THERE was once upon a time a charming young lady, possessed of much
taste, who was asked by her anxious parent, the years passing and family
expenditure not decreasing, which of the numerous and eligible young men
then paying court to her she liked the best. She replied, that was her
difficulty; she could not make up her mind which she liked the best.
They were all so nice. She could not possibly select one to the
exclusion of all the others. What she would have liked would have been
to marry the lot; but that, she presumed, was impracticable.
I feel I resemble that young lady, not so much in charm and beauty as in
indecision of mind, when the question is that of my favourite author or
my favourite book. It is as if one were asked one’s favourite food.
There are times when one fancies an egg with one’s tea. On other
occasions one dreams of a kipper. To-day one clamours for lobsters.
To-morrow one feels one never wishes to see a lobster again. One
determines to settle down, for a time, to a diet of bread and milk and
rice pudding. Asked suddenly to say whether I preferred ices to soup, or
beef-steak to caviare, I should be completely nonplussed.
There may be readers who care for only one literary diet. I am a person
of gross appetites, requiring many authors to satisfy me. There are
moods when the savage strength of the Bronte sisters is companionable to
me. One rejoices in the unrelieved gloom of “Wuthering Heights,” as in
the lowering skies of a stormy autumn. Perhaps part of the marvel of the
book comes from the knowledge that the authoress was a slight, delicate
young girl. One wonders what her future work would have been, had she
lived to gain a wider experience of life; or was it well for her fame
that nature took the pen so soon from her hand? Her suppressed vehemence
may have been better suited to those tangled Yorkshire byways than to the
more open, cultivated fields of life.
There is not much similarity between the two books, yet when recalling
Emily Bronte my thoughts always run on to Olive Schreiner. Here, again,
was a young girl with the voice of a strong man. Olive Schreiner, more
fortunate, has lived; but I doubt if she will ever write a book that will
remind us of her first. “The Story of an African Farm” is not a work to
be repeated. We have advanced in literature of late. I can well
remember the storm of indignation with which the “African Farm” was
received by Mrs. Grundy and her then numerous, but now happily
diminishing, school. It was a book that was to be kept from the hands of
every young man and woman. But the hands of the young men and women
stretched out and grasped it, to their help. It is a curious idea, this
of Mrs. Grundy’s, that the young man and woman must never think—that all
literature that does anything more than echo the conventions must be
hidden away.
Then there are times when I love to gallop through history on Sir
Walter’s broomstick. At other hours it is pleasant to sit in converse
with wise George Eliot. From her garden terrace I look down on Loamshire
and its commonplace people; while in her quiet, deep voice she tells me
of the hidden hearts that beat and throb beneath these velveteen jackets
and lace falls.
Who can help loving Thackeray, wittiest, gentlest of men, in spite of the
faint suspicion of snobbishness that clings to him? There is something
pathetic in the good man’s horror of this snobbishness, to which he
himself was a victim. May it not have been an affectation, born
unconsciously of self-consciousness? His heroes and heroines must needs
be all fine folk, fit company for lady and gentlemen readers. To him the
livery was too often the man. Under his stuffed calves even _Jeames de
la Pluche_ himself stood upon the legs of a man, but Thackeray could
never see deeper than the silk stockings. Thackeray lived and died in
Clubland. One feels that the world was bounded for him by Temple Bar on
the east and Park Lane on the west; but what there was good in Clubland
he showed us, and for the sake of the great gentlemen and sweet ladies
that his kindly eyes found in that narrow region, not too overpeopled
with great gentlemen and sweet women, let us honour him.
“Tom Jones,” “Peregrine Pickle,” and “Tristram Shandy” are books a man is
the better for reading, if he read them wisely. They teach him that
literature, to be a living force, must deal with all sides of life, and
that little help comes to us from that silly pretence of ours that we are
perfect in all things, leading perfect lives, that only the villain of
the story ever deviates from the path of rectitude.
This is a point that needs to be considered by both the makers and the
buyers of stories. If literature is to be regarded solely as the
amusement of an idle hour, then the less relationship it has to life the
better. Looking into a truthful mirror of nature we are compelled to
think; and when thought comes in at the window self-satisfaction goes out
by the door. Should a novel or play call us to ponder upon the problems
of existence, or lure us from the dusty high road of the world, for a
while, into the pleasant meadows of dreamland? If only the latter, then
let our heroes and our heroines be not what men and women are, but what
they should be. Let Angelina be always spotless and Edwin always true.
Let virtue ever triumph over villainy in the last chapter; and let us
assume that the marriage service answers all the questions of the Sphinx.
Very pleasant are these fairy tales where the prince is always brave and
handsome; where the princess is always the best and most beautiful
princess that ever lived; where one knows the wicked people at a glance
by their ugliness and ill-temper, mistakes being thus rendered
impossible; where the good fairies are, by nature, more powerful than the
bad; where gloomy paths lead ever to fair palaces; where the dragon is
ever vanquished; and where well-behaved husbands and wives can rely upon
living happily ever afterwards. “The world is too much with us, late and
soon.” It is wise to slip away from it at times to fairyland. But,
alas, we cannot live in fairyland, and knowledge of its geography is of
little help to us on our return to the rugged country of reality.
Are not both branches of literature needful? By all means let us dream,
on midsummer nights, of fond lovers led through devious paths to
happiness by Puck; of virtuous dukes—one finds such in fairyland; of fate
subdued by faith and gentleness. But may we not also, in our more
serious humours, find satisfaction in thinking with Hamlet or Coriolanus?
May not both Dickens and Zola have their booths in Vanity Fair? If
literature is to be a help to us, as well as a pastime, it must deal with
the ugly as well as with the beautiful; it must show us ourselves, not as
we wish to appear, but as we know ourselves to be. Man has been
described as a animal with aspirations reaching up to Heaven and
instincts rooted—elsewhere. Is literature to flatter him, or reveal him
to himself?
Of living writers it is not safe, I suppose, to speak except, perhaps, of
those who have been with us so long that we have come to forget they are
not of the past. Has justice ever been done to Ouida’s undoubted genius
by our shallow school of criticism, always very clever in discovering
faults as obvious as pimples on a fine face? Her guardsmen “toy” with
their food. Her horses win the Derby three years running. Her wicked
women throw guinea peaches from the windows of the Star and Garter into
the Thames at Richmond. The distance being about three hundred and fifty
yards, it is a good throw. Well, well, books are not made worth reading
by the absence of absurdities. Ouida possesses strength, tenderness,
truth, passion; and these be qualities in a writer capable of carrying
many more faults than Ouida is burdened with. But that is the method of
our little criticism. It views an artist as Gulliver saw the Brobdingnag
ladies. It is too small to see them in their entirety: a mole or a wart
absorbs all its vision.
Why was not George Gissing more widely read? If faithfulness to life
were the key to literary success, Gissing’s sales would have been counted
by the million instead of by the hundred.
Have Mark Twain’s literary qualities, apart altogether from his humour,
been recognised in literary circles as they ought to have been? “Huck
Finn” would be a great work were there not a laugh in it from cover to
cover. Among the Indians and some other savage tribes the fact that a
member of the community has lost one of his senses makes greatly to his
advantage; he is then regarded as a superior person. So among a school
of Anglo-Saxon readers, it is necessary to a man, if he would gain
literary credit, that he should lack the sense of humour. One or two
curious modern examples occur to me of literary success secured chiefly
by this failing.
All these authors are my favourites; but such catholic taste is held
nowadays to be no taste. One is told that if one loves Shakespeare, one
must of necessity hate Ibsen; that one cannot appreciate Wagner and
tolerate Beethoven; that if we admit any merit in Dore, we are incapable
of understanding Whistler. How can I say which is my favourite novel? I
can only ask myself which lives clearest in my memory, which is the book
I run to more often than to another in that pleasant half hour before the
dinner-bell, when, with all apologies to good Mr. Smiles, it is useless
to think of work.
I find, on examination, that my “David Copperfield” is more dilapidated
than any other novel upon my shelves. As I turn its dog-eared pages,
reading the familiar headlines “Mr. Micawber in difficulties,” “Mr.
Micawber in prison,” “I fall in love with Dora,” “Mr. Barkis goes out
with the tide,” “My child wife,” “Traddles in a nest of roses”—pages of
my own life recur to me; so many of my sorrows, so many of my joys are
woven in my mind with this chapter or the other. That day—how well I
remember it when I read of “David’s” wooing, but Dora’s death I was
careful to skip. Poor, pretty little Mrs. Copperfield at the gate,
holding up her baby in her arms, is always associated in my memory with a
child’s cry, long listened for. I found the book, face downwards on a
chair, weeks afterwards, not moved from where I had hastily laid it.
Old friends, all of you, how many times have I not slipped away from my
worries into your pleasant company! Peggotty, you dear soul, the sight
of your kind eyes is so good to me. Our mutual friend, Mr. Charles
Dickens, is prone, we know, just ever so slightly to gush. Good fellow
that he is, he can see no flaw in those he loves, but you, dear lady, if
you will permit me to call you by a name much abused, he has drawn in
true colours. I know you well, with your big heart, your quick temper,
your homely, human ways of thought. You yourself will never guess your
worth—how much the world is better for such as you! You think of
yourself as of a commonplace person, useful only for the making of
pastry, the darning of stockings, and if a man—not a young man, with only
dim half-opened eyes, but a man whom life had made keen to see the beauty
that lies hidden beneath plain faces—were to kneel and kiss your red,
coarse hand, you would be much astonished. But he would be a wise man,
Peggotty, knowing what things a man should take carelessly, and for what
things he should thank God, who has fashioned fairness in many forms.
Mr. Wilkins Micawber, and you, most excellent of faithful wives, Mrs.
Emma Micawber, to you I also raise my hat. How often has the example of
your philosophy saved me, when I, likewise, have suffered under the
temporary pressure of pecuniary liabilities; when the sun of my
prosperity, too, has sunk beneath the dark horizon of the world—in short,
when I, also, have found myself in a tight corner. I have asked myself
what would the Micawbers have done in my place. And I have answered
myself. They would have sat down to a dish of lamb’s fry, cooked and
breaded by the deft hands of Emma, followed by a brew of punch, concocted
by the beaming Wilkins, and have forgotten all their troubles, for the
time being. Whereupon, seeing first that sufficient small change was in
my pocket, I have entered the nearest restaurant, and have treated myself
to a repast of such sumptuousness as the aforesaid small change would
command, emerging from that restaurant stronger and more fit for battle.
And lo! the sun of my prosperity has peeped at me from over the clouds
with a sly wink, as if to say “Cheer up; I am only round the corner.”
Cheery, elastic Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, how would half the world face
their fate but by the help of a kindly, shallow nature such as yours? I
love to think that your sorrows can be drowned in nothing more harmful
than a bowl of punch. Here’s to you, Emma, and to you, Wilkins, and to
the twins!
May you and such childlike folk trip lightly over the stones upon your
path! May something ever turn up for you, my dears! May the rain of
life ever fall as April showers upon your simple bald head, Micawber!
And you, sweet Dora, let me confess I love you, though sensible friends
deem you foolish. Ah, silly Dora, fashioned by wise Mother Nature who
knows that weakness and helplessness are as a talisman calling forth
strength and tenderness in man, trouble yourself not unduly about the
oysters and the underdone mutton, little woman. Good plain cooks at
twenty pounds a year will see to these things for us. Your work is to
teach us gentleness and kindness. Lay your foolish curls just here,
child. It is from such as you we learn wisdom. Foolish wise folk sneer
at you. Foolish wise folk would pull up the laughing lilies, the
needless roses from the garden, would plant in their places only useful,
wholesome cabbage. But the gardener, knowing better, plants the silly,
short-lived flowers, foolish wise folk asking for what purpose.
Gallant Traddles, of the strong heart and the unruly hair; Sophy, dearest
of girls; Betsy Trotwood, with your gentlemanly manners and your woman’s
heart, you have come to me in shabby rooms, making the dismal place seem
bright. In dark hours your kindly faces have looked out at me from the
shadows, your kindly voices have cheered me.
Little Em’ly and Agnes, it may be my bad taste, but I cannot share my
friend Dickens’ enthusiasm for them. Dickens’ good women are all too
good for human nature’s daily food. Esther Summerson, Florence Dombey,
Little Nell—you have no faults to love you by.
Scott’s women were likewise mere illuminated texts. Scott only drew one
live heroine—Catherine Seton. His other women were merely the prizes the
hero had to win in the end, like the sucking pig or the leg of mutton for
which the yokel climbs the greasy pole. That Dickens could draw a woman
to some likeness he proved by Bella Wilfer, and Estella in “Great
Expectations.” But real women have never been popular in fiction. Men
readers prefer the false, and women readers object to the truth.
From an artistic point of view, “David Copperfield” is undoubtedly
Dickens’ best work. Its humour is less boisterous; its pathos less
highly coloured.
One of Leech’s pictures represents a cab-man calmly sleeping in the
gutter.
“Oh, poor dear, he’s ill,” says a tender-hearted lady in the crowd.
“Ill!” retorts a male bystander indignantly, “Ill! ’E’s ’ad too much of
what I ain’t ’ad enough of.”
Dickens suffered from too little of what some of us have too much
of—criticism. His work met with too little resistance to call forth his
powers. Too often his pathos sinks to bathos, and this not from want of
skill, but from want of care. It is difficult to believe that the
popular writer who allowed his sentimentality—or rather the public’s
sentimentality—to run away with him in such scenes as the death of Paul
Dombey and Little Nell was the artist who painted the death of Sidney
Carton and of Barkis, the willing. The death of Barkis, next to the
passing of Colonel Newcome, is, to my thinking, one of the most perfect
pieces of pathos in English literature. No very deep emotion is
concerned. He is a commonplace old man, clinging foolishly to a
commonplace box. His simple wife and the old boatmen stand by, waiting
calmly for the end. There is no straining after effect. One feels death
enter, dignifying all things; and touched by that hand, foolish old
Barkis grows great.
In Uriah Heap and Mrs. Gummidge, Dickens draws types rather than
characters. Pecksniff, Podsnap, Dolly Varden, Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Gamp,
Mark Tapley, Turveydrop, Mrs. Jellyby—these are not characters; they are
human characteristics personified.
We have to go back to Shakespeare to find a writer who, through fiction,
has so enriched the thought of the people. Admit all Dickens’ faults
twice over, we still have one of the greatest writers of modern times.
Such people as these creations of Dickens never lived, says your little
critic. Nor was Prometheus, type of the spirit of man, nor was Niobe,
mother of all mothers, a truthful picture of the citizen one was likely
to meet often during a morning’s stroll through Athens. Nor grew there
ever a wood like to the Forest of Arden, though every Rosalind and
Orlando knows the path to glades having much resemblance thereto.
Steerforth, upon whom Dickens evidently prided himself, I must confess,
never laid hold of me. He is a melodramatic young man. The worst I
could have wished him would have been that he should marry Rose Dartle
and live with his mother. It would have served him right for being so
attractive. Old Peggotty and Ham are, of course, impossible. One must
accept them also as types. These Brothers Cheeryble, these Kits, Joe
Gargeries, Boffins, Garlands, John Peerybingles, we will accept as types
of the goodness that is in men—though in real life the amount of virtue
that Dickens often wastes upon a single individual would by more
economically minded nature, be made to serve for fifty.
To sum up, “David Copperfield” is a plain tale, simply told; and such are
all books that live. Eccentricities of style, artistic trickery, may
please the critic of a day, but literature is a story that interests us,
boys and girls, men and women. It is a sad book; and that, again, gives
it an added charm in these sad later days. Humanity is nearing its old
age, and we have come to love sadness, as the friend who has been longest
with us. In the young days of our vigour we were merry. With Ulysses’
boatmen, we took alike the sunshine and the thunder with frolic welcome.
The red blood flowed in our veins, and we laughed, and our tales were of
strength and hope. Now we sit like old men, watching faces in the fire;
and the stories that we love are sad stories—like the stories we
ourselves have lived.