From Chaucer to Tennyson Part 12

and again,

O could I feel as I have felt--or be what I have been, Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene; As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tho' they be, So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me.

This mood was sincere in Byron; but by cultivating it, and posing too long in one att.i.tude, he became self-conscious and theatrical, and much of his serious poetry has a false ring. His example infected the minor poetry of the time, and it was quite natural that Thackeray--who represented a generation that had a very different ideal of the heroic--should be provoked into describing Byron as "a big sulky dandy."

Byron was well fitted by birth and temperament to be the spokesman of this fierce discontent. He inherited from his mother a haughty and violent temper, and profligate tendencies from his father. He was through life a spoiled child, whose main characteristic was willfulness.

He liked to shock people by exaggerating his wickedness, or by perversely maintaining the wrong side of a dispute. But he had traits of bravery and generosity. Women loved him, and he made strong friends.

There was a careless charm about him which fascinated natures as unlike each other as Sh.e.l.ley and Scott. By the death of the fifth Lord Byron without issue, Byron came into a t.i.tle and estates at the age of ten.

Though a liberal in politics he had aristocratic feelings, and was vain of his rank as he was of his beauty. He was educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was idle and dissipated, but did a great deal of miscellaneous reading. He took some of his Cambridge set--Hobhouse, Matthews, and others--to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral seat, where they filled the ancient cloisters with eccentric orgies.

Byron was strikingly handsome. His face had a spiritual paleness and a cla.s.sic regularity, and his dark hair curled closely to his head. A deformity in one of his feet was a mortification to him, and impaired his activity in many ways, although he prided himself upon his powers as a swimmer.

In 1815, when at the height of his literary and social _eclat_ in London, he married. In February of the following year he was separated from Lady Byron, and left England forever, pursued by the execrations of outraged respectability. In this chorus of abuse there was mingled a share of cant; but Byron got, on the whole, what he deserved. From Switzerland, where he spent a summer by Lake Leman, with the Sh.e.l.leys; from Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Rome, scandalous reports of his intrigues and his wild debaucheries were wafted back to England, and with these came poem after poem, full of burning genius, pride, scorn, and anguish, and all hurling defiance at English public opinion. The third and fourth cantos of _Childe Harold_, 1816-1818, were a great advance upon the first two, and contain the best of Byron's serious poetry. He has written his name all over the continent of Europe, and on a hundred memorable spots has made the scenery his own. On the field of Waterloo, on "the castled crag of Drachenfels," "by the blue rus.h.i.+ng of the arrowy Rhone," in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, in the Coliseum at Rome, and among the "Isles of Greece," the tourist is compelled to see with Byron's eyes and under the a.s.sociations of his pilgrimage. In his later poems, such as _Beppo_, 1818, and _Don Juan_, 1819-1823, he pa.s.sed into his second manner, a mocking cynicism gaining ground upon the somewhat stagey gloom of his early poetry--Mephistophiles gradually elbowing out Satan. _Don Juan_, though morally the worst, is intellectually the most vital and representative of Byron's poems. It takes up into itself most fully the life of the time; exhibits most thoroughly the characteristic alternations of Byron's moods and the prodigal resources of wit, pa.s.sion, and understanding, which--rather than imagination--were his prominent qualities as a poet. The hero, a graceless, amorous stripling, goes wandering from Spain to the Greek islands and Constantinople, thence to St. Petersburg, and finally to England. Every-where his seductions are successful, and Byron uses him as a means of exposing the weakness of the human heart and the rottenness of society in all countries. In 1823, breaking away from his life of selfish indulgence in Italy, Byron threw himself into the cause of Grecian liberty, which he had sung so gloriously in the _Isles of Greece_. He died at Missolonghi, in the following year, of a fever contracted by exposure and overwork.

Byron was a great poet but not a great literary artist. He wrote negligently and with the ease of a.s.sured strength; his mind gathering heat as it moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profusion. His work is diffuse and imperfect; much of it is melodrama or speech-making, rather than true poetry. But, on the other hand, much, very much of it is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere utterance of personal feeling. Such is the quality of his best lyrics, like _When We Two Parted_, the _Elegy on Thyrza_, _Stanzas to Augusta_, _She Walks in Beauty_, and of innumerable pa.s.sages, lyrical and descriptive, in his longer poems. He had not the wisdom of Wordsworth, nor the rich and subtle imagination of Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley, and Keats when they were at their best. But he had greater body and motive force than any of them.

He is the strongest personality among English poets since Milton, though his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture. In Milton the pa.s.sion was there, but it was held in check by the will and the artistic conscience, made subordinate to good ends, ripened by long reflection, and finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious beauty. Byron's love of Nature was quite different in kind from Wordsworth's. Of all English poets he has sung most lyrically of that national theme, the sea; as witness, among many other pa.s.sages, the famous apostrophe to the ocean which closes _Childe Harold_, and the opening of the third canto in the same poem,

Once more upon the waters, etc.

He had a pa.s.sion for night and storm, because they made him forget himself.

Most glorious night!

Thou wert not sent for slumber! Let me be A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, A portion of the tempest and of thee!

Byron's literary executor and biographer was the Irish poet, Thomas Moore, a born song-writer, whose _Irish Melodies_, set to old native airs, are, like Burns's, genuine, spontaneous singing, and run naturally to music. Songs such as the _Meeting of the Waters_, _The Harp of Tara_, _Those Evening Bells_, the _Light of Other Days_, _Araby's Daughter_, and the _Last Rose of Summer_ were, and still are, popular favorites.

Moore's Oriental romance, _Lalla Rookh_, 1817, is overladen with ornament and with a sugary sentiment that clogs the palate. He had the quick Irish wit, sensibility rather than pa.s.sion, and fancy rather than imagination.

Byron's friend, Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley (1792-1822), was also in fiery revolt against all conventions and inst.i.tutions, though his revolt proceeded not, as in Byron's case, from the turbulence of pa.s.sions which brooked no restraint, but rather from an intellectual impatience of any kind of control. He was not, like Byron, a sensual man, but temperate and chaste. He was, indeed, in his life and in his poetry, as nearly a disembodied spirit as a human creature can be. The German poet, Heine, said that liberty was the religion of this century, and of this religion Sh.e.l.ley was a wors.h.i.+per. His rebellion against authority began early. He refused to f.a.g at Eton, and was expelled from Oxford for publis.h.i.+ng a tract on the _Necessity of Atheism_. At nineteen, he ran away with Harriet Westbrook, and was married to her in Scotland. Three years later he deserted her for Mary G.o.dwin, with whom he eloped to Switzerland. Two years after this his first wife drowned herself in the Serpentine, and Sh.e.l.ley was then formally wedded to Mary G.o.dwin. All this is rather startling, in the bare statement of it, yet it is not inconsistent with the many testimonies that exist to Sh.e.l.ley's singular purity and beauty of character, testimonies borne out by the evidence of his own writings. Impulse with him took the place of conscience. Moral law, accompanied by the sanction of power, and imposed by outside authority, he rejected as a form of tyranny. His nature lacked robustness and ballast. Byron, who was at the bottom intensely practical, said that Sh.e.l.ley's philosophy was too spiritual and romantic. Hazlitt, himself a Radical, wrote of Sh.e.l.ley: "He has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced." It was, perhaps, with some recollection of this last-mentioned trait of Sh.e.l.ley the man, that Carlyle wrote of Sh.e.l.ley the poet, that "the sound of him was shrieky,"

and that he had "filled the earth with an inarticulate wailing."

His career as a poet began, characteristically enough, with the publication, while at Oxford, of a volume of political rimes, ent.i.tled _Margaret Nicholson's Remains_, Margaret Nicholson being the crazy woman who tried to stab George III. His boyish poem, _Queen Mab_, was published in 1813; _Alastor_ in 1816, and the _Revolt of Islam_--his longest--in 1818, all before he was twenty-one. These were filled with splendid, though unsubstantial, imagery, but they were abstract in subject, and had the faults of incoherence and formlessness which make Sh.e.l.ley's longer poems wearisome and confusing. They sought to embody his social creed of perfectionism, as well as a certain vague pantheistic system of belief in a spirit of love in nature and man, whose presence is a constant source of obscurity in Sh.e.l.ley's verse. In 1818 he went to Italy, where the last four years of his life were pa.s.sed, and where, under the influences of Italian art and poetry, his writing became deeper and stronger. He was fond of yachting, and spent much of his time upon the Mediterranean. In the summer of 1822 his boat was swamped in a squall, off the Gulf of Spezzia, and Sh.e.l.ley's drowned body was washed ash.o.r.e, and burned in the presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt. The ashes were entombed in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, with the epitaph, _Cor cordium_.

Sh.e.l.ley's best and maturest work, nearly all of which was done in Italy, includes his tragedy, _The Cenci_, 1819, and his lyrical drama, _Prometheus Unbound_, 1821. The first of these has a unity and a definiteness of contour unusual with Sh.e.l.ley, and is, with the exception of some of Robert Browning's, the best English tragedy since Otway.

Prometheus represented to Sh.e.l.ley's mind the human spirit fighting against divine oppression, and in his portrayal of this figure he kept in mind not only the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus, but the Satan of _Paradise Lost_. Indeed, in this poem, Sh.e.l.ley came nearer to the sublime than any English poet since Milton. Yet it is in lyrical, rather than in dramatic, quality that _Prometheus Unbound_ is great. If Sh.e.l.ley be not, as his latest editor, Mr. Forman, claims him to be, the foremost of English lyrical poets, he is at least the most lyrical of them. He had, in a supreme degree, the "lyric cry." His vibrant nature trembled to every breath of emotion, and his nerves craved ever newer shocks; to pant, to quiver, to thrill, to grow faint in the spasm of intense sensation. The feminine cast observable in Sh.e.l.ley's portrait is borne out by this tremulous sensibility in his verse. It is curious how often he uses the metaphor of wings: of the winged spirit, soaring, like his skylark, till lost in music, rapture, light, and then falling back to earth. Three successive moods--longing, ecstasy, and the revulsion of despair--are expressed in many of his lyrics; as in the _Hymn to the Spirit of Nature_ in _Prometheus_, in the ode _To a Skylark_, and in the _Lines to an Indian Air_--Edgar Poe's favorite. His pa.s.sionate desire to lose himself in Nature, to become one with that spirit of love and beauty in the universe which was to him in place of G.o.d, is expressed in the _Ode to the West Wind_, his most perfect poem:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is; What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep autumnal tone Sweet, though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!

In the lyrical pieces already mentioned, together with _Adonais_, the lines _Written in the Euganean Hills_, _Epipsychidion_, _Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples_, _A Dream of the Unknown_, and many others, Sh.e.l.ley's lyrical genius reaches a rarer loveliness and a more faultless art than Byron's ever attained, though it lacks the directness and momentum of Byron.

In Sh.e.l.ley's longer poems, intoxicated with the music of his own singing, he abandons himself wholly to the guidance of his imagination, and the verse seems to go on of itself, like the enchanted boat in _Alastor_, with no one at the helm. Vision succeeds vision in glorious but bewildering profusion; ideal landscapes and cities of cloud "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." These poems are like the water-falls in the Yosemite, which, tumbling from a height of several thousand feet, are shattered into foam by the air, and waved about over the valley. Very beautiful is this descending spray, and the rainbow dwells in its bosom; but there is no longer any stream, nothing but an iridescent mist. The word _ethereal_ best expresses the quality of Sh.e.l.ley's genius. His poetry is full of atmospheric effects; of the tricks which light plays with the fluid elements of water and air; of stars, clouds, rain, dew, mist, frost, wind, the foam of seas, the phases of the moon, the green shadows of waves, the shapes of flames, the "golden lightning of the setting sun." Nature, in Sh.e.l.ley, wants homeliness and relief. While poets like Wordsworth and Burns let in an ideal light upon the rough fields of earth, Sh.e.l.ley escapes into a "moonlight-colored" realm of shadows and dreams, among whose abstractions the heart turns cold. One bit of Wordsworth's mountain turf is worth them all.

By the death of John Keats (1796-1821), whose elegy Sh.e.l.ley sang in _Adonais_, English poetry suffered an irreparable loss. His _Endymion_, 1818, though disfigured by mawkishness and by some affectations of manner, was rich in promise. Its faults were those of youth, the faults of exuberance and of a sensibility, which time corrects. _Hyperion_, 1820, promised to be his masterpiece, but he left it unfinished--"a t.i.tanic torso"--because, as he said, "there were too many Miltonic inversions in it." The subject was the displacement by Phoebus Apollo of the ancient sun-G.o.d, Hyperion, the last of the t.i.tans who retained his dominion. It was a theme of great capabilities, and the poem was begun by Keats with a strength of conception which leads to the belief that here was once more a really epic genius, had fate suffered it to mature.

The fragment, as it stands--"that inlet to severe magnificence"--proves how rapidly Keats's diction was clarifying. He had learned to string up his loose chords. There is nothing maudlin in _Hyperion_; all there is in whole tones and in the grand manner, "as sublime as Aeschylus," said Byron, with the grave, antique simplicity, and something of modern sweetness interfused.

Keats's father was a groom in a London livery-stable. The poet was apprenticed at fifteen to a surgeon. At school he had studied Latin but not Greek. He, who of all the English poets had the most purely h.e.l.lenic spirit, made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the medium of cla.s.sical dictionaries, translations, and popular mythologies; and later through the marbles and casts in the British Museum. His friend, the artist Haydon, lent him a copy of Chapman's Homer, and the impression that it made upon him he recorded in his sonnet, _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_. Other poems of the same inspiration are his three sonnets, _To Homer_, _On Seeing the Elgin Marbles_, _On a Picture of Leander_, _Lamia_, and the beautiful _Ode on a Grecian Urn_. But Keats's art was retrospective and eclectic, the blossom of a double root; and "golden-tongued Romance with serene lute"

had her part in him, as well as the cla.s.sics. In his seventeenth year he had read the _Faerie Queene_, and from Spenser he went on to a study of Chaucer, Shakspere and Milton. Then he took up Italian and read Ariosto.

The influence of these studies is seen in his poem, _Isabella, or the Pot of Basil_, taken from a story of Boccaccio; in his wild ballad, _La Belle Dame sans Merci_; and in his love tale, the _Eve of St. Agnes_, with its wealth of mediaeval adornment. In the _Ode to Autumn_, and _Ode to a Nightingale_, the h.e.l.lenic choiceness is found touched with the warmer hues of romance.

There is something deeply tragic in the short story of Keats's life. The seeds of consumption were in him; he felt the stirrings of a potent genius, but he knew that he could not wait for it to unfold, but must die

Before high-piled books in charactry Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain.

His disease was aggravated, possibly, by the stupid brutality with which the reviewers had treated _Endymion_; and certainly by the hopeless love which devoured him. "The very thing which I want to live most for," he wrote, "will be a great occasion of my death. If I had any chance of recovery, this pa.s.sion would kill me." In the autumn of 1820, his disease gaining apace, he went on a sailing vessel to Italy, accompanied by a single friend, a young artist named Severn. The change was of no avail, and he died at Rome a few weeks after, in his twenty-sixth year.

Keats was, above all things, the _artist_, with that love of the beautiful and that instinct for its reproduction which are the artist's divinest gifts. He cared little about the politics and philosophy of his day, and he did not make his poetry the vehicle of ideas. It was sensuous poetry, the poetry of youth and gladness. But if he had lived, and if, with wider knowledge of men and deeper experience of life, he had attained to Wordsworth's spiritual insight and to Byron's power of pa.s.sion and understanding, he would have become a greater poet than either. For he had a style--a "natural magic"--which only needed the chastening touch of a finer culture to make it superior to any thing in modern English poetry, and to force us back to Milton or Shakspere for a comparison. His tombstone, not far from Sh.e.l.ley's, bears the inscription of his own choosing: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But it would be within the limits of truth to say that it is written in large characters on most of our contemporary poetry. "Wordsworth," says Lowell, "has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their forms." And he has influenced these out of all proportion to the amount which he left, or to his intellectual range, by virtue of the exquisite quality of his _technique_.

1. Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England, 18th-19th Centuries. London: Macmillan & Co., 1883.

2. Wordsworth's Poems. Chosen and edited by Matthew Arnold. London, 1879.

3. Poetry of Byron. Chosen and arranged by Matthew Arnold. London, 1881.

4. Sh.e.l.ley. Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, Lyrical Pieces.

5. Landor. Pericles and Aspasia.

6. Coleridge. Table-Talk, Notes on Shakspere, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Love, Ode to France, Ode to the Departing Year, Kubla Khan, Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, Youth and Age, Frost at Midnight.

7. De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Flight of a Tartar Tribe, Biographical Sketches.

8. Scott. Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, Bride of Lammermoor, Rob Roy, Antiquary, Marmion, Lady of the Lake.

9. Keats. Hyperion, Eve of St. Agnes, Lyrical Pieces.

Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1871.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Southey, Scott, Coleridge, Macaulay.]

CHAPTER VIII.

FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME.

1832-1893.

The literature of the past fifty years is too close to our eyes to enable the critic to p.r.o.nounce a final judgment, or the literary historian to get a true perspective. Many of the princ.i.p.al writers of the time are still living, and many others have been dead but a few years. This concluding chapter, therefore, will be devoted to the consideration of the few who stand forth, incontestably, as the leaders of literary thought, and who seem likely, under all future changes of fas.h.i.+on and taste, to remain representatives of their generation. As regards _form_, the most striking fact in the history of the period under review is the immense preponderance in its imaginative literature of prose fiction, of the novel of real life. The novel has become to the solitary reader of to-day what the stage play was to the audiences of Elizabeth's reign, or the periodical essay, like the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, to the clubs and breakfast-tables of Queen Anne's. And if its criticism of life is less concentrated and brilliant than the drama gives, it is far more searching and minute. No period has ever left in its literary records so complete a picture of its whole society as the period which is just closing. At any other time than the present, the names of authors like Charlotte Bronte, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Reade--names which are here merely mentioned in pa.s.sing--besides many others which want of s.p.a.ce forbids us even to mention--would be of capital importance. As it is, we must limit our review to the three acknowledged masters of modern English fiction, Charles d.i.c.kens (1812-1870), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), and "George Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880).

It is sometimes helpful to reduce a great writer to his lowest term, in order to see what the prevailing bent of his genius is. This lowest term may often be found in his early work, before experience of the world has overlaid his original impulse with foreign accretions. d.i.c.kens was much more than a humorist, Thackeray than a satirist, and George Eliot than a moralist; but they had their starting-points respectively in humor, in burlesque, and in strong ethical and religious feeling. d.i.c.kens began with a broadly comic series of papers, contributed to the _Old Magazine_ and the _Evening Chronicle_, and reprinted in book form, in 1836, as _Sketches by Boz_. The success of these suggested to a firm of publishers the preparation of a number of similar sketches of the misadventures of c.o.c.kney sportsmen, to accompany plates by the comic draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour. This suggestion resulted in the _Pickwick Papers_, published in monthly installments in 1836-1837. The series grew, under d.i.c.kens's hand, into a continuous though rather loosely strung narrative of the doings of a set of characters, conceived with such exuberant and novel humor that it took the public by storm and raised its author at once to fame. _Pickwick_ is by no means d.i.c.kens's best, but it is his most characteristic and most popular book. At the time that he wrote these early sketches he was a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_. His naturally acute powers of observation had been trained in this pursuit to the utmost efficiency, and there always continued to be about his descriptive writing a reportorial and newspaper air. He had the eye for effect, the sharp fidelity to detail, the instinct for rapidly seizing upon and exaggerating the salient point, which are developed by the requirements of modern journalism.

d.i.c.kens knew London as no one else has ever known it, and, in particular, he knew its hideous and grotesque recesses, with the strange developments of human nature that abide there; slums like Tom-all-Alone's, in _Bleak House_; the river-side haunts of Rogue Riderhood, in _Our Mutual Friend_; as well as the old inns, like the "White Hart," and the "dusky purlieus of the law." As a man, his favorite occupation was walking the streets, where, as a child, he had picked up the most valuable part of his education. His tramps about London--often after nightfall--sometimes extended to fifteen miles in a day. He knew, too, the s.h.i.+fts of poverty. His father--some traits of whom are preserved in Mr. Micawber--was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea prison, where his wife took lodging with him, while Charles, then a boy of ten, was employed at six s.h.i.+llings a week to cover blacking-pots in Warner's blacking warehouse. The hards.h.i.+ps and loneliness of this part of his life are told under a thin disguise in d.i.c.kens's masterpiece, _David Copperfield_, the most autobiographical of his novels. From these young experiences he gained that insight into the lives of the lower cla.s.ses and that sympathy with children and with the poor which s.h.i.+ne out in his pathetic sketches of Little Nell, in _The Old Curiosity Shop_; of Paul Dombey; of poor Jo, in _Bleak House_; of "the Marchioness," and a hundred other figures.

In _Oliver Twist_, contributed, during 1837-1838, to _Bentley's Miscellany_, a monthly magazine of which d.i.c.kens was editor, he produced his first regular novel. In this story of the criminal cla.s.ses the author showed a tragic power which he had not hitherto exhibited.

Thenceforward his career was a series of dazzling successes. It is impossible here to particularize his numerous novels, sketches, short tales, and "Christmas Stories"--the latter a fas.h.i.+on which he inaugurated, and which has produced a whole literature in itself. In _Nicholas Nickleby_, 1839; _Master Humphrey's Clock_, 1840; _Martin Chuzzlewit_, 1844; _Dombey and Son_, 1848; _David Copperfield_, 1850, and _Bleak House_, 1853, there is no falling off in strength. The last named was, in some respects, and especially in the skillful construction of the plot, his best novel. In some of his latest books, as _Great Expectations_, 1861, and _Our Mutual Friend_, 1865, there are signs of a decline. This showed itself in an unnatural exaggeration of characters and motives, and a painful straining after humorous effects; faults, indeed, from which d.i.c.kens was never wholly free. There was a histrionic side to him, which came out in his fondness for private theatricals, in which he exhibited remarkable talent, and in the dramatic action which he introduced into the delightful public readings from his works that he gave before vast audiences all over the United Kingdom, and in his two visits to America. It is not surprising, either, to learn that upon the stage his preference was for melodrama and farce.

His own serious writing was always dangerously close to the melodramatic, and his humor to the farcical. There is much false art, bad taste, and even vulgarity in d.i.c.kens. He was never quite a gentleman, and never succeeded well in drawing gentlemen or ladies. In the region of low comedy he is easily the most original, the most inexhaustible, the most wonderful, of modern humorists. Creations such as Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Micawber, Sam Weller, Sairy Gamp, take rank with Falstaff and Dogberry; while many others, like d.i.c.k Swiveller, Stiggins, Chadband, Mrs. Jellyby, and Julia Mills, are almost equally good. In the innumerable swarm of minor characters with which he has enriched our comic literature there is no indistinctness. Indeed, the objection that has been made to him is that his characters are too distinct--that he puts labels on them; that they are often mere personifications of a single trick of speech or manner, which becomes tedious and unnatural by repet.i.tion. Thus, Grandfather Smallweed is always settling down into his cus.h.i.+on, and having to be shaken up; Mr. Jellyby is always sitting with his head against the wall; Peggotty is always bursting her b.u.t.tons off, etc. As d.i.c.kens's humorous characters tend perpetually to run into caricatures and grotesques, so his sentiment, from the same excess, slops over too frequently into "gush," and into a too deliberate and protracted attack upon the pity. A favorite humorous device in his style is a stately and roundabout way of telling a trivial incident, as where, for example, Mr. Roker "muttered certain unpleasant invocations concerning his own eyes, limbs, and circulating fluids;" or where the drunken man who is singing comic songs in the Fleet received from Mr.

Smangle "a gentle intimation, through the medium of the water-jug, that his audience were not musically disposed." This manner was original with d.i.c.kens, though he may have taken a hint of it from the mock heroic language of _Jonathan Wild_; but as practiced by a thousand imitators, ever since, it has gradually become a burden.