ought not to have done so. Our excuse is that, at the time, we could not
help it. We may make the further plea, common to all soft-hearted
sinners, that if we hadn't wept, other people would, so that no great
harm was done, after all.
But letting bygones be bygones, and not seeking to justify the
enthusiasms of the nineteenth century, one may return to Dickens as to
the home of one's childhood. How do the old scenes affect us? Does the
charm remain? When thus we return to Dickens, we are compelled to
confess the justice of the latter-day criticism. In all his writings he
deals with characters and situations which are wholly obvious; at least
they are obvious after he deals with them. Not only is he without the
art which conceals art, but, unlike some novelists of more recent fame,
he is without the art that conceals the lack of art He produces an
impression by the crude method of "rubbing it in." There are no
subtleties to pique our curiosity, no problems left us for discussion,
no room for difference of opinion. There is no more opportunity for
speculation than in a one-price clothing store where every article is
marked in plain figures. To have heartily disliked Mr. Pecksniff and to
have loved the Cheeryble Brothers indicates no sagacity on our part. The
author has distinctly and repeatedly told us that the one is an odious
hypocrite and that the others are benevolent to an unusual degree. Our
appreciation of Sam Weller does not prove that we have any sense of
humor save that which is common to man. For Mr. Weller's humor is a
blessing that is not in disguise. It is a pump which needs no priming.
There is no denying that the humor, the pathos, and the sentiment of
Dickens are obvious.
All this, according to certain critics, goes to prove that Dickens lacks
distinction, and that the writing of his novels was a commonplace
achievement. This judgment seems to me to arise from a confusion of
thought. The _perception_ of the obvious is a commonplace achievement;
the _creation_ of the obvious, and making it interesting, is the work of
genius. There is no intellectual distinction in the enjoyment of "The
Pickwick Papers"; to write "The Pickwick Papers" would be another
matter.
It is only in the last quarter of a century that English literature has
been accepted not as a recreation, but as a subject of serious study.
Now, the first necessity for a study is that it should be "hard." Some
of the best brains in the educational world have been enlisted in the
work of giving a disciplinary value to what was originally an innocent
pleasure. It is evident that one cannot give marks for the number of
smiles or tears evoked by a tale of true love. The novel or the play
that is to hold its own in the curriculum in competition with
trigonometry must have some knotty problem which causes the harassed
reader to knit his brows in anxious thought.
In answer to this demand, the literary craftsman has arisen who takes
his art with a seriousness which makes the "painful preacher" of the
Puritan time seem a mere pleasure-seeker. Equipped with instruments of
precision drawn from the psychological laboratory, he is prepared to
satisfy our craving for the difficult By the method of suggestion he
tries to make us believe that we have never seen his characters before,
and sometimes he succeeds. He deals in descriptions which leave us with
the impression of an indescribable something which we should recognize
if we were as clever as he is. As we are not nearly so clever, we are
left with a chastened sense of our inferiority, which is doubtless good
for us. And all this groping for the un-obvious is connected with an
equally insistent demand for realism. The novel must not only be as real
as life, but it must be more so. For life, as it appears in our ordinary
consciousness, is full of illusions. When these are stripped off and the
residuum is compressed into a book, we have that which is at once
intensely real and painfully unfamiliar.
Now, there is a certain justification for this. A psychologist may show
us aspects of character which we could not see by ourselves, as the
X-rays will reveal what is not visible to the naked eye. But if the
insides of things are real, so also are the outsides. Surfaces and forms
are not without their importance.
It may be said in extenuation of Dickens that the blemish of obviousness
is one which he shared with the world he lived in. It would be too much
to say that all realities are obvious. There is a great deal that we do
not see at the first glance; but there is a great deal that we do see.
To reproduce the freshness and wonder of the first view of the obvious
world is one of the greatest achievements of the imagination.
The reason why the literary artist shuns the obvious is that there is
too much of it. It is too big for the limited resources of his art. In
the actual world, realities come in big chunks. Nature continually
repeats herself. She hammers her facts into our heads with a persistency
which is often more than a match for our stupidity. If we do not
recognize a fact to-day, it will hit us in the same place to-morrow.
We are so used to this educational method of reiteration that we make it
a test of reality. An impression made upon us must be repeated before it
has validity to our reason. If a thing really happened, we argue that it
will happen again under the same conditions. That is what we mean by
saying that we are under the reign of law. There is a great family
resemblance between happenings.
We make acquaintance with people by the same method. The recognition of
identity depends upon the ability which most persons have of appearing
to be remarkably like themselves. The reason why we think that the
person whom we met to-day is the same person we met yesterday is that he
_seems_ the same. There are obvious resemblances that strike us at once.
He looks the same, he acts the same, he has the same mannerisms, the
same kind of voice, and he answers to the same name. If Proteus, with
the best intention in the world, but with an unlimited variety of
self-manifestations, were to call every day, we should greet him always
as a stranger. We should never feel at home with so versatile a person.
A character must have a certain degree of monotony about it before we
can trust it. Unexpectedness is an agreeable element in wit, but not in
friendship. Our friend must be one who can say with honest Joe Gargery,
"It were understood, and it are understood, and it ever will be similar,
according."
But in the use of this effective method of reiteration there is a
difference between nature and a book. Nature does not care whether she
bores us or not: she has us by the buttonhole, and we cannot get away.
Not so with a book. When we are bored, we lay it down, and that brings
the interview to an end. It is from the fear of our impatience that most
writers abstain from the natural method of producing an impression.
And they are quite right. It is only now and then that an audience will
grant an extension of time to a speaker in order that he may make his
point more clear. They would rather miss the point. And it is still more
rare for the reader to grant a similar extension in order that the
author may tell again what he has told before. It is much easier to shut
up a book than to shut up a speaker.
The criticism of Dickens that his characters repeat themselves quite
misses the mark. As well object to an actor that he frequently responds
to an encore. If indicted for the offense, he could at least insist that
the audience be indicted with him as accessory before the fact.
Dickens tells us that when he read at Harrogate, "There was a remarkably
good fellow of thirty or so who found something so very ludicrous in
Toots that he could not compose himself at all, but laughed until he sat
wiping his eyes with his handkerchief, and whenever he felt Toots coming
again he began to laugh and wipe his eyes afresh."
"Whenever he felt Toots coming again"--there you have the whole
philosophy of the matter. The young fellow found Toots amusing when he
first laid eyes on him. He wanted to see him again, and it must always
be the same Toots.
It is useless to cavil at an author because of the means by which he
produces his effects. The important thing is that he does produce an
effect. That the end justifies the means may be a dangerous doctrine in
ethics, but much may be said for it in literature. The situation is like
that of a middle-aged gentleman beset by a small boy on a morning just
right for snowballing. "Give me leave, mister?" cries the youthful
sharpshooter. The good-natured citizen gives leave by pulling up his
coat-collar and quickening his pace. If the small boy can hit him, he is
forgiven, if he cannot hit him, he is scorned. The fact is that Dickens
with a method as broad and repetitious as that of Nature herself does
succeed in hitting our fancy. That is, he succeeds nine times out of
ten.
It is the minor characters of Dickens that are remembered. And we
remember them for the same reason that we remember certain faces which
we have seen in a crowd. There is some salient feature or trick of
manner which first attracts and then holds our attention. A person must
have some tag by which he is identified, or, so far as we are concerned,
he becomes one of the innumerable lost articles. There are persons who
are like umbrellas, very useful, but always liable to be forgotten. The
memory is an infirm faculty, and must be humored. It often clings to
mere trifles. The man with the flamboyant necktie whom you saw on the
8.40 train may also be the author of a volume of exquisite lyrics; but
you never saw the lyrics, and you did see the necktie. In the scale of
being, the necktie may be the least important parcel of this good man's
life, but it is the only thing about him which attracts your attention.
When you see it day after day at the same hour you feel that you have a
real, though perhaps not a deep, acquaintance with the man behind it. It
is thus we habitually perceive the human world. We see things, and infer
persons to correspond. One peculiarity attracts us. It is not the whole
man, but it is all of him that is for us. In all this we are very
Dickensy.
We may read an acute character study and straightway forget the person
who was so admirably analyzed; but the lady in the yellow curl-papers is
unforgettable. We really see very little of her, but she is real, and
she would not be so real without her yellow curl-papers. A
yellow-curl-paper-less lady in the Great White Horse Inn would be as
unthinkable to us as a white-plume-less Henry of Navarre at Ivry.
In ecclesiastical art the saints are recognized by their emblems. Why
should not the sinners have the same means of identification? Dickens
has the courage to furnish us these necessary aids to recollection.
Micawber, Mrs. Gummidge, Barkis, Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep, Betsy Trotwood,
Dick Swiveiler, Mr. Mantalini, Harold Skimpole, Sairey Gamp, always
appear with their appropriate insignia. We should remember that it is
for our sakes.
According to the canons of literary art, a fact should be stated clearly
once and for all. It would be quite proper to mention the fact that
Silas Wegg had a wooden leg; but this fact having been made plain, why
should it be referred to again? There is a sufficient reason based on
sound psychology. If the statement were not repeated, we should forget
that Mr. Wegg had a wooden leg, and by and by we should forget Silas
Wegg himself. He would fade away among the host of literary gentlemen
who are able to read "The Decline and Fall," but who are not able to
keep themselves out of the pit of oblivion. But when we repeatedly see
Mr. Wegg as Mr. Boffin saw him, "the literary gentleman _with_ a wooden
leg," we feel that we really have the pleasure of his acquaintance.
There is not only perception of him, but what the pedagogical people
call apperception. Our idea of Mr. Wegg is inseparably connected with
our antecedent ideas of general woodenness.
Again, we are introduced to "a large, hard-breathing, middle-aged man,
with a mouth like a fish, dull, staring eyes, and sandy hair standing
upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had been choked and had
at that moment come to." This is Mr. Pumblechook. He does not emerge
slowly like a ship from below the horizon. We see him all at once, eyes,
mouth, hair, and character to match. It is a case of falling into
acquaintance at first sight. We are now ready to hear what Mr.
Pumblechook says and see what he does. We have a reasonable assurance
that whatever he says and does it will be just like Mr. Pumblechook.
We enter a respectable house in a shady angle adjoining Portman Square.
We go out to dinner in solemn procession. We admire the preternatural
solidity of the furniture and the plate. The hostess is a fine woman,
"with neck and nostrils like a rocking-horse, hard features and majestic
headdress." Her husband, large and pompous, with little light-colored
wings "more like hairbrushes than hair" on the sides of his otherwise
bald head, begins to discourse on the British Constitution. We now know
as much of Mr. Podsnap as we shall know at the end of the book. But it
is a real knowledge conveyed by the method that gives dinner-parties
their educational value. We forgive Dickens his superfluous discourse on
Podsnappery in general. For his remarks are precisely of the kind which
we make when the party is over, and we sit by the fire generalizing and
allegorizing the people we have met.
That Mr. Thomas Gradgrind was unduly addicted to hard facts might have
been delicately insinuated in the course of two hundred pages. We might
have felt a mild pleasure in the discovery which we had made, and then
have gone our way forgetting what manner of man he was. What is
Gradgrind to us or we to Gradgrind? Dickens introduces him to us in all
his uncompromising squareness--"square coat, square legs, square
shoulders, nay, his very neckcloth is trained to take him by the throat
with an unaccommodating grasp." We are made at once to see "the square
wall of a forehead which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes
found commodious cellarage in the two dark caves overshadowed by the
wall." Having taken all this in at a glance, there is nothing more to be
done in the development of the character of Mr. Gradgrind. He takes his
place among the obvious facts of existence. But in so much as we were
bound to find him out sometime, shall we quarrel with Dickens because we
were enabled to do so in the first chapter?
Nor do the obvious exaggerations of Dickens arising from the exuberance
of his fancy interfere with the sense of reality. A truth is not less
true because it is in large print. We recognize creatures who are
prodigiously like ourselves, and we laugh at the difference in scale.
Did not all Lilliput laugh over the discovery of Gulliver? How they
rambled over the vast expanse of countenance, recognizing each
feature--lips, cheek, nose, chin, brow. "How very odd," they would say
to themselves, "and how very like!"
It is to the wholesome obviousness of Dickens that we owe the atmosphere
of good cheer that surrounds his characters. No writer has pictured more
scenes of squalid misery, and yet we are not depressed. There is bad
weather enough, but we are not "under the weather." There are characters
created to be hated. It is a pleasure to hate them. As to the others,
whenever their trials and tribulations abate for an instant, they
relapse into a state of unabashed contentment.
This is unusual in literature, for most literary men are saddest when
they write. The fact is that happiness is much more easy to experience
than to describe, as any one may learn in trying to describe a good time
he has had. One good time is very much like another good time. Moreover,
we are shy, and dislike to express our enthusiasm. We wouldn't for the
world have any one know what simple creatures we are and how little it
takes to make us happy. So we talk critically about a great many things
we do not care very much about, and complain of the absence of many
things which we do not really miss. We feel badly about not being
invited to a party which we don't want to go to.
We are like a horse that has been trained to be a "high-stepper." By
prancing over imaginary difficulties and shying at imaginary dangers he
gives an impression of mettlesomeness which is foreign to his native
disposition.
The story-teller is on the lookout for these eager attitudes. He cannot
afford to let his characters be too happy. There is a literary value in
misery that he cannot afford to lose.
That "the course of true love never did run smooth" is an assertion of
story-tellers rather than of ordinary lovers. The fact is that nothing
is so easy as falling in love and staying there. It is a very common
experience, so common that it attracts little attention. The course of
true love usually runs so smoothly that there is nothing that causes
remark. It is not an occasion of gossip. Two good-tempered and healthy
persons are obviously made for each other. They know it, and everybody
else knows it, and they keep on knowing it, and act, as Joe Gargery
would say, "similar, according."
The trouble is that the literary man finds that this does not afford
exciting material for a best seller. So he must invent hazards to make
the game interesting to the spectators. In a story the course of true
love must not run smooth or no one would read it. The old-time romancer
brought his young people through all sorts of misadventures. When all
the troubles he could think of were over, he left them abruptly at the
church door, murmuring feebly to the gentle reader, "they were happy
ever after."
The present-day novelist is offended at this ending. "How absurd!" he
says. "They are still in the early twenties. The world is all before
them, and they have time to fall into all sorts of troubles which the
romanticist has not thought of. Middle age is just as dangerous a period
as youth, and matrimony has its pitfalls. Let me take up the story and
tell you how they didn't live happily ever afterwards, but, on the
contrary, had a cat-and-dog life of it."
Now I would pardon the novelist if he were perfectly honest and were to
say, "Ladies and gentlemen, I am trying to interest you. I have not the
skill to make a story of placid happiness interesting. So I will do the
next best thing. I will tell you a story of a different kind. It is the
picture of a kind of life that is easier to make readable."
In making such a confession he would be in good company. Even
Shakespeare, with all his dramatic genius, confessed that he could not
avoid monotony in his praise of true love. Its ways were ways of
pleasantness, but did not afford much incentive to originality.
"Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse to constancy confined,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
'Fair, kind, and true' is all my argument,
'Fair, kind, and true' varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent."
But the novelist, when he takes himself too seriously as the man who is
to show us "life as it is," is not content to acknowledge his
limitations. When he pictures a situation in which there is nothing but
a succession of problems and misunderstandings, he asks us to admire his
austere faithfulness. Faithful he may be to his Art, as he understands
it, but he is not faithful to reality, unless he is able to make us see
ordinary people in the act of enjoying themselves.
The most obvious thing in life is that people are seldom as unhappy as
their circumstances would lead us to expect. Nobody is happy all the
time, and if he were, nobody is enough of a genius to make his
undeviating felicity interesting. But a great many people are happy most
of the time, and almost everybody has been happy at some time or other.
It may have been only a momentary experience, but it was very real, and
he likes to think about it. He is excessively grateful to any one who
recalls the feeling. The point is that the aggregate of these good times
makes a considerable amount of cheerfulness.
Dickens does not attempt the impossible literary feat of showing us one
person who is happy all the time, but he does what is more obvious, he
makes us see a great many people who have snatches of good cheer in the
midst of their humdrum lives. He lets us see another obvious fact, that
happiness is more a matter of temperament than of circumstance. It is
not given as a reward of merit or as a mark of distinguished
consideration. There is one perennial fountain of pleasure. Any one can
have a good time who can _enjoy himself_. Dickens was not above
celebrating the kind of happiness which comes to the natural man and the
natural boy through what we call the "creature comforts." He could
sympathize with the unadulterated self-satisfaction of little Jack
Horner when
"He put in his thumb
And pulled out a plum,
And said, 'What a great boy am I!'"
The finding of the plum was not a matter of world-wide importance, but
it was a great pleasure for Jack Horner, and he did not care who knew
it.
What joy Mr. Micawber gets out of his own eloquence! We cannot begrudge
him this unearned increment. We sympathize, as, "much affected, but
still intensely enjoying himself, Mr. Micawber folded up his letter and
handed it with a bow to my aunt as something she might like to keep."
And R. Wilfer, despite his meagre salary, and despite Mrs. Wilfer,
enjoys himself whenever he gets a chance. When he goes to Greenwich with
Bella he finds everything as it should be. "Everything was delightful.
The Park was delightful; the punch was delightful, the dishes of fish
were delightful; the wine was delightful." If that was not happiness,
what was it?
Said R. Wilfer: "Supposing a man to go through life, we won't say with a
companion, but we will say with a tune. Very good. Supposing the tune
allotted to him was the 'Dead March' in 'Saul.' Well. It would be a very
suitable tune for particular occasions--none more so--but it would be
difficult to keep time with it in the ordinary run of domestic
transactions."
It is a matter of common observation that those who have allotted to
them the most solemn music do not always keep time with it. In the
"ordinary run of domestic transactions" they find many little
alleviations. In the aggregate these amount to a considerable blessing.
The world may be rough, and many of its ways may be cruel, but for all
that it is a joyful sensation to be alive, and the more alive we are,
the better we like it. All of which is very obvious, and it is what we
want somebody to point out for us again and again.
THE SPOILED CHILDREN OF CIVILIZATION
To spoil a child is no easy task, for Nature is all the time working in
behalf of the childish virtues and veracities, and is gently correcting
the abnormalities of education. Still it can be done. The secret of it
is never to let the child alone, and to insist on doing for him all that
he would otherwise do for himself--and more.
In that "more" lies the spoiling power. The child must be early made
acquainted with the feeling of satiety. There must be too much of
everything. If he were left to himself to any extent, this would be an
unknown experience. For he is a hungry little creature, with a growing
appetite, and naturally is busy ministering to his own needs. He is
always doing something for himself, and enjoys the exercise. The little
egoist, even when he has "no language but a cry," uses that language to
make known to the world that he wants something and wants it very much.
As his wants increase, his exertions increase also. Arms and legs,
fingers and toes, muscles and nerves and busy brain are all at work to
get something which he desires. He is a mechanic fashioning his little
world to his own uses. He is a despot who insists on his divine right to
rule the subservient creatures around him. He is an inventor devising
ways and means to secure all the ends which he has the wit to see. That
these great works on which he has set his heart end in self is obvious
enough, but we forgive him. Altruism will come in its own time.