Mr. Andrew Lang is delightfully severe on those who 'cannot read
Dickens,' but in truth it is only by accident that he is not himself of
that unhappy persuasion. For Dickens the humourist he has a most
uncompromising enthusiasm; for Dickens the artist in drama and romance he
has as little sympathy as the most practical. Of the prose of _David
Copperfield_ and _Our Mutual Friend_, the _Tale of Two Cities_ and _The
Mystery of Edwin Drood_, he disdains to speak. He is almost fierce (for
him) in his denunciation of Little Nell and Paul Dombey; he protests that
Monks and Ralph Nickleby are 'too steep,' as indeed they are. But of
Bradley Headstone and Sydney Carton he says not a word; while of _Martin
Chuzzlewit_--but here he shall speak for himself, the italics being a
present to him. 'I have read in that book a score of times,' says he; 'I
never see it but I revel in it--in Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp and the
Americans. _But what the plot is all about_, _what Jonas did_, _what
Montague Tigg had to make in the matter_, _what all the pictures with
plenty of shading illustrate_, _I have never been able to comprehend_.'
This is almost as bad as the reflection (in a magazine) that Jonas
Chuzzlewit is 'the most shadowy murderer in fiction.' Yet it is
impossible to be angry. In his own way and within his own limits Mr.
Lang is such a thoroughgoing admirer of Dickens that you are moved to
compassion when you think of the much he loses by 'being constitutionally
incapable' of perfect apprehension. 'How poor,' he cries, with generous
enthusiasm, 'the world of fancy would be, "how dispeopled of her dreams,"
if, in some ruin of the social system, the books of Dickens were lost;
and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates, and Mr. Crinkle and Miss Squeers
and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick Swiveller were to perish, or to
vanish with Menander's men and women! We cannot think of our world
without them; and, children of dreams as they are, they seem more
essential than great statesmen, artists, soldiers, who have actually worn
flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and uniforms.' Nor is this
all. He is almost prepared to welcome 'free education,' since 'every
Englishman who can read, unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more' for
Dickens. Does it not give one pause to reflect that the writer of this
charming eulogy can only read the half of Dickens, and is half the ideal
of his own denunciation.
His Method.
Dickens's imagination was diligent from the outset; with him conception
was not less deliberate and careful than development; and so much he
confesses when he describes himself as 'in the first stage of a new book,
which consists in going round and round the idea, as you see a bird in
his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches it.' 'I have no
means,' he writes to a person wanting advice, 'of knowing whether you are
patient in the pursuit of this art; but I am inclined to think that you
are not, and that you do not discipline yourself enough. When one is
impelled to write this or that, one has still to consider: "How much of
this will tell for what I mean? How much of it is my own wild emotion
and superfluous energy--how much remains that is truly belonging to this
ideal character and these ideal circumstances?" It is in the laborious
struggle to make this distinction, and in the determination to try for
it, that the road to the correction of faults lies. [Perhaps I may
remark, in support of the sincerity with which I write this, that I am an
impatient and impulsive person myself, but that it has been for many
years the constant effort of my life to practise at my desk what I preach
to you.]' Such golden words could only have come from one enamoured of
his art, and holding the utmost endeavour in its behalf of which his
heart and mind were capable for a matter of simple duty. They are a
proof that Dickens--in intention at least, and if in intention then
surely, the fact of his genius being admitted, to some extent in fact as
well--was an artist in the best sense of the term.
His Development.
In the beginning he often wrote exceeding ill, especially when he was
doing his best to write seriously. He developed into an artist in words
as he developed into an artist in the construction and the evolution of a
story. But his development was his own work, and it is a fact that
should redound eternally to his honour that he began in newspaper
English, and by the production of an imitation of the _novela
picaresca_--a string of adventures as broken and disconnected as the
adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes or Peregrine Pickle, and went on to
become an exemplar. A man self-made and self-taught, if he knew anything
at all about the 'art for art' theory--which is doubtful--he may well
have held it cheap enough. But he practised Millet's dogma--_Dans l'art
il faut sa peau_--as resolutely as Millet himself, and that, too, under
conditions that might have proved utterly demoralising had he been less
robust and less sincere. He began as a serious novelist with Ralph
Nickleby and Lord Frederick Verisopht; he went on to produce such
masterpieces as Jonas Chuzzlewit and Doubledick, and Eugene Wrayburn and
the immortal Mrs. Gamp, and Fagin and Sikes and Sydney Carton, and many
another. The advance is one from positive weakness to positive strength,
from ignorance to knowledge, from incapacity to mastery, from the
manufacture of lay figures to the creation of human beings.
His Results.
His faults were many and grave. He wrote some nonsense; he sinned
repeatedly against taste; he could be both noisy and vulgar; he was apt
to be a caricaturist where he should have been a painter; he was often
mawkish and often extravagant; and he was sometimes more inept than a
great writer has ever been. But his work, whether bad or good, has in
full measure the quality of sincerity. He meant what he did: and he
meant it with his whole heart. He looked upon himself as representative
and national--as indeed he was; he regarded his work as a universal
possession; and he determined to do nothing that for lack of pains should
prove unworthy of his function. If he sinned it was unadvisedly and
unconsciously; if he failed it was because he knew no better. You feel
that as you read. The freshness and fun of _Pickwick_--a comic middle-
class epic, so to speak--seem mainly due to high spirits; and perhaps
that immortal book should be described as a first improvisation by a
young man of genius not yet sure of either expression or ambition and
with only vague and momentary ideas about the duties and necessities of
art. But from _Pickwick_ onwards to _Edwin Drood_ the effort after
improvement is manifest. What are _Dombey_ and _Dorrit_ themselves but
the failures of a great and serious artist? In truth the man's genius
did but ripen with years and labour; he spent his life in developing from
a popular writer into an artist. He extemporised _Pickwick_, it may be,
but into _Copperfield_ and _Chuzzlewit_ and the _Tale of Two Cities_ and
_Our Mutual Friend_ he put his whole might, working at them with a
passion of determination not exceeded by Balzac himself. He had
enchanted the public without an effort; he was the best-beloved of modern
writers almost from the outset of his career. But he had in him at least
as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if
all his life he never ceased from self-education but went unswervingly in
pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his
conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise. We have been
told so often to train ourselves by studying the practice of workmen like
Gautier and Hugo and imitating the virtues of work like _Hernani_ and
_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ and _l'Education Sentimentale_--we have heard so
much of the aesthetic impeccability of Young France and the section of
Young England that affects its qualities and reproduces its fashions--that
it is hard to refrain from asking if, when all is said, we should not do
well to look for models nearer home? if in place of such moulds of form
as _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ we might not take to considering stuff like
_Rizpah_ and _Our Mutual Friend_?
Ave atque Vale.
Yes, he had many and grave faults. But so had Sir Walter and the good
Dumas; so, to be candid, had Shakespeare himself--Shakespeare the king of
poets. To myself he is always the man of his unrivalled and enchanting
letters--is always an incarnation of generous and abounding gaiety, a
type of beneficent earnestness, a great expression of intellectual vigour
and emotional vivacity. I love to remember that I came into the world
contemporaneously with some of his bravest work, and to reflect that even
as he was the inspiration of my boyhood so is he a delight of my middle
age. I love to think that while English literature endures he will be
remembered as one that loved his fellow-men, and did more to make them
happy and amiable than any other writer of his time.