“THE PICKWICK PAPERS”
Round the birth of “Pickwick” broke one of those literary quarrels
that were too common in the life of Dickens. Such quarrels indeed
generally arose from some definite mistake or misdemeanour on the part
of somebody else; but they were also made possible by an indefinite
touchiness and susceptibility in Dickens himself. He was so sensitive
on points of personal authorship and responsibility that even his
sacred sense of humour deserted him. He turned people into mortal
enemies whom he might have turned very easily into immortal jokes. It
was not that he was lawless: in a sense it was that he was too legal;
but he did not understand the principle of _de minimis non curat lex_.
Anybody could draw him; any fool could make a fool of him. Any obscure
madman who chose to say that he had written the whole of “Martin
Chuzzlewit”; any penny-a-liner who chose to say that Dickens wore no
shirt collar could call forth the most passionate and public denials as
of a man pleading “not guilty” to witchcraft or high treason. Hence
the letters of Dickens are filled with a certain singular type of
quarrels and complaints, quarrels and complaints in which one cannot
say that he was on the wrong side, but merely that even in being on the
right side he was in the wrong place. He was not only a generous man,
he was even a just man; to have made against anybody a charge or claim
which was unfair would have been insupportable to him. His weakness
was that he found the unfair claim or charge, however small, equally
insupportable when brought against himself. No one can say of him
that he was often wrong; we can only say of him as of many pugnacious
people, that he was too often right.
The incidents attending the inauguration of the “Pickwick Papers” are
not, perhaps, a perfect example of this trait, because Dickens was here
a hand-to-mouth journalist, and the blow might possibly have been more
disabling than those struck at him in his days of triumph. But all
through those days of triumph, and to the day of his death, Dickens
took this old tea-cup tempest with the most terrible gravity, drew
up declarations, called witnesses, preserved pulverizing documents,
and handed on to his children the forgotten folly as if it had been
a Highland feud. Yet the unjust claim made on him was so much more
ridiculous even than it was unjust, that it seems strange that he
should have remembered it for a month except for his amusement. The
facts are simple and familiar to most people. The publishers--Chapman
& Hall--wished to produce some kind of serial with comic illustrations
by a popular caricaturist named Seymour. This artist was chiefly famous
for his rendering of the farcical side of sport, and to suit this
specialty it was very vaguely suggested to Dickens by the publishers
that he should write about a Nimrod Club, or some such thing, a club
of amateur sportsmen, foredoomed to perpetual ignominies. Dickens
objected in substance upon two very sensible grounds--first, that
sporting sketches were stale; and second, that he knew nothing about
sport. He changed the idea to that of a general club for travel
and investigation, the Pickwick Club, and only retained one fated
sportsman, Mr. Winkle, the melancholy remnant of the Nimrod Club that
never was. The first seven pictures appeared with the signature of
Seymour and the letterpress of Dickens, and in them Winkle and his
woes were fairly, but not extraordinarily prominent. Before the eighth
picture appeared Seymour had blown his brains out. After a brief
interval of the employment of a man named Buss, Dickens obtained the
assistance of Hoblot K. Brown whom we all call “Phiz,” and may almost,
in a certain sense, be said to have gone into partnership with him.
They were as suited to each other and to the common creation of a
unique thing as Gilbert and Sullivan. No other illustrator ever created
the true Dickens characters with the precise and correct quantum of
exaggeration. No other illustrator ever breathed the true Dickens
atmosphere, in which clerks are clerks and yet at the same time elves.
To the tame mind the above affair does not seem to offer anything
very promising in the way of a row. But Seymour’s widow managed to
evolve out of it the proposition that somehow or other her husband had
written “Pickwick,” or, at least, had been responsible for the genius
and success of it. It does not appear that she had anything at all
resembling a reason for this opinion except the unquestionable fact
that the publishers had started with the idea of employing Seymour.
This was quite true, and Dickens (who over and above his honesty was
far too quarrelsome a man not to try to keep in the right, and who
showed a sort of fierce carefulness in telling the truth in such cases)
never denied it or attempted to conceal it. It was quite true, that
at the beginning, instead of Seymour being employed to illustrate
Dickens, Dickens may be said to have been employed to illustrate
Seymour. But that Seymour invented anything in the letter-press large
or small, that he invented either the outline of Mr. Pickwick’s
character or the number of Mr. Pickwick’s cabman, that he invented
either the story, or so much as a semi-colon in the story was not only
never proved, but was never very lucidly alleged. Dickens fills his
letters with all that there is to be said against Mrs. Seymour’s idea;
it is not very clear whether there was ever anything definitely said
for it.
Upon the mere superficial fact and law of the affair, Dickens ought
to have been superior to this silly business. But in a much deeper
and a much more real sense he ought to have been superior to it.
It did not really touch him or his greatness at all, even as an
abstract allegation. If Seymour had started the story, had provided
Dickens with his puppets, Tupman or Jingle, Dickens would have still
have been Dickens and Seymour only Seymour. As a matter of fact, it
happened to be a contemptible lie, but it would have been an equally
contemptible truth. For the fact is that the greatness of Dickens and
especially the greatness of Pickwick is not of a kind that could be
affected by somebody else suggesting the first idea. It could not be
affected by somebody else writing the first chapter. If it could be
shown that another man had suggested to Hawthorne (let us say) the
primary conception of the “Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne who worked it
out would still be an exquisite workman; but he would be by so much
less a creator. But in a case like Pickwick there is a simple test.
If Seymour gave Dickens the main idea of Pickwick, what was it? There
is no primary conception of Pickwick for any one to suggest. Dickens
not only did not get the general plan from Seymour, he did not get it
at all. In Pickwick, and, indeed, in Dickens, generally it is in the
details that the author is creative, it is in the details that he is
vast. The power of the book lies in the perpetual torrent of ingenious
and inventive treatment; the theme (at least at the beginning) simply
does not exist. The idea of Tupman, the fat lady-killer, is in itself
quite dreary and vulgar; it is the detailed Tupman, as he is developed,
who is unexpectedly amusing. The idea of Winkle, the clumsy sportsman,
is in itself quite stale; it is as he goes on repeating himself that
he becomes original. We hear of men whose imagination can touch with
magic the dull facts of our life, but Dickens’s yet more indomitable
fancy could touch with magic even our dull fiction. Before we are
halfway through the book the stock characters of dead and damned farces
astonish us like splendid strangers.
Seymour’s claim, then, viewed symbolically was even a compliment. It
was true in spirit that Dickens obtained (or might have obtained) the
start of Pickwick from somebody else, from anybody else. For he had
a more gigantic energy than the energy of the intense artist, the
energy which is prepared to write something. He had the energy which
is prepared to write anything. He could have finished any man’s tale.
He could have breathed a mad life into any man’s characters. If it
had been true that Seymour had planned out Pickwick, if Seymour had
fixed the chapters and named and numbered the characters, his slave
would have shown even in these shackles such a freedom as would have
shaken the world. If Dickens had been forced to make his incidents out
of a chapter in a child’s reading-book, or the names in a scrap of
newspaper, he would have turned them in ten pages into creatures of
his own. Seymour, as I say, was in a manner right in spirit. Dickens
would at this time get his materials from anywhere, in the sense that
he cared little what materials they were. He would not have stolen;
but if he had stolen he would never have imitated. The power which
he proceeded at once to exhibit was the one power in letters which
literally cannot be imitated, the primary inexhaustible creative
energy, the enormous prodigality of genius which no one but another
genius could parody. To claim to have originated an idea of Dickens is
like claiming to have contributed a glass of water to Niagara. Wherever
this stream or that stream started the colossal cataract of absurdity
went roaring night and day. The volume of his invention overwhelmed all
doubt of his inventiveness; Dickens was evidently a great man; unless
he was a thousand men.
The actual circumstances of the writing and publishing of “Pickwick”
show that while Seymour’s specific claim was absurd, Dickens’s
indignant exactitude about every jot and tittle of authorship was also
inappropriate and misleading. “The Pickwick Papers,” when all is said
and done, did emerge out of a haze of suggestions and proposals in
which more than one person was involved. The publishers failed to base
the story on a Nimrod Club, but they succeeded in basing it on a club.
Seymour, by virtue of his idiosyncrasy, if he did not create, brought
about the creation of Mr. Winkle. Seymour sketched Mr. Pickwick as a
tall, thin man. Mr. Chapman (apparently without any word from Dickens)
boldly turned him into a short, fat man. Chapman took the type from a
corpulent old dandy named Foster, who wore tights and gaiters and lived
at Richmond. In this sense were we affected by this idle aspect of the
thing we might call Chapman the real originator of “Pickwick.” But as I
have suggested, originating “Pickwick” is not the point. It was quite
easy to originate “Pickwick.” The difficulty was to write it.
However such things may be, there can be no question of the result of
this chaos. In “The Pickwick Papers” Dickens sprang suddenly from a
comparatively low level to a very high one. To the level of “Sketches
by Boz” he never afterwards descended. To the level of “The Pickwick
Papers” it is doubtful if he ever afterwards rose. “Pickwick,” indeed,
is not a good novel; but it is not a bad novel, for it is not a novel
at all. In one sense, indeed, it is something nobler than a novel, for
no novel with a plot and a proper termination could emit that sense of
everlasting youth--a sense as of the gods gone wandering in England.
This is not a novel, for all novels have an end; and “Pickwick,”
properly speaking, has no end--he is equal unto the angels. The point
at which, as a fact, we find the printed matter terminates is not
an end in any artistic sense of the word. Even as a boy I believed
there were some more pages that were torn out of my copy, and I am
looking for them still. The book might have been cut short anywhere
else. It might have been cut short after Mr. Pickwick was released by
Mr. Nupkins, or after Mr. Pickwick was fished out of the water, or at
a hundred other places. And we should still have known that this was
not really the story’s end. We should have known that Mr. Pickwick
was still having the same high adventures on the same high roads. As
it happens, the book ends after Mr. Pickwick has taken a house in the
neighbourhood of Dulwich. But we know he did not stop there. We know
he broke out, that he took again the road of the high adventures; we
know that if we take it ourselves in any acre of England, we may come
suddenly upon him in a lane.
But this relation of “Pickwick” to the strict form of fiction demands
a further word, which should indeed be said in any case before the
consideration of any or all of the Dickens tales. Dickens’s work is
not to be reckoned in novels at all. Dickens’s work is to be reckoned
always by characters, sometimes by groups, oftener by episodes, but
never by novels. You cannot discuss whether “Nicholas Nickleby” is a
good novel, or whether “Our Mutual Friend” is a bad novel. Strictly,
there is no such novel as “Nicholas Nickleby.” There is no such novel
as “Our Mutual Friend.” They are simply lengths cut from the flowing
and mixed substance called Dickens--a substance of which any given
length will be certain to contain a given proportion of brilliant and
of bad stuff. You can say, according to your opinions, “the Crummles
part is perfect,” or “the Boffins are a mistake,” just as a man
watching a river go by him could count here a floating flower, and
there a streak of scum. But you cannot artistically divide the output
into books. The best of his work can be found in the worst of his
works. “The Tale of Two Cities” is a good novel; “Little Dorrit” is
not a good novel. But the description of “The Circumlocution Office”
in “Little Dorrit” is quite as good as the description of “Tellson’s
Bank” in “The Tale of Two Cities.” “The Old Curiosity Shop” is not
so good as “David Copperfield,” but Swiveller is quite as good as
Micawber. Nor is there any reason why these superb creatures, as a
general rule, should be in one novel any more than another. There is
no reason why Sam Weller, in the course of his wanderings, should not
wander into “Nicholas Nickleby.” There is no reason why Major Bagstock,
in his brisk way, should not walk straight out of “Dombey and Son”
and straight into “Martin Chuzzlewit.” To this generalization some
modification should be added. “Pickwick” stands by itself, and has even
a sort of unity in not pretending to unity. “David Copperfield,” in a
less degree, stands by itself, as being the only book in which Dickens
wrote of himself; and “The Tale of Two Cities” stands by itself as
being the only book in which Dickens slightly altered himself. But as
a whole, this should be firmly grasped, that the units of Dickens, the
primary elements, are not the stories, but the characters who affect
the stories--or, more often still, the characters who do not affect the
stories.
This is a plain matter; but, unless it be stated and felt, Dickens may
be greatly misunderstood and greatly underrated. For not only is his
whole machinery directed to facilitating the self-display of certain
characters, but something more deep and more unmodern still is also
true of him. It is also true that all the _moving_ machinery exists
only to display entirely _static_ character. Things in the Dickens
story shift and change only in order to give us glimpses of great
characters that do not change at all. If we had a sequel of Pickwick
ten years afterwards, Pickwick would be exactly the same age. We know
he would not have fallen into that strange and beautiful second
childhood which soothed and simplified the end of Colonel Newcome.
Newcome, throughout the book, is in an atmosphere of time: Pickwick,
throughout the book, is not. This will probably be taken by most modern
people as praise of Thackeray and dispraise of Dickens. But this only
shows how few modern people understand Dickens. It also shows how few
understand the faiths and the fables of mankind. The matter can only be
roughly stated in one way. Dickens did not strictly make a literature;
he made a mythology.
For a few years our corner of Western Europe has had a fancy for this
thing we call fiction; that is, for writing down our own lives or
similar lives in order to look at them. But though we call it fiction,
it differs from older literatures chiefly in being less fictitious.
It imitates not only life, but the limitations of life; it not only
reproduces life, it reproduces death. But outside us, in every other
country, in every other age, there has been going on from the beginning
a more fictitious kind of fiction. I mean the kind now called folklore,
the literature of the people. Our modern novels, which deal with men
as they are, are chiefly produced by a small and educated section of
the society. But this other literature deals with men greater than
they are--with demi-gods and heroes; and that is far too important a
matter to be trusted to the educated classes. The fashioning of these
portents is a popular trade, like ploughing or bricklaying; the men who
made hedges, the men who made ditches, were the men who made deities.
Men could not elect their kings, but they could elect their gods. So we
find ourselves faced with a fundamental contrast between what is called
fiction and what is called folklore. The one exhibits an abnormal
degree of dexterity operating within our daily limitations; the other
exhibits quite normal desires extended beyond those limitations.
Fiction means the common things as seen by the uncommon people. Fairy
tales mean the uncommon things as seen by the common people.
As our world advances through history towards its present epoch, it
becomes more specialist, less democratic, and folklore turns gradually
into fiction. But it is only slowly that the old elfin fire fades into
the light of common realism. For ages after our characters have dressed
up in the clothes of mortals they betray the blood of the gods. Even
our phraseology is full of relics of this. When a modern novel is
devoted to the bewilderments of a weak young clerk who cannot decide
which woman he wants to marry, or which new religion he believes in,
we still give this knock-kneed cad the name of “the hero”--the name
which is the crown of Achilles. The popular preference for a story
with “a happy ending” is not, or at least was not, a mere sweet-stuff
optimism; it is the remains of the old idea of the triumph of the
dragon-slayer, the ultimate apotheosis of the man beloved of heaven.
But there is another and more intangible trace of this fading
supernaturalism--a trace very vivid to the reader, but very elusive
to the critic. It is a certain air of endlessness in the episodes,
even in the shortest episodes--a sense that, although we leave them,
they still go on. Our modern attraction to short stories is not an
accident of form; it is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and
fragility; it means that existence is only an impression, and, perhaps,
only an illusion. A short story of to-day has the air of a dream; it
has the irrevocable beauty of a falsehood; we get a glimpse of grey
streets of London or red plains of India, as in an opium vision; we
see people,--arresting people, with fiery and appealing faces. But
when the story is ended, the people are ended. We have no instinct
of anything ultimate and enduring behind the episodes. The moderns,
in a word, describe life in short stories because they are possessed
with the sentiment that life itself is an uncommonly short story,
and perhaps not a true one. But in this elder literature, even in the
comic literature (indeed, especially in the comic literature), the
reverse is true. The characters are felt to be fixed things of which
we have fleeting glimpses; that is, they are felt to be divine. Uncle
Toby is talking for ever, as the elves are dancing for ever. We feel
that whenever we hammer on the house of Falstaff, Falstaff will be
at home. We feel it as a Pagan would feel that, if a cry broke the
silence after ages of unbelief, Apollo would still be listening in his
temple. These writers may tell short stories, but we feel they are only
parts of a long story. And herein lies the peculiar significance, the
peculiar sacredness even, of penny dreadfuls and the common printed
matter made for our errand-boys. Here in dim and desperate forms, under
the ban of our base culture, stormed at by silly magistrates, sneered
at by silly schoolmasters,--here is the old popular literature still
popular; here is the unmistakable voluminousness, the thousand and one
tales of Dick Deadshot, like the thousand and one tales of Robin Hood.
Here is the splendid and static boy, the boy who remains a boy through
a thousand volumes and a thousand years. Here in mean alleys and dim
shops, shadowed and shamed by the police, mankind is still driving its
dark trade in heroes. And elsewhere, and in all other ages, in braver
fashion, under cleaner skies the same eternal tale-telling goes on, and
the whole mortal world is a factory of immortals.
Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of
the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest. He did not always manage
to make his characters men, but he always managed, at the least, to
make them gods. They are creatures like Punch or Father Christmas. They
live statically, in a perpetual summer of being themselves. It was not
the aim of Dickens to show the effect of time and circumstance upon a
character; it was not even his aim to show the effect of a character on
time and circumstance. It is worth remark, in passing, that whenever he
tried to describe change in a character, he made a mess of it, as in
the repentance of Dombey or the apparent deterioration of Boffin. It
was his aim to show character hung in a kind of happy void, in a world
apart from time--yes, and essentially apart from circumstance, though
the phrase may seem odd in connection with the godlike horse-play of
“Pickwick.” But all the Pickwickian events, wild as they often are,
were only designed to display the greater wildness of souls, or
sometimes merely to bring the reader within touch, so to speak, of that
wildness. The author would have fired Mr. Pickwick out of a cannon to
get him to Wardle’s by Christmas; he would have taken the roof off to
drop him into Bob Sawyer’s party. But once put Pickwick at Wardle’s,
with his punch and a group of gorgeous personalities, and nothing will
move him from his chair. Once he is at Sawyer’s party, he forgets
how he got there; he forgets Mrs. Bardell and all his story. For the
story was but an incantation to call up a god, and the god (Mr. Jack
Hopkins) is present in divine power. Once the great characters are face
to face, the ladder by which they climbed is forgotten and falls down,
the structure of the story drops to pieces, the plot is abandoned, the
other characters deserted at every kind of crisis; the whole crowded
thoroughfare of the tale is blocked by two or three talkers, who take
their immortal ease as if they were already in Paradise. For they do
not exist for the story; the story exists for them; and they know it.
To every man alive, one must hope, it has in some manner happened
that he has talked with his more fascinating friends round a table on
some night when all the numerous personalities unfolded themselves
like great tropical flowers. All fell into their parts as in some
delightful impromptu play. Every man was more himself than he had
ever been in this vale of tears. Every man was a beautiful caricature
of himself. The man who has known such nights will understand the
exaggerations of “Pickwick.” The man who has not known such nights
will not enjoy “Pickwick” nor (I imagine) heaven. For, as I have
said, Dickens is, in this matter, close to popular religion, which is
the ultimate and reliable religion. He conceives an endless joy; he
conceives creatures as permanent as Puck or Pan--creatures whose will
to live æons upon æons cannot satisfy. He is not come, as a writer,
that his creatures may copy life and copy its narrowness; he is come
that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. It
is absurd indeed that Christians should be called the enemies of life
because they wish life to last for ever; it is more absurd still to
call the old comic writers dull because they wished their unchanging
characters to last for ever. Both popular religion, with its endless
joys, and the old comic story, with its endless jokes, have in our
time faded together. We are too weak to desire that undying vigour.
We believe that you can have too much of a good thing--a blasphemous
belief, which at one blow wrecks all the heavens that men have hoped
for. The grand old defiers of God were not afraid of an eternity of
torment. We have come to be afraid of an eternity of joy. It is not
my business here to take sides in this division between those who
like life and long novels and those who like death and short stories;
my only business is to point out that those who see in Dickens’s
unchanging characters and recurring catch-words a mere stiffness and
lack of living movement miss the point and nature of his work. His
tradition is another tradition altogether; his aim is another aim
altogether to those of the modern novelists who trace the alchemy of
experience and the autumn tints of character. He is there, like the
common people of all ages, to make deities; he is there, as I have
said, to exaggerate life in the direction of life. The spirit he at
bottom celebrates is that of two friends drinking wine together and
talking through the night. But for him they are two deathless friends
talking through an endless night and pouring wine from an inexhaustible
bottle.
This, then, is the first firm fact to grasp about “Pickwick”--about
“Pickwick” more than about any of the other stories. It is, first
and foremost, a supernatural story. Mr. Pickwick was a fairy. So was
old Mr. Weller. This does not imply that they were suited to swing
in a trapeze of gossamer; it merely implies that if they had fallen
out of it on their heads they would not have died. But, to speak more
strictly, Mr. Samuel Pickwick is not the fairy; he is the fairy prince;
that is to say, he is the abstract wanderer and wonderer, the Ulysses
of Comedy--the half-human and half-elfin creature--human enough to
wander, human enough to wonder, but still sustained with that merry
fatalism that is natural to immortal beings--sustained by that hint
of divinity which tells him in the darkest hour that he is doomed to
live happily ever afterwards. He has set out walking to the end of the
world, but he knows he will find an inn there.
And this brings us to the best and boldest element of originality in
“Pickwick.” It has not, I think, been observed, and it may be that
Dickens did not observe it. Certainly he did not plan it; it grew
gradually, perhaps out of the unconscious part of his soul, and warmed
the whole story like a slow fire. Of course it transformed the whole
story also; transformed it out of all likeness to itself. About this
latter point was waged one of the numberless little wars of Dickens.
It was a part of his pugnacious vanity that he refused to admit the
truth of the mildest criticism. Moreover, he used his inexhaustible
ingenuity to find an apologia that was generally an afterthought.
Instead of laughingly admitting, in answer to criticism, the glorious
improbability of Pecksniff, he retorted with a sneer, clever and very
unjust, that he was not surprised that the Pecksniffs should deny the
portrait of Pecksniff. When it was objected that the pride of old Paul
Dombey breaks as abruptly as a stick, he tried to make out that there
had been an absorbing psychological struggle going on in that gentleman
all the time, which the reader was too stupid to perceive. Which is, I
am afraid, rubbish. And so, in a similar vein, he answered those who
pointed out to him the obvious and not very shocking fact that our
sentiments about Pickwick are very different in the second part of the
book from our sentiments in the first; that we find ourselves at the
beginning setting out in the company of a farcical old fool, if not
a farcical old humbug, and that we find ourselves at the end saying
farewell to a fine old English merchant, a monument of genial sanity.
Dickens answered with the same ingenious self-justification as in the
other cases--that surely it often happened that a man met us first
arrayed in his more grotesque qualities, and that fuller acquaintance
unfolded his more serious merits. This, of course, is quite true; but
I think any honest admirer of “Pickwick” will feel that it is not an
answer. For the fault in “Pickwick” (if it be a fault) is a change, not
in the hero but in the whole atmosphere. The point is not that Pickwick
turns into a different kind of man; it is that “The Pickwick Papers”
turns into a different kind of book. And however artistic both parts
may be, this combination must, in strict art, be called inartistic. A
man is quite artistically justified in writing a tale in which a man as
cowardly as Bob Acres becomes a man as brave as Hector. But a man is
not artistically justified in writing a tale which begins in the style
of “The Rivals” and ends in the style of the “Iliad.” In other words,
we do not mind the hero changing in the course of a book; but we are
not prepared for the author changing in the course of the book. And the
author did change in the course of this book. He made, in the midst of
this book a great discovery, which was the discovery of his destiny,
or, what is more important, of his duty. That discovery turned him from
the author of “Sketches by Boz” to the author of “David Copperfield.”
And that discovery constituted the thing of which I have spoken--the
outstanding and arresting original feature in “The Pickwick Papers.”
“Pickwick,” I have said, is a romance of adventure, and Samuel Pickwick
is the romantic adventurer. So much is indeed obvious. But the strange
and stirring discovery which Dickens made was this--that having chosen
a fat old man of the middle classes as a good thing of which to make
a butt, he found that a fat old man of the middle classes is the
very best thing of which to make a romantic adventurer. “Pickwick”
is supremely original in that it is the adventures of an old man. It
is a fairy tale in which the victor is not the youngest of the three
brothers, but one of the oldest of their uncles. The result is both
noble and new and true. There is nothing which so much needs simplicity
as adventure. And there is no one who so much possesses simplicity as
an honest and elderly man of business. For romance he is better than a
troop of young troubadours; for the swaggering young fellow anticipates
his adventures, just as he anticipates his income. Hence, both the
adventures and the income, when he comes up to them, are not there.
But a man in late middle-age has grown used to the plain necessities,
and his first holiday is a second youth. A good man, as Thackeray said
with such thorough and searching truth, grows simpler as he grows
older. Samuel Pickwick in his youth was probably an insufferable young
coxcomb. He knew then, or thought he knew, all about the confidence
tricks of swindlers like Jingle. He knew then, or thought he knew, all
about the amatory designs of sly ladies like Mrs. Bardell. But years
and real life have relieved him of this idle and evil knowledge. He
has had the high good luck in losing the follies of youth, to lose
the wisdom of youth also. Dickens has caught, in a manner at once
wild and convincing, this queer innocence of the afternoon of life.
The round, moon-like face, the round, moon-like spectacles of Samuel
Pickwick move through the tale as emblems of a certain spherical
simplicity. They are fixed in that grave surprise that may be seen in
babies; that grave surprise which is the only real happiness that is
possible to man. Pickwick’s round face is like a round and honourable
mirror, in which are reflected all the fantasies of earthly existence;
for surprise is, strictly speaking, the only kind of reflection. All
this grew gradually on Dickens. It is odd to recall to our minds the
original plan, the plan of the Nimrod Club, and the author who was to
be wholly occupied in playing practical jokes on his characters. He had
chosen (or somebody else had chosen) that corpulent old simpleton as a
person peculiarly fitted to fall down trap-doors, to shoot over butter
slides, to struggle with apple-pie beds, to be tipped out of carts and
dipped into horse-ponds. But Dickens, and Dickens only, discovered as
he went on how fitted the fat old man was to rescue ladies, to defy
tyrants, to dance, to leap, to experiment with life, to be a _deus
ex machinâ_, and even a knight-errant. Dickens made this discovery.
Dickens went into the Pickwick Club to scoff, and Dickens remained to
pray.
Molière and his marquises are very much amused when M. Jourdain, the
fat old middle-class fellow, discovers with delight that he has been
talking prose all his life. I have often wondered whether Molière
saw how in this fact M. Jourdain towers above them all and touches
the stars. He has the freshness to enjoy a fresh fact, the freshness
to enjoy an old one. He can feel that the common thing prose is an
accomplishment like verse; and it is an accomplishment like verse; it
is the miracle of language. He can feel the subtle taste of water, and
roll it on his tongue like wine. His simple vanity and voracity, his
innocent love of living, his ignorant love of learning, are things far
fuller of romance than the weariness and foppishness of the sniggering
cavaliers. When he consciously speaks prose, he unconsciously thinks
poetry. It would be better for us all if we were as conscious that
supper is supper or that life is life, as this true romantic was that
prose is actually prose. M. Jourdain is here the type, Mr. Pickwick is
elsewhere the type, of this true and neglected thing, the romance of
the middle classes. It is the custom in our little epoch to sneer at
the middle classes. Cockney artists profess to find the bourgeoisie
dull; as if artists had any business to find anything dull. Decadents
talk contemptuously of its conventions and its set tasks; it never
occurs to them that conventions and set tasks are the very way to keep
that greenness in the grass and that redness in the roses--which they
had lost for ever. Stevenson, in his incomparable “Lantern Bearers,”
describes the ecstasy of a schoolboy in the mere fact of buttoning a
dark lantern under a dark great-coat. If you wish for that ecstasy
of the schoolboy, you must have the boy; but you must also have the
school. Strict opportunities and defined hours are the very outline
of that enjoyment. A man like Mr. Pickwick has been at school all his
life, and when he comes out he astonishes the youngsters. His heart, as
that acute psychologist, Mr. Weller, points out, had been born later
than his body. It will be remembered that Mr. Pickwick also, when on
the escapade of Winkle and Miss Allen, took immoderate pleasure in
the performances of a dark lantern which was not dark enough, and was
nothing but a nuisance to everybody. His soul also was with Stevenson’s
boys on the grey sands of Haddington, talking in the dark by the
sea. He also was of the league of the “Lantern Bearers.” Stevenson,
I remember, says that in the shops of that town they could purchase
“penny Pickwicks (that remarkable cigar).” Let us hope they smoked
them, and that the rotund ghost of Pickwick hovered over the rings of
smoke.
Pickwick goes through life with that godlike gullibility which is
the key to all adventures. The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in
everything; it is he that gets the most out of life. Because Pickwick
is led away by Jingle, he will be led to the White Hart Inn, and
see the only Weller cleaning boots in the courtyard. Because he is
bamboozled by Dodson and Fogg, he will enter the prison house like a
paladin, and rescue the man and the woman who have wronged him most.
His soul will never starve for exploits or excitements who is wise
enough to be made a fool of. He will make himself happy in the traps
that have been laid for him; he will roll in their nets and sleep. All
doors will fly open to him who has a mildness more defiant than mere
courage. The whole is unerringly expressed in one fortunate phrase--he
will be always “taken in.” To be taken in everywhere is to see the
inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circumstance. With
torches and trumpets, like a guest, the greenhorn is taken in by Life.
And the sceptic is cast out by it.