It was said for many years, until the reversal that now befalls the
sayings of many years had happened to this also, that Thackeray was the
unkind satirist and Dickens the kind humourist. The truth seems to be
that Dickens imagined more evil people than did Thackeray, but that he
had an eager faith in good ones. Nothing places him so entirely out of
date as his trust in human sanctity, his love of it, his hope for it, his
leap at it. He saw it in a woman's face first met, and drew it to
himself in a man's hand first grasped. He looked keenly for it. And if
he associated minor degrees of goodness with any kind of folly or mental
ineptitude, he did not so relate sanctity; though he gave it, for
companion, ignorance; and joined the two, in Joe Gargery, most tenderly.
We might paraphrase, in regard to these two great authors, Dr. Johnson's
famous sentence: "Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no joys."
Dickens has many scoundrels, but Thackeray has no saints. Helen
Pendennis is not holy, for she is unjust and cruel; Amelia is not holy,
for she is an egoist in love; Lady Castlewood is not holy, for she too is
cruel; and even Lady Jane is not holy, for she is jealous; nor is Colonel
Newcome holy, for he is haughty; nor Dobbin, for he turns with a taunt
upon a plain sister; nor Esmond, for he squanders his best years in love
for a material beauty; and these are the best of his good people. And
readers have been taught to praise the work of him who makes none
perfect; one does not meet perfect people in trains or at dinner, and
this seemed good cause that the novelist should be praised for his
moderation; it seemed to imitate the usual measure and moderation of
nature.
But Charles Dickens closed with a divine purpose divinely different. He
consented to the counsels of perfection. And thus he made Joe Gargery,
not a man one might easily find in a forge; and Esther Summerson, not a
girl one may easily meet at a dance; and Little Dorrit, who does not come
to do a day's sewing; not that the man and the women are inconceivable,
but that they are unfortunately improbable. They are creatures created
through a creating mind that worked its six days for the love of good,
and never rested until the seventh, the final Sabbath. But granting that
they are the counterpart, the heavenly side, of caricature, this is not
to condemn them. Since when has caricature ceased to be an art good for
man--an honest game between him and nature? It is a tenable opinion that
frank caricature is a better incident of art than the mere exaggeration
which is the more modern practice. The words mean the same thing in
their origin--an overloading. But, as we now generally delimit the
words, they differ. Caricature, when it has the grotesque inspiration,
makes for laughter, and when it has the celestial, makes for admiration;
in either case there is a good understanding between the author and the
reader, or between the draughtsman and the spectator. We need not, for
example, suppose that Ibsen sat in a room surrounded by a repeating
pattern of his hair and whiskers on the wallpaper, but it makes us most
exceedingly mirthful and joyous to see him thus seated in Mr. Max
Beerbohm's drawing; and perhaps no girl ever went through life without
harbouring a thought of self, but it is very good for us all to know that
such a girl was thought of by Dickens, that he loved his thought, and
that she is ultimately to be traced, through Dickens, to God.
But exaggeration establishes no good understanding between the reader and
the author. It is a solemn appeal to our credulity, and we are right to
resent it. It is the violence of a weakling hand--the worst manner of
violence. Exaggeration is conspicuous in the newer poetry, and is so
far, therefore, successful, conspicuousness being its aim. But it was
also the vice of Swinburne, and was the bad example he set to the
generation that thought his tunings to be the finest "music." For
instance, in an early poem he intends to tell us how a man who loved a
woman welcomed the sentence that condemned him to drown with her, bound,
his impassioned breast against hers, abhorring. He might have convinced
us of that welcome by one phrase of the profound exactitude of genius.
But he makes his man cry out for the greatest bliss and the greatest
imaginable glory to be bestowed upon the judge who pronounces the
sentence. And this is merely exaggeration. One takes pleasure in
rebuking the false ecstasy by a word thus prim and prosaic. The poet
intended to impose upon us, and he fails; we "withdraw our attention," as
Dr. Johnson did when the conversation became foolish. In truth we do
more, for we resent exaggeration if we care for our English language. For
exaggeration writes relaxed, and not elastic, words and verses; and it is
possible that the language suffers something, at least temporarily--during
the life of a couple of generations, let us say--from the loss of
elasticity and rebound brought about by such strain. Moreover,
exaggeration has always to outdo itself progressively. There should have
been a Durdles to tell this Swinburne that the habit of exaggerating,
like that of boasting, "grows upon you."
It may be added that later poetry shows us an instance of exaggeration in
the work of that major poet, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie. His violence and
vehemence, his extremity, are generally signs not of weakness but of
power; and yet once he reaches a breaking-point that power should never
know. This is where his Judith holds herself to be so smirched and
degraded by the proffer of a reverent love (she being devoted to one
only, a dead man who had her heart) that thenceforth no bar is left to
her entire self-sacrifice to the loathed enemy Holofernes. To this, too,
the prim rebuke is the just one, a word for the mouth of governesses: "My
dear, you exaggerate."
It may be briefly said that exaggeration takes for granted some degree of
imbecility in the reader, whereas caricature takes for granted a high
degree of intelligence. Dickens appeals to our intelligence in all his
caricature, whether heavenly, as in Joe Gargery, or impish, as in Mrs.
Micawber. The word "caricature" that is used a thousand times to
reproach him is the word that does him singular honour.
If I may define my own devotion to Dickens, it may be stated as chiefly,
though not wholly, admiration of his humour, his dramatic tragedy, and
his watchfulness over inanimate things and landscape. Passages of his
books that are ranged otherwise than under those characters often leave
me out of the range of their appeal or else definitely offend me. And
this is not for the customary reason--that Dickens could not draw a
gentleman, that Dickens could not draw a lady. It matters little whether
he could or not. But as a fact he did draw a gentleman, and drew him
excellently well, in Cousin Feenix, as Mr. Chesterton has decided. The
question of the lady we may waive; if it is difficult to prove a
negative, it is difficult also to present one; and to the making, or
producing, or liberating, or detaching, or exalting, of the character of
a lady there enter many negatives; and Dickens was an obvious and a
positive man. Esther Summerson is a lady, but she is so much besides
that her ladyhood does not detach itself from her sainthood and her
angelhood, so as to be conspicuous--if, indeed, conspicuousness may be
properly predicated of the quality of a lady. It is a conventional
saying that sainthood and angelhood include the quality of a lady, but
that saying is not true; a lady has a great number of negatives all her
own, and also some things positive that are not at all included in
goodness. However this may be--and it is not important--Dickens, the
genial Dickens, makes savage sport of women. Such a company of envious
dames and damsels cannot be found among the persons of the satirist
Thackeray. Kate Nickleby's beauty brings upon her at first sight the
enmity of her workshop companions; in the innocent pages of "Pickwick"
the aunt is jealous of the niece, and the niece retorts by wounding the
vanity of the aunt as keenly as she may; and so forth through early books
and late. He takes for granted that the women, old and young, who are
not his heroines, wage this war within the sex, being disappointed by
defect of nature and fortune. Dickens is master of wit, humour, and
derision; and it must be confessed that his derision is abundant, and is
cast upon an artificially exposed and helpless people; that is, he, a
man, derides the women who miss what a man declared to be their "whole
existence."
The advice which M. Rodin received in his youth from Constant--"Learn to
see the other side; never look at forms only in extent; learn to see them
always in relief"--is the contrary of the counsel proper for a reader of
Dickens. That counsel should be, "Do not insist upon seeing the immortal
figures of comedy 'in the round.' You are to be satisfied with their
face value, the face of two dimensions. It is not necessary that you
should seize Mr. Pecksniff from beyond, and grasp the whole man and his
destinies." The hypocrite is a figure dreadful and tragic, a shape of
horror; and Mr. Pecksniff is a hypocrite, and a bright image of heart-
easing comedy. For comic fiction cannot exist without some such paradox.
Without it, where would our laugh be in response to the generous genius
which gives us Mr. Pecksniff's parenthesis to the mention of sirens
("Pagan, I regret to say"); and the scene in which Mr. Pecksniff, after a
stormy domestic scene within, goes as it were accidentally to the door to
admit the rich kinsman he wishes to propitiate? "Then Mr. Pecksniff,
gently warbling a rustic stave, put on his garden hat, seized a spade,
and opened the street door, as if he thought he had, from his vineyard,
heard a modest rap, but was not quite certain." The visitor had
thundered at the door while outcries of family strife had been rising in
the house. "'It is an ancient pursuit, gardening. Primitive, my dear
sir; for, if I am not mistaken, Adam was the first of the calling. My
Eve, I grieve to say, is no more, sir; but' (and here he pointed to his
spade, and shook his head, as if he were not cheerful without an effort)
'but I do a little bit of Adam still.' He had by this time got them into
the best parlour, where the portrait by Spiller and the bust by Spoker
were." And again, Mr. Pecksniff, hospitable at the supper table:
"'This,' he said, in allusion to the party, not the wine, 'is a Mingling
that repays one for much disappointment and vexation. Let us be merry.'
Here he took a captain's biscuit. 'It is a poor heart that never
rejoices; and our hearts are not poor. No!' With such stimulants to
merriment did he beguile the time and do the honours of the table."
Moreover it is a mournful thing and an inexplicable, that a man should be
as mad as Mr. Dick. None the less is it a happy thing for any reader to
watch Mr. Dick while David explains his difficulty to Traddles. Mr. Dick
was to be employed in copying, but King Charles the First could not be
kept out of the manuscripts; "Mr. Dick in the meantime looking very
deferentially and seriously at Traddles, and sucking his thumb." And the
amours of the gentleman in gaiters who threw the vegetable-marrows over
the garden wall. Mr. F.'s aunt, again! And Augustus Moddle, our own
Moddle, whom a great French critic most justly and accurately brooded
over. "Augustus, the gloomy maniac," says Taine, "makes us shudder." A
good medical diagnosis. Long live the logical French intellect!
Truly, Humour talks in his own language, nay, his own dialect, whereas
Passion and Pity speak the universal tongue.
It is strange--it seems to me deplorable--that Dickens himself was not
content to leave his wonderful hypocrite--one who should stand
imperishable in comedy--in the two dimensions of his own admirable art.
After he had enjoyed his own Pecksniff, tasting him with the "strenuous
tongue" of Keats's voluptuary bursting "joy's grapes against his palate
fine," Dickens most unfairly gives himself the other and incompatible joy
of grasping his Pecksniff in the third dimension, seizes him "in the
round," horsewhips him out of all keeping, and finally kicks him out of a
splendid art of fiction into a sorry art of "poetical justice," a
Pecksniff not only defeated but undone.
And yet Dickens's retribution upon sinners is a less fault than his
reforming them. It is truly an act denoting excessive simplicity of mind
in him. He never veritably allows his responsibility as a man to lapse.
Men ought to be good, or else to become good, and he does violence to his
own excellent art, and yields it up to his sense of morality. Ah, can we
measure by years the time between that day and this? Is the fastidious,
the impartial, the non-moral novelist only the grandchild, and not the
remote posterity, of Dickens, who would not leave Scrooge to his egoism,
or Gradgrind to his facts, or Mercy Pecksniff to her absurdity, or Dombey
to his pride? Nay, who makes Micawber finally to prosper? Truly, the
most unpardonable thing Dickens did in those deplorable last chapters of
his was the prosperity of Mr. Micawber. "Of a son, in difficulties"--the
perfect Micawber nature is respected as to his origin, and then perverted
as to his end. It is a pity that Mr. Peggotty ever came back to England
with such tidings. And our last glimpse of the emigrants had been made
joyous by the sight of the young Micawbers on the eve of emigration;
"every child had its own wooden spoon attached to its body by a strong
line," in preparation for Colonial life. And then Dickens must needs go
behind the gay scenes, and tell us that the long and untiring delight of
the book was over. Mr. Micawber, in the Colonies, was never again to
make punch with lemons, in a crisis of his fortunes, and "resume his
peeling with a desperate air"; nor to observe the expression of his
friends' faces during Mrs. Micawber's masterly exposition of the
financial situation or of the possibilities of the coal trade; nor to eat
walnuts out of a paper bag what time the die was cast and all was over.
Alas! nothing was over until Mr. Micawber's pecuniary liabilities were
over, and the perfect comedy turned into dulness, the joyous
impossibility of a figure of immortal fun into cold improbability.
There are several such late or last chapters that one would gladly cut
away: that of Mercy Pecksniff's pathos, for example; that of Mr. Dombey's
installation in his daughter's home; that which undeceives us as to Mr.
Boffin's antic disposition. But how true and how whole a heart it was
that urged these unlucky conclusions! How shall we venture to complain?
The hand that made its Pecksniff in pure wit, has it not the right to
belabour him in earnest--albeit a kind of earnest that disappoints us?
And Mr. Dombey is Dickens's own Dombey, and he must do what he will with
that finely wrought figure of pride. But there is a little irony in the
fact that Dickens leaves more than one villain to his orderly fate for
whom we care little either way; it is nothing to us, whom Carker never
convinced, that the train should catch him, nor that the man with the
moustache and the nose, who did but weary us, should be crushed by the
falling house. Here the end holds good in art, but the art was not good
from the first. But then, again, neither does Bill Sikes experience a
change of heart, nor Jonas Chuzzlewit; and the end of each is most
excellently told.
George Meredith said that the most difficult thing to write in fiction
was dialogue. But there is surely one thing at least as difficult--a
thing so rarely well done that a mere reader might think it to be more
difficult than dialogue; and that is the telling _what happened_.
Something of the fatal languor and preoccupation that persist beneath all
the violence of our stage--our national undramatic character--is
perceptible in the narrative of our literature. The things the usual
modern author says are proportionately more energetically produced than
those he tells. But Dickens, being simple and dramatic and capable of
one thing at a time, and that thing whole, tells us what happened with a
perfect speed which has neither hurry nor delays. Those who saw him act
found him a fine actor, and this we might know by reading the murder in
_Oliver Twist_, the murder in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, the coming of the
train upon Carker, the long moment of recognition when Pip sees his
guest, the convict, reveal himself in his chambers at night. The swift
spirit, the hammering blow of his narrative, drive the great storm in
_David Copperfield_ through the poorest part of the book--Steerforth's
story. There is surely no greater gale to be read of than this: from the
first words, "'Don't you think that,' I said to the coachman, 'a very
remarkable sky?'" to the end of a magnificent chapter. "Flying clouds
tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the
clouds than there were depths below them. . . There had been a wind all
day; and it was rising then with an extraordinary great sound . . . Long
before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips . . . The water was out
over the flat country, and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and
had its stress of little breakers. When we came within sight of the sea,
the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the boiling abyss,
were like glimpses of another shore, with towers and buildings. . . The
people came to their doors all aslant, and with streaming hair." David
dreams of a cannonade, when at last he "fell--off a tower and down a
precipice--into the depths of sleep." In the morning, "the wind might
have lulled a little, though not more sensibly than if the cannonading I
had dreamed of had been diminished by the silencing of half a dozen guns
out of hundreds." "It went from me with a shock, like a ball from a
rifle," says David in another place, after the visit of a delirious
impulse; here is the volley of departure, the shock of passion vanishing
more perceptibly than it came.
The tempest in _David Copperfield_ combines Dickens's dramatic tragedy
of narrative with his wonderful sense of sea and land. But here are
landscapes in quietness: "There has been rain this afternoon, and a
wintry shudder goes among the little pools in the cracked, uneven flag-
stones. . . Some of the leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary within
the low-arched cathedral door; but two men coming out resist them, and
cast them out with their feet:" The autumn leaves fall thick, "but never
fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness." Again, "Now
the woods settle into great masses as if they were one profound tree."
And yet again, "I held my mother in my embrace, and she held me in hers;
and among the still woods in the silence of the summer day there seemed
to be nothing but our two troubled minds that was not at peace." Yet,
with a thousand great felicities of diction, Dickens had no _body_ of
style.
Dickens, having the single and simple heart of a moralist, had also the
simple eyes of a free intelligence, and the light heart. He gave his
senses their way, and well did they serve him. Thus his eyes--and no
more modern man in anxious search of "impressions" was ever so simple and
so masterly: "Mr. Vholes gauntly stalked to the fire, and warmed his
funereal gloves." "'I thank you,' said Mr. Vholes, putting out his long
black sleeve, to check the ringing of the bell, 'not any.'" Mr. and Mrs.
Tope "are daintily sticking sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces
of the cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the button-
holes of the Dean & Chapter." The two young Eurasians, brother and
sister, "had a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a
certain air of being the objects of the chase rather than the followers."
This phrase lacks elegance--and Dickens is not often inelegant, as those
who do not read him may be surprised to learn--but the impression is
admirable; so is that which follows: "An indefinable kind of pause coming
and going on their whole expression, both of face and form." Here is
pure, mere impression again: "Miss Murdstone, who was busy at her writing-
desk, gave me her cold finger-nails." Lady Tippins's hand is "rich in
knuckles." And here is vision with great dignity: "All beyond his figure
was a vast dark curtain, in solemn movement towards one quarter of the
heavens."
With that singleness of sight--and his whole body was full of the light
of it--he had also the single hearing; the scene is in the Court of
Chancery on a London November day: "Leaving this address ringing in the
rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog knows him
no more." "Mr. Vholes emerged into the silence he could scarcely be said
to have broken, so stifled was his tone." "Within the grill-gate of the
chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the fast-darkening organ,
white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and falling
in a cracked monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard . . .
until the organ and the choir burst forth and drowned it in a sea of
music. Then the sea fell, and the dying voice made another feeble
effort; and then the sea rose high and beat its life out, and lashed the
roof, and surged among the arches, and pierced the heights of the great
tower; and then the sea was dry and all was still." And this is how a
listener overheard men talking in the cathedral hollows: "The word
'confidence,' shattered by the echoes, but still capable of being pieced
together, is uttered."
Wit, humour, derision--to each of these words we assign by custom a part
in the comedy of literature; and (again) those who do not read
Dickens--perhaps even those who read him a little--may acclaim him as a
humourist and not know him as a wit. But that writer is a wit, whatever
his humour, who tells us of a member of the Tite Barnacle family who had
held a sinecure office against all protest, that "he died with his drawn
salary in his hand." But let it be granted that Dickens the humourist is
foremost and most precious. For we might well spare the phrase of wit
just quoted rather than the one describing Traddles (whose hair stood
up), as one who looked "as though he had seen a cheerful ghost." Or
rather than this:-
He was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg
naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer that he might
be expected--if his development received no untimely check--to be
completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months.
Or rather than the incident of the butcher and the beef-steak. He gently
presses it, in a cabbage leaf, into Tom Pinch's pocket. "'For meat,' he
said with some emotion, 'must be humoured, not drove.'"
A generation, between his own and the present, thought Dickens to be
vulgar; if the cause of that judgement was that he wrote about people in
shops, the cause is discredited now that shops are the scenes of the
novelist's research. "High life" and most wretched life have now given
place to the little shop and its parlour, during a year or two. But Dr.
Brown, the author of _Rab and His Friends_, thought that Dickens
committed vulgarities in his diction. "A good man was Robin" is right
enough; but "He was a good man, was Robin" is not so well, and we must
own that it is Dickensian; but assuredly Dickens writes such phrases as
it were dramatically, playing the cockney. I know of but two words that
Dickens habitually misuses, and Charles Lamb misuses one of them
precisely in Dickens's manner; it is not worth while to quote them. But
for these his English is admirable; he chooses what is good and knows
what is not. A little representative collection of the bad or foolish
English of his day might be made by gathering up what Dickens forbore and
what he derided; for instance, Mr. Micawber's portly phrase, "gratifying
emotions of no common description," and Littimer's report that "the young
woman was partial to the sea." This was the polite language of that
time, as we conclude when we find it to be the language that Charlotte
Bronte shook off; but before she shook it off she used it. Dickens, too,
had something to throw off; in his earlier books there is an
inflation--rounded words fill the inappropriate mouth of Bill Sikes
himself--but he discarded them with a splendid laugh. They are charged
upon Mr. Micawber in his own character as author. See him as he sits by
to hear Captain Hopkins read the petition in the debtors' prison "from
His Most Gracious Majesty's unfortunate subjects." Mr. Micawber
listened, we read, "with a little of an author's vanity, contemplating
(not severely) the spikes upon the opposite wall." It should be
remembered that when Dickens shook himself free of everything that
hampered his genius he was not so much beloved or so much applauded as
when he gave to his cordial readers matter for facile sentiment and for
humour of the second order. His public were eager to be moved and to
laugh, and he gave them Little Nell and Sam Weller; he loved to please
them, and it is evident that he pleased himself also. Mr. Micawber, Mr.
Pecksniff, Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Chick, Mrs. Pipchin, Mr. Augustus Moddle,
Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Plornish, are not so famous as Sam Weller and Little
Nell, nor is Traddles, whose hair looked as though he had seen a cheerful
ghost.
We are told of the delight of the Japanese man in a chance finding of
something strange-shaped, an asymmetry that has an accidental felicity,
an interest. If he finds such a grace or disproportion--whatever the
interest may be--in a stone or a twig that has caught his ambiguous eye
at the roadside, he carries it to his home to place it in its irregularly
happy place. Dickens seems to have had a like joy in things misshapen or
strangely shapen, uncommon or grotesque. He saddled even his
heroes--those heroes are, perhaps, his worst work, young men at once
conventional and improbable--with whimsically ugly names; while his
invented names are whimsically perfect: that of Vholes for the predatory
silent man in black, and that of Tope for the cathedral verger. A
suggestion of dark and vague flight in Vholes; something of old floors,
something respectably furtive and musty, in Tope. In Dickens, the love
of lurking, unusual things, human and inanimate--he wrote of his
discoveries delightedly in his letters--was hypertrophied; and it has its
part in the simplest and the most fantastic of his humours, especially
those that are due to his child-like eyesight; let us read, for example,
of the rooks that seemed to attend upon Dr. Strong (late of Canterbury)
in his Highgate garden, "as if they had been written to about him by the
Canterbury rooks and were observing him closely in consequence"; and of
Master Micawber, who had a remarkable head voice--"On looking at Master
Micawber again I saw that he had a certain expression of face as if his
voice were behind his eyebrows"; and of Joe in his Sunday clothes, "a
scarecrow in good circumstances"; and of the cook's cousin in the Life
Guards, with such long legs that "he looked like the afternoon shadow of
somebody else"; and of Mrs. Markleham, "who stared more like a figure-
head intended for a ship to be called the Astonishment, than anything
else I can think of." But there is no reader who has not a thousand such
exhilarating little sights in his memory of these pages. From the gently
grotesque to the fantastic run Dickens's enchanted eyes, and in Quilp and
Miss Mowcher he takes his joy in the extreme of deformity; and a
spontaneous combustion was an accident much to his mind.
Dickens wrote for a world that either was exceedingly excitable and
sentimental, or had the convention or tradition of great sentimental
excitability. All his people, suddenly surprised, lose their presence of
mind. Even when the surprise is not extraordinary their actions are
wild. When Tom Pinch calls upon John Westlock in London, after no very
long separation, John, welcoming him at breakfast, puts the rolls into
his boots, and so forth. And this kind of distraction comes upon men and
women everywhere in his books--distractions of laughter as well. All
this seems artificial to-day, whereas Dickens in his best moments is the
simplest, as he is the most vigilant, of men. But his public was as
present to him as an actor's audience is to the actor, and I cannot think
that this immediate response was good for his art. Assuredly he is not
solitary. We should not wish him to be solitary as a poet is, but we may
wish that now and again, even while standing applauded and acclaimed, he
had appraised the applause more coolly and more justly, and within his
inner mind.
Those critics who find what they call vulgarisms think they may safely go
on to accuse Dickens of bad grammar. The truth is that his grammar is
not only good but strong; it is far better in construction than
Thackeray's, the ease of whose phrase sometimes exceeds and is slack.
Lately, during the recent centenary time, a writer averred that Dickens
"might not always be parsed," but that we loved him for his, etc., etc.
Dickens's page is to be parsed as strictly as any man's. It is, apart
from the matter of grammar, a wonderful thing that he, with his little
education, should have so excellent a diction. In a letter that records
his reluctance to work during a holiday, the word "wave" seems to me
perfect: "Imaginary butchers and bakers wave me to my desk." In his
exquisite use of the word "establishment" in the following phrase, we
find his own perfect sense of the use of words in his own day; but in the
second quotation given there is a most beautiful sign of education.
"Under the weight of my wicked secret" (the little boy Pip had succoured
his convict with his brother-in-law's provisions) "I pondered whether the
Church would be powerful enough to shield me . . if I divulged to that
establishment." And this is the phrase that may remind us of the
eighteenth-century writers of prose, and among those writers of none so
readily as of Bolingbroke: it occurs in that passage of Esther's life in
which, having lost her beauty, she resolves to forego a love unavowed.
"There was nothing to be undone; no chain for him to drag or for me to
break."
If Dickens had had the education which he had not, his English could not
have been better; but if he had had the _usage du monde_ which as a
young man he had not, there would have been a difference. He would not,
for instance, have given us the preposterous scenes in _Nicholas_
_Nickleby_ in which parts are played by Lord Frederick Verisopht, Sir
Mulberry Hawke, and their friends; the scene of the hero's luncheon at a
restaurant and the dreadful description of the mirrors and other
splendours would not have been written. It is a very little thing to
forgive to him whom we have to thank for--well, not perhaps for the
"housefull of friends" for the gift of whom a stranger, often quoted,
once blessed him in the street; we may not wish for Mr. Feeder, or Major
Bagstock, or Mrs. Chick, or Mrs. Pipchin, or Mr. Augustus Moddle, or Mr.
F.'s aunt, or Mr. Wopsle, or Mr. Pumblechook, as an inmate of our homes.
Lack of knowledge of the polite world is, I say, a very little thing to
forgive to him whom we thank most chiefly for showing us these
interesting people just named as inmates of the comedy homes that are not
ours. We thank him because they are comedy homes, and could not be ours
or any man's; that is, we thank him for his admirable art.