through the body with his irony. When we turn over the pages of his books, which suffer an inevitable loss from the fugitive nature of the themes on which they mainly expatiate, we are astounded at the ceaseless agility of the lucid, restless brain of the man. He is an acrobat, incessantly flinging himself with aerial lightness into some new impossible position. An article a day for twenty-five years what an expenditure of vital force that seems to sum up; and yet to-day, at the age of seventy-eight, the indefatigable brain and body seem as elastic as ever! The fullness of the material in M. Clemenceau's articles has always been a matter of amazement to those who know how much clever journalism is of the kind Francisque Sarcey described when he said, 'You may turn the tap as much as you please; if the cistern is empty, nothing but wind comes out!' But M. Clemenceau seemed always full, and copious as was the output, the reader had always the impression that there was much more behind.

We may regret that while the great politician was chiefly engaged in writing, namely, between 1893 and

The Edinburgh Review

1903, he was obliged by circumstances to expend so much of his experience and his condition upon occasional issues. In turning over his pages, we must not forget that he wrote, not in the calm retirement of a study, but out in the street, in the midst of the battle and heat of the day. His insatiable appetite for action drove him forth into the madding crowd. There has always been something encyclopædic about his passion for knowledge, for practical acquaintance with the actual practice of life. He has cultivated a genius for observation, and his feverish career has been spent in pursuing knowledge, day by day, without giving himself time to arrange the trophies of his pursuit. He has published no systematic scheme of his philosophy, but has left us to gather it as well as we may from his prefaces, and most of all from Le Grand Pan. As an author, we may sum him up as the latest, and in some respects the most vigorous and agile, of the disciples of the Encyclopædists. Like them, through a long and breathless career, he has ceaselessly striven to struggle upward into the light of knowledge.

I

ACCORDING to Mr. G. K. Chesterton, it was somewhere about the 'eighties that the reaction against Dickens set in. Mr. Chesterfield, like other men of genius, is not strong on dates. His own brilliantly written History of England is said to contain but two and they are both wrong! My own recollection is that the reaction was at its height some ten or fifteen years later, and that, at all events, it existed then there can be no question whatever. It was customary among the Smart Set

a

the smart literary set- in those days to sneer at Dickens; to denounce him as crude, catholic, and an apostle of the obvious. As the latter is always the most difficult thing to describe, this was, in effect, a very sincere tribute to his powers. Again, he was referred to as a mere journalist phrase that shows pretty clearly of what the diseased frame of mind that disdained Dickens really consisted. This may have set in about the 'eighties. I can only say that I found the habit of sneering at him in full force, when, in the early 'nineties, I made my début into the literary and Bohemian circles of the time. We were just then much in love with the Decadents and the Decadent movement, and were

curiously persuaded that Ibsen and Bernard Shaw, among others, were of the company also. My impression is borne out by the evidence of a journalist friend of mine, who recently had occasion to read through the files of that invaluable publication, the Review of Reviews, then at its best under that immutable journalist, W. T. Stead. He told me that he scarcely ever chanced on any article on Dickens from periodical or reviews of that time. To-day, it would be difficult to find any periodical that does not contain copious references to the man, and his work as novelist, journalist, and teacher.

But there can be no doubt whatever that there was a period of sharp decline in the popularity of Dickens, when his novels went, not unread by the public, but unnoticed by the litterateurs; when his teachings and characters were regarded as second-best; when it was the thing to sneer at his work and personality. Mr. Shaw, I am informed by one of his friends, almost regretted the passing of the period, because, as he put it, before Dickens became fashionable again, praise of him was a certain indication of genuine literary capacity. To-day, everybody praises Dickens, and the criterion has passed into the Ewigkeit.

Quite seriously, however, it is very important indeed — if it be important to understand the period in which we live to trace briefly the cardinal causes of the decline, and to see how far we have recovered from the miasma that led to it. That task I propose now briefly to essay.

II

Dickens's decline coincided with the rise of the Decadents. I do not say that the one thing caused the other; but I am going to suggest that they were both produced by the same cause. The Decadents themselves were necessarily a passing phase. The best thing that can be said about them is that it was impossible to take them quite seriously. This is particularly true of one man of brilliant genius, who led them and their forces against the conventions and established usages of the society in which they lived; a society that it was not very difficult for them to ridicule or assail very effectively. Oscar Wilde, as we know from De Profundis, cherished as the supreme ambition of his life his acceptance as the dominant literary type of his day. He wanted to be to the later nineteenth century what Byron was to the earlier part; and he succeeded partly on account of his extraordinary wit, and shrewd destructive intellect; partly because of his personal charm and Irish audacity; but chiefly because there was nothing, or little, to oppose him. People were very ready to listen to the amusing shafts and sarcasms of a man who had no beliefs and who said so, because their own beliefs had become devitalized, or non-existent.

All art is quite useless,' he said; and his age caught eagerly at the axiom. which saved them from censure, rebuke, or self-examination, just as securely as they were protected from it in the ser

mons to which they occasionally listened. 'Art for art's sake,' became a great shibboleth, one of the very silliest that ever inflicted itself on clever men. People were to live for these sensations alone; the Esthetic movement, with its flower pots and peacock feathers, became the dominant movement of the time. Morality was something for the Philistines and the lower orders; and the morality of the day was, in truth, silly and lifeless enough. The white lock of Whistler,' says Mr. G. K. Chesterton, 'became the great symbol'the symbol of the intellectual movement of an age, which soon lost the genius of modification. Revolutionary or democratic movements were hailed merely because they threatened to break up the existing synthesis, and it became the correct thing to take nothing seriously. Frequently the devotees of this particular school avowed themselves socialists, because, under that condition of affairs, it would not be necessary to trouble about the poor, and the old-fashioned and tiresome virtue of sympathy would cease to have any valid excuse. The great aim of life was the development at all costs of an intense personality, if necessary, by the violation of all or any moral instincts that the race might possess.

It was inevitable that this view, so divorced from reality and the nature of things, could not long endure. It ended, so far as its principal apostle was concerned, in the tragedy that wrecked his life and sent him to prison. Its chief value for us is that it was a symptom of the prevalent malady into which our times had fallen.

Now the return to Dickens was, I think, much more due to events than to any literary influences. It dates from the year 1900, about which time references to him and to his works begin again to appear in the papers, and

when there was a considerable quickening interest alike in his personality and philosophy, a renaissance that found its expression in the formation of the Dickens Fellowship, stronger and more vigorous to-day than ever. The event which, as I venture to think, broke up the atmosphere that had been suffocating the Dickensian spirit, took place in 1899, when the Boer Republic made war on Great Britain, and entered into a hopeless struggle, destined to cover their arms with glory, ourselves with chagrin, and finally the Dutch farmers with almost complete ascendancy in South Africa. The Boer War was the end of British imperialism; the end of the doctrine of the inevitable, and the first reawakening in England of admiration for manful qualities of resistance against odds, for fortitude under adversity, perhaps, one might say, for heroism. I can remember to this day the fatuous optimism of the stockbrokers who shared Cecil Rhodes's confident belief that the Boers would never fight, and, that if they did, their resistance would soon be overcome. 'It will soon be over,' said one of them to me; and, on my expressing doubts, he laughingly assured me that I was a croaker, and that three months at most would see it through. The two-and-a-half years' stubborn resistance that followed had an immense effect upon the mind of England; for it changed altogether the material and fatalistic view which we were beginning to take of all problems, both human and political. It was, moreover, during those two-and-a-half years that the Dickens renaissance took shape and form.

But it would, I think, be idle to deny that the renaissance was preceded by powerful and original literary activities, which owe their inspiration. almost exclusively to Dickens. During the very period through which we had

been traveling many of the most popular novelists were men bred in his school, who had trained themselves in his methods of observation, following closely his choice of subjects, and breathing the same atmosphere as that in which he moved. Walter Besant, George Gissing, Pett Ridge, Farjeon, Arthur Morrison these men, various and diverse in many ways, owe their inspiration mainly to Dickens; as did that later recruit to literature, the late William de Morgan, one of the most charming and accomplished writers of his period. But they were not primarily responsible for the return of literature to those stimuli to which Dickens made it first respond. For this, we must look largely to two other writers, neither of whom had, by a strange accident, been associated with the Dickens revival; but who, between them, may have been said to have caused it, in so far as the written word was responsible for that epoch-making movement.

III

The first of these was Bernard Shaw. That Dickens influenced him more than any other author, we know, not merely as a matter of reasoning and deduction, but by his own statement. 'Nothing but the stupendous illiteracy of modern criticism,' he says, 'could have missed this fact; could have failed to observe my continual exploitation of Dickens's demonstration that it is possible to combine a mirror-like exactness of character drawing with the wildest extravagances of humorous expression and grotesque situation. I have actually transferred characters of Dickens to my plays-Jaggers, in Great Expectations to You Never Can Tell, for example - with complete success. Lomax in Major Barbara is technically a piece of pure Dickens.' But the public would not, of course, have