Reading Memorial High School - Pioneer Yearbook (Reading, MA)

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10 THE PIONEER. thev did our fathers. The novel of to-day has • c rapidly advanced in characterization. Dickens has almost no characters, and although Thacker¬ ay’s touch is much finer, he dissects only the tissue nearer the skin. What will never lose its power is the vividness of their social delineation. Being the first realists to treat the modern world they see it as a whole. Men appear to them in social groups, while the novelist of to-day sees one or two, or a small group of contrasting characters. In all Dickens’ or Thackeray’s books the author seems to see modern society in review and never to look into the sold of man. Although both lived in the same age, one did not see what the other did, and just where Dickens leaves off in the social scale Thackeray begins. Dickens starts in the depths with the criminals and murderers, trades-pe ople, and lower grades of the professional classes. lie makes his environment match the people and does not allow us to forget their occupations. They have no manners, and when they enter the world of propriety Dickens makes them absurd. Thack¬ eray deals with the upper class of so¬ ciety. lie is more at home where trade is never mentioned, and if, perchance, he creates a professional character, it is introduced with a little air of apology. While Dickens’ favorite haunts are the street and inn, Thackeray’s are the drawing room and club. The best factors of his art are the funny way in which he describes life below stairs, and his keen knowl¬ edge of the throng which seeks to elbow its way into the secret enclosure of fashion. Though both lived in the same city with the same scenes to draw from, their worlds hardly touch. One region alone they have in common — literary Bohemia. There are some great social omissions in their work. They do not know the agricultural poor or approach very near the clerical world. Neither is Dickens fully aware of that silent throng, the productive class. His people live by selling, not making. Yet what range of social observation in these two novelists and what marvellous pictures of life they have given us! Through their achievement, modern Eng¬ lish civilization becomes an imaginative reality, arrested, undying. However far apart their worlds they are not uncorrelated, for the world of Thackeray depends upon the existence of Dickens’ world. Dickens’ world is absorbed in the making, Thackeray’s in the spending of l money. In the eighteenth century the hero began to deteriorate. There were few heroes in Victorian fiction. A sorrowful endurance is the lot of Thackeray’s best people; it is for victims, not for fighters, that our sympathy is claimed by Dickens. Thackeray does not admire the way of the world, but he accepts it. Our first Victorian novelists, then, reflect for us a society of a new type; a society in which the dignity of the old order is vanishing, but the ideal of the new has not yet appeared. Their work shows the social surface alone; of the deeper forces stirring below, neither was cognizant. Into this society Carlyle threw his Sartor Resartus. To the generation of 18-10 this work was completely battling. It jeered at the most cherished conventions, religious and social. It was a chaos of seemingly incoherent quotations. For us, however, it is perhaps the noblest utterance of the early romantic move¬ ment in England. It is also the first notable and sincere expression of the attitude which seeks to see modern life with no glamour of delusion. Thus it belongs both to the future and the past, to romanticism and idealism. It found at last those for whom it was written, the children of the future. To the young men of England, it remained for generations a sort of gospel. The spiritual and social elements of the book are so united that separation is im¬ possible, and conventions of society and religion disappear with equal celerity, as we turn its pages. To Carlyle, society is no result of a “social contract,” no casual collection of indi¬ viduals ; it is a band of brothers living in har¬ mony. He places the poor slave and the dandies side by side, with highest art. After three generations the instinct which animated Car¬ lyle’s thought has become almost universal. Yet in some ways he is still distinctly in advance of v r

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THE PIONEER. 9 SOCIAL IDEALS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE. (From Miss Scudder ' s “Social Ideals.”) Nineteenth century literature is the expression of a period quite different from any that lias gone before. The times of political strife in which Swift wrote are over; the stately and simple movement of expansion in the Renas¬ cence lies far in the past; the majestic immobil¬ ity of the feudal system is hard even for the imagination to reproduce. The greatest help to spiritual ideals, the Christian Church, was little in evidence in the early part of the nineteenth century. The spiritual ideals of any people may he read through its imaginative art. The imaginative art of early England was not Christian. There was no inspiration for prose and poetry, nor did either solve its social problems through her aid. Thus the thought of the century began with its foundation slipping away in all directions, leaving it unguided and helpless. Such a pe¬ riod no man could express. Therefore we must know many authors, in order to gain even hints of the social moods, desires and sorrows of modern times. The English poets may well be called the heirs of the Revolution. Their ideal of love and freedom is our national inheritance. From Wordsworth to Byron, the poets were influenced by the political revolution with its swift, dra¬ matic changes from hope to despair. The aim of all their passion was ideal. One notable fact in the poetry of the revolutionary period was the new spirit of seriousness which it showed. These poets were probably the first who believ¬ ed their visions might influence public thought and social work. After preparing the ideal for future generations the voices of the poets were silenced, m 1825. Now comes the Victorian Age and with it a change in the places of poetry and prose. This change was inevitable, .as prose expresses best the social interests and passions of men, while poetry exists on illusions. From the days of Sartor Resartus, English prose assumed a social attitude. Its candor and audacity in rendering larger collective facts account for its new dignity, scope and importance. Novelists and essayists have with one accord been social critics. The novelists give us criticisms through pictures, the essayists through analysis. But if we follow the social aspect of men of letters from 1830 to 1880, we shall see the growth of a new con¬ sciousness which was developed over all Europe. Three men have played the most important part in this social evolution ; Carlyle, the prophet, of peasant origin, indifferent to delicacy and beauty; Ruskin, the dreamer, son of a rich merchant, softly born and bred; Arnold, the scoffer and observer, from the professional class. After these men Avere silenced, a new social force took up their work embracing the first fifty years of Victoria’s reign. First let us glance at the great work of the Victorian novel. At the beginning of the pe¬ riod, fiction turned from donjou and tourneys to the street and club, the England of today. Dickens and Thackeray uncovered and revealed the social pictures and problems of early Victo¬ rian England until, in 1850, their simple pro¬ ductions gave way to novels of protest and arraignment, which in turn are yielding to the novel of constructive suggestion. Our social novels illustrate and supplement social essays. Beneath all this literature, is a civilization with fuller ideas of freedom than ever before known, for. its hope, and a new form of bondage in which millions are held, for its achievement. Literature has confronted a social situation dra¬ matic and difficult, and intelligent England shows appalled surprise. But our writer has to en¬ counter these and leader, critic, opposer of his generation though he be, instinctively utters the age in which he lives, and his works in some degree must lose their charm for the next or the same century. Writers, however, do not see the world alike, as we find by comparing contemporary authors. Take for example Dickens and Thackeray. Dickens’ coarse and heavy melodrama and crude plots have lost vitality. In Thackeray’s works we find a charm, yet they do not delight us as

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THE PIONEER 11 us. For his accents, unlike our own, fall con¬ stantly on the non-material aspects of social need. Being inured to poverty from childhood, hard¬ ships and privation do not seem so great evils to him as the thought of the multitudes spiritually disinherited. While C arlyle brooded in Craigenputtock, cer¬ tain Tories were thinking in lines not wholly dissimilar to his own. Wordsworth and South¬ ey felt the damages arising from the new industrial method hut they faced the future, not the past, and although they could see the evils, they could not interpret the needs of their times. Carlyle first, in sober prose, promoted the free play of consciousness and quickened again the undying soul of social renewal. This consciousness is the starting point of all our social t hought. Writing at the dawn of revo¬ lutionary science, tingling with a new historic sense, Carlyle gathers his social thought into a wide universal conception, lie was the first man in England to proclaim the equal rights of the manufacturing class and the aristocracy. While Carlyle was indicting society with vehement and spasmodic eloquence, Ruskin was writing his beautiful interpretations of beauty. Here was nothing repugnant or obscuro to the ! English public. It was only natural for Ruskin to pass from criticism of fine arts to criticism of society. The first thing to awaken his social imagination was the ugliness of his country, which was overrun with manufacturing towns | and cheap, dreary, crowded buildings. “Bcauti- fill art can only be produced by people who have beautiful things around them and leisure i to look upon them: and unless you provide some elements of beauty for your workmen to be surrounded by, you will find that no elements of beauty can be invented by them.” This love of beauty was what Ruskin tried to awaken in (lie public soul. Arnold thought that modern civilization was absurd because his attention was arrested, not by the industrial or the aesthetic, but by the intellectual conditions of England. lie turned to the great middle class, and that which im¬ pressed him most was its utter imperviousness to ideas. lie tried to convince the people of their stupidity, prejudice and ineptitude, in economic theories, religious life and literary standards. At times the emphasis is upon moral defects, again on intellectual, but of satis¬ faction or exultation in the existing conditions, the Victorian writers show no sign. The modern situation offers no novelty, yet the instinct of our social critics is sound. At present, neither rank nor force is devoid of spiritual significance. The most impressive point of agreement among our authors is their sense of impending change. The men of 1880 believed the revolution was past; those of 1840, of I860 and 1870 believed it was to come. They awaited its coming, yet how to meet it or what was its nature, they were not sure, but that a more searching and subversive social change than the world has ever known was imminent,they all were assured. Again and again they lift their warn¬ ing note, and every five, every ten years, to a rapidly moving civilization comes a cry of pro¬ test and fear. In every book Carlyle wrote, “There must be a new world, if there is to be any woild at all;” and fifty years, afterward, Arnold, the cool and collected, reiterates the thought. In this steady insistence of imminent danger, a call of warning and fear echoing down the decades, we may see something ludicrous or sinister, but we cannot help being awed by the reiteration. We may well ask if the social revolution is nearer in 1900 than in 1840 or 1800. From every country, every class, gather men and women vowed to simplicity of life and social service, aware of the lack of social har¬ mony in our civilization, restless with pain, perplexity, and distress, yet happy as they obey the command of a widened consciousness. Among these latter people was George Eliot, whose books express the restless and inquiring mood of the central Victorian period. Her attitude is that of the thinking people of the time, deeply agitated by ethical problems, trying earnestly to adjust itself to widening horizons. The interests that controlled English thought between 1830 and 1870 were chiefly religious, and although famous writers tried to express