But he was not exempt from the ordinary laws of nature. The conditions of
his youth left their marks for good and evil on his maturity. The petting
of his babyhood gave him the habit of showing off. We often see him as
a grown man, standing on the table and reciting his little piece, or
singing his little song, to please an admiring audience. He delighted in
playing to the galleries.
His early experience of poverty made him at once tremendously sympathetic
and invincibly optimistic—both of which virtues belong to the poor
more than to the rich. Dickens understood this and never forgot it.
The chief moralities of his poor people are mutual helpfulness and
unquenchable hopefulness. From them, also, he caught the tone of material
comfort which characterizes his visions of the reward of virtue. Having
known cold and hunger, he simply could not resist the desire to make
his favourite characters—if they stayed on earth till the end of the
book—warm and “comfy,” and to give them plenty to eat and drink. This may
not have been artistic, but it was intensely human.
The same personal quality may be noted in his ardour as a reformer. No
writer of fiction has ever done more to better the world than Charles
Dickens. But he did not do it by setting forth programmes of legislation
and theories of government. As a matter of fact, he professed an
amusing “contempt for the House of Commons,” having been a Parliamentary
reporter; and of Sir Robert Peel, who emancipated the Catholics,
enfranchised the Jews, and repealed the Corn Laws, he thought so little
that he caricatured him as Mr. Pecksniff.
Dickens felt the evils of the social order at the precise point where
the shoe pinched; he did not go back to the place where the leather was
tanned or the last designed. It was some practical abuse in poorhouses
or police-courts or prisons; it was some hidden shame in the conduct of
schools, or the renting of tenements; it was some monumental absurdity
in the Circumlocution Office, some pompous and cruel delay in the course
of justice, that made him hot with indignation. These were the things
that he assailed with Rabelaisian laughter, or over which he wept with a
deeper and more sincere pity than that of Tristram Shandy. His idea was
that if he could get people to see that a thing was both ridiculous and
cruel, they would want to stop it. What would come after that, he did not
clearly know, nor had he any particularly valuable suggestions to make,
except the general proposition that men should do justly, and love mercy,
and walk humbly with their God.
He took no stock in the doleful predictions of the politicians that
England was in an awful state merely because Lord Coodle was going out of
office, and Sir Thomas Doodle would not come in, and each of these was
the only man to save the country. The trouble seemed to him deeper and
more real. It was a certain fat-witted selfishness, a certain callous,
complacent blindness in the people who were likely to read his books. He
conceived that his duty as a novelist was done when he had shown up the
absurd and hateful things, and made people laugh at their ugliness, weep
over their inhumanity, and long to sweep them away.
In this attitude, I think, Dickens was not only natural, and true to his
bringing-up, but also wise as a great artist in literature. For I have
observed that brilliant writers, while often profitable as satirists to
expose abuses, are seldom judicious as legislators to plan reforms.
Before we leave this subject of the effects of Dickens’s early poverty
and sudden popularity, we must consider his alleged lack of refinement.
Some say that he was vulgar, others that he was ungrateful and
inconsiderate of the feelings of his friends and relations, others that
he had little or no taste. I should rather say, in the words of the old
epigram, that he had a great deal of taste, and that some of it was very
bad.
Take the matter of his caricaturing real people in his books. No one
could object to his use of the grotesque insolence of a well-known London
magistrate as the foundation of his portrait of Mr. Fang in _Oliver
Twist._ That was public property. But the amiable eccentricities of his
own father and mother, the airy irresponsible ways of his good friend
Leigh Hunt, were private property. Yet even here Dickens could not
reasonably be blamed for observing them, for being amused by them, or for
letting them enrich his general sense of the immense, incalculable, and
fantastic humour of the world. Taste, which is simply another name for
the gusto of life, has a comic side; and a man who is keenly sensitive
to everything cannot be expected to be blind to the funny things that
happen among his family and friends. But when Dickens used these private
delights for the public amusement, and in such a form that the partial
portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Mrs. Nickleby, and Harold Skimpole
were easily identified, all that we can say is that his taste was still
there, but it had gone bad. What could you expect? Where, in his early
years, was he likely to have learned the old-fashioned habit of reserve
in regard to private affairs, which you may call either a mark of good
manners, or a sign of silly pride, according to your own education?
Or take his behavior during his first visit to America in 1842, and
immediately after his return to England. His reception was enough to turn
anybody’s head. “There never was a king or emperor,” wrote Dickens to a
friend, “so cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained at splendid
balls and dinners, and waited upon by public bodies of all kinds.” This
was at the beginning. At the end he was criticized by all, condemned
by many, and abused by some of the newspapers. Why? Chiefly because
he used the dinners given in his honour as occasions to convict the
Americans of their gross national sin of literary piracy, and because
when he got home he wrote a book of _American Notes_, containing some
very severe strictures upon the country which had just entertained him so
magnificently.
Mr. Chesterton defends Dickens for his attack upon the American practice
of book-stealing which grew out of the absence of an International
Copyright Law. He says that it was only the new, raw sensibility of the
Americans that was hurt by these speeches. “Dickens was not in the least
desirous of being thought too ‘high-souled’ to want his wages.... He
asked for his money in a valiant and ringing voice, like a man asking for
his honour.” And this, Mr. Chesterton leaves us to infer, is what any
bold Englishman, as distinguished from a timidly refined American, would
do.
Precisely. But if the bold Englishman had been gently-bred would he have
accepted an invitation to dinner in order that he might publicly say
to his host, in a valiant and ringing voice, “You owe me a thousand
pounds”? Such procedure at the dinner-table is contrary not only to good
manners but also to good digestion. This is what Mr. Chesterton’s bold
British constitution apparently prevents him from seeing. What Dickens
said about international copyright was right. But he was wretchedly wrong
in his choice of the time and place for saying it. The natural irritation
which his bad taste produced was one of the causes which delayed for
fifty years the success of the efforts of American authors to secure
copyright for foreign authors.
The same criticism applies to the _American Notes_. Read them again and
you will see that they are not bad notes. With much that he says about
Yankee boastfulness and superficiality, and the evils of slavery, and the
dangers of yellow journalism, every sane American will agree to-day. But
the occasion which Dickens took for making these remarks was not happily
chosen. It was as if a man who had just been entertained at your house
should write to thank you for the pleasure of the visit, and improve the
opportunity to point out the shocking defects of your domestic service
and the exceedingly bad tone which pervaded your establishment. Such a
“bread-and-butter letter” might be full of good morals, but their effect
would be diminished by its bad manners. Of this Dickens was probably
quite unconscious. He acted spontaneously, irrepressibly, vivaciously,
in accordance with his own taste; and it surprised and irritated him
immensely that people were offended by it.
It was precisely so in regard to his personal appearance. When the time
suddenly arrived that he could indulge his taste in dress without fear of
financial consequences, he did so hilariously and to the fullest extent.
Here is a description of him as he appeared to an American girl at an
evening party in Cincinnati eighty years ago. “He is young and handsome,
has a mellow beautiful eye, fine brow and abundant hair.... His manner
is easy and negligent, but not elegant. His dress was foppish.... He had
a dark coat with lighter pantaloons; a black waistcoat embroidered with
coloured flowers; and about his neck, covering his white shirt-front,
was a black neck-cloth also embroidered with colours, on which were two
large diamond pins connected by a chain; a gold watch-chain and a large
red rose in his buttonhole completed his toilet.”
The young lady does not seem to have been delighted with this costume.
But Dickens did not dress to please her, he dressed to please himself.
His taste was so exuberant that it naturally effervesced in this kind
of raiment. There was certainly nothing immoral about it. He had paid
for it and he had a right to wear it, for to him it seemed beautiful. He
would have been amazed to know that any young lady did not like it; and
her opinion would probably have had little effect upon him, for he wrote
of the occasion on which this candid girl met him, as follows: “In the
evening we went to a party at Judge Walker’s and were introduced to at
least one hundred and fifty first-rate bores, separately and singly.”
But what does it all amount to, this lack of discretion in manners, this
want of reserve in speech, this oriental luxuriance in attire? It simply
goes to show that _Dickens himself was a Dickens character_.
He was vivid, florid, inexhaustible, and untamed. There was material
in the little man for a hundred of his own immortal caricatures. The
self-portrait that he has drawn in _David Copperfield_ is too smooth,
like a retouched photograph. That is why David is less interesting than
half-a-dozen other people in the book. If Dickens could have seen his
own humourous aspects in the magic mirror of his fancy, it would have
been among the richest of his observations, and if he could have let
his enchantment loose upon the subject, not even the figures of Dick
Swiveller and Harold Skimpole would have been more memorable than the
burlesque of “Boz” by the hand of C. D.
But the humourous, the extravagant, the wildly picturesque,—would these
have given a true and complete portrait of the man? Does it make any
great difference what kind of clothes he wore, or how many blunders
of taste and tact he made, even tragic blunders like his inability to
refrain from telling the world all about his domestic unhappiness,—does
all this count for much when we look back upon the wonders which his
imagination wrought in fiction, and upon the generous fruits which his
heart brought forth in life?
It is easy to endure small weaknesses when you can feel beneath them the
presence of great and vital power. Faults are forgiven readily in one
who has the genius of loving much. Better many blunders than the supreme
mistake of a life that is
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.
Charles Dickens never made, nor indeed was tempted to make, that mistake.
He carried with him the defects of his qualities, the marks of his early
life, the penalties of his bewildering success. But, look you, _he
carried them_—they did not crush him nor turn him from his true course.
Forward he marched, cheering and beguiling the way for his comrades
with mirthful stories and tales of pity, lightening many a burden and
consoling many a dark and lonely hour, until he came at last to the
goal of honour and the haven of happy rest. Those who knew him best saw
him most clearly as Carlyle did: “The good, the gentle, high-gifted,
ever-friendly, noble Dickens,—every inch of him an Honest Man.”