Street the day before yesterday, I saw a copy of Hume at a
book-seller's window with the following label: 'Only L2 2s.
Hume's _History of England_, in eight volumes, highly valuable
as an introduction to Macaulay.' I laughed so convulsively
that the other people who were staring at the books took me
for a poor demented gentleman. Alas for poor David! As for me,
only one height of renown remains to be attained. I am not yet
in Madam Tussaud's wax-works. I live, however, in hope of
seeing one day an advertisement of a new group of figures--Mr.
Macaulay, in one of his own coats, conversing with Mr. Silk
Buckingham in Oriental costume, and Mr. Robert Montgomery in
full canonicals."
"March 9th, 1850.
"I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake, and I
can assure you that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the
works of God. But you must hear of my triumphs. Thackeray
swears that he was eye-witness and ear-witness of the proudest
event of my life. Two damsels were about to pass that doorway
which we, on Monday, in vain attempted to enter, when I was
pointed out to them. 'Mr. Macaulay,' cried the lovely pair.
'Is that Mr. Macaulay? Never mind the hippopotamus.' And
having paid a shilling to see Behemoth, they left him in the
very moment at which he was about to display himself to them
in order to see--but spare my modesty. I can wish for nothing
more on earth, now that Madam Tussaud, in whose Parthenon I
once hoped for a place, is dead."
In his diary of June 30th, 1849, we find: "Today my yearly account
with Longman is wound up. I may now say that my book has run the
gauntlet of criticism pretty thoroughly. The most savage and dishonest
assailant has not been able to deny me merit as a writer. All critics
who have the least pretense to impartiality have given me praise which
I may be glad to think that I at all deserve.... I received a note
from Prince Albert. He wants to see me at Buckingham Palace at three
to-morrow. I answered like a courtier; yet what am I to say to him?
For, of course, he wants to consult me about the Cambridge
professorship. How can I be just at once to Stephen and to Kemble?"
"Saturday, July 1st--To the Palace. The Prince, to my extreme
astonishment, offered me the professorship, and very earnestly and
with many flattering expressions, pressed me to accept it. I was
resolute, and gratefully and respectfully declined. I should have
declined, indeed, if only in order to give no ground to anybody to
accuse me of foul play, for I have had difficulty enough in steering
my course so as to deal properly both by Stephen and Kemble, and if I
had marched off with the prize, I could not have been astonished if
both had entertained a very unjust suspicion of me. But, in truth, my
temper is that of the wolf in the fable, I cannot bear the collar, and
I have got rid of much finer and richer collars than this. It would be
strange if, having sacrificed for liberty, a seat in the Cabinet and
twenty-five hundred pounds a year, I should now sacrifice liberty for
a chair at Cambridge and four hundred pounds a year. Besides, I never
could do two things at once. If I lectured well, my _History_ must be
given up, and to give up my _History_ would be to give up much more
than the emoluments of the professorship--if emolument were my chief
object, which it is not now, nor ever was. The prince, when he found
me determined, asked me about the other candidates."
XXIV
DICKENS WRITES THE PICKWICK PAPERS
We are always interested in the beginnings of a successful career, for
humanity with all its selfishness takes a generous pleasure in the
advancement of those who have made an honest fight for fame or wealth.
The first success of Dickens came with the publication of the
_Pickwick Papers_, by the publication of which the publishers, it is
said, made $100,000,--much to their astonishment.
We all know the early career of the famous novelist: How he passed a
boyhood of poverty; how he became a stenographer, a good one, for said
a Mr. Beard, "There never was such a shorthand writer," at the time
Dickens entered the gallery as a Parliament reporter; how he later
became a reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_. In the December number
of the _Old Monthly Magazine_ his first published story saw the light.
This was in 1833, when Dickens was twenty-one. The story first went
under the name of _A Dinner at Poplar Walk_, but it afterwards was
changed to _Mr. Mims and his Cousin_. Then came _Sketches by Boz_ in
1835, and in 1836 _Pickwick_ appeared in serial form, the book coming
out a year later.
An amusing and striking illustration of the widespread interest in
the story of _Pickwick_, if we may call so rambling an account as
_Pickwick_ a story, is related by Carlyle: "An archdeacon with his own
venerable lips repeated to me the other night a strange profane story:
of a solemn clergyman who had been administering ghostly consolation
to a sick person; having finished, satisfactorily as he thought, and
got out of the room, he heard the sick person ejaculate, 'Well, thank
God, _Pickwick_ will be out in ten days any way!'--this is dreadful."
We are always interested in knowing whether the author received
adequate remuneration for his work. Literature is not a commercial
venture. The man who says, "Go to, now I shall make money by my pen!"
is not the one who achieves a masterpiece. Nevertheless we are glad to
know that genius is rewarded. It is more comforting to learn that Pope
received $45,000 for his translations of Homer than that Milton got
$25 for his _Paradise Lost_; that Scott received over $40,000 for
_Woodstock_, a novel written in three months, than that the author of
the _Canterbury Tales_ two years before his death was obliged to
petition the king, "for God's sake and as a work of charity," for the
grant of a hogshead of wine yearly at the port of London.
Did Dickens receive anything for his _Pickwick_? Mr. Chapman, one of
the publishers, told Mr. Forster, the friend and biographer of
Dickens, that there was but a verbal agreement. The publishers were to
pay 15 guineas for each number and as there were twenty numbers it is
not hard to estimate his receipts on such a basis. The publishers,
however, were to add to this compensation according to the sale. Mr.
Chapman thinks that his firm paid about 3,000 pounds for _Pickwick_,
but Mr. Forster thinks the sum was about 2,500 pounds. While this sum
bears but a small proportion to what Dickens would have received had
he made a good bargain with his publishers, it is yet a large sum to
one beginning his literary career, and must have been deeply
appreciated by Dickens, who had been so poor that he was paid 30
pounds in advance for the first two numbers, so that he might "go and
get married."
_Pickwick_ was soon followed by _Oliver Twist_, and then came
_Nicholas Nickleby_, and the long series of successful novels that
brought the author both fame and money. For when Dickens died he had a
fortune of L93,000. Some of this was made in America, where his
"readings" were attended by great crowds. On his second tour to
America, after he had given thirty-seven readings, about one-half the
entire number, he sent home a check for L10,000. Some evenings he took
in $2,000.
One reason why Dickens is a popular novelist is that he understands
the common emotions of humanity. He may be "stagey," be lacking in
plot, given to exaggeration, indulge in cheap pathos, but in spite of
all these defects his abounding vitality, his sympathy with the common
lot, his imagination, are of such transcendent power that his world of
readers adores the name of Dickens. Dickens was a good man. While not
closely following the forms of religion, his life was better than that
of many who follow the letter but break the spirit. As an illustration
of his Christian belief I quote an extract from his letter to his
youngest son, who was about to go to Australia:
September, 1868.
Never take a mean advantage of any one in any transaction, and
never be hard upon people who are in your power. Try to do to
others as you would have them do to you, and do not be
discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better for you
that they should fail in obeying the greatest rule laid down
by our Saviour than that you should. I put a New Testament
among your books for the very same reasons, and with the very
same hopes, that made me write an easy account of it for you,
when you were a little child. Because it is the best book that
ever was, or will be, known in the world; and because it
teaches you the best lessons by which any human creature, who
tries to be truthful and faithful to duty, can possibly be
guided.... You will remember that you have never at home been
harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities--I
have always been anxious not to weary my children with such
things, before they are old enough to have opinions respecting
them. You will therefore understand the better that I now most
solemnly impress upon you the truth and beauty of the
Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the
impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but
heartily respect it.... Never abandon the wholesome practice
of saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have
never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it.
[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS]
XXV
CHARLES DICKENS AS READER
My first sight of Dickens, writes Herman Merivale in a gossipy article
in an English magazine, was characteristic enough. I was in the second
or third row of seats with some friends, at one of his readings of
_Oliver Twist_. As Thackeray was a gossip on the platform, so Dickens
was an actor. Like all speakers and actors, he longed for sympathy
somewhere; an unanswering audience kills us, on whichever side the
fault may lie. In the days of my political measles I have harangued a
London audience for an hour and twenty minutes when I have meant to
speak for a quarter of an hour; and in an out-of-the-way Hampshire
district, where I had gone on purpose to address the rurals for a set
hour, I have sate down, covered with confusion, in ten minutes, not
being able to hit on anything that interested them at all. I saw too
plainly, in all their good-natured faces, that they regarded me as the
greatest ass they had ever seen, or as an odd kind of cow gone wrong,
and of no use to the three acres. Dickens's audience that night was
dull, and he became so, too. I was disappointed. His characters were
not lifelike, and his acting was not good, and got worse as he went
on. It was the inevitable law of reaction. His audience bored him, and
he began to bore me, amongst the rest. He was not "in touch" with us,
that is all; and his eyes wandered as hopelessly in search of some
sympathetic eye to catch them, as the gladiators of old, for mercy in
the circus. Then suddenly, at one point of his reading, he had to
introduce the passing character of a nameless individual in a London
crowd, a choleric old gentleman who has only one short sentence to
fire off. This he gave so spontaneously, so inimitably, that the
puppet became an absolute reality in a second. I saw him, crowd,
street, man, temper, and all. For I am, I may say, what is called a
very good audience. I like what I like, and I hate what I hate; and on
one occasion growled at the theater so audibly at what I thought some
very bad acting that I began to hear ominous cries of "Turn him out!"
It was the first night of one of my own plays, Dickens's electric
flash bowled me over so completely and instantly that I broke into a
peal of laughter, and as we sometimes do when hard hit, kept on
laughing internally, which is half tears, and half hiccough, for some
time afterwards. Upon my word, I am laughing now, as I recall it. It
was so funny. The audience of course glared at me with the well-known
look of rebuke. "How _dare_ you express your feelings out loud, and
disturb us!"
But Dickens's eye--I wasn't much more than a boy, and he didn't know
me from Adam--went at once straight for mine. "Here's somebody who
likes me, anyhow," it said. For the next few minutes he read at me, if
ever man did. The sympathetic unit is everything to us. And on my
word the result was that he so warmed to his work that he got the
whole audience in his hand, and dispensed with me. Only once
again--oh, how like him it was!--he fixed me with his eye just towards
the end of the reading, and made a short but perceptible pause. I
wondered what was coming--and soon knew. The choleric old party in the
street had to appear for one passing instant more, and fire off one
more passing sentence. Which he did--with the same results. Good
heavens! what an actor Dickens was.
When that reading ended--with the success which it deserved--never did
that most expressive of all human features, the eye, thank a boy more
expressively. Over all things cultivate sympathy. If antipathy goes
with it, so much the better. If the magnet must attract, it likewise
must repel. Dickens was a magnet of the magnets; but in his case I
must confess, that when a modern specimen tells me he can't laugh at
him, he makes me feel rather as Heine felt when somebody told him that
he--the somebody--was an atheist; frightened.
... Dickens is perhaps best described as to my immense amusement, and
by the most delicious misprint I ever saw, I found myself once
described in the "Visitors' List" in an English paper abroad--"Human
Marvel, and family." It looked like some new kind of acrobat. Of
Charles Dickens's great kindnesses to me in after days, and of some
personal experiences of his stage passion, at the end of his life, I
ventured to gossip with readers of the _Bar_, some months ago, in a
paper called "With the Majority." In one sense, yes; but in
another--in what a minority, Thackeray and he!
XXVI
ON THE DEATH OF DICKENS
When Charles Dickens died the English papers and magazines were filled
with criticisms and appreciations of the great writer. It may be
interesting to glance at a few extracts from these:
From _Fraser's Magazine_.--On the eighth of June, 1870, the busiest
brain and the busiest hand that ever guided pen over paper finished
their appointed work, and that pen was laid aside forever. Words of
its inditing were sure of immediately reaching and being welcomed by a
larger number of men and women than those of any other living
writer--perhaps of any writer who has ever lived.
About six o'clock on that summer evening, having done his day's work
with habitual assiduity, Charles Dickens sat down to dinner with some
members of his family. He had complained of headache, but neither he
nor any one felt the least apprehension. The pain increased, the head
drooped forward, and he never spoke again. Breathing went on for
four-and-twenty hours, and then there was nothing left but ... dismay
and sorrow. When the sad news was made public it fell with the shock
of a personal loss on the hearts of countless millions, to whom the
name of the famous author was like that of an intimate and dear
friend....
Anthony Trollope in _St. Paul's_.--It seems to have been but the other
day that, sitting where I now sit, in the same chair, at the same
table, with the same familiar things around me, I wrote for the
_Cornhill Magazine_ a few lines in remembrance of Thackeray, who had
then been taken from us, and when those lines appeared they were
preceded by others, very full of feeling, from his much older friend,
Charles Dickens. Now I take up my pen again because Charles Dickens
has also gone, and because it is not fit that this publication should
go forth without a word spoken to his honor.
It is singular that two men in age so nearly equal, in career so
nearly allied, friends so old, and rivals so close, should each have
left us so suddenly, without any of that notice, first doubting and
then assured, which illness gives; so that in the case of the one as
of the other, the tidings of death's dealings have struck us a hard
and startling blow, inflicting not only sorrow, but for a while that
positive, physical pain which comes from evil tidings which are
totally unexpected. It was but a week or two since that I was
discussing at the club that vexed question of American copyright with
Mr. Dickens, and while differing from him somewhat, was wondering at
the youthful vitality of the man who seemed to have done his forty
years of work without having a trace of it left upon him to lessen his
energy, or rob his feelings of their freshness. It was but the other
day that he spoke at the Academy dinner, and those who heard him then
heard him at his best; and those who did not hear him, but only read
his words, felt how fortunate it was that there should be such a man
to speak for literature on such an occasion. When he took farewell of
the public as a public reader, a few months since, the public wondered
that a man in the very prime of his capacity should retire from such a
career. But though there was to be an end to his readings, there was
not, therefore, to be an end of his labors. He was to resume, and did
resume, his old work, and when the first number of _Edwin Drood's
Mystery_ was bought up with unprecedented avidity by the lovers of
Dickens's stories, it was feared, probably, by none but one that he
might not live to finish his chronicle. He was a man, as we all
thought, to live to be a hundred. He looked to be full of health, he
walked vigorously, he stood, and spoke, and, above all, he laughed
like a man in the full vigor of his life....
He would attempt nothing--show no interest in anything--which he could
not do, and which he did not understand. But he was not on that
account forced to confine himself to literature. Every one knows how
he read. Most readers of these lines, though they may never have seen
him act,--as I never did,--still know that his acting was excellent.
As an actor he would have been at the top of his profession. And he
had another gift,--had it so wonderfully, that it may almost be said
that he has left no equal behind him. He spoke so well, that a public
dinner became a blessing instead of a curse, if he was in the
chair,--had its compensating twenty minutes of pleasure, even if he
were called upon to propose a toast, or to thank the company for
drinking his health. For myself, I never could tell how far his
speeches were ordinarily prepared:--but I can declare that I have
heard him speak admirably when he has had to do so with no moment of
preparation.
A great man has gone from us--such a one that we may surely say of him
that we shall not look upon his like again. As years roll on, we shall
learn to appreciate his loss. He now rests in the spot consecrated to
the memory of our greatest and noblest; and Englishmen would certainly
not have been contented had he been laid elsewhere.
XXVII
RUSKIN'S CHILDHOOD
We are fortunate in having Ruskin's own account of how he passed his
childhood days. In _Praeterita_ we have his autobiography. His
description of his early days runs as follows:
"I am and my father was before me a violent Tory of the old school
(Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's); I name these two
out of the numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own two
masters. I had Walter Scott's novels and the _Iliad_ (Pope's
translation), for my only reading when I was a child, on weekdays; on
Sunday their effect was tempered by _Robinson Crusoe_ and the
_Pilgrim's Progress_, my mother having it deeply in her heart to make
an evangelical clergyman of me. Fortunately, I had an aunt more
evangelical than her mother, and my aunt gave me cold mutton for
Sunday's dinner, which, as I much preferred it hot, greatly diminished
the influence of the _Pilgrim's Progress_, and the end of the matter
was, that I got all of the imaginative teachings of De Foe and Bunyan,
and yet--am not an evangelical clergyman.
"I had, however, still better teaching than theirs, and that
compulsorily, and every day of the week.
"Walter Scott and Pope's Homer were reading of my own election, but my
mother forced me, by steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of the
Bible by heart, as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud,
hard names and all, from Genesis, to the Apocalypse, about once a
year: and to that discipline--patient, accurate, and resolute--I owe,
not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally
serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, and the
best part of my taste in literature. From Walter Scott's novels I
might easily, as I grew older, have fallen to other people's novels;
and Pope might, perhaps, have led me to take Johnson's English, or
Gibbon's, as types of language; but once knowing the 32d of
Deuteronomy, or the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, the
Sermon on the Mount, and most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by
heart, and having always a way of thinking with; myself what words
meant, it was not possible for me, even in the foolishest times of
youth, to write entirely superficial or formal English, and the
affectation of trying to write like Hooker or George Herbert was the
most innocent I could have fallen into."
* * * * *
"As years went on, and I came to be four or five years old he (the
father) could command a post-chaise and pair for two months in the
summer, by help of which, with my mother and me, he went the round of
his country customers (who liked to see the principal of the house,
his own traveler); so that, at a jog-trot pace, and through the
panoramic opening of the four windows of a post-chaise, made more
panoramic still to me because my seat was a little bracket in front
(for we used to hire the chaise regularly for the two months out of
Long Acre, and so could have it bracketed and pocketed as we liked), I
saw all the highroads, and most of the cross ones, of England and
Wales, and great part of lowland Scotland, as far as Perth, where
every other year we spent the whole summer; and I used to read the
_Abbot_ at Kinross, and the _Monastery_ at Glen Farg, which I used to
confuse with 'Glendearg,' and thought that the White Lady had as
certainly lived by the streamlet in the glen of the Ochlis, as the
Queen of Scots in the island of Loch Leven.
"To my farther benefit, as I grew older, I thus saw nearly all the
noblemen's houses in England, in reverent and healthy delight of
uncovetous admiration,--perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any
political truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live in a
small house, and have Warwick castle to be astonished at, than to live
in Warwick castle and have nothing to be astonished at; but that, at
all events, it would not make Brunswick Square in the least more
pleasantly habitable, to pull Warwick castle down."
* * * * *
"Contented, by reason of these occasional glimpses of the rivers of
Paradise, I lived until I was more than four years old in Hunter
Street, Brunswick Square, the greater part of the year; for a few
weeks in the summer breathing country air, by taking lodgings in small
cottages (real cottages, not villas, so-called) either about
Hampstead, or at Dulwich, at 'Mrs. Ridley's,' the last of a row in a
lane which led out into the Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself
full of buttercups in spring, and blackberries in autumn. But my
chief remaining impressions of those days are attached to Hunter
Street. My mother's general principles of first treatment were, to
guard me with steady watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger,
and, for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was
neither fretful or troublesome. But the law was, that I should find my
own amusement. No toys of any kind were at first allowed, and the pity
of my Croydon aunt for my monastic poverty in this respect was
boundless. On one of my birthdays, thinking to overcome my mother's
resolution by splendor of temptation, she bought the most radiant
Punch and Judy she could find in the Soho bazaar, as big as a real
Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet and gold, and that would dance,
tied to the leg of a chair. I must have been greatly impressed, for I
remember well the look of the two figures, as my aunt herself
exhibited their virtues. My mother was obliged to accept them, but
afterward quietly told me it was not right that I should have them,
and I never saw them again.