Studies in Early Victorian Literature

by Frederic Harrison

But to say this, is not to condemn Thackeray as a cynic. With these many scenes of exquisite tenderness and pathos, with men and women of such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray, with a fine and sympathetic soul, had a creative imagination that was far stronger on the darker and fouler sides of life than it was on the brighter and pure side of life. He saw the bright and pure side: he loved it, he felt with it, he made us love it. But his artistic genius worked with more free and consummate zest when he painted the dark and the foul. His creative imagination fell short of the true equipoise, of that just vision of chiaroscuro, which we find in the greatest masters of the human heart. This limitation of his genius has been visited upon Thackeray with a heavy hand. And such as it is, he must bear it.

The place of Thackeray in English literature will always be determined by his Vanity Fair: which will be read, we may confidently predict, as long as Tom Jones, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, The Antiquary, and Pickwick. But all the best of his pieces, even the smaller jeux d'esprit, may be read with delight again and again by young and old. And of the best are—Esmond, The Newcomes, Barry Lyndon, the Book of Snobs, the Hoggarty Diamond, some of the Burlesques and Christmas Books, and the English Humourists. Of these, Esmond has every quality of a great book, except its artificial form, its excessive elaboration of historical colouring, and its unsavoury plot. Beatrix Esmond is almost as wonderful a creation as Becky Sharp; though, if formed on a grander mould, she has less fascination than that incorrigible minx. The Newcomes, if in some ways the most genial of the longer pieces, is plainly without the power of Vanity Fair. And if Barry Lyndon has this power, it is an awful picture of cruelty and meanness. The Book of Snobs and the Hoggarty Diamond were each a kind of prelude to Vanity Fair, and both contain some of its essential marks of pathos and of power. It is indeed strange to us now to remember that both of these books, written with such finished mastery of hand and full of such passages of wit and insight, could have been published for years before the world had recognised that it had a new and consummate writer before it. The Book of Snobs indeed may truly be said to have seriously improved the public opinion of the age, and to have given a death-blow to many odious forms of sycophancy and affectation which passed unrebuked in England fifty years ago. And the Burlesque Romances and the English Humourists have certainly assisted in forming the public taste and in promoting a sound criticism of our standard fiction.

Charlotte Brontë dedicated her Jane Eyre, in 1847, to William Makepeace Thackeray, as "the first social regenerator of the day." Such language, though interesting as coming from a girl of singular genius and sincerity, however ignorant of real life, was excessive. But we may truly assert that he has enriched our literature with some classical masterpieces in the comedy of contemporary manners.

VI

CHARLES DICKENS

It is a fearsome thing to venture to say anything now about Charles Dickens, whom we have all loved, enjoyed, and laughed over: whose tales are household words in every home where the English tongue is heard, whose characters are our own school-friends, the sentiment of our youthful memories, our boon-companions and our early attachments. To view him in any critical light is a task as risky as it would be to discuss the permanent value of some fashionable amusement, a favourite actor, a popular beverage, or a famous horse. Millions and millions of old and young love Charles Dickens, know his personages by heart, play at games with his incidents and names, and from the bottom of their souls believe that there never was such fun, and that there never will be conceived again such inimitable beings, as they find in his ever-fresh and ever-varied pages. This is by itself a very high title to honour: perhaps it is the chief jewel in the crown that rests on the head of Charles Dickens. I am myself one of these devotees, of these lovers, of these slaves of his: or at least I can remember that I have been. To have stirred this pure and natural humanity, this force of sympathy, in such countless millions is a great triumph. Men and women to-day do not want any criticism of Charles Dickens, any talk about him at all. They enjoy him as he is: they examine one another in his books: they gossip on by the hour about his innumerable characters, his never-to-be-forgotten waggeries and fancies.

No account of early Victorian literature can omit the name of Charles Dickens from the famous writers of the time. How could we avoid notice of one whose first immortal tale coincides with the accession of our Queen, and who for thirty-three successive years continued to pour out a long stream of books that still delight the English-speaking world? When we begin to talk about the permanent place in English literature of eminent writers, one of the first definite problems is presented by Charles Dickens. And it is one of the most obscure of such problems; because, more than almost any writer of our age, Charles Dickens has his own accustomed nook at every fireside: he is a familiar friend, a welcome guest; we remember the glance of his eye; we have held his hand, as it were, in our own. The children brighten up as his step is heard; the chairs are drawn round the hearth, and a fresh glow is given to the room. We do not criticise one whom we love, nor do we suffer others to do so. And there is perhaps a wider sympathy with Charles Dickens as a person than with any other writer of our time. For this reason there has been hardly any serious criticism or estimate of Dickens as a great artist, apart from some peevish and sectional disparagement of his genius, which has been too much tinged with academic pedantry and the bias of aristocratic temper or political antagonism.

I am free to confess that I am in no mood to pretend making up my mind for any impartial estimate of Charles Dickens as an abiding power in English literature. The "personal equation" is in my own case somewhat too strong to leave me with a perfectly "dry light" in the matter. I will make a clean breast of it at once by saying, that I can remember reading some of the most famous of these books in their green covers, month by month, as they came out in parts, when I was myself a child or "in my 'teens." That period included the first ten of the main works from Pickwick down to David Copperfield. With Bleak House, which I read as a student of philosophy at Oxford beginning to be familiar with Aristotelian canons, I felt my enjoyment mellowed by a somewhat more measured judgment. From that time onward Charles Dickens threw himself into a great variety of undertakings and many diverse kinds of publication. His Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities, were never to me anything like the wonder and delight that I found in Oliver Twist, Nickleby, and Copperfield. And as to the short tales and the later pieces down to Edwin Drood, I never find myself turning back to them; the very memory of the story is fading away; and I fail to recall the characters and names. A mature judgment will decide that the series after David Copperfield, written when the author was thirty-eight, was not equal to the series of the thirteen years preceding. Charles Dickens will always be remembered by Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nickleby, and Copperfield. And though these tales will long continue to delight both old and young, learned and unlearned alike, they are most to be envied who read him when young, and they are most to be pitied who read him with a critical spirit. May that be far from us, as we take up our Pickwick and talk over the autobiographic pathos of David Copperfield.

This vivid sympathy with the man is made stronger in my own case in that, from my own boyhood till his death, I was continually seeing him, was frequently his neighbour both in London and the seaside, knew some of his friends, and heard much about him and about his work. Though I never spoke to him, there were times when I saw him almost daily; I heard him speak and read in public; and his favourite haunts in London and the country have been familiar to me from my boyhood. And thus, as I read again my Pickwick, and Nickleby, and Copperfield, there come back to me many personal and local memories of my own. The personality of Charles Dickens was, even to his distant readers, vivid and intense; and hence it is much more so to those who have known his person. I am thus an ardent Pickwickian myself; and anything I say about our immortal Founder must be understood in a Pickwickian sense.

Charles Dickens was before all things a great humourist—doubtless the greatest of this century; for, though we may find in Scott a more truly Shakespearean humour of the highest order, the humour of Dickens is so varied, so paramount, so inexhaustible, that he stands forth in our memory as the humourist of the age. Swift, Fielding, Hogarth, Sterne, and Goldsmith, in the last century, reached at times a more enduring level of humour without caricature; but the gift has been more rarely imparted to their successors in the age of steam. Now, we shall never get an adequate definition of that imponderable term—humour—a term which, perhaps, was invented to be the eternal theme of budding essayists. We need not be quite as liberal in our interpretation of humour as was Thackeray in opening his English Humourists; for he declared that its business was to awaken and direct our love, our pity, our kindness, our scorn for imposture, our tenderness for the weak, to comment on the actions and passions of life, to be the week-day preacher—and much more to that effect. But it may serve our immediate purpose to say with Samuel Johnson that humour is "grotesque imagery"; and "grotesque" is "distorted of figure; unnatural." That is to say, humour is an effort of the imagination presenting human nature with some element of distortion or disproportion which instantly kindles mirth. It must be imaginative; it must touch the bed-rock of human nature; it must arouse merriment and not anger or scorn. In this fine and most rare gift Charles Dickens abounded to overflowing; and this humour poured in perfect cataracts of "grotesque imagery" over every phase of life of the poor and the lower middle classes of his time, in London and a few of its suburbs and neighbouring parts.