![2 Vehicular Networks
The number of proposed vehicular safety applications that
could use direct vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication is
impressive [PAP 09]. However, at a close inspection, it can be
noted that all these applications practically use the same
information, coming from onboard sensors of neighboring
vehicles: speed, acceleration, steering angle and location.
Considering this, the standardization bodies decided to
add a supplementary layer between the applications and the
transport protocol. The role of this layer, called message
sublayer in the IEEE Wireless Access in Vehicular
Environments (WAVE) architecture and facilities layer in the
ETSI ITS terminology, is to keep an accurate image of the
surrounding environment inside every vehicle and to provide
applications with the desired information.
The facilities layer only needs two types of messages in
order to achieve these objectives, called (in the ETSI ITS
architecture) cooperative awareness message (CAM) and
decentralized environmental notification message (DENM).
CAMs are regular beacons, transmitted by every vehicle with
a predetermined frequency, and containing details about the
vehicle that might be relevant to its neighbors from a safety
point of view. In addition, if a vehicle detects a potential
hazard (e.g. a sudden brake) and considers that this
information needs to be quickly disseminated to the other
traffic participants, it transmits a DENM.
However, regardless of the scenario and message type,
these safety messages are always transmitted in broadcast
mode at the medium access control (MAC) layer. Even in the
case when the transmitted information targets a certain
geographical area (e.g. an electronic brake alarm is only of
interest to vehicles traveling in the same direction as the
transmitter and situated behind it), the message is still
broadcast and the filtering happens at the facilities layer, as
described by the ETSI framework [EUR 10].](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/169-250411060014-d481e6df/85/Vehicular-Networks-Models-and-Algorithms-1st-Edition-Andr-Luc-Beylot-21-320.jpg)
![Congestion Control 3
The broadcast nature of the CCH in vehicular ad hoc
networks (VANET) is an essential property that
distinguishes it from other IEEE 802.11-based networks. As
a matter of fact, the numerous studies on the distributed
coordination function (DCF) implementing MAC mechanisms
in IEEE 802.11 usually focus on unicast traffic, and broadcast
messages are only considered for control purposes. Oliveira et
al. [OLI 09] quantify the influence of broadcast traffic on the
performance of IEEE 802.11 networks, and they find out that
the effect of broadcast messages becomes significant when
the proportion of broadcast traffic is higher than 50%. In this
scenario, the behavior of the network largely deviates from
what is predicted by classic DCF models. However, the
authors consider this situation quite unreal and they do not
investigate the issue further.
Another important characteristic of safety messages comes
from the limited lifetime of CAMs. As these beacons are
produced periodically by the facilities layer, there is a certain
probability that they can expire before the MAC layer has the
opportunity to transmit them. When a CAM is waiting for the
IEEE 802.11 back-off timer to expire, and the next beacon
also arrives in the transmission queue, the first message has
to be dropped, as its transmission would only disseminate
outdated information to its neighbors. This property, rarely
taken into consideration in VANET studies, has a significant
effect on the optimal value of different MAC layer
parameters.
The IEEE 802.11p amendment [THE 10] is the preferred
MAC technology in both the IEEE WAVE and the ETSI ITS
architectures. IEEE 802.11p radios can communicate at a
distance of 1 km. In a simple scenario, with a two-lane road
in both directions and an average inter-vehicular distance of
50 m (a medium density highway), the number of one-hop
neighbors reaches 160 vehicles. This is clearly a more](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/169-250411060014-d481e6df/85/Vehicular-Networks-Models-and-Algorithms-1st-Edition-Andr-Luc-Beylot-22-320.jpg)
![4 Vehicular Networks
challenging environment than the classic Wireless Local Area
Network (WLAN), with a central access point and no more
than 10–20 nodes. The MAC layer protocol, therefore, needs
solutions for this congested environment to achieve
scalability.
Congestion control mechanisms received a lot of attention
from the VANET research community and the most relevant
studies in this area are summarized later. The
standardization bodies also recognized the importance of a
decentralized congestion control framework for V2V safety
communications, and ETSI published a series of technical
specifications in this area in July 2011 [EUR 11]. In the US,
the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) is also developing
a standard with similar objectives, SAE J2945.1, currently in
a draft phase. SAE J2945.1 is expected to be integrated into
the WAVE architecture as a complement for the different
IEEE standards.
In this chapter, five different approaches for MAC layer
congestion control are discussed. In section 1.2, beaconing
frequency adaptation is presented that reduces the number of
transmitted safety messages in a dense network, speculating
the relationship between high density and reduced speed in
vehicular traffic. In section 1.3, increased data rates can be
achieved by using more complex modulations and result in a
lower occupancy of the CCH. Other proposals form the object
of section 1.4, which are based on the fact that transmission
power control has an important impact on the number of
hidden nodes, and can increase the spatial reuse and hence
the channel capacity, in a congested network. In section 1.5,
the fourth element, the minimum contention window
(CWmin), is analyzed, a parameter with a major importance
for collision probability in an IEEE 802.11 network. Finally,
the role of the physical carrier sense in congestion control is
highlighted in section 1.6.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/169-250411060014-d481e6df/85/Vehicular-Networks-Models-and-Algorithms-1st-Edition-Andr-Luc-Beylot-23-320.jpg)
![Congestion Control 5
1.2. Beaconing frequency
The most obvious solution for controlling the channel load
in a congested environment is to reduce the number of
transmitted messages. This can be achieved in a
straightforward manner in vehicular networks by adapting
the frequency of the safety beaconing. However, such an
adaptive mechanism should be designed carefully because
sending less messages can easily have the effect of damaging
the performance of safety applications instead of improving
it.
In this context, Fukui et al. [FUK 02] proposed
transmitting a CAM every time the vehicle travels a certain
distance instead of using a regular time interval. According
to a fundamental relationship from traffic theory, the mean
speed decreases when the vehicular density increases, thus
the consequence of this approach would be that nodes would
reduce the beaconing frequency in a dense network where
they would travel at low speeds. However, a basic example for
which this solution fails is that of a vehicle waiting to make a
left turn in normal traffic. Because the vehicle would need to
stop, the adaptive mechanism would practically turn off the
beaconing transmission, making an application like the left
turn assistant practically unusable. Therefore, as stationary
vehicles or low speeds are not always the consequences of
high vehicular densities, such an approach cannot be
efficiently used in a real scenario.
As a part of the California PATH program, Rezaei et al.
[REZ 07] take a more complex approach, where vehicles run
an estimator to calculate the position of each one-hop
neighbor based on the already received messages. The same
estimator is used by the node to predict its own position, as it
would be calculated by its neighbors. When the difference
between the prediction and the actual location becomes
larger than a predefined threshold, the node transmits a](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/169-250411060014-d481e6df/85/Vehicular-Networks-Models-and-Algorithms-1st-Edition-Andr-Luc-Beylot-24-320.jpg)
![6 Vehicular Networks
safety beacon. The problem with this solution is that it is
efficient in the predictable free-flow traffic, but not in a
congested scenario where the acceleration is highly variable.
Moreover, this self-estimator approach does not take into
account that the error at some of the neighbors might be
considerably different because some of the transmitted
beacons could be lost. To solve this problem, Huang et al.
[HUA 10] further develop this idea using the packet error
ratio (PER) measured by a node to predict the losses
encountered by its neighbors. Still, measuring a PER in a
vehicular network without being able to detect collisions or
use feedback from the receivers is not a straightforward task.
Seo et al. [SEO 10] make an analogy between the safety
beaconing and the coupon collector problem. The mechanism
they design relies upon nodes piggybacking acknowledgments
(ACKs) for the received beacons in their own safety message.
Every received ACK would further delay the transmission of
the next CAM, reducing the beaconing frequency. However,
the introduced overhead would be significant, especially in a
dense network (a 4 byte ACK for 50 one-hop neighbors would
result in 200 extra bytes for every safety message). It is also
unclear if this approach would be compatible with a security
framework based on changing pseudonyms, like the approach
currently proposed by the ETSI ITS architecture [PAP 08],
because the ACK would need to include the identifier of the
sender and most probably a sequence number for the
acknowledged message.
Adaptive Traffic Beacon (ATB) is a solution/mechanism/
approach proposed by Sommer et al. [SOM 11], where the
beaconing frequency is calculated based on two metrics: the
channel quality and the message utility. The idea is to
transmit only the most important messages in a congested
network, reducing the offered load. Nevertheless, the channel
quality is very sensitive to the number of collisions, which
implies that the nodes are somehow supposed to detect such](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/169-250411060014-d481e6df/85/Vehicular-Networks-Models-and-Algorithms-1st-Edition-Andr-Luc-Beylot-25-320.jpg)
![title to David. But there is strong reason, in the phraseology and in the spirit
of the poem, to believe that it was written by the Prophet Jeremiah.
III
It is not to be supposed that our reverence for the Psalms in their moral
and religious aspects will make us put them all on the same level poetically.
There is a difference among the books of the New Testament in regard to the
purity and dignity of the Greek in which they are written. There is a difference
among St. Paul’s Epistles in regard to the clearness and force of their style.
There is a difference even among the chapters of the same epistle in regard
to the beauty of thought and language. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians,
the thirteenth chapter is poetic, and the fourteenth is prosaic. Why should
there not be a difference in poetic quality among the Psalms?
There is a difference. The honest reader will recognize it. It will be no harm
to him if he should have his favourites among the poems which have been
gathered from many centuries into this great collection.
There are some, like the Twenty-seventh, the Forty-second, the Forty-sixth,
the Fifty-first, the Sixty-third, the Ninety-first, the Ninety-sixth, the One
Hundred and Third, the One Hundred and Seventh, the One Hundred and
Thirty-ninth, which rank with the noblest poetic literature of the world. Others
move on a lower level, and show the traces of effort and constraint. There are
also manifest alterations and interpolations, which are not always
improvements. Dr. Perowne, who is one of the wisest and most conservative
of modern commentators, says, “Many of the Psalms have not come down to
us in their original form,”[8] and refers to the alterations which the Seventieth
makes in the Fortieth, and the Fifty-third in the Fourteenth. The last two
verses of the Fifty-first were evidently added by a later hand. The whole book,
in its present form, shows the marks of its compilation and use as the Hymn-
Book of the Jewish people. Not only in the titles, but also in the text, we can
discern the work of the compiler, critic, and adapter, sometimes wise, but
occasionally otherwise.
IV
The most essential thing in the appreciation of the poetry in the Psalms is
the recognition of the three great spiritual qualities which distinguish them.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/169-250411060014-d481e6df/85/Vehicular-Networks-Models-and-Algorithms-1st-Edition-Andr-Luc-Beylot-28-320.jpg)
![The first of these is the deep and genuine love of nature. The psalmists
delight in the vision of the world, and their joy quickens their senses to read
both the larger hieroglyphs of glory written in the stars and the delicate
tracings of transient beauty on leaf and flower; to hear both the mighty
roaring of the sea and the soft sweet laughter of the rustling corn-fields. But
in all these they see the handwriting and hear the voice of God. It is His
presence that makes the world sublime and beautiful. The direct, piercing,
elevating sense of this presence simplifies, enlarges, and enables their style,
and makes it different from other nature-poetry. They never lose themselves,
as Theocritus and Wordsworth and Shelley and Tennyson sometimes do, in
the contemplation and description of natural beauty. They see it, but they
always see beyond it. Compare, for example, a modern versified translation
with the psalm itself:
The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their Great Original proclaim.[9]
Addison’s descriptive epithets betray a conscious effort to make a splendid
picture. But the psalmist felt no need of this; a larger impulse lifted him at
once into “the grand style:”
The heavens declare the glory of God;
And the firmament showeth his handiwork.
The second quality of the poetry in the Psalms is their passionate sense of
the beauty of holiness. Keats was undoubtedly right in his suggestion that the
poet must always see truth in the form of beauty. Otherwise he may be a
philosopher, or a critic, or a moralist, but he is not a true poet. But we must
go on from this standpoint to the Platonic doctrine that the highest form of
beauty is spiritual and ethical. The poet must also see beauty in the light of
truth. It is the harmony of the soul with the eternal music of the Good. And
the highest poets are those who, like the psalmists, are most ardently
enamoured of righteousness. This fills their songs with sweetness and fire
incomparable and immortal:](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/169-250411060014-d481e6df/85/Vehicular-Networks-Models-and-Algorithms-1st-Edition-Andr-Luc-Beylot-29-320.jpg)
![Things that have seldom or never happened, occur inevitably. The
preposterous becomes the necessary, the wildly improbable is the one thing
that must come to pass. Mr. Dombey is converted, Mr. Krook is removed by
spontaneous combustion, Mr. Micawber performs amazing feats as an
amateur detective, Sam Weller gets married, the immortally absurd epitaphs
of Young John Chivery and Mrs. Sapsea are engraved upon monuments more
lasting than brass.
The fact is, Dickens himself was bewitched by the spell of his own
imagination. His people carried him away, did what they liked with him. He
wrote of Little Nell: “You can’t imagine how exhausted I am to-day with
yesterday’s labours. I went to bed last night utterly dispirited and done up. All
night I have been pursued by the child; and this morning I am unrefreshed
and miserable. I don’t know what to do with myself.... I think the close of the
story will be great.” Again he says: “As to the way in which these characters
have opened out [in Martin Chuzzlewit], that is to me one of the most
surprising processes of the mind in this sort of invention. Given what one
knows, what one does not know springs up; and I am as absolutely certain of
its being true, as I am of the law of gravitation—if such a thing is possible,
more so.”
Precisely such a thing (as Dickens very well understood) is not only
possible, but unavoidable. For what certainty have we of the law of
gravitation? Only by hearsay, by the submissive reception of a process of
reasoning conducted for us by Sir Isaac Newton and other vaguely conceived
men of science. The fall of an apple is an intense reality (especially if it falls
upon your head); but the law which regulates its speed is for you an
intellectual abstraction as remote as the idea of a “combination in restraint of
trade,” or the definition of “art for art’s sake.” Whereas the irrepressible
vivacity of Sam Weller, and the unctuous hypocrisy of Pecksniff, and the moist
humility of Uriah Heep, and the sublime conviviality of Dick Swiveller, and the
triumphant make-believe of the Marchioness are facts of experience. They
have touched you, and you cannot doubt them. The question whether they
are actual or imaginary is purely academic.
Another fairy-land feature of Dickens’s world is the way in which minor
personages of the drama suddenly take the centre of the stage and hold the
attention of the audience. It is always so in fairy-land.
In The Tempest, what are Prospero and Miranda, compared with Caliban
and Ariel? In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who thinks as much of Oberon and
Titania, as of Puck, and Bottom the Weaver? Even in an historical drama like
Henry IV, we feel that Falstaff is the most historic character.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/169-250411060014-d481e6df/85/Vehicular-Networks-Models-and-Algorithms-1st-Edition-Andr-Luc-Beylot-33-320.jpg)
![sends him to sleep. At his worst, he says his prayers on the street-corners and
reviles his neighbour for sins which he himself cherishes in secret.
That is the snob: the particular species of sham whom Thackeray pursues
and satirizes through all his disguises and metamorphoses. He does it
unsparingly, yet never—or at least hardly ever—savagely. There is always a
strain of good humour in it, and often a touch of fellow-feeling for the man
himself, camouflaged under his affectations. It may not be worth while—this
kind of work. All satire is perishable. It has no more of the immortal in it than
the unreality which it aims to destroy. But some shams die hard. And while
they live and propagate, the arrows which hit them fairly are not out of date.
Stevenson makes a curious misjudgment of this part of Thackeray’s work,
when he says in his essay on “Some Gentlemen in Fiction”:
“Personally [Thackeray] scarce appeals to us as the ideal gentleman; if
there were nothing else, perpetual nosing after snobbery at least suggests the
snob.”
Most true, beloved R. L. S., but did you forget that this is precisely what
Thackeray himself says? He tells us not to be too quick or absolute in our
judgments; to acknowledge that we have some faults and failings of our own;
to remember that other people have sometimes hinted at a vein, a trace, a
vestige of snobbery in ourselves. Search for truth and speak it; but, above all,
no arrogance—faut pas monter sur ses grands chevaux. Have you ever read
the end of the lecture on “Charity and Humour”?
“The author ... has been described by The London Times newspaper as a
writer of considerable parts, but a dreary misanthrope, who sees no good
anywhere, who sees the sky above him green, I think, instead of blue, and
only miserable sinners around him. So we are, as is every writer and reader I
have heard of; so was every being who ever trod this earth, save One. I
cannot help telling the truth as I view it, and describing what I see. To
describe it otherwise than it seems to me would be falsehood in that calling in
which it has pleased Heaven to place me; treason to that conscience which
says that men are weak; that truth must be told; that faults must be owned;
that pardon must be prayed for; and that Love reigns supreme over all.”
II
With Vanity Fair begins what some one has called the quadrilateral on which
Thackeray’s larger fame rests. The three other pillars are, Henry Esmond,
Pendennis, and The Newcomes. Which is the greatest of these four novels?](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/169-250411060014-d481e6df/85/Vehicular-Networks-Models-and-Algorithms-1st-Edition-Andr-Luc-Beylot-54-320.jpg)
Vehicular Networks Models and Algorithms 1st Edition Andr?-Luc Beylot
- 1. Vehicular Networks Models and Algorithms 1st Edition Andr?-Luc Beylot pdf download https://ebookfinal.com/download/vehicular-networks-models-and- algorithms-1st-edition-andr-luc-beylot/ Explore and download more ebooks or textbooks at ebookfinal.com
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- 5. Vehicular Networks Models and Algorithms 1st Edition Andr?-Luc Beylot Digital Instant Download Author(s): Andr?-Luc Beylot, Houda Labiod ISBN(s): 9781848214897, 1848214898 Edition: 1 File Details: PDF, 11.85 MB Year: 2013 Language: english
- 7. Vehicular Networks Models and Algorithms Edited by André-Luc Beylot Houda Labiod Series Editor Guy Pujolle
- 8. First published 2013 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address: ISTE Ltd John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 27-37 St George’s Road 111 River Street London SW19 4EU Hoboken, NJ 07030 UK USA www.iste.co.uk www.wiley.com © ISTE Ltd 2013 The rights of André-Luc Beylot and Houda Labiod to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Library of Congress Control Number: 2013936314 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-84821-489-7 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd., Croydon, Surrey CR0 4YY
- 9. Table of Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Houda LABIOD and André-Luc BEYLOT Chapter 1. Congestion Control for Safety Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Razvan STANICA, Emmanuel CHAPUT and André-Luc BEYLOT 1.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2. Beaconing frequency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.3. Data rate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.4. Transmission power. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 1.5. Minimum contention window . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 1.6. Physical carrier sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 1.7. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 1.8. Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Chapter 2. Inter-Vehicle Communication for the Next Generation of Intelligent Transport Systems: Trends in Geographic Ad Hoc Routing Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Xunxing DIAO, Kun-Mean MOU, Jian-Jin LI and Haiying ZHOU 2.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 2.2. IVC-relating ITS projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 2.3. Wireless sublayer techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
- 10. vi Vehicular Networks 2.3.1. WLAN and WPAN (up to 300 m) . . . . . . . . 45 2.3.2. Dedicated short-range communication (up to 1 km) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 2.3.3. Cellular networks (more than 1 km) . . . . . 49 2.3.4. Comparison. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 2.4. Geographic routing techniques for VANET . . . 52 2.4.1. Features of VANET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 2.4.2. Localization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 2.4.3. Unicast greedy routing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 2.4.4. Geocast (multicast) routing . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 2.4.5. Delay tolerant network-based routing . . . . 75 2.4.6. Map-based routing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 2.5. Conclusion and open issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 2.6. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 2.7. Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Chapter 3. CONVOY: A New Cluster-Based Routing Protocol for Vehicular Networks. . . . . . 91 Véronique VÈQUE, Florent KAISSER, Colette JOHNEN and Anthony BUSSON 3.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 3.2. Clustering or network partitioning . . . . . . . . . 94 3.2.1. General remarks on the partitioning of mobile ad hoc networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 3.2.2. Controlling the number of hops . . . . . . . . . 96 3.2.3. Controlling the number of nodes . . . . . . . . 97 3.2.4. Role of the clusterhead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 3.3. Mobility-based clustering in ad hoc vehicular networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 3.3.1. The dynamics of vehicular traffic in VANETs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 3.3.2. Clustering according to the lane . . . . . . . . 101 3.3.3. Clustering depending on the relative speed between the vehicles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 3.3.4. Clustering depending on the direction of the movement (movement-based) . . . . . . . . . . 101 3.3.5. Clustering depending on the radio link quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
- 11. Table of Contents vii 3.3.6. Clustering depending on speed and relative speed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 3.3.7. Clustering depending on the position, speed and direction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 3.4. Clustering of VANETs for MAC and transport applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 3.4.1. Cluster-based MAC protocol . . . . . . . . . . . 105 3.4.2. Clustering for transport applications . . . . . 106 3.5. CONVOY: a vehicle convoy formation protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 3.5.1. Intra-convoy communication protocol . . . . . 110 3.5.2. Convoy formation algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . 110 3.6. Assessment of the convoy formation protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 3.6.1. Optimal parameters of the algorithm . . . . . 119 3.6.2. Distribution of the length of convoys . . . . . 120 3.6.3. Convoy stability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 3.7. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 3.8. Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 Chapter 4. Complementarity between Vehicular Networks and LTE Networks . . . . . . . 131 Guillaume RÉMY, Sidi-Mohammed SENOUCI, François JAN and Yvon GOURHANT 4.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 4.2. State of the art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 4.3. General description of the proposed architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 4.3.1. Network organization mechanisms for areas completely covered by LTE . . . . . . . . . . 139 4.3.2. Network organization mechanisms for areas that are not completely covered by LTE . . . 140 4.3.3. Information collection application: LTE4V2X-C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 4.3.4. Information dissemination application: LTE4V2X-D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
- 12. viii Vehicular Networks 4.4. Detailed description of the LTE4V2X-C protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 4.4.1. Initialization phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 4.4.2. Maintenance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 4.4.3. Extension for the areas not covered by the LTE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 4.5. A detailed description of the LTE4V2X-D protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 4.6. Performance evaluation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 4.6.1. Hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 4.6.2. The results of the simulation and their analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 4.6.3. Analysis of the impact of the handover. . . . 164 4.7. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 4.8. Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Chapter 5. Gateway Selection Algorithms in Vehicular Networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Ghayet e mouna ZHIOUA, Houda LABIOD, Nabil TABBANE and Sami TABBANE 5.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 5.2. Clustering and gateway selection in VANET networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 5.2.1. Clustering in VANET networks. . . . . . . . . 173 5.2.2. Gateway selection in a clustered/ non-clustered VANET architecture. . . . . . . . . . . 177 5.2.3. Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 5.3. Gateway selection in a clustered VANET-LTE advanced hybrid network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 5.3.1. Problem statement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 5.3.2. LTE-advanced standard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 5.3.3. Proposed algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 5.3.4. Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 5.4. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 5.5. Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 l
- 13. Table of Contents ix Chapter 6. Synthetic Mobility Traces for Vehicular Networking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Sandesh UPPOOR, Marco FIORE and Jérôme HÄRRI 6.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 6.2. Generation process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 6.2.1. Road topology database. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 6.2.2. Microscopic traffic flow description. . . . . . . 215 6.2.3. Macroscopic road traffic description . . . . . . 218 6.3. Mobility simulators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 6.3.1. Microscopic traffic simulators . . . . . . . . . . 220 6.3.2. Mesoscopic traffic simulators. . . . . . . . . . . 221 6.3.3. Macroscopic traffic simulators . . . . . . . . . . 222 6.3.4. Interactions between simulators . . . . . . . . 223 6.4. Mobility traces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 6.4.1. Perception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 6.4.2. Small-scale measurements . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 6.4.3. Road traffic imagery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 6.4.4. Roadside detectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 6.4.5. Sociodemographic surveys. . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 6.4.6. Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 6.5. Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240 Chapter 7. Traffic Signal Control Systems and Car-to-Car Communications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Mounir BOUSSEDJRA, Nitin MASLEKAR, Joseph MOUZNA and Houda LABIOD 7.1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 7.2. Classification of traffic signal control systems . 249 7.2.1. Static systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250 7.2.2. Dynamic systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 7.3. Traffic signal control and car-to-car communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 7.4. Summary and conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 7.5. Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 List of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
- 14. Introduction Due to the technical improvements implemented by car manufacturers, we have recently witnessed a significant decrease in road traffic accidents in developed countries. However, there is still considerable scope for improvement in the field of road safety. The advancement made in wireless communications provides numerous possibilities for offering drivers a large panoply of interesting services in the field of intelligent transport systems (ITS). The proposed solutions include the possibility to enable communication directly between vehicles or through a telecommunication infrastructure. The first solutions are thus related to infrastructureless communications and ad hoc networks; so we will discuss vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs); in contrast, the second set of solutions comprises more conventional communications that can use infrastructures (general packet radio service (GPRS), universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS), long-term evolution (LTE), etc.). Hybrid solutions could be involved in order to make the best use of available resources.
- 15. xii Vehicular Networks Therefore, from a network point of view, we see that new, specific problems are emerging. These problems are related not only to the particular applications implemented but also to the heterogeneous aspect of the types of networks used. For example, in the given context, we cannot simply apply the proposed solutions to ad hoc networks (such as mobile ad hoc network (MANET)). The tackled themes can be found at the crossroads of several research communities: the telecommunications research community and the research community of transport systems. In this book, we discuss several interesting and relevant research topics related to vehicular networks, such as congestion control, routing, clustering, interconnection between vehicular networks and LTE/LTE advanced networks, signal traffic control, simulation tools and mobility trace generation. The main objective of this book is to present the contributions brought by each research community in their respective fields. Finally, we have chosen a descriptive approach to draw up exhaustive reports, to globally present the individual author contributions, to illustrate clearly their advantages and limitations, and to pave the way for future research. Readers wishing to broaden their knowledge of the technical concepts will find at the end of each chapter a set of references and the recent publications of various authors. Considering the diversity of the fields discussed in various chapters, this book is structured into seven chapters. Following the Introduction written by Houda Labiod and André-Luc Beylot, Chapter 1 written by Razvan Stanica, Emmanuel Chaput and André-Luc Beylot presents a state of the art of the congestion control protocols in VANET networks. This problem is very critical. A tendency toward decentralized congestion control is emerging at the level of academic research, as well as at the level of standardization,
- 16. Introduction xiii more particularly within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) where several technical specifications have been published on this subject. Five approaches are discussed in this chapter: the first approach based on the adaptation of the sending frequency of beacons, the second approach based on the increase in data transmission flow rate (due to the use of complex modulations), the third approach based on the transmission power control in order to increase the channel capacity, the fourth approach based on the reduction of the contention window size and, finally, the fifth approach based on carrier sensing. A performance assessment of several adaptive mechanisms involved is presented by comparing them to the IEEE 802.11p standard mechanism. Chapter 2, written by Xunxing Diao, Jian-Jin Li, Kun- Mean Mou and Haiying Zhou, focuses on the geographical routing techniques in a pure VANET. The routing is, of course, a basic, indispensable feature that must be supported by every ad hoc network, including VANETs. The routing in vehicular networks – which is different from classic IP routing and from MANET routing – is, in particular, a challenging problem due to the high mobility of vehicles on the one hand and the frailty of wireless connections on the other hand, and due to the strong constraints of the applications as well. The chapter presents a summary of various ITS projects related to intervehicular communications. Wireless technologies, which are indispensable in the design of all routing techniques, are made available, developed and experimented by these ITS projects, and described in detail before addressing the key problem, that is geographical routing dedicated to VANET. In the conclusion of this chapter, the authors sketch a list of open questions such as security, location management, transport layer contextual techniques and, finally, the support of the Quality-of-Service in order to increase the reliability and efficiency of the applications.
- 17. xiv Vehicular Networks Chapter 3, written by Véronique Vèque, Florent Kaisser, Colette Johnen and Anthony Busson, analyzes the forming of clusters in vehicular networks. The authors start out from the assumption that the VANETs by themselves cannot implement all the applications correctly, primarily because of their intermittent connection. They can only function in conjunction with an infrastructure. However, if we observe road traffic, we notice that natural groups of vehicles are formed and the main objective then becomes to take advantage of these geographical characteristics in order to form clusters. The aim of clustering is to facilitate the organization of communications and minimize their cost. The authors then propose a hierarchical protocol called a “convoy”, which allows the construction of stable clusters as well as providing scalability. Chapter 4, written by Guillaume Rémy, Sidi-Mohammed Senouci, François Jan and Yvon Gourhant, sheds more light on the previous chapter by focusing on the complementarity between infrastructureless vehicular networks and LTE networks. The idea is thus to fill in the gaps of the infrastructure-based network coverage by using intervehicle communications. The solution is called LTE for vehicle-to-X communications (LTE4V2X) and has several characteristics. A first protocol allows us to collect information and organize the network in a centralized manner. Depending on the total or partial coverage by the LTE network, several scenarios are considered. A second protocol deals with the dissemination of data toward the vehicles, uniquely either in LTE or in multihop networks. Giving specific examples, the authors show that their solution is powerful and it allows us to fix, quite effectively, the gaps in coverage due to the presence of tunnels, for example. Chapter 5, written by Ghayet El Mouna Zhioua, Houda Labiod, Nabil Tabbane and Sami Tabbane, discusses the integration of VANET networks into fourth-generation
- 18. Introduction xv mobile networks. The association between a mobile network and a VANET network aims to improve the coverage of the mobile network and the Quality-of-Service, while having the possibility to resort to alternative traffic routes in case there are any problems on the usual connections. In the first stage, the authors give an overview of the state of the art of clustering algorithms proposed in the relevant literature. The gateway selection problem for the vehicle-to- infrastructure (V2I) connection is discussed in the case of traffic transport from the VANET network toward the infrastructure. The authors study the proposed algorithms in a clustered and non-clustered VANET architecture. Then, the authors look into the problem of gateway selection from the VANET network toward the LTE advanced network. Chapter 6, written by Jérôme Härri, Sandesh Uppoor and Marco Fiore, deals with the simulation of vehicular networks. The authors present an exhaustive report on the simulation tools used, including microscopic, macroscopic and mesoscopic traffic simulators, as well as on the interactions between these different simulators. The chapter details the trace generation/mobility models used by the network simulators aimed for the assessment of different vehicular networks’ mechanisms; it also provides the reader with the basic elements for successfully carrying out simulations for these type of networks. Chapter 7 describes the signal traffic control systems. The authors provide a classification of the different existing systems and a fine comparison between them. A special emphasis is placed on the dynamic systems whose objective is to reduce traffic jams and improve traffic flow. A new original approach via vehicle-to-vehicle communications is presented. The proposed control system adjusts the duration of traffic lights by using the density information provided by the dissemination protocols, which, in turn, use geographic and directional clustering.
- 19. xvi Vehicular Networks Besides presenting several relevant and very interesting areas of research, we hope that this book will contribute to bring a realistic global view of the evolution of VANETs. As all the authors in this book have already pointed out, there still remain numerous research topics to be explored. We warmly thank the authors for their very relevant contributions and the quality of their work, as well as the proofreaders who had the difficult task of helping us deliver a final version of this book. Houda LABIOD and André-Luc BEYLOT April 2013
- 20. Chapter 1 Congestion Control for Safety Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks 1.1. Introduction In the highly dynamic vehicular environment, congestion control is essential, especially with regard to safety messages. Although a dedicated spectrum has been allocated for vehicular communications, the European 30 MHz Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) band (with a possible extension to 50 MHz) or the US 75 MHz Direct Short Range Communication (DSRC) band still represent a scarce resource and need efficient mechanisms in order to be optimally used under high vehicular density. In both Europe and the US, the allocated spectrum has been divided into 10 MHz channels. From these channels, one is known as the control channel (CCH) and it is used solely by road safety applications. The rest of the channels, called service channels (SCH), can be used by both safety and non-safety applications. Chapter written by Razvan STANICA, Emmanuel CHAPUT and André-Luc BEYLOT.
- 21. 2 Vehicular Networks The number of proposed vehicular safety applications that could use direct vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication is impressive [PAP 09]. However, at a close inspection, it can be noted that all these applications practically use the same information, coming from onboard sensors of neighboring vehicles: speed, acceleration, steering angle and location. Considering this, the standardization bodies decided to add a supplementary layer between the applications and the transport protocol. The role of this layer, called message sublayer in the IEEE Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) architecture and facilities layer in the ETSI ITS terminology, is to keep an accurate image of the surrounding environment inside every vehicle and to provide applications with the desired information. The facilities layer only needs two types of messages in order to achieve these objectives, called (in the ETSI ITS architecture) cooperative awareness message (CAM) and decentralized environmental notification message (DENM). CAMs are regular beacons, transmitted by every vehicle with a predetermined frequency, and containing details about the vehicle that might be relevant to its neighbors from a safety point of view. In addition, if a vehicle detects a potential hazard (e.g. a sudden brake) and considers that this information needs to be quickly disseminated to the other traffic participants, it transmits a DENM. However, regardless of the scenario and message type, these safety messages are always transmitted in broadcast mode at the medium access control (MAC) layer. Even in the case when the transmitted information targets a certain geographical area (e.g. an electronic brake alarm is only of interest to vehicles traveling in the same direction as the transmitter and situated behind it), the message is still broadcast and the filtering happens at the facilities layer, as described by the ETSI framework [EUR 10].
- 22. Congestion Control 3 The broadcast nature of the CCH in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) is an essential property that distinguishes it from other IEEE 802.11-based networks. As a matter of fact, the numerous studies on the distributed coordination function (DCF) implementing MAC mechanisms in IEEE 802.11 usually focus on unicast traffic, and broadcast messages are only considered for control purposes. Oliveira et al. [OLI 09] quantify the influence of broadcast traffic on the performance of IEEE 802.11 networks, and they find out that the effect of broadcast messages becomes significant when the proportion of broadcast traffic is higher than 50%. In this scenario, the behavior of the network largely deviates from what is predicted by classic DCF models. However, the authors consider this situation quite unreal and they do not investigate the issue further. Another important characteristic of safety messages comes from the limited lifetime of CAMs. As these beacons are produced periodically by the facilities layer, there is a certain probability that they can expire before the MAC layer has the opportunity to transmit them. When a CAM is waiting for the IEEE 802.11 back-off timer to expire, and the next beacon also arrives in the transmission queue, the first message has to be dropped, as its transmission would only disseminate outdated information to its neighbors. This property, rarely taken into consideration in VANET studies, has a significant effect on the optimal value of different MAC layer parameters. The IEEE 802.11p amendment [THE 10] is the preferred MAC technology in both the IEEE WAVE and the ETSI ITS architectures. IEEE 802.11p radios can communicate at a distance of 1 km. In a simple scenario, with a two-lane road in both directions and an average inter-vehicular distance of 50 m (a medium density highway), the number of one-hop neighbors reaches 160 vehicles. This is clearly a more
- 23. 4 Vehicular Networks challenging environment than the classic Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), with a central access point and no more than 10–20 nodes. The MAC layer protocol, therefore, needs solutions for this congested environment to achieve scalability. Congestion control mechanisms received a lot of attention from the VANET research community and the most relevant studies in this area are summarized later. The standardization bodies also recognized the importance of a decentralized congestion control framework for V2V safety communications, and ETSI published a series of technical specifications in this area in July 2011 [EUR 11]. In the US, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) is also developing a standard with similar objectives, SAE J2945.1, currently in a draft phase. SAE J2945.1 is expected to be integrated into the WAVE architecture as a complement for the different IEEE standards. In this chapter, five different approaches for MAC layer congestion control are discussed. In section 1.2, beaconing frequency adaptation is presented that reduces the number of transmitted safety messages in a dense network, speculating the relationship between high density and reduced speed in vehicular traffic. In section 1.3, increased data rates can be achieved by using more complex modulations and result in a lower occupancy of the CCH. Other proposals form the object of section 1.4, which are based on the fact that transmission power control has an important impact on the number of hidden nodes, and can increase the spatial reuse and hence the channel capacity, in a congested network. In section 1.5, the fourth element, the minimum contention window (CWmin), is analyzed, a parameter with a major importance for collision probability in an IEEE 802.11 network. Finally, the role of the physical carrier sense in congestion control is highlighted in section 1.6.
- 24. Congestion Control 5 1.2. Beaconing frequency The most obvious solution for controlling the channel load in a congested environment is to reduce the number of transmitted messages. This can be achieved in a straightforward manner in vehicular networks by adapting the frequency of the safety beaconing. However, such an adaptive mechanism should be designed carefully because sending less messages can easily have the effect of damaging the performance of safety applications instead of improving it. In this context, Fukui et al. [FUK 02] proposed transmitting a CAM every time the vehicle travels a certain distance instead of using a regular time interval. According to a fundamental relationship from traffic theory, the mean speed decreases when the vehicular density increases, thus the consequence of this approach would be that nodes would reduce the beaconing frequency in a dense network where they would travel at low speeds. However, a basic example for which this solution fails is that of a vehicle waiting to make a left turn in normal traffic. Because the vehicle would need to stop, the adaptive mechanism would practically turn off the beaconing transmission, making an application like the left turn assistant practically unusable. Therefore, as stationary vehicles or low speeds are not always the consequences of high vehicular densities, such an approach cannot be efficiently used in a real scenario. As a part of the California PATH program, Rezaei et al. [REZ 07] take a more complex approach, where vehicles run an estimator to calculate the position of each one-hop neighbor based on the already received messages. The same estimator is used by the node to predict its own position, as it would be calculated by its neighbors. When the difference between the prediction and the actual location becomes larger than a predefined threshold, the node transmits a
- 25. 6 Vehicular Networks safety beacon. The problem with this solution is that it is efficient in the predictable free-flow traffic, but not in a congested scenario where the acceleration is highly variable. Moreover, this self-estimator approach does not take into account that the error at some of the neighbors might be considerably different because some of the transmitted beacons could be lost. To solve this problem, Huang et al. [HUA 10] further develop this idea using the packet error ratio (PER) measured by a node to predict the losses encountered by its neighbors. Still, measuring a PER in a vehicular network without being able to detect collisions or use feedback from the receivers is not a straightforward task. Seo et al. [SEO 10] make an analogy between the safety beaconing and the coupon collector problem. The mechanism they design relies upon nodes piggybacking acknowledgments (ACKs) for the received beacons in their own safety message. Every received ACK would further delay the transmission of the next CAM, reducing the beaconing frequency. However, the introduced overhead would be significant, especially in a dense network (a 4 byte ACK for 50 one-hop neighbors would result in 200 extra bytes for every safety message). It is also unclear if this approach would be compatible with a security framework based on changing pseudonyms, like the approach currently proposed by the ETSI ITS architecture [PAP 08], because the ACK would need to include the identifier of the sender and most probably a sequence number for the acknowledged message. Adaptive Traffic Beacon (ATB) is a solution/mechanism/ approach proposed by Sommer et al. [SOM 11], where the beaconing frequency is calculated based on two metrics: the channel quality and the message utility. The idea is to transmit only the most important messages in a congested network, reducing the offered load. Nevertheless, the channel quality is very sensitive to the number of collisions, which implies that the nodes are somehow supposed to detect such
- 26. Discovering Diverse Content Through Random Scribd Documents
- 27. So they did eat and were filled, For he gave them their own desire. They were not estranged from their lust: But while the meat was yet in their mouths, The wrath of God came upon them, and slew the fattest of them, And smote down the chosen men of Israel. The Forty-fifth Psalm is a Marriage Ode: the Hebrew title calls it a Love Song. It bears all the marks of having been composed for some royal wedding-feast in Jerusalem. There are many nature lyrics among the Psalms. The Twenty-ninth is notable for its rugged realism. It is a Song of Thunder. The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars: Yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon: He maketh them also to skip like a calf: Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn. The One Hundred and Fourth, on the contrary, is full of calm sublimity and meditative grandeur. O, Lord, my God, thou art very great: Thou art clothed with honour and majesty: Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment; Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain. The Nineteenth is famous for its splendid comparison between “the starry heavens and the moral law.” I think that we may find also some dramatic lyrics among the Psalms— poems composed to express the feelings of an historic person, like David or Solomon, in certain well-known and striking experiences of his life. That a later writer should thus embody and express the truth dramatically through the personality of some great hero of the past, involves no falsehood. It is a mode of utterance which has been common to the literature of all lands and of all ages. Such a method of composition would certainly be no hindrance to the spirit of inspiration. The Thirty-first Psalm, for instance, is ascribed by the
- 28. title to David. But there is strong reason, in the phraseology and in the spirit of the poem, to believe that it was written by the Prophet Jeremiah. III It is not to be supposed that our reverence for the Psalms in their moral and religious aspects will make us put them all on the same level poetically. There is a difference among the books of the New Testament in regard to the purity and dignity of the Greek in which they are written. There is a difference among St. Paul’s Epistles in regard to the clearness and force of their style. There is a difference even among the chapters of the same epistle in regard to the beauty of thought and language. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, the thirteenth chapter is poetic, and the fourteenth is prosaic. Why should there not be a difference in poetic quality among the Psalms? There is a difference. The honest reader will recognize it. It will be no harm to him if he should have his favourites among the poems which have been gathered from many centuries into this great collection. There are some, like the Twenty-seventh, the Forty-second, the Forty-sixth, the Fifty-first, the Sixty-third, the Ninety-first, the Ninety-sixth, the One Hundred and Third, the One Hundred and Seventh, the One Hundred and Thirty-ninth, which rank with the noblest poetic literature of the world. Others move on a lower level, and show the traces of effort and constraint. There are also manifest alterations and interpolations, which are not always improvements. Dr. Perowne, who is one of the wisest and most conservative of modern commentators, says, “Many of the Psalms have not come down to us in their original form,”[8] and refers to the alterations which the Seventieth makes in the Fortieth, and the Fifty-third in the Fourteenth. The last two verses of the Fifty-first were evidently added by a later hand. The whole book, in its present form, shows the marks of its compilation and use as the Hymn- Book of the Jewish people. Not only in the titles, but also in the text, we can discern the work of the compiler, critic, and adapter, sometimes wise, but occasionally otherwise. IV The most essential thing in the appreciation of the poetry in the Psalms is the recognition of the three great spiritual qualities which distinguish them.
- 29. The first of these is the deep and genuine love of nature. The psalmists delight in the vision of the world, and their joy quickens their senses to read both the larger hieroglyphs of glory written in the stars and the delicate tracings of transient beauty on leaf and flower; to hear both the mighty roaring of the sea and the soft sweet laughter of the rustling corn-fields. But in all these they see the handwriting and hear the voice of God. It is His presence that makes the world sublime and beautiful. The direct, piercing, elevating sense of this presence simplifies, enlarges, and enables their style, and makes it different from other nature-poetry. They never lose themselves, as Theocritus and Wordsworth and Shelley and Tennyson sometimes do, in the contemplation and description of natural beauty. They see it, but they always see beyond it. Compare, for example, a modern versified translation with the psalm itself: The spacious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their Great Original proclaim.[9] Addison’s descriptive epithets betray a conscious effort to make a splendid picture. But the psalmist felt no need of this; a larger impulse lifted him at once into “the grand style:” The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament showeth his handiwork. The second quality of the poetry in the Psalms is their passionate sense of the beauty of holiness. Keats was undoubtedly right in his suggestion that the poet must always see truth in the form of beauty. Otherwise he may be a philosopher, or a critic, or a moralist, but he is not a true poet. But we must go on from this standpoint to the Platonic doctrine that the highest form of beauty is spiritual and ethical. The poet must also see beauty in the light of truth. It is the harmony of the soul with the eternal music of the Good. And the highest poets are those who, like the psalmists, are most ardently enamoured of righteousness. This fills their songs with sweetness and fire incomparable and immortal:
- 30. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever: The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. The third quality of the poetry of the Psalms is their intense joy in God. No lover ever poured out the longings of his heart toward his mistress more eagerly than the Psalmist voices his desire and thirst for God. No conqueror ever sang of victory more exultantly than the Psalmist rejoices in the Lord, who is his light and his salvation, the strength of his life and his portion forever. After all, the true mission of poetry is to increase joy. It must, indeed, be sensitive to sorrow and acquainted with grief. But it has wings given to it in order that it may bear us up into the air of gladness. There is no perfect joy without love. Therefore love-poetry is the best. But the highest of all love-poetry is that which celebrates, with the Psalms, that Love which is and was My Father and my Brother and my God.
- 31. THE GOOD ENCHANTMENT OF CHARLES DICKENS I There are four kinds of novels. First, those that are easy to read and hard to remember: the well-told tales of no consequence, the cream-puffs of perishable fiction. Second, those that are hard to read and hard to remember: the purpose- novels which are tedious sermons in disguise, and the love-tales in which there is no one with whom it is possible to fall in love. Third, those that are hard to read and easy to remember: the books with a crust of perverse style or faulty construction through which the reader must break in order to get at the rich and vital meaning. Fourth, those that are easy to read and easy to remember: the novels in which stories worth telling are well-told, and characters worth observing are vividly painted, and life is interpreted to the imagination in enduring forms of literary art. These are the best-sellers which do not go out of print— everybody’s books. In this fourth class healthy-minded people and unprejudiced critics put the novels of Charles Dickens. For millions of readers they have fulfilled what Dr. Johnson called the purpose of good books, to teach us to enjoy life or help us to endure it. They have awakened laughter and tears. They have enlarged and enriched existence by revealing the hidden veins of humour and pathos beneath the surface of the every-day world, and by giving “the freedom of the city” to those poor prisoners who had thought of it only as the dwelling-place of so many hundred thousand inhabitants and no real persons. What a city it was that Dickens opened to us! London, of course, in outward form and semblance,—the London of the early Victorian epoch, with its reeking Seven Dials close to its perfumed Piccadilly, with its grimy river-front and its musty Inns of Court and its mildly rural suburbs, with its rollicking
- 32. taverns and its deadly solemn residential squares and its gloomy debtors’ prisons and its gaily insanitary markets, with all its consecrated conventions and unsuspected hilarities,—vast, portentous, formal, merry, childish, inexplicable, a wilderness of human homes and haunts, ever thrilling with sincerest passion, mirth, and pain,—London it was, as the eye saw it in those days, and as the curious traveller may still retrace some of its vanishing landmarks and fading features. But it was more than London, after Dickens touched it. It was an enchanted city, where the streets seemed to murmur of joy or fear, where the dark faces of the dens of crime scowled or leered at you, and the decrepit houses doddered in senility, and the new mansions stared you down with stolid pride. Everything spoke or made a sign to you. From red-curtained windows jollity beckoned. From prison-doors lean hands stretched toward you. Under bridges and among slimy piers the river gurgled, and chuckled, and muttered unholy secrets. Across trim front-yards little cottages smiled and almost nodded their good-will. There were no dead spots, no deaf and dumb regions. All was alive and significant. Even the real estate became personal. One felt that it needed but a word, a wave of the wand, to bring the buildings leaping, roistering, creeping, tottering, stalking from their places. It was an enchanted city, and the folk who filled it and almost, but never quite, crowded it to suffocation, were so intensely and supernaturally human, so blackly bad, so brightly good, so touchingly pathetic, so supremely funny, that they also were creatures of enchantment and seemed to come from fairy- land. For what is fairy-land, after all? It is not an invisible region, an impossible place. It is only the realm of the hitherto unobserved, the not yet realized, where the things we have seen but never noticed, and the persons we have met but never known, are suddenly “translated,” like Bottom the Weaver, and sent forth upon strange adventures. That is what happens to the Dickens people. Good or bad they surpass themselves when they get into his books. That rotund Brownie, Mr. Pickwick, with his amazing troupe; that gentle compound of Hop-o’-my-Thumb and a Babe in the Wood, Oliver Twist, surrounded by wicked uncles, and hungry ogres, and good fairies in bottle-green coats; that tender and lovely Red Riding-Hood, Little Nell; that impetuous Hans-in-Luck, Nicholas Nickleby; that intimate Cinderella, Little Dorrit; that simple-minded Aladdin, Pip; all these, and a thousand more like them, go rambling through Dickensopolis and behaving naturally in a most extraordinary manner.
- 33. Things that have seldom or never happened, occur inevitably. The preposterous becomes the necessary, the wildly improbable is the one thing that must come to pass. Mr. Dombey is converted, Mr. Krook is removed by spontaneous combustion, Mr. Micawber performs amazing feats as an amateur detective, Sam Weller gets married, the immortally absurd epitaphs of Young John Chivery and Mrs. Sapsea are engraved upon monuments more lasting than brass. The fact is, Dickens himself was bewitched by the spell of his own imagination. His people carried him away, did what they liked with him. He wrote of Little Nell: “You can’t imagine how exhausted I am to-day with yesterday’s labours. I went to bed last night utterly dispirited and done up. All night I have been pursued by the child; and this morning I am unrefreshed and miserable. I don’t know what to do with myself.... I think the close of the story will be great.” Again he says: “As to the way in which these characters have opened out [in Martin Chuzzlewit], that is to me one of the most surprising processes of the mind in this sort of invention. Given what one knows, what one does not know springs up; and I am as absolutely certain of its being true, as I am of the law of gravitation—if such a thing is possible, more so.” Precisely such a thing (as Dickens very well understood) is not only possible, but unavoidable. For what certainty have we of the law of gravitation? Only by hearsay, by the submissive reception of a process of reasoning conducted for us by Sir Isaac Newton and other vaguely conceived men of science. The fall of an apple is an intense reality (especially if it falls upon your head); but the law which regulates its speed is for you an intellectual abstraction as remote as the idea of a “combination in restraint of trade,” or the definition of “art for art’s sake.” Whereas the irrepressible vivacity of Sam Weller, and the unctuous hypocrisy of Pecksniff, and the moist humility of Uriah Heep, and the sublime conviviality of Dick Swiveller, and the triumphant make-believe of the Marchioness are facts of experience. They have touched you, and you cannot doubt them. The question whether they are actual or imaginary is purely academic. Another fairy-land feature of Dickens’s world is the way in which minor personages of the drama suddenly take the centre of the stage and hold the attention of the audience. It is always so in fairy-land. In The Tempest, what are Prospero and Miranda, compared with Caliban and Ariel? In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who thinks as much of Oberon and Titania, as of Puck, and Bottom the Weaver? Even in an historical drama like Henry IV, we feel that Falstaff is the most historic character.
- 34. Dickens’s first lady and first gentleman are often less memorable than his active supernumeraries. A hobgoblin like Quilp, a good old nurse like Peggotty, a bad old nurse like Sairey Gamp, a volatile elf like Miss Mowcher, a shrewd elf and a blunder-headed elf like Susan Nipper and Mr. Toots, a good-natured disreputable sprite like Charley Bates, a malicious gnome like Noah Claypole, a wicked ogre like Wackford Squeers, a pair of fairy-godmothers like the Cheeryble Brothers, a dandy ouphe like Mr. Mantalini, and a mischievous, wooden-legged kobold like Silas Wegg, take stronger hold upon us than the Harry Maylies and Rose Flemings, the John Harmons and Bella Wilfers, for whose ultimate matrimonial felicity the business of the plot is conducted. Even the more notable heroes often pale a little by comparison with their attendants. Who remembers Martin Chuzzlewit as clearly as his servant Mark Tapley? Is Pip, with his Great Expectations, half as delightful as his clumsy dry-nurse Joe Gargery? Has even the great Pickwick a charm to compare with the unique, immortal Sam Weller? Do not imagine that Dickens was unconscious of this disarrangement of rôles, or that it was an evidence of failure on his part. He knew perfectly well what he was doing. Great authors always do. They cannot help it, and they do not care. Homer makes Agamemnon and Priam the kings of his tale, and Paris the first walking gentleman and Helen the leading lady. But Achilles and Ajax and Hector are the bully boys, and Ulysses is the wise jester, and Thersites the tragic clown. As for Helen,— The face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium— her reputed pulchritude means less to us than the splendid womanhood of Andromache, or the wit and worth of the adorable matron Penelope. Now this unconventionality of art, which disregards ranks and titles, even those of its own making, and finds the beautiful and the absurd, the grotesque and the picturesque, the noble and the base, not according to the programme but according to the fact, is precisely the essence of good enchantment. Good enchantment goes about discovering the ass in the lion’s skin and the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the princess in the goose-girl and the wise man under the fool’s cap, the pretender in the purple robe and the rightful heir in rags, the devil in the belfry and the Redeemer among the publicans and sinners. It is the spirit of revelation, the spirit of divine sympathy and laughter,
- 35. the spirit of admiration, hope, and love—or better still, it is simply the spirit of life. When I call this the essence of good enchantment I do not mean that it is unreal. I mean only that it is unrealistic, which is just the opposite of unreal. It is not in bondage to the beggarly elements of form and ceremony. It is not captive to names and appearances, though it revels in their delightful absurdity. It knows that an idol is nothing, and finds all the more laughter in its pompous pretence of being something. It can afford to be merry because it is in earnest; it is happy because it has not forgotten how to weep; it is content because it is still unsatisfied; it is humble in the sense of unfathomed faults and exalted in the consciousness of inexhaustible power; it calls nothing common or unclean; it values life for its mystery, its surprisingness, and its divine reversals of human prejudice,—just like Beauty and the Beast and the story of the Ugly Duckling. This, I say, is the essence of good enchantment; and it is also the essence of true religion. “For God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the mighty, and base things of the world and things which are despised, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things which are.” This is also the essence of real democracy, which is not a theory of government but a state of mind. No one has ever expressed it better than Charles Dickens did in a speech which he made at Hartford, Connecticut, seventy years ago. “I have faith,” said he, “and I wish to diffuse faith in the existence—yes, of beautiful things, even in those conditions of society which are so degenerate, so degraded and forlorn, that at first sight it would seem as though it could only be described by a strange and terrible reversal of the words of Scripture—God said let there be light, and there was none. I take it that we are born, and that we hold our sympathies, hopes, and energies in trust for the Many and not the Few. That we cannot hold in too strong a light of disgust and contempt, before our own view and that of others, all meanness, falsehood, cruelty, and oppression of every grade and kind. Above all, that nothing is high because it is in a high place; and that nothing is low because it is in a low place. This is the lesson taught us in the great book of Nature. This is the lesson which may be read alike in the bright track of the stars, and in the dusty course of the poorest thing that drags its tiny length upon the ground.” This was the creed of Dickens; and like every man’s creed, conscious or unconscious, confessed or concealed, it made him what he was.
- 36. It has been said that he had no deep philosophy, no calmly reasoned and clearly stated theory of the universe. Perhaps that is true. Yet I believe he hardly missed it. He was too much interested in living to be anxious about a complete theory of life. Perhaps it would have helped him when trouble came, when domestic infelicity broke up his home, if he could have climbed into some philosopher’s ivory tower. Perhaps not. I have observed that even the most learned and philosophic mortals, under these afflictions, sometimes fail to appreciate the consolations of philosophy to any noticeable extent. From their ivory towers they cry aloud, being in pain, even as other men. But it was certainly not true (even though his biographer wrote it, and it has been quoted a thousand times), that just because Dickens cried aloud, “there was for him no ‘city of the mind’ against outward ills, for inner consolation and shelter.” He was not cast out and left comfortless. Faith, hope, and charity—these three abode with him. His human sympathy, his indomitable imagination, his immense and varied interest in the strange adventures of men and women, his unfaltering intuition of the truer light of God that burns In this vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, Heart, or whatever else—— these were the celestial powers and bright serviceable angels that built and guarded for him a true “city of refuge,” secure, inviolate, ever open to the fugitive in the day of his calamity. Thither he could flee to find safety. There he could ungird his heart and indulge Love and the thoughts that breathe for humankind; there he could laugh and sing and weep with the children, the dream- children, which God had given him; there he could enter into his work-shop and shut the door and lose himself in joyous labour which should make the world richer by the gift of good books. And so he did, even until the end came and the pen fell from his fingers, he sitting safe in his city of refuge, learning and unfolding The Mystery of Edwin Drood. O enchanted city, great asylum in the mind of man, where ideals are embodied, and visions take form and substance to parley with us! Imagination rears thy towers and Fancy populates thy streets; yet art thou a city that hath
- 37. foundations, a dwelling eternal though unseen. Ever building, changing, never falling, thy walls are open-gated day and night. The fountain of youth is in thy gardens, the treasure of the humble in thy storehouses. Hope is thy doorkeeper, and Faith thy warden, and Love thy Lord. In thee the wanderer may take shelter and find himself by forgetting himself. In thee rest and refreshment are waiting for the weary, and new courage for the despondent, and new strength for the faint. From thy magic casements we have looked upon unknown horizons, and we return from thy gates to our task, our toil, our pilgrimage, with better and braver hearts, knowing more surely that the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear, and that the imperishable jewels of the universe are in the souls of men. O city of good enchantment, for my brethren and companions’ sakes I will now say: Peace be within thee! II Of the outward appearance, or, as Sartor Resartus would have called it, the Time-Vesture and Flesh-Garment of that flaming light-particle which was cast hither from Heaven in the person of Charles Dickens, and of his ways and manners while he hasted jubilantly and stormfully across the astonished Earth, something must be said here. Charles Dickens was born at Portsea, in 1812, an offspring of what the accurate English call the “lower middle class.” Inheriting something from a father who was decidedly Micawberish, and a mother who resembled Mrs. Nickleby, Charles was not likely to be a humdrum child. But the remarkable thing about him was the intense, aspiring, and gaily sensible spirit with which he entered into the business of developing whatever gifts he had received from his vague and amiable parents. The fat streak of comfort in his childish years, when his proud father used to stand the tiny lad on a table to sing comic songs for an applauding audience of relatives, could not spoil him. The lean streak of misery, when the improvident family sprawled in poverty, with its head in a debtors’ prison, while the bright, delicate, hungry boy roamed the streets, or drudged in a dirty blacking-factory, could not starve him. The two dry years of school at Wellington House Academy could not fossilize him. The years from fifteen to nineteen, when he was earning his bread as office-boy, lawyers’ clerk, shorthand reporter, could not commercialize him. Through it all he burned his way painfully and joyously.
- 38. He was not to be detailed as a perpetual comic songster in upholstered parlors; nor as a prosperous frock-coated citizen with fatty degeneration of the mind; nor as a newspaper politician, a power beneath the footstool. None of these alluring prospects delayed him. He passed them by, observing everything as he went, now hurrying, now sauntering, for all the world like a boy who has been sent somewhere. Where it was, he found out in his twenty- fifth year, when the extraordinary results of his self-education bloomed in the Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. Never was a good thing coming out of Nazareth more promptly welcomed. The simple-minded critics of that day had not yet discovered the damning nature of popularity, and they hailed the new genius in spite of the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were reading his books. His success was exhilarating, overwhelming, and at times intoxicating. It was roses, roses all the way.— Some of them had thorns, which hurt his thin skin horribly, but they never made him despair or doubt the goodness of the universe. Being vexed, he let it off in anger instead of distilling it into pessimism to poison himself. Life was too everlastingly interesting for him to be long unhappy. A draught of his own triumph would restore him, a slice of his own work would reinvigorate him, and he would go on with his industrious dreaming. No one enjoyed the reading of his books more than he the making of them, though he sometimes suffered keenly in the process. That was a proof of his faith that happiness does not consist in the absence of suffering, but in the presence of joy. Dulness, insincerity, stupid humbug—voilà l’ennemi! So he lived and wrote with a high hand and an outstretched arm. He made men see what he saw, and hate what he hated, and love what he loved. This was his great reward,—more than money, fame, or hosts of friends,—that he saw the children of his brain enter into the common life of the world.
- 39. CHARLES DICKENS AS CAPTAIN BOBADIL IN “EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR.” Painted by C. R. Leslie. But he was not exempt from the ordinary laws of nature. The conditions of his youth left their marks for good and evil on his maturity. The petting of his babyhood gave him the habit of showing off. We often see him as a grown man, standing on the table and reciting his little piece, or singing his little song, to please an admiring audience. He delighted in playing to the galleries. His early experience of poverty made him at once tremendously sympathetic and invincibly optimistic—both of which virtues belong to the poor more than to the rich. Dickens understood this and never forgot it. The chief moralities of his poor people are mutual helpfulness and unquenchable hopefulness. From them, also, he caught the tone of material comfort which characterizes his visions of the reward of virtue. Having known cold and hunger, he simply could not resist the desire to make his favourite characters —if they stayed on earth till the end of the book—warm and “comfy,” and to
- 40. give them plenty to eat and drink. This may not have been artistic, but it was intensely human. The same personal quality may be noted in his ardour as a reformer. No writer of fiction has ever done more to better the world than Charles Dickens. But he did not do it by setting forth programmes of legislation and theories of government. As a matter of fact, he professed an amusing “contempt for the House of Commons,” having been a Parliamentary reporter; and of Sir Robert Peel, who emancipated the Catholics, enfranchised the Jews, and repealed the Corn Laws, he thought so little that he caricatured him as Mr. Pecksniff. Dickens felt the evils of the social order at the precise point where the shoe pinched; he did not go back to the place where the leather was tanned or the last designed. It was some practical abuse in poorhouses or police-courts or prisons; it was some hidden shame in the conduct of schools, or the renting of tenements; it was some monumental absurdity in the Circumlocution Office, some pompous and cruel delay in the course of justice, that made him hot with indignation. These were the things that he assailed with Rabelaisian laughter, or over which he wept with a deeper and more sincere pity than that of Tristram Shandy. His idea was that if he could get people to see that a thing was both ridiculous and cruel, they would want to stop it. What would come after that, he did not clearly know, nor had he any particularly valuable suggestions to make, except the general proposition that men should do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their God. He took no stock in the doleful predictions of the politicians that England was in an awful state merely because Lord Coodle was going out of office, and Sir Thomas Doodle would not come in, and each of these was the only man to save the country. The trouble seemed to him deeper and more real. It was a certain fat-witted selfishness, a certain callous, complacent blindness in the people who were likely to read his books. He conceived that his duty as a novelist was done when he had shown up the absurd and hateful things, and made people laugh at their ugliness, weep over their inhumanity, and long to sweep them away. In this attitude, I think, Dickens was not only natural, and true to his bringing-up, but also wise as a great artist in literature. For I have observed that brilliant writers, while often profitable as satirists to expose abuses, are seldom judicious as legislators to plan reforms. Before we leave this subject of the effects of Dickens’s early poverty and sudden popularity, we must consider his alleged lack of refinement. Some say that he was vulgar, others that he was ungrateful and inconsiderate of the
- 41. feelings of his friends and relations, others that he had little or no taste. I should rather say, in the words of the old epigram, that he had a great deal of taste, and that some of it was very bad. Take the matter of his caricaturing real people in his books. No one could object to his use of the grotesque insolence of a well-known London magistrate as the foundation of his portrait of Mr. Fang in Oliver Twist. That was public property. But the amiable eccentricities of his own father and mother, the airy irresponsible ways of his good friend Leigh Hunt, were private property. Yet even here Dickens could not reasonably be blamed for observing them, for being amused by them, or for letting them enrich his general sense of the immense, incalculable, and fantastic humour of the world. Taste, which is simply another name for the gusto of life, has a comic side; and a man who is keenly sensitive to everything cannot be expected to be blind to the funny things that happen among his family and friends. But when Dickens used these private delights for the public amusement, and in such a form that the partial portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Mrs. Nickleby, and Harold Skimpole were easily identified, all that we can say is that his taste was still there, but it had gone bad. What could you expect? Where, in his early years, was he likely to have learned the old-fashioned habit of reserve in regard to private affairs, which you may call either a mark of good manners, or a sign of silly pride, according to your own education? Or take his behavior during his first visit to America in 1842, and immediately after his return to England. His reception was enough to turn anybody’s head. “There never was a king or emperor,” wrote Dickens to a friend, “so cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained at splendid balls and dinners, and waited upon by public bodies of all kinds.” This was at the beginning. At the end he was criticized by all, condemned by many, and abused by some of the newspapers. Why? Chiefly because he used the dinners given in his honour as occasions to convict the Americans of their gross national sin of literary piracy, and because when he got home he wrote a book of American Notes, containing some very severe strictures upon the country which had just entertained him so magnificently. Mr. Chesterton defends Dickens for his attack upon the American practice of book-stealing which grew out of the absence of an International Copyright Law. He says that it was only the new, raw sensibility of the Americans that was hurt by these speeches. “Dickens was not in the least desirous of being thought too ‘high-souled’ to want his wages.... He asked for his money in a valiant and ringing voice, like a man asking for his honour.” And this, Mr.
- 42. Chesterton leaves us to infer, is what any bold Englishman, as distinguished from a timidly refined American, would do. Precisely. But if the bold Englishman had been gently-bred would he have accepted an invitation to dinner in order that he might publicly say to his host, in a valiant and ringing voice, “You owe me a thousand pounds”? Such procedure at the dinner-table is contrary not only to good manners but also to good digestion. This is what Mr. Chesterton’s bold British constitution apparently prevents him from seeing. What Dickens said about international copyright was right. But he was wretchedly wrong in his choice of the time and place for saying it. The natural irritation which his bad taste produced was one of the causes which delayed for fifty years the success of the efforts of American authors to secure copyright for foreign authors. The same criticism applies to the American Notes. Read them again and you will see that they are not bad notes. With much that he says about Yankee boastfulness and superficiality, and the evils of slavery, and the dangers of yellow journalism, every sane American will agree to-day. But the occasion which Dickens took for making these remarks was not happily chosen. It was as if a man who had just been entertained at your house should write to thank you for the pleasure of the visit, and improve the opportunity to point out the shocking defects of your domestic service and the exceedingly bad tone which pervaded your establishment. Such a “bread-and- butter letter” might be full of good morals, but their effect would be diminished by its bad manners. Of this Dickens was probably quite unconscious. He acted spontaneously, irrepressibly, vivaciously, in accordance with his own taste; and it surprised and irritated him immensely that people were offended by it. It was precisely so in regard to his personal appearance. When the time suddenly arrived that he could indulge his taste in dress without fear of financial consequences, he did so hilariously and to the fullest extent. Here is a description of him as he appeared to an American girl at an evening party in Cincinnati eighty years ago. “He is young and handsome, has a mellow beautiful eye, fine brow and abundant hair.... His manner is easy and negligent, but not elegant. His dress was foppish.... He had a dark coat with lighter pantaloons; a black waistcoat embroidered with coloured flowers; and about his neck, covering his white shirt-front, was a black neck-cloth also embroidered with colours, on which were two large diamond pins connected by a chain; a gold watch-chain and a large red rose in his buttonhole completed his toilet.”
- 43. The young lady does not seem to have been delighted with this costume. But Dickens did not dress to please her, he dressed to please himself. His taste was so exuberant that it naturally effervesced in this kind of raiment. There was certainly nothing immoral about it. He had paid for it and he had a right to wear it, for to him it seemed beautiful. He would have been amazed to know that any young lady did not like it; and her opinion would probably have had little effect upon him, for he wrote of the occasion on which this candid girl met him, as follows: “In the evening we went to a party at Judge Walker’s and were introduced to at least one hundred and fifty first-rate bores, separately and singly.” But what does it all amount to, this lack of discretion in manners, this want of reserve in speech, this oriental luxuriance in attire? It simply goes to show that Dickens himself was a Dickens character. He was vivid, florid, inexhaustible, and untamed. There was material in the little man for a hundred of his own immortal caricatures. The self-portrait that he has drawn in David Copperfield is too smooth, like a retouched photograph. That is why David is less interesting than half-a-dozen other people in the book. If Dickens could have seen his own humourous aspects in the magic mirror of his fancy, it would have been among the richest of his observations, and if he could have let his enchantment loose upon the subject, not even the figures of Dick Swiveller and Harold Skimpole would have been more memorable than the burlesque of “Boz” by the hand of C. D. But the humourous, the extravagant, the wildly picturesque,—would these have given a true and complete portrait of the man? Does it make any great difference what kind of clothes he wore, or how many blunders of taste and tact he made, even tragic blunders like his inability to refrain from telling the world all about his domestic unhappiness,—does all this count for much when we look back upon the wonders which his imagination wrought in fiction, and upon the generous fruits which his heart brought forth in life? It is easy to endure small weaknesses when you can feel beneath them the presence of great and vital power. Faults are forgiven readily in one who has the genius of loving much. Better many blunders than the supreme mistake of a life that is Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.
- 44. Charles Dickens never made, nor indeed was tempted to make, that mistake. He carried with him the defects of his qualities, the marks of his early life, the penalties of his bewildering success. But, look you, he carried them—they did not crush him nor turn him from his true course. Forward he marched, cheering and beguiling the way for his comrades with mirthful stories and tales of pity, lightening many a burden and consoling many a dark and lonely hour, until he came at last to the goal of honour and the haven of happy rest. Those who knew him best saw him most clearly as Carlyle did: “The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens,—every inch of him an Honest Man.” III As an artist in fiction Dickens was great; but not because he had a correct theory of the technique of the novel, not because he always followed good rules and models in writing, nor because he was one Who saw life steadily and saw it whole. On the contrary, his vision of life, though vivid, was almost always partial. He was capable of doing a great deal of bad work, which he himself liked. The plots of his novels, on which he toiled tremendously, are negligible; indeed it is often difficult to follow and impossible to remember them. The one of his books that is notably fine in structure and approximately faultless in technique —A Tale of Two Cities—is so unlike his other novels that it stands in a class by itself, as an example of what he could have done if he had chosen to follow that line. In a way it is his most perfect piece of work. But it is not his most characteristic piece of work, and therefore I think it has less value for us than some of his other books in which his peculiar, distinctive, unrivalled powers are more fully shown. After all, art must not only interpret the world but also reveal the artist. The lasting interest of his vision, its distinction, its charm, depend, at least in some real degree, upon the personal touch. Being himself a part of the things that are seen, he must “paint the thing as he sees it” if he wishes to win the approval of “the God of things as they are.” Now the artistic value of Dickens’s way of seeing things lay in its fitness to the purpose which he had in mind and heart,—a really great purpose, namely, to enhance the interest of life by good enchantment, to save people from the
- 45. plague of dulness and the curse of indifference by showing them that the world is full of the stuff for hearty laughter and deep sympathy. This way of seeing things, with constant reference to their humourous and sentimental potency, was essential to the genius of Dickens. His method of making other people see it was strongly influenced, if not absolutely determined, by two facts which seemed to lie outside of his career as an author: first, his training as a reporter for the press; second, his favourite avocation as an amateur actor, stage-manager, and dramatic reader. The style of Dickens at its best is that of an inspired reporter. It is rapid, graphic, pictorial, aiming always at a certain heightening of effect, making the shadows darker and the lights brighter for the purpose of intensifying sensation. He did not get it in the study but in the street. Take his description in Martin Chuzzlewit of Todgers’s Boarding House with its complicated smells and its mottled shades of dinginess; or take his picture in Little Dorrit of Marseilles burning in the August sunlight with its broad, white, universal stare. Here is the art of journalism,—the trick of intensification by omission,—carried to the limit. He aims distinctly at a certain effect, and he makes sure of getting it. He takes long walks in the heart of London, attends police courts, goes behind the scenes of theatres, rides in omnibuses, visits prisons and workhouses. You think he is seeking realism. Quite wrong. He is seeking a sense of reality which shall make realism look cheap. He is not trying to put up canned goods which shall seem more or less like fresh vegetables. He is trying to extract the essential flavour of places and people so that you can taste it in a drop. We find in his style an accumulation of details all bearing on a certain point; nothing that serves his purpose is overlooked; everything that is likely to distract the attention or obscure his aim is disregarded. The head-lines are in the text. When the brute, Bill Sykes, says to Nancy: “Get up,” you know what is coming. When Mrs. Todgers gives a party to Mr. Pecksniff you know what is coming. But the point is that when it comes, tragedy or comedy, it is as pure and unadulterated as the most brilliant of reporters could make it. Naturally, Dickens puts more emphasis upon the contrast between his characters than upon the contrast within them. The internal inconsistencies and struggles, the slow processes of growth and change which are the delight of the psychological novelist do not especially interest him. He sees things black or white, not gray. The objects that attract him most, and on which he lavishes his art, do not belong to the average, but to the extraordinary. Dickens is not a commonplace merchant. He is a dealer in oddities and
- 46. rarities, in fact the keeper of an “Old Curiosity Shop,” and he knows how to set forth his goods with incomparable skill. His drawing of character is sharp rather than deep. He makes the figure stand out, always recognizable, but not always thoroughly understood. Many of his people are simply admirable incarnations of their particular trades or professions: Mould the undertaker, old Weller the coachman, Tulkinghorn the lawyer, Elijah Program the political demagogue, Blimber the school-master, Stiggins the religious ranter, Betsey Prig the day-nurse, Cap’n Cuttle the retired skipper. They are all as easy to identify as the wooden image in front of a tobacconist’s shop. Others are embodiments of a single passion or quality: Pecksniff of unctuous hypocrisy, Micawber of joyous improvidence, Mr. Toots of dumb sentimentalism, Little Dorrit of the motherly instinct in a girl, Joe Gargery of the motherly instinct in a man, Mark Tapley of resolute and strenuous optimism. If these persons do anything out of harmony with their head-lines, Dickens does not tell of it. He does not care for the incongruities, the modifications, the fine shadings which soften and complicate the philosophic and reflective view of life. He wants to write his “story” sharply, picturesquely, with “snap” and plenty of local colour; and he does it, in his happiest hours, with all the verve and skill of a star reporter for the Morning Journal of the Enchanted City. In this graphic and emphatic quality the art of Dickens in fiction resembles the art of Hogarth in painting. But Dickens, like Hogarth, was much more than a reporter. He was a dramatist, and therefore he was also, by necessity, a moralist. I do not mean that Dickens had a dramatic genius in the Greek sense that he habitually dealt with the eternal conflict between human passion and inscrutable destiny. I mean only this: that his lifelong love for the theatre often led him, consciously or unconsciously, to construct the scenario of a story with a view to dramatic effect, and to work up the details of a crisis precisely as if he saw it in his mind’s eye on the stage. Notice how the dramatis personæ are clearly marked as comic, or tragic, or sentimental. The moment they come upon the scene you can tell whether they are meant to appeal to your risibilities or to your sensibilities. You are in no danger of laughing at the heroine, or weeping over the funny man. Dickens knows too much to leave his audience in perplexity. He even gives to some of his personages set phrases, like the musical motifs of the various characters in the operas of Wagner, by which you may easily identify them. Mr. Micawber is forever “waiting for something to turn up.” Mr. Toots always reminds us that “it’s of no consequence.” Sairey Gamp never appears without
- 47. her imaginary friend Mrs. Harris. Mrs. General has “prunes and prism” perpetually on her lips. Observe, also, how carefully the scene is set, and how wonderfully the preparation is made for a dramatic climax in the story. If it is a comic climax, like the trial of Mr. Pickwick for breach of promise, nothing is forgotten, from the hysterics of the obese Mrs. Bardell to the feigned indignation of Sergeant Buzfuz over the incriminating phrase “chops and tomato sauce!” If it is a tragic climax, like the death of Bill Sykes, a score of dark premonitions lead up to it, the dingiest slum of London is chosen for it, the grimy streets are filled with a furious crowd to witness it, and just as the murderer is about to escape, the ghostly eyes of his victim glare upon him, and he plunges from the roof, tangled in his rope, to be hanged by the hand of the Eternal Judge as surely as if he stood upon the gallows. Or suppose the climax is not one of shame and terror, but of pure pity and tenderness, like the death of Little Nell. Then the quiet room is prepared for it, and the white bed is decked with winter berries and green leaves that the child loved because they loved the light; and gentle friends are there to read and talk to her, and she sleeps herself away in loving dreams, and the poor old grandfather, whom she has guided by the hand and comforted, kneels at her bedside, wondering why his dear Nell lies so still, and the very words which tell us of her peace and his grief, move rhythmically and plaintively, like soft music with a dying fall. Close the book. The curtain descends. The drama is finished. The master has had his way with us; he has made us laugh; he has made us cry. We have been at the play. But was it not as real to us while it lasted as many of the scenes in which we actors daily take our parts? And did it not mellow our spirits with mirth, and soften our hearts with tears? And now that it is over are we not likely to be a little better, a little kinder, a little happier for what we have laughed at or wept over? Ah, master of the good enchantment, you have given us hours of ease and joy, and we thank you for them. But there is a greater gift than that. You have made us more willing to go cheerfully and companionably along the strange, crowded, winding way of human life, because you have deepened our faith that there is something of the divine on earth, and something of the human in heaven.
- 49. THACKERAY AND REAL MEN In that fragrant bunch of Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children which has just brightened and sweetened our too sadly strenuous times there are some passages on novel-reading which are full of spirited good sense. He says that he can read Pendennis, and The Newcomes, and Vanity Fair over and over again; he agrees with his boy in preferring Thackeray to Dickens, and then he gives the reason—or at least a reason—for this preference: “Of course one fundamental difference ... is that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was not.” The damnatory clause in this sentence seems to me too absolute, though Roosevelt softens it by adding, “but a man might do some mighty good work without being in any sense a gentleman.” That is certainly true, and beyond a doubt Dickens did it—a wonderful plenty of it. It is also true that in several perfectly good senses he was a brave and kind gentleman, despite his faults in manners and dress. But it is the laudatory clause in Roosevelt’s judgment that interests me. Thackeray’s work is pervaded with his personality to an unusual degree. It is a saturated solution of the man. We can taste him in every page. And it is because we like the taste, because we find something strong and true, bracing and stimulant in it, that we love to read him. ’Tis like being with a gentleman in any enterprise or adventure; it gives us pleasure and does us unconscious good. Well, then, what do we mean by “a gentleman?” Tennyson calls it The grand old name of gentleman Defamed by every charlatan, And soil’d with all ignoble use. In the big New Oxford Dictionary there is more than a pageful of definitions of the word, and almost every English essayist has tried a shot at it. One thing is sure, its old hereditary use as a title of rank or property is going out, or
- 50. already gone. “John Jones, Gent.,” is a vanishing form of address. More and more the word is coming to connote something in character and conduct. Inheritance may enter into it, and the sense of honour has a great part in it, and its outward and visible sign is an unassuming fitness of behaviour in the various circumstances of life. But its indispensable essence is reality; its native speech, sincerity; and its controlling spirit, good-will. Let us content ourselves with a description instead of a definition. A gentleman is a real man who deals honestly, bravely, frankly, and considerately with all sorts and conditions of other real men. This is Thackeray’s very mark and quality. We can feel it all through his life and works. Everything real in the world he recognized and accepted, even though he might not always like it. But the unreal people and things—the pretenders, the hypocrites, the shams, and the frauds (whether pious or impious)—he detested and scoffed away. Reality was his quest and his passion. He followed it with unfailing interest, penetration, and good temper. He found it, at least in humankind, always mixed and complicated, never altogether good nor altogether bad, no hero without a fault, and no villain without a germ of virtue. Life is really made that way. The true realist is not the materialist, the five-sense naturalist, but the man who takes into account the human soul and God as ultimate realities. Thackeray’s personal life had nothing that was remarkable and much that was admirable. It was simply the background of his genius. He was a child of the upper-middle class in England—if you know just what that means. He went to the Charterhouse School in London (which he afterward immortalized as Greyfriars in The Newcomes), and illustrated his passion for reality by getting his nose broken in a fight, which gave his face a permanent Socratic cast. At Cambridge University he seems to have written much and studied little, but that little to good purpose. He inherited a modest fortune, which he spent, not in riotous living, but in travel, art study in Paris, and in the most risky of all extravagances, the starting of new periodicals. When this failed and his money was gone, he lived in London as a hack-writer. His young wife was taken from him by that saddest of all bereavements— the loss of her mind. It became necessary to place her in a private sanitarium, where she outlived her husband by thirty years. To her, and to the two little daughters whom she left him, Thackeray was faithful and devoted. He never complained, never flinched into an easy way of escape from his burden. He bent his back to it, and, in spite of natural indolence, he worked hard and was cheerful.
- 51. He made a host of friends and kept them, as Stevenson puts it, “without capitulation.” Of course, this grim condition implies some frictions and some dislikes, and from these Thackeray was not exempt. The satire which was his first mode in writing was too direct and pungent to be relished by those who had any streak of self-humbug in their make-up. But, so far as I know, he had only one serious literary quarrel—that unhappy dispute with Mr. Edmund Yates, in which Dickens, with the best intentions in the world, became, unfortunately, somewhat involved. Thackeray might perhaps have been more generous and forgiving—he could have afforded that luxury. But he could not have been more honest and frank, more real, than he was. Being very angry, and for a just cause, he said so in plain words. Presently the tempest passed away. When Thackeray died in 1863, Dickens wrote: “No one can be surer than I of the greatness and goodness of his heart.” The first period of his life as a man of letters was given almost entirely to satirical and fragmentary writing, under various noms de guerre. Hence, he remained for a long time in comparative poverty and obscurity, from which he stepped into fame and prosperity with the publication of his first large novel, Vanity Fair, in 1847-48. It was like turning the corner of Grub Street and coming into Glory Avenue. Henceforth the way was open, though not easy. The succession of his big, welcome novels was slow, steady, unbroken. Each one brought him thousands of new readers, and the old ones were semper fideles, even when they professed a preference for the earlier over the later volumes. His lecture tours in Great Britain and the United States were eminently successful—more so, I think, than those of Charles Dickens. They may have brought in less money, but more of what old William Caxton, the prince of printers, called “good fame and renommee.” The last of his completed books, and one of his most delightful, was Roundabout Papers—a volume of essays that has no superior in English for a light, firm, friendly touch upon the realities of life. His last story begun was Denis Duval, and on this he was working when he laid down his pen on Christmas Eve, 1863, and fell asleep for the last time. It was Edmund Yates who wrote of him then: “Thackeray was dead; and the purest English prose writer of the nineteenth century and the novelist with a greater knowledge of the human heart, as it really is, than any other—with the exception perhaps of Shakespeare and Balzac—was suddenly struck down in the midst of us.” The human heart as it really is—there’s the point! That is what Thackeray sought to know, to understand, to reveal, and—no! not to explain, nor to
- 52. judge and sentence—for that, as he well knew, was far beyond him or any of us—but his desire was to show the real heart of man, in its various complexities and perplexities, working its way through the divers realities and unrealities in which we are all entangled. The acute French critic, Edmond Scherer, distinguished and divided between George Eliot as “a novelist of character,” and Thackeray as “a novelist of manners.” The epithet will pass only if we take the word in the sense of William of Wykeham’s motto, “Manners makyth man.” For, as surely as there is something in the outward demeanour which unveils and discloses the person within, even so surely is there something in behaviour, the habitual mode of speech and conduct, which moulds the man using it. A false behaviour weaves a texture of lies into the warp of his nature. A true behaviour weakens the hold of his own self-delusions, and so helps him to know what he really is—which is good for him and for others. It was in this sense that Thackeray was interested in manners, and depicted them in his books. Go with him to a ball, and you arrive at the hour of unmasking; to a club, and you are aware of the thoughts under the conversation; to a play, and you pass behind the footlights and the paint; to a death-bed, and—well, do you remember the death of Helen in Pendennis? and of the Colonel in The Newcomes? Foolish critics speak of these last two passages as “scenes.” Scenes! By Heaven! no, they are realities. We can feel those pure souls passing. Let us follow this clew of the passion for reality through the three phases of Thackeray’s work. I At first he is the indefatigable satirist, rejoicing in the assault. Youth is almost always inclined that way—far more swift and sweeping in judgment, more severe in condemnation, than maturity or age. Thackeray writes much that is merely amusing, full of high spirits and pure fun, in his first period. But his main business is to expose false pretensions, false methods, false principles in literature and life; to show up the fakers, to ridicule the humbugs, to convict the crooks of every rank and degree. Here, for example, is a popular fashion of books with criminals and burglars for heroes and heroines, portrayed in the glamour of romance. Very well, our satirist, assuming the name of “Ikey Solomons, Esq.,” will take a real criminal, a murderess, and show us the manner of life she leads with her associates. So
- 53. we have Catherine. Here is another fashion of weaving a fiction about a chevalier d’industrie, a bold, adventurous, conscienceless fellow who pursues his own pleasure with a swagger, and makes a brave show hide a mean and selfish heart. Very well, a fellow of this kidney shall tell his own story and show himself in his habit as he lives, and as he dies in prison. So we have The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. Here are innumerable fashions of folly and falsehood current not only in high society, but also in the region of respectable mediocrity, and in the “world below-stairs.” Very well, our satirist, under the name of “Jeames Yellowplush,” or “M. Angelo Titmarsh,” or “Fitz-Boodle,” will show them up for us. So we have various bundles of short stories, and skits, and sketches of travel, some of them bubbling over with fun, some of them, like Dennis Haggarty’s Wife, touched with quiet pathos. The culmination of this satiric period is The Book of Snobs, which appeared serially in the London Punch, 1845-46. In order to understand the quality and meaning of Thackeray’s satire—an element which stayed with him all through his writing, though it was later subdued to its proper place—we must take the necessary pains to know just what he meant by a “snob.” A snob is an unreal person who tries to pass himself off for a real person; a pretender who meanly admires and imitates mean things; an ape of gentility. He is a specific variety of the great genus “Sham.” Carlyle, the other notable English satirist of the nineteenth century, attacked the whole genus with heavy artillery. Thackeray, with his light cavalry of ridicule, assailed the species. All snobs are shams, but not all shams are snobs. The specific qualities of the snob are developed only in countries where there are social classes and distinctions, but no insuperable barriers between them. Thus in native India with its immutable caste, or in Central Africa with its general barbarism, I fancy it must be difficult to discover snobbism. (Yet I have seen traces of it even among dogs and cats.) But in a country like England or the United States of America, where society is arranged in different stories, with staircases between, snobbism is frequent and flourishing. The snob is the man who tries to sneak up-stairs. He is the surreptitious climber, the person who is ashamed to pass for what he is. Has he been at an expensive college? He goes home and snubs his old friends with allusions to the distinguished society he has been keeping. Is he entertaining fashionable strangers? He gives them elaborate and costly fare at the most aurivorous hotel, but at home his wife and daughters may starve. He talks about books that he has never read, and pretends to like music that
- 54. sends him to sleep. At his worst, he says his prayers on the street-corners and reviles his neighbour for sins which he himself cherishes in secret. That is the snob: the particular species of sham whom Thackeray pursues and satirizes through all his disguises and metamorphoses. He does it unsparingly, yet never—or at least hardly ever—savagely. There is always a strain of good humour in it, and often a touch of fellow-feeling for the man himself, camouflaged under his affectations. It may not be worth while—this kind of work. All satire is perishable. It has no more of the immortal in it than the unreality which it aims to destroy. But some shams die hard. And while they live and propagate, the arrows which hit them fairly are not out of date. Stevenson makes a curious misjudgment of this part of Thackeray’s work, when he says in his essay on “Some Gentlemen in Fiction”: “Personally [Thackeray] scarce appeals to us as the ideal gentleman; if there were nothing else, perpetual nosing after snobbery at least suggests the snob.” Most true, beloved R. L. S., but did you forget that this is precisely what Thackeray himself says? He tells us not to be too quick or absolute in our judgments; to acknowledge that we have some faults and failings of our own; to remember that other people have sometimes hinted at a vein, a trace, a vestige of snobbery in ourselves. Search for truth and speak it; but, above all, no arrogance—faut pas monter sur ses grands chevaux. Have you ever read the end of the lecture on “Charity and Humour”? “The author ... has been described by The London Times newspaper as a writer of considerable parts, but a dreary misanthrope, who sees no good anywhere, who sees the sky above him green, I think, instead of blue, and only miserable sinners around him. So we are, as is every writer and reader I have heard of; so was every being who ever trod this earth, save One. I cannot help telling the truth as I view it, and describing what I see. To describe it otherwise than it seems to me would be falsehood in that calling in which it has pleased Heaven to place me; treason to that conscience which says that men are weak; that truth must be told; that faults must be owned; that pardon must be prayed for; and that Love reigns supreme over all.” II With Vanity Fair begins what some one has called the quadrilateral on which Thackeray’s larger fame rests. The three other pillars are, Henry Esmond, Pendennis, and The Newcomes. Which is the greatest of these four novels?
- 55. On this question there is dispute among critics, and difference of opinion, even among avowed Thackerayans, who confess that they “like everything he wrote.” Why try to settle the question? Why not let the interesting, illuminating causerie run on? In these furious days when the hysteria of world-problems vexes us, it is good to have some subjects on which we can dispute without ranting or raving. For my part, I find Vanity Fair the strongest, Pendennis the most intimate, The Newcomes the richest and in parts the most lovable, and Henry Esmond the most admirable and satisfying, among Thackeray’s novels. But they all have this in common: they represent a reaction from certain false fashions in fiction which prevailed at that time. From the spurious romanticism of G. P. R. James and Harrison Ainsworth, from the philosophic affectation of Bulwer, from the gilding and rococo-work of the super-snob Disraeli—all of them popular writers of their day—Thackeray turned away, not now as in his earlier period to satirize and ridicule and parody them, but to create something in a different genre, closer to the facts of life, more true to the reality of human nature. We may read in the preface to Pendennis just what he had in mind and purpose: “Many ladies have remonstrated and subscribers left me, because, in the course of the story, I described a young man resisting and affected by temptation. My object was to say, that he had the passions to feel, and the manliness and generosity to overcome them. You will not hear—it is best to know it—what moves in the real world, what passes in society, in the clubs, colleges, mess-rooms—what is the life and talk of your sons. A little more frankness than is customary has been attempted in this story; with no bad desire on the author’s part, it is hoped, and with no ill consequence to any reader. If truth is not always pleasant, at any rate truth is best, from whatever chair—from those whence graver writers or thinkers argue, as from that at which the story-teller sits as he concludes his labour, and bids his kind reader farewell.”
- 56. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. Reproduced from the Kensington Edition of Thackeray’s Works. It is amusing, in this age of art undressed, to read this modest defense of frankness in fiction. Its meaning is very different from the
- 57. interpretation of it which is given by disciples of the “show- everything-without-a-fig-leaf” school. Thackeray did not confuse reality with indecency. He did not think it needful to make his hero cut his toe-nails or take a bath in public in order to show him as a real man. The ordinary and common physical details of life may be taken for granted; to obtrude them is to exaggerate their importance. It is with the frailties and passions, the faults and virtues, the defeats and victories of his men and women that Thackeray deals. He describes Pendennis tempted without making the description a new temptation. He brings us acquainted with Becky Sharp, enchanteresse, without adding to her enchantment. We feel that she is capable of anything; but we do not know all that she actually did,—indeed Thackeray himself frankly confessed that even he did not know, nor much care. The excellence of his character-drawing is that his men and women are not mere pegs to hang a doctrine or a theory on. They have a life of their own, independent of, and yet closely touching his. This is what he says of them in his essay “De Finibus”: “They have been boarding and lodging with me for twenty months.... I know the people utterly,—I know the sound of their voices.” Fault has been found with him (and that by such high authority as Mr. Howells) for coming into his own pages so often with personal comment or, “a word to the reader.” It is said that this disturbs the narrative, breaks the illusion, makes the novel less convincing as a work of art. Frankly, it does not strike me that way. On the contrary, it adds to the verisimilitude. These men and women are so real to him that he cannot help talking to us about them as we go along together. Is it not just so in actual life, when you go with a friend to watch the passing show? Do you think that what Thackeray says to you about Colonel Newcome, or Captain Costigan, or Helen Pendennis, or Laura, or Ethel, or George Warrington, makes them fade away?
- 58. Yes, I know the paragraphs at the beginning and end of Vanity Fair about the showman and the puppets and the box. But don’t you see what the parable means? It is only what Shakespeare said long ago: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. Nor would Thackeray have let this metaphor pass without adding to it Pope’s fine line: Act well your part, there all the honour lies. Of course, there is another type of fiction in which running personal comment by the author would be out of place. It is illustrated in Dickens by A Tale of Two Cities, and in Thackeray by Henry Esmond. The latter seems to me the most perfect example of a historical novel in all literature. More than that,—it is, so far as I know, the best portrayal of the character of a gentleman. The book presents itself as a memoir of Henry Esmond, Esq., a colonel in the service of her Majesty, Queen Anne, written by himself. Here, then, we have an autobiographical novel, the most difficult and perilous of all modes of fiction. If the supposed author puts himself in the foreground, he becomes egotistical and insufferable; if he puts himself in the background, he becomes insignificant, a mere Chinese “property-man” in the drama. This dilemma Thackeray avoids by letting Esmond tell his own story in the third person—that is to say, with a certain detachment of view, such as a sensible person would feel in looking back on his own life. Rarely is this historic method of narration broken. I recall one instance, in the last chapter, where Beatrix, after that tremendous
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