The greatest mystery about almost any great writer is why he was ever
allowed to write at all. The first efforts of eminent men are always
imitations; and very often they are bad imitations. The only question is
whether the publisher had (as his name would seem to imply) some
subconscious connection or sympathy with the public, and thus felt
instinctively the presence of something that might ultimately tell; or
whether the choice was merely a matter of chance and one Dickens was
chosen and another Dickens left. The fact is almost unquestionable: most
authors made their reputation by bad books and afterwards supported it
by good ones. This is in some degree true even in the case of Dickens.
The public continued to call him "Boz" long after the public had
forgotten the _Sketches by Boz_. Numberless writers of the time speak of
"Boz" as having written _Martin Chuzzlewit_ and "Boz" as having written
_David Copperfield_. Yet if they had gone back to the original book
signed "Boz" they might even have felt that it was vulgar and flippant.
This is indeed the chief tragedy of publishers: that they may easily
refuse at the same moment the wrong manuscript and the right man. It is
easy to see of Dickens now that he was the right man; but a man might
have been very well excused if he had not realised that the _Sketches_
was the right book. Dickens, I say, is a case for this primary query:
whether there was in the first work any clear sign of his higher
creative spirit. But Dickens is much less a case for this query than
almost all the other great men of his period. The very earliest works of
Thackeray are much more unimpressive than those of Dickens. Nay, they
are much more vulgar than those of Dickens. And worst of all, they are
much more numerous than those of Dickens. Thackeray came much nearer to
being the ordinary literary failure than Dickens ever came. Read some of
the earliest criticisms of Mr. Yellowplush or Michael Angelo Titmarsh
and you will realise that at the very beginning there was more potential
clumsiness and silliness in Thackeray than there ever was in Dickens.
Nevertheless there was some potential clumsiness and silliness in
Dickens; and what there is of it appears here and there in the admirable
_Sketches by Boz_.
Perhaps we may put the matter this way: this is the only one of
Dickens's works of which it is ordinarily necessary to know the date. To
a close and delicate comprehension it is indeed very important that
_Nicholas Nickleby_ was written at the beginning of Dickens's life, and
_Our Mutual Friend_ towards the end of it. Nevertheless anybody could
understand or enjoy these books, whenever they were written. If _Our
Mutual Friend_ was written in the Latin of the Dark Ages we should still
want it translated. If we thought that _Nicholas Nickleby_ would not be
written until thirty years hence we should all wait for it eagerly. The
general impression produced by Dickens's work is the same as that
produced by miraculous visions; it is the destruction of time. Thomas
Aquinas said that there was no time in the sight of God; however this
may be, there was no time in the sight of Dickens. As a general rule
Dickens can be read in any order; not only in any order of books, but
even in any order of chapters. In an average Dickens book every part is
so amusing and alive that you can read the parts backwards; you can read
the quarrel first and then the cause of the quarrel; you can fall in
love with a woman in the tenth chapter and then turn back to the first
chapter to find out who she is. This is not chaos; it is eternity. It
means merely that Dickens instinctively felt all his figures to be
immortal souls who existed whether he wrote of them or not, and whether
the reader read of them or not. There is a peculiar quality as of
celestial pre-existence about the Dickens characters. Not only did they
exist before we heard of them, they existed also before Dickens heard of
them. As a rule this unchangeable air in Dickens deprives any discussion
about date of its point. But as I have said, this is the one Dickens
work of which the date _is_ essential. It is really an important part of
the criticism of this book to say that it is his first book. Certain
elements of clumsiness, of obviousness, of evident blunder, actually
require the chronological explanation. It is biographically important
that this is his first book, almost exactly in the same way that it is
biographically important that _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ was his last
book. Change or no change, _Edwin Drood_ has this plain point of a last
story about it: that it is not finished. But if the last book is
unfinished, the first book is more unfinished still.
The _Sketches_ divide themselves, of course, into two broad classes. One
half consists of sketches that are truly and in the strict sense
sketches. That is, they are things that have no story and in their
outline none of the character of creation; they are merely facts from
the street or the tavern or the town hall, noted down as they occurred
by an intelligence of quite exceptional vivacity. The second class
consists of purely creative things: farces, romances, stories in any
case with a non-natural perfection, or a poetical justice, to round them
off. One class is admirably represented, for instance, by the sketch
describing the Charity Dinner, the other by such a story as that of
_Horatio Sparkins_. These things were almost certainly written by
Dickens at very various periods of his youth; and early as the harvest
is, no doubt it is a harvest and had ripened during a reasonably long
time. Nevertheless it is with these two types of narrative that the
young Charles Dickens first enters English literature; he enters it with
a number of journalistic notes of such things as he has seen happen in
streets or offices, and with a number of short stories which err on the
side of the extravagant and even the superficial. Journalism had not
then, indeed, sunk to the low level which it has since reached. His
sketches of dirty London would not have been dirty enough for the modern
Imperialist press. Still these first efforts of his are journalism, and
sometimes vulgar journalism. It was as a journalist that he attacked the
world, as a journalist that he conquered it.
The biographical circumstances will not, of course, be forgotten. The
life of Dickens had been a curious one. Brought up in a family just poor
enough to be painfully conscious of its prosperity and its
respectability, he had been suddenly flung by a financial calamity into
a social condition far below his own. For men on that exact edge of the
educated class such a transition is really tragic. A duke may become a
navvy for a joke, but a clerk cannot become a navvy for a joke.
Dickens's parents went to a debtors' prison; Dickens himself went to a
far more unpleasant place. The debtors' prison had about it at least
that element of amiable compromise and kindly decay which belonged (and
belongs still) to all the official institutions of England. But Dickens
was doomed to see the very blackest aspect of nineteenth-century
England, something far blacker than any mere bad government. He went not
to a prison but to a factory. In the musty traditionalism of the
Marshalsea old John Dickens could easily remain optimistic. In the
ferocious efficiency of the modern factory young Charles Dickens
narrowly escaped being a pessimist. He did escape this danger; finally
he even escaped the factory itself. His next step in life was, if
possible, even more eccentric. He was sent to school; he was sent off
like an innocent little boy in Eton collars to learn the rudiments of
Latin grammar, without any reference to the fact that he had already
taken his part in the horrible competition and actuality of the age of
manufactures. It was like giving a sacked bank manager a satchel and
sending him to a dame's school. Nor was the third stage of this career
unconnected with the oddity of the others. On leaving the school he was
made a clerk in a lawyer's office, as if henceforward this child of
ridiculous changes was to settle down into a silent assistant for a
quiet solicitor. It was exactly at this moment that his fundamental
rebellion began to seethe; it seethed more against the quiet finality of
his legal occupation than it had seethed against the squalor and slavery
of his days of poverty. There must have been in his mind, I think, a dim
feeling: "Did all my dark crises mean only this; was I crucified only
that I might become a solicitor's clerk?" Whatever be the truth about
this conjecture there can be no question about the facts themselves. It
was about this time that he began to burst and bubble over, to insist
upon his own intellect, to claim a career. It was about this time that
he put together a loose pile of papers, satires on institutions,
pictures of private persons, fairy tales of the vulgarity of his world,
odds and ends such as come out of the facility and the fierce vanity of
youth. It was about this time at any rate that he decided to publish
them, and gave them the name of _Sketches by Boz_.
They must, I think, be read in the light of this youthful explosion. In
some psychological sense he had really been wronged. But he had only
become conscious of his wrongs as his wrongs had been gradually righted.
Similarly, it has often been found that a man who can patiently endure
penal servitude through a judicial blunder will nevertheless, when once
his cause is well asserted, quarrel about the amount of compensation or
complain of small slights in his professional existence. These are the
marks of the first literary action of Dickens. It has in it all the
peculiar hardness of youth; a hardness which in those who have in any
way been unfairly treated reaches even to impudence. It is a terrible
thing for any man to find out that his elders are wrong. And this
almost unkindly courage of youth must partly be held responsible for the
smartness of Dickens, that almost offensive smartness which in these
earlier books of his sometimes irritates us like the showy gibes in the
tall talk of a school-boy. These first pages bear witness both to the
energy of his genius and also to its unenlightenment; he seems more
ignorant and more cocksure than so great a man should be. Dickens was
never stupid, but he was sometimes silly; and he is occasionally silly
here.
All this must be said to prepare the more fastidious modern for these
papers, if he has never read them before. But when all this has been
said there remains in them exactly what always remains in Dickens when
you have taken away everything that can be taken away by the most
fastidious modern who ever dissected his grandmother. There remains that
_primum mobile_ of which all the mystics have spoken: energy, the power
to create. I will not call it "the will to live," for that is a priggish
phrase of German professors. Even German professors, I suppose, have the
will to live. But Dickens had exactly what German professors have not:
he had the power to live. And indeed it is most valuable to have these
early specimens of the Dickens work if only because they are specimens
of his spirit apart from his matured intelligence. It is well to be able
to realise that contact with the Dickens world is almost like a physical
contact; it is like stepping suddenly into the hot smells of a
greenhouse, or into the bleak smell of the sea. We know that we are
there. Let any one read, for instance, one of the foolish but amusing
farces in Dickens's first volume. Let him read, for instance, such a
story as that of _Horatio Sparkins_ or that of _The Tuggses at
Ramsgate_. He will not find very much of that verbal felicity or
fantastic irony that Dickens afterwards developed; the incidents are
upon the plain lines of the stock comedy of the day: sharpers who entrap
simpletons, spinsters who angle for husbands, youths who try to look
Byronic and only look foolish. Yet there is something in these stories
which there is not in the ordinary stock comedies of that day: an
indefinable flavour of emphasis and richness, a hint as of infinity of
fun. Doubtless, for instance, a million comic writers of that epoch had
made game of the dark, romantic young man who pretended to abysses of
philosophy and despair. And it is not easy to say exactly why we feel
that the few metaphysical remarks of Mr. Horatio Sparkins are in some
way really much funnier than any of those old stock jokes. It is in a
certain quality of deep enjoyment in the writer as well as the reader;
as if the few words written had been dipped in dark nonsense and were,
as it were, reeking with derision. "Because if Effect be the result of
Cause and Cause be the Precursor of Effect," said Mr. Horatio Sparkins,
"I apprehend that you are wrong." Nobody can get at the real secret of
sentences like that; sentences which were afterwards strewed with
reckless liberality over the conversation of Dick Swiveller or Mr.
Mantalini, Sim Tappertit or Mr. Pecksniff. Though the joke seems most
superficial one has only to read it a certain number of times to see
that it is most subtle. The joke does not lie in Mr. Sparkins merely
using long words, any more than the joke lies merely in Mr. Swiveller
drinking, or in Mr. Mantalini deceiving his wife. It is something in
the arrangement of the words; something in a last inspired turn of
absurdity given to a sentence. In spite of everything Horatio Sparkins
is funny. We cannot tell why he is funny. When we know why he is funny
we shall know why Dickens is great.
Standing as we do here upon the threshold, as it were, of the work of
Dickens, it may be well perhaps to state this truth as being, after all,
the most important one. This first work had, as I have said, the faults
of first work and the special faults that arose from its author's
accidental history; he was deprived of education, and therefore it was
in some ways uneducated; he was confronted with the folly and failure of
his natural superiors and guardians, and therefore it was in some ways
pert and insolent. Nevertheless the main fact about the work is worth
stating here for any reader who should follow the chronological order
and read the _Sketches by Boz_ before embarking on the stormy and
splendid sea of _Pickwick_. For the sea of _Pickwick_, though splendid,
does make some people seasick. The great point to be emphasised at such
an initiation is this: that people, especially refined people, are not
to judge of Dickens by what they would call the coarseness or
commonplaceness of his subject. It is quite true that his jokes are
often on the same _subjects_ as the jokes in a halfpenny comic paper.
Only they happen to be good jokes. He does make jokes about drunkenness,
jokes about mothers-in-law, jokes about henpecked husbands, jokes (which
is much more really unpardonable) about spinsters, jokes about physical
cowardice, jokes about fatness, jokes about sitting down on one's hat.
He does make fun of all these things; and the reason is not very far to
seek. He makes fun of all these things because all these things, or
nearly all of them, are really very funny. But a large number of those
who might otherwise read and enjoy Dickens are undoubtedly "put off" (as
the phrase goes) by the fact that he seems to be echoing a poor kind of
claptrap in his choice of incidents and images. Partly, of course, he
suffers from the very fact of his success; his play with these topics
was so good that every one else has played with them increasingly since;
he may indeed have copied the old jokes, but he certainly renewed them.
For instance, "Ally Sloper" was certainly copied from Wilkins Micawber.
To this day you may see (in the front page of that fine periodical) the
bald head and the high shirt collar that betray the high original from
which "Ally Sloper" is derived. But exactly because "Sloper" was stolen
from Micawber, for that very reason the new generation feels as if
Micawber were stolen from "Sloper." Many modern readers feel as if
Dickens were copying the comic papers, whereas in truth the comic papers
are still copying Dickens.
Dickens showed himself to be an original man by always accepting old and
established topics. There is no clearer sign of the absence of
originality among modern poets than their disposition to find new
themes. Really original poets write poems about the spring. They are
always fresh, just as the spring is always fresh. Men wholly without
originality write poems about torture, or new religions, of some
perversion of obscenity, hoping that the mere sting of the subject may
speak for them. But we do not sufficiently realise that what is true of
the classic ode is also true of the classic joke. A true poet writes
about the spring being beautiful because (after a thousand springs) the
spring really is beautiful. In the same way the true humourist writes
about a man sitting down on his hat, because the act of sitting down on
one's hat (however often and however admirably performed) really is
extremely funny. We must not dismiss a new poet because his poem is
called _To a Skylark_; nor must we dismiss a humourist because his new
farce is called _My Mother-in-law_. He may really have splendid and
inspiring things to say upon an eternal problem. The whole question is
whether he has.
Now this is exactly where Dickens, and the possible mistake about
Dickens, both come in. Numbers of sensitive ladies, numbers of simple
aesthetes, have had a vague shrinking from that element in Dickens which
begins vaguely in _The Tuggses at Ramsgate_ and culminates in
_Pickwick_. They have a vague shrinking from the mere subject matter;
from the mere fact that so much of the fun is about drinking or
fighting, or falling down, or eloping with old ladies. It is to these
that the first appeal must be made upon the threshold of Dickens
criticism. Let them really read the thing and really see whether the
humour is the gross and half-witted jeering which they imagine it to be.
It is exactly here that the whole genius of Dickens is concerned. His
subjects are indeed stock subjects; like the skylark of Shelley, or the
autumn of Keats. But all the more because they are stock subjects the
reader realises what a magician is at work. The notion of a clumsy
fellow who falls off his horse is indeed a stock and stale subject. But
Mr. Winkle is not a stock and stale subject. Nor is his horse a stock
and stale subject; it is as immortal as the horses of Achilles. The
notion of a fat old gentleman proud of his legs might easily be vulgar.
But Mr. Pickwick proud of his legs is not vulgar; somehow we feel that
they were legs to be proud of. And it is exactly this that we must look
for in these _Sketches_. We must not leap to any cheap fancy that they
are low farces. Rather we must see that they are not low farces; and see
that nobody but Dickens could have prevented them from being so.