From the nature of his subjects and from his mode of treatment Marryat invites comparison with his predecessors, Smollett and Fenimore Cooper, as well as with his contemporary, Michael Scott, who, next to Marryat himself, is the best of the naval story-tellers of that time. Marryat is by no means the equal of Smollett in richness of humour. His is rather the humour of boisterous spirits than that intellectual quality which gives so fine a flavour to books. On the other hand, Marryat is much more humane than Smollett. The life depicted by both is rough to the last degree. In Smollett, the roughness frequently passes over into brutality; while Marryat, though he depicts brutality, never seems to share it. As against the American, Cooper, Marryat has the advantage, in his sea stories, of greater familiarity with the life he paints; Cooper’s strength is elsewhere, and there he reaches higher than Marryat’s highest point.
Michael Scott
(1789-1835).
Michael Scott, one of the Blackwood group of writers, would be not unworthy to be bracketed with Marryat if a man could be judged by parts of his books without regard to the whole; but unfortunately Tom Cringle’s Log (1829-30) and The Cruise of the Midge (1836) are little more than scenes and incidents loosely strung together. Perhaps Scott was influenced by the genius loci; at any rate his books resemble the Noctes Ambrosianæ in so far as they are the outlet to every riotous fancy and every lawless freak of the writer’s humour.
Marryat had several imitators, the best of whom were Glascock and Chamier, the latter still fairly well known by name as the author of Ben Brace and The Arethusa. But though they had practical experience of sea life, like Marryat, Glascock and Chamier had not his literary faculty. At a later date, James Hannay, the essayist and critic, essayed the naval tale with more literary skill, but without the practical knowledge possessed by these men.
Samuel Warren
(1807-1877).
To a wholly different class belonged the once famous Samuel Warren. He was a barrister and the author of several legal works, but his literary career was determined rather by a short period of medical study in Edinburgh, before he resolved to be a barrister. His acquaintance with Christopher North opened the pages of Blackwood to him, and he utilised his medical training in the Diary of a Late Physician, an unpleasantly realistic book which first appeared in that magazine. Ten Thousand a Year (1841), though commonplace in substance, was interesting. Warren lived upon the reputation of this book. His subsequent attempts were failures, and he was known through life as the author of Ten Thousand a Year.
CHAPTER V
FICTION: THE INTERMEDIATE PERIOD
Where dates so overlap it is impossible to find, and therefore misleading to seek for, absolute divisions. Some of the writers to be treated in this chapter began to publish only a few years after those dealt with in the last, and great part of their career was strictly contemporaneous. The division only means that, on the whole, we can recognise in the earlier writers a closer relationship with the preceding period, a more direct debt to Scott and Byron. In the fourth decade of the century we begin to see the romance of the Middle Ages and of the East giving place to the humours of low life in Dickens, to satire on society in Thackeray, and to the novel of passion in the Brontës. These writers may be said to form ideals of their own, and though they do not constitute a school they are each distinguished by characteristics which we recognise as the growth of the present period.
Charles Dickens
(1812-1870).
The difference between good work and excellent work is seen when we turn from even the best of the earlier writers to Charles Dickens. The novelist’s father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the navy pay-office; and the circumstances of the lad’s early life are universally known from David Copperfield, a novel largely autobiographical. Forster’s biography proves that the picture of the miserable little drudge, David, is even painfully accurate. The sordid life, both of his home, with its mysterious ‘deeds’ leading up to his father’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea, and of the London streets and the blacking warehouse, was the best possible for the development of his talents; but the bitterness of it never faded from his memory. Neither can it be denied that certain of the faults of Dickens may with probability be explained by his early life. His many fine qualities were marred by a slight strain of vulgarity, visible both in his works and in his life, from which the surroundings of a happier home would almost certainly have preserved a nature so sensitive.
The family circumstances improved, and in 1824 Dickens was sent to a school at once poor and pretentious, where he remained for two years. He afterwards spent some time in a lawyer’s office, but left it to become a reporter. After much toil he became, in his own words, which are confirmed by the estimate of others, ‘the best and most rapid reporter ever known.’ Journalism is akin to literature, and Dickens gradually drifted into authorship. His first article, A Dinner at Poplar Walk, now entitled Mr. Minns and his Cousin, appeared in the old Monthly Magazine for December, 1833; and the collected papers were published in 1836, under the title of Sketches by Boz. They were in some respects crude, but they contained the promise of genius. The first drafts of some of Dickens’s best characters are to be found in them, and the sketches are eminently fresh and independent. Few books owe less to other books than the early works of Dickens. His book was the streets of London; and even what he read was best assimilated if it had some connexion with them. George Colman’s description of Covent Garden captivated him. ‘He remembered,’ says Forster, ‘snuffing up the flavour of the faded cabbage-leaves as if it were the very breath of comic fiction;’ and Forster adds, with justice, ‘it was reserved for himself to give a sweeter and fresher breath to it.’ For to the honour of Dickens it may be said that, despite certain lapses of taste, he seldom forgot that ‘there is as much reality in the scent of a rose as in the smell of a sewer.’
The extraordinary rapidity with which Dickens rose to popularity is indicated by the advance in the value of his copyrights. He sold the copyright of Sketches by Boz for £150, and before Pickwick was finished in the following year, he found reason to buy it back for no less than £2,000. Pickwick, scarcely equalled for broad humour in the English language, was published in monthly parts, and finished in November, 1837. It was Pickwick that led to the first meeting between Dickens and Thackeray; for on the suicide of Seymour, the original illustrator, Thackeray was one of those who offered to execute the sketches. Oliver Twist was begun before Pickwick was finished; and in the same way Nicholas Nickleby overlapped Oliver. Thus the stream flowed on for many years; and though towards the close of his life the rate of production was slower, Dickens, like Thackeray, was writing to the last.
The life of Dickens was purely literary, and was diversified by few incidents. But he was liable to overstrain, as men of great nervous energy are apt to be, and was consequently forced to allow himself occasional holidays. During one of these, in 1842, he visited America, and wrote, in consequence, the not very wise or generous American Notes. This journey bore fruit in Martin Chuzzlewit. Two years later he made a journey to Italy, and subsequently he was several times on the continent and once again in America. The influence of the continental journeys can be traced in A Tale of Two Cities, though the story is rather due to Carlyle’s French Revolution than to the personal observation of Dickens. A more serious interruption than any holiday he ever allowed himself was his indulgence, for so it may be described, in public readings. They increased his wealth, and they gratified the vanity which, in spite of his biographer, was one of the weaknesses of Dickens; but they impaired his literary work, and in all probability they hastened his death. Besides these readings, the nervous strain of which was very great, Dickens encumbered himself with editorial work. He conducted Household Words from its start in 1850; and when it stopped in 1859 he started All the Year Round, with which he was connected till his death. Through these various distractions both the quantity and the quality of his original work declined. Probably after David Copperfield he never wrote anything altogether first-rate. His health too gave way under the strain, and he died at the age of 58, on June 9th, 1870.
Dickens has enjoyed a popularity probably unparalleled among English writers. Forster has calculated that during the twelve years succeeding his death no fewer than 4,239,000 volumes of his works were sold in Britain. The secret was in the first place originality. Dickens had lived the life he depicted. With a strong memory and keen powers of observation he had been storing up from early boyhood information which in his maturer years served him well. ‘Sam’s knowledge of London was extensive and peculiar,’ he writes of Weller, when Mr. Pickwick addresses him with a sudden query about the nearest public house; and he illustrates Sam’s knowledge by making him answer without a moment’s hesitation. Dickens himself, if put down suddenly in any quarter of London, could probably have answered the question with equal readiness. He was emphatically a man of cities, was restless when he was long away from streets, and loved above all things the streets of London.
But he was still more an observer of persons than an observer of places. Even in boyhood he judged men with great accuracy; and after he had won fame he asserted that he had never seen cause to change the secret impression of his boyhood with regard to anyone whom he had known then. Moreover, he never forgot. In his troubled and wretched boyhood, therefore, he was ‘making himself,’ though involuntarily and in an unpleasant fashion, as much as Scott was by his Liddesdale raids.
It is however the something added to observation that gives literary value; and had Dickens added nothing he would have been far on the way to oblivion now. Shakespeare may have based Falstaff on observation; but probably no man, except Shakespeare himself, was ever quite as humorous as the fat knight. Similarly, it is safe to assert that Dickens never met a Londoner with all the wit and resource of Sam Weller. ‘The little more, and how much it is.’ What the artist adds creates the character. Incidents he has seen, phrases he has heard, are only the raw material for his imagination. Humour is practically non-existent unless it is understood; and, as a more recent humourist has whimsically insisted, there may be here a kind of division of labour, the humour being lodged in one mind and the comprehension of it in another. It is so with Dickens. He sympathises, appreciates, interprets, and thus in part creates. He frequently makes the fun by his own keen sense of it.
But while Dickens was excellent within his own sphere, that sphere was comparatively small. He was good only as a painter of his own generation and of what had come under his own experience. Living in the days of the historical novel, Dickens nevertheless felt that his talent lay in the delineation of contemporary manners. Neither his education nor the bent of his mind fitted him to excel in the historical romance. Twice he tried the experiment—in Barnaby Rudge, and in A Tale of Two Cities; but on both occasions he wisely kept pretty close to his own time. Barnaby Rudge is, by general consent, second-rate, and whatever may be the true value of A Tale of Two Cities, its merit is not essentially of the historical kind. It is Scott who has written the history of the Porteous riot and of the rebellion of ’45; and our most vivid impression of society in Queen Anne’s time comes from Esmond. But there is no danger of Carlyle’s French Revolution being superseded by A Tale of Two Cities.
Neither has Dickens command over a wide range of character. He is completely at home only in one grade of society, and, as a rule, the farther he moves from the lower ranks of Londoners the more he falls short of excellence. Coachmen, showmen, servants of all kinds, beadles, self-made men of imperfect education, he could depict with wonderful force and vivacity; but his triumphs in the higher ranks are few. The reason lies partly in the character of the experience he had acquired, partly in his manner of conception. Dickens was theatrical and had a tendency to farce; above all, he was by nature a caricaturist. If anyone, man or woman, presented some conspicuous peculiarity, whether of disposition, or of physical appearance, or of dress, Dickens was happy and made the most of it. But education and social convention tend to smooth away angularities and prominences, and hence among the classes influenced by them he rarely found the material he needed.
The characters of Dickens, then, are personified humours, his method is the method not of Shakespeare, but of Ben Jonson. Pecksniff is just another name for hypocrisy, Jonas Chuzzlewit for avarice, Quilp for cruelty. The result is excellent of its kind. The repetitions and catch-words are, within limits, highly effective. Sometimes they are genuinely illuminative; but sometimes, on the other hand, they reveal nothing and are used to weariness. The ‘waiting for something to turn up’ of the Micawber family goes to the root of their character. But ‘ain’t I volatile?’ ‘Donkeys, Janet,’ the sleepiness of the Fat Boy, Pecksniff and Salisbury Cathedral, even the jollity of Mark Tapley, are worn threadbare. Mrs. Harris herself is heard of rather too often. Exaggeration has no law, it is rather the abrogation of law; and the writer who adopts the method of exaggeration pays the price in losing all check upon himself.
In exaggeration too we find the defect of Dickens’s highest quality. His humour, like the humour of the country he at first satirised so bitterly, rests too much on exaggeration. It is ready, copious, irresistible; but, while it wins and deserves admiration, it rarely provokes the exclamation, ‘how natural,’ or ‘how true.’ Micawber is one of the most comical characters in fiction, but we are not struck by his fidelity to nature. Though he is drawn from the life he is not representative, but rather belongs to the class of curiosities whose natural resting-place is a museum.
The mannerism of which this is one form runs through the whole of the work of Dickens, affecting style as well as substance, the description of nature as well as the delineation of character. The English is nervous and vivid, but little regard is paid to proportion. The minutest detail, if it happens to strike the writer’s fancy, is elaborated as if it were vital to the story. The moaning of the sea, the freaks of the wind, the fluttering of a leaf, are dilated upon in paragraph after paragraph. It is the romantic method liberated from all restraint. There is no poetry more heavily charged with the ‘pathetic fallacy’ than the prose of Dickens; and in prose it is more dangerous because of the absence of the trammels of verse.
The dangers of this style and this manner of conception become more conspicuous when we turn to other manifestations of them. Dickens was in his own time thought to be a master of the pathetic equally with the mirthful strain. It was correct taste to weep over little Nell; and Jeffrey, no very indulgent critic of contemporaries, declared that there had been nothing so good since Cordelia. Dickens has been dead only a quarter of a century, but few critics would pronounce such a judgment now. His humour so far retains its power; but the veneer has already worn off his pathos. Little Nell and little Emily may still draw tears, more tears perhaps than were ever shed for the fate of Cordelia. But this is not the best test of the quality of pathos. That which, from Homer to Shakespeare, has conquered the suffrages of the world, is solemnising and saddening, rather than tear-compelling. Tears are within the range of a very ordinary writer, but to produce a tragic Cordelia or Antigone is only possible to a Shakespeare or a Sophocles. The truth is that the faults of Dickens, apparent in his humour but pardonable there, become offensive in his pathos. His touch is not sufficiently delicate, he does not know when to leave off, he unduly prolongs the agony. The death-scene of Cordelia and Lear, perhaps the most tragically pathetic in all literature, occupies some sixty or seventy lines. How different from this are the scenes relating to the death of Little Nell! Their very diffuseness has contributed to their popularity, but it damages them as literature.
Many of the other faults of Dickens are cognate to this. He sacrifices everything for effect, and hence his proneness to horrors. The pictures are often wonderfully done, but they are unwholesome. The murder by Jonas Chuzzlewit, and still more the murder of Nancy, are examples. Sometimes Dickens goes wholly beyond the reach of pardon, as in the purely horrible and sickening description of spontaneous combustion in Bleak House. More frequently the sin is rather against proportion. We hear too much of the dragging of the river for dead bodies in Our Mutual Friend. Dickens never could learn where to stop. His highly pictorial imagination presented to him every detail of the scene; and, like a Pre-Raphaelite, he forgot that to the reader a general impression conveyed more truth than minute accuracy in every detail.
The faults of Dickens grew with time, his merits tended to decline; but even to the end the characteristic merits are to be found. It was not unjustly said that his death had once more eclipsed the gaiety of nations.
William Makepeace Thackeray
(1811-1863).
While Dickens, as has been seen, leaped into fame, his only contemporary rival, William Makepeace Thackeray, slowly and with difficulty forced his way to it. He was the senior of Dickens by rather more than half a year, having been born at Calcutta on July 18th, 1811. He was educated at the Charterhouse; and if his feelings may be inferred from his works they must have changed considerably. In his earlier writings it is Slaughter House; in The Newcomes it is the celebrated Grey Friars. After leaving school Thackeray went in 1829 to Cambridge, but he left the University in 1830 without taking his degree. While he was there he contributed to The Snob, the name of which suggested to him a title in after years. One of his papers was an amusing burlesque on Timbuctoo, the subject for the prize poem, won by Tennyson, for 1829. In 1830 Thackeray went to Weimar, and he spent a considerable time there and in Paris training himself as an artist. The inaccuracy of his drawing was a fatal bar to his success in art; but he turned his studies to account afterwards in illustrating his own books; and there are probably no works in English in which the illustrations throw more light upon the text. In 1832 he became master of his little fortune of about £500 per annum, all of which was lost within a year or two. Most of it was sunk in an unprofitable newspaper adventure, reference to which is made in Lovel the Widower, and, with less accuracy of circumstance, in Pendennis. But if he lost his money by a newspaper, it was by journalism that he first gained his livelihood. He wrote for The Times, for Fraser’s Magazine, and for the New Monthly Magazine, contributing to the second some of the most important of his early works; and for about eight years (1842-1850) he was one of the principal literary contributors to Punch. In these periodicals there appeared during the ten years, 1837-1847, The Yellowplush Papers, The Great Hoggarty Diamond, Barry Lyndon, The Book of Snobs and The Ballads of Policeman X. Thackeray had also published independently The Paris Sketch-Book and The Irish Sketch-Book.
Vanity Fair (1847-1848) was Thackeray’s first novel on the great scale. Barry Lyndon was indeed an exhibition of the highest intellectual power; but it was not of the orthodox length, and it failed to bring the writer wide fame. Vanity Fair did bring him fame among the more thoughtful readers, though not a popularity rivalling that of Dickens. It was followed by Pendennis (1849-1850), Esmond (1852) and The Newcomes (1854-1855). Esmond was the only one that was published as a whole, and it is significant that it is by far the best constructed of the four usually accepted as Thackeray’s greatest novels. The periodical method of publication had peculiar dangers for him. He was constitutionally indolent, almost always left his work to the last moment, and sometimes had to patch up his part anyhow.
In 1851 Thackeray delivered the lectures on the Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, and repeated the course in America in 1852-1853. The lectures on The Four Georges were delivered first in America (1855-1856). Of all Thackeray’s writings these two courses have probably had the most scanty justice meted out to them. Critics are frequently apologetic, sometimes condescending. Nobody need apologise, and few can afford to condescend with respect to what are really among the richest and best criticisms of this century. Thackeray knew not only the literature but the life of the eighteenth century as few have known it. In minute acquaintance with facts he has doubtless been surpassed by many professional historians; but there is no book to be compared to Esmond as a picture of life in the age of Queen Anne; and the lectures on the humourists are saturated, as Esmond is, with the eighteenth century spirit. The figures of the humourists live and move before our eyes. We may not always agree with the critic’s opinion, but we can hardly fail to understand the subject better through his mode of treatment. Strong objection has been taken, perhaps in some respects with justice, to his handling of Swift. Yet, much as has been written about Swift, where does there exist a picture of him so vivid, so suggestive and so memorable? Who else has done such justice to Steele? Who has written better about Hogarth? Thackeray succeeded because he not only knew the work of these men but felt with them. He was at bottom of the eighteenth century type. Much of Swift himself, softened and humanised, something of Fielding, whom he justly regarded as a model, and a great deal of Hogarth may be detected in Thackeray. The best criticism is always sympathetic; and it is because sympathy is so easy to him here that Thackeray is so excellent. The treatment even of Swift is far from being unsympathetic.
With the four Georges Thackeray was certainly not in sympathy. But they afforded him an ample field for the exercise of his satiric gifts, and he found occasion in his treatment of them for some passages of his most eloquent writing. The objection taken to this course of lectures has been as much political as literary. Thackeray is supposed to have treated the throne with scanty reverence; but it is the throne itself that is lacking in reverence when such lives are led; and the day for the concealment of disagreeable truths has long gone by.
The Virginians, a continuation of Esmond, ran its periodical course from 1857 to 1859. In the latter year Thackeray became editor of the Cornhill, for which he wrote Lovel the Widower (1860), The Adventures of Philip (1861-1862), and the delicious Roundabout Papers, which he contributed occasionally from the beginning of his editorship to his death. Denis Duval had not even begun to appear in the magazine, and only a small part had been written when the author was suddenly cut off at the age of fifty-two.
It would not be easy to name two great contemporary writers, working in the same field of letters, more radically unlike than Dickens and Thackeray. Even the qualities they possess in common diverge as far as qualities bearing the same name can do. Both are humourists; but the humour of Thackeray is permeated through and through with satire; that of Dickens has not infrequently a touch of satire, but its essential principle is pure fun, and it is largely burlesque. We look for it in the absurdities of the Micawber family, in the Jarley wax-works, in the ridiculous adventures of the Pickwick Club, and in the solemn fatuity of Silas Wegg. Thackeray was a master of burlesque too, as his imitations of contemporary novels—Phil Fogarty, Codlingsby, Rebecca and Rowena—and his Ballads of Policeman X prove. But it is a totally different burlesque. That of Dickens moves to laughter, and the laughter is frequently uproarious; Thackeray only excites a smile and a chuckle of intellectual enjoyment.
The two writers differ equally in their pathos. Dickens, as we have seen, draws it out, paragraph after paragraph, chapter piled on chapter. Thackeray concentrates, partly from the artist’s knowledge that concentration is necessary to permanent effect, in greater degree because of a personal dignity, accompanied by reticence, in which Dickens was certainly deficient. Just as there are substances which will not bear light, so there are feelings which seem to be profaned if they are too long exposed to view. All art involves exposure; but the difference between perfect taste and defective taste lies in knowing just in what manner and how long to make the exposure. In The Four Georges two paragraphs contain all we are told about the last tragic years of George III.; and just a few lines of eloquence and pathos rarely equalled close the story.
When we search back from symptom to cause we find the secret of these and many other differences in the fact that the work of Dickens is primarily sentimental, while Thackeray’s is primarily intellectual. This is by no means equivalent to saying that Dickens is deficient in intellect, or Thackeray in sentiment. It means rather that the strong intellect of Dickens is the servant of sentiment, the strong sentiment of Thackeray the servant of intellect. It is another way of saying that Thackeray is essentially of the eighteenth century, the century of predominant understanding. It follows from his satirical way of viewing life; for the satirist must not wholly lose himself even in his sæva indignatio. The effect of his satire depends upon his keeping aloof, critical, superior. The Romans were great satirists because they did so; the English are great satirists in so far as they do so likewise. Something is lost in emotion, as art, something is gained in comprehension, for practical application.
No one can doubt that Thackeray is thus reflective and satirical. Critic after critic has called attention to his habit of staying the course of his story for comment and exposition. Not only so, but there is subdued and disguised comment all through. The artist makes each character criticise itself; and the effect is as if we were walking constantly in the light of those rays which pierce through the opaque and reveal what lies beneath. Thackeray’s satire plays continually over the characters he creates for warning and example. Blanche Amory, Becky Sharp, Major Pendennis, all have their inner motives exposed by this searching and pitiless light. So much is this the case that Thackeray has been described as not properly a novelist at all, but first of all a satirist. The difference is that the novelist primarily exhibits life as it is, while the satirist comments upon it. That Thackeray does the latter is obvious; but it seems an exaggeration to say that he is not properly a novelist. Though most of his stories are loosely constructed, though plot and incident are of subordinate importance, yet without the story his books would be vitally different. Moreover, the pure satirist commonly deals with types rather than individuals. Juvenal does so, Horace does so, Swift does so. So does Thackeray himself in The Book of Snobs. But Becky Sharp and Major Pendennis and Beatrix Esmond all have individuality.
Further, in what may fairly be regarded as Thackeray’s highest effort, satire sinks to a secondary place. Esmond, though not the best known of Thackeray’s works, is his purest piece of art. It is so, partly at least, because the conditions presupposed by the story put a curb upon the satirical tendency, in which undeniably Thackeray was too prone to indulge. In Esmond the writer is restrained in two ways. First, as the hero is himself the narrator, the sentiments have to be fitted to his character. And Henry Esmond was not the familiar compound of weakness and selfishness, crossed with some good nature and with occasional higher impulses, but, on the contrary, Thackeray’s ideal man. He is endowed with a power of satire, but it is rarely exercised. The second restraint arose from the need of unceasing watchfulness to use language consistent with the time in which the story is laid. If Thackeray was tempted to be careless, this necessity must have kept him constantly in check. And so well did he satisfy the requirements that Esmond is admitted on all hands to be, of all books in English, that which most accurately reproduces the style of a past age.
It is remarkable that the same book which contains the noblest figure Thackeray ever drew contains also the most lovable of his good women, and the most brilliant and fascinating of the class that cannot be called good. All critics have been struck with Thackeray’s tendency to make his good women weak and colourless, or else sermons incarnate. Amelia and Helen Pendennis are examples of the former class, Laura of the latter. Lady Castlewood escapes the censure. She has greater strength of character than Amelia or Helen; and her human weaknesses win a sympathy Laura does not command. Moreover, there is no other woman of her type shown in the light of passion as she is in that perfect chapter, The 29th December. Beatrix, on the contrary, ranks among the reprobate. She is not so wonderfully clever as Becky Sharp, but she has what Becky has not, fascination. Becky has only her intellect. Beatrix, clever too, has, besides her social position, splendid beauty, and above all the indescribable magnetic power of attraction. She can win men against themselves, and though they are alive to all the evil of her character. Becky can only win those whom she has blinded.