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_By Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch_
On the Art of Writing
On the Art of Reading
Studies in Literature
(first series)
Studies in Literature
(second series)
Adventures in Criticism
Charles Dickens and Other Victorians
Charles Dickens
And Other Victorians
Charles Dickens
And Other Victorians
By
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, M.A.
Fellow of Jesus College
King Edward VII Professor of English Literature
in the University of Cambridge
[Illustration]
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
New York & London
The Knickerbocker Press
1925
Copyright, 1925
by
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
[Illustration:
The
Knickerbocker
Press
New York
]
Made in the United States of America
PREFACE
All save one of the papers here collected were written as lectures
and read from a desk at Cambridge; the exception being that upon
Trollope, contributed to _The Nation and the Athenaeum_ and pleasantly
provoked by a recent edition of the “Barsetshire” novels. To these
it almost wholly confines itself. But a full estimate of Trollope
as one of our greatest English novelists--and perhaps the raciest
of them all--is long overdue, awaiting a complete edition of him.
His bulk is a part of his quality: it can no more be separated from
the man than can Falstaff’s belly from Falstaff. He will certainly
come to his own some day, but this implies his coming with all his
merits and all his defects: and this again cannot happen until some
publisher shows enterprise. The expensive and artificial vogue of the
three-volume-novel did wonders for Trollope in one generation, to kill
him for another: since no critic can talk usefully about books to
many of which his hearers have no access. But we shall see Trollope
reanimated.
The papers on Dickens and Thackeray attempt judgment on them as full
novelists. Those on Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell merely take a theme, and
try to show how one theme, taking possession, will work upon two very
different minds. Much more could have been said generally upon both
authors, and generically upon the “idea” of a novel.
As usual, with a few corrections, I leave these lectures as they were
written and given, at intervals and for their purpose. They abound
therefore with repetitions and reminders which the reader must try to
forgive.
ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH.
January 5, 1925.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE v
DICKENS
I 3
II 24
III 42
IV 62
V 81
THACKERAY
I 100
II 119
III 137
THE VICTORIAN BACKGROUND 158
DISRAELI 180
MRS. GASKELL 199
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
THE BARSETSHIRE NOVELS 219
INDEX 235
Charles Dickens
and Other Victorians
DICKENS (I)
I
If anything on this planet be great, great things have happened in
Westminster Hall: which is open for anyone, turning aside from London’s
traffic, to wander in and admire. Some property in the oak of its
roof forbids the spider to spin there, and now that architects have
defeated the worm in beam and rafter it stands gaunt and clean as when
William Rufus built it: and I dare to say that no four walls and a
roof have ever enclosed such a succession of historical memories as do
these, as no pavement--not even that lost one of the Roman Forum--has
been comparably trodden by the feet of grave men moving towards grave
decisions, grand events.
The somewhat cold interior lays its chill on the imagination. A
romantic mind can, like the spider, spin its cobwebs far more easily in
the neighbouring Abbey, over the actual dust to which great men come--
Here the bones of birth have cried--
“Though gods they were, as men they died.”
Here are sands, ignoble things
Dropt from the ruin’d sides of kings.
But in the Abbey is _finis rerum_, and our contemplation there the
common contemplation of mortality which, smoothing out place along
with titles, degrees and even deeds, levels the pyramids with the low
mounds of a country churchyard and writes the same moral over Socrates
as over our Unknown Soldier--_Vale, vale, nos te in ordine quo natura
permittet sequamur_. In Westminster Hall (I am stressing this with a
purpose) we walk heirs of events in actual play, shaping our destiny as
citizens of no mean country: in this covered rood of ground have been
compacted from time to time in set conflict the high passions by which
men are exalted to make history. Here a king has been brought to trial,
heard and condemned to die; under these rafters have pleaded in turn
Bacon, Algernon Sidney, Burke, Sheridan. Here the destinies of India
were, after conflict, decided for two centuries. Through that great
door broke the shout, taken up, reverberated by gun after gun down the
river, announcing the acquittal of the Seven Bishops.
II
So, if this tragic comedy we call life be worth anything more than a
bitter smile: if patriotism mean anything to you, and strong opposite
wills out of whose conflict come great issues in victory or defeat,
the arrest, the temporary emptiness of Westminster Hall--a sense of
what it has seen and yet in process of time may see--will lay a deeper
solemnity on you than all the honoured dust in the Abbey.
But, as men’s minds are freakish, let me tell you of a solitary figure
I see in Westminster Hall more vividly even than the ghosts of Charles
I and Warren Hastings bayed around by their accusers: the face and
figure of a youth, not yet twenty-two, who has just bought a copy of
the Magazine containing his first appearance in print as an author. “I
walked down to Westminster Hall,” he has recorded, “and turned into it
for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride
that they could not bear the street and were not fit to be seen there.”
Now the paper which opened the fount of these boyish tears (here, if
you will, is bathos) was entitled _A Dinner at Poplar Walk_. You may
find it to-day under another title, “Mr. Minns and his Cousin” among
_Sketches by Boz_: reading it, you may pronounce it no great shakes;
and anyhow you may ask why anyone’s imagination should select this
slight figure, to single it out among the crowd of ghosts. Well,
to this I might make simple and sufficient answer, saying that the
figure of unbefriended youth, with its promise, a new-comer alone in
the market-place, has ever been one of the most poignant in life,
and, because in life, therefore in literature. Dickens himself,
who had been this figure and remembered all too well the emotion
that choked its heart, has left us a wonderful portrait-gallery of
these lads. But indeed our literature--every literature, all legend,
for that matter--teems with them: with these youngest brothers of
the fairy-tales, these Oedipus’s, Jasons, these Dick Whittingtons,
Sindbads, Aladdins, Japhets in search of their Fathers; this
Shakespeare holding horses for a groat, that David comely from the
sheepfold with the basket of loaves and cheeses. You remember De
Quincey and the stony waste of Oxford Street? or the forlorn and
invalid boy in Charles Lamb’s paper on _The Old Margate Hoy_ who “when
we asked him whether he had any friends where he was going,” replied,
“he _had_ no friends.” Solitariness is ever the appeal of such a
figure; an unbefriendedness that “makes friends,” searching straight to
our common charity: this and the attraction of youth, knocking--so to
speak--on the house-door of our own lost or locked-away ambitions. “Is
there anybody there?” says this Traveller, and he, unlike the older one
(who is oneself), gets an answer. The mid-Victorian Dr. Smiles saw him
as an embryonic Lord Mayor dazed amid the traffic on London Bridge but
clutching at his one half-crown for fear of pick-pockets. I myself met
him once in a crowded third-class railway carriage. He was fifteen and
bound for the sea: and when we came in sight of it he pushed past our
knees to the carriage window and broke into a high tuneless chant, all
oblivious of us. Challenge was in it and a sob of desire at sight of
his predestined mistress and adversary. For the sea is great, but the
heart in any given boy may be greater: and
these things are life
And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse.
III
But I am a Professor, and ought to have begun by assuring you that this
figure in Westminster Hall has a real historical interest in connexion
with your studies “on the subject of English Literature.”
Well, then, it has. The date of the apparition is New Year’s Day, 1834,
and by New Year’s Day, 1838, Charles Dickens was not only the most
popular of living authors, but in a fair way to become that which he
remained until the end in 1870--a great National Institution.
I use no exaggerated term. Our fathers of the nineteenth century had a
way (and perhaps not altogether a bad way) of considering their great
writers as national institutions; Carlyle was one, Ruskin another. It
was a part of their stout individualism, nowadays derided. And it was,
if you will consider, in the depths of its soul [say, if you will,
its Manchester Soul] a high-polite retort upon such a sworn enemy
as Ruskin. “Curse us, Sir: but _we_ and no _Government_ make you a
demigod.” You will never understand your fathers, Gentlemen, until you
understand their proud distrust of Government save by consent. Take
a favourite term of theirs--say “The Liberty of the Press.” By that
_they_ meant liberty from interference by _Government_. _We_, using
that term to-day, should mean nothing of the sort. _We_ should mean
“liberty from control by capitalists.”
I interrogate my youthful memories and am confident that, in a modest
country household these men--Carlyle, Ruskin--were, with decent
reverence, though critically, read for prophets. Tennyson, too, and
Browning had their sacred niches; and Darwin and Huxley, and Buckle,
who perished young attempting a _History of Civilisation in Europe_:
John Stuart Mill, also, and Kingsley, Maurice, George Eliot, and
Thackeray. These names leap to memory as names of household gods. A few
weeks ago, rummaging over some family papers I came upon the following
entry:
1848, June 20. I received a visit from Mr. Alfred Tennyson, the
Poet. He came into Cornwall along the North Coast, and from about
Camelford crossed over to Fowey, where I called on him on the 19th.
He came to Polperre in a boat, with Mr. Peach and others; and
after viewing our scenery in all directions and taking tea at our
house, they all rowed back to Fowey late in the evening. I find
him well-informed and communicative. I believe a good Greek scholar
with some knowledge of Hebrew. His personal appearance is not
prepossessing; having a slouch in his gait and rather slovenly in
his dress tho’ his clothes were new and good. He confesses to this.
He admired the wildness of our scenery, deprecated the breaking in
of improvements, as they are termed. He enquired after traditions,
especially of the great Arthur: his object in visiting the County
being to collect materials for a poem on that Chief. But he almost
doubted his existence. He show’d me a MS. sketch of a history of
the Hero: but it was prolix and modern.
You see, hinted in this extract from a journal, how our ancestors, in
1848 and the years roundabout, and in remote parts of England, welcomed
these great men as gods: albeit critically, being themselves stout
fellows. But above all these, from the publication of _Pickwick_--or,
to be precise, of its fifth number, in which (as Beatrice would say)
“there was a star danced” and under it Sam Weller was born--down to
June 14, 1870, and the funeral in Westminster Abbey, Dickens stood
exalted, in a rank apart. Nay, when he had been laid in the grave upon
which, left and right, face the monuments of Chaucer, Shakespeare
and Dryden, and for days after the grave was closed, the stream of
unbidden mourners went by. “All day long,” wrote Dean Stanley on the
17th, “there was a constant pressure on the spot, and many flowers were
strewn on it by unknown hands, many tears shed from unknown eyes.”
Without commenting on it for the moment, I want you to realise this
exaltation of Dickens in the popular mind, his countrymen’s and
countrywomen’s intimate, passionate pride in him; in the first place
because it is an historical fact, and a fact (I think) singular
in our literary history; but also because, as a phenomenon itself
unique--unique, at any rate, in its magnitude--it reacted singularly
upon the man and his work, and you must allow for this if you would
thoroughly understand either.
IV
To begin with, you must get it out of your minds that it resembled
any popularity known to us, in our day: the deserved popularity of
Mr. Kipling, for example. You must also (of this generation I may be
asking a hard thing, but it is necessary) get it out of your minds
that Dickens was, in any sense at all, a cheap artist playing to
the gallery. He was a writer of imperfect, or hazardous, literary
education: but he was also a man of iron will and an artist of the
fiercest literary conscience. Let me enforce this by quoting two
critics whom you will respect. “The faults of Dickens,” says William
Ernest Henley,
were many and grave. He wrote some nonsense; he sinned repeatedly
against taste; he could be both noisy and vulgar; he was apt to be
a caricaturist where he should have been a painter; he was often
mawkish and often extravagant; and he was sometimes more inept than
a great writer has ever been. But his work, whether good or bad,
has in full measure the quality of sincerity. He meant what he did;
and he meant it with his whole heart. He looked upon himself as
representative and national--as indeed he was; he regarded his work
as a universal possession; and he determined to do nothing that for
lack of pains should prove unworthy of his function. If he sinned,
it was unadvisedly and unconsciously; if he failed it was because
he knew no better. You feel that as you read....
He had enchanted the public without an effort: he was the best
beloved of modern writers almost from the outset of his career.
But he had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the
middle-class Englishman; and if all his life he never ceased from
self-education, but went unswervingly in pursuit of culture, it was
out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist
would not let him do otherwise.
Now let me add this testimony from Mr. G. K. Chesterton:
Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when
a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the
community. For the kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not
like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write
what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted....
Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked up to the
people. He approached the people like a deity and poured out his
riches and his blood. He had not merely produced something they
could understand, but he took it seriously, and toiled and agonised
to produce it. They were not only enjoying one of the best writers,
they were enjoying the best he could do. His raging and sleepless
nights, his wild walks in the darkness, his note-books crowded,
his nerves in rags, all this extraordinary output was but a fit
sacrifice to the ordinary man.
“The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens,”
wrote Carlyle of him, on hearing the news of his death,--“every inch of
him an honest man.” “What a face it is to meet,” had said Leigh Hunt,
years before; and Mrs. Carlyle, “It was as if made of steel.”
V
I shall endeavour to appraise with you, by and by, the true worth of
this amazing popularity. For the moment I merely ask you to consider
the fact and the further fact that Dickens took it with the seriousness
it deserved and endeavoured more and more to make himself adequate to
it. He had--as how could he help having?--an enormous consciousness
of the power he wielded: a consciousness which in action too often
displayed itself as an irritable conscientiousness. For instance,
_Pickwick_ is a landmark in our literature: its originality can no
more be disputed than the originality (say) of the _Divina Commedia_.
“I thought of Pickwick”--is his classical phrase. He thought of
Pickwick--and Pickwick was. But just because the ill-fated illustrator,
Seymour--who shot himself before the great novel had found its
stride--was acclaimed by some as its inventor, Dickens must needs
charge into the lists with the hottest, angriest, most superfluous,
denials. Even so, later on, when he finds it intolerable to go on
living with his wife, the world is, somehow or other, made acquainted
with this distressing domestic affair as though by a papal encyclical.
Or, even so, when he chooses (in _Bleak House_) to destroy an
alcoholised old man by “spontaneous combustion”--quite unnecessarily--a
solemn preface has to be written to explain that such an end is
scientifically possible. This same conscientiousness made him (and
here our young novelist of to-day will start to blaspheme) extremely
scrupulous about scandalising his public--I use the term in its literal
sense of laying a stumbling-block, a cause of offence. For example,
while engaged upon _Dombey and Son_, he has an idea (and a very good
idea too, though he abandoned it) that instead of keeping young Walter
the unspoilt boyish lover that he is, he will portray the lad as
gradually yielding to moral declension, through hope deferred--a theme
which, as you will remember, he afterwards handled in _Bleak House_:
and he seriously writes thus about it to his friend Forster:
About the boy, who appears in the last chapter of the first
number--I think it would be a good thing to disappoint all the
expectations that chapter seems to raise of his happy connection
with the story and the heroine, and to show him gradually and
naturally trailing away, from that love of adventure and boyish
light-heartedness, into negligence, idleness, dissipation,
dishonesty and ruin. To show, in short, that common, every day,
miserable declension of which we know so much in our ordinary life:
to exhibit something of the philosophy of it, in great temptations
and an easy nature; and to show how the good turns into the bad, by
degrees. If I kept some notion of Florence always at the bottom of
it, _I think it might be made very powerful and very useful. What
do you think? Do you think it may be done without making people
angry?_
George Gissing--in a critical study of Dickens which cries out for
reprinting--imagines a young writer of the ’nineties (as we may imagine
a young writer of to-day) coming on that and crying out upon it.
What! a great writer, with a great idea, to stay his hand until he
has made grave enquiry whether Messrs. Mudie’s subscribers will
approve it or not! The mere suggestion is infuriating.... Look
at Flaubert, for example. Can you imagine _him_ in such a sorry
plight? Why, nothing would have pleased him better than to know
he was outraging public sentiment! In fact, it is only when one
_does_ so that one’s work has a chance of being good.
All which, adds Gissing, may be true enough in relation to the speaker.
As regards Dickens, it is irrelevant. And Gissing speaks the simple
truth; “that he owed it to his hundreds of thousands of readers to
teach them a new habit of judgment Dickens did not see or begin to
see.” But that it lay upon him to deal with his public scrupulously he
felt in the very marrow of his bones. Let me give you two instances:
When editing _Household Words_ he receives from a raw contributor a MS.
impossible as sent, in which he detects merit. “I have had a story,” he
writes to Forster, “to hack and hew into some form this morning, which
has taken me four hours of close attention.” “Four hours of Dickens’
time,” comments Gissing, “in the year 1856, devoted to such a matter as
this!--where any ordinary editor, or rather his assistant, would have
contented himself with a few blottings and insertions, sure that ‘the
great big stupid heart of the public,’ as Thackeray called it, would be
no better pleased, toil how one might.”
For my second instance. The next year, 1857, was Mutiny Year, and
closed upon an England raging mad over the story of Cawnpore. Dickens
and Wilkie Collins, on a tour together in the north of England, had
contrived a Christmas Number for _Household Words_, announced and
entitled _The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and their Treasures
in Women, Children, Silver and Jewels_. The public expected a red-hot
account of the Nana Sahib, the treacherous embarkation, the awful
voyage down the Ganges. It was all there, to the man’s hand, with
illimitable applause for his mere inviting. But it might inflame--and,
inflaming, hurt--the nation’s temper, and therefore he would have none
of it: he, Dickens, the great literary Commoner; lord over millions of
English and to them, and to right influence on them, bounden. Therefore
the public got something more profitable than it craved for: it got
a romantic story empty of racial or propagandist hatred; a simple
narrative of peril and adventure on a river in South America.
VI
But now let us see what a light this conscious popularity throws upon
two important events in Dickens’ career: his visit to the United States
in 1842, and his invention, the next year, of the “Christmas Book.”
Dickens went over to America as a great personage: securely, but
neither immodestly nor overweeningly conscious of it. He went over also
as a great and genuine early-Victorian radical; something better than
any politician; an unbribed and unbribable writer, immensely potent,
with a pen already dedicated to war against social abuses. He landed
at Boston, fully expecting to see Liberty in realisation under the
star-spangled banner. He found Colonel Diver and Mr. Jefferson Brick,
Mr. La Fayette Kettle and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. He found, of
course, a fervent and generous hospitality that sprang, in Forster’s
words, “from feelings honourable both to giver and receiver,” and was
bestowed sincerely, if with a touch of bravado and challenge--“We of
the New World want to show you, by extending the kind of homage that
the Old World reserves for kings and conquerors, to a young man with
nothing to distinguish him but his heart and his genius, what it is we
think in these parts worthier of honour than birth or wealth, a title
or a sword.” These are Forster’s words again, and they do well enough.
The hospitality included no doubt a good deal of the ridiculous: food
for innocent caricature of the kind provided in the great Pogram levee
where the two Literary Ladies are presented to the Honourable Elijah by
the Mother of the Modern Gracchi.
“To be presented to a Pogram,” said Miss Codger, “by a Hominy,
indeed a thrilling moment is it in its impressiveness on what we
call our feelings. But why we call them so, and why impressed
they are, or if impressed they are at all, or if at all we are,
or if there really is, oh gasping one! a Pogram or a Hominy, or
any active principle to which we give those titles is a topic,
Spirit searching, light-abandoned, much too vast to enter on, at
this unlooked-for Crisis.” “Mind and Matter,” said the lady in the
wig, “glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime,
and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of
Imagination. To hear it, sweet it is. But then outlaughs the stern
philosopher, and saith to the Grotesque, ‘What ho! arrest for me
that agency! Go bring it here! And so the vision fadeth.’”
I will not take oath that I have not heard faint echoes of that sort of
talk at literary gatherings within a mile or so of this very spot. But
if it be not to some extent endemic in America even to-day, then all I
can say is that certain American authors (Mrs. Edith Wharton for one)
have misrepresented it far more cruelly than ever did Charles Dickens,
or certainly than I, with no knowledge at all, have any wish to do.
But what brought Dickens up with a round turn was his discovery (as
he believed) that in this land of freedom no man was free to speak his
thought.
“I believe,” he wrote to Forster on Feb. 24th, “there is no country
on the face of the earth where there is less freedom of opinion on
any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference of
opinion than in this.... There!--I write the words with reluctance,
disappointment and sorrow: but I believe it from the bottom of my
soul.”
He did believe it, and it shocked him inexpressibly. “Very well,”
it may be answered; “but there were obligations. A man should not
publicly criticise a country in which he is an honoured guest.” Yes,
but he had gone out to the States with intent to discuss the question
of copyright, or rather of literary piracy, in which American law
and practice were so flagrantly immoral that he had never a doubt of
getting both rectified by a little heart-to-heart talk (as we call it
now) with some of their public men and lawgivers. Dickens was always a
good man of business. As the most widely-read of British authors, and
therefore the chief of sufferers, he could speak authoritatively on
behalf of his poorer brethren. He went, and received on a grand scale
that shock which on a far modester scale many of us have experienced
in our time, with the sort of embarrassment one feels (let us say)
in sitting down to Bridge with a very delightful person whose code
in the matter of revoking is rather notoriously “off colour.” Let
me illustrate this by the remark of a just man at Washington in the
debate preceding the latest copyright enactment. A member of Congress
had pleaded for the children of the backwoods--these potential Abraham
Lincolns devouring education by the light of pine-knot fires--how
desirable that these little Sons of Liberty should be able to purchase
their books (as he put it) “free of authorial expenses!” “Hear, hear!”
retorted my just man. “And the negroes of the South too--so fond of
chicken free of _farmer-ial_ expenses!”--A great saying!
And yet Dickens was wrong: in my opinion wrong as an English Gentleman,
being America’s Guest. On the balance I hold that he should have
thought what he thought and, thinking it, have shortened his visit and
come silently away.
Well, Dickens discussed the matter with Washington Irving, Prescott,
Hoffman, Bryant, Dana and others, and found that while every writer
in America was agreed upon the atrocious state of the law, not a man
of them dared to speak out. The suggestion that an American could be
found with temerity enough to hint that his country was possibly wrong
struck the boldest dumb. “Then,” said Dickens, “I shall speak out”: and
he did. “I wish you could have seen,” he writes home, “the faces that
I saw, down both sides of the table at Hartford, when I began to talk
about Scott.” [Remember, please, this is my interjection, Gentlemen,
that, on a small portion of his dues, on a 10 per cent. (say) of his
plundered sales, the great Sir Walter Scott would have died in calm of
mind and just prosperity.] “I wish you could have heard how I gave it
out. My blood so boiled as I thought of the monstrous injustice that I
felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their throats.”
The violence of the reaction upon Dickens you can of course study in
_American Notes_ and _Martin Chuzzlewit_. But the real import of these
two books and the violence of resentment they raised, we shall not
understand without realising that Dickens went over, was feasted: was
disappointed, then outraged, and spoke his mind, from first to last _as
a representative of the democracy of this country_, always conscious
of a great, if undefined, responsibility and, under disappointment,
resolute to be brave, at whatever cost of favour.
VII
The same grand consciousness seems to me to have been the true
inspiration of his “Christmas Books.” For a private confession,
I dislike them: I find them--_A Christmas Carol_, _The Chimes_,
_The Cricket on the Hearth_, _The Battle of Life_, _The Haunted
Man_--grossly sentimental and as grossly overcharged with violent
conversions to the “Christmas Spirit.” For a further confession I
greatly prefer several of his later Christmas Stories in _Household
Words_ and _All the Year Round_--_The Wreck of the “Golden Mary”_ for
instance, or _Dr. Marigold’s Prescriptions_ or _The Holly-Tree Inn_--to
this classic five which are still separated in the collected editions
under the title of “Christmas Books.” He himself confessed, in a
general preface of less than a dozen lines, his inability to work out
character in the limits he assigned himself--a hundred pages or so. “My
chief purpose,” he says of _A Christmas Carol_, “was, in a whimsical
kind of masque which the good humour of the season justified, to awaken
some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian
land.” But he took it as a mission, and quite seriously. Christmas to
England had always meant, and should mean, a festival of neighbourly
goodwill and robust hospitality. Listen to the old Carols:
Now thrice welcome, Christmas,
Which brings us good cheer,
Minced pies and plum porridge,
Good ale and strong beer;
With pig, goose and capon,
The best that may be,
So well doth the weather
And our stomachs agree.
Or
Now that the time is come wherein
Our Saviour Christ was born,
The larders full of beef and pork,
The garners fill’d with corn....
Or
Bring us in good ale, and bring us in good ale;
For our blessed Lady’s sake, bring us in good ale.
These out of a score or more verses I might quote from _Poor Robin’s
Almanack_ and the like. But take Campion’s more aristocratic Muse:
Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours,
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o’erflow with wine;
Let well-attuned words amaze
With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
Shall wait on honey love,
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
Sleep’s leaden spell remove.
Carry this again down to Frederick Tennyson’s _The Holy Tide_:
The days are sad, it is the Holy tide;
The Winter morn is short, the Night is long;
So let the lifeless Hours be glorified
With deathless thoughts and echo’d in sweet song:
And through the sunset of this purple cup
They will resume the roses of their prime,
And the old Dead will hear us and wake up,
Pass with dim smiles and make our hearts sublime.
“An Englishman’s house is his Castle,” said an immortal farmer at a Fat
Stock Dinner. “The storms may assail it and the winds whistle round it,
but the King himself cannot do so.” Dickens saw always the Englishman’s
house as his castle, fortified and provisioned against the discharge
of snow and sleet: always most amply provisioned! Witness his picture
of Christmas at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell--Old Wardle with his friends,
neighbours, poor relations, and his farm-labourers too, all sitting
down together to a colossal supper “and a mighty bowl of wassail
something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which the hot
apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look and jolly sound that
were perfectly irresistible.”
Old Wardle, in fact, is in the direct line of succession to Chaucer’s
Frankeleyne--
Withoute bake mete was never his hous,
Of fish and flesh, and that so plenteous,
It snewed in his hous of mete and drink.
Dickens, I repeat to you, was always, in the straight line of Chaucer,
Ben Jonson, Dryden, Fielding, a preacher of man’s dignity in his full
appetite; and quite consciously, as a national genius, he preached the
doctrine of Christmas to his nation.
VIII
But you will say perhaps “Granted his amazing popularity--granted, too,
his right to assume on it--was it really deserved?” To this question
I oppose for the moment my opinion that, were I asked to choose out
of the story of English Literature a short list of the most fecund
authors, I should start with Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne,
Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Dickens, Browning. If compelled to reduce the
list to three, choosing the three most lavishly endowed by God with
imagination for their fellows’ good, I almost think that among all
God’s plenty I should choose, as pre-eminent stars, Shakespeare, Burke
and Dickens. Milton, of course, will stand apart always, a solitary
star: and Chaucer for his amazing invention, less even for what he did
than for that he did it at all; Keats for infinity of promise; and to
exclude Scott seems almost an outrage on human kindness. Yet if it
come to the mere wonder-work of genius--the creation of men and women,
on a page of paper, who are actually more real to us than our daily
acquaintances, as companionable in a crowd as even our best selected
friends, as individual as the most eccentric we know, yet as universal
as humanity itself, I do not see what English writer we can choose to
put second to Shakespeare save Charles Dickens. I am talking of sheer
creative power, as I am thinking of Tasso’s proud saying that, next to
God himself, no one but the poet deserves the name of Creator. You
feel of Dickens as of Shakespeare that anything may happen: because
it is not with them as with other authors: it is not they who speak.
Falstaff or Hamlet or Sam Weller or Mr. Micawber: it is the god
speaking:
Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα.
They are as harps upon which the large wind plays: and as that is
illimitable there is no limit to their utterances. It was so with
Charles Dickens from the Sam Weller of his lost youth down to the last
when, in pain and under the shadow of death, he invented the Billickin.
In another lecture I propose to show you (if I can) that Dickens’
characters belong to a world of his own, rather than to this one. But
if he also created that world of his own, so much the grander creator
he!--As if he made men and women walk and talk in it, compelling us to
walk with them, and listen, and, above all, open our lungs and laugh,
suffer within the tremendous illusion, so much is he the more potent
magician! I also feel, in reading Shakespeare, or Dickens--I would
add Burke--as I feel with no fourth that I am dealing with a scope of
genius quite incalculable; that while it keeps me proud to belong to
their race and nation and to inherit their speech, it equally keeps
me diffident because, at any turn of the page may occur some plenary
surprise altogether beyond my power or scope of guessing. With these
three writers, as with no fourth, _I_ have the sensation of a certain
_faintness_ of enjoyment, of surrender, to be borne along as on vast
wings. Yet of Dickens, as of Shakespeare, the worst work can be
incredibly bad. Sorrier stuff could scarcely be written, could scarcely
conceivably have ever been written, than the whole part of Speed in
_The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ unless it be the first chapter of _Martin
Chuzzlewit_. Yet in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ you get Mrs. Gamp: and I ask
you, How much the poorer should we not all be, lacking Mrs. Gamp?
I grant you that he has not yet passed--as he has not yet had time to
pass--the _great_ test of a classical writer; which is that, surviving
the day’s popularity and its conditions, his work goes on meaning
more, under quite different conditions, to succeeding ages; the great
test which Shakespeare has passed more than once or twice, remaining
to-day, though quite differently, even more significant than he was to
his contemporaries. I grant--as in another lecture I shall be at pains
to show--that Dickens’ plots were usually incredible, often monstrous.
But he invented a world: he peopled it with men and women for our joy:
and my confidence in the diuturnity of his fame rests even on more than
this--on the experience that, test this genius by whatever standard a
critic may, he has by and by to throw down his measure and admit that,
while Dickens was always a learner, out of his prodigality he could
have at any moment knocked the critic over by creating a new world with
new and delectable lasting characters to take it in charge.
DICKENS (II)
I
I take up my parable for a few words more upon the point at which
I broke off last week--the essential _greatness_ of Dickens. For
greatness is a quality in some few men: indefinable perhaps, but
yet to be recognised; a certain thing and, by those of us who would
traffic with life or literature, not to be overlooked or denied save
at our soul’s peril, no matter what standard of artistry or of refined
scholarship we may set up: a _quality_ in itself, moreover, and not
any addition or multiplication or raising of talent by industry. For
an illustration of the peril: I was reading, the other day, a history
of French Literature by the late M. Ferdinand Brunetière, and, coming
to the time of Alexandre Dumas the elder, I found that the historian,
disapproving of Dumas, has just left him out! Now that, I contend
(saving M. Brunetière’s eminence), is to write oneself down a pedant,
outside the catholic mind. Dumas lived a scandalous life, wrote much
execrable French, and encouraged--even employed--some of his fellows
to write worse. But the author of _The Three Musketeers_, _Le Vicomte
de Bragelonne_, _La Reine Margot_--Dumas, “the seven-and-seventy times
to be forgiven,” is not to be treated so, by your leave: or only so,
I repeat, at the critic’s peril. Or let me take an Englishman--John
Dryden. I suspect I shall not misrepresent or misreport the attitude
of many in this room towards Dryden when I say that we find a world
of slovenly sorry stuff in his dramas, and in his poems a deal of
wit and rhetoric which our later taste--such as it is, good or bad,
true or false--refuses to pass for poetry at all. Now if I merely
wanted to prove to you that Dryden at his best could write finely,
exquisitely--that out of the strong could come forth sweetness--I could
content myself with asking you to listen to these verses:
No, no, poor suffering heart, no change endeavour,
Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her;
My ravish’d eyes behold such charms about her,
I can die with her, but not live without her
One tender sigh of her, to see me languish,
Will more than pay the price of my past anguish;
Beware, O cruel fair, how you smile on me,
’Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me.
_Love_ has in store for me one happy minute,
And she will end my pain, who did begin it;
Then no day, void of bliss, of pleasure, leaving,
Ages shall slide away without perceiving:
_Cupid_ shall guard the door, the more to please us,
And keep out _Time_ and _Death_, when they would seize us:
_Time_ and _Death_ shall depart, and say in flying,
“Love has found out a way to live--by dying.”
There, obviously, is a _virtuoso_ who commands his keyboard. But if I
were talking about Dryden to you for your soul’s good, I should rather
show you the man with all his imperfections on his head, then turn
and challenge you to deny his greatness. Why, you can scarcely read a
page, even of his prose--say, for choice, the opening of his _Essay of
Dramatic Poesy_--without recognising the tall fellow of his hands, the
giant among his peers,
ψυχἠ ...
... μακρὰ βιβᾶσα κατ’ ἀσφοδελὸν λειμῶνα,
“pacing with long stride the asphodel meadow” where, let us say, Samuel
Johnson walks, and Handel, and Hugo, nor are they abashed to salute the
very greatest--Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare.
I repeat, Gentlemen, that at all risk of appearing exorbitant I should
preach this to you for your souls’ good. For I do most earnestly want
you, before all else, to recognise this _quality_ of greatness and
respond to it. In so far as, in your fleeting generation, you give me
your confidence and honour me (shall I say?) with a personal hope for
A or B or C, I would warn you of what I have experimentally proved to
be true of my contemporaries--that the man is most fatally destined to
be great himself who learns early to enlarge his heart to the great
masters; that those have steadily sunk who cavilled at Caesar with
Cassius, or over a cigarette chatted admiringly of the rent which
envious Casca made: that anyone with an ear learns very surely to
distinguish the murmur of the true bee from the morose hum of the drone
who is bringing no honey, nor ever will, to the hive. In my own time
of apprenticeship--say in the ’nineties--we were all occupied--after
the French novelists--with style: in seeking the right word, _le mot
juste_, and with “art for art’s sake,” etc. And we were serious enough,
mind you. We cut ourselves with knives. To-day, if I may diagnose
your more youthful sickness, you are occupied rather with lyricism,
curious and recondite sensations, appositions of unrelated facts with
magenta-coloured adjectives. The craze has spread to the shop-fronts,
to curtains, bedspreads, as the craze for Byronic collars spread in
its day: and “Hell is empty!” cried Ferdinand, plunging overboard: but
you can still find psycho-analysis rampant, with any amount of Birth
Control, among the geese on Golder’s Green. But if from this desk
I have preached incessantly on a text, it is this--that all spirit
being mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually attractive, is an
ultimate fact: and that therefore we shall grow the greater and better
critics as we surrender ourselves to the great writers and without
detraction, at least until we have, in modesty of mind, proved them:
since, to apply a word of Emerson’s:
Heartily know--
When half-gods go,
The gods arrive.
II
So I broke off, or almost, upon a saying of Tasso’s--you may find it
repeated in Ben Jonson’s _Timber, or Discoveries_--that in this world
none deserves the name of Creator save God himself and the Poet--by
“Poet” meaning, of course, the great imaginative artist whether working
in restricted verse or in “that other harmony of prose.”
And you may be thinking--I don’t doubt, a number will be thinking--that
in a discourse on Dickens, I am putting the claim altogether too high.
I can feel your minds working, I think--working to some such tune as
this “Dickens and Virgil, now--Dickens and Dante--Oh, heaven alive!”
You cannot say that I have shirked it--can you?
Well now, fair and softly! If I had said “Dickens and Shakespeare,” it
would have given you no such shock: and if I had said “Shakespeare and
Dante,” or “Dickens and Molière,” it would have given you no shock at
all. I am insisting, you understand, that the first test of greatness
in an imaginative writer is his power to create: and I propose to begin
with that which, if there should by any chance happen to be a fool in
this apparently representative gathering, he will infallibly despise
for the easiest thing in the world, the creation of a fool. I beg to
reassure him and, so far as I can, restore his self-respect. It is
about the hardest thing in the world, to create a fool and laugh at
him. It is a human, nay, even a Godlike function (so and not by others
shared) to laugh. Listen, before we go further, to these stanzas on
divine laughter:
Nay, ’tis a Godlike function; laugh thy fill!
Mirth comes to thee unsought:
Mirth sweeps before it like a flood the mill
Of languaged logic: thought
Hath not its source so high;
The will
Must let it by:
For, though the heavens are still,
God sits upon His hill
And sees the shadows fly:
And if He laughs at fools, why should He not?
“Yet hath the fool a laugh”--Yea, of a sort;
God careth for the fools;
The chemic tools
Of laughter He hath given them, and some toys
Of sense, as ’twere a small retort
Wherein they may collect the joys
Of natural giggling, as becomes their state:
The fool is not inhuman, making sport
For such as would not gladly be without
That old familiar noise:
Since, though he laugh not, he can cachinnate--
This also is of God, we may not doubt.
Shakespeare, as we know, delighted in a fool, and revelled in creating
one. (I need hardly say that I am not talking of the professionals,
such as Touchstone or the Fool in _Lear_, who are astute critics
rather, ridiculing the folly of their betters by reflexion by some odd
facet of common sense, administering hellebore to minds diseased and so
in their function often reminding us of the Chorus in Greek tragedy.) I
mean, of course, the fool in his _quiddity_, such as Dogberry, or Mr.
Justice Shallow, or Cousin Abraham Slender. Hearken to Dogberry:
_Dog._ Come hither, neighbour Seacole. God hath blessed you with a
good name: to be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to
write and read comes by nature.
_Sec. Watch._ Both which, master Constable--
_Dog._ You have: I knew it would be your answer. Well, for your
favour, sir, why, give God thanks, and make no boast of it; and for
your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of
such vanity.
Why, it might be an extract from the Geddes Report--or so much of it as
deals with Education!
And now to Slender, bidden in by sweet Anne Page to her father’s
dinner-table:
_Anne._ Will it please your worship to come in, sir?
_Slender._ No--I thank you, forsooth--heartily. I am very well.
_Anne._ The dinner attends you, sir.
_Slender._ I am not a-hungry, I thank you, forsooth....
_Anne._ I may not go in without your worship; they will not sit
till you come.
_Slender._ I’faith, I’ll eat nothing: I thank you as much as though
I did.
_Anne._ I pray you, sir, walk in.
_Slender._ I had rather walk here--I thank you. I bruised my shin
th’ other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of
fence--three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes--and, I with my
ward defending my head, he shot my shin, and by my troth, I cannot
abide the smell of hot meat since.... Why do your dogs bark so? Be
there bears in town?
_Anne._ I think there are, sir. I heard them talked of.
_Slender._ I love the sport well, but I shall as soon quarrel at
it as any man in England.... _You_ are afraid, if you see a bear
loose, are you not?
_Anne._ Ay, indeed, sir.
_Slender._ That’s meat and drink to me, now: I have seen Sackerson
loose--twenty times, and have taken him by the chain.... But women,
indeed, cannot abide ’em--they _are_ very ill-favoured rough things.
“Othello,” as Hartley Coleridge noted, “could not brag more amorously”:
and, as I wrote the other day in an introduction to _The Merry Wives_,
when Anne finally persuades him to walk before her into the house, my
fellow-editor and I had written (but afterwards in cowardice erased)
the stage-direction, _He goes in: she follows with her apron spread, as
if driving a goose._ Yes, truly, Slender is a goose to say grace over
and to be carved “as a dish fit for the gods.” “A very potent piece of
imbecility,” writes Hazlitt, and adds, “Shakespeare is the only writer
who was as great in describing weakness as strength.”