steaming flavour what it was! Thereupon came the by-play of the
Humorist--after the fashion of Munden, who, according to Charles Lamb,
“understood a leg of mutton in its quiddity.” It was thus with the
Reader when he syllabled, with watering lips, guess after guess at the
half-opened basket. “It ain't--I suppose it ain't polonies? [sniffing].
No. It's--it's mellower than polonies. It's too decided for trotters.
Liver? No. There's a mildness about it that don't answer to liver.
Pettitoes? No. It ain't faint enough for pettitoes. It wants the
stringiness of cock's heads. And I know it ain't sausages. I'll tell you
what it is. No, it isn't, neither. Why, what am I thinking of! I shall
forget my own name next. It's tripe!” Forthwith, to reward him for
having thus hit it off at last so cleverly, Meg, as she expressed it,
with a flourish, laid the cloth, meaning the pocket-handkerchief in
which the basin of tripe had been tied up, and actually offered the
sybarite who was going to enjoy the unexpected banquet, a choice of
dining-places! “Where will you dine, father? On the post, or on the
steps? How grand we are: two places to choose from!” The weather being
dry, and the steps therefore chosen, those being rheumatic only in the
damp, Trotty Veck was not merely represented by the Reader as feasting
upon the tripe, but as listening meanwhile to Meg's account of how it
had all been arranged that she and her lover Eichard should, upon the
very next day, that is, upon New Year's Day, be married.
In the midst of this agreeable confabulation--Richard himself having in
the interim become one of the party--the little old ticket-porter,
the pretty daughter, and the sturdy young blacksmith, were suddenly
scattered. The Reader went on to relate how this happened, with
ludicrous accuracy, upon the abrupt opening of the door, around the
steps of which they were gathered--a flunkey nearly putting his foot in
the tripe, with this indignant apostrophe, “Out of the vays, here, will
you? You must always go and be a settin' on our steps, must you? You
can't go and give a turn to none of the neighbours never, can't you?”
Adding, even, a moment afterwards, with an aggrieved air of almost
affecting expostulation, “You're always a being begged and prayed upon
your bended knees, you are, to let our door-steps be? Can't you let
'em be?” Nothing more was seen or heard of that footman, and yet in the
utterance of those few words of his the individuality of the man somehow
was thoroughly realised. Observing him, listening to him, as he stood
there palpably before us, one seemed to understand better than ever
Thackeray's declaration in regard to those same menials in plush
breeches, that a certain delightful “quivering swagger” of the
calves about them, had for him always, as he expressed it, “a frantic
fascination!” Immediately afterwards, however, as the Reader turned
a new leaf, in place of the momentary apparition of that particular
flunkey, three very different persons appeared to step across the
threshold on to the platform. Low-spirited, Mr. Filer, with his hands in
his trousers-pockets. The red-faced gentleman who was always vaunting,
under the title of the “good old times,” some undiscoverable past which
he perpetually lamented as his deceased Millennium. And finally--as
large as life, and as real--Alderman Cute. As in the original Christmas
book, so also in the Reading, the one flagrant improbability was the
consumption by Alderman Cute of the last lukewarm tid-bit of tripe left
by Trotty Veck down at the bottom of the basin--its consumption, indeed,
by any alderman, however prying or gluttonous. Barring that, the whole
of the first scene of the “Chimes” was alive with reality, and with a
curious diversity of human character. In the one that followed, and in
which Trotty conveyed a letter to Sir Joseph Rowley, the impersonation
of the obese hall-porter, later on identified as Tugby, was in every
way far beyond that of the pompous humanitarian member of parliament. A
hall-porter this proved to be whose voice, when he had found it--“which
it took him some time to do, for it was a long way off, and hidden under
a load of meat”--was, in truth, as the Author's lips expressed it, and
as his pen had long before described it in the book, “a fat whisper.”
Afterwards when re-introduced, Tugby hardly, as it appeared to us,
came up to the original description. When the stout old lady, his
supposititious wife, formerly, or rather really, all through, Mrs.
Chickenstalker, says, in answer to his inquiries as to the weather,
one especially bitter winter's evening, “Blowing and sleeting hard, and
threatening snow. Dark, and very cold”--Tugby's almost apoplectic reply
was delicious, no doubt, in its suffocative delivery. “I'm glad to think
we had muffins for tea, my dear. It's a sort of night that's meant for
muffins. Likewise crumpets; also Sally Lunns.” But, for all that,
we invariably missed the sequel--which, once missed, could hardly be
foregone contentedly. We recalled to mind, for example, such descriptive
particulars in the original story as that, in mentioning each successive
kind of eatable, Tugby did so “as if he were musingly summing up his
good actions,” or that, after this, rubbing his fat legs and jerking
them at the knees to get the fire upon the yet unroasted parts, he
laughed as if somebody had tickled him! We bore distinctly enough
in remembrance, and longed then to have heard from the lips of the
Reader--in answer to the dream-wife's remark, “You're in spirits,
Tugby, my dear!”--Tugby's fat, gasping response, “No,--No. Not
particular. I'm a little elewated. The muffins came so pat!” Though,
even if that addition had been vouchsafed, we should still, no doubt,
have hungered for the descriptive particulars that followed, relating
not only how the former hall-porter chuckled until he was black in the
face--having so much ado, in fact, to become any other colour, that
his fat legs made the strangest excursions into the air--but that Mrs.
Tugby, that is, Chickenstalker, after thumping him violently on the
back, and shaking him as if he were a bottle, was constrained to cry
out, in great terror, “Good gracious, goodness, lord-a-mercy, bless
and save the man! What's he a-doing?” To which all that Mr. Tugby can
faintly reply, as he wipes his eyes, is, that he finds himself a little
“elewated!”
Another omission in the Reading was, if possible, yet more surprising,
namely, the whole of Will Fern's finest speech: an address full of
rustic eloquence that one can't help feeling sure would have told
wonderfully as Dickens could have delivered it. However, the story,
foreshortened though it was, precisely as he related it, was told with
a due regard to its artistic completeness. Margaret and Lilian, the
old ticket-porter and the young blacksmith, were the principal
interlocutors. Like the melodrama of Victorine, it all turned out,
of course, to be no more than “the baseless fabric of a vision,” the
central incidents of the tale, at any rate, being composed of “such
stuff as dreams are made of.” How it all came to be evolved by
the “Chimes” from the slumbering brain of the queer, little old
ticket-porter was related more fully and more picturesquely, no doubt,
in the printed narrative, but in the Reading, at the least, it was
depicted with more dramatic force and passion. The merest glimmering,
however, was afforded of the ghostly or elfin spectacle, as seen by
the “mind's eye” of the dreamer, and which in the book itself was
so important an integral portion of the tale, as there unfolded,
constituting, as it did, for that matter, the very soul or spirit of
what was meant by “The Chimes.”
Speaking of the collective chimes of a great city, Victor Hugo has
remarked in his prose masterpiece that, in an ordinary way, the noise
issuing from a vast capital is the talking of the city, that at night it
is the breathing of the city, but that when the bells are ringing it
is the singing of the city. Descanting upon this congenial theme,
the poet-novelist observes, in continuation, that while at first the
vibrations of each bell rise straight, pure, and in a manner separate
from that of the others, swelling by degrees, they blend, melt, and
amalgamate in magnificent concert until they become at length one mass
of sonorous vibrations, which, issuing incessantly from innumerable
steeples, float, undulate, bound, whirl over the city, expanding at last
far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of their oscillations. What
has been said thus superbly, though it may be somewhat extravagantly, by
Hugo, in regard to “that _tutti_ of steeples, that column of sound, that
cloud or sea of harmony,” as he variously terms it, has been said less
extravagantly, but quite as exquisitely, by Charles Dickens, in regard
to the chimes of a single belfry. After this New Year's tale of his was
first told, there rang out from the opposite shores of the Atlantic,
that most wonderful tintinnabulation in all literature, “The Bells” of
Edgar Poe--which is, among minor poems, in regard to the belfry, what
Southey's “Lodore” is to the cataract, full, sonorous, and exhaustive.
And there it is, in that marvellous little poem of “The Bells,” that the
American lyrist, as it has always seemed to us, has caught much of the
eltrich force and beauty and poetic significance of “The Chimes” as
they were originally rung forth in the prose-poetry of the English
novelist:--
“And the people--ah, the people--
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On [or from] the human heart a stone--
They are neither man nor woman--
They are neither brute nor human--
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A pæan from the hells.”
Charles Dickens, in his beautiful imaginings in regard to the Spirits
of the Bells--something of the grace and goblinry of which, Maclise's
pencil shadowed forth in the lovely frontispiece to the little volume
in the form in which it was first of all published--has exhausted the
vocabulary of wonder in his elvish delineation of the Goblin Sight
beheld in the old church-tower on New Year's Eve by the awe-stricken
ticket-porter.
In the Reading one would naturally have liked to have caught some
glimpse at least of the swarmmg out to view of the “dwarf-phantoms,
spirits, elfin creatures of the Bells;” to have seen them “leaping,
flying, dropping, pouring from the Bells,” unceasingly; to have realised
them anew as a listener, just as the imaginary dreamer beheld them all
about him in his vision--“round him on the ground, above him in the air,
clambering from him by the ropes below, looking down upon him from the
massive iron-girded beams, peeping in upon him through the chinks and
loopholes in the walls, spreading away and away from him in enlarging
circles, as the water-ripples give place to a huge stone that suddenly
comes plashing in among them.” In their coming and in their going, the
sight, it will be remembered, was equally marvellous. Whether--as the
Chimes rang out--we read of the dream-haunted, “He saw them [these
swarming goblins] ugly, handsome, crippled, exquisitely formed. He saw
them young, he saw them old, he saw them kind, he saw them cruel, he saw
them merry, he saw them grim, he saw them dance, he heard them sing,
he saw them tear their hair, and heard them howl”--diving, soaring,
sailing, perching, violently active in their restlessness--stone, brick,
slate, tile, transparent to the dreamer's gaze, and pervious to their
movements--the bells all the while in an uproar, the great church
tower vibrating from parapet to basement! Or, whether--when the Chimes
ceased--there came that instantaneous transformation! “The whole swarm
fainted; their forms collapsed, their speed deserted them; they
sought to fly, but in the act of falling died and melted into air. One
straggler,” says the book, “leaped down pretty briskly from the surface
of the Great Bell, and alighted on his feet, but he was dead and gone
before he could turn round.” After it has been added that some thus
gambolling in the tower “remained there, spinning over and over a little
longer,” becoming fainter, fewer, feebler, and so vanishing--we read,
“The last of all was one small hunchback, who had got into an echoing
corner, where he twirled and twirled, and floated by himself a long
time; showing such perseverance, that at last he dwindled to a leg, and
even to a foot, before he finally retired; but he vanished in the end,
and then the tower was silent.” Nothing of this, however, was given in
the Reading, the interest of which was almost entirely restricted to the
fancied fluctuation of fortunes among the human characters. All of
the pathetic and most of the comic portions of the tale were
happily preserved. When, in the persons of the Tugbys, “fat company,
rosy-cheeked company, comfortable company,” came to be introduced, there
was an instant sense of exhilaration among the audience.
A roar invariably greeted the remark, “They were but two, but they
were red enough for ten.” Similarly pronounced was the reception of the
casual announcement of the “stone pitcher of terrific size,” in which
the good wife brought her contribution of “a little flip” to the final
merry-making. “Mrs. Chicken-stalker's notion of a little flip did honour
to her character,” elicited a burst of laughter that was instantly
renewed when the Reader added, that “the pitcher reeked like a
volcano,” and that “the man who carried it was faint.” The Drum, by
the way--braced tight enough, as any one might admit in the original
narrative--seemed rather slackened, and was certainly less effective,
in the Reading. One listened in vain for the well-remembered parenthesis
indicative of its being the man himself, and not the instrument. “The
Drum (who was a private friend of Trotty's) then stepped forward,
and” offered--evidently with a hiccough or two--his greeting of good
fellowship, “which,” as we learn from the book, “was received with
a general shout.” The Humorist added thereupon, in his character as
Storyteller, not in his capacity as Reader, “The Drum was rather drunk,
by-the-bye; but never mind.” A band of music, with marrow-bones
and cleavers and a set of hand-bells--clearly all of them under the
direction of the Drum--then struck up the dance at Meg's wedding.
But, after due mention had been made of how Trotty danced with Mrs.
Chickenstalker “in a step unknown before or since, founded on his own
peculiar trot,” the story closed in the book, and closed also in the
Reading, with words that, in their gentle and harmonious flow, seemed
to come from the neighbouring church-tower as final echoes from “The
Chimes” themselves.
THE STORY OF LITTLE DOMBEY.
[Illustration: Little-Dombey.jpg]
The hushed silence with which the concluding passages of this Reading
were always listened to, spoke more eloquently than any applause could
possibly have done, of the sincerity of the emotions it awakened. A
cursory glance at the audience confirmed the impression produced by
that earlier evidence of their rapt and breathless attention. It is
the simplest truth to say that at those times many a face illustrated
involuntarily the loveliest line in the noblest ode in the language,
where Dryden has sung even of a warrior--
“And now and then a sigh he heaved,
And tears began to flow.”
The subdued voice of the Reader, moreover, accorded tenderly with one's
remembrance of his own acknowledgment ten years after his completion of
the book from which this story was extracted, that with a heavy heart he
had walked the streets of Paris alone during the whole of one winter's
night, while he and his little friend parted company for ever! Charles
Young's son, the vicar of Ilminster, has, recently, in his own Diary
appended to his memoir of his father, the tragedian, related a curious
anecdote, illustrative, in a very striking way, of the grief--the
profound and overwhelming grief--excited in a mind and heart like
those of Lord Jeffrey, by the imaginary death of another of these
dream-children of Charles Dickens. The editor of the _Edinburgh Review_,
we there read, was surprised by Mrs. Henry Siddons, seated in his
library, with his head on the table, crying. “Delicately retiring,” we
are then told, “in the hope that her entrance had been unnoticed,” Mrs.
Siddons observed that Jeffrey raised his head and was kindly beckoning
her back. The Diary goes on: “Perceiving that his cheek was flushed
and his eyes suffused with tears, she apologised for her intrusion,
and begged permission to withdraw. When he found that she was seriously
intending to leave him, he rose from his chair, took her by both hands,
and led her to a seat.” Then came the acknowledgment prefaced by Lord
Jeffrey's remark that he was “a great goose to have given way so.”
Little Nell was dead! The newly published number of “Master Humphrey's
Clock” (No. 44) was lying before him, in which he had just been reading
of the general bereavement!
Referring to another of these little creatures' deaths, that of Tiny
Tim, Thackeray wrote in the July number of _Fraser_, for 1844, that
there was one passage regarding it about which a man would hardly
venture to speak in print or in public “any more than he would of any
other affections of his private heart.”
It has been related, even of the burly demagogue, O'Connell, that
on first reading of Nell's death in the Old Curiosity Shop, he
exclaimed--his eyes running over with tears while he flung the leaves
indignantly out of the window--“he should not have killed her--he should
not have killed her: she was too good!”
Finally, another Scotch critic and judge, Lord Cockburn, writing to the
Novelist on the very morrow of reading the memorable fifth number of
“Dombey and Son,” in which the death of Little Paul is so exquisitely
depicted--offering his grateful acknowledgments to the Author for the
poignant grief he had caused him--added, “I have felt my heart purified
by those tears, and blessed and loved you for making me shed them.”
Hardly can it be matter for wonder, therefore, remarking how the printed
pages would draw such tokens of sympathy from men like Cockburn, and
Jeffrey, and Thackeray, and O'Connell, that a mixed audience showed
traces of emotion when the profoundly sympathetic voice of Dickens
himself related this story of the Life and Death of Little Dombey. Yet
the pathetic beauty of the tale, for all that, was only dimly hinted at
throughout,--the real pathos of it, indeed, being only fully indicated
almost immediately before its conclusion. Earlier in the Reading, in
fact, the drollery of the comic characters introduced--of themselves
irresistible--would have been simply paramount, but for the incidental
mention of the mother's death, when clinging to that frail spar within
her arms, her little daughter, “she drifted out upon the dark and
unknown sea that rolls round all the world.” Paul's little wistful face
looked out every now and then, it is true, from among the fantastic
forms and features grouped around him, with a growing sense upon the
hearer of what was really meant by the child being so “old-fashioned.”
But the ludicrous effect of those surrounding characters was nothing
less than all-mastering in its predominance.
There was Mrs. Pipchin, for example, that grim old lady with a mottled
face like bad marble, who acquired an immense reputation as a manager
of children, by the simple device of giving them everything they didn't
like and nothing that they did! Whose constitution required mutton chops
hot and hot, and buttered toast in similar relays! And with whom one of
Little Dombey's earliest dialogues in the Reading awakened invariably
such bursts of hearty laughter! Seated in his tall, spindle-legged
arm-chair by the fire, staring steadily at the exemplary Pipchin, Little
Paul, we were told, was asked [in the most snappish voice possible], by
that austere female, What he was thinking about?
“You,” [in the gentlest childlike voice] said Paul, without the least
reserve.
“And what are you thinking about me?”
“I'm--thinking--how old--you must be.”
“You mustn't say such things as that, young gentleman. That'll never
do.”
“Why not [slowly and wonderingly]?”
“Never you mind, sir [shorter and sharper than ever]. Remember the
story of the little boy that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking
questions.”
“If the bull [in a high falsetto voice and with greater deliberation
than ever] was mad, how did he know that the boy asked questions? Nobody
can go and whisper secrets to a mad bull. I don't believe that story.”
Little Dombey's fellow-sufferers at Mrs. Pipchin's were hardly less
ludicrous in their way than that bitter old victim of the Peruvian mines
in her perennial weeds of black bombazeen. Miss Pankey, for instance,
the mild little blue-eyed morsel of a child who was instructed by the
Ogress that “nobody who sniffed before visitors ever went to heaven!”
And her associate in misery, one Master Bitherstone, from India, who
objected so much to the Pipchinian system, that before Little Dombey had
been in the house five minutes, he privately consulted that gentleman
if he could afford him any idea of the way back to Bengal! What the
Pipchinian system was precisely, the Reader indicated perhaps the most
happily by his way of saying, that instead of its encouraging a child's
mind to develop itself, like a flower, it strove to open it by force,
like an oyster. Fading slowly away while he is yet under Mrs. Pipchin's
management, poor little Paul, as the audience well knew, was removed on
to Doctor Blimber's Academy for Young Gentlemen. There the humorous
company gathered around Paul immediately increased. But, before his
going amongst them, the Reader enabled us more vividly to realise, by an
additional touch or two, the significance of the peculiarity of being
“old fashioned,” for which the fading child appeared in everybody's eyes
so remarkable.
Wheeled down to the beach in a little invalid-carriage, he would cling
fondly to his sister Florence. He would say to any chance child who
might come to bear him company [in a soft, drawling, half-querulous
voice, and with the gravest look], “Go away, if you please. Thank you,
but I don't want you.” He would wonder to himself and to Floy what the
waves were always saying--always saying! At about the middle of the 47th
page of the Reading copy of this book about Little Dombey, the copy
from which Dickens Read, both in England and America, there is, in
his handwriting, the word--“Pause.” It occurs just in between Little
Dombey's confiding to his sister, that if she were in India he should
die of being so sorry and so lonely! and the incident of his suddenly
waking up at another time from a long sleep in his little carriage on
the shingles, to ask her, not only “What the rolling waves are saying so
constantly, but What place is over there?--far away!--looking eagerly,
as he inquires, towards some invisible region beyond the horizon!” That
momentary pause will be very well remembered by everyone who attended
this Reading.