Chapter XIII: Part 13

These things were not easy for him to do; for he was never a rich man, and he had constant calls upon his charity. He kept a small floating fund always in circulation among his poorer acquaintances; and when one returned it to him he passed it to another, never considering it as his own but for the use of the unfortunate. He liked to disguise his charities as jokes,--as filling a pill-box with gold pieces and sending it to a needy friend, with the inscription, "To be taken one at a time, as needed;" and various devices of this kind. He was as generous of his praise as of his money, and always had a good word for his literary friends. His fine tribute to Macaulay will be remembered, and his praise of Washington Irving, of Charlotte Bronte, and many others. While he had an exaggerated contempt for the foibles of the world at large, he had an almost equally exaggerated sympathy for the joys and sorrows of individuals; and much of the scorn which he gives to humanity collectively may be taken as a sort of vent to his feelings when he is ashamed of having been too foolishly weak in dealing with some of these fellow-mortals in real life.

He never encouraged his companions in being cynical, but always encouraged them in admiration. "I am glad he worships anybody," he said, when some friends were satirizing an absent companion for his devotion to a great man. Neither would he encourage any unkind talk about the absent, or laugh at any good hit which was aimed at a friend. "You fiend!" he said to a friend who was laughing over a sharp attack on an acquaintance, and he refused to read or hear a word of it. Indeed, for steadfast loyalty to his friends, his equal has seldom been seen. He made common cause with them in everything, and nothing so enraged him as treachery or deceit among friends.

He was a man of aristocratic feeling, and resented familiarity. He was also in general a reserved man, and allowed few people really to know him. He had a surface nature which was all his mere acquaintances knew. Even his friends were long in finding him out. Douglas Jerrold was once heard to say, "I have known Thackeray eighteen years, and I don't know him yet;" and this was the case with the majority of his friends. His great griefs he kept closely within his own heart, and the more serious side of his nature was all hidden from the world as much as he could hide it. Those who read between the lines discovered it in his books, and those who looked deeply enough into human nature found it in the man, but superficial observers saw only the mocking man of the world. When suddenly observed, his face always had a sad, grave aspect, and it was often hard for him to throw off this seriousness and to put on his harlequin's mask. Upon religious matters he was always reticent, but reverent. Only upon rare occasions would he discuss serious subjects at all, and only with a chosen few. In one letter which has been published he departs from his usual custom and writes:--

"I never feel pity for a man dying, only for survivors if there be
such passionately deploring him. You see the pleasures the
undersigned proposes to himself here in future years,--a sight of
the Alps, a holiday on the Rhine, a ride in the Park, a colloquy
with pleasant friends of an evening. If it is death to part with
these delights (and pleasures they are, and no mistake), sure the
mind can conceive others afterward; and I know one small
philosopher who is quite ready to give up these pleasures,--quite
content (after a pang or two of separation from dear friends here)
to put his hand into that of the summoning angel, and say, 'Lead
on, O messenger of God our Father, to the next place whither the
divine goodness calls us.' We must be blindfolded before we can
pass, I know; but I have no fear about what is to come, any more
than my children need fear that the love of _their_ father should
fail them. I thought myself a dead man once, and protest the notion
gave me no disquiet about myself,--at least the philosophy is more
comfortable than that which is tinctured with brimstone."

He hated those who make a stock in trade of their religion, and, like Dr. Johnson, would have advised them to clear their minds of cant; but no genuine evidence of religious feeling or experience was ever treated lightly by him, and he was greatly shocked at any real desecration of sacred things. He had a simple, childlike faith in God and in the Saviour, and a firm hope in the everlasting life.

In person, Thackeray was a tall, ruddy, simple-looking Englishman, with rather a full face, florid, almost rubicund, and keen, kindly eyes, and, after forty, abundant gray hair. He had a conspicuous, almost a commanding figure, with a certain awkwardness in his gait. He had a misshaped nose, caused by an accident in boyhood, and a sarcastic twinkle oftentimes in his eyes, which changed the expression of his whole face.

He dressed well, but unpretendingly, and his voice and manner were always courteous and cordial. He smiled easily, and had a humorous look when not oppressed with sadness, which was often the case in later life. He died suddenly in middle life, leaving, like Dickens, an unfinished novel in the press. No other literary man, save perhaps Macaulay, has been mourned as Thackeray was mourned. There was universal sorrow for his premature loss, and great personal grief among his friends. Twenty-three years have passed since that time, and no successor has arisen to repay the world for that loss. When the curtain fell upon Becky Sharpe and Beatrix, upon Ethel Newcome and the good Colonel, upon Laura and Pendennis, upon Esmond and Warrington, and upon all the deeply studied characters of his mimic stage, that curtain fell to rise no more upon such creatures as his hands had made. He will have no successor. He is the One, the Only. Such pathos, such wit, such wisdom, will not dawn upon us again--in time.

When he wrote Finis for the last time at the close of one of those matchless volumes, it was an epoch closed in the history of literature. When the recording angel wrote Finis at the close of that sad and weary but bravely spent and useful life, it was a sad day for the world of men, who will not look upon his like again. Who that felt a love for the writer and the man could fail to rejoice that the end was quick and painless? One of our own poets has well described the scene:--

"The angel came by night
(Such angels still come down),
And like a winter cloud
Passed over London Town,
Along its lonesome streets,
Where want had ceased to weep,
Until it reached a house
Where a great man lay asleep;
The man of all his time
Who knew the most of men,--
The soundest head and heart,
The sharpest, kindest pen.
It paused beside his bed
And whispered in his ear;
He never turned his head,
But answered, 'I am here.'
Into the night they went;
At morning, side by side,
They gained the sacred place
Where the greatest dead abide;
Where grand old Homer sits,
In godlike state benign;
Where broods in endless thought
The awful Florentine;
Where sweet Cervantes walks,
A smile on his grave face;
Where gossips quaint Montaigne,
The wisest of his race;
Where Goethe looks through all
With that calm eye of his;
Where--little seen, but light--
The only Shakspeare is!
When the new spirit came,
They asked him, drawing near,
'Art thou become like us?'
He answered, 'I am here.'"

CHARLES DICKENS.

No novelist has dealt so directly with the home life of the world as Charles Dickens. He has painted few historic pictures; he has dealt mostly in interiors,--beautiful bits of home life, full of domestic feeling. Indeed, we may say that his background is always the home, and here he paints his portraits, often like those of Hogarth for strength and grotesque effect. Here, too, he limns the scenes of his comedy-tragedy, and depicts the changing fashions of the time. The color is sometimes a little crude, laid on occasionally with too coarse a brush; but the effect is always lifelike, and our interest in it is never known to flag.

Nowhere else in all the range of literature have we such tender description of home life and love, such intuitive knowledge of child life, such wonderful sympathy with every form of domestic wrong and suffering, such delicate appreciation of the shyest and most unobtrusive of social virtues; nowhere else such indignation at any neglect or desecration of the home, as in Mrs. Jellyby with her mission, in Mrs. Pardiggle with her charities, Mr. Pecksniff with his hypocrisy, and Mr. Dombey with his unfeeling selfishness. In short, Dickens is pre-eminently the prophet and the poet of the home.

Now, can it be possible that we must say of such a man as this, that in his own life he was the opposite of all that which he so feelingly describes,--that he desecrated the very home he so apostrophizes,--that he put all his warmth, geniality, and tenderness into his books and kept for his own fireside his sour humors and unhappy moods,--that he was "ill to live with," as Mrs. Carlyle puts it? We cannot believe it in so bald a form, but we are forced to admit that his married life seems to have been in every way unhappy and unfortunate. No one could state this more strongly than Dickens himself, in the letter he wrote at the time of the separation. He said:--

"Mrs. Dickens and I have lived unhappily for many years. Hardly any
one who has known us intimately can fail to have known that we are
in all respects of character and temperament wonderfully unsuited
to each other. I suppose that no two people, not vicious in
themselves, were ever joined together, who had greater difficulty
in understanding one another, or who had less in common. An
attached woman-servant (more friend to both of us than servant),
who lived with us sixteen years and had the closest familiar
experience of this unhappiness in London, in the country, in
France, in Italy, wherever we have been, year after year, month
after month, week after week, day after day, will bear testimony to
this. Nothing has on many occasions stood between us and a
separation but Mrs. Dickens's sister, Georgina Hogarth. From the
age of fifteen, she has devoted herself to our home and our
children. She has been their playmate, nurse, instructress, friend,
protectress, adviser, companion. In the manly consideration towards
Mrs. Dickens, which I owe to my wife, I will only remark of her
that the peculiarity of her character has thrown all the children
on some one else. I do not know, I cannot by any stretch of fancy
imagine, what would have become of them but for this aunt, who has
grown up with them, to whom they are devoted, and who has
sacrificed the best part of her youth and life to them. She has
remonstrated, reasoned, suffered, and toiled, and come again to
prevent a separation between Mrs. Dickens and me. Mrs. Dickens has
often expressed to her her sense of her affectionate care and
devotion in the house,--never more strongly than within the last
twelve months."

Again, in the public statement which he prepared for "Household Words," alluding to a multitude of damaging rumors which were quickly put in circulation, he says:--

"By some means, arising out of wickedness or out of folly or out of
inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has
been made the occasion of misrepresentations most grossly false,
most monstrous, and most cruel,--involving not only me, but
innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I
have no knowledge, if indeed they have any existence,--and so
widely spread that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse
these lines by whom some touch of the breath of these slanderers
will not have passed like an unwholesome air.

"Those who know me and my nature need no assurance under my hand
that such calumnies are as irreconcilable with me as they are in
their frantic incoherence with one another. But there is a great
multitude who know me through my writings and who do not know me
otherwise, and I cannot bear that one of them should be left in
doubt or hazard of doubt through my poorly shrinking from taking
the unusual means to which I now resort of circulating the truth. I
most solemnly declare then--and this I do both in my own name and
my wife's name--that all lately whispered rumors touching the
trouble at which I have glanced are abominably false; and that
whosoever repeats one of them, after this denial, will lie as
wilfully and as foully as it is possible for any false witness to
lie before heaven and earth."

This denial, coming from a man of truth and honor like Charles Dickens, must, once for all, dispose of that convenient way of accounting for the sad estrangement.

The reasons for the unhappy state of things were of a much more complicated nature than this. Only the most intimate of his friends ever knew them in full, and of course they were debarred from making them public. But Professor Ward of Cambridge University, who has written a very kind and appreciative Life of Dickens, and one which gives a far more pleasing idea of his character than the bulky and egotistical Life by Forster, gives a clue to the whole trouble in the following statement. He says:--

"If he ever loved his wife with that affection before which
so-called incompatibilities of habits, temper, or disposition fade
into nothingness, there is no indication of it in any of the
numerous letters addressed to her. Neither has it ever been
pretended that he strove in the direction of that resignation which
love and duty made possible to David Copperfield, or even that he
remained in every way master of himself, as many men have known how
to remain, the story of whose wedded life and its disappointments
has never been written in history or figured in fiction."

And this troublous condition of things was very much intensified by Dickens having fallen violently in love with Mary Hogarth, Mrs. Dickens's youngest sister. This beautiful girl died at their house at the early age of seventeen. No sorrow seems ever to have touched the heart and possessed the imagination of Charles Dickens like that for the loss of this dearly loved girl. "I can solemnly say," he wrote to her mother a few months after her death, "that waking or sleeping I have never lost the recollection of our hard sorrow, and I never shall." "If," he writes in his diary at the beginning of a new year, "she was with me now,--the same winning, happy, amiable companion, sympathizing with all my thoughts and feelings more than any one I ever knew did or will,--I think I should have nothing to wish but a continuance of such happiness." Throughout life her memory haunted him with great vividness. After her death he wrote: "I dreamed of her every night for many weeks, and always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to me that I never lay down without a hope of the vision returning." The year before he died he wrote to a friend: "She is so much in my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful, that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is." In a word, she was the one great imaginative passion of his life. He is said to have pictured her in Little Nell, and he writes after finishing that book, "Dear Mary died yesterday when I think of it."

Have we not in this the key to all the sorrows of his domestic life? Could he have married the woman he loved in this manner, he would doubtless have been one of the tenderest and most devoted of husbands, and a family life as beautiful as any of the ideal ones he has depicted would have resulted. It is probable that he did not know Mary Hogarth until after his marriage, when she came to live in his house, and when his youthful fancy for his wife had begun to decline. Miss Hogarth died instantly of heart-disease, without even a premonitory warning.

All accounts agree in calling Mrs. Dickens a very pretty, amiable, and well-bred woman; and even if she was as infinitely incapable as represented, that alone would seem to be insufficient cause for so serious a trouble. Miss Georgina Hogarth, whom all describe as a very lovely and superior person, possessed the executive ability Mrs. Dickens lacked, it would seem; for all visitors both to Tavistock House and Gad's Hill describe with enthusiasm the perfect order which prevailed in the large establishments, attributing this in part at least to Dickens's own intense love of method and passion for neatness. But no man without the aid of feminine head and hands would have succeeded in attaining to this perfect housekeeping, especially where the family consisted of nine children, as in this case.

Hans Christian Andersen thus describes a visit to Gad's Hill:--

"It was a fine new house, with red walls and four bow-windows, and
a jutting entrance supported by pillars; in the gable a large
window. A dense hedge of cherry-laurel surrounded the house, in
front of which extended a neat lawn, and on the opposite side rose
two mighty cedars of Lebanon, whose crooked branches spread their
green far over another large lawn surrounded by ivy and wild
vines, the hedge being so dense and dark that no sunbeam could
penetrate it.

"As soon as I stepped into the house, Dickens came to meet me
kindly and cordially. He was now in the prime of life, still so
youthful, so active, so eloquent, so rich in the most pleasant
humor, through which his sterling kind-heartedness always beamed
forth. As he stood before me in the first hour, so he was and
remained during all the weeks I passed in his company,--merry,
good-natured, and full of charming sympathy. Dickens at home seems
to be perpetually jolly, and enters into the interests of games
with all the ardor of a boy. My bedroom was the perfection of a
sleeping-apartment; the view across the Kentish hills, with a
distant peep of the Thames, charming. In every room I found a table
covered with writing-materials, headed notepaper, envelopes, cut
quill-pens, wax, matches, sealing-wax, and all scrupulously neat
and orderly. There are magnificent specimens of Newfoundland dogs
on the grounds, such animals as Landseer would love to paint. One
of these, named Bumble, seems to be a favorite with Dickens."

Mr. Mackenzie writes:--

"Eminently social and domestic, he exercised a liberal hospitality,
and though he lived well as his means allowed, avoided excesses. It
is said of him that he never lost a friend, never made an enemy."

From all sources comes the same report of his geniality, of his devotion to his children and their devotion to him, of his constant generosity and good-humor. Byron's old servant said that Lady Byron was the only woman he ever saw who could not manage his master. Was this also true of Mrs. Dickens? Was she the only one who found him "ill to live with"? It may be; and yet one can easily imagine him to have been a man of moods, and that in some of these moods it would be best to give him a wide berth. The very excess of his animal spirits may have been wearying to one who could not share them; and that he was egotistical to a degree, and vain, and fond of flattery, goes without saying. A lady in the "English-woman's Magazine" tells this story of his wild and reckless fun, and it is matched by many others. They were down on the seashore in the moonlight, and had been dancing there.

"We then strolled farther down to watch the fading light. The tide
came rippling in. The night grew darker,--starless, moonless.
Dickens seemed suddenly to be possessed with the spirit of
mischief; he threw his arm around me, and ran me down the inclined
plane to the end of the jetty till we reached the toll-post. He put
his other arm around this, and exclaimed in theatrical tones that
he intended to hold me there till the sad sea waves should submerge
us. 'Think of the sensation we shall create.' Here I implored him
to let me go, and struggled hard to release myself. 'Let your mind
dwell upon the column in the "Times" wherein will be vividly
described the pathetic fate of the lovely E. P., drowned by Dickens
in a fit of dementia. Don't struggle, poor little bird; you are
helpless.' By this time the last gleam of light had faded out, and
the water close to us looked uncomfortably black. The tide was
coming up rapidly, and surged over my feet. I gave a loud shriek,
and tried to bring him back to common-sense by reminding him that
my dress--my best dress, my only silk dress--would be ruined. Even
this climax did not soften him; he still went on with his
serio-comic nonsense, shaking with laughter all the time, and
panting with his struggles to hold me. 'Mrs. Dickens,' I shrieked,
'help me! Make Mr. Dickens let me go--the waves are up to my
knees.' 'Charles,' cried Mrs. Dickens, 'how can you be so silly?
You will both be carried off by the tide!' And it was not until my
dress had been completely ruined that I succeeded in wresting
myself from him. Upon two other occasions he seized me and ran with
me under the cataract, and held me there until I was thoroughly
baptized and my bonnets a wreck of lace and feathers."

The same writer says,--and she is one who writes from familiar personal acquaintance,--"To describe Dickens as always amiable, always just, and always in the right, would be simply false and untrue to Nature;" and she relates several anecdotes going to prove that he was sometimes capricious, not always responsive to appeals for help, and other things of that sort; all of which may be true and not be very damaging. This writer tells still another story of his reckless fun-making, as follows:--

"We were about to make an excursion to Pegwell Bay, and lunch
there. Presently Dickens came in in high glee, flourishing about a
yard of ballads, which he had bought from a beggar in the street.
'Look here,' he cried exultingly, 'all for a penny. One song alone
is worth a Jew's eye,--quite new and original, the subject being
the interesting announcement by our gracious Queen.' He commenced
to give us a specimen, but after hearing one verse there arose a
cry of universal execration. He pretended to be vexed at our
'shutting him up.' said there was nothing wrong in it, he had
written a great deal worse himself; and when we were going to enter
the carriages he said: 'Now, look here! I give due notice to all
and sundry, that I mean to sing that song, and a good many others,
during the ride; so those ladies who think them vulgar can go in
the other carriages. I am not going to invest my hard-earned penny
for nothing.' I was quite certain that Charles Dickens was the last
man in the world to shock the modesty of any female, and too much
of a gentleman to do anything that was annoying to us, but I
thought it as well to go in the other carriage; and so he had no
ladies with him but his wife and Mrs. S----. I was not sorry,
however, to be where I was, as I heard for the next half-hour
portions of those songs wafted on the breeze; and the bursts of
laughter from ladies and gentlemen and the mischievous twinkle in
Dickens's eye proved that he was in such a madcap mood that it was
as well there were none but married people with him,--the subject
being of a 'Gampish' nature. But he was not always full of spirits
or even-tempered,--indeed, I was sometimes puzzled by the
variability of his moods."

Anecdotes like the following, told by Blanchard Jerrold, abound in all writers who wrote of Dickens from personal knowledge:--

"A very dear friend of mine, and of many others to whom literature
is a staff, had died. To say that his family had claims upon
Dickens is to say that they were promptly acknowledged and
satisfied, with the grace and heartiness which double the gift,
sweeten the bread, and warm the wine. I asked a connection of our
dead friend whether he had seen the poor wife and children. 'Seen
them?' he answered. 'I was there to-day. They are removed into a
charming cottage. They have everything about them; and just think
of this: when I burst into the room, in my eager survey of the new
home, I saw a man in his shirt-sleeves up some steps, hammering
away lustily. He turned. It was Charles Dickens, and he was hanging
the pictures for the widow. . . . Dickens was the soul of truth and
manliness as well as kindness, so that such a service as this came
as naturally to him as help from his purse.'"

Jerrold continues:--

"There was that boy-element in him which has been so often remarked
of men of genius. 'Why, we played a game of knock 'em down only a
week ago,' a friend remarked to me last June, with beaming eyes,
'and he showed all the old astonishing energy and delight in taking
aim at Aunt Sally.' My own earliest recollections of Dickens are of
his gayest moods, when the boy in him was exuberant, and leap-frog
and rounders were not sports too young for the player who had
written 'Pickwick' twenty years before. The sweet and holy lessons
which he presented to humanity out of the humble places in the
world could not have been evolved out of a nature less true and
sympathetic than his. It wanted such a man as Dickens was in his
life to be such a writer as he was for the world."

One more anecdote. J. C. Young tells us that one day Mrs. Henry Siddons, a neighbor and intimate of Lord Jeffrey, who often entered his library unannounced, opened the door very gently to see if he were there, and saw enough at a glance to convince her that the visit was ill-timed. The hard critic of the "Edinburgh Review" was sitting in his chair with his head on the table in deep grief. As Mrs. Siddons was retiring, in the hope that her entrance had been unnoticed, Jeffrey raised his head and kindly beckoned her back. Perceiving that his cheek was flushed and his eyes suffused with tears, she begged permission to withdraw. When he found that she was intending to leave him, he rose from his chair, took her by both hands, and led her to a seat.

"Don't go, my dear friend; I shall be right again in another minute."

"I had no idea you had had any bad news, or cause for grief, or I would not have come. Is any one dead?"

"Yes, indeed. I'm a great goose to have given way so; but I could not help it. You'll be sorry to hear that little Nelly, Boz's little Nelly, is dead."

Dear, sweet, loving little Nell! We doubt if any other creation of poet or novelist in any language has received the tribute of as many tears as thou. From high, from low, on land, on sea, wherever thy story has been read, there has been paid the spontaneous tribute of tears. Whether or not many of the fantastic creations of the great master's hand will live in the far future we cannot tell, but of thy immortality there is no more question than there is of that of Hamlet or of Lear. Bret Harte tells us of a camp among the stern Sierras, where a group of wanderers gathered about the fire, and one of them arose, and "from his pack's scant treasure" drew forth the magic book; and soon all their own wants and labors were forgotten, and

"The whole camp with Nell on English meadows
Wandered and lost their way."

And from many different sources come stories of her influence upon the hearts and minds of all classes and conditions of men.

Of Dickens's personal appearance and of the leading traits of his character much has been written, and by some of the keenest observers of his time. He is said to have been a very small and sickly boy, subject to attacks of violent spasm. Although so fond of games and sports when a man, as a boy he evinced little interest in them, probably on account of his ill health. We should naturally think of him as the autocrat of the playground, and the champion in all games of strength and skill; but such was not the fact. He was extremely fond of reading, at a very early age, and of acting little plays, and showing pictures in a magic lantern; he even sang at this time, and was as fond of fun as in later life. When quite young he and his companions mounted a small theatre, and got together scenery to illustrate "The Miller and his Men," and one or two other plays.

Mr. Forster describes him thus:--

"The features were very good. He had a capital forehead, a firm
nose, with full, wide nostril, eyes wonderfully beaming with
intellect and running over with humor and cheerfulness, and a
rather prominent mouth, strongly marked with sensibility. The head
was altogether well-formed and symmetrical, and the air and
carriage of it extremely spirited. The hair, so scant and grizzled
in later days, was then of a rich brown and the most luxuriant
abundance, and the bearded face of the last two decades had hardly
a vestige of hair or whisker, but there was that in the face, as I
first recollect it, which no time could change, and which remained
implanted on it unalterably to the last. This was the quickness,
keenness, and practical power, the eager, restless, energetic look
on each several feature, that seemed to tell so little of a student
or writer of books, and so much of a man of action and business in
the world. Light and motion flashed from every part of it."

Another keen observer writes:--

"The French painter's remark that 'he was more like one of the old
Dutch admirals we see in picture galleries than a man of letters,'
conveyed an admirably true idea to his friends. He had, indeed,
much of the quiet, resolute manner of command of a captain of a
ship. He trod along briskly as he walked; as he listened, his
searching eye rested on you, and the nerves in his face quivered,
much like those in the delicately formed nostrils of a finely bred
dog. There was a curl or two in his hair at each side, which was
characteristic; and the jaunty way he wore his little morning hat,
rather on one side, added to the effect. But when there was
anything droll suggested, a delightful sparkle of lurking humor
began to kindle and spread to his mouth, so that, even before he
uttered anything, you felt that something irresistibly droll was at
hand."

Mr. Mackenzie tells us:--

"Dickens's personal taste in dress was always 'loud.' He loved gay
vests, glittering jewelry, showy satin stocks, and everything
rather _prononce_; yet no man had a keener or more unsparing
critical eye for these vulgarities in others. He once gave to a
friend a vest of gorgeous shawl pattern. Soon after, at a party, he
quizzed his friend most unmercifully for his stunning vest,
although he had on him at that very moment its twin brother or
sister, whichever sex vests belong to."

There was an almost morbid restlessness in the man, out of which arose his habit of excessive walking. When he was writing one of his great books he could not be away from London streets, and he used to walk about in them at night for hours at a time, until his body was completely exhausted; in this way only could he get sleep. When not composing he loved long country walks, and probably injured his health much in later life by the great length of these tramps across country. His restlessness showed itself also in many other ways. The element of repose was not in him. "My last special feat," he writes once when unable to sleep, "was turning out of bed at two, after a hard day, pedestrian and otherwise, and walking thirty miles into the country to breakfast."

The story is told, too, of a night spent in private theatricals, following a very laborious day for Dickens, and of his being so much fresher than any of his companions that towards morning he jumped leap-frog over the backs of the whole weary company, and was not willing to go to bed even then. His animal spirits were really inexhaustible, and this was the great unfailing charm of his companionship. He never drooped or lagged, but was always alert, keen, and ready for any emergency. Out-of-door games he entered into with great hilarity, and was usually the youngest man in the party. There was a positive sparkle and atmosphere of holiday sunshine about him, and to no man was the word "genial" ever more appropriately applied.

He carried an atmosphere of good cheer with him in person as he did in his books, and was fond of the sentiment of joviality; wrote, indeed, a great deal about feasting, but was really abstemious himself, though he liked to brew punch and have little midnight suppers with his friends. Yet at these same suppers he ate and drank almost nothing, though he furnished the hilarity for the whole party.

His powers of microscopic observation have seldom been equalled. As Arthur Helps said of him, he seemed to see and observe nine facts while his companion was seeing the tenth. His books are full of the results of this accurate observation. Comparatively little in them is invention; the major part of everything is description of something he has seen and noted. When he was engaged in reporting, among eighty or ninety reporters, he occupied the very highest rank, not merely for accuracy in observing, but for marvellous quickness in transcribing. His wonderful ability as an actor is known to all. Probably he would have been the greatest comedian of his day if he had not been one of its greatest writers. His love for the theatre was an absorbing passion. He was quite as good a manager as actor, and could bring order out of the chaos of rehearsals for private theatricals, as no other man has ever been known to do. Carlyle, who was one of the keenest observers of men our time has produced, said: "Dickens's essential faculty, I often say, is that of a first-rate play-actor." Macready also gave it as his opinion that Dickens was the only amateur with any pretensions to talent that he had ever seen.

Among the weaknesses of his character were his love of display, which amounted to ostentation sometimes; his fear of being slighted; his vanity, which was prodigious, and a certain hardness, which at times amounted to aggressiveness and almost to fierceness. The displays of this latter quality were very rare; but they left an ineffaceable impression upon all witnesses.

The only political questions which deeply moved him were those social problems to which his sympathy for the poor had always directed his attention,--the Poor Law, temperance, Sunday observance, punishment and prisons, labor and strikes. But that he much influenced the legislation of his country by his writings, no man can doubt. In religion he was a Liberal. Born in the Church of England, we are told by Professor Ward that he had so strong an aversion for what seemed dogmatism of any kind, that for a time--in 1843--he connected himself with a Unitarian congregation, and to Unitarian views his own probably continued during his life most nearly to approach.

In his will he says:--

"I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ, and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide
themselves by the teaching of the New Testament, in its broad
spirit, and to put no faith in any man's narrow construction of its
letter here or there."

Although a man of deep emotional nature, his religion was, after all, mostly a religion of good deeds. Helpfulness, kindliness,--these were to him the supreme things. One who knew him well wrote after his death:--

"I frankly confess that having met innumerable men and had dealings
with innumerable men, I never met one with an approach to his
genuine, unaffected, unchanging kindness, or one that ever found so
sunshiny a pleasure in doing one a kindness. I cannot call to mind
that any request I ever made to him was ungranted, or left without
an attempt to grant it."

Upon this point all who ever knew the man are well agreed. It will suffice. To him who loved so much, if need be much will be forgiven.

As we close this paper, how softly pass before us the long procession of the men and women he has created,--for they all seem thus to us,--not characters, but people, many of them personal acquaintances of our own. There are actual tears in our eyes as the little company of children pass in review, led by David Copperfield, and followed by Oliver Twist, with Paul Dombey in his wake, and little Nell timidly pressing near; while trooping after, sad, tearful, or grotesque, come Florence Dombey, poor Joe, Pip and Smike, Sloppy and Peepy, Little Dorrit and Tiny Tim, and many more of those with whose sorrows we have sympathized, and over each and all of whom we have wept hot tears in the days that are no more. Dream-children, he calls them; but the great world acknowledges them as real beings, and sorrows and rejoices with them, even more, it is to be feared, than it does sometimes with the children of flesh and blood, homeless and forsaken as many of them are. But for the sake of Tiny Tim many an old Scrooge has softened his hard heart somewhat; and in memory of poor Joe many a hardened city man has been a little less imperious to the beggar-boy about "moving on." Even poor Smike has served the purpose of ameliorating a trifle the hard lot of such unfortunates as he, who are tyrannized over in public institutions; and, altogether, Dickens's dream-children can be said to have been useful in their day and generation.

How the other old friends come following on! We have our own peculiar greeting for each. We cannot help holding our sides as Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller go by, followed by Captain Cuttle with his hook, the finest gentleman of them all; by the Major and Mrs. Bagnet, by whom discipline is maintained in the group; by Micawber, with his large outlines and flowing periods; and by Mrs. Micawber and her relations, senseless imbeciles or unmitigated scoundrels all, as her husband testifies; by Mrs. Gamp, by Barkis, and even the young man by the name of Guppy. A smile spreads over the face of the whole reading world at the bare mention of their names. How the smiles deepen into tears as we think over the other friends to whom he has introduced us,--mutual friends of us all; of whom we talk when we congregate together, with just as much of real feeling and interest as we do of other friends of flesh and blood, laugh over their foibles and follies, pity their sorrows, blame their acts, and all with no other feeling than that of utter reality.

Will little Nell's friend, the old schoolmaster, ever cease to draw tears from our eyes? Shall we ever weary of gentle Tom Pinch? Shall we not always touch our hats to Joe Gargery? Shall we ever cease loving Mr. Jarndyce, even when the wind is in the east? And will Agnes and Esther ever pall upon our taste? Not, we verily believe, until the sources of feeling are dried up in us forever, and we have grown indifferent to all of earth. What an array of them there are, too! The bare catalogue of their names would fill a volume, and it would not be bad reading to the genuine Dickens lover,--recalling, as each name would, so much of vivid portrayal, and starting so many associations in the mind. But there is no need to repeat the names; the big, dull old world long ago learned them by heart. Nor will they soon be relegated to the shades. While the tide of English speech flows on, they will linger, component parts of the language itself.

GEORGE ELIOT.

While the great woman who wrote under the _nom de plume_ of George Eliot was alive, there was much appreciative interest and much unlawful curiosity felt regarding her private life. This as a matter of course. No such striking personality as hers could project itself into a time of dulness and mediocrity without exciting unusual interest and attention. And the half-knowledge which had been gained of her life and character served as an active stimulus to this curiosity. One or two leading facts in her history had become known and had been made the most of by a gossip-loving time; but aside from these isolated facts there was very little known of George Eliot, except by a little close circle of personal friends, who seem to have refrained in a remarkable manner from writing of her in the newspapers. That modern and almost purely American institution, the interviewer, allowed her to escape, and even up to the time of her death comparatively little was said of her except as a writer of books. But the interest in her as a woman has been deepening constantly since her death, fed by some half-revelations which have been made; and few books of our own time have been so eagerly anticipated and so universally sought after as the biography by her husband, which lately appeared. Here at last we have that wonderful woman painted by her own hand; not in an autobiography, where a person poses for the public, but in the private letters and journals of a lifetime. Like Mrs. Carlyle, she had unconsciously drawn her own portrait from day to day. An admiring world looks upon the work, and with one voice must pronounce it well done. For it is easy to gather from these unconscious touches everything of real importance in regard to the character and life of this woman. Much as we should have enjoyed the letters and journals in a complete form, untouched by pruning fingers, we cannot but heartily approve the wisdom of Mr. Cross in carefully selecting and editing them. He has shown himself a person of excellent taste and judgment, and one could scarcely ask to fall into better hands, if one's life must be given to the public at all when one has travelled away from the things of time and sense.

Let us see, then, what manner of woman this was who held a world entranced by the splendor of her genius for so many years. Here is one of the earliest glimpses of the child:--

"Any one who happened to look through the windows of Griff House
would have seen a pretty picture in the dining-room Saturday
evening after tea. The powerful, middle-aged man, with the strongly
marked features, sits in his deep leather-covered arm-chair at the
right-hand corner of the ruddy fire-place, with the head of the
'little wench' between his knees. The child turns over the book
with pictures which she wishes her father to explain to her, or
that perhaps she prefers explaining to him. Her rebellious hair is
all over her eyes, much vexing the pale, energetic mother who sits
on the opposite side of the fire, cumbered with much service,
letting no instant of time escape the inevitable click of the
knitting-needles. The father is already proud of the astonishing
and growing intelligence of his little girl. An old-fashioned
child, already living in a world of her own imagination,
impressible to her finger-tips, and ready to give her views upon
any subject."

To readers of "The Mill on the Floss" little description of her child-life will be necessary. She has, in Maggie, pictured herself as nearly as possible during childhood. Here is her own description:--

"A creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was
beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear
straining after dreamy music that died away, and would not come to
her; with a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would
link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life and
give her soul a sense of home in it. No wonder, when there is this
contrast between the outward and the inward, that painful
collisions come of it."

In Adam Bede we have a partial portrait of her father, and there are other striking resemblances to him in Caleb Garth, although neither character is to be really identified with him. Mrs. Poyser bears the same partial relation to her mother. With these people for the _dramatis personae_, the drama could scarcely fail to be a striking one. The relation existing between herself and her sister is described in "Dorothea and Celia,"--no intellectual affinity, but strong family affection. The repression of these early years she afterwards refers to in saying,--

"You may try, but you can never imagine, what it is to have a man's
force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a
girl."

During her early youth she writes thus to a friend:--

"I really feel for you, sacrificing as you are your own tastes and
comforts for the pleasure of others, and that in a manner the most
trying to rebellious flesh and blood; for I verily believe that in
most cases it requires more of a martyr's spirit to endure with
patience and cheerfulness daily crossings and interruptions of our
petty desires and pursuits and to rejoice in them, if they can be
made to conduce to God's glory and our own sanctification, than
even to lay down our lives for the truth."

Deep religious feeling was one of the most striking characteristics of this period of her youth. On her nineteenth birthday she writes:--

"May the Lord give me such an insight into what is truly good that
I may not rest contented with making Christianity a mere addendum
to my pursuits, or with tacking it as a mere fringe to my garments!
May I seek to be sanctified wholly!"

This religious feeling she carried with her throughout life, although she soon left behind her the tenets and creeds of the church in which she was born and for which she had so strong an affection. In later life, although placing herself entirely outside of historic Christianity, and becoming a rationalist of the rationalists, the fervor of strong religious feeling never left her, and to her latest days she loved to read the Scriptures and to feel the glow of devotional feeling which belonged to her nature. The strong and powerful motive of her life in youth and age was the intense desire to aid and help the world, for which she felt a compassion so strong as to remind one of the descriptions given of Buddha in Eastern song and story. In every period of her life, in her most private letters and journals, this burden of the world's sorrow seemed to find expression, and her pitying love was almost Christ-like in its tenderness.

In forming an estimate of the woman we must never lose sight of this predominating feeling. Next to it in intensity is to be placed the longing for love and sympathy, the strength of the affections. No such deeply loving human heart has been pictured to the world in all the realm of books. To those who have been accustomed to think of George Eliot as the master-mind of her time, the greatest intellect of her generation, the revelation of her heart will be a great surprise and delight. A deep, strong, passionate, loving human soul, with heights and depths of devotion and tenderness unthinkable even to the poorer natures around her,--it was in this that both her strength and her weakness lay. This affectionateness was shown in her youth in her devotion to her father, whose home she kept for several years, and in lavish regard for the few friends who were near her, all of whom she retained and loved to her dying day. It was shown later on in the passionate and absorbing love she gave to Mr. Lewes throughout a lifetime, and which seemed but to deepen and widen with the years; and in the tenderness and thoughtfulness of the mother-love she gave to his children, and which seem to lack not one of the elements of real maternal feeling. This strong, pitying, passionate love of hers--a love hardly to be conceived of by cold and self-contained natures--is the key to the one action of her life requiring apology and charitable construction. In the first place, she pitied Mr. Lewes for the sorrows of his life and for the unfaithfulness of the wife upon whom he had lavished his heart's devotion, and whom he had forgiven for the first offence, only to be deceived the second time. Next, the strong feeling for justice which characterized her nature rebelled against that law which bound him to this unfaithful wife simply because he had once forgiven her; and, finally, the desire she felt to comfort his loneliness and redeem his life overcame all the scruples which the integrity of her nature must have confronted her with, and she defied the law which was odious to her and the conventionalities which were dear to her, in the same act, and assumed the tie which held her in such loyal allegiance until death severed it. Here is the only allusion she made to it in all her correspondence, as far as we know. This was written to one of her oldest friends, Mrs. Bray.

"If there is any one action or relation of my life which is, and
always has been, profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr.
Lewes. It is, however, natural enough that you should mistake me in
many ways, for not only are you unacquainted with Mr. Lewes's real
character, and the course of his actions, but also it is several
years since you and I were much together, and it is possible that
the modifications my mind has undergone may be quite in the
opposite direction of what you imagine. No one can be better aware
than yourself that it is possible for two people to hold different
opinions on momentous subjects with equal sincerity and an equally
earnest conviction that their respective opinions are alone the
truly moral ones. If we differ on the subject of the marriage laws,
I at least can believe that you cleave to what you believe to be
good, and I don't know of anything in the nature of your views that
should prevent you from believing the same of me. How far we differ
I think we neither of us know; for I am ignorant of your precise
views, and apparently you attribute to me both feelings and
opinions which are not mine. We cannot set each other right in
letters; but one thing I can tell you in few words. Light and
easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor
could live for practically. Women who are satisfied with such ties
do not act as I have done. That any unworldly, unsuperstitious
person who is sufficiently acquainted with the realities of life
can pronounce my relation to Mr. Lewes immoral, I can only
understand by remembering how subtle and complex are the influences
which mould opinion. But I do remember this, and I indulge in no
arrogant or uncharitable thoughts about those who condemn us, even
though we might have expected a somewhat different verdict. From
the majority of persons we never, of course, looked for anything
but condemnation. We are leading no life of self-indulgence,
except, indeed, that being happy in each other we find everything
easy. We are working hard to provide for others better than we
provide for ourselves, and to fulfil every responsibility that lies
upon us."