THE TIME OF TRANSITION
Dickens was back in London by the June of 1845. About this time he
became the first editor of _The Daily News_, a paper which he had
largely planned and suggested, and which, I trust, remembers its
semi-divine origin. That his thoughts had been running, as suggested in
the last chapter, somewhat monotonously on his Christmas domesticities,
is again suggested by the rather singular fact that he originally
wished _The Daily News_ to be called _The Cricket_. Probably he was
haunted again with his old vision of a homely, tale-telling periodical
such as had broken off in “Master Humphrey’s Clock.” About this time,
however, he was peculiarly unsettled. Almost as soon as he had taken
the editorship he threw it up; and having only recently come back to
England, he soon made up his mind to go back to the Continent. In the
May of 1846 he ran over to Switzerland and tried to write “Dombey and
Son” at Lausanne. Tried to, I say, because his letters are full of an
angry impotence. He could not get on. He attributed this especially
to his love of London and his loss of it, “the absence of streets and
numbers of figures.... _My_ figures seem disposed to stagnate without
crowds about them.” But he also, with shrewdness, attributed it more
generally to the laxer and more wandering life he had led for the last
two years, the American tour, the Italian tour, diversified, generally
speaking, only with slight literary productions. His ways were never
punctual or healthy, but they were also never unconscientious as far as
work was concerned. If he walked all night he could write all day. But
in this strange exile or inter-regnum he did not seem able to fall into
any habits, even bad habits. A restlessness beyond all his experience
had fallen for a season upon the most restless of the children of men.
It may be a mere coincidence: but this break in his life very nearly
coincided with the important break in his art. “Dombey and Son,”
planned in all probability some time before, was destined to be the
last of a quite definite series, the early novels of Dickens. The
difference between the books from the beginning up to “Dombey,” and
the books from “David Copperfield” to the end may be hard to state
dogmatically, but is evident to every one with any literary sense. Very
coarsely, the case may be put by saying that he diminished, in the
story as a whole, the practice of pure caricature. Still more coarsely
it may be put in the phrase that he began to practise realism. If we
take Mr. Stiggins, say, as a clergyman depicted at the beginning of
his literary career, and Mr. Crisparkle, say, as a clergyman depicted
at the end of it, it is evident that the difference does not merely
consist in the fact that the first is a less desirable clergyman than
the second. It consists in the nature of our desire for either of them.
The glory of Mr. Crisparkle partly consists in the fact that he might
really exist anywhere, in any country town into which we may happen
to stray. The glory of Mr. Stiggins wholly consists in the fact that
he could not possibly exist anywhere except in the head of Dickens.
Dickens has the secret recipe of that divine dish. In some sense,
therefore, when we say that he became less of a caricaturist we mean
that he became less of a creator. That original violent vision of
all things which he had seen from his boyhood began to be mixed with
other men’s milder visions and with the light of common day. He began
to understand and practise other than his own mad merits; began to
have some movement towards the merits of other writers, towards the
mixed emotion of Thackeray, or the solidity of George Eliot. And this
must be said for the process; that the fierce wine of Dickens could
endure some dilution. On the whole, perhaps, his primal personalism
was all the better when surging against some saner restraints. Perhaps
a flavour of strong Stiggins goes a long way. Perhaps the colossal
Crummles might be cut down into six or seven quite credible characters.
For my own part, for reasons which I shall afterwards mention, I am
in real doubt about the advantage of this realistic education of
Dickens. I am not sure that it made his books better; but I am sure it
made them less bad. He made fewer mistakes undoubtedly; he succeeded
in eliminating much of the mere rant or cant of his first books; he
threw away much of the old padding, all the more annoying, perhaps,
in a literary sense, because he did not mean it for padding, but
for essential eloquence. But he did not produce anything actually
better than Mr. Chuckster. But then there is nothing better than Mr.
Chuckster. Certain works of art, such as the Venus of Milo, exhaust our
aspiration. Upon the whole this may, perhaps, be safely said of the
transition. Those who have any doubt about Dickens can have no doubt
of the superiority of the later books. Beyond question they have less
of what annoys us in Dickens. But do not, if you are in the company of
any ardent adorers of Dickens (as I hope for your sake you are) do not
insist too urgently and exclusively on the splendour of Dickens’s last
works, or they will discover that you do not like him.
“Dombey and Son” is the last novel in the first manner: “David
Copperfield” is the first novel in the last. The increase in care and
realism in the second of the two is almost startling. Yet even in
“Dombey and Son” we can see the coming of a change, however faint, if
we compare it with his first fantasies, such as “Nicholas Nickleby” or
“The Old Curiosity Shop.” The central story is still melodrama, but it
is much more tactful and effective melodrama. Melodrama is a form of
art, legitimate like any other, as noble as farce, almost as noble as
pantomime. The essence of melodrama is that it appeals to the moral
sense in a highly simplified state, just as farce appeals to the sense
of humour in a highly simplified state. Farce creates people who are
so intellectually simple as to hide in packing-cases or pretend to be
their own aunts. Melodrama creates people so morally simple as to kill
their enemies in Oxford Street, and repent on seeing their mother’s
photograph. The object of the simplification in farce and melodrama
is the same, and quite artistically legitimate, the object of gaining
a resounding rapidity of action which subtleties would obstruct. And
this can be done well or ill. The simplified villain can be a spirited
charcoal sketch or a mere black smudge. Carker is a spirited charcoal
sketch: Ralph Nickleby is a mere black smudge. The tragedy of Edith
Dombey teems with unlikelihood, but it teems with life. That Dombey
should give his own wife censure through his own business manager is
impossible, I will not say in a gentleman, but in a person of ordinary
sane self-conceit. But once having got the inconceivable trio before
the footlights, Dickens gives us good ringing dialogue, very different
from the mere rants in which Ralph Nickleby figures in the unimaginable
character of a rhetorical money-lender. And there is another point
of technical improvement in this book over such books as “Nicholas
Nickleby.” It has not only a basic idea, but a good basic idea. There
is a real artistic opportunity in the conception of a solemn and
selfish man of affairs, feeling for his male heir his first and last
emotion, mingled of a thin flame of tenderness and a strong flame of
pride. But with all these possibilities, the serious episode of the
Dombeys serves ultimately only to show how unfitted Dickens was for
such things, how fitted he was for something opposite.
The incurable poetic character, the hopelessly non-realistic character
of Dickens’s essential genius could not have a better example than
the story of the Dombeys. For the story itself is probable; it is the
treatment that makes it unreal. In attempting to paint the dark pagan
devotion of the father (as distinct from the ecstatic and Christian
devotion of the mother), Dickens was painting something that was
really there. This is no wild theme, like the wanderings of Nell’s
grandfather, or the marriage of Gride. A man of Dombey’s type would
love his son as he loves Paul. He would neglect his daughter as he
neglects Florence. And yet we feel the utter unreality of it all, while
we feel the utter reality of monsters like Stiggins or Mantalini.
Dickens could only work in his own way, and that way was the wild
way. We may almost say this: that he could only make his characters
probable if he was allowed to make them impossible. Give him license
to say and do anything, and he could create beings as vivid as our own
aunts and uncles. Keep him to likelihood and he could not tell the
plainest tale so as to make it seem likely. The story of “Pickwick” is
credible, although it is not possible. The story of Florence Dombey is
incredible although it is true.
An excellent example can be found in the same story. Major Bagstock
is a grotesque, and yet he contains touch after touch of Dickens’s
quiet and sane observation of things as they are. He was always most
accurate when he was most fantastic. Dombey and Florence are perfectly
reasonable, but we simply know that they do not exist. The Major is
mountainously exaggerated, but we all feel that we have met him at
Brighton. Nor is the rationale of the paradox difficult to see; Dickens
exaggerated when he had found a real truth to exaggerate. It is a
deadly error (an error at the back of much of the false placidity of
our politics) to suppose that lies are told with excess and luxuriance,
and truths told with modesty and restraint. Some of the most frantic
lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the
simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them. Many
official declarations are just as dignified as Mr. Dombey, because
they are just as fictitious. On the other hand, the man who has found
a truth dances about like a boy who has found a shilling; he breaks
into extravagances, as the Christian churches broke into gargoyles. In
one sense truth alone can be exaggerated; nothing else can stand the
strain. The outrageous Bagstock is a glowing and glaring exaggeration
of a thing we have all seen in life--the worst and most dangerous of
all its hypocrisies. For the worst and most dangerous hypocrite is not
he who affects unpopular virtue, but he who affects popular vice. The
jolly fellow of the saloon bar and the racecourse is the real deceiver
of mankind; he has misled more than any false prophet, and his victims
cry to him out of hell. The excellence of the Bagstock conception can
best be seen if we compare it with the much weaker and more improbable
knavery of Pecksniff. It would not be worth a man’s while, with any
worldly object, to pretend to be a holy and high-minded architect. The
world does not admire holy and high-minded architects. The world does
admire rough and tough old army men who swear at waiters and wink at
women. Major Bagstock is simply the perfect prophecy of that decadent
jingoism which corrupted England of late years. England has been duped,
not by the cant of goodness, but by the cant of badness. It has been
fascinated by a quite fictitious cynicism, and reached that last and
strangest of all impostures in which the mask is as repulsive as the
face.
“Dombey and Son” provides us with yet another instance of this
general fact in Dickens. He could only get to the most solemn emotions
adequately if he got to them through the grotesque. He could only, so
to speak, really get into the inner chamber by coming down the chimney,
like his own most lovable lunatic in “Nicholas Nickleby.” A good
example is such a character as Toots. Toots is what none of Dickens’s
dignified characters are, in the most serious sense, a true lover. He
is the twin of Romeo. He has passion, humility, self-knowledge, a mind
lifted into all magnanimous thoughts, everything that goes with the
best kind of romantic love. His excellence in the art of love can only
be expressed by the somewhat violent expression that he is as good a
lover as Walter Gay is a bad one. Florence surely deserved her father’s
scorn if she could prefer Gay to Toots. It is neither a joke nor any
kind of exaggeration to say that in the vacillations of Toots, Dickens
not only came nearer to the psychology of true love than he ever came
elsewhere, but nearer than any one else ever came. To ask for the loved
one, and then not to dare to cross the threshold, to be invited by her,
to long to accept, and then to lie in order to decline, these are the
funny things that Mr. Toots did, and that every honest man who yells
with laughter at him has done also. For the moment, however, I only
mention this matter as a pendent case to the case of Major Bagstock,
an example of the way in which Dickens had to be ridiculous in order
to begin to be true. His characters that begin solemn end futile;
his characters that begin frivolous end solemn in the best sense.
His foolish figures are not only more entertaining than his serious
figures, they are also much more serious. The Marchioness is not only
much more laughable than Little Nell; she is also much more of all that
Little Nell was meant to be; much more really devoted, pathetic, and
brave. Dick Swiveller is not only a much funnier fellow than Kit, he
is also a much more genuine fellow, being free from that slight stain
of “meekness,” or the snobbishness of the respectable poor, which the
wise and perfect Chuckster wisely and perfectly perceived in Kit. Susan
Nipper is not only more of a comic character than Florence; she is more
of a heroine than Florence any day of the week. In “Our Mutual Friend”
we do not, for some reason or other, feel really very much excited
about the fall or rescue of Lizzie Hexam. She seems too romantic to
be really pathetic. But we do feel excited about the rescue of Miss
Lammle, because she is, like Toots, a holy fool; because her pink
nose and pink elbows, and candid outcry and open indecent affections
do convey to us a sense of innocence helpless among human dragons,
of Andromeda tied naked to a rock. Dickens had to make a character
humorous before he could make it human; it was the only way he knew,
and he ought to have always adhered to it. Whether he knew it or not,
the only two really touching figures in “Martin Chuzzlewit” are the
Misses Pecksniff. Of the things he tried to treat unsmilingly and
grandly we can all make game to our heart’s content. But when once he
has laughed at a thing it is sacred for ever.
“Dombey,” however, means first and foremost the finale of the early
Dickens. It is difficult to say exactly in what it is that we perceive
that the old crudity ends there, and does not reappear in “David
Copperfield” or in any of the novels after it. But so certainly it
is. In detached scenes and characters, indeed, Dickens kept up his
farcical note almost or quite to the end. But this is the last farce;
this is the last work in which a farcical license is tacitly claimed, a
farcical note struck to start with. And in a sense his next novel may
be called his first novel. But the growth of this great novel, “David
Copperfield,” is a thing very interesting, but at the same time very
dark, for it is a growth in the soul. We have seen that Dickens’s
mind was in a stir of change; that he was dreaming of art, and even
of realism. Hugely delighted as he invariably was with his own books,
he was humble enough to be ambitious. He was even humble enough to be
envious. In the matter of art, for instance, in the narrower sense,
of arrangement and proportion in fictitious things, he began to be
conscious of his deficiency, and even, in a stormy sort of way, ashamed
of it; he tried to gain completeness even while raging at any one who
called him incomplete. And in this matter of artistic construction, his
ambition (and his success too) grew steadily up to the instant of his
death. The end finds him attempting things that are at the opposite
pole to the frank formlessness of “Pickwick.” His last book, “The
Mystery of Edwin Drood,” depends entirely upon construction, even upon
a centralized strategy. He staked everything upon a plot; he who had
been the weakest of plotters, weaker than Sim Tappertit. He essayed a
detective story, he who could never keep a secret; and he has kept it
to this day. A new Dickens was really being born when Dickens died.
And as with art, so with reality. He wished to show that he could
construct as well as anybody. He also wished to show that he could be
as accurate as anybody. And in this connection (as in many others) we
must recur constantly to the facts mentioned in connection with America
and with his money-matters. We must recur, I mean, to the central fact
that his desires were extravagant in quantity, but not in quality;
that his wishes were excessive, but not eccentric. It must never be
forgotten that sanity was his ideal, even when he seemed almost insane.
It was thus with his literary aspirations. He was brilliant; but he
wished sincerely to be solid. Nobody out of an asylum could deny that
he was a genius and an unique writer; but he did not wish to be an
unique writer, but an universal writer. Much of the manufactured pathos
or rhetoric against which his enemies quite rightly rail, is really
due to his desire to give all sides of life at once, to make his book
a cosmos instead of a tale. He was sometimes really vulgar in his wish
to be a literary Whiteley, an universal provider. Thus it was that he
felt about realism and truth to life. Nothing is easier than to defend
Dickens as Dickens, but Dickens wished to be everybody else. Nothing
is easier than to defend Dickens’s world as a fairyland, of which he
alone has the key; to defend him as one defends Maeterlinck, or any
other original writer. But Dickens was not content with being original,
he had a wild wish to be true. He loved truth so much in the abstract
that he sacrificed to the shadow of it his own glory. He denied his own
divine originality, and pretended that he had plagiarized from life. He
disowned his own soul’s children, and said he had picked them up in the
street.
And in this mixed and heated mood of anger and ambition, vanity and
doubt, a new and great design was born. He loved to be romantic, yet
he desired to be real. How if he wrote of a thing that was real and
showed that it was romantic? He loved real life; but he also loved his
own way. How if he wrote his own real life, but wrote it in his own
way? How if he showed the carping critics who doubted the existence
of his strange characters, his own yet stranger existence? How if
he forced these pedants and unbelievers to admit that Weller and
Pecksniff, Crummles and Swiveller, whom they thought so improbably wild
and wonderful, were less wild and wonderful than Charles Dickens? What
if he ended the quarrels about whether his romances could occur, by
confessing that his romance had occurred?
For some time past, probably during the greater part of his life, he
had made notes for an autobiography. I have already quoted an admirable
passage from these notes, a passage reproduced in “David Copperfield,”
with little more alteration than a change of proper names--the
passage which describes Captain Porter and the debtor’s petition in
the Marshalsea. But he probably perceived at last what a less keen
intelligence must ultimately have perceived, that if an autobiography
is really to be honest it must be turned into a work of fiction. If it
is really to tell the truth, it must at all costs profess not to. No
man dare say of himself, over his own name, how badly he has behaved.
No man dare say of himself, over his own name, how well he has behaved.
Moreover, of course a touch of fiction is almost always essential
to the real conveying of fact, because fact, as experienced, has a
fragmentariness which is bewildering at first hand and quite blinding
at second hand. Facts have at least to be sorted into compartments and
the proper head and tail given to each. The perfection and pointedness
of art are a sort of substitute for the pungency of actuality. Without
this selection and completion our life seems a tangle of unfinished
tales, a heap of novels, all volume one. Dickens determined to make one
complete novel of it.
For though there are many other aspects of “David Copperfield,” this
autobiographical aspect is, after all, the greatest. The point of the
book is, that unlike all the other books of Dickens, it is concerned
with quite common actualities, but it is concerned with them warmly
and with the war-like sympathies. It is not only both realistic and
romantic; it is realistic because it is romantic. It is human nature
described with the human exaggeration. We all know the actual types
in the book; they are not like the turgid and preternatural types
elsewhere in Dickens. They are not purely poetic creations like Mr.
Kenwiggs or Mr. Bunsby. We all know that they exist. We all know the
stiff-necked and humorous old-fashioned nurse, so conventional and
yet so original, so dependent and yet so independent. We all know the
intrusive stepfather, the abstract strange male, coarse, handsome,
sulky, successful; a breaker-up of homes. We all know the erect and
sardonic spinster, the spinster who is so mad in small things and so
sane in great ones. We all know the cock of the school; we all know
Steerforth, the creature whom the gods love and even the servants
respect. We know his poor and aristocratic mother, so proud, so
gratified, so desolate. We know the Rosa Dartle type, the lonely woman
in whom affection itself has stagnated into a sort of poison.
But while these are real characters they are real characters lit
up with the colours of youth and passion. They are real people
romantically felt; that is to say, they are real people felt as real
people feel them. They are exaggerated, like all Dickens’s figures:
but they are not exaggerated as personalities are exaggerated by an
artist; they are exaggerated as personalities are exaggerated by their
own friends and enemies. The strong souls are seen through the glorious
haze of the emotions that strong souls really create. We have Murdstone
as he would be to a boy who hated him; and rightly, for a boy would
hate him. We have Steerforth as he would be to a boy who adored him;
and rightly, for a boy would adore him. It may be that if these persons
had a mere terrestrial existence, they appeared to other eyes more
insignificant. It may be that Murdstone in common life was only a heavy
business man with a human side that David was too sulky to find. It may
be that Steerforth was only an inch or two taller than David, and only
a shade or two above him in the lower middle classes; but this does not
make the book less true. In cataloguing the facts of life the author
must not omit that massive fact, illusion.
When we say the book is true to life we must stipulate that it is
especially true to youth; even to boyhood. All the characters seem a
little larger than they really were, for David is looking up at them.
And the early pages of the book are in particular astonishingly vivid.
Parts of it seem like fragments of our forgotten infancy. The dark
house of childhood, the loneliness, the things half understood, the
nurse with her inscrutable sulks and her more inscrutable tenderness,
the sudden deportations to distant places, the seaside and its childish
friendships, all this stirs in us when we read it, like something out
of a previous existence. Above all, Dickens has excellently depicted
the child enthroned in that humble circle which only in after years he
perceives to have been humble. Modern and cultured persons, I believe,
object to their children seeing kitchen company or being taught by a
woman like Peggoty. But surely it is more important to be educated in
a sense of human dignity and equality than in anything else in the
world. And a child who has once had to respect a kind and capable woman
of the lower classes will respect the lower classes for ever. The true
way to overcome the evil in class distinctions is not to denounce them
as revolutionists denounce them, but to ignore them as children ignore
them.
The early youth of David Copperfield is psychologically almost as good
as his childhood. In one touch especially Dickens pierced the very core
of the sensibility of boyhood; it was when he made David more afraid of
a manservant than of anybody or anything else. The lowering Murdstone,
the awful Mrs. Steerforth are not so alarming to him as Mr. Littimer,
the unimpeachable gentleman’s gentleman. This is exquisitely true to
the masculine emotions, especially in their undeveloped state. A youth
of common courage does not fear anything violent, but he is in mortal
fear of anything correct. This may or may not be the reason that so few
female writers understand their male characters, but this fact remains:
that the more sincere and passionate and even headlong a lad is the
more certain he is to be conventional. The bolder and freer he seems
the more the traditions of the college or the rules of the club will
hold him with their gyves of gossamer; and the less afraid he is of his
enemies the more cravenly he will be afraid of his friends. Herein lies
indeed the darkest peril of our ethical doubt and chaos. The fear is
that as morals become less urgent, manners will become more so; and men
who have forgotten the fear of God will retain the fear of Littimer. We
shall merely sink into a much meaner bondage. For when you break the
great laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You
get the small laws.
The sting and strength of this piece of fiction, then, do (by a rare
accident) lie in the circumstance that it was so largely founded on
fact. “David Copperfield” is the great answer of a great romancer to
the realists. David says in effect: “What! you say that the Dickens
tales are too purple really to have happened! Why, this is what
happened to me, and it seemed the most purple of all. You say that
the Dickens heroes are too handsome and triumphant! Why, no prince or
paladin in Ariosto was ever so handsome and triumphant as the Head
Boy seemed to me walking before me in the sun. You say the Dickens
villains are too black! Why, there was no ink in the devil’s ink-stand
black enough for my own stepfather when I had to live in the same house
with him. The facts are quite the other way to what you suppose. This
life of grey studies and half tones, the absence of which you regret
in Dickens, is only life as it is looked at. This life of heroes and
villains is life as it is lived. The life a man knows best is exactly
the life he finds most full of fierce certainties and battles between
good and ill--his own. Oh, yes, the life we do not care about may
easily be a psychological comedy. Other people’s lives may easily be
human documents. But a man’s own life is always a melodrama.”
There are other effective things in “David Copperfield;” they are
not all autobiographical, but they nearly all have this new note of
quietude and reality. Micawber is gigantic; an immense assertion of the
truth that the way to live is to exaggerate everything. But of him I
shall have to speak more fully in another connection. Mrs. Micawber,
artistically speaking, is even better. She is very nearly the best
thing in Dickens. Nothing could be more absurd, and at the same time
more true, than her clear, argumentative manner of speech as she sits
smiling and expounding in the midst of ruin. What could be more lucid
and logical and unanswerable than her statement of the prolegomena
of the Medway problem, of which the first step must be to “see the
Medway,” or of the coal-trade, which required talent and capital.
“Talent Mr. Micawber has. Capital Mr. Micawber has not.” It seems as
if something should have come at last out of so clear and scientific
an arrangement of ideas. Indeed if (as has been suggested) we regard
“David Copperfield” as an unconscious defence of the poetic view of
life, we might regard Mrs. Micawber as an unconscious satire on the
logical view of life. She sits as a monument of the hopelessness and
helplessness of reason in the face of this romantic and unreasonable
world.
As I have taken “Dombey and Son” as the book before the transition,
and “David Copperfield” as typical of the transition itself, I may
perhaps take “Bleak House” as the book after the transition. “Bleak
House” has every characteristic of his new realistic culture. Dickens
never, as in his early books, revels now in the parts he likes and
scamps the parts he does not, after the manner of Scott. He does not,
as in previous tales, leave his heroes and heroines mere walking
gentlemen and ladies with nothing at all to do but walk: he expends
upon them at least ingenuity. By the expedients (successful or not)
of the self-revelation of Esther or the humorous inconsistencies of
Rick, he makes his younger figures if not lovable at least readable.
Everywhere we see this tighter and more careful grip. He does not, for
instance, when he wishes to denounce a dark institution, sandwich it
in as a mere episode in a rambling story of adventure, as the debtor’s
prison is embedded in the body of Pickwick or the low Yorkshire school
in the body of Nicholas Nickleby. He puts the Court of Chancery in the
centre of the stage, a sombre and sinister temple, and groups round
it in artistic relation decaying and fantastic figures, its offspring
and its satirists. An old dipsomaniac keeps a rag and bone shop, type
of futility and antiquity, and calls himself the Lord Chancellor. A
little mad old maid hangs about the courts on a forgotten or imaginary
lawsuit, and says with perfect and pungent irony, “I am expecting a
judgment shortly, on the Day of Judgment.” Rick and Ada and Esther are
not mere strollers who have strayed into the court of law, they are
its children, its symbols, and its victims. The righteous indignation
of the book is not at the red heat of anarchy, but at the white heat
of art. Its anger is patient and plodding, like some historic revenge.
Moreover, it slowly and carefully creates the real psychology of
oppression. The endless formality, the endless unemotional urbanity,
the endless hope deferred, these things make one feel the fact of
injustice more than the madness of Nero. For it is not the activeness
of tyranny that maddens, but its passiveness. We hate the deafness of
the god more than his strength. Silence is the unbearable repartee.
Again we can see in this book strong traces of an increase in social
experience. Dickens, as his fame carried him into more fashionable
circles, began really to understand something of what is strong and
what is weak in the English upper class. Sir Leicester Deadlock is a
far more effective condemnation of oligarchy than the ugly swagger of
Sir Mulberry Hawke, because pride stands out more plainly in all its
impotence and insolence as the one weakness of a good man, than as
one of the million weaknesses of a bad one. Dickens, like all young
Radicals, had imagined in his youth that aristocracy rested upon the
hardness of somebody; he found, as we all do, that it rests upon the
softness of everybody. It is very hard not to like Sir Leicester
Deadlock, not to applaud his silly old speeches, so foolish, so manly,
so genuinely English, so disastrous to England. It is true that the
English people love a lord, but it is not true that they fear him;
rather, if anything, they pity him; there creeps into their love
something of the feeling they have towards a baby or a black man. In
their hearts they think it admirable that Sir Leicester Deadlock should
be able to speak at all. And so a system, which no iron laws and no
bloody battles could possibly force upon a people, is preserved from
generation to generation by pure, weak good-nature.
In “Bleak House” occurs the character of Harold Skimpole, the character
whose alleged likeness to Leigh Hunt has laid Dickens open to so
much disapproval. Unjust disapproval, I think, as far as fundamental
morals are concerned. In method he was a little clamorous and clumsy,
as, indeed, he was apt to be. But when he said that it was possible to
combine a certain tone of conversation taken from a particular man with
other characteristics which were not meant to be his, he surely said
what all men who write stories know. A work of fiction often consists
in combining a pair of whiskers seen in one street with a crime seen
in another. He may quite possibly have really meant only to make Leigh
Hunt’s light philosophy the mask for a new kind of scamp, as a variant
on the pious mask of Pecksniff or the candid mask of Bagstock. He may
never once have had the unfriendly thought, “Suppose Hunt behaved like
a rascal!” he may have only had the fanciful thought, “Suppose a rascal
behaved like Hunt!”
But there is a good reason for mentioning Skimpole especially. In the
character of Skimpole, Dickens displayed again a quality that was very
admirable in him--I mean a disposition to see things sanely and to
satirize even his own faults. He was commonly occupied in satirizing
the Gradgrinds, the economists, the men of Smiles and Self-Help. For
him there was nothing poorer than their wealth, nothing more selfish
than their self-denial. And against them he was in the habit of
pitting the people of a more expansive habit--the happy Swivellers and
Micawbers, who, if they were poor, were at least as rich as their last
penny could make them. He loved that great Christian carelessness that
seeks its meat from God. It was merely a kind of uncontrollable honesty
that forced him into urging the other side. He could not disguise
from himself or from the world that the man who began by seeking
his meat from God might end by seeking his meat from his neighbour,
without apprising his neighbour of the fact. He had shown how good
irresponsibility could be; he could not stoop to hide how bad it could
be. He created Skimpole; and Skimpole is the dark underside of Micawber.
In attempting Skimpole he attempted something with a great and urgent
meaning. He attempted it, I say; I do not assert that he carried it
through. As has been remarked, he was never successful in describing
psychological change; his characters are the same yesterday, to-day,
and for ever. And critics have complained very justly of the crude
villainy of Skimpole’s action in the matter of Joe and Mr. Bucket.
Certainly Skimpole had no need to commit a clumsy treachery to win
a clumsy bribe; he had only to call on Mr. Jarndyce. He had lost his
honour too long to need to sell it.
The effect is bad; but I repeat that the aim was great. Dickens wished,
under the symbol of Skimpole, to point out a truth which is perhaps the
most terrible in moral psychology. I mean the fact that it is by no
means easy to draw the line between light and heavy offence. He desired
to show that there are no faults, however kindly, that we can afford to
flatter or to let alone; he meant that perhaps Skimpole had once been
as good a man as Swiveller. If flattered or let alone, our kindliest
fault can destroy our kindliest virtue. A thing may begin as a very
human weakness, and end as a very inhuman weakness. Skimpole means that
the extremes of evil are much nearer than we think. A man may begin by
being too generous to pay his debts, and end by being too mean to pay
his debts. For the vices are very strangely in league, and encourage
each other. A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward.
A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard. That is the
thing Dickens was darkly trying to convey in Skimpole--that a man might
become a mountain of selfishness if he attended only to the Dickens
virtues. There is nothing that can be neglected; there is no such
thing (he meant) as a peccadillo.
I have dwelt on this consciousness of his because, alas, it had a
very sharp edge for himself. Even while he was permitting a fault,
originally small, to make a comedy of Skimpole, a fault, originally
small, was making a tragedy of Charles Dickens. For Dickens also had
a bad quality, not intrinsically very terrible, which he allowed to
wreck his life. He also had a small weakness that could sometimes
become stronger than all his strengths. His selfishness was not, it
need hardly be said, the selfishness of Gradgrind; he was particularly
compassionate and liberal. Nor was it in the least the selfishness of
Skimpole. He was entirely self-dependent, industrious, and dignified.
His selfishness was wholly a selfishness of the nerves. Whatever his
whim or the temperature of the instant told him to do, must be done.
He was the type of man who would break a window if it would not open
and give him air. And this weakness of his had, by the time of which we
speak, led to a breach between himself and his wife which he was too
exasperated and excited to heal in time. Everything must be put right,
and put right at once, with him. If London bored him, he must go to
the Continent at once; if the Continent bored him, he must come back
to London at once. If the day was too noisy, the whole household must
be quiet; if night was too quiet, the whole household must wake up.
Above all, he had this supreme character of the domestic despot--that
his good temper was, if possible, more despotic than his bad temper.
When he was miserable (as he often was, poor fellow), they only had to
listen to his railings. When he was happy they had to listen to his
novels. All this, which was mainly mere excitability, did not seem to
amount to much; it did not in the least mean that he had ceased to
be a clean-living and kind-hearted and quite honest man. But there
was this evil about it--that he did not resist his little weakness at
all; he pampered it as Skimpole pampered his. And it separated him and
his wife. A mere silly trick of temperament did everything that the
blackest misconduct could have done. A random sensibility, started
about the shuffling of papers or the shutting of a window, ended by
tearing two clean, Christian people from each other, like a blast of
bigamy or adultery.