OLD CURIOSITY SHOP

Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only

redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and

crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us or the

things on the retina of the eye or the enormous irrelevancy of

encyclopaedias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come.

All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in

some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation. The

first thing that has to be realised about Dickens is this ultimate

spiritual condition of the man, which lay behind all his creations. This

Dickens state of mind is difficult to pick out in words as are all

elementary states of mind; they cannot be described, not because they

are too subtle for words, but because they are too simple for words.

Perhaps the nearest approach to a statement of it would be this: that

Dickens expresses an eager anticipation of everything that will happen

in the motley affairs of men; he looks at the quiet crowd waiting for it

to be picturesque and to play the fool; he expects everything; he is

torn with a happy hunger. Thackeray is always looking back to yesterday;

Dickens is always looking forward to to-morrow. Both are profoundly

humorous, for there is a humour of the morning and a humour of the

evening; but the first guesses at what it will get, at all the

grotesqueness and variety which a day may bring forth; the second looks

back on what the day has been and sees even its solemnities as slightly

ironical. Nothing can be too extravagant for the laughter that looks

forward; and nothing can be too dignified for the laughter that looks

back. It is an idle but obvious thing, which many must have noticed,

that we often find in the title of one of an author's books what might

very well stand for a general description of all of them. Thus all

Spenser's works might be called _A Hymn to Heavenly Beauty_; or all Mr.

Bernard Shaw's bound books might be called _You Never Can Tell_. In the

same way the whole substance and spirit of Thackeray might be gathered

under the general title _Vanity Fair_. In the same way too the whole

substance and spirit of Dickens might be gathered under the general

title _Great Expectations_.

In a recent criticism on this position I saw it remarked that all this

is reading into Dickens something that he did not mean; and I have been

told that it would have greatly surprised Dickens to be informed that he

"went down the broad road of the Revolution." Of course it would.

Criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they knew

themselves. It exists to say the things about them which they did not

know themselves. If a critic says that the _Iliad_ has a pagan rather

than a Christian pity, or that it is full of pictures made by one

epithet, of course he does not mean that Homer could have said that. If

Homer could have said that the critic would leave Homer to say it. The

function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only

be one function--that of dealing with the subconscious part of the

author's mind which only the critic can express, and not with the

conscious part of the author's mind, which the author himself can

express. Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position)

or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that

would have made him jump out of his boots.

Doubtless the name in this case _Great Expectations_ is an empty

coincidence; and indeed it is not in the books of the later Dickens

period (the period of _Great Expectations_) that we should look for the

best examples of this sanguine and expectant spirit which is the

essential of the man's genius. There are plenty of good examples of it

especially in the earlier works. But even in the earlier works there is

no example of it more striking or more satisfactory than _The Old

Curiosity Shop_. It is particularly noticeable in the fact that its

opening and original framework express the idea of a random experience,

a thing come across in the street; a single face in the crowd, followed

until it tells its story. Though the thing ends in a novel it begins in

a sketch; it begins as one of the _Sketches by Boz_. There is something

unconsciously artistic in the very clumsiness of this opening. Master

Humphrey starts to keep a scrap-book of all his adventures, and he finds

that he can fill the whole scrap-book with the sequels and developments

of one adventure; he goes out to notice everybody and he finds himself

busily and variedly occupied only in watching somebody. In this there is

a very profound truth about the true excitement and inexhaustible poetry

of life. The truth is not so much that eternity is full of souls as that

one soul can fill eternity. In strict art there is something quite lame

and lumbering about the way in which the benevolent old story-teller

starts to tell many stories and then drops away altogether, while one of

his stories takes his place. But in a larger art, his collision with

Little Nell and his complete eclipse by her personality and narrative

have a real significance. They suggest the random richness of such

meetings, and their uncalculated results. It makes the whole book a sort

of splendid accident.

It is not true, as is commonly said, that the Dickens pathos as pathos

is bad. It is not true, as is still more commonly said, that the whole

business about Little Nell is bad. The case is more complex than that.

Yet complex as it is it admits of one sufficiently clear distinction.

Those who have written about the death of Little Nell, have generally

noticed the crudities of the character itself; the little girl's

unnatural and staring innocence, her constrained and awkward piety. But

they have nearly all of them entirely failed to notice that there is in

the death of Little Nell one quite definite and really artistic idea. It

is not an artistic idea that a little child should die rhetorically on

the stage like Paul Dombey; and Little Nell does not die rhetorically

upon the stage like Paul Dombey. But it is an artistic idea that all the

good powers and personalities in the story should set out in pursuit of

one insignificant child, to repair an injustice to her, should track her

from town to town over England with all the resources of wealth,

intelligence, and travel, and should all--arrive too late. All the good

fairies and all the kind magicians, all the just kings and all the

gallant princes, with chariots and flying dragons and armies and navies

go after one little child who had strayed into a wood, and find her

dead. That is the conception which Dickens's artistic instinct was

really aiming at when he finally condemned Little Nell to death, after

keeping her, so to speak, so long with the rope round her neck. The

death of Little Nell is open certainly to the particular denial which

its enemies make about it. The death of Little Nell is not pathetic. It

is perhaps tragic; it is in reality ironic. Here is a very good case of

the injustice to Dickens on his purely literary side. It is not that I

say that Dickens achieved what he designed; it is that the critics will

not see what the design was. They go on talking of the death of Little

Nell as if it were a mere example of maudlin description like the death

of Little Paul. As a fact it is not described at all; so it cannot be

objectionable. It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of

Little Nell, that I object to.

In this, in the actual picture of her personality, if you can call it a

personality, Dickens did fall into some of his facile vices. The real

objection to much of his pathos belongs really to another part of his

character. It is connected with his vanity, his voracity for all kinds

of praise, his restive experimentalism and even perhaps his envy. He

strained himself to achieve pathos. His humour was inspiration; but his

pathos was ambition. His laughter was lonely; he would have laughed on a

desert island. But his grief was gregarious. He liked to move great

masses of men, to melt them into tenderness, to play on the people as a

great pianist plays on them; to make them mad or sad. His pathos was to

him a way of showing his power; and for that reason it was really

powerless. He could not help making people laugh; but he tried to make

them cry. We come in this novel, as we often do come in his novels, upon

hard lumps of unreality, upon a phrase that suddenly sickens. That is

always due to his conscious despotism over the delicate feelings; that

is always due to his love of fame as distinct from his love of fun. But

it is not true that all Dickens's pathos is like this; it is not even

true that all the passages about Little Nell are like this; there are

two strands almost everywhere and they can be differentiated as the

sincere and the deliberate. There is a great difference between Dickens

thinking about the tears of his characters and Dickens thinking about

the tears of his audience.

When all this is allowed, however, and the exaggerated contempt for the

Dickens pathos is properly corrected, the broad fact remains: that to

pass from the solemn characters in this book to the comic characters in

this book, is to be like some Ulysses who should pass suddenly from the

land of shadows to the mountain of the gods. Little Nell has her own

position in careful and reasonable criticism: even that wobbling old

ass, her grandfather, has his position in it; perhaps even the

dissipated Fred (whom long acquaintance with Mr. Dick Swiveller has not

made any less dismal in his dissipation) has a place in it also. But

when we come to Swiveller and Sampson Brass and Quilp and Mrs. Jarley,

then Fred and Nell and the grandfather simply do not exist. There are no

such people in the story. The real hero and heroine of _The Old

Curiosity Shop_ are of course Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness. It is

significant in a sense that these two sane, strong, living, and lovable

human beings are the only two, or almost the only two, people in the

story who do not run after Little Nell. They have something better to do

than to go on that shadowy chase after that cheerless phantom. They have

to build up between them a true romance; perhaps the one true romance in

the whole of Dickens. Dick Swiveller really has all the half-heroic

characteristics which make a man respected by a woman and which are the

male contribution to virtue. He is brave, magnanimous, sincere about

himself, amusing, absurdly hopeful; above all, he is both strong and

weak. On the other hand the Marchioness really has all the

characteristics, the entirely heroic characteristics which make a woman

respected by a man. She is female: that is, she is at once incurably

candid and incurably loyal, she is full of terrible common-sense, she

expects little pleasure for herself and yet she can enjoy bursts of it;

above all, she is physically timid and yet she can face anything. All

this solid rocky romanticism is really implied in the speech and action

of these two characters and can be felt behind them all the time.

Because they are the two most absurd people in the book they are also

the most vivid, human, and imaginable. There are two really fine love

affairs in Dickens; and I almost think only two. One is the happy

courtship of Swiveller and the Marchioness; the other is the tragic

courtship of Toots and Florence Dombey. When Dick Swiveller wakes up in

bed and sees the Marchioness playing cribbage he thinks that he and she

are a prince and princess in a fairy tale. He thinks right.

I speak thus seriously of such characters with a deliberate purpose; for

the frivolous characters of Dickens are taken much too frivolously. It

has been quite insufficiently pointed out that all the serious moral

ideas that Dickens did contrive to express he expressed altogether

through this fantastic medium, in such figures as Swiveller and the

little servant. The warmest upholder of Dickens would not go to the

solemn or sentimental passages for anything fresh or suggestive in faith

or philosophy. No one would pretend that the death of little Dombey

(with its "What are the wild waves saying?") told us anything new or

real about death. A good Christian dying, one would imagine, not only

would not know what the wild waves were saying, but would not care. No

one would pretend that the repentance of old Paul Dombey throws any

light on the psychology or philosophy of repentance. No doubt old

Dombey, white-haired and amiable, was a great improvement on old Dombey

brown-haired and unpleasant. But in his case the softening of the heart

seems to bear too close a resemblance to softening of the brain. Whether

these serious passages are as bad as the critical people or as good as

the sentimental people find them, at least they do not convey anything

in the way of an illuminating glimpse or a bold suggestion about men's

moral nature. The serious figures do not tell one anything about the

human soul. The comic figures do. Take anything almost at random out of

these admirable speeches of Dick Swiveller. Notice, for instance, how

exquisitely Dickens has caught a certain very deep and delicate quality

at the bottom of this idle kind of man. I mean that odd impersonal sort

of intellectual justice, by which the frivolous fellow sees things as

they are and even himself as he is; and is above irritation. Mr.

Swiveller, you remember, asks the Marchioness whether the Brass family

ever talk about him; she nods her head with vivacity. "'Complimentary?'

inquired Mr. Swiveller. The motion of the little servant's head

altered.... 'But she says,' continued the little servant, 'that you

ain't to be trusted.' 'Well, do you know, Marchioness,' said Mr.

Swiveller thoughtfully, 'many people, not exactly professional people,

but tradesmen, have had the same idea. The excellent citizen from whom I

ordered this beer inclines strongly to that opinion.'"

This philosophical freedom from all resentment, this strange love of

truth which seems actually to come through carelessness, is a very real

piece of spiritual observation. Even among liars there are two classes,

one immeasurably better than another. The honest liar is the man who

tells the truth about his old lies; who says on Wednesday, "I told a

magnificent lie on Monday." He keeps the truth in circulation; no one

version of things stagnates in him and becomes an evil secret. He does

not have to live with old lies; a horrible domesticity. Mr. Swiveller

may mislead the waiter about whether he has the money to pay; but he

does not mislead his friend, and he does not mislead himself on the

point. He is quite as well aware as any one can be of the accumulating

falsity of the position of a gentleman who by his various debts has

closed up all the streets into the Strand except one, and who is going

to close that to-night with a pair of gloves. He shuts up the street

with a pair of gloves, but he does not shut up his mind with a secret.

The traffic of truth is still kept open through his soul.

It is exactly in these absurd characters, then, that we can find a mass

of psychological and ethical suggestion. This cannot be found in the

serious characters except indeed in some of the later experiments: there

is a little of such psychological and ethical suggestion in figures like

Gridley, like Jasper, like Bradley Headstone. But in these earlier books

at least, such as _The Old Curiosity Shop_, the grave or moral figures

throw no light upon morals. I should maintain this generalisation even

in the presence of that apparent exception _The Christmas Carol_ with

its trio of didactic ghosts. Charity is certainly splendid, at once a

luxury and a necessity; but Dickens is not most effective when he is

preaching charity seriously; he is most effective when he is preaching

it uproariously; when he is preaching it by means of massive

personalities and vivid scenes. One might say that he is best not when

he is preaching his human love, but when he is practising it. In his

grave pages he tells us to love men; but in his wild pages he creates

men whom we can love. By his solemnity he commands us to love our

neighbours. By his caricature he makes us love them.

There is an odd literary question which I wonder is not put more often

in literature. How far can an author tell a truth without seeing it

himself? Perhaps an actual example will express my meaning. I was once

talking to a highly intelligent lady about Thackeray's _Newcomes_. We

were speaking of the character of Mrs. Mackenzie, the Campaigner, and in

the middle of the conversation the lady leaned across to me and said in

a low, hoarse, but emphatic voice, "She drank. Thackeray didn't know it;

but she drank." And it is really astonishing what a shaft of white light

this sheds on the Campaigner, on her terrible temperament, on her

agonised abusiveness and her almost more agonised urbanity, on her

clamour which is nevertheless not open or explicable, on her temper

which is not so much bad temper as insatiable, bloodthirsty, man-eating

temper. How far can a writer thus indicate by accident a truth of which

he is himself ignorant? If truth is a plan or pattern of things that

really are, or in other words, if truth truly exists outside ourselves,

or in other words, if truth exists at all, it must be often possible for

a writer to uncover a corner of it which he happens not to understand,

but which his reader does happen to understand. The author sees only two

lines; the reader sees where they meet and what is the angle. The author

sees only an arc or fragment of a curve; the reader sees the size of the

circle. The last thing to say about Dickens, and especially about books

like _The Old Curiosity Shop_, is that they are full of these

unconscious truths. The careless reader may miss them. The careless

author almost certainly did miss them. But from them can be gathered an

impression of real truth to life which is for the grave critics of

Dickens an almost unknown benefit, buried treasure. Here for instance is

one of them out of _The Old Curiosity Shop_. I mean the passage in which

(by a blazing stroke of genius) the dashing Mr. Chuckster, one of the

Glorious Apollos of whom Mr. Swiveller was the Perpetual Grand, is made

to entertain a hatred bordering upon frenzy for the stolid, patient,

respectful, and laborious Kit. Now in the formal plan of the story Mr.

Chuckster is a fool, and Kit is almost a hero; at least he is a noble

boy. Yet unconsciously Dickens made the idiot Chuckster say something

profoundly suggestive on the subject. In speaking of Kit Mr. Chuckster

makes use of these two remarkable phrases; that Kit is "meek" and that

he is "a snob." Now Kit is really a very fresh and manly picture of a

boy, firm, sane, chivalrous, reasonable, full of those three great Roman

virtues which Mr. Belloc has so often celebrated, _virtus_ and

_verecundia_ and _pietas_. He is a sympathetic but still a

straightforward study of the best type of that most respectable of all

human classes, the respectable poor. All this is true; all that Dickens

utters in praise of Kit is true; nevertheless the awful words of

Chuckster remain written on the eternal skies. Kit is meek and Kit is a

snob. His natural dignity does include and is partly marred by that

instinctive subservience to the employing class which has been the

comfortable weakness of the whole English democracy, which has prevented

their making any revolution for the last two hundred years. Kit would

not serve any wicked man for money, but he would serve any moderately

good man and the money would give a certain dignity and decisiveness to

the goodness. All this is the English popular evil which goes along with

the English popular virtues of geniality, of homeliness, tolerance and

strong humour, hope and an enormous appetite for a hand-to-mouth

happiness. The scene in which Kit takes his family to the theatre is a

monument of the massive qualities of old English enjoyment. If what we

want is Merry England, our antiquarians ought not to revive the Maypole

or the Morris Dancers; they ought to revive Astley's and Sadler's Wells

and the old solemn Circus and the old stupid Pantomime, and all the

sawdust and all the oranges. Of all this strength and joy in the poor,

Kit is a splendid and final symbol. But amid all his masculine and

English virtue, he has this weak touch of meekness, or acceptance of the

powers that be. It is a sound touch; it is a real truth about Kit. But

Dickens did not know it. Mr. Chuckster did.

Dickens's stories taken as a whole have more artistic unity than appears

at the first glance. It is the immediate impulse of a modern critic to

dismiss them as mere disorderly scrap-books with very brilliant scraps.

But this is not quite so true as it looks. In one of Dickens's novels

there is generally no particular unity of construction; but there is

often a considerable unity of sentiment and atmosphere. Things are

irrelevant, but not somehow inappropriate. The whole book is written

carelessly; but the whole book is generally written in one mood. To take

a rude parallel from the other arts, we may say that there is not much

unity of form, but there is much unity of colour. In most of the novels

this can be seen. _Nicholas Nickleby_, as I have remarked, is full of a

certain freshness, a certain light and open-air curiosity, which

irradiates from the image of the young man swinging along the Yorkshire

roads in the sun. Hence the comic characters with whom he falls in are

comic characters in the same key; they are a band of strolling players,

charlatans and poseurs, but too humane to be called humbugs. In the same

way, the central story of _Oliver Twist_ is sombre; and hence even its

comic character is almost sombre; at least he is too ugly to be merely

amusing. Mr. Bumble is in some ways a terrible grotesque; his apoplectic

visage recalls the "fire-red Cherubimme's face," which added such horror

to the height and stature of Chaucer's Sompnour. In both these cases

even the riotous and absurd characters are a little touched with the

tint of the whole story. But this neglected merit of Dickens can

certainly be seen best in _The Old Curiosity Shop_.

The curiosity shop itself was a lumber of grotesque and sinister things,

outlandish weapons, twisted and diabolic decorations. The comic

characters in the book are all like images bought in an old curiosity

shop. Quilp might be a gargoyle. He might be some sort of devilish

door-knocker, dropped down and crawling about the pavement. The same

applies to the sinister and really terrifying stiffness of Sally Brass.

She is like some old staring figure cut out of wood. Sampson Brass, her

brother, again is a grotesque in the same rather inhuman manner; he is

especially himself when he comes in with the green shade over his eye.

About all this group of bad figures in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ there is

a sort of _diablerie_. There is also within this atmosphere an

extraordinary energy of irony and laughter. The scene in which Sampson

Brass draws up the description of Quilp, supposing him to be dead,

reaches a point of fiendish fun. "We will not say very bandy, Mrs.

Jiniwin," he says of his friend's legs, "we will confine ourselves to

bandy. He is gone, my friends, where his legs would never be called in

question." They go on to the discussion of his nose, and Mrs. Jiniwin

inclines to the view that it is flat. "Aquiline, you hag! Aquiline,"

cries Mr. Quilp, pushing in his head and striking his nose with his

fist. There is nothing better in the whole brutal exuberance of the

character than that gesture with which Quilp punches his own face with

his own fist. It is indeed a perfect symbol; for Quilp is always

fighting himself for want of anybody else. He is energy, and energy by

itself is always suicidal; he is that primordial energy which tears and

which destroys itself.