observation. No one seeks in Jane Austen for examples of strength: and
you will find none in Dickens to compare with Othello or Cleopatra or
(say) with Mr. Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. But, like Charles Lamb,
Jane Austen and Dickens both “loved a fool”: Jane Austen delicately,
Dickens riotously: witness the one’s Miss Bates, the other’s Mr. Toots.
But observe, pray: the fools they delight in are always--like Slender,
like Miss Bates, like Mr. Toots--simple fools, sincere fools, good at
heart, good to live with, and in their way, the salt of the earth.
Miss Bates herself bears unconscious witness to this in one of her
wisest foolishest remarks--“It is such a happiness when good people get
together--and they always do.” (Consoling thought for you and me at
this very moment.) With the fool who is also a humbug, a self-deceiver,
Dickens could find no patience in his heart; and this impatience of his
you may test again and again, always to find it--if I may say so with
reverence--as elementary as our Lord’s. I am not speaking of conscious,
malignant hypocrites--your Stiggins’s, Pecksniffs, Chadbands--on whom
Dickens waged war, his life through; but of the self-deceiving fool
whom we will agree with him in calling an “ass”--Uncle Pumblechook,
for instance, in _Great Expectations_, Mr. Sapsea in _Edwin Drood_;
on whom, or on whose kind, as he grew older, he seems (most of all
in his last book, whenever handling Mr. Sapsea) to lose his artistic
self-control, to savage them. But of kind fools, lovable fools, good
fools, God’s fools, Dickens’ heaven will open any moment at call
and rain you down half-a-dozen, all human, each distinct. You may
count half-a-dozen in his most undeservedly misprised book, _Little
Dorrit_, omitting Mr. F.’s Aunt: who is an eccentric, rather, though
an unforgettable one and has left her unforgettable mark on the world
in less than 200 words. She stands apart: for the others, apart from
foolishness, share but one gift in common, a consanguinity (as it were)
in flow of language or determination of words to the mouth. Shall we
select the vulgar, breathless, good-natured widow, Flora Finching,
ever recalling the past (without so much pause as a comma’s) to her
disillusioned first lover?--
In times for ever fled Arthur pray excuse me Doyce and Clennam (the
name of his firm) infinitely more correct and though unquestionably
distant still ’tis distance lends enchantment to the view, at
least I don’t mean that and if I did I suppose it would depend
considerably on the nature of the view, but I’m running on again
and you put it all out of my head.
She glanced at him tenderly and resumed:
In times for ever fled I was going to say it would have sounded
strange indeed for Arthur Clennam--Doyce and Clennam naturally
quite different--to make apologies for coming here at any time, but
that is past and what is past can never be recalled except in his
own case as poor Mr. F. said when in spirits Cucumber and therefore
never ate it.... Papa is sitting prosingly, breaking his new laid
egg over the City article, exactly like the Woodpecker Tapping, and
need never know that you are here....
The withered chaplet is then perished the column is crumbled and
the pyramid is standing upside down upon its what’s-his-name call
it not giddiness call it not weakness call it not folly I must now
retire into privacy and looking upon the ashes of departed joys no
more but taking the further liberty of paying for the pastry which
has formed the humble pretext for our interview, will for ever say
Adieu!
Mr. F’s Aunt who had eaten her pie with great solemnity ... and who
had been elaborating some grievous scheme of injury in her mind,
took the present opportunity of addressing the following sibyllic
apostrophe to the relict of her late nephew: “Bring him for’ard,
and I’ll chuck him out o’ winder!”
III
Mr. Chesterton, selecting another fool from the gallery--Young Mr.
Guppy, of _Bleak House_--observes very wisely, that we may disapprove
of Mr. Guppy, but we recognise him as a creation flung down like a
miracle out of an upper sphere: we can pull him to pieces, but we
could not have put him together. And this (says he) is the pessimists’
disadvantage in criticising any creation. Even in their attacks on the
Universe they are always under this depressing disadvantage.
“A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard the
hippopotamus as an enormous mistake: but he is also bound to confess
that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such a
mistake.”
Well, that is, of course, our difficulty in criticising all
creative genius. We tell ourselves how we could have suggested to
Shakespeare--or to Dickens--his doing this or that better than he did;
but the mischief is, _we_ could not have done it at all. And in this
matter of Mr. Guppy, Mr. Chesterton continues: “Not one of us could
have invented Mr. Guppy. But even if we could have stolen Mr. Guppy
from Dickens, we have still to confront the fact that Dickens would
have been able to invent another quite inconceivable character to take
his place.”
IV
Here we get to it. I have instanced his fools only, and but a select
two or three of these for a test: but you may take, if you will,
shrewd men, miserly men, ruffians, doctors, proctors, prisoners,
schoolmasters, coachmen, licensed victuallers, teetotallers, thieves,
monthly nurses--whatever the choice be, Dickens will shake them out of
his sleeve to populate a world for us. For, like Balzac, he has a world
of his own and can at call dispense to us of its abundance.
What sort of a world is it out of which Dickens so enriches ours?
Well, to begin with, it is a crowded world, a world that in his
imagination positively teems with folk going, coming, hurrying: of
innumerable streets where you may knock in (and welcome) at any chance
door to find the house in accumulated misery, poverty, woe, or else in
a disorder of sausages and squalling children, with a henpecked husband
at one end of the table, a bowl of punch in the middle, and at the
other end a mortuary woman whose business in life is to make a burden
of life to all who live near her and would have her cheerful. (There
was never such a man as Dickens for depicting the blight induced by one
ill-tempered person--usually a woman--upon a convivial gathering.) The
henpecked husband dispensing the punch is, likely as not, a city clerk
contriving a double debt to pay, a slave during office hours, bound
to a usurious master: a sort of fairy--a Puck, a Mr. Wemmick, as soon
as he sheds his office-coat and makes for somewhere in the uncertain
gaslight of the suburbs, “following darkness like a dream.”
Yes, this world is of the streets; in which Dickens was bred and
from which he drew the miseries and consolations of his boyhood. A
world “full of folk,” but not, like Piers Plowman’s, a “_field_ full
of folk.” His understanding of England is in many ways as deep as
Shakespeare’s; but it is all, or almost all, of the urban England
which in his day had already begun to kill the rural. I ask you to
consider any average drawing of Phiz’s; the number of figures crowded
into a little room, the many absurd things all happening at once, and
you will understand why Phiz was Dickens’ favourite illustrator. A
crowded world: an urban world, largely a middle-class and lower-class
London world--what else could we expect as outcome of a boyhood spent
in poverty and in London? Of London his knowledge is indeed, like Sam
Weller’s, “extensive and peculiar”: with a background or distance
of the lower Thames, black wharves peopled by waterside loafers or
sinister fishers in tides they watch for horrible traffic; rotting
piles such as caught and held the corpse of Quilp. Some sentiment,
indeed, up Twickenham-way: a handful of flowers, taken from the breast
and dropped at the river’s brink, to be floated down, pale and unreal,
in the moonlight; “and thus do greater things that once were in our
breasts and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal seas.” But
before they reach the eternal seas they must pass Westminster Bridge
whence an inspired dalesman saw the City wearing the beauty of dawn as
a garment.
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples ... and Waterloo Bridge,
Hood’s dark arch of tragedy; and London Bridge, hymned of old by
Dunbar. Dickens’ bridge is the old Iron one by Hungerford, and under it
the Thames runs down to ghastly flats, convict-haunted, below Woolwich.
Shakespeare knew his London, his Eastcheap, its taverns. But when
you think of Shakespeare you think (I will challenge you) rather of
rural England, of Avon, of Arden, of native wood-notes wild. I hold
it doubtful that Falstaff on his death-bed babbled o’ green fields:
but I will take oath that when he got down to Gloucestershire he smelt
the air like a colt or a boy out of school. And Justice Shallow is
there--always there!
_Silence._ This Sir John, cousin, that comes hither anon about
soldiers?
_Shallow._ The same Sir John, the very same. I saw him break
Skogan’s head at the court-gate, when a’ was a crack not thus high:
and the very same day did I fight with one Sampson Stockfish, a
fruiterer, behind Gray’s Inn. Jesu, Jesu, the mad days I have
spent! and to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead!
_Silence._ We shall all follow, cousin.
_Shallow._ Certain, ’tis certain; very sure, very sure: death, as
the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die. How a good
yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair?
_Silence._ By my troth, I was not there.
_Shallow._ Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet?
_Silence._ Dead, sir.
_Shallow._ Jesu, Jesu, dead! a’ drew a good bow: and dead! a’ shot
a fine shoot: John a Gaunt loved him well, and betted much money
on his head. Dead!--a’ would have clapped i’ the clout at twelve
score; and carried you a forehand shaft a fourteen and fourteen and
a half, that it would have done a man’s heart good to see. How a
score of ewes now?
_Silence._ Thereafter as they be: a score of good ewes may be worth
ten pounds.
_Shallow._ And is old Double dead?
You get little or none of that solemn, sweet rusticity in Dickens: nor
of the rush of England in spring with slow country-folk watching it:
The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit;
In every street these tunes our ears do greet--
_Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!_
Spring, the sweet Spring!
You will remember that _Pickwick_, in its first conception, was to
deal with the adventures and misadventures of a Sporting Club after
the fashion of the _Handley Cross_ series by Surtees. Now Surtees--not
a great writer but to this day (at any rate to me) a most amusing
one--was, although like Dickens condemned to London and the law, a
north-country sportsman, and could ride and, it is reported, “without
riding for effect usually saw a deal of what the hounds were doing.”
The Pickwickian sportsmen had to decline _that_ competition very soon.
V
But they, and a host of Dickens’ characters, are very devils for
post-chaises.
“If I had no duties, and no deference to futurity, I would spend
my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman,”
said Dr. Johnson. “There are milestones on the Dover Road,” and we
spin past them. You will remember that Dickens in his apprenticeship
spent a brief but amazingly strenuous while as reporter for the
_Morning Chronicle_, scouring the country after political meetings by
road-vehicles in all weathers. As he told his audience, twenty years
later, at the annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund:
I have often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes,
important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was
required, and a mistake in which would have been, to a young man,
severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light
of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four galloping through a
wild country, and through the dead of night, at the then surprising
rate of fifteen miles an hour.... Returning home from exciting
political meetings in the country (and it might be from Exeter
west, or Manchester north) to the waiting press in London, I do
verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of
vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated in
miry by-roads, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less
carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got
back in time for publication....
So, you see, this world Dickens imagined was more than crowded; it was
a hurrying, a breathless one. This sense of speed in travel, of the
wind in one’s face; of weight and impetus in darkness, with coach lamps
flaring through the steam from your good horses’ hindquarters, runs as
an inspiration through much of the literature of the early nineteenth
century. De Quincey has hymned it magnificently in _The English
Mail Coach_, and you may enjoy a capital drive of the sort in _Tom
Brown’s School Days_: and always the rush of air whets your appetite
for the hot rum-and-water at the stage hostelry or the breakfast of
kidney-pie. Dickens saw the invasion of the railway train, and lived
to be disastrously mixed up in a railway collision. But railway-train
travelling at sixty miles an hour or over, has a static convenience.
For the pleasures of inconvenient travel, without a time-table,
I have recourse to a sailing-boat: but I can well understand my
fellow-creature who prefers a car or a motor-bicycle to the motion of
four horses at a stretch gallop. With the wind of God in his face he
gets there (wherever it is) before the dew is dry, does his business,
swallows his bun and Bovril and is home again with an evening paper for
the cosy gas-cooked meal, ere yet Eve has drawn over his little place
in the country her gradual dusky veil.
Rapid travel, as Dickens well knew it and how to describe it--with
crime straining from what it fears--is one of his most potent
resources. Read the flight of Carker in _Dombey and Son_.
VI
His is a crowded world then, tumultuous and full of fierce hurry: but
a world (let us grant it) strangely empty of questioning ideas, subtle
nuisances that haunt many thoughtful men’s souls, through this pass of
existence “still clutching the inviolable shade.” He wrote far better
novels than _John Inglesant_, novels far, far, better than _Robert
Ellesmere_; but you cannot conceive him as interested in the matter of
these books--which yet is serious matter. Still less, or at least as
little, can you imagine him pursuing the track of so perplexed a spirit
as Prince André in Tolstoy’s _War and Peace_. Churches annoyed him. He
will, of a christening or a marriage service (let be a funeral), make
the mouldiest ceremony in the world. We offer the baby up; we give the
blushing bride away; but in the very act we catch ourselves longing
for that subsequent chat with the pew-opener which he seldom denies us
for reward. Dickens, in short, had little use for religious forms or
religious mysteries: for he carried his own religion about with him and
it was the religion of James--so annoying alike to the mystic and the
formalist--“to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and
to keep himself unspotted from the world.” This again belongs to his
“universality.” Is it not the religion of most good fellows not vocal?
It is observable how many of his heroes and heroines--his child heroes
and heroines especially--pass through his thronged streets and keep
themselves unspotted.
But, if careless of mysteries, Dickens had a hawk’s eye for truth of
morals. You never find him mocking a good or condoning an evil thing:
here his judgment and its resultant passion of love or of hate, I dare
to say, never went wrong. Sinners--real sinners--in Dickens have the
very _inferno_ of a time: the very forces of Nature--“fire and hail,
snow and vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling God’s word”--hunt the
murderer to the pit that yawns; till he perishes, and the sky is clear
again over holy and humble men of heart. Again, witness, here, the
elemental flight of Jonas Chuzzlewit. Carlyle never said an unjuster
thing (and that is saying a deal) than when he accused Dickens’ theory
of life as entirely wrong. “He thought men ought to be buttered up ...
and all sorts of fellows have turkey for their Christmas dinner.” It is
false. Dickens had a keener eye for sin than Carlyle ever had; and a
relentless eye: “a military eye,” said Henry James of it, recalling his
first introduction to the great man--“a _merciless_ military eye.” “A
field-punishment eye,” _I_ say!
VII
But this world of Dickens, you may object, was an unreal world,
a phantasmagoric world. Well, I hope to discuss that--or rather
the inference from it--in my next lecture, which shall deal, in
Aristotelian order, with his plots first and his characters next. But,
for the moment, if you will, Yes: his world was like nothing on earth:
yes, it is liker to Turner’s sunset to which the critic objected “he
never saw a sunset like that,” and was answered, “Ah, but don’t you
wish you could?” Yes, for Dickens made his world--as the proud parent
said of his son’s fiddle--“he made it, sir, entirely out of his own
head!”
“Night is generally my time for walking” (thus begins Master Humphrey,
in _The Old Curiosity Shop_) “although I am an old man.”
So in that crowded phantasmagoric city of London, which is in his
mind, Dickens walks by night--not like Asmodeus, lifting the roofs
and peering into scandals: but like the good Caliph of his favourite
_Arabian Nights_, intent to learn the life of the poor and oppressed,
and as a monarch to see justice done them: a man patterning his work on
the great lines of Fulke Greville, sometime of Jesus College, in this
town; with which let me conclude to-day:
The chief use, then, in man, of that he knows,
Is his painstaking for the good of all:
Not fleshly weeping for our own-made woes,
Not laughing from a melancholy gall,
Not hating from a soul that overflows
With bitterness, breath’d out from inward thrall:
But sweetly rather to ease, loose, or bind,
As need requires, this frail, fall’n humankind.
DICKENS (III)
I
I left you, Gentlemen, with a promise to say something on Dickens’
plots and Dickens’ characters, taking them in that Aristotelian order.
Now why Aristotle, speaking of drama, prefers Plot to Character; if his
reasons are sound; if they are all the reasons; and, anyhow, if they
can be transferred from drama and applied to the Novel; are questions
which some of you have debated with me “in another place,” and, if
without heat, yet with all the vigour demanded by so idle a topic.
But, for certain, few of you will dissent when I say of Dickens that
he is memorable and to be loved (if loved at all) for his characters
rather than for his plots. You have (say) a general idea of _Dombey and
Son_, a vivid recollection of Captain Cuttle, Mr. Toots, Susan Nipper,
perhaps a vivid recollection of Carker’s long, hunted flight and its
appalling end, when the pursuer, recovering from a swoon--
saw them bringing from a distance something covered ... upon a
board, between four men, and saw that others drove some dogs away
that sniffed upon the road, and soaked his blood up, with a train
of ashes.
Or you have a general idea of _Our Mutual Friend_, and your memory
preserves quite a sharp impression of Silas Wegg, Mr. Boffin, the
Doll’s Dressmaker. But if suddenly asked how Carker’s flight came
about, why Boffin practised his long dissimulation, and what precisely
Wegg or the Doll’s Dressmaker had to do with it--could you, off-hand,
supply a clear answer? Some votaries can, no doubt: but I ask it of the
ordinary reader. Myself indeed may claim to be something of a votary,
with an inexplicably soft spot in my heart for _Little Dorrit_: yet,
and often as I have read that tale, I should be gravelled if asked, at
this moment, to tell you just what was the secret of the old house, or
just what Miss Wade and Tattycoram have to do with the story. Somehow,
in retrospect, such questions do not seem to matter.
In truth, as I see it--and foresee it as a paradox, to be
defended--Dickens was at once, like Shakespeare in the main, careless
of his plots, and, unlike Shakespeare, over-anxious about them. I shall
stress this second point, which stabs (I think) to the truth beneath
the paradox, by and by.
But first I ask you to remember that Dickens habitually published a
novel in monthly numbers or instalments; starting it, indeed, upon a
plan, but often working at white heat to fulfil the next instalment,
and improvising as he went. Thackeray used the same method, with the
printer’s devil ever infesting the hall when the day for delivery
came around. This method of writing masterpieces may well daunt their
successors, even in this journalistic age of internal combustion with
the voice of Mr. H. G. Wells insistent that the faster anyone travels
the nearer he is _ex hypothesi_ to that New Jerusalem in which there
shall be no night (and therefore, I presume, not a comfortable bed
to be hired), but the eternal noise of elevators and daylight-saving
made perfect. It did not daunt our forefathers: who were giants of
their time, undertook a _Pendennis_ or a _Dombey and Son_, and having
accomplished a chapter or so, cheerfully went to bed and slept under
that dreadful imminent duty. You all know, who have studied _Pickwick_,
that _Pickwick_ began (so to speak) in the air; that it took the
narrative, so desultory in conception, some numbers before it found
a plot at all. But how admirable is the plot, once found or--to say
better--once happened on! For a double peripeteia who could ask better
art than the charitable turn of Pickwick on Jingle in the debtor’s
prison, and the incarceration and release of Mrs. Bardell? Consider the
first. Insensibly, without premonition of ours and I dare to say, of no
long prepared purpose in the author, the story finds a climax:
“Come here, Sir,” said Mr. Pickwick, trying to look stern, with
four large tears running down his waistcoat. “Take that, Sir.”
Take what? In the ordinary acceptation of such language, it should
have been a blow. As the world runs, it ought to have been a sound
hearty cuff: for Mr. Pickwick had been duped, deceived, and wronged
by the destitute outcast who was now wholly in his power. Must we
tell the truth? It was something from Mr. Pickwick’s waistcoat
pocket which chinked as it was given into Job’s hand....
But this admirable plot, with all the Bardell _versus_ Pickwick
business, and the second most excellent “reversal of fortune” when Mrs.
Bardell, the prosecutrix, herself gets cast into prison by Dodson and
Fogg whose tool she has been, and there, confronted by her victim and
theirs, finds herself (O wonder!) pardoned--with the simple, sudden,
surprising, yet most natural and (when you come to think of it) most
Christian story of Sam Weller’s loyalty and Mr. Weller’s aiding and
abetting, so absurdly and withal so delicately done--all this grew, as
everyone knows, with the story’s growth and grew out of fierce, rapid,
improvisation. You can almost see the crucible with the fire under it,
taking heat, reddening, exhaling fumes of milk-punch; and then, with
Sam Weller and Jingle cast into it for ingredients, boiling up and
precipitating the story, to be served
as a dish
Fit for the gods
--“served,” not “carved.” You cannot carve the dish of your true
_improvisatore_. You cannot _articulate_ a story of Dickens--or, if you
can, “the less Dickens he”: you may be sure it is one of his worst.
_A Tale of Two Cities_ has a deft plot: well-knit but stagey: and, I
would add, stagey _because_ well-knit, since (as we shall presently
see) Dickens, cast back upon plot, ever conceived it in terms of the
stage; of the stage, moreover, at its worst--of the early-Victorian
stage, before even a Robertson had preluded better things. So, when I
talk to any man of Dickens, and he ups with his first polite concession
that _A Tale of Two Cities_ is a fine story, anyhow, I know that man’s
case to be difficult, for that he admires what is least admirable in
Dickens. Why, Gentlemen, you or I could with some pains construct as
good a plot as that of _A Tale of Two Cities_; as you or I could with
some pains construct a neater plot than Shakespeare invented for _The
Merry Wives of Windsor_ or even hand out some useful improvements on
the plot of _King Lear_. The trouble with us is that we cannot write a
_Merry Wives_, a _Lear_; cannot touch that _it_ which, achieved, sets
the _Merry Wives_ and _Lear_, in their degrees, above imperfection,
indifferent to imperfections detectable even by a fool. Greatness is
indefinable, whether in an author or a man of affairs: but had I to
attempt the impossibility, no small part of my definition would set
up its rest on indifference--on a grand carelessness of your past
mistakes, involving a complete unconcern for those who follow them, to
batten on the bone you have thrown over your shoulder.
II