Dickens

Something, then, he owed to other writers, but it was little indeed in comparison with what he owed to his natural gifts. First amongst these, I think, must be placed what may, in a word, be called his sensibility—that quality of which humour, in the more limited sense of the word, and pathos are the twin products. And in Dickens both these were paramount powers, almost equally various in their forms and effective in their operation. According to M. Taine, Dickens, whilst he excels in irony of a particular sort, being an Englishman, is incapable of being gay. Such profundities are unfathomable to the readers of Pickwick; though the French critic may have generalised from Dickens’s later writings only. His pathos is not less true than various, for the gradations are marked between the stern, tragic pathos of Hard Times, the melting pathos of the Old Curiosity Shop, Dombey and Son, and David Copperfield, and the pathos of helplessness which appeals to us in Smike and Jo. But this sensibility would not have given us Dickens’s gallery of living pictures had it not been for the powers of imagination and observation which enabled him spontaneously to exercise it in countless directions. To the way in which his imagination enabled him to identify himself with the figments of his own brain he frequently testified; Dante was not more certain in his celestial and infernal topography than was Dickens as to “every stair in the little mid-shipman’s house,” and as to “every young gentleman’s bedstead in Dr. Blimber’s establishment.” One particular class of phenomena may be instanced instead of many, in the observation and poetic reproduction of which his singular natural endowment continually manifested itself—I mean those of the weather. It is not, indeed, often that he rises to a fine image like that in the description of the night in which Ralph Nickleby, ruined and crushed, slinks home to his death:

“The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds furiously and fast before it. There was one black, gloomy mass that seemed to follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with the others, but lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealthily on. He often looked back at this, and more than once stopped to let it pass over; but, somehow, when he went forward again it was still behind him, coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shadowy funeral train.”

But he again and again enables us to feel as if the Christmas morning on which Mr. Pickwick ran gaily down the slide, or as if the “very quiet” moonlit night in the midst of which a sudden sound, like the firing of a gun or a pistol, startled the repose of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, were not only what we have often precisely experienced in country villages or in London squares, but as if they were the very morning and the very night which we must experience, if we were feeling the glow of wintry merriment, or the awful chill of the presentiment of evil in a dead hour. In its lower form this combination of the powers of imagination and observation has the rapidity of wit, and, indeed, sometimes is wit. The gift of suddenly finding out what a man, a thing, a combination of man and thing, is like—this, too, comes by nature; and there is something electrifying in its sudden exercise, even on the most trivial occasions, as when Flora, delighted with Little Dorrit’s sudden rise to fortune, requests to know all

“about the good, dear, quiet little thing, and all the changes of her fortunes, carriage people now, no doubt, and horses without number most romantic, a coat of arms, of course, and wild beasts on their hind legs, showing it as if it was a copy they had done with mouths from ear to ear, good gracious!”

But Nature, when she gifted Dickens with sensibility, observation, and imagination, had bestowed upon him yet another boon in the quality which seems more prominent than any other in his whole being. The vigour of Dickens—a mental and moral vigour supported by a splendid physical organism—was the parent of some of his foibles; amongst the rest, of his tendency to exaggeration. No fault has been more frequently found with his workmanship than this; nor can he be said to have defended himself very successfully on this head when he declared that he did “not recollect ever to have heard or seen the charge of exaggeration made against a feeble performance, though, in its feebleness, it may have been most untrue.” But without this vigour he could not have been creative as he was; and in him there were accordingly united with rare completeness a swift responsiveness to the impulses of humour and pathos, an inexhaustible fertility in discovering and inventing materials for their exercise, and the constant creative desire to give to these newly-created materials a vivid plastic form.

And the mention of this last-named gift in Dickens suggests the query whether, finally, there is anything in his manner as a writer which may prevent the continuance of his extraordinary popularity. No writer can be great without a manner of his own; and that Dickens had such a manner his most supercilious censurer will readily allow. His terse narrative power, often intensely humorous in its unblushing and unwinking gravity, and often deeply pathetic in its simplicity, is as characteristic of his manner as is the supreme felicity of phrase, in which he has no equal. As to the latter, I should hardly know where to begin and where to leave off were I to attempt to illustrate it. But, to take two instances of different kinds of wit, I may cite a passage in Guster’s narrative of her interview with Lady Dedlock: “And so I took the letter from her, and she said she had nothing to give me; and I said I was poor myself, and consequently wanted nothing;” and, of a different kind, the account in one of his letters of a conversation with Macready, in which the great tragedian, after a solemn but impassioned commendation of his friend’s reading, “put his hand upon my breast and pulled out his pocket-handkerchief, and I felt as if I were doing somebody to his Werner.” These, I think, were amongst the most characteristic merits of his style. It also, and more especially in his later years, had its characteristic faults. The danger of degenerating into mannerism is incident to every original manner. There is mannerism in most of the great English prose-writers of Dickens’s age—in Carlyle, in Macaulay, in Thackeray—but in none of them is there more mannerism than in Dickens himself. In his earlier writings, in Nicholas Nickleby, for instance (I do not, of course, refer to the Portsmouth boards), and even in Martin Chuzzlewit, there is much staginess; but in his later works his own mannerism had swallowed up that of the stage, and, more especially in serious passages, his style had become what M. Taine happily characterises as le style tourmenté. His choice of words remained throughout excellent, and his construction of sentences clear. He told Mr. Wilkie Collins that “underlining was not his nature;” and in truth he had no need to emphasise his expressions, or to bid the reader “go back upon their meaning.” He recognised his responsibility, as a popular writer, in keeping the vocabulary of the language pure; and in Little Dorrit he even solemnly declines to use the French word trousseau. In his orthography, on the other hand, he was not free from Americanisms; and his interpunctuation was consistently odd. But these are trifles; his more important mannerisms were, like many really dangerous faults of style, only the excess of characteristic excellences. Thus it was he who elaborated with unprecedented effect that humorous species of paraphrase which, as one of the most imitable devices of his style, has also been the most persistently imitated. We are all tickled when Grip, the raven, “issues orders for the instant preparation of innumerable kettles for purposes of tea;” or when Mr. Pecksniff’s eye is “piously upraised, with something of that expression which the poetry of ages has attributed to a domestic bird, when breathing its last amid the ravages of an electric storm;” but in the end the device becomes a mere trick of circumlocution. Another mannerism which grew upon Dickens, and was faithfully imitated by several of his disciples, was primarily due to his habit of turning a fact, fancy, or situation round on every side. This consisted in the reiteration of a construction, or of part of a construction, in the strained rhetorical fashion to which he at last accustomed us in spite of ourselves, but to which we were loath to submit in his imitators. These and certain other peculiarities, which it would be difficult to indicate without incurring the charge of hypercriticism, hardened as the style of Dickens hardened; and, for instance, in the Tale of Two Cities his mannerisms may be seen side by side in glittering array. By way of compensation, the occasional solecisms and vulgarisms of his earlier style (he only very gradually ridded himself of the cockney habit of punning) no longer marred his pages; and he ceased to break or lapse occasionally, in highly-impassioned passages, into blank verse.

From first to last Dickens’s mannerism, like everything which he made part of himself, was not merely assumed on occasion, but was, so to speak, absorbed into his nature. It shows itself in almost everything that he wrote in his later years, from the most carefully-elaborated chapters of his books down to the most deeply-felt passages of his most familiar correspondence, in the midst of the most genuine pathos and most exuberant humour of his books, and in the midst of the sound sense and unaffected piety of his private letters. Future generations may, for this very reason, be perplexed and irritated by what we merely stumbled at, and may wish that what is an element hardly separable from many of Dickens’s compositions were away from them, as one wishes away from his signature that horrible flourish which in his letters he sometimes represents himself as too tired to append.

But no distaste for his mannerisms is likely to obscure the sense of his achievements in the branch of literature to which he devoted the full powers of his genius and the best energies of his nature. He introduced, indeed, no new species of prose fiction into our literature. In the historical novel he made two far from unsuccessful essays, in the earlier of which in particular—Barnaby Rudge—he showed a laudable desire to enter into the spirit of a past age; but he was without the reading or the patience of either the author of Waverley or the author of The Virginians, and without the fine historic enthusiasm which animates the broader workmanship of Westward Ho. For the purely imaginative romance, on the other hand, of which in some of his works Lord Lytton was the most prominent representative in contemporary English literature, Dickens’s genius was not without certain affinities; but, to feel his full strength, he needed to touch the earth with his feet. Thus it is no mere phrase to say of him that he found the ideal in the real, and drew his inspirations from the world around him. Perhaps the strongest temptation which ever seemed likely to divert him from the sounder forms in which his masterpieces were cast lay in the direction of the novel with a purpose, the fiction intended primarily and above all things to promote the correction of some social abuse, or the achievement of some social reform. But in spite of himself, to whom the often voiceless cause of the suffering and the oppressed was at all times dearer than any mere literary success, he was preserved from binding his muse, as his friend Cruikshank bound his art, handmaid in a service with which freedom was irreconcilable. His artistic instinct helped him in this, and perhaps also the consciousness that where, as in The Chimes or in Hard Times, he had gone furthest in this direction, there had been something jarring in the result. Thus, under the influences described above, he carried on the English novel mainly in the directions which it had taken under its early masters, and more especially in those in which the essential attributes of his own genius prompted him to excel.

Amongst the elements on which the effect alike of the novelist’s and of the dramatist’s work must, apart from style and diction, essentially depend, that of construction is obviously one of the most significant. In this Dickens was, in the earlier period of his authorship, very far from strong. This was due in part to the accident that he began his literary career as a writer of Sketches, and that his first continuous book, Pickwick, was originally designed as little more than a string of such. It was due in a still greater measure to the influence of those masters of English fiction with whom he had been familiar from boyhood, above all to Smollett. And though, by dint of his usual energy, he came to be able to invent a plot so generally effective as that of A Tale of Two Cities, or, I was about to say, of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, yet on this head he had had to contend against a special difficulty; I mean, of course, the publication of most of his books in monthly or even weekly numbers. In the case of a writer both pathetic and humorous the serial method of publication leads the public to expect its due allowance of both pathos and humour every month or week, even if each number, to borrow a homely simile applied in Oliver Twist to books in general, need not contain “the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.” And again, as in a melodrama of the old school, each serial division has, if possible, to close emphatically, effectively, with a promise of yet stranger, more touching, more laughable things to come. On the other hand, with this form of publication repetition is frequently necessary by way of “reminder” to indolent readers, whose memory needs refreshing after the long pauses between the acts. Fortunately, Dickens abhorred living, as it were, from hand to mouth, and thus diminished the dangers to which, I cannot help thinking, Thackeray at times almost succumbed. Yet, notwithstanding, in the arrangement of his incidents and the contrivance of his plots it is often impossible to avoid noting the imperfection of the machinery, or at least the traces of effort. I have already said under what influences, in my opinion, Dickens acquired a constructive skill which would have been conspicuous in most other novelists.

If in the combination of parts the workmanship of Dickens was not invariably of the best, on the other hand in the invention of those parts themselves he excelled, his imaginative power and dramatic instinct combining to produce an endless succession of effective scenes and situations, ranging through almost every variety of the pathetic and the humorous. In no direction was nature a more powerful aid to art with him than in this. From his very boyhood he appears to have possessed in a developed form what many others may possess in its germ, the faculty of converting into a scene—putting, as it were, into a frame—personages that came under his notice, and the background on which he saw them. Who can forget the scene in David Copperfield in which the friendless little boy attracts the wonderment of the good people of the public-house where—it being a special occasion—he has demanded a glass of their “very best ale, with a head to it?” In the autobiographical fragment already cited, where the story appears in almost the same words, Dickens exclaims:

“Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study in Devonshire Terrace. The landlord, in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar window-frame; his wife, looking over the little half-door; and I, in some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition.”

He saw the scene while he was an actor in it. Already the Sketches by Boz showed the exuberance of this power, and in his last years more than one paper in the delightful Uncommercial Traveller series proved it to be as inexhaustible as ever, while the art with which it was exercised had become more refined. Who has better described (for who was more sensitive to it?) the mysterious influence of crowds, and who the pitiful pathos of solitude? Who has ever surpassed Dickens in his representations, varied a thousandfold, but still appealing to the same emotions, common to us all, of the crises or turning-points of human life? Who has dwelt with a more potent effect on that catastrophe which the drama of every human life must reach; whose scenes of death in its pathetic, pitiful, reverend, terrible, ghastly forms speak more to the imagination and more to the heart? There is, however, one species of scenes in which the genius of Dickens seems to me to exercise a still stronger spell—those which precede a catastrophe, which are charged like thunder-clouds with the coming storm. And here the constructive art is at work; for it is the arrangement of the incidents, past and to come, combined by anticipation in the mind of the reader, which gives their extraordinary force to such scenes as the nocturnal watching of Nancy by Noah, or Carker’s early walk to the railway station, where he is to meet his doom. Extremely powerful, too, in a rather different way, is the scene in Little Dorrit, described in a word or two, of the parting of Bar and Physician at dawn, after they have “found out Mr. Merdle’s complaint:”

“Before parting, at Physician’s door, they both looked up at the sunny morning sky, into which the smoke of a few early fires, and the breath and voices of a few early stirrers, were peacefully rising, and then looked round upon the immense city and said: ‘If all those hundreds and thousands of beggared people who were yet asleep could only know, as they two spoke, the ruin that impended over them, what a fearful cry against one miserable soul would go up to Heaven!’”

Nor is it awe only, but pity also, which he is able thus to move beforehand, as in Dombey and Son, in the incomparable scenes leading up to little Paul’s death.

More diverse opinions have been expressed as to Dickens’s mastery of that highest part of the novelist’s art, which we call characterisation. Undoubtedly, the characters which he draws are included in a limited range. Yet I question whether their range can be justly termed narrow as compared with that commanded by any other great English novelist except Scott, or with those of many novelists of other literatures except Balzac. But within his own range Dickens is unapproached. His novels do not altogether avoid the common danger of uninteresting heroes and insipid heroines; but only a very few of his heroes are conventionally declamatory like Nicholas Nickleby, and few of his heroines simper sentimentally like Rose Maylie. Nor can I for a moment assent to the condemnation which has been pronounced upon all the female characters in Dickens’s books, as more or less feeble or artificial. At the same time it is true that from women of a mightier mould Dickens’s imagination turns aside; he could not have drawn a Dorothea Casaubon any more than he could have drawn Romola herself. Similarly, heroes of the chivalrous or magnanimous type, representatives of generous effort in a great cause, will not easily be met with in his writings: he never even essayed the picture of an artist devoted to Art for her own sake.

It suited the genius, and in later years perhaps the temper, of Dickens as an author to leave out of sight those “public virtues” to which no man was in truth less blind than himself, and to remain content with the illustration of types of the private or domestic kind. We may cheerfully take to us the censure that our great humourist was in nothing more English than in this—that his sympathy with the affections of the hearth and the home knew almost no bounds. A symbolisation of this may be found in the honour which, from the Sketches and Pickwick onwards, through a long series of Christmas books and Christmas numbers, Dickens, doubtless very consciously, paid to the one great festival of English family life. Yet so far am I from agreeing with those critics who think that he is hereby lowered to the level of the poets of the teapot and the plum-pudding, that I am at a loss how to express my admiration for this side of his genius—tender with the tenderness of Cowper, playful with the playfulness of Goldsmith, natural with the naturalness of the author of Amelia. Who was ever more at home with children than he, and, for that matter, with babies to begin with? Mr. Horne relates how he once heard a lady exclaim: “Oh, do read to us about the baby; Dickens is capital at a baby!” Even when most playful, most farcical concerning children, his fun is rarely without something of true tenderness, for he knew the meaning of that dreariest solitude which he has so often pictured, but nowhere, of course, with a truthfulness going so straight to the heart as in David Copperfield—the solitude of a child left to itself. Another wonderfully true child-character is that of Pip, in Great Expectations, who is also, as his years progress, an admirable study of boy-nature. For Dickens thoroughly understood what that mysterious variety of humankind really is, and was always, if one may so say, on the lookout for him. He knew him in the brightness and freshness which makes true ingénus of such delightful characters (rare enough in fiction) as Walter Gay and Mrs. Lirriper’s grandson. He knew him in his festive mood—witness the amusing letter in which he describes a water expedition at Eton with his son and two of his irrepressible school-fellows. He knew him in his precocity—the boy of about three feet high, at the “George and Vulture,” “in a hairy cap and fustian overalls, whose garb bespoke a laudable ambition to attain in time the elevation of an hostler;” and the thing on the roof of the Harrisburg coach, which, when the rain was over, slowly upreared itself, and patronisingly piped out the enquiry: “Well, now, stranger, I guess you find this a’most like an English arternoon, hey?” He knew the Gavroche who danced attendance on Mr. Quilp at his wharf, and those strangest, but by no means least true, types of all, the pupil-teachers in Mr. Fagin’s academy.

But these, with the exception of the last-named, which show much shrewd and kindly insight into the paradoxes of human nature, are, of course, the mere croquis of the great humourist’s pencil. His men and women, and the passions, the desires, the loves, and hatreds that agitate them, he has usually chosen to depict on that background of domestic life which is in a greater or less degree common to us all. And it is thus also that he has secured to himself the vast public which vibrates very differently from a mere class or section of society to the touch of a popular speaker or writer. “The more,” he writes, “we see of life and its brevity, and the world and its varieties, the more we know that no exercise of our abilities in any art, but the addressing of it to the great ocean of humanity in which we are drops, and not to by-ponds (very stagnant) here and there, ever can or ever will lay the foundations of an endurable retrospect.” The types of character which in his fictions he chiefly delights in reproducing are accordingly those which most of us have opportunities enough of comparing with the realities around us; and this test, a sound one within reasonable limits, was the test he demanded. To no other author were his own characters ever more real; and Forster observes that “what he had most to notice in Dickens at the very outset of his career was his indifference to any praise of his performances on the merely literary side, compared with the higher recognition of them as bits of actual life, with the meaning and purpose, on their part, and the responsibility on his, of realities, rather than creations of fancy.” It is, then, the favourite growths of our own age and country for which we shall most readily look in his works, and not look in vain: avarice and prodigality; pride in all its phases; hypocrisy in its endless varieties, unctuous and plausible, fawning and self-satisfied, formal and moral; and, on the other side, faithfulness, simplicity, long-suffering patience, and indomitable heroic good-humour. Do we not daily make room on the pavement for Mr. Dombey, erect, solemn, and icy, along-side of whom in the road Mr. Carter deferentially walks his sleek horse? Do we not know more than one Anthony Chuzzlewit laying up money for himself and his son, and a curse for both along with it; and many a Richard Carston, sinking, sinking, as the hope grows feebler that Justice or Fortune will at last help one who has not learnt how to help himself? And will not prodigals of a more buoyant kind, like the immortal Mr. Micawber (though, maybe, with an eloquence less ornate than his), when their boat is on the shore and their bark is on the sea, become “perfectly business-like and perfectly practical,” and propose, in acknowledgment of a parting gift we had neither hoped nor desired to see again, “bills” or, if we should prefer it, “a bond, or any other description of security?” All this will happen to us, as surely as we shall be buttonholed by Pecksniffs in a state of philanthropic exultation; and watched round corners by ’umble but observant Uriah Heeps; and affronted in what is best in us by the worst hypocrite of all, the hypocrite of religion, who flaunts in our eyes his greasy substitute for what he calls the “light of terewth.” To be sure, unless it be Mr. Chadband and those of his tribe, we shall find the hypocrite and the man-out-at-elbows in real life less endurable than their representatives in fiction; for Dickens well understood “that if you do not administer a disagreeable character carefully, the public have a decided tendency to think that the story is disagreeable, and not merely the fictitious form.” His economy is less strict with characters of the opposite class, true copies of Nature’s own handiwork—the Tom Pinches and Trotty Vecks and Clara Peggottys, who reconcile us with our kind, and Mr. Pickwick himself, “a human being replete with benevolence,” to borrow a phrase from a noble passage in Dickens’s most congenial predecessor. These characters in Dickens have a warmth which only the creations of Fielding and Smollett had possessed before, and which, like these old masters, he occasionally carries to excess. At the other extreme stand those characters in which the art of Dickens, always in union with the promptings of his moral nature, illustrates the mitigating or redeeming qualities observable even in the outcasts of our civilisation. To me his figures of this kind, when they are not too intensely elaborated, are not the least touching; and there is something as pathetic in the uncouth convict Magwitch as in the consumptive crossing-sweeper Jo.