CHAPTER X.

_THE REALISTIC NOVELISTS--DICKENS, THACKERAY, BALZAC._

The pendulum of human interest swings quickly from one side to the other. Within five years of the appearance of the last of the Waverley novels there appeared in England a novelist as great as Scott and in every way his direct antithesis. Scott was a splendid story-teller. With a swift brush he painted large scenes and large characters. His brilliant pageantry moved easily and steadily from the beginning to the end of more than thirty novels, most of which were published in three stately volumes. In 1835 came Dickens, with his disconnected sketches of ordinary types of Englishmen. His first great success, Pickwick, was written from week to week as it was published. The author never knew three chapters ahead what would happen to his characters; nor did it matter. He had his characters, he had Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller and the rest; what mattered anything else? As the story went on something would happen to them, and that was enough.

And with Dickens we have an entirely different style of writing. The Waverley novels are written with more or less fine language, large words, sweeping phrases; Pickwick was a great bubbling mass of sentiment and emotion, pathos, humour, the cold feeling, the hot feeling, the shaky feeling, the melancholy feeling, the riotous feeling--one might go on forever. With every turn of his pen this new magician plays upon our heart-strings, possesses us, fills us, makes us laugh or cry at will. The very collocation of his words causes our flesh to quiver and the blood to leap in our veins, and holds our attention spell-bound. What Jane Austen did in her fine way, to the despair of Scott, Dickens did in his big, coarse, splashing way, and with ten times the genius.

Dickens’s father was a poor man in the navy-pay office, at first with a yearly salary of £80. Micawber in David Copperfield was drawn from him. Even when he got as much as £350 a year he was always in debt, and finally landed in the Marshalsea, which Dickens so vividly describes in Little Dorrit.

While still a child, Charles was sent to work in a blacking warehouse, described as the establishment of Murdstone & Grinby in David Copperfield. He had a terribly hard life of it. But after a while he was taken away and sent to school for a short time, finally studying shorthand and becoming a newspaper reporter of the debates in Parliament at a time when these were taken down verbatim.

By the time he was twenty-four he was getting about thirty-five dollars a week. He tried a few sketches in a magazine (Sketches by Boz) which were successful in their way, and finally was asked by Chapman & Hall to write the text for some sporting pictures by a noted artist of the day. This turned out to be Pickwick, became instantly popular, and Dickens was a famous novelist before he was twenty-five. He wrote about twenty novels, and earned as much money as Scott (a million dollars), though many more copies of his novels have been published. He may be considered the most popular English novelist that ever wrote.

Pickwick, Dickens’s first novel, is undoubtedly also his most humorous. It tells of the doings of a farcical club headed by Mr. Pickwick. But Pickwick’s servant, Sam Weller, is the most amusing character in it, and as a character probably the most famous in all Dickens’s works.

Next to Pickwick in popularity, and by many liked much better, is David Copperfield. This is nothing less than a pathetic and intensely human autobiography of Dickens himself, with certain fictitious additions. David Copperfield is Charles Dickens (notice the reversed initials), Micawber is Dickens’s own father, and Dora was Dickens’s first love. Only a passionately sympathetic heart could have conceived this story, and only a man with an overflowing genius for work could have written it in the spontaneous and natural way that Dickens did.

Third in the list of popularity is probably The Old Curiosity Shop, in which appears Little Nell, the description of whose pathetic death is found in every school reader. This volume also tells the story of Mr. Quilp, the dwarf, the Marchioness, and Dick Swiveller. Oliver Twist was written partly as an attack on workhouses in Dickens’s day. It tells us the story of a poor waif, and takes us among thieves, introducing us to the famous Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy. Little Dorrit is the story of the Marshalsea, the great debtors’ prison in which Dickens’s own father at one time resided. Dombey & Son tells the pathetic story of little Paul Dombey, the boy mate to Little Nell; Martin Chuzzlewit introduces us to the inimitable Pecksniff and family. Barnaby Rudge is a sort of detective story, telling of a murder and how it was found out. Bleak House and Nicholas Nickleby are also considered to be among the best of Dickens’s novels.

By many his greatest is thought to be A Tale of Two Cities, an intensely dramatic historical novel of the French Revolution. It is entirely different from anything else Dickens ever wrote, yet the pathetic and sympathetic character-drawing makes it entirely unlike the historical novels of Scott or Dumas.

His short Christmas stories are also among his best work, especially A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Cricket on the Hearth. Either may be read in an hour or two. W. E. Henley considers Barbox Bros., a beautiful and simple story of a lame girl, a little child, and a man running away from his birthday, even better; but it is not found in most complete editions and only recently has been published in separate form.

When the name of Dickens is mentioned that of Thackeray is also always on the tongue, yet there are large numbers even of the most refined people who do not find Thackeray as good reading as Dickens. It takes a quiet person, with a sense for the intellectual, the sarcastic and the ironical as opposed to the sentimental and humorous, a person with gentlemanly or ladylike instincts, to fall quite into sympathy with Thackeray. But those who love him, love him with an intensity surpassing their feeling for any other author. Thackeray penetrates life with his keen shafts. He is strong because of his reserves, Dickens because of his lack of reserve. Thackeray has polish and elegance of style, he is a master of the best English, and handles it with the ease and grace of inborn, hereditary skill. He could not have made such personal confessions as David Copperfield or Little Dorrit, he could not have laid the colour on with the indiscriminate profusion of Pickwick or the scenes describing Little Nell. He was in no sense a great emotional artist, for only now and then does he lose himself. Such passages as the death of Colonel Newcome are few in Thackeray. He is more often ridiculing foibles than gaining our sympathy for admirable sinners. He bites and stings; and unless we have a fine heart to perceive it we never become aware that he is winning too, that under his cynical perception of the truth of things in this world, especially in the aristocratic society which alone he knew and of which alone he wrote, he has a great and loving heart, a heart tender and forgiving, sympathetic even when he ridicules most unmercifully. It is this great loving heart, so hidden that it can be seen only by those who are truly his friends, that makes Thackeray, the belated exponent of a class in itself repulsive to the average democrat of to-day, in some respects the greatest writer of fiction in the English language. He has grave faults: he is always preaching; he is seldom very hopeful; he had no great belief in himself or his mission in the world. But language in his hands is almost a living and breathing entity, a polished, perfect instrument. And Thackeray teaches the great lessons of restraint, of patience and thoughtful study of life, of the little, nameless compensations which after all to most of us alone make life really worth living.

Thackeray was born and brought up as an English gentleman. His parents were married and lived in India, belonging to the great British civil service there. But his father died when he was young, and his mother married again and took him to England. He had his small fortune, and little thought of worrying about money till in middle life he found his substance gone through injudicious speculation, and his pen the principal means by which he could earn a living. He married and had several daughters, but his wife became insane. This was the only cloud on his domestic life.

Thackeray’s early books are not remarkable. Samuel Titmarsh and even Barry Lyndon are not and never have been popular. It was not until 1848, a dozen years after Dickens (a year the younger man) had become famous with Pickwick, that Thackeray really took his place among the great English novelists on the publication of Vanity Fair. Thackeray’s novels never attained the sale that Dickens’s did, and never yielded anything like as much money.

The sub-title of Vanity Fair was “A Novel Without a Hero.” The heroine, Becky Sharpe, however, was hero and heroine in one. It is said that Thackeray’s women are weak; but no finer portrayal of feminine character is to be found in modern literature than that of Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair.

The Newcomes is considered a greater novel by some. It presents much more lovable characters. Colonel Newcome being one of the most lovable in fiction; and Clive Newcome, and Ethel Newcome whom he loves, are of the same stuff as the well bred, educated people we see about us and number as our friends and most cherished companions.

Pendennis is in the same vein as The Newcomes, and involves some of the same characters, but it is not so strong a novel by any means, though perhaps more sentimental.

Henry Esmond is an historical novel, and may perhaps be considered the highest type of historical novel ever written. It never has had the popularity of Scott’s, but its characters are undoubtedly much stronger and more carefully drawn than any of his. Lady Castlewood and Beatrix are as real as if they had lived in the flesh, and yet as interesting as any a romancer ever imagined.

His fifth great novel is The Virginians, a sort of sequel to Esmond.

Only five novels! but they are of a kind to do for Thackeray what Les Miserables did for Victor Hugo as compared with the popular and productive Dumas. Thackeray and Hugo are both most admired, and rank highest in the literary firmament, in spite of the perennial popularity of Dickens and Dumas.

We have now considered the great romantic artists, who cared for point of view, Gothic castles, and the events of history; and likewise the great domestic story tellers, who, like Dickens, have sacrificed plot and scene to character portrayal.

We have reserved until the present a novelist of France who may ultimately be counted the greatest master of modern fiction. He was a contemporary of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, but he took no part in the romantic movement. Indeed, the critics of his own day would have nothing to do with him. His works, far more numerous than Scott’s and almost as bulky, sold in sufficient numbers to enable him to pay the debts his lack of business experience caused him to contract in various speculations; but even his own fellow citizens of Tours snubbed him so unmercifully that in sorrow he decided not to give to that town his large and valuable library, as he had intended to do. Only recently have his books been adequately translated into English, and now only a portion are accessible. He is the last great classic to come upon the stage; and the most thoughtful young writers of to-day whisper among themselves that the Master is Balzac.

Victor Hugo, Dumas, George Sand, the representatives of the romantic movement, are fascinating story-tellers, but they are not true to human nature. Their works abound in glaring faults in the grammar of human life. They were so wrapped up in the thrills their tales were to excite that they had small time to think seriously about the minuter facts. They have never analysed the principles of life. What observation chanced to bring them they used in the most effective way; and as we read Les Miserables and Consuelo we are shocked at every point by the inconsistency of the characters, the false ring of the speeches they make and the acts they perform. The colour has been laid on thick and hot, and flames with overpowering brilliancy; but the drawing will not bear close inspection.

In Scott we find no such inaccuracies of characterization, however many faults of grammar there may be. The Englishman is a master at characterization, and in no great English novelists do we find the inaccuracies of thought and feeling which characterized the French romancers. But in all Scott’s pageantry, with his hundreds of figures, we find but relatively few types, and even they are not very profound or wonderful. They are the common, everyday men Scott knew, dressed up in the clothes of history and romance. And though they are all true enough as far as they go, the same type appears again and again with a different feather in his cap and a fresh name to be hailed by. And Dickens and Thackeray have drawn but a few types, those they themselves had come personally in contact with and known by habit and instinct. These they have immortalized, and repeated often enough for us to understand them in all their phases. The types in their books are drawn unconsciously. They were no deep students of the varieties of human nature, nor of the underlying principles of life. Their time and effort were devoted to the art of representation, in which, each in his own peculiar line, they excelled all other men.

But Balzac essayed to write the whole Comedy of Humanity (he called his books the Comedie Humaine). He takes his characters one after the other, beginning with Parisian life, and then taking up the life of the provinces, political life, military life, and in each presenting a series of characters that accurately represent the historical types of his own age in France. He is a Frenchman, his characters and his ideals are French, and he omits the innocent lovely rose of English purity: he writes no idylls. But a person with broad mind and catholic tastes cannot help feeling the masterly touch.

His personal history is that of a worker. Before he was thirty he had published a dozen novels to which he did not attach his name. They were for practice. Then he came out with The Chouans, which attracted some attention. In the next few years he wrote and gave to the world some ninety compositions long and short, mostly full-fledged books.

His friends had told him he had no talent, and his native town never honoured him; but by industry alone he overcame all difficulties, and by sheer force of character took his place among the great novelists of his age. Most of the money he earned was devoted to paying off his debts; and when that was accomplished and he had married the lady he loved, he died.

Not all of Balzac’s novels will be liked by the English reader, and they differ immensely in subject, character, and interest.

The most popular of his stories, perhaps, because it treats of the rotten though dramatic life of Paris, is Père Goriot, the story of a simple old man whose daughters become fashionable, and to whose passions he is made to minister, while his own comforts in life are heartlessly sacrificed.

Rivaling Père Goriot as Balzac’s masterpiece is Eugenie Grandet, a story of country life utterly devoid of the excitement with which the Parisian story abounds. Eugenie is the daughter of a rich miser, who deprives her and her mother almost of the necessities of life. She meets and learns to love her cousin, Charles Grandet. He goes to the West Indies where he begins to build his fortunes with the savings Eugenie has given him. But the girl’s mother dies, and then her father, and she is left a rich heiress. Not knowing this, Charles writes asking her to release him that he may marry an heiress. Eugenie never thinks of her own sacrifice, but gives him his liberty, and even secretly pays his father’s debts lest they hamper him in his career. She ends her life in works of philanthropy.

It is a simple story, but told with the hard exactness of fate and truth, and it is this profound truth that makes it appeal to us so powerfully.

Many are very fond of The Country Doctor. The first half of the book tells the simple life and good works of this remarkable man; but the intense interest of the story is in the recital of the romantic early life of this strange man--his own story of himself which fills the second half of the book.

Cousin Pons tells the story of a collector of curios, for whose property various relatives are intriguing. Cousine Bette teaches us the lengths to which a Parisian middle-class family will go to get the money to maintain their respectability, and the catastrophes which are likely to follow when character is rotten at the bottom. Madame de Langeais is one of the shorter and more exciting stories of Parisian love. César Birroteau portrays the typical life of a Parisian lawyer, and The House of Nucingen that of a Parisian banker, while in The Illustrious Gaudissart we have the French drummer or travelling salesman.

In still another series of novels, much less generally read, Balzac goes into philosophy and even the mysticism of Swedenborg. The most philosophic of these novels is Louis Lambert, the most mystical and Swedenborgian is Seraphita, the story of an angel, so to speak. The Magic Skin is symbolistic, and The Search for the Absolute gives us most realistically the mystic and self-sacrificing life of an inventor.

Zola has attempted to do for his time what Balzac did for his, and in stories of the Rougon-Macquart family tells us the life histories of as varied a series of characters. The thing that made Balzac great, however, is his profound knowledge of human nature and the laws of human life, while Zola is bent on telling the thrilling stories he has found in different classes of society which, as a journalist, he has investigated.

Balzac and Zola handle contemporary life in much the same spirit that the romantic novelists handle the life of a past age; but Balzac is also a realistic student of character, and the interest in his characters predominates over the interest in his subjects and scenes. He is as much a master of description, however, as Scott or Victor Hugo. But much of Balzac’s and Zola’s realism is distasteful to the English or American reader. To be appreciated they must be read intellectually and not emotionally.

Among the great realists, or novelists of character and domestic life, we must include the women who have written fiction. Of these the greatest is George Eliot, whose novels rank below those of Dickens and Thackeray only because they are lacking in humour and fun. They are very serious, but they give us women as they really are in heart and soul and emotion. The best of George Eliot’s novels is Middlemarch, the story of an English country village and especially of an interesting educated young woman, Dorothea Casaubon. But there are other and almost equally interesting quiet English characterizations. More dramatic in its plot is Adam Bede, which tells the story of a girl who had an illegitimate child which she destroyed. The Mill on the Floss begins by realistically describing the everyday life of two children, a boy and a girl, and many will find the first half of the book very dull and commonplace. The last half is dramatic enough, however, to make up for the dullness of the first part. Daniel Deronda is considered less successful, though Silas Marner is a classic. It is a shorter story, of a certain phase of English country life. These are practically all of George Eliot’s works, the two or three other books being hardly fascinating enough to hold the modern reader.

To many Jane Austen is greater even than George Eliot. She wrote in the early part of the century, even before the appearance of the Waverley novels; but her stories are read as much to-day as they ever were. They are fine and exceedingly true portrayals of the uneventful but interesting heart life of a number of different young women in English country villages. Some consider Emma her greatest story; but it is less interesting than Sense and Sensibility (a study of two girls, one representing sense and the other sensibility) and Pride and Prejudice (the story of the marrying off of five daughters, one of whom is especially interesting and is the heroine). Jane Austen is notable in that she has a lively though quiet sense of humour that runs through all her work.

Another charming, simple, and rather amusing study of English village life is Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, a book well worth reading if one is interested in the unheroic struggles and devotions of women.

Of modern writers in this style, Mary Wilkins is probably the best, her short stories being superior to her novels.

There are two women’s novels entirely different from any that had gone before or that have come after. They are Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

The lives of these girls was sad and unfortunate. They belonged to a respectable family, and throughout maintained their respectability shut in by conventionality and suffering from poverty. Jane Eyre is a girl whose mind and not her face was her fortune. The story is in reality the autobiography of the inner tempestuous life of Charlotte Bronte herself. Jane is governess in the family of an eccentric man named Rochester, who was at one time the hero of half the women of England. He loved Jane and asked her to marry him, but at the altar it is discovered that he has a wife living, whom he had looked on as dead because she was insane. So the lovers are parted to be united only in a tragedy.

Wuthering Heights is a story of love and revenge within the conventionalities of English higher-class life, and extends over two generations. As a study of love and the far-reaching effects of its disappointment, it is a powerful though gloomy story, and by no means so finely artistic as Jane Eyre.

Another woman’s work in a class by itself is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which to this day is found in the list of half dozen best selling books, equaling the sales of the latest current novel. It is a wonderfully humorous, pathetic, and sympathetic picture of Southern life before the war, and probably as exact as most historical fiction, though many Southerners violently resent its claim to truthfulness.