English Literature
young man of society, whom he knows thoroughly, and whom he paints exactly
as he is,--a careless, good-natured but essentially selfish person, who
goes through life intent on his own interests. _Pendennis_ is a profound
moral study, and the most powerful arraignment of well-meaning selfishness
in our literature, not even excepting George Eliot's _Romola_, which it
suggests.
Two other novels, _The Newcomes_ (1855) and _The Virginians_ (1859),
complete the list of Thackeray's great works of fiction. The former is a
sequel to _Pendennis_, and the latter to _Henry Esmond;_ and both share the
general fate of sequels in not being quite equal in power or interest to
their predecessors. _The Newcomes_, however, deserves a very high place,--
some critics, indeed, placing it at the head of the author's works. Like
all Thackeray's novels, it is a story of human frailty; but here the
author's innate gentleness and kindness are seen at their best, and the
hero is perhaps the most genuine and lovable of all his characters.
Thackeray is known in English literature as an essayist as well as a
novelist. His _English Humorists_ and _The Four Georges_ are among the
finest essays of the nineteenth century. In the former especially,
Thackeray shows not only a wide knowledge but an extraordinary
understanding of his subject. Apparently this nineteenth-century writer
knows Addison, Fielding, Swift, Smollett, and other great writers of the
past century almost as intimately as one knows his nearest friend; and he
gives us the fine flavor of their humor in a way which no other writer,
save perhaps Larnb, has ever rivaled.[240] _The Four Georges_ is in a vein
of delicate satire, and presents a rather unflattering picture of four of
England's rulers and of the courts in which they moved. Both these works
are remarkable for their exquisite style, their gentle humor, their keen
literary criticisms, and for the intimate knowledge and sympathy which
makes the' people of a past age live once more in the written pages.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. In treating of Thackeray's view of life, as
reflected in his novels, critics vary greatly, and the following summary
must be taken not as a positive judgment but only as an attempt to express
the general impression of his works on an uncritical reader. He is first of
a realist, who paints life as he sees it. As he says himself, "I have no
brains above my eyes; I describe what I see.". His pictures of certain
types, notably the weak and vicious elements of society, are accurate and
true to life, but they seem to play too large a part in his books, and have
perhaps too greatly influenced his general judgment of humanity. An
excessive sensibility, or the capacity for fine feelings and emotions, is a
marked characteristic of Thackeray, as it is of Dickens and Carlyle. He is
easily offended, as they are, by the shams of society; but he cannot find
an outlet, as Dickens does, in laughter and tears, and he is too gentle to
follow Carlyle in violent denunciations and prophecies. He turns to
satire,--influenced, doubtless, by eighteenth-century literature which he
knew so well, and in which satire played too large a part.[241] His satire
is never personal, like Pope's, or brutal, like Swift's, and is tempered by
kindness and humor; but it is used too freely, and generally lays too much
emphasis on faults and foibles to be considered a true picture of any large
class of English society.
Besides being a realist and satirist, Thackeray is essentially a moralist,
like Addison, aiming definitely in all his work at producing a moral
impression. So much does he revere goodness, and so determined is he that
his Pendennis or his Becky Sharp shall be judged at their true value, that
he is not content, like Shakespeare, to be simply an artist, to tell an
artistic tale and let it speak its own message; he must explain and
emphasize the moral significance of his work. There is no need to consult
our own conscience over the actions of Thackeray's characters; the beauty
of virtue and the ugliness of vice are evident on every page.
Whatever we may think of Thackeray's matter, there is one point in which
critics are agreed,--that he is master of a pure and simple English style.
Whether his thought be sad or humorous, commonplace or profound, he
expresses it perfectly, without effort or affectation. In all his work
there is a subtle charm, impossible to describe, which gives the impression
that we are listening to a gentleman. And it is the ease, the refinement,
the exquisite naturalness of Thackeray's style that furnishes a large part
of our pleasure in reading him.
MARY ANN EVANS, GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1880)
In nearly all the writers of the Victorian Age we note, on the one hand, a
strong intellectual tendency to analyze the problems of life, and on the
other a tendency to teach, that is, to explain to men the method by which
these problems may be solved. The novels especially seem to lose sight of
the purely artistic ideal of writing, and to aim definitely at moral
instruction. In George Eliot both these tendencies reach a climax. She is
more obviously, more consciously a preacher and moralizer than any of her
great contemporaries. Though profoundly religious at heart, she was largely
occupied by the scientific spirit of the age; and finding no religious
creed or political system satisfactory, she fell back upon duty as the
supreme law of life. All her novels aim, first, to show in individuals the
play of universal moral forces, and second, to establish the moral law as
the basis of human society. Aside from this moral teaching, we look to
George Eliot for the reflection of country life in England, just as we look
to Dickens for pictures of the city streets, and to Thackeray for the
vanities of society. Of all the women writer's who have helped and are
still helping to place our English novels at the head of the world's
fiction, she holds at present unquestionably the highest rank.
LIFE. Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans, known to us by her pen name of George
Eliot, began to write late in life, when nearly forty years of age, and
attained the leading position among living English novelists in the ten
years between 1870 and 1880, after Thackeray and Dickens had passed away.
She was born at Arbury Farm, Warwickshire, some twenty miles from
Stratford-on-Avon, in 1819. Her parents were plain, honest folk, of the
farmer class, who brought her up in the somewhat strict religious manner of
those days. Her father seems to have been a man of sterling integrity and
of practical English sense,--one of those essentially noble characters who
do the world's work silently and well, and who by their solid worth obtain
a position of influence among their fellow-men.
A few months after George Eliot's birth the family moved to another home,
in the parish of Griff, where her childhood was largely passed. The scenery
of the Midland counties and many details of her own family life are
reflected in her earlier novels. Thus we find her and her brother, as
Maggie and Tom Tulliver, in _The Mill on the Floss;_ her aunt, as Dinah
Morris, and her mother, as Mrs. Poyser, in _Adam Bede_. We have a
suggestion of her father in the hero of the latter novel, but the picture
is more fully drawn as Caleb Garth, in _Middlemarch_. For a few years she
studied at two private schools for young ladies, at Nuneaton and Coventry;
but the death of her mother called her, at seventeen years of age, to take
entire charge of the household. Thereafter her education was gained wholly
by miscellaneous reading. We have a suggestion of her method in one of her
early letters, in which she says: "My mind presents an assemblage of
disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern; scraps of poetry
picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton; newspaper
topics, morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology,
and chemistry; reviews and metaphysics, all arrested and petrified and
smothered by the fast-thickening everyday accession of actual events,
relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations."
When Mary was twenty-one years old the family again moved, this time to
Foleshill Road, near Coventry. Here she became acquainted with the family
of Charles Bray, a prosperous ribbon manufacturer, whose house was a
gathering place for the freethinkers of the neighborhood. The effect of
this liberal atmosphere upon Miss Evans, brought up in a narrow way, with
no knowledge of the world, was to unsettle many of her youthful
convictions. From a narrow, intense dogmatism, she went to the other
extreme of radicalism; then (about 1860) she lost all sympathy with the
freethinkers, and, being instinctively religious, seemed to be groping
after a definite faith while following the ideal of duty. This spiritual
struggle, which suggests that of Carlyle, is undoubtedly the cause of that
gloom and depression which hang, like an English fog, over much of her
work; though her biographer, Cross, tells us that she was not by any means
a sad or gloomy woman.
In 1849 Miss Evans's father died, and the Brays took her abroad for a tour
of the continent. On her return to England she wrote several liberal
articles for the _Westminster Review_, and presently was made assistant
editor of that magazine. Her residence in London at this time marks a
turning point in her career and the real beginning of her literary life.
She made strong friendships with Spencer, Mill, and other scientists of the
day, and through Spencer met George Henry Lewes, a miscellaneous writer,
whom she afterwards married.
Under his sympathetic influence she began to write fiction for the
magazines, her first story being "Amos Barton" (1857), which was later
included in the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1858). Her first long novel,
_Adam Bede_, appeared early in 1859 and met with such popular favor that to
the end of her life she despaired of ever again repeating her triumph. But
the unexpected success proved to be an inspiration, and she completed _The
Mill on the Floss_ and began _Silas Marner_ during the following year. Not
until the great success of these works led to an insistent demand to know
the author did the English public learn that it was a woman, and not an
English clergyman, as they supposed, who had suddenly jumped to the front
rank of living writers.
Up to this point George Eliot had confined herself to English country life,
but now she suddenly abandoned the scenes and the people with whom she was
most familiar in order to write an historical novel. It was in 1860, while
traveling in Italy, that she formed "the great project" of _Romola_,--a
mingling of fiction and moral philosophy, against the background of the
mighty Renaissance movement. In this she was writing of things of which she
had no personal knowledge, and the book cost her many months of hard and
depressing labor. She said herself that she was a young woman when she
began the work, and an old woman when she finished it. _Romola_ (1862--
1863) was not successful with the public, and the same may be said of
_Felix Holt the Radical_ (1866) and _The Spanish Gypsy_ (1868). The
last-named work was the result of the author's ambition to write a dramatic
poem which should duplicate the lesson of _Romola_; and for the purpose of
gathering material she visited Spain, which she had decided upon as the
scene of her poetical effort. With the publication of _Middlemarch_
(1871-1872) George Eliot came back again into popular favor, though this
work is less spontaneous, and more labored and pedantic, than her earlier
novels. The fault of too much analysis and moralizing was even more
conspicuous in _Daniei Deronda_ (1876), which she regarded as her greatest
book. Her life during all this time was singularly uneventful, and the