638 



KNOAVLEDGE * 



[June 26, 1885. 



work and among the characters of his story, as the true 

 artist should live ; but it is certain that he deceived him- 

 self, for if he had he could never have been in doubt what 

 their fate was to be, and still less could he have modified, 

 at the suggestion of those who were comparatively stranger"! 

 to his creations, the fate which he had decided should be 

 theirs. 



I am aware that other novelists have on occasion done 

 likewise. Scott, for instance, consented to restore Athel- 

 atane of Coningsby to life after he had killed him, and a 

 fine mess Scott made of that change ; but, even if we 

 assigned now to Scott the high position which was assigned 

 him by contemporaries, it might still be answered that 

 Athelstaue was only a subordinate figure in the story, and 

 that Scott would never have consented so to arrange 

 matters to suit the popular taste — that the insipid Rowena 

 should have disappeared and the gallant but shadowy 

 Ivanhoe have married Rebecca, that most beautiful of all 

 Scott's creations. 



It need hardly be said that Thackeray does not allow 

 himself such license as Dickens in the portraiture of 

 character. Not a line can be found in the picture.? of 

 Costigan, Huxter, Eawdon Crawley, Lord Steyne, and the 

 host of varied characters wliich appear in Thackeray's 

 principal works, which can be regarded as incongruous, nor 

 can I recall a single instance in which characteristics 

 appropriate to one character are distributed among several. 

 Again, Thackeray never, so far as can be judged, departs 

 from that natural sequence of events which the develop- 

 ment of his stories has suggested to him. 



Thackery was content, in fact, to hold the mirror up to 

 nature. I do not say that the portraiture is always perfect, 

 still less that the work belongs always to the highest class. 

 George Eliot seems to me to be as far in advance of 

 Thackeray in many respects, as Browning is in advance of 

 Tennyson. (For this reason she will always be 4ess popular 

 than Thackery, even as Thackeray is less popular than 

 Dickens.) But the work Thackeray undertakes is always 

 good work, and it is always well done. He does not seek 

 to please by effective situations, by bringing in per fas et 

 iif/as humorous or pathetic images, though his humour is 

 true, his pathos deep and touching. Nor does he care to 

 make his stories " end well ' or even end at all. They are 

 slices from real life, and real life moves ever onward. His 

 pictures, if not the finest, are among the best drawn of all 

 that English writers have given us. 



I have already said much more than I had intended 

 when I began, yet I seem scarcely to have done more than 

 touch upon my subject, so many considerations have I been 

 obliged to omit which I had had in my thoughts. But 

 there is one point which I must touch on, though briefly — 

 viz., the quality of the language in which Thackeray and 

 Dickens have expressed their conceptions. Here, as it 

 seems to me, the two writers hold a nearly equal position. 

 Thackeray, it is true, wrote more accurately, at any rate in 

 his later works (for there is some very questionable English 

 in his earlier writings). Dickens, indeed, repeatedly uses 

 words in a wrong sense, and not unfrequently offends 

 against the rules of grammar. He makes his worst mis- 

 takes when he aims either at line or precise writing. Of 

 the former we have a remarkable instance in a passage 

 which Forster quotes with high approval, where Dickens 

 speaks of a man being " an atheist in all the better feelings 

 of our nature." Of the latter the most striking illustration 

 which occurs to me at the moment is the passage where he 

 Eays of Eugene and Bradley Headstone that " no matter 

 who spoke or whom was addressed " they continued to 

 watch each other. 



But despite mistakes such as these there is a singular 



charm about Dickens's English. The charm resides partly 

 in its clearness, partly in liveliness of imagery, but chiefly, 

 I believe, in its perfect music. In order to appreciate 

 Dickens's English fully let some of the descriptions in his 

 '■'Uncommercial Traveller" be compared with writings on 

 similar matters even by the ablest authors of the age. Of 

 Dickens, indeed, we may say — though probably he himself 

 would not have been disposed to admit as much — that 

 "description was his forte." 



Of the two writers Thackeray occupies far the higher 

 position. His true place is daily becoming more clearly 

 recognised. It will, I believe, be generally admitted before 

 long that Charlotte Bronte was not far from the truth 

 when she wrote (as nearly as I can recall the passage) that 

 he was the foreman of that working body which sought to 

 restore the warped order of things to rectitude. As she 

 said, his wit is keen, his humour light, but they are no 

 more by comparison with his serious power than the sheet 

 lightning of the summer cloud compared with the scathing 

 flash which leaps from its dark bosom. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHING. 



By "W. Mattied Williams. 

 XI.— THE REMOVAL OF PERSPIRATION BY CLOTHING. 



THE manner in which Rumford treated the question 

 propounded at the conclusion of my last paper was 

 simple and characteristic. He took equal quantities of the 

 substamces named in the following tabular statement " in a 

 state of the most perfect cleanliness and purity," spread 

 them out on clean china plates, and exposed them for 

 twenty-four hours in the dry air of a room which had been 

 heated for several months by a German stove, and kept up 

 during the last six hours of the experiment to 85' Fahr. 

 He then weighed them in the room. 



After this they were removed to a table in the middle of 

 a large uninhabited room on the second floor, and there 

 exposed for forty-eight hours, the temperature of the room 

 being 45° Fahr. They were then carefully weighed in the 

 room ; the increase of weight being shown in the second 

 column below. 



Thirdly, they were placed on a table in the middle of a 

 very damp cellar, where the hygiometer indicated saturation 

 of the air with moisture, and to maintain this saturation 

 the vault was hung round with wet linen cloths, and the 

 door shut. They remained here three days and three nights ; 

 the temperature of the vault was 45° Fahr. They were 

 then weighed in the vault. The table displays the results : 



