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
—“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:
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
—and these express the instinct. The sanction, for us, lies in the words
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
IV
Now if you accept no more than a much lower estimate of Dickens than I am preaching, you will be apt to dismiss what I have just been saying as “tall talk”: and you will be quite mistaken, because it applies from Shakespeare down to men of infinitesimally less desert than Dickens; to every small artist, in fact, whose conscience will not cease harrying him until he improves on his best: a process which obviously—and, as a matter of history, with the great authors—never stops until they come to the grave.
At which point my now notorious discursiveness, Gentlemen, also stops and gets back to Dickens. You see, the trouble of the matter is that in these experiments an author can never be sure. He takes an infinite risk, it may be against his own true genius. Where is the critic to correct him?
V
Well, with Dickens, his own adoring public corrected him sharply and, on the whole, with true instinct. To them he was the wand-waving magician, the improvisatore in excelsis who had caught up out of their midst an elderly small gentleman in spectacles and gaiters and shot him suddenly out of Goswell Street into the firmament, to be a star equal with Hercules—
sic fratres Helenae, lucida sidera—
“instead of which” he had turned to making plots so patently theatrical (and of the theatre of Crummles) that the man himself was helping everybody to see through them. So came the revenge; over-proved by the opening chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit, which I suppose to be about the sorriest piece of writing ever perpetrated by a great English writer. Its perusal induces on me at any rate, something like physical misery, not unmixed with the sort of shame any one of us might feel if a parent behaved unbecomingly in public. I want to obey the exhortation on Mrs. Sapsea’s monument and “with a blush retire.”
But, note you, the general reader—that entity often abused, seldom quite the fool that he looks—was quick to mark and punish. Listen to Forster:
Chuzzlewit had fallen short of all the expectations formed of it in regard to sale. By much the most masterly of his writings hitherto, the public had rallied to it in far less numbers than to any of its predecessors.... The primary cause of this, there is little doubt, had been the change to weekly issues in the form of publication of his last two stories.... The forty and fifty thousand purchasers of Pickwick and Nickleby, the sixty and seventy thousand of the early numbers of the enterprises in which The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge appeared had fallen to little over twenty thousand. They rose, somewhat on Martin’s ominous announcement, at the end of the fourth number, that he’d go to America....
They rose at once by a couple of thousand: but a serial of course can never be easily lifted out of a rut into which it has once dropped. The reasons for this are obvious, and the serial sales of Chuzzlewit never over-topped twenty-three thousand. There was a very different story when Chuzzlewit came to book form. “Its sale, since,” writes Forster, “has ranked next after Pickwick and Copperfield.” In short, Dickens had been, quite conscientiously, in the opening chapters of Chuzzlewit, working against the grain of his genius. His public recalled him to it in the brutal way the public uses. When he sat down to write Chuzzlewit he had never an idea of carrying Martin off to America. Suddenly, in fear of falling sales and many challenges to make good his American Notes, he became the improvisatore again and switched his hero across the Atlantic. Who will deny that the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit are its best and, save for any given chapter upon which Sarah Gamp knocks in, its most memorable?
VI
None the less, and to the end, Dickens the artist is hag-ridden by this business of “plot,” which for him meant “stage-plot.” It hampers him in book after book, as its silly exigencies perpetually get in the way of the reader’s pleasure, even of the reader’s understanding. His genius did not lie that way, any more than did Shakespeare’s. I put in this comparison, for it can never be untimely for a Professor of English Literature to get in a word to damn the school-books which present Shakespeare to you as chasing along his shelves for some Italian novel to provide him with a new plot. Oh, believe me, Gentlemen—after The Comedy of Errors and that sort of thing, Shakespeare never bothered any more about his plots or whence he took them. It is very right indeed for a young author to sweat his soul over “plot” structure. But, through practice, there comes a time—suddenly, it may be, but as sure in his development as puberty in his physical growth—when lo! he has a hundred plots to his hand, if heaven would but grant him time to treat them. I often wonder why men blame the elder Dumas so severely, accepting the allegation that he employed hirelings—viciously termed by the critic his “ghosts” or his “devils.” Why, if you have an imagination teeming, like Dumas’, with stories to make men happier—why, knowing how short is life and that you cannot, on this side of the grave, tell one-fifth of these with your own pen—why go to that grave leaving the world, through that scruple, so much imaginatively the poorer? Only the thing should be done frankly, openly, of course.
VII
I just raise that question. It applies to Dumas and (I think) to most great novelists. But it applies less to Dickens than to most—than to Trollope for instance. And in this very inapplicability lies a secret of Dickens’ weakness which I am to suggest.
His plots are not merely stagey, melodramatic. Carefully examined, they are seen to repeat themselves, under a wealth of disguise, with an almost singular poverty of invention. Let us take one most favourite trick of his—the trick of “the masked battery” as I shall call it: the discomfiture of the villain by the betrayal of his supposed confederate. The characters are artfully assembled for the bad man’s triumph. Of a sudden the confederate rounds on him, gives him away before the audience—usually in a long story, at the end of which the baffled schemer creeps away, usually again to destroy himself. We get this coup as early as in Oliver Twist where Monks blurts out his story. It is repeated in Nickleby when Ralph Nickleby is confronted with the man “Snawley” and by Squeers. In the next novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, we get a double dose; Jonas “given away” by an accomplice; Pecksniff explosively denounced by Old Chuzzlewit after a long course of watchful dissimulation. This idea of a long and careful dissimulation so catches hold of Dickens that he goes on to rope into its service in subsequent stories two men who, on his own showing of them, are about the very last two in the world capable of carrying through a strategy so patient—Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield and Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend. As a portrait, Mr. Boffin ranks pretty high even in Dickens’ gallery, while Micawber ranks with the very best of his best. But who will assert that either of them could have found it in his nature to behave as the plot compels them to behave? To continue—by just the same trick Quilp gets his exposure in The Old Curiosity Shop, Harewood forces the revelation in Barnaby Rudge, Lady Dedlock is hunted down in Bleak House. The more the peripeteia—the reversal of fortune—disguises itself, the more it is the same thing.
VIII
George Santayana—he is so excellent a writer that I dispense with “Doctor” or “Professor” or other prefix to his name—tells us that:
Dickens entered the theatre of this world by the stage door; the shabby little adventures of the actors in their private capacity replace for him the mock tragedies which they enact before a dreaming public. Mediocrity of circumstance and mediocrity of soul for ever return to the centre of his stage; a more wretched or a grander existence is sometimes broached, but the pendulum swings back, and we return, with the relief with which we put on our slippers after the most romantic excursion, to a golden mediocrity—to mutton and beer, and to love and babies in a suburban villa with one frowsy maid.
Yes, that is true enough, but not all the truth. Dickens entered the theatre by the stage door; but he passed through to the front, to turn up the lights, wave his wand and create a new world—a fairy world, let us agree: a theatrical world, as I have been attempting to show. Yet consider—
Most of us in this room have childish recollections of green fields, running brooks, woods in leaf, birds’ nests, cattle at pasture, all that pageant of early summer which is going on at this moment a few furlongs from this desk—this dead piece of timber—and at the thought of which (if you will not think me impolite) I long to be somewhere else at this moment. With some of us elders, not specially imaginative, the early habit persists even after long servitude to city life: so that still by habit our first instinct on rising from bed is to go to the window and con the weather—how the day is making, from what quarter the wind sets—“Is it too strong for the fruit blossom?” “Will it be a good day for the trout?” Again, of my experience I appeal to some of you—to those who, aware in childhood or boyhood (quite suddenly, it may be, made aware) of the beauty underlying this world (yes, and clothing it too), have been as suddenly afflicted with the hopeless yearning to express it, was not that yearning awakened, quickened in you, you knew not how, by some casual sight—an open glade between woods, a ship with all canvas spread, or, through the hazels,
the nesting throstle’s shining eye,
or the fish darting in the deep of a pool? Was it not some similar moment that, though you have never yet arrived at putting it and its underthought into words, yet so touched you that for the rest of your days you will understand what was in Coleridge’s heart when he wrote:
Yes, and I dare say your first visit to the theatre brought you a like delicious shock. (I can recall to this day, very distinctly, the gods and goddesses who, between the acts of my first pantomime, danced on the blue ceiling with baskets and festoons of roses.)
But now, bethink you that Dickens struggled through a childhood to which green fields, trees, birds, cattle, brooks and pools, were all denied: that the child was condemned to a squalid lodging; to spend his days washing bottles in a dreadful blacking factory, his hours “off” in visiting his parents in the yet more dreadful Marshalsea prison to which his father had been committed for debt: and you will understand not only that he had to enter the theatre of this world by the stage door, but that the lighted theatre, when he could pay a few pence and get to the gallery, was his one temple of beauty: that only there—if we except a hint or two picked up in the street—from a shabby acrobat or a stray Punch and Judy show—could he drink the romance for which his young spirit thirsted. You have all read, I doubt not, Charles Lamb’s paper on “My First Play,” first contributed to the London Magazine in December, 1821, afterwards reprinted in Elia:
But when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed—the breathless anticipations I endured! I had seen something like it in the plate prefixed to Troilus and Cressida in Rowe’s Shakespeare—the tent scene with Diomede—and a sight of that plate can always bring back in a measure the feeling of that evening—The boxes at that time, full of well-dressed women of quality, projected over the pit; and the pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling—a homely fancy—but I judged it to be sugar-candy—yet, to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy!—The orchestra lights at length arose, those ‘fair Auroras’! Once the bell sounded. It was to ring out yet once again—and, incapable of anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in a sort of resignation upon the maternal lap. It rang the second time. The curtain drew up—I was not past six years old—and the play was Artaxerxes!
There we have the confession of a Cockney-bred boy, more happily placed than was Dickens at the same age or for many years later. Lamb had his hardships, his tragedy or tragedies, in life: but in the childhood of Dickens, most sensitively resentful, penury and shameful occupation bit down to the bone. What other vision of beauty had he—a born actor, as all contemporaries report—but that which Drury Lane or Covent Garden supplied? Love, says a late Roman singer, was born in a field:
The bad early and mid-Victorian stage hurt more than one Victorian novelist of genius. It seriously hurt Charles Reade, for example, who habitually sought the advice of Egeria from a fourth-rate actress: and that should bring tears to the eyes of any critic who knows Reade’s strong country nurture and has sized his genius. But, with Dickens—think of that forlorn child, plotting to snatch his soul’s sustenance in the shilling gallery of Drury Lane—at intervals how rare! Is it any wonder that—to convert a famous phrase—coming to power, he invoked out of the theatre a new world, to redress the balance of his old?
IX
Moreover—and mind you this—you will never understand Charles Dickens until you realise how exquisitely, how indignantly the genius in this child of the blacking-warehouse felt the shame of its lot. Dickens was never a snob: but a prouder spirit never inhabited flesh. This shepherd boy was not one to sing in the Valley of Humiliation. For years after success came to him he kept his mouth closed like a steel trap upon past agonies. At length he confided something to Forster (Life, Volume 1, Chapter 2), and few sadder reflections have ever been implied by a grown man upon his parents:
It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a Grammar School, and going to Cambridge.
Terrible words those: the more terrible for being, after long repression, uttered so judicially.
And again:
I suppose my lodging was paid for by my father: I certainly did not pay it myself, and I certainly had no other assistance whatever—the making of my clothes, I think, excepted—from Monday morning until Saturday night. No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God!
Nor did his parents’ neglect end with starving his heart’s affection, his brain’s activity. It starved the weak little body into spasms through malnutrition. He had a boy friend in the warehouse, one Bob Fagin. Dickens writes of this time:
Bob Fagin was very good to me on the occasion of a bad attack of my old disorder. I suffered such excruciating pain that they made a temporary bed of straw in my old recess in the counting-house, and I rolled about on the floor, and Bob filled empty blacking-bottles with hot water, and applied relays of them to my side half the day. I got better and quite easy towards evening; but Bob (who was much bigger and older than I) did not like the idea of my going home alone, and took me under his protection. I was too proud to let him know about the prison; and after making several efforts to get rid of him, to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark Bridge on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece of reality, in case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman opened it, was that Mr. Robert Fagin’s house?
O caeca pectora! Dickens had hard streaks in him, and I confess to a curious wonderment how, afterwards, he could have used that name of Fagin—how he could have used it as he did—in Oliver Twist.
But I end by repeating my question—Is it any wonder that this street-boy of genius, coming to his own, invoked out of the theatre a new world, to redress the balance of his old?
Of that new world I propose to say something, Gentlemen, a fortnight hence.