1859.]

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WE

THOUGHTS ON MODERN

E live in a literary age. If books are deficient in this nineteenth century, certainly it is not in quantity. There is a plethora of books. They are to us as the jungle is to our Indian soldiers. We struggle through life waistdeep in them. We gasp, we faint under the accumulated treasures of intellect that are pressed upon us with a fatal liberality. To be sure this is a fault on the right side. How our ancestors in the last century managed to exist, it is not easy for us to conceive. For in those days books-taking the term in the popular sense were few indeed. Ponderous dictionaries, scientific books, scholastic books there were in plenty. But books such as one could read-new books -three-volume books, magazines, travels, charming' fashionable novels, green and yellow monthlies' -where were they? A hundred and fifty years ago was born in the sprightly soul of Dick Steele the great periodical' idea, and the result was the Tatler and Spectator, and the rest of that respectable and laudable tribe. But only fancy a public compelled to slake its thirst for light literature in the polished dulness and prim pleasantries of Addison and Steele, and to swallow diurnal doses of morality disguised in little histories about Florinda and her lap-dog or Chloë and her fan. We, who luxuriate in a copious stream of journals and hebdomadals, monthlies and quarterlies, think with a shudder of the desolate and benighted state of our forefathers, our only consolation being that they did not know their own misery. But if they were worse off than ourselves as to quantity, I am not at all sure that they were so as to quality.

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In fiction they had not Scott, or Bulwer, or Dickens, or Thackeray ; but perhaps they would not have exchanged Goldsmith, or Fielding, or Smollett, or Sterne for either of them; and they had Richardson, whose fame, great as it is, has never been half so great as he deserved. There is not, in my opinion, a tale in any language at all worthy to be put on the same shelf with Clarissa Harlowe. The consummate art with which the characters are grouped, and the simple and masterly grandeur of their separate treatment, so that each is perfect not only absolutely but relatively, tells of true and unrivalled genius; and for the heroine-perhaps even Shakspeare never drew one more exquisite. From Ada's self

To her that did but yesterday suspire, There was not such a gracious creature born;

grace, purity, refinement, gentleness, patience, truth, and lovelove so intense that it survived all sense of personal outrage and illtreatment, yet so pure that for a vicious nature, once proved to be such, it could not endure a day;a modesty so majestic in its stainless lustre that vice, the coarsest, foulest, and most brutal, felt in her presence strange emotions first of wonder and then of shame, yet a girlish vivacity and playfulness so indomitable as even to show itseif at times, fitfully radiant, amidst the gloomy and sorrowful depths of that long and bitter trial;-a heart so rich in human affection that it would have made earth a paradise for the infatuated sensualist who might have won but would not win it, yet so full of the love of God that it bore without a murmur the blighting of a life thus formed

and fitted for all earthly joy, and welcomed, with a smile so heavenly that it turned a remorseless sinner into a zealous penitent and saint, her ghastly bridegroom, Death :all these were Clarissa's; and where, on paper, shall we look upon her like again? What are our novel heroines in this nineteenth century? Amy Robsart, Flora MacIvor, Lucy Ashton, Diana Vernon-you that on your first appearance so captivated the world-we summon you to pass before us that we may pronounce in our calmer moments deliberate judgment on you all. Well, you are sweet creatures; but are you genuine women? Does any one of you possess a fair specimen of that miraculous complicationa woman's heart? Are you not rather the romantic creations of a brain impregnated with the spirit of an age when woman was worshipped, but not understood? And is it not rather in the Rotten-Row sense that you are 'charming?' Then there was Mr. James, the most wonderful grinder of threevolume novels, on the Scott principle, that the world has ever seen

not wholly unreadable, though they always begin with a tall knight and a short one, and end with the triumph of virtue over vice. Of Mr. James's heroines one can say nothing, simply because there is nothing to say. Their business is to be persecuted by vicious knights, and rescued by virtuous ones; and this they certainly manage to perform tolerably well. But both for Scott and his satellite James there is this to be said, that they are not novel-writers, but romance-writers; and that in a romance we do not look for any deep knowledge of human nature, but only or chiefly for picturesque description and exciting incident. And inasmuch as poetry is an infinitely higher thing than romance, so I believe that it is on his poetry (the most Homeric since Homer), and not on his romances, that Sir Walter's title to immortality will mainly

rest.

But Clarissa has led me from my subject, which is not our heroines but our books-the literature with which the public has been fed since circulating libraries flourished. It

is a copious if not generous, a various if not altogether wholesome, diet. Most abundant of all, there is the novel and the pseudo-novel. To the latter class belong our serial stories, among writers of which the most notable are Mr.Dickens and Mr. Thackeray. These are not, properly speaking, novels, for they are not constructed on the principles of that art, wholly unknown to the ancients, which may be called the narrativedramatic, and for perfection in which genius of much the same order and degree is required as for the drama itself. Nicholas Nickleby and Pendennis are not to be called novels, any more than are Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey. It is indeed simply as a humorist that Mr. Dickens has taken and will keep his place among the remarkable writers of the age. If he had written only the Pickwick Papers this would be evident enough. They were a series of sketches of middle and lower-class life and manners perfectly admirable in their way, and written with a freshness and keenness of observation absolutely marvellous; but it was an observation not of character and motive, but of the mere externals of humanity-appearance, manner, and mode of self-expression. From the beginning to the end there is not one of the characters which is real. Every one of them is a caricature, not of a human being, but of the superficial peculiarities of one. There is no more reality in Pickwick himself than there is in Monsieu Jabot. Both are the offspring of the same intellectual faculty; both are exquisitely ridiculous, but neither is the result of any particular knowledge of human nature. It is to a sense of mere humour, and that not of the highest class, that we owe both these creations. Compare Pickwick and Falstaff. We laugh at Falstaff as we do at Pickwick for that which is personally ridiculous in him, but we laugh much more at his moral weaknesses and follies. In Pickwick it is the tights and gaiters; in Falstaff it is the man. For Dickens has humour only, Shakspeare had both humour and wit; Shakspeare had creative genius, Dickens has only an extraor dinarily-developed minetic faculty.

1859.]

It is unquestionable, too, that the later works of Dickens have by no means realized the expectations raised by his first flights. It may be said indeed that succeedevery ing series of green monthlies' has stood a step lower than its prede cessor, till at last they have died out from mere exhaustion of popularity. This is no doubt partly owing to the loss of the freshness and keen edge which are peculiar to maiden authorship; but also, I believe, it is in a great degree the result of what Coleridge called 'ultra-crepidation.' Having succeeded with Pickwick, Mr. Dickens resolved on attempting elaborate stories with mysterious plots, tragic dénouemens, and all the rest of it. The consequence was that the stories failed both as regular tales and as humorous sketches of real life. Their pathos is apt to be tawdry sentiment, their passion torn to rags, and their interest wound up to the requisite pitch at the end by the coarse artifice of a savage murder. On the other hand, each character, having to perform his part in a complicated narrative, is cramped and straitened into a more or less artificial aspect, and loses the free and life-like appearance in which the unfettered Pickwickians each and all of them rejoice. The power of comic delineation in such characters as Squeers, Sairey Gamp, Mantalini, Pecksniff, and the rest, is no doubt extraordinary; but the interest even in these is damped by the painful elaboration and total want of skill with which the story is constructed; and many of the characters are unnatural-odd without being amusing, and grotesque rather than ridiculous. If Mr. Dickens had stood manfully to his trade, which is the caricaturing of real life and manners, and avoided all tragical and hysterical writing, every new work which he produced would have added to his fame. The success of the murder in Oliver Twist may probably have operated to divert him from the true line of his business; but there are thousands who can describe a murder so as to thrill your very soul with horror, for one who can construct a 'plot' for a novel or a play. In Household Words Mr. Dickens is himself

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again; there are papers in it evidently bearing the mark of the editor and well worthy of his palmiest days.

The humour of Mr. Thackeray is of a far finer and more subtle and at the same time of a less joyous and genial order, than that of Mr. Dickens. The essential difference between them is, that one is a humorist only, the other a humorist and satirist combined. The weapon which Mr. Dickens employs to excite risibility is little more than what is commonly called 'fun,' and implies none but the most superficial knowledge of the motives of human action; the chief implement used by Mr. Thackeray is the exposure of the littlenesses, meannesses, and vulgarities of his fellow-creatures. The most successful of Mr. Dickens's humorous characters are rarely persons for whom we feel anything like animosity or contempt. Most of them, however ridiculous, are, so far as they have any characters at all, rather amiable than otherwise. But with Thackeray we laugh and despise or hate at the same time. Dickens will sketch you a Bath footman utterly ridiculous in his pompous mimicry of high life, but so as that your laughter, if slightly tinged with contempt, is in the main good-natured enough. Thackeray will take a London functionary of the same order and anatomize him with a merciless delight, giving page after page and chapter after chapter to the exposure of all the vulgarity, all the spite, the envy, the pride and servility, the selfishness and meanness which are apt to be found in the worst specimens of the class, at the same time rendering' (as the painters say) with a forty preRaphaelite power all that is most ridiculous in the form of expression and style of spelling characteristic of it, till we wonder how in one life there can have been time and opportunity for acquiring knowledge so perfect in its kind. There can be no doubt which of these two faculties is the highest, and which in the long run will be most lucrative. Mankind likes ment, but it has a positive passion for satire. If you make your characters lifelike, and at the same time utterly contemptible and ridiculous,

amuse