From Chaucer to Tennyson
with its wealth of mediaeval adornment. In the _Ode to Autumn_, and _Ode
to a Nightingale_, the Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the
warmer hues of romance.
There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats's life. The
seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent
genius, but he knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must
die
Before high-piled books in charactry
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain.
His disease was aggravated, possibly, by the stupid brutality with which
the reviewers had treated _Endymion_; and certainly by the hopeless love
which devoured him. "The very thing which I want to live most for," he
wrote, "will be a great occasion of my death. If I had any chance of
recovery, this passion would kill me." In the autumn of 1820, his
disease gaining apace, he went on a sailing vessel to Italy,
accompanied by a single friend, a young artist named Severn. The change
was of no avail, and he died at Rome a few weeks after, in his
twenty-sixth year.
Keats was, above all things, the _artist_, with that love of the
beautiful and that instinct for its reproduction which are the artist's
divinest gifts. He cared little about the politics and philosophy of his
day, and he did not make his poetry the vehicle of ideas. It was
sensuous poetry, the poetry of youth and gladness. But if he had lived,
and if, with wider knowledge of men and deeper experience of life, he
had attained to Wordsworth's spiritual insight and to Byron's power of
passion and understanding, he would have become a greater poet than
either. For he had a style--a "natural magic"--which only needed the
chastening touch of a finer culture to make it superior to any thing in
modern English poetry, and to force us back to Milton or Shakspere for a
comparison. His tombstone, not far from Shelley's, bears the inscription
of his own choosing: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But
it would be within the limits of truth to say that it is written in
large characters on most of our contemporary poetry. "Wordsworth," says
Lowell, "has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their
forms." And he has influenced these out of all proportion to the amount
which he left, or to his intellectual range, by virtue of the exquisite
quality of his _technique_.
* * * * *
1. Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England, 18th-19th
Centuries. London: Macmillan & Co., 1883.
2. Wordsworth's Poems. Chosen and edited by Matthew
Arnold. London, 1879.
3. Poetry of Byron. Chosen and arranged by Matthew
Arnold. London, 1881.
4. Shelley. Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound,
The Cenci, Lyrical Pieces.
5. Landor. Pericles and Aspasia.
6. Coleridge. Table-Talk, Notes on Shakspere, The Ancient
Mariner, Christabel, Love, Ode to France, Ode to the Departing
Year, Kubla Khan, Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni,
Youth and Age, Frost at Midnight.
7. De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium Eater,
Flight of a Tartar Tribe, Biographical Sketches.
8. Scott. Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, Bride of Lammermoor,
Rob Roy, Antiquary, Marmion, Lady of the Lake.
9. Keats. Hyperion, Eve of St. Agnes, Lyrical Pieces.
Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1871.
CHAPTER VIII.
FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME.
1832-1893.
The literature of the past fifty years is too close to our eyes to
enable the critic to pronounce a final judgment, or the literary
historian to get a true perspective. Many of the principal writers of
the time are still living, and many others have been dead but a few
years. This concluding chapter, therefore, will be devoted to the
consideration of the few who stand forth, incontestably, as the leaders
of literary thought, and who seem likely, under all future changes of
fashion and taste, to remain representatives of their generation. As
regards _form_, the most striking fact in the history of the period
under review is the immense preponderance in its imaginative literature
of prose fiction, of the novel of real life. The novel has become to the
solitary reader of to-day what the stage play was to the audiences of
Elizabeth's reign, or the periodical essay, like the _Tatler_ and
_Spectator_, to the clubs and breakfast-tables of Queen Anne's. And if
its criticism of life is less concentrated and brilliant than the drama
gives, it is far more searching and minute. No period has ever left in
its literary records so complete a picture of its whole society as the
period which is just closing. At any other time than the present, the
names of authors like Charlotte Bronte, Charles Kingsley, and Charles
Reade--names which are here merely mentioned in passing--besides many
others which want of space forbids us even to mention--would be of
capital importance. As it is, we must limit our review to the three
acknowledged masters of modern English fiction, Charles Dickens
(1812-1870), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), and "George
Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880).
It is sometimes helpful to reduce a great writer to his lowest term, in
order to see what the prevailing bent of his genius is. This lowest term
may often be found in his early work, before experience of the world has
overlaid his original impulse with foreign accretions. Dickens was much
more than a humorist, Thackeray than a satirist, and George Eliot than a
moralist; but they had their starting-points respectively in humor, in
burlesque, and in strong ethical and religious feeling. Dickens began
with a broadly comic series of papers, contributed to the _Old Magazine_
and the _Evening Chronicle_, and reprinted in book form, in 1836, as
_Sketches by Boz_. The success of these suggested to a firm of
publishers the preparation of a number of similar sketches of the
misadventures of cockney sportsmen, to accompany plates by the comic
draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour. This suggestion resulted in the _Pickwick
Papers_, published in monthly installments in 1836-1837. The series
grew, under Dickens's hand, into a continuous though rather loosely
strung narrative of the doings of a set of characters, conceived with
such exuberant and novel humor that it took the public by storm and
raised its author at once to fame. _Pickwick_ is by no means Dickens's
best, but it is his most characteristic and most popular book. At the
time that he wrote these early sketches he was a reporter for the
_Morning Chronicle_. His naturally acute powers of observation had been
trained in this pursuit to the utmost efficiency, and there always
continued to be about his descriptive writing a reportorial and
newspaper air. He had the eye for effect, the sharp fidelity to detail,
the instinct for rapidly seizing upon and exaggerating the salient
point, which are developed by the requirements of modern journalism.
Dickens knew London as no one else has ever known it, and, in
particular, he knew its hideous and grotesque recesses, with the strange
developments of human nature that abide there; slums like
Tom-all-Alone's, in _Bleak House_; the river-side haunts of Rogue
Riderhood, in _Our Mutual Friend_; as well as the old inns, like the
"White Hart," and the "dusky purlieus of the law." As a man, his
favorite occupation was walking the streets, where, as a child, he had
picked up the most valuable part of his education. His tramps about
London--often after nightfall--sometimes extended to fifteen miles in a
day. He knew, too, the shifts of poverty. His father--some traits of
whom are preserved in Mr. Micawber--was imprisoned for debt in the
Marshalsea prison, where his wife took lodging with him, while Charles,
then a boy of ten, was employed at six shillings a week to cover
blacking-pots in Warner's blacking warehouse. The hardships and
loneliness of this part of his life are told under a thin disguise in
Dickens's masterpiece, _David Copperfield_, the most autobiographical of
his novels. From these young experiences he gained that insight into the
lives of the lower classes and that sympathy with children and with the
poor which shine out in his pathetic sketches of Little Nell, in _The
Old Curiosity Shop_; of Paul Dombey; of poor Jo, in _Bleak House_; of
"the Marchioness," and a hundred other figures.
In _Oliver Twist_, contributed, during 1837-1838, to _Bentley's
Miscellany_, a monthly magazine of which Dickens was editor, he produced
his first regular novel. In this story of the criminal classes the
author showed a tragic power which he had not hitherto exhibited.
Thenceforward his career was a series of dazzling successes. It is
impossible here to particularize his numerous novels, sketches, short
tales, and "Christmas Stories"--the latter a fashion which he
inaugurated, and which has produced a whole literature in itself. In
_Nicholas Nickleby_, 1839; _Master Humphrey's Clock_, 1840; _Martin
Chuzzlewit_, 1844; _Dombey and Son_, 1848; _David Copperfield_, 1850,
and _Bleak House_, 1853, there is no falling off in strength. The last
named was, in some respects, and especially in the skillful
construction of the plot, his best novel. In some of his latest books,
as _Great Expectations_, 1861, and _Our Mutual Friend_, 1865, there are
signs of a decline. This showed itself in an unnatural exaggeration of
characters and motives, and a painful straining after humorous effects;
faults, indeed, from which Dickens was never wholly free. There was a
histrionic side to him, which came out in his fondness for private
theatricals, in which he exhibited remarkable talent, and in the
dramatic action which he introduced into the delightful public readings
from his works that he gave before vast audiences all over the United
Kingdom, and in his two visits to America. It is not surprising, either,
to learn that upon the stage his preference was for melodrama and farce.
His own serious writing was always dangerously close to the
melodramatic, and his humor to the farcical. There is much false art,
bad taste, and even vulgarity in Dickens. He was never quite a
gentleman, and never succeeded well in drawing gentlemen or ladies. In
the region of low comedy he is easily the most original, the most
inexhaustible, the most wonderful, of modern humorists. Creations such
as Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Micawber, Sam Weller, Sairy Gamp, take rank with
Falstaff and Dogberry; while many others, like Dick Swiveller, Stiggins,
Chadband, Mrs. Jellyby, and Julia Mills, are almost equally good. In the
innumerable swarm of minor characters with which he has enriched our
comic literature there is no indistinctness. Indeed, the objection that
has been made to him is that his characters are too distinct--that he
puts labels on them; that they are often mere personifications of a
single trick of speech or manner, which becomes tedious and unnatural by
repetition. Thus, Grandfather Smallweed is always settling down into his
cushion, and having to be shaken up; Mr. Jellyby is always sitting with
his head against the wall; Peggotty is always bursting her buttons off,
etc. As Dickens's humorous characters tend perpetually to run into
caricatures and grotesques, so his sentiment, from the same excess,
slops over too frequently into "gush," and into a too deliberate and
protracted attack upon the pity. A favorite humorous device in his style
is a stately and roundabout way of telling a trivial incident, as where,
for example, Mr. Roker "muttered certain unpleasant invocations
concerning his own eyes, limbs, and circulating fluids;" or where the
drunken man who is singing comic songs in the Fleet received from Mr.
Smangle "a gentle intimation, through the medium of the water-jug, that
his audience were not musically disposed." This manner was original with