However we may despise fiction, there is no doubt that it often unconsciously fulfils purposes which no other form of writing, except perhaps diaries and familiar letters, can pretend to fulfil. It gives us the atmosphere of an age or a generation, and it clothes the dry bones of history with flesh and blood. We shall find, as might be expected, that just in proportion as the lower classes-we use the term in no invidious sense-rise in importance, so do works of fiction concern themselves with their doings. In the days of Homer, while the adventures and exploits of kings and chiefs were chronicled with abundance of loving and admiring detail, the common herd were almost passed over in silence.1 So tales of chivalry, the delight of the Middle Ages, dealt mainly with the doings of noble knights and beautiful ladies.

Chaucer and Piers Plowman reflect in their poems the change that was coming over English thought and life. The characters, largely drawn from the middle classes, who appear in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, herald a new era in English literature. But in the Tales themselves the serious element is chiefly supplied by the "privileged classes," while the lower orders are mainly employed to give comic relief. The old ballad of Chevy Chase puts into the mouth of perhaps its bravest warrior the characteristic words:

You be two earls, quoth Witherington, And I a squire alone.

Even Shakespeare does not, as a rule, concern himself much with the doings of the baser sort. He has a great con

"The Vicar of Wakefield." By Oliver Goldsmith. (London. 1766.)

"Bleak House." By Charles Dickens. (London. 1853.)

"The Old Wives' Tales." By Arnold Benlett. (London: Chapman and Hall. 1908.) "Thompson's Progress." By Cutcliffe

tempt for the masses, as we may see in the opening scene of Julius Cæsar,' and, like Chaucer, he generally utilizes them to supply the comic element in his plays. But there is at least one notable exception. The finest scene in Henry V is without doubt the one where the king, unrecognized in the early morning twilight before the battle of Agincourt, takes part in the dialogue between "Bates, Court and Williams," three English soldiers, on the probable fortunes of the day. Here Shakespeare shows a genuine sympathy with the point of view of the common soldier, and the reality which this gives to the situation adds to the impressiveness of the magnificent soliloquy which follows:

Upon the king!

This, however, is almost a solitary instance, for the beautiful figure of "Adam" in As You Like It-a part which tradition tells us, and which we love to believe, was once performed by the poet himself-shows us one whose chief characteristic is that of fidelity to his superiors. It is in this character, and not merely on his own account, that he interests us.

Long indeed after Shakespeare's time the main interest of English fiction, as well as of the drama, continued to lie with the upper classes. "Every reader" (says Goldsmith in the Vicar of Wakefield), "however beggarly himself, is fond of high-lived dialogues, with anecdotes of Lords, Ladies and Knights of the Garter." This delightful romance loses, nevertheless, none of its charm from the circumstance that it deals with the fortunes of simHyne. (London: T. Nelson and Sons. 1910.) And other Works.

1 The delightful episodes of Eumæus and Euryclea, both in the Odyssey, might be quoted as exceptions; but the poet's main interest is in their relations with Odysseus.

This

It

ple and humble folk; and Fielding's novels also show that the public taste was shifting, and that "low life" had begun to have an interest of its own. "Except what Dr. Burdock does" (says Lady Blarney in the Vicar of Wakefield) "and our dear countess at Hanover Square there's nothing comes out but the most lowest stuff in nature, not a bit of high life among them." was written about 1765. Fielding had died in 1749, but his popularity was very high when Goldsmith wrote, and the art of Hogarth, though chiefly concerned with the vices and follies of the rich, was as broad in its sympathies as it doubtless was in its humor. was long, however, before literature seriously occupied itself with the fortunes of the very poor. Some of the most exquisite lines of Gray's Elegy show a fine and real sympathy with the "rude forefathers of the hamlet," though we may venture to doubt if the shy sensitive inmate of Peterhouse would have had very much to say to one of the rustics of Stoke Pogis if he had found himself in his company. Shenstone's delightful Schoolmistress and Goldsmith's Deserted Village somewhat idealize the rustic life. Perhaps the first writer who ventured to paint the English poor as they really are was Crabbe. Such lines as the following make one wonder that he and Robert Burns could have existed in the same century and in the same kingdom:

Reuben and Rachel, though as fond as doves,

Were yet discreet and cautious in their loves;

Nor would attend to Cupid's wild commands

Till cool reflection made them join their hands.

When both were poor, they thought it argued ill

Of hasty love to make them poorer

still;

What if, in both, life's bloomy flush was lost,

And their full autumn felt the mellowing frost?

Yet Time, who blowed the rose of youth away,

Had left the vigorous stem without decay.2

If Crabbe was one of the most prosaic of poets, there is no doubt that his great admirer Walter Scott was one of the most poetical of prose writers; and it is remarkable that a man of his aristocratic tastes and old world proclivities should have been inimitable in his representation of humble and middle-class life. He is far more "convincing" in his portraits of David and Jeanie Deans than he is to our mind at least-in the somewhat conventional figures of his tales of chivalry who, while placed in the twelfth century, converse in quasi-Elizabethan English. We have only to mention his great novels-the Antiquary, Guy Mannering, the Bride of Lammermoor, etc., to remind ourselves of scenes in which he shows a sympathy, quite unpatronizing, with the peasant, the fisherman, the gipsy, the beggar, the Liddesdale yeoman and the Highlander. One feels 2 "Parish Register."

that he has lived with the people, eaten and drunk and talked with them, and all this without the slightest sacrifice of delicacy or refinement.

We cannot, especially with Mr. Barnes' delightful Dorset poems in our mind, exactly say of the English peasantry, "carent vate sacro." But we fear it must be owned that they are less susceptible of poetical handling than their northern neighbors. The English peasant of the Midlands and the South finds scarcely a place in the pages of Jane Austen. We feel little doubt that one of so kindly a nature, especially in her character of clergyman's daughter, was "good to the poor." But hardly ever in her pages is a poor man or woman sympathetically painted. The north of England fared better. Much of Wordsworth's genius was devoted to the presentation of the poetical side of humble life, and of those emotions which are shared by "the general heart of men," as illustrated in the lives of Cumbrian shepherds and other simple folk. Gaskell's Mary Barton, with its vivid photographs of Manchester workmen and work women, may be said to have been an "epoch-making" book. And the greatest of English women writers, George Eliot, chose for the hero of her most perfect work (the exquisite tale of Silas Marner) a Derbyshire weaver; while in her other great novels, the novels in which she is most truly herself, we find a gallery-second only to Scott's, and drawn as it would seem from Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Notts, and Warwickshire-of men and women of nearly every class, whose enthusiasm has been aroused by the great Wesleyan and Evangelical movementthat one redeeming feature, apart from the great European struggle, in the crass dullness of eighteenth century life.

Mrs.

So far, however, be the theme what it may be, we find the pen always in

the hands of the "privileged" or "educated" classes. Men and women write about the poor, but they are not really of them.

With the advent of Dickens the new school of modern fiction may be said to begin. Dickens was a man of the peopie, and wrote for the people. Born and reared in poverty, scrappily and imperfectly educated (though it is extraordinary how his brilliant ability turned to account the few opportunities he had), trained in the hard school of adversity, and in very many departments of that school, he had seen more of life before he was thirty than many men do in double or treble the time. On the publication of Pickwick he may be said to have "awakened and found himself famous." In every circle of society his books were read, discussed, laughed over, cried over, wondered at, and doubtless criticized. We can hardly doubt that some great social reforms were indirectly promoted by them. "Mr. Pecksniff," "Mrs. Gamp," and "Dotheboys Hall" have become part of the English language. People protested at the "vulgarity" of Dickens, but they bought and read. They might have said with truth that it was not the vulgarity as such which attracted them, but the exuberant, bubbling humor which played around it, and the wholesome, kindly and, at bottom, religious nature of the writer. No one could ever say that Dickens had a coarse mind. Even when describing the foulest and most loathsome situations, we never feel that he is foul or loathsome. His sympathies are always on the right side. Like Dante's Vergil, he takes us down to some hideous circles of the Inferno, but he is himself unstained by their impurities. There is something Hogarthian in the touches of human tenderness with which he relieves some of his darkest picturessuch as the faithful dog-like devotion of the woman to Bill Sikes, despite all