_Our Mutual Friend_ is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr. Dickens's
works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment,
but of permanent exhaustion. It is wanting in inspiration. For the last
ten years it has seemed to us that Mr. Dickens has been unmistakeably
forcing himself. _Bleak House_ was forced; _Little Dorrit_ was laboured;
the present work is dug out as with a spade and pickaxe.
Of course--to anticipate the usual argument--who but Dickens could have
written it? Who, indeed? Who else would have established a lady in
business in a novel on the admirably solid basis of her always putting
on gloves and tying a handkerchief around her head in moments of grief,
and of her habitually addressing her family with "Peace! hold!" It is
needless to say that Mrs. Reginald Wilfer is first and last the occasion
of considerable true humour. When, after conducting her daughter to Mrs.
Boffin's carriage, in sight of all the envious neighbours, she is
described as enjoying her triumph during the next quarter of an hour by
airing herself on the doorstep "in a kind of splendidly serene trance,"
we laugh with as uncritical a laugh as could be desired of us. We pay
the same tribute to her assertions, as she narrates the glories of the
society she enjoyed at her father's table, that she has known as many as
three copper-plate engravers exchanging the most exquisite sallies and
retorts there at one time. But when to these we have added a dozen more
happy examples of the humour which was exhaled from every line of Mr.
Dickens's earlier writings, we shall have closed the list of the merits
of the work before us.
To say that the conduct of the story, with all its complications,
betrays a long-practised hand, is to pay no compliment worthy the
author. If this were, indeed, a compliment, we should be inclined to
carry it further, and congratulate him on his success in what we should
call the manufacture of fiction; for in so doing we should express a
feeling that has attended us throughout the book. Seldom, we reflected,
had we read a book so intensely _written_, so little seen, known, or
felt.
In all Mr. Dickens's works the fantastic has been his great resource;
and while his fancy was lively and vigorous it accomplished great
things. But the fantastic, when the fancy is dead, is a very poor
business. The movement of Mr. Dickens's fancy in Mr. Wilfer and Mr.
Boffin and Lady Tippins, and the Lammles and Miss Wren, and even in
Eugene Wrayburn, is, to our mind, a movement lifeless, forced,
mechanical. It is the letter of his old humour without the spirit. It is
hardly too much to say that every character here put before us is a mere
bundle of eccentricities, animated by no principle of nature whatever.
In former days there reigned in Mr. Dickens's extravagances a
comparative consistency; they were exaggerated statements of types that
really existed. We had, perhaps, never known a Newman Noggs, nor a
Pecksniff, nor a Micawber; but we had known persons of whom these
figures were but the strictly logical consummation. But among the
grotesque creatures who occupy the pages before us, there is not one
whom we can refer to as an existing type. In all Mr. Dickens's stories,
indeed, the reader has been called upon, and has willingly consented, to
accept a certain number of figures or creatures of pure fancy, for this
was the author's poetry. He was, moreover, always repaid for his
concession by a peculiar beauty or power in these exceptional
characters. But he is now expected to make the same concession, with a
very inadequate reward.
What do we get in return for accepting Miss Jenny Wren as a possible
person? This young lady is the type of a certain class of characters of
which Mr. Dickens has made a specialty, and with which he has been
accustomed to draw alternate smiles and tears, according as he pressed
one spring or another. But this is very cheap merriment and very cheap
pathos. Miss Jenny Wren is a poor little dwarf, afflicted as she
constantly reiterates, with a "bad back" and "queer legs," who makes
doll's dresses, and is for ever pricking at those with whom she
converses in the air, with her needle, and assuring them that she knows
their "tricks and their manners." Like all Mr. Dickens's pathetic
characters, she is a little monster; she is deformed, unhealthy,
unnatural; she belongs to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and
precocious children who have carried on the sentimental business in all
Mr. Dickens's novels; the little Nells, the Smikes, the Paul Dombeys.
Mr. Dickens goes as far out of the way for his wicked people as he does
for his good ones. Rogue Riderhood, indeed, in the present story, is
villainous with a sufficiently natural villainy; he belongs to that
quarter of society in which the author is most at his ease. But was
there ever such wickedness as that of the Lammles and Mr. Fledgeby? Not
that people have not been as mischievous as they; but was any one ever
mischievous in that singular fashion? Did a couple of elegant swindlers
ever take such particular pains to be aggressively inhuman?--for we can
find no other word for the gratuitous distortions to which they are
subjected. The word _humanity_ strikes us as strangely discordant, in
the midst of these pages; for, let us boldly declare it, there is no
humanity here.
Humanity is nearer home than the Boffins, and the Lammles, and the
Wilfers, and the Veneerings. It is in what men have in common with each
other, and not what they have in distinction. The people just named have
nothing in common with each other, except the fact that they have
nothing in common with mankind at large. What a world were this world if
the world of _Our Mutual Friend_ were an honest reflection of it! But a
community of eccentrics is impossible. Rules alone are consistent with
each other; exceptions are inconsistent. Society is maintained by
natural sense and natural feeling. We cannot conceive a society in which
these principles are not in some manner represented. Where in these
pages are the depositaries of that intelligence without which the
movement of life would cease? Who represents nature?
Accepting half of Mr. Dickens's persons as intentionally grotesque,
where are those examplars of sound humanity who should afford us the
proper measure of their companions' variations? We ought not, in justice
to the author, to seek them among his weaker--that is, his mere
conventional--characters; in John Harmon, Lizzie Hexam, or Mortimer
Lightwood; but we assuredly cannot find them among his stronger--that
is, his artificial creations.
Suppose we take Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone. They occupy a
half-way position between the habitual probable of nature and the
habitual impossible of Mr. Dickens. A large portion of the story rests
upon the enmity borne by Headstone to Wrayburn, both being in love with
the same woman. Wrayburn is a gentleman, and Headstone is one of the
people. Wrayburn is well-bred, careless, elegant, sceptical, and idle:
Headstone is a high-tempered, hard-working, ambitious young
schoolmaster. There lay in the opposition of these two characters a very
good story. But the prime requisite was that they should _be_
characters: Mr. Dickens, according to his usual plan, has made them
simply figures, and between them the story that was to be, the story
that should have been, has evaporated. Wrayburn lounges about with his
hands in his pockets, smoking a cigar, and talking nonsense. Headstone
strides about, clenching his fists and biting his lips and grasping his
stick.
There is one scene in which Wrayburn chaffs the schoolmaster with easy
insolence, while the latter writhes impotently under his well-bred
sarcasm. This scene is very clever, but it is very insufficient. If the
majority of readers were not so very timid in the use of words we should
call it vulgar. By this we do not mean to indicate the conventional
impropriety of two gentlemen exchanging lively personalities; we mean to
emphasise the essentially small character of these personalities. In
other words, the moment, dramatically, is great, while the author's
conception is weak. The friction of two _men_, of two characters, of two
passions, produces stronger sparks than Wrayburn's boyish repartees and
Headstone's melodramatic commonplaces.
Such scenes as this are useful in fixing the limits of Mr. Dickens's
insight. Insight is, perhaps, too strong a word; for we are convinced
that it is one of the chief conditions of his genius not to see beneath
the surface of things. If we might hazard a definition of his literary
character, we should, accordingly, call him the greatest of superficial
novelists. We are aware that this definition confines him to an inferior
rank in the department of letters which he adorns; but we accept this
consequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence
against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists. For,
to repeat what we have already intimated, he has created nothing but
figure. He has added nothing to our understanding of human character. He
is master of but two alternatives: he reconciles us to what is
commonplace, and he reconciles us to what is odd. The value of the
former service is questionable; and the manner in which Mr. Dickens
performs it sometimes conveys a certain impression of charlatanism. The
value of the latter service is incontestable, and here Mr. Dickens is an
honest, an admirable artist.
But what is the condition of the truly great novelist? For him there are
no alternatives, for him there are no oddities, for him there is nothing
outside of humanity. He cannot shirk it; it imposes itself upon him. For
him alone, therefore, there is a true and a false; for him alone, it is
possible to be right, because it is possible to be wrong. Mr. Dickens is
a great observer and a great humourist, but he is nothing of a
philosopher.
Some people may hereupon say, so much the better; we say, so much the
worse. For a novelist very soon has need of a little philosophy. In
treating of Micawber, and Boffin, and Pickwick, _et hoc genus omne_, he
can, indeed, dispense with it, for this--we say it with all
deference--is not serious writing. But when he comes to tell the story
of a passion, a story like that of Headstone and Wrayburn, he becomes a
moralist as well as an artist. He must know _man_ as well as _men_, and
to know man is to be a philosopher.
The writer who knows men alone, if he have Mr. Dickens's humour and
fancy, will give us figures and pictures for which we cannot be too
grateful, for he will enlarge our knowledge of the world. But when he
introduces men and women whose interest is preconceived to lie not in
the poverty, the weakness, the drollery of their natures, but in their
complete and unconscious subjection to ordinary and healthy human
emotions, all his humour, all his fancy, will avail him nothing if, out
of the fullness of his sympathy, he is unable to prosecute those
generalisations in which alone consists the real greatness of a work of
art.
This may sound like very subtle talk about a very simple matter. It is
rather very simple talk about a very subtle matter. A story based upon
those elementary passions in which alone we seek the true and final
manifestation of character must be told in a spirit of intellectual
superiority to those passions. That is, the author must understand what
he is talking about. The perusal of a story so told is one of the most
elevating experiences within the reach of the human mind. The perusal of
a story which is not so told is infinitely depressing and
unprofitable.