of English novelists--and certainly among the greatest of all the
greatest European novelists. His failing was that he did not quite
trust his genius for the novel, but was persuaded that it could be
bettered by learning from the drama--from the bad drama of his time.
But I want you to see, Gentlemen, how honourable was the artist’s
endeavour; how creditable, if mistaken, to the man. He was a born
_improvisatore_. _Pickwick_, under your eyes, takes a shape--conceives
it, finds it--as the story goes on. Then shape he must struggle for;
the idea of “shape” has, against his genius, taken hold on him. So
_Pickwick_ is not finished before he begins a new story, never thinking
to repeat, by similar methods, _Pickwick’s_ overwhelming success.
No, the responsibility of that success weighs on him; but it is a
responsibility to improve. The weakness of _Pickwick_, undertaken as
a series of mock-sporting episodes, lies in its desultoriness. This
time we will have a well-knit plot. And so we get _Oliver Twist_ and
_Nicholas Nickleby_, each with any amount of plot, but of plot in
the last degree stagey; so stagey, indeed, that in _Nickleby_ the
critic gasps at the complacency of an author who, having created that
“nurseling of immortality” Mr. Vincent Crummles, together with a world
and the atmosphere of that world in which Crummles breathes and moves
and has his being, can work the strings of the puppet with so fine a
finger, detect its absurdities with so sure an instinct and reveal them
with so riotous a joy; yet misses to see that he himself is committing
absurdities just as preposterous, enormities of the very same category,
on page after page. The story of Lord Frederick Verisopht and Sir
Mulberry Hawke, for example, is right Crummles from beginning to end.
Crummles could have composed it in his sleep,--and to say this, mind
you, is to convey in the very censure an implicit compliment--or,
shall I use a more modest word and say implicit homage? Crummles could
have written a great part of _Nickleby_: but Crummles could only have
written it after Dickens had made him. I seem to hear the two arguing
it out in some _Dialogue of the Dead_.
_Auctor._ “My dear Crummles, however _did_ you contrive to be what
you are?”
_Crummles._ “Why, don’t you see, Mr. Dickens? You created me in
your image.” (_sotto voce_) “And, he doesn’t know it, poor great
fellow, but it seems to me I’ve been pretty smart in returning the
compliment.”
III
I have said, in a previous lecture, that Dickens, from first to last,
strove to make himself a better artist; quoting to you a sentence
of Henley’s, which I repeat here because you have almost certainly
forgotten it:
He had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the
middle-class Englishman; and if in all his life, he never ceased
from self-education, but went unswervingly in the pursuit of
culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience
as an artist would not let him do otherwise.
“Unswervingly”?--no, not unswervingly. No great genius that ever
was has marched unswervingly on. As a condition of becoming a great
artist he must be more sensitive than his fellows; as a result of that
sensitiveness he will doubt, hesitate, draw back to leap the better.
The very success of his latest book, his latest picture, alarms him.
“Oh yes,” the true artist says to his heart, “popularity is sweet;
money is sweet; and I can hold both in my hand by the simple process
of repeating myself.” And the temptations are many and great. You have
on the profits of your first and second books, and a reasonable hope
of continuance, enlarged your way of life, incurred responsibilities,
built a charming house not yet paid for, married a wife who adores you
(shall we say?) and is proud of your celebrity, but for these very
reasons--and chiefly for love--will on any diminution of your fame,
fret secretly even if she does not nag actively. Against this we have,
opposed, the urge in the true artist who--having done a thing--tosses
it over his shoulder and thinks no more of it; can only think of how to
do something further and do it better. I indicate the strength of the
temptation. There are, of course, sundry ways of getting round it. For
instance, as _I_ read the life of Shakespeare from the few hints left
to us, Shakespeare dodged it by the Gordian-knot solution of leaving
his wife and bolting to London: a solution in this particular instance
happy for us, yet not even on that account to be recommended in general
to young literary aspirants. I mention Shakespeare here less for this,
than as an exemplar of the true artist, never content with his best,
to repeat it. Why, having written a _Hamlet_, an _Othello_, did he,
instead of reproducing _Hamlets_ and _Othellos_, go on to have a shy at
a _Cymbeline_? For the self-same reason, Sirs, why Ulysses--if I may
quote a poet none too popular just now--could not bide at home after
even such tribulations of wandering as had become a proverb:
I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things--
You may read the mere yearning of this, if you will, in Defoe, opening
_The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe_; or, if you will, in
Kipling’s
For to admire an’ for to see,
For to be’old this world so wide--
It never done no good to me,
But I can’t drop it if I tried
--and these express the _instinct_. The sanction, for us, lies in the
words
but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things.
And the desire for that--as I am sure you know--operates with no less
force of prompting in the spiritual world than in the world of commerce
and sea-travel. It carried Shakespeare at the last to that Ariel’s isle
which no commentator has ever (thank heaven!) been able yet to locate;
and it brought him home at the very last
A bringer of new things.
IV
Now if you accept no more than a much lower estimate of Dickens than I
am preaching, you will be apt to dismiss what I have just been saying
as “tall talk”: and you will be quite mistaken, because it applies from
Shakespeare down to men of infinitesimally less desert than Dickens; to
every small artist, in fact, whose conscience will not cease harrying
him until he improves on his best: a process which obviously--and, as a
matter of history, with the great authors--never stops until they come
to the grave.
At which point my now notorious discursiveness, Gentlemen, also stops
and gets back to Dickens. You see, the trouble of the matter is that
in these experiments an author can never be sure. He takes an infinite
risk, it may be _against his own true genius_. Where is the critic to
correct him?
V
Well, with Dickens, his own adoring public corrected him sharply and,
on the whole, with true instinct. To them he was the wand-waving
magician, the _improvisatore in excelsis_ who had caught up out of
their midst an elderly small gentleman in spectacles and gaiters and
shot him suddenly out of Goswell Street into the firmament, to be a
star equal with Hercules--
sic fratres Helenae, lucida sidera--
“instead of which” he had turned to making plots so patently theatrical
(and of the theatre of Crummles) that the man himself was helping
everybody to see through them. So came the revenge; over-proved by the
opening chapter of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, which I suppose to be about the
sorriest piece of writing ever perpetrated by a great English writer.
Its perusal induces on _me_ at any rate, something like physical
misery, not unmixed with the sort of shame any one of us might feel if
a parent behaved unbecomingly in public. I want to obey the exhortation
on Mrs. Sapsea’s monument and “with a blush retire.”
But, note you, the general reader--that entity often abused, seldom
quite the fool that he looks--was quick to mark and punish. Listen to
Forster:
_Chuzzlewit_ had fallen short of all the expectations formed of
it in regard to sale. By much the most masterly of his writings
hitherto, the public had rallied to it in far less numbers than
to any of its predecessors.... The primary cause of this, there
is little doubt, had been the change to weekly issues in the form
of publication of his last two stories.... The forty and fifty
thousand purchasers of _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, the sixty and
seventy thousand of the early numbers of the enterprises in which
_The Old Curiosity Shop_ and _Barnaby Rudge_ appeared had fallen
to little over twenty thousand. They rose, somewhat on Martin’s
ominous announcement, at the end of the fourth number, that he’d go
to America....
They rose at once by a couple of thousand: but a serial of course can
never be easily lifted out of a rut into which it has once dropped.
The reasons for this are obvious, and the serial sales of _Chuzzlewit_
never over-topped twenty-three thousand. There was a very different
story when _Chuzzlewit_ came to book form. “Its sale, since,” writes
Forster, “has ranked next after _Pickwick_ and _Copperfield_.” In
short, Dickens had been, quite conscientiously, in the opening chapters
of _Chuzzlewit_, working against the grain of his genius. His public
recalled him to it in the brutal way the public uses. When he sat down
to write _Chuzzlewit_ he had never an idea of carrying Martin off to
America. Suddenly, in fear of falling sales and many challenges to make
good his _American Notes_, he became the _improvisatore_ again and
switched his hero across the Atlantic. Who will deny that the American
chapters of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ are its best and, save for any given
chapter upon which Sarah Gamp knocks in, its most memorable?
VI
None the less, and to the end, Dickens the artist is hag-ridden by
this business of “plot,” which for him meant “stage-plot.” It hampers
him in book after book, as its silly exigencies perpetually get in
the way of the reader’s pleasure, even of the reader’s understanding.
His genius did not lie that way, any more than did Shakespeare’s. I
put in this comparison, for it can never be untimely for a Professor
of English Literature to get in a word to damn the school-books
which present Shakespeare to you as chasing along his shelves for
some Italian novel to provide him with a new plot. Oh, believe me,
Gentlemen--after _The Comedy of Errors_ and that sort of thing,
Shakespeare never bothered any more about his plots or whence he took
them. It is very right indeed for a young author to sweat his soul over
“plot” structure. But, through practice, there comes a time--suddenly,
it may be, but as sure in his development as puberty in his physical
growth--when lo! he has a hundred plots to his hand, if heaven would
but grant him time to treat them. I often wonder why men blame the
elder Dumas so severely, accepting the allegation that he employed
hirelings--viciously termed by the critic his “ghosts” or his “devils.”
Why, if you have an imagination teeming, like Dumas’, with stories to
make men happier--_why_, knowing how short is life and that you cannot,
on this side of the grave, tell one-fifth of these with your own
pen--why go to that grave leaving the world, through that scruple, so
much imaginatively the poorer? Only the thing should be done frankly,
openly, of course.
VII
I just raise that question. It applies to Dumas and (I think) to most
great novelists. But it applies less to Dickens than to most--than to
Trollope for instance. And in this very inapplicability lies a secret
of Dickens’ weakness which I am to suggest.
His plots are not merely stagey, melodramatic. Carefully examined, they
are seen to repeat themselves, under a wealth of disguise, with an
almost singular poverty of invention. Let us take one most favourite
trick of his--the trick of “the masked battery” as I shall call it:
the discomfiture of the villain by the betrayal of his supposed
confederate. The characters are artfully assembled for the bad man’s
triumph. Of a sudden the confederate rounds on him, gives him away
before the audience--usually in a long story, at the end of which
the baffled schemer creeps away, usually again to destroy himself.
We get this _coup_ as early as in _Oliver Twist_ where Monks blurts
out his story. It is repeated in _Nickleby_ when Ralph Nickleby is
confronted with the man “Snawley” and by Squeers. In the next novel,
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, we get a double dose; Jonas “given away” by an
accomplice; Pecksniff explosively denounced by Old Chuzzlewit after a
long course of watchful dissimulation. This idea of a long and careful
dissimulation so catches hold of Dickens that he goes on to rope into
its service in subsequent stories two men who, on his own showing of
them, are about the very last two in the world capable of carrying
through a strategy so patient--Mr. Micawber in _David Copperfield_ and
Mr. Boffin in _Our Mutual Friend_. As a portrait, Mr. Boffin ranks
pretty high even in Dickens’ gallery, while Micawber ranks with the
very best of his best. But who will assert that either of them could
have found it in his nature to behave as the plot compels them to
behave? To continue--by just the same trick Quilp gets his exposure in
_The Old Curiosity Shop_, Harewood forces the revelation in _Barnaby
Rudge_, Lady Dedlock is hunted down in _Bleak House_. The more the
peripeteia--the reversal of fortune--disguises itself, the more it is
the same thing.
VIII
George Santayana--he is so excellent a writer that I dispense with
“Doctor” or “Professor” or other prefix to his name--tells us that:
Dickens entered the theatre of this world by the stage door; the
shabby little adventures of the actors in their private capacity
replace for him the mock tragedies which they enact before a
dreaming public. Mediocrity of circumstance and mediocrity of
soul for ever return to the centre of his stage; a more wretched
or a grander existence is sometimes broached, but the pendulum
swings back, and we return, with the relief with which we put
on our slippers after the most romantic excursion, to a golden
mediocrity--to mutton and beer, and to love and babies in a
suburban villa with one frowsy maid.
Yes, that is true enough, but not all the truth. Dickens entered the
theatre by the stage door; but he passed through to the front, to turn
up the lights, wave his wand and create a new world--a fairy world, let
us agree: a theatrical world, as I have been attempting to show. Yet
consider--
Most of us in this room have childish recollections of green fields,
running brooks, woods in leaf, birds’ nests, cattle at pasture, all
that pageant of early summer which is going on at this moment a few
furlongs from this desk--this dead piece of timber--and at the thought
of which (if you will not think me impolite) I long to be somewhere
else at this moment. With some of us elders, not specially imaginative,
the early habit persists even after long servitude to city life: so
that still by habit our first instinct on rising from bed is to go
to the window and con the weather--how the day is making, from what
quarter the wind sets--“Is it too strong for the fruit blossom?” “Will
it be a good day for the trout?” Again, of my experience I appeal
to some of you--to those who, aware in childhood or boyhood (quite
suddenly, it may be, made aware) of the beauty underlying this world
(yes, and clothing it too), have been as suddenly afflicted with the
hopeless yearning to express it, was not that yearning awakened,
quickened in you, you knew not how, by some casual sight--an open glade
between woods, a ship with all canvas spread, or, through the hazels,
the nesting throstle’s shining eye,
or the fish darting in the deep of a pool? Was it not some similar
moment that, though you have never yet arrived at putting it and its
underthought into words, yet so touched you that for the rest of your
days you will understand what was in Coleridge’s heart when he wrote:
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gush’d from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware.
Yes, and I dare say your first visit to the theatre brought you a like
delicious shock. (I can recall to this day, very distinctly, the gods
and goddesses who, between the acts of my first pantomime, danced on
the blue ceiling with baskets and festoons of roses.)
But now, bethink you that Dickens struggled through a childhood to
which green fields, trees, birds, cattle, brooks and pools, were all
denied: that the child was condemned to a squalid lodging; to spend his
days washing bottles in a dreadful blacking factory, his hours “off”
in visiting his parents in the yet more dreadful Marshalsea prison to
which his father had been committed for debt: and you will understand
not only that he had to enter the theatre of this world by the stage
door, but that the lighted theatre, when he could pay a few pence and
get to the gallery, was his one temple of beauty: that only there--if
we except a hint or two picked up in the street--from a shabby acrobat
or a stray Punch and Judy show--could he drink the romance for which
his young spirit thirsted. You have all read, I doubt not, Charles
Lamb’s paper on “_My First Play_,” first contributed to the _London
Magazine_ in December, 1821, afterwards reprinted in _Elia_:
But when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled
a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed--the
breathless anticipations I endured! I had seen something like
it in the plate prefixed to _Troilus and Cressida_ in Rowe’s
Shakespeare--the tent scene with Diomede--and a sight of that
plate can always bring back in a measure the feeling of that
evening--The boxes at that time, full of well-dressed women of
quality, projected over the pit; and the pilasters reaching down
were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under
glass (as it seemed), resembling--a homely fancy--but I judged
it to be sugar-candy--yet, to my raised imagination, divested
of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy!--The
orchestra lights at length arose, those ‘fair Auroras’! Once the
bell sounded. It was to ring out yet once again--and, incapable of
anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in a sort of resignation upon
the maternal lap. It rang the second time. The curtain drew up--I
was not past six years old--and the play was Artaxerxes!
There we have the confession of a Cockney-bred boy, more happily placed
than was Dickens at the same age or for many years later. Lamb had his
hardships, his tragedy or tragedies, in life: but in the childhood of
Dickens, most sensitively resentful, penury and shameful occupation bit
down to the bone. What other vision of beauty had he--a born actor, as
all contemporaries report--but that which Drury Lane or Covent Garden
supplied? Love, says a late Roman singer, was born in a _field_:
_Ipse Amor, puer Dionae, rure natus dicitur_--
Pleasure planteth a field; it conceives under Pleasure, the pang of
its joy:
In a field was Dione in labour delivered of Cupid the boy:
And the field to her lap, to her fostering breast, took the rascal;
he drew
Mother’s milk from the delicate kisses of flowers and he prospered
and grew--
Now learn ye to love who loved never: now ye who have loved, love
anew!
The bad early and mid-Victorian stage hurt more than one Victorian
novelist of genius. It seriously hurt Charles Reade, for example, who
habitually sought the advice of Egeria from a fourth-rate actress:
and that should bring tears to the eyes of any critic who knows
Reade’s strong country nurture and has sized his genius. But, with
Dickens--think of that forlorn child, plotting to snatch his soul’s
sustenance in the shilling gallery of Drury Lane--at intervals how
rare! Is it any wonder that--to convert a famous phrase--coming to
power, he invoked out of the theatre a new world, to redress the
balance of his old?
IX
Moreover--and mind you this--you will never understand Charles Dickens
until you realise how exquisitely, how indignantly the genius in this
child of the blacking-warehouse felt the shame of its lot. Dickens was
never a snob: but a prouder spirit never inhabited flesh. This shepherd
boy was not one to sing in the Valley of Humiliation. For years after
success came to him he kept his mouth closed like a steel trap upon
past agonies. At length he confided something to Forster (_Life_,
Volume 1, Chapter 2), and few sadder reflections have ever been implied
by a grown man upon his parents:
It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away
at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent
into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no
one had compassion on me--a child of singular abilities, quick,
eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally--to suggest that
something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been,
to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were
tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite
satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been
twenty years of age, distinguished at a Grammar School, and going
to Cambridge.
Terrible words those: the more terrible for being, after long
repression, uttered so judicially.
And again:
I suppose my lodging was paid for by my father: I certainly
did not pay it myself, and I certainly had no other assistance
whatever--the making of my clothes, I think, excepted--from
Monday morning until Saturday night. No advice, no counsel, no
encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone that I can
call to mind, so help me God!
Nor did his parents’ neglect end with starving his heart’s affection,
his brain’s activity. It starved the weak little body into spasms
through malnutrition. He had a boy friend in the warehouse, one Bob
Fagin. Dickens writes of this time:
Bob Fagin was very good to me on the occasion of a bad attack of my
old disorder. I suffered such excruciating pain that they made a
temporary bed of straw in my old recess in the counting-house, and
I rolled about on the floor, and Bob filled empty blacking-bottles
with hot water, and applied relays of them to my side half the
day. I got better and quite easy towards evening; but Bob (who was
much bigger and older than I) did not like the idea of my going
home alone, and took me under his protection. _I was too proud to
let him know about the prison_; and after making several efforts
to get rid of him, to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was
deaf, shook hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark
Bridge on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there. As a
finishing piece of reality, in case of his looking back, I knocked
at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman opened it, was
that Mr. Robert Fagin’s house?
_O caeca pectora!_ Dickens had hard streaks in him, and I confess to
a curious wonderment how, afterwards, he could have used that name of
Fagin--how he _could_ have used it as he did--_in Oliver Twist_.
But I end by repeating my question--Is it any wonder that this
street-boy of genius, coming to his own, invoked out of the theatre a
new world, to redress the balance of his old?
Of that new world I propose to say something, Gentlemen, a fortnight
hence.
DICKENS (IV)
PREFACE
I think it meet, Gentlemen, that before we resume our subject to-day,
a word should be said on a loss that has befallen English letters in
general and our sister-University in particular, since I last addressed
you.
Walter Raleigh was an authentic son of Cambridge: and although he spent
the most of his life teaching in other places the better understanding
of a literature--our own literature--which in his undergraduate days
had not found adequate recognition here, yet Cambridge had been his
pasture, and he carried everywhere the mettle of that pasture: yes, and
unmistakably, and although by the gay sincerity of his nature he would
win men to like him, wherever he went.
Personal affection may count for too much in my faith that he will
some day be recognised, not only for a true son of Cambridge, but for
a great one in his generation. I put, however, that reckoning on one
side. He did, very gaily and manfully and well, all the work that
fell to his hand; and his end was in this wise. He had, in the first
and second weeks of August, 1914, been eye-witness at Oxford of one
of two amazing scenes--the other simultaneously passing here--when in
these precincts, in these courts of unconscious preparation, by these
two sacred streams, all on a sudden the spirit of youth was a host
incorporate.
Χρυσῷ δ’ ἄρα Δῆλος ἅπασα
ἤνθησ’, ὡς ὅτε τε ῥίον οὔρεος ἄνθεσιν ὕλης.
“Then Delos broke in gold, as a mountain spur is canopied in season
with the flowering bush.”