together of the materials for this particular Reading from the original
narrative. In approaching Dr. Blimber's establishment for the first
time, we would gladly have witnessed the sparring-match, as one may say,
on the very threshold, between Mrs. Pipchin the Ogress in bombazeen and
the weak-eyed young man-servant who opens the door! The latter of
whom, having “the first faint streaks or early dawn of a grin on his
countenance--(it was mere imbecility)” as the Author himself explains
parenthetically--Mrs. Pipchin at once takes it into her head, is
inspired by impudence, and snaps at accordingly. Of this we saw nothing,
however, in the Reading. We heard nothing of Mrs. Pipchin's explosive,
“How dare you laugh behind the gentleman's back?” or of the weak-eyed
young man's answering in consternation, “I ain't a laughing at nobody,
ma'am.” Any more than of the Ogress saying a while later, “You're
laughing again, sir!” or of the young man, grievously oppressed,
repudiating the charge with, “I _ain't_. I never see such a thing
as this!” The old lady as she passed on with, “Oh! he was a precious
fellow,” leaving him, who was in fact all meekness and incapacity,
“affected even to tears by the incident.” If we saw nothing, however, of
that retainer of Dr. Blimber, we were introduced to another, meaning the
blue-coated, bright-buttoned butler, “who gave quite a winey flavour
to the table-beer--he poured it out so superbly!” We had Dr. Blimber
himself, besides, with his learned legs, like a clerical pianoforte--a
bald head, highly polished, and a chin so double, it was a wonder how
he ever managed to shave into the creases. We had Miss Blimber, in
spectacles, like a ghoul, “dry and sandy with working in the graves
of deceased languages.” We had Mrs. Blimber, not learned herself, but
pretending to be so, which did quite as well, languidly exclaiming at
evening parties, that if she could have known Cicero, she thought she
could have died contented. We had Mr. Feeder, clipped to the stubble,
grinding out his classic stops like a barrel-organ of erudition. Above
all, we had Toots, the head boy, or rather “the head and shoulder
boy,” he was so much taller than the rest! Of whom in that intellectual
forcing-house (where he had “gone through” everything so completely,
that one day he “suddenly left off blowing, and remained in the
establishment a mere stalk”) people had come at last to say, “that the
Doctor had rather overdone it with young Toots, and that when he began
to have whiskers he left off having brains.” From the moment when Young
Toots's voice was first heard, in tones so deep, and in a manner
so sheepish, that “if a lamb had roared it couldn't have been more
surprising,” saying to Little Dombey with startling suddenness, “How
are you?”--every time the Reader opened his lips, as speaking in that
character, there was a burst of merriment. His boastful account
always called forth laughter--that his tailor was Burgess and Co.,
“fash'nable, but very dear.” As also did his constantly reiterated
inquiries of Paul--always as an entirely new idea--“I say--it's not
of the slightest consequence, you know, but I should wish to mention
it--how are you, you know?” Hardly less provocative of mirth was
Briggs's confiding one evening to Little Dombey, that his head ached
ready to split, and “that he should wish himself dead if it wasn't for
his mother and a blackbird he had at home.”
Wonderful fun used to be made by the Reader of the various incidents at
the entertainment given upon the eve of the vacations by Doctor and Mrs.
Blimber to the Young Gentlemen and their Friends, when “the hour was
half-past seven o'clock, and the object was quadrilles.” The Doctor
pacing up and down in the drawing-room, full dressed, before anybody had
arrived, “with a dignified and unconcerned demeanour, as if he thought
it barely possible that one or two people might drop in by-and-by!” His
exclaiming, when Mr. Toots and Mr. Feeder were announced by the butler,
and as if he were extremely surprised to see them, “Aye, aye, aye!
God bless my soul!” Mr. Toots, one blaze of jewellery and buttons, so
undecided, “on a calm revision of all the circumstances,” whether it
were better to have his waistcoat fastened or unfastened both at top and
bottom, as the arrivals thickened, so influencing him by the force of
example, that at the last he was “continually fingering that article of
dress as if he were performing on some instrument!” Thoroughly enjoyable
though the whole scene was in its throng of ludicrous particulars, it
merely led the way up appreciably and none the less tenderly, for all
the innocent laughter, to the last and supremely pathetic incidents of
the story as related thenceforth (save only for one startling instant)
_sotto voce_, by the Reader.
The exceptional moment here alluded to, when his voice was suddenly
raised, to be hushed again the instant afterwards, came at the very
opening of the final scene by Little Dombey's death-bed, where the
sunbeams, towards evening, struck through the rustling blinds and
quivered on the opposite wall like golden water. Overwhelmed, as little
Paul was occasionally, with “his only trouble,” a sense of the swift and
rapid river, “he felt forced,” the Reader went on to say, “to try and
stop it--to stem it with his childish hands, or choke its way with
sand--and when he saw it coming on, resistless, he cried out!” Dropping
his voice from that abrupt outcry instantly afterwards, to the gentlest
tones, as he added, “But a word from Florence, who was always at his
side, restored him to himself”--the Reader continued in those subdued
and tender accents to the end.
The child's pity for his father's sorrowing, was surpassed only, as
all who witnessed this Reading will readily recollect, by the yet more
affecting scene with his old nurse. Waking upon a sudden, on the last
of the many evenings, when the golden water danced in shining ripples on
the wall, waking mind and body, sitting upright in his bed--
“And who is this? Is this my old nurse?” asked the child, regarding with
a radiant smile a figure coming in.
“Yes, yes. No other stranger would have shed those tears at sight of
him, and called him her dear boy, her pretty boy, her own poor blighted
child. No other woman would have stooped down by his bed and taken up
his wasted hand and put it to her lips and breast, as one who had some
right to fondle it. No other woman would have so forgotten everybody
there but him and Floy, and been so full of tenderness and pity.”
The child's words coming then so lovingly: “Floy! this is a kind good
face! I am glad to see it again. Don't go away, old nurse! Stay here!
Good bye!” prepared one exquisitely for the rest. “Not goodbye?” “Ah,
yes! good-bye!”
Then the end! The child having been laid down again with his arms
clasped round his sister's neck, telling her that the stream was lulling
him to rest, that now the boat was out at sea and that there was shore
before him, and--Who stood upon the bank! Putting his hands together “as
he had been used to do at his prayers “--not removing his arms to do it,
but folding them so behind his sister's neck--“Mamma is like you, Floy!”
he cried; “I know her by the face! But tell them that the picture on
the stairs at school is not Divine enough. The light about the head is
shining on me as I go!”
Then came two noble passages, nobly delivered.
First--when there were no eyes unmoistened among the listeners--
“The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else stirred
in the room. The old, old fashion! The fashion that came in with our
first garments, and will last unchanged until our race has run its
course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The old, old
fashion--Death!”
And lastly--with a tearful voice--
“Oh, thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet of
Immortality! And look upon us, Angels of young children, with regards
not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean!”
Remembering which exquisite words as he himself delivered them, having
the very tones of his voice still ringing tenderly in our recollection,
the truth of that beautiful remark of Dean Stanley's comes back anew
as though it were now only for the first time realised, where, in
his funeral sermon of the 19th June, 1870, he said that it was the
inculcation of the lesson derived from precisely such a scene as this
which will always make the grave of Charles Dickens seem “as though it
were the very grave of those little innocents whom he created for our
companionship, for our instruction, for our delight and solace.” The
little workhouse-boy, the little orphan girl, the little cripple,
who “not only blessed his father's needy home, but softened the rude
stranger's hardened conscience,” were severally referred to by the
preacher when he gave this charming thought its affecting application.
But, foremost among these bewitching children of the Novelist's
imagination, might surely be placed the child-hero of a story closing
hardly so much with his death as with his apotheosis.
MR CHOPS, THE DWARF.
It remains still a matter of surprise how so much was made out of this
slight sketch by the simple force of its humorous delivery. “Mr. Chops,
the Dwarf,” as, indeed, was only befitting, was the smallest of all the
Readings. The simple little air that so caught the dreamer's fancy, when
played upon the harp by Scrooge's niece by marriage, is described after
all, as may be remembered by the readers of the Carol, to to have been
intrinsically “a mere nothing; you might learn to whistle it in
two minutes.” Say that in twenty minutes, or, at the outside, in
half-an-hour, any ordinarily glib talker might have rattled through
these comic recollections of Mr. Magsman, yet, when rattled through by
Dickens, the laughter awakened seems now in the retrospect to have been
altogether out of proportion. In itself the subject was anything
but attractive, relating, as it did, merely to the escapade of a
monstrosity. The surroundings are ignoble, the language is illiterate,
the narrative from first to last is characterised by its grotesque
extravagance. Yet the whole is presented to view in so utterly ludicrous
an aspect, that one needs must laugh just as surely as one listened.
Turning over the leaves now, and recalling to mind the hilarity they
used to excite even among the least impressionable audience whenever
they were fluttered (there are not a dozen of them altogether) on
the familiar reading-desk, one marvels over the success of such an
exceedingly small oddity as over the remembrance, let us say, of the
brilliant performance of a fantasia on the jew's-harp by Rubenstein.
Nevertheless, slight though it is, the limning all through has touches
of the most comic suggestiveness. Magsman's account of the show-house
during his occupancy is sufficiently absurd to begin with--“the picter
of the giant who was himself the heighth of the house,” being run up
with a line and pulley to a pole on the roof till “his 'ed was coeval
with the parapet;” the picter of the child of the British Planter
seized by two Boa Constrictors, “not that we never had no child, nor
no Constrictors either;” similarly, the picter of the Wild Ass of the
Prairies, “not that _we_ never had no wild asses, nor wouldn't have had
'em at a gift.” And to crown all, the picter of the Dwarf--who was “a
uncommon small man, he really was. Certainly not so small as he was made
out to be; but where _is_ your Dwarf as is?” A picter “like him, too
considering, with George the Fourth, in such a state of astonishment
at him as his Majesty couldn't with his utmost politeness and stoutness
express.” Wrote up the Dwarf was, we are told by Mr. Magsman, as Major
Tpschoffski--“nobody couldn't pronounce the name,” he adds, “and it
never was intended anybody should.” Corrupted into Chopski by the
public, he gets called in the line Chops, partly for that reason,
“partly because his real name, if he ever had any real name (which was
dubious), was Stakes.” Wearing a diamond ring “(or quite as good to
look at)” on his forefinger, having the run of his teeth, “and he was
a Woodpecker to eat--but all dwarfs are,” receiving a good salary, and
gathering besides as his perquisites the ha'pence collected by him in a
Chaney sarser at the end of every entertainment, the Dwarf never has
any money somehow. Nevertheless, having what his admiring proprietor
considers “a fine mind, a poetic mind,” Mr. Chops indulges himself in
the pleasing delusion that one of these days he is to Come Into his
Property, his ideas respecting which are never realised by him so
powerfully as when he sits upon a barrel-organ and has the handle
turned! “Arter the wibration has run through him a little time,”
says Mr. Magsman, “he screeches out, 'Toby, I feel my property
a-coming--gr-r-rind away! I feel the Mint a-jingling in me. I'm
a-swelling out into the Bank of England!' Such,” reflectively observes
his proprietor, “is the influence of music on a poetic mind!” Adding,
however, immediately afterwards, “Not that he was partial to any other
music but a barrel-organ; on the contrairy, hated it.” Indulging in
day-dreams about Coming Into his Property and Going Into Society, for
which he feels himself formed, and to aspire towards which is his avowed
ambition, the mystery, as to where the Dwarf's salary and ha'pence
all go, is one day cleared up by his winning a prize in the Lottery, a
half-ticket for the twenty-five thousand pounder.
Mr. Chops Comes Into his Property--twelve thousand odd hundred. Further
than that, he Goes Into Society “in a chay and four greys with silk
jackets.” It was at this turning-point in the career of his large-headed
but diminutive hero that the grotesque humour of the Reader would play
upon the risible nerves of his hearers, as, according to Mr. Disraeli's
phrase, Sir Robert Peel used to play upon the House of Commons, “like
an old fiddle.” Determined to Go Into Society in style, with his twelve
thousand odd hundred, Mr. Chops, we are told, “sent for a young man
he knowed, as had a very genteel appearance, and was a Bonnet at a
gaming-booth. Most respectable brought up,” adds Mr. Magsman--“father
having been imminent in the livery-stable line, but unfortunate in a
commercial crisis through painting a old grey ginger-bay, and sellin'
him with a pedigree.” In intimate companionship with this Bonnet, “who
said his name was Normandy, which it warn't,” Mr. Magsman, on invitation
by note a little while afterwards, visits Mr. Chops at his lodgings in
Pall Mall, London, where he is found carousing not only with the Bonnet
but with a third party, of whom we were then told with unconscionable
gravity, “When last met, he had on a white Roman shirt, and a bishop's
mitre covered with leopard-skin, and played the clarionet all wrong in
a band at a Wild Beast Show.” How the reverential Magsman, finding the
three of them blazing away, blazes away in his turn while remaining in
their company, who, that once heard it, has forgotten? “I made the round
of the bottles,” he says--evidently proud of his achievement--“first
separate (to say I had done it), and then mixed 'em altogether (to say
I had done it), and then tried two of 'em as half-and-half, and then
t'other two; altogether,” he adds, “passin' a pleasin' evenin' with
a tendency to feel muddled.” How all Mr. Chop's blazing away is to
terminate everybody but himself perceives clearly enough from the
commencement.
Normandy having bolted with the plate, and “him as formerly wore the
bishop's mitre” with the jewels, the Dwarf gets out of society by being,
as he significantly expresses it, “sold out,” and in this plight
returns penitently one evening to the show-house of his still-admiring
proprietor. Mr. Magsman happens at the moment to be having a dull
_tête-à-tête_ with a young man without arms, who gets his living by
writing with his toes, “which,” says the low-spirited narrator, “I had
taken on for a month--though he never drawed--except on paper.” Hearing
a kicking at the street-door, “'Halloa!' I says to the young man,
'what's up?' He rubs his eyebrows with his toes, and he says, 'I can't
imagine, Mr. Magsman'--which that young man [with an air of disgust]
never _could_ imagine nothin', and was monotonous company.” Mr.
Chops--“I never dropped the 'Mr.' with him,” says his again proprietor;
“the world might do it, but not me”--eventually dies. Having sat upon
the barrel-organ over night, and had the handle turned through all the
changes, for the first and only time after his fall, Mr. Chops is found
on the following morning, as the disconsolate Magsman expresses it,
“gone into much better society than either mine or Pall Mall's.” Out
of such unpromising materials as these could the alembic of a genius
all-embracing in its sympathies extract such an abundance of innocent
mirth--an illiterate showman talking to us all the while about such
people as the Bonnet of a gaming-booth, or a set of monstrosities he
himself has, for a few coppers, on exhibition. Yet, as Mr. Magsman
himself remarks rather proudly when commenting on his own establishment,
“as for respectability,--if threepence ain't respectable, what is?”
THE POOR TRAVELLER.
Apart altogether from the Readings of Charles Dickens, has the reader of
this book any remembrance of the original story of “The Poor Traveller”?
If he has, he will recognise upon the instant the truth of the words in
which we would here speak of it, as of one of those, it may be, slight
but exquisite sketches, which are sometimes, in a happy moment,
thrown off by the hand of a great master. Comparatively trivial
in itself--carelessly dashed off, apparently hap-hazard--having no
pretension about it in the least, it is anything, in short, but a
finished masterpiece. Yet, for all that, it is marked, here and there,
by touches so felicitous and inimitable in their way, that we hardly
find the like in the artist's more highly elaborated and ambitious
productions. Not that one would speak of it, however, as of a drawing
upon toned paper in neutral tint, or as of a picture pencilled in sepia
or with crayons; one would rather liken it to a radiant water-colour,
chequered with mingled storm and sunshine, sparkling with lifelike
effects, and glowing with brilliancy. And yet the little work is one,
when you come to look into it, that is but the product of a seemingly
artless _abandon_, in which without an effort the most charming results
have been arrived at, obviously upon the instant, and quite unerringly.
Trudging down to Chatham, footsore and without a farthing in his pocket,
it is in this humble guise first of all that he comes before us, this
Poor Traveller. Christian name, Eichard, better known as Dick, his own
surname dropped upon the road, he assumes that of Doubledick--being
thenceforth spoken of all through the tale, even to the very end of it,
by his new name, as Eichard Doubledick. A scapegrace, a ne'er-do-well,
an incorrigible, hopeless of himself, despaired of by others, he has
“gone wrong and run wild.” His heart, still in the right place, has been
sealed up. “Betrothed to a good and beautiful girl whom he had loved
better than she--or perhaps even he--believed,” he had given her cause,
in an evil hour, to tell him solemnly that she would never marry any
other man; that she would live single for his sake, but that her lips,
“that Mary Marshall's lips,” would never address another word to him
on earth, bidding him in the end--Go! and Heaven forgive him! Hence,
in point of fact, this journey of his on foot down to Chatham, for the
purpose of enlisting, if possible, in a cavalry regiment, his object
being to get shot, though he himself thinks in his devil-may-care
indifference, that “he might as well ride to death as be at the trouble
of walking.” Premising simply that his hero's age is at this time
twenty-two, and his height five foot ten, and that, there being no
cavalry at the moment in Chatham, he enlists into a regiment of the
line, where he is glad to get drunk and forget all about it, the Author
readily made the path clear for the opening up of his narrative.
Whenever Charles Dickens introduced this tale among his Readings, how
beautifully he related it! After recounting how Private Doubledick was
clearly going to the dogs, associating himself with the dregs of every
regiment, seldom being sober and constantly under punishment, until
it became plain at last to the whole barracks that very soon indeed
he would come to be flogged, when the Reader came at this point to the
words--“Now the captain of Doubledick's company was a young gentleman
not above five years his senior, whose eyes had an expression in them
which affected Private Doubledick in a very remarkable way”--the effect
was singularly striking. Out of the Reader's own eyes would look the
eyes of that Captain, as the Author himself describes them: “They were
bright, handsome, dark eyes, what are called laughing eyes generally,
and, when serious, rather steady than severe.” But, he immediately went
on to say, they were the only eyes then left in his narrowed world
that could not be met without a sense of shame by Private Doubledick.
Insomuch that if he observed Captain Taunton coming towards him, even
when he himself was most callous and unabashed, “he would rather turn
back and go any distance out of the way, than encounter those two
handsome, dark, bright eyes.” Here it was that came, what many will
still vividly remember, as one of the most exquisitely portrayed
incidents in the whole of this Reading--the interview between Captain
Taunton and Private Doubledick!
The latter, having passed forty-eight hours in the Black Hole, has been
just summoned, to his great dismay, to the Captain's quarters. Having
about him all the squalor of his incarceration, he shrinks from making
his appearance before one whose silent gaze even was a reproach.
However, not being so mad yet as to disobey orders, he goes up to the
officers' quarters immediately upon his release from the Black Hole,
twisting and breaking in his hands as he goes along a bit of the straw
that had formed its decorative furniture.
“'Come in!'
“Private Doubledick pulled off his cap, took a stride forward and stood
in the light of the dark bright eyes.”
From that moment until the end of the interview, the two men alternately
were standing there distinctly before the audience upon the platform.
“Doubledick! do you know where you are going to?”
“To the devil, sir!”
“Yes, and very fast.”
Thereupon one did not hear the words simply, one saw it done precisely
as it is described in the original narrative: “Private Richard
Doubledick turned the straw of the Black Hole in his mouth and made a
_miserable_ salute of acquiescence.” Captain Taunton then remonstrates
with him thus earnestly: “Doubledick, since I entered his Majesty's
service, a boy of seventeen, I have been pained to see many men of
promise going that road; but I have never been _so_ pained to see a man
determined to make the shameful journey, as I have been, ever since you
joined the regiment, to see _you_.” At this point in the printed story,
as it was originally penned, one reads that “Private Richard Doubledick
began to find a film stealing over the floor at which he looked; also to
find the legs of the Captain's breakfast-table turning crooked as if he
saw them through water.” Although those words are erased in the reading
copy, and were not uttered, pretty nearly the effect of them was visible
when, after a momentary pause, the disheartened utterance was faltered
out--
“I am only a common soldier, sir. It signifies very little what such a
poor brute comes to.”
In answer to the next remonstrance from his officer, Doubledick's words
are blurted out yet more despairingly--
“I hope to get shot soon, sir, and then the regiment, and the world
together, will be rid of me!”
What are the descriptive words immediately following this in the printed
narrative? They also were visibly expressed upon the platform. “Looking
up he met the eyes that had so strong an influence over him. He put his
hand before his own eyes, and the breast of his disgrace-jacket swelled
as if it would fly asunder.” His observant adviser thereupon quietly
but very earnestly remarks, that he “would rather see this in him
(Doubledick) than he would see five thousand guineas counted out upon
the table between them for a gift to his (the Captain's) good mother,”
adding suddenly, “Have you a mother?” Doubledick is thankful to say she
is dead. Reminded by the Captain that if his praises were sounded from
mouth to mouth through the whole regiment, through the whole army,
through the whole country, he would wish she had lived to say with pride
and joy, “He is my son!” Doubledick cries out, “Spare me, sir! She would
never have heard any good of me. She would never have had any pride or
joy in owning herself my mother. Love and compassion she might have had,
and would always have had, I know; but not--spare me, sir! I am a broken
wretch quite at your mercy.” By this time, according to the words of the
writing, according only to the eloquent action of the Reading, “He had
turned his face to the wall and stretched out his _imploring_ hand.”
How eloquently that “imploring hand” spoke in the agonised, dumb
supplication of its movement, coupled as it was with the shaken frame
and the averted countenance, those who witnessed this Reading will
readily recall to their recollection. As also the emotion expressed in
the next broken utterances exchanged by the interlocutors:--
“My friend------”
“God bless you, sir!”
Captain Taunton, interrupted for the moment, adding--
“You are at the crisis of your fate, my friend. Hold your course
unchanged a little longer, and you know what must happen, _I_ know
better than ever you can imagine, that after that has happened you are a
lost man. No man who could shed such tears could bear such marks.”