Chapter XXXV: Section IV: The Ideal Man

We do not believe that this contrast between the weak and the strong, or this outcry against society in favor 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 on 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 faculty and the positive mind. The acquisition of these habits, faculties, and mind, to which must be added former hostile feelings to Rome, and an inveterate 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 authority, severity in its exercise, 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 ascendancy 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 nature. 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.

[Footnote 238: Taine was not wrong in thinking so. In the "Life of Charles Dickens" by J. Forster we find (vol. I. p. 8) the following words: "And here I may at once expressly mention, what already has been hinted, that even as Fielding described himself and his belongings in Captain Booth and Amelia, and protested always that he had writ in his books nothing more than he had seen in life, so it may be said of Dickens, in more especial relation to David Copperfield. Many guesses have been made since his death, connecting David's autobiography with his own. ... There is not only truth in all this, but it will very shortly be seen that the identity went deeper than any had supposed, and covered experiences not less startling in the reality than they appear to be in the fiction."--Tr.]

[Footnote 239: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. XLII. The translator has used the "Charles Dickens" edition, 1868, 18 vols.]

[Footnote 240: "It was small tyranny for a respectable wind to go wreaking its vengeance on such poor creatures as the fallen leaves; but this wind happening to come up with a great heap of them just after venting its humour on the insulted Dragon, did so disperse and scatter them that they fled away, pell-mell, some here, some there, rolling over each other, whirling round and round upon their thin edges, taking frantic flights into the air, and playing all manner of extraordinary gambols in the extremity of their distress. Nor was this enough for its malicious fury: for, not content with driving them abroad, it charged small parties of them and hunted them into the wheel-wright's saw-pit, and below the planks and timbers in the yard, and, scattering the sawdust in the air, it looked for them underneath, and when it did meet with any, whew! how it drove them on and followed at their heels!

"The scared leaves only flew the faster for all this, and a giddy chase it was: for they got into unfrequented places, where there was no outlet, and where their pursuer kept them eddying round and round at his pleasure; and they crept under the eaves of houses, and clung tightly to the sides of hayricks, like bats; and tore in at open chamber windows, and cowered close to hedges; and, in short, went anywhere for safety."--"Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. II.]

[Footnote 241: "The Chimes," first quarter.]

[Footnote 242: "The Chimes," first quarter.]

[Footnote 243: "Martin Chuzzlewit." ch. XLV.]

[Footnote 244: "Dombey and Son," ch. IV.]

[Footnote 245: See ante, vol. I. note, page 393.]

[Footnote 246: "David Copperfield," ch. V.]

[Footnote 247: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. XXXVI.]

[Footnote 248: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. LI.]

[Footnote 249: Novels of George Sand.]

[Footnote 250: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. XXXVI.]

[Footnote 251: "Hard Times," bk. 3, ch. VI.]

[Footnote 252: Ibid.]

[Footnote 253: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. VIII.]

[Footnote 254: Ibid.]

[Footnote 255: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. XIX.]

[Footnote 256: "The Chimes," the first quarter.]

[Footnote 257: A living French author, whose dramas are all said to have a moral purpose.--Tr.]

[Footnote 258: "David Copperfield," ch. LXV; the scene between the doctor and his wife.]

[Footnote 259: "Et je verrais mourir frère, enfants, mère, et femme Que je m'en soucierais autant que de cela." These lines, said by Orgon to his brother-in-law Cléante, are from Molière's "Tartuffe," I. 6.]

[Footnote 260: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. II.]

[Footnote 261: "Martin Chuzzlewit," ch. VIII.]

[Footnote 262: "Hard Times," book I. ch. I.]

[Footnote 263: Ibid, book I. ch. II.]

CHAPTER SECOND

THE NOVEL CONTINUED--THACKERAY

Comparison Between Dickens and Thackeray

The novel of manners in England multiplies, and for this there are several reasons: first, it is born there, and every plant thrives well in its own soil; secondly, it is a natural outlet: there is no music in England as in Germany, or conversation as in France; and men who must think and feel find in it a means of feeling and thinking. On the other hand, women take part in it with eagerness; amidst the stagnation 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 all.

In this crowd two men have appeared of superior talent, original and contrasted, popular on the same grounds, ministers to the same cause, moralists in comedy and drama, defenders of natural sentiments against social institutions; who, by the precision of their pictures, the depth of their observations, the succession and bitterness of their attacks, have renewed, with other views and in another style, the old combative spirit of Swift and Fielding.

One, more ardent, more expansive, wholly given up to rapture, an impassioned painter of crude and dazzling pictures, a lyric prose-writer, omnipotent in laughter and tears, plunged into fantastic invention, painful sensibility, vehement buffoonery; and by the boldness of his style, the excess of his emotions, the grotesque familiarity of his caricatures, he has displayed all the forces and weaknesses of an artist, all the audacities, all the successes, and all the oddities of the imagination.

The other, more contained, better informed and stronger, a lover of moral dissertations, a counsellor of the public, a sort of lay preacher, less bent on defending the poor, more bent on censuring man, has brought to the aid of satire a sustained common-sense, a great knowledge of the heart, consummate cleverness, powerful reasoning, a treasure of meditated hatred, and has persecuted vice with all the weapons of reflection. By this contrast the one completes the other; and we may form an exact idea of English taste by placing the portrait of William Makepeace Thackeray by the side of that of Charles Dickens.

Part I.--The Satirist