_Our Mutual Friend_ marks a happy return to the earlier manner of
Dickens at the end of Dickens's life. One might call it a sort of Indian
summer of his farce. Those who most truly love Dickens love the earlier
Dickens; and any return to his farce must be welcomed, like a young man
come back from the dead. In this book indeed he does not merely return
to his farce; he returns in a manner to his vulgarity. It is the old
democratic and even uneducated Dickens who is writing here. The very
title is illiterate. Any priggish pupil teacher could tell Dickens that
there is no such phrase in English as "our mutual friend." Any one could
tell Dickens that "our mutual friend" means "our reciprocal friend," and
that "our reciprocal friend" means nothing. If he had only had all the
solemn advantages of academic learning (the absence of which in him was
lamented by the _Quarterly Review_), he would have known better. He
would have known that the correct phrase for a man known to two people
is "our common friend." But if one calls one's friend a common friend,
even that phrase is open to misunderstanding.
I dwell with a gloomy pleasure on this mistake in the very title of the
book because I, for one, am not pleased to see Dickens gradually
absorbed by modern culture and good manners. Dickens, by class and
genius, belonged to the kind of people who do talk about a "mutual
friend"; and for that class there is a very great deal to be said. These
two things can at least be said--that this class does understand the
meaning of the word "friend" and the meaning of the word "mutual." I
know that for some long time before he had been slowly and subtly sucked
into the whirlpool of the fashionable views of later England. I know
that in _Bleak House_ he treats the aristocracy far more tenderly than
he treats them in _David Copperfield_. I know that in _A Tale of Two
Cities_, having come under the influence of Carlyle, he treats
revolution as strange and weird, whereas under the influence of Cobbett
he would have treated it as obvious and reasonable. I know that in _The
Mystery of Edwin Drood_ he not only praised the Minor Canon of
Cloisterham at the expense of the dissenting demagogue, Honeythunder; I
know that he even took the last and most disastrous step in the modern
English reaction. While blaming the old Cloisterham monks (who were
democratic), he praised the old-world peace that they had left behind
them--an old-world peace which is simply one of the last amusements of
aristocracy. The modern rich feel quite at home with the dead monks.
They would have felt anything but comfortable with the live ones. I
know, in short, how the simple democracy of Dickens was gradually dimmed
by the decay and reaction of the middle of the nineteenth century. I
know that he fell into some of the bad habits of aristocratic
sentimentalism. I know that he used the word "gentleman" as meaning good
man. But all this only adds to the unholy joy with which I realise that
the very title of one of his best books was a vulgarism. It is pleasant
to contemplate this last unconscious knock in the eye for the gentility
with which Dickens was half impressed. Dickens is the old self-made man;
you may take him or leave him. He has its disadvantages and its merits.
No university man would have written the title; no university man could
have written the book.
If it were a mere matter of the accident of a name it would not be worth
while thus to dwell on it, even as a preface. But the title is in this
respect typical of the tale. The novel called _Our Mutual Friend_ is in
many ways a real reaction towards the earlier Dickens manner. I have
remarked that _Little Dorrit_ was a reversion to the form of the first
books, but not to their spirit; _Our Mutual Friend_ is a reversion to
the spirit as well as the form. Compare, for instance, the public
figures that make a background in each book. Mr. Merdle is a commercial
man having no great connection with the plot; similarly Mr. Podsnap is a
commercial man having no great connection with the plot. This is
altogether in the spirit of the earlier books; the whole point of an
early Dickens novel was to have as many people as possible entirely
unconnected with the plot. But exactly because both studies are
irrelevant, the contrast between them can be more clearly perceived.
Dickens goes out of his way to describe Merdle; and it is a gloomy
description. But Dickens goes out of his way to describe Podsnap, and it
is a happy and hilarious description. It recalls the days when he hunted
great game; when he went out of his way to entrap such adorable monsters
as Mr. Pecksniff or Mr. Vincent Crummles. With these wild beings we
never bother about the cause of their coming. Such guests in a story
may be uninvited, but they are never _de trop_. They earn their night's
lodging in any tale by being so uproariously amusing; like little Tommy
Tucker in the legend, they sing for their supper. This is really the
marked truth about _Our Mutual Friend_, as a stage in the singular
latter career of Dickens. It is like the leaping up and flaming of a
slowly dying fire. The best things in the book are in the old best
manner of the author. They have that great Dickens quality of being
something which is pure farce and yet which is not superficial; an
unfathomable farce--a farce that goes down to the roots of the universe.
The highest compliment that can ever be paid to the humour of Dickens is
paid when some lady says, with the sudden sincerity of her sex, that it
is "too silly." The phrase is really a perfectly sound and acute
criticism. Humour does consist in being too silly, in passing the
borderland, in breaking through the floor of sense and falling into some
starry abyss of nonsense far below our ordinary human life. This "too
silly" quality is really present in _Our Mutual Friend_. It is present
in _Our Mutual Friend_ just as it is present in _Pickwick_, or _Martin
Chuzzlewit_; just as it is not present in _Little Dorrit_ or in _Hard
Times_. Many tests might be employed. One is the pleasure in purely
physical jokes--jokes about the body. The general dislike which every
one felt for Mr. Stiggins's nose is of the same kind as the ardent
desire which Mr. Lammle felt for Mr. Fledgeby's nose. "Give me your
nose, Sir," said Mr. Lammle. That sentence alone would be enough to show
that the young Dickens had never died.
The opening of a book goes for a great deal. The opening of _Our Mutual
Friend_ is much more instinctively energetic and light-hearted than that
of any of the other novels of his concluding period. Dickens had always
enough optimism to make his stories end well. He had not, in his later
years, always enough optimism to make them begin well. Even _Great
Expectations_, the saddest of his later books, ends well; it ends well
in spite of himself, who had intended it to end badly. But if we leave
the evident case of good endings and take the case of good beginnings,
we see how much _Our Mutual Friend_ stands out from among the other
novels of the evening or the end of Dickens. The tale of _Little Dorrit_
begins in a prison. One of the prisoners is a villain, and his villainy
is as dreary as the prison; that might matter nothing. But the other
prisoner is vivacious, and even his vivacity is dreary. The first note
struck is sad. In the tale of _Edwin Drood_ the first scene is in an
opium den, suffocated with every sort of phantasy and falsehood. Nor is
it true that these openings are merely accidental; they really cast
their shadow over the tales. The people of _Little Dorrit_ begin in
prison; and it is the whole point of the book that people never get out
of prison. The story of _Edwin Drood_ begins amid the fumes of opium,
and it never gets out of the fumes of opium. The darkness of that
strange and horrible smoke is deliberately rolled over the whole story.
Dickens, in his later years, permitted more and more his story to take
the cue from its inception. All the more remarkable, therefore, is the
real jerk and spurt of good spirits with which he opens _Our Mutual
Friend_. It begins with a good piece of rowdy satire, wildly exaggerated
and extremely true. It belongs to the same class as the first chapter
of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, with its preposterous pedigree of the Chuzzlewit
family, or even the first chapter of _Pickwick_, with its immortal
imbecilities about the Theory of Tittlebats and Mr. Blotton of Aldgate.
Doubtless the early satiric chapter in _Our Mutual Friend_ is of a more
strategic and ingenious kind of satire than can be found in these early
and explosive parodies. Still, there is a quality common to both, and
that quality is the whole of Dickens. It is a quality difficult to
define--hence the whole difficulty of criticising Dickens. Perhaps it
can be best stated in two separate statements or as two separate
symptoms. The first is the mere fact that the reader rushes to read it.
The second is the mere fact that the writer rushed to write it.
This beginning, which is like a burst of the old exuberant Dickens, is,
of course, the Veneering dinner-party. In its own way it is as good as
anything that Dickens ever did. There is the old faculty of managing a
crowd, of making character clash with character, that had made Dickens
not only the democrat but even the demagogue of fiction. For if it is
hard to manage a mob, it is hardest of all to manage a swell mob. The
particular kind of chaos that is created by the hospitality of a rich
upstart has perhaps never been so accurately and outrageously described.
Every touch about the thing is true; to this day any one can test it if
he goes to a dinner of this particular kind. How admirable, for
instance, is the description of the way in which all the guests ignored
the host; how the host and hostess peered and gaped for some stray
attention as if they had been a pair of poor relations. Again, how well,
as a matter of social colour, the distinctions between the type and
tone of the guests are made even in the matter of this unguestlike
insolence. How well Dickens distinguishes the ill-bred indifference of
Podsnap from the well-bred indifference of Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene
Wrayburn. How well he distinguishes the bad manners of the merchant from
the equally typical bad manners of the gentleman. Above all, how well he
catches the character of the creature who is really the master of all
these: the impenetrable male servant. Nowhere in literature is the truth
about servants better told. For that truth is simply this: that the
secret of aristocracy is hidden even from aristocrats. Servants,
butlers, footmen, are the high priests who have the real dispensation;
and even gentlemen are afraid of them. Dickens was never more right than
when he made the new people, the Veneerings, employ a butler who
despised not only them but all their guests and acquaintances. The
admirable person called the Analytical Chemist shows his perfection
particularly in the fact that he regards all the sham gentlemen and all
the real gentlemen with the same gloomy and incurable contempt. He
offers wine to the offensive Podsnap or the shrieking Tippins with a
melancholy sincerity and silence; but he offers his letter to the
aristocratic and unconscious Mortimer with the same sincerity and with
the same silence. It is a great pity that the Analytical Chemist only
occurs in two or three scenes of this excellent story. As far as I know,
he never really says a word from one end of the book to the other; but
he is one of the best characters in Dickens.
Round the Veneering dinner-table are collected not indeed the best
characters in Dickens, but certainly the best characters in _Our Mutual
Friend_. Certainly one exception must be made. Fledgeby is unaccountably
absent. There was really no reason why he should not have been present
at a dinner-party given by the Veneerings and including the Lammles. His
money was at least more genuine than theirs. If he had been present the
party would really have included all that is important in _Our Mutual
Friend_. For indeed, outside Mr. Fledgeby and the people at the
dinner-party, there is something a little heavy and careless about the
story. Mr. Silas Wegg is really funny; and he serves the purpose of a
necessary villain in the plot. But his humour and his villainy seem to
have no particular connection with each other; when he is not scheming
he seems the last man likely to scheme. He is rather like one of
Dickens's agreeable Bohemians, a pleasant companion, a quoter of fine
verses. His villainy seems an artificial thing attached to him, like his
wooden leg. For while his villainy is supposed to be of a dull, mean,
and bitter sort (quite unlike, for instance, the uproarious villainy of
Quilp), his humour is of the sincere, flowing and lyric character, like
that of Dick Swiveller or Mr. Micawber. He tells Mr. Boffin that he will
drop into poetry in a friendly way. He does drop into it in a friendly
way; in much too really a friendly way to make him convincing as a mere
calculating knave. He and Mr. Venus are such natural and genuine
companions that one does not see why if Venus repents Wegg should not
repent too. In short, Wegg is a convenience for a plot and not a very
good plot at that. But if he is one of the blots on the business, he is
not the principal one. If the real degradation of Wegg is not very
convincing, it is at least immeasurably more convincing than the
pretended degradation of Boffin. The passage in which Boffin appears as
a sort of miser, and then afterwards explains that he only assumed the
character for reasons of his own, has something about it highly jerky
and unsatisfactory. The truth of the whole matter I think, almost
certainly, is that Dickens did not originally mean Boffin's lapse to be
fictitious. He originally meant Boffin really to be corrupted by wealth,
slowly to degenerate and as slowly to repent. But the story went too
quickly for this long, double, and difficult process; therefore Dickens
at the last moment made a sudden recovery possible by representing that
the whole business had been a trick. Consequently, this episode is not
an error merely in the sense that we may find many errors in a great
writer like Dickens; it is a mistake patched up with another mistake. It
is a case of that ossification which occurs round the healing of an
actual fracture; the story had broken down and been mended.
If Dickens had fulfilled what was probably his original design, and
described the slow freezing of Boffin's soul in prosperity, I do not say
that he would have done the thing well. He was not good at describing
change in anybody, especially not good at describing a change for the
worse. The tendency of all his characters is upwards, like bubbles,
never downwards, like stones. But at least it would probably have been
more credible than the story as it stands; for the story as it stands is
actually less credible than any conceivable kind of moral ruin for
Boffin. Such a character as his--rough, simple and lumberingly
unconscious--might be more easily conceived as really sinking in
self-respect and honour than as keeping up, month after month, so
strained and inhuman a theatrical performance. To a good man (of that
particular type) it would be easier to be bad than to pretend to be bad.
It might have taken years to turn Noddy Boffin into a miser; but it
would have taken centuries to turn him into an actor. This unreality in
the later Boffin scenes makes the end of the story of John Harmon
somewhat more unimpressive perhaps than it might otherwise have been.
Upon no hypothesis, however, can he be made one of the more impressive
figures of Dickens. It is true that it is an unfair criticism to object,
as some have done, that Dickens does not succeed in disguising the
identity of John Harmon with John Rokesmith. Dickens never intended to
disguise it; the whole story would be mainly unintelligible and largely
uninteresting if it had been successfully disguised. But though John
Harmon or Rokesmith was never intended to be merely a man of mystery, it
is not quite so easy to say what he was intended to be. Bella is a
possible and pretty sketch. Mrs. Wilfer, her mother, is an entirely
impossible and entirely delightful one. Miss Podsnap is not only
excellent, she is to a healthy taste positively attractive; there is a
real suggestion in her of the fact that humility is akin to truth, even
when humility takes its more comic form of shyness. There is not in all
literature a more human _cri de coeur_ than that with which Georgiana
Podsnap receives the information that a young man has professed himself
to be attracted by her--"Oh what a Fool he must be!"
Two other figures require praise, though they are in the more tragic
manner which Dickens touched from time to time in his later period.
Bradley Headstone is really a successful villain; so successful that he
fully captures our sympathies. Also there is something original in the
very conception. It was a new notion to add to the villains of fiction,
whose thoughts go quickly, this villain whose thoughts go slow but sure;
and it was a new notion to combine a deadly criminality not with high
life or the slums (the usual haunts for villains) but with the laborious
respectability of the lower, middle classes. The other good conception
is the boy, Bradley Headstone's pupil, with his dull, inexhaustible
egoism, his pert, unconscious cruelty, and the strict decorum and
incredible baseness of his views of life. It is singular that Dickens,
who was not only a radical and a social reformer, but one who would have
been particularly concerned to maintain the principle of modern popular
education, should nevertheless have seen so clearly this potential evil
in the mere educationalism of our time--the fact that merely educating
the democracy may easily mean setting to work to despoil it of all the
democratic virtues. It is better to be Lizzie Hexam and not know how to
read and write than to be Charlie Hexam and not know how to appreciate
Lizzie Hexam. It is not only necessary that the democracy should be
taught; it is also necessary that the democracy should be taught
democracy. Otherwise it will certainly fall a victim to that
snobbishness and system of worldly standards which is the most natural
and easy of all the forms of human corruption. This is one of the many
dangers which Dickens saw before it existed. Dickens was really a
prophet; far more of a prophet than Carlyle.
[Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1868
From a photograph by Gurney.]