police reported officially," he wrote to his daughter from Liverpool on
the 14th of April, "that three thousand people were turned away from the
hall last night. . . . Except that I can _not_ sleep, I really think myself
in very much better training than I had anticipated. A dozen oysters and
a little champagne between the parts every night, seem to constitute the
best restorative I have ever yet tried." "Such a prodigious
demonstration last night at Manchester," he wrote to the same
correspondent twelve days later, "that I was obliged (contrary to my
principle in such cases) to go back. I am very tired to-day; for it
would be of itself very hard work in that immense place, if there were
not to be added eighty miles of railway and late hours to boot." "It has
been very heavy work," he wrote to his sister-in-law on the 11th of May
from Clifton, "getting up at 6.30 each morning after a heavy night, and
I am not at all well to-day. We had a tremendous hall at Birmingham last
night, L230 odd, 2100 people; and I made a most ridiculous mistake. Had
_Nickleby_ on my list to finish with, instead of _Trial_. Read
_Nickleby_ with great go, _and the people remained_. Went back again at
10 o'clock, and explained the accident: but said if they liked I would
give them the _Trial_. They _did_ like;--and I had another half hour of
it, in that enormous place. . . . I have so severe a pain in the ball of my
left eye that it makes it hard for me to do anything after 100 miles
shaking since breakfast. My cold is no better, nor my hand either." It
was his left eye, it will be noted, as it was his left foot and hand;
the irritability or faintness of heart was also of course on the left
side; and it was on the same left side he felt most of the effect of the
railway accident.
Everything was done to make easier the labour of travel, but nothing
could materially abate either the absolute physical exhaustion, or the
nervous strain. "We arrived here," he wrote from Aberdeen (16th of May),
"safe and sound between 3 and 4 this morning. There was a compartment
for the men, and a charming room for ourselves furnished with sofas and
easy chairs. We had also a pantry and washing-stand. This carriage is to
go about with us." Two days later he wrote from Glasgow: "We halted at
Perth yesterday, and got a lovely walk there. Until then I had been in a
condition the reverse of flourishing; half strangled with my cold, and
dyspeptically gloomy and dull; but, as I feel much more like myself this
morning, we are going to get some fresh air aboard a steamer on the
Clyde." The last letter during his country travel was from Portsmouth on
the 24th of May, and contained these words: "You need have no fear about
America." The readings closed in June.
The readings of the new year began with even increased enthusiasm, but
not otherwise with happier omen. Here was his first outline of plan: "I
start on Wednesday afternoon (the 15th of January) for Liverpool, and
then go on to Chester, Derby, Leicester, and Wolverhampton. On Tuesday
the 29th I read in London again, and in February I read at Manchester
and then go on into Scotland." From Liverpool he wrote on the 21st:
"The enthusiasm has been unbounded. On Friday night I quite astonished
myself; but I was taken so faint afterwards that they laid me on a sofa,
at the hall for half an hour. I attribute it to my distressing inability
to sleep at night, and to nothing worse. Everything is made as easy to
me as it possibly can be. Dolby would do anything to lighten the work,
and _does_ everything." The weather was sorely against him. "At
Chester," he wrote on the 24th from Birmingham, "we read in a snow-storm
and a fall of ice. I think it was the worst weather I ever saw. . . . At
Wolverhampton last night the thaw had thoroughly set in, and it rained
furiously, and I was again heavily beaten. We came on here after the
reading (it is only a ride of forty miles), and it was as much as I
could do to hold out the journey. But I was not faint, as at Liverpool.
I was only exhausted." Five days later he had returned for his Reading
in London, and thus replied to a summons to dine with Macready at my
house: "I am very tired; cannot sleep; have been severely shaken on an
atrocious railway; read to-night, and have to read at Leeds on Thursday.
But I have settled with Dolby to put off our going to Leeds on
Wednesday, in the hope of coming to dine with you, and seeing our dear
old friend. I say 'in the hope,' because if I should be a little more
used-up to-morrow than I am to-day, I should be constrained, in spite of
myself, to take to the sofa and stick there."
On the 15th of February he wrote to his sister-in-law from Liverpool
that they had had "an enormous turnaway" the previous night. "The day
has been very fine, and I have turned it to the wholesomest account by
walking on the sands at New Brighton all the morning. I am not quite
right within, but believe it to be an effect of the railway shaking.
There is no doubt of the fact that, after the Staplehurst experience, it
tells more and more (railway shaking, that is) instead of, as one might
have expected, less and less." The last remark is a strange one, from a
man of his sagacity; but it was part of the too-willing self-deception
which he practised, to justify him in his professed belief that these
continued excesses of labour and excitement were really doing him no
harm. The day after that last letter he pushed on to Scotland, and on
the 17th wrote to his daughter from Glasgow. The closing night at
Manchester had been enormous. "They cheered to that extent after it was
over that I was obliged to huddle on my clothes (for I was undressing to
prepare for the journey) and go back again. After so heavy a week, it
_was_ rather stiff to start on this long journey at a quarter to two in
the morning; but I got more sleep than I ever got in a railway-carriage
before. . . . I have, as I had in the last series of readings, a curious
feeling of soreness all round the body--which I suppose to arise from
the great exertion of voice . . ." Two days later he wrote to his
sister-in-law from the Bridge of Allan, which he had reached from
Glasgow that morning. "Yesterday I was so unwell with an internal malady
that occasionally at long intervals troubles me a little, and it was
attended with the sudden loss of so much blood, that I wrote to F. B.
from whom I shall doubtless hear to-morrow. . . . I felt it a little more
exertion to read, afterwards, and I passed a sleepless night after that
again; but otherwise I am in good force and spirits to-day: I may say,
in the best force. . . . The quiet of this little place is sure to do me
good." He rallied again from this attack, and, though he still
complained of sleeplessness, wrote cheerfully from Glasgow on the 21st,
describing himself indeed as confined to his room, but only because "in
close hiding from a local poet who has christened his infant son in my
name, and consequently haunts the building." On getting back to
Edinburgh he wrote to me, with intimation that many troubles had beset
him; but that the pleasure of his audiences, and the providence and
forethought of Messrs. Chappell, had borne him through. "Everything is
done for me with the utmost liberality and consideration. Every want I
can have on these journeys is anticipated, and not the faintest spark of
the tradesman spirit ever peeps out. I have three men in constant
attendance on me; besides Dolby, who is an agreeable companion, an
excellent manager, and a good fellow."
On the 4th of March he wrote from Newcastle: "The readings have made an
immense effect in this place, and it is remarkable that although the
people are individually rough, collectively they are an unusually tender
and sympathetic audience; while their comic perception is quite up to
the high London standard. The atmosphere is so very heavy that yesterday
we escaped to Tynemouth for a two hours' sea walk. There was a high
north wind blowing, and a magnificent sea running. Large vessels were
being towed in and out over the stormy bar, with prodigious waves
breaking on it; and, spanning the restless uproar of the waters, was a
quiet rainbow of transcendent beauty. The scene was quite wonderful. We
were in the full enjoyment of it when a heavy sea caught us, knocked us
over, and in a moment drenched us and filled even our pockets. We had
nothing for it but to shake ourselves together (like Dr. Marigold), and
dry ourselves as well as we could by hard walking in the wind and
sunshine. But we were wet through for all that, when we came back here
to dinner after half-an-hour's railway drive. I am wonderfully well, and
quite fresh and strong." Three days later he was at Leeds; from which he
was to work himself round through the most important neighbouring places
to another reading in London, before again visiting Ireland.
This was the time of the Fenian excitements; it was with great
reluctance he consented to go;[259] and he told us all at his first
arrival that he should have a complete breakdown. More than 300 stalls
were gone at Belfast two days before the reading, but on the afternoon
of the reading in Dublin not 50 were taken. Strange to say however a
great crowd pressed in at night, he had a tumultuous greeting, and on
the 22nd of March I had this announcement from him: "You will be
surprised to be told that we have done WONDERS! Enthusiastic crowds have
filled the halls to the roof each night, and hundreds have been turned
away. At Belfast the night before last we had L246 5_s._ In Dublin
to-night everything is sold out, and people are besieging Dolby to put
chairs anywhere, in doorways, on my platform, in any sort of hole or
corner. In short the Readings are a perfect rage at a time when
everything else is beaten down." He took the Eastern Counties at his
return, and this brought the series to a close. "The reception at
Cambridge was something to be proud of in such a place. The colleges
mustered in full force, from the biggest guns to the smallest; and went
beyond even Manchester in the roars of welcome and rounds of cheers. The
place was crammed, and all through the reading everything was taken with
the utmost heartiness of enjoyment." The temptation of offers from
America had meanwhile again been presented to him so strongly, and in
such unlucky connection with immediate family claims threatening excess
of expenditure even beyond the income he was making, that he was fain to
write to his sister-in-law: "I begin to feel myself drawn towards
America as Darnay in the _Tale of Two Cities_ was attracted to Paris. It
is my Loadstone Rock." Too surely it was to be so; and Dickens was not
to be saved from the consequence of yielding to the temptation, by any
such sacrifice as had rescued Darnay.
The letter which told me of the close of his English readings had in it
no word of the farther enterprise, yet it seemed to be in some sort a
preparation for it. "Last Monday evening" (14th May) "I finished the 50
Readings with great success. You have no idea how I have worked at them.
Feeling it necessary, as their reputation widened, that they should be
better than at first, I have _learnt them all_, so as to have no
mechanical drawback in looking after the words. I have tested all the
serious passion in them by everything I know; made the humorous points
much more humorous; corrected my utterance of certain words; cultivated
a self-possession not to be disturbed; and made myself master of the
situation. Finishing with _Dombey_ (which I had not read for a long
time) I learnt that, like the rest; and did it to myself, often twice a
day, with exactly the same pains as at night, over and over and over
again." . . . Six days later brought his reply to a remark that no degree
of excellence to which he might have brought his readings could
reconcile me to what there was little doubt would soon be pressed upon
him. "It is curious" (20th May) "that you should touch the American
subject, because I must confess that my mind is in a most disturbed
state about it. That the people there have set themselves on having the
readings, there is no question. Every mail brings me proposals, and the
number of Americans at St. James's Hall has been surprising. A certain
Mr. Grau, who took Ristori out, and is highly responsible, wrote to me
by the last mail (for the second time) saying that if I would give him a
word of encouragement he would come over immediately and arrange on the
boldest terms for any number I chose, and would deposit a large sum of
money at Coutts's. Mr. Fields writes to me on behalf of a committee of
private gentlemen at Boston who wished for the credit of getting me out,
who desired to hear the readings and did not want profit, and would put
down as a guarantee L10,000--also to be banked here. Every American
speculator who comes to London repairs straight to Dolby, with similar
proposals. And, thus excited, Chappells, the moment this last series was
over, proposed to treat for America!" Upon the mere question of these
various offers he had little difficulty in making up his mind. If he
went at all, he would go on his own account, making no compact with any
one. Whether he should go at all, was what he had to determine.
One thing with his usual sagacity he saw clearly enough. He must make up
his mind quickly. "The Presidential election would be in the autumn of
next year. They are a people whom a fancy does not hold long. They are
bent upon my reading there, and they believe (on no foundation whatever)
that I am going to read there. If I ever go, the time would be when the
Christmas number goes to press. Early in this next November." Every sort
of enquiry he accordingly set on foot; and so far came to the immediate
decision, that, if the answers left him no room to doubt that a certain
sum might be realized, he would go. "Have no fear that anything will
induce me to make the experiment, if I do not see the most forcible
reasons for believing that what I could get by it, added to what I have
got, would leave me with a sufficient fortune. I should be wretched
beyond expression there. My small powers of description cannot describe
the state of mind in which I should drag on from day to day." At the end
of May he wrote: "Poor dear Stanfield!" (our excellent friend had passed
away the week before). "I cannot think even of him, and of our great
loss, for this spectre of doubt and indecision that sits at the board
with me and stands at the bedside. I am in a tempest-tossed condition,
and can hardly believe that I stand at bay at last on the American
question. The difficulty of determining amid the variety of statements
made to me is enormous, and you have no idea how heavily the anxiety of
it sits upon my soul. But the prize looks so large!" One way at last
seemed to open by which it was possible to get at some settled opinion.
"Dolby sails for America" (2nd of July) "on Saturday the 3rd of August.
It is impossible to come to any reasonable conclusion, without sending
eyes and ears on the actual ground. He will take out my MS. for the
_Children's Magazine_. I hope it is droll, and very child-like; though
the joke is a grown-up one besides. You must try to like the pirate
story, for I am very fond of it." The allusion is to his pleasant
_Holiday Romance_ which he had written for Mr. Fields.
Hardly had Mr. Dolby gone when there came that which should have availed
to dissuade, far more than any of the arguments which continued to
express my objection to the enterprise. "I am laid up," he wrote on the
6th of August, "with another attack in my foot, and was on the sofa all
last night in tortures. I cannot bear to have the fomentations taken off
for a moment. I was so ill with it on Sunday, and it looked so fierce,
that I came up to Henry Thompson. He has gone into the case heartily,
and says that there is no doubt the complaint originates in the action
of the shoe, in walking, on an enlargement in the nature of a bunion.
Erysipelas has supervened upon the injury; and the object is to avoid a
gathering, and to stay the erysipelas where it is. Meantime I am on my
back, and chafing. . . . I didn't improve my foot by going down to
Liverpool to see Dolby off, but I have little doubt of its yielding to
treatment, and repose." A few days later he was chafing still; the
accomplished physician he consulted having dropped other hints that
somewhat troubled him. "I could not walk a quarter of a mile to-night
for L500. I make out so many reasons against supposing it to be gouty
that I really do not think it is."
So momentous in my judgment were the consequences of the American
journey to him that it seemed right to preface thus much of the
inducements and temptations that led to it. My own part in the
discussion was that of steady dissuasion throughout: though this might
perhaps have been less persistent if I could have reconciled myself to
the belief, which I never at any time did, that Public Readings were a
worthy employment for a man of his genius. But it had by this time
become clear to me that nothing could stay the enterprise. The result of
Mr. Dolby's visit to America--drawn up by Dickens himself in a paper
possessing still the interest of having given to the Readings when he
crossed the Atlantic much of the form they then assumed[260]--reached me
when I was staying at Ross; and upon it was founded my last argument
against the scheme. This he received in London on the 28th of September,
on which day he thus wrote to his eldest daughter: "As I telegraphed
after I saw you, I am off to Ross to consult with Mr. Forster and Dolby
together. You shall hear, either on Monday, or by Monday's post from
London, how I decide finally." The result he wrote to her three days
later: "You will have had my telegram that I go to America. After a long
discussion with Forster, and consideration of what is to be said on both
sides, I have decided to go through with it. We have telegraphed 'Yes'
to Boston." Seven days later he wrote to me: "The Scotia being full, I
do not sail until lord mayor's day; for which glorious anniversary I
have engaged an officer's cabin on deck in the Cuba. I am not in very
brilliant spirits at the prospect before me, and am deeply sensible of
your motive and reasons for the line you have taken; but I am not in the
least shaken in the conviction that I could never quite have given up
the idea."
The remaining time was given to preparations; on the 2nd of November
there was a Farewell Banquet in the Freemasons' Hall over which Lord
Lytton presided; and on the 9th Dickens sailed for Boston. Before he
left he had contributed his part to the last of his Christmas Numbers;
all the writings he lived to complete were done; and the interval of his
voyage may be occupied by a general review of the literary labour of his
life.
FOOTNOTES:
[253] There had been some estrangement between them since the autumn of
1858, hardly now worth mention even in a note. Thackeray, justly
indignant at a published description of himself by the member of a club
to which both he and Dickens belonged, referred it to the Committee, who
decided to expel the writer. Dickens, thinking expulsion too harsh a
penalty for an offence thoughtlessly given, and, as far as might be,
manfully atoned for by withdrawal and regret, interposed to avert that
extremity. Thackeray resented the interference, and Dickens was justly
hurt by the manner in which he did so. Neither was wholly right, nor was
either altogether in the wrong.
[254] As I have thus fallen on theatrical subjects, I may add one or two
practical experiences which befell Dickens at theatres in the autumn of
1864, when he sallied forth from his office upon these night wanderings
to "cool" a boiling head. "I went the other night" (8th of October) "to
see the _Streets of London_ at the Princess's. A piece that is really
drawing all the town, and filling the house with nightly overflows. It
is the most depressing instance, without exception, of an utterly
degraded and debased theatrical taste that has ever come under my
writhing notice. For not only do the audiences--of all classes--go, but
they are unquestionably delighted. At Astley's there has been much
puffing at great cost of a certain Miss Ada Isaacs Menkin, who is to be
seen bound on the horse in _Mazeppa_ 'ascending the fearful precipices
not as hitherto done by a dummy.' Last night, having a boiling head, I
went out from here to cool myself on Waterloo Bridge, and I thought I
would go and see this heroine. Applied at the box-door for a stall.
'None left sir.' For a box-ticket. 'Only standing-room sir.' Then the
man (busy in counting great heaps of veritable checks) recognizes me and
says--'Mr. Smith will be very much concerned when he hears that you went
away sir'--'Never mind; I'll come again.' 'You never go behind I think
sir, or--?' 'No thank you, I never go behind.' 'Mr. Smith's box, sir--'
'No thank you, I'll come again.' Now who do you think the lady is? If
you don't already know, ask that question of the highest Irish mountains
that look eternal, and they'll never tell you--_Mrs. Heenan!_" This
lady, who turned out to be one of Dickens's greatest admirers, addressed
him at great length on hearing of this occurrence, and afterwards
dedicated a volume of poems to him! There was a pleasanter close to his
letter. "Contrariwise I assisted another night at the Adelphi (where I
couldn't, with careful calculation, get the house up to Nine Pounds),
and saw quite an admirable performance of Mr. Toole and Mrs.
Mellon--she, an old servant, wonderfully like Anne--he, showing a power
of passion very unusual indeed in a comic actor, as such things go, and
of a quite remarkable kind."
[255] Writing to me three months before, he spoke of the death of one
whom he had known from his boyhood (_ante_, i. 47-8) and with whom he
had fought unsuccessfully for some years against the management of the
Literary Fund. "Poor Dilke! I am very sorry that the capital old
stout-hearted man is dead." Sorrow may also be expressed that no
adequate record should remain of a career which for steadfast purpose,
conscientious maintenance of opinion, and pursuit of public objects with
disregard of self, was one of very high example. So averse was Mr. Dilke
to every kind of display that his name appears to none of the literary
investigations which were conducted by him with an acuteness wonderful
as his industry, and it was in accordance with his express instructions
that the literary journal which his energy and self-denial had
established kept silence respecting him at his death.
[256] One day before, the 8th of June 1865, his old friend Sir Joseph
Paxton had breathed his last.
[257] Here are allusions to it at that time. "I have got a boot on
to-day,--made on an Otranto scale, but really not very discernible from
its ordinary sized companion." After a few days' holiday: "I began to
feel my foot stronger the moment I breathed the sea air. Still, during
the ten days I have been away, I have never been able to wear a boot
after four or five in the afternoon, but have passed all the evenings
with the foot up, and nothing on it. I am burnt brown and have walked by
the sea perpetually, yet I feel certain that if I wore a boot this
evening, I should be taken with those torments again before the night
was out." This last letter ended thus: "As a relief to my late dismal
letters, I send you the newest American story. Backwoods Doctor is
called in to the little boy of a woman-settler. Stares at the child some
time through a pair of spectacles. Ultimately takes them off, and says
to the mother: 'Wa'al Marm, this is small-pox. 'Tis Marm, small-pox. But
I am not posted up in Pustuls, and I do not know as I could bring him
along slick through it. But I'll tell you wa'at I can do Marm:--I can
send him a draft as will certainly put him into a most etarnal Fit, and
I am almighty smart at Fits, and we might git round Old Grisly that
way.'"
[258] I give one such instance: "The railway people have offered, in the
case of the young man whom I got out of the carriage just alive, all the
expenses and a thousand pounds down. The father declines to accept the
offer. It seems unlikely that the young man, whose destination is India,
would ever be passed for the Army now by the Medical Board. The question
is, how far will that contingency tell, under Lord Campbell's Act?"
[259] He wrote to me on the 15th of March from Dublin: "So profoundly
discouraging were the accounts from here in London last Tuesday that I
held several councils with Chappell about coming at all; had actually
drawn up a bill announcing (indefinitely) the postponement of the
readings; and had meant to give him a reading to cover the charges
incurred--but yielded at last to his representations the other way. We
ran through a snow storm nearly the whole way, and in Wales got snowed
up, came to a stoppage, and had to dig the engine out. . . . We got to
Dublin at last, found it snowing and raining, and heard that it had been
snowing and raining since the first day of the year. . . . As to outward
signs of trouble or preparation, they are very few. At Kingstown our
boat was waited for by four armed policemen, and some stragglers in
various dresses who were clearly detectives. But there was no show of
soldiery. My people carry a long heavy box containing gas-fittings. This
was immediately laid hold of; but one of the stragglers instantly
interposed on seeing my name, and came to me in the carriage and
apologised. . . . The worst looking young fellow I ever saw, turned up at
Holyhead before we went to bed there, and sat glooming and glowering by
the coffee-room fire while we warmed ourselves. He said he had been
snowed up with us (which we didn't believe), and was horribly
disconcerted by some box of his having gone to Dublin without him. We
said to one another 'Fenian:' and certainly he disappeared in the
morning, and let his box go where it would." What Dickens heard and saw
in Dublin, during this visit, convinced him that Fenianism and
disaffection had found their way into several regiments.
[260] This renders it worth preservation in a note. He called it
"THE CASE IN A NUTSHELL.
"1. I think it may be taken as proved, that
general enthusiasm and excitement are awakened
in America on the subject of the Readings, and
that the people are prepared to give me a great
reception. _The New York Herald_, indeed, is of
opinion that 'Dickens must apologise first';
and where a _New York Herald_ is possible,
anything is possible. But the prevailing tone,
both of the press and of people of all
conditions, is highly favourable. I have an
opinion myself that the Irish element in New
York is dangerous; for the reason that the
Fenians would be glad to damage a conspicuous
Englishman. This is merely an opinion of my
own.
"2. All our original calculations were based on
100 Readings. But an unexpected result of
careful enquiry on the spot, is the discovery
that the month of May is generally considered
(in the large cities) bad for such a purpose.
Admitting that what governs an ordinary case in
this wise, governs mine, this reduces the
Readings to 80, and consequently at a blow
makes a reduction of 20 per cent., in the means
of making money within the half year--unless
the objection should not apply in my
exceptional instance.
"3. I dismiss the consideration that the great
towns of America could not possibly be
exhausted--or even visited--within 6 months,
and that a large harvest would be left
unreaped. Because I hold a second series of
Readings in America is to be set down as out of
the question: whether regarded as involving two
more voyages across the Atlantic, or a vacation
of five months in Canada.
"4. The narrowed calculation we have made, is
this: What is the largest amount of clear
profit derivable, under the most advantageous
circumstances possible, as to their public
reception, from 80 Readings and no more? In
making this calculation, the expenses have been
throughout taken on the New York scale--which
is the dearest; as much as 20 per cent., has
been deducted for management, including Mr.
Dolby's commission; and no credit has been
taken for any extra payment on reserved seats,
though a good deal of money is confidently
expected from this source. But on the other
hand it is to be observed that four Readings
(and a fraction over) are supposed to take
place every week, and that the estimate of
receipts is based on the assumption that the
audiences are, on all occasions, as large as
the rooms will reasonably hold.
"5. So considering 80 Readings, we bring out
the net profit of that number, remaining to me
after payment of all charges whatever, as
L15,500.
"6. But it yet remains to be noted that the
calculation assumes New York City, and the
State of New York, to be good for a very large
proportion of the 80 Readings; and that the
calculation also assumes the necessary
travelling not to extend beyond Boston and
adjacent places, New York City and adjacent
places, Philadelphia, Washington, and
Baltimore. But, if the calculation should prove
too sanguine on this head, and if these places
should _not_ be good for so many Readings, then
it may prove impracticable to get through 80
within the time: by reason of other places that
would come into the list, lying wide asunder,
and necessitating long and fatiguing journeys.
"7. The loss consequent on the conversion of
paper money into gold (with gold at the present
ruling premium) is allowed for in the
calculation. It counts seven dollars to the
pound."
CHAPTER XIV.
DICKENS AS A NOVELIST.
1836-1870.
THE TALE OF TWO CITIES.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
CHRISTMAS SKETCHES.
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.
DR. MARIGOLD AND TALES FOR AMERICA.
M. Taine's Criticism--What M. Taine
overlooks--Anticipatory Reply to M.
Taine--Paper by Mr. Lewes--Plea for Objectors
to Dickens--Dickens a "Seer of
Visions"--Criticised and Critic--An Opinion on
Mr. and Mrs. Micawber--Dickens in a Fit of
Hallucination--Dickens's Leading
Quality--Dickens's Earlier Books--Mastery of
Dialogue--Realities of Fiction--Fielding and
Dickens--Universality of Micawber
Experiences--Dickens's Enjoyment of his Own
Humour--Origin of _Tale of Two
Cities_--Title-hunting--Success--Method
different from his Other Books--Reply to an
Objection--Care with which Dickens
worked--_Tale of Two Cities_
characterized--Opinion of an American
Critic--_Great Expectations_--Another Boy-child
for Hero--Groundwork of the Story--Masterly
Drawing of Character--Christmas Sketches--_Our
Mutual Friend_--Germ of Characters for
it--Writing Numbers in Advance--Death of
Leech--Holiday in France--In the Staplehurst
Accident--On a Tale by Edmund About--Doctor
Marigold--Minor Stories--Edwin Drood--Purity of
Dickens's Writings--True Province of
Humour--Dickens's Death--Effect of the News in
America--A Far-Western Admirer of Dickens.
WHAT I have to say generally of Dickens's genius as a writer may be made
part of the notice, which still remains to be given, of his writings
from _The Tale of Two Cities_ to the time at which we have arrived,
leaving _Edwin Drood_ for mention in its place; and this will be
accompanied, as in former notices of individual stories, by
illustrations drawn from his letters and life. His literary work was so
intensely one with his nature that he is not separable from it, and the
man and the method throw a singular light on each other. But some
allusion to what has been said of these books, by writers assuming to
speak with authority, will properly precede what has to be offered by
me; and I shall preface this part of my task with the hint of Carlyle,
that in looking at a man out of the common it is good for common men to
make sure that they "see" before they attempt to "oversee" him.
Of the French writer, M. Henri Taine, it has before been remarked that
his inability to appreciate humour is fatal to his pretensions as a
critic of the English novel. But there is much that is noteworthy in his
criticism notwithstanding, as well as remarkable in his knowledge of our
language; his position entitles him to be heard without a suspicion of
partizanship or intentional unfairness; whatever the value of his
opinion, the elaboration of its form and expression is itself no common
tribute; and what is said in it of Dickens's handling in regard to style
and character, embodies temperately objections which have since been
taken by some English critics without his impartiality and with less
than his ability. As to style M. Taine does not find that the natural or
simple prevails sufficiently. The tone is too passionate. The
imaginative or poetic side of allusion is so uniformly dwelt on, that
the descriptions cease to be subsidiary, and the minute details of pain
or pleasure wrought out by them become active agencies in the tale. So
vivid and eager is the display of fancy that everything is borne along
with it; imaginary objects take the precision of real ones; living
thoughts are controlled by inanimate things; the chimes console the poor
old ticket-porter; the cricket steadies the rough carrier's doubts; the
sea waves soothe the dying boy; clouds, flowers, leaves, play their
several parts; hardly a form of matter without a living quality; no
silent thing without its voice. Fondling and exaggerating thus what is
occasional in the subject of his criticism, into what he has evidently
at last persuaded himself is a fixed and universal practice with
Dickens, M. Taine proceeds to explain the exuberance by comparing such
imagination in its vividness to that of a monomaniac. He fails
altogether to apprehend that property in Humour which involves the
feeling of subtlest and most affecting analogies, and from which is
drawn the rare insight into sympathies between the nature of things and
their attributes or opposites, in which Dickens's fancy revelled with
such delight. Taking the famous lines which express the lunatic, the
lover, and the poet as "of Imagination all compact," in a sense that
would have startled not a little the great poet who wrote them, M. Taine
places on the same level of creative fancy the phantoms of the lunatic
and the personages of the artist. He exhibits Dickens as from time to
time, in the several stages of his successive works of fiction, given up
to one idea, possessed by it, seeing nothing else, treating it in a
hundred forms, exaggerating it, and so dazzling and overpowering his
readers with it that escape is impossible. This he maintains to be
equally the effect as Mr. Mell the usher plays the flute, as Tom Pinch
enjoys or exposes his Pecksniff, as the guard blows his bugle while Tom
rides to London, as Ruth Pinch crosses Fountain Court or makes the
beefsteak pudding, as Jonas Chuzzlewit commits and returns from the
murder, and as the storm which is Steerforth's death-knell beats on the
Yarmouth shore. To the same kind of power he attributes the
extraordinary clearness with which the commonest objects in all his
books, the most ordinary interiors, any old house, a parlour, a boat, a
school, fifty things that in the ordinary tale-teller would pass
unmarked, are made vividly present and indelible; are brought out with a
strength of relief, precision, and force, unapproached in any other
writer of prose fiction; with everything minute yet nothing cold, "with
all the passion and the patience of the painters of his country." And
while excitement in the reader is thus maintained to an extent
incompatible with a natural style or simple narrative, M. Taine yet
thinks he has discovered, in this very power of awakening a feverish
sensibility and moving laughter or tears at the commonest things, the
source of Dickens's astonishing popularity. Ordinary people, he says,
are so tired of what is always around them, and take in so little of the
detail that makes up their lives, that when, all of a sudden, there
comes a man to make these things interesting, and turn them into objects
of admiration, tenderness, or terror, the effect is enchantment. Without
leaving their arm-chairs or their firesides, they find themselves
trembling with emotion, their eyes are filled with tears, their cheeks
are broad with laughter, and, in the discovery they have thus made that
they too can suffer, love, and feel, their very existence seems doubled
to them. It had not occurred to M. Taine that to effect so much might
seem to leave little not achieved.
So far from it, the critic had satisfied himself that such a power of
style must be adverse to a just delineation of character. Dickens is not
calm enough, he says, to penetrate to the bottom of what he is dealing
with. He takes sides with it as friend or enemy, laughs or cries over
it, makes it odious or touching, repulsive or attractive, and is too
vehement and not enough inquisitive to paint a likeness. His imagination
is at once too vivid and not sufficiently large. Its tenacious quality,
and the force and concentration with which his thoughts penetrate into
the details he desires to apprehend, form limits to his knowledge,
confine him to single traits, and prevent his sounding all the depths of
a soul. He seizes on one attitude, trick, expression, or grimace; sees
nothing else; and keeps it always unchanged. Mercy Pecksniff laughs at
every word, Mark Tapley is nothing but jolly, Mrs. Gamp talks
incessantly of Mrs. Harris, Mr. Chillip is invariably timid, and Mr.
Micawber is never tired of emphasizing his phrases or passing with
ludicrous brusqueness from joy to grief. Each is the incarnation of some
one vice, virtue, or absurdity; whereof the display is frequent,
invariable, and exclusive. The language I am using condenses with strict
accuracy what is said by M. Taine, and has been repeated _ad nauseam_ by
others, professing admirers as well as open detractors. Mrs. Gamp and
Mr. Micawber, who belong to the first rank of humorous creation, are
thus without another word dismissed by the French critic; and he shows
no consciousness whatever in doing it, of that very fault in himself for
which Dickens is condemned, of mistaking lively observation for real
insight.
He has, however much concession in reserve, being satisfied, by his
observation of England, that it is to the people for whom Dickens wrote
his deficiencies in art are mainly due. The taste of his nation had
prohibited him from representing character in a grand style. The English
require too much morality and religion for genuine art. They made him
treat love, not as holy and sublime in itself, but as subordinate to
marriage; forced him to uphold society and the laws, against nature and
enthusiasm; and compelled him to display, in painting such a seduction
as in _Copperfield_, not the progress, ardour, and intoxication of
passion, but only the misery, remorse, and despair. The result of such
surface religion and morality, combined with the trading spirit, M.
Taine continues, leads to so many national forms of hypocrisy, and of
greed as well as worship for money, as to justify this great writer of
the nation in his frequent choice of those vices for illustration in his
tales. But his defect of method again comes into play. He does not deal
with vices in the manner of a physiologist, feeling a sort of love for
them, and delighting in their finer traits as if they were virtues. He
gets angry over them. (I do not interrupt M. Taine, but surely, to take
one instance illustrative of many, Dickens's enjoyment in dealing with
Pecksniff is as manifest as that he never ceases all the time to make
him very hateful.) He cannot, like Balzac, leave morality out of
account, and treat a passion, however loathsome, as that great
tale-teller did, from the only safe ground of belief, that it is a
force, and that force of whatever kind is good. It is essential to an
artist of that superior grade, M. Taine holds, no matter how vile his
subject, to show its education and temptations, the form of brain or
habits of mind that have reinforced the natural tendency, to deduce it
from its cause, to place its circumstances around it, and to develop its
effects to their extremes. In handling such and such a capital miser,
hypocrite, debauchee, or what not, he should never trouble himself about
the evil consequences of the vices. He should be too much of a
philosopher and artist to remember that he is a respectable citizen. But
this is what Dickens never forgets, and he renounces all beauties
requiring so corrupt a soil. M. Taine's conclusion upon the whole
nevertheless is, that though those triumphs of art which become the
property of all the earth have not been his, much has yet been achieved
by him. Out of his unequalled observation, his satire, and his
sensibility, has proceeded a series of original characters existing
nowhere but in England, which will exhibit to future generations not the
record of his own genius only, but that of his country and his times.
Between the judgment thus passed by the distinguished French lecturer,
and the later comment to be now given from an English critic, certainly
not in arrest of that judgment, may fitly come a passage from one of
Dickens's letters saying something of the limitations placed upon the
artist in England. It may read like a quasi-confession of one of M.
Taine's charges, though it was not written with reference to his own
but to one of Scott's later novels. "Similarly" (15th of August 1856) "I
have always a fine feeling of the honest state into which we have got,
when some smooth gentleman says to me or to some one else when I am by,
how odd it is that the hero of an English book is always
uninteresting--too good--not natural, &c. I am continually hearing this
of Scott from English people here, who pass their lives with Balzac and
Sand. But O my smooth friend, what a shining impostor you must think
yourself and what an ass you must think me, when you suppose that by
putting a brazen face upon it you can blot out of my knowledge the fact
that this same unnatural young gentleman (if to be decent is to be
necessarily unnatural), whom you meet in those other books and in mine,
_must_ be presented to you in that unnatural aspect by reason of your
morality, and is not to have, I will not say any of the indecencies you
like, but not even any of the experiences, trials, perplexities, and
confusions inseparable from the making or unmaking of all men!"
M. Taine's criticism was written three or four years before Dickens's
death, and to the same date belong some notices in England which adopted
more or less the tone of depreciation; conceding the great effects
achieved by the writer, but disputing the quality and value of his art.
For it is incident to all such criticism of Dickens to be of necessity
accompanied by the admission, that no writer has so completely impressed
himself on the time in which he lived, that he has made his characters a
part of literature, and that his readers are the world.
But, a little more than a year after his death, a paper was published
of which the object was to reconcile such seeming inconsistency, to
expound the inner meanings of "Dickens in relation to Criticism," and to
show that, though he had a splendid genius and a wonderful imagination,
yet the objectors were to be excused who called him only a stagy
sentimentalist and a clever caricaturist. This critical essay appeared
in the _Fortnightly Review_ for February 1872, with the signature of Mr.
George Henry Lewes; and the pretentious airs of the performance, with
its prodigious professions of candour, force upon me the painful task of
stating what it really is. During Dickens's life, especially when any
fresh novelist could be found available for strained comparison with
him, there were plenty of attempts to write him down: but the trick of
studied depreciation was never carried so far or made so odious as in
this case, by intolerable assumptions of an indulgent superiority; and
to repel it in such a form once for all is due to Dickens's memory.
The paper begins by the usual concessions--that he was a writer of vast
popularity, that he delighted no end of people, that his admirers were
in all classes and all countries, that he stirred the sympathy of masses
not easily reached through literature and always to healthy emotion,
that he impressed a new direction on popular writing, and modified the
literature of his age in its spirit no less than its form. The very
splendour of these successes, on the other hand, so deepened the shadow
of his failures, that to many there was nothing but darkness. Was it
unnatural? Could greatness be properly ascribed, by the fastidious, to a
writer whose defects were so glaring, exaggerated, untrue, fantastic,
and melodramatic? Might they not fairly insist on such defects as
outweighing all positive qualities, and speak of him with condescending
patronage or sneering irritation? Why, very often such men, though their
talk would be seasoned with quotations from, and allusions to, his
writings, and though they would lay aside their most favourite books to
bury themselves in his new "number," had been observed by this critic to
be as niggardly in their praise of him as they were lavish in their
scorn. He actually heard "_a very distinguished man_," on one occasion,
express measureless contempt for Dickens, and a few minutes afterwards
admit that Dickens had "entered into his life." And so the critic betook
himself to the task of reconciling this immense popularity and this
critical contempt, which he does after the following manner.
He says that Dickens was so great in "fun" (humour he does not concede
to him anywhere) that Fielding and Smollett are small in comparison, but
that this would only have been a passing amusement for the world if he
had not been "gifted with an imagination of marvellous vividness, and an
emotional sympathetic nature capable of furnishing that imagination with
elements of universal power." To people who think that words should
carry some meaning it might seem, that, if only a man could be "gifted"
with all this, nothing more need be said. With marvellous imagination,
and a nature to endow it with elements of universal power, what secrets
of creative art could possibly be closed to him? But this is reckoning
without your philosophical critic. The vividness of Dickens's
imagination M. Taine found to be simply monomaniacal, and his follower
finds it to be merely hallucinative. Not the less he heaps upon it
epithet after epithet. He talks of its irradiating splendour; calls it
glorious as well as imperial and marvellous; and, to make us quite sure
he is not with these fine phrases puffing-off an inferior article, he
interposes that such imagination is "common to all great writers."
Luckily for great writers in general, however, their creations are of
the old, immortal, commonplace sort; whereas Dickens in his creative
processes, according to this philosophy of criticism, is tied up hard
and fast within hallucinative limits.
"He was," we are told, "a seer of visions." Amid silence and darkness,
we are assured, he heard voices and saw objects; of which the revived
impressions to him had the vividness of sensations, and the images his
mind created in explanation of them had the coercive force of
realities;[261] so that what he brought into existence in this way, no
matter how fantastic and unreal, was (whatever this may mean)
universally intelligible. "His types established themselves in the
public mind like personal experiences. Their falsity was unnoticed in
the blaze of their illumination. Every humbug seemed a Pecksniff, every
jovial improvident a Micawber, every stinted serving-wench a
Marchioness." The critic, indeed, saw through it all, but he gave his
warnings in vain. "In vain critical reflection showed these figures to
be merely masks; not characters, but personified characteristics;
caricatures and distortions of human nature. The vividness of their
presentation triumphed over reflection; their creator managed to
communicate to the public his own unhesitating belief." What, however,
is the public? Mr Lewes goes on to relate. "Give a child a wooden horse,
with hair for mane and tail, and wafer-spots for colouring, he will
never be disturbed by the fact that this horse does not move its legs
but runs on wheels; and this wooden horse, which he can handle and draw,
is believed in more than a pictured horse by a Wouvermanns or an
Ansdell(!!) It may be said of Dickens's human figures that they too are
wooden, and run on wheels; but these are details which scarcely disturb
the belief of admirers. Just as the wooden horse is brought within the
range of the child's emotions, and dramatizing tendencies, when he can
handle and draw it, so Dickens's figures are brought within the range of
the reader's interests, and receive from these interests a sudden
illumination, when they are the puppets of a drama every incident of
which appeals to the sympathies."
_Risum teneatis?_ But the smile is grim that rises to the face of one to
whom the relations of the writer and his critic, while both writer and
critic lived, are known; and who sees the drift of now scattering such
rubbish as this over an established fame. As it fares with the
imagination that is imperial, so with the drama every incident of which
appeals to the sympathies. The one being explained by hallucination, and
the other by the wooden horse, plenty of fine words are to spare by
which contempt may receive the show of candour. When the characters in a
play are puppets, and the audiences of the theatre fools or children, no
wise man forfeits his wisdom by proceeding to admit that the successful
playwright, "with a fine felicity of instinct," seized upon situations,
for his wooden figures, having "irresistible hold over the domestic
affections;" that, through his puppets, he spoke "in the mother-tongue
of the heart;" that, with his spotted horses and so forth, he "painted
the life he knew and everyone knew;" that he painted, of course, nothing
ideal or heroic, and that the world of thought and passion lay beyond
his horizon; but that, with his artificial performers and his
feeble-witted audiences, "all the resources of the bourgeois epic were
in his grasp; the joys and pains of childhood, the petty tyrannies of
ignoble natures, the genial pleasantries of happy natures, the life of
the poor, the struggles of the street and back parlour, the insolence of
office, the sharp social contrasts, east wind and Christmas jollity,
hunger, misery, and hot punch"--"so that even critical spectators who
complained that these broadly painted pictures were artistic daubs could
not wholly resist their effective suggestiveness." Since Trinculo and
Caliban were under one cloak, there has surely been no such delicate
monster with two voices. "His forward voice, now, is to speak well of
his friend; his backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to
detract." One other of the foul speeches I may not overlook, since it
contains what is alleged to be a personal revelation of Dickens made to
the critic himself.
"When one thinks of Micawber always presenting himself in the same
situation, moved with the same springs and uttering the same sounds,
always confident of something turning up, always crushed and rebounding,
always making punch--and his wife always declaring she will never part
from him, always referring to his talents and her family--when one
thinks of the 'catchwords' personified as characters, one is reminded of
the frogs whose brains have been taken out for physiological purposes,
and whose actions henceforth want the distinctive peculiarity of organic
action, that of fluctuating spontaneity." Such was that sheer inability
of Dickens, indeed, to comprehend this complexity of the organism, that
it quite accounted, in the view of this philosopher, for all his
unnaturalness, for the whole of his fantastic people, and for the
strained dialogues of which his books are made up, painfully resembling
in their incongruity "the absurd and eager expositions which insane
patients pour into the listener's ear when detailing their wrongs, or
their schemes. Dickens once declared to me," Mr. Lewes continues, "that
every word said by his characters was distinctly _heard_ by him; I was
at first not a little puzzled to account for the fact that he could hear
language so utterly unlike the language of real feeling, and not be
aware of its preposterousness; but the surprise vanished when I thought
of the phenomena of hallucination." Wonderful sagacity! to unravel
easily such a bewildering "puzzle"! And so to the close. Between the
uncultivated whom Dickens moved, and the cultivated he failed to move;
between the power that so worked in delft as to stir the universal
heart, and the commonness that could not meddle with porcelain or aspire
to any noble clay; the pitiful see-saw is continued up to the final
sentence, where, in the impartial critic's eagerness to discredit even
the value of the emotion awakened in such men as Jeffrey by such
creations as Little Nell, he reverses all he has been saying about the
cultivated and uncultivated, and presents to us a cultivated
philosopher, in his ignorance of the stage, applauding an actor whom
every uncultivated playgoing apprentice despises as stagey. But the bold
stroke just exhibited, of bringing forward Dickens himself in the actual
crisis of one of his fits of hallucination, requires an additional word.
To establish the hallucinative theory, he is said on one occasion to
have declared to the critic that every word uttered by his characters
was distinctly _heard_ by him before it was written down. Such an
averment, not credible for a moment as thus made, indeed simply untrue
to the extent described, may yet be accepted in the limited and quite
different sense which a passage in one of Dickens's letters gives to it.
All writers of genius to whom their art has become as a second nature,
will be found capable of doing upon occasion what the vulgar may think
to be "hallucination," but hallucination will never account for. After
Scott began the _Bride of Lammermoor_ he had one of his terrible
seizures of cramp, yet during his torment he dictated[262] that fine
novel; and when he rose from his bed, and the published book was placed
in his hands, "he did not," James Ballantyne explicitly assured
Lockhart, "recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it
contained." When Dickens was under the greatest trial of his life, and
illness and sorrow were contending for the mastery over him, he thus
wrote to me. "Of my distress I will say no more than that it has borne a
terrible, frightful, horrible proportion to the quickness of the gifts
you remind me of. But may I not be forgiven for thinking it a wonderful
testimony to my being made for my art, that when, in the midst of this
trouble and pain, I sit down to my book, some beneficent power shows it
all to me, and tempts me to be interested, and I don't invent it--really
do not--_but see it_, and write it down. . . . It is only when it all fades
away and is gone, that I begin to suspect that its momentary relief has
cost me something."
Whatever view may be taken of the man who wrote those words, he had the
claim to be judged by reference to the highest models in the art which
he studied. In the literature of his time, from 1836 to 1870, he held
the most conspicuous place, and his claim to the most popular one in
the literature of fiction was by common consent admitted. He obtained
this rank by the sheer force of his genius, unhelped in any way, and he
held it without dispute. As he began he closed. After he had written for
only four months, and after he had written incessantly for four and
thirty years, he was of all living writers the most widely read. It is
of course quite possible that such popularity might imply rather
littleness in his contemporaries than greatness in him: but his books
are the test to judge by. Each thus far, as it appeared, has had notice
in these pages for its illustration of his life, or of his method of
work, or of the variety and versatility in the manifestations of his
power. But his latest books remain still for notice, and will properly
suggest what is farther to be said of his general place in literature.
His leading quality was Humour. It has no mention in either of the
criticisms cited, but it was his highest faculty; and it accounts for
his magnificent successes, as well as for his not infrequent failures,
in characteristic delineation. He was conscious of this himself. Five
years before he died, a great and generous brother artist, Lord Lytton,
amid much ungrudging praise of a work he was then publishing, asked him
to consider, as to one part of it, if the modesties of art were not a
little overpassed. "I cannot tell you," he replied, "how highly I prize
your letter, or with what pride and pleasure it inspires me. Nor do I
for a moment question its criticism (if objection so generous and easy
may be called by that hard name) otherwise than on this ground--that I
work slowly and with great care, and never give way to my invention
recklessly, but constantly restrain it; and that I think it is my
infirmity to fancy or perceive relations in things which are not
apparent generally. Also, I have such an inexpressible enjoyment of what
I see in a droll light, that I dare say I pet it as if it were a spoilt
child. This is all I have to offer in arrest of judgment." To perceive
relations in things which are not apparent generally, is one of those
exquisite properties of humour by which are discovered the affinities
between the high and the low, the attractive and the repulsive, the
rarest things and things of every day, which bring us all upon the level
of a common humanity. It is this which gives humour an immortal touch
that does not belong of necessity to pictures, even the most exquisite,
of mere character or manners; the property which in its highest aspects
Carlyle so subtly described as a sort of inverse sublimity, exalting
into our affections what is below us as the other draws down into our
affections what is above us. But it has a danger which Dickens also
hints at, and into which he often fell. All humour has in it, is indeed
identical with, what ordinary people are apt to call exaggeration; but
there is an excess beyond the allowable even here, and to "pet" or
magnify out of proper bounds its sense of what is droll, is to put the
merely grotesque in its place. What might have been overlooked in a
writer with no uncommon powers of invention, was thrown into
overpowering prominence by Dickens's wealth of fancy; and a splendid
excess of his genius came to be objected to as its integral and
essential quality.
It cannot be said to have had any place in his earlier books. His
powers were not at their highest and the humour was less fine and
subtle, but there was no such objection to be taken. No misgiving
interrupted the enjoyment of the wonderful freshness of animal spirits
in _Pickwick_; but beneath its fun, laughter, and light-heartedness were
indications of power of the first rank in the delineation of character.
Some caricature was in the plan; but as the circle of people widened
beyond the cockney club, and the delightful oddity of Mr. Pickwick took
more of an independent existence, a different method revealed itself,
nothing appeared beyond the exaggerations permissible to humorous
comedy, and the art was seen which can combine traits vividly true to
particular men or women with propensities common to all mankind. This
has its highest expression in Fielding: but even the first of Dickens's
books showed the same kind of mastery; and, by the side of its life-like
middle-class people universally familiar, there was one figure before
seen by none but at once knowable by all, delightful for the surprise it
gave by its singularity and the pleasure it gave by its truth; and,
though short of the highest in this form of art, taking rank with the
class in which live everlastingly the dozen unique inventions that have
immortalized the English novel. The groups in _Oliver Twist_, Fagin and
his pupils, Sikes and Nancy, Mr. Bumble and his parish-boy, belong to
the same period; when Dickens also began those pathetic delineations
that opened to the neglected, the poor, and the fallen, a world of
compassion and tenderness. Yet I think it was not until the third book,
_Nickleby_, that he began to have his place as a writer conceded to
him; and that he ceased to be regarded as a mere phenomenon or marvel
of fortune, who had achieved success by any other means than that of
deserving it, and who challenged no criticism better worth the name than
such as he has received from the Fortnightly reviewer. It is to be added
to what before was said of _Nickleby_, that it established beyond
dispute his mastery of dialogue, or that power of making characters real
existences, not by describing them but by letting them describe
themselves, which belongs only to story-tellers of the first rank.
Dickens never excelled the easy handling of the subordinate groups in
this novel, and he never repeated its mistakes in the direction of
aristocratic or merely polite and dissipated life. It displayed more
than before of his humour on the tragic side; and, in close connection
with its affecting scenes of starved and deserted childhood, were placed
those contrasts of miser and spendthrift, of greed and generosity, of
hypocrisy and simple-heartedness, which he handled in later books with
greater power and fullness, but of which the first formal expression was
here. It was his first general picture, so to speak, of the character
and manners of his time, which it was the design more or less of all his
books to exhibit; and it suffers by comparison with his later
productions, because the humour is not to the same degree enriched by
imagination; but it is free from the not infrequent excess into which
that supreme gift also tempted its possessor. None of the tales is more
attractive throughout, and on the whole it was a step in advance even of
the stride previously taken. Nor was the gain lost in the succeeding
story of the _Old Curiosity Shop_. The humorous traits of Mrs. Nickleby
could hardly be surpassed: but, in Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness,
there was a subtlety and lightness of touch that led to finer issues;
and around Little Nell[263] and her fortunes, surpassingly touching and
beautiful, let criticism object what it will, were gathered some small
characters that had a deeper intention and more imaginative insight,
than anything yet done. Strokes of this kind were also observable in the
hunted life of the murderer in _Barnaby Rudge_; and his next book,
_Chuzzlewit_, was, as it still remains, one of his greatest
achievements. Even so brief a retrospect of the six opening years of
Dickens's literary labour will help to a clearer judgment of the work of
the twenty-eight more years that remained to him.
To the special observations already made on the series of stories which
followed the return from America, _Chuzzlewit_, _Dombey_, _Copperfield_,
and _Bleak House_, in which attention has been directed to the higher
purpose and more imaginative treatment that distinguished them,[264] a
general remark is to be added. Though the range of character they
traverse is not wide, it is surrounded by a fertility of invention and
illustration without example in any previous novelist; and it is
represented in these books, so to speak, by a number and variety of
existences sufficiently real to have taken places as among the actual
people of the world. Could half as many known and universally
recognisable men and women be selected out of one story, by any other
prose writer of the first rank, as at once rise to the mind from one of
the masterpieces of Dickens? So difficult of dispute is this, that as
much perhaps will be admitted; but then it will be added, if the reply
is by a critic of the school burlesqued by Mr. Lewes, that after all
they are not individual or special men and women so much as general
impersonations of men and women, abstract types made up of telling
catchwords or surface traits, though with such accumulation upon them of
a wonderful wealth of humorous illustration, itself filled with minute
and accurate knowledge of life, that the real nakedness of the land of
character is hidden. Well, what can be rejoined to this, but that the
poverty or richness of any territory worth survey will for the most part
lie in the kind of observation brought to it. There was no finer
observer than Johnson of the manners of his time, and he protested of
their greatest delineator that he knew only the shell of life. Another
of his remarks, after a fashion followed by the criticizers of Dickens,
places Fielding below one of his famous contemporaries; but who will not
now be eager to reverse such a comparison, as that Fielding tells you
correctly enough what o'clock it is by looking at the face of the dial,
but that Richardson shows you how the watch is made? There never was a
subtler or a more sagacious observer than Fielding, or who better
deserved what is generously said of him by Smollett, that he painted the
characters and ridiculed the follies of life with equal strength,
humour, and propriety. But might it not be said of him, as of Dickens,
that his range of character was limited; and that his method of
proceeding from a central idea in all his leading people, exposed him
equally to the charge of now and then putting human nature itself in
place of the individual who should only be a small section of it? This
is in fact but another shape of what I have expressed on a former page,
that what a character, drawn by a master, will roughly present upon its
surface, is frequently such as also to satisfy its more subtle
requirements; and that when only the salient points or sharper
prominences are thus displayed, the great novelist is using his
undoubted privilege of showing the large degree to which human
intercourse is carried on, not by men's habits or ways at their
commonest, but by the touching of their extremes. A definition of
Fielding's genius has been made with some accuracy in the saying, that
he shows common propensities in connection with the identical
unvarnished adjuncts which are peculiar to the individual, nor could a
more exquisite felicity of handling than this be any man's aim or
desire; but it would be just as easy, by employment of the critical
rules applied to Dickens, to transform it into matter of censure.
Partridge, Adams, Trulliber, Squire Western, and the rest, present
themselves often enough under the same aspects, and use with sufficient
uniformity the same catchwords, to be brought within the charge of
mannerism; and though M. Taine cannot fairly say of Fielding as of
Dickens, that he suffers from too much morality, he brings against him
precisely the charge so strongly put against the later novelist of
"looking upon the passions not as simple forces but as objects of
approbation or blame." We must keep in mind all this to understand the
worth of the starved fancy, that can find in such a delineation as that
of Micawber only the man described by Mr. Lewes as always in the same
situation, moved with the same springs and uttering the same sounds,
always confident of something turning up, always crushed and rebounding,
always making punch, and his wife always declaring she will never part
from him. It is not thus that such creations are to be viewed; but by
the light which enables us to see why the country squires, village
schoolmasters, and hedge parsons of Fielding became immortal. The later
ones will live, as the earlier do, by the subtle quality of genius that
makes their doings and sayings part of those general incentives which
pervade mankind. Who has not had occasion, however priding himself on
his unlikeness to Micawber, to think of Micawber as he reviewed his own
experiences? Who has not himself waited, like Micawber, for something to
turn up? Who has not at times discovered, in one or other acquaintance
or friend, some one or other of that cluster of sagacious hints and
fragments of human life and conduct which the kindly fancy of Dickens
embodied in this delightful form? If the irrepressible New Zealander
ever comes over to achieve his long promised sketch of St. Paul's, who
can doubt that it will be no other than our undying Micawber, who had
taken to colonisation the last time we saw him, and who will thus again
have turned up? There are not many conditions of life or society to
which his and his wife's experiences are not applicable; and when, the
year after the immortal couple made their first appearance on earth,
Protection was in one of its then frequent difficulties, declaring it
could not live without something widely different from existing
circumstances shortly turning up, and imploring its friends to throw
down the gauntlet and boldly challenge society to turn up a majority and
rescue it from its embarrassments, a distinguished wit seized upon the
likeness to Micawber, showed how closely it was borne out by the jollity
and gin-punch of the banquets at which the bewailings were heard, and
asked whether Dickens had stolen from the farmer's friends or the
farmer's friends had stolen from Dickens. "Corn, said Mr. Micawber, may
be gentlemanly, but it is not remunerative. . . . I ask myself this
question: if corn is not to be relied on, what is? We must live. . . ."
Loud as the general laughter was, I think the laughter of Dickens
himself was loudest, at this discovery of so exact and unexpected a
likeness.[265]
A readiness in all forms thus to enjoy his own pleasantry was indeed
always observable (it is common to great humourists, nor would it be
easier to carry it farther than Sterne did), and his own confession on
the point may receive additional illustration before proceeding to the
later books. He accounted by it, as we have seen, for occasional even
grotesque extravagances. In another of his letters there is this
passage: "I can report that I have finished the job I set myself, and
that it has in it something--to me at all events--so extraordinarily
droll, that though I have been reading it some hundred times in the
course of the working, I have never been able to look at it with the
least composure, but have always roared in the most unblushing manner. I
leave you to find out what it was." It was the encounter of the major
and the tax-collector in the second Mrs. Lirriper. Writing previously of
the papers in _Household Words_ called The Lazy Tour of Two Idle
Apprentices, after saying that he and Mr. Wilkie Collins had written
together a story in the second part, "in which I think you would find it
very difficult to say where I leave off and he comes in," he had said of
the preceding descriptions: "Some of my own tickle me very much; but
that may be in great part because I know the originals, and delight in
their fantastic fidelity." "I have been at work with such a will" he
writes later of a piece of humour for the holidays, "that I have done
the opening and conclusion of the Christmas number. They are done in the
character of a waiter, and I think are exceedingly droll. The thread on
which the stories are to hang, is spun by this waiter, and is,
purposely, very slight; but has, I fancy, a ridiculously comical and
unexpected end. The waiter's account of himself includes (I hope)
everything you know about waiters, presented humorously." In this last
we have a hint of the "fantastic fidelity" with which, when a fancy
"tickled" him, he would bring out what Corporal Nym calls the humour of
it under so astonishing a variety of conceivable and inconceivable
aspects of subtle exaggeration, that nothing was left to the subject but
that special individual illustration of it. In this, however, humour was
not his servant but his master; because it reproduced too readily, and
carried too far, the grotesque imaginings to which great humourists are
prone; which lie indeed deep in their nature; and from which they derive
their genial sympathy with eccentric characters that enables them to
find motives for what to other men is hopelessly obscure, to exalt into
types of humanity what the world turns impatiently aside at, and to
enshrine in a form for eternal homage and love such whimsical absurdity
as Captain Toby Shandy's. But Dickens was too conscious of these
excesses from time to time, not zealously to endeavour to keep the
leading characters in his more important stories under some strictness
of discipline. To confine exaggeration within legitimate limits was an
art he laboriously studied; and, in whatever proportions of failure or
success, during the vicissitudes of both that attended his later years,
he continued to endeavour to practise it. In regard to mere description,
it is true, he let himself loose more frequently, and would sometimes
defend it even on the ground of art; nor would it be fair to omit his
reply, on one occasion, to some such remonstrance as M. Taine has
embodied in his adverse criticism, against the too great imaginative
wealth thrown by him into mere narrative.[266] "It does not seem to me
to be enough to say of any description that it is the exact truth. The
exact truth must be there; but the merit or art in the narrator, is the
manner of stating the truth. As to which thing in literature, it always
seems to me that there is a world to be done. And in these times, when
the tendency is to be frightfully literal and catalogue-like--to make
the thing, in short, a sort of sum in reduction that any miserable
creature can do in that way--I have an idea (really founded on the love
of what I profess), that the very holding of popular literature through
a kind of popular dark age, may depend on such fanciful treatment."
THE TALE OF TWO CITIES.
Dickens's next story to _Little Dorrit_ was the _Tale of Two Cities_, of
which the first notion occurred to him while acting with his friends and
his children in the summer of 1857 in Mr. Wilkie Collins's drama of _The
Frozen Deep_. But it was only a vague fancy, and the sadness and trouble
of the winter of that year were not favourable to it. Towards the close
(27th) of January 1858, talking of improvements at Gadshill in which he
took little interest, it was again in his thoughts. "Growing
inclinations of a fitful and undefined sort are upon me sometimes to
fall to work on a new book. Then I think I had better not worry my
worried mind yet awhile. Then I think it would be of no use if I did,
for I couldn't settle to one occupation.--And that's all!" "If I can
discipline my thoughts," he wrote three days later, "into the channel of
a story, I have made up my mind to get to work on one: always supposing
that I find myself, on the trial, able to do well. Nothing whatever will
do me the least 'good' in the way of shaking the one strong possession
of change impending over us that every day makes stronger; but if I
could work on with some approach to steadiness, through the summer, the
anxious toil of a new book would have its neck well broken before
beginning to publish, next October or November. Sometimes, I think I may
continue to work; sometimes, I think not. What do you say to the title,
ONE OF THESE DAYS?" That title held its ground very briefly. "What do
you think," he wrote after six weeks, "of _this_ name for my
story--BURIED ALIVE? Does it seem too grim? Or, THE THREAD OF GOLD? Or,
THE DOCTOR OF BEAUVAIS?" But not until twelve months later did he fairly
buckle himself to the task he had contemplated so long. _All the Year
Round_ had taken the place of _Household Words_ in the interval; and the
tale was then started to give strength to the new weekly periodical for
whose pages it was designed.
"This is merely to certify," he wrote on the 11th of March 1859, "that I
have got exactly the name for the story that is wanted; exactly what
will fit the opening to a T. A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Also, that I have
struck out a rather original and bold idea. That is, at the end of each
month to publish the monthly part in the green cover, with the two
illustrations, at the old shilling. This will give _All the Year Round_
always the interest and precedence of a fresh weekly portion during the
month; and will give me my old standing with my old public, and the
advantage (very necessary in this story) of having numbers of people who
read it in no portions smaller than a monthly part. . . . My American
ambassador pays a thousand pounds for the first year, for the privilege
of republishing in America one day after we publish here. Not bad?" . . .
He had to struggle at the opening through a sharp attack of illness, and
on the 9th of July progress was thus reported. "I have been getting on
in health very slowly and through irksome botheration enough. But I
think I am round the corner. This cause--and the heat--has tended to my
doing no more than hold my ground, my old month's advance, with the
_Tale of Two Cities_. The small portions thereof, drive me frantic; but
I think the tale must have taken a strong hold. The run upon our
monthly parts is surprising, and last month we sold 35,000 back numbers.
A note I have had from Carlyle about it has given me especial pleasure."
A letter of the following month expresses the intention he had when he
began the story, and in what respect it differs as to method from all
his other books. Sending in proof four numbers ahead of the current
publication, he adds: "I hope you will like them. Nothing but the
interest of the subject, and the pleasure of striving with the
difficulty of the form of treatment,--nothing in the way of mere money,
I mean,--could else repay the time and trouble of the incessant
condensation. But I set myself the little task of making a _picturesque
story_, rising in every chapter, with characters true to nature, but
whom the story should express more than they should express themselves
by dialogue. I mean in other words, that I fancied a story of incident
might be written (in place of the odious stuff that is written under
that pretence), pounding the characters in its own mortar, and beating
their interest out of them. If you could have read the story all at
once, I hope you wouldn't have stopped halfway."[267] Another of his
letters supplies the last illustration I need to give of the design and
meanings in regard to this tale expressed by himself. It was a reply to
some objections of which the principal were, a doubt if the feudal
cruelties came sufficiently within the date of the action to justify his
use of them, and some question as to the manner of disposing of the
chief revolutionary agent in the plot. "I had of course full knowledge
of the formal surrender of the feudal privileges, but these had been
bitterly felt quite as near to the time of the Revolution as the
Doctor's narrative, which you will remember dates long before the
Terror. With the slang of the new philosophy on the one side, it was
surely not unreasonable or unallowable, on the other, to suppose a
nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, and representing the time going
out as his nephew represents the time coming in. If there be anything
certain on earth, I take it that the condition of the French peasant
generally at that day was intolerable. No later enquiries or provings by
figures will hold water against the tremendous testimony of men living
at the time. There is a curious book printed at Amsterdam, written to
make out no case whatever, and tiresome enough in its literal
dictionary-like minuteness; scattered up and down the pages of which is
full authority for my marquis. This is Mercier's _Tableau de Paris_.
Rousseau is the authority for the peasant's shutting up his house when
he had a bit of meat. The tax-tables are the authority for the wretched
creature's impoverishment. . . . I am not clear, and I never have been
clear, respecting the canon of fiction which forbids the interposition
of accident in such a case as Madame Defarge's death. Where the accident
is inseparable from the passion and action of the character; where it is
strictly consistent with the entire design, and arises out of some
culminating proceeding on the part of the individual which the whole
story has led up to; it seems to me to become, as it were, an act of
divine justice. And when I use Miss Pross (though this is quite another
question) to bring about such a catastrophe, I have the positive
intention of making that half-comic intervention a part of the desperate
woman's failure; and of opposing that mean death, instead of a desperate
one in the streets which she wouldn't have minded, to the dignity of
Carton's. Wrong or right, this was all design, and seemed to me to be in
the fitness of things."
These are interesting intimations of the care with which Dickens worked;
and there is no instance in his novels, excepting this, of a deliberate
and planned departure from the method of treatment which had been
pre-eminently the source of his popularity as a novelist. To rely less
upon character than upon incident, and to resolve that his actors should
be expressed by the story more than they should express themselves by
dialogue, was for him a hazardous, and can hardly be called an entirely
successful, experiment. With singular dramatic vivacity, much
constructive art, and with descriptive passages of a high order
everywhere (the dawn of the terrible outbreak in the journey of the
marquis from Paris to his country seat, and the London crowd at the
funeral of the spy, may be instanced for their power), there was
probably never a book by a great humourist, and an artist so prolific in
the conception of character, with so little humour and so few
rememberable figures. Its merits lie elsewhere. Though there are
excellent traits and touches all through the revolutionary scenes, the
only full-length that stands out prominently is the picture of the
wasted life saved at last by heroic sacrifice. Dickens speaks of his
design to make impressive the dignity of Carton's death, and in this he
succeeded perhaps even beyond his expectation. Carton suffers himself to
be mistaken for another, and gives his life that the girl he loves may
be happy with that other; the secret being known only to a poor little
girl in the tumbril that takes them to the scaffold, who at the moment
has discovered it, and whom it strengthens also to die. The incident is
beautifully told; and it is at least only fair to set against verdicts
not very favourable as to this effort of his invention, what was said of
the particular character and scene, and of the book generally, by an
American critic whose literary studies had most familiarized him with
the rarest forms of imaginative writing.[268] "Its pourtrayal of the
noble-natured castaway makes it almost a peerless book in modern
literature, and gives it a place among the highest examples of literary
art. . . . The conception of this character shows in its author an ideal of
magnanimity and of charity unsurpassed. There is not a grander, lovelier
figure than the self-wrecked, self-devoted Sydney Carton, in literature
or history; and the story itself is so noble in its spirit, so grand and
graphic in its style, and filled with a pathos so profound and simple,
that it deserves and will surely take a place among the great serious
works of imagination." I should myself prefer to say that its
distinctive merit is less in any of its conceptions of character, even
Carton's, than as a specimen of Dickens's power in imaginative
story-telling. There is no piece of fiction known to me, in which the
domestic life of a few simple private people is in such a manner knitted
and interwoven with the outbreak of a terrible public event, that the
one seems but part of the other. When made conscious of the first sultry
drops of a thunderstorm that fall upon a little group sitting in an
obscure English lodging, we are witness to the actual beginning of a
tempest which is preparing to sweep away everything in France. And, to
the end, the book in this respect is really remarkable.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
The _Tale of Two Cities_ was published in 1859; the series of papers
collected as the _Uncommercial Traveller_ were occupying Dickens in
1860; and it was while engaged in these, and throwing off in the course
of them capital "samples" of fun and enjoyment, he thus replied to a
suggestion that he should let himself loose upon some single humorous
conception, in the vein of his youthful achievements in that way. "For a
little piece I have been writing--or am writing; for I hope to finish it
to-day--such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me,
that I begin to doubt whether I had not better cancel the little paper,
and reserve the notion for a new book. You shall judge as soon as I get
it printed. But it so opens out before _me_ that I can see the whole of
a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner." This was
the germ of Pip and Magwitch, which at first he intended to make the
groundwork of a tale in the old twenty-number form, but for reasons
perhaps fortunate brought afterwards within the limits of a less
elaborate novel. "Last week," he wrote on the 4th of October 1860, "I
got to work on the new story. I had previously very carefully considered
the state and prospects of _All the Year Round_, and, the more I
considered them, the less hope I saw of being able to get back, _now_,
to the profit of a separate publication in the old 20 numbers." (A tale,
which at the time was appearing in his serial, had disappointed
expectation.) "However I worked on, knowing that what I was doing would
run into another groove; and I called a council of war at the office on
Tuesday. It was perfectly clear that the one thing to be done was, for
me to strike in. I have therefore decided to begin the story as of the
length of the _Tale of Two Cities_ on the first of December--begin
publishing, that is. I must make the most I can out of the book. You
shall have the first two or three weekly parts to-morrow. The name is
GREAT EXPECTATIONS. I think a good name?" Two days later he wrote: "The
sacrifice of _Great Expectations_ is really and truly made for myself.
The property of _All the Year Round_ is far too valuable, in every way,
to be much endangered. Our fall is not large, but we have a considerable
advance in hand of the story we are now publishing, and there is no
vitality in it, and no chance whatever of stopping the fall; which on
the contrary would be certain to increase. Now, if I went into a
twenty-number serial, I should cut off my power of doing anything serial
here for two good years--and that would be a most perilous thing. On the
other hand, by dashing in now, I come in when most wanted; and if Reade
and Wilkie follow me, our course will be shaped out handsomely and
hopefully for between two and three years. A thousand pounds are to be
paid for early proofs of the story to America." A few more days brought
the first instalment of the tale, and explanatory mention of it. "The
book will be written in the first person throughout, and during these
first three weekly numbers you will find the hero to be a boy-child,
like David. Then he will be an apprentice. You will not have to complain
of the want of humour as in the _Tale of Two Cities_. I have made the
opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a
child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very
funny. Of course I have got in the pivot on which the story will turn
too--and which indeed, as you remember, was the grotesque tragi-comic
conception that first encouraged me. To be quite sure I had fallen into
no unconscious repetitions, I read _David Copperfield_ again the other
day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe."
It may be doubted if Dickens could better have established his right to
the front rank among novelists claimed for him, than by the ease and
mastery with which, in these two books of _Copperfield_ and _Great
Expectations_, he kept perfectly distinct the two stories of a boy's
childhood, both told in the form of autobiography. A subtle penetration
into character marks the unlikeness in the likeness; there is enough at
once of resemblance and of difference in the position and surroundings
of each to account for the divergences of character that arise; both
children are good-hearted, and both have the advantage of association
with models of tender simplicity and oddity, perfect in their truth and
quite distinct from each other; but a sudden tumble into distress
steadies Peggotty's little friend, and as unexpected a stroke of good
fortune turns the head of the small protege of Joe Gargery. What a deal
of spoiling nevertheless, a nature that is really good at the bottom of
it will stand without permanent damage, is nicely shown in Pip; and the
way he reconciles his determination to act very shabbily to his early
friends, with a conceited notion that he is setting them a moral
example, is part of the shading of a character drawn with extraordinary
skill. His greatest trial comes out of his good luck; and the
foundations of both are laid at the opening of the tale, in a churchyard
down by the Thames, as it winds past desolate marshes twenty miles to
the sea, of which a masterly picture in half a dozen lines will give
only average example of the descriptive writing that is everywhere one
of the charms of the book. It is strange, as I transcribe the words,
with what wonderful vividness they bring back the very spot on which we
stood when he said he meant to make it the scene of the opening of his
story--Cooling Castle ruins and the desolate Church, lying out among the
marshes seven miles from Gadshill! "My first most vivid and broad
impression . . . on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening . . . was
. . . that this bleak place, overgrown with nettles, was the churchyard,
and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected
with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it,
was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and
that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the
sea. . . . On the edge of the river . . . only two black things in all
the prospect seemed to be standing upright . . . one, the beacon by
which the sailors steered, like an unhooped cask upon a pole, an ugly
thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet with some chains
hanging to it which had once held a pirate." Here Magwitch, an escaped
convict from Chatham, terrifies the child Pip into stealing for him food
and a file; and though recaptured and transported, he carries with him
to Australia such a grateful heart for the small creature's service,
that on making a fortune there he resolves to make his little friend a
gentleman. This requires circumspection; and is so done, through the
Old-Bailey attorney who has defended Magwitch at his trial (a character
of surprising novelty and truth), that Pip imagines his present gifts
and "great expectations" to have come from the supposed rich lady of
the story (whose eccentricities are the unattractive part of it, and
have yet a weird character that somehow fits in with the kind of wrong
she has suffered). When therefore the closing scenes bring back Magwitch
himself, who risks his life to gratify his longing to see the gentleman
he has made, it is an unspeakable horror to the youth to discover his
benefactor in the convicted felon. If any one doubts Dickens's power of
so drawing a character as to get to the heart of it, seeing beyond
surface peculiarities into the moving springs of the human being
himself, let him narrowly examine those scenes. There is not a grain of
substitution of mere sentiment, or circumstance, for the inner and
absolute reality of the position in which these two creatures find
themselves. Pip's loathing of what had built up his fortune, and his
horror of the uncouth architect, are apparent in even his most generous
efforts to protect him from exposure and sentence. Magwitch's convict
habits strangely blend themselves with his wild pride in, and love for,
the youth whom his money has turned into a gentleman. He has a craving
for his good opinion; dreads to offend him by his "heavy grubbing," or
by the oaths he lets fall now and then; and pathetically hopes his Pip,
his dear boy, won't think him "low": but, upon a chum of Pip's appearing
unexpectedly while they are together, he pulls out a jack-knife by way
of hint he can defend himself, and produces afterwards a greasy little
clasped black Testament on which the startled new-comer, being found to
have no hostile intention, is sworn to secrecy. At the opening of the
story there had been an exciting scene of the wretched man's chase and
recapture among the marshes, and this has its parallel at the close in
his chase and recapture on the river while poor Pip is helping to get
him off. To make himself sure of the actual course of a boat in such
circumstances, and what possible incidents the adventure might have,
Dickens hired a steamer for the day from Blackwall to Southend. Eight or
nine friends and three or four members of his family were on board, and
he seemed to have no care, the whole of that summer day (22nd of May
1861), except to enjoy their enjoyment and entertain them with his own
in shape of a thousand whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation
was at work all the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on
either side of the river. The fifteenth chapter of the third volume is a
masterpiece.
The characters generally afford the same evidence as those two that
Dickens's humour, not less than his creative power, was at its best in
this book. The Old-Bailey attorney Jaggers, and his clerk Wemmick (both
excellent, and the last one of the oddities that live in everybody's
liking for the goodheartedness of its humorous surprises), are as good
as his earliest efforts in that line; the Pumblechooks and Wopsles are
perfect as bits of _Nickleby_ fresh from the mint; and the scene in
which Pip, and Pip's chum Herbert, make up their accounts and schedule
their debts and obligations, is original and delightful as Micawber
himself. It is the art of living upon nothing and making the best of it,
in the most pleasing form. Herbert's intentions to trade east and west,
and get himself into business transactions of a magnificent extent and
variety, are as perfectly warranted to us, in his way of putting them,
by merely "being in a counting-house and looking about you," as Pip's
means of paying his debts are lightened and made easy by his method of
simply adding them up with a margin. "The time comes," says Herbert,
"when you see your opening. And you go in, and you swoop upon it, and
you make your capital, and then there you are! When you have once made
your capital you have nothing to do but employ it." In like manner Pip
tells us "Suppose your debts to be one hundred and sixty four pounds
four and two-pence, I would say, leave a margin and put them down at two
hundred; or suppose them to be four times as much, leave a margin and
put them down at seven hundred." He is sufficiently candid to add, that,
while he has the highest opinion of the wisdom and prudence of the
margin, its dangers are that in the sense of freedom and solvency it
imparts there is a tendency to run into new debt. But the satire that
thus enforces the old warning against living upon vague hopes, and
paying ancient debts by contracting new ones, never presented itself in
more amusing or kindly shape. A word should be added of the father of
the girl that Herbert marries, Bill Barley, ex-ship's purser, a gouty,
bed-ridden, drunken old rascal, who lies on his back in an upper floor
on Mill Pond Bank by Chinks's Basin, where he keeps, weighs, and serves
out the family stores or provisions, according to old professional
practice, with one eye at a telescope which is fitted on his bed for the
convenience of sweeping the river. This is one of those sketches, slight
in itself but made rich with a wealth of comic observation, in which
Dickens's humour took especial delight; and to all this part of the
story, there is a quaint riverside flavour that gives it amusing reality
and relish.
Sending the chapters that contain it, which open the third division of
the tale, he wrote thus: "It is a pity that the third portion cannot be
read all at once, because its purpose would be much more apparent; and
the pity is the greater, because the general turn and tone of the
working out and winding up, will be away from all such things as they
conventionally go. But what must be, must be. As to the planning out
from week to week, nobody can imagine what the difficulty is, without
trying. But, as in all such cases, when it is overcome the pleasure is
proportionate. Two months more will see me through it, I trust. All the
iron is in the fire, and I have 'only' to beat it out." One other letter
throws light upon an objection taken not unfairly to the too great speed
with which the heroine, after being married, reclaimed, and widowed, is
in a page or two again made love to, and remarried by the hero. This
summary proceeding was not originally intended. But, over and above its
popular acceptance, the book had interested some whose opinions Dickens
specially valued (Carlyle among them, I remember);[269] and upon Bulwer
Lytton objecting to a close that should leave Pip a solitary man,
Dickens substituted what now stands. "You will be surprised" he wrote
"to hear that I have changed the end of _Great Expectations_ from and
after Pip's return to Joe's, and finding his little likeness there.
Bulwer, who has been, as I think you know, extraordinarily taken by the
book, so strongly urged it upon me, after reading the proofs, and
supported his view with such good reasons, that I resolved to make the
change. You shall have it when you come back to town. I have put in as
pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the
story will be more acceptable through the alteration." This turned out
to be the case; but the first ending nevertheless seems to be more
consistent with the drift, as well as natural working out, of the tale,
and for this reason it is preserved in a note.[270]
CHRISTMAS SKETCHES.
Between that fine novel, which was issued in three volumes in the autumn
of 1861, and the completion of his next serial story, were interposed
three sketches in his happiest vein at which everyone laughed and cried
in the Christmas times of 1862, '3, and '4. Of the waiter in _Somebody's
Luggage_ Dickens has himself spoken; and if any theme is well treated,
when, from the point of view taken, nothing more is left to say about
it, that bit of fun is perfect. Call it exaggeration, grotesqueness, or
by what hard name you will, laughter will always intercept any graver
criticism. Writing from Paris of what he was himself responsible for in
the articles left by Somebody with his wonderful Waiter, he said that in
one of them he had made the story a camera obscura of certain French
places and styles of people; having founded it on something he had
noticed in a French soldier. This was the tale of Little Bebelle, which
had a small French corporal for its hero, and became highly popular. But
the triumph of the Christmas achievements in these days was Mrs.
Lirriper. She took her place at once among people known to everybody;
and all the world talked of Major Jemmy Jackman, and his friend the poor
elderly lodging-house keeper of the Strand, with her miserable cares
and rivalries and worries, as if they had both been as long in London
and as well known as Norfolk-street itself. A dozen volumes could not
have told more than those dozen pages did. The _Legacy_ followed the
_Lodgings_ in 1864, and there was no falling off in the fun and
laughter.
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.
The publication of _Our Mutual Friend_, in the form of the earliest
stories, extended from May 1864 to November 1865. Four years earlier he
had chosen this title as a good one, and he held to it through much
objection. Between that time and his actual commencement there is
mention, in his letters, of the three leading notions on which he
founded the story. In his water-side wanderings during his last book,
the many handbills he saw posted up, with dreary description of persons
drowned in the river, suggested the 'long shore men and their ghastly
calling whom he sketched in Hexam and Riderhood, "I think," he had
written, "a man, young and perhaps eccentric, feigning to be dead, and
_being_ dead to all intents and purposes external to himself, and for
years retaining the singular view of life and character so imparted,
would be a good leading incident for a story;" and this he partly did in
Rokesmith. For other actors in the tale, he had thought of "a poor
impostor of a man marrying a woman for her money; she marrying _him_ for
_his_ money; after marriage both finding out their mistake, and
entering into a league and covenant against folks in general:" with
whom he had proposed to connect some Perfectly New people. "Everything
new about them. If they presented a father and mother, it seemed as if
THEY must be bran new, like the furniture and the carriages--shining
with varnish, and just home from the manufacturers." These groups took
shape in the Lammles and the Veneerings. "I must use somehow," is the
remark of another letter, "the uneducated father in fustian and the
educated boy in spectacles whom Leech and I saw at Chatham;" of which a
hint is in Charley Hexam and his father. The benevolent old Jew whom he
makes the unconscious agent of a rascal, was meant to wipe out a
reproach against his Jew in _Oliver Twist_ as bringing dislike upon the
religion of the race he belonged to.[271]
Having got his title in '61 it was his hope to have begun in '62.
"Alas!" he wrote in the April of that year, "I have hit upon nothing for
a story. Again and again I have tried. But this odious little house" (he
had at this time for a few weeks exchanged Gadshill for a friend's house
near Kensington) "seems to have stifled and darkened my invention." It
was not until the autumn of the following year he saw his way to a
beginning. "The Christmas number has come round again" (30th of August
1863)--"it seems only yesterday that I did the last--but I am full of
notions besides for the new twenty numbers. When I can clear the
Christmas stone out of the road, I think I can dash into it on the
grander journey." He persevered through much difficulty; which he
described six weeks later, with characteristic glance at his own ways
when writing, in a letter from the office of his journal. "I came here
last night, to evade my usual day in the week--in fact to shirk it--and
get back to Gad's for five or six consecutive days. My reason is, that I
am exceedingly anxious to begin my book. I am bent upon getting to work
at it. I want to prepare it for the spring; but I am determined not to
begin to publish with less than five numbers done. I see my opening
perfectly, with the one main line on which the story is to turn; and if
I don't strike while the iron (meaning myself) is hot, I shall drift off
again, and have to go through all this uneasiness once more."
He had written, after four months, very nearly three numbers, when upon
a necessary rearrangement of his chapters he had to hit upon a new
subject for one of them. "While I was considering" (25th of February)
"what it should be, Marcus,[272] who has done an excellent cover, came
to tell me of an extraordinary trade he had found out, through one of
his painting requirements. I immediately went with him to Saint Giles's
to look at the place, and found--what you will see." It was the
establishment of Mr. Venus, preserver of animals and birds, and
articulator of human bones; and it took the place of the last chapter of
No. 2, which was then transferred to the end of No. 3. But a start with
three full numbers done, though more than enough to satisfy the hardest
self-conditions formerly, did not satisfy him now. With his previous
thought given to the story, with his Memoranda to help him, with the
people he had in hand to work it with, and ready as he still was to turn
his untiring observation to instant use on its behalf, he now moved,
with the old large canvas before him, somewhat slowly and painfully. "If
I were to lose" (29th of March) "a page of the five numbers I have
proposed to myself to be ready by the publication day, I should feel
that I had fallen short. I have grown hard to satisfy, and write very
slowly. And I have so much--not fiction--that _will_ be thought of, when
I don't want to think of it, that I am forced to take more care than I
once took."
The first number was launched at last, on the first of May; and after
two days he wrote: "Nothing can be better than _Our Friend_, now in his
thirtieth thousand, and orders flowing in fast." But between the first
and second number there was a drop of five thousand, strange to say, for
the larger number was again reached, and much exceeded, before the book
closed. "This leaves me" (10th of June) "going round and round like a
carrier-pigeon before swooping on number seven." Thus far he had held
his ground; but illness came, with some other anxieties, and on the 29th
of July he wrote sadly enough. "Although I have not been wanting in
industry, I have been wanting in invention, and have fallen back with
the book. Looming large before me is the Christmas work, and I can
hardly hope to do it without losing a number of _Our Friend_. I have
very nearly lost one already, and two would take one half of my whole
advance. This week I have been very unwell; am still out of sorts; and,
as I know from two days' slow experience, have a very mountain to climb
before I shall see the open country of my work." The three following
months brought hardly more favourable report. "I have not done my
number. This death of poor Leech (I suppose) has put me out woefully.
Yesterday and the day before I could do nothing; seemed for the time to
have quite lost the power; and am only by slow degrees getting back into
the track to-day." He rallied after this, and satisfied himself for a
while; but in February 1865 that formidable illness in his foot broke
out which, at certain times for the rest of his life, deprived him more
or less of his inestimable solace of bodily exercise. In April and May
he suffered severely; and after trying the sea went abroad for more
complete change. "Work and worry, without exercise, would soon make an
end of me. If I were not going away now, I should break down. No one
knows as I know to-day how near to it I have been."
That was the day of his leaving for France, and the day of his return
brought these few hurried words. "Saturday, tenth of June, 1865. I was
in the terrific Staplehurst accident yesterday, and worked for hours
among the dying and dead. I was in the carriage that did not go over,
but went off the line, and hung over the bridge in an inexplicable
manner. No words can describe the scene.[273] I am away to Gads." Though
with characteristic energy he resisted the effects upon himself of that
terrible ninth of June, they were for some time evident; and, up to the
day of his death on its fatal fifth anniversary, were perhaps never
wholly absent. But very few complaints fell from him. "I am curiously
weak--weak as if I were recovering from a long illness." "I begin to
feel it more in my head. I sleep well and eat well; but I write half a
dozen notes, and turn faint and sick." "I am getting right, though still
low in pulse and very nervous. Driving into Rochester yesterday I felt
more shaken than I have since the accident." "I cannot bear railway
travelling yet. A perfect conviction, against the senses, that the
carriage is down on one side (and generally that is the left, and _not_
the side on which the carriage in the accident really went over), comes
upon me with anything like speed, and is inexpressibly distressing."
These are passages from his letters up to the close of June. Upon his
book the immediate result was that another lost number was added to the
losses of the preceding months, and "alas!" he wrote at the opening of
July, "for the two numbers you write of! There is only one in existence.
I have but just begun the other." "Fancy!" he added next day, "fancy my
having under-written number sixteen by two and a half pages--a thing I
have not done since _Pickwick_!" He did it once with _Dombey_, and was
to do it yet again.
The book thus begun and continued under adverse influences, though with
fancy in it, descriptive power, and characters well designed, will never
rank with his higher efforts. It has some pictures of a rare veracity of
soul amid the lowest forms of social degradation, placed beside others
of sheer falsehood and pretence amid unimpeachable social correctness,
which lifted the writer to his old place; but the judgment of it on the
whole must be, that it wants freshness and natural development. This
indeed will be most freely admitted by those who feel most strongly that
all the old cunning of the master hand is yet in the wayward loving
Bella Wilfer, in the vulgar canting Podsnap, and in the dolls'
dressmaker Jenny Wren, whose keen little quaint weird ways, and
precocious wit sharpened by trouble, are fitted into a character as
original and delightfully conceived as it is vividly carried through to
the last. A dull coarse web her small life seems made of; but even from
its taskwork, which is undertaken for childhood itself, there are
glittering threads cast across its woof and warp of care. The
unconscious philosophy of her tricks and manners has in it more of the
subtler vein of the satire aimed at in the book, than even the voices of
society which the tale begins and ends with. In her very kindliness
there is the touch of malice that shows a childish playfulness familiar
with unnatural privations; this gives a depth as well as tenderness to
her humours which entitles them to rank with the writer's happiest
things; and though the odd little creature's talk is incessant when she
is on the scene, it has the individuality that so seldom tires. It is
veritably her own small "trick" and "manner," and is never mistakeable
for any one else's. "I have been reading," Dickens wrote to me from
France while he was writing the book, "a capital little story by Edmond
About--_The Notary's Nose_. I have been trying other books; but so
infernally conversational, that I forget who the people are before they
have done talking, and don't in the least remember what they talked
about before when they begin talking again!" The extreme contrast to his
own art could not be defined more exactly; and other examples from this
tale will be found in the differing members of the Wilfer family, in the
riverside people at the Fellowship Porters, in such marvellous
serio-comic scenes as that of Rogue Riderhood's restoration from
drowning, and in those short and simple annals of Betty Higden's life
and death which might have given saving virtue to a book more likely
than this to perish prematurely. It has not the creative power which
crowded his earlier page, and transformed into popular realities the
shadows of his fancy; but the observation and humour he excelled in are
not wanting to it, nor had there been, in his first completed work,
more eloquent or generous pleading for the poor and neglected, than this
last completed work contains. Betty Higden finishes what Oliver Twist
began.
DR. MARIGOLD AND TALES FOR AMERICA.
He had scarcely closed that book in September, wearied somewhat with a
labour of invention which had not been so free or self-sustaining as in
the old facile and fertile days, when his customary contribution to
Christmas became due from him; and his fancy, let loose in a narrower
field, resumed its old luxury of enjoyment. Here are notices of it from
his letters. "If people at large understand a Cheap Jack, my part of the
Christmas number will do well. It is wonderfully like the real thing, of
course a little refined and humoured." "I do hope that in the beginning
and end of this Christmas number you will find something that will
strike you as being fresh, forcible, and full of spirits." He described
its mode of composition afterwards. "Tired with _Our Mutual_, I sat down
to cast about for an idea, with a depressing notion that I was, for the
moment, overworked. Suddenly, the little character that you will see,
and all belonging to it, came flashing up in the most cheerful manner,
and I had only to look on and leisurely describe it." This was _Dr.
Marigold's Prescriptions_, one of the most popular of all the pieces
selected for his readings, and a splendid example of his humour, pathos,
and character. There were three more Christmas pieces before he made his
last visit to America: _Barbox Brothers_, _The Boy at Mugby Station_,
and _No Thoroughfare_: the last a joint piece of work with Mr. Wilkie
Collins, who during Dickens's absence in the States transformed it into
a play for Mr. Fechter, with a view to which it had been planned
originally. There were also two papers written for first publication in
America, _George Silverman's Explanation_, and _Holiday Romance_,
containing about the quantity of half a shilling number of his ordinary
serials, and paid for at a rate unexampled in literature. They occupied
him not many days in the writing, and he received a thousand pounds for
them.
* * * * *
The year after his return, as the reader knows, saw the commencement of
the work which death interrupted. The fragment will hereafter be
described; and here meanwhile may close my criticism--itself a fragment
left for worthier completion by a stronger hand than mine.
But at least I may hope that the ground has been cleared by it from
those distinctions and comparisons never safely to be applied to an
original writer, and which always more or less intercept his fair
appreciation. It was long the fashion to set up wide divergences between
novels of incident and manners, and novels of character; the narrower
range being left to Fielding and Smollett, and the larger to Richardson;
yet there are not many now who will accept such classification. Nor is
there more truth in other like distinctions alleged between novelists
who are assumed to be real, or ideal, in their methods of treatment. To
any original novelist of the higher grade there is no meaning in these
contrasted phrases. Neither mode can exist at all perfectly without the
other. No matter how sensitive the mind to external impressions, or how
keen the observation to whatever can be seen, without the rarer seeing
of imagination nothing will be arrived at that is real in any genuine
artist-sense. Reverse the proposition, and the result is expressed in an
excellent remark of Lord Lytton's, that the happiest effort of
imagination, however lofty it may be, is that which enables it to be
cheerfully at home with the real. I have said that Dickens felt
criticism, of whatever kind, with too sharp a relish for the
indifference he assumed to it; but the secret was that he believed
himself to be entitled to higher tribute than he was always in the habit
of receiving. It was the feeling which suggested a memorable saying of
Wordsworth. "I am not at all desirous that any one should write a
critique on my poems. If they be from above, they will do their own work
in course of time; if not, they will perish as they ought."
The something "from above" never seems to be absent from Dickens, even
at his worst. When the strain upon his invention became apparent, and he
could only work freely in a more confined space than of old, it was
still able to assert itself triumphantly; and his influence over his
readers was continued by it to the last day of his life. Looking back
over the series of his writings, the first reflection that rises to the
mind of any thoughtful person, is one of thankfulness that the most
popular of writers, who had carried into the lowest scenes and
conditions an amount of observation, fun, and humour not approached by
any of his contemporaries, should never have sullied that world-wide
influence by a hint of impurity or a possibility of harm. Nor is there
anything more surprising than the freshness and variety of character
which those writings include, within the range of the not numerous types
of character that were the limit of their author's genius. For, this
also appears, upon any review of them collectively, that the teeming
life which is in them is that of the time in which his own life was
passed; and that with the purpose of showing vividly its form and
pressure, was joined the hope and design to leave it better than he
found it. It has been objected that humanity receives from him no
addition to its best types; that the burlesque humourist is always
stronger in him than the reflective moralist; that the light thrown by
his genius into out of the way corners of life never steadily shines in
its higher beaten ways; and that beside his pictures of what man is or
does, there is no attempt to show, by delineation of an exalted purpose
or a great career, what man is able to be or to do. In the charge
abstractedly there is truth; but the fair remark upon it is that
whatever can be regarded as essential in the want implied by it will be
found in other forms in his writings, that the perfect innocence of
their laughter and tears has been itself a prodigious blessing, and that
it is otherwise incident to so great a humourist to work after the
fashion most natural to the genius of humour. What kind of work it has
been in his case, the attempt is made in preceding pages to show; and on
the whole it can be said with some certainty that the best ideals in
this sense are obtained, not by presenting with added comeliness or
grace the figures which life is ever eager to present as of its best,
but by connecting the singularities and eccentricities, which ordinary
life is apt to reject or overlook, with the appreciation that is deepest
and the laws of insight that are most universal. It is thus that all
things human are happily brought within human sympathy. It was at the
heart of everything Dickens wrote. It was the secret of the hope he had
that his books might help to make people better; and it so guarded them
from evil, that there is scarcely a page of the thousands he has written
which might not be put into the hands of a little child.[274] It made
him the intimate of every English household, and a familiar friend
wherever the language is spoken whose stores of harmless pleasure he has
so largely increased.
"The loss of no single man during the present generation, if we except
Abraham Lincoln alone," said Mr. Horace Greeley, describing the profound
and universal grief of America at his death, "has carried mourning into
so many families, and been so unaffectedly lamented through all the
ranks of society." "The terrible news from England," wrote Longfellow to
me (Cambridge, Mass. 12th of June 1870), "fills us all with
inexpressible sadness. Dickens was so full of life that it did not seem
possible he could die, and yet he has gone before us, and we are
sorrowing for him. . . . I never knew an author's death cause such general
mourning. It is no exaggeration to say that this whole country is
stricken with grief . . ." Nor was evidence then wanting, that far beyond
the limits of society on that vast continent the English writer's
influence had penetrated. Of this, very touching illustration was given
in my first volume; and proof even more striking has since been afforded
to me, that not merely in wild or rude communities, but in life the most
savage and solitary, his genius had helped to while time away.
"Like all Americans who read," writes an American gentleman, "and that
takes in nearly all our people, I am an admirer and student of
Dickens. . . . Its perusal" (that of my second volume) "has recalled an
incident which may interest you. Twelve or thirteen years ago I crossed
the Sierra Nevada mountains as a Government surveyor under a famous
frontiersman and civil engineer--Colonel Lander. We were too early by a
month, and became snow-bound just on the very summit. Under these
circumstances it was necessary to abandon the wagons for a time, and
drive the stock (mules) down the mountains to the valleys where there
was pasturage and running water. This was a long and difficult task,
occupying several days. On the second day, in a spot where we expected
to find nothing more human than a grizzly bear or an elk, we found a
little hut, built of pine boughs and a few rough boards clumsily hewn
out of small trees with an axe. The hut was covered with snow many feet
deep, excepting only the hole in the roof which served for a chimney,
and a small pit-like place in front to permit egress. The occupant came
forth to hail us and solicit whisky and tobacco. He was dressed in a
suit made entirely of flour-sacks, and was curiously labelled on various
parts of his person _Best Family Flour_. _Extra._ His head was covered
by a wolf's skin drawn from the brute's head--with the ears standing
erect in a fierce alert manner. He was a most extraordinary object, and
told us he had not seen a human being in four months. He lived on bear
and elk meat and flour laid in during his short summer. Emigrants in
the season paid him a kind of ferry-toll. I asked him how he passed his
time, and he went to a barrel and produced _Nicholas Nickleby_ and
_Pickwick_. I found he knew them almost by heart. He did not know, or
seem to care, about the author; but he gloried in Sam Weller, despised
Squeers, and would probably have taken the latter's scalp with great
skill and cheerfulness. For Mr. Winkle he had no feeling but contempt,
and in fact regarded a fowling-piece as only a toy for a squaw. He had
no Bible; and perhaps if he practised in his rude savage way all Dickens
taught, he might less have felt the want even of that companion."
FOOTNOTES:
[261] I hope my readers will find themselves able to understand that, as
well as this which follows: "What seems preposterous, impossible to us,
seemed to him simple fact of observation. When he imagined a street, a
house, a room, a figure, he saw it not in the vague schematic way of
ordinary imagination, but in the sharp definition of actual perception,
all the salient details obtruding themselves on his attention. He,
seeing it thus vividly, made us also see it; and believing in its
reality however fantastic, he communicated something of his belief to
us. He presented it in such relief that we ceased to think of it as a
picture. So definite and insistent was the image, that even while
knowing it was false we could not help, for a moment, being affected, as
it were, by his hallucination."
[262] "Though," John Ballantyne told Lockhart, "he often turned himself
on his pillow with a groan of torment, he usually continued the sentence
in the same breath. But when dialogue of peculiar animation was in
progress, spirit seemed to triumph altogether over matter--he arose from
his couch and walked up and down the room, raising and lowering his
voice, and as it were acting the parts." _Lockhart_, vi. 67-8. The
statement of James Ballantyne is at p. 89 of the same volume. The
original incidents on which Scott had founded the tale he remembered,
but "not a single character woven by the romancer, not one of the many
scenes and points of humour, nor anything with which he was connected as
the writer of the work."
[263] "Do you know _Master Humphrey's Clock_! I admire Nell in the _Old
Curiosity Shop_ exceedingly. The whole thing is a good deal borrowed
from _Wilhelm Meister_. But little Nell is a far purer, lovelier, more
_English_ conception than Mignon, treasonable as the saying would seem
to some. No doubt it was suggested by Mignon."--Sara Coleridge to Aubrey
de Vere (_Memoirs and Letters_, ii. 269-70). Expressing no opinion on
this comparison, I may state it as within my knowledge that the book
referred to was not then known to Dickens.
[264] The distinction I then pointed out was remarked by Sara Coleridge
(_Memoirs and Letters_, ii. 169) in writing of her children. "They like
to talk to me . . . above all about the productions of Dickens, the
never-to-be-exhausted fun of _Pickwick_, and the capital new strokes of
_Martin Chuzzlewit_. This last work contains, besides all the fun, some
very marked and available morals. I scarce know any book in which the
evil and odiousness of selfishness are more forcibly brought out, or in
a greater variety of exhibitions. In the midst of the merry quotations,
or at least on any fair opportunity, I draw the boys' attention to these
points."
[265] All the remarks in my text had been some time in type when Lord
Lytton sent me what follows, from one of his father's manuscript (and
unpublished) note-books. Substantially it agrees with what I have said;
and such unconscious testimony of a brother novelist of so high a rank,
careful in the study of his art, is of special value. "The greatest
masters of the novel of modern manners have generally availed themselves
of Humour for the illustration of manners; and have, with a deep and
true, but perhaps unconscious, knowledge of art, pushed the humour
almost to the verge of caricature. For, as the serious ideal requires a
certain exaggeration in the proportions of the natural, so also does the
ludicrous. Thus Aristophanes, in painting the humours of his time,
resorts to the most poetical extravagance of machinery, and calls the
Clouds in aid of his ridicule of philosophy, or summons Frogs and Gods
to unite in his satire on Euripides. The Don Quixote of Cervantes never
lived, nor, despite the vulgar belief, ever could have lived, in Spain;
but the art of the portrait is in the admirable exaltation of the
humorous by means of the exaggerated. With more or less qualification,
the same may be said of Parson Adams, of Sir Roger de Coverley, and even
of the Vicar of Wakefield. . . . It follows therefore that art and
correctness are far from identical, and that the one is sometimes proved
by the disdain of the other. For the ideal, whether humorous or serious,
does not consist in the imitation but in the exaltation of nature. And
we must accordingly enquire of art, not how far it resembles what we
have seen, so much as how far it embodies what we can imagine."
[266] I cannot refuse myself the satisfaction of quoting, from the best
criticism of Dickens I have seen since his death, remarks very pertinent
to what is said in my text. "Dickens possessed an imagination
unsurpassed, not only in vividness, but in swiftness. I have
intentionally avoided all needless comparisons of his works with those
of other writers of his time, some of whom have gone before him to their
rest, while others survive to gladden the darkness and relieve the
monotony of our daily life. But in the power of his imagination--of this
I am convinced--he surpassed them, one and all. That imagination could
call up at will those associations which, could we but summon them in
their full number, would bind together the human family, and make that
expression no longer a name, but a living reality. . . . Such associations
sympathy alone can warm into life, and imagination alone can at times
discern. The great humourist reveals them to every one of us; and his
genius is indeed an inspiration from no human source, in that it enables
him to render this service to the brotherhood of mankind. But more than
this. So marvellously has this earth become the inheritance of mankind,
that there is not a thing upon it, animate or inanimate, with which, or
with the likeness of which, man's mind has not come into contact; . . .
with which human feelings, aspirations, thoughts, have not acquired an
endless variety of single or subtle associations. . . . These also, which
we imperfectly divine or carelessly pass by, the imagination of genius
distinctly reveals to us, and powerfully impresses upon us. When they
appeal directly to the emotions of the heart, it is the power of Pathos
which has awakened them; and when the suddenness, the unexpectedness,
the apparent oddity of the one by the side of the other, strike the mind
with irresistible force, it is the equally divine gift of Humour which
has touched the spring of laughter by the side of the spring of
tears."--_Charles Dickens. A Lecture by Professor Ward. Delivered in
Manchester, 30th November, 1870._
[267] The opening of this letter (25th of August 1859), referring to a
conviction for murder, afterwards reversed by a Home Office pardon
against the continued and steadily expressed opinion of the judge who
tried the case, is much too characteristic of the writer to be lost. "I
cannot easily tell you how much interested I am by what you tell me of
our brave and excellent friend. . . . I have often had more than half a
mind to write and thank that upright judge. I declare to heaven that I
believe such a service one of the greatest that a man of intellect and
courage can render to society. . . . Of course I have been driving the
girls out of their wits here, by incessantly proclaiming that there
needed no medical evidence either way, and that the case was plain
without it. . . . Lastly of course (though a merciful man--because a
merciful man, I mean), I would hang any Home Secretary, Whig, Tory,
Radical, or otherwise, who should step in between so black a scoundrel
and the gallows. . . . I am reminded of Tennyson by thinking that King
Arthur would have made short work of the amiable man! How fine the
Idylls are! Lord! what a blessed thing it is to read a man who really
can write. I thought nothing could be finer than the first poem, till I
came to the third; but when I had read the last, it seemed to me to be
absolutely unapproachable." Other literary likings rose and fell with
him, but he never faltered in his allegiance to Tennyson.
[268] Mr. Grant White, whose edition of Shakespeare has been received
with much respect in England.
[269] A dear friend now gone, used laughingly to relate what outcry
there used to be, on the night of the week when a number was due, for
"that Pip nonsense!" and what roars of laughter followed, though at
first it was entirely put aside as not on any account to have time
wasted over it.
[270] There was no Chapter xx. as now; but the sentence which opens it
("For eleven years" in the original, altered to "eight years") followed
the paragraph about his business partnership with Herbert, and led to
Biddy's question whether he is sure he does not fret for Estella ("I am
sure and certain, Biddy" as originally written, altered to "O no--I
think not, Biddy"): from which point here was the close. "It was two
years more, before I saw herself. I had heard of her as leading a most
unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband who had used her
with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of
pride, brutality, and meanness. I had heard of the death of her husband
(from an accident consequent on ill-treating a horse), and of her being
married again to a Shropshire doctor, who, against his interest, had
once very manfully interposed, on an occasion when he was in
professional attendance on Mr. Drummle, and had witnessed some
outrageous treatment of her. I had heard that the Shropshire doctor was
not rich, and that they lived on her own personal fortune. I was in
England again--in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little
Pip--when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a
lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony
carriage, which the lady was driving; and the lady and I looked sadly
enough on one another. 'I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you
would like to shake hands with Estella too, Pip. Lift up that pretty
child and let me kiss it!' (She supposed the child, I think, to be my
child.) I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in
her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance,
that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham's teaching, and had
given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be."
[271] On this reproach, from a Jewish lady whom he esteemed, he had
written two years before. "Fagin, in _Oliver Twist_, is a Jew, because
it unfortunately was true, of the time to which that story refers, that
that class of criminal almost invariably _was_ a Jew. But surely no
sensible man or woman of your persuasion can fail to observe--firstly,
that all the rest of the wicked _dramatis personae_ are Christians; and,
secondly, that he is called 'The Jew,' not because of his religion, but
because of his race."