In one of those glimpses of my childhood which
are clearest and most recurrent, I see lying on the table of a familiar room a
thin book in a green-paper cover, which shows the title, Our Mutual Friend.
What that title meant I could but vaguely conjecture; though I fingered the
pages, I was too young to read them with understanding; but this thin, green
book notably impressed me and awoke my finer curiosity. For I knew that it had
been received with smiling welcome; eager talk about it fell upon my ears; and
with it was associated a name which from the very beginning of things I had
heard spoken respectfully, admiringly. Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson --
these were to me as the names of household gods; I uttered them with reverence
before two of the framed portraits upon our walls.
Another glimpse into that homely cloud-land
shows me a bound volume, rather heavy for small hands, which was called Little
Dorrit. I saw it only as a picture book, and found most charm in the
frontispiece. This represented a garret bedroom, with a lattice through which
streamed the sunshine; thereamid stood a girl, her eyes fixed upon the prospect
of city roofs. Often and long did I brood over this picture, which touched my
imagination in ways more intelligible to me now than then. To begin with, there
was the shaft of sunlight, always, whether in nature or in art, powerful to set
me dreaming. Then the view from the window -- vague, suggestive of vastness; I
was told that those were the roofs of London, and London, indefinitely remote,
had begun to play the necromancer in my brain. Moreover, the poor bareness of
that garret, and the wistful gazing of the lonely girl, held me entranced. It
was but the stirring of a child's fancy, excited by the unfamiliar; yet many a
time in the after years, when, seated in just such a garret, I saw the sunshine
flood the table at which I wrote, that picture in Little Dorrit has
risen before me, and I have half believed that my childish emotion meant the
unconscious foresight of things to come.
I think that the first book-the first real,
substantial book-I read through was The Old Curiosity Shop. At all
events, it was the first volume of Dickens which I made my own. And I could not
have lighted better in my choice. At ten years old, or so, one is not ready for
Pickwick. I remember very well the day when I plunged into that sea of
mirth; I can hear myself, half-choked with laughter, clamouring for the
attention of my elders whilst I read aloud this and that passage from the great
Trial. But The Old Curiosity Shop makes strong appeal to a youthful
imagination, and contains little that is beyond its scope. Dickens's sentiment,
however it may distress the mature mind of our later day, is not unwholesome,
and, at all events in this story, addresses itself naturally enough to feelings
unsubdued by criticism. His quality of picturesqueness is here seen at its
best, with little or nothing of that melodrama which makes the alloy of Nicholas
Nickleby and Oliver Twist -- to speak only of the early books. The
opening scene, that dim-lighted storehouse of things old and grotesque, is the
best approach to Dickens's world, where sights of every day are transfigured in
the service of romance. The kindliness of the author's spirit, his with poor
and humble folk, set one's mind to a sort of music which it is good to live
with; and no writer of moralities ever showed triumphant virtue in so cheery a
light as that which falls upon these honest people when rascality has got its
deserts. Notably good, too, whether for young or old, is the atmosphere of
rural peace breathed in so many pages of this book; I know that it helped to
make conscious in me a love of English field and lane and village, one day to
become a solacing passion. In The Old Curiosity Shop, town is set before
you only for effect of contrast; the aspiration of the story is to the country
road winding along under a pure sky. Others have pictured with a closer
fidelity the scenes of English rustic life, but who succeeds better than Dickens
in throwing a charm upon the wayside inn and the village church? Among his
supreme merits is that of having presented in abiding form one of the best or
our national ideals -- rural homeliness. By the way of happiest emotions, the
child reader takes this ideal into mind and heart and perhaps it is in great
part because Dickens's books are still so much read, because one sees edition
after edition scattered over town and country homes, that one cannot wholly
despair of this new England which tries so hard to be unlike the old.
Time went by, and one day I stood before a
picture newly hung in the children 5 room. It was a large wood-cut, published
(I think) by The Illustrated London News, and called "The Empty
Chair." Then for the first time I heard of Dickens's home and knew that he
had lived at that same Gadshill of which Shakespeare spoke. Not without awe did
I see the picture of the room which now was tenantless; I remember, too, a
curiosity which led me to look closely at the writing table and the objects
upon it, at the comfortable, round-backed chair, at the book-shelves behind;
and I began to ask myself how books were written, and how the men lived who
wrote them. It is my last glimpse of childhood. Six months later there was an
empty chair in my own home, and the tenor of my life was broken.
When, seven years after this, I somehow found
myself amid the streets of London, it was a minor matter to me, a point by the
way, that I had to find the means of keeping myself alive; what I chiefly
thought of was that now at length I could go hither or thither in London's
immensity, seeking for the places which had been made known to me by Dickens. Previous
short visits had eased my mind about the sights that everyone must see; I now
had leisure to wander among the by-ways, making real to my vision what hitherto
had been but names and insubstantial shapes. A map of the town lay open on my
table, and amid its close-printed mazes I sought the familiar word; then off I
set, no matter the distance, to see and delight myself. At times, when walking
with other thoughts, I would come upon a discovery the name of a street-corner
would catch my eye and thrill me. Thus, one day in the City, I found myself at
the entrance to Bevis Marks! I had just been making an application in reply to
some advertisement -- of course, fruitlessly; but what was that disappointment
compared with the discovery of Bevis Marks! Here dwelt Mr. Brass, and Sally,
and the Marchioness. Up and down the little street, this side and that, I went
gazing and dreaming. No press of busy folk disturbed me; the place was quiet;
it looked no doubt, much the same as when Dickens knew it. I am not sure that I
had any dinner that day, but, if not, I dare say I did not mind it very much.
London of that time differed a good deal from
the London of to-day; it was still more unlike the town in which Dickens lived
when writing his earlier books but the localities which he made familiar to his
readers were, on the whole, those which had undergone least change. If Jacob's
Island and Folly Ditch could no longer be seen, the river side showed many a
spot sufficiently akin to them, and was everywhere suggestive of Dickens; I had
but to lean, at night, over one of the City bridges, and the broad flood spoke
to me in the very tones of the master. The City itself, Clerkenwell, Gray's-Inn
Road, the Inns of Court -- these places remained much as of old. To this day,
they would bear for me something of that old association but four and twenty
years ago, when I had no London memories of my own, they were simply the scenes
of Dickens's novels, with all remoter history enriching their effect on the
great writer's page. The very atmosphere declared him; if I gasped in a fog,
was it not Mr. Guppy's "London particular"? -- if the wind pierced me
under a black sky, did I not see Scrooge's clerk trotting off to his Christmas
Eve in Somers Town? We bookish people have our consolations for the life we do
not live. In time I came to see London with my own eyes, but how much better
when I saw it with those of Dickens!
Forster's biography told me where to look for
the novelist's homes and haunts. I sought out Furnival's Inn, where he wrote Pickwick;
the little house near Guilford Street, to which he moved soon after his
marriage; Devonshire Place, in Marylebone Road, where he lived and worked for
many years. But Forster did me another and a greater service; from the purchase
of his book dates a second period of my Dickens memories, different in kind and
in result from those which are concerned with the contents of the novels. At
this time I had begun my attempts in the art of fiction much of my day was
spent in writing, and often enough it happened that such writing had to be done
amid circumstances little favourable to play of the imagination, or intentness
of the mind. Then it was that the Life of Dickens came to my help. When
I was tired and discouraged and could not spur the brain to work, I took down
Forster and read at random, sure to come upon something which renewed my
intellectual zest. Merely as the narrative of a wonderfully active, zealous,
and successful life, this book scarce has its equal; almost any reader must
find it exhilarating; but to me it yielded such special sustenance as, in those
days, I could not have found elsewhere, and, lacking which, I should perhaps
have failed by the way. I am not referring to Dickens's swift triumph, to his
resounding fame and high prosperity; these things are cheery to read about,
especially when shown in a light so human, with the accompaniment of such
geniality and mirth. No; the pages which invigorated me were those where one
sees Dickens at work, alone at his writing-table, absorbed in the task of the
story-teller. Constantly he makes known to Forster how his story is getting on,
speaks in detail of difficulties, rejoices over spells of happy labour; and
what splendid sincerity in it all If this work of his was not worth doing, why,
nothing was. A troublesome letter has arrived by the morning's post, and
threatens to spoil the day; but he takes a few turns up and down the room,
shakes off the worry, and sits down to write for hours and hours. He is at the
seaside, his desk at a sunny bay window overlooking the shore, and there all
the morning he writes with gusto, ever and again bursting into laughter at his
own thoughts. A man of method, too, with no belief in the theory of casual
inspiration fine artist as he is, he goes to work regularly, punctually; one
hears of breakfast advanced by a quarter of an hour, that the morning's session
may be more fruitful.
Well, this it was that stirred me, not to
imitate Dickens as a novelist, but to follow afar off his example as a worker. From
this point of view the debt I owe to him is incalculable. Among the best of my
memories are those moments under a lowering sky when I sought light in the
pages of his biographer, and rarely sought in vain.
Dickens's first piece of original writing which
got into print appeared in 1833, when he was not quite twenty-two years old. It
was a sketch entitled A Dinner at Poplar Walk, republished later as Mr.
Minns and His Cousin. He sent it, as an unknown contributor, to a magazine
called the Old Monthly, and its acceptance gave him the keenest joy he
had ever known. Already for more than two years he had worked as press reporter
in the gallery of the House of Commons and elsewhere, but this mere livelihood
was far from satisfying his ambition; he had often thought of the stage, and
even gone through a good deal of hard, methodical work with a view of training
himself for that career. The publication of his story -- which so delighted him
that as he tells us, he walked for half an hour about Westminster Hall, his
eyes "so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street,
and were not fit to be seen there" -- fixed his mind in the right
direction. Though the Old Monthly paid him nothing, he contributed nine
more sketches, anonymous save the last two, which were signed "Boz"
-- a jocose nasal abridgment of "Moses" (in the Vicar of Wakefield),
wherewith Dickens had nicknamed one of his brothers before he assumed it as his
own literary signature. Such matter was too attractive to remain long without
market value; an evening edition of the Morning Chronicle (for which
paper he reported) continued the publication of his sketches, with an increase
of the young journalist's salary from five guineas a week to seven. At length,
in 1836, a publisher bought the copyright of these collected pieces, and issued
them in two volumes as Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Everyday Life
and Everyday People.
It is amusing (and more than that) to read in
Dickens's first published story that Mr. Minns had "a good and increasing
salary, in addition to some £10,000 of his own, invested in the funds." One
recalls the wretched poverty of the author's childhood, his slavery as a little
boy in the blacking warehouse, the wonderful energy by which he had raised
himself in a few years from the position of attorney's office-lad to that of a
reporter without rival in the press gallery, and one thinks of the tremulous
hopes with which he set down to write of Mr. Minns and his £10,000. Forster quotes
for us (Life of Dickens, Bk. I, Chap. 4) the letter in which Dickens
applied to the editor of the Chronicle for increase of payment on his
contributing original work; and the extreme modesty of its wording, the
scrupulous care with which he guards himself against the appearance of urging
an unreasonable claim, excite a smile in view of the brilliant success so soon
to come to him. Dickens would have been successful in any line of life he had,
besides his "shaping spirit of imagination," all the practical
qualities which make a man prosperous. But his rapid rise to fame and fortune
by means of a book or two which described the world as he saw it in his obscure
youth has an exhilarating interest scarcely to be paralleled in the biography
of men of letters. It was well for him, and for all, that his triumph came so
speedily. A difference of tone which we at once remark on passing from the Sketches
to Pickwick must not be attributed solely to the natural ripening of his
powers; that exuberance of animation, that joyous exercise of happiest
faculties which give Pickwick its perennial value, was due in great
measure to the burst of sunshine which had gladdened the writer's heart. Imagine
a Dickens who had to strive for half a lifetime against neglect; would his gift
to the heedless world have been the same as that he offered in the plenitude of
grateful delight?
This collection of Sketches no longer
makes much appeal to the ordinary reader; its interest (apart from literary
criticism) is mainly historical, and from that point of view it has
considerable value. There we have a picture of (I will not say English, but)
London life at the beginning of the Victorian era, the life of the lower
classes of society, that is to say, of the folk who constitute the mass of the
population, yet leave no record of themselves in formal chronicle. With few
exceptions the people dealt with belong to a rank between that of the educated
citizen and the order of wage-earners; they are the inhabitants of the lower
world of "business," whose work does not soil their hands, and who,
on that account, lay claim to a place on the edge of gentility. This, of
course, was the world to which Dickens belonged, by birth and breeding it is
the peculiar merit of his earliest work that he writes of things intimately
known to him, writes of them, moreover, with abundant sympathy, notwithstanding
his occasional attitude of moralist. For the first time, a member of this class
has become conscious and vocal, capable of looking about him with intelligent
observation and of describing with remarkable veracity all he sees. As such
endowments were very little to be expected amid that dull and gross multitude,
Dickens's voice, as soon as it made itself heard, drew an attention which was
in great part surprise. The reading public (a term of narrow application in
those days) felt, first of all, a certain astonishment at finding themselves
interested in such trivial themes, and were still more surprised that their
interest could be excited by an author who made no pretension to what was
called intellectual standing. Indeed, the outlook of Boz was notably
restricted; he seemed to live wholly among the people he described; nowhere in
his writing is there any suggestion of acquaintance with a social order above the
vulgar. His own superiority to the subjects of his sketches seems to consist
only in certain mental qualities, above all in his power of humorous
appreciation and in the vivid attention with which he regards everything around
him. Never had been known such absorbing interest in the commonplace. The
volume opens with a series of papers on "Our Parish." It is no rural
parish, amid beautiful surroundings, suggestive of idyllic story and possibly
of romance; but a semi-squalid district somewhere on the outskirts of London,
roads of monotonous ugliness, streets and by-ways remarkable only for degrees
of discomfort and dirt and sordid struggle. The inhabitants presented to us are
in complete harmony with their circumstances -- paltry officials, old maids
living meanly on small incomes, fussy leaders of local society, clerical
inanities; nothing more ignobly "parochial" could be imagined. Yet
the writer is engrossed in his topic; treats it lovingly -- his spirit of jest
never for a moment interfering with the seriousness of his purpose, which is to
make us see and understand the things to him so familiar. After the Parish
sketches come glimpses of the general life of London, still on its poorer side
descriptions of notable streets and localities, of holiday resorts, of the
haunts of crime and misery. We go into public-houses and pawnshops, visit
popular theatres, are led over Newgate. The rest of the book is filled with
sketches of typical characters, and with little stories illustrating vulgar
life.
Every page reminds us how the outside of things
has changed during the last sixty years. The London of that day was decidedly
more picturesque than now; its citizens presented more variety of costume, with
freer indulgence of the taste for colour. A bricklayer leaning against a post
in his Sunday clothes wears a blue coat, long yellow waistcoat and Blucher
boots. A "gentleman" at a boarding-house sits down to dinner in a
maroon-coloured dress coat, with velvet collar and cuffs. A bridegroom wears a
light-blue coat, with "double-milled Kersay pantaloons." Trousers of
the cloth known as "shepherd's plaid" are often mentioned, and in the
matter of waistcoats great variety of hue was permitted. The wheel traffic of
the streets, with stage-coaches, glass-coaches, hackney-coaches, tells of a
time very remote from ours; well-to-do men commonly rode to business on
horseback; cabriolets were just going out of use, and omnibuses just coming in.
Great, too, are the changes in the social characteristics of the world with
which Dickens is concerned; increase of wealth and advance of education have
complicated the conditions of life in the lower middle class, putting a much
greater distance between its representatives at the two extremes. Vulgarity of
manners made, in that day, a more obvious link than now beyond the clerk or
shop-boy and the thriving tradesman. It would not be easy to make a less
attractive presentment of the everyday life of a people than that which Dickens
has here set forth and his picture is the more impressive for its being quite
without malice. The men and women he shows us are thoroughly human; they do not
lack elementary virtues yet the impression they leave is one of gross ignorance
combined with bumptiousness, of coarseness and dullness, fortified by obstinacy,
of pretentiousness hidebound in snobbery. In our time these are still the
rooted characteristics of a large class of English people, but they have no
longer such free play; a new criterion of life and demeanour interferes to a
great extent with the inherent tendencies of this social type. There is no
reason whatever to doubt Dickens's fidelity in portraiture; we have abundant
confirmation of the truth of what he shows us, and, on laying down his Sketches,
it is natural to ask the question: could a writer whose mission was to mock at
conceited stupidity, to assail pernicious humbug, possibly have been born among
a people and in a time which afforded him richer scope for his genius ? Putting
aside certain pages of rather forced pathos or of deliberate gloom (such as
"Our Next-door Neighbour," "The Black Veil," " The
Drunkard's Death"), the volume contains hardly a person or a scene not
provocative of just ridicule and contempt. To say that Dickens was quite aware
of this is in no way to contradict the statement that he writes sympathetically
of his chosen subjects. Consciousness of knowledge and power made him delight
in the material which he could best use. Let him step ever so little beyond his
familiar ground, and the failure of sympathy, consequently of effect, becomes
at once evident. The Sketches are the early, immature work of a great
humorist and satirist. The eye is there, and the ability to depict what it sees
but the finer spirit which will direct observation, inspire the artist's work,
is not quite awakened. From the material he is collecting he chooses only that
which is easiest of treatment, with the result that we feel an elementariness
in his view of things, however truthful it be within the limits thus imposed.
With a knowledge of the Sketches alone,
it would not be possible to forecast Dickens's greater work. One would see the
promise of an original novelist, but several of the leading traits which mark
his position in English literature are barely, if at all, suggested by this
youthful writing. Excellent as are these little pictures of grimy or dreary
London, they do not affect us with that peculiar sense of imaginative vision
which is the note of his best books, that unique power of picturesque
suggestiveness which enabled Dickens to create a London previously unknown, and
to make it part of the mind of his readers. With his observation there already
mingles, indeed, a characteristic strain of fancy, as in the paper on Monmouth
Street, but the true Dickens note is not yet sounded, the atmosphere through
which London will appear to him and to us has not yet come into existence. To
say this is to mark the absence of that distinctive power which --
notwithstanding the associations of the word -- may best be described as
melodramatic; that picturesqueness of action which is the complement of
Dickens's descriptive magic. Read "The Black Veil" or "The
Drunkard's Death," and you feel that they might have been written by
anyone; whereas, at a later time, such narratives would have been stamped in every
line with the author's personality. Sadly as Dickens was led astray, now and
then, by his melodramatic impulses, it is none the less one of his great
qualities; in the best moments, it enables him to give tragic significance to
the commonplace, and all through his finer work it helps to produce what one
may call a romantic realism, the charm of his books considered merely as
stories. Then again, we nowhere in the Sketches meet with that playful
tenderness which recurs to the mind as often as we think of David
Copperfield or Dombey and Son. It could not be here; it is not found
in Pickwick; Dickens was too young to experience the emotion which
uttered itself so delightfully in some of his ripest pages. Compassion he felt
and expressed; yet here, too, as was inevitable, the pathetic intention has too
much emphasis, and too little originality. Where he touches upon the sorrows of
girls and women, especially those whom misery had condemned to vice, we are
reminded of the unfortunate turn for sentimentality which he was never to
overcome. For the very reason, however, which otherwise works to its
disadvantage, the book of Sketches is in this regard less open to
objection than the novels.
Is it not a strange and interesting fact that,
in this first production of a man of genius, among the numerous and various
persons he has selected for portraiture, there occurs not a single example of
female beauty and delightfulness? If the males of this order of society are
fairly to be characterized in terms such as I have used, it is certain that
their mothers, sweethearts, wives and daughters, in every respect correspond to
them with the exception of a few poor downtrodden creatures, starved, misused,
every female in the book is more or less contemptible. The exceptions do not
for a moment convince us; the drunkards' wives who bend meekly to a blow, the
streetwalkers who readily burst into tears, are merely conventional figures; on
the other hand, the throng of silly or ill-tempered or cunning or avaricious
and always unspeakably vulgar women who fill these pages are obviously true to
reality, not for a moment to be denied by anyone who has a slight acquaintance
with London lower life in our own day. Must we regard it as an idiosyncrasy of
Dickens that, in his most impressionable years, he took this view of the other
sex -- a view which submitted only to a few modifications throughout his life? Or
did it result from his origin in a certain class, and his birth in a certain
time? Mr. Robert Bridges, in his essay on Keats (prefixed to the edition of
that poet in the Muses Library), has some interesting remarks which bear upon
this question; speaking of Keats's conception of women, its shallowness and
feebleness, he reminds us that this is common to most writers in the early part
of our century, and especially marked in those who were of humble birth. Dickens,
it is plain, utterly lacked romantic passion, as we understand the term; in
that respect he doubtless belonged to his class and his time, and even the
possession of literary genius did not on this ground separate him from ordinary
men. Keats, with all his glorious imagination, could not, in poetry, shape
anything better than the feebly sentimental type of woman, and in life became
the victim of a damsel whose name seems to have been admirably suited to her
personality -- one thinks of her as a sort of "Flora" (in Little
Dorrit). No doubt the poet with his early experience of life in London
would have recognized the entire verisimilitude of Dickens's female world,
where girls known as "young ladies" have but two ways of manifesting
strong emotion -- to fall into a simulated swoon, or to scratch the faces of
those who offend them. Granting the facetious spirit in which such persons and
scenes are described, they have a significance serious enough when we are
viewing Dickens's work as material for social history. Is there any instance in
the literature of other countries of an imaginative author whose early work
conveys such an impression of the society in which he had grown up?
In the general treatment of their themes, the Sketches
have more of simple realism than the later books; we are reminded of the young
journalist that their author then was, rather than of the novelist he would
soon become. Here we find nothing of the optimism which delighted his
contemporaries, and is still an enduring cause of Dickens's popularity. Miserable
people are miserable to the bitter end; no benevolent old gentleman goes about
relieving distress and making everyone as hilarious as himself; it is the mere
truth we are called upon to see and deplore. Read, for instance, the story of
the " Broker's Man " with its descriptions of starving families and
of all the evil that results from suffering. Of one mother it is said that
"misery had changed her to a devil. If you had heard how she cursed the
little naked children as were rolling on the floor, and seen how savagely she
struck the infant when it cried with hunger, you'd have shuddered as much as I
did." Or turn to the sketch of a Private Theatre. All the foolishness and
squalor and harm of the thing is insisted upon, with nothing of that large and
tolerant spirit of mirth which, at a later time, would have shown these
stage-stricken shop-boys in quite another light. The amateur actors are
"donkeys who are persuaded to pay for the permission to exhibit their
lamentable ignorance and embryoism on the stage"; the audience consists
of" a motley group of dupes and blackguards." Compare "The
Boarding House" with that immortal establishment presided over by Mrs.
Todgers; the difference is not only one of power, but of spirit. For literal
truth, there can be no doubt that the boarding-house as sketched by Boz takes
precedence of that which illumines the pages of Martin Chuzzlewit. It
was natural enough that Dickens, in after years, spoke very slightingly of his
first book. If ever he glanced at it, he must have felt as though he were
reading the work of someone who treated his own subjects without his own
ability to give them value.
Those to whom the Sketches revealed a
new writer saw in them many merits which to us are obscured; they broke
entirely new ground, were written in a new style, and, despite their frouzy
topics, seemed to bring a refreshing breath of reality into the literary
atmosphere. Nowadays, the best parts of the book seem to be those which are
purely descriptive. Remembering how rare a thing is the ability to depict,
really to depict, in words and especially to make interesting a description of
the everyday, the commonplace, we gladly recognize in Boz's handwork the first
proofs of Dickens's extraordinary power. Probably he was right when he said
that his early success was largely due to the wholesome training of severe
newspaper work," and that not only because of the knowledge with which it
supplied him, but quite as much because it taught him how to put into
straightforward words what he saw or thought. The descriptions in the Sketches
are never long, but they contain a wonderful amount of detail, and the details
selected are always just the right ones, the essential, the effective. Read the
page in which he shows us London streets at early morning in bad winter weather
("The Early Coach"). In simplest possible language the wretched
discomfort of the hour and scene are brought before us, so that we shudder as
we read. Or the paper on London streets at night -- one of the best things in
the book. There is "just enough damp gently stealing down to make the
pavement greasy, without cleansing it of any of its impurities," and
"the heavy, lazy mist, which hangs over every object makes the gas-lamps
look brighter." We see the kidney-pie merchant, who has vainly tried to
keep his candle lit against the wind, and the only signs of hose whereabouts
are "the bright sparks, of which a long irregular train is whirled down
the street every time he opens his portable oven "; the grocers windows,
the loafing ragamuffins, the "little chandler's shop with the cracked bell
behind the door, whose melancholy tinkling is regulated by the demand for quarterns
of sugar and half-ounces of coffee." We hear "the constant clinking
of pattens on the slippery and uneven pavement," and the "rustling of
umbrellas as the wind blows." The policeman, buttoned up in oilskin cape,
"holds his hat on his head, and turns round to avoid the gust of wind and
rain which drives against him at the street corner." All this is the very
life, and could not possibly be presented with more clearness to our mental
vision. Still minuter observation is frequent; as when we have descriptions of
door-knockers in all their variety; or are told that a fruit-pie maker
"displayed on his well-scrubbed window-board large white compositions of
flour and dripping, ornamented with pink stains, giving rich promise of the
fruit within." (Cannot we feel sure that the poor hungry little boy named
Charles Dickens had many a time cast a longing eye upon such dainties?) Or note
the passing remark that "a toast-master's shirt-front, waistcoat and
neckerchief always exhibit three distinct shades of cloudy white" -- where
humour transforms the trivial and gives it value.
On the whole, there is much more of the satiric
spirit in these pages than of humour in the true sense, and occasionally the
satire is a vigorous forecast of that to come. Already Dickens is making war upon
the absurdities of public life, as well as of private. See the election of the
beadle, in "Our Parish," with its specimens of vestry speechmaking;
or the address delivered before a ladies' society by a missionary from the West
Indies, who "repeated a dialogue he had heard between two negroes, behind
a hedge," and earned tumultuous applause by imitating the negroes in
broken English. Still more noticeable is the "Parliamentary Sketch,"
in which he exhibits his profound contempt for the legislative assembly at
Westminster. It contains an admirable portrait, that of the parliamentary
butler, which (as might be said of one or two things in the book) rather
reminds one of Charles Lamb, and indeed would not be unworthy of him. Here and
there crops up a prejudice against the "cultured" class, such as
frequently betrays itself in the novels. Himself so informally educated,
Dickens always looked askance at places of learning and the kind of men they
produced. In his sketch of Scotland Yard, he flouts the antiquary, not all
whose "black-letter lore, or his skill in book-collecting, nor all the dry
studies of a long life" can avail to restore a true knowledge of things
gone by. And, in describing some great domestic occasion, he says that there
was no doctor of civil law to deliver an address -- but there were several
other old women present, who spoke quite as much to the purpose, and understood
themselves equally well."
Let me, in conclusion, note an odd simile. Of a
pleasure steamboat in a high wind it is said that "every timber began to
creak, as if the boat were an over-laden clothes-basket." Who but Dickens
would ever have hit upon a fancy so homely? It is significant of those
experiences in early life which were the source of most of his weaknesses, yet
supplied him with so much of his strength.
On March 31st, 1836, was issued the first
monthly number of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, edited by Boz.
The said Boz (aged four and twenty) had already put forth, in two volumes, a
collection of Sketches, Illustrative of Everyday Life and Everyday People;
his name was beginning to be recognized by readers in search of entertainment,
and to excite the attention of prescient publishers. A newly established firm,
Messrs. Chapman & Hall, had suggested to him that he should supply
facetious letterpress to accompany a series of plates by the artist Seymour,
their subject the adventures of a dub of Cockney sportsmen; and the young
author had accepted the suggestion in a modified form -- he was to write as he
chose, leading the artist instead of following him. Thus the Cockney Club
became an association for the study of things in general, one alone of its
members, Mr. Winkle, figuring as a comic sportsman. Between the first and second
numbers, Seymour died; part the third was illustrated by a Mr. Buss;
afterwards, the plates were supplied by Hablôt K. Browne, a name to be long
associated with that of the novelist.
Pickwick ran through twenty numbers. Of the first part,
four hundred copies were prepared; of the fifteenth more than forty thousand. Boz,
not unnaturally, gave up the work of Parliamentary reporter, by which hitherto
he had lived, and devoted himself to the career of letters.
Thus came into existence an English classic --
a book representative of its age, exhibiting the life and the ideals of an
important class of English folk, on the threshold of the Victorian era. Work so
original of course excited prejudice in some quarters we have the admission of
Sydney Smith (a man not deficient in humour) that he "held out against
" Boz as long as possible, even unto the days of Nickleby, and
there must have been many who held out longer. Boz was by such persons deemed
vulgar, an objection still heard in our own time from readers unable to
distinguish between vulgarity of subject and of treatment. Let us remember
that, in the years 1836-7, standard fiction was represented by Bulwer and
Disraeli; the drawing-room talked of Rienzi and Ernest Maltravers,
of Henrietta Temple and Venetia. But admirers grew to a
multitude, and their enthusiasm was boundless. There is a classic story (told
by Carlyle to Forster) of some sick person, who, after a visit from his
clergyman, was heard to exclaim: "Well, thank God, Pickwick will be
out in ten days!" Some years later, Lord Campbell declared that he would
rather have written Pickwick than be Chief Justice of England. Now,
after half a century, Pickwick holds its assured place in the literature
of' our tongue, and, among all its author's works, seems to have the best
chance of achieving what is known as immortality.
The book was an improvisation. Sitting down to
make fun for that small public which knew Goswell Street, and could relish the
quips of a hackney-coachman, Dickens was led by his genius and by the
indulgence of his jocose fancy into picturing all the popular life which his
varied experience in and out of London had made familiar to him. He began
heavily; the first page promises little; but before the end of Chapter I he had
laughed out one of those happy phrases destined to become part of the common
language; apologizing for an offensive remark to the President of the Club, a
member declares that he had considered that gentleman a humbug only "in a
Pickwickian point of view. The second chapter sees the immortal Four set forth
upon their travels, and the scheme of the book, in so far as it is to have any
scheme at all, becomes evident. Dickens had in mind the old novel of the road,
the story of adventure from inn to inn, as he knew it in his favourite authors
of the bygone age, especially Smollett. Very appropriately, Mr. Pickwick and
his companions make first for Rochester; was it not by Rochester Castle that
the "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy " (as
Dickens long after described himself) had been wont to read and re-read, till
he all but knew them by heart, those old masters of English fiction ?
But the high road is that of the nineteenth
century; its possibilities of romance are diminished; we are concerned with
law-abiding citizens, who, spite of their bibulous propensities, persevere in a
robust good humour, and never deviate from the commonplace. Characters are
picked up, and dropped, as it suits the author's mood; he can be lavish with
these samples of human nature, feeling his resources practically inexhaustible.
The incident which develops into the main episode of the story attains its
prominence merely because, as this merry thought flashed across his mind, the
writer saw in it a great scope for amusing satire, for uproarious farce, and
for the spirit of whimsical benevolence. Mrs. Bardell leads us to the Fleet,
where at length we come upon a vein of graver interest, and see a new aspect of
our author's genius; the picture of trivial and vulgar life acquires a larger
significance, and the narrative is enriched by a serious import little imagined
at its outset.
No essay in fiction ever gave more
incontestable assurance of genius. Among the various endowments essential to a
novelist of the first rank, the most important is that which at once declares
itself to critical and uncritical reader alike; the power of creating persons. Force
or charm of style, adroitness in story-telling, the gift of observation and of
acumen, these are all subservient to that imaginative vigour which through
language fashions a human being, and indues him with identity as unmistakable
as that of our living acquaintances. Were it only by the figures of Sam and
Tony Weller, Dickens would in this book have proved himself a born master in
the art of fiction. Let this be ever kept in view when his standing in
literature is debated. That his creations (here, at all events) are more or
less ignoble, and represent an unlovely world, is nothing to the point; the
same kind of power went to the shaping of Mr. Pickwick's man-servant as to the
bodying forth of Mercutio -- power which, in its infinite manifestations, we
indicate by the one word genius.
Sam Weller is, of course, the "hero"
of the book, the character of prime interest a significant fact in the history
of literature. Dickens, without any deliberate purpose, obeyed the hint of an
older day, and having his eyes on Joseph Andrews, on Humphrey Clinker,
opened the new era of democracy in letters. London being the centre of his
interests, the source whence he was to obtain his richest material from first
to last, it is natural that he begins with a masterpiece of characterization
embodying the essentials of popular life in the capital city. " Mr.
Weller's knowledge of London was extensive and peculiar"; he is the
grown-up gamin, retaining his boyhood's impudence, shrewdness, vivacity,
and adding to it the caustic philosophy resulting from much rough experience. Moreover,
he is moralized not only has life taught him that honesty is the best policy,
but its hardships have served only to polish and brighten in him those sterling
virtues which Dickens, as champion of the poor, will never cease to discover in
humble hearts. Sam is a model servant, capable, loyal, content with his
station. He scorns humbug; it delights him to be "down upon it', in the
person of Job Trotter or of Mr. Stiggins. Respecting himself and his duties, he
looks with genial contempt on the fashionable "flunkey" and lashes
him with dry sarcasm. He rises to any demand of circumstance and never shines
more brilliantly than when confronted with the alarming formalities of a court
of law; his wit proves more than a match for that of the sharpest and severest
counsel. Sam is the incarnation of common sense and common goodness, tricked
out with all manner of personal and local singularities. In the flesh, we know,
he never walked the streets of London; the man most nearly resembling him was
deformed with no little coarseness, and made but an imperfect response to the
appeals of humanity or honour. That we accept Sam Weller is the result of
Dickens's power of creative illusion; that we regard him with affection is the
work of Dickens's humour.
The great humorist is declared in two or three
of the persons of Pickwick, and in many a passage throughout the book;
where our laughter is immoderate, we pay tribute to the master of farce. In
farce of every degree Dickens is without an equal. At times his humour mingles
inseparably with this pranksome spirit; the immortal thirty-fourth chapter,
"wholly devoted to a full and faithful report of the trial of Bardell
against Pickwick," heads the farcical in English literature; but true
humour has a large part in its satiric effectiveness. Never, perhaps, was
satire so large-hearted and so entertaining. At this time his genius had all
the advantage of buoyant youth; after Pickwick, he hardly again
exhibited this perfect spontaneity of side-shaking merriment. The later books
present occasionally a satiric use of farce marred by extravagance which has a
touch of the mechanical; in Pickwick he ridicules much more effectively
by sheer exuberance of spirits. Nothing was ever penned so mirth-provoking in
its admirable travesty of absurd truth as the address of Serjeant Buzfuz; no
dialogue ever written impels more irresistibly to laughter than the examination
of the witnesses. In its kind, this is work of the highest order. As we finish
the chapter, as we hear old Weller address his son with the sorrowful reproof:
Oh, Sammy, Sammy, vy worn't there a
alleybi!" we have a sense of something complete and abiding, even as at
the close of a great scene in serious drama. Whatever the fun was to be got out
of a sordid species of litigation has been extracted once for all, and only
Dickens's genius could have made so much of it.
Vulgar he is not, even when his fancy sports
with the vulgarest object. The sure test of vulgarity is that it debases
whatever it takes note of. Dickens, on the other hand, cannot touch the
commonest, coarsest detail of ignoble life, but at once it gains a certain
interest and suggestiveness; it is seen from an unfamiliar point of view; and
the mirth excited in us, boisterous as it may be, invariably allies itself with
the kindly emotions. It would be easy to quote from jesters of a later day
examples of the arid facetiousness which serves only to degrade its topic
neither in Pickwick, nor in any other of its author's volumes, will you
come upon any such perversion of the gracious Spirit of laughter. A note of the
vulgar in drolling is its affectation of superiority; in Dickens we always feel
a sympathetic understanding, a recognition of the human through whatever
grotesque disguise.
Think for a moment of Mr. Stiggins. The man, as
we have elsewhere met him, or heard of him (he still exists), is undeniably
odious. Dickens tells us, indeed, that the friend of Mrs. Tony Weller had a
"semi-rattle-snake sort of eye -- rather sharp, but decidedly bad ,'; and,
as he sits over his hot pineapple rum in the bar-parlour of the Marquis of
Granby, a portrait-painter of the realistic school would present him as
anything but a subject for tolerant chuckles. Dickens prefers to show us what
vast comicality is inherent in the character and circumstances of this "
deputy-shepherd." In truth, it is a philosophic attitude which goes with
the genius of humour. Quite without pretence of philosophy, the young novelist,
gaily writing his chapter for an expectant public, suggests a view of life
saner and more faithful than any laboured scheme of scholasticism. "They're
the wictims o' gammon, Samivel," says Tony Weller, speaking of the
shepherd's female admirers; and it is as "wictims o' gammon" that the
laughing philosopher sees and sympathizes with all mankind. For he knows that
the impostor of one day is the dupe of the next, and that, however we may seem
to be justified in condemnation, a smile at common failings is the safer as
well as the happier form of judgment.
Mr. Pickwick himself is the only figure in the
volume not at once completely realized. We first see him as a trivially vague
conception, and insensibly he grows towards definiteness; as with the book
itself, which has so casual a commencement, so with its eponymous hero, who, to
begin with, is at best a puppet of farce, but develops into a very human
personage. The subordinate members of the Club are at once adequately
characterized, and long indeed would be a list of the incidental actors whose
names recall forthwith a clear-stamped personality. Significant as any, with a
regard to the author's future achievements, is Mr. Perker, whose vivacious
acuteness and honesty rather remind one of Mr. Pleydell in Guy Mannering.
Dickens's connection with the legal world was less personal than that of Scott,
but he made more use of his experience from the group concerned in the case of
Bardell v. Pickwick, to Mr. Jaggers and his clerk in Great Expectations,
this "valley of the shadow of the law" supplied him with much of the
finest material for his frolic jesting and his serious art. We do not turn with
any irresistible attraction to the so-called young ladies who supply the
narrative with a feminine interest; they are chiefly interesting as portraiture
of a certain type of middle-class damsel early in our century. More pleasing,
on the whole, is the pretty housemaid of Mr. Weller's affections. But, if proof
be sought of Dickens's early ability to depict female characters, we must turn
our backs alike on gentility and sentiment and be satisfied with the living
likeness of Mrs. Bardell, of Mrs. Cluppins, Mrs. Tony Weller, and the choleric
landlady of Lant Street.
Pickwick is a mental tonic. In its forthright flow of
vivacity the book has no parallel. Dullness, weariness, seem unknown to the
writer. Who can resist the influence of a convivial spirit such as greets us in
these wayside inns and country houses? And it is all so English; whether in
town or country, the life playing before us is peculiarly, vehemently,
national. Dickens was never more himself than when describing a journey by
coach on one of the great highroads if it should happen to be at Christmas
time, how his blood tingles with the joy of travel Often as he returned to the
subject, he did not surpass the classic journey of the Muggleton coach which
bore Mr. Pickwick and his friends to Dingley Dell; the spirit of this narrative
was not to be quite recaptured, and even as a piece of writing it is among the
best that can be selected from his works. British to the core are all his
people, representing the most stubbornly and aggressively conservative of
social ranks. We breathe an atmosphere compounded of bracing air and the odours
of punch. Stout men of ripe middle-age behave like hilarious schoolboys. Cold
and cloudy skies serve but to animate these magnificently energetic beings.
It was the sort of afternoon which might induce
a couple of elderly gentlemen, in a lonely field, to take off their great-coats
and play at leap-frog in pure lightness of heart and gaiety," and
"had Mr. Tupman at that moment proffered 'a back,' Mr. Pickwick would have
accepted his offer with the utmost avidity." Great is the insistence on
good cheer. A barrel of oysters becomes a sacred object; a Christmas pudding
radiates mirth and kindliness. As for the flowing bowl, to partake of it too
well is a mere duty of all honest and hearty folk. We revel in the humours of
inebriety; it would be interesting to count the number of occasions on which a
Pickwickian, or someone connected with him, is jovially overcome. Their liquor,
as a rule, being brandy, we are reminded very forcibly of a change in social
habits which came about during Dickens s lifetime -- one of the few
improvements in his time to which he cannot be said to have directly
contributed.
That Pickwick did in several directions
help on the better day is beyond doubt. When writing his Preface to a popular
edition of the book, ten years later, Dickens glanced at legal reforms which
had meanwhile come about, and he noted with special satisfaction that the Fleet
was no longer in existence. Recollections of his own sad childhood gave him a
peculiar interest in the debtors' prison. The chapters of Pickwick
concerned with the Fleet are admirably picturesque; no oppressive gloom hangs
over them, but in a few vivid strokes we have a sketch of the vile place such
as can never be forgotten. It is indicative of his method and his power that
Dickens shows us this haunt of horrors without one of those lurid or revolting
details which it would have been so easy to insert, and of which a novelist in
our day would make the very most. All the misery he desired to suggest is,
nevertheless, made plain to us; we have abundant suggestion of character and
the influence of circumstance; nor is there wanting a note of the truest
pathos. These shadows serve as a background to the happier features of life
which it was always Dickens's purpose to emphasize and glorify.
Except in the episodic stories -- which denote
a melodramatic tendency, and in one instance (the tale of Gabriel Grub)
anticipate the Christmas Books -- the style of Pickwick is colloquial. Sam
Weller's racy tongue, with its trick of analogy, was thoroughly congenial to
the author; just that unexpectedness, so apt, so droll, which gives point to
Sam's remarks, is the characteristic of Dickens's happiest descriptions and
comments. The evidence of his manuscripts shows that the early books were
written easily and rapidly, in a bold hand, with very little correction; later,
becoming more self-critical, he composed laboriously, with the result that one
too often regrets the happy carelessness of his prime. His English is sound and
idiomatic, frequently reminding one of his excellent models, the
eighteenth-century novelists and essayists. Nowadays it is refreshing to open
these old-fashioned pages, 50 free from neologism and preciosity, and not
uninstructive to observe that the old fashion has still so much life in it.
It has been remarked that Mr. Pickwick and his
serving-man bear a certain far-off resemblance to the Knight of La Mancha and
his squire; and in one respect, at all events, the parallel is suggestive. Like
Cervantes' great book, Pickwick appeals equally to childhood and to
those of riper years. Don Quixote enthralls a boy's mind with mere joy
in the picturesque, the adventurous; not till long after does he perceive the
profound significance of that study in human nature. So, in the minor degree,
with Dickens's work. To the young, its high spirits, its hilarity, its brisk
movement and gay surprises, are an all-sufficient delight. Turn to the volume
in middle age, and these things assuredly have not lost their charm but the
eyes bring a larger power of seeing, and to follow the old story from page to
page is to marvel at the observation, the charity, the wisdom, which insensibly
convert a book of jests into a cherished masterpiece of literature.
It was a proof of Dickens's force and
originality that, whilst still engaged upon Pickwick, with the laughter
of a multitude flattering his joyous and eager temper, he chose for his new
book such a subject as that of Oliver Twist. The profound seriousness of
his genius, already suggesting itself in the course of Mr. Pickwick's
adventures, was fully declared in "The Parish Boy's Progress." Doubts
might well have been entertained as to the reception by the public of this
squalid chronicle, this story of the workhouse, the thieves' den, and the
condemned cell; as a matter of fact, voices were soon raised in protest, and
many of Pickwick's admirers turned away in disgust. When the complete
novel appeared, a Quarterly reviewer attacked it vigorously, declaring
the picture injurious to public morals, and the author's satire upon public
institutions mere splenetic extravagance. For all this Dickens was prepared.
Consciously, deliberately, he had begun the great work of his life, and he had
strength to carry with him the vast majority of English readers. His mistakes
were those of a generous purpose. When criticism had said its say, the world
did homage to a genial moralist, a keen satirist, and a leader in literature.
In January, 1837, appeared the first number of
a magazine called Bentley's Miscellany, with Dickens for editor, and in
its second number began Oliver Twist, which ran from month to month
until March of 1839. Long before the conclusion of the story as a serial, it
appeared (October, 1838) in three volumes, illustrated by Cruikshank. Some of
these illustrations were admirable, some very poor, and one was so bad that
Dickens caused it to be removed before many copies of the book had been issued.
Years after, Cruikshank seems to have hinted that his etchings were the origin
of Oliver Twist, Dickens having previously seen them and founded his
story upon them. The claim was baseless, and it is not worth while discussing
how Cruikshank came to imagine such a thing.
There had fallen upon Dickens the first penalty
of success; he was tempted to undertake more work than he could possibly do,
and at the same time was worried by discontent with the pecuniary results of
his hasty agreements. During the composition of Oliver he wrote the
latter portion of Pickwick and the early chapters of Nickleby;
moreover, he compiled an anonymous life of the clown Grimaldi, and did other
things which can only be considered hack-work. That he had not also to work at Barnaby
Rudge, and thus be carrying on three novels at the same time, was only due
to his resolve to repudiate an impossible engagement. Complications such as these
were inevitable at the opening of the most brilliant literary career in the
Victorian time.
How keenly Dickens felt the hardship of his
position, toiling for the benefit of a publisher, is shown in Chapter XIV,
where Oliver is summoned to Mr. Brownlow's study, and, gazing about him in
wonder at the laden shelves, is asked by his benefactor whether he would like
to be a writer of books. "Oliver considered a little while and at last
said he should think it would be a much better thing to be a bookseller upon
which the old gentleman laughed heartily and declared he had said a very good
thing." -- "Don't be afraid," added Mr. Brownlow, "we won't
make an author of you whilst there's an honest trade to be learnt, or
brick-making to turn to." An amusing passage, in the light of Dickens's
position only a year or two after it was written.
Oliver Twist had a twofold moral purpose to exhibit the
evil working of the Poor Law Act, and to give a faithful picture of the life of
thieves in London. The motives hung well together, for in Dickens's view the
pauper system was directly responsible for a great deal of crime. It must be
remembered that, by the new Act of 1834, outdoor sustenance was as much as
possible done away with, paupers being henceforth relieved only on condition of
their entering a workhouse, while the workhouse life was made thoroughly
uninviting, among other things by the separation of husbands and wives, and
parents and children. Against this seemingly harsh treatment of a helpless
class Dickens is very bitter; he regards such legislation as the outcome of
cold-blooded theory, evolved by well-to-do persons of the privileged caste, who
neither perceive nor care about the result of their system in individual
suffering. "I wish some well-fed philosopher, whose meat and drink turn to
gall within him; whose blood is ice, whose heart is iron, could have seen
Oliver Twist clutching at the dainty viands that the dog had neglected. . . . There
is only one thing I should like better, and that would be to see the
philosopher making the same sort of meal himself, with the same relish." (Chapter
IV.) By "philosopher" Dickens meant a political-economist; he uses
the word frequently in this book, and always in the spirit which moved Carlyle
when speaking of "the dismal science." He is the thorough-going
advocate of the poor, the uncompromising Radical. Speaking with irony of the
vices nourished in Noah Claypole by vicious training, he bids us note "how
impartially the same amiable qualities are developed in the finest lord and the
dirtiest charity boy." This partisanship lay in his genius; it was one of
the sources of his strength its entire sincerity enabled him to carry out the
great task set before him, that of sweetening in some measure the Augean stable
of English social life in the early half of our century.
That he was in error on the point immediately
at issue mattered little. The horrible condition of the poor which so
exasperated him resulted (in so far as it was due to any particular
legislation) from the old Poor Law, which, by its system of granting relief in
aid of insufficient wages had gone far towards pauperizing the whole of
agricultural England. Not in a year or two could this evil be remedied. Dickens,
seeing only the hardship of the inevitable reform, visited upon the authors of
that reform indignation merited by the sluggishness and selfishness which had
made it necessary. In good time the new Act justified itself; it helped to
bring about increase of wages and to awaken self-respect, so far as self-respect
is possible in the toilers perforce living from hand to mouth. But Dickens's
quarrel with the "guardians of the poor" lay far too deep to be
affected by such small changes; his demand was for justice and for mercy, in
the largest sense, for a new spirit in social life. Now that his work is done,
with that of Carlyle and Ruskin to aid its purpose, a later generation applauds
him for throwing scorn upon mechanical "philosophy." Constitutional
persons, such as Macaulay, might declare his views on social government beneath
contempt; but those views have largely prevailed, and we see their influence
ever extending. Readers of Oliver Twist, nowadays, do not concern
themselves with the technical question Oliver "asks for more," and
has all our sympathies; be the law old or new, we are made to perceive that,
more often than not, "the law is an ass," and its proceedings invalid
in the court of conscience.
In a preface to Oliver (written in 1841)
Dickens spoke at length of its second purpose, and defended himself against
critics who had objected to his dealing with the lives of pickpockets and
burglars. His aim, he tells us, was to discredit a school of fiction then
popular, which glorified the thief in the guise of a gallant highwayman; the
real thief, he declared, he had nowhere found portrayed, save in Hogarth, and
his own intention was to show the real creature, vile and miserable, "for
ever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest paths of life." From the
category of evil examples in fiction of the day, he excepts "Sir Edward
Bulwer's admirable and powerful novel of Paul Clifford," having for that
author a singular weakness not easily explained. His own scenes lie in
"the cold, wet, shelterless midnight streets of London," in
"foul and frowsy dens," in "haunts of hunger and disease";
and "where" -- he asks -- "are the attractions of these
things?"
This defence, no doubt, had in view (amongst
other things) the censure upon Oliver Twist contained in Thackeray's
story of Catherine, which was published in Fraser's Magazine, 1839-40,
under the signature of "Ikey Solomons jun." Thackeray at this time
was not the great novelist whom we know; seven years had still to elapse before
the publication of Vanity Fair. His Catherine is a stinging
satire upon the same popular fiction that Dickens had in view, but he throws a
wider net, attacking with scornful vigour Paul Clifford and Ernest
Maltravers, together with the Jack Sheppards and Dick Turpins and Duvals,
and, in two instances, speaking contemptuously of Oliver itself. "To
tread in the footsteps of the immortal Fagin requires a genius of inordinate
stride," and he cannot present his readers with any "white-washed
saints," like poor "Biss Dadsy" in Oliver Twist. Still,
says the author, he has taken pains to choose a subject "agreeably low,
delightfully disgusting, and at the same time eminently pleasing and
pathetic." His heroine is a -real person, one Catherine Hayes, whose
history can be read in the Newgate Calendar --she was brought up in the
workhouses, apprenticed to the landlady of a village inn, and, in the year
1726, was burned at Tyburn for the murder of her husband. Thackeray uses his
lash on all novelists who show themselves indulgent to evil-doers. "Let
your rogues act like rogues, and your honest men like honest men; don't let us
have any juggling and thimblerigging with virtue and vice." In short, he
writes very angrily, having, it is plain, Dickens often in mind. Nor is it hard
to see the cause of this feeling. Thackeray was impatient with the current
pictures of rascaldom simply because he was aware of his own supreme power to
depict the rascal world; what thoughts may we surmise in the creator of Barry
Lyndon when he read the novels of Bulwer and of Ainsworth, or the new
production of the author of Pickwick? Only three years more, and we find
him writing a heartfelt eulogy of the Christmas Carol, praise which
proves him thoroughly to have appreciated the best of Dickens. But it must be
avowed that very much of Oliver is far from Dickens's best, and Thackeray,
with his native scorn of the untrue and the feeble, would often enough have his
teeth set on edge as he perused those pages. Catherine itself, flung off
in disdainful haste, is evidence of its author's peculiar power; it has
dialogues, scenes, glimpses of character beyond the reach of any other English
novelist. In certain directions Thackeray may be held the greatest
"realist" who ever penned fiction. There is nothing to wonder at in
his scoff at Fagin and Nancy; but we are glad of the speedy change to a
friendlier point of view.
It was undoubtedly Dickens's conviction that,
within limits imposed by decency, he had told the truth, and nothing but the
truth, about his sordid and criminal characters. Imagine his preface to have
been written fifty years later, and it would be all but appropriate to some
representative of a daring school of "naturalism," asserting his
right to deal with the most painful facts of life. "I will not abate one
hole in the Dodger's coat, or one scrap of curl-paper in the girl's dishevelled
hair." True, he feels obliged so to manipulate the speech of these persons
that it shall not "offend the ear," but that seemed to him a matter
of course. He appeals to the example of the eighteenth-century novelists, who
were unembarrassed in their choice of subjects. He will stand or fall by his
claim to have made a true picture. The little hero of the book is as real to
him as Bill Sikes. "I wished to show, in little Oliver, the principle of
good surviving through every adverse circumstance, and triumphing at
last." Think what we may of his perfectly sincere claim, the important
thing, in our retrospect, is the spirit in which he made it. After a long
interval during which English fiction was represented by the tawdry unreal or
the high imaginative (I do not forget the homely side of Scott, but herein
Scott stood alone), a new writer demands attention for stories of obscure
lives, and tells his tale so attractively that high and low give ear. It is a
step in social and political history; it declares the democratic tendency of
the new age. here is the significance of Dickens's early success, and we do not
at all understand his place in English literature if we lose sight of this
historic point of view.
By comparison with the book which preceded it, Oliver
Twist seems immature. Putting aside the first chapter or two, Pickwick
is an astonishingly ripe production, marvellous as the work of a man of five
and twenty, who had previously published only a few haphazard sketches of
contemporary life. Oliver, on the other hand, might well pass for a
first effort. Attempting a continued story, the author shows at once his
weakest side, the defect which he will never outgrow. There is no coherency in
the structure of the thing; the plotting is utterly without ingenuity, the
mysteries are so artificial as to be altogether uninteresting. Again, we must
remember the time at which Dickens was writing. Our modern laws of fiction did
not exist; a story was a story, not to be judged by the standard of actual
experience. Moreover, it had always to be borne in mind how greatly Dickens was
under the influence of the stage, which at one time he had seriously studied
with a view to becoming an actor; all through his books the theatrical tendency
is manifest, not a little to their detriment. Obviously he saw a good deal of Oliver
Twist as if from before the footlights, and even in the language of his
characters the traditional note of melodrama is occasionally sounded. When,
long years after, he horrified a public audience by his "reading" of
the murder of Nancy, it was a singular realization of hopes cherished in his
early manhood. Not content with his fame as an author, he delighted in giving
proof that he possessed in a high degree the actor's talent. In our own day the
popularity of the stage is again exerting an influence on the methods of
fiction; such intermingling of two very different arts must always be
detrimental to both.
Put aside the two blemishes of the book -- on
the one hand, Monks with his insufferable (often ludicrous) rant, and his
absurd machinations; on the other, the feeble idyllicism of the Maylie group --
and there remains a very impressive picture of the wretched and the horrible. Oliver's
childish miseries show well against a background of hopeless pauperdom; having
regard to his origin, we grant the "gentle, attached, affectionate
creature," who is so unlike a typical workhouse child, and are made to
feel his sufferings among people who may be called inhuman, but who in truth
are human enough, the circumstances considered. Be it noted that, whereas even
Mr. Bumble is at moments touched by natural sympathy, and Mr. Sowerberry would
be not unkind if he had his way, the women of this world -- Mrs. Corney, Mrs.
Sowerberry, and the workhouse hags -- are fiercely cruel; in them, as in many
future instances, Dickens draws strictly from his observation, giving us the
very truth in despite of sentiment. Passing from the shadow of the workhouse to
that of criminal London, we submit to the effect which Dickens alone can
produce; London as a place of squalid mystery and terror, of the grimly
grotesque, of labyrinthine obscurity and lurid fascination, is Dickens's own;
he taught people a certain way of regarding the huge city, and to this day how
common it is to see London with Dickens's eyes. The vile streets, accurately
described and named; the bare, filthy rooms inhabited by Fagin and Sikes and
the rest of them; the hideous public-house to which thieves resort are before
us with a haunting reality. Innumerable scarcely noticed touches heighten the
impression; we know, for instance, exactly what these people eat and drink, and
can smell the dish of sheep's head, flanked with porter, which Nancy sets
before her brutal companion. Fagin is as visible as Shylock; we hear the very
voices of the Artful Dodger and of Charley Bates, whose characters are so
admirably unlike in similarity; Nancy herself becomes credible by force of her
surroundings and in certain scenes (for instance, that of her hysterical fury
in Chapter XVI) is life itself. The culminating horrors have a wild
picturesqueness unlike anything achieved by other novelists; one never forgets
Sikes's wanderings after the murder (with that scene in the inn with the
pedlar), nor his death in Jacob's Island, nor Fagin in the condemned cell. These
things could not be more vividly presented. The novelist's first duty is to
make us see what he has seen himself, whether with the actual eye or with that
of imagination, and no one ever did this more successfully than Dickens in his
best moments.
His allusion (in the Preface) to Hogarth
suggests a comparison of these two great artists, each of whom did such
noteworthy work in the same field. On the whole, one observes more of contrast
than of likeness in the impressions they severally leave upon us; the men
differed widely in their ways of regarding life and were subjected to very
different influences. But the life of the English poor as seen by Dickens in
his youth had undergone little outward change from that which was familiar to
Hogarth, and it is Oliver Twist especially that reminds us of the
other's stern moralities in black-and-white. Not improbably they influenced the
young writer's treatment of his subject. He never again deals in such
unsoftened horrors as those death-scenes in the workhouse, or draws a figure so
peculiarly base as that of Noah Claypole; his humour at moments is grim, harsh,
unlike the ordinary Dickens note, and sometimes seems resolved to show human
nature at its worst, as in the passage when Oliver runs after the coach,
induced by promise of a half penny, only to be scoffed at when he falls back in
weariness and pain (Chapter VIII). Dickens is, as a rule, on better terms with
his rascals and villains; they generally furnish matter for a laugh; but
half-a-dozen faces in Oliver have the very Hogarth stamp, the lines of
bestial ugliness which disgust and repel.
One is often inclined to marvel that, with such
a world to draw upon for his material, the world of the lower classes in the
England -of sixty years ago, he was able to tone his work with so genial a
humanity. The features of that time, as they impress our imagination, are for
the most part either ignoble or hideous, and a Hogarth in literature would seem
a more natural outcome of such conditions than the author of Pickwick
and the Christmas Carol. Dickens's service to civilization by the
liberality of his thought cannot be too much insisted upon. The atmosphere of
that age was a stifling Puritanism. "I have been very happy for some years,
says Mrs. Maylie; "too happy, perhaps. It may be time that I should meet
with some misfortune." (Chapter XXXIII.) Against the state of mind
declared in this amazing utterance, Dickens instinctively rebelled; he believed
in happiness, in its moral effect, and in the right of all to have their share
in it. Forced into contemplation of the gloomiest aspects of human existence,
his buoyant spirit would not be held in darkness; as his art progressed, it
dealt more gently with oppressive themes. Take, for instance, the mortuary
topic, which has so large a place in the life of the poor, and compare Mr.
Sowerberry's business, squalid and ghastly, with that of Mr. Mould in Chuzzlewit,
where humour prevails over the repulsive, and that again with the picture of Messrs.
Omer and Joram in Copperfield, which touches mortality with the
homeliest kindness. The circumstances, to be sure, are very different, but
their choice indicates the movement of the author's mind. It was by virtue of
his ever-hopeful outlook that Dickens became such a force for good.
Disposing of those of his characters who remain
alive at the end, he assures us, as in a fairy tale, that the good people lived
happily ever after, and we are quite ready to believe it. Among the evildoers
he distinguishes, Mr. Bumble falls to his appropriate doom; Noah Claypole
disappears in the grime which is his native element -- severity, in his case
unmitigated by the reflection that he, too, was a parish-boy and a creature of
circumstances. Charley Bates it is impossible to condemn; his jollity is after
Dickens's own heart, and, as there is always hope for the boy who can laugh,
one feels it natural enough that he is last heard of as "the merriest
young grazier in all Northamptonshire." But what of his companion, Mr.
Dawkins, the Dodger? Voices pleaded for him; the author was besought to give
him a chance but of the Dodger we have no word. His last appearance is in
Chapter XLIII, perhaps the best in the book. We know how Dickens must have
enjoyed the writing of that chapter; Mr. Dawkins before the Bench is a triumph
of his most characteristic humour. What more is to be told of the Dodger after
that?
We take philosophic leave of him, assured that
he is "doing full justice to his bringing-up, and establishing for himself
a glorious reputation."
It was well for Dickens that, whatever his
defects in the conception and in the practice of his art, he possessed in a
high degree the artist's conscience. We English, proud of our thoroughness in
many departments of life, have never felt that quality to be indispensable to
the producer of fiction probably because novel-writing has never been regarded
as a road to wealth. The English novelist, especially when success has come to
him, is wont to see his art from the reader's point of view; with results too
obvious. Dickens, for all that he put his heart into everything he undertook,
did not wholly escape this perilous influence; his early and rapid conquest of the
public had results which at one moment threatened artistic disaster. In writing
Nicholas Nickleby he was often overwearied, often compelled by haste to
an improvisation which showed him at anything but his best. The book as a whole
is unsatisfactory ever considering the circumstances under which it was
composed, the notable thing about it is the vigorous spontaneity of its better
parts.
Long before Pickwick was finished, Oliver
Twist had been begun, and through much of the year 1837 the author worked alternately
at both books. He had engaged to complete another novel (Barnaby Rudge)
in the course of 1838, and he was actually tempted into undertaking to begin Nicholas
Nickleby early in that same year. Dickens found himself confronted with the
impossible. After a great deal of worry, and some little quarrelling, it was
decided that Barnaby must be postponed; Oliver Twist and Nicholas
Nickleby proceeded together. The first part of Nickleby appeared on
March 31, 1838, and twenty numbers, as usual, completed the story. It was
illustrated by Hablôt K. Browne.
"It will be our aim," wrote Dickens,
a preliminary advertisement to his new novel, "to amuse, by producing a
rapid succession of characters and incidents, and describing them as cheerfully
and pleasantly as in us lies." Such, too, had been his aim in Pickwick,
and probably he foresaw just as little of the course of the narrative in one
case as in the other; he relied upon his abounding invention, and, at this
time, had not arrived at the conception of a novel as a balanced and elaborated
whole. His novel was the eighteenth-century story of adventure; in the Preface
to the 1848 edition of Nickleby he glances significantly at the reading
of his childhood, when he had "a head full of Partridge, Strap, Tom Pipes,
and Sancho Panza"; but with the characteristics of that breezy fiction he
combined a tendency traceable to his love of the stage, a melodramatic
violence, already manifested in Oliver Twist, and never to be outgrown
through all the changes of his mood and manner. So long as he is following the
rambles of Nicholas, not much troubling himself as to how they shall end, all
goes well but when the progress of his monthly parts reminded him that the
story must be knit together to an effective close, he has recourse to
theatrical devices, and we lose ourselves amid the tedious unreality of
Madeline and Gride and Ralph. The latter part of Nickleby, in so far as
it is concerned with these stagy figures, is perhaps Dickens's poorest work. Its
picturesqueness -- the quality which often redeems his melodrama -- will not
compare with that of the clock-and-lantern villainies in Oliver Twist. When
we read of Ralph Nickleby "foaming at the mouth," we feel strangely
remote from the delightful world of stage-coach and hostelry which our author
has shown us with such inimitable spirit. No less drearily fantastic is the
presentment of high-life debauchery in the persons of Lord Frederick Verisopht
and Sir Mulberry Hawk. These persecutors of virgin innocence will bear no
illumination but that of the footlights; they are, of course, stage-stricken
shopboys masking as devil-may-care aristocrats. Let it be remembered, however,
that Dickens was a very young man, with experience of life -- however wide in
one sense -- necessarily very limited; also, that he was a "radical,"
with strong middle-class ideas. Even in these unprofitable portions of the
story his writing is never insincere; whilst at work he thoroughly believed in
his personages, even those which to us seem mere puppets. Some years after,
speaking in public, he had occasion to allude to Lord Frederick, and did so
with laughing disparagement; but to suppose that he had any such thought whilst
writing Nickleby would be a grave misunderstanding of the man and the
artist. In the year 1838 he was producing too much and too quickly, but he
never consciously sent forth inferior work saying to himself that "it
would do."
In Dickens's correspondence with Forster, it is
evident, from first to last, that, however desirous he might be of keeping his
public in good humour, and of supplying them with moral examples, he always
conceived himself to be a very close and faithful student of human character. The
theories of so-called "realism" had, of course, never occurred to
him; a novel, to his mind, was a very different thing from a severe chronicle
of actual lives; for all that, the Preface to Nickleby closes with a
remark which shows that he held himself a "realist" in portraiture. "If
Nicholas be not always found to be blameless or agreeable, he is not always
intended to appear so. He is a young man of an impetuous temper and of little
or no experience; and I saw no reason why such a hero should be lifted out of
nature." It was a protest, doubtless, against the school of fiction
favoured by Mrs. Wititterly. We smile at the suggestion that Nicholas is an
uncompromising study of human nature, but Dickens thought himself, and was
thought, to have done a bold thing in taking for his hero this penniless youth
of the everyday world. Had he not been even bolder in his choice of theme for Oliver
Twist? He was opening in truth a new era of English fiction, and the critic
of our day who loses sight of this, who compares Dickens to his disadvantage
with novelists of a later school, perpetrates the worst kind of injustice! Dickens
is one of the great masters of fiction, who, by going straight to life,
revitalized their art. That he did not see life with the eyes of a later
generation can scarcely be brought as a charge against him; that his
individuality affected his vision is no more than must be said of any artists
that ever lived.
Nicholas himself, being the "hero" of
the book, is (as in so many novels old and new) one of its least interesting
characters. To feel the author's vigorous originality we must turn to the
figures which are nowadays commonly spoken of as grotesques -- to Squeers and
Newman Noggs, to Mr. Crummles and Tim Linkinwater arid Mr. Kenwigs. These,
however grotesque, are living persons, and I think they live not merely by the
imaginative power of the novelist; one and all of them Dickens may very well
have met. To insist upon the "unreality" of such pictures is to
evince slight acquaintance with the life of the lower middle-class, or very
imperfect observation. What may be reasonably objected to them is this: that
Dickens does not show us the whole man, only certain of his more peculiar
aspects. But whatever is given has been truly observed and faithfully rendered
in the spirit of the artist. Nay, these figures could not be so amusing, so
delightful, but for their genuine humanity. Mr. Squeers, no doubt, had moments
when he was not quite the Squeers we know; Mr. Mantalini was not at all times
so vivacious, so choice in speech; but our author has shown us these persons on
the side that took his fancy, and very wisely abstains from any efforts to
complete the portrait. Contrast them with Ralph Nickleby, in whose case Dickens
goes out of his way to attempt what we nowadays call analysis; the reflections
at the beginning of Chap. XLIV do not impress one and certainly help to make
"unreal" a character very well presented earlier in the book. In this
matter of deliberate analysis Dickens always failed; though much more
elaborate, his discussions of Mr. Dombey are very little more to the point than
this moralizing paragraph on the secret mind of Nicholas's uncle.
With Nickleby Dickens began his lifelong
warfare against the bad old methods of education. It is in Dotheboys Hall that
the interest of this book really centres; to attack the "Yorkshire
schools" was his one defined purpose when he sat down to write, and it
seems probable that much more space would have been given to Dotheboys had not
the subject proved rather refractory. Here, as always, in dealing with social
abuses, Dickens had to reconcile painful material with his prime purpose of
presenting life "as cheerfully and pleasantly as in him lay." How is
one to show in a cheery and pleasant light the spectacle of a number of starved
and tortured children? It is done by insisting once and only once on the horror
of the situation, and thence onwards keeping the reader mirthful over every
detail that can be turned to merriment. One paragraph, admirably written (see
Chap. VIII), puts before us the picture in all its hideousness; in the next we
read, "And yet this scene, painful as it was, had its grotesque features,
which, in a less interested observer than Nicholas, might have provoked a
smile"; whereupon comes Mrs. Squeers, "presiding over an immense
basin of brimstone and treacle," and the porridge which "looked like
diluted pincushions without covers," and the "first class in English
spelling and philosophy." These Dotheboys chapters served their double
aim; they led to a practical reform and delighted the young novelist's vast
circle of readers. It is doubtful whether any writer ever succeeded so well,
and so easily, as Dickens in this most difficult endeavour. Nickleby
taught him his power as a social reformer, and it is not the least wonderful
feature of his career that again and again he repeated this success, combining,
with much felicity, the moral and the artistic purpose, generally incompatible.
One of Mr. Squeers's victims accompanies us
through the book; but, precisely because this figure is meant to be
consistently pathetic, it fails of its effect. Smike is a mere shadow, never
either boy or man. On the stage the part has commonly been played by a woman;
as also that of Jo, the crossing-sweeper; a significant fact. Smike and Jo
reveal the weakness of the master. Of true pathos there is abundance in his
novels, but those passages are lightly touched think of the Marchioness in The
Old Curiosity Shop, and of the little maid called Charley in Bleak House.
Sentimentality is a mark of the great semi-educated class from which Dickens
sprung and to which, unconsciously, he so often addressed himself. In Smike he
indulged a native proneness to the idly lachrymose; where he is truly pathetic,
his genius overcame the fault of birth and breeding.
Nickleby is the first of Dickens's novels in which we
meet with a full-length female portrait. Excellent sketches of a certain class
of woman had appeared in Pickwick and in Oliver Twist; his third
book fulfilled the promise of those earlier efforts, and, in Mrs. Nickleby,
gave the world a masterly piece of characterization. It is needless to repeat
the tradition that Dickens found his model in a near relative; even without
such opportunity of close study, he would have observed and have portrayed Mrs.
Nickleby, who was a representative woman of the decent English household half a
century ago, and who may still be met with more frequently than is desirable in
the middle-class home. To be sure, the mother of Nicholas and Kate is
delightfully idealized; what in reality bores, exasperates and crushes has been
converted by a humorist into matter for inextinguishable laughter; but Mrs.
Nickleby, in her turns of thought, her tricks of speech, is the great exemplar
of her kind, the perfectly silly and incompetent gentle-woman. For the joy of
the thing, I copy one of her finest bits of monologue.
"Kate, my dear, I don't know how it is,
but a fine warm summer day like this, with the birds singing in every
direction, always puts me in mind of roast pig, with sage and onion sauce, and
made gravy. . . . Roast pig; let me see. On the day five weeks after you were
christened, we had a roast -- no, that couldn't have been a pig either, because
I recollect there were a pair of them to carve, and your poor papa and I could
never have thought of sitting down to two pigs -- they must have been
partridges. Roast pig! I hardly think we ever could have had one, now I come to
remember, for your papa could never bear the sight of them in the shops, and
used to say that they always put him in mind of very little babies, only the
pigs had much fairer complexions. . . . I recollect dining once at Mrs.
Bevan's, in that broad street round the corner by the coachmaker's, where the
tipsy man fell through the cellar-flap of an empty house nearly a week before
quarter-day and wasn't found till the new tenant went in -- and we had a roast
pig there! It must be that, I think, that reminds me of it, especially as there
was a little bird in the room that would keep on singing all the time of the
dinner -- at least, not a little bird, for it was a parrot, and he didn't sing
exactly, for he talked and swore dreadfully; but I think it must be that. Indeed
I am sure it must. Shouldn't you say so, my dear?" (Chap. XLI.)
Kate makes answer "with a cheerful
smile"; the necessity of Dickens's fiction kept out of sight the dreary
and life-wasting aspect of this kind of thing, and in my comment it would be
disproportionate to insist upon it, But one may remark that Mrs. Nickleby
served the cause of social progress no less surely, if less obviously, than
Squeers and Dotheboys. To Dickens we are vastly indebted -- can there be a
doubt of it? -- for our advance in the matter of female education. That women
of a certain class should be more or less fools was in his early day taken for
granted; among the causes tending to a happier state of things, Dickens's
humorous satire surely has had a great part.
Of Kate herself one can only say that she
supplies a pendant to her brother; she has not been "lifted out of
nature"; she has no relation to nature at all. No more has that pale
martyr of the footlights, Madeline Bray. It is interesting to note that the
young lady beloved by the hero of the novel, and whom in the end he marries, is
so little realized by the author that she simply escapes one's memory; who, in
thinking over Nickleby, gives so much as a glance at Madeline Bray? Dickens
never succeeded in depicting an ordinary well-bred and charming girl -- unless
in his very last book. His most elaborate effort is Agnes in David Copperfield,
and Agnes has hardly more life than Madeline. On the other hand, what could be
better than Fanny Squeers and Matilda Price? Fanny reminds us of Smollett, to
whom Dickens owed so much; she is something too full-flavoured for a modern
public, and, taken with certain other characters one could name, she suggests
in a very interesting way the kind of work Dickens would have produced had he
been born a century Sooner.
Writing for that earlier generation, he would
assuredly not have conceived tile brothers Cheeryble, who embody a spirit
peculiar to the age of flourishing "radicalism". When moved to answer
critics who accused him of exaggeration in his characters, Dickens declared
that the Cheerybles were drawn from life. We know what he meant by that, and we
have no difficulty in distinguishing such a copy of nature from a portrait such
as Mrs. Nickleby; in the Cheerybles all he took from reality was a habit of
profuse benevolence, whereas in that other picture he has the very life-blood
of his subject. Tim Linkinwater's employers are the good spirits of a
fairy-tale; they anticipate the rapturous kindliness and joviality of the Christmas
Carol and its successors. Of course they are plebeians; Dickens glories in
their defects of breeding, and more than hints that such defect is essential to
the true philanthropist. Henry Fielding, a writer not lacking in humanity, when
he wished to depict "a human being replete with benevolence, meditating in
what manner he might render himself most acceptable to his Creator, by doing
most good to his creatures," gave the world Squire Allworthy and saw no
need of making him other than a gentleman. But Dickens was the spokesman of a
class in rebellion against political privilege -- that middle order which was
enriching itself at the expense of the ranks below it, and aimed through
political reform at social dignity. In him, a true philanthropy allied itself
with this party spirit, and, whereas he was never in the political sense a
democrat, the teaching of his work is often purely democratic. All the man's
heart is put into this delightful bit of idealism he glows over the Cheeryble
view of life, and makes the reader glow with him. What our judgment must be of
these merry pages if we take the modern view of the art of fiction need not be
said. With severe art they have nothing whatever to do; but who will deny that
they are literature?
In this unequal book (of all Dickens's the most
unequal) one wholly admirable group of characters and incidents is that
signalled by the name of Crummles. We approach it by a delightful way.
"Nicholas, accompanied by Smike, sallies forth to seek his fortune"
-- how appetizing is that old-fashioned chapter-heading! And how inspiriting
the chapter itself -- the wayfarer's tramp from London along the Portsmouth
road. "A broad, fine, honest sun lighted up the green pastures and dimpled
water with the semblance of summer, while it left the travellers all the
invigorating freshness of that early time of the year." Then, the wayside
inn, "twelve miles short of Portsmouth," the supper of hot beef-steak
pudding ordered by the gentleman in the parlour, and that gentleman Mr. Vincent
Crummles "on tour." Here are all the jolliest traditions of the
English novel, yet nothing is at second-hand, every scene and every figure is
observed from the life of that day. Dickens must have been descended from a
strolling player; he revelled in every sort of rambling entertainment, and saw
the fun of this mostly squalid world as no man before or since. Everyone
connected with the Crummles family is in his best vein, and possibly best of
all is the house of Kenwigs. For an instance of Dickens's ripest humour,
maturest work, thus early in his career, turn to Chap. XXXVI: "Private and
Confidential; Relating to Family Matters." In plain terms it describes the
confinement of Mrs. Kenwigs, from the domestic point of view, and nothing of
its kind in English fiction is more masterly. Contrast these pages with those
in which Ralph Nickleby is foaming and ranting, and you learn not only to
appreciate the most delicate side of Dickens's genius, but therewith to
estimate the misfortune which combined such a genius with such a bias to the
histrionic.
As always, there is mingled with the writing
worthy of being called humorous a good deal of sheer farce; sometimes of
indifferent quality, as in the chapter relating to the Muffin and Crumpet
Company, and the scene between Mr. Gregsbury and his constituents. Farcical,
but in the best sense, is Mr. Mantalini, some of whose utterances show amazing
resources of comic inventiveness. No one, I fear, ever talked so marvellously
-- yet, who knows! for every day that I live I am more convinced of the
difficulty of exaggerating human follies and singularities. However fantastic,
the man is real enough to have excited the gaiety of multitudes, and some of
his phrases are all but proverbial. Nothing of that sort can be said of the
so-called lunatic who pays court to Mrs. Nickleby; he is not good farce, but
mere tedious extravagance. Unfortunately, Dickens more than once tried to get
fun out of insanity, with the same depressing results.
A word should be given to the episodic stories,
which are part of the old-fashioned structure of the book. The Baron of
Grogzwig is clever extravaganza; that which precedes it, the Five
Sisters of Fork, illustrates Dickens's singular versatility, his power of
appropriating a style utterly unlike his own. Nickleby is the last book
in which he thus interrupted the course of the narrative.
"I have endeavoured, in the progress of
this tale" -- thus wrote Dickens in his original Preface to Martin
Chuzzlewit -- "to resist the temptation of the current monthly number,
and to keep a steadier eye upon the general purpose and design." The
temptation of the current monthly number none the less disastrously prevailed. It
could only be overcome in one way, by elaborating a scheme of the book in hand
before sitting down to write it; and this was opposed to the method of
Dickens's imagination. Oddly enough, his remark prefaced the one of all his
novels in which this defect of artistic structure is most glaringly obvious; no
great work of fiction is so ill put together as Martin Chuzzlewit. But
for this imperfection, the book would perhaps rank as his finest. In it he
displays the fullness of his presentative power, the ripeness of his humour,
the richest flow of his satiric vivacity, and the culmination of his
melodramatic vigour. Wrought into a shapely edifice of fiction, such qualities
would have announced an incontestable masterpiece. As it is, we admire and
enjoy with intervals of impatience. The novel is naught; the salient features
of the book are priceless.
After Barnaby Rudge, Dickens took a year
of well-earned and very needful holiday. He had worked too hard; he had written
too much. The difficulties with his publishers were at an end, and, with the
opportunity of rest and change before him, he lent ear to pressing invitations
from the other side of the Atlantic -- January of 1842 saw him on the voyage
which was to bear such important results. On his return he published American
Notes, and then, with the uproar excited by this volume ringing in his
ears, set himself to the new story which he had long had in mind. The first
monthly number of Chuzzlewit appeared in January, 1843; the last in
July, 1844; and the illustrations, as usual, were by Hablôt K. Browne. Originally
the book had a long cumbrous title, in a strain of facetiousness which now
strikes us as unworthy of it and of the author; it is in keeping, however, with
the first chapter, an utterly mistaken bit of sub-acid jocosity, which might
well have been omitted from later editions, and certainly would never have been
missed. (Contrast this, by the way, with the jesting fable which Thackeray prefixes
to his Newcomes; it affords a lesson in literary method.) One cannot but
feel that, after his long repose, the master's hand was "out." The
true opening of the work is in Chapter II, where, in a scene which recalls the
rural pages of The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge, Dickens
finds himself again, and goes happily on his way.
For whatever reason (and who shall explain
these caprices of the public?) Chuzzlewit in its monthly issue had but
poor success The sale, we are told, never exceeded 23,000 copies, whereas of
Nickleby a round 50,000 had been wont to go off. To Dickens, with his
dependence upon public sympathy, this was annoying; an inconsiderate remark
from his publishers, who felt uneasy as to financial results, heightened his
annoyance to irritation; he cast a bout him for a means of improving the sale,
with the result that Martin hurriedly decided to go to America. This meant, of
course, a renewal of the pungent criticism which Americans had so strongly
resented in his Notes. Dickens had in no small degree the English
persistency and pugnacity. He made fun of America, first of all, because the
opportunity to his satiric and boisterous genius was irresistible; having felt
his strength, he returned joyously to the onslaught, seeing no reason whatever
why he should not look for profit to a sort of work that he delighted in,
however offensive it might be to a foreign people. One must bear in mind his
reasonable discontent on the international copyright question; assuredly, but
for this crying injustice, the United States would have received gentler
treatment at his hands. Dickens fought for what he regarded as simple honesty;
all the better for him that he held a weapon which flashed so brilliantly and
pierced so keenly. His defenders against American reproaches were wont to point
out that no man had more severely censured and ridiculed the faults of his own
countrymen. But, of course, there was a difference. He never offended a
majority of his English readers; he never fell foul of the English people at
large his writing palpitated with English emotion, sympathies, prejudices. The
one point on which he really incurred some risk by indulging his satiric turn
was where he touched religion; yet even here he had the Anglican Church on his
side. To tell the truth, Dickens in America was Dickens the satirist without
counterpoise of his native tenderness. Abstract the gracious sentiment from his
work, and would he ever have attained half his popularity at home? This
transatlantic episode is really important to an understanding of his genius and
his success. As soon as he returned to purely English subjects, his favour in
America revived; he became the novelist of the English-speaking world; and
twenty-five years later, America welcomed his second visit with boundless
enthusiasm. The copyright question was as far as ever from settlement, but
Dickens had now mellowed to middle age. Moreover, he came with the express
purpose of making money, and on this subject one must be content with remarking
that Dickens combined most wonderfully the characteristics of true artist and
man of business.
If Dickens was haphazard in regard to the
construction of his stories, on the other hand he commonly began with a moral
theme which served him for guidance. The present book had for its purpose
"to show how selfishness propagates itself"; a leading illustration
of the truth being, of course, the character and career of Jonas Chuzzlewit. But
there are probably few readers who rise from the book with reflections of this
nature the moral issue is not half so impressive as the power which sets before
us a great number of immensely entertaining persons, our interest in whom holds
no relation to their ethical value. In fact, the virtuous characters attract us
least. We do not care overmuch for Tom Pinch, who ought to have had enough
common-sense to recognize flagrant hypocrisy and rascality; for the most part
he is a mere walking virtue; we are never quite clear as to his age, and can
form only a blurred conception of his person. His friend Westlock is nothing
but goodness and a name. In Old Martin we have not the slightest belief; his
schemes leave us unmoved, and his final outbreak of triumphant wrath is too
manifestly mere stage business. Martin the younger, titular hero of the book,
presents himself to us as a thoroughly commonplace young man, whose flabby
egoism could never do very much harm, and it is with great difficulty that we
congratulate him on his conversion to a more wholesome frame of mind. Of Mark
Tapley, to be sure, the world had made a favourite he is no distant cousin to
Sam Weller, talks now and then very much in Sam's vein, and amuses us with his
cheery stoicism; but Mark does not stand in the front rank of Dickens's
creations. At the other extreme, downright villainy as represented by Jonas
fails somehow to stir our moral sensibilities. Jonas is a very vulgar ruffian,
so primitive a creature that his mode of thought and action is scarcely ever in
doubt. True, he figures in an elaborate and powerful scenic effect, but as a
bit of character he has small merit. There remain the really vivid personages,
whom we watch and hear for their own inimitable sake, indifferent to their
bearing on the moral, and often barely conceiving their connection with the
tangled narrative. Mr. Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp are masterpieces of genius in
its happiest mood, and behind them come a troop of figures alive from the same
hand -- Bailey Junior, Sweedlepipe, Mrs. Todgers, Mr. Mould, Moddle and Betsy
Prig and the Pecksniff girls. All are denizens of a mean world and personally
ignoble; it is shocking company; with not one of them, male or female, can we
imagine ourselves delighting to converse did we meet them in the flesh yet in
the realm of imagination they are our familiars. Their sayings remain with us
for our mirth; sayings neither wise nor witty, but so perfectly indicative of
character, so entirely original on the speaker's lips, that we never lose the
first impression of surprise and amusement. Moreover, this talk has its serious
significance; it represents a whole society, a phase of civilization; here we
have lower London at the middle of our century, uttering itself so as to be for
ever recognizable. Each speaker is at once individual and a type; manifestly
akin, yet so various of feature, they reveal the multitude behind them, the
obscure swarming of a vast city.
This is one explanation of Dickens's
impressiveness. He suggests, as few writers are able to do, the complexity of
modern life, with special references to its sordid aspects consciously or not,
we are made to feel what an old, old world it is that has brought forth these
surprising forms of humanity. When he aims at depicting the simply good, the
touchingly ingenuous, he is never so successful as with the amusingly base; and
this has its cause in the nature of things, for the society with which he is
concerned does not favour goodness and ingenuousness. The conditions of its
life are hard, for the most part ignoble; there goes on a furious struggle for
existence, and assuredly the self-forgetful do not win the fight. Mr. Pecksniff
flourishing carries conviction; as a ragged mendicant, whining to Tom Pinch, he
is not the same man, but a puppet set to illustrate the axiom that honesty is
the best policy. Mrs. Gamp, most happily, gets off with a dignified reproof
which, of course, had not the least effect upon her conduct. These protagonists
of the book (though not of the story) stand for incalculable forces of social
corruption; as in all great studies of human nature, the artist implies more
than he is aware of. Given a social order which aims before everything at
material comfort, yet professes obedience to spiritual law, and midway in its
battling throng appears Mr. Pecksniff; lower down, where the atmosphere is
thicker and fouler, one will perceive Mrs. Gamp. They are types of a multitude
given over to crass materialism, yet bound by moral formula; a people which is
stupidly proud of the letter though the Spirit has long ceased to have a
meaning for it. In their several spheres, Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp represent
respectability -- the significant name of a significant status. They are the
successful, and we see how they have managed to succeed. Here is the problem of
modern society reduced to its simplest terms. Life disguises the repulsive
truth, complicates it with all manner of virtues, affections, prettinesses. But
a great writer presents us with two chosen specimens of humanity, and the
secret is bare to all who have eyes for it.
We laugh so much, however, that we are little
disposed to look below the appearances which entertain us. Idle to question
whether the way of merriment is the right way whether the picture thus shown
corresponds to "reality"? To each reader Dickens brings what that
reader seeks; the laughter of each has its own significance; to one he exhibits
a boisterous extravaganza; to another, a philosophy of existence; yet both must
needs laugh. To the thankless persons who charged him with exaggeration for the
purpose of making mirth, he answered in his Preface to the final edition of Chuzzlewit.
"What is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions is plain truth
to another." And he asks himself "whether it is always the writer who
colours highly, or whether it is now and then the reader whose eye for colour
is a little dull?" Of course, the novelist was right; he has given us
essential truth, choosing his own method for making it plain. Reflect on the
laws of fiction. Into a page the writer must concentrate what in nature is
boundless; his business is not to report life in extenso, but to convey
to another mind some impression which it made upon his own. If he do this and
capably, then his work is "true." A novelist can give only one aspect
of a thing, that which at the moment it presents to him; in Pecksniff and Sarah
Gamp, who to another beholder might have been tedious, offensive, monstrous, he
saw matter for infinite jest, and the proof that he saw truly lies in the eager
acceptance of his picture by mankind at large. For all art is relative to the
human mind; apart from that sanction, it would be meaningless. One cannot
easily explain why a drunken hypocrite who urges us to be moral and to
contemplate existence should minister to our delight; nor why a loathsome
creature who, under guise of sick-nursing, ill-treats and robs her patients
should be to us a joy for ever; we only know that by a certain art this effect
can be produced, and that Dickens had the art in perfection.
It is one thing to describe with vividness a
personage of fiction; it is another, and greatly more difficult, to put
convincing words into the personage's mouth. Often as Dickens succeeded in
adapting the idiom of the London vulgar to the expression of a strongly marked
personality, one instance of his power in this respect shines with surpassing
brilliance; unparalleled in his work, or in that of any other author, is the
language of Mrs. Gamp. To describe Mrs. Gamp as the incarnation of vulgarity
would be true, but inadequate; representing vulgarity in its essence, she is
also vulgar in a special mode, and, what is more, vulgar through the medium of
a strong individuality. No painful observer of her class could, by mere literal
faithfulness, have transferred to paper this thick, gurgling flux of talk;
knowing the lingo, we recognize it upon her lips, but at the same time we know
that we never before listened to Mrs. Gamp; fortune never led us into this
odorous presence until we were introduced to her by Dickens. Sensual grossness,
luring shrewdness, the callousness of base experience, could not conceivably
find fitter utterance. Compare her speech with that of Betsy Prig, in many
respects a woman of the same stamp, but altogether lacking in originality, of
poorer spirit, of thinner blood; Betsy's talk is mere acrid commonplace, the
meanness of every day. Read the quarrel scene between these two, one of
Dickens's great things, and contrast the crude personalities wherein Mrs. Prig
gives voice to her acrimony with the figured phrase, the pointed anecdote, the
inimitable hapax legomena, which go to express Mrs. Gamp's indignation. This
amazing creature is, in her way, a humorist; she throws out, in panting
parenthesis, little sketches of the life familiar to her, which show the amused
observer. "Which Mr. Harris who was dreadful timid went and stopped his
ears in a empty dog-kennel, and never took his hands away or come out once till
he was showed the baby, w'en being took with fits, the doctor collared him and
laid him on his back upon the airy stones, and she was told to ease her mind,
his 'owls was organs." Read her conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Mould in
their parlour admire her vein of bantering facetiousness, and its effect upon
the hearers. Nay, so superabundant is her facility in the way of discourse that
she has been led to invent an imaginary friend, a supposed constant
interlocutrix, whose remarks, faithfully reported, lend graceful variety to her
self-praise and her compliments. Great in herself, Mrs. Gamp becomes greater
still as the author of Mrs. Harris: "I says to Mrs. Harris only t'other
day, the last Monday evening fortnight as ever dawned upon this Pilgrim's
Projiss of a mortal wale --" Of a truth Dickens has here achieved the
incredible, the material was beneath contempt; in no small degree even
loathsome. In his hands it became a new delight, unique and imperishable.
Mr. Pecksniff's eloquence exhibits art of
another kind. It is purely personal; it is not the language of a class, however
representative the way of thinking; the architect is an educated man, with
polished diction at his tongue's end. Here we enjoy the humorous originality
which has discovered a new form of insincere and inflated speech. "I am
forced to keep things on the square if I can, sir," pleads Mrs. Todgers,
in her curt and homely phrase. "The profit is very small." Whereto
responds Mr. Pecksniff; "Oh, Calf, Calf, Oh, Baal, Baal! To barter away
that precious jewel, self-esteem, and cringe to every mortal creature -- for
eighteen shillings a week!" The exquisite rightness of Pecksniff's speech
is well perceived in comparing it with that of a personage who belongs to the
same order, a scarcely less eloquent humbug, to wit, Mr. Chadband (in Bleak
House). There is great similarity between the style of these two; their
unction aims at very much the same effect; yet never for a moment could we
mistake the authorship of a phrase quoted from either. This, with many like
instances, disposes at once of the thoughtless charge against Dickens, that his
best-known figures are mere exaggerations to the farcical point of a vice or a
humour. On the contrary, he excels in subtle delineation of characteristics
which demand great adroitness in the artist. Consider what a number of new
types he gave to fiction, new, yet at once recognizable by his public. That an
English novelist should grope towards the figure of Pecksniff is natural
enough; Dickens alone could grasp and present it. This was the appointed end of
his genius; by humorous interpretation it set forth in a new light, and endowed
with striking personality faults and foibles which were so common as to pass
unregarded.
I dwell in this Preface on the point of
dialogue, for in Chuzzlewit, it seems to me, the dialogue is Dickens's
best. Up to this point it had gained strength; hereafter, it was to betray more
or less decidedly the encroachment of mannerism. In Dombey and Son the
decline is noticeable; we have long, long pages of iteration, especially where
the speaker is a person whom Dickens realizes by force of will, instead of by
the prompting of genius. Even David Copperfield, with all its return of
spontaneity, and its matchless episodes, suffers from a note of the mechanical
in much of its talk. But of Chuzzlewit only an insignificant part falls
below the author's inspiration; on the whole it breathes a vital energy
wondrously sustained. Open the book at hazard, and one is almost sure to light
upon dialogue of irresistible originality. If the leading actors are absent,
then it is Bailey, Junior, who flashes his cockney wit, or Mr. Moddle who moons
for our delectation, or Montague Tigg who utters himself at large, or some
other of a score one could name who says things unfailingly fresh and personal.
From this point of view the American chapters are admirable. Whether Dickens
"exaggerated" the American note, or (as some contend) gave no more
than a fair impression of Transatlantic speech in certain orders of society, I
have no means of determining the thing beyond doubt is that his Americans
express themselves with a racy vigour which has a great air of verisimilitude. With
astonishing skill this language is varied in the mouths of different
characters; Jefferson Brick does not talk like Mr. Scadder, nor like Hannibal
Challop, nor yet like Elijah Pogram; but all are of the same soil, and
unmistakably native. Remembering the brevity of Dickens's American experience,
one marvels at the abundant material commanded by his vivifying fancy. He is in
his glory among these exuberances of character and of speech which appeal so
forcibly to his humour on the hilarious side; he lets himself go, feeling that
he cannot go too far; the old country could never have given him such scope in
fantastically self-assertive diction. "He is a true-born child of this
free hemisphere; verdant as the mountains of our country; bright and flowing as
our mineral drinks; unspoiled by withering conventionalities as are our broad
and boundless Perearers! Rough he may be. So are our Barrs. Wild he may be. So
are our Buffaloes. But he is a child of nature, and a child of freedom, and his
boastful answer to the Despot and the Tyrant is, that his bright home is in the
Settin' Sun." The unsurpassable gusto betrayed in such passages as this
must have won their author's pardon at once from every American who had in any
degree the literary sense.
Every quality of Dickens is seen at its best in
Martin Chuzzlewit. He has no example of the domestic ideal (his constant
preoccupation) more successful than Ruth Pinch. Ruth making a pudding, Ruth at
the butcher's, Ruth tripping by the Temple Fountain, remains with us as the
type of a certain feminine excellence, which we may or may not admire, but
which Dickens -- representative of an epoch -- admired with all his heart. Contrasted
with her are the two Pecksniff girls, who for insight and careful workmanship
perhaps take precedence of all Dickens's underbred young women; their portraits
never fall into excess of colour; they are bits of admirable
"realism"; an impression of scoundreldom was never better conveyed
than in the group surrounding Montague Tigg, and of all Dickens's murders the
most effective from every point of view is that wrought by the sullen, brutal
Jonas. Above all, the master hand shows itself in glimpses of everyday vulgar
life, which demand a finer power than episodes of horror; for instance, the
burial of Anthony Chuzzlewit, of which no praise can exaggerate the truth, the
proposition, the grim humour. (It should be put side by side with Mrs.
Kenwigs's confinement in Nickleby.) Mr. Mould in the bosom of his
family; Mrs. Todgers in difficulties about gravy, or agitated about a
courtship; the old clerk Chuffey in the old, musty warehouse; Poll
Sweedlepipe's tonsorial existence; the household ruled by Mrs. Lupin -- endless
the enumeration. What a full book it is! We feel ourselves amid a vast multitude,
the thronging life of that over-peopled world which Dickens never allows us to
forget.
For the most part, the prose of Chuzzlewit
is excellent, much riper than that of The Old Curiosity Shop, and more
varied than that of Barnaby Rudge. Putting aside the first chapter
(which is weak from every point of view), the story begins with a
characteristic description of a windy autumn sunset there is perfect adaptation
of language -- always simple, with large intermixture of the homely -- to the
cheerily familiar yet thoroughly fresh and fanciful mode of thought. The wind,
we are told -- "after its pranks in the village street, hurried away
rejoicing, roaring over moor and meadow, hill and flat, until it got out to
sea, where it met with other winds similarly disposed, and made a night of
it." This is Dickens in full command of his resources; the image is no
sooner born in his imagination than it clothes itself in the fitting phrase; no
striving and straining to be himself, as is too often the case in later
books. Perfect, too, are his descriptions of persons; if possible, more vivid
than ever as regards external feature, and adding thereto a richer
suggestiveness of things within. "In this domestic chamber Mr. Mould now
sat, gazing, a placid man, upon his punch and home. If, for a moment at a time,
he sought a wider prospect, whence he might return with freshened zest to these
enjoyments, his moist glance wandered like a sunbeam through a rural screen of
scarlet runners, trained on strings before the window; and he looked down, with
an artist's eye, upon the graves." A passage such as this corresponds to
the little mellow masterpieces of Flemish art; the man is caught at the right
moment, amid the natural surroundings, in an atmosphere of unctuously
suggestive tone. In local picturing one of Dickens's most successful efforts is
the view of "Todgers's" and its vicinity, and I doubt whether any
other novelist ever gave at once such a complete and such a living idea of a
place he wished to describe. Recalling many scenes in the books which followed,
one hesitates to say that he never again pictured with such power; but the
subject in this case was peculiarly his own, and he elaborates detail with a
fond minuteness which only enhances the impressiveness of the general effect. To
depict London was one of the ends for which Dickens was born. In the pages
headed "Town and Todgers's" he achieved supremely that purpose of his
being.
"Dealings with the firm of Dombey and Son,
Wholesale, Retail and for Exportations" -- thus was the book originally
entitled -- came out in the familiar monthly parts, with illustrations by
Hablôt K. Browne, from October, 1846, to April, 1848. Its success was
immediate, and great beyond expectation. Since the close of Martin
Chuzzlewit (commercially a disappointment) more than two years had elapsed,
Dickens's only publication meanwhile having been the Christmas Carol; he
had refreshed himself with a long sojourn in Italy (which, oddly to our ears,
he speaks of in a letter as likely to heighten his prestige with the public)
and turned once more to the composition of a long novel with that gusto which
was an essential feature of his genius.
Dombey was begun at Lausanne, continued at Paris,
completed in London, and at English seaside places; whilst the early parts were
being written, a Christmas story, The Battle of Life, was also in hand,
and Dickens found it troublesome to manage both together. That he overcame the
difficulty -- that, soon after, we find him travelling about England as member
of an amateur dramatic company -- that he undertook all sorts of public
engagements and often devoted himself to private festivity -- Dombey
going on the while, from month to month -- is matter enough for astonishment to
those who know anything about artistic production. But such marvels become
commonplaces in the life of Charles Dickens.
The moral theme of this book was Pride -- pride
of wealth, pride of place, personal arrogance. Dickens started with a clear
conception of his central character and of the course of the story in so far as
it depended upon that personage; he planned the action, the play of motive,
with unusual definiteness, and adhered very closely in the working to this
well-laid scheme nevertheless, Dombey and Son is a novel which in its
beginning promises more than its progress fulfils. Impossible to avoid the
reflection that the death of Dombey's son and heir marks the end of a complete
story, that we feel a gap between Chapter XVI and what comes after (the author
speaks of feeling it himself, of his striving to "transfer the interest to
Florence") and that the narrative of the later part is ill-constructed,
often wearisome, sometimes incredible. We miss Paul, we miss Walter Gay
(shadowy young hero though he be); Florence is too colourless for deep
interest, and the second Mrs. Dombey is rather forced upon us than accepted as
a natural figure in the drama. Dickens's familiar shortcomings are abundantly
exemplified. He is wholly incapable of devising a plausible intrigue, and
shocks the reader with monstrous improbabilities such as all that portion of
the denouement in which old Mrs. Brown and her daughter are concerned. A
favourite device with him (often employed with picturesque effect) was to bring
into contact persons representing widely severed social ranks; in this book the
"effect" depends too often on "incidences of the boldest
artificiality," as nearly always we end by neglecting the story as a
story, and surrendering ourselves to the charm of certain parts, the
fascination of certain characters.
It was unfortunate that Dickens planned his
book to illustrate a passion -- for the treatment of passion does not come
within his scope. Compare his personages meant to be vehement with the like in
Balzac; the difference is that between a drawing of Michael Angelo and one by
Fuseli. Mr. Dombey himself is consistently presented, but we regard him as an
actor rather than a human being. Still more decidedly is this the case with
Carker, whose deeds proclaim him an automaton, and with Edith, who has her
place beside several other would-be haughty women in the other novels. In this
parallel of aristocratic Mrs. Skewton and her daughter with plebeian Mrs. Brown
and her daughter we note a happy conception, but neither of the younger
women is convincingly drawn, and as for Alice Marwood, she is perhaps the most
stagy figure in all Dickens; Chapter XXXIV, a scene between Alice and her
mother, I take to be the worst he ever wrote.
Thus, as a satire on Pride, the book is not
very effective. Contrast the life of Mr. Dombey and his polite acquaintances
with that which goes on below-stairs in Mr. Dombey's house; in the one case we
have conscientious labour, never quite successful in vitalizing its subjects;
in the other, the work of an artist with full command of his material. It is
easy, and not much to the purpose, to disparage Dickens when he deals with the
Dombey group by pointing to the masterpieces of Thackeray; these great writers
differ widely in method and intention; each must be judged by the standard of
achievement in his best work, and we need say no more than that Dickens is not
seen at his happiest in certain parts of a novel which, for all that, remains a
wonder and a delight. In one instance his reproofs and worldliness find
adequate artistic expression; the death of Mrs. Skewton is an excellent piece
of grisly realism. Throughout, indeed, the picture of this decayed woman of
fashion is more striking than that of her low-life parallel, Mrs. Brown; and,
after all objections, Mrs. Skewton's daughter comes much nearer to the likeness
of a real woman than the fierce castaway, Alice Marwood.
The fact of the matter is that Dickens fails in
certain of his upper-class portraitures not, first and foremost, because that
class is unfamiliar to his imagination, but rather because he had chosen types
of character which his art finds uncongenial. He can fail just as decidedly in
a picture from the humble world, when misled by the unfortunate hankering after
lofty or violent passion. Dickens had not the tragic gift with the possible
exception of Sidney Carton, his novels present no figure which belongs in the
true sense of the word to tragedy. What he can, and does often, excel in is the
wildly or grimly picturesque -- a totally different thing. Note how, in his
efforts to give life to Mr. and Mrs. Dombey, where they are in fierce silent
conflict, he falls into the rhetorical mood, and occasionally preaches at the
reader for whole pages -- a fault never so marked in his other novels. He is
not given to "analysis"; it is his merit that he makes us see and
know his people directly, rarely endeavouring to dissect their minds for us. But
turn to the opening pages of Chapter XLVII, where one comes upon long paragraphs
beginning with "Alas!" and "Oh!" and punctuated with notes
of exclamation; it is Dickens woefully astray, so possessed with the need of
emphasizing what he has to show us (and ought to be content merely to show us)
that his writing-desk becomes a pulpit, and is soundly thumped. As an example
of how he progressed in his art, think of that lofty personage in a later
novel, Sir Leicester Dedlock; from every point of view better work than Mr.
Dombey, and unspoilt by rhetorical excesses. Dickens was still engaged on
refractory material, trying to attain what was beyond his limits; but we see
clearly enough in Sir Leicester that it is character, not social position,
which offers the stumbling-block.
It has become the fashion to sneer at Dickens's
pathos, and the death of little Paul is commonly mentioned as an example of
intolerable mawkishness. That the story is at this point too long drawn out
everyone must admit; it was one of the unhappy results of a method of
publication for which no good word can be said; but to some readers, not wholly
uncritical, the child's deathbed is still genuinely pathetic, though they
cannot speak of it in the terms of excited eulogy which flattered the author's
ears. Paul Dombey is a picture of childhood such as only Dickens could draw;
abounding in observation, enriched with imaginative sympathy; a thing very
touching and tender. Remember, too, that, in the 'forties, such a picture as
this was a national benefaction England sadly needed awakening to her
responsibilities in the matter of childhood, and who shall say how great an
influence for good was exercised by Charles Dickens in his constant
preoccupation with children, their sufferings, their education, their claims of
every kind. Poor little Paul is crushed by a system of ignorant selfishness. Impossible
to depict more skilfully the sorrows of an exceptionally gifted child ground in
the mill of what was understood to be instruction; the appeal to our
compassion, our indignation, is irresistible. As in writing of "Little
Nell," the writer somewhat lost control of himself; tears blurred his view
of artistic proportion. So often has the effect been aimed at by subsequent
novelists that it is grown a weariness, and is too often an obvious
insincerity; we are apt to forget that Dickens imitated no one, that he spoke
from his heart at the prompting of his genius. The thing has perhaps been more
artistically done; never with truer emotion or gentler touch.
A review of all the scholastic persons in
Dickens's novels would be very interesting and of historical value. Grant the
"exaggeration" which is inseparable from his methods (exaggeration in
no vulgar sense, and far oftener an artistic merit than a defect), these
masters and instructors represent very truly the state of middle-class
education in early-Victorian days. That the author of Nicholas Nickleby
must be credited with a share in the abolition of many a Dotheboys Hall has
long been recognized, but his influence on public opinion as to the whole
subject of teaching was probably much greater than is supposed. Dr. Blimber's
establishment is a well-chosen example of the private school for young
gentlemen which survives in the memories of gentlemen at present neither young
nor old; it has no connection whatever with Dotheboys; externally, it promises
very well indeed, and only when we see its educational system at work do we
become aware that nothing is taught here, nothing learnt. The education
presumed to be given) is "classical." Dickens himself, whose boy hood
knew little or nothing of Greek and Latin, had a strong prejudice against the
"classics"; their true value he was not capable of appreciating, and
his common sense told him that, as used in the average middle-class school,
they were worse than valueless -- the cover for every kind of inefficiency. Miss
Blimber, a thoroughly conscientious person, was "dry and sandy with
working in the graves of deceased languages. None of your live languages for
Miss Blimber. They must be dead -- stone dead -- and then Miss Blimber dug them
up like a ghoul." Mr. Feeder, rejoicing in the degree of B. A., was
"a kind of human barrel-organ, with a little list of tunes at which he was
continually working, over and over again, without any variation." Contemporary
readers made merry over the Blimber establishment this was the veritable
Dickens, greatest of sparkling jesters; but after merriment came reflection,
and we may feel assured that many an English paterfamilias, who gave his
opinion in favour of modern against ancient, and helped on the new spirit in
matters educational was more or less consciously influenced by the reading of Dombey
and Son. Great is the achievement of a public man who supplies his audience
with the picture that abides, the catch word unforgettable, and Dickens many a time
did so. It is the picture and the catch-word, not reason or rhetoric, that
effect reform.
Passing to the lighter features of the book, we
see Dickens at his best in a large group of whimsical characters -- figures hot
satirical (or not primarily so), but depicted for mere love of quaint humanity.
And let it be noted that not the least successful of these portraits is that of
Cousin Feenix, an aristocrat. Cousin Feenix is weak at the knees, and anything
but strong intellectually; doubtless he implies a good-humoured joke at the
expense of an "effete" order; but, as we come to know the man, we
like and even respect him. Morally there is much to be said for Cousin Feenix;
he has fine sensibilities; his talk is always entertaining, and often profitable.
In the last chapter but one he plays a delightful part; indeed, his appearance
and behaviour make this chapter one of the pleasantest of all. The absurd
charge against Dickens that he cannot represent a "gentleman" is
refuted by several instances, and certainly Cousin Feenix must be numbered
amongst them.
Major Bagstock is, of course, not meant to be a
gentleman; he makes very good fun, however, and serves richly as a foil to
"our friend Dombey." Pungent is the irony in this juxtaposition of
the overweening City merchant and the military vulgarian of social pretensions;
as we watch them go arm in arm, we feel Mr. Dombey more living than on most
occasions. Miss Fox and Mrs. Chick are well contrasted, a contrast which helps
us to sympathize with the angular maiden lady. Better still are Mrs. Pipchin
and Miss Nipper. Were Florence Dombey anything like so well depicted as her
maid, the story, as a story, would greatly profit by it; but Florence is merely
a good girl of gentle breeding, as difficult a subject as any novelist can
undertake, and very rarely (one thinks first of Mrs. Gaskell) done with
complete success; whereas Susan Nipper is a young person after Dickens's heart,
in her habits of speech suggesting a shrill feminine echo of Sam Weller, and
morally a pattern of all virtues, all the proprieties. She does not belong to
the gallery of shrewish women; we feel her capable of outgrowing her
"snappish" tendencies, and of becoming an excellent wife (guardian,
one might say) to the egregious Mr. Toots.
Toots himself is a figure of farce, and at
moments we see just a little too much of him. To be sure, the farce is good, so
is that in which Jack Bunsby plays his part; better was never written than the
scene exhibiting the matrimonial triumph of Mrs. MacStinger. Dickens throws
himself into drollery such as this with extraordinary enjoyment. Read the
passage (Chap. LX) beginning "While the Reverend Melchisedech was offering
up extemporary orisons," and when laughter allows you to examine it
critically, admire the dramatic quality of that hurried dialogue between Jack
and the Captain. Farce, but of the finest, not a word too much, and every word
telling of hilarity. And if you would see how Dickens's broadest mirth can melt
into kindliest feeling, read on to the end of the chapter, through the little
scene between Mrs. Toots and Florence, with the epilogue spoken by Mrs. Toots's
husband this was the kind of thing that made Dickens as much loved as admired;
I cannot class myself with those who nowadays smile at it aloof.
Captain Cuttle has a larger humanity than his
roaring friend, he is the creation of humour. That the Captain suffered dire
things at the hands of Mrs. MacStinger is as credible as it is amusing, but he
stood in no danger of Bunsby's fate; at times he can play his part in a
situation purely farcical, but the man himself moves on a higher level. He is
one of the most familiar to us among Dickens's characters, an instance of the
novelist's supreme power, which (I like to repeat) proves itself in the bodying
forth of a human personality henceforth accepted by the world. His sentences
have become proverbs; the mention of his name brings before the mind's eye an
image of flesh and blood -- rude, tending to the grotesque, but altogether
lovable. Captain Cuttle belongs to the world of Uncle Toby, with, to be sure, a
subordinate position. Analyse him as you will, make the most of those
extravagances which pedants of to-day cannot away with, and in the end you will
still be face to face with something vital -- explicable only as the product of
genius.
Consider the Captain as he appears in Chapter
XLIX, one of the most delightful in English fiction. Florence Dombey, fleeing
from her desecrated home, has taken refuge in the queer old house with the sign
of the Midshipman, is living there under the guardianship of the tough and
tender old seaman. With what infinite charm of fancy is this picture set before
us! With what command of happy illusion are we reconciled to so many
improbabilities! "A wandering princess and a good monster in a story-book
might have sat by the fireside and talked as Captain Cuttle and poor Florence
talked." Precisely, our novel is become a sort of fairy-tale; and for all
that, we suffer no shock, no canon of arts is outraged. Dickens's art is
consistent with itself. And arts mean illusion, in different degrees, of
various kinds.
"In simple innocence of the world's ways
and the world's perplexities and dangers, they were nearly on a level." It
is in this sacred simplicity that Dickens above all delights; this it is that
makes him akin to Oliver Goldsmith and to the better part of Sterne. Florence
and the Captain, as they sit together by the fireside, are enveloped in the
atmosphere of homeliness, which, to our English thought, favours every form of
moral good. Oddity and homeliness -- these are the notes of Dickens at his
best. For another instance of their combination, turn to the scene of Mr.
Toodle in the bosom of his family in Chapter XXXVIII. Many such scenes of
humble domesticity occur in Dickens, and once or twice it happens that his
sympathy with the poor a little outweighs his judgment; but his Toodle
household is safe from any such censure. One of its members, Rob the Grinder,
is nothing more or less than a young scamp; probably born so, and with all his
scampish propensities developed by a bringing up at the hands of the worst kind
of "charity." Rob's backslidings and repentings, his periodical
affection for the good mother who weeps over him, his proclivity to lying, his
greediness and thievishness make, from one point of view, the most truthful
picture of London boyhood to be found in Dickens's pages. One thinks of
crossing-sweeper Jo and regrets that lost opportunity; but for the allurements
of melodrama, Jo and Rob might have made such an admirable pair of young
rascals, each after his kind.
The "realist" in fiction says to
himself: Given such and such circumstances, what would be the probable issue? Dickens,
on the other hand, was wont to ask: What would be the pleasant issue? Several
times during the composition of this novel he consulted with Forster as to the
feeling of his readers about some proposed incident or episode; not that he
feared, in any ignoble sense, to offend his public, but because his view of art
involved compliance with ideals of ordinary simple folk. He held that view as a
matter of course. Quite recently it has been put forth with prophetic fervour
by Tolstoy, who cites Dickens among the few novelists whose work will bear this
test. An instinctive sympathy with the moral (and therefore the artistic)
prejudices of the everyday man guided Dickens throughout his career, teaching
him when, and how far, he might strike at things he thought evil, yet never
defeat his prime purpose of sending forth fiction acceptable to the multitude. Himself,
in all but his genius, a representative Englishman of the middle-class, he was
able to achieve this task with unfailing zeal and with entire sincerity.
The aim of fiction, as Dickens saw it, was to
amuse, to elevate, and finally to calm. When his evil-doers have been got rid
of, he delights in apportioning quiet happiness to every character in the novel
beloved by him and his readers. Forster tells a story about the close of Dombey
and Son, which amusingly illustrates this desire to omit no sympathetic
actor from the final benediction. "I suddenly remember," wrote
Dickens to his friend, who was correcting the proofs for him, "that I have
forgotten Diogenes. Will you put him in the last little chapter?" Diogenes
was but a dog, yet Dickens could not bear to close the book without mention of
him, and accordingly we read that when the white-haired Mr. Dombey and his
wedded daughter, with her children, walk on the sea beach, "an old dog is
generally in their company. A light touch to the completed picture, but
thoroughly characteristic of the artist's spirit and method.
Barnaby Rudge gave its author more trouble than any other of
his books. We first hear mention of the name in 1837, when, with Pickwick
still unfinished, with Oliver Twist begun ("not even by a
week," says Forster, "in advance of the printer with either"),
he chose the subject and title of a third story, which he agreed to write
within a very short time for Mr. Bentley. Dickens was at this time overworking
himself, excited by extraordinary success; at five-and-twenty, in the spring of
his genius, nothing seemed impossible to him, and he would probably have made
every effort to fulfil his engagement, but for the fact that it had been shaped
on unfair terms, the thought of which first worried and later exasperated him. By
way of compromise, he presently undertook to finish Barnaby by November
of 1838, and thereupon burdened himself anew with the compiling of a Life of
Grimaldi. In this same year, 1837, falls the agreement with Messrs. Chapman
& Hall to write a novel as successor to Pickwick (published by that
firm), in consequence whereof Nicholas Nickleby was begun early in 1838
and finished towards the end of the following year. How, under these
circumstances, could Mr. Bentley's novel get itself written? It must be
remembered that, in addition to his original work, Dickens was editing
Bentley's Miscellany (in which Oliver Twist appeared). "The
conduct of three different stories at the same time" -- he wrote to his
impatient publisher -- "and the production of a large portion of each,
every month, would have been beyond Scott himself." A quarrel ensued, and
one marvels how the novelist at this time managed to do any work at all. It was
at length arranged that Barnaby should wait until the completion of Oliver.
In spite of all this, probably no man in
England was enjoying his life more keenly than Dickens. It does one good to
read the chapters of Forster which present these early years, so full are they
of joyous energy. Dickens's temperament secured him against the danger of
"forgoing all custom of exercise; he could not exist without a good deal
of activity in the open air, and his fortunate circumstances allowed him to
take it in pleasant ways. He rode a great deal, and his notes inviting Forster
to join him at such times are often mere shouts of hilarity never was grown man
so uproariously boyish. He ran across to the Continent; he combated fits of
dullness by speeding off to Broadstairs. His marriage seemed to give promise of
happiness, and already he was able to keep a pair of ponies for his wife's use.
There is nothing, it seems to me, more wonderful in the history of literature
than Dickens's achievements from 1837 to 1841, when we consider his age, his
previous experiences, and the sudden bursting upon him of an unexampled
popularity. There needed the rarest combination of genius and character to
guide him through this perilous time. He did not escape unscathed; good as the
early novels are, we know they might have been made better; we see many a trace
of hurry, of fatigue. But Dickens had an extraordinary power of resisting the
Common effects of applause and flattery; the artist in him prevailed against his
own weaknesses and the world's assault. Only after a lifetime of glory did his
manly nature seem to have suffered Some decline. Few men can have been so
tested, with result, on the whole, so honourable.
In January, 1839, when, by the terms of his
compromise, it behoved him to beg in the writing of Barnaby Rudge,
Dickens felt himself unequal to the task. He was profoundly discouraged by the
terms of the agreement entered into with Mr. Bentley at a time when he did not
know the value of his future work. He writes to Forster to announce his
intention of liberating himself from the unjust bargain. "The immense
profits which Oliver has realized to its publisher, and is still
realizing; the paltry, wretched, miserable sum it brought to me (not equal to
what is every day paid for a novel that sells fifteen hundred copies at most);
the recollection of this, and the consciousness that I have still the slavery
and drudgery of another work on the same journeyman terms; the consciousness
that my books are enriching everybody connected with them but myself, and that
I, with such a popularity as I have acquired, am struggling in old toils, and
wasting my energies in the very height and freshness of my fame, and the best
part of my life, to fill the pockets of others, while for those who are nearest
and dearest to me I can realize little more than a genteel subsistence all this
puts me out of heart and Spirits. . . . There -- for six months -- Barnaby
Rudge stands over. From every point of view Dickens was right. We may be
allowed to wince at the phrase "genteel subsistence," especially when
we remember the social tyranny which it indicates -- a tyranny strong for harm
in the great writer's career; but his passionate plea is unanswerable by anyone
who can distinguish between a product of the -human intellect and a bale of
merchandise. Mr. Bentley had acted simply as a man of business; we may grant
his right of complaint; but those who deal in men's brains must be prepared for
the unexpected in the current of their commerce. Duty to his readers, no less
than to himself, obliged Dickens to rest.
He ceased to edit the Miscellany. In the
course of 1840 the agreement concerning Barnaby was cancelled and
Dickens purchased back from Mr. Bentley the copyright of Oliver Twist,
so that he now had only Messrs. Chapman & Hall for publishers. Nickleby,
meanwhile, had run its course, and nothing seemed to prevent free work on the
new novel. But it moved very slowly, amid many interruptions by external
circumstance, and, after all, another book was to be written and published
before Barnaby. Dickens hankered after a new periodical; he had made a
suggestion to Chapman & Hall, which resulted in the establishment of Master
Humphrey's Clock, and for these pages (before his final withdrawing from
the agreement with Bentley) he wrote The Old Curiosity Shop. In January,
1841, Barnaby is at last resumed, as the new novel for the Clock. We
learn from Dickens's letters how hard he worked upon this story, which,
inasmuch as it dealt with bygone days, was an unfamiliar kind of writing to
him. The period, to be sure, was near enough to his own time to spare him the
necessity of picturing strange social conditions, but he must have read very
carefully the history of the Gordon Riots, and the book altogether demanded
more thought than had been needful for its predecessors. The good results of
this slow preparation are at once observable; Barnaby Rudge is Dickens's
best constructed story; and, in one sense of the word, the best written. It has
faults, of course; the connection between the "plot" and the public
events which occupy a large part of the book is not so close as it might be; we
feel something of disproportion, and now and then, are in danger of forgetting
the point from which we started. But, considering Dickens's habit in this
matter, there is reason to be more than satisfied with a story which, at least,
is quite coherent, never violently improbable, and fairly progressive to the
close. In an address to his readers, published after the completion of Barnaby,
the author complained that he had found the practice of writing in weekly parts
"most anxious, perplexing, and difficult." He gave in full his
objections to this mode of publication and announced that he would revert to
the old monthly issue for his succeeding novel. The truth is that his
objections apply to both methods alike; to print parts of a work of fiction
concurrently with the writing can never be anything but unsatisfactory, and
many of the shortcomings of Dickens's novels are directly due to this system. But
in the present instance it is probable that the book profited by the necessity
of anxious planning and of difficult compression. Testimony to the
attractiveness of the intrigue is afforded by the well-known incident which led
to a correspondence between Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe. Midway in the serial
publication, Poe exercised his acumen in solving the mystery of the Chigwell
murder, and forecasting the general course of events to the end of the
narrative, with the result that the novelist was moved to enquire whether Mr.
Poe had dealings with the Devil. Of course, Dickens's characteristics as a
master of fiction have nothing whatever to do with the special form of
ingenuity which constructs "plots"; it was his misfortune that he could
never outgrow that primitive view of the novel, and that, by endeavouring to
fit his original work into an old-fashioned frame, he merely encumbered
himself, and showed at a disadvantage in comparison with writers far below him.
Turning his thoughts to a historical novel,
Dickens could not but fall, in some degree, under the influence of Scott. This
is perceptible in the style of the book, which differs considerably from that
of its predecessors; also in the scenes and dialogues where Dickens had least
scope for his own habits of mind, as where Sir John Chester is to the front, or
the Haredales, or Lord George and Gashford. In his treatment of the riotous
crowd (which is very successful) he may well have had in mind "The Heart
of Midlothian," and perhaps it is not straining comparison to suggest that
points of Barnaby's guise and demeanour reflect a memory of Madge Wildfire. The
prose of the book is good, yet, for the most part, not characteristic of its
writer; it is unaffected and forcible, lending itself well to rapid narrative. Read,
however, the first half of Chapter XVI, a sketch of London at the date of the
story, and contrast its good, plain, unimaginative English with any page of
Dickens at his best -- here he is not moving freely; the sprightly fancies do
not come to him as they are wont. The same may be said of Chapter LXXVII; yet
that description of the dawning of the condemned rioters' last day is excellent
work; it would be admirable as the work of anyone less than Dickens.
What one misses most of all, perhaps, in Barnaby
Rudge is a note of high spirits. It is altogether a less vivacious book
(Sim Tappertit notwithstanding) than the others of Dickens's early time. One
need not seek an explanation in stress of work; the subject sufficiently
accounts for a subdued tone. Dennis the Hangman does not provoke hilarity, and
after reading the case of Mary Jones (recited at length in the Preface to Barnaby),
one's only wonder is that an author who wrote with that story in his mind could
still preserve so much of his native humour. Judging by my own experience,
there must be many a reader to whom the thought of that infamous horror brings
gloom unutterable; after such an introduction, one is not ready for explosions
of mirth. Religious bigotry, too, is a sufficiently grave subject. We know the
merrily contemptuous manner in which Dickens is wont to deal with
"religious" absurdities and insincerities: Stiggins and Chadband, and
many another of that stamp, remain for our delight. In Barnaby he touches
the same subject more seriously, and, when one thinks of it, with remarkable
impartiality. He leans to neither side; his characters illustrate at once the
virtues of honest faith, the evils of honest intolerance, and the vices of
hypocrisy. Dickens was guided in such matters by a very liberal spirit and by
sound common-sense; at no point of his intellectual life does he show to more
advantage. It would be impossible to discover in this book a phrase or a word
indicating undue vehemence of judgment. And in this connection it may be noted
that several of the characters exhibit a genuine manliness, such as Dickens did
not often succeed in depicting. Mr. Haredale's gravity is well expressed; young
Chester commands respect; both are personages alien to the author's familiar
world. Better still, because more thoroughly understood, are Joe Willet and
Gabriel Varden. I am not sure that Joe does not stand alone among Dickens's
creations as an example of the handsome, honest, manly young fellow in that
rank of life; he is perfectly credible, and he Wins upon us by no singularity,
but by mere force of his human qualities. Such a character is by no means
easily presented it calls for much more skill in the handling than those
examples of eccentric or simpleton goodness which occur so frequently in the
other novels, and which sometimes quite fail of their effect. Joe Willet is
convincing from first to last. Nothing could be more natural than his courtship
of Dolly and his bearing under her coquettish ill-usage; we feel a sympathetic
sinking of the heart as he takes leave of her to go to the wars. Varden, too,
is as honest and manly, withal as softhearted, as one could desire; the best
type of his class completely realized. He does not incite us to laughter; we
regard him with a friendly smile, and listen with quiet pleasure to his genial,
common-sense talk. With his exasperating wife he is all good-nature and
patience, yet he never loses our respect, and we are not at all surprised when,
at the right moment, he vigorously asserts himself. Here Dickens is working
upon lines of ordinary experience; for the moment, he sees life in simpler
colours than of wont. The result is satisfactory from the artistic point of
view. Other creations, more characteristic of the master, claim our preference;
but we are in no danger of forgetting these studies in a softer tone.
Barnaby himself, the so-called idiot, interests
us very little. For some reason not easy to discover (perhaps it was merely his
love of the grotesque in humanity), Dickens had a leaning to mad people, whom
he liked to make amusing. In each case the insanity is merely conventional
(unless we except Miss Flite, in Bleak House, who is crazy with good
reason) and, of course, no attempt is made to suggest a serious study of mental
disease. In taking a person of disordered mind for the hero of his novel
Dickens can have had no motive except a desire for picturesqueness. Barnaby is
the victim of his father's crime, but this moral point does not suffice to
justify the choice of subject. At one moment Dickens purposed the introduction
of another madman; it came into his mind to show the mob of rioters directed by
a seemingly acute and vigorous leader, who in the end should prove to have
escaped from Bedlam; fortunately, his better judgment overrode this idea. With
regard to the widow's son, it is a misuse of language to call him an
"idiot." Idiocy means an imperfection of mind which degrades and
possibly brutalizes; but Barnaby's weak point is a morbid development of the
imagination at the expense of the reasoning powers; he is simply insane, and
subject to poetic hallucinations. Moreover, we find him aware of his own
condition, and glorying in it. "Ha! ha! Why, how much better to be silly
than as wise as you! You don't see shadowy people there, like those that live
in sleep -- not you. Nor eyes in the knotted panes of glass, nor swift ghosts
when it blows hard, nor do you hear voices in the air, nor see men stalking in
the sky -- not you! I lead a merrier life than you, with all your cleverness. You're
the dull men, we're the bright ones. Ha, ha!" Whereupon Mr. Willet sagely
remarks: "He wants imagination, that's what he wants. I've tried to
instill it into him, many and many's the time, but he ain't made for it, that's
the fact." We should enjoy this comment of mine host of the Maypole much
more if Barnaby had been in his wits. Lunacy may be the subject of art,
provided it appear as a catastrophe; we follow Ophelia or Lear with unabated
interest when they walk in the dark places of the shattered mind, but that is
because we have known them as responsible human beings. A born lunatic has no
place as a leading character in a work of fiction -- least of all, when we see
that his characteristics are merely fanciful caprices of the author.
The raven deserved a better companion. Dickens
had as keen an eye for points of character in bird and beast as in human
beings; who but he could have written that chapter of The Uncommercial
Traveller entitled "Shy Neighbourhoods," which treats of the moral
effect upon fowls of life in a London slum? "I know a low fellow,
originally of a good family from Dorking, who takes his whole establishment of
wives, in single file, in at the door of the Jug Department of a disorderly
tavern near the Haymarket, manoeuvres them among the company's legs, emerges
with them at the Bottle Entrance, and so passes his life; seldom, in the
season, going to bed before two in the morning." Excellent as is the
picture of Grip in the novel, the Preface contains something still better,
Dickens's reminiscences of the two ravens he had himself possessed; but best of
all is the long letter he wrote to Maclise (quoted by Forster) describing in
detail the last hours of the bird from which Grip was studied. "Towards
eleven o'clock he was so much worse that it was found necessary to muffle the
stable knocker. At half-past, or thereabouts, he was heard talking to himself
about the horse and Topping's family, and to add some incoherent expressions
which are supposed to have been either a forboding of his approaching
dissolution, or some wishes relative to the disposal of his little property,
consisting chiefly of halfpence which he had buried in different parts of the
garden. On the clock striking twelve, he appeared slightly agitated, but he
soon recovered, walked twice or thrice along the coach-house, stopped to bark,
staggered, exclaimed "Halloa, old girl!" (his favourite expression)
and died." The whole letter is an instance of Dickens's profusion in
literary productiveness; to amuse himself and his friends he poured forth pages
of inimitable merriment, often no less worthy of being given to the world than
what he wrote for publication.
Picturesque in a much truer sense than Barnaby
are the two prominent figures in the No-Popery mob: Hugh and Dennis. Hugh, the
neglected bastard of Sir John Chester, child of an outcast who perished on the
gallows, is a very strong piece of work. From the moment when he lazily
appeared in answer to Willet's summons, and at a bound seats himself upon the
horse he is to lead to stable, this romantic ruffian has a genuine interest for
us; he is well conceived, well depicted, and there is moving tragedy in his
fate. Dennis, as vile a creature as can be found in fiction, lends happy relief
to the other's fine traits of savagery. With the hangman we come near to
Hogarth; indeed, the comparison between Hogarth and Dickens must rest (in so
far as it is justified at all) upon the grimmer features of this story; with
one or two exceptions (such as the figure of Noah Claypole), it is elsewhere a
contrast, rather than a similarity, of which we are aware in considering the
two artists. But in Dennis we have much of the Hogarthian spirit -- an
uncompromising emphasis of ugliness, a sternly sardonic humour. The subject
admits of no twinkling facetiousness; we are shown the humorous side of horror,
but it is horror still. "'Did you ever, Muster Gashford,' whispered
Dennis, with a horrible kind of admiration, such as that with which a cannibal
might regard his intimate friend, when hungry -- 'did you ever' -- and here he
drew still closer to his ear, and fenced his mouth with both his open hands --
'see such a throat as his? Do but cast your eye upon it. There's a neck for
stretching, Muster Gashford!'" The joke is professional and has the due
effect upon us. Since his Fagin in the condemned cell, Dickens had much
matured; greatly better work is the scene of the hangman waiting to be hanged;
it could not easily be surpassed for hideous force and truth. To the horrible,
in the proper sense of the word, Dickens never after this returned. His next
book contained the murderer, Jonas Chuzzlewit, but that picture, very powerful
of its kind, is in another tone; odd as the epithet may sound, it is genial
work; we see everything through the true Dickens atmosphere, which softens the
impression by those very means that serve to heighten it. Study the execution
chapter of Barnaby, and note the absence of familiar touches, those
side-glances at the reader which keep one in heart: all is straightforward
reporting, vigorous, pitiless, no room for a superfluous word. Admirable work,
but in darker mood than suits the author's genius.
It is a relief to turn to the Maypole. Given an
old inn amid country lanes, and Dickens is at his happiest. He delights in the
picturesque exterior, in the comfort, the old-time habits, the scents and
odours to be met on crossing the threshold. Pure joy to him, also, is the
immeasurable stupidity and monumental self-esteem of such a landlord as old
Willet. This engaging blockhead belongs to the school of Dogberry and Verges;
he is almost worthy -- nay, I think altogether worthy -- of a place beside
them. Such a portrait depends for its vitality upon observation which is
humorously sympathetic. Anyone can insist upon Willet's ludicrous features and
write him down an ass; the result is something forgotten as soon as seen. But
Dickens gets to the very core of the man's absurd being; he loves him, as a
collector loves a fine specimen; he chuckles in anticipation of the creature's
next look or word. For perfect finish, for consistency and credibility, the
portrait is insurpassable. It has significance, too, beyond the amusement at
once excited; this fat somnolence, this engrained dullness, this stagnant
habitude fermenting in foolish conceit, represents one natural outcome of an
order of things bound by prescription, lulled by over-security. The day will
come when meanings such as this, in which Dickens abounds, will be far more
obvious and important than they seem to us now.
One need not say much of Dolly Varden, who
stands for an example of feminine charm less attractive nowadays than to the
early Victorians. We are led to suppose that the better of her parents has the
larger part in her composition, and that as wife and mother she quite puts
aside the sweet defects of her girlhood. It may be so; on the other hand, one
easily conceives of Mrs. Varden in her early years as a "charmer"
very much like Dolly, and we know what Mrs. Varden became. Often as Dickens has
drawn for us the insupportable matron, he never did so more faithfully and more
impressively than in this instance. It pleases him to convert the wife of the
cheery locksmith, lest we should take leave of Gabriel in too despondent a
mood; it is a case of compliance with the desire for a happy ending. Miggs,
meanwhile, is treated unsparingly; for here there can be neither assuagement of
acrid characteristics, nor solace in change of circumstance. Yet Miggs, all
things considered, was less to blame than her mistress, and seemed a more
hopeful subject for conversion. Decidedly an early-Victorian figure, poor Miss
Miggs. After half a century she is less obviously amusing; the jest strikes us
as primitive. But she has her place with Miss Squeers and Sophy Wackles in
Dickens's long gallery of notably unattractive women.
To the popular mind, The Old Curiosity Shop
is Dickens's most attractive book. In this story he arrived at a complete
expression of his genius, made his full appeal to the sympathies of that
intermediate class whose favour secures an author's reputation. A long list
could be made of noteworthy contemporaries who followed the fortunes of Little
Nell with passionate interest: Jeffrey was dissolved in tears; Macready pleaded
for the child's life as for that of a loved relative; Thomas Hood gave his
heart to the sad little heroine, and wrote tenderly about her before her
history was complete but it was among the multitude that this book found its
enduring welcome, the mass of honest readers who admire they know not why and
love for the same reason, Dickens the humorist had given abundant proof of his
quality; as melodramatist he was known and appreciated; the exhibition of his
power in pathos -- pathos in the rich popular sense -- established him for his
lifetime, and who shall say how much longer, as England's chosen novelist.
Dickens's first conception of Little Nell was
as the heroine of a short story to be published in his weekly magazine, Master
Humphrey's Clock, all the contents of which were from the editor's own
hand. The idea on which Dickens founded this periodical was not very happy,
though sufficiently in his true vein to make it seem hopeful. He imagined a
solitary old man living in an old house in an old suburb of London and
cherishing above all things an old clock, which is associated with the
recollections of his whole life. Presently, the recluse, known as Master
Humphrey, makes friends with two or three other eccentrics, who meet in his
house late at night for converse and story-telling, or rather reading, the
members of this little circle being supposed to pen narratives which lie stored
until wanted within the case of the old clock. Of course Dickens had in mind
the eighteenth-century essayists, and their more or less ingenious methods of
giving coherence to a literary miscellany; Master Humphrey was to deliver
himself meditatively on all manner of subjects, and, "From his clock-side
in the chimney-corner," do what, at a much later time, Dickens did so very
much better in his Uncommercial Traveller. For this kind of thing the
author was not yet ripe; or perhaps one should say that, among the Sketches
by Boz, he had already given the best in the way of fanciful essay-writing
of which he was as yet capable. The clock-case stories aim at being picturesque
glimpses of old English life; however unwillingly, one must admit that they are
commonplace they remind us, however, that Dickens was at this time preparing
for Barnaby Rudge, where he showed considerable imaginative power in
dealing with the past. When it became evident that the Clock was failing
to attract readers, the scheme was extended by the introduction of certain old
friends of the public, to wit: Mr. Pickwick and the two Wellers, with a
youthful scion of the Weller house born to Sam since the world had lost sight
of him. Tony and his son discourse in their familiar strain, and their talk is
perhaps as good as ever, but the subordinate club which they are supposed to
form had no life in it, could not serve the purposes of a magazine with
declining circulation. The editor had miscalculated his resources in the way of
casual writing and perforce abandoned his original design.
Master Humphrey's Clock was saved only by the beginning of
a long serial which promised Dickens at his best, and which soon occupied, from
week to week, the whole of the magazine. Thus, through many months of 1840 and
'41, appeared The Old Curiosity Shop, wherein (accidentally as usual)
the author expanded his original idea of a child placed amid grotesque
surroundings and subjected to sad trials. Nothing he had yet written had taken
such hold upon Dickens's mind and emotions. To-day, from our critical point of
view, we find it difficult to take seriously the vehement phrases in which he
wrote to friends about his suffering during the composition. The tragical end
(suggested by Forster) cost him nothing less than anguish; he declares himself
"nearly dead with work and grief for the loss of my child." He sat up
till four in the morning to write the last pages -- always an unusual mode of
work with him, and after this never repeated. It was an emotional age, and the
men whose influence upon it was most perceptible wrought in a spirit of high
enthusiasm. Carlyle, in these earlier days, thought but slightingly of Boz,
yet his prophetic glow and wrath corresponded, on another plane, to the
effusive tenderness wherewith Dickens answered the people's unconscious desire.
Jeffrey wept over Little Nell; his successors
of to-day criticize the pages of deliberate pathos in which her death is
narrated and find them intolerably mawkish. To be just we have to remember
under what circumstances Dickens wrote. In 1840, Little Nell struck readers not
only as pathetic, but as fresh and original, which indeed she was;
over-familiarity robs us of the delight which was inspired by a new vein of
fiction, discovered and worked by a master spirit. It was Dickens who taught
his countrymen the imaginative value of humble domestic life; and in The Old
Curiosity Shop he succeeds to perfection in conveying his idea of
domesticity. The strange figures grouped about that of the child serve to
emphasize her gentle homeliness of spirit. From the beginning of the story,
when she is seen making order and comfort in the gloomy old house, to the end
of her wanderings in the cottage by the still churchyard, her one desire is for
the peace and security of home. This sentiment appeals very strongly to the
English mood, and no one before Dickens had given it such emphatic utterance. We
find it in Goldsmith; it has a great part in the charm of Gray's Elegy;
Wordsworth had turned it to purpose in his own grave way; and Tennyson was
striking the same note. Remember, too, that Dickens spoke with a new voice on
behalf of children at a time when children were commonly neglected, and often
horribly ill-used, he found a way of calling attention to their unregarded
lives. Oliver Twist had already played his part; Little Nell, like Oliver,
straying among perils, moved a more tender interest. Imitators and successors
have worn out the subject; it is not easy nowadays to reproduce with any
impressiveness that sentiment of the hearth, still less to animate a picture of
suffering childhood; but for his own generation Dickens was perfectly
successful with these as with other themes since grown wearisome. He pursued,
with clear vision, an artistic motive and obtained precisely the effect at
which he aimed.
The sentiment of Little Nell is that of The
May Queen. Towards the middle of our century, poets, no less than
inarticulate men, found pleasure in a pathos which now seems to us excessive. It
was pursued to the utmost end of tearfulness; we see the May Queen reprieved
from death that we may weep anew, and conventional piety lends all its aid to
the emphasizing of a most approved emotion. Tennyson, of course, redeems his
subject by the exquisite quality of his verse; Dickens is justified by the
profound sincerity of his feeling and by his true sense of the picturesque. One
would like to find a place, in literary criticism, for a pathos below the
universal, a pathos which is relatively true; under such a head would fall
these pictures of gentle and fading childhood. To dismiss with a scoff pages
which came from the hearts of Tennyson and of Dickens is something worse than
dullness. This pathos was true for them and for their day; it had nothing of
affectation, nothing of conscious extravagance; and if the ends of art were
imperfectly served, none the less did such work tend to civilization.
With art which is undeniable, Dickens has set
his little heroine amid a world so ancient that in great part it is mouldering.
The shop of Nell's grandfather, where all manner of crazy and curious
antiquities are heaped together in gloom and dust, symbolizes that old order,
social and political, which is at once dear to the novelist and the object of
his destructive satire. In every chapter of this story we catch some delightful
glimpse of things old and picturesque; the details of ruin are tenderly dwelt
upon, as for example in the description of a church where the child rested:
"Everything told of long use and quiet, slow decay; the very bell-rope in
the porch was frayed into a fringe, and hoary with old age" (Chap. XVII).
From one point of view, it might be the work of an utterly conservative mind,
ever looking backwards, lamenting every change, and dreading the new time that
advanced; herein, as in almost everything, Dickens represented the English
people, conservative at the root of their progressive principles. The ideal set
before us is a life of the simplest virtues, favoured by conditions of rustic
peace. Great towns, the haunt of every disorder, contrast with secluded
hamlets, where gentleness and piety possess the heart. The child heroine, ever
trying to save her companion from his fatal vice by drawing him further and
further away into rural solitude, becomes the embodied spirit of the book; she
is sacrificed to greed and knavery and toil even as the ancient virtues of
homely life perish under a rule of heartless commercialism.
This love of antiquity and stability, always
manifest in Dickens, yet permits him the freest criticism of evils which result
from undisturbed prescription. One outcome of a society wrapped in ancient
peace was that dignified and powerful lady, Miss Monflathers, to whom were
entrusted the minds of the growing generation, that they might be shaped and
polished on the approved pattern (Chap. XXXI). Miss Monflathers is the
comfortable person who clearly perceives the duty of her social inferiors and
proclaims it with peculiar unction. She would have all impolite noses kept
vigorously to the grindstone; in their release is peril to Church and State. "Don't
you know," she asks of Nell, "that the harder you are at work the
happier you are?" It is the axiom of a condescending aristocracy,
Dickens's abhorrence. "You might have the proud consciousness of assisting
to the extent of your infant powers the manufacturers of your country; of
improving your mind by the constant contemplation of the steam-engine; and of
earning a comfortable and independent subsistence of from two and ninepence to
three shillings per week." Whilst the instructive lady thus delivers
herself, one of her pupils, the unconsidered child of poor parents, chances to show
a trifling kindness to Little Nell, and draws upon herself a severe rebuke. "Is
it not a remarkable thing, Miss Edwards, that you have an attachment to the
lower classes which always draws you to their sides . . . that all I say and do
will not wean you from propensities which your original station in life have
unhappily rendered habitual to you, you extremely vulgar-minded girl." The
strictly logical reformer would refuse to see any beauty in an order of things
which had this philosophy for one of its natural offshoots. Dickens, an
Englishman and an artist, clings to the ancient with inherited tenacity, yet
assails its abuses with the keenest gusto. One writer alone has surpassed him
in the expression of this habit of mind, and that is Ruskin. Despite differences
of character and culture, Dickens and Ruskin have the same sentiment towards
modern life, and the noblest eloquence of the philosopher, when he turns fondly
backward, or prophesies against the passing day, is a re-utterance in perfect
phrase of the message delivered by the novelist.
The preceding books had suggested their
author's pleasure in rural life; in The Old Curiosity Shop this theme is
predominant. Here we have more of the country than in any other of Dickens's
novels. With hardly any effort at description, he sets us amid fields and lanes
and cottages, and produces by the simplest means that atmosphere of rusticity
which has such an unfailing charm for the English reader. Dickens never talks
about "nature"; there is a vast difference between his love of the
country and the same disposition as expressed by Wordsworth he nowhere suggests
a thought above the reach of the average man. This rural strain is found
through all the healthy periods of English literature; it connects Dickens with
Chaucer, who had just the same irreflective joy in escaping from town and
roaming the green meadows. When the weary Nell has climbed the tower of the
church which is to be her final resting-place, she is enraptured with the scene
around her. "The freshness of the fields and woods stretching away on
every side and meeting the bright blue sky; the cattle grazing in the
pasturage; the smoke that, coming from among the trees, seemed to rise upwards
from the green earth." Nothing could be homelier, in thought or wording,
but a light is shed upon the page, and the reader loses himself in a happy
dream. To strike such a note amid the roar of triumphant mechanism was to
deserve well of one's time. The sympathy it excited in the masses of his
countrymen enhanced Dickens's popularity, and will always have a great part in
keeping his work alive.
To throw into relief the ideal of peace and
virtue, a number of sordid figures play their villainous or eccentric pranks
around the innocent child. For the most part, they are creatures bred of social
slime; their home is the grimy centre of London; set amid country surroundings,
they would seem to pollute the landscape. Mr. Quilp of Tower Hill and Mr. Brass
of Bevis Marks belong to a complex social order; their squalid self-interest
has overcome all scruples; their vile persons and habits represent the spirit
of inhuman greed against which the author is throughout pointing his lesson. Mr.
Swiveller, when first we know him, is on the way to become just such another; a
cheery selfishness promises its natural development; but Dick's sense of humour
and the favour of circumstance combine to arrest his progress. One used to hear
lively discussions as to the possibility of such a creature as Quilp; most
people nowadays regard him and his kin as mere sport of Dickens's imagination. For
my own part, I am disposed to accept the sprightly Daniel as a scarcely
exaggerated portrait; the holes and corners of our civilization send forth many
a monster whose peculiarities are quite incredible to the ordinary inobservant
person. Dickens revels in such extravagances of human nature. His instinct for
the picturesque enables him to group his grotesque against the background which
will show them most effectively, and in all his work there is nothing more
sordidly delightful than the picture of Quilp at home, nothing more squalidly
grim than Quilp's death in the foggy Thames. Sampson Brass finds easier
acceptance; he and his sister are admirably finished characters, as works of
art the best figures in the story. Remark Mr. Brass's habit of soliloquizing on
the virtues of Quilp in Quilp's presence, a notable touch of humour. Between
him and Sally there is fine contrast in similarity; the sister's rascally
courage when Sampson shows himself a grovelling poltroon is excellent truth. Their
little slave, Dick Swiveller's Marchioness, must take place with Dickens's best
bits of humorous tenderness; consider the skill with which he has vitalized
this scrubby little person, of whom we catch only one or two brief glimpses,
but who remains unforgettable. She is greatly more real to us than the heroine
of the book. For Dickens's imagination always works most successfully upon
uncouth material his art is primarily concerned with the underbred. The uncouth
and the underbred play so vast a part in human life that to neglect them is to
falsify; but only the rarest genius can turn them to worthy use, exhibiting
their manifold significance in the light of mirth or of compassion.
The Nubbles' household is meant to illustrate
one of Dickens's leading principles, that the decent poor are the salt of the
earth in this case, virtue is found even among crowded alleys, with only the
teachings of Little Bethel and the solace of Astley's to support its courage. There
is no half-heartedness in his championship of the humble hero as represented by
Kit. Having "nothing genteel or polite about him," Kit, when unhappy,
did not imitate "your finely-strung people," who "must have
everybody else unhappy likewise," but "turned his thoughts to the
vulgar expedient" of doing all the kindness in his power (Chap. XIV). Mrs.
Nubbles and her children shine in ideal domesticity; they enjoy what poor
wandering Nell desires in vain; evil-doers may disturb their peace for a
season, but simple virtue is, of course, triumphant, and at the end we are
rejoiced by the prospect of a second Nubbles household which shall propagate
sterling qualities through the years to come. "If ever household
affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor. The
ties which bind the wealthy and the proud to home may be forged 6n earth; but
those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the truer metal and
bear the stamp of Heaven" (Chap. XXXVIII). Led by these convictions --
which were to exercise a vast influence on the thought of his time -- Dickens
went far; he attributes to his chosen examples of the poor and lowly much more
than the virtues of the hearth. Kit, besides being a good-natured,
straightforward lad, possesses a delicate sense of honour which can only be
described a8 chivalrous. When his worthy master suggests to him that he might
like to enter into better-paid service, Kit is stricken at the heart with a
noble distress; he cannot bear to be so misjudged; respectfully, but very firmly,
he asserts his claim to be treated as one of nature's gentlemen. The scene
moves us to a smile; we are reminded for the moment of good little stories for
good little people; happily, there enters Mr. Chuckster, who is so very much of
the world as we know it, that we cannot but half credit all we have just heard.
So does Dickens, by force of his ceaseless variety, keep hold upon our
sympathies when another would weary or repel. In the chapter that ensues, Kit
goes to look for his mother at Little Bethel, and under the provocation of the
"small gentleman (by trade a shoemaker, and by calling a divine),"
becomes altogether human. Mrs. Nubbles, too (who, on being awakened during the
sermon, exclaims, "Oh, Christopher, how have I been edified this
night!"), wins upon us by this characteristic weakness, not at all
inconsistent, we may be sure, with her maternal duties. After all, we are not
preached at; our author is no Little Bethelite; we find it pleasant to reflect
upon the moral purpose of one who is on such good terms with life.
Nowadays, we note with interest the limits of
Dickens's "radicalism." In his advocacy of the poor, he never demands
that they shall be raised above the status of poverty. Morally, he would change
the world; socially, he is a thorough conservative. Kit was born to be a
servant, and a servant let him remain. He shall find a mate worthy of him among
his own kind, and their sons shall be Kits over again, their daughters good
little Barbaras. Let the humbly-born discharge the duties appointed them by
Providence. What comes of immoderate ambition we see plainly in the case of
Nell's grandfather, whose ruinous vice originated merely in a desire to provide
the child with luxuries to which she had no claim. To be sure, we learn in the
last chapter that Kit, "after serious remonstrance and advice," did
quit Mr. Garland's service, and that "a good post" was procured for
him by benevolent persons; omission of all detail allows us to feel sure that
to the end of his life he still touched his hat, and that his
"prosperity" was of the respectful kind. Remember, it was to the
middle class that Dickens addressed himself, speaking as one of them. His
English spirit knows nothing of egalitarianism. The more wonderful that he was
equally free from the least taint of condescension. How whole-heartedly he
enters into the joys of these social inferiors! As when Kit and his domestic
circle spend an evening at Astley's; a chapter which no other novelist could
have written. Here is no caricature; it is the mere truth seen by entirely
sympathetic eyes and reported with the kindliest gaiety. Abstract the sympathy,
substitute cold observation, and we should have a truth, perhaps, but wholly
uninteresting. It is only by the vehicle of emotion that life can be translated
into art; in Dickens at his best the emotion is strictly subordinate to
artistic law, and points no narrower moral than that of human charity.
It remains to speak of a most delightful
feature of the book -- those passages which are concerned with strolling
showmen. All through his life Dickens had an appetite for this kind of
entertainment; he probably knew more of such folk than anyone else outside
their obscure profession; there seems to have been a strain of vagabondism in
his blood. For the purposes of this story no feature could have been more
suitable; it is time-honoured vagabondism to which we are introduced; it
harmonizes with the note of antiquity, and with the rustic scene. An admirable
picturesqueness charms us at each new encounter. Think how indelible on one's
mind is that evening scene in the churchyard, where Codlin and Short are found
resting themselves and repairing their tattered dramatis personae. One
sees it as an actual memory of one's own wanderings; the sky warm with sunset,
the old grey ivied church, the clergyman's horse browsing among the graves, and
there, seated upon the turf, the two disreputable showmen, with Punch perched
cross-legged upon a tombstone behind them -- he "seemed to be pointing
with the tip of his cap to a most flourishing epitaph, and to be chuckling over
it with all his heart" (Chap. XVI). Then, the supper at the Jolly
Sandboys, with that "deep ruddy blush upon the room," and a blend of
savoury odours which make the mouth water; the dog that had lost a halfpenny,
and for punishment has to grind the Old Hundredth on an organ whilst the other
dogs sup; and the talk about superannuated giants, "usually kept in
caravans to wait upon the dwarfs" -- what an artist was he who pictured it
for ever! Since Dickens's time there has arisen a school of fiction which, with
incredible labour, strives to set before us the reality of things, to impress
by a scrupulous fidelity of presentment; the method has been in a few instances
successful, but which of these novelists has excelled Dickens in his power of
reproducing for us what he saw with his mind's eye, and making it part of our
own experience of life? The author of The Old Curiosity Shop did it
without an effort. Moreover, he did it in a spirit of abounding cheerfulness,
rebuking, by anticipation, the gloom of some who came after him, in the person
of his sententious showman, Codlin the pessimist.
For the prose in which this book is written,
not much can be said. In places it declares the author still young at his craft;
it is marked with immaturity, occasionally touches commonplace, and nowhere
rises above honest pedestrian English. The seeming exception, the passages of
emotion which are concerned with the fading and the death of Nell, depend for
their effect upon the common error that prose is dignified by assuming the
rhythm of verse. Dickens himself was quite aware of the tendency which
irresistibly beset him to fall into iambics when his feelings were deeply
engaged; somewhere in a letter to Forster he jestingly remarks upon the habit. For
favourable contrast, turn to the page in which he describes the flight of Nell
and her grandfather from London; as style, it is not remarkable, but at least
it is fair prose and vividly descriptive. These shortcomings, however, count
little against the eloquence of Mr. Swiveller, the conversation of Sampson
Brass, and the philosophic dialogue of Messrs. Codlin and Short. Dickens's
style is an expression of his humour, and touches perfection only on the lips
of his living characters.
I was whilst engaged upon Bleak House
that Dickens, for the first time in his career, complained of feeling
overwrought. He began the writing of this book in November, 1851, just a year
after the close of David Copperfield, and was busy at it until August
1853; the first of the usual twenty monthly parts appeared in March, 1852, with
illustrations by Hablôt K. Browne. Doubtless the story cost him a great deal of
trouble, for he had set himself a task alien to his genius -- that of
constructing a neatly elaborate "plot," a rounded mystery with
manifold complications, to serve as the vehicle for his attack upon a monstrous
abuse. His letters of the time show that he was not working with the old gusto;
he felt his other literary tasks, going on concurrently, very burdensome, to
say nothing of the strain imposed by amateur acting and ceaseless social
engagements. Of course the method of monthly publication, with author but a
little in advance of printer, was, notwithstanding Dickens's deliberate
defence, as bad a one as novelist has ever contrived, and we, who owe to it so
many of Dickens's blemishes, cannot condemn it too severely. Imagine him to
have written how, when, and where he pleased, making his books short or long
with regard only to their subject, and choosing his own time for putting forth
the complete story, how different would be the possession bequeathed to us!
In the serial issue David Copperfield
had not had a great sale; Bleak House began at once with a larger, and presently
rose to a circulation of nearly twice that attained by the earlier and better
book. The wise man does not try very hard to explain such statistics, but it
seems intelligible that the opening chapters of Bleak House should have
excited that sort of curiosity which in the public at large means interest;
there is a lawsuit involving a great fortune, and there is a mystery affecting
aristocratic lives. Herein lay novelty; for the two preceding books, Dombey
and Copperfield, had opened with childhood, and followed a regular
biographic tenor. Dickens's first idea with regard to their successor was to
call it Tom-all-Alone's, and to make Jo the centre of interest;
obviously a project of no great promise and soon abandoned. I have somewhere
read a suggestion, that in the changed character of his later works, where
"plot" takes the place of biographic narrative, we are to note the
influence of Dickens's friend, Wilkie Collins; but in the year 1851 Wilkie
Collins had published only his first, and uncharacteristic, work of fiction, Antonina,
and it is more likely that, if influence there were of one novelist upon the
other, Bleak House had its part in the shaping of Collins's successful
work; Inspector Bucket, at all events, certainly gave a new type to the novelists
of crime.
Dickens thought he was making an advance in
art. He had been occasionally reproached for the old-fashioned, happy-go-lucky
progress of his stories, and now set himself resolutely to amend the fault. The
result was a fiction which his biographer considers very nearly perfect. "Look
back from the last to the first page of the present novel, and not even in the
highest examples of this kind of elaborate care will it be found that event
leads more closely to event or that the separate incidents have been planned
with a more studied consideration of the bearing they are severally to have on
the general result. Nothing is introduced at random, everything tends to the
catastrophe, the various lines of the plot converge and fit to its centre, and
to this larger interest all the rest is irresistibly drawn" (Forster, Bk. VIII,
Chap. I). Now, if we omit the objectionable word "plot," this is a
description of faultless art in the constructing of a story; it will apply, in
its degree, to every fine drama, scenic or narrative. But in the case before us
its application is imperfect, owing to Dickens's failure to distinguish between
art and artifice. In the fable of Bleak House there is much ingenuity,
but an almost total disregard of probability the fitting of incidents suggests
a mechanical puzzle rather than the complications of human life; arbitrary
coincidence takes the place of well-contrived motive, and at times the motive
suggested is glaringly inadequate. Briefly, the plot is not a good plot;
infinite labour was wasted in a mistaken direction and here, as in so many of
Dickens's novels, we have to enjoy the book in spite of its framework.
To make matters worse, the scheme is not
homogeneous; intermingled with this weft of elaborate pattern are patches of a
totally different order of work, the chapters of autobiography supposed to be
written by Esther Summerson. In Copperfield, the first-person narrative
was a great success, for it was indeed Dickens himself who spoke throughout,
with all his qualities of humour and observation, vigour and pathos, allowed
free play; one understands that the memory of his delight in achieving that
masterpiece tempted him to a repetition of the same method. The result was most
unfortunate. Of Esther Summerson as a woman we are liable to form no conception
whatever, and we utterly refuse to believe that any hand save one penned the
chapters bearing her signature. An attempt is made to write ''in character,''
but it is speedily abandoned, and I imagine it would be an easy thing, by the
changing of a very few words on each page, to incorporate these Esther portions
with the rest of the narrative. The object, presumably, of writing a book in
this way is to obtain the effect of varied points of view regarding characters
and events; but it is of necessity a mistake in art. With a skill much greater
than that of Dickens, the device is employed in Daudet's "Le Nabab,"
where one still feels that the harmonious construction of the novel is
unwarrantably disturbed.
So much for technicalities. To come to the root
of the matter, Bleak House is a brilliant, admirable, and most righteous
satire upon the monstrous iniquity of "old Father Antic the Law,"
with incidental mockery of allied abuses which, now as then, hold too large a
place in the life of the English people.
Needless nowadays to revive the controversies
which the book excited; we know that the Court of Chancery disgraced a country
pretending to civilization; we know that, not long after the publication of Bleak
House, it submitted to certain reforms yet it is interesting to remember
that legal luminaries scoffed at Dickens's indignation and declared his picture
utterly unlike the truth. One of these critics (Lord Denman) published a long
and severe arraignment of the author, disputing not only his facts, but his
theories of human nature. This novel, asserted Lord Denman, contained all
Dickens's old faults and a good many new ones. Especially bitter was his
lordship on the subject of Mrs. Jellyby, whom he held to be a gross libel on
the philanthropic cause of slave emancipation. Many readers, naturally, found
subject of offence in Mr. Chadband. Indeed, Bleak House seems to have
aroused emotions in England very much as Martin Chuzzlewit did in
America, the important point being that in neither case did Dickens's satire
ultimately injure him with his public; in the end, the laugh was on his side,
and with a laugh he triumphed. Not a little remarkable, when one comes to think
of it, this immunity of the great writer. Humour, and humour alone, could have
ensured it to him. It is all very well to talk of right prevailing, of the
popular instinct for justice, and so on; these phrases mean very little. Dickens
held his own because he amused. The noblest orator ever born, raising his voice
in divine wrath against Chancery and all its vileness would not have touched
the "great heart of the People" as did these pages which make
gloriously ridiculous the whole legal world from His Lordship in his High Court
down to Mr. Guppy on his high stool.
The satire is of very wide application; it
involves that whole system of pompous precedent which in Dickens's day was
responsible for so much cruelty and hypocrisy, for such waste of life in filth
and gloom and wretchedness. With the glaring injustice of the Law, rotting
society down to such places as Tom-all-Alone's, is associated the subtler evils
of an aristocracy sunk to harmful impotence. With absurd precedent goes foolish
pride, and self-righteousness, and every form of idle egoism; hence we have a
group of admirable studies in selfish conceit -- Harold Skimpole, Mr.
Turveydrop, Mr. Chadband, Mrs. Jellyby. Impossible to vary the central theme
more adroitly, more brilliantly. In Bleak House London is seen as a mere
dependance of the Court of Chancery, a great gloomy city, webbed and meshed, as
it were, by the spinnings of a huge poisonous spider sitting in the region of
Chancery Lane; its inhabitants are the blighted, stunted and prematurely old
offspring of a town which knows not fresh air. Perfect, all this, for the
purpose of the satirist. In this sense, at all events, Bleak House is an
excellently constructed book.
There is no leading character. In Richard
Carstone, about whom the story may be said to circle, Dickens tried to carry out
a purpose he had once entertained with regard to Walter Gay in Dombey and
Son. That of showing a good lad at the mercy of temptations and
circumstances which little by little wreck his life; but Richard has very
little life to lose, and we form only a shadowy conception of his amiably
futile personality. Still less convincing is his betrothed, Ada, whose very
name one finds it difficult to remember. Nothing harder, to be sure, than to
make a living picture of one whose part in the story is passive, and in Bleak
House passivity is the characteristic of all the foremost figures; their
business is to submit to the irresistible. Yet two of these personages seem to
me successful studies of a kind in which Dickens was not often successful; I
cannot but think that both Sir Leicester Dedlock and John Jarndyce is, each in
his way, an excellent piece of work, making exactly the impression at which the
author aimed. Compare Jarndyce with Mr. Pickwick and with the brothers
Cheeryble. It is to their world that he belongs, the world of eccentric
benevolence; he is the kind of man Dickens delighted to portray; but Mr.
Jarndyce is far more recognizably a fellow-mortal than his gay predecessors; in
truth, he may claim the style of gentleman, and perhaps may stand for the most
soberly agreeable portrait of a gentleman to be found in all Dickens's novels. Sir
Leicester, though he shows in the full light of satiric intention, being a
figurehead on the crazy old ship of aristocratic privilege, is a human being
akin to John Jarndyce; he speaks with undue solemnity, but behaves at all times
as noblesse oblige, and, when sinking beneath his unmerited calamities,
makes no little claim upon our sympathetic admiration. We have travelled far
since the days of Sir Mulberry Hawk; the artist, meanwhile, had made friends in
the privileged class of his countrymen, and had learnt what the circumstances
of his early life did not allow him to perceive, that virtue and good manners
are not confined to the middle and lower orders. He would not go so far as to
make Sir Leicester intelligent; in spite of personal experience, Dickens never
reconciled himself to the thought of "birth" in association with
brains. His instinctive feeling comes out very strongly in that conversation
between the Baronet and the Ironmaster which points to Dickens's remedy -- the
Radical remedy -- for all the evils he is depicting.
That the Dedlock tragedy is the least
impressive portion of the book results partly from Dickens's inability to
represent any kind of woman save the eccentric, the imbecile, and the shrew
(there are at most one or two small exceptions), and partly from the
melodramatic strain in him, which so often misled his genius. Educated readers
of to-day see little difference between these chapters of Bleak House
and the treatment of any like "mystery" in a penny novelette. There
is no need to insist on these weaknesses of the master; we admit them as a
matter of critical duty, and at the same time point out the characteristics,
moral and intellectual, of Victorian England, which account for so many of
Dickens's limitations. Had he not been restrained by an insensate prudishness
from dealing honestly with Lady Dedlock's story, Lady Dedlock herself might
have been far more human. Where the national conscience refuses to recognize
certain phases of life, it is not wonderful that national authors should
exhibit timidity and ineptitude whenever they glance in the forbidden
direction. Instead of a picture, we get a cloudy veil suggestive of nameless
horrors; it is the sort of exaggeration which necessarily results in
feebleness.
Dickens was very fond of the effect produced by
bringing into close contact representatives of social extremes; the typical
instance is Lady Dedlock's relations with crossing-sweeper Jo. Contemporary
readers saw in Jo a figure of supreme pathos; they wept over his death-bed, as
by those of Paul Dombey and of Little Nell. An ecclesiastical dignitary could
not find words of solemn praise adequate to his emotions at the end of Chapter
XLVII. "Uncultured nature is there indeed; the intimations of true
heart feeling, the glimmerings of higher feeling, all are there; but everything
still consistent and in harmony. To my mind nothing in the field of fiction is
to be found in English literature surpassing the death of Jo!" That
expressed the common judgment; but there were dissentients, especially Lord
Denman, who after deploring the introduction of so much squalor -- "the
author's love of low life appears to grow on him" -- went on to protest
against Dickens's habit of discovering "delicacy of virtuous sentiment in
the lowest depths of human degradation." We know that Lord Denman was here
quite right; for, though virtue may exist in the ignorant and the poor and the
debased, most assuredly the delicacies of virtue will not be found in them, and
it is these delicacies on which Dickens so commonly insists. If one fact can be
asserted of the lowest English it is that, supposing them to say or do a good
thing, they will say or do it in the worst possible way. Does there, I wonder,
exist in all literature, a scene less correspondent with any possibility of
life than that description of Jo's last moments? Dickens believed in it --
there is the odd thing. Not a line, not a word, is insincere. He had a twofold
mission in life, and, from our standpoint, in an age which has outgrown so many
conditions of fifty years ago, we can only mark with regret how the
philanthropist in him so often overcame the artist.
His true pathos comes when he does not
particularly try for it and is invariably an aspect of his humour. The two
chief instances in this book are the picture of Coavinses' children after their
father's death, and the figure of Guster, Mrs. Snagsby's slave-of-all-work. Nothing
more touching, more natural, more simple, than that scene in Chapter XV where
Esther and her companions find the little Coavinses locked up for safety in
their cold garret, whilst the elder child, Charley, is away at washing to earn
food for them all.
"'God help you, Charley!' said my
Guardian. 'You're not tall enough to reach the tub!'"
"'In pattens I am, Sir,' she answered
quickly. 'I've got a high pair as belonged to mother.'"
That is worth many death-beds of ideal
crossing-sweepers. We see it is a possible and intelligible thing that Charley
should be a good girl, and her goodness takes precisely the right form. She is
healthy in mind and body; her little figure makes one of the points of contrast
(others are Mr. Boythorn, and Caddy Jellyby, and Trooper George, and the Bagnet
household) which emphasize the sordid evil all about her. Anything but healthy,
on the other hand, is Mrs. Snagsby's Guster, the poor slavey whose fits and
starved stupidities supply us with such strange matter for mirth. She belongs
to the Marchioness group of characters, wherein Dickens's hand has a peculiar
skill. "Guster, really aged three or four and twenty, but looking a round
ten years older, goes cheap with this unaccountable drawback of fits, and is so
apprehensive of being returned on the hands of her patron saint" -- the
parish -- "that except when she is found with her head in the pail, or the
sink, or the copper, or the dinner, she is always at work. The law-stationer's
establishment is, in Guster's eyes, a temple of plenty and splendour. She believes
the little drawing-room upstairs, always kept, as one may say, with its hair in
papers and its pinafore on, to be the most elegant apartment in Christendom. .
. . Guster has some recompense for her many privations." The wonderful
thing about such work as this is Dickens's subdual of his indignation to the
humorous note. It is when indignation gets the upper hand, and humour is lost
sight of, that he falls into peril of unconsciously false sentiment.
Among the characters of this book there is not
one belonging to the foremost groups of Dickens's creations, no one standing
together with Mr. Micawber and Mr. Pecksniff; yet what novel by any other
writer presents such a multitude of strongly-featured individuals, their names
and their persons familiar to everyone who has but once read Bleak House?
As I have already remarked, most of them illustrate the main theme of the
story, exhibiting in various forms the vice of a fixed idea which sacrifices
everything and everybody to its own selfish demands. The shrewdly ingenious
Skimpole (I do not stop to comment on the old story of his outward resemblance
to Leigh Hunt), the lordly Turveydrop, the devoted Mrs. Jellyby, the unctuously
eloquent Mr. Chadband, all are following in their own little way the example of
the High Court of Chancery -- victimizing all about them on pretence of the
most disinterested motives. The legal figures -- always so admirable in Dickens
-- of course strike this key-note with peculiar emphasis; we are in no doubt as
to the impulses ruling Mr. Kenge or Mr. Vholes, and their spirit is potent for
evil down to the very dregs of society, in Grandfather Smallweed and in Mr.
Krook. The victims themselves are a ragged regiment after Dickens's own heart;
crazy Chancery suitors, Mr. Jellyby and his hapless offspring, fever-stricken
dwellers in Chancery's slums, all shown with infinite picturesqueness -- which
indeed is the prime artistic quality of the book. For mirth extracted from
sordid material no example can surpass Mr. Guppy, who is chicane incarnate; his
withdrawal from the tender suit to Miss Summerson, excellent farce, makes as
good comment as ever was written upon the law-office frame of mind. That we
have little if any frank gaiety is but natural and right; it would be out of
keeping with the tone of a world overshadowed by the Law. To regret that
Skimpole is not so engaging as Micawber, with other like contrasts, is merely
to find fault with the aim which the novelist sets before him. Yet it is
probable enough that the rather long-drawn dreariness of some parts of the book
may be attributed to the overstrain from which at this time Dickens was
avowedly suffering.
In his Preface he tells us that he had
"purposely dwelt on the romantic side of familiar things." But the
word romantic does not seem to be very accurately applied. In using it, Dickens
no doubt was thinking of the Dedlock mystery, the involvement of a
crossing-sweeper in aristocratic tragedies, and so on; all which would be
better called melodrama than romance. What he did achieve was to make the
common and the unclean most forcibly picturesque. From the fog at the opening
of the story to Lady Dedlock's miserable death at the end, we are held by a
powerful picture of murky, swarming, rotting London, a marvellous rendering of
the impression received by any imaginative person who in low spirits has had
occasion to wander about London's streets. Nowhere is Dickens stronger in lurid
effects; for a fine horror he never went beyond Chapter XXXII -- where it
would, of course, be wide of the mark to begin discussing the possibility of
spontaneous combustion. Masterly descriptions abound; the Court in Chapter I,
the regions of the Law during vacation in Chapter XIX, Mr. Vholes's office in
Chapter XXXIX, are among the best. The inquest at the Sol's Arms shows all
Dickens's peculiar power of giving typical value to the commonplace; scene and
actors are unforgettable; the gruesome, the vile, and the ludicrous combine in
unique effects, in the richest suggestiveness. And for the impressive in another
kind -- still shadowed by the evil genius of the book, but escaped from the
city's stifling atmosphere -- what could be better than Chapter LVII, Esther's
posting through the night with Inspector Bucket. This is very vigorous
narrative. We, of course, forget that an amiable young lady is supposed to be
penning it, and are reminded of those chapters of earlier books where Dickens
revels in the joy of the road.
As a reminder that even in Bleak House
the master did not altogether lose his wonted cheeriness by humble firesides,
one may recall the Bagnet household, dwelling at a happy distance from Chancery
Lane. Compare the dinner presided over by the Old Girl beside her shining
hearth with that partaken of by Mr. Guppy, Mr. Jobling and Mr. Smallweed at their
familiar chop-house. Each is perfect in its kind, and each a whole world in
little.
(Provided by Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Nagoya University, Japan,
on 23 October 1997.)