afterwards so sleepy. The waking from a sound nap as the mail
came dashing past like a highway comet, with gleaming lamps
and rattling hoofs, and visions of a guard behind, standing up
to keep his feet warm, and of a gentleman in a fur cap opening
his eyes and looking wild and stupefied—the stopping at the
turnpike, where the man was gone to bed, and knocking at the
door until he answered with a smothered shout from under the
bed-clothes in the little room above, where the faint light was
burning, and presently came down, night-capped and shivering,
to throw the gate wide open, and wish all wagons off the road
except by day. The cold sharp interval between night and
morning—the distant streak of light widening and spreading,
and turning from grey to white, and from white to yellow, and
from yellow to burning red—the presence of day, with all its
cheerfulness and life—men and horses at the plough—birds in
the trees and hedges, and boys in solitary fields frightening
them away with rattles. The coming to a town—people busy in
the market; light carts and chaises round the tavern yard;
tradesmen standing at their doors; men running horses up and
down the streets for sale; pigs plunging and grunting in the
dirty distance, getting off with long strings at their legs,
running into clean chemists’ shops and being dislodged with
brooms by ’prentices; the night-coach changing horses—the
passengers cheerless, cold, ugly, and discontented, with
three months’ growth of hair in one night—the coachmen fresh
as from a bandbox, and exquisitely beautiful by contrast:—so
much bustle, so many things in motion, such a variety of
incidents—when was there a journey with so many delights as
that journey in the wagon!’
Or, as a relief from a very painful series of accompanying characters, it
is pleasant to read and remember the description of the fine morning on
which Mr. Jonas Chuzzlewit does not reflect. Mr. Dickens has, however,
no feeling analogous to the nature-worship of some other recent writers.
There is nothing Wordsworthian in his bent; the interpreting inspiration
(as that school speak) is not his. Nor has he the erudition in difficult
names which has filled some pages in late novelists with mineralogy and
botany. His descriptions of nature are fresh and superficial; they are
not sermonic or scientific.
Nevertheless, it may be said that Mr. Dickens’s genius is especially
suited to the delineation of City life. London is like a newspaper.
Everything is there, and everything is disconnected. There is every
kind of person in some houses; but there is no more connection between
the houses than between the neighbours in the lists of ‘births,
marriages, and deaths.’ As we change from the broad leader to the squalid
police-report, we pass a corner and we are in a changed world. This is
advantageous to Mr. Dickens’s genius. His memory is full of instances
of old buildings and curious people, and he does not care to piece
them together. On the contrary, each scene, to his mind, is a separate
scene,—each street a separate street. He has, too, the peculiar alertness
of observation that is observable in those who live by it. He describes
London like a special correspondent for posterity.
A second most wonderful special faculty which Mr. Dickens possesses
is what we may call his _vivification_ of character, or rather of
characteristics. His marvellous power of observation has been exercised
upon men and women even more than upon town or country; and the store
of human detail, so to speak, in his books is endless and enormous. The
boots at the inn, the pickpockets in the street, the undertaker, the
Mrs. Gamp, are all of them at his disposal; he knows each trait and
incident, and he invests them with a kind of perfection in detail which
in reality they do not possess. He has a very peculiar power of taking
hold of some particular traits, and making a character out of them. He
is especially apt to incarnate particular professions in this way. Many
of his people never speak without some allusion to their occupation. You
cannot separate them from it. Nor does the writer ever separate them.
What would Mr. Mould be if not an undertaker? or Mrs. Gamp if not a
nurse? or Charley Bates if not a pickpocket? Not only is human nature in
them subdued to what it works in, but there seems to be no nature to
subdue; the whole character is the idealisation of a trade, and is not
in fancy or thought distinguishable from it. Accordingly, of necessity,
such delineations become caricatures. We do not in general contrast them
with reality; but as soon as we do, we are struck with the monstrous
exaggerations which they present. You could no more fancy Sam Weller,
or Mark Tapley, or the Artful Dodger really existing, walking about
among common ordinary men and women, than you can fancy a talking duck
or a writing bear. They are utterly beyond the pale of ordinary social
intercourse. We suspect, indeed, that Mr. Dickens does not conceive his
characters to himself as mixing in the society he mixes in. He sees
people in the street, doing certain things, talking in a certain way,
and his fancy petrifies them in the act. He goes on fancying hundreds
of reduplications of that act and that speech; he frames an existence
in which there is nothing else but that aspect which attracted his
attention. Sam Weller is an example. He is a man-servant, who makes a
peculiar kind of jokes, and is wonderfully felicitous in certain similes.
You see him at his first introduction:—
‘“My friend,” said the thin gentleman.
‘“You’re one o’ the adwice gratis order,” thought Sam, “or
you wouldn’t be so werry fond o’ me all at once.” But he only
said—“Well, sir?”
‘“My friend,” said the thin gentlemen, with a conciliatory
hem—“Have you got many people stopping here, now? Pretty busy?
Eh?”
‘Sam stole a look at the inquirer. He was a little high-dried
man, with a dark squeezed-up face, and small restless black
eyes, that kept winking and twinkling on each side of his
little inquisitive nose, as if they were playing a perpetual
game of peep-bo with that feature. He was dressed all in black,
with boots as shiny as his eyes, a low white neckcloth, and a
clean shirt with a frill to it. A gold watch-chain, and seals,
depended from his fob. He carried his black kid gloves _in_
his hands, not _on_ them; and as he spoke, thrust his wrists
beneath his coat-tails, with the air of a man who was in the
habit of propounding some regular posers.
‘“Pretty busy, eh?” said the little man.
‘“Oh, werry well, sir,” replied Sam, “we shan’t be bankrupts,
and we shan’t make our fort’ns. We eats our biled mutton
without capers, and don’t care for horse-radish ven ve can get
beef?”
‘“Ah,” said the little man, “you’re a wag, ain’t you?”
‘“My eldest brother was troubled with that complaint,” said
Sam, “it may be catching—I used to sleep with him.”
‘“This is a curious old house of yours,” said the little man,
looking round him.
‘“If you’d sent word you was a coming, we’d ha’ had it
repaired,” replied the imperturbable Sam.
‘The little man seemed rather baffled by these several
repulses, and a short consultation took place between him and
the two plump gentlemen. At its conclusion, the little man took
a pinch of snuff from an oblong silver box, and was apparently
on the point of renewing the conversation, when one of the
plump gentlemen, who, in addition to a benevolent countenance,
possessed a pair of spectacles and a pair of black gaiters,
interfered—
‘“The fact of the matter is,” said the benevolent gentleman,
“that my friend here” (pointing to the other plump gentleman)
“will give you half a guinea, if you’ll answer one or two—”
‘“Now, my dear sir—my dear sir,” said the little man, “pray
allow me—my dear sir, the very first principle to be observed
in these cases is this: if you place a matter in the hands of a
professional man, you must in no way interfere in the progress
of the business; you must repose implicit confidence in him.
Really, Mr. (he turned to the other plump gentleman, and
said)—I forget your friend’s name.”
‘“Pickwick,” said Mr. Wardle, for it was no other than that
jolly personage.
‘“Ah, Pickwick—really Mr. Pickwick, my dear sir, excuse me—I
shall be happy to receive any private suggestions of yours,
as _amicus curiæ_, but you must see the impropriety of your
interfering with my conduct in this case, with such an _ad
captandum_ argument as the offer of half a guinea. Really, my
dear sir, really,” and the little man took an argumentative
pinch of snuff, and looked very profound.
‘“My only wish, sir,” said Mr. Pickwick, “was to bring this
very unpleasant matter to as speedy a close as possible.”
‘“Quite right—quite right,” said the little man.
‘“With which view,” continued Mr. Pickwick, “I made use of the
argument which my experience of men has taught me is the most
likely to succeed in any case.”
‘“Ay, ay,” said the little man, “very good, very good indeed;
but you should have suggested it to _me_. My dear sir,
I’m quite certain you cannot be ignorant of the extent of
confidence which must be placed in professional men. If any
authority can be necessary on such a point, my dear sir, let me
refer you to the well-known case in Barnwell and—”
‘“Never mind George Barnwell,” interrupted Sam, who had
remained a wondering listener during this short colloquy;
“everybody knows vat sort of a case his was, tho’ it’s always
been my opinion, mind you, that the young ’ooman deserved
scragging a precious sight more than he did. Hows’ever, that’s
neither here nor there. You want me to except of half a guinea.
Werry well, I’m agreeable: I can’t say no fairer than that, can
I, sir? (Mr. Pickwick smiled.) Then the next question is, what
the devil do you want with me, as the man said wen he see the
ghost?”
‘“We want to know—” said Mr. Wardle.
‘“Now, my dear sir—my dear sir,” interposed the busy little man.
‘Mr. Wardle shrugged his shoulders, and was silent.
‘“We want to know,” said the little man, solemnly; “and we
ask the question of you, in order that we may not awaken
apprehensions inside—we want to know who you’ve got in this
house at present.”
‘“Who there is in the house!” said Sam, in whose mind the
inmates were always represented by that particular article of
their costume, which came under his immediate superintendence.
“There’s a wooden leg in number six; there’s a pair of Hessians
in thirteen; there’s two pair of halves in the commercial;
there’s these here painted tops in the snuggery inside the bar;
and five more tops in the coffee-room.”
‘“Nothing more?” said the little man.
‘“Stop a bit,” replied Sam, suddenly recollecting himself.
“Yes; there’s a pair of Wellingtons a good deal worn, and a
pair o’ lady’s shoes, in number five.”
‘“What sort of shoes?” hastily inquired Wardle, who, together
with Mr. Pickwick, had been lost in bewilderment at the
singular catalogue of visitors.
‘“Country make,” replied Sam.
‘“Any maker’s name?”
‘“Brown.”
‘“Where of?”
‘“Muggleton.”
‘“It _is_ them,” exclaimed Wardle. “By Heavens, we’ve found
them.”
‘“Hush!” said Sam. “The Wellingtons has gone to Doctors
Commons.”
‘“No,” said the little man.
‘“Yes, for a license.”
‘“We’re in time,” exclaimed Wardle. “Show us the room; not a
moment is to be lost.”
‘“Pray, my dear sir—pray,” said the little man; “caution,
caution.” He drew from his pocket a red silk purse, and looked
very hard at Sam as he drew out a sovereign.
‘Sam grinned expressively.
‘“Show us into the room at once, without announcing us,” said
the little man, “and it’s yours.”’
One can fancy Mr. Dickens hearing a dialogue of this sort,—not nearly
so good, but something like it,—and immediately setting to work to make
it better and put it in a book; then changing a little the situation,
putting the boots one step up in the scale of service, engaging him as
footman to a stout gentleman (but without for a moment losing sight of
the peculiar kind of professional conversation and humour which his first
dialogue presents), and astonishing all his readers by the marvellous
fertility and magical humour with which he maintains that style. Sam
Weller’s father is even a stronger and simpler instance. He is simply
nothing but an old coachman of the stout and extinct sort: you cannot
separate him from the idea of that occupation. But how amusing he is! We
dare not quote a single word of his talk; because we should go on quoting
so long, and every one knows it so well. Some persons may think that this
is not a very high species of delineative art. The idea of personifying
traits and trades may seem to them poor and meagre. Anybody, they may
fancy, can do that. But how would they do it? Whose fancy would not break
down in a page—in five lines? Who could carry on the vivification with
zest and energy and humour for volume after volume? Endless fertility in
laughter-causing detail is Mr. Dickens’s most astonishing peculiarity. It
requires a continuous and careful reading of his works to be aware of his
enormous wealth. Writers have attained the greatest reputation for wit
and humour, whose whole works do not contain so much of either as are to
be found in a very few pages of his.
Mr. Dickens’s humour is indeed very much a result of the two
peculiarities of which we have been speaking. His power of detailed
observation and his power of idealising individual traits of
character—sometimes of one or other of them, sometimes of both of them
together. His similes on matters of external observation are so admirable
that everybody appreciates them, and it would be absurd to quote
specimens of them; nor is it the sort of excellence which best bears to
be paraded for the purposes of critical example. Its off-hand air and
natural connection with the adjacent circumstances are inherent parts of
its peculiar merit. Every reader of Mr. Dickens’s works knows well what
we mean. And who is not a reader of them?
But his peculiar humour is even more indebted to his habit of vivifying
external traits, than to his power of external observation. He, as we
have explained, expands traits into people; and it is a source of true
humour to place these, when so expanded, in circumstances in which only
people—that is complete human beings—can appropriately act. The humour
of Mr. Pickwick’s character is entirely of this kind. He is a kind of
incarnation of simple-mindedness and what we may call obvious-mindedness.
The conclusion which each occurrence or position in life most immediately
presents to the unsophisticated mind is that which Mr. Pickwick is sure
to accept. The proper accompaniments are given to him. He is a stout
gentleman in easy circumstances, who is irritated into originality by
no impulse from within, and by no stimulus from without. He is stated
to have ‘retired from business.’ But no one can fancy what he was in
business. Such guileless simplicity of heart and easy impressibility
of disposition would soon have induced a painful failure amid the
harsh struggles and the tempting speculations of pecuniary life. As
he is represented in the narrative, however, nobody dreams of such
antecedents. Mr. Pickwick moves easily over all the surface of English
life from Goswell Street to Dingley Dell, from Dingley Dell to the
Ipswich elections, from drinking milk-punch in a wheelbarrow to sleeping
in the approximate pound, and no one ever thinks of applying to him the
ordinary maxims which we should apply to any common person in life, or
to any common personage in a fiction. Nobody thinks it is wrong in Mr.
Pickwick to drink too much milk-punch in a wheelbarrow, to introduce
worthless people of whom he knows nothing to the families of people for
whom he really cares; nobody holds him responsible for the consequences;
nobody thinks there is anything wrong in his taking Mr. Bob Sawyer and
Mr. Benjamin Allen to visit Mr. Winkle, senior, and thereby almost
irretrievably offending him with his son’s marriage. We do not reject
moral remarks such as these, but they never occur to us. Indeed, the
indistinct consciousness that such observations are possible, and that
they are hovering about our minds, enhances the humour of the narrative.
We are in a conventional world, where the mere maxims of common life do
not apply, and yet which has all the amusing detail, and picturesque
elements, and singular eccentricities of common life. Mr. Pickwick is
a personified ideal; a kind of amateur in life, whose course we watch
through all the circumstances of ordinary existence, and at whose follies
we are amused just as really skilled people are at the mistakes of an
amateur in their art. His being in the pound is not wrong; his being the
victim of Messrs. Dodson is not foolish. ‘Always shout with the mob,’
said Mr. Pickwick. ‘But suppose there are two mobs,’ said Mr. Snodgrass.
‘Then shout with the loudest,’ said Mr. Pickwick. This is not in him
weakness or time-serving, or want of principle, as in most even of
fictitious people it would be. It is his way. Mr. Pickwick was expected
to say something, so he said ‘Ah!’ in a grave voice. This is not pompous
as we might fancy, or clever as it might be, if intentionally devised; it
is simply his way. Mr. Pickwick gets late at night over the wall behind
the back-door of a young-ladies’ school, is found in that sequestered
place by the schoolmistress and the boarders and the cook, and there is
a dialogue between them. There is nothing out of possibility in this; it
is his way. The humour essentially consists in treating as a moral agent
a being who really is not a moral agent. We treat a vivified accident as
a man, and we are surprised at the absurd results. We are reading about
an acting thing, and we wonder at its scrapes, and laugh at them as if
they were those of the man. There is something of this humour in every
sort of farce. Everybody knows these are not real beings acting in real
life, though they talk as if they were, and want us to believe that they
are. Here, as in Mr. Dickens’s books, we have exaggerations pretending to
comport themselves as ordinary beings, caricatures acting as if they were
characters.
At the same time it is essential to remember, that however great may be
and is the charm of such exaggerated personifications, the best specimens
of them are immensely less excellent, belong to an altogether lower range
of intellectual achievements, than the real depiction of actual living
men. It is amusing to read of beings _out_ of the laws of morality, but
it is more profoundly interesting, as well as more instructive, to read
of those whose life in its moral conditions resembles our own. We see
this most distinctly when both representations are given by the genius
of one and the same writer. Falstaff is a sort of sack-holding paunch,
an exaggerated over-development which no one thinks of holding down to
the commonplace rules of the ten commandments and the statute-law. We
do not think of them in connection with him. They belong to a world
apart. Accordingly, we are vexed when the king discards him and reproves
him. Such a fate was a necessary adherence on Shakespeare’s part to the
historical tradition; he never probably thought of departing from it, nor
would his audience have perhaps endured his doing so. But to those who
look at the historical plays as pure works of imaginative art, it seems
certainly an artistic misconception to have developed so marvellous an
_un_moral impersonation, and then to have subjected it to an ethical
and punitive judgment. Still, notwithstanding this error, which was very
likely inevitable, Falstaff is probably the most remarkable specimen
of caricature-representation to be found in literature. And its very
excellence of execution only shows how inferior is the kind of art
which creates only such representations. Who could compare the genius,
marvellous as must be its fertility, which was needful to create a
Falstaff with that shown in the higher productions of the same mind
in Hamlet, Ophelia, and Lear? We feel instantaneously the difference
between the aggregating accident which rakes up from the externalities
of life other accidents analogous to itself, and the central ideal of
a real character which cannot show itself wholly in any accidents,
but which exemplifies itself partially in many, which unfolds itself
gradually in wide spheres of action, and yet, as with those we know best
in life, leaves something hardly to be understood, and after years of
familiarity is a problem and a difficulty to the last. In the same way,
the embodied characteristics and grotesque exaggerations of Mr. Dickens,
notwithstanding all their humour and all their marvellous abundance, can
never be for a moment compared with the great works of the real painters
of essential human nature.
There is one class of Mr. Dickens’s pictures which may seem to form an
exception to this criticism. It is the delineation of the outlaw, we
might say the anti-law, world in _Oliver Twist_. In one or two instances
Mr. Dickens has been so fortunate as to hit on characteristics which,
by his system of idealisation and continual repetition, might really
be brought to look like a character. A man’s trade or profession in
regular life can only exhaust a very small portion of his nature; no
approach is made to the essence of humanity by the exaggeration of the
traits which typify a beadle or an undertaker. With the outlaw world it
is somewhat different. The bare fact of a man belonging to that world
is so important to his nature, that if it is artistically developed
with coherent accessories, some approximation to a distinctly natural
character will be almost inevitably made. In the characters of Bill
Sykes and Nancy this is so. The former is the skulking ruffian who may
be seen any day at the police-courts, and whom anyone may fancy he sees
by walking through St. Giles’s. You cannot attempt to figure to your
imagination the existence of such a person without being thrown into
the region of the passions, the will, and the conscience; the mere fact
of his maintaining, as a condition of life and by settled profession,
a struggle with regular society necessarily brings these deep parts of
his nature into prominence; great crime usually proceeds from abnormal
impulses or strange effort. Accordingly, Mr. Sykes is the character
most approaching to a coherent man who is to be found in Mr. Dickens’s
works. We do not say that even here there is not some undue heightening
admixture of caricature,—but this defect is scarcely thought of amid the
general coherence of the picture, the painful subject, and the wonderful
command of strange accessories. Miss Nancy is a still more delicate
artistic effort. She is an idealisation of the girl who may also be seen
at the police-courts and St. Giles’s; as bad, according to occupation and
common character, as a woman can be, yet retaining a tinge of womanhood,
and a certain compassion for interesting suffering, which under favouring
circumstances might be the germ of a regenerating influence. We need
not stay to prove how much the imaginative development of such a
personage must concern itself with our deeper humanity; how strongly,
if excellent, it must be contrasted with everything conventional or
casual or superficial. Mr. Dickens’s delineation is in the highest degree
excellent. It possesses not only the more obvious merits belonging to the
subject, but also that of a singular delicacy of expression and idea.
Nobody fancies for a moment that they are reading about anything beyond
the pale of ordinary propriety. We read the account of the life which
Miss Nancy leads with Bill Sykes without such an idea occurring to us:
yet, when we reflect upon it, few things in literary painting are more
wonderful than the depiction of a professional life of sin and sorrow,
so as not even to startle those to whom the deeper forms of either are
but names and shadows. Other writers would have given as vivid a picture:
Defoe would have poured out even a more copious measure of telling
circumstantiality, but he would have narrated his story with an inhuman
distinctness, which if not impure is _un_pure; French writers, whom we
need not name, would have enhanced the interest of their narrative by
trading on the excitement of stimulating scenes. It would be injustice
to Mr. Dickens to say that he has surmounted these temptations; the
unconscious evidence of innumerable details proves that, from a certain
delicacy of imagination and purity of spirit, he has not even experienced
them. Criticism is the more bound to dwell at length on the merits of
these delineations, because no artistic merit can make _Oliver Twist_ a
pleasing work. The squalid detail of crime and misery oppresses us too
much. If it is to be read at all, it should be read in the first hardness
of the youthful imagination, which no touch can move too deeply, and
which is never stirred with tremulous suffering at the ‘still sad music
of humanity.’ The coldest critic in later life may never hope to have
again the apathy of his boyhood.