The Joy of Reading

chapter ten

Critics and Seers

As though obedient to Hegel’s metaphysical views, the Napoleonic wars finally ended in 1815, and for a time people began to hope that the years of warfare—an entire generation’s worth, from 1789 to 1815—would somehow or other teach the world about the folly of war, about its inability to solve any problems or answer any questions. They were wrong, but no one could see this at the time, as they couldn’t see it a hundred years later, in 19l5, or in two hundred—that is, today. Or am I wrong? Have we learned the lesson yet?

Nevertheless, as Europe entered the nineteenth century, there was hope, excitement, a sense of newness. In science, for example, although as usual there were many who didn’t want to accept what scientists like Darwin were beginning to learn. In politics, economics, social arrangements, although, again, the new ideas promulgated by men like Marx and J.S. Mill tended to be accepted only by the few, whereas the many were uncomfortable with the changes that were foreseen. There were vocal critics, too, in prose as well as verse, although the verse sometimes sounded like prose and vice versa. And there were novelists like Dickens, great storytellers who were also—intentionally—social critics. This self-consciousness in art was also new.

Finally, two very great poets came on the American scene and responded to the first total war in very different ways and words. They knew the conflict threatened to tear America asunder despite the thrilling words of the man who, more than anyone, wanted to keep it whole. They were poets who also knew that even in peace there is always the threat and, in a way, the promise of death. This is what poets have always known. Do we love them for that? I don’t know, but we need them all the same.

CLAUDE BERNARD

1813–1878

Introduction to the Study of

Experimental Medicine

The life of Claude Bernard was happy. Born in 1813, a poor, shy child, he was able to acquire only a minimal education. Apprenticed to an apothecary, he offended him by spending his free time writing plays. He managed to enter medical school but was far from the best student. However, much to their credit, two eminent French medical scientists recognized the genius of the gruff, ill-tempered young man and furthered his career. By the end of his life Bernard was one of the two most famous scientists in France—the other was Pasteur—and he received the first state funeral ever accorded a French scientist.

A redoubtable experimenter, he made important discoveries concerning the role of the pancreas in digestion, the function of the liver, and the regulation of the blood supply by the vasomotor nerves. (He ended up suffering, and dying, from illnesses involving all these organs.) His claim to literary fame was a short book he wrote when he was fifty.

The book was intended to be a major treatise on experimental medicine, but Bernard never wrote much more than the introduction to this work. That does not matter; the Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine is brilliant and interesting. More, in this case, might have turned out to be less.

Research in medicine up to about the sixteenth century had been guided by an understanding of Aristotle’s methods that was perhaps mistaken. Experiments, so-called, were confirmatory only; the real work of the experimenter was supposed to be done in his head, in the logical search for principles from which conclusions could then be deduced. This was the so-called deductive method, and it led nowhere.

The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reversed the procedure. The experimenter must, it was said, have no preconceived notions. He must merely observe nature and from his observations form conclusions about principles. This was the so-called inductive method, and by itself it too led nowhere.

Claude Bernard was the first philosopher of science to recognize that the most effective experimental method of research involves a combination of the two procedures—a combination so subtle and so complex that we are still trying to understand it more than a century later. The experimenter, Bernard said, must have some notion in his head of what he is looking for. But he must also be able to observe freely, unprejudiced by his prior assumptions. He must be prepared to change his mind if necessary and ready, too, to discard all of his hard-won principles if the facts controvert them.

This method is discussed with great clarity in the Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. But the book, despite its small size—only eighty or so pages—also makes other important points, involving the intricate relations between physiology, the study of living organisms, on the one hand, and the sciences of physics and chemistry, the study of inert substances, on the other. This relationship, too, has been the subject of intense study and speculation since Bernard’s death in Paris in 1878.

The most interesting part of Bernard’s Introduction deals with what he called the milieu interieur, for which the phrase “internal environment” is a poor translation. The living organism, Bernard recognized, lives as it were in two different worlds. There is the outside world, the environment per se, which the entire organism confronts and attempts to deal with and control. But there is also an inner world, invisible to the eye, of which the organism itself is often largely unaware. This world is an enormously complicated system of physical, chemical, and biochemical interrelationships, among organs and parts of organs that together make up a whole living thing. The continued peaceful operations of this interior system are essential to the life of a living being; in fact, they almost are its life. Bernard was the first to see this, and again we have been struggling for more than a century to further his ideas and insights.

The Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine is not at all hard to read; no scientist ever possessed a more lucid style than Claude Bernard and his ideas, as I have pointed out, are strikingly modern. But he will always be, or seem to be, “modern” because he got at some very fundamental truths about life and about medicine. And truth is always modern.

CHARLES DARWIN

1809–1882

On the Origin of Species by Means of

Natural Selection

Five out of ten college students, queried about the title of Darwin’s book, respond, “The Origin of the Species.” The implication, apparently, is that Darwin wrote the book about man and his long evolution from the lower animals. Darwin did, it is true, write such a book: it is titled The Descent of Man. It is a fine, but not a famous, book. His very famous book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, dealt with “that mystery of mysteries,” as Darwin called it in his Introduction.

Why was the origin of species such a mystery? Two hundred years ago many of the enlightened, and almost all of the unenlightened, believed that the Biblical account of Creation was strictly true, that God had made the world and all the things in it in six days, then rested on the seventh. In principle there is nothing impossible about this: God could have done it if He had wanted. In practice there were many problems. The geological record was confusing, but it seemed to suggest that the Earth was much older, and had been subjected to much more far-reaching modification, than the Biblical account appeared to allow for. Living things, furthermore, revealed a truly astonishing variety and diversity when you got down to looking at them. There were not hundreds but hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of separate species. In addition, many of them seemed so closely related to each other that it was hard to conceive the purpose of their separate creation by the Divinity.

Finally, man had been able to produce extensive modifications in species by means of his experiments with controlled breeding. Had new species come into being as a result of such experiments? No one was absolutely sure, but it seemed likely. If so, however, species now existed that man and not God had created. What was the truth of this mystery of mysteries? Was there a truth that could be discovered by man?

Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809—the same day as Abraham Lincoln, although in markedly different circumstances. Darwin’s grandfather was the famous physician and naturalist, Erasmus Darwin. His father was a prosperous surgeon. The boy grew up slowly and cared most for collecting things—rocks, butterflies, it didn’t matter what. He tried to study medicine but became ill at his first operation. He then went to Cambridge to prepare for a career as a country parson. By the kind of accident that changes the world, he was nominated by his professor of biology at Cambridge to sail as naturalist on the government experimental ship, H.M.S. Beagle. He left England on December 27, 1831, knowing almost nothing about science; he returned five years later a tough and expert biologist with radical ideas that he was not very willing to make public.

He had contracted more than ideas on his journey, the most famous, perhaps, in the history of science. A brave adventurer, he had saved the ship on one occasion and had also struck out on his own on long treks through the South American wilderness. Once, crossing the Andes, he was attacked by a swarm of vicious mosquitoes. Apparently at that time he contracted Chagas’s disease (a debilitating recurrent fever that weakens the heart), from which he suffered for the rest of his life and from which he died in 1882. The disease could be controlled today; then, it could not even be diagnosed.

Darwin’s journal of his voyage on the Beagle was published, together with three other monographs, during the period from 1839 to 1846. These books gave him a reputation, and his sweetness and charm attracted many friends, both in and outside of science. Meanwhile he was always thinking about the great problem, as he called it. Clearly, as it seemed to him, species underwent modification, most certainly under domestication, less certainly in nature, but by what great mechanism did the changes come about? One day, while reading Thomas Malthus on population, it suddenly occurred to him how, in the struggle for existence—which he had everywhere observed—“favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result would be the formation of a new species. Here then I had at last a theory by which to work.”

It was 1844; he confided his theory to Charles Lyell and William Hooker, two close scientist friends. But he still published nothing on it, although he continued to produce other work. Suddenly, in 1858, he received word that a rival biologist, A.R. Wallace, had written a treatise proposing the very same theory. Darwin asked Lyell and Hooker what to do; they counseled joint publication of some notes he had written earlier together with Wallace’s paper. Darwin then set to work in earnest. The Origin of Species was published late in 1859. Every copy of the first edition was sold on publication day.

No book, perhaps, has ever been so immediately, and so explosively, controversial. Darwin saved both “time and temper” by ignoring the battles and letting men like T.H. Huxley, his friend and intellectual disciple, defend the thesis publicly. Darwin returned to his comfortable retirement at Down and wrote more books about biology and evolution. He knew he was right; why waste time in public broils and turmoil?

His disease wore him down but he managed to write for a few hours each day. The Descent of Man appeared in 1871. Other notable works both preceded and followed it. He had neither time nor energy to devote to poetry, art, and music, which he loved; his mind had become, he wrote in his Autobiography, “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.” In what spare time he had he read light fiction and averred that “a law ought to be passed” against unhappy endings of novels. He was loved by everyone who knew him for his gentleness, and he loved them in return.

His great book is not gentle. It is severe, strong, and rock-hard in its certainties; it never wavers in its steady motion to its conclusions. It is a pleasure to read—more so, probably, than any other famous scientific book. It is so well organized that it requires no major effort to understand it; and it is so well written that one moves through it rapidly, without pain. I say this in full awareness that there are millions of people who simply could not read this book. I can only say they are missing something wonderful.

JOHN STUART MILL

1806–1873

On Liberty

Considerations on Representative

Government

The peculiar circumstances of John Stuart Mill’s early life and education are well known. Born in London in 1806, the son of James Mill, a noted English utilitarian philosopher, John Stuart was from the age of three subjected to a strict course of study in ancient languages, history, mathematics, and philosophy that resulted in his possessing, by the time he was thirteen, the equivalent of an excellent university education. He began with Greek and arithmetic, and by the age of eight had read all of Herodotus, several dialogues of Plato, and much other history. Before he was twelve he had studied Euclid and algebra, the Greek and Latin poets, and had read some English poetry. At twelve he was introduced to Aristotle’s Organon, and he studied logic for the next year or so. From thirteen on he read law, history, and political science. At nineteen he had a nervous breakdown.

All of this is described in painful—yet fascinating—detail in his Autobiography (1873). It doesn’t require reading between the lines to recognize that young Mill was given too much to chew too soon and ended up by being unable to digest it all. But the remarkable thing is not that John Stuart Mill broke under the strain of his dominating father/teacher. It is astonishing that he survived and became one of the most eloquent and persuasive writers in the English language, and the author of some indispensable books.

Having said this, I must immediately confess to a personal bias in favor of John Stuart Mill. I admit that I am mesmerized by the style of Mill; I don’t know any philosopher I enjoy reading more. There is an elegant yet tough sinuousness about his sentences, a compelling inevitability about his line of thought. He can make even platitudes sound as if they were the most novel and earthshaking truths. And probably many of his truths are self-evident, and not in need of the battalions of arguments that he brings forward to support them.

On the other hand, little that John Stuart Mill says about government is—at least in my opinion—not true. And even if his truths are often platitudinous or self-evident, they are the kind of commonsense notions that bear repeating. They are so important that they must never be forgotten—even if the price for not forgetting them is to hear them too often.

Take the short book On Liberty that Mill had been working on for years but that he did not publish until 1859, when he was fifty-three years old. Its object, as Mill himself said, was “to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion.” That principle was that the only justifiable reason for interfering with the life of any adult human being was self-protection—“to prevent harm to others.”

His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise.

In short, as Mill sums up, “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” He may—indeed, in a just society he must—be hindered from harming other people. But if he desires to harm himself he must be allowed to do so, as long as harm to himself does not harm others as well. And anyway, who should be the final judge of harm? We often find it easier to see the “good” for others than for ourselves. We passionately wish them to allow us to make our own mistakes. But so with them, as well.

Mill educes many convincing arguments for his views, which I confess seem true to me. One of the arguments is a social one. That society is better off in every way in which all are free, than in which only some are free. “Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.” And, in the most famous statement of this position Mill ever made:

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

Shortly after Mill suffered his nervous breakdown, in 1825, he met the woman who would be the greatest influence on his life and thought. She was at the time married, but when her husband died, Mill married her. He had known her for twenty years and she had only seven years to live. But those seven years of marriage to Harriet Taylor were the happiest of his life.

Mrs. Taylor taught Mill many things, not least of which was his sense of indignation, which never ceased to increase, at the “subjection of women”—this being the title of one of his most famous books. Indeed, The Subjection of Women (1869) is a remarkable document, written in the heat of a passionate love for a woman whom we would call today a “women’s libber.” An even better book, however, because of its much greater generality, is Considerations on Representative Government (1861), which deals with, and obliterates the arguments in behalf of, all kinds of benevolent despotism, not just that of husbands over their wives.

Representative Government considers in eloquent detail all of the classical problems of government, and particularly of democracy. A glance at the table of contents of the book is in itself instructive. In my view, the most interesting of all the chapters is Chapter 3, “That the ideally best Form of Government is Representative Government.” The chapter opens with a ringing challenge: “It has long …been a common saying, that if a good despot could be ensured, despotic monarchy would be the best form of government. I look upon this as a radical and most pernicious misconception of what good government is; which, until it can be got rid of, will fatally vitiate all our speculations on government.” This doctrine, which is held, more or less without thinking about it, by most of the human race, is indeed both radical and pernicious. There would seem to be all sorts of spurious support of it. For one thing, most “governments” with which we are familiar are benevolent despotisms. The family is not a democracy, at least when the children are little. The children are “ruled” for their own good, as perceived by their parents. A university is not a democracy, although some radical students in the 1960s and later tried to make it one—and in so doing did much harm to higher education. A corporation is not a democracy; the chief executive officer does not decide what to do on the basis of a majority vote of his employees, or even of his stockholders. Nor is a sports team a democracy; the coach tells the team what to do and they had better do it, for his judgment of what is best for the team is, supposedly, better than theirs. In fact, the only government under which we live that is or should be a democracy is the government itself. That, Mill insists, must not be a despotism, no matter how benevolent.

Why not? The answer, finally, is not simple. Despotisms seem more efficient, Mill says, but they really are not. Despotisms seem more able to defend themselves, but they really are not. Despotisms seem more able to ensure the comfort and contentment of their people, but again they really are not. Most important of all is the effect that despotism, even the most perfectly benevolent despotism, has on the individuals that the despot rules. Despotism has the inevitable effect of making its subjects slaves. Free government makes its citizens free. It is incomparably better to be free than to be a slave.

The arguments in favor of freedom, and of participation in the state by all adults, women as well as men, poor as well as rich, are thorough and, I think, completely convincing. Representative Government is thus an important book to read at a time when despots everywhere are presenting their spurious allurements—in Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, and in all the Communist countries. Sometimes it almost seems easier to give in and to say, well, if every other government is a despotism, why should ours not be so too? That way we would not have to work so hard at governing ourselves. But we must never stop working to do that. The reasons for this are many, but the most important of them is expressed by John Stuart Mill, not in Representative Government but at the end of his companion volume, On Liberty:

The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.

KARL MARX

1818–1883

FRIEDRICH ENGELS

1820–1895

The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx was born in Prussia, the son of middle-class parents, in 1818. He studied law at the University of Berlin and there discovered Hegel, whose metaphysical interpretations of history he later attacked violently, but who nevertheless was the single greatest influence on his thought. Marx joined the “Young Hegelians,” or Left Republicans, and, leaving the university without a degree, went to Paris, where he embarked on his lifelong career in political journalism. Driven out of Paris by the police, he went to Brussels where, in 1845, there occurred his fateful meeting with Engels.

Friedrich Engels, also originally a bourgeois, was born in Germany in 1820. Educated in the gymnasium of his native town, he left it to go to work for his father, a cotton manufacturer. Engels spent a number of years after 1849 working, first as an employee, then as a partner and director of a textile firm founded by his father in Manchester, England.

When the two young men met in Brussels in 1845 they recognized each other as kindred spirits. Engels, with his considerable financial resources, helped Marx and his family to survive until Marx’s death in 1883; and Marx, with his enormous intellectual resources, enlivened Engels’s mind for four decades. Their joint productions were many, and after Marx’s death Engels continued, until his own death in 1895, to promote the works, notably Das Kapital, of his angry, difficult friend who, Engels rightly understood, had proposed a vision of the world that was going to change it from top to bottom.

Their first joint venture was the most famous of all. In his 1888 Preface to The Communist Manifesto, Engels explained how the tract had come to be. At a Congress of the Communist League, then a secret society, held in London in 1847, he and Marx had been commissioned to prepare for publication “a complete theoretical and practical party platform.” Drawn up in German in January 1848, it was sent to the printer a few weeks before the French revolution of February 24. Within six months, in that famous Year of the FortyEight, Europe was aflame, and the Manifesto seemed to be forgotten in the midst of events that were even more exciting than its words. But when the revolutionary fervor died down, as it did until it blazed up again in 1870, the Manifesto was rediscovered and began its climb toward worldwide fame. Translations were published in French, English, Danish, Polish, and Italian; in 1872 it was published in a new English translation in New York. “Thus the history of the Manifesto,” Engels wrote in 1888, “reflects to a great extent the history of the modern working class movement; at present it is undoubtedly the most widespread, the most international production of all Socialist literature, the common platform,” he concluded, “acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to California.”

Engels, writing five years after the death of Karl Marx, was nevertheless generous enough in his Preface to concede that “the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus” was owing to Marx. Engels’s statement of this “fundamental proposition” is both accurate and succinct. Here is the single sentence in which Engels summed up the doctrine that has come to be called Marxism:

That proposition is: That in every historical epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, forms the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that, consequently, the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploited and exploiting, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the bourgeoisie—without at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.

How many men and women have died for, and against, that doctrine! And how many more have been exploited and oppressed in its name!

This consequence, at least, was not foreseen by Engels in 1888, nor indeed by the young Marx and Engels as they struck off the burning brands of the Manifesto in the dark January of forty years before. Indeed, it is a most extraordinary political document. Its few pages—even in an edition on cheap paper and large type it hardly runs more than twenty-five—contain some of the swiftest prose ever composed. “A spectre is haunting Europe,” it begins, “—the spectre of Communism.” And so it should, the Manifesto proclaims; all the powers of the old and dying world are right to fear the new ideas. And the work ends with these ringing words:

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!

It does not matter what you think of Communism—whether you are for it or against it, whether you think it is the doctrine of the angels or that of the devils. You cannot claim to be a thinking man or woman in today’s world unless you have read The Communist Manifesto. That seems so obvious as hardly to need stating; but there are nevertheless many places in the United States where you will have to carry the Manifesto under your coat and not take it out in public.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

1821–1867

Flowers of Evil

André Gide, when asked who was the greatest French poet, responded: “Victor Hugo, hélas!” Indeed, it would be a shame if France had no greater poet than Hugo. But in fact it has at least two: La Fontaine and Baudelaire. Unfortunately, La Fontaine only wrote fables; and even for Gide, whose own life was irregular, it was difficult to forgive Baudelaire for the disaster he had made of his life.

Born in Paris in 1821, debaucher, wastrel, drug user, Charles Baudelaire died in 1867 of syphilis and failed in almost everything he tried to do. Except to shock people. He was good at that. When Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) was first published, in 1857, it was not met with the universal praise that Baudelaire had hoped for and may even have expected; instead, Baudelaire and his publisher were prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy and were convicted of a public offense and fined. Six of the poems were banned until 1949, and Baudelaire’s name, for nearly a century after his death, was synonymous with depravity and vice in the mind of a French public that has always been more conservative in its moral judgments than the image of “Gay Paree” would suggest.

Baudelaire suffered terribly. He planned many works but never wrote them; he started others but never finished them; he declared bankruptcy but still could not escape his creditors; when he died, in the arms of his mother, who had always told him sternly that he ought to live another way, only a few of the many invited to his funeral came. Yet his achievement was enormous. This strange, tortured soul was a hard worker and a producer.

If he possessed any fame during his lifetime it was as the translator of the American author, until then unknown in Europe, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe appealed to Baudelaire; they shared a dark view of mankind and the world and a concept of the poet as one who was able to lift the mask from evil and show it in all its putrescent appeal and beauty. Baudelaire wrote the first critical article to appear on Poe in any language other than English and translated many of Poe’s stories into classical French—these translations are still the preferred ones. But Poe was hardly a subject to remake Baudelaire’s reputation.

He was also a fine, although almost completely unappreciated, art critic. He knew Delacroix and Courbet, and what is more understood them and what they were trying to do, which most Frenchmen of his time did not. His review of the Salon of 1846 is said to be a landmark in aesthetic criticism. He continued to write such reviews for twenty years until, paralyzed and oppressed by poverty, he was unable to visit the places where new paintings were being shown.

The most important events of Baudelaire’s life were private ones. When he was twenty he took his only sea voyage, a trip to India, which was aborted when he suddenly declared his intention to return home. But for the rest of his life Baudelaire remembered images of that voyage, and they fill his poems with a strange, beautiful light. All of his voyages were, thenceforth, in his imagination only, but he soared nonetheless, perhaps because his broken body was so resolutely earthbound.

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;

Exilé sur le sol, au milieu des huées,

Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.”

[The poet is like the prince of the clouds,

Who rides the tempest and scorns the hunter. An exile on the ground, amidst boos and insults, His wings of a giant prevent his walking.]

These famous lines, from the poem “The Albatross,” became the marching song of the Symbolist movement, which was already marshaling its forces in France when Baudelaire died. The lines express Baudelaire’s feelings about poetry, and his heartbreak.

Many poems in Flowers of Evil are erotic, shocking, perhaps even depraved, but they are not to be read for that reason. They are also beautiful. And they are symbolic; they have meanings that must be sought out, that are not apparent on the surface. To read Baudelaire, then, is something of an effort—and he is hard to translate. Nevertheless, even a little of the essence of Baudelaire is worth the effort of distilling it.

Why? Because poor Baudelaire, so blind to his own good, saw ours better than we are likely to do ourselves. The world is not just full of fools; everyone knows that (when we do not wish to forget it); it is also full of knaves, and worse than knaves. Theologically speaking, we have to admit that the Devil has never given up and may even be winning. Priests and prophets are not enough to stop him. Poets are needed, too, to point with both astonishment and derision at the cloven foot showing through his shoes and the horns peeking through his hair.

CHARLES DICKENS

1812–1870

A Christmas Carol

Hard Times

The Pickwick Papers

Bleak House

Our Mutual Friend

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1812. His childhood years were spent in Chatham and he returned to the town in 1860 to live in his famous house, Gad’s Hill, until his death. From 1822 to 1860, Dickens lived in London, where he experienced his most desolate moments and his greatest triumphs.

In 1824, his father, an extravagant ne’er-do-well who was the pattern for Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, went to prison for debt. Charles, the eldest son, was withdrawn from school and sent to work. An improvement in the family fortunes made it possible for him to later go back to school, but he never forgot the depression he felt at that time and he wrote about the experience, or similar ones, in several of his books.

Dickens left school for good when he was fifteen to work in a lawyer’s office. He soon became a court shorthand reporter and, later, a parliamentary reporter. He liked journalism, but he found he had contempt for both the legal profession and for Parliament.

In 1833, when he was twenty-one, he began contributing stories and essays to magazines and published a collection of them in 1836 called Sketches by “Boz.” He was then invited to produce a comic serial narrative; seven weeks later the first installment of The Pickwick Papers appeared. Within a few months Pickwick was the rage and Dickens, not yet twenty-five, was the most popular author in England.

Pickwick was written by a very young man who did not yet fully comprehend his powers, and who, furthermore, while it was still running, started another serial, Oliver Twist (1837–39). Indeed, the fecundity of his imagination and the skill of his pen were in these early years incredible. Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39) was begun before Oliver Twist was completed, and it was in turn immediately followed by The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), and that by Barnaby Rudge (1841). At this point Dickens, exhausted, rested for five months, but by 1843 he was publishing again; in that year appeared perhaps the most famous of all his works, A Christmas Carol.

The early phase of Dickens’ career is said to have ended in 1850, with the publication of the autobiographical novel, David Copperfield. It was Dickens’s favorite and it is the favorite of many readers as well.

For years Dickens had been editing a monthly magazine; starting in 1850, at the age of thirty-eight, he began to produce the weekly Household Words, which was succeeded in 1860 by the even more popular All the Year Round. He edited all the copy and wrote a great deal of it, including the first serial publication of his later novels. The ventures were enormously lucrative—and time-consuming.

But the years after 1850 were not happy ones. Dickens had loved his children when they were young but he didn’t like them now that they were grown up. Worse, he was having serious trouble with his wife. From 1868 on, they lived apart; for years before that Dickens had spent most of his time away from home. The world knew little of this at the time; only as recently as 1939 did some of the details come out about his relations with his wife and other women.

Whether or not his personal unhappiness was the cause, the novels that followed Copperfield—Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorritt (1855–57)—were different from what had gone before. They were more carefully plotted, technically more competent and efficient, stylistically more powerful. The most important change was in the balance between light and dark, between happiness and woe.

The latter part of Dickens’s career was spent half in his study and half in the theater. He developed a series of dramatic readings and presented them all over the English-speaking world, and was even more successful at that than at writing books. Not that he stopped doing the latter. A Tale of Two Cities appeared in 1859, Great Expectations in 1860–61, and Our Mutual Friend in 1865. When he died in 1870, at the age of fifty-eight, worn out by the extraordinary efforts that had hardly stopped since his twenty-first year, he was mourned around the world.

I am certain that the way to begin reading—or rereading—Dickens is with A Christmas Carol. It doesn’t matter how many times you may have read it as a child; nor does it matter how often it has been exploited by television and the other media. All these productions do not touch the heart of the book, which is as hard and imperishable as a diamond.

To Ebenezer Scrooge, Christmas is all “humbug.” Believing this does not make Scrooge happy, however; and when the ghost of his partner, Marley, returns to try to redirect his spirit while there is yet time, Scrooge does not long resist. A succession of visions—of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas to Come—makes him a better man, and he ends up filled not only with Christmas happiness but also with a sense that there is more meaning and value to life than he had ever thought.

How utterly familiar is the story, and yet how moving when you read it! A reader would have to struggle not to cry at several points in the narrative and the struggle would be misspent effort. Why not cry? Why not allow the change in Scrooge, and the picture of Bob Cratchit and his little crippled son, Tiny Tim, to enter your heart and change you, too?

Probably the best time to read A Christmas Carol is close to Christmas, but this sovereign remedy for the gloomy cynicism of ordinary life works any time.

After A Christmas Carol I suggest reading Hard Times, one of the shortest of Dickens’s novels and perhaps the most uncompromising. The story has a solid Dickensian plot with no surprises in it. But plot is not the essence of this book. Mainly it is about the deep conflict that Dickens saw in his time—and that we see in ours—between two kinds of lives: a carefree, feeling existence, full of sentiment and imagination; and one based on facts, efficiency, and dogged work. The Gradgrind family tries to live entirely in their heads; Sissy Jupe, the little circus orphan who, untypically, they take in and care for, tries to be like them. But they fail to turn Sissy into an efficient human machine, and she ends up revealing to all of them—amid much pain and anguish—the values of the heart. It is a beautiful and moving story, made not the less effective by Dickens’s savage descriptions of Coketown, his imaginary blighted Midlands town.

Hard Times has fewer than three hundred pages; The Pickwick Papers has nearly eight hundred, which is closer to the Dickensian norm.

The original proposal made to the then young Dickens by his publisher was for a series of sketches about the members of a sporting club—hunters and fishermen. Dickens vetoed the idea; he knew very little about such sports. What he did know a lot about, from his reporter days, was travel. He decided to write a book about a club of traveling gentlemen.

It started unremarkably; the first issue sold only fifty copies and reviews were mixed. As the issues appeared, Samuel Pickwick, fat, wealthy, and good-hearted, the head of the club, emerged as the leading character. But it was not until the fifth issue—Chapter 15—that Dickens was inspired to introduce Sam Weller as Mr. Pickwick’s servant. By the fifteenth number the publishers were selling upward of forty thousand copies, and Dickens was famous.

So was Pickwick, whose name has given us an English adjective; so, even more so, was Sam Weller. There are many intelligent, cunning, loyal servants in literature but none quite like Sam Weller, who is more loyal and loving than any other at the same time that the world is never able to outwit him. Mr. Pickwick flourishes under his care and so does this splendid book.

It is customary to say that The Pickwick Papers is not really a novel—but what is a novel, then, if this is not one? True, it has its false starts, its slow places. On the whole it charges ahead at full speed, entertaining all its readers enormously and touching their hearts.

A Christmas Carol and Hard Times are both short books, and The Pickwick Papers is easy because it demands nothing from readers (except enjoyment). There is a great part of Dickens that remains after those comfortable books have been read and digested. Once captured by this greatest of English novelists, you may decide to read all of Dickens, from Oliver Twist to Great Expectations, from The Old Curiosity Shop to A Tale of Two Cities (you may have read that one in school). But where to start? I suggest Bleak House. It is a very long, very great book. It has all of Dickens’s faults but also all of his virtues; the latter much outweigh the former. And if you decide to read no more, you will have read, in Bleak House, what is probably the quintessential Dickens work.

If our memory of David Copperfield is primarily one of sunshine happiness, then our memory of Bleak House is just the opposite. The prevailing image of the book is fog. It is there from the very first page.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights … Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all around them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

The fog is not only on the outside, it is also within the characters in Bleak House, all of them, in their eyes, their throats, their very brains. It is an extraordinary living thing, this fog.

Bleak House contains scenes of love and happiness, but the most memorable ones are fog-bound and fog-dirtied. Nevertheless, readers are not left with a sense of foggy confusion. Just the opposite. The world may be fog-bound, Dickens is telling us, but good and evil, true and false, right and wrong, are as clear-cut as ever. Indeed, it is almost as if you cannot make those fundamental human judgments if you have not experienced the fogginess that lies at the heart of so much that we think and do.

The moral world, in short, although surrounded by fog, is not foggy in itself. Perhaps our modern prejudice goes just the other way. We are vague about our moral judgments and decisions, certain about our business ones. Dickens would strongly disagree. I think it is worth hearing his side.

Bleak House has a complex, multilevel plot, with a cast of characters and locales that it takes two or more pages merely to list. Half a dozen are very memorable: Mr. Jarndyce and Esther Summerson. Krook and Mrs. Jellyby. Inspector Bucket and Jo, the poor little crossing-sweep. Lady Dedlock and Tom-All-Alone’s, the section of London blighted by the eternal Chancery suit, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, Chancery itself, and the Lord Chancellor. The list need not be extended; that is enough to bring to mind all the tumultuous action and passion of this great, moving book.

Having read these four works of Dickens, you are surely capable of deciding for yourself what, or whether, to read. I must add two recommendations. Do not pass over Little Dorritt because of its rather odd, antique title. I once spent an entire winter month reading that long, rich book. I will never forget the experience. Finally, there is Dickens’s last novel, Our Mutual Friend. It is not well known, at least by me; in fact I had never even heard of it when I saw in the library in Key West a set of videos of a performance by the BBC. Having nothing else to do at the time, I took them out and watched them, expecting to be bored. Just the opposite, I was entranced. Try to find this version. I’m sure you will love it. And then read the book, too. Our Mutual Friend is special not only for Dickens’s typical skills, but also because it has a real love story.

GEORGE ELIOT

1819–1880

Adam Bede

Silas Marner

Middlemarch

Mary Anne Evans was born in 1819 on an estate in Warwickshire (that is, in the Midlands of England) for which her father was the agent. She enjoyed a curious, truncated education. She went away to school, but when her mother died she was called home again to care for her father. A rigidly pious man, he nevertheless permitted her to take lessons in languages and in history and, when she told him she could no longer believe in the tenets of his church, he finally accepted her unbelief if she would agree to attend services. All the time she was watching him with the great intensity of a young woman who would someday be a novelist. But there was no sign of this scrutiny as yet.

Her father died in 1849, when she was thirty, leaving her one hundred pounds a year. Was that enough to live on? she wondered. Perhaps, if she could find a suitable place to live, probably with a family in London, and if she could obtain a small income from translations, religious articles, and essays. She moved to London in 1851 and, after producing some turmoil in several households—her intensity had grown, not decreased—she was introduced to George Henry Lewes, the famous journalist. It was he who helped to create “George Eliot.”

Lewes was the victim of a strange Victorian injustice. He and his wife Agnes had had four sons; but in 1850 a fifth son was born, admittedly the son not of Lewes but of their friend, Thornton Leigh Hunt. Lewes, a generous man, accepted the newborn as his own child. But Agnes did not give up Hunt; she continued to have children by him and Lewes found that, having once condoned the adultery, he could not sue for divorce. In fact, he supported Agnes and her children by Hunt until the end of his life. In the meantime he had fallen in love with Mary Anne Evans, and she with him.

This remarkable pair could not live apart, but they felt they could not live together in England, so in 1854 they went off to Germany, where Lewes struggled to support the family that had abandoned him by his writing. Mary Anne Evans was saddened at being isolated from her own Warwickshire family, who naturally disapproved of her decision to live with Lewes. It was nostalgia, therefore, that first brought her to write fiction. She began to compose sketches of her old home and friends, and the friends of her father. Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) was the first published result of these labors; the second, incomparably better, was Adam Bede (1859). Neither her own name nor that of Lewes was, she felt, acceptable, so she adopted a pseudonym, George Eliot.

Soon George Eliot was famous. Her books, all of which owed much to the encouragement and sympathy of the loving, helpfully critical Lewes, were successes, and the income allowed the lovers, who had lived together from the beginning exactly as man and wife, to return to London in 1863. There they established a salon and George Eliot continued to write books: The Mill on the Floss, Romola, Daniel Deronda. Silas Marner was published in 1861; Middlemarch appeared in parts from 1871 to 1872.

Adam Bede is a simply wonderful book about a wonderfully simple and loving man. Oh, there are many other persons in the book, but Adam, the village carpenter who is wiser than anyone else, is at its center. He suffers in his loves but finally is rewarded by the love of a good woman, wise and caring like himself. You will smile when you turn over the last page and thank me for suggesting the book.

Silas Marner reminds us that there is no justice like poetic justice. In this carefully crafted short novel, all the characters get their just deserts. But the punishments, and especially the rewards, are not simple. Marner, the bitter miser who loses his gold but gains a golden-haired child in its place—it is a mystery he never really understands—is rewarded not so much for things he has done as for having the capacity, not yet realized at the beginning of the book, of loving someone with all his heart. He loves the child in that way, and so his life is blessed. Godfrey Cass, the real father of the child, is condemned to childlessness by his unwillingness to accept his child while he could still do so. He gets most of what he desires in life, for he is a genial, goodhearted man; but not everything, for he is also a moral coward. In fact, the book is, more than anything else, about such carefully drawn moral distinctions.

It is not the less fascinating for that, because it is also a marvelous fairy tale. But it is a fairy tale for grown-ups, not for children; surely it has been a mistake for many years to force Silas Marner on young readers, who could hardly understand it in any but a superficial way. If the book was forced on you, and if you hated it as a result, try reading it again. The novel, which is very short, has the power deeply to affect persons who have had large experience of real life.

Of the half-dozen or ten greatest English novels, on which list Middlemarch certainly belongs, it is probably the least read. It was said by Virginia Woolf to be “one of the few English novels written for grownup people.” That may account for its relative lack of popularity.

There may be other reasons, too. Middlemarch is not a romance, as most novels are, although there are one or two romantics in it who are wonderfully well described. Nor does the novel have a distinct hero. Middlemarch is the name of the small (imaginary) city in which most of the action takes place. It has been accurately said that Middlemarch is the novel’s hero. Certainly the town itself, and all the people in it, are the focus of the author’s attention and concern.

The action of the book takes place during the period just before the passage of the Reform Bill, in 1832—which is to say, just before the social revolution brought about by the railroad had occurred. In pre-railroad days, when transportation was both slow and arduous, people lived as they had for centuries, living and dying within a few miles of one another, acting on and being acted on by one another. No man’s or woman’s life could be adequately understood, George Eliot felt, if it were shorn of interrelationships with all those around him or her. Even more than Middlemarch the town, this complex web of interrelationships is the subject of the novel. And for this reason Middlemarch has often been compared to Tolstoy’s War and Peace which, in the opinion of George Eliot’s admirers, is the only novel deserving to be called greater.

It is true enough that Middlemarch and War and Peace are both big books, complex and full of characters. But despite the fact that Tolstoy read everything written by George Eliot and admired her, I don’t think the two books are very much alike. The scope of War and Peace is ever so much larger; it extends over all of Europe at a crucial moment in its history, and throughout an entire society. Middlemarch’s scope is narrow, although it is still broad by comparison with many other novels; it focuses on a town, examining all the people of that town, and all its occupations and social classes, with an unremitting intensity, but it does not extend to a greater world. That greater world is there, of course, but it is only hinted at.

I am glad George Eliot was content with Middlemarch and was not tempted to shift the scene to London, or to the Continent, where she and Lewes had lived. For Middlemarch, in its ideal existence, is itself a world; as a fictional place, as a metaphor, it contains and comprises all the life that was lived in England in its time. The novel has been called the best account and analysis of English life on the eve of the Reform Bill, but the book deserves even higher praise than that. Middlemarch, more effectively than any novel I know, manages to present the entire worldview of a relatively large and variegated group of persons. In Middlemarch, I feel strongly that simply nothing has been left out. This is the way it must have been in an English Midlands town in 1830. And if I can say that, knowing as I do that life in one town is very like another, and life in one time is very like another—then Middlemarch is as complete an account of the kind of lives that people live as we can find anywhere in fiction.

WALT WHITMAN

1819–1892

Leaves of Grass

The first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the title he gave his collected poems, appeared in 1855 with a picture of the author on the cover, “broad-shouldered, rouge-fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr,” wearing “a slouched hat, for house and street alike.” This was of course a persona, one of the first to be consciously assumed by a poet on the western side of the Atlantic; as was the claim, in one of the poems included in the collection, that he was sounding his “barbaric yawp over the roof of the world.” Yet there was truth in it, as well, for the book by this “insolent unknown,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of Whitman, was truly new, “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom” America had produced. At a time when Stendhal was dedicating The Charterhouse of Parma to “the happy few” and Baudelaire was writing poems for a tiny audience of like-minded aesthetes and précieuses, here was Whitman addressing democratic man en masse. Poetry for everybody, instead of just for literary folk, had indeed to be different. But it was not Americans but rather English and French critics of the culture and society of the Old World who first appreciated Whitman. The first edition of the works of this democratic poet attracted very few democratic readers.

Whitman had been born on Long Island in 1819. It was years before he found and understood himself. He worked as an editor and a printer, writing poems in his infrequent spare time. He was sufficiently encouraged by Emerson’s letter to produce a second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856, with a quote from Emerson on the cover (without Emerson’s permission), and, inside the book, a collection of quotes from reviews, most of which Whitman had written himself. In this edition many of Whitman’s best-known poems began to take their final shape. A third edition appeared in 1860.

Still, Whitman had not found his true voice, which was not, after all, a barbaric yawp but instead a soft yet strong and steady note. This true voice was given to Whitman by the Civil War, which also made Emily Dickinson a poet, although their experiences of the conflict were different. Whitman spent the war in Washington working for the federal government, visiting hospitals and bringing presents to wounded Union and Confederate soldiers alike. The murder of President Lincoln, in 1865, less than a week after the war’s end, helped Whitman to comprehend fully the bitterness and heartbreak of war. He expressed it with new power in “When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d: Memories of President Lincoln,” one of the great American poems, which was included in an edition of Leaves of Grass that appeared late in 1865.

This volume also included a number of small, clear-cut word pictures, like “The noiseless patient spider,” “Once I saw in Louisiana a live oak growing,” and (perhaps best of all) “Come up from the fields father,”—this last a curt, unsentimental account of how word has come to a family that their son has been killed—my throat tightens even as I describe it. Gone was the yawp, gone the uncontrolled self-advertisements, gone the lists of particulars that so offended Emerson in Whitman’s later editions of Leaves of Grass. The war had focused Whitman’s spiritual and emotional strength on a few simple, basic ideas, and the poems he wrote—or rewrote—at this time are among the best ever written by an American.

The taut excellence of his style and subject matter during the period from 1863 to 1868 could not, or at least did not, last. Whitman began to revert in later editions of Leaves of Grass to the diffuse, nervous, even frantic tone that had marked his earliest poems. But Whitman wrote a great deal, and we don’t need to read it all. What remains, after all the bad poems have been weeded out, is still a marvelous harvest of poetry.

Much of “Song of Myself” is fine, although this longest of Whitman poems—more than a hundred pages—also contains tiresome, repetitious matter. “When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d” is wonderful, but “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” which deals with the same subject—death and the need to face it—is even better. Its soft, repetitive (not repetitious), profoundly moving refrain is hypnotic; it reminds one, as it is supposed to do, of the hypnotic effect of the sea at evening, with the waves lapping ceaselessly against the shore; and it brings to mind long, deep thoughts of death and life. Many of the poems from Drum Taps and The Sequel to Drum Taps (included in Leaves of Grass), which were written during or immediately after the Civil War, have the quintessential Whitman quality. You will discover a handful more of great poems when you read Whitman selectively.

EMILY DICKINSON

1830–1886

Selected Poems

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830, the daughter of a prominent lawyer. Her formal education ended after one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary when she returned home, at the age of eighteen, to live permanently in her father’s house. She took two or three short trips to Washington and Boston in the next few years but otherwise she never left Amherst, becoming more and more reclusive as the years passed, although she maintained correspondences with several persons whom she hardly ever saw face to face.

She never married. She probably experienced one or two love affairs; we know little about her inner life. If these love affairs were unhappy it is also probable that the failure was on the man’s side, not on hers. Or she may have decided the man was not up to her standard. Certainly her poetry gives the impression of a woman who very well knew her own mind.

She began writing verse during her school days and never stopped, although her finest poems were written just before and during the Civil War—from 1858 to 1866. Few knew that she wrote them, but she did send a few samples to a family friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who for many years gently urged her not to publish. Apart from seven heavily edited poems, she never did. But after her death in 1886, her family, together with Higginson, brought out a small volume, Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890). The reviews were bad, but people bought the book, and other collections soon followed.

Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems are glancing blows at life, which is too big a subject, she may have felt, to take on directly. She chips away at the rock of existence, piece by little piece, until she is surrounded by a pile of fragments, and a figure emerges. That figure is never wholly clear; like Michelangelo, she was content to leave this or that aspect of her work unfinished. But when she chose to emphasize a point or line, it emerged with blinding clarity.

A few scattered lines and couplets demonstrate her talents:

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne’er succeed.

The heart asks pleasure first,

And then, excuse from pain.

The soul selects her own society,

Then shuts the door;

On her divine majority

Obtrude no more.

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me.

After great pain a formal feeling comes.

Those lines were chosen almost at random. Few poets are so consistently good. Emily Dickinson hardly ever misses, hardly ever loses her exquisite touch. And she is always saying something extraordinary. Take the poem that begins, “The soul selects her own society/Then shuts the door.” That is indeed the way we are. We choose a friend, we fall in love, and then we turn our backs on all the other people, doubtless some of them equally interesting and beautiful, in the world. Why do we do it? That is another question, and Emily Dickinson does not answer it. One thing at a time. The observation was worth making for its own sake.

An old name for poet was “troubadour,” taken from an old French term that comes down in modern French as trouver, to find. A poet, then, was a finder. And is: Nothing that poets do is more important than this finding, which is also discovering, noticing, observing. The great poet sees things that we have not seen, that are plainly there to see once he has pointed them out, but that no one could see before they were limned. Emily Dickinson was above all a finder, a troubadour.

She is easy to read, but there is the danger that her ease and apparent simplicity will lead you to think she really is simple, even simpleminded. That would be foolish, like thinking Socrates was simpleminded because he discussed philosophy in plain terms. Emily Dickinson seems simple because she is so controlled, because the weapon of her poetry is so sharp that when she cuts there is no sound, no quiver of the blade. The piece she has cut off of reality simply lies there, at her feet. She looks at you with her level glance, not smiling. There, she seems to be saying, do you see? Do you understand? And do you know how much more hard work there is to do?

The physical form of Emily Dickinson’s poems is usually odd: they were scratched out on stray slips of paper, thrown into a box all higgledy-piggledy, as if she didn’t care what became of them. Why do poets do things like that? Shakespeare seems not to have cared about his manuscripts, either—they survive by accident, or at least the goodwill of friends, not the effort of their author. I think Emily Dickinson was challenging posterity to recognize her greatness, a greatness that was unknown to her contemporaries. I believe it was known to her. It is known now by everyone, and it is not rare to hear it said that she and Whitman are the two greatest American poets. Oh, if only she could know that! Except, again, she probably does.

Since Emily Dickinson is such a consistently good poet it hardly matters which poems are read first. Any good anthology contains a wealth of possibilities.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

1822–1888

Poems

Criticism

Matthew Arnold was born in 1822, the eldest son of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby, which through various reforms he had raised to the rank of a great public school rivaling Eton and Harrow. His son was educated there and at Oxford. Matthew’s great career began in 1851 when he was appointed an inspector of schools, in which capacity he served for thirty-five years, traveling all over England and on the Continent. His first book of poetry was published in 1849; it was followed by many more. On his honeymoon, two years later, he began writing “Dover Beach,” his best-known poem and one that deserves its fame.

He and his bride stand at a window listening to the waves as they fling pebbles “up the high strand” and, returning, “bring the eternal note of sadness in.” “The sea of faith was once, too, at the flood,” he feels, but now he only hears “its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” “Ah, love, let us be true to one another,” he cries, for there is “neither joy, nor love, nor light,” and we are here “as on a darkling plain,” where “ignorant armies clash by night.”

“Dover Beach” is one of the saddest poems ever written. Arnold was aware that many changes were occurring in England and elsewhere, changes produced by the Industrial Revolution and all it represented and entailed. J.S. Mill, Baudelaire, Dickens, and George Eliot, too, had heard that “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” I believe we can hear it still.

In his fifties, Arnold turned to prose instead of poetry to express his deep pessimism about the way the world was going. He called for “high seriousness” in literature and nominated a dozen “touchstones” of great poetry that he urged poets of his day always to keep in mind as they wrote, famous lines and images from Homer, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and a few others—not many. Employing a famous phrase, he described the “Cultured” man as distinct from the “Philistine,” culture being represented by the possession of “sweetness and light.” He was mocked in his time, and the real meaning of those words has been totally lost. But for Arnold, “sweetness” was beauty and good taste, while “light” was intelligence and knowledge.

In his last book, Culture and Anarchy, he described those two “polar opposites” as battling for the souls of men and women of his time. He died in 1888 convinced that anarchy was winning the war.

MARK TWAIN

1835–1910

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Samuel L. Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835 and moved to the flourishing river town of Hannibal, Missouri, when he was four. Experience was his best and almost his only teacher, and he went to work for his brother, a newspaper publisher, at sixteen. Young Clemens learned to write by setting in type the writings of other people, mostly the rough, popular humorists of the period before the Civil War.

He left home at eighteen, wandered around the country as an itinerant journalist for a while, and then suddenly decided to become a riverboat pilot. This idyllic experience he magically described in Life on the Mississippi (1883), the best of his autobiographical writings.

The Civil War put an end to Sam Clemens’s life on the river. He went to California, mainly to avoid the war— like many Westerners, he wanted no part of it. It was in California, in the 1860s, that he became Mark Twain, a name that itself was a nostalgic reminder of his happiest days. (The phrase was a leadsman’s cry, signifying that the shoaling water was just safe for navigation—was two fathoms, or twelve feet, deep.) He gained his first national fame with a widely reprinted humorous story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and his first great literary success was an account of a trip to Europe and the Holy Land, Innocents Abroad (1869).

Mark Twain liked boyhood. In 1876 he published the boys’ book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Everyone loved this book, and indeed they still do, even though the central character, Tom, is completely without warmth. The comic-book quality of the story of Tom and Becky lost in the cave with a villainous Injun Joe made it successful, but Mark Twain himself knew the book had no heart and immediately set about writing a better one. This was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which was finally published, after many delays in the writing, in 1884. It was hard to write—Tom Sawyer had been easy—and the reasons for that go to the center of the book’s meaning and significance.

Huckleberry Finn is many things. First—to get it out of the way—it is the American novel par excellence, the great American novel that will never have to be written because it appeared more than a century ago. Mark Twain’s birthplace was within a few miles of the geographical center of what was then the United States, and his book was equally close to the country’s spiritual center. It is about a white man and a black man, a free man and a slave. It is about a journey down the great central, dividing river in search of freedom for both white and black. How much more American can you get? Ernest Hemingway was right to say that “all real American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

That is not in the long run very important. More important to us is the fact that Huckleberry Finn is a fine, funny story—at least the first two thirds of it, up to the point where Tom Sawyer arrives to both bore and offend every compassionate reader with his practical jokes at the expense of Jim. But that same reader cannot fail to appreciate the story of Huck’s escape from his wicked Old Man, and Jim’s escapes as well from many hard places, to say nothing of the wonderful foolishness of the “King” and the “Duke,” whose really vicious immorality is not lost on us however loudly we may guffaw at their scams and cheats.

Even more important for us are the background, the tone, and the style of this book—again, only the first two thirds of it, before the intrusion of Tom. Huck and Jim speak an American English that is quite extinct now but that seems as genuine as any dialogue ever spoken by any characters in fiction. And the great rolling river is even more eloquent than they are. It holds its course and its counsel, but even in its silence it seems to tell us of the Earth’s largeness and the littleness of men.

Most important of all, I think, is that Huckleberry Finn is not just the story of Huck’s escape from Old Finn, or of Jim’s from slavery; it is also, and preeminently, an account of the escape from the world itself, the world which, as Wordsworth said, “is too much with us”:

late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

That world, which is our own everyday world, is the one from which Huck and Jim escape as they float down the river in the moonlight on their raft. The moon sparkles on the water, fish jump in the silence, the shores are hardly visible, and it almost seems that it might go on like this forever. “We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” So says Huck at the end of Chapter 18, but in the very next chapter the world intrudes once more, and Huck and Jim are never so free again, even though Jim eventually does obtain his legal freedom. Huck, at the end of the book, lights out for the Territory, where he hopes he may escape the “sivilization” he abhors. But of course he cannot escape it; none of us can, Mark Twain no more than the rest of us. That is why The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at bottom is such a sad book, funny as it is, and why Twain had so much trouble finishing it, and why, when he did get around to finishing it, he turned the end into a series of cruel jokes.

So-called escapist literature has a bad name, and rightly so in most cases. The great majority of escapist novels—all but a very few—are cheats and frauds, playing upon our susceptibilities for the sake of book sales, teasing our imaginations with sly delights but in the end leaving us empty and ashamed that we were so easily fooled. A small number of such books are among the greatest of all. Huckleberry Finn is one of them. It forces us to ask whether the best thing is not, after all, to escape from the world. The world, in turn, disapproves of that, and Mark Twain knew it did and was frightened. He didn’t want to be disliked. This radical revolutionary of the human spirit preferred to be thought of as an easygoing clown. Only to his closest friends would he reveal what he really thought of “the damned human race.” He was afraid he had revealed too much in Huckleberry Finn.

Huck’s story, as Mark Twain told it, was terrible enough. Huck had to escape to save his life; his father would have killed him. When he did escape, Mark Twain stopped writing the book because he did not know what else to do with his hero. He thought he ought to do something with him because, unlike the Huck at the end of the book, he—Mark Twain—felt obliged to be “sivilized.” But all he could think of was Tom Sawyer’s bad jokes at Jim’s expense.

In other words, he told a series of jokes to make people think he had not meant it, after all. But he had. In this one great book of his, Mark Twain told the truth about what he really thought about man and the world.

He lived for twenty-five years after publishing Huckleberry Finn, but they were not happy years. His beloved younger daughter, Susy, died while the rest of the family was away on a trip; his older daughter became an invalid, as did his wife, who then died. Old Mark Twain put on his famous white suit and went on lecture tours to entertain the world he hated. He wrote many books, but those he considered to be the worst—that is, the ones that most clearly revealed his views of his fellow human beings—he was reluctant to publish. He lived “full of malice,” as he wrote to a friend, “saturated with malignity.” He had been born when Halley’s Comet visited the solar system in 1835; he predicted that he would “go out with it” when it came again, and so he did, departing this life on April 21, 1910, within a few hours of the comet’s closest approach to the Earth. Any loving reader will hope that Mark Twain’s journey to freedom was a comfortable one, and that he found life upon the comet as easy as he had known it would have been upon a raft.

HENRY ADAMS

1838–1918

The United States in 1800

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

The Education of Henry Adams

Henry Adams was born in Boston in 1838, the great-grandson of President John Adams and the grandson of President John Quincy Adams. He graduated from Harvard in 1858, then studied at Berlin and toured Germany and Italy. He served as secretary to his father while the latter was minister to Great Britain during the Civil War. After the war Adams taught history at Harvard but left his academic “exile” in 1877 to live in Washington among his important friends and to write books.

Henry Adams was the first member of his distinguished family to be a literary man. This both pleased and disturbed him. He never got over the feeling—expressed with eloquence in his autobiography—that he had betrayed his distinctive genius by refusing to follow in the political footsteps of his forebears. He thought of the Adams line as wearing thin or playing out in the generation of himself and his brother Brooks Adams (also a historian). This feeling, confirmed by the then-current excitement about the discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (that everything in the universe “runs down” and eventually suffers a “heat death”), led him to propose a highly pessimistic theory of history, according to which things in general could not help but grow worse as time passed. Looking around him at the end of the nineteenth century, and comparing his own time to the period when the United States was new, as well as to the even earlier period of the Middle Age in Europe, he found reason to believe his theory true. And he wrote three books about it.

The first was the nine-volume History of the United States of America from 1801 to 1817 (published 1889–1891), which analyzed the American experience during the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Much of this fine and readable work has since been superseded, but the first six chapters, in which Adams attempted to set forth the state of the union at the beginning of the nineteenth century, remain a marvelous summary of the condition and prospects of America at the time. These six chapters have been republished under the title The United States in 1800, and they are worth reading if only because of their posing of what Adams thought was the great American question: Considering the weakness and relative poverty, and especially the sparseness of population of the States in 1800, how had it been possible for the nation to grow to its present (that is, in 1890) greatness in the span of only three generations?

This is a good question, and Adams’s answer is interesting. The relatively few persons who occupied North America in 1800 would not have been able to achieve what they actually did achieve if all were not actively involved in the achievement, he says. But to be actively involved they had to be educated. The greatest of all American inventions, therefore, according to Adams, and the source of the nation’s greatness, is universal, free, public education. If the United States in 1800 had retained the European system, of educating a few very well and most not at all, then the nation might not have survived and could not have prospered.

The second book that grew out of Henry Adams’s theory of history was Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), an account of the art, literature, and philosophy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe (mostly in France). The book begins with a study of the great fortress in Brittany dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel, which represented for Adams the aggressive religious militarism of the twelfth century (which is also reflected in the first Crusades). Reading the pages devoted to Mont-Saint-Michel and its builders will lead you to open the travel section of your Sunday newspaper in search of tours to western France. But the best is yet to come. Adams’s book moves south and east toward Paris, to the soaring gothic cathedrals of the thirteenth century, most of them dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Of all these great buildings, Nôtre Dame de Chartres is not only the largest but also the most beautiful, says Adams. If Adams’s words do not convince you of this, you will soon see for yourself, because I predict that you will not be able to resist extending your tour from Brittany into the Ile-de-France, with Chartres as the final goal of your pilgrimage.

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres is not only about cathedrals and fortresses. Some of its best chapters deal with the other arts and the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Italy. Adams was a critic of pure and exalted taste and when he praises a work—for example, The Song of Roland—you want to immediately read or see it. The finest of all the chapters may be the one on Saint Thomas Aquinas, in which Adams compares the Summa Theologica (Summa Theologiae is the correct Latin name and the one used by scholars), Aquinas’s masterwork, to a cathedral, declaring it to be the analogue in words of Chartres in stone.

Finally, Adams wrote his autobiography, in which he refers to himself throughout in the third person (Adams did this; Adams said that) and attempts to justify his life’s work in the face of his own severe criticisms of himself. The Education of Henry Adams, published 1906, is one of the best of all autobiographies, but it is somehow not a pleasant book. Read it after reading The United States in 1800 and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, but do not expect to feel the same exhilaration that those works inspire.

This, perhaps, is precisely the point Adams wanted to make. History, taken overall, is a melancholy tale, a winding down of great energies and creative impulses into their present-day analogues: enormous, sprawling organizations devoted entirely to greed. Toward the end of The Education, in the chapter titled “A Law of Acceleration,” Adams reveals that he is not completely hopeless. In comparing the works of men who worshiped the Virgin with those of men who worship the dynamo, he concedes that it is possible to imagine a future that is as good as, even better than, the past. But to attain this, says Adams, we have to change our ideas and our ways more rapidly and more profoundly than we ever have.

The movement from unity into multiplicity between 1200 and 1900 was unbroken in sequence and rapid in acceleration. Prolonged one generation longer it would require a new social mind. As though thought were common salt in indefinite solution, it must enter a new phase subject to new laws. Thus far, since five or ten thousand years, the mind had successfully reacted, and nothing yet proved that it would fail to react—but it would need to jump.

Of course Adams, if he were still alive, might consider (or recognize) the Internet and all it entails as the “jump” he said would have to occur. At any rate he would have been not only astonished but also amused. On the other hand, it might have made him even more unhappy.