BOOKS•
MR. LILLY'S HUMOURISTS.* Tun book is misnamed. Mr. Lilly scarcely deals with humourists as humourists, at all. It should be called " The Non-Htimourous Aspects of Four English Humonrists." He begins by quoting Thackeray's definition of a humourist, which, indeed, seems to us a very happy one :—" The humorous writer proposes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness,—your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture,—your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability, he comments on all the ordinary actions and passions of human life almost. He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak." And Mr. Lilly adds, still better, on his own account, that "the humourist, we may say, is an artist who playfully gives us his intuition of the world and human life." Now, if Mr. Lilly had kept to his own conception of a hnmourist in dealing with the humourists whom he has chosen from the nineteenth century, he would have done well ; but in speaking of great writers, whose one common quality it is that they are " week-day preachers," that they " playfully give us " their " intuition of the world and human life," he has almost entirely omitted the " week-day " aspect of their preaching, the playfulness of their manner of giving this intuition. For our own parts, we should have been inclined to consider Dickens and Thackeray as the only express humourists of the four. George Eliot, though her humour is great and delightful when she is painting the weaknesses and eccentricities of others, is hardly ever a humonrist when she speaks for herself as an author, and is indeed then apt to be a little grandiloquently didactic and scientific ; and Carlyle, though he had a rich vein of somewhat grim playfulness in him, is treated by Mr. Lilly from a point of view so absolutely destitute of any reference to that humour, that his lecture might have been delivered from the pulpit itself.
Except in the case of Dickens, Mr. Lilly hardly touches on the playful side of any of these humourists, and even in the case of Dickens, he picks out his " democracy," that is, his preference for the life of the masses rather than that of the classes, as his chief characteristic as a humourist,—which is not in the least a characteristic due to his humour, but simply to his circumstances,—and passes over his most striking qualities as a humourist without a word. " I shall deal very little," he says on p. 12, " with the distinctively humorous element in my four subjects." And there we must admit that he keeps rigidly to his intention. He adds, however, "I shall occupy myself specially in considering what the substantive contri- bution of these four great writers to the world's literature is, what is the real message of each to his day and generation, and to us." But why, then, speak of them in the titles of the lectures specially as humourists ? The solemn side of four great humourists is rather a strange subject to propose to himself, but it is Mr. Lilly's real subject. His discourses aim at ignoring as much as possible the playfulness of writers of whom he tells us that the playfulness of their treatment of their subjects should be an essential characteristic. In the case of Carlyle he succeeds perfectly in ignoring his humorous side; for Carlyle, though his humour gave almost all the pungency and power to his treatment of human life, regarded himself, as Mr. Lilly regards him, chiefly as a prophet. and took himself a good deal more seriously than he should have
• Four English Humeurisis of the Nineteenth Century. Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution by William Fumnel Lilly, Honorary Fellow of Peed:ions% Cambridge. Lo d John Murray.
done. If he had laughed at himself a little more, he would not have overdone his "message" to the world half so much.
The fault we have to find with these lectures is that Mr. Lilly seems to us in every instance to have missed, instead of hitting, the "substantive contribution" of his subject to "the world's literature." Dickens was a supreme humourist, but nothing can describe the essential character of his contribu- tion to English literature less adequately than his democratic spirit. No doubt it is quite true that it was in one sense "hie work to democratise the novel," if we use " democratise" in the sense of interesting us much more in the ways and humours• of uneducated people, than in the ways and humours of refined people. But that is a very loose, and we think a very mis- leading sense of the word democratise. It omits the very kernel of the word, which lies in the last syllable but one. A. democrat is one who aims at giving power to the multitude. Dickens aimed at nothing of the sort. So far as he wove political ends into his works, he failed and spoiled his books. He did immense good by interesting us deeply in the virtues and vices, the shrewdness and the folly, in short, in the human nature generally, of the crude and vulgar life of Englishmen who live by their wits, or in spite of their want of wits. But Dickens " as democrat " was a nobody, and hardly existed at all. "As democrat," if he were a democrat, which we very much doubt, he was not even a humonrist, and certainly could not be called par excellence "the humourist as democrat.' Moreover, we do not think that Mr. Lilly's praise of Dickens is good. Dickens's pathos, which he greatly praises, is too much the pathos of the Adelphi. It is slightly hysterical and melodramatic. Dickens's " tears in the voice" are much too audible. " Little Em'ly " and "little Nell" are falsetto heroines. Only Nancy in Oliver Twist seems to us to keep within the limits of the highest pathos, Dickens revelled in his own pathos. And the pathos in which you can consciously luxuriate is not true pathos. His Agnes in David Copperfield is always "pointing upwards." His Esther in Bleak House, and his Rnth Pinch, in Martin Chuzzlewit, make us unwell. They are sickly and self- conscious in their meekness and lovingness. Even little Paul. Dombey's death is described in a falsetto key. And Tiny Tim in the Christmas story is pitied with an exuberance that rather turns the stomach. Dickens had no reserve in his pathos, and pathos without reserve is always wanting in. truth. Nor do we care much for Dickens's burlesque. The- burlesque of all the early part of Pickwick is full of high- spirits, indeed, but of little else. His real contribution to literature was the subtlety with which he distilled the humours of a profession, or a temperament, into such a creation as Mrs. Gamp or Mr. Pecksniff or Bailey junior, or. Mr. Toots, or Charley Bates, or Noah Claypole, or Dick Swiveller, or the ideal coachman, Mr. Weller, senior. Nobody but Dickens could have conceived of a Tartuffe who would have said, " The name of those fabulous animals,—pagan, regret to say,—who used to sing in the water, has escaped me ; or, " Charity, my dear, when I take my chamber-candlestick to- night, remind me to be more than usually particular in praying for Mr. Anthony Chuzzlewit, who has done me an injustice." If, as Mr. Lilly says of Dickens, "he has done more than any other man of our day for the idealisation of common life," the word " idealisation " must be used in a sense very different from that usually given to it. It can hardly be said that Mrs. Gamp is an idealisation of the monthly nurse, or Mr. Peck- sniff of the humble philanthropist, unless we ignore altogether- the moral element in idealisation, and apply it to the invention and completion of all that is selfish and vulgar and hypocritical in selfish and vulgar and hypocritical characters,—to the rounding-off into an impossible perfection of selfishness, vulgarity, and hypocrisy. It is difficult even to regard Mr. Weller, senior, as an ideal coachman, or the Artful Dodger as an ideal thief, for the idealisation only consists in the extension and completion of amusing but far from morally admirable types of professional dexterity and narrowness. Dickens " idealised " the various types of London hardness and shrewdness and fastness and disreput- ableness, till they took hold of us all,—not for their excellence,. but for their squalid consistency and humorous fascination.. That was his great service to literature, not its democratisa- tion. He rendered his pictures of the London poor popular by rendering them much more ludicrous and generally some-. what more squalid than they really are. Yet, if Mr. Lilly both misses the peculiar subtlety of Dickens's humour when he describes him as the humourist "as democrat," and misses even the excuse for Dickens's exaggerated over-colouring, and the grotesque improba- bilities or even impossibilities of his tales,—we might quote half a page of what reads like loathing of Dickens on Mr. Lilly's part, and another half-page of what reads like eulogy, which are never really brought into anything like harmony,—he misses almost altogether the right of his other three humourists to be called humonrists at all. Thackeray he treats as a philosopher on account of his insight into the foibles of human nature and his pro- found sense of the loneliness and isolation in which every human soul lives and dies. That no doubt is, so far as it goes, an evidence of wisdom ; but is it an evidence of philosophy, which is usually understood to imply the love of wisdom in the abstract as well as in the concrete, the love of wise intellectual and moral generalisation, the love of wise con- ceptions of human life, and large and true inferences as to the exact relation of its good and evil characteristics P Thackeray was in the main a satirist, as Mr. Lilly appears to admit. His playfulness consisted in exaggerating somewhat the weaknesses of human nature, and dwelling on them with an emphasis that makes the reader smile, but that fills him, as it filled Thackeray, with a somewhat scornful melancholy. No one would deny that there is a great beauty in the character of Colonel Newcome, but half of the attractive- ness of the character is in the compassion which its optimism, its want of shrewdness excites. Except George War- rington there is hardly one both strong and noble character in Thackeray's pages, and George Warrington is far less clearly and powerfully painted than the great majority of his characters. Thackeray loved to call his figures, puppets, and puppets for the most part he made them, puppets of their affections sometimes, more often puppets of their passions, of their selfishness, of their follies. He was a great satirist, but to our mind very far indeed from a great philosopher. When Mr. Lilly insists on painting him as an unconscious disciple of Kant's ethical teaching, he romances. Thackeray dwelt, and loved to dwell, on the philosophy (in a narrow sense) of human wickedness and folly, if you please. But no satirist, as such, can be a great philosopher. Thackeray did not love to dwell, and did not dwell, on the philosophy (even in the same narrow sense) of human greatness and goodness. And as for philosophy in the larger sense, philosophy which lays bare the secrets of greatness and nobleness and power, he never showed any trace of that kind of love of wisdom at all. He was at his best in making a bad man look base; he was very happy in making a good man look foolish and a dreamer. But in laying bare the secrets of power and grandeur of character he was not great at all. He hardly even attempted it.
With Mr. Lilly's lecture on George Eliot we have much less fault to find, except that we object to its title. He says what is both true and finely expressed of the tragic character of her greater stories. But when he speaks of her as "the humourist as poet," we think he misses the mark. In her verse, as Mr. Lilly admits, she missed being a poet. She aimed at Milton's style, and just missed it. She caught the grandiose style, but not the grand style. Bat in her stories she often reached true grandeur, yet hardly ever the grandeur of the poet. She moralised too much, and her scientific pedantry stood in her way. She had not the con- centration of the higher poetic genius. Even in the beautiful idyllic passage quoted by Mr. Lilly, the pedantry breaks out once. Thackeray was more of a poet than George Eliot. George Eliot was more of a philosopher than Thackeray. There is more poetry in the passage in which Lady Castle wood welcomes back Esmond from the war, after meeting him in the cathedral, than in all George Eliot's tales. There is more true philosophy in Middlemarch than in all Thackeray's. But Mr. Lilly misses his spring when he lays so little stress on the hnmourist in either of them. Both were far greater as humourists than they were either as philosopher or as poet.
And in the lecture on Carlyle, Mr. Lilly fails because he almost ignores the humourist altogether. Indeed that lecture seems to ns positively dull, which is not often Mr. Lilly's fault. The exaggeration in Carlyle was greatly due to his rich humour. What Mr. Lilly calls his prophecy, was very much spoiled by that exaggeration. Powerful as was Carlyle's
imagination,—his French Revolution was perhaps the greatest literary achievement of this century,—he loved to paint in lurid colours, and was a great deal too lurid for the wiser kind of English prophecy. The French Revolution wanted a lurid painter of its great passions, and it obtained it in Carlyle. But the failure of English parliamentary methods to obtain good results, did not need a lurid painter, and his Latter- Day Pamphlets were almost as ludicrous as they were vivid and, in a sense, humorous. Carlyle was always scolding us for not finding out heaven-born rulers, but he never contributed a single valuable hint towards the best mode of making that most desirable and valuable dis- covery, and hence the screaming of his Latter-Day Pamphlets was very bad prophecy, though often enough very good fun. In the lecture on Carlyle Mr. Lilly forgets the humourist altogether. He both exaggerates Carlyle's merits and fails to see the best excuse for his extravagance and his shortcomings as a prophet. Mr. Lilly cannot laugh at Carlyle, though it is one of Carlyle's great merits that he could often laugh heartily at himself.
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