With the return from America began the old life of hard work and hard
play. There was much industrious writing of "American Notes," at
Broadstairs and elsewhere; and there were many dinners of welcome
home, and strolls, doubtless, with Forster and Maclise, and other
intimates, to old haunts, as Jack Straw's Castle on Hampstead Heath,
and similar houses of public entertainment. And then in the autumn
there was "such a trip ... into Cornwall," with Forster, and the
painters Stanfield and Maclise for travelling companions. How they
enjoyed themselves to be sure, and with what bubbling, bursting
merriment. "I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey,"
writes Dickens, "... I was choking and gasping ... all the way. And
Stanfield got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often
obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could
recover him." Immediately on their return, refreshed and invigorated
by this wholesome hilarity and enjoyment, he threw himself into the
composition of his next book, and the first number of "Martin
Chuzzlewit" appeared in January, 1843.
"Martin Chuzzlewit" is unquestionably one of Dickens' great works. He
himself held it to be "in a hundred points" and "immeasurably"
superior to anything he had before written, and that verdict may, I
think, be accepted freely. The plot, as plot is usually understood,
can scarcely indeed be commended. But then plot was never his strong
point. Later in life, and acting, as I have always surmised, under the
influence of his friend, Mr. Wilkie Collins, he endeavoured to
construct ingenious stories that turned on mysterious disappearances,
and the substitution of one person for another, and murders real or
suspected. All this was, to my mind, a mistake. Dickens had no real
gift for the manufacture of these ingenious pieces of mechanism. He
did not even many times succeed in disposing the events and
marshalling the characters in his narratives so as to work, by
seemingly unforced and natural means, to a final situation and climax.
Too often, in order to hold his story together and make it move
forward at all, he was compelled to make his personages pursue a line
of conduct preposterous and improbable, and even antagonistic to their
nature. Take this very book. Old Martin Chuzzlewit is a man who has
been accustomed, all through a long life, to have his own way, and to
take it with a high hand. Yet he so far sets aside, during a course of
months, every habit of his life, as to simulate the weakest
subservience to Pecksniff--and that not for the purpose of unmasking
Pecksniff, who wanted no unmasking, but only in order to disappoint
him. Is it believable that old Martin should have thought Pecksniff
worth so much trouble, personal inconvenience, and humiliation? Or
take again Mr. Boffin in "Our Mutual Friend." Mr. Boffin is a simple,
guileless, open-hearted, open-handed old man. Yet, in order to prove
to Miss Bella Wilfer that it is not well to be mercenary, he, again,
goes through a long course of dissimulation, and does some admirable
comic business in the character of a miser. I say it boldly, I do not
believe Mr. Boffin possessed that amount of histrionic talent. Plots
requiring to be worked out by such means are ill-constructed plots;
or, to put it in another way, a man who had any gift for the
construction of plots would never have had recourse to such means. Nor
would he, I think, have adopted, as Dickens did habitually and for all
his stories, a mode of publication so destructive of unity of effect,
as the publication in monthly or weekly parts. How could the reader
see as a whole that which was presented to him at intervals of time
more or less distant? How, and this is of infinitely greater
importance, how could the writer produce it as a whole? For Dickens,
it must be remembered, never finished a book before the commencement
of publication. At first he scarcely did more than complete each
monthly instalment as required; and though afterwards he was generally
some little way in advance, yet always he wrote by parts, having the
interest of each separate part in his mind, as well as the general
interest of the whole novel. Thus, however desirable in the
development of the story, he dared not risk a comparatively tame and
uneventful number. Moreover, any portion once issued was unalterable
and irrevocable. If, as sometimes happened, any modification seemed
desirable as the book progressed, there was no possibility of
changing anything in the chapters already in the hands of the public,
and so making them harmonize better with the new.
But of course, with all this, the question still remains how far
Dickens' comparative failure as a constructor of plots really detracts
from his fame and standing as a novelist. To my mind, I confess, not
very much. Plot I regard as the least essential element in the
novelist's art. A novel can take the very highest rank without it.
There is not any plot to speak of in Lesage's "Gil Blas," and just as
little in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," and only a very bad one in
Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield." Coleridge admired the plot of "Tom
Jones," but though one naturally hesitates to differ from a critic of
such superb mastery and power, I confess I have never been struck by
that plot, any more than by the plots, such as they are, in "Joseph
Andrews," or in Smollett's works. Nor, if I can judge of other
people's memories by my own, is it by the mechanism of the story, or
by the intrigue, however admirably woven and unravelled, that one
remembers a work of fiction. These may exercise an intense passing
interest of curiosity, especially during a first perusal. But
afterwards they fade from the mind, while the characters, if highly
vitalized and strong, will stand out in our thoughts, fresh and full
coloured, for an indefinite time. Scott's "Guy Mannering" is a
well-constructed story. The plot is deftly laid, the events are
prepared for with a cunning hand; the coincidences are so arranged as
to be made to look as probable as may be. Yet we remember and love the
book, not for such excellences as these, but for Dandie Dinmont, the
Border farmer, and Pleydell, the Edinburgh advocate, and Meg
Merrilies, the gipsy. The book's life is in its flesh and blood, not
in its plot. And the same is true of Dickens' novels. He crowds them
so full of human creatures, each with its own individuality and
character, that we have no care for more than just as much story as
may serve to show them struggling, joying, sorrowing, loving. If the
incidents will do this for us we are satisfied. It is not necessary
that those incidents should be made to go through cunning evolutions
to a definite end. Each is admirable in itself, and admirably adapted
to its immediate purpose. That should more than suffice.
And Dickens sometimes succeeds in reaching a higher unity than that of
mere plot. He takes one central idea, and makes of it the soul of his
novel, animating and vivifying every part. That central idea in
"Martin Chuzzlewit" is the influence of selfishness. The Chuzzlewits
are a selfish race. Old Martin is selfish; and so, with many good
qualities and possibilities of better things, is his grandson, young
Martin. The other branch of the family, Anthony Chuzzlewit and his son
Jonas, are much worse. The latter especially is a horrible creature.
Brought up to think of nothing except his own interests and the main
chance, he is only saved by an accident from the crime of parricide,
and afterwards commits a murder and poisons himself. As his career is
one of terrible descent, so young Martin's is one of gradual
regeneration from his besetting weakness. He falls in love with his
cousin Mary--the only unselfish member of the family, by the bye--and
quarrels about this love affair with his grandfather, and so passes
into the hard school of adversity. There he learns much. Specially
valuable is the teaching which he gets as a settler in the swampy
backwoods of the United States in company with Mark Tapley, jolliest
and most helpful of men. On his return, he finds his grandfather
seemingly under the influence of Pecksniff, the hypocrite, the English
Tartuffe. But that, as I have already mentioned, is only a ruse. Old
Martin is deceiving Pecksniff, who in due time receives the reward of
his deeds, and all ends happily for those who deserve happiness. Such
is something like a bare outline of the story, with the beauty
eliminated. For what makes its interest, we must go further, to the
household of Pecksniff with his two daughters, Charity and Mercy, and
Tom Pinch, whose beautiful, unselfish character stands so in contrast
to that of the grasping self-seekers by whom he is surrounded; we must
study young Martin himself, whose character is admirably drawn, and
without Dickens' usual tendency to caricature; we must laugh in
sympathy with Mark Tapley; we must follow them both through the
American scenes, which, intensely amusing as they are, must have
bitterly envenomed the wounds inflicted on the national vanity by
"American Notes," and, according to Dickens' own expression, "sent
them all stark staring raving mad across the water;" we must frequent
the boarding establishment for single gentlemen kept by lean Mrs.
Todgers, and sit with Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig as they hideously
discuss their avocations, or quarrel over the shadowy Mrs. Harris; we
must follow Jonas Chuzzlewit on his errand of murder, and note how
even his felon nature is appalled by the blackness and horror of his
guilt, and how the ghastly terror of it haunts and cows him. A great
book, I say again, a very great book.
Yet not at the time a successful book. Why Fortune, the fickle jade,
should have taken it into her freakish head to frown, or half frown,
on Dickens at this particular juncture, who shall tell? He was wooing
her with his very best work, and she turned from him. The sale of
"Pickwick" and "Nicholas Nickleby" had been from forty to fifty
thousand copies of each part; the sale of _Master Humphrey's Clock_
had risen still higher; the sale of even the most popular parts of
"Martin Chuzzlewit" fell to twenty-three thousand. This was, as may be
supposed, a grievous disappointment. Dickens' personal expenditure had
not perhaps been lavish in view of what he thought he could calculate
on earning; but it had been freely based on that calculation. Demands,
too, were being made upon his purse by relations,--probably by his
father, and certainly by his brother Frederic, which were frequent,
embarrassing, and made in a way which one may call worse than
indelicate. Any permanent loss of popularity would have meant serious
money entanglements. With his father's career in full view, such a
prospect must have been anything but pleasant. He cast about what he
should do, and determined to leave England for a space, live more
economically on the Continent, and gather materials in Italy or
Switzerland for a new travel book. But before carrying out this
project, he would woo fortune once again, and in a different form.
During the months of October and November, 1843, in the intervals of
"Chuzzlewit," he wrote a short story that has taken its place, by
almost universal consent, among his masterpieces, nay, among the
masterpieces of English literature: "The Christmas Carol."
All Dickens' great gifts seem reflected, sharp and distinct, in this
little book, as in a convex mirror. His humour, his best pathos, which
is not that of grandiloquence, but of simplicity, his bright poetic
fancy, his kindliness, all here find a place. It is great painting in
miniature, genius in its quintessence, a gem of perfect water. We may
apply to it any simile that implies excellence in the smallest
compass. None but a fine imagination would have conceived the
supernatural agency that works old Scrooge's moral regeneration--the
ghosts of Christmas past, present, and to come, that each in turn
speaks to the wizened heart of the old miser, so that, almost
unwittingly, he is softened by the tender memories of childhood,
warmed by sympathy for those who struggle and suffer, and appalled by
the prospect of his own ultimate desolation and black solitude. Then
the episodes: the scenes to which these ghostly visitants convey
Scrooge; the story of his earlier years as shown in vision; the
household of the Cratchits, and poor little crippled Tiny Tim; the
party given by Scrooge's nephew; nay, before all these, the terrible
interview with Marley's Ghost. All are admirably executed. Sacrilege
would it be to suggest the alteration of a word. First of the
Christmas books in the order of time, it is also the best of its own
kind; it is in its own order perfect.
Nor did the public of Christmas, 1843, fail to appreciate that
something of very excellent quality had been brought forth for their
benefit. "The first edition of six thousand copies," says Forster,
"was sold" on the day of publication, and about as many more would
seem to have been disposed of before the end of February, 1844. But,
alas, Dickens had set his heart on a profit of £1,000, whereas in
February he did not see his way to much more than £460,[18] and his
unpaid bills for the previous year he described as "terrific." So
something, as I have said, had to be done. A change of front became
imperative. Messrs. Bradbury and Evans advanced him £2,800 "for a
fourth share in whatever he might write during the ensuing eight
years,"--he purchased at the Pantechnicon "a good old shabby devil of
a coach," also described as "an English travelling carriage of
considerable proportions"; engaged a courier who turned out to be the
courier of couriers, a very conjurer among couriers; let his house in
Devonshire Terrace; and so started off for Italy, as I calculate the
dates, on the 1st of July, 1844.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] The profit at the end of 1844 was £726.