Masters of the English Novel by Richard BurtonA Study of Principles and Personalities (page 3)

This idea of a plan was not crystallized into the famous title given to his collective works–La Comedie Humaine–until 1842, when but eight years of life remained to him. But four years earlier it had been mentioned in a letter, and when Balzac was only a little over thirty, at a time when his better-known books were just beginning to appear, he had signified his sense of an inclusive scheme by giving such a running title to a group of his stories as the familiar “Scenes from Private Life”–to which, in due course, were added other designations for the various parts of the great plan. The encyclopedic survey was never fully completed, but enough was done to justify all the laudation that belongs to a Herculean task and the exploitation of an almost incredible amount of human data. As for finishing the work, the failure hardly detracts from its value or affects its place in literature. Neither Spenser’s “Faery Queen” nor Wordsworth’s “The Excursion” was completed, and, per contra, it were as well for Browning if “The Ring and the Book” had not been. In all such cases of so-called incompletion, one recognizes Hercules from the feet. Had this mighty story-teller and student of humanity carried out his full intention there would have been nearly 150 pieces of fiction; of the plan-on-paper he actually completed ninety-seven, two-thirds of the whole, and enough to illustrate the conception. And it must be remembered that Balzac died at fifty. One result of the incompletion, as Brunetiere has pointed out, is to give disproportionate treatment to certain phases of life, to the military, for instance, for which Balzac has twenty-four stories on his list, whereas only two, “The Chouans” and “A Passion in the Desert,” were executed. But surely, sufficient was done, looking to the comedy as a whole, to force us to describe the execution as well as the conception as gigantic. Had the work been more mechanically pushed to its end for the exact plan’s sake, the perfection of scheme might have been attained at the expense of vitality and inspiration. Ninety-seven pieces of fiction, the majority of them elaborate novels, the whole involving several thousand characters, would be impressive in any case, but when they come from an author who marvelously reproduces his time and country, creating his scenes in a way to afford us a sense of the complexity of life–its depth and height, its beauty, terror and mystery–we can but hail him as Master.

And in spite of the range and variety in Balzac’s unique product, it has an effect of unity based upon a sense of social solidarity. He conceives it his duty to present the unity of society in his day, whatever its apparent class and other divergencies. He would show that men and women are members of the one body social, interacting upon each other in manifold relations and so producing the dramas of earth; each story plays its part in this general aim, illustrating the social laws and reactions, even as the human beings themselves play their parts in the world. In this way Balzac’s Human Comedy is an organism, however much it may fall short of symmetry and completion.

In the outline of the plan we find him separating his studies into three groups or classes: The Studies of Manners, the Philosophical Studies, and the Analytic Studies. In the first division were placed the related groups of scenes of Private life, Provincial life, Parisian life, Political life, Military life and Country life. It was his desire, as he says in a letter to Madame Hanska, to have the group of studies of Manners “represent all social effects”; in the philosophic studies the causes of those effects: the one exhibits individualities typified, the other, types individualized: and in the Analytic Studies he searches for the principles. “Manners are the performance; the causes are the wings and the machinery. The principles–they are the author…. Thus man, society and humanity will be described, judged, analyzed without repetition and in a work which will be, as it were, ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ of the west.”

The scheme thus categorically laid down sounds rather dry and formal, nor is it too easy to understand. But all trouble vanishes when once the Human Comedy itself, in any example of it, is taken up; you launch upon the great swollen tide of life and are carried irresistibly along.

It is plain that with an author of Balzac’s productive powers, any attempt to convey an idea of his quality must perforce confine itself to a few representative specimens. A few of them, rightly chosen, give a fair notion of his general interpretation. What then are some illustrative creations?

In the case of most novelists, although of first rank, it is not as a rule difficult to define their class and name their tendency: their temperaments and beliefs are so-and-so, and they readily fall under the designation of realist or romanticist, pessimist, or optimist, student of character or maker of plots. This is, in a sense, impossible with Balzac. The more he be read, the harder to detect his bias: he seems, one is almost tempted to say, more like a natural force than a human mind. Persons read two or three–perhaps half a dozen of his books–and then prate glibly of his dark view, his predilection for the base in mankind; when fifty fictions have been assimilated, it will be realized that but a phase of Balzac had been seen.

When the passion of creation, the birth-throes of a novel were on him, he became so immersed in the aspect of life he was depicting that he saw, felt, knew naught else: externally this obsession was expressed by his way of life and work while the story was growing under his hand: his recluse habits, his monkish abstention from worldly indulgences, the abnormal night hours of activity, the loss of flesh, so that the robust man who went into the guarded chamber came out at the end of six weeks the shadow of himself.

As a consequence of the consecration to the particular task (as if it embraced the one view of existence), the reader perhaps experiences a shock of surprise in passing from “The Country Doctor” to “Pere Goriot.” But the former is just as truly part of his interpretation as the latter. A dozen fictions can be drawn from the body of his production which portray humanity in its more beautiful, idealistic manifestations. Books like “The Country Doctor” and “Eugenic Grandet” are not alone in the list. And how beautiful both are! “The Country Doctor” has all the idyllic charm of setting which a poetic interpretation of life in a rural community can give. Not alone Nature, but human nature is hymned. The kindly old physician, whose model is the great Physician himself, is like Chaucer’s good parson, an unforgettable vision of the higher potentialities of the race. Such a novel deserves to be called quite as truly romance and prose poem, save that Balzac’s vraisemblance, his gift for photographic detail and the contemporaneousness of the setting, make it modern. And thus with “Eugenie Grandet” the same method applied in “The Country Doctor” to the study of a noble profession in a rural atmosphere, is here used for the portrait of a good woman whose entourage is again that of simple, natural conditions. There is more of light and shade in the revelation of character because Eugenie’s father, the miser–a masterly sketch–furnishes a dark background for her radiant personality. But the same effect is produced, that of throwing into bold relief the sweet, noble, high and pure in our common humanity. And in this case it is a girl of humble station far removed from the shams and shameful passions of the town. The conventional contrast would be to present in another novel some woman of the city as foul as this daughter of Grandet is fair. Not so Balzac. He is too broad an observer of humanity, and as artist too much the master for such cheap effects of chiaroscuro. In “The Duchess De Langeais” e sets his central character amidst the frivolities of fashion and behold, yet another beautiful type of the sex! As Richardson drew his Pamela and Clarissa, so Balzac his Eugenie and the Duchess: and let us not refrain from carrying out the comparison, and add, how feeble seems the Englishman in creation when one thinks of the half a hundred other female figures, good and bad, high and low, distinctly etched upon the memory by the mordant pen of the Frenchman!

Then if we turn to that great tragedy of family, “Pere Goriot,” the change is complete. Now are we plunged into an atmosphere of greed, jealousy, uncleanliness and hate, all steeped in the bourgeois street air of Paris. In this tale of thankless daughters and their piteous old father, all the hideousness possible to the ties of kin is uncovered to our frightened yet fascinated eye. The plot holds us in a vise; to recall Madame Vautrin’s boarding house is to shudder at the sights and smells! Compare it with Dickens’ Mrs. Todgers, and once and for all you have the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic genius.

Suppose, now, the purpose be to reveal not a group or community, but one human soul, a woman’s this time: read “A Woman of Thirty” and see how the novelist,–for the first time–and one is inclined to add, for all time,–has pierced through the integuments and reached the very quick of psychologic exposure. It is often said that he has created the type of young-old, or old-young woman: meaning that before him, novelists overlooked the fact that a woman of this age, maturer in experience and still ripe in physical charms, is really of intense social attraction, richly worth study. But this is because Balzac knows that all souls are interesting, if only we go beneath the surface. The only work of modern fiction which seems to me so nakedly to lay open the recesses of the human spirit as does “A Woman of Thirty” is Meredith’s “The Egoist”; and, of course, master against master, Balzac is easily the superior, since the English author’s wonderful book is so mannered and grotesque. Utter sympathy is shown in these studies of femininity, whether the subject be a harlot, a saint or a patrician of the Grande Monde.

If the quest be for the handling of mankind en masse, with big effects of dark and light: broad brush-work on a canvas suited to heroical, even epic, themes,–a sort of fiction the later Zola was to excel in–Balzac will not fail us. His work here is as noteworthy as it is in the fine detailed manner of his most realistical modern studies–or in the searching analysis of the human spirit. “The Chouans” may stand for this class: it has all the fire, the color, the elan that emanate from the army and the call of country. We have flashed before us one of those reactionary movements, after the French Revolution, which take on a magic romanticism because they culminate in the name of Napoleon. While one reads, one thinks war, breathes war–it is the only life for the moment. Just ahead a step, one feels, is the “imminent deadly breach”; the social or business or Bohemian doings of later Paris are as if they did not exist. And this particular novel will achieve such a result with the reader, even although it is not by any means one of Balzac’s supreme achievements, being in truth, a little aside from his metier, since it is historical and suggests in spots the manner of Scott. But this power of envisaging war (which will be farther realized if such slighter works as “A Dark Affair” and “An Episode Under the Terror” be also perused), is only a single manifestation of a general gift. Suppose there is desired a picture very common in our present civilization–most common it may be in America,–that of the country boy going up to the city to become–what? Perhaps a captain of commerce, or a leader of fashion: perhaps a great writer or artist; or a politician who shall rule the capitol. It is a venture packed full of realistic experience but equally full of romance, drama, poetry–of an epic suggestiveness. In two such volumes as “A Great Provincial Man in Paris” and “Lost Illusions,” all this, with its dire chances of evil as well as its roseate promise of success, has been wonderfully expressed. So cogently modern a motive had never been so used before.

Sometimes in a brace of books Balzac shows us the front and back-side of some certain section of life: as in “Cousin Pons” and “Cousine Bette.”–The corner of Paris where artists, courtesans and poor students most do congregate, where Art capitalized is a sacred word, and the odd estrays of humanity, picturesque, humorous, and tragic, display all the chances of mankind,–this he paints so that we do not so much look on as move amidst the throng. In the first-named novel, assuredly a very great book, the figure of the quaint old connoisseur is one of fiction’s superlative successes: to know him is to love him in all his weakness. In the second book, Bette is a female vampire and the story around her as terrible as the other is heart-warming and sweet. And you know that both are true, true as they would not have been apart: “helpless each without the other.”

Again, how much of the gambling activities of modern business are emblazoned in another of the acknowledged masterpieces, “Caesar Birotteau.” We can see in it the prototype of much that comes later in French fiction: Daudet’s “Risler Aine et Froment Jeune” and Zola’s “L’Argent,” to name but two. Such a story sums up the practical, material side of a reign or an epoch.

Nor should it be forgotten that this close student of human nature, whose work appears so often severely mundane, and most strong when its roots go down into the earth, sometimes seeming to prefer the rankness and slime of human growths,–can on occasion soar into the empyrean, into the mystic region of dreams and ideals and all manner of subtle imaginings. Witness such fiction as “The Magic Skin,” “Seraphita,” and “The Quest of the Absolute.” It is hard to believe that the author of such creations is he of “Pere Goriot” or “Cousine Bette.” But it is Balzac’s wisdom to see that such pictures are quite as truly part of the Human Comedy: because they represent man giving play to his soul–exercising his highest faculties. Nor does the realistic novelist in such efforts have the air of one who has left his true business in order to disport himself for once in an alien element. On the contrary, he seems absolutely at home: for the time, this is his only affair, his natural interest.

And so with illustrations practically inexhaustible, which the long list prodigally offers. But the scope and variety have been already suggested; the best rule with Balzac is, each one to his taste, always remembering that in a writer so catholic, there is a peculiar advantage in an extended study. Nor can from twenty to twenty-five of his best books be read without a growing conviction that here is a man of genius who has done a unique thing.

It is usual to refer to Balzac as the first great realist of the French, indeed, of modern fiction. Strictly, he is not the first in France, as we have seen, since Beyle preceded him; nor in modern fiction, for Jane Austen, so admirably an artist of verity, came a generation before. But, as always when a compelling literary force appears, Balzac without any question dominates in the first half of the nineteenth century: more than this, he sets the mold of the type which marks the second half. In fact, the modern Novel means Balzac’s recipe. English fiction, along with that of Europe, shares this influence. We shall see in dealing with Dickens how definitely the English writer adopted the Balzac method as suited to the era and sympathetic to Dickens’ own nature.

As to the accuracy with which he gave a representation of contemporary life–thus deserving the name realist–considerable may be said in the way of qualification. Much of it applies with similar force to Zola, later to be hailed as a king among modern realists in the naturalistic extreme to which he pushed the movement. Balzac, through his remarkable instinct for detail and particularity, did introduce into nineteenth century fiction an effect of greater truth in the depiction of life. Nobody perhaps had–nobody has since–presented mis-en-scene as did he. He builds up an impression by hundreds of strokes, each seemingly insignificant, but adding to a totality that becomes impressive. Moreover, again and again in his psychologic analysis there are home-thrusts which bring the blood to the face of any honest person. His detail is thus quite as much subjective as external. It were a great mistake to regard Balzac as merely a writer who photographed things outside in the world; he is intensely interested in the things within–and if objectivity meant realism exclusively, he would be no realist at all.

But farther than this; with all his care for minute touches and his broad and painstaking observation, it is not so much life, after all, as a vision of life which he gives. This contradicts what was said early in the present chapter: but the two statements stand for the change likely to come to any student of Balzac: his objective personality at last resolves itself into a vividly personal interpretation. His breadth blinds one for a while, that is all. Hence Balzac may be called an incurable romantic, an impressionist, as much as realist. Like all first-class art, his gives us the seeming-true for our better instruction. He said in the Preface to “Pere Goriot” that the novelist should not only depict the world as it is, but “a possibly better world.” He has done so. The most untrue thing in a novel may be the fact lifted over unchanged from life? Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but great fiction is truer than truth. Balzac understood this, remembered it in his heart. He is too big as man and artist to be confined within the narrow realistic formula. While, as we have seen, he does not take sides on moral issues, nor allow himself to be a special pleader for this or that view, his work strikes a moral balance in that it shows universal humanity–not humanity tranced in metaphysics, or pathologic in analysis, or enmeshed in sensualism. In this sense, Balzac is a great realist. There is no danger of any novelist–any painter of life–doing harm, if he but gives us the whole. It is the story-teller who rolls some prurient morsel under his tongue who has the taint in him: he who, to sell his books, panders to the degraded instincts of his audience. Had Balzac been asked point-blank what he deemed the moral duty of the novelist, he would probably have disclaimed any other responsibility than that of doing good work, of representing things as they are. But this matters not, if only a writer’s nature be large and vigorous enough to report of humanity in a trustworthy way. Balzac was much too well endowed in mind and soul and had touched life far too widely, not to look forth upon it with full comprehension of its spiritual meaning.

In spite, too, of his alleged realism, he believed that the duty of the social historian was more than to give a statement of present conditions–the social documents of the moment,–variable as they might be for purposes of deduction. He insisted that the coming,–perhaps seemingly impossible things, should be prophesied;–those future ameliorations, whether individual or collective, which keep hope alive in the human breast. Let me again quote those words, extraordinary as coming from the man who is called arch-realist of his day: “The novelist should depict the world not alone as it is, but a possibly better world.” In the very novel where he said it (“Pere Goriot”) he may seem to have violated the principle: but taking his fiction in its whole extent, he has acted upon it, the pronunciamento exemplifies his practice.

Balzac’s work has a Shaksperian universality, because it is so distinctly French,–a familiar paradox in literature. He was French in his feeling for the social unit, in his keen receptivity to ideas, in his belief in Church and State as the social organisms through which man could best work out his salvation. We find him teaching that humanity, in terms of Gallic temperament, and in time limits between the Revolution and the Second Republic, is on the whole best served by living under a constitutional monarchy and in vital touch with Mother Church,–that form of religion which is a racial inheritance from the Past. In a sense, then, he was a man with the limitations of his place and time, as, in truth, was Shakspere. But the study of literature instructs us that it is exactly those who most vitally grasp and voice their own land and period, who are apt to give a comprehensive view of humanity at large; to present man sub specie aeternitatis. This is so because, thoroughly to present any particular part of mankind, is to portray all mankind. It is all tarred by the same stick, after all. It is only in the superficials that unlikenesses lie.

Balzac was intensely modern. Had he lived today, he might have been foremost in championing the separation of Church and State and looked on serenely at the sequestration of the religious houses. But writing his main fiction from 1830 to 1850, his attitude was an enlightened one, that of a thoughtful patriot.

His influence upon nineteenth century English fiction was both direct and indirect. It was direct in its effect upon several of the major novelists, as will be noted in studying them; the indirect influence is perhaps still more important, because it was so all-pervasive, like an emanation that expressed the Time. It became impossible, after Balzac had lived and wrought, for any artist who took his art seriously to write fiction as if the great Frenchman had not come first. He set his seal upon that form of literature, as Ibsen, a generation later, was to set his seal upon the drama, revolutionizing its technique. To the student therefore he is a factor of potent power in explaining the modern fictional development. Nor should he be a negligible quantity to the cultivated reader seeking to come genially into acquaintance with the best that European letters has accomplished. While upon the lover of the Novel as a form of literature–which means the mass of all readers to-day–Balzac cannot fail to exercise a personal fascination.–Life widens before us at his touch, and that glamour which is the imperishable gift of great art, returns again as one turns the pages of the little library of yellow books which contain the Human Comedy.

Balzac died in 1850, when in the prime of his powers. Seven years later was published the “Madame Bovary” of Flaubert, one of the most remarkable novels of the nineteenth century and the most unrelenting depiction of the devolution of a woman’s soul in all fiction: certainly it deserved that description up to the hour of its appearance, if not now, when so much has been done in the realm of female pathology. Flaubert is the most noteworthy intermediate figure between Balzac and Zola. He seems personally of our own day, for, living to be an old man, he was friend and fellow-worker with the brothers Goncourt (whom we associate with Zola) and extended a fatherly hand to the young Maupassant at the beginning of the latter’s career,–so brilliant, brief, tragic. The influence of this one novel (overlooking that of “Salambo,” in its way also of influence in the modern growth) has been especially great upon a kind of fiction most characteristic of the present generation: in which, in fact, it has assumed a “bad preeminence.” I mean the Novel of sexual relations in their irregular aspects. The stormy artist of the Goncourt dinners has much to answer for, if we regard him only as the creator of such a creature as Madame Bovary. Many later books were to surpass this in license, in coarseness, or in the effect of evoking a libidinous taste; but none in its unrelenting gloom, the cold detachment of the artist-scientist obsessed with the idea of truthfully reflecting certain sinister facets of the many-faced gem called life! It is hardly too much to say, in the light of the facts, that “Madame Bovary” was epochal. It paved the way for Zola. It justified a new aim for the modern fiction of so-called unflinching realism. The saddest thing about the book is its lack of pity, of love. Emma Bovary is a weak woman, not a bad woman; she goes downhill through the force of circumstances coupled with a want of backbone. And she is not responsible for her flabby moral muscles. Behind the story is an absolutely fatalistic philosophy; given a certain environment, any woman (especially if assisted a bit by her ancestors) will go to hell,–such seems the lesson. Now there is nothing just like this in Balzac, We hear in it a new note, the latter-day note of quiescence, and despair. And if we compare Flaubert’s indifference to his heroine’s fate with the tenderness of Dumas fils, or of Daudet, or the English Reade and Dickens–we shall realize that we have here a mixture of a personal and a coming general interpretation: Flaubert having by nature a kind of aloof determinism, yet feeling, like the first puffs of a cold chilling wind, the oncoming of an age of Doubt.

III.

These three French writers then, Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert, molded the Novel before 1860 into such a shape as to make it plastic to the hand of Zola a decade later. Zola’s influence upon our present generation of English fiction has been great, as it has upon all novel-making since 1870. Before explaining this further, it will be best to return to the study of the mid-century English novelists who were too early to be affected by him to any perceptible degree.

CHAPTER VIII

DICKENS

By the year 1850, in England, the so-called Novel of realism had conquered. Scott in an earlier generation had by his wonderful gift made the romance fashionable. But, as we said, it was the romance with a difference: the romance with its feet firmly planted on mother-earth, not ballooning in cloudland; the romance depicting men and women of the past but yet men and women, not creatures existing only in the fancy of the romance-maker. In short, Scott, romancer though he was, helped modern realism along, because he handled his material more truthfully than it had been handled before. And his great contemporary, Jane Austen, with her strict adherence to the present and to her own locale, threw all her influence in the same direction, justifying Mr. Howell’s assertion that she leads all English novelists in that same truthful handling.

Moreover, that occult but imperative thing, the spirit of the Time, was on the side of Realism: and all bend to its dictation. Then, in the mid-century, Dickens and Thackeray, with George Eliot a little later on their heels, and Trollope too, came to give a deeper set to the current which was to flow in similar channels for the remainder of the period. In brief, this is the story, whatever modifications of the main current are to be noted: the work of Bulwer and Disraeli, of Reade, Kingsley and Collins.

A decade before Thackeray got a general hearing Dickens had fame and mighty influence. It was in the eighteen thirties that the self-made son of an impecunious navy clerk, who did not live in vain since he sat for a portrait of Micawber and the father of the Marshalsea, turned from journalism to that higher reporting which means the fiction of manners and humors. All the gods had prepared him for his destiny. Sympathy he had for the poor, the oppressed, the physically and morally unfit, for he had suffered in his own person, or in his imagination, for them all. His gift of observation had been sharpened in the grim school of necessity: he had learned to write by writing under the pressure of newspaper needs. And he had in his blood, while still hardly more than a lad, a feeling for idiomatic English which, so far as it was not a boon straight from heaven, had been fostered when the very young Charles had battened, as we saw, upon the eighteenth century worthies.

It is now generally acknowledged that Dickens is not a temporary phenomenon in Victorian letters, but a very solid major fact in the native literature, too large a creative force to be circumscribed by a generation. Looked back upon across the gap of time, he looms up all the more impressively because the years have removed the clutter about the base of the statue. The temporary loss of critical regard (a loss affecting his hold on the general reading public little, if any) has given way to an almost violent critical reaction in his favor. We are widening the esthetic canvas to admit of the test of life, and are coming to realize that, obsessed for a time by the attraction of that lower truth which makes so much of external realities, realism lost sight of the larger demands of art which include selection, adaptation, and that enlargement of effect marking the distinction between art and so-called reality. No critic is now timid about saying a good word for the author of “Pickwick” and “Copperfield.” A few years ago it was otherwise. Present-day critics such as Henley, Lang, and Chesterton have assured the luke-warm that there is room in English literature for both Thackeray and Dickens.

That Dickens began to write fiction as a very young journalist was in some ways in his favor; in other ways, to the detriment of his work. It meant an early start on a career of over thirty years. It meant writing under pressure with the spontaneity and reality which usually result. It also meant the bold grappling with the technique of a great art, learning to make novels by making them. Again, one truly inspired to fiction is lucky to have a novitiate in youth. So far the advantages.

On the other hand, the faults due to inexperience, lack of education, uncertainty of aim, haste and carelessness and other foes of perfection, will probably be in evidence when a writer who has scarcely attained to man’s estate essays fiction. Dickens’ early work has thus the merits and demerits of his personal history. A popular and able parliamentary reporter, with sympathetic knowledge of London and the smaller towns where his duties took him, possessed of a marvelous memory which photographed for him the boyish impressions of places like Chatham and Rochester, he began with sketches of that life interspersed with more fanciful tales which drew upon his imagination and at times passed the melodramatic border-line. When these collected pieces were published under the familiar title “Sketches by Boz,” it is not too much to say that the Dickens of the “Pickwick Papers” (which was to appear next year) was revealed. Certainly, the main qualities of a great master of the Comic were in these pages; so, in truth, was the master of both tears and smiles. But not at full-length: the writer had not yet found his occasion;–the man needs the occasion, even as it awaits the man. And so, hard upon the Boz book, followed, as it were by an accident, the world-famous “Adventures of Mr. Pickwick.” By accident, I say, because the promising young author was asked to furnish the letter-press for a series of comic sporting pictures by the noted artist, Seymour; whereupon–doubtless to the astonishment of all concerned, the pictures became quite secondary to the reading matter and the Wellers soon set all England talking and laughing over their inimitable sayings. Here in a loosely connected series of sketches the main unity of which was the personality of Mr. Pickwick and his club, its method that of the episodic adventure story of “Gil Blas” lineage, its purpose frankly to amuse at all costs, a new creative power in English literature gave the world over three hundred characters in some sixty odd scenes: intensely English, intensely human, and still, after the lapse of three quarters of a century, keenly enjoyable.

In a sense, all Dickens’ qualities are to be found in “The Pickwick Papers,” as they have come to be called for brevity’s sake. But the assertion is misleading, if it be taken to mean that in the fifteen books of fiction which Dickens was to produce, he added nothing, failed to grow in his art or to widen and deepen in his hold upon life. So far is this from the truth, that one who only knows Charles Dickens in this first great book of fun, knows a phase of him, not the whole man: more, hardly knows the novelist at all. He was to become, and to remain, not only a great humorist, but a great novelist as well: and “Pickwick” is not, by definition, a Novel at all. Hence, the next book the following year, “Oliver Twist,” was important as answering the question: Was the brilliant new writer to turn out very novelist, able to invent, handle and lead to due end a tangled representation of social life?

Before replying, one rather important matter may be adverted to, concerning the Dickens introduced to the world by “Pickwick”: his astonishing power in the evocation of human beings, whom we affectionately remember, whose words are treasured, whose fates are followed with a sort of sense of personal responsibility. If the creation of differentiated types of humanity who persist in living in the imagination be the cardinal gift of the fiction writer, then this one is easily the leading novelist of the race. Putting aside for the moment the question of his caricaturing tendency, one fact confronts us, hardly to be explained away: we can close our eyes and see Micawber, Mrs. Gamp, Pegotty, Dick Swiveller, the Artful Dodger, Joe Gargery, Tootles, Captain Cutter, and a hundred more, and their sayings, quaint and dear, are like household companions. And this is true in equal measure of no other story-maker who has used English speech–it may be doubted if it is true to like degree of Shakspere himself.

In the quick-following stories, “Oliver Twist” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” the author passed from episode and comic characterization to what were in some sort Novels: the fiction of organism, growth and climax.

His wealth of character creation was continued and even broadened. But there was more here: an attempt to play the game of Novel-making. It may be granted that when Dickens wrote these early books (as a young man in the twenties), he had not yet mastered many of the difficulties of the art of fiction. There is loose construction in both: the melodrama of “Oliver Twist” blends but imperfectly with the serious and sentimental part of the narrative, which is less attractive. So, too, in “Nickleby,” there is an effect at times of thin ice where the plot is secondary to the episodic scenes and characters by the way. Yet in both Novels there is a story and a good one: we get the spectacle of genius learning its lesson,–experimenting in a form. And as those other early books, differing totally from each other too, “Old Curiosity Shop,” and “Barnaby Rudge,” were produced, and in turn were succeeded by a series of great novels representing the writer’s young prime,–I mean “Martin Chuzzlewit,” “Dombey and Son” and “David Copperfield,”–it was plain that the hand of Dickens was becoming subdued to the element it worked in. Not only was there a good fable, as before, but it was managed with increasing mastery, while the general adumbration of life gained in solidity, truth and rich human quality. In brief, by the time “Copperfield,” the story most often referred to as his best work, was reached, Dickens was an artist. He wrought in that fiction in such a fashion as to make the most of the particular class of Novel it represented: to wit, the first-person autobiographic picture of life. Given its purpose, it could hardly have been better done. It surely bears favorable comparison, for architecture, with Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” a work in the same genre, though lacking the autobiographic method. This is quite aside from its remarkable range of character-portrayal, its humor, pathos and vraisemblance, its feeling for situation, its sonorous eloquence in massed effects.

By the time he had reached mid-career, then, Charles Dickens had made himself a skilled, resourceful story-teller, while his unique qualities of visualization and interpretation had strengthened. This point is worth emphasis, since there are those who contend that “The Pickwick Papers” is his most characteristic performance. Such a judgment is absurd, It overlooks the grave beauty of the picture of Chesney Wold in Bleak House; the splendid harmony of the Yarmouth storm in “Copperfield”; the fine melodrama of the chapter in “Chuzzlewit” where the guilty Jonas takes his haggard life; the magnificent portraiture of the Father of the Marshalsea in “Little Dorrit”: the spiritual exaltation in vivid stage terms of Carton’s death; the exquisite April-day blend of tenderness and fun in limning the young life of a Marchioness, a little Dombey and a tiny Tim. To call Dickens a comic writer and stop there, is to try to pour a river into a pint pot; for a sort of ebullient boy-like spirit of fun, the high jinks of literature, we go to “Pickwick”; for the light and shade of life to “Copperfield”; for the structural excellencies of fiction to later masterpieces like “The Tale of Two Cities” and “Great Expectations.”

Just here a serious objection often brought against Dickens may be considered: his alleged tendency to caricature. Does Dickens make his characters other than what life itself shows, and if so, is he wrong in so doing?

His severest critics assume the second if the first be but granted. Life–meaning the exact reproduction of reality–is their fetish. Now, it must be granted that Dickens does make his creatures talk as their prototypes do not in life. Nobody would for a moment assert that Mrs. Gamp, Pecksniff and Micawber could be literally duplicated from the actual world. But is not Dickens within his rights as artist in so changing the features of life as to increase our pleasure? That is the nub of the whole matter. The artist of fiction should not aim at exact photography, for it is impossible; no fiction-maker since time began has placed on the printed pages half the irrelevance and foolishness or one-fifth the filth which are in life itself. Reasons of art and ethics forbid. The aim, therefore, should rather be at an effect of life through selection and re-shaping. And I believe Dickens is true to this requirement. We hear less now than formerly of his crazy exaggerations: we are beginning to realize that perhaps he saw types that were there, which we would overlook if they were under our very eyes: we feel the wisdom of Chesterton’s remarks that Dickens’ characters will live forever because they never lived at all! We suffered from the myopia of realism. Zola desired above all things to tell the truth by representing humanity as porcine, since he saw it that way: he failed in his own purpose, because decency checked him: his art is not photographic (according to his proud boast) but has an almost Japanese convention of restraint in its suppression of facts. Had Sarah Gamp been allowed by Dickens to speak as she would speak in life, she would have been unspeakably repugnant, never cherished as a permanently laughable, even lovable figure of fiction. Dickens was a master of omissions as well as of those enlargments which made him carry over the foot lights. Mrs. Gamp is a monumental study of the coarse woman rogue: her creator makes us hate the sin and tolerate the sinner. Nor is that other masterly portrait of the woman rascal–Thackeray’s Becky Sharp–an example of strict photography; she is great in seeming true, but she is not life.

So much, then, for the charge of caricature: it is all a matter of degree. It all depends upon the definition of art, and upon the effect made upon the world by the characters themselves. If they live in loving memory, they must, in the large sense, be true. Thus we come back to the previous statement: Dickens’ people live–are known by their words and in their ways all over the civilized world. No collection of mere grotesques could ever bring this to pass. Prick any typical creation of Dickens and it runs blood, not sawdust. And just in proportion as we travel, observe broadly and form the habit of a more penetrating and sympathetic study of mankind, shall we believe in these emanations of genius. Occasionally, under the urge and surplusage of his comic force, he went too far and made a Quilp: but the vast majority even of his drolls are as credible as they are dear.

That he showed inequality as he wrought at the many books which filled the years between “Pickwick” and the unfinished “Mystery of Edwin Drood,” may also be granted. Also may it be confessed that within the bounds of one book there are the extremes of good and bad. It is peculiar to Dickens that often in the very novel we perchance feel called upon to condemn most, occurs a scene or character as memorably great as anything he left the world. Thus, we may regard “Old Curiosity Shop,” once so beloved, as a failure when viewed as a whole; and yet find Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness at their immortal game as unforgettable as Mrs. Battle engaged in the same pleasant employment. Nor because other parts of “Little Dorrit” seem thin and artificial, would we forego the description of the debtor’s prison. And our belief that the presentation of the labor-capital problem in “Hard Times” is hasty and shallow, does not prevent a recognition of the opening sketch of the circus troop as displaying its author at his happiest of humorous observation. There are thus always redeeming things in the stories of this most unequal man of genius. Seven books there are, novels in form, which are indubitable masterpieces: “Martin Chuzzlewit,” “Dombey and Son,” “David Copperfield,” “Bleak House,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Great Expectations” and “Our Mutual Friend.” These, were all the others withdrawn, would give ample evidence of creative power: they have the largeness, variety and inventive verve which only are to be found in the major novelists. Has indeed the same number of equal weight and quality been given forth by any other English writer?

Another proof that the power of Dickens was not dependent exclusively upon the comic, is his production of “A Tale of Two Cities.” It is sometimes referred to as uncharacteristic because it lacks almost entirely his usual gallery of comics: but it is triumphantly a success in a different field. The author says he wished for the nonce to make a straight adventure tale with characters secondary. He did it in a manner which has always made the romance a favorite, and compels us to include this dramatic study of the French Revolution among the choicest of his creations. Its period and scene have never–save by Carlyle–been so brilliantly illuminated. Dickens was brooding on this story at a time when, wretchedly unhappy, he was approaching the crisis of a separation from his wife: the fact may help to explain its failure to draw on that seemingly inexhaustible fountain of bubbling fun so familiar in his work. But even subtract humor and Dickens exhibits the master-hand in a fiction markedly of another than his wonted kind. This Novel–or romance, as it should properly be called–reminds us of a quality in Dickens which has been spoken of in the way of derogation: his theatrical tendency. When one declares an author to be dramatic, a compliment is intended. But when he is called theatric, censure is implied. Dickens, always possessed of a strong sense of the dramatic and using it to immense advantage, now and again goes further and becomes theatric: that is, he suggests the manipulating of effects with artifice and the intention of providing sensational and scenic results at the expense of proportion and truth. A word on this is advisable.

Those familiar with the man and his works are aware how close he always stood to the playhouse and its product. He loved it from early youth, all but went on the stage professionally, knew its people as have few of the writing craft, was a fine amateur actor himself, wrote for the stage, helped to dramatize his novels and gave delightful studies of theatrical life in his books. Shall we ever forget Mr. Crummles and his family? He had an instinctive feeling for what was scenic and effective in the stage sense. When he appeared as a reader of his own works, he was an impersonator; and noticeably careful to have the stage accessories exactly right. And when all this, natural and acquired, was applied to fiction, it could not but be of influence. As a result, Dickens sometimes forced the note, favored the lurid, exaggerated his comic effects. To put it in another way, this theater manner of his now and then injured the literature he made. But that is only one side of the matter: it also helped him greatly and where he went too far, he was simply abusing a precious gift. To speak of Dickens’ violent theatricality as if it expressed his whole being, is like describing the wart on Cromwell’s face as if it were his set of features. Remove from Dickens his dramatic power, and the memorable master would be no more: he would vanish into dim air. We may be thankful–in view of what it produced–that he possessed even in excess this sense of the scenic value of character and situation: it is not a disqualification but a virtue, and not Dickens alone but Dumas, Hugo and Scott were great largely because of it.

In the praise naturally enough bestowed upon a great autobiographical Novel like “David Copperfield,” the fine art of a late work like “Great Expectations” has been overlooked or at least minimized. If we are to consider skilful construction along with the other desirable qualities of the novelist, this noble work has hardly had justice done it: moreover, everything considered,–story value, construction, characters, atmosphere, adequacy of style, climactic interest, and impressive lesson, I should name “Great Expectations,” published when the author was fifty, as his most perfect book, if not the greatest of Charles Dickens’ novels. The opinion is unconventional: but as Dickens is studied more as artist progressively skilful in his craft, I cannot but believe this particular story will receive increasing recognition. In the matter of sheer manipulation of material, it is much superior to the book that followed it two years later, the last complete novel: “Our Mutual Friend.” It is rather curious that this story, which was in his day and has steadily remained a favorite with readers, has with equal persistency been severely handled by the critics. What has insured its popularity? Probably its vigor and variety of characterization, its melodramatic tinge, the teeming world of dramatic contrasts it opens, its bait to our sense of mystery. It has a power very typical of the author and one of the reasons for Dickens’ hold upon his audience. It is a power also exhibited markedly in such other fictions as “Dombey and Son,” “Martin Chuzzlewit” and “Bleak House.” I refer to the impression conveyed by such stories that life is a vast, tumultuous, vari-colored play of counter-motives and counter-characters, full of chance, surprise, change and bitter sweet: a thing of mystery, terror, pity and joy. It has its masks of respectability, its frauds of place, its beauty blossoming in the mud, its high and low of luck, its infinite possibilities betwixt heaven and hell. The effect of this upon the sensitive reader is to enlarge his sympathetic feeling for humanity: life becomes a big, awful, dear phantasmagoria in such hands. It seems not like a flat surface, but a thing of length, breadth, height and depth, which it has been a privilege to enter. Dickens’ fine gift–aside from that of character creation–is found in this ability to convey an impression of puissant life. He himself had this feeling and he got it into his books: he had, in a happier sense, the joy of life of Ibsen, the life force of Nietzsche. From only a few of the world’s great writers does one receive this sense of life, the many-sided spectacle; Cervantes, Hugo, Tolstoy, Sienkiewicz, it is men like they that do this for us.

Another side of Dickens’ literary activity is shown in his Christmas stories, which it may be truly said are as well beloved as anything he gave the world in the Novel form. This is assuredly so of the “Christmas Carol,” “The Chimes” and “The Cricket on the Hearth.” This last is on a par with the other two in view of its double life in a book and on the boards of the theater. The fragrance of Home, of the homely kindness and tenderness of the human heart, is in them, especially in the Carol, which is the best tale of its kind in the tongue and likely to remain so. It permanently altered the feeling of the race for Christmas. Irving preceded him in the use of the Christmas motive, but Dickens made it forever his own. By a master’s magic evocation, the great festival shines brighter, beckons more lovingly than it did of old. Thackeray felt this when he declared that such a story was “a public benefit.” Such literature lies aside from our main pursuit, that of the Novel, but is mentioned because it is the best example possible, the most direct, simple expression of that essential kindness, that practical Christianity which is at the bottom of Dickens’ influence. It is bonhomie and something more. It is not Dickens the reformer, as we get him when he satirizes Dotheboys hall, or the Circumlocution Office or the Chancery Court: but Dickens as Mr. Greatheart, one with all that is good, tender, sweet and true. Tiny Tim’s thousand-times quoted saying is the quintessence, the motto for it all and the writer speaks in and through the lad when he says: “God bless us, every one.” When an author gets that honest unction into his work, and also has the gift of observation and can report what he sees, he is likely to contribute to the literature of his land. With a sneer of the cultivated intellect, we may call it elementary: but to the heart, such a view of life is royally right.

This thought of Dickens’ moral obligation in his work and his instinctive attitude towards his audience, leads to one more point: a main reason for this Victorian novelist’s strong hold on the affections of mankind is to be found in the warm personal relation he establishes with the reader. The relationship implies obligation on the part of the author, a vital bond between the two, a recognition of a steady, not a chance, association. There goes with it, too, an assumption that the author believes in and cares much for his characters, and asks the reader for the same faith. This personal relation of author to reader and of both to the imagined characters, has gone out of fashion in fiction-making: in this respect, Dickens (and most of his contemporaries) seem now old-fashioned. The present realist creed would keep the novelist away and out of sight both of his fictive creations and his audience; it being his business to pull the strings to make his puppets dance–up to heaven or down to hell, whatever does it matter to the scientist-novelist? Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection” is as a subject much more disagreeable than Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”; but it is beautiful where the other is horrible, because it palpitates with a Christ-like sympathy for an erring woman, while the French author cares not a button whether his character is lost or not. The healthy-minded public (which can be trusted in heart, if not in head) will instinctively choose that treatment of life in a piece of fiction which shows the author kindly cooperative with fate and brotherly in his position towards his host of readers. That is the reason Dickens holds his own and is extremely likely to gain in the future, while spectacular reputations based on all the virtues save love, continue to die the death. What M. Anatole France once said of Zola, applies to the whole school of the aloof and unloving: “There is in man an infinite need of loving which renders him divine. M. Zola does not know it…. The holiness of tears is at the bottom of all religions. Misfortune would suffice to render man august to man. M. Zola does not know it.”

Charles Dickens does know these truths and they get into his work and that work, therefore, gets not so much into the minds as into the souls of his fellow-man. When we recite the sayings which identify his classic creations: when we express ourselves in a Pickwickian sense, wait for something to turn up with Mr. Micawber, drop into poetry with Silas Wegg, move on with little Joe, feel ‘umble after the manner of Uriah Heap, are willin’ with Barkis, make a note of, in company with Captain Cuttle, or conclude with Mr. Weller, Senior, that it is the part of wisdom to beware of “widders,” we may observe that what binds us to this motley crowd of creatures is not their grotesquerie but their common humanity, their likeness to ourselves, the mighty flood-tide of tolerant human sympathy on which they are floated into the safe haven of our hearts. With delightful understanding, Charles Dudley Warner writes: “After all, there is something about a boy I like.” Dickens, using the phrasing for a wider application, might have said: “After all, there is something about men and women I like!” It was thus no accident that he elected to write of the lower middle classes; choosing to depict the misery of the poor, their unfair treatment in institutions; to depict also the unease of criminals, the crushed state of all underlings–whether the child in education or that grown-up evil child, the malefactor in prison. He was a spokesman of the people, a democratic pleader for justice and sympathy. He drew the proletariat preferably, not because he was a proletariat but because he was a brother-man and the fact had been overlooked. He drew thousands of these suppressed humans, and they were of varied types and fortunes: but he loved them as though they were one, and made the world love them too: and love their maker. The deep significance of Dickens, perhaps his deepest, is in the social note that swells loud and insistent through his fiction. He was a pioneer in the democratic sympathy which was to become so marked feature in the Novel in the late nineteenth century: and which, as we have already seen, is from the first a distinctive trait of the modern fiction, one of the explanations of its existence.

CHAPTER IX

THACKERAY

The habit of those who appraise the relative worth of Dickens and Thackeray to fall into hostile camps, swearing by one, and at the other, has its amusing side but is to be deprecated as irrational. Why should it be necessary to miss appreciation of the creator of “Vanity Fair” because one happens to like “David Copperfield”? Surely, our literary tastes or standards should be broad enough to admit into pleasurable companionship both those great early Victorian novelists.

Yet, on second thought, there would appear to be some reason for the fact that ardent lovers of Thackeray are rarely devotees of the mighty Charles–or vice versa. There is something mutually exclusive in the attitude of the two, their different interpretation of life. Unlike in birth, environment, education and all that is summed up in the magic word personality, their reaction to life, as a scientist would say, was so opposite that a reader naturally drawn to one, is quite apt to be repelled by (or at least, cold to) the other. If you make a wide canvass among booklovers, it will be found that this is just what happens. Rarely does a stanch supporter of Dickens show a more than Laodicean temper towards Thackeray; and for rabid Thackerians, Dickens too often spells disgust. It is a rare and enjoyable experience to meet with a mind so catholic as to welcome both. The backbone of the trouble is personal, in the natures of the two authors. But I think it is worth while to say that part of the explanation may be found in the fact that Thackeray began fiction ten years later than his rival and was in a deeper sense than was Dickens a voice of the later century. This means much, because with each decade between 1830 and 1860, English thought was moving fast toward that scientific faith, that disillusionment and that spirit of grim truth which culminated in the work of the final quarter of the century. Thackeray was impelled more than was Dickens by the spirit of the times to speak the truth in his delineations of contemporary mankind: and this operated to make him a satirist, at times a savage one. The modern thing in Dickens–and he had it–was the humanitarian sympathy for the submerged tenth; the modern thing in Thackeray, however, was his fearlessness in uncovering the conventional shams of polite society. The idols that Dickens smashed (and never was a bolder iconoclast) were to be seen of all men: but Thackeray’s were less tangible, more subtle, part and parcel of his own class. In this sense, and I believe because he began his major novel-writing about 1850, whereas the other began fifteen years before, Thackeray is more modern, more of our own time, than his great co-mate in fiction. When we consider the question of their respective interpretations of Life it is but fair to bear in mind this historical consideration, although it would be an error to make too much of it. Of course, in judging Thackeray and trying to give him a place in English fiction, he must stand or fall, like any other writer, by two things: his art, and his message. Was the first fine, the other sane and valuable–those are the twin tests.

A somewhat significant fact of their literary history may be mentioned, before an attempt is made to appreciate Thackeray’s novels. For some years after Dickens’ death, which, it will be remembered, occurred six years after Thackeray’s, the latter gained in critical recognition while Dickens slowly lost. There can be little question of this. Lionized and lauded as was the man of Gadshill, promptly admitted to Westminster Abbey, it came to pass in time that, in a course on modern English literature offered at an old and famous New England college, his name was not deemed worthy of even a reference. Some critics of repute have scarce been able to take Dickens seriously: for those who have steadily had the temerity to care for him, their patronage has been vocal. This marks an astonishing shift of opinion from that current in 1870. Thackeray, gaining in proportion, has been hailed as an exquisite artist, one of the few truly great and permanent English figures not only of fiction but of letters. But in the most recent years, again a change has come: the pendulum has swung back, as it always does when an excessive movement carries it too far beyond the plumb line. Dickens has found valiant, critical defenders; he has risen fast in thoughtful so well as popular estimation (although with the public he has scarcely fluctuated in favor) until he now enjoys a sort of resurrection of popularity. What is the cause of this to-and-fro of judgment? The main explanation is to be found in the changing literary ideals from 1850 to 1900. When Dickens was active, literature, broadly speaking, was estimated not exclusively as art, but as human product, an influence in the world. With the coming of the new canon, which it is convenient to dub by the catch-phrase, Art for Art’s Sake, a man’s production began to be tested more definitely by the technique he possessed, the skilled way in which he performed his task. Did he play the game well? That was the first question. Often it was the first and last. If he did, his subject-matter, and his particular vision of Life, were pretty much his own affair. And this modern touchstone, applied to the writings of our two authors, favored Thackeray. Simple, old-fashioned readers inclined to give Dickens the preference over him because the former’s interpretation of humanity was, they averred, kindlier and more wholesome. Thackeray was cynical, said they; Dickens humanitarian; but the later critical mood rebounded from Dickens, since he preached, was frankly didactic, insisted on his mission of doing good–and so failed in his art. Now, however, that the l’art pour art shibboleth has been sadly overworked and is felt to be passing or obsolete, the world critical is reverting to that broader view which demands that the maker of literature shall be both man and artist: as a result, Dickens gains in proportion. This explanation makes it likely that, looking to the future, while Thackeray may not lose, Dickens is sure to be more and more appreciated. A return to a saner and truer criterion will be general and the confines of a too narrow estheticism be understood: or, better yet, the esthetic will be so defined as to admit of wider application. The Gissings and Chestertons of the time to come will insist even more strenuously than those of ours that while we may have improved upon Dickens’ technique–and every schoolboy can tinker his faults–we shall do exceedingly well if we duplicate his genius once in a generation. And they will add that Thackeray, another man of genius, had also his malaises of art, was likewise a man with the mortal failings implied in the word. For it cannot now be denied that just as Dickens’ faults have been exaggerated, Thackeray’s have been overlooked.

Thackeray might lose sadly in the years to come could it be demonstrated that, as some would have it, he deserved the title of cynic. Here is the most mooted point in Thackeray appreciation: it interests thousands where the nice questions concerning the novelist’s art claim the attention of students alone. What can be said with regard to it? It will help just here to think of the man behind the work. No sensible human being, it would appear, can become aware of the life and personality of Thackeray without concluding that he was an essentially kind-hearted, even soft-hearted man. He was keenly sensitive to praise and blame, most affectionate and constant with his friends, generous and impulsive in his instincts, loving in his family, simple and humble in his spiritual nature, however questioning in his intellect. That is a fair summary of Thackeray as revealed in his daily walk–in his letters, acts and thoughts. Nothing could be sweeter and more kindly than the mass of his writings in this regard, pace “The Book of Snobs”–even in such a mood the satire is for the most part unbitter. The reminiscential essays continually strike a tender note that vibrates with human feeling and such memorials as the paper he wrote on the deaths of Irving and Macaulay represent a frequent vein. Thackeray’s friends are almost a unit in this testimony: Edward Fitzgerald, indeed–“dear old Fitz,” as Tennyson loved to call him–declares in a letter to somebody that he hears Thackeray is spoiled: meaning that his social success was too much for him. It is true that after the fame of “Vanity Fair,” its author was a habitue of the best drawing-rooms, much sought after, and enjoying it hugely. But to read his letter to Mrs. Brookfield after the return home from such frivolities is to feel that the real man is untouched. Why Thackeray, with such a nature, developed a satirical bent and became a critic of the foibles of fashion and later of the social faults of humanity, is not so easy perhaps to say–unless we beg the question by declaring it to be his nature. When he began his major fiction at the age of thirty-seven he had seen much more of the seamy side of existence than had Dickens when he set up for author. Thackeray had lost a fortune, traveled, played Bohemian, tried various employments, failed in a business venture–in short, was an experienced man of the world with eyes wide open to what is light, mean, shifty and vague in the sublunary show. “The Book of Snobs” is the typical early document expressing the subacidulous tendency of his power: “Vanity Fair” is the full-length statement of it in maturity. Yet judging his life by and large (in contrast with his work) up to the day of his sudden death, putting in evidence all the testimony from many sources, it may be asserted with considerable confidence that William Makepeace Thackeray, whatever we find him to be in his works, gave the general impression personally of being a genial, kind and thoroughly sound-hearted man. We may, therefore, look at the work itself, to extract from it such evidence as it offers, remembering that, when all is said, the deepest part of a man, his true quality, is always to be discovered in his writings.

First a word on the books secondary to the four great novels. It is necessary at the start in studying him to realize that Thackeray for years before he wrote novels was an essayist, who, when he came to make fiction introduced into it the essay touch and point of view. The essay manner makes his larger fiction delightful, is one of its chief charms and characteristics. And contrariwise, the looseness of construction, the lack of careful architecture in Thackeray’s stories, look to the same fact.

It can not justly be said of these earlier and minor writings that, taken as a whole, they reveal a cynic. They contain many thrusts at the foolishness and knavery of society, especially that genteel portion of it with which the writer, by birth, education and experience, was familiar. When Thackeray, in the thirties, turned to newspaper writing, he did so for practical reasons: he needed money, and he used such talents as were his as a writer, knowing that the chances were better than in art, which he had before pursued. It was natural that he should have turned to account his social experiences, which gave him a power not possessed by the run of literary hacks, and which had been to some extent disillusioning, but had by no means soured him. Broadly viewed, the tone of these first writings was genial, the light and shade of human nature–in its average, as it is seen in the world–was properly represented. In fact, often, as in “The Great Hoggarty Diamond,” the style is almost that of burlesque, at moments, of horse-play: and there are too touches of beautiful young-man pathos. Such a work is anything rather than tart or worldly. There are scenes in that enjoyable story that read more like Dickens than the Thackeray of “Vanity Fair.” The same remark applies, though in a different way, to the “Yellowplush Papers.” An early work like “Barry Lyndon,” unique among the productions of the young writer, expresses the deeper aspect of his tendency to depict the unpleasant with satiric force, to make clear-cut pictures of rascals, male and female. Yet in this historical study, the eighteenth century setting relieves the effect and one does not feel that the author is speaking with that direct earnestness one encounters in “Pendennis” and “The Newcomes.” The many essays, of which the “Roundabout Papers” are a type, exhibit almost exclusively the sunnier and more attractive side of Thackeray’s genius. Here and there, in the minor fiction of this experimental period, there are premonitions of he more drastic treatment of later years: but the dominant mood is quite other. One who read the essays alone, with no knowledge of the fiction, would be astonished at a charge of cynicism brought against the author.

And so we come to the major fiction: “Vanity Fair,” “Pendennis,” “The Newcomes,” and “Esmond.” Of “The Adventures of Philip” a later word may be said. “The Virginians” is a comparatively unimportant pendant to that great historical picture, “Henry Esmond.” The quartet practically composes the fundamental contribution of Thackeray to the world of fiction, containing as it does all his characteristic traits. Some of them have been pointed out, time out of mind: others, often claimed, are either wanting or their virtue has been much exaggerated.

Of the merits incontestable, first and foremost may be mentioned the color and motion of Life which spread like an atmosphere over this fiction. By his inimitable idiom, his knowledge of the polite world, and his equal knowledge of the average human being irrespective of class or condition, Thackeray was able to make his chronicle appear the very truth. Moreover, for a second great merit, he was able, quite without meretricious appeals, to make that truth interesting. You follow the fortunes of the folk in a typical Thackeray novel as you would follow a similar group in actual life. They interest because they are real–or seem to be, which, for the purposes of art, is the same thing. To read is not so much to look from an outside place at a fictive representation of existence as to be participant in such a piece of life–to feel as if you were living the story. Only masters accomplish this, and it is, it may be added, the specialty of modern masters.

For another shining merit: much of wisdom assimilated by the author in the course of his days is given forth with pungent power and in piquant garb in the pages of these books: the reader relishes the happy statements of an experience profounder than his own, yet tallying in essentials: Thackeray’s remarks seem to gather up into final shape the scattered oracles of the years. Gratitude goes out to an author who can thus condense and refine one’s own inarticulate conclusions. The mental palate is tickled by this, while the taste is titillated by the grace and fitness of the style.

Yet in connection with this quality is a habit which already makes Thackeray seem of an older time–a trifle archaic in technique. I refer to the intrusion of the author into the story in first-personal comment and criticism. This is tabooed by the present-day realist canons. It weakens the illusion, say the artists of our own day, this entrance of an actual personality upon the stage of the imagined scene. Thackeray is guilty of this lovable sin to a greater degree than is Dickens, and it may be added here that, while the latter has so often been called preacher in contrast with Thackeray the artist, as a matter of fact, Thackeray moralizes in the fashion described fully as much: the difference being that he does it with lighter touch and with less strenuosity and obvious seriousness: is more consistently amusing in the act of instruction.

Thackeray again has less story to tell than his greatest contemporary and never gained a sure hand in construction, with the possible exception of his one success in plot, “Henry Esmond.” Nothing is more apparent than the loose texture of “Vanity Fair,” where two stories centering in the antithetic women, Becky and Amelia, are held together chronicle fashion, not in the nexus of an organism of close weave. But this very looseness, where there is such superlative power of characterization with plenty of invention in incident, adds to the verisimilitude and attraction of the book. The impression of life is all the more vivid, because of the lack of proportioned progress to a climax. The story conducts itself and ends much as does life: people come in and out and when Finis is written, we feel we may see them again–as indeed often happens, for Thackeray used the pleasant device of re-introducing favorite characters such as Pendennis, Warrington and the descendants thereof, and it adds distinctly to the reality of the ensemble.

“Vanity Fair” has most often been given precedence over the other novels of contemporary life: but for individual scenes and strength of character drawing both “Pendennis” and “The Newcomes” set up vigorous claims. If there be no single triumph in female portraiture like Becky Sharp, Ethel New-come (on the side of virtue) is a far finer woman than the somewhat insipid Amelia: and no personage in the Mayfair book is more successful and beloved than Major Pendennis or Colonel Newcome. Also, the atmosphere of these two pictures seems mellower, less sharp, while as organic structures they are both superior to “Vanity Fair.” Perhaps the supremacy of the last-named is due most of all to the fact that a wonderfully drawn evil character has more fascination than a noble one of workmanship as fine. Or is it that such a type calls forth the novelist’s powers to the full? If so, it were, in a manner, a reproach. But it is more important to say that all three books are delightfully authentic studies of upper-class society in England as Thackeray knew it: the social range is comparatively restricted, for even the rascals are shabby-genteel. But the exposure of human nature (which depends upon keen observation within a prescribed boundary) is wide and deep: a story-teller can penetrate just as far into the arcana of the human spirit if he confine himself to a class as if he surveyed all mankind. But mental limitations result: the point of view is that of the gentleman-class: the ideas of the personal relation to one’s self, one’s fellow men and one’s Maker are those natural to a person of that station. The charming poem which the author set as Finis to “Dr. Birch and His Young Friends,” with its concluding lines, is an unconscious expression of the form in which he conceived human duty. The “And so, please God, a gentleman,” was the cardinal clause in his creed and all his work proves it. It is wiser to be thankful that a man of genius was at hand to voice the view, than to cavil at its narrow outook. In literature, in-look is quite as important. Thackeray drew what he felt and saw, and like Jane Austen, is to be understood within his limitations. Nor did he ever forget that, because pleasure-giving was the object of his art, it was his duty so to present life as to make it somehow attractive, worth while. The point is worth urging, for not a little nonsense has been written concerning the absolute veracity of Thackeray’s pictures: as if he sacrificed all pleasurableness to the modern Moloch, truth. Neither he nor any other great novelist reproduces Life verbatim et literatim. Trollope, in his somewhat unsatisfactory biography of his fellow fictionist, very rightly puts his finger on a certain scene in “Vanity Fair” in which Sir Pitt Crawley figures, which departs widely from reality. The traditional comparison between the two novelists, which represents Dickens as ever caricaturing, Thackeray as the photographer, is coming to be recognized as foolish.

It is all merely a question of degree, as has been said. It being the artist’s business to show a few of the symbols of life out of the vast amount of raw material offered, he differs in the main from his brother artist in the symbols he selects. No one of them presents everything–if he did, he were no artist. Thackeray approaches nearer than Dickens, it is true, to the average appearances of life; but is no more a literal copyist than the creator of Mrs. Gamp. He was rather one of art’s most capable exemplars in the arduous employment of seeming-true.

It must be added that his technique was more careless than an artist of anything like his caliber would have permitted himself to-day. The audience was less critical: not only has the art of fiction been evolved into a finer finish, but gradually the court of judgment made up of a select reading public, has come to decide with much more of professional knowledge. Thus, technique in fiction is expected and given. So much of gain there has been, in spite of all the vulgarization of taste which has followed in the wake of cheap magazines and newspapers. In “Vanity Fair,” for example, there are blemishes which a careful revision would never have suffered to remain: the same is true of most of Thackeray’s books. Like Dickens, Thackeray was exposed to all the danger of the Twenty Parts method of publication. He began his stories without seeing the end; in one of them he is humorously plaintive over the trouble of making this manner of fiction. While “Vanity Fair” is, of course, written in the impersonal third person, at least one passage is put into the mouth of a character in the book: an extraordinary slip for such a novelist.

But peccadilloes such as these, which it is well to realize in view of the absurd claims to artistic impeccability for Thackeray made by rash admirers, melt away into nothing when one recalls Rawdon Crawley’s horsewhipping of the Marquis; George Osborn’s departure for battle, Colonel Newcome’s death, or the incomparable scene where Lady Castlewood welcomes home the wandering Esmond; that “rapture of reconciliation”! It is by such things that great novelists live, and it may be doubted if their errors are ever counted against them, if only they can create in this fashion.

In speaking of Thackeray’s unskilful construction the reference is to architectonics; in the power of particular scenes it is hard to name his superior. He has both the pictorial and the dramatic sense. The care with which “Esmond” was planned and executed suggests too that, had he taken his art more seriously and given needed time to each of the great books, he might have become one of the masters in that prime excellence of the craft, the excellence of proportion, progress and climax. He never quite brought himself to adopt the regular modern method of scenario. “Philip,” his last full length fiction, may be cited as proof.

Yet it may be that he would have given increased attention to construction had he lived a long life. It is worth noting that when the unfinished “Denis Duval” dropt from a hand made inert by death, the general plan, wherefrom an idea of its architecture could be got, was among his effects.

To say a word now of Thackeray’s style. There is practical unanimity of opinion as to this. Thackeray had the effect of writing like a cultivated gentleman not self-consciously making literature. He was tolerant of colloquial concessions that never lapsed into vulgarity; even his slips and slovenlinesses are those of the well-bred. To pass from him back to Richardson is to realize how stiffly correct is the latter. Thackeray has flexibility, music, vernacular felicity and a deceptive ease. He had, too, the flashing strokes, the inspirational sallies which characterize the style of writers like Lamb, Stevenson and Meredith. Fitness, balance, breeding and harmony are his chief qualities. To say that he never sinned or nodded would be to deny that he was human. He cut his cloth to fit the desired garment and is a modern English master of prose designed to reproduce the habit and accent of the polite society of his age. In his hortatory asides and didactic moralizings with their thees and thous and yeas, he is still the fine essayist, like Fielding in his eighteenth century prefatory exordiums. And here is undoubtedly one of his strongest appeals to the world of readers, whether or no it makes him less perfect a fictionist. The diction of a Thackeray is one of the honorable national assets of his race.

Thackeray’s men and women talk as they might be expected to talk in life; each in his own idiom, class and idiosyncrasy. And in the descriptions which furnish atmosphere, in which his creatures may live and breathe and have their being, the hand of the artist of words is equally revealed. Both for dialogue and narration the gift is valid, at times superb. It would be going too far to say that if Thackeray had exercised the care in revision bestowed by later reputable authors, his style might not have been improved: beyond question it would have been, in the narrow sense. But the correction of trifling mistakes is one thing, a change in pattern another. The retouching, although satisfying grammar here and there, might have dimmed the vernacular value of his speech.

But what of Thackeray’s view, his vision of things? Does he bear down unduly upon poor imperfect humanity? and what was his purpose in satire? If he is unfair in the representation his place among the great should suffer; since the truly great observer of life does general justice to humankind in his harmonious portrayal.

We have already spoken of Thackeray’s sensitive nature as revealed through all available means: he conveys the impression of a suppressed sentimentalist, even in his satire. And this establishes a presumption that the same man is to be discovered in the novels, the work being an unconscious revelation of the worker. The characteristic books are of satirical bent, that must be granted: Thackeray’s purpose, avowed and implicit in the stories, is that of a Juvenal castigating with a smiling mouth the evils of society. With keen eye he sees the weaknesses incident to place and power, to the affectations of fashion or the corruptions of the world, the flesh and the devil. Nobody of commonsense will deny that here is a welcome service if performed with skill and fair-mindedness in the interests of truth. The only query would be: Is the picture undistorted? If Thackeray’s studies leave a bad taste in the mouth, if their effect is depressing, if one feels as a result that there is neither virtue nor magnanimity in woman, and that man is incapable of honor, bravery, justice and tenderness–then the novelist may be called cynic. He is not a wholesome writer, however acceptable for art or admirable for genius. Nor will the mass of mankind believe in and love him.

Naturally we are here on ground where the personal equation influences judgment. There can never be complete agreement. Some readers, and excellent people they are, will always be offended by what they never tire of calling the worldly tone of Thackeray; to others, he will be as lovable in his view of life as he is amusing. Speaking, then, merely for myself, it seems to me that for mature folk who have had some experience with humanity, Thackeray is a charming companion whose heart is as sound as his pen is incisive. The very young as a rule are not ready for him and (so far as my observation goes) do not much care for him. That his intention was to help the cause of kindness, truth and justice in the world is apparent. It is late in the day to defend his way of crying up the good by a frank exhibition of the evil. Good and bad are never confused by him, and Taine was right in calling him above all a moralist. But being by instinct a realist too, he gave vent to his passion for truth-telling so far as he dared, in a day when it was far less fashionable to do this than it now is. A remark in the preface to “Pendennis” is full of suggestion: “Since the author of ‘Tom Jones’ was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a Man. We must drape him and give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art.”

It will not do to say (as is often said) that Thackeray could not draw an admirable or perfect woman. If he did not leave us a perfect one, it was perhaps for the reason alleged to have been given by Mr. Howells when he was charged with the same misdemeanor: he was waiting for the Lord to do it first! But Thackeray does no injustice to the sex: if Amelia be stupid (which is matter of debate), Helen Warrington is not, but rather a very noble creature built on a large plan: whatever the small blemishes of Lady Castlewood she is indelible in memory for character and charm. And so with others not a few. Becky and Beatrix are merely the reverse of the picture. And there is a similar balance in the delineation of men: Colonel Newcome over against Captain Costigan, and many a couple more. Thackeray does not fall into the mistake of making his spotted characters all-black. Who does not find something likable in the Fotheringay and in the Campaigner? Even a Barry Lyndon has the redeeming quality of courage. And surely we adore Beatrix, with all her faults. Major Pendennis is a thoroughgoing old worldling, but it is impossible not to feel a species of fondness for him. Jos. Sedley is very much an ass, but one’s smile at him is full of tolerance. Yes, the worst of them all, the immortal Becky (who was so plainly liked by her maker) awakens sympathy in the reader when routed in her fortunes, black-leg though she be. She cared for her husband, after her fashion, and she plays the game of Bad Luck in a way far from despicable. Nor is that easy-going, commonplace scoundrel, Rawdon, with his dog-like devotion to the same Becky, denied his touch of higher humanity. Behind all these is a large tolerance, an intellectual breadth, a spiritual comprehension that is merciful to the sinner, while never condoning the sin. Thackeray is therefore more than story-teller or fine writer: a sane observer of the Human Comedy; a satirist in the broad sense, devoting himself to revealing society to itself and for its instruction. It is easy to use negations: to say he did not know nor sympathize with the middle class nor the lower and outcast classes as did Dickens; that his interest was in peccadilloes and sins, not in courageous virtues: and that he judged the world from a club window. But this gets us nowhere and is aside from the critic’s chief business: which is that of an appreciative explanation of his abiding power and charm. This has now been essayed. Thackeray was too great as man and artist not to know that it was his function to present life in such wise that while a pleasure of recognition should follow the delineation, another and higher pleasure should also result: the surprising pleasure of beauty. “Fiction,” he declared, “has no business to exist, unless it be more beautiful than reality,” And again: “The first quality of an artist is to have a large heart.” With which revelatory utterances may be placed part of the noble sentence closing “The Book of Snobs”: “If fun is good, truth is better still, and love best of all.” To read him with open mind is to feel assured that his works, taken in their entirety, reflect these humane sentiments. It is a pity, therefore, for any reader of the best fiction, through intense appreciation of Dickens or for any other reason, to cut himself off from such an enlightening student of humanity and master of imaginative literature.

CHAPTER X

GEORGE ELIOT

George Eliot began fiction a decade later than Thackeray, but seems more than a decade nearer to us. With her the full pulse of modern realism is felt a-throbbing. There is no more of the ye’s and thous with which, when he would make an exordium, Thackeray addressed the world–a fashion long since laid aside. Eliot drew much nearer to the truth, the quiet, homely verity of her scenes is a closer approximation to life, realizes life more vitally than the most veracious page of “Vanity Fair.” Not that the great woman novelist made the mistake of a slavish imitation of the actual: that capital, lively scene in the early part of “The Mill on the Floss,” where Mrs. Tulliver’s connections make known to us their delightsome personalities, is not a mere transcript from life; and all the better for that. Nevertheless, the critic can easily discover a difference between Thackeray and Eliot in this regard, and the ten years between them (as we saw in the case of Dickens and Thackeray) are partly responsible: technique and ideal in literary art were changing fast. George Eliot was a truer realist. She took more seriously her aim of interpreting life, and had a higher conception of her artistic mission. Dickens in his beautiful tribute to Thackeray on the latter’s death, speaks of the failure of the author of “Pendennis” to take his mission, his genius, seriously: there was justice in the remark. Yet we heard from the preface to “Pendennis” that Thackeray had the desire to depict a typical man of society with the faithful frankness of a Fielding, and since him, Thackeray states, never again used. But the novelist’s hearers were not prepared, the time was not yet ripe, and the novelist himself lacked the courage, though he had the clear vision. With Eliot, we reach the psychologic moment: that deepest truth, the truth of character, exhibited in its mainsprings of impulse and thought, came with her into English fiction as it had never before appeared. It would hardly be overstatement to say that modern psychology in the complete sense as method and interest begins in the Novel with Eliot. For there is a radical difference, not only between the Novel which exploits plot and that which exploits character: but also between that which sees character in terms of life and that which sees it in terms of soul. Eliot’s fiction does the latter: life to her means character building, and has its meaning only as an arena for spiritual struggle. Success or failure means but this: have I grown in my higher nature, has my existence shown on the whole an upward tendency?

If so, well and good. If not, whatever of place or power may be mine, I am among the world’s failures, having missed the goal. This view, steadily to be encountered in all her fiction, gives it the grave quality, the deep undertone and, be it confessed, at times the almost Methodistic manner, which mark this woman’s worth in its weakness and its notable strength. In her early days, long before she made fiction, she was morbidly religious; she became in the fulness of time one of the intellectually emancipated. Yet, emotionally, spiritually, she remained to the end an intensely religious person. Conduct, aspiration, communion of souls, these were to her always the realities. If Thackeray’s motto was Be good, and Dickens’, Do good, Eliot’s might be expressed as: Make me good! Consider for a moment and you will see that these phrases stand successively for a convention, an action and an aspiration.

The life of Mary Ann Evans falls for critical purposes into three well-defined divisions: the early days of country life with home and family and school; her career as a savant; and the later years, when she performed her service as story-teller. Unquestionably, the first period was most important in influencing her genius. It was in the home days at Griff, the school days at Nuneaton nearby, that those deepest, most permanent impressions were absorbed which are given out in the finest of her fictions. Hence came the primal inspiration which produced her best. And it is because she drew most generously upon her younger life in her earlier works that it is they which are most likely to survive the shocks of Time.

The experiences of Eliot’s childhood, youth and young womanhood were those which taught her the bottom facts about middle-class country life in the mid-century, and in a mid-county of England; Shakspere’s county of Warwick. Those experiences gave her such sympathetic comprehension of the human case in that environment that she became its chronicler, as Dickens had become the chronicler of the lower middle-class of the cities. Unerringly, she generalized from the microcosm of Warwickshire to the life of the world and guessed the universal human heart. With utmost sympathy, joined with a nice power of scrutiny, she saw and understood the character-types of the village, when there was a village life which has since passed away: the yeoman, the small farmer, the operative in the mill, the peasant, the squire and the parson, the petty tradesman, the man of the professions: the worker with his hands at many crafts.

She matured through travel, books and social contact, her knowledge was greatly extended: she came to be, in a sense, a cultured woman of the world, a learned person. Her later books reflected this; they depict the so-called higher strata of English society as in “Middlemarch,” or, as in “Romola,” give an historical picture of another time in a foreign land. The woman who was gracious hostess at those famous Sunday afternoons at the Priory seems to have little likeness to the frail, shy, country girl in Griff–seems, too, far more important; yet it may be doubted whether all this later work reveals such mastery of the human heart or comes from such an imperative source of expression as do the earlier novels, “Adam Bede” and “The Mill on the Floss.” For human nature is one and the same in Griff or London or Florence, as all the amplitude of the sky is mirrored in the dewdrop. And although Eliot became in later life a more accurate reporter of the intellectual unrest of her day, and had probed deeper into the mystery and the burden of this unintelligible world, great novels are not necessarily made in that way and the majority of those who love her cleave to the less burdened, more unforced expression of her power.

In those early days, moreover, her attitude towards life was established: it meant a wish to improve the “complaining millions of men.” Love went hand in hand with understanding. It may well be that the somberly grave view of humanity and of the universe at large which came to be hers, although strengthened by the positivistic trend of her mature studies, was generated in her sickly youth and a reaction from the narrow theologic thought with which she was then surrounded. Always frail–subject through life to distressing illness–it would not be fair to ask of this woman an optimism of the Mark Tapley stripe. In part, the grave outlook was physical, temperamental: but also it was an expression of a swiftly approaching mood of the late nineteenth century. And the beginning can be traced back to the autumn evenings in the big farmhouse at Griff when, as a mere child, she wrestled or prayed with what she called her sick soul. That stern, upright farmer father of hers seems the dominant factor in her make-up, although the iron of her blood was tempered by the livelier, more mundane qualities of her sprightly mother, towards whom we look for the source of the daughter’s superb gift of humor. Whatever the component parts of father and mother in her, and however large that personal variation which is genius, of this we may be comfortably sure: the deepest in the books, whether regarded as presentation of life or as interpretation, came from the early Warwickshire years.

Gradually came that mental eclaircissement which produced the editor, the magazinist, the translator of Strauss. The friendship with the Brays more than any one thing marks the external cause of this awakening: but it was latent, this response to the world of thought and of scholarship, and certain to be called out sooner or later. Our chief interest in it is due to the query how much it ministered to her coming career as creative author of fiction.

George Eliot at this period looked perilously like a Blue Stocking. The range and variety of her reading and the severely intellectual nature of her pursuits justify the assertion. Was this well for the novelist?

The reply might be a paradox: yes and no. This learning imparted to Eliot’s works a breadth of vision that is tonic and wins the respect of the judicious. It helps her to escape from that bane of the woman novelist–excessive sentiment without intellectual orientation. But, on the other hand, there are times when she appears to be writing a polemic, not a novel: when the tone becomes didactic, the movement heavy–when the work seems self-conscious and over-intellectualized. Nor can it be denied that this tendency grew on Eliot, to the injury of her latest work. There is a simple kind of exhortation in the “Clerical Scenes,” but it disappears in the earliest novels, only to reappear in stories like “Daniel Deronda.” Any and all culture that comes to a large, original nature (and such was Eliot’s) should be for the good of the literary product: learning in the narrower, more technical sense, is perhaps likely to do harm. Here and there there is a reminder of the critic-reviewer in her fiction.

George Eliot’s intellectual development during her last years widened her work and strengthened her comprehensive grasp of life. She gained in interpretation thereby. There will, however, always be those who hold that it would have been better for her reputation had she written nothing after “Middlemarch,” or even after “Felix Holt.” Those who object on principle to her agnosticism, would also add that the negative nature of her philosophy, her lack of what is called definite religious convictions, had its share in injuring materially her maturest fiction. The vitality or charm of a novel, however, is not necessarily impaired because the author holds such views. It is more pertinent to take the books as they are, in chronologic order, to point out so far as possible their particular merits.

And first, the “Scenes from Clerical Life.” It is interesting to the student of this novelist that her writing of fiction was suggested to her by Lewes, and that she tried her hand at a tale when she was not far from forty years old. The question will intrude: would a genuine fiction-maker need to be thus prodded by a friend, and refrain from any independent attempt up to a period so late? Yet it will not do to answer glibly in the negative. Too many examples of late beginning and fine fiction as a consequence are furnished by English literature to make denial safe. We have seen Defoe and Richardson and a number of later novelists breaking the rules–if any such exist. No one can now read the “Clerical Scenes” without discovering in them qualities of head and heart which, when allowed an enlarged canvas and backed by a sure technique, could be counted on to make worthy fiction. The quiet village life glows softly under the sympathetic touch of a true painter.

A recent reading of this first book showed more clearly than ever the unequalness of merit in the three stories, their strong didactic bent, and the charmingly faithful observation which for the present-day reader is their greatest attraction. The first and simplest, “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton,” is by far the best. The poorest is the second, “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” which has touches of conventional melodrama in a framework reminiscent of earlier fictionists like Disraeli. “Janet’s Repentance,” with its fine central character of the unhappy wedded wife, is strong, sincere, appealing; and much of the local color admirable. But–perhaps because there is more attempt at story-telling, more plot–the narrative falls below the beautiful, quiet chronicle of the days of Amos: an exquisite portrayal of an average man who yet stands for humanity’s best. The tale is significant as a prelude to Eliot’s coming work, containing, in the seed, those qualities which were to make her noteworthy. Perusing the volume to-day, we can hardly say that it appears an epoch-making production in fiction, the declaration of a new talent in modern literature. But much has happened in fiction during the half century since 1857, and we are not in a position to judge the feeling of those who then began to follow the fortunes of the Reverend Amos.

But it is not difficult for the twentieth century reader, even if blase, to understand that “Adam Bede,” published when its author was forty, aroused a furore of admiration: it still holds general attention, and many whose opinion is worth having, regard it with respect, affection, even enthusiasm.

The broader canvas was exactly what the novelist needed to show her power of characterization, her ability to build up her picture by countless little touches guided by the most unflinching faith in detail and given vibrancy by the sympathy which in all George Eliot’s fiction is like the air you breathe. Then, too, as an appeal to the general, there is more of story interest, although neither here nor in any story to follow, does plot come first with a writer whose chief interest is always character, and its development. The autobiographic note deepens and gives at once verity and intensity to the novel; here, as in “The Mill on the Floss” which was to follow the next year, Eliot first gave free play to that emotional seizure of her own past to which reference has been made. The homely material of the first novel was but part of its strength. Readers who had been offered the flash-romantic fiction of Disraeli and Bulwer, turned with refreshment to the placid annals of a village where, none the less, the human heart in its follies and frailties and nobilities, is laid bare. The skill with which the leisurely moving story rises to its vivid moments of climactic interest–the duel in the wood, Hetty’s flight, the death of Adam’s father–is marked and points plainly to the advance, through study and practice, of the novelist since the “Clerical Scenes”; constructive excellencies do not come by instinct. “Adam Bede” is preeminently a book of belief, written not so much in ink as in red blood, and in that psychic fluid that means the author’s spiritual nature. She herself declared, “I love it very much,” and it reveals the fact on every page. Aside from its indubitable worth as a picture of English middle-class country life in an earlier nineteenth century than we know–the easy-going days before electricity–it has its highest claim to our regard as a reading in life, not conveyed by word of mouth didactically, but carried in scene and character. The author’s tenderness over Hetty, without even sentimentalizing her as, for example, Dumas sentimentalizes his Camille, suggests the mood of the whole narrative: a large-minded, large-hearted comprehension of humankind, an insistence on spiritual tests, yet with the will to tell the truth and present impartially the darkest shadows. It is because George Eliot’s people are compounded with beautiful naturalness of good and bad–not hopelessly bad with Hetty, nor hopelessly good with Adam–that we understand them and love them. Here is an element of her effectiveness. Even her Dinah walks with her feet firmly planted upon the earth, though her mystic vision may be skyward.

With “Adam Bede” she came into her own. The “Clerical Scenes” had won critical plaudits: Dickens, in 1857 long settled in his seat of public idolatry, wrote the unknown author a letter of appreciation, so warm-hearted, so generous, that it is hard to resist the pleasure of quoting it: it is interesting to remark that in despite the masculine pen-name, he attributed the work to a woman. But the public had not responded. With “Adam Bede” this was changed; the book gained speedy popularity, the author even meeting with that mixed compliment, a bogus claimant to its authorship. And so, greatly encouraged, and stimulated to do her best, she produced “The Mill on the Floss,” a novel, which, if not her finest, will always be placed high on her list of representative fiction.

This time the story as such was stronger, there was more substance and variety because of the greater number of characters and their freer interplay upon each other. Most important of all, when we look beyond the immediate reception by the public to its more permanent position, the work is decidedly more thoroughgoing in its psychology: it goes to the very core of personality, where the earlier book was in some instances satisfied with sketch-work. In “Adam Bede” the freshness comes from the treatment rather than the theme. The framework, a seduction story, is old enough–old as human nature and pre-literary story-telling. But in “The Mill on the Floss” we have the history of two intertwined lives, contrasted types from within the confines of family life, bound by kin-love yet separated by temperament. It is the deepest, truest of tragedy and we see that just this particular study of humanity had not been accomplished so exhaustively before in all the annals of fiction. As it happened, everything conspired to make the author at her best when she was writing this novel: as her letters show, her health was, for her, good: we have noted the stimulus derived from the reception of “Adam Bede”–which was as wine to her soul. Then–a fact which should never be forgotten–the tale is carried through logically and expresses, with neither paltering nor evasion, George Eliot’s sense of life’s tragedy. In the other book, on the contrary, a touch of the fictitious was introduced by Lewes; Dinah and Adam were united to make at the end a mitigation of the painfulness of Hetty’s downfall. Lewes may have been right in looking to the contemporary audience, but never again did Eliot yield to that form of the literary lie, the pleasant ending. She certainly did not in “The Mill on the Floss”: an element of its strength is its truth. The book, broadly considered, moves slow, with dramatic accelerando at cumulative moments; it is the kind of narrative where this method is allowable without artistic sin. Another great excellence is the superb insight into the nature of childhood, boy and girl; if Maggie is drawn with the more penetrating sympathy, Tom is finely observed: if the author never rebukes his limitations, she states them and, as it were, lifts hands to heaven to cry like a Greek chorus: “See these mortals love yet clash! Behold, how havoc comes! Eheu! this mortal case!”

With humanity still pulling at her heart-strings, and conceiving fiction which offered more value of plot than before, George Eliot wrote the charming romance “Silas Marner,” novelette in form, modern romance in its just mingling of truth and idealization: a work published the next year. She interrupted “Romola” to do it, which is suggestive as indicating absorption by the theme. This story offers a delightful blend of homely realism with poetic symbolism. The miser is wooed from his sordid love of gold by the golden glint of a little girl’s hair: as love creeps into his starved heart, heartless greed goes out forever: before a soulless machine, he becomes a man. It is the world-old, still potent thought that the good can drive out the bad: a spiritual allegory in a series of vivid pictures carrying the wholesomest and highest of lessons. The artistic and didactic are here in happy union. And as nowhere else in her work (unless exception be made in the case of “Romola”) she sees a truth in terms of drama. To read the story is to feel its stage value: it is no surprise to know that several dramatizations of the book have been made. Aside from its central motive, the studies of homely village life, as well as of polite society, are in Eliot’s best manner: the humor of Dolly Winthrop is of as excellent vintage as the humor of Mrs. Poyser in “Adam Bede,” yet with the necessary differentiation. The typical deep sympathy for common humanity–just average folks–permeates the handling. Moreover, while the romance has a happy issue, as a romance should according to Stevenson, if it possibly can, it does not differ in its view of life from so fatalistic a book as “The Mill on the Floss”; for circumstances change Silas; if the child Eppie had not come he might have remained a miser. It was not his will alone that revolutionized his life; what some would call luck was at work there. In “Silas Marner” the teaching is of a piece with that of all her representative work.

But when we reach “Romola” there is a change, debatable ground is entered upon at once. Hitherto, the story-teller has mastered the preacher, although an ever more earnest soul has been expressing itself about Life. Now we enter the region of more self-conscious literary art, of planned work and study, and confront the possibility of flagging invention. Also, we leave the solid ground of contemporary themes and find the realist with her hang for truth, essaying an historical setting, an entirely new and foreign motive. Eliot had already proved her right to depict certain aspects of her own English life. To strive to exercise the same powers on a theme like “Romola” was a venturesome step. We have seen how Dickens and Thackeray essayed romance at least once with ringing success; now the third major mid-century novelist was to try the same thing.

It may be conceded at the start that in one important respect this Florentine story of Savonarola and his day is entirely typical: it puts clearly before us in a medieval romantic mis-en scene, the problem of a soul: the slow, subtle, awful degeneration of the man Tito, with its foil in the noble figure of the girl Romola. The central personality psychologically is that of the wily Greek-Italian, and Eliot never probed deeper into the labyrinths of the perturbed human spirit than in this remarkable analysis. The reader, too, remembers gratefully, with a catch of the breath, the great scenes, two of which are the execution of Savonarola, and the final confrontation of Tito by his adoptive father, with its Greek-like sense of tragic doom. The same reader stands aghast before the labor which must lie behind such a work and often comes to him a sudden, vital sense of fifteenth century Florence, then, as never since, the Lily of the Arno: so cunningly and with such felicity are innumerable details individualized, massed and blended. And yet, somehow it all seems a splendid experiment, a worthy performance rather than a spontaneous and successful creative endeavor: this, in comparison with the fiction that came before. The author seems a little over-burdened by the tremendousness of her material. Whether it is because the Savonarola episode is not thoroughly synthetized with the Tito-Romola part: or that the central theme is of itself fundamentally unpleasant–or again, that from the nature of the romance, head-work had largely to supplant that genial draught upon the springs of childhood which gave us “Adam Bede” and “The Mill on the Floss”;–or once more, whether the crowded canvas injures the unity of the design, be these as they may, “Romola” strikes one as great in spots and as conveying a noble though somber truth, but does not carry us off our feet. That is the blunt truth about it, major work as it is, with only half a dozen of its kind to equal it in all English literature. It falls distinctly behind both “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Esmond.” It is a book to admire, to praise in many particulars, to be impressed by: but not quite to treasure as one treasures the story of the Tullivers. It was written by George Eliot, famous novelist, who with that anxious, morbid conscience of hers, had to live up to her reputation, and who received $50,000 for the work, even to-day a large sum for a piece of fiction. It was not written by a woman irresistibly impelled to self-expression, seized with the passionate desire to paint Life. It is, in a sense, her first professional feat and performance.

Meanwhile, she was getting on in life: we saw that she was seven and thirty when she wrote the “Clerical Scenes”: it was almost a decade later when “Felix Holt, Radical” appeared, and she was nearing fifty. I believe it to be helpful to draw a line between all her fiction before and after “Felix Holt,” placing that book somewhat uncertainly on the dividing line. The four earlier novels stand for a period when there is a strong, or at least sufficient story interest, the proper amount of objectification: to the second division belong “Middlemarch” and “Daniel Deronda,” where we feel that problem comes first and story second. In the intermediate novel, “Felix Holt,” its excellent story places it with the first books, but its increased didactic tendency with the latest stories. Why has “Felix Holt” been treated by the critics, as a rule, as of comparatively minor value? It is very interesting, contains true characterization, much of picturesque and dramatic worth; it abounds in enjoyable first-hand observation of a period by-gone yet near enough to have been cognizant to the writer. Her favorite types, too, are in it. Holt, a study of the advanced workman of his day, is another Bede, mutatis mutandis, and quite as truly realized. Both Mr. Lyon and his daughter are capitally drawn and the motive of the novel–to teach Felix that he can be quite as true to his cause if he be less rough and eccentric in dress and deportment, is a good one handled with success. To which may be added that the encircling theme of Mrs. Transome’s mystery, grips the attention from the start and there is pleasure when it is seen to involve Esther, leading her to make a choice which reveals that she has awakened to a truer valuation of life–and of Felix. With all these things in its favor, why has appreciation been so scant?

Is it not that continually in the narrative you lose its broader human interest because of the narrower political and social questions that are raised? They are vital questions, but still, more specific, technical, of the time. Nor is their weaving into the more permanent theme altogether skilful: you feel like exclaiming to the novelist: “O, let Kingsley handle chartism, but do you stick to your last–love and its criss-cross, family sin and its outcome, character changed as life comes to be more vitally realized.” George Eliot in this fine story falls into this mistake, as does Mrs. Humphry Ward in her well-remembered “Robert Elsmere,” and as she has again in the novel which happens to be her latest as these words are written, “Marriage a la Mode.” The thesis has a way of sticking out obtrusively in such efforts.

Many readers may not feel this in “Felix Holt,” which, whatever its shortcomings, remains an extremely able and interesting novel, often underestimated. Still, I imagine a genuine distinction has been made with regard to it.

The difference is more definitely felt in “Middlemarch,” not infrequently called Eliot’s masterpiece. It appeared five years later and the author was over fifty when the book was published serially during 1871 and 1872. Nearly four years were spent in the work of composition: for it the sum of $60,000 was paid.

“Middlemarch,” which resembles Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” in telling two stories not closely related, seems less a Novel than a chronicle-history of two families. It is important to remember that its two parts were conceived as independent; their welding, to call it such, was an afterthought. The tempo again, suiting the style of fiction, is leisurely: character study, character contrast, is the principal aim. More definitely, the marriage problem, illustrated by Dorothea’s experience with Casaubon, and that of Lydgate with Rosamond, is what the writer places before us. Marriage is chosen simply because it is the modern spiritual battleground, a condition for the trying-out of souls. The greatness of the work lies in its breadth (subjective more than objective), its panoramic view of English country life of the refined type, its rich garner of wisdom concerning human motive and action. We have seen in earlier studies that its type, the chronicle of events as they affect character, is a legitimate one: a successful genus in English-speaking fiction in hands like those of Thackeray, Eliot and Howells. It is one accepted