English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History Part 46

In this work he began that a.s.sault, not so much on shams as upon prominent, unblushing evil, which he carried on in some form or other in all his later works; and which was to make him prominent among the reformers and benefactors of his age. He was at once famous, and his pen was in demand to amuse the idle and to aid the philanthropic.

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.--The _Pickwick Papers_ were in their intention a series of sketches somewhat desultory and loosely connected. His next work was _Nicholas Nickleby_, a complete story, in which he was entirely successful. Wonderful in the variety and reality of his characters, his powerful satire was here princ.i.p.ally directed against the private boarding-schools in England, where unloved children, exiled and forgotten, were ill fed, scantily clothed, untaught, and beaten. Do-the-boys' Hall was his type, and many a school prison under that name was fearfully exposed and scourged. The people read with wonder and applause; these haunts of cruelty were scrutinized, some of them were suppressed; and since Nicholas Nickleby appeared no such school can live, because Squeers and Smike are on every lip, and punishment awaits the tyrant.

Our scope will not permit a review of his numerous novels. In _Oliver Twist_ he denounces the parish system in its care of orphans, and throws a Drummond light upon the haunts of crime in London.

_The Old Curiosity Shop_ exposes the mania of gaming, and seems to have been a device for presenting the pathetic pictures of _Little Nell_ and her grandfather, the wonderful and rapid learning of the marchioness, and the uncommon vitality of Mr. Richard Swiveller; and also the compound of will and hideousness in Quilp.

He affected to find in the receptacle of Master Humphrey's clock, his _Barnaby Rudge_, a very dramatic picture of the great riot incited by Lord George Gordon in 1780, which, in its gathering, its fury, and its easy dispersion, was not unlike that of Wat Tyler. d.i.c.kens's delineations are eminently historic, and present a better notion of the period than the general history itself.

AMERICAN NOTES.--In 1841 d.i.c.kens visited America, where he was received by the public with great enthusiasm, and annoyed, as the author of his biography says, by many individuals. On his return to England, he produced his _American Notes for General Circulation_. They were sarcastic, superficial, and depreciatory, and astonished many whose hospitalities he had received. But, in 1843, he published _Martin Chuzzlewit_, in which American peculiarities are treated with the broadest caricature. The _Notes_ might have been forgiven; but the novel excited a great and just anger in America. His statements were not true; his pictures were not just; his prejudice led him to malign a people who had received him with a foolish hospitality. He had eaten and drunk at the hands of the men whom he abused, and his character suffered more than that of his intended victims. In taking a few foibles for his caricature, he had left our merits untold, and had been guilty of the implication that we had none, although he knew that there were as elegant gentlemen, as refined ladies, and as cultivated society in America as the best in England. But a truce to reproaches; he has been fully forgiven.

His next novel was _Dombey and Son_, in which he attacks British pomp and pride of state in the haughty merchant. It is full of character and of pathos. Every one knows, as if they had appeared among us, the proud and rigid Dombey, J. B. the sly, the unhappy Floy, the exquisite Toots, the inimitable Nipper, Sol Gills the simple, and Captain Cuttle with his hook and his notes.

This was followed by _David Copperfield_, which is, to some extent, an autobiography describing the struggles of his youth, his experience in acquiring short-hand to become a reporter, and other vicissitudes of his own life. In it there is an attack upon the system of model prisons; but the chief interest is found in his wonderful portraitures of varied and opposite characters: the Peggottys, Steerforth, the inimitable Micawber, Betsy Trotwood; Agnes, the lovely and lovable; Mr. d.i.c.k, with such n.o.ble method in his madness; Dora, the child-wife; the simple Traddles, and Uriah Heep, the 'umble intriguer and villain.

_Bleak House_ is a tremendous onslaught upon the Chancery system, and is said to have caused a modification of it; his knowledge of law gave him the power of an expert in detailing and dissecting its enormities.

_Little Dorrit_ presents the heartlessness of society, and is besides a full and fearful picture of the system of imprisonment for debt. For variety, power, and pathos, it is one of his best efforts.

_A Tale of Two Cities_ is a gloomy but vivid story of the French Revolution, which has by no means the popularity of his other works.

In _Hard Times_, a shorter story, he has shown the evil consequences of a hard, statistical, cramming education, in which the sympathies are repressed, and the mind made a practical machine. The failure of Gradgrind has warned many a parent from imitating him.

_Great Expectations_ failed to fulfil the promise of the name; but Joe Gargery is as original a character as any he had drawn.

His last completed story is _Our Mutual Friend_, which, although unequal to his best novels, has still original characters and striking scenes. The rage for rising in the social scale ruins the Veneerings, and Podsnappery is a well-chosen name far the heartless dogmatism which rules in English society.

Besides these splendid works, we must mention the delight he has given, and the good he has done in expanding individual and public charity, by his exquisite Christmas stories, of which _The Chimes_, _The Christmas Carol_, and _The Cricket on the Hearth_ are the best.

His dramatic power has been fully ill.u.s.trated by the ready adaptations of his novels to the stage; they are, indeed, in scenes, personages, costume, and interlocution, dramas in all except the form; and he himself was an admirable actor.

HIS VARIED POWERS.--His tenderness is touching, and his pathos at once excites our sympathy. He does not tell us to feel or to weep, but he shows us scenes like those in the life of Smike, and in the sufferings and death of Little Nell, which so simply appeal to the heart that we are for the time forgetful of the wand which conjures them before us.

d.i.c.kens is bold in the advocacy of truth and in denouncing error; he is the champion of honest poverty; he is the foe of cla.s.s pretension and oppression; he is the friend of friendless children; the reformer of those whom society has made vagrants. Without many clear a.s.sertions of Christian doctrine, but with no negation of it, he believes in doing good for its own sake,--in self-denial, in the rewards which virtue gives herself. His faults are few and venial. His merry life smacks too much of the practical joke and the punch-bowl; he denounces cant in the self-appointed ministers of the gospel, but he is not careful to draw contrasted pictures of good pastors. His opinion seems to be based upon a human perfectibility. But for rare pictures of real life he has never been surpa.s.sed; and he has instructed an age, concerning itself, wisely, originally, and usefully. He has the simplicity of Goldsmith, and the truth to nature of Fielding and Smollett, without a spice of sentimentalism or of impurity; he has brought the art of prose fiction to its highest point, and he has left no worthy successor. He lived for years separated from his wife on the ground of incompatibility, and, during his later years at Gadshill, twenty miles from London, to avoid the dissipations and draughts upon his time in that city.

SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA.--In 1868 he again visited America, to read portions of his own works. He was well received by the public; but society had learned its lesson on his former visit, and he was not overwhelmed with a hospitality he had so signally failed to appreciate. And if we had learned better, he had vastly improved; the genius had become a gentleman.

His readings were a great pecuniary success, and at their close he made an amend which was graceful and proper; so that when he departed from our sh.o.r.es his former errors were fully condoned, and he left an admiring hemisphere behind him.

In the glow of health, and while writing, in serial numbers, a very promising novel ent.i.tled _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, he was struck by apoplexy, in June, 1870, and in a few hours was dead. England has hardly experienced a greater loss. All cla.s.ses of men mourned when he was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the poets' corner, among ill.u.s.trious writers,--a prose-poet, none of whom has a larger fame than he; a historian of his time of greater value to society than any who distinctively bear the t.i.tle. His characters are drawn from life; his own experience is found in _Nicholas Nickleby_ and _David Copperfield_; _Micawber_ is a caricature of his own father. _Traddles_ is said to represent his friend Talfourd.

_Skimpole_ is supposed to be an original likeness of Leigh Hunt, and William and Daniel Grant, of Manchester, were the originals of the _Brothers Cheeryble_.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.--d.i.c.kens gives us real characters in the garb of fiction; but Thackeray uses fiction as the vehicle of social philosophy. Great name, second only to d.i.c.kens; he is not a story-teller, but an eastern Cadi administering justice in the form of apologue. d.i.c.kens is eminently dramatic; Thackeray has nothing dramatic, neither scene nor personage. He is Democritus the laughing philosopher, or Jupiter the thunderer; he arraigns vice, pats virtue on the shoulder, shouts for muscular Christianity, uncovers shams,--his personages are only names.

d.i.c.kens describes individuals; Thackeray only cla.s.ses: his men and women are representatives, and, with but few exceptions, they excite our sense of justice, but not our sympathy; the princ.i.p.al exception is _Colonel Newcome_, a real individual creation upon whom Thackeray exhausted his genius, and he stands alone.

Thackeray was born in Calcutta, of an old Yorkshire family, in 1811. His father was in the civil service, and he was sent home, when a child of seven, for his education at the Charter House in London. Thence he was entered at Cambridge, but left without being graduated. An easy fortune of 20,000 led him to take life easily; he studied painting with somewhat of the desultory devotion he has ascribed to Clive Newcome, and, like that worthy, travelled on the Continent. Partly by unsuccessful investments, and partly by careless living, his means were spent, and he took up writing as a profession. The comic was his forte, and his early pieces, written under the pseudonym of Michael Angelo Fitzmarsh and George Fitz Boodle, are broadly humorous, but by no means in his later finished style.

_The Great Hoggarty Diamond_ (1841) did not disclose his full powers.

In 1841, _Punch_, a weekly comic ill.u.s.trated sheet, was begun, and it opened to Thackeray a field which exactly suited him. Short sc.r.a.ps of comedy, slightly connected sketches, and the weekly tale of brick, chimed with his humor, and made him at once a favorite. The best of these serial contributions were _The Sn.o.b Papers_: they are as fine specimens of humorous satire as exist in the language. But these would not have made him famous, as they did not disclose his power as a novelist.

VANITY FAIR.--This was done by his _Vanity Fair_, which was published, in monthly numbers, between 1846 and 1848. It was at once popular, and is the most artistic of all his works. He called it a novel without a hero, and he is right; the mind repudiates all aspirants for the post, and settles upon poor Major Sugar-Plums as the best man in it. He could not have said _without a heroine_, for does not the world since ring with the fame of Becky Sharpe, the cleverest and wickedest little woman in England? The virtuous reader even is sorry that Becky must come to grief, as, with a proper respect to morality, the novelist makes her.

Never had the Vanity Fair of European society received so scathing a dissection; and its author was immediately recognized as one of the greatest living satirists and novelists. If he adheres more to the old school of Fielding, who was his model, in his plots and handling of the story, he was evidently original in his satire.

In 1847, upon the completion of this work, he began his _History of Pendennis_, in serial numbers, in which he presents the hero, Arthur Pendennis, as an average youth of the day, full of faults and foibles, but likewise generous and repentant. Here he enlists the sympathies which one never feels for perfection; and here, too, he portrays female loveliness and endurance in his Mrs. Pendennis and Laura. Arthur is a purer Tom Jones and Laura a superior Sophia Western.

In 1851 he gave a course of lectures, repeated in America the next year, on "the English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century." There was no one better fitted to write such a course; he felt with them and was of them.

But if this enabled him to present them sympathetically, it also caused him to overrate them, and in some cases to descend to the standpoint of their own partial views. He is wrong in his estimate of Swift, and too eulogistic of Addison; but he is thoroughly English in both.

HENRY ESMOND.--The study of history necessary to prepare these led to his undertaking a novel on the time of Queen Anne, ent.i.tled _The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., written by himself_. His appreciation of the age is excellent; but the book, leaving for the most part the comic field in which he was most at home, is drier and less read than his others; as an historical presentation a great success, with rare touches of pathos; as a work of fiction not equal to his other stories. The comic muse a.s.sumes a tragic, or at least a very sombre, dress. We have a portraiture of Queen Anne in her last days, and a sad picture of him who, to the Protestant succession, was the pretender, and to the hopeful Jacobites, James III.

The character of Marlborough is given with but little of what was really meritorious in that great captain.

His novel of _Pendennis_ gave him, after the manner of Bulwer's _Caxton_, an editor in _Arthur Pendennis_, who presents us _The Newcomes, Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family_, which he published in a serial form, completing it in 1855.

THE NEWCOMES.--In that work we have the richest culture, the finest satire, and the rarest social philosophy. The character--the hero by pre-eminence--is Colonel Newcome, a n.o.bleman of nature's creation, generous, simple, a yearningly affectionate father, a friend to all the poor and afflicted, one of the best men ever delineated by a novelist; few hearts are so hard as not to be touched by the story of his death in his final retirement at the Charter House. When, surrounded by weeping friends, he heard the bell, "a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said 'Adsum,' and fell back: it was the word we used at school when names were called; and, lo!

he, whose heart was that of a little child, had answered to his name, and stood in the presence of the Master."

THE GEORGES.--While he was writing _The Newcomes_, he had prepared a course of four lectures on the _Four Georges_, kings of England, with which he made his second visit to the United States, and which he delivered in the princ.i.p.al cities, to make a fund for his daughters and for his old age. It was entirely successful, and he afterwards read them in England and Scotland. They are very valuable historically, as they give us the truth with regard to men whose reigns were brilliant and on the whole prosperous, but who themselves, with the exception of the third of the name, were as bad men as ever wore crowns. George III. was continent and honest, but a maniac, and Mr. Thackeray has treated him with due forbearance and eulogy.

In 1857, Mr. Thackeray was a candidate for Parliament from Oxford, but was defeated by a small majority; his conduct in the election was so magnanimous, that his defeat may be regarded as an advantage to his reputation.

In the same year he began _The Virginians_, which may be considered his failure; it is historically a continuation of _Esmond_,--some of the English characters, the Esmonds in Virginia, being the same as in that work. But his presentation and estimate of Washington are a caricature, and his sketch of General James Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, is tame and untrue to life. His descriptions of Virginia colonial life are unlike the reality; but where he is on his own ground, describing English scenes and customs in that day, he is more successful. To paint historical characters is beyond the power of his pencil, and his Doctor Johnson is not the man whom Boswell has so successfully presented.

In 1860 he originated the _Cornhill Magazine_, to which his name gave unusual popularity: it attained a circulation of one hundred thousand--unprecedented in England. In that he published _Lovel the Widower_, which was not much liked, and a charming reproduction of the Newcomes,--for it is nothing more,--ent.i.tled _The Adventures of Philip on His Way through the World_. Philip is a more than average Englishman, with a wicked father and rather a stupid wife; but "the little sister" is a star--there is no finer character in any of his works. _Philip_, in spite of its likeness to _The Newcomes_, is a delightful book.

With an achieved fame, a high position, a home which he had just built at Kensington, a large income, he seemed to have before him as prosperous an old age as any one could desire, when, such are the mysteries of Providence, he was found dead in his room on the morning of December 24, 1863.

ESTIMATE OF HIS POWERS.--Thackeray's excellences are manifest: he was the master of idiomatic English, a great moralist and reformer, and the king of satire, all the weapons of which he managed with perfect skill. He had a rapier for aristocratic immunities of evil, arrows to transfix prescriptions and shams; and with sn.o.bs (we must change the figure) he played as a cat does with a mouse, torturing and then devouring. In the words of Miss Bronte, "he was the first social regenerator of the day, the very master of that working corps who would restore to rect.i.tude the warped system of things." But this was his chief and glorious strength: in the truest sense, he was a satirist and a humorist, but not a novelist; he could not create character. His dramatic persons do not speak for themselves; he tells us what they are and do. His mission seems to have been to arraign and demolish evil rather than to applaud good, and thus he enlists our sinless anger as crusaders rather than our sympathy as philanthropists. In d.i.c.kens we are sometimes disposed to skip a little, in our ardor, to follow the plot and find the denouement. In Thackeray we read every word, for it is the philosophy we want; the plot and personages are secondary, as indeed he considered them; for he often tells us, in the time of greatest depression of his hero, that it will all come out right at the end,--that Philip will marry Charlotte, and have a good income, while the poor soul is wrestling with the _res augusta domi_. d.i.c.kens and Thackeray seemed to draw from each other in their later works; the former philosophizing more in his _Little Dorrit_ and _Our Mutual Friend_, and the latter attempting more of the descriptive in _The Newcomes_ and _Philip_. Of minor pieces we may mention his _Rebecca_ and _Rowena_, and his _Kickleburys on the Rhine_; his _Essay on Thunder_ and _Small Beer_; his _Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo_, in 1846, and his published collection of smaller sketches called _The Roundabout Papers_.

That Thackeray was fully conscious of the dignity of his functions may be gathered from his own words in _Henry Esmond_. "I would have history familiar rather than heroic, and think Mr. Hogarth and Mr. Fielding.

[and, we may add, Mr. Thackeray,] will give our children a much better idea of the manners of that age in England than the _Court Gazette_ and the newspapers which we get thence." At his death he left an unfinished novel, ent.i.tled _Dennis Duval_. A gifted daughter, who was his kind amanuensis. Miss ANNE E. THACKERAY, has written several interesting tales, among which are _The Village on the Cliff_ and _The Story of Elizabeth_.

CHAPTER XLI.

THE LATER WRITERS.

Charles Lamb. Thomas Hood. Thomas de Quincey. Other Novelists. Writers on Science and Philosophy.