Charles Dickens and other Victorians

DICKENS (V)

I

“I remember,” says Henry James in a wise little Essay on The Art of Fiction—

I wish I could make you promise, Gentlemen, to bear this little story in mind whenever some solemn fellow assures you that a man rustically born and bred could not have written Hamlet or The Tempest; “he would never have seen this, learned or experienced that” and so on: the simple answer being that under such disadvantage they would never have written Hamlet or The Tempest. They are, in fact, not even Shakespeares to the extent of understanding how an artist creates, how the imaginative mind operates.

Henry James, who was an artist and understood that operation, simply comments on his anecdote that the lady had caught her direct personal impression and it was enough:

Yes, Mr. James, for the purpose of your immediate argument “this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.” But for our argument it does, and accurately, constitute imaginative genius. It is the gift that taught Xenophanes, watching the stars, to catch the whole piece from the pattern and cry out “All is one—” the gift that suddenly hitches the particular upon the universal and gives us a Falstaff, a Don Quixote, a Tartuffe, My Uncle Toby, the Vicar of Wakefield—

Forms more real than living man.

You know—you must know—that none of these is a photographic portrait of a living person—of a certain eccentric lodger whom Dickens had studied in Goswell Street, of a certain bibulous nurse resident in Kingsgate Street, High Holborn, “at a bird-fancier’s, next door but one to the celebrated mutton-pie shop”—but children of imagination begotten upon it by some such observant moment as was vital to Mr. James’s lady novelist. What, in fact, was the genesis of Mr. Pickwick? Dickens, you recall, was to write the letterpress accompaniment to a series of humorous sporting sketches by Seymour. The publisher Mr. Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, has left this uncontradicted record:

Seymour drew the figure from Mr. Chapman’s description: Dickens put life into it—yet more life—and made it a “nurseling of immortality.” That, believe me, is how it happens; just so, and in no other way: and the operative power is called Genius. Remind yourselves of this when learned men, discussing Shakespeare, assure you they have fished the particular murex up which dyed Hamlet’s inky cloak. Themselves are the cuttle, and only theirs is the ink.

II

But we talk of Dickens: and the trouble with Dickens is that he—whose brain in creating personage I suppose to be the most fecund that ever employed itself on fiction—to the end of his days kept a curious distrust of himself and a propensity for this childish expedient of “drawing from the life.” It is miserable, to me, to think of this giant who could turn off a Pickwick, a Sam Weller, a Dick Swiveller, a Mark Tapley, a Sarah Gamp, Captain Cuttle, Mr. Dick, Mr. Toots, Mr. Crummles, Mr. Mantalini, Dodson and Fogg, Codlin and Short, Spenlow and Jorkins, Mrs. Jellaby, Mrs. Billickin, Mrs. Gargery, Mrs. Wilfer, Mr. Twemlow, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Mr. Sapsea, Silas Wegg, and indeed anyone you take into your own experience of life—from Mr. Chadband to the Dolls’ Dressmaker, with hundreds of lesser characters no less distinct—it is miserable to me, I say, that a Genius with all this largess to mint and scatter should have taxed his acquaintance to stamp their effigies upon poorer coin.

III

But let us discriminate. In “drawing from life” much will depend, as Aristotle might say, on (a) the extent, (b) the manner, (c) your intention: as likewise upon (d) the person drawn. I exclude all such portraits as are likely to provoke an action at law; for these come to be assessed under separate rules of criticism: and in general we may say of them that they should be avoided from the instinct of self-preservation rather than on grounds of disinterested aesthetic.

Confining ourselves, then, to portraits which are not actionable, we may take, as an extreme instance, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. For in this book the persons portrayed are the author’s own parents, and he portrays them in a manner and with intention to make them odious, and to any extent: which seems to involve the nice moral question whether a person the best able to do a thing should not sometimes be the person who least ought to do it. And should the injunction against laying hands on your father Parmenides cover Parmenides if he happen to be your maiden aunt?—and maybe, too, she can retort, because you come of a literary family, you know! This power of retort, again, complicates a question which, you perceive, begins to be delicate. Ought you to catch anyone and hit him where he cannot hit back? Parmenides is no longer a relative but (say) a publisher, and you have—or think you have—reason to believe that he has cheated you. (And before you answer that this is incredible, let me say that I am dealing with an actual case, in which, however, I was not a party.) Are you justified in writing a work of fiction which holds him up to public opprobrium under a thin disguise? In my opinion you are not: because it means your attacking the fellow from a plane on which he can get no footing, to retaliate.

But it may be urged against him that Dickens by consent, and pretty well on his own admission, drew portraits of his mother in Mrs. Nickleby, and of his father in Mr. Micawber, and again in old Mr. Dorrit of the Marshalsea—this last, I am sure, the nearest to life. Well, I pass the question of provocation or moral excuse, observing only that Dickens tholed a childhood of culpable, even of damnable, neglect, whereas the parents of Samuel Butler did at least wing, with a Shrewsbury and Cambridge education, the barbs he was to shoot into their dead breasts. Dickens’ parents turned him down, at ten, to a blacking-factory, and, as we saw in our last lecture, when the moment came to release him from the blacking-warehouse his mother tried to insist on his returning.

IV

So there was provocation in plenty, humiliation inflicted on a young and infinitely sensitive mind. But, when we have granted that Dickens borrowed from his mother for Mrs. Nickleby, from his father for Mr. Micawber and the Elder Dorrit, mark you how genius diverges from the mere hint—how far Micawber differs from Dorrit, while both are elemental. Mark you further how and while both are sublimated and Mrs. Nickleby too—how much charity has to do with the chemical process. Who thinks of Mrs. Nickleby but as an amiable noodle? Who of Mr. Micawber, but to enjoy his company? Who of Mr. Dorrit but with a sad ironical pity? Where in any portrait of the three can you trace a stroke of that vindictiveness you find bitten upon page after page of The Way of All Flesh?

Moreover, choosing Old Dorrit, the least sympathetically but the most subtly drawn of the three, I would ask you, studying that character for yourselves, to note how Dickens conveys that, while much of its infirmity is native, much also comes of the punishment of the Marshalsea against which the poor creature’s pomposities are at once a narcotic, and a protest, however futile, of the dignity of a human soul, however abject. Mark especially, at the close of Chapter XXXV, how delicately he draws the shade of the Marshalsea over Little Dorrit herself. He would fain keep her, born and bred in that unwholesome den, its one uncontaminated “prison-flower”—but with all his charity he is (as I tried to show you in a previous lecture) a magisterial artist and the truth compels him. Mark then the workings of this child’s mind on hearing the glad news of her father’s release. Here is the passage:

Now I call that, Gentlemen, the true novelist’s stroke; rightly divined, so suddenly noted that we, who had not expected it, consent at once with a “Yes, yes—of course it happened so.”

V

But what I wish you to grasp is—in a man who could play strokes like that by the score and conjure up out of his vasty deeps anything from Dick Swiveller to Uncle Pumblechook, from the Marchioness to Mrs. Joe Gargery—the silliness of diffidence which drove him again and again to mere copying “from the life.” The superstition was idle, even when it did no harm. Having, in Oliver Twist, to describe a harsh and insolent Magistrate, Dickens (who could invent a Mr. Nupkins at will) took pains to be introduced to the Hatton Garden Police Court over which a certain Mr. Laing presided. He took these pains scrupulously, through an official channel (as they say), with the double result that we get Mr. Fang in the novel and that the Home Secretary very soon found it convenient to remove Mr. Laing from the Bench—and this, maybe, was all for the good—but you see how our author has already mixed up his conception of Charles Dickens as an author with that of Charles Dickens as a popular institution.

We will suppose that this Mr. Laing got his deserts. None the less Dickens was hitting him on a pitch where he had no standing and could not hit back. And I would warn you of this, Gentlemen—that if, trained here, you go forth to do battle with wrongdoing, one of two methods is equally fair, and no other. Either you must persuade men generally that such and such a principle should govern their actions, or, if you have to take a particular wrongdoer by the throat, you should in the first place be absolutely sure of your facts, and, in the second, take him preferably on his own ground: so that his defeat will be righteous and plain to all, and he can excuse nothing on your advantage of position.

I have diverged into advising you as artists in public life: but the advice is not irrelevant, for it echoes that which, repeatedly given to Dickens by his best friends, he repeatedly ignored, yet never without detriment to his art and not seldom with irritating personal consequences. You all know how he came to grief over his caricatures of Landor and Leigh Hunt in Bleak House. Laurence Boythorne was merely a cheap superficial, not ill-natured, portrait. Landor, who never condescended to notice it, might well have shrugged his tall shoulders and said, “Is this the friend who visited Fiesole for my sake, and sent me home the only gift I demanded—an ivy-leaf from my old Villa there ... and is this what he knows of me, or even what I seemed to him?” (The ivy-leaf was found wrapped away among Landor’s papers, twenty years later.) But nothing—least of all its verisimilitude—can excuse the outrage perpetrated upon Leigh Hunt in the mask of Harold Skimpole: for, as Forster observes, to this character in the plot itself of Bleak House is assigned a part which no fascinating foibles or gaieties of speech could redeem from contempt. Hunt, who (with all his faults) never lacked generosity, had been among the first to hail and help Dickens, was (as often happens) the last to recognise himself for the intended victim: but when some kind friend drew his attention to the calculated wound, it went deep. Dickens apologised in a letter which did its best, but could, in the nature of things, amount to no more than kindly evasiveness. He was guilty, and he knew it. Hunt had been wounded in the house of his friend. It was all very well, or ill, for Dickens to plead (as he did) that in Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby he had played a like trick on his own father and mother. The first and most obvious answer to that is, “Well, if you did, you ought to have known better”—the second, “And, anyhow, why should that make it any the more agreeable to me?” But Mrs. Nickleby and Mr. Micawber (as we saw) are kindly, even lovable characters. Harold Skimpole is at once abject and mischievous: and as Forster very justly remarks:

But Landor and Leigh Hunt, you may say, were literary men of their hands, well able to defend themselves. Well, then, take down your David Copperfield and compare the Miss Mowcher of Chapter XXII with the Miss Mowcher of Chapter XXXII. You will see at once that something very queer has happened; that the Miss Mowcher of the earlier chapter, obviously meant to be an odious little go-between in the Steerforth plot, has changed into a decent little creature at once pathetic and purposeless. Why? The answer is that the deformed original, recognising her portrait, had in the interim addressed to Dickens a poignant letter of remonstrance. Dickens, writing the story in monthly numbers, apologised and hastily readjusted his plot.

These things work out to this—that in dealing with Dickens we have to lay our account—as in dealing with Shakespeare we have to lay our account—with a genius capable of vast surprises but at any point liable to bolt out of self-control. I have no theories at all of what a genius should be, or of how it ought to behave. Let us take what the gods give and be thankful: and with Dickens as with Shakespeare—both of whom write execrably at times and at times above admiration—we have to accept this inequality as a condition of our arriving at the very best. Even if we allow that a stricter schooling would have spoilt both, and is indeed the bane of originality: still let us keep our heads and tell ourselves that a great part of Oliver Twist is execrable stuff and no less, as the talk of Speed in The Two Gentlemen of Verona or of Lucio in Measure for Measure is execrable stuff and no less. By all means let us keep in mind that these flagrancies are human and, if you will, a necessary part of any Shakespeare, of any Dickens. But let us be quite clear in judging them as counterweights, and tell ourselves that a Virgil or a Dante—yes, or a Cervantes—would never need to ask such forgiveness from us.

VI

Corruptio optimi pessima is one of those orotund sayings which impress for the moment but are liable to have their wisdom very considerably spokeshaved (so to speak) as soon as we apply the Socratic knife. Is Tarzan of the Apes, after all, a corruption of the best? And, if so, from what incalculable height did Lucifer plunge, and how many days did he take before he broke the roof of the railway station and scattered himself over the bookstalls? We may derive solace, if we will, by telling ourselves that those horrible days in the Chandos Street blacking-warehouse were a part of the education of Dickens’ genius, taught it to observe, and so on. But I say to you, as he said of Little Dorrit, that such a shadow of cruelty, induced upon a sensitive boy, must inevitably leave its stain: and I do most earnestly ask you, some of whom may find yourselves trustees for the education of poor children, if you are sure that Dickens himself was the better for a starved childhood? For my part I can give that starvation little credit for his achievement, reading its effect rather into his many faults of taste and judgment.

VII

It is usual to class among the first of these faults a defective sense of English prose: and the commonest arraignment lies against his use of blank verse in moments of pathos or of deep emotion. Well, but let us clear our minds of cant about English prose, and abstain from talking about it as if the Almighty had invented its final pattern somewhere in the eighteenth century. Prose—and Poetry too, for that matter—is a way of putting things worth record into memorable speech. English writers of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century found, with some measure of consent, an admirable fashion of doing this, and have left a tradition: and it is a tradition to which I, personally, would cling if I could, admiring it as I do, and admiring so much less many pages of Dickens and a thousand of pages of Carlyle. After all, so long as the thing gets itself said, and effectively, and memorably, who are we to prescribe rules or parse sentences? What, for example, could that mysterious body, the College of Preceptors, do to improve the grammar of Antony and Cleopatra, even if they persuaded one another “Well, apparently they have come to stay, and perhaps we had better call upon them, my dear”?

VIII

Having, then, no preconceived notions about prose, and few prejudices save against certain locutions of which I confess I dislike them mainly because I dislike the sort of person who employs them—I assert that Dickens, aiming straight at his purpose, wrote countless pages of quite splendid prose. I defy you, for example, to suggest how a sense of the eeriness of the Woolwich marshes with an apprehension of horror behind the fog could be better conveyed in words than Dickens conveys them in the opening chapters of Great Expectations; as I ask you how the earliest impressions of a sensitive child can be better conveyed in language than they are in the early chapters of David Copperfield.

IX

But even this apologia—sufficient as I think it—does not cover the whole defence. We have picked up a habit of consenting with critics who tell us that Dickens’ prose is careless and therefore not worth studying. Believe me, you are mistaken if you believe these critics. Dickens sometimes wrote execrably: far oftener he penned at a stretch page upon page of comment and conversation that brilliantly effect their purpose and are, therefore, good writing. You will allow, I dare say, his expertness in glorifying the loquacity that comes of a well-meaning heart and a rambling head. Recall, for example—casually chosen out of hundreds—Mrs. Chivery on her son John, nursing his love-lornness amid the washing in the back-yard: and remark the idiom of it:

Is that not prose? Of course it is prose for its purpose: and, strictly for her purpose—strictly, mind you for their purpose—Mrs. Chivery’s parallelisms of speech will match those of the prophet Jeremiah at his literary best. “Ah,” say you, “but Dickens is dealing out humorous reported speech. Can he write prose of his own?” Well, yes, and yes most certainly. If you will search and study his passages of deliberate writing you will scarcely miss to see how he derives in turn of phrase as in intonation from the great eighteenth-century novelists and translators whose works, if you remember, were the small child’s library in the beautiful fourth chapter of David Copperfield:

The whole passage, if you will turn to it, you will recognise as delicate English prose. But it is also a faithful, if translated, record. From this line of English writers, the more you study him, the more clearly you will recognise Dickens as standing in the direct descent of a pupil. He brings something of his own, of course, to infuse it, as genius will: and that something is usually a hint of pathos which the eighteenth-century man avoided. But (this touch of pathos excepted) you will find little, say, to distinguish Fielding’s sketch of Squire Allworthy on his morning stroll from this sketch, which I take casually from The Old Curiosity Shop, of an aged woman punctually visiting the grave of her husband who had died in his prime of twenty-three:

X

No, we can none of us afford to despise Dickens’ prose. This passage comes from one of his earliest books: if you would learn how he (ever a learner) learned to consolidate his style, study that neglected work of his, The Uncommercial Traveller—study such essays as that on “Wapping Workhouse” or that on “The City Churchyards”—study them with Thackeray’s Roundabout Papers—and tell me if these two great Victorian novelists, after shaking the dust of an Esmond or a David Copperfield off their palms, cannot, as a parergon, match your Augustans—your Steele or your Addison—on their own ground. Few recognise it, this pair being otherwise so great: but it is so.

And because you will probably disbelieve me at first going-off, I shall add the testimony of one you will be apter to trust—that of George Gissing. I have spoken of one chapter in David Copperfield, to commend it.

But, says Gissing:

XI

I am glad, Gentlemen, on the verge of concluding these talks about Dickens, to quote this from Gissing—a genuine genius, himself an author of what Dr. Johnson would have described as “inspissated gloom.” There is, I daresay, some heaven of recognition in which all true artists meet; and at any rate it pleases one to think that the author of The New Grub Street should, in this sublunary sphere, have been comforted on his way (it would even seem, entranced) by such children of joy as Sam Weller and Mr. Toots. And I, at any rate, who admired Gissing in life, like to think of him who found this world so hard, now, by virtue of his love for Dickens, reconciled to look down on it from that other sphere, with tolerant laughter—upon this queer individual England, at least. For Providence has made and kept this nation a comfortable nation, even to this day: and if you take its raciest literature from Chaucer down, you may assure yourselves that much of its glorious merit rests on the “triple pillar” of common-sense, religious morality and hearty laughter. I for my part hold that we shall help a great deal to restore our commonwealth by seeking back to that last “Godlike function” and re-learning it. To promote that laughter, with good sense and good morality, was ever Dickens’ way, as to kill wherever he could what he once called “this custom of putting the natural demand for amusement out of sight, as some untidy housekeepers put dust, and pretending that it was swept away.” And I think of Dickens as a great Englishman not least in this, that he was a man of his hands, with a great laugh scattering humbug to make place for mirth and goodwill; “a clean hearth and [to adapt Mrs. Battle] the spirit of the game.”

XII

I conclude these lectures on Dickens with a word or two casually uttered in conversation by a great man—possibly the greatest—of the generation that succeeded Dickens; himself a superb novelist, and a ruthless thinker for the good of his kind; a Russian, moreover, to whom the language alone of Sam Weller or of Mrs. Gamp must have presented difficulties well-nigh inconceivable by us. Some nineteen years ago a friend of mine visited Tolstoy at his home and, the talk falling upon Dickens, this is what Tolstoy said:

This having been reported to Swinburne, here is a part of Swinburne’s answer:

Tolstoy to Dickens.... That is how the tall ships, the grandees of literature, dip their flags and salute as they pass. Gentlemen, let us leave it at that!