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| Charles Dickens Reading The Chimes at 58 Lincoln's Inn Fields on the Second of December, 1844. From a Sketch by Daniel Maclise, R.A. | Title |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay at the Age of Forty-nine—After an Engraving by W. Holl, from a Drawing by George Richmond, A.R.A. | 6 |
| Sir Walter Scott—This Portrait is taken from Chantrey's Bust now at Abbotsford, which, according to Lockhart, "Alone Preserves for Posterity the Expression most fondly Remembered by All who Ever Mingled in his Domestic Circle." | 12 |
| White Horse Inn—From an Illustration to Waverley, Drawn by G. Cattermole and Engraved by E. Finden | 14 |
| Thomas Carlyle—From the World-Famed Masterpiece of Portraiture by James McNeill Whistler | 20 |
| Archhouse, Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, the Birthplace of Thomas Carlyle—From a Photograph in the Possession of Alexander Carlyle, M.A., on which Carlyle has Written a Memorandum to Show in which Room he was Born | 26 |
| Thomas De Quincey—From an old Engraving | 30 |
| De Quincey with Two Daughters and Grandchild—From a Chalk Drawing by James Archer, R.S.A., made in 1855 | 34 |
| Charles Lamb—From the Portrait by William Hazlitt | 38 |
| Mary and Charles Lamb—From the Painting by F.S. Cary made in 1834 | 44 |
| Charles Dickens at the Age of Twenty-seven—From the Portrait by Daniel Maclise, R.A. | 48 |
| Original Pickwick Cover Issued in 1837 with Dickens' Autograph—Most of Dickens' Novels were Issued in Shilling Installments before being Published in the Complete Volume | 52 |
| William Makepeace Thackeray—From a Drawing by Samuel Laurence, Engraved by J.C. Armytage | 56 |
| Title-page to Vanity Fair, Drawn by Thackeray, who Furnished the Illustrations for Many of his Earlier Editions | 58 |
| William Makepeace Thackeray—A Caricature Drawn by Himself | 62 |
| Charlotte Brontë—From the Exquisitely Sympathetic Crayon Portrait by George Richmond, R.A., now in the National Portrait Gallery of London | 66 |
| Mrs. Gaskell—From the Portrait by George Richmond, R.A. Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Brontë is one of the Finest Biographies in the Language | 72 |
| George Eliot in 1864—From the Etching by Mr. Paul Rajon—Drawn by Mr. Frederick Burton—From the Frontispiece to the First Edition of George Eliot's Life, by Her Husband, J.W. Cross | 76 |
| George Eliot's Birthplace, South Farm, Arbury, Nuneaton | 80 |
| John Ruskin—From a Photograph Taken on July 20, 1882, by Messrs. Elliott & Fry | 88 |
| John Ruskin—From the Semi-Romantic Portrait by Sir John E. Millais | 92 |
| Lord Alfred Tennyson—After an Engraving by G.J. Stodart From a Photograph by J. Mayall | 96 |
| Facsimile of Tennyson's Original Manuscript of Crossing the Bar. (Copyright by the Macmillan Company) | 100 |
| Robert Browning—From a Photograph by Hollyer after the Portrait by G.F. Watts, R.A. | 106 |
| Elizabeth Barrett Browning—After the Portrait by Field Talfourd | 110 |
| George Meredith with His Daughter and Grandchildren—From a Photograph Taken Shortly Before His Death | 118 |
| Flint Cottage, Boxhill, the Home of George Meredith—His Writing was done in a Small Swiss Chalet in the Garden | 120 |
| Robert Louis Stevenson—The Author's Intimate Associates Pronounce this Photograph a Perfect Presentation of His Most Typical Expression | 126 |
| Stevenson's Home at Valima, Samoa, Looking Toward Vaea | 128 |
| Thomas Hardy—A Portrait Which Brings Out Strikingly the Man of Creative Power, the Artist, the Philosopher and the Poet | 132 |
| Rudyard Kipling—A Striking Likeness of the Author in a Characteristic Pose | 140 |
| Rudyard Kipling—From a Cartoon by W. Nicholson | 144 |
My aim in this little book has been to give short sketches and estimates of the greatest modern English writers from Macaulay to Stevenson and Kipling. Omissions there are, but my effort has been to give the most characteristic writers a place and to try to stimulate the reader's interest in the man behind the book as well as in the best works of each author. Too much space is devoted in most literary criticism to the bare facts of biography and the details of essays or novels or histories written by authors. My plan has been to arouse interest both in the men and their books so that any reader of this volume may be stimulated to extend his knowledge of the modern English classics.
These chapters include the greatest English writers during the last one hundred and fifty years and they have been prepared mainly for those who have no thorough knowledge of modern English books or authors. They are of limited scope so that few quotations have been possible. But they have been written with an eager desire to help those who care to know the best works of modern English authors. In the same spirit the most appropriate illustrations have been secured and a helpful bibliography has been added. If this book helps readers to secure one lasting friend among these authors it will have done good missionary work; for to make the books of one man or woman of genius a part of our mental possessions is to be set on the broad highway to literary culture.
To Get the Spiritual Essence of a Great Book One Must Study the Man Who Wrote It—The Man Is the Best Epitome His Message.
In this volume as in its predecessor, "Comfort Found in Good Old Books," my aim has been to enforce the theory that behind every great book is a man, greater than the best book that he ever wrote. This strong spiritual quality which every one of the great authors puts into his best books is what we should strive to secure when we read these great classics. Unless we get this spiritual part we miss the essence of the book.
Hence it has been my aim in this volume to make clear what manner of men wrote these books which serve as the landmarks of modern English literature.
The scope of this book is limited, but from Macaulay to Kipling the effort has been to include those representative modern English authors who both in prose and verse best reflect the spiritual tendencies of their age. Whether essayists, historians, novelists or poets each of these writers has furnished something distinctive; each has caught some salient feature of his age and fixed it for all time in the amber of his thought.
And what a bead-roll is this of great English worthies: Macaulay, the most brilliant and learned of all English essayists; Scott, the finest story-teller of his own or any other age; Carlyle, the inspirer of ambitious youth; De Quincey, the greatest artist in style, whose words are as music to the sensitive ear; Dickens, the master painter of sorrows and joys of the common people; Thackeray, the best interpreter of human life and character; Charlotte Brontë, the brooding Celtic genius who laid bare the hearts of women; George Eliot, the greatest artist of her sex in mastery of human emotion; Ruskin, the first to teach the common people appreciation of art and architecture; Tennyson, the melodious singer who voiced the highest aspiration of his time; Browning, the greatest dramatic poet since Shakespeare; Charles Lamb, one of the tenderest of essayists; George Meredith, the most brilliant and suggestive novelist of the Victorian age; Stevenson, the best beloved and most artistic story-teller of his day; Hardy, the master painter of tragedies of rural life; and Kipling, the interpreter of Anglo-Indian life, the singer of the new age of science and discovery, the laureate of the gospel of blood and iron.
The work of each of these men and women who make up the splendid roll of English immortals varies in quality, in style, in capacity to touch the heart and inspire the thought of the reader of to-day. But great as are their differences, all meet on the common ground of a warm-hearted, sympathetic humanity that knows no distinctions of race or creed, no limitations of time or place. The splendid sermons on the gospel of work that Carlyle preached after long wrestlings of the spirit are as full of inspiration to the youth of to-day as they were when they came out from the mind of the man who actually lived the laborious life that he commended; the little lay discourses that may be found scattered through Thackeray's novels and essays are born of agony of spirit, and it is their spiritual power which keeps them fresh and full of inspiration in this age of doubt and materialism.
And so we might go down through the whole list. Each of these great writers had his Gethsemane, from which he emerged with the power of moving the hearts of men. So when we read that most beautiful essay of Lamb's on "Dream Children," our hearts ache for the lonely man who sacrificed the best things in life for the sake of the sister whom he loved better than his own happiness. And when we read Thackeray's eloquent words on family love we know that he wrote in his heart's blood, for the dearest woman in the world to him was lost forever in this world, when the light of her reason was clouded.
And so I have tried in these essays to show how bitter waters of sorrow have strengthened the spirit of all these masters of English thought and style, until they have poured out their hearts in eloquent words that can never die. Far across the gulf of years their sonorous voices reach our ears. Pregnant are they with the passionate earnestness of these men and women of genius, these bearers of the torch of spiritual inspiration passed from hand to hand down the centuries.
When our souls are moved by some great bereavement then the words of these inspired writers soothe our griefs. When we are beaten down in the dust of conflict they come with the refreshment of water from springs in the everlasting hills. When we are bitter over great losses or sore over hope deferred or stricken because friends have proved faithless, then they soften our hearts and give us courage to take up once more the battle of life.
The Foremost Essayist in English Literature—His Style and Learning Have Made Macaulay a Favorite For Over a Half Century.
Macaulay belonged to the nineteenth century, as he was born in 1800, but in his cast of mind, in his literary tastes and in his intense partisanship he belonged to the century that includes Swift, Johnson and Goldsmith. He stands alone among famous English authors by reason of his prodigious memory, his wide reading, his oratorical style and his singular ascendancy over the minds of young students. The only writers of modern times who can be classed with him as great personal forces in the development of young minds are Carlyle and Emerson, and of the three Macaulay must be given first place because of a certain dynamic quality in the man and his style which forces conviction on the mind of the immature reader. The same thing to a less extent is true of Carlyle, who suffers in his influence as one grows older. Emerson is in a class by himself. His appeal is that of pure reason and of high enthusiasm—an appeal that never loses its force with those who love the intellectual life.
Many famous men have testified to the mental stimulus which they received from Macaulay's essays. Upon these essays, contributed to the Edinburgh Review in its prime, Macaulay lavished all the resources of his vast scholarship, his discursive reading in the ancient and modern classics, his immense enthusiasm and his strong desire to prove his case. He was a great advocate before he was a great writer, and he never loses sight of the jury of his readers. He blackens the shadows and heightens the lights in order to make heroes out of Clive and Warren Hastings; he hammers Boswell and Boswell's editor, Croker, over the sacred head of old Dr. Johnson; he lampoons every eminent Tory, as he idealizes every prominent Whig in English political history. Macaulay's style is declamatory; he wrote as though he were to deliver his essays from the rostrum; he abounds in antithesis; he works up your interest in the course of a long paragraph until he reaches his smashing climax, in which he fixes indelibly in your mind the impression which he desires to create. It is all like a great piece of legerdemain; your eyes cannot follow the processes, but your mind is amazed and then convinced by the triumphant proof of the conjuror's skill.
Macaulay had one of the most successful of lives. His early advantages were ample. He had a memory which made everything he read his own, ready to be drawn upon at a moment's notice. He was famous as an author at the early age of twenty-five; he was already a distinguished Parliamentary orator at thirty; at thirty-three he had gained a place in the East Indian Council. He never married, but he had an ideal domestic life in the home of his sister, and one of his nephews, George Otto Trevelyan, wrote his biography, one of the best in the language, which reveals the sweetness of nature that lay under the hard surface of Macaulay's character. He made a fortune out of his books, and in ten years' service in India he gained another fortune, with the leisure for wide reading, which he utilized in writing his history of England. He died at the height of his fame, before his great mental powers had shown any sign of decay. Take it all in all, his was a happy life, brimful of work and enjoyment.
Thomas Babington Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, the son of a wealthy merchant who was active in securing the abolition of the slave trade. His precocity is almost beyond belief. He read at three years of age, gave signs of his marvelous memory at four, and when only eight years old wrote a theological discourse. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at eighteen, but his aversion to mathematics cost him college honors. He showed at Cambridge great fondness for Latin declamation and for poetry. At twenty-four he became a fellow of Trinity. He studied law, but did not practice. Literature and politics absorbed his attention. At twenty-five he made his first hit with his essay on Milton in the Edinburgh Review.
This was followed in rapid succession by the series of essays on which his fame mainly rests. In 1830 he was elected to Parliament, and in the following year he established his reputation as an orator by a great speech on the reform bill. But financial reverses came when he lost the lucrative post of Commissioner in Bankruptcy and his fellowship at Trinity lapsed. To gain an income he accepted the position of secretary of the Board of Control of Indian Affairs, and soon after was offered a seat in the Supreme Council of India at Calcutta at $50,000 a year. He lived in India four years, and it was mainly in these years that he did the reading which afterward bore fruit in his History of England.
Thomas Babington Macaulay at the Age of Forty-nine—After an Engraving by W. Holl, from a Drawing by George Richmond, A.R.A.ToList
At thirty-nine Macaulay began his History of England, which continued to absorb most of his time for the next twenty years. While he was working on his history he published Lays of Ancient Rome, that had a success scarcely inferior to that of Scott's Lady of the Lake or Byron's Childe Harold. He also published his essays, which had a remarkable sale. His history, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1848, scored a success that astounded all the critics. When the third volume appeared in 1855, no less than twenty-six thousand, five hundred copies were sold in ten weeks, which broke all records of that day. Macaulay received royalties of over $150,000 on history, a sum which would have been trebled had he secured payment on editions issued in the United States, where his works were more popular than in his own country. His last years were crowded with honors. He accepted a peerage two years before his death. When the end came he was given a public funeral and a place in Westminster Abbey.
With Carlyle, Macaulay shares the honor of being the greatest of English essayists. While he cannot compare with Carlyle in insight into character and in splendor of imagination, he appeals to the wider audience because of his attractive style, his wealth of ornament and illustration and his great clearness. Carlyle's appeal is mainly to students, but Macaulay appeals to all classes of readers.
Macaulay's style has been imitated by many hands, but no one has ever worked such miracles as he wrought with apparent ease. In the first place, his learning was so much a part of his mind that he drew on its stores without effort. Scarcely a paragraph can be found in all his essays which is not packed with allusions, yet all seem to illustrate his subject so naturally that one never looks upon them as used to display his remarkable knowledge.
Macaulay is a master of all the literary arts. Especially does he love to use antithesis and to make his effects by violent contrasts. Add to this the art of skilful climax, clever alliteration, happy illustration and great narrative power and you have the chief features of Macaulay's style. The reader is carried along on this flood of oratorical style, and so great is the author's descriptive power that one actually beholds the scenes and the personages which he depicts.
Of all his essays Macaulay shows his great powers most conspicuously in those on Milton, Clive, Warren Hastings and Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson. In these he is always the advocate laboring to convince his hearers; always the orator filled with that passion of enthusiasm which makes one accept his words for the time, just as one's mind is unconsciously swayed by the voice of an eloquent speaker. It is this intense earnestness, this fierce desire to convince, joined to this prodigal display of learning, which stamps Macaulay's words on the brain of the receptive reader. Only when in cold blood we analyze his essays do we escape from this literary hypnotism which he exerts upon every reader.
The essays of Macaulay are full of meat and all are worth reading, but, of course, every reader will differ in his estimate of them according to his own tastes and sympathies. It is fine practice to take one of these essays and look up the literary and historical allusions. No more attractive work than this can be set before a reading club. It will give rich returns in knowledge as well as in methods of literary study. Macaulay's History is not read to-day as it was twenty years ago, mainly because historical writing in these days has suffered a great change, due to the growth of religious and political toleration. Macaulay is a partisan and a bigot, but if one can discount much of his bias and bitterness it will be found profitable to read portions of this history. Macaulay's verse is not of a high order, but his Lays are full of poetic fire, and they appeal to a wider audience than more finished verse.
Of all the English writers of the last century Macaulay has preserved the strongest hold on the reading public, and whatever changes time may make in literary fashions, one may rest assured that Macaulay will always retain his grip on readers of English blood.
The Greatest Novelist the World Has Known—He Made History Real and Created Characters That Will Never Die.