THE GREAT POPULARITY
There is one aspect of Charles Dickens which must be of interest even
to that subterranean race which does not admire his books. Even if we
are not interested in Dickens as a great event in English literature,
we must still be interested in him as a great event in English history.
If he had not his place with Fielding and Thackeray, he would still
have his place with Wat Tyler and Wilkes; for the man led a mob. He did
what no English statesman, perhaps, has really done; he called out the
people. He was popular in a sense of which we moderns have not even a
notion. In that sense there is no popularity now. There are no popular
authors to-day. We call such authors as Mr. Guy Boothby or Mr. William
Le Queux popular authors. But this is popularity altogether in a weaker
sense; not only in quantity, but in quality. The old popularity was
positive; the new is negative. There is a great deal of difference
between the eager man who wants to read a book, and the tired man who
wants a book to read. A man reading a Le Queux mystery wants to get
to the end of it. A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might
never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so
well. If a man can read a Le Queux story six times it is only because
he can forget it six times. In short, the Dickens novel was popular,
not because it was an unreal world, but because it was a real world; a
world in which the soul could live. The modern “shocker” at its very
best is an interlude in life. But in the days when Dickens’s work was
coming out in serial, people talked as if real life were itself the
interlude between one issue of “Pickwick” and another.
In reaching the period of the publication of “Pickwick,” we reach this
sudden apotheosis of Dickens. Henceforward he filled the literary
world in a way hard to imagine. Fragments of that huge fashion remain
in our daily language; in the talk of every trade or public question
are embedded the wrecks of that enormous religion. Men give out the
airs of Dickens without even opening his books; just as Catholics can
live in a tradition of Christianity without having looked at the New
Testament. The man in the street has more memories of Dickens, whom he
has not read, than of Marie Corelli, whom he has. There is nothing
in any way parallel to this omnipresence and vitality in the great
comic characters of Boz. There are no modern Bumbles and Pecksniffs,
no modern Gamps and Micawbers. Mr. Rudyard Kipling (to take an author
of a higher type than those before mentioned) is called, and called
justly, a popular author; that is to say, he is widely read, greatly
enjoyed, and highly remunerated; he has achieved the paradox of at once
making poetry and making money. But let any one who wishes to see the
difference try the experiment of assuming the Kipling characters to
be common property like the Dickens characters. Let any one go into
an average parlour and allude to Strickland as he would allude to
Mr. Bumble, the Beadle. Let any one say that somebody is “a perfect
Learoyd,” as he would say “a perfect Pecksniff.” Let any one write a
comic paragraph for a halfpenny paper, and allude to Mrs. Hawksbee
instead of to Mrs. Gamp. He will soon discover that the modern world
has forgotten its own fiercest booms more completely than it has
forgotten this formless tradition from its fathers. The mere dregs
of it come to more than any contemporary excitement; the gleaning of
the grapes of “Pickwick” is more than the whole vintage of “Soldiers
Three.” There is one instance, and I think only one, of an exception
to this generalization; there is one figure in our popular literature
which would really be recognized by the populace. Ordinary men would
understand you if you referred currently to Sherlock Holmes. Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle would no doubt be justified in rearing his head
to the stars, remembering that Sherlock Holmes is the only really
familiar figure in modern fiction. But let him droop that head again
with a gentle sadness, remembering that if Sherlock Holmes is the only
familiar figure in modern fiction, Sherlock Holmes is also the only
familiar figure in the Sherlock Holmes tales. Not many people could say
offhand what was the name of the owner of Silver Blaze, or whether Mrs.
Watson was dark or fair. But if Dickens had written the Sherlock Holmes
stories, every character in them would have been equally arresting and
memorable. A Sherlock Holmes would have cooked the dinner for Sherlock
Holmes; a Sherlock Holmes would have driven his cab. If Dickens brought
in a man merely to carry a letter, he had time for a touch or two, and
made him a giant. Dickens not only conquered the world, he conquered
it with minor characters. Mr. John Smauker, the servant of Mr. Cyrus
Bantam, though he merely passes across the stage, is almost as vivid to
us as Mr. Samuel Weller, the servant of Mr. Samuel Pickwick. The young
man with the lumpy forehead, who only says “Esker” to Mr. Podsnap’s
foreign gentleman, is as good as Mr. Podsnap himself. They appear only
for a fragment of time, but they belong to eternity. We have them only
for an instant, but they have us for ever.
In dealing with Dickens, then, we are dealing with a man whose public
success was a marvel and almost a monstrosity. And here I perceive
that my friend, the purely artistic critic, primed with Flaubert
and Turgenev, can contain himself no longer. He leaps to his feet,
upsetting his cup of cocoa, and asks contemptuously what all this
has to do with criticism. “Why begin your study of an author,” he
says, “with trash about popularity? Boothby is popular, and Le Queux
is popular, and Mother Siegel is popular. If Dickens was even more
popular, it may only mean that Dickens was even worse. The people
like bad literature. If your object is to show that Dickens was good
literature, you should rather apologize for his popularity, and try to
explain it away. You should seek to show that Dickens’s work was good
literature, although it was popular. Yes, that is your task, to prove
that Dickens was admirable, although he was admired!”
I ask the artistic critic to be patient for a little and to believe
that I have a serious reason for registering this historic popularity.
To that we shall come presently. But as a manner of approach I may
perhaps ask leave to examine this actual and fashionable statement,
to which I have supposed him to have recourse--the statement that
the people like bad literature, and even like literature because it
is bad. This way of stating the thing is an error, and in that error
lies matter of much import to Dickens and his destiny in letters. The
public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind
of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad
better than another kind of literature even when it is good. Nor is
this unreasonable; for the line between different types of literature
is as real as the line between tears and laughter; and to tell people
who can only get bad comedy that you have some first-class tragedy is
as irrational as to offer a man who is shivering over weak warm coffee
a really superior sort of ice.
Ordinary people dislike the delicate modern work, not because it is
good or because it is bad, but because it is not the thing that they
asked for. If, for instance, you find them pent in sterile streets
and hungering for adventure and a violent secrecy, and if you then
give them their choice between “A Study in Scarlet,” a good detective
story, and “The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford,” a good psychological
monologue, no doubt they will prefer “A Study in Scarlet.” But they
will not do so because “The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford” is a
very good monologue, but because it is evidently a very poor detective
story. They will be indifferent to “Les Aveugles,” not because it is
good drama, but because it is bad melodrama. They do not like good
introspective sonnets; but neither do they like bad introspective
sonnets, of which there are many. When they walk behind the brass of
the Salvation Army band instead of listening to harmonies at Queen’s
Hall, it is always assumed that they prefer bad music. But it may be
merely that they prefer military music, music marching down the open
street, and that if Dan Godfrey’s band could be smitten with salvation
and lead them, they would like that even better. And while they might
easily get more satisfaction out of a screaming article in _The War
Cry_ than out of a page of Emerson about the Over-soul, this would
not be because the page of Emerson is another and superior kind of
literature. It would be because the page of Emerson is another (and
inferior) kind of religion.
Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when a great
literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community.
For this kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our
ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the
people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted. And with this
was connected that other fact which must never be forgotten, and which
I have more than once insisted on, that Dickens and his school had a
hilarious faith in democracy and thought of the service of it as a
sacred priesthood. Hence there was this vital point in his popularism,
that there was no condescension in it. The belief that the rabble will
only read rubbish can be read between the lines of all our contemporary
writers, even of those writers whose rubbish the rabble reads. Mr.
Fergus Hume has no more respect for the populace than Mr. George Moore.
The only difference lies between those writers who will consent to talk
down to the people, and those writers who will not consent to talk down
to the people. But Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked
up to the people. He approached the people like a deity and poured out
his riches and his blood. This is what makes the immortal bond between
him and the masses of men. He had not merely produced something they
could understand, but he took it seriously, and toiled and agonized to
produce it. They were not only enjoying one of the best writers, they
were enjoying the best he could do. His raging and sleepless nights,
his wild walks in the darkness, his note-books crowded, his nerves in
rags, all this extraordinary output was but a fit sacrifice to the
ordinary man. He climbed towards the lower classes. He panted upwards
on weary wings to reach the heaven of the poor.
His power, then, lay in the fact that he expressed with an energy and
brilliancy quite uncommon the things close to the common mind. But with
this mere phrase, the common mind, we collide with a current error.
Commonness and the common mind are now generally spoken of as meaning
in some manner inferiority and the inferior mind; the mind of the mere
mob. But the common mind means the mind of all the artists and heroes;
or else it would not be common. Plato had the common mind; Dante had
the common mind; or that mind was not common. Commonness means the
quality common to the saint and the sinner, to the philosopher and the
fool; and it was this that Dickens grasped and developed. In everybody
there is a certain thing that loves babies, that fears death, that
likes sunlight: that thing enjoys Dickens. And everybody does not mean
uneducated crowds; everybody means everybody: everybody means Mrs.
Meynell. This lady, a cloistered and fastidious writer, has written
one of the best eulogies of Dickens that exist, an essay in praise
of his pungent perfection of epithet. And when I say that everybody
understands Dickens I do not mean that he is suited to the untaught
intelligence. I mean that he is so plain that even scholars can
understand him.
The best expression of the fact, however, is to be found in noting
the two things in which he is most triumphant. In order of artistic
value, next after his humour, comes his horror. And both his humour and
his horror are of a kind strictly to be called human; that is, they
belong to the basic part of us, below the lowest roots of our variety.
His horror for instance is a healthy churchyard horror, a fear of the
grotesque defamation called death; and this every man has, even if he
also has the more delicate and depraved fears that come of an evil
spiritual outlook. We may be afraid of a fine shade with Henry James;
that is, we may be afraid of the world. We may be afraid of a taut
silence with Maeterlinck; that is, we may be afraid of our own souls.
But every one will certainly be afraid of a Cock Lane Ghost, including
Henry James and Maeterlinck. This latter is literally a mortal fear,
a fear of death; it is not the immortal fear, or fear of damnation,
which belongs to all the more refined intellects of our day. In a
word, Dickens does, in the exact sense, make the flesh creep; he does
not, like the decadents, make the soul crawl. And the creeping of the
flesh on being reminded of its fleshly failure is a strictly universal
thing which we can all feel, while some of us are as yet uninstructed
in the art of spiritual crawling. In the same way the Dickens mirth is
a part of man and universal. All men can laugh at broad humour, even
the subtle humourists. Even the modern _flâneur_, who can smile at a
particular combination of green and yellow, would laugh at Mr. Lammle’s
request for Mr. Fledgeby’s nose. In a word--the common things are
common--even to the uncommon people.
These two primary dispositions of Dickens, to make the flesh creep
and to make the sides ache, were a sort of twins of his spirit; they
were never far apart and the fact of their affinity is interestingly
exhibited in the first two novels.
Generally he mixed the two up in a book and mixed a great many other
things with them. As a rule he cared little if he kept six stories
of quite different colours running in the same book. The effect was
sometimes similar to that of playing six tunes at once. He does not
mind the coarse tragic figure of Jonas Chuzzlewit crossing the mental
stage which is full of the allegorical pantomime of Eden, Mr. Chollop
and _The Watertoast Gazette_, a scene which is as much of a satire
as “Gulliver,” and nearly as much of a fairy tale. He does not mind
binding up a rather pompous sketch of prostitution in the same book
with an adorable impossibility like Bunsby. But “Pickwick” is so far a
coherent thing that it is coherently comic and consistently rambling.
And as a consequence his next book was, upon the whole, coherently
and consistently horrible. As his natural turn for terrors was kept
down in “Pickwick,” so his natural turn for joy and laughter is kept
down in “Oliver Twist.” In “Oliver Twist” the smoke of the thieves’
kitchen hangs over the whole tale, and the shadow of Fagin falls
everywhere. The little lamp-lit rooms of Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie
are to all appearance purposely kept subordinate, a mere foil to the
foul darkness without. It was a strange and appropriate accident that
Cruikshank and not “Phiz” should have illustrated this book. There was
about Cruikshank’s art a kind of cramped energy which is almost the
definition of the criminal mind. His drawings have a dark strength:
yet he does not only draw morbidly, he draws meanly. In the doubled-up
figure and frightful eyes of Fagin in the condemned cell there is not
only a baseness of subject; there is a kind of baseness in the very
technique of it. It is not drawn with the free lines of a free man;
it has the half-witted secrecies of a hunted thief. It does not look
merely like a picture of Fagin; it looks like a picture by Fagin.
Among these dark and detestable plates there is one which has with a
kind of black directness, the dreadful poetry that does inhere in the
story, stumbling as it often is. It represents Oliver asleep at an open
window in the house of one of his humaner patrons. And outside the
window, but as big and close as if they were in the room stand Fagin
and the foul-faced Monk, staring at him with dark monstrous visages and
great, white wicked eyes, in the style of the simple deviltry of the
draughtsman. The very _naïveté_ of the horror is horrifying: the very
woodenness of the two wicked men seems to make them worse than mere
men who are wicked. But this picture of big devils at the window-sill
does express, as has been suggested above, the thread of poetry in
the whole thing; the sense, that is, of the thieves as a kind of
army of devils compassing earth and sky, crying for Oliver’s soul and
besieging the house in which he is barred for safety. In this matter
there is, I think, a difference between the author and the illustrator.
In Cruikshank there was surely something morbid; but, sensitive and
sentimental as Dickens was, there was nothing morbid in him. He had,
as Stevenson had, more of the mere boy’s love of suffocating stories
of blood and darkness; of skulls, of gibbets, of all the things, in
a word, that are sombre without being sad. There is a ghastly joy in
remembering our boyish reading about Sikes and his flight; especially
about the voice of that unbearable pedlar which went on in a monotonous
and maddening sing-song, “will wash out grease-stains, mud-stains,
blood-stains,” until Sikes fled almost screaming. For this boyish
mixture of appetite and repugnance there is a good popular phrase,
“supping on horrors.” Dickens supped on horrors as he supped on
Christmas pudding. He supped on horrors because he was an optimist and
could sup on anything. There was no saner or simpler schoolboy than
Traddles, who covered all his books with skeletons.
“Oliver Twist” had begun in Bentley’s _Miscellany_, which Dickens
edited in 1837. It was interrupted by a blow that for the moment broke
the author’s spirit and seemed to have broken his heart. His wife’s
sister, Mary Hogarth, died suddenly. To Dickens his wife’s family seems
to have been like his own; his affections were heavily committed to the
sisters, and of this one he was peculiarly fond. All his life, through
much conceit and sometimes something bordering on selfishness, we can
feel the redeeming note of an almost tragic tenderness; he was a man
who could really have died of love or sorrow. He took up the work of
“Oliver Twist” again later in the year, and finished it at the end
of 1838. His work was incessant and almost bewildering. In 1838 he
had already brought out the first number of “Nicholas Nickleby.” But
the great popularity went booming on; the whole world was roaring for
books by Dickens, and more books by Dickens, and Dickens was labouring
night and day like a factory. Among other things he edited the “Memoirs
of Grimaldi.” The incident is only worth mentioning for the sake of
one more example of the silly ease with which Dickens was drawn by
criticism and the clever ease with which he managed, in these small
squabbles, to defend himself. Somebody mildly suggested that, after
all, Dickens had never known Grimaldi. Dickens was down on him like a
thunderbolt, sardonically asking how close an intimacy Lord Braybrooke
had with Mr. Samuel Pepys.
“Nicholas Nickleby” is the most typical perhaps of the tone of his
earlier works. It is in form a very rambling, old-fashioned romance,
the kind of romance in which the hero is only a convenience for the
frustration of the villain. Nicholas is what is called in theatricals a
stick. But any stick is good enough to beat a Squeers with. That strong
thwack, that simplified energy is the whole object of such a story;
and the whole of this tale is full of a kind of highly picturesque
platitude. The wicked aristocrats, Sir Mulberry Hawk, Lord Frederick
Verisopht and the rest are inadequate versions of the fashionable
profligate. But this is not (as some suppose) because Dickens in his
vulgarity could not comprehend the refinement of patrician vice.
There is no idea more vulgar or more ignorant than the notion that a
gentleman is generally what is called refined. The error of the Hawk
conception is that, if anything, he is too refined. Real aristocratic
blackguards do not swagger and rant so well. A real fast baronet would
not have defied Nicholas in the tavern with so much oratorical dignity.
A real fast baronet would probably have been choked with apoplectic
embarrassment and said nothing at all. But Dickens read into this
aristocracy a grandiloquence and a natural poetry which, like all
melodrama, is really the precious jewel of the poor.
But the book contains something which is much more Dickensian. It is
exquisitely characteristic of Dickens that the truly great achievement
of the story is the person who delays the story. Mrs. Nickleby with
her beautiful mazes of memory does her best to prevent the story of
Nicholas Nickleby from being told. And she does well. There is no
particular necessity that we should know what happens to Madeline
Bray. There is a desperate and crying necessity that we should know
that Mrs. Nickleby once had a foot-boy who had a wart on his nose and
a driver who had a green shade over his left eye. If Mrs. Nickleby
is a fool, she is one of those fools who are wiser than the world.
She stands for a great truth which we must not forget; the truth that
experience is not in real life a saddening thing at all. The people who
have had misfortunes are generally the people who love to talk about
them. Experience is really one of the gaieties of old age, one of its
dissipations. Mere memory becomes a kind of debauch. Experience may be
disheartening to those who are foolish enough to try to co-ordinate it
and to draw deductions from it. But to those happy souls, like Mrs.
Nickleby, to whom relevancy is nothing, the whole of their past life
is like an inexhaustible fairyland. Just as we take a rambling walk
because we know that a whole district is beautiful, so they indulge a
rambling mind because they know that a whole existence is interesting.
A boy does not plunge into his future more romantically and at random,
than they plunge into their past.
Another gleam in the book is Mr. Mantalini. Of him, as of all the
really great comic characters of Dickens, it is impossible to speak
with any critical adequacy. Perfect absurdity is a direct thing,
like physical pain, or a strong smell. A joke is a fact. However
indefensible it is it cannot be attacked. However defensible it is
it cannot be defended. That Mr. Mantalini should say in praising
the “outline” of his wife, “The two Countesses had no outlines,
and the Dowager’s was a demd outline,” this can only be called an
unanswerable absurdity. You may try to analyse it, as Charles Lamb
did the indefensible joke about the hare; you may dwell for a moment
on the dark distinctions between the negative disqualification of the
Countesses and the positive disqualification of the Dowager, but you
will not capture the violent beauty of it in any way. “She will be
a lovely widow; I shall be a body. Some handsome women will cry; she
will laugh demnedly.” This vision of demoniac heartlessness has the
same defiant finality. I mention the matter here, but it has to be
remembered in connection with all the comic masterpieces of Dickens.
Dickens has greatly suffered with the critics precisely through this
stunning simplicity in his best work. The critic is called upon to
describe his sensations while enjoying Mantalini and Micawber, and he
can no more describe them than he can describe a blow in the face. Thus
Dickens, in this self-conscious, analytical and descriptive age, loses
both ways. He is doubly unfitted for the best modern criticism. His bad
work is below that criticism. His good work is above it.
But gigantic as were Dickens’s labours, gigantic as were the exactions
from him, his own plans were more gigantic still. He had the type of
mind that wishes to do every kind of work at once; to do everybody’s
work as well as its own. There floated before him a vision of a
monstrous magazine, entirely written by himself. It is true that
when this scheme came to be discussed, he suggested that other pens
might be occasionally employed; but, reading between the lines, it is
sufficiently evident that he thought of the thing as a kind of vast
multiplication of himself, with Dickens as editor, opening letters,
Dickens as leader-writer writing leaders, Dickens as reporter reporting
meetings, Dickens as reviewer reviewing books, Dickens, for all I know,
as office-boy, opening and shutting doors. This serial, of which he
spoke to Messrs. Chapman and Hall, began and broke off and remains as a
colossal fragment bound together under the title of “Master Humphrey’s
Clock.” One characteristic thing he wished to have in the periodical.
He suggested an Arabian Nights of London, in which Gog and Magog,
the giants of the city, should give forth chronicles as enormous as
themselves. He had a taste for these schemes or frameworks for many
tales. He made and abandoned many; many he half-fulfilled. I strongly
suspect that he meant Major Jackman, in “Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings” and
“Mrs. Lirriper’s Legacy,” to start a series of studies of that lady’s
lodgers, a kind of history of No. 81 Norfolk Street, Strand. “The Seven
Poor Travellers” was planned for seven stories; we will not say seven
poor stories. Dickens had meant, probably, to write a tale for each
article of “Somebody’s Luggage”: he only got as far as the hat and the
boots. This gigantesque scale of literary architecture, huge and yet
curiously cosy, is characteristic of his spirit, fond of size and
yet fond of comfort. He liked to have story within story, like room
within room of some labyrinthine but comfortable castle. In this spirit
he wished “Master Humphrey’s Clock” to begin, and to be a big frame
or bookcase for numberless novels. The clock started; but the clock
stopped.
In the prologue by Master Humphrey reappears Mr. Pickwick and Sam
Weller, and of that resurrection many things have been said, chiefly
expressions of a reasonable regret. Doubtless they do not add much to
their author’s reputation, but they add a great deal to their author’s
pleasure. It was ingrained in him to wish to meet old friends. All his
characters are, so to speak, designed to be old friends; in a sense
every Dickens character is an old friend, even when he first appears.
He comes to us mellow out of many implied interviews, and carries the
firelight on his face. Dickens was simply pleased to meet Pickwick
again, and being pleased, he made the old man too comfortable to be
amusing.
But “Master Humphrey’s Clock” is now scarcely known except as the
shell of one of the well-known novels. “The Old Curiosity Shop” was
published in accordance with the original “Clock” scheme. Perhaps the
most typical thing about it is the title. There seems no reason in
particular, at the first and most literal glance, why the story should
be called after the Old Curiosity Shop. Only two of the characters have
anything to do with such a shop, and they leave us for ever in the
first few pages. It is as if Thackeray had called the whole novel of
“Vanity Fair” “Miss Pinkerton’s Academy.” It is as if Scott had given
the whole story of “The Antiquary” the title of “The Hawes Inn.” But
when we feel the situation with more fidelity we realize that this
title is something in the nature of a key to the whole Dickens romance.
His tales always started from some splendid hint in the streets. And
shops, perhaps the most poetical of all things, often set off his fancy
galloping. Every shop, in fact, was to him the door of romance. Among
all the huge serial schemes of which we have spoken, it is a matter of
wonder that he never started an endless periodical called “The Street,”
and divided it into shops. He could have written an exquisite romance
called “The Baker’s Shop”; another called “The Chemist’s Shop”; another
called “The Oil Shop,” to keep company with “The Old Curiosity Shop.”
Some incomparable baker he invented and forgot. Some gorgeous chemist
might have been. Some more than mortal oilman is lost to us for ever.
This Old Curiosity Shop he did happen to linger by: its tale he did
happen to tell.
Around “Little Nell,” of course, a controversy raged and rages; some
implored Dickens not to kill her at the end of the story: some regret
that he did not kill her at the beginning. To me the chief interest
in this young person lies in the fact that she is an example, and the
most celebrated example of what must have been, I think, a personal
peculiarity, perhaps a personal experience of Dickens. There is, of
course, no paradox at all in saying that if we find in a good book a
wildly impossible character it is very probable indeed that it was
copied from a real person. This is one of the commonplaces of good art
criticism. For although people talk of the restraints of fact and the
freedom of fiction, the case for most artistic purposes is quite the
other way. Nature is as free as air: art is forced to look probable.
There may be a million things that do happen, and yet only one thing
that convinces us as likely to happen. Out of a million possible things
there may be only one appropriate thing. I fancy, therefore, that many
stiff, unconvincing characters are copied from the wild freak-show of
real life. And in many parts of Dickens’s work there is evidence of
some peculiar affection on his part for a strange sort of little girl;
a little girl with a premature sense of responsibility and duty; a sort
of saintly precocity. Did he know some little girl of this kind? Did
she die, perhaps, and remain in his memory in colours too ethereal and
pale? In any case there are a great number of them in his works. Little
Dorrit was one of them, and Florence Dombey with her brother, and even
Agnes in infancy; and, of course, Little Nell. And, in any case, one
thing is evident; whatever charm these children may have they have not
the charm of childhood. They are not little children: they are “little
mothers.” The beauty and divinity in a child lie in his not being
worried, not being conscientious, not being like Little Nell. Little
Nell has never any of the sacred bewilderment of a baby. She never
wears that face, beautiful but almost half-witted, with which a real
child half understands that there is evil in the universe.
As usual, however, little as the story has to do with the title, the
splendid and satisfying pages have even less to do with the story.
Dick Swiveller is perhaps the noblest of all the noble creations of
Dickens. He has all the overwhelming absurdity of Mantalini, with the
addition of being human and credible, for he knows he is absurd. His
high-falutin is not done because he seriously thinks it right and
proper, like that of Mr. Snodgrass, nor is it done because he thinks it
will serve his turn, like that of Mr. Pecksniff, for both these beliefs
are improbable; it is done because he really loves high-falutin,
because he has a lonely literary pleasure in exaggerative language.
Great draughts of words are to him like great draughts of wine--pungent
and yet refreshing, light and yet leaving him in a glow. In unerring
instinct for the perfect folly of a phrase he has no equal, even
among the giants of Dickens. “I am sure,” says Miss Wackles, when she
had been flirting with Cheggs, the market-gardener, and reduced Mr.
Swiveller to Byronic renunciation, “I am sure I’m very sorry if--”
“Sorry,” said Mr. Swiveller, “sorry in the possession of a Cheggs!”
The abyss of bitterness is unfathomable. Scarcely less precious is the
pose of Mr. Swiveller when he imitates the stage brigand. After crying,
“Some wine here! Ho!” he hands the flagon to himself with profound
humility, and receives it haughtily. Perhaps the very best scene in
the book is that between Mr. Swiveller and the single gentleman with
whom he endeavours to remonstrate for having remained in bed all day:
“We cannot have single gentlemen coming into the place and sleeping
like double gentlemen without paying extra.... An equal amount of
slumber was never got out of one bed, and if you want to sleep like
that you must pay for a double-bedded room.” His relations with the
Marchioness are at once purely romantic and purely genuine; there
is nothing even of Dickens’s legitimate exaggerations about them. A
shabby, larky, good-natured clerk would, as a matter of fact, spend
hours in the society of a little servant girl if he found her about the
house. It would arise partly from a dim kindliness, and partly from
that mysterious instinct which is sometimes called, mistakenly, a love
of low company--that mysterious instinct which makes so many men of
pleasure find something soothing in the society of uneducated people,
particularly uneducated women. It is the instinct which accounts for
the otherwise unaccountable popularity of barmaids.
And still the pot of that huge popularity boiled. In 1841 another novel
was demanded, and “Barnaby Rudge” supplied. It is chiefly of interest
as an embodiment of that other element in Dickens, the picturesque or
even the pictorial. Barnaby Rudge, the idiot with his rags and his
feathers and his raven, the bestial hangman, the blind mob--all make
a picture, though they hardly make a novel. One touch there is in it
of the richer and more humorous Dickens, the boy-conspirator, Mr. Sim
Tappertit. But he might have been treated with more sympathy--with as
much sympathy, for instance, as Mr. Dick Swiveller; for he is only the
romantic guttersnipe, the bright boy at the particular age when it is
most fascinating to found a secret society and most difficult to keep
a secret. And if ever there was a romantic guttersnipe on earth it
was Charles Dickens. “Barnaby Rudge” is no more an historical novel
than Sim’s secret league was a political movement; but they are both
beautiful creations. When all is said, however, the main reason for
mentioning the work here is that it is the next bubble in the pot, the
next thing that burst out of that whirling, seething head. The tide
of it rose and smoked and sang till it boiled over the pot of Britain
and poured over all America. In the January of 1842 he set out for the
United States.