Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/218

208 a cynic. Gifted with a superb style, with profound sympathy and insight into human emotion, and with a power of rendering the picturesque aspects of a society, Thackeray remains a great master. The work of his contemporary, Charles Dickens, has had an even greater popular success. Dickens's early career gave him a knowledge of a much humbler grade of society than Thackeray pictures, and at the same time left him with a vivid sense of the wrongs under which the more unfortunate members of that society suffered. This led him to devote many of his works to the redress of social grievances, and connects him with the general humanitarian movements of modern times. Powerful as was Dickens's influence for reform in his own time, it seems clear that the very specific nature of the evils he attacked is bound to impair the permanence of his work, as it always impaired the artistic value. But we relish still his buoyant humor and geniality, the binding interest of his complex though sometimes confusing plots, and the charm of his immense throng of creations, typical to the point of caricature, but in their setting vital, appealing, and eminently memorable.

In spite of the abundant humor in both Thackeray and Dickens, the novel with them had become a very serious form, the vehicle of important moral and social truths. In the hands of its more notable masters, serious it has remained. The prevalence of the scientific point of view, so marked since the promulgation of the theories of Charles Darwin, has left distinct traces on the history of fiction. The philosophical and scientific learning of George Eliot appears in her work in the emphasis on the reign of law in the character of the individual, and, although she too possesses a rich vein of humor, the charming playfulness in which her immediate predecessors permitted themselves to indulge is replaced by an almost portentous realization of the responsibilities of art and life. In Thomas Hardy, too, the scientific influence is plainly felt, the overwhelming power of environment and circumstance being presented with a force so crushing as to leave the reader depressed with a sense of the helplessness of the individual, without any compensating faith in a