were heard clapping their
    hands in the silence that followed.

Defoe within his limits does that sort of thing to perfection: but then
Defoe’s world observes the limits of the “real” (as we absurdly call
everything that is not spiritual), has little emotion, scintillates
scarce a glimmer of humour. Dickens handles it in a phantasmagoric
world, charged even to excess with emotion, and is not in the least
afraid to employ it--I quote Mr. Saintsbury again:

    Of invading those confines of nonsense which Hazlitt proudly and
    wisely claimed as the appanage and province of every Englishman.

I need but to instance a writer whose acquaintance Hazlitt had not
the joy to make, nor Lamb--woe upon these divisions of time!--Lewis
Carroll, in whom both would have revelled for his insane logicality of
detail--or, if you prefer it, I will fall back upon Lear’s Nonsense
Books or even upon _A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_--to convince you that,
as a nation, we have this appanage: and if it bewilder a foreigner, or
he deride it, why then we will give him a look, and pass.


IX

Yes, but there is something else.

What else--no mere artistic secret--ties this phantasmagoric world to
ours and makes it universal with ours, conterminous, and so real?

It is no dodge or trick of artistry that can work so incredible a
feat--that can open our hearts to such beings as Dick Swiveller
and Mrs. Gamp (whom in private life you or I would avoid like the
plague)--to enjoy their company, to hang on every word they utter. It
must be some very simple catholic gift, thus to unite the unreal with
the real, thus to make brothers and sisters of all men and women, high
or low.

It is: nor shall I delay you by elaborate pretence to search for it.
For I know; and you know, or will recognise it as soon as I utter the
word. It is _Charity_; the inestimable gift of Charity that Dickens
flings over all things as his magic mantle: so that, whether there
be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall
cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away; and whether
there be little critics tormented about Dickens’ style, in the folds of
that mantle they shall be folded and hushed:

    That it may please Thee to preserve all that travel by land or
    by water, all women labouring of child, sick persons, and young
    children; and to shew Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives.

    That it may please Thee to defend, and provide for, the fatherless
    children, and widows, and all that are desolate and oppressed.

_That_ is the last secret of Dickens: and _that_ is what George
Santayana means when he writes:

    If Christendom should lose everything that is now in the
    melting-pot, human life would still remain amiable and quite
    adequately human. I draw this comforting assurance from the pages
    of Dickens.




DICKENS (V)


I

“I remember,” says Henry James in a wise little Essay on _The Art of
Fiction_--

    I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me
    that she was much commended for the impression she had managed
    to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the
    French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned
    so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated
    on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in
    her having, once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed
    an open door where, in the household of a _pasteur_, some of the
    young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The
    glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment
    was experience.

I wish I could make you promise, Gentlemen, to bear this little story
in mind whenever some solemn fellow assures you that a man rustically
born and bred could not have written _Hamlet_ or _The Tempest_; “he
would never have seen this, learned or experienced that” and so on: the
simple answer being that under such disadvantage _they_ would never
have written _Hamlet_ or _The Tempest_. They are, in fact, not even
Shakespeares to the extent of understanding how an artist creates, how
the imaginative mind operates.

Henry James, who was an artist and understood that operation, simply
comments on his anecdote that the lady had caught her direct personal
impression and it was enough:

    She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism: she also had the
    advantage of having seen what it was to be French, so that she
    converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality.

    Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which when
    you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a
    much greater source of strength than any accident of residence
    or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen
    from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the
    whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in
    general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any
    particular corner of it--this cluster of gifts may almost be said
    to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town,
    and in the most different stages of education.

Yes, Mr. James, for the purpose of your immediate argument “this
cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.” But for
our argument it does, and accurately, constitute imaginative genius.
It is the gift that taught Xenophanes, watching the stars, to catch
the whole piece from the pattern and cry out “All is one--” the gift
that suddenly hitches the particular upon the universal and gives us
a Falstaff, a Don Quixote, a Tartuffe, My Uncle Toby, the Vicar of
Wakefield--

                    Forms more real than living man.

You know--you must know--that none of these is a photographic portrait
of a living person--of a certain eccentric lodger whom Dickens had
studied in Goswell Street, of a certain bibulous nurse resident in
Kingsgate Street, High Holborn, “at a bird-fancier’s, next door but
one to the celebrated mutton-pie shop”--but children of imagination
begotten upon it by some such observant moment as was vital to Mr.
James’s lady novelist. What, in fact, was the genesis of Mr. Pickwick?
Dickens, you recall, was to write the letterpress accompaniment to a
series of humorous sporting sketches by Seymour. The publisher Mr.
Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, has left this uncontradicted record:

    As this letter is to be historical, I may as well claim what
    little belongs to me in the matter, and that is the figure of
    Pickwick. Seymour’s first sketch was of a long, thin man. The
    present immortal one he made from my description of a friend of
    mine at Richmond--a fat old beau who would wear, in spite of the
    ladies’ protests, drab tights and black gaiters. His name was John
    Foster.[1]

    [1] Is there not a blend of Mr. Tracy Tupman here?

Seymour drew the figure from Mr. Chapman’s description: Dickens put
life into it--yet more life--and made it a “nurseling of immortality.”
That, believe me, is how it happens; just so, and in no other way: and
the operative power is called Genius. Remind yourselves of this when
learned men, discussing Shakespeare, assure you they have fished the
particular murex up which dyed Hamlet’s inky cloak. Themselves are the
cuttle, and only theirs is the ink.


II

But we talk of Dickens: and the trouble with Dickens is that he--whose
brain in creating personage I suppose to be the most fecund that ever
employed itself on fiction--to the end of his days kept a curious
distrust of himself and a propensity for this childish expedient of
“drawing from the life.” It is miserable, to me, to think of this
giant who could turn off a Pickwick, a Sam Weller, a Dick Swiveller,
a Mark Tapley, a Sarah Gamp, Captain Cuttle, Mr. Dick, Mr. Toots, Mr.
Crummles, Mr. Mantalini, Dodson and Fogg, Codlin and Short, Spenlow
and Jorkins, Mrs. Jellaby, Mrs. Billickin, Mrs. Gargery, Mrs. Wilfer,
Mr. Twemlow, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Mr. Sapsea, Silas Wegg, and indeed
anyone you take into your own experience of life--from Mr. Chadband
to the Dolls’ Dressmaker, with hundreds of lesser characters no less
distinct--it is miserable to me, I say, that a Genius with all this
largess to mint and scatter should have taxed his acquaintance to stamp
their effigies upon poorer coin.


III

But let us discriminate. In “drawing from life” much will depend, as
Aristotle might say, on (_a_) the extent, (_b_) the manner, (_c_) your
intention: as likewise upon (_d_) the person drawn. I exclude all
such portraits as are likely to provoke an action at law; for these
come to be assessed under separate rules of criticism: and in general
we may say of them that they should be avoided from the instinct of
self-preservation rather than on grounds of disinterested aesthetic.

Confining ourselves, then, to portraits which are not actionable, we
may take, as an extreme instance, Samuel Butler’s _The Way of All
Flesh_. For in this book the persons portrayed are the author’s own
parents, and he portrays them in a manner and with intention to
make them odious, and to any extent: which seems to involve the nice
moral question whether a person the best able to do a thing should
not sometimes be the person who least ought to do it. And should
the injunction against laying hands on your father Parmenides cover
Parmenides if he happen to be your maiden aunt?--and maybe, too, she
can retort, because you come of a literary family, you know! This power
of retort, again, complicates a question which, you perceive, begins
to be delicate. Ought you to catch anyone and hit him where he cannot
hit back? Parmenides is no longer a relative but (say) a publisher, and
you have--or think you have--reason to believe that he has cheated you.
(And before you answer that this is incredible, let me say that I am
dealing with an actual case, in which, however, I was not a party.) Are
you justified in writing a work of fiction which holds him up to public
opprobrium under a thin disguise? In my opinion you are not: because
it means your attacking the fellow from a plane on which he can get no
footing, to retaliate.

But it may be urged against him that Dickens by consent, and pretty
well on his own admission, drew portraits of his mother in Mrs.
Nickleby, and of his father in Mr. Micawber, and again in old Mr.
Dorrit of the Marshalsea--this last, I am sure, the nearest to life.
Well, I pass the question of provocation or moral excuse, observing
only that Dickens tholed a childhood of culpable, even of damnable,
neglect, whereas the parents of Samuel Butler did at least wing, with
a Shrewsbury and Cambridge education, the barbs he was to shoot into
their dead breasts. Dickens’ parents turned him down, at ten, to a
blacking-factory, and, as we saw in our last lecture, when the moment
came to release him from the blacking-warehouse his mother tried to
insist on his returning.

    “I do not,” he records to Forster, “write resentfully or angrily,
    for I know how all these things have worked together to make me
    what I am; but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I
    never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.”


IV

So there was provocation in plenty, humiliation inflicted on a young
and infinitely sensitive mind. But, when we have granted that Dickens
borrowed from his mother for Mrs. Nickleby, from his father for Mr.
Micawber and the Elder Dorrit, mark you how genius diverges from
the mere hint--how far Micawber differs from Dorrit, while both are
elemental. Mark you further how and while both are sublimated and Mrs.
Nickleby too--how much charity has to do with the chemical process. Who
thinks of Mrs. Nickleby but as an amiable noodle? Who of Mr. Micawber,
but to enjoy his company? Who of Mr. Dorrit but with a sad ironical
pity? Where in any portrait of the three can you trace a stroke of that
vindictiveness you find bitten upon page after page of _The Way of All
Flesh_?

Moreover, choosing Old Dorrit, the least sympathetically but the most
subtly drawn of the three, I would ask you, studying that character
for yourselves, to note how Dickens conveys that, while much of
its infirmity is native, much also comes of the punishment of the
Marshalsea against which the poor creature’s pomposities are at once
a narcotic, and a protest, however futile, of the dignity of a human
soul, however abject. Mark especially, at the close of Chapter XXXV,
how delicately he draws the shade of the Marshalsea over Little Dorrit
herself. He would fain keep her, born and bred in that unwholesome den,
its one uncontaminated “prison-flower”--but with all his charity he is
(as I tried to show you in a previous lecture) a magisterial artist and
the truth compels him. Mark then the workings of this child’s mind on
hearing the glad news of her father’s release. Here is the passage:

    Little Dorrit had been thinking too. After softly putting his [her
    father’s] hair aside, and touching his forehead with her lips, she
    looked towards Arthur, who came nearer to her, and pursued in a low
    whisper the subject of her thoughts.

    “Mr. Clennam, will he pay all his debts before he leaves here?”

    “No doubt. All.”

    “All the debts for which he has been imprisoned here, all my life
    and longer?”

    “No doubt.”

    There was something of uncertainty and remonstrance in her look;
    something that was not all satisfaction. He wondered to detect it,
    and said:

    “You are glad that he should do so?”

    “Are you?” asked Little Dorrit wistfully.

    “Am I? Most heartily glad!”

    “Then I know I ought to be.”

    “And are you not?”

    “It seems to me hard,” said Little Dorrit, “that he should have
    lost so many years and suffered so much, and at last pay all the
    debts as well. It seems to me hard that he should pay in life and
    money both.”

    “My dear child----” Clennam was beginning.

    “Yes, I know I am wrong,” she pleaded timidly. “Don’t think any
    worse of me; it has all grown up with me here.”

    The prison, which could spoil so many things, had tainted Little
    Dorrit’s mind no more than this. Engendered as the confusion was,
    in compassion for the poor prisoner, her father, it was the first
    speck Clennam had ever seen, it was the last speck Clennam ever
    saw, of the prison atmosphere upon her.

Now I call that, Gentlemen, the true novelist’s stroke; rightly
divined, so suddenly noted that we, who had not expected it, consent at
once with a “Yes, yes--of course it happened so.”


V

But what I wish you to grasp is--in a man who could play strokes like
that by the score and conjure up out of his vasty deeps anything from
Dick Swiveller to Uncle Pumblechook, from the Marchioness to Mrs. Joe
Gargery--the silliness of diffidence which drove him again and again
to mere copying “from the life.” The superstition was idle, even when
it did no harm. Having, in _Oliver Twist_, to describe a harsh and
insolent Magistrate, Dickens (who could invent a Mr. Nupkins at will)
took pains to be introduced to the Hatton Garden Police Court over
which a certain Mr. Laing presided. He took these pains scrupulously,
through an official channel (as they say), with the double result that
we get Mr. Fang in the novel and that the Home Secretary very soon
found it convenient to remove Mr. Laing from the Bench--and this,
maybe, was all for the good--but you see how our author has already
mixed up his conception of Charles Dickens as an author with that of
Charles Dickens as a popular institution.

We will suppose that this Mr. Laing got his deserts. None the less
Dickens was hitting him on a pitch where he had no standing and could
not hit back. And I would warn you of this, Gentlemen--that if, trained
here, you go forth to do battle with wrongdoing, one of two methods is
equally fair, and no other. Either you must persuade men generally that
such and such a principle should govern their actions, or, if you have
to take a particular wrongdoer by the throat, you should in the first
place be absolutely sure of your facts, and, in the second, take him
preferably on his own ground: so that his defeat will be righteous and
plain to all, and he can excuse nothing on your advantage of position.

I have diverged into advising you as artists in public life: but the
advice is not irrelevant, for it echoes that which, repeatedly given
to Dickens by his best friends, he repeatedly ignored, yet never
without detriment to his art and not seldom with irritating personal
consequences. You all know how he came to grief over his caricatures of
Landor and Leigh Hunt in _Bleak House_. Laurence Boythorne was merely
a cheap superficial, not ill-natured, portrait. Landor, who never
condescended to notice it, might well have shrugged his tall shoulders
and said, “Is this the friend who visited Fiesole for my sake, and
sent me home the only gift I demanded--an ivy-leaf from my old Villa
there ... and is _this_ what he knows of me, or even what I seemed
to him?” (The ivy-leaf was found wrapped away among Landor’s papers,
twenty years later.) But nothing--least of all its verisimilitude--can
excuse the outrage perpetrated upon Leigh Hunt in the mask of Harold
Skimpole: for, as Forster observes, to this character in the plot
itself of _Bleak House_ is assigned a part which no fascinating foibles
or gaieties of speech could redeem from contempt. Hunt, who (with all
his faults) never lacked generosity, had been among the first to hail
and help Dickens, was (as often happens) the last to recognise himself
for the intended victim: but when some kind friend drew his attention
to the calculated wound, it went deep. Dickens apologised in a letter
which did its best, but could, in the nature of things, amount to no
more than kindly evasiveness. He was guilty, and he knew it. Hunt had
been wounded in the house of his friend. It was all very well, or ill,
for Dickens to plead (as he did) that in Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby he
had played a like trick on his own father and mother. The first and
most obvious answer to that is, “Well, if you did, you ought to have
known better”--the second, “And, anyhow, why should that make it any
the more agreeable to _me_?” But Mrs. Nickleby and Mr. Micawber (as we
saw) are kindly, even lovable characters. Harold Skimpole is at once
abject and mischievous: and as Forster very justly remarks:

    The kindly or unkindly impression makes all the difference
    where liberties are taken with a friend; and even this entirely
    favourable condition will not excuse the practice to many, where
    near relatives are concerned.

But Landor and Leigh Hunt, you may say, were literary men of their
hands, well able to defend themselves. Well, then, take down your
_David Copperfield_ and compare the Miss Mowcher of Chapter XXII with
the Miss Mowcher of Chapter XXXII. You will see at once that something
very queer has happened; that the Miss Mowcher of the earlier chapter,
obviously meant to be an odious little go-between in the Steerforth
plot, has changed into a decent little creature at once pathetic and
purposeless. Why? The answer is that the deformed original, recognising
her portrait, had in the interim addressed to Dickens a poignant
letter of remonstrance. Dickens, writing the story in monthly numbers,
apologised and hastily readjusted his plot.

These things work out to this--that in dealing with Dickens we have
to lay our account--as in dealing with Shakespeare we have to lay our
account--with a genius capable of vast surprises but at any point
liable to bolt out of self-control. I have no theories at all of what
a genius should be, or of how it ought to behave. Let us take what the
gods give and be thankful: and with Dickens as with Shakespeare--both
of whom write execrably at times and at times above admiration--we
have to accept this inequality as a condition of our arriving at the
very best. Even if we allow that a stricter schooling would have
spoilt both, and is indeed the bane of originality: still let us keep
our heads and tell ourselves that a great part of _Oliver Twist_ is
execrable stuff and no less, as the talk of Speed in _The Two Gentlemen
of Verona_ or of Lucio in _Measure for Measure_ is execrable stuff and
no less. By all means let us keep in mind that these flagrancies are
human and, if you will, a necessary part of any Shakespeare, of any
Dickens. But let us be quite clear in judging them as counterweights,
and tell ourselves that a Virgil or a Dante--yes, or a Cervantes--would
never need to ask such forgiveness from us.


VI

_Corruptio optimi pessima_ is one of those orotund sayings which
impress for the moment but are liable to have their wisdom very
considerably spokeshaved (so to speak) as soon as we apply the Socratic
knife. Is _Tarzan of the Apes_, after all, a corruption of the best?
And, if so, from what incalculable height did Lucifer plunge, and how
many days did he take before he broke the roof of the railway station
and scattered himself over the bookstalls? We may derive solace, if
we will, by telling ourselves that those horrible days in the Chandos
Street blacking-warehouse were a part of the education of Dickens’
genius, taught it to _observe_, and so on. But I say to you, as he
said of Little Dorrit, that such a shadow of cruelty, induced upon a
sensitive boy, must inevitably leave its stain: and I do most earnestly
ask you, some of whom may find yourselves trustees for the education
of poor children, if you are sure that Dickens himself was the better
for a starved childhood? For my part I can give that starvation little
credit for his achievement, reading its effect rather into his many
faults of taste and judgment.


VII

It is usual to class among the first of these faults a defective sense
of English prose: and the commonest arraignment lies against his use of
blank verse in moments of pathos or of deep emotion. Well, but let us
clear our minds of cant about English prose, and abstain from talking
about it as if the Almighty had invented its final pattern somewhere
in the eighteenth century. Prose--and Poetry too, for that matter--is
a way of putting things worth record into memorable speech. English
writers of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century found, with
some measure of consent, an admirable fashion of doing this, and have
left a tradition: and it is a tradition to which I, personally, would
cling if I could, admiring it as I do, and admiring so much less many
pages of Dickens and a thousand of pages of Carlyle. After all, so long
as the thing gets itself said, and effectively, and memorably, who are
we to prescribe rules or parse sentences? What, for example, could that
mysterious body, the College of Preceptors, do to improve the grammar
of _Antony and Cleopatra_, even if they persuaded one another “Well,
apparently they have come to stay, and perhaps we had better call upon
them, my dear”?


VIII

Having, then, no preconceived notions about prose, and few prejudices
save against certain locutions of which I confess I dislike them mainly
because I dislike the sort of person who employs them--I assert that
Dickens, aiming straight at his purpose, wrote countless pages of quite
splendid prose. I defy you, for example, to suggest how a sense of the
eeriness of the Woolwich marshes with an apprehension of horror behind
the fog could be better conveyed in words than Dickens conveys them
in the opening chapters of _Great Expectations_; as I ask you how the
earliest impressions of a sensitive child can be better conveyed in
language than they are in the early chapters of _David Copperfield_.


IX

But even this apologia--sufficient as I think it--does not cover the
whole defence. We have picked up a habit of consenting with critics
who tell us that Dickens’ prose is careless and therefore not worth
studying. Believe me, you are mistaken if you believe these critics.
Dickens sometimes wrote execrably: far oftener he penned at a stretch
page upon page of comment and conversation that brilliantly effect
their purpose and are, _therefore_, good writing. You will allow, I
dare say, his expertness in glorifying the loquacity that comes of a
well-meaning heart and a rambling head. Recall, for example--casually
chosen out of hundreds--Mrs. Chivery on her son John, nursing his
love-lornness amid the washing in the back-yard: and remark the _idiom_
of it:

    “It’s the only change he takes,” said Mrs. Chivery, shaking her
    head afresh. “He won’t go out, even to the back-yard, when there’s
    no linen: but when there’s linen to keep the neighbours’ eyes off,
    he’ll sit there, hours. Hours he will. Says he feels as if it
    was groves.... Our John has everyone’s good word and everyone’s
    good wish. He played with her as a child when in that yard she
    played. He has known her ever since. He went out upon the Sunday
    afternoon when in this very parlour he had dined, and met her,
    with appointment or without appointment which I do not pretend to
    say. He made his offer to her. Her brother and sister is high in
    their views and against Our John. ‘No, John, I cannot have you, I
    cannot have any husband, it is not my intentions ever to become a
    wife, it is my intentions to be always a sacrifice, farewell. Find
    another worthy of you and forget me!’ This is the way in which she
    is doomed to be a constant slave, to them that are not worthy that
    a constant slave unto them she should be. This is the way in which
    Our John has come to find no pleasure but in taking cold among the
    linen....”

Is _that_ not prose? Of course it is prose _for its purpose_: and,
strictly for her purpose--strictly, mind you for their purpose--Mrs.
Chivery’s parallelisms of speech will match those of the prophet
Jeremiah at his literary best. “Ah,” say you, “but Dickens is dealing
out humorous reported speech. Can he write prose of his own?” Well,
yes, and yes most certainly. If you will search and study his passages
of deliberate writing you will scarcely miss to see how he derives
in turn of phrase as in intonation from the great eighteenth-century
novelists and translators whose works, if you remember, were the small
child’s library in the beautiful fourth chapter of _David Copperfield_:

    My father had left a small collection of books in a little room
    upstairs ... which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From
    that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle,
    Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote,
    Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me
    company....

The whole passage, if you will turn to it, you will recognise as
delicate English prose. But it is also a faithful, if translated,
record. From this line of English writers, the more you study him,
the more clearly you will recognise Dickens as standing in the direct
descent of a pupil. He brings something of his own, of course, to
infuse it, as genius will: and that something is usually a hint of
pathos which the eighteenth-century man avoided. But (this touch of
pathos excepted) you will find little, say, to distinguish Fielding’s
sketch of Squire Allworthy on his morning stroll from this sketch,
which I take casually from _The Old Curiosity Shop_, of an aged woman
punctually visiting the grave of her husband who had died in his prime
of twenty-three:

    “Yes, I was his wife. Death doesn’t change no more than life, my
    dear.”... And now that five-and-fifty years were gone, she spoke of
    the dead man as if he had been her son or grandson, with a kind of
    pity for his youth growing out of her own old age, and an exalting
    of his strength and manly beauty, as compared with her own weakness
    and decay; and yet she spoke of him as her husband too, and
    thinking of herself in connection with him, as she used to be and
    not as she was now, talked of their meeting in another world, as
    if he were dead but yesterday, and she, separated from her former
    self, were thinking of the happiness of that comely girl who seemed
    to have died with him.


X

No, we can none of us afford to despise Dickens’ prose. This passage
comes from one of his earliest books: if you would learn how he (ever
a learner) learned to consolidate his style, study that neglected
work of his, _The Uncommercial Traveller_--study such essays as that
on “Wapping Workhouse” or that on “The City Churchyards”--study
them with Thackeray’s _Roundabout Papers_--and tell me if these two
great Victorian novelists, after shaking the dust of an _Esmond_ or
a _David Copperfield_ off their palms, cannot, as a parergon, match
your Augustans--your Steele or your Addison--on their own ground. Few
recognise it, this pair being otherwise so great: but it is so.

And because you will probably disbelieve me at first going-off, I
shall add the testimony of one you will be apter to trust--that of
George Gissing. I have spoken of one chapter in _David Copperfield_, to
commend it.

But, says Gissing:

    In the story of David Copperfield’s journey on the Dover road
    we have as good a piece of narrative prose as can be found in
    English. Equally good, in another way, are those passages of
    rapid retrospect in which David tells us of his later boyhood, a
    concentration of memory perfumed with the sweetest humour. It is
    not an easy thing to relate, with perfect proportion of detail,
    with interest that never for a moment drops, the course of a year
    or two of wholly uneventful marriage: but read the chapter entitled
    _Our Domestic Life_ and try to award adequate praise to the great
    artist who composed it. One can readily suggest how the chapter
    could have been spoiled; ever so little undue satire, ever so
    little excess of sentiment; but who can point to a line in which it
    might be bettered? It is perfect writing: one can say no more and
    no less.


XI

I am glad, Gentlemen, on the verge of concluding these talks about
Dickens, to quote this from Gissing--a genuine genius, himself an
author of what Dr. Johnson would have described as “inspissated
gloom.” There is, I daresay, some heaven of recognition in which all
true artists meet; and at any rate it pleases one to think that the
author of _The New Grub Street_ should, in this sublunary sphere, have
been comforted on his way (it would even seem, entranced) by such
children of joy as Sam Weller and Mr. Toots. And I, at any rate, who
admired Gissing in life, like to think of him who found this world
so hard, now, by virtue of his love for Dickens, reconciled to look
down on it from that other sphere, with tolerant laughter--upon this
queer individual England, at least. For Providence has made and kept
this nation a comfortable nation, even to this day: and if you take
its raciest literature from Chaucer down, you may assure yourselves
that much of its glorious merit rests on the “triple pillar” of
common-sense, religious morality and hearty laughter. I for my part
hold that we shall help a great deal to restore our commonwealth by
seeking back to that last “Godlike function” and re-learning it. To
promote that laughter, with good sense and good morality, was ever
Dickens’ way, as to kill wherever he could what he once called “this
custom of putting the natural demand for amusement out of sight, as
some untidy housekeepers put dust, and pretending that it was swept
away.” And I think of Dickens as a great Englishman not least in this,
that he was a man of his hands, with a great laugh scattering humbug to
make place for mirth and goodwill; “a clean hearth and [to adapt Mrs.
Battle] the _spirit_ of the game.”


XII

I conclude these lectures on Dickens with a word or two casually
uttered in conversation by a great man--possibly the greatest--of the
generation that succeeded Dickens; himself a superb novelist, and a
ruthless thinker for the good of his kind; a Russian, moreover, to whom
the language alone of Sam Weller or of Mrs. Gamp must have presented
difficulties well-nigh inconceivable by us. Some nineteen years ago a
friend of mine visited Tolstoy at his home and, the talk falling upon
Dickens, this is what Tolstoy said:

    All his characters are my personal friends. I am constantly
    comparing them with living persons, and living persons with them.
    And what a _spirit_ there was in all he wrote!

This having been reported to Swinburne, here is a part of Swinburne’s
answer:

    What a superb and crushing reply to the vulgar insults of such
    malignant boobies and poetasters as G. H. Lewes and Co. (too
    numerous a Co.!) is the witness of ... such a man among men!...
    After all, like will to like--genius will find out genius, and
    goodness will recognise goodness.

Tolstoy to Dickens.... _That_ is how the tall ships, the grandees of
literature, dip their flags and salute as they pass. Gentlemen, let us
leave it at that!




THACKERAY (I)


I

Among many wise sayings left behind him by the late Sir Walter
Raleigh--_our_ Sir Walter and Oxford’s of whom his pupils there would
say, “But Raleigh is a prince”--there haunts me as I begin to speak of
Thackeray, a slow remark dropped as from an afterthought upon those
combatants who are for ever extorting details of Shakespeare’s private
life out of the Plays and the Sonnets, and those others (Browning, for
example, and Matthew Arnold) who in revulsion have preached Shakespeare
up for the grand impersonal artist who never unlocked his heart, who
smiles down upon all questioning and is still

                         Out-topping knowledge.

Such a counter-claim may be plausible--is at any rate excusable if only
as an oath upon the swarm of pedlars who infest Shakespeare and traffic
in obscure hints of scandal. Yet, it will not work. “It would never be
entertained,” says Raleigh, “by an artist, and would have had short
shrift from any of the company that assembled at the Mermaid Tavern.
No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow. No dramatist can create
live characters save by bequeathing the best of himself to the children
of his art, scattering among them a largess of his own qualities,
giving, it may be, to one his wit, to another his philosophic doubt,
to another his love of action, to another the simplicity and constancy
that he finds deep in his own nature. There is no thrill of feeling
communicated from the printed page but has first been alive in the
mind of the author: there was nothing alive in his mind that was
not intensely and sincerely felt. Plays like Shakespeare’s cannot
be written in cold blood; they call forth the man’s whole energies,
and take toll of the last farthing of his wealth of sympathy and
experience.”


II

_No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow._ That is the sentence,
of truly Johnsonian common-sense, which bears most intimately on our
subject this morning. The story runs that Thackeray, one day tapping
impatiently upon the cover of some adulatory memoir of somebody, warm
from the press, enjoined upon his family, “None of this nonsense
about me, after my death”: and the injunction was construed by his
daughter, Lady Ritchie, most piously beyond a doubt, perhaps too
strictly, for certain not with the happiest results. For this denial
of any authoritative biography--of a writer and a clean-living English
gentleman who might, if any human being can or could, have walked up
to the Recording Angel and claimed his _dossier_ without a blush--has
not only let in a flood of spurious reminiscences, anecdotes, sayings
he most likely never uttered or at least never uttered with meaning or
accent to give pain that, as reported, they convey. It has led to a
number of editions with gossipy prefaces and filial chat (I fear I must
say it) none the more helpful for being tinctured by affection and
qualified by reserve.

This happens to be the more unfortunate of Thackeray since, as I
suppose, no writer of the Victorian age walked abroad more sturdily on
his own tall shadow, or trusted more on it. It was a shadow, too: dark
enough for any man’s footstep. I do not wish--nor is it necessary--to
break in upon any reticence. But you probably know the main outline
of the story--of a Cambridge youth, of Trinity, who living moderately
beyond his means (as undergraduates will) lost his affluence, lost the
remains of it when, bolting to London, he dared to run a newspaper--two
newspapers. _The National Standard_ had soon (in his own phrase) to
be hauled down, and _The Constitutional_ belied its title by a rapid
decline and decease. Thus he lost a moderate patrimony, and we find him
next as a roving journalist in Paris, divided between pen and pencil,
with an almost empty pocket. There, in August, 1836, at the British
Embassy, he made a most imprudent but happy marriage--most happy, that
is for a while. Years afterwards he wrote to a young friend:

    I married at your age with £400 paid by a newspaper which failed
    six months afterwards, and always love to hear of a young man
    testing his fortune in that way. Though my marriage was a wreck,
    as you know, I would do it over again, for behold Love is the
    crown and completion of all earthly good.... The very best and
    pleasantest house I ever knew in my life had but £300 to keep it.

Here, then, comes in the tragedy of Thackeray’s life. Daughters were
born to him amid those pleasures and anxieties which only they can
taste fully who earn their daily bread in mutual love on the future’s
chance. As he beautifully wrote, long after, in _Philip_:

    I hope, friend, you and I are not too proud to ask for our daily
    bread, and to be grateful for getting it? Mr. Philip had to work
    for his, in care and trouble, like other children of men:--to
    work for it, and I hope to pray for it too. It is a thought to me
    awful and beautiful, that of the daily prayer, and of the myriads
    of fellow-men uttering it, in care and in sickness, in doubt and
    in poverty, in health and in wealth. _Panem nostrum da nobis
    hodie._ Philip whispers it by the bedside where wife and child lie
    sleeping, and goes to his early labour with a stouter heart: as he
    creeps to his rest when the day’s labour is over, and the quotidian
    bread is earned, and breathes his hushed thanks to the bountiful
    Giver of the meal. All over this world what an endless chorus is
    singing of love, and thanks, and prayer. Day tells to day the
    wondrous story, and night recounts it unto night. How do I come to
    think of a sunrise which I saw near twenty years ago on the Nile
    when the river and sky flushed with the dawning light and, as the
    luminary appeared, the boatmen knelt on the rosey deck and adored
    Allah? So, as thy sun rises, friend, over the humble housetops
    round about your home, shall you wake many and many a day to duty
    and labour. May the task have been honestly done when the night
    comes; and the steward deal kindly with the labourer.

Always this refrain in Thackeray--the text which Dr. Johnson once had
inscribed on his watch, _ΝΥΞ ΓΑΡ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ_, “For the night cometh.”

With the birth of her third child, however, Mrs. Thackeray fell
under a mental disease not violent at first, but deepening until it
imperatively required removal and restraint.


III

I have been as short over this as could be: but the simple fact must
be taken into account if we would understand Thackeray at all. Without
knowledge of it, for instance, how can we interpret the ache behind his
jolly _Ballad of Bouillabaisse_?

    This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is--
      A sort of soup, or broth, or brew,
    Or hotchpotch, of all sorts of fishes,
      That Greenwich never could outdo;
    Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffern,
      Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace;
    All these you eat at Terré’s tavern,
      In that one dish of Bouillabaisse...

    Ah me! how quick the days are flitting!
      I mind me of a day that’s gone,
    When here I’d sit, as now I’m sitting,
      In this same place--but not alone.
    A fair young form was nestled near me,
      A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
    And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me
      --There’s no one now to share my cup.

If you wish, taking him at his best, to envisage Thackeray in the days
of his assured triumph, you must understand him as a desolated man;
as a man who, having built a fine house for himself in Kensington
Palace Gardens, could never fit it for a real home. If he built himself
a house, he could not sit and write in it; scarcely a page of _The
Newcomes_ was written but on Club paper or at a hotel. It would seem
as if the very anguish of the hearth drove this soul, so domestic by
instinct, into the waste of Club-land, Pall Mall, the Reform Club,
where his portrait now so pathetically hangs. For above all (let _The
Rose and the Ring_ with its delightful and delicate occasion attest)
Thackeray was born to be beloved of a nursery--the sort of great fellow
to whom on entrance every child, as every dog, takes by instinct. In
the nursery, quite at home, he rattles off the gayest unforgettable
verses:

    Did you ever hear of Miss Symons?
    She lives at a two-penny pieman’s:
      But when she goes out
      To a ball or a rout
    Her stomacher’s all covered with di’monds.

Or, for elder taste,

    In the romantic little town of Highbury,
    My father kept a Succulating Libary.
    He followed in his youth the Man immortal who
    Conquered the Frenchman on the plains of Waterloo

--with similar fooling. Some men at Cambridge had the gift of this
fooling--in Tennyson’s day, too--and not the least of them was Edward
Lear, incomparable melodist of nonsense--nursery Mozart of the Magic
Flute--to whom, on his Travels in Greece, Tennyson dedicated those very
lovely stanzas beginning:

    Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls
      Of water, sheets of summer glass,
      The long divine Peneian pass,
    The vast Acroceraunian walls....

He must be an unsympathetic critic (I think) and therefore an
incomplete critic, if indeed a critic at all, who feels any real
incongruity as in his mind he lets those lines fade off into

    Far and few, far and few,
    Are the lands where the Jumblies live, etc.;

for as Shelley once assured us, more or less:

    Many a green isle needs must be
    In the deep wide sea of--Philistie,

and to anyone who remembers the imaginary horizons of his nursery I
dare say the Blessed Isles of Nonsense and the land where the Bong tree
grows lie not far from Calypso’s grot, or the house of Circe

    In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
    Where that Æaean isle forgets the main....

or the yellow sands of Prospero’s island where the elves curtsy, kiss
and dance, or Sindbad’s cave, or those others “measureless to man”
rushed through by Alph the sacred river to where we

        see the children sport upon the shore,
    And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.


IV

No: I am not talking fantastically at all. Let us be sober-serious,
corrugating our brows upon history: and at once see that these
Cambridge men of Thackeray’s generation--FitzGerald (to whom he was
“old Thack”), Tennyson, Brookfield, Monckton Milnes, Kinglake--all
with the exception of Arthur Hallam (whom I sadly suspect to have been
something of a prig) cultivated high fooling and carried it to the
nth power as a fine art. Life, in that Victorian era of peace between
wars, was no lull of lotus-eating for them--the England of Carlyle,
Newman, Ruskin admitted no lull of the young mind--but a high-spirited
hilarious game. As one of them, Milnes, wrote of “The Men of Old”:

    They went about their gravest deeds
      As noble boys at play.

A plenty of English writers--some of them accounted highly serious
writers--had indulged in what I may call similar “larks” before them.
Swift, for example, has a glorious sense of the high-nonsensical;
Cowper has it, of course. I regret to say that I even suspect Crabbe.
Canning had it--take, for example, a single stage-direction in _The
Rovers_:

    Several soldiers cross the stage wearily, as if returning from the
    Thirty Years’ War.

Lamb of course had it; and in his letters will carry it to a _delirium
in excelsis_. But this Cambridge group would seem to have shared and
practised it as a form, an exercise, in their free-masonry. Take for a
single instance James Spedding’s forehead. James Spedding, afterwards
learned editor of Bacon, and a butt in that profane set, had a brow
severe and high, of the sort (you know) that tells of moral virtue with
just a hint of premature baldness. It was very smooth; it rose to a
scalp all but conical. His admiring friends elected to call it Alpine.
Now hear FitzGerald upon it, in a letter:

    That portrait of Spedding, for instance, which Lawrence has given
    me: not swords, nor cannon, nor all the Bulls of Bashan butting
    at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No
    wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude: no wonder his
    view of Bacon’s virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences
    of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse
    ourselves with the idea of Spedding’s forehead: we find it somehow
    or other in all things, just peering out of all things: you see it
    in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead rising
    with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the lake of
    Geneva. The forehead is at present in Pembrokeshire, I believe: or
    Glamorganshire: or Monmouthshire: it is hard to say which. It has
    gone to spend its Christmas there.

And later, May 22, 1842:

    You have of course read the account of Spedding’s forehead landing
    in America. English sailors hail it in the Channel, mistaking it
    for Beachy Head.

I have quoted this just to enforce my argument that, to understand
Thackeray’s work, you must understand just what kind of a man he was
in his upbringing and the way of his early friendships. And when I
add that his gift for nursery folly was expended upon a widowed and
desolate home--on a home from which his heart drove him to flee, no
matter how ambitiously he rebuilt and adorned it, to scribble his
novels on Club paper or in hotels, you may get (I hope) a little closer
to understanding his generous, but bitter and always sad heart.


V

I must dwell on another point, too. The Thackerays (or Thackwras--which
I suppose to be another form of Dockwras) had for some generations
prospered and multiplied as Anglo-Indians in the service of the old
East India Company. Their tombs are thick in the old graveyard of
Calcutta, and I would refer anyone who would ponder their epitaphs, or
is interested in the stock from which Thackeray sprang, to a little
book by the late Sir William Hunter entitled _The Thackerays in India
and some Calcutta Graves_ (Henry Frowde, London: 1897). Thackeray
himself was born at Calcutta on the 18th of July, 1811, and, according
to the sad fate of Anglo-Indian children, was shipped home to England
at the age of five, just as Clive Newcome is shipped home in the novel;
and when he pictured the sad figure of Colonel Newcome tottering back
up the _ghaut_, or river-stairs, Thackeray drew what his own boyish
eyes had seen and his small heart suffered. Turn to the “Roundabout
Paper” _On Letts’s Diary_ and you will read concerning that parting:

    I wrote this, remembering in long, long distant days, such a
    _ghaut_, or river-stair, at Calcutta, and a day when down those
    steps, to a boat which was in waiting, came two children, whose
    mothers remained on the shore. One of those ladies was never to see
    her boy more.... We were first cousins; had been little playmates
    and friends from the time of our birth; and the first house in
    London to which I was taken was that of our aunt, the mother of his
    Honour the Member of Council.

This young cousin and playmate returned in time, as Thackeray never
did, to the shore they were leaving; and died Sir Richmond Shakespeare
(no _vile nomen_!), Agent to the Governor-General for Central India.
The news of his death gave occasion to the tender little essay from
which I have been quoting.

On the passage their ship touched at St. Helena, and their black
servant took them a long walk over rocks and hills “until we reached a
garden, where we saw a man walking. ‘That’s he,’ said the black man:
‘that is Bonaparte! He eats three sheep every day, and all the little
children he can lay hands upon.’”--After which terrible vision no doubt
the youngsters resumed their Odyssey--as Homer would put it--

            ἀκαχήμενοι ἦτορ,
    ἄσμενοι ἐκ θανάτοιο.

“Stricken at heart yet rejoicing to have escaped perdition.” They
reached London to find it plunged in mourning (and, for many reasons,
in very genuine mourning) by the death of the Princess Charlotte:
and young Thackeray proceeded to Chiswick, to the charge and care
of his aunt Mrs. Ritchie. One day she caught the child trying on
his uncle’s large hat, and, finding to her alarm that it accurately
fitted him, swept him off to the fashionable physician, Sir Charles
Clark: “Reassure yourself, madam,” the doctor is reported as saying:
“he has, to be sure, an abnormal head; but I think there’s something
in it.” He was put to school first at a young gentlemen’s academy
at Chiswick, maybe next door to Miss Pinkerton’s Seminary for Young
Ladies through the portals of which (if you remember, and into the
garden) Miss Rebecca Sharp hurled back her “leaving copy” of Dr.
Johnson’s “Dixonary.” The master would seem to have been a Dr.
Swishtail, compounded of negligence and tyranny, as so many “private
schoolmasters” chose to be even to days of my own experience. But here
is the child’s first letter, dated February 18, 1818, to his mother in
India and composed in a round hand between ruled lines:

    My dear Mama--I hope you are quite well. I have given my dear
    Grandmama a kiss. My aunt Ritchie is very good to me. I like
    Chiswick, there are so many good boys to play with. St. James’s
    Park is a very nice place. St. Paul’s Church, too, I like very
    much. It is a finer place than I expected. I hope Captain Smyth is
    well: Give my love to him and tell him he must bring you home to
    your affectionate little son.

                                              WILLIAM THACKERAY.

The separating sea was wide: but what a plucky little letter!


VI

I shall lay stress on it for a moment because, as it seems to me, if
we read between the childish lines, they not only evince the pluck
of the child, and not only breathe a waft of the infinite pathos of
English children, Indian born: but because I hold that no one who would
understand Thackeray can afford to forget that he was of Anglo-Indian
stock, bone and marrow.

Now I want, avoiding so much of offence as I may, to say a word or two
(and these only as a groping through private experience, to illustrate
Thackeray) about the retired Anglo-Indian as he has come within the
range of a long experience at an English town by the seashore. On the
whole I know of no human being more typically pathetic. His retirement
may be happier in some places such as Cheltenham, where he has a Club
in which he can meet old Indian cronies or men from “the other side,”
and tell stories and discuss the only politics which interest them. But
in any odd angle of this capital yet most insular isle his isolation is
horrible and fatal. Compared with it, the sorrows of a British child
“sent home” (as conveyed, and to the very heart, in Mr. Kipling’s _Wee
Willie Winkie_, for example) are tragically insignificant. Youth is
elastic and can recover. But this grown man, through the “long, long
Indian days,” has toiled and supported himself upon a hope, to end in
England with fishing or shooting and a share of that happy hospitality
which (God knows) he has earned.

What happens? The domestic servant question (always with us), cold
rooms, dinner-parties at which stories about Allahabad are listened to
patiently by ladies who confuse it with Lahore, polite men who suggest
a game of “snooker pool” as a relief, hoping for not too many anecdotes
in the course of it. And for this your friend and his admirable wife
have been nursing, feeding themselves on promise for, maybe, thirty
years and more, all the time and day after day--_there_ lies the
tragedy--dutifully giving all their best, for England, in confidence of
its reward.

It is not altogether our fault. It is certainly not our fault that the
partridges do not rise on the stubble or the salmon leap up and over
the dams in such numbers as the repatriated fondly remember. To advise
a lady accustomed to many Indian servants upon tact with a couple or
three of English ones--post-War too--is (as Sir Thomas Browne might
say) to bid her sleep in Epicurus his faith, and reacclimatise her
notion. But, to be short, they talk to us politics which have no basis
discoverable in this country.

Yet, withal, they are so noble! So simple in dignity! Far astray
from any path of progress as we may think him; insane as we may deem
his demand to rule, unreasonable his lament over the lost England of
his youth which for so long he has sentimentalised, or domestic his
interest in his nephews, the Anglo-Indian has that key of salvation
which is loyalty. He is for England: and for that single cause I
suppose no men or women that ever lived and suffered on earth have
suffered more than those who lie now under the huddled gravestones of
Calcutta.


VII

I am coming to this: that those who accuse Thackeray of being a snob
(even under his own definition) should in fairness lay their account
that he came of people who, commanding many servants, supported the
English tradition of rule and dominance in a foreign land.

I believe this to explain him in greater measure than he has generally
been explained or understood. Into a class so limited, so exiled,
so professional in its aims and interests--so _borné_ and repugnant
against ideas that would invade upon the tried order of things and
upset caste along with routine--so loyal to its own tradition of
service, so dependent for all reward upon official recognition (which
often means the personal caprice of some Governor or Secretary of
State or Head of Department), some Snobbery--as we understand the word
nowadays--will pretty certainly creep; to make its presence felt, if
not to pervade. But I am not going to discuss with you the question,
“Was Thackeray that thing he spent so much pains, such excessive
pains, in denouncing?”--over which so many disputants have lost their
tempers. It is not worth our while, as the whole business, to my
thinking, was not worth Thackeray’s while. When we come to it--as we
must, because it bulks so largely in his work--we shall quickly pass on.

To me it seems that Thackeray’s geniture and early upbringing--all
those first impressions indelible in any artist--affected him in
subtler ways far better worth our considering. Let me just indicate two.


VIII

For the first.--It seems to me that Thackeray--a social delineator or
nothing--never quite understood the roots of English life or of the
classes he chose to depict; those roots which even in Pall Mall or
Piccadilly or the Houses of Parliament ramify underground deep and
out, fetching their vital sap from the countryside. Walter Bagehot,
after quoting from _Venus and Adonis_ Shakespeare’s famous lines on a
driven hare, observes that “it is absurd to say we know _nothing_ about
the man who wrote that: we know he had been after a hare.” I cannot
find evidence in his works that this child, brought from Calcutta to
Chiswick, transferred to the Charterhouse (then by Smithfield), to
Cambridge, Paris, Fleet Street, Club-land, had ever been after a hare:
and if you object that this means nothing, I retort that it means a
great deal: it means that he never “got off the pavement.” It means
that he is on sure ground when he writes of Jos. Sedley, demi-nabob,
but on no sure ground at all when he gets down to Queen’s Crawley: that
in depicting a class--now perhaps vanishing--he never, for example,
got near the spirit that breathes in Archdeacon Grantly’s talk with
his gamekeeper:

    “I do think, I do indeed, sir, that Mr. Thorne’s man ain’t dealing
    fairly along of the foxes. I wouldn’t say a word about it, only
    that Mr. Henry is so particular.”

    “What about the foxes? What is he doing with the foxes?”

    “Well, sir, he’s a trapping on ’em. He is, indeed, your reverence.
    I wouldn’t speak if I warn’t well nigh mortial sure.”

    Now the archdeacon had never been a hunting man, though in his
    early days many a clergyman had been in the habit of hunting
    without losing his clerical character by doing so; but he had lived
    all his life among gentlemen in a hunting county, and had his own
    very strong ideas about the trapping of foxes. Foxes first, and
    pheasants afterwards, had always been the rule with him as to any
    land of which he himself had had the management.... But now his
    heart was not with the foxes,--and especially not with the foxes
    on behalf of his son Henry. “I can’t have any meddling with Mr.
    Thorne,” he said; “I can’t and I won’t ... I’m sure he wouldn’t
    have the foxes trapped.”

    “Not if he knowed it, he wouldn’t, your reverence. A gentleman of
    the likes of him, who’s been a hunting over fifty year, wouldn’t
    do the likes of that; but the foxes is trapped ... a vixen was
    trapped just across the field yonder, in Goshall Springs, no later
    than yesterday morning.” Flurry was now thoroughly in earnest; and,
    indeed, the trapping of a vixen in February is a serious thing.

    “Goshall Springs don’t belong to me,” said the archdeacon.

    “No, your reverence; they’re on the Ullathorne property. But a word
    from your reverence would do it. Mr. Henry thinks more of the foxes
    than anything. The last word he told me was that it would break
    his heart if he saw the coppices drawn blank....”

    “I will have no meddling in the matter, Flurry.... I will not have
    a word said to annoy Mr. Thorne.” Then he rode away....

    But the archdeacon went on thinking, thinking, thinking. He could
    have heard nothing of his son to stir him more in his favour than
    this strong evidence of his partiality for foxes. I do not mean
    it to be understood that the archdeacon regarded foxes as better
    than active charity, or a contented mind, or a meek spirit, or than
    self-denying temperance. No doubt all these virtues did hold in his
    mind their proper places, altogether beyond contamination of foxes.
    But he had prided himself on thinking that his son should be a
    country gentleman.... On the same morning the archdeacon wrote the
    following note:--

    DEAR THORNE,--My man tells me that foxes have been trapped on
    Darvell’s farm, just outside the coppices. I know nothing of it
    myself, but I am sure you’ll look to it.--

                                                     Yours always,
                                                             T. GRANTLY.

Absurd? Very well--but you will never understand the politics of the
last century--that era so absurdly viewed out of focus, just now, as
one of mere industrial expansion--unless you lay your account with it
better than Thackeray did. As you know, he once stood for Parliament,
as Liberal candidate for the City of Oxford: and it is customary to
rejoice over his defeat as releasing from party what was meant for
mankind. In fact he never had a true notion of politics or of that
very deep thing, political England. Compare his sense of it--his
_novelist’s_ sense--with Disraeli’s. He and Disraeli, as it happens,
both chose to put the famous-infamous Marquis of Hertford into a
novel. But what a thing of cardboard, how entirely without atmosphere
of political or social import, is Lord Steyne in _Vanity Fair_ as
against Lord Monmouth in _Coningsby_!


IX

The late Herman Merivale, in a very brilliant study, interrupted
by death and left to be completed by Sir Frank Marzials, finds
the two key-secrets (as he calls them) of Thackeray’s life to be
these--Disappointment and Religion. I propose ten days hence to examine
this, and to speak of both. But I may premise, here and at once, that
Thackeray was a brave man who took the knocks of life without flinching
(even that from young Venables’ fist, which broke his nose but not
their friendship), and that to me the melancholy which runs through
all his writing--the melancholy of Ecclesiastes, the eternal Mataiotes
Mataioteton--Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity--was drawn by origin
from the weary shore of Ganges and brought in the child’s blood to us,
over the sea.

“Vanity of vanities,” saith the Preacher--Thackeray was before all else
a Preacher: and that is the end of it, whether in a set of Cornhill
verses or in his most musical, most solemn, prose--

    How spake of old the Royal Seer?
    (His text is one I love to treat on.)
    This life of ours, he said, is sheer
      Mataiotes Mataioteton ..., etc.

And now hear the burden of it on that famous page telling how Harry
Esmond walked home after breaking the news of Duke Hamilton’s duel and
death:

    As Esmond and the Dean walked away from Kensington discoursing of
    this tragedy, and how fatal it was to the cause which they both had
    at heart, the street-criers were already out with their broadsides,
    shouting through the town the full, true, and horrible account of
    the death of Lord Mohun and Duke Hamilton in a duel. A fellow had
    got to Kensington, and was crying it in the square there at very
    early morning, when Mr. Esmond happened to pass by. He drove the
    man from under Beatrix’s very window, whereof the casement had
    been set open. The sun was shining, though ’twas November: he had
    seen the market-carts rolling into London, the guard relieved at
    the palace, the labourers trudging to their work in the gardens
    between Kensington and the City--the wandering merchants and
    hawkers filling the air with their cries. The world was going to
    its business again, although dukes lay dead and ladies mourned for
    them, and kings, very likely, lost their chances. So night and day
    pass away, and to-morrow comes, and our place knows us not. Esmond
    thought of the courier now galloping on the North road, to inform
    him who was Earl of Arran yesterday that he was Duke of Hamilton
    to-day; and of a thousand great schemes, hopes, ambitions, that
    were alive in the gallant heart, beating a few hours since, and now
    in a little dust quiescent.

A heavy passage, Gentlemen--and commonplace? Ah! as you grow older you
will find that most of the loveliest, most of the most sacred passages
in literature are commonplaces exquisitely turned and tuned to catch
and hold new hearts.




THACKERAY (II)


I

I left off, Gentlemen, upon a saying of Herman Merivale’s that the two
key-secrets of Thackeray’s life were Disappointment and Religion, and I
proposed, examining this to-day, to speak of both.

Well, for the first, I have already (I think) given full room in the
account to that domestic sorrow which drove him, great boon favourite
of the nursery, to flee from his grand new house in Kensington Gardens--

    Cedes coemptis saltibus et domo
    Villaque--

to write his novels anywhere rather than at home. In the words of
Barnes’ beautiful lament, which I here make free to divorce from its
native dialect--

    Since now beside my dinner-board
    Your voice does never sound,
    I’ll eat the bit I can afford
    Afield upon the ground;
    Below the darksome bough, my love,
    Where you did never dine,
    And I don’t grieve to miss you now
    As I at home do pine.


II

But those who stress this Disappointment in Thackeray go on to allege
other causes, additional causes, for it: as that he lost a comfortable
patrimony early in life, and that, conscious of great powers, he felt
them for many years unappreciated, and, when appreciated, partially
eclipsed by the popularity of his great rival, Dickens. Now I don’t
deny that one disappointment may accumulate upon another on a man:
but I ask you to consider also that in criticism one nail may drive
out another, and that in ordinary one explanation is better than two,
almost always far better than three: the possible conclusion being that
not one of the three--not even the first--is the right one.

Actually, then, Thackeray as a young man lost his patrimony by flinging
the hazard quite gallantly and honourably, as a young man should;
foolishly perhaps, as a young man will, but having been just as young
and foolish I am even now not turned Cato enough to condemn a boy for
that. Let us see just what happened.

From the Charterhouse he came up here, to Trinity. His means have been
variously computed: but you may put it down pretty safely at £500
a year--a very pretty sum indeed for an undergraduate. What he did
with it you may find for yourselves in those brilliant chapters in
_Pendennis_--perhaps the very best written on University life--which
treat of Pen’s career at Cambridge.

(For it is Cambridge, of course, though he calls it Oxbridge. And here
may I parenthetically drop a long-hoarded curse upon that trick of the
Victorian novelists of sending up their young heroes to Oxbridge or
Camford, entering them usually at the College of St. Boniface, head of
the river or just about to be head. If, from the pages of Victorian
fiction, a crew could be mustered to unmoor and paddle down the dear
old ’Varsity barge, in the early June twilight, past the Pike and Eel
to Iffley, there to await the crack of the rifle that loosens the
tense muscles,--heavens! what a crew!--or, as Matthew Arnold would
say, “what a set!”--all so indifferent to the rules of training, so
like in appearance to young Greek gods, so thirsty!--and, on the run
of it, what laurels for dear old St. Boniface!... I don’t know why
these hermaphrodite names “Oxbridge” and “Camford” have always been so
peculiarly repugnant to me: but they always have been, and are. I feel
somehow as if to be a graduate of either were to offend against the
Table of Forbidden Degrees. But Thackeray achieved one success in the
blending--when he combined “scout” and “gyp” into “skip.”)

Oxbridge, then, in _Pendennis_ is Cambridge. Thackeray came up in
February, 1829--in the Lent term, that is, instead of in the previous
October--I cannot discover for what reason. It made him, however, by
the rules then prevailing, a _non ens_ or _non annus_ man for that
year: and being also a non-reading man, he decided after two years of
genially unprofitable residence, to refuse the Tripos and a degree, and
retire on London, and took chambers at Hare Court in the Temple. His
age was twenty.


III

Sainte-Beuve--I have read reasonably in his voluminous works, but
without as yet happening on the passage which, quoted by Stevenson in
his _Apology for Idlers_, really needs no verification by reference,
being just an opinion dropped, and whoever dropped it and when,
equally valuable to us--Sainte-Beuve, according to Stevenson, as he
grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book,
in which to study for a few years before we go hence: and it seemed
all one to him whether you should read in Chapter XX, which is the
Differential Calculus, or in Chapter XXXIX, which is hearing the band
play in the gardens. Note well, if you please, that I am not endorsing
this as a word of advice for Tripos purposes. I am but applying it to
Thackeray, who never sat for his degree, but left Cambridge to write
_Vanity Fair_, _Pendennis_, _Esmond_, sundry other great stories,
with several score of memorable trifles--ballads, burlesques, essays,
lectures, _Roundabout Papers_, what-not. If I may again quote from Sir
Walter Raleigh, “there are two Days of Judgment, of which a University
examination in an Honours School is considerably the less important.”
The learning we truly take away from a University is (as I conceive)
the talent, whatever it be, we use (God helping), and turn to account.
Says Mr. Charles Whibley of Thackeray’s two years here:

    The friendships that he made ended only with his life, and he must
    have been noble, indeed, who was the friend of Alfred Tennyson and
    of Edward FitzGerald. Moreover, Cambridge taught him the literary
    use of the university, as the Charterhouse had taught him the
    literary use of a public school. In a few chapters of _Pendennis_
    he sketched the life of an undergraduate, which has eluded all his
    rivals save only Cuthbert Bede. He sketched it, moreover, in the
    true spirit of boyish extravagance, which he felt at Cambridge and
    preserved even in the larger world of London; and if Trinity and
    the rustling gown of Mr. Whewell had taught him nothing more than
    this, he would not have contemplated them in vain.

As a matter of fact, of course, the Charterhouse and Cambridge had
taught him much more, even of scholarship. “Scholarship,” is, to be
sure, a relative term which, if lifted to the excellent heights--to
scorn lower degrees of comparison--(as heaven forbid it should not be)
will exclude all who have so learnt their Horace at school that in
after life merely to rehearse and patch together from memory an Ode
of his, long ago learnt for “repetition,” brings comfort to the soul
and can steel it, Romanly, under the stars even on Himalayan outposts.
But if there be aught worthy the name of scholarship to have that one
author bred into your bones--why, then, I challenge that Thackeray did
carry away a modicum of scholarship (and a very pure modicum, too) from
school and university. I shall come to his prose cadences by and by,
and will say no more of them here than that--in _Esmond_ especially,
but in general and throughout his prose--they are inconceivable by
me save as the cadences of a writer early trained upon Greek and
Latin. For blunter evidence, you will find the _Roundabout Papers_
redolent--in quotation, reminiscences, atmosphere--of Horace on every
page; and for evidence yet more patent take his avowed imitation of
Horace (_Odes_ i. 38), the two famous, jolly Sapphic stanzas beginning
_Persicos odi_. Turn to your Conington (say) and you will find them
most neatly and adequately rendered: and then take your Thackeray--

    But a plain leg of mutton, my Lucy,
      I prithee get ready at three;
    Have it smoking and tender and juicy,
      And what better meat can there be?

    And when it has feasted the master,
      ’Twill amply suffice for the maid:
    Meanwhile I will smoke my canaster,
      And tipple my ale in the shade.

Years ago, I discoursed, standing here, on the Horatian Model in
English Verse, attempting to show you how this man and that man--Andrew
Marvell, for example, and Matthew Prior, had attempted it here and
there and how nearly achieved it: of Milton, again, how he tried to
build his Sonnet, redeeming it from the Petrarcan love-business upon
the model of the Horatian Ode; how some sonnets of his (familiar or
political--that _To Mr. Lawrence_ for instance, as a specimen in one
mode, or those _To the Lady Margaret Ley_, or _On the Late Massacre in
Piedmont_ as specimens in another) are deliberately, experimentally
Horatian; and how narrowly--how very narrowly--William Cowper, by
deflection of religious mania, missed to be our purest Horace of
all. But Thackeray is of the band. To alter a word of Carlyle’s, “a
beautiful vein of _Horace_ lay struggling about him.”


IV

But, to return upon the first of the two “key-secrets”--Disappointment
and Religion--and to leave Religion aside for a moment--I cannot find
that, save in his domestic affliction, Thackeray can rightly be called
a disappointed man. There is of course a sense--there is of course a
degree--in which every one of us, if he be worth anything, arrives at
being a disappointed man. We all have our knocks to bear, and some the
most dreadful irremediable wounds to bind up and hide. But whatever
Thackeray spent or owed at Cambridge (to pay in due time), he took
away, with his experience, a most gallant heart. He went to London,
lost the rest of his money in journalistic adventures, and fared out as
a random writer, without (as they say) a penny to put between himself
and heaven. What does he write later on in reminiscence to his mother,
but that these days of struggle were the jolliest of all his life?--

    Ye joys that Time hath swept with him away,
      Come to mine eyes, ye dreams of love and fun;
    For you I pawned my watch full many a day,
      In the brave days when I was twenty-one.

That is good gospel. “Fall in love early, throw your cap over the mill;
take an axe, spit on your hands; and, for some one, make the chips fly.”


V

But (say the critics) he was disappointed, soured because--conscious
of his powers of “superior” education and certain gifts only to be
acquired through education, he felt that Dickens--whom certain foolish
people chose to talk of endlessly as his rival--was all the time
outstripping him in public favour. Now, as for this, I cannot see how
Thackeray, in any wildest dream, could have hoped to catch up with
Dickens and pass him in popularity. To begin with, he came to fruition
much later than Dickens: in comparison with the precocity of _Pickwick_
Thackeray was in fact thirty-seven before he hit the target’s gold
with _Vanity Fair_. His earlier serious efforts--_Catherine_, _Barry
Lyndon_, _The Book of Snobs_--are sour and green stuff, call them
what else you will. They deal with acrid characters and (what is more)
deal with them acridly. But even supposing them to be masterpieces
(which title to two of the three I should certainly deny) where was
the audience in comparison with that to which Dickens appealed? Where,
outside a few miles’ radius of Club-land, did men and women exist in
any numbers to whom Thackeray’s earlier work could, by any possibility,
appeal? The dear and maiden lady in _Cranford_, Miss Jenkyns, as
you remember, made allowances for _Pickwick_ in comparison with Dr.
Johnson’s _Rasselas_. “Still perhaps the author is young. Let him
persevere, and who knows what he may become, if he will take the Great
Doctor for his model.” But what--what on earth would she have made of
_Barry Lyndon_? And what would good Captain Brown himself have made of
it? I can almost better see the pair, on the sly, consenting to admire
_Tristram Shandy_.

Now Dickens and Thackeray were both thin-skinned men in their
sensitiveness to public approbation. On at least one occasion each
made a fool of himself by magnifying a petty personal annoyance into
an affair of the world’s concern. As if _anybody_ mattered to that
extent!--

    Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta
    Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt.

But in literary London there are always (I regret to say) busybodies
who will estrange great men if they can; and, the cause of quarrel
once set up, I still more regret to say that the great men quite as
often as not come most foolishly out of it. Thackeray’s estrangement
from Dickens happened over an article by a young journalist of
twenty-seven--Mr. Edmund Yates, afterwards Editor of _The World_, a
society newspaper--and Thackeray’s foolish insistence, in the teeth of
remonstrances by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, that young Yates should be
expelled from the Garrick Club. A week before Thackeray’s death, he and
Dickens met on the steps of the Athenæum, passed, turned, and looked at
each other. Thackeray held out a hand, which Dickens did not refuse.

Now may I put in here, Gentlemen, and in parenthesis, a word of which
I have often wanted to unburden myself?... Some of you--some of the
best of you, I hope--may leave Cambridge for Fleet Street, a street
which I too have trodden. It is a street of ambitions; but withal the
centre of our English Republic of Letters, in the motto of which,
though there can be no “Equality,” let us neither exclude the “Liberty”
that Milton fought for, nor the “Fraternity” of elder and younger
brethren. I remember this plea for Fraternity being put up by an
eminent man of letters, still with us; and being so much impressed by
it that it outlasted even the week-after-next, when I found him taking
off the gloves to punish a rival scribe. But these two were musical
critics, arguing about music: and I have sometimes, pondering, thought
that there must really be something naturally akin between music and
prosody (arts of which I know so little), seeing that the professors
of both pelt each other in terms of insult so amazingly similar and
with a ferocity the likeness of which one has to recognise even while
murmuring, “Come, come! What is this all about, after all?” I suppose
the average Musical Review in the weekly papers to contain more mud to
the square inch than even _The Dunciad_! And you must acknowledge,
Gentlemen, _The Dunciad_, for all its wit, to be on the whole a pretty
wearisome heap of bad breeding. It kicks: but as they say in the
country, there is “plenty hair on the hoof.” What I plead is that all
we engaged in _literature_ take some warning from the discourtesies
of the past, and that you, at any rate, who pass out into literary
practice from this Tripos of ours, shall pass out as a confraternity of
gentlemen. Consider, if you will, that Literature, our mistress, is a
goddess greater than any of us. She is Shakespeare and Ben Jonson too;
Milton and Dry den; Swift, Addison, Steele; Berkeley and Goldsmith;
Pope and John Gay; Johnson, Gibbon, Burke, Sheridan; Cowper and Burns;
Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge; Landor, Scott, Keats, Shelley and
Byron; Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, all, says the Preacher,
“giving counsel by their understanding and declaring prophecies.” I
name but a few of the procession, but all were her knights; and each,
in his time, fought for his ideal of her--

    Blue is Our Lady’s colour,
      White is Our Lord’s:
    Tomorrow I will make a knot
      Of blue and white cords;
    That you may see it where I ride
      Among the flashing swords.

Or let me lower the key and put it thus--addressing you as plain
apprentices and setting the ground no higher than an appeal for the
credit of our craft. I once wrote of Robert Louis Stevenson, and with
truth, that he never seemed to care who did a good piece of work so
long as a good piece of work got itself done. Consider, on top of this,
the amount of loss to the world’s benefit through those literary
broils and squabbles. You are expected, for example, to know something,
at least, of _The Dunciad_ in your reading for the English Tripos: and
I dare say many of you have admired its matchless conclusion:

    Lo! thy dread empire CHAOS is restor’d:
    Light dies before thy uncreating word:
    Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall.

But turn your admiration about and consider what a hand capable of
writing _so_ might have achieved in the long time it had wasted,
turning over an immense buck-basket of foul linen. No, Gentlemen--take
the example of poor Hazlitt--contemporary misunderstandings,
heart-burnings, bickerings make poor material for great authors. I
cannot find that, although once, twice or thrice, led astray into these
pitfalls, Thackeray (and this is the touchstone) ever really envied
another man’s success.

“Get _David Copperfield_,” he writes in a familiar letter: “by jingo,
it’s beautiful; it beats the yellow chap (_Pendennis_) of this month
hollow.”

And again, “Have you read Dickens? Oh, it’s charming. Bravo Dickens!
it (_David Copperfield_ again) has some of his very prettiest
touches--those inimitable Dickens’ touches which make such a great man
of him.”

In truth there was in this tall fellow of six-feet-four a strain of
melancholy not seldom observable in giants.[2] Add to this that touch
of inherited Anglo-Indian melancholy of which I spoke a fortnight ago;
add the tragedy of his marriage; and I think we need not seek amid any
literary disappointments for the well of the song of “Vanity, vanity,
all is vanity” which, springing evident in the title of his first great
novel, runs an undercurrent through all that he wrote.

    [2] He was remarkable for height and bulk: a lumbering,
        unathletic figure with a slouch. One day being at a fair
        with his friend “Big Higgins” (_Jacob Omnium_) they
        approached a booth and Higgins felt in his pockets for
        small change. “Oh!” said Thackeray, “they’ll pass us in
        free, as two of the profession.”

It was not for nothing that he translated Uhland’s


                        _The King on the Tower_

    The cold grey hills they bind me around,
      The darksome valleys lie sleeping below,
    But the winds as they pass o’er all this ground,
      Bring me never a sound of woe!

    Oh! for all I have suffered and striven,
      Care has embittered my cup and my feast;
    But here is the night and the dark blue heaven,
      And my soul shall be at rest.

    O golden legends writ in the skies!
      I turn towards you with longing soul,
    And list to the awful harmonies
      Of the Spheres as on they roll.

    My hair is grey and my sight nigh gone;
      My sword it rusteth upon the wall;
    Right have I spoken, and right have I done:
      When shall I rest me once for all?

    O blessed rest! O royal night!
      Wherefore seemeth the time so long
    Till I see yon stars in their fullest light,
      And list to their loudest song?


VI

This leads us naturally to the second “key-secret” which Mr. Merivale
found in Thackeray--his Religion. That is all very well, but what do
we understand by it? That Thackeray was very simply devout no reader
of his novels will question for a moment. Philip, for instance, flings
himself quite naturally on his knees in prayer: and, I am sure, quite
as naturally did Thackeray in any moment of trouble, as he might be
seen religiously walking with his daughters to public worship. But
again, what is prayer? or what was it to Thackeray?--forgive me that
I raise this question, since religion has been claimed as one of his
two “key-secrets.” What is prayer, then? Is it that which, in Jeremy
Taylor, “can obtain everything,” can “put a holy constraint upon God,
and detain an angel till he leave a blessing ... arrest the sun in the
midst of his course and send the swift-wing’d winds upon our errand;
and all those strange things, and secret decrees, and unrevealed
translations which are above the clouds and far beyond the region of
the stars, shall combine in ministry and advantages for the praying
man”? Is it with Thackeray so forcible a power as that? Or is it
just the humble yet direct petition of the Athenians, commended by
Marcus Aurelius--“Rain, rain, dear Zeus, on the ploughed fields of the
Athenians”--in truth, says the Emperor, for his part, “we ought not to
pray at all, or to pray in this simple and noble fashion.”

There is a considerable difference, you see: and for my part I have,
searching Thackeray’s works, no doubt that Thackeray’s prayer was
ever direct, devout, unabashed and as simple, as anything in _Tom
Brown’s School Days_ transferred to a big grown man. You may at most
put him down as a guest at the inn of Emmaus. But he lived through
the time of Newman, Manning, Martineau; and all I can say is that if
Religion involve any conflict at all of the soul, in his novels I
detect nothing of the sort: nothing even resembling those spiritual
tortures which, afflicting men so various and differing (if you will)
in degree as Newman, Clough, and yet later Richard Jefferies, were a
real and dreadful burden of the soul to our fathers and grandfathers.
Thackeray lived up to the very thick of the conflict: it touched
him not. He was devout just as--shall we say?--we elders have known
certain Anglo-Indian Captains who went through the Mutiny and during
it saw things upon which, coming home, they locked their lips, gallant
gentlemen!

So Thackeray walked and knelt, as it seems to me in the very simplest
of Creeds. Its summary is no more--and no less--than old Colonel
Newcome’s dying _Adsum_! Says a reviewer in the _North British_:

    We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December,
    when he was walking with two friends along the Dean road to the
    west of Edinburgh--one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was
    a lovely evening, such a sunset as one never forgets; a rich dark
    bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the highland
    hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and
    the hills there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender
    cowslip colour, lucid, and as if it were the very body of heaven
    in its clearness; every object standing out as if etched upon the
    sky. The north-west of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks,
    lay in the heart of this pure radiance, and there a wooden crane,
    used in the quarry below, was so placed as to assume the figure
    of a cross: there it was, unmistakable, lifted up against the
    crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed,
    he gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what
    all were feeling, in the word “Calvary”! The friends walked on in
    silence, and then turned to other things. All that evening he was
    very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of divine
    things,--of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing
    his simple faith in God, and in his Saviour.


VII

I shall attempt in another lecture, Gentlemen, to examine some of
Thackeray’s limitations as a novelist; and passing on, to explore
the curious, most haunting felicity of his prose. You will have
already gathered that I am trying to do what all Professors must and
no critic should; which is to discuss an author with whom he has a
broken sympathy. The lilt, the cadence, of Thackeray’s prose are to
me a rapture, almost. The meanness of his concern with life and his
cruelty in handling mean things--as in _A Shabby Genteel Story_--evoke
something like physical nausea. His _Paris Sketch Book_ seems to me
about the last word in bumptiousness: his lectures on Swift and on
Sterne might, bating reverence for him even in misdeed, be flipped as
flies are flipped off a clean page of paper. They needed (as Venables
most justly advised) a piano for accompaniment--or a pianola. On the
other hand--to omit the great novels--his _Roundabout Papers_ almost
touch Horatian perfection.

As for his snobbery--well, I promised you that coming to it, I
should waste little of your time. Perhaps I should have called it
his “alleged” snobbery, guardedly (as a cautious non-committal
journalist once wrote of “an alleged School-Treat”), since my own ears
have heard it denied of him. But they have heard with incredulity,
since I suppose of this distressing little disease two things to be
certain: the first that it is unmistakable, the second that it is
incurable. The patient may know--perhaps may feel as acutely as his
listeners--that he has it--but in his next sentence it must out: he
cannot help himself. Still, it is a human frailty--not ranking in any
just condemnation with cruelty (say) or treachery; not worthy to be
exalted as a Deadly sin, belonging rather to the peccadilloes about
which--if one may misapply Dante’s phrase--we do not reason, but give
a look and pass on. Moreover, if you followed the argument of my
previous lecture, Thackeray’s was a venial form of the malady because
not deliberately acquired, not (as an American said of side-whiskers)
“the man’s own fault,” but in his blood, inherited of his Anglo-Indian
stock. He never--transferred to Chiswick, the Charterhouse, Cambridge,
the Temple, Kensington, Pall Mall--eradicated that family sense of
belonging to a governing few set amid an alien race, with a high sense
of the duty attached to privilege, but without succour of knowing all
sorts and conditions of men and understanding them as neighbours; or
let me put it, without just that sense which quite stupid men at home
acquire in a Rural Council, or the hunting-field, or a cricket-match on
the village green.

I wish we could end with that, and just put it (with W. E. Henley)
that Thackeray was ever too conscious of a footman behind his chair.
Superficially and in estimating him as a man, that were enough for us.
But artistically the trouble goes deeper. There is no reason why an
artist should or should not take the squalidest of scenes, provided
that the story he sets in it is of serious import. May we agree
that of all atmospheres the atmosphere of a cheap boarding-house is
perhaps the least inviting--the smell of linoleum and cookery in the
well-staircase, the shabby gentility refurbishing itself in the small
bedrooms, the pretence, the ceremony at dinner, the _rissoles_, the
talk about the Prince of Wales, the president landlady with “Saturday”
written on her brow? Well, Balzac took this sort of thing and made
masterpieces of it; and Balzac made masterpieces of it just because he
understood that it, also, belonged to human comedy and tragedy, and
that there, as well as anywhere else, you may find essentially the
wreckage of a King Lear, the dreams of a Napoleon. Thackeray takes a
boarding-house merely to savage it, to empty one poor chest-of-drawers
after another and hang their pitiable contents on a public wash-line,
to hold the dirty saucepans under our noses, to expose the poor
servingmaid’s heart along with her hands, its foolish inarticulate
yearnings along with her finger-nails--and all for _what_? That is
the point--for _what_? To tell us that her dreams of a fairy prince
oscillated between a flash lodger with a reversible tie and a seedy
artist who dropped his “h’s”? We might have guessed that much, surely,
without elaborate literary assistance. But suppose the thing worth
while, why is the man so cruel about it? His favourite Horace, to be
sure, was cruel to his discarded loves. But here is no revulsion of
lost love. Here is nothing but gratuitous mocking at a poor girl--

              a fifth-rate dabbler in the British gravy--

and nothing else, or nothing we could not have smelt inside the front
door. And he finds _this_ worth continuing and expanding into a long
novel of _Philip_!

As a rule, Gentlemen, I hold it idle for a lecturer to talk about an
author with whom he has to confess an imperfect sympathy. There are so
many others, worth admiring, whom he may help you to admire! But as
many of us come to Milton against the grain, conquered by his divine
music, so the spell of Thackeray’s prose takes me, often in the moment
of angriest revolt and binds me back his slave. I shall try, next time,
to speak of its great magic.




THACKERAY (III)


I

I fear, Gentlemen, that you will have to take my earlier remarks to-day
with some sympathy for your lecturer’s time of life, even though you
refuse that respect for greying hairs which I shall never claim of you.
If you hereafter remember at all, you will remember that never from
this desk was preached anything but confidence in you, never a word to
bind you with any old or middle-aged rules of wisdom. “Earth loves her
young,” says Meredith:

    Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads
    The ways they walk, by what they speak oppressed

--which is well and hopeful and in the way of nature. But since
Professors do not come by nature you have to forgive them a certain
maturity, a date, a crust in the bottle, and handle them gently if you
would know the vintage.

I shall ask you, then, to discount what follows in apparent
depreciation of Thackeray: to remind yourselves that we are all too
prone to destroy the age just preceding our own; with something of
that primitive instinct which (they say), translated into legislation
amid the South Seas, commands a grandfather to scale a tree and hold
on, if he can, while his prehensile young sway the trunk and jerk it.
I do not myself believe in these rude communal tests, that they ever
were, or indeed that, even in our time, natural science has arrived,
for instance, at any fixable limit for a Professor’s incapacity--and
tenacity.

I am simply stating a plain historical fact when I say that the men
who were young and practised writing in the later days of Queen
Victoria--and as devotedly as any of you can be practising it
to-day--found their most peculiar, most dearly cherished, anathema
in the “preachiness” of the _mid_-Victorian novelists--of which
“preachiness” Thackeray had been perhaps the most eminent practitioner
and exemplar. He confesses it, indeed, in one of the _Roundabout
Papers_. Says he:

    Perhaps of all the novel-spinners now extant, the present speaker
    is the most addicted to preaching. Does he not stop perpetually in
    his story and begin to preach to you? When he ought to be engaged
    with business, is he not for ever taking the Muse by the sleeve,
    and plaguing her with one of his cynical sermons? I cry peccavi
    loudly and heartily. I tell you I would like to be able to write a
    story which should show no egotism whatever, in which there should
    be no reflections, no cynicism, no vulgarity (and so forth) but an
    incident in every other page, a villain, a battle, a mystery, in
    every chapter.


II

That last sentence quite misses the point--or at least seemed to miss
it quite hopelessly to those who were young in the ’nineties: whose
favourite models were French or Russian--Balzac, Stendhal, Mérimée,
Flaubert, de Maupassant, Turgueniev, the Tolstoy of _Sevastopol_ and
_War and Peace_.

It is a long while ago: but passions of faith we had; the first
commanding us (poor fellows!) to agonise in search of the right or
most expressive word; the second to keep _our_selves out of any given
story making the persons exhibit their characters of themselves and by
the actions, the actions again explain themselves by what the persons
had said or done previously. In other words these young men attempted
to apply to the novel Aristotle’s dictum concerning the Epic, of
which they conceived the novel to be (as Fielding had maintained) the
artistic successor. (And here let me advise all you who have read the
_Poetics_ to study Fielding’s reasoned application of that treatise in
his prefaces to the several Books of _Tom Jones_):

    “Admirable on all counts,” says Aristotle, “Homer has the special
    merit of being the only poet who understands the part he should
    take himself. In his own person he should intrude as little as
    possible. It is not in _that_ way he imitates life. Other writers
    force themselves into the business throughout and imitate but
    little and rarely. Homer, after a few words of preface, at once
    brings in a man or a woman as it may be, never characterless but
    each distinctively characteristic.”

To put it in another way--and to employ for once a couple of terms
which as a rule these discourses banish, a story should be as purely
objective as possible, the author’s meaning infused indeed (as it must
be in any story worth the telling) but his own person, with his own
commentary, as rigidly excluded as from a stage-play--say, as from
_King Lear_ or _Tartuffe_. _Madame Bovary_ and _Boule de Suif_ were the
exemplars (to name but two); any chat by the author himself ranked as
an offence against art.


III

Now, just accepting this as a historical fact, without question for the
moment of its Tightness or wrongness, you will easily see how impatient
it made that generation with many things to which their fathers had
been prone. Let me mention two or three.

(1) To begin with, it made them abhor those detailed descriptions
of hero, heroine and others--those page-long introductions to which
the great Sir Walter was prone: the philosophical reason for this
being that no art should attempt that which can be far better done by
another. “Her hair, of a raven gloss, concealed its luxuriance within
the confines of a simple ribbon. Loosened, it fell below her waist. The
upper part of her face, with its purely-arched eyebrows, suggested a
Cleopatra. A lover of the antique might have cavilled, perchance, at
the slight uptilt of the nose, which indeed, etc.: or again at the pout
of the pretty, provocative mouth reminiscent”--well, of some picture of
Greuze rather than of some statue or other with which the reader was
presumably acquainted. “But as she burst upon Harold’s vision in a gown
of some simple soft white clinging material--” and so on. It seemed
that a drawing could do that sort of thing better and, for the reader,
in one-twentieth part of the time.

(2) Secondly, our theory cut out long descriptions of “natural
scenery.” Hardy’s preliminary Chapter of Egdon Heath would, of course,
be judged for what it was--a deliberate and magnificent setting of
slow, perdurable nature as background to the transitory life of man,
the stern breast that has suckled so many fretful children and seen
them pass. And again, as in _The Woodlanders_ all the sap of English
woodland--all its spirits of Dryad and Hamadryad--all its aeolian
murmurs in the upper boughs--might be evoked to dignify a most simple
country story. But the sort of romanticism that used to enjoy itself in
the Alps, amid thunderstorms, the solitary communings of the tortured
breast with the grander aspects of peak and ravine, of the atrabilious
or merely bilious, with the avalanche--all this [shall I call it
the Obermann nonsense?] was wiped out even as the terrors of that
gentleman who making an early ascent of the tall but inconsiderable
slope of Glaramara, sat down and demanded to be “let blood.” In short,
lengthy descriptions of scenery passed out of vogue along with lengthy
descriptions of feminine charms.

(3) Thirdly--and to be very brief about this--the names of invented
characters came to be real, or at least plausible names. Such
names as those with which Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, spoilt the
verisimilitude of their novels--“Lord Frederick Verisopht,” “Mr.
Quiverful” or the list of Becky’s guests in _Vanity Fair_--“the Duchess
Dowager of Stilton, Duc de la Gruyère, Marchioness of Cheshire,
Marchese Allessandro Strachino, Comte de Brie, Baron Schapsugar and
Chevalier Tosti”--all in the slang of that day “quite the _cheese_.”
You may say what you like against the old realistic novel, but anyhow
it earned a living in its day if only by cutting out this detestable
boil inherited from Ben Jonson, with his type names of Brain-worm,
Well-bred, La Foule, Sir Epicure Mammon, and so on....

(4) But above all this passion of one’s youth for purely objective
treatment of narrative fell as a denunciatory curse upon Thackeray’s
incurable habit of _preaching_. And here, if we were right (which I
shall not here contend), we blithely damned ourselves to the permanent
unpopularity we are beginning to enjoy. Take warning: for if there be
one vice this nation has in its bones it is a fondness for preaching.
An inscrutable addiction, an unholy habit! I observe even in railway
trains that nine of our nation will swallow a column of propaganda,
unashamed in its cookery, for one that will relish a clean news-report.
And yet, Gentlemen, the mind that can separate clean news from
propaganda and suggestion is the only mind we should seek to send forth
from this city of ours, as the only mind that shall save our state.

This awful propensity to preaching!--and but yesterday an attempt to
force upon all Professors no less than forty preachments a year--a
gluttony of misemployment in a land of unemployed!

Let me illustrate. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a story, _Treasure
Island_, over which a number of those young men of whom I have been
talking waxed enthusiastic, just because it told a plain tale neatly as
(they held) a tale should be told. But _Treasure Island_ cut (as they
say) very little ice with the General Public. What fetched the General
Public and made Stevenson popular was _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, and
that because the General Public read into it a religious lesson which
the author had never intended. Thereafter he, having ever in him a
strain, as W. E. Henley noted, a

                  something of the Shorter Catechist,

gave way to preachment--to the composition of collects and Christmas
sermons and (as apparently any of us can do--it is a career open to
all the talents) thereby attracted audiences. But where had gone the
economy of description, the directness of narrative, the sudden
incisiveness of a speaking voice? Take this, for example, of the
_Hispaniola’s_ working her way in to anchorage:

    All the way in, Long John stood by the steersman and conned the
    ship. He knew the passage like the palm of his hand; and though the
    man in the chains got everywhere more water than was down in the
    chart, John never hesitated once.

    “There’s a strong scour with the ebb,” he said, “and this here
    passage has been dug out, in a manner of speaking, with a spade.”

    We brought up just where the anchor was in the chart, about a third
    of a mile from either shore, the mainland on one side, and Skeleton
    Island on the other. The bottom was clean sand. The plunge of our
    anchor sent up clouds of birds wheeling and crying over the woods;
    but in less than a minute they were down again, and all was once
    more silent.

    The place was entirely land-locked, buried in woods, the trees
    coming right down to a high-water mark, the shores mostly flat,
    and the hill-tops standing round at a distance in a sort of
    amphitheatre, one here, one there. Two little rivers, or rather,
    two swamps, emptied out into this pond, as you might call it; and
    the foliage round that part of the shore had a kind of poisonous
    brightness. From the ship we could see nothing of the house or
    stockade, for they were quite buried among trees; and if it had not
    been for the chart on the companion, we might have been the first
    that had ever anchored there since the island arose out of the seas.

    There was not a breath of air moving, nor a sound but that of the
    surf booming half a mile away along the beaches and against the
    rocks outside. A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage--a
    smell of sodden leaves and rotting tree-trunks. I observed the
    doctor sniffing and sniffing like some one tasting a bad egg.

    “I don’t know about treasure,” he said, “but I’ll stake my wig
    there’s fever here.”

You will remark, first, how the mere description moves with the
story, following the crew in and just noting the landscape as _they_
saw it after the long sea-passage: quite in the fashion of Homer who
(as Lessing observed) does not in the _Iliad_ weary with any long
description of the finished shield of Achilles but coaxes us up to the
forge of Hephaestus, so that like the children at the open door of
Longfellow’s village smithy we see the work shaping under the workman’s
hammer, and--forgive the trite old verse--

        love to see the flaming forge
      And hear the bellows roar,
    And catch the burning sparks that fly
      Like chaff from a threshing-floor:

quite in the fashion of the _Odyssey_, too, where the Wanderers, _and
we with them_, make landfall

                                  on the foam
    Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn

and beach the black ship and disembark and wonder at cliff, glade and
waterfall, we wondering (that is) through their eyes.

You will remark, secondly, in the casual passage I quoted, how the
very few words spoken--those by John Silver, the villain, those by
the Doctor who is the true _punctum indifferens_, the normal sane
man of the story as truly as is Horatio in _Hamlet_--bite in, as by
sharp acid, the impression of the story--the _meaning_ of it, at that
moment, to the mutineer and to the simply honest man.

Am I comparing small things with great? Why, Gentlemen, of course I
am, and purposely; to convince you, if I can, that in small as in
great--the same laws rule true narrative art.


IV

So we come back to Thackeray, and to preaching. Preaching, or
lecturing, would seem to be an endemic itch of our nation, first (I am
sure) to be cured through attack on the public propensity for listening
to lectures and sermons. You will never cure the lecturer. In my own
part of the world the propensity to preach is notoriously virulent. As
the song puts it, into the mouth of an enthusiastic emigrant--

    And I will be the preacher,
      And preach, three times a day,
    To every living creature
      In North Americay.

For a moment let us go back to Thackeray’s humbugging protest that he
wished he were able to write a story with “an incident in every other
page, a villain, a battle, a mystery, in every chapter.”

I say (with what reverence it leaves me to command) that this is
pure, if unconscious, humbug, and a clouding of truth. For what is an
“incident”? A murder--say that of Duncan in the castle of Inverness;
a ghost on the battlements of Elsinore, stalking; a horseman in the
night, clattering; a ghostly tapping, a detective holding a lantern
over a reopened grave--all these are incidents and rather obviously so.
But so also, if properly used, may be the tearing-up of a letter, the
stiffened drop of a woman’s hands, a sigh, a turning-away.

“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”--just that, and
if you can use that, what more tragic? Thackeray himself--albeit he
could borrow hardily enough from Dumas, as when Colonel Esmond breaks
his sword--in that very book achieves his topmost height, his most
unchallengeable stroke as an artist, by just telling how a brilliant
girl steps down a staircase, and ending on two words, half-whispered in
French, at the foot of it--as we shall see, by and by.


V

No: I dare to say that this gift of loose, informal, preaching was
Thackeray’s bane _as a novelist_. The ease with which it came to him,
and the public’s readiness to accept it, just tempted him to slouch
along. _Esmond_ and the first half of _Vanity Fair_ excepted, he never
seems (to me at least) to have planned out a novel. He could not sit at
home, in his desolated house, and concentrate himself upon a close-knit
artistic design: but wrote, as I have said, in hotels or “upon Club
paper,” usually behind-time and (as the saying is) with the printer’s
devil at his elbow: and so this great melancholy man could, out of his
melancholy and his genius, curiously matched with it, of vivacious talk
summon up ream upon ream at call. Heaven forbid this should suggest
that when he came to facts--more especially when he dealt with his
beloved eighteenth century--he was careless. On the contrary, he knew
it familiarly as a hand knows its glove. I suppose no later writer
(with the possible exception of Austin Dobson) has understood the
earlier half of that century better. For certain, again, no writer
has, comparably with Thackeray, revivified it. Scholars are always on
the pad, with dark lanterns, to catch out writers of imagination: but
I observe that these Proctors, encountering Thackeray, carefully edge
to the other side of the street. I cannot find that anything in _Barry
Lyndon_, _Esmond_, _The Virginians_, the opening of _Denis Duval_,
has ever been seriously challenged by the pedants: and considering
Thackeray’s fame and the minute jealousy of pedants, that is a fairly
fine record. In the famous chapters on Brussels and Waterloo in
_Vanity Fair_, so far as I discover, every record confirms, not one
contradicts, his story.

Again, as it seems to me, this feebleness in construction--this letting
the story go at hazard and filling out with chat or preaching--this
lazy range of invention in plot--matches with limits in the range of
his _characters_. Here again he is always impeccable when dealing
with an Anglo-Indian retired, whether it be Jos. Sedley or Colonel
Newcome--high or low; or with a Foker or a Costigan or anyone he has
encountered in his own Bohemian life, or in a Pall Mall Club or in an
Irish regiment or in any dingy lodging-house, at home or abroad. Any
inhabitant of these haunts, haunts of his actual experience, he can
exhibit and experiment upon with infinite variety. Within that range,
you can say, he almost never went wrong. He could there convert all
particulars to a Universal. No shadow of doubt can rest on the literal
and actual truth of an anecdote he puts into _De Finibus_, one of his
best _Roundabout Papers_.

    “I was smoking,” says he, “in a tavern parlour one night, and
    this Costigan came into the room alive, the very man; the most
    remarkable resemblance of the printed sketches of the man, of the
    rude drawings in which I had depicted him. He had the same little
    coat, the same battered hat, cocked on one eye, the same twinkle in
    that eye. ‘Sir,’ said I, knowing him to be an old friend whom I had
    met in unknown regions--‘Sir,’ I said, ‘may I offer you a glass of
    brandy-and-water?’ ‘_Bedad ye may_,’ says he, ‘_and I’ll sing ye a
    song tu._’ Of course he spoke with an Irish brogue. Of course he
    had been in the army. In ten minutes he pulled out an army agent’s
    account, whereon his name was written. A few months later we read
    of him in a police court. How had I come to know him, to divine
    him? Nothing shall convince me that I have not seen that man in the
    world of spirits....”

They used (he adds) to call the good Sir Walter the “Wizard of
the North.” What if some writer should appear who can write so
_enchantingly_ that he shall be able to call into actual life the
people whom he invents?... Well, I think Thackeray could do that: but
only, I think, in the small district limited by the Haymarket on the
east and Kensington Gardens on the west. He could call spirits from the
vasty deep of the Cider Cellars, evoke them from the shadowy recesses
of the Reform or the Athenaeum Club. But, like Prospero, he had to draw
a ring around him before his best incantations worked. The cautious
Trollope remarks that his Sir Pitt Crawley “has always been to me a
stretch of audacity which I have been unable to understand. But it has
been accepted.” Yes, to be sure, it has been accepted, and old Sir
Pitt is wickedly alive and breathing just because (on Thackeray’s own
confession) he was drawn from the life. But as a rule, if you take his
dukes and duchesses you will find him on ticklish ground, even so far
northward as Mayfair, apt (shall we say?) to buttonhole the butler.
Always saving _Esmond_ and a part of _The Virginians_, I ask you to
compare anything in Thackeray with the opening of Tolstoy’s _War and
Peace_, and you will detect at once which author is dealing with what
he supposes and which with what is known to him, so familiar that he
cannot mistake his people even as he enters a room.


VI

But now we come to the man’s style; by which I mean, of course, his
propriety and grace of writing. It is, as we have seen, a “flowing”
style: it has that amplitude which Longinus commended and our Burke
practised, as an attribute of the sublime. For defect, as a _narrative_
style, it tells in three or more pages what might as well be told in
three sentences and often better. Without insisting that the writers
of the ’nineties (of whom I spoke but now) ever managed to justify
their painful search for the briefest, most telling phrase, I submit
that it is unlikeliest to be found by a man writing against time, for
monthly numbers. That (if you will) being granted, we have to ask
ourselves _why_ Thackeray’s prose is so beautiful that it moves one
so frequently to envy, and not seldom to a pure delight, transcending
all envy. For certain the secret lies nowhere in his grammar, in which
anyone can find flaws by the score. Half the time his sentences run as
if (to borrow a simile of Mr. Max Beerbohm’s concerning Shakespeare’s
_A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_) the man were kicking up a bedroom slipper
and catching it again on his toe. The secret lies, if you will follow
his sentences and surrender yourselves to their run and lull and lapse,
in a curious haunting music, as of a stream; a music of which scarce
any other writer of English prose has quite the natural, effortless,
command. You have no need to search in his best pages, or to hunt for
his purple patches. It has a knack of making music even while you are
judging his matter to be poor stuff; music--and frequent music--in his
most casual light-running sentences. I protest, Gentlemen, I am not
one of your _pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt_ fellows: I grudge
no man saying a thing of mine before me, even when I know it _must_
be valuable because the anticipator is Mr. George Saintsbury; and so
far am I from wishing him to perish that one of my sustaining hopes
of life is that of congratulating him on his hundredth birthday. (Do
not be afraid: in any event, it shall not be from this desk.) But I
protest also that in his _History of English Prose Rhythm_ he surprised
a secret which was mine, and shy as love--the conviction that for
mastery--unconscious, native mastery, it may be--of “that other rhythm
of prose”--no English writer excels Thackeray, and a very few indeed
approach him. So you guess that I have to deal at once with a sense
of gratitude and a grudge that my secret can now stand expressed and
confirmed by so high an authority: and my grudge I shall work off by
quoting him.

    “When I say,” he affirms, “that I hardly know any master of
    English prose-rhythm greater, in his way, than Thackeray, and that
    I certainly do not know any one with so various and pervasive a
    command, I may seem to provoke the answer, ‘Oh! you are, if not
    a maniac, at any rate a _maniaque_.’ Nevertheless, I say it; and
    will maintain it. The most remarkable thing about Thackeray is
    his mastery of that mixed style, ‘_shot_ with rhythm.’ Even in
    his earliest and most grotesque extravaganzas you will rarely
    find a discordant sentence--the very vulgarisms and misspellings
    come like solecisms from a pair of pretty lips and are uttered
    in a musical voice. As there never was a much hastier writer,
    it is clear that the man thought in rhythm--that the words, as
    they flowed from his pen, brought the harmony with them. Even his
    blank verse and his couplets in prose, never, I think, in any
    one instance unintentional, but deliberately used for burlesque
    purposes, have a diabolical quality and, as the wine merchants say,
    ‘breed’ about them, which some very respectable ‘poets’ have never
    achieved.”

He quotes a short beautiful passage from _Vanity Fair_--

    She was wrapped in a white morning dress, her hair falling on her
    shoulders and her large eyes fixed and without light. By way of
    helping on the preparations for the departure [for Waterloo where
    let me remind you he, her husband, was to fall and lie, with a
    bullet through his heart], and showing that she too could be useful
    at a moment so critical, this poor soul had taken up a sash of
    George’s, from the drawers whereon it lay and followed him to and
    fro, with the sash in her hand, looking on mutely as the packing
    proceeded. She came out and stood leaning at the wall, holding this
    sash against her bosom, from which the heavy net of crimson dropped
    like a large stain of blood.

He proceeds:

    Take another and shorter--not, I hope, impudently short “Becky was
    always good to him, always amused, never angry.”

    Anybody can do that? Perhaps; but please find something like it for
    me before 1845, and out of Thackeray, if you will kindly do so.
    _In_ him it is everywhere.

But, for the cadence of it--since all true prose demands prolonged
cadences--let me try to read you a passage or two from the exquisite
sixth and seventh chapters of _Esmond_. Harry Esmond is home from his
campaigning, has been to service in the old cathedral, and meets his
dear mistress outside as the service is done and over. Mark, I say, the
cadences of that scene of reconciliation--

    She gave him her hand, her little fair hand: there was only her
    marriage ring on it. The quarrel was all over. The year of grief
    and estrangement was passed. They never had been separated. His
    mistress had never been out of his mind all that time. No, not
    once. No, not in the prison; nor in the camp; nor on shore before
    the enemy; nor at sea under the stars of solemn midnight; nor as
    he watched the glorious rising of the dawn: not even at the table,
    where he sat carousing with friends, or at the theatre yonder,
    where he tried to fancy that other eyes were brighter than hers.
    Brighter eyes there might be, and faces more beautiful, but none
    so dear--no voice so sweet as that of his beloved mistress, who
    had been sister, mother, goddess to him during his youth--goddess
    now no more, for he knew of her weaknesses; and by thought, by
    suffering, and that experience it brings, was older now than she;
    but more fondly cherished as woman perhaps than ever she had been
    adored as divinity. What is it? Where lies it? the secret which
    makes one little hand the dearest of all? Who ever can unriddle
    that mystery? Here she was, her son by his side, his dear boy. Here
    she was, weeping and happy. She took his hand in both hers; he felt
    her tears. It was a rapture of reconciliation.

    They walked as though they had never been parted, slowly, with the
    grey twilight closing round them.

    “And now we are drawing near to home,” she continued, “I knew you
    would come, Harry, if--if it was but to forgive me for having
    spoken unjustly to you after that horrid--horrid misfortune. I was
    half frantic with grief then when I saw you. And I know now--they
    have told me. That wretch, whose name I can never mention, even has
    said it: how you tried to avert the quarrel, and would have taken
    it on yourself, my poor child: but it was God’s will that I should
    be punished, and that my dear lord should fall.”

    “He gave me his blessing on his death-bed,” Esmond said. “Thank God
    for that legacy!”

    “Amen, amen! dear Henry,” said the lady, pressing his arm. “I knew
    it. Mr. Atterbury, of St. Bride’s, who was called to him, told me
    so. And I thanked God, too, and in my prayers ever since remembered
    it.”

    “You had spared me many a bitter night, had you told me sooner,”
    Mr. Esmond said.

    “I know it, I know it,” she answered, in a tone of such sweet
    humility, as made Esmond repent that he should ever have dared
    to reproach her. “I know how wicked my heart has been; and I
    have suffered too, my dear. I confessed to Mr. Atterbury--I must
    not tell any more. He--I said I would not write to you or go to
    you--and it was better even that, having parted, we should part.
    But I knew you would come back--I own that. That is no one’s fault.
    And to-day, Henry, in the anthem, when they sang it, ‘When the
    Lord turned the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream,’
    I thought yes, like them that dream--them that dream. And then it
    went, ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy; and he that goeth
    forth and weepeth, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing,
    bringing his sheaves with him;’ I looked up from the book and saw
    you. I was not surprised when I saw you. I knew you would come, my
    dear, and saw the gold sunshine round your head.”

    She smiled an almost wild smile as she looked up at him. The moon
    was up by this time, glittering keen in the frosty sky. He could
    see for the first time now clearly, her sweet careworn face.

    “Do you know what day it is?” she continued. “It is the 29th of
    December--it is your birthday! But last year we did not drink
    it--no, no. My lord was cold, and my Harry was likely to die: and
    my brain was in a fever; and we had no wine. But now--now you are
    come again, bringing your sheaves with you, my dear.” She burst
    into a wild flood of weeping as she spoke: she laughed and sobbed
    on the young man’s heart, crying out wildly, “bringing your sheaves
    with you--your sheaves with you!”

So they fare to the lit house, and to the tragedy which is the tragedy
of all womankind; of beauty fading while desire endures, the passion to
be loved persists; most tragic of all when a mother meets in a daughter
her careless conquering rival.

    As they came up to the house at Walcote, the windows from within
    were lighted up with friendly welcome; the supper-table was spread
    in the oak parlour; it seemed as if forgiveness and love were
    awaiting the returning prodigal. Two or three familiar faces of
    domestics were on the look-out at the porch--the old housekeeper
    was there, and young Lockwood from Castlewood, in my lord’s livery
    of tawny and blue. His dear mistress pressed his arm as they
    passed into the hall. Her eyes beamed out on him with affection
    indescribable. “Welcome,” was all she said, as she looked up,
    putting back her fair curls and black hood. A sweet rosy smile
    blushed on her face; Harry thought he had never seen her look so
    charming. Her face was lighted with a joy that was brighter than
    beauty--she took a hand of her son, who was in the hall waiting his
    mother--she did not quit Esmond’s arm.

    “Welcome, Harry!” my young lord echoed after her. “Here we are all
    come to say so. Here’s old Pincot: hasn’t she grown handsome?” and
    Pincot, who was older, and no handsomer than usual, made a curtsey
    to the Captain, as she called Esmond, and told my lord to “Have
    done, now.”

    “And here’s Jack Lockwood. He’ll make a famous grenadier, Jack;
    and so shall I; we’ll both ’list under you, Cousin. As soon as
    I am seventeen, I go to the army--every gentleman goes to the
    army. Look! who comes here--ho, ho!” he burst into a laugh. “’Tis
    Mistress Trix, with a new ribbon; I knew she would put one on as
    soon as she heard a captain was coming to supper.”

    This laughing colloquy took place in the hall of Walcote House,
    in the midst of which is a staircase that leads from an open
    gallery, where are the doors of the sleeping chambers: and from
    one of these, a wax candle in her hand, and illuminating her, came
    Mistress Beatrix--the light falling indeed upon the scarlet ribbon
    which she wore, and upon the most brilliant white neck in the world.

    Esmond had left a child and found a woman, grown beyond the common
    height, and arrived at such a dazzling completeness of beauty,
    that his eyes might well show surprise and delight at beholding
    her. In hers there was a brightness so lustrous and melting, that
    I have seen a whole assembly follow her as if by an attraction
    irresistible: and that night the great Duke was at the playhouse
    after Ramillies, every soul turned and looked (she chanced to enter
    at the opposite side of the theatre at the same moment) at her,
    and not at him. She was a brown beauty: that is, her eyes, hair
    and eyebrows and eye-lashes were dark: her hair curling with rich
    undulations, and waving over her shoulders; but her complexion was
    as dazzling white as snow in sunshine; except her cheeks, which
    were a bright red, and her lips, which were of a still deeper
    crimson. Her mouth and chin, they said, were too large and full,
    and so they might be for a goddess in marble, but not for a
    woman whose eyes were fire, whose look was love, whose voice was
    the sweetest low song, whose shape was perfect symmetry, health,
    decision, activity, whose foot as it planted itself on the ground
    was firm but flexible, and whose motion, whether rapid or slow,
    was always perfect grace--agile as a nymph, lofty as a queen--now
    melting, now imperious, now sarcastic--there was no single movement
    of hers but was beautiful. As he thinks of her, he who writes feels
    young again, and remembers a paragon.

    So she came holding her dress with one fair rounded arm, and her
    taper before her, tripping down the stair to greet Esmond.

    “She hath put on her scarlet stockings and white shoes,” says
    my lord, still laughing. “Oh, my fine mistress! is this the way
    you set your cap at the Captain?” She approached, shining smiles
    upon Esmond, who could look at nothing but her eyes. She advanced
    holding forward her head, as if she would have him kiss her as he
    used to do when she was a child.

    “Stop,” she said, “I am grown too big! Welcome, Cousin Harry,”
    and she made him an arch curtsey, sweeping down to the ground
    almost, with the most gracious bend, looking up the while with the
    brightest eyes and sweetest smile. Love seemed to radiate from her.
    Harry eyed her with such a rapture as the first lover is described
    as having by Milton.

    “N’est-ce pas?” says my lady, in a low, sweet voice, still hanging
    on his arm.

    Esmond turned round with a start and a blush, as he met his
    mistress’s clear eyes. He had forgotten her, rapt in admiration of
    the _filia pulcrior_.

I have said some hard things, Gentlemen, upon Thackeray and have
indicated some dislike of him here and there, or, at least, some
impatience. But to the man who could at once so poignantly and so
reticently bring those two scenes into contrast--with all its
meaning--_all_ meaning--modulated to so perfect a balance of heart and
intelligence wedded in human speech--well, to that man I conclude by
bowing the head, acknowledging a real master: a great melancholy man
with his genius running in streaks, often in thin streaks about him but
always, when uttered, uttered in liquid lovely prose.




THE VICTORIAN BACKGROUND


I

I intend, in this and two following lectures, Gentlemen, taking my
illustrations in the main from Victorian times, to examine with you how
one and the same social question, urgent in our politics, presented
itself to several writers of imaginative genius, all of whom found
something intolerable in England and sought in their several ways to
amend it.

At the beginning of this enquiry let me disclaim any _parti pris_
about the duty of an imaginative writer towards the politics of his
age. Aristophanes has a political sense, Virgil a strong one even
when imitating Theocritus; Theocritus none: yet both are delightful:
Lucretius has no care for politics, Horace has any amount, and both
are delightful again: the evils of his time which oppress the author
of _Piers Plowman_, affect Chaucer not at all: Dante is intensely
political, Petrarch, far less sublime as a poet, disdains the
business; Villon is for life as it flies, Ronsard for verse and art
(and the devil take the rest); Spenser, with a sore enough political
experience, casts it off almost as absolutely as does Ariosto.
Shakespeare has a strong patriotic sense and a manly political sense:
but he treats politics--let us take _King John_ and _Coriolanus_ for
examples--artistically, for their dramatic value. He knows about

            The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely

and that they can be unendurable: but he does not use them for
propaganda (odious word!) whatever the minute of utterance. Milton
put all his religion into verse, his politics into prose; save for a
passage or two in _Lycidas_ and _Paradise Lost_ he excluded politics
from his high poetry. On the other hand Dryden had a high poetic sense
of politics, and it pervades the bulk of his original poetry, while the
opening of his famous _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ strikes an introductory
note as sure as Virgil’s, through whom a deep undercurrent of politics
runs from the first page of the _Eclogues_ to the last of the _Æneid_.
Our poets of the eighteenth century were social and political in the
main: since if you once take Man for your theme, you, or some one
following you, must be drawn on irresistibly to compare the position
you assign him in the scheme of things with his actual position in the
body politic, to consider the “Rights of Man,” “man’s inhumanity to
man” and so forth. _An Essay on Man_ (with the philosophy Pope borrowed
for it) leads on to _The Deserted Village_:

    Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,
    Where wealth accumulates and men decay

--to Crabbe’s Poor House, Hall of Justice, Prison; to Blake’s lyrical
laments over small chimney-sweeps, blackamoors, foundlings and all that
are young and desolate and oppressed, and the vow to sweep away “these
dark Satanic mills” (of which I shall have more to say by and by)
“and build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.” Turn now
to Keats and you are returned upon _mere_ poetry, in the Latin sense
of _mere_. Keats has no politics, no philosophy of statecraft, little
social feeling: he is a young apostle of poetry for poetry’s sake.

    Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

But of course, to put it solidly, that is a vague observation--to
anyone whom life has taught to face facts and define his terms,
actually an _uneducated_ conclusion, albeit most pardonable in one so
young and ardent. Let us, for a better, go on to the last and grandest
word of his last, unfinished, poem:

    “High Prophetess,” said I, “purge off
    Benign, if so it please thee, my mind’s film.”
    “None can usurp this height,” returned the Shade,
    “But those to whom the miseries of this world
    _Are_ misery, and will not let them rest.”

Such a spirit, preëminently, was Shelley; of whom, when the last word
of disparagement has been said, or the undeniable truth, put into a
phrase by Mr. Max Beerbohm, “a crystal crank,” the equally undeniable
fact remains that Shelley suffered tortures over the woes of his
fellow-creatures, while Byron (for a contrast) cares scarcely at all
for the general woe surrounding him, everything for his own affliction
in a world which had paid him tribute far above the earnings of common
men, and yet not only (as Shelley does) casts the blame on tyrants and
governments, but the _cure_ for his egoistical troubles on political
machinery, revolutions. I go on, taking names and illustrations almost
at random. Contrast any Radical utterance of Tennyson’s--his _Lady
Clara Vere de Vere_, for example--with poor Thomas Hood’s _Song of the
Shirt_. Why, it fades away: Hood’s passionate charity simply withers
up the other’s personal self-assertive inverted snobbery. If you have
stuff in you, contrast the note of

    With fingers weary and worn,
      With eyelids heavy and red,
    A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
      Plying her needle and thread

with the whine of _Lady Clara Vere de Vere_--

    The grand old gardener and his wife
      Laugh at the claims of long descent

--which is just

    When Adam delved, and Eve span,
      Who was then the gentleman?

--on the pianola. Observe, pray, that I am not comparing the poetic
_gift_, in which (as in other gifts of the gods) Tennyson very greatly
outweighted Hood. I am merely setting some poets against others and
contrasting the degrees in which they exhibit social or political
sensitiveness. We should all allow, probably, that Robert Browning
was a greater poet and a stronger thinker than his wife: but probably
deny to him the acute indignation against human misery, social
wrong, political injustice, evinced by the authoress of _The Cry of
the Children_ or _Casa Guidi Windows_. Of the two friends, Matthew
Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, we should as probably admit Arnold to
be the better poet as Clough to be the less occupied with his own
soul, the more in vain attempt to save other men. So again among the
Pre-Raphaelites Swinburne raves magnificently for the blood of tyrants:
but when it came to lifting the oppressed, to throwing himself into the
job, what a puff-ball was he beside William Morris who had announced
himself as no more than “the idle singer of an empty day”!

    One fishes in the night of deep sea pools:
      For him the nets hang long and low,
    Cork buoyed and strong: the silver gleaming schools
        Come with the ebb and flow
      Of universal tides, and all the channels glow.

    Or holding with his hand the weighted line
      He sounds the languors of the neaps,
    Or feels what current of the springing brine
        The cord divergent sweeps,
      The throb of what great heart bestirs the middle deeps.

    Thou also weavest meshes, fine and thin,
      And leaguer’st all the forest ways:
    But of that sea, and the great heart therein
        Thou knowest nought: whole days
      Thou toil’st, and hast thy end--good store of pies and jays.


II

So far we have spoken of poets--fairly selected, I trust--and have
found that there are poets and poets; and some are Olympian in
attitude, looking down deep below the surface from a great height as a
gannet spies his fish; but high aloof, concerned rather with universal
themes than with the woman of Canaan clamorous in the street crying
for her daughter, “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which
fall from their masters’ table.”

Now if we turn to our novelists, from Defoe to Scott, we find that the
novel from its first virtual beginning in our country and for a century
or more, has for social diseases in the body politic little concern
and practically no sense at all. Defoe has strong political sense,
but keeps it for his tracts and pamphlets: in _Robinson Crusoe_ (and
specially in the third volume, _The Serious Reflections of Robinson
Crusoe_), in _Moll Flanders_, in _Roxana_, he is always a moralist,
but a religious moralist. If--to twist a line of _Hamlet_--there’s
something rotten in the _state_ of Denmark, it does not come within the
scope of the novelist whose office is to combine amusement with general
edification. So--leaving out the edification--it is in _Tristram
Shandy_, so in _The Vicar of Wakefield_. Richardson is all for the
human heart as he reads it, and female virtue. Fielding with his genial
manly morality--Fielding, magistrate of a London Police Court, and a
humane one--discloses little sense in his novels of any _vera causa_
in our system supplying the unfortunates for whom, in daily life, he
tempers justice with mercy. You will not, I think, cite _Jonathan Wild_
against me. Noble fellow, as he drops down the Thames--stricken to
death, and knowing it--on that hopeless voyage to Lisbon, his thoughts
are hopeful for England and the glory of her merchant shipping: and
(says he) it must be our own fault if it doth not continue glorious:

    for continue so it will, as long as the flourishing state of our
    trade shall support it, and this support it can never want, till
    our legislators, shall cease to give sufficient attention to the
    protection of our trade, and our magistrates want sufficient power,
    ability, and honesty to execute the laws: a circumstance not to be
    apprehended, as it cannot happen till our senates and our benches
    shall be filled with the blindest ignorance, or with the blackest
    corruption.

Smollett’s recipe for a novel is just a rattling picaresque story
enlivened by jocular horse-play. Respect Fanny Burney and idolise Jane
Austen as we will, they move their plots on a narrow and sheltered
stage: while the romantics, working up from Horace Walpole to Scott,
call in the past to redress the poverty of the present and the
emptiness of a general theory of the arts which, deservedly sovereign
in its day, has passed by imitation into convention, and through
convention, as always, into mere inanition.


III

Now if you will take, as a convenient starting-point for your enquiry,
the year 1832--the year that saw the passing of the Great Reform Bill
and the death of Scott: if you will start (I say) with that year
beyond which, when I first made acquaintance, with the English School
here, our curiosity was forbidden to trespass--you will find that
then, or about then, certain terrible diseases in our Commonwealth
were brewing up to a head. As everyone now recognises, we must
seek the operating cause of these in what we now agree to call the
“Industrial Revolution”; that is in the process as yet unrestricted
by law, encouraged by economic theory, moving at once too fast for
the national conscience to overtake or even to realise it and with a
step of doom as rigidly inexorable as the machinery, its agent and its
symbol, converting England into a manufacturing country, planting the
Manchester of those days and many Manchesters over England’s green
and pleasant land, and leaving them untended to grow as they pleased
polluting her streams, blackening her fields, and covering--here lies
the indictment--with a pall of smoke, infinite human misery: all this
controlled and elaborated by cotton-lords and mine-owners who prospered
on that misery.

The plight of rural, agricultural, England is another story. Here in
Lancashire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire was a monstrous revolution gathering
strength (as I say) beyond men’s power even to realise it. And if they
realised it, there was Political Economy assuring them that it had
to be. And it continued (as you will remember) long after poor Wragg
strangled and left her illegitimate infant on the dismal Mapperly
hills and the egregious Mr. Roebuck asked, if, the world over or in
past history, there was anything like it. “Nothing. I pray that our
unrivalled happiness may last.”

We all recognise it now, and the wicked folly of it--or at least I hope
we do. My purpose to-day, Gentlemen, is not to excite vain emotions
over a past which neither you nor I can remedy at all, but simply to
show that--as, after all, we are a kindly nation--the spectacle of
industrial England about and after 1832 became intolerable to our
grandfathers: how it operated upon two extraordinarily different minds:
and (if I can) how irresistible is the wind of literature, through what
mouthpiece soever it breathes with conviction.


IV

But before examining how two of the most dissimilar minds
conceivable--one a man’s, the other a woman’s--reacted upon it, I must
indicate the enormity of the challenge.

France had passed through her Revolution and her Terror, with graphic
details of which our public speakers and writers had taken pains to
make our country familiar enough: and England had won out of the
struggle, having taken the side she chose, all oblivious (as we are,
maybe, to-day) that victory in arms is at best but the beginning of
true victory, and that she herself was in the throes of a revolution
not a whit the less murderous than that of France, and only less
clamant because its victims, instead of aristocrats and politicians
and eminent saviours of their country following one another by scores
in tumbrils to die scenically in the Place de la République, the Place
of the Guillotine, were serfs of the cotton-mill and the mine, wives,
small children, starved unscenically, withered up in foetid cellars
or done to death beside the machines of such a hell-upon-earth as
Manchester had grown to be out of towns in which an artificer, however
humble, had once been permitted to rejoice in that which alone, beyond
his hearth and family, heartens a man--the well-executed work of hand
and brain. The capitalists of that time simply overwhelmed these towns,
expanding, converting them into barracks for workers. Who these workers
were, let an advertisement in a Macclesfield paper of 1825 attest--

    To the Overseers of the Poor and to families desirous of settling
    in Macclesfield. Wanted between 4,000 and 5,000 persons between the
    ages of 7 and 21 years.

Yes, let us pass the hideous towns with but one quotation, from Nassau
Senior--

    As I passed through the dwellings of the mill-hands in Irish
    Town, Ancoats and Little Ireland, I was only amazed that it was
    possible to maintain a reasonable state of health in such homes.
    The towns, for in extent and number of inhabitants they are towns,
    have been erected with the utmost disregard of everything except
    the immediate advantage of the speculative builder.... In one
    place we found a whole street following the course of a ditch,
    because in this way deeper cellars could be secured without the
    cost of digging, cellars not for storing wares or rubbish, but for
    dwellings of human beings. Not one house in the street escaped the
    cholera.

“Such,” wrote Chadwick, that careful observer, “is the absence of
civic economy in some of our towns that their condition in respect
of cleanliness is almost as bad as that of an encamped horde or an
undisciplined soldiery.”

But from the poor men and women--who had _sold_ themselves into these
slums and industrial slavery--let us turn to their hapless children,
who, after all, had never asked to be born. Your Malthus in that age,
and your Mr. Harold Cox in this, are positive (God forgive them!) that
a number of these brats never ought to be born. (I don’t know the price
of millstones, but they ought to be cheap and handy, and properly
labelled.) I shall lay stress on these children, Gentlemen, because--as
children do so often--they brought back the gospel--or something of it.
For these weaklings, _as they were the foundation of the manufacturer’s
wealth, by their illimitable woe enabling him to cut his wages_, in
the end brought about his exposure. To us--for always to us in our
day the past wears a haze softening it into sentiment--Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s _Cry of the Children_ is nothing, or suspected as
sentimental, to be classed alongside with anything (say) by Mrs.
Hemans or L. E. L. Listen to a couple of stanzas or three--

    “For oh,” say the children, “we are weary,
      And we cannot run or leap;
    If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
      To drop down in them and sleep.
    Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,
      We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
    And underneath our heavy eyelids drooping
      The reddest flower would look pale as snow.
    For, all day, we drag our burden tiring
      Through the coal-dark, underground;
    Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
      In the factories, round and round.

    For all day the wheels are droning, turning;
      Their wind comes in our faces,
    Till our hearts turn, our head with pulses burning,
      And the walls turn in their places:
    Turns the sky in the high window, blank and reeling,
      Turns the long light that drops adown the wall,
    Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling:
      All are turning, all the day, and we with all.
    And all day the iron wheels are droning,
      And sometimes we could pray,
    ‘O ye wheels’ (breaking out in a mad moaning),
      ‘Stop! be silent for to-day!’”

    And well may the children weep before you!
      They are weary ere they run;
    They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory
      Which is brighter than the sun.
    They know the grief of man, without its wisdom;
      They sink in man’s despair, without its calm;
    As slaves, without the liberty in Christdom,
      As martyrs, by the pang without the palm....

                _Let them weep! let them weep!_

    They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
      And their look is dread to see,
    For they mind you of their angels in high places,
      With eyes turned on Deity.
    “How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation,
      Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,--
    Stifle down with a mail’d heel its palpitation,
      And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
    Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,
      And your purple shows your path!”
    But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper
      Than the strong man in his wrath.


V

Now, I dare say some of you, even while I read this, were dismissing
it in your minds as early-Victorian humanitarianism, faded
philanthropy, outworn sentiment. Yes, but even a sentiment, if it works
simultaneously upon a generation of great and very dissimilar writers,
is a fact in the story of our literature--a phenomenon, at least, which
made itself an event--to be studied by you scientifically. One of the
first rules of good criticism, and the sheet-anchor of the historical
method, is to put yourself (as near as may be) in the other fellow’s
place: and if you take but a very little pains to do so, you will soon
discover that Mrs. Browning was not writing “for the fun of the thing,”
exuding, or causing to be exuded, any cheap tears. We are accustomed
to Manchester to-day: we take it for granted as a great community with
a most honourable Press to represent its opinions. But we only take
it for granted because it has become tolerable, and it only became
tolerable, then dignified--it only became a city--because our Victorian
writers shamed its manufacturers out of their villainies. In the
twenties, thirties, and “hungry forties” of the last century Manchester
was merely a portent, and a hideous portent, the growth of which at
once fascinated our economists and frightened our rulers. Think of the
fisherman in the _Arabian Nights_ who, unstopping the bottle brought
ashore in his net, beheld a column of smoke escape and soar and spread,
and anon and aloft, overlooking it, the awful visage of a Genie. Even
so our economists watched an enormous smoke ascend from Manchester and
said, “Here is undreamed-of national prosperity”; while our ministers
stared up into the evil face of a monster they had no precedent to
control. You understand, of course, that I use “Manchester” as a
symbolic name, covering a Lancashire population which grew in the first
twenty years of the century from 672,000 to 1,052,000. But let a very
different person from Mrs. Browning--let Benjamin Disraeli, then a
young man, describe the portent.

    From early morn to the late twilight our Coningsby for several days
    devoted himself to the comprehension of Manchester. It was to him a
    new world, pregnant with new trains of thought and feeling. In this
    unprecedented partnership between capital and science--

Mark you, not between capital and labour, but between capital and
science, still by machinery arming capital to vaster strength--

    In this unprecedented partnership between capital and science,
    working on a spot which Nature had indicated as the fitting theatre
    for their exploits, he beheld a great source of the wealth of
    nations which had been reserved for these times, and he perceived
    that this wealth was rapidly developing classes whose power was
    imperfectly recognised in the constitutional scheme, and whose
    duties to the social system seemed altogether omitted

--“_and whose duties to the social system seemed altogether omitted_.”
There, in Disraeli’s words, you have it. Every prolonged war raises a
new governing class of prosperous profiteers who turn their country’s
necessity to glorious gain. So it was a hundred years ago at the
conclusion of the long Napoleonic struggle: so it is to-day. So it goes
on ever. A profiteering class of speculators and (as Cobbett would
say) “loan-mongers” emerges at the top of any great war. Ex-soldiers
tramp the roads for work, for bread. Decent folk, bred in the incurable
belief that England, whoever suffers, must pay her debts, sell out and
suffer, breaking up old homes, cutting neighbourly ties, disappearing,
taxed out of endurance, electing to suffer, for honour’s sake. Succeeds
a generation or two which, at school or University, are baptised into
the old honourable cult. The gravity of an Englishman, because they are
English after all, revives and takes possession of young hearts, made
generous by education, forgetful of old woes. And so in time--give it
a couple of generations--the descendants of the sponge and the parvenu
will have shed the hair from the hoof, will leap to the summons of
_noblesse oblige_, and in their turn make haste to die by Ypres or the
Somme, transmitting somehow the mettle of England into a future denied
to them.


VI

But you will say that, although this revolt in the better minds of
England, a hundred years ago, may be a fact, I have as yet quoted but
the evidence of a poetess and a novelist. Very well, then: I go to Blue
Books and the reports of several commissions, reminding you that I lay
most stress on the children because it happened through their almost
inconceivable sufferings that, such as it was, victory came.

In 1831 Michael Sadler (a great man, in spite of Macaulay, and the
ancestor of a great one--if I may insert this word of long admiration
for the first senior man who spoke to me at my first undergraduate
dinner in Hall, more than forty years ago)--in 1831 this Michael
Sadler, member for Newark, introduced a Ten Hours Bill, and moved its
second reading in a speech that roundly exposed, along with other woes
of the poor, the sacrifice of child life in the mills. The Bill was
allowed a second reading on condition that the whole subject should be
referred to a Select Committee, over which Sadler presided.

Now let me quote a page from Mr. and Mrs. Hammond’s recently published
study of Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, who, though so many have
laughed at him, devoted his life that they should laugh if they chose,
but willy-nilly on the right side of their mouths, and not with a grin
unacceptable to any Divinity presumed as having created Man in His
image--

    The Report of Sadler’s Committee is a classical document; it is
    one of the main sources of our knowledge of the conditions of
    factory life at the time. Its pages bring before the reader in
    the vivid form of dialogue the kind of life that was led by the
    victims of the new system. Men and women who were old at twenty,
    from all the industrial districts, from Manchester, from Glasgow,
    from Huddersfield, from Dundee, from Bradford, from Leeds, passed
    before their rulers with their tale of weariness, misery, and
    diseased and twisted limbs. A worsted spinner of Huddersfield,
    Joseph Hebergram, aged seventeen, described his day’s work at the
    age of seven. His hours were from five in the morning to eight
    at night, with one solitary break of thirty minutes at noon. All
    other meals had to be taken in snatches, without any interruption
    of work. “Did you not become very drowsy and sleepy towards the
    end of the day and feel much fatigued?” “Yes; that began about
    three o’clock; and grew worse and worse, and it came to be very bad
    towards six and seven.” “What means were taken to keep you at your
    work so long?” “There were three overlookers; there was one a head
    overlooker, and there was one man kept to grease the machines, and
    there was one kept on purpose to strap.” His brother, who worked in
    the same mill, died at sixteen from spinal affection, due to his
    work, and he himself began to grow deformed after six months of it.
    “How far do you live from the mill?” “A good mile.” “Was it very
    painful for you to move?” “Yes, in the morning I could scarcely
    walk, and my brother and sister used, out of kindness, to take me
    under each arm, and run with me to the mill, and my legs dragged on
    the ground; in consequence of the pain I could not walk.” Another
    witness, an overseer in a flax spinning mill at Dundee, said that
    there were nine workers in the room under his charge who had begun
    work before they were nine years old, and that six of them were
    splay-footed and the other three deformed in other ways. A tailor
    at Stanningley, Samuel Coulson, who had three daughters in the
    mill, described the life of his household when the mill was busy.
    In the ordinary time the hours were from six in the morning to
    half-past eight at night; in the brisk time, for six weeks in the
    year, these girls, the youngest of them “going eight,” worked from
    three in the morning to ten or half-past ten at night. “What was
    the length of time they could be in bed during those long hours?”
    “It was near eleven o’clock before we could get them into bed after
    getting a little victuals, and then at morning my mistress used to
    stop up all night, for fear that we could not get them ready for
    the time; sometimes we have gone to bed and one of us generally
    awoke.” “Were the children excessively fatigued by this labour?”
    “Many times; we have cried often when we have given them the little
    victualling we had to give them; we had to shake them, and they
    have fallen asleep with the victuals in their mouths many a time.”

    Another witness, Gillett Sharpe, described how his boy, who had
    been very active and a good runner, gradually lost the use of his
    limbs at the mill. “I had three steps up into my house, and I have
    seen that boy get hold of the sides of the door to assist his
    getting up into the house; many a one advised me to take him away;
    they said he would be ruined and made quite a cripple; but I was
    a poor man, and could not afford to take him away, having a large
    family, six children under my care.”

--and so on, and so on. Sadler forced the horrible tale upon
Parliament. Unhappily, being pitted against Macaulay at Leeds in the
General Election of 1832, he lost his seat, though Manchester sent an
appeal signed by 40,000 factory-workers: and he never returned to the
House of Commons. He died in 1835 at fifty-five, worn out by his work
on behalf of these poor children.


VII

His mantle descended to Lord Ashley: and Ashley, after bitter defeats,
won on the mine-children what had been lost in the cotton-mills. For
the mines took an even more hideous toll of childhood than did the
mills. Listen to this, extracted from the Report of the Commission of
1840–1842, which shocked all England by its disclosures--

    In every district except North Staffordshire, where the younger
    children were needed in the Potteries, the employment of children
    of seven was common, in many pits children were employed at six,
    in some at five, and in one case a child of three was found to be
    employed. Even babies were sometimes taken down into the pits to
    keep the rats from their fathers’ food. The youngest children were
    employed as trappers; that is, they were in charge of the doors in
    the galleries, on the opening and closing of which the safety of
    the mine depended. For the ventilation of the mine was contrived
    on a simple principle; there were two shafts, one the downcast,
    the other the upcast. A fire was lighted at the foot of the upcast
    to drive the air up the shaft, and air was sucked down through the
    downcast to fill the vacuum. This air was conducted by means of a
    series of doors through all the workings of the mine on its passage
    to the upcast, and these doors were in the charge of a little boy
    or girl, who sat in a small hole, with a string in his or her hand,
    in darkness and solitude for twelve hours or longer at a time.
    “Although this employment,” reported the Commission, “scarcely
    deserves the name of labour, yet as the children engaged in it are
    commonly excluded from light, and are always without companions,
    it would, were it not for the passing and re-passing of the coal
    carriages, amount to solitary confinement of the worst order.”

    Children were also employed to push the small carriages filled
    with coals along the passages, and as the passages were often
    very low and narrow, it was necessary to use very small children
    for this purpose. “In many mines which are at present worked, the
    main gates are only from 24 to 30 inches high, and in some parts
    of these mines the passages do not exceed 18 inches in height.
    In this case not only is the employment of very young children
    absolutely indispensable to the working of the mine, but even the
    youngest children must necessarily work in a bent position of
    the body.” As a rule the carriages were pushed along small iron
    railways, but sometimes they were drawn by children and women,
    “harnessed like dogs in a go-cart,” and moving, like dogs, on all
    fours. Another children’s task was that of pumping water in the
    under-bottom of pits, a task that kept children standing ankle-deep
    in water for twelve hours. In certain districts children were used
    for a particularly responsible duty. In Derbyshire and parts of
    Lancashire and Cheshire it was the custom to employ them as engine
    men, to let down and draw up the cages in which the population of
    the pit descended to its depths and returned to the upper air. A
    “man of discretion” required 30_s._ a week wages; these substitutes
    only cost 5_s._ or 7_s._ a week. Accidents were, of course,
    frequent,--on one occasion three lives were lost because a child
    engineman of nine turned away to look at a mouse at a critical
    moment,--and the Chief Constable of Oldham said that the coroners
    declined to bring in verdicts of gross neglect from pity for the
    children.


VIII

Do you ask “What has all this to do with literature, or what has
literature to do with these things”? I answer that, as a matter of
mere history, literature in the nineteenth century did immensely
concern itself with these things: and I add that, as literature deals
with life, so if it deserve a place in any decent state, it _should_
deal with these things. And to this again I add, because they dealt
righteously and unsparingly with these things, Shelley, Dickens,
Carlyle, Ruskin--yes and, later, William Morris--live on the lips of
men to-day. For they let in light upon dark places; not only revealing
them to the public conscience, but, better still and better far,
conveying light and waking eyesight in the victims themselves.

Denunciation has its uses: and if you want to hear denunciation, listen
to Carlyle--

    British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge
    poison-swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral; a hideous
    _living_ Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive; such a
    Curtius’ gulf, communicating with the Nether Deeps, as the Sun
    never saw till now. These scenes, which the _Morning Chronicle_
    is bringing home to all minds of men,--thanks to it for a service
    such as Newspapers have seldom done,--ought to excite unspeakable
    reflections in every mind. Thirty-thousand outcast Needlewomen
    working themselves swiftly to death; three million Paupers rotting
    in forced idleness, _helping_ said Needlewomen to die: these are
    but items in the sad ledger of despair.

    Thirty-thousand wretched women, sunk in that putrefying well of
    abominations; they have oozed-in upon London, from the universal
    Stygian quagmire of British industrial life; are accumulated in the
    _well_ of the concern, to that extent. British charity is smitten
    to the heart, at the laying-bare of such a scene; passionately
    undertakes, by enormous subscription of money, or by other enormous
    effort, to redress that individual horror; as I and all men hope
    it may. But, alas, what next? This general well and cesspool once
    baled clean out to-day, will begin before night to fill itself anew.

Yes, denunciation has its uses: and public exposure is salutary, or at
least sanitary, though its first revelations sicken to such despair as
Carlyle’s. But the true operation of light is upon the sufferer’s own
eyes, the promise in its salutation is for them. Listen to this one
sentence from Porter’s _Progress of the Nation_, published in 1851--

    In 1839, 1840 and 1841, 40 per cent. of the men and 65 per cent.
    of the women married or witnessing marriages in Lancashire and
    Cheshire could not sign their names

--and at this time Leonard Horner, Inspector of Factories, reported
that in an area of thirty-two square miles comprising Oldham and
Ashton, with a population of 105,000, there was not a single public day
school for poor children. Consider these millions of children who grew
up to be men and wives in purlieus not once penetrated by so much as
a glint of the romance, the poetry, that as we look back--you a short
way, Gentlemen--I a long one--we see as Heaven lying about us in _our_
infancy. _There_ lay the soul’s tragedy--

    The singers have sung, and the builders have builded,
      The painters have fashioned their tales of delight;
    For what and for whom hath the world’s book been gilded,
      When all is for these but the blackness of night?

There lay the tragedy: there the seat of cure: and if, with so much
left undone, it has become possible from this desk to preach, without
serious rebuke, that humanism can be taught even in our Elementary
Schools, and, further, that to see it is so taught may well concern
even a great University, these humanitarians of the nineteenth
century were the men and women who invaded the borders of Zabulon and
Nephthalim, until for them which sat in darkness, in the region and
shadow of death, light is sprung up.


IX

But I recall myself to my purpose; which in two following lectures
shall be as literary, as merely critical, as I can keep it. To-day I
have set out the theme and tried to show you how it had perforce to
occupy men’s minds and--since artists and imaginative writers must
have feelings as well as intellect--almost to dominate our literature
and art in the last century. In that domination of interest you will
find implicit, and will easily evolve for yourselves, the reason why
the novel in particular, being a social form of art and lending itself
in so many ways to episode, discussion, even direct preaching, became
political as it never was in the days of Richardson and Fielding, Scott
and Jane Austen. The preponderance of the theme being granted, I next
propose to examine how it took possession of two persons of genius: a
man and a woman; the man assertive, personally ambitious, full of fire
and opulent phrase: the woman staid, self-abnegating, to me wearing
the quiet, with the intensity, of a noble statue. I can conceive, if
one would trace in literature the operation of a compelling idea, no
two exponents more essentially disparate than Benjamin Disraeli and
Elizabeth Gaskell.




DISRAELI


I

For two reasons or (shall we say) against two main obstacles, both
serious, Benjamin Disraeli found it hard to gain the ear of Parliament
and, having gained it, had yet a long fight before attaining office.
To begin with, his race and reputation were against him. He was a
Jew, and he had written novels. He was admittedly clever to excess:
but cleverness, specially when tainted by literary skill, is, of all
others, the reputation which our British Senate most profoundly (and
perhaps on the whole wisely) distrusts. That the House “hates a man
who makes it think” was the observation of a cynic, no doubt. But I
have also heard it said by one long a member of it, that a speaker
there must always count on somebody--he knows not whom--who knows the
subject more thoroughly than he. Its instinct being for solidity, it
shrinks from brilliance as a danger: and this was specially true of
the party to which Disraeli allied himself--upon which, we may say, he
thrust himself--a Jew, an adventurer, an ambitious, esurient fellow
without any stake in the country. What had a party, which didn’t in the
least object to being called stupid, to gain by the support of such an
outsider?

And it is obvious that, for Parliamentary success, Disraeli had to
overcome something more serious--a certain bumptiousness of manner, a
youthful confidence and ease in Sion, helped out by elaborate ringlets,
mannerisms and a foppish dress very much overdone: an opulence of
speech and waistcoat, both jarring on the very men--and probably most
upon these--into whose less-oiled heads he was fighting to drive some
ideas. There is a great deal of tactlessness in the story of Disraeli,
right up to the moment of Peel’s fall. But the story witnesses not
only to a growing mastery, won by amazing courage, over the House
but--better--to a discipline won over himself.


II

Now as Disraeli, being a novelist, was naturally suspect among the
party with whom he had chosen to cast his political lot, so his
books were naturally suspected and unjustly treated by his opponents
throughout his lifetime: and for this again we may decide that he was
largely to blame. He was, as you know, the son of a man of letters:
as he puts it, “born in a library, and trained from early childhood
by learned men who did not share the passions and prejudices of our
political and social life.” In his early work, such as _The Young Duke_
or _The Infernal Marriage_, we find, with all its excess--the excess of
youth--a hard literary finish. Let me quote from the last-named story a
few sentences for specimen:

    The next morning the Elysian world called to pay their respects to
    Proserpine. Her Majesty, indeed, held a drawing-room, which was
    fully and brilliantly attended.... From this moment the career
    of Proserpine was a series of magnificent entertainments. The
    principal Elysians vied with each other in the splendour and
    variety of the amusements which they offered to the notice of their
    Queen. Operas, plays, balls and banquets followed in dazzling
    succession. Proserpine who was almost inexperienced in society,
    was quite fascinated. She regretted the years she had wasted in
    her Sicilian solitude: and marvelled that she could ever have
    looked forward with delight to a dull annual visit to Olympus; she
    almost regretted that, for the sake of an establishment, she could
    have been induced to cast her lot in the regal gloom of Tartarus.
    Elysium exactly suited her.

Now that, in its way, is as neat as can be. You perceive at once that
the style is literary and controlled. Nor, even in the tumultuous close
of _Vivian Grey_, his first work, can you fail to perceive that, though
exuberant, it was at first controlled. He says:

    I have too much presumed upon an attention which I am not able to
    command. I am, as yet, but standing without the gate of the garden
    of romance. True it is that, as I gaze through the ivory bars of
    its golden portal I would fain believe that, following my roving
    fancy, I might arrive at some green retreats hitherto unexplored,
    and loiter among some leafy bowers where none have lingered before
    me. But these expectations may be as vain as those dreams of youth
    over which we have all mourned. The disappointment of manhood
    succeeds to the delusions of youth: let us hope that the heritage
    of old age is not despair.

Analyse that, and you will find it youthful, orientally luxuriant, but
well bridled, on the whole, to the cadence of good prose. Press your
analysis a little further, and you will detect the voice of a born
rhetorician even in its first sentence. Let me add but two words to it:

    I have too much presumed, Mr. Speaker, upon an attention which I am
    not able to command.

--and you have the House of Commons before you, with Peel and
Macaulay, Palmerston and Lord John Russell, listening. Even so early
his vocation can be detected as calling, enticing Disraeli away from
the stern discipline of letters to the easier success of rhetoric,
from the sessions of silent thought to the immediate response of an
auditory, whether in Parliament or at the foot of the hustings. As
even the noblest, most impassioned sentences of Cicero, addressed to
Senate or law-court, wear a somewhat artificial, attitudinising air
to us in comparison (say) with a colloquy of Socrates meditated and
colloquially reported by Plato, so, speaking as one who has recently
had to search for true prose, as we conceive it, among the speeches of
British orators, I promise but a thin harvest to the researcher: the
simple reason being that oratory plays to the moment, literature to
thoughts and emotions carried away, reconsidered, tested, approved on
second thought and in solitude. Not forgetting many purple patches in
Chatham, his son, Fox, Sheridan, Canning, Bright, Lincoln, Gladstone
and Disraeli himself, I yet assure you that nowhere--save with the
incomparable Burke--you will find great gleaning on that many-acred
field. And Burke, our glorious exception, was “the dinner-bell of the
House” when he rose to speak. I fancy that the most of our legislators
when lately seeking re-election would have avoided a Burke--and wisely.

I shall have more to say of this before I conclude. For the moment I
am but concerned to point out to you that Parliamentary practice laid
a double trap for Disraeli as a writer: the first inherent in that
practice, the second a peculiar temptation for him.

“It is only by frequent and varied iteration,” says Herbert Spencer
somewhere, “that unfamiliar truths can be impressed upon reluctant
minds”: and who has ever served, for example, on a County Council and
not felt the iron of that truth penetrate his soul? How true must it
have been of a young man, brilliant but suspected, kept out of office
on suspicion, preaching a new creed not so much to the benches opposite
or into the necks of a distrustful ministry, but hammering it, rather,
upon the intelligence of supporters scarcely less distrustful while
infinitely more stupid! Can any conceivable task tempt more to that
redundancy which destroys a clean literary style?

Now for the man himself.--He was an Oriental and proud of it (let
_Tancred_, in particular, attest), of a race but lately admitted to the
House of Commons and, if for that reason only, challenged to display
himself in debate. With a courage perhaps unexampled in Parliamentary
story he let himself go, took the risk, triumphed. But the dyer’s hand
must inevitably acknowledge, sooner or later, its trade. Now of all
practitioners in English writing, a man of Oriental mind and upbringing
has to beware of this--that no Occidental literature, since Greece
taught it, will suffer ornament as an addition superinduced upon style:
and, after some experience, I put it quite plainly--if harshly, yet
seriously for his good--to any Indian student who may be listening to
these words--that extraneous ornament in English is not only vapid,
but ridiculous as the outpouring of a young Persian lover who, unable
equally by stress of passion and defect of education to unburden his
heart, betakes himself to a professional letter-writer; who in his turn
(in Newman’s words)--

    dips the pen of desire into the ink of devotion and proceeds to
    spread it over the page of desolation. Then the nightingale of
    affection is heard to warble to the rose of loveliness while the
    breeze of anxiety plays around the brow of expectation.

“That,” says Newman, “is what the Easterns are said to consider fine
writing”: and Disraeli, yielding to that Oriental temptation, will give
you, again and again, whole passages that might have been hired, to
depict the stateliest homes of England, from any professional penman in
any Eastern bazaar.

Speaking, in the Preface to _Lothair_, of his early work, Disraeli
himself admits that much of it (and _Vivian Grey_ in particular)
suffers at least from affectation. “Books written by boys, which
pretend to give a picture of manners and to deal in knowledge of
human nature, _must_,” he says, “be affected. They can be, at the
best, but the results of imagination acting on knowledge not acquired
by experience. Of such circumstances exaggeration is a necessary
consequence, and false taste accompanies exaggeration.” Yes, but
_Lothair_ appeared in 1870, when its author had been Prime Minister,
and had certainly acquired by experience much knowledge of the world
and human nature: and the trouble is that in this very book the
youthful exaggeration not only persists but has exaggerated itself
ten-fold, that the Eastern flamboyancy is more flamboyant than
ever. Take, for example, the following description of the ducal
breakfast-table at Brentham--

    The breakfast-room at Brentham was very bright. It opened on
    a garden of its own, which at this season was so glowing, and
    cultured into patterns so fanciful and finished, that it had the
    resemblance of a vast mosaic. The walls of the chamber were covered
    with bright drawings and sketches of our modern masters and frames
    of interesting miniatures, and the meal was served at half-a-dozen
    or more round tables which vied with each other in grace and
    merriment....

--as well, one may pause to observe, as in rotundity. These
half-a-dozen or more round tables were

    brilliant as a cluster of Greek or Italian republics.... After
    breakfast the ladies retired to their morning room.

We have already been told what they did there--

    One knitted a purse, another adorned a slipper, a third emblazoned
    a page. Beautiful forms in counsel leant over frames glowing with
    embroidery, while two fair sisters more remote occasionally burst
    into melody, as they tried the passages of a new air which had been
    communicated to them in the manuscript of some devoted friend.

On the other hand

    the gentlemen strolled to the stables, Lord St. Aldegonde lighting
    a Manilla cheroot of enormous length. As Lothair was very fond of
    horses, this delighted him.

--the cheroot, apparently.

    The stables at Brentham were rather too far from the house, but
    they were magnificent, and the stud worthy of them. It was numerous
    and choice, and, above all, it was useful. It could supply a
    readier number of capital riding horses than any stable in England.
    [Advt.] Brentham was a great riding family. In the summer season
    the Duke delighted to head a numerous troop, penetrate far into the
    country, and scamper home to a nine o’clock dinner. All the ladies
    of the house were fond and fine horsewomen. The mount of one of
    these riding parties was magical. The dames and damsels vaulted
    on their barbs and genets and thorough-bred hacks with such airy
    majesty: they were absolutely overwhelming with their bewildering
    habits and bewitching hats.

Now, whatever else we say of that, it belongs--does it not?--to the
_Arabian Nights_ rather than to English acres and the line of English
fiction. It is Bluebeard bewitching his guests--his next bride among
them--with a delicious _fête-champêtre_. Nay, can you not imagine our
poor English Duke gripping the back of his ducal head in the endeavour
to recognise himself as leader of this cavalcade? It almost defies
parody. Even Thackeray could but make fun of it, in _Codlingsby_, by
opposition of scene rather than by caricature of style; by transferring
the style merely and maliciously to an old clothes shop in Holywell
Street, as thus--

    They entered a moderate-sized apartment--indeed Holywell Street is
    not above a hundred yards long, and this chamber was not more than
    half that length--and fitted up with the simple taste of its owner.

    The carpet was of white velvet--(laid over several webs of
    Aubassun, Ispahan, and Axminster, so that your foot gave no more
    sound as it trod upon the yielding plain than the shadow did which
    followed you)--of white velvet painted with flowers, arabesques
    and classic figures by Sir William Ross, J. M. W. Turner, Mrs. Mee
    and Paul Delaroche, etc.

    “Welcome to our snuggery, my Codlingsby. We are quieter here than
    in the front of the house, and I wanted to show you a picture....
    That Murillo was pawned to my uncle by Marie Antoinette.”


III

Disraeli’s style, in short, cried aloud for attack by critics who hated
him on other scores.

    “Personal influences,” wrote he, “inevitably mingle in some degree
    with such productions. There are critics who, abstractedly, do
    not approve of successful books, particularly if they have failed
    in the same style; social acquaintances also of lettered taste,
    and especially contemporaries whose public life has not exactly
    realised the vain dreams of their fussy existence, would seize the
    accustomed opportunity of welcoming with affected discrimination
    about nothing, and elaborate controversy about trifles, the
    production of a friend: and there is always, both in politics and
    literature, the race of the Dennises, the Oldmixons, and Curls,
    who flatter themselves that by libelling some eminent personage of
    their times, they have a chance of descending to posterity.”

This sounds well enough, indeed. But in point of fact Disraeli has
a persistent habit of wrapping up his incomparable gift of irony in
language so detestably fustian that even a fair critic has to search
his periods carefully, separating the true from the sham. A fine ear
will separate them: but it needs a fine ear, and will tax it the most
of its time. All his life, in letters as in politics, he posed somewhat
as a Man of Mystery: and your Man of Mystery must take the rough with
the smooth: and your Cagliostro or even your honest merchant who talks
at once too floridly and too cleverly cannot blame any plain auditor
for suspecting that he talks, all the while, with his tongue in his
cheek.

It is a pity: for I do not see how any fair-minded reader of Disraeli’s
novels can fail to acknowledge, at this distance of time, that the man
was eminently serious, and in earnest, and wise even. I spoke to you,
a fortnight ago--at too great a length, you may think--of the problem
of industrial England and how the misery of the poor, caught in its
machinery, forced itself through the imaginative sympathy of certain
writers upon the national conscience: and especially (you may remember)
I spoke of the children because the children won the battle. As Francis
Thompson says, “The grim old superstition was right. When man would
build to a lasting finish, he must found his building over a child.”

Well, I see no reason to doubt--no reason either in his writings or
his public action--that Disraeli’s concern over this industrial misery
was ever less than disinterested, sincere, even chivalrous. No one
can deny the sincerity, at least, of _Sybil_; no one the terrible
authenticity of its descriptive pages--such as the famous picture of a
gang emerging from a coal-mine: for research has shown that throughout
and almost sentence by sentence the author has been at silent pains to
document the almost incredible evidence of his own eyes with evidence
from Blue Books and Parliamentary Reports. I shall not harrow your
feelings by reading the passage, having harrowed them (as I say)
sufficiently a fortnight ago. But you may take it for the moment--as
you may amply satisfy yourselves by enquiry later and at leisure--that
the Inferno is faithfully depicted: that the mill-owners Shuffle
and Screw (Disraeli had a foible for such names and for running them
in double harness--you will recall those celebrated duettists, Taper
and Tadpole)--that the exactions of these men were real exactions,
that the sufferings of the handweaver Warner and his starving family
are sufferings that did actually break actual human hearts and that
even the upbringing of the factory urchin Devilsdust is not only true
to fact but typical. You may be excused for doubting as you read
how Devilsdust--so he came to be called, for he had no legitimate
name--“having survived a baby-farm by toughness of constitution, and
the weekly threepence ceasing on his mother’s death,” was thrown out
into the streets to starve or be run over: how even this expedient
failed--

    The youngest and feeblest of the band of victims, Juggernaut spared
    him to Moloch. All his companions were disposed of. Three months’
    play in the streets got rid of this tender company....

You shudder as you read how the cholera visited the cellar where he and
other outcasts slept, until

    --one night when he returned home he found the old woman herself
    dead and surrounded only by corpses. The child before this had
    slept on the same bed of straw with a corpse: but then there were
    also breathing things for his companions. A night passed only
    with corpses seemed to him itself a kind of death. He stole out
    of the cellar, quitted the quarter of pestilence, and, after much
    wandering, lay down at the door of a factory.

--where he was taken in, not from charity, but because a brat of five
was useful. Do you tell yourself that Disraeli exaggerates? Then turn
to Hansard and read that before Hanway’s Act the annual death-rate
among these pauper children was estimated at something between 60
and 70 per cent.: that this Act, as Howlett grimly put it, caused
“a deficiency of 2,100 burials a year”: that the London parishes by
custom claimed a right to dispose at will of all children of a person
receiving relief, and disposed of them to the manufacturers; and that
one Lancashire mill-owner agreed with a London parish to take one idiot
with every twenty sound children supplied.[3]

    [3] _The Town Labourer, 1760–1832_, by Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, p.
        145. From Horner’s Speech, _Hansard_, June 6, 1815.


IV

Man, as Aristotle tells us, is a political animal: and among
imaginative writers in the ’thirties and ’forties of the last century,
Disraeli had an eminently political mind. I say, “eminently,” because
in the years that followed the great struggle over the Reform Bill all
men’s eyes--eyes of advocates as of opponents--were turned on this
wonderful Reformed Parliament, awaiting some transformation of our
society, for good or for evil. The expectancy operated on Disraeli as
on the rest. He was a House of Commons man with his ambition centred
on success in that House. He did not believe that this reformed House
was in any way capable of producing a millennium. With his own purpose
very steadily set to advance his career; with a sense of intrigue and a
courage steadily sharpened by disappointment; he perceived the nostrums
of the new Parliament to be nostrums no more honest than the old; as
he perceived the counteracting devices of his own party to be no more
than delaying devices devoid of principle. He hated the very name of
“the Conservative Party” invented by Croker:

    I observe, indeed, a party in the State whose rule is to consent to
    no change until it is clamorously called for, and then instantly to
    yield; but these are _Concessionary_, not Conservative principles.
    This party treats institutions as we do our pheasants, they
    preserve but to destroy.

But he felt, with the feeling of England, that this evil of the factory
system demanded an instant redress only to be achieved by sharp
legislation: and, so far he was right. Ashley and his backers could
look nowhere but to Parliament for immediate cure. There happen from
time to time in the history of a nation (as sensible men must admit)
crises to which hasty methods must be applied, as you catch up and
spoil a valuable rug to smother an outbreak of fire.


V

We know how Disraeli, in those days, saw the full problem. Here was a
country, this England, divided into Two Nations, the rich and the poor.
Here were the nobles who should, by all _devoir_, be the saviours of
the State, standing by while the middle-class manufacturer held the
poor in misery; standing by while the authority of the Crown diminished
under steady depression by the Whigs; standing by while Churchmen
fought for preferment, neglecting the oppressed, for whom--by every
teaching of Christ--a true disciple is a trustee. You all know, I
doubt not, the main persons and principles of the Young England party
which rallied to Disraeli’s call. The men were all younger than he;
mostly of Eton and Cambridge--foremost George Smythe, later Viscount
Strangford, most brilliant of all, Lord John Manners, Alexander Baillie
Cochrane “the fiery and generous Buckhurst” of _Coningsby_. All of them
figure, under other names, in _Coningsby_, and, while that novel is
remembered, will be identified in its pages; that is, long after human
memory has ceased to care for the personal romance of young men once so
chivalrous and admired--

    The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
    The glass of fashion and the mould of form.

But the tenets of this Young England party which gathered so eagerly
about the maturer man, Disraeli, were these, as you know: the King
stood over all, with his prerogative to be vindicated. His rightful
vindicators were our ancient nobility, and their task was to exalt,
to sustain him as protector of the poor, and so to restore the
peasantry of England (including its mill-hands, famished families,
pauper children) to the supposedly happy conditions once enjoyed in
the golden age of the monasteries, but forfeit under the oppression
of middle-class “industrialists,” as we should now term them. I find,
for my part, no real evidence of this golden age of the monasteries,
and suspect the glow they reputedly shed over a consented medieval
countryside to be very vastly enlarged by the mist of romance. But
whatever they might or might not have been, their lethargy could never
have matched, for evil, the active cruelty of the new system. The
monasteries were dead, anyhow: the mills and the mines were grinding
lives into death by tens of thousands under men’s eyes. Disraeli
_knew_ how the bringing up of a Devilsdust turns the grown man into a
Chartist, and a danger. Disraeli understood Chartists.


VI

In September, 1841, Peel (who owed it to him) refused Disraeli office.
We need not go into that tortuous story, or the rights of it this way
or that. The point for us is that his exclusion gave him leisure to
write _Coningsby_.

What were his qualifications, what his disqualifications in writing
_Coningsby_?

To begin with the disqualifications--(1) He had the haziest notion of
constructing a plot. From first to last he never gets beyond an idea,
and a string of episodes. (2) His hero is, for all his recommendation,
an invariable nincompoop, and his heroine (Sybil particularly) not
of flesh and blood: not even an embodiment of an idea; a dream of it
rather. Coningsby does very much less than justice to Smythe, a man of
failings and infinite wit; while in _Lothair_ you will pass whole pages
in which the hero’s contribution to the wisdom of the world amounts to
“You don’t say so,” “I am more than a little surprised,” “I have never
looked into this matter upon which Your Grace sheds for me, I confess,
an entirely new light.” You may say that the heroes and heroines of
most Victorian novels are puppets conducted through adversity to a
chime of marriage bells. But Disraeli deliberately presenting his
heroes and heroines as grandiose creatures of ineffable charm, has
never the art to make them justify this by what they do or say. Their
golden, or raven, hair hangs down their back, and there it ends. Lastly
his prose lapses, as the rhetorician’s hand becomes subdued to what
it works in, into sentences more and more slipshod: while fatuities
abound, such as the exclamation, at the beginning of a chapter, “What
wonderful things are events!”

So far the devil’s advocate.... But set against this, first and in
front of it, the great fact that an inventor is great not only because
he does a thing well, but because he could do it at all. Disraeli
in _Coningsby_ invented the political novel: and I know nothing to
compare with that book unless it be his own _Endymion_ in which so
touchingly an old man, dejected from political office and power,
seeks back with all his worldly wisdom, as one walking out into a
garden in a lunar light of memory, to recapture the rose of youth. Of
the trilogy--_Coningsby_, _Sybil_, _Tancred_--I confess, tracing it
backward, that I have small use for _Tancred_, having (be it confessed)
not only a stark insensibility to Disraeli’s enthusiasm for a mongrel
religion neither of his breed nor of mine, but a constitutional
aversion to the Lion of Judah considered as a pet. _Sybil_, in addition
to its most vivid pictures of the factory poor, has at least a score of
pages which no student of the art of writing in English can afford to
neglect--take for example its _tour de force_ in exhibiting the rise of
the Marney family and the successive ennoblements of John Warren, club
waiter, and his progeny, through Sir John Warren, and Lord Fitz-Warene,
to Earl de Mowbray of Mowbray Castle. The juxtaposition of the selfish
and opulent Marney household with the wretched mines, close by, from
which they drew their wealth, is admirably managed. But, as I have
said, the heroine is but a shadowy figure, and I find the hero little
more lively: the pair of them “made for a purpose,” and that purpose
propaganda. No: _Coningsby_ is the masterpiece: and Peel’s refusal
which led to its composition--Peel’s own fatal loss, as it turned
out--is our delightful gain. You will easily find, in almost any period
of our prose literature since Defoe, a more noble novel: and if one
goes back to early romance and thinks (say) of a page of Malory--well,
it rebukes the sensual rapture. But, for all that, I defy you to find
a more vivacious, a more scintillating book--scintillating with joyful
and irresistible malice. At the turn of any page you may happen on such
a gem as this:

    Lord and Lady Gaverstock were also there, who never said an unkind
    thing of anybody: her ladyship was pure as snow: but, her mother
    having been divorced, she ever fancied she was paying a kind of
    homage to her parent by visiting those who might some day be in the
    same predicament.

It dares history, and will, for a whole chapter, recount the fall
of a Government, the passing of a Bill, the formation of a Cabinet,
unravelling actual intrigue, carrying you along by sheer logic as
though you galloped with Dumas’ Three Musketeers. Disraeli could not
invent a character: but he could at once disguise and reveal one
borrowed from life. In _Coningsby_ he had actual men made to his hands,
to prompt the apotheosis or the caricature. He sentimentalises his
young friends, and the sense beneath the sensibility may be read in
the last paragraph of _Sybil_. What he could do with an enemy let the
portrait of Rigby attest.


VII

In _Coningsby_ he invented the Political Novel. That this _partus
masculus_ came so late to birth in our literature, as that it has
begotten few successors, admits (as Sir Thomas Browne would say) no
wide solution. Genius is rare, anyhow: the combination of political
with literary genius necessarily rarer. Given the two combined, as
they were in Burke, you still require, for superadding, the inventive
faculty, the mode, and the leisure. Not one man of letters in ten
thousand can match Disraeli’s close inner acquaintance with his
subject. Statesmen, in short, have not the leisure to write. Alcibiades
leaves no record of what Alcibiades did or suffered. By a glorious
fluke, Peel gave this chance and Disraeli took it.


VIII

For a last word to-day--

Quite apart from genuine coruscation of genius, and almost as widely
separating and casting from account that tinsel and tawdriness
which all can detect, one feels a mistrust (gnawing, as it were,
within our laurel) that even the best page of Disraeli does not
belong to us. We cannot match it somehow with a racy page of Dryden,
or of good Sir Walter Scott, of Izaak Walton, John Bunyan, grave
Clarendon, Bolingbroke. Gibbon is artificial enough, heaven knows;
yet somehow--and one remembers that he had served in the Hampshire
Militia--the scent of the hawthorn is never more afar than a field
away, even when he discourses of Tertullian or of Diocletian. From
Disraeli’s prose--or rather from my sense of it--I can never dispel
the smatch of burnt sandalwood, the smell of camels and the bazaar. He
officiates, somehow--he, a Prime Minister, over an altar not ours--we
admire the oracle, but its tongue is foreign.

Still his fame grows. I observe that, as the incense clears, each
successive study of him tells something better. He stands in politics
admittedly a champion; in literature, too, a figure certainly not among
the greatest, yet as certainly one of the great.




MRS. GASKELL


I

We think of her habitually--do we not?--by her married title of “Mrs.
Gaskell.” Who Mr. Gaskell was this generation does not, in an ordinary
way, pause to enquire: a neglect which does injustice to a gentleman
of fine presence, noble manners and high culture. She was a beautiful
woman: they married in 1832, and had children, and lived most happily.

So it is as “Mrs. Gaskell” that we think of her: and I dare to wager
that most of you think of her as Mrs. Gaskell, authoress of _Cranford_.
Now heaven forbid that anything I say this morning should daunt your
affection for _Cranford_, as heaven knows how long and sincerely I
have adored it. I have adored it at least long enough and well enough
to understand its devotees--for _Cranford_ has not only become popular
in the sense, more or less, that _Omar Khayyam_ has become popular--by
which I mean that, at this season or thereabouts, numbers of people
buy a copy in limp _suède_, with Hugh Thomson’s illustrations, and
only hesitate over sending it to the So-and-So’s with best wishes on
a chilling doubt that they sent it last year, with the identical good
wishes--if indeed they are not returning the identical volume they
received! Well, let us be merry and careless!--in the course of a week
or two these soft bricks will be dropping on every hearth.

But seriously, one finds devotees of _Cranford_ everywhere; and
especially, in my experience, among scholarly old men. They have
_Cranford_ written on their hearts, sometimes hardly covering a
cherished solution of _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_. _Cranford_ and
the novels of Jane Austen--you never know how many delightful persons
cherish them, have them by heart, pore over their text as over an Ode
of Pindar’s. And they are fierce, these devotees, as the noble new
edition of Jane Austen by Mr. Chapman of the Oxford Press has recently
been teaching us. Here are five volumes edited with all the care that
study and affection can lavish on the task. Yet from here, there and
everywhere lovers start up from firesides--scattered widowers of this
dear maiden--challenging over _variae lectiones_, feeling for the hilt
on the old hip to champion (we’ll say) “_screen_” as the right word
against “scene” as printed--

    “Swerve to the left, Son Roger,” he said,
    “When you catch his eyes through the helmet-slit.”

It is as serious, almost, as all that: and so it is with _Cranford_,
and Miss Jenkyns and Captain Brown and adorable Miss Matty.

Yet, let us admit there are certain works which conquer some of us, we
cannot tell why. To go a very long way from _Cranford_, take _Tristram
Shandy_. No one can really criticise _Tristram Shandy_, and all
pretence to do so is mere humbug. Either you like _Tristram Shandy_
(as I do, for one) or you don’t, and there’s an end to it. My sole
complaint against the devotees of _Cranford_ is that, admiring it,
revelling in it, they imagine themselves to have the secret of Mrs.
Gaskell, stop there, and do not go on to explore her other works of
which one at any rate I shall presently dare to proclaim to you as the
most perfect small idyll ever written in English prose.


II

The sin is the worse because every one acknowledges the _Life of
Charlotte Brontë_ to be--after Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, admittedly
beyond competition--among the two or three best biographies in our
language. Conceive the Brontës--not Charlotte alone, but the whole
family--the whole of that terrible family in that terrible parsonage at
Haworth--as this staid lady, wife of a Unitarian minister, faithfully
depicts them--the wastrel son, Branwell: through long nights tearing
his own heart out, with his stern old father’s, in the bedroom they
had, for safety, to occupy together: in the end pulling himself up to
_die standing_: the shuddering sisters listening on the stairs; Emily,
doomed and fierce, she too in her turn standing up to die. Consider--I
will not say _Wuthering Heights_, or Charlotte’s well-known magnificent
description, in _Villette_, of Rachel and her tortured acting--but
consider if only by illustration of contrast this most maddened poem by
Emily--and there are others as tragic--


                             _The Prisoner_

    Still let my tyrants know, I am not doom’d to wear
    Year after year in gloom and desolate despair;
    A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,
    And offers for short life, eternal liberty.

    He comes with Western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,
    With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars:
    Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
    And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.

    Desire for nothing known in my maturer years,
    When Joy grew made with awe, at counting future tears:
    When, if my spirit’s sky was full of flashes warm,
    I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunder-storm.

    But first, a hush of peace--a soundless calm descends;
    The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends.
    Mute music soothes my breast--unutter’d harmony
    That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.

    Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
    My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;
    Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found;
    Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound.

    O dreadful is the check--intense the agony--
    When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
    When the pulse begins to throb--the brain to think again--
    The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

    Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;
    The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless;
    And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine,
    If it but herald Death, the vision is divine.

Consider, I say, that the authoress of _Cranford_ not only lived with
these fierce women and comforted them as their benign friend, with
a comfort that no soul can give to another without understanding,
but portrayed them (their struggles ended) in a book that combines
the English (even the Victorian English) with the Greek, a fidelity
to awful fact with a serene judgment, a tender mercy--the two so
discovering and covering all, that--whether it be in charity or in
justice--its core of truth has never been challenged: that it stands
yet among the noblest few of English biographies. I put it to you that,
if you but set together those two books--_Cranford_ and the _Life of
Charlotte Brontë_--at once you must recognise the operating hand--the
quietly operating hand--of genius. But this, even when Mrs. Gaskell’s
longer novels are thrown into the scale, has avoided, I think--because
she herself is so equable, so temperate--its right recognition.
Yes, her very portrait has a Hellenic look, so beautiful it is, so
penetrating its calm gaze.


III

Yet maybe you think it strange that I find so much of high Hellenic
quality in this quiet lady--born a Stevenson, to be sure--but
christened Elizabeth Cleghorn, names not to us reminiscential of Hybla
or the Ilissus. Her father was a Unitarian minister, who preached in
that capacity, in Dob Lane Chapel, Manchester--which again does not
suggest the Acropolis. In 1832 she married a Unitarian minister, son
of a prosperous manufacturer, minister to a Chapel in Cross Street,
Manchester, and prominent on the Home Missionary Board. For these and
some particulars that follow I go to the best sources known to me.[4]

    [4] Sir Adolphus Ward’s various Introductions to the Knutsford
        Edition (8 volumes, published by John Murray) and the
        article on her in the _Dictionary of National Biography_,
        by the same writer, whose scholarship, when devoted to this
        dead lady, reaches to a religious note of chivalry.

Her married life was one of unbroken happiness. Her husband had
literary leanings, and in 1838 she writes to Mrs. Howitt, “We once
thought of _trying_ to write sketches among the poor, _rather_ in
the manner of Crabbe (now don’t think this presumptuous), but in a
more beauty-seeing spirit: and one--the only one--was published in
_Blackwood_, January, 1837.[5] But I suppose we spoke our plan near a
dog-rose, for it never went any further.”

    [5] The curious may read it in _Blackwood’s Magazine_, Vol.
        XLI, No. CCIV, or in Sir Adolphus Ward’s _Biographical
        Introduction_.

So you see that she had already made Manchester her home, and was
already interested in the poor.

Also one may interpose here that (without evidence of her portrait) she
was acknowledged by all who met her to be a person of quite remarkable
beauty, and as little conscious of it as any beautiful woman has any
right to be: since as Jaques noted:

              if ladies be but young and fair,
    They have the gift to know it.

Above all, she had the ineffable charm of being the least assertive,
the most concerned with others, in any company. I think that of her
rather than of any other writing-woman one may quote Mrs. Browning’s
lines on her Kate--

    I doubt if she said to you much that could act
    As a thought or suggestion: she did not attract
    In the sense of the brilliant or wise: I infer
    ’Twas her thinking for others made you think of her.

    She never found fault with you, never implied
    Your wrong by her right: and yet men at her side
    Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town
    The children were gladder that pulled at her gown....

    The weak and the gentle, the ribald and rude,
    She took as she found them, and did them all good:
    It always was so with her--see what you have!
    She has made the grass greener even here ... with her grave.

Such a woman, as I trace her portrait, was Mrs. Gaskell, and I think
the end of the story will confirm my reading of her. She made no show:
without interfering she saw beauty in the lives of the poor: she lived
with the misery of Manchester and pitied it; and across a personal
bereavement--or (shall we say?) out of the very anguish of her own
breast--she relieved her heart in her first long book in pity for that
place.

In 1844 Mr. and Mrs. Gaskell revisited Festiniog, in North Wales,
a halt of their wedding tour. They took their children with them;
and at the inn there the eldest daughter caught the scarlet fever.
Mrs. Gaskell removed her with her infant brother to Portmadoc, where
he sickened of the fever and died. It was in search of an anodyne
for sorrow that the mother began to write _Mary Barton_. Read that
book with just these two or three facts in your mind, and you will
find an illustration--though it almost shames me to give you one so
poignant--of the way in which the sincerest art is begotten and brought
forth: that is, by lifting one’s own experience up to a Universal, and
then bringing it back to _reclothe_ it in imaginary, particular, men
and women.


IV

In two previous lectures, Gentlemen, I have given you--it may well be
_ad nauseam_--the conditions of life among the industrial poor of that
period as they can be gathered from Blue Books and out of Hansard. In
my last lecture I tried to indicate how they affected the ambitious
(and to that extent selfish) but yet chivalrous mind of Disraeli. I
shall be shorter with Mrs. Gaskell, who invents no political novel, but
just tells the tale and passes on. But she tells it, and I select here
to read to you a passage to illustrate rather how gently and charitably
she tells it than to make out the worst of the case, which yet may be
found in her pages.

    At all times it is a bewildering thing to the poor weaver to see
    his employer removing from house to house, each one grander than
    the last, till he ends in building one more magnificent than all,
    or withdraws his money from the concern, or sells his mill, to
    buy an estate in the country, while all the time the weaver, who
    thinks he and his fellows are the real makers of this wealth, is
    struggling on for bread for his children, through the vicissitudes
    of lowered wages, short hours, fewer hands employed, etc. And when
    he knows trade is bad, and could understand (at least partially)
    that there are not buyers enough in the market to purchase the
    goods already made, and consequently that there is no demand for
    more; when he would bear and endure much without complaining, could
    he also see that his employers were bearing their share; he is,
    I say, bewildered and (to use his own word) “aggravated” to see
    that all goes on just as usual with the mill-owners. Large houses
    are still occupied, while spinners’ and weavers’ cottages stand
    empty, because the families that once filled them are obliged to
    live in rooms or cellars. Carriages still roll along the streets,
    concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive
    luxuries still find daily customers while the workman loiters away
    his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the
    pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking
    in vain for enough of food,--of the sinking health, of the dying
    life, of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why
    should he alone suffer from bad times?

    I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the
    truth in such matters: but what I wish to impress is what the
    workman feels and thinks.

    But there are earnest men among these people, men who have endured
    wrongs without complaining, but without ever forgetting or
    forgiving those whom (they believe) have caused all this woe.

    Among these was John Barton. His parents had suffered; his mother
    had died from absolute want of the necessaries of life. He himself
    was a good, steady workman, and, as such, pretty certain of steady
    employment. But he spent all he got with the confidence (you may
    also call it improvidence) of one who was willing, and believed
    himself able, to supply all his wants by his own exertions. And
    when his master suddenly failed, and all hands in the mill were
    turned back, one Tuesday morning, with the news that Mr. Hunter had
    stopped, Barton had only a few shillings to rely on; but he had
    good heart of being employed at some other mill, and accordingly,
    before returning home, he spent some hours in going from factory
    to factory, asking for work. But at every mill was some sign of
    depression of trade! Some were working short hours, some were
    turning off hands, and for weeks Barton was out of work, living on
    credit. It was during this time that his little son, the apple of
    his eye, the cynosure of all his strong power of love, fell ill
    of the scarlet fever. They dragged him through the crisis, but
    his life hung on a gossamer thread. Everything, the doctor said,
    depended on good nourishment, on generous living, to keep up the
    little fellow’s strength, in the prostration in which the fever
    had left him. Mocking words! when the commonest food in the house
    would not furnish one little meal. Barton tried credit; but it was
    worn out at the little provision shops, which were now suffering
    in their turn. He thought it would be no sin to steal, and would
    have stolen; but he could not get the opportunity in the few days
    the child lingered. Hungry himself, almost to an animal pitch
    of ravenousness, but with bodily pain swallowed up in anxiety
    for his little sinking lad, he stood at one of the shop windows,
    where all edible luxuries are displayed; haunches of venison,
    Stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly--all appetising sights to the
    common passer by. And out of this shop came Mrs. Hunter, his late
    employer’s wife! She crossed to her carriage, followed by the
    shopman loaded with purchases for a party. The door was quickly
    slammed to, and she drove way; and Barton returned home with a
    bitter spirit of wrath in his heart, to see his only boy a corpse!

    You can fancy, now, the hoards of vengeance in his heart against
    the employers. For there are never wanting those who, either
    in speech or in print, find it their interest to cherish such
    feelings in the working classes; who know how and when to rouse the
    dangerous power at their command; and who use their knowledge with
    unrelenting purpose to either party.

Now you know from actual evidence given you in my two previous lectures
that this account is not overstrained. You see how the writer makes
allowances; and how, all allowances made, her thrust is as deadly as
any in Disraeli’s _Sybil_.


V

But now comes in the difference. Mrs. Gaskell knew these people as
Disraeli did not. She had lived among them, and to all the angry
protests evoked by _Mary Barton_ she returned, of her knowledge,
gentle, but gently firm answers which could not be refuted.[6] The
story, at any rate, exercised at once a “commanding effect,” and the
width of that effect was attested by translations into many foreign
languages--French, German, Spanish, Hungarian and Finnish.

    [6] I should mention here, by the way, on Sir Adolphus Ward’s
        authority, the virtual certainty that before writing her
        own novel she “had remained quite unacquainted with both
        _Coningsby_ and _Sybil_.”

She did not go on to exploit that success, that effect. She had said
what she had to say; and having found, in the saying of it, her gift
as a writer, she passed on to other things. A very beautiful necklace
of novels was the result. But this serene indifference to what might
with others have meant a very strong “literary” temptation implied no
failing devotion to the poor whose woes the book had, once for all,
championed. Some eighteen years later, in 1862–3, a time of trouble
came over Manchester and South-west Lancashire in general, which

    called forth one of the most notable, and certainly one of the
    best-organized efforts of goodwill and charity which this country
    has ever seen. In the long struggle between masters and men,
    the times of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, due to the outbreak
    and continuance of the American Civil War, brought about a
    protracted truce, in which the kindly feelings inspired by the
    self-sacrificing efforts of many leading employers of manufacturing
    labour cannot but have counted for much.

I am quoting from Sir Adolphus Ward:

    Mrs. Gaskell, whose name had so good a sound among the Lancashire
    working classes that we hear of an Oldham man regularly bringing
    his children to gaze upon the house in Plymouth Grove where dwelt
    the authoress of _Mary Barton_, gave many proofs in these times
    of trouble of her readiness to help suffering in every way in her
    power.

The relief problem, in short, claimed her almost entirely during that
long tribulation of her people. “We were really glad,” she writes
to a friend, “to check one another in talking of the one absorbing
topic, which was literally haunting us in our sleep, as well as being
our first thoughts in wakening and the last at night.” In organising,
superintending, working sewing-rooms, providing dinners, she would work
for six or seven hours of her day.

The shadow of these and other industrial troubles recurs, indeed,
in some of the later novels, particularly in _North and South_: but
always you see that with her there is no political axe to grind,
nor scarce a consciousness of there being any such thing: and this
disinterested charitableness leads her, as it were, imperceptibly into
regions of which Disraeli, with all his genius, never won ken. The
first incentive, I have tried to show, operated on both. But whereas
he went off into a life of action--great and powerful action, let all
admit--to return in his old age to revisit with _Endymion_ the glimpses
of the moon and his boyish dreams, this unambitious Victorian lady,
having found her literary talent, went on to employ it with a serenity
unmoved to worship any idols of the market. Glad of course she was to
enjoy and use her gift: very modestly glad (as what true woman or man
is not?) of the recognition it brought, but following the path to the
end to bequeath to the world several noble novels and three shining
masterpieces. Of these, of course, the _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ is
one and _Cranford_ the second: and for the moment I leave you to guess
at the third. For the moment I wish you to picture this woman. In
her writing, as in her daily life, she had no mannerisms. She copied
neither Disraeli, nor Dickens, who also championed the poor and was
moreover her encourager and editor; nor the Brontës, for all the spell
of their genius; nor Trollope, nor George Eliot; though all were great
and flattered her with their admiration. Past them all we see her
quietly keeping the tenor of her way. Now and again she seems to falter
and ask herself--_herself_, mind you--Is this trouble to speak the
simple truth as best I can, without heat, really worth its reward as
set against the heat and acrimony it provokes? The strictures passed
on her _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ gave her, for a time, a distaste for
it all. But she wrote on, after a little, and on Sunday, November 12,
1865, killed of a sudden by a pang of the heart--carried away, as her
epitaph at Knutsford (which is “Cranford”) says, “Without a moment’s
warning”--she left her writings all just as clean and bright as the
bunch of her household keys.

    Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,
    Makes that, and the action, fine.


VI

I shall pass the catalogue of these writings very quickly in review.
The authoress of _Mary Barton_ was hailed at that time, when novels
were yet few and even poetry but beginning to recover its strength, by
great men and by Dickens especially, who engaged her pen for the first
number of his serial adventure, _Household Words_. In 1853 appeared
her second important novel, _Ruth_ (which possibly influenced Dickens’
own _Hard Times_, published a year later). Then in June, 1853, came
_Cranford_, made into a book from papers contributed to _Household
Words_ between December, 1851, and May, 1853. _North and South_ ran
in _Household Words_ from September, 1854, to January, 1855, and
appeared as a book, with some slight alterations, in that year. In
that year also (on March 31st) Charlotte Brontë died and Mrs. Gaskell
consented, at the old father’s urgent request, to write the Biography.
She gave herself up to the work and finished it in the spring of
1857. The strictures on it--truth, as Milton says, never comes into
the world but as a bastard--broke her spirit for a while for all but
occasional writing: and then came the cotton famine, of which I have
spoken, to tax all her energies. But after the stress of this they
revived. In 1863 appeared _Sylvia’s Lovers_, in 1863–4 _Cousin Phillis_
in the pages of the _Cornhill Magazine_. In this magazine (August,
1864–January, 1866) followed her last story, _Wives and Daughters_,
published soon after in that year as an unfinished work. So you see the
whole tale of it lies within the central years of the last century,
beginning with _Mary Barton_ in 1848 and ending sharply just eighteen
years after.


VII

I do not propose to discuss the toll of her work this morning. I wish
that those of you who aspire to write, and are here learning to write,
would study it--for two reasons. For the first, while I admit many
flaws, it seems to me elementally of the best literary breeding, so
urbane it is, so disposedly truthful; so much of the world, quizzing
it; so well aware, all the while, of another. For my second, that
here you have, refuting, an exception to all hasty generalisations
about the nineteenth century, the Victorian Age, horsehair sofas, the
Evangelicals, the Prince Consort, the Great Exhibition of 1851 and all
that bagful of cheap rubbish. In 1851 this lady was writing _Cranford_:
in 1863 she was writing _Cousin Phillis_: and considering that most
lovely idyll, I am moved to ask, “Do you, at any rate, know it, this
Sicilian yet most English thing of the mid-nineteenth century?” I am
moved to say, “Yes, Keats is lovely, and was lovely to me alas! before
ever you were born: but quit your gushing and your talk about ‘romantic
revivals’--which are but figments invented by fellows who walk round
and round a Grecian urn, appraising it scholastically. Quit it, and try
to _make_ a Grecian urn. The horses on the frieze of the Parthenon are
good horses: but you have as good to study to-day or to-morrow if you
will but take a short journey out to Newmarket and study them. Which is
better?--to watch a gallop between two colts on a heath, or to bend a
congested nose over _Ferrex and Porrex_?”

To be classical is not to _copy_ the classics: to be classical is to
learn the intelligence of the classics and apply just _that_ to this
present world and particularly to this island of ours so familiar and
yet so romantic.


VIII

I spoke, a while back, of _three_ masterpieces of Mrs. Gaskell, naming
two, leaving you to guess the third. Lay by your _Cranford_, and take
up and study _Cousin Phillis_.

I suppose its underlying sadness has kept it out of popular
esteem--this tale of scarcely more than a hundred pages--a pale and
shadowy sister of _Cranford_. It has none, or little of _Cranford’s_
pawky fun: it has not _Cranford’s_ factitious happy ending. But it
beats me to guess how any true critic can pass it over and neglect
a thing with all that is best in Theocritus moving in rustic English
hearts. And it is not _invented_. It has in all its movements the
suggestion of things actually seen--of small things that could not
have occurred to any mind save that of an eye-witness--of small
_recognitions_, each in its turn a little flash of light upon the
steady background of rural England. It is England and yet pure
Virgil--as purely Virgilian as the vignette, in the Fourth Georgic, of
the old man of Corycus tilling his scanty acres:

            nec fertilis ilia juvencis
    Nec pecori opportuna seges nec commoda Baccho--

who yet brought home his own-grown vegetables at night and cast them
on the table, in his mind equal to the wealth of kings. I shall read
you two passages--the first of young Paul’s introduction, by his cousin
Phillis, to her father the ex-minister and Virgilian scholar turned
farmer and labouring with his hinds--

    “There is father!” she exclaimed, pointing out to me a man in his
    shirt-sleeves, taller by the head than the other two with whom he
    was working. We only saw him through the leaves of the ash-trees
    growing in the hedge, and I thought I must be confusing the
    figures, or mistaken: that man still looked like a very powerful
    labourer, and had none of the precise demureness of appearance
    which I had always imagined was the characteristic of a minister.
    It was the Reverend Ebenezer Holman, however. He gave us a nod as
    we entered the stubble-field; and I think he would have come to
    meet us, but that he was in the middle of giving some directions
    to his men. I could see that Phillis was built more after his
    type than her mother’s. He, like his daughter, was largely made,
    and of a fair, ruddy complexion, whereas hers was brilliant and
    delicate. His hair had been yellow or sandy, but now was grizzled.
    Yet his grey hairs betokened no failure in strength. I never saw
    a more powerful man--deep chest, lean flanks, well-planted head.
    By this time we were nearly up to him; and he interrupted himself
    and stepped forwards, holding out his hand to me, but addressing
    Phillis.

    “Well, my lass, this is cousin Manning, I suppose. Wait a minute,
    young man, and I’ll put on my coat, and give you a decorous and
    formal welcome. But--Ned Hall, there ought to be a water-furrow
    across this land: it’s a nasty, stiff, clayey, dauby bit of
    ground, and thou and I must fall to, come next Monday--I beg your
    pardon, cousin Manning--and there’s old Jem’s cottage wants a
    bit of thatch; you can do that job to-morrow, while I am busy.”
    Then, suddenly changing the tone of his deep bass voice to an odd
    suggestion of chapels and preachers, he added, “Now I will give
    out the psalm: ‘Come all harmonious tongues,’ to be sung to ‘Mount
    Ephraim’ tune.”

    He lifted his spade in his hand, and began to beat time with it;
    the two labourers seemed to know both words and music, though I
    did not; and so did Phillis: her rich voice followed her father’s,
    as he set the tune; and the men came in with more uncertainty,
    but still harmoniously. Phillis looked at me once or twice, with
    a little surprise at my silence; but I did not know the words.
    There we five stood, bareheaded, excepting Phillis, in the tawny
    stubble-field, from which all the shocks of corn had not yet been
    carried--a dark wood on one side, where the wood-pigeons were
    cooing; blue distance, seen through the ash-trees, on the other.
    Somehow, I think that, if I had known the words, and could have
    sung, my throat would have been choked up by the feeling of the
    unaccustomed scene.

    The hymn was ended, and the men had drawn off, before I could stir.
    I saw the minister beginning to put on his coat, and looking at me
    with friendly inspection in his gaze, before I could rouse myself.

And now let me read you this exquisite passage--there are many almost
as lovely--of Phillis in love, walking with her cousin Paul--alas! not
her beloved.

    We talked about the different broods of chickens, and she showed
    me the hens that were good mothers, and told me the characters of
    all the poultry with the utmost good-faith; and in all good-faith I
    listened, for I believe there was a great deal of truth in all she
    said. And then we strolled on into the wood beyond the ash-meadow,
    and both of us sought for early primroses and the fresh green
    crinkled leaves. She was not afraid of being alone with me after
    the first day. I never saw her so lovely, or so happy. I think she
    hardly knew why she was so happy all the time. I can see her now,
    standing under the budding branches of the grey trees, over which a
    tinge of green seemed to be deepening day after day, her sun-bonnet
    fallen back on her neck, her hands full of delicate wood-flowers,
    quite unconscious of my gaze, but intent on sweet mockery of some
    bird in neighbouring bush or tree. She had the art of warbling,
    and replying to the notes of different birds, and knew their song,
    their habits and ways, more accurately than any one else I ever
    knew. She had often done it at my request the spring before; but
    this year she really gurgled, and whistled, and warbled, just as
    they did, out of the very fulness and joy of her heart. She was
    more than ever the very apple of her father’s eye; her mother gave
    her both her own share of love and that of the dead child who had
    died in infancy. I have heard cousin Holman murmur, after a long
    dreamy look at Phillis, and tell herself how like she was growing
    to Johnnie, and soothe herself with plaintive inarticulate sounds,
    and many gentle shakes of the head, for the aching sense of loss
    she would never get over in this world.

My eyes, to be sure, are not what they were: but to them the prose
of this shimmers with beauty. In Mrs. Gaskell, as with many another
ageing writer, one can detect towards the close a certain sunset
softness--a haze, we may call it--in which many hard experiences are
reconciled. To take the highest, we agree that it so happened to
Shakespeare. To step down to the man with whom for a study in the
differences of literary genius starting from a like incentive--the woes
of the poor, and operating in the same literary form, the novel--I
have been--I hope, Gentlemen, not whimsically--contrasting this very
noble lady, we know that in his later days, in _Endymion_, Disraeli
saw his youth so, casting back to it. And you, maybe, will say that
these sunset softening colours are all a mirage. Well, a great deal
of it all is that. I believe that, as you grow older, you will find
yourselves more and more tending to make less, and still less, account
of definitions, of sharp outlines and judgments based on them; of
anybody’s positive assertions, be he never so young.


IX

I have been speaking, however, to-day of one whose measure in any
light has never to my thinking been accurately taken. The crew of
Odysseus were Greeks. They beached their ship (says Homer) on the isle
of the Laestrygonians: and there came down to them the Queen of the
Laestrygonians, “a woman as tall as a mountain,” _and they hated her_.
The Victorian Age lent itself to excess; and its excessive figures are
our statues for some to deface or bedaub. But I, who have purposely
compared Elizabeth Gaskell with her most ornate contemporary, dare
to prophesy that when criticism has sifted all out, she will come to
her own, as a woman of genius, sweetly proportioned as a statue, yet
breathing; one of these writers we call by that vain word--so vain, so
pathetic even when used of the greatest poet--“immortal.”




ANTHONY TROLLOPE

THE BARSETSHIRE NOVELS


I

A few months ago I asked a publisher if he had ever thought of
venturing on a complete edition of Trollope, and was answered that he
had thought of it often, but doubted it would not pay. A few weeks ago
I referred this answer to an eminent bookseller, and he praised the
publisher’s judgment. I retain my belief that the pair of them are
mistaken: for let the name of Trollope be mentioned in any company
of novel-lovers, almost to a certainty one or two will kindle, avow
a passion for him, and start a chorus of lament that there exists no
complete worthy edition of him.

“All Balzac’s novels occupy one shelf”--and all Trollope’s would
occupy a plaguey long one. Some of them, too, are hasty, baddish
novels. None the less, I see that shelf as one of trusted and familiar
resort for such a number of my fellows as would fill a respectable
subscription-list: and, anyhow, it remains a scandal that certain good
works of his--_The Eustace Diamonds_, for instance--are unprocurable
save by advertising for second-hand copies. Mr. Humphrey Milford, of
the Oxford University Press, has recently printed _The Claverings_ and
_The Belton Estate_ in the World’s Classics, with the _Autobiography_,
which did, as it happened, about as much harm as a perfectly honest
book could do to an honest man’s fame. Messrs. Chatto & Windus--whom,
as Cicero would say, “I name for the sake of honour,” as publishers
who respect their moral contract to keep an author’s books alive while
they can--have kept on sale some eight or nine, including _The American
Senator_, _The Way We Live Now_, and _The Golden Lion of Grandpré_;
and the famous Barsetshire six, of which Messrs. George Bell now offer
us a cheap and pleasant reprint,[7] have always been (as they say in
Barset) “come-at-able” in some form or another. But while three full
editions of Stevenson have been subscribed for since his death in 1894
(the first of them fetching far more than the original price), and his
sale in cheaper editions has been high and constant, Trollope, who died
in 1882, has, in these forty-odd years, received no gratitude of public
recognition at all answerable to his deserts.

    [7] Trollope’s Barsetshire Novels: (1) _The Warden_, (2)
        _Barchester Towers_, (3) _Dr. Thorne_, (4) _Framley
        Parsonage_, (5) _The Small House at Allington_ (2 vols.),
        (6) _The Last Chronicle of Barset_ (2 vols.) 8 vols. 25s.
        the set. (Bell & Sons.)

It is a curious business in two ways. For the first, the rebirth of
Trollope’s fame, with the growing readiness of an admirer to cast away
apology and hail a fellow-admirer as a friend “by adoption tried,” has
nothing esoteric about it. A passion for Peacock, or for Landor--as
a passion for Pindar--you may share with a friend as a half-masonic,
half-amorous secret. But there can be no such freemasonry over
Trollope, who is as English as a cut off the joint or a volume of
_Punch_. For the second curiosity, I suppose that no man ever wrote
himself down at a more delicately ill-chosen time than did Trollope
by the publication (posthumous) of his _Autobiography_ in 1883. It was
a brave--if unconsciously brave--and candid book. But it fell on a
generation of young men fired in literature by Flaubert, in painting
(say) by Whistler; on a generation just beginning to be flamboyant over
“art for art’s sake,” the _mot juste_, and the rest. It all seems vain
enough at this distance, and the bigots of each successive iron time
will always be arraigning their fathers’ harmless art, no doubt to the
ultimate advancement of letters. But by young men quite honestly and
frenetically devoted to chiselling out English as though (God rest
them!) in obedience to a Higher Power, it may be allowed that such a
confession as the following would be felt as an irritant:

    All those, I think, who have lived as literary men--working daily
    as literary labourers--will agree with me that three hours a day
    will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then he should
    so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously
    during those three hours--or have so tutored his mind that it
    shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen and gazing
    at the wall before him till he shall have found the words with
    which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this time become my
    custom--and it still is my custom, though of late I have become a
    little lenient to myself--to write with my watch before me, and
    to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have
    found that my 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my
    watch went.

The reader may easily imagine the maddening effect of that upon any
ambitious young writer, indolent by habit yet conscientious in his
craft, reminiscent of hours spent in gazing at a wall for words with
which he wanted to express his ideas. How many times did Plato alter
the opening sentence of _The Republic_? How many times did Gray recast
the _Elegy_?

But time, which should bring the philosophic mind, will lead most
critics who follow criticism sincerely to the happy conviction that
there are no rules for the operation of genius; a conviction born to
save a vast amount of explanation--and whitewash. Literary genius may
be devoted, as with Milton; nonchalant, as with Congreve; elaborately
draped, as with Tennyson. Catullus or Burns may splash your face and
run on; but always the unmistakable god has passed your way. In reading
Trollope one’s sense of trafficking with genius arises more and more
evidently out of his large sincerity--a sincerity in bulk, so to speak;
wherefore, to appraise him, you must read him in bulk, taking the good
with the bad, even as you must with Shakespeare. (This comparison is
not so foolish as it looks at first sight: since, while no two authors
can ever have been more differently gifted, it would be difficult to
name a third in competition as typically English.) The very mass of
Trollope commands a real respect; its prodigious quantity is felt to be
a quality, as one searches in it and finds that--good or bad, better
or very much worse--there is not a dishonest inch in the whole. He
practised among novelists of genius: Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, the
Brontës, George Eliot, Ouida were his contemporaries; he lived through
the era of “sensational novels,” _Lady Audley’s Secret_ and the rest;
and he wrote, as he confesses, with an eye on the publisher’s cheque.
But no success of genius tempted him to do more than admire it from
a distance; no success of “sensation” seduced him from his loom of
honest tweed. He criticises the gods and Titans of his time. He had
personal reasons for loving Thackeray, who gave him his great lift into
fame by commissioning him to write the serial novel that opened the
_Cornhill_ upon a highly expectant public. Trollope played up nobly to
the compliment and the responsibility. _Framley Parsonage_ belongs to
his very best: it took the public accurately (and deservedly) between
wind and water. Thackeray was grateful for the good and timely service;
Trollope for the good and timely opportunity. Yet one suspects no taint
of servility when he writes of Thackeray that “among all our novelists
his style is the purest, as to my ear it is the most harmonious.”
(And so, I hope, say most of us.) Of Dickens he declares with entire
simplicity that his “own peculiar idiosyncrasy in the matter” forbids
him to join in the full chorus of applause. “Mrs. Gamp, Micawber,
Pecksniff, and others have become household words--but to my judgment
they are not human beings.”

    Of Dickens’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is
    jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of
    rules--almost as completely as that created by Carlyle. To readers
    who have taught themselves to regard language, it must therefore
    be unpleasant. But the critic is driven to feel the weakness of
    his criticism when he acknowledges to himself--as he is compelled
    in all honesty to do--that with the language, such as it is, the
    writer has satisfied the great mass of the readers of his country.

To the merits of Disraeli--whom he must take into account as “the
present Prime Minister of England,” who “has been so popular as a
novelist that, whether for good or for ill, I feel myself compelled to
speak of him”--he is quite genuinely blind. For the political insight
which burns in page after page of _Coningsby_, as for the seriousness
at the core of _Sybil_, he has no eyes at all. To him, dealing with
the honest surface and sub-surface of English country life, with the
rooted interest of county families and cathedral closes, all Disraeli’s
pictures of high society appear as pomatum and tinsel, false glitter
and flash. He had never a guess that this flash and glitter (false as
they so often were) played over depths his own comfortable philosophy
never divined. He just found it false and denounced it. Upon Wilkie
Collins and the art that constructed _The Woman in White_ and _The
Moonstone_ he could only comment that “as it is a branch which I have
not myself at all cultivated, it is not unnatural that his work should
be very much lost upon me individually. When I sit down to write a
novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to
end.”

Again, honest though he was, he accepted and used false tricks and
conventions calculated, in the ’eighties and ’nineties, to awake
frenzy in any young practitioner who, however incompetent, was trying
to learn how a novel should be written. The worst “stage aside” of
an old drama was as nothing in comparison with Trollope’s easy-going
remarks, dropped anywhere in the story, and anyhow, that “This is a
novel, and I am writing it to amuse you. I might just as easily make
my heroine do _this_ as do _that_. Which shall it be?... Well, I am
going to make her do _that_; for if she did _this_, what would become
of my novel?” One can imagine Henry James wincing physically at such a
question posed in cold print by an artist; as in a most catholic and
charitable paper--written in 1883, when the young dogs were assembling
to insult Trollope’s carcase--he reveals himself as wincing over the
first sentence in the last chapter of _Barchester Towers_: “The end of
a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner-party, must be made up of
sweetmeats and sugar plums.” James laments:

    These little slaps at credulity ... are very discouraging, but
    they are even more inexplicable; for they are deliberately
    inartistic, even judged from the point of view of that rather vague
    consideration of form which is the only canon we have a right to
    impose upon Trollope. It is impossible to imagine what a novelist
    takes himself to be unless he regard himself as a historian and
    his narrative as history. It is only as a historian that he has
    the smallest _locus standi_. As a narrator of fictitious events
    he is nowhere; to insert into his attempt a backbone of logic he
    must relate events that are assumed to be real. This assumption
    permeates, animates all the work of the most solid storytellers....

Yes; but on further acquaintance with Trollope one discovers that this
trick (annoying always) of asking, “Now what shall we make Mrs. Bold
do?--accept Mr. Arabin, or reject him?” is no worse than “uncle’s
fun,” as I may put it. Uncle is just playing with us, though we wish
he wouldn’t. In fact, Trollope never chooses the wrong answer to the
infelicitous question. He is wise and unerringly right every time. You
will (I think) search his novels in vain for a good man or a good woman
untrue to duty as weighed out between heart and conscience.

Another offence in Trollope is his distressing employment of facetious
names--“Mr. Quiverful” for a philoprogenitive clergyman, “Dr.
Fillgrave” for a family physician, etc. “It would be better,” murmurs
Henry James pathetically, “to go back to Bunyan at once.” (Trollope,
in fact, goes back farther--to the abominable tradition of Ben Jonson;
and it is the less excusable because he could invent perfect names when
he tried--Archdeacon Grantly, Johnny Eames, Algernon Crosbie, Mrs.
Proudie, the Dales of Allington, the Thornes of Ullathorne, Barchester,
Framley--names, families, places fitting like gloves.) And still worse
was he advised when he introduced caricature, for which he had small
gift, into his stories; “taking off” eminent bishops in the disguise
of objectionable small boys, or poking laborious fun at Dickens and
Carlyle under the titles of Mr. Sentiment and Dr. Pessimist Anticant.
_The Warden_ is in conception, and largely in execution, a beautiful
story of an old man’s conscience. It is a short story, too. I know of
none that could be more easily shortened to an absolute masterpiece by
a pair of scissors.

With Trollope, as with Byron, in these days a critic finds himself at
first insensibly forced, as though by shouldering of a crowd, upon
apology for the man’s reputation.


II

I do not wish to make a third with Pontius Pilate and Mr. Chadband in
raising the question, “What is Truth?” but merely to suggest here that,
as soon as ever you raise it over poetry or over prose fiction, it
becomes--as Aristotle did not miss to discover--highly philosophical
and ticklish. To begin at plumb bottom with your mere matter-of-fact
man, you will be asked to explain how in the world there can be “truth”
in “fiction,” the two being opponent and mutually exclusive terms; and
such a man will tell you that larkspurs don’t listen, lilies don’t
whisper, and no spray blossoms with pleasure because a bird has
clung to it; wherefore, what is the use of pretending any such lies?
Ascending a little higher in the scale of creation, we come to another
bottom, a false bottom, a Bully Bottom, who enjoys make-believe, but
feels it will never do “to bring in (God shield us!) a lion among
ladies.” Still ascending past much timber, we emerge on the decks of
argosies--

             Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,

portlily negligent of all this bottom-business on which they ride,
carrying piled canvas over the foam of perilous seas. In short, the man
who hasn’t it in his soul that there is a truth of emotion and a truth
of imagination just as solid for a keelson as any truth of fact, merely
does not know what literature is _about_. As Heine once said of a fat
opponent, “it is easier for a camel to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than
for that fellow to pass through the eye of a needle.” Now Trollope,
if we look at him in one way, and consider him as an entirely honest
Bottom, simply saw Micawber as a grotesque creation and Victor Hugo as
a writer extravagantly untrue to nature. He merely could not understand
what Hugo would be aiming at (say) in _Gastibelza_ or in the divine
serenade:

    Allons-nous-en par l’Autriche!
      Nous aurons l’aube à nos fronts.
    Je serai grand et toi riche,
      Puisque nous nous aimerons ...

    Tu seras dame et moi comte.
      Viens, mon cœur s’épanouit.
    Viens, nous conterons ce conte
      Aux étoiles de la nuit.

He could as little see--and yet who doubts it?--that the creator of
Micawber was absolutely honest in closing _David Copperfield_ on
the declaration that “no one can ever believe this Narrative in the
reading more than I believed it in the writing.” What Trollope made
of _Don Quixote_ (or of _Alice in Wonderland_) lies beyond my power
to imagine. But the point for us is that as an honest man who lived
through the vogue of Poe and Dickens and, in later times, of Ouida (who
will surely, soon or late, be recognised for the genius she was), and
was all the time, on his own admission, alive as anyone to the market,
Trollope kept the noiseless tenor of his way and, resisting temptation
this side or that, went on describing life as he saw it.

Thus, and in this easy, humdrum, but pertinacious style, he arrived,
much as he often arrived at the death of a fox. He was a great
fox-hunter; lumbering in the saddle, heavy, short-sighted, always
unaware of what might happen on t’other side of the next fence--“few
have explored more closely than I have done the depth and breadth and
water-holding capacities of an Essex ditch.” He knew little of the
science of the sport:

    Indeed, all the notice I take of hounds is not to ride over them.
    My eyes are so constituted that I can never see the nature of
    a fence. I either follow some one, or ride at it with the full
    conviction that I may be going into a horse-pond or a gravel-pit. I
    have jumped into both one and the other. I am very heavy and have
    never ridden expensive horses.

“The cause of my delight in the amusement,” he confesses, “I have
never been able to analyze my own satisfaction.” He arose regularly at
5:30 A.M., had his coffee brought him by a groom, had completed his
“literary work” before he dressed for breakfast; then on four working
days a week he toiled for the General Post Office, and on the other two
rode to hounds. In all kinds of spare time--in railway-carriages or
crossing to America--he had always a pen in his hand, a pad of paper on
his knee, or on a cabin table specially constructed.

As he sets it all down, with parenthetical advice to the literary
tyro, it is all as simple, apparently, as a cash account. But don’t
you believe it! The man who created the Barsetshire novels lived quite
as intimately with his theme as Dickens did in _David Copperfield_;
nay, more intimately. To begin with, his imaginary Barsetshire is
as definitely an actual piece of England as Mr. Hardy’s Wessex. Of
_Framley Parsonage_ he tells us that

    as I wrote it I became more closely than ever acquainted with the
    new shire which I had added to the English counties.... I had it
    all in my mind--its roads and railroads, its towns and parishes,
    its members of Parliament and the different hunts that rode over
    it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and
    their parks, the rectors and their churches. This was the fourth
    novel of which I had placed the scene in Barsetshire, and as I
    wrote it I made a map of the dear county. Throughout these stories
    there has been no name given to a fictitious site which does not
    represent to me a spot of which I know all the accessories, as
    though I had lived and wandered there.

Here Trollope asserts less than one-half of his true claim. He not only
carried all Barsetshire in his brain as a map, with every cross-road,
by-lane, and footpath noted--Trollope was great at cross-roads,
having as an official reorganised, simplified, and speeded-up the
postal service over a great part of rural England--but knew all the
country-houses, small or great, of that shire, with their families,
pedigrees, intermarriages, political interests, monetary anxieties,
the rise and fall of interdependent squires, parsons, tenants; how a
mortgage, for example, will influence a character, a bank-book set
going a matrimonial intrigue, a transferred bill operate on a man’s
sense of honour. You seem to see him moving about the Cathedral Close
in “very serviceable suit of black,” or passing the gates and lodge
of a grand house in old hunting-pink like a very wise solicitor on a
holiday: garrulous, to be sure, but to be trusted with any secret--to
be trusted most of all, perhaps, with that secret of a maiden’s love
which as yet she hardly dares to avow to herself. Here let us listen to
the late Frederic Harrison, who puts it exactly:

    The Barsetshire cycle of tales has one remarkable feature; for it
    is designed[8] on a scheme which is either a delightful success or
    a tiresome failure. And it is a real success. To fill eight volumes
    in six distinct tales with the intricate relations of one set of
    families, all within access to one cathedral city, covering a whole
    generation in time, and exhibiting the same characters from youth
    to maturity and age--this is indeed a perilous task.... Balzac and
    Zola abroad have done this, and with us Scott, Thackeray, Lytton,
    and Dickens have in some degree tried this plan. But, I think,
    no English novelist has worked it out on so large a field, with
    such minute elaboration, and with such entire mastery of the many
    dilemmas and pitfalls which beset the competitor in this long and
    intricate course.

    [8] I should prefer to say that it grew.--Q.

It is a strange reflection--as one turns the advertisement pages of
_The Times_, or of _Country Life_, and scans the photographs of
innumerable “stately homes” to-day on the market--that Trollope’s fame
should be reviving just as the society he depicted would seem to be in
process of deracination. I use the word “deracination” because that
society--with all its faults, stunted offshoots, gnarled prejudices,
mossed growth of convention, parasitic ivies--was a tree of ancestry
rooted in the countryside, not to be extracted save by wrenching of
fibres and with bleeding of infinite homely ties. To some extent, no
doubt, this sorrowful dislocation must follow all long wars. A hundred
years ago Cobbett rode our land and noted how its true gentry, as a
reward for their very sacrifices during the Napoleonic struggle, were
being dispossessed by bankers and “loan-mongers.” So, to-day, are
decent families--who, while “thinking too much of themselves,” thought
much for their neighbours--being uprooted and exiled, and taking into
lodgings a few portraits, some medals, and the last framed piece of
vellum conferring posthumously a D.S.O. _These_ times, at any rate,
do not “strike monied worldlings with dismay.” On the contrary, the
war-profiteer and the week-ender with his golf-clubs are smothering the
poor last of the society that Trollope knew; and in time, no doubt,
_their_ sons will go to Eton and Winchester, learn in holidays the old
English love of field and stream and sea, and so prepare themselves in
a generation or two to cast off life at earliest call simply because
this England, to which they have succeeded, has come to be, in _their_
turn, _their_ country. Thus it will go on again (please heaven) as the
father’s hair wears off the grandson’s hoof.

The fortunes and misfortunes of Trollope’s comfortable England have
always this element of the universal, that they are not brought about
by any devastating external calamity, but always by process of inward
rectitude or inward folly, reasonably operating on the ordinary
business of life. In this business he can win and keep our affection
for an entirely good man--for Mr. Harding, for Doctor Thorne. In all
his treatment of women, even of the _jeune fille_ of the Victorian
Age, this lumbering, myopic rider-to-hounds always (as they say) “has
hands”--and to “have hands” is a gift of God. He was, as Henry James
noted, “by no means destitute of a certain saving grace of coarseness,”
but it is forgotten on the instant he touches a woman’s pulse. Over
that, to interpret it, he never bends but delicately. No one challenges
his portraits of the maturer ladies. Mrs. Proudie is a masterpiece,
of course, heroically consistent to the moment of her death--nay,
living afterwards consistently in her husband’s qualified regrets (can
anything be truer than the tragedy told with complete restraint in
chapters 66 and 67 of _The Last Chronicle_?). Lady Lufton’s portrait,
while less majestic, seems to me equally flawless, equably flawless.
Trollope’s women can all show claws on occasion; can all summon “that
sort of ill-nature which is not uncommon when one woman speaks of
another”; and the most, even of his maidens, betray sooner or later
some glance of that _malice_ upon the priestly calling, or rather upon
its pretensions, which Trollope made them share with him:

    “Ah! yes: but Lady Lufton is not a clergyman, Miss Robarts.”

    It was on Lucy’s tongue to say that her ladyship was pretty nearly
    as bad, but she stopped herself.

Difference of time and convention and pruderies allowed for, Trollope
will give you in a page or so of discourse between two Victorian
maidens--the whole of it delicately understood, chivalrously handled,
tenderly yet firmly revealed--the secret as no novelist has quite
revealed it before or since. At any moment one may be surprised by a
sudden Jane Austen touch; and this will come with the more startling
surprise being dropped by a plain, presumably blunt, man. For Trollope
adds to his strain of coarseness, already mentioned, a strain--or at
least an intimate understanding--of cheapness. His gentle breeding and
his upbringing (poverty-stricken though it had been) ever checked him
on the threshold of the holies. But he had tholed too many years in the
G.P.O. to have missed intimate acquaintance with

      The noisy chaff
      And ill-bred laugh
    Of clerks on omnibuses.

Those who understand this will understand why he could not bring
himself to mate his “dear Lily Dale” with that faithful, most helpful,
little bounder Johnny Eames. He knew his Johnny Eames too well to
introduce him upon the Cathedral Close of Barchester, though he could
successfully dare to introduce the Stanhope family. He walks among
rogues, too, and wastrels, with a Mr. Sowerby or a Bertie Stanhope,
as sympathetically as among bishops, deans, archdeacons, canons. His
picture of Sowerby and the ruin he has brought on an ancient family,
all through his own sins is no less and no more truthful than his
picture of Mrs. Proudie in altercation with Mr. Slope; while they both
are inferior in imaginative power to the scene of Mr. Crawley’s call
on the Bishop. In the invention of Crawley, in his perfect handling
of that strong and insane mind, I protest that I am astonished almost
as though he had suddenly shown himself capable of inventing a King
Lear. In this Trollope, with whom one has been jogging along under a
slowly growing conviction that he is by miles a greater artist than he
knows or has ever been reckoned, there explodes this character--and
out of the kindliest intentions to preach him up, one is awakened in
a fright and to a sense of shame at never having recognised the man’s
originality or taken the great measure of his power.




INDEX


  Addison, Joseph, 96, 128

  _Aeneid_, 159

  _Alice in Wonderland_, 228

  _All the Year Round_, 18

  _American Notes_, 17, 52

  _American Senator, The_, 220

  _Antony and Cleopatra_, 93

  _Arabian Nights_, 41, 170, 187

  Ariosto, Lodovico, 158

  Aristophanes, 158

  Aristotle, 42, 84, 139, 191, 226

  Arnold, Matthew, 74, 100, 121, 161

  _Art of Fiction, The_, James’, 81

  Ashley, Lord (Lord Shaftesbury), 172, 174, 192

  Aurelius, Marcus, 131

  Austen, Jane, 31, 71, 164, 179, 200, 233

  _Autobiography_, Trollope’s, 219, 221


  Bacon, Francis, 4, 107

  Bagehot, Walter, 114

  _Ballad of Bouillabaisse_, 104

  Balzac, Honoré de, 34, 135, 138, 219, 230

  _Barchester Towers_, 220, 225

  _Barnaby Rudge_, 52, 55

  Barnes, William, 119

  _Barry Lyndon_, 125, 126, 147

  _Battle of Life, The_, 18

  Beerbohm, Max, 149, 160

  _Belton Estate, The_, 219

  Bentham, Jeremy, 73

  Berkeley, Bishop George, 128

  _Blackwood’s Magazine_, 204

  Blake, William, 128, 159

  _Bleak House_, 11, 12, 33, 55, 69, 89

  Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 70

  Bolingbroke, Viscount, 197

  _Book of Snobs, The_, 125

  Boswell, James, 201

  _Boule de Suif_, 139

  Bright, John, 183

  Brontë, Anne, 211, 222

  Brontë, Branwell, 201

  Brontë, Charlotte, 72, 201, 211, 212, 222

  Brontë, Emily, 201, 211, 222

  Brookfield, William Henry, 106

  Browne, Sir Thomas, 112, 197

  Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 161, 167, 170, 204

  Browning, Robert, 7, 21, 100, 128, 161

  Brunetière, Ferdinand, 24

  Bryant, William Cullen, 17

  Buckle, Henry Thomas, 7

  Bunyan, John, 71, 197, 225

  Burke, Edmund, 4, 21, 22, 128, 149, 183, 197

  Burney, Fanny, 164

  Burns, Robert, 66, 128, 222

  Butler, Samuel, 84, 85

  Byron, Lord, 66, 128, 160, 226


  Campion, Thomas, 19

  Canning, George, 107, 183

  Carlyle, Mrs., 10

  Carlyle, Thomas, 7, 10, 21, 40, 74, 93, 107, 124, 128, 176, 177, 223,
        226

  Carols, 18

  Carroll, Lewis, 78

  _Casa Guidi Windows_, 161

  _Catherine_, 125

  Catullus, 222

  Cervantes, Miguel de, 91

  Chadwick, Sir Edwin, 167

  Chapman, Frederic, 83

  Chapman, Robert William, 200

  Charles I, 4

  Charlotte Augusta, Princess, 110

  Chatham, Earl of, 183

  Chaucer, Geoffrey, 8, 20, 66, 67, 98, 158

  Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 10, 33

  _Childe Harold_, 66

  _Chimes, The_, 18

  _Christmas Carol, A_, 18

  Cicero, 183

  City Churchyards, The, Dickens’ essay on, 96

  Clarendon, Earl of, 197

  Clark, Sir Charles, 110

  _Claverings, The_, 219

  Clough, Arthur Hugh, 74, 132, 161

  Cobbett, William, 68, 171, 231

  Cochrane, Alexander Baillie, 193

  _Codlingsby_, 188

  Colenso, Bishop, 73

  Coleridge, Hartley, 30

  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 21, 56, 77, 128

  Collins, Wilkie, 13, 127, 224

  _Comedy of Errors, The_, 53

  _Compleat Angler, The_, 71

  Congreve, William, 222

  _Coningsby_, 117, 193, 194–196, 208, 223

  Conington, John, 123

  _Constitutional, The_, 102

  _Coriolanus_, 158

  _Cornhill Magazine_, 212, 223

  _Country Life_, 230

  _Cousin Phillis_, 212–216

  Coverly, Sir Roger de, in _The Spectator_, 71

  Cowper, William, 107, 124, 128

  Cox, Harold, 167

  Crabbe, George, 107, 159, 204

  _Cranford_, 126, 199, 200, 202, 203, 210, 212, 213

  _Cricket on the Hearth, The_, 18

  Croker, John Wilson, 192

  _Cry of the Children, The_, 161, 168, 169


  Dana, Richard Henry, 17

  Dante, 28, 91, 134, 158

  Darwin, Charles, 7, 73

  _David Copperfield_, 52, 54, 67, 75, 76, 90, 93–97, 129, 228, 229

  Defoe, Daniel, 49, 78, 163, 196

  _Denis Duval_, 147

  De Quincey, Thomas, 5, 38

  _Deserted Village, The_, 159

  Dickens, Charles, 3–99, 125–127, 129–141, 176, 210, 222, 223, 226,
        228, 229, 230

  _Dictionary of National Biography_, 203

  _Dinner at Poplar Walk, A_, 5

  Diocletian, 197

  Disraeli, Benjamin, 116, 170, 171, 180–198, 206, 208, 210, 217,
        222–224

  _Divina Commedia_, 11

  Dobson, Austin, 146

  _Dombey and Son_, 11, 39, 42, 44, 69

  Donne, John, 21

  _Don Quixote_, 228

  Dostoievsky, Feodor, 75

  _Dream, The_, Byron’s, 66

  _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, 142

  _Dr. Marigold’s Prescriptions_, 18

  _Dr. Thorne_, 220

  Dryden, John, 8, 20, 24, 25, 66, 128, 159, 197

  Dumas, Alexandre, the elder, 24, 53, 54, 146, 196

  _Dunciad, The_, 128, 129


  _Eclogues_, Virgil’s, 159

  _Elegy written in a Country Churchyard_, 222

  Eliot, George, 7, 72, 211, 222

  _Endymion_, Disraeli’s, 195, 210, 217

  _English Mail Coach, The_, 38

  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 27

  _Esmond_, 96, 122, 123, 146, 147, 149, 152–156

  _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, 26, 159

  _Essay on Man, An_, 159

  _Essays of Elia, The_, 57

  _Eustace Diamonds, The_, 219

  Evelyn, John, 71


  _Ferrex and Porrex_, 213

  Fielding, Henry, 20, 71, 95, 139, 163, 179

  FitzGerald, Edward, 106, 108, 122

  Flaubert, Gustave, 12, 138, 221

  Forster, John, 12, 13, 15, 16, 51, 59, 86, 89

  Fox, Charles James, 183

  _Framley Parsonage_, 220, 223, 229


  Gaskell, Mrs., 179, 199–218

  Gaskell, William, 199, 203, 205

  _Gastibelza_, 227

  Gay, John, 128

  _Georgics_, 214

  Gibbon, Edward, 21, 128, 197

  Gissing, George, 12, 13, 96, 97

  Gladstone, William Ewart, 183

  _Golden Lion of Grandpré, The_, 220

  Goldsmith, Oliver, 128

  Gray, Thomas, 222

  _Great Expectations_, 31, 74, 93

  Greuze, Jean Baptiste, 140

  Greville, Fulke, 41


  Hallam, Arthur, 107

  _Hamlet_, 49, 81, 144, 163

  Hammond, John Lawrence, 172, 191

  Hammond, Mrs., 172, 191

  Handel, Georg Friedrich, 26

  _Handley Cross_, 37, 68

  Hansard’s _Parliamentary Debates_, 191, 206

  _Hard Times_, 211

  Hardy, Thomas, 31, 140, 229

  Harrison, Frederic, 230

  Hastings, Warren, 4

  _Haunted Man, The_, 18

  Hazlitt, William, 30, 78, 129

  Heine, Heinrich, 227

  Hemans, Mrs., 168

  Henley, William Ernest, 9, 48, 134, 142

  Hertford, Marquis of, 117

  Higgins, Matthew James, 129

  _History of Civilisation in Europe_, 7

  _History of English Prose Rhythm_, Saintsbury’s, 150–151

  Hoffman, Josiah Ogden, 17

  _Holly-Tree Inn, The_, 18

  _Holy Tide, The_, 19

  Homer, 110, 139, 144, 217

  Hood, Thomas, 161

  Horace, 123, 124, 135, 158

  Horner, Leonard, 178

  _Household Words_, 13, 18, 211, 212

  Howitt, Mrs., 204

  Howlett, John, 191

  Hugo, Victor, 227

  Hunt, Leigh, 10, 89, 90

  Hunter, Sir William, 109

  Huxley, Thomas Henry, 7, 73


  _Infernal Marriage, The_, 181, 182

  Inge, William Ralph, 63, 64

  Irving, Washington, 17


  James, Henry, 40, 76, 81–83, 225, 232

  Jefferies, Richard, 132

  _John Inglesant_, 39

  Johnson, Samuel, 21, 26, 37, 97, 101, 103, 110, 126, 128

  _Jonathan Wild_, 163

  Jonson, Ben, 20, 27, 128, 141, 226


  Keats, John, 21, 128, 159, 160, 213

  _King John_, 158

  Kinglake, Alexander William, 107

  _King Lear_, 29, 46, 139

  _King on the Tower, The_, 130

  Kingsley, Charles, 7

  Kipling, Rudyard, 9, 49, 112


  _Lady Audley’s Secret_, 222

  _Lady Clara Vere de Vere_, 161

  Lamb, Charles, 5, 31, 57, 78, 107

  Landor, Walter Savage, 89, 90, 128, 220

  _Last Chronicle of Barset, The_, 220, 232

  Lear, Edward, 78, 105

  L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), 168

  Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 144

  Lewes, George Henry, 99

  _Life of Charles Dickens_, Forster’s, 59

  _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, 201, 203, 210–212

  _Life of Dr. Johnson_, 201

  Lincoln, Abraham, 183

  _Little Dorrit_, 32, 43

  _London Magazine_, 57

  Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 144

  Longinus, 149

  _Lothair_, 185, 186

  _Lycidas_, 159

  Lytton, Lord, 230


  Macaulay, Lord, 172, 174, 183

  _Madame Bovary_, 139

  Malory, Sir Thomas, 196

  Malthus, Thomas Robert, 167

  Manners, Lord John, 193

  Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward, 132

  Marlowe, Christopher, 21

  _Martin Chuzzlewit_, 17, 23, 51–53, 54, 74

  Martineau, James, 74, 132

  Marvell, Andrew, 124

  _Mary Barton_, 205–209, 211, 212

  Marzials, Sir Frank T., 117

  Maupassant, Guy de, 138

  Maurice, Frederick Denison, 7

  _Measure for Measure_, 91

  Meredith, George, 137

  Mérimée, Prosper, 138

  Merivale, Herman, 117, 119, 131

  _Merry Wives of Windsor, The_, 30, 45, 46

  Michelangelo, 26

  _Midsummer-Night’s Dream, A_, 78, 149

  Mill, John Stuart, 7

  Milnes, Richard Monckton, 106, 107

  Milton, John, 21, 66, 124, 127, 128, 136, 159, 212, 222

  Molière, 28

  _Moll Flanders_, 163

  _Moonstone, The_, 224

  _Morning Chronicle_, 37, 177

  Morris, William, 162, 176

  _Mystery of Edwin Drood, The_, 31, 200


  _National Standard, The_, 102

  _Newcomes, The_, 104

  _New Grub Street, The_, 97

  Newman, John Henry, 73, 74, 107, 132, 185

  _Nicholas Nickleby_, 47, 52, 54

  _North and South_, 210, 212

  _North British_, 132


  _Odes_, Horace’s, 123

  _Odyssey_, 144

  _Old Curiosity Shop, The_, 41, 52, 55, 95

  _Old Margate Hoy, The_, 5

  _Old Squire, The_, 70

  _Oliver Twist_, 47, 54, 61, 88, 91

  _Omar Khayyam_, 199

  _On Letts’s Diary_, 109

  _On the Late Massacre in Piedmont_, 124

  _Othello_, 49

  Ouida (Louise de la Ramée), 222, 228

  _Our Mutual Friend_, 42, 54


  Palmerston, Viscount, 183

  _Paradise Lost_, 159

  _Paris Sketch Book_, 133

  Peacock, Thomas Love, 220

  Peel, Sir Robert, 181, 183, 194, 196, 197

  _Pendennis_, 44, 120–122, 129

  _Perils of Certain English Prisoners, The_, 13, 77

  Petrarch, 158

  _Philip_, 103, 135

  _Pickwick Papers, The_, 8, 11, 37, 44, 46, 52, 68, 77, 125, 126

  _Piers Plowman_, 158

  Pindar, 200, 220

  Pitt, William, 183

  Plato, 183, 222

  Poe, Edgar Allan, 228

  _Poetics_, Aristotle’s, 139

  _Poor Robin’s Almanack_, 19

  Pope, Alexander, 21, 66, 128, 159

  Porter, George Richardson, 177

  Prescott, William Hickling, 17

  Prior, Matthew, 124

  _Prisoner, The_, 201, 202

  _Progress of the Nation from the Beginning of the Nineteenth
        Century_, 177

  _Prologue to the Canterbury Tales_, 67

  _Punch_, 220


  Raleigh, Sir Walter, 62–65, 100, 122

  _Rasselas_, 126

  Reade, Charles, 58

  _Redgauntlet_, 67

  _Reine Margot, La_, 24

  _Republic, The_, Plato’s, 222

  Richardson, Samuel, 163, 179

  Ritchie, Lady, 101

  Ritchie, Mrs., 110

  _Robert Ellesmere_, 39

  Robertson, Thomas William, 45

  _Robinson Crusoe_, 49, 163

  _Romola_, 75

  Ronsard, Pierre de, 158

  _Rose and the Ring, The_, 105

  _Roundabout Papers_, 96, 109, 122, 123, 133, 138, 147

  _Rovers, The_, 107

  _Roxana_, 163

  Ruskin, John, 7, 107, 128, 176

  Russell, Lord John, 183

  _Ruth_, 211


  Sadler, Michael, 172–174

  Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 121

  Saintsbury, George, 76, 78, 150–152

  Santayana, George, 55, 79

  Scott, Sir Walter, 17, 21, 66, 128, 140, 148, 163, 164, 179, 197, 230

  _Sevastopol_, 138

  Seymour, Robert, 83

  _Shabby Genteel Story, A_, 133

  Shaftesbury, Lord, 172, 175, 193

  Shakespeare, Sir Richmond, 110

  Shakespeare, William, 8, 21–23, 26, 28, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36, 43, 45,
        49, 50, 53, 57, 66, 67, 81, 83, 91, 100, 101, 114, 128, 149,
        158, 217, 222

  Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 21, 106, 128, 160, 176

  Shenstone, William, 68

  Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 4, 128, 183

  Sidney, Algernon, 4

  _Sketches by Boz_, 5

  _Small House at Alington, The_, 220

  Smollett, Tobias, 164

  Smythe, George (Viscount Strangford), 193, 194

  Socrates, 4, 183

  _Song of the Shirt_, 161

  Spedding, James, 107, 108

  Spencer, Herbert, 184

  Spenser, Edmund, 158

  Stanley, Dean, 8

  Steele, Richard, 96, 128

  Stendhal, 138

  Sterne, Laurence, 133

  Stevenson, Robert Louis, 77, 121, 128, 142, 220

  Strangford, Viscount, 193

  Surtees, Robert Smith, 37

  Swift, Jonathan, 107, 128, 133

  Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 99, 162

  _Sybil_, 189, 195, 196, 208, 224

  _Sylvia’s Lovers_, 212


  _Tale of Two Cities, A_, 45

  _Tancred_, 184, 195

  _Tartuffe_, 139

  _Tarzan of the Apes_, 92

  Tasso, Torquato, 21, 27, 66

  Taylor, Jeremy, 131

  _Tempest, The_, 81

  Temple, Sir William, 71

  Tennyson, Frederick, 19

  Tennyson, Lord, 7, 105, 106, 122, 128, 161, 222

  Tertullian, 197

  Thackeray, Mrs., 103

  Thackeray, William Makepeace, 7, 43, 66, 96, 100–157, 187, 223, 230

  _Thackerays in India and some Calcutta Graves, The_, 109

  Theocritus, 158, 214

  Thompson, Francis, 189

  Thomson, Hugh, 199

  _Three Musketeers, The_, 24

  _Timber, or Discoveries_, 27

  _Times, The_, 230

  Tolstoy, Count Leo, 39, 75, 99, 138, 149

  _Tom Brown’s School Days_, 38, 131

  _Tom Jones_, 139

  _To Mr. Lawrence_, 124

  _To the Lady Margaret Ley_, 124

  _Town Labourer, 1760–1832, The_, 191

  _Treasure Island_, 142

  _Tristram Shandy_, 126, 163, 200

  _Troilus and Cressida_, 57

  Trollope, Anthony, 54, 141, 148, 211, 219–234

  Turgueniev, Ivan, 138

  Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 41

  _Two Gentlemen of Verona, The_, 23, 91


  Uhland, Johann Ludwig, 130

  _Uncommercial Traveller, The_, 96


  _Vanity Fair_, 117, 122, 125, 141, 146, 147, 151

  Venables, George Stovin, 117, 133

  _Venus and Adonis_, 114

  _Vicar of Wakefield, The_, 163

  _Vicomte de Bragelonne, Le_, 24

  _Victorian Age, The_, Inge’s, 63

  _Villette_, 201

  Villon, François, 158

  Virgil, 27, 91, 158, 159, 214

  _Virginians, The_, 147, 149

  _Vivian Grey_, 182, 185


  Walpole, Horace, 164

  Walton, Izaak, 197

  Wapping Workhouse, Dickens’ essay on, 96

  _War and Peace_, 39, 138, 149

  Ward, Sir Adolphus, 203, 204, 208, 209

  _Warden, The_, 220, 226

  _Way of All Flesh, The_, 84, 86

  _Way We Live Now, The_, 220

  _Wee Willie Winkie_, 112

  Wells, Herbert George, 43

  Wharton, Edith, 15

  Whewell, William, 122

  Whibley, Charles, 122

  Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 221

  Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas Patrick Stephen, 73

  _Wives and Daughters_, 212

  _Woman in White, The_, 224

  _Woodlanders, The_, 140

  Wordsworth, William, 128

  _World, The_, 127

  _Wreck of the “Golden Mary,” The_, 18

  _Wuthering Heights_, 201


  _Xenophanes_, 82


  Yates, Edmund, 127

  _Young Duke, The_, 181


  Zola, Emile, 230




Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.

The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references.

Page 19: The inconsistent indentation of the ninth line of the poem,
“Now Winter Nights Enlarge” was printed that way.





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