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Ebook has 768 lines and 75279 words, and 16 pages

PAGE

PREFACE v

DICKENS

I 3

II 24

V 81

THACKERAY

I 100

II 119

THE VICTORIAN BACKGROUND 158

DISRAELI 180

MRS. GASKELL 199

ANTHONY TROLLOPE THE BARSETSHIRE NOVELS 219

INDEX 235

Charles Dickens and Other Victorians

DICKENS

If anything on this planet be great, great things have happened in Westminster Hall: which is open for anyone, turning aside from London's traffic, to wander in and admire. Some property in the oak of its roof forbids the spider to spin there, and now that architects have defeated the worm in beam and rafter it stands gaunt and clean as when William Rufus built it: and I dare to say that no four walls and a roof have ever enclosed such a succession of historical memories as do these, as no pavement--not even that lost one of the Roman Forum--has been comparably trodden by the feet of grave men moving towards grave decisions, grand events.

The somewhat cold interior lays its chill on the imagination. A romantic mind can, like the spider, spin its cobwebs far more easily in the neighbouring Abbey, over the actual dust to which great men come--

Here the bones of birth have cried-- "Though gods they were, as men they died." Here are sands, ignoble things Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings.

So, if this tragic comedy we call life be worth anything more than a bitter smile: if patriotism mean anything to you, and strong opposite wills out of whose conflict come great issues in victory or defeat, the arrest, the temporary emptiness of Westminster Hall--a sense of what it has seen and yet in process of time may see--will lay a deeper solemnity on you than all the honoured dust in the Abbey.

But, as men's minds are freakish, let me tell you of a solitary figure I see in Westminster Hall more vividly even than the ghosts of Charles I and Warren Hastings bayed around by their accusers: the face and figure of a youth, not yet twenty-two, who has just bought a copy of the Magazine containing his first appearance in print as an author. "I walked down to Westminster Hall," he has recorded, "and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street and were not fit to be seen there."

these things are life And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse.

But I am a Professor, and ought to have begun by assuring you that this figure in Westminster Hall has a real historical interest in connexion with your studies "on the subject of English Literature."

Well, then, it has. The date of the apparition is New Year's Day, 1834, and by New Year's Day, 1838, Charles Dickens was not only the most popular of living authors, but in a fair way to become that which he remained until the end in 1870--a great National Institution.

Without commenting on it for the moment, I want you to realise this exaltation of Dickens in the popular mind, his countrymen's and countrywomen's intimate, passionate pride in him; in the first place because it is an historical fact, and a fact singular in our literary history; but also because, as a phenomenon itself unique--unique, at any rate, in its magnitude--it reacted singularly upon the man and his work, and you must allow for this if you would thoroughly understand either.

To begin with, you must get it out of your minds that it resembled any popularity known to us, in our day: the deserved popularity of Mr. Kipling, for example. You must also get it out of your minds that Dickens was, in any sense at all, a cheap artist playing to the gallery. He was a writer of imperfect, or hazardous, literary education: but he was also a man of iron will and an artist of the fiercest literary conscience. Let me enforce this by quoting two critics whom you will respect. "The faults of Dickens," says William Ernest Henley,

were many and grave. He wrote some nonsense; he sinned repeatedly against taste; he could be both noisy and vulgar; he was apt to be a caricaturist where he should have been a painter; he was often mawkish and often extravagant; and he was sometimes more inept than a great writer has ever been. But his work, whether good or bad, has in full measure the quality of sincerity. He meant what he did; and he meant it with his whole heart. He looked upon himself as representative and national--as indeed he was; he regarded his work as a universal possession; and he determined to do nothing that for lack of pains should prove unworthy of his function. If he sinned, it was unadvisedly and unconsciously; if he failed it was because he knew no better. You feel that as you read....

He had enchanted the public without an effort: he was the best beloved of modern writers almost from the outset of his career. But he had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if all his life he never ceased from self-education, but went unswervingly in pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise.

Now let me add this testimony from Mr. G. K. Chesterton:

Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For the kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted.... Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked up to the people. He approached the people like a deity and poured out his riches and his blood. He had not merely produced something they could understand, but he took it seriously, and toiled and agonised to produce it. They were not only enjoying one of the best writers, they were enjoying the best he could do. His raging and sleepless nights, his wild walks in the darkness, his note-books crowded, his nerves in rags, all this extraordinary output was but a fit sacrifice to the ordinary man.

"The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens," wrote Carlyle of him, on hearing the news of his death,--"every inch of him an honest man." "What a face it is to meet," had said Leigh Hunt, years before; and Mrs. Carlyle, "It was as if made of steel."

George Gissing--in a critical study of Dickens which cries out for reprinting--imagines a young writer of the 'nineties coming on that and crying out upon it.

All which, adds Gissing, may be true enough in relation to the speaker. As regards Dickens, it is irrelevant. And Gissing speaks the simple truth; "that he owed it to his hundreds of thousands of readers to teach them a new habit of judgment Dickens did not see or begin to see." But that it lay upon him to deal with his public scrupulously he felt in the very marrow of his bones. Let me give you two instances:

But now let us see what a light this conscious popularity throws upon two important events in Dickens' career: his visit to the United States in 1842, and his invention, the next year, of the "Christmas Book."

Dickens went over to America as a great personage: securely, but neither immodestly nor overweeningly conscious of it. He went over also as a great and genuine early-Victorian radical; something better than any politician; an unbribed and unbribable writer, immensely potent, with a pen already dedicated to war against social abuses. He landed at Boston, fully expecting to see Liberty in realisation under the star-spangled banner. He found Colonel Diver and Mr. Jefferson Brick, Mr. La Fayette Kettle and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. He found, of course, a fervent and generous hospitality that sprang, in Forster's words, "from feelings honourable both to giver and receiver," and was bestowed sincerely, if with a touch of bravado and challenge--"We of the New World want to show you, by extending the kind of homage that the Old World reserves for kings and conquerors, to a young man with nothing to distinguish him but his heart and his genius, what it is we think in these parts worthier of honour than birth or wealth, a title or a sword." These are Forster's words again, and they do well enough. The hospitality included no doubt a good deal of the ridiculous: food for innocent caricature of the kind provided in the great Pogram levee where the two Literary Ladies are presented to the Honourable Elijah by the Mother of the Modern Gracchi.

"To be presented to a Pogram," said Miss Codger, "by a Hominy, indeed a thrilling moment is it in its impressiveness on what we call our feelings. But why we call them so, and why impressed they are, or if impressed they are at all, or if at all we are, or if there really is, oh gasping one! a Pogram or a Hominy, or any active principle to which we give those titles is a topic, Spirit searching, light-abandoned, much too vast to enter on, at this unlooked-for Crisis." "Mind and Matter," said the lady in the wig, "glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination. To hear it, sweet it is. But then outlaughs the stern philosopher, and saith to the Grotesque, 'What ho! arrest for me that agency! Go bring it here! And so the vision fadeth.'"

I will not take oath that I have not heard faint echoes of that sort of talk at literary gatherings within a mile or so of this very spot. But if it be not to some extent endemic in America even to-day, then all I can say is that certain American authors have misrepresented it far more cruelly than ever did Charles Dickens, or certainly than I, with no knowledge at all, have any wish to do.

But what brought Dickens up with a round turn was his discovery that in this land of freedom no man was free to speak his thought.

"I believe," he wrote to Forster on Feb. 24th, "there is no country on the face of the earth where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference of opinion than in this.... There!--I write the words with reluctance, disappointment and sorrow: but I believe it from the bottom of my soul."

And yet Dickens was wrong: in my opinion wrong as an English Gentleman, being America's Guest. On the balance I hold that he should have thought what he thought and, thinking it, have shortened his visit and come silently away.

Well, Dickens discussed the matter with Washington Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant, Dana and others, and found that while every writer in America was agreed upon the atrocious state of the law, not a man of them dared to speak out. The suggestion that an American could be found with temerity enough to hint that his country was possibly wrong struck the boldest dumb. "Then," said Dickens, "I shall speak out": and he did. "I wish you could have seen," he writes home, "the faces that I saw, down both sides of the table at Hartford, when I began to talk about Scott." "I wish you could have heard how I gave it out. My blood so boiled as I thought of the monstrous injustice that I felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their throats."

Now thrice welcome, Christmas, Which brings us good cheer, Minced pies and plum porridge, Good ale and strong beer; With pig, goose and capon, The best that may be, So well doth the weather And our stomachs agree.

Now that the time is come wherein Our Saviour Christ was born, The larders full of beef and pork, The garners fill'd with corn....

Bring us in good ale, and bring us in good ale; For our blessed Lady's sake, bring us in good ale.

Now winter nights enlarge The number of their hours, And clouds their storms discharge Upon the airy towers. Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o'erflow with wine; Let well-attuned words amaze With harmony divine. Now yellow waxen lights Shall wait on honey love, While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights Sleep's leaden spell remove.

The days are sad, it is the Holy tide; The Winter morn is short, the Night is long; So let the lifeless Hours be glorified With deathless thoughts and echo'd in sweet song: And through the sunset of this purple cup They will resume the roses of their prime, And the old Dead will hear us and wake up, Pass with dim smiles and make our hearts sublime.

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