of decision” ... and the host, so suddenly gathered, as suddenly in
motion, gone, for their country’s sake challenging the scythe. Raleigh
saw that with his eyes, and could not forget.
* * * * *
The Dean of St. Paul’s returned, the other day, to a rightly respectful
Cambridge, to deliver a Rede Lecture to us on _The Victorian Age_. Now
he is a fool who denies or doubts Dean Inge to be a great man of our
time--though he may now and then be a little too apt to regard himself
as the only widow of another. Dean Inge, at any rate, felt himself
strong enough to tell you he had no doubt that, to the historian of the
future, the Elizabethan and Victorian Ages will appear as “the twin
peaks in which English civilisation culminated.”
Now I have been talking to you--already through three lectures--upon
the best-beloved writer of that Victorian Age--its most representative
writer, perhaps--and preaching his eminence. But I should be nervous
of claiming quite all that! It seems to me, if I may put it so without
offence, a somewhat complacent view for _us_ to take of an Age in which
we were born--he, to unseal the vials of prophecy, I, just to happen
along with the compensation of a more sanguine temperament. He admits
that he has “no wish to offer an unmeasured panegyric on an age which
after all cannot be divested of the responsibility for making our own
inevitable.” He admits that “the twentieth century will doubtless be
full of interest, and may even develop some elements of greatness.” But
as regards this country, “the signs are that our work on a grand scale,
with the whole world as our stage, is probably nearing its end.” Well,
I dare to say that such talk from a man of the Dean’s age or mine is
more than unhopeful; is ungrateful:
Difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti....
Would he but go back in memory to the _tempus actum_ of August, 1914,
it may dawn upon him that “fears may be liars” and the likelier for
that some hopes were not dupes: that some men less gifted, less
eloquent, than he, in those August days of 1914 saw this vision as of a
farther Pacific:
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Raleigh at any rate saw it: I would not use extravagant language, but
I verily believe Raleigh, from that hour, saw the assembled chivalry
of those boys of 1914 as a meadow of cloth-of-gold spreading past all
known or prophetical horizons--a prairie, the scent over which was a
scent of sacrifice, at once holy and intolerable. Let me repeat--for
one does not ring changes on the loss of a friend--the mourning bell
strikes once and repeats itself--let me repeat some words written, the
other night, under durance on returning from his funeral:
In his last few years, under an invincible inward compulsion, he
turned from his life’s trade, in which he had vindicated himself
as one of the best few, to become a child again and learn to be a
valiant soldier. The sacrifice of the young in 1914–18, about which
so many talk so easily, was a torture to him: it cut to the bone,
the marrow. It was matter for indignation that he should survive
these many boys.... Some of us, who noted, almost from the first,
the operation of the War upon Raleigh’s soul, foreboded that in
some way or other it would cut short his span, or, at least, that
it menaced him. His converse again and again would wander away from
the old writers, once his heart-fellows, to machinery, air-fights,
anything.... When I last talked with him he was full of his History
of the Air Service in the War, the first volume of which is in
the press, I believe. For the second he went out to survey, from
the air, the fields of campaign in Mesopotamia, took typhoid in
Baghdad, and came home just in time to die.
It is a purely simple story: of a great teacher who saw his pupils go
from him on a call more instant than his teaching, and followed their
shades with no thought of
So were I equall’d with them in renown
but the thought only to overtake them in service.
* * * * *
Forgive the length of my discourse, Gentlemen. It is right, I think,
that our sister-Universities should feel one for the other’s pride, one
for the other’s wound.
I
To take up our tale--
It has already been objected against these lectures on Dickens--or
against such parts of them as the newspapers honour me by
quoting--that they treat Dickens as a genius of the first class. That
term has little meaning for me who seldom or never think--can hardly
bring myself to think--of great men in class-lists, in terms of a
Tripos. (I reserve that somewhat crude method of criticism to practise
it upon those who are _going to be_ great men; and even so--if you
will credit me--derive scant enjoyment from it.) But I foresaw the
objection, and forestalled it by quoting a famous saying of Tasso,
and I take my stand on that: as I take not the smallest interest in
weighing Chaucer against Pope, Shakespeare against Milton, Scott
against Burns, or Dickens against Thackeray. Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Scott, Dickens--their other qualities apart--are grand creators, lords
of literature all, by this specific virtue; and, were there sense in
challenging, with this _quadriga_ alone we could securely challenge
any literature in any living tongue. Note you, moreover: it is to
this creative power that other artists less creative, but great and
therefore generous, instinctively pay homage: Dryden, for instance, or
Byron:
’Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought!...
(_Childe Harold_, III. 6.)
Or again:
The mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh....
(_The Dream_, st. 1.)
Note you particularly, if you will, the words “planets of its own....”
We talk too often, perhaps (I have talked in this fashion myself
unheedingly), as if these men had been makers of picture-galleries,
lining their walls with lively characters, brilliant portraits. But
in truth neither Chaucer’s _Prologue_ nor Shakespeare’s succession of
women, neither _Redgauntlet_ nor _David Copperfield_, is a gallery of
characters; but a planet rather, with its own atmosphere which the
characters breathe; in which as proper inhabitants they move easily
and have their natural being: while for us all great literature is
a catholic hostelry, in which we seat ourselves at the board with
Falstaff, Dugald Dalgetty, Sam Weller, the Wife of Bath, Mrs. Gamp and
Mrs. Quickly, and wonder how soon Don Quixote, My Uncle Toby, or The
Three Musketeers will knock in to share the good meat and the wine.
II
So, between a discussion of Dickens’ plots--which we examined a
fortnight ago and found wanting--at once stagey and ill-knit and, at
that, repetitive, poor in invention; and of his characters, which
teemed from his brain in a procession closed only by their author’s
death, so inexhaustibly various and withal so individual, vivid and
distinct, that the critic can scarcely help telling himself, “Here,
and only here, _must_ lie the secret of the man’s genius”; I shall
interpose to-day a few words upon this world of Dickens, with its
atmosphere.
For it is a strange world, with an atmosphere of its own, as strange as
itself.
I have already noted some things of that world of his--that it was a
crowded world: a world of the city, of the streets; that his novels,
when they visit the country, take us at a violent rate in post-chaises
to find, with Shenstone,
The warmest welcome at an inn.
For one moment, at the term of Little Nell’s wanderings, in the quiet
of the old schoolmaster’s garden, we almost touch a sense of country
rest and repose. But of _real_ country, of solid growth in rest, of
sport, of gardens, of farms and tenantry, of harvests, of generations
rooted, corroborated in old grudges, old charities; of all that England
stood for in Dickens’ day and, of its sap, fed what Cobbett had already
called the “Great Wen” of London, our author had about as much sense as
Mr. Winkle of a horse, or a snipe.
Now I wish to be rather particularly scrupulous just here: for we are
dealing with a peculiarly, an unmistakably genuine, English writer;
who, himself a child of the streets, acquainted, by eyesight and daily
wont, with an industrial England into which the old agricultural
England--what with railway and factory, gas, and everything extractible
from coal--was rapidly converting itself; did yet by instinct seize
on the ancient virtues. Take away the hospitality, the punch and
mistletoe, from Dingley Dell, and what sort of a country house is
left? Why, the _Handley Cross_ series, for which Messrs. Chapman and
Hall intended _Pickwick_ as a stale challenge, could give _Pickwick_
ten and a beating from the first. As the season comes round you play
cricket at Dingley Dell, or you skate, or you mix the bowl and turn
the toe. But the stubble-fields are not there, nor the partridges; nor
the turnips, nor the gallops to hounds, nor the tillage and reaping,
nor the drowsed evenings with tired dogs a-stretch by the hearth. Of
all this side of England Dickens knew, of acquaintance, nothing. I am
not speaking, you will understand, of any Wordsworthian intimacy with
natural scenery tender or sublime, of anything imparted or suggested to
the imagination by a primrose or in the “sounding cataract” haunting
it “like a passion.” I am speaking rather of human life as lived in
rural England in Dickens’ time and in some corners yet surviving the
week-end habit. Of these Sabine virtues, of these Sabine amenities and
hardships, of the countryman’s eye on the weather-glass for “snow and
vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling His word,” Dickens (I repeat) had
no sense, having no tradition, of field life, of that _neighbourliness_
which existed in quiet places and persisted around ancient houses:
The summer air of this green hill
’Va-heaved in bosoms now all still,
And all their hopes and all their tears
Be unknown things of other years....
So, if ’twere mine, I’d let alone
The great old House of mossy stone.
Dickens loved the old stage-coaches and travel by them. What he thought
of the new railways and their effect upon landscape, you may read
in _Dombey and Son_. He lived, moreover, to undergo the chastening
experience of a railway collision. But his actual sense of the country
you may translate for yourself from the account, in _Bleak House_, of
the country life of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock. It is worse than
stupid: it is vapid: or, rather, it is not there at all. Will you
conceive Dickens, closing one of those Adelphi-Dedlock chapters and
running his head suddenly into Mr. Wilfrid Blunt’s ballad of _The Old
Squire_?
I like the hunting of the hare
Better than that of the fox;
The new world still is all less fair
Than the old world it mocks....
I leave my neighbours to their thought;
My choice it is, and pride,
On my own lands to find my sport,
In my own fields to ride....
Nor has the world a better thing
Though one should search it round,
Than thus to live, one’s own sole king
Upon one’s own sole ground.
I like the hunting of the hare;
It brings me, day by day,
The memory of old days as fair
With dead men past away.
To these, as homeward still I ply
And pass the churchyard gate
Where all are laid as I must lie,
I stop and raise my hat.
I like the hunting of the hare;
New sports I hold in scorn.
I like to be as my fathers were
In the days e’er I was born.
For a figure like that--hopelessly conservative, if you will, but
conceived of truth, Dickens could only substitute a week-ender (as
we should say nowadays) and make him a pompous ass. By one touch or
two, of understanding what “the stately homes of England” really
stood for--their virtue along with their stupidity--by one touch of
Jane Austen’s wit, shall we say?--Dickens might have made some sort
of a fist of it. As it is, when he wanders anywhere into the country,
he is a lost child, mooning incuriously along the hedgerows with an
impercipience rivalling that of a famous Master of Trinity who once
confessed that his ignorance of botany was conterminous with all
Solomon’s knowledge, since it ranged from the cedar of Lebanon to the
hyssop that grows in the wall. Dickens’ favourite flower (we have it on
record) was a scarlet geranium!
Still, I would be fair, and must mention a fact which I have
experimentally discovered for myself and tested of late in the slow
process of compiling a Book of English Prose (an “Oxford Book,” if you
will forgive me), that, while our poetry from the very first--from
“Sumer is icumen in; Lhude sing cuccu!”--positively riots in country
scenes, sounds, scents, country delights:
--all foison, all abundance,
and soothes us with the deep joy of it, with music and “the herb called
heart’s-ease,” of all such joy, even of all such perception, our prose,
until we come to the middle of the last century, is correspondently
barren. Consider what a unique thing, and unique for generations, was
_The Compleat Angler_! Try of your memory to match it. An Essay of
Temple’s? a few pages of Bunyan, of Evelyn? The Sir Roger de Coverly
papers?--charming; but of the town, surely, and with something of
Saturday-to-Monday patronage not only in pose but in _raison d’être_?
Fielding understood the country better--witness his Squire Allworthy.
But on the whole, and in fairness, if Dickens’ pages exhibit--and
they do--a thin theatrical picture of rural England, without core or
atmosphere, against his childhood’s disinheritance--against the mean
streets and the Marshalsea--we must balance (if I may use a paradoxical
term) the weight of traditional vacuity.
III
But I fear we have a great deal more to empty out of this world of his.
To begin with, we must jettison religion; or at any rate all religion
that gets near to definition by words in a _Credo_. Religious formulae
I think we may say that he hated; and equally that he had little use
for ministers of religion. I can recall but one sympathetic portrait of
an Anglican parson--the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle, Minor Canon of
Cloisterham--and that in his last book, and with scarcely a shadow of a
quality impinged upon it by his vocation, by Holy Orders: Crisparkle,
Minor Canon and muscular Christian, well visualised, is a good fellow
just as Tartar in the same story is a good fellow: nothing more. George
Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, who disliked ecclesiastics, have to give
them understanding, even sympathy, in some degree. Dickens merely
neglects them. Unaccredited missionaries of the Gospel are humbugs all,
in Dickens; uneducated Pharisees, Stiggins’s, Chadbands; devourers of
widows’ (and widowers’) houses; spongers on the kindness and credulity
of poor folk just a little more ignorant than they, while far more
innocent. As for sacred edifices--cathedrals, churches--Dickens uses
them as picturesque, romantic, mouldy, just as suits his convenience--a
last harbourage for Little Nell or an object with a steeple suggesting
to Mr. Wemmick--“Hullo! here’s a church!... let’s get married!” If
Dickens ever conceives of a church as a tabernacle of any faith, I have
yet to find the passage.
You must remember that, while Dickens wrote, Tractarian Movements,
Unitarian Movements, Positivist Movements--Wiseman’s claim, Newman’s
secession, the Gorham judgment, Bishop Colenso’s heresies--Darwin’s
hypothesis, Huxley’s agnostic rejection of doctrine, and so on--that
all these were agitating men’s thoughts as with a succession of shocks
of earthquake. But all these passed Dickens by, as little observed as
felt by him: simply disregarded.
IV
Of political thought, again, his world is almost as empty. He was, in
his way, an early-Victorian Radical. When he saw a legal or political
hardship which hurt or depressed the poor, conventions injurious
to the Commonwealth--the Poor Laws, Debtors’ Prisons, the Court of
Chancery, the Patent (or Circumlocution) Office and so forth, with
the people who batten on such conventions, taking them for granted as
immutable--Dickens struck hard and often effectively. But he struck
at what he saw under his own eyes. Beyond this immediate indignation
he had no reasoned principles of political or social reform. I
have to hand, at this moment, no evidence to confirm a guess which
I will nevertheless hazard, that he hated Jeremy Bentham and all
his works. Certainly the professional, bullying, committee-working
philanthropists--Mrs. Jellaby and Mr. Honeythunder, whose successors
pullulate in this age--were the very devil to him. His simple formula
ever was--in an age when Parliament carried a strong tradition of
respect--“Yes, my Lords and Gentlemen, look on this waif, this corpse,
this broken life. Lost, broken, dead, my Lords and Gentlemen, and all
through your acquiescence, your misfeasance, your neglect!” To the
immediate reader his message ran simply, “Take into your heart God’s
most excellent gift of Charity: by which I mean let Charity begin at
home, in that kingdom of God which is within you, let it operate in
your own daily work; let it but extend to your own neighbours who need
your help; and so--and only so--will the city of God be established on
earth.”
V
I perceive, Gentlemen, that in my hurry I have let slip a great part
of the secret, and so will add but this in hasty summary, catching up,
before retreat, my cloak of _advocatus diaboli_:
(1) In the first place, Dickens’ world was not a world of ideas at all,
but a city “full of folk.” Compared with the world as Carlyle saw it,
or Clough, or Martineau, or Newman, or Arnold, it is void of ideas, if
not entirely unintellectual.
(2) Moreover, and secondly, it is a vivid hurrying world; but
the characters in it--until you come to Pip, say, in _Great
Expectations_--are all quite curiously static; and, as the exception
proves the rule, I am not afraid to back this assertion against _Martin
Chuzzlewit_, for example, in which young Martin is, of set purpose,
to be converted out of the family selfishness. Things happen to Mr.
Pecksniff, to Little Nell, to Mr. Micawber, to Mr. Dombey, to Bradley
Headstone and Eugene Wraybourne, to Sally Brass and her brother: but,
_as the rule_, these things do not happen _within them_, as such
things happen in the soul of any protagonist in a novel by Tolstoy or
Dostoievsky, or as they are intended and traced as happening (say)
in _Romola_. Dombey’s conversion is a mere stage-trick; and, for
Micawber’s apotheosis as a prosperous colonist, let him believe it who
will.
VI
Further--and to conclude on this point--over and beyond its infertility
of thought, Dickens’ is a world in which technical or professional
skill never comes into play to promote anything on earth. We have
spoken of his clergy. His innumerous lawyers, from the Lord Chancellor
to Messrs. Dodson and Fogg (assisted by his own personal experience
in the Law’s service), draw their money for exculpating the guilty or
slowly killing the righteous through hope deferred:
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office--
Equally with lawyers (readers of epitaphs and of _David Copperfield_
will take the allusion) “physicians are in vain.” It would be
interesting [I do not suggest it as a subject of research for a Ph.D.
degree] to count the number of births in Dickens’ novels and discover
an _accoucheur_ who did not contrive to lose either the mother or the
child, or both.
VII
What remains, then, of a world thus emptied of religion, thought,
science?
I reserve the answer for a minute or two.
But I start my approach to it thus: Be the world of Dickens what you
will, he had the first demiurgic gift, of entirely believing in what he
created. The belief may be as frantic as you will: for any true artist
it is the first condition. Well, this remains: nobody has ever doubted
that, in the preface to _David Copperfield_, he wrote the strict truth:
It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how
sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the end of a two-years’
imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing
some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of
all the creatures of his brain are going from him forever. Yet I
had nothing else to tell, unless indeed I were to confess (which
might be of less moment still) that no one can ever believe this
Narrative in the reading more than I believed it in the writing.
Well, there, Gentlemen--just there, and so simply--you have the first
condition of a work of art--its own creator is so possessed that he
thoroughly believes in it. As Henry James once said to me (I recall the
words as nearly as I can), “Ah, yes, how jollily the little figures
dance under the circle of the lamp, until _Good-bye_, and off they go,
to take their chance of the dark!”
VIII
Having that, you have artistic sincerity: of which I wonder, as
experience enlarges, how many faults it cannot excuse--or indeed _what
is the fault it cannot excuse_.
All that remains of the merely artistic secret has been summarised by
Mr. Saintsbury:
It cannot have taken many people of any competence in criticism
very long to discover where, at least in a general way, the secret
of this “new world” of Dickens lies. _It lies, of course, in the
combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-tale
unrealism of general atmosphere._ The note of one or the other or
both, is sometimes forced and then there is a jar: in the later
books this is frequently the case. But in _Pickwick_ it hardly ever
occurs; and therefore, to all happily fit persons, the “suspension
of disbelief,” to adopt and shift Coleridge’s great dictum from
verse to prose fiction, is, except in the case of some of the short
inset stories, never rudely broken. Never, probably, was there a
writer who knew or cared less about Aristotle than Dickens did. If
he had spoken of the father of criticism, he would probably have
talked--one is not certain that he has not sometimes come near to
talking--some of his worst stuff. But certainly, when he did master
it (which was often) nobody ever mastered better than Dickens, in
practice, the Aristotelian doctrine of the impossibility rendered
probable or not improbable.
Well, there you have the artistic secret of Dickens’ world accurately
given, and not by me. _It lies in the combination of the strictest
realism of detail with a fairy-tale unrealism of general atmosphere._
Let me give you, to illustrate this, a single instance out of many.
In his Christmas story, _The Perils of Certain English Prisoners_--an
adventurous story of the sort that Stevenson loved and some of you make
the mistake of despising--a handful of a British garrison with their
women and children in a stockaded fort in South America tensely await
an attack of pirates hopelessly outnumbering them. Now listen to one
paragraph:
(It is a corporal of Marines who tells it.)
“Close up here, men, and gentlemen all!” said the sergeant. “A
place too many in the line.”
The pirates were so close upon us at this time that the foremost
of them were already before the gate. More and more came up with a
great noise, and shouting loudly. When we believed from the sound
that they were all there, we gave three English cheers. The poor
little children joined, and were so fully convinced of our being at
play, that they enjoyed the noise, and were heard clapping their
hands in the silence that followed.
Defoe within his limits does that sort of thing to perfection: but then
Defoe’s world observes the limits of the “real” (as we absurdly call
everything that is not spiritual), has little emotion, scintillates
scarce a glimmer of humour. Dickens handles it in a phantasmagoric
world, charged even to excess with emotion, and is not in the least
afraid to employ it--I quote Mr. Saintsbury again:
Of invading those confines of nonsense which Hazlitt proudly and
wisely claimed as the appanage and province of every Englishman.