Sir,--It has been said that every man is born a Platonist or an
Aristotelian, though the enormous majority of us, to be sure, live and
die without being conscious of any invidious philosophic partiality
whatever. With more truth (though that does not imply very much) every
Englishman who reads may be said to be a partisan of yourself or of Mr.
Thackeray. Why should there be any partisanship in the matter; and
why, having two such good things as your novels and those of your
contemporary, should we not be silently happy in the possession? Well,
men are made so, and must needs fight and argue over their tastes in
enjoyment. For myself, I may say that in this matter I am what the
Americans do not call a 'Mugwump,' what English politicians dub a
'superior person'--that is, I take no side, and attempt to enjoy the
best of both.
It must be owned that this attitude is sometimes made a little difficult
by the vigour of your special devotees. They have ceased, indeed, thank
Heaven! to imitate you; and even in 'descriptive articles' the touch
of Mr. Gigadibs, of him whom 'we almost took for the true Dickens,'
has disappeared. The young lions of the Press no longer mimic your less
admirable mannerisms--do not strain so much after fantastic comparisons,
do not (in your manner and Mr. Carlyle's) give people nick-names derived
from their teeth, or their complexion; and, generally, we are spared
second-hand copies of all that in your style was least to be commended.
But, though improved by lapse of time in this respect, your devotees
still put on little conscious airs of virtue, robust manliness, and so
forth, which would have irritated you very much, and there survive some
press men who seem to have read you a little (especially your later
works), and never to have read anything else. Now familiarity with the
pages of 'Our Mutual Friend'and 'Dombey and Son' does not precisely
constitute a liberal education, and the assumption that it does is apt
(quite unreasonably) to prejudice people against the greatest comic
genius of modern times.
On the other hand, Time is at last beginning to sift the true admirers
of Dickens from the false. Yours, Sir, in the best sense of the word, is
a popular success, a popular reputation. For example, I know that, in a
remote and even Pictish part of this kingdom, a rural household, humble
and under the shadow of a sorrow inevitably approaching, has found in
'David Copperfield' oblivion of winter, of sorrow, and of sickness. On
the other hand, people are now picking up heart to say that 'they cannot
read Dickens,' and that they particularly detest 'Pickwick.' I believe
it was young ladies who first had the courage of their convictions in
this respect. 'Tout sied aux belles,' and the fair, in the confidence of
youth, often venture on remarkable confessions. In your 'Natural History
of Young Ladies' I do not remember that you describe the Humorous Young
Lady (1). She is a very rare bird indeed, and humour generally is at a
deplorably low level in England.
(1) I am informed that the _Natural History of Young
Ladies_ is attributed, by some writers, to another
philosopher, the author of _The Art of Pluck_.
Hence come all sorts of mischief, arisen since you left us; and, it
may be said, that inordinate philanthropy, genteel sympathy with Irish
murder and arson, Societies for Badgering the Poor, Esoteric
Buddhism, and a score of other plagues, including what was once called
Aestheticism, are all, primarily, due to want of humour. People discuss,
with the gravest faces, matters which properly should only be stated
as the wildest paradoxes. It naturally follows that, in a period almost
destitute of humour, many respectable persons 'cannot read Dickens,' and
are not ashamed to glory in their shame. We ought not to be angry with
others for their misfortunes; and yet when one meets the _crétins_ who
boast that they cannot read Dickens, one certainly does feel much as Mr.
Samuel Weller felt when he encountered Mr. Job Trotter.
How very singular has been the history of the decline of humour. Is
there any profound psychological truth to be gathered from consideration
of the fact that humour has gone out with cruelty? A hundred years ago,
eighty years ago--nay, fifty years ago--we were a cruel but also
a humorous people. We had bull-baitings, and badger-drawings, and
hustings, and prize-fights, and cock-fights; we went to see men hanged;
the pillory and the stocks were no empty 'terrors unto evil-doers,' for
there was commonly a malefactor occupying each of these institutions.
With all this we had a broad blown comic sense. We had Ho-garth, and
Bunbury, and George Cruikshank, and Gilray; we had Leech and Surtees,
and the creator of Tittlebat Titmouse; we had the Shepherd of the
'Noctes,' and, above all, we had _you_.
From the old giants of English fun--burly persons delighting in broad
caricature, in decided colours, in cockney jokes, in swashing blows at
the more prominent and obvious human follies--from these you derived the
splendid high spirits and unhesitating mirth of your earlier works. Mr.
Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and all the Pickwickians, and
Mr. Dowler, and John Browdie--these and their immortal companions were
reared, so to speak, on the beef and beer of that naughty, fox-hunting,
badger-baiting old England, which we have improved out of existence.
And these characters, assuredly, are your best; by them, though stupid
people cannot read about them, you will live while there is a laugh left
among us. Perhaps that does not assure you a very prolonged existence,
but only the future can show.
The dismal seriousness of the time cannot, let us hope, last for ever
and a day. Honest old Laughter, the true _lutin_ of your inspiration,
must have life left in him yet, and cannot die; though it is true that
the taste for your pathos, and your melodrama, and plots constructed
after your favourite fashion ('Great Expectations' and the 'Tale of Two
Cities' are exceptions) may go by and never be regretted. Were people
simpler, or only less clear-sighted, as far as your pathos is concerned,
a generation ago? Jeffrey, the hard-headed shallow critic, who declared
that Wordsworth 'would never do,' cried, 'wept like anything,' over your
Little Nell. One still laughs as heartily as ever with Dick Swiveller;
but who can cry over Little Nell?
Ah, Sir, how could you--who knew so intimately, who remembered so
strangely well the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of childhood--how
could you 'wallow naked in the pathetic,' and massacre holocausts of the
Innocents? To draw tears by gloating over a child's death-bed, was it
worthy of you? Was it the kind of work over which our hearts should
melt? I confess that Little Nell might die a dozen times, and be
welcomed by whole legions of Angels, and I (like the bereaved fowl
mentioned by Pet Marjory) would remain unmoved.
She was more than usual calm,
She did not give a single dam,
wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott. Over your
Little Nell and your Little Dombey I remain more than usual calm; and
probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers. But about matter
of this kind, and the unsealing of the fountains of tears, who can
argue? Where is taste? where is truth? What tears are 'manly, Sir,
manly,' as Fred Bayham has it; and of what lamentations ought we rather
to be ashamed? _Sunt lacrymae rerum_; one has been moved in the cell
where Socrates tasted the hemlock; or by the river-banks where Syracusan
arrows slew the parched Athenians among the mire and blood; or, in
fiction, when Colonel Newcome said _Adsum_, or over the diary of Clare
Doria Forey, or where Aramis laments, with strange tears, the death
of Porthos. But over Dombey (the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to
snivel.
When an author deliberately sits down and says, 'Now, let us have a good
cry,' he poisons the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least in many
breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of 'Dombey and Son' there is little
we care to remember except the deathless Mr. Toots; just as we forget
the melodramatics of 'Martin Chuzzlewit.' I have read in that book a
score of times; I never see it but I revel in it--in Pecksniff, and Mrs.
Gamp, and the Americans. But what the plot is all about, what Jonas did,
what Montagu Tigg had to make in the matter, what all the pictures with
plenty of shading illustrate, I have never been able to comprehend. In
the same way, one of your most thorough-going admirers has allowed (in
the licence of private conversation) that 'Ralph Nickleby and Monk are
too steep;' and probably a cultivated taste will always find them a
little precipitous.
'Too steep:'--the slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius,
carried above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its
grotesque and in its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to press
fantasy too hard, to deepen the gloom with black over the indigo, that
was the failing which proved you mortal. To take an instance in little:
when Pip went to Mr. Pumblechook's, the boy thought the seedsman 'a very
happy man to have so many little drawers in his shop.' The reflection
is thoroughly boyish; but then you add, 'I wondered whether the
flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those
jails and bloom.' That is not boyish at all; that is the hard-driven,
jaded literary fancy at work.
'So we arraign her; but she,' the Genius of Charles Dickens, how
brilliant, how kindly, how beneficent she is! dwelling by a fountain of
laughter imperishable; though there is something of an alien salt in the
neighbouring fountain of tears. How poor the world of fancy would be,
how 'dispeopled of her dreams,' if, in some ruin of the social system,
the books of Dickens were lost; and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates,
and Mr. Crinkle, and Miss Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and
Dick Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish with Menander's men and
women! We cannot think of our world without them; and, children of
dreams as they are, they seem more essential than great statesmen,
artists, soldiers, who have actually worn flesh and blood, ribbons and
orders, gowns and uniforms. May we not almost welcome 'Free Education'?
for every Englishman who can read, unless he be an Ass, is a reader the
more for you.