He

Carlyle was not genuinely democratic, and in this he differs from his revolutionary predecessors. One of his cardinal doctrines was "government by the best." Democracy he thought to be "government by the worst." Carlyle was a hero worshiper, and his Heroes and Hero-Worship is one of his most significant books. took no stock in the judgment and insight of the masses. To him the real problem of life was to find out the superior, God-inspired men, the genuine heroes, and to follow them. Carlyle is, therefore, in constant search of great personalities. History, to him, was but a series of biographies of great men. Like Macaulay, most of his work has to do with biography and history. Yet both his point of view and his method are different. Macaulay was interested in what men did; Carlyle, in what men actually were. One emphasizes events; the other, personality. Macaulay's History of England is a well-planned, progressive narrative of events. Carlyle's History of the French Revolution is a drama in which great personalities such as Mirabeau display their power in scenes of confusion. In biography, Carlyle's work is far more sympathetic and penetrating than Macaulay's, as a comparison of their essays on Dr. Johnson shows. The History of Frederick the Great is Carlyle's most stupendous, perhaps his greatest biographical work. The most appreciative and sympathetic of his shorter sketches is the Essay on Burns.

(a) REALISM

The Realistic Novel. Carlyle's protest against his time was vigorous and influential, but it did not stop realistic tendencies, as the development of the nineteenth-century novel attests. Back in the romantic period Jane Austen had made a more or less conscious protest against the extravagance of Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis in her

novels of manners, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Emma. And now in the middle of the nineteenth century the effort to treat everyday life in the novel is further emphasized by Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot.

Dickens's Character Creations. - Charles Dickens (18121870) was a representative everyday Englishman. He lived very close to the public, and knew well how to represent it and to speak for it. He began life as a reporter, and later became an editor, amateur actor, and public reader. As reporter he studied his public, as actor and reader he learned how to play upon it. Early in his career he began to write sketches of London life, mostly caricatures. Urged on by their success, he invented the "Pickwick Club," and worked out a large book of sketches, The Pickwick Papers, a book without any careful plan, but full of comic figures. Later, he conceived grotesque and terrible characters: Fagin and Sykes in Oliver Twist (1838), Quilp in Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and Madam Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). His child characters, too, are famous, Little Nell, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, pathetic and abused little creatures. The stories are often carelessly constructed; indeed, many of them were written and published in installments, Dickens himself not knowing at the beginning how the story was to end. But the characters are always inimitable. Dickens was a great showman, with an inexhaustible supply of figures, humorous and pathetic, vicious and innocent.

Dickens as a Reformer. His work has also distinct moral purpose. Dickens attacked public abuses, and sought to redress wrongs. His stories aided many a reform. Oliver Twist attacks the workhouse; Bleak House, the chancery court; Little Dorrit, the debtor's prisons. Dombey and

Son and Nicholas Nickleby by exposing the cruelties practiced in English schools, helped to put a stop to the shameful exploitation of innocent children. Indeed, the memory of Dickens's own bitter childhood is at the root of his opposition to social injustice and of his zeal for reform. It is easy to find fault with the work of Dickens. His characters are not so much portraits as caricatures. His plots are often formless. Mistakes in English may be found on almost every page. Yet he was the most popular writer of his day, and the hundredth anniversary of his birth hardly finds his fame diminished. He lived close to the popular life. He had rare sympathy and insight. He knew well how to produce laughter and horror and tears.

Thackeray's Attitude toward Life. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) likewise wrote novels of real life, but his point of view differed from that of Dickens. Dickens was a man of the common people; Thackeray, of the drawing-room and the club. Thackeray was the easy-going satirist of social life, drawing intellectual inspiration from the classicism of the eighteenth century. He represents the common-sense point of view of the critical clubman, not caring to make the world over, but accepting it as it is with all its irregularities, and laughing at it in a manner a little patronizing. He despises hypocrisy and sham, but does not employ invective as Carlyle does. His method is subtle, suggestive, and insinuating, without being cynical. He does not despise human nature as the true cynic does, but believes rather in its essential worth. The simple goodness of Colonel Newcome, for example, is treated with genuine sympathy, though not with the frank simplicity of Dickens. Thackeray is more critical, and maintains always a halfsmiling reserve.

His Novels. Thackeray's novels show a thorough knowl

edge of life and literature in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Henry Esmond and its sequel, The Virginians, picture English social life from the time of Addison to the time of the war for American independence. English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century shows a keen appreciation of the literature. Life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is treated in Pendennis, The Newcomes, and Vanity Fair. The development of these stories is desultory and haphazard, Henry Esmond alone being carefully wrought out. The characters, too, are not so carefully analyzed as those of George Eliot, for instance, are. Thackeray had no scientific and philosophical ideas of novel writing, no elaborate theory of realism, no set of principles. He simply had a clear vision and a critical judgment, a genius for significant details, a chatty and confidential manner. He avoided fundamental spiritual conflicts and problems; but for a vivid picture of English social manners and customs in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as seen from the point of view of a common-sense man of the world, there is perhaps no better place to go than to the novels of Thack

eray.

Henry Esmond shows Thackeray at his best. Esmond is a character of dignity and worth, an honorable and loyal English gentleman, who is allowed to tell his own story from his own essentially noble point of view. Moreover, Thackeray's sympathetic knowledge of the eighteenth century gives the book peculiar reality and warmth. "The vanished world

lives for us in character and in episode; lives with a dignity and richness of conception and style that shows Thackeray to have been, when he chose, the greatest artist among the English novelists." 1

George Eliot's Realism. - George Eliot (1819-1880) took

1 Moody and Lovett, History of English Literature.

the art of novel writing far more seriously than Thackeray did. Thackeray did not scorn to gossip about life. George Eliot strove earnestly to interpret it. Her stories arose for the most part out of her real experiences, and her characters were often suggested by real people. Adam Bede, for example, was suggested by an incident in the life of her aunt, who was the original of Dinah Morris, the woman preacher. Mrs. Poyser is supposed to have traits of George Eliot's mother. Cabel Garth in Middlemarch is like her father. There is much that is autobiographical in Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. George Eliot's earlier stories of rustic life have great reality and freshness, but she was not content to give us a mere photograph of life. She must uncover the hidden springs of action and discuss moral problems as an ethical teacher. Not content with surface reality, she must interpret the obvious facts philosophically and scientifically. She claimed to be a realist; and so she was to the extent that she gave no false idea of life, did not exaggerate life for effect, or color it, or throw it out of true perspective. But her books are not mirrors of life. Her sympathetic imagination plays around it all, and facts are always used for a conscious moral purpose. Silas Marner, for instance, treats of the regeneration of character. Hardened and embittered by unjust suspicion, Silas is later humanized through the influence of love. Love will heal a morbid nature, is the theme. The story also illustrates the law of life that "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Romola is a psychologic study of the degeneration of character in Tito. George Eliot's purpose is to show that ethical law is as inexorable as physical law.

Structure and Style. In structure and style, George Eliot was more painstaking than either Dickens or Thackeray. Her stories were first thoughtfully planned, and then