struggles to which the evils of the present
day have given rise. We feel that great events are being enacted; that
greater still are in preparation; and we long for an epic, a
world-moulding epic, to imbody and depict them. The undertaking is a
dangerous one--many a lance is shivered in the first encounter. A mere
tendency-novel is in itself a monster. A picture of the age must be, in
the highest acceptation of the word, a poem. It must not represent real
persons or places--it must create such. It must not ingraft itself upon
the passing and the accidental, but be pervaded by a poetic intuition of
the real. He that attempts it must look with a poet's eye at the real
and enduring elements in the confusing contradictions of the time, and
place the result before us as an actual existence. It has been the high
privilege of the English realistic school, which we may call without
hesitation the school of Dickens, that it has been the first to strike
the key-note with a firm and skillful hand. Its excellence would stand
out with undimmed lustre had it not, as its gloomy background, the
French school of Victor Hugo and Balzac, that opposite of "the poetry of
despair," as Goethe calls it. Here again, in this new English school,
has the genius of Kingsley alighted. Most of his novels belong to it.
And, besides himself and Dickens, there stand forth as its most
brilliant members the distinguished authoress of _Mary Barton_, and the
sorely-tried Charlotte Bronte, the gifted writer of _Jane Eyre_--too
soon, alas! removed from us. This school has portrayed, in colors
doubtless somewhat strong, the sufferings and the virtues, the dangers
and the hopes of the working-classes, especially in towns and factories.
But, instead of enjoining hatred of the higher classes, and despair of
all improvement in the future for humanity, a healthy tone pervades
their writings throughout, and an unwavering and cheering hope of better
things to come shines through the gloomy clouds that surround the dreary
present. There are throes of anguish--but they tell of coming
deliverance; there are discords--but they resolve into harmony. The
spirit finds, pervading the entire composition, that satisfaction of the
desires of our higher nature which constitutes true artistic success.

Dickens, too, has at length chosen the real life of the working-classes
in their relations to those above them as a subject for his masterly
pen. _Dombey and Son_ will not readily b