Chapter IV: Part I: Reginald Bateman (3)

A realist in fiction like Balzac or Flaubert or their imitator, Arnold Bennett, seems almost photographic in the accuracy of his descriptions; and yet so artistic is the selection of the details described that though we get the impression of absolute reality, the emotional atmosphere is often intense. Realism, when well done, is an admirable literary method, but it may and often does degenerate into a vice. In the hands of Zola it becomes a medium for the conveyance of sickening, sordid, or disgusting detail.

The kind of realism with which I wish to deal is _realism in poetry_--the phrase seems almost a contradiction in terms--and I am taking for my purpose certain phases of the work of Wordsworth and Browning.

Wordsworth and Browning, two poets in many respects direct antitheses of one another, are not usually classed together in any way. There is, however, one class of poetry which Browning was the first to develop to a large extent, in which Wordsworth may be said to have been a pioneer; in fact, Browning actually succeeded in a kind of poetry of which Wordsworth barely saw the possibility. I do not mean to suggest that Browning was in any way a disciple or conscious imitator of Wordsworth; but that we see in full flower in Browning's poetry a certain artistic method of which in Wordsworth's poetry we can just perceive the germ.

The kind of poetry to which I refer is one which is frequent in Browning, and which, in fact, has often been regarded as not poetry at all--I mean such utterly unpretentious, prosaic, uncouth, rough, or at times even grotesque verse as we find in poems like _Bishop Blougram's Apology, Mr. Sludge the Medium, Old Pictures in Florence, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_, much of _The Ring and the Book_, and Browning's later work generally. Such verse produces the effect of an exact reproduction of the actual. It is so realistic that it seems at times lacking in art.

No work which is an exact, or nearly exact, reproduction of the actual can be a work of art. A work of art is based on man's experience of what is, but is always modified and altered by his conception of what ought to be.

It was here that Wordsworth failed. His realistic poetry is too close to the actual. The intensely realistic effect of Browning's poems is an illusion; otherwise his claim to be a poetic artist disappears in so far as these poems are concerned.

I wish to indicate the nature of these effects, and to inquire how far Browning was anticipated by Wordsworth.

Wordsworth was perhaps the chief representative of the Romantic School--the title given to the group of poets who dominated English Literature at the commencement of the nineteenth century. The spirit of the age to which their work gave expression was one of question and revolt, the spirit which found its most remarkable political expression in the French Revolution. Question of established beliefs, revolt against established rules and conventions, was the keynote of literary as well as of social and political life.

The attitude of the Romantic School is indicated by its name. Romance is that element in literature which appeals to the sense of the marvellous in man, which awakens his capacity for wonder. In the eighteenth century, under the régime of Pope and the Classical School, wonder had been dead. It was an age of acceptance and submission; acceptance of certain definite conventions, submission to certain fixed rules. Correctness was more desired than imagination, and polish than originality.

It was against the barren conventions and narrow outlook of the Classical School that Wordsworth and his fellows revolted. The spirit of wonder toward Nature and toward Man sprang into new life.

My meaning will be illustrated by the following lines:

A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.

They might have been written of Pope. What was the primrose to Wordsworth?

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

I do not wish, however, to talk to-night of Wordsworth's attitude towards Nature. It is with just two aspects of the Romantic Revolt that I have to deal, one relating to subject matter, the other to form.

The poet's eye in Shakespeare's time

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

With Pope, poetry was confined mainly to man as he exists in society, and was largely concerned with satirizing social defects; Wordsworth dealt with men as human beings, as mysterious manifestations of the infinite, creatures trailing clouds of glory, coming we know not whence, going we know not whither. To him, as to Burns, rank and station were nothing. Any human being, however humble, was worthy to be the poet's theme. He claimed for the misfortunes of Lucy Gray or the miserable mother, the Idiot Boy or Peter Bell, the same consideration as Sophocles for the sorrows of OEdipus and the lofty line of Thebes.

Gray, an eighteenth century poet in whom romantic tendencies are found, shows the same spirit in the _Elegy_ when he writes of the humble dead who lie beneath the soil:

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

Wordsworth, then, enlarged the scope of poetry to include any human experience, however humble.

There was another side to Wordsworth's revolt. He revolted not only against the limitations of subject imposed on the poets by eighteenth-century ideals, but also against the limitations of form. Pope and his followers had been poets of practically a single metre, the heroic couplet. Their tricks, mannerisms, and phraseology had been exalted into a _poetic diction_, or, rather, jargon, by countless imitators, and poems written in any other style were not allowed admission to the best company. A field, for example, had to be either a _verdant mead_ or a _grassy sward_, or it could not decently make its appearance in poetry. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century a rainbow is to Campbell _Heaven's ethereal bow_, and a musket becomes, in poetical dress, _a glittering tube_. Wordsworth claimed for the poet the right of using the language of everyday life, plain, simple, and unadorned.

Such is a very brief and insufficient outline of the two main points in Wordsworth's _poetic theory_, which were developed at great length by Wordsworth himself in his prefaces and by Coleridge in the _Biographia Literaria_.

It is to just one small part of Wordsworth's _poetic practice_ that I wish to draw your attention. I mean certain studiously simple and realistic poems written in deliberate illustration of his theories. The first of them were published in the famous _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798, a work which burst like a bombshell upon an astonished literary world, and aroused more scorn, indignation, and controversy than perhaps any other volume of poetry ever published.

The _Lyrical Ballads_ was in the nature of a challenge. It contained an announcement of Wordsworth's new theories, together with illustrations of them by himself and Coleridge. Many of the poems were admirable, but in many others Wordsworth is at his worst.

A generation brought up in the principles of Pope and nourished on such verse as _The Pleasures of Hope_ could not away with poems like _The Idiot Boy_, or _Alice Fell_, or even _We Are Seven_.

There is no doubt that Wordsworth went much too far in his zeal for the new theories, and was unfortunately without a sense of humour which might have saved him from absurdities. As an illustration of Wordsworth at his worst, let us take _The Idiot Boy_, one of the poems in the _Lyrical Ballads_. The very outline of the plot would make the ghost of Pope rise in indignation from the grave. Old Susan Gale, a peasant woman, is very ill. Her neighbour, Betty Foy, comes to attend on her, accompanied by her only son, Johnny, an idiot. Susan gets worse, and the doctor must be sent for. Betty dare not leave her, and so the only alternative is to send the idiot boy to fetch him. I need not complete the story, but will quote a few stanzas from the poem:

But when the pony moved his legs,
Oh! then for the poor idiot boy!
For joy he cannot hold the bridle,
For joy his head and heels are idle,
He's idle all for very joy.

And Susan's growing worse and worse,
And Betty's in a sad quandary;
And then there's nobody to say
If she must go, or she must stay!
She's in a sad quandary.

"Oh Doctor! Doctor! where's my Johnny?"
"I'm here, what is't you want with me?"
"Oh sir! you know I'm Betty Foy
And I have lost my poor dear boy
You know him--him you often see;

"He's not so wise as some folks be."
"The Devil take his wisdom!" said
The Doctor looking somewhat grim,
"What, woman, should I know of him?"
And grumbling, he went back to bed.

This from a poet who could write _The Solitary Reaper_ or _Milton, thou should'st be living at this hour_, or such magnificent philosophical poetry as we find in _The Prelude, Tintern Abbey_, and _The Excursion_, where Wordsworth treats of

the mind of man,
The haunt and the main region of my song;

or such splendid descriptive passages as are scattered everywhere through his works, visions worthy to rank with Shakespeare's

Cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces.

Other examples of Wordsworth's simple style are all too numerous, and may be found in such poems as _Peter Bell_, which relates the story of a tinker and a donkey (in parts an admirable poem), _Alice Fell_, which tells the sorrow of a little girl for her tattered cloak, _The Brothers_, and _Michael_. These are not, by any means, all bad; in fact, when Wordsworth can forget for a while that he is writing to illustrate a theory, flashes of his natural style break out, producing odd effects of incongruity. Some of the poems which appeared in the _Lyrical Ballads_ are admirable, such as _Her Eyes are Wild_ and _The Affliction of Margaret_.

To us who have, since Wordsworth's time, been trained to a wider scope of appreciation in poetry, it will seem strange that even the worst of them should have aroused such adverse criticism, but even to us it is evident that Wordsworth in them is not at his best, that he is writing a style which is not natural to him. And yet it was these poems which, for a time, attracted most attention from Wordsworth's contemporaries, and prejudiced Byron, Horace Smith, Peacock, and many others against his greater poetry.

Wordsworth, though he failed in his attempt, had got hold of a true idea--that the most common things in life are pregnant with poetry, and that there are many subjects, not susceptible of ordinary poetical treatment, which may yet be handled in such a simple, unpretentious way as to retain their essential outlines, while the emotional element is subtly indicated rather than actually expressed. As a very ordinary landscape will be transformed into a thing of beauty under the rays of the setting sun, so commonplace subjects may take on a new appearance under the influence of the poet's imagination. Care must be taken, however, not to idealize too much. It would be impossible, for example, to lift such a subject as _The Idiot Boy_ into the realm of the ideal.

Now if we turn to Browning, we find that he also deals with subjects of this kind. Let us consider his treatment of one or two of them. In _The Spanish Cloister_ he takes as his subject the mean and petty jealousy of one commonplace monk for another. Or, again, he takes a sick man, stretched on his death-bed, putting aside impatiently the ministrations of the parson, as his half-dazed thoughts go back to a rather sordid love affair which was yet the brightest spot in his past. Other examples are _Sludge the Medium_, and the cynical and worldly Bishop Blougram endeavouring after dinner over the nuts and wine to justify his appearance of orthodoxy to Gigadibs, the scribbler and shallow rationalist:

So, you despise me, Mr. Gigadibs.
No deprecation--nay, I beg you, sir!
Beside 'tis our engagement: don't you know,
I promised, if you'd watch a dinner out,
We'd see truth dawn together?--truth that peeps
Over the glass's edge when dinner's done,
And body gets its sop and holds its noise
And leaves soul free a little. Now's the time--
'Tis break of day! You do despise me then.
And if I say, "despise me,"--never fear--
I know you do not in a certain sense--
Not in my arm-chair for example: here,
I well imagine you respect my place
(Status, _entourage_, worldly circumstance)
Quite to its value---very much indeed
--Are up to the protesting eyes of you
In pride at being seated here for once--
You'll turn it to such capital account!
When somebody, through years and years to come,
Hints of the bishop--names me--that's enough--
"Blougram? I knew him"--(into it you slide)
"Dined with him once, a Corpus Christi Day,
All alone, we two--he's a clever man--
And after dinner--why, the wine you know--
Oh, there was wine, and good!--what with the wine...
'Faith, we began upon all sorts of talk!
He's no bad fellow, Blougram--he had seen
Something of mine he relished--some review--
He's quite above their humbug in his heart,
Half-said as much, indeed--the thing's his trade--
I warrant, Blougram 's sceptical at times--
How otherwise? I liked him, I confess!"
_Che ch'è_, my dear sir, as we say at Rome,
Don't you protest now! It's fair give and take;
You have had your turn and spoken your home truths--
The hand's mine now, and here you follow suit.

Could anything be more easy, conversational, realistic? And yet every now and then we find throughout the poem touches of the noblest poetry introduced so skilfully that there is no sense of incongruity. For example, the Bishop in the course of his argument says that absolute unbelief is just as impossible as absolute faith.

And now what are we? unbelievers both,
Calm and complete, determinately fixed
To-day, to-morrow, and for ever, pray?
You'll guarantee me that? Not so, I think.
In no-wise! all we've gained is, that belief,
As unbelief before, shakes us by fits,
Confounds us like its predecessor. Where's
The gain? how can we guard our unbelief?
Make it bear fruit to us?--the problem here.
Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides--
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as Nature's self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again--
The grand Perhaps! we look on helplessly--
There the old misgivings, crooked questions are--
This good God--what he could do, if he would,
Would, if he could--then must have done long since:
If so, when, where, and how? some way must be--
Once feel about, and soon or late you hit
Some sense, in which it might be, after all.
Why not, "The Way, the Truth, the Life?"

Browning's love poetry does not properly enter into this discussion, since love is a common theme of poets, and this discussion deals with Browning's treatment of apparently unpoetical themes; but Browning's choice and treatment of situation in his love poems are so unusual as to bring them into the same class as his other realistic poems. Take as an example:

See, how she looks now, drest
In a sledging-cap and vest.
'Tis a huge fur cloak--
Like a reindeer's yoke
Falls the lappet along the breast:
Sleeves for her arms to rest,
Or to hang, as my love likes best.

These few examples will serve to show that the essential principles of Browning's realism and Wordsworth's are the same. Browning, like Wordsworth, claimed for poetry a greater licence both in subject matter and in form, but he went farther than Wordsworth in both. Wordsworth took for his new subjects the humble joys and sorrows of the poor--but all was fish that came to Browning's net. Any psychological situation, any out-of-the-way corner of human experience, became in his hands matter for poetry. Then as to form, Wordsworth merely refrained from the conventional language of poetry, but Browning boldly used language that was frankly unpoetical--uncouth, unmusical, rough, rhyming grotesquely, accented outrageously. Perhaps his most important advance on Wordsworth was in the use of the dramatic form--nearly all Browning's poems of the sort described are dramatic monologues--for when the speaker is professedly not the poet, we are less inclined to find an incongruity in unpoetical language. Browning, by adopting the dramatic form, gets at things from the subjective point of view, from the inside. Wordsworth tried to describe them objectively from the point of view of a spectator.

Browning, then, practically discovered a new poetical form which enabled him to bring within the scope of poetical treatment subjects never so treated before. He found a new field for poetry and found new forms to suit it. He entered land which Wordsworth had only beheld from afar, and which, indeed, Wordsworth never could have entered.

Browning saw that familiar objects, everyday doings and sayings, commonplace happenings which seem to the ordinary observer prosaic and barren, are, to the poet, pregnant with underlying emotion.

Ordinary poetry deals with the obviously poetical things, or converts the everyday things of life into poetry by depriving them of some of their actuality. Browning contrives to give us things as they are, with all the harshness and crudeness of real life, and yet to make us feel the underlying element of poetry. About his most brutally realistic poem, there is a subtle atmosphere of emotion.

Browning, like Shakespeare, dares to place side by side the grotesque, the beautiful, the tragic, the ludicrous. He can do it by virtue of his unassuming form. Take, for example, _Old Pictures in Florence_. There we get the dirt of the old streets, the very must and smell of the second-hand dealer's stores, the filthy canvas and peeling fresco, but we get also the tragedy of the wronged Old Masters, and a noble conception of the development of art.

In _Bishop Blougram_ we get the wine, the nuts, the plausible conversation, but we get also the spectacle, pregnant with emotional possibilities, of two human midgets in the presence of the Almighty, the one daring lightly to compound with his Maker, the other lightly to deny Him.

The value of this inquiry, if it have any value, is to show that those poetical forms which are often assumed to be due to a radical defect in Browning's work as poetry, were really a deliberate artistic method, deliberate in the sense that Carlyle's style is deliberate. The style, with both Carlyle and Browning, is indeed the man, but each had to find the style which would express him best. Carlyle, in his early work, wrote like Macaulay; Browning, in his early work, wrote like Shelley. And whenever Browning, in his later poems, met with a subject capable of conventional poetical treatment, he did not hesitate so to treat it.

I need only instance such poems as _Saul, Abt Vogler, The Guardian Angel_, and _Prospice_. I shall quote the last of these poems:

Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go;
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness, and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be at rest!

Can anyone after hearing that poem maintain that Browning was incapable, when he wished, of dispensing with eccentricities?

In conclusion, I should like to say that the subject I have been treating has nothing to do with the obscurity of Browning's poetry. His obscurity has nothing to do with his realism.

SYNGE

_Incomplete notes of an Address to a Study Club_

Three years ago, in July 1910, died John Millington Synge, Irish dramatist, whose name will probably be better known twenty years hence, perhaps one hundred and twenty years hence, than it is to-day.

Those who know Ireland only by hearsay, or from books, or even from the stage, will be slow at first to appreciate his work; but we who know and love the real Ireland, we, who have wandered through her glens and by her streams, and looked upon her wonderful skies, who have felt within ourselves her sadness, her mirth, and her poetry, must at once acknowledge that in the work of Synge the soul of Ireland has, for the first time, received adequate expression. In that small island, a green speck in the tumbling billows of the Atlantic, right in the heart of the barren conventionalism of modern civilization, there still remains, if one knows where to look for it, the Celtic spirit in all its original purity; there is still to be found a glamour and a mystery as fine as any that lingers on the shores of old Romance.

Many have found and felt these things, but they have been silent, for they have been restrained from speech by a sense that such things could not be interpreted in words. Synge was the first to find the medium by which they might be expressed. "He was a solitary, undemonstrative man," says his friend Yeats, "never asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking sympathy; all folded up in brooding intellect, knowing nothing of new books and newspapers, reading the great masters alone; and he was but the more hated because he gave his country what it needed, an unmoved mind, where there is a perpetual last day, a trumpeting and coming up to judgment."

Thus, it seems to me, Synge will be slow in winning recognition from the masses of his countrymen. He saw them too clearly, and painted too accurate a portrait of them to be flattering; they recognize their weaknesses and are indignant, while they fail to see that he has painted also their fine poetical qualities, their romance, and their tenderness.

Again the same writer: "In Ireland, he loved only what was wild in its people and in the grey wintry sides of many glens." All the rest, all that one reasoned over, fought for, read of in leading articles, all that came from Education, all that came down from young Ireland--aroused in him little interest. Perhaps its only effect on him was to awaken in him first that irony which, once awakened, he turned upon the whole of life.

The scene of Synge's later literary work--the work which counts--was the Abbey Theatre, a small and unpretentious building, hidden away in a side street near the Dublin quays. Here is a central point for the Irish Dramatic Movement, a movement recognized by all competent critics as being one of the most significant things in modern literature. Lovers of literature of the present generation who have been walking in a vain shadow, groping their way uneasily amid realistic novels, paradoxical problem plays, pale poems, and epigrammatic essays, turn with relief to a literature which is realistic, and at the same time rich and poetical, and which shows unmistakable signs of real vitality.

At the Abbey Theatre one may see the peasant life of modern Ireland and hear the beautiful legends of her past portrayed by native actors, with a fidelity and a force which have never been surpassed on any stage. Their acting is a true "holding of the mirror up to Nature"--there are no stage tricks, no declamations, no poses, no sound and fury--the scene is perhaps the rude interior of a peasant cottage in some Irish village, or of a hut in some lonely glen, or the side of a windy hill or open field, where the sun shines and the air is mild and the breeze fresh and kindly. The figures that fill the scene bear no resemblance to the traditional buffoon, who, on most stages, is made to do duty for an Irishman; their speech is quite unlike the traditional brogue which is commonly supposed to be the medium of communication between Irish peasants; the characters represented are primitive but poetical, wild but noble; their dialogue is rich with humour and imagination, and is spoken with a charming and musical intonation. In the movements and words of the people we see on the stage, there is no appearance of acting; they talk easily and naturally, their gestures are few and altogether free from exaggeration or striving after effect. Their whole performance is simple and apparently without effort; and yet I have again and again been far more profoundly stirred by this unpretentious acting, I have had a far deeper sense of the tragedy and comedy and mystery of life in this little Abbey Theatre than I have ever received from the elaborate productions of the London stage.

The Irish National Theatre was founded in 1899 by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, who, ever since its inception, have devoted their time and thought and work almost exclusively to perfecting this new drama. The result has amply justified their faithful labour. The Irish National Theatre has already given to the world an entirely original style of acting, a company of actors "unrivalled in the quality which they profess," and now known not only in Ireland, but all over Britain and America, and also several dramatists of extraordinary merit.

Of these dramatists Synge is undoubtedly the most remarkable. His production is small and extends over only a few years, but it is of a quality unknown in English literature since Elizabethan times. "It has been claimed for him," says Mr. Bickley, "that he is the greatest imaginative dramatist who has written English since Shakespeare, or at least since the Puritans closed the theatres in 1642." This claim may at first sight seem extravagant, especially to those who know the very limited range and quantity of Synge's work, but on reflection it is clear that if one admits that Synge is a great dramatist, one is forced also to admit that he is the first since Shakespeare. What have we had in drama since Shakespeare? A number of classical or pseudo-Shakespearean verse plays, most of them extremely dreary, from Addison to Swinburne, the brilliant but tawdry comedy of intrigue of the Restoration, the later eighteenth-century society comedy of Goldsmith and Sheridan, and the modern drawing-room dramas of Shaw and Wilde--to none of which the term great can properly be applied.

A study of the causes of the decay of the drama would be a most interesting one, but the topic is too large and too difficult to be attempted in a short paper. Suffice it to say, that Synge appeared to believe that the modern drama suffered from two main defects. Either it lacked reality, or it lacked poetry. The drama which was imaginative and poetical was alien from real life, the drama which attempted a realistic picture of life was flat and joyless and anaemic.

According to this idea two main things were necessary to a re-creation of the drama. First, the type of life in which there still remained some vigour, colour, and poetry; where convention had not crushed out all elemental emotions and produced a barren artificial uniformity; secondly, an artistic language by which that life might be expressed. Synge found both these requisites among the Irish peasantry of Connemara and the Aran Islands. In Mr. Bickley's books we learn how W. B. Yeats found Synge. Synge was then twenty-six. "He had wandered among people whose life is as picturesque as that of the Middle Ages, playing his fiddle to Italian sailors and listening to stories in Bavarian woods, but life had cast no light into his writings."

Following Yeats' advice, Synge left France and went to live at Aran, a group of stony islands at the entrance of Galway Bay. "There he lived the peasants' life, learned their language and discovered his own possibilities." In the Aran peasants he found a people with "an imagination, fiery and magnificent and tender," and at the same time with the elemental emotions strongly in evidence, a just mixture of God and brute. Synge found splendid material for a drama at once human and beautiful; in their language, English spoken by men who thought in Gaelic, that is, English coloured by Celtic imagination, he found his medium of expression. The result was the half-dozen plays which will probably survive most of the other writing of this generation.

To find the Ireland of romance, Synge returned again and again to Aran, to Kerry and to the Blaskets. "He was a drifting, silent man, full of hidden passion, and loved wild islands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay hidden in himself." He liked to enter the houses of the people and sit quietly listening to their talk. In the dialect of Aran "the cadence is long and meditative as befits the thought of men who are much alone, and who, when they meet in each other's houses--as is their way at the day's end--listen patiently, each man speaking in turn for some little time, and taking pleasure in the vaguer meaning of the words and in their sounds. Their thought, when not merely practical, is as full of traditional wisdom and extravagant pictures as some Aeschylean chorus."

Synge wrote down words and phrases wherever he went, and found the Irish dialect so rich a thing that he had begun translating into it fragments of the great literatures of the world and had planned a complete version of the _Imitation of Christ_. He attached great importance to the discovery of this dramatic dialect.

In Synge's plays is not to be found any definite philosophy; he was that rarest of things--a pure artist. "He loves all that has edge, all that is salt in the mouth, all that is rough to the hand, all that heightens the emotions by contrast, all that stings into life the sense of tragedy."

All his plays, except the beautiful _Deirdre_, in which he goes back to Irish legend for his plot, deal with modern peasant life in Ireland, and range from the rollicking comedy of the _Tinker's Wedding_, through the irony of the _Playboy of the Western World_, and the _Shadow of the Glen_, to the pure and magnificent tragedy of _Riders to the Sea_. I shall never forget the impression made upon me by the latter play when I saw it acted for the first time in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, acted as only the Irish players can act it. I have seen it often since, and never without being deeply stirred, but that first performance was a revelation and opened up a new world of thought and feeling.

_Riders to the Sea_ is a short, simple, one-act play, taking, perhaps, twenty minutes to act; but in that twenty minutes the spectator plunges deep into the mystery and tragedy of life, before him black and bottomless depths of suffering; he becomes aware of Destiny hovering, a grim unseen presence, over the little lives of men. The background of the little play is the vast remorseless sea, and over it broods Eternity.

DICKENS AND THACKERAY

_An Essay found among Professor Bateman's early papers_

To attempt anything like an adequate discussion of two literary giants like Dickens and Thackeray in a short paper of this kind is like undertaking to empty Niagara with a quart pot. It is obvious that I can hope to do no more than indicate in a rather sketchy way some of the main points of difference and resemblance in our two authors. In doing so I shall naturally pay somewhat more attention to Dickens than to Thackeray. With the exception of _Esmond_, Thackeray's work is all very much of the same kind, and displays a considerably smaller degree of variety and versatility than that of Dickens. One requires less guidance for an intelligent appreciation of Thackeray than for an intelligent appreciation of Dickens. The merits of Thackeray's work are easily seen and easily defined; a recognition of them is largely a matter of reason, and can confidently be expected from any intelligent reader. But Dickens is an author much more difficult to understand. His faults as well as his merits are gigantic; but then he frequently gets credit for faults which are not there, and sometimes even some of his greatest merits are construed as faults. The true appreciation of Dickens requires a larger exercise of the imagination than in the case of Thackeray. In other words, it is more a matter of feeling than of reason. Ask many a lover of Dickens to give a reason for the faith that is in him, and he may find it difficult to satisfy you.

Take, for example, Dickens's humorous characters. There are some who cannot be got to admit that Mr. Toots, Sim Tappertit, Sairey Gamp, and others of that ilk are divinely humorous and inspired creations; some will only admit that at best they are but "excellent fooling"; others will even characterize them as mere buffoonery. It is an inferior class of mind, however, which rejects the abnormal merely on account of its abnormality, and votes the improbable impossible, because it fails to fit in with previously conceived ideas of right and wrong. Criticism is useless in the case of people who hold such a view. I may assert, with all the force of which I am capable, that Mr. Toots is the best thing in Dombey; that age cannot wither Sairey Gamp any more than Cleopatra, and that she will blossom in perennial freshness while the language endures; but if you ask me for a reason, I can give none. It is no more possible to give a reason for liking Sairey Gamp than for disliking Dr. Fell. We can enjoy with Thackeray the skilful dissection of a character like that of Becky Sharp, and penetrate with him the innermost recesses of her mighty little soul; but Dickens himself could not have penetrated the secret of the composition of Sairey Gamp. In her presence criticism is dumb. We must be content to stand in humble and reverent admiration and satisfy ourselves with exclaiming, "Behold, it is very good." I shall return again to this point of characterization, but I must now say something of the position held by Dickens and Thackeray in the historical development of the novel.

Though undoubtedly the two greatest novelists of the Early Victorian school, Dickens and Thackeray are alike in exercising very little apparent influence on the development of the contemporary novel of manners. They both look back rather than forward. They set the crown and consummation on the work of the early eighteenth-century group of writers. Dickens derives from Smollett, and Thackeray from Fielding. When Dickens as a boy discovered in an old garret that precious pile of dusty eighteenth-century books, _Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker_ and the rest, which he absorbed with such loving eagerness, he little thought that he was destined to be a second and a greater Smollett.

The characteristic type of English novel was defined by Richardson, Fielding, and their school at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It aimed at a dramatic representation of contemporary life and manners; it took, in fact, the place of the drama as the popular form of literature. With the decay of the Fielding novel came a reaction, and opposed to the lusty and vivid realism of _Tom Jones_ and _Humphrey Clinker_ we get the sham mediaevalism, the dungeon-keeps, the echoing chambers, the hollow-voiced spectres, and the absurd sentiment of Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, and its imitators. This was a sort of side stream in the history of the novel, which nevertheless created the taste for historical romance, fed later by the novels of Scott. Scott stands apart from the main stream of English fiction, though his style exercised an immense influence on later novelists. After the mediaeval relapse, the contemporary novel of manners was continued at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century by Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. The latter died in 1817; between 1814 and 1832 Scott's novels fill the field of fiction; and then, between about 1835 and 1860, come Dickens and Thackeray with their contemporaries, of whom perhaps the most remarkable were Lytton and Disraeli. In none of these writers, however, must we look for the foundation of the characteristic Victorian novel--the novel of George Eliot and George Meredith. The founder of that novel was Charlotte Brontë. Her _Jane Eyre_ and Thackeray's _Vanity Fair_ were published in the same year, 1848, and were reviewed together in a famous number of the _Quarterly_. The two works represent two distinct schools of fiction. Between the Dickens-Thackeray novel and the Brontë-Eliot novel there is a great gulf fixed. Dickens and Thackeray stand out from their time like two solitary giants.

Perhaps now it might be well to remind you briefly of the main facts in the literary history of the two men. Dickens's first great work, _Pickwick_, appeared in 1837, five years after the death of Scott. It was at once received with acclamation. His next book, _Oliver Twist_, though it must have come as a sort of shock after _Pickwick_, did not stem the tide of appreciation. Like Oliver himself, every one was soon asking for more. They did not ask in vain. During the next two decades, the forties and fifties, Dickens poured forth novel after novel with surprising rapidity. Pickwick, Sam Weller, Fagin, Squeers, Micawber soon became household words. Dickens won a popularity of which we can form no true conception. There has been nothing like it in our time. England and America were taken by storm; even France was infected with the prevailing enthusiasm.

During the days of Dickens' early popularity a clever young man had been making a name for himself as a humorist and satirist in the pages of _Fraser's Magazine, Punch_, and similar journals. This was William Makepeace Thackeray. In 1838, the year after _Pickwick_, Thackeray began a series known as the _Yellow Plush Papers_; during the next ten years he produced a great variety of journalistic work, short stories, sketches and essays, and wrote, in addition, two satirical novels, _Catherine_ and _Barry Lyndon_. In 1848 he burst on the world as a great novelist with _Vanity Fair_, and within ten years more he had published _Pendennis, Esmond, The Newcomes_, and _The Virginians_. This brings us up to 1859. By that year Dickens had produced his best work; Thackeray had only four more years to live; and he was followed to the grave by Dickens in 1870. From this account it is apparent that Dickens made a much bigger stir than Thackeray in the contemporary literary world. He was the leviathan who frolicked at will in the sea of popular appreciation. Thackeray was a much smaller fish.

Considering Dickens and Thackeray first strictly as novelists, we find a point of resemblance in the fact that, from the point of view of form, they are both uncommonly bad novelists. A good novel, like any other work of art, must have some unity about it. The incidents must not be bundled in pell-mell, but must all contribute to the working out of some central idea or situation. Then we must have an element of romance, and this ought to regulate the subordination of the characters. The characters in every romance are essentially three, as Chesterton puts it, St. George, the Princess, and the Dragon; that is, St. George, something that loves and fights; the Princess, something that is loved and fought for; while the Dragon represents the opposition. Other characters besides these three there may and must be, but they serve as mere machinery or scenery as far as the romance is concerned.

Now let us consider the novels of Dickens and Thackeray from these points of view. As regards incident they are almost wholly lacking in unity. We cannot exactly deny them plots. They develop stories and interesting stories, but it is not an orderly development. Dickens strings his incidents together almost haphazard, and so, to a large extent, does Thackeray. (By the way, in these remarks on Thackeray I do not include _Esmond_, which is magnificent, but is not really Thackeray.)

In the greater part of his writing Dickens had no central aim or motive in view; he wrote, so to speak, from hand to mouth. Most of his books in fact were written for periodicals in monthly parts, and it is safe to say that nobody, and least of all Dickens himself, knew exactly what a month would bring forth. I am here again speaking generally; there are some exceptions, notably the _Tale of Two Cities_--which stands almost as much apart from the rest of Dickens's work as _Esmond_ does from the rest of Thackeray's--and the unfinished _Edwin Drood_. Of Thackeray we may say that he may have had some central aim or motive in his novels, but if so, he paid little attention to it, and did not allow it to impede his rambling progress in the smallest degree. We may take it, then, as generally true that the novels of Dickens and Thackeray are rough-hewn and sometimes shapeless. In the case of Dickens this characteristic seldom annoys, but it is otherwise with Thackeray. I doubt, for example, if there is anyone here who has read and enjoyed every word of that fearfully digressive and dropsical novel, _The Newcomes_.

Again, as regards characters, in neither novelist do we get an orderly subordination. Dickens, perhaps, is the worst offender in this respect. In Thackeray, the hero and heroine are usually in a sense the most important personages, though crowds of personages who have really nothing to do with the story bulk very largely, and though in _Vanity Fair_ there is no hero at all. But in Dickens, the personages who ought to be most important have frequently very little to do with the novel. As a rule, the leading characters, hero, heroine, and villain, are lifeless and uninteresting, and only serve to connect loosely a great amount of strictly secondary matter.

The really important characters in Dickens are the _unimportant_ ones, those who are introduced _en passant_, and who might as well be anywhere else as far as the story is concerned. In _Nicholas Nickleby_ Nicholas himself does not interest me, neither does his sister, neither do Madeline Bray and Mr. Bray, neither does Ralph Nickleby. The people who do interest me are people like Mrs. Nickleby, Mantalini, the Squeers family, the Kenwigs, and Vincent Crummies. In _Martin Chuzzlewit_ the least important character is Martin himself, but his life serves as a string upon which are hung Pecksniff, Todger's Boarding House and all that therein was, Chevy Slime, Esq., Sairey Gamp, Betsy Prigg, Mr. Mould, Elijah Pogram, and many others in whose company there is endless delight. All these, however, might just as well have been hung on the string of _Nicholas Nickleby_ or _David Copperfield_ or _Bleak House_ or almost any of the other books. Similarly all through. In _Dombey_ Florence is a nonentity, Walter Gay is a nonentity, Dombey himself is a "made character," well-made, but not created. In _David Copperfield_ David begins by being a reality, but tails off into an abstraction. In _A Tale of Two Cities_ Darnay does not exist, and Lucie Manette only barely exists. In both Dickens and Thackeray, in fact, the romantic element is really subordinate, in Dickens very much so; and in neither writer do St. George, the Princess, and the Dragon ever become all-important. Both writers, in fact, are to be judged piece-meal, as creators of situations and characters, rather than in the bulk as creators of novels.

The keynote of the work of both our authors was struck in two of their first works of any note. In 1848 Thackeray published in _Punch_ the series of papers entitled the _Book of Snobs_, which marks his dedication to the especial task of unmasking the pretence and sham which underlay the whole of English public and private life. His definition of the word _snob_ was comprehensive. "The snob," says Thackeray, "is a child of aristocratical societies. Perched on his step of the long social ladder, he respects the man on the step above and despises the man on the step below, without enquiring what they are worth, solely on account of their position; in his innermost heart he finds it natural to kiss the boots of the first, and to kick the second." Starting with this definition, Thackeray lashed unsparingly all classes of society from the highest to the lowest. He discovered and unmasked snobs of all descriptions, church snobs, military snobs, literary snobs, country snobs, political snobs, Continental snobs. In this book Thackeray appears as the caustic satirist of every sort of social hypocrisy, and this character he maintains in his novels. _Pendennis, Vanity Fair_, and _The Newcomes_ are largely _Books of Snobs_ worked into the form of novels.

Dickens's first important work was his _Sketches by Boz_, a series of papers in which he describes various aspects and phases of the life of the English lower middle class. Though somewhat crude in style and occasionally even vulgar in tone, these papers are seldom completely commonplace, and many of the characteristics of the mature Dickens can be discerned there in embryo. They have a distinction of manner and a suggestion of creative power which is unmistakable, and they mark the dedication of Dickens to his especial task, the sympathetic though exaggerated painting of the poorer middle classes. While Thackeray took his stand on the universal sham and corruption of our social system, lashing hypocrisy and showing up the rottenness which lay hidden beneath the whited sepulchres of society, Dickens revealed the treasures which were buried beneath the rubbish-heap designated as the "poorer middle classes." Just as Thackeray's novels are glorified _Books of Snobs_, so Dickens's novels are, for the most part, glorified _Sketches by Boz_. His early works, though called novels, are undisguisedly a series of sketches loosely strung together. _Pickwick_, of course, is absolutely episodic. It was begun to supply the letterpress to a series of drawings by a popular artist, and when Dickens commenced he had no aim except to get his characters into such amusing situations as would afford scope to the illustrator. As the book goes on, however, it begins to get hold of Dickens, and the change is seen especially in the character of Pickwick, who begins as an elderly crank about whom Dickens does not care a jot, but develops into one of the most lovable old gentlemen of fiction. However, the fact remains that _Pickwick_ has not the remotest vestige of a plot, and can by no stretch of the imagination be called a novel. Again, _Oliver Twist_, as Chesterton remarks, is really not a novel, and might, without losing much, have been published as a series of papers entitled _The Workhouse, A Thieves' Den_, and so on. _Nicholas Nickleby_ might similarly have been published as a series of papers entitled _A Yorkshire School, A Provincial Theatre_, and so on. The fact that all these sketches are strung together on the lives of those shadowy personages Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby does not at all affect their real character. After _Nicholas Nickleby_ the books begin to lose, to some extent, this sketchiness, that is, the episodes are more closely and skilfully interwoven into a connected whole, but still Dickens, the novelist, never quite emerges from Boz, the essayist.

These remarks about Dickens naturally lead me to say something about the development of our two authors. About Thackeray I cannot say very much. By the time he emerges from the undercurrent of journalistic work, all the essentials of the mature Thackeray seem almost fully developed. _Barry Lyndon_ is almost as mature in style as _Vanity Fair_. _Vanity Fair_ itself, Thackeray's first work of importance, is also his greatest work. That is, instead of working up to a climax as a novelist, Thackeray began at the top and worked downwards. Of course, we must remember that when he wrote it he had reached the age of thirty-seven. The subsequent novels, with the exception of _Esmond_, mark a deterioration, and not an advance.

I must here make a slight digression to speak of _Esmond_. Into this brilliant historical patch Thackeray threw all his great knowledge of, and love for, the eighteenth century. He was soaked in eighteenth-century literature and history--witness his _Four Georges_ and _English Humourists_; and in _Esmond_ he assumed with consummate skill the eighteenth-century manner.

In this novel Thackeray casts off completely his mask of cynicism, and appears as a man of noble feeling and deep sympathy, who could write a polished, pure, and straightforward English style. We feel, however, that the book is after all only a brilliant freak, and that the real Thackeray is the cynical, the satirical, and the caustic Thackeray of _Vanity Fair_. _Esmond_ stands to the rest of Thackeray's work somewhat in the relation of _Romola_ to George Eliot's other novels. In both the atmosphere is artificial, the result of long and careful study, and in both the deception is so perfect that the artificiality is almost impossible to detect. In two of his novels Dickens took historical subjects, namely in _Barnaby Rudge_ and the _Tale of Two Cities_. The latter is the acme of Dickens's attainments in the descriptive style, and is perhaps more restrained and artistic than any of his other works. In brilliant imagination and vivid representation of an historical phase he more than equals Thackeray, though his novel falls short of _Esmond_ in characterization. Esmond, Beatrix, and Lady Castlewood are much better than Darnay, Lucie, and the Doctor, though Sidney Carton, perhaps, is as fine as anything in Thackeray.

To return to the question of development, we may say that Thackeray's style was fully developed during his career as a journalist, essayist, and writer of short stories, and that we find its culminating point in _Vanity Fair_.

In the case of Dickens, however, we can trace a well-marked, if rapid, advance. _Sketches by Boz_ are distinctly crude. _Pickwick Papers_ are a startling advance on one side of Dickens's art. We find in them the vigour, versatility, and exuberance of a youthful and tremendous imagination. They display inexhaustible resource and gigantic humour. Dickens lavished enough genius on them to do ten ordinary men for a lifetime, and yet he did it with perfect ease. We feel that he enjoyed himself in writing them, that he revelled in the task. Every character, down to the smallest, lives. Mr. John Swanker and Mr. Cyrus Bantam, for example, are as real to us as Mr. Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick. Pickwick is one of the greatest of humorous portraits in literature. It is as great as the _Canterbury Tales_. It is wonderful that a young writer who in _Sketches by Boz_ had only been feeling his way should, at one bound, reach the height of excellence which we find in _Pickwick_. The incidents are commonplace enough. The jokes are the sort of jokes which are still the stock-in-trade of the ha'penny comic--jokes about mothers-in-law, red-nosed curates, and falling on the ice, about getting drunk, and fighting, and fatness, and sitting upon one's hat. But what a difference between the treatment of Dickens and that of the uninspired humorists.