Charles what makes a man a man

In a Supreme Court case concerning the admission of a Black man to the University of Missouri, Houston argued that it was unconstitutional for the state to bar Blacks from admission since there was no "separate but equal" facility. At the time, Southern states collectively spent less than half of what was allotted for white students on education for Blacks. Houston's intention was to make it too expensive for facilities to remain separate.

Houston's shrewd strategy worked, effectively paving the way for desegregation. While not rejecting the premise of "separate but equal" facilities, the Supreme Court ruled that Black students could be admitted to a white school if there was only one school. Sadly, Houston would not live to see segregation declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in in Brown v.

Board of Education. He died in from a heart attack. His most hated types, the people he believes to be responsible for all human ills, are kings, landowners, priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants.

At first sight a list beginning with kings and ending with peasants looks like a mere omnium gatherum, but in reality all these people have a common factor.

All of them are archaic types, people who are governed by tradition and whose eyes are turned towards the past — the opposite, therefore, of the rising bourgeois who has put his money on the future and sees the past simply as a dead hand.

Actually, although Dickens lived in a period when the bourgeoisie was really a rising class, he displays this characteristic less strongly than Wells. He is vaguely on the side of the working class — has a sort of generalized sympathy with them because they are oppressed — but he does not in reality know much about them; they come into his books chiefly as servants, and comic servants at that.

At the other end of the scale he loathes the aristocrat and — going one better than Wells in this loathes the big bourgeois as well. His real sympathies are bounded by Mr. Pickwick on the upper side and Mr.

Barkis on the lower. All through his books there are countess hostile sketches of these people, and hardly any that are friendly. There are practically no friendly pictures of the landowning class, for instance. One might make a doubtful exception of Sir Leicester Dedlock; otherwise there is only Mr. There are no friendly pictures of soldiers i. As for his bureaucrats, judges and magistrates, most of them would feel quite at home in the Circumlocution Office. The only officials whom Dickens handles with any kind of friendliness are, significantly enough, policemen.

The class Dickens belonged to, at least by adoption, was growing suddenly rich after a couple of centuries of obscurity. It had grown up mainly in the big towns, out of contact with agriculture, and politically impotent; government, in its experience, was something which either interfered or persecuted. Consequently it was a class with no tradition of public service and not much tradition of usefulness.

What now strikes us as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility; they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists.

On the other hand, a Tite Barnacle, even when he was neglecting his duties, would have some vague notion of what duties he was neglecting. What he does not see, or only intermittently sees, is that Coodle and Doodle and all the other corpses left over from the eighteenth century are performing a function which neither Pickwick nor Boffin would ever bother about.

And of course this narrowness of vision is in one way a great advantage to him, because it is fatal for a caricaturist to see too much. What a crew! Lady Tippins! Lord Verisopht! The Honourable Bob Stables! Sparsit whose husband was a Powler! The Tite Barnacles! It is practically a case-book in lunacy. But at the same time his remoteness from the landowning-military-bureaucratic class incapacitates him for full-length satire.

He only succeeds with this class when he depicts them as mental defectives. Sir Mulberry Hawk, for instance, is a wretched attempt at the wicked-baronet type. Harthouse in Hard Times is better, but he would be only an ordinary achievement for Trollope or Thackeray. Like Dickens, he identifies with the puritanical moneyed class against the card-playing, debt-bilking aristocracy. The eighteenth century, as he sees it, is sticking out into the nineteenth in the person of the wicked Lord Steyne.

Vanity Fair is a full-length version of what Dickens did for a few chapters in Little Dorrit. But by origins and upbringing Thackeray happens to be somewhat nearer to the class he is satirizing. Consequently he can produce such comparatively subtle types as, for instance, Major Pendennis and Rawdon Crawley.

Major Pendennis is a shallow old snob, and Rawdon Crawley is a thick-headed ruffian who sees nothing wrong in living for years by swindling tradesmen; but what Thackery realizes is that according to their tortuous code they are neither of them bad men. Major Pendennis would not sign a dud cheque, for instance; Rawdon certainly would, but on the other hand he would not desert a friend in a tight corner. Both of them would behave well on the field of battle — a thing that would not particularly appeal to Dickens.

The result is that at the end one is left with a kind of amused tolerance for Major Pendennis and with something approaching respect for Rawdon ;and yet one sees, better than any diatribe could make one, the utter rottenness of that kind of cadging, toadying life on the fringes of smart society.

Dickens would be quite incapable of this. In his hands both Rawdon and the Major would dwindle to traditional caricatures. When he produces a really subtle and damaging portrait, like John Dorrit or Harold Skimpole, it is generally of some rather middling, unimportant person.

One very striking thing about Dickens, especially considering the time he lived in, is his lack of vulgar nationalism. All peoples who have reached the point of becoming nations tend to despise foreigners, but there is not much doubt that the English-speaking races are the worst offenders. One can see this from the fact that as soon as they become fully aware of any foreign race they invent an insulting nickname for it. Any time before the list would have been shorter, because the map of the world was different from what it is now, and there were only three or four foreign races that had fully entered into the English consciousness.

And of course they are not a completely untrue legend even now. Till very recently nearly all English children were brought up to despise the southern European races, and history as taught in schools was mainly a list of battles won by England. But one has got to read, say, the Quarterly Review of the thirties to know what boasting really is.

Thackeray, for instance, has this outlook very strongly, though there are moments when he sees through it and laughs at it. The one historical fact that is firmly fixed in his mind is that the English won the battle of Waterloo.

One never reads far in his books without coming upon some reference to it. The English, as he sees it, are invincible because of their tremendous physical strength, due mainly to living on beef. Like most Englishmen of his time, he has the curious illusion that the English are larger than other people Thackeray, as it happened, was larger than most people , and therefore he is capable of writing passages like this:. I say to you that you are better than a Frenchman. I would lay even money that you who are reading this are more than five feet seven in height, and weigh eleven stone; while a Frenchman is five feet four and does not weigh nine.

The Frenchman has after his soup a dish of vegetables, where you have one of meat. You are a different and superior animal — a French-beating animal the history of hundreds of years has shown you to be so , etc. Dickens would never be guilty of anything of that kind. It would be an exaggeration to say that he nowhere pokes fun at foreigners, and of course like nearly all nineteenth-century Englishmen, he is untouched by European culture.

This, however, is simply the reaction of a generous mind against cant. But he is remarkably free from the idiocy of regarding nations as individuals. He seldom even makes jokes turning on nationality. He does not exploit the comic Irishman and the comic Welshman, for instance, and not because he objects to stock characters and ready-made jokes, which obviously he does not.

It is perhaps more significant that he shows no prejudice against Jews. It is true that he takes it for granted Oliver Twist and Great Expectations that a receiver of stolen goods will be a Jew, which at the time was probably justified. He is very much an Englishman but he is hardly aware of it — certainly the thought of being an Englishman does not thrill him. He has no imperialist feelings, no discernible views on foreign politics, and is untouched by the military tradition.

It is noticeable that Dickens hardly writes of war, even to denounce it. With all his marvellous powers of description, and of describing things he had never seen, he never describes a battle, unless one counts the attack on the Bastille in A Tale of Two Cities. Probably the subject would not strike him as interesting, and in any case he would not regard a battlefield as a place where anything worth settling could be settled. It is one up to the lower-middle-class, puritan mentality.

Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in spite of his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. So he is, so long as he thinks of them as oppressed; but there are two things that condition his attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man, and a Cockney at that, and therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed masses, the industrial and agricultural labourers.

He shows this unmistakably whenever he writes of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His descriptions of the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion:. The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people half naked, drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, and filth, and misery, etc.

There are many similar passages in Dickens. From them one gets the impression of whole submerged populations whom he regards as being beyond the pale. Dickens also shows less understanding of criminals than one would expect of him. Although he is well aware of the social and economic causes of crime, he often seems to feel that when a man has once broken the law he has put himself outside human society. There is a chapter at the end of David Copperfield in which David visits the prison where Latimer and Uriah Heep are serving their sentences.

He complains that the food is too good! The attitude of Pip obviously the attitude of Dickens himself towards Magwitch in Great Expectations is extremely interesting. Pip is conscious all along of his ingratitude towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch.

When he discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is actually a transported convict, he falls into frenzies of disgust. So far as one can discover from the text, this is not because when Pip was a child he had been terrorized by Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a criminal and a convict.

There is nothing psychologically false in this, either. The result is that Magwitch belongs to the same queer class of characters as Falstaff and, probably, Don Quixote — characters who are more pathetic than the author intended.

He has the sincerest admiration for people like the Peggottys and the Plornishes. But it is questionable whether he really regards them as equals. For more than twenty years afterwards the memory was so painful to him that he would go out of his way to avoid that part of the Strand.

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these everyday associates with those of my happier childhood. But I held some station at the blacking warehouse too… I soon became at least as expeditious and as skilful with my hands as either of the other boys. Though perfectly familiar with them, my conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to place a space between us. However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does not wish to resemble them.

Given his origins, and the time he lived in, it could hardly be otherwise. In the early nineteenth century class animosities may have been no sharper than they are now, but the surface differences between class and class were enormously greater. Dickens is quite genuinely on the side of the poor against the rich, but it would be next door to impossible for him not to think of a working-class exterior as a stigma. If his palms are hard from work, they let him in; if his palms are soft, out he goes.

This would be hardly intelligible to Dickens; all his heroes have soft hands. He likes a bourgeois exterior and a bourgeois not aristocratic accent. One curious symptom of this is that he will not allow anyone who is to play a heroic part to speak like a working man. A comic hero like Sam Weller, or a merely pathetic figure like Stephen Blackpool, can speak with a broad accent, but the jeune premier always speaks the equivalent of B.

This is so, even when it involves absurdities. Little Pip, for instance, is brought up by people speaking broad Essex, but talks upper-class English from his earliest childhood; actually he would have talked the same dialect as Joe, or at least as Mrs. Even Rachel in Hard Times has barely a trace of Lancashire accent, an impossibility in her case. One sees that at its most obvious where a class-distinction is also a colour-distinction.

When this issue arises, novelists often revert to crude class-feelings which they might disclaim at other times. He feels the seduction of a poor girl by a rich man to be something atrocious, a kind of defilement, something quite different from her seduction by a man in her own walk of life. Trollope deals with this theme twice The Three Clerks and The Small House at Allington and, as one might expect, entirely from the upper-class angle.

Thackeray, as often, seems to hesitate. So one can with Dickens, but what emerges, as usual, is that he is more inclined to identify himself with the middle class than with the proletariat. This, however, is merely a costume-piece put in to explain the implacable hatred of Madame Defarge, which Dickens does not pretend to approve of. In David Copperfield, where he is dealing with a typical nineteenth-century seduction, the class-issue does not seem to strike him as paramount.

It is a law of Victorian novels that sexual misdeeds must not go unpunished, and so Steerforth is drowned on Yarmouth sands, but neither Dickens, nor old Peggotty, nor even Ham, seems to feel that Steerforth has added to his offence by being the son of rich parents. The Steerforths are moved by class-motives, but the Peggottys are not — not even in the scene between Mrs.

Steerforth and old Peggotty; if they were, of course, they would probably turn against David as well as against Steerforth. Neither behaves in the least like this. Finally they are married and no one is any the worse, except Mrs. Twemlow, who will lose a few dinner engagements. It is all very much as it might have happened in real life. There is a scarcely mistakable class-reaction when David Copperfield discovers that Uriah Heep is plotting to marry Agnes Wickfield. The disgusting Uriah suddenly announces that he is in love with her:.

I believe I had the delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of the fire, and running him through with it. It is one of the stock jokes of English literature, from Malvolio onwards.

This evidently strikes him as very comic. So it is in a way, though one might question whether it is not better for a footman even to have delusions of this kind than simply to accept his status in the spirit of the catechism. In his attitude towards servants Dickens is not ahead of his age. An enormous number of the jokes in nineteenth-century comic papers deals with the uppishness of servants. Dickens is sometimes guilty of this kind of thing himself. His books abound with the ordinary comic servants; they are dishonest Great Expectations , incompetent David Copperfield , turn up their noses at good food Pickwick Papers , etc.

But what is curious, in a nineteenth-century radical, is that when he wants to draw a sympathetic picture of a servant, he creates what is recognizably a feudal type.

No doubt Mark Tapley and Sam Weller are derived to some extent from Smollett, and hence from Cervantes; but it is interesting that Dickens should have been attracted by such a type.

He gets himself arrested in order to follow Mr. Pickwick into the Fleet, and afterwards refuses to get married because he feels that Mr. Pickwick still needs his services. There is a characteristic scene between them:. Pickwick, when Mr. It is easy to imagine what the young woman would have said to this in real life.

But notice the feudal atmosphere. A modern manservant would never think of doing either. Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend , though a wretched failure as a character, represents the same kind of loyalty as Sam Weller. Such loyalty, of course, is natural, human, and likeable; but so was feudalism.

What Dickens seems to be doing, as usual, is to reach out for an idealized version of the existing thing. He was writing at a time when domestic service must have seemed a completely inevitable evil.

There were no labour-saving devices, and there was huge inequality of wealth. It was an age of enormous families, pretentious meals and inconvenient houses, when the slavey drudging fourteen hours a day in the basement kitchen was something too normal to be noticed. And given the fact of servitude, the feudal relationship is the only tolerable one. Sam Weller and Mark Tapley are dream figures, no less than the Cheerybles.

If there have got to be masters and servants, how much better that the master should be Mr. Pickwick and the servant should be Sam Weller. Better still, of course, if servants did not exist at all — but this Dickens is probably unable to imagine. Without a high level of mechanical development, human equality is not practically possible; Dickens goes to show that it is not imaginable either. It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about food.

He was a Cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply civilized but not primarily useful.

Like many popular singers who came to represent the very essence of France — such as Georges Moustaki and, to a certain extent, Edith Piaf herself — Aznavour is shaped by his foreign roots. Born Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian in Paris to an actor-father and singer-mother who had fled the Armenian genocide , he left school and became a child actor at the age of nine.

He survived the German occupation of Paris singing in cabarets, while his parents hid fellow Armenians, Jews, Russians and Communists in their apartment and his father joined the resistance. French critics dismissed him as repulsively ugly, too short, with a terrible voice and dubious song titles.

But his global singing fame was cemented in the 70s with a triumphant crossover into the US and UK — something he puts down to the excellent translation of his lyrics into English. The bittersweet British No 1, She, is hardly known in France. Britain was seduced by this scrawny Frenchman crooning about painful crushes in a ton accent.

His 51st studio album is out in the UK now and he is working on his 52nd. I took you for someone else yesterday evening. That troubles me. I never saw the face. The left arm is across the face, and the right arm is waved. Violently waved. This way. I followed his action with my eyes, and it was the action of an arm gesticulating with the utmost passion and vehemence: 'For God's sake clear the way!

The voice seemed hoarse with shouting, and it cried, "Look out! Look out! What has happened? I advanced so close upon it that I wondered at its keeping the sleeve across its eyes. I ran right up at it, and had my hand stretched out to pull the sleeve away, when it was gone. I ran on into the tunnel, five hundred yards. I stopped and held my lamp above my head, and saw the figures of the measured distance, and saw the wet stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the arch. I ran out again, faster than I had run in for I had a mortal abhorrence of the place upon me , and I looked all round the red light with my own red light, and I went up the iron ladder to the gallery atop of it, and I came down again, and ran back here.

I telegraphed both ways, "An alarm has been given. Is anything wrong? Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine, I showed him how that this figure must be a deception of his sense of sight, and how that figures, originating in disease of the delicate nerves that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have often troubled patients, some of whom had become conscious of the nature of their affliction, and had even proved it by experiments upon themselves.

That was all very well, he returned, after we had sat listening for a while, and he ought to know something of the wind and the wires, he who so often passed long winter nights there, alone and watching. But he would beg to remark that he had not finished. I asked his pardon, and he slowly added these words, touching my arm: 'Within six hours after the Appearance, the memorable accident on this Line happened, and within ten hours the dead and wounded were brought along through the tunnel over the spot where the figure had stood.

A disagreeable shudder crept over me, but I did my best against it. It was not to be denied, I rejoined, that this was a remarkable coincidence, calculated deeply to impress his mind. But it was unquestionable that remarkable coincidences did continually occur, and they must be taken into account in dealing with such a subject.

Though to be sure I must admit, I added for I thought I saw that he was going to bring the objection to bear upon me , men of common sense did not allow much for coincidences in making the ordinary calculations of life.

I again begged his pardon for being betrayed into interruptions. Six or seven months passed, and I had recovered from the surprise and shock, when one morning, as the day was breaking, I, standing at that door, looked towards the red light, and saw the spectre again. It leaned against the shaft of the light, with both hands before the face. Like this. Once more, I followed his action with my eyes.

It was an action of mourning. I have seen such an attitude in stone figures on tombs. When I went to the door again, daylight was above me, and the ghost was gone.

Nothing came of this? He touched me on the arm with his forefinger twice or thrice, giving a ghastly nod each time: 'That very day, as a train came out of the tunnel, I noticed, at a carriage window on my side, what looked like a confusion of hands and heads, and something waved.

I saw it, just in time to signal the driver, Stop! He shut off, and put his brake on, but the train drifted past here a hundred and fifty yards or more. I ran after it, and, as I went along, heard terrible screams and cries. A beautiful young lady had died instantaneously in one of the compartments, and was brought in here, and laid down on this floor between us.

Involuntarily, I pushed my chair back, as I looked from the boards at which he pointed, to himself. I could think of nothing to say, to any purpose, and my mouth was very dry. The wind and the wires took up the story with a long lamenting wail. He resumed. The spectre came back, a week ago.

Ever since, it has been there, now and again, by fits and starts. He repeated, if possible with increased passion and vehemence, that former gesticulation of 'For God's sake clear the way! Then, he went on. It calls to me, for many minutes together, in an agonised manner, "Below there! It rings my little bell'. I caught at that. My eyes were on the bell, and my ears were open to the bell, and if I am a living man, it did NOT ring at those times.