The _Pictures from Italy_ are excellent in themselves and excellent as a
foil to the _American Notes_. Here we have none of that air of giving a
decision like a judge or sending in a report like an inspector; here we
have only glimpses, light and even fantastic glimpses, of a world that
is really alien to Dickens. It is so alien that he can almost entirely
enjoy it. For no man can entirely enjoy that which he loves; contentment
is always unpatriotic. The difference can indeed be put with approximate
perfection in one phrase. In Italy he was on a holiday; in America he
was on a tour. But indeed Dickens himself has quite sufficiently
conveyed the difference in the two phrases that he did actually use for
the titles of the two books. Dickens often told unconscious truths,
especially in small matters. The _American Notes_ really are notes, like
the notes of a student or a professional witness. The _Pictures from
Italy_ are only pictures from Italy, like the miscellaneous pictures
that all tourists bring from Italy.
To take another and perhaps closer figure of speech, almost all
Dickens's works such as these may best be regarded as private letters
addressed to the public. His private correspondence was quite as
brilliant as his public works; and many of his public works are almost
as formless and casual as his private correspondence. If he had been
struck insensible for a year, I really think that his friends and family
could have brought out one of his best books by themselves if they had
happened to keep his letters. The homogeneity of his public and private
work was indeed strange in many ways. On the one hand, there was little
that was pompously and unmistakably public in the publications; on the
other hand, there was very little that was private in the private
letters. His hilarity had almost a kind of hardness about it; no man's
letters, I should think, ever needed less expurgation on the ground of
weakness or undue confession. The main part, and certainly the best
part, of such a book as _Pictures from Italy_ can certainly be
criticised best as part of that perpetual torrent of entertaining
autobiography which he flung at his children as if they were his readers
and his readers as if they were his children. There are some brilliant
patches of sense and nonsense in this book; but there is always
something accidental in them; as if they might have occurred somewhere
else. Perhaps the most attractive of them is the incomparable
description of the Italian Marionette Theatre in which they acted a play
about the death of Napoleon in St. Helena. The description is better
than that of Codlin and Short's Punch and Judy, and almost as good as
that of Mrs. Jarley's Wax Works. Indeed the humour is similar; for Punch
is supposed to be funny, but Napoleon (as Mrs. Jarley said when asked if
her show was funnier than Punch) was not funny at all. The idea of a
really tragic scene being enacted between tiny wooden dolls with large
heads is delightfully dealt with by Dickens. We can almost imagine the
scene in which the wooden Napoleon haughtily rebukes his wooden jailor
for calling him General Bonaparte--"Sir Hudson Low, call me not thus; I
am Napoleon, Emperor of the French." There is also something singularly
gratifying about the scene of Napoleon's death, in which he lay in bed
with his little wooden hands outside the counterpane and the doctor (who
was hung on wires too short) "delivered medical opinions in the air." It
may seem flippant to dwell on such flippancies in connection with a book
which contains many romantic descriptions and many moral generalisations
which Dickens probably valued highly. But it is not for such things that
he is valued. In all his writings, from his most reasoned and sustained
novel to his maddest private note, it is always this obstreperous
instinct for farce which stands out as his in the highest sense. His
wisdom is at the best talent, his foolishness is genius. Just that
exuberant levity which we associate with a moment we associate in his
case with immortality. It is said of certain old masonry that the mortar
was so hard that it has survived the stones. So if Dickens could revisit
the thing he built, he would be surprised to see all the work he thought
solid and responsible wasted almost utterly away, but the shortest
frivolities and the most momentary jokes remaining like colossal rocks
for ever.
[Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1844
From a miniature by Margaret Gillies.]