wife, proud Edith Skewton, resists and scorns him; the pride of the merchant is pitted against the pride of the noble-born woman, and the restrained outbursts of this growing opposition reveal an intensity of passion, which souls thus born and bred alone could feel. Edith, to avenge herself, flees on the anniversary of her marriage, and gives herself the appearance of being an adulteress. It is then that the inflexible pride asserts itself in all its stiffness. He has driven out of the house his daughter, whom he believes the accomplice of his wife; he forbids the one or the other to be brought to his memory; he commands his sister and his friends to be silent; he receives guests with the same tone and the same coldness. Despairing in heart, eaten up by the insult, by the conscience of his failure, by the idea of public ridicule, he remains as firm, as haughty, as calm as ever. He launches out more recklessly in business, and is ruined; he is on the point of suicide. Hitherto all was well the bronze column continued whole and unbroken; but the exigencies of public morality mar the idea of the book. His daughter arrives in the nick of time. She entreats him; he softens, she carries him away; he becomes the best of fathers, and spoils a fine novel. III. Let us look at some other personages. In contrast with these bad and factitious characters, produced by national institutions, you find good creatures such as nature made them; and first, children. We have none in French literature. Racine's little Joas could only exist in a piece composed for the ladies' college of Saint Cyr; the little child speaks like a prince's son, with noble and acquired phrases, as if repeating his catechism. Now-a-days these portraits are only seen in France in New-year's books, written as models for good children. Dickens has painted his with special gratification; he did not think of edifying the public, and he has charmed it. All his children are of extreme sensibility; they love much, and they crave to be loved. To understand this gratification of the painter, and this choice of characters, we must think of their physical type. English children have a colour so fresh, a complexion so delicate, a skin so transparent, eyes so blue and pure, that they are like beautiful flowers. No wonder if a novelist loves them, lends to their soul a sensibility and innocence which shine forth from their looks, if he thinks that these frail and charming roses are crushed by the coarse hands which try to bend them. We must also imagine to ourselves the households în which they grow up. When at five o'clock the merchant and the clerk leave their office and their business, they return as quickly as possible to the pretty cottage, where their children have played all day on the lawn. The fireside by which they will pass the evening is a sanctuary, and domestic tenderness is the only poetry they need. A child deprived of these affections and this happiness will seem to be deprived of the air that we breathe, and the novelist will not find a volume too much to explain its unhappiness. Dickens has recorded it in ten volumes, and at last he has written the history of David Copperfield. David is loved by his mother, and by an honest servant girl, Peggotty; he plays with her in the garden; he watches her sew; he reads to her the natural history of crocodiles; he fears the hens and geese, which strut in a menacing and ferocious manner in the yard; he is perfectly happy. His mother marries again, and all changes. The father-in-law, Mr. Murdstone, and his sister Jane, are harsh, methodic, and cold beings. Poor little David is every moment wounded by hard words. He dare not speak or move; he is afraid to kiss his mother; he feels himself weighed down, as by a leaden cloak, by the cold looks of the new master and mistress. He falls back on himself; mechanically studies the lessons assigned him; cannot learn them, so great is his dread of not knowing them. He is whipped, shut up with bread and water in a lonely room. He is terrified by night, and fears himself. He asks himself whether in fact he is not bad or wicked, and weeps. This incessant terror, hopeless and issueless, the spectacle of this wounded sensibility and stupefied intelligence, the long anxieties, the watches, the solitude of the poor imprisoned child, his passionate desire to kiss his mother or to weep on the breast of his nurse,—all this is sad to see. These children's griefs are as deep as the vexations of a man. It is the history of a frail plant, which was flourishing in a warm air, under a sweet sun, and which, suddenly transplanted to the snow, sheds its leaves and withers. The common people are like the children, dependent, ill cultivated, akin to nature, and subject to oppression. That is to say, Dickens extols them. That is not new in France; the novels of Eugène Sue have given us more than one example, and the theme is as old as Rousseau; but in the hands of the English writer it has acquired a singular force. His heroes have admirable delicacy and devotion. They have nothing vulgar but their pronunciation; the rest is but nobility and generosity. You see a mountebank abandon his daughter, his only joy, for fear of harming her in any way. A young woman devotes herself to save the unworthy wife of a man who loves her, and whom she loves; the man dies; she continues, from pure selfsacrifice, to care for the degraded creature. A poor waggoner who thinks his wife unfaithful, loudly pronounces her innocent, and all his vengeance is to think only of loading her with tenderness and kindNo one, according to Dickens, feels so strongly as they do the happiness of loving and being loved-the pure joys of domestic life. No one has so much compassion for those poor deformed and infirm creatures whom they so often bring into the world, and who seem only born to die. No one has a juster and more inflexible moral sense. I confess even that Dickens' heroes unfortunately resemble the indignant fathers of French melodramas. When old Peggotty learns that his niece is seduced, he sets off, stick in hand, and walks over France, ness. Germany, and Italy, to find her and bring her back to duty. But above all, they have an English sentiment, which fails in Frenchmen: they are Christians. It is not only women, as in France, who take refuge in the idea of another world; men turn also their thoughts towards it. In England, where there are so many sects, and every one chooses his own, each one believes in the religion he has made for himself; and this noble sentiment raises still higher the throne, upon which the uprightness of their resolution and the delicacy of their heart has placed them. In reality, the novels of Dickens can all be reduced to one phrase, to wit: Be good, and love; there is genuine joy only in the emotions of the heart; sensibility is the whole man. Leave science to the wise, pride to the nobles, luxury to the rich; have compassion on humble wretchedness; the smallest and most despised being may in himself be worth as much as thousands of the powerful and the proud. Take care not to bruise the delicate souls which flourish in all conditions, under all costumes, in all ages. Believe that humanity, pity, forgiveness, are the finest things in man; believe that intimacy, expansion, tenderness, tears, are the finest things in the world. To live is nothing; to be powerful, learned, illustrious, is little; to be useful is not enough. He alone has lived and is a man who has wept at the remembrance of a benefit, given or received. IV. We do not believe that this contrast between the weak and the strong, or this outcry against society in favour of nature, are the caprice of an artist or the chance of the moment. When we penetrate deeply into the history of English genius, we find that its primitive foundation was impassioned sensibility, and that its natural expression was lyrical exaltation. Both were brought from Germany, and make up the literature existing before the Conquest. After an interval you find them again in the sixteenth century, when the French literature, introduced from Normandy, had passed away: they are the very soul of the nation. But the education of this soul was opposite to its genius; its history contradicted its nature; and its primitive inclination has clashed with all the great events which it has created or suffered. The chance of a victorious invasion and an imposed aristocracy, whilst establishing the enjoyment of political liberty, has impressed in the character habits of strife and pride. The chance of an insular position, the necessity of commerce, the abundant possession of the first materials for industry, have developed the practical faculties and the positive mind. The acquisition of these habits, faculties, and mind, added to the chance of an old hostility to Rome, and an old hatred against an oppressive church, has given birth to a proud and reasoning religion, replacing submission by independence, poetic theology by practical morality, and faith by discussion. Politics, business, and religion, like three powerful machines, have created a new man above the old. Stern dignity, self-command, the need of domination, harshness in dominion, strict morality, without compromise or pity, a taste for figures and dry calculation, a dislike of facts not palpable and ideas not useful, ignorance of the invisible world, scorn of the weaknesses and tendernesses of the heart,-such are the dispositions which the stream of facts and the ascendency of institutions tend to confirm in their souls. But poetry and domestic life prove that they have only half succeeded. The old sensibility, oppressed and perverted, still lives and works. The poet subsists under the Puritan, the trader, the statesman. The social man has not destroyed the natural man. This frozen crust, this unsociable pride, this rigid attitude, often cover a good and tender being. It is the English mask of a German head; and when a talented writer, often a writer of genius, reaches the sensibility which is bruised or buried by education and national institutions, he moves his reader in the most inner depths, and becomes the master of all hearts. Library California. CHAPTER II. The Novel continued-Thackeray. Of I. Abundance and excellence of novels-Of manners in England-Superiority of Dickens and Thackeray-Comparison between them. II. The satirist His moral intentions-His moral dissertations. III. Comparison of raillery in France and England-Difference of the two temperaments, tastes, and minds. IV. Superiority of Thackeray in bitter and serious satire-Serious irony—Literary snobs-Miss Blanche Amory-Serious caricature-Miss Hoggarty. V. Solidity and precision of this satirical conception-Resemblance of Thackeray VI. Misanthropy of Thackeray-Silliness of his heroines-Silliness of love- VII. His levelling tendencies-Default of characters and society in England- X. Literature is a definition of man- -The definition according to Thackeray-- THE I. HE novel of manners in England multiplies, and for this there are several reasons: first, it is born there, and every plant grows well in its own soil; secondly, it is an amusement: there is no music there as in Germany, or conversation as in France; and men who must think and feel find it a means of feeling and thinking. On the other hand, women take part in it with eagerness; amidst the nullity of gallantry and the coldness of religion, it gives scope for imagination and dreams. Finally, by its minute details and practical counsels, it opens up a career to the precise and moral mind. The critic thus is, as it were, swamped in this copiousness; he must select in order to grasp the whole, and confine himself to a few in order to embrace the whole. In this crowd two men have appeared of a superior talent, original |