the very manner with which Dickens commenced the Reading of one of his
stories, and which was always especially noticeable in the instance
of this particular ghost story of his about Christmas. The opening
sentences were always given in those cheery, comfortable tones,
indicative of a double relish on the part of a narrator--to wit, his own
enjoyment of the tale he is going to relate, and his anticipation of
the enjoyment of it by those who are giving him their attention.
Occasionally, at any rate during the last few years, his voice was husky
just at the commencement, but as he warmed to his work, with him at
all times a genuine labour of love, everything of that kind disappeared
almost at the first turn of the leaf. The genial inflections of the
voice, curiously rising, in those first moments of the Reading, at the
end of every sentence, there was simply no resisting. Had there been a
wedding guest present, he would hardly have repined in not being able to
obey the summons of the loud bassoon. The narrator had his will with one
and all. However large and however miscellaneous the audience, from the
front of the stalls to the back of the gallery, every one listened to
the familiar words that fell from his lips, from the beginning to the
end, with unflagging attention. There could be small room for marvel at
this, however, in the instance of the “Carol,” on first reading
which, Thackeray spoke of its author as that “delightful genius!” The
_Edinburgh_ editor, Lord Jeffrey, at the very same time, namely,
towards the close of 1843, on the morrow of the little book's original
publication, avowing, in no less glowing terms, that he had been nothing
less than charmed by the exquisite apologue: “chiefly,” as he declared,
“for the genuine goodness which breathes all through it, and is the true
inspiring angel by which its genius has been awakened.” Never since he
had first--and that but a very few years previously--taken pen in hand
as a story-teller, had this “delightful genius” sat down in a happier
vein for writing anything, than when he did so for the purpose
of recounting how Scrooge was converted, by a series of ghostly
apparitions, from the error of his utterly selfish way in life, until
then, as a tough-skinned, ingrained curmudgeon.
Characters and incidents, brought before us anew in the Reading, were
all so cordially welcomed,--the former being such old friends, the
latter so familiarly within our knowledge! Insomuch that many passages
were, almost word for word, remembered by those who, nevertheless,
listened as if curious to learn what might follow, yet who could
readily, any one of them, have prompted the Reader, that is the Author
himself, supposing by some rare chance he had happened, just for one
moment, to be at fault. It is curious to observe, on turning over
the leaves of the marked copy of this Reading, the sententious little
marginal notes for his own guidance, jotted down by the hand of this
wonderful master of elocutionary effect. “Narrative” is written on the
side of p. 5 where Scrooge's office, on Christmas Eve, is described,
just before mention is made of the Clerk's dismal little cell seeming to
be “a sort of tank,” and of his fire being so small that it looked like
“one coal,” and of his trying at last to warm himself by the candle, “in
which effort, not being a man of strong imagination, he failed.” Again,
“Cheerful” is penned on the side of p. 6, where Scrooge's Nephew comes
in at a burst with “A Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!”
After Scrooge's inhuman retort of “Bah! humbug!” not a word was added of
the descriptive sentence immediately following. Admirable though every
word of it is, however, one could hardly regret its suppression. Is it
asked why? Well then, for this simple reason--the force of which will
be admitted by anyone who ever had the happiness of grasping Charles
Dickens's hand in friendship--that his description of Scrooge's Nephew
was, quite unconsciously but most accurately, in every word of it, a
literal description of himself, just as he looked upon any day in the
blithest of all seasons, after a brisk walk in the wintry streets or on
the snowy high road. “He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the
fog and frost, this Nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his
face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked
again.” The Novelist himself was depicted there to a nicety. No need,
therefore, was there for even one syllable of this in the Reading.
Scrooge's Nephew was visibly before us, without a word being uttered.
To our thinking, it has always seemed as if the one chink through which
Scrooge's sympathies are got at and his heart-strings are eventually
touched, is discernable in his keen sense of humour from the very
outset. It is precisely through this that there seems hope, from the
very beginning, of his proving to be made of “penetrable stuff.” When,
after his monstrous “Out upon merry Christmas!” he goes on to say, “If
I had my will every idiot who goes about with 'merry Christmas' on his
lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of
holly in his heart: he should!” one almost feels as if he were laughing
in his sleeve from the very commencement. Instance, as yet more
strikingly to the point in respect to what we are here maintaining, the
wonderfully comic effect of the bantering remarks addressed by him to
the Ghost of Jacob Marley all through their confabulation, even when the
spectre's voice, as we are told, was disturbing the very marrow in
his bones. True, it is there stated that, all through that portentous
dialogue, he was only trying to be smart “as a means of distracting his
own attention.” But the jests themselves are too delicious, one would
say, for mere make-believes. Besides which, hear his laugh at the end of
the book! Hardly that of one really so long out of practice--“a splendid
laugh, a most illustrious laugh, the father of a long, long line of
brilliant laughs!” A laugh, one might suppose, as contagious as that of
his own Nephew when he was “so inexpressibly tickled that he was obliged
to get up off the sofa and stamp!” Speaking of which our author writes
so delectably, “If you should happen by any unlikely chance to know a
man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge's Nephew, all I can say is, I
should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I'll cultivate
his acquaintance.” At which challenge one might almost have been tempted
anticipatively to say at a venture--Scrooge! Good-humoured argument
apart, however, what creatures were those who, one by one--sometimes, it
almost seemed, two or three of them together--appeared and disappeared
upon the platform, at the Reader's own good-will and pleasure!
After Scrooge's “Good afternoon!”--delivered with irresistibly ludicrous
iteration--we caught something more than a distant glimpse of the Clerk
in the tank, when--on Scrooge's surly interrogation, if he will want
all day to-morrow?--the Reader replied in the thinnest and meekest of
frightened voices, “If quite convenient, sir!” It brought into full
view instantaneously, and for the first time, the little Clerk whom one
followed in imagination with interest a minute afterwards on his “going
down a slide at the end of a lane of boys twenty times in honour of
Christmas, and then, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling
below his waist (for he boasted no greatcoat) running home as hard as
he could pelt to play at blind man's buff.” Instantly, upon the heels
of this, we find noted on the margin, p. 18, “Tone to mystery.” The
spectral illusion of the knocker on Scrooge's house-door, looking for
all the world not like a knocker, but like Marley's face, “with a dismal
light about it like a bad lobster in a dark cellar,” prepared the
way marvellously for what followed. Numberless little tid-bits of
description that anybody else would have struck out with reluctance, as,
for instance, that of Scrooge looking cautiously behind the street door
when he entered, “as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight
of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall,” were unhesitatingly
erased by the Reader, as, from his point of view, not necessarily to
the purpose. Then, after the goblin incident of the disused bell slowly
oscillating until it and all the other bells in the house rang loudly
for a while--afterwards becoming in turn just as suddenly hushed--we got
to the clanking approach, from the sub-basement of the old building,
of the noise that at length came on through the heavy door of Scrooge's
apartment! “And”--as the Reader said with startling effect, while
his voice rose to a hurried outcry as he uttered the closing
exclamation--“upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though
it cried, '_I know him! Marley's Ghost!_'” The apparition, although
the description of it was nearly stenographically abbreviated in the
Reading, appeared to be, in a very few words, no less startlingly
realised. “Same face, usual waistcoat, tights, boots,” even to the
spectral illusion being so transparent that Scrooge (his own marrow,
then, we may presume, becoming sensitized) looking through his
waistcoat “could see the two back buttons on the coat behind”--with
the incorrigible old joker's cynical reflection to himself that “he had
often heard Marley spoken of as having no bowels, but had never believed
it until then.” The grotesque humour of his interview with the spectre
seemed scarcely to have been realised, in fact, until their colloquy was
actually listened to in the Reading.
Scrooge's entreaty addressed to the Ghost, when the latter demanded a
hearing, “Don't be flowery, Jacob, pray!” was only less laughable, for
example, than the expression of the old dreamer's visage when Marley
informed him that he had often sat beside him invisibly! Promised a
chance and hope in the fixture--a chance and hope of his dead partner's
procuring--Scrooge's “Thank 'ee!”--full of doubt--was a fitting prelude
to his acknowledgment of the favour when explained. “You will be
haunted,” quoth the Ghost, “by three Spirits.” The other faltering,
“I--I think I'd rather not:” and then quietly hinting afterwards,
“Couldn't I take 'em all at once, and have it over, Jacob?”
As for the revelations made to Ebenezer Scrooge by those three memorable
Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, who can ever hope to
relate them and impersonate them as they were related and impersonated
by the Author himself of this peerless ghost-story! Fezziwig, for
example, with his calves shining like moons, who, after going
through all the intricacies of the country dance, bow, corkscrew,
thread-the-needle, and back again to your place, cut--“cut so deftly
that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again
without a stagger!” The very Fiddler, who “went up to the lofty desk
and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches!” Master
Peter Cratchit, again, arrayed in his father's shirt collars, who,
rejoicing to find himself so gallantly attired, at one moment “yearned
to show his linen in the fashionable parks,” and at another, hearing his
sister Martha talk of some lord who “was much about as tall as Peter,
pulled up his collars so high that you couldn't have seen him if you
had been there.” As for the pathetic portions of the narrative, it is
especially observable in regard to those, that they were anything rather
than made too much of. There, more particularly, the elisions were
ruthless. Looking through the marked copy, it really would appear that
only a very few indeed of the salient points were left in regard to the
life and death of Tiny Tim. Bob's visit to the death-bed was entirely
unmentioned. Even the words “Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence
was from God!” were never uttered. Two utterances there _were_, however,
the one breathing an exquisite tenderness, the other indicative of a
long-suppressed but passionate outburst of grief, that thrilled to
the hearts of all who heard them, and still, we doubt not, haunt their
recollection. The one--where the mother, laying her mourning needlework
upon the table, put her hand up to her face. “'The colour hurts my
eyes,' she said. The colour? Ah! poor Tiny Tim!” The other, where the
father, while describing the little creature's grave, breaks down in a
sudden agony of tears. “It would have done you good to see how green a
place it is. But you'll see it often. I promised him that I would walk
there on a Sunday--_My little, little child! My little child!_” It was a
touch of nature that made the Reader and his world of hearers, upon the
instant, kin. The tearful outcry brimmed to the eyes of those present
a thousand visible echoes. “He broke down all at once. He couldn't help
it,” said the Reader, adding in subdued accents the simple words, “If
he could have helped it, he and his child would have been further apart
perhaps than they were.” With that ended all reference to the home-grief
at Bob Cratchit's. Everything else in relation to the loss of Tiny Tim
was foregone unhesitatingly.
The descriptive passages were cut out by wholesale. While the Christmas
dinner at Scrooge's Clerk's, and the Christmas party at Scrooge's
Nephew's, were left in almost in their entirety, the street-scenes and
shop-window displays were obliterated altogether. Nothing at all was
said about the “great round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped
like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen lolling at the doors and
tumbling into the streets in their apoplectic opulence.” Nothing about
the ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the
fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and “winking from their
shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced
demurely at the hung-up mistletoe.” Nothing about the canisters of tea
and coffee “rattled up and down like juggling tricks,” or about the
candied fruits, “so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the
coldest lookers-on feel faint, and subsequently bilious.”
Nay, we were denied even a momentary glimpse, on the snow-crusted
pavement at nightfall, of that group of handsome girls, all hooded and
fur-booted, and all chattering at once, tripping lightly off to some
near neighbour's house, “where, woe upon the single man who saw them
enter--artful witches, well they knew it--in a glow!” Topper was there,
however, and the plump sister in the lace tucker, and the game of
Yes-and-No, the solution to which was, “It's your uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!”
Happiest of all these non-omissions, as one may call them, there
was that charming picture of Scrooge's niece by marriage, which--as
brightly, exquisitely articulated by the lips of her imaginer--was
like the loveliest girl-portrait ever painted by Greuze. “She was very
pretty, exceedingly pretty. With a dimpled, surprised-looking, capital
face; a ripe little mouth, that seemed made to be kissed--as no doubt it
was; all kinds of good little dots about her chin, that melted into one
another when she laughed; and the sunniest pair of eyes you ever saw
in any little creature's head. Altogether she was what you would
have called provoking, you know; but satisfactory, too. Oh, perfectly
satisfactory.” The grave face and twinkling eyes with which this
cordial acquiescence in the conclusion arrived at was expressed were
irresistibly exhilarating. Just in the same way there was a sort of
parenthetical smack of the lips in the self-communing of Scrooge when,
at the very close of the story, after hesitating awhile at his Nephew's
door as to whether he should knock, he made a dash and did it. “Is your
master at home, my dear?” said Scrooge. “_Nice girl! very._” Then, as to
the cordiality of his reception by his Nephew, what could by possibility
have expressed it better than the look, voice, manner of the Reader.
“'Will you let me in, Fred?' _Let him in! It is a mercy he didn't shake
his arm off._” The turkey that “never could have stood upon its legs,
that bird,” but must have “snapped 'em short off in a minute, like
sticks of sealing-wax!”--the remarkable boy who was just about its
size, and who, when told to go and buy it, cried out “Walk-ER!”--Bob
Cratchit's trying to overtake nine o'clock with his pen on his arriving
nearly twenty minutes afterwards; his trembling and getting a little
nearer the ruler when regenerated Scrooge talks about raising his
salary, prior to calling him Bob, and, with a clap on the back, wishing
him a merry Christmas!--brought, hilariously, the whole radiant Reading
of this wonderful story to its conclusion. It was a feast of humour
and a flow of fun, better than all the yule-tide fare that ever was
provided--fuller of good things than any Christmas pudding of plums and
candied fruit-peel--more warming to the cockles of one's heart,
whatever those may be, than the mellowest wassail-bowl ever brimmed to
over-flowing. No wonder those two friends of Thackeray, who have been
already mentioned, and who were both of them women, said of the Author
of the “Carol,” by way of criticism, “God bless him!” This being
exclaimed by them, as will be remembered, simply after reading it to
themselves. If only they had heard him read it!
THE TRIAL FROM PICKWICK.
Reader and audience about equally, one may say, revelled in the “Trial
from Pickwick.” Every well-known person in the comic drama was looked
for eagerly, and when at last Serjeant Buzfuz, as we were told, “rose
with more importance than he had yet exhibited, if that were possible,
and said, 'Call Samuel Weller,'” a round of applause invariably greeted
the announcement of perhaps the greatest of all Dickens's purely
humorous characters. The Reading copy of this abbreviated report of
the great case of _Bardell v. Pickwick_ has, among the complete set of
Readings, one very striking peculiarity. Half-bound in scarlet morocco
like all the other thin octavos in the collection, its leaves though
yellow and worn with constant turning like the rest, are wholly _un_like
those of the others in this, that the text is untouched by pen or
pencil. Beyond the first condensation of that memorable 34th chapter
of Pickwick, there is introduced not one single alteration by way of
after-thought. Struck off at a heat, as it was, that first humorous
report of the action for breach of promise of marriage brought by Martha
Bardell against Samuel Pickwick admitted in truth in no way whatever of
improvement. Anything like a textual change would have been resented by
the hearers--every one of them Pickwickian, as the case might be, to
a man, woman, or child--as in the estimation of the literary court,
nothing less than a high crime and misdemeanour. Once epitomised for
the Reading, the printed version, at least of the report, was left
altogether intact. Nevertheless, strange to say, there was perhaps no
Reading out of the whole series of sixteen, in the delivery of which
the Author more readily indulged himself with an occasional gag. Every
interpolation of this kind, however, was so obviously introduced on
the spur of the moment, so refreshingly spontaneous and so ludicrously
_apropos_, that it was always cheered to the very echo, or, to put
the fact not conventionally but literally, was received with peals of
laughter. Thus it was in one instance, as we very well remember, in
regard to Mr. Justice Stareleigh--upon every occasion that we saw
him, one of the Reader's most whimsical impersonations. The little
judge--described in the book as “all face and waistcoat”--was presented
to view upon the platform as evidently with no neck at all (to speak
of), and as blinking with owl-like stolidity whenever he talked, which
he always did under his voice, and with apparently a severe cold in the
head. On the night more particularly referred to, Sam Weller, being
at the moment in the witness-box, had just replied to the counsel's
suggestion, that what he (Sam) meant by calling Mr. Pickwick's “a very
good service” was “little to do and plenty to get.”--“Oh, quite enough
to get, sir, as the soldier said ven they ordered him three hundred and
fifty lashes.” Thereupon--glowering angrily at Sam, and blinking his
eyes more than ever--Mr. Justice Stareleigh remarked, with a heavier
cold in the head than hitherto, in a severe monotone, and with the
greatest deliberation, “You must not tell us what the soldier says
unless the soldier is in court, unless that soldier comes here in
uniform, and is examined in the usual way--it's not evidence.” Another
evening, again, we recall quite as clearly to mind, when the Reader was
revelling more even than was his wont, in the fun of this representation
of the trial-scene, he suddenly seemed to open up the revelation of an
entirely new phase in Mr. Winkle's idiosyncrasy. Under the badgering of
Mr. Skimpin's irritating examination, as to whether he was or was not
a particular friend of Mr. Pickwick the defendant, the usually placable
Pickwickian's patience upon this occasion appeared gradually and at last
utterly to forsake him. “I have known Mr. Pickwick now, as well as I can
recollect at this moment, nearly----”
“Pray, Mr. Winkle, do not evade the question. Are you or are you not
a particular friend of the defendant's?” “I was just about to say----”
“Will you, or will you not, answer my question, sir?” “Why, God bless my
soul, I was just about to say that------” Whereupon the Court, otherwise
Mr. Justice Stareleigh, blinking faster than ever, blurted out severely,
“If you don't answer the question you'll be committed to prison, sir!”
And then, but not till then, Mr. Winkle was sufficiently restored to
equanimity to admit at last, meekly, “Yes, he was!”
In the Reading of the Trial the first droll touch was the
well-remembered reference to the gentlemen in wigs, in the barristers'
seats, presenting as a body “all that pleasing variety of nose and
whisker for which the bar of England is so justly celebrated.” Even the
allusion to those among their number who carried a brief “scratching
their noses with it to impress the fact more strongly on the observation
of the spectators,” and the other allusion to those who hadn't a brief,
carrying instead red-labelled octavos with “that under-done-pie-crust
cover, technically known as law calf,” was each, in turn, welcomed with
a flutter of amusement. Every point, however minute, told, and told
eifectively. More eifectively than if each was heard for the first
time, because all were thoroughly known, and, therefore, thoroughly well
appreciated. The opening address of Serjeant Buzfuz every one naturally
enough regarded as one of the most mirth-moving portions of the whole
representation. In the very exordium of it there was something eminently
absurd in the Serjeant's extraordinarily precise, almost mincing
pronunciation. As where he said, that “never in the whole course of his
professional experience--never from the first moment of his applying
himself to the study and practice of the law--had he approached a case
with such a heavy sense of respon-see-bee-lee-ty imposed upon him--a
respon-see-bee-lee-ty he could never have supported were he not,” and so
forth. Again, a wonderfully ridiculous effect was imparted by the Reader
to his mere contrasts of manner when, at one moment, in the bland and
melancholy accents of Serjeant Buzfuz, he referred to the late Mr.
Bardell as having “glided almost imperceptibly from the world to seek
elsewhere for that repose and peace which a custom-house can never
afford,” adding, the next instant in his own voice, and with the most
cruelly matter-of-fact precision, “This was a pathetic description of
the decease of Mr. Bardell, who had been knocked on the head with
a quart-pot in a public-house cellar.” The gravity of the Reader's
countenance at these moments, with, now and then, but very rarely, a
lurking twinkle in the eye, was of itself irresistibly provocative of
laughter. Even upon the Serjeant's mention of the written placard hung
up in the parlour window of Goswell Street, bearing this inscription,
“Apartments furnished for single gentlemen: inquire within,” the
sustained seriousness with which he added, that there the forensic
orator paused while several gentlemen of the jury “took a note of the
document,” one of that intelligent body inquiring, “There is no date to
that, is there, sir?” made fresh ripples of laughter spread from it as
inevitably as the concentric circles on water from the dropping of a
pebble. The crowning extravagances of this most Gargantuan of comic
orations were always of course the most eagerly welcomed, such, for
example, as the learned Serjeant's final allusion to Pickwick's
coming before the court that day with “his heartless tomato-sauce and
warming-pans,” and the sonorous close of the impassioned peroration
with the plaintiff's appeal to “an enlightened, a high-minded, a
right-feeling, a conscientious, a dispassionate, a sympathising, a
contemplative jury of her civilised countrymen.” It was after this,
however, that the true fun of the Reading began with the examination
and cross-examination of the different witnesses. These, as a matter of
course, were acted, not described.