He married a young girl who probably was contracted to him by her

parents without having any voice in the matter. He bestows on her his

name and rank, and in return demands--_everything_, her abject

submission to his every whim, her complete indifference to everything

and everybody but himself. It was too much. The poor girl could not

crush all the humanity out of her heart, nor the vitality out of her

body. The Duke saw, with cold disapproval, her fresh interest and

pleasure in all around her, her delight in every attention that was

offered her, her ever-ready smile. He wanted all these things for

himself, and for nobody else. That smile must be for him alone. But

unfortunately the Duchess liked whatever "she looked on, and her looks

went everywhere," she had a kind word and glance for everybody.

This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together.

In other words, he did away with her, had her murdered, an easy thing

for a man of his power at this epoch. First, however, he had her

portrait painted. If he could not have the Duchess all to himself, he

could at least have her picture entirely his own,

... since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I.

He is thinking now of marrying again. Some Count snaps at the bait,

the chance of this magnificent alliance for his daughter. Better to

kill her with his own hand than to let her pass into the clutches of

the Duke. The Duke's object in showing the envoy the picture is

probably partly to get the opportunity of letting him know in time what

he expects from his wife, so that when the messenger returns he may

warn his young lady to keep her smiles under strict control.

Notice how Browning indicates the attitude of the envoy. First he is

struck by the marvellous face of the Duchess--

The depth and passion of its earnest glance.

At last he essays a word in her defence,

Who'd stoop to blame

This sort of trifling?

and when the Duke has finished, he sits a little stupefied at the

revelation that has been made, and still gazing at the picture. Even

when the Duke rises he does not stir, and the latter has to rouse him,

a little impatiently, "Will't please you rise?"

To me the most striking thing about this poem is its suggestiveness.

It suggests infinitely more than it expresses. It expresses merely a

fragment of a conversation; it suggests a whole tragedy.

Browning has, in these few lines, with delicate and curious skill,

given us first the Renaissance atmosphere, a mixture of culture and

refinement, delight in art and beauty, with immorality and crime; he

has suggested to us the characters of the two actors in the drama from

which this poem is but a fragment, the polished and cynical Duke and

the girl who is sacrificed to his position and wealth; he has even

suggested the mixture of deference, loathing, and fear with which the

envoy listens to the Duke's description. There are anatomists who from

a single bone of any animal will construct the whole skeleton; and so

from this scrap which Browning has here given us we can construct the

complete drama.

The poem is, as I have remarked, typical of a whole class of Browning's

poetry. These poems are usually called _dramatic monologues_, but

perhaps the title given to them by Stopford Brooke is on the whole more

suggestive. He calls them _imaginative representations_.

These poems are, in the first place, the utterance of one person, at a

single time, and in one place. Some individual is influenced or

induced by some unusual opportunity or circumstance to reveal himself.

The veil which conceals his inmost heart is lifted for a moment and we

get a glimpse into its depths.

They have a certain dramatic element. Browning himself styled this

poem a _dramatic romance_. They are dramatic in that they are

objective as regards the author; the poet is not uttering his own

thoughts. The circumstances under which the monologue is spoken are

usually dramatic (_i.e._, such as a playwright might choose to bring

out some trait of character), the background, scenery, and even the

action is vividly suggested, and there are usually subsidiary figures

whose attitude towards the central actor is carefully indicated.

The chief point to notice about these poems is that the poet studies

not merely an individual as such, the working out of passion in a

single soul, but he takes that individual as a type of some special

period, some phase of historical development, some special era of

thought. It was Browning's way of using history for poetical purposes,

and it was completely his own. This poem is not a very good example,

because the personages and events described are not peculiar to any one

epoch, but may occur wherever there are two people unhappily married.

But even here we have in the Duke not only an intensely interesting,

even if objectionable, type of human being, but the concentrated

essence of a certain side of the Italian Renaissance.

Browning, in his series of _imaginative representations_ has covered a

big field. _Artemis Prologuizer, Caliban on Setebos, The Bishop Orders

his Tomb, Fra Lippo Lippi, A Death in the Desert, Cleon_, and many

others cover an immense range, from Greek mythology through early and

late Renaissance down to the modern life of Europe. "The poet can

place us with ease and truth at Corinth, Athens or Rome, in Paris,

Vienna or London, and wherever we go with him we are at home."

Scenery, character, time, place, and action are all suitably and

harmoniously blended, the characters are vividly alive. The

qualifications which Browning brought to these poems were, first, a

wide historical knowledge, not so much of separate events as of the

main trend of thought in a given period; an intense imaginative power;

a wide knowledge of human nature; and last, but not least, in his

Italian poems, a familiar acquaintance with "a multitude of small

intimate details of the customs, clothing, architecture, popular dress,

talk and scenery of the towns and country of Italy from the thirteenth

century to modern times." The poem under consideration gives us only a

glimpse of the skill with which Browning handles this particular type;

but I hope it will be sufficient to induce those who are not acquainted

with Browning's other work to study it further.

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING

"O whither are you going,

My friend, I'd fain be knowing,

O whither are you going

With that air of do-and-dare?

O what the destination

Of your grim determination,

Of your bloody resolution

And your fierce defiant stare?"

"I am going Christmas shopping,"

Said the hero, freely mopping

Beads of nervous perspiration

From his broad and gallant brow,

"I am going forth to-day

In this bellicose array

To do my Christmas shopping,

Or to perish in the fray."

* * * * *

"O whence are you returning,

My friend, I'd fain be learning,

O whence are you returning

With that bloodstained weary air?

With that battered shirt and collar

And without a single dollar,

And with piles of useless lumber

That would make a dustman stare?"

"I have done my Christmas shopping,"

Said the hero, almost dropping,

"You may send to fetch the doctor,

Though I cannot pay his fee;

My story is romantic,

For the fight was fierce and frantic,

And I bought a lot of articles

I didn't even see;

But I've done my Christmas shopping

(For I take a lot of stopping),

I have done my Christmas shopping,

And that's enough for me."

REALISM IN WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING

_A paper read to the Faculty Club during the

session_ 1911-12

What is Realism? Realism means what it says--truth to reality and

fact. The realist expresses imaginative conceptions in terms of the

actual world around him, in terms of the objects which he can see and

describe accurately; the idealist gets away from fact, and creates an

imaginative world which differs from the real.

The idealist who writes of love, talks about raptures and bliss and

gates of heaven; the realist describes the wave of the girl's hair, the

colour of her dress, the way in which the man stands and looks, and

leaves the reader to supply the emotional background. The idealist who

writes of death talks about ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the common

goal of mortality, the gate of everlasting life; the realist describes

the sick man's ghastly pallor, his wavering pulse, his gasping breath,

the clock ticking out the minutes in the silence of the chamber of

death.

A realist in fiction like Balzac or Flaubert or their imitator, Arnold

Bennett, seems almost photographic in the accuracy of his descriptions;

and yet so artistic is the selection of the details described that

though we get the impression of absolute reality, the emotional

atmosphere is often intense. Realism, when well done, is an admirable

literary method, but it may and often does degenerate into a vice. In

the hands of Zola it becomes a medium for the conveyance of sickening,

sordid, or disgusting detail.

The kind of realism with which I wish to deal is _realism in

poetry_--the phrase seems almost a contradiction in terms--and I am

taking for my purpose certain phases of the work of Wordsworth and

Browning.

Wordsworth and Browning, two poets in many respects direct antitheses

of one another, are not usually classed together in any way. There is,

however, one class of poetry which Browning was the first to develop to

a large extent, in which Wordsworth may be said to have been a pioneer;

in fact, Browning actually succeeded in a kind of poetry of which

Wordsworth barely saw the possibility. I do not mean to suggest that

Browning was in any way a disciple or conscious imitator of Wordsworth;

but that we see in full flower in Browning's poetry a certain artistic

method of which in Wordsworth's poetry we can just perceive the germ.

The kind of poetry to which I refer is one which is frequent in

Browning, and which, in fact, has often been regarded as not poetry at

all--I mean such utterly unpretentious, prosaic, uncouth, rough, or at

times even grotesque verse as we find in poems like _Bishop Blougram's

Apology, Mr. Sludge the Medium, Old Pictures in Florence, Master Hugues

of Saxe-Gotha_, much of _The Ring and the Book_, and Browning's later

work generally. Such verse produces the effect of an exact

reproduction of the actual. It is so realistic that it seems at times

lacking in art.

No work which is an exact, or nearly exact, reproduction of the actual

can be a work of art. A work of art is based on man's experience of

what is, but is always modified and altered by his conception of what

ought to be.

It was here that Wordsworth failed. His realistic poetry is too close

to the actual. The intensely realistic effect of Browning's poems is

an illusion; otherwise his claim to be a poetic artist disappears in so

far as these poems are concerned.

I wish to indicate the nature of these effects, and to inquire how far

Browning was anticipated by Wordsworth.

Wordsworth was perhaps the chief representative of the Romantic

School--the title given to the group of poets who dominated English

Literature at the commencement of the nineteenth century. The spirit

of the age to which their work gave expression was one of question and

revolt, the spirit which found its most remarkable political expression

in the French Revolution. Question of established beliefs, revolt

against established rules and conventions, was the keynote of literary

as well as of social and political life.

The attitude of the Romantic School is indicated by its name. Romance

is that element in literature which appeals to the sense of the

marvellous in man, which awakens his capacity for wonder. In the

eighteenth century, under the régime of Pope and the Classical School,

wonder had been dead. It was an age of acceptance and submission;

acceptance of certain definite conventions, submission to certain fixed

rules. Correctness was more desired than imagination, and polish than

originality.

It was against the barren conventions and narrow outlook of the

Classical School that Wordsworth and his fellows revolted. The spirit

of wonder toward Nature and toward Man sprang into new life.

My meaning will be illustrated by the following lines:

A primrose by a river's brim

A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more.

They might have been written of Pope. What was the primrose to

Wordsworth?

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

I do not wish, however, to talk to-night of Wordsworth's attitude

towards Nature. It is with just two aspects of the Romantic Revolt

that I have to deal, one relating to subject matter, the other to form.

The poet's eye in Shakespeare's time

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

With Pope, poetry was confined mainly to man as he exists in society,

and was largely concerned with satirizing social defects; Wordsworth

dealt with men as human beings, as mysterious manifestations of the

infinite, creatures trailing clouds of glory, coming we know not

whence, going we know not whither. To him, as to Burns, rank and

station were nothing. Any human being, however humble, was worthy to

be the poet's theme. He claimed for the misfortunes of Lucy Gray or

the miserable mother, the Idiot Boy or Peter Bell, the same

consideration as Sophocles for the sorrows of OEdipus and the lofty

line of Thebes.

Gray, an eighteenth century poet in whom romantic tendencies are found,

shows the same spirit in the _Elegy_ when he writes of the humble dead

who lie beneath the soil:

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile

The short and simple annals of the poor.

Wordsworth, then, enlarged the scope of poetry to include any human

experience, however humble.

There was another side to Wordsworth's revolt. He revolted not only

against the limitations of subject imposed on the poets by

eighteenth-century ideals, but also against the limitations of form.

Pope and his followers had been poets of practically a single metre,

the heroic couplet. Their tricks, mannerisms, and phraseology had been

exalted into a _poetic diction_, or, rather, jargon, by countless

imitators, and poems written in any other style were not allowed

admission to the best company. A field, for example, had to be either

a _verdant mead_ or a _grassy sward_, or it could not decently make its

appearance in poetry. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth

century a rainbow is to Campbell _Heaven's ethereal bow_, and a musket

becomes, in poetical dress, _a glittering tube_. Wordsworth claimed

for the poet the right of using the language of everyday life, plain,

simple, and unadorned.

Such is a very brief and insufficient outline of the two main points in

Wordsworth's _poetic theory_, which were developed at great length by

Wordsworth himself in his prefaces and by Coleridge in the _Biographia

Literaria_.

It is to just one small part of Wordsworth's _poetic practice_ that I

wish to draw your attention. I mean certain studiously simple and

realistic poems written in deliberate illustration of his theories.

The first of them were published in the famous _Lyrical Ballads_ of

1798, a work which burst like a bombshell upon an astonished literary

world, and aroused more scorn, indignation, and controversy than

perhaps any other volume of poetry ever published.

The _Lyrical Ballads_ was in the nature of a challenge. It contained

an announcement of Wordsworth's new theories, together with

illustrations of them by himself and Coleridge. Many of the poems were

admirable, but in many others Wordsworth is at his worst.

A generation brought up in the principles of Pope and nourished on such

verse as _The Pleasures of Hope_ could not away with poems like _The

Idiot Boy_, or _Alice Fell_, or even _We Are Seven_.

There is no doubt that Wordsworth went much too far in his zeal for the

new theories, and was unfortunately without a sense of humour which

might have saved him from absurdities. As an illustration of

Wordsworth at his worst, let us take _The Idiot Boy_, one of the poems

in the _Lyrical Ballads_. The very outline of the plot would make the

ghost of Pope rise in indignation from the grave. Old Susan Gale, a

peasant woman, is very ill. Her neighbour, Betty Foy, comes to attend

on her, accompanied by her only son, Johnny, an idiot. Susan gets

worse, and the doctor must be sent for. Betty dare not leave her, and

so the only alternative is to send the idiot boy to fetch him. I need

not complete the story, but will quote a few stanzas from the poem:

But when the pony moved his legs,

Oh! then for the poor idiot boy!

For joy he cannot hold the bridle,

For joy his head and heels are idle,

He's idle all for very joy.

And Susan's growing worse and worse,

And Betty's in a sad quandary;

And then there's nobody to say

If she must go, or she must stay!

She's in a sad quandary.

"Oh Doctor! Doctor! where's my Johnny?"

"I'm here, what is't you want with me?"

"Oh sir! you know I'm Betty Foy

And I have lost my poor dear boy

You know him--him you often see;

"He's not so wise as some folks be."

"The Devil take his wisdom!" said

The Doctor looking somewhat grim,

"What, woman, should I know of him?"

And grumbling, he went back to bed.

This from a poet who could write _The Solitary Reaper_ or _Milton, thou

should'st be living at this hour_, or such magnificent philosophical

poetry as we find in _The Prelude, Tintern Abbey_, and _The Excursion_,

where Wordsworth treats of

the mind of man,

The haunt and the main region of my song;

or such splendid descriptive passages as are scattered everywhere

through his works, visions worthy to rank with Shakespeare's

Cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces.

Other examples of Wordsworth's simple style are all too numerous, and

may be found in such poems as _Peter Bell_, which relates the story of

a tinker and a donkey (in parts an admirable poem), _Alice Fell_, which

tells the sorrow of a little girl for her tattered cloak, _The

Brothers_, and _Michael_. These are not, by any means, all bad; in

fact, when Wordsworth can forget for a while that he is writing to

illustrate a theory, flashes of his natural style break out, producing

odd effects of incongruity. Some of the poems which appeared in the

_Lyrical Ballads_ are admirable, such as _Her Eyes are Wild_ and _The

Affliction of Margaret_.

To us who have, since Wordsworth's time, been trained to a wider scope

of appreciation in poetry, it will seem strange that even the worst of

them should have aroused such adverse criticism, but even to us it is

evident that Wordsworth in them is not at his best, that he is writing

a style which is not natural to him. And yet it was these poems which,

for a time, attracted most attention from Wordsworth's contemporaries,

and prejudiced Byron, Horace Smith, Peacock, and many others against

his greater poetry.

Wordsworth, though he failed in his attempt, had got hold of a true

idea--that the most common things in life are pregnant with poetry, and

that there are many subjects, not susceptible of ordinary poetical

treatment, which may yet be handled in such a simple, unpretentious way

as to retain their essential outlines, while the emotional element is

subtly indicated rather than actually expressed. As a very ordinary

landscape will be transformed into a thing of beauty under the rays of

the setting sun, so commonplace subjects may take on a new appearance

under the influence of the poet's imagination. Care must be taken,

however, not to idealize too much. It would be impossible, for

example, to lift such a subject as _The Idiot Boy_ into the realm of

the ideal.

Now if we turn to Browning, we find that he also deals with subjects of

this kind. Let us consider his treatment of one or two of them. In

_The Spanish Cloister_ he takes as his subject the mean and petty

jealousy of one commonplace monk for another. Or, again, he takes a

sick man, stretched on his death-bed, putting aside impatiently the

ministrations of the parson, as his half-dazed thoughts go back to a

rather sordid love affair which was yet the brightest spot in his past.

Other examples are _Sludge the Medium_, and the cynical and worldly

Bishop Blougram endeavouring after dinner over the nuts and wine to

justify his appearance of orthodoxy to Gigadibs, the scribbler and

shallow rationalist:

So, you despise me, Mr. Gigadibs.

No deprecation--nay, I beg you, sir!

Beside 'tis our engagement: don't you know,

I promised, if you'd watch a dinner out,

We'd see truth dawn together?--truth that peeps

Over the glass's edge when dinner's done,

And body gets its sop and holds its noise

And leaves soul free a little. Now's the time--

'Tis break of day! You do despise me then.

And if I say, "despise me,"--never fear--

I know you do not in a certain sense--

Not in my arm-chair for example: here,

I well imagine you respect my place

(Status, _entourage_, worldly circumstance)

Quite to its value---very much indeed

--Are up to the protesting eyes of you

In pride at being seated here for once--

You'll turn it to such capital account!

When somebody, through years and years to come,

Hints of the bishop--names me--that's enough--

"Blougram? I knew him"--(into it you slide)

"Dined with him once, a Corpus Christi Day,

All alone, we two--he's a clever man--

And after dinner--why, the wine you know--

Oh, there was wine, and good!--what with the wine...

'Faith, we began upon all sorts of talk!

He's no bad fellow, Blougram--he had seen

Something of mine he relished--some review--

He's quite above their humbug in his heart,

Half-said as much, indeed--the thing's his trade--

I warrant, Blougram 's sceptical at times--

How otherwise? I liked him, I confess!"

_Che ch'è_, my dear sir, as we say at Rome,

Don't you protest now! It's fair give and take;

You have had your turn and spoken your home truths--

The hand's mine now, and here you follow suit.

Could anything be more easy, conversational, realistic? And yet every

now and then we find throughout the poem touches of the noblest poetry

introduced so skilfully that there is no sense of incongruity. For

example, the Bishop in the course of his argument says that absolute

unbelief is just as impossible as absolute faith.

And now what are we? unbelievers both,

Calm and complete, determinately fixed

To-day, to-morrow, and for ever, pray?

You'll guarantee me that? Not so, I think.

In no-wise! all we've gained is, that belief,

As unbelief before, shakes us by fits,

Confounds us like its predecessor. Where's

The gain? how can we guard our unbelief?

Make it bear fruit to us?--the problem here.

Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,

A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,

A chorus-ending from Euripides--

And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears

As old and new at once as Nature's self,

To rap and knock and enter in our soul,

Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,

Round the ancient idol, on his base again--

The grand Perhaps! we look on helplessly--

There the old misgivings, crooked questions are--

This good God--what he could do, if he would,

Would, if he could--then must have done long since:

If so, when, where, and how? some way must be--

Once feel about, and soon or late you hit

Some sense, in which it might be, after all.

Why not, "The Way, the Truth, the Life?"

Browning's love poetry does not properly enter into this discussion,

since love is a common theme of poets, and this discussion deals with

Browning's treatment of apparently unpoetical themes; but Browning's

choice and treatment of situation in his love poems are so unusual as

to bring them into the same class as his other realistic poems. Take

as an example:

See, how she looks now, drest

In a sledging-cap and vest.

'Tis a huge fur cloak--

Like a reindeer's yoke

Falls the lappet along the breast:

Sleeves for her arms to rest,

Or to hang, as my love likes best.

These few examples will serve to show that the essential principles of

Browning's realism and Wordsworth's are the same. Browning, like

Wordsworth, claimed for poetry a greater licence both in subject matter

and in form, but he went farther than Wordsworth in both. Wordsworth

took for his new subjects the humble joys and sorrows of the poor--but

all was fish that came to Browning's net. Any psychological situation,

any out-of-the-way corner of human experience, became in his hands

matter for poetry. Then as to form, Wordsworth merely refrained from

the conventional language of poetry, but Browning boldly used language

that was frankly unpoetical--uncouth, unmusical, rough, rhyming

grotesquely, accented outrageously. Perhaps his most important advance

on Wordsworth was in the use of the dramatic form--nearly all

Browning's poems of the sort described are dramatic monologues--for

when the speaker is professedly not the poet, we are less inclined to

find an incongruity in unpoetical language. Browning, by adopting the

dramatic form, gets at things from the subjective point of view, from

the inside. Wordsworth tried to describe them objectively from the

point of view of a spectator.

Browning, then, practically discovered a new poetical form which

enabled him to bring within the scope of poetical treatment subjects

never so treated before. He found a new field for poetry and found new

forms to suit it. He entered land which Wordsworth had only beheld

from afar, and which, indeed, Wordsworth never could have entered.

Browning saw that familiar objects, everyday doings and sayings,

commonplace happenings which seem to the ordinary observer prosaic and

barren, are, to the poet, pregnant with underlying emotion.

Ordinary poetry deals with the obviously poetical things, or converts

the everyday things of life into poetry by depriving them of some of

their actuality. Browning contrives to give us things as they are,

with all the harshness and crudeness of real life, and yet to make us

feel the underlying element of poetry. About his most brutally

realistic poem, there is a subtle atmosphere of emotion.

Browning, like Shakespeare, dares to place side by side the grotesque,

the beautiful, the tragic, the ludicrous. He can do it by virtue of

his unassuming form. Take, for example, _Old Pictures in Florence_.

There we get the dirt of the old streets, the very must and smell of

the second-hand dealer's stores, the filthy canvas and peeling fresco,

but we get also the tragedy of the wronged Old Masters, and a noble

conception of the development of art.

In _Bishop Blougram_ we get the wine, the nuts, the plausible

conversation, but we get also the spectacle, pregnant with emotional

possibilities, of two human midgets in the presence of the Almighty,

the one daring lightly to compound with his Maker, the other lightly to

deny Him.

The value of this inquiry, if it have any value, is to show that those

poetical forms which are often assumed to be due to a radical defect in

Browning's work as poetry, were really a deliberate artistic method,

deliberate in the sense that Carlyle's style is deliberate. The style,

with both Carlyle and Browning, is indeed the man, but each had to find

the style which would express him best. Carlyle, in his early work,

wrote like Macaulay; Browning, in his early work, wrote like Shelley.

And whenever Browning, in his later poems, met with a subject capable

of conventional poetical treatment, he did not hesitate so to treat it.

I need only instance such poems as _Saul, Abt Vogler, The Guardian

Angel_, and _Prospice_. I shall quote the last of these poems:

Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat,

The mist in my face,

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote

I am nearing the place,

The power of the night, the press of the storm,

The post of the foe;

Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,

Yet the strong man must go;

For the journey is done and the summit attained,

And the barriers fall,

Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,

The reward of it all.

I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,

The best and the last!

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,

And bade me creep past.

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,

The heroes of old,

Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears

Of pain, darkness, and cold.

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,

The black minute's at end,

And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,

Shall dwindle, shall blend,

Shall change, shall become a peace out of pain,

Then a light, then thy breast,

O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,

And with God be at rest!

Can anyone after hearing that poem maintain that Browning was

incapable, when he wished, of dispensing with eccentricities?

In conclusion, I should like to say that the subject I have been

treating has nothing to do with the obscurity of Browning's poetry.

His obscurity has nothing to do with his realism.

SYNGE

_Incomplete notes of an Address to a Study Club_

Three years ago, in July 1910, died John Millington Synge, Irish

dramatist, whose name will probably be better known twenty years hence,

perhaps one hundred and twenty years hence, than it is to-day.

Those who know Ireland only by hearsay, or from books, or even from the

stage, will be slow at first to appreciate his work; but we who know

and love the real Ireland, we, who have wandered through her glens and

by her streams, and looked upon her wonderful skies, who have felt

within ourselves her sadness, her mirth, and her poetry, must at once

acknowledge that in the work of Synge the soul of Ireland has, for the

first time, received adequate expression. In that small island, a

green speck in the tumbling billows of the Atlantic, right in the heart

of the barren conventionalism of modern civilization, there still

remains, if one knows where to look for it, the Celtic spirit in all

its original purity; there is still to be found a glamour and a mystery

as fine as any that lingers on the shores of old Romance.

Many have found and felt these things, but they have been silent, for

they have been restrained from speech by a sense that such things could

not be interpreted in words. Synge was the first to find the medium by

which they might be expressed. "He was a solitary, undemonstrative

man," says his friend Yeats, "never asking pity, nor complaining, nor

seeking sympathy; all folded up in brooding intellect, knowing nothing

of new books and newspapers, reading the great masters alone; and he

was but the more hated because he gave his country what it needed, an

unmoved mind, where there is a perpetual last day, a trumpeting and

coming up to judgment."

Thus, it seems to me, Synge will be slow in winning recognition from

the masses of his countrymen. He saw them too clearly, and painted too

accurate a portrait of them to be flattering; they recognize their

weaknesses and are indignant, while they fail to see that he has

painted also their fine poetical qualities, their romance, and their

tenderness.

Again the same writer: "In Ireland, he loved only what was wild in its

people and in the grey wintry sides of many glens." All the rest, all

that one reasoned over, fought for, read of in leading articles, all

that came from Education, all that came down from young

Ireland--aroused in him little interest. Perhaps its only effect on

him was to awaken in him first that irony which, once awakened, he

turned upon the whole of life.

The scene of Synge's later literary work--the work which counts--was

the Abbey Theatre, a small and unpretentious building, hidden away in a

side street near the Dublin quays. Here is a central point for the

Irish Dramatic Movement, a movement recognized by all competent critics

as being one of the most significant things in modern literature.

Lovers of literature of the present generation who have been walking in

a vain shadow, groping their way uneasily amid realistic novels,

paradoxical problem plays, pale poems, and epigrammatic essays, turn

with relief to a literature which is realistic, and at the same time

rich and poetical, and which shows unmistakable signs of real vitality.

At the Abbey Theatre one may see the peasant life of modern Ireland and

hear the beautiful legends of her past portrayed by native actors, with

a fidelity and a force which have never been surpassed on any stage.

Their acting is a true "holding of the mirror up to Nature"--there are

no stage tricks, no declamations, no poses, no sound and fury--the

scene is perhaps the rude interior of a peasant cottage in some Irish

village, or of a hut in some lonely glen, or the side of a windy hill

or open field, where the sun shines and the air is mild and the breeze

fresh and kindly. The figures that fill the scene bear no resemblance

to the traditional buffoon, who, on most stages, is made to do duty for

an Irishman; their speech is quite unlike the traditional brogue which

is commonly supposed to be the medium of communication between Irish

peasants; the characters represented are primitive but poetical, wild

but noble; their dialogue is rich with humour and imagination, and is

spoken with a charming and musical intonation. In the movements and

words of the people we see on the stage, there is no appearance of

acting; they talk easily and naturally, their gestures are few and

altogether free from exaggeration or striving after effect. Their

whole performance is simple and apparently without effort; and yet I

have again and again been far more profoundly stirred by this

unpretentious acting, I have had a far deeper sense of the tragedy and

comedy and mystery of life in this little Abbey Theatre than I have

ever received from the elaborate productions of the London stage.

The Irish National Theatre was founded in 1899 by W. B. Yeats and Lady

Gregory, who, ever since its inception, have devoted their time and

thought and work almost exclusively to perfecting this new drama. The

result has amply justified their faithful labour. The Irish National

Theatre has already given to the world an entirely original style of

acting, a company of actors "unrivalled in the quality which they

profess," and now known not only in Ireland, but all over Britain and

America, and also several dramatists of extraordinary merit.

Of these dramatists Synge is undoubtedly the most remarkable. His

production is small and extends over only a few years, but it is of a

quality unknown in English literature since Elizabethan times. "It has

been claimed for him," says Mr. Bickley, "that he is the greatest

imaginative dramatist who has written English since Shakespeare, or at

least since the Puritans closed the theatres in 1642." This claim may

at first sight seem extravagant, especially to those who know the very

limited range and quantity of Synge's work, but on reflection it is

clear that if one admits that Synge is a great dramatist, one is forced

also to admit that he is the first since Shakespeare. What have we had

in drama since Shakespeare? A number of classical or

pseudo-Shakespearean verse plays, most of them extremely dreary, from

Addison to Swinburne, the brilliant but tawdry comedy of intrigue of

the Restoration, the later eighteenth-century society comedy of

Goldsmith and Sheridan, and the modern drawing-room dramas of Shaw and

Wilde--to none of which the term great can properly be applied.

A study of the causes of the decay of the drama would be a most

interesting one, but the topic is too large and too difficult to be

attempted in a short paper. Suffice it to say, that Synge appeared to

believe that the modern drama suffered from two main defects. Either

it lacked reality, or it lacked poetry. The drama which was

imaginative and poetical was alien from real life, the drama which

attempted a realistic picture of life was flat and joyless and anaemic.

According to this idea two main things were necessary to a re-creation

of the drama. First, the type of life in which there still remained

some vigour, colour, and poetry; where convention had not crushed out

all elemental emotions and produced a barren artificial uniformity;

secondly, an artistic language by which that life might be expressed.

Synge found both these requisites among the Irish peasantry of

Connemara and the Aran Islands. In Mr. Bickley's books we learn how W.

B. Yeats found Synge. Synge was then twenty-six. "He had wandered

among people whose life is as picturesque as that of the Middle Ages,

playing his fiddle to Italian sailors and listening to stories in

Bavarian woods, but life had cast no light into his writings."

Following Yeats' advice, Synge left France and went to live at Aran, a

group of stony islands at the entrance of Galway Bay. "There he lived

the peasants' life, learned their language and discovered his own

possibilities." In the Aran peasants he found a people with "an

imagination, fiery and magnificent and tender," and at the same time

with the elemental emotions strongly in evidence, a just mixture of God

and brute. Synge found splendid material for a drama at once human and

beautiful; in their language, English spoken by men who thought in

Gaelic, that is, English coloured by Celtic imagination, he found his

medium of expression. The result was the half-dozen plays which will

probably survive most of the other writing of this generation.

To find the Ireland of romance, Synge returned again and again to Aran,

to Kerry and to the Blaskets. "He was a drifting, silent man, full of

hidden passion, and loved wild islands, because there, set out in the

light of day, he saw what lay hidden in himself." He liked to enter

the houses of the people and sit quietly listening to their talk. In

the dialect of Aran "the cadence is long and meditative as befits the

thought of men who are much alone, and who, when they meet in each

other's houses--as is their way at the day's end--listen patiently,

each man speaking in turn for some little time, and taking pleasure in

the vaguer meaning of the words and in their sounds. Their thought,

when not merely practical, is as full of traditional wisdom and

extravagant pictures as some Aeschylean chorus."

Synge wrote down words and phrases wherever he went, and found the

Irish dialect so rich a thing that he had begun translating into it

fragments of the great literatures of the world and had planned a

complete version of the _Imitation of Christ_. He attached great

importance to the discovery of this dramatic dialect.

In Synge's plays is not to be found any definite philosophy; he was

that rarest of things--a pure artist. "He loves all that has edge, all

that is salt in the mouth, all that is rough to the hand, all that

heightens the emotions by contrast, all that stings into life the sense

of tragedy."

All his plays, except the beautiful _Deirdre_, in which he goes back to

Irish legend for his plot, deal with modern peasant life in Ireland,

and range from the rollicking comedy of the _Tinker's Wedding_, through

the irony of the _Playboy of the Western World_, and the _Shadow of the

Glen_, to the pure and magnificent tragedy of _Riders to the Sea_. I

shall never forget the impression made upon me by the latter play when

I saw it acted for the first time in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, acted

as only the Irish players can act it. I have seen it often since, and

never without being deeply stirred, but that first performance was a

revelation and opened up a new world of thought and feeling.

_Riders to the Sea_ is a short, simple, one-act play, taking, perhaps,

twenty minutes to act; but in that twenty minutes the spectator plunges

deep into the mystery and tragedy of life, before him black and

bottomless depths of suffering; he becomes aware of Destiny hovering, a

grim unseen presence, over the little lives of men. The background of

the little play is the vast remorseless sea, and over it broods

Eternity.

DICKENS AND THACKERAY

_An Essay found among Professor Bateman's early papers_

To attempt anything like an adequate discussion of two literary giants

like Dickens and Thackeray in a short paper of this kind is like

undertaking to empty Niagara with a quart pot. It is obvious that I

can hope to do no more than indicate in a rather sketchy way some of

the main points of difference and resemblance in our two authors. In

doing so I shall naturally pay somewhat more attention to Dickens than

to Thackeray. With the exception of _Esmond_, Thackeray's work is all

very much of the same kind, and displays a considerably smaller degree

of variety and versatility than that of Dickens. One requires less

guidance for an intelligent appreciation of Thackeray than for an

intelligent appreciation of Dickens. The merits of Thackeray's work

are easily seen and easily defined; a recognition of them is largely a

matter of reason, and can confidently be expected from any intelligent

reader. But Dickens is an author much more difficult to understand.

His faults as well as his merits are gigantic; but then he frequently

gets credit for faults which are not there, and sometimes even some of

his greatest merits are construed as faults. The true appreciation of

Dickens requires a larger exercise of the imagination than in the case

of Thackeray. In other words, it is more a matter of feeling than of

reason. Ask many a lover of Dickens to give a reason for the faith

that is in him, and he may find it difficult to satisfy you.

Take, for example, Dickens's humorous characters. There are some who

cannot be got to admit that Mr. Toots, Sim Tappertit, Sairey Gamp, and

others of that ilk are divinely humorous and inspired creations; some

will only admit that at best they are but "excellent fooling"; others

will even characterize them as mere buffoonery. It is an inferior

class of mind, however, which rejects the abnormal merely on account of

its abnormality, and votes the improbable impossible, because it fails

to fit in with previously conceived ideas of right and wrong.

Criticism is useless in the case of people who hold such a view. I may

assert, with all the force of which I am capable, that Mr. Toots is the

best thing in Dombey; that age cannot wither Sairey Gamp any more than

Cleopatra, and that she will blossom in perennial freshness while the

language endures; but if you ask me for a reason, I can give none. It

is no more possible to give a reason for liking Sairey Gamp than for

disliking Dr. Fell. We can enjoy with Thackeray the skilful dissection

of a character like that of Becky Sharp, and penetrate with him the

innermost recesses of her mighty little soul; but Dickens himself could

not have penetrated the secret of the composition of Sairey Gamp. In

her presence criticism is dumb. We must be content to stand in humble

and reverent admiration and satisfy ourselves with exclaiming, "Behold,

it is very good." I shall return again to this point of

characterization, but I must now say something of the position held by

Dickens and Thackeray in the historical development of the novel.

Though undoubtedly the two greatest novelists of the Early Victorian

school, Dickens and Thackeray are alike in exercising very little

apparent influence on the development of the contemporary novel of

manners. They both look back rather than forward. They set the crown

and consummation on the work of the early eighteenth-century group of

writers. Dickens derives from Smollett, and Thackeray from Fielding.

When Dickens as a boy discovered in an old garret that precious pile of

dusty eighteenth-century books, _Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker_

and the rest, which he absorbed with such loving eagerness, he little

thought that he was destined to be a second and a greater Smollett.

The characteristic type of English novel was defined by Richardson,

Fielding, and their school at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

It aimed at a dramatic representation of contemporary life and manners;

it took, in fact, the place of the drama as the popular form of

literature. With the decay of the Fielding novel came a reaction, and

opposed to the lusty and vivid realism of _Tom Jones_ and _Humphrey

Clinker_ we get the sham mediaevalism, the dungeon-keeps, the echoing

chambers, the hollow-voiced spectres, and the absurd sentiment of

Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, and its imitators. This was a

sort of side stream in the history of the novel, which nevertheless

created the taste for historical romance, fed later by the novels of

Scott. Scott stands apart from the main stream of English fiction,

though his style exercised an immense influence on later novelists.

After the mediaeval relapse, the contemporary novel of manners was

continued at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the

nineteenth century by Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. The latter died in

1817; between 1814 and 1832 Scott's novels fill the field of fiction;

and then, between about 1835 and 1860, come Dickens and Thackeray with

their contemporaries, of whom perhaps the most remarkable were Lytton

and Disraeli. In none of these writers, however, must we look for the

foundation of the characteristic Victorian novel--the novel of George

Eliot and George Meredith. The founder of that novel was Charlotte

Brontë. Her _Jane Eyre_ and Thackeray's _Vanity Fair_ were published

in the same year, 1848, and were reviewed together in a famous number

of the _Quarterly_. The two works represent two distinct schools of

fiction. Between the Dickens-Thackeray novel and the Brontë-Eliot

novel there is a great gulf fixed. Dickens and Thackeray stand out

from their time like two solitary giants.

Perhaps now it might be well to remind you briefly of the main facts in

the literary history of the two men. Dickens's first great work,

_Pickwick_, appeared in 1837, five years after the death of Scott. It

was at once received with acclamation. His next book, _Oliver Twist_,

though it must have come as a sort of shock after _Pickwick_, did not

stem the tide of appreciation. Like Oliver himself, every one was soon

asking for more. They did not ask in vain. During the next two

decades, the forties and fifties, Dickens poured forth novel after

novel with surprising rapidity. Pickwick, Sam Weller, Fagin, Squeers,

Micawber soon became household words. Dickens won a popularity of

which we can form no true conception. There has been nothing like it

in our time. England and America were taken by storm; even France was

infected with the prevailing enthusiasm.

During the days of Dickens' early popularity a clever young man had

been making a name for himself as a humorist and satirist in the pages

of _Fraser's Magazine, Punch_, and similar journals. This was William

Makepeace Thackeray. In 1838, the year after _Pickwick_, Thackeray

began a series known as the _Yellow Plush Papers_; during the next ten

years he produced a great variety of journalistic work, short stories,

sketches and essays, and wrote, in addition, two satirical novels,

_Catherine_ and _Barry Lyndon_. In 1848 he burst on the world as a

great novelist with _Vanity Fair_, and within ten years more he had

published _Pendennis, Esmond, The Newcomes_, and _The Virginians_.

This brings us up to 1859. By that year Dickens had produced his best

work; Thackeray had only four more years to live; and he was followed

to the grave by Dickens in 1870. From this account it is apparent that

Dickens made a much bigger stir than Thackeray in the contemporary

literary world. He was the leviathan who frolicked at will in the sea

of popular appreciation. Thackeray was a much smaller fish.

Considering Dickens and Thackeray first strictly as novelists, we find

a point of resemblance in the fact that, from the point of view of

form, they are both uncommonly bad novelists. A good novel, like any

other work of art, must have some unity about it. The incidents must

not be bundled in pell-mell, but must all contribute to the working out

of some central idea or situation. Then we must have an element of

romance, and this ought to regulate the subordination of the

characters. The characters in every romance are essentially three, as

Chesterton puts it, St. George, the Princess, and the Dragon; that is,

St. George, something that loves and fights; the Princess, something

that is loved and fought for; while the Dragon represents the

opposition. Other characters besides these three there may and must

be, but they serve as mere machinery or scenery as far as the romance

is concerned.

Now let us consider the novels of Dickens and Thackeray from these

points of view. As regards incident they are almost wholly lacking in

unity. We cannot exactly deny them plots. They develop stories and

interesting stories, but it is not an orderly development. Dickens

strings his incidents together almost haphazard, and so, to a large

extent, does Thackeray. (By the way, in these remarks on Thackeray I

do not include _Esmond_, which is magnificent, but is not really

Thackeray.)

In the greater part of his writing Dickens had no central aim or motive

in view; he wrote, so to speak, from hand to mouth. Most of his books

in fact were written for periodicals in monthly parts, and it is safe

to say that nobody, and least of all Dickens himself, knew exactly what

a month would bring forth. I am here again speaking generally; there

are some exceptions, notably the _Tale of Two Cities_--which stands

almost as much apart from the rest of Dickens's work as _Esmond_ does

from the rest of Thackeray's--and the unfinished _Edwin Drood_. Of

Thackeray we may say that he may have had some central aim or motive in

his novels, but if so, he paid little attention to it, and did not

allow it to impede his rambling progress in the smallest degree. We

may take it, then, as generally true that the novels of Dickens and

Thackeray are rough-hewn and sometimes shapeless. In the case of

Dickens this characteristic seldom annoys, but it is otherwise with

Thackeray. I doubt, for example, if there is anyone here who has read

and enjoyed every word of that fearfully digressive and dropsical

novel, _The Newcomes_.

Again, as regards characters, in neither novelist do we get an orderly

subordination. Dickens, perhaps, is the worst offender in this

respect. In Thackeray, the hero and heroine are usually in a sense the

most important personages, though crowds of personages who have really

nothing to do with the story bulk very largely, and though in _Vanity

Fair_ there is no hero at all. But in Dickens, the personages who

ought to be most important have frequently very little to do with the

novel. As a rule, the leading characters, hero, heroine, and villain,

are lifeless and uninteresting, and only serve to connect loosely a

great amount of strictly secondary matter.

The really important characters in Dickens are the _unimportant_ ones,

those who are introduced _en passant_, and who might as well be

anywhere else as far as the story is concerned. In _Nicholas Nickleby_

Nicholas himself does not interest me, neither does his sister, neither

do Madeline Bray and Mr. Bray, neither does Ralph Nickleby. The people

who do interest me are people like Mrs. Nickleby, Mantalini, the

Squeers family, the Kenwigs, and Vincent Crummies. In _Martin

Chuzzlewit_ the least important character is Martin himself, but his

life serves as a string upon which are hung Pecksniff, Todger's

Boarding House and all that therein was, Chevy Slime, Esq., Sairey

Gamp, Betsy Prigg, Mr. Mould, Elijah Pogram, and many others in whose

company there is endless delight. All these, however, might just as

well have been hung on the string of _Nicholas Nickleby_ or _David

Copperfield_ or _Bleak House_ or almost any of the other books.

Similarly all through. In _Dombey_ Florence is a nonentity, Walter Gay

is a nonentity, Dombey himself is a "made character," well-made, but

not created. In _David Copperfield_ David begins by being a reality,

but tails off into an abstraction. In _A Tale of Two Cities_ Darnay

does not exist, and Lucie Manette only barely exists. In both Dickens

and Thackeray, in fact, the romantic element is really subordinate, in

Dickens very much so; and in neither writer do St. George, the

Princess, and the Dragon ever become all-important. Both writers, in

fact, are to be judged piece-meal, as creators of situations and

characters, rather than in the bulk as creators of novels.

The keynote of the work of both our authors was struck in two of their

first works of any note. In 1848 Thackeray published in _Punch_ the

series of papers entitled the _Book of Snobs_, which marks his

dedication to the especial task of unmasking the pretence and sham

which underlay the whole of English public and private life. His

definition of the word _snob_ was comprehensive. "The snob," says

Thackeray, "is a child of aristocratical societies. Perched on his

step of the long social ladder, he respects the man on the step above

and despises the man on the step below, without enquiring what they are

worth, solely on account of their position; in his innermost heart he

finds it natural to kiss the boots of the first, and to kick the

second." Starting with this definition, Thackeray lashed unsparingly

all classes of society from the highest to the lowest. He discovered

and unmasked snobs of all descriptions, church snobs, military snobs,

literary snobs, country snobs, political snobs, Continental snobs. In

this book Thackeray appears as the caustic satirist of every sort of

social hypocrisy, and this character he maintains in his novels.

_Pendennis, Vanity Fair_, and _The Newcomes_ are largely _Books of

Snobs_ worked into the form of novels.

Dickens's first important work was his _Sketches by Boz_, a series of

papers in which he describes various aspects and phases of the life of

the English lower middle class. Though somewhat crude in style and

occasionally even vulgar in tone, these papers are seldom completely

commonplace, and many of the characteristics of the mature Dickens can

be discerned there in embryo. They have a distinction of manner and a

suggestion of creative power which is unmistakable, and they mark the

dedication of Dickens to his especial task, the sympathetic though

exaggerated painting of the poorer middle classes. While Thackeray

took his stand on the universal sham and corruption of our social

system, lashing hypocrisy and showing up the rottenness which lay

hidden beneath the whited sepulchres of society, Dickens revealed the

treasures which were buried beneath the rubbish-heap designated as the

"poorer middle classes." Just as Thackeray's novels are glorified

_Books of Snobs_, so Dickens's novels are, for the most part, glorified

_Sketches by Boz_. His early works, though called novels, are

undisguisedly a series of sketches loosely strung together.

_Pickwick_, of course, is absolutely episodic. It was begun to supply

the letterpress to a series of drawings by a popular artist, and when

Dickens commenced he had no aim except to get his characters into such

amusing situations as would afford scope to the illustrator. As the

book goes on, however, it begins to get hold of Dickens, and the change

is seen especially in the character of Pickwick, who begins as an

elderly crank about whom Dickens does not care a jot, but develops into

one of the most lovable old gentlemen of fiction. However, the fact

remains that _Pickwick_ has not the remotest vestige of a plot, and can

by no stretch of the imagination be called a novel. Again, _Oliver

Twist_, as Chesterton remarks, is really not a novel, and might,

without losing much, have been published as a series of papers entitled

_The Workhouse, A Thieves' Den_, and so on. _Nicholas Nickleby_ might

similarly have been published as a series of papers entitled _A

Yorkshire School, A Provincial Theatre_, and so on. The fact that all

these sketches are strung together on the lives of those shadowy

personages Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby does not at all affect

their real character. After _Nicholas Nickleby_ the books begin to

lose, to some extent, this sketchiness, that is, the episodes are more

closely and skilfully interwoven into a connected whole, but still

Dickens, the novelist, never quite emerges from Boz, the essayist.

These remarks about Dickens naturally lead me to say something about

the development of our two authors. About Thackeray I cannot say very

much. By the time he emerges from the undercurrent of journalistic

work, all the essentials of the mature Thackeray seem almost fully

developed. _Barry Lyndon_ is almost as mature in style as _Vanity

Fair_. _Vanity Fair_ itself, Thackeray's first work of importance, is

also his greatest work. That is, instead of working up to a climax as

a novelist, Thackeray began at the top and worked downwards. Of

course, we must remember that when he wrote it he had reached the age

of thirty-seven. The subsequent novels, with the exception of

_Esmond_, mark a deterioration, and not an advance.

I must here make a slight digression to speak of _Esmond_. Into this

brilliant historical patch Thackeray threw all his great knowledge of,

and love for, the eighteenth century. He was soaked in

eighteenth-century literature and history--witness his _Four Georges_

and _English Humourists_; and in _Esmond_ he assumed with consummate

skill the eighteenth-century manner.

In this novel Thackeray casts off completely his mask of cynicism, and

appears as a man of noble feeling and deep sympathy, who could write a

polished, pure, and straightforward English style. We feel, however,

that the book is after all only a brilliant freak, and that the real

Thackeray is the cynical, the satirical, and the caustic Thackeray of

_Vanity Fair_. _Esmond_ stands to the rest of Thackeray's work

somewhat in the relation of _Romola_ to George Eliot's other novels.

In both the atmosphere is artificial, the result of long and careful

study, and in both the deception is so perfect that the artificiality

is almost impossible to detect. In two of his novels Dickens took

historical subjects, namely in _Barnaby Rudge_ and the _Tale of Two

Cities_. The latter is the acme of Dickens's attainments in the

descriptive style, and is perhaps more restrained and artistic than any

of his other works. In brilliant imagination and vivid representation

of an historical phase he more than equals Thackeray, though his novel

falls short of _Esmond_ in characterization. Esmond, Beatrix, and Lady

Castlewood are much better than Darnay, Lucie, and the Doctor, though

Sidney Carton, perhaps, is as fine as anything in Thackeray.

To return to the question of development, we may say that Thackeray's

style was fully developed during his career as a journalist, essayist,

and writer of short stories, and that we find its culminating point in

_Vanity Fair_.

In the case of Dickens, however, we can trace a well-marked, if rapid,

advance. _Sketches by Boz_ are distinctly crude. _Pickwick Papers_

are a startling advance on one side of Dickens's art. We find in them

the vigour, versatility, and exuberance of a youthful and tremendous

imagination. They display inexhaustible resource and gigantic humour.

Dickens lavished enough genius on them to do ten ordinary men for a

lifetime, and yet he did it with perfect ease. We feel that he enjoyed

himself in writing them, that he revelled in the task. Every

character, down to the smallest, lives. Mr. John Swanker and Mr. Cyrus

Bantam, for example, are as real to us as Mr. Sam Weller and Mr.

Pickwick. Pickwick is one of the greatest of humorous portraits in

literature. It is as great as the _Canterbury Tales_. It is wonderful

that a young writer who in _Sketches by Boz_ had only been feeling his

way should, at one bound, reach the height of excellence which we find

in _Pickwick_. The incidents are commonplace enough. The jokes are

the sort of jokes which are still the stock-in-trade of the ha'penny

comic--jokes about mothers-in-law, red-nosed curates, and falling on

the ice, about getting drunk, and fighting, and fatness, and sitting

upon one's hat. But what a difference between the treatment of Dickens

and that of the uninspired humorists.

_Pickwick_, however, as I have said, represents only one side of

Dickens's art, but perhaps the greatest side, the humorous delineation

of character. There is as yet no trace of Dickens the novelist (for by

no stretch of the imagination can _Pickwick_ be called a novel), of

Dickens the master of pathos, of Dickens the descriptive artist. There

is, however, to be found in _Pickwick_ traces of a youthful phase in

Dickens's character, a somewhat morbid leaning towards the horrible and

criminal, afterwards toned down and corrected by his strong common

sense, but never wholly absent. This trait is to be found in some of

the short stories inserted in _Pickwick_, notably _The Madman's Tale_.

The latter story might have served as a warning to some very discerning

critic of the startling change to be found in Dickens's next book,

_Oliver Twist_. In this work the lavish humour of _Pickwick_ dwindles

down to very small proportions, and is decidedly overweighed by the

horrible and morbid. The murder of Nancy and the death of Bill Sykes

are only equalled for vivid awfulness a couple of times in Dickens's

later books, notably in _Bleak House_ and in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. In

_Oliver Twist_ appears a new element which was to take a prominent

place in Dickens's future work, the element of social reform. Social

reform had already produced the workhouse. Dickens started his reform

by attacking the workhouse. But Dickens is not yet a novelist. The

romantic element is absent in _Oliver Twist_; the hero is only a child.

It was in his fourth book, _Nicholas Nickleby_, that we find Dickens

definitely deciding to write romance. Accordingly he introduces an

impossibly good St. George, throws in a Princess and a Dragon half-way

through for his benefit, and tries to make an orthodox novel. He

succeeds, however, in making only a very poor imitation of one.

Nicholas himself is a hopelessly badly-drawn character; and in fact

nearly everywhere in the story that Dickens tries to be definitely

romantic and orthodox he sinks below the level of the ha'penny

novelette.

In his next book, _The Old Curiosity Shop_ (1840), he almost abandons

his good intentions formed with _Nicholas Nickleby_, and we return to

the realm of sketches and sketchiness. He is progressing, however, in

the use of forcible and restrained language. _Barnaby Rudge_ (1841) is

splendid of its kind, the best bit of actual writing Dickens had yet

done, though it is rather a series of brilliant pictures than an

orthodox novel. The hero is an idiot, but nevertheless not so idiotic

as was Nicholas Nickleby. In _Martin Chuzzlewit_ (1844) we get an

attempt at romance. Martin is a hero a little more life-like than the

much-abused Nicholas. In this book Dickens's powers of satire come out

at their best in his pictures of American society, and his power of

humorous characterization is also at its height in Pecksniff, Sairey

Gamp, and many of the minor characters. The melodramatic side of

Dickens's art unfortunately comes out unpleasantly strong in the

description of old Chuzzlewit and his hopeful son, Jonas. At this

point all Dickens's characteristic traits may be said to be fully

developed. From this time, except in _David Copperfield_, which marks

the culmination of his powers, and in the _Tale of Two Cities_, there

is a distinct decline. _Dombey_ is in parts magnificent, but a sort of

gloom hangs over most of the book, relieved only by such bright patches

as Mr. Toots, Bunsby, and Susan Nipper. Major Bagstock is the most

unpleasant of Dickens's humorous characters. In this novel Dickens

trespassed on Thackeray's preserves with disastrous results. His

attempted satire on fashionable society and fashionable marriages, in

the Cleopatra-Edith-Carker episodes, should be compared with

Thackeray's treatment of a similar subject in _The Newcomes_. Still,

there is nothing crude about the style of _Dombey_; it has the strength

and force of maturity. After _David Copperfield_, which is known and

loved by every one, and which is the most purely natural and wholly

lovable of Dickens's books, we get a series of what may be called

splendid failures in _Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Hard Times, Our

Mutual Friend_, and _Great Expectations_. They all contain magnificent

patches, but they fail to impress one like the earlier books. It is

some time now since I read _Bleak House_, and I must say I have very

faint recollections of the greater part of it, whereas the earlier

works are unforgettable.

Proceeding now to a consideration of Dickens and Thackeray as

humorists, we may say, in a general way, that Thackeray's humour is

largely incidental to his style, whereas the humour is the very root

and groundwork of Dickens's best and most characteristic writing. It

is difficult to define humour, but it seems to me that it consists, to

a considerable extent, in an unexpected overthrow of the strictly

logical. Mr. Micawber, the weak and foolish, the obvious failure in

life, logically ought to be the most despairing and miserable of men.

The fact, however, that so far from harbouring self-contempt, Mr.

Micawber has a self-confidence which nothing can destroy, and that so

far from retiring with disgust from a world which offers him nothing

but kicks, he has the most childlike faith in his ultimate acquirement

of unlimited halfpence, strikes us as being such a curious and blessed

reversal of the logical order of things that we are pleased with Mr.

Micawber. Instead of despising him, we love him. Micawber is

undoubtedly a fool. Nearly all Dickens's great characters are fools.

They are persons whom we should avoid in real life; but the gospel of

Dickens, as Chesterton says, "is to suffer fools gladly." "Every

instant we neglect a great fool merely because he is foolish. Every

day we neglect Tootses and Swivellers, Guppys and Joblings. Every day

we are missing a monster whom we might love, and an imbecile whom we

should certainly admire." The humour of Dickens took the failures of

life and turned them into successes. True humour is seldom far

separated from pathos, and with Dickens, even while we laugh, we pity

and we love. With Thackeray we laugh, but as a rule we do not love nor

pity, we despise. The element of pathos is in general absent from

Thackeray's humour; hence it is not really true humour at all; it is an

inverted way of looking at things which strikes us as being funny. But

the critic is always with Thackeray, hidden beneath the humorist. It

is impossible for him to produce a lovable fool, for it is impossible

for him to conceal the fact that he knows his character is a fool, and

despises him accordingly. Take Jos. Sedley in _Vanity Fair_. The big

Anglo-Indian was just the stuff of which a good Dickens's character is

made. He is just the right sort of fool. But Thackeray goes out of

his way to make him as contemptible as he is laughable, and in the end

we are extremely glad to be rid of Mr. Jos.

In other words, with Thackeray the humour is nearly always overweighed

by the satire. Thackeray is always considered as a satirist _par

excellence_. But Dickens also is a satirist of another and perhaps a

more effective kind. Thackeray's satire is the keen, cold, pitiless

dissection of a surgeon. He lays bare every motive, every contemptible

little spring of action. He tries, indeed, by his humorous manner to

convince us that he is not all the time desperately in earnest, but

behind it all we feel the preacher warning us, holding up examples for

us, imploring us not to be or do likewise. In the character of Mr.

Osborne, for example, we have the city magnate, self-made and able, but

the slave of money. He is under the impression that money can make up

for the vulgarity and coarseness of which he is vaguely conscious.

When poor Sedley, his old friend, is broken, he casts him off without

pity; along with Sedley's money, all his value in Osborne's eyes had

disappeared. The latter lavished his wealth in trying to make his son

a gentleman, and the result is that miserable cad, George Osborne, who

despises his father, disappoints his wishes out of obstinacy, marries

Amelia out of bravado, tires of her and proceeds to flirt with Becky

Sharp, and dies a hero's death at Waterloo because he cannot help

himself. Thackeray shows it all up without mercy, and he is always

showing up similar things in great profusion. His satire depends

largely for its effect on his _manner_. He conceals from us his

indignation and contempt for the vices he describes, and writes of them

carelessly, almost flippantly, as if they were the most natural things

in the world. This is another effect gained by the reversal of the

logical. But is such satire effective? I doubt it. I doubt that all

Thackeray's analysis of the vice and rottenness of fashionable society

ever turned one sinner from the evil of his ways. People do not mind

being shown up, although they hate to be made ridiculous. Now

Dickens's method of satirizing was to make the objects which he

attacked ridiculous. He took the weak points of a man or an

institution, carried them to extremes and showed their logical

absurdity. When people saw in the person of Bumble what workhouse

beadles were--not bad, not vicious--but absurd institutions, they

desired to get rid of them. Dickens might have abused Yorkshire

schools till he was blue in the face, have analysed and shown up their

weak points, and written to the papers, and yet might have done little

good. Instead, he drew Squeers, and while people laughed consumedly,

they also made a mental note that such persons as Squeers were an

absurd blot on our social system and should forthwith be abolished.

When Dickens wished to satirize America, he did not make an exhaustive

analysis of the American system. He simply accepted its absurdities,

exaggerated them to the utmost limit, embodied them in Elijah Pogram,

Jefferson Brick, and their fellows, and drew a crushing satirical

picture of a state of society eaten up with self-conceit. When a man

beholds his natural face in a distorting mirror, he is not quite so

pleased with himself as before; and when the Americans beheld

themselves in the mirror of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ they were not pleased

either. If Thackeray had taken on himself to analyse and expose their

moral corruption, they would probably have felt flattered. Dickens's

method of satire was the _reductio ad absurdum_, and appealed to the

imagination. Further, Thackeray's satire was generally aimed at

individuals and had for its object moral reform. We must admit,

however, in favour of Thackeray's method that it produced brilliant,

consistent, and life-like pictures of society such as Dickens was

wholly incapable of drawing. If you want real life, go to Thackeray;

but if you wish to get out of this world for a while, and take a short

holiday in another and a more pleasant world, go to Dickens. I hope no

one will think that I am here belittling the genius of Thackeray.

_Vanity Fair_ will ever stand as one of the most brilliant works of

fiction in the language. It is more consistently good than anything

Dickens ever did. As a humorous and, at the same time, dreadfully

caustic picture of society it is incomparable. In breadth of view and

variety of incident it rivals _Tom Jones_; in minute observation of

detail it reminds one of Jane Austen.

It is as a creator of character that, in my opinion, Dickens has his

greatest advantage over Thackeray. The man who maintains that Dickens

is a genius of the first order must be finally driven to take his stand

on Dickens's characters. Thackeray's characters are photographic; they

are excellent copies of life. Yet, admirable as many of them are, we

can never quite get away from the suspicion that they were made for a

purpose. Thackeray takes them to pieces with such skill that we are

half inclined to think that he also puts them together. But Dickens's

characters are pure creatures of the imagination. They are not studies

of, but splendid additions to, the human race. Dickens does not

analyse their motives, and could not if he would. He describes them,

and we feel that they are alive. The very smallest of them is

indelibly impressed on our imagination. Dickens conquered Thackeray

completely in his minor characters. I have read _The Newcomes_

recently, for example, but I have no clear idea of the distinction

between Mrs. Brian Newcome and Mrs. Hobson Newcome; I have read

_Chuzzlewit_ less recently, but I am quite clear about Mr. Chevy Slime

and Mr. Tigg.

Thackeray produced a tremendous variety of characters, but the large

majority of them, I should say, are unpleasant. Thackeray, when all is

said and done, was first and last a moralist; and it was his aim as a

moralist to make his characters unpleasant. There are few lovable

characters in _Pendennis_; there are none in _Vanity Fair_. The few

respectable characters are all figure-heads, and as for the remainder,

if it were not for the humour and dramatic force with which they are

pictured to us, the description of such people as Becky Sharp, Sir Pitt

Crawley, Lord Steyne, and Jos. Sedley could give little pleasure. As

it is, one feels that outside the pages of Thackeray one would give a

good deal to avoid meeting them. But who would not give his dearest

possession for the privilege of beholding in the flesh Sam Weller, Mr.

Micawber, Sairey Gamp, Mr. Dick, and even such unmitigated scoundrels

as Jingle and Squeers. There are in Dickens many sorts of characters,

but only one sort is great--the characters whom Dickens himself found

amusing. The characters he admired, such as Nicholas, are wooden; the

characters he hated are too hateful; but the characters, whether

pleasant or unpleasant, in whom he found something amusing are all at

least interesting. Those whom he found amusing and at the same time

lovable are his greatest characters.

The persons in Dickens's pages whom I call his _great_ characters are

frequently accused of being impossible. You might as well say that a

hippopotamus or a duck-billed platypus is impossible because it does

not suit your ideas of what is right and proper. The existence of the

hippopotamus is its justification, and it is so also with a Dickens

character. It is obviously not copied, nor is it a mere abstraction.

It is vividly alive. _You_ could not have created it, and you know

that nobody else but Dickens could. I think it quite possible that a

very clever man might produce a Colonel Newcome, or a Blanche Amory, or

even a Becky Sharp; but I assert that no one but Dickens could produce

a Sairey Gamp or a Mr. Toots, and that nobody would be mad enough to

try.

Dickens's characters are improbable, that I grant you. But any man

with a marked individuality is improbable. It is all the people in the

world to one against his being what he is. Dickens's characters are

just a little more improbable, that is all. Dickens's work is called

by Chesterton rather mythology than history or fiction, the mythology

of the lower middle class. Micawber and Pecksniff, like Falstaff and

Lear, Hector and Achilles, are immortal realities, an undying

possession of humanity. Their alleged _impossibility_ is, in fact,

their passport to immortality. Thackeray's exact copies of life may

grow faded and out of date; but Dickens's creations will never be any

more impossible than when he created them. They will never be too

impossible for our acceptance. The glories of a Toots and a Swiveller

were veiled from the eyes of Thackeray. If he could have conceived

such characters, he would have exposed their weaknesses (an easy task),

and covered them with ridicule and contempt. But as depicted by the

kindly hand of Dickens, who is not ready to own them as fellow

creatures and admit that they are lovable?

The mention of Pecksniff reminds me that Dickens is sometimes accused

of merely attaching a label to his characters, of making them living

embodiments of some trait or peculiarity; in other words, that Dickens,

like Ben Jonson, made his characters mere illustrations of some

particular humour. Thus Mark Tapley may be designated by the word

"jolly," Micawber will always be "hoping for something to turn up,"

Pecksniff will always be playing the hypocrite. But though Pecksniff

is first and foremost a hypocrite, and though Dickens's purpose is

undoubtedly to impress on us and exaggerate his hypocrisy, he has all

the other essentials of a human being. He can, for example, get drunk.

Let me read a few extracts from that marvellous scene from _Martin

Chuzzlewit_ when Mr. Pecksniff gets tipsy at Todgers' Boarding House.

If any one, after reading it, can still assert that it is an

abstraction or impossible, I give him up in despair.

The gentlemen, after the toasts have been drunk, rejoin the ladies:

Mr. Pecksniff had followed his younger friends up-stairs and taken a

chair at the side of Mrs. Todgers. He had also spilt a cup of coffee

over his legs without appearing to be aware of the circumstance; nor

did he seem to know that there was muffin on his knee.

"And how have they used you down-stairs, sir?" asked the hostess.

"Their conduct has been such, my dear madam," said Mr. Pecksniff, "as I

can never think of without emotion, or remember without a tear. Oh,

Mrs. Todgers!"

"My goodness!" exclaimed the lady. "How low you are in your spirits,

sir!"

"I am a man, my dear madam," said Mr. Pecksniff, shedding tears, and

speaking with an imperfect articulation, "but I am also a father. I am

also a widower. My feelings, Mrs. Todgers, will not consent to be

entirely smothered, like the young children in the Tower. They are

grown up, and the more I press the bolster on them, the more they look

round the corner of it."

He suddenly became conscious of the bit of muffin, and stared at it

intently: shaking his head the while, in a forlorn and imbecile manner,

as if he regarded it as his evil genius, and mildly reproached it.

"She was beautiful, Mrs. Todgers," he said, turning his glazed eye

again upon her, without the least preliminary notice. "She had a small

property."

"So I have heard," said Mrs. Todgers with great sympathy.

"Those are her daughters," said Mr. Pecksniff, pointing out the young

ladies, with increased emotion.

Mrs. Todgers had no doubt about it.

"Mercy and Charity," said Mr. Pecksniff, "Charity and Mercy. Not

unholy names, I hope?"

"Mr. Pecksniff!" cried Mrs. Todgers. "What a ghastly smile! Are you

ill, sir?"

He pressed his hand upon her arm, and answered in a solemn manner, and

a faint voice, "Chronic."

"Chronic?" cried the frightened Mrs. Todgers.

"Chron-ic," he repeated with some difficulty. "Chronic. A chronic

disorder. I have been its victim from childhood. It is carrying me to

my grave."

"Heaven forbid!" cried Mrs. Todgers.

"Yes, it is," said Mr. Pecksniff, reckless with despair. "I am rather

glad of it, upon the whole. You are like her, Mrs. Todgers."

"Don't squeeze me so tight, pray, Mr. Pecksniff. If any of the

gentlemen should notice us."

"For her sake," said Mr. Pecksniff. "Permit me. In honour of her

memory. For the sake of a voice from the tomb. You are _very_ like

her, Mrs. Todgers! What a world this is!"

"Ah! Indeed you may say that!" cried Mrs. Todgers.

"I am afraid it is a vain and thoughtless world," said Mr. Pecksniff,

overflowing with despondency. "These young people about us. Oh! what

sense have they of their responsibilities? None. Give me your other

hand, Mrs. Todgers."

The lady hesitated, and said "she didn't like."

"Has a voice from the grave no influence?" said Mr. Pecksniff with

dismal tenderness. "This is irreligious! My dear creature."

"Hush!" urged Mrs. Todgers. "Really you mustn't."

"It's not me," said Mr. Pecksniff. "Don't suppose it's me: it's the

voice; it's her voice."

Mrs. Pecksniff, deceased, must have had an unusually thick and husky

voice for a lady, and rather a stuttering voice, and to say the truth

somewhat of a drunken voice, if it had ever borne much resemblance to

that in which Mr. Pecksniff spoke just then. But perhaps this was

delusion on his part.

"It has been a day of enjoyment, Mrs. Todgers, but still it has been a

day of torture. It has reminded me of my loneliness. What am I in the

world?"

"An excellent gentleman, Mr. Pecksniff," said Mrs. Todgers.

"There is consolation in that too," cried Mr. Pecksniff. "Am I?"

"There is no better man living," said Mrs. Todgers, "I am sure."

Mr. Pecksniff smiled through his tears, and slightly shook his head....

"Chronic--chronic! Let's have a little drop of something to drink."

"Bless my life, Miss Pecksniffs!" cried Mrs. Todgers, aloud, "your dear

pa 's took very poorly!"

Mr. Pecksniff straightened himself by a surprising effort, as every one

turned hastily towards him; and standing on his feet, regarded the

assembly with a look of ineffable wisdom. Gradually it gave place to a

smile; a feeble, helpless, melancholy smile; bland almost to

sickliness. "Do not repine, my friends," said Mr. Pecksniff, tenderly.

"Do not weep for me. It is chronic." And with these words, after

making a futile attempt to pull off his shoes, he fell into the

fireplace.

In conclusion, I am sorry that I have not time to discuss the actual

style of our two writers. I had hoped to dwell a little on Dickens's

descriptive power, in which he far excels Thackeray; on that wonderful

photographic imagination of his which impresses on our minds the

scenery of his novels down to the smallest details as vividly as it was

impressed on his own, on his splendid handling of crowds and big stage

effects. I am afraid that in the foregoing remarks I have dwelt too

much on Dickens's strong points; I have said nothing of his cheap

melodrama, his maudlin pathos, his frequent bad taste; but after all,

these are but comparatively small blots on a great genius, and they

nearly always occur where Dickens is trying to impress us in a way that

does not come naturally to him. I am afraid, also, that I have

emphasized mainly Thackeray's weak points and neglected his strong

ones. I set off, however, avowedly as a champion of Dickens, and I

should find it hard to pose as an impartial judge, for while I only

admire Thackeray, I love Dickens.

PESSIMISM

This poem and the poem entitled "Eternal Silence" were found among

Professor Bateman's papers. While there is some doubt as to their

authorship, there are indications that they are probably his

workmanship.

WHAT IS THE END TO WHICH ALL THINGS PROGRESS?

No man will ever know;

Not though for countless years

Not though with toil and tears

Millions of human brains

Ever more strong and clear,

Rise on this planet here;

And with more perfect skill,

With cunning greater still

Than any yet attains,

Probe for the mystery.

Why all these burning suns

Ringed with their planets

Driving through endless space?

By what strange accident

Rose there to consciousness

On this poor ball of earth

A being aware,

Who can wonder and question?

A speck in the Universe,

Who looks up aghast

At the glittering riddle

That night ever brings him?

One speck that dissents

From the law of the Whole,

The one interruption

To the balanced perfection,

The voiceless and passionless life

Of the meaningless Whole?

And when, in countless years,

At last comes the moment

When this little system,

The sun and the moon and the stars that are seven,

Shall crash to its doom

'Gainst some on-coming sphere-world,

And with infinite roaring

And hideous combustion,

Burst all into atoms

And seething abysses

Of nebulae, fiery and whirling,

Then, with it shall perish

The last fading traces

Of life and of love

And of human endeavour

That are left on this cold, lifeless earth-star;

And so shall go on

For ever and ever

Through infinite spaces,

World making and breaking,

And Man's little moment,

His life on this planet,

A drop in the ages,

Shall pass unlamented,

Shall pass unrecurring,

A strange inexplicable chance

In the meaningless Whole.

BRAINS AND INTELLECT

_A fugitive production--occasion unknown_

Accepting the well-known dictum of Appius Claudius that the government

is the belly of the body-politic, and the general mob of citizens "the

limbs and outward flourishes," what section of the community, shall we

say, constitutes the brains? We might, at first, be inclined to assign

the role of "brains" to those members of the community who are

particularly occupied with the pursuit of learning, such as, for

example (to take a large and representative class), University

professors. A little reflection, however, suffices to show that we

should be mistaken. The men who are usually spoken of as the "brains

of the community" are of a very different type from University

professors. They are men who maintain fair round bellies and expansive

watch chains, who ride in automobiles and smoke imposing cigars.

Clearly, University professors are not in this class.

Where, then, shall we place those members of the community who make the

pursuit of knowledge for its own sake their chief occupation? It may

help us towards the solution of this weighty problem if we make a

distinction between brains and intellect, and call such people as

professors, philosophers, and poets the "intellect" of the community.

We shall then have to define clearly what we mean by "brains," and what

we mean by "intellect."

"Brains" are what a man uses when he has some practical end in view,

such as more money in his pocket, better food to eat, better clothes to

wear; "intellect" deals with problems (usually classed as "academic")

which have no immediate commercial value--such as whether the sun goes

round the earth or the earth round the sun, or why an apple falls to

the ground. "Brains" are generally admired, because everybody can see

the results which they achieve; "intellect" is usually treated with

neglect or indifference because it works in a sphere which is far out

of range of the common vision.

What, then, is the justification for the maintenance in a community of

a purely intellectual class of people, occupied with problems which

have nothing to do with actual life, and which apparently contribute

nothing to the common stock of "useful" knowledge, the kind of

knowledge that can be turned into money. Why, for example, do we

maintain at great expense in our universities professors of literature,

philosophy, and pure science to devote their time to the study of

merely academic problems, and to teach our sons and daughters such a

smattering of these things as is of no practical use to them whatever,

and which causes most of them a good deal of trouble and annoyance?

It is easy to understand why we should maintain professors of such

subjects as engineering, dentistry, and agriculture, for engines and

teeth are both things that will not allow themselves to be neglected,

and it is undoubtedly a good thing to make two blades of grass grow

where only one grew before. But why should a man be afraid to devote

his time to making an appreciation of Greek tragedy grow where none

grew before, or to try to arouse an interest in such a problem as the

psychology of metre.

It may be argued, of course, that University professors provide a good

deal of amusement for their students, that their personal

peculiarities, carefully observed through four years of class-room

work, often furnish rich entertainment at convivial gatherings. Or,

again, it may be urged that the study of professors (in so far as

professors can be regarded as human) is the study of human nature, and

that students who observe their professors carefully are gaining an

acquaintance with a practical branch of the science of anthropology.

But neither of these answers to our question can be regarded as wholly

satisfactory.

Let us consider briefly the function of intellect in the individual,

and see if it will throw any light on the function of the intellectual

class in the community. When intellect is developed at all in the

average citizen, its sole function seems to be to make him either

uncomfortable or objectionable. For suppose a small puny growth of

intellect does appear in a man, it generally has one of two effects;

either it makes him _dissatisfied_ with himself, troubled with vague

yearnings after a higher life, worried with misgivings on religious

questions, annoyed by the feeling that he ought to be able to enjoy

books and pictures and music which afford him no real enjoyment; or, he

becomes abnormally _satisfied_ with himself, propounds half-baked

theories of the universe, teems with criticisms of books which he has

not read or does not understand, or bubbles over with solutions of

problems upon which he has never seriously pondered.

The one thing that such men can seldom be got to do is to set to work

to develop that little growth of intellect, to feed and nourish it by

the study of literature and philosophy, so that they may at last be

enabled to think out problems for themselves, or at least to appreciate

intelligently the solutions of them which great thinkers have placed on

record. When, oh when, will men understand that intellectual things

are not an amusement nor a hobby, to be taken up as a side-line in

one's spare time, but that the appreciation of the things of the

intellect is the reward of the most difficult and baffling of all kinds

of labour; that one will appreciate Plato or Sophocles, Shakespeare or

Milton, Descartes or Newton, precisely in proportion to the distance

which one has climbed along the rugged path which leads to the

intellectual peaks upon which those giants of thought sit eternally

throned, that the cultivation of the intellect is not the work of four

years or forty years, but of a lifetime, nay, of many lifetimes?

To spend uncounted years of pain,

Again, again, and yet again,

In working out in heart and brain,

The problem of our being here,

To gather facts from far and near,

Upon the mind to hold them clear

And knowing more may yet appear,

Unto one's latest breath to fear,

The premature result to draw--

Is the object, end and law,

And purpose of our being here?

asks Clough, and to this question all our greatest thinkers have

answered--Yes.

It is the few who are convinced of the value and seriousness of

intellectual things, and who do not flinch from the self-sacrifice and

apparently fruitless labour which the pursuit of such things involves,

that humanity as a whole owes its progress. If it were not for these

men, whom Bunyan would call the intellectual Greathearts of the

community, we should still, as a race, be sunk in barbarism. Intellect

in the average man is allowed to atrophy; in the small percentage who

strive after culture it accomplishes nothing of value, but it is the

latter people who form the rank and file of the intellectual army.

Gradually, little by little, that army is advancing;. every now and

then some great general appears--a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Newton, a

Kant, a Darwin--and under his leadership a victory is won; now this

outpost of the hosts of darkness is captured, now that, and the flag of

the human intellect is raised upon its ramparts. Meanwhile, the mass

of mankind trudges on heavily, often two or three centuries behind.

Next arrive the inventors, the reformers, the men of constructive

intellect, who take the results of the great thinkers and plan their

application to life; and lastly come the men of "brains" in their fur

coats and fair round bellies, promote their companies, organize their

industries, make their political speeches, and finally gather in the

shekels, and also most of the honour and glory. By this time the

intellectual army is again far ahead, attacking the next outpost of the

kingdom of chaos and Old Night. And so humanity moves onward and

upward.

What, then, is the function of the academic class in the community?

Simply to keep the flag of human intellect flying, a work which, in

most cases, involves some self-sacrifice in those who devote themselves

to it. A professor, for example, though a man of intellect, is not

necessarily devoid of brains, and he might well turn those brains to

advantage in some more lucrative profession. As it is, he is compelled

to a large extent to sacrifice his individuality, to degrade his

intellect with drudgery which is beneath it, to stand as a mere

intermediary or conduit-pipe between the student and knowledge. At the

same time, if, out of the hundreds of students who pass through his

hands in one academic year, he succeeds in inspiring even a single

individual with a true desire for culture, his existence for that year

is fully justified, for has he not added one member to the band of

intellectual pioneers who will finally, we hope, take possession, in

the name of humanity, of the whole universe of thought?

Come, my friends,

Push off, and sitting well in order, smite

The sounding furrows, for our purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars until we die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

THE ETERNAL SILENCE

Around this rolling sphere of Man

There lies a vast Unknown,

Beyond the space that he can scan

With tracts of starlight sown.

Beneath the shadow of th' Unknown

From age to age he stands,

And to the Void in wavering hope

He stretches praying hands.

But in the Void no signs appear,

It stands unbroken still,

And from the void no word of cheer,

But silence deep and chill.

And when the upstart race of men

Has ceased from all this earth,

When past is their brave strife with Fate,

When past are Death and Birth;

When lifeless, sightless, blank and cold

The home of man's poor breath;

Still will this ball through space be rolled,

In Silence deep as death.