DICKENS
By the year 1850, in England, the so-called Novel of realism had
conquered. Scott in an earlier generation had by his wonderful
gift made the romance fashionable. But, as we said, it was the
romance with a difference: the romance with its feet firmly
planted on mother-earth, not ballooning in cloudland; the
romance depicting men and women of the past but yet men and
women, not creatures existing only in the fancy of the romance-maker.
In short, Scott, romancer though he was, helped modern
realism along, because he handled his material more truthfully
than it had been handled before. And his great contemporary,
Jane Austen, with her strict adherence to the present and to her
own locale, threw all her influence in the same direction,
justifying Mr. Howell's assertion that she leads all English
novelists in that same truthful handling.
Moreover, that occult but imperative thing, the spirit of the
Time, was on the side of Realism: and all bend to its dictation.
Then, in the mid-century, Dickens and Thackeray, with George
Eliot a little later on their heels, and Trollope too, came to
give a deeper set to the current which was to flow in similar
channels for the remainder of the period. In brief, this is the
story, whatever modifications of the main current are to be
noted: the work of Bulwer and Disraeli, of Reade, Kingsley and
Collins.
A decade before Thackeray got a general hearing Dickens had fame
and mighty influence. It was in the eighteen thirties that the
self-made son of an impecunious navy clerk, who did not live in
vain since he sat for a portrait of Micawber and the father of
the Marshalsea, turned from journalism to that higher reporting
which means the fiction of manners and humors. All the gods had
prepared him for his destiny. Sympathy he had for the poor, the
oppressed, the physically and morally unfit, for he had suffered
in his own person, or in his imagination, for them all. His gift
of observation had been sharpened in the grim school of
necessity: he had learned to write by writing under the pressure
of newspaper needs. And he had in his blood, while still hardly
more than a lad, a feeling for idiomatic English which, so far
as it was not a boon straight from heaven, had been fostered
when the very young Charles had battened, as we saw, upon the
eighteenth century worthies.
It is now generally acknowledged that Dickens is not a temporary
phenomenon in Victorian letters, but a very solid major fact in
the native literature, too large a creative force to be
circumscribed by a generation. Looked back upon across the gap
of time, he looms up all the more impressively because the years
have removed the clutter about the base of the statue. The
temporary loss of critical regard (a loss affecting his hold on
the general reading public little, if any) has given way to an
almost violent critical reaction in his favor. We are widening
the esthetic canvas to admit of the test of life, and are coming
to realize that, obsessed for a time by the attraction of that
lower truth which makes so much of external realities, realism
lost sight of the larger demands of art which include selection,
adaptation, and that enlargement of effect marking the
distinction between art and so-called reality. No critic is now
timid about saying a good word for the author of "Pickwick" and
"Copperfield." A few years ago it was otherwise. Present-day
critics such as Henley, Lang, and Chesterton have assured the
luke-warm that there is room in English literature for both
Thackeray and Dickens.
That Dickens began to write fiction as a very young journalist
was in some ways in his favor; in other ways, to the detriment
of his work. It meant an early start on a career of over thirty
years. It meant writing under pressure with the spontaneity and
reality which usually result. It also meant the bold grappling
with the technique of a great art, learning to make novels by
making them. Again, one truly inspired to fiction is lucky to
have a novitiate in youth. So far the advantages.
On the other hand, the faults due to inexperience, lack of
education, uncertainty of aim, haste and carelessness and other
foes of perfection, will probably be in evidence when a writer
who has scarcely attained to man's estate essays fiction.
Dickens' early work has thus the merits and demerits of his
personal history. A popular and able parliamentary reporter,
with sympathetic knowledge of London and the smaller towns where
his duties took him, possessed of a marvelous memory which
photographed for him the boyish impressions of places like
Chatham and Rochester, he began with sketches of that life
interspersed with more fanciful tales which drew upon his
imagination and at times passed the melodramatic border-line.
When these collected pieces were published under the familiar
title "Sketches by Boz," it is not too much to say that the
Dickens of the "Pickwick Papers" (which was to appear next year)
was revealed. Certainly, the main qualities of a great master of
the Comic were in these pages; so, in truth, was the master of
both tears and smiles. But not at full-length: the writer had
not yet found his occasion;--the man needs the occasion, even as
it awaits the man. And so, hard upon the Boz book, followed, as
it were by an accident, the world-famous "Adventures of Mr.
Pickwick." By accident, I say, because the promising young
author was asked to furnish the letter-press for a series of
comic sporting pictures by the noted artist, Seymour;
whereupon--doubtless to the astonishment of all concerned, the
pictures became quite secondary to the reading matter and the Wellers
soon set all England talking and laughing over their inimitable
sayings. Here in a loosely connected series of sketches the main
unity of which was the personality of Mr. Pickwick and his club,
its method that of the episodic adventure story of "Gil Blas"
lineage, its purpose frankly to amuse at all costs, a new
creative power in English literature gave the world over three
hundred characters in some sixty odd scenes: intensely English,
intensely human, and still, after the lapse of three quarters of
a century, keenly enjoyable.
In a sense, all Dickens' qualities are to be found in "The
Pickwick Papers," as they have come to be called for brevity's
sake. But the assertion is misleading, if it be taken to mean
that in the fifteen books of fiction which Dickens was to
produce, he added nothing, failed to grow in his art or to widen
and deepen in his hold upon life. So far is this from the truth,
that one who only knows Charles Dickens in this first great book
of fun, knows a phase of him, not the whole man: more, hardly
knows the novelist at all. He was to become, and to remain, not
only a great humorist, but a great novelist as well: and
"Pickwick" is not, by definition, a Novel at all. Hence, the
next book the following year, "Oliver Twist," was important as
answering the question: Was the brilliant new writer to turn out
very novelist, able to invent, handle and lead to due end a
tangled representation of social life?
Before replying, one rather important matter may be adverted to,
concerning the Dickens introduced to the world by "Pickwick":
his astonishing power in the evocation of human beings, whom we
affectionately remember, whose words are treasured, whose fates
are followed with a sort of sense of personal responsibility. If
the creation of differentiated types of humanity who persist in
living in the imagination be the cardinal gift of the fiction
writer, then this one is easily the leading novelist of the
race. Putting aside for the moment the question of his
caricaturing tendency, one fact confronts us, hardly to be
explained away: we can close our eyes and see Micawber, Mrs.
Gamp, Pegotty, Dick Swiveller, the Artful Dodger, Joe Gargery,
Tootles, Captain Cutter, and a hundred more, and their sayings,
quaint and dear, are like household companions. And this is true
in equal measure of no other story-maker who has used English
speech--it may be doubted if it is true to like degree of
Shakspere himself.
In the quick-following stories, "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas
Nickleby," the author passed from episode and comic
characterization to what were in some sort Novels: the fiction
of organism, growth and climax.
His wealth of character creation was continued and even
broadened. But there was more here: an attempt to play the game
of Novel-making. It may be granted that when Dickens wrote these
early books (as a young man in the twenties), he had not yet
mastered many of the difficulties of the art of fiction. There
is loose construction in both: the melodrama of "Oliver Twist"
blends but imperfectly with the serious and sentimental part of
the narrative, which is less attractive. So, too, in "Nickleby,"
there is an effect at times of thin ice where the plot is
secondary to the episodic scenes and characters by the way. Yet
in both Novels there is a story and a good one: we get the
spectacle of genius learning its lesson,--experimenting in a
form. And as those other early books, differing totally from
each other too, "Old Curiosity Shop," and "Barnaby Rudge," were
produced, and in turn were succeeded by a series of great novels
representing the writer's young prime,--I mean "Martin
Chuzzlewit," "Dombey and Son" and "David Copperfield,"--it was
plain that the hand of Dickens was becoming subdued to the
element it worked in. Not only was there a good fable, as
before, but it was managed with increasing mastery, while the
general adumbration of life gained in solidity, truth and rich
human quality. In brief, by the time "Copperfield," the story
most often referred to as his best work, was reached, Dickens
was an artist. He wrought in that fiction in such a fashion as
to make the most of the particular class of Novel it
represented: to wit, the first-person autobiographic picture of
life. Given its purpose, it could hardly have been better done.
It surely bears favorable comparison, for architecture, with
Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," a work in the same genre, though
lacking the autobiographic method. This is quite aside from its
remarkable range of character-portrayal, its humor, pathos and
vraisemblance, its feeling for situation, its sonorous eloquence
in massed effects.
By the time he had reached mid-career, then, Charles Dickens had
made himself a skilled, resourceful story-teller, while his
unique qualities of visualization and interpretation had
strengthened. This point is worth emphasis, since there are
those who contend that "The Pickwick Papers" is his most
characteristic performance. Such a judgment is absurd, It
overlooks the grave beauty of the picture of Chesney Wold in
Bleak House; the splendid harmony of the Yarmouth storm in
"Copperfield"; the fine melodrama of the chapter in "Chuzzlewit"
where the guilty Jonas takes his haggard life; the magnificent
portraiture of the Father of the Marshalsea in "Little Dorrit":
the spiritual exaltation in vivid stage terms of Carton's death;
the exquisite April-day blend of tenderness and fun in limning
the young life of a Marchioness, a little Dombey and a tiny Tim.
To call Dickens a comic writer and stop there, is to try to pour
a river into a pint pot; for a sort of ebullient boy-like spirit
of fun, the high jinks of literature, we go to "Pickwick"; for
the light and shade of life to "Copperfield"; for the structural
excellencies of fiction to later masterpieces like "The Tale of
Two Cities" and "Great Expectations."
Just here a serious objection often brought against Dickens may
be considered: his alleged tendency to caricature. Does Dickens
make his characters other than what life itself shows, and if
so, is he wrong in so doing?
His severest critics assume the second if the first be but
granted. Life--meaning the exact reproduction of reality--is
their fetish. Now, it must be granted that Dickens does make his
creatures talk as their prototypes do not in life. Nobody would
for a moment assert that Mrs. Gamp, Pecksniff and Micawber could
be literally duplicated from the actual world. But is not
Dickens within his rights as artist in so changing the features
of life as to increase our pleasure? That is the nub of the
whole matter. The artist of fiction should not aim at exact
photography, for it is impossible; no fiction-maker since time
began has placed on the printed pages half the irrelevance and
foolishness or one-fifth the filth which are in life itself.
Reasons of art and ethics forbid. The aim, therefore, should
rather be at an effect of life through selection and re-shaping.
And I believe Dickens is true to this requirement. We hear less
now than formerly of his crazy exaggerations: we are beginning
to realize that perhaps he saw types that were there, which we
would overlook if they were under our very eyes: we feel the
wisdom of Chesterton's remarks that Dickens' characters will
live forever because they never lived at all! We suffered from
the myopia of realism. Zola desired above all things to tell the
truth by representing humanity as porcine, since he saw it that
way: he failed in his own purpose, because decency checked him:
his art is not photographic (according to his proud boast) but
has an almost Japanese convention of restraint in its
suppression of facts. Had Sarah Gamp been allowed by Dickens to
speak as she would speak in life, she would have been
unspeakably repugnant, never cherished as a permanently
laughable, even lovable figure of fiction. Dickens was a master
of omissions as well as of those enlargments which made him
carry over the foot lights. Mrs. Gamp is a monumental study of
the coarse woman rogue: her creator makes us hate the sin and
tolerate the sinner. Nor is that other masterly portrait of the
woman rascal--Thackeray's Becky Sharp--an example of strict
photography; she is great in seeming true, but she is not life.
So much, then, for the charge of caricature: it is all a matter
of degree. It all depends upon the definition of art, and upon
the effect made upon the world by the characters themselves. If
they live in loving memory, they must, in the large sense, be
true. Thus we come back to the previous statement: Dickens'
people live--are known by their words and in their ways all over
the civilized world. No collection of mere grotesques could ever
bring this to pass. Prick any typical creation of Dickens and it
runs blood, not sawdust. And just in proportion as we travel,
observe broadly and form the habit of a more penetrating and
sympathetic study of mankind, shall we believe in these
emanations of genius. Occasionally, under the urge and
surplusage of his comic force, he went too far and made a Quilp:
but the vast majority even of his drolls are as credible as they
are dear.
That he showed inequality as he wrought at the many books which
filled the years between "Pickwick" and the unfinished "Mystery
of Edwin Drood," may also be granted. Also may it be confessed
that within the bounds of one book there are the extremes of
good and bad. It is peculiar to Dickens that often in the very
novel we perchance feel called upon to condemn most, occurs a
scene or character as memorably great as anything he left the
world. Thus, we may regard "Old Curiosity Shop," once so
beloved, as a failure when viewed as a whole; and yet find Dick
Swiveller and the Marchioness at their immortal game as
unforgettable as Mrs. Battle engaged in the same pleasant
employment. Nor because other parts of "Little Dorrit" seem thin
and artificial, would we forego the description of the debtor's
prison. And our belief that the presentation of the labor-capital
problem in "Hard Times" is hasty and shallow, does not
prevent a recognition of the opening sketch of the circus troop
as displaying its author at his happiest of humorous
observation. There are thus always redeeming things in the
stories of this most unequal man of genius. Seven books there
are, novels in form, which are indubitable masterpieces: "Martin
Chuzzlewit," "Dombey and Son," "David Copperfield," "Bleak
House," "A Tale of Two Cities," "Great Expectations" and "Our
Mutual Friend." These, were all the others withdrawn, would give
ample evidence of creative power: they have the largeness,
variety and inventive verve which only are to be found in the
major novelists. Has indeed the same number of equal weight and
quality been given forth by any other English writer?
Another proof that the power of Dickens was not dependent
exclusively upon the comic, is his production of "A Tale of Two
Cities." It is sometimes referred to as uncharacteristic because
it lacks almost entirely his usual gallery of comics: but it is
triumphantly a success in a different field. The author says he
wished for the nonce to make a straight adventure tale with
characters secondary. He did it in a manner which has always
made the romance a favorite, and compels us to include this
dramatic study of the French Revolution among the choicest of
his creations. Its period and scene have never--save by Carlyle--been
so brilliantly illuminated. Dickens was brooding on this
story at a time when, wretchedly unhappy, he was approaching the
crisis of a separation from his wife: the fact may help to
explain its failure to draw on that seemingly inexhaustible
fountain of bubbling fun so familiar in his work. But even
subtract humor and Dickens exhibits the master-hand in a fiction
markedly of another than his wonted kind. This Novel--or
romance, as it should properly be called--reminds us of a
quality in Dickens which has been spoken of in the way of
derogation: his theatrical tendency. When one declares an author
to be dramatic, a compliment is intended. But when he is called
theatric, censure is implied. Dickens, always possessed of a
strong sense of the dramatic and using it to immense advantage,
now and again goes further and becomes theatric: that is, he
suggests the manipulating of effects with artifice and the
intention of providing sensational and scenic results at the
expense of proportion and truth. A word on this is advisable.
Those familiar with the man and his works are aware how close he
always stood to the playhouse and its product. He loved it from
early youth, all but went on the stage professionally, knew its
people as have few of the writing craft, was a fine amateur
actor himself, wrote for the stage, helped to dramatize his
novels and gave delightful studies of theatrical life in his
books. Shall we ever forget Mr. Crummles and his family? He had
an instinctive feeling for what was scenic and effective in the
stage sense. When he appeared as a reader of his own works, he
was an impersonator; and noticeably careful to have the stage
accessories exactly right. And when all this, natural and
acquired, was applied to fiction, it could not but be of
influence. As a result, Dickens sometimes forced the note,
favored the lurid, exaggerated his comic effects. To put it in
another way, this theater manner of his now and then injured the
literature he made. But that is only one side of the matter: it
also helped him greatly and where he went too far, he was simply
abusing a precious gift. To speak of Dickens' violent
theatricality as if it expressed his whole being, is like
describing the wart on Cromwell's face as if it were his set of
features. Remove from Dickens his dramatic power, and the
memorable master would be no more: he would vanish into dim air.
We may be thankful--in view of what it produced--that he
possessed even in excess this sense of the scenic value of
character and situation: it is not a disqualification but a
virtue, and not Dickens alone but Dumas, Hugo and Scott were
great largely because of it.
In the praise naturally enough bestowed upon a great
autobiographical Novel like "David Copperfield," the fine art of
a late work like "Great Expectations" has been overlooked or at
least minimized. If we are to consider skilful construction
along with the other desirable qualities of the novelist, this
noble work has hardly had justice done it: moreover, everything
considered,--story value, construction, characters, atmosphere,
adequacy of style, climactic interest, and impressive lesson, I
should name "Great Expectations," published when the author was
fifty, as his most perfect book, if not the greatest of Charles
Dickens' novels. The opinion is unconventional: but as Dickens
is studied more as artist progressively skilful in his craft, I
cannot but believe this particular story will receive increasing
recognition. In the matter of sheer manipulation of material, it
is much superior to the book that followed it two years later,
the last complete novel: "Our Mutual Friend." It is rather
curious that this story, which was in his day and has steadily
remained a favorite with readers, has with equal persistency
been severely handled by the critics. What has insured its
popularity? Probably its vigor and variety of characterization,
its melodramatic tinge, the teeming world of dramatic contrasts
it opens, its bait to our sense of mystery. It has a power very
typical of the author and one of the reasons for Dickens' hold
upon his audience. It is a power also exhibited markedly in such
other fictions as "Dombey and Son," "Martin Chuzzlewit" and
"Bleak House." I refer to the impression conveyed by such
stories that life is a vast, tumultuous, vari-colored play of
counter-motives and counter-characters, full of chance,
surprise, change and bitter sweet: a thing of mystery, terror,
pity and joy. It has its masks of respectability, its frauds of
place, its beauty blossoming in the mud, its high and low of
luck, its infinite possibilities betwixt heaven and hell. The
effect of this upon the sensitive reader is to enlarge his
sympathetic feeling for humanity: life becomes a big, awful,
dear phantasmagoria in such hands. It seems not like a flat
surface, but a thing of length, breadth, height and depth, which
it has been a privilege to enter. Dickens' fine gift--aside from
that of character creation--is found in this ability to convey
an impression of puissant life. He himself had this feeling and
he got it into his books: he had, in a happier sense, the joy of
life of Ibsen, the life force of Nietzsche. From only a few of
the world's great writers does one receive this sense of life,
the many-sided spectacle; Cervantes, Hugo, Tolstoy, Sienkiewicz,
it is men like they that do this for us.
Another side of Dickens' literary activity is shown in his
Christmas stories, which it may be truly said are as well
beloved as anything he gave the world in the Novel form. This is
assuredly so of the "Christmas Carol," "The Chimes" and "The
Cricket on the Hearth." This last is on a par with the other two
in view of its double life in a book and on the boards of the
theater. The fragrance of Home, of the homely kindness and
tenderness of the human heart, is in them, especially in the
Carol, which is the best tale of its kind in the tongue and
likely to remain so. It permanently altered the feeling of the
race for Christmas. Irving preceded him in the use of the
Christmas motive, but Dickens made it forever his own. By a
master's magic evocation, the great festival shines brighter,
beckons more lovingly than it did of old. Thackeray felt this
when he declared that such a story was "a public benefit." Such
literature lies aside from our main pursuit, that of the Novel,
but is mentioned because it is the best example possible, the
most direct, simple expression of that essential kindness, that
practical Christianity which is at the bottom of Dickens'
influence. It is bonhomie and something more. It is not Dickens
the reformer, as we get him when he satirizes Dotheboys hall, or
the Circumlocution Office or the Chancery Court: but Dickens as
Mr. Greatheart, one with all that is good, tender, sweet and
true. Tiny Tim's thousand-times quoted saying is the
quintessence, the motto for it all and the writer speaks in and
through the lad when he says: "God bless us, every one." When an
author gets that honest unction into his work, and also has the
gift of observation and can report what he sees, he is likely to
contribute to the literature of his land. With a sneer of the
cultivated intellect, we may call it elementary: but to the
heart, such a view of life is royally right.
This thought of Dickens' moral obligation in his work and his
instinctive attitude towards his audience, leads to one more
point: a main reason for this Victorian novelist's strong hold
on the affections of mankind is to be found in the warm personal
relation he establishes with the reader. The relationship
implies obligation on the part of the author, a vital bond
between the two, a recognition of a steady, not a chance,
association. There goes with it, too, an assumption that the
author believes in and cares much for his characters, and asks
the reader for the same faith. This personal relation of author
to reader and of both to the imagined characters, has gone out
of fashion in fiction-making: in this respect, Dickens (and most
of his contemporaries) seem now old-fashioned. The present
realist creed would keep the novelist away and out of sight both
of his fictive creations and his audience; it being his business
to pull the strings to make his puppets dance--up to heaven or
down to hell, whatever does it matter to the scientist-novelist?
Tolstoy's novel "Resurrection" is as a subject much more
disagreeable than Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"; but it is
beautiful where the other is horrible, because it palpitates
with a Christ-like sympathy for an erring woman, while the
French author cares not a button whether his character is lost
or not. The healthy-minded public (which can be trusted in
heart, if not in head) will instinctively choose that treatment
of life in a piece of fiction which shows the author kindly
cooperative with fate and brotherly in his position towards his
host of readers. That is the reason Dickens holds his own and is
extremely likely to gain in the future, while spectacular
reputations based on all the virtues save love, continue to die
the death. What M. Anatole France once said of Zola, applies to
the whole school of the aloof and unloving: "There is in man an
infinite need of loving which renders him divine. M. Zola does
not know it.... The holiness of tears is at the bottom of all
religions. Misfortune would suffice to render man august to man.
M. Zola does not know it."
Charles Dickens does know these truths and they get into his
work and that work, therefore, gets not so much into the minds
as into the souls of his fellow-man. When we recite the sayings
which identify his classic creations: when we express ourselves
in a Pickwickian sense, wait for something to turn up with Mr.
Micawber, drop into poetry with Silas Wegg, move on with little
Joe, feel 'umble after the manner of Uriah Heap, are willin'
with Barkis, make a note of, in company with Captain Cuttle, or
conclude with Mr. Weller, Senior, that it is the part of wisdom
to beware of "widders," we may observe that what binds us to
this motley crowd of creatures is not their grotesquerie but
their common humanity, their likeness to ourselves, the mighty
flood-tide of tolerant human sympathy on which they are floated
into the safe haven of our hearts. With delightful
understanding, Charles Dudley Warner writes: "After all, there
is something about a boy I like." Dickens, using the phrasing
for a wider application, might have said: "After all, there is
something about men and women I like!" It was thus no accident
that he elected to write of the lower middle classes; choosing
to depict the misery of the poor, their unfair treatment in
institutions; to depict also the unease of criminals, the
crushed state of all underlings--whether the child in education
or that grown-up evil child, the malefactor in prison. He was a
spokesman of the people, a democratic pleader for justice and
sympathy. He drew the proletariat preferably, not because he was
a proletariat but because he was a brother-man and the fact had
been overlooked. He drew thousands of these suppressed humans,
and they were of varied types and fortunes: but he loved them as
though they were one, and made the world love them too: and love
their maker. The deep significance of Dickens, perhaps his
deepest, is in the social note that swells loud and insistent
through his fiction. He was a pioneer in the democratic sympathy
which was to become so marked feature in the Novel in the late
nineteenth century: and which, as we have already seen, is from
the first a distinctive trait of the modern fiction, one of the
explanations of its existence.