CHAPTER IX: THE VICTORIAN AGE, 1837-1900

History of the Period.--In the two periods of English history most

remarkable for their accomplishment, the Elizabethan and the

Victorian, the throne was occupied by women. Queen Victoria, the

granddaughter of George III., ruled from 1837 to the beginning of

1901. Her long reign of sixty-three years may be said to close with

the end of the nineteenth century.

For nearly fifty years after the battle of Waterloo (1815), England

had no war of magnitude. In 1854 she joined France in a war against

Russia to keep her from taking Constantinople. Tennyson's well-known

poem, _The Charge of the Light Brigade_, commemorates an incident in

this bloody contest, which was successful in preventing Russia from

dismembering Turkey.

When the Turks massacred the Christians in Bulgaria in 1876, Russia

fought and conquered Turkey. England again intervened, this time after

the war, in the Berlin Congress (1878). In return for her diplomatic

services and for a guaranty to maintain the integrity of certain

Turkish territory, England received from Turkey the island of Cyprus.

As a result of this Congress, the principalities of Roumania, Servia,

and Bulgaria were formed, but the Turk was allowed to remain in

Europe. A later English prime minister, Lord Salisbury (1830-1903),

referring to England's espousal of the Turkish cause, said that she

had "backed the wrong horse." The bloody war of 1912-1913 between

Turkey and the allied armies of Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, and

Greece was the result of this mistake.

An important part of England's history during this period centers

around the expansion, protection, and development of her colonies in

Asia, Australia, Africa, and America. England was then constantly

agitated by the fear that Russia might grow strong enough to seize

India or some other English colonial possessions.

A serious rebellion in India (1857) led England to take from the East

India Company the government of that colony. "Empress of India" was

later (1876) added to the titles of Queen Victoria. Had India not been

an English colony, literature might not have had Kipling's fascinating

_Jungle Books_ and Hindu stories. England's protectorate over Egypt

(1882) was assumed in order to strengthen her control over the newly

completed Suez Canal (1869), which was needed for her communication

with India and her Australian colonies.

The Boer war in South Africa (1899-1902)required the largest number of

troops that England ever mustered into service in any of her wars. The

final outcome of this desperate struggle was the further extension of

her South African possessions.

In the nineteenth century, England's most notable political

achievement was "her successful rule over colonies, ranging from

India, with its 280,000,000 subjects, to Fanning Island with its

population of thirty." Her tactful guidance was for the must part

directed toward enabling them to develop and to govern themselves. She

had learned a valuable lesson from the American revolution.

Ireland, however, failed to secure her share of the benefits that

usually resulted from English rule. She was neither regarded as a

colony, like Australia, nor as an integral part of England. For the

greater part of the century her condition was deplorable. The great

prime minister, William E. Gladstone (1809-1898), tried to secure

needed home rule for her, but did not succeed. Toward the end of the

century, more liberal laws regarding the tenure of the land and more

self-government afforded some relief from unjust conditions.

During the Victorian age the government of England became more

democratic. Two reform bills (1867 and 1884) gave almost unrestricted

suffrage to men. The extension of the franchise and the granting of

local self-government to her counties (1888) made England one of the

most democratic of all nations. Her monarch has less power than the

president of the United States.

The Victorian age saw the rise of trades unions and the passing of

many laws to improve the condition of the working classes. As the

tariff protecting the home grower of wheat had raised the price of

bread and caused much suffering to the poor, England not only repealed

this duty (1846) but also became practically a free-trade country. The

age won laurels in providing more educational facilities for all, in

abridging class privileges, and in showing increasing recognition of

human rights, without a bloody revolution such as took place in

France. A rough indication of the amount of social and moral progress

is the decrease in the number of convicts in England, from about

50,000 at the accession of Victoria to less than 6000 at her death.

An Age of Science and Invention.--In the extent and the variety of

inventions, in their rapid improvement and utilization for human

needs, and in general scientific progress, the sixty-three years of

the Victorian age surpassed all the rest of historic time.

When Victoria ascended the throne, the stage coach was the common

means of traveling; only two short pieces of railroad had been

constructed; the electric telegraph had not been developed; few

steamships had crossed the Atlantic. The modern use of the telephone

would then have seemed as improbable as the wildest Arabian Nights'

tale. Before her reign ended, the railroad, the telegraph, the

steamship, and the telephone had wrought an almost magical change in

travel and in communication.

The Victorian age introduced anaesthetics and antiseptic surgery,

developed photography, the sciences of chemistry and physics, of

biology and zoölogy, of botany and geology. The enthusiastic

scientific worker appeared in every field, endeavoring to understand

the laws of nature and to apply them in the service of man. Science

also turned its attention to human progress and welfare. The new

science of sociology had earnest students.

[Illustration: CHARLES DARWIN.]

The Influence of Science on Literature.--The Victorian age was the

first to set forth clearly the evolution hypothesis, which teaches the

orderly development from simple to complex forms. While the idea of

evolution had suggested itself to many naturalists, Charles Darwin

(1809-1882) was the first to gain a wide hearing for the theory. After

years of careful study of nature, he published in 1859 _The Origin of

Species by Natural Selection_, an epoch-making work, which had a

far-reaching effect on the thought of the age.

The influence of his doctrine of evolution is especially apparent in

Tennyson's poetry, in George Eliot's fiction, in religious thought,

and in the change in viewing social problems. In his _Synthetic

Philosophy_, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), philosopher and

metaphysician, applied the doctrine of evolution not only to plants

and animals but also to society, morality, and religion.

Two eminent scientists, John Tyndall (1820-1893) and Thomas Huxley

(1825-1895), did much to popularize science and to cause the age to

seek a broader education. Tyndall's _Fragments of Science_ (1871)

contains a fine lecture on the _Scientific Use of the Imagination_, in

which he becomes almost poetic in his imaginative conception of

evolution:--

"Not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular

or animal life, not alone the nobler

forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite

and wonderful mechanism of the human

body, but the human mind itself,--emotion,

intellect, will, and all their phenomena,--were

once latent in a fiery cloud... All our philosophy, all our poetry,

all our science, and all our art,--Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and

Raphael,--are potential in the fires of the sun."

[Illustration: JOHN TYNDALL.]

Unlike Keats in his _Lamia_, Tyndall is firm in his belief that

science will not clip the wings of imagination. In the same lecture he

says:--

"How are we to lay hold of the physical basis of light, since, like

that of life itself, it lies entirely without the domain of the

senses? We are gifted with the power of imagination and by this

power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the

senses... Bounded and conditioned by coöperant reason, imagination

becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer.

Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was at the

outset a leap of the imagination."

Huxley was even a more brilliant interpreter of science to popular

audiences. His so-called _Lay Sermons_ (1870) are invigorating

presentations of scientific and educational subjects. He awakened many

to a sense of the importance of "knowing the laws of the physical

world" and "the relations of cause and effect therein." Nowhere is he

more impressive than where he forces us to admit that we must all play

the chess game of life against an opponent that never makes an error

and never fails to count our mistakes against us.

[Illustration: THOMAS HUXLEY. _From the painting by Collier,

National Portrait Gallery_.]

"The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the

universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.

The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his

play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our

cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest

allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest

stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which

the strong man shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is

checkmated--without haste, but without remorse.

* * * * *

"Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty

game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect

in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things

and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the

affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move

in harmony with those laws."[1]

We find the influence of science manifest in much of the general

literature of the age, as well as in the special writings of the

scientists. Science introduced to literature a new interest in

humanity and impressed on writers what is known as the "growth idea."

Preceding literature, with the conspicuous exception of Shakespeare's

work, had for the most part presented individuals whose character was

already fixed. This age loved to show the growth of souls. George

Eliot's novels are frequently Darwinian demonstrations of the various

steps in the moral growth or the perversion of the individual. In

_Rabbi Ben Ezra_, Browning thus expresses this new idea of the working

of the Divine Power:--

"He fixed thee mid this dance

Of plastic circumstance."

The Trend of Prose; Minor Prose Writers.--The prose of this age is

remarkable for amount and variety. In addition to the work of the

scientists, there are the essays and histories of Macaulay and

Carlyle, the essays and varied prose of Newman, the art and social

philosophy of Ruskin, the critical essays of Matthew Arnold and

Swinburne.

One essayist, Walter Pater (1839-1894), an Oxford graduate and

teacher, who kept himself aloof from contemporary thought, produced

almost a new type of serious prose, distinguished for color,

ornamentation, melody, and poetic thought. Even such prosaic objects

as wood and brick were to his retrospective gaze "half mere

soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows where." His object was to

charm his reader, to haunt him with vague suggestions rather than to

make a logical appeal to him, or to add to his world of vivid fact,

after the manner of Macaulay. A quotation from Pater's most brilliant

essay, _Leonardo Da Vinci_, in the volume, _The Renaissance: Studies

in Art and Poetry_[2] (1873) will show some of the characteristics of

his prose. This description of Da Vinci's masterpiece, the portrait of

Mona Lisa, has added to the world-wide fame of that picture--

"Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,'

and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from

within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange

thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a

moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women

of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into

which the soul with its maladies has passed!... She is older than

the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead

many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a

diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and

trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda,

was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of

Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and

flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the

changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."

The period from 1780 to 1837 had only two great writers of

fiction,--Scott and Jane Austen; but the Victorian age saw the novel

gain the ascendancy that the drama enjoyed in Elizabethan times.

In addition to the chief novelists,--Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot,

Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, and Kipling,--there were

many other writers who produced one or more excellent works of

fiction. In this class are the Brontë sisters, especially Charlotte

Brontë (1816-1855) and Emily Brontë (1818-1848), the daughters of a

clergyman, who lived in Haworth, Yorkshire. They had genius, but they

were hampered by poverty, lack of sympathy, and peculiar environment.

Charlotte Brontë's _Jane Eyre_ (1847) is a thrilling story, which

centers around the experiences of one of the great nineteenth-century

heroines of fiction. This virile novel, an unusual compound of

sensational romance and of intense realism, lives because the highly

gifted author made it pulsate with her own life. Unlike _Jane Eyre_,

Emily Brontë's powerful novel, _Wuthering Heights_ (1847) is not

pleasant reading. This romantic novel is really her imaginative

interpretation of the Yorkshire life that she knew. If she had

humanized _Wuthering Heights_, it could have been classed among the

greatest novels of the Victorian age. She might have learned this art,

had she not died at the age of thirty. "Stronger than a man, simpler

than a child, her nature stood alone," wrote Charlotte Brontë of her

sister Emily.

Among the other authors who deserve mention for one or more works of

fiction are: Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), a versatile writer whose

best-known work is _The Last Days of Pompeii_; Elizabeth Gaskell

(1810-1865), whose _Cranford_ (1853) is an inimitable picture of

mid-nineteenth century life in a small Cheshire village; Anthony

Trollope (1815-1882), whose _Barchester Towers_ is a realistic study

of life in a cathedral town; Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), who stirs

the blood in _Westward Ho!_ (1855), a tale of Elizabethan seamen;

Charles Reade (1814-1884), author of _The Cloister and the Hearth_

(1861), a careful and fascinating study of fifteenth-century life;

R.D. Blackmore (1825-1900), whose _Lorna Doone_ (1869) is a

thrilling North Devonshire story of life and love in the latter part

of the seventeenth century; J.M. Barrie (1860- ), whose _The Little

Minister_ (1891) is a richly human, sympathetic, and humorous story,

the scene of which is laid in Kirriemuir, a town about sixty miles

north of Edinburgh. His _Sentimental Tommy_ (1896), although not so

widely popular, is an unusually original, semi-autobiographical story

of imaginative boyhood. This entire chapter could be filled with

merely the titles of Victorian novels, many of which possess some

distinctive merit.

The changed character of the reading public furnished one reason for

the unprecedented growth of fiction. The spread of education through

public schools, newspapers, cheap magazines, and books caused a

widespread habit of reading, which before this time was not common

among the large numbers of the uneducated and the poor. The masses,

however, did not care for uninteresting or abstruse works. The

majority of books drawn from the circulating libraries were novels.

The scientific spirit of the age impelled the greatest novelists to

try to paint actual life as it impressed them. Dickens chose the lower

classes in London; Thackeray, the clubs and fashionable world; George

Eliot, the country life near her birthplace in Warwickshire; Hardy,

the people of his Wessex; Meredith, the cosmopolitan life of

egotistical man; Kipling, the life of India both in jungle and camp,

as well as the life of the great outer world. These writers of fiction

all sought a realistic background, although some of them did not

hesitate to use romantic touches to heighten the general effect.

Stevenson was the chief writer of romances.

The Trend of Poetry: Minor Poets.--The Victorian age was dominated

by two great poets,--Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. Browning

showed the influence of science in his tendency to analyze human

motives and actions. In one line of _Fra Lippo Lippi_, he voices the

new poetic attitude toward the world:--

"To find its meaning is my meat and drink."

Browning advanced into new fields, while Tennyson was more content to

make a beautiful poetic translation of much of the thought of the age.

In his youth he wrote:--

"Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime

With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time."

From merely reading Tennyson's verse, one could gauge quite accurately

the trend of Victorian scientific thought.

The poetry of both Browning and Tennyson is so resonant with faith

that they have been called great religious teachers. Rudyard Kipling,

the poet of imperialistic England, of her "far-flung battle line,"

attributes her "dominion over palm and pine" to faith in the "Lord God

of Hosts."

In the minor poets, there is often a different strain. Arnold is beset

with doubt, and hears no "clear call," such as Tennyson voices in

_Crossing the Bar_. Swinburne, seeing the pessimistic side of the

shield of evolution, exclaims:--

"Thou hast fed one rose with dust of many men."

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), Oxford tutor, traveler, and

educational examiner, was a poet who struggled with the doubt of the

age. He loved--

"To finger idly some old Gordian knot,

Unskilled to sunder, and too weak to cleave,

And with much toil attain to half-believe."

His verse would be forgotten if it expressed only such an uncertain

note; but his greatest poem thus records his belief in the value of

life's struggle and gives a hint of final victory:--

"Say not the struggle naught availeth,

The labor and the wounds are vain,

The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

And as things have been they remain.

"If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;

It maybe, in yon smoke concealed,

Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,

And, but for you, possess the field."

Although he paid too little attention to the form of his verse, some

of his poems have the vitality of an earnest, thoughtful sincerity.

Two poets, W. E. Henley (1849-1903) and Robert Bridges (1844- ),

although they do not possess Robert Browning's genius, yet have much

of his capacity to inspire others with joy in "the mere living."

Henley, a cripple and a great sufferer, was a poet, critic, and London

editor. His message is "the joy of life ":--

"...the blackbird sings but a box-wood flute,

But I lose him best of all

For his song is all of the joy of life."

His verse, which is elemental, full of enthusiasm and beauty, often

reminds us of the work of the thirteenth-century lyrists.

Robert Bridges, an Oxford graduate, physician, critic, and poet, also

had for his creed: "Life and joy are one." His universe, like

Shelley's, is an incarnation of the spirit of love:--

"Love can tell, and love alone,

Whence the million stars were strewn,

Why each atom knows its own,

How, in spite of woe and death,

Gay is life, and sweet is breath."

He wishes for no happier day than the present one. Bridges has been

called a classical poet because he often selects Greek and Roman

subjects for his verse, and because he writes with a formality,

purity, and precision of style. He is, however, most delightful in

such volumes as _Shorter Poems_ and _New Poems_.[3] wherein he

describes in a simple, artless manner English rural scenes and

fireside joys. In 1913 he was appointed poet laureate, to succeed

Alfred Austin.

John Davidson (1857-1909), a Scotch poet, who came to London and

wrestled with poverty, produced much uneven work. In his best verse,

there is often a pleasing combination of poetic beauty and vigorous

movement. Lines like these from his _Ballad of a Nun_ have been much

admired:--

"On many a mountain's happy head

Dawn lightly laid her rosy hand.

The adventurous son took heaven by storm,

Clouds scattered largesses of rain."

Davidson later became an offensively shrill preacher of materialism

and lost his early charm. Some of the best of his poetry may be found

in _Fleet Street Ecologues_.

Francis Thompson (1860-1907), a Catholic poet, who has been called a

nineteenth-century Crashaw, passed much of his short life of suffering

in London, where he was once reduced to selling matches on a street

corner. His greatest poem, _The Hound of Heaven_ (1893), is an

impassioned lyrical rendering of the passage in the _Psalms_

beginning: "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I

flee from thy presence?" While fleeing down "the long savannahs of the

blue," the poet hears a Voice say:--

"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."

William Watson (1858- ), a London poet, looked to Milton,

Wordsworth, and Arnold as his masters. Some of Watson's best verse,

such as _Wordsworth's Grave_, is written in praise of dead poets. His

early volume _Epigrams_ (1884), containing one hundred poems of four

lines each, shows his power of conveying poetic thought in brief

space. One of these poems is called _Shelley and Harriet Westbrook_:--

"A star looked down from heaven and loved a flower,

Grown in earth's garden--loved it for an hour:

Let eyes that trace his orbit in the spheres

Refuse not, to a ruin'd rosebud, tears."[4]

Many expected to see Watson appointed poet-laureate to succeed

Tennyson. Possibly mental trouble, which had temporarily affected him,

influenced the choice; for Alfred Austin (1835-1913) received the

laureateship in 1896. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Watson disliked those

whom he called a "phrase-tormenting fantastic chorus of poets." His

best verse shows depth of poetic thought, directness of expression,

and a strong sense of moral values.

The Victorian age has provided poetry to suit almost all tastes. In

striking contrast with those who wrestled with the eternal verities

are such poets and essayists as Austin Dobson (1840- ), long a clerk

of the London Board of Trade, and Arthur Symons (1865- ), a poet and

discriminating prose critic. Austin Dobson, who is fond of

eighteenth-century subjects, is at his best in graceful society verse.

His poems show the touch of a highly skilled metrical artist who has

been a careful student of French poetry. His ease of expression,

freshness, and humor charm readers of his verse without making serious

demands on their attention. His best poems are found in _Vignettes in

Rhyme_ (1873), _At the Sign of the Lyre_ (1885), and _Collected Poems_

(1913).

In choice of subject matter, Arthur Symons sometimes suggests the

Cavalier poets. He has often squandered his powers in acting on his

theory that it is one of the provinces of verse to record any

momentary mood, irrespective of its value. His deftness of touch and

acute poetic sensibility are evident in such short poems as _Rain on

the Down, Credo, A Roundel of Rest_ and _The Last Memory_.[5]

[Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. _From the drawing by himself,

National Portrait Gallery_.]

The Pre-Raphaelite Movement.--In 1848 three artists, Dante Gabriel

Rossetti (1828-1882), William Holman-Hunt (1827-1910), and John

Everett Millais (1829-1896), formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Others soon joined the movement which was primarily artistic, not

literary. Painting had become imitative. The uppermost question in the

artist's mind was, "How would Raphael or some other authority have

painted this picture?" The new school determined to paint things from

a direct study of nature, without a thought of the way in which any

one else would have painted them. They decided to assume the same

independence as the Pre-Raphaelite artists, who expressed their

individuality in their own way. Keats was the favorite author of the

new school. The artists painted subjects suggested by his poems, and

Rossetti thought him "the one true heir of Shakespeare."

When the Pre-Raphaelite paintings were violently attacked, Ruskin

examined them and decided that they conformed to the principles which

he had already laid down in the first two volumes of _Modern Painters_

(1843, 1846), so he wrote _Pre-Raphaelitism_ (1851) as the champion of

the new school. It has been humorously said that some of the painters

of this school, before beginning a new picture, took an oath "to paint

the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

The new movement in poetry followed this revolt in art. Dante Gabriel

Rossetti, the head of the literary Pre-Raphaelites, though born in

London, was of Italian parentage in which there was a strain of

English blood. His poem, _The Blessed Damozel_ (first published in

1850), has had the greatest influence of any Pre-Raphaelite literary

production. This poem was suggested by _The Raven_ (1845), the work of

the American, Edgar Allan Poe. Rossetti said:--

"I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the

grief of the lover an earth, and I determined to reverse the

conditions, and give utterance to the yearnings of the loved one in

heaven."

His Blessed Damozel, wearing a white rose, "Mary's gift," leaning out

from the gold bar of heaven, watching with sad eyes, "deeper than the

depth of waters stilled at even," for the coming of her lover, has

left a lasting impression on many readers. Simplicity, beauty, and

pathos are the chief characteristics of this poem, which, like

Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, was written by a youth of eighteen.

Painting was the chief work of Rossetti's life, but he wrote many

other poems. Some of the most characteristic of these are the two

semi-ballads, _Sister Helen_ and _The King's Tragedy, Rose Mary,

Love's Nocturn_, and _Sonnets_.

One of the earliest of these Sonnets, _Mary's Girlhood_, describes the

child as:--

"An angel-watered lily, that near God

Grows and is quiet."

His sister, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), the author of much

religious verse, shows the unaffected naturalness of the new movement.

This stanza from her _Amor Mundi_ (_Love of the World_) is

characteristic:--

"So they two went together in glowing August weather,

The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right;

And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seemed to float on

The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight."

William Morris (1834-1896), Oxford graduate, decorator,

manufacturer, printer, and poet, was born near London. He was

fascinated by _The Blessed Damozel_, and his first and most poetical

volume, _The Defence of Guinevere and Other Poems_ (1858), shows

Rossetti's influence. The simplicity insisted on by the new school is

evident in such lines as these from _Two Red Roses across the Moon_:--

"There was a lady lived in a hall,

Large in the eyes and slim and tall;

And ever she sung from noon to noon,

Two red roses across the moon."

Morris later wrote a long series of narrative poems, called _The

Earthly Paradise_ (1868-1870) and an epic, _Sigurd the Volsung_

(1876). He turned from Pre-Raphaelitism to become an earnest social

reformer.

In literature, the Pre-Raphaelite movement disdained the old

conventions and started a miniature romantic revival, which emphasized

individuality, direct expression, and the use of simple words. Its

influence soon became merged in that of the earlier and far greater

romantic school.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, 1800-1859

[Illustration: THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. _From the painting by Sir

F. Grant, National Portrait Gallery_.]

Life.--A prominent figure in the social and political life of

England during the first part of the century was Thomas Babington

Macaulay, a man of brilliant intellectual powers, strict integrity of

character, and enormous capacity for work. He loved England and

gloried in her liberties and her commercial prosperity. He served her

for many years in the House of Commons, and he bent his whole energy

and splendid forensic talent in favor of the Reform Bill of 1832,

which secured greater political liberty for England.

He was not a theorizer, but a practical man of affairs.

Notwithstanding the fact that his political opinions were ready made

for him by the Whig party, his career in the House was never

"inconsistent with rectitude of intention and independence of spirit."

He voted conscientiously for measures, although he personally

sacrificed hundreds of pounds by so doing.

He was a remarkable talker. A single speech of his has been known to

change an entire vote in Parliament. Unlike Coleridge, he did not

indulge in monologue, but showed to finest advantage in debate. His

power of memory was wonderful. He often startled an opponent by

quoting from a given chapter and page of a book. He repeated long

passages from _Paradise Lost_; and it is said he could have restored

it complete, had it all been lost.

His disposition was sweet and his life altogether fortunate. His

biographer says of him: "Descended from Scotch Presbyterians

--ministers many of them--on his father's side, and from

a Quaker family on his mother's, he probably united as many guaranties

of 'good birth,' in the moral sense of the word, as could be found in

these islands at the beginning of the century."

He was born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, in 1800. He was

prepared for college at good private schools, and sent to Cambridge

when he was eighteen. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in

1825; but, in the following year, he determined to adopt literature as

a profession, owing to the welcome given to his _Essay on Milton_. As

he had written epics, histories, and metrical romances prior to the

age of ten, his choice of a profession was neither hasty nor

unexpected.

He continued from this time to write for the _Edinburgh Review_, but

literature was not the only field of his activity. He had a seat in

Parliament, and he held several positions under the Government. He was

never unemployed. Many of his _Essays_ were written before breakfast;

while the other members of the household were asleep.

He was a voracious reader. If he walked in the country or in London,

he always carried a book to read. He spent some years in the

government's service in India. On the long voyage over, he read

incessantly, and on the return trip he studied the German language.

He was beyond the age of forty when he found the leisure to begin his

_History of England_. He worked uninterruptedly, but broke down early,

dying at the age of fifty-nine.

With his large, fine physique, his sturdy common sense, his interest

in practical matters, and his satisfaction in the physical

improvements of the people, Macaulay was a fine specimen of the

English gentleman.

Essays and Poetry.--Like De Quincey, Macaulay was a frequent

contributor to periodicals. He wrote graphic essays on men of action

and historical periods. The essays most worthy of mention in this

class are _Sir William Temple, Lord Clive, Warren Hastings_, and

_William Pitt, Earl of Chatham_. Some of his essays on English writers

and literary subjects are still classic. Among these are _Milton,

Dryden, Addison, Southey's Edition of Pilgrim's Progress, Croker's

Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson_, and the biographical essays on

_Bunyan, Goldsmith_, and _Johnson_, contributed to the _Encyclopaedia

Britannica_. Although they may lack deep spiritual insight into the

fundamental principles of life and literary criticism, these essays

are still deservedly read by most students of English history and

literature.

Gosse says: "The most restive of juvenile minds, if induced to enter

one of Macaulay's essays, is almost certain to reappear at the other

end of it gratified, and, to an appreciable extent, cultivated." These

_Essays_ have developed a taste for general reading in many who could

not have been induced to begin with anything dry or hard. Many who

have read Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ during the past fifty years say

that Macaulay first turned their attention to that fascinating work.

In the following quotation from an essay on that great biography, we

may note his love for interesting concrete statements, presented in a

vigorous and clear style:--

"Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the

enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any

other man in history. Everything about him, his chat, his wig, his

figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling

walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked

his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish

sauce and veal pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea,

his trick of touching the posts as he walked ... all are as familiar

to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from

childhood."

Macaulay wrote some stirring ballad poetry, known as _Lays of Ancient

Rome_, which gives a good picture of the proud Roman Republic in its

valorous days. These ballads have something of Scott's healthy, manly

ring. They contain rhetorical and martial stanzas, which are the

delight of many boys; but they lack the spirituality and beauty that

are necessary for great poetry.

History of England.--Macaulay had for some time wondered why some

one should not do for real history what Scott had done for imaginary

history. Macaulay accordingly proposed to himself the task of writing

a history that should be more accurate than Hume's and possess

something of the interest of Scott's historical romances. In 1848

appeared the first two volumes of _The History of England from the

Accession of James II_. Macaulay had the satisfaction of seeing his

work, in sales and popular appreciation, surpass the novels. He

intended to trace the development of English liberty from James II. to

the death of George III.; but his minute method of treatment allowed

him to unfold only sixteen years (from 1685 to 1701) of that period,

so important in the constitutional and religious history of England.

Macaulay's pages are not a graveyard for the dry bones of history. The

human beings that figure in his chapters have been restored to life by

his touch. We see Charles II. "before the dew was off in St. James's

Park striding among the trees, playing with his spaniels, and flinging

corn to his ducks." We gaze for a moment with the English courtiers at

William III.:--

"They observed that the king spoke in a somewhat imperious tone,

even to the wife to whom he owed so much, and whom he sincerely

loved and esteemed. They were amused and shocked to see him,

when the Princess Anne dined with him, and when the first green peas

of the year were put on the table, devour the whole dish without

offering a spoonful to her Royal Highness, and they pronounced that

this great soldier and politician was no better than a low Dutch

bear."[6]

Parts of the _History_ are masterpieces of the narrator's art. A

trained novelist, unhampered by historical facts, could scarcely have

surpassed the last part of Macaulay's eighth chapter in relating the

trial of the seven Bishops. Our blood tingles to the tips of our

fingers as we read in the fifth chapter the story of Monmouth's

rebellion and of the Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffreys.

Macaulay shirked no labor in preparing himself to write the _History_.

He read thousands of pages of authorities and he personally visited

the great battlefields in order to give accurate descriptions.

Notwithstanding such preparation, the value of his _History_ is

impaired, not only because he sometimes displays partisanship, but

also because he fails to appreciate the significance of underlying

social movements. He does not adopt the modern idea that history is a

record of social growth, moral as well as physical. While a graphic

picture of the exterior aspects of society is presented, we are given

no profound insight into the interior movements of a great

constitutional epoch. We may say of both Gibbon and Macaulay that they

are too often mere surveyors, rather than geologists, of the historic

field.[7] The popularity of the _History_ is not injured by this

method.

Macaulay's grasp of fact never weakens, his love of manly courage

never relaxes, his joy in bygone time never fails, his zeal for the

free institutions of England never falters, and his style is never

dull.

General Characteristics.--The chief quality of Macaulay's style is

its clearness. Contemporaries said that the printers' readers never

had to read his sentences a second time to understand them. This

clearness is attained, first, by the structure of his sentences. He

avoids entangling clauses, obscure references in his pronouns, and

long sentences whenever they are in danger of becoming involved and

causing the reader to lose his way. In the second place, if the idea

is a difficult one or not likely to be apprehended at its full worth,

Macaulay repeats his meaning from a different point of view and throws

additional light on the subject by varied illustrations.

In the third place, his works abound in concrete ideas, which are more

readily grasped than abstract ones. He is not content to write: "The

smallest actual good is better than the most magnificent promise of

impossibilities:" but he gives the concrete equivalent: "An acre in

Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia."

It is possible for style to be both clear and lifeless, but his style

is as energetic as it is clear. In narration he takes high rank. His

erudition, displayed in the vast stores of fact that his memory

retained for effective service in every direction, is worthy of

special mention.

While his excellences may serve as a model, he has faults that

admirers would do well to avoid. His fondness for contrast often leads

him to make one picture too bright and the other too dark. His love of

antithesis has the merit of arousing attention in his readers and of

crystallizing some thoughts into enduring epigrammatic form; but he is

often led to sacrifice exact truth in order to obtain fine contrasts,

as in the following:--

"The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the

bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."

Macaulay is more the apostle of the material than of the spiritual. He

lacked sympathy with theories and aspirations that could not

accomplish immediate practical results. While his vigorous,

easily-read pages exert a healthy fascination, they are not illumined

with the spiritual glow that sheds luster on the pages of the great

Victorian moral teachers, like Carlyle and Ruskin. He has, however,

had more influence on the prose style of the last half of the

nineteenth century than any other writer. Many continue to find in him

their most effective teacher of a clear, energetic form of expression.

JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN, 1801-1890

[Illustration: JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN. _From the painting by

Emmeline Deane_.]

Life.--Newman, who was born in London the year after Macaulay,

represents a different aspect of English thought. Macaulay was

thrilled in contemplating the great material growth and energy of the

nation. Newman's interest was centered in the development of the

spiritual life.

This son of a practical London banker was writing verses at nine, a

mock drama at twelve, and at fourteen, "he broke out into periodicals,

_The Spy_ and _Anti-Spy_, intended to answer one another." Of his

tendency toward mysticism in youth, he wrote:--

"I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true; my imagination ran on

unknown influences, on magical powers and influences. I thought life

might be a dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception, my

fellow angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and

deceiving me with the semblance of a material world."

In his youth he imitated the style of Addison, Johnson, and Gibbon.

Few boys of his generation had as much practice in writing English

prose. At the age of fifteen years and ten months he entered Trinity

College, Oxford, from which he was graduated at nineteen. Two years

later he won an Oxford fellowship, and in 1824 he became a clergyman

of the Church of England.

The rest of his life belongs mainly to theological history. He became

one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement (1833-1841) toward stricter

High-Church principles, as opposed to liberalism, and in 1845 he

joined the Catholic Church. He was rector of the new Catholic

University at Dublin from 1854 to 1858. In 1879 he was made a

cardinal. Most of his later life was spent at Edgbaston (near

Birmingham) at the Oratory of St. Philip Neri.

Works and General Characteristics.--Newman was a voluminous writer.

An edition of his works in thirty-six volumes was issued during his

lifetime. Most of these properly belong to the history of theological

thought. His _Apologia pro Vita Sua_, which he wrote in reply to an

attack by Charles Kingsley, an Episcopal clergyman, is really, as its

sub-title indicates, _A History of His Religious Opinions_. This

intimate, sympathetic account of his religious experiences won him

many friends. He wrote two novels: _Loss and Gain_ (1848), which gives

an excellent picture of Oxford society during the last days of the

Oxford Movement, and _Callista_ (1852), a vivid story of an early

Christian martyr in Africa. His best-known hymn, _Lead kindly Light_,

remains a favorite with all Christian denominations. _The Dream of

Gerontius_ (1865) is a poem that has been called "the happiest effort

to represent the unseen world that has been made since the time of

Dante."

Those who are not interested in Newman's Episcopal or Catholic sermons

or in his great theological treatises will find some of his best prose

in the work known as _The Idea of a University_. This volume,

containing 521 pages, is composed of discussions, lectures, and

essays, prepared while he was rector of the University at Dublin.

Newman's prose is worthy of close study for the following reasons:--

(1) His style is a clear, transparent medium for the presentation of

thought. He molded his sentences with the care of an artist. He

said:--

"I have been obliged to take great pains with everything I have ever

written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides

innumerable corrections and interlinear additions."

His definition of style is "a thinking out into language," not an

ornamental "addition from without." He employs his characteristic

irony in ridiculing those who think that "_one_ man could do the

thought and _another_ the style":--

"We read in Persian travels of the way in which young gentlemen

go to work in the East, when they would engage in correspondence

with those who inspire them with hope or fear. They cannot write one

sentence themselves; so they betake themselves to the professional

letter writer... The man of thought comes to the man of words; and

the man of words duly instructed in the thought, dips the pen of

desire into the ink of devotedness, and proceeds to spread it over

the page of desolation. Then the nightingale of affection is heard

to warble to the rose of loveliness, while the breeze of anxiety

plays around the brow of expectation. This is what the Easterns are

said to consider fine writing;

and it seems pretty much the idea of the school of critics to whom I

have been referring."[8]

It was a pleasure to him to "think out" expressions like the

following:--

"Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt."

"Calculation never made a hero."

"Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have

changed often."

(2) Like Macaulay, Newman excelled in the use of the concrete. In his

_Historical Sketches_, he imagines the agent of a London company sent

to inspect Attica:--

"He would report that the climate was mild; the hills were

limestone; there was plenty of good marble; more pasture land than

at first survey might have been expected, sufficient certainly for

sheep and goats; fisheries productive; silver mines once, but long

since worked out; figs fair; oil first rate; olives in profusion...

He would not tell how that same delicate and brilliant atmosphere

freshened up the pale olive till the olive forgot its monotony, and

its cheek glowed like the arbutus or the beech of the Umbrian

hills."

A general statement about superseding "the operation of the laws of

the universe in a multitude of ways" does not satisfy him. He

specifies in those ways when he records his belief that saints have

"raised the dead to life, crossed the sea without vessels, multiplied

grain and bread, cured incurable diseases."

(3) He modestly called himself a rhetorician, but he possessed also

the qualities of an acute thinker. He displayed unusual sagacity in

detecting the value of different arguments in persuasion. He could

arrange in proper proportion the most complex tangle of facts, so as

to make one clear impression. Such power made him one of the great

Victorian masters of argumentative prose.

THOMAS CARLYLE, 1795-1881

[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE. _From the painting by James McNeil

Whistler, Glasgow Art Galleries_.]

Life.--Thomas Carlyle, who became one of the great tonic forces of

the nineteenth century, was also most interested in spiritual growth.

He specially emphasized the gospel of work as the only agency that

could develop the atmosphere necessary for such growth, and, though

deeply religious, he cared little for any special faith or creed.

The son of a Scotch stone mason, Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795 at

Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. At the age of fourteen, the boy was ready

for the University of Edinburgh, and he walked the eighty miles

between it and his home. After he was graduated, he felt that he could

not enter the ministry, as his parents wished. He therefore taught

while he was considering what vocation to follow.

In 1821 he met Jane Welsh, a brilliant and beautiful girl, descended

on her father's side from John Knox and on her mother's from William

Wallace. With the spirit of Wallace, she climbed in her girlhood up to

places that a boy would have considered perilous. When she was

forbidden to take up such a masculine study as Latin, she promptly

learned to decline a Latin noun. Carlyle had much trouble in winning

her; but she finally consented to be his wife, and they were married

in 1826. In 1828 they went to live for six lonely years on her farm at

Craigenputtock, sixteen miles north of Dumfries, where it was so quiet

that Mrs. Carlyle said she could hear the sheep nibbling the grass a

quarter of a mile away. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited them here and

formed a lifelong friendship with Carlyle. It was here that Carlyle

fought the intense spiritual battle of his early life, here that he

wrote his first great work, _Sartor Resartus_, which his wife

pronounced "a work of genius, dear."

[Illustration: CRAIGENPUTTOCK.]

It would be difficult to overestimate the beneficent influence which

Mrs. Carlyle exerted over her husband in those trying days of poverty

and spiritual stress. When her private correspondence was inadvisedly

published after his death, she unwittingly became her husband's

Boswell. For many years after the appearance of her letters, his

personality and treatment of her were more discussed than his

writings. Her references to marital unhappiness were for awhile given

undue prominence; but with the passing of time there came a

recognition of the fact that she was almost as brilliant a writer as

her husband, that, like him, she was frequently ill, and that in

expressing things in a striking way, she sometimes exercised his

prerogative of exaggeration. "Carlyle has to take a journey always

after writing a book," she declared, "and then gets so weary with

knocking about that he has to write another book to recover from it."

She once said that living with him was as bad as keeping a lunatic

asylum.

[Illustration: MRS. CARLYLE.]

Unfortunately, his early privations had caused him to have chronic

indigestion. He thought that the worst punishment he could suggest for

Satan would be to compel him to "try to digest for all eternity with

my stomach." This disorder rendered Carlyle peculiarly irascible and

explosive. His wife's quick temper sometimes took fire at his

querulousness; but her many actions, which spoke much louder than her

words, showed how deeply she loved him and how proud she was of his

genius. After their removal to London, she would quietly buy the

neighbors' crowing roosters, which kept him awake, and she prepared

food that would best suit his disordered digestion. She complained of

his seeming lack of appreciation. "You don't want to be praised for

doing your duty," he said. "I did, though," she wrote.

Carlyle's lack of restraint was most evident in little things. A

German who came from Weimar to see him was unfortunately admitted

during a period of stress in writing. A minute later the German was

seen rapidly descending the stairs and leaving the house. Carlyle

immediately hurried to the room where his wife was receiving a

visitor, and tragically asked what he had done to cause the Almighty

to send a German all the way from Weimar to wrench off the handles of

his cupboard doors. Carlyle did not then appear to realize that the

frightened German had mistaken the locked cupboard doors for the exit

from the room. On the other hand, when the great political economist,

John Stuart Mill, was responsible for the loss of the borrowed

manuscript of the first volume of _The French Revolution_, Carlyle

said to his wife: "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we

must endeavor to hide from him how very serious the business is to

us." To rewrite this volume cost Carlyle a year's exhausting labor.

In 1834 Carlyle went to London, where he lived for the rest of his

life in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. The publication of _The French

Revolution_ in 1837 made him famous. Other works of his soon appeared,

to add to his fame. His essays, collected and published in 1839 under

the title, _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays_, contained his

sympathetic _Essay on Burns_, which no subsequent writer has

surpassed. _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations_ (1845)

permanently raised England's estimation of that warrior statesman.

Carlyle's writings, his lectures on such subjects as _Heroes and Hero

Worship_ (1841), and his oracular criticism on government and life

made him as conspicuous a figure as Dr. Samuel Johnson had been in the

previous century. Carlyle's last great work, _History of Friedrich

II_., was fortunately finished in 1865, the year before his great

misfortune.

In the latter part of 1865 the students of the University of Edinburgh

elected Carlyle Lord Rector of that institution because they

considered him the man most worthy to receive such high honor. In the

spring of 1866, he went to Edinburgh to deliver his inaugural address.

Before he returned, he received a telegram stating that his wife had

died of heart failure while she was taking a drive in London. The blow

was a crushing one. The epitaph that he placed on her monument shows

his final realization of her worth and of his irreparable loss. He

said truly that the light of his life had gone out.

During his remaining years, he produced little of value except his

_Reminiscences_, a considerable part of which had been written long

before. Honors, however, came to him until the last. The Prussian

Order of Merit was conferred on him in 1874. The English government

offered him the Grand Cross of Bath and a pension, both of which he

declined. On his eightieth birthday, more than a hundred of the most

distinguished men of the English-speaking race joined in giving him a

gold medallion portrait. When he died in 1881, an offer of interment

in Westminster Abbey was declined and he was laid beside his parents

in the graveyard at Ecclefechan.

Sartor Resartus.--Like Coleridge, Carlyle was a student of German

philosophy and literature. His earliest work was _The Life of

Friedrich Schiller_ (1823-1825), which won for him the appreciation

and friendship of the German poet, Goethe.

Carlyle's first great original work, the one in which he best delivers

his message to humanity, is _Sartor Resartus_ (_The Tailor Patched_).

This first appeared serially in _Fraser's Magazine_ in 1833-1834. He

feigned that he was merely editing a treatise on _The Philosophy of

Clothes_, the work of a German professor, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. This

professor is really Carlyle himself; but the disguise gave him an

excuse for writing in a strange style and for beginning many of his

nouns with capitals, after the German fashion.

When _Sartor Resartus_ first appeared, Mrs. Carlyle remarked that it

was "completely understood and appreciated only by women and mad

people." This work did not for some years receive sufficient attention

in England to justify publication in book form. The case was different

in America, where the first edition with a preface by Emerson was

published in 1836, two years before the appearance of the English

edition. In the year of Carlyle's death, a cheap London edition of

30,000 copies was sold in a few weeks.

Carlyle calls _Sartor Resartus_ a "Philosophy of Clothes." He uses the

term "Clothes" symbolically to signify the outward expression of the

spiritual. He calls Nature "the Living Garment of God." He teaches us

to regard these vestments only as semblances and to look beyond them

to the inner spirit, which is the reality. The century's material

progress, which was such a cause of pride to Macaulay, was to Carlyle

only a semblance, not a sign of real spiritual growth. He says of the

utilitarian philosophy, which he hated intensely:--

"It spreads like a sort of Dog-madness; till the whole World-kennel

will be rabid."

The majority of readers cared nothing for the symbolism of _Sartor

Resartus_; but they responded to its effective presentation of the

gospel of work and faced the duties of life with increased energy.

Carlyle seemed to stand before them saying:--

"_Do the Duty which lies nearest thee_, which thou knowest to be a

Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer... The

Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal was never yet occupied by

man. Yes here, in this poor miserable, hampered, despicable Actual,

wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work

it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the

Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition

is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of ..."

The French Revolution.--In 1837 when Carlyle finished the third

volume of his historic masterpiece, _The French Revolution_, he handed

the manuscript to his wife for her criticism, saying: "This I could

tell the world: 'You have not had for a hundred years any book that

comes more direct and flamingly from the heart of a living man.'" His

Scotch blood boiled over the injustice to the French peasants. His

temperature begins to rise when he refers to the old law authorizing a

French hunter, if a nobleman, "to kill not more than two serfs."

Carlyle brings before us a vast stage where the actors in the French

Revolution appear: in the background, "five full-grown millions of

gaunt figures with their hungry faces"; in the foreground, one young

mother of seven children, "looking sixty years of age, although she is

not yet twenty-eight," and trying to respond to the call for seven

different kinds of taxes; and, also in the foreground, "a perfumed

Seigneur," taking part of the children's dinner. The scene changes;

the great individual actors in the Revolution enter: the tocsin

clangs; the stage is reddened with human blood and wreathed in flames.

We feel that we are actually witnessing that great historic tragedy.

Carlyle had something of Shakespeare's dramatic imagination, which

pierced to the heart of men and movements. More detailed and scholarly

histories of this time have been written; but no other historian has

equaled Carlyle in presenting the French Revolution as a human tragedy

that seems to be acted before our very eyes.

He did not attempt to write a complete history of the time. He used

the dramatist's legitimate privilege of selection. From a mass of

material that would have bewildered a writer of less ability, he chose

to present on the center of the stage the most significant actors and

picturesque incidents.

Carlyle's "Real Kings."--Carlyle believed that "universal history,

the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom

the history of the great men who have worked here." In accordance with

this belief, he studied, not the slow growth of the people, but the

lives of the world's great geniuses.

In his course of lectures entitled _Heroes and Hero Worship_ (1841),

he considers _The Hero as Prophet, The Hero as Poet, The Hero as

Priest_, and _The Hero as King_, and shows how history has been molded

by men like Mohammed, Shakespeare, Luther, and Napoleon. It is such

men as these whom Carlyle calls "kings," beside whom "emperors,"

"popes," and "potentates" are as nothing. He believed that there was

always living some man worthy to be the "real king" over men, and such

a kingship was Carlyle's ideal of government.

Oliver Cromwell was one of these "real kings." In the work entitled

_Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations_, Carlyle was the

first to present the character of the Protector in its full strength

and greatness and to demonstrate once for all that he was a hero whose

memory all Englishmen should honor.

The _Life of John Sterling_ (1851) is a fair, true, and touching

biography of Carlyle's most intimate friend, the man who had

introduced him to Jane Welsh. After reading this book, George Eliot

said she wished that more men of genius would write biographies.

Carlyle's next attempt at biography grew into the massive _History of

Friedrich II_. (1858-1865), which includes a survey of European

history in that dreary century which preceded the French Revolution.

"Friedrich is by no means one of the perfect demigods." He is "to the

last a questionable hero." However, "in his way he is a Reality," one

feels "that he always means what he speaks; grounds his actions, too,

on what he recognizes for the truth; and, in short, has nothing of the

Hypocrite or Phantasm." Despite his tyranny and his bloody career, he,

therefore, is another of Carlyle's "real kings." While this work is a

history of modern Europe, Friedrich is always the central figure. He

gives to these six volumes a human note, a glowing interest of

personal adventure, and a oneness that are remarkable in so vast a

work.

General Characteristics.--Carlyle's writings must be classed among

the great social and democratic influences of the nineteenth century,

in spite of the fact that he did not believe in pure democracy. It was

his favorite theory that a great man, like Oliver Cromwell, could

govern better than the unintelligent multitude. However much he

rebelled against democracy in government, his sympathies were with the

toiling masses. His work entitled _Past and Present_ (1843) suggests

the organization of labor and introduces such modern expressions as "a

fair day's wages for a fair day's work." In _Sartor Resartus_, he

specially honors "the toilworn Craftsman, that with earthmade

implement laboriously conquers the Earth and makes her Man's."

Carlyle had a large fund of incisive wit and humor, which often appear

in picturesque setting, as when he said to a physician: "A man might

as well pour his sorrows into the long hairy ear of a jackass." As the

satiric censor of his time, Carlyle found frequent occasion for

caustic wit. He lashed the age for its love of the "swine's trough,"

of "Pig-science, Pig-enthusiasm and devotion." Although his intentions

were good, his satire was not always just or discriminating, and he

was in consequence bitterly criticized. The following Dutch parable is

in some respects specially applicable to Carlyle:--

"There was a man once,--a satirist. In the natural course of time

his friends slew him and he died. And the people came and stood

about his corpse. 'He treated the whole round world as his

football,' they said indignantly, 'and he kicked it.' The dead man

opened one eye. 'But always toward the goal,' he said."

This goal toward which Carlyle struggled to drive humanity was the

goal of moral achievement. Young people on both sides of the Atlantic

responded vigorously to his appeals. The scientist John Tyndall said

to his students:--

"The reading of the works of two men has placed me here to-day.

These men are the English Carlyle and the American Emerson.

I must ever remember with gratitude that through three long, cold

German winters, Carlyle placed me in my tub, even when ice was on

its surface, at five o'clock every morning ... determined, whether

victor or vanquished, not to shrink from difficulty... They told me

what I ought to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all my

consequent intellectual action is to be traced to this purely moral

force... They called out. 'Act!' I hearkened to the summons."

Huxley aptly defined Carlyle as a "great tonic,--a source of

intellectual invigoration and moral stimulus."

Carlyle is not only a "great Awakener" but also a great literary

artist. His style is vivid, forceful, and often poetic. He loves to

present his ideas with such picturesqueness that the corresponding

images develop clearly in the reader's mind. Impressive epithets and

phrases abound. His metaphors are frequent and forceful. Mirabeau's

face is pictured as "rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled." In describing

Daniel Webster, Carlyle speaks of "the tanned complexion, that

amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of

brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown, the

mastiff-mouth, accurately closed." He formed many new compound words

after the German fashion, such as "mischief-joy"; and when he pleased,

he coined new words, like "dandiacal" and "croakery."

His frequent exclamations and inversions make his style seem choppy,

like a wave-tossed sea; but his sentences are so full of vigor that

they almost call aloud from the printed page. His style was not an

imitation of the German, but a characteristic form of expression,

natural to him and to his father.

The gift of verse was denied him, but he is one of the great prose

poets of the nineteenth century. Much of _Sartor Resartus_ is highly

poetic and parts of _The French Revolution_ resemble a dramatic poem.

JOHN RUSKlN, 1819-1900

[Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN. _From a photograph_]

Life.--The most famous disciple of Carlyle is John Ruskin, the only

child of wealthy parents, who was born in London in 1819. When he was

four years old the family moved to Herne Hill, a suburb south of

London, where his intense love of nature developed as he looked over

open fields, "animate with cow and buttercup," "over softly wreathing

distances of domestic wood," to the distant hills. His entertaining

autobiography, _Praeterita_ (1885-1889), relates how he was reared:--

"I had never heard my father's or mother's voice once raised in any

question with each other ... I had never heard a servant scolded ...

I obeyed word or lifted finger, of father or mother, simply as a

ship her helm ...nothing was ever promised me that was not given;

nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted, and nothing ever

told me that was not true... Peace, obedience, faith; these three

for chief good; next to these, the habit of fixed attention with

both eyes and mind."

He grew up a solitary child without playmates. This solitude was

relieved when his parents took him on occasional trips through

England, Switzerland, and Italy. In _Praeterita_ he tells in an

inimitable way how the most portentious interruption to his solitude

came in 1836, when his father's Spanish partner came with his four

beautiful daughters to visit Herne Hill. These were the first girls in

his own station to whom he had spoken. "Virtually convent-bred more

closely than the maids themselves," says Ruskin, "I was thrown, bound

hand and foot, in my unaccomplished simplicity, into the fiery

furnace." In four days he had fallen so desperately in love with the

oldest, Clotilde Adèle Domecq, a "graceful blonde" of fifteen, that he

was more than four years in recovering his equilibrium. She laughed at

his protestations of love; but she repeatedly visited his parents, and

he did not give up hope until 1840, when she married a French baron.

His biographer says that the resulting "emotional strain doubtless was

contributory to his breakdown at Oxford" and to his enforced absence

for a recuperative trip on the continent.

His feminine attachments usually showed some definite results in his

writing. Miss Domecq's influence during the long period of his

devotion inspired him to produce much verse, which received such high

praise that his father desired him to become a poet. Although some of

Ruskin's verse was good, he finally had the penetration to see that it

ranked decidedly below the greatest, and he later laid down the

dictum: "with second-rate poetry _in quality_ no one ought to be

allowed to trouble mankind." In 1886, he had the humor to allude as

follows to Miss Domecq and her influence on his rimes, "...her sisters

called her Clotilde, after the queen-saint, and I, Adèle, because it

rimed to shell, spell, and knell."

Before he was graduated from Oxford in 1842, he wrote the beautiful

altruistic story, _The King of the Golden River_ (1841) for Euphemia

Gray, the young girl unhappily chosen by his mother to become his

wife. He married her in 1848, but was divorced from her in 1854. In

1855 she was married to the Pre-Raphaelite artist, John Millais.

Another attachment led to his writing some of the finest parts of his

most popular work, _Sesame and Lilies_ (1864). "I wrote Lilies," he

says, "to please one girl." He is here referring to Rose La Touche, a

bright, ardent, religious enthusiast, to whom he began to teach

drawing when she was ten years old. His affection for her grew so

strong that he finally asked her to become his wife. He was then a man

of forty while she was scarcely grown. Her religious scruples kept her

from definitely accepting him, because his belief was not sufficiently

orthodox. The attachment, however, continued until her early death.

She was in some respects a remarkable character, and he seems to have

had her in mind when he wrote in _Sesame and Lilies_ the "pearly"

passage about Shakespeare's heroines.

Although Ruskin's wealth relieved him from earning a living, he was

rarely idle. He studied, sketched, arranged collections of minerals,

prepared Turner's pictures for the National Gallery, became professor

of art at Oxford University, and wrote and lectured on art and social

subjects. His later activities, before his health gave way, were in

many respects similar to those of a twentieth-century social-service

worker. The realization of the misery that overwhelmed so much of

human life caused him to turn from art to consider remedies for the

evils that developed as the competitive industries of the nation

expanded. He endeavored to improve the condition of the working

classes in such ways as building sanitary tenements, establishing a

tea shop, and forming an altruistic association, known as St. George's

Guild. Nearly all his inheritance of £180,000 was expended in such

activities. The royalties coming from the sale of his books supported

him in old age.

Ruskin suffered from periods of mental depression during his last

years, which were spent at Brantwood on Coniston Water in the Lake

District. He died in 1900 at the age of eighty-one and was buried in

the cemetery at Coniston.

Art Works.--Ruskin published the first volume of _Modern Painters_

in 1843, the year after he was graduated from Oxford, and the fifth

and last volume, seventeen years later, in 1860. Many of his views

changed during this period; but he honestly declared them and left to

his readers the task of reconciling the divergent ideas in _Modern

Painters_. The purpose of this book was, in his own words, "to declare

the perfectness and eternal beauty of the work of God; and test all

works of man by concurrence with, or subjection to that."

_Modern Painters_ contains painstaking descriptions of God's handiwork

in cloud formation, mountain structure, tree architecture, and water

forms. In transferring these aspects of nature to canvas, Ruskin shows

the superiority of modern to ancient painting. He emphasizes the moral

basis of true beauty, and the necessity of right living as a

foundation for the highest type of art. Perhaps _Modern Painters_

achieved its greatest success in freeing men from the bondage of a

conventional criticism that was stifling art, in sending them direct

to nature as a guide, and in developing a love for her varied

manifestations of beauty.

Two of Ruskin's works on architecture, _The Seven Lamps of

Architecture_ (1849) and _The Stones of Venice_ (1851-1853), had a

decided effect on British taste in building. The three volumes of the

_The Stones of Venice_ give a history of the Venetians and of their

Gothic architecture. He aims to show that the beauty of such buildings

as St. Mark's Cathedral and the Doges' Palace is due to the virtue and

patriotism of the people, the nobility of the designers, and the joy

of the individual workmen, whose chisels made the very stones of

Venice tell beautiful stories.

The most important of his many other writings on art is the volume

entitled _Lectures on Art, Delivered before the University of Oxford,

1870_. In his famous _Inaugural_ of this series, he thus states what

he considers the central truth of his teaching: "The art of any

country is the exponent of its social and political virtues."

Social Works.--By turning from the criticism of art to consider the

cause of humanity, Ruskin shows the influence of the ethical and

social forces of the age. In middle life he was overwhelmed with the

amount of human misery and he determined to do his best to relieve it.

He wrote:--

"I simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do

anything else that I like, and the very light of the morning sky,

when there is any--which is seldom, nowadays, near London--has

become hateful to me, because of the misery that I know of, and see

signs of, where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret

too bitterly."[9]

After 1860 his main efforts with both pen and purse were devoted to

improving the condition of his fellow men. His attempts to provide a

remedy led him to write _Unto this Last_ (1860), his first and most

complete work on political economy, _Munera Pulveris_ (1863), _Time

and Tide by Weare and Tyne_ (1868), _Fors Clavigera_ (1871-1884),

which is a long series of letters to workingmen, and a number of other

works, that also present his views on social questions.

He abhorred the old political economy, which he defined as "the

professed and organized pursuit of money." Instead of considering

merely the question of the production and distribution of articles,

his interest lay in the causes necessary to produce healthy, happy

workmen. It seemed to him that the manufacture "of souls" ought to be

"exceedingly lucrative." This statement and his maxim, "There is no

wealth but life," were called "unscientific." In his fine book of

essays, entitled _Sesame and Lilies_ (1864), he actually had printed

in red those pathetic pages describing how an old cobbler and his son

worked night and day to try to keep a little home of one room, until

the father died from exhaustion and the son had a film come over his

eyes.

John Ruskin, social reformer, has an important place in the social

movement of the nineteenth century. Many of his theories, which were

considered revolutionary, have since become the commonplace

expressions of twentieth-century social economists.

General Characteristics.--Ruskin was a champion of the

Pre-Raphaelite school of art. He used his powerful influence to free

art from its conventional fetters and to send people direct to nature

for careful loving study of her beautiful forms. His chief strength

lies in his moral enthusiasm and his love of the beautiful in nature.

Like his master, Carlyle, Ruskin is a great ethical teacher; but he

aimed at more definite results in the reformation of art and of social

life. He moralized art and humanized political economy.

Some of his art criticisms and social theories are fanciful, narrow,

and sometimes even absurd. He did not seem to recognize with

sufficient clearness the fact that immoral individuals might produce

great works of art; but no one can successfully assail his main

contention that there must be a connection between great art and the

moral condition of a people. His rejection of railroads and steam

machinery as necessary factors in modern civilization caused many to

pay little attention to any of his social theories. Much of the gospel

that he preached has, however, been accepted by the twentieth century.

He was in advance of his time when he said in 1870 that the object of

his art professorship would be accomplished if "the English nation

could be made to understand that the beauty which is indeed to be a

joy forever must be a joy for all."

At the age of fifty-eight, he thus summed up the principal work of his

life:--

"_Modern Painters_ taught the claim of all lower nature on the

hearts of men; of the rock, and wave, and herb, as a part of their

necessary spirit life... _The Stories of Venice_ taught the laws of

constructive Art, and the dependence of all human work or edifice,

for its beauty, on the happy life of the workman. _Under this Last_

taught the laws of that life itself and its dependence on the Sun of

Justice; the _Inaugural Oxford Lectures_, the necessity that it

should be led, and the gracious laws of beauty and labor recognized,

by the upper, no less than the lower classes of England; and,

lastly, _Fors Clavigera_ has declared the relation of these to each

other, and the only possible conditions of peace and honor, for low

and high, rich and poor..."

Ruskin has written remarkable descriptive prose. A severe English

critic, George Saintsbury, says of Ruskin's works "...they will he

found to contain the very finest prose (without exception and beyond

comparison) which has been written in English during the last half of

the nineteenth century... _The Stones of Venice_ ... is _the_ book of

descriptive prose in English, and all others toil after it in vain."

Ruskin could be severely plain in expression, but much of his earlier

prose is ornate and almost poetic. The following description of the

Rhone deserves to be ranked with the painter's art:--

"There were pieces of wave that danced all day as if Perdita were

looking on to learn; there were little streams that skipped like

lambs and leaped like chamois; there were pools that shook the

sunshine all through them, and were rippled in layers of overlaid

ripples, like crystal sand; here were currents that twisted the

light into golden braids, and inlaid the threads with turquoise

enamel; there were strips of stream that had certainly above the

lake been mill streams, and were busily looking for mills to turn

again."[10]

CHARLES DICKENS, 1812-1870

[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS. _From a photograph taken in America,

1868_.]

Life.--The first of the great Victorian novelists to make his mark

was Charles Dickens. This great portrayer of child life had a sad

painful childhood. He was born in 1812 at Landport, a district of the

city of Portsmouth, Hampshire, where his father was a clerk in the

Navy Pay Office. John Dickens, the prototype of Mr. Micawber, was a

kind, well-intentioned man, who knew far better how to harangue his

large household of children than how to supply it with the necessities

of life. He moved from place to place, sinking deeper into poverty and

landing finally in a debtors' prison.

The dreams of a fine education and a brilliant career, which the

future novelist had fondly cherished in his precocious little brain,

had to be abandoned. At the age of eleven the delicate child was

called upon to do his part toward maintaining the family. He was

engaged, at six-pence a week, to paste labels on blacking bottles. He

was poorly clothed, ill fed, forced to live in the cheapest place to

be found, and to associate with the roughest kind of companions. This

experience was so bitter and galling to the sensitive boy that years

after, when he was a successful, happy man, he could not look back

upon it without tears in his eyes. Owing to a rupture between his

employer and the elder Mr. Dickens, Charles was removed from this

place and sent to school. At fifteen, however, he had to seek work

again. This time he was employed in an attorney's office at Gray's

Inn.

It was impossible, of course, for this ambitious boy to realize that

he was receiving an education in the dirty streets, the warehouses,

the tenements, and the prisons. Yet, for his peculiar bent of mind,

these furnished far richer stores of learning than either school or

college could have given. He had marvelous powers of observation. He

noted everything, from the saucy street waif to the sorrowful prison

child, from the poor little drudge to the brutal schoolmaster, and he

transplanted them from life to fiction, in such characters as Sam

Weller, Little Dorrit, the Marchioness, Mr. Squeers, and a hundred

others.

While in the attorney's office, Dickens began to study shorthand, in

order to become a reporter. This was the beginning of his success. His

reports were accurate and racy, even when they happened to be written

in the pouring rain, in a shaking stagecoach, or by the light of a

lantern. They were also promptly handed in at the office, despite the

fact that the stages sometimes broke down and left their passengers to

plod on foot through the miry roads leading into London. These reports

and newspaper articles soon attracted attention; and Dickens received

an offer for a series of humorous sketches, which grew into the famous

_Pickwick Papers_, and earned £20,000 for the astonished publishers.

He was able to make his own terms for his future novels. Fame came to

him almost at a bound. He was loved and toasted in England and America

before he had reached the age of thirty. When, late in life, he made

lecture tours through his own country, or through Scotland or America,

they were like triumphal marches.

In his prime Dickens was an energetic, high-spirited, fun-loving man.

He made a charming host, and was never happier than when engineering

theatrical entertainments at his delightful home, Gads Hill. He was

esteemed by all the literary men of London, and idolized by his

children and friends. As his strong personality was communicated to

his audiences and his readers, his death in 1870 was felt as a

personal loss throughout the English-speaking world.

[Illustration: DICKENS'S HOME, GADS HILL.]

Works.--_Pickwick Papers_ (1836-1837), Dickens's first long story,

is one of his best. Mr. Pickwick, with his genial nature, his simple

philosophy, and his droll adventures, and Sam Weller, with his ready

wit, his acute observations, and his almost limitless resources, are

amusing from start to finish. The book is brimful of its author's high

spirits. It has no closely knit plot, but merely a succession of

comical incidents, and vivid caricatures of Mr. Pickwick and his

friends. Yet the fun is so good-natured and infectious, and the

looseness of design is so frankly declared that the book possesses a

certain unity arising from its general atmosphere of frolic and

jollity.

_Oliver Twist_ (1837-1838) is a powerful story, differing widely from

_Pickwick Papers_. While the earlier work is delightful chiefly for

its humor, _Oliver Twist_ is strong in its pictures of passion and

crime. Bill Sykes the murderer, Fagin the Jew, who teaches the boys

deftness of hand in stealing, and poor Nancy, are drawn with such

power that they seem to be still actually living in some of London's

dark alleys. Little Oliver, born in the poor-house, clothed by

charity, taught by the evil genius of the streets, starved in body and

soul, is one of the many pathetic portraits of children drawn with a

sure and loving hand by Dickens. There are some improbable features

about the plot and some overwrought sentimental scenes in this story.

Dickens reveled in the romantic and found it in robbers' dens, in bare

poverty, in red-handed crime. The touching pathos and thrilling

adventures of _Oliver Twist_ make a strong appeal to the reader's

emotions.

With the prodigality of a fertile genius, Dickens presented his

expectant and enthusiastic public with a new novel on an average of

once a year for fourteen years; and, even after that, his productivity

did not fall off materially. The best and most representative of these

works are _Nicholas Nickleby_ (1838-1839), _Barnaby Rudge_ (1841),

_Martin Chuzzlewit_ (1843-1844), _Dombey and Son_ (1846-1848), _David

Copperfield_ (1849-1850), _Bleak House_ (1852-1853), _Hard Times_

(1854), _A Tale of Two Cities_ (1859), and _Our Mutual Friend_ (1864).

Of these, _David Copperfield_ is at once Dickens's favorite work and

the one which the world acclaims as his masterpiece. The novel is in

part an autobiography. Some incidents are taken directly from

Dickens's early experiences and into many more of David's childish

sorrows, boyish dreams, and manly purposes, Dickens has breathed the

breath of his own life. David Copperfield is thus a vitally

interesting and living character. The book contains many of Dickens's

most human men and women. Petted Little Em'ly with her pathetic

tragedy is handled with deep sympathy and true artistic delicacy.

Peggotty and Mrs. Steerforth are admirably drawn and contrasted. Mrs.

Gummidge's thoughtful care of Peggotty exhibits Dickens's fine

perception of the self-sacrificing spirit among the very poor. Uriah

Heep remains the type of the humble sycophant, and Mr. Micawber, the

representative of the man of big words and pompous manners. These

various characters and separate life histories are bound in same way

to the central story of David. General Characteristics.--England has

produced no more popular novelist than Charles Dickens. His novels

offer sound and healthy entertainment, hearty laughter, a wide range

of emotions, and a wonderful array of personalities. He presents the

universal physical experiences of life that are understood by all men,

and irradiates this life with emotion and romance. He keeps his

readers in an active state of feeling. They laugh at the broad humor

in Sam Weller's jokes; they chuckle over the sly exposure of Mr.

Pecksniff in _Martin Chuzzlewit_; they weep in _Dombey and Son_ over

poor Paul crammed with grown-up learning when he wanted to be just a

child; they rejoice over David Copperfield's escape from his

stepfather into the loving arms of whimsical, clever Aunt Betsey

Trotwood; they shiver with horror in _Our Mutual Friend_ during the

search for floating corpses on the dark river; and they feel more

kindly toward the whole world after reading _A Christmas Carol_ and

taking Tiny Tim into their hearts.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MS. OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL.]

Dickens excels in the portrayal of humanity born and reared in poverty

and disease. He grasps the hand of these unfortunates in a brother's

clasp. He says in effect "I present to you my friends, the beggar, the

thief, the outcast. They are men worth knowing." He does not probe

philosophically into complex causes of poverty and crime. His social

creed was well formulated by Dowden in these words: "Banish from earth

some few monsters of selfishness, malignity, and hypocrisy, set to

rights a few obvious imperfections in the machinery of society,

inspire all men with a cheery benevolence, and everything will go well

with this excellent world of ours."

Every student of the science of society, however, owes a debt to

Dickens. He did what no science or knowledge or logic can do alone. He

reached the heart, awoke the conscience, and pierced the obtuseness of

the public. He aroused its protests because his genius painted prisons

and hovels and dens of vice so vividly that his readers actually

suffered from the scenes thus presented and wanted such horrors

abolished.

Dickens's infectious humor is a remarkable and an unfailing quality of

his works. It pervades entire chapters, colors complete incidents, and

displays the temper of the optimist through the darkest pictures of

human suffering.

A hypocrite is an abomination to Dickens. Speaking of Mr. Pecksniff in

_Martin Chuzzlewit_, Dickens says: "Some people likened him to a

direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never

goes there." His humor can be fully appreciated only by reading long

passages, such as the scene of Mr. Pickwick's trial, the descriptions

of Mr. Micawber and of Miss Betsey Trotwood, or the chapter on

Podsnappery in _Our Mutual Friend_. Dickens's humor has an exuberant

richness, which converts men and women into entertaining figures of

comedy.

Closely allied to his fund of humor is his capacity for pathos,

especially manifest in his treatment of childhood. Dickens has a large

gallery of children's portraits, fondly and sympathetically executed.

David Copperfield, enduring Mr. Murdstone's cruel neglect, Florence

Dombey pining for her father's love, the Marchioness starving upon

cold potatoes, Tom and Louise Gradgrind, stuffed with facts and

allowed no innocent amusement, and the waifs of Tom's-All-Alone dying

from abject poverty and disease, are only a few of the sad-eyed

children peering from the pages of Dickens and yearning for love and

understanding. He wrings the heart; but, happily, his books have

improved the conditions of children, not only in public asylums,

factories, and courts, but also in schools and homes.

Dickens's chief faults arise from an excess of sensibility and humor.

His soft heart and romantic spirit lead him to exaggerate. In such

passages as the death of Little Nell in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ and

the interviews between Dora and David in _David Copperfield_, Dickens

becomes mawkish and sentimental. While his power of portraiture is

amazing, he often overleaps the line of character drawing and makes

side-splitting caricatures of his men and women. They are remembered

too often by a limp or a mannerism of speech, or by some other little

peculiarity, instead of by their human weaknesses and accomplishments.

Dickens is not a master in the artistic construction of his plots. The

majority of his readers do not, however, notice this failing because

he keeps them in such a delightful state of interest and suspense by

the sprightliness with which he tells a story.

He was a very rapid writer, and his English is consequently often

careless in structure and in grammar. As he was not a man of books, he

never acquired that half-unconscious knowledge of fine phrasing which

comes to the careful student of literature. No novelist has, however,

told more graphically such appealing stories of helpless childhood and

of the poor and the outcast.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, 1811-1863

[Illustration: WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. _From the painting by

Samuel Laurence, National Portrait Gallery_.]

Life_.--Though nearly a year older than Dickens, Thackeray made his

way to popularity much more slowly. These two men, who became friends

and generous rivals, were very different in character and disposition.

Instead of possessing the self-confidence, energy, and industry that

brought Dickens fame in his youth, Thackeray had to contend with a

somewhat shy and vacillating temperament, with extreme modesty, and

with a constitutional aversion to work.

Born in Calcutta in 1811, he was sent to England to be educated. He

passed through Charter House and went one year to Cambridge. He was

remembered by his school friends for his skill in caricature

sketching. He hoped to make painting a profession and went to Paris to

study; but he never attained correctness in drawing, and when he

offered to illustrate the works of Dickens, the offer was declined.

Thackeray certainly added to the charm of his own writings by his

droll and delightful illustrations.

When Thackeray came of age in 1832, he inherited a small fortune,

which he soon lost in an Indian bank and in newspaper investments. He

was then forced to overcome his idle, procrastinating habits. He

became a literary hack, and contributed humorous articles to such

magazines as _Fraser_ and _Punch_. While his pen was causing mirth and

laughter in England, his heart was torn by suffering. His wife, whom

he had married in 1837, became insane. He nursed her patiently with

the vain hope that she could recover; but he finally abandoned hope

and put her in the care of a conscientious attendant. His home was

consequently lonely, and the club was his only recourse. Here, his

broad shoulders and kindly face were always greeted with pleasure;

for his affable manners and his sparkling humor, which concealed an

aching heart, made him a charming companion.

[Illustration: CARICATURE OF THACKERAY BY HIMSELF.]

It is pleasant to know that the later years of his life were happier.

They were cheered by the presence of his daughters, and were free from

financial worries. He had the satisfaction of knowing that, through

the sales of his book; and the returns from his lectures, he had

recovered his lost fortune.

Novels.--_Vanity Fair_ (1847-1848) is Thackeray's masterpiece. For

the lifelikeness of its characters, it is one of the most remarkable

creations in fiction. Thackeray called this work "A Novel without a

Hero." He might have added "and without a heroine"; for neither clever

Becky Sharp nor beautiful Amelia Sedley satisfies the requirements for

a heroine. No perfect characters appear in the book, but it is

enlivened with an abundance of genuine human nature. Few people go

through life without meeting a George Osborne, a Mrs. Bute Crawley, or

a Mrs. Sedley. Even a penurious, ridiculous, old Sir Pitt Crawley is

sometimes seen. The greatest stroke of genius in the book, however, is

the masterly portrayal of the artful, scheming Becky Sharp, who

alternately commands respect for her shrewdness and repels by her

moral depravity.

In _Vanity Fair_ certain classes of society are satirized. Their

intrigues, frivolities, and caprices are mercilessly dealt with.

Thackeray probes almost every weakness, vanity, or ambition that leads

humanity to strive for a place in society, to long for a bow from a

lord, and to stint in private in order to shine in public. He uncovers

the great social farce of life, which is acted with such solemn

gravity by the snobs, the hypocrites, and the other superficial

_dramatis personae_. Amid these satirized frivolities there appear

occasional touches of true pathos and deep human tragedy, which are

strangely effective in their unsympathetic surroundings.

[Illustration: THACKERAY'S HOME WHERE VANITY FAIR WAS WRITTEN.]

Thackeray gives in _Henry Esmond_ (1852) an enduring picture of high

life in the eighteenth century. This work is one of the great

historical novels in our language. The time of queen Anne is

reconstructed with remarkable skill. The social etiquette, the ideals

of honor, the life and spirit of that bygone day, reappear with a

powerful vividness. Thackeray even went so far as to disguise his own

natural, graceful style, and to imitate eighteenth-century prose.

_Henry Esmond_ is a dangerous rival of _Vanity Fair_. The earlier work

has a freshness of humor and a spontaneity of manner that are not so

apparent in _Henry Esmond_. On the other hand, _Esmond_ has a superior

plot and possesses a true hero.

In _The Newcomes_ (1854-1855), Thackeray exhibits again his incisive

power of delineating character. This book would continue to live if

for nothing except the simple-hearted, courtly Colonel Newcome. Few

scenes in English fiction are more affecting than those connected with

his death. The accompanying lines will show what a simple pathos

Thackeray could command:--

"At the usual evening hour the chapel bell begin to toll, and

Thomas Newcome's hands outside the bed feebly beat time--and just

as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face,

and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said, '_Adsum_'--and

fell back. It was the word we used at school when names were called;

and, lo! he whose heart was as that of a little child had answered

to his name, and stood in the presence of the Master!"

_The History of Pendennis_ (1849) and _The Virginians_ (1857-1859) are

both popular novels and take rank inferior only to the author's three

greatest works. _The Virginians_ is a sequel to _Esmond_, and carries

the Castlewood family through adventures in the New World.

Essays.--Thackeray will live in English literature as an essayist as

well as a novelist. _The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century_

(1853) and _The Four Georges_ (1860) are among the most delightful

essays of the age. The author of _Henry Esmond_ knew Swift, Addison,

Fielding, and Smollett, almost as one knows the mental peculiarities

of an intimate friend. In _The English Humorists of the Eighteenth

Century_, Thackeray writes of their conversations, foibles, and strong

points of character, in a most easy and entertaining way. There is a

constant charm about his manner, which, without effort or display of

learning, brings the authors vividly before the reader. In addition to

this presentation of character, the essays contain appreciative

literary criticism. The essence of the humor in these

eighteenth-century writers is distilled in its purest, most delicate

flavor, by this nineteenth-century member of their brotherhood.

_The Four Georges_ deals with England's crowned heads in a satiric

vein, which caused much comment among Thackeray's contemporaries. The

satire is, however, mild and subdued, never venomous. For example, he

says in the essay on George III.:--

"King George's household was a model of an English gentleman's

household. It was early; it was kindly; it was charitable; it was

frugal; it was orderly; it must have been stupid to a degree which I

shudder now to contemplate. No wonder all the princes ran away from

the lap of that dreary domestic virtue. It always rose, rode, dined,

at stated intervals. Day after day was the same. At the same hour at

night the King kissed his daughters' jolly cheeks; the Princesses

kissed their mother's hand; and Madame Thielke brought the royal

nightcap."

General Characteristics.--Dickens and Thackeray have left graphic

pictures of a large portion of contemporary London life. Dickens

presents interesting pictures of the vagabonds, the outcasts, and the

merchants, and Thackeray portrays the suave, polite leisure class and

its dependents.

Thackeray is an uncompromising realist and a satirist. He insisted

upon picturing life as he believed that it existed in London society;

and, to his satiric eye, that life was composed chiefly of the small

vanities, the little passions, and the petty quarrels of commonplace

people, whose main objects were money and title. He could conceive

noble men and women, as is proved by Esmond, Lady Castlewood, and

Colonel Newcome; but such characters are as rare in Thackeray as he

believed they were in real life. The following passage upon mankind's

fickleness is a good specimen of his satiric vein in dealing with

human weakness:--

"There are no better satires than letters. Take a bundle of your

dear friend's letters of ten years back--your dear friend whom you

hate now. Look at a pile of your sister's! How you clung to each

other until you quarreled about the twenty-pound legacy!... Vows,

love promises, confidence, gratitude,--how queerly they read after a

while!...The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded

utterly in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank, so

that you might write on it to somebody else."

The phases of life that he describes have had no more subtle

interpreter. He does not label his characters with external marks, but

enters into communion with their souls. His analytic method of laying

bare their motives and actions is strictly modern. His great master,

Fielding, would have been baffled by such a complex personality as

Becky Sharp. Amid the throng of Thackeray's men and women, there are

but few who are not genuine flesh and blood.

The art of describing the pathetic is unfailing in Thackeray. He never

jars upon the most sensitive feelings nor wearies them by too long a

treatment. With a few simple but powerful expressions he succeeds in

arousing intense emotions of pity or sorrow. He has been wrongly

called a cynic; for no man can be a cynic who shows Thackeray's

tenderness in the treatment of pathos.

Thackeray is master of a graceful, simple prose style. In its ease and

purity, it most resembles that of Swift, Addison, or Goldsmith.

Thackeray writes as a cultured, ideal, old gentleman may be imagined

to talk to the young people, while he sits in his comfortable armchair

in a corner by the fireplace. The charm of freshness, quaintness, and

colloquial familiarity is seldom absent from the delightfully natural

pages of Thackeray.

GEORGE ELIOT, 1819-1880

[Illustration: GEORGE ELIOT. _From a drawing by Sir E.W. Burton,

National Portrait Gallery._]

Life.--Mary Ann Evans, known to her family as Marian and to her

readers as George Eliot, was born in 1819, at South Farm, in Arbury,

Warwickshire, about twenty-two miles north of Stratford-on-Avon. A few

months later, the family moved to a spacious ivy-covered farmhouse at

Griff, some two miles east, where the future novelist lived until she

was twenty-two.

She was a thoughtful, precocious child. She lived largely within

herself, passed much time in reverie, and pondered upon deep problems.

She easily outstripped her schoolmates in all mental accomplishments,

and, from the first, gave evidence of a clear, strong intellect.

The death of her mother and the marriage of a sister left the entire

care of the house and dairy to Marian before she was seventeen years

old. Her labors were quite heavy for the neat six years. At the end of

that time, she and her father moved to Foleshill, near Coventry, where

she had ample leisure to pursue her studies and music. At Foleshill,

she came under the influence of free-thinking friends and became an

agnostic, which she remained through the rest of her life. This home

was again broken up in 1849 by the death of her father. Through the

advice of friends she sought comfort in travel on the continent.

Upon her return, she settled in London as assistant editor of the

_Westminster Review_. By this time she had become familiar with five

languages, had translated abstruse metaphysical books from the German

into English, and had so thoroughly equipped her naturally strong

intellect that she was sought after in London by such men as Herbert

Spencer and George Henry Lewes. A deep attachment sprang up between

Mr. Lewes and Miss Evans, and they formed an alliance that lasted

until his death.

George Eliot's early literary labors were mainly critical and

scientific, being governed by the circle in which she moved. When she

came under the influence of Mr. Lewes, she was induced to attempt

creative work. Her novels, published under the pen name of George

Eliot, quickly became popular. Despite this success, it is doubtful

whether she would have possessed sufficient self-reliance to continue

her work without Mr. Lewes's encouragement and protecting love, which

shielded her from contact with publishers and from a knowledge of

harsh criticisms.

Their companionship was so congenial that her friends were astonished

when she formed another attachment after his death in 1878, and

married Mr. Cross. Her husband said that her affectionate nature

required some deep love to which to cling. She had never been very

robust, and, during her later years, she was extremely frail. She died

in 1880.

[Illustration: GEORGE ELIOT'S BIRTHPLACE.]

Works.--George Eliot was fast approaching forty when she found the

branch of literature in which she was to achieve fame. Her first

volume of stories, _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1858), showed decisively

that she was master of fiction writing. Three novels followed rapidly,

_Adam Bede_ (1859), _The Mill on the Floss_ (1860), and _Silas Marner_

(1861). Her mind was stored with memories of the Midland counties,

where her young life was spent; and these four books present with a

powerful realism this rich rural district and its quaint inhabitants,

who seem flushed with the warmth of real life.

_Adam Bede_ is the freshest, healthiest, and most delightful of her

books. This story leaves upon the memory a charming picture of peace

and contentment, with its clearly drawn and interesting characters,

its ideal dairy, the fertile stretches of meadow lands, the squire's

birthday party, the harvest supper, and the sweet Methodist woman

preaching on the green.

_The Mill on the Floss_ also gives a fine picture of village life.

This novel is one of George Eliot's most earnest productions. She

exhibits one side of her own intense, brooding girlhood, in the

passionate heroine, Maggie Tulliver. There is in this tragic story a

wonderfully subtle revelation of a young nature, which is morbid,

ambitious, quick of intellect, and strong of will, and which has no

hand firm enough to serve as guide at the critical period of her life.

_Silas Marner_, artistically considered, is George Eliot's

masterpiece. In addition to the ruddy glow of life in the characters,

there is an idyllic beauty about the pastoral setting, and a poetic,

half mystic charm about the weaver's manner of connecting his gold

with his bright-haired Eppie. The slight plot is well planned and

rounded, and the narrative is remarkable for ease and simplicity.

_Romola_ (1863) is a much bolder flight. It is an attempt to present

Florence of the fifteenth century, to contrast Savonarola's ardent

Christianity with the Greek aestheticism of the Medicis, and to show

the influence of the time upon two widely different characters, Romola

and Tito Melema. This novel is the greatest intellectual achievement

of its author; but it has neither the warmth of life, nor the vigor of

her English stories. Though no pains is spared to delineate Romola,

Tito, and the inspiring monk, Savonarola, yet they do not possess the

genuineness and reality that are felt in her Warwickshire characters.

_Middlemarch_ (1871-1872) and _Daniel Deronda_ (1876) marked the

decline of George Eliot's powers. Although she still possessed the

ability to handle dialogue, to analyze subtle complex characters, and

to attain a philosophical grasp of the problems of existence, yet her

weakening powers were shown in the length of tedious passages, in an

undue prominence of ethical purpose, in the more studied and, on the

whole, duller characters, and in the prolixity of style.

George Eliot's poetry does not bear comparison with her prose. _The

Spanish Gypsy_ (1868) is her most ambitious poem, and it contains some

fine dramatic passages. Her most beautiful poem is the hymn

beginning:--

"Oh, may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence!"

There is a strain of noble thought and lofty feeling in her poems, and

she rises easily to the necessary passion and fervor of verse; but her

expression is hampered by the metrical form.

General Characteristics.--George Eliot is more strictly modern in

spirit than either of the other two great contemporary novelists. This

spirit is exhibited chiefly in her ethical purpose, her scientific

sympathies, and her minute dissection of character.

Her writings manifest her desire to benefit human beings by convincing

them that nature's laws are inexorable, and that an infraction of the

moral law will be punished as surely as disobedience to physical laws.

She strives to arouse people to a knowledge of hereditary influences,

and to show how every deed brings its own results, and works, directly

or indirectly, toward the salvation or ruin of the doer. She throws

her whole strength into an attempt to prove that joy is to be found

only in strict attendance upon duty and in self-renunciation. In order

to carry home these serious lessons of life, she deals with powerful

human tragedies, which impart a somberness of tone to all her novels.

In her early works she treats these problems with artistic beauty; but

in her later books she often forgets the artist in the moralist, and

uses a character to preach a sermon.

The analytical tendency is pronounced in George Eliot's works, which

exhibit an exhaustive study of the feelings, the thoughts, the dreams,

and purposes of the characters. They become known more through

description than through action.

A striking characteristic of her men and women is their power to grow.

They do not appear ready-made and finished at the beginning of a

story, but, like real human beings amid the struggles of life, they

change for the better or the worse. Tito Melema in _Romola_ is an

example of her skill in evolving character. At the outset, he is a

beautiful Greek boy with a keen zest for pleasure. His selfishness,

however, which betrays itself first in ingratitude to his benefactor,

leads step by step to his complete moral degradation. The consequences

of his deeds entangle him finally in such a network of lies that he is

forced to betray "every trust that was reposed in him, that he might

keep himself safe."

George Eliot occasionally brightens the seriousness of her works with

humor. Her stories are not permeated with joyousness, like those of

Dickens, nor do they ripple with quiet amusement, like the novels of

Thackeray; but she puts witty and aphoristic sayings into the

conversations of the characters. The scene at the "Rainbow" inn is

bristling with mother wit. Mr. Macey observes:--

"'There's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of

himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be

two 'pinions about a cracked bell if the bell could hear

itself.'"[11]

Great precision and scholarlike correctness mark the style of George

Eliot. Her vocabulary, though large, is too full of abstract and

scientific terms to permit of great flexibility and idiomatic purity

of English. She is master of powerful figures of speech, original,

epigrammatic turns of expression, and, sometimes, of a stirring

eloquence.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, 1850-1894

[Illustration: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _From a photograph_.]

Life.--By preferring romantic incident to the portrayal of

character, Stevenson differed from his great Victorian predecessors in

the field of fiction. He was born in 1850 in the romantic city of

Edinburgh, which he has described so well in his _Picturesque Notes on

Edinburgh_. Being an invalid from early childhood, he was not sent

regularly to school; yet he was ready at the age of seventeen to enter

Edinburgh University. He says of himself that in college he neglected

all the studies that did not appeal to him, to read with avidity

English poetry and fiction, Scottish legend and history. During his

summer vacations he worked at lighthouse engineering. The out-of-door

life was just what he liked; but the office work was irksome to him.

When finally he made his dislike known, his father, although bitterly

disappointed at his son's aversion to the calling followed by two

generations of Stevensons, nevertheless consented to a change; and

they compromised on the law. In 1875 Stevenson succeeded in gaining

admission to the bar; but he soon realized that he would never feel at

home in this profession. Moreover, he had always wanted to be a

writer. He says:--

"All through my boyhood and youth...

I was always busy on my own private end,

which was to learn to write. I kept always

two books in my pocket, one to read, one

to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy

fitting what I saw with appropriate words.

...Thus I lived with words. And what I

thus wrote was for no ulterior use; it was

written consciously for practice."

[Illustration: STEVENSON AS A BOY.]

The next year, therefore, he decided to devote himself entirely to

literature.

He was by heredity predisposed to weak lungs. For the greater part of

his life he moved from place to place, searching for some location

that would improve his health and allow him to write. He lived for a

while in Switzerland, in the south of France, in the south of England,

in the Adirondack Mountains, and in California. In 1880 he married in

California, Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, of whom he wrote:--

"Steel-true and blade-straight,

The great artificer made my mate."

By a former marriage she had a son, who, at the age of thirteen,

inspired Stevenson to write that exciting romance of adventure,

_Treasure Island_, published in book form in 1883. This and the

remarkable story, _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_

(1886), made him so famous that when he visited New York in 1887, a

newspaper there offered him $10,000 for a weekly article during the

year.

He preferred to accept an offer of $3500 for twelve monthly articles

for a magazine.

The most romantic part of his life began in 1888, when he chartered a

yacht in San Francisco for a cruise among the South Sea Islands. He

had the enthusiasm of a boy for this trip, which was planned to

benefit his health. Almost as many adventures befell him as Robinson

Crusoe. At one time Stevenson became so ill that he was left with his

wife on one of the Society Islands while the yacht sailed away for

repairs. Before the boat returned, both his food and money were

exhausted, and he and Mrs. Stevenson were forced to live on the bounty

of the natives, who adopted him into one of their tribes and gave him

the name of Tusitala.

He wandered for three and a half years among the islands of the

Southern Pacific, visiting Australia twice. On one trip he called at

thirty-three small coral islands, and wrote, "Hackney cabs have more

variety than atolls."

He finally selected for his residence the island of Samoa, where he

spent the last three and a half years of his life. He died suddenly in

his forty-fifth year, and was buried on the summit of a Samoan

mountain near his home.

In 1893 he wrote to George Meredith:--

"In fourteen years I have not had a day's real health; I have

wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work

unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written

in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for

weakness..."

Many have found in Stevenson's life an inspiration to overcome

obstacles, to cease complaining, and to bear a message of good cheer.

These lines from his volume of poems called _Underwoods_ (1887), are

especially characteristic:--

"If I have faltered more or less

In my great task of happiness;

If I have moved among my race

And shown no glorious morning face;

If beams from happy human eyes

Have moved me not; if morning skies,

Books, and my food, and summer rain

Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:--

Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take

And stab my spirit broad awake."

Works.--Stevenson wrote entertaining travels, such as _An Inland

Voyage_ (1878), the record of a canoe journey from Antwerp to

Pontoise, _Travels with a Donkey through the Cévennes_ (1879), and _In

the South Seas_ (published in book form in 1896). Early in life he

wrote many essays, the best of which are included in the volumes,

_Virginibus Puerisque_ (_To Girls and Boys_, 1881) and _Familiar

Studies of Men and Books_ (1882). Valuable papers presenting his views

of the technique of writing may be found in the volumes called

_Memories and Portraits_ (1887) and _Essays in the Art of Writing_

(collected after his death). There is a happy blending of style,

humor, and thought in many of these essays. Perhaps the most unusual

and original of all is _Child's Play_ (_Virginibus Puerisque_). This

is a psychological study, which reveals one of his strongest

characteristics, the power of vividly recalling the events and

feelings of childhood.

"When my cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a

device to enliven the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and

explained it to be a country continually buried under snow. I took

mine with milk, and explained it to be a country suffering gradual

inundation. You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an

island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with

snow; ...and how, in fine, the food was of altogether secondary

importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we

seasoned it with these dreams."

The simplicity and apparent artlessness of his _A Child's Garden of

Verse_ (1885) have caused many critics to neglect these poems; but the

verdict of young children is almost unanimous against such neglect.

These songs

"Lead onward into fairy land,

Where all the children dine at five,

And all the playthings come alive."

It is quite possible that the verses in this little volume may in the

coming years appeal to more human beings than all the remainder of

Stevenson's work. He and his American contemporary, Eugene Field

(1850-1895), had the peculiar genius to delight children with a type

of verse in which only a very few poets have excelled.

Boys and young men love Stevenson best for his short stories and

romances. After a careful study of Poe and Hawthorne, the American

short story masters, Stevenson made the English impressionistic short

story a more artistic creation. Some of the best of his short stories

are _Will o' the Mill_ (1878), _The Sire de Malétroit's Door_ (1878),

and _Markheim_ (1885). His best-known single production, _The Strange

Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, is really a short story that

presents a remarkable psychological study of dual personality.

The short stories served as an apprenticeship for the longer romances,

of which _Treasure Island_ is the best constructed and the most

interesting. Among a number of other romances, the four which deal

with eighteenth-century Scottish history are the best: _Kidnapped_

(1886), _The Master of Ballantrae_ (1889), _David Balfour_

(_Catriona_, 1893), and the unfinished _Weir of Hermiston_, published

two years after his death.

[Illustration: EDINBURGH MEMORIAL OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _By

Augustus St. Candeus._]

General Characteristics.--Unlike the majority of the Victorian

writers of fiction, Stevenson preferred the field of romance and

adventure. It is natural to compare him with Scott, who showed a far

wider range, both in subject matter and in the portrayal of human

beings. Stevenson, however, surpassed Scott in swift delineation of

incident, in pictorial vividness, and in literary form. Scott dashed

off some of his long romances in six weeks; while Stevenson said that

his printer's copy was sometimes the result of ten times that amount

of writing. The year before he died, he spent three weeks in writing

twenty-four pages.

Stevenson's romances are remarkable for artistic style, clearness of

visual image, and boyish love of adventure. He made little attempt to

portray more than the masculine half of the human race. His simple

verses possess rare power to charm children. The most evident quality

of all his prose is its artistic finish.

GEORGE MEREDITH, 1828-1909

[Illustration: GEORGE MEREDITH. _From the painting by G.F. Watts,

National Portrait Gallery_.]