No More Learning

294 (#310) ############################################

294
[CH.
Thackeray
height of his fame. Vanity Fair had brought him into sudden
renown, and, from that time, he shared with Dickens the pre-
eminence in contemporary fiction. In 1846, after six years of
living in lodgings, first in Jermyn street and afterwards at
88 St James's street, where most of Vanity Fair was written,
he made a home for himself and his daughters at a house in
Young street, Kensington, from which he moved, in 1853, to
36 Onslow square. Until 1852, he continued to be a frequent
contributor to Punch, and, at this time, his ingenuity in writing
light verse, abounding in quaint rimes and ludicrous conceits,
was freely exercised. If The Ballads of Policeman X are not
poetry, they are, at any rate, some of the most spontaneous
expressions in rime of the humour which can find food for
merriment in the prose of ordinary life ; and Thackeray's more
serious verse, unambitious of the higher achievements of lyric
poetry, embodies a kindly philosophy, fostered by his favourite
Horace, which touches the deeper chords of feeling lightly and
gracefully. From Christmas to Christmas appeared the series
of books beginning in 1847 with Mrs Perkins's Ball, in which
Mr Titmarsh commented, with the aid of his pencil, upon the
eccentricities of his social surroundings. In 1850, the same guile-
less author took his readers abroad in The Kickleburys on the
Rhine and excelled his earlier Legend of the Rhine in Rebecca
and Rowena, to which Richard Doyle supplied the illustrations.
The versatile Michael Angelo himself, however, illustrated the last
and best of Christmas Books, The Rose and the Ring (1855), a
perpetual joy to the 'great and small children’ to whom it was
dedicated. Fresh from the writing of Pendennis, Thackeray, in
1851, succumbed to the temptation of lecturing. His lectures
entitled The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century,
first delivered at Willis's rooms in the summer of that year, and
in America, at the end of 1852 and beginning of 1853, were,
financially, very profitable. As criticism, they can hardly be said
to do justice to the literary side of their subjects: they are simply
Thackeray's impressions of men whom he judged through their
works as he judged the characters of his novels. The simple
rule of life which he laid down with earnest emphasis in the
epilogue to Dr Birch and his Young Friends,
Who misses, or who wins the prize ?
Go, lose and conquer as you can:
But if you fail, or if you rise,
Be each, pray God, a gentleman,


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IX]
Lectures
295
is not, however, a safe criterion for the impartial estimate of
literary worth. Thackeray's severe condemnation of Swift is more
than unjust : his disgust with Sterne's indecency and habit of
pose naturally obscures his discernment of the qualities which
made Tristram Shandy an influence far beyond the bounds of
England; while the author of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones
needs no defence because he shared the habits of his age. The
moralist was too prominent in his second series of lectures,
The Four Georges, delivered in the United States and London
in 1855 and 1856. Thackeray could not fail to be interesting
in his dealings with the eighteenth century. But the memory
of George IV bad not yet passed into the remoteness of history,
and, by training and conviction, Thackeray belonged to the party
which had seen in George the Good, the Magnificent, the Great'
an object for savage detestation ; and, if the loyalty with
l
which Scott bent before his august patron in his lifetime was
extravagant, it was, at any rate, mingled with an appreciation
of his princely tastes and qualities to which Thackeray was
blind.
Meanwhile, The Newcomes had run its serial course from
October 1853 to August 1855, under the ostensible editorship of
Pendennis, domesticated with his Laura and fortified by personal
experience in the task of piloting stormy youth to the sheltered
haven of middle life. The habit of digression is more confirmed
in The Newcomes than in any previous work; but one can hardly
blame the desultoriness which elaborated the sympathetic portrait
of Florac and strayed from the main current of the story to enlarge
• upon the wiles of the duchesse d'Ivry. The manifold happenings
of the novel have their centre in the fortunes of Clive Newcome,
and the device by which these are saved, the discovery of a will
in a book, is mechanical. But Clive himself is much the least
a
interesting member of his family: his excellent instincts, frequent
errors and alternations of mood between gaiety and sulkiness
excite sympathy, but the character is a type of which Thackeray
had written much under other names, and its individual strength
is not enough to obscure the fact that it exists for other purposes
than its own sake. The contrast between the stately Sir Brian
and the agricultural Hobson, the oblique references of Mrs Hobson
in Bryanstone square to lady Ann in Park lane, the impecunious
Honeyman's devices for his own precarious comfort, and the
devotion of his admirable sister to the comfort of others, are
individual traits of a stronger kind than any which Clive possesses.


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296
Thackeray
[ch.
The unpleasant Barnes is too much of a monster : his brutality,
amounting to insanity, is somewhat overdrawn to balance the
virtues of the more deserving branch of his family. His maternal
relations, however, his grandmother lady Kew and his cousin the
earl, play a more natural part in the tale. Kew, faults and all, is
honourable and lovable, and lady Kew is the most perfectly drawn
of Thackeray's worldly and cynical old women, sometimes almost
terrible in their disregard of scruple and in the tyranny with
which they alleviate the dreariness of their old age. But, if lady
Kew is intimidating, she is, at all events, a more pleasant object
of contemplation than Clive's vulgar mother-in-law, Mrs Mackenzie,
whose transformation from a scheming but commonplace widow
of some attractions in her better days to the compound of harpy
and fury of her days of adversity makes some of the later chapters
of the book intolerably painful. As for her daughter, the ill-
fated Rosey, perplexed between her mother's violence and Clive's
moodiness, her individuality is that of the light-hearted nonentity
of ordinary life, who needs the stay of a perfect devotion to support
her through the troubles she is incapable of meeting on her
own account.
But the colonel and Ethel are the two portraits on which the
fame of The Newcomes rests. Ethel, if her artistic presentation is
less striking than that of Becky Sharp and Beatrix, redeems
Thackeray from the charge of inability to draw a good woman.
Amelia was inferior and insignificant, Laura was shadowy, Helen
could have been effectual only as an angel and even lady Castle-
wood was better suited to another sphere than a troublesome
world . which tried her temper. Ethel is perfectly adapted to our
planet: she has her caprices and contradictory moods, all the
capacity for making mistakes and inflicting unconscious injury
which belongs to pride and high spirits. The trouble which she
can cause to others is fully atoned for by the unhappiness which
she can inflict on herself; and the period of trial through which she
passes strengthens a nature too true and honourable to be deluded
and spoiled by flattery and by ambition of the mere externals of
Colonel Newcome's character, on the other hand, is free
from the complications which beset Ethel. From the evening
when he rebuked old Costigan at the Cave of Harmony to the last
scene when 'he, whose heart was as that of a little child, had
answered to his name, and stood in the presence of the Master,'
his attitude to the world is perfectly simple. It cannot be said
that he is drawn entirely without blemishes. He had knowledge


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IX]
The Newcomes
297
>
of the world, and the trustfulness which survived this knowledge is
sometimes incredible; in his period of financial success, he runs the
risk of being condemned as ostentatious. It was a dangerous experi-
ment to put so guileless a chevalier in the position of a promoter of
a fraudulent company; and it might be argued that his martyrdom
at the hands of Mrs Mackenzie is a cruel expedient adopted to
enhance the effect of a nobly pathetic climax. However this may
.
be, the colonel's simplicity, detestable to Barnes Newcome, mere
quixotism in the eyes of Sir Brian and Hobson, wins the instinctive
respect and love of all who, like Ethel, Martha Honeyman, Florac
and the erratic Frederick Bayham, are capable of generous
emotion. His character responds to those ideals which were the
contemporary theme of the poetry of Tennyson ; it awakened the
enthusiasm, expressed by Burne-Jones, of the young band of poets
and artists who were producing The Oxford and Cambridge
Magazine ; and it endowed English literature with the most life-
like picture of a man governed in all his actions by an absolutely
direct sense of honour and duty, with a complete absence of
self-consciousness.
In July 1857, Thackeray followed colonel Newcome's example
by standing as a liberal candidate for a seat in parliament. The
electors of Oxford rejected him by 67 votes, thereby doing
probably little disservice to politics. His best work in letters had
been done, it is true. His fund of invention was not inexhaustible,
and, in his early journalistic work, he had shown a tendency to
repeat himself, even in his fertile gift of coining appropriate
names for his humorous types. The Virginians, appearing in
serial parts from November 1857 to September 1859, was a
chronicle of the descendants of Henry Esmond, the American
Warringtons to whom Pendennis's friend traced his ancestry.
There is no falling-off in the matter of style. Thackeray wrote
as freely as ever, dropping, with all his accomplished ease, from
narrative into reflective digressions, which, if they interrupt the
story, are, themselves, as lightly broken off in turn. The general
construction, however, is even more careless than usual, and there
are portions of the book in which the situations are so prolonged
that action seems to hang fire altogether. The brothers George
and Harry Warrington are spectators, as their grandfather had
been, of stirring historical events; but the elements of history and
fiction are less successfully blended than in Esmond. Washington
and Wolfe are felt as excrescences upon the story: that one is the
friend and adviser of Madam Warrington and the other the


## p. 298 (#314) ############################################

298
[CH.
Thackeray
intimate of the father of Theo and Hetty Lambert is not enough to
give them an indispensable connection with the chief actors. The
exigencies of the historical setting are so severely felt that the
concluding chapters are little more than an appendix devoted to
the American war of independence. Moreover, while the grand-
sons of colonel Esmond are two very pretty young men, united,
even when outwardly opposed, by a firm bond of sincere affection,
it must be owned that Harry, with some of George's brains, would
have been less of a blockhead, and George, with a compensating
quantity of Harry's insouciance, would escape the imputation of
being something of a prig. Theo and Hetty are charming ex-
amples of a type which Thackeray, devotedly attached to his own
daughters, drew with tender affection. But, without the family of
Castlewood, The Virginians would be a pale and fatigued per-
formance after Esmond and The Newcomes. After Harry, standing
upon the bridge at Castlewood, has seen his cousins return to their
home in their coach-and-six, followed by the chariot that bore the
baroness Bernstein, 'a stout, high-coloured lady, with a very dark
pair of eyes,' and has received their dubious welcome to the house
of his ancestors, the long digression in which the antecedents of
his visit to England are related finds us impatient to know more
of the children of the boy to whom Esmond had unswervingly
resigned his own rightful inheritance. The sins of the fathers
have overtaken the children : lord Castlewood is a polite swindler,
his brother Will is a boor and blackleg, while his sisters have
achieved a notoriety conspicuous even in an age tolerant of
scandal. Nevertheless, the fortunes of this doomed household
awaken interest and pity. Lord Castlewood retains his breeding
and has not wholly renounced acquaintance with the virtues
which he does not practise ; while lady Maria's frustrated attempt
to ensnare her young and susceptible cousin with her autumnal
attractions, and her eventual infatuation for the actor whom she
marries are the theme of a comedy with a strong element of
pathos. But the presiding genius of the house, malignantly open-
eyed to its faults, sardonically resigned to the destiny which she
has chosen of her own freewill, but determined that the grandson
of the man whose love she has rejected shall not be condemned to
share the limbo of vanished fortunes and ruined reputations which
is her own refuge, is baroness Bernstein. At the end of Esmond,
Beatrix had made her choice, and the baroness, after many years,
is still Beatrix, with her beauty gone and ambition defeated,
but with her intelligence sharpened and with an undisguised


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IX]
The Virginians and Philip
299
consciousness, quite distinct from remorse, of the relative value
of the lot which she has renounced and the risks which she has
preferred. Her influence is the most powerful factor in deter-
mining the course of events in The Virginians, and, with the
moving scene in which she passes out of life, revealing in her
delirium the hopes and fears which had agitated her at the crisis
of her youth, the real interest of the book is over.
The first number of The Cornhill Magazine, under Thackeray's
editorship, was published in January 1860, containing the first
instalment of Lovel the Widower, a short story closely akin to
Thackeray's early essays in fiction, and the first of Roundabout
Papers, discursive essays in which his genius for embroidering
a fabric of mingled satire and sentiment upon a ground of casual
reminiscence surpassed itself. Thackeray had not the unworldli-
ness of Elia, nor had his style that magical kinship to poetry and
that power of giving new currency to the gold of the past which
place that most lovable of essayists above all rivals ; but the man
of the world who unburdens himself of his wisdom with colloquial
ease, commenting upon the contradictions and humours of every-
day life with a sympathy born of self-knowledge, wins the affection
even of those who are a little afraid of his keen criticism. His
last complete novel, The Adventures of Philip, was contributed in
serial instalments to The Cornhill of 1862. For the subject of this,
he returned to the characters of A Shabby Genteel Story. The
deceived Caroline re-appears as the Little Sister, the hero of the
story is the son of her seducer, whose shiftiness and heartlessness
have not grown less with years, and the Tom Tufthunt who per-
formed the mock marriage of Caroline to Brandon attempts, as
the drunken blackmailer Tufton Hunt, to wreck the peace of the
leading characters. As in The Newcomes, the urbane influence of
Pendennis checks the whirlwind of the hero's passion. No one,
however, who has known Clive Newcome will find much that is
new in Philip Firmin, whose bearishness and tactlessness, however,
are individual outgrowths of a mercurial temperament. The
cousin of the piece, unlike Ethel, is fundamentally heartless and
fickle; and Philip finds his happiness, where Clive missed it, in
the incidental lady of the drama. While his mother-in-law,
Mrs Baynes, is as great a virago as Mrs Mackenzie, he has not
to endure the martyrdom of a poverty-stricken life under the lash
of her tongue; and Charlotte is more nearly related to Theo and
Hetty Lambert than to the inane Rosey. With all these qualifi-
cations, it is impossible to feel that the book contains a new


## p. 300 (#316) ############################################

300
[CH.
Thackeray
a
character : the old pieces are arranged upon the board in a new
formation. The story drags rather slowly through its appointed
length of twelve monthly numbers, and ends with a theatrical
device, the discovery of a will in the lining of a family chariot,
which relieves Philip, as a somewhat similar discovery relieved
Clive, from all financial cares. But, in The Newcomes, this event is
redeemed by the true climax of the book, the colonel's death, and
to this recovery of interest Philip affords no parallel.
Thackeray's last work of fiction, Denis Duval, was left un-
finished at his death. The incomplete story was printed in
The Cornhill during the first half of 1864. Its close relation to
.
historical events resembles that of Esmond: in this instance, the
chief actors, introduced through the medium of a tragic episode,
as skilfully told as the court drama in Barry Lyndon and in-
trinsically even more piteous, were intended to work out their
fortunes in the French revolution. Denis is his own autobio-
grapher : writing in the evening of his days, he looks back upon
the past with something of Esmond's subdued humour and
pity for the blind striving and wasteful passions that wear
out human life. While Thackeray struck out no new line for
himself in Denis Duval, he showed no sign of the exhaustion of
power which is evident in Philip; and the last work that came
from his hand is vigorous in conception and embodies his matured
view of life with unabated clearness and simplicity.
In his later years, Thackeray began to feel heavily the strain
of the hard and continuous labour with which he paid toll for
fame and comfort. In February 1862, while still occupied with
Philip, he moved into a house in Palace green, Kensington, which
he had rebuilt upon a scale compatible with somewhat luxurious
ideals of living. Here, he proposed to devote himself to what he
intended should be his greatest work, a history of the reign of
queen Anne. But Denis Duval came in the way of his new plan,
and, before Denis Duval was far advanced, its author died
suddenly in the early morning of the Christmas eve of 1863.
Thackeray's life is entirely bound up in his literary work. Its
great catastrophe took place before he had achieved fame and
social success, and, while it affected him deeply, did not check his
appreciation of the fullness and gaiety of existence. To his con-
temporaries, who saw the redoubtable satirist at work in his clubs,
where it was his habit to write daily in the heart of the life which
he described, he appeared a cool man of the world, ready to meet
their advances with an easy and, sometimes, formidable politeness.


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IX]
General Characteristics
301
The notorious character-sketch, written by Edmund Yates in 1858,
which brought about the rupture of friendly relations between
Thackeray and Dickens, expressed, with malicious resentment, the
bewilderment provoked by his superficial conversation and the
suspicion with which persons of less alert intelligence regarded
the apparent contradictions in his writings. The misunderstanding
still exists, and in more than one form. There are those, on the
one hand, who complain that Thackeray was heartless and cynical,
because he lacked a cheerful faith in the general excellence of
human nature. Others, who, from a different point of view, seem
to regard a genius for satire as precluding a sincere appreciation
of goodness, condemn his use of sentiment as a mere concession to
contemporary ideas of propriety. It is, indeed, true that his range
of character was limited compared with that of Dickens and
Balzac, and that the sentiments and actions of his people are far
more restrained by the conventions of their age and country.
But, if this be equivalent to the confession that he had less
imagination and invention than his two greatest contemporaries
in fiction, it also implies that he kept more closely than they to
the observation of the life that lay immediately beneath his notice.
His appreciation of the comedy of manners was accurate and
conscientious : he brought to his work an historic faculty which
not only enabled him to vary his operations by re-creating with
astonishing freshness the manners of a past age, but made his
novels, where they dealt with his own times, important landmarks
of fiction in its relation to contemporary manners. Even where
his characters were most akin to himself, he was able to watch
them from a detached and critical point of view, impatient of
extravagance and improbability. Combining sympathy with
criticism, he recognised that the puppets of his stage possessed
a higher value for themselves than for the impartial spectator,
that what is petty and laughable in its relation to life at large is
of serious importance to the individual. No one has seen this
double aspect of life more clearly than Thackeray. Conscious of
his own share in the imperfections of humanity, he was unable to
regard his fellows with an Olympian indifference. He varied
continually between the two points of view, different and yet hard
to distinguish. His sense of human littleness now had the upper
hand, to be succeeded, without a pause, by a revulsion of feeling,
in which the laughing philosopher trembled on the brink of tears.
These apparent contrasts and sudden variations are the per-
plexing quality of his work to the reader who prefers the ludicrous


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302
[CH. IX
Thackeray
and pathetic elements of life to be divided into distinct chapters,
or, at any rate, to be isolated in parallel columns. The balance
which Thackeray holds may not always be even: at times, his satire
and irony may seem wanting in sympathy, his pathetic passages
excessive in their demand upon the reader's emotions. But,
when these sides of his art in its relation to human nature are
examined as a whole, it is found that, like their prototypes in life,
they meet so closely that there is no line of demarcation between
them. And this sense of the humour of life, of the proportion in
which its elements are mingled, is conveyed by means of a style,
not, indeed, free from mannerisms and imperfections, but endowed
with a flexibility that responds at a touch to the demands of
gravity and gaiety alike, and with a freedom of flow that brings
the novelist into unstrained communication with his readers.


## p. 303 (#319) ############################################

CHAPTER X
DICKENS
THERE is a point in the consideration of the subject of the
present chapter which, though of the most obvious to uncritical,
as well as to critical, appreciation, is, perhaps, worthy of more atten-
tion in respect of criticism proper than has usually been given to it.
This point is the immense popularity of Dickens, as it is vulgarly
called, or (as it may be put in a form more critically useful) the
immense amount of pleasure which he has given to a number of
people who, from the very vastness of that number, must, neces-
sarily, have included individuals and whole sections of readers
of the most various tastes, powers and qualifications. Except
Shakespeare and Scott, there is, probably, no other English writer
who can match him in this respect. Now, mere popularity,
especially of an ephemeral kind, of course, proves nothing as to
merit; and, though it is never exactly negligible to the critic (for
he must satisfy himself as to its causes), he can scarcely allow it
to affect his judgment. But very long-continued popularity is
in a different case; and popularity which has been attained in the
case of very dissimilar classes and individuals, and, therefore, by
very dissimilar appeals, is in a different case again. These latter
kinds of popularity not only cannot be neglected, but they cannot,
without danger, be slightly recognised by the critic, and, especially,
by the historical critic.
It may be said, perhaps, that Dickens's popularity has not yet
had time, as Shakespeare's has, to vindicate itself by the test of
long continuance and some vicissitudes. More than a century
has, indeed, elapsed since his birth and nearly half a century since
his death : but instances could be produced of reputations which,
after towering for at least as long, have dropped to a much
lower level, if they have not fallen altogether. Complaints,
undoubtedly, are, sometimes, made that his atmosphere is be-
coming difficult to breathe ; and, though the lungs which feel


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304
Dickens
[ch.
6
this difficulty are probably rather weak, their complaint must be
registered. But, in regard to the other point, there is no possibility
of rational and well informed doubt. It is probably safe to say
(here making no exception at all and giving him no companions)
that no author in our literary history has been both admired and
enjoyed for such different reasons; by such different tastes and
intellects; by whole classes of readers unlike each other. He is
'made one with Nature,' not, indeed, by a Shakespearean univer-
sality-for there are wide, numerous and, sometimes, unfortunate
gaps in his appeal—but by the great range and diversity of
that appeal. The uncritical lover of the sentimental and the
melodramatic; the frank devotee of mere 'fun’; the people who
simply desire to pass their time by witnessing a lively and
interesting set of scenes and figures ; the respectable yearners
for social and political reform; the not quite so respectable
seekers after scandal and satire on the upper and wealthier and
more accomplished classes : these and a dozen or a hundred
other types all fly to Dickens as to a magnet. And—what is
most remarkable of all and most unparalleled in other cases—the
very critics who find it their duty to object to his faults most
strongly, who think his sentiment too often worse than mawkish,
and his melodrama not seldom more than ridiculous; who rank
his characters too close to 'character parts,' in the lower theatrical
sense; who consider his style too often tawdry; his satire strained,
yet falling short or wide of its object; his politics unpractical and,
sometimes, positively mischievous; his plots either non-existent
or tediously complicated for no real purpose ; who fully admit
the quaint unreality of his realism and the strange 'some-
other-worldliness' of much of his atmosphere—these very persons,
not unfrequently, read him for choice again and again. In fact,
neither the uncritical nor the critical lover of Dickens ever tires of
him, as both often do of some writers whom they have admired.
Some of his books will, of course, in different cases, be read oftener
than others; but, generally, the Dickens quality, mixed and diverse
as it is, never loses its attraction for anyone who has once felt it.
The road to Eatanswill is never hard or hackneyed; the company
of Mrs Gamp never ceases to be as delightful in fiction as it
would be disgusting (especially supposing her to be on duty) in
real life.
It results infallibly from these facts that the quality in
question must, as it has been called, be extraordinarily 'mixed. '
The simpler kinds of genius never attain to this result. They
6


## p. 305 (#321) ############################################

>
x]
Early Life
305
being of a ‘higher' (to use the question-begging but unavoid-
able word) strain, may create a higher satisfaction, and, as we
flatter ourselves, appeal to a higher order of mind; but this, of
itself, means limitation. And it follows that mixed genius of the
Dickens kind requires a corresponding variety of analysis to
understand itself, its causes and its manifestations.
The influence of life on literature, commonly exaggerated,
may be easily exaggerated here; but it counts solidly, if not in
a manifold fashion. Dickens's biography is familiar from one
great storehouse, Forster's Life, and from many smaller mono-
graphs of varying merit, nor does it require full handling here.
Born in the lower, rather than the upper, middle class, and sunk,
by family misfortune, at one time, to the very level poignantly
described in David Copperfield, he acquired, in his interrupted
schooldays, a very limited amount of regular education and never
enjoyed David's subsequent 'advantages. ' But he knew some-
thing of the school groundwork usual at that time, and, on his own
account, developed a keen and most fortunate fondness for the
great classics of English fiction, original or translated—Smollett,
perhaps, most of all, but, also, Fielding; Don Quixote, as well as
The Arabian Nights. After all the sordid but, eventually, genial
experiences which, later, reflect themselves in his books—the
childish schooling which provides some of the most charming
themes of his Christmas stories ; his father's prison in the Mar-
shalsea ; the dismal shabby lodgings at Camden town and in Lant
street and so forth—he got no nearer Copperfield's dignified articled
position in Doctors' Commons than a boy-clerkship in a solicitor's
office and a reportership in the Commons itself. But this last gave
him a sort of hold on the fringe of journalism, if not of literature,
and he soon fastened that hold on the garment itself. More
varied and important reportings ; Sketches by Boz, at first mainly
imitative but, even then, in part, noticeably original, led to the
great chance of Pickwick, which was taken greatly. After the
success of Pickwick, the aspect of his life presented as sharp a
contrast to its earlier phase as the often cited one which is
shown by the two parts of a portrait in a picture-cleaner's windows,
or the advertisements of a certain soap. It was, if not exactly all
,
dark, at any rate all shabby, grimy and obscure before: it was all
bright now, except for certain domestic inconveniences late in his
career. He never had any more money troubles; he never had
any lack of popularity; he worked hard, indeed : but he was
a 'glutton for work' and could choose his time, place and manner
20
6
E. L. XIII.
OH. X.


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306
[CH.
Dickens
of doing it after a fashion which deprives work of all, or nearly all,
its worrying effect. He found, in addition to his original and
independent work as novelist, two occupations, that of editor and
that of public reader, both of which were very profitable, while
the former of them gave exercise to his busy and rather autocratic
temper, and the latter furnished an outlet to the histrionic faculty
which was almost as strong in him as the literary. He died, it is
true, in middle age only; but after a full, glorious and, apparently,
on the whole, happy life, not, indeed, without some preliminary
illness, but without suffering from that terrible lingering failure of
faculties which had beset Scott and Southey and Moore in the
generation immediately before him. Fame and fortune after
the very earliest step, and far earlier than in most cases, had,
in almost all respects, been equally kind to him.
Not the least of these respects concerns the exact relations of
his life and his work; though qualifications begin here to be
necessary. The hardships and vicissitudes, the enforced self-
reliance of his youth, confirmed, if they did not originate, the
unflinching, undoubting adventurousness which enabled him to
turn out book after book-most of them utterly unlike anything
that had been seen before, and hardly one of them, even at its
worst, showing that fatal groove-and-mould character which besets
the novelist more than any other literary craftsman. His almost
immediate success, and the power of taking his own line which it
conferred, removed the slightest temptation to follow fashions in
any way. Neither kind of influence could have been better
contrived to nurse that indomitable idiosyncrasy which was his.
At the same time, neither, as it will at once be perceived, was
likely to contribute the counterbalancing gift which idiosyncrasy
requires—the gift of self-discipline and self-criticism. Self-
sufficiency,' unfortunately, has two meanings; and those who, in
early life, have to learn it in the one and better sense are too apt
to display it later in the other and worse. That the qualities of
what the Italians have denominated the selfelpista are not always
wholly amiable or admirable is a truism. Their dangerous side is
not likely to be effaced when the severer struggle is over almost
before the man has reached full manhood, and when, thenceforward,
he is almost as much ‘his own master' as if he were born to
independence and several thousands a year. And these qualities
themselves are well known, especially on the ethical side, though
they have seldom had such an opportunity of developing them-
selves on the aesthetic and literary as they had in Dickens's case.


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x]
His Contemporaries
307
Arrogance, 'cocksureness,' doubtful taste, undue indulgence in
'tricks and manners' (one naturally takes his own words to
describe him), a general rebelliousness against criticism and an
irresistible or, at least, unresisted tendency to do it again'
when something has been found objectionable—these things, and
a still more general tendency to exaggerate, to "force the
note,' to keep one's own personality constantly in the fore-
ground', are among necessary consequences of the situation. If
a man of this stamp is, for his own good fortune and the world's,
endowed with a great inventive genius, it would, according to
some critics, be actually possible to forecast, and it certainly
is, according to, perhaps, safer and saner views, not at all
surprising to find, a result of work such as that which Dickens
has actually given. Let us follow the method of these latter
critics and examine the work itself with the least prolix but most
necessary preface as to the historical circumstances in which he
began.
To understand his position thoroughly, it must be remembered
that, when he began to write, Scott had been dead for some years
and Jane Austen for nearly twenty ; that no one had yet seriously
tried to fit on the mantle of the latter in the domain of the domestic
novel; that Scott's had been most unsuccessfully attempted by men
like Ainsworth and James; that new special varieties had been
introduced by Bulwer, Marryat, Lever and others; but that
nothing of absolutely first class quality had been achieved. The
most popular novelist of Dickens's younger manhood was, however,
none of these, but a man who produced work not so good as that
of even the worst of them-Theodore Hook. That Hook's novels,
as well as Leigh Hunt's essays, had immense influence on Sketches
by Boz few critical readers of the three will deny; and that the
habit of the essayist as well as that of the novelist clung to
Dickens, much better things than Sketches-such as The Un-
commercial Traveller and not a few oddments up to the very
close of his career-remain to attest. Both, as well as his earlier
1 Dickens's way of doing this is curious and easy to feel, though not so easy to
analyse. He is not always drawing costune'-portraits of himself, like Byron :
it is difficult to think of one of his characters (for Copperfield is only so in childish
externals and literary success later) who is at all like himself or could have been
meant for himself. He does not meditate himself' before our eyes as, in different
ways, do Fielding and Lamb and Thackeray. And yet, in most of the books (Pickwick
is the great exception and, perhaps, this is not the least of its merits), there is a constant
and, sometimes, an uneasy feeling of the showman behind the curtain. We are not
allowed to forget all about him and to amuse ourselves frankly,' as Émile de
Girardin said to Théophile Gautier, about the other matter of style.
6
202


## p. 308 (#324) ############################################

308
[CH.
Dickens
favourite, Smollett", were his masters in the comparatively little
used art of minute description of 'interiors' and setting. Hook
gave him the tone of caricature and extravaganza: Hunt that
of easy intimate talk.
But he added to these “the true Dickens,' and it is difficult,
even for those who hold, with the greatest tenacity, to the historical
view of literature, to believe that this true Dickens would not have
made its way without any patterns at all, though it may be that
they gave that mysterious start or suggestion which is sometimes,
if not always, necessary. What is certain is that they hindered
almost as much as they helped ; and that some of the faults of the
later and greater books are not unfairly traceable to their influence;
while it was some considerable time before he got free from relapses
into mere bad imitation of them. To appreciate this, it is necessary
to pay more attention to the early Sketches than has sometimes
been given to them. Dickens himself wisely refrained from re-
printing any of them except the Boz division, which, though it is
the earliest, contains, also, by far the best work. But the student,
if not the general reader, must submit himself to the perusal
not merely of these, but of Sketches of Young Gentlemen,
Sketches of Young Couples and The Mudfog Papers, which the
ruthless resurrectionists of literature have unearthed. There is,
indeed, hardly anything that is good in these ; the best of them are
weak copies of papers by Hunt and others of the older generation;
survivals of the old stock character'; newspaper 'Balaam' (as the
cant phrase then went) of the thinnest and dreariest kind. Yet,
some, if not all, of them were written after The Pickwick Papers
and alongside of the greater part of the earlier novels. They-or,
rather, the critical or uncritical spirit which allowed him to write
them-account for the clumsy and soon discarded framework of
Master Humphrey's Clock: and their acceptance of the type by
one who, in his better moods, was one of the most individual and
individualising of writers, never quite effaces itself from his work
to the very end; while, in the Mudfog group, at least, the habit
of exaggerated and overdriven irony (or, rather, attempt at irony)
which, unfortunately, was to increase, is manifest. These things,
though, as has been pointed out, not exactly novice-work, are such
obvious 'slips of the pen’on a large scale that one is almost
1 Attempts have been made to deny the connection, chiefly on the ground that
Dickens was of the order of Abou ben Adhem, and loved his fellow men,' while
Smollett did not. This, if true, could be of little or no literary importance : and,
as a matter of fact, Smollett, though possessed of a savage pen, seems to have had
habits the reverse of uncharitable.
6
:


## p. 309 (#325) ############################################

x]
Sketches
309
ashamed to speak of them seriously. Yet, after all, they form part
of the dossier—the body of documents in the case—which every
honest historical critic and student has to examine.
There is very much better matter in the Boz Sketches
themselves, though their immaturity and inequality are great,
and were frankly acknowledged by the author himself, whose fault
was certainly not excess of modesty.
The patterns are even more
obvious; but the vigour and versatility are far greater, and the
addition to the title “illustrative of everyday life and everyday
people’ is justified in a fashion for which Hunt had not strength
enough, which Hook's inveterate tendency to caricature and charge
precluded him from attaining and which the lapse of nearly a
century throws out of comparison with Smollett. The best of them
are real studies for the finished pictures of the novels; and the
author rarely attempts the sentimentalism, the melodrama and
the fine writing which were to be snares for him later. There
are not many things more curious in critical enquiry, of what may
be called the physiological or biological sort, than the way in
which Our Parish' shows the future novelist. It is, to a large
extent, made up of studies of the type kind above described and
not commended; but these are connected, if not by any plot, by a
certain community of characters, and even by some threads of
incident; and, accordingly, things become far more alive and the
shadow of the coming novelist falls on the mere sketch-writer. The
scenes are still Leigh-Huntian in general scheme; but they are drawn
with a precision, a verve and an atmosphere of, at least, plausible
realism which Hunt could not reach. Of the ‘Tales' (so called),
Dickens himself was rather ashamed; and no wonder. None,
perhaps, has the merit of Hook's best short stories, such as Gervase
Skinner; the subjects are, sometimes, thin for the lengths; and
a certain triviality is not deniable, especially in the longer efforts
about boardinghouse society and the like. But the teller can, at
other times, tell; conventions pass, now and then, into vivid touches
of, at least, low life; there is, occasionally, fun which does not
always mean mere horseplay; there is, almost always, the setting
of the scenes adapted to show up whatever incident there may be? .
Still, neither in the larger, earlier and better, nor in the
smaller, later and worse, collection of these Sketches is there
anything of that 'true Dickens' which is a more remarkable
idiosyncrasy than even what Browning meant when he used the
1 The • Parliamentary Sketch,' especially the admirable description of 'Bellamy's'
is, perhaps, the best of all; but this is not a tale.
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## p. 310 (#326) ############################################

310
[CH.
Dickens
>
words. It is, again, a curiosity of historical criticism to note that,
while in Thackeray's nearly contemporary and similarly 'Hookish
attempts, such as The Professor, there are immature, but quite
perceptible, traces of the special quality which was to need seven
years' hard labour and constant failure to mature it, there is in
Dickens's big volume of early sketches hardly anything of the
astonishing 'quiddity' which was to reveal itself at once in The
Pickwick Papers. There are some of the externals ready, there is
something of the framework and machinery—of the plant’; more
than something of the sentiment, opinion and the like; but nothing
whatever of the strange phantasmagoric spirit of life? which was
now, apparently, by a sudden daemonic impulse to be breathed
into what had been hitherto simply puppets. It has been com-
plained, with what justice we may consider later, that Dickens's
folk, at their greatest and best, are not exactly, in the Falstaffian
phrase, 'men [and women) of this world. ' But, up to this time,
they had been trying to be so and had been more or less pale
copies of such. They now become conscious living beings of
a world of their own; varying, of course, in power, gift, appeal,
like creatures of any world, but seldom without flashes of their
peculiar life ; while, at times, and at their best, they are creations
and such creations as had never been seen in literature before and
have never been seen since, whether anything like them has been
seen in this life or not. And it adds to the curiosity that the
actual opening of Pickwick itself promises little or nothing of this.
The club scene and debate with their stock machinery; the parody,
smart enough but rather facile and rather overdone, of parliament
and the like might easily have been a Boz sketch. The second
chapter opens with another parody of Fielding which promises
little more.
But the journey from Goswell street to the
Golden Cross (though this, too, links itself with the red cab'
driver in Boz) is big with quite new suggestions and possibilities;
and even before Jingle elbows himself in, still more when he takes
further root (though he, too, is Hook's debtor to an extent which few
people know) we are in the new world—never (not even in Hard
Times) to be entirely shut out of it until death performs the
ungracious office and leaves Edwin Drood not half told.
Whether Dickens was himself conscious of this sudden and,
as it were, miraculous transformation nowhere (speaking under
correction) appears. But he has, in a way however circular and
1 Producing those droppolai or effluences of humanity happily described by Lewis
Campbell, see, ante, vol. xn. p. 220.


## p. 311 (#327) ############################################

x]
The Pickwick Papers
311
cryptic, registered the time of its occurrence in the famous phrase
'I thought of Mr Pickwick,' when telling how he brushed aside the
proposals of his publishers for what was, in fact, a stale competition
with the already popular Mr Jorrocks, and substituted his own.
As has been hinted, there are signs of his not having thought of
Mr Pickwick ’ in the full sense quite at once—signs which are not
entirely accounted for by, though they are not inconsistent with, his
equally wellknown apology about the salient absurdities of a
man's character being noticeable first. Probably, Seymour's death
relieved him rather of something like a clog than (as was suggested,
illiberally but inevitably, at the time and denied by him with his
usual over-sensitiveness) of an inconvenient suggestion of the
general idea. At any rate, how it happened we do not and cannot
know; that it happened, we know and ought to be truly thankful
for. There is no book like Pickwick anywhere ; it is almost
(extravagant as the saying may seem) worth while to read the
wretched imitations of it in order to enjoy the zest with which one
comes back to the real, though fantastically real, thing. The
diversity of Dickens's clients is nowhere better illustrated than
in the case of this, his first, and, as some think, his greatest, book.
Those much to be commiserated people, on the other hand, who
do not like it may be said to consist of two classes only-classes
each well worth the consideration of the historical student of
literature. The first, which has existed from the beginning and
must always exist, consists of those who cannot relish pure fun-
fantastic humour which cares nothing for probability, consistency,
chronology (the chronology of Pickwick has long been a favourite
subject for the amazement of the serious and the amusement of
others) and is not in the least afraid of invading those confines
of nonsense which Hazlitt proudly and wisely claimed as the
appanage and province of every true Englishman. For these, of
course, nothing can be done. They may or must be looked at
(whether with humility, respect, contempt, pity or thankfulness
matters little) and passed.
These, however, are a constant body at all times. The other
class varies much more with times and seasons, and is, therefore,
of greater historical interest. It consists of those who feel, not
exactly a critical or rational objection to the author's methods and
results, but a half aesthetic and half intellectual incapacity to
adjust themselves to his means, his atmosphere and what is
sometimes called his milieu. These persons appear (for what
reasons, educational or other, it would be irrelevant to enquire)


## p. 312 (#328) ############################################

312
Dickens
[ch.
to be particularly numerous just now. The combination of near
and far in Dickens; the identity of places, names and so forth,
by the side of the difference of manners, habits and, to some extent,
speech, seems altogether to upset them. They cannot see the
spencer-wearing, punch-drinking, churchgoing world of seventy or
eighty years since. This certainly argues what Dryden, in discussing
a somewhat similar matter, calls a singular 'heaviness of soul'-
a strange inability to transport and adjust. One can only hope-
without being too certain that it will be outgrown, and that these
persons (some of whom, at least, would be not a little offended if they
were assumed not to like Homer or Vergil, Dante or Shakespeare,
because the manners of the times of each were different from ours)
may, at last, consent to allow the characters and the atmosphere of
Dickens to differ from those of today, without declining, in con-
sequence, to have anything to do with them. But, for the time,
they may be nearly as hopeless as the others.
It cannot have taken many people of any competence in
criticism very long to discover where, at least, in a general way,
the secret of this new world of Dickens lies. It lies, of course,
in the combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-
tale unrealism of general atmosphere. The note of one or the
other or both is sometimes forced, and then there is a jar : in the
later books, this is too frequently the case. But, in Pickwick, it
hardly ever occurs; and, therefore, to all happily fit persons, the
'suspension of disbelief' to adopt and shift Coleridge's great dictum
from verse to prose fiction, is, except in the case of some of the
short inset stories, never rudely broken. Never, probably, was there
a great writer who knew, or cared, less about Aristotle than Dickens
did. If he had spoken of the father of criticism, he would probably
have talked-one is not certain that he has not sometimes come
near to talking-some of his worst stuff. But, certainly, when he
did master it (which was often), nobody ever mastered better than
Dickens, in practice, the Aristotelian doctrine of the impossibility
rendered probable or not improbable.
As yet, however, nothing has been said of his conversation,
though something of what has been said above applies to that, too.
Conversation had always been one of the main difficulties of the
novel. The romance, with some striking exceptions, had not
indulged much in it; and the novel, till Dryden and Addison and
Steele and Swift created something of the kind, could find no good
conversational style ready to its hand. Even after them-after
the great eighteenth century groups, after Scott, after Jane
6


## p. 313 (#329) ############################################

x]
The Pickwick Papers
313
Austen—there hung on the novel a sort of conventional lingo,
similar to that of the stage and, probably, derived from it, which
was like nothing ever used by man in actual speech-as heavy as
frost, but far from having any depth of life at all. Dickens himself
was very long in getting rid of this, if he ever did ; and some of
the worst examples of it are in the speeches of Nicholas Nickleby
and his sister in a book which was not begun till Pickwick was
nearly finished. But, in Pickwick itself (some of the inset stories
again excepted), this lingo hardly ever appears, being ousted, no
doubt, to some extent, necessarily, by the prevailing grotesque, and
by the fact that a very large part of it is 'in the vulgar tongue’
with the adjective underlined. But, even when neither of these
cathartics of book-made and stage-made lingo was present, the
characters almost invariably talk like human beings.
The mention of the word character brings us to another and
still more important aspect of our 'true Dickens. It has been
said that even the very rudimentary connection of character and
incident which is observable in 'Our Parish’had stimulated, to some
extent, the author's actual novel-writing faculty; the infinitely
more complicated interconnection of the same kind in Pickwick
seems to have stimulated it still more. Story of the more techni-
cal kind there is, no doubt, little; though there is more than has
been sometimes allowed, for the intended exploration of England
provides a sort of beginning, the Bardell imbroglio and its sequels
provide a really distinct middle and Mr Pickwick's retirement
and the marriage of his younger friends give us as much of an end
as most novels contain. But the interest is really in the separate
scenes and not in the connection of them, except in so far as the
same characters reappear. Nay, it is scarcely extravagant to say
that the interest of the scenes is largely due to the fact of the
same characters appearing in them.
Yet, these characters themselves, with the possible exception of
the hero, can hardly be said to be in any way developed by the
different situations. They remain the same; not now exactly
types, though Mr Snodgrass, at least, is not very far from the
poetical young gentleman” who seems actually to have succeeded
him in production. But they are always 'humours,' in the Jon-
sonian sense. Only late in his career, in Hard Times, A Tale of
1 These insets (which gradually disappeared) were, of course, mere legacies from
eighteenth century practice. And this inheritance was by no means always damnosa.
The two tales told by the bagman in Pickwick are among the very best of English
short stories.
2 In Sketches of Young Gentlemen.
6
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## p. 314 (#330) ############################################

314
[CH.
Dickens
Two Cities, Great Expectations and, perhaps, Our Mutual Friend,
did Dickens attempt anything like a character at least apparently
prepared to stand analysis and to achieve or suffer development.
Even then, he never went far; it was, frankly, not his business.
But, here, in Pickwick once for all, and as no one had done before
him, he displayed the power of imparting, not, indeed, the com-
plexity, variety and depth of life, but a certain—to stoop, for once, to
paradoxical phrase—'external intensity' of it? The characters of
Pickwick are not, perhaps, in any one instance, like anyone that we
have actually met or shall probably meet, but (the insets once more
excluded) they are not puppets. The worst treated in this way is.
the unfortunate Mr Winkle, who is wanted so often for the horse-
play and pantomime business, and is devoted to it so early, that
it seems a little incongruous when a girl like Arabella is made to
reciprocate his affection. Yet, to us, he is not a mere puppet; and,
from the duel scene to that where he manages to get the better
of Dowler, he is alive with the strange Dickensian life, if not with
the quintessence of it. It is easy to say that the characters furthest
from him, the truest 'servants of Quintessence,' the two Wellers,
are impossible, that they could not be. The only reply is that
they are ; and that, this being the case, their possibility is a mere
‘previous question,' a phantom from which we pass to the order
of the actual day. Nor is there (once and always excepting the
insets and not all of them) any part of the book where this
mimetic actuality does not prevail. Improving immensely upon
the lines of Defoe and Smollett, and adding to them an imagi-
nation of which Defoe had nothing and Smollett not very much,
Dickens by this time creates, in a fashion unprecedented and
unparalleled, his characters and their surroundings. The person-
ages may be psychologically rudimentary, and often put into
exaggerated comic or tragic action; the scenes may be curiously
destitute of beauty (Dickens can make a place comfortable just
as he can make it horrible and ugly, but he never makes it
exactly beautiful; in fact, when he merely tries to describe beauty,
as in Pictures from Italy, he cannot do it); they may be
open to criticisms of all sorts; but, in their own order of logic,
they never fail to be what the critical man of a later day calls
'convincing,' though with a conviction which has nothing to do with
* At the moment of writing, an illustration occurred, not, indeed, from Pickwick but
from Nicholas Nickleby. The keeper of Mrs Nickleby's mad lover shook his head so
emphatically that he was obliged to frown to keep his hat on. ' Almost everybody
has done this; very few people can have noticed that they do it; Dickens registers it.


## p. 315 (#331) ############################################

x]
The Pickwick Papers
315
evidence. They are, in their own way, real: and there's an end of
it. The 'swarry' at Bath is open to a hundred cavils; but it is as
real, if as artificial, as the Roman remains there, and likely to be as
solid, when it is equally out of date and fashion.
The originality of this method of construction could, of course,
never be exhibited again as it is in The Pickwick Papers.
Whether its power was ever better shown, so far as presence
of merits with absence of defects is concerned, is a question,
perhaps, of opinion mainly; but that it was capable of almost
indefinite extension in range was clear. Strict realism (from
which, except in his Christmas books and stories, Dickens never
departed) in main subject and in what may be called detail of
setting, with audacious disrealising in treatment, were of its essence.
But he had tendencies and characteristics which, though visible even
in the immature work, and not quite obscured in Pickwick itself,
had been kept down in the first group by the fact of its being
hackwork, and, in Pickwick, by its general scheme of cheerful
extravaganza. The not quite immediate, but speedy and immense,
success of Pickwick made it possible for him to write more or less
as he liked; and, unless he had been more or less than human,
he must have been slightly intoxicated with the wine of his own
achievement. He continued, for some time (in Bentley's Mis-
cellany, chiefly), to write the slight things noted above; but, before
Pickwick itself was finished, he began to compose, and within a
short time of its completion he had published, two elaborate
novels of a much closer construction, and (as some would say) of a
much more ambitious character than Pickwick itself. In these
works, he allowed very large scope to the tendencies above men-
tioned—that towards sentimental pathos; that towards melodrama;
and that towards carrying out political-social purpose of a reforming
kind. These were Oliver Twist—the shorter, the earlier published,
but, perhaps, not the earlier begun—and the much longer, the more
varied and, with some strands of melodrama, the less serious,
Nicholas Nickleby.
The Pickwick Papers, as everybody knows, were issued in
monthly numbers, a revival of an old, if not exactly time-honoured,
fashion which was coming in at the moment, and which was main-
tained in popularity through the adoption of it by Dickens, by
Thackeray and by others for a full generation. All his books, indeed,
appeared either in this manner or as contributions to periodicals,
the monthly Miscellany already mentioned, and the famous weekly
papers, Household Words and all the Year Round, which he


## p. 316 (#332) ############################################

316
[CH.
Dickens
edited later. He never, on any occasion, issued a work as a whole.
It is doubtful, however, whether this piecemeal method of publi-
cation exercised on his writing either the mischievous influence
with which it has been credited and which it certainly seems to
have had in some cases, or, indeed, any particular influence at all.
For, whatever else Dickens was, he was certainly a man of business,
and not likely to neglect his business in whatever form it presented
itself, especially when that form was of his own choice. Oliver
Twist, which succeeded Pickwick as a book, came out in Bentley's
Miscellany. It has been more differently valued at different times
than, perhaps, any other of the whole list; and the revival, some
twenty years ago, of a fancy for grime-novels should have been in
its favour. But it is doubtful whether, in good judgments, it has ever
been, or ever will be, put in the first class of Dickens's work. The
author's general quarrel with society as it is or was; and that
particular and personal sympathy with neglected or persecuted
childhood which was to leave such striking marks on almost all his
books, here first lay a distinct, and, to some tastes, a rather
cramping, hand on his creative powers. Sentiment and melodrama
both have the reins flung on their backs; and, though the comic
power refuses to be suppressed altogether, the book is too short and
too little varied to give it fair play. Oliver himself, save in the one
sublime, but early and never repeated, moment of his demand for
‘more,' is totally uninteresting except from the point of view of
sheer compassion; the other good characters lack even that virtue
and are, therefore, uninteresting simpliciter. But, whether the
high-flavoured crimes of the goats have interest enough to make us
forget the insipid virtues of the sheep is, of course, the point of
difference. The tragedy of Nancy is a real tragedy, for it springs
partly, at least, from a human and forgivable frailty ; but it is
awkwardly introduced at first and it is some time before Nancy
herself becomes, in any way, a sympathetic character. Moreover,
the unbroken sordidness of the whole scene and setting makes one
apt to revise unfavourable opinions of certain once orthodox critical
notions as to 'dignity' of subject. Charley Bates and the Dodger,
with Bumble (in the middle division), do what they can to temper
disgust; but it is not quite enough. The progress of Sikes from
the murder to his self-execution is, indeed, fine (Dickens had a
singular mastery of travel, in all its phases, tragic, comic and
neutral), nor can he, even earlier, be said to be an impossible ruffian.
Fagin is some way further from reality; and a pithy observation
attributed to the late G. S. Venables, that 'Dickens hanged
6


## p. 317 (#333) ############################################

x]
Nicholas Nickleby
317
Fagin for being the villain of a novel,' might be extended over the
Jew's earlier history. Noah Claypole is merely, and his Charlotte
is much too frequently, disgusting. But the greatest blot on the
book is Monks, the first of the scarecrow scoundrels whom Dickens
was always too fond of putting on the stage, to be followed-in
more or less detail, and with more or less inclination towards
the partly verisimilar and the wholly incredible—by Ralph Nickleby
and Barnaby Rudge's father and Jonas Chuzzlewit, and to leave
traces of himself even on the Carker of Dombey and the Rigaud
of Little Dorrit.
The faults of Oliver Twist, and the tendencies and methods
which brought about those faults, reappear in Nicholas Nickleby.
But the book is on a very much larger scale; it is very much
more varied in scene and character; and almost all the new
elements as well as the reversions to Pickwickian ways are sheer
gain. It would, indeed, be amazing—were there not many
examples of similar blindness in life and literature—that Dickens,
whose portrayal of the weakness of the stage and its population
makes one of the most delightful features of the book, should
(obviously without the least consciousness of what he was doing)
have put beside the Crummleses and in fuller and more constant
presence a stage-acting and stage-speaking hero in Nicholas; a
stage-heroine in Kate; a stage-villain in Ralph, and a second ditto
combined with a stage bad fine gentleman in Sir Mulberry; a stage
silly aristocrat with a few better touches in lord Frederick;
stage supers in Pyke and Pluck and the Wititterlys and others :
almost all these, moreover, being of a very inferior stage kind.
Yet, even this part provides one atoning comic moment when lord
Frederick pronounces Shakespeare 'a clayver man,' and a really
fine, if distinctly melodramatic, finale in the duel and the scene
more immediately leading up to it. Luckily, too, this element
is practically merged in, altogether overweighted and counter-
influenced by, ‘metal more attractive. ' The sordid misery and
brutality of Dotheboys hall, unlike things of the same general
class in Oliver Twist, are not too long dwelt on, are enlivened
with excellent comedy and afford opportunities for more than one
exhibition of the most refreshing and least mawkish poetical
justice'. Mrs Nickleby atones for her son and her daughter and
a
6
1 Four and twenty years after the book appeared, two Oxford undergraduates,
tramping toward Barnard Castle, stopped at a little inn and, half in joke, asked about
the truth of Dotheboys hall. • True ! ' said the innkeeper, 'why Fanny Squeers was
sitting, last market-day, in the chair you've got l' Whereat, the occupant promptly
jumped out of it-a double testimony to Dickens's realism.
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318
[CH.
Dickens
her brother-in-law and a whole generation of stage Nicklebys
twenty times over. The more sentimental 'facets,' as they
may be called—the Smike part and the Cheeryble part and
Madeline's sufferings from her again too histrionic papa-may
appeal differently to different persons; but the liberal provision of
other matter should reconcile reasonable doubters. Mr Crummles
and those about him remain, like all the best things in Dickens,
joys unspeakable and inexhaustible for ever; and they are not ill-
seconded by the Mantalinis, the Kenwigses and others, especially
Newman Noggs, who is, perhaps, that one of Dickens's avowed
grotesques who has had least justice done to him. The book, in
fact, has regained and displayed, in more variety than Pickwick,
if less uniformity, that quality of abundance, of 'God's plenty,'
to use a famous phrase, of production without reproduction,
and variation without obvious mechanical effort, which only the
greatest 'makers' in verse and prose possess.
This ebullience of creative' faculty (to borrow once more
from Coleridge, though from a less admirable phrase) is, how-
ever, notoriously subject to boiling over ; and it certainly
does so in the misplaced ingenuity of the framework which, for
a time, enshrined, and very far from adorned, the next two books
The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. There are two
explanations, though they can hardly be called excuses, of the
mistake of Master Humphrey's Clock. One is that Dickens (whose
strong sense of his predecessors is never to be forgotten, though
it often is) had not freed himself from that early difficulty of the
novelist—the nervous idea that, in some way, he ought to account to
his readers for the way in which he got his information. The other is
that the period of publication-weekly not monthly—suggested the
necessity of some vehicle to excuse and convey the actual works.
However, this framework soon proved itself (as it was bound to do)
not merely a superfluity but a nuisance; and Dickens (who, if he was
not a perfect critic, was, as has been said, a born man of business)
got rid of it. The transient, embarrassed (and still more em-
barrassing] phantom' of Master Humphrey still hinders, without
in the least helping, the overture of The Old Curiosity Shop;
with the actual text of Barnaby Rudge, it, fortunately, does not
interfere at all. In the more recent reprints of Dickens's mis-
cellaneous remains, the reader may, if he choses, read so much of
the framework as was actually written ; but, except for critical
purposes, he had much better not. The belated club machinery
of the Tatler tradition works to no satisfaction; and the inset tales
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2
x]
X
The Old Curiosity Shop
319
(with the possible exception, to some extent, of 'Gog and Magog ')
take us back to the level of the Sketches. The frequently falsified
maxim as to the badness of sequels has, perhaps, never been more
thoroughly justified than in the unfortunate resurrection of the
Pickwick group'; and the additions to them are wholly unin-
teresting. For one good thing, it taught him never to reintroduce
his characters-a proceeding successful enough with some other
authors, but which the very stuff and substance of his own form of
creation forbade.
But, if the attempted, and, fortunately, abortive, husk or shell
was worthless, the twin nuts or kernels were very far from being
80. The old Curiosity Shop, like all Dickens's novels without
exception save The Pickwick Papers, contains a tragic or, at least,
sentimental element; at the time, that element attracted most
attention and it has, perhaps, attracted most favourable or un-
favourable comment since. On the vexed question of little Nell,
there is no need to say much here. She ravished contemporaries,
at least partly because she was quite news. She often, though
not always, disgusted the next age. That wise compromise for
which there is seldom room at first has withdrawn the objections
to herself, while, perhaps, retaining those to her grandfather, as
(except at the very last) an entirely unnatural person, especially
in speech, and one of Dickens's worst borrowings from the lower
stage. But it has been, perhaps, insufficiently noticed that, except
in her perfectly natural and unstage-like appearances with Kit,
with Codlin and Short and elsewhere, she could be cut out of the
book with little loss except of space, taking her grandfather and her
most superfluous and unsatisfactory cousin Trent with her. There
would remain enough to make a book of the first class. The
humours of the shop and the pilgrimage are almost, if not quite,
independent of the unhappy ending. We should not lose Codlin and
Short themselves, or Mrs Jarley, or other treasures. The Brasses
-close, of course, to the Squeerses and even to the Fagin house-
hold, but saved, like the former, if not like all the latter, by
humour-Quilp, an impossibility, equally of course, but, again, saved
1 The very Wellerisms, with the rarest exceptions, are quite inferior ; you may
often see as good in the actual imitations, such as G. W. M. Reynolds's Pickwick
Abroad.
2 Our Mutual Friend is not one, though the tragedy is partly simulated and partly
minor.
3 Sterne and his school may be objected. But Dickens had quite a different
manner of handling the pocket-handkerchief from that of the gentleman in the
black silk smalls. '
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320
[CH.
Dickens
from mere loathsomeness by a fantastic grotesque which is almost
diablerie; and, above all, Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness would
abide with us as they do. There have been some, it is believed, who
regard the prodigal son of Dorsetshire (that small but delightful
county bred the Dorrits, too, but cannot be so proud of them; and,
though it has had important offspring in literature since, has been
unfairly merged in ‘Wessex ') as one of Dickens's choicest achieve-
ments, while the Marchioness herself (would there were more of
her! ) is simply unique—the sentimental note being never forced,
the romantic pleasantly indicated and the humorous triumphantly
maintained.
Barnaby Rudge, independently of its internal and detailed
attractions, has a special interest for the student as a whole book.
It may seem strange that Dickens had not, like almost all his contem-
poraries and immediate predecessors in novel-writing, attempted
the historical novel, which, in the hands of its creator Scott,
had shown itself to be a royal road to praise and profit. The
reasons why he had not are speculative, and, though more than
one could easily be alleged", there is no room here for mere
speculation. The fact that he attempted it now is a fact, and to
be registered with the companion fact that, except in A Tale of
Two Cities, he never attempted it again. And these two facts,
taken with the character of the particular books, suggest that, in
the kind, as a kind, he did not feel himself at home. It is certain
that the historical events and personages in Barnaby Rudge are
not the main source or cause of the interest, though they are, with
a skill which the author did not often show elsewhere, constantly
made the occasion of it. That the actual Gordon riots, though
described with splendid vigour and with a careful attention to docu-
mentary detail which sometimes suggests Macaulay and sometimes
Carlyle, were somewhat exaggerated in presentation was to be
expected, and matters but little, especially as the tale is most
powerfully told. But, once more, the chief attraction of the book
is in the comic or heroi-comic accessories. Barnaby is, of course,
Smike endowed with some more heroic qualities; and Hugh
stands to Barnaby, with a melodramatic addition, very much as
Barnaby does to Smike. Gashford rings up once more the un-
welcome eidolon of the stage villain, and lord George is ineffective,
while the tragedy part connected with Barnaby's father and the
Haredales were much better away. But the Vardens and Sim
i As, for instance, want of knowledge of past times and, hence, want of
sympathy with them. See, post, on A Child's History.


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x]
Barnaby Rudge
321
Tappertit and Miggs and old John Willet (a little overdone perhaps)
are of the best Dickens quality. Even Dennis, who stands to Squeers
very much as Hugh to Smike and sometimes shivers on the brink
of caricature, can be accepted as a whole. The blot on the book is
Sir John Chester, who is not only, once more, 'of the boards,' merely,
but, also, is an abiding proof of the author's weakness in his-
torical psychology. Lord Chesterfield had some real, and more
assumed, foibles, common in his time, and he was a man of no high
passions and few great actions. But he was a man (as even Horace
.
Walpole, who hated him, admits) of singular weight and wits ;
not a few of his letters show real good nature and good feeling
under fashionable disguises; he might have been a great statesman,
and he was quite a human being. His double, here, is little better
than a puppet, and a puppet 'made up' wrong.
The great attractions, however, and the smaller defects of the
book in detail, subordinate themselves, in a general view of Dickens,
to the question of the total result. Was this substitution of the
more ambitious and unified style an improvement on the rambling
chronicle of humour and incident, comic mainly, sometimes serious,
which had formed the staple of his earlier books ? Opinions will,
of course, differ, but that of the present writer inclines to the
negative answer. There is, certainly, no falling off in it as regards
power; on the contrary, there are variations and additions in this
respect.