The technique of his novels seems to select for a central personage some David Copperfield or Florence Dombey, normal, perhaps commonplace, with whom the largest number of readers will be in sympathy. Attached to such central character are others like Florence Dombey's father-abnormal, it may be, but fully revealed. Other characters are related to the central personage as heroes or villains of some tragic plot-like Edith Dombey or Carker the manager: in this capacity they are fully exhibited, but only in this aspect. Other personages have a smaller part in the whole action of the story, and are proportionately less delineated: Mrs. Skewton, the juvenile old woman; Joe Bagstock, the blunt flatterer. On the outskirts of the action there are crowded together what are seen as mere surfaces, scratches of manners-painting-Captain Cuttle, inseparable from a glazed hat; Jack Bunsby, with his eye forever on the coast of Greenland; Mrs. MacStinger, in the act of chastizing her offspring and setting them on the pavement to cool. Thus life, in Dickens' novels, is presented to the central personages of the story as life in reality is seen by each one of us: a center of character as fully revealed as one's own consciousness, and round this concentric circles of decreasing individuality, ending in an horizon of unexplained 'humors.' So generally, the analysis of a particular character involves, among other things, the degree to which, in the economy of the plot, the personality is allowed to display itself.

From this interest of character and manners we must distinguish another interest reflected in such terms as tragic, comic, farcical. This is, technically, interest of tone. And tone is a particular aspect of plot: it is the emotional perspective in which the material of a story is presented. It is a mistake to think of tragic and comic as emotional qualities attaching to the experience portrayed. The Comedy of Errors-apart from

1 Compare Shakespeare as Thinker, pages 9-10, or chapter x; Shakespeare as Artist, chapter xviii from page 343.

Aegeon-is full of the richest comedy: yet the actual experience of Adriana and Luciana and the two Antipholuses is, to these personages themselves, acutely painful; it is to the spectator, who sees this experience in the perspective of the whole plot, that the effect is comic. It is upon the spectator that the mixture of tones in a drama is brought to play.

To sum up: the matter of story presents life, not in the casual connection of things we call reality, but life focused into a perspective of which the plot of the story is the formulation. It is this arrangement in perspective that brings the life presented close to philosophic principle. To ignore plot is to see the life out of drawing. When principles of analysis like this have been fully observed, then it appears how rich story is in the philosophy of life. In the great phrase of Bacon, the truth of being, and the truth of knowing, are one: differing no more than the direct beam and the beam reflected.

CHAPTER XIX

LITERATURE AS THE CRITICISM OF LIFE

Matthew Arnold was bringing a valuable phrase into the currency of common speech when he described literature as the criticism of life. By 'criticism' Arnold understands the power of seeing things as they really are. Such is also the function of science. But the science which so markedly distinguishes the modern world from the world of antiquity is bound up with specialization; the observation-comprehensive and minute on which science rests is impossible except by the division of the field between co-operating bands of specialists. Such specialization is incompatible with what is meant in Arnold's phrase by 'life.' Where human life becomes the subject of scientific treatment—in biology, sociology, psychology, and the like only single aspects of life are considered, one at a time. It is the synthesis of all these separate aspects that is expressed by our use of the word 'life' in the full sense: as when we speak of 'seeing life,' or when we use the great sayingHomo sum, nihil humani a me alienum puto.

There is no possibility here of specialization: life in this sense we should have to murder in order to dissect. Accordingly literature, which is the mother country from which special studies have passed out as colonists, retains its dominion over the criticism of life. And it must be an unspecialized philosophy which performs this function: the instrument of observation would not be made truer by restricting itself further than the matter to be observed will admit. Poetry and prose, creation

' In his Introduction to Ward's English Poets (Macmillan).

Compare his Essays in Criticism. First Series (Macmillan), page 1.

and discussion, with all their varieties, must co-operate in the literary treatment of life.'

In primitive literature, which is the stage common to all particular literatures before they have differentiated, the philosophy of life has already begun. It manifests itself in the proverb, or gnome, which remains to the end the only philosophy of the uneducated classes. A proverb is a unit of thought in a unit of form. Each is a separate and independent observation made on human life: the word 'aphorism' suggests how each, so to speak, has an horizon of its own. Even if there be no other prose or verse form, the epigrammatic character of the proverb has the effect of form. Such proverbs then are natural crystals of wisdom. They maintain themselves, and multiply through all subsequent phases of literary advance. Of the national literatures that associate themselves with our world literature, it is perhaps Spanish literature that is richest in this primitive wisdom: Sancho Panza is its prophet, and his discourse when he feels himself at home becomes little more than aggregations of such wisdom crystals.

And if your high and mightiness does not think fit to let me have this same government, why so be it; it may be for the good of my conscience to go without it. I am a fool, it is true, but yet I understand the meaning of the saying, The pismire had wings to do her hurt; and Sancho the squire may sooner get to heaven than Sancho the governor. There is as good bread baked here as in France, and Joan is as good as my lady in the dark. In the night all cats are grey. Unhappy he is that wants his breakfast at two in the afternoon. It is always good fasting after a good breakfast. There is no man has a stomach a yard bigger than another; but let it be never so big, there will be hay and straw enough to fill it. A bellyfull is a bellyfull. The sparrow speeds as well as the sparrow-hawk. Good serge is fine, but coarse cloth is warm; and four yards of the one are as long as four yards of the other. When the hour is come we must The matter of this chapter runs parallel with, and is an expansion of, part of chapter vi.

no.

all be packed off; the prince and the prick-louse go the same way at last; the road is no fairer for the one than the other. The Pope's body takes up no more room than the sexton's, though one be taller; for when they come to the pit all are alike, or made so in spite of our teeth; and so good-night, or good-morrow, which you please. And let me tell you again if you don't think fit to give me an island because I am a fool, I will be so wise as not to care whether you do or It is an old saying, The devil lurks behind the cross. All is not gold that glisters. From the tail of the plough Bamba was made king of Spain; and from his silks and riches was Rodrigo cast to be devoured by the snakes, if the old ballads say true, and sure they are too old to tell a lie. . . . . As for the governing part, let me alone: I was ever charitable and good to the poor, and scorn to take the bread out of another man's mouth. On the other side, by our Lady, they shall play me no foul play. I am an old cur at a crust, and can sleep dog-sleep when I list. I can look sharp as well as another, and let me alone to keep the cobwebs out of my eyes. I know where the shoe wrings me. I will know who and who is together. Honesty is the best policy: I will stick to that. The good shall have my hand and heart, but the bad neither foot nor fellowship.'

....

When we come to literature in its full development, the philosophy of life appears, firstly, in wisdom literature. The supreme example of this type is the wisdom literature of the Bible. In this we can trace most clearly-as I have shown at length elsewhere the rise of the different literary forms of wisdom. We have aggregations of independent proverbs; then-especially in Ecclesiasticus-we see proverbs clustering around leading topics, and so passing, by stages, to the full form of the essay. The proverb couplet is the meeting-point of prose and verse: there is development, on the prose side, into the maxim, the essay, and the rhetorical encomium; on the verse side, into the epigram and the (Biblical) sonnet. Hebrew

2

Motteux' translation.

Literary Study of the Bible, chapter xiii. Wisdom literature is also discussed in the Introductions to the successive books of wisdom in the Modern Reader's Bible.