It is a fearsome thing to venture to say anything now about Charles
Dickens, whom we have all loved, enjoyed, and laughed over: whose tales
are household words in every home where the English tongue is heard,
whose characters are our own school-friends, the sentiment of our
youthful memories, our boon-companions and our early attachments. To
view him in any critical light is a task as risky as it would be to
discuss the permanent value of some fashionable amusement, a favourite
actor, a popular beverage, or a famous horse. Millions and millions of
old and young love Charles Dickens, know his personages by heart, play
at games with his incidents and names, and from the bottom of their
souls believe that there never was such fun, and that there never will
be conceived again such inimitable beings, as they find in his
ever-fresh and ever-varied pages. This is by itself a very high title
to honour: perhaps it is the chief jewel in the crown that rests on the
head of Charles Dickens. I am myself one of these devotees, of these
lovers, of these slaves of his: or at least I can remember that I have
been. To have stirred this pure and natural humanity, this force of
sympathy, in such countless millions is a great triumph. Men and women
to-day do not want any criticism of Charles Dickens, any talk about him
at all. They enjoy him as he is: they examine one another in his
books: they gossip on by the hour about his innumerable characters, his
never-to-be-forgotten waggeries and fancies.
No account of early Victorian literature can omit the name of Charles
Dickens from the famous writers of the time. How could we avoid notice
of one whose first immortal tale coincides with the accession of our
Queen, and who for thirty-three successive years continued to pour out
a long stream of books that still delight the English-speaking world?
When we begin to talk about the permanent place in English literature
of eminent writers, one of the first definite problems is presented by
Charles Dickens. And it is one of the most obscure of such problems;
because, more than almost any writer of our age, Charles Dickens has
his own accustomed nook at every fireside: he is a familiar friend, a
welcome guest; we remember the glance of his eye; we have held his
hand, as it were, in our own. The children brighten up as his step is
heard; the chairs are drawn round the hearth, and a fresh glow is given
to the room. We do not criticise one whom we love, nor do we suffer
others to do so. And there is perhaps a wider sympathy with Charles
Dickens as a person than with any other writer of our time. For this
reason there has been hardly any serious criticism or estimate of
Dickens as a great artist, apart from some peevish and sectional
disparagement of his genius, which has been too much tinged with
academic pedantry and the bias of aristocratic temper or political
antagonism.
I am free to confess that I am in no mood to pretend making up my mind
for any impartial estimate of Charles Dickens as an abiding power in
English literature. The "personal equation" is in my own case somewhat
too strong to leave me with a perfectly "dry light" in the matter. I
will make a clean breast of it at once by saying, that I can remember
reading some of the most famous of these books in their green covers,
month by month, as they came out in parts, when I was myself a child or
"in my 'teens." That period included the first ten of the main works
from _Pickwick_ down to _David Copperfield_. With _Bleak House_, which
I read as a student of philosophy at Oxford beginning to be familiar
with Aristotelian canons, I felt my enjoyment mellowed by a somewhat
more measured judgment. From that time onward Charles Dickens threw
himself into a great variety of undertakings and many diverse kinds of
publication. His _Hard Times_, _Little Dorrit_, _Our Mutual Friend_,
_Great Expectations_, _Tale of Two Cities_, were never to me anything
like the wonder and delight that I found in Oliver Twist, Nickleby, and
Copperfield. And as to the short tales and the later pieces down to
_Edwin Drood_, I never find myself turning back to them; the very
memory of the story is fading away; and I fail to recall the characters
and names. A mature judgment will decide that the series after _David
Copperfield_, written when the author was thirty-eight, was not equal
to the series of the thirteen years preceding. Charles Dickens will
always be remembered by _Pickwick_, _Oliver Twist_, _Nickleby_, and
_Copperfield_. And though these tales will long continue to delight
both old and young, learned and unlearned alike, they are most to be
envied who read him when young, and they are most to be pitied who read
him with a critical spirit. May that be far from us, as we take up our
_Pickwick_ and talk over the autobiographic pathos of _David
Copperfield_.
This vivid sympathy with the man is made stronger in my own case in
that, from my own boyhood till his death, I was continually seeing him,
was frequently his neighbour both in London and the seaside, knew some
of his friends, and heard much about him and about his work. Though I
never spoke to him, there were times when I saw him almost daily; I
heard him speak and read in public; and his favourite haunts in London
and the country have been familiar to me from my boyhood. And thus, as
I read again my _Pickwick_, and _Nickleby_, and _Copperfield_, there
come back to me many personal and local memories of my own. The
personality of Charles Dickens was, even to his distant readers, vivid
and intense; and hence it is much more so to those who have known his
person. I am thus an ardent Pickwickian myself; and anything I say
about our immortal Founder must be understood in a Pickwickian sense.
Charles Dickens was before all things a great humourist--doubtless the
greatest of this century; for, though we may find in Scott a more truly
Shakespearean humour of the highest order, the humour of Dickens is so
varied, so paramount, so inexhaustible, that he stands forth in our
memory as the humourist of the age. Swift, Fielding, Hogarth, Sterne,
and Goldsmith, in the last century, reached at times a more enduring
level of humour without caricature; but the gift has been more rarely
imparted to their successors in the age of steam. Now, we shall never
get an adequate definition of that imponderable term--humour--a term
which, perhaps, was invented to be the eternal theme of budding
essayists. We need not be quite as liberal in our interpretation of
humour as was Thackeray in opening his _English Humourists_; for he
declared that its business was to awaken and direct our love, our pity,
our kindness, our scorn for imposture, our tenderness for the weak, to
comment on the actions and passions of life, to be the week-day
preacher--and much more to that effect. But it may serve our immediate
purpose to say with Samuel Johnson that humour is "grotesque imagery";
and "grotesque" is "distorted of figure; unnatural." That is to say,
humour is an effort of the imagination presenting human nature with
some element of distortion or disproportion which instantly kindles
mirth. It must be imaginative; it must touch the bed-rock of human
nature; it must arouse merriment and not anger or scorn. In this fine
and most rare gift Charles Dickens abounded to overflowing; and this
humour poured in perfect cataracts of "grotesque imagery" over every
phase of life of the poor and the lower middle classes of his time, in
London and a few of its suburbs and neighbouring parts.
This in itself is a great title to honour; it is his main work, his
noblest title. His sphere was wide, but not at all general; it was
strictly limited to the range of his own indefatigable observations.
He hardly ever drew a character or painted a scene, even of the most
subordinate kind, which he had not studied from the life with minute
care, and whenever he did for a moment wander out of his limits, he
made an egregious failure. But this task of his, to cast the sunshine
of pathos and of genial mirth over the humblest, dullest, and most
uninviting of our fellow-creatures, was a great social mission to which
his whole genius was devoted. No waif and stray was so repulsive, no
drudge was so mean, no criminal was so atrocious, but what Charles
Dickens could feel for him some ray of sympathy, or extract some
pathetic mirth out of his abject state. And Dickens does not look on
the mean and the vile as do Balzac and Zola, that is, from without,
like the detective or the surgeon. He sees things more or less from
their point of view: he feels with the Marchioness: he himself as a
child was once a Smike: he cannot help liking the fun of the Artful
Dodger: he has been a good friend to Barkis: he likes Traddles: he
loves Joe: poor Nancy ends her vile life in heroism: and even his brute
of a dog worships Bill Sikes.
Here lies the secret of his power over such countless millions of
readers. He not only paints a vast range of ordinary humanity and
suffering or wearied humanity, but he speaks for it and lives in it
himself, and throws a halo of imagination over it, and brings home to
the great mass of average readers a new sense of sympathy and gaiety.
This humane kinship with the vulgar and the common, this magic which
strikes poetry out of the dust of the streets, and discovers traces of
beauty and joy in the most monotonous of lives, is, in the true and
best sense of the term, Christ-like, with a message and gospel of hope.
Thackeray must have had Charles Dickens in his mind when he wrote: "The
humourous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity,
your kindness--your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture--your
tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy."
Charles Dickens, of all writers of our age, assuredly did this in every
work of his pen, for thirty-three years of incessant production. It is
his great title to honour; and a novelist can desire no higher title
than this.
There is another quality in which Charles Dickens is supreme--in
purity. Here is a writer who is realistic, if ever any writer was, in
the sense of having closely observed the lowest strata of city life,
who has drawn the most miserable outcasts, the most abandoned men and
women in the dregs of society, who has invented many dreadful scenes of
passion, lust, seduction, and debauchery; and yet in forty works and
more you will not find a page which a mother need withhold from her
grown daughter. As Thackeray wrote of his friend:--"I am grateful for
the innocent laughter and the sweet and unsullied page which the author
of _David Copperfield_ gives to my children." We need not formulate
any dogma or rule on such a topic, nor is it essential that all books
should be written _virginibus puerisque_; but it is certain that every
word of Charles Dickens was so written, even when he set himself (as he
sometimes did) to describe animal natures and the vilest of their sex.
Dickens is a realist in that he probes the gloomiest recesses and faces
the most disheartening problems of life: he is an idealist in that he
never presents us the common or the vile with mere commonplace or
repulsiveness, and without some ray of humane and genial charm to which
ordinary eyes are blind. Dickens, then, was above all things a
humourist, an inexhaustible humourist, to whom the humblest forms of
daily life wore a certain sunny air of genial mirth; but the question
remains if he was a humourist of the highest order: was he a poet, a
creator of abiding imaginative types? Old Johnson's definition of
humour as "grotesque imagery," and "grotesque" as meaning some
distortion in figure, may not be adequate as a description of humour,
but it well describes the essential feature of Charles Dickens. His
infallible instrument is caricature--which strictly means an
"overload," as Johnson says, "an exaggerated resemblance." Caricature
is a likeness having some comical exaggeration or distortion. Now,
caricature is a legitimate and potent instrument of humour, which great
masters have used with consummate effect. Leonardo da Vinci, Michael
Angelo, Rembrandt, Hogarth, use it; but only at times, and in a
subsidiary way. Rabelais, Swift, Fielding, use this weapon not
unfrequently; Shakespeare very sparingly; Goldsmith and Scott, I think,
almost never. Caricature, the essence of which is exaggeration of some
selected feature, distortion of figure, disproportion of some part, is
a potent resource, but one to which the greater masters resort rarely
and with much moderation.
Now with Charles Dickens caricature--that comical exaggeration of a
particular feature, distortion of some part beyond nature--is not only
the essence of his humour, but it is the universal and ever-present
source of his mirth. It would not be true to say that, exaggeration is
the sole form of humour that he uses, but there is hardly a character
of his to which it is not applied, nor a scene of which it is not the
pervading "motive." Some feature, some oddity, some temperament is
seized, dwelt upon, played with, and turned inside out, with incessant
repetition and unwearied energy. Every character, except the walking
gentleman and the walking lady, the insipid lover, or the colourless
friend, have some feature thrust out of proportion, magnified beyond
nature. Sam Weller never speaks without his anecdote, Uriah is always
"'umble," Barkis is always "willin'," Mark Tapley is always "jolly,"
Dombey is always solemn, and Toots is invariably idiotic. It is no
doubt natural that Barnaby's Raven should always want tea, whatever
happens, for the poor bird has but a limited vocabulary. But one does
not see why articulate and sane persons like Captain Cuttle, Pecksniff,
and Micawber should repeat the same phrases under every condition and
to all persons. This, no doubt, is the essence of farce: it may be
irresistibly droll as farce, but it does not rise beyond farce. And at
last even the most enthusiastic Pickwickian wearies of such monotony of
iteration.
Now, the keynote of caricature being the distortion of nature, it
inevitably follows that humourous exaggeration is unnatural, however
droll; and, where it is the main source of the drollery, the picture as
a whole ceases to be within the bounds of nature. But the great
masters of the human heart invariably remain true to nature: not merely
true to a selected feature, but to the natural form as a whole.
Falstaff, in his wildest humour, speaks and acts as such a man really
might speak and act. He has no catch-phrase on which he harps, as if
he were a talking-machine wound up to emit a dozen sounds. Parson
Adams speaks and acts as such a being might do in nature. The comic
characters of Goldsmith, Scott, or Thackeray do not outrun and defy
nature, nor does their drollery depend on any special and abnormal
feature, much less on any stock phrase which they use as a label. The
illustrations of Cruikshank and Phiz are delightfully droll, and often
caricatures of a high order. But being caricatures, they overload and
exaggerate nature, and indeed are always, in one sense, impossible in
nature. The grins, the grimaces, the contortions, the dwarfs, the
idiots, the monstrosities of these wonderful sketches could not be
found in human beings constructed on any known anatomy. And Dickens's
own characters have the same element of unnatural distortion. It is
possible that these familiar caricatures have even done harm to his
reputation. His creations are of a higher order of art and are more
distinctly spontaneous and original. But the grotesque sketches with
which he almost uniformly presented his books accentuate the element of
caricature on which he relied; and often add an unnatural extravagance
beyond that extravagance which was the essence of his own method.
The consequence is that everything in Dickens is "in the excess," as
Aristotle would say, and not "in the mean." Whether it is Tony Weller,
or "the Shepherd," or the Fat Boy, Hugh or the Raven, Toots or
Traddles, Micawber or Skimpole, Gamp or Mantalini--all are overloaded
in the sense that they exceed nature, and are more or less extravagant.
They are wonderful and delightful caricatures, but they are impossible
in fact. The similes are hyperbolic; the names are grotesque; the
incidents partake of harlequinade, and the speeches of roaring farce.
It is often wildly droll, but it is rather the drollery of the stage
than of the book. The characters are never possible in fact; they are
not, and are not meant to be, nature; they are always and everywhere
comic distortions of nature. Goldsmith's Dr. Primrose tells us that he
chose his wife for the same qualities for which she chose her wedding
gown. That is humour, but it is also pure, literal, exact truth to
nature. David Copperfield's little wife is called a lap-dog, acts like
a lap-dog, and dies like a lap-dog; the lap-dog simile is so much
overdone that we are glad to get rid of her, and instead of weeping
with Copperfield, we feel disposed to call him a ninny.
Nothing is more wonderful in Dickens than his exuberance of animal
spirits, that inexhaustible fountain of life and gaiety, in which he
equals Scott and far surpasses any other modern. The intensity of the
man, his electric activity, his spasmodic nervous power, quite dazzle
and stun us. But this restless gaiety too often grows fatiguing, as
the rollicking fun begins to pall upon us, as the jokes ring hollow,
and the wit gets stale by incessant reiteration. We know how much in
real life we get to hate the joker who does not know when to stop, who
repeats his jests, and forces the laugh when it does not flow freely.
Something of the kind the most devoted of Dickens's readers feel when
they take in too much at one time. None but the very greatest can
maintain for long one incessant outpour of drollery, much less of
extravagance. Aristophanes could do it; Shakespeare could do it; so
could Cervantes; and so, too, Rabelais. But then, the wildest
extravagance of these men is so rich, so varied, so charged with
insight and thought, and, in the case of Rabelais, so resplendent with
learning and suggestion, that we never feel satiety and the cruel sense
that the painted mask on the stage is grinning at us, whilst the actor
behind it is weary and sad. When one who is not amongst the very
greatest pours forth the same inextinguishable laughter in the same
key, repeating the same tricks, and multiplying kindred oddities,
people of cultivation enjoy it heartily once, twice, it may be a dozen
times, but at last they make way for the young bloods who can go
thirty-seven times to see "Charley's Aunt."
A good deal has been said about Dickens's want of reading; and his
enthusiastic biographer very fairly answers that Charles Dickens's book
was the great book of life, of which he was an indefatigable student.
When other men were at school and at college, he was gathering up a
vast experience of the hard world, and when his brother writers were
poring over big volumes in their libraries, he was pacing up and down
London and its suburbs with inexhaustible energy, drinking in oddities,
idiosyncrasies, and wayside incidents at every pore. It is quite true:
London is a microcosm, an endless and bottomless Babylon; which,
perhaps, no man has ever known so well as did Charles Dickens. This
was his library: here he gathered that vast encyclopaedia of human
nature, which some are inclined to call "cockney," but if it be,
"Cockayne" must be a very large country indeed. Still, the fact
remains, that of book-learning of any kind Dickens remained, to the end
of his days, perhaps more utterly innocent than any other famous
English writer since Shakespeare. His biographer labours to prove that
he had read Fielding and Smollett, _Don Quixote_ and _Gil Blas_, _The
Spectator_, and _Robinson Crusoe_. Perhaps he had, like most men who
have learned to read. But, no doubt, this utter severance from books,
which we feel in his tales, will ultimately tell against their
immortality.
This rigid abstinence from books, which Dickens practised on system,
had another reaction that we notice in his style. Not only do we feel
in reading his novels that we have no reason to assume that he had ever
read anything except a few popular romances, but we note that he can
hardly be said to have a formed literary style of his own. Dickens had
mannerisms, but hardly a style. In some ways, this is a good thing:
much less can he be said to have a bad style. It is simply no style.
He knows nothing of the crisp, modulated, balanced, and reserved
mastery of phrase and sentence which marks Thackeray. Nor is it the
easy simplicity of _Robinson Crusoe_ and the _Vicar of Wakefield_. The
tale spins along, and the incidents rattle on with the volubility of a
good story-teller who warms up as he goes, but who never stops to think
of his sentences and phrases. He often gets verbose, rings the changes
on a point which he sees to have caught his hearers; he plays with a
fancy out of measure, and turns his jest inside out and over and over,
like a fine comic actor when the house is in a roar. His language is
free, perfectly clear, often redundant, sometimes grandiloquent, and
usually addressed more to the pit than to the boxes. And he is a
little prone to slide, even in his own proper person, into those formal
courtesies and obsolete compliments which forty years ago survived
amongst the superior orders of bagmen and managing clerks.
There is an old topic of discussion whether Dickens could invent an
organic and powerful plot, and carry out an elaborate scheme with
perfect skill. It is certain that he has never done so, and it can
hardly be said that he has ever essayed it. The serial form in parts,
wherein almost all his stories were cast, requiring each number of
three chapters to be "assorted," like sugar-plums, with grave and gay,
so as to tell just enough but not too much, made a highly-wrought
scheme almost impossible. It is plain that Charles Dickens had nothing
of that epical gift which gave us _Tom Jones_ and _Ivanhoe_. Perhaps
the persistent use of the serial form shows that he felt no interest in
that supreme art of an immense drama duly unfolded to a prepared end.
In _Pickwick_ there neither was, nor could there be, any organic plot.
In _Oliver Twist_, in _Barnaby Rudge_, in _Dombey_, in _Bleak House_,
in the _Tale of Two Cities_, there are indications of his possessing
this power, and in certain parts of these tales we seem to be in the
presence of a great master of epical narration. But the power is not
sustained; and it must be confessed that in none of these tales is
there a complete and equal scheme. In most of the other books,
especially in those after _Bleak House_, the plot is so artless, so
_décousu_, so confused, that even practised readers of Dickens fail to
keep it clear in their mind. The serial form, where a leading
character wanders about to various places, and meets a succession of
quaint parties, seems to be that which suited his genius and which he
himself most entirely enjoyed.
In contrast with the Pickwickian method of comic rambles in search of
human "curios," Dickens introduced some darker effects and persons of a
more or less sensational kind. Some of these are as powerful as
anything in modern fiction; and Fagin and Bill Sikes, Smike and Poor
Jo, the Gordon riots and the storms at sea, may stand beside some
tableaux of Victor Hugo for lurid power and intense realism. But it
was only at times and during the first half of his career that Dickens
could keep clear of melodrama and somewhat stagey blue fire. And at
times his blue fire was of a very cheap kind. Rosa Dartle and Carker,
Steerforth and Blandois, Quilp and Uriah Heep, have a melancholy
glitter of the footlights over them. We cannot see what the villains
want, except to look villainous, and we fail to make out where is the
danger to the innocent victims. We find the villain of the piece
frantically struggling to get some paper, or to get hold of some boy or
girl. But as the scene is in London in the nineteenth century, and not
in Naples in the fifteenth century, we cannot see who is in real
danger, or why, or of what. And with all this, Dickens was not
incapable of bathos, or tragedy suddenly exploding in farce. The end
of Krook by spontaneous combustion is such a case; but a worse case is
the death of Dora, Copperfield's baby wife, along with that of the
lap-dog, Jip. This is one of those unforgotten, unpardonable,
egregious blunders in art, in feeling, even in decency, which must
finally exclude Charles Dickens from the rank of the true immortals.
But his books will long be read for his wonderful successes, and his
weaker pieces will entirely be laid aside as are the failures of so
many great men, the rubbish of Fielding, of Goldsmith, of Defoe; which
do nothing now to dim the glory of _Tom Jones_, _The Vicar of
Wakefield_, and _Robinson Crusoe_. The glory of Charles Dickens will
always be in his _Pickwick_, his first, his best, his inimitable
triumph. It is true that it is a novel without a plot, without
beginning, middle, or end, with much more of caricature than of
character, with some extravagant tom-foolery, and plenty of vulgarity.
But its originality, its irrepressible drolleries, its substantial
human nature, and its intense vitality, place it quite in a class by
itself. We can no more group it, or test it by any canon of criticism,
than we could group or define _Pantagruel_ or _Faust_. There are some
works of genius which seem to transcend all criticism, of which the
very extravagances and incoherences increase the charm. And _Pickwick_
ought to live with _Gil Blas_ and _Tristram Shandy_. In a deeper vein,
the tragic scenes in _Oliver Twist_ and in _Barnaby Rudge_ must long
hold their ground, for they can be read and re-read in youth, in
manhood, in old age. The story of Dotheboys Hall, the Yarmouth
memories of Copperfield, Little Nell, Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, Toots,
Captain Cuttle, Pecksniff, and many more will long continue to delight
the youth of the English-speaking races. But few writers are
remembered so keenly by certain characters, certain scenes, incidental
whimsies, and so little for entire novels treated strictly as works of
art. There is no reason whatever for pretending that all these scores
of tales are at all to be compared with the best of them, or that the
invention of some inimitable scenes and characters is enough to make a
supreme and faultless artist. The young and the uncritical make too
much of Charles Dickens, when they fail to distinguish between his best
and his worst. Their fastidious seniors make too little of him, when
they note his many shortcomings and fail to see that in certain
elements of humour he has no equal and no rival. If we mean Charles
Dickens to live we must fix our eye on these supreme gifts alone.