All this could not but tell; the incidents in a book like "Waverley" are unforced: the advance of the story closely imitates Life in its ever-shifting succession of events: the reader soon learns to trust the author's faculty of invention. Plot, story-interest, is it not the backbone of romantic fiction? And Scott, though perchance he may not conduct it so swiftly as pleases the modern taste, may be relied on to furnish it.

In the earlier period up to "Ivanhoe," that famous sortie into English history, belong such masterpieces as "Guy Mannering," "Old Mortality," "Heart of Midlothian," "The Bride of Lammermoor," and "Rob Roy"; a list which, had he produced nothing else would have sufficed to place him high among the makers of romance. It is not the intention to analyze these great books one by one—a task more fit for a volume than a chapter; but to bring out those qualities of his work which are responsible for his place in fiction and influence in the Novel of the nineteenth century.

No story of this group—nor of his career as a writer—has won more plaudits than "The Heart of Midlothian." Indeed, were the reader forced to the unpleasant necessity of choosing out of the thirty stories which Scott left the world the one most deserving of the prize, possibly the choice would fall on that superb portrayal of Scotch life—although other fine Novels of the quintet named would have their loyal friends. To study the peerlessly pathetic tale of Effie and Jeanie Deans is to see Scott at his representative best and note the headmarks of his genius: it is safe to say that he who finds nothing in it can never care for its author.

The first thing to notice in this novel of the ancient Edinburgh Tolbooth, this romance of faithful sisterhood, is its essential Scotch fiber. The fact affects the whole work. It becomes thereby simpler, homelier, more vernacular: it is a story that is a native emanation. The groundwork of plot too is simple, vital: and moreover, founded on a true incident. Effie, the younger of two sisters, is betrayed; concerning her betrayer there is mystery: she is supposed to commit child-murder to hide her shame: a crime then punishable by death. The story deals with her trial, condemnation and final pardon and happy marriage with her lover through the noble mediation of Jeanie, her elder sister.

In the presentation of an earlier period in Scotland, the opening of the eighteenth century, when all punitive measures were primitive and the lawless social elements seethed with restless discontent, Scott had a fine chance: and at the very opening, in describing the violent putting to death of Captain Porteous, he skilfully prepares the way for the general picture to be given. Then, as the story progresses, to the supreme sacrificial effort of Jeanie in behalf of her erring sister's life, gradually, stroke upon stroke, the period with its religious schisms, its political passions and strong family ties, is so illuminated that while the interest is centered upon the Deans and their homely yet tragic history, Scotch life in an earlier century is envisaged broadly, truthfully, in a way never to grow pale in memory. Cameraman or King's man, God-fearing peasant, lawless ruffian or Tory gentleman, the characters are so marshaled that without sides being taken by the writer, one feels the complexity of the period: and its uncivil wildness is dramatically conveyed as a central fact in the Tolbooth with its grim concomitants of gallows and gaping crowd of sightseers and malcontents.

Scott's feeling for dramatic situation is illustrated in several scenes that stand out in high relief after a hundred details have been forgotten: one such is the trial scene in which Effie implores her sister to save her by a lie, and Jeanie in agony refuses; the whole management of it is impressively pictorial. Another is that where Jeanie, on the road to London, is detained by the little band of gypsy-thieves and passes the night with Madge Wildfire in the barn: it is a scene Scott much relishes and makes his reader enjoy. And yet another, and greater, is that meeting with Queen Caroline and Lady Suffolk when the humble Scotch girl is conducted by the Duke of Argyll to the country house and in the garden beseeches pardon for her sister Effie. It is intensely picturesque, real with many homely touches which add to the truth without cheapening the effect of royalty. The gradual working out of the excellent plot of this romance to a conclusion pleasing to the reader is a favorable specimen of this romancer's method in story-telling. There is disproportion in the movement: it is slow in the first part, drawing together in texture and gaining in speed during its closing portion. Scott does not hesitate here, as so often, to interrupt the story in order to interpolate historical information, instead of interweaving it atmospherically with the tale itself. When Jeanie is to have her interview with the Duke of Argyll, certain preliminary pages must be devoted to a sketch of his career. A master of plot and construction to-day would have made the same story, so telling in motive, so vibrant with human interest, more effective, so far as its conductment is concerned. Scott in his fiction felt it as part of his duty to furnish chronicle-history, very much as Shakspere seems to have done in his so-called chronicle-history plays; whereas at present the skilled artist feels no such responsibility. It may be questioned if the book's famous scenes—the attempted breaking into the Tolbooth, or the visit of Jeanie to the Queen—would not have gained greatly from a dramatic point of view had they been more condensed; they are badly languaged, looking to this result, not swift enough for the best effects of drama, whereas conception and framework are highly dramatic. In a word, if more carefully written, fuller justice would have been done the superb theme.

The characters that crowd the novel (as, in truth, they teem throughout the great romances) testify to his range and grasp: the Dean family, naturally, in the center. The pious, sturdy Cameronian father and the two clearly contrasted sisters: Butler, the clergyman lover; the saddle-maker, Saddletree, for an amusing, long-winded bore; the quaint Laird Dumbledikes; the soldiers of fortune, George Wilson and his mate; that other soldier, Porteous; the gang of evildoers with Madge in the van—a wonderful creation, she, only surpassed by the better known Meg—the high personages clustered about the Queen: loquacious Mrs. Glass, the Dean's kinswoman—one has to go back to Chaucer or Shakspere for a companion picture so firmly painted in and composed on such a generous scale.

Contention arises in a discussion of a mortal so good as Jeanie: it would hardly be in the artistic temper of our time to draw a peasant girl so well-nigh superhuman in her traits; Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet" (the book appeared only fifteen years later), is much nearer our time in its conception of the possibilities of human nature: Eugenie does not strain credence, while Jeanie's pious tone at times seems out of character, if not out of humanity. The striking contrast with Effie is in a way to her advantage: the weaker damsel appears more natural, more like flesh and blood. But the final scene when, after fleeing with her high-born lover, she returns to her simple sister as a wife in a higher grade of society and the sister agrees that their ways henceforth must be apart—that scene for truth and power is one of the master-strokes. The reader finds that Jeanie Deans somehow grows steadily in his belief and affection: quietly but surely, a sense of her comeliness, her truthful love, her quaint touch of Scotch canniness, her daughterly duteousness and her stanch principle intensifies until it is a pang to bid her farewell, and the mind harks back to her with a fond recollection. Take her for all in all, Jeanie Deans ranks high in Scott's female portraiture: with Meg Merillies in her own station, and with Lucy Ashton and Di Vernon among those of higher social place. In her class she is perhaps unparalleled in all his fiction. The whole treatment of Effie's irregular love is a fine example of Scott's kindly tolerance (tempered to a certain extent by the social convention of his time) in dealing with the sins of human beings. He is plainly glad to leave Effie an honestly married woman with the right to look forward to happy, useful years. The story breeds generous thoughts on the theme of young womanhood: it handled the problem neither from the superior altitude of the conventional moralist nor the cold aloofness of the latter-day realist—Flaubert's attitude in "Madame Bovary."

"A big, imperfect, noble Novel," the thoughtful reader concludes as he closes it, and thinking back to an earlier impression, finds that time has not loosened its hold.

And to repeat the previous statement: what is true of this is true of all Scott's romances. The theme varies, the setting with its wealth of local color may change, the period or party differ with the demands of fact. Scotch and English history are widely invoked: now it is the time of the Georges, now of the Stuarts, now Elizabethan, again back to the Crusades. Scott, in fact, ranges from Rufus the Red to the year 1800, and many are the complications he considers within that ample sweep. It would be untrue to say that his plots imitate each other or lack in invention: we have seen that invention is one of his virtues. Nevertheless, the motives are few when disencumbered of their stately historical trappings: hunger, ambition, love, hate, patriotism, religion, the primary passions and bosom interests of mankind are those he depicts, because they are universal. It is his gift for giving them a particular dress in romance after romance which makes the result so often satisfactory, even splendid. Yet, despite the range of time and grasp of Life's essentials, there is in Scott's interpretation of humanity a certain lack which one feels in comparing him with the finest modern masters: with a Meredith, a Turgeneff or a Balzac. It is a difference not only of viewpoint but of synthetic comprehension and philosophic penetration. It means that he mirrored a day less complex, less subtle and thoughtful. This may be dwelt upon and illustrated a little in some further considerations on his main qualities.

Scott, like the earlier novelists in general, was content to depict character from without rather than from within: to display it through act and scene instead of by the probing analysis so characteristically modern. This meant inevitable limitations in dealing with an historical character or time. A high-church Tory himself, a frank Jacobite in his leanings—Taine declared he had a feudal mind—he naturally so composed a picture as to reflect this predilection, making effects of picturesqueness accordingly. The idea given of Mary Queen of Scots from "The Abbot" is one example of what is meant; that of Prince Charley in "Waverley" is another. In a sense, however, the stories are all the better for this obvious bias. Where a masculine imagination moved by warm affection seizes on an historic figure the result is sure to be vivid, at least; and let it be repeated that Scott has in this way re-created history for the many. He shows a sound artistic instinct in his handling of historic personages relative to those imaginary: rarely letting them occupy the center of interest, but giving that place to the creatures of his fancy, thereby avoiding the hampering restriction of a too close following of fact. The manipulation of Richard Coeur de Lion in "Ivanhoe" is instructive with this in mind.

While the lights and shadows of human life are duly blended in his romances, Scott had a preference for the delineation of the gentle, the grand (or grandiose), the noble and the beautiful: loving the medieval, desiring to reproduce the age of chivalry, he was naturally aristocratic in taste, as in intellect, though democratic by the dictates of a thoroughly good heart. He liked a pleasant ending—or, at least, believed in mitigating tragedy by a checker of sunlight at the close. He had little use for the degenerate types of mankind: certainly none for degeneracy for its own sake, or because of a kind of scientific interest in its workings. Nor did he conceive of the mission of fiction as being primarily instructional: nor set too high a value on a novel as a lesson in life—although at times (read the moral tag to "The Heart of Midlothian") he speaks in quite the preacher's tone of the improvement to be got from the teaching of the tale. Critics to-day are, I think, inclined to place undue emphasis upon what they regard as Scott's failure to take the moral obligations of fiction seriously: they confuse his preaching and his practice. Whatever he declared in his letters or Journal, the novels themselves, read in the light of current methods, certainly leave an old-fashioned taste on the palate, because of their moralizings and avowments of didactic purpose. The advantages and disadvantages of this general attitude can be easily understood: the loss in philosophic grasp is made up in healthiness of tone and pleasantness of appeal. One recognizes such an author as, above all, human and hearty. The reserves and delicacies of Anglo-Saxon fiction are here, of course, in full force: and a doctored view of the Middle Ages is the result, as it is in Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." A sufficient answer is that it is not Scott's business to set us right as to medievalism, but rather to use it for the imaginative purposes of pleasure. The frank intrusion of the author himself into the body of the page o in the way of footnotes is also disturbing, judged by our later standards: but was carried on with much charm by Thackeray in the mid-century, to reappear at its end in the pages of Du Maurier.

In the more technical qualifications of the story-maker's art, Scott compensated in the more masculine virtues for what he lacked in the feminine. Possessing less of finesse, subtlety and painstaking than some who were to come, he excelled in sweep, movement and variety, as well as in a kind of largeness of effect: "the big bow-wow business," to use his own humorously descriptive phrase when he was comparing himself with Jane Austen, to his own disadvantage. And it is these very qualities that endear him to the general and keep his memories green; making "Ivanhoe" and "Kenilworth" still useful for school texts—unhappy fate! Still, this means that he always had a story to tell and told it with the flow and fervor and the instinctive coherence of the story-teller born, not made.

When the fortunes of his fictive folk were settled, this novelist, always more interested in characters than in the plot which must conduct them, often loses interest and his books end more or less lamely, or with obvious conventionality. Anything to close it up, you feel. But of action and incident, scenes that live and situations with stage value, one of Scott's typical fictions has enough to furnish the stock in trade for life of many later-day romanticists who feebly follow in his wake. He has a special skill in connecting the comparatively small private involvement, which is the kernel of a story, with important public matters, so that they seem part of the larger movements or historic occurrences of the world. Dignity and body are gained for the tale thereby.

In the all-important matter of characterization, Scott yields the palm to very few modern masters. Merely to think of the range, variety and actuality of his creations is to feel the blood move quicker. From figures of historic and regal importance—Richard, Elizabeth, Mary—to the pure coinage of imagination—Dandy Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Dominie Sampson, Rebecca, Lucy, Di Vernon and Jeanie—how the names begin to throng and what a motley yet welcome company is assembled in the assizes where this romancer sits to mete out fate to those within the wide bailiwick of his imagination! This central gift he possessed with the princes of story-making. It is also probable that of the imaginative writers of English speech, nobody but Shakspere and Dickens—and Dickens alone among fellow fiction-makers—has enriched the workaday world with so many people, men and women, whose speech, doings and fates are familiar and matter for common reference. And this is the gift of gifts. It is sometimes said that Scott's heroes and heroines (especially, perhaps, the former) are lay figures, not convincing, vital creations. There is a touch of truth in it. His striking and successful figures are not walking gentlemen and leading ladies. When, for example, you recall "Guy Mannering," you do not think of the young gentleman of that name, but of Meg Merillies as she stands in the night in high relief on a bank, weather-beaten of face and wild of dress, hurling her anathema: "Ride your ways, Ellangowan!" In characters rather of humble pathos like Jeanie Deans or of eccentric humor like Dominie Sampson, Scott is at his best. He confessed to mis-liking his heroes and only warming up to full creative activity over his more unconventional types: border chiefs, buccaneers, freebooters and smugglers. "My rogue always, in spite of me, turns out my hero," is his whimsical complaint.

But this does not apply in full force to his women. Di Vernon—who does not recall that scene where from horseback in the moonlight she bends to her lover, parting from him with the words: "Farewell, Frank, forever! There is a gulf between us—a gulf of absolute perdition. Where we go, you must not follow; what we do, you must not share in—farewell, be happy!" That is the very accent of Romance, in its true and proper setting: not to be staled by time nor custom.

Nor will it do to claim that he succeeds with his Deans and fails with women of regal type: his Marys and Elizabeth Tudors. In such portrayals it seems to me he is pre-eminently fine: one cannot understand the critics who see in such creations mere stock figures supplied by history not breathed upon with the breath of life. Scott had a definite talent for the stage-setting of royalty: that is one of the reasons for the popularity of "Kenilworth." It is, however, a true discrimination which finds more of life and variety in Scott's principal women than in his men of like position. But his Rob Roys, Hatteraicks and Dalgettys justify all praise and help to explain that title of Wizard of the North which he won and wore.

In nothing is Scott stronger than in his environments, his devices for atmosphere. This he largely secures by means of description and with his wealth of material, does not hesitate to take his time in building up his effects. Perhaps the most common criticism of him heard to-day refers to his slow movement. Superabundance of matter is accompanied by prolixity of style, with a result of breeding impatience in the reader, particularly the young. Boys and girls at present do not offer Scott the unreserved affection once his own, because he now seems an author upon whom to exercise the gentle art of skipping. Enough has been said as to Scott's lack of modern economy of means. It is not necessary to declare that this juvenile reluctance to his leisurely manner stands for total depravity. The young reader of the present time (to say nothing of the reader more mature) is trained to swifter methods, and demands them. At the same time, it needs to be asserted that much of the impressiveness of Scott would be lost were his method and manner other than they are: nor will it do harm to remind ourselves that we all are in danger of losing our power of sustained and consecutive attention in relation to literature, because of the scrap-book tendency of so much modern reading. On the center-table, cheap magazines; on the stage, vaudeville—these are habits that sap the ability for slow, ruminative pleasure in the arts. Luckily, they are not the only modern manifestation, else were we in a parlous state, indeed! The trouble with Scott, then, may be resolved in part into a trouble with the modern folk who read him.

When one undertakes the thankless task of analyzing coldly and critically the style of Scott, the faults are plain enough. He constantly uses two adjectives or three in parallel construction where one would do the work better. The construction of his sentences loses largely the pleasing variation of a richly articulated system by careless punctuation and a tendency to make parallel clauses where subordinate relations should be expressed. The unnecessary copula stars his pages. Although his manner in narration rises with his subject and he may be justly called a picturesque and forceful writer, he is seldom a distinguished one. One does not turn to him for the inevitable word or phrase, or for those that startle by reason of felicity and fitness. These strictures apply to his descriptive and narrative parts, not to the dialogue: for there, albeit sins of diffuseness and verbosity are to be noted—and these are modified by the genial humanity they embody—he is one of the great masters. His use of the Scotch dialect adds indefinitely to his attraction and native smack: racy humor, sly wit, canny logic, heartful sympathy—all are conveyed by the folk medium. All subsequent users of the people-speech pay toll to Walter Scott. Small courtesy should be extended to those who complain that these idioms make hard reading. Never does Scott give us dialect for its own sake, but always for the sake of a closer revelation of the human heart—dialect's one justification.

At its worst, Scott's style may fairly be called ponderous, loose, monotonous: at its finest, the adequate instrument of a natural story-teller who is most at home when, emerging from his longueur, he writes of grand things in the grand manner.

Thus, Sir Walter Scott defined the Romance for modern fiction, gave it the authority of his genius and extended the gamut of the Novel by showing that the method of the realist, the awakening of interest in the actualities of familiar character and life, could be more broadly applied. He opposed the realist in no true sense: but indicated how, without a lapse of art or return to outworn machinery, justice might yet be done to the more stirring, large, heroic aspects of the world of men: a world which exists and clamors to be expressed: a world which readers of healthy taste are perennially interested in, nay, sooner or later, demand to be shown. His fiction, whether we award it the somewhat grudging recognition of Carlyle or with Ruskin regard its maker as the one great novelist of English race, must be deemed a precious legacy, one of literature's most honorable ornaments—especially desirable in a day so apparently plain and utilitarian as our own, eschewing ornament and perchance for that reason needing it all the more.



CHAPTER VII

FRENCH INFLUENCE

In the first third of the nineteenth century English fiction stood at the parting of the ways. Should it follow Scott and the romance, or Jane Austen and the Novel of everyday life? Should it adopt that form of story-making which puts stress on action and plot and is objective in its method, roaming all lands and times for its material; or, dealing with the familiar average of contemporary society, should it emphasize character analysis and choose the subjective realm of psychology for its peculiar domain? The pen dropped from the stricken hand of Scott in 1832; in that year a young parliamentary reporter in London was already writing certain lively, closely observed sketches of the town, and four years later they were to be collected and published under the title of "Sketches by Boz," while the next year that incomparable extravaganza, "The Pickwick Papers," was to go to an eager public. English fiction had decided: the Novel was to conquer the romance for nearly a century. It was a victory which to the present day has been a dominant influence in story-making; establishing a tendency which, until Stevenson a few years since, with the gaiety of the inveterate boy, cried up Romance once more, bade fair to sweep all before it.

Before tracing this vigorous development of the Novel of Reality with Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot (to name three great leaders), it is important to get an idea of the growth on French soil which was so deeply influential upon English as well as upon other modern fiction. Nothing is more certain in literary evolution than the fact that the French Novel in the nineteenth century has molded and defined modern fiction, thus repaying an earlier debt owed the English pioneers, Richardson and Fielding. English fiction of our own generation may be described as a native variation on a French model: in fact, the fictionists of Europe and the English-speaking lands, with whatever divergencies personal or national, have derived in large measure from the Gaul the technique, the point of view and the choice of theme which characterizes the French Novel from Stendhal to Balzac, from Zola to Guy de Maupassant.

I

The name of Henri Beyle, known to literature under the sobriquet of Stendhal, has a meaning in the development of the modern type of fiction out of proportion to the intrinsic value of his stories.

He was, of course, far surpassed by mightier followers like Balzac, Flaubert and Zola; yet his significance lies in the very fact that they were followers. His is all the merit pertaining to the feat of introducing the Novel of psychic analysis: of that persistent and increasingly unpleasant bearing-down upon the darker facts of personality. Hence his "Rouge et Noir," dated 1830 and typical of his aim and method, is in a sense an epoch-making book.

Balzac was at the same time producing the earlier studies to culminate in that Human Comedy which was to stand as the chief accomplishment of his nation in the literature of fiction. But Stendhal, sixteen years older, began to print first and to him falls the glory of innovation. Balzac gives full praise to his predecessor in his essay on Beyle, and his letters contain frequent references to the debt he owed that curious bundle of fatuities, inconsistencies and brilliancies, the author of "The Chartreuse de Parme." Later, Zola calls him "the father of us all," meaning of the naturalistic school of which Zola himself was High Priest. Beyle's business was the analysis of soul states: an occupation familiar enough in these times of Hardy, Meredith and Henry James. He held several posts of importance under Napoleon, worshiped that leader, loved Italy as his birthplace, loved England too, and tried to show in his novels the result of the inactive Restoration upon a generation trained by Napoleon to action, violence, ambition and passion.

Read to-day, "Le Rouge et Noir," which it is sufficient to consider for our purposes, seems somewhat slow in movement, struggling in construction, meticulous in manner. At times, its interminability recalls "Clarissa Harlowe," but it possesses the traits' which were to mark the coming school of novel-writing in France and hence in the modern world: to wit, freedom in dealing with love in its irregular relation, the tendency towards tragedy, and that subtlety of handling which makes the main interest to depend upon motive and thought rather than upon the external action itself. "Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,"—that might be the motto. The young quasi-hero is Julian, an ambitious worldling of no family, and his use of the Church as a means of promotion, his amours with several women and his death because of his love for one of them, are traced with a kind of tortuous revelation of the inner workings of the human heart which in its way declares genius in the writer: and which certainly makes a work disillusioning of human nature. Its more external aspect of a study of the politic Church and State, of the rivalry between the reds and the blacks of the state religion, is entirely secondary to this greater purpose and result: here, for the first time at full length, a writer shows the possibility of that realistic portrayal sternly carried through, no matter how destructive of romantic preconceptions of men and women. It is the method of Richardson flowering in a time of greater freedom and more cynical questioning of the gods.

II

But giving Stendhal his full mint and cummin of praise, he yet was but the forerunner of a mightier man. Undoubtedly, he prepared the soil and was a necessary link in the chain of development wherewith fiction was to forge itself an unbreakable sequence of strength. Balzac was to put out his lesser light, as indeed the refulgence of his genius was to overshine all French fiction, before and since. It would be an exaggeration to say that the major English novelists of the middle nineteenth century were consciously disciples of Balzac—for something greater even than he moved them; the spirit of the Time. But it is quite within bounds to say that of all modern fiction he is the leader and shaper. Without him, his greatest native follower, Zola, is inconceivable. He gathers up into himself and expresses at its fullest all that was latent in the striking modern growth whose banner-cry was Truth, and whose method was that of the social scientist. Here was a man who, early in his career, for the first time in the history of the Novel, deliberately planned to constitute himself the social historian of his epoch and race: and who, in upwards of a hundred remarkable pieces of fiction in Novel form executed that plan in such fulness that his completed work stands not only as a monument of industry, but as perhaps the most inspiring example of literary synthesis in the history of letters. In bigness of conception and of construction—let alone the way in which the work was performed—the Human Comedy is awe-begetting; it drives one to Shakspere for like largeness of scale. Such a performance, ordered and directed to a foreseen end, is unique in literature.

As Balzac thus gave birth, with a fiery fecundity of invention, to book after book of the long list of Novels that make up his story of life, there took shape in his mind a definite intention: to become the Secretary of an Age of which he declared society to be the historian. He wished to exhibit man in his species as he was to be seen in the France of the novelist's era, just as a naturalist aims to study beast-kind, segregating them into classes for zoological investigation. Later, Balzac's great successor (as we shall see) applied this analogy with more rigid insistence upon the scientific method which should obtain in all literary study. The survey proposed covered a period of about half a century and included the Republic, the Empire and the Restoration: it ranged through all classes and conditions of men with no appearance of prejudice, preference or parti-pris (this is one of the marvels of Balzac), thus gaining the immense advantage of an apparently complete and catholic comprehension of the human show. Of all modern novelists, Balzac is the one whose work seems like life instead of an opinion of life; he has the objectivity of Shakspere. Even a Tolstoy set beside him seems limited.

This idea of a plan was not crystallized into the famous title given to his collective works—La Comedie Humaine—until 1842, when but eight years of life remained to him. But four years earlier it had been mentioned in a letter, and when Balzac was only a little over thirty, at a time when his better-known books were just beginning to appear, he had signified his sense of an inclusive scheme by giving such a running title to a group of his stories as the familiar "Scenes from Private Life"—to which, in due course, were added other designations for the various parts of the great plan. The encyclopedic survey was never fully completed, but enough was done to justify all the laudation that belongs to a Herculean task and the exploitation of an almost incredible amount of human data. As for finishing the work, the failure hardly detracts from its value or affects its place in literature. Neither Spenser's "Faery Queen" nor Wordsworth's "The Excursion" was completed, and, per contra, it were as well for Browning if "The Ring and the Book" had not been. In all such cases of so-called incompletion, one recognizes Hercules from the feet. Had this mighty story-teller and student of humanity carried out his full intention there would have been nearly 150 pieces of fiction; of the plan-on-paper he actually completed ninety-seven, two-thirds of the whole, and enough to illustrate the conception. And it must be remembered that Balzac died at fifty. One result of the incompletion, as Brunetiere has pointed out, is to give disproportionate treatment to certain phases of life, to the military, for instance, for which Balzac has twenty-four stories on his list, whereas only two, "The Chouans" and "A Passion in the Desert," were executed. But surely, sufficient was done, looking to the comedy as a whole, to force us to describe the execution as well as the conception as gigantic. Had the work been more mechanically pushed to its end for the exact plan's sake, the perfection of scheme might have been attained at the expense of vitality and inspiration. Ninety-seven pieces of fiction, the majority of them elaborate novels, the whole involving several thousand characters, would be impressive in any case, but when they come from an author who marvelously reproduces his time and country, creating his scenes in a way to afford us a sense of the complexity of life—its depth and height, its beauty, terror and mystery—we can but hail him as Master.

And in spite of the range and variety in Balzac's unique product, it has an effect of unity based upon a sense of social solidarity. He conceives it his duty to present the unity of society in his day, whatever its apparent class and other divergencies. He would show that men and women are members of the one body social, interacting upon each other in manifold relations and so producing the dramas of earth; each story plays its part in this general aim, illustrating the social laws and reactions, even as the human beings themselves play their parts in the world. In this way Balzac's Human Comedy is an organism, however much it may fall short of symmetry and completion.

In the outline of the plan we find him separating his studies into three groups or classes: The Studies of Manners, the Philosophical Studies, and the Analytic Studies. In the first division were placed the related groups of scenes of Private life, Provincial life, Parisian life, Political life, Military life and Country life. It was his desire, as he says in a letter to Madame Hanska, to have the group of studies of Manners "represent all social effects"; in the philosophic studies the causes of those effects: the one exhibits individualities typified, the other, types individualized: and in the Analytic Studies he searches for the principles. "Manners are the performance; the causes are the wings and the machinery. The principles—they are the author.... Thus man, society and humanity will be described, judged, analyzed without repetition and in a work which will be, as it were, 'The Thousand and One Nights' of the west."

The scheme thus categorically laid down sounds rather dry and formal, nor is it too easy to understand. But all trouble vanishes when once the Human Comedy itself, in any example of it, is taken up; you launch upon the great swollen tide of life and are carried irresistibly along.

It is plain that with an author of Balzac's productive powers, any attempt to convey an idea of his quality must perforce confine itself to a few representative specimens. A few of them, rightly chosen, give a fair notion of his general interpretation. What then are some illustrative creations?

In the case of most novelists, although of first rank, it is not as a rule difficult to define their class and name their tendency: their temperaments and beliefs are so-and-so, and they readily fall under the designation of realist or romanticist, pessimist, or optimist, student of character or maker of plots. This is, in a sense, impossible with Balzac. The more he be read, the harder to detect his bias: he seems, one is almost tempted to say, more like a natural force than a human mind. Persons read two or three—perhaps half a dozen of his books—and then prate glibly of his dark view, his predilection for the base in mankind; when fifty fictions have been assimilated, it will be realized that but a phase of Balzac had been seen.

When the passion of creation, the birth-throes of a novel were on him, he became so immersed in the aspect of life he was depicting that he saw, felt, knew naught else: externally this obsession was expressed by his way of life and work while the story was growing under his hand: his recluse habits, his monkish abstention from worldly indulgences, the abnormal night hours of activity, the loss of flesh, so that the robust man who went into the guarded chamber came out at the end of six weeks the shadow of himself.

As a consequence of the consecration to the particular task (as if it embraced the one view of existence), the reader perhaps experiences a shock of surprise in passing from "The Country Doctor" to "Pere Goriot." But the former is just as truly part of his interpretation as the latter. A dozen fictions can be drawn from the body of his production which portray humanity in its more beautiful, idealistic manifestations. Books like "The Country Doctor" and "Eugenic Grandet" are not alone in the list. And how beautiful both are! "The Country Doctor" has all the idyllic charm of setting which a poetic interpretation of life in a rural community can give. Not alone Nature, but human nature is hymned. The kindly old physician, whose model is the great Physician himself, is like Chaucer's good parson, an unforgettable vision of the higher potentialities of the race. Such a novel deserves to be called quite as truly romance and prose poem, save that Balzac's vraisemblance, his gift for photographic detail and the contemporaneousness of the setting, make it modern. And thus with "Eugenie Grandet" the same method applied in "The Country Doctor" to the study of a noble profession in a rural atmosphere, is here used for the portrait of a good woman whose entourage is again that of simple, natural conditions. There is more of light and shade in the revelation of character because Eugenie's father, the miser—a masterly sketch—furnishes a dark background for her radiant personality. But the same effect is produced, that of throwing into bold relief the sweet, noble, high and pure in our common humanity. And in this case it is a girl of humble station far removed from the shams and shameful passions of the town. The conventional contrast would be to present in another novel some woman of the city as foul as this daughter of Grandet is fair. Not so Balzac. He is too broad an observer of humanity, and as artist too much the master for such cheap effects of chiaroscuro. In "The Duchess De Langeais" e sets his central character amidst the frivolities of fashion and behold, yet another beautiful type of the sex! As Richardson drew his Pamela and Clarissa, so Balzac his Eugenie and the Duchess: and let us not refrain from carrying out the comparison, and add, how feeble seems the Englishman in creation when one thinks of the half a hundred other female figures, good and bad, high and low, distinctly etched upon the memory by the mordant pen of the Frenchman!

Then if we turn to that great tragedy of family, "Pere Goriot," the change is complete. Now are we plunged into an atmosphere of greed, jealousy, uncleanliness and hate, all steeped in the bourgeois street air of Paris. In this tale of thankless daughters and their piteous old father, all the hideousness possible to the ties of kin is uncovered to our frightened yet fascinated eye. The plot holds us in a vise; to recall Madame Vautrin's boarding house is to shudder at the sights and smells! Compare it with Dickens' Mrs. Todgers, and once and for all you have the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic genius.

Suppose, now, the purpose be to reveal not a group or community, but one human soul, a woman's this time: read "A Woman of Thirty" and see how the novelist,—for the first time—and one is inclined to add, for all time,—has pierced through the integuments and reached the very quick of psychologic exposure. It is often said that he has created the type of young-old, or old-young woman: meaning that before him, novelists overlooked the fact that a woman of this age, maturer in experience and still ripe in physical charms, is really of intense social attraction, richly worth study. But this is because Balzac knows that all souls are interesting, if only we go beneath the surface. The only work of modern fiction which seems to me so nakedly to lay open the recesses of the human spirit as does "A Woman of Thirty" is Meredith's "The Egoist"; and, of course, master against master, Balzac is easily the superior, since the English author's wonderful book is so mannered and grotesque. Utter sympathy is shown in these studies of femininity, whether the subject be a harlot, a saint or a patrician of the Grande Monde.

If the quest be for the handling of mankind en masse, with big effects of dark and light: broad brush-work on a canvas suited to heroical, even epic, themes,—a sort of fiction the later Zola was to excel in—Balzac will not fail us. His work here is as noteworthy as it is in the fine detailed manner of his most realistical modern studies—or in the searching analysis of the human spirit. "The Chouans" may stand for this class: it has all the fire, the color, the elan that emanate from the army and the call of country. We have flashed before us one of those reactionary movements, after the French Revolution, which take on a magic romanticism because they culminate in the name of Napoleon. While one reads, one thinks war, breathes war—it is the only life for the moment. Just ahead a step, one feels, is the "imminent deadly breach"; the social or business or Bohemian doings of later Paris are as if they did not exist. And this particular novel will achieve such a result with the reader, even although it is not by any means one of Balzac's supreme achievements, being in truth, a little aside from his metier, since it is historical and suggests in spots the manner of Scott. But this power of envisaging war (which will be farther realized if such slighter works as "A Dark Affair" and "An Episode Under the Terror" be also perused), is only a single manifestation of a general gift. Suppose there is desired a picture very common in our present civilization—most common it may be in America,—that of the country boy going up to the city to become—what? Perhaps a captain of commerce, or a leader of fashion: perhaps a great writer or artist; or a politician who shall rule the capitol. It is a venture packed full of realistic experience but equally full of romance, drama, poetry—of an epic suggestiveness. In two such volumes as "A Great Provincial Man in Paris" and "Lost Illusions," all this, with its dire chances of evil as well as its roseate promise of success, has been wonderfully expressed. So cogently modern a motive had never been so used before.

Sometimes in a brace of books Balzac shows us the front and back-side of some certain section of life: as in "Cousin Pons" and "Cousine Bette."—The corner of Paris where artists, courtesans and poor students most do congregate, where Art capitalized is a sacred word, and the odd estrays of humanity, picturesque, humorous, and tragic, display all the chances of mankind,—this he paints so that we do not so much look on as move amidst the throng. In the first-named novel, assuredly a very great book, the figure of the quaint old connoisseur is one of fiction's superlative successes: to know him is to love him in all his weakness. In the second book, Bette is a female vampire and the story around her as terrible as the other is heart-warming and sweet. And you know that both are true, true as they would not have been apart: "helpless each without the other."

Again, how much of the gambling activities of modern business are emblazoned in another of the acknowledged masterpieces, "Caesar Birotteau." We can see in it the prototype of much that comes later in French fiction: Daudet's "Risler Aine et Froment Jeune" and Zola's "L'Argent," to name but two. Such a story sums up the practical, material side of a reign or an epoch.

Nor should it be forgotten that this close student of human nature, whose work appears so often severely mundane, and most strong when its roots go down into the earth, sometimes seeming to prefer the rankness and slime of human growths,—can on occasion soar into the empyrean, into the mystic region of dreams and ideals and all manner of subtle imaginings. Witness such fiction as "The Magic Skin," "Seraphita," and "The Quest of the Absolute." It is hard to believe that the author of such creations is he of "Pere Goriot" or "Cousine Bette." But it is Balzac's wisdom to see that such pictures are quite as truly part of the Human Comedy: because they represent man giving play to his soul—exercising his highest faculties. Nor does the realistic novelist in such efforts have the air of one who has left his true business in order to disport himself for once in an alien element. On the contrary, he seems absolutely at home: for the time, this is his only affair, his natural interest.

And so with illustrations practically inexhaustible, which the long list prodigally offers. But the scope and variety have been already suggested; the best rule with Balzac is, each one to his taste, always remembering that in a writer so catholic, there is a peculiar advantage in an extended study. Nor can from twenty to twenty-five of his best books be read without a growing conviction that here is a man of genius who has done a unique thing.

It is usual to refer to Balzac as the first great realist of the French, indeed, of modern fiction. Strictly, he is not the first in France, as we have seen, since Beyle preceded him; nor in modern fiction, for Jane Austen, so admirably an artist of verity, came a generation before. But, as always when a compelling literary force appears, Balzac without any question dominates in the first half of the nineteenth century: more than this, he sets the mold of the type which marks the second half. In fact, the modern Novel means Balzac's recipe. English fiction, along with that of Europe, shares this influence. We shall see in dealing with Dickens how definitely the English writer adopted the Balzac method as suited to the era and sympathetic to Dickens' own nature.

As to the accuracy with which he gave a representation of contemporary life—thus deserving the name realist—considerable may be said in the way of qualification. Much of it applies with similar force to Zola, later to be hailed as a king among modern realists in the naturalistic extreme to which he pushed the movement. Balzac, through his remarkable instinct for detail and particularity, did introduce into nineteenth century fiction an effect of greater truth in the depiction of life. Nobody perhaps had—nobody has since—presented mis-en-scene as did he. He builds up an impression by hundreds of strokes, each seemingly insignificant, but adding to a totality that becomes impressive. Moreover, again and again in his psychologic analysis there are home-thrusts which bring the blood to the face of any honest person. His detail is thus quite as much subjective as external. It were a great mistake to regard Balzac as merely a writer who photographed things outside in the world; he is intensely interested in the things within—and if objectivity meant realism exclusively, he would be no realist at all.

But farther than this; with all his care for minute touches and his broad and painstaking observation, it is not so much life, after all, as a vision of life which he gives. This contradicts what was said early in the present chapter: but the two statements stand for the change likely to come to any student of Balzac: his objective personality at last resolves itself into a vividly personal interpretation. His breadth blinds one for a while, that is all. Hence Balzac may be called an incurable romantic, an impressionist, as much as realist. Like all first-class art, his gives us the seeming-true for our better instruction. He said in the Preface to "Pere Goriot" that the novelist should not only depict the world as it is, but "a possibly better world." He has done so. The most untrue thing in a novel may be the fact lifted over unchanged from life? Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but great fiction is truer than truth. Balzac understood this, remembered it in his heart. He is too big as man and artist to be confined within the narrow realistic formula. While, as we have seen, he does not take sides on moral issues, nor allow himself to be a special pleader for this or that view, his work strikes a moral balance in that it shows universal humanity—not humanity tranced in metaphysics, or pathologic in analysis, or enmeshed in sensualism. In this sense, Balzac is a great realist. There is no danger of any novelist—any painter of life—doing harm, if he but gives us the whole. It is the story-teller who rolls some prurient morsel under his tongue who has the taint in him: he who, to sell his books, panders to the degraded instincts of his audience. Had Balzac been asked point-blank what he deemed the moral duty of the novelist, he would probably have disclaimed any other responsibility than that of doing good work, of representing things as they are. But this matters not, if only a writer's nature be large and vigorous enough to report of humanity in a trustworthy way. Balzac was much too well endowed in mind and soul and had touched life far too widely, not to look forth upon it with full comprehension of its spiritual meaning.

In spite, too, of his alleged realism, he believed that the duty of the social historian was more than to give a statement of present conditions—the social documents of the moment,—variable as they might be for purposes of deduction. He insisted that the coming,—perhaps seemingly impossible things, should be prophesied;—those future ameliorations, whether individual or collective, which keep hope alive in the human breast. Let me again quote those words, extraordinary as coming from the man who is called arch-realist of his day: "The novelist should depict the world not alone as it is, but a possibly better world." In the very novel where he said it ("Pere Goriot") he may seem to have violated the principle: but taking his fiction in its whole extent, he has acted upon it, the pronunciamento exemplifies his practice.

Balzac's work has a Shaksperian universality, because it is so distinctly French,—a familiar paradox in literature. He was French in his feeling for the social unit, in his keen receptivity to ideas, in his belief in Church and State as the social organisms through which man could best work out his salvation. We find him teaching that humanity, in terms of Gallic temperament, and in time limits between the Revolution and the Second Republic, is on the whole best served by living under a constitutional monarchy and in vital touch with Mother Church,—that form of religion which is a racial inheritance from the Past. In a sense, then, he was a man with the limitations of his place and time, as, in truth, was Shakspere. But the study of literature instructs us that it is exactly those who most vitally grasp and voice their own land and period, who are apt to give a comprehensive view of humanity at large; to present man sub specie aeternitatis. This is so because, thoroughly to present any particular part of mankind, is to portray all mankind. It is all tarred by the same stick, after all. It is only in the superficials that unlikenesses lie.

Balzac was intensely modern. Had he lived today, he might have been foremost in championing the separation of Church and State and looked on serenely at the sequestration of the religious houses. But writing his main fiction from 1830 to 1850, his attitude was an enlightened one, that of a thoughtful patriot.

His influence upon nineteenth century English fiction was both direct and indirect. It was direct in its effect upon several of the major novelists, as will be noted in studying them; the indirect influence is perhaps still more important, because it was so all-pervasive, like an emanation that expressed the Time. It became impossible, after Balzac had lived and wrought, for any artist who took his art seriously to write fiction as if the great Frenchman had not come first. He set his seal upon that form of literature, as Ibsen, a generation later, was to set his seal upon the drama, revolutionizing its technique. To the student therefore he is a factor of potent power in explaining the modern fictional development. Nor should he be a negligible quantity to the cultivated reader seeking to come genially into acquaintance with the best that European letters has accomplished. While upon the lover of the Novel as a form of literature—which means the mass of all readers to-day—Balzac cannot fail to exercise a personal fascination.—Life widens before us at his touch, and that glamour which is the imperishable gift of great art, returns again as one turns the pages of the little library of yellow books which contain the Human Comedy.

Balzac died in 1850, when in the prime of his powers. Seven years later was published the "Madame Bovary" of Flaubert, one of the most remarkable novels of the nineteenth century and the most unrelenting depiction of the devolution of a woman's soul in all fiction: certainly it deserved that description up to the hour of its appearance, if not now, when so much has been done in the realm of female pathology. Flaubert is the most noteworthy intermediate figure between Balzac and Zola. He seems personally of our own day, for, living to be an old man, he was friend and fellow-worker with the brothers Goncourt (whom we associate with Zola) and extended a fatherly hand to the young Maupassant at the beginning of the latter's career,—so brilliant, brief, tragic. The influence of this one novel (overlooking that of "Salambo," in its way also of influence in the modern growth) has been especially great upon a kind of fiction most characteristic of the present generation: in which, in fact, it has assumed a "bad preeminence." I mean the Novel of sexual relations in their irregular aspects. The stormy artist of the Goncourt dinners has much to answer for, if we regard him only as the creator of such a creature as Madame Bovary. Many later books were to surpass this in license, in coarseness, or in the effect of evoking a libidinous taste; but none in its unrelenting gloom, the cold detachment of the artist-scientist obsessed with the idea of truthfully reflecting certain sinister facets of the many-faced gem called life! It is hardly too much to say, in the light of the facts, that "Madame Bovary" was epochal. It paved the way for Zola. It justified a new aim for the modern fiction of so-called unflinching realism. The saddest thing about the book is its lack of pity, of love. Emma Bovary is a weak woman, not a bad woman; she goes downhill through the force of circumstances coupled with a want of backbone. And she is not responsible for her flabby moral muscles. Behind the story is an absolutely fatalistic philosophy; given a certain environment, any woman (especially if assisted a bit by her ancestors) will go to hell,—such seems the lesson. Now there is nothing just like this in Balzac, We hear in it a new note, the latter-day note of quiescence, and despair. And if we compare Flaubert's indifference to his heroine's fate with the tenderness of Dumas fils, or of Daudet, or the English Reade and Dickens—we shall realize that we have here a mixture of a personal and a coming general interpretation: Flaubert having by nature a kind of aloof determinism, yet feeling, like the first puffs of a cold chilling wind, the oncoming of an age of Doubt.

III.

These three French writers then, Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert, molded the Novel before 1860 into such a shape as to make it plastic to the hand of Zola a decade later. Zola's influence upon our present generation of English fiction has been great, as it has upon all novel-making since 1870. Before explaining this further, it will be best to return to the study of the mid-century English novelists who were too early to be affected by him to any perceptible degree.



CHAPTER VIII

DICKENS

By the year 1850, in England, the so-called Novel of realism had conquered. Scott in an earlier generation had by his wonderful gift made the romance fashionable. But, as we said, it was the romance with a difference: the romance with its feet firmly planted on mother-earth, not ballooning in cloudland; the romance depicting men and women of the past but yet men and women, not creatures existing only in the fancy of the romance-maker. In short, Scott, romancer though he was, helped modern realism along, because he handled his material more truthfully than it had been handled before. And his great contemporary, Jane Austen, with her strict adherence to the present and to her own locale, threw all her influence in the same direction, justifying Mr. Howell's assertion that she leads all English novelists in that same truthful handling.

Moreover, that occult but imperative thing, the spirit of the Time, was on the side of Realism: and all bend to its dictation. Then, in the mid-century, Dickens and Thackeray, with George Eliot a little later on their heels, and Trollope too, came to give a deeper set to the current which was to flow in similar channels for the remainder of the period. In brief, this is the story, whatever modifications of the main current are to be noted: the work of Bulwer and Disraeli, of Reade, Kingsley and Collins.

A decade before Thackeray got a general hearing Dickens had fame and mighty influence. It was in the eighteen thirties that the self-made son of an impecunious navy clerk, who did not live in vain since he sat for a portrait of Micawber and the father of the Marshalsea, turned from journalism to that higher reporting which means the fiction of manners and humors. All the gods had prepared him for his destiny. Sympathy he had for the poor, the oppressed, the physically and morally unfit, for he had suffered in his own person, or in his imagination, for them all. His gift of observation had been sharpened in the grim school of necessity: he had learned to write by writing under the pressure of newspaper needs. And he had in his blood, while still hardly more than a lad, a feeling for idiomatic English which, so far as it was not a boon straight from heaven, had been fostered when the very young Charles had battened, as we saw, upon the eighteenth century worthies.

It is now generally acknowledged that Dickens is not a temporary phenomenon in Victorian letters, but a very solid major fact in the native literature, too large a creative force to be circumscribed by a generation. Looked back upon across the gap of time, he looms up all the more impressively because the years have removed the clutter about the base of the statue. The temporary loss of critical regard (a loss affecting his hold on the general reading public little, if any) has given way to an almost violent critical reaction in his favor. We are widening the esthetic canvas to admit of the test of life, and are coming to realize that, obsessed for a time by the attraction of that lower truth which makes so much of external realities, realism lost sight of the larger demands of art which include selection, adaptation, and that enlargement of effect marking the distinction between art and so-called reality. No critic is now timid about saying a good word for the author of "Pickwick" and "Copperfield." A few years ago it was otherwise. Present-day critics such as Henley, Lang, and Chesterton have assured the luke-warm that there is room in English literature for both Thackeray and Dickens.

That Dickens began to write fiction as a very young journalist was in some ways in his favor; in other ways, to the detriment of his work. It meant an early start on a career of over thirty years. It meant writing under pressure with the spontaneity and reality which usually result. It also meant the bold grappling with the technique of a great art, learning to make novels by making them. Again, one truly inspired to fiction is lucky to have a novitiate in youth. So far the advantages.

On the other hand, the faults due to inexperience, lack of education, uncertainty of aim, haste and carelessness and other foes of perfection, will probably be in evidence when a writer who has scarcely attained to man's estate essays fiction. Dickens' early work has thus the merits and demerits of his personal history. A popular and able parliamentary reporter, with sympathetic knowledge of London and the smaller towns where his duties took him, possessed of a marvelous memory which photographed for him the boyish impressions of places like Chatham and Rochester, he began with sketches of that life interspersed with more fanciful tales which drew upon his imagination and at times passed the melodramatic border-line. When these collected pieces were published under the familiar title "Sketches by Boz," it is not too much to say that the Dickens of the "Pickwick Papers" (which was to appear next year) was revealed. Certainly, the main qualities of a great master of the Comic were in these pages; so, in truth, was the master of both tears and smiles. But not at full-length: the writer had not yet found his occasion;—the man needs the occasion, even as it awaits the man. And so, hard upon the Boz book, followed, as it were by an accident, the world-famous "Adventures of Mr. Pickwick." By accident, I say, because the promising young author was asked to furnish the letter-press for a series of comic sporting pictures by the noted artist, Seymour; whereupon—doubtless to the astonishment of all concerned, the pictures became quite secondary to the reading matter and the Wellers soon set all England talking and laughing over their inimitable sayings. Here in a loosely connected series of sketches the main unity of which was the personality of Mr. Pickwick and his club, its method that of the episodic adventure story of "Gil Blas" lineage, its purpose frankly to amuse at all costs, a new creative power in English literature gave the world over three hundred characters in some sixty odd scenes: intensely English, intensely human, and still, after the lapse of three quarters of a century, keenly enjoyable.

In a sense, all Dickens' qualities are to be found in "The Pickwick Papers," as they have come to be called for brevity's sake. But the assertion is misleading, if it be taken to mean that in the fifteen books of fiction which Dickens was to produce, he added nothing, failed to grow in his art or to widen and deepen in his hold upon life. So far is this from the truth, that one who only knows Charles Dickens in this first great book of fun, knows a phase of him, not the whole man: more, hardly knows the novelist at all. He was to become, and to remain, not only a great humorist, but a great novelist as well: and "Pickwick" is not, by definition, a Novel at all. Hence, the next book the following year, "Oliver Twist," was important as answering the question: Was the brilliant new writer to turn out very novelist, able to invent, handle and lead to due end a tangled representation of social life?

Before replying, one rather important matter may be adverted to, concerning the Dickens introduced to the world by "Pickwick": his astonishing power in the evocation of human beings, whom we affectionately remember, whose words are treasured, whose fates are followed with a sort of sense of personal responsibility. If the creation of differentiated types of humanity who persist in living in the imagination be the cardinal gift of the fiction writer, then this one is easily the leading novelist of the race. Putting aside for the moment the question of his caricaturing tendency, one fact confronts us, hardly to be explained away: we can close our eyes and see Micawber, Mrs. Gamp, Pegotty, Dick Swiveller, the Artful Dodger, Joe Gargery, Tootles, Captain Cutter, and a hundred more, and their sayings, quaint and dear, are like household companions. And this is true in equal measure of no other story-maker who has used English speech—it may be doubted if it is true to like degree of Shakspere himself.

In the quick-following stories, "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby," the author passed from episode and comic characterization to what were in some sort Novels: the fiction of organism, growth and climax.

His wealth of character creation was continued and even broadened. But there was more here: an attempt to play the game of Novel-making. It may be granted that when Dickens wrote these early books (as a young man in the twenties), he had not yet mastered many of the difficulties of the art of fiction. There is loose construction in both: the melodrama of "Oliver Twist" blends but imperfectly with the serious and sentimental part of the narrative, which is less attractive. So, too, in "Nickleby," there is an effect at times of thin ice where the plot is secondary to the episodic scenes and characters by the way. Yet in both Novels there is a story and a good one: we get the spectacle of genius learning its lesson,—experimenting in a form. And as those other early books, differing totally from each other too, "Old Curiosity Shop," and "Barnaby Rudge," were produced, and in turn were succeeded by a series of great novels representing the writer's young prime,—I mean "Martin Chuzzlewit," "Dombey and Son" and "David Copperfield,"—it was plain that the hand of Dickens was becoming subdued to the element it worked in. Not only was there a good fable, as before, but it was managed with increasing mastery, while the general adumbration of life gained in solidity, truth and rich human quality. In brief, by the time "Copperfield," the story most often referred to as his best work, was reached, Dickens was an artist. He wrought in that fiction in such a fashion as to make the most of the particular class of Novel it represented: to wit, the first-person autobiographic picture of life. Given its purpose, it could hardly have been better done. It surely bears favorable comparison, for architecture, with Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," a work in the same genre, though lacking the autobiographic method. This is quite aside from its remarkable range of character-portrayal, its humor, pathos and vraisemblance, its feeling for situation, its sonorous eloquence in massed effects.

By the time he had reached mid-career, then, Charles Dickens had made himself a skilled, resourceful story-teller, while his unique qualities of visualization and interpretation had strengthened. This point is worth emphasis, since there are those who contend that "The Pickwick Papers" is his most characteristic performance. Such a judgment is absurd, It overlooks the grave beauty of the picture of Chesney Wold in Bleak House; the splendid harmony of the Yarmouth storm in "Copperfield"; the fine melodrama of the chapter in "Chuzzlewit" where the guilty Jonas takes his haggard life; the magnificent portraiture of the Father of the Marshalsea in "Little Dorrit": the spiritual exaltation in vivid stage terms of Carton's death; the exquisite April-day blend of tenderness and fun in limning the young life of a Marchioness, a little Dombey and a tiny Tim. To call Dickens a comic writer and stop there, is to try to pour a river into a pint pot; for a sort of ebullient boy-like spirit of fun, the high jinks of literature, we go to "Pickwick"; for the light and shade of life to "Copperfield"; for the structural excellencies of fiction to later masterpieces like "The Tale of Two Cities" and "Great Expectations."

Just here a serious objection often brought against Dickens may be considered: his alleged tendency to caricature. Does Dickens make his characters other than what life itself shows, and if so, is he wrong in so doing?

His severest critics assume the second if the first be but granted. Life—meaning the exact reproduction of reality—is their fetish. Now, it must be granted that Dickens does make his creatures talk as their prototypes do not in life. Nobody would for a moment assert that Mrs. Gamp, Pecksniff and Micawber could be literally duplicated from the actual world. But is not Dickens within his rights as artist in so changing the features of life as to increase our pleasure? That is the nub of the whole matter. The artist of fiction should not aim at exact photography, for it is impossible; no fiction-maker since time began has placed on the printed pages half the irrelevance and foolishness or one-fifth the filth which are in life itself. Reasons of art and ethics forbid. The aim, therefore, should rather be at an effect of life through selection and re-shaping. And I believe Dickens is true to this requirement. We hear less now than formerly of his crazy exaggerations: we are beginning to realize that perhaps he saw types that were there, which we would overlook if they were under our very eyes: we feel the wisdom of Chesterton's remarks that Dickens' characters will live forever because they never lived at all! We suffered from the myopia of realism. Zola desired above all things to tell the truth by representing humanity as porcine, since he saw it that way: he failed in his own purpose, because decency checked him: his art is not photographic (according to his proud boast) but has an almost Japanese convention of restraint in its suppression of facts. Had Sarah Gamp been allowed by Dickens to speak as she would speak in life, she would have been unspeakably repugnant, never cherished as a permanently laughable, even lovable figure of fiction. Dickens was a master of omissions as well as of those enlargments which made him carry over the foot lights. Mrs. Gamp is a monumental study of the coarse woman rogue: her creator makes us hate the sin and tolerate the sinner. Nor is that other masterly portrait of the woman rascal—Thackeray's Becky Sharp—an example of strict photography; she is great in seeming true, but she is not life.

So much, then, for the charge of caricature: it is all a matter of degree. It all depends upon the definition of art, and upon the effect made upon the world by the characters themselves. If they live in loving memory, they must, in the large sense, be true. Thus we come back to the previous statement: Dickens' people live—are known by their words and in their ways all over the civilized world. No collection of mere grotesques could ever bring this to pass. Prick any typical creation of Dickens and it runs blood, not sawdust. And just in proportion as we travel, observe broadly and form the habit of a more penetrating and sympathetic study of mankind, shall we believe in these emanations of genius. Occasionally, under the urge and surplusage of his comic force, he went too far and made a Quilp: but the vast majority even of his drolls are as credible as they are dear.

That he showed inequality as he wrought at the many books which filled the years between "Pickwick" and the unfinished "Mystery of Edwin Drood," may also be granted. Also may it be confessed that within the bounds of one book there are the extremes of good and bad. It is peculiar to Dickens that often in the very novel we perchance feel called upon to condemn most, occurs a scene or character as memorably great as anything he left the world. Thus, we may regard "Old Curiosity Shop," once so beloved, as a failure when viewed as a whole; and yet find Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness at their immortal game as unforgettable as Mrs. Battle engaged in the same pleasant employment. Nor because other parts of "Little Dorrit" seem thin and artificial, would we forego the description of the debtor's prison. And our belief that the presentation of the labor-capital problem in "Hard Times" is hasty and shallow, does not prevent a recognition of the opening sketch of the circus troop as displaying its author at his happiest of humorous observation. There are thus always redeeming things in the stories of this most unequal man of genius. Seven books there are, novels in form, which are indubitable masterpieces: "Martin Chuzzlewit," "Dombey and Son," "David Copperfield," "Bleak House," "A Tale of Two Cities," "Great Expectations" and "Our Mutual Friend." These, were all the others withdrawn, would give ample evidence of creative power: they have the largeness, variety and inventive verve which only are to be found in the major novelists. Has indeed the same number of equal weight and quality been given forth by any other English writer?

Another proof that the power of Dickens was not dependent exclusively upon the comic, is his production of "A Tale of Two Cities." It is sometimes referred to as uncharacteristic because it lacks almost entirely his usual gallery of comics: but it is triumphantly a success in a different field. The author says he wished for the nonce to make a straight adventure tale with characters secondary. He did it in a manner which has always made the romance a favorite, and compels us to include this dramatic study of the French Revolution among the choicest of his creations. Its period and scene have never—save by Carlyle—been so brilliantly illuminated. Dickens was brooding on this story at a time when, wretchedly unhappy, he was approaching the crisis of a separation from his wife: the fact may help to explain its failure to draw on that seemingly inexhaustible fountain of bubbling fun so familiar in his work. But even subtract humor and Dickens exhibits the master-hand in a fiction markedly of another than his wonted kind. This Novel—or romance, as it should properly be called—reminds us of a quality in Dickens which has been spoken of in the way of derogation: his theatrical tendency. When one declares an author to be dramatic, a compliment is intended. But when he is called theatric, censure is implied. Dickens, always possessed of a strong sense of the dramatic and using it to immense advantage, now and again goes further and becomes theatric: that is, he suggests the manipulating of effects with artifice and the intention of providing sensational and scenic results at the expense of proportion and truth. A word on this is advisable.

Those familiar with the man and his works are aware how close he always stood to the playhouse and its product. He loved it from early youth, all but went on the stage professionally, knew its people as have few of the writing craft, was a fine amateur actor himself, wrote for the stage, helped to dramatize his novels and gave delightful studies of theatrical life in his books. Shall we ever forget Mr. Crummles and his family? He had an instinctive feeling for what was scenic and effective in the stage sense. When he appeared as a reader of his own works, he was an impersonator; and noticeably careful to have the stage accessories exactly right. And when all this, natural and acquired, was applied to fiction, it could not but be of influence. As a result, Dickens sometimes forced the note, favored the lurid, exaggerated his comic effects. To put it in another way, this theater manner of his now and then injured the literature he made. But that is only one side of the matter: it also helped him greatly and where he went too far, he was simply abusing a precious gift. To speak of Dickens' violent theatricality as if it expressed his whole being, is like describing the wart on Cromwell's face as if it were his set of features. Remove from Dickens his dramatic power, and the memorable master would be no more: he would vanish into dim air. We may be thankful—in view of what it produced—that he possessed even in excess this sense of the scenic value of character and situation: it is not a disqualification but a virtue, and not Dickens alone but Dumas, Hugo and Scott were great largely because of it.

In the praise naturally enough bestowed upon a great autobiographical Novel like "David Copperfield," the fine art of a late work like "Great Expectations" has been overlooked or at least minimized. If we are to consider skilful construction along with the other desirable qualities of the novelist, this noble work has hardly had justice done it: moreover, everything considered,—story value, construction, characters, atmosphere, adequacy of style, climactic interest, and impressive lesson, I should name "Great Expectations," published when the author was fifty, as his most perfect book, if not the greatest of Charles Dickens' novels. The opinion is unconventional: but as Dickens is studied more as artist progressively skilful in his craft, I cannot but believe this particular story will receive increasing recognition. In the matter of sheer manipulation of material, it is much superior to the book that followed it two years later, the last complete novel: "Our Mutual Friend." It is rather curious that this story, which was in his day and has steadily remained a favorite with readers, has with equal persistency been severely handled by the critics. What has insured its popularity? Probably its vigor and variety of characterization, its melodramatic tinge, the teeming world of dramatic contrasts it opens, its bait to our sense of mystery. It has a power very typical of the author and one of the reasons for Dickens' hold upon his audience. It is a power also exhibited markedly in such other fictions as "Dombey and Son," "Martin Chuzzlewit" and "Bleak House." I refer to the impression conveyed by such stories that life is a vast, tumultuous, vari-colored play of counter-motives and counter-characters, full of chance, surprise, change and bitter sweet: a thing of mystery, terror, pity and joy. It has its masks of respectability, its frauds of place, its beauty blossoming in the mud, its high and low of luck, its infinite possibilities betwixt heaven and hell. The effect of this upon the sensitive reader is to enlarge his sympathetic feeling for humanity: life becomes a big, awful, dear phantasmagoria in such hands. It seems not like a flat surface, but a thing of length, breadth, height and depth, which it has been a privilege to enter. Dickens' fine gift—aside from that of character creation—is found in this ability to convey an impression of puissant life. He himself had this feeling and he got it into his books: he had, in a happier sense, the joy of life of Ibsen, the life force of Nietzsche. From only a few of the world's great writers does one receive this sense of life, the many-sided spectacle; Cervantes, Hugo, Tolstoy, Sienkiewicz, it is men like they that do this for us.

Another side of Dickens' literary activity is shown in his Christmas stories, which it may be truly said are as well beloved as anything he gave the world in the Novel form. This is assuredly so of the "Christmas Carol," "The Chimes" and "The Cricket on the Hearth." This last is on a par with the other two in view of its double life in a book and on the boards of the theater. The fragrance of Home, of the homely kindness and tenderness of the human heart, is in them, especially in the Carol, which is the best tale of its kind in the tongue and likely to remain so. It permanently altered the feeling of the race for Christmas. Irving preceded him in the use of the Christmas motive, but Dickens made it forever his own. By a master's magic evocation, the great festival shines brighter, beckons more lovingly than it did of old. Thackeray felt this when he declared that such a story was "a public benefit." Such literature lies aside from our main pursuit, that of the Novel, but is mentioned because it is the best example possible, the most direct, simple expression of that essential kindness, that practical Christianity which is at the bottom of Dickens' influence. It is bonhomie and something more. It is not Dickens the reformer, as we get him when he satirizes Dotheboys hall, or the Circumlocution Office or the Chancery Court: but Dickens as Mr. Greatheart, one with all that is good, tender, sweet and true. Tiny Tim's thousand-times quoted saying is the quintessence, the motto for it all and the writer speaks in and through the lad when he says: "God bless us, every one." When an author gets that honest unction into his work, and also has the gift of observation and can report what he sees, he is likely to contribute to the literature of his land. With a sneer of the cultivated intellect, we may call it elementary: but to the heart, such a view of life is royally right.

This thought of Dickens' moral obligation in his work and his instinctive attitude towards his audience, leads to one more point: a main reason for this Victorian novelist's strong hold on the affections of mankind is to be found in the warm personal relation he establishes with the reader. The relationship implies obligation on the part of the author, a vital bond between the two, a recognition of a steady, not a chance, association. There goes with it, too, an assumption that the author believes in and cares much for his characters, and asks the reader for the same faith. This personal relation of author to reader and of both to the imagined characters, has gone out of fashion in fiction-making: in this respect, Dickens (and most of his contemporaries) seem now old-fashioned. The present realist creed would keep the novelist away and out of sight both of his fictive creations and his audience; it being his business to pull the strings to make his puppets dance—up to heaven or down to hell, whatever does it matter to the scientist-novelist? Tolstoy's novel "Resurrection" is as a subject much more disagreeable than Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"; but it is beautiful where the other is horrible, because it palpitates with a Christ-like sympathy for an erring woman, while the French author cares not a button whether his character is lost or not. The healthy-minded public (which can be trusted in heart, if not in head) will instinctively choose that treatment of life in a piece of fiction which shows the author kindly cooperative with fate and brotherly in his position towards his host of readers. That is the reason Dickens holds his own and is extremely likely to gain in the future, while spectacular reputations based on all the virtues save love, continue to die the death. What M. Anatole France once said of Zola, applies to the whole school of the aloof and unloving: "There is in man an infinite need of loving which renders him divine. M. Zola does not know it.... The holiness of tears is at the bottom of all religions. Misfortune would suffice to render man august to man. M. Zola does not know it."

Charles Dickens does know these truths and they get into his work and that work, therefore, gets not so much into the minds as into the souls of his fellow-man. When we recite the sayings which identify his classic creations: when we express ourselves in a Pickwickian sense, wait for something to turn up with Mr. Micawber, drop into poetry with Silas Wegg, move on with little Joe, feel 'umble after the manner of Uriah Heap, are willin' with Barkis, make a note of, in company with Captain Cuttle, or conclude with Mr. Weller, Senior, that it is the part of wisdom to beware of "widders," we may observe that what binds us to this motley crowd of creatures is not their grotesquerie but their common humanity, their likeness to ourselves, the mighty flood-tide of tolerant human sympathy on which they are floated into the safe haven of our hearts. With delightful understanding, Charles Dudley Warner writes: "After all, there is something about a boy I like." Dickens, using the phrasing for a wider application, might have said: "After all, there is something about men and women I like!" It was thus no accident that he elected to write of the lower middle classes; choosing to depict the misery of the poor, their unfair treatment in institutions; to depict also the unease of criminals, the crushed state of all underlings—whether the child in education or that grown-up evil child, the malefactor in prison. He was a spokesman of the people, a democratic pleader for justice and sympathy. He drew the proletariat preferably, not because he was a proletariat but because he was a brother-man and the fact had been overlooked. He drew thousands of these suppressed humans, and they were of varied types and fortunes: but he loved them as though they were one, and made the world love them too: and love their maker. The deep significance of Dickens, perhaps his deepest, is in the social note that swells loud and insistent through his fiction. He was a pioneer in the democratic sympathy which was to become so marked feature in the Novel in the late nineteenth century: and which, as we have already seen, is from the first a distinctive trait of the modern fiction, one of the explanations of its existence.



CHAPTER IX

THACKERAY

The habit of those who appraise the relative worth of Dickens and Thackeray to fall into hostile camps, swearing by one, and at the other, has its amusing side but is to be deprecated as irrational. Why should it be necessary to miss appreciation of the creator of "Vanity Fair" because one happens to like "David Copperfield"? Surely, our literary tastes or standards should be broad enough to admit into pleasurable companionship both those great early Victorian novelists.

Yet, on second thought, there would appear to be some reason for the fact that ardent lovers of Thackeray are rarely devotees of the mighty Charles—or vice versa. There is something mutually exclusive in the attitude of the two, their different interpretation of life. Unlike in birth, environment, education and all that is summed up in the magic word personality, their reaction to life, as a scientist would say, was so opposite that a reader naturally drawn to one, is quite apt to be repelled by (or at least, cold to) the other. If you make a wide canvass among booklovers, it will be found that this is just what happens. Rarely does a stanch supporter of Dickens show a more than Laodicean temper towards Thackeray; and for rabid Thackerians, Dickens too often spells disgust. It is a rare and enjoyable experience to meet with a mind so catholic as to welcome both. The backbone of the trouble is personal, in the natures of the two authors. But I think it is worth while to say that part of the explanation may be found in the fact that Thackeray began fiction ten years later than his rival and was in a deeper sense than was Dickens a voice of the later century. This means much, because with each decade between 1830 and 1860, English thought was moving fast toward that scientific faith, that disillusionment and that spirit of grim truth which culminated in the work of the final quarter of the century. Thackeray was impelled more than was Dickens by the spirit of the times to speak the truth in his delineations of contemporary mankind: and this operated to make him a satirist, at times a savage one. The modern thing in Dickens—and he had it—was the humanitarian sympathy for the submerged tenth; the modern thing in Thackeray, however, was his fearlessness in uncovering the conventional shams of polite society. The idols that Dickens smashed (and never was a bolder iconoclast) were to be seen of all men: but Thackeray's were less tangible, more subtle, part and parcel of his own class. In this sense, and I believe because he began his major novel-writing about 1850, whereas the other began fifteen years before, Thackeray is more modern, more of our own time, than his great co-mate in fiction. When we consider the question of their respective interpretations of Life it is but fair to bear in mind this historical consideration, although it would be an error to make too much of it. Of course, in judging Thackeray and trying to give him a place in English fiction, he must stand or fall, like any other writer, by two things: his art, and his message. Was the first fine, the other sane and valuable—those are the twin tests.

A somewhat significant fact of their literary history may be mentioned, before an attempt is made to appreciate Thackeray's novels. For some years after Dickens' death, which, it will be remembered, occurred six years after Thackeray's, the latter gained in critical recognition while Dickens slowly lost. There can be little question of this. Lionized and lauded as was the man of Gadshill, promptly admitted to Westminster Abbey, it came to pass in time that, in a course on modern English literature offered at an old and famous New England college, his name was not deemed worthy of even a reference. Some critics of repute have scarce been able to take Dickens seriously: for those who have steadily had the temerity to care for him, their patronage has been vocal. This marks an astonishing shift of opinion from that current in 1870. Thackeray, gaining in proportion, has been hailed as an exquisite artist, one of the few truly great and permanent English figures not only of fiction but of letters. But in the most recent years, again a change has come: the pendulum has swung back, as it always does when an excessive movement carries it too far beyond the plumb line. Dickens has found valiant, critical defenders; he has risen fast in thoughtful so well as popular estimation (although with the public he has scarcely fluctuated in favor) until he now enjoys a sort of resurrection of popularity. What is the cause of this to-and-fro of judgment? The main explanation is to be found in the changing literary ideals from 1850 to 1900. When Dickens was active, literature, broadly speaking, was estimated not exclusively as art, but as human product, an influence in the world. With the coming of the new canon, which it is convenient to dub by the catch-phrase, Art for Art's Sake, a man's production began to be tested more definitely by the technique he possessed, the skilled way in which he performed his task. Did he play the game well? That was the first question. Often it was the first and last. If he did, his subject-matter, and his particular vision of Life, were pretty much his own affair. And this modern touchstone, applied to the writings of our two authors, favored Thackeray. Simple, old-fashioned readers inclined to give Dickens the preference over him because the former's interpretation of humanity was, they averred, kindlier and more wholesome. Thackeray was cynical, said they; Dickens humanitarian; but the later critical mood rebounded from Dickens, since he preached, was frankly didactic, insisted on his mission of doing good—and so failed in his art. Now, however, that the l'art pour art shibboleth has been sadly overworked and is felt to be passing or obsolete, the world critical is reverting to that broader view which demands that the maker of literature shall be both man and artist: as a result, Dickens gains in proportion. This explanation makes it likely that, looking to the future, while Thackeray may not lose, Dickens is sure to be more and more appreciated. A return to a saner and truer criterion will be general and the confines of a too narrow estheticism be understood: or, better yet, the esthetic will be so defined as to admit of wider application. The Gissings and Chestertons of the time to come will insist even more strenuously than those of ours that while we may have improved upon Dickens' technique—and every schoolboy can tinker his faults—we shall do exceedingly well if we duplicate his genius once in a generation. And they will add that Thackeray, another man of genius, had also his malaises of art, was likewise a man with the mortal failings implied in the word. For it cannot now be denied that just as Dickens' faults have been exaggerated, Thackeray's have been overlooked.