Charles Dickens and other Victorians

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:

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,

“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:

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:

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:

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:

“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?—

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!

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:

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:

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: