“Ladies and gentlemen, I have the honour to read to you ‘A Christmas
Carol,’ in four staves. Stave one, Marley’s Ghost. Marley was dead.
There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial
was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief
mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon
’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as
dead as a door-nail.”
At the close of this paragraph our first impression is that Mr. Dickens’s
voice is limited in power, husky, and naturally monotonous. If he
succeeds in overcoming these defects, it will be by dramatic genius. We
begin to wonder why Mr. Dickens constantly employs the rising inflexion,
and never comes to a full stop; but we are so pleasantly introduced to
Scrooge, that our spirits revive.
“Foul weather didn’t know where to leave him. The heaviest rain and
snow, and hail, and sleet could boast of the advantage over him in only
one respect,—they often ‘came down’ handsomely, and Scrooge _never did_.”
Here the magnetic current between reader and listener sets in, and when
Scrooge’s clerk “put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at
the candle; in which effort, not being a man of strong imagination, he
failed;” the connexion is tolerably well established. We see old Scrooge
very plainly, growling and snarling at his pleasant nephew; and when that
nephew invites that uncle to eat a Christmas dinner with him, and Mr.
Dickens goes on to relate that Scrooge said “he would see him—yes, I am
sorry to say he did,—he went the whole length of the expression, and said
he would see him in that extremity first.” He makes one dive at our
sense of humour, and takes it captive. Mr. Dickens is Scrooge; he is the
two portly gentlemen on a mission of charity; he is twice Scrooge when,
upon one of the portly gentlemen remarking that many poor people would
rather die than go to the workhouse, he replies: “If they would rather
die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population;” and
thrice Scrooge, when, turning upon his clerk, he says, “You’ll want all
day to-morrow, I suppose?” It is the incarnation of a hard-hearted,
hard-fisted, hard-voiced miser.
“If quite convenient, sir.” A few words, but they denote Bob Cratchit in
three feet of comforter exclusive of fringe, in well-darned, thread-bare
clothes, with a mild, frightened voice, so thin that you can see through
it!
Then there comes the change when Scrooge, upon going home, “saw in the
knocker, Marley’s face!” Of course Scrooge saw it, because the
expression of Mr. Dickens’s face makes us see it “with a dismal light
about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar.” There is good acting in
this scene, and there is fine acting when the dying flame leaps up as
though it cried, “I know him! Marley’s ghost!” With what gusto Mr.
Dickens reads that description of Marley, and how, “looking through his
waistcoat, Scrooge _could see the two buttons on his coat behind_.”
Nothing can be better than the rendering of the Fezziwig party, in Stave
Two. You behold Scrooge gradually melting into humanity; Scrooge, as a
joyous apprentice; that model of employers, Fezziwig; Mrs. Fezziwig “one
vast substantial smile,” and all the Fezziwigs. Mr. Dickens’s expression
as he relates how “in came the housemaid with _her cousin_ the baker, and
in came the cook _with her brother’s particular friend the milkman_,” is
delightfully comic, while his complete rendering of that dance where “all
were top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them,” is owing to
the inimitable action of his hands. They actually perform upon the
table, as if it were the floor of Fezziwig’s room, and every finger were
a leg belonging to one of the Fezziwig’s family. This feat is only
surpassed by Mr. Dickens’s illustration of Sir Roger de Coverley, as
interpreted by Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig, when “a positive light appeared to
issue from Fezziwig’s calves,” and he “cut so deftly that he appeared to
wink with his legs!” It is a maze of humour. Before the close of the
stave, Scrooge’s horror at sight of the young girl once loved by him, and
put aside for gold, shows that Mr. Dickens’s power is not purely comic.
But the best of all, is Stave Three. We distinctly see that “Cratchit”
family. There are the potatoes that “knocked loudly at the saucepan-lid
to be let out and peeled;” there is Mrs. Cratchit, fluttering and
cackling like a motherly hen with a young brood of chickens; and there is
everybody. The way those two young Cratchits hail Martha, and
exclaim—“There’s _such_ a goose, Martha!” can never be forgotten. By
some conjuring trick, Mr. Dickens takes off his own head and puts on a
Cratchit’s. Later Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim come in. Assuredly it is
Bob’s thin voice that pipes out, “Why, where’s our Martha?” and it is
Mrs. Cratchit who shakes her head and replies, “Not coming!” Then Bob
relates how Tiny Tim behaved: “as good as gold and better. Somehow he
gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest
things you have ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the
people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be
pleasant to them to remember, upon Christmas-day, who made lame beggars
walk, and blind men see.” There is a volume of pathos in these words,
which are the most delicate and artistic rendering of the whole reading.
Ah, that Christmas dinner! We feel as if we were eating every morsel of
it. There are “the two young Cratchits,” who “crammed spoons into their
mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn;” there is
Tiny Tim, who “beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and feebly
cried, ‘Hoorray,’” in such a still, small voice. And there is that
goose! I see it with my naked eye. And O the pudding! “A smell like a
washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a
pastry-cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to
that! That was the pudding.” Mr. Dickens’s sniffing and smelling of
that pudding would make a starving family believe that they had swallowed
it, holly and all. It is infectious.
What Mr. Dickens _does_ is very frequently infinitely better than
anything he says, or the way he says it; yet the doing is as delicate and
intangible as the odour of violets, and can be no better described.
Nothing of its kind can be more touchingly beautiful than the manner in
which Bob Cratchit—previous to proposing “a merry Christmas to us all, my
dears, God bless us”—stoops down, with tears in his eyes and places Tiny
Tim’s withered little hand in his, “as if he loved the child, and wished
to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him.”
It is pantomime worthy of the finest actor.
Admirable is Mrs. Cratchit’s ungracious drinking to Scrooge’s health, and
Martha’s telling how she had seen a lord, and how he “was much about as
tall as Peter!”
It is a charming cabinet picture, and so likewise is the glimpse of
Christmas at Scrooge’s nephew’s. The plump sister is “satisfactory, O
perfectly satisfactory,” and Topper is a magnificent fraud on the
understanding; a side-splitting fraud. We see Fred get off the sofa, and
_stamp_ at his own fun, and we hear the plump sister’s voice when she
guesses the wonderful riddle, “It’s your uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!”
Altogether, Mr. Dickens is better than any comedy.
What a change in Stave Four! There sit the gray-haired rascal “Old Joe,”
with his crooning voice; Mr. Dilber, and those robbers of dead men’s
shrouds; there lies the body of the plundered, unknown man; there sit the
Cratchits weeping over Tiny Tim’s death, a scene that would be beyond all
praise were Bob’s cry, “My little, little child!” a shade less dramatic.
Here, and only here, Mr. Dickens forgets the nature of Bob’s voice, and
employs all the power of his own, carried away apparently by the
situation. Bob would not thus give way to his feelings. Finally, there
is Scrooge, no longer a miser, but a human being, screaming at the
“conversational” boy in Sunday clothes, to buy him the prize turkey “that
never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped
’em off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.” There is Bob Cratchit
behind time, trying to overtake nine o’clock, “that fled fifteen minutes
before.” There is Scrooge poking Bob in the ribs, and vowing he will
raise his salary; and there is at last happiness for all, as Tiny Tim
exclaims, “God bless us every one!”
It is difficult to see how the “Christmas Carol” can be read and acted
better. The only improvement possible is in the ghosts, who are,
perhaps, too monotonous; a way ghosts have when they return to earth.
Solemnity and monotony are not synonymous terms, yet every theatrical
ghost insists that they are, and Mr. Dickens is no exception to the rule.
If monotony is excusable in anyone, however, it is in him; for, when one
actor is obliged to represent _twenty-three different characters_, giving
to everyone an individual tone, he may be pardoned if his ghosts are not
colloquial.
Talk of sermons and churches! There never was a more beautiful sermon
than this of “The Christmas Carol.” Sacred names do not necessarily mean
sacred things.