which he brought about in contemporary manners, the meannesses which he sneered down, the follies which he laughed away. It is only where he was concerned with principles, with everlasting springs of action, that he will continue to have more than a historic interest. It is his weakness, his conspicuous weakness, that he is too preoccupied with accidents, with mere matters of detail, to the neglect of principles. Still he does, at times, deal with his subject in a broad, human fashion, and he does this more often than perhaps he gets credit for.

Where he is bound to submit to us a somewhat extended view of life, as in most of his novels, it becomes plain that he has a genuine seriousness of purpose beyond the scope of the successful satirist. He is not confined, as sometimes he seems to be, to the regions where the question of hiring plate for a dinner-party becomes a part of ethics; he is the most trenchant adversary of the materialization of the English aristocracy and middle classes in the early years of the Victorian era. But he is much more than that. He has penetrated deeply into some of the eternal characters of human nature.

Thackeray's method and Thackeray's view of life were based on an instinct of revolt against the view of life and the method of describing it, which aims at its glorification at the expense of truth; which appeals, not to a sense of reality, but to unintelligent curiosity and to a vanity that finds a gratification in seeing human nature outrageously flattered; the method and the views which at that time had Bulwer Lytton for their most popular exponent. As he had attacked affectation and insincerity in slight affairs of etiquette and conduct, he attacked insincerity and affectation here too. He went on to examine the relations of human life, to try men's actions and motives, at first only with the object of showing how grossly they wre being misrepresented, but soon with a much more serious design. The us ion for truth entered into him, the secr to discover and show it in its accom without the dazzling, many

colored hues which imagination casts upon it. He felt that the pompous and tinsel disguise which his contemporaries loved was scarcely falser than the beauty lent by the fancy of poets or the enthusiasm of ardent souls to a very commonplace and prosaic world. Either fantasy, or convention, or fondness for tawdry ornament had perpetually interfered with accurate representation. He was the prophet and apostle of realism, and his realism -very real and very intense for all its decent restraint and well-bred utterance-was a spiritual realism. He explored the dark places of the soul, and described passions and crimes while they slept, still only germinant and potential, in the heart and the intellect. It was thus that he could introduce his realism unreproved, a concealed innovator, and for this purpose the men and women whom he knew best, the men and women of the upper classes, were the most appropriate material.

But it is in his treatment of virtue, in contact with characters for whom he has an esteem, that Thackeray's analysis is most searching and most edifying. In "Vanity Fair," what his first audience felt most vividly was his exposure of the depraved constitution of society; the sketches of that noble profligate, the Marquis of Steyne, of Becky, that successful adventuress, of that distinguished soldier, General Tufto. It was the most scathing satire on a hopelessly materialized aristocracy, and as such it had its immediate effect. But what to-day retains any power of edification, of more than amusement, or has anything more than a historic interest, is the penetration into the weaknesses of the human heart at its best and purest, the flaws of parental love, of wifely affection, the selfishness incident to the joy of childhood, the inseparable limitations of generosity and friendship. Amelia and Dobbin and the old Sedleys and Helen Pendennis seem dull personages to many readers; they have not that quality which we call dramatic, the quality which appeals to the senses and the powers of the intellect most nearly

allied to them. But how edifying! how instructive! how they open the secret workings of the heart!

Thackeray does not write as a cynic, but as a lover of sober truth, else his subtle analysis would have no value but its cleverness, his power of edification would be gone. He has not an indictment framed against the human race as he had against the society of his time; but he conceived of the dignity of man in another than the current fashion. He did not believe that human nature was the better for being invested with false attributes, that man was any nobler for being looked at through colored glasses. He was prepared to grant that love is a beautiful thing, but he did not think it a blasphemous discovery that love seldom comes in the sudden, victorious manner which was universally held to be proper to it, but is heralded by false alarms, preceded by pretenders who usurp its name, and often dashed and tarnished by cold, prudential considerations. A mother's affection is even more beautiful, but it can be, for all that, unwise, irrational, unjust. Children are the world's delight, the especial favorites of heaven, yet experience teaches us that they can be selfish, callous to kindness, exacting, untruthful.

What is the end of this curious considering? It has for its end the discovery of something true, stable, unassailable, something in human nature to rest upon with conviction. Thackeray could not rest upon a transfigured humanity; he was too clearsighted, and of too solid a temperament to assent to an imaginative re-construction of the world. He labored with his unceasing rigid realism to strip off the delusive externals which were so satisfactory to most of his fellows, that he might be able to rest at last, assured that he was not placing his confidence in a painted virtue.

His natural bent was to seek the satisfaction of his nature less in the intellectual than in the moral and emotional. He had no fondness for abstract thinking, and was not in sympathy with what was being

achieved in that direction in his own time. He distrusted thought which was elevated above the sphere of action, seeing clearly that lofty thinking often went with very ignoble deeds. His life had been such, it may safely be said that his temperament, in any case, was such, that he could not live in imagination, protected against the jars and pains of life. Religion would have been his natural refuge, and he felt himself alternately drawn to it by instinct and repelled by the clear vision which told him that it was not the right harbor for such a mind as his.

The unrest produced by this alternate attraction and repulsion deepened his natural melancholy. It gave him a feeling of being at war with his better self. and he has expressed something of his agitation in the picture which he gives of Arthur Pendennis's attitude, Pendennis being to a considerable degree a revelation of his own mind.

To what does this easy and sceptical life lead a man?

Friend Arthur was a Sadducee, and the Baptist might be in the wilderness shouting to the poor, who were listening with all their might and faith to the preacher's awful accents and denunciations of wrath or woe or salvation; and our friend the Sadducee would turn his sleek mule with a shrug and a smile from the crowd, and go home to the shade of his terrace, and muse over preacher and audience, and turn to his roll of Plato, or his pleasant Greek song-book babbling of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains and love. To what, we say, does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfishness, so to speak-the more shameful because it is so goodhumored and conscienceless and serene. Conscience! What is conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public o private faith? Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If, seeing and acknowledging the lies of the world, Arthur, as see them you can with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest further than a laugh; if, plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the whole wretched world to pass groaning you unmoved: if the fight for the trut'w. taking place, and all men of honor a w the ground armed on the one side, other, and you alone are to lie.

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balcony and smoke your pipe out of the noise and the danger, you had better have died, or never have been at all, than such a sensual coward.

The case is brutally overstated, and Thackeray must have been conscious that it was so. This was only a momentary outburst. Still, he felt a continual uneasiness at having to stand aloof from all the causes into which other men could throw their entire souls. He regretted that he could not fight for a half-truth as if it were the whole, and blamed himself for his inability. Religion, too, only expressed

half the truth of man's life for him. What then remained to which he could attach himself? There remained a certain fundamental goodness in man in which he could believe and which he regarded as the clue to conduct. Not to pitch one's standard too high, not to live out of the world in a sphere of abstract thought or imagination or mysticism, not to put one's trust in lofty qualities, which have their rise perhaps only in imagination or ignorance, to the neglect of plain, hard matters of fact and duty, but to recognize, believe in, and cultivate the virtues of humility and kindness-that was the secret which Thackeray believed would carry one safely through the world. He did not flatter himself that it was a newly-discovered secret, or promising to bear very wide results, or even capable of affording a vividly triumphant issue to those who practised it, but he believed that it was true when tested, and safe when put into effect.

It is in those novels which reflect most directly on life that one naturally looks to find Thackeray, but it is in one devoted to dramatic presentment that the crown and proof of his system is to be found. The discovery and the application of it is elsewhere, in the novels which will be held to represent Thackeray most precisely, "Vanity Fair," "Pendennis." "The Newcomes;" but it is Henry Esmond who is introduced to us as actually holding Thackeray's secret. Esmond is endowed with all the accomplishments of a man, and holds

them so lightly that they seem to make no difference to him. He moves in the society of the greatest men of a great age, and all he finds worth recording is that Dr. Swift was insolent and St. John a drunkard. He is more clear-sighted than any man of his time, and he attempts to give his country a bad king, in defiance of his principles and to the ruin of his hopes. Yet he is the best man Thackeray has given us; perhaps the best man we have known. And the

springs of his goodness are that he is humble before what he can understand of goodness, and true to the motions of his heart in gratitude and affection.

Perhaps Thackeray's analysis was more important than his results. Perhaps his secret was neither new nor very effectual. But he first taught men to know their hearts, where they had only seen their actions. He held the mirror up to nature in a way that was very surprising to it, and while his caricatures of society have lost their first interest, his delineation of the motions of the heart can never lose its significance. Indeed it may yet take on a new and surprising significance as literature strays farther and farther from the path which he indicated for it. into the labyrinth of mental pathology.

From The Saturday Review.

THE DEMOCRATIC CULTURE.1 "The Land of the Dollar" is indisputably the most interesting and suggestive book that has been published this year; it is the portrait of a culture done with astonishing vigor and vividness, and one could easily and agreeably fill one's review with an arrangement of adjectives in its honor. There have been versions of America since the war, but none of enduring distinction; so many people come back nearly incoherent with indignation; the manners of the hotel clerks are dreadful, the continent is quite unfit for a

1 The Land of the Dollar. By G. W. Steevens. London: Blackwood & Sons, 1897.

gentleman, and so forth. We have witnessed Chicago confronted with the Christian era and unabashed. But this book is neither the bitter cry of outraged gentility nor polemical piety. It is a portrait, sympathetically done, as every portrait should be, of what is, after all, the most interesting people in the world. And it is done with a skilful development of effect, with an insight and a sense of unity, that make it, albeit nominally a reprint of thirtythree letters to a London halfpenny paper, a single and complete work of art.

Partly its unity is the outcome of accident, though Mr. Stevens has certainly made an artist's use of the opportunity luck gave him. The problem was to get New York and Niagara, the Chinaman and Wisconsin, Chicago and Nevada, the nigger and the "poor white," into the picture, and yet to avoid the miscellaneous effect of a pawnbroker's window. It has beaten everybody else; it would probably have beaten Mr. Steevens had it not been for the coincidence of the most significant of all presidential elections since Lincoln's. It was a singularly intimate issue in suspense, not so much a discussion as a revelation of idiosyncrasy; the perfect pose. It turned on the question of currency, it touched the pocket of every man of a people essentially competitive and commercial from Sandy Hook to the Golden Gates; the East talked of the West, and the city of the country; they brought their business relations into the streets, they put them on banners, they plastered them on walls, for Mr. Steevens to see. But a journalist merely would have seen the election and nothing more, would have made his book the election and nothing but the election-America taken for granted, everything of any enduring importance taken for granted, a trash of arguments that pass, facts that do not matter and figures that do not signify. Mr. Steevens, on the other hand, makes it America, engaged in electing a president.

For his technique he may be indebted -as any sane man would probably take

care to be indebted-to Heine's description of London. And the journalistic beginnings of the book necessitated a division of the matter into numerous concise sections, each with its effective impression. But the impressions are arranged with remarkable skill-they broaden steadily. "The Voyage" is entertainingly trivial-with its anecdote of the American who wanted to know what the visitor thought of America while it was still a pale blue line on the horizon-and "The Dollar" is a gleam of the common humorist, And from that we work up towards the fortified mines of Leadville, a brilliant piece of description, and the dawn after the election in New York:

"Gunpowder flared, bands crashed, bugles rang; overhead the late trains puffed and clattered, and above all rang volleys of cheers and the interminable discordant blare of tin trumpets, all blended in a furious angle of jubilation. The whole place was mad, demoniac, inspired with a divine frenzy. . . . And through the crowd came pushing a man with matted hair crying the morning papers."

Of all these descriptive vignettes. I like least those two that deal chiefly with scenery, for people are the texture of the book. If nature, if the continental mass of America is to come in, then the whole design is wrong. After all, the entire American civilization, in relation to its scenery, is very like a penny bottle of ink spilt over a half-acre lawn. Niagara is redeemed by the smoking chimney, but the description of the Colorado cañons is simply irrelevance. They took Mr. Steevens in a weak place, for being a highly educated Englishman he was naturally weak in his geography; he did not know that every Board School Reader, every elementary text-book of geology in this country, reeks with these same cañons. But he drops his modesty; he becomes a discoverer. "Nobody," he says, "seems to have thought it worth while to advertise" these pyrochomatic solitudes. Well-it is pleasant to catch one's abler contemporaries tripping. And it is only a lapse of two pages after all.

The quality that makes this book so particularly rich in suggestion, so stimulating to the imagination, is the acute sense of causation that pervades it. A great majority of people seem to see things only as things that are: their vision of affairs is static. They seem to think that mountains keep always the same height, rivers the same length, nations the same character. The Americans to them are a remarkable people, infested with Irish, whose cities are painfully uniform, and who spell offensively and put your railway check in your hatband whether you like it or no. To a minority, perhaps a considerable minority, of people nowadays, however, things are seen as things that becometheir vision of things is dramatic. That way of looking at things may be innate in some cases; in many it is the result of a study of, and comprehension of, the evolutionary idea. Now Mr. Steevens has the latter quality of mind to a contagious degree. The reader will be dull indeed who does not catch something of his fine sense of implication. You find that the iron-bound trunk at Euston Station, the ticket stuck into your hatband by a familiar-mannered conductor, the secret whiskey-bar in a scullery at Portland, are significant things, straws perhaps, but showing all the better for that the trend of the Democratic idea.

Over here we pretend to be Democratic. But it is the thinnest pretence in the world. Our country is an aristocracy in decay, an aristocracy with a leaky organization, a land of hyphened names, bogus crests and derived manners, where every one is strenuously putting on Side-toadying, imitating, presuming equality with some person supposed to be "above" him, holding aloof from or imposing charity or patronage upon some other person supposed to be "below" him. I never met an Englishman so pitiful that he did not find a consolation in being "a little superior" to some other Englishman. In this country the wine merchant's wife does not call on the ironmonger's wife, and the ironmonger's wife on the fishmonger's wife, and the fishmonger's wife on the publican's wife whose

license is only for beer; and the mere fact that each husband has a vote no more makes us Democratic in the face of these vulgarities of selectness than the fact that each husband has two legs and a head of hair.

And in return for the right to step on certain "inferiors" your Englishman is always ready to be meanly abject to certain "superiors." The tradesman cultivates an abject manner to his customers, the railway servant has to be not civil but "respectful," and such people as the jobbing workman, the jobbing gardener, in a rural community, literally crawl through existence touching their hats. When we travel there seems an understanding that we are all Ineffable Personages, incognito; if possible we go into a compartment alone to avoid losing caste by contact with our "inferiors," and we "snub" conversational advances and "tip" the guard beyond our means to keep him in his place. Of course, when one writes a book representing a man doing such things, every reviewer in the three kingdoms calls one's character a snob for doing what everybody does. But that is only the refinement of our snobbery. In America they really have purged their minds of much of this sort of thing. The conductor of the train is the man, your equal, who examines your ticket and looks after you while you travel, and you are the man, his equal, who travels under his direction. Both being sane human beings, you cooperate to get the business done with as little bother as possible, and so you hand him your ticket and he very properly whips your check into your hatband so that he can see it at a glance a dozen yards off. Then there is no more fuss for either of you. The formulæ and gestures of respect exacted by English travellers from railway servants are as much resented by the American conductor as they would be over here in a club smoking-room. So they must be in any genuine Democracy.

Certain other things follow as a matter of straightforward deduction from the Democratic theory. There are no