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

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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

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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. this readjustment, George Eliot was the most vividly human. Progress was breathlessly rapid during that half-century, but her work is as im¬ portant in its social as in its religious aspect. It marks the transition between a period pre¬ occupied with life and evolution to the next period, in which we are living. The intense social consciousness of her characters is possi¬ ble only in an age which has outlived revolution in history and is facing evolution in thought. George Eliot is the first to show us an enlarged recognition of social responsibility. Her works mark the climax of the social feeling in fiction previous to 1880. They show the social con¬ science fairly awake and waiting its summons. Taken as a whole, fiction from 1840 to 1880 testified to the quickening of interest in social types; to the gradual awakening of social un¬ rest ; to a vague and helpless quest of wider freedom and instinct, new and as yet baffled, hopeful only because of its own intensity. All these various authors knew not just what they were seeking, and to us it seems only an epoch of beginnings. Although we are starting in on anew century, ideals are still being formed, but we seem no nearer the height of idealism than in the eighteenth century; the track which the early poets and novelists started upon, is not yet followed to the end, but appears, at least, to open toward a light that brightens as we proceed. Etiikj.yn A. Smith, Class of ’00. MR. BUTTERFIELD’S SECOND VISIT TO NEW YORK. Mr. Butterfield was leaning back in his seat with a luxurious air, as the train drew rapidly out of the Beantown station towards New York. The only things which marred his perfect tran¬ quillity were first, the idea of changing cars at Patterson and secondly, his great carpet bag of ancient pattern, lie had placed it under the seat and twisted his leg around it, so that his foot rested uncomfortably but squarely upon it, for it had occurred to him that he must take precautions against train robbers, and he was sure that those gentlemen would be particularly anxious to get possession of such a valuable carpet bag. He whispered confidentially to his son, “Your great grandfather Butterfield brought thet there carpet-bag up from Pumpkin Centre fifty years ago, and today there ain’t one cent less in it than ten dollars an’ fifteen cents.” Master Artemus opened his eyes to their fullest extent and whispered back, “Ten-dollars- an’-fifteen cents ! Say, dad, will yer buy me a stick of maple candy when we get to Ne’ York?” Mr. Butterfield indulgently promised that he would invest a cent in one of the New York stores for the desired candy, so Artemus sighed contentedly and turned his attention to the window. lie was a very small boy of nine years and very stout into the bargain. His cheeks were so fat that his eyes were very narrow in consequence. When he had departed from Beantown, his mother had placed squarely on his head a primi¬ tive straw hat with red ribbons, giving him strict injunctions not to remove it on any account, as there would be plenty of people glad to relieve him of the burden, so he had kept careful watch of it ever since. 11 is irintr- ham blouse of old fashioned cut was set off by an alarming tie of green plaid silk. Ilis pants were very roomy, reaching to a distance of about six inches below the knee, and revealing some cheerful looking stockings of red and white. It may be said that Master Artemus had a consciousness of being very much dressed up, as indeed he was. He became intensely interested in what he saw from his window. Once he glanced up quickly and called his father’s attention, “() see that man on that bicycle, ain’t it funny? It’s coasting up hill. It’s something like Simon Piper’s velocipede, aint it, pa?” “That must be a - a - steam tricycle, my son,” answered Mr. Butterfield, “One o’ them things I wuss readin’ about in the ‘Inventors’ Yearly.’ My, but I’d like to have Almiror Jane see thet durned thing whiz up hill.” “Well, anyhow, I’d like ter hev one,” respond-