warped it; finally, after various oscillations, it was manifested by the conception of a special ideal, which gradually fashioned or produced religion, literature, institutions. Thus fixed and expressed, it was thenceforth the mover of the rest; it explains the present, on it depends the future; its force and direction will produce the present and future civilisation. Now that great historic violences-I mean the destructions and enslavements of peoples-have become almost impracticable, each nation can develop its life according to its own conception of life; the chances of a war, a discovery, have no hold but on details; national inclinations and aptitudes alone now draw the great features of a national history; when twenty-five million men conceive the good and useful after a certain type, they will seek and end by attaining this kind of the good and useful. The Englishman has henceforth his priest, his gentleman, his manufacture, his comfort, and his novel. If you wish to seek in what sense this work will alter, you must seek in what sense the central conception will alter. A vast revolution has taken place during the last three centuries in human intelligence, -like those regular and vast uprisings which, displacing a continent, displace all the prospects. We know that positive discoveries go on increasing day by day, that they will increase daily more and more, that from object to object they reach the most lofty, that they begin by renewing the science of man, that their useful application and their philosophical consequences are ceaselessly unfolded; in short, that their universal encroachment will at last comprise the whole human mind. From this body of invading truths springs in addition an original conception of the good and the useful, and, moreover, a new idea of state and church, art and industry, philosophy and religion. This has its power, as the old idea had; it is scientific, if the other was national; it is supported on proved facts, if the other was upon established things. Already their opposition is being manifested; already their results begin; and we may affirm beforehand, that the proximate condition of English civilisation will depend upon their divergence and their agreement.

THE translator thinks it due to M. Taine to state, that the fifth book, on the Modern Authors, was written whilst Dickens, Thackeray, and Macaulay were still alive. He also gives the original preface of that book :

'This fifth book is the sequel to the History of English Literature; it is written on another plan, because the subject is different. The present period is not yet completed, and the ideas which govern it are in process of formation, that is, in the rough. We cannot therefore as yet systematically arrange them. When documents are still mere indications, history is necessarily reduced to studies; science is moulded on existence; and our conclusions cannot be other than incomplete, so long as the facts which suggest them are unfinished. Fifty years hence the history of this age may be written; in the meantime we can but sketch it. I have selected from contemporary English writers the most original minds, the most consistent, and the most contrasted; they may be regarded as specimens, representing the common features, the opposite tendencies, and consequently the general direction of the public miud.

They are only specimens. By the side of Macaulay and Carlyle we have historians like Hallam, Buckle, and Grote; by the side of Dickens, novel-writers like Bulwer, Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, and many more; by the side of Tennyson, poets like Elizabeth Browning; by the side of Stuart Mill, philosophers like Hamilton, Bain, and Herbert Spencer. I pass over the vast number of men of talent who write anonymously in reviews, and who, like soldiers in an army, display at times more clearly than their generals the faculties and inclinations of their time and their country. If we look for the common marks in this multitude of varied minds, we shall, I think, find the two salient features which I have already pointed out. One of these features is proper to English civilisation, the other to the civilisation of the nineteenth century. The one is national, the other European. On the one hand, special to this people, their literature is an inquiry instituted into humanity, altogether positive, and consequently only partially beautiful or philosophical, but very exact, minute, useful, and moreover very moral; and this to such a degree, that sometimes the generosity or purity of its aspirations raises it to a height which no artist or philosopher has transcended. On the other hand, in common with the various peoples of our age, this literature subordinates dominant creeds and institutions to private inquiry and established science-I mean, to that irresponsible tribunal which is erected in each man's individual conscience, and to that universal anthority which the diverse human judgments, mutually rectified, and controlled by practice, borrow from the verifications of experience, and from their own harmony.

Whatever be the judgment passed on these tendencies and on these doctrines, we cannot, I think, refuse them the merit of spontaneity and originality. They are living and thriving plants. The six writers, described in this volume, have VOL. II. Y

expressed efficacious and complete ideas on God, nature, man, science, religion, art, and morality. To produce such ideas we have in Europe at this day but three nations-England, Germany, and France. Those of England will here be found arranged, discussed, and compared with those of the other two thinking countries.'

CHAPTER I.

The Novel.-Dickens:

§ 1. THE AUTHOR.

1. Connection of the different elements of a talent-Importance of the imaginative faculty.

II. Lucidity and intensity of imagination in Dickens-Boldness and vehemence of his fancy-How with him inanimate objects are personified and impassioned-Wherein his conception is akin to intuition-How he describes idiots and madmen.

III. The objects to which he directs his enthusiasm-His trivialities and minuteness- - Wherein he resembles the painters of his country—Wherein he differs from George Sand-Miss Ruth and Geneviève—A journey in a coach.

IV. Vehemence of the emotions which this kind of imagination must produceHis pathos-Stephen, the factory hand-His humour-Why he attains to buffoonery and caricature-Recklessness and nervous exaggeration of his gaiety.

§ 2. THE PUBLIC.

English novels are compelled to be moral-Wherein this constraint modifies the idea of love-Comparison of love in George Sand and DickensPictures of the young girl and the wife--Wherein this constraint qualifies the idea of passion Comparison of passions in Balzac and Dickens--Inconvenience of this foregone necessity-How comic or odious masks are substituted for natural characters-Comparison of Pecksniff and Tartusse -Why unity of action is absent in Dickens.

§ 3. THE CHARACTERS,

I. Two classes of characters-Natural and instinctive characters-Artificial and positive characters-Preference of Dickens for the first-Aversion against the second.

II. The hypocrite-Mr. Pecksniff-Wherein he is English-Comparison of Pecksniff and Tartuffe The positive man-Mr. Gradgrind-The proud man-Mr. Dombey-Wherein these characters are English.

III. Children-Wanting in French literature-Little Joas and David Copperfield-Men of the lower orders.

IV. The ideal man according to Dickens-Wherein this conception corresponds to a public need-Opposition of culture and nature in England-Reassertion of sense and instinct oppressed by conventionalism and rule-Success of Dickens.

W

ERE Dickens dead, his biography might be written. On the day after the burial of a celebrated man, his friends and enemies apply themselves to the work; his schoolfellows relate in the newspapers his boyish pranks; another man recalls exactly, and word for word, the conversations he had with him a score of years ago. The lawyer, who manages the affairs of the deceased, draws up a list of the different offices he has filled, his titles, dates and figures, and reveals to the matter-of-fact readers how the money left has been invested, and how the fortune has been made; the grandnephews and second cousins publish an account of his acts of humanity, and the catalogue of his domestic virtues. If there is no literary genius in the family, they select an Oxford man, conscientious, learned, who treats the dead like a Greek author, amasses endless documents, involves them in endless comments, crowns the whole with endless discussions, and comes ten years later, some fine Christmas morning, with his white tie and placid smile, to present to the assembled family three quartos, of eight hundred pages, the easy style of which would send a German from Berlin to sleep. He is embraced by them with tears in their eyes; they make him sit down; he is the chief ornament of the festivities; and his work is sent to the Edinburgh Review. The latter groans at the sight of the enormous present, and tells off a young and intrepid member of the staff to concoct some kind of a biography from the table of contents. Another advantage of posthumous biographies is, that the dead man is no longer there to refute either biographer or man of learning.

Unfortunately Dickens is still alive, and refutes the biographies made of him. What is worse, he claims to be his own biographer. His translator in French once asked him for a few particulars of his life; Dickens replied that he kept them for himself. Without doubt, David Copperfield, his best novel, has much the appearance of a confession; but where does the confession end, and how far does fiction embroider truth? All that is known, or rather all that is told, is that Dickens was born in 1812, that he is the son of a shorthand-writer, that he was himself at first a shorthand-writer, that he was poor and unfortunate in his youth, that his novels, published in parts, have gained for him a great fortune and an immense reputation. The reader may conjecture the rest; Dickens will tell him it one day, when he writes his memoirs. Meanwhile he closes the door, and leaves outside the too inquisitive folk who go on knocking. He has a right to do so. Though a man may be illustrious, he is not on that account public property; he is not constrained to be confidential; he still belongs to himself; he may reserve of himself what he thinks proper. If we give our works to our readers, we do not give our lives. Let us be satisfied with what Dickens has given us. Forty volumes suffice, and more than suffice, to enable us to know a man well; moreover, they show of him all that it is important to know. It is not through the accidental circumstances of his life that he belongs to history, but by his talent; and his talent is in his books.

A man's genius is like a clock; it has its mechanism, and amongst its parts a mainspring. Find out this spring, show how it communicates movement to the others, pursue this movement from part to part down to the hands in which it ends. This inner history of genius does not depend upon the outer history of the man; and it is worth more.

§ 1. THE AUTHOR.

I.

The first question which should be asked in connection with an artist is this: How does he regard objects? With what clearness, what energy, what force? The reply defines his whole work beforehand : for in a writer of novels the imagination is the master faculty; the art of composition, good taste, appreciation of truth, depend upon it; one degree more of vehemence destroys the style which expresses it, changes the characters which it produces, breaks the framework in which it is enclosed. Consider that of Dickens, and you will perceive therein the cause of his faults and his merits, his power and his excess.

II.

He has the painter in him, and the English painter. Never surely did a mind figure to itself with more exact detail or greater energy all the parts and tints of a picture. Read this description of a storm; the images seem photographed by a dazzling electric light:

'The eye, partaking of the quickness of the flashing light, saw in its every gleam a multitude of objects which it could not see at steady noon in fifty times that period. Bells in steeples, with the rope and wheel that moved them; ragged nests of birds in cornices and nooks; faces full of consternation in the tilted waggons that came tearing past: their frightened teams ringing out a warning which the thunder drowned; harrows and ploughs left out in fields; miles upon miles of hedge-divided country, with the distant fringe of trees as obvious as the scarecrow in the beanfield close at hand; in a trembling, vivid, flickering instant, everything was clear and plain: then came a flush of red into the yellow light; a change to blue; a brightness so intense that there was nothing else but light; and then the deepest and profoundest darkness.'1

An imagination so lucid and energetic cannot but animate inanimate objects without an effort. It provokes in the mind in which it works extraordinary emotions, and the author pours over the objects which he figures to himself, something of the ever-welling passion which overflows in him. Stones for him take a voice, white walls swell out into big phantoms, black wells yawn hideously and mysteriously in the darkness; legions of strange creatures whirl shuddering over the fantastic landscape; blank nature is peopled, inert matter moves. But the images remain clear; in this madness there is nothing vague or

1 Martin Chuzzlewit, ch. xlii. The translator has used the 'Charles Dickens' edition, 1868, 18 vols.