THE VICTORIANS

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 100, 24 October 1925, Page 17

THE VICTORIANS

THEIR FAULTS AND VIRTUES

DICKENS, THACKERAY, TROLLOPE

, v Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has written of "Charles Dickens and Other Victorians," and G. P. Putnam's, Sons, Ltd., New York and London, have just published the book. Mr. Henry B. Fuller, in reviewing the work, for the "New York. Times,'.' show 3 how Dickens is placed by the author as leader of the Victorians. In the thirties'of the last century the factory system was entrenching itself in the English Midlands. Manchester and Laissezfaire were having it all their own way. The callousness of the new breed of manufacturers toward women and children seems quite incredible. Disraeli's "Sybil," with its vivid*pictures of the factory poor/ and Mrs. Uaskcll's "Mary Barton," with.its' cruel depiction of distress among the weavers, awell the author's pages and kindle his indignation; and it is probable that Dickens's humanitarianism and his eagerness for reform may have much - to do with the rank which the present volume assigns him. However, discrimination is not sacrificed : ' When he saw a legal or political hardship which hurt or depressed the poor, conventions injurious to the Common wealth, the Poor Laws, Debtors'- Prisons,. the Court of Chancery, tho Patent (or Circumlocution) Office, and so forth, with the. people who batti'n on such conventions, taking them for granted as immutable— Dickens struck hard and often effec- , tively. But he struck at what-he'saw under, his own ; eyes. Beyond the im- • mediate indignation ho had no reasoned principles of political or social .reform. His simple formula ever was— in an'ago when Parliament carried a strong tradition of respect—"Yes, my Lords and gentlemen, look on this waif, this corpse, this broken life. Lost, broken, dead, my Lords and gentlemen, and all through your acquiescence, your malfeasance, your neglect!"' . ■ ' Dickens's world was not a world of ideas at all, but. a city "full of folk" Dickens was indeed a town man and had little success with the country. , Another item •on the same side of the ledger is .Dickens's occasional touch of vulgarity and his frequent lack of taste. Again, his plots are "stagey,'-' "ill-knit," "repetitious," "poor in invention." Still ' another and even more important charge, frequently brought by other commentators as well, is that Dickens's characters, are, as a rule, static. They do not grow, do not develop; what they are at, the beginning they remain at the end. .-,-.■ . ■ ■ ■ ■ Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch denies Dickens tho capacity for character development, and also shuts him away from any real interest in religion, any knowledge of science, ■ any ' great aptitude for thought.' .What remains, then, to justify his enthusiasm? Intense' sincerity, of'course, and a tremendous creative i imagination;, but for his capital reason tie has to;draw upon Saintsburv. The artistic secret of. Dickens's world lies iv the'combination of the strictest ■ realism of detail' with a, fairy-tale unxf 118I 18"1 of general atmosphere. . Aobpdy ever mastered better than Dickens, in practice, the Aristotelian ; doctrine of tho' impossibility, rendered , probable or not improbable ! Ihackcrary, is shown by Sir Arthur as a product- of Anglo-Indian life and of thwarted domesticity. -Too much of his domestic life was distributed among lodgings and clubs. Those who accuse Thackcrary of being a snob . .'.should in tairncss lay their account that-he? came of people who, comm&.ndinji many servants, supported thq BnjrJish tradition of rule and dominance in a foreign land. . Into: a' class so limited, so exiled' so professional in its aims' and interest—so borne, and repugnant against ideas that would invad" upon the tried order of things and upset caste along with routiuc--ao loyal to its own tradition of service, so dependent for all reward upon official recognition (which often means the personal caprice of some Governor or Secretary of ,' State or head of Department), * some snobbery, as we understand the word nowadays, will pretty certainly' creep—to make its presence felt, if not to pervade. Thackeray—a social delineator or nothing—never quite understood the roots of English life or of the classes he chose to depict; those roots which even in Pall Mall or the houses fcf Parliament ramify underground deep and out, fetching their vital sap from the countryside is the way the author sees it. Tbaekeray, liko Dickens,. was a town man, with the same (or a greater) ineptitude for the country. The town house called him. If ho looked up to some people, lie was fated to look down on others. He took up finy one of tho cruder manifestations cf life "merely to savage it." Before tho cheap boarding-house Balzac \ias triumphant, where Thackeray was only contemptuous. IT is "cruel-ty-in handling mean things" seems but the reverse of his own definition of the snob as "one who nicanlj admires mean things." As, a writer of-fiction Thackeray i* taxed by Quiller-Couch with feeble-ness-and uncertainty of construction and c.hidcrt.for-his "loose, informal preaching." This'last was Thackeray's "bane as a novelist." But Sir Arthur Quiller - Couch describes Thackeray's style—"a prose so beautiful that it'"moves ono frequently to envy and not seldom 16. pure delight . . . The secret lies, if you will follow his sentences and surrender joursclf to their run and lull and lapse, in a curious haunting music, as of a stream; a music of which scarce any other writer of English prose l.as quite the natural effortless command. You have no need to search iv his best' pages or to hunt for his purple patches. It hws a knack of making music even while you are judging his matter to.be poor stuff; music—and frequent music—in his most casual light-running sentences." The volume concludes with a paler on Anthony Trollope. He merits recognition if for. no other reason tliim that of his hulk. And it is interesting to note that his fame tends to revive just as the society ho depicted enters, upon its decline. The cathedral close is now hardly what it once was, and the "stately homes-of England" arc sinking into eclipse. Trollope will survive :is tho historian of their ill-dwellers. There is an undoubted revival of interest in iiis "Banthcster" m>vcL«.