"Pickwick" had been a novel without any plot. The story, if story it
can be called, bore every trace of its hasty origin. Scene succeeded
scene, and incident incident, and Mr. Pickwick and his three friends
were hurried about from place to place, and through adventures of all
kinds, without any particularly defined purpose. In truth, many
people, and myself among the number, find some difficulty in reading
the book as a connected narrative, and prefer to take it piecemeal.
But in "Oliver Twist" there is a serious effort to work out a coherent
plot, and real unity of conception. Whether that conception be based
on probability, is another point. Oliver is the illegitimate son of a
young lady who has lapsed from virtue under circumstances of great
temptation, but still lapsed from virtue, and who dies in giving him
birth. He is brought up as a pauper child in a particularly
ill-managed workhouse, and apprenticed to a low undertaker. Thence he
escapes, and walks to London, where he falls in with a gang of
thieves. His legitimate brother, an unutterable scoundrel, happens to
see him in London, and recognizing him by a likeness to their common
father, bribes the thieves to recapture him when he has escaped from
their clutches. Now I would rather not say whether I consider it quite
likely that a boy of this birth and nurture would fly at a boy much
bigger than himself in vindication of the fair fame of a mother whom
he had never known, or would freely risk his life to warn a sleeping
household that they were being robbed, or would, on all occasions,
exhibit the most excellent manners and morals, and a delicacy of
feeling that is quite dainty. But this is the essence of the book. To
show purity and goodness of disposition as self-sufficient in
themselves to resist all adverse influences, is Dickens' main object.
Take Oliver's sweet uncontaminated character away, and the story
crumbles to pieces. With mere improbabilities of plot, I have no
quarrel. Of course it is not likely that the boy, on the occasion of
his first escape from the thieves, should be rescued by his father's
oldest friend, and, on the second occasion, come across his aunt. But
such coincidences must be accepted in any story; they violate no truth
of character. I am afraid I can't say as much of Master Oliver's
graces and virtues.
With this reservation, however, how much there is in the book to which
unstinted admiration can be given! As "Pickwick" first fully exhibited
the humorous side of Dickens' genius, so "Oliver Twist" first fully
exhibited its tragic side;--the pathetic side was to come somewhat
later. The scenes at the workhouse; at the thieves' dens in London;
the burglary; the murder of poor Nancy; the escape and death of the
horror-haunted Sikes,--all are painted with a master's hand. And the
book, like its predecessor, and like those that were to follow,
contains characters that have passed into common knowledge as
types,--characters of the keenest individuality, and that yet seem in
themselves to sum up a whole class. Such are Bill Sikes, whose
ruffianism has an almost epic grandeur; and black-hearted Fagin, the
Jew, receiver of stolen goods and trainer of youth in the way they
should _not_ go; and Master Dawkins, the Artful Dodger. Such, too, is
Mr. Bumble, greatest and most unhappy of beadles.
Comedy had predominated in "Pickwick," tragedy in "Oliver Twist." The
more complete fusion of the two was effected in "Nicholas Nickleby."
But as the mighty actor Garrick, in the well-known picture by Sir
Joshua Reynolds, is drawn towards the more mirthful of the two
sisters, so, here again, I think that comedy decidedly bears away the
palm,--though tragedy is not beaten altogether without a struggle
either. Here is the story as it unfolds itself. The two heroes are
Ralph Nickleby and his nephew Nicholas. They stand forth, almost from
the beginning, as antagonists, in battle array the one against the
other; and the story is, in the main, a history of the campaigns
between them--cunning and greed being mustered on the one side, and
young, generous courage on the other. At first Nicholas believes in
his uncle, who promises to befriend Nicholas's mother and sister, and
obtains for Nicholas himself a situation as usher in a Yorkshire
school kept by one Squeers. But the young fellow's gorge rises at the
sickening cruelty exercised in the school, and he leaves it, having
first beaten Mr. Squeers,--leaves it followed by a poor shattered
creature called Smike. Meanwhile Ralph, the usurer, befriends his
sister-in-law and niece after his own fashion, and tries to use the
latter's beauty in furtherance of his trade as a money-lender.
Nicholas discovers his plots, frustrates all his schemes, rescues, and
ultimately marries, a young lady who had been immeshed in one of them;
and Ralph, at last, utterly beaten, commits suicide on finding that
Smike, through whom he had been endeavouring all through to injure
Nicholas, and who is now dead, was his own son. Such are the book's
dry bones, its skeleton, which one is almost ashamed to expose thus
nakedly. For the beauty of these novels lies not at all in the plot;
it is in the incidents, situations, characters. And with beauty of
this kind how richly dowered is "Nicholas Nickleby"! Take the
characters alone. What lavish profusion of humour in the theatrical
group that clusters round Mr. Vincent Crummles, the country manager;
and in the Squeers family too; and in the little shop-world of Mrs.
Mantalini, the fashionable dressmaker; and in Cheeryble Brothers, the
golden-hearted old merchants who take Nicholas into their
counting-house. Then for single characters commend me to Mrs.
Nickleby, whose logic, which some cynics would call feminine, is
positively sublime in its want of coherence; and to John Browdie, the
honest Yorkshire cornfactor, as good a fellow almost as Dandie
Dinmont, the Border yeoman whom Scott made immortal. The high-life
personages are far less successful. Dickens had small gift that way,
and seldom succeeded in his society pictures. Nor, if the truth must
be told, do I greatly care for the description of the duel between Sir
Mulberry Hawk and Lord Verisopht, though it was evidently very much
admired at the time, and is quoted, as a favourable specimen of
Dickens' style, in Charles Knight's "Half-hours with the Best
Authors." The writing is a little too _tall_. It lacks simplicity, as
is sometimes the case with Dickens, when he wants to be particularly
impressive.
And this leads me, by a kind of natural sequence, to what I have to
say about his next book, "The Old Curiosity Shop;" for here, again,
though in a very much more marked degree, I fear I shall have to run
counter to a popular opinion.
But first a word as to the circumstances under which the book was
published. Casting about, after the conclusion of "Nicholas Nickleby,"
for further literary ventures, Dickens came to the conclusion that the
public must be getting tired of his stories in monthly parts. It
occurred to him that a weekly periodical, somewhat after the manner of
Addison's _Spectator_ or Goldsmith's _Bee_, and containing essays,
stories, and miscellaneous papers,--to be written mainly, but not
entirely, by himself,--would be just the thing to revive interest, and
give his popularity a spur. Accordingly an arrangement was entered
into with Messrs. Chapman and Hall, by which they covenanted to give
him £50 for each weekly number of such a periodical, and half
profits;--and the first number of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ made its
appearance in the April of 1840. Unfortunately Dickens had reckoned
altogether without his host. The public were not to be cajoled. What
they expected from their favourite was novels, not essays, short
stories, or sketches, however admirable. The orders for the first
number had amounted to seventy thousand; but they fell off as soon as
it was discovered that Master Humphrey, sitting by his clock, had no
intention of beguiling the world with a continuous narrative,--that
the title, in short, did not stand for the title of a novel. Either
the times were not ripe for the _Household Words_, which, ten years
afterwards, proved to be such a great and permanent success, or
Dickens had laid his plans badly. Vainly did he put forth all his
powers, vainly did he bring back upon the stage those old popular
favourites, Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller, and Tony Weller. All was of no
avail. Clearly, in order to avoid defeat, a change of front had become
necessary. The novel of "The Old Curiosity Shop" was accordingly
commenced in the fourth number of the _Clock_, and very soon acted the
cuckoo's part of thrusting Master Humphrey and all that belonged to
him out of the nest. He disappeared pretty well from the periodical,
and when the novel was republished, the whole machinery of the _Clock_
had gone;--and with it I may add, some very characteristic and
admirable writing. Dickens himself confessed that he "winced a
little," when the "opening paper, ... in which Master Humphrey
described himself and his manner of life," "became the property of the
trunkmaker and the butterman;" and most Dickens lovers will agree with
me in rejoicing that the omitted parts have now at last been tardily
rescued from unmerited neglect, and finds [Transcriber's Note: sic] a
place in the recently issued "Charles Dickens" edition of the works.
There is no hero in "The Old Curiosity Shop,"--unless Mr. Richard
Swiveller, "perpetual grand-master of the Glorious Apollos," be the
questionable hero; and the heroine is Little Nell, a child. Of
Dickens' singular feeling for the pathos and humour of childhood, I
have already spoken. Many novelists, perhaps one might even say, most
novelists, have no freedom of utterance when they come to speak about
children, do not know what to do with a child if it chances to stray
into their pages. But how different with Dickens! He is never more
thoroughly at home than with the little folk. Perhaps his best speech,
and they all are good, is the one uttered at the dinner given on
behalf of the Children's Hospital. Certainly there is no figure in
"Dombey and Son" on which more loving care has been lavished than the
figure of little Paul, and when the lad dies one quite feels that the
light has gone out of the book. "David Copperfield" shorn of David's
childhood and youth would be a far less admirable performance. The
hero of "Oliver Twist" is a boy. Pip is a boy through a fair portion
of "Great Expectations." The heroine of "The Old Curiosity Shop" is,
as I have just said, a girl. And of all these children, the one who
seems, from the first, to have stood highest in popular favour, and
won most hearts, is Little Nell. Ay me, what tears have been shed over
her weary wanderings with that absurd old gambling grandfather of
hers; how many persons have sorrowed over her untimely end as if she
had been a daughter or a sister. High and low, literate and
illiterate, over nearly all has she cast her spell. Hood, he who sang
the "Song of the Shirt," paid her the tribute of his admiration, and
Jeffrey, the hard-headed old judge and editor of _The Edinburgh
Review_, the tribute of his tears. Landor volleyed forth his
thunderous praises over her grave, likening her to Juliet and
Desdemona. Nay, Dickens himself sadly bewailed her fate, described
himself as being the "wretchedest of the wretched" when it drew near,
and shut himself from all society as if he had suffered a real
bereavement. While as to the feeling which she has excited in the
breasts of the illiterate, we may take Mr. Bret Harte's account of the
haggard golddiggers by the roaring Californian camp fire, who throw
down their cards to listen to her story, and, for the nonce, are
softened and humanized.[14]--Such is the sympathy she has created. And
for the description of her death and burial, as a superb piece of
pathetic writing, there has been a perfect chorus of praise broken
here and there no doubt by a discordant voice, but still of the
loudest and most heartfelt. Did not Horne, a poet better known to the
last generation than to this, point out that though printed as prose,
these passages were, perhaps as "the result of harmonious accident,"
essentially poetry, and "written in blank verse of irregular metres
and rhythms, which Southey and Shelley and some other poets have
occasionally adopted"? Did he not print part of the passages in this
form, substituting only, as a concession to the conventionalities of
verse, the word "grandames" for "grandmothers"; and did he not declare
of one of the extracts so printed that it was "worthy of the best
passages in Wordsworth"?
If it "argues an insensibility" to stand somewhat unmoved among all
these tears and admiration, I am afraid I must be rather
pebble-hearted. To tell the whole damaging truth, I am, and always
have been, only slightly affected by the story of Little Nell; have
never felt any particular inclination to shed a tear over it, and
consider the closing chapters as failing of their due effect, on me at
least, because they are pitched in a key that is altogether too high
and unnatural. Of course one makes a confession of this kind with
diffidence. It is no light thing to stem the current of a popular
opinion. But one can only go with the stream when one thinks the
stream is flowing in a right channel. And here I think the stream is
meandering out of its course. For me, Little Nell is scarcely more
than a figure in cloudland. Possibly part of the reason why I do not
feel as much sympathy with her as I ought, is because I do not seem to
know her very well. With Paul Dombey I am intimately acquainted. I
should recognize the child anywhere, should be on the best of terms
with him in five minutes. Few things would give me greater pleasure
than an hour's saunter by the side of his little invalid's carriage
along the Parade at Brighton. How we should laugh, to be sure, if we
happened to come across Mr. Toots, and smile, too, if we met Feeder,
B.A., and give a furtive glance of recognition at Glubb, the discarded
charioteer. Then the classic Cornelia Blimber would pass, on her
constitutional, and we should quail a little--at least I am certain
_I_ should--as she bent upon us her scholastic spectacles; and a
glimpse of Dr. Blimber would chill us even more; till--ah! what's
this? Why does a flush of happiness mantle over my little friend's
pale face? Why does he utter a faint cry of pleasure? Yes, there she
is--he has caught sight of Floy running forward to meet him.--So am
I led, almost instinctively, whenever the figure of Paul flashes into
my mind, to think of him as a child I have actually known. But
Nell--she has no such reality of existence. She has been etherealized,
vapourized, rhapsodized about, till the flesh and blood have gone out
of her. I recognize her attributes, unselfishness, sweetness of
disposition, gentleness. But these don't constitute a human being.
They don't make up a recognizable individuality. If I met her in the
street, I am afraid I should not know her; and if I did, I am sure we
should both find it difficult to keep up a conversation.
Do the passages describing her death and burial really possess the
rhythm of poetry? That would seem to me, I confess, to be as ill a
compliment as to say of a piece of poetry that it was really prose.
The music of prose and of poetry are essentially different. They do
not affect the ear in the same way. The one is akin to song, the other
to speech. Give to prose the recurring cadences, the measure, and the
rhythmic march of verse, and it becomes bad prose without becoming
good poetry.[15] So, in fairness to Dickens, one is bound, as far as
one can, to forget Horne's misapplied praise. But even thus, and
looking upon it as prose alone, can we say that the account of Nell's
funeral is, in the high artistic sense, a piece of good work. Here is
an extract: "And now the bell--the bell she had so often heard, by
night and day, and listened to with solemn pleasure almost as a
living voice--rang its remorseless toll, for her, so young, so
beautiful, so good. Decrepit age, and vigorous life, and blooming
youth, and helpless infancy, poured forth--on crutches, in the pride
of strength and health, in the full blush of promise, in the mere dawn
of life--to gather round her tomb. Old men were there, whose eyes were
dim and senses failing--grandmothers, who might have died ten years
ago, and still been old,--the deaf, the blind, the lame, the palsied,
the living dead in many shapes and forms, to see the closing of that
earthly grave. What was the death it would shut in, to that which
still could crawl and creep above it?" Such is the tone throughout,
and one feels inclined to ask whether it is quite the appropriate tone
in which to speak of the funeral of a child in a country churchyard?
All this pomp of rhetoric seems to me--shall I say it?--as much out of
place as if Nell had been buried like some great soldier or minister
of state--with a hearse, all sable velvet and nodding plumes, drawn by
a long train of sable steeds, and a final discharge of artillery over
the grave. The verbal honours paid here to the deceased are really not
much less incongruous and out of keeping. Surely in such a subject,
above all others, the pathos of simplicity would have been most
effective.
There are some, indeed, who deny to Dickens the gift of pathos
altogether. Such persons acknowledge, for the most part a little
unwillingly, that he was a master of humour of the broader, more
obvious kind. But they assert that all his sentiment is mawkish and
overstrained, and that his efforts to compel our tears are so obvious
as to defeat their own purpose. Now it will be clear, from what I
have said about Little Nell, that I am capable of appreciating the
force of any criticism of this kind; nay, that I go so far as to
acknowledge that Dickens occasionally lays himself open to it. But go
one inch beyond this I cannot. Of course we may, if we like, take up a
position of pure stoicism, and deny pathos altogether, in life as in
art. We may regard all human affairs but as a mere struggle for
existence, and say that might makes right, and that the weak is only
treated according to his deserts when he goes to the wall. We may hold
that neither sorrow nor suffering call for any meed of sympathy. Such
is mainly the attitude which the French novelist adopts towards the
world of his creation.[16] But once admit that feeling is legitimate;
once allow that tears are due to those who have been crushed and left
bleeding by this great world of ours as it crashes blundering on its
way; once grant that the writer's art can properly embrace what
Shakespeare calls "the pity of it," the sorrows inwoven in all our
human relationships; once acknowledge all this, and then I affirm,
most confidently, that Dickens, working at his best, was one of the
greatest masters of pathos who ever lived. I can myself see scarce a
strained discordant note in the account of the short life and early
death of Paul Dombey, and none in the description of the death of Paul
Dombey's mother, or in the story of Tiny Tim, or in the record of
David Copperfield's childhood and boyhood. I consider the passage in
"American Notes" describing the traits of gentle kindliness among the
emigrants as being nobly, pathetically eloquent. Did space allow, I
could support my position by quotations and example to any extent. And
my conclusion is that, though he failed with Little Nell, yet he
succeeded elsewhere, and superbly.
The number of _Master Humphrey's Clock_, containing the conclusion of
"The Old Curiosity Shop," appeared on the 17th of January, 1841, and
"Barnaby Rudge" began its course in the ensuing week. The first had
been essentially a tale of modern life. All the characters that made a
kind of background, mostly grotesque or hideous, for the figure of
Little Nell, were characters of to-day, or at least of the day when
the book was written; for I must not forget that that day ran into the
past some six and forty years ago. Quilp, the dwarf,--and a far finer
specimen of a scoundrel by the by, in every respect, than that poor
stage villain Monks; Sampson Brass and his legal sister Sally, a
goodly pair; Kit, golden-hearted and plain of body, who so barely
escapes from the plot laid by the afore-mentioned worthies to prove
him a thief; Chuckster, most lady-killing of notaries' clerks; Mrs.
Jarley, the good-natured waxwork woman, in whose soul there would be
naught save kindliness, only she cannot bring herself to tolerate
Punch and Judy; Short and Codlin, the Punch and Judy men; the little
misused servant, whom Dick Swiveller in his grandeur creates a
marchioness; and the magnificent Swiveller himself, prince among the
idle and impecunious, justifying by his snatches of song, and flowery
rhetoric, his high position as "perpetual grand-master" among the
"Glorious Apollers,"--all these, making allowance perhaps for some
idealization, were personages of Dickens' own time. But in "Barnaby
Rudge," Dickens threw himself back into the last century. The book is
a historical novel, one of the two which he wrote, the other being the
"Tale of Two Cities," and its scenes are many of them laid among the
No Popery Riots of 1780.
A ghastly time, a time of aimless, brutal incendiarism and mad
turbulence on the part of the mob; a time of weakness and ineptitude
on the part of the Government; a time of wickedness, folly, and
misrule. Dickens describes it admirably. His picture of the riots
themselves seems painted in pigments of blood and fire; and yet,
through all the hurry and confusion, he retains the clearness of
arrangement and lucidity which characterize the pictures of such
subjects when executed by the great masters of the art--as Carlyle,
for example. His portrait of the poor, crazy-brained creature, Lord
George Gordon, who sowed the wind which the country was to reap in
whirlwind, is excellent. Nor is what may be called the private part of
the story unskilfully woven with the historical part. The plot, though
not good, rises perhaps above the average of Dickens' plots; for even
we, his admirers, are scarcely bound to maintain that plot was his
strong point. Beyond this, I think I may say that the book is, on the
whole, the least characteristic of his books. It is the one which
those who are most out of sympathy with his peculiar vein of humour
and pathos will probably think the best, and the one which the true
Dickens lovers will generally regard as bearing the greatest
resemblance to an ordinary novel.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] "Dickens in Camp."
[15] Dickens himself knew that he had a tendency to fall into blank
verse in moments of excitement, and tried to guard against it.
[16] M. Daudet, in many respects a follower of Dickens, is a fine and
notable exception.