Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop; while the opening of Little Dorrit (1857), with its splendid description of Marseilles in hot weather, similarly appeals to all our senses, making us see and hear and smell and touch and taste all at the same time. Hard Times is a powerful and tragic story dealing with social problems. Little Dorrit is another long rambling book like Bleak House, containing a not dissimilar satire in the person of Mr. Tite Barnacle and the Circumlocution Company. Mr. F.'s aunt and Mrs. General, the celebrated advocate of "papa, prunes, and prism," are not easily forgotten; nor Mr. Flintwinch, whose addresses to his wife are almost as ferocious as Quilp's connubial amenities; but the book also includes an abundance of sensational mystery, and the villainous Rigaud is a worthy fellow-countryman of Hortense in that imaginary land of fierce passions which Dickens supposed to be France. However, in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), he wrote a strong dramatic novel of the French Revolution, full of vivid realism and profound tragedy. This and its successor, Great Expectations (1861) -The Uncommercial Traveller (1860), a series of sketches, came between-both appeared in All the Year Round, and are, each in its own way, small masterpieces beloved of students of Dickens. Great Expectations is a return to the excellence of David Copperfield, while the Tale of Two Cities has an isolated excellence of its own. Our Mutual Friend (1865) completes the trio of long novels of which Bleak House and Little Dorrit are the other members; the atmosphere is equally gloomy, and the more humorous portions stand out in equally lurid relief. Rogue Riderhood, Mr. Venus, and the immortal Silas Wegg, are fresh creations in Dickens' best manner; but the Veneerings, the Lammles, and other members of the same society, are of the Skewton-Bagstock genus. The falling-off which, even before David Copperfield, was conspicuous, is irretrievable in Our Mutual Friend, and the incomplete Edwin Drood (1870) shows no reaction. Soon after Dickens' return from a second visit to America, which, in spite of Martin Chuzzlewit, was a greater triumph even than the first, he was suddenly smitten down by apoplexy, the penalty of an overtasked brain, at his house of Gadshill, near Rochester, and died the next day, June 9, 1870. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. Dickens' characters: their § 13. We have already indicated the intrinsic elements of Dickens' work, and only a few accidents remain to be noticed. When we speak of the decline of his powers, the epithet is merely relative, and serves to point out the extraordinary character of his genius. We may regret the errors of taste to which he succumbed, his grotesque lachrymosity and his love of fantastic horror; but there is not a single novel-not even Edwin Drood -which is not a distinguished contribution to English literature, and has not left its mark upon the mind of every English reader. relation The person who knows nothing of Sam Weller, of Mrs. Gamp, of Mr. F.'s aunt, or of Silas Wegg, is not far removed from the illiterate. No characters are more intensely familiar to us than the portraits of this immense gallery. We may confuse Scott's people and forget many of Thackeray's, but, for anyone who has read his Dickens thoroughly, each of these people has an individuality not easily forgotten. This is not as much as to say that they are faithful portraits from real life. We know that they are magnificent caricatures, and that they are as impossible as it is impossible that the world is flat. They might inhabit a world on Mercator's projection, with the sun perpetually travelling round its angles; many of them would even then be impossible still. But the fact is that, as creations of pure fancy, with a superficial resemblance to mankind, they are inimitable; and he who would desert Mr. Micawber to find a compensation in the more photographic atmosphere of modern fiction would be very unwise. Fastidious readers may accuse Dickens of vulgarity and profess their inability to admire characters whose life often depends on their repetition of a single phrase; but they may travel farther and fare worse. From Pickwick to Edwin Drood every page of Dickens is worth reading and adds to the pure pleasure which is the best thing we can derive from literature. This triumph was achieved without any formal excellence. Form is almost incredibly absent from Dickens' novels. It is Absence of form and style from the novels. incorrect to deny them a plot, for we feel an amazing interest in the growth of the story. But the books appeared in serial parts, and the plot was therefore left to work itself out automatically, while underplots developed themselves and sometimes took the chief place in the story. To make an abstract, say, of the story of Bleak House, would require a superhuman memory; to do it with the book before one would lead to inevitable confusion. Pickwick is a series of droll sketches bound together by the thinnest of links. The central incident of Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield must be a matter of taste. And yet all the threads of the story are closely connected. It is possible to follow out the adventures of a single character by reading a chapter here and a chapter there, but they have their definite relation to the rest of the book, and their logical sequence is incomprehensible without a reference to the principal narrative. Of course, in speaking of logical sequence and Dickens' works in the same breath, we limit ourselves to the understanding that his plots are conceived in the same extravagant and improbable manner as his characters, and bear the same reference to ordinary life that his people bear to human nature. Again, he is not a great master of style, if we judge him by the standard of great English prose. He was not one of those novelists whose peculiarities of manner become the watchwords of a school But in no other case was the style so entirely the man, or so entirely emblematic of his work. Dickens was no purist; and when he wrote finely he was too often pretentious and melodramatic. Nowhere in his work is there a passage of intrinsically beautiful English; but this is no cause for blame. Style is an individual matter; and, if Dickens' style was wanting in distinction, it had individuality enough and to spare. Dickens' Moreover, Dickens was a great artist. His people are abnormal in themselves and in their doings, but their surroundings are ordinarily true to life. We have mentioned the Black Country in The Old Curiosity London: Shop and Hard Times-pictures which none but his value as an artist sensitive to impressions could have drawn. an artist. But his great claim to reputation on this head is that he was in a peculiar sense the painter of London. Since Ben Jonson, no one had arisen who knew his London so well, whose early training had brought him into contact with the common Londoner, and had drowned horror in curiosity. Everyone who has gone down the Thames from London Bridge has seen a dozen places by the river-side that might do duty for Quilp's wharf; everyone, in walking through the London streets, has seen houses which immediately recall scenes in Dickens. We learn to connect his characters with certain parts of London; to seek Mr. Micawber in the purlieus of City Road, or Messrs. Bob Sawyer and Benjamin Allen in the Borough. Dickens' London is not the London of our own day, and its landmarks are fast disappearing; but it is the London of the early Victorian era drawn to the life, with all its disagreeable circumstances thrown into relief-the Marshalsea, the Fleet, the slums of Southwark and St. Giles'. He did not altogether confine himself to London. In many scenes, which have less historical interest, but an equally great power of realistic description, he went to his beloved towns of Rochester and Chatham, and drew pictures which may still be recognised. But, in effect, it is in his pictures of London that his artistic greatness consists; in the reality of the houses in which his people lived and the streets through which they walked. His realism surpasses Smollett's, and is less distorted by ill-temper. He is greater than the Elizabethan realists, in that they have left us a number of brilliant sketches, while he has given us the life of a whole city in his novels. Not even Jonson himself, in Bartholomew Fair or The Alchemist, where he used all the weapons of brutality and spoke out with no reticence, makes a greater impression than Dickens with his easy temper and good-humoured satire. As Balzac painted Paris, so Dickens painted his own city; and thus the contemporaries, so unlike in many ways, so curiously similar in others, come together again. Dickens left behind him no band of imitators; he did not, like Balzac, give the direct impetus to a certain class of novel; his work remains solitary of its kind. But, from whatever point we consider it, whether from the side of its extravagance or of its accuracy, its popularity is overwhelming. Dickens is not one of those novelists whose fastidiousness makes them either loved or hated; he frankly delighted in common and vulgar things, and it is just this that constitutes the universal appeal of his work. W. M. THACKERAY (1811-1863). § 14. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, although older than Dickens, did not make his mark until ten years later. He was born at Calcutta and educated at the Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge. He took no degree, but contributed to a magazine called the Snob, in which he showed some foretaste of his literary power. The work of his earlier years, done principally for Fraser's Magazine, is extremely interesting, but at the time attracted as little attention as the manifestly inferior drawings with which he illustrated it. He published in Fraser some stories, two novels, Barry Lyndon (1844)--an admirable narrative, due to his study of Jonathan Wild the Great-and Catherine (1839-40), which deals with the criminal class in a less satisfactory way. Barry Lyndon was, however, perfect of its kind, and illustrated, as clearly as any of his later novels, Thackeray's command of humour and delicate irony, and that leaning to cynicism with which he has been short-sightedly reproached. The Paris Sketch-Book (1840), and the more consecutive Irish Sketch-Book (1843) were the first of those miscellanies in which he recorded his curious impressions of things in general and gossiped easily with his readers. At the end of the decade he began to write for Punch, and contributed to the early volumes The Book of Snobs (1848), a third miscellany, in which he appeared as a not too charitable critic of his fellows, combining a singular censoriousness of tone with a no less unusual tendency to pathos. The famous chapters which describe the household of Major Ponto are typical, in their odd and paradoxical humour, of all his work. A similar eccentricity is seen in the scattered Fraser contribu tions known as the Yellowplush Papers (1838-40), and especially in their principal member, The Amours of Mr. Deuceace. Yellowplush, in spite of his glorious orthography-by far the best instance in English of misspelling as a form of humouris really a very hard and selfish person, whose only anxiety is for himself; and yet from time to time he deals a sudden stroke of pathos which is simply enhanced by its ludicrous surroundings. It is not difficult to see that The Amours of Mr. Deuceace, superficially amusing, is one of the most tragic and melancholy stories that could be written. It is certainly one of Thackeray's finest things. The Novels by Eminent Hands, contributed to Punch (1847) by "C. Jeames de la Pluche," are a series of inimitable parodies of popular novelists. Some of them have shared, as is natural, the fate of the books of which they made fun; but George de Barnwell and Coalingsby will live as long as Eugene Aram and Coningsby, and Barbazure will preserve the memory of G. P. R. James more certainly than his own novels. These were the essays which led up to Vanity Fair. This great novel, which appeared in parts in 1847 and 1848, was the most remarkable book of its kind since Pickwick, and was its author's chef d'œuvre. If Dickens' "Vanity pedigree came through Smollett, Thackeray's came (1848). through Fielding; and, just as in Barry Lyndon he Fair" His had imitated and improved upon Jonathan Wild, in Vanity Fair he followed the model of Tom Jones. Vanity Fair is not so great a book as its exemplar. Thackeray had not that Shakespearean grasp of life which was Fielding's; his observation of the surface was minute in the extreme, but his faculty of insight was very limited. His moral standard was high, but narrow; he hated vice and adored virtue. garrulous digressions, very much in Fielding's manner without Fielding's dignity, are all moral essays, rules of conduct laid down by a man who strives to conceal his earnestness beneath a cynical polish and a studied indifference to high motive. Vanity Fair, as a humorous masterpiece, as a picture of society, is incomparable; as a novel of character it has serious defects. The obvious thing which meets the reader is that all its dramatis persona are more or less disagreeable. The most prominent figure, Becky Sharp, has a very equivocal reputation, and in all her doings from first to last is reprehensible. Of the two families chiefly concerned in this "novel without a hero," the amiability of the Sedleys and the hardness of the Osbornes are equally uninviting. The whole Crawley family, with the exception of Lady Jane and of Rawdon in his later days, is nothing less than disreputable. If Vanity Fair were the only novel of Thackeray which remained to us, the real greatness of heart and zeal for virtue which distinguished him might possibly be undervalued. Thackeray's humour, delicate and flexible as it is, always leans to the bitter and satiric side; and Vanity Fair is full of passages the obituary of Lord Steyne for example-which reach the extreme limit of irony. His almost morbid sense of the difference between masks and faces, his scorn of pretence and pose, carried this prevalent irony farther than it should have gone. The noble character of Major Dobbin, the womanly tenderness of Lady Jane Crawley, are obscured by its almost involuntary use in their description. He made Dobbin ugly and awkward, Lady Jane shy and foolish, and did not save them from ridiculous situations. Where he trod on consecrated ground, in the character of Amelia, he succeeded in creating insipidity, and, instead of painting a woman equal to Sophia Western, drew a commonplace, immature, and manifestly silly schoolgirl whose attractions are inconceiv Satire of the novel. |