the joy to make, nor Lamb--woe upon these divisions of time!--Lewis
Carroll, in whom both would have revelled for his insane logicality of
detail--or, if you prefer it, I will fall back upon Lear’s Nonsense
Books or even upon _A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_--to convince you that,
as a nation, we have this appanage: and if it bewilder a foreigner, or
he deride it, why then we will give him a look, and pass.
IX
Yes, but there is something else.
What else--no mere artistic secret--ties this phantasmagoric world to
ours and makes it universal with ours, conterminous, and so real?
It is no dodge or trick of artistry that can work so incredible a
feat--that can open our hearts to such beings as Dick Swiveller
and Mrs. Gamp (whom in private life you or I would avoid like the
plague)--to enjoy their company, to hang on every word they utter. It
must be some very simple catholic gift, thus to unite the unreal with
the real, thus to make brothers and sisters of all men and women, high
or low.
It is: nor shall I delay you by elaborate pretence to search for it.
For I know; and you know, or will recognise it as soon as I utter the
word. It is _Charity_; the inestimable gift of Charity that Dickens
flings over all things as his magic mantle: so that, whether there
be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall
cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away; and whether
there be little critics tormented about Dickens’ style, in the folds of
that mantle they shall be folded and hushed:
That it may please Thee to preserve all that travel by land or
by water, all women labouring of child, sick persons, and young
children; and to shew Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives.
That it may please Thee to defend, and provide for, the fatherless
children, and widows, and all that are desolate and oppressed.
_That_ is the last secret of Dickens: and _that_ is what George
Santayana means when he writes:
If Christendom should lose everything that is now in the
melting-pot, human life would still remain amiable and quite
adequately human. I draw this comforting assurance from the pages
of Dickens.
DICKENS (V)
I
“I remember,” says Henry James in a wise little Essay on _The Art of
Fiction_--
I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me
that she was much commended for the impression she had managed
to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the
French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned
so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated
on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in
her having, once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed
an open door where, in the household of a _pasteur_, some of the
young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The
glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment
was experience.
I wish I could make you promise, Gentlemen, to bear this little story
in mind whenever some solemn fellow assures you that a man rustically
born and bred could not have written _Hamlet_ or _The Tempest_; “he
would never have seen this, learned or experienced that” and so on: the
simple answer being that under such disadvantage _they_ would never
have written _Hamlet_ or _The Tempest_. They are, in fact, not even
Shakespeares to the extent of understanding how an artist creates, how
the imaginative mind operates.
Henry James, who was an artist and understood that operation, simply
comments on his anecdote that the lady had caught her direct personal
impression and it was enough:
She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism: she also had the
advantage of having seen what it was to be French, so that she
converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality.
Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which when
you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a
much greater source of strength than any accident of residence
or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen
from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the
whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in
general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any
particular corner of it--this cluster of gifts may almost be said
to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town,
and in the most different stages of education.
Yes, Mr. James, for the purpose of your immediate argument “this
cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.” But for
our argument it does, and accurately, constitute imaginative genius.
It is the gift that taught Xenophanes, watching the stars, to catch
the whole piece from the pattern and cry out “All is one--” the gift
that suddenly hitches the particular upon the universal and gives us
a Falstaff, a Don Quixote, a Tartuffe, My Uncle Toby, the Vicar of
Wakefield--
Forms more real than living man.
You know--you must know--that none of these is a photographic portrait
of a living person--of a certain eccentric lodger whom Dickens had
studied in Goswell Street, of a certain bibulous nurse resident in
Kingsgate Street, High Holborn, “at a bird-fancier’s, next door but
one to the celebrated mutton-pie shop”--but children of imagination
begotten upon it by some such observant moment as was vital to Mr.
James’s lady novelist. What, in fact, was the genesis of Mr. Pickwick?
Dickens, you recall, was to write the letterpress accompaniment to a
series of humorous sporting sketches by Seymour. The publisher Mr.
Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, has left this uncontradicted record:
As this letter is to be historical, I may as well claim what
little belongs to me in the matter, and that is the figure of
Pickwick. Seymour’s first sketch was of a long, thin man. The
present immortal one he made from my description of a friend of
mine at Richmond--a fat old beau who would wear, in spite of the
ladies’ protests, drab tights and black gaiters. His name was John
Foster.[1]
[1] Is there not a blend of Mr. Tracy Tupman here?
Seymour drew the figure from Mr. Chapman’s description: Dickens put
life into it--yet more life--and made it a “nurseling of immortality.”
That, believe me, is how it happens; just so, and in no other way: and
the operative power is called Genius. Remind yourselves of this when
learned men, discussing Shakespeare, assure you they have fished the
particular murex up which dyed Hamlet’s inky cloak. Themselves are the
cuttle, and only theirs is the ink.
II
But we talk of Dickens: and the trouble with Dickens is that he--whose
brain in creating personage I suppose to be the most fecund that ever
employed itself on fiction--to the end of his days kept a curious
distrust of himself and a propensity for this childish expedient of
“drawing from the life.” It is miserable, to me, to think of this
giant who could turn off a Pickwick, a Sam Weller, a Dick Swiveller,
a Mark Tapley, a Sarah Gamp, Captain Cuttle, Mr. Dick, Mr. Toots, Mr.
Crummles, Mr. Mantalini, Dodson and Fogg, Codlin and Short, Spenlow
and Jorkins, Mrs. Jellaby, Mrs. Billickin, Mrs. Gargery, Mrs. Wilfer,
Mr. Twemlow, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Mr. Sapsea, Silas Wegg, and indeed
anyone you take into your own experience of life--from Mr. Chadband
to the Dolls’ Dressmaker, with hundreds of lesser characters no less
distinct--it is miserable to me, I say, that a Genius with all this
largess to mint and scatter should have taxed his acquaintance to stamp
their effigies upon poorer coin.
III
But let us discriminate. In “drawing from life” much will depend, as
Aristotle might say, on (_a_) the extent, (_b_) the manner, (_c_) your
intention: as likewise upon (_d_) the person drawn. I exclude all
such portraits as are likely to provoke an action at law; for these
come to be assessed under separate rules of criticism: and in general
we may say of them that they should be avoided from the instinct of
self-preservation rather than on grounds of disinterested aesthetic.
Confining ourselves, then, to portraits which are not actionable, we
may take, as an extreme instance, Samuel Butler’s _The Way of All
Flesh_. For in this book the persons portrayed are the author’s own
parents, and he portrays them in a manner and with intention to
make them odious, and to any extent: which seems to involve the nice
moral question whether a person the best able to do a thing should
not sometimes be the person who least ought to do it. And should
the injunction against laying hands on your father Parmenides cover
Parmenides if he happen to be your maiden aunt?--and maybe, too, she
can retort, because you come of a literary family, you know! This power
of retort, again, complicates a question which, you perceive, begins
to be delicate. Ought you to catch anyone and hit him where he cannot
hit back? Parmenides is no longer a relative but (say) a publisher, and
you have--or think you have--reason to believe that he has cheated you.
(And before you answer that this is incredible, let me say that I am
dealing with an actual case, in which, however, I was not a party.) Are
you justified in writing a work of fiction which holds him up to public
opprobrium under a thin disguise? In my opinion you are not: because
it means your attacking the fellow from a plane on which he can get no
footing, to retaliate.
But it may be urged against him that Dickens by consent, and pretty
well on his own admission, drew portraits of his mother in Mrs.
Nickleby, and of his father in Mr. Micawber, and again in old Mr.
Dorrit of the Marshalsea--this last, I am sure, the nearest to life.
Well, I pass the question of provocation or moral excuse, observing
only that Dickens tholed a childhood of culpable, even of damnable,
neglect, whereas the parents of Samuel Butler did at least wing, with
a Shrewsbury and Cambridge education, the barbs he was to shoot into
their dead breasts. Dickens’ parents turned him down, at ten, to a
blacking-factory, and, as we saw in our last lecture, when the moment
came to release him from the blacking-warehouse his mother tried to
insist on his returning.
“I do not,” he records to Forster, “write resentfully or angrily,
for I know how all these things have worked together to make me
what I am; but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I
never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.”
IV
So there was provocation in plenty, humiliation inflicted on a young
and infinitely sensitive mind. But, when we have granted that Dickens
borrowed from his mother for Mrs. Nickleby, from his father for Mr.
Micawber and the Elder Dorrit, mark you how genius diverges from
the mere hint--how far Micawber differs from Dorrit, while both are
elemental. Mark you further how and while both are sublimated and Mrs.
Nickleby too--how much charity has to do with the chemical process. Who
thinks of Mrs. Nickleby but as an amiable noodle? Who of Mr. Micawber,
but to enjoy his company? Who of Mr. Dorrit but with a sad ironical
pity? Where in any portrait of the three can you trace a stroke of that
vindictiveness you find bitten upon page after page of _The Way of All
Flesh_?
Moreover, choosing Old Dorrit, the least sympathetically but the most
subtly drawn of the three, I would ask you, studying that character
for yourselves, to note how Dickens conveys that, while much of
its infirmity is native, much also comes of the punishment of the
Marshalsea against which the poor creature’s pomposities are at once
a narcotic, and a protest, however futile, of the dignity of a human
soul, however abject. Mark especially, at the close of Chapter XXXV,
how delicately he draws the shade of the Marshalsea over Little Dorrit
herself. He would fain keep her, born and bred in that unwholesome den,
its one uncontaminated “prison-flower”--but with all his charity he is
(as I tried to show you in a previous lecture) a magisterial artist and
the truth compels him. Mark then the workings of this child’s mind on
hearing the glad news of her father’s release. Here is the passage:
Little Dorrit had been thinking too. After softly putting his [her
father’s] hair aside, and touching his forehead with her lips, she
looked towards Arthur, who came nearer to her, and pursued in a low
whisper the subject of her thoughts.
“Mr. Clennam, will he pay all his debts before he leaves here?”
“No doubt. All.”
“All the debts for which he has been imprisoned here, all my life
and longer?”
“No doubt.”
There was something of uncertainty and remonstrance in her look;
something that was not all satisfaction. He wondered to detect it,
and said:
“You are glad that he should do so?”
“Are you?” asked Little Dorrit wistfully.
“Am I? Most heartily glad!”
“Then I know I ought to be.”
“And are you not?”
“It seems to me hard,” said Little Dorrit, “that he should have
lost so many years and suffered so much, and at last pay all the
debts as well. It seems to me hard that he should pay in life and
money both.”
“My dear child----” Clennam was beginning.
“Yes, I know I am wrong,” she pleaded timidly. “Don’t think any
worse of me; it has all grown up with me here.”
The prison, which could spoil so many things, had tainted Little
Dorrit’s mind no more than this. Engendered as the confusion was,
in compassion for the poor prisoner, her father, it was the first
speck Clennam had ever seen, it was the last speck Clennam ever
saw, of the prison atmosphere upon her.
Now I call that, Gentlemen, the true novelist’s stroke; rightly
divined, so suddenly noted that we, who had not expected it, consent at
once with a “Yes, yes--of course it happened so.”
V
But what I wish you to grasp is--in a man who could play strokes like
that by the score and conjure up out of his vasty deeps anything from
Dick Swiveller to Uncle Pumblechook, from the Marchioness to Mrs. Joe
Gargery--the silliness of diffidence which drove him again and again
to mere copying “from the life.” The superstition was idle, even when
it did no harm. Having, in _Oliver Twist_, to describe a harsh and
insolent Magistrate, Dickens (who could invent a Mr. Nupkins at will)
took pains to be introduced to the Hatton Garden Police Court over
which a certain Mr. Laing presided. He took these pains scrupulously,
through an official channel (as they say), with the double result that
we get Mr. Fang in the novel and that the Home Secretary very soon
found it convenient to remove Mr. Laing from the Bench--and this,
maybe, was all for the good--but you see how our author has already
mixed up his conception of Charles Dickens as an author with that of
Charles Dickens as a popular institution.
We will suppose that this Mr. Laing got his deserts. None the less
Dickens was hitting him on a pitch where he had no standing and could
not hit back. And I would warn you of this, Gentlemen--that if, trained
here, you go forth to do battle with wrongdoing, one of two methods is
equally fair, and no other. Either you must persuade men generally that
such and such a principle should govern their actions, or, if you have
to take a particular wrongdoer by the throat, you should in the first
place be absolutely sure of your facts, and, in the second, take him
preferably on his own ground: so that his defeat will be righteous and
plain to all, and he can excuse nothing on your advantage of position.
I have diverged into advising you as artists in public life: but the
advice is not irrelevant, for it echoes that which, repeatedly given
to Dickens by his best friends, he repeatedly ignored, yet never
without detriment to his art and not seldom with irritating personal
consequences. You all know how he came to grief over his caricatures of
Landor and Leigh Hunt in _Bleak House_. Laurence Boythorne was merely
a cheap superficial, not ill-natured, portrait. Landor, who never
condescended to notice it, might well have shrugged his tall shoulders
and said, “Is this the friend who visited Fiesole for my sake, and
sent me home the only gift I demanded--an ivy-leaf from my old Villa
there ... and is _this_ what he knows of me, or even what I seemed
to him?” (The ivy-leaf was found wrapped away among Landor’s papers,
twenty years later.) But nothing--least of all its verisimilitude--can
excuse the outrage perpetrated upon Leigh Hunt in the mask of Harold
Skimpole: for, as Forster observes, to this character in the plot
itself of _Bleak House_ is assigned a part which no fascinating foibles
or gaieties of speech could redeem from contempt. Hunt, who (with all
his faults) never lacked generosity, had been among the first to hail
and help Dickens, was (as often happens) the last to recognise himself
for the intended victim: but when some kind friend drew his attention
to the calculated wound, it went deep. Dickens apologised in a letter
which did its best, but could, in the nature of things, amount to no
more than kindly evasiveness. He was guilty, and he knew it. Hunt had
been wounded in the house of his friend. It was all very well, or ill,
for Dickens to plead (as he did) that in Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby he
had played a like trick on his own father and mother. The first and
most obvious answer to that is, “Well, if you did, you ought to have
known better”--the second, “And, anyhow, why should that make it any
the more agreeable to _me_?” But Mrs. Nickleby and Mr. Micawber (as we
saw) are kindly, even lovable characters. Harold Skimpole is at once
abject and mischievous: and as Forster very justly remarks:
The kindly or unkindly impression makes all the difference
where liberties are taken with a friend; and even this entirely
favourable condition will not excuse the practice to many, where
near relatives are concerned.
But Landor and Leigh Hunt, you may say, were literary men of their
hands, well able to defend themselves. Well, then, take down your
_David Copperfield_ and compare the Miss Mowcher of Chapter XXII with
the Miss Mowcher of Chapter XXXII. You will see at once that something
very queer has happened; that the Miss Mowcher of the earlier chapter,
obviously meant to be an odious little go-between in the Steerforth
plot, has changed into a decent little creature at once pathetic and
purposeless. Why? The answer is that the deformed original, recognising
her portrait, had in the interim addressed to Dickens a poignant
letter of remonstrance. Dickens, writing the story in monthly numbers,
apologised and hastily readjusted his plot.
These things work out to this--that in dealing with Dickens we have
to lay our account--as in dealing with Shakespeare we have to lay our
account--with a genius capable of vast surprises but at any point
liable to bolt out of self-control. I have no theories at all of what
a genius should be, or of how it ought to behave. Let us take what the
gods give and be thankful: and with Dickens as with Shakespeare--both
of whom write execrably at times and at times above admiration--we
have to accept this inequality as a condition of our arriving at the
very best. Even if we allow that a stricter schooling would have
spoilt both, and is indeed the bane of originality: still let us keep
our heads and tell ourselves that a great part of _Oliver Twist_ is
execrable stuff and no less, as the talk of Speed in _The Two Gentlemen
of Verona_ or of Lucio in _Measure for Measure_ is execrable stuff and
no less. By all means let us keep in mind that these flagrancies are
human and, if you will, a necessary part of any Shakespeare, of any
Dickens. But let us be quite clear in judging them as counterweights,
and tell ourselves that a Virgil or a Dante--yes, or a Cervantes--would
never need to ask such forgiveness from us.
VI
_Corruptio optimi pessima_ is one of those orotund sayings which
impress for the moment but are liable to have their wisdom very
considerably spokeshaved (so to speak) as soon as we apply the Socratic
knife. Is _Tarzan of the Apes_, after all, a corruption of the best?
And, if so, from what incalculable height did Lucifer plunge, and how
many days did he take before he broke the roof of the railway station
and scattered himself over the bookstalls? We may derive solace, if
we will, by telling ourselves that those horrible days in the Chandos
Street blacking-warehouse were a part of the education of Dickens’
genius, taught it to _observe_, and so on. But I say to you, as he
said of Little Dorrit, that such a shadow of cruelty, induced upon a
sensitive boy, must inevitably leave its stain: and I do most earnestly
ask you, some of whom may find yourselves trustees for the education
of poor children, if you are sure that Dickens himself was the better
for a starved childhood? For my part I can give that starvation little
credit for his achievement, reading its effect rather into his many
faults of taste and judgment.
VII
It is usual to class among the first of these faults a defective sense
of English prose: and the commonest arraignment lies against his use of
blank verse in moments of pathos or of deep emotion. Well, but let us
clear our minds of cant about English prose, and abstain from talking
about it as if the Almighty had invented its final pattern somewhere
in the eighteenth century. Prose--and Poetry too, for that matter--is
a way of putting things worth record into memorable speech. English
writers of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century found, with
some measure of consent, an admirable fashion of doing this, and have
left a tradition: and it is a tradition to which I, personally, would
cling if I could, admiring it as I do, and admiring so much less many
pages of Dickens and a thousand of pages of Carlyle. After all, so long
as the thing gets itself said, and effectively, and memorably, who are
we to prescribe rules or parse sentences? What, for example, could that
mysterious body, the College of Preceptors, do to improve the grammar
of _Antony and Cleopatra_, even if they persuaded one another “Well,
apparently they have come to stay, and perhaps we had better call upon
them, my dear”?
VIII
Having, then, no preconceived notions about prose, and few prejudices
save against certain locutions of which I confess I dislike them mainly
because I dislike the sort of person who employs them--I assert that
Dickens, aiming straight at his purpose, wrote countless pages of quite
splendid prose. I defy you, for example, to suggest how a sense of the
eeriness of the Woolwich marshes with an apprehension of horror behind
the fog could be better conveyed in words than Dickens conveys them
in the opening chapters of _Great Expectations_; as I ask you how the
earliest impressions of a sensitive child can be better conveyed in
language than they are in the early chapters of _David Copperfield_.
IX
But even this apologia--sufficient as I think it--does not cover the
whole defence. We have picked up a habit of consenting with critics
who tell us that Dickens’ prose is careless and therefore not worth
studying. Believe me, you are mistaken if you believe these critics.
Dickens sometimes wrote execrably: far oftener he penned at a stretch
page upon page of comment and conversation that brilliantly effect
their purpose and are, _therefore_, good writing. You will allow, I
dare say, his expertness in glorifying the loquacity that comes of a
well-meaning heart and a rambling head. Recall, for example--casually
chosen out of hundreds--Mrs. Chivery on her son John, nursing his
love-lornness amid the washing in the back-yard: and remark the _idiom_
of it:
“It’s the only change he takes,” said Mrs. Chivery, shaking her
head afresh. “He won’t go out, even to the back-yard, when there’s
no linen: but when there’s linen to keep the neighbours’ eyes off,
he’ll sit there, hours. Hours he will. Says he feels as if it
was groves.... Our John has everyone’s good word and everyone’s
good wish. He played with her as a child when in that yard she
played. He has known her ever since. He went out upon the Sunday
afternoon when in this very parlour he had dined, and met her,
with appointment or without appointment which I do not pretend to
say. He made his offer to her. Her brother and sister is high in
their views and against Our John. ‘No, John, I cannot have you, I
cannot have any husband, it is not my intentions ever to become a
wife, it is my intentions to be always a sacrifice, farewell. Find
another worthy of you and forget me!’ This is the way in which she
is doomed to be a constant slave, to them that are not worthy that
a constant slave unto them she should be. This is the way in which
Our John has come to find no pleasure but in taking cold among the
linen....”