Modern English Books of Power Part 2

In his _Confessions_ he tells of his sufferings from want of food, of his nights in an unfurnished house in Soho with a little girl who was the "slavey" of a disreputable lawyer, of his wanderings in the streets, of the saving of his life by an outcast woman whom he has immortalized in the most eloquent pa.s.sages of the book. Finally, he was restored to his friends and went to Oxford. His mental independence prevented him from taking a degree, and chronic neuralgia of the face and teeth led him to form the habit of taking opium, which clung to him for life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DE QUINCEY WITH TWO DAUGHTERS AND GRANDCHILD--FROM A CHALK DRAWING BY JAMES ARCHER, R.S.A. MADE IN 1855.]

De Quincey was a close a.s.sociate of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb and others. He was a brilliant talker, especially when stimulated with opium, but he was incapable of sustained intellectual work. Hence all his essays and other work first appeared in periodicals and were then published in book form. It is noteworthy that an American publisher was the first to gather his essays in book form, and that his first appreciation, like that of Carlyle, came from this country.

Much of De Quincey's work is now unreadable because it deals with political economy and allied subjects, in which he fancied he was an expert. He is a master only when he deals with pure literature, but he has a large vein of satiric humor that found its best expression in the grotesque irony of "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." In this essay he descants on the greatest crime as though it were an accomplishment, and his freakish wit makes this paper as enjoyable as Charles Lamb's essay on the origin of roast pig.

De Quincey's fame, however, rests upon _The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_. This is a record unique in English literature. It tells in De Quincey's usual style, with many tedious digressions, the story of his neglected boyhood, his revolt at school discipline and monotony that had shattered his health, his wanderings in Wales, his life as a common vagrant in London, his college life, his introduction to opium and the dreams that came with indulgence in the drug. The gorgeous beauty of De Quincey's pictures of these opium visions has probably induced many susceptible readers to make a trial of the drug, with deep disappointment as the result. No common mind can hope to have such visions as De Quincey records.

His imagination has well been called Druidic; it played about the great facts and personages of history and it invested these with a background of the most solemn and imposing natural features. These dreams came to have with him the very semblance of reality. Read the terrible pa.s.sages in the _Confessions_ in which the Malay figures; read the dream fugues in "Suspira," the visions seen by the boy when he looked on his dead sister's face, or the n.o.ble pa.s.sages that picture the three Ladies of Sorrow. Here is a pa.s.sage on the vision of eternity at his sister's death bier, which gives a good idea of De Quincey's style:

Whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow--the saddest that ear ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many times since upon summer days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell; it is in this world the one great audible symbol of eternity.

It is a great temptation to quote some of De Quincey's fine pa.s.sages, but most of them are so interwoven with the context that the most eloquent bits cannot be taken out without the loss of their beauty. De Quincey was a dreamer before he became a slave to opium. This drug intensified a natural tendency until he became a visionary without an equal in English literature. And these visions, evoked by his splendid imagination, are worth reading in these days as an antidote to the materialism of present-day life; they demonstrate the power of the spiritual life, which is the potent and abiding force in all literature.

CHARLES LAMB AND THE ESSAYS OF ELIA

THE BEST BELOVED OF ALL THE ENGLISH WRITERS--QUAINTEST AND TENDEREST ESSAYIST WHOSE WORK APPEALS TO ALL HEARTS.

Of all the English writers of the last century none is so well beloved as Charles Lamb. Thirty years ago his _Essays of Elia_ was a book which every one with any claim to culture had not only read, but read many times. It was the traveling companion and the familiar friend, the unfailing resource in periods of depression, the comforter in time of trouble. It touched many experiences of life, and it ranged from sunny, spontaneous humor to that pathos which is too deep for tears.

Into it Lamb put all that was rarest and best in his nature, all that he had gleaned from a life of self-sacrifice and spiritual culture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHARLES LAMB FROM THE PORTRAIT BY WILLIAM HAZLITT]

Such men as he were rare in his day, and not understood by the literary men of harder nature who criticised his peculiarities and failed to appreciate the delicacy of his genius. Only one such has appeared in our time--he who has given us a look into his heart in _A Window in Thrums_ and in that beautiful tribute to his mother, _Margaret Ogilvie_. Barrie, in his insight into the mind of a child and in his freakish fancy that seems brought over from the world of fairyland to lend its glamour to prosaic life, is the only successor to Lamb.

Lamb can endure this neglect, for were he able to revisit this earth no one would touch more whimsically than he upon the fads and the foibles of contemporary life; but it's a great pity that in the popular craze about the new writers, all redolent with the varnish of novelty, we should consign to the dust of unused shelves the works of Charles Lamb. All that he wrote which the world remembers is in Elia and his many letters--those incomparable epistles in which he quizzed his friends and revealed the tenderness of his nature and the delicacy of his fancy.

Robert Louis Stevenson is justly regarded as the greatest essayist of our time, but I would not exchange the _Essays of Elia_ for the best things of the author of _Virginibus Puerisque_. Stevenson always, except in his familiar early letters, suggests the literary artist who has revised his first draft, with an eye fixed on the world of readers who will follow him when he is gone. But Lamb always wrote with that charming spontaneous grace that comes from a mind saturated with the best reading and mellow with much thought. You fancy him jotting down his thoughts, with his quizzical smile at the effect of his quips and cranks. You cannot figure him as laboriously searching for the right word or painfully recasting the same sentence many times until he reached the form which suited his finical taste. This was Stevenson's method, and it leaves much of his work with the smell of the lamp upon it. Lamb apparently wrote for the mere pleasure of putting his thoughts in form, just as he talked when his stammering tongue had been eased with a little good old wine.

It is idle to expect another Lamb in our strenuous modern life, so we should make the most of this quaint Englishman of the early part of the last century, who seemed to bring over into an artificial age all the dewy freshness of fancy of the old Elizabethan worthies. Can anything be more perfect in its pathos than his essay on "Dream Children," the tender fancy of a bachelor whom hard fate robbed of the domestic joys that would have made life beautiful for him? Can anything be more full of fun than his "Dissertation on Roast Pig," or his "Mrs. Battle's Opinion on Whist"? His style fitted his thought like a glove; about it is the aroma of an earlier age when men and women opened their hearts like children. Lamb lays a spell upon us such as no other writer can work; he plays upon the strings of our hearts, now surprising us into wholesome laughter, now melting us to tears. You may know his essays by heart, but you can't define their elusive charm.

Lamb had one of the saddest of lives, yet he remained sweet and wholesome through trials that would have embittered a nature less fine and n.o.ble. He came of poor people and he and his sister Mary inherited from their mother a strain of mental unsoundness. Lamb spent seven years in Christ's Hospital as a "Blue Coat" boy, and the chief result, aside from the foundations of a good cla.s.sical scholarship, was a friendship for Coleridge which endured through life. From this school he was forced to go into a clerkship in the South Sea house, but after three years he secured a desk in the East India house, where he remained for thirty years.

Four years later his first great sorrow fell upon Lamb. His sister Mary suddenly developed insanity, attacked a maid servant, and when the mother interfered the insane girl fatally wounded her with a knife. In this crisis Lamb showed the fineness of his nature. Instead of permitting poor Mary to be consigned to a public insane asylum, he gave bonds that he would care for her, and he did care for her during the remainder of her life. Although in love with a girl, he resolutely put aside all thoughts of marriage and domestic happiness and devoted himself to his unfortunate sister, who in her lucid periods repaid his devotion with the tenderest affection.

Lamb's letters to Coleridge in those trying days are among the most pathetic in the language. To Coleridge he turned for stimulus in his reading and study, and he never failed to get help and comfort from this great, ill-balanced man of genius. Later he began a correspondence with Southey, in which he betrayed much humor and great fancy. In his leisure he saturated his mind with the Elizabethan poets and dramatists; practically he lived in the sixteenth century, for his only real life was a student's dream life. He contributed to the London newspapers, but his first published work to score any success was his _Tales From Shakespeare_, in which his sister aided him. Then followed _Poets Contemporary With Shakespeare_, selections with critical comment, which at once gave Lamb rank among the best critics of his time. He wrote, when the mood seized him, recollections of his youth, essays and criticisms which he afterward issued in two volumes.

Twenty-five essays that he contributed to the LONDON MAGAZINE over the signature of Elia were reprinted in a book, the _Essays of Elia_, and established Lamb's reputation as one of the great masters of English.

Another volume of _Essays of Elia_ was published in 1833. In 1834 Lamb sorrowed over the death of Coleridge, and in November of the same year death came to him. Of all English critics Carlyle is the only one who had hard words for Lamb, and the Sage of Chelsea probably wrote his scornful comment because of some playful jest of Elia.

Charles Lamb's taste was for the writers of the Elizabethan age, and even in his time he found that this taste had become old-fashioned. He complained, when only twenty-one years old, in a letter to Coleridge, that all his friends "read nothing but reviews and new books." His letters, like his essays, reflect the reading of little-known books; they show abundant traces of his loiterings in the byways of literature.

Here there is s.p.a.ce only to dwell on some of the best of the _Essays of Elia_. In these we find the most pathetic deal with the sufferings of children. Lamb himself had known loneliness and suffering and lack of appreciation when a boy in the great Blue Coat School. Far more vividly than d.i.c.kens he brings before us his neglected childhood and all that it represented in lonely helplessness. Then he deals with later things, with his love of old books, his pa.s.sion for the play, his delight in London and its various aspects, his joy in all strange characters like the old benchers of the Inner Temple.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARY AND CHARLES LAMB FROM THE PAINTING BY F.S.

CARY MADE IN 1834]

The essay opens with that alluring picture of the South Sea house, and is followed by the reminiscences of Christ's Hospital, where Lamb was a schoolboy for seven years. These show one side of Lamb's nature--the quaintly reminiscent. Another side is revealed in "Mrs.

Battle's Opinions on Whist," with its delicate irony and its playful humor, while still another phase is seen in the exquisite phantasy of "Dream Children," with its tender pathos and its revelation of a heart that never knew the joys of domestic love and care. Yet close after this beautiful reverie comes "A Dissertation On Roast Pig," in which Lamb develops the theory that the Chinese first discovered the virtues of roast suckling pig after a fire which destroyed the house of Ho-ti, and that with the fatuousness of the race they regularly burned down their houses to enjoy this succulent delicacy.

_The Last Essays of Elia_, a second series which Lamb brought out with a curious preface "by a friend of the late Elia," do not differ from the earlier series, save that they are shorter and are more devoted to literary themes. Perfect in its pathos is "The Superannuated Man,"

while "The Child Angel" is a dream which appeals to the reader more than any of the splendid dreams that De Quincey immortalized in his florid prose. Lamb in these essays gives some wise counsel on books and reading, urging with a whimsical earnestness the claims of the good old books which had been his comfort in many dark hours. It is in such confidences that we come very close to this man, so richly endowed with all endearing qualities that the world will never forget Elia and his exquisite essays.

d.i.c.kENS THE FOREMOST OF NOVELISTS

MORE WIDELY READ THAN ANY OTHER STORY TELLER--THE GREATEST OF THE MODERN HUMORISTS APPEALS TO THE READERS OF ALL AGES AND CLa.s.sES.

Charles d.i.c.kens is the greatest English novelist since Scott, and he and Scott, to my mind, are the greatest English writers after Shakespeare. Many will dissent from this, but my reason for giving him this foremost place among the modern writers is the range, the variety, the dramatic power, the humor and the pathos of his work. He was a great caricaturist rather than a great artist, but he was supreme in his cla.s.s, and his grotesque characters have enough in them of human nature to make them accepted as real people.

To him belongs the first place among novelists, after Scott, because of his splendid creative imagination, which has peopled the world of fiction with scores of fine characters. His genial humor which has brightened life for so many thousands of readers; his tender pathos which brings tears to the eyes of those who seldom weep over imaginary or even real grief or pain; his rollicking gayety which makes one enjoy good food and good drink in his tales almost as much as if one really shared in those feasts he was so fond of describing; his keen sympathy with the poor and the suffering; his flaming anger against injustice and cruelty that resulted in so many great public reforms; his descriptive power that makes the reader actually see everything that he depicts--all these traits of d.i.c.kens' genius go to make him the unquestioned leader of our modern story tellers. Without his humor and his pathos he would still stand far above all others of his day; with these qualities, which make every story he ever wrote throb with genuine human feeling, he stands in a cla.s.s by himself.

Many literary critics have spent much labor in comparing d.i.c.kens with Thackeray, but there seems to me no basis for such comparison. One was a great caricaturist who wrote for the common people and brought tears or laughter at will from the kitchen maid as freely as from the great lady; from the little child with no knowledge of the world as readily as from the mature reader who has known wrong, sorrow and suffering. The other was the supreme literary artist of modern times, a gentleman by instinct and training, who wrote for a limited cla.s.s of readers, and who could not, because of nature and temperament, touch at will the springs of laughter and tears as d.i.c.kens did. d.i.c.kens has created a score of characters that are household words to one that Thackeray has given us.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHARLES d.i.c.kENS AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-SEVEN--FROM THE PORTRAIT BY DANIEL MACLISE, R.A.]

Both were men of the rarest genius, English to the core, but each expressed his genius in his own way, and the way of d.i.c.kens touched a thousand hearts where Thackeray touched but one. Personally, Thackeray appeals to me far more than d.i.c.kens does, but it is foolish to permit one's own fancies to blind or warp his critical judgments. Hence I set d.i.c.kens at the head of modern novelists and give him an equal place with Scott as the greatest English writer since Shakespeare.

Take it all in all, d.i.c.kens had a successful and a happy life. He was born in 1812 and died in 1870. His boyhood was hard because of his father's thriftlessness, and it always rankled in his memory that at nine years of age he was placed at work pasting labels on boxes of shoe blacking. But he had many chances in childhood and youth for reading and study, and his keen mind took advantage of all these. He was a natural mimic, and it was mere blind chance that kept him from the stage and made him a great novelist. He drifted into newspaper work as a shorthand reporter, wrote the stories that are known as _Sketches by Boz_, and in this way came to be engaged to write the _Pickwick Papers_, to serve as a story to accompany drawings by Seymour, a popular artist. But d.i.c.kens from the outset planned the story and Seymour lived only to ill.u.s.trate the first number.

The tale caught the fancy of the public, and d.i.c.kens developed Pickwick, the Wellers and other characters in a most amusing fashion.

Great success marked the appearance of the _Pickwick Papers_ in book form, and the public appreciation gave d.i.c.kens confidence and stimulus. Soon appeared _Oliver Twist_, _Nicholas Nickleby_, _Old Curiosity Shop_ and the long line of familiar stories that ended with _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, left unfinished by the master's hand.

All these novels were originally published in monthly numbers. In these days, when so many new novels come from the press every month, it is difficult to appreciate the eagerness with which one of these monthly parts of d.i.c.kens' stories was awaited in England as well as in this country. My father used to tell of the way these numbers of d.i.c.kens' novels were seized upon in New England when he was a young man and were worn out in pa.s.sing from hand to hand. d.i.c.kens first developed the Christmas story and made it a real addition to the joy of the holiday season. His _Christmas Carol_ and _The Cricket on the Hearth_ still stand as the best of these tales that paint the simple joys of the greatest of English Holidays. d.i.c.kens was also a great editor, and in HOUSEHOLD WORDS and ALL THE YEAR ROUND he found a means of giving pleasure to hosts of readers as well as a vehicle for the monthly publication of his novels.

d.i.c.kens was the first to make a great fortune by giving public readings from his own works. His rare dramatic ability made him an ideal interpreter of his own work, and those who were fortunate enough to hear him on his two trips to this country speak always of the light which these readings cast on his princ.i.p.al characters and of the pleasure that the audience showed in the novelist's remarkable powers as a mimic and an elocutionist.

Most of the great English writers have labored until forty or over before fame came to them. Of such were Scott, Thackeray, Carlyle and George Eliot. But d.i.c.kens had an international fame at twenty-four, and he was a household word wherever English was spoken by the time he was thirty. From that day to the day of his death, fame, popularity, wealth, troops of friends, were his portion, and with these were joined unusual capacity for work and unusual delight in the exercise of his great creative powers.

In taking up d.i.c.kens' novels it must always be borne in mind that you will find many digressions, many bits of affectation, some mawkish pathos. But these defects do not seriously injure the stories. You cannot afford to leave _Pickwick Papers_ unread, because this novel contains more spontaneous humor than any other of d.i.c.kens' work, and it is also quoted most frequently. The boy or girl who cannot follow with relish the amusing incidents in this book is not normal. Older readers will get more from the book, but it is doubtful whether they will enjoy its rollicking fun with so keen a zest. Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller and his father, Bob Sawyer and the others, how firmly they are fixed in the mind! What real flesh and blood creatures they are, despite their creator's exaggeration of special traits and peculiarities!

[Ill.u.s.tration: ORIGINAL PICKWICK COVER ISSUED IN 1837 WITH d.i.c.kENS' AUTOGRAPH--MOST OF d.i.c.kENS' NOVELS WERE ISSUED IN SHILLING INSTALLMENTS BEFORE BEING PUBLISHED IN THE COMPLETE VOLUME]

After the _Pickwick Papers_ the choice of the most characteristic of d.i.c.kens' novels is difficult, but my favorites have always been _David Copperfield_ and _A Tale of Two Cities_, the one the most spontaneous, the freshest in fancy, the most deeply pathetic of all d.i.c.kens' work; the other absolutely unlike anything he ever wrote, but great in its intense descriptive pa.s.sages, which make the horrors of the French Revolution more real than Carlyle's famous history, and in the sublime self-sacrifice of Sidney Carton, which Henry Miller, in "The Only Way," has impressed on thousands of tearful playgoers. That _David Copperfield_ is not autobiographical we have the positive a.s.sertion of Charles d.i.c.kens the younger, yet at the same time every lover of this book feels that the boyhood of David reproduces memories of the novelist's childhood and youth, and that from real people and real scenes are drawn the humble home and the loyal hearts of the Peggottys, the great self-sacrifice of Ham, the woes of Little Emily and the tragedy of Steerforth's fate. One misses much who does not follow the chief actors in this great story, the masterpiece of d.i.c.kens.

Other fine novels, if you have time for them, are _Nicholas Nickleby_, which broke up the unspeakably cruel boarding schools for boys in Yorkshire, in one of which poor Smike was done to death; or _Our Mutual Friend_ which d.i.c.kens attacked the English poor laws; or _Dombey and Son_, that paints the pathos of the child of a rich man dying for the love which his father was too selfish to give him; or _Bleak House_, in which the terrible sufferings wrought by the law's delay in the Court of Chancery are drawn with so much pathos that the book served as a valuable aid in removing a great public wrong, while the satire on foreign missions served to draw the English nation's attention to the wretched heathen at home in the East Side of London, of whom Poor Jo was a pitiable specimen. In other novels other good purposes were also served.

But several pages could be filled with a mere enumeration of d.i.c.kens'

stories and their salient features. You cannot go wrong in taking up any of his novels or his short stories, and when you have finished with them you will have the satisfaction of having added to your possessions a number of the real people of fiction, whom it is far better to know than the best characters of contemporary fiction, because these will be forgotten in a twelvemonth, if not before. The hours that you spend with d.i.c.kens will be profitable as well as pleasant, for they will leave the memory of a great-hearted man who labored through his books to make the world better and happier.