 CHAPTER XXIX The paths of the two poets who first sprang into fame in the present reign are strangely remote from each other. Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Browning are as unlike in style and choice of subject, and indeed in the whole spirit of their poetry as Wordsworth and Byron. Mr. Tennyson deals with incident and picturesque form and graceful legend, and with so much of doubt and thought and yearning melancholy as would belong to a refined and cultured intellect under no greater stress or strain than the ordinary chances of life among educated Englishmen might be expected to impose. He has revived with great success the old Arthurian legends and made them a part of the living literature of England. But the knights and ladies whom he paints are refined, graceful, noble, without roughness, without wild, or at all events complex and distracting passions. It may perhaps be said that Tennyson has taken for his province all the beauty, all the nobleness, all the feeling that lie near to or on the surface of life and nature. His object might seem to be that which Lessing declared the true object of all art, to delight, but it is to delight in a somewhat narrower sense than was the meaning of Lessing. Beauty, melancholy, and repose are the elements of Tennyson's poetry. There is no storm, no conflict, no complication. Mr. Browning, on the other hand, delights in perplexed problems of character and life, in studying the effects of strange contrasting forces of passion coming into play under peculiar and distracting conditions. All that lies beneath the surface, all that is out of the common track of emotion, all that is possible, that is poetically conceivable, but that the outer air and the daily walks of life never see, this is what especially attracts Mr. Browning. In Tennyson, the night of King Arthur's mythical court has the emotions of a polished English gentleman of our day and nothing more. Mr. Browning would prefer in treating of a polished English gentleman of our day, to exhibit him under some conditions which should draw out in him all the strange elementary passions and complications of emotion that lie far down in deeps below the surface of the best ordered civilization. The tendency of the one poet is naturally to fall now and then into the sweetly insipid of the other to wander away into the tangled regions of the grotesque. It is perhaps only natural that under such conditions the one poet should be profoundly concerned for beauty of form and the latter almost absolutely indifferent to it. No poet has more finished beauty of style and exquisite charm of melody than Tennyson. None certainly can be more often wanting in grace of form and the light of soft sound than Mr. Browning. There are many passages and even many poems of Browning which show that the poet could be melodious if he would, but he seems sometimes as if he took a positive delight in perplexing the reader's ear with harsh, untuneful sounds. Mr. Browning commonly allows the study of the purely psychological to absorb too much of his moods and of his genius. It has a fascination for him which he is seemingly unable to resist. He makes of his poems too often mere searchings into strange deeps of human character and human error. He seldom abandons himself altogether to the inspiration of the poet. He hardly ever deserves the definition of the minstrel given in Goethe's ballad who sings but as the songbird sings. Moreover, Mr. Browning has an almost morbid taste for the grotesque. He is not infrequently a sort of poetic callow. It has to be added that Mr. Browning is seldom easy to understand and that there are times when he is only to be understood at the expense of as much thought and study as one might give to a controversial passage in an ancient author. This is a defect of art and a very serious defect. The more devoted of Mr. Browning's admirers will tell us no doubt that the poet is not bound to supply us with brains as well as poetry, and that if we cannot understand what he says it is the fault simply of our stupidity. But an ordinary man who finds that he can understand Shakespeare and Milton, Dryden and Wordsworth, Byron and Keats without any trouble may surely be excused if he does not set down his difficulty about some of Browning's poems wholly to the account of his own dullness. It may well be doubted whether there is any idea so subtle that if the poet can actually realize it in his own mind clearly for himself, the English language will not be found capable of expressing it with sufficient clearness. The language has been made to do this for the most refined reasonings of philosophical schools, for transcendentalists and utilitarians, for psychologists and metaphysicians. No intelligent person feels any difficulty in understanding what Mill or Herbert Spencer or Huxley means, and it can hardly be said that the ideas Mr. Browning desires to convey to his readers are more difficult of exposition than some of those which the authors we name have contrived to set out with a white light of clearness all around them. The plain truth is that Mr. Browning is a great poet in spite of some of the worst defects that ever stood between a poet and popularity. He is a great poet by virtue of his commanding genius, his fearless imagination, his penetrating pathos. He strikes an iron harp string. In certain of his moods his poetry is like that of the terrible lyre in the weird old Scottish ballad, the lyre that was made of the murdered maiden's breast bone in which told its fearful tale in tones that would melt a heart of stone. In strength and depth of passion and pathos, in wild humor, in emotion of every kind, Mr. Browning is much superior to Mr. Tennyson. The poet laureate is the completeer man. Mr. Tennyson is beyond doubt the most complete of the poets of Queen Victoria's time. No one else has the same combination of melody, beauty of description, culture and intellectual power. He has sweetness and strength in exquisite combination. If a just balance of poetic powers were to be the crown of a poet, then undoubtedly Mr. Tennyson must be proclaimed the greatest English poet of our time. The reader's estimate of Browning and Tennyson will probably be decided by his predilection for the higher effort or the more perfect art. Browning's is surely the higher aim in poetic art, but of the art which he assays, Tennyson is by far the completeer master. Tennyson has undoubtedly thrown away much of his sweetness and his exquisite grace of form on mere triflings and pretty conceits. And perhaps as a retribution those poems of his which are most familiar to the popular mouth are just those which least do justice to his genuine strength and intellect. The cheap sentiment of Lady Clara, Vier de Vier, the yet cheaper pathos of the May Queen, are in the minds of thousands the choicest representation of the genius of the poet who wrote in Memoriam and the Mort D'Arthur. Mr. Browning, on the other hand, has chosen to court the approval of his time on terms of such disadvantage as an orator might who insisted in addressing an assemblage in some tongue which they but imperfectly understood. It is the fault of Mr. Browning himself if he has for his only audience and admirers men and women of culture and misses altogether that broad public audience to which most poets have chosen to sing and which all true poets, one would think, must desire to reach with their song. It is on the other hand assuredly Mr. Tennyson's fault if he has by his too frequent condescension to the drawing-room and even the young lady school made men and women of culture forget for the moment his best things and credit him with no higher gift than that of singing, we are guinebus puerisque. One quality ought to be mentioned as common to these two poets who have so little else in common. They are both absolutely faithful to nature and truth in their pictures of the earth and its scenes and seasons. Almost all the great poets of the past age, even including Wordsworth himself, were now and then content to generalize nature, to take some things for granted, to use their memory or the eyes of others rather than their own eyes when they had to describe changes on leaf or sky or water. It is the characteristic of Tennyson and Browning that they deal with nature in a spirit of the most faithful loyalty. Not the branch of a tree nor the cry of a bird nor the shifting colors on sea or sky will be found described on their pages otherwise than as the eye sees for itself at the season of which the poet tells. In reading Tennyson's description of woodland and forest scenes, one might almost fancy that he can catch the exact peculiarities of sound in the rustling and moaning of each separate tree. In some of Mr. Browning's pictures of Italian scenery, every detail is so perfect that many a one journeying along an Italian road and watching the little mouse-colored cattle as they drink at the stream may for a moment almost feel uncertain whether he is looking on a page of living reality or recalling to memory a page from the author of The Ring in the Book. The poets seem to have returned to the fresh simplicity of a far distant age of poetry when a man described exactly what he saw and was put to describing it because he saw it. In most of the intermediate times a poet describes because some other poet has described before and has said that in nature that there are such and such beautiful things which every true poet must see and is bound to acknowledge accordingly in his verse. These two are the greatest of our poets in the earlier part of the rain, indeed in the rain early or late so far, but there are other poets also of whom we must take account. Mrs. Browning has often been described as the greatest poetess of whom we know anything since Sappho. This description, however, seems to carry with it a much higher degree of praise than it really bears. It has to be remembered that there is no great poetess of whom we know anything from the time of Sappho to that of Mrs. Browning. In England we have hardly any woman but Mrs. Browning alone who really deserves to rank with poets. She takes a place altogether different from that of any Mrs. Hemons or such singer of sweet mild and innocent note, Mrs. Browning would rank higher among poets without any allowance being claimed for her sex. But estimated in this way which assuredly she would have chosen for herself, she can hardly be admitted to stand with the foremost even of our modern day. She is one of the most sympathetic of poets. She speaks to the hearts of numbers of readers who think tennis and all too sweet, smooth and trivial, and Robert Browning harsh and rugged. She speaks especially to the emotional in woman. In all moods when men or women are distracted by the bewildering conditions of life, when they feel themselves alternately dazzled by its possibilities and baffled by its limitations, the poems of Elizabeth Browning ought to find sympathetic ears. But the poems are not the highest which might appeal to our own moods and echo our own plates, and there was not much of creative genius in Mrs. Browning. Her poems are often but a prolonged sob, a burst of almost hysterical remonstrance or entreaty. It must be owned, however, that the egotism of emotion has seldom found such exquisite form of outpouring as in her so-called sonnets from the Portuguese, and that what the phraseology of a school would call the emotion of altruism has rarely been given forth in tones of such piercing pathos as in the cry of the children. Mr. Matthew Arnold's reputation was made before this earlier period had closed. He is a maker of such exquisite and thoughtful verse that it is hard sometimes to question his title to be considered a genuine poet. On the other hand it is likely that the very grace and culture and thoughtfulness of his style inspire in many the first doubt of his claim to the name of poet. Where the art is evident and elaborate we are all too apt to assume that it is all art and not genius. Mr. Arnold is a sort of miniature Gürte. We do not know that his most ardent admirers could demand a higher praise for him, while it is probable that the description will suggest exactly the intellectual peculiarities which lead so many to deny him a place with the really inspired singers of his day. Of the three men whom we have named we should be inclined to say that Mr. Arnold made the very most of his powers and Mr. Browning the very least. Mr. Arnold is a critic as well as a poet. There are many who relish him more in the critic than in the poet. In literary criticism his judgment is refined and his aims are always high if his range is not very wide. In politics and theology he is somewhat apt to be at once fastidious and fantastic. The song of the shirt would give Thomas Hood a technical right if he had none other to be classed as a poet of the reign of Queen Victoria. The song of the shirt was published in Punch when the rain was well on and after it appeared the bridge of size and no two of Hood's poems have done more to make him famous. He is a genuine though not a great poet in whom humor was most properly to be defined as Thackeray had defined it, the blending of love and wit. The song of the shirt and the bridge of size made themselves a kind of monumental place in English sympathies. The plea of the Midsummer fairies was written several years before. It alone would have made for its author a reputation. The ballad of Farinez is almost perfect in its way. The name of Sir Henry Taylor must be included with the poets of this reign although his best work was done before the reign began. In his work clear strong intelligence prevails more than the emotional and the sensuous. He makes himself a poet by virtue of intellect and artistic judgment for there really do seem some examples of a poet being made and not born. We can hardly bring Proctor among the Victorian poets. Macaulay's ringing verses are rather the splendid and successful tour de force of a clever man than the genuine lyrics of a poet. Arthur Clough was a man of rare promise whose lamp was extinguished all too soon. Philip James Bailey startled the world by his festus and for a time made people believe that a great new poet was coming but the impression did not last and Bailey proved to be little more than the comet of a season. A spasmodic school which sprang up after the success of festus and which was led by a brilliant young scotchman Alexander Smith passed away in a spasm as it came and is now almost forgotten. Or Ryan, an epic poem by Richard H. Horne made a very distinct mark upon the time. Horne proved himself to be a sort of landor monkey or perhaps a connecting link between the style of landor and that of browning. The earlier part of the reign was rich in singers but the names and careers of most of them would serve rather to show that the poet-experient was abroad in that it sought expression in all manner of forms than that there were many poets to dispute the place with Tennyson and Browning. It is not necessary here to record a list of mere names. The air was filled with the voices of minor singers. It was pleasant to listen to their piping and the general effect may well be commended but it is not necessary that the names of all the performers in an orchestra should be recorded for the supposed gratification of a posterity which assuredly would never stop to read the list. Thirty-six years have passed away since Mr. Ruskin leaped into the literary arena with his spring as bold and startling as that of Keen on the Kemble haunted stage. The little volume so modest in its appearance and self-sufficient in its tone which the author defiantly flung down like a gauge of battle before the world was entitled, modern painters their superiority in the art of landscape painting to all the ancient masters by a graduate of Oxford. It was a challenge to establish beliefs and prejudices and the challenge was delivered in the tone of one who felt confident that he could make good his words against any and all opponents. If there was one thing that more than another seemed to have been fixed and rooted in the English mind, it was that Claude and one or two others of the old masters possessed the secret of landscape painting. When therefore a bold young dogmatist involved in one common denunciation, Claude, Gaspar Poussin, Salvatore Rosa, Rauschdal, Paul Potter, Connelletto and the various van-somethings and kook-somethings, more especially and malignantly those who have libeled the sea, it was no wonder that a fronted authority raised its indignant voice and thundered at him. A fronted authority however gained little by its thunder. The young Oxford graduate possessed, along with genius and profound conviction, an imperturbable and magnificent self-conceit against which the surges of angry criticism dashed themselves in vain. Mr. Ruskin sprang into literary life simply as a vindicator of the fame and genius of Turner. But as he went on with his task, he found, or at least he convinced himself, that the vindication of the great landscape painter was essentially a vindication of all true art. Still further proceeding with his self-imposed task, he persuaded himself that the cause of true art was identical with the cause of truth, and that truth, from Ruskin's point of view, enclosed in the same rules and principles all the morals, all the science, industry and daily business of life. Therefore from an art critic, he became a moralist, a political economist, a philosopher, a statesman, a preacher, anything, everything that human intelligence can impel a man to be. All that he has written since his first appeal to the public has been inspired by this conviction, that an appreciation of the truth in art reveals to him who has it the truth in everything. This belief has been the source of Mr. Ruskin's greatest successes and of his most complete and ludicrous failures. It has made him the admiration of the world one week and the object of its placid pity or broad laughter the next. A being who could be Joan of Arc today and Voltaire's Pucelle tomorrow would hardly exhibit a stranger's psychical paradox than the eccentric genius of Mr. Ruskin sometimes illustrates. But in order to do him justice and not to regard him as a mirror-radic utterer of eloquent contradictions poured out on the impulse of each moment's new freak of fancy, we must always bear in mind the fundamental faith of the man. Extravagant as this or that doctrine may be, outrageous as today's contradiction of yesterday's assertion may sound, yet the whole career is consistent with its essential beliefs and principles. It may be fairly questioned whether Mr. Ruskin has any great qualities but his eloquence and his true honest love of nature. As a man to stand up before a society of which one part was fashionably languid and the other part only too busy and greedy and preached to it of nature's immortal beauty and of the true way to do her reverence, Ruskin has and had a position of genuine dignity. This ought to be enough for the work and for the praise of any man. But the restlessness of Ruskin's temperament, combined with the extraordinary self-sufficiency which contributed so much to his success where he was master of a subject, sent him perpetually intruding into fields where he was unfit to labor and enterprises which he had no capacity to conduct. Seldom has a man contradicted himself so often, so recklessly, and so complacently as Mr. Ruskin. It is venturesome to call him a great critic even in art, for he seldom expresses any opinion one day without flatly contradicting it the next. He is a great writer as Russo was, fresh, eloquent, audacious, writing out of the fullness of the present mood and heedless how far the impulse of to-day may contraven that of yesterday. But as Russo is always faithful to his idea of truth, so Ruskin is always faithful to nature. When all his errors and paradoxes and contradictions shall have been utterly forgotten this will remain to his praise. No man since Wordsworth's brightest days did have so much to teach his countrymen and those who speak his language how to appreciate and honor that silent nature which never did betray the heart that loved her. In fiction, as well as in poetry, there are two great names to be compared or contrasted when we turn to the literature of the earlier part of the reign. In the very year of Queen Victoria's accession appeared the Pickwick Papers. The work of the author, who the year before had published the sketches by Boz. The public soon recognized the fact that a new and wonderfully original force had come into literature. The success of Charles Dickens is absolutely unequaled in the history of English fiction. At the season of his highest popularity Sir Walter Scott was not so popular an author. But that happened to Dickens which did not happen to Scott. When Dickens was at his zenith and when it might have been thought that any manner of rivalry with him was impossible, a literary man who was no longer young, who had been working with but moderate success for many years in light literature, suddenly took to writing novels and almost in a moment stepped up to a level with the author of Pickwick. During the remainder of their careers the two men stood as nearly as possible on the same level. Dickens always remained by far the more popular of the two, but on the other hand it may be safely said that the opinion of the literary world in general was inclined to favor thackery. From the time of the publication of Vanity Fair the two were always put side by side for comparison or contrast. They have been sometimes likened to fielding in Smollett, but no comparison could be more misleading or less happy. That stands on a level distinctly and considerably below that of fielding, but Dickens cannot be said to stand thus below thackery. If the comparison were to hold at all, thackery must be compared to fielding, for fielding is not in the least like Dickens. But then it must be allowed that Smollett wants many of the higher qualities of the author of David Copperfield. It is natural that men should compare Dickens and Thackery, but the two will be found to be curiously unlike when once a certain superficial resemblance ceases to impress the mind. Their ways of treating a subject were not only dissimilar, but were absolutely in contrast. They started to begin with under the influence of a totally different philosophy of life, if that is to be called a philosophy which was probably only the result of peculiarity of temperament in each case. Dickens set out on the literary theory that in life everything is better than it looks. Only with the impression that it is worse. In the one case there was somewhat too much of a mechanical interpretation of everything for the best in the best possible world. In the other the savor of cynicism was at times a little annoying. As each writer went on the peculiarity became more and more a mannerism. But the writings of Dickens were far more deeply influenced by his peculiarities of feeling or philosophy than those of Thackery. A large share of the admiration which is popularly given to Dickens is undoubtedly a tribute to what people consider his cheerful view of life. In that too he is especially English. In this country the artistic theory of France and other continental nations borrowed from the aesthetic principles of Greece which accords the palm to the artistic treatment rather than to the subject or the purpose or the way of looking at things has found hardly any broad and general acceptation. The popularity of Dickens was therefore in great measure due to the fact that he set forth life in cheerful lights and colors. He had of course gifts of far higher artistic value. He could describe anything that he saw with the fidelity which Balzac could not have surpassed. And like Balzac he had a way of inspiring inanimate objects with a mystery and motive of their own which gave them often a weird and fascinating individuality. But it must be owned that if Dickens peculiar philosophy were afaced from his works the fame of the author would remain a very different thing from what it is at the present moment. On the other hand it would be possible to cut out of Thackery all his little cynical melancholy sentences and reduce his novels to bear descriptions of life and character without affecting in any sensible degree his influence on the reader or his position in literature. Thackery had a marvelously keen appreciation of human motive and character within certain limits. If Dickens could draw an old quaint house or an odd family interior as faithfully and yet as picturesquely as Balzac so on the other hand not Balzac himself could analyze and illustrate the weaknesses and foibles of certain types of character with greater subtlety of judgment and force of exposition than Thackery. Dickens had little or no knowledge of human character and evidently cared very little about the study. His stories are fairy tales made credible by the masterly realism with which he described all the surroundings and accessories, the costumes and the ways of his men and women. While we are reading of a man whose odd peculiarities strike us with a sense of reality as if we had observed them for ourselves many a time, while we see him surrounded by streets and houses which seemed to us rather more real and a hundred times more interesting than those through which we pass every day, we are not likely to observe very quickly or to take much heed of the fact, when we do observe it, that the man acts on various important occasions of his life as only people in fairy stories ever do act. Thackery on the other hand cared little for descriptions of externals. He left his readers to construct for themselves the greater part of the surroundings of his personages from his description of the characters of the personages themselves. He made us acquainted with the man or woman in his chapters as if we had known him or her all our life, and knowing Pendennis or Becky Sharp we had no difficulty in constructing the surroundings of either for ourselves. Thus it will be seen that these two eminent authors had not only different ideas about life, but absolutely contrasting principles of art. One worked from the externals inward, the other realized the unseen and left the externals to grow of themselves. Three great peculiarities, however, they shared each lived and wrote of and for London. Dickens created for art the London of the middle and poorer classes. Thackery did the same for the London of the upper class and for those who strive to imitate their ways. Neither ever even attempted to describe a man kept constantly above or beyond the atmosphere of mere egotism by some sustaining greatness or even intensity of purpose. In Dickens as in Thackery the emotions described are those of conventional life merely. This is not to be said in disparagement of either artist. It is rather a tribute to an artist's knowledge of his own capacity and sphere of work that he only attempts to draw what he thoroughly understands. But it is proper to remark of Dickens and of Thackery, as of Balzac, that the life they described was, after all, but the life of a coterie or a quarter, and that there existed side by side with their field of work, a whole world of emotion, aspiration, struggle, defeat and triumph of which their brightest pages do not give a single suggestion. This is the more curious to observe because of the third peculiarity which Dickens and Thackery had in common, a love for the purely ideal and romantic infiction. There are many critics who hold that Dickens Barnaby-Rudge and The Tale of Two Cities, Thackery and Esmond exhibited powers which vindicated for their possessors a very rare infusion of that higher poetic spirit which might have made of both something greater than the painters of the manners of a day and a class. But to paint the manners of a day and a class as Dickens and Thackery have done is to deserve fame and the gratitude of posterity. The age of Victoria may claim in this respect an equality at least without of the reign which produced Fielding and Smollett. For if there are some who would demand for Fielding a higher place on the whole than can be given either to Dickens or to Thackery, there are not many on the other hand who would not say that either Dickens or Thackery is distinctly superior to Smollett. The age must claim a high place in art which could, in one department alone, produce two such competitors. Their effect upon their time was something marvelous. People talked Dickens or thought Thackery. Passionate will be seen counted for little in the works of Dickens and Thackery. Dickens indeed could draw a conventionally or dramatically wicked man with much power and impressiveness and Thackery could suggest certain forms of vice with wonderful delicacy and yet vividness. But the passions which are common to all human natures in their elementary moods made but little play in the novels of either writer. Both were in this respect for all their originality and genius in other ways, highly and even exclusively conventional. There was apparently a sort of understanding in the minds of each, indeed Thackery is admitted as much in his preface to Pendennis, that men and women are not to be drawn as men and women are known to be, but with certain reserves to suit conventional etiquette. It is somewhat curious that the one only novel writer who during the period we are now considering came into any real rivalry with them was one who depended on passion altogether for her material and her success. The novels of a young woman, Charlotte Bronte compelled all English society into a recognition not alone of her own sterling power in genius but also of the fact that profound and passionate emotion was still the stuff out of which great fiction could be constructed. Exaltations, agonies and love and man's unconquerable mind were taken by Charlotte Bronte as the matter out of which her art was to produce its triumphs. The novels which made her fame, Jane Eyre and Villette are positively aflame with passion and pain. They have little variety. They make hardly any pretense to accurate drawing of ordinary men and women in ordinary life or at all events under ordinary conditions. The authoress had little of the gift of the mere storyteller and her own peculiar powers were exerted sometimes within different success. The familiar on whom she depended for her inspiration would not always come at call. She had little genuine relish for beauty except the beauty of a weird melancholy and of decay. But when she touched the court of elementary human emotion with her best skill, then it was impossible for her audience not to feel that they were under the spell of a power rare indeed in our well ordered days. The absolute sincerity of the author's expression of feeling lent it great part of its strength and charm. Nothing was ever said by her because it seemed to society the right sort of thing to say. She told a friend that she felt sure Jane Eyre would have an effect on readers in general because it had so great an effect on herself. It would be possible to argue that the great strength of the books lay in their sincerity alone. That Charlotte Bronte was not so much a woman of extraordinary genius as a woman who looked her own feelings fairly in the face and painted them as she saw them. But the capacity to do this would surely be something which we could not better describe than by the word genius. Charlotte Bronte was far from being an artist of fulfilled power. She's rather to be regarded as one who gave evidence of extraordinary gifts which might with time and care and under happier artistic auspices have been turned to such account as would have made for her a fame with the very chiefs of her tribe. She died at an age hardly more mature than that at which Thackeray won his first distinct literary success. Much earlier than the age at which some of our greatest novelists brought forth their first completed novels. But she left a very deep impression on her time and the time that has come and is coming after her. No other hand in the age of Queen Victoria has dealt with human emotion so powerfully and so truthfully. Hers were not cheerful novels. A cold, grey, mournful atmosphere hangs over them. One might imagine that the shadow of an early death is forecast on them. They love to linger among the glooms of nature, to haunt her darkling wintery twilight, to study her stormy sunsets, to link man's destiny and his hopes, fears, and passions somehow with the glare and gloom of storm and darkness and to read the symbols of his fate as the foredoomed and passion wasted Antony did in the cloud masses that our black Vespers pageants. The supernatural had a constant vague charm for Charlotte Bronte as the painful had. Man was to her a being torn between passionate love and the most ignoble impulses and ambitions and common day occupations of life. Woman was a being of equal passion, still more sternly and cruelly doomed to repression and renunciation. It was a strange fact that in the midst of the splendid material successes and the quietly triumphant intellectual progress of this most prosperous and well-ordered age, when even in its poetry and its romance passion was systematically toned down and put in thrall to good taste and propriety, this young writer should have suddenly come out with her books all thrilling with emotion and all protesting in the strongest possible manner against the theory that the loves and hates of men and women had been tamed by the process of civilization. Perhaps the very novelty of the apparition was in great measure a part of its success. Charlotte Bronte did not indeed influence the general public or even the literary public to anything like the same extent that Thackery and Dickens did. She appeared and passed away almost in a moment. As Miss Martino said of her, she stole like a shadow into literature and then became a shadow again. But she struck very deeply into the heart of the time. If her writings were only, as has been said of them, a cry of pain, yet they were such a cry as once heard lingers and echoes in the mind forever after. Godwin declared that he would write in Caleb Williams a book which would leave no man to read it the same as he was before. Something not unlike this might be said of Jane Eyre. No one who read it was exactly the same as he had been before he opened its weird and wonderful pages. No man could well have made more of his gifts than Lord Lytton. Before the coming up of Dickens and Thackery, he stood above all living English novelists. Perhaps this is rather to the reproach of English fiction of the day than to the renown of Lord Lytton. But even after Dickens and Thackery and Charlotte Bronte, and later and not less powerful and original writers had appeared in the same field, he still held a place of great mark in literature. That he was not a man of genius is perhaps conclusively proved by the fact that he was able so readily to change his style to suit the tastes of each day. He began by writing of Phops and Rue, of a time now almost forgotten. Then he made heroes of high women and murderers. Afterwards, he tried the philosophic and mildly didactic style. Then he turned to mysticism and spiritualism. Later still, he wrote of the French Second Empire. Whatever he tried to do, he did well. Besides his novels, he wrote plays and poems, and his plays are among the very few modern productions which managed to keep the stage. He played too and with much success he became a statesman and an orator. Not Demosthenes himself had such difficulties of articulation to contend against in the beginning. And Demosthenes conquered his difficulties while some of those in the way of Lord Lytton proved unconquerable. Yet Lord Lytton did somehow contribe to become a great speaker and to seem occasionally like a great orator in the House of Commons. He was at the very least a superb phrase-maker and he could turn to account every scrap of knowledge in literature, art, or science which he happened to possess. His success in the House of Commons was exactly like his success in romance and the drama. He threw himself into competition with men of far higher original gifts and he made so good a show of contesting with them that in the minds of many the victory was not clearly with his antagonists. There was always for example even among educated persons who maintained that Lytton was in his way quite the peer of Thakri and Dickens. His plays or some of them obtained a popularity second only to those of Shakespeare and although nobody cared to read them yet people were always found to go and look at them. When Lytton went into the House of Commons for the second time he found audiences which were occasionally tempted as the rival of Gladstone and Bright. Not a few persons saw in all this a sort of superb charlatanerie and indeed it is certain that no man ever made and kept a genuine success in so many different fields as those in which Lord Lytton tried and seemed to succeed. But he had splendid qualities. He had everything short of genius. He had indomitable patients inexhaustible power of self-culture and a capacity for assimilating the floating ideas of the hour which supplied the place of originality. He borrowed from the poet the knack of poetical expression and from the dramatist the trick of construction. From the Byronic time its professed scorn for the false gods of the world and from the more modern period of popular science and sham mysticism its extremes of materialism and magic. And of these and various other borrowings he made up an article which no one else could have constructed out of the same materials. He was not a great author but he was a great literary man. Mr. Disraeli's novels belong in some measure to the school of Pelham and Godolphin but it should be said that Mr. Disraeli's Vivian Gray was published before Pelham made its appearance. In all that belongs to political life Mr. Disraeli's novels are far superior to those of Lord Lytton. We have nothing in our literature to compare with some of the best of Mr. Disraeli's novels for light political satire and for easy accurate characterization of political cliques and personages. But all else in Disraeli's novels is sham the sentiment the poetry, the philosophy all these are sham. They have not the appearance of reality about them that Lytton has contrived to give to his efforts of the same kind. In one at least of Disraeli's latest novels the political sketches and satirizing became sham also. Alton Locke was published nearly 30 years ago. Then Charles Kingsley became to most boys in Great Britain who read books at all a sort of living embodiment of chivalry, liberty and a revolt against the established order of class oppression in so many spheres of our society. For a long time he continued to be the chosen hero of young men with the youthful spirit of revolt in them with dreams of republics and ideas about the equality of man. Later on he commanded other admiration for other qualities for the championship of slave systems of oppression and the iron reign of mere force. But though Charles Kingsley always held a high place somewhere in popular estimation, he is not to be rated very highly as an author. He described glowing scenery admirably and he rang the changes vigorously on his two or three ideas, the muscular Englishman, the glory of the Elizabethan discoveries and so on. He was a scholar and he wrote verses which sometimes one is on the point of mistaking for poetry, so much of the poet's feeling have they in them. He did a great many things very cleverly. Perhaps if he had done less he might have done better. Human capacity is limited. It is not given to mortal to be a great preacher, a great philosopher, a great scholar, a great poet, a great historian, a great novelist and an indefatigable country person. Charles Kingsley never seems to have made up his mind for which of these callings to go in especially with all his versatility not at all many-sided, but strictly one-sided and almost one-idead. The result was that while touching success at many points he absolutely mastered it at none. Since his novel Westward Ho he never added anything substantial to his reputation. All this acknowledged however it must still be owned that failing in this stat and the other attempt and never achieving any real success. Charles Kingsley was an influence and a man of mark in the Victorian age. Perhaps a word ought to be said of the rattling romances of Irish electioneering, lovemaking and fighting which set people reading Charles O'Malley and Jack Hinton even when Pickwick was still a novelty. Charles Lever had wonderful animal spirits and a broad bright humor. He was quite genuine in his way. He afterwards changed his style completely and with much success and will be found in the later part of the period holding just the same relative places in the earlier, just behind the foremost men, but in manners so different that he might be a new writer who had never read a line of the roistering adventures of light dragoons which were popular when Charles Lever first gave them to the world. There was nothing great about Lever, but the literature of the Victorian period would not be quite all that we know it without him. There are many other popular novelists during the period we have passed over some in their day more popular than either Thackeray or Charlotte Bronte. Many of us can remember without being too much ashamed of the fact that there were early days when Mr. James and his cavaliers and his chivalric adventures gave nearly as much delight as Walter Scott could have given to the youth of a preceding generation. But Walter Scott is with us still, young and old, and poor James is gone. His once famous solitary horseman has ridden away into actual solitude and the shades of night have gathered over his heroic form. The founding of Punch drew together a host of clever young writers some of whom made a really deep mark on the literature of their time and the combined influence of whom in this artistic and literary undertaking was on the whole decidedly healthy. Thackeray was by far the greatest of the regular contributors to Punch in its early days. But the song of the shirt appeared in its pages and some of the brightest of Douglas Gerald's writings made their appearance there. Punch was a thoroughly English production. It had little or nothing in common with the comic periodicals of Paris. It ignored absolutely and of set purpose the whole class of subjects which make up three fourths of the stock and trade of a French court. The escapades of husbands and the infidelities of wives formed the theme of by far the greater number of the humorous sketches with pen and pencil in Parisian comicalities. Punch kept altogether aloof from such unsavory subjects. It had an advantage, of course, which was habitually denied to the French papers. It had unlimited freedom of political satire and caricature. Politics and the more trivial troubles and trials of social life gave subjects to Punch. The inequalities of class and the struggles of ambitious and vain persons to get into circles higher than their own, or at least to imitate their manners, these supplied for Punch the place of the class of topics on which French papers relied when they had to deal with the domestic life of the nation. Punch started by being somewhat fiercely radical, but gradually toned away into a sort of intelligent and respectable conservatism. Its artistic sketches were from the first to last admirable. Some men of true genius wrought for it with the pencil as others did with the pen. Doyle, Leech, and Tenille were men of whom any school of art might well be proud. A remarkable sobriety of style was apparent in all their humors. Of later years, caricature has absolutely no place in the illustrations to Punch. The satire is quiet, delicate, and no doubt superficial. It is a satire of manners, dress, and social ways altogether. There is justice in the criticism that of late more especially the pages of Punch give no idea whatever of the emotions of the English people. There is no suggestion of grievance, of bitterness, of passion, or pain. It is all made up of the pleasures and annoyances of the kind of life which is enclosed in Punch. But it must be said that Punch has thus always succeeded in maintaining a good, open, convenient, neutral ground where young men and maidens, girls and boys, elderly politicians and state matrons, law, trade, science, all sex and creeds may safely and pleasantly mingle. It is not so to be sure that great satire is wrought. A swift or a juvenile is not thus to be sure. But a votary of the present would have his answers simple and conclusive. We live in the age of Punch. We do not live in the age of juvenile or swift. End of section 30 Recording by Pamela Nagami M.D. in Encino, California, July 2019. End of a history of our own times from the accession of Queen Victoria to the general election of 1880 in William II by Justin McCarthy