LATER LIFE AND WORKS
I have deliberately in this book mentioned only such facts in the life
of Dickens as were, I will not say significant (for all facts must be
significant, including the million facts that can never be mentioned
by anybody), but such facts as illustrated my own immediate meaning.
I have observed this method consistently and without shame because I
think that we can hardly make too evident a chasm between books which
profess to be statements of all ascertainable facts, and books which
(like this one) profess only to contain a particular opinion or a
summary deducible from the facts. Books like Forster’s exhaustive work
and others exist, and are as accessible as St. Paul’s Cathedral; we
have them in common as we have the facts of the physical universe; and
it seems highly desirable that the function of making an exhaustive
catalogue and that of making an individual generalization should not
be confused. No catalogue, of course, can contain all the facts even
of five minutes; every catalogue, however long and learned, must be
not only a bold, but, one may say, an audacious selection. But if a
great many facts are given, the reader gains a blurred belief that
all the facts are being given. In a professedly personal judgment it
is therefore clearer and more honest to give only a few illustrative
facts, leaving the other obtainable facts to balance them. For thus
it is made quite clear that the thing is a sketch, an affair of a few
lines.
It is as well, however, to make at this point a pause sufficient to
indicate the main course of the later life of the novelist. And it is
best to begin with the man himself, as he appeared in those last days
of popularity and public distinction. Many are still alive who remember
him in his after-dinner speeches, his lectures, and his many public
activities; as I am not one of these, I cannot correct my notions with
that flash of the living features without which a description may be
subtly and entirely wrong. Once a man is dead, if it be only yesterday,
the newcomer must piece him together from descriptions really as
much at random as if he were describing Cæsar or Henry II. Allowing,
however, for this inevitable falsity, a figure vivid and a little
fantastic, does walk across the stage of Forster’s “Life.”
Dickens was of a middle size and his vivacity and relative physical
insignificance probably gave rather the impression of small size;
certainly of the absence of bulk. In early life he wore, even for that
epoch, extravagant clusters of brown hair, and in later years, a brown
moustache and a fringe of brown beard (cut like a sort of broad and
bushy imperial) sufficiently individual in shape to give him a faint
air as of a foreigner. His face had a peculiar tint or quality which
is hard to describe even after one has contrived to imagine it. It
was the quality which Mrs. Carlyle felt to be, as it were, metallic,
and compared to clear steel. It was, I think, a sort of pale glitter
and animation, very much alive and yet with something deathly about
it, like a corpse galvanized by a god. His face (if this was so) was
curiously a counterpart of his character. For the essence of Dickens’s
character was that it was at once tremulous and yet hard and sharp,
just as the bright blade of a sword is tremulous and yet hard and
sharp. He vibrated at every touch and yet he was indestructible; you
could bend him, but you could not break him. Brown of hair and beard,
somewhat pale of visage (especially in his later days of excitement
and ill-health) he had quite exceptionally bright and active eyes;
eyes that were always darting about like brilliant birds to pick up
all the tiny things of which he made more, perhaps, than any novelist
has done; for he was a sort of poetical Sherlock Holmes. The mouth
behind the brown beard was large and mobile, like the mouth of an
actor; indeed he was an actor, in many things too much of an actor.
In his lectures, in later years, he could turn his strange face into
any of the innumerable mad masks that were the faces of his grotesque
characters. He could make his face fall suddenly into the blank inanity
of Mrs. Raddle’s servant, or swell, as if to twice its size, into the
apoplectic energy of Mr. Sergeant Buzfuz. But the outline of his face
itself, from his youth upwards, was cut quite delicate and decisive,
and in repose and its own keen way, may even have looked effeminate.
The dress of the comfortable classes during the later years of Dickens
was, compared with ours, somewhat slipshod and somewhat gaudy. It was
the time of loose pegtop trousers of an almost Turkish oddity, of
large ties, of loose short jackets and of loose long whiskers. Yet
even this expansive period, it must be confessed, considered Dickens a
little too flashy or, as some put it, too Frenchified in his dress. He
wore velvet coats; he wore wild waistcoats that were like incredible
sunsets; he wore large hats of an unnecessary and startling whiteness.
He did not mind being seen in sensational dressing-gowns; nay, he
had his portrait painted in one of them. All this is not meritorious;
neither is it particularly discreditable; it is a characteristic only,
but an important one. He was an absolutely independent and entirely
self-respecting man. But he had none of that old dusty, half-dignified
English feeling upon which Thackeray was so sensitive; I mean the
desire to be regarded as a private gentleman, which means at bottom the
desire to be left alone. This again is not a merit; it is only one of
the milder aspects of aristocracy. But meritorious or not, Dickens did
not possess it. He had no objection to being stared at, if he were also
admired. He did not exactly pose in the oriental manner of Disraeli;
his instincts were too clean for that; but he did pose somewhat in
the French manner, of some leaders like Mirabeau and Gambetta. Nor
had he the dull desire to “get on” which makes men die contented as
inarticulate Under Secretaries of State. He did not desire success
so much as fame, the old human glory, the applause and wonder of the
people. Such he was as he walked down the street in his white hat,
probably with a slight swagger.
His private life consisted of one tragedy and ten thousand comedies.
By one tragedy I mean one real and rending moral tragedy--the failure
of his marriage. He loved his children dearly, and more than one of
them died; but in sorrows like these there is no violence and above
all no shame. The end of life is not tragic like the end of love. And
by the ten thousand comedies I mean the whole texture of his life,
his letters, his conversation, which were one incessant carnival of
insane and inspired improvisation. So far as he could prevent it, he
never permitted a day of his life to be ordinary. There was always
some prank, some impetuous proposal, some practical joke, some sudden
hospitality, some sudden disappearance. It is related of him (I give
one anecdote out of a hundred) that in his last visit to America, when
he was already reeling as it were under the blow that was to be mortal,
he remarked quite casually to his companions that a row of painted
cottages looked exactly like the painted shops in a pantomime. No
sooner had the suggestion passed his lips than he leapt at the nearest
doorway and in exact imitation of the clown in the harlequinade, beat
conscientiously with his fist, not on the door (for that would have
burst the canvas scenery of course), but on the side of the doorpost.
Having done this he lay down ceremoniously across the doorstep for
the owner to fall over him if he should come rushing out. He then
got up gravely and went on his way. His whole life was full of such
unexpected energies, precisely like those of the pantomime clown.
Dickens had indeed a great and fundamental affinity with the landscape,
or rather house-scape, of the harlequinade. He liked high houses, and
sloping roofs, and deep areas. But he would have been really happy if
some good fairy of the eternal pantomime had given him the power of
flying off the roofs and pitching harmlessly down the height of the
houses and bounding out of the areas like an indiarubber ball. The
divine lunatic in “Nicholas Nickleby” comes nearest to his dream. I
really think Dickens would rather have been that one of his characters
than any of the others. With what excitement he would have struggled
down the chimney. With what ecstatic energy he would have hurled the
cucumbers over the garden wall.
His letters exhibit even more the same incessant creative force. His
letters are as creative as any of his literary creations. His shortest
postcard is often as good as his ablest novel; each one of them is
spontaneous; each one of them is different. He varies even the form and
shape of the letter as far as possible; now it is in absurd French!
now it is from one of his characters; now it is an advertisement for
himself as a stray dog. All of them are very funny; they are not only
very funny, but they are quite as funny as his finished and published
work. This is the ultimately amazing thing about Dickens; the amount
there is of him. He wrote, at the very least, sixteen thick important
books packed full of original creation. And if you had burnt them all
he could have written sixteen more, as a man writes idle letters to his
friend.
In connection with this exuberant part of his nature there is another
thing to be noted, if we are to make a personal picture of him. Many
modern people, chiefly women, have been heard to object to the Bacchic
element in the books of Dickens, that celebration of social drinking as
a supreme symbol of social living, which those books share with almost
all the great literature of mankind, including the New Testament.
Undoubtedly there is an abnormal amount of drinking in a page of
Dickens, as there is an abnormal amount of fighting, say, in a page of
Dumas. If you reckon up the beers and brandies of Mr. Bob Sawyer, with
the care of an arithmetician and the deductions of a pathologist, they
rise alarmingly, like a rising tide at sea. Dickens did defend drink
clamorously, praised it with passion, and described whole orgies of
it with enormous gusto. Yet it is wonderfully typical of his prompt
and impatient nature that he himself drank comparatively little. He
was the type of man who could be so eager in praising the cup that
he left the cup untasted. It was a part of his active and feverish
temperament that he did not drink wine very much. But it was a part
of his humane philosophy, of his religion, that he did drink wine. To
healthy European philosophy, wine is a symbol; to European religion
it is a sacrament. Dickens approved it because it was a great human
institution, one of the rites of civilization, and this it certainly
is. The teetotaller who stands outside it may have perfectly clear
ethical reasons of his own, as a man may have who stands outside
education or nationality, who refuses to go to an University or to
serve in an Army. But he is neglecting one of the great social things
that man has added to nature. The teetotaller has chosen a most
unfortunate phrase for the drunkard when he says that the drunkard is
making a beast of himself. The man who drinks ordinarily makes nothing
but an ordinary man of himself. The man who drinks excessively makes
a devil of himself. But nothing connected with a human and artistic
thing like wine can bring one nearer to the brute life of nature. The
only man who is, in the exact and literal sense of the words, making a
beast of himself is the teetotaller.
The tone of Dickens towards religion, though like that of most of his
contemporaries, philosophically disturbed and rather historically
ignorant, had an element that was very characteristic of himself. He
had all the prejudices of his time. He had, for instance, that dislike
of defined dogmas, which really means a preference for unexamined
dogmas. He had the usual vague notion that the whole of our human past
was packed with nothing but insane Tories. He had, in a word, all the
old Radical ignorances which went along with the old Radical acuteness
and courage and public spirit. But this spirit tended, in almost all
the others who held it, to a specific dislike of the Church of England;
and a disposition to set the other sects against it, as truer types
of inquiry, or of individualism. Dickens had a definite tenderness
for the Church of England. He might have even called it a weakness
for the Church of England, but he had it. Something in those placid
services, something in that reticent and humane liturgy pleased him
against all the tendencies of his time; pleased him in the best part
of himself, his virile love of charity and peace. Once, in a puff of
anger at the Church’s political stupidity (which is indeed profound),
he left it for a week or two and went to an Unitarian Chapel; in a
week or two he came back. This curious and sentimental hold of the
English Church upon him increased with years. In the book he was at
work on when he died he describes the Minor Canon, humble, chivalrous,
tender-hearted, answering with indignant simplicity the froth and
platform righteousness of the sectarian philanthropist. He upholds
Canon Crisparkle and satirizes Mr. Honeythunder. Almost every one of
the other Radicals, his friends, would have upheld Mr. Honeythunder and
satirized Canon Crisparkle.
I have mentioned this matter for a special reason. It brings us back
to that apparent contradiction or dualism in Dickens to which, in one
connection or another, I have often adverted, and which, in one shape
or another, constitutes the whole crux of his character. I mean the
union of a general wildness approaching lunacy, with a sort of secret
moderation almost amounting to mediocrity. Dickens was, more or less,
the man I have described--sensitive, theatrical, amazing, a bit of a
dandy, a bit of a buffoon. Nor are such characteristics, whether weak
or wild, entirely accidents or externals. He had some false theatrical
tendencies integral in his nature. For instance, he had one most
unfortunate habit, a habit that often put him in the wrong, even when
he happened to be in the right. He had an incurable habit of explaining
himself. This reduced his admirers to the mental condition of the
authentic but hitherto uncelebrated little girl who said to her mother,
“I think I should understand if only you wouldn’t explain.” Dickens
always would explain. It was a part of that instinctive publicity of
his which made him at once a splendid democrat and a little too much of
an actor. He carried it to the craziest lengths. He actually wanted to
have printed in _Punch_, it is said, an apology for his own action in
the matter of his marriage. That incident alone is enough to suggest
that his external offers and proposals were sometimes like screams
heard from Bedlam. Yet it remains true that he had in him a central
part that was pleased only by the most decent and the most reposeful
rites, by things of which the Anglican prayer-book is very typical. It
is certainly true that he was often extravagant. It is most certainly
equally true that he detested and despised extravagance.
The best explanation can be found in his literary genius. His literary
genius consisted in a contradictory capacity at once to entertain and
to deride--very ridiculous ideas. If he is a buffoon, he is laughing
at buffoonery. His books were in some ways the wildest on the face
of the world. Rabelais did not introduce into Paphlagonia or the
Kingdom of the Coqcigrues satiric figures more frantic and misshapen
than Dickens made to walk about the Strand and Lincoln’s Inn. But
for all that, you come, in the core of him, on a sudden quietude and
good sense. Such, I think, was the core of Rabelais, such were all
the far-stretching and violent satirists. This is a point essential
to Dickens, though very little comprehended in our current tone of
thought. Dickens was an immoderate jester, but a moderate thinker. He
was an immoderate jester because he was a moderate thinker. What we
moderns call the wildness of his imagination was actually created by
what we moderns call the tameness of his thought. I mean that he felt
the full insanity of all extreme tendencies, because he was himself
so sane; he felt eccentricities, because he was in the centre. We are
always, in these days, asking our violent prophets to write violent
satires; but violent prophets can never possibly write violent satires.
In order to write satire like that of Rabelais--satire that juggles
with the stars and kicks the world about like a football--it is
necessary to be one’s self temperate, and even mild. A modern man like
Nietzsche, a modern man like Gorky, a modern man like d’Annunzio, could
not possibly write real and riotous satire. They are themselves too
much on the borderlands. They could not be a success as caricaturists,
for they are already a great success as caricatures.
I have mentioned his religious preference merely as an instance of
this interior moderation. To say, as some have done, that he attacked
Nonconformity is quite a false way of putting it. It is clean across
the whole trend of the man and his time to suppose that he could have
felt bitterness against any theological body as a theological body; but
anything like religious extravagance, whether Protestant or Catholic,
moved him to an extravagance of satire. And he flung himself into the
drunken energy of Stiggins, he piled up to the stars the “verbose
flights of stairs” of Mr. Chadband, exactly because his own conception
of religion was the quiet and impersonal Morning Prayer. It is typical
of him that he had a peculiar hatred for speeches at the graveside.
An even clearer case of what I mean can be found in his political
attitude. He seemed to some an almost anarchic satirist. He made equal
fun of the systems which reformers made war on, and of the instruments
on which reformers relied. He made no secret of his feeling that the
average English premier was an accidental ass. In two superb sentences
he summed up and swept away the whole British constitution: “England,
for the last week, has been in an awful state. Lord Coodle would go
out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come in, and there being no people in
England to speak of except Coodle and Doodle, the country has been
without a government.” He lumped all cabinets and all government
offices together, and made the same game of them all. He created his
most staggering humbugs, his most adorable and incredible idiots,
and set them on the highest thrones of our national system. To many
moderate and progressive people, such a satirist seemed to be insulting
heaven and earth, ready to wreck society for some mad alternative,
prepared to pull down St. Paul’s, and on its ruins erect a gory
guillotine. Yet, as a matter of fact, this apparent wildness of his
came from his being, if anything, a very moderate politician. It came,
not at all from fanaticism, but from a rather rational detachment. He
had the sense to see that the British constitution was not democracy,
but the British constitution. It was an artificial system--like any
other, good in some ways, bad in others. His satire of it sounded wild
to those that worshipped it; but his satire of it arose not from his
having any wild enthusiasm against it, but simply from his not having,
like every one else, a wild enthusiasm for it. Alone, as far as I know,
among all the great Englishmen of that age, he realized the thing
that Frenchmen and Irishmen understand. I mean the fact that popular
government is one thing, and representative government another. He
realized that representative government has many minor disadvantages,
one of them being that it is never representative. He speaks of his
“hope to have made every man in England feel something of the contempt
for the House of Commons that I have.” He says also these two things,
both of which are wonderfully penetrating as coming from a good Radical
in 1855, for they contain a perfect statement of the peril in which we
now stand, and which may, if it please God, sting us into avoiding the
long vista at the end of which one sees so clearly the dignity and the
decay of Venice--
“I am hourly strengthened,” he says, “in my old belief, that our
political aristocracy and our tuft-hunting are the death of England.
In all this business I don’t see a gleam of hope. As to the popular
spirit, it has come to be so entirely separated from the Parliament
and the Government, and so perfectly apathetic about them both,
that I seriously think it a most portentous sign.” And he says also
this: “I really am serious in thinking--and I have given as painful
consideration to the subject as a man with children to live and suffer
after him can possibly give it--that representative government is
become altogether a failure with us, that the English gentilities and
subserviences render the people unfit for it, and the whole thing has
broken down since the great seventeenth century time, and has no hope
in it.”
These are the words of a wise and perhaps melancholy man, but certainly
not of an unduly excited one. It is worth noting, for instance, how
much more directly Dickens goes to the point than Carlyle did, who
noted many of the same evils. But Carlyle fancied that our modern
English government was wordy and long-winded because it was democratic
government. Dickens saw, what is certainly the fact, that it is wordy
and long-winded because it is aristocratic government, the two most
pleasant aristocratic qualities being a love of literature and an
unconsciousness of time. But all this amounts to the same conclusion of
the matter. Frantic figures like Stiggins and Chadband were created out
of the quietude of his religious preference. Wild creations like the
Barnacles and the Bounderbys were produced in a kind of ecstasy of the
ordinary, of the obvious in political justice. His monsters were made
out of his level and his moderation, as the old monsters were made out
of the level sea.
Such was the man of genius we must try to imagine; violently emotional,
yet with a good judgment; pugnacious, but only when he thought himself
oppressed; prone to think himself oppressed, yet not cynical about
human motives. He was a man remarkably hard to understand or to
reanimate. He almost always had reasons for his action; his error was
that he always expounded them. Sometimes his nerve snapped; and then he
was mad. Unless it did so he was quite unusually sane.
Such a rough sketch at least must suffice us in order to summarize
his later years. Those years were occupied, of course, in two main
additions to his previous activities. The first was the series of
public readings and lectures which he now began to give systematically.
The second was his successive editorship of _Household Words_ and of
_All the Year Round_. He was of a type that enjoys every new function
and opportunity. He had been so many things in his life, a reporter, an
actor, a conjurer, a poet. As he had enjoyed them all, so he enjoyed
being a lecturer, and enjoyed being an editor. It is certain that his
audiences (who sometimes stacked themselves so thick that they lay
flat on the platform all round him) enjoyed his being a lecturer. It
is not so certain that the sub-editors enjoyed his being an editor.
But in both connections the main matter of importance is the effect
on the permanent work of Dickens himself. The readings were important
for this reason, that they fixed, as if by some public and pontifical
pronouncement, what was Dickens’s interpretation of Dickens’s work.
Such a knowledge is mere tradition, but it is very forcible. My own
family has handed on to me, and I shall probably hand on to the next
generation, a definite memory of how Dickens made his face suddenly
like the face of an idiot in impersonating Mrs. Raddle’s servant,
Betsy. This does serve one of the permanent purposes of tradition; it
does make it a little more difficult for any ingenious person to prove
that Betsy was meant to be a brilliant satire on the over-cultivation
of the intellect.
As for his relation to his two magazines, it is chiefly important,
first for the admirable things that he wrote in the magazines himself
(one cannot forbear to mention the inimitable monologue of the waiter
in “Somebody’s Luggage”), and secondly for the fact that in his
capacity of editor he made one valuable discovery. He discovered
Wilkie Collins. Wilkie Collins was the one man of unmistakable genius
who has a certain affinity with Dickens; an affinity in this respect,
that they both combine in a curious way a modern and cockney and even
commonplace opinion about things with a huge elemental sympathy with
strange oracles and spirits and old night. There were no two men in
Mid-Victorian England, with their top-hats and umbrellas, more typical
of its rationality and dull reform; and there were no two men who could
touch them at a ghost story. No two men would have more contempt for
superstitions; and no two men could so create the superstitious thrill.
Indeed, our modern mystics make a mistake when they wear long hair or
loose ties to attract the spirits. The elves and the old gods when they
revisit the earth really go straight for a dull top-hat. For it means
simplicity, which the gods love.
Meanwhile his books, which, as brilliant as ever, were appearing
from time to time, bore witness to that increasing tendency to a
more careful and responsible treatment which we have marked in the
transition which culminated in “Bleak House.” His next important
book, “Hard Times,” strikes an almost unexpected note of severity.
The characters are indeed exaggerated, but they are bitterly and
deliberately exaggerated; they are not exaggerated with the old
unconscious high spirits of Nicholas Nickleby or Martin Chuzzlewit.
Dickens exaggerates Bounderby because he really hates him. He
exaggerated Pecksniff because he really loved him. “Hard Times” is not
one of the greatest books of Dickens; but it is perhaps in a sense
one of his greatest monuments. It stamps and records the reality of
Dickens’s emotion on a great many things that were then considered
unphilosophical grumblings, but which since have swelled into the
immense phenomenon of the socialist philosophy. To call Dickens a
Socialist is a wild exaggeration; but the truth and peculiarity of his
position might be expressed thus: that even when everybody thought
that Liberalism meant individualism he was emphatically a Liberal
and emphatically not an individualist. Or the truth might be better
still stated in this manner: that he saw that there was a secret
thing, called humanity, to which both extreme socialism and extreme
individualism were profoundly and inexpressibly indifferent, and that
this permanent and presiding humanity was the thing he happened to
understand; he knew that individualism is nothing and non-individualism
is nothing but the keeping of the commandment of man. He felt, as a
novelist should, that the question is too much discussed as to whether
a man is in favour of this or that scientific philosophy; that there
is another question, whether the scientific philosophy is in favour
of the man. That is why such books as “Hard Times” will remain always
a part of the power and tradition of Dickens. He saw that economic
systems are not things like the stars, but things like the lamp-posts,
manifestations of the human mind, and things to be judged by the human
heart.
Thenceforward until the end his books grow consistently graver and, as
it were, more responsible; he improves as an artist if not always as a
creator. “Little Dorrit” (published in 1857) is at once in some ways so
much more subtle and in every way so much more sad than the rest of his
work that it bores Dickensians and especially pleases George Gissing.
It is the only one of the Dickens tales which could please Gissing,
not only by its genius, but also by its atmosphere. There is something
a little modern and a little sad, something also out of tune with the
main trend of Dickens’s moral feeling, about the description of the
character of Dorrit as actually and finally weakened by his wasting
experiences, as not lifting any cry above the conquered years. It is
but a faint fleck of shadow. But the illimitable white light of human
hopefulness, of which I spoke at the beginning, is ebbing away, the
work of the revolution is growing weaker everywhere; and the night of
necessitarianism cometh when no man can work. For the first time in a
book by Dickens perhaps we really do feel that the hero is forty-five.
Clennam is certainly very much older than Mr. Pickwick.
This was indeed only a fugitive grey cloud; he went on to breezier
operations. But whatever they were, they still had the note of the
later days. They have a more cautious craftsmanship; they have a more
mellow and a more mixed human sentiment. Shadows fell upon his page
from the other and sadder figures out of the Victorian decline. A good
instance of this is his next book, “The Tale of Two Cities” (1859).
In dignity and eloquence it almost stands alone among the books by
Dickens, but it also stands alone among his books in this respect, that
it is not entirely by Dickens. It owes its inspiration avowedly to the
passionate and cloudy pages of Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” And there
is something quite essentially inconsistent between Carlyle’s disturbed
and half-sceptical transcendentalism and the original school and spirit
to which Dickens belonged, the lucid and laughing decisiveness of the
old convinced and contented Radicalism. Hence the genius of Dickens
cannot save him, just as the great genius of Carlyle could not save him
from making a picture of the French Revolution, which was delicately
and yet deeply erroneous. Both tend too much to represent it as a mere
elemental outbreak of hunger or vengeance; they do not see enough
that it was a war for intellectual principles, even for intellectual
platitudes. We, the modern English, cannot easily understand the French
Revolution, because we cannot easily understand the idea of bloody
battle for pure common sense; we cannot understand common sense in arms
and conquering. In modern England common sense appears to mean putting
up with existing conditions. For us a practical politician really means
a man who can be thoroughly trusted to do nothing at all; that is where
his practicality comes in. The French feeling--the feeling at the back
of the Revolution--was that the more sensible a man was, the more you
must look out for slaughter.
In all the imitators of Carlyle, including Dickens, there is an obscure
sentiment that the thing for which the Frenchmen died must have been
something new and queer, a paradox, a strange idolatry. But when such
blood ran in the streets, it was for the sake of a truism; when those
cities were shaken to their foundations, they were shaken to their
foundations by a truism.
I have mentioned this historical matter because it illustrates these
later and more mingled influences which at once improve and as it were
perplex the later work of Dickens. For Dickens had in his original
mental composition capacities for understanding this cheery and
sensible element in the French Revolution far better than Carlyle.
The French Revolution was, among other things, French, and, so far
as that goes, could never have a precise counterpart in so jolly and
autochthonous an Englishman as Charles Dickens. But there was a great
deal of the actual and unbroken tradition of the Revolution itself in
his early radical indictments; in his denunciations of the Fleet Prison
there was a great deal of the capture of the Bastille. There was, above
all, a certain reasonable impatience which was the essence of the old
Republican, and which is quite unknown to the Revolutionist in modern
Europe. The old Radical did not feel exactly that he was “in revolt;”
he felt if anything that a number of idiotic institutions had revolted
against reason and against him. Dickens, I say, had the revolutionary
idea, though an English form of it, by clear and conscious inheritance;
Carlyle had to rediscover the Revolution by a violence of genius and
vision. If Dickens, then, took from Carlyle (as he said he did) his
image of the Revolution, it does certainly mean that he had forgotten
something of his own youth and come under the more complex influences
of the end of the nineteenth century. His old hilarious and sentimental
view of human nature seems for a moment dimmed in “Little Dorrit.” His
old political simplicity has been slightly disturbed by Carlyle.
I repeat that this graver note is varied, but it remains a graver
note. We see it struck, I think, with particular and remarkable
success in “Great Expectations” (1860–61). This fine story is told
with a consistency and quietude of individuality which is rare in
Dickens. But so far had he travelled along the road of a heavier
reality, that he even intended to give the tale an unhappy ending,
making Pip lose Estella for ever; and he was only dissuaded from it
by the robust romanticism of Bulwer-Lytton. But the best part of the
tale--the account of the vacillations of the hero between the humble
life to which he owes everything, and the gorgeous life from which
he expects something, touch a very true and somewhat tragic part of
morals; for the great paradox of morality (the paradox to which only
the religions have given an adequate expression) is that the very
vilest kind of fault is exactly the most easy kind. We read in books
and ballads about the wild fellow who might kill a man or smoke opium,
but who would never stoop to lying or cowardice or to “anything mean.”
But for actual human beings opium and slaughter have only occasional
charm; the permanent human temptation is the temptation to be mean.
The one standing probability is the probability of becoming a cowardly
hypocrite. The circle of the traitors is the lowest of the abyss,
and it is also the easiest to fall into. That is one of the ringing
realities of the Bible, that it does not make its great men commit
grand sins; it makes its great men (such as David and St. Peter) commit
small sins and behave like sneaks.
Dickens has dealt with this easy descent of desertion, this silent
treason, with remarkable accuracy in the account of the indecisions of
Pip. It contains a good suggestion of that weak romance which is the
root of all snobbishness: that the mystery which belongs to patrician
life excites us more than the open, even the indecent virtues of the
humble. Pip is keener about Miss Havisham, who may mean well by him,
than about Joe Gargery, who evidently does. All this is very strong
and wholesome; but it is still a little stern. “Our Mutual Friend”
(1864) brings us back a little into his merrier and more normal
manner; some of the satire, such as that upon Veneering’s election,
is in the best of his old style, so airy and fanciful, yet hitting so
suddenly and so hard. But even here we find the fuller and more serious
treatment of psychology; notably in the two facts that he creates a
really human villain, Bradley Headstone, and also one whom we might
call a really human hero, Eugene, if it were not that he is much too
human to be called a hero at all. It has been said (invariably by cads)
that Dickens never described a gentleman; it is like saying that he
never described a zebra. A gentleman is a very rare animal among human
creatures, and to people like Dickens, interested in all humanity, not
a supremely important one. But in Eugene Wrayburne he does, whether
consciously or not, turn that accusation with a vengeance. For he
not only describes a gentleman but describes the inner weakness and
peril that belong to a gentleman, the devil that is always rending the
entrails of an idle and agreeable man. In Eugene’s purposeless pursuit
of Lizzie Hexam, in his yet more purposeless torturing of Bradley
Headstone, the author has marvellously realized that singular empty
obstinacy that drives the whims and pleasures of a leisured class. He
sees that there is nothing that such a man more stubbornly adheres to,
than the thing that he does not particularly want to do. We are still
in serious psychology.
His last book represents yet another new departure, dividing him from
the chaotic Dickens of days long before. His last book is not merely
an attempt to improve his power of construction in a story: it is an
attempt to rely entirely on that power of construction. It not only
has a plot, it is a plot. “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” (1870) was
in such a sense, perhaps, the most ambitious book that Dickens ever
attempted. It is, as every one knows, a detective story, and certainly
a very successful one, as is attested by the tumult of discussion
as to its proper solution. In this, quite apart from its unfinished
state, it stands, I think, alone among the author’s works. Elsewhere,
if he introduced a mystery, he seldom took the trouble to make it very
mysterious. “Our Mutual Friend” was finished, but if only half of it
were readable, I think any one could see that John Rokesmith was John
Harman. “Bleak House” is finished, but if it were only half finished
I think any one would guess that Lady Deadlock and Nemo had sinned in
the past. “Edwin Drood” is not finished; for in the very middle of it
Dickens died.
He had altogether overstrained himself in a last lecturing tour in
America. He was a man in whom any serious malady would naturally make
very rapid strides; for he had the temper of an irrational invalid.
I have said before that there was in his curious character something
that was feminine. Certainly there was nothing more entirely feminine
than this, that he worked because he was tired. Fatigue bred in him a
false and feverish industry, and his case increased, like the case of
a man who drinks to cure the effects of drink. He died in 1870; and
the whole nation mourned him as no public man has ever been mourned;
for prime ministers and princes were private persons compared with
Dickens. He had been a great popular king, like a king of some more
primal age whom his people could come and see, giving judgment under an
oak tree. He had in essence held great audiences of millions, and made
proclamations to more than one of the nations of the earth. His obvious
omnipresence in every part of public life was like the omnipresence
of the sovereign. His secret omnipresence in every house and hut of
private life was more like the omnipresence of a deity. Compared with
that popular leadership all the fusses of the last forty years are
diversions in idleness. Compared with such a case as his it may be said
that we play with our politicians, and manage to endure our authors. We
shall never have again such a popularity until we have again a people.
He left behind him this almost sombre fragment, “The Mystery of Edwin
Drood.” As one turns it over the tragic element of its truncation
mingles somewhat with an element of tragedy in the thing itself; the
passionate and predestined Landless, or the half maniacal Jasper
carving devils out of his own heart. The workmanship of it is very
fine; the right hand has not only not lost, but is still gaining its
cunning. But as we turn the now enigmatic pages the thought creeps into
us again which I have suggested earlier, and which is never far off the
mind of a true lover of Dickens. Had he lost or gained by the growth of
technique and probability in his later work? His later characters were
more like men; but were not his earlier characters more like immortals?
He has become able to perform a social scene so that it is possible at
any rate; but where is that Dickens who once performed the impossible?
Where is that young poet who created such majors and architects as
nature will never dare to create? Dickens learnt to describe daily
life as Thackeray and Jane Austen could describe it; but Thackeray
could not have thought such a thought as Crummles; and it is painful
to think of Miss Austen attempting to imagine Mantalini. After all, we
feel there are many able novelists; but there is only one Dickens, and
whither has he fled?
He was alive to the end. And in this last dark and secretive story of
Edwin Drood he makes one splendid and staggering appearance, like a
magician saying farewell to mankind. In the centre of this otherwise
reasonable and rather melancholy book, this grey story of a good
clergyman and the quiet Cloisterham Towers, Dickens has calmly inserted
one entirely delightful and entirely insane passage. I mean the frantic
and inconceivable epitaph of Mrs. Sapsea, that which describes her as
“the reverential wife” of Thomas Sapsea, speaks of her consistency in
“Looking up to him,” and ends with the words, spaced out so admirably
on the tombstone, “Stranger pause. And ask thyself this question,
Canst thou do likewise? If not, with a blush retire.” Not the wildest
tale in Pickwick contains such an impossibility as that; Dickens dare
scarcely have introduced it, even as one of Jingle’s lies. In no human
churchyard will you find that invaluable tombstone; indeed, you could
scarcely find it in any world where there are churchyards. You could
scarcely have such immortal folly as that in a world where there is
also death. Mr. Sapsea is one of the golden things stored up for us in
a better world.
Yes, there were many other Dickenses: a clever Dickens, an industrious
Dickens, a public-spirited Dickens; but this was the great one. This
last outbreak of insane humour reminds us wherein lay his power and
his supremacy. The praise of such beatific buffoonery should be the
final praise, the ultimate word in his honour. The wild epitaph of Mrs.
Sapsea should be the serious epitaph of Dickens.