"The weather obstinately clearing, we started off last Tuesday for the

Great St. Bernard, returning here on Friday afternoon. The party

consisted of eleven people and two servants--Haldimand, Mr. and Mrs.

Cerjat and one daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Watson, two Ladies Taylor, Kate,

Georgy, and I. We were wonderfully unanimous and cheerful; went away

from here by the steamer; found at its destination a whole omnibus

provided by the Brave (who went on in advance everywhere); rode therein

to Bex; found two large carriages ready to take us to Martigny; slept

there; and proceeded up the mountain on mules next day. Although the St.

Bernard convent is, as I dare say you know, the highest inhabited spot

but one in the world, the ascent is extremely gradual and uncommonly

easy: really presenting no difficulties at all, until within the last

league, when the ascent, lying through a place called the valley of

desolation, is very awful and tremendous, and the road is rendered

toilsome by scattered rocks and melting snow. The convent is a most

extraordinary place, full of great vaulted passages, divided from each

other with iron gratings; and presenting a series of the most

astonishing little dormitories, where the windows are so small (on

account of the cold and snow), that it is as much as one can do to get

one's head out of them. Here we slept: supping, thirty strong, in a

rambling room with a great wood-fire in it set apart for that purpose;

with a grim monk, in a high black sugar-loaf hat with a great knob at

the top of it, carving the dishes. At five o'clock in the morning the

chapel bell rang in the dismallest way for matins: and I, lying in bed

close to the chapel, and being awakened by the solemn organ and the

chaunting, thought for a moment I had died in the night and passed into

the unknown world.

"I wish to God you could see that place. A great hollow on the top of a

range of dreadful mountains, fenced in by riven rocks of every shape and

colour: and in the midst, a black lake, with phantom clouds perpetually

stalking over it. Peaks, and points, and plains of eternal ice and snow,

bounding the view, and shutting out the world on every side: the lake

reflecting nothing: and no human figure in the scene. The air so fine,

that it is difficult to breathe without feeling out of breath; and the

cold so exquisitely thin and sharp that it is not to be described.

Nothing of life or living interest in the picture, but the grey dull

walls of the convent. No vegetation of any sort or kind. Nothing

growing, nothing stirring. Everything iron-bound, and frozen up. Beside

the convent, in a little outhouse with a grated iron door which you may

unbolt for yourself, are the bodies of people found in the snow who have

never been claimed and are withering away--not laid down, or stretched

out, but standing up, in corners and against walls; some erect and

horribly human, with distinct expressions on the faces; some sunk down

on their knees; some dropping over on one side; some tumbled down

altogether, and presenting a heap of skulls and fibrous dust. There is

no other decay in that atmosphere; and there they remain during the

short days and the long nights, the only human company out of doors,

withering away by grains, and holding ghastly possession of the mountain

where they died.

"It is the most distinct and individual place I have seen, even in this

transcendent country. But, for the Saint Bernard holy fathers and

convent in themselves, I am sorry to say that they are a piece of as

sheer humbug as we ever learnt to believe in, in our young days. Trashy

French sentiment and the dogs (of which, by the bye, there are only

three remaining) have done it all. They are a lazy set of fellows; not

over fond of going out themselves; employing servants to clear the road

(which has not been important or much used as a pass these hundred

years); rich; and driving a good trade in Innkeeping: the convent being

a common tavern in everything but the sign. No charge is made for their

hospitality, to be sure; but you are shown to a box in the chapel, where

everybody puts in more than could, with any show of face, be charged for

the entertainment; and from this the establishment derives a right good

income. As to the self-sacrifice of living up there, they are obliged to

go there young, it is true, to be inured to the climate: but it is an

infinitely more exciting and various life than any other convent can

offer; with constant change and company through the whole summer; with a

hospital for invalids down in the valley, which affords another change;

and with an annual begging-journey to Geneva and this place and all the

places round for one brother or other, which affords farther change. The

brother who carved at our supper could speak some English, and had just

had _Pickwick_ given him!--what a humbug he will think me when he tries

to understand it! If I had had any other book of mine with me, I would

have given it him, that I might have had some chance of being

intelligible. . . ."

FOOTNOTES:

[124] Where he makes remark also on a class of offences which are still

most inadequately punished: "I hope you will follow up your idea about

the defective state of the law in reference to women, by some remarks on

the inadequate punishment of that ruffian flippantly called by the

liners the Wholesale Matrimonial Speculator. My opinion is, that in any

well-ordered state of society, and advanced spirit of social

jurisprudence, he would have been flogged more than once (privately),

and certainly sentenced to transportation for no less a term than the

rest of his life. Surely the man who threw the woman out of window was

no worse, if so bad."

[125] Ten days before there had been a visit from Mr. Ainsworth and his

daughters on their way to Geneva. "I breakfasted with him at the hotel

Gibbon next morning and they dined here afterwards, and we walked about

all day, talking of our old days at Kensal-lodge." The same letter told

me: "We had a regatta at Ouchy the other day, mainly supported by the

contributions of the English handfull. It concluded with a rowing-match

by women, which was very funny. I wish you could have seen Roche appear

on the Lake, rowing, in an immense boat, Cook, Anne, two nurses, Katey,

Mamey, Walley, Chickenstalker, and Baby; no boatmen or other degrading

assistance; and all sorts of Swiss tubs splashing about them . . . Senior

is coming here to-morrow, I believe, with his wife; and they talk of

Brunel and his wife as on their way. We dine at Haldimand's to meet

Senior--which solitary and most interesting piece of intelligence is all

the news I know of . . . Take care you don't back out of your Paris

engagement; but that we really do have (please God) some happy hours

there. Kate, Georgy, Mamey, Katey, Charley, Walley, Chickenstalker, and

Baby, send loves. . . . I am all anxiety and fever to know what we start

_Dombey_ with!"

[126] This was the fourth Baron Vernon, who succeeded to the title in

1829, and died seven years after the date of Dickens's description, in

his 74th year.

CHAPTER XIII.

LITERARY LABOUR AT LAUSANNE.

1846.

A Picture completed--Self-judgments--Christmas

Fancies--Second Number of _Dombey_--A Personal

Revelation--First Thought of Public

Readings--Two Tales in Hand--Christmas Book

given up--Goes to Geneva--Disquietudes of

Authorship--Shadows from _Dombey_--A New Social

Experience--Eccentricities--Feminine Smoking

Party--Visit of the Talfourds--Christmas Book

resumed--Lodging his Friends.

SOMETHING of the other side of the medal has now to be presented. His

letters enable us to see him amid his troubles and difficulties of

writing, as faithfully as in his leisure and enjoyments; and when, to

the picture thus given of Dickens's home life in Switzerland, some

account has been added of the vicissitudes of literary labour undergone

in the interval, as complete a representation of the man will be

afforded as could be taken from any period of his career. Of the larger

life whereof it is part, the Lausanne life is indeed a perfect

microcosm, wanting only the London streets. This was his chief present

want, as will shortly be perceived: but as yet the reader does not feel

it, and he sees otherwise in all respects at his best the great observer

and humourist; interested in everything that commended itself to a

thoroughly earnest and eagerly enquiring nature; popular beyond measure

with all having intercourse with him; the centre, and very soul, of

social enjoyment; letting nothing escape a vision that was not more keen

than kindly; and even when apparently most idle, never idle in the sense

of his art, but adding day by day to experiences that widened its range,

and gave freer and healthier play to an imagination always busily at

work, alert and active in a singular degree, and that seemed to be quite

untiring. At his heart there was a genuine love of nature at all times;

and strange as it may seem to connect this with such forms of humorous

delineation as are most identified with his genius, it is yet the

literal truth that the impressions of this noble Swiss scenery were with

him during the work of many subsequent years: a present and actual,

though it might be seldom a directly conscious, influence. When he said

afterwards, that, while writing the book on which he is now engaged, he

had not seen less clearly each step of the wooden midshipman's

staircase, each pew of the church in which Florence was married, or each

bed in the dormitory of Doctor Blimber's establishment, because he was

himself at the time by the lake of Geneva, he might as truly have said

that he saw them all the more clearly even because of that circumstance.

He worked his humour to its greatest results by the freedom and force of

his imagination; and while the smallest or commonest objects around him

were food for the one, the other might have pined or perished without

additional higher aliment. Dickens had little love for Wordsworth, but

he was himself an example of the truth the great poet never tired of

enforcing, that Nature has subtle helps for all who are admitted to

become free of her wonders and mysteries.

Another noticeable thing in him is impressed upon these letters, as upon

many also heretofore quoted, for indeed all of them are marvellously

exact in the reproduction of his nature. He did not think lightly of his

work; and the work that occupied him at the time was for the time

paramount with him. But the sense he entertained, whether right or

wrong, of the importance of what he had to do, of the degree to which it

concerned others that the power he held should be exercised

successfully, and of the estimate he was justified in forming as the

fair measure of its worth or greatness, does not carry with it of

necessity presumption or self-conceit. Few men have had less of either.

It was part of the intense individuality by which he effected so much,

to set the high value which in general he did upon what he was striving

to accomplish; he could not otherwise have mastered one half the work he

designed; and we are able to form an opinion, more just now for

ourselves than it might have seemed to us then from others, of the

weight and truth of such self-judgment. The fussy pretension of small

men in great places, and the resolute self-assertion of great men in

small places, are things essentially different. _Respice finem_. The

exact relative importance of all our pursuits is to be arrived at by

nicer adjustments of the Now and the Hereafter than are possible to

contemporary judgments; and there have been some indications since his

death confirmatory of the belief, that the estimate which he thought

himself entitled to form of the labours to which his life was devoted,

will be strengthened, not lessened, by time.

Dickens proposed to himself, it will be remembered, to write at Lausanne

not only the first four numbers of his larger book, but the Christmas

book suggested to him by his fancy of a battle field; and reserving what

is to be said of _Dombey_ to a later chapter, this and its successor

will deal only with what he finished as well as began in Switzerland,

and will show at what cost even so much was achieved amid his other and

larger engagements.

He had restless fancies and misgivings before he settled to his first

notion. "I have been thinking this last day or two," he wrote on the

25th of July, "that good Christmas characters might be grown out of the

idea of a man imprisoned for ten or fifteen years; his imprisonment

being the gap between the people and circumstances of the first part and

the altered people and circumstances of the second, and his own changed

mind. Though I shall probably proceed with the Battle idea, I should

like to know what you think of this one?" It was afterwards used in a

modified shape for the _Tale of Two Cities_. "I shall begin the little

story straightway," he wrote a few weeks later; "but I have been dimly

conceiving a very ghostly and wild idea, which I suppose I must now

reserve for the _next_ Christmas book. _Nous verrons._ It will mature in

the streets of Paris by night, as well as in London." This took

ultimately the form of the _Haunted Man_, which was not written until

the winter of 1848. At last I knew that his first slip was done, and

that even his eager busy fancy would not turn him back again.

But other unsatisfied wants and cravings had meanwhile broken out in

him, of which I heard near the close of the second number of _Dombey_.

The first he had finished at the end of July; and the second, which he

began on the 8th of August, he was still at work upon in the first week

of September, when this remarkable announcement came to me. It was his

first detailed confession of what he felt so continuously, and if that

were possible even more strongly, as the years went on, that there is no

single passage in any of his letters which throws such a flood of

illuminative light into the portions of his life which always awaken the

greatest interest. Very much that is to follow must be read by it. "You

can hardly imagine," he wrote on the 30th of August, "what infinite

pains I take, or what extraordinary difficulty I find in getting on

FAST. Invention, thank God, seems the easiest thing in the world; and I

seem to have such a preposterous sense of the ridiculous, after this

long rest" (it was now over two years since the close of _Chuzzlewit_),

"as to be constantly requiring to restrain myself from launching into

extravagances in the height of my enjoyment. But the difficulty of going

at what I call a rapid pace, is prodigious; it is almost an

impossibility. I suppose this is partly the effect of two years' ease,

and partly of the absence of streets and numbers of figures. I can't

express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to

my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or a

fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place (as at

Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But

the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic

lantern, is IMMENSE!! I don't say this at all in low spirits, for we

are perfectly comfortable here, and I like the place very much indeed,

and the people are even more friendly and fond of me than they were in

Genoa. I only mention it as a curious fact, which I have never had an

opportunity of finding out before. _My_ figures seem disposed to

stagnate without crowds about them. I wrote very little in Genoa (only

the _Chimes_), and fancied myself conscious of some such influence

there--but Lord! I had two miles of streets at least, lighted at night,

to walk about in; and a great theatre to repair to, every night." At the

close of the letter he told me that he had pretty well matured the

general idea of the Christmas book, and was burning to get to work on

it. He thought it would be all the better, for a change, to have no

fairies or spirits in it, but to make it a simple domestic tale.[127]

In less than a week from this date his second number was finished, his

first slip of the little book done, and his confidence greater. They had

had wonderful weather,[128] so clear that he could see from the

Neuchatel road the whole of Mont Blanc, six miles distant, as plainly

as if he were standing close under it in the courtyard of the little inn

at Chamounix; and, though again it was raining when he wrote, his

"nailed shoes" were by him and his "great waterproof cloak" in

preparation for a "fourteen-mile walk" before dinner. Then, after three

days more, came something of a sequel to the confession before made,

which will be read with equal interest. "The absence of any accessible

streets continues to worry me, now that I have so much to do, in a most

singular manner. It is quite a little mental phenomenon. I should not

walk in them in the day time, if they were here, I dare say: but at

night I want them beyond description. I don't seem able to get rid of my

spectres unless I can lose them in crowds. However, as you say, there

are streets in Paris, and good suggestive streets too: and trips to

London will be nothing then. WHEN I have finished the Christmas book, I

shall fly to Geneva for a day or two, before taking up with _Dombey_

again. I like this place better and better; and never saw, I think, more

agreeable people than our little circle is made up of. It is so little,

that one is not 'bothered' in the least; and their interest in the

inimitable seems to strengthen daily. I read them the first number last

night 'was a' week, with unrelateable success; and old Mrs. Marcet, who

is devilish 'cute, guessed directly (but I didn't tell her she was

right) that little Paul would die. They were all so apprehensive that it

was a great pleasure to read it; and I shall leave here, if all goes

well, in a brilliant shower of sparks struck out of them by the promised

reading of the Christmas book." Little did either of us then imagine to

what these readings were to lead, but even thus early they were taking

in his mind the shape of a sort of jest that the smallest opportunity of

favour might have turned into earnest. In his very next letter he wrote

to me: "I was thinking the other day that in these days of lecturings

and readings, a great deal of money might possibly be made (if it were

not infra dig) by one's having Readings of one's own books. It would be

an _odd_ thing. I think it would take immensely. What do you say? Will

you step to Dean-street, and see how Miss Kelly's engagement-book (it

must be an immense volume!) stands? Or shall I take the St. James's?" My

answer is to be inferred from his rejoinder: but even at this time,

while heightening and carrying forward his jest, I suspected him of

graver desires than he cared to avow; and the time was to come, after a

dozen years, when with earnestness equal to his own I continued to

oppose, for reasons to be stated in their place, that which he had set

his heart upon too strongly to abandon, and which I still can only wish

he had preferred to surrender with all that seemed to be its enormous

gains! "I don't think you have exercised your usual judgment in taking

Covent-garden for me. I doubt it is too large for my purpose. However, I

shall stand by whatever you propose to the proprietors."

Soon came the changes of trouble and vexation I had too surely seen.

"You remember," he wrote, "your objection about the two stories. I made

over light of it. I ought to have considered that I have never before

really tried the opening of two together--having always had one pretty

far ahead when I have been driving a pair of them. I know it all now.

The apparent impossibility of getting each into its place, coupled with

that craving for streets, so thoroughly put me off the track, that, up

to Wednesday or Thursday last, I really contemplated, at times, the

total abandonment of the Christmas book this year, and the limitation of

my labours to _Dombey and Son_! I cancelled the beginning of a first

scene--which I have never done before--and, with a notion in my head,

ran wildly about and about it, and could not get the idea into any

natural socket. At length, thank Heaven, I nailed it all at once; and

after going on comfortably up to yesterday, and working yesterday from

half-past nine to six, I was last night in such a state of enthusiasm

about it that I think I was an inch or two taller. I am a little cooler

to-day, with a headache to boot; but I really begin to hope you will

think it a pretty story, with some delicate notions in it agreeably

presented, and with a good human Christmas groundwork. I fancy I see a

great domestic effect in the last part."

That was written on the 20th of September; but six days later changed

the picture and surprised me not a little. I might grudge the space thus

given to one of the least important of his books but that the

illustration goes farther than the little tale it refers to, and is a

picture of him in his moods of writing, with their weakness as well as

strength upon him, of a perfect truth and applicability to every period

of his life. Movement and change while he was working were not mere

restlessness, as we have seen; it was no impatience of labour, or desire

of pleasure, that led at such times to his eager craving for the fresh

crowds and faces in which he might lose or find the creatures of his

fancy; and recollecting this, much hereafter will be understood that

might else be very far from clear, in regard to the sensitive conditions

under which otherwise he carried on these exertions of his brain. "I am

going to write you" (26th of September) "a most startling piece of

intelligence. I fear there may be NO CHRISTMAS BOOK! I would give the

world to be on the spot to tell you this. Indeed I once thought of

starting for London to-night. I have written nearly a third of it. It

promises to be pretty; quite a new idea in the story, I hope; but to

manage it without the supernatural agency now impossible of

introduction, and yet to move it naturally within the required space, or

with any shorter limit than a _Vicar of Wakefield_, I find to be a

difficulty so perplexing--the past _Dombey_ work taken into

account--that I am fearful of wearing myself out if I go on, and not

being able to come back to the greater undertaking with the necessary

freshness and spirit. If I had nothing but the Christmas book to do, I

WOULD do it; but I get horrified and distressed beyond conception at the

prospect of being jaded when I come back to the other, and making it a

mere race against time. I have written the first part; I know the end

and upshot of the second; and the whole of the third (there are only

three in all). I know the purport of each character, and the plain idea

that each is to work out; and I have the principal effects sketched on

paper. It cannot end _quite_ happily, but will end cheerfully and

pleasantly. But my soul sinks before the commencement of the second

part--the longest--and the introduction of the under-idea. (The main one

already developed, with interest.) I don't know how it is. I suppose it

is the having been almost constantly at work in this quiet place; and

the dread for the _Dombey_; and the not being able to get rid of it, in

noise and bustle. The beginning two books together is also, no doubt, a

fruitful source of the difficulty; for I am now sure I could not have

invented the _Carol_ at the commencement of the _Chuzzlewit_, or gone to

a new book from the _Chimes_. But this is certain. I am sick, giddy, and

capriciously despondent. I have bad nights; am full of disquietude and

anxiety; and am constantly haunted by the idea that I am wasting the

marrow of the larger book, and ought to be at rest. One letter that I

wrote you before this, I have torn up. In that the Christmas book was

wholly given up for this year: but I now resolve to make one effort

more. I will go to Geneva to-morrow, and try on Monday and Tuesday

whether I can get on at all bravely, in the changed scene. If I cannot,

I am convinced that I had best hold my hand at once; and not fritter my

spirits and hope away, with that long book before me. You may suppose

that the matter is very grave when I can so nearly abandon anything in

which I am deeply interested, and fourteen or fifteen close MS. pages of

which, that have made me laugh and cry, are lying in my desk. Writing

this letter at all, I have a great misgiving that the letter I shall

write you on Tuesday night will not make it better. Take it, for

Heaven's sake, as an extremely serious thing, and not a fancy of the

moment. Last Saturday after a very long day's work, and last Wednesday

after finishing the first part, I was full of eagerness and pleasure. At

all other times since I began, I have been brooding and brooding over

the idea that it was a wild thing to dream of, ever: and that I ought to

be at rest for the _Dombey_."

The letter came, written on Wednesday not Tuesday night, and it left the

question still unsettled. "When I came here" (Geneva, 30th of September)

"I had a bloodshot eye; and my head was so bad, with a pain across the

brow, that I thought I must have got cupped. I have become a great deal

better, however, and feel quite myself again to-day. . . . I still have not

made up my mind as to what I CAN do with the Christmas book. I would

give any money that it were possible to consult with you. I have begun

the second part this morning, and have done a very fair morning's work

at it, but I do not feel it _in hand_ within the necessary space and

divisions: and I have a great uneasiness in the prospect of falling

behind hand with the other labour, which is so transcendantly important.

I feel quite sure that unless I (being in reasonably good state and

spirits) like the Christmas book myself, I had better not go on with it;

but had best keep my strength for _Dombey_, and keep my number in

advance. On the other hand I am dreadfully averse to abandoning it, and

am so torn between the two things that I know not what to do. It is

impossible to express the wish I have that I could take counsel with

you. Having begun the second part I will go on here, to-morrow and

Friday (Saturday, the Talfourds come to us at Lausanne, leaving on

Monday morning), unless I see new reason to give it up in the meanwhile.

Let it stand thus--that my next Monday's letter shall finally decide the

question. But if you have not already told Bradbury and Evans of my last

letter I think it will now be best to do so. . . . This non-publication of

a Christmas book, if it must be, I try to think light of with the

greater story just begun, and with this _Battle of Life_ story (of which

I really think the leading idea is very pretty) lying by me, for future

use. But I would like you to consider, in the event of my not going on,

how best, by timely announcement, in November's or December's _Dombey_,

I may seem to hold the ground prospectively. . . . Heaven send me a good

deliverance! If I don't do it, it will be the first time I ever

abandoned anything I had once taken in hand; and I shall not have

abandoned it until after a most desperate fight. I could do it, but for

the _Dombey_, as easily as I did last year or the year before. But I

cannot help falling back on that continually: and this, combined with

the peculiar difficulties of the story for a Christmas book, and my

being out of sorts, discourages me sadly. . . . Kate is here, and sends her

love.". . . A postscript was added on the following day. "Georgy has come

over from Lausanne, and joins with Kate, &c. &c. My head remains greatly

better. My eye is recovering its old hue of beautiful white, tinged with

celestial blue. If I hadn't come here, I think I should have had some

bad low fever. The sight of the rushing Rhone seemed to stir my blood

again. I don't think I shall want to be cupped, this bout; but it

looked, at one time, worse than I have confessed to you. If I have any

return, I will have it done immediately."

He stayed two days longer at Geneva, which he found to be a very good

place; pleasantly reporting himself as quite dismayed at first by the

sight of gas in it, and as trembling at the noise in its streets, which

he pronounced to be fully equal to the uproar of Richmond in Surrey; but

deriving from it some sort of benefit both in health and in writing. So

far his trip had been successful, though he had to leave the place

hurriedly to welcome his English visitors to Rosemont.

One social and very novel experience he had in his hotel, however, the

night before he left, which may be told before he hastens back to

Lausanne; for it could hardly now offend any one even if the names were

given. "And now sir I will describe, modestly, tamely, literally, the

visit to the small select circle which I promised should make your hair

stand on end. In our hotel were Lady A, and Lady B, mother and daughter,

who came to the Peschiere shortly before we left it, and who have a deep

admiration for your humble servant the inimitable B. They are both very

clever. Lady B, extremely well-informed in languages, living and dead;

books, and gossip; very pretty; with two little children, and not yet

five and twenty. Lady A, plump, fresh, and rosy; matronly, but full of

spirits and good looks. Nothing would serve them but we _must_ dine with

them; and accordingly, on Friday at six, we went down to their room. I

knew them to be rather odd. For instance, I have known Lady A, _full

dressed_, walk alone through the streets of Genoa, the squalid Italian

bye streets, to the Governor's soiree; and announce herself at the

palace of state, by knocking at the door. I have also met Lady B, full

dressed, without any cap or bonnet, walking a mile to the opera, with

all sorts of jingling jewels about her, beside a sedan chair in which

sat enthroned her mama. Consequently, I was not surprised at such little

sparkles in the conversation (from the young lady) as 'Oh God what a

sermon we had here, last Sunday!' 'And did you ever read such infernal

trash as Mrs. Gore's?'--and the like. Still, but for Kate and Georgy

(who were decidedly in the way, as we agreed afterwards), I should have

thought it all very funny; and, as it was, I threw the ball back again,

was mighty free and easy, made some rather broad jokes, and was highly

applauded. 'You smoke, don't you?' said the young lady, in a pause of

this kind of conversation. 'Yes,' I said, 'I generally take a cigar

after dinner when I am alone.' 'I'll give you a good 'un,' said she,

'when we go up-stairs.' Well sir, in due course we went up stairs, and

there we were joined by an American lady residing in the same hotel, who

looked like what we call in old England 'a reg'lar Bunter'--fluffy face

(rouged); considerable development of figure; one groggy eye; blue satin

dress made low with short sleeves, and shoes of the same. Also a

daughter; face likewise fluffy; figure likewise developed; dress

likewise low, with short sleeves, and shoes of the same; and one eye not

yet actually groggy, but going to be. American lady married at sixteen;

daughter sixteen now, often mistaken for sisters, &c. &c. &c. When that

was over, Lady B brought out a cigar box, and gave me a cigar, made of

negrohead she said, which would quell an elephant in six whiffs. The box

was full of cigarettes--good large ones, made of pretty strong tobacco;

I always smoke them here, and used to smoke them at Genoa, and I knew

them well. When I lighted my cigar, Lady B lighted hers, at mine; leaned

against the mantelpiece, in conversation with me; put out her stomach,

folded her arms, and with her pretty face cocked up sideways and her

cigarette smoking away like a Manchester cotton mill, laughed, and

talked, and smoked, in the most gentlemanly manner I ever beheld. Lady A

immediately lighted her cigar; American lady immediately lighted hers;

and in five minutes the room was a cloud of smoke, with us four in the

centre pulling away bravely, while American lady related stories of her

'Hookah' up stairs, and described different kinds of pipes. But even

this was not all. For presently two Frenchmen came in, with whom, and

the American lady, Lady B sat down to whist. The Frenchmen smoked of

course (they were really modest gentlemen, and seemed dismayed), and

Lady B played for the next hour or two with a cigar continually in her

mouth--never out of it. She certainly smoked six or eight. Lady A gave

in soon--I think she only did it out of vanity. American lady had been

smoking all the morning. I took no more; and Lady B and the Frenchmen

had it all to themselves.

"Conceive this in a great hotel, with not only their own servants, but

half a dozen waiters coming constantly in and out! I showed no atom of

surprise; but I never _was_ so surprised, so ridiculously taken aback,

in my life; for in all my experience of 'ladies' of one kind and

another, I never saw a woman--not a basket woman or a gypsy--smoke,

before!" He lived to have larger and wider experience, but there was

enough to startle as well as amuse him in the scene described.

But now Saturday is come; he has hurried back for the friends who are on

their way to his cottage; and on his arrival, even before they have

appeared, he writes to tell me his better news of himself and his work.

"In the breathless interval" (Rosemont: 3rd of October) "between our

return from Geneva and the arrival of the Talfourds (expected in an hour

or two), I cannot do better than write to you. For I think you will be

well pleased if I anticipate my promise, and Monday, at the same time. I

have been greatly better at Geneva, though I still am made uneasy by

occasional giddiness and headache: attributable, I have not the least

doubt, to the absence of streets. There is an idea here, too, that

people are occasionally made despondent and sluggish in their spirits by

this great mass of still water, lake Leman. At any rate I have been very

uncomfortable: at any rate I am, I hope, greatly better: and (lastly) at

any rate I hope and trust, _now_, the Christmas book will come in due

course!! I have had three very good days' work at Geneva, and trust I

may finish the second part (the third is the shortest) by this day week.

Whenever I finish it, I will send you the first two together. I do not

think they can begin to illustrate it, until the third arrives; for it

is a single minded story, as it were, and an artist should know the

end: which I don't think very likely, unless he reads it." Then, after

relating a superhuman effort he was making to lodge his visitors in his

doll's house ("I didn't like the idea of turning them out at night. It

is so dark in these lanes, and groves, when the moon's not bright"), he

sketched for me what he possibly might, and really did, accomplish. He

would by great effort finish the small book on the 20th; would fly to

Geneva for a week to work a little at _Dombey_, if he felt "pretty

sound;" in any case would finish his number three by the 10th of

November; and on that day would start for Paris: "so that, instead of

resting unprofitably here, I shall be using my interval of idleness to

make the journey and get into a new house, and shall hope so to put a

pinch of salt on the tail of the sliding number in advance. . . . I am

horrified at the idea of getting the blues (and bloodshots) again."

Though I did not then know how gravely ill he had been, I was fain to

remind him that it was bad economy to make business out of rest itself;

but I received prompt confirmation that all was falling out as he

wished. The Talfourds stayed two days: "and I think they were very

happy. He was in his best aspect; the manner so well known to us, not

the less loveable for being laughable; and if you could have seen him

going round and round the coach that brought them, as a preliminary to

paying the voiturier to whom he couldn't speak, in a currency he didn't

understand, you never would have forgotten it." His friends left

Lausanne on the 5th; and five days later he sent me two-thirds of the

manuscript of his Christmas book.

FOOTNOTES:

[127] Writing on Sunday he had said: "I hope to finish the second number

to-morrow, and to send it off bodily by Tuesday's post. On Wednesday I

purpose, please God, beginning the _Battle of Life_. I shall peg away at

that, without turning aside to _Dombey_ again; and _if_ I can only do it

within the month!" I had to warn him, on receiving these intimations,

that he was trying too much.

[128] The storm of rain formerly mentioned by him had not been repeated,

but the weather had become unsettled, and he thus referred to the

rainfall which made that summer so disastrous in England. "What a storm

that must have been in London! I wish we could get something like it,

here. . . . It is thundering while I write, but I fear it don't look black

enough for a clearance. The echoes in the mountains are of such a

stupendous sort, that a peal of thunder five or ten minutes long, is

here the commonest of circumstances. . . ." That was early in August, and

at the close of the month he wrote: "I forgot to tell you that yesterday

week, at half-past 7 in the morning, we had a smart shock of an

earthquake, lasting, perhaps, a quarter of a minute. It awoke me in bed.

The sensation was so curious and unlike any other, that I called out at

the top of my voice I was sure it was an earthquake."

CHAPTER XIV.

REVOLUTION AT GENEVA, CHRISTMAS BOOK, AND LAST DAYS IN SWITZERLAND.

1846.

At Lausanne--Large Sale of _Dombey_--Christmas

Book done--At Geneva--Back to _Dombey_--Rising

against the Jesuits--The Fight in Geneva--Rifle

against Cannon--Genevese "Aristocracy"--Swiss

"Rabble"--Traces left by the

Revolution--Smaller Revolution in

Whitefriars--_Daily News_ changes--Letters

about his _Battle of Life_--Sketch of

Story--Difficulty in Plot--His own

Comments--Date of Story--Reply to

Criticism--Stanfield's Offer of

Illustrations--Doubts of Third Part--Tendency

to Blank Verse--Stanfield's Designs--Grave

Mistake by Leech--Last Days in

Switzerland--Mountain Winds--A Ravine in the

Hills--Sadness of Leave-taking--Travelling to

Paris.

"I SEND you in twelve letters, counting this as one, the first two parts

(thirty-five slips) of the Christmas book. I have two present anxieties

respecting it. One to know that you have received it safely; and the

second to know how it strikes you. Be sure you read the first and second

parts together. . . . There seems to me to be interest in it, and a pretty

idea; and it is unlike the others. . . . There will be some minor points

for consideration: as, the necessity for some slight alterations in one

or two of the Doctor's speeches in the first part; and whether it should

be called 'The Battle of Life. A Love Story'--to express both a love

story in the common acceptation of the phrase, and also a story of love;

with one or two other things of that sort. We can moot these by and by.

I made a tremendous day's work of it yesterday and was horribly

excited--so I am going to rush out, as fast as I can: being a little

used up, and sick. . . . But never say die! I have been to the glass to

look at my eye. Pretty bright!"

I made it brighter next day by telling him that the first number of

_Dombey_ had outstripped in sale the first of _Chuzzlewit_ by more than

twelve thousand copies; and his next letter, sending the close of his

little tale, showed his need of the comfort my pleasant news had given

him. "I really do not know what this story is worth. I am so floored:

wanting sleep, and never having had my head free from it for this month

past. I think there are some places in this last part which I may bring

better together in the proof, and where a touch or two may be of

service; particularly in the scene between Craggs and Michael Warden,

where, as it stands, the interest seems anticipated. But I shall have

the benefit of your suggestions, and my own then cooler head, I hope;

and I will be very careful with the proofs, and keep them by me as long

as I can. . . . Mr. Britain must have another Christian name, then? 'Aunt

Martha' is the Sally of whom the Doctor speaks in the first part. Martha

is a better name. What do you think of the concluding paragraph? Would

you leave it for happiness' sake? It is merely experimental. . . . I am

flying to Geneva to-morrow morning." (That was on the 18th of October;

and on the 20th he wrote from Geneva.) "We came here yesterday, and we

shall probably remain until Katey's birthday, which is next Thursday

week. I shall fall to work on number three of _Dombey_ as soon as I can.

At present I am the worse for wear, but nothing like as much so as I

expected to be on Sunday last. I had not been able to sleep for some

time, and had been hammering away, morning, noon, and night. A bottle of

hock on Monday, when Elliotson dined with us (he went away homeward

yesterday morning), did me a world of good; the change comes in the very

nick of time; and I feel in Dombeian spirits already. . . . But I have

still rather a damaged head, aching a good deal occasionally, as it is

doing now, though I have not been cupped--yet. . . . I dreamed all last

week that the _Battle of Life_ was a series of chambers impossible to be

got to rights or got out of, through which I wandered drearily all

night. On Saturday night I don't think I slept an hour. I was

perpetually roaming through the story, and endeavouring to dove-tail the

revolution here into the plot. The mental distress, quite horrible."

Of the "revolution" he had written to me a week before, from Lausanne;

where the news had just reached them, that, upon the Federal Diet

decreeing the expulsion of the Jesuits, the Roman Catholic cantons had

risen against the decree, the result being that the Protestants had

deposed the grand council and established a provisional government,

dissolving the Catholic league. His interest in this, and prompt seizure

of what really was brought into issue by the conflict, is every way

characteristic of Dickens. "You will know," he wrote from Lausanne on

the 11th of October, "long before you get this, all about the

revolution at Geneva. There were stories of plots against the

Government when I was there, but I didn't believe them; for all sorts of

lies are always afloat against the radicals, and wherever there is a

consul from a Catholic Power the most monstrous fictions are in

perpetual circulation against them: as in this very place, where the

Sardinian consul was gravely whispering the other day that a society

called the Homicides had been formed, whereof the president of the

council of state, the O'Connell of Switzerland and a clever fellow, was

a member; who were sworn on skulls and cross-bones to exterminate men of

property, and so forth. There was a great stir here, on the day of the

fight in Geneva. We heard the guns (they shook this house) all day; and

seven hundred men marched out of this town of Lausanne to go and help

the radical party--arriving at Geneva just after it was all over. There

is no doubt they had received secret help from here; for a powder

barrel, found by some of the Genevese populace with 'Canton de Vaud'

painted on it, was carried on a pole about the streets as a standard, to

show that they were sympathized with by friends outside. It was a poor

mean fight enough, I am told by Lord Vernon, who was present and who was

with us last night. The Government was afraid; having no confidence

whatever, I dare say, in its own soldiers; and the cannon were fired

everywhere except at the opposite party, who (I mean the revolutionists)

had barricaded a bridge with an omnibus only, and certainly in the

beginning might have been turned with ease. The precision of the common

men with the rifle was especially shown by a small party of _five_, who

waited on the ramparts near one of the gates of the town, to turn a

body of soldiery who were coming in to the Government assistance. They

picked out every officer and struck him down instantly, the moment the

party appeared; there were three or four of them; upon which the

soldiers gravely turned round and walked off. I dare say there are not

fifty men in this place who wouldn't click your card off a target a

hundred and fifty yards away, at least. I have seen them, time after

time, fire across a great ravine as wide as the ornamental ground in St.

James's-park, and never miss the bull's-eye.

"It is a horribly ungentlemanly thing to say here, though I _do_ say it

without the least reserve--but my sympathy is all with the radicals. I

don't know any subject on which this indomitable people have so good a

right to a strong feeling as Catholicity--if not as a religion, clearly

as a means of social degradation. They know what it is. They live close

to it. They have Italy beyond their mountains. They can compare the

effect of the two systems at any time in their own valleys; and their

dread of it, and their horror of the introduction of Catholic priests

and emissaries into their towns, seems to me the most rational feeling

in the world. Apart from this, you have no conception of the

preposterous, insolent little aristocracy of Geneva: the most ridiculous

caricature the fancy can suggest of what we know in England. I was

talking to two famous gentlemen (very intelligent men) of that place,

not long ago, who came over to invite me to a sort of reception

there--which I declined. Really their talk about 'the people' and 'the

masses,' and the necessity they would shortly be under of shooting a few

of them as an example for the rest, was a kind of monstrosity one might

have heard at Genoa. The audacious insolence and contempt of the people

by their newspapers, too, is quite absurd. It is difficult to believe

that men of sense can be such donkeys politically. It was precisely such

a state of things that brought about the change here. There was a most

respectful petition presented on the Jesuit question, signed by its tens

of thousands of small farmers; the regular peasants of the canton, all

splendidly taught in public schools, and intellectually as well as

physically a most remarkable body of labouring men. This document is

treated by the gentlemanly party with the most sublime contempt, and the

signatures are said to be the signatures of 'the rabble.' Upon which,

each man of the rabble shoulders his rifle, and walks in upon a given

day agreed upon among them to Lausanne; and the gentlemanly party walk

out without striking a blow."

Such traces of the "revolution" as he found upon his present visit to

Geneva he described in writing to me from the hotel de l'Ecu on the 20th

of October. "You never would suppose from the look of this town that

there had been anything revolutionary going on. Over the window of my

old bedroom there is a great hole made by a cannon-ball in the

house-front; and two of the bridges are under repair. But these are

small tokens which anything else might have brought about as well. The

people are all at work. The little streets are rife with every sight and

sound of industry; the place is as quiet by ten o'clock as

Lincoln's-inn-fields; and the only outward and visible sign of public

interest in political events is a little group at every street corner,

reading a public announcement from the new Government of the forthcoming

election of state-officers, in which the people are reminded of their

importance as a republican institution, and desired to bear in mind

their dignity in all their proceedings. Nothing very violent or bad

could go on with a community so well educated as this. It is the best

antidote to American experiences, conceivable. As to the nonsense 'the

gentlemanly interest' talk about, their opposition to property and so

forth, there never was such mortal absurdity. One of the principal

leaders in the late movement has a stock of watches and jewellery here

of immense value--and had, during the disturbance--perfectly

unprotected. James Fahzey has a rich house and a valuable collection of

pictures; and, I will be bound to say, twice as much to lose as half the

conservative declaimers put together. This house, the liberal one, is

one of the most richly furnished and luxurious hotels on the continent.

And if I were a Swiss with a hundred thousand pounds, I would be as

steady against the Catholic cantons and the propagation of Jesuitism as

any radical among 'em: believing the dissemination of Catholicity to be

the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the

world. Which these people, thoroughly well educated, know perfectly. . . .

The boys of Geneva were very useful in bringing materials for the

construction of the barricades on the bridges; and the enclosed song may

amuse you. They sing it to a tune that dates from the great French

Revolution--a very good one."

But revolutions may be small as well as their heroes, and while he thus

was sending me his Gamin de Geneve I was sending him news of a sudden

change in Whitefriars which had quite as vivid interest for him. Not

much could be told him at first, but his curiosity instantly arose to

fever pitch. "In reference to that _Daily News_ revolution," he wrote

from Geneva on the 26th, "I have been walking and wondering all day

through a perfect Miss Burney's Vauxhall of conjectural dark walks.

Heaven send you enlighten me fully on Wednesday, or number three will

suffer!" Two days later he resumed, as he was beginning his journey back

to Lausanne. "I am in a great state of excitement on account of your

intelligence, and desperately anxious to know all about it. I shall be

put out to an unspeakable extent if I don't find your letter awaiting

me. God knows there has been small comfort for either of us in the _D.

N._'s nine months." There was not much to tell then, and there is less

now; but at last the discomfort was over for us both, as I had been

unable to reconcile myself to a longer continuance of the service I had

given in Whitefriars since he quitted it. The subject may be left with

the remark made upon it in his first letter after returning to Rosemont.

"I certainly am very glad of the result of the _Daily News_ business,

though my gladness is dashed with melancholy to think that you should

have toiled there so long, to so little purpose. I escaped more easily.

However, it is all past now. . . . As to the undoubted necessity of the

course you took, I have not a grain of question in my mind. That, being

what you are, you had only one course to take and have taken it, I no

more doubt than that the Old Bailey is not Westminster Abbey. In the

utmost sum at which you value yourself, you were bound to leave; and

now you _have_ left, you will come to Paris, and there, and at home

again, we'll have, please God, the old kind of evenings and the old life

again, as it used to be before those daily nooses caught us by the legs

and sometimes tripped us up. Make a vow (as I have done) never to go

down that court with the little news-shop at the corner, any more, and

let us swear by Jack Straw as in the ancient times. . . . I am beginning to

get over my sorrow for your nights up aloft in Whitefriars, and to feel

nothing but happiness in the contemplation of your enfranchisement. God

bless you!"

The time was now shortening for him at Lausanne; but before my sketches

of his pleasant days there close, the little story of his Christmas book

may be made complete by a few extracts from the letters that followed

immediately upon the departure of the Talfourds. Without comment they

will explain its closing touches, his own consciousness of the

difficulties in working out the tale within limits too confined not to

render its proper development imperfect, and his ready tact in dealing

with objection and suggestion from without. His condition while writing

it did not warrant me in pressing what I might otherwise have thought

necessary; but as the little story finally left his hands, it had points

not unworthy of him; and a sketch of its design will render the

fragments from his letters more intelligible. I read it lately with a

sense that its general tone of quiet beauty deserved well the praise

which Jeffrey in those days had given it. "I like and admire the

_Battle_ extremely," he said in a letter on its publication, sent me by

Dickens and not included in Lord Cockburn's Memoir. "It is better than

any other man alive could have written, and has passages as fine as

anything that ever came from the man himself. The dance of the sisters

in that autumn orchard is of itself worth a dozen inferior tales, and

their reunion at the close, and indeed all the serious parts, are

beautiful, some traits of Clemency charming."

Yet it was probably here the fact, as with the _Chimes_, that the

serious parts were too much interwoven with the tale to render the

subject altogether suitable to the old mirth-bringing season; but this

had also some advantages. The story is all about two sisters, the

younger of whom, Marion, sacrifices her own affection to give happiness

to the elder, Grace. But Grace had already made the same sacrifice for

this younger sister; life's first and hardest battle had been won by her

before the incidents begin; and when she is first seen, she is busying

herself to bring about her sister's marriage with Alfred Heathfield,

whom she has herself loved, and whom she has kept wholly unconscious, by

a quiet change in her bearing to him, of what his own still disengaged

heart would certainly not have rejected. Marion, however, had earlier

discovered this, though it is not until her victory over herself that

Alfred knows it; and meanwhile he is become her betrothed. The sisters

thus shown at the opening, one believing her love undiscovered and the

other bent for the sake of that love on surrendering her own, each

practising concealment and both unselfishly true, form a pretty and

tender picture. The second part is intended to give to Marion's flight

the character of an elopement; and so to manage this as to show her all

the time unchanged to the man she is pledged to, yet flying from, was

the author's difficulty. One Michael Warden is the _deus ex machina_ by

whom it is solved, hardly with the usual skill; but there is much art in

rendering his pretensions to the hand of Marion, whose husband he

becomes after an interval of years, the means of closing against him all

hope of success, in the very hour when her own act might seem to be

opening it to him. During the same interval Grace, believing Marion to

be gone with Warden, becomes Alfred's wife; and not until reunion after

six years' absence is the truth entirely known to her. The struggle, to

all of them, has been filled and chastened with sorrow; but joy revisits

them at its close. Hearts are not broken by the duties laid upon them;

nor is life shown to be such a perishable holiday, that amidst noble

sorrow and generous self-denial it must lose its capacity for happiness.

The tale thus justifies its place in the Christmas series. What Jeffrey

says of Clemency, too, may suggest another word. The story would not be

Dickens's if we could not discover in it the power peculiar to him of

presenting the commonest objects with freshness and beauty, of detecting

in the homeliest forms of life much of its rarest loveliness, and of

springing easily upward from everyday realities into regions of

imaginative thought. To this happiest direction of his art, Clemency and

her husband render new tribute; and in her more especially, once again,

we recognize one of those true souls who fill so large a space in his

writings, for whom the lowest seats at life's feasts are commonly kept,

but whom he moves and welcomes to a more fitting place among the prized

and honoured at the upper tables.

"I wonder whether you foresaw the end of the Christmas book! There are

two or three places in which I can make it prettier, I think, by slight

alterations. . . . I trust to Heaven you may like it. What an affecting

story I could have made of it in one octavo volume. Oh to think of the

printers transforming my kindly cynical old father into Doctor Taddler!"

(28th of October.)

* * * * *

"Do you think it worth while, in the illustrations, to throw the period

back at all for the sake of anything good in the costume? The story may

have happened at any time within a hundred years. Is it worth having

coats and gowns of dear old Goldsmith's day? or thereabouts? I really

don't know what to say. The probability is, if it has not occurred to

you or to the artists, that it is hardly worth considering; but I ease

myself of it by throwing it out to you. It may be already too late, or

you may see reason to think it best to 'stick to the _last_' (I feel it

necessary to italicize the joke), and abide by the ladies' and

gentlemen's spring and winter fashions of this time. Whatever you think

best, in this as in all other things, is best, I am sure. . . . I would go,

in the illustrations, for 'beauty' as much as possible; and I should

like each part to have a general illustration to it at the beginning,

shadowing out its drift and bearing: much as Browne goes at that kind of

thing on _Dombey_ covers. I don't think I should fetter your discretion

in the matter farther. The better it is illustrated, the better I shall

be pleased of course." (29th of October.)

". . . I only write to say that it is of no use my writing at length,

until I have heard from you; and that I will wait until I shall have

read your promised communication (as my father would call it) to-morrow.

I have glanced over the proofs of the last part and really don't wonder,

some of the most extravagant mistakes occurring in Clemency's account to

Warden, that the marriage of Grace and Alfred should seem rather

unsatisfactory to you. Whatever is done about that must be done with the

lightest hand, for the reader MUST take something for granted; but I

think it next to impossible, without dreadful injury to the effect, to

introduce a scene between Marion and Michael. The introduction must be

in the scene between the sisters, and must be put, mainly, into the

mouth of Grace. Rely upon it there is no other way, in keeping with the

spirit of the tale. With this amendment, and a touch here and there in

the last part (I know exactly where they will come best), I think it may

be pretty and affecting, and comfortable too. . . ." (31st of October.)

* * * * *

". . . I shall hope to touch upon the Christmas book as soon as I get your

opinion. I wouldn't do it without. I am delighted to hear of noble old

Stanny. Give my love to him, and tell him I think of turning Catholic.

It strikes me (it may have struck you perhaps) that another good place

for introducing a few lines of dialogue, is at the beginning of the

scene between Grace and her husband, where he speaks about the messenger

at the gate." (4th of November.)

"Before I reply to your questions I wish to remark generally of the

third part that all the passion that can be got into it, through my

interpretation at all events, is there. I know that, by what it cost me;

and I take it to be, as a question of art and interest, in the very

nature of the story that it _should_ move at a swift pace after the

sisters are in each other's arms again. Anything after that would drag

like lead, and must. . . . Now for your questions. I don't think any little

scene with Marion and anybody can prepare the way for the last paragraph

of the tale: I don't think anything but a printer's line _can_ go

between it and Warden's speech. A less period than ten years? Yes. I see

no objection to six. I have no doubt you are right. Any word from Alfred

in his misery? Impossible: you might as well try to speak to somebody in

an express train. The preparation for his change is in the first part,

and he kneels down beside her in that return scene. He is left alone

with her, as it were, in the world. I am quite confident it is wholly

impossible for me to alter that. . . . BUT (keep your eye on me) when

Marion went away, she left a letter for Grace in which she charged her

to encourage the love that Alfred would conceive for her, and FOREWARNED

her that years would pass before they met again, &c. &c. This coming out

in the scene between the sisters, and something like it being expressed

in the opening of the little scene between Grace and her husband before

the messenger at the gate, will make (I hope) a prodigious difference;

and I will try to put in something with Aunt Martha and the Doctor which

shall carry the tale back more distinctly and unmistakeably to the

battle-ground. I hope to make these alterations next week, and to send

the third part back to you before I leave here. If you think it can

still be improved after that, say so to me in Paris and I will go at it

again. I wouldn't have it limp, if it can fly. I say nothing to you of a

great deal of this being already expressed in the sentiment of the

beginning, because your delicate perception knows all that already.

Observe for the artists. Grace will now only have _one child_--little

Marion.". . . (At night, on same day.). . . "You recollect that I asked you

to read it all together, for I knew that I was working for that? But I

have no doubt of _your_ doubts, and will do what I have said. . . . I had

thought of marking the time in the little story, and will do so. . . .

Think, once more, of the period between the second and third parts. I

will do the same." (7th of November.)

* * * * *

"I hope you will think the third part (when you read it in type with

these amendments) very much improved. I think it so. If there should

still be anything wanting, in your opinion, pray suggest it to me in

Paris. I am bent on having it right, if I can. . . . If in going over the

proofs you find the tendency to blank verse (I _cannot_ help it, when I

am very much in earnest) too strong, knock out a word's brains here and

there." (13th of November. Sending the proofs back.)

* * * * *

". . . Your Christmas book illustration-news makes me jump for joy. I will

write you at length to-morrow. I should like this dedication: This

Christmas Book is cordially inscribed To my English Friends in

Switzerland. Just those two lines, and nothing more. When I get the

proofs again I think I may manage another word or two about the

battle-field, with advantage. I am glad you like the alterations. I feel

that they make it complete, and that it would have been incomplete

without your suggestions." (21st of November. From Paris.)

I had managed, as a glad surprise for him, to enlist both Stanfield and

Maclise in the illustration of the story, in addition to the

distinguished artists whom the publishers had engaged for it, Leech and

Richard Doyle; and among the subjects contributed by Stanfield are three

morsels of English landscape which had a singular charm for Dickens at

the time, and seem to me still of their kind quite faultless. I may add

a curious fact, never mentioned until now. In the illustration which

closes the second part of the story, where the festivities to welcome

the bridegroom at the top of the page contrast with the flight of the

bride represented below, Leech made the mistake of supposing that

Michael Warden had taken part in the elopement, and has introduced his

figure with that of Marion. We did not discover this until too late for

remedy, the publication having then been delayed, for these drawings, to

the utmost limit; and it is highly characteristic of Dickens, and of the

true regard he had for this fine artist, that, knowing the pain he must

give in such circumstances by objection or complaint, he preferred to

pass it silently. Nobody made remark upon it, and there the illustration

still stands; but any one who reads the tale carefully will at once

perceive what havoc it makes of one of the most delicate turns in it.

"When I first saw it, it was with a horror and agony not to be

expressed. Of course I need not tell _you_, my dear fellow, Warden has

no business in the elopement scene. _He_ was never there! In the first

hot sweat of this surprise and novelty, I was going to implore the

printing of that sheet to be stopped, and the figure taken out of the

block. But when I thought of the pain this might give to our

kind-hearted Leech; and that what is such a monstrous enormity to me, as

never having entered my brain, may not so present itself to others, I

became more composed: though the fact is wonderful to me. No doubt a

great number of copies will be printed by the time this reaches you, and

therefore I shall take it for granted that it stands as it is. Leech

otherwise is very good, and the illustrations altogether are by far the

best that have been done for any of the Christmas books. You know how I

build up temples in my mind that are not made with hands (or expressed

with pen and ink, I am afraid), and how liable I am to be disappointed

in these things. But I really am _not_ disappointed in this case.

Quietness and beauty are preserved throughout. Say everything to Mac and

Stanny, more than everything! It is a delight to look at these little

landscapes of the dear old boy. How gentle and elegant, and yet how

manly and vigorous, they are! I have a perfect joy in them."

Of the few days that remained of his Lausanne life, before he journeyed

to Paris, there is not much requiring to be said. His work had continued

during the whole of the month before departure to occupy him so entirely

as to leave room for little else, and even occasional letters to very

dear friends at home were intermitted. Here is one example of many. "I

will write to Landor as soon as I can possibly make time, but I really

am so much at my desk perforce, and so full of work, whether I am there

or elsewhere, between the Christmas book and _Dombey_, that it is the

most difficult thing in the world for me to make up my mind to write a

letter to any one but you. I ought to have written to Macready. I wish

you would tell him, with my love, how I am situated in respect of pen,

ink, and paper. One of the Lausanne papers, treating of free trade, has

been very copious lately in its mention of LORD GOBDEN. Fact; and I

think it a good name." Then, as the inevitable time approached, he cast

about him for such comfort as the coming change might bring, to set

against the sorrow of it; and began to think of Paris, "'in a less

romantic and more homely contemplation of the picture,' as not wholly

undesirable. I have no doubt that constant change, too, is indispensable

to me when I am at work: and at times something more than a doubt will

force itself upon me whether there is not something in a Swiss valley

that disagrees with me. Certainly, whenever I live in Switzerland again,

it shall be on the hill-top. Something of the _goitre_ and _cretin_

influence seems to settle on my spirits sometimes, on the lower

ground.[129] How sorry, ah yes! how sorry I shall be to leave the

little society nevertheless. We have been thoroughly good-humoured and

agreeable together, and I'll always give a hurrah for the Swiss and

Switzerland."

One or two English travelling by Lausanne had meanwhile greeted him as

they were passing home, and a few days given him by Elliotson had been

an enjoyment without a drawback. It was now the later autumn, very high

winds were coursing through the valley, and his last letter but one

described the change which these approaches of winter were making in the

scene. "We have had some tremendous hurricanes at Lausanne. It is an

extraordinary place now for wind, being peculiarly situated among

mountains--between the Jura, and the Simplon, St. Gothard, St. Bernard,

and Mont Blanc ranges; and at night you would swear (lying in bed) you

were at sea. You cannot imagine wind blowing so, over earth. It is very

fine to hear. The weather generally, however, has been excellent. There

is snow on the tops of nearly all the hills, but none has fallen in the

valley. On a bright day, it is quite hot between eleven and half past

two. The nights and mornings are cold. For the last two or three days,

it has been thick weather; and I can see no more of Mont Blanc from

where I am writing now than if I were in Devonshire terrace, though last

week it bounded all the Lausanne walks. I would give a great deal that

you could take a walk with me about Lausanne on a clear cold day. It is

impossible to imagine anything more noble and beautiful than the scene;

and the autumn colours in the foliage are more brilliant and vivid now

than any description could convey to you. I took Elliotson, when he was

with us, up to a ravine I had found out in the hills eight hundred or a

thousand feet deep! Its steep sides dyed bright yellow, and deep red, by

the changing leaves; a sounding torrent rolling down below; the lake of

Geneva lying at its foot; one enormous mass and chaos of trees at its

upper end; and mountain piled on mountain in the distance, up into the

sky! He really was struck silent by its majesty and splendour."

He had begun his third number of _Dombey_ on the 26th of October, on the

4th of the following month he was half through it, on the 7th he was in

the "agonies" of its last chapter, and on the 9th, one day before that

proposed for its completion, all was done. This was marvellously rapid

work, after what else he had undergone; but within a week, Monday the

16th being the day for departure, they were to strike their tents, and

troubled and sad were the few days thus left him for preparation and

farewell. He included in his leave-taking his deaf, dumb, and blind

friends; and, to use his own homely phrase, was yet more terribly "down

in the mouth" at taking leave of his hearing, speaking, and seeing

friends. "I shall see you soon, please God, and that sets all to rights.

But I don't believe there are many dots on the map of the world where we

shall have left such affectionate remembrances behind us, as in

Lausanne. It was quite miserable this last night, when we left them at

Haldimand's."

He shall himself describe how they travelled post to Paris, occupying

five days. "We got through the journey charmingly, though not quite so

quickly as we hoped. The children as good as usual, and even Skittles

jolly to the last. (That name has long superseded Sampson Brass, by the

bye. I call him so, from something skittle-playing and public-housey in

his countenance.) We have been up at five every morning, and on the road

before seven. We were three carriages: a sort of wagon, with a cabriolet

attached, for the luggage; a ramshackle villainous old swing upon wheels

(hired at Geneva), for the children; and for ourselves, that travelling

chariot which I was so kind as to bring here for sale. It was very cold

indeed crossing the Jura--nothing but fog and frost; but when we were

out of Switzerland and across the French frontier, it became warmer, and

continued so. We stopped at between six and seven each evening; had two

rather queer inns, wild French country inns; but the rest good. They

were three hours and a half examining the luggage at the frontier

custom-house--atop of a mountain, in a hard and biting frost; where Anne

and Roche had sharp work I assure you, and the latter insisted on

volunteering the most astonishing and unnecessary lies about my books,

for the mere pleasure of deceiving the officials. When we were out of

the mountain country, we came at a good pace, but were a day late in

getting to our hotel here."

They were in Paris when that was written; at the hotel Brighton; which

they had reached in the evening of Friday the 20th of November.

FOOTNOTES:

[129] "I may tell you," he wrote to me from Paris at the end of

November, "now it is all over. I don't know whether it was the hot

summer, or the anxiety of the two new books coupled with D. N.

remembrances and reminders, but I was in that state in Switzerland, when

my spirits sunk so, I felt myself in serious danger. Yet I had little

pain in my side; excepting that time at Genoa I have hardly had any

since poor Mary died, when it came on so badly; and I walked my fifteen

miles a day constantly, at a great pace."

CHAPTER XV.

THREE MONTHS IN PARIS.

1846-1847.

Lord Brougham--French Sunday--A House

taken--His French Abode--A Former

Tenant--Sister Fanny's Illness--The King of the

Barricades--The Morgue--Parisian

Population--Americans and French--Unsettlement

of Plans--A True Friend--Hard Frost--Alarming

Neighbour--A Fellow-litterateur--London

Visit--Return to

Paris--Begging-letter-writers--A Boulogne

Reception--French-English--Citizen

Dickens--Sight-seeing--Evening with Victor

Hugo--At the Bibliotheque Royale--Adventure

with a Coachman--Illness of Eldest Son--Visit

of his Father--The "Man that put together

Dombey."

NO man enjoyed brief residence in a hotel more than Dickens, but

"several tons of luggage, other tons of servants, and other tons of

children" are not desirable accompaniments to this kind of life; and his

first day in Paris did not close before he had offered for an "eligible

mansion." That same Saturday night he took a "colossal" walk about the

city, of which the brilliancy and brightness almost frightened him; and

among other things that attracted his notice was "rather a good book

announced in a bookseller's window as _Les Mysteres de Londres par Sir

Trollopp_. Do you know him?" A countryman better known had given him

earlier greeting. "The first man who took hold of me in the street,

immediately outside this door, was Bruffum in his check trousers, and

without the proper number of buttons on his shirt, who was going away

this morning, he told me, but coming back in two months, when we would

go and dine--at some place known to him and fame."

Next day he took another long walk about the streets, and lost himself

fifty times. This was Sunday, and he hardly knew what to say of it, as

he saw it there and then. The bitter observance of that day he always

sharply resisted, believing a little rational enjoyment to be not

opposed to either rest or religion; but here was another matter. "The

dirty churches, and the clattering carts and waggons, and the open shops

(I don't think I passed fifty shut up, in all my strollings in and out),

and the work-a-day dresses and drudgeries, are not comfortable. Open

theatres and so forth I am well used to, of course, by this time; but so

much toil and sweat on what one would like to see, apart from religious

observances, a sensible holiday, is painful."

The date of his letter was the 22nd of November, and it had three

postscripts.[130] The first, "Monday afternoon," told me a house was

taken; that, unless the agreement should break off on any unforeseen

fight between Roche and the agent ("a French Mrs. Gamp"), I was to

address him at No. 48, Rue de Courcelles, Faubourg St. Honore; and that

he would merely then advert to the premises as in his belief the "most

ridiculous, extraordinary, unparalleled, and preposterous" in the whole

world; being something between a baby-house, a "shades," a haunted

castle, and a mad kind of clock. "They belong to a Marquis Castellan,

and you will be ready to die of laughing when you go over them." The

second P.S. declared that his lips should be sealed till I beheld for

myself. "By Heaven it is not to be imagined by the mind of man!" The

third P.S. closed the letter. "One room is a tent. Another room is a

grove. Another room is a scene at the Victoria. The upstairs rooms are

like fanlights over street-doors. The nurseries--but no, no, no, no

more! . . ."

His following letter nevertheless sent more, even in the form of an

additional protestation that never till I saw it should the place be

described. "I will merely observe that it is fifty yards long, and

eighteen feet high, and that the bedrooms are exactly like opera-boxes.

It has its little courtyard and garden, and porter's house, and cordon

to open the door, and so forth; and is a Paris mansion in little. There

is a gleam of reason in the drawing-room. Being a gentleman's house, and

not one furnished to let, it has some very curious things in it; some of

the oddest things you ever beheld in your life; and an infinity of easy

chairs and sofas. . . . Bad weather. It is snowing hard. There is not a

door or window here--but that's nothing! there's not a door or window in

all Paris--that shuts; not a chink in all the billions of trillions of

chinks in the city that can he stopped to keep the wind out. And the

cold!--but you shall judge for yourself; and also of this preposterous

dining-room. The invention, sir, of Henry Bulwer, who when he had

executed it (he used to live here), got frightened at what he had done,

as well he might, and went away. . . . The Brave called me aside on

Saturday night, and showed me an improvement he had effected in the

decorative way. 'Which,' he said, 'will very much s'prize Mis'r Fors'er

when he come.' You are to be deluded into the belief that there is a

perspective of chambers twenty miles in length, opening from the

drawing-room. . . ."

My visit was not yet due, however, and what occupied or interested him

in the interval may first be told. He had not been two days in Paris

when a letter from his father made him very anxious for the health of

his eldest sister. "I was going to the play (a melodrama in eight acts,

five hours long), but hadn't the heart to leave home after my father's

letter," he is writing on the 30th of November, "and sent Georgy and

Kate by themselves. There seems to be no doubt whatever that Fanny is in

a consumption." She had broken down in an attempt to sing at a party in

Manchester; and subsequent examination by Sir Charles Bell's son, who

was present and took much interest in her, too sadly revealed the cause.

"He advised that neither she nor Burnett should be told the truth, and

my father has not disclosed it. In worldly circumstances they are very

comfortable, and they are very much respected. They seem to be happy

together, and Burnett has a great deal of teaching. You remember my

fears about her when she was in London the time of Alfred's marriage,

and that I said she looked to me as if she were in a decline? Kate took

her to Elliotson, who said that her lungs were certainly not affected

then. And she cried for joy. Don't you think it would be better for her

to be brought up, if possible, to see Elliotson again? I am deeply,

deeply grieved about it." This course was taken, and for a time there

seemed room for hope; but the result will be seen. In the same letter I

heard of poor Charles Sheridan, well known to us both, dying of the same

terrible disease; and his chief, Lord Normanby, whose many acts of

sympathy and kindness had inspired strong regard in Dickens, he had

already found "as informal and good-natured as ever, but not so gay as

usual, and having an anxious, haggard way with him, as if his

responsibilities were more than he had bargained for." Nor, to account

for this, had Dickens far to seek, when a little leisure enabled him to

see something of what was passing in Paris in that last year of Louis

Philippe's reign. What first impressed him most unfavourably was a

glimpse in the Champs Elysees, of the King himself coming in from the

country. "There were two carriages. His was surrounded by horseguards.

It went at a great pace, and he sat very far back in a corner of it, I

promise you. It was strange to an Englishman to see the Prefet of Police

riding on horseback some hundreds of yards in advance of the cortege,

turning his head incessantly from side to side, like a figure in a Dutch

clock, and scrutinizing everybody and everything, as if he suspected all

the twigs in all the trees in the long avenue."

But these and other political indications were only, as they generally

prove to be, the outward signs of maladies more deeply-seated. He saw

almost everywhere signs of canker eating into the heart of the people

themselves. "It is a wicked and detestable place, though wonderfully

attractive; and there can be no better summary of it, after all, than

Hogarth's unmentionable phrase." He sent me no letter that did not

contribute something of observation or character. He went at first

rather frequently to the Morgue, until shocked by something so repulsive

that he had not courage for a long time to go back; and on that same

occasion he had noticed the keeper smoking a short pipe at his little

window, "and giving a bit of fresh turf to a linnet in a cage." Of the

condition generally of the streets he reported badly; the quays on the

other side of the Seine were not safe after dark; and here was his own

night experience of one of the best quarters of the city. "I took Georgy

out, the night before last, to show her the Palais Royal lighted up; and

on the Boulevard, a street as bright as the brightest part of the Strand

or Regent-street, we saw a man fall upon another, close before us, and

try to tear the cloak off his back. It was in a little dark corner near

the Porte St. Denis, which stands out in the middle of the street. After

a short struggle, the thief fled (there were thousands of people walking

about), and was captured just on the other side of the road."

An incident of that kind might mean little or much: but what he

proceeded to remark of the ordinary Parisian workpeople and smaller

shopkeepers, had a more grave complexion; and may be thought perhaps

still to yield some illustration, not without value, to the story of

the quarter of a century that has passed since, and even to some of the

appalling events of its latest year or two. "It is extraordinary what

nonsense English people talk, write, and believe, about foreign

countries. The Swiss (so much decried) will do anything for you, if you

are frank and civil; they are attentive and punctual in all their

dealings; and may be relied upon as steadily as the English. The

Parisian workpeople and smaller shopkeepers are more like (and unlike)

Americans than I could have supposed possible. To the American

indifference and carelessness, they add a procrastination and want of

the least heed about keeping a promise or being exact, which is

certainly not surpassed in Naples. They have the American

semi-sentimental independence too, and none of the American vigour or

purpose. If they ever get free trade in France (as I suppose they will,

one day), these parts of the population must, for years and years, be

ruined. They couldn't get the means of existence, in competition with

the English workmen. Their inferior manual dexterity, their lazy habits,

perfect unreliability, and habitual insubordination, would ruin them in

any such contest, instantly. They are fit for nothing but

soldiering--and so far, I believe, the successors in the policy of your

friend Napoleon have reason on their side. Eh bien, mon ami, quand vous

venez a Paris, nous nous mettrons a quatre epingles, et nous verrons

toutes les merveilles de la cite, et vous en jugerez. God bless me, I

beg your pardon! It comes so natural."

On the 30th he wrote to me that he had got his papers into order and

hoped to begin that day. But the same letter told me of the

unsettlement thus early of his half-formed Paris plans. Three months

sooner than he designed he should be due in London for family reasons;

should have to keep within the limit of four months abroad; and as his

own house would not be free till July, would have to hire one from the

end of March. "In these circumstances I think I shall send Charley to

King's-college after Christmas. I am sorry he should lose so much

French, but don't you think to break another half-year's schooling would

be a pity? Of my own will I would not send him to King's-college at all,

but to Bruce-castle instead. I suppose, however, Miss Coutts is best. We

will talk over all this when I come to London." The offer to take charge

of his eldest son's education had been pressed upon Dickens by this true

friend, to whose delicate and noble consideration for him it would

hardly become me to make other allusion here. Munificent as the kindness

was, however, it was yet only the smallest part of the obligation which

Dickens felt that he owed this lady; to whose generous schemes for the

neglected and uncared-for classes of the population, in all which he

deeply sympathised, he did the very utmost to render, through many

years, unstinted service of his time and his labour, with sacrifice

unselfish as her own. His proposed early visit to London, named in this

letter, was to see the rehearsal of his Christmas story, dramatised by

Mr. Albert Smith for Mr. and Mrs. Keeley at the Lyceum; and my own

proposed visit to Paris was to be in the middle of January. "It will

then be the height of the season, and a good time for testing the

unaccountable French vanity which really does suppose there are no fogs

here, but that they are all in London."[131]

The opening of his next letter, which bore date the 6th of December, and

its amusing sequel, will sufficiently speak for themselves. "Cold

intense. The water in the bedroom-jugs freezes into solid masses from

top to bottom, bursts the jugs with reports like small cannon, and rolls

out on the tables and wash-stands, hard as granite. I stick to the

shower-bath, but have been most hopelessly out of sorts--writing sorts;

that's all. Couldn't begin, in the strange place; took a violent dislike

to my study, and came down into the drawing-room; couldn't find a corner

that would answer my purpose; fell into a black contemplation of the

waning month; sat six hours at a stretch, and wrote as many lines, &c.

&c. &c. . . . Then, you know what arrangements are necessary with the

chairs and tables; and then what correspondence had to be cleared off;

and then how I tried to settle to my desk, and went about and about it,

and dodged at it, like a bird at a lump of sugar. In short I have just

begun; five printed pages finished, I should say; and hope I shall be

blessed with a better condition this next week, or I shall be

behind-hand. I shall try to go at it--hard. I can't do more. . . . There is

rather a good man lives in this street, and I have had a correspondence

with him which is preserved for your inspection. His name is Barthelemy.

He wears a prodigious Spanish cloak, a slouched hat, an immense beard,

and long black hair. He called the other day and left his card. Allow me

to enclose his card, which has originality and merit.

[Illustration: =Rue de Courcelles=

_Barthelemy_

=49.=]

Roche said I wasn't at home. Yesterday, he wrote me to say that he too

was a 'Litterateur'--that he had called, in compliment to my

distinguished reputation--'qu'il n'avait pas ete recu--qu'il n'etait pas

habitue a cette sorte de procede--et qu'il pria Monsieur Dickens

d'oublier son nom, sa memoire, sa carte, et sa visite, et de considerer

qu'elle n'avait pas ete rendu!' Of course I wrote him a very polite

reply immediately, telling him good-humouredly that he was quite

mistaken, and that there were always two weeks in the beginning of every

month when M. Dickens ne pouvait rendre visite a personne. He wrote back

to say that he was more than satisfied; that it was his case too, at

the end of every month; and that when busy himself, he not only can't

receive or pay visits, but--'tombe, generalement, aussi, dans des

humeurs noires qui approchent de l'anthropophagie!!!' I think that's

pretty well."

He was in London eight days, from the 15th to the 23rd of December;[132]

and among the occupations of his visit, besides launching his little

story on the stage, was the settlement of form for a cheap edition of

his writings, which began in the following year. It was to be printed in

double-columns, and issued weekly in three-halfpenny numbers; there were

to be new prefaces, but no illustrations; and for each book something

less than a fourth of the original price was to be charged. Its success

was very good, but did not come even near to the mark of the later

issues of his writings. His own feeling as to this, however, though any

failure at the moment affected him on other grounds, was always that of

a quiet confidence; and he had expressed this in a proposed dedication

of this very edition, which for other reasons was ultimately laid aside.

It will be worth preserving here. "This cheap edition of my books is

dedicated to the English people, in whose approval, if the books be true

in spirit, they will live, and out of whose memory, if they be false,

they will very soon die."

Upon his return to Paris I had frequent report of his progress with his

famous fifth number, on the completion of which I was to join him. The

day at one time seemed doubtful. "It would be miserable to have to work

while you were here. Still, I make such sudden starts, and am so

possessed of what I am going to do, that the fear may prove to be quite

groundless, and if any alteration would trouble you, let the 13th stand

at all hazards." The cold he described as so intense, and the price of

fuel so enormous, that though the house was not half warmed ("as you'll

say, when you feel it") it cost him very near a pound a day.

Begging-letter writers had found out "Monsieur Dickens, le romancier

celebre," and waylaid him at the door and in the street as numerously as

in London: their distinguishing peculiarity being that they were nearly

all of them "Chevaliers de la Garde Imperiale de sa Majeste Napoleon le

Grand," and that their letters bore immense seals with coats of arms as

large as five-shilling pieces. His friends the Watsons passed new year's

day with him on their way to Rockingham from Lausanne, leaving that

country covered with snow and the Bise blowing cruelly over it, but

describing it as nothing to the cold of Paris. On the day that closed

the old year he had gone into the Morgue and seen an old man with grey

head lying there. "It seemed the strangest thing in the world that it

should have been necessary to take any trouble to stop such a feeble,

spent, exhausted morsel of life. It was just dusk when I went in; the

place was empty; and he lay there, all alone, like an impersonation of

the wintry eighteen hundred and forty-six. . . . I find I am getting

inimitable, so I'll stop."

The time for my visit having come, I had grateful proof of the minute

and thoughtful provision characteristic of him in everything. My dinner

had been ordered to the second at Boulogne, my place in the malle-poste

taken, and these and other services announced in a letter, which, by way

of doing its part also in the kindly work of preparation, broke out into

French. He never spoke that language very well, his accent being somehow

defective; but he practised himself into writing it with remarkable ease

and fluency. "I have written to the Hotel des Bains at Boulogne to send

on to Calais and take your place in the malle-poste. . . . Of course you

know that you'll be assailed with frightful shouts all along the two

lines of ropes from all the touters in Boulogne, and of course you'll

pass on like the princess who went up the mountain after the talking

bird; but don't forget quietly to single out the Hotel des Bains

commissionnaire. The following circumstances will then occur. My

experience is more recent than yours, and I will throw them into a

dramatic form. . . . You are filtered into the little office, where there

are some soldiers; and a gentleman with a black beard and a pen and ink

sitting behind a counter. _Barbe Noire_ (to the lord of L. I. F.).

Monsieur, votre passeport. _Monsieur._ Monsieur, le voici! _Barbe

Noire._ Ou allez-vous, monsieur? _Monsieur._ Monsieur, je vais a Paris.

_Barbe Noire._ Quand allez-vous partir, monsieur? _Monsieur._ Monsieur,

je vais partir aujourd'hui. Avec la malle-poste. _Barbe Noire._ C'est

bien. (To Gendarme.) Laissez sortir monsieur! _Gendarme._ Par ici,

monsieur, s'il vous plait. Le gendarme ouvert une tres petite porte.

Monsieur se trouve subitement entoure de tous les gamins, agents,

commissionnaires, porteurs, et polissons, en general, de Boulogne, qui

s'elancent sur lui, en poussant des cris epouvantables. Monsieur est,

pour le moment, tout-a-fait effraye et bouleverse. Mais monsieur reprend

ses forces et dit, de haute voix: 'Le Commissionnaire de l'Hotel des

Bains!' _Un petit homme_ (s'avancant rapidement, et en souriant

doucement). Me voici, monsieur. Monsieur Fors Tair, n'est-ce pas? . . .

Alors. . . . Alors monsieur se promene _a_ l'Hotel des Bains, ou monsieur

trouvera qu'un petit salon particulier, en haut, est deja prepare pour

sa reception, et que son diner est deja commande, aux soins du brave

Courier, _a midi et demi_. . . . Monsieur mangera son diner pres du feu,

avec beaucoup de plaisir, et il boirera de vin rouge a la sante de

Monsieur de Boze, et sa famille interessante et aimable. La malle-poste

arrivera au bureau de la poste aux lettres a deux heures ou peut-etre un

peu plus tard. Mais monsieur chargera le commissionnaire d'y

l'accompagner de bonne heure, car c'est beaucoup mieux de l'attendre que

de la perdre. La malle-poste arrive, monsieur s'assiera, aussi

confortablement qu'il le peut, et il y restera jusqu'a son arrive au

bureau de la poste aux lettres a Paris. Parceque, le convoi (_train_)

n'est pas l'affaire de monsieur, qui continuera s'asseoir dans la

malle-poste, sur le chemin de fer, et apres le chemin de fer, jusqu'il

se trouve a la basse-cour du bureau de la poste aux lettres a Paris, ou

il trouvera une voiture qui a ete depeche de la Rue de Courcelles,

quarante-huit. Mais monsieur aura la bonte d'observer--Si le convoi

arriverait a Amiens apres le depart du convoi a minuit, il faudra y

rester jusqu'a l'arrive d'un autre convoi a trois heures moins un quart.

En attendant, monsieur peut rester au buffet (_refreshment room_), ou

l'on peut toujours trouver un bon feu, et du cafe chaud, et des tres

bonnes choses a boire et a manger, pendant toute la nuit.--Est-ce que

monsieur comprend parfaitement toutes ces regles pour sa guidance?--Vive

le Roi des Francais! Roi de la nation la plus grande, et la plus noble,

et la plus extraordinairement merveilleuse, du monde! A bas des Anglais!

"CHARLES DICKENS,

"Francais naturalise, et Citoyen de Paris."

We passed a fortnight together, and crowded into it more than might seem

possible to such a narrow space. With a dreadful insatiability we passed

through every variety of sight-seeing, prisons, palaces, theatres,

hospitals, the Morgue and the Lazare, as well as the Louvre, Versailles,

St. Cloud, and all the spots made memorable by the first revolution. The

excellent comedian Regnier, known to us through Macready and endeared by

many kindnesses, incomparable for his knowledge of the city and

unwearying in friendly service, made us free of the green-room of the

Francais, where, on the birthday of Moliere, we saw his "Don Juan"

revived. At the Conservatoire we witnessed the masterly teaching of

Samson; at the Odeon saw a new play by Ponsard, done but indifferently;

at the Varietes "Gentil-Bernard," with four grisettes as if stepped out

of a picture by Watteau; at the Gymnase "Clarisse Harlowe," with a

death-scene of Rose Cheri which comes back to me, through the distance

of time, as the prettiest piece of pure and gentle stage-pathos in my

memory; at the Porte St. Martin "Lucretia Borgia" by Hugo; at the

Cirque, scenes of the great revolution, and all the battles of

Napoleon; at the Comic Opera, "Gibby"; and at the Palais Royal the usual

new-year's piece, in which Alexandre Dumas was shown in his study beside

a pile of quarto volumes five feet high, which proved to be the first

tableau of the first act of the first piece to be played on the first

night of his new theatre. That new theatre, the Historique, we also saw

verging to a very short-lived completeness; and we supped with Dumas

himself, and Eugene Sue, and met Theophile Gautier and Alphonse Karr. We

saw Lamartine also, and had much friendly intercourse with Scribe, and

with the kind good-natured Amedee Pichot. One day we visited in the Rue

du Bac the sick and ailing Chateaubriand, whom we thought like Basil

Montagu; found ourselves at the other extreme of opinion in the

sculpture-room of David d'Angers; and closed that day at the house of

Victor Hugo, by whom Dickens was received with infinite courtesy and

grace. The great writer then occupied a floor in a noble corner-house in

the Place Royale, the old quarter of Ninon l'Enclos and the people of

the Regency, of whom the gorgeous tapestries, the painted ceilings, the

wonderful carvings and old golden furniture, including a canopy of state

out of some palace of the middle age, quaintly and grandly reminded us.

He was himself, however, the best thing we saw; and I find it difficult

to associate the attitudes and aspect in which the world has lately

wondered at him, with the sober grace and self-possessed quiet gravity

of that night of twenty-five years ago. Just then Louis Philippe had

ennobled him, but the man's nature was written noble. Rather under the

middle size, of compact close-buttoned-up figure, with ample dark hair

falling loosely over his close-shaven face, I never saw upon any

features so keenly intellectual such a soft and sweet gentility, and

certainly never heard the French language spoken with the picturesque

distinctness given to it by Victor Hugo. He talked of his childhood in

Spain, and of his father having been Governor of the Tagus in Napoleon's

wars; spoke warmly of the English people and their literature; declared

his preference for melody and simplicity over the music then fashionable

at the Conservatoire; referred kindly to Ponsard, laughed at the actors

who had murdered his tragedy at the Odeon, and sympathized with the

dramatic venture of Dumas. To Dickens he addressed very charming

flattery, in the best taste; and my friend long remembered the enjoyment

of that evening.

There is little to add of our Paris holiday, if indeed too much has not

been said already. We had an adventure with a drunken coachman, of which

the sequel showed at least the vigour and decisiveness of the police in

regard to hired vehicles[133] in those last days of the Orleans

monarchy. At the Bibliotheque Royale we were much interested by seeing,

among many other priceless treasures, Gutenberg's types, Racine's notes

in his copy of Sophocles, Rousseau's music, and Voltaire's note upon

Frederick of Prussia's letter. Nor should I omit that in what Dickens

then told me, of even his small experience of the social aspects of

Paris, there seemed but the same disease which raged afterwards through

the second Empire. Not many days after I left, all Paris was crowding to

the sale of a lady of the demi-monde, Marie du Plessis, who had led the

most brilliant and abandoned of lives, and left behind her the most

exquisite furniture and the most voluptuous and sumptuous bijouterie.

Dickens wished at one time to have pointed the moral of this life and

death of which there was great talk in Paris while we were together. The

disease of satiety, which only less often than hunger passes for a

broken heart, had killed her. "What do you want?" asked the most famous

of the Paris physicians, at a loss for her exact complaint. At last she

answered: "To see my mother." She was sent for; and there came a simple

Breton peasant-woman clad in the quaint garb of her province, who prayed

by her bed until she died. Wonderful was the admiration and sympathy;

and it culminated when Eugene Sue bought her prayer-book at the sale.

Our last talk before I quitted Paris, after dinner at the Embassy, was

of the danger underlying all this, and of the signs also visible

everywhere of the Napoleon-worship which the Orleanists themselves had

most favoured. Accident brought Dickens to England a fortnight later,

when again we met together, at Gore-house, the self-contained reticent

man whose doubtful inheritance was thus rapidly preparing to fall to

him.[134]

The accident was the having underwritten his number of _Dombey_ by two

pages, which there was not time to supply otherwise than by coming to

London to write them.[135] This was done accordingly; but another

greater trouble followed. He had hardly returned to Paris when his

eldest son, whom I had brought to England with me and placed in the

house of Doctor Major, then head-master of King's-college-school, was

attacked by scarlet fever; and this closed prematurely Dickens's

residence in Paris. But though he and his wife at once came over, and

were followed after some days by the children and their aunt, the

isolation of the little invalid could not so soon be broken through. His

father at last saw him, nearly a month before the rest, in a lodging in

Albany-street, where his grandmother, Mrs. Hogarth, had devoted herself

to the charge of him; and an incident of the visit, which amused us all

very much, will not unfitly introduce the subject that waits me in my

next chapter.

An elderly charwoman employed about the place had shown so much sympathy

in the family trouble, that Mrs. Hogarth specially told her of the

approaching visit, and who it was that was coming to the sick-room.

"Lawk ma'am!" she said. "Is the young gentleman upstairs the son of the

man that put together _Dombey_?" Reassured upon this point, she

explained her question by declaring that she never thought there was a

man that _could_ have put together _Dombey_. Being pressed farther as to

what her notion was of this mystery of a _Dombey_ (for it was known she

could not read), it turned out that she lodged at a snuff-shop kept by a

person named Douglas, where there were several other lodgers; and that

on the first Monday of every month there was a Tea, and the landlord

read the month's number of _Dombey_, those only of the lodgers who

subscribed to the tea partaking of that luxury, but all having the

benefit of the reading; and the impression produced on the old charwoman

revealed itself in the remark with which she closed her account of it.

"Lawk ma'am! I thought that three or four men must have put together

_Dombey_!"

Dickens thought there was something of a compliment in this, and was not

ungrateful.

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[130] It had also the mention of another floating fancy for the weekly

periodical which was still and always present to his mind, and which

settled down at last, as the reader knows, into _Household Words_. "As

to the Review, I strongly incline to the notion of a kind of _Spectator_

(Addison's)--very cheap, and pretty frequent. We must have it thoroughly

discussed. It would be a great thing to found something. If the mark

between a sort of _Spectator_, and a different sort of _Athenaeum_, could

be well hit, my belief is that a deal might be done. But it should be

something with a marked and distinctive and obvious difference, in its

design, from any other existing periodical."

[131] Some smaller items of family news were in the same letter. "Mamey

and Katey have come out in Parisian dresses, and look very fine. They

are not proud, and send their loves. Skittles is cutting teeth, and gets

cross towards evening. Frankey is smaller than ever, and Walter very

large. Charley in statu quo. Everything is enormously dear. Fuel,

stupendously so. In airing the house, we burnt five pounds' worth of

firewood in one week!! We mix it with coal now, as we used to do in

Italy, and find the fires much warmer. To warm the house thoroughly,

this singular habitation requires fires on the ground floor. We burn

three. . . ."

[132] "I shall bring the Brave, though I have no use for him. He'd die

if I didn't."

[133] Dickens's first letter after my return described it to me. "Do you

remember my writing a letter to the prefet of police about that

coachman? I heard no more about it until this very day" (12th of

February), "when, at the moment of your letter arriving, Roche put his

head in at the door (I was busy writing in the Baronial drawing-room)

and said, 'Here is datter cocher!'--Sir, he had been in prison ever

since! and being released this morning, was sent by the police to pay

back the franc and a half, and to beg pardon, and to get a certificate

that he had done so, or he could not go on the stand again! Isn't this

admirable? But the culminating point of the story (it could happen with

nobody but me) is that he WAS DRUNK WHEN HE CAME!! Not very, but his eye

was fixed, and he swayed in his sabots, and smelt of wine, and told

Roche incoherently that he wouldn't have done it (committed the offence,

that is) if the people hadn't made him. He seemed to be troubled with a

phantasmagorial belief that all Paris had gathered round us that night

in the Rue St. Honore, and urged him on with frantic shouts. . . . Snow,

frost, and cold. . . . The Duke of Bordeaux is very well, and dines at

the Tuileries to-morrow. . . . _When_ I have done, I will write you a

brilliant letter. . . . Loves from all. . . . Your blue and golden bed

looks desolate." The allusion to the Duc de Bordeaux was to remind me

pleasantly of a slip of his own during our talk with Chateaubriand,

when, at a loss to say something interesting to the old royalist, he

bethought him to enquire with sympathy when he had last seen the

representative of the elder branch of Bourbons, as if he were resident

in the city then and there!

[134] This was on Sunday, the 21st of February, when a party were

assembled of whom I think the French Emperor, his cousin the Prince

Napoleon, Doctor Quin, Dickens's eldest son, and myself, are now the

only survivors. Lady Blessington had received the day before from her

brother Major Power, who held a military appointment in Hobart Town, a

small oil-painting of a girl's face by the murderer Wainewright

(mentioned on a former page as having been seen by us together in

Newgate), who was among the convicts there under sentence of

transportation, and who had contrived somehow to put the expression of

his own wickedness into the portrait of a nice kind-hearted girl. Major

Power knew nothing of the man's previous history at this time, and had

employed him on the painting out of a sort of charity. As soon as the

truth went back, Wainewright was excluded from houses before open to

him, and shortly after died very miserably. What Reynolds said of

portrait painting, to explain its frequent want of refinement, that a

man could only put into a face what he had in himself, was forcibly

shown in this incident. The villain's story altogether moved Dickens to

the same interest as it had excited in another profound student of

humanity (Sir Edward Lytton), and, as will be seen, he also introduced

him into one of his later writings.

[135] ". . . I am horrified to find that the first chapter makes _at

least_ two pages less than I had supposed, and I have a terrible

apprehension that there will not be copy enough for the number! As it

could not possibly come out short, and as there would be no greater

possibility of sending to me, in this short month, to supply what may be

wanted, I decide--after the first burst of nervousness is gone--_to

follow this letter by Diligence to-morrow morning_. The malle poste is

full for days and days. I shall hope to be with you some time on

Friday." C. D. to J. F. Paris: Wednesday, 17th February, 1847.

THE LIFE

OF

CHARLES DICKENS

BY

JOHN FORSTER.

THREE VOLUMES IN TWO.

VOL. II.

BOSTON:

JAMES R. OSGOOD & COMPANY,

(LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.)

1875.

CHAPTER XVI.

DOMBEY AND SON.

1846-1848.

Drift of the Tale--Why undervalued--Mistakes of

Critics--Adherence to First Design--Design as

to Paul and Sister--As to Dombey and

Daughter--Real Character of Hero--Walter

Gay--Omissions proposed--Anxiety as to Face of

his Hero--Passage of Original MS.

omitted--Artist-fancies for Mr. Dombey--Dickens

and his Illustrators--Hints for Artist--Letter

to Cruikshank--An Experience of Ben

Jonson's--Sale of the First Number--A Reading

of the Second Number--Scene at Mrs.

Pipchin's--The Mrs. Pipchin of his

Childhood--First Thought of his

Autobiography--Paul's School-life--Jeffrey's

Forecast of the Tale--A Damper to the Spirit--A

Fancy for New Zealand--Close of Paul's

Life--Jeffrey on Paul's Death--Florence and

Little Nell--Jeffrey on the Edith

Scenes--Edith's First Destiny--Jack

Bunsby--Dombey Household--Blimber

Establishment--Supposed Originals.

THOUGH his proposed new "book in shilling numbers" had been mentioned to

me three months before he quitted England, he knew little himself at

that time or when he left excepting the fact, then also named, that it

was to do with Pride what its predecessor had done with Selfishness. But

this limit he soon overpassed; and the succession of independent groups

of character, surprising for the variety of their forms and handling,

with which he enlarged and enriched his plan, went far beyond the range

of the passion of Mr. Dombey and Mr. Dombey's second wife.

Obvious causes have led to grave under-estimates of this novel. Its

first five numbers forced up interest and expectation so high that the

rest of necessity fell short; but it is not therefore true of the

general conception that thus the wine of it had been drawn, and only the

lees left. In the treatment of acknowledged masterpieces in literature

it not seldom occurs that the genius and the art of the master have not

pulled together to the close; but if a work of imagination is to forfeit

its higher meed of praise because its pace at starting has not been

uniformly kept, hard measure would have to be dealt to books of

undeniable greatness. Among other critical severities it was said here,

that Paul died at the beginning not for any need of the story, but only

to interest its readers somewhat more; and that Mr. Dombey relented at

the end for just the same reason. What is now to be told will show how

little ground existed for either imputation. The so-called "violent

change" in the hero has more lately been revived in the notices of Mr.

Taine, who says of it that "_it spoils a fine novel_;" but it will be

seen that in the apparent change no unnaturalness of change was

involved, and certainly the adoption of it was not a sacrifice to

"public morality." While every other portion of the tale had to submit

to such varieties in development as the characters themselves entailed,

the design affecting Paul and his father had been planned from the

opening, and was carried without alteration to the close. And of the

perfect honesty with which Dickens himself repelled such charges as

those to which I have adverted, when he wrote the preface to his

collected edition, remarkable proof appears in the letter to myself

which accompanied the manuscript of his proposed first number. No other

line of the tale had at this time been placed on paper.

When the first chapter only was done, and again when all was finished

but eight slips, he had sent me letters formerly quoted. What follows

came with the manuscript of the first four chapters on the 25th of July.

"I will now go on to give you an outline of my immediate intentions in

reference to _Dombey_. I design to show Mr. D. with that one idea of the

Son taking firmer and firmer possession of him, and swelling and

bloating his pride to a prodigious extent. As the boy begins to grow up,

I shall show him quite impatient for his getting on, and urging his

masters to set him great tasks, and the like. But the natural affection

of the boy will turn towards the despised sister; and I purpose showing

her learning all sorts of things, of her own application and

determination, to assist him in his lessons; and helping him always.

When the boy is about ten years old (in the fourth number), he will be

taken ill, and will die; and when he is ill, and when he is dying, I

mean to make him turn always for refuge to the sister still, and keep

the stern affection of the father at a distance. So Mr. Dombey--for all

his greatness, and for all his devotion to the child--will find himself

at arms' length from him even then; and will see that his love and

confidence are all bestowed upon his sister, whom Mr. Dombey has

used--and so has the boy himself too, for that matter--as a mere

convenience and handle to him. The death of the boy is a death-blow, of

course, to all the father's schemes and cherished hopes; and 'Dombey and

Son,' as Miss Tox will say at the end of the number, 'is a Daughter

after all.'. . . From that time, I purpose changing his feeling of

indifference and uneasiness towards his daughter into a positive hatred.

For he will always remember how the boy had his arm round her neck when

he was dying, and whispered to her, and would take things only from her

hand, and never thought of him. . . . At the same time I shall change _her_

feeling towards _him_ for one of a greater desire to love him, and to be

loved by him; engendered in her compassion for his loss, and her love

for the dead boy whom, in his way, he loved so well too. So I mean to

carry the story on, through all the branches and offshoots and

meanderings that come up; and through the decay and downfall of the

house, and the bankruptcy of Dombey, and all the rest of it; when his

only staff and treasure, and his unknown Good Genius always, will be

this rejected daughter, who will come out better than any son at last,

and whose love for him, when discovered and understood, will be his

bitterest reproach. For the struggle with himself which goes on in all

such obstinate natures, will have ended then; and the sense of his

injustice, which you may be sure has never quitted him, will have at

last a gentler office than that of only making him more harshly

unjust. . . . I rely very much on Susan Nipper grown up, and acting partly

as Florence's maid, and partly as a kind of companion to her, for a

strong character throughout the book. I also rely on the Toodles, and on

Polly, who, like everybody else, will be found by Mr. Dombey to have

gone over to his daughter and become attached to her. This is what cooks

call 'the stock of the soup.' All kinds of things will be added to it,

of course." Admirable is the illustration thus afforded of his way of

working, and very interesting the evidence it gives of the genuine

feeling for his art with which this book was begun.

The close of the letter put an important question affecting gravely a

leading person in the tale. . . . "About the boy, who appears in the last

chapter of the first number, I think it would be a good thing to

disappoint all the expectations that chapter seems to raise of his happy

connection with the story and the heroine, and to show him gradually and

naturally trailing away, from that love of adventure and boyish

light-heartedness, into negligence, idleness, dissipation, dishonesty,

and ruin. To show, in short, that common, every-day, miserable

declension of which we know so much in our ordinary life; to exhibit

something of the philosophy of it, in great temptations and an easy

nature; and to show how the good turns into bad, by degrees. If I kept

some little notion of Florence always at the bottom of it, I think it

might be made very powerful and very useful. What do you think? Do you

think it may be done, without making people angry? I could bring out

Solomon Gills and Captain Cuttle well, through such a history; and I

descry, anyway, an opportunity for good scenes between Captain Cuttle

and Miss Tox. This question of the boy is very important. . . . Let me hear

all you think about it. Hear! I wish I could.". . .

For reasons that need not be dwelt upon here, but in which Dickens

ultimately acquiesced, Walter was reserved for a happier future; and the

idea thrown out took subsequent shape, amid circumstances better suited

to its excellent capabilities, in the striking character of Richard

Carstone in the tale of _Bleak House_. But another point had risen

meanwhile for settlement not admitting of delay. In the first enjoyment

of writing after his long rest, to which a former letter has referred,

he had over-written his number by nearly a fifth; and upon his proposal

to transfer the fourth chapter to his second number, replacing it by

another of fewer pages, I had to object that this might damage his

interest at starting. Thus he wrote on the 7th of August: ". . . I have

received your letter to-day with the greatest delight, and am overjoyed

to find that you think so well of the number. I thought well of it

myself, and that it was a great plunge into a story; but I did not know

how far I might be stimulated by my paternal affection. . . . What should

you say, for a notion of the illustrations, to 'Miss Tox introduces the

Party?' and 'Mr. Dombey and family?' meaning Polly Toodle, the baby, Mr.

Dombey, and little Florence: whom I think it would be well to have.

Walter, his uncle, and Captain Cuttle, might stand over. It is a great

question with me, now, whether I had not better take this last chapter

bodily out, and make it the last chapter of the second number; writing

some other new one to close the first number. I think it would be

impossible to take out six pages without great pangs. Do you think such

a proceeding as I suggest would weaken number one very much? I wish you

would tell me, as soon as you can after receiving this, what your

opinion is on the point. If you thought it would weaken the first

number, beyond the counterbalancing advantage of strengthening the

second, I would cut down somehow or other, and let it go. I shall be

anxious to hear your opinion. In the meanwhile I will go on with the

second, which I have just begun. I have not been quite myself since we

returned from Chamounix, owing to the great heat." Two days later: "I

have begun a little chapter to end the first number, and certainly think

it will be well to keep the ten pages of Wally and Co. entire for number

two. But this is still subject to your opinion, which I am very anxious

to know. I have not been in writing cue all the week; but really the

weather has rendered it next to impossible to work." Four days later: "I

shall send you with this (on the chance of your being favourable to that

view of the subject) a small chapter to close the first number, in lieu

of the Solomon Gills one. I have been hideously idle all the week, and

have done nothing but this trifling interloper: but hope to begin again

on Monday--ding dong. . . . The inkstand is to be cleaned out to-night, and

refilled, preparatory to execution. I trust I may shed a good deal of

ink in the next fortnight." Then, the day following, on arrival of my

letter, he submitted to a hard necessity. "I received yours to-day. A

decided facer to me! I had been counting, alas! with a miser's greed,

upon the gained ten pages. . . . No matter. I have no doubt you are right,

and strength is everything. The addition of two lines to each page, or

something less,--coupled with the enclosed cuts, will bring it all to

bear smoothly. In case more cutting is wanted, I must ask you to try

your hand. I shall agree to whatever you propose." These cuttings,

absolutely necessary as they were, were not without much disadvantage;

and in the course of them he had to sacrifice a passage foreshadowing

his final intention as to Dombey. It would have shown, thus early,

something of the struggle with itself that such pride must always go

through; and I think it worth preserving in a note.[136]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Several letters now expressed his anxiety and care about the

illustrations. A nervous dread of caricature in the face of his

merchant-hero, had led him to indicate by a living person the type of

city-gentleman he would have had the artist select; and this is all he

meant by his reiterated urgent request, "I do wish he could get a

glimpse of A, for he is the very Dombey." But as the glimpse of A was

not to be had, it was resolved to send for selection by himself glimpses

of other letters of the alphabet, actual heads as well as fanciful

ones; and the sheetful I sent out, which he returned when the choice was

made, I here reproduce in fac-simile. In itself amusing, it has now the

important use of showing, once for all, in regard to Dickens's

intercourse with his artists, that they certainly had not an easy time

with him; that, even beyond what is ordinary between author and

illustrator, his requirements were exacting; that he was apt, as he has

said himself, to build up temples in his mind not always makeable with

hands; that in the results he had rarely anything but disappointment;

and that of all notions to connect with him the most preposterous would

be that which directly reversed these relations, and depicted him as

receiving from any artist the inspiration he was always vainly striving

to give. An assertion of this kind was contradicted in my first volume;

but it has since been repeated so explicitly, that to prevent any

possible misconstruction from a silence I would fain have persisted in,

the distasteful subject is again reluctantly introduced.

It originated with a literary friend of the excellent artist by whom

_Oliver Twist_ was illustrated from month to month, during the earlier

part of its monthly issue. This gentleman stated, in a paper written and

published in America, that Mr. Cruikshank, by executing the plates

before opportunity was afforded him of seeing the letter press, had

suggested to the writer the finest effects in his story; and to this,

opposing my clear recollection of all the time the tale was in progress,

it became my duty to say that within my own personal knowledge the

alleged fact was not true. "Dickens," the artist is reported an saying

to his admirer, "ferreted out that bundle of drawings, and when he came

to the one which represents Fagin in the cell, he silently studied it

for half an hour, and told me he was tempted to change the whole plot of

his story. . . . I consented to let him write up to my designs; and that

was the way in which Fagin, Sikes, and Nancy were created." Happily I

was able to add the complete refutation of this folly by producing a

letter of Dickens written at the time, which proved incontestably that

the closing illustrations, including the two specially named in support

of the preposterous charge, Sikes and his Dog, and Fagin in his Cell,

had not even been seen by Dickens until his finished book was on the eve

of appearance. As however the distinguished artist, notwithstanding the

refreshment of his memory by this letter, has permitted himself again to

endorse the statement of his friend, I can only again print, on the same

page which contains the strange language used by him, the words with

which Dickens himself repels its imputation on his memory. To some it

may be more satisfactory if I print the latter in fac-simile; and so

leave for ever a charge in itself so incredible that nothing would have

justified farther allusion to it but the knowledge of my friend's old

and true regard for Mr. Cruikshank, of which evidence will shortly

appear, and my own respect for an original genius well able to subsist

of itself without taking what belongs to others.

[Illustration: My dear Cruikshank,

I returned suddenly to town yesterday afternoon to look at the latter

["last" crossed out] pages of Oliver Twist before it was delivered to

the booksellers, when I saw the majority of the plates in the last

volume for the first time.

With reference to the last one, Rose Maylie and Oliver. Without entering

into the question of great haste or [word crossed out] any other cause

which may have led to its being what it is. I am quite sure there can be

little difference of opinion between us with [word crossed out] respect

to the result--may]

[Illustration: I ask you whether you will object

to designing [word crossed out] this plate

afresh and doing so ~at once~ in order that as

few impressions as possible of the present one

may go forth?

I feel confident [words crossed out] you know me

too well to feel hurt by this enquiry, and with

that confidence in you I have lost no time in

preparing it.][137]

Resuming the _Dombey_ letters I find him on the 30th of August in better

heart about his illustrator. "I shall gladly acquiesce in whatever more

changes or omissions you propose. Browne seems to be getting on well. . . .

He will have a good subject in Paul's christening. Mr. Chick is like

D, if you'll mention that when you think of it. The little chapter of

Miss Tox and the Major, which you alas! (but quite wisely) rejected from

the first number, I have altered for the last of the second. I have not

quite finished the middle chapter yet--having, I should say, three good

days' work to do at it; but I hope it will be all a worthy successor to

number one. I will send it as soon as finished." Then, a little later:

"Browne is certainly interesting himself, and taking pains. I think the

cover very good: perhaps with a little too much in it, but that is an

ungrateful objection." The second week of September brought me the

finished MS. of number two; and his letter of the 3rd of October,

noticing objections taken to it, gives additional touches to this

picture of him while at work. The matter that engages him is one of his

masterpieces. There is nothing in all his writings more perfect, for

what it shows of his best qualities, than the life and death of Paul

Dombey. The comedy is admirable; nothing strained, everything hearty and

wholesome in the laughter and fun; all who contribute to the mirth,

Doctor Blimber and his pupils, Mr. Toots, the Chicks and the Toodles,

Miss Tox and the Major, Paul and Mrs. Pipchin, up to his highest mark;

and the serious scenes never falling short of it, from the death of

Paul's mother in the first number, to that of Paul himself in the fifth,

which, as a writer of genius with hardly exaggeration said, threw a

whole nation into mourning. But see how eagerly this fine writer takes

every suggestion, how little of self-esteem and self-sufficiency there

is, with what a consciousness of the tendency of his humour to

exuberance he surrenders what is needful to restrain it, and of what

small account to him is any special piece of work in his care and his

considerateness for the general design. I think of Ben Jonson's

experience of the greatest of all writers. "He was indeed honest, and of

an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions and

gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometimes

it was necessary he should be stopped." Who it was that stopped _him_,

and the ease of doing it, no one will doubt. Whether he, as well as the

writer of later time, might not with more advantage have been left

alone, will be the only question.

Thus ran the letter of the 3rd of October: "Miss Tox's colony I will

smash. Walter's allusion to Carker (would you take it _all_ out?) shall

be dele'd. Of course, you understand the man! I turned that speech over

in my mind; but I thought it natural that a boy should run on, with such

a subject, under the circumstances: having the matter so presented to

him. . . . I thought of the possibility of malice on christening points of

faith, and put the drag on as I wrote. Where would you make the

insertion, and to what effect? _That_ shall be done too. I want you to

think the number sufficiently good stoutly to back up the first. It

occurs to me--might not your doubt about the christening be a reason for

not making the ceremony the subject of an illustration? Just turn this

over. Again: if I could do it (I shall have leisure to consider the

possibility before I begin), do you think it would be advisable to make

number three a kind of half-way house between Paul's infancy, and his

being eight or nine years old?--In that case I should probably not kill

him until the fifth number. Do you think the people so likely to be

pleased with Florence, and Walter, as to relish another number of them

at their present age? Otherwise, Walter will be two or three and twenty,

straightway. I wish you would think of this. . . . I am sure you are right

about the christening. It shall be artfully and easily amended. . . . Eh?"