Could words simpler, purer, more touching be found to paint a terrible, albeit very common sorrow! Not a needless epithet, not a false note, not a touch over-wrought! And this is the writing of an unknown, untried youth!

This exquisitely simple, easy, idiomatic, and nervous style marks all Thackeray's work for his twenty-six years of activity, and is equally perfect for whatever purpose it is used, and in whatever key he may choose to compose. It naturally culminates in _Vanity Fair_, written just in the middle of his literary career. Here not a word is wasted: the profoundest impressions are made by a quiet sentence or a dozen plain words that neither Swift nor Defoe could have surpa.s.sed. I know nothing in English literature more powerful than those last lines of the thirty-second chapter of _Vanity Fair_. For thirty-two chapters we have been following the loves, sorrows, and anxieties of Amelia Sedley and George Osborne. For four chapters the story has pictured the scene in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo. The women and non-combatants are trembling with excitement, anxiety, fear; the men are in the field, whilst the cannon roar all day in the distance--Amelia half distracted with love, jealousy, and foreboding. And the wild alternations of hope, terror, grief, and agony are suddenly closed in the last paragraph of Chapter x.x.xII.

No more firing was heard at Brussels--the pursuit rolled miles away.

Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

Take all the great critical scenes in the book, and note how simple, and yet how full of pathos and of power, is the language in which they are described. There is the last parting of George and Amelia as the bugle rings to arms.

George came in and looked at her again, entering still more softly. By the pale night-lamp he could see her sweet, pale face--the purple eyelids were fringed and closed, and one round arm, smooth and white, lay outside of the coverlet. Good G.o.d! how pure she was; how gentle, how tender, and how friendless! and he, how selfish, brutal, and black with crime! Heart-stained and shame-stricken, he stood at the bed's foot, and looked at the sleeping girl. How dared he--who was he, to pray for one so spotless! G.o.d bless her! G.o.d bless her! He came to the bed-side, and looked at the hand, the little soft hand, lying asleep; and he bent over the pillow noiselessly towards the gentle pale face.

The whole tragedy of their lives is given in miniature in this touching scene; and yet how natural and commonplace are all the effects of which it is composed, how few and simple the words which describe such love and such remorse. It is hard to judge in _Vanity Fair_ which are the more perfect in style, the pathetic and tragic scenes or those which are charged with humour and epigram.

And the scene after George's marriage, when old Osborne burns his will and erases his son's name from the family Bible--and the scene when Osborne receives his son's last letter--"Osborne trembled long before the letter from his dead son"--"His father could not see the kiss George had placed on the superscription of his letter. Mr. Osborne dropped it with the bitterest, deadliest pang of balked affection and revenge. His son was still beloved and unforgiven." And the scene of "the widow and mother," when young Georgy is born, and the wonderful scene when Sir Pitt proposes marriage to the little green-eyed governess and she is scared into confessing her great secret, and the most famous scene of all, when Rawdon Crawley is released from the sponging-house and finds Lord Steyne with Rebecca alone. It is but a single page. The words spoken are short, brief, plain--not five sentences pa.s.s--"I am innocent," said she--"Make way, let me pa.s.s,"

cried My Lord--"You lie, you coward and villain!" said Rawdon. There is in all fiction no single scene more vivid, more true, more burnt into the memory, more tragic. And with what n.o.ble simplicity, with what incisive reticence, with what subtle anatomy of the human heart, is it recorded.

_Vanity Fair_ was written, it is true, under the strain of serial publication, haste, and anxiety, but it is perhaps, even in style, the most truly complete. The wonderful variety, elasticity, and freshness of the dialogue, the wit of the common scenes, the terrible power of the tragic scenes, the perfection of the _mise-en-scene_--the rattle, the fun, the glitter of the Fair, are sustained from end to end, from the first words of the ineffable Miss Pinkerton to the _Vanitas Vanitatum_ when the showman shuts up his puppets in their box. There is not in all _Vanity Fair_ a single dull page that we skip, not a bit of padding, no rigmarole of explanation whilst the action stands still.

Of what other fiction can this be said? Richardson and even Fielding have their _longueurs_. Miss Austen is too p.r.o.ne to linger over the tea-table beyond all human patience. And even Scott's descriptions of his loved hills grow sometimes unreadable, especially when they are told in a flaccid and slovenly style. But _Vanity Fair_ is kept up with inexhaustible life and invention, with a style which, for purity and polish, was beyond the reach of Fielding, Richardson, or Scott.

_Esmond_ was composed with even greater care than _Vanity Fair_, and in the matter of style is usually taken to be Thackeray's greatest masterpiece. Its language is a miracle of art. But it is avowedly a _tour de force_--an effort to reproduce an entire book in the form and speech of a century and a half preceding. As a _tour de force_ it is wonderful; but in so long a book the effort becomes at last too visible, and undoubtedly it somewhat cramps the freedom of the author's genius. Thackeray was not a born historical romancist, as were Scott and Dumas; nor was he a born historian at all. And when he undertook to produce an elaborate romance in the form and with the colouring of a past age, like George Eliot, he becomes rather too learned, too conscientious, too rigidly full of his authorities; and if as an historian he enters into rivalry with Macaulay, he somewhat loses his cunning as a novelist. Thackeray's force lay in the comedy of manners.

In the comedy of manners we have nothing but _Tom Jones_ to compare with _Vanity Fair_. And though Thackeray is not equal to the "prose Homer of human nature," he wrote an English even finer and more racy.

In _Esmond_ we are constantly pausing to admire the wonderful ingenuity and exquisite grace of the style, studying the language quite apart from the story; and we feel, as we do when we read Milton's Latin poems or Swinburne's French sonnets, that it is a surprising imitation of the original. But at the same time _Esmond_ contains some of the n.o.blest pa.s.sages that Thackeray ever wrote, scenes and chapters which in form have no superior in English literature. That sixth chapter of the second book, in the cathedral, when Henry Esmond returns to his mistress on the 29th of December, on his birthday. "Here she was weeping and happy. She took his hand in both hers; he felt her tears.

It was a rapture of reconciliation"--"so for a few moments Esmond's beloved mistress came to him and blessed him." To my mind, there is nothing in English fiction which has been set forth in language of such exquisite purity and pathos.

_Esmond_, too, which may be said to be one prolonged parody of the great Queen-Anne essayists, contains that most perfect of all parodies in the English language--"The paper out of the _Spectator_"--in chapter third of the third book. It is of course not a "parody" in the proper sense, for it has no element of satire or burlesque, and imitates not the foibles but the merits of the original, with an absolute illusion.

The 341st number of the _Spectator_, dated Tuesday, April 1, 1712, is so absolutely like d.i.c.k Steele at his best, that Addison himself would have been deceived by it. Steele hardly ever wrote anything so bright and amusing. It is not a "parody": it is a forgery; but a forgery which required for its execution the most consummate mastery over all the subtleties and mysteries of style.

In parody of every kind, from the most admiring imitation down to the most boisterous burlesque, Thackeray stands at the head of all other imitators. The _Rejected Addresses_ of James and Horace Smith (1812) is usually regarded as the masterpiece in this art; and Scott good-humouredly said that he could have mistaken the death of Higginbottom for his own verses. But Thackeray's _Novels by Eminent Hands_ are superior even to the _Rejected Addresses_. _Codlingsby_, the parody of Disraeli's _Coningsby_, may be taken as the most effective parody in our language: intensely droll in itself, it reproduces the absurdities, the affectations, the oriental imagination of Disraeli with inimitable wit. Those ten pages of irrepressible fooling are enough to destroy Disraeli's reputation as a serious romancer. No doubt they have unfairly reacted so as to dim our sense of Disraeli's real genius as a writer. When we know _Codlingsby_ by heart, as every one with a sense of humour must do, it is impossible for us to keep our countenance when we take up the palaver about Sidonia and the Chosen Race. The _Novels by Eminent Hands_ are all good: they are much more than parodies; they are real criticism, sound, wise, genial, and instructive. Nor are they in the least unfair. If the balderdash and cheap erudition of Bulwer and Disraeli are covered with inextinguishable mirth, no one is offended by the pleasant imitations of Lever, James, and Fenimore Cooper.

All the burlesques are good, and will bear continual re-reading; but the masterpiece of all is _Rebecca and Rowena_, the continuation in burlesque of _Ivanhoe_. It is one of the mysteries of literature that we can enjoy both, that the warmest admirers of Scott's glorious genius, and even those who delight in _Ivanhoe_, can find the keenest relish in _Rebecca and Rowena_, which is simply the great romance of chivalry turned inside out. But Thackeray's immortal burlesque has something of the quality of Cervantes' _Don Quixote_--that we love the knight whilst we laugh, and feel the deep pathos of human nature and the beauty of goodness and love even in the midst of the wildest fun.

And this fine quality runs through all the comic pieces, ballads, burlesques, pantomimes, and sketches. What genial fun in the _Rose and the Ring_, in _Little Billee_, in _Mrs. Perkins' Ball_, in the _Sketch Book_, in _Yellowplush_. It is only the very greatest masters who can produce extravaganzas, puerile tomfooleries, drolleries to delight children, and catchpenny songs, of such a kind that mature and cultivated students can laugh over them for the fiftieth time and read them till they are household words. This is the supreme merit of _Don Quixote_, of _Scapin_, of _Gulliver_, of _Robinson Crusoe_. And this quality of immortal truth and wit we find in _Rebecca and Rowena_, in the _Rose and the Ring_, in _Little Billee_, in _Codlingsby_, and _Yellowplush_. The burlesques have that Aristophanic touch of beauty, pathos, and wisdom mingled with the wildest pantomime.

A striking example of Thackeray's unrivalled powers of imitation may be seen in the letters which are freely scattered about his works. No one before or since ever wrote such wonderfully happy ill.u.s.trations of the epistolary style of boy or girl, old maid or illiterate man. There never were such letters as those of George Osborne in _Vanity Fair_--that letter from school describing the fight between Cuff and Figs is a masterpiece--the letters of Becky, of Rawdon, of Amelia--all are perfect reproductions of the writer, as are scores of letters scattered up and down the twenty-six volumes. Nor must we omit, as part of the style, the author's own ill.u.s.trations. They are really part of the book; they a.s.sist us to understand the characters; they are a very important portion of the writer's method. None of our great writers ever had this double instrument: and Thackeray has used it with consummate effect. The sketches in _Vanity Fair_ and in _Punch_, especially the minor thumb-nail drolleries, are delightful--true caricatures--real portraits of character. It is true they are ill drawn, often impossible, crude, and almost childish in their incorrectness and artlessness. But they have in them the soul of a great caricaturist. They have the Hogarthian touch of a great comic artist.

One is tempted to enlarge at length on the merits of Thackeray's style, because it is in his mastery over all the resources of the English language that he surpa.s.ses contemporary prose writers. And it is a mastery which is equally shown in every form of composition. There is a famous bit of Byron's about Sheridan to the effect that he had written the best comedy, made the finest speech, and invented the drollest farce in the English language. And it is hardly extravagant to say of Thackeray that, of all the Englishmen of this century, he has written the best comedy of manners, the best extravaganza, the best burlesque, the best parody, and the best comic song. And to this some of his admirers would add--the best lectures, and the best critical essays. It is of course true that he has never reached or attempted to reach the gorgeous rhapsodies of De Quincey or the dithyrambic melodies of Ruskin. But these heaven-born Pegasi cannot be harnessed to the working vehicles of our streets. The marvel of Thackeray's command over language is this--that it is unfailing in prose or in verse, in pathos or in terror, in tragedy or in burlesque, in narrative, in repartee, or in drollery: and that it never waxes or flags in force and precision throughout twenty-six full volumes.

Of Thackeray's style--a style that has every quality in perfection: simplicity, clearness, ease, force, elasticity, and grace--it is difficult to speak but in terms of unstinted admiration. When we deal with the substance and effective value of his great books we see that, although Thackeray holds his own with the best writers of this century, he cannot be said to hold the same manifest crown of supremacy. One of his strongest claims is the vast quant.i.ty and variety of his best work, and the singularly small proportion of inferior work. Fielding himself wrote pitiful trash when he became, as he said, a mere "hackney writer"; Richardson's _Grandison_ overcomes most readers; Scott at last broke down; Carlyle, Disraeli, d.i.c.kens, and Ruskin have written many things which "we do not turn over by day and turn over by night," to put it as gently as one can. But Thackeray is hardly ever below himself in form, and rarely is he below himself in substance.

_Pendennis_ is certainly much inferior to _Vanity Fair_, and _Philip_ is much inferior to _Pendennis_. _The Virginians_ is far behind _Esmond_. But of the more important books not one can be called in any sense a failure unless it be _Lovel the Widower_, and _The Adventures of Philip_.

Thackeray's masterpiece beyond question is _Vanity Fair_--which as a comedy of the manners of contemporary life is quite the greatest achievement in English literature since _Tom Jones_. It has not the consummate plot of _Tom Jones_; it has not the breadth, the Shakespearean jollity, the genial humanity of the great "prose Homer"; it has no such beautiful character as Sophia Western. It is not the overflowing of a warm, genial, sociable soul, such as that of Henry Fielding. But _Vanity Fair_ may be put beside _Tom Jones_ for variety of character, intense reality, ingenuity of incident, and profusion of wit, humour, and invention. It is even better written than _Tom Jones_; has more pathos and more tragedy; and is happily free from the nauseous blots into which Harry Fielding was betrayed by the taste of his age. It is hard to say what scene in _Vanity Fair_, what part, what character, rests longest in the memory. Is it the home of the Sedleys and the Osbornes, is it Queen's Crawley, or the incidents at Brussels, or at Gaunt House:--is it George Osborne, or Jos, or Miss Crawley, the Major or the Colonel,--is it Lord Steyne or Rebecca? All are excellent, all seem perfect in truth, in consistency, in contrast.

The great triumph of _Vanity Fair_--the great triumph of modern fiction--is Becky Sharp: a character which will ever stand in the very foremost rank of English literature, if not with Falstaff and Shylock, then with Squire Western, Uncle Toby, Mr. Primrose, Jonathan Oldbuck, and Sam Weller. There is no character in the whole range of literature which has been worked out with more elaborate completeness. She is drawn from girlhood to old age, under every conceivable condition, and is brought face to face with all kinds of persons and trials. In all circ.u.mstances Becky is true to herself; her ingenuity, her wit, her selfishness, her audacity, her cunning, her clear, cool, alert brain, even her common sense, her spirit of justice, when she herself is not concerned, and her good-nature, when it could cost her nothing--all this is unfailing, inimitable, never to be forgotten. Some good people cry out that she is so wicked. Of course she is wicked: so were Iago and Blifil. The only question is, if she be real? Most certainly she is, as real as anything in the whole range of fiction, as real as Tartuffe, or Gil Blas, Wilhelm Meister, or Rob Roy. No one doubts that Becky Sharps exist: unhappily they are not even very uncommon. And Thackeray has drawn one typical example of such bad women with an anatomical precision that makes us shudder.

And if Becky Sharp be the masterpiece of Thackeray's art amongst the characters, the scene of her husband's encounter with her paramour is the masterpiece of all the scenes in _Vanity Fair_, and has no superior, hardly any equal, in modern fiction. Becky, Rawdon Crawley, and Lord Steyne--all are inimitably true, all are powerful, all are fearful in their agony and rage. The uprising of the poor rake almost into dignity and heroism, and his wife's outburst of admiration at his vengeance, are strokes of really Shakespearean insight. It was with justice that Thackeray himself felt pride in that touch. "_She stood there trembling before him. She admired her husband, strong, brave, victorious_." It is these touches of clear sight in Becky, her respect for Dobbin, her kindliness to Amelia apart from her own schemes, which make us feel an interest in Becky, loathsome as she is. She is always a woman, and not an inhuman monster, however bad a woman, cruel, heartless, and false.

There remains always the perpetual problem if _Vanity Fair_ be a cynic's view of life, the sardonic grin of a misanthrope gloating over the trickery and meanness of mankind. It is well to remember how many are the scenes of tenderness and pathos in _Vanity Fair_, how powerfully told, how deeply they haunt the memory and sink into the heart. The school life of Dobbin, the ruin of old Sedley and the despair of Amelia, the last parting of Amelia and George, Osborne revoking his will, Sedley broken down, Rawdon in the sponging-house, the birth and boyhood of Georgy Osborne, the end of old Sedley, the end of old Osborne, are as pathetic and humane as anything in our literature. Mature men, who study fiction with a critical spirit and a cool head, admit that the only pa.s.sages in English romance that they can never read again without faltering, without a dim eye and a quavering voice, are these scenes of pain and sorrow in _Vanity Fair_.

The death of old Sedley, nursed by his daughter, is a typical piece--perfect in simplicity, in truth, in pathos.

One night when she stole into his room, she found him awake, when the broken old man made his confession. "O, Emmy, I've been thinking we were very unkind and unjust to you," he said, and put out his cold and feeble hand to her. She knelt down and prayed by his bed-side, as he did too, having still hold of her hand. When our turn comes, friend, may we have such company in our prayers.

And this is the arch-cynic and misanthrope, grinning at all that is loveable and tender!

It is too often forgotten that _Vanity Fair_ is not intended to be simply the world: it is society, it is fashion, the market where mammon-worship, folly, and dissipation display and barter their wares.

Thackeray wrote many other books, and has given us many worthy characters. Dobbin, Warrington, Colonel Newcome, Ethel Newcome, Henry Esmond are generous, brave, just, and true. Neither _Esmond_, nor _The Newcomes_, nor _The Virginians_ are in any sense the work of a misanthrope. And where Thackeray speaks in his own person, in the lectures on the _English Humourists_, he is brimful of all that is genial, frank, lenient, and good-hearted. What we know of the man, who loved his friends and was loved by them, and who in all his critical and personal sketches showed himself a kindly, courteous, and considerate gentleman, inclines us to repel this charge of cynicism.

We will not brand him as a mere satirist, and a cruel mocker at human virtue and goodness.

This is, however, not the whole of the truth. The consent of mankind, and especially the consent of women, is too manifest. There is something ungenial, there is a bitter taste left when we have enjoyed these books, especially as we lay down _Vanity Fair_. It is a long comedy of roguery, meanness, selfishness, intrigue, and affectation.

Rakes, ruffians, bullies, parasites, fortune-hunters, adventurers, women who sell themselves, and men who cheat and cringe, pa.s.s before us in one incessant procession, crushing the weak, and making fools of the good. Such, says our author, is the way of Vanity Fair--which we are warned to loathe and to shun. Be it so:--but it cannot be denied that the rakes, ruffians, and adventurers fill too large a canvas, are too conspicuous, too triumphant, too interesting. They are more interesting than the weak and the good whom they crush under foot: they are drawn with a more glowing brush, they are far more splendidly endowed. They have better heads, stronger wills, richer natures than the good and kind ones who are their b.u.t.ts. Dobbin, as the author himself tells us, "is a spooney." Amelia, as he says also, "is a little fool." Peggy O'Dowd, dear old goody, is the laughing-stock of the regiment, though she is also its grandmother. _Vanity Fair_ has here and there some virtuous and generous characters. But we are made to laugh at every one of them to their very faces. And the evil and the selfish characters bully them, mock them, thrust them aside at every page--and they do so because they are more the stuff of which men and women of any mark are made.

There are evil characters in Shakespeare, in Fielding, in Goldsmith, in Scott: we find ruffians, rakes, traitors, and parasites. But they are not paramount, not universal, not unqualified. Iago is utterly overshadowed by Oth.e.l.lo, Blifil by Alworthy, Tom Jones by Sophia Western, Squire Thornhill by Dr. Primrose, the reprobate Staunton by the good angel Jeanie Deans. Shakespeare, Fielding, Goethe, Scott draw n.o.ble and generous natures quite as well as they paint the evil natures: indeed they paint them better; they enjoy the painting of them more; they make us enjoy them more. Take this test: if we run over the characters of Shakespeare or of Scott we have to reflect before we find the villains. If we run over the characters in Thackeray, it is an effort of memory to recall the generous and the fine natures.

Thackeray has given us some loveable and affectionate men and women; but they all have qualities which lower them and tend to make them either tiresome or ridiculous. Henry Esmond is a high-minded and almost heroic gentleman, but he is glum, a regular kill-joy, and, as his author admitted, something of a prig. Colonel Newcome is a n.o.ble true-hearted soldier; but he is made too good for this world and somewhat too innocent, too transparently a child of nature.

Warrington, with all his sense and honesty, is rough; Pendennis is a bit of a puppy; Clive Newcome is not much of a hero; and as for Dobbin he is almost intended to be a b.u.t.t.

A more serious defect is a dearth in Thackeray of women to love and to honour. Shakespeare has given us a gallery of n.o.ble women; Fielding has drawn the adorable Sophia Western; Scott has his Jeanie Deans. But though Thackeray has given us over and over again living pictures of women of power, intellect, wit, charm, they are all marred by atrocious selfishness, cruelty, ambition, like Becky Sharp, Beatrix Esmond, and Lady Kew; or else they have some weakness, silliness, or narrowness which prevents us from at once loving and respecting them. Amelia is rather a poor thing and decidedly silly; we do not really admire Laura Pendennis; the Little Sister is somewhat colourless; Ethel Newcome runs great risk of being a spoilt beauty; and about Lady Castlewood, with all her love and devotion, there hangs a certain sinister and unnatural taint, which the world cannot forgive, and perhaps ought not to forgive. The sum of all this is, that in all these twenty-six volumes and hundreds of men and women portrayed, there is not one man or one woman having at once a n.o.ble character, perfect generosity, powerful mind, and loveable nature; not one man or one woman of tender heart and perfect honour, but has some trait that tends to make him or her either laughable or tedious. It is not so with the supreme masters of the human heart. And the world does not condone this, and it is right in not condoning it.

But to say this, is not to condemn Thackeray as a cynic. With these many scenes of exquisite tenderness and pathos, with men and women of such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray, with a fine and sympathetic soul, had a creative imagination that was far stronger on the darker and fouler sides of life than it was on the brighter and pure side of life. He saw the bright and pure side: he loved it, he felt with it, he made us love it. But his artistic genius worked with more free and consummate zest when he painted the dark and the foul. His creative imagination fell short of the true equipoise, of that just vision of _chiaroscuro_, which we find in the greatest masters of the human heart. This limitation of his genius has been visited upon Thackeray with a heavy hand. And such as it is, he must bear it.

The place of Thackeray in English literature will always be determined by his _Vanity Fair_: which will be read, we may confidently predict, as long as _Tom Jones_, _Clarissa_, _Tristram Shandy_, _The Antiquary_, and _Pickwick_. But all the best of his pieces, even the smaller _jeux d'esprit_, may be read with delight again and again by young and old.

And of the best are--_Esmond_, _The Newcomes_, _Barry Lyndon_, the _Book of Sn.o.bs_, the _Hoggarty Diamond_, some of the _Burlesques_ and _Christmas Books_, and the _English Humourists_. Of these, _Esmond_ has every quality of a great book, except its artificial form, its excessive elaboration of historical colouring, and its unsavoury plot.

Beatrix Esmond is almost as wonderful a creation as Becky Sharp; though, if formed on a grander mould, she has less fascination than that incorrigible minx. The _Newcomes_, if in some ways the most genial of the longer pieces, is plainly without the power of _Vanity Fair_. And if _Barry Lyndon_ has this power, it is an awful picture of cruelty and meanness. The _Book of Sn.o.bs_ and the _Hoggarty Diamond_ were each a kind of prelude to _Vanity Fair_, and both contain some of its essential marks of pathos and of power. It is indeed strange to us now to remember that both of these books, written with such finished mastery of hand and full of such pa.s.sages of wit and insight, could have been published for years before the world had recognised that it had a new and consummate writer before it. The _Book of Sn.o.bs_ indeed may truly be said to have seriously improved the public opinion of the age, and to have given a death-blow to many odious forms of sycophancy and affectation which pa.s.sed unrebuked in England fifty years ago. And the _Burlesque Romances_ and the _English Humourists_ have certainly a.s.sisted in forming the public taste and in promoting a sound criticism of our standard fiction.

Charlotte Bronte dedicated her _Jane Eyre_, in 1847, to William Makepeace Thackeray, as "the first social regenerator of the day."

Such language, though interesting as coming from a girl of singular genius and sincerity, however ignorant of real life, was excessive.

But we may truly a.s.sert that he has enriched our literature with some cla.s.sical masterpieces in the comedy of contemporary manners.

VI

CHARLES d.i.c.kENS

It is a fearsome thing to venture to say anything now about Charles d.i.c.kens, whom we have all loved, enjoyed, and laughed over: whose tales are household words in every home where the English tongue is heard, whose characters are our own school-friends, the sentiment of our youthful memories, our boon-companions and our early attachments. To view him in any critical light is a task as risky as it would be to discuss the permanent value of some fashionable amus.e.m.e.nt, a favourite actor, a popular beverage, or a famous horse. Millions and millions of old and young love Charles d.i.c.kens, know his personages by heart, play at games with his incidents and names, and from the bottom of their souls believe that there never was such fun, and that there never will be conceived again such inimitable beings, as they find in his ever-fresh and ever-varied pages. This is by itself a very high t.i.tle to honour: perhaps it is the chief jewel in the crown that rests on the head of Charles d.i.c.kens. I am myself one of these devotees, of these lovers, of these slaves of his: or at least I can remember that I have been. To have stirred this pure and natural humanity, this force of sympathy, in such countless millions is a great triumph. Men and women to-day do not want any criticism of Charles d.i.c.kens, any talk about him at all. They enjoy him as he is: they examine one another in his books: they gossip on by the hour about his innumerable characters, his never-to-be-forgotten waggeries and fancies.

No account of early Victorian literature can omit the name of Charles d.i.c.kens from the famous writers of the time. How could we avoid notice of one whose first immortal tale coincides with the accession of our Queen, and who for thirty-three successive years continued to pour out a long stream of books that still delight the English-speaking world?

When we begin to talk about the permanent place in English literature of eminent writers, one of the first definite problems is presented by Charles d.i.c.kens. And it is one of the most obscure of such problems; because, more than almost any writer of our age, Charles d.i.c.kens has his own accustomed nook at every fireside: he is a familiar friend, a welcome guest; we remember the glance of his eye; we have held his hand, as it were, in our own. The children brighten up as his step is heard; the chairs are drawn round the hearth, and a fresh glow is given to the room. We do not criticise one whom we love, nor do we suffer others to do so. And there is perhaps a wider sympathy with Charles d.i.c.kens as a person than with any other writer of our time. For this reason there has been hardly any serious criticism or estimate of d.i.c.kens as a great artist, apart from some peevish and sectional disparagement of his genius, which has been too much tinged with academic pedantry and the bias of aristocratic temper or political antagonism.

I am free to confess that I am in no mood to pretend making up my mind for any impartial estimate of Charles d.i.c.kens as an abiding power in English literature. The "personal equation" is in my own case somewhat too strong to leave me with a perfectly "dry light" in the matter. I will make a clean breast of it at once by saying, that I can remember reading some of the most famous of these books in their green covers, month by month, as they came out in parts, when I was myself a child or "in my 'teens." That period included the first ten of the main works from _Pickwick_ down to _David Copperfield_. With _Bleak House_, which I read as a student of philosophy at Oxford beginning to be familiar with Aristotelian canons, I felt my enjoyment mellowed by a somewhat more measured judgment. From that time onward Charles d.i.c.kens threw himself into a great variety of undertakings and many diverse kinds of publication. His _Hard Times_, _Little Dorrit_, _Our Mutual Friend_, _Great Expectations_, _Tale of Two Cities_, were never to me anything like the wonder and delight that I found in Oliver Twist, Nickleby, and Copperfield. And as to the short tales and the later pieces down to _Edwin Drood_, I never find myself turning back to them; the very memory of the story is fading away; and I fail to recall the characters and names. A mature judgment will decide that the series after _David Copperfield_, written when the author was thirty-eight, was not equal to the series of the thirteen years preceding. Charles d.i.c.kens will always be remembered by _Pickwick_, _Oliver Twist_, _Nickleby_, and _Copperfield_. And though these tales will long continue to delight both old and young, learned and unlearned alike, they are most to be envied who read him when young, and they are most to be pitied who read him with a critical spirit. May that be far from us, as we take up our _Pickwick_ and talk over the autobiographic pathos of _David Copperfield_.

This vivid sympathy with the man is made stronger in my own case in that, from my own boyhood till his death, I was continually seeing him, was frequently his neighbour both in London and the seaside, knew some of his friends, and heard much about him and about his work. Though I never spoke to him, there were times when I saw him almost daily; I heard him speak and read in public; and his favourite haunts in London and the country have been familiar to me from my boyhood. And thus, as I read again my _Pickwick_, and _Nickleby_, and _Copperfield_, there come back to me many personal and local memories of my own. The personality of Charles d.i.c.kens was, even to his distant readers, vivid and intense; and hence it is much more so to those who have known his person. I am thus an ardent Pickwickian myself; and anything I say about our immortal Founder must be understood in a Pickwickian sense.

Charles d.i.c.kens was before all things a great humourist--doubtless the greatest of this century; for, though we may find in Scott a more truly Shakespearean humour of the highest order, the humour of d.i.c.kens is so varied, so paramount, so inexhaustible, that he stands forth in our memory as the humourist of the age. Swift, Fielding, Hogarth, Sterne, and Goldsmith, in the last century, reached at times a more enduring level of humour without caricature; but the gift has been more rarely imparted to their successors in the age of steam. Now, we shall never get an adequate definition of that imponderable term--humour--a term which, perhaps, was invented to be the eternal theme of budding essayists. We need not be quite as liberal in our interpretation of humour as was Thackeray in opening his _English Humourists_; for he declared that its business was to awaken and direct our love, our pity, our kindness, our scorn for imposture, our tenderness for the weak, to comment on the actions and pa.s.sions of life, to be the week-day preacher--and much more to that effect. But it may serve our immediate purpose to say with Samuel Johnson that humour is "grotesque imagery"; and "grotesque" is "distorted of figure; unnatural." That is to say, humour is an effort of the imagination presenting human nature with some element of distortion or disproportion which instantly kindles mirth. It must be imaginative; it must touch the bed-rock of human nature; it must arouse merriment and not anger or scorn. In this fine and most rare gift Charles d.i.c.kens abounded to overflowing; and this humour poured in perfect cataracts of "grotesque imagery" over every phase of life of the poor and the lower middle cla.s.ses of his time, in London and a few of its suburbs and neighbouring parts.