It is absurd, of course, to think that it is necessary to "hold a brief"
for Dickens. But sometimes, when one comes across charming and
exquisite people who "cannot read him," one is tempted to give
one's personal appreciation that kind of form.
Dickens is one of the great artists of the world, and he is so, in spite
of the fact that in certain spheres, in the sphere of Sex, for instance,
or the sphere of Philosophy, he is such a hopeless conventionalist. It
is because we are at this hour so preoccupied with Sex, in our desire
to readjust the conventions of Society and Morality towards it, that a
great artist, who simply leaves it out altogether, or treats it with a
mixture of the conventionality of the preacher and the worst
foolishness of the crowd, is an artist whose appeal is seriously
handicapped.
Yet, given this "lacuna," this amazing "gap" in his work, a
deprivation much more serious than his want of "philosophy,"
Dickens is a writer of colossal genius, whose originality and vision
puts all our modern "literateurs" to shame. One feels this directly
one opens any volume of his. Only a great creative genius could so
dominate, for instance, his mere "illustrators," as to mesmerize them
completely into his manner. And certainly his illustrators are
_drugged_ with the Dickens atmosphere. Those hideous-lovely
persons, whose legs and arms are so thin that it is impossible to
suppose they ever removed their clothes; do they not strut and leer
and ogle and grin and stagger and weep, in the very style of their
author?
Remembering my "brief" and the sort of jury, among my friends, I
have to persuade, I am not inclined in this sketch to launch out into
panegyrics upon Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Gamp and Mr. Pecksniff
and Betsy Trotwood and Bill Sikes and Dick Swiveller and Bob
Sawyer and Sam Weller and Mark Tapley and Old Scrooge. The
mere mention of these names, which, to some, would suggest the
music of the spheres, to others would suggest forced merriment,
horrible Early Victorian sentiment, and that sort of hackneyed
"unction" of sly moral elders, which is youth's especial Hell. Much
wiser were it, as it seems to me, to indicate what in Dickens--in his
style, his method, his vision, his art--actually appeals to one
particular mind. I think it is to be found in his childlike Imagination.
Now, the modern cult for children has reached such fantastic limits
that one has to be very careful when one uses that word. But
Dickens is childlike, not as Oscar Wilde--that Uranian Baby--or as
Paul Verlaine--that little "pet lamb" of God--felt themselves to be
childlike, or as the artificial-minded Robert Louis Stevenson fooled
his followers into thinking him. He is really and truly childlike. His
imagination and vision are literally the imagination and vision of
children. We have not all played at Pirates and Buccaneers. We have
not all dreamed of Treasure-Islands and Marooned sailors. We have
not all "believed in Fairies." These rather tiresome and over-rung-upon
aspects of children's fancies are, after all, very often nothing
more than middle-aged people's damned affectations. The children's
cult at the present day plays strange tricks.
But Dickens, from beginning to end, has the real touch, the authentic
reaction. How should actual and living children, persecuted by
"New Educational Methods," glutted with toys, depraved by
"understanding sympathy," and worn out by performances of "Peter
Pan," believe--really and truly--in fairies any more? But, in spite of
sentimental Child-worshippers, let us not hesitate to whisper: "It
doesn't matter in the least if they don't!" The "enlightened" and
cultivated mothers, who grow unhappy when they find their darlings
cold to Titania and Oberon and to the more "poetic" modern fairies,
with the funny names, may rest in peace. If the house they inhabit
and the street they inhabit be not sanitarized and art-decorated
beyond all human interest, they may let their little ones alone. They
will dream their dreams. They will invent their games. They will
talk to their shadows. They will blow kisses to the Moon. And all
will go well with "the Child in the House," even if he has not so
much as even heard of "the Blue Bird"!
If these uncomfortably "childlike" people read Dickens, they would
know how a child really does regard life, and perhaps they would be
a little shocked. For it is by no means only the "romantic" and
"aesthetic" side of things that appeals to children. They have their
nightmares, poor imps, and such devils follow them as older people
never dream of. Dickens knew all that, and in his books the thrill of
the supernatural, as it hovers over chairs and tables and pots and
pans, is never far away. It lurks, that repelling-alluring Terror, in a
thousand simple places. It moves in the darkness of very modern
cupboards. It hides in the recesses of very modern cellars. It pounces
out from the eaves of quite modern attics. It is there, halfway up the
Staircase. It is there, halfway down the Passage. And God knows
whither it comes or where it goes!
To endow the little every-day objects that surround us--a certain
picture in a certain light, a certain clock or stove in a certain shadow,
a certain corner of the curtain when the wind moves it--with the
fetish-magic of natural "animism"; that is the real childlike trick, and
that is what Dickens does. It is, of course, something not confined to
people who are children in years. It is the old, sweet Witch-Hag,
Mystery, that, sooner or later, has us all by the throat!
And that is why, to me, Dickens is so great a writer. Since men have
come to live so much in cities; since houses and streets and rooms
and passages and windows and basements have come to mean more
to them than fields and woods, it is essential that "the Old Man
covered with a Mantle," the Ancient of Ancients, the Disturber of
Rational Dreams, should move into the town, too, and mutter and
murmur in its shadows!
How hard a thing is it, to put into words the strange attraction and
the strange terror which the dwellings of mortal men have the power
of exciting! To drift at nightfall into an unknown town, and wander
through its less frequented ways, and peep into its dark, empty
churches, and listen to the wind in the stunted trees that grow by its
Prison, and watch some flickering particular light high up in some
tall house--the light of a harlot, a priest, an artist, a murderer--surely
there is no imaginative experience equal to this! Then, the things
one sees, by chance, by accident, through half-open doors and
shutter-chinks and behind lifted curtains! Verily the ways of men
upon earth are past finding out, and their madness beyond
interpretation!
It is not only children--and yet it is children most of all--who get the
sense, in a weird, sudden flash, of the demonic life of inanimate
things. Why are our houses so full of things that one had better not
look at, things that, like the face of Salome, had better be seen in
mirrors, and things that must be forbidden to look at us? The houses
of mortal men are strange places. They are sepulchres and
cemeteries. Dungeons are they, and prison cells. Not one of them
but have murderous feet going up and down. Not one of them but
have lavisher's hands, fumbling, back and forth, along the walls. For
the secret wishes, and starved desires, and mad cravings, and furious
revolts, of the hearts of men and women, living together decently in
their "homes," grow by degrees palpable and real and gather to
themselves strange shapes.
No writer who has ever lived can touch Dickens in indicating this
sort of familiar sorcery and the secret of its terror. For it is children,
more than any, who are conscious how "haunted" all manner of
places and things are. And people themselves! The searching
psychologists are led singularly astray. They peer and pry and repine,
and all the while the real essence of the figure lies in its momentary
expression--in its most superficial gesture.
Dickens' world is a world of gnomes and hob-goblins, of ghouls and
of laughing angels. The realist of the Thackeray School finds
nothing but monstrous exaggeration here--and fantastic mummery.
If he were right, par-dieu! If his sleek "reality" were all that there
was--"alarum!" We were indeed "betrayed"! But no; the children are
right. Dickens is right. Neither "realist" or "psychologist" hits the
mark, when it comes to the true diablerie of living people. There is
something more whimsical, more capricious, more _unreal,_ than
philosophers suppose about this human pantomime. People are
actually--as every child knows--much worse and much better than
they "ought" to be. And, as every child knows, too, they tune their
souls up to the pitch of their "masks." The surface of things is the
heart of things; and the protruded goblin-tongue, the wagged head,
the groping fingers, the shuffling step, are just as significant of the
mad play-motif as any hidden thoughts. People _think_ with their
bodies, and their looks and gestures; nay! their very garments are
words, tones, whispers, in their general Confession.
The world of Dickens' fantastic creations is all the nearer to the truth
of our life because it is so arbitrary and "impossible." He seems to
go backwards and forwards with a torch, throwing knobs, jags,
wrinkles, corrugations, protuberancies, cavities, horns, and snouts
into terrifying illumination. But we are like that! That is what we
actually are. That is how the Pillar of Fire sees us. Then, again, are
we to limit our interest, as these modern writers do, to the beautiful
people or the interesting people or the gross, emphatic
people. Dickens is never more childlike than when he draws us,
wonderingly and confidingly, to the stark knees of a Mrs. Pipchin,
or when he drives us away, in unaccountable panic-terror, from the
rattling jet-beads of a Miss Murdstone.
Think of the vast, queer, dim-lighted world wherein live and move
all those funny, dusty, attenuated, heart-breaking figures, of such as
wear the form of women--and yet may never know "love"! It is
wonderful--when you think of it--how much of absorbing interest is
left in life, when you have eliminated "sex," suppressed
"psychology," and left philosophy out! Then appear all those queer
attractions and repulsions which are purely superficial, and even
material, and yet which are so dominant. Mother of God! How
unnecessary to bring in Fairies and Blue Birds, when the solemnity
of some little seamstress and her sorceress hands, and the quaint
knotting of her poor wisp of hair, would be enough to keep a child
staring and dreaming for hours upon hours!
Life in a great city is like life in an enchanted forest. One never
knows what hideous ogre or what exquisite hamadryad one may
encounter. And the little ways of all one's scrabbling and burrowing
and chuckling and nodding and winking house-mates! To go
through the world expecting adventures is to find them sooner or
later. But one need only cross one's threshold to find one adventure--the
adventure of a new, unknown fellow-creature, full of suspicion,
full of cloudy malice, full of secretive dreams, and yet ready to
respond--poor devil--to a certain kind of signal!
Long reading of Dickens' books, like long living with children, gives
one a wholesome dread of cynicism and flippancy. Children's games
are more serious than young men's love-affairs, and they must be
treated so. It is not exactly that life is to be "taken seriously." It is
to be taken for what it is--an extraordinary Pantomime. The people
who will not laugh with Pierrot because his jokes are so silly, and
the people who will not cry with Columbine because her legs are so
thin, may be shrewd psychologists and fastidious artists--but, God
help them! they are not in the game.
The romance of city-life is one thing. The romance of a particular
city leads us further. Dickens has managed to get the inner identity
of London; what is permanent in it; what can be found nowhere else;
as not even Balzac got hold of Paris. London is terrible and ghastly.
One knows that; but the wretchedest of its "gamins" knows that it is
something else also. More than any place on earth it seems to have
that weight, that mass, that depth, that foursquare solidity, which
reassures and comforts, in the midst of the illusions of life. It
descends so far, with its huge human foundations, that it gives one
the impression of a monstrous concrete Base, sunk into eternity,
upon which, for all its accumulated litter and debris, man will be
able to build, perhaps has begun already, to build, his Urbs Beata.
And Dickens entered with dramatic clairvoyance into every secret of
this Titanic mystery. He knew its wharfs, its bridges, its viaducts, its
alleys, its dens, its parks, its squares, its churches, its morgues, its
circuses, its prisons, its hospitals, and its mad-houses. And as the
human atoms of that fantastic, gesticulating, weeping, grinning
crowd of his dance their crazy "Carmagnole," we cannot but feel
that somehow we _must_ gather strength and friendliness enough to
applaud such a tremendous Performance.
Dickens was too great a genius to confine his demonic touch to the
town alone. There are _suggestions_ of his, relating to country roads
and country Inns and country solitudes, like nothing else, except,
perhaps, the Vignettes of Bewick. He carries the same "animism"
into this also. And he notes and records sensations of the most
evasive kind. The peculiar terror we feel, for instance, mixed with a
sort of mad pity, when by chance we light upon some twisted
root-trunk, to which the shadows have given outstretched arms. The
vague feelings, too, so absolutely unaccountable, that the sight of a
lonely gate, or weir, or park-railing, or sign-post, or ruined shed, or
tumble-down sheep-fold, may suddenly arouse, when we feel that in
some weird manner we are the accomplices of the Thing's tragedy,
are feelings that Dickens alone among writers seems to understand.
A road with no people upon it, and the wind alone sobbing there;
with blind eyes and wrinkled forehead; a pool by the edge of a wide
marsh-land--like the marsh-land in "Great Expectations"--with I
know not what reflected in it, and waiting, always waiting, for
something that does not come; a low, bent, knotted pine-tree, over
which the ravens fly, one by one, shrieking; these are the things that
to some people--to children, for instance--remain in the mind when
all else of their country journey is forgotten.
There is no one but Dickens who has a style that can drag these
things into light. His style shrieks sometimes like a ghoul tugging at
the roots of a mandrake. At other times it wails like a lost soul. At
other times it mutters, and whimpers, and pipes in its throat, like an
old man blinking at the moon. At other times it roars and thunders
like ten thousand drunken devils. At other times it breaks into
wistful, tender, little-girl sobs--and catches the rhythm of poetry--as
in the death of Nell. Sometimes a character in Dickens will say
something so humorously pregnant, so directly from what we hear in
street and tavern, that art itself "gives up," and applauds, speechless.
After all, it is meet and right that there should be one great author,
undistracted by psychology--unseduced by eroticism. There remain
a few quite important things to deal with, when these are removed!
Birth, for instance--the mystery of birth--and the mystery of death.
One never forgets death in reading Dickens. He has a thought, a pity,
for those things that once were men and women, lying, with their six
feet of earth upon them, in our English Churchyards, so horribly still,
while the mask of their sorrow yields to the yet more terrible grin of
our mortality's last jest.
And to the last he is--like all children--the lover of Players. Every
poor dog of Public Entertainer, from the Barrel-Organ man to him
who pulls the ropes for Punch and Judy, has his unqualified
devotion. The modern Stage may see strange revolutions, some of
them by no means suitable to children--but we need not be alarmed.
There will always remain the larger Stage, the stage of man's own
Exits and Entrances; and there, at any rate, while Dickens is their
"Manager," Pierrot may weep and dance, and Pierrette dance and
weep, knowing that they will not be long without their audience, or
long without their applause!
He was a vulgar writer. Why not? England would not be England--and
what would London be?--if we didn't have a touch, a smack, a
sprinkling of that ingredient!
He was a shameless sentimentalist. Why not? It is better to cry than
to comb one's hair all day with an ivory comb.
He was a monstrous melodramatist. Why not? To be born is a
melodrama. To play "hide-and-seek" with Death is a melodrama.
And some have found melodramatic satisfaction in letting
themselves be caught. All the World's a Puppet-Show, and if the Big
Showman jerks his wires so extravagantly, why should not the Little
Showman do the same?