“What is as striking as anything in all this reading, however—that is, in the reading copy of it now lying before us as we write—is the mass of hints as to the by-play in the stage directions for himself, so to speak, scattered up and down the margin. ‘Fagin raised his right hand, and shook his trembling forefinger in the air,’ is there on page 101 in print. Beside it, on the margin in MS., is the word ‘Action.’ Not a word of it was said. It was simplydone. Again, immediately below that, on the same page—Sikesloquitur: ‘Oh! you haven’t, haven’t you?’ passing a pistol into a more convenient pocket (‘Action’ again in MS. on the margin.) Not a word was said about the pistol.... So again, afterwards, as a rousing self-direction, one sees notified in MS. on page 107 the grim stage direction, ‘Murder coming!’”
“What is as striking as anything in all this reading, however—that is, in the reading copy of it now lying before us as we write—is the mass of hints as to the by-play in the stage directions for himself, so to speak, scattered up and down the margin. ‘Fagin raised his right hand, and shook his trembling forefinger in the air,’ is there on page 101 in print. Beside it, on the margin in MS., is the word ‘Action.’ Not a word of it was said. It was simplydone. Again, immediately below that, on the same page—Sikesloquitur: ‘Oh! you haven’t, haven’t you?’ passing a pistol into a more convenient pocket (‘Action’ again in MS. on the margin.) Not a word was said about the pistol.... So again, afterwards, as a rousing self-direction, one sees notified in MS. on page 107 the grim stage direction, ‘Murder coming!’”
The “Murder” was frequently read by Dickens not less than four times a week during the early months of 1869, in which year, after beginning in Ireland, he had been continually travelling to and fro between various parts of Great Britain and town. Already in February the old trouble in his foot had made itself felt, but, as usual, it had long been disregarded. On the 10th of April he had been entertained at Liverpool, in St. George’s Hall, at a banquet presided over by Lord Dufferin, and in a genial speech had tossed back the ball to Lord Houghton, who had pleasantly bantered him for his unconsciousness of the merits of the House of Lords. Ten days afterwardshe was to read at Preston, but, feeling uneasy about himself, had reported his symptoms to his doctor in London. The latter hastened down to Preston, and persuaded Dickens to accompany him back to town, where, after a consultation, it was determined that the readings must be stopped for the current year, and that reading combined with travelling must never be resumed. What his sister-in-law and daughter feel themselves justified in calling “the beginning of the end” had come at last.
With his usual presence of mind Dickens at once perceived the imperative necessity of interposing, “as it were, a fly-leaf in the book of my life, in which nothing should be written from without for a brief season of a few weeks.” But he insisted that the combination of the reading and the travelling was alone to be held accountable for his having found himself feeling, “for the first time in my life, giddy, jarred, shaken, faint, uncertain of voice and sight and tread and touch, and dull of spirit.” Meanwhile, he for once kept quiet, first in London, and then at Gad’s Hill. “This last summer,” say those who did most to make it bright for him, “was a very happy one,” and gladdened by the visits of many friends. On the retirement, also on account of ill-health, fromAll the Year Roundof his second self, Mr. W. H. Wills, he was fortunately able at once to supply the vacant place by the appointment to it of his eldest son, who seems to have inherited that sense of lucid order which was amongst his father’s most distinctive characteristics. He travelled very little this year, though in September he made a speech at Birmingham on behalf of his favourite Midland Institute, delivering himself, at its conclusion, of an antithetical Radical commonplace, which, being misreported or misunderstood, was commented upon with much unnecessarywonderment. With a view to avoiding the danger of excessive fatigue, the latter part of the year was chiefly devoted to writing in advance part of his new book, which, likeGreat Expectations, was to grow up, and to be better for growing up, in his own Kentish home, and almost within sound of the bells of “Cloisterham” Cathedral. But the new book was never to be finished.
The first number ofThe Mystery of Edwin Droodwas not published till one more short series of twelve readings, given in London during a period extending from January to March, was at an end. He had obtained Sir Thomas Watson’s consent to his carrying out this wish, largely caused by the desire to compensate the Messrs. Chappell in some measure for the disappointment to which he had been obliged to subject them by the interruption of his longer engagement. Thus, though the Christmas of 1869 had brought with it another warning of trouble in the foot, the year 1870 opened busily, and early in January Dickens established himself for the season at 5 Hyde Park Place. Early in the month he made another speech at Birmingham; but the readings were strictly confined to London. On the other hand, it was not to be expected that the “Murder” would be excluded from the list. It was read in January to an audience of actors and actresses; and it is pleasant to think that he was able to testify to his kindly feeling towards their profession on one of the last occasions when he appeared on his own stage. “I set myself,” he wrote, “to carrying out of themselves and their observation those who were bent on watching how the effects were got; and, I believe, I succeeded. Coming back to it again, however, I feel it was madness ever to do it so continuously. My ordinary pulse is seventy-two, and it runs up under this effort to one hundredand twelve.” Yet this fatal reading was repeated thrice more before the series closed, and with even more startling results upon the reader. The careful observations made by the physician, however, show that the excitement of his last readings was altogether too great for any man to have endured much longer. At last, on March 16, the night came which closed fifteen years of personal relations between the English public and its favourite author, such as are, after all, unparalleled in the history of our literature. His farewell words were few and simple, and referred with dignity to his resolution to devote himself henceforth exclusively to his calling as an author, and to his hope that in but two short weeks’ time his audience “might enter, in their own homes, on a new series of readings at which his assistance would be indispensable.”
Of the short time which remained to him his last book was the chief occupation; and an association thus clings to theMystery of Edwin Droodwhich would, in any case, incline us to treat this fragment—for it was to be no more—with tenderness. One would, indeed, hardly be justified in asserting that this story, like that which Thackeray left behind him in the same unfinished state, bade fair to become a masterpiece in its author’s later manner; there is much that is forced in its humour, while as to the working out of the chief characters our means of judgment are, of course, incomplete. The outline of the design, on the other hand, presents itself with tolerable clearness to the minds of most readers of insight or experience, though the story deserves its name of a mystery, instead of, likeOur Mutual Friend, seeming merely to withhold a necessary explanation. And it must be allowed few plots have ever been more effectively laid than this, of which the untying will never be known. Three suchpersonages in relation to a deed of darkness as Jasper for its contriver, Durden for its unconscious accomplice, and Deputy for its self-invited witness, and all so naturally connecting themselves with the locality of the perpetration of the crime, assuredly could not have been brought together except by one who had gradually attained to mastership in the adaptation of characters to the purposes of a plot. Still, the strongest impression left upon the reader of this fragment is the evidence it furnishes of Dickens having retained to the last powers which were most peculiarly and distinctively his own. Having skilfully brought into connexion, for the purposes of his plot, two such strangely-contrasted spheres of life and death as the cathedral close at “Cloisterham” and an opium-smoking den in one of the obscurest corners of London, he is enabled, by his imaginative and observing powers, not only torealisethe picturesque elements in both scenes, but also to convert them into a twofold background, accommodating itself to the most vivid hues of human passion. This is to bring out what he was wont to call “the romantic aspect of familiar things.” With the physiognomy of Cloisterham—otherwise Rochester—with its cathedral, and its “monastery” ruin, and its “Minor Canon Corner,” and its “Nuns’ House”—otherwise “Eastgate House,” in the High Street—he was, of course, closely acquainted; but he had never reproduced its features with so artistic a cunning, and the Mystery of Edwin Drood will always haunt Bishop Gundulph’s venerable building and its tranquil precincts. As for the opium-smoking, we have his own statement that what he described he saw—“exactly as he had described it, penny ink-bottle and all—down in Shadwell” in the autumn of 1869. “A couple of the Inspectors of Lodging-houses knew the woman, and took me to her asI was making a round with them to see for myself the working of Lord Shaftesbury’s Bill.” Between these scenes John Jasper—a figure conceived with singular force—moves to and fro, preparing his mysterious design. No story of the kind ever began more finely; and we may be excused from enquiring whether signs of diminished vigour of invention and freshness of execution are to be found in other and less prominent portions of the great novelist’s last work.
Before, in this year 1870, Dickens withdrew from London to Gad’s Hill, with the hope of there in quiet carrying his all but half-finished task to its close, his health had not been satisfactory; he had suffered from time to time in his foot, and his weary and aged look was observed by many of his friends. He was able to go occasionally into society; though at the last dinner-party which he attended—it was at Lord Houghton’s, to meet the Prince of Wales and the King of the Belgians—he had been unable to mount above the dining-room floor. Already in March the Queen had found a suitable opportunity for inviting him to wait upon her at Buckingham Palace, when she had much gratified him by her kindly manner; and a few days later he made his appearance at the levee. These acknowledgments of his position as an English author were as they should be; no others were offered, nor is it a matter of regret that there should have been no titles to inscribe on his tomb. He was also twice seen on one of those public occasions which no eloquence graced so readily and so pleasantly as his: once in April, at the dinner for the Newsvenders’ Charity, when he spoke of the existence among his humble clients of that “feeling of brotherhood and sympathy which is worth much to all men, or they would herd with wolves;” and once in May—only aday or two before he went home into the country—when, at the Royal Academy dinner, he paid a touching tribute to the eminent painter, Daniel Maclise, who in the good old days had been much like a brother to himself. Another friend and companion, Mark Lemon, passed away a day or two afterwards; and with the most intimate of all, his future biographer, he lamented the familiar faces of their companions—not one of whom had passed his sixtieth year—upon which they were not to look again. On the 30th of May he was once more at Gad’s Hill.
Here he forthwith set to work on his book, taking walks as usual, though of no very great length. On Thursday, the 9th of June, he had intended to pay his usual weekly visit to the office of his journal, and accordingly, on the 8th, devoted the afternoon as well as the morning to finishing the sixth number of the story. When he came across to the house from the châlet before dinner he seemed to his sister-in-law, who alone of the family was at home, tired and silent, and no sooner had they sat down to dinner than she noticed how seriously ill he looked. It speedily became evident that a fit was upon him. “Come and lie down,” she entreated. “Yes, on the ground,” he said, very distinctly—these were the last words he spoke—and he slid from her arm and fell upon the floor. He was laid on a couch in the room, and there he remained unconscious almost to the last. He died at ten minutes past six on the evening of the 9th—by which time his daughters and his eldest son had been able to join the faithful watcher by his side; his sister and his son Henry arrived when all was over.
His own desire had been to be buried near Gad’s Hill; though at one time he is said to have expressed a wish to lie in a disused graveyard, which is still pointed out, in asecluded corner in the moat of Rochester Castle. Preparations had been made accordingly, when the Dean and Chapter of Rochester urged a request that his remains might be placed in their Cathedral. This was assented to; but at the last moment the Dean of Westminster gave expression to a widespread wish that the great national writer might lie in the national Abbey. There he was buried on June 14, without the slightest attempt at the pomp which he had deprecated in his will, and which he almost fiercely condemned in more than one of his writings. “The funeral,” writes Dean Stanley, whose own dust now mingles with that of so many illustrious dead, “was strictly private. It took place at an early hour in the summer morning, the grave having been dug in secret the night before, and the vast solitary space of the Abbey was occupied only by the small band of the mourners, and the Abbey clergy, who, without any music except the occasional peal of the organ, read the funeral service. For days the spot was visited by thousands. Many were the tears shed by the poorer visitors. He rests beside Sheridan, Garrick, and Henderson”—the first actor ever buried in the Abbey. Associations of another kind cluster near; but his generous spirit would not have disdained the thought that he would seem even in death the players’ friend.
A plain memorial brass on the walls of Rochester Cathedral vindicates the share which the ancient city and its neighbourhood will always have in his fame. But most touching of all it is to think of him under the trees of his own garden on the hill, in the pleasant home where, after so many labours and so many wanderings, he died in peace, and as one who had earned his rest.
THE FUTURE OF DICKENS’S FAME.
There is no reason whatever to believe that in the few years which have gone by since Dickens’s death the delight taken in his works throughout England and North America, as well as elsewhere, has diminished, or that he is not still one of our few most popular writers. The mere fact that his popularity has remained such since, nearly half a century ago, he, like a beam of spring sunshine, first made the world gay, is a sufficient indication of the influence which he must have exercised upon his age. In our world of letters his followers have been many, though naturally enough those whose original genius impelled them to follow their own course soonest ceased to be his imitators. Amongst these I know no more signal instance than the great novelist whose surpassing merits he had very swiftly recognised in her earliest work. For though in theScenes of Clerical LifeGeorge Eliot seems to be, as it were, hesitating between Dickens and Thackeray as the models of her humorous writing, reminiscences of the former are unmistakable in the opening ofAmos Barton, inMr. Gilfil’s Love-Story, inJanet’s Repentance; and though it would be hazardous to trace his influence in the domestic scenes inAdam Bede, neither a Christmas exordium in one of the books ofThe Mill on the Floss, nor the SamWeller-like freshness of Bob Wakem in the same powerful story, is altogether the author’s own. Two of the most successful Continental novelists of the present day have gone to school with Dickens: the one the truly national writer whoseDebit and Credit, a work largely in the manner of his English model, has, as a picture of modern life, remained unexcelled in German literature;[14]the other, the brilliant Southerner, who may write as much of theHistory of his Booksas his public may desire to learn, but who cannot write the pathos of Dickens altogether out ofJack, or his farcical fun out ofLe Nabab. And again—for I am merely illustrating, not attempting to describe, the literary influence of Dickens—who could fail to trace in the Californian studies and sketches of Bret Harte elements of humour and of pathos, to which that genuinely original author would be the last to deny that his great English “master” was no stranger?
Yet popularity and literary influence, however wide and however strong, often pass away as they have come; and in no field of literature are there many reputations which the sea of time fails before very long to submerge. In prose fiction—a comparatively young literary growth—they are certainly not the most numerous, perhaps because on works of this species the manners and style of an age most readily impress themselves, rendering them proportionately strange to the ages that come after. In the works of even the lesser playwrights who pleased the liberal times of Elizabeth, and in lyrics of even secondary merit that were admired by fantastic Caroline cavaliers,we can still take pleasure. But who can read many of the “standard” novels published as lately even as the days of George the Fourth? The speculation is, therefore, not altogether idle, whether Dickens saw truly when labouring, as most great men do labour, in the belief that his work was not only for a day. Literary eminence was the only eminence he desired, while it was one of the very healthiest elements in his character, that whatever he was, he was thoroughly. He would not have told any one, as Fielding’s author told Mr. Booth at the sponging-house, that romance-writing “is certainly the easiest work in the world;” nor, being what he was, could he ever have found it such in his own case. “Whoever,” he declared, “is devoted to an art must be content to give himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it.” And not only did he obey his own labour-laws, but in the details of his work as a man of letters he spared no pains and no exercise of self-control. “I am,” he generously told a beginner, to whom he was counselling patient endeavour, “an impatient and impulsive person myself, but it has been for many years the constant effort of my life to practise at my desk what I preach to you.” Never, therefore has a man of letters had a better claim to be judged by his works. As he expressly said in his will, he wished for no other monument than his writings; and with their aid we, who already belong to a new generation, and whose children will care nothing for the gossip and the scandal of which he, like most popular celebrities, was in his lifetime privileged or doomed to become the theme, may seek to form some definite conception of his future place among illustrious Englishmen.
It would, of course, be against all experience to suppose that to future generations Dickens, as a writer, will be allthat he was to his own. Much that constitutes the subject, or at least furnishes the background, of his pictures of English life, like the Fleet Prison and the Marshalsea, has vanished, or is being improved off the face of the land. The form, again, of Dickens’s principal works may become obsolete, as it was in a sense accidental. He was the most popular novelist of his day; but should prose fiction, or even the full and florid species of it which has enjoyed so long-lived a favour ever be out of season, the popularity of Dickens’s books must experience an inevitable diminution. And even before that day arrives not all the works in a particular species of literature that may to a particular age have seemed destined to live, will have been preserved. Nothing is more surely tested by time than that originality which is the secret of a writer’s continuing to be famous, and continuing to be read.
Dickens was not—and to whom in these latter ages of literature could such a term be applied?—a self-made writer, in the sense that he owed nothing to those who had gone before him. He was most assuredly no classical scholar—how could he have been? But I should hesitate to call him an ill-read man, though he certainly was neither a great nor a catholic reader, and though he could not help thinking aboutNicholas Nicklebywhile he was reading theCurse of Kehama. In his own branch of literature his judgment was sound and sure-footed. It was, of course, a happy accident that as a boy he imbibed that taste for good fiction which is a thing inconceivable to the illiterate. Sneers have been directed against the poverty of his book-shelves in his earlier days of authorship; but I fancy there were not many popular novelists in 1839 who would have taken down with them into the country for a summer sojourn, as Dickens did toPetersham, not only a couple of Scott’s novels, but Goldsmith, Swift, Fielding, Smollett, and the British Essayists; nor is there one of these national classics—unless it be Swift—with whom Dickens’s books or letters fail to show him to have been familiar. Of Goldsmith’s books, he told Forster, in a letter which the biographer of Goldsmith modestly suppressed, he “had no indifferent perception—to the best of his remembrance—when little more than a child.” He discusses with understanding the relative literary merits of the serious and humorous papers inThe Spectator; and, with regard to another work of unique significance in the history of English fiction,Robinson Crusoe, he acutely observed that “one of the most popular books on earth has nothing in it to make any one laugh or cry.” “It is a book,” he added, which he “read very much.” It may be noted, by-the-way, that he was an attentive and judicious student of Hogarth; and that thus his criticisms of humorous pictorial art rested upon as broad a basis of comparison as did his judgment of his great predecessors in English humorous fiction.
Amongst these predecessors it has become usual to assert that Smollett exercised the greatest influence upon Dickens. It is no doubt true that in David Copperfield’s library Smollett’s books are mentioned first, and in the greatest number, that a vision of Roderick Random and Strap haunted the very wicket-gate at Blunderstone, that the poor little hero’s first thought on entering the King’s Bench prison was the strange company whom Roderick met in the Marshalsea; and that the references to Smollett and his books are frequent in Dickens’s other books and in his letters. Leghorn seemed to him “made illustrious” by Smollett’s grave, and in a late period of his life he criticises his chief fictions with admirable justice. “HumphryClinker,” he writes, “is certainly Smollett’s best. I am rather divided betweenPeregrine PickleandRoderick Random, both extraordinarily good in their way, which is a way without tenderness; but you will have to read them both, and I send the first volume ofPeregrineas the richer of the two.” An odd volume ofPeregrinewas one of the books with which the waiter at theHolly Tree Innendeavoured to beguile the lonely Christmas of the snowed-up traveller, but the latter “knew every word of it already.” In theLazy Tour, “Thomas, now just able to grope his way along, in a doubled-up condition, was no bad embodiment of Commodore Trunnion.” I have noted, moreover, coincidences of detail which bear witness to Dickens’s familiarity with Smollett’s works. To Lieutenant Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as to Captain Cuttle, every man was a “brother,” and to the Commodore, as to Mr. Smallweed, the most abusive substantive addressed to a woman admitted of intensification by the epithet “brimstone.” I think Dickens had not forgotten the opening of theAdventures of an Atomwhen he wrote a passage in the opening of his ownChristmas Carol; and that the characters of Tom Pinch and Tommy Traddles—the former more especially—were not conceived without some thought of honest Strap. Furthermore, it was Smollett’s example that probably suggested to Dickens the attractive jingle in the title of hisNicholas Nickleby. But these are for the most part mere details. The manner of Dickens as a whole resembles Fielding’s more strikingly than Smollett’s, as it was only natural that it should. The irony of Smollett is drier than was reconcilable with Dickens’s nature; it is only in the occasional extravagances of his humour that the former anticipates anything in the latter, and it is only the coarsest scenes of Dickens’s earlier books—such as thatbetween Noah, Charlotte, and Mrs. Sowerbery inOliver Twist—which recall the whole manner of his predecessor. They resemble one another in their descriptive accuracy, and in the accumulation of detail by which they produce instead of obscuring vividness of impression; but it was impossible that Dickens should prefer the general method of the novel of adventure pure and simple, such as Smollett produced after the example ofGil Blas, to the less crude form adopted by Fielding, who adhered to earlier and nobler models. With Fielding’s, moreover, Dickens’s whole nature was congenial; they both had that tenderness which Smollett lacked; and the circumstance that, of all English writers of the past, Fielding’s name alone was given by Dickens to one of his sons, shows how, like so many of Fielding’s readers, he had learnt to love him with an almost personal affection. The very spirit of the author ofTom Jones—that gaiety which, to borrow the saying of a recent historian concerning Cervantes, renders even brutality agreeable, and that charm of sympathetic feeling which makes us love those of his characters which he loves himself—seem astir in some of the most delightful passages of Dickens’s most delightful books. So inPickwick, to begin with, in which, by the way, Fielding is cited with a twinkle of the eye all his own, and inMartin Chuzzlewit, where a chapter opens with a passage which is pure Fielding:
“It was morning, and the beautiful Aurora, of whom so much hath been written, said, and sung, did, with her rosy fingers, nip and tweak Miss Pecksniff’s nose. It was the frolicsome custom of the goddess, in her intercourse with the fair Cherry, to do so; or, in more prosaic phrase, the tip of that feature in the sweet girl’s countenance was always very red at breakfast-time.”
“It was morning, and the beautiful Aurora, of whom so much hath been written, said, and sung, did, with her rosy fingers, nip and tweak Miss Pecksniff’s nose. It was the frolicsome custom of the goddess, in her intercourse with the fair Cherry, to do so; or, in more prosaic phrase, the tip of that feature in the sweet girl’s countenance was always very red at breakfast-time.”
Amongst the writers of Dickens’s own age there wereonly two, or perhaps three, who in very different degrees and ways exercised a noticeable influence upon his writings. He once declared to Washington Irving that he kept everything written by that delightful author upon “his shelves, and in his thoughts, and in his heart of hearts.” And, doubtless, in Dickens’s early days as an author the influence of the American classic may have aided to stimulate the imaginative element in his English admirer’s genius, and to preserve him from a grossness of humour into which, after theSketches by Boz, he very rarely allowed himself to lapse. The two other writers were Carlyle, and, as I have frequently noted in previous chapters, the friend and fellow-labourer of Dickens’s later manhood, Mr. Wilkie Collins. It is no unique experience that the disciple should influence the master; and in this instance, perhaps with the co-operation of the examples of the modern French theatre, which the two friends had studied in common, Mr. Wilkie Collins’s manner had, I think, no small share in bringing about a transformation in that of Dickens. His stories thus gradually lost all traces of the older masters both in general method and in detail; whilst he came to condense and concentrate his effects in successions of skilfully-arranged scenes. Dickens’s debt to Carlyle was, of course, of another nature; and in his works the proofs are not few of his readiness to accept the teachings of one whom he declared he would “go at all times farther to see than any man alive.” There was something singular in the admiration these two men felt for one another; for Carlyle, after an acquaintance of almost thirty years, spoke of Dickens as “a most cordial, sincere, clear-sighted, quietly decisive, just, and loving man;” and there is not one of these epithets but seems well considered and well chosen. But neither Carlyle nor Dickens possessed amoral quality omitted in this list, the quality of patience, which abhors either “quietly” or loudly “deciding” a question before considering it under all its aspects, and in a spirit of fairness to all sides. TheLatter-Day Pamphlets, to confine myself to them,[15]like so much of the political philosophy, if it is to be dignified by that name, which in part Dickens derived from them, were at the time effective strokes of satirical invective; now, their edge seems blunt and their energy inflation. Take the pamphlet on Model Prisons, with its summary of a theory which Dickens sought in every way to enforce upon his readers; or again, that entitledDowning Street, which settles the question of party government as a question of the choice between Buffy and Boodle, or, according to Carlyle, the Honourable Felix Parvulus and the Right Honourable Felicissimus Zero. The corrosive power of such sarcasms may be unquestionable; but the angry rhetoric pointed by them becomes part of the nature of those who habitually employ its utterance in lieu of argument; and not a little of the declamatory element in Dickens, which no doubt at first exercised its effect upon a large number of readers, must be ascribed to his reading of a great writer who was often very much more stimulative than nutritious.
Something, then, he owed to other writers, but it was little indeed in comparison with what he owed to his natural gifts. First amongst these, I think, must be placed what may, in a word, be called his sensibility—that quality of which humour, in the more limited sense of the word, and pathosare the twin products. And in Dickens both these were paramount powers, almost equally various in their forms and effective in their operation. According to M. Taine, Dickens, whilst he excels in irony of a particular sort, being an Englishman, is incapable of being gay. Such profundities are unfathomable to the readers ofPickwick; though the French critic may have generalised from Dickens’s later writings only. His pathos is not less true than various, for the gradations are marked between the stern, tragic pathos ofHard Times, the melting pathos of theOld Curiosity Shop,Dombey and Son, andDavid Copperfield, and the pathos of helplessness which appeals to us in Smike and Jo. But this sensibility would not have given us Dickens’s gallery of living pictures had it not been for the powers of imagination and observation which enabled him spontaneously to exercise it in countless directions. To the way in which his imagination enabled him to identify himself with the figments of his own brain he frequently testified; Dante was not more certain in his celestial and infernal topography than was Dickens as to “every stair in the little mid-shipman’s house,” and as to “every young gentleman’s bedstead in Dr. Blimber’s establishment.” One particular class of phenomena may be instanced instead of many, in the observation and poetic reproduction of which his singular natural endowment continually manifested itself—I mean those of the weather. It is not, indeed, often that he rises to a fine image like that in the description of the night in which Ralph Nickleby, ruined and crushed, slinks home to his death:
“The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds furiously and fast before it. There was one black, gloomy mass that seemed to follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with theothers, but lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealthily on. He often looked back at this, and more than once stopped to let it pass over; but, somehow, when he went forward again it was still behind him, coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shadowy funeral train.”
“The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds furiously and fast before it. There was one black, gloomy mass that seemed to follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with theothers, but lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealthily on. He often looked back at this, and more than once stopped to let it pass over; but, somehow, when he went forward again it was still behind him, coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shadowy funeral train.”
But he again and again enables us to feel as if the Christmas morning on which Mr. Pickwick ran gaily down the slide, or as if the “very quiet” moonlit night in the midst of which a sudden sound, like the firing of a gun or a pistol, startled the repose of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, were not only what we have often precisely experienced in country villages or in London squares, but as if they were the very morning and the very night which wemustexperience, if we were feeling the glow of wintry merriment, or the awful chill of the presentiment of evil in a dead hour. In its lower form this combination of the powers of imagination and observation has the rapidity of wit, and, indeed, sometimes is wit. The gift of suddenly finding out what a man, a thing, a combination of man and thing, is like—this, too, comes by nature; and there is something electrifying in its sudden exercise, even on the most trivial occasions, as when Flora, delighted with Little Dorrit’s sudden rise to fortune, requests to know all
“about the good, dear, quiet little thing, and all the changes of her fortunes, carriage people now, no doubt, and horses without number most romantic, a coat of arms, of course, and wild beasts on their hind legs, showing it as if it was a copy they had done with mouths from ear to ear, good gracious!”
“about the good, dear, quiet little thing, and all the changes of her fortunes, carriage people now, no doubt, and horses without number most romantic, a coat of arms, of course, and wild beasts on their hind legs, showing it as if it was a copy they had done with mouths from ear to ear, good gracious!”
But Nature, when she gifted Dickens with sensibility, observation, and imagination, had bestowed upon him yet another boon in the quality which seems more prominent than any other in his whole being. The vigour of Dickens—a mental and moral vigour supported by a splendid physical organism—was the parent of some of his foibles;amongst the rest, of his tendency to exaggeration. No fault has been more frequently found with his workmanship than this; nor can he be said to have defended himself very successfully on this head when he declared that he did “not recollect ever to have heard or seen the charge of exaggeration made against a feeble performance, though, in its feebleness, it may have been most untrue.” But without this vigour he could not have been creative as he was; and in him there were accordingly united with rare completeness a swift responsiveness to the impulses of humour and pathos, an inexhaustible fertility in discovering and inventing materials for their exercise, and the constant creative desire to give to these newly-created materials a vivid plastic form.
And the mention of this last-named gift in Dickens suggests the query whether, finally, there is anything in hismanneras a writer which may prevent the continuance of his extraordinary popularity. No writer can be great without amannerof his own; and that Dickens had such a manner his most supercilious censurer will readily allow. His terse narrative power, often intensely humorous in its unblushing and unwinking gravity, and often deeply pathetic in its simplicity, is as characteristic of his manner as is the supreme felicity of phrase, in which he has no equal. As to the latter, I should hardly know where to begin and where to leave off were I to attempt to illustrate it. But, to take two instances of different kinds of wit, I may cite a passage in Guster’s narrative of her interview with Lady Dedlock: “And so I took the letter from her, and she said she had nothing to give me; andI said I was poor myself, and consequently wanted nothing;” and, of a different kind, the account in one of his letters of a conversation with Macready, in which the great tragedian, after a solemnbut impassioned commendation of his friend’s reading, “put his hand upon my breast and pulled out his pocket-handkerchief, andI felt as if I were doing somebody to his Werner.” These, I think, were amongst the most characteristic merits of his style. It also, and more especially in his later years, had its characteristic faults. The danger of degenerating into mannerism is incident to every original manner. There is mannerism in most of the great English prose-writers of Dickens’s age—in Carlyle, in Macaulay, in Thackeray—but in none of them is there more mannerism than in Dickens himself. In his earlier writings, inNicholas Nickleby, for instance (I do not, of course, refer to the Portsmouth boards), and even inMartin Chuzzlewit, there is much staginess; but in his later works his own mannerism had swallowed up that of the stage, and, more especially in serious passages, his style had become what M. Taine happily characterises asle style tourmenté. His choice of words remained throughout excellent, and his construction of sentences clear. He told Mr. Wilkie Collins that “underlining was not his nature;” and in truth he had no need to emphasise his expressions, or to bid the reader “go back upon their meaning.” He recognised his responsibility, as a popular writer, in keeping the vocabulary of the language pure; and inLittle Dorrithe even solemnly declines to use the French wordtrousseau. In his orthography, on the other hand, he was not free from Americanisms; and his interpunctuation was consistently odd. But these are trifles; his more important mannerisms were, like many really dangerous faults of style, only the excess of characteristic excellences. Thus it was he who elaborated with unprecedented effect that humorous species of paraphrase which, as one of the most imitable devices of his style, has also been the mostpersistently imitated. We are all tickled when Grip, the raven, “issues orders for the instant preparation of innumerable kettles for purposes of tea;” or when Mr. Pecksniff’s eye is “piously upraised, with something of that expression which the poetry of ages has attributed to a domestic bird, when breathing its last amid the ravages of an electric storm;” but in the end the device becomes a mere trick of circumlocution. Another mannerism which grew upon Dickens, and was faithfully imitated by several of his disciples, was primarily due to his habit of turning a fact, fancy, or situation round on every side. This consisted in the reiteration of a construction, or of part of a construction, in the strained rhetorical fashion to which he at last accustomed us in spite of ourselves, but to which we were loath to submit in his imitators. These and certain other peculiarities, which it would be difficult to indicate without incurring the charge of hypercriticism, hardened as the style of Dickens hardened; and, for instance, in theTale of Two Citieshis mannerisms may be seen side by side in glittering array. By way of compensation, the occasional solecisms and vulgarisms of his earlier style (he only very gradually ridded himself of the cockney habit of punning) no longer marred his pages; and he ceased to break or lapse occasionally, in highly-impassioned passages, into blank verse.
From first to last Dickens’s mannerism, like everything which he made part of himself, was not merely assumed on occasion, but was, so to speak, absorbed into his nature. It shows itself in almost everything that he wrote in his later years, from the most carefully-elaborated chapters of his books down to the most deeply-felt passages of his most familiar correspondence, in the midst of the most genuine pathos and most exuberant humour of his books,and in the midst of the sound sense and unaffected piety of his private letters. Future generations may, for this very reason, be perplexed and irritated by what we merely stumbled at, and may wish that what is an element hardly separable from many of Dickens’s compositions were away from them, as one wishes away from his signature that horrible flourish which in his letters he sometimes represents himself as too tired to append.
But no distaste for his mannerisms is likely to obscure the sense of his achievements in the branch of literature to which he devoted the full powers of his genius and the best energies of his nature. He introduced, indeed, no new species of prose fiction into our literature. In the historical novel he made two far from unsuccessful essays, in the earlier of which in particular—Barnaby Rudge—he showed a laudable desire to enter into the spirit of a past age; but he was without the reading or the patience of either the author ofWaverleyor the author ofThe Virginians, and without the fine historic enthusiasm which animates the broader workmanship ofWestward Ho. For the purely imaginative romance, on the other hand, of which in some of his works Lord Lytton was the most prominent representative in contemporary English literature, Dickens’s genius was not without certain affinities; but, to feel his full strength, he needed to touch the earth with his feet. Thus it is no mere phrase to say of him that he found the ideal in the real, and drew his inspirations from the world around him. Perhaps the strongest temptation which ever seemed likely to divert him from the sounder forms in which his masterpieces were cast lay in the direction of thenovel with a purpose, the fiction intended primarily and above all things to promote the correction of some social abuse, or the achievement ofsome social reform. But in spite of himself, to whom the often voiceless cause of the suffering and the oppressed was at all times dearer than any mere literary success, he was preserved from binding his muse, as his friend Cruikshank bound his art, handmaid in a service with which freedom was irreconcilable. His artistic instinct helped him in this, and perhaps also the consciousness that where, as inThe Chimesor inHard Times, he had gone furthest in this direction, there had been something jarring in the result. Thus, under the influences described above, he carried on the English novel mainly in the directions which it had taken under its early masters, and more especially in those in which the essential attributes of his own genius prompted him to excel.
Amongst the elements on which the effect alike of the novelist’s and of the dramatist’s work must, apart from style and diction, essentially depend, that of construction is obviously one of the most significant. In this Dickens was, in the earlier period of his authorship, very far from strong. This was due in part to the accident that he began his literary career as a writer ofSketches, and that his first continuous book,Pickwick, was originally designed as little more than a string of such. It was due in a still greater measure to the influence of those masters of English fiction with whom he had been familiar from boyhood, above all to Smollett. And though, by dint of his usual energy, he came to be able to invent a plot so generally effective as that ofA Tale of Two Cities, or, I was about to say, ofThe Mystery of Edwin Drood, yet on this head he had had to contend against a special difficulty; I mean, of course, the publication of most of his books in monthly or even weekly numbers. In the case of a writer both pathetic and humorous the serial method of publicationleads the public to expect its due allowance of both pathos and humour every month or week, even if each number, to borrow a homely simile applied inOliver Twistto books in general, need not contain “the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.” And again, as in a melodrama of the old school, each serial division has, if possible, to close emphatically, effectively, with a promise of yet stranger, more touching, more laughable things to come. On the other hand, with this form of publication repetition is frequently necessary by way of “reminder” to indolent readers, whose memory needs refreshing after the long pauses between the acts. Fortunately, Dickens abhorred living, as it were, from hand to mouth, and thus diminished the dangers to which, I cannot help thinking, Thackeray at times almost succumbed. Yet, notwithstanding, in the arrangement of his incidents and the contrivance of his plots it is often impossible to avoid noting the imperfection of the machinery, or at least the traces of effort. I have already said under what influences, in my opinion, Dickens acquired a constructive skill which would have been conspicuous in most other novelists.
If in the combination of parts the workmanship of Dickens was not invariably of the best, on the other hand in the invention of those parts themselves he excelled, his imaginative power and dramatic instinct combining to produce an endless succession of effective scenes and situations, ranging through almost every variety of the pathetic and the humorous. In no direction was nature a more powerful aid to art with him than in this. From his very boyhood he appears to have possessed in a developed form what many others may possess in its germ, the faculty of converting into a scene—putting, as it were,into a frame—personages that came under his notice, and the background on which he saw them. Who can forget the scene inDavid Copperfieldin which the friendless little boy attracts the wonderment of the good people of the public-house where—it being a special occasion—he has demanded a glass of their “very best ale, with a head to it?” In the autobiographical fragment already cited, where the story appears in almost the same words, Dickens exclaims:
“Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study in Devonshire Terrace. The landlord, in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar window-frame; his wife, looking over the little half-door; and I, in some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition.”
“Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study in Devonshire Terrace. The landlord, in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar window-frame; his wife, looking over the little half-door; and I, in some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition.”
He saw the scene while he was an actor in it. Already theSketches by Bozshowed the exuberance of this power, and in his last years more than one paper in the delightfulUncommercial Travellerseries proved it to be as inexhaustible as ever, while the art with which it was exercised had become more refined. Who has better described (for who was more sensitive to it?) the mysterious influence of crowds, and who the pitiful pathos of solitude? Who has ever surpassed Dickens in his representations, varied a thousandfold, but still appealing to the same emotions, common to us all, of the crises or turning-points of human life? Who has dwelt with a more potent effect on that catastrophe which the drama of every human life must reach; whose scenes of death in its pathetic, pitiful, reverend, terrible, ghastly forms speak more to the imagination and more to the heart? There is, however, one species of scenes in which the genius of Dickens seems to me to exercise a still stronger spell—those whichprecedea catastrophe, which are charged like thunder-clouds withthe coming storm. And here the constructive art is at work; for it is the arrangement of the incidents, past and to come, combined by anticipation in the mind of the reader, which gives their extraordinary force to such scenes as the nocturnal watching of Nancy by Noah, or Carker’s early walk to the railway station, where he is to meet his doom. Extremely powerful, too, in a rather different way, is the scene inLittle Dorrit, described in a word or two, of the parting of Bar and Physician at dawn, after they have “found out Mr. Merdle’s complaint:”