THE FUTURE OF DICKENS'S FAME.
There is no reason whatever to believe that in the few years which have
gone by since Dickens's death the delight taken in his works throughout
England and North America, as well as elsewhere, has diminished, or that
he is not still one of our few most popular writers. The mere fact that
his popularity has remained such since, nearly half a century ago, he,
like a beam of spring sunshine, first made the world gay, is a sufficient
indication of the influence which he must have exercised upon his age. In
our world of letters his followers have been many, though naturally enough
those whose original genius impelled them to follow their own course
soonest ceased to be his imitators. Amongst these I know no more signal
instance than the great novelist whose surpassing merits he had very
swiftly recognised in her earliest work. For though in the _Scenes of
Clerical Life_ George Eliot seems to be, as it were, hesitating between
Dickens and Thackeray as the models of her humorous writing, reminiscences
of the former are unmistakable in the opening of _Amos Barton_, in _Mr.
Gilfil's Love-Story_, in _Janet's Repentance_; and though it would be
hazardous to trace his influence in the domestic scenes in _Adam Bede_,
neither a Christmas exordium in one of the books of _The Mill on the
Floss_, nor the Sam Weller-like freshness of Bob Wakem in the same
powerful story, is altogether the author's own. Two of the most successful
Continental novelists of the present day have gone to school with Dickens:
the one the truly national writer whose _Debit and Credit_, a work largely
in the manner of his English model, has, as a picture of modern life,
remained unexcelled in German literature;[14] the other, the brilliant
Southerner, who may write as much of the _History of his Books_ as his
public may desire to learn, but who cannot write the pathos of Dickens
altogether out of _Jack_, or his farcical fun out of _Le Nabab_. And
again--for I am merely illustrating, not attempting to describe, the
literary influence of Dickens--who could fail to trace in the Californian
studies and sketches of Bret Harte elements of humour and of pathos, to
which that genuinely original author would be the last to deny that his
great English "master" was no stranger?
Yet popularity and literary influence, however wide and however strong,
often pass away as they have come; and in no field of literature are there
many reputations which the sea of time fails before very long to submerge.
In prose fiction--a comparatively young literary growth--they are
certainly not the most numerous, perhaps because on works of this species
the manners and style of an age most readily impress themselves, rendering
them proportionately strange to the ages that come after. In the works of
even the lesser playwrights who pleased the liberal times of Elizabeth,
and in lyrics of even secondary merit that were admired by fantastic
Caroline cavaliers, we can still take pleasure. But who can read many of
the "standard" novels published as lately even as the days of George the
Fourth? The speculation is, therefore, not altogether idle, whether
Dickens saw truly when labouring, as most great men do labour, in the
belief that his work was not only for a day. Literary eminence was the
only eminence he desired, while it was one of the very healthiest elements
in his character, that whatever he was, he was thoroughly. He would not
have told any one, as Fielding's author told Mr. Booth at the
sponging-house, that romance-writing "is certainly the easiest work in the
world;" nor, being what he was, could he ever have found it such in his
own case. "Whoever," he declared, "is devoted to an art must be content to
give himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it." And not
only did he obey his own labour-laws, but in the details of his work as a
man of letters he spared no pains and no exercise of self-control. "I am,"
he generously told a beginner, to whom he was counselling patient
endeavour, "an impatient and impulsive person myself, but it has been for
many years the constant effort of my life to practise at my desk what I
preach to you." Never, therefore has a man of letters had a better claim
to be judged by his works. As he expressly said in his will, he wished for
no other monument than his writings; and with their aid we, who already
belong to a new generation, and whose children will care nothing for the
gossip and the scandal of which he, like most popular celebrities, was in
his lifetime privileged or doomed to become the theme, may seek to form
some definite conception of his future place among illustrious Englishmen.
It would, of course, be against all experience to suppose that to future
generations Dickens, as a writer, will be all that he was to his own.
Much that constitutes the subject, or at least furnishes the background,
of his pictures of English life, like the Fleet Prison and the Marshalsea,
has vanished, or is being improved off the face of the land. The form,
again, of Dickens's principal works may become obsolete, as it was in a
sense accidental. He was the most popular novelist of his day; but should
prose fiction, or even the full and florid species of it which has enjoyed
so long-lived a favour ever be out of season, the popularity of Dickens's
books must experience an inevitable diminution. And even before that day
arrives not all the works in a particular species of literature that may
to a particular age have seemed destined to live, will have been
preserved. Nothing is more surely tested by time than that originality
which is the secret of a writer's continuing to be famous, and continuing
to be read.
Dickens was not--and to whom in these latter ages of literature could such
a term be applied?--a self-made writer, in the sense that he owed nothing
to those who had gone before him. He was most assuredly no classical
scholar--how could he have been? But I should hesitate to call him an
ill-read man, though he certainly was neither a great nor a catholic
reader, and though he could not help thinking about _Nicholas Nickleby_
while he was reading the _Curse of Kehama_. In his own branch of
literature his judgment was sound and sure-footed. It was, of course, a
happy accident that as a boy he imbibed that taste for good fiction which
is a thing inconceivable to the illiterate. Sneers have been directed
against the poverty of his book-shelves in his earlier days of authorship;
but I fancy there were not many popular novelists in 1839 who would have
taken down with them into the country for a summer sojourn, as Dickens did
to Petersham, not only a couple of Scott's novels, but Goldsmith, Swift,
Fielding, Smollett, and the British Essayists; nor is there one of these
national classics--unless it be Swift--with whom Dickens's books or
letters fail to show him to have been familiar. Of Goldsmith's books, he
told Forster, in a letter which the biographer of Goldsmith modestly
suppressed, he "had no indifferent perception--to the best of his
remembrance--when little more than a child." He discusses with
understanding the relative literary merits of the serious and humorous
papers in _The Spectator_; and, with regard to another work of unique
significance in the history of English fiction, _Robinson Crusoe_, he
acutely observed that "one of the most popular books on earth has nothing
in it to make any one laugh or cry." "It is a book," he added, which he
"read very much." It may be noted, by-the-way, that he was an attentive
and judicious student of Hogarth; and that thus his criticisms of humorous
pictorial art rested upon as broad a basis of comparison as did his
judgment of his great predecessors in English humorous fiction.
Amongst these predecessors it has become usual to assert that Smollett
exercised the greatest influence upon Dickens. It is no doubt true that in
David Copperfield's library Smollett's books are mentioned first, and in
the greatest number, that a vision of Roderick Random and Strap haunted
the very wicket-gate at Blunderstone, that the poor little hero's first
thought on entering the King's Bench prison was the strange company whom
Roderick met in the Marshalsea; and that the references to Smollett and
his books are frequent in Dickens's other books and in his letters.
Leghorn seemed to him "made illustrious" by Smollett's grave, and in a
late period of his life he criticises his chief fictions with admirable
justice. "_Humphry Clinker_," he writes, "is certainly Smollett's best. I
am rather divided between _Peregrine Pickle_ and _Roderick Random_, both
extraordinarily good in their way, which is a way without tenderness; but
you will have to read them both, and I send the first volume of
_Peregrine_ as the richer of the two." An odd volume of _Peregrine_ was
one of the books with which the waiter at the _Holly Tree Inn_ endeavoured
to beguile the lonely Christmas of the snowed-up traveller, but the latter
"knew every word of it already." In the _Lazy Tour_, "Thomas, now just
able to grope his way along, in a doubled-up condition, was no bad
embodiment of Commodore Trunnion." I have noted, moreover, coincidences of
detail which bear witness to Dickens's familiarity with Smollett's works.
To Lieutenant Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as to Captain Cuttle, every
man was a "brother," and to the Commodore, as to Mr. Smallweed, the most
abusive substantive addressed to a woman admitted of intensification by
the epithet "brimstone." I think Dickens had not forgotten the opening of
the _Adventures of an Atom_ when he wrote a passage in the opening of his
own _Christmas Carol_; and that the characters of Tom Pinch and Tommy
Traddles--the former more especially--were not conceived without some
thought of honest Strap. Furthermore, it was Smollett's example that
probably suggested to Dickens the attractive jingle in the title of his
_Nicholas Nickleby_. But these are for the most part mere details. The
manner of Dickens as a whole resembles Fielding's more strikingly than
Smollett's, as it was only natural that it should. The irony of Smollett
is drier than was reconcilable with Dickens's nature; it is only in the
occasional extravagances of his humour that the former anticipates
anything in the latter, and it is only the coarsest scenes of Dickens's
earlier books--such as that between Noah, Charlotte, and Mrs. Sowerbery
in _Oliver Twist_--which recall the whole manner of his predecessor. They
resemble one another in their descriptive accuracy, and in the
accumulation of detail by which they produce instead of obscuring
vividness of impression; but it was impossible that Dickens should prefer
the general method of the novel of adventure pure and simple, such as
Smollett produced after the example of _Gil Blas_, to the less crude form
adopted by Fielding, who adhered to earlier and nobler models. With
Fielding's, moreover, Dickens's whole nature was congenial; they both had
that tenderness which Smollett lacked; and the circumstance that, of all
English writers of the past, Fielding's name alone was given by Dickens to
one of his sons, shows how, like so many of Fielding's readers, he had
learnt to love him with an almost personal affection. The very spirit of
the author of _Tom Jones_--that gaiety which, to borrow the saying of a
recent historian concerning Cervantes, renders even brutality agreeable,
and that charm of sympathetic feeling which makes us love those of his
characters which he loves himself--seem astir in some of the most
delightful passages of Dickens's most delightful books. So in _Pickwick_,
to begin with, in which, by the way, Fielding is cited with a twinkle of
the eye all his own, and in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, where a chapter opens
with a passage which is pure Fielding:
"It was morning, and the beautiful Aurora, of whom so much hath been
written, said, and sung, did, with her rosy fingers, nip and tweak
Miss Pecksniff's nose. It was the frolicsome custom of the goddess, in
her intercourse with the fair Cherry, to do so; or, in more prosaic
phrase, the tip of that feature in the sweet girl's countenance was
always very red at breakfast-time."
Amongst the writers of Dickens's own age there were only two, or perhaps
three, who in very different degrees and ways exercised a noticeable
influence upon his writings. He once declared to Washington Irving that he
kept everything written by that delightful author upon "his shelves, and
in his thoughts, and in his heart of hearts." And, doubtless, in Dickens's
early days as an author the influence of the American classic may have
aided to stimulate the imaginative element in his English admirer's
genius, and to preserve him from a grossness of humour into which, after
the _Sketches by Boz_, he very rarely allowed himself to lapse. The two
other writers were Carlyle, and, as I have frequently noted in previous
chapters, the friend and fellow-labourer of Dickens's later manhood, Mr.
Wilkie Collins. It is no unique experience that the disciple should
influence the master; and in this instance, perhaps with the co-operation
of the examples of the modern French theatre, which the two friends had
studied in common, Mr. Wilkie Collins's manner had, I think, no small
share in bringing about a transformation in that of Dickens. His stories
thus gradually lost all traces of the older masters both in general method
and in detail; whilst he came to condense and concentrate his effects in
successions of skilfully-arranged scenes. Dickens's debt to Carlyle was,
of course, of another nature; and in his works the proofs are not few of
his readiness to accept the teachings of one whom he declared he would "go
at all times farther to see than any man alive." There was something
singular in the admiration these two men felt for one another; for
Carlyle, after an acquaintance of almost thirty years, spoke of Dickens as
"a most cordial, sincere, clear-sighted, quietly decisive, just, and
loving man;" and there is not one of these epithets but seems well
considered and well chosen. But neither Carlyle nor Dickens possessed a
moral quality omitted in this list, the quality of patience, which abhors
either "quietly" or loudly "deciding" a question before considering it
under all its aspects, and in a spirit of fairness to all sides. The
_Latter-Day Pamphlets_, to confine myself to them,[15] like so much of the
political philosophy, if it is to be dignified by that name, which in part
Dickens derived from them, were at the time effective strokes of satirical
invective; now, their edge seems blunt and their energy inflation. Take
the pamphlet on Model Prisons, with its summary of a theory which Dickens
sought in every way to enforce upon his readers; or again, that entitled
_Downing Street_, which settles the question of party government as a
question of the choice between Buffy and Boodle, or, according to Carlyle,
the Honourable Felix Parvulus and the Right Honourable Felicissimus Zero.
The corrosive power of such sarcasms may be unquestionable; but the angry
rhetoric pointed by them becomes part of the nature of those who
habitually employ its utterance in lieu of argument; and not a little of
the declamatory element in Dickens, which no doubt at first exercised its
effect upon a large number of readers, must be ascribed to his reading of
a great writer who was often very much more stimulative than nutritious.
Something, then, he owed to other writers, but it was little indeed in
comparison with what he owed to his natural gifts. First amongst these, I
think, must be placed what may, in a word, be called his sensibility--that
quality of which humour, in the more limited sense of the word, and
pathos are the twin products. And in Dickens both these were paramount
powers, almost equally various in their forms and effective in their
operation. According to M. Taine, Dickens, whilst he excels in irony of a
particular sort, being an Englishman, is incapable of being gay. Such
profundities are unfathomable to the readers of _Pickwick_; though the
French critic may have generalised from Dickens's later writings only. His
pathos is not less true than various, for the gradations are marked
between the stern, tragic pathos of _Hard Times_, the melting pathos of
the _Old Curiosity Shop_, _Dombey and Son_, and _David Copperfield_, and
the pathos of helplessness which appeals to us in Smike and Jo. But this
sensibility would not have given us Dickens's gallery of living pictures
had it not been for the powers of imagination and observation which
enabled him spontaneously to exercise it in countless directions. To the
way in which his imagination enabled him to identify himself with the
figments of his own brain he frequently testified; Dante was not more
certain in his celestial and infernal topography than was Dickens as to
"every stair in the little mid-shipman's house," and as to "every young
gentleman's bedstead in Dr. Blimber's establishment." One particular class
of phenomena may be instanced instead of many, in the observation and
poetic reproduction of which his singular natural endowment continually
manifested itself--I mean those of the weather. It is not, indeed, often
that he rises to a fine image like that in the description of the night in
which Ralph Nickleby, ruined and crushed, slinks home to his death:
"The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds
furiously and fast before it. There was one black, gloomy mass that
seemed to follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with the others,
but lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealthily on.
He often looked back at this, and more than once stopped to let it
pass over; but, somehow, when he went forward again it was still
behind him, coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shadowy funeral
train."
But he again and again enables us to feel as if the Christmas morning on
which Mr. Pickwick ran gaily down the slide, or as if the "very quiet"
moonlit night in the midst of which a sudden sound, like the firing of a
gun or a pistol, startled the repose of Lincoln's Inn Fields, were not
only what we have often precisely experienced in country villages or in
London squares, but as if they were the very morning and the very night
which we _must_ experience, if we were feeling the glow of wintry
merriment, or the awful chill of the presentiment of evil in a dead hour.
In its lower form this combination of the powers of imagination and
observation has the rapidity of wit, and, indeed, sometimes is wit. The
gift of suddenly finding out what a man, a thing, a combination of man and
thing, is like--this, too, comes by nature; and there is something
electrifying in its sudden exercise, even on the most trivial occasions,
as when Flora, delighted with Little Dorrit's sudden rise to fortune,
requests to know all
"about the good, dear, quiet little thing, and all the changes of her
fortunes, carriage people now, no doubt, and horses without number
most romantic, a coat of arms, of course, and wild beasts on their
hind legs, showing it as if it was a copy they had done with mouths
from ear to ear, good gracious!"
But Nature, when she gifted Dickens with sensibility, observation, and
imagination, had bestowed upon him yet another boon in the quality which
seems more prominent than any other in his whole being. The vigour of
Dickens--a mental and moral vigour supported by a splendid physical
organism--was the parent of some of his foibles; amongst the rest, of his
tendency to exaggeration. No fault has been more frequently found with his
workmanship than this; nor can he be said to have defended himself very
successfully on this head when he declared that he did "not recollect ever
to have heard or seen the charge of exaggeration made against a feeble
performance, though, in its feebleness, it may have been most untrue." But
without this vigour he could not have been creative as he was; and in him
there were accordingly united with rare completeness a swift
responsiveness to the impulses of humour and pathos, an inexhaustible
fertility in discovering and inventing materials for their exercise, and
the constant creative desire to give to these newly-created materials a
vivid plastic form.
And the mention of this last-named gift in Dickens suggests the query
whether, finally, there is anything in his _manner_ as a writer which may
prevent the continuance of his extraordinary popularity. No writer can be
great without a _manner_ of his own; and that Dickens had such a manner
his most supercilious censurer will readily allow. His terse narrative
power, often intensely humorous in its unblushing and unwinking gravity,
and often deeply pathetic in its simplicity, is as characteristic of his
manner as is the supreme felicity of phrase, in which he has no equal. As
to the latter, I should hardly know where to begin and where to leave off
were I to attempt to illustrate it. But, to take two instances of
different kinds of wit, I may cite a passage in Guster's narrative of her
interview with Lady Dedlock: "And so I took the letter from her, and she
said she had nothing to give me; and _I said I was poor myself, and
consequently wanted nothing_;" and, of a different kind, the account in
one of his letters of a conversation with Macready, in which the great
tragedian, after a solemn but impassioned commendation of his friend's
reading, "put his hand upon my breast and pulled out his
pocket-handkerchief, and _I felt as if I were doing somebody to his
Werner_." These, I think, were amongst the most characteristic merits of
his style. It also, and more especially in his later years, had its
characteristic faults. The danger of degenerating into mannerism is
incident to every original manner. There is mannerism in most of the great
English prose-writers of Dickens's age--in Carlyle, in Macaulay, in
Thackeray--but in none of them is there more mannerism than in Dickens
himself. In his earlier writings, in _Nicholas Nickleby_, for instance (I
do not, of course, refer to the Portsmouth boards), and even in _Martin
Chuzzlewit_, there is much staginess; but in his later works his own
mannerism had swallowed up that of the stage, and, more especially in
serious passages, his style had become what M. Taine happily characterises
as _le style tourmente_. His choice of words remained throughout
excellent, and his construction of sentences clear. He told Mr. Wilkie
Collins that "underlining was not his nature;" and in truth he had no need
to emphasise his expressions, or to bid the reader "go back upon their
meaning." He recognised his responsibility, as a popular writer, in
keeping the vocabulary of the language pure; and in _Little Dorrit_ he
even solemnly declines to use the French word _trousseau_. In his
orthography, on the other hand, he was not free from Americanisms; and his
interpunctuation was consistently odd. But these are trifles; his more
important mannerisms were, like many really dangerous faults of style,
only the excess of characteristic excellences. Thus it was he who
elaborated with unprecedented effect that humorous species of paraphrase
which, as one of the most imitable devices of his style, has also been the
most persistently imitated. We are all tickled when Grip, the raven,
"issues orders for the instant preparation of innumerable kettles for
purposes of tea;" or when Mr. Pecksniff's eye is "piously upraised, with
something of that expression which the poetry of ages has attributed to a
domestic bird, when breathing its last amid the ravages of an electric
storm;" but in the end the device becomes a mere trick of circumlocution.
Another mannerism which grew upon Dickens, and was faithfully imitated by
several of his disciples, was primarily due to his habit of turning a
fact, fancy, or situation round on every side. This consisted in the
reiteration of a construction, or of part of a construction, in the
strained rhetorical fashion to which he at last accustomed us in spite of
ourselves, but to which we were loath to submit in his imitators. These
and certain other peculiarities, which it would be difficult to indicate
without incurring the charge of hypercriticism, hardened as the style of
Dickens hardened; and, for instance, in the _Tale of Two Cities_ his
mannerisms may be seen side by side in glittering array. By way of
compensation, the occasional solecisms and vulgarisms of his earlier style
(he only very gradually ridded himself of the cockney habit of punning) no
longer marred his pages; and he ceased to break or lapse occasionally, in
highly-impassioned passages, into blank verse.
From first to last Dickens's mannerism, like everything which he made part
of himself, was not merely assumed on occasion, but was, so to speak,
absorbed into his nature. It shows itself in almost everything that he
wrote in his later years, from the most carefully-elaborated chapters of
his books down to the most deeply-felt passages of his most familiar
correspondence, in the midst of the most genuine pathos and most exuberant
humour of his books, and in the midst of the sound sense and unaffected
piety of his private letters. Future generations may, for this very
reason, be perplexed and irritated by what we merely stumbled at, and may
wish that what is an element hardly separable from many of Dickens's
compositions were away from them, as one wishes away from his signature
that horrible flourish which in his letters he sometimes represents
himself as too tired to append.
But no distaste for his mannerisms is likely to obscure the sense of his
achievements in the branch of literature to which he devoted the full
powers of his genius and the best energies of his nature. He introduced,
indeed, no new species of prose fiction into our literature. In the
historical novel he made two far from unsuccessful essays, in the earlier
of which in particular--_Barnaby Rudge_--he showed a laudable desire to
enter into the spirit of a past age; but he was without the reading or the
patience of either the author of _Waverley_ or the author of _The
Virginians_, and without the fine historic enthusiasm which animates the
broader workmanship of _Westward Ho_. For the purely imaginative romance,
on the other hand, of which in some of his works Lord Lytton was the most
prominent representative in contemporary English literature, Dickens's
genius was not without certain affinities; but, to feel his full strength,
he needed to touch the earth with his feet. Thus it is no mere phrase to
say of him that he found the ideal in the real, and drew his inspirations
from the world around him. Perhaps the strongest temptation which ever
seemed likely to divert him from the sounder forms in which his
masterpieces were cast lay in the direction of the _novel with a purpose_,
the fiction intended primarily and above all things to promote the
correction of some social abuse, or the achievement of some social
reform. But in spite of himself, to whom the often voiceless cause of the
suffering and the oppressed was at all times dearer than any mere literary
success, he was preserved from binding his muse, as his friend Cruikshank
bound his art, handmaid in a service with which freedom was
irreconcilable. His artistic instinct helped him in this, and perhaps also
the consciousness that where, as in _The Chimes_ or in _Hard Times_, he
had gone furthest in this direction, there had been something jarring in
the result. Thus, under the influences described above, he carried on the
English novel mainly in the directions which it had taken under its early
masters, and more especially in those in which the essential attributes of
his own genius prompted him to excel.
Amongst the elements on which the effect alike of the novelist's and of
the dramatist's work must, apart from style and diction, essentially
depend, that of construction is obviously one of the most significant. In
this Dickens was, in the earlier period of his authorship, very far from
strong. This was due in part to the accident that he began his literary
career as a writer of _Sketches_, and that his first continuous book,
_Pickwick_, was originally designed as little more than a string of such.
It was due in a still greater measure to the influence of those masters of
English fiction with whom he had been familiar from boyhood, above all to
Smollett. And though, by dint of his usual energy, he came to be able to
invent a plot so generally effective as that of _A Tale of Two Cities_,
or, I was about to say, of _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, yet on this head
he had had to contend against a special difficulty; I mean, of course, the
publication of most of his books in monthly or even weekly numbers. In the
case of a writer both pathetic and humorous the serial method of
publication leads the public to expect its due allowance of both pathos
and humour every month or week, even if each number, to borrow a homely
simile applied in _Oliver Twist_ to books in general, need not contain
"the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers
of red and white in a side of streaky bacon." And again, as in a melodrama
of the old school, each serial division has, if possible, to close
emphatically, effectively, with a promise of yet stranger, more touching,
more laughable things to come. On the other hand, with this form of
publication repetition is frequently necessary by way of "reminder" to
indolent readers, whose memory needs refreshing after the long pauses
between the acts. Fortunately, Dickens abhorred living, as it were, from
hand to mouth, and thus diminished the dangers to which, I cannot help
thinking, Thackeray at times almost succumbed. Yet, notwithstanding, in
the arrangement of his incidents and the contrivance of his plots it is
often impossible to avoid noting the imperfection of the machinery, or at
least the traces of effort. I have already said under what influences, in
my opinion, Dickens acquired a constructive skill which would have been
conspicuous in most other novelists.
If in the combination of parts the workmanship of Dickens was not
invariably of the best, on the other hand in the invention of those parts
themselves he excelled, his imaginative power and dramatic instinct
combining to produce an endless succession of effective scenes and
situations, ranging through almost every variety of the pathetic and the
humorous. In no direction was nature a more powerful aid to art with him
than in this. From his very boyhood he appears to have possessed in a
developed form what many others may possess in its germ, the faculty of
converting into a scene--putting, as it were, into a frame--personages
that came under his notice, and the background on which he saw them. Who
can forget the scene in _David Copperfield_ in which the friendless little
boy attracts the wonderment of the good people of the public-house
where--it being a special occasion--he has demanded a glass of their "very
best ale, with a head to it?" In the autobiographical fragment already
cited, where the story appears in almost the same words, Dickens exclaims:
"Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study in Devonshire
Terrace. The landlord, in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar
window-frame; his wife, looking over the little half-door; and I, in
some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition."
He saw the scene while he was an actor in it. Already the _Sketches by
Boz_ showed the exuberance of this power, and in his last years more than
one paper in the delightful _Uncommercial Traveller_ series proved it to
be as inexhaustible as ever, while the art with which it was exercised had
become more refined. Who has better described (for who was more sensitive
to it?) the mysterious influence of crowds, and who the pitiful pathos of
solitude? Who has ever surpassed Dickens in his representations, varied a
thousandfold, but still appealing to the same emotions, common to us all,
of the crises or turning-points of human life? Who has dwelt with a more
potent effect on that catastrophe which the drama of every human life must
reach; whose scenes of death in its pathetic, pitiful, reverend, terrible,
ghastly forms speak more to the imagination and more to the heart? There
is, however, one species of scenes in which the genius of Dickens seems to
me to exercise a still stronger spell--those which _precede_ a
catastrophe, which are charged like thunder-clouds with the coming storm.
And here the constructive art is at work; for it is the arrangement of the
incidents, past and to come, combined by anticipation in the mind of the
reader, which gives their extraordinary force to such scenes as the
nocturnal watching of Nancy by Noah, or Carker's early walk to the railway
station, where he is to meet his doom. Extremely powerful, too, in a
rather different way, is the scene in _Little Dorrit_, described in a word
or two, of the parting of Bar and Physician at dawn, after they have
"found out Mr. Merdle's complaint:"
"Before parting, at Physician's door, they both looked up at the sunny
morning sky, into which the smoke of a few early fires, and the breath
and voices of a few early stirrers, were peacefully rising, and then
looked round upon the immense city and said: 'If all those hundreds
and thousands of beggared people who were yet asleep could only know,
as they two spoke, the ruin that impended over them, what a fearful
cry against one miserable soul would go up to Heaven!'"
Nor is it awe only, but pity also, which he is able thus to move
beforehand, as in _Dombey and Son_, in the incomparable scenes leading up
to little Paul's death.
More diverse opinions have been expressed as to Dickens's mastery of that
highest part of the novelist's art, which we call characterisation.
Undoubtedly, the characters which he draws are included in a limited
range. Yet I question whether their range can be justly termed narrow as
compared with that commanded by any other great English novelist except
Scott, or with those of many novelists of other literatures except Balzac.
But within his own range Dickens is unapproached. His novels do not
altogether avoid the common danger of uninteresting heroes and insipid
heroines; but only a very few of his heroes are conventionally declamatory
like Nicholas Nickleby, and few of his heroines simper sentimentally like
Rose Maylie. Nor can I for a moment assent to the condemnation which has
been pronounced upon all the female characters in Dickens's books, as more
or less feeble or artificial. At the same time it is true that from women
of a mightier mould Dickens's imagination turns aside; he could not have
drawn a Dorothea Casaubon any more than he could have drawn Romola
herself. Similarly, heroes of the chivalrous or magnanimous type,
representatives of generous effort in a great cause, will not easily be
met with in his writings: he never even essayed the picture of an artist
devoted to Art for her own sake.
It suited the genius, and in later years perhaps the temper, of Dickens as
an author to leave out of sight those "public virtues" to which no man was
in truth less blind than himself, and to remain content with the
illustration of types of the private or domestic kind. We may cheerfully
take to us the censure that our great humourist was in nothing more
English than in this--that his sympathy with the affections of the hearth
and the home knew almost no bounds. A symbolisation of this may be found
in the honour which, from the _Sketches_ and _Pickwick_ onwards, through a
long series of Christmas books and Christmas numbers, Dickens, doubtless
very consciously, paid to the one great festival of English family life.
Yet so far am I from agreeing with those critics who think that he is
hereby lowered to the level of the poets of the teapot and the
plum-pudding, that I am at a loss how to express my admiration for this
side of his genius--tender with the tenderness of Cowper, playful with the
playfulness of Goldsmith, natural with the naturalness of the author of
_Amelia_. Who was ever more at home with children than he, and, for that
matter, with babies to begin with? Mr. Horne relates how he once heard a
lady exclaim: "Oh, do read to us about the baby; Dickens is capital at a
baby!" Even when most playful, most farcical concerning children, his fun
is rarely without something of true tenderness, for he knew the meaning of
that dreariest solitude which he has so often pictured, but nowhere, of
course, with a truthfulness going so straight to the heart as in _David
Copperfield_--the solitude of a child left to itself. Another wonderfully
true child-character is that of Pip, in _Great Expectations_, who is also,
as his years progress, an admirable study of boy-nature. For Dickens
thoroughly understood what that mysterious variety of humankind really is,
and was always, if one may so say, on the lookout for him. He knew him in
the brightness and freshness which makes true _ingenus_ of such delightful
characters (rare enough in fiction) as Walter Gay and Mrs. Lirriper's
grandson. He knew him in his festive mood--witness the amusing letter in
which he describes a water expedition at Eton with his son and two of his
irrepressible school-fellows. He knew him in his precocity--the boy of
about three feet high, at the "George and Vulture," "in a hairy cap and
fustian overalls, whose garb bespoke a laudable ambition to attain in time
the elevation of an hostler;" and the thing on the roof of the Harrisburg
coach, which, when the rain was over, slowly upreared itself, and
patronisingly piped out the enquiry: "Well, now, stranger, I guess you
find this a'most like an English arternoon, hey?" He knew the Gavroche who
danced attendance on Mr. Quilp at his wharf, and those strangest, but by
no means least true, types of all, the pupil-teachers in Mr. Fagin's
academy.
But these, with the exception of the last-named, which show much shrewd
and kindly insight into the paradoxes of human nature, are, of course,
the mere _croquis_ of the great humourist's pencil. His men and women, and
the passions, the desires, the loves, and hatreds that agitate them, he
has usually chosen to depict on that background of domestic life which is
in a greater or less degree common to us all. And it is thus also that he
has secured to himself the vast public which vibrates very differently
from a mere class or section of society to the touch of a popular speaker
or writer. "The more," he writes, "we see of life and its brevity, and the
world and its varieties, the more we know that no exercise of our
abilities in any art, but the addressing of it to the great ocean of
humanity in which we are drops, and not to by-ponds (very stagnant) here
and there, ever can or ever will lay the foundations of an endurable
retrospect." The types of character which in his fictions he chiefly
delights in reproducing are accordingly those which most of us have
opportunities enough of comparing with the realities around us; and this
test, a sound one within reasonable limits, was the test he demanded. To
no other author were his own characters ever more real; and Forster
observes that "what he had most to notice in Dickens at the very outset of
his career was his indifference to any praise of his performances on the
merely literary side, compared with the higher recognition of them as bits
of actual life, with the meaning and purpose, on their part, and the
responsibility on his, of realities, rather than creations of fancy." It
is, then, the favourite growths of our own age and country for which we
shall most readily look in his works, and not look in vain: avarice and
prodigality; pride in all its phases; hypocrisy in its endless varieties,
unctuous and plausible, fawning and self-satisfied, formal and moral; and,
on the other side, faithfulness, simplicity, long-suffering patience, and
indomitable heroic good-humour. Do we not daily make room on the pavement
for Mr. Dombey, erect, solemn, and icy, along-side of whom in the road Mr.
Carter deferentially walks his sleek horse? Do we not know more than one
Anthony Chuzzlewit laying up money for himself and his son, and a curse
for both along with it; and many a Richard Carston, sinking, sinking, as
the hope grows feebler that Justice or Fortune will at last help one who
has not learnt how to help himself? And will not prodigals of a more
buoyant kind, like the immortal Mr. Micawber (though, maybe, with an
eloquence less ornate than his), when _their_ boat is on the shore and
_their_ bark is on the sea, become "perfectly business-like and perfectly
practical," and propose, in acknowledgment of a parting gift we had
neither hoped nor desired to see again, "bills" or, if we should prefer
it, "a bond, or any other description of security?" All this will happen
to us, as surely as we shall be buttonholed by Pecksniffs in a state of
philanthropic exultation; and watched round corners by 'umble but
observant Uriah Heeps; and affronted in what is best in us by the worst
hypocrite of all, the hypocrite of religion, who flaunts in our eyes his
greasy substitute for what he calls the "light of terewth." To be sure,
unless it be Mr. Chadband and those of his tribe, we shall find the
hypocrite and the man-out-at-elbows in real life less endurable than their
representatives in fiction; for Dickens well understood "that if you do
not administer a disagreeable character carefully, the public have a
decided tendency to think that the _story_ is disagreeable, and not merely
the fictitious form." His economy is less strict with characters of the
opposite class, true copies of Nature's own handiwork--the Tom Pinches and
Trotty Vecks and Clara Peggottys, who reconcile us with our kind, and Mr.
Pickwick himself, "a human being replete with benevolence," to borrow a
phrase from a noble passage in Dickens's most congenial predecessor. These
characters in Dickens have a warmth which only the creations of Fielding
and Smollett had possessed before, and which, like these old masters, he
occasionally carries to excess. At the other extreme stand those
characters in which the art of Dickens, always in union with the
promptings of his moral nature, illustrates the mitigating or redeeming
qualities observable even in the outcasts of our civilisation. To me his
figures of this kind, when they are not too intensely elaborated, are not
the least touching; and there is something as pathetic in the uncouth
convict Magwitch as in the consumptive crossing-sweeper Jo.
As a matter of course it is possible to take exceptions of one kind or
another to some of the characters created by Dickens in so extraordinary a
profusion. I hardly know of any other novelist less obnoxious to the
charge of repeating himself; though, of course, many characters in his
earlier or shorter works contained in themselves the germs of later and
fuller developments. But Bob Sawyer and Dick Swiveller, Noah Claypole and
Uriah Heep are at least sufficiently independent variations on the same
themes. On the other hand, Filer and Cute in _The Chimes_ were the first
sketches of Gradgrind and Bounderby in _Hard Times_; and Clemency in _The
Battle of Life_ prefigures Peggotty in _David Copperfield_. No one could
seriously quarrel with such repetitions as these, and there are remarkably
few of them; for the fertile genius of Dickens took delight in the variety
of its creativeness, and, as if to exemplify this, there was no relation
upon the contrasted humours of which he better loved to dwell than that of
partnership. It has been seen how rarely his inventive power condescended
to supplement itself by what in the novel corresponds to the mimicry of
the stage, and what in truth is as degrading to the one as it is to the
other--the reproduction of originals _from real life_. On the other hand,
he carries his habit too far of making a particular phrase do duty as an
index of a character. This trick also is a trick of the stage, where it
often enough makes the judicious grieve. Many may be inclined to censure
it in Dickens as one of several forms of the exaggeration which is so
frequently condemned in him. There was no charge to which he was more
sensitive; and in the preface to _Martin Chuzzlewit_ he accordingly (not
for the first time) turned round upon the objectors, declaring roundly
that "what is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions is plain
truth to another;" and hinting a doubt "whether it is _always_ the writer
who colours highly, or whether it is now and then the reader whose eye for
colour is a little dull." I certainly do not think that the term
"exaggerated" is correctly applied to such conventional characters of
sensational romance as Rosa Dartle, who has, as it were, lost her way into
_David Copperfield_, while Hortense and Madame Defarge seem to be in their
proper places in _Bleak House_ and _A Tale of Two Cities_. In his earlier
writings, and in the fresher and less overcharged serious parts of his
later books, he rarely if ever paints black in black; even the Jew Fagin
has a moment of relenting against the sleeping Oliver; he is not that
unreal thing, a "demon," whereas Sikes is that real thing, a brute. On the
other hand, certainly he at times makes his characters more laughable than
nature; few great humourists have so persistently sought to efface the
line which separates the barely possible from the morally probable. This
was, no doubt, largely due to his inclination towards the grotesque,
which a severer literary training might have taught him to restrain. Thus
he liked to introduce insane or imbecile personages into fiction, where,
as in real life, they are often dangerous to handle. It is to his sense of
the grotesque, rather than to any deep-seated satirical intention, and
certainly not to any want of reverence or piety in his very simple and
very earnest nature, that I would likewise ascribe the exaggeration and
unfairness of which he is guilty against Little Bethel and all its works.
But in this, as in other instances, no form of humour requires more
delicate handling than the grotesque, and none is more liable to cause
fatigue. Latterly, Dickens was always adding to his gallery of eccentric
portraits, and if inner currents may be traced by outward signs, it may be
worth while to apply the test of his _names_, which become more and more
odd as their owners deviate more and more from the path of nature. Who
more simply and yet more happily named than the leading members of the
Pickwick Club--from the poet, Mr. Snodgrass, to the sportsman, Mr.
Winkle--Nathaniel, not Daniel; but with Veneering and Lammle, and Boffin
and Venus, and Crisparkle and Grewgious--be they actual names or not--we
feel instinctively that we are in the region of the transnormal.
Lastly, in their descriptive power and the faithfulness with which they
portray the life and ways of particular periods or countries, of special
classes, professions, or other divisions of mankind, the books of Dickens
are, again of course within their range, unequalled. He sought his
materials chiefly at home, though his letters from Italy and Switzerland
and America, and his French pictures in sketch and story, show how much
wider a field his descriptive powers might have covered. The _Sketches by
Boz_ and the _Pickwick Papers_ showed a mastery, unsurpassed before or
since, in the description of the life of English society in its middle and
lower classes, and in _Oliver Twist_ he lifted the curtain from some of
the rotten parts of our civilisation. This history of a work-house child
also sounded the note of that sympathy with the poor which gave to
Dickens's descriptions of their sufferings and their struggles a veracity
beyond mere accuracy of detail. He was still happier in describing their
household virtues, their helpfulness to one another, their compassion for
those who are the poorest of all--the friendless and the outcast--as he
did in his _Old Curiosity Shop_, and in most of his Christmas books. His
pictures of middle-class life abounded in kindly humour; but the humour
and pathos of poverty--more especially the poverty which has not yet lost
its self-respect--commended themselves most of all to his descriptive
power. Where, as in _Nicholas Nickleby_ and later works, he essayed to
describe the manners of the higher classes, he was, as a rule, far less
successful; partly because there was in his nature a vein of rebellion
against the existing system of society, so that, except in his latest
books, he usually approached a description of members of its dominant
orders with a satirical intention, or at least an undertone of bitterness.
At the same time I demur to the common assertion that Dickens could not
draw a real gentleman. All that can be said is that it very rarely suited
his purpose to do so, supposing the term to include manners as well as
feelings and actions; though Mr. Twemlow, in _Our Mutual Friend_, might be
instanced as a (perhaps rather conscious) exception of one kind, and Sir
Leicester Dedlock, in the latter part of _Bleak House_, as another.
Moreover, a closer examination of Lord Frederick Verisopht and Cousin
Feenix will show that, gull as the one and ninny as the other is, neither
has anything that can be called ungentlemanly about him; on the contrary,
the characters, on the whole, rather plead in favour of the advantage than
of the valuelessness of blue blood. As for Dickens's other noblemen, whom
I find enumerated in an American dictionary of his characters, they are
nearly all mere passing embodiments of satirical fancies, which pretend to
be nothing more.
Another ingenious enthusiast has catalogued the numerous callings,
professions, and trades of the personages appearing in Dickens's works. I
cannot agree with the criticism that in his personages the man is apt to
become forgotten in the externals of his calling--the barrister's wig and
gown, as it were, standing for the barrister, and the beadle's cocked hat
and staff for the beadle. But he must have possessed in its perfection the
curious detective faculty of deducing a man's occupation from his manners.
To him nothing wore a neutral tint, and no man or woman was featureless.
He was, it should be remembered, always observing; half his life he was
afoot. When he undertook to describe any novel or unfamiliar kind of
manners, he spared no time or trouble in making a special study of his
subject. He was not content to know the haunts of the London thieves by
hearsay, or to read the history of opium-smoking and its effects in
Blue-books. From the office of his journal in London we find him starting
on these self-imposed commissions, and from his hotel in New York. The
whole art of descriptive reporting, which has no doubt produced a large
quantity of trashy writing, but has also been of real service in arousing
a public interest in neglected corners of our social life, was, if not
actually set on foot, at any rate re-invigorated and vitalised by him. No
one was so delighted to notice the oddities which habit and tradition
stereotype in particular classes of men. A complete natural history of
the country actor, the London landlady, and the British waiter might be
compiled from his pages. This power of observation and description
extended from human life to that of animals. His habits of life could not
but make him the friend of dogs, and there is some reason for a title
which was bestowed on him in a paper in a London magazine concerning his
own dogs--the Landseer of Fiction. His letters are full of delightful
details concerning these friends and companions, Turk, Linda, and the rest
of them; nor is the family of their fictitious counterparts, culminating
(intellectually) in Merrylegs, less numerous and delightful. Cats were
less congenial to Dickens, perhaps because he had no objection to changing
house; and they appear in his works in no more attractive form than as the
attendant spirits of Mrs. Pipchin and of Mr. Krook. But for the humours of
animals in general he had a wonderfully quick eye. Of his ravens I have
already spoken. The pony Whisker is the type of kind old gentlemen's
ponies. In one of his letters occurs an admirably droll description of the
pig-market at Boulogne; and the best unscientific description ever given
of a spider was imagined by Dickens at Broadstairs, when in his solitude
he thought
"of taming spiders, as Baron Trenck did. There is one in my cell (with
a speckled body and twenty-two very decided knees) who seems to know
me."
In everything, whether animate or inanimate, he found out at once the
characteristic feature, and reproduced it in words of faultless precision.
This is the real secret of his descriptive power, the exercise of which it
would be easy to pursue through many other classes of subjects. Scenery,
for its own sake, he rarely cared to describe; but no one better
understood how to reproduce the combined effect of scenery and weather on
the predisposed mind. Thus London and its river in especial are, as I have
said, haunted by the memory of Dickens's books. To me it was for years
impossible to pass near London Bridge at night, or to idle in the Temple
on summer days, or to frequent a hundred other localities on or near the
Thames, without instinctively recalling pictures scattered through the
works of Dickens--in this respect, also, a real _liber veritatis_.
Thus, and in many ways which it would be labour lost to attempt to
describe, and by many a stroke or touch of genius which it would be idle
to seek to reproduce in paraphrase, the most observing and the most
imaginative of our English humourists revealed to us that infinite
multitude of associations which binds men together, and makes us members
one of another. But though observation and imagination might discern and
discover these associations, sympathy--the sympathy of a generous human
heart with humanity--alone could breathe into them the warmth of life.
Happily, to most men, there is one place consecrated above others to the
feelings of love and good-will; "that great altar where the worst among us
sometimes perform the worship of the heart, and where the best have
offered up such sacrifices and done such deeds of heroism as, chronicled,
would put the proudest temples of old time, with all their vaunting
annals, to the blush." It was thus that Dickens spoke of the sanctity of
_home_; and, English in many things, he was most English in that love of
home to which he was never weary of testifying. But, though the "pathway
of the sublime" may have been closed to him, he knew well enough that the
interests of a people and the interests of humanity are mightier than the
domestic loves and cares of any man; and he conscientiously addressed
himself, as to the task of his life, to the endeavour to knit humanity
together. The method which he, by instinct and by choice, more especially
pursued was that of seeking to show the "good in everything." This it is
that made him, unreasonably sometimes, ignobly never, the champion of the
poor, the helpless, the outcast. He was often tempted into a rhetoric too
loud and too shrill, into a satire neither fine nor fair; for he was
impatient, but not impatient of what he thought true and good. His
purpose, however, was worthy of his powers; nor is there recorded among
the lives of English men of letters any more single-minded in its aim, and
more successful in the pursuit of it, than his. He was much criticised in
his lifetime; and he will, I am well aware, be often criticised in the
future by keener and more capable judges than myself. They may miss much
in his writings that I find in them; but, unless they find one thing
there, it were better that they never opened one of his books. He has
indicated it himself when criticising a literary performance by a clever
writer:
"In this little MS. everything is too much patronised and condescended
to, whereas the slightest touch of feeling for the rustic who is of
the earth earthy, or of sisterhood with the homely servant who has
made her face shine in her desire to please, would make a difference
that the writer can generally imagine without trying it. You don't
want any sentiment laboriously made out in such a thing. You don't
want any maudlin show of it. But you do want a pervading suggestion
that it is there."
The sentiment which Dickens means is the salt which will give a fresh
savour of their own to his works so long as our language endures.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See _Idyll_. xv. 77. This discovery is not my own, but that of the
late Dr. Donaldson, who used to translate the passage accordingly with
great gusto.
[2] For operas, as a form of _dramatic_ entertainment, Dickens seems
afterwards to have entertained a strong contempt, such as, indeed, it is
difficult for any man with a sense of humour wholly to avoid.
[3] W. & D. Grant Brothers had their warehouse at the lower end of Cannon
Street, and their private house in Mosely Street.
[4] As there is hardly a character in the whole world of fiction and the
drama without some sort of a literary predecessor, so Dickens may have
derived the first notion of Grip from the raven Ralpho--likewise the
property of an idiot--who frightened Roderick Random and Strap out of
their wits, and into the belief that he was the personage Grip so
persistently declared himself to be.
[5] After dining at a party including the son of an eminent man of
letters, he notes in his _Remembrancer_ that he found the great man's son
"decidedly lumpish," and appends the reflexion, "Copyrights need be
hereditary, for genius isn't."
[6] From a list of MSS. at South Kensington, kindly furnished me by Mr. R.
F. Sketchley, I find that Mr. R. H. Shepherd's _Bibliography of Dickens_
is incomplete on this head.
[7] By an odd coincidence, not less than four out of the six theatres
advertising their performances in this first number of the _Daily News_
announce each a different adaptation of _The Cricket on the Hearth_.
Amongst the curiosities of the casts are observable: At the Adelphi,
Wright as Tilly Slowboy, and at the Haymarket Buckstone in the same
character, with William Farren as Caleb Plummer. The latter part is taken
at the Princess's by Compton, Mrs. Stirling playing Dot. At the Lyceum,
Mr., Mrs., and Miss Mary Keeley, and Mr. Emery, appear in the piece.
[8] It is, perhaps, worth pointing out, though it is not surprising, that
Dickens had a strong sense of what I may call the poetry of the
railway-train. Of the effect of the weird _Signalman's Story_ in one of
his Christmas numbers it is not very easy to rid one's self. There are
excellent descriptions of the _rapidity_ of a railway journey in the first
chapter of _The Lazy Tour_, and in another _Household Words_ paper, called
_A Flight_.
[9] Among these is Mr. Alexander Ireland, the author of the _Bibliography
of Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt_, who has kindly communicated to me part of his
collections concerning the former. The tittle-tattle against Leigh Hunt
repeated by Lord Macaulay is, on the face of it, unworthy of notice.
[10] _By Rail to Parnassus_, June 16, 1855.
[11] One of the last things ever written by Dickens was a criticism of M.
Fechter's acting, intended to introduce him to the American public. A
false report, by-the-way, declared Dickens to have been the author of the
dramatic version of Scott's novel, which at Christmas, 1865-'66, was
produced at the Lyceum, under the title of _The Master of Ravenswood_; but
he allowed that he had done "a great deal towards and about the piece,
having an earnest desire to put Scott, for once, on the stage in his own
gallant manner."
[12] Dickens undoubtedly had a genius for titles. Amongst some which he
suggested for the use of a friend and contributor to his journal are,
"_What will he do with it?_" and "_Can he forgive her?_"
[13] This title has helped to extinguish the phrase of which it consists.
Few would now be found to agree with the last clause of Flora's
parenthesis in _Little Dorrit_: "Our mutual friend--too cold a word for
me; at least I don't mean that very proper expression, mutual friend."
[14] In the last volume of his _magnum opus_ of historical fiction Gustav
Freytag describes "Boz" as, about the year 1846, filling with boundless
enthusiasm the hearts of young men and maidens in a small Silesian country
town.
[15] The passage in _Oliver Twist_ (chapter xxxvii.) which illustrates the
maxim that "dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes are more questions
of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine," may, or may not, be a
reminiscence of _Sartor Resartus_, then (1838) first published in a
volume.
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Transcriber's Notes:
Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
The following misprints have been corrected:
"absurb" corrected to "absurd" (page 21)
"hear-trending" corrected to "heart-rending" (page 26)
"the the" corrected to "the" (page 135)
Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and
hyphenation have been retained from the original.