THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, 1800-1859 In the minor poets, there is often a different strain. Arnold is beset with doubt, and hears no "clear call," such as Tennyson voices in Crossing the Bar . Swinburne, seeing the pessimistic side of the shield of evolution, exclaims:— "Thou hast fed one rose with dust of many men." Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), Oxford tutor, traveler, and educational examiner, was a poet who struggled with the doubt of the age. He loved— "To finger idly some old Gordian knot, Unskilled to sunder, and too weak to cleave, And with much toil attain to half-believe." His verse would be forgotten if it expressed only such an uncertain note; but his greatest poem thus records his belief in the value of life's struggle and gives a hint of final victory:— "Say not the struggle naught availeth, The labor and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain. "If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It maybe, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, And, but for you, possess the field." Although he paid too little attention to the form of his verse, some of his poems have the vitality of an earnest, thoughtful sincerity. Two poets, W. E. Henley (1849-1903) and Robert Bridges (1844- ), although they do not possess Robert Browning's genius, yet have much of his capacity to inspire others with joy in "the mere living." Henley, a cripple and a great sufferer, was a poet, critic, and London editor. His message is "the joy of life ":— "…the blackbird sings but a box-wood flute, But I lose him best of all For his song is all of the joy of life." His verse, which is elemental, full of enthusiasm and beauty, often reminds us of the work of the thirteenth-century lyrists. Robert Bridges, an Oxford graduate, physician, critic, and poet, also had for his creed: "Life and joy are one." His universe, like Shelley's, is an incarnation of the spirit of love:— "Love can tell, and love alone, Whence the million stars were strewn, Why each atom knows its own, How, in spite of woe and death, Gay is life, and sweet is breath." He wishes for no happier day than the present one. Bridges has been called a classical poet because he often selects Greek and Roman subjects for his verse, and because he writes with a formality, purity, and precision of style. He is, however, most delightful in such volumes as Shorter Poems and New Poems .[3] wherein he describes in a simple, artless manner English rural scenes and fireside joys. In 1913 he was appointed poet laureate, to succeed Alfred Austin. John Davidson (1857-1909), a Scotch poet, who came to London and wrestled with poverty, produced much uneven work. In his best verse, there is often a pleasing combination of poetic beauty and vigorous movement. Lines like these from his Ballad of a Nun have been much admired:— "On many a mountain's happy head Dawn lightly laid her rosy hand. The adventurous son took heaven by storm, Clouds scattered largesses of rain." Davidson later became an offensively shrill preacher of materialism and lost his early charm. Some of the best of his poetry may be found in Fleet Street Ecologues . Francis Thompson (1860-1907), a Catholic poet, who has been called a nineteenth-century Crashaw, passed much of his short life of suffering in London, where he was once reduced to selling matches on a street corner. His greatest poem, The Hound of Heaven (1893), is an impassioned lyrical rendering of the passage in the Psalms beginning: "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?" While fleeing down "the long savannahs of the blue," the poet hears a Voice say:— "Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me." William Watson (1858- ), a London poet, looked to Milton, Wordsworth, and Arnold as his masters. Some of Watson's best verse, such as Wordsworth's Grave , is written in praise of dead poets. His early volume Epigrams (1884), containing one hundred poems of four lines each, shows his power of conveying poetic thought in brief space. One of these poems is called Shelley and Harriet Westbrook :— "A star looked down from heaven and loved a flower, Grown in earth's garden—loved it for an hour: Let eyes that trace his orbit in the spheres Refuse not, to a ruin'd rosebud, tears."[4] Many expected to see Watson appointed poet-laureate to succeed Tennyson. Possibly mental trouble, which had temporarily affected him, influenced the choice; for Alfred Austin (1835-1913) received the laureateship in 1896. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Watson disliked those whom he called a "phrase-tormenting fantastic chorus of poets." His best verse shows depth of poetic thought, directness of expression, and a strong sense of moral values. The Victorian age has provided poetry to suit almost all tastes. In striking contrast with those who wrestled with the eternal verities are such poets and essayists as Austin Dobson (1840- ), long a clerk of the London Board of Trade, and Arthur Symons (1865- ), a poet and discriminating prose critic. Austin Dobson, who is fond of eighteenth-century subjects, is at his best in graceful society verse. His poems show the touch of a highly skilled metrical artist who has been a careful student of French poetry. His ease of expression, freshness, and humor charm readers of his verse without making serious demands on their attention. His best poems are found in Vignettes in Rhyme (1873), At the Sign of the Lyre (1885), and Collected Poems (1913). In choice of subject matter, Arthur Symons sometimes suggests the Cavalier poets. He has often squandered his powers in acting on his theory that it is one of the provinces of verse to record any momentary mood, irrespective of its value. His deftness of touch and acute poetic sensibility are evident in such short poems as Rain on the Down, Credo, A Roundel of Rest and The Last Memory .[5] [Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. From the drawing by himself, National Portrait Gallery .] The Pre-Raphaelite Movement.—In 1848 three artists, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), William Holman-Hunt (1827-1910), and John Everett Millais (1829-1896), formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Others soon joined the movement which was primarily artistic, not literary. Painting had become imitative. The uppermost question in the artist's mind was, "How would Raphael or some other authority have painted this picture?" The new school determined to paint things from a direct study of nature, without a thought of the way in which any one else would have painted them. They decided to assume the same independence as the Pre-Raphaelite artists, who expressed their individuality in their own way. Keats was the favorite author of the new school. The artists painted subjects suggested by his poems, and Rossetti thought him "the one true heir of Shakespeare." When the Pre-Raphaelite paintings were violently attacked, Ruskin examined them and decided that they conformed to the principles which he had already laid down in the first two volumes of Modern Painters (1843, 1846), so he wrote Pre-Raphaelitism (1851) as the champion of the new school. It has been humorously said that some of the painters of this school, before beginning a new picture, took an oath "to paint the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." The new movement in poetry followed this revolt in art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the head of the literary Pre-Raphaelites, though born in London, was of Italian parentage in which there was a strain of English blood. His poem, The Blessed Damozel (first published in 1850), has had the greatest influence of any Pre-Raphaelite literary production. This poem was suggested by The Raven (1845), the work of the American, Edgar Allan Poe. Rossetti said:— "I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover an earth, and I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearnings of the loved one in heaven." His Blessed Damozel, wearing a white rose, "Mary's gift," leaning out from the gold bar of heaven, watching with sad eyes, "deeper than the depth of waters stilled at even," for the coming of her lover, has left a lasting impression on many readers. Simplicity, beauty, and pathos are the chief characteristics of this poem, which, like Bryant's Thanatopsis , was written by a youth of eighteen. Painting was the chief work of Rossetti's life, but he wrote many other poems. Some of the most characteristic of these are the two semi-ballads, Sister Helen and The King's Tragedy, Rose Mary, Love's Nocturn , and Sonnets . One of the earliest of these Sonnets, Mary's Girlhood , describes the child as:— "An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet." His sister, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), the author of much religious verse, shows the unaffected naturalness of the new movement. This stanza from her Amor Mundi ( Love of the World ) is characteristic:— "So they two went together in glowing August weather, The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right; And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seemed to float on The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive to alight." William Morris (1834-1896), Oxford graduate, decorator, manufacturer, printer, and poet, was born near London. He was fascinated by The Blessed Damozel , and his first and most poetical volume, The Defence of Guinevere and Other Poems (1858), shows Rossetti's influence. The simplicity insisted on by the new school is evident in such lines as these from Two Red Roses across the Moon :— "There was a lady lived in a hall, Large in the eyes and slim and tall; And ever she sung from noon to noon, Two red roses across the moon." Morris later wrote a long series of narrative poems, called The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870) and an epic, Sigurd the Volsung (1876). He turned from Pre-Raphaelitism to become an earnest social reformer. In literature, the Pre-Raphaelite movement disdained the old conventions and started a miniature romantic revival, which emphasized individuality, direct expression, and the use of simple words. Its influence soon became merged in that of the earlier and far greater romantic school. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, 1800-1859 [Illustration: THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. From the painting by Sir F. Grant, National Portrait Gallery .] Life.—A prominent figure in the social and political life of England during the first part of the century was Thomas Babington Macaulay, a man of brilliant intellectual powers, strict integrity of character, and enormous capacity for work. He loved England and gloried in her liberties and her commercial prosperity. He served her for many years in the House of Commons, and he bent his whole energy and splendid forensic talent in favor of the Reform Bill of 1832, which secured greater political liberty for England. He was not a theorizer, but a practical man of affairs. Notwithstanding the fact that his political opinions were ready made for him by the Whig party, his career in the House was never "inconsistent with rectitude of intention and independence of spirit." He voted conscientiously for measures, although he personally sacrificed hundreds of pounds by so doing. He was a remarkable talker. A single speech of his has been known to change an entire vote in Parliament. Unlike Coleridge, he did not indulge in monologue, but showed to finest advantage in debate. His power of memory was wonderful. He often startled an opponent by quoting from a given chapter and page of a book. He repeated long passages from Paradise Lost ; and it is said he could have restored it complete, had it all been lost. His disposition was sweet and his life altogether fortunate. His biographer says of him: "Descended from Scotch Presbyterians —ministers many of them—on his father's side, and from a Quaker family on his mother's, he probably united as many guaranties of 'good birth,' in the moral sense of the word, as could be found in these islands at the beginning of the century." He was born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, in 1800. He was prepared for college at good private schools, and sent to Cambridge when he was eighteen. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1825; but, in the following year, he determined to adopt literature as a profession, owing to the welcome given to his Essay on Milton . As he had written epics, histories, and metrical romances prior to the age of ten, his choice of a profession was neither hasty nor unexpected. He continued from this time to write for the Edinburgh Review , but literature was not the only field of his activity. He had a seat in Parliament, and he held several positions under the Government. He was never unemployed. Many of his Essays were written before breakfast; while the other members of the household were asleep. He was a voracious reader. If he walked in the country or in London, he always carried a book to read. He spent some years in the government's service in India. On the long voyage over, he read incessantly, and on the return trip he studied the German language. He was beyond the age of forty when he found the leisure to begin his History of England . He worked uninterruptedly, but broke down early, dying at the age of fifty-nine. With his large, fine physique, his sturdy common sense, his interest in practical matters, and his satisfaction in the physical improvements of the people, Macaulay was a fine specimen of the English gentleman. Essays and Poetry.—Like De Quincey, Macaulay was a frequent contributor to periodicals. He wrote graphic essays on men of action and historical periods. The essays most worthy of mention in this class are Sir William Temple, Lord Clive, Warren Hastings , and William Pitt, Earl of Chatham . Some of his essays on English writers and literary subjects are still classic. Among these are Milton, Dryden, Addison, Southey's Edition of Pilgrim's Progress, Croker's Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson , and the biographical essays on Bunyan, Goldsmith , and Johnson , contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica . Although they may lack deep spiritual insight into the fundamental principles of life and literary criticism, these essays are still deservedly read by most students of English history and literature. Gosse says: "The most restive of juvenile minds, if induced to enter one of Macaulay's essays, is almost certain to reappear at the other end of it gratified, and, to an appreciable extent, cultivated." These Essays have developed a taste for general reading in many who could not have been induced to begin with anything dry or hard. Many who have read Boswell's Life of Johnson during the past fifty years say that Macaulay first turned their attention to that fascinating work. In the following quotation from an essay on that great biography, we may note his love for interesting concrete statements, presented in a vigorous and clear style:— "Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him, his chat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish sauce and veal pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked … all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood." Macaulay wrote some stirring ballad poetry, known as Lays of Ancient Rome , which gives a good picture of the proud Roman Republic in its valorous days. These ballads have something of Scott's healthy, manly ring. They contain rhetorical and martial stanzas, which are the delight of many boys; but they lack the spirituality and beauty that are necessary for great poetry. History of England.—Macaulay had for some time wondered why some one should not do for real history what Scott had done for imaginary history. Macaulay accordingly proposed to himself the task of writing a history that should be more accurate than Hume's and possess something of the interest of Scott's historical romances. In 1848 appeared the first two volumes of The History of England from the Accession of James II . Macaulay had the satisfaction of seeing his work, in sales and popular appreciation, surpass the novels. He intended to trace the development of English liberty from James II. to the death of George III.; but his minute method of treatment allowed him to unfold only sixteen years (from 1685 to 1701) of that period, so important in the constitutional and religious history of England. Macaulay's pages are not a graveyard for the dry bones of history. The human beings that figure in his chapters have been restored to life by his touch. We see Charles II. "before the dew was off in St. James's Park striding among the trees, playing with his spaniels, and flinging corn to his ducks." We gaze for a moment with the English courtiers at William III.:— "They observed that the king spoke in a somewhat imperious tone, even to the wife to whom he owed so much, and whom he sincerely loved and esteemed. They were amused and shocked to see him, when the Princess Anne dined with him, and when the first green peas of the year were put on the table, devour the whole dish without offering a spoonful to her Royal Highness, and they pronounced that this great soldier and politician was no better than a low Dutch bear."[6] Parts of the History are masterpieces of the narrator's art. A trained novelist, unhampered by historical facts, could scarcely have surpassed the last part of Macaulay's eighth chapter in relating the trial of the seven Bishops. Our blood tingles to the tips of our fingers as we read in the fifth chapter the story of Monmouth's rebellion and of the Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffreys. Macaulay shirked no labor in preparing himself to write the History . He read thousands of pages of authorities and he personally visited the great battlefields in order to give accurate descriptions. Notwithstanding such preparation, the value of his History is impaired, not only because he sometimes displays partisanship, but also because he fails to appreciate the significance of underlying social movements. He does not adopt the modern idea that history is a record of social growth, moral as well as physical. While a graphic picture of the exterior aspects of society is presented, we are given no profound insight into the interior movements of a great constitutional epoch. We may say of both Gibbon and Macaulay that they are too often mere surveyors, rather than geologists, of the historic field.[7] The popularity of the History is not injured by this method. Macaulay's grasp of fact never weakens, his love of manly courage never relaxes, his joy in bygone time never fails, his zeal for the free institutions of England never falters, and his style is never dull. General Characteristics.—The chief quality of Macaulay's style is its clearness. Contemporaries said that the printers' readers never had to read his sentences a second time to understand them. This clearness is attained, first, by the structure of his sentences. He avoids entangling clauses, obscure references in his pronouns, and long sentences whenever they are in danger of becoming involved and causing the reader to lose his way. In the second place, if the idea is a difficult one or not likely to be apprehended at its full worth, Macaulay repeats his meaning from a different point of view and throws additional light on the subject by varied illustrations. In the third place, his works abound in concrete ideas, which are more readily grasped than abstract ones. He is not content to write: "The smallest actual good is better than the most magnificent promise of impossibilities:" but he gives the concrete equivalent: "An acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia." It is possible for style to be both clear and lifeless, but his style is as energetic as it is clear. In narration he takes high rank. His erudition, displayed in the vast stores of fact that his memory retained for effective service in every direction, is worthy of special mention. While his excellences may serve as a model, he has faults that admirers would do well to avoid. His fondness for contrast often leads him to make one picture too bright and the other too dark. His love of antithesis has the merit of arousing attention in his readers and of crystallizing some thoughts into enduring epigrammatic form; but he is often led to sacrifice exact truth in order to obtain fine contrasts, as in the following:— "The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators." Macaulay is more the apostle of the material than of the spiritual. He lacked sympathy with theories and aspirations that could not accomplish immediate practical results. While his vigorous, easily-read pages exert a healthy fascination, they are not illumined with the spiritual glow that sheds luster on the pages of the great Victorian moral teachers, like Carlyle and Ruskin. He has, however, had more influence on the prose style of the last half of the nineteenth century than any other writer. Many continue to find in him their most effective teacher of a clear, energetic form of expression. JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN, 1801-1890 [Illustration: JOHN HENRY, CARDINAL NEWMAN. From the painting by Emmeline Deane .] Life.—Newman, who was born in London the year after Macaulay, represents a different aspect of English thought. Macaulay was thrilled in contemplating the great material growth and energy of the nation. Newman's interest was centered in the development of the spiritual life. This son of a practical London banker was writing verses at nine, a mock drama at twelve, and at fourteen, "he broke out into periodicals, The Spy and Anti-Spy , intended to answer one another." Of his tendency toward mysticism in youth, he wrote:— "I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true; my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers and influences. I thought life might be a dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world." In his youth he imitated the style of Addison, Johnson, and Gibbon. Few boys of his generation had as much practice in writing English prose. At the age of fifteen years and ten months he entered Trinity College, Oxford, from which he was graduated at nineteen. Two years later he won an Oxford fellowship, and in 1824 he became a clergyman of the Church of England. The rest of his life belongs mainly to theological history. He became one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement (1833-1841) toward stricter High-Church principles, as opposed to liberalism, and in 1845 he joined the Catholic Church. He was rector of the new Catholic University at Dublin from 1854 to 1858. In 1879 he was made a cardinal. Most of his later life was spent at Edgbaston (near Birmingham) at the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. Works and General Characteristics.—Newman was a voluminous writer. An edition of his works in thirty-six volumes was issued during his lifetime. Most of these properly belong to the history of theological thought. His Apologia pro Vita Sua , which he wrote in reply to an attack by Charles Kingsley, an Episcopal clergyman, is really, as its sub-title indicates, A History of His Religious Opinions . This intimate, sympathetic account of his religious experiences won him many friends. He wrote two novels: Loss and Gain (1848), which gives an excellent picture of Oxford society during the last days of the Oxford Movement, and Callista (1852), a vivid story of an early Christian martyr in Africa. His best-known hymn, Lead kindly Light , remains a favorite with all Christian denominations. The Dream of Gerontius (1865) is a poem that has been called "the happiest effort to represent the unseen world that has been made since the time of Dante." Those who are not interested in Newman's Episcopal or Catholic sermons or in his great theological treatises will find some of his best prose in the work known as The Idea of a University . This volume, containing 521 pages, is composed of discussions, lectures, and essays, prepared while he was rector of the University at Dublin. Newman's prose is worthy of close study for the following reasons:— (1) His style is a clear, transparent medium for the presentation of thought. He molded his sentences with the care of an artist. He said:— "I have been obliged to take great pains with everything I have ever written, and I often write chapters over and over again, besides innumerable corrections and interlinear additions." His definition of style is "a thinking out into language," not an ornamental "addition from without." He employs his characteristic irony in ridiculing those who think that " one man could do the thought and another the style":— "We read in Persian travels of the way in which young gentlemen go to work in the East, when they would engage in correspondence with those who inspire them with hope or fear. They cannot write one sentence themselves; so they betake themselves to the professional letter writer… The man of thought comes to the man of words; and the man of words duly instructed in the thought, dips the pen of desire into the ink of devotedness, and proceeds to spread it over the page of desolation. Then the nightingale of affection is heard to warble to the rose of loveliness, while the breeze of anxiety plays around the brow of expectation. This is what the Easterns are said to consider fine writing; and it seems pretty much the idea of the school of critics to whom I have been referring."[8] It was a pleasure to him to "think out" expressions like the following:— "Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt." "Calculation never made a hero." "Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." (2) Like Macaulay, Newman excelled in the use of the concrete. In his Historical Sketches , he imagines the agent of a London company sent to inspect Attica:— "He would report that the climate was mild; the hills were limestone; there was plenty of good marble; more pasture land than at first survey might have been expected, sufficient certainly for sheep and goats; fisheries productive; silver mines once, but long since worked out; figs fair; oil first rate; olives in profusion… He would not tell how that same delicate and brilliant atmosphere freshened up the pale olive till the olive forgot its monotony, and its cheek glowed like the arbutus or the beech of the Umbrian hills." A general statement about superseding "the operation of the laws of the universe in a multitude of ways" does not satisfy him. He specifies in those ways when he records his belief that saints have "raised the dead to life, crossed the sea without vessels, multiplied grain and bread, cured incurable diseases." (3) He modestly called himself a rhetorician, but he possessed also the qualities of an acute thinker. He displayed unusual sagacity in detecting the value of different arguments in persuasion. He could arrange in proper proportion the most complex tangle of facts, so as to make one clear impression. Such power made him one of the great Victorian masters of argumentative prose. THOMAS CARLYLE, 1795-1881 [Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE. From the painting by James McNeil Whistler, Glasgow Art Galleries .] Life.—Thomas Carlyle, who became one of the great tonic forces of the nineteenth century, was also most interested in spiritual growth. He specially emphasized the gospel of work as the only agency that could develop the atmosphere necessary for such growth, and, though deeply religious, he cared little for any special faith or creed. The son of a Scotch stone mason, Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. At the age of fourteen, the boy was ready for the University of Edinburgh, and he walked the eighty miles between it and his home. After he was graduated, he felt that he could not enter the ministry, as his parents wished. He therefore taught while he was considering what vocation to follow. In 1821 he met Jane Welsh, a brilliant and beautiful girl, descended on her father's side from John Knox and on her mother's from William Wallace. With the spirit of Wallace, she climbed in her girlhood up to places that a boy would have considered perilous. When she was forbidden to take up such a masculine study as Latin, she promptly learned to decline a Latin noun. Carlyle had much trouble in winning her; but she finally consented to be his wife, and they were married in 1826. In 1828 they went to live for six lonely years on her farm at Craigenputtock, sixteen miles north of Dumfries, where it was so quiet that Mrs. Carlyle said she could hear the sheep nibbling the grass a quarter of a mile away. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited them here and formed a lifelong friendship with Carlyle. It was here that Carlyle fought the intense spiritual battle of his early life, here that he wrote his first great work, Sartor Resartus , which his wife pronounced "a work of genius, dear." [Illustration: CRAIGENPUTTOCK.] It would be difficult to overestimate the beneficent influence which Mrs. Carlyle exerted over her husband in those trying days of poverty and spiritual stress. When her private correspondence was inadvisedly published after his death, she unwittingly became her husband's Boswell. For many years after the appearance of her letters, his personality and treatment of her were more discussed than his writings. Her references to marital unhappiness were for awhile given undue prominence; but with the passing of time there came a recognition of the fact that she was almost as brilliant a writer as her husband, that, like him, she was frequently ill, and that in expressing things in a striking way, she sometimes exercised his prerogative of exaggeration. "Carlyle has to take a journey always after writing a book," she declared, "and then gets so weary with knocking about that he has to write another book to recover from it." She once said that living with him was as bad as keeping a lunatic asylum. [Illustration: MRS. CARLYLE.] Unfortunately, his early privations had caused him to have chronic indigestion. He thought that the worst punishment he could suggest for Satan would be to compel him to "try to digest for all eternity with my stomach." This disorder rendered Carlyle peculiarly irascible and explosive. His wife's quick temper sometimes took fire at his querulousness; but her many actions, which spoke much louder than her words, showed how deeply she loved him and how proud she was of his genius. After their removal to London, she would quietly buy the neighbors' crowing roosters, which kept him awake, and she prepared food that would best suit his disordered digestion. She complained of his seeming lack of appreciation. "You don't want to be praised for doing your duty," he said. "I did, though," she wrote. Carlyle's lack of restraint was most evident in little things. A German who came from Weimar to see him was unfortunately admitted during a period of stress in writing. A minute later the German was seen rapidly descending the stairs and leaving the house. Carlyle immediately hurried to the room where his wife was receiving a visitor, and tragically asked what he had done to cause the Almighty to send a German all the way from Weimar to wrench off the handles of his cupboard doors. Carlyle did not then appear to realize that the frightened German had mistaken the locked cupboard doors for the exit from the room. On the other hand, when the great political economist, John Stuart Mill, was responsible for the loss of the borrowed manuscript of the first volume of The French Revolution , Carlyle said to his wife: "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavor to hide from him how very serious the business is to us." To rewrite this volume cost Carlyle a year's exhausting labor. In 1834 Carlyle went to London, where he lived for the rest of his life in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. The publication of The French Revolution in 1837 made him famous. Other works of his soon appeared, to add to his fame. His essays, collected and published in 1839 under the title, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays , contained his sympathetic Essay on Burns , which no subsequent writer has surpassed. Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations (1845) permanently raised England's estimation of that warrior statesman. Carlyle's writings, his lectures on such subjects as Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), and his oracular criticism on government and life made him as conspicuous a figure as Dr. Samuel Johnson had been in the previous century. Carlyle's last great work, History of Friedrich II ., was fortunately finished in 1865, the year before his great misfortune. In the latter part of 1865 the students of the University of Edinburgh elected Carlyle Lord Rector of that institution because they considered him the man most worthy to receive such high honor. In the spring of 1866, he went to Edinburgh to deliver his inaugural address. Before he returned, he received a telegram stating that his wife had died of heart failure while she was taking a drive in London. The blow was a crushing one. The epitaph that he placed on her monument shows his final realization of her worth and of his irreparable loss. He said truly that the light of his life had gone out. During his remaining years, he produced little of value except his Reminiscences , a considerable part of which had been written long before. Honors, however, came to him until the last. The Prussian Order of Merit was conferred on him in 1874. The English government offered him the Grand Cross of Bath and a pension, both of which he declined. On his eightieth birthday, more than a hundred of the most distinguished men of the English-speaking race joined in giving him a gold medallion portrait. When he died in 1881, an offer of interment in Westminster Abbey was declined and he was laid beside his parents in the graveyard at Ecclefechan. Sartor Resartus.—Like Coleridge, Carlyle was a student of German philosophy and literature. His earliest work was The Life of Friedrich Schiller (1823-1825), which won for him the appreciation and friendship of the German poet, Goethe. Carlyle's first great original work, the one in which he best delivers his message to humanity, is Sartor Resartus ( The Tailor Patched ). This first appeared serially in Fraser's Magazine in 1833-1834. He feigned that he was merely editing a treatise on The Philosophy of Clothes , the work of a German professor, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. This professor is really Carlyle himself; but the disguise gave him an excuse for writing in a strange style and for beginning many of his nouns with capitals, after the German fashion. When Sartor Resartus first appeared, Mrs. Carlyle remarked that it was "completely understood and appreciated only by women and mad people." This work did not for some years receive sufficient attention in England to justify publication in book form. The case was different in America, where the first edition with a preface by Emerson was published in 1836, two years before the appearance of the English edition. In the year of Carlyle's death, a cheap London edition of 30,000 copies was sold in a few weeks. Carlyle calls Sartor Resartus a "Philosophy of Clothes." He uses the term "Clothes" symbolically to signify the outward expression of the spiritual. He calls Nature "the Living Garment of God." He teaches us to regard these vestments only as semblances and to look beyond them to the inner spirit, which is the reality. The century's material progress, which was such a cause of pride to Macaulay, was to Carlyle only a semblance, not a sign of real spiritual growth. He says of the utilitarian philosophy, which he hated intensely:— "It spreads like a sort of Dog-madness; till the whole World-kennel will be rabid." The majority of readers cared nothing for the symbolism of Sartor Resartus ; but they responded to its effective presentation of the gospel of work and faced the duties of life with increased energy. Carlyle seemed to stand before them saying:— " Do the Duty which lies nearest thee , which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer… The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal was never yet occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of …" The French Revolution.—In 1837 when Carlyle finished the third volume of his historic masterpiece, The French Revolution , he handed the manuscript to his wife for her criticism, saying: "This I could tell the world: 'You have not had for a hundred years any book that comes more direct and flamingly from the heart of a living man.'" His Scotch blood boiled over the injustice to the French peasants. His temperature begins to rise when he refers to the old law authorizing a French hunter, if a nobleman, "to kill not more than two serfs." Carlyle brings before us a vast stage where the actors in the French Revolution appear: in the background, "five full-grown millions of gaunt figures with their hungry faces"; in the foreground, one young mother of seven children, "looking sixty years of age, although she is not yet twenty-eight," and trying to respond to the call for seven different kinds of taxes; and, also in the foreground, "a perfumed Seigneur," taking part of the children's dinner. The scene changes; the great individual actors in the Revolution enter: the tocsin clangs; the stage is reddened with human blood and wreathed in flames. We feel that we are actually witnessing that great historic tragedy. Carlyle had something of Shakespeare's dramatic imagination, which pierced to the heart of men and movements. More detailed and scholarly histories of this time have been written; but no other historian has equaled Carlyle in presenting the French Revolution as a human tragedy that seems to be acted before our very eyes. He did not attempt to write a complete history of the time. He used the dramatist's legitimate privilege of selection. From a mass of material that would have bewildered a writer of less ability, he chose to present on the center of the stage the most significant actors and picturesque incidents. Carlyle's "Real Kings."—Carlyle believed that "universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here." In accordance with this belief, he studied, not the slow growth of the people, but the lives of the world's great geniuses. In his course of lectures entitled Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), he considers The Hero as Prophet, The Hero as Poet, The Hero as Priest , and The Hero as King , and shows how history has been molded by men like Mohammed, Shakespeare, Luther, and Napoleon. It is such men as these whom Carlyle calls "kings," beside whom "emperors," "popes," and "potentates" are as nothing. He believed that there was always living some man worthy to be the "real king" over men, and such a kingship was Carlyle's ideal of government. Oliver Cromwell was one of these "real kings." In the work entitled Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations , Carlyle was the first to present the character of the Protector in its full strength and greatness and to demonstrate once for all that he was a hero whose memory all Englishmen should honor. The Life of John Sterling (1851) is a fair, true, and touching biography of Carlyle's most intimate friend, the man who had introduced him to Jane Welsh. After reading this book, George Eliot said she wished that more men of genius would write biographies. Carlyle's next attempt at biography grew into the massive History of Friedrich II . (1858-1865), which includes a survey of European history in that dreary century which preceded the French Revolution. "Friedrich is by no means one of the perfect demigods." He is "to the last a questionable hero." However, "in his way he is a Reality," one feels "that he always means what he speaks; grounds his actions, too, on what he recognizes for the truth; and, in short, has nothing of the Hypocrite or Phantasm." Despite his tyranny and his bloody career, he, therefore, is another of Carlyle's "real kings." While this work is a history of modern Europe, Friedrich is always the central figure. He gives to these six volumes a human note, a glowing interest of personal adventure, and a oneness that are remarkable in so vast a work. General Characteristics.—Carlyle's writings must be classed among the great social and democratic influences of the nineteenth century, in spite of the fact that he did not believe in pure democracy. It was his favorite theory that a great man, like Oliver Cromwell, could govern better than the unintelligent multitude. However much he rebelled against democracy in government, his sympathies were with the toiling masses. His work entitled Past and Present (1843) suggests the organization of labor and introduces such modern expressions as "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work." In Sartor Resartus , he specially honors "the toilworn Craftsman, that with earthmade implement laboriously conquers the Earth and makes her Man's." Carlyle had a large fund of incisive wit and humor, which often appear in picturesque setting, as when he said to a physician: "A man might as well pour his sorrows into the long hairy ear of a jackass." As the satiric censor of his time, Carlyle found frequent occasion for caustic wit. He lashed the age for its love of the "swine's trough," of "Pig-science, Pig-enthusiasm and devotion." Although his intentions were good, his satire was not always just or discriminating, and he was in consequence bitterly criticized. The following Dutch parable is in some respects specially applicable to Carlyle:— "There was a man once,—a satirist. In the natural course of time his friends slew him and he died. And the people came and stood about his corpse. 'He treated the whole round world as his football,' they said indignantly, 'and he kicked it.' The dead man opened one eye. 'But always toward the goal,' he said." This goal toward which Carlyle struggled to drive humanity was the goal of moral achievement. Young people on both sides of the Atlantic responded vigorously to his appeals. The scientist John Tyndall said to his students:— "The reading of the works of two men has placed me here to-day. These men are the English Carlyle and the American Emerson. I must ever remember with gratitude that through three long, cold German winters, Carlyle placed me in my tub, even when ice was on its surface, at five o'clock every morning … determined, whether victor or vanquished, not to shrink from difficulty… They told me what I ought to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all my consequent intellectual action is to be traced to this purely moral force… They called out. 'Act!' I hearkened to the summons." Huxley aptly defined Carlyle as a "great tonic,—a source of intellectual invigoration and moral stimulus." Carlyle is not only a "great Awakener" but also a great literary artist. His style is vivid, forceful, and often poetic. He loves to present his ideas with such picturesqueness that the corresponding images develop clearly in the reader's mind. Impressive epithets and phrases abound. His metaphors are frequent and forceful. Mirabeau's face is pictured as "rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled." In describing Daniel Webster, Carlyle speaks of "the tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown, the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed." He formed many new compound words after the German fashion, such as "mischief-joy"; and when he pleased, he coined new words, like "dandiacal" and "croakery." His frequent exclamations and inversions make his style seem choppy, like a wave-tossed sea; but his sentences are so full of vigor that they almost call aloud from the printed page. His style was not an imitation of the German, but a characteristic form of expression, natural to him and to his father. The gift of verse was denied him, but he is one of the great prose poets of the nineteenth century. Much of Sartor Resartus is highly poetic and parts of The French Revolution resemble a dramatic poem. JOHN RUSKlN, 1819-1900 [Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN. From a photograph ] Life.—The most famous disciple of Carlyle is John Ruskin, the only child of wealthy parents, who was born in London in 1819. When he was four years old the family moved to Herne Hill, a suburb south of London, where his intense love of nature developed as he looked over open fields, "animate with cow and buttercup," "over softly wreathing distances of domestic wood," to the distant hills. His entertaining autobiography, Praeterita (1885-1889), relates how he was reared:— "I had never heard my father's or mother's voice once raised in any question with each other … I had never heard a servant scolded … I obeyed word or lifted finger, of father or mother, simply as a ship her helm …nothing was ever promised me that was not given; nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted, and nothing ever told me that was not true… Peace, obedience, faith; these three for chief good; next to these, the habit of fixed attention with both eyes and mind." He grew up a solitary child without playmates. This solitude was relieved when his parents took him on occasional trips through England, Switzerland, and Italy. In Praeterita he tells in an inimitable way how the most portentious interruption to his solitude came in 1836, when his father's Spanish partner came with his four beautiful daughters to visit Herne Hill. These were the first girls in his own station to whom he had spoken. "Virtually convent-bred more closely than the maids themselves," says Ruskin, "I was thrown, bound hand and foot, in my unaccomplished simplicity, into the fiery furnace." In four days he had fallen so desperately in love with the oldest, Clotilde Adèle Domecq, a "graceful blonde" of fifteen, that he was more than four years in recovering his equilibrium. She laughed at his protestations of love; but she repeatedly visited his parents, and he did not give up hope until 1840, when she married a French baron. His biographer says that the resulting "emotional strain doubtless was contributory to his breakdown at Oxford" and to his enforced absence for a recuperative trip on the continent. His feminine attachments usually showed some definite results in his writing. Miss Domecq's influence during the long period of his devotion inspired him to produce much verse, which received such high praise that his father desired him to become a poet. Although some of Ruskin's verse was good, he finally had the penetration to see that it ranked decidedly below the greatest, and he later laid down the dictum: "with second-rate poetry in quality no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind." In 1886, he had the humor to allude as follows to Miss Domecq and her influence on his rimes, "…her sisters called her Clotilde, after the queen-saint, and I, Adèle, because it rimed to shell, spell, and knell." Before he was graduated from Oxford in 1842, he wrote the beautiful altruistic story, The King of the Golden River (1841) for Euphemia Gray, the young girl unhappily chosen by his mother to become his wife. He married her in 1848, but was divorced from her in 1854. In 1855 she was married to the Pre-Raphaelite artist, John Millais. Another attachment led to his writing some of the finest parts of his most popular work, Sesame and Lilies (1864). "I wrote Lilies," he says, "to please one girl." He is here referring to Rose La Touche, a bright, ardent, religious enthusiast, to whom he began to teach drawing when she was ten years old. His affection for her grew so strong that he finally asked her to become his wife. He was then a man of forty while she was scarcely grown. Her religious scruples kept her from definitely accepting him, because his belief was not sufficiently orthodox. The attachment, however, continued until her early death. She was in some respects a remarkable character, and he seems to have had her in mind when he wrote in Sesame and Lilies the "pearly" passage about Shakespeare's heroines. Although Ruskin's wealth relieved him from earning a living, he was rarely idle. He studied, sketched, arranged collections of minerals, prepared Turner's pictures for the National Gallery, became professor of art at Oxford University, and wrote and lectured on art and social subjects. His later activities, before his health gave way, were in many respects similar to those of a twentieth-century social-service worker. The realization of the misery that overwhelmed so much of human life caused him to turn from art to consider remedies for the evils that developed as the competitive industries of the nation expanded. He endeavored to improve the condition of the working classes in such ways as building sanitary tenements, establishing a tea shop, and forming an altruistic association, known as St. George's Guild. Nearly all his inheritance of £180,000 was expended in such activities. The royalties coming from the sale of his books supported him in old age. Ruskin suffered from periods of mental depression during his last years, which were spent at Brantwood on Coniston Water in the Lake District. He died in 1900 at the age of eighty-one and was buried in the cemetery at Coniston. Art Works.—Ruskin published the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843, the year after he was graduated from Oxford, and the fifth and last volume, seventeen years later, in 1860. Many of his views changed during this period; but he honestly declared them and left to his readers the task of reconciling the divergent ideas in Modern Painters . The purpose of this book was, in his own words, "to declare the perfectness and eternal beauty of the work of God; and test all works of man by concurrence with, or subjection to that." Modern Painters contains painstaking descriptions of God's handiwork in cloud formation, mountain structure, tree architecture, and water forms. In transferring these aspects of nature to canvas, Ruskin shows the superiority of modern to ancient painting. He emphasizes the moral basis of true beauty, and the necessity of right living as a foundation for the highest type of art. Perhaps Modern Painters achieved its greatest success in freeing men from the bondage of a conventional criticism that was stifling art, in sending them direct to nature as a guide, and in developing a love for her varied manifestations of beauty. Two of Ruskin's works on architecture, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-1853), had a decided effect on British taste in building. The three volumes of the The Stones of Venice give a history of the Venetians and of their Gothic architecture. He aims to show that the beauty of such buildings as St. Mark's Cathedral and the Doges' Palace is due to the virtue and patriotism of the people, the nobility of the designers, and the joy of the individual workmen, whose chisels made the very stones of Venice tell beautiful stories. The most important of his many other writings on art is the volume entitled Lectures on Art, Delivered before the University of Oxford, 1870 . In his famous Inaugural of this series, he thus states what he considers the central truth of his teaching: "The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues." Social Works.—By turning from the criticism of art to consider the cause of humanity, Ruskin shows the influence of the ethical and social forces of the age. In middle life he was overwhelmed with the amount of human misery and he determined to do his best to relieve it. He wrote:— "I simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like, and the very light of the morning sky, when there is any—which is seldom, nowadays, near London—has become hateful to me, because of the misery that I know of, and see signs of, where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly."[9] After 1860 his main efforts with both pen and purse were devoted to improving the condition of his fellow men. His attempts to provide a remedy led him to write Unto this Last (1860), his first and most complete work on political economy, Munera Pulveris (1863), Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne (1868), Fors Clavigera (1871-1884), which is a long series of letters to workingmen, and a number of other works, that also present his views on social questions. He abhorred the old political economy, which he defined as "the professed and organized pursuit of money." Instead of considering merely the question of the production and distribution of articles, his interest lay in the causes necessary to produce healthy, happy workmen. It seemed to him that the manufacture "of souls" ought to be "exceedingly lucrative." This statement and his maxim, "There is no wealth but life," were called "unscientific." In his fine book of essays, entitled Sesame and Lilies (1864), he actually had printed in red those pathetic pages describing how an old cobbler and his son worked night and day to try to keep a little home of one room, until the father died from exhaustion and the son had a film come over his eyes. John Ruskin, social reformer, has an important place in the social movement of the nineteenth century. Many of his theories, which were considered revolutionary, have since become the commonplace expressions of twentieth-century social economists. General Characteristics.—Ruskin was a champion of the Pre-Raphaelite school of art. He used his powerful influence to free art from its conventional fetters and to send people direct to nature for careful loving study of her beautiful forms. His chief strength lies in his moral enthusiasm and his love of the beautiful in nature. Like his master, Carlyle, Ruskin is a great ethical teacher; but he aimed at more definite results in the reformation of art and of social life. He moralized art and humanized political economy. Some of his art criticisms and social theories are fanciful, narrow, and sometimes even absurd. He did not seem to recognize with sufficient clearness the fact that immoral individuals might produce great works of art; but no one can successfully assail his main contention that there must be a connection between great art and the moral condition of a people. His rejection of railroads and steam machinery as necessary factors in modern civilization caused many to pay little attention to any of his social theories. Much of the gospel that he preached has, however, been accepted by the twentieth century. He was in advance of his time when he said in 1870 that the object of his art professorship would be accomplished if "the English nation could be made to understand that the beauty which is indeed to be a joy forever must be a joy for all." At the age of fifty-eight, he thus summed up the principal work of his life:— " Modern Painters taught the claim of all lower nature on the hearts of men; of the rock, and wave, and herb, as a part of their necessary spirit life… The Stories of Venice taught the laws of constructive Art, and the dependence of all human work or edifice, for its beauty, on the happy life of the workman. Under this Last taught the laws of that life itself and its dependence on the Sun of Justice; the Inaugural Oxford Lectures , the necessity that it should be led, and the gracious laws of beauty and labor recognized, by the upper, no less than the lower classes of England; and, lastly, Fors Clavigera has declared the relation of these to each other, and the only possible conditions of peace and honor, for low and high, rich and poor…" Ruskin has written remarkable descriptive prose. A severe English critic, George Saintsbury, says of Ruskin's works "…they will he found to contain the very finest prose (without exception and beyond comparison) which has been written in English during the last half of the nineteenth century… The Stones of Venice … is the book of descriptive prose in English, and all others toil after it in vain." Ruskin could be severely plain in expression, but much of his earlier prose is ornate and almost poetic. The following description of the Rhone deserves to be ranked with the painter's art:— "There were pieces of wave that danced all day as if Perdita were looking on to learn; there were little streams that skipped like lambs and leaped like chamois; there were pools that shook the sunshine all through them, and were rippled in layers of overlaid ripples, like crystal sand; here were currents that twisted the light into golden braids, and inlaid the threads with turquoise enamel; there were strips of stream that had certainly above the lake been mill streams, and were busily looking for mills to turn again."[10] CHARLES DICKENS, 1812-1870 [Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS. From a photograph taken in America, 1868 .] Life.—The first of the great Victorian novelists to make his mark was Charles Dickens. This great portrayer of child life had a sad painful childhood. He was born in 1812 at Landport, a district of the city of Portsmouth, Hampshire, where his father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. John Dickens, the prototype of Mr. Micawber, was a kind, well-intentioned man, who knew far better how to harangue his large household of children than how to supply it with the necessities of life. He moved from place to place, sinking deeper into poverty and landing finally in a debtors' prison. The dreams of a fine education and a brilliant career, which the future novelist had fondly cherished in his precocious little brain, had to be abandoned. At the age of eleven the delicate child was called upon to do his part toward maintaining the family. He was engaged, at six-pence a week, to paste labels on blacking bottles. He was poorly clothed, ill fed, forced to live in the cheapest place to be found, and to associate with the roughest kind of companions. This experience was so bitter and galling to the sensitive boy that years after, when he was a successful, happy man, he could not look back upon it without tears in his eyes. Owing to a rupture between his employer and the elder Mr. Dickens, Charles was removed from this place and sent to school. At fifteen, however, he had to seek work again. This time he was employed in an attorney's office at Gray's Inn. It was impossible, of course, for this ambitious boy to realize that he was receiving an education in the dirty streets, the warehouses, the tenements, and the prisons. Yet, for his peculiar bent of mind, these furnished far richer stores of learning than either school or college could have given. He had marvelous powers of observation. He noted everything, from the saucy street waif to the sorrowful prison child, from the poor little drudge to the brutal schoolmaster, and he transplanted them from life to fiction, in such characters as Sam Weller, Little Dorrit, the Marchioness, Mr. Squeers, and a hundred others. While in the attorney's office, Dickens began to study shorthand, in order to become a reporter. This was the beginning of his success. His reports were accurate and racy, even when they happened to be written in the pouring rain, in a shaking stagecoach, or by the light of a lantern. They were also promptly handed in at the office, despite the fact that the stages sometimes broke down and left their passengers to plod on foot through the miry roads leading into London. These reports and newspaper articles soon attracted attention; and Dickens received an offer for a series of humorous sketches, which grew into the famous Pickwick Papers , and earned £20,000 for the astonished publishers. He was able to make his own terms for his future novels. Fame came to him almost at a bound. He was loved and toasted in England and America before he had reached the age of thirty. When, late in life, he made lecture tours through his own country, or through Scotland or America, they were like triumphal marches. In his prime Dickens was an energetic, high-spirited, fun-loving man. He made a charming host, and was never happier than when engineering theatrical entertainments at his delightful home, Gads Hill. He was esteemed by all the literary men of London, and idolized by his children and friends. As his strong personality was communicated to his audiences and his readers, his death in 1870 was felt as a personal loss throughout the English-speaking world. [Illustration: DICKENS'S HOME, GADS HILL.] Works.— Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), Dickens's first long story, is one of his best. Mr. Pickwick, with his genial nature, his simple philosophy, and his droll adventures, and Sam Weller, with his ready wit, his acute observations, and his almost limitless resources, are amusing from start to finish. The book is brimful of its author's high spirits. It has no closely knit plot, but merely a succession of comical incidents, and vivid caricatures of Mr. Pickwick and his friends. Yet the fun is so good-natured and infectious, and the looseness of design is so frankly declared that the book possesses a certain unity arising from its general atmosphere of frolic and jollity. Oliver Twist (1837-1838) is a powerful story, differing widely from Pickwick Papers . While the earlier work is delightful chiefly for its humor, Oliver Twist is strong in its pictures of passion and crime. Bill Sykes the murderer, Fagin the Jew, who teaches the boys deftness of hand in stealing, and poor Nancy, are drawn with such power that they seem to be still actually living in some of London's dark alleys. Little Oliver, born in the poor-house, clothed by charity, taught by the evil genius of the streets, starved in body and soul, is one of the many pathetic portraits of children drawn with a sure and loving hand by Dickens. There are some improbable features about the plot and some overwrought sentimental scenes in this story. Dickens reveled in the romantic and found it in robbers' dens, in bare poverty, in red-handed crime. The touching pathos and thrilling adventures of Oliver Twist make a strong appeal to the reader's emotions. With the prodigality of a fertile genius, Dickens presented his expectant and enthusiastic public with a new novel on an average of once a year for fourteen years; and, even after that, his productivity did not fall off materially. The best and most representative of these works are Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844), Dombey and Son (1846-1848), David Copperfield (1849-1850), Bleak House (1852-1853), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Our Mutual Friend (1864). Of these, David Copperfield is at once Dickens's favorite work and the one which the world acclaims as his masterpiece. The novel is in part an autobiography. Some incidents are taken directly from Dickens's early experiences and into many more of David's childish sorrows, boyish dreams, and manly purposes, Dickens has breathed the breath of his own life. David Copperfield is thus a vitally interesting and living character. The book contains many of Dickens's most human men and women. Petted Little Em'ly with her pathetic tragedy is handled with deep sympathy and true artistic delicacy. Peggotty and Mrs. Steerforth are admirably drawn and contrasted. Mrs. Gummidge's thoughtful care of Peggotty exhibits Dickens's fine perception of the self-sacrificing spirit among the very poor. Uriah Heep remains the type of the humble sycophant, and Mr. Micawber, the representative of the man of big words and pompous manners. These various characters and separate life histories are bound in same way to the central story of David. General Characteristics.—England has produced no more popular novelist than Charles Dickens. His novels offer sound and healthy entertainment, hearty laughter, a wide range of emotions, and a wonderful array of personalities. He presents the universal physical experiences of life that are understood by all men, and irradiates this life with emotion and romance. He keeps his readers in an active state of feeling. They laugh at the broad humor in Sam Weller's jokes; they chuckle over the sly exposure of Mr. Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit ; they weep in Dombey and Son over poor Paul crammed with grown-up learning when he wanted to be just a child; they rejoice over David Copperfield's escape from his stepfather into the loving arms of whimsical, clever Aunt Betsey Trotwood; they shiver with horror in Our Mutual Friend during the search for floating corpses on the dark river; and they feel more kindly toward the whole world after reading A Christmas Carol and taking Tiny Tim into their hearts. [Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MS. OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL.] Dickens excels in the portrayal of humanity born and reared in poverty and disease. He grasps the hand of these unfortunates in a brother's clasp. He says in effect "I present to you my friends, the beggar, the thief, the outcast. They are men worth knowing." He does not probe philosophically into complex causes of poverty and crime. His social creed was well formulated by Dowden in these words: "Banish from earth some few monsters of selfishness, malignity, and hypocrisy, set to rights a few obvious imperfections in the machinery of society, inspire all men with a cheery benevolence, and everything will go well with this excellent world of ours." Every student of the science of society, however, owes a debt to Dickens. He did what no science or knowledge or logic can do alone. He reached the heart, awoke the conscience, and pierced the obtuseness of the public. He aroused its protests because his genius painted prisons and hovels and dens of vice so vividly that his readers actually suffered from the scenes thus presented and wanted such horrors abolished. Dickens's infectious humor is a remarkable and an unfailing quality of his works. It pervades entire chapters, colors complete incidents, and displays the temper of the optimist through the darkest pictures of human suffering. A hypocrite is an abomination to Dickens. Speaking of Mr. Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit , Dickens says: "Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there." His humor can be fully appreciated only by reading long passages, such as the scene of Mr. Pickwick's trial, the descriptions of Mr. Micawber and of Miss Betsey Trotwood, or the chapter on Podsnappery in Our Mutual Friend . Dickens's humor has an exuberant richness, which converts men and women into entertaining figures of comedy. Closely allied to his fund of humor is his capacity for pathos, especially manifest in his treatment of childhood. Dickens has a large gallery of children's portraits, fondly and sympathetically executed. David Copperfield, enduring Mr. Murdstone's cruel neglect, Florence Dombey pining for her father's love, the Marchioness starving upon cold potatoes, Tom and Louise Gradgrind, stuffed with facts and allowed no innocent amusement, and the waifs of Tom's-All-Alone dying from abject poverty and disease, are only a few of the sad-eyed children peering from the pages of Dickens and yearning for love and understanding. He wrings the heart; but, happily, his books have improved the conditions of children, not only in public asylums, factories, and courts, but also in schools and homes. Dickens's chief faults arise from an excess of sensibility and humor. His soft heart and romantic spirit lead him to exaggerate. In such passages as the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop and the interviews between Dora and David in David Copperfield , Dickens becomes mawkish and sentimental. While his power of portraiture is amazing, he often overleaps the line of character drawing and makes side-splitting caricatures of his men and women. They are remembered too often by a limp or a mannerism of speech, or by some other little peculiarity, instead of by their human weaknesses and accomplishments. Dickens is not a master in the artistic construction of his plots. The majority of his readers do not, however, notice this failing because he keeps them in such a delightful state of interest and suspense by the sprightliness with which he tells a story. He was a very rapid writer, and his English is consequently often careless in structure and in grammar. As he was not a man of books, he never acquired that half-unconscious knowledge of fine phrasing which comes to the careful student of literature. No novelist has, however, told more graphically such appealing stories of helpless childhood and of the poor and the outcast. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, 1811-1863