REGINALD BATEMAN (continued 2)

The word Ferrara at the head of the poem gives us the clue to the period. Ferrara is an ancient Italian town, and was at one time the seat of a powerful duchy. The ancient ducal palace still frowns down from its eminence upon the country around. The Duke of Ferrara at the period of our poem was one of the most powerful noblemen of Italy.

The speaker in this monologue is the Duke of Ferrara, a typical Renaissance product, cultured and cold and cruel. He is showing the picture of his late wife to an envoy from some Count or other who has sent to negotiate a marriage for his daughter with the widowed Duke.

The first thing to do with a poem like this is to make it live. We will read it.

The character we have represented here is one probably not uncommon at the period. The Duke is a man of intellect, imbued with the new culture, a critic and collector of art treasures. He combines with this appreciation of art, an utter selfishness and cynicism. His heart is incapable of tenderness or emotion. He has an immense pride in his rank and in his ancient name, and an impatience of anything that would derogate from his dignity.

Can you picture him, the polished old villain, as he stands before the picture of the girl he has cruelly done to death and points out its beauties with delicate jewelled finger? On his cultured but sensual features the critical appreciation of a connoisseur for the skill of the artist mingles with some recollection of and pride in the beauty of his former duchess; but of affection there is not a sign, of remorse not a trace.

He married a young girl who probably was contracted to him by her parents without having any voice in the matter. He bestows on her his name and rank, and in return demands—everything, her abject submission to his every whim, her complete indifference to everything and everybody but himself. It was too much. The poor girl could not crush all the humanity out of her heart, nor the vitality out of her body. The Duke saw, with cold disapproval, her fresh interest and pleasure in all around her, her delight in every attention that was offered her, her ever-ready smile. He wanted all these things for himself, and for nobody else. That smile must be for him alone. But unfortunately the Duchess liked whatever "she looked on, and her looks went everywhere," she had a kind word and glance for everybody.

In other words, he did away with her, had her murdered, an easy thing for a man of his power at this epoch. First, however, he had her portrait painted. If he could not have the Duchess all to himself, he could at least have her picture entirely his own,

He is thinking now of marrying again. Some Count snaps at the bait, the chance of this magnificent alliance for his daughter. Better to kill her with his own hand than to let her pass into the clutches of the Duke. The Duke's object in showing the envoy the picture is probably partly to get the opportunity of letting him know in time what he expects from his wife, so that when the messenger returns he may warn his young lady to keep her smiles under strict control.

Notice how Browning indicates the attitude of the envoy. First he is struck by the marvellous face of the Duchess—

At last he essays a word in her defence,

and when the Duke has finished, he sits a little stupefied at the revelation that has been made, and still gazing at the picture. Even when the Duke rises he does not stir, and the latter has to rouse him, a little impatiently, "Will't please you rise?"

To me the most striking thing about this poem is its suggestiveness. It suggests infinitely more than it expresses. It expresses merely a fragment of a conversation; it suggests a whole tragedy.

Browning has, in these few lines, with delicate and curious skill, given us first the Renaissance atmosphere, a mixture of culture and refinement, delight in art and beauty, with immorality and crime; he has suggested to us the characters of the two actors in the drama from which this poem is but a fragment, the polished and cynical Duke and the girl who is sacrificed to his position and wealth; he has even suggested the mixture of deference, loathing, and fear with which the envoy listens to the Duke's description. There are anatomists who from a single bone of any animal will construct the whole skeleton; and so from this scrap which Browning has here given us we can construct the complete drama.

The poem is, as I have remarked, typical of a whole class of Browning's poetry. These poems are usually called dramatic monologues, but perhaps the title given to them by Stopford Brooke is on the whole more suggestive. He calls them imaginative representations.

These poems are, in the first place, the utterance of one person, at a single time, and in one place. Some individual is influenced or induced by some unusual opportunity or circumstance to reveal himself. The veil which conceals his inmost heart is lifted for a moment and we get a glimpse into its depths.

They have a certain dramatic element. Browning himself styled this poem a dramatic romance. They are dramatic in that they are objective as regards the author; the poet is not uttering his own thoughts. The circumstances under which the monologue is spoken are usually dramatic (i.e., such as a playwright might choose to bring out some trait of character), the background, scenery, and even the action is vividly suggested, and there are usually subsidiary figures whose attitude towards the central actor is carefully indicated.

The chief point to notice about these poems is that the poet studies not merely an individual as such, the working out of passion in a single soul, but he takes that individual as a type of some special period, some phase of historical development, some special era of thought. It was Browning's way of using history for poetical purposes, and it was completely his own. This poem is not a very good example, because the personages and events described are not peculiar to any one epoch, but may occur wherever there are two people unhappily married. But even here we have in the Duke not only an intensely interesting, even if objectionable, type of human being, but the concentrated essence of a certain side of the Italian Renaissance.

Browning, in his series of imaginative representations has covered a big field. Artemis Prologuizer, Caliban on Setebos, The Bishop Orders his Tomb, Fra Lippo Lippi, A Death in the Desert, Cleon, and many others cover an immense range, from Greek mythology through early and late Renaissance down to the modern life of Europe. "The poet can place us with ease and truth at Corinth, Athens or Rome, in Paris, Vienna or London, and wherever we go with him we are at home." Scenery, character, time, place, and action are all suitably and harmoniously blended, the characters are vividly alive. The qualifications which Browning brought to these poems were, first, a wide historical knowledge, not so much of separate events as of the main trend of thought in a given period; an intense imaginative power; a wide knowledge of human nature; and last, but not least, in his Italian poems, a familiar acquaintance with "a multitude of small intimate details of the customs, clothing, architecture, popular dress, talk and scenery of the towns and country of Italy from the thirteenth century to modern times." The poem under consideration gives us only a glimpse of the skill with which Browning handles this particular type; but I hope it will be sufficient to induce those who are not acquainted with Browning's other work to study it further.

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING

REALISM IN WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING

A paper read to the Faculty Club during the session 1911-12

What is Realism? Realism means what it says—truth to reality and fact. The realist expresses imaginative conceptions in terms of the actual world around him, in terms of the objects which he can see and describe accurately; the idealist gets away from fact, and creates an imaginative world which differs from the real.

The idealist who writes of love, talks about raptures and bliss and gates of heaven; the realist describes the wave of the girl's hair, the colour of her dress, the way in which the man stands and looks, and leaves the reader to supply the emotional background. The idealist who writes of death talks about ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the common goal of mortality, the gate of everlasting life; the realist describes the sick man's ghastly pallor, his wavering pulse, his gasping breath, the clock ticking out the minutes in the silence of the chamber of death.

A realist in fiction like Balzac or Flaubert or their imitator, Arnold Bennett, seems almost photographic in the accuracy of his descriptions; and yet so artistic is the selection of the details described that though we get the impression of absolute reality, the emotional atmosphere is often intense. Realism, when well done, is an admirable literary method, but it may and often does degenerate into a vice. In the hands of Zola it becomes a medium for the conveyance of sickening, sordid, or disgusting detail.

The kind of realism with which I wish to deal is realism in poetry—the phrase seems almost a contradiction in terms—and I am taking for my purpose certain phases of the work of Wordsworth and Browning.

Wordsworth and Browning, two poets in many respects direct antitheses of one another, are not usually classed together in any way. There is, however, one class of poetry which Browning was the first to develop to a large extent, in which Wordsworth may be said to have been a pioneer; in fact, Browning actually succeeded in a kind of poetry of which Wordsworth barely saw the possibility. I do not mean to suggest that Browning was in any way a disciple or conscious imitator of Wordsworth; but that we see in full flower in Browning's poetry a certain artistic method of which in Wordsworth's poetry we can just perceive the germ.

The kind of poetry to which I refer is one which is frequent in Browning, and which, in fact, has often been regarded as not poetry at all—I mean such utterly unpretentious, prosaic, uncouth, rough, or at times even grotesque verse as we find in poems like Bishop Blougram's Apology, Mr. Sludge the Medium, Old Pictures in Florence, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, much of The Ring and the Book, and Browning's later work generally. Such verse produces the effect of an exact reproduction of the actual. It is so realistic that it seems at times lacking in art.

No work which is an exact, or nearly exact, reproduction of the actual can be a work of art. A work of art is based on man's experience of what is, but is always modified and altered by his conception of what ought to be.

It was here that Wordsworth failed. His realistic poetry is too close to the actual. The intensely realistic effect of Browning's poems is an illusion; otherwise his claim to be a poetic artist disappears in so far as these poems are concerned.

I wish to indicate the nature of these effects, and to inquire how far Browning was anticipated by Wordsworth.

Wordsworth was perhaps the chief representative of the Romantic School—the title given to the group of poets who dominated English Literature at the commencement of the nineteenth century. The spirit of the age to which their work gave expression was one of question and revolt, the spirit which found its most remarkable political expression in the French Revolution. Question of established beliefs, revolt against established rules and conventions, was the keynote of literary as well as of social and political life.

The attitude of the Romantic School is indicated by its name. Romance is that element in literature which appeals to the sense of the marvellous in man, which awakens his capacity for wonder. In the eighteenth century, under the régime of Pope and the Classical School, wonder had been dead. It was an age of acceptance and submission; acceptance of certain definite conventions, submission to certain fixed rules. Correctness was more desired than imagination, and polish than originality.

It was against the barren conventions and narrow outlook of the Classical School that Wordsworth and his fellows revolted. The spirit of wonder toward Nature and toward Man sprang into new life.

My meaning will be illustrated by the following lines:

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

I do not wish, however, to talk to-night of Wordsworth's attitude towards Nature. It is with just two aspects of the Romantic Revolt that I have to deal, one relating to subject matter, the other to form.

The poet's eye in Shakespeare's time

With Pope, poetry was confined mainly to man as he exists in society, and was largely concerned with satirizing social defects; Wordsworth dealt with men as human beings, as mysterious manifestations of the infinite, creatures trailing clouds of glory, coming we know not whence, going we know not whither. To him, as to Burns, rank and station were nothing. Any human being, however humble, was worthy to be the poet's theme. He claimed for the misfortunes of Lucy Gray or the miserable mother, the Idiot Boy or Peter Bell, the same consideration as Sophocles for the sorrows of OEdipus and the lofty line of Thebes.

Gray, an eighteenth century poet in whom romantic tendencies are found, shows the same spirit in the Elegy when he writes of the humble dead who lie beneath the soil:

Wordsworth, then, enlarged the scope of poetry to include any human experience, however humble.

There was another side to Wordsworth's revolt. He revolted not only against the limitations of subject imposed on the poets by eighteenth-century ideals, but also against the limitations of form. Pope and his followers had been poets of practically a single metre, the heroic couplet. Their tricks, mannerisms, and phraseology had been exalted into a poetic diction, or, rather, jargon, by countless imitators, and poems written in any other style were not allowed admission to the best company. A field, for example, had to be either a verdant mead or a grassy sward, or it could not decently make its appearance in poetry. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century a rainbow is to Campbell Heaven's ethereal bow, and a musket becomes, in poetical dress, a glittering tube. Wordsworth claimed for the poet the right of using the language of everyday life, plain, simple, and unadorned.

Such is a very brief and insufficient outline of the two main points in Wordsworth's poetic theory, which were developed at great length by Wordsworth himself in his prefaces and by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria.

It is to just one small part of Wordsworth's poetic practice that I wish to draw your attention. I mean certain studiously simple and realistic poems written in deliberate illustration of his theories. The first of them were published in the famous Lyrical Ballads of 1798, a work which burst like a bombshell upon an astonished literary world, and aroused more scorn, indignation, and controversy than perhaps any other volume of poetry ever published.

The Lyrical Ballads was in the nature of a challenge. It contained an announcement of Wordsworth's new theories, together with illustrations of them by himself and Coleridge. Many of the poems were admirable, but in many others Wordsworth is at his worst.

A generation brought up in the principles of Pope and nourished on such verse as The Pleasures of Hope could not away with poems like The Idiot Boy, or Alice Fell, or even We Are Seven.

There is no doubt that Wordsworth went much too far in his zeal for the new theories, and was unfortunately without a sense of humour which might have saved him from absurdities. As an illustration of Wordsworth at his worst, let us take The Idiot Boy, one of the poems in the Lyrical Ballads. The very outline of the plot would make the ghost of Pope rise in indignation from the grave. Old Susan Gale, a peasant woman, is very ill. Her neighbour, Betty Foy, comes to attend on her, accompanied by her only son, Johnny, an idiot. Susan gets worse, and the doctor must be sent for. Betty dare not leave her, and so the only alternative is to send the idiot boy to fetch him. I need not complete the story, but will quote a few stanzas from the poem:

This from a poet who could write The Solitary Reaper or Milton, thou should'st be living at this hour, or such magnificent philosophical poetry as we find in The Prelude, Tintern Abbey, and The Excursion, where Wordsworth treats of

or such splendid descriptive passages as are scattered everywhere through his works, visions worthy to rank with Shakespeare's

Other examples of Wordsworth's simple style are all too numerous, and may be found in such poems as Peter Bell, which relates the story of a tinker and a donkey (in parts an admirable poem), Alice Fell, which tells the sorrow of a little girl for her tattered cloak, The Brothers, and Michael. These are not, by any means, all bad; in fact, when Wordsworth can forget for a while that he is writing to illustrate a theory, flashes of his natural style break out, producing odd effects of incongruity. Some of the poems which appeared in the Lyrical Ballads are admirable, such as Her Eyes are Wild and The Affliction of Margaret.

To us who have, since Wordsworth's time, been trained to a wider scope of appreciation in poetry, it will seem strange that even the worst of them should have aroused such adverse criticism, but even to us it is evident that Wordsworth in them is not at his best, that he is writing a style which is not natural to him. And yet it was these poems which, for a time, attracted most attention from Wordsworth's contemporaries, and prejudiced Byron, Horace Smith, Peacock, and many others against his greater poetry.

Wordsworth, though he failed in his attempt, had got hold of a true idea—that the most common things in life are pregnant with poetry, and that there are many subjects, not susceptible of ordinary poetical treatment, which may yet be handled in such a simple, unpretentious way as to retain their essential outlines, while the emotional element is subtly indicated rather than actually expressed. As a very ordinary landscape will be transformed into a thing of beauty under the rays of the setting sun, so commonplace subjects may take on a new appearance under the influence of the poet's imagination. Care must be taken, however, not to idealize too much. It would be impossible, for example, to lift such a subject as The Idiot Boy into the realm of the ideal.

Now if we turn to Browning, we find that he also deals with subjects of this kind. Let us consider his treatment of one or two of them. In The Spanish Cloister he takes as his subject the mean and petty jealousy of one commonplace monk for another. Or, again, he takes a sick man, stretched on his death-bed, putting aside impatiently the ministrations of the parson, as his half-dazed thoughts go back to a rather sordid love affair which was yet the brightest spot in his past. Other examples are Sludge the Medium, and the cynical and worldly Bishop Blougram endeavouring after dinner over the nuts and wine to justify his appearance of orthodoxy to Gigadibs, the scribbler and shallow rationalist:

Could anything be more easy, conversational, realistic? And yet every now and then we find throughout the poem touches of the noblest poetry introduced so skilfully that there is no sense of incongruity. For example, the Bishop in the course of his argument says that absolute unbelief is just as impossible as absolute faith.

Browning's love poetry does not properly enter into this discussion, since love is a common theme of poets, and this discussion deals with Browning's treatment of apparently unpoetical themes; but Browning's choice and treatment of situation in his love poems are so unusual as to bring them into the same class as his other realistic poems. Take as an example:

These few examples will serve to show that the essential principles of Browning's realism and Wordsworth's are the same. Browning, like Wordsworth, claimed for poetry a greater licence both in subject matter and in form, but he went farther than Wordsworth in both. Wordsworth took for his new subjects the humble joys and sorrows of the poor—but all was fish that came to Browning's net. Any psychological situation, any out-of-the-way corner of human experience, became in his hands matter for poetry. Then as to form, Wordsworth merely refrained from the conventional language of poetry, but Browning boldly used language that was frankly unpoetical—uncouth, unmusical, rough, rhyming grotesquely, accented outrageously. Perhaps his most important advance on Wordsworth was in the use of the dramatic form—nearly all Browning's poems of the sort described are dramatic monologues—for when the speaker is professedly not the poet, we are less inclined to find an incongruity in unpoetical language. Browning, by adopting the dramatic form, gets at things from the subjective point of view, from the inside. Wordsworth tried to describe them objectively from the point of view of a spectator.

Browning, then, practically discovered a new poetical form which enabled him to bring within the scope of poetical treatment subjects never so treated before. He found a new field for poetry and found new forms to suit it. He entered land which Wordsworth had only beheld from afar, and which, indeed, Wordsworth never could have entered.

Browning saw that familiar objects, everyday doings and sayings, commonplace happenings which seem to the ordinary observer prosaic and barren, are, to the poet, pregnant with underlying emotion.

Ordinary poetry deals with the obviously poetical things, or converts the everyday things of life into poetry by depriving them of some of their actuality. Browning contrives to give us things as they are, with all the harshness and crudeness of real life, and yet to make us feel the underlying element of poetry. About his most brutally realistic poem, there is a subtle atmosphere of emotion.

Browning, like Shakespeare, dares to place side by side the grotesque, the beautiful, the tragic, the ludicrous. He can do it by virtue of his unassuming form. Take, for example, Old Pictures in Florence. There we get the dirt of the old streets, the very must and smell of the second-hand dealer's stores, the filthy canvas and peeling fresco, but we get also the tragedy of the wronged Old Masters, and a noble conception of the development of art.

In Bishop Blougram we get the wine, the nuts, the plausible conversation, but we get also the spectacle, pregnant with emotional possibilities, of two human midgets in the presence of the Almighty, the one daring lightly to compound with his Maker, the other lightly to deny Him.

The value of this inquiry, if it have any value, is to show that those poetical forms which are often assumed to be due to a radical defect in Browning's work as poetry, were really a deliberate artistic method, deliberate in the sense that Carlyle's style is deliberate. The style, with both Carlyle and Browning, is indeed the man, but each had to find the style which would express him best. Carlyle, in his early work, wrote like Macaulay; Browning, in his early work, wrote like Shelley. And whenever Browning, in his later poems, met with a subject capable of conventional poetical treatment, he did not hesitate so to treat it.

I need only instance such poems as Saul, Abt Vogler, The Guardian Angel, and Prospice. I shall quote the last of these poems:

Can anyone after hearing that poem maintain that Browning was incapable, when he wished, of dispensing with eccentricities?

In conclusion, I should like to say that the subject I have been treating has nothing to do with the obscurity of Browning's poetry. His obscurity has nothing to do with his realism.

SYNGE

Incomplete notes of an Address to a Study Club

Three years ago, in July 1910, died John Millington Synge, Irish dramatist, whose name will probably be better known twenty years hence, perhaps one hundred and twenty years hence, than it is to-day.

Those who know Ireland only by hearsay, or from books, or even from the stage, will be slow at first to appreciate his work; but we who know and love the real Ireland, we, who have wandered through her glens and by her streams, and looked upon her wonderful skies, who have felt within ourselves her sadness, her mirth, and her poetry, must at once acknowledge that in the work of Synge the soul of Ireland has, for the first time, received adequate expression. In that small island, a green speck in the tumbling billows of the Atlantic, right in the heart of the barren conventionalism of modern civilization, there still remains, if one knows where to look for it, the Celtic spirit in all its original purity; there is still to be found a glamour and a mystery as fine as any that lingers on the shores of old Romance.

Many have found and felt these things, but they have been silent, for they have been restrained from speech by a sense that such things could not be interpreted in words. Synge was the first to find the medium by which they might be expressed. "He was a solitary, undemonstrative man," says his friend Yeats, "never asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking sympathy; all folded up in brooding intellect, knowing nothing of new books and newspapers, reading the great masters alone; and he was but the more hated because he gave his country what it needed, an unmoved mind, where there is a perpetual last day, a trumpeting and coming up to judgment."

Thus, it seems to me, Synge will be slow in winning recognition from the masses of his countrymen. He saw them too clearly, and painted too accurate a portrait of them to be flattering; they recognize their weaknesses and are indignant, while they fail to see that he has painted also their fine poetical qualities, their romance, and their tenderness.

Again the same writer: "In Ireland, he loved only what was wild in its people and in the grey wintry sides of many glens." All the rest, all that one reasoned over, fought for, read of in leading articles, all that came from Education, all that came down from young Ireland—aroused in him little interest. Perhaps its only effect on him was to awaken in him first that irony which, once awakened, he turned upon the whole of life.

The scene of Synge's later literary work—the work which counts—was the Abbey Theatre, a small and unpretentious building, hidden away in a side street near the Dublin quays. Here is a central point for the Irish Dramatic Movement, a movement recognized by all competent critics as being one of the most significant things in modern literature. Lovers of literature of the present generation who have been walking in a vain shadow, groping their way uneasily amid realistic novels, paradoxical problem plays, pale poems, and epigrammatic essays, turn with relief to a literature which is realistic, and at the same time rich and poetical, and which shows unmistakable signs of real vitality.

At the Abbey Theatre one may see the peasant life of modern Ireland and hear the beautiful legends of her past portrayed by native actors, with a fidelity and a force which have never been surpassed on any stage. Their acting is a true "holding of the mirror up to Nature"—there are no stage tricks, no declamations, no poses, no sound and fury—the scene is perhaps the rude interior of a peasant cottage in some Irish village, or of a hut in some lonely glen, or the side of a windy hill or open field, where the sun shines and the air is mild and the breeze fresh and kindly. The figures that fill the scene bear no resemblance to the traditional buffoon, who, on most stages, is made to do duty for an Irishman; their speech is quite unlike the traditional brogue which is commonly supposed to be the medium of communication between Irish peasants; the characters represented are primitive but poetical, wild but noble; their dialogue is rich with humour and imagination, and is spoken with a charming and musical intonation. In the movements and words of the people we see on the stage, there is no appearance of acting; they talk easily and naturally, their gestures are few and altogether free from exaggeration or striving after effect. Their whole performance is simple and apparently without effort; and yet I have again and again been far more profoundly stirred by this unpretentious acting, I have had a far deeper sense of the tragedy and comedy and mystery of life in this little Abbey Theatre than I have ever received from the elaborate productions of the London stage.

The Irish National Theatre was founded in 1899 by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, who, ever since its inception, have devoted their time and thought and work almost exclusively to perfecting this new drama. The result has amply justified their faithful labour. The Irish National Theatre has already given to the world an entirely original style of acting, a company of actors "unrivalled in the quality which they profess," and now known not only in Ireland, but all over Britain and America, and also several dramatists of extraordinary merit.

Of these dramatists Synge is undoubtedly the most remarkable. His production is small and extends over only a few years, but it is of a quality unknown in English literature since Elizabethan times. "It has been claimed for him," says Mr. Bickley, "that he is the greatest imaginative dramatist who has written English since Shakespeare, or at least since the Puritans closed the theatres in 1642." This claim may at first sight seem extravagant, especially to those who know the very limited range and quantity of Synge's work, but on reflection it is clear that if one admits that Synge is a great dramatist, one is forced also to admit that he is the first since Shakespeare. What have we had in drama since Shakespeare? A number of classical or pseudo-Shakespearean verse plays, most of them extremely dreary, from Addison to Swinburne, the brilliant but tawdry comedy of intrigue of the Restoration, the later eighteenth-century society comedy of Goldsmith and Sheridan, and the modern drawing-room dramas of Shaw and Wilde—to none of which the term great can properly be applied.

A study of the causes of the decay of the drama would be a most interesting one, but the topic is too large and too difficult to be attempted in a short paper. Suffice it to say, that Synge appeared to believe that the modern drama suffered from two main defects. Either it lacked reality, or it lacked poetry. The drama which was imaginative and poetical was alien from real life, the drama which attempted a realistic picture of life was flat and joyless and anaemic.

According to this idea two main things were necessary to a re-creation of the drama. First, the type of life in which there still remained some vigour, colour, and poetry; where convention had not crushed out all elemental emotions and produced a barren artificial uniformity; secondly, an artistic language by which that life might be expressed. Synge found both these requisites among the Irish peasantry of Connemara and the Aran Islands. In Mr. Bickley's books we learn how W. B. Yeats found Synge. Synge was then twenty-six. "He had wandered among people whose life is as picturesque as that of the Middle Ages, playing his fiddle to Italian sailors and listening to stories in Bavarian woods, but life had cast no light into his writings."

Following Yeats' advice, Synge left France and went to live at Aran, a group of stony islands at the entrance of Galway Bay. "There he lived the peasants' life, learned their language and discovered his own possibilities." In the Aran peasants he found a people with "an imagination, fiery and magnificent and tender," and at the same time with the elemental emotions strongly in evidence, a just mixture of God and brute. Synge found splendid material for a drama at once human and beautiful; in their language, English spoken by men who thought in Gaelic, that is, English coloured by Celtic imagination, he found his medium of expression. The result was the half-dozen plays which will probably survive most of the other writing of this generation.

To find the Ireland of romance, Synge returned again and again to Aran, to Kerry and to the Blaskets. "He was a drifting, silent man, full of hidden passion, and loved wild islands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay hidden in himself." He liked to enter the houses of the people and sit quietly listening to their talk. In the dialect of Aran "the cadence is long and meditative as befits the thought of men who are much alone, and who, when they meet in each other's houses—as is their way at the day's end—listen patiently, each man speaking in turn for some little time, and taking pleasure in the vaguer meaning of the words and in their sounds. Their thought, when not merely practical, is as full of traditional wisdom and extravagant pictures as some Aeschylean chorus."

Synge wrote down words and phrases wherever he went, and found the Irish dialect so rich a thing that he had begun translating into it fragments of the great literatures of the world and had planned a complete version of the Imitation of Christ. He attached great importance to the discovery of this dramatic dialect.

In Synge's plays is not to be found any definite philosophy; he was that rarest of things—a pure artist. "He loves all that has edge, all that is salt in the mouth, all that is rough to the hand, all that heightens the emotions by contrast, all that stings into life the sense of tragedy."

All his plays, except the beautiful Deirdre, in which he goes back to Irish legend for his plot, deal with modern peasant life in Ireland, and range from the rollicking comedy of the Tinker's Wedding, through the irony of the Playboy of the Western World, and the Shadow of the Glen, to the pure and magnificent tragedy of Riders to the Sea. I shall never forget the impression made upon me by the latter play when I saw it acted for the first time in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, acted as only the Irish players can act it. I have seen it often since, and never without being deeply stirred, but that first performance was a revelation and opened up a new world of thought and feeling.

Riders to the Sea is a short, simple, one-act play, taking, perhaps, twenty minutes to act; but in that twenty minutes the spectator plunges deep into the mystery and tragedy of life, before him black and bottomless depths of suffering; he becomes aware of Destiny hovering, a grim unseen presence, over the little lives of men. The background of the little play is the vast remorseless sea, and over it broods Eternity.

DICKENS AND THACKERAY

An Essay found among Professor Bateman's early papers

To attempt anything like an adequate discussion of two literary giants like Dickens and Thackeray in a short paper of this kind is like undertaking to empty Niagara with a quart pot. It is obvious that I can hope to do no more than indicate in a rather sketchy way some of the main points of difference and resemblance in our two authors. In doing so I shall naturally pay somewhat more attention to Dickens than to Thackeray. With the exception of Esmond, Thackeray's work is all very much of the same kind, and displays a considerably smaller degree of variety and versatility than that of Dickens. One requires less guidance for an intelligent appreciation of Thackeray than for an intelligent appreciation of Dickens. The merits of Thackeray's work are easily seen and easily defined; a recognition of them is largely a matter of reason, and can confidently be expected from any intelligent reader. But Dickens is an author much more difficult to understand. His faults as well as his merits are gigantic; but then he frequently gets credit for faults which are not there, and sometimes even some of his greatest merits are construed as faults. The true appreciation of Dickens requires a larger exercise of the imagination than in the case of Thackeray. In other words, it is more a matter of feeling than of reason. Ask many a lover of Dickens to give a reason for the faith that is in him, and he may find it difficult to satisfy you.

Take, for example, Dickens's humorous characters. There are some who cannot be got to admit that Mr. Toots, Sim Tappertit, Sairey Gamp, and others of that ilk are divinely humorous and inspired creations; some will only admit that at best they are but "excellent fooling"; others will even characterize them as mere buffoonery. It is an inferior class of mind, however, which rejects the abnormal merely on account of its abnormality, and votes the improbable impossible, because it fails to fit in with previously conceived ideas of right and wrong. Criticism is useless in the case of people who hold such a view. I may assert, with all the force of which I am capable, that Mr. Toots is the best thing in Dombey; that age cannot wither Sairey Gamp any more than Cleopatra, and that she will blossom in perennial freshness while the language endures; but if you ask me for a reason, I can give none. It is no more possible to give a reason for liking Sairey Gamp than for disliking Dr. Fell. We can enjoy with Thackeray the skilful dissection of a character like that of Becky Sharp, and penetrate with him the innermost recesses of her mighty little soul; but Dickens himself could not have penetrated the secret of the composition of Sairey Gamp. In her presence criticism is dumb. We must be content to stand in humble and reverent admiration and satisfy ourselves with exclaiming, "Behold, it is very good." I shall return again to this point of characterization, but I must now say something of the position held by Dickens and Thackeray in the historical development of the novel.

Though undoubtedly the two greatest novelists of the Early Victorian school, Dickens and Thackeray are alike in exercising very little apparent influence on the development of the contemporary novel of manners. They both look back rather than forward. They set the crown and consummation on the work of the early eighteenth-century group of writers. Dickens derives from Smollett, and Thackeray from Fielding. When Dickens as a boy discovered in an old garret that precious pile of dusty eighteenth-century books, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker and the rest, which he absorbed with such loving eagerness, he little thought that he was destined to be a second and a greater Smollett.

The characteristic type of English novel was defined by Richardson, Fielding, and their school at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It aimed at a dramatic representation of contemporary life and manners; it took, in fact, the place of the drama as the popular form of literature. With the decay of the Fielding novel came a reaction, and opposed to the lusty and vivid realism of Tom Jones and Humphrey Clinker we get the sham mediaevalism, the dungeon-keeps, the echoing chambers, the hollow-voiced spectres, and the absurd sentiment of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, and its imitators. This was a sort of side stream in the history of the novel, which nevertheless created the taste for historical romance, fed later by the novels of Scott. Scott stands apart from the main stream of English fiction, though his style exercised an immense influence on later novelists. After the mediaeval relapse, the contemporary novel of manners was continued at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century by Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. The latter died in 1817; between 1814 and 1832 Scott's novels fill the field of fiction; and then, between about 1835 and 1860, come Dickens and Thackeray with their contemporaries, of whom perhaps the most remarkable were Lytton and Disraeli. In none of these writers, however, must we look for the foundation of the characteristic Victorian novel—the novel of George Eliot and George Meredith. The founder of that novel was Charlotte Brontë. Her Jane Eyre and Thackeray's Vanity Fair were published in the same year, 1848, and were reviewed together in a famous number of the Quarterly. The two works represent two distinct schools of fiction. Between the Dickens-Thackeray novel and the Brontë-Eliot novel there is a great gulf fixed. Dickens and Thackeray stand out from their time like two solitary giants.

Perhaps now it might be well to remind you briefly of the main facts in the literary history of the two men. Dickens's first great work, Pickwick, appeared in 1837, five years after the death of Scott. It was at once received with acclamation. His next book, Oliver Twist, though it must have come as a sort of shock after Pickwick, did not stem the tide of appreciation. Like Oliver himself, every one was soon asking for more. They did not ask in vain. During the next two decades, the forties and fifties, Dickens poured forth novel after novel with surprising rapidity. Pickwick, Sam Weller, Fagin, Squeers, Micawber soon became household words. Dickens won a popularity of which we can form no true conception. There has been nothing like it in our time. England and America were taken by storm; even France was infected with the prevailing enthusiasm.

During the days of Dickens' early popularity a clever young man had been making a name for himself as a humorist and satirist in the pages of Fraser's Magazine, Punch, and similar journals. This was William Makepeace Thackeray. In 1838, the year after Pickwick, Thackeray began a series known as the Yellow Plush Papers; during the next ten years he produced a great variety of journalistic work, short stories, sketches and essays, and wrote, in addition, two satirical novels, Catherine and Barry Lyndon. In 1848 he burst on the world as a great novelist with Vanity Fair, and within ten years more he had published Pendennis, Esmond, The Newcomes, and The Virginians. This brings us up to 1859. By that year Dickens had produced his best work; Thackeray had only four more years to live; and he was followed to the grave by Dickens in 1870. From this account it is apparent that Dickens made a much bigger stir than Thackeray in the contemporary literary world. He was the leviathan who frolicked at will in the sea of popular appreciation. Thackeray was a much smaller fish.

Considering Dickens and Thackeray first strictly as novelists, we find a point of resemblance in the fact that, from the point of view of form, they are both uncommonly bad novelists. A good novel, like any other work of art, must have some unity about it. The incidents must not be bundled in pell-mell, but must all contribute to the working out of some central idea or situation. Then we must have an element of romance, and this ought to regulate the subordination of the characters. The characters in every romance are essentially three, as Chesterton puts it, St. George, the Princess, and the Dragon; that is, St. George, something that loves and fights; the Princess, something that is loved and fought for; while the Dragon represents the opposition. Other characters besides these three there may and must be, but they serve as mere machinery or scenery as far as the romance is concerned.

Now let us consider the novels of Dickens and Thackeray from these points of view. As regards incident they are almost wholly lacking in unity. We cannot exactly deny them plots. They develop stories and interesting stories, but it is not an orderly development. Dickens strings his incidents together almost haphazard, and so, to a large extent, does Thackeray. (By the way, in these remarks on Thackeray I do not include Esmond, which is magnificent, but is not really Thackeray.)

In the greater part of his writing Dickens had no central aim or motive in view; he wrote, so to speak, from hand to mouth. Most of his books in fact were written for periodicals in monthly parts, and it is safe to say that nobody, and least of all Dickens himself, knew exactly what a month would bring forth. I am here again speaking generally; there are some exceptions, notably the Tale of Two Cities—which stands almost as much apart from the rest of Dickens's work as Esmond does from the rest of Thackeray's—and the unfinished Edwin Drood. Of Thackeray we may say that he may have had some central aim or motive in his novels, but if so, he paid little attention to it, and did not allow it to impede his rambling progress in the smallest degree. We may take it, then, as generally true that the novels of Dickens and Thackeray are rough-hewn and sometimes shapeless. In the case of Dickens this characteristic seldom annoys, but it is otherwise with Thackeray. I doubt, for example, if there is anyone here who has read and enjoyed every word of that fearfully digressive and dropsical novel, The Newcomes.

Again, as regards characters, in neither novelist do we get an orderly subordination. Dickens, perhaps, is the worst offender in this respect. In Thackeray, the hero and heroine are usually in a sense the most important personages, though crowds of personages who have really nothing to do with the story bulk very largely, and though in Vanity Fair there is no hero at all. But in Dickens, the personages who ought to be most important have frequently very little to do with the novel. As a rule, the leading characters, hero, heroine, and villain, are lifeless and uninteresting, and only serve to connect loosely a great amount of strictly secondary matter.

The really important characters in Dickens are the unimportant ones, those who are introduced en passant, and who might as well be anywhere else as far as the story is concerned. In Nicholas Nickleby Nicholas himself does not interest me, neither does his sister, neither do Madeline Bray and Mr. Bray, neither does Ralph Nickleby. The people who do interest me are people like Mrs. Nickleby, Mantalini, the Squeers family, the Kenwigs, and Vincent Crummies. In Martin Chuzzlewit the least important character is Martin himself, but his life serves as a string upon which are hung Pecksniff, Todger's Boarding House and all that therein was, Chevy Slime, Esq., Sairey Gamp, Betsy Prigg, Mr. Mould, Elijah Pogram, and many others in whose company there is endless delight. All these, however, might just as well have been hung on the string of Nicholas Nickleby or David Copperfield or Bleak House or almost any of the other books. Similarly all through. In Dombey Florence is a nonentity, Walter Gay is a nonentity, Dombey himself is a "made character," well-made, but not created. In David Copperfield David begins by being a reality, but tails off into an abstraction. In A Tale of Two Cities Darnay does not exist, and Lucie Manette only barely exists. In both Dickens and Thackeray, in fact, the romantic element is really subordinate, in Dickens very much so; and in neither writer do St. George, the Princess, and the Dragon ever become all-important. Both writers, in fact, are to be judged piece-meal, as creators of situations and characters, rather than in the bulk as creators of novels.

The keynote of the work of both our authors was struck in two of their first works of any note. In 1848 Thackeray published in Punch the series of papers entitled the Book of Snobs, which marks his dedication to the especial task of unmasking the pretence and sham which underlay the whole of English public and private life. His definition of the word snob was comprehensive. "The snob," says Thackeray, "is a child of aristocratical societies. Perched on his step of the long social ladder, he respects the man on the step above and despises the man on the step below, without enquiring what they are worth, solely on account of their position; in his innermost heart he finds it natural to kiss the boots of the first, and to kick the second." Starting with this definition, Thackeray lashed unsparingly all classes of society from the highest to the lowest. He discovered and unmasked snobs of all descriptions, church snobs, military snobs, literary snobs, country snobs, political snobs, Continental snobs. In this book Thackeray appears as the caustic satirist of every sort of social hypocrisy, and this character he maintains in his novels. Pendennis, Vanity Fair, and The Newcomes are largely Books of Snobs worked into the form of novels.

Dickens's first important work was his Sketches by Boz, a series of papers in which he describes various aspects and phases of the life of the English lower middle class. Though somewhat crude in style and occasionally even vulgar in tone, these papers are seldom completely commonplace, and many of the characteristics of the mature Dickens can be discerned there in embryo. They have a distinction of manner and a suggestion of creative power which is unmistakable, and they mark the dedication of Dickens to his especial task, the sympathetic though exaggerated painting of the poorer middle classes. While Thackeray took his stand on the universal sham and corruption of our social system, lashing hypocrisy and showing up the rottenness which lay hidden beneath the whited sepulchres of society, Dickens revealed the treasures which were buried beneath the rubbish-heap designated as the "poorer middle classes." Just as Thackeray's novels are glorified Books of Snobs, so Dickens's novels are, for the most part, glorified Sketches by Boz. His early works, though called novels, are undisguisedly a series of sketches loosely strung together. Pickwick, of course, is absolutely episodic. It was begun to supply the letterpress to a series of drawings by a popular artist, and when Dickens commenced he had no aim except to get his characters into such amusing situations as would afford scope to the illustrator. As the book goes on, however, it begins to get hold of Dickens, and the change is seen especially in the character of Pickwick, who begins as an elderly crank about whom Dickens does not care a jot, but develops into one of the most lovable old gentlemen of fiction. However, the fact remains that Pickwick has not the remotest vestige of a plot, and can by no stretch of the imagination be called a novel. Again, Oliver Twist, as Chesterton remarks, is really not a novel, and might, without losing much, have been published as a series of papers entitled The Workhouse, A Thieves' Den, and so on. Nicholas Nickleby might similarly have been published as a series of papers entitled A Yorkshire School, A Provincial Theatre, and so on. The fact that all these sketches are strung together on the lives of those shadowy personages Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby does not at all affect their real character. After Nicholas Nickleby the books begin to lose, to some extent, this sketchiness, that is, the episodes are more closely and skilfully interwoven into a connected whole, but still Dickens, the novelist, never quite emerges from Boz, the essayist.

These remarks about Dickens naturally lead me to say something about the development of our two authors. About Thackeray I cannot say very much. By the time he emerges from the undercurrent of journalistic work, all the essentials of the mature Thackeray seem almost fully developed. Barry Lyndon is almost as mature in style as Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair itself, Thackeray's first work of importance, is also his greatest work. That is, instead of working up to a climax as a novelist, Thackeray began at the top and worked downwards. Of course, we must remember that when he wrote it he had reached the age of thirty-seven. The subsequent novels, with the exception of Esmond, mark a deterioration, and not an advance.

I must here make a slight digression to speak of Esmond. Into this brilliant historical patch Thackeray threw all his great knowledge of, and love for, the eighteenth century. He was soaked in eighteenth-century literature and history—witness his Four Georges and English Humourists; and in Esmond he assumed with consummate skill the eighteenth-century manner.

In this novel Thackeray casts off completely his mask of cynicism, and appears as a man of noble feeling and deep sympathy, who could write a polished, pure, and straightforward English style. We feel, however, that the book is after all only a brilliant freak, and that the real Thackeray is the cynical, the satirical, and the caustic Thackeray of Vanity Fair. Esmond stands to the rest of Thackeray's work somewhat in the relation of Romola to George Eliot's other novels. In both the atmosphere is artificial, the result of long and careful study, and in both the deception is so perfect that the artificiality is almost impossible to detect. In two of his novels Dickens took historical subjects, namely in Barnaby Rudge and the Tale of Two Cities. The latter is the acme of Dickens's attainments in the descriptive style, and is perhaps more restrained and artistic than any of his other works. In brilliant imagination and vivid representation of an historical phase he more than equals Thackeray, though his novel falls short of Esmond in characterization. Esmond, Beatrix, and Lady Castlewood are much better than Darnay, Lucie, and the Doctor, though Sidney Carton, perhaps, is as fine as anything in Thackeray.

To return to the question of development, we may say that Thackeray's style was fully developed during his career as a journalist, essayist, and writer of short stories, and that we find its culminating point in Vanity Fair.

In the case of Dickens, however, we can trace a well-marked, if rapid, advance. Sketches by Boz are distinctly crude. Pickwick Papers are a startling advance on one side of Dickens's art. We find in them the vigour, versatility, and exuberance of a youthful and tremendous imagination. They display inexhaustible resource and gigantic humour. Dickens lavished enough genius on them to do ten ordinary men for a lifetime, and yet he did it with perfect ease. We feel that he enjoyed himself in writing them, that he revelled in the task. Every character, down to the smallest, lives. Mr. John Swanker and Mr. Cyrus Bantam, for example, are as real to us as Mr. Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick. Pickwick is one of the greatest of humorous portraits in literature. It is as great as the Canterbury Tales. It is wonderful that a young writer who in Sketches by Boz had only been feeling his way should, at one bound, reach the height of excellence which we find in Pickwick. The incidents are commonplace enough. The jokes are the sort of jokes which are still the stock-in-trade of the ha'penny comic—jokes about mothers-in-law, red-nosed curates, and falling on the ice, about getting drunk, and fighting, and fatness, and sitting upon one's hat. But what a difference between the treatment of Dickens and that of the uninspired humorists.

Pickwick, however, as I have said, represents only one side of Dickens's art, but perhaps the greatest side, the humorous delineation of character. There is as yet no trace of Dickens the novelist (for by no stretch of the imagination can Pickwick be called a novel), of Dickens the master of pathos, of Dickens the descriptive artist. There is, however, to be found in Pickwick traces of a youthful phase in Dickens's character, a somewhat morbid leaning towards the horrible and criminal, afterwards toned down and corrected by his strong common sense, but never wholly absent. This trait is to be found in some of the short stories inserted in Pickwick, notably The Madman's Tale. The latter story might have served as a warning to some very discerning critic of the startling change to be found in Dickens's next book, Oliver Twist. In this work the lavish humour of Pickwick dwindles down to very small proportions, and is decidedly overweighed by the horrible and morbid. The murder of Nancy and the death of Bill Sykes are only equalled for vivid awfulness a couple of times in Dickens's later books, notably in Bleak House and in Martin Chuzzlewit. In Oliver Twist appears a new element which was to take a prominent place in Dickens's future work, the element of social reform. Social reform had already produced the workhouse. Dickens started his reform by attacking the workhouse. But Dickens is not yet a novelist. The romantic element is absent in Oliver Twist; the hero is only a child.

It was in his fourth book, Nicholas Nickleby, that we find Dickens definitely deciding to write romance. Accordingly he introduces an impossibly good St. George, throws in a Princess and a Dragon half-way through for his benefit, and tries to make an orthodox novel. He succeeds, however, in making only a very poor imitation of one. Nicholas himself is a hopelessly badly-drawn character; and in fact nearly everywhere in the story that Dickens tries to be definitely romantic and orthodox he sinks below the level of the ha'penny novelette.

In his next book, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840), he almost abandons his good intentions formed with Nicholas Nickleby, and we return to the realm of sketches and sketchiness. He is progressing, however, in the use of forcible and restrained language. Barnaby Rudge (1841) is splendid of its kind, the best bit of actual writing Dickens had yet done, though it is rather a series of brilliant pictures than an orthodox novel. The hero is an idiot, but nevertheless not so idiotic as was Nicholas Nickleby. In Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) we get an attempt at romance. Martin is a hero a little more life-like than the much-abused Nicholas. In this book Dickens's powers of satire come out at their best in his pictures of American society, and his power of humorous characterization is also at its height in Pecksniff, Sairey Gamp, and many of the minor characters. The melodramatic side of Dickens's art unfortunately comes out unpleasantly strong in the description of old Chuzzlewit and his hopeful son, Jonas. At this point all Dickens's characteristic traits may be said to be fully developed. From this time, except in David Copperfield, which marks the culmination of his powers, and in the Tale of Two Cities, there is a distinct decline. Dombey is in parts magnificent, but a sort of gloom hangs over most of the book, relieved only by such bright patches as Mr. Toots, Bunsby, and Susan Nipper. Major Bagstock is the most unpleasant of Dickens's humorous characters. In this novel Dickens trespassed on Thackeray's preserves with disastrous results. His attempted satire on fashionable society and fashionable marriages, in the Cleopatra-Edith-Carker episodes, should be compared with Thackeray's treatment of a similar subject in The Newcomes. Still, there is nothing crude about the style of Dombey; it has the strength and force of maturity. After David Copperfield, which is known and loved by every one, and which is the most purely natural and wholly lovable of Dickens's books, we get a series of what may be called splendid failures in Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, and Great Expectations. They all contain magnificent patches, but they fail to impress one like the earlier books. It is some time now since I read Bleak House, and I must say I have very faint recollections of the greater part of it, whereas the earlier works are unforgettable.

Proceeding now to a consideration of Dickens and Thackeray as humorists, we may say, in a general way, that Thackeray's humour is largely incidental to his style, whereas the humour is the very root and groundwork of Dickens's best and most characteristic writing. It is difficult to define humour, but it seems to me that it consists, to a considerable extent, in an unexpected overthrow of the strictly logical. Mr. Micawber, the weak and foolish, the obvious failure in life, logically ought to be the most despairing and miserable of men. The fact, however, that so far from harbouring self-contempt, Mr. Micawber has a self-confidence which nothing can destroy, and that so far from retiring with disgust from a world which offers him nothing but kicks, he has the most childlike faith in his ultimate acquirement of unlimited halfpence, strikes us as being such a curious and blessed reversal of the logical order of things that we are pleased with Mr. Micawber. Instead of despising him, we love him. Micawber is undoubtedly a fool. Nearly all Dickens's great characters are fools. They are persons whom we should avoid in real life; but the gospel of Dickens, as Chesterton says, "is to suffer fools gladly." "Every instant we neglect a great fool merely because he is foolish. Every day we neglect Tootses and Swivellers, Guppys and Joblings. Every day we are missing a monster whom we might love, and an imbecile whom we should certainly admire." The humour of Dickens took the failures of life and turned them into successes. True humour is seldom far separated from pathos, and with Dickens, even while we laugh, we pity and we love. With Thackeray we laugh, but as a rule we do not love nor pity, we despise. The element of pathos is in general absent from Thackeray's humour; hence it is not really true humour at all; it is an inverted way of looking at things which strikes us as being funny. But the critic is always with Thackeray, hidden beneath the humorist. It is impossible for him to produce a lovable fool, for it is impossible for him to conceal the fact that he knows his character is a fool, and despises him accordingly. Take Jos. Sedley in Vanity Fair. The big Anglo-Indian was just the stuff of which a good Dickens's character is made. He is just the right sort of fool. But Thackeray goes out of his way to make him as contemptible as he is laughable, and in the end we are extremely glad to be rid of Mr. Jos.

In other words, with Thackeray the humour is nearly always overweighed by the satire. Thackeray is always considered as a satirist par excellence. But Dickens also is a satirist of another and perhaps a more effective kind. Thackeray's satire is the keen, cold, pitiless dissection of a surgeon. He lays bare every motive, every contemptible little spring of action. He tries, indeed, by his humorous manner to convince us that he is not all the time desperately in earnest, but behind it all we feel the preacher warning us, holding up examples for us, imploring us not to be or do likewise. In the character of Mr. Osborne, for example, we have the city magnate, self-made and able, but the slave of money. He is under the impression that money can make up for the vulgarity and coarseness of which he is vaguely conscious. When poor Sedley, his old friend, is broken, he casts him off without pity; along with Sedley's money, all his value in Osborne's eyes had disappeared. The latter lavished his wealth in trying to make his son a gentleman, and the result is that miserable cad, George Osborne, who despises his father, disappoints his wishes out of obstinacy, marries Amelia out of bravado, tires of her and proceeds to flirt with Becky Sharp, and dies a hero's death at Waterloo because he cannot help himself. Thackeray shows it all up without mercy, and he is always showing up similar things in great profusion. His satire depends largely for its effect on his manner. He conceals from us his indignation and contempt for the vices he describes, and writes of them carelessly, almost flippantly, as if they were the most natural things in the world. This is another effect gained by the reversal of the logical. But is such satire effective? I doubt it. I doubt that all Thackeray's analysis of the vice and rottenness of fashionable society ever turned one sinner from the evil of his ways. People do not mind being shown up, although they hate to be made ridiculous. Now Dickens's method of satirizing was to make the objects which he attacked ridiculous. He took the weak points of a man or an institution, carried them to extremes and showed their logical absurdity. When people saw in the person of Bumble what workhouse beadles were—not bad, not vicious—but absurd institutions, they desired to get rid of them. Dickens might have abused Yorkshire schools till he was blue in the face, have analysed and shown up their weak points, and written to the papers, and yet might have done little good. Instead, he drew Squeers, and while people laughed consumedly, they also made a mental note that such persons as Squeers were an absurd blot on our social system and should forthwith be abolished. When Dickens wished to satirize America, he did not make an exhaustive analysis of the American system. He simply accepted its absurdities, exaggerated them to the utmost limit, embodied them in Elijah Pogram, Jefferson Brick, and their fellows, and drew a crushing satirical picture of a state of society eaten up with self-conceit. When a man beholds his natural face in a distorting mirror, he is not quite so pleased with himself as before; and when the Americans beheld themselves in the mirror of Martin Chuzzlewit they were not pleased either. If Thackeray had taken on himself to analyse and expose their moral corruption, they would probably have felt flattered. Dickens's method of satire was the reductio ad absurdum, and appealed to the imagination. Further, Thackeray's satire was generally aimed at individuals and had for its object moral reform. We must admit, however, in favour of Thackeray's method that it produced brilliant, consistent, and life-like pictures of society such as Dickens was wholly incapable of drawing. If you want real life, go to Thackeray; but if you wish to get out of this world for a while, and take a short holiday in another and a more pleasant world, go to Dickens. I hope no one will think that I am here belittling the genius of Thackeray. Vanity Fair will ever stand as one of the most brilliant works of fiction in the language. It is more consistently good than anything Dickens ever did. As a humorous and, at the same time, dreadfully caustic picture of society it is incomparable. In breadth of view and variety of incident it rivals Tom Jones; in minute observation of detail it reminds one of Jane Austen.

It is as a creator of character that, in my opinion, Dickens has his greatest advantage over Thackeray. The man who maintains that Dickens is a genius of the first order must be finally driven to take his stand on Dickens's characters. Thackeray's characters are photographic; they are excellent copies of life. Yet, admirable as many of them are, we can never quite get away from the suspicion that they were made for a purpose. Thackeray takes them to pieces with such skill that we are half inclined to think that he also puts them together. But Dickens's characters are pure creatures of the imagination. They are not studies of, but splendid additions to, the human race. Dickens does not analyse their motives, and could not if he would. He describes them, and we feel that they are alive. The very smallest of them is indelibly impressed on our imagination. Dickens conquered Thackeray completely in his minor characters. I have read The Newcomes recently, for example, but I have no clear idea of the distinction between Mrs. Brian Newcome and Mrs. Hobson Newcome; I have read Chuzzlewit less recently, but I am quite clear about Mr. Chevy Slime and Mr. Tigg.

Thackeray produced a tremendous variety of characters, but the large majority of them, I should say, are unpleasant. Thackeray, when all is said and done, was first and last a moralist; and it was his aim as a moralist to make his characters unpleasant. There are few lovable characters in Pendennis; there are none in Vanity Fair. The few respectable characters are all figure-heads, and as for the remainder, if it were not for the humour and dramatic force with which they are pictured to us, the description of such people as Becky Sharp, Sir Pitt Crawley, Lord Steyne, and Jos. Sedley could give little pleasure. As it is, one feels that outside the pages of Thackeray one would give a good deal to avoid meeting them. But who would not give his dearest possession for the privilege of beholding in the flesh Sam Weller, Mr. Micawber, Sairey Gamp, Mr. Dick, and even such unmitigated scoundrels as Jingle and Squeers. There are in Dickens many sorts of characters, but only one sort is great—the characters whom Dickens himself found amusing. The characters he admired, such as Nicholas, are wooden; the characters he hated are too hateful; but the characters, whether pleasant or unpleasant, in whom he found something amusing are all at least interesting. Those whom he found amusing and at the same time lovable are his greatest characters.

The persons in Dickens's pages whom I call his great characters are frequently accused of being impossible. You might as well say that a hippopotamus or a duck-billed platypus is impossible because it does not suit your ideas of what is right and proper. The existence of the hippopotamus is its justification, and it is so also with a Dickens character. It is obviously not copied, nor is it a mere abstraction. It is vividly alive. You could not have created it, and you know that nobody else but Dickens could. I think it quite possible that a very clever man might produce a Colonel Newcome, or a Blanche Amory, or even a Becky Sharp; but I assert that no one but Dickens could produce a Sairey Gamp or a Mr. Toots, and that nobody would be mad enough to try.

Dickens's characters are improbable, that I grant you. But any man with a marked individuality is improbable. It is all the people in the world to one against his being what he is. Dickens's characters are just a little more improbable, that is all. Dickens's work is called by Chesterton rather mythology than history or fiction, the mythology of the lower middle class. Micawber and Pecksniff, like Falstaff and Lear, Hector and Achilles, are immortal realities, an undying possession of humanity. Their alleged impossibility is, in fact, their passport to immortality. Thackeray's exact copies of life may grow faded and out of date; but Dickens's creations will never be any more impossible than when he created them. They will never be too impossible for our acceptance. The glories of a Toots and a Swiveller were veiled from the eyes of Thackeray. If he could have conceived such characters, he would have exposed their weaknesses (an easy task), and covered them with ridicule and contempt. But as depicted by the kindly hand of Dickens, who is not ready to own them as fellow creatures and admit that they are lovable?

The mention of Pecksniff reminds me that Dickens is sometimes accused of merely attaching a label to his characters, of making them living embodiments of some trait or peculiarity; in other words, that Dickens, like Ben Jonson, made his characters mere illustrations of some particular humour. Thus Mark Tapley may be designated by the word "jolly," Micawber will always be "hoping for something to turn up," Pecksniff will always be playing the hypocrite. But though Pecksniff is first and foremost a hypocrite, and though Dickens's purpose is undoubtedly to impress on us and exaggerate his hypocrisy, he has all the other essentials of a human being. He can, for example, get drunk. Let me read a few extracts from that marvellous scene from Martin Chuzzlewit when Mr. Pecksniff gets tipsy at Todgers' Boarding House. If any one, after reading it, can still assert that it is an abstraction or impossible, I give him up in despair.

The gentlemen, after the toasts have been drunk, rejoin the ladies:

Mr. Pecksniff had followed his younger friends up-stairs and taken a chair at the side of Mrs. Todgers. He had also spilt a cup of coffee over his legs without appearing to be aware of the circumstance; nor did he seem to know that there was muffin on his knee.

"And how have they used you down-stairs, sir?" asked the hostess.

"Their conduct has been such, my dear madam," said Mr. Pecksniff, "as I can never think of without emotion, or remember without a tear. Oh, Mrs. Todgers!"

"My goodness!" exclaimed the lady. "How low you are in your spirits, sir!"

"I am a man, my dear madam," said Mr. Pecksniff, shedding tears, and speaking with an imperfect articulation, "but I am also a father. I am also a widower. My feelings, Mrs. Todgers, will not consent to be entirely smothered, like the young children in the Tower. They are grown up, and the more I press the bolster on them, the more they look round the corner of it."

He suddenly became conscious of the bit of muffin, and stared at it intently: shaking his head the while, in a forlorn and imbecile manner, as if he regarded it as his evil genius, and mildly reproached it.

"She was beautiful, Mrs. Todgers," he said, turning his glazed eye again upon her, without the least preliminary notice. "She had a small property."

"So I have heard," said Mrs. Todgers with great sympathy.

"Those are her daughters," said Mr. Pecksniff, pointing out the young ladies, with increased emotion.

Mrs. Todgers had no doubt about it.

"Mercy and Charity," said Mr. Pecksniff, "Charity and Mercy. Not unholy names, I hope?"

"Mr. Pecksniff!" cried Mrs. Todgers. "What a ghastly smile! Are you ill, sir?"

He pressed his hand upon her arm, and answered in a solemn manner, and a faint voice, "Chronic."

"Chronic?" cried the frightened Mrs. Todgers.

"Chron-ic," he repeated with some difficulty. "Chronic. A chronic disorder. I have been its victim from childhood. It is carrying me to my grave."

"Heaven forbid!" cried Mrs. Todgers.

"Yes, it is," said Mr. Pecksniff, reckless with despair. "I am rather glad of it, upon the whole. You are like her, Mrs. Todgers."

"Don't squeeze me so tight, pray, Mr. Pecksniff. If any of the gentlemen should notice us."

"For her sake," said Mr. Pecksniff. "Permit me. In honour of her memory. For the sake of a voice from the tomb. You are very like her, Mrs. Todgers! What a world this is!"

"Ah! Indeed you may say that!" cried Mrs. Todgers.

"I am afraid it is a vain and thoughtless world," said Mr. Pecksniff, overflowing with despondency. "These young people about us. Oh! what sense have they of their responsibilities? None. Give me your other hand, Mrs. Todgers."

The lady hesitated, and said "she didn't like."

"Has a voice from the grave no influence?" said Mr. Pecksniff with dismal tenderness. "This is irreligious! My dear creature."

"Hush!" urged Mrs. Todgers. "Really you mustn't."

"It's not me," said Mr. Pecksniff. "Don't suppose it's me: it's the voice; it's her voice."

Mrs. Pecksniff, deceased, must have had an unusually thick and husky voice for a lady, and rather a stuttering voice, and to say the truth somewhat of a drunken voice, if it had ever borne much resemblance to that in which Mr. Pecksniff spoke just then. But perhaps this was delusion on his part.

"It has been a day of enjoyment, Mrs. Todgers, but still it has been a day of torture. It has reminded me of my loneliness. What am I in the world?"

"An excellent gentleman, Mr. Pecksniff," said Mrs. Todgers.

"There is consolation in that too," cried Mr. Pecksniff. "Am I?"

"There is no better man living," said Mrs. Todgers, "I am sure."

Mr. Pecksniff smiled through his tears, and slightly shook his head.... "Chronic—chronic! Let's have a little drop of something to drink."

"Bless my life, Miss Pecksniffs!" cried Mrs. Todgers, aloud, "your dear pa 's took very poorly!"

Mr. Pecksniff straightened himself by a surprising effort, as every one turned hastily towards him; and standing on his feet, regarded the assembly with a look of ineffable wisdom. Gradually it gave place to a smile; a feeble, helpless, melancholy smile; bland almost to sickliness. "Do not repine, my friends," said Mr. Pecksniff, tenderly. "Do not weep for me. It is chronic." And with these words, after making a futile attempt to pull off his shoes, he fell into the fireplace.

In conclusion, I am sorry that I have not time to discuss the actual style of our two writers. I had hoped to dwell a little on Dickens's descriptive power, in which he far excels Thackeray; on that wonderful photographic imagination of his which impresses on our minds the scenery of his novels down to the smallest details as vividly as it was impressed on his own, on his splendid handling of crowds and big stage effects. I am afraid that in the foregoing remarks I have dwelt too much on Dickens's strong points; I have said nothing of his cheap melodrama, his maudlin pathos, his frequent bad taste; but after all, these are but comparatively small blots on a great genius, and they nearly always occur where Dickens is trying to impress us in a way that does not come naturally to him. I am afraid, also, that I have emphasized mainly Thackeray's weak points and neglected his strong ones. I set off, however, avowedly as a champion of Dickens, and I should find it hard to pose as an impartial judge, for while I only admire Thackeray, I love Dickens.

PESSIMISM

This poem and the poem entitled "Eternal Silence" were found among Professor Bateman's papers. While there is some doubt as to their authorship, there are indications that they are probably his workmanship.

WHAT IS THE END TO WHICH ALL THINGS PROGRESS?

BRAINS AND INTELLECT

A fugitive production—occasion unknown

Accepting the well-known dictum of Appius Claudius that the government is the belly of the body-politic, and the general mob of citizens "the limbs and outward flourishes," what section of the community, shall we say, constitutes the brains? We might, at first, be inclined to assign the role of "brains" to those members of the community who are particularly occupied with the pursuit of learning, such as, for example (to take a large and representative class), University professors. A little reflection, however, suffices to show that we should be mistaken. The men who are usually spoken of as the "brains of the community" are of a very different type from University professors. They are men who maintain fair round bellies and expansive watch chains, who ride in automobiles and smoke imposing cigars. Clearly, University professors are not in this class.

Where, then, shall we place those members of the community who make the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake their chief occupation? It may help us towards the solution of this weighty problem if we make a distinction between brains and intellect, and call such people as professors, philosophers, and poets the "intellect" of the community. We shall then have to define clearly what we mean by "brains," and what we mean by "intellect."

"Brains" are what a man uses when he has some practical end in view, such as more money in his pocket, better food to eat, better clothes to wear; "intellect" deals with problems (usually classed as "academic") which have no immediate commercial value—such as whether the sun goes round the earth or the earth round the sun, or why an apple falls to the ground. "Brains" are generally admired, because everybody can see the results which they achieve; "intellect" is usually treated with neglect or indifference because it works in a sphere which is far out of range of the common vision.

What, then, is the justification for the maintenance in a community of a purely intellectual class of people, occupied with problems which have nothing to do with actual life, and which apparently contribute nothing to the common stock of "useful" knowledge, the kind of knowledge that can be turned into money. Why, for example, do we maintain at great expense in our universities professors of literature, philosophy, and pure science to devote their time to the study of merely academic problems, and to teach our sons and daughters such a smattering of these things as is of no practical use to them whatever, and which causes most of them a good deal of trouble and annoyance?

It is easy to understand why we should maintain professors of such subjects as engineering, dentistry, and agriculture, for engines and teeth are both things that will not allow themselves to be neglected, and it is undoubtedly a good thing to make two blades of grass grow where only one grew before. But why should a man be afraid to devote his time to making an appreciation of Greek tragedy grow where none grew before, or to try to arouse an interest in such a problem as the psychology of metre.

It may be argued, of course, that University professors provide a good deal of amusement for their students, that their personal peculiarities, carefully observed through four years of class-room work, often furnish rich entertainment at convivial gatherings. Or, again, it may be urged that the study of professors (in so far as professors can be regarded as human) is the study of human nature, and that students who observe their professors carefully are gaining an acquaintance with a practical branch of the science of anthropology. But neither of these answers to our question can be regarded as wholly satisfactory.

Let us consider briefly the function of intellect in the individual, and see if it will throw any light on the function of the intellectual class in the community. When intellect is developed at all in the average citizen, its sole function seems to be to make him either uncomfortable or objectionable. For suppose a small puny growth of intellect does appear in a man, it generally has one of two effects; either it makes him dissatisfied with himself, troubled with vague yearnings after a higher life, worried with misgivings on religious questions, annoyed by the feeling that he ought to be able to enjoy books and pictures and music which afford him no real enjoyment; or, he becomes abnormally satisfied with himself, propounds half-baked theories of the universe, teems with criticisms of books which he has not read or does not understand, or bubbles over with solutions of problems upon which he has never seriously pondered.

The one thing that such men can seldom be got to do is to set to work to develop that little growth of intellect, to feed and nourish it by the study of literature and philosophy, so that they may at last be enabled to think out problems for themselves, or at least to appreciate intelligently the solutions of them which great thinkers have placed on record. When, oh when, will men understand that intellectual things are not an amusement nor a hobby, to be taken up as a side-line in one's spare time, but that the appreciation of the things of the intellect is the reward of the most difficult and baffling of all kinds of labour; that one will appreciate Plato or Sophocles, Shakespeare or Milton, Descartes or Newton, precisely in proportion to the distance which one has climbed along the rugged path which leads to the intellectual peaks upon which those giants of thought sit eternally throned, that the cultivation of the intellect is not the work of four years or forty years, but of a lifetime, nay, of many lifetimes?

asks Clough, and to this question all our greatest thinkers have answered—Yes.

It is the few who are convinced of the value and seriousness of intellectual things, and who do not flinch from the self-sacrifice and apparently fruitless labour which the pursuit of such things involves, that humanity as a whole owes its progress. If it were not for these men, whom Bunyan would call the intellectual Greathearts of the community, we should still, as a race, be sunk in barbarism. Intellect in the average man is allowed to atrophy; in the small percentage who strive after culture it accomplishes nothing of value, but it is the latter people who form the rank and file of the intellectual army. Gradually, little by little, that army is advancing;. every now and then some great general appears—a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Newton, a Kant, a Darwin—and under his leadership a victory is won; now this outpost of the hosts of darkness is captured, now that, and the flag of the human intellect is raised upon its ramparts. Meanwhile, the mass of mankind trudges on heavily, often two or three centuries behind. Next arrive the inventors, the reformers, the men of constructive intellect, who take the results of the great thinkers and plan their application to life; and lastly come the men of "brains" in their fur coats and fair round bellies, promote their companies, organize their industries, make their political speeches, and finally gather in the shekels, and also most of the honour and glory. By this time the intellectual army is again far ahead, attacking the next outpost of the kingdom of chaos and Old Night. And so humanity moves onward and upward.

What, then, is the function of the academic class in the community? Simply to keep the flag of human intellect flying, a work which, in most cases, involves some self-sacrifice in those who devote themselves to it. A professor, for example, though a man of intellect, is not necessarily devoid of brains, and he might well turn those brains to advantage in some more lucrative profession. As it is, he is compelled to a large extent to sacrifice his individuality, to degrade his intellect with drudgery which is beneath it, to stand as a mere intermediary or conduit-pipe between the student and knowledge. At the same time, if, out of the hundreds of students who pass through his hands in one academic year, he succeeds in inspiring even a single individual with a true desire for culture, his existence for that year is fully justified, for has he not added one member to the band of intellectual pioneers who will finally, we hope, take possession, in the name of humanity, of the whole universe of thought?