History of English Literature Volume 3 (of 3)Taine, Hippolyte
History
History of English Literature Volume 3 (of 3)
Taine, Hippolyte
English literature -- History and criticism
"See the bright moon; high up before we know it; making the earth
reflect the objects on its breast like water. Hedges, trees, low
cottages, church steeples, blighted stumps and flourishing young slips,
have all grown vain upon the sudden, and mean to contemplate their own
fair images till morning. The poplars yonder rustle, that their
quivering leaves may see themselves upon the ground. Not so the oak;
trembling does not become him; and he watches himself in his stout old
burly steadfastness, without the motion of a twig. The moss-grown gate,
ill poised upon its creaking hinges, crippled and decayed, swings to and
fro before its glass like some fantastic dowager; while our own ghostly
likeness travels on, Yoho! Yoho! through ditch and brake, upon the
ploughed land and the smooth, along the steep hill-side and steeper
wall, as if it were a phantom-Hunter.
"Clouds too! And a mist upon the Hollow! Not a dull fog that hides it,
but a light, airy, gauze-like mist, which in our eyes of modest
admiration gives a now charm to the beauties it is spread before: as
real gauze has done ere now, and would again, so please you, though we
were the Pope. Yoho! Why, now we travel like the Moon herself. Hiding
this minute in a grove of trees, next minute in a patch of vapour,
emerging now upon our broad, clear course, withdrawing now, but always
dashing on, our journey is a counterpart of hers. Yoho! A match against
the Moon!
"The beauty of the night is hardly felt, when Day comes leaping up.
Yoho! Two stages, and the country roads are almost changed to a
continuous street. Yoho, past market gardens, rows of houses, villas,
crescents, terraces, and squares; past wagons, coaches, carts; past
early workmen, late stragglers, drunken men, and sober carriers of
loads; past brick and mortar in its every shape; and in among the
rattling pavements, where a jaunty-seat upon a coach is not so easy to
preserve! Yoho down countless turnings, and through countless mazy ways,
until an old Inn-yard is gained, and Tom Pinch, getting down, quite
stunned and giddy, is in London!"[250]
All this to tell us that Tom Pinch is come to London! This fit of lyric
poetry, in which the most poetic extravagances spring from the most
vulgar commonplaces, like sickly flowers growing in a broken old
flower-pot, displays in its natural and quaint contrasts all the sides
of Dickens's imagination. We shall have his portrait if we picture to
ourselves a man who, with a stew-pan in one hand and a postilion's whip
in the other, took to making prophecies.
Section IV.--His Emotions.--His Pathos.--His Humor
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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