questionable tissues of grotesque fun to amuse idle people; others have shrewd, keen sense in them; while a few are altogether of a higher species, and show a bright and poetic fancy. From what has been said, it will be seen that the wit and humour in Mr. Jerrold's writings must naturally lie more in passages of express and direct dialogue between himself and his reader, and in casual outbreaks of his own individual sense of the comic, than in sustained comic delineation. The tendency, upon the whole, is, as might be expected, to wit, sarcasm, sharp allusion, irony, the semi-jocose expression of a serious opinion; often, however, we have something deeper, humour itself, rich conceit, real and genial perception of what is comic in nature. A few random examples, though they cannot give a full impression of Mr. Jerrold's comic manner, may illustrate the peculiar verbal form that his witty sallies are apt to assume: 'Put away temptation from the heart, eyes, ears, and fingers of Job Pippins, and behold in him a model of self-government. Born an Esquimaux, we can answer for him, he had never yearned for grapejuice; blind, carnal beauty had never betrayed him; deaf, he had given no ear to bland seductions; rich as a Nabob, we are convinced he had never wished to pick a pocket. Superficial characters may call this negative goodness. Very well. Will they, at the same time, tell us how much in this world of contradiction is made up of mere negatives? Consult those everlasting lights, the daily and weekly newspapers. Are not certain bipeds therein immortalized for not going on all-fours? Timbrels sounded before decent ladies and gentlemen, for that they are neither ogresses nor ogres? A duke runs into a farmhouse from a pelting shower; warming his toes at the hearth, he-yes-he 'talks familiarly' with his rural host! At this the historian flourishes his pen in a convulsion of delight. Was ever such condescension, such startling affability? Of course, it was expected that the distinguished visitor would command the baby at the breast to be carefully washed, and straightway served up to him in cutlets!'-Men of Character, vol. i., p. 33. Again, the ostrich is libelled for his gluttony. Believe what is said of him, and you would not trust him even in the royal stables, lest he should devour the very shoes from the feet of the horses. Why, the ostrich ought to be taken as the one emblem of temperance. He lives and flourishes on the desert, his choicest food a little spikey shrub, with a few stones-for how rarely can he find iron, how few the white days in which the poor ostrich can, in Arabia Petræa, have the luxury of a tenpenny nail,-to season, as with salt, his vegetable diet.'-Story of a Feather, p. 3. 'But the mayor who writes his history in the enlarged pottle-pot, who indissolubly links his name with sucking-pig for fourpence-the yearly magistrate who associates himself with cupboard comforts-his renown shall be heard at ten thousand hearths, when the fame of other mayors shall be voiceless, dumb as a dead trumpeter.'—Cakes and Ale, vol. i., p. 231. 'We know the common story runs that nature has peculiar visages for poets, philosophers, statesmen, warriors, and so forth: we do not believe it: we have seen a slack-wire dancer with the face of a great pious bard, an usurer with the legendary features of a Socrates, a passer of bad money very like a Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a carcase-butcher at Whitechapel so resembling Napoleon, that Prince Talleyrand, suddenly beholding him, burst into tears at the similitude.' -Ibid., vol. i., pp. 269, 270. "And how do you get your bread?' (says Perditus Mutton to Pups the link boy, whom he meets in Cheapside in a thick fog.) Why, I pick it up in the winter in the fogs; only there ar'nt such fogs now as there used to be. When my grandmother was a little one, there was a fog of three weeks; but some folks, you know, is born to luck. That was the time, she says: there war'nt a gentleman who wouldn't been ashamed to own he hadn't lost a watch-it was so dark."—Ibid., vol. ii., p. 81. 'I will tell you what I once saw in the land of the Mogul. There, sir, there were certain bonzes or priests, who, like the twirling dervises you may have heard of, were wont to show their devotion by spinning, like tops, in white gowns. Suddenly there came other dervises who spun in black gowns; then others came who spun in yellow raiment; others in scarlet; others in purple. And every colour had its champions and apostles; and there were many foul words, and a little foul play exchanged among them. The tumult convulsed the land, every party vowing to fight to the death for the one colour. When I left the country, it was torn to pieces by the separate factions of the separate-coloured gowns. After some years I returned and found the whole land in peace; and how, sir, think you, was amity restored? A great man-a man of genius and benevolence-arose, and he combined all the opposite colours into one steadfast admiring body of himself; for he, looking upon any colour as of no matter, if the twirling were good -if the spinning were sincere-he, the meek and easy man, spun in something very like a harlequin's jacket.'-The Chronicles of Clovernook, pp. 51, 52. 6 Yet, for all this, Jericho was ordinarily a dull, matter-of-fact man. Talk to him of Jacob's ladder, and he would ask the number of the steps.'-A Man made of Money, p. 8. At that hour when sparrows look down reproachfully from their eaves at the flushed man trying the street-door.'-Ibid., p. 12. "Pon my life, you are so good, you'd pour rose-water over a toad.' -Ibid., p. 113. 'I'll tell you what, Jenny, the noblest sight on earth is a man talking reason, and his wife sittin' at the fireside listening to him.'Ibid., p. 114. 'Commentators-the worthy folks that too often write on books, as men with diamonds write on glass, obscuring light with scratches.' Ibid., p. 195. Earth is here (in Australia) so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe, and she laughs with a harvest.'-Ibid., p. 212. "Robert, my dear,' said Jenny, with the deferential air of a scholar; 'Robert, what did Mr. Carraways mean when he said he hated dog-dogmatism?' Topps was puzzled. 'Robert, my dear,' Jenny urged, 'what-what in the world is dogmatism?" Now it was the weakness of Topps never to confess ignorance of anything soever to his wife. A man should never do it,' Topps had been known in convivial seasons to declare; 'it makes 'em conceited.' Whereupon Topps prepared himself, as was his wont, to make solemn, satisfying answer. Taking off his hat, and smoothing the wrinkles of his brow, Topps said-Humph! what is dogmatism? Why it is this of course. Dogmatism is puppyism come to its full growth."—Ibid., p. 252. I declare, Mr. Goldthumb, it seems you have read everything.' 'Why, ma'am, after working thirty years as a trunk-maker, 'twould be to my shame if I didn't know something of the literature of my country."-Time Works Wonders. But Mr. Jerrold, as we have already said, is no mere wit, no mere satiric observer, no mere maker of amusing jests and conceits. He is something more; he is a man of highly emotional nature, armed to the teeth with keen sensibilities and convictions, and as ready as any man we know to leave jest for earnest when the moment requires it. There is no sneering with him at high art, exalted virtue, or recondite science-cheap resource of mean natures; no uneasy striving to keep down the discourse so low that it may still be possible to pun and joke. On the contrary, he has a native sympathy with what is elevated; will gladly hear a new fact in physics, will quote with zest a sounding verse, will speak with enthusiasm of an heroic action, will kindle at the mention of a great name. It is this very inner seriousness of nature that gives his wit its force. If his arrows are light and parrot-feathered, they are at least shot with vigour and tipped with fire. Were even quantity to be made a test, Mr. Jerrold is to be placed out of the category of merely comic writers; for at least half of what he has written consists of perfectly serious matter-pathetic story, fanciful description, or bitter and vehement satire. Like all earnest persons, Mr. Jerrold has certain points of peculiarly strong feeling, certain favourite contemplations in which his mind, if left to itself, will always necessarily settle. Let us note one or two of these ingredients, if we may so call them, of Mr. Jerrold's severer nature. And, first, in that oldest and most general of human contemplations, the transitoriness of life, and the littleness of all we see, we find him specially at home. That truly we live in a vain show, that our days are numbered, that round our world there lies an unknown Infinite, is a thought most familiar to him. Nor is this so slight a thing to be said of a writer. This familiarity with the idea of mortality, this sense of the supernatural, is the basis of all genuine feeling; and different minds have it in very different degrees. In Mr. Jerrold it is developed to an unusual extent; and in this one respect, at least, he is superior to Mr. Thackeray, who, though he too, of course, knows that the world is a Vanity Fair, seems yet somehow rather to have intellectually ascertained the fact, than to believe it. The ways in which the habit of thought we are speaking of makes its appearance in Mr. Jerrold's writings, are various. Sometimes it breaks out in an express passage; sometimes it adds keenness to a sarcasm; sometimes, it is the medium through which an incident strikes him, as when he sees a child carrying away a skull, or an old pauper in a country lane earning alms by opening a gate; and, sometimes, as in the Man made of Money, and others of his tales, it shows itself in a tendency to a more extensive use of the supernatural or miraculous in a plot than the public like. Nay, not unknown, we should fancy, to Mr. Jerrold, even the thought of that unpleasant old verse of the philosophic Hadrian 'Animula vagula, blandula, Again, to a mind such as Mr. Jerrold's, the inequality of human conditions, and the abundance of misery in the world, could not fail to be familiar matters of reflection. In point of fact, no writer of our day is more vehement in his comments on social anomalies. To shame niggardly wealth, to make out a case for suffering and poverty, to show the beauty even of profuse charity, is his constant literary aim. There is hardly one of his stories, of which the unequal distribution of the world's gifts is not, in one way or other, the theme. His Man made of Money, for example, is nothing else than a satire, couched in fiction, on the inordinate desire of wealth, and the false respect paid to it. The hero, Mr. Solomon Jericho, an elderly city gentleman of jovial habits, goaded by the ceaseless pecuniary importunities of his wife, is induced, in a rash moment, to sit bolt upright in bed, and wish that he were made of money. No rash word, it seems, is uttered in vain; Jericho's wish goes through the universe like a shudder; the Powers answer it in the affirmative; and in an instant the heart of the unfortunate man becomes a literal exhaustless mass of bank paper. Thenceforward Mr. Jericho, when he wants money, has only to touch the place of his heart, and, at every touch, a virgin Bank of England note for one hundred pounds, remains between his fingers. Thus transformed, Mr. Jericho, moves on through the world, a man made of money. At first the change is delightful; friends, reputation, a wife kinder than before, a mansion, an estate, servants, a seat in parliament, all are Jericho's. For a little time the only perceptible change in Mr. Jericho himself is a moral one; he grows colder, haughtier, and sourer in his temper. But soon the horrible truth reveals itself, there is a physical change, too; the money that Mr. Jericho spends so prodigally, is his own flesh, the substance of his own body; and every day he grows thinner and thinner. Bearing up against this discovery, he continues to enact for the necessary time, his part as Mrs. Jericho's husband, the morose stepfather of her three children, Basil, Monica, and Agatha Pennibacker, and the millionaire of general society. At length, however, shrivelled to a skeleton, and metamorphosed into a miser and a misanthrope, he shuts himself up in a garret, where he is attended by a single haggard old servant; Mrs. Jericho and her friends meantime scheming his confinement as a lunatic. In a last miserly freak he resolves to reconvert all his property -furniture, plate, jewels, and everything else-into the money that bought it. The brokers furnish him with an inventory and estimate; he requires a light to read it; his familiar servant hands him for the purpose a piece of paper, which chances to be a folded bank note; he thrusts it between the bars of the grate, when, flash! the flame leaps through his body, consumes it like a shred of parchment, and seizing, by sympathy, on all his gathered wealth, converts it on the instant into tinder, soot, and ashes. Such is the moral of the Man made of Money; and it is one that Mr. Jerrold has often repeated. Contempt for money, then, generous and bountiful dealing with one's fellow creatures, is a principal part of the morality that Mr. Jerrold inculcates. In the structure of the foregoing story the imagination of the author has possibly been allowed to take too great a liberty with the understanding of the reader. The natural in the moral loses considerably in its effect from its relation to the unnatural in the fiction. His teaching, too, on the points in question, is often too vague and lax; mere sentimental generosity, it is to be feared, sometimes prevailing in his philanthropic theory, over the moral element of justice. Essentially there is a similarity in this respect, though not in other respects, between him and Mr. Leigh Hunt. Both would have the world |