By Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

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  (first series)
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• Charles Dickens and Other Victorians

Charles Dickens
And Other Victorians

Charles Dickens
And Other Victorians

By
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, M.A.

Fellow of Jesus College
King Edward VII Professor of English Literature
in the University of Cambridge

G.P. Putnam’s Sons
New York & London
The Knickerbocker Press
1925

Copyright, 1925
by
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

The
Knickerbocker
Press
New York

Made in the United States of America

PREFACE

All save one of the papers here collected were written as lectures and read from a desk at Cambridge; the exception being that upon Trollope, contributed to The Nation and the Athenaeum and pleasantly provoked by a recent edition of the “Barsetshire” novels. To these it almost wholly confines itself. But a full estimate of Trollope as one of our greatest English novelists—and perhaps the raciest of them all—is long overdue, awaiting a complete edition of him. His bulk is a part of his quality: it can no more be separated from the man than can Falstaff’s belly from Falstaff. He will certainly come to his own some day, but this implies his coming with all his merits and all his defects: and this again cannot happen until some publisher shows enterprise. The expensive and artificial vogue of the three-volume-novel did wonders for Trollope in one generation, to kill him for another: since no critic can talk usefully about books to many of which his hearers have no access. But we shall see Trollope reanimated.

The papers on Dickens and Thackeray attempt judgment on them as full novelists. Those on Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell merely take a theme, and try to show how one theme, taking possession, will work upon two very different minds. Much more could have been said generally upon both authors, and generically upon the “idea” of a novel.

As usual, with a few corrections, I leave these lectures as they were written and given, at intervals and for their purpose. They abound therefore with repetitions and reminders which the reader must try to forgive.

ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH.

January 5, 1925.

CONTENTS

Charles Dickens
and Other Victorians

DICKENS (I)

I

If anything on this planet be great, great things have happened in Westminster Hall: which is open for anyone, turning aside from London’s traffic, to wander in and admire. Some property in the oak of its roof forbids the spider to spin there, and now that architects have defeated the worm in beam and rafter it stands gaunt and clean as when William Rufus built it: and I dare to say that no four walls and a roof have ever enclosed such a succession of historical memories as do these, as no pavement—not even that lost one of the Roman Forum—has been comparably trodden by the feet of grave men moving towards grave decisions, grand events.

The somewhat cold interior lays its chill on the imagination. A romantic mind can, like the spider, spin its cobwebs far more easily in the neighbouring Abbey, over the actual dust to which great men come—

Here the bones of birth have cried—

“Though gods they were, as men they died.”

Here are sands, ignoble things

Dropt from the ruin’d sides of kings.

But in the Abbey is finis rerum, and our contemplation there the common contemplation of mortality which, smoothing out place along with titles, degrees and even deeds, levels the pyramids with the low mounds of a country churchyard and writes the same moral over Socrates as over our Unknown Soldier—Vale, vale, nos te in ordine quo natura permittet sequamur. In Westminster Hall (I am stressing this with a purpose) we walk heirs of events in actual play, shaping our destiny as citizens of no mean country: in this covered rood of ground have been compacted from time to time in set conflict the high passions by which men are exalted to make history. Here a king has been brought to trial, heard and condemned to die; under these rafters have pleaded in turn Bacon, Algernon Sidney, Burke, Sheridan. Here the destinies of India were, after conflict, decided for two centuries. Through that great door broke the shout, taken up, reverberated by gun after gun down the river, announcing the acquittal of the Seven Bishops.

II

So, if this tragic comedy we call life be worth anything more than a bitter smile: if patriotism mean anything to you, and strong opposite wills out of whose conflict come great issues in victory or defeat, the arrest, the temporary emptiness of Westminster Hall—a sense of what it has seen and yet in process of time may see—will lay a deeper solemnity on you than all the honoured dust in the Abbey.

But, as men’s minds are freakish, let me tell you of a solitary figure I see in Westminster Hall more vividly even than the ghosts of Charles I and Warren Hastings bayed around by their accusers: the face and figure of a youth, not yet twenty-two, who has just bought a copy of the Magazine containing his first appearance in print as an author. “I walked down to Westminster Hall,” he has recorded, “and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street and were not fit to be seen there.”

Now the paper which opened the fount of these boyish tears (here, if you will, is bathos) was entitled A Dinner at Poplar Walk. You may find it to-day under another title, “Mr. Minns and his Cousin” among Sketches by Boz: reading it, you may pronounce it no great shakes; and anyhow you may ask why anyone’s imagination should select this slight figure, to single it out among the crowd of ghosts. Well, to this I might make simple and sufficient answer, saying that the figure of unbefriended youth, with its promise, a new-comer alone in the market-place, has ever been one of the most poignant in life, and, because in life, therefore in literature. Dickens himself, who had been this figure and remembered all too well the emotion that choked its heart, has left us a wonderful portrait-gallery of these lads. But indeed our literature—every literature, all legend, for that matter—teems with them: with these youngest brothers of the fairy-tales, these Oedipus’s, Jasons, these Dick Whittingtons, Sindbads, Aladdins, Japhets in search of their Fathers; this Shakespeare holding horses for a groat, that David comely from the sheepfold with the basket of loaves and cheeses. You remember De Quincey and the stony waste of Oxford Street? or the forlorn and invalid boy in Charles Lamb’s paper on The Old Margate Hoy who “when we asked him whether he had any friends where he was going,” replied, “he had no friends.” Solitariness is ever the appeal of such a figure; an unbefriendedness that “makes friends,” searching straight to our common charity: this and the attraction of youth, knocking—so to speak—on the house-door of our own lost or locked-away ambitions. “Is there anybody there?” says this Traveller, and he, unlike the older one (who is oneself), gets an answer. The mid-Victorian Dr. Smiles saw him as an embryonic Lord Mayor dazed amid the traffic on London Bridge but clutching at his one half-crown for fear of pick-pockets. I myself met him once in a crowded third-class railway carriage. He was fifteen and bound for the sea: and when we came in sight of it he pushed past our knees to the carriage window and broke into a high tuneless chant, all oblivious of us. Challenge was in it and a sob of desire at sight of his predestined mistress and adversary. For the sea is great, but the heart in any given boy may be greater: and

these things are life

And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse.

III

But I am a Professor, and ought to have begun by assuring you that this figure in Westminster Hall has a real historical interest in connexion with your studies “on the subject of English Literature.”

Well, then, it has. The date of the apparition is New Year’s Day, 1834, and by New Year’s Day, 1838, Charles Dickens was not only the most popular of living authors, but in a fair way to become that which he remained until the end in 1870—a great National Institution.

I use no exaggerated term. Our fathers of the nineteenth century had a way (and perhaps not altogether a bad way) of considering their great writers as national institutions; Carlyle was one, Ruskin another. It was a part of their stout individualism, nowadays derided. And it was, if you will consider, in the depths of its soul [say, if you will, its Manchester Soul] a high-polite retort upon such a sworn enemy as Ruskin. “Curse us, Sir: but we and no Government make you a demigod.” You will never understand your fathers, Gentlemen, until you understand their proud distrust of Government save by consent. Take a favourite term of theirs—say “The Liberty of the Press.” By that they meant liberty from interference by Government. We, using that term to-day, should mean nothing of the sort. We should mean “liberty from control by capitalists.”

I interrogate my youthful memories and am confident that, in a modest country household these men—Carlyle, Ruskin—were, with decent reverence, though critically, read for prophets. Tennyson, too, and Browning had their sacred niches; and Darwin and Huxley, and Buckle, who perished young attempting a History of Civilisation in Europe: John Stuart Mill, also, and Kingsley, Maurice, George Eliot, and Thackeray. These names leap to memory as names of household gods. A few weeks ago, rummaging over some family papers I came upon the following entry:

1848, June 20. I received a visit from Mr. Alfred Tennyson, the Poet. He came into Cornwall along the North Coast, and from about Camelford crossed over to Fowey, where I called on him on the 19th. He came to Polperre in a boat, with Mr. Peach and others; and after viewing our scenery in all directions and taking tea at our house, they all rowed back to Fowey late in the evening. I find him well-informed and communicative. I believe a good Greek scholar with some knowledge of Hebrew. His personal appearance is not prepossessing; having a slouch in his gait and rather slovenly in his dress tho’ his clothes were new and good. He confesses to this. He admired the wildness of our scenery, deprecated the breaking in of improvements, as they are termed. He enquired after traditions, especially of the great Arthur: his object in visiting the County being to collect materials for a poem on that Chief. But he almost doubted his existence. He show’d me a MS. sketch of a history of the Hero: but it was prolix and modern.

You see, hinted in this extract from a journal, how our ancestors, in 1848 and the years roundabout, and in remote parts of England, welcomed these great men as gods: albeit critically, being themselves stout fellows. But above all these, from the publication of Pickwick—or, to be precise, of its fifth number, in which (as Beatrice would say) “there was a star danced” and under it Sam Weller was born—down to June 14, 1870, and the funeral in Westminster Abbey, Dickens stood exalted, in a rank apart. Nay, when he had been laid in the grave upon which, left and right, face the monuments of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dryden, and for days after the grave was closed, the stream of unbidden mourners went by. “All day long,” wrote Dean Stanley on the 17th, “there was a constant pressure on the spot, and many flowers were strewn on it by unknown hands, many tears shed from unknown eyes.”

Without commenting on it for the moment, I want you to realise this exaltation of Dickens in the popular mind, his countrymen’s and countrywomen’s intimate, passionate pride in him; in the first place because it is an historical fact, and a fact (I think) singular in our literary history; but also because, as a phenomenon itself unique—unique, at any rate, in its magnitude—it reacted singularly upon the man and his work, and you must allow for this if you would thoroughly understand either.

IV

To begin with, you must get it out of your minds that it resembled any popularity known to us, in our day: the deserved popularity of Mr. Kipling, for example. You must also (of this generation I may be asking a hard thing, but it is necessary) get it out of your minds that Dickens was, in any sense at all, a cheap artist playing to the gallery. He was a writer of imperfect, or hazardous, literary education: but he was also a man of iron will and an artist of the fiercest literary conscience. Let me enforce this by quoting two critics whom you will respect. “The faults of Dickens,” says William Ernest Henley,

were many and grave. He wrote some nonsense; he sinned repeatedly against taste; he could be both noisy and vulgar; he was apt to be a caricaturist where he should have been a painter; he was often mawkish and often extravagant; and he was sometimes more inept than a great writer has ever been. But his work, whether good or bad, has in full measure the quality of sincerity. He meant what he did; and he meant it with his whole heart. He looked upon himself as representative and national—as indeed he was; he regarded his work as a universal possession; and he determined to do nothing that for lack of pains should prove unworthy of his function. If he sinned, it was unadvisedly and unconsciously; if he failed it was because he knew no better. You feel that as you read....

He had enchanted the public without an effort: he was the best beloved of modern writers almost from the outset of his career. But he had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if all his life he never ceased from self-education, but went unswervingly in pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise.

Now let me add this testimony from Mr. G. K. Chesterton:

Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For the kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted.... Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked up to the people. He approached the people like a deity and poured out his riches and his blood. He had not merely produced something they could understand, but he took it seriously, and toiled and agonised to produce it. They were not only enjoying one of the best writers, they were enjoying the best he could do. His raging and sleepless nights, his wild walks in the darkness, his note-books crowded, his nerves in rags, all this extraordinary output was but a fit sacrifice to the ordinary man.

“The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens,” wrote Carlyle of him, on hearing the news of his death,—“every inch of him an honest man.” “What a face it is to meet,” had said Leigh Hunt, years before; and Mrs. Carlyle, “It was as if made of steel.”

V

I shall endeavour to appraise with you, by and by, the true worth of this amazing popularity. For the moment I merely ask you to consider the fact and the further fact that Dickens took it with the seriousness it deserved and endeavoured more and more to make himself adequate to it. He had—as how could he help having?—an enormous consciousness of the power he wielded: a consciousness which in action too often displayed itself as an irritable conscientiousness. For instance, Pickwick is a landmark in our literature: its originality can no more be disputed than the originality (say) of the Divina Commedia. “I thought of Pickwick”—is his classical phrase. He thought of Pickwick—and Pickwick was. But just because the ill-fated illustrator, Seymour—who shot himself before the great novel had found its stride—was acclaimed by some as its inventor, Dickens must needs charge into the lists with the hottest, angriest, most superfluous, denials. Even so, later on, when he finds it intolerable to go on living with his wife, the world is, somehow or other, made acquainted with this distressing domestic affair as though by a papal encyclical. Or, even so, when he chooses (in Bleak House) to destroy an alcoholised old man by “spontaneous combustion”—quite unnecessarily—a solemn preface has to be written to explain that such an end is scientifically possible. This same conscientiousness made him (and here our young novelist of to-day will start to blaspheme) extremely scrupulous about scandalising his public—I use the term in its literal sense of laying a stumbling-block, a cause of offence. For example, while engaged upon Dombey and Son, he has an idea (and a very good idea too, though he abandoned it) that instead of keeping young Walter the unspoilt boyish lover that he is, he will portray the lad as gradually yielding to moral declension, through hope deferred—a theme which, as you will remember, he afterwards handled in Bleak House: and he seriously writes thus about it to his friend Forster:

About the boy, who appears in the last chapter of the first number—I think it would be a good thing to disappoint all the expectations that chapter seems to raise of his happy connection with the story and the heroine, and to show him gradually and naturally trailing away, from that love of adventure and boyish light-heartedness, into negligence, idleness, dissipation, dishonesty and ruin. To show, in short, that common, every day, miserable declension of which we know so much in our ordinary life: to exhibit something of the philosophy of it, in great temptations and an easy nature; and to show how the good turns into the bad, by degrees. If I kept some notion of Florence always at the bottom of it, I think it might be made very powerful and very useful. What do you think? Do you think it may be done without making people angry?

George Gissing—in a critical study of Dickens which cries out for reprinting—imagines a young writer of the ’nineties (as we may imagine a young writer of to-day) coming on that and crying out upon it.

What! a great writer, with a great idea, to stay his hand until he has made grave enquiry whether Messrs. Mudie’s subscribers will approve it or not! The mere suggestion is infuriating.... Look at Flaubert, for example. Can you imagine him in such a sorry plight? Why, nothing would have pleased him better than to know he was outraging public sentiment! In fact, it is only when one does so that one’s work has a chance of being good.

All which, adds Gissing, may be true enough in relation to the speaker. As regards Dickens, it is irrelevant. And Gissing speaks the simple truth; “that he owed it to his hundreds of thousands of readers to teach them a new habit of judgment Dickens did not see or begin to see.” But that it lay upon him to deal with his public scrupulously he felt in the very marrow of his bones. Let me give you two instances:

When editing Household Words he receives from a raw contributor a MS. impossible as sent, in which he detects merit. “I have had a story,” he writes to Forster, “to hack and hew into some form this morning, which has taken me four hours of close attention.” “Four hours of Dickens’ time,” comments Gissing, “in the year 1856, devoted to such a matter as this!—where any ordinary editor, or rather his assistant, would have contented himself with a few blottings and insertions, sure that ‘the great big stupid heart of the public,’ as Thackeray called it, would be no better pleased, toil how one might.”

For my second instance. The next year, 1857, was Mutiny Year, and closed upon an England raging mad over the story of Cawnpore. Dickens and Wilkie Collins, on a tour together in the north of England, had contrived a Christmas Number for Household Words, announced and entitled The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and their Treasures in Women, Children, Silver and Jewels. The public expected a red-hot account of the Nana Sahib, the treacherous embarkation, the awful voyage down the Ganges. It was all there, to the man’s hand, with illimitable applause for his mere inviting. But it might inflame—and, inflaming, hurt—the nation’s temper, and therefore he would have none of it: he, Dickens, the great literary Commoner; lord over millions of English and to them, and to right influence on them, bounden. Therefore the public got something more profitable than it craved for: it got a romantic story empty of racial or propagandist hatred; a simple narrative of peril and adventure on a river in South America.

VI

But now let us see what a light this conscious popularity throws upon two important events in Dickens’ career: his visit to the United States in 1842, and his invention, the next year, of the “Christmas Book.”

Dickens went over to America as a great personage: securely, but neither immodestly nor overweeningly conscious of it. He went over also as a great and genuine early-Victorian radical; something better than any politician; an unbribed and unbribable writer, immensely potent, with a pen already dedicated to war against social abuses. He landed at Boston, fully expecting to see Liberty in realisation under the star-spangled banner. He found Colonel Diver and Mr. Jefferson Brick, Mr. La Fayette Kettle and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. He found, of course, a fervent and generous hospitality that sprang, in Forster’s words, “from feelings honourable both to giver and receiver,” and was bestowed sincerely, if with a touch of bravado and challenge—“We of the New World want to show you, by extending the kind of homage that the Old World reserves for kings and conquerors, to a young man with nothing to distinguish him but his heart and his genius, what it is we think in these parts worthier of honour than birth or wealth, a title or a sword.” These are Forster’s words again, and they do well enough. The hospitality included no doubt a good deal of the ridiculous: food for innocent caricature of the kind provided in the great Pogram levee where the two Literary Ladies are presented to the Honourable Elijah by the Mother of the Modern Gracchi.

“To be presented to a Pogram,” said Miss Codger, “by a Hominy, indeed a thrilling moment is it in its impressiveness on what we call our feelings. But why we call them so, and why impressed they are, or if impressed they are at all, or if at all we are, or if there really is, oh gasping one! a Pogram or a Hominy, or any active principle to which we give those titles is a topic, Spirit searching, light-abandoned, much too vast to enter on, at this unlooked-for Crisis.” “Mind and Matter,” said the lady in the wig, “glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination. To hear it, sweet it is. But then outlaughs the stern philosopher, and saith to the Grotesque, ‘What ho! arrest for me that agency! Go bring it here! And so the vision fadeth.’”

I will not take oath that I have not heard faint echoes of that sort of talk at literary gatherings within a mile or so of this very spot. But if it be not to some extent endemic in America even to-day, then all I can say is that certain American authors (Mrs. Edith Wharton for one) have misrepresented it far more cruelly than ever did Charles Dickens, or certainly than I, with no knowledge at all, have any wish to do.

But what brought Dickens up with a round turn was his discovery (as he believed) that in this land of freedom no man was free to speak his thought.

“I believe,” he wrote to Forster on Feb. 24th, “there is no country on the face of the earth where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference of opinion than in this.... There!—I write the words with reluctance, disappointment and sorrow: but I believe it from the bottom of my soul.”

He did believe it, and it shocked him inexpressibly. “Very well,” it may be answered; “but there were obligations. A man should not publicly criticise a country in which he is an honoured guest.” Yes, but he had gone out to the States with intent to discuss the question of copyright, or rather of literary piracy, in which American law and practice were so flagrantly immoral that he had never a doubt of getting both rectified by a little heart-to-heart talk (as we call it now) with some of their public men and lawgivers. Dickens was always a good man of business. As the most widely-read of British authors, and therefore the chief of sufferers, he could speak authoritatively on behalf of his poorer brethren. He went, and received on a grand scale that shock which on a far modester scale many of us have experienced in our time, with the sort of embarrassment one feels (let us say) in sitting down to Bridge with a very delightful person whose code in the matter of revoking is rather notoriously “off colour.” Let me illustrate this by the remark of a just man at Washington in the debate preceding the latest copyright enactment. A member of Congress had pleaded for the children of the backwoods—these potential Abraham Lincolns devouring education by the light of pine-knot fires—how desirable that these little Sons of Liberty should be able to purchase their books (as he put it) “free of authorial expenses!” “Hear, hear!” retorted my just man. “And the negroes of the South too—so fond of chicken free of farmer-ial expenses!”—A great saying!

And yet Dickens was wrong: in my opinion wrong as an English Gentleman, being America’s Guest. On the balance I hold that he should have thought what he thought and, thinking it, have shortened his visit and come silently away.

Well, Dickens discussed the matter with Washington Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant, Dana and others, and found that while every writer in America was agreed upon the atrocious state of the law, not a man of them dared to speak out. The suggestion that an American could be found with temerity enough to hint that his country was possibly wrong struck the boldest dumb. “Then,” said Dickens, “I shall speak out”: and he did. “I wish you could have seen,” he writes home, “the faces that I saw, down both sides of the table at Hartford, when I began to talk about Scott.” [Remember, please, this is my interjection, Gentlemen, that, on a small portion of his dues, on a 10 per cent. (say) of his plundered sales, the great Sir Walter Scott would have died in calm of mind and just prosperity.] “I wish you could have heard how I gave it out. My blood so boiled as I thought of the monstrous injustice that I felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their throats.”

The violence of the reaction upon Dickens you can of course study in American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit. But the real import of these two books and the violence of resentment they raised, we shall not understand without realising that Dickens went over, was feasted: was disappointed, then outraged, and spoke his mind, from first to last as a representative of the democracy of this country, always conscious of a great, if undefined, responsibility and, under disappointment, resolute to be brave, at whatever cost of favour.

VII

The same grand consciousness seems to me to have been the true inspiration of his “Christmas Books.” For a private confession, I dislike them: I find them—A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Haunted Man—grossly sentimental and as grossly overcharged with violent conversions to the “Christmas Spirit.” For a further confession I greatly prefer several of his later Christmas Stories in Household Words and All the Year Round—The Wreck of the “Golden Mary” for instance, or Dr. Marigold’s Prescriptions or The Holly-Tree Inn—to this classic five which are still separated in the collected editions under the title of “Christmas Books.” He himself confessed, in a general preface of less than a dozen lines, his inability to work out character in the limits he assigned himself—a hundred pages or so. “My chief purpose,” he says of A Christmas Carol, “was, in a whimsical kind of masque which the good humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land.” But he took it as a mission, and quite seriously. Christmas to England had always meant, and should mean, a festival of neighbourly goodwill and robust hospitality. Listen to the old Carols:

Now thrice welcome, Christmas,

Which brings us good cheer,

Minced pies and plum porridge,

Good ale and strong beer;

With pig, goose and capon,

The best that may be,

So well doth the weather

And our stomachs agree.

Or

Now that the time is come wherein

Our Saviour Christ was born,

The larders full of beef and pork,

The garners fill’d with corn....

Or

Bring us in good ale, and bring us in good ale;

For our blessed Lady’s sake, bring us in good ale.

These out of a score or more verses I might quote from Poor Robin’s Almanack and the like. But take Campion’s more aristocratic Muse:

Now winter nights enlarge

The number of their hours,

And clouds their storms discharge

Upon the airy towers.

Let now the chimneys blaze

And cups o’erflow with wine;

Let well-attuned words amaze

With harmony divine.

Now yellow waxen lights

Shall wait on honey love,

While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights

Sleep’s leaden spell remove.

Carry this again down to Frederick Tennyson’s The Holy Tide:

The days are sad, it is the Holy tide;

The Winter morn is short, the Night is long;

So let the lifeless Hours be glorified

With deathless thoughts and echo’d in sweet song:

And through the sunset of this purple cup

They will resume the roses of their prime,

And the old Dead will hear us and wake up,

Pass with dim smiles and make our hearts sublime.

“An Englishman’s house is his Castle,” said an immortal farmer at a Fat Stock Dinner. “The storms may assail it and the winds whistle round it, but the King himself cannot do so.” Dickens saw always the Englishman’s house as his castle, fortified and provisioned against the discharge of snow and sleet: always most amply provisioned! Witness his picture of Christmas at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell—Old Wardle with his friends, neighbours, poor relations, and his farm-labourers too, all sitting down together to a colossal supper “and a mighty bowl of wassail something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look and jolly sound that were perfectly irresistible.”

Old Wardle, in fact, is in the direct line of succession to Chaucer’s Frankeleyne—

Withoute bake mete was never his hous,

Of fish and flesh, and that so plenteous,

It snewed in his hous of mete and drink.

Dickens, I repeat to you, was always, in the straight line of Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Fielding, a preacher of man’s dignity in his full appetite; and quite consciously, as a national genius, he preached the doctrine of Christmas to his nation.

VIII

But you will say perhaps “Granted his amazing popularity—granted, too, his right to assume on it—was it really deserved?” To this question I oppose for the moment my opinion that, were I asked to choose out of the story of English Literature a short list of the most fecund authors, I should start with Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Dickens, Browning. If compelled to reduce the list to three, choosing the three most lavishly endowed by God with imagination for their fellows’ good, I almost think that among all God’s plenty I should choose, as pre-eminent stars, Shakespeare, Burke and Dickens. Milton, of course, will stand apart always, a solitary star: and Chaucer for his amazing invention, less even for what he did than for that he did it at all; Keats for infinity of promise; and to exclude Scott seems almost an outrage on human kindness. Yet if it come to the mere wonder-work of genius—the creation of men and women, on a page of paper, who are actually more real to us than our daily acquaintances, as companionable in a crowd as even our best selected friends, as individual as the most eccentric we know, yet as universal as humanity itself, I do not see what English writer we can choose to put second to Shakespeare save Charles Dickens. I am talking of sheer creative power, as I am thinking of Tasso’s proud saying that, next to God himself, no one but the poet deserves the name of Creator. You feel of Dickens as of Shakespeare that anything may happen: because it is not with them as with other authors: it is not they who speak. Falstaff or Hamlet or Sam Weller or Mr. Micawber: it is the god speaking:

Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα.

They are as harps upon which the large wind plays: and as that is illimitable there is no limit to their utterances. It was so with Charles Dickens from the Sam Weller of his lost youth down to the last when, in pain and under the shadow of death, he invented the Billickin.

In another lecture I propose to show you (if I can) that Dickens’ characters belong to a world of his own, rather than to this one. But if he also created that world of his own, so much the grander creator he!—As if he made men and women walk and talk in it, compelling us to walk with them, and listen, and, above all, open our lungs and laugh, suffer within the tremendous illusion, so much is he the more potent magician! I also feel, in reading Shakespeare, or Dickens—I would add Burke—as I feel with no fourth that I am dealing with a scope of genius quite incalculable; that while it keeps me proud to belong to their race and nation and to inherit their speech, it equally keeps me diffident because, at any turn of the page may occur some plenary surprise altogether beyond my power or scope of guessing. With these three writers, as with no fourth, I have the sensation of a certain faintness of enjoyment, of surrender, to be borne along as on vast wings. Yet of Dickens, as of Shakespeare, the worst work can be incredibly bad. Sorrier stuff could scarcely be written, could scarcely conceivably have ever been written, than the whole part of Speed in The Two Gentlemen of Verona unless it be the first chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit. Yet in Martin Chuzzlewit you get Mrs. Gamp: and I ask you, How much the poorer should we not all be, lacking Mrs. Gamp?

I grant you that he has not yet passed—as he has not yet had time to pass—the great test of a classical writer; which is that, surviving the day’s popularity and its conditions, his work goes on meaning more, under quite different conditions, to succeeding ages; the great test which Shakespeare has passed more than once or twice, remaining to-day, though quite differently, even more significant than he was to his contemporaries. I grant—as in another lecture I shall be at pains to show—that Dickens’ plots were usually incredible, often monstrous. But he invented a world: he peopled it with men and women for our joy: and my confidence in the diuturnity of his fame rests even on more than this—on the experience that, test this genius by whatever standard a critic may, he has by and by to throw down his measure and admit that, while Dickens was always a learner, out of his prodigality he could have at any moment knocked the critic over by creating a new world with new and delectable lasting characters to take it in charge.

DICKENS (II)

I

I take up my parable for a few words more upon the point at which I broke off last week—the essential greatness of Dickens. For greatness is a quality in some few men: indefinable perhaps, but yet to be recognised; a certain thing and, by those of us who would traffic with life or literature, not to be overlooked or denied save at our soul’s peril, no matter what standard of artistry or of refined scholarship we may set up: a quality in itself, moreover, and not any addition or multiplication or raising of talent by industry. For an illustration of the peril: I was reading, the other day, a history of French Literature by the late M. Ferdinand Brunetière, and, coming to the time of Alexandre Dumas the elder, I found that the historian, disapproving of Dumas, has just left him out! Now that, I contend (saving M. Brunetière’s eminence), is to write oneself down a pedant, outside the catholic mind. Dumas lived a scandalous life, wrote much execrable French, and encouraged—even employed—some of his fellows to write worse. But the author of The Three Musketeers, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, La Reine Margot—Dumas, “the seven-and-seventy times to be forgiven,” is not to be treated so, by your leave: or only so, I repeat, at the critic’s peril. Or let me take an Englishman—John Dryden. I suspect I shall not misrepresent or misreport the attitude of many in this room towards Dryden when I say that we find a world of slovenly sorry stuff in his dramas, and in his poems a deal of wit and rhetoric which our later taste—such as it is, good or bad, true or false—refuses to pass for poetry at all. Now if I merely wanted to prove to you that Dryden at his best could write finely, exquisitely—that out of the strong could come forth sweetness—I could content myself with asking you to listen to these verses:

No, no, poor suffering heart, no change endeavour,

Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her;

My ravish’d eyes behold such charms about her,

I can die with her, but not live without her

One tender sigh of her, to see me languish,

Will more than pay the price of my past anguish;

Beware, O cruel fair, how you smile on me,

’Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me.

Love has in store for me one happy minute,

And she will end my pain, who did begin it;

Then no day, void of bliss, of pleasure, leaving,

Ages shall slide away without perceiving:

Cupid shall guard the door, the more to please us,

And keep out Time and Death, when they would seize us:

Time and Death shall depart, and say in flying,

“Love has found out a way to live—by dying.”

There, obviously, is a virtuoso who commands his keyboard. But if I were talking about Dryden to you for your soul’s good, I should rather show you the man with all his imperfections on his head, then turn and challenge you to deny his greatness. Why, you can scarcely read a page, even of his prose—say, for choice, the opening of his Essay of Dramatic Poesy—without recognising the tall fellow of his hands, the giant among his peers,

ψυχἠ ...

... μακρὰ βιβᾶσα κατ’ ἀσφοδελὸν λειμῶνα,

“pacing with long stride the asphodel meadow” where, let us say, Samuel Johnson walks, and Handel, and Hugo, nor are they abashed to salute the very greatest—Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare.

I repeat, Gentlemen, that at all risk of appearing exorbitant I should preach this to you for your souls’ good. For I do most earnestly want you, before all else, to recognise this quality of greatness and respond to it. In so far as, in your fleeting generation, you give me your confidence and honour me (shall I say?) with a personal hope for A or B or C, I would warn you of what I have experimentally proved to be true of my contemporaries—that the man is most fatally destined to be great himself who learns early to enlarge his heart to the great masters; that those have steadily sunk who cavilled at Caesar with Cassius, or over a cigarette chatted admiringly of the rent which envious Casca made: that anyone with an ear learns very surely to distinguish the murmur of the true bee from the morose hum of the drone who is bringing no honey, nor ever will, to the hive. In my own time of apprenticeship—say in the ’nineties—we were all occupied—after the French novelists—with style: in seeking the right word, le mot juste, and with “art for art’s sake,” etc. And we were serious enough, mind you. We cut ourselves with knives. To-day, if I may diagnose your more youthful sickness, you are occupied rather with lyricism, curious and recondite sensations, appositions of unrelated facts with magenta-coloured adjectives. The craze has spread to the shop-fronts, to curtains, bedspreads, as the craze for Byronic collars spread in its day: and “Hell is empty!” cried Ferdinand, plunging overboard: but you can still find psycho-analysis rampant, with any amount of Birth Control, among the geese on Golder’s Green. But if from this desk I have preached incessantly on a text, it is this—that all spirit being mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually attractive, is an ultimate fact: and that therefore we shall grow the greater and better critics as we surrender ourselves to the great writers and without detraction, at least until we have, in modesty of mind, proved them: since, to apply a word of Emerson’s:

Heartily know—

When half-gods go,

The gods arrive.

II

So I broke off, or almost, upon a saying of Tasso’s—you may find it repeated in Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries—that in this world none deserves the name of Creator save God himself and the Poet—by “Poet” meaning, of course, the great imaginative artist whether working in restricted verse or in “that other harmony of prose.”

And you may be thinking—I don’t doubt, a number will be thinking—that in a discourse on Dickens, I am putting the claim altogether too high. I can feel your minds working, I think—working to some such tune as this “Dickens and Virgil, now—Dickens and Dante—Oh, heaven alive!”

You cannot say that I have shirked it—can you?

Well now, fair and softly! If I had said “Dickens and Shakespeare,” it would have given you no such shock: and if I had said “Shakespeare and Dante,” or “Dickens and Molière,” it would have given you no shock at all. I am insisting, you understand, that the first test of greatness in an imaginative writer is his power to create: and I propose to begin with that which, if there should by any chance happen to be a fool in this apparently representative gathering, he will infallibly despise for the easiest thing in the world, the creation of a fool. I beg to reassure him and, so far as I can, restore his self-respect. It is about the hardest thing in the world, to create a fool and laugh at him. It is a human, nay, even a Godlike function (so and not by others shared) to laugh. Listen, before we go further, to these stanzas on divine laughter:

Nay, ’tis a Godlike function; laugh thy fill!

Mirth comes to thee unsought:

Mirth sweeps before it like a flood the mill

Of languaged logic: thought

Hath not its source so high;

The will

Must let it by:

For, though the heavens are still,

God sits upon His hill

And sees the shadows fly:

And if He laughs at fools, why should He not?

“Yet hath the fool a laugh”—Yea, of a sort;

God careth for the fools;

The chemic tools

Of laughter He hath given them, and some toys

Of sense, as ’twere a small retort

Wherein they may collect the joys

Of natural giggling, as becomes their state:

The fool is not inhuman, making sport

For such as would not gladly be without

That old familiar noise:

Since, though he laugh not, he can cachinnate—

This also is of God, we may not doubt.

Shakespeare, as we know, delighted in a fool, and revelled in creating one. (I need hardly say that I am not talking of the professionals, such as Touchstone or the Fool in Lear, who are astute critics rather, ridiculing the folly of their betters by reflexion by some odd facet of common sense, administering hellebore to minds diseased and so in their function often reminding us of the Chorus in Greek tragedy.) I mean, of course, the fool in his quiddity, such as Dogberry, or Mr. Justice Shallow, or Cousin Abraham Slender. Hearken to Dogberry:

Dog. Come hither, neighbour Seacole. God hath blessed you with a good name: to be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.

Sec. Watch. Both which, master Constable—

Dog. You have: I knew it would be your answer. Well, for your favour, sir, why, give God thanks, and make no boast of it; and for your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity.

Why, it might be an extract from the Geddes Report—or so much of it as deals with Education!

And now to Slender, bidden in by sweet Anne Page to her father’s dinner-table:

Anne. Will it please your worship to come in, sir?

Slender. No—I thank you, forsooth—heartily. I am very well.

Anne. The dinner attends you, sir.

Slender. I am not a-hungry, I thank you, forsooth....

Anne. I may not go in without your worship; they will not sit till you come.

Slender. I’faith, I’ll eat nothing: I thank you as much as though I did.

Anne. I pray you, sir, walk in.

Slender. I had rather walk here—I thank you. I bruised my shin th’ other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of fence—three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes—and, I with my ward defending my head, he shot my shin, and by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.... Why do your dogs bark so? Be there bears in town?

Anne. I think there are, sir. I heard them talked of.

Slender. I love the sport well, but I shall as soon quarrel at it as any man in England.... You are afraid, if you see a bear loose, are you not?

Anne. Ay, indeed, sir.

Slender. That’s meat and drink to me, now: I have seen Sackerson loose—twenty times, and have taken him by the chain.... But women, indeed, cannot abide ’em—they are very ill-favoured rough things.

“Othello,” as Hartley Coleridge noted, “could not brag more amorously”: and, as I wrote the other day in an introduction to The Merry Wives, when Anne finally persuades him to walk before her into the house, my fellow-editor and I had written (but afterwards in cowardice erased) the stage-direction, He goes in: she follows with her apron spread, as if driving a goose. Yes, truly, Slender is a goose to say grace over and to be carved “as a dish fit for the gods.” “A very potent piece of imbecility,” writes Hazlitt, and adds, “Shakespeare is the only writer who was as great in describing weakness as strength.”

Well, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens came after, to confirm Hazlitt’s observation. No one seeks in Jane Austen for examples of strength: and you will find none in Dickens to compare with Othello or Cleopatra or (say) with Mr. Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. But, like Charles Lamb, Jane Austen and Dickens both “loved a fool”: Jane Austen delicately, Dickens riotously: witness the one’s Miss Bates, the other’s Mr. Toots. But observe, pray: the fools they delight in are always—like Slender, like Miss Bates, like Mr. Toots—simple fools, sincere fools, good at heart, good to live with, and in their way, the salt of the earth. Miss Bates herself bears unconscious witness to this in one of her wisest foolishest remarks—“It is such a happiness when good people get together—and they always do.” (Consoling thought for you and me at this very moment.) With the fool who is also a humbug, a self-deceiver, Dickens could find no patience in his heart; and this impatience of his you may test again and again, always to find it—if I may say so with reverence—as elementary as our Lord’s. I am not speaking of conscious, malignant hypocrites—your Stiggins’s, Pecksniffs, Chadbands—on whom Dickens waged war, his life through; but of the self-deceiving fool whom we will agree with him in calling an “ass”—Uncle Pumblechook, for instance, in Great Expectations, Mr. Sapsea in Edwin Drood; on whom, or on whose kind, as he grew older, he seems (most of all in his last book, whenever handling Mr. Sapsea) to lose his artistic self-control, to savage them. But of kind fools, lovable fools, good fools, God’s fools, Dickens’ heaven will open any moment at call and rain you down half-a-dozen, all human, each distinct. You may count half-a-dozen in his most undeservedly misprised book, Little Dorrit, omitting Mr. F.’s Aunt: who is an eccentric, rather, though an unforgettable one and has left her unforgettable mark on the world in less than 200 words. She stands apart: for the others, apart from foolishness, share but one gift in common, a consanguinity (as it were) in flow of language or determination of words to the mouth. Shall we select the vulgar, breathless, good-natured widow, Flora Finching, ever recalling the past (without so much pause as a comma’s) to her disillusioned first lover?—

In times for ever fled Arthur pray excuse me Doyce and Clennam (the name of his firm) infinitely more correct and though unquestionably distant still ’tis distance lends enchantment to the view, at least I don’t mean that and if I did I suppose it would depend considerably on the nature of the view, but I’m running on again and you put it all out of my head.

She glanced at him tenderly and resumed:

In times for ever fled I was going to say it would have sounded strange indeed for Arthur Clennam—Doyce and Clennam naturally quite different—to make apologies for coming here at any time, but that is past and what is past can never be recalled except in his own case as poor Mr. F. said when in spirits Cucumber and therefore never ate it.... Papa is sitting prosingly, breaking his new laid egg over the City article, exactly like the Woodpecker Tapping, and need never know that you are here....

The withered chaplet is then perished the column is crumbled and the pyramid is standing upside down upon its what’s-his-name call it not giddiness call it not weakness call it not folly I must now retire into privacy and looking upon the ashes of departed joys no more but taking the further liberty of paying for the pastry which has formed the humble pretext for our interview, will for ever say Adieu!

Mr. F’s Aunt who had eaten her pie with great solemnity ... and who had been elaborating some grievous scheme of injury in her mind, took the present opportunity of addressing the following sibyllic apostrophe to the relict of her late nephew: “Bring him for’ard, and I’ll chuck him out o’ winder!”

III

Mr. Chesterton, selecting another fool from the gallery—Young Mr. Guppy, of Bleak House—observes very wisely, that we may disapprove of Mr. Guppy, but we recognise him as a creation flung down like a miracle out of an upper sphere: we can pull him to pieces, but we could not have put him together. And this (says he) is the pessimists’ disadvantage in criticising any creation. Even in their attacks on the Universe they are always under this depressing disadvantage.

“A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard the hippopotamus as an enormous mistake: but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such a mistake.”

Well, that is, of course, our difficulty in criticising all creative genius. We tell ourselves how we could have suggested to Shakespeare—or to Dickens—his doing this or that better than he did; but the mischief is, we could not have done it at all. And in this matter of Mr. Guppy, Mr. Chesterton continues: “Not one of us could have invented Mr. Guppy. But even if we could have stolen Mr. Guppy from Dickens, we have still to confront the fact that Dickens would have been able to invent another quite inconceivable character to take his place.”

IV

Here we get to it. I have instanced his fools only, and but a select two or three of these for a test: but you may take, if you will, shrewd men, miserly men, ruffians, doctors, proctors, prisoners, schoolmasters, coachmen, licensed victuallers, teetotallers, thieves, monthly nurses—whatever the choice be, Dickens will shake them out of his sleeve to populate a world for us. For, like Balzac, he has a world of his own and can at call dispense to us of its abundance.

What sort of a world is it out of which Dickens so enriches ours?

Well, to begin with, it is a crowded world, a world that in his imagination positively teems with folk going, coming, hurrying: of innumerable streets where you may knock in (and welcome) at any chance door to find the house in accumulated misery, poverty, woe, or else in a disorder of sausages and squalling children, with a henpecked husband at one end of the table, a bowl of punch in the middle, and at the other end a mortuary woman whose business in life is to make a burden of life to all who live near her and would have her cheerful. (There was never such a man as Dickens for depicting the blight induced by one ill-tempered person—usually a woman—upon a convivial gathering.) The henpecked husband dispensing the punch is, likely as not, a city clerk contriving a double debt to pay, a slave during office hours, bound to a usurious master: a sort of fairy—a Puck, a Mr. Wemmick, as soon as he sheds his office-coat and makes for somewhere in the uncertain gaslight of the suburbs, “following darkness like a dream.”

Yes, this world is of the streets; in which Dickens was bred and from which he drew the miseries and consolations of his boyhood. A world “full of folk,” but not, like Piers Plowman’s, a “field full of folk.” His understanding of England is in many ways as deep as Shakespeare’s; but it is all, or almost all, of the urban England which in his day had already begun to kill the rural. I ask you to consider any average drawing of Phiz’s; the number of figures crowded into a little room, the many absurd things all happening at once, and you will understand why Phiz was Dickens’ favourite illustrator. A crowded world: an urban world, largely a middle-class and lower-class London world—what else could we expect as outcome of a boyhood spent in poverty and in London? Of London his knowledge is indeed, like Sam Weller’s, “extensive and peculiar”: with a background or distance of the lower Thames, black wharves peopled by waterside loafers or sinister fishers in tides they watch for horrible traffic; rotting piles such as caught and held the corpse of Quilp. Some sentiment, indeed, up Twickenham-way: a handful of flowers, taken from the breast and dropped at the river’s brink, to be floated down, pale and unreal, in the moonlight; “and thus do greater things that once were in our breasts and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal seas.” But before they reach the eternal seas they must pass Westminster Bridge whence an inspired dalesman saw the City wearing the beauty of dawn as a garment.

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples ... and Waterloo Bridge, Hood’s dark arch of tragedy; and London Bridge, hymned of old by Dunbar. Dickens’ bridge is the old Iron one by Hungerford, and under it the Thames runs down to ghastly flats, convict-haunted, below Woolwich.

Shakespeare knew his London, his Eastcheap, its taverns. But when you think of Shakespeare you think (I will challenge you) rather of rural England, of Avon, of Arden, of native wood-notes wild. I hold it doubtful that Falstaff on his death-bed babbled o’ green fields: but I will take oath that when he got down to Gloucestershire he smelt the air like a colt or a boy out of school. And Justice Shallow is there—always there!

Silence. This Sir John, cousin, that comes hither anon about soldiers?

Shallow. The same Sir John, the very same. I saw him break Skogan’s head at the court-gate, when a’ was a crack not thus high: and the very same day did I fight with one Sampson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray’s Inn. Jesu, Jesu, the mad days I have spent! and to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead!

Silence. We shall all follow, cousin.

Shallow. Certain, ’tis certain; very sure, very sure: death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair?

Silence. By my troth, I was not there.

Shallow. Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet?

Silence. Dead, sir.

Shallow. Jesu, Jesu, dead! a’ drew a good bow: and dead! a’ shot a fine shoot: John a Gaunt loved him well, and betted much money on his head. Dead!—a’ would have clapped i’ the clout at twelve score; and carried you a forehand shaft a fourteen and fourteen and a half, that it would have done a man’s heart good to see. How a score of ewes now?

Silence. Thereafter as they be: a score of good ewes may be worth ten pounds.

Shallow. And is old Double dead?

You get little or none of that solemn, sweet rusticity in Dickens: nor of the rush of England in spring with slow country-folk watching it:

The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,

Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit;

In every street these tunes our ears do greet—

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

Spring, the sweet Spring!

You will remember that Pickwick, in its first conception, was to deal with the adventures and misadventures of a Sporting Club after the fashion of the Handley Cross series by Surtees. Now Surtees—not a great writer but to this day (at any rate to me) a most amusing one—was, although like Dickens condemned to London and the law, a north-country sportsman, and could ride and, it is reported, “without riding for effect usually saw a deal of what the hounds were doing.” The Pickwickian sportsmen had to decline that competition very soon.

V

But they, and a host of Dickens’ characters, are very devils for post-chaises.

“If I had no duties, and no deference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman,” said Dr. Johnson. “There are milestones on the Dover Road,” and we spin past them. You will remember that Dickens in his apprenticeship spent a brief but amazingly strenuous while as reporter for the Morning Chronicle, scouring the country after political meetings by road-vehicles in all weathers. As he told his audience, twenty years later, at the annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund:

I have often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been, to a young man, severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.... Returning home from exciting political meetings in the country (and it might be from Exeter west, or Manchester north) to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated in miry by-roads, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication....

So, you see, this world Dickens imagined was more than crowded; it was a hurrying, a breathless one. This sense of speed in travel, of the wind in one’s face; of weight and impetus in darkness, with coach lamps flaring through the steam from your good horses’ hindquarters, runs as an inspiration through much of the literature of the early nineteenth century. De Quincey has hymned it magnificently in The English Mail Coach, and you may enjoy a capital drive of the sort in Tom Brown’s School Days: and always the rush of air whets your appetite for the hot rum-and-water at the stage hostelry or the breakfast of kidney-pie. Dickens saw the invasion of the railway train, and lived to be disastrously mixed up in a railway collision. But railway-train travelling at sixty miles an hour or over, has a static convenience. For the pleasures of inconvenient travel, without a time-table, I have recourse to a sailing-boat: but I can well understand my fellow-creature who prefers a car or a motor-bicycle to the motion of four horses at a stretch gallop. With the wind of God in his face he gets there (wherever it is) before the dew is dry, does his business, swallows his bun and Bovril and is home again with an evening paper for the cosy gas-cooked meal, ere yet Eve has drawn over his little place in the country her gradual dusky veil.

Rapid travel, as Dickens well knew it and how to describe it—with crime straining from what it fears—is one of his most potent resources. Read the flight of Carker in Dombey and Son.

VI

His is a crowded world then, tumultuous and full of fierce hurry: but a world (let us grant it) strangely empty of questioning ideas, subtle nuisances that haunt many thoughtful men’s souls, through this pass of existence “still clutching the inviolable shade.” He wrote far better novels than John Inglesant, novels far, far, better than Robert Ellesmere; but you cannot conceive him as interested in the matter of these books—which yet is serious matter. Still less, or at least as little, can you imagine him pursuing the track of so perplexed a spirit as Prince André in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Churches annoyed him. He will, of a christening or a marriage service (let be a funeral), make the mouldiest ceremony in the world. We offer the baby up; we give the blushing bride away; but in the very act we catch ourselves longing for that subsequent chat with the pew-opener which he seldom denies us for reward. Dickens, in short, had little use for religious forms or religious mysteries: for he carried his own religion about with him and it was the religion of James—so annoying alike to the mystic and the formalist—“to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” This again belongs to his “universality.” Is it not the religion of most good fellows not vocal? It is observable how many of his heroes and heroines—his child heroes and heroines especially—pass through his thronged streets and keep themselves unspotted.

But, if careless of mysteries, Dickens had a hawk’s eye for truth of morals. You never find him mocking a good or condoning an evil thing: here his judgment and its resultant passion of love or of hate, I dare to say, never went wrong. Sinners—real sinners—in Dickens have the very inferno of a time: the very forces of Nature—“fire and hail, snow and vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling God’s word”—hunt the murderer to the pit that yawns; till he perishes, and the sky is clear again over holy and humble men of heart. Again, witness, here, the elemental flight of Jonas Chuzzlewit. Carlyle never said an unjuster thing (and that is saying a deal) than when he accused Dickens’ theory of life as entirely wrong. “He thought men ought to be buttered up ... and all sorts of fellows have turkey for their Christmas dinner.” It is false. Dickens had a keener eye for sin than Carlyle ever had; and a relentless eye: “a military eye,” said Henry James of it, recalling his first introduction to the great man—“a merciless military eye.” “A field-punishment eye,” I say!

VII

But this world of Dickens, you may object, was an unreal world, a phantasmagoric world. Well, I hope to discuss that—or rather the inference from it—in my next lecture, which shall deal, in Aristotelian order, with his plots first and his characters next. But, for the moment, if you will, Yes: his world was like nothing on earth: yes, it is liker to Turner’s sunset to which the critic objected “he never saw a sunset like that,” and was answered, “Ah, but don’t you wish you could?” Yes, for Dickens made his world—as the proud parent said of his son’s fiddle—“he made it, sir, entirely out of his own head!”

“Night is generally my time for walking” (thus begins Master Humphrey, in The Old Curiosity Shop) “although I am an old man.”

So in that crowded phantasmagoric city of London, which is in his mind, Dickens walks by night—not like Asmodeus, lifting the roofs and peering into scandals: but like the good Caliph of his favourite Arabian Nights, intent to learn the life of the poor and oppressed, and as a monarch to see justice done them: a man patterning his work on the great lines of Fulke Greville, sometime of Jesus College, in this town; with which let me conclude to-day:

The chief use, then, in man, of that he knows,

Is his painstaking for the good of all:

Not fleshly weeping for our own-made woes,

Not laughing from a melancholy gall,

Not hating from a soul that overflows

With bitterness, breath’d out from inward thrall:

But sweetly rather to ease, loose, or bind,

As need requires, this frail, fall’n humankind.

DICKENS (III)

I

I left you, Gentlemen, with a promise to say something on Dickens’ plots and Dickens’ characters, taking them in that Aristotelian order. Now why Aristotle, speaking of drama, prefers Plot to Character; if his reasons are sound; if they are all the reasons; and, anyhow, if they can be transferred from drama and applied to the Novel; are questions which some of you have debated with me “in another place,” and, if without heat, yet with all the vigour demanded by so idle a topic. But, for certain, few of you will dissent when I say of Dickens that he is memorable and to be loved (if loved at all) for his characters rather than for his plots. You have (say) a general idea of Dombey and Son, a vivid recollection of Captain Cuttle, Mr. Toots, Susan Nipper, perhaps a vivid recollection of Carker’s long, hunted flight and its appalling end, when the pursuer, recovering from a swoon—

saw them bringing from a distance something covered ... upon a board, between four men, and saw that others drove some dogs away that sniffed upon the road, and soaked his blood up, with a train of ashes.

Or you have a general idea of Our Mutual Friend, and your memory preserves quite a sharp impression of Silas Wegg, Mr. Boffin, the Doll’s Dressmaker. But if suddenly asked how Carker’s flight came about, why Boffin practised his long dissimulation, and what precisely Wegg or the Doll’s Dressmaker had to do with it—could you, off-hand, supply a clear answer? Some votaries can, no doubt: but I ask it of the ordinary reader. Myself indeed may claim to be something of a votary, with an inexplicably soft spot in my heart for Little Dorrit: yet, and often as I have read that tale, I should be gravelled if asked, at this moment, to tell you just what was the secret of the old house, or just what Miss Wade and Tattycoram have to do with the story. Somehow, in retrospect, such questions do not seem to matter.

In truth, as I see it—and foresee it as a paradox, to be defended—Dickens was at once, like Shakespeare in the main, careless of his plots, and, unlike Shakespeare, over-anxious about them. I shall stress this second point, which stabs (I think) to the truth beneath the paradox, by and by.

But first I ask you to remember that Dickens habitually published a novel in monthly numbers or instalments; starting it, indeed, upon a plan, but often working at white heat to fulfil the next instalment, and improvising as he went. Thackeray used the same method, with the printer’s devil ever infesting the hall when the day for delivery came around. This method of writing masterpieces may well daunt their successors, even in this journalistic age of internal combustion with the voice of Mr. H. G. Wells insistent that the faster anyone travels the nearer he is ex hypothesi to that New Jerusalem in which there shall be no night (and therefore, I presume, not a comfortable bed to be hired), but the eternal noise of elevators and daylight-saving made perfect. It did not daunt our forefathers: who were giants of their time, undertook a Pendennis or a Dombey and Son, and having accomplished a chapter or so, cheerfully went to bed and slept under that dreadful imminent duty. You all know, who have studied Pickwick, that Pickwick began (so to speak) in the air; that it took the narrative, so desultory in conception, some numbers before it found a plot at all. But how admirable is the plot, once found or—to say better—once happened on! For a double peripeteia who could ask better art than the charitable turn of Pickwick on Jingle in the debtor’s prison, and the incarceration and release of Mrs. Bardell? Consider the first. Insensibly, without premonition of ours and I dare to say, of no long prepared purpose in the author, the story finds a climax:

“Come here, Sir,” said Mr. Pickwick, trying to look stern, with four large tears running down his waistcoat. “Take that, Sir.”

Take what? In the ordinary acceptation of such language, it should have been a blow. As the world runs, it ought to have been a sound hearty cuff: for Mr. Pickwick had been duped, deceived, and wronged by the destitute outcast who was now wholly in his power. Must we tell the truth? It was something from Mr. Pickwick’s waistcoat pocket which chinked as it was given into Job’s hand....

But this admirable plot, with all the Bardell versus Pickwick business, and the second most excellent “reversal of fortune” when Mrs. Bardell, the prosecutrix, herself gets cast into prison by Dodson and Fogg whose tool she has been, and there, confronted by her victim and theirs, finds herself (O wonder!) pardoned—with the simple, sudden, surprising, yet most natural and (when you come to think of it) most Christian story of Sam Weller’s loyalty and Mr. Weller’s aiding and abetting, so absurdly and withal so delicately done—all this grew, as everyone knows, with the story’s growth and grew out of fierce, rapid, improvisation. You can almost see the crucible with the fire under it, taking heat, reddening, exhaling fumes of milk-punch; and then, with Sam Weller and Jingle cast into it for ingredients, boiling up and precipitating the story, to be served

as a dish

Fit for the gods

—“served,” not “carved.” You cannot carve the dish of your true improvisatore. You cannot articulate a story of Dickens—or, if you can, “the less Dickens he”: you may be sure it is one of his worst. A Tale of Two Cities has a deft plot: well-knit but stagey: and, I would add, stagey because well-knit, since (as we shall presently see) Dickens, cast back upon plot, ever conceived it in terms of the stage; of the stage, moreover, at its worst—of the early-Victorian stage, before even a Robertson had preluded better things. So, when I talk to any man of Dickens, and he ups with his first polite concession that A Tale of Two Cities is a fine story, anyhow, I know that man’s case to be difficult, for that he admires what is least admirable in Dickens. Why, Gentlemen, you or I could with some pains construct as good a plot as that of A Tale of Two Cities; as you or I could with some pains construct a neater plot than Shakespeare invented for The Merry Wives of Windsor or even hand out some useful improvements on the plot of King Lear. The trouble with us is that we cannot write a Merry Wives, a Lear; cannot touch that it which, achieved, sets the Merry Wives and Lear, in their degrees, above imperfection, indifferent to imperfections detectable even by a fool. Greatness is indefinable, whether in an author or a man of affairs: but had I to attempt the impossibility, no small part of my definition would set up its rest on indifference—on a grand carelessness of your past mistakes, involving a complete unconcern for those who follow them, to batten on the bone you have thrown over your shoulder.

II

Dickens was a great novelist—as I should contend, the greatest of English novelists—and certainly among the greatest of all the greatest European novelists. His failing was that he did not quite trust his genius for the novel, but was persuaded that it could be bettered by learning from the drama—from the bad drama of his time. But I want you to see, Gentlemen, how honourable was the artist’s endeavour; how creditable, if mistaken, to the man. He was a born improvisatore. Pickwick, under your eyes, takes a shape—conceives it, finds it—as the story goes on. Then shape he must struggle for; the idea of “shape” has, against his genius, taken hold on him. So Pickwick is not finished before he begins a new story, never thinking to repeat, by similar methods, Pickwick’s overwhelming success. No, the responsibility of that success weighs on him; but it is a responsibility to improve. The weakness of Pickwick, undertaken as a series of mock-sporting episodes, lies in its desultoriness. This time we will have a well-knit plot. And so we get Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, each with any amount of plot, but of plot in the last degree stagey; so stagey, indeed, that in Nickleby the critic gasps at the complacency of an author who, having created that “nurseling of immortality” Mr. Vincent Crummles, together with a world and the atmosphere of that world in which Crummles breathes and moves and has his being, can work the strings of the puppet with so fine a finger, detect its absurdities with so sure an instinct and reveal them with so riotous a joy; yet misses to see that he himself is committing absurdities just as preposterous, enormities of the very same category, on page after page. The story of Lord Frederick Verisopht and Sir Mulberry Hawke, for example, is right Crummles from beginning to end. Crummles could have composed it in his sleep,—and to say this, mind you, is to convey in the very censure an implicit compliment—or, shall I use a more modest word and say implicit homage? Crummles could have written a great part of Nickleby: but Crummles could only have written it after Dickens had made him. I seem to hear the two arguing it out in some Dialogue of the Dead.

Auctor. “My dear Crummles, however did you contrive to be what you are?”

Crummles. “Why, don’t you see, Mr. Dickens? You created me in your image.” (sotto voce) “And, he doesn’t know it, poor great fellow, but it seems to me I’ve been pretty smart in returning the compliment.”

III

I have said, in a previous lecture, that Dickens, from first to last, strove to make himself a better artist; quoting to you a sentence of Henley’s, which I repeat here because you have almost certainly forgotten it:

He had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if in all his life, he never ceased from self-education, but went unswervingly in the pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise.

“Unswervingly”?—no, not unswervingly. No great genius that ever was has marched unswervingly on. As a condition of becoming a great artist he must be more sensitive than his fellows; as a result of that sensitiveness he will doubt, hesitate, draw back to leap the better. The very success of his latest book, his latest picture, alarms him. “Oh yes,” the true artist says to his heart, “popularity is sweet; money is sweet; and I can hold both in my hand by the simple process of repeating myself.” And the temptations are many and great. You have on the profits of your first and second books, and a reasonable hope of continuance, enlarged your way of life, incurred responsibilities, built a charming house not yet paid for, married a wife who adores you (shall we say?) and is proud of your celebrity, but for these very reasons—and chiefly for love—will on any diminution of your fame, fret secretly even if she does not nag actively. Against this we have, opposed, the urge in the true artist who—having done a thing—tosses it over his shoulder and thinks no more of it; can only think of how to do something further and do it better. I indicate the strength of the temptation. There are, of course, sundry ways of getting round it. For instance, as I read the life of Shakespeare from the few hints left to us, Shakespeare dodged it by the Gordian-knot solution of leaving his wife and bolting to London: a solution in this particular instance happy for us, yet not even on that account to be recommended in general to young literary aspirants. I mention Shakespeare here less for this, than as an exemplar of the true artist, never content with his best, to repeat it. Why, having written a Hamlet, an Othello, did he, instead of reproducing Hamlets and Othellos, go on to have a shy at a Cymbeline? For the self-same reason, Sirs, why Ulysses—if I may quote a poet none too popular just now—could not bide at home after even such tribulations of wandering as had become a proverb:

I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things—

You may read the mere yearning of this, if you will, in Defoe, opening The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; or, if you will, in Kipling’s

For to admire an’ for to see,

For to be’old this world so wide—

It never done no good to me,

But I can’t drop it if I tried

—and these express the instinct. The sanction, for us, lies in the words

but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things.

And the desire for that—as I am sure you know—operates with no less force of prompting in the spiritual world than in the world of commerce and sea-travel. It carried Shakespeare at the last to that Ariel’s isle which no commentator has ever (thank heaven!) been able yet to locate; and it brought him home at the very last