Mr. Dickens’s genius, that it would be little skilled in planning plots
for his novels. He certainly is not so skilled. He says in his preface
to the _Pickwick Papers_ ‘that they were designed for the introduction
of diverting characters and incidents; that no ingenuity of plot was
attempted, or even at that time considered feasible by the author in
connection with the desultory plan of publication adopted;’ and he adds
an expression of regret that ‘these chapters had not been strung together
on a thread of more general interest.’ It is extremely fortunate that no
such attempt was made. In the cases in which Mr. Dickens has attempted
to make a long connected story, or to develop into scenes or incidents
a plan in any degree elaborate, the result has been a complete failure.
A certain consistency of genius seems necessary for the construction
of a consecutive plot. An irregular mind naturally shows itself in
incoherency of incident and aberration of character. The method in
which Mr. Dickens’s mind works, if we are correct in our criticism upon
it, tends naturally to these blemishes. Caricatures are necessarily
isolated; they are produced by the exaggeration of certain conspicuous
traits and features; each being is enlarged on its greatest side; and
we laugh at the grotesque grouping and the startling contrast. But that
connection between human beings on which a plot depends is rather severed
than elucidated by the enhancement of their diversities. Interesting
stories are founded on the intimate relations of men and women. These
intimate relations are based not on their superficial traits, or common
occupations, or most visible externalities, but on the inner life of
heart and feeling. You simply divert attention from that secret life
by enhancing the perceptible diversities of common human nature, and
the strange anomalies into which it may be distorted. The original
germ of _Pickwick_ was a ‘Club of Oddities.’ The idea was professedly
abandoned; but traces of it are to be found in all Mr. Dickens’s books.
It illustrates the professed grotesqueness of the characters as well as
their slender connection.
The defect of plot is heightened by Mr. Dickens’s great, we might say
complete, inability to make a love-story. A pair of lovers is by custom
a necessity of narrative fiction, and writers who possess a great
general range of mundane knowledge, and but little knowledge of the
special sentimental subject, are often in amusing difficulties. The
watchful reader observes the transition from the hearty description of
well-known scenes, of prosaic streets, or journeys by wood and river, to
the pale colours of ill-attempted poetry, to such sights as the novelist
evidently wishes that he need not try to see. But few writers exhibit
the difficulty in so aggravated a form as Mr. Dickens. Most men by
taking thought can make a lay figure to look not so very unlike a young
gentleman, and can compose a telling schedule of ladylike charms. Mr.
Dickens has no power of doing either. The heroic character—we do not
mean the form of character so called in life and action, but that which
is hereditary in the heroes of novels—is not suited to his style of
art. Hazlitt wrote an essay to inquire ‘Why the heroes of romances are
insipid;’ and without going that length it may safely be said that the
character of the agreeable young gentleman who loves and is loved should
not be of the most marked sort. Flirtation ought not to be an exaggerated
pursuit. Young ladies and their admirers should not express themselves in
the heightened and imaginative phraseology suited to Charley Bates and
the Dodger. Humour is of no use, for no one makes love in jokes: a tinge
of insidious satire may perhaps be permitted as a rare and occasional
relief, but it will not be thought ‘a pretty book,’ if so malicious an
element be at all habitually perceptible. The broad farce in which Mr.
Dickens indulges is thoroughly out of place. If you caricature a pair of
lovers ever so little, by the necessity of their calling you make them
ridiculous. One of Sheridan’s best comedies is remarkable for having no
scene in which the hero and heroine are on the stage together; and Mr.
Moore suggests that the shrewd wit distrusted his skill in the light
dropping love-talk which would have been necessary. Mr. Dickens would
have done well to imitate so astute a policy; but he has none of the
managing shrewdness which those who look at Sheridan’s career attentively
will probably think not the least remarkable feature in his singular
character. Mr. Dickens, on the contrary, pours out painful sentiments
as if he wished the abundance should make up for the inferior quality.
The excruciating writing which is expended on Miss Ruth Pinch passes
belief. Mr. Dickens is not only unable to make lovers talk, but to
describe heroines in mere narrative. As has been said, most men can make
a jumble of blue eyes and fair hair and pearly teeth, that does very well
for a young lady, at least for a good while; but Mr. Dickens will not,
probably cannot, attain even to this humble measure of descriptive art.
He vitiates the repose by broad humour, or disenchants the delicacy by
an unctuous admiration.
This deficiency is probably nearly connected with one of Mr. Dickens’s
most remarkable excellences. No one can read Mr. Thackeray’s writings
without feeling that he is perpetually treading as close as he dare
to the border-line that separates the world which may be described in
books from the world which it is prohibited so to describe. No one knows
better than this accomplished artist where that line is, and how curious
are its windings and turns. The charge against him is that he knows it
but too well; that with an anxious care and a wistful eye he is ever
approximating to its edge, and hinting with subtle art how thoroughly
he is familiar with, and how interesting he could make, the interdicted
region on the other side. He never violates a single conventional rule;
but at the same time the shadow of the immorality that is not seen is
scarcely ever wanting to his delineation of the society that is seen.
Every one may perceive what is passing in his fancy. Mr. Dickens is
chargeable with no such defect: he does not seem to feel the temptation.
By what we may fairly call an instinctive purity of genius, he not only
observes the conventional rules, but makes excursions into topics which
no other novelist could safely handle, and, by a felicitous instinct,
deprives them of all impropriety. No other writer could have managed
the humour of Mrs. Gamp without becoming unendurable. At the same time
it is difficult not to believe that this singular insensibility to the
temptations to which many of the greatest novelists have succumbed is
in some measure connected with his utter inaptitude for delineating the
portion of life to which their art is specially inclined. He delineates
neither the love-affairs which ought to be, nor those which ought not to
be.
Mr. Dickens’s indisposition to ‘make capital’ out of the most commonly
tempting part of human sentiment is the more remarkable because he
certainly does not show the same indisposition in other cases. He has
naturally great powers of pathos; his imagination is familiar with the
common sort of human suffering; and his marvellous conversancy with the
detail of existence enables him to describe sick-beds and death-beds
with an excellence very rarely seen in literature. A nature far more
sympathetic than that of most authors has familiarised him with such
subjects. In general, a certain apathy is characteristic of book-writers,
and dulls the efficacy of their pathos. Mr. Dickens is quite exempt
from this defect; but, on the other hand, is exceedingly prone to a
very ostentatious exhibition of the opposite excellence. He dwells on
dismal scenes with a kind of fawning fondness; and he seems unwilling to
leave them, long after his readers have had more than enough of them.
He describes Mr. Dennis the hangman as having a professional fondness
for his occupation: he has the same sort of fondness apparently for the
profession of death-painter. The painful details he accumulates are a
very serious drawback from the agreeableness of his writings. Dismal
‘light literature’ is the dismallest of reading. The reality of the
police reports is sufficiently bad, but a fictitious police report would
be the most disagreeable of conceivable compositions. Some portions of
Mr. Dickens’s books are liable to a good many of the same objections.
They are squalid from noisome trivialities, and horrid with terrifying
crime. In his earlier books this is commonly relieved at frequent
intervals by a graphic and original mirth. As we will not say age, but
maturity, has passed over his powers, this counteractive element has
been lessened; the humour is not so happy as it was, but the wonderful
fertility in painful _minutiæ_ still remains.
Mr. Dickens’s political opinions have subjected him to a good deal
of criticism, and to some ridicule. He has shown, on many occasions,
the desire—which we see so frequent among able and influential men—to
start as a political reformer. Mr. Spurgeon said, with an application
to himself, ‘If you’ve got the ear of the public, _of course_ you must
begin to tell it its faults.’ Mr. Dickens has been quite disposed to
make this use of his popular influence. Even in _Pickwick_ there are
many traces of this tendency; and the way in which it shows itself in
that book and in others is very characteristic of the time at which
they appeared. The most instructive political characteristic of the
years from 1825 to 1845 is the growth and influence of the scheme of
opinion which we call Radicalism. There are several species of creeds
which are comprehended under this generic name, but they all evince a
marked reaction against the worship of the English constitution and the
affection for the English _status quo_, which were then the established
creed and sentiment. All Radicals are anti-Eldonites. This is equally
true of the Benthamite or philosophical radicalism of the early period,
and the Manchester, or ‘definite-grievance radicalism,’ among the
last vestiges of which we are now living. Mr. Dickens represents a
species different from either. His is what we may call the ‘sentimental
radicalism;’ and if we recur to the history of the time, we shall find
that there would not originally have been any opprobrium attaching to
such a name. The whole course of the legislation, and still more of the
administration, of the first twenty years of the nineteenth century was
marked by a harsh unfeelingness which is of all faults the most contrary
to any with which we are chargeable now. The world of the ‘Six Acts,’
of the frequent executions, of the Draconic criminal law, is so far
removed from us that we cannot comprehend its having ever existed. It is
more easy to understand the recoil which has followed. All the social
speculation, and much of the social action of the few years succeeding
the Reform Bill, bear the most marked traces of the reaction. The spirit
which animates Mr. Dickens’s political reasonings and observations
expresses it exactly. The vice of the then existing social authorities,
and of the then existing public, had been the forgetfulness of the pain
which their own acts evidently produced,—an unrealising habit which
adhered to official rules and established maxims, and which would not
be shocked by the evident consequences, by proximate human suffering.
The sure result of this habit was the excitement of the habit precisely
opposed to it. Mr. Carlyle, in his _Chartism_, we think, observes of
the poor-law reform: ‘It was then, above all things, necessary that
outdoor relief should cease. But how? What means did great Nature take
for accomplishing that most desirable end? She created a race of men who
believed the cessation of outdoor relief to be the one thing needful.’
In the same way, and by the same propensity to exaggerated opposition
which is inherent in human nature, the unfeeling obtuseness of the
early part of this century was to be corrected by an extreme, perhaps
an excessive, sensibility to human suffering in the years which have
followed. There was most adequate reason for the sentiment in its origin,
and it had a great task to perform in ameliorating harsh customs and
repealing dreadful penalties; but it has continued to repine at such
evils long after they ceased to exist, and when the only facts that at
all resemble them are the necessary painfulness of due punishment and the
necessary rigidity of established law. Mr. Dickens is an example both
of the proper use and of the abuse of the sentiment. His earlier works
have many excellent descriptions of the abuses which had descended to the
present generation from others whose sympathy with pain was less tender.
Nothing can be better than the description of the poor debtors’ gaol in
_Pickwick_, or of the old parochial authorities in _Oliver Twist_. No
doubt these descriptions are caricatures, all his delineations are so;
but the beneficial use of such art can hardly be better exemplified.
Human nature endures the aggravation of vices and foibles in written
description better than that of excellences. We cannot bear to hear even
the hero of a book for ever called ‘just;’ we detest the recurring praise
even of beauty, much more of virtue. The moment you begin to exaggerate a
character of true excellence, you spoil it; the traits are too delicate
not to be injured by heightening, or marred by over-emphasis. But a
beadle is made for caricature. The slight measure of pomposity that
humanises his unfeelingness introduces the requisite comic element; even
the turnkeys of a debtors’ prison may by skilful hands be similarly
used. The contrast between the destitute condition of Job Trotter and Mr.
Jingle and their former swindling triumph is made comic by a rarer touch
of unconscious art. Mr. Pickwick’s warm heart takes so eager an interest
in the misery of his old enemies, that our colder nature is tempted
to smile. We endure the over-intensity, at any rate the unnecessary
aggravation, of the surrounding misery; and we endure it willingly,
because it brings out better than anything else could have done the
half-comic intensity of a sympathetic nature.
It is painful to pass from these happy instances of well-used power to
the glaring abuses of the same faculty in Mr. Dickens’s later books. He
began by describing really removable evils in a style which would induce
all persons, however insensible, to remove them if they could; he has
ended by describing the natural evils and inevitable pains of the present
state of being, in such a manner as must tend to excite discontent and
repining. The result is aggravated, because Mr. Dickens never ceases
to hint that these evils are removable, though he does not say by what
means. Nothing is easier than to show the evils of anything. Mr. Dickens
has not unfrequently spoken, and what is worse, he has taught a great
number of parrot-like imitators to speak, in what really is, if they knew
it, a tone of objection to the necessary constitution of human society.
If you will only write a description of it, any form of government will
seem ridiculous. What is more absurd than a despotism, even at its best?
A king of ability or an able minister sits in an orderly room filled
with memorials, and returns, and documents, and memoranda. These are his
world; among these he of necessity lives and moves. Yet how little of
the real life of the nation he governs can be represented in an official
form! How much of real suffering is there that statistics can never tell!
how much of obvious good is there that no memorandum to a minister will
ever mention! how much deception is there in what such documents contain!
how monstrous must be the ignorance of the closet statesman, after all
his life of labour, of much that a ploughman could tell him of! A free
government is almost worse, as it must read in a written delineation.
Instead of the real attention of a laborious and anxious statesman,
we have now the shifting caprices of a popular assembly—elected for
one object, deciding on another; changing with the turn of debate;
shifting in its very composition; one set of men coming down to vote
to-day, to-morrow another and often unlike set, most of them eager for
the dinner-hour, actuated by unseen influences, by a respect for their
constituents, by the dread of an attorney in a far-off borough. What
people are these to control a nation’s destinies, and wield the power
of an empire, and regulate the happiness of millions! Either way we are
at fault. Free government seems an absurdity, and despotism is so too.
Again, every form of law has a distinct expression, a rigid procedure,
customary rules and forms. It is administered by human beings liable to
mistake, confusion, and forgetfulness, and in the long run, and on the
average, is sure to be tainted with vice and fraud. Nothing can be easier
than to make a case, as we may say, against any particular system, by
pointing out with emphatic caricature its inevitable miscarriages, and
by pointing out nothing else. Those who so address us may assume a tone
of philanthropy, and for ever exult that they are not so unfeeling as
other men are; but the real tendency of their exhortations is to make men
dissatisfied with their inevitable condition, and, what is worse, to make
them fancy that its irremediable evils can be remedied, and indulge in a
succession of vague strivings and restless changes. Such, however,—though
in a style of expression somewhat different,—is very much the tone with
which Mr. Dickens and his followers have in later years made us familiar.
To the second-hand repeaters of a cry so feeble, we can have nothing
to say; if silly people cry because they think the world is silly,
let them cry; but the founder of the school cannot, we are persuaded,
peruse without mirth the lachrymose eloquence which his disciples have
perpetrated. The soft moisture of irrelevant sentiment cannot have
entirely entered into his soul. A truthful genius must have forbidden
it. Let us hope that his pernicious example may incite some one of equal
genius to preach with equal efficiency a sterner and a wiser gospel; but
there is no need just now for us to preach it without genius.
There has been much controversy about Mr. Dickens’s taste. A great many
cultivated people will scarcely concede that he has any taste at all;
a still larger number of fervent admirers point, on the other hand, to
a hundred felicitous descriptions and delineations which abound in apt
expressions and skilful turns and happy images,—in which it would be
impossible to alter a single word without altering for the worse; and
naturally inquire whether such excellences in what is written do not
indicate good taste in the writer. The truth is, that Mr. Dickens has
what we may call creative taste; that is to say, the habit or faculty,
whichever we may choose to call it, which at the critical instant of
artistic production offers to the mind the right word, and the right
word only. If he is engaged on a good subject for caricature, there will
be no defect of taste to preclude the caricature from being excellent.
But it is only in moments of imaginative production that he has any
taste at all. His works nowhere indicate that he possesses in any degree
the passive taste which decides what is good in the writings of other
people, and what is not, and which performs the same critical duty upon a
writer’s own efforts when the confusing mists of productive imagination
have passed away. Nor has Mr. Dickens the gentlemanly instinct which in
many minds supplies the place of purely critical discernment, and which,
by constant association with those who know what is best, acquires a
second-hand perception of that which is best. He has no tendency to
conventionalism for good or for evil; his merits are far removed from the
ordinary path of writers, and it was not probably so much effort to him
as to other men to step so far out of that path: he scarcely knew how far
it was. For the same reason, he cannot tell how faulty his writing will
often be thought, for he cannot tell what people will think.
A few pedantic critics have regretted that Mr. Dickens had not received
what they call a regular education. And if we understand their meaning,
we believe they mean to regret that he had not received a course of
discipline which would probably have impaired his powers. A regular
education should mean that ordinary system of regulation and instruction
which experience has shown to fit men best for the ordinary pursuits of
life. It applies the requisite discipline to each faculty in the exact
proportion in which that faculty is wanted in the pursuits of life; it
develops understanding, and memory, and imagination, each in accordance
with the scale prescribed. To men of ordinary faculties this is nearly
essential; it is the only mode in which they can be fitted for the
inevitable competition of existence. To men of regular and symmetrical
genius also, such a training will often be beneficial. The world knows
pretty well what are the great tasks of the human mind, and has learnt in
the course of ages with some accuracy what is the kind of culture likely
to promote their exact performance. A man of abilities extraordinary
in degree but harmonious in proportion will be the better for having
submitted to the kind of discipline which has been ascertained to fit a
man for the work to which powers in that proportion are best fitted; he
will do what he has to do better and more gracefully; culture will add
a touch to the finish of nature. But the case is very different with
men of irregular and anomalous genius, whose excellences consist in
the aggravation of some special faculty, or at the most of one or two.
The discipline which will fit such a man for the production of great
literary works is that which will most develop the peculiar powers in
which he excels; the rest of the mind will be far less important; it
will not be likely that the culture which is adapted to promote this
special development will also be that which is most fitted for expanding
the powers of common men in common directions. The precise problem is to
develop the powers of a strange man in a strange direction. In the case
of Mr. Dickens, it would have been absurd to have shut up his observant
youth within the walls of a college. They would have taught him nothing
about Mrs. Gamp there; Sam Weller took no degree. The kind of early life
fitted to develop the power of apprehensive observation is a brooding
life in stirring scenes; the idler in the streets of life knows the
streets; the bystander knows the picturesque effect of life better than
the player; and the meditative idler amid the hum of existence is much
more likely to know its sound and to take in and comprehend its depths
and meanings than the scholastic student intent on books, which, if they
represent any world, represent one which has long passed away,—which
commonly try rather to develop the reasoning understanding than the
seeing observation,—which are written in languages that have long been
dead. You will not train by such discipline a caricaturist of obvious
manners.