No More Learning

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


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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.
6


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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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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.
6


## p. 318 (#334) ############################################

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
6


## p. 319 (#335) ############################################

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. '
6


## p. 320 (#336) ############################################

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.


## p. 321 (#337) ############################################

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. But, on analysing the satisfaction derived from it, one finds
that the sources of this satisfaction fall apart from each other almost
as much as in the more disconnected chronicles of the earlier books.
There is still no 'total impression,' but a succession of situations,
incidents, utterances, which excite amusement, suspense, pity,
terror and other kinds or phases of interest. To so remarkable an
extent is this the case that, in almost all Dickens's books, if you
take the appearances of one character and put them together in
what the eighteenth century would have called a 'history,' with
as little inclusion of their companions and surroundings as possible
(the thing has once or twice been tried by injudicious meddlers), a
great deal of the interest is lost. The successive situations form,
as it were, separate tableaux, to which all the persons and circum-
stances contained in them are necessary, but which refuse to
combine in any strict sense, preferring merely to follow one another.
Almost immediately after the completion of Master Humphrey's
Clock (or, rather, of the two novels for which it had long been
nothing but a mechanical sort of cover, or even label), Dickens
undertook, in the spring of 1842, his journey to America—the first
E. L. XIII.
сн. х.
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## p. 322 (#338) ############################################

322
[CH.
Dickens
1
a
of a series of longer or shorter visits to foreign countries which
became frequent and exercised a great influence, both direct and
indirect, on his work. This particular voyage produced American
Notes as an immediate, and Martin Chuzzlewit as a not long
delayed, consequence.
In the Notes, their author may be thought to have been a
little oblivious of the sarcasm contained in his own Mr Weller's
suggestion that Mr Pickwick should escape from the Fleet in 'a
pianner' to America and then come back and write a book about
the Merrikins as'll pay all his expenses and more if he blows 'em
up enough. ' But, though the subjects of the description probably
disliked even more the subsequent utilisation of his experiences
in the novel, the extra-severity of which, to some extent, they had
provoked by their complaints”, this latter was much more legitimate;
and Martin Chuzzlewit, undoubtedly, is one of Dickens's greatest
successes. A hint has been given above that, here again, the
present writer cannot acknowledge true tragedy in Dickens. Jonas
may not be an absolutely impossible creature, but his improba-
bility, as he is presented, is so great, and his ethical-aesthetic
disgustingness is so little palliated by actual touches of nature or
of artistic power, that he becomes intolerable to some people, and
has upon the book the same effect as might be produced by a
crushed black beetle between its actual leaves—that of an irrelevant
and intruded abomination. His father is of the Ralph Nickleby
and Gride order, with too slight a difference; and Mercy, like
others of Dickens's mixed characters, is not mixed 'convincingly. '
But, once more, all this could be cut out with perfect ease and then
you may say 'Here's richness' indeed. There is, in the bulk of the
book, and in the majority of its characters, an intensity of verve,
& warmth of imagination which excites the composition of the
writer,' only to be found in Pickwick earlier and never surpassed,
and seldom, even in David Copperfield, equalled later. Martin
himself, whether unreformed or reformed, may have too much of the
stock quality which clings strangely to nominal heroes ; his grand-
father may have some of the old touch of the theatrical tarbrush;
| This, no doubt, was aimed at Mrs Trollope. Marryat had not yet written.
: The indignation, though natural, was scarcely wise. There are, on the whole,
more compliments than reproaches; the real sting does not come out till Martin
Chuzslewit itself, and no 'institution,' except the sore place of slavery, is seriously
attacked. As a book, American Notes, though amusing enough, perforce lacks the
peculiar fantastic attraction of the novels; and, perhaps, in it, the tendency to
exaggerated description, which, later, was to be, sometimes, almost disastrous, first
displays itself.


## p. 323 (#339) ############################################

x]
Christmas Books
323
once
1
6
Tom Pinch may want a little disinfecting of sentimentalism
for some tastes. But the Pecksniffs, Mark Tapley, Mrs Gamp,
,
*Todgers's'-any number of minorities display the true Dickens,
ore, in excelsis. Whether the American scenes were, at
the time, over-coloured in fact is, now, merely a historical question.
That they justify themselves artistically few competent judges will
deny.
Between American Notes and its second crop in fiction, Dickens
had begun the remarkable series of Christmas books which,
probably, gave him almost as much popularity, in the strictest
sense of the word, as any other part of his work. Beginning in
1843 with A Christmas Carol, they continued annually through
The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and
The Haunted Man for five years and only ceased when the
establishment of Household Words changed them to Christmas
stories of smaller bulk which, in that paper and in All the Year
Round, were scattered over the rest of his life and produced some
things perhaps of greater literary value than the 'books. ' The
division, though partly, if not wholly, accidental in origin, is a real
one; and the first batch only had better be noticed here, reserving
the stories' for subsequent criticism.
Dickens himself, in the brief later preface to the collected
Christmas Books, describes them as 'a whimsical kind of masque
intended to awaken loving and forbearing thoughts. ' In later
days, ignorant and hasty writers have, sometimes, credited him with
creating the popular notion of Christmas as a season of enlarged
heart, and, also, waistcoat. Scores and hundreds of passages from
all ages of our literature refute this folly; and the simple fact
that Washington Irving wrote Bracebridge Hall when Dickens
was at the blacking manufactory is enough to expose its gross
ignorance. But the idea of Christmas as a season of good feeding
and good feeling was congenial to all Dickens's best characteristics,
though it may have slightly encouraged some of his weaknesses.
The fanciful supernatural, too, for which influences (chiefly, though
not wholly, German) had already created a great taste, was
thoroughly in his line, and he had used it in some of the inset
stories of Pickwick and elsewhere not without effect. Of the five
actual books, only one The Battle of Life can be called a positive
failure ; it is, indeed, probably the worst thing that Dickens, after
he came to his own, ever did in fiction except George Silverman's
Explanation. Some have found his true quality in Britain, the
gloomy footman, and it may, at least, be conceded to them that it is
21-2


## p. 324 (#340) ############################################

324
Dickens
[CH.
difficult to find it anywhere else. The Chimes and The Cricket on
the Hearth have been great favourites, though, to some tastes, the
first is almost fatally injured by dull stock social satire-lacking all
real sting of individuality in Sir Joseph Bowley and alderman
Cute and others; while The Cricket, with some refreshing chirps in
Tilly Slowboy and elsewhere, does not, to some tastes, seem quite 'to
come off. ' The first 'book,' A Christmas Carol and the last, The
Haunted Man are, by far, the best and the Carol is delightful. We
must, of course, grant-as we must grant to Mrs Barbauld in the
case of The Ancient Mariner--that its story is 'improbable’; there
is scarcely another objection that can be sustained against it
except in the eyes of those to whom all sentiment and all fairy
tales are red rags. The Haunted Man is more unequal and some-
times commits the old fault of 'forcing the note. '
But the
Tetterbys are of the first water; they are, indeed, better than
the Cratchits, their parallels in the Carol; the good angel Milly is
managed with an unusual freedom from exaggeration or mawkish-
ness; and, in the serious parts, unequal as they are, there are
touches and flashes of a true romantic quality which Dickens
often attempted but less often attained.
The years which produced these by-works produced, also, not
a little else. Martin Chuzzlewit itself overran a considerable
.
portion of them, and a long visit (two visits, indeed) to Italy resulted
in the Pictures from that country originally published in The
Daily News, which Dickens nominally edited for a week or two
but quickly relinquished. He had, thus, no time during them for
more than one new attempt at fiction on the great scale. Dealings
with the Firm of Dombey and Son, the title of which posterity, in
general, bas wisely cut down to the last three words, if not even to
one, Dombey, is of importance in more than size. In the first
place, it marks a very important transition in the handling of scene
and personage, especially the latter. For reasons obvious enough,
partly from his biography and partly from the character of the work
itself, his drawing of actual society, except as concerns the middle,
lower and lowest classes, had been very vague. Mr Pickwick is ‘a
gentleman retired from business' and, as some of his less discreet
admirers almost petulantly insist, he possesses all the moral
qualities of gentlemanliness. Nor are his actions, nor is his general
behaviour, inconsistent with that status. But his 'atmosphere'is
certainly not quite that which we know not merely from other novels
but from letters, biographies, indisputable documents of all sorts,
to have been that, not merely of the upper ranks, but of the upper


## p. 325 (#341) ############################################

a
<
x]
Dombey and Son
325
middle and professional classes at the time. The superior per-
sonages of Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity
Shop and Martin Chuzzlewit (Barnaby Rudge, definitely dealing
with the past, here falls out) partake of the same vagueness when
they are not purely theatrical. But, in Dombey, Dickens has more
or less shaken off the theatrical, and, apparently, is endeavouring to
observe the actual manners and character of society. Dombey is,
at least, meant to be an actual city man of quite the highest class.
Dr Blimber and Major Bagstock, however obviously caricatured,
are meant to retain the general character of an officer who has
emerged from real barracks, a clergyman and schoolmaster who is
no shadowy angel like the good clergymen of Pickwick and The
Old Curiosity Shop, no fantastic tyrant like Squeers in the past
and, to some extent, Creakle in the future, but a rational, if some-
what pedantic, individual who has passed through a university and
taken orders himself and is preparing other persons for the same
or similar occupations. Even the Dombey servants, though, of
course, comically heightened, are nearer to the actual population
of London areas than ever before. It is true that Dickens has (to
avail oneself of the dictum of the dictionaries that dis- is used at
will to form words' and to coin one much wanted in English) 'dis-
damaged' himself most freely in this respect. Cousin Feenix,
though almost the first 'aristocrat' whom he represents as a
thoroughly good fellow, is, of course, all but burlesqued ; Mrs
Skewton is, at least, much exaggerated, and, as for Edith, she is
completely 'out of drawing,' as is, by common consent, her villain-
lover Carker, who once more belongs to the tribe of Monks, save
that, unfortunately, he is much less shadowy. Even in the characters
not yet mentioned, the element of exaggeration and caricature
comes in to some extent. Susan Nipper, though we should be very
sorry if she had not, has it; Toots has it to the utmost possible or
impossible extent; Captain Cuttle (and great would be the loss)
could not exist without it; even Miss Tox has it in no slight
degree. He has further relieved himself in the old directions by
doubling, in the sentimental way, with more detail, the part of
little Nell with that of little Paul and, in the melodramatic, by
the retribution of Carker. But, at the same time, Dombey remains
his first attempt at painting actual modern society—his first to
'disfantasy,' so far as he could, the atmosphere, and to be not
merely realist but real. General remarks as to his success will come
best later, but the point of departure should be marked.
About a year after the close of Dombey, and a few months after
8
>
6
6


## p. 326 (#342) ############################################

326
[CH.
Dickens
the issue of The Haunted Man, the time having been also partly
occupied by the composition of his favourite and (as some think)
greatest book, David Copperfield, Dickens also undertook the
new and very important adventure of editing Household Words,
a weekly periodical which very soon justified its title and which,
with its sequel All the Year Round, he carried on for more than
twenty years till his death.
The two (though he by no means discontinued the method of
monthly issues for the bigger novels which would have overloaded
a weekly paper) contained, thenceforward, a great deal of his own
work; they caused a, perhaps, rather beneficent change of the
Christmas books into shorter Christmas stories and they un-
doubtedly enriched popular literature with a great deal of good
work besides his own. Dickens was a decidedly despotic, and
a rather egotistic, editor; and work of the very highest merit, off his
own special lines, would have had little chance with him. But he
succeeded in attracting and training a remarkable number of
competent writers who could, more or less, fall in with those lines.
The short story and the short miscellaneous essay which had already
made lodgments in the monthly magazines found open house in
these weekly ones ; and, though a great many of the contributions
have been more permanently and accessibly enshrined in collected
Works of himself, of Wilkie Collins, of Collins's less known but,
perhaps, even more gifted brother Charles, of Mrs Gaskell and of
others, there must remain a considerable résiduum on which it is
rather surprising that the active reprinters of today have not laid
hands. It is certain that there are few luckier 'finds' on a wet
day in a country house, or, still more, a country inn, than a volume
of Household Words or All the Year Round.
The opus majus, however, above glanced at, was given to the
world in the old monthly form by itself, though its first part did
not appear till a month or two after the first number of Household
Words. Of his own interest in David Copperfield, the author has
made no secret_hardly any of the autobiographical reasons of
that interest. But, to all 'men of feeling,' in something more than
the sense of Sterne and Mackenzie, the main appeal of the book
must lie in a fact which Dickens could not be expected to indicate
—which, probably, he did not consciously recognise. Copperfield
is not only partly what Dickens was, but, to a much larger extent,
what Dickens could not be and would have liked to be. The early
sufferings and the early successes were there ; but the interval
between them had no counterpart in fact. The liberal education
a


## p. 327 (#343) ############################################

x]
David Copperfield
327
at the Wickfield's and Mr Strong's which succeeds the Murdstone
and Grinby purgatory, the position at Doctors' Commons and the
society which it opened, the other 'liberal education' of the succes-
sive loves, calf' and real, for Miss Shepherd, Miss Larkins, almost
Rosa Dartle, Dora and Agnes, very different from the shadowy and
unfelt amorosities of the earlier books; the true boy's worship of
Steerforth-whatever reserves may be made as to Steerforth himself
-and the rest, had been denied to him or very partially given
hitherto : now they flourished. From this 'lived' or 'would-have-
been-lived' character of the book comes its unique freedom from
what has been unkindly but intelligibly called the pantomime
character of much of the author's work. Even Mr Dick, much more
Miss Betsey, is free from this, and it only appears (if there) in mere
side-sketches like that of 'Hamlet's Aunt,' of no importance to the
story. Nobody, save those unfortunate persons before referred to
who are untouched by the comic spirit altogether, can say 'Let us
have no more of this foolery' to any part of David Copperfield;
though the comic spirit is sufficiently present, from Mr Chillip's
first appearance at the Rookery to his last in the coffee room. On
the other side, the position is, perhaps, a little more assailable.
Although there was, perhaps, no reason for making Dora quite so
silly in life, it must be an excessive, and, probably, rather an
affected, cynicism which finds her death mawkish. But it may be
allowed that the triangle of Dr Strong, his wife and her admirer is
handled rather unintelligibly, and that Uriah Heep, though not to be
spared, has a little too much of the old type villain about him. Few
people now consider Rosa Dartle an entire success, and the whole
Steerforth and little Em’ly business is open to the other old
charge of melodrama. But Mr Micawber (though the success may
have been obtained a little in the teeth of the fifth command-
ment) is an unsurpassed triumph; most of the pure comedy is first
rate; the chapter 'I Fall into Captivity' has, in anything like its
own kind, no superior in fiction; and, almost throughout, the reality
of interest felt by the author exalts all his powers and keeps down
all his foibles. There is, in short, hardly any possibility of denying
that David Copperfield is Dickens's most varied and, at the same
time, most serious and best sustained effort-one to be accepted
with all faults' on its side and with all gratitude on the
reader's.
As Dickens had never before attained to such an equable combi-
nation of the various elements of his power and skill, so he never
attained to it again; though some would make a partial exception
a
6
>


## p. 328 (#344) ############################################

328
[ch.
Dickens
for Great Expectations. Nothing that he did later, except (and
this is not invariably allowed) his last and unfinished work, failed
to contain something of his best; nothing, perhaps (except that
and Hard Times), was without something of his very best. But
the total results were much more unequal; and they began to
show, in a degree far greater than had appeared in the earlier
work (though there had been something of it there), the 'obsession'
of social and, to some extent, of political purpose. For a year or
fifteen months, after the close of David Copperfield in 1850,
Dickens gave the public nothing except Household Words. But,
in the spring of 1852, he began Bleak House, which occupied the rest
of that, and most of the next, year. It illustrates most strikingly,
and, perhaps, more valuably than any of its sucessors, the remarks
just made. Most of the comic, and some of the serious, parts are
'true Dickens' to the very nth; and it is, perhaps, one of the most
interesting of all, except in the character of its quasi-heroine
and part narrator, Esther Summerson, who is one of the most
irritating of Dickens's unconscious angels. But the overdone
onslaught on chancery and the slighter, but still constantly
attempted, satire on parliament, the aristocracy and so forth, be-
come, at times, almost insufferable, and the author's determination
to take things seriously provokes a corresponding and retaliatory
disposition to take seriously in him things that one hardly notices
in the earlier books. Of the too famous Skimpole matter one need
not say much. Macaulay, in one of the very latest entries of his
diary, has expressed the judgment of most people who have
impartially examined the matter. Nobody dreams of imputing to
Leigh Hunt the worst rascalities of his eidolon, such as the selling
of Jo. But Dickens himself afterwards admitted that he took
'the light externals of character' from this veteran of letters-
then still living and his friend-and everybody knew that some
such not very light characteristics—reckless running into debt
and complete neglect of obligation—were common to the fictitious
and to the actual personages. The fault of taste, to call it no worse,
was very grave; but, as no one but a foolish partisan would maintain
that good taste was Dickens's strong point, there need be no more
said
Other things of a different kind should be noticed because,
as has been said, they become stronger and stronger features-
not for the better—in Dickens's general work henceforward. Not to
1 The taste of the Boythorn-Landor pendant in portraiture may not have been
perfect; but, at any rate, there was nothing offensive in it.
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## p. 329 (#345) ############################################

x]
Hard Times
329
mention many minor improbabilities, the reason for Mr Tulking-
horn's persecution of lady Dedlock, on which the whole plot turns, is
never made apparent or plausible. The divulging of the secret could
do neither himself nor anybody else any earthly good; he certainly
was not looking forward to be bought off; and the actual revelation
would have been most likely to damage very seriously his character
as a sort of living Chubb's safe for such matters, not to mention that
silence gave him continuance of power over his victim'. One might
add to this the quite illegal hunting of Jo by the police (which
would have got them into considerable trouble if it had ever come
before a magistrate) and the entire presentation of some characters,
especially Mr Vholes. For the 'spontaneous combustion' business,
Dickens had (as Marryat had had before him) the excuse of some
quasi-scientific authority; and there is so much that is good in
the book that one is loth to speak anything but good of it. But
it certainly does show a 'black drop'-or two black drops—of
quarrelling excessively with the world and of over-emphasising
scenes and characters.
These drops continued to spread and to ink the water for some
time, if not for ever, afterwards. The year 1854 was a rather dis-
astrous one in Dickens's annals. It saw the production in book form
of two works, both of which had previously passed through House-
hold Words. Of the deplorable Child's History of England,
it is not necessary to say more than that it is, perhaps, the capital
instance of a man of genius, not tempted by the wellknown ‘want
of pence,' or by anything except his own wilfulness, going far out of
his way to write something for which he was in everything but the
possession of narrative faculty) absolutely disqualified. But Hard
Times, the other fruit of that year, cannot be passed over quite so
lightly. The book has had its admirers; and for at least one
thing that it gives us—the Sleary group-some readers, at, any
rate, would put up with even worse company. There is certainly
genuine pathos—whether overdone or not is, perhaps, a matter of
taste--in the Stephen and Rachel part, while (a thing which has
sometimes escaped even laudatory critics) Louisa, though she is
made the cause or occasion of some of the least good parts of the
book, is more of a real live girl of the nineteenth century than
1 If anyone urges lady Dedlock's disregard of his wishes with regard to
Rosa as a provocation, it can only be said that this is utterly inadequate.
Mr Tulkinghorn may have been as fond of power as he was of port wine; but he
ought to have been as good & judge of the one as the other, and to have known that
he would lose more than he gained by making disobedience to an arbitrary caprice an
unpardonable sin.


## p. 330 (#346) ############################################

330
[ch.
Dickens
a
Dickens ever achieved, except in the more shadowy sketch of
Estella in Great Expectations. But these good things, comic or
,
pathetic or analytic, are buried in such a mass of exaggeration
and false drawing that one struggles with the book as with a bad
dream. There are, unfortunately, many such young whelps as Tom
Gradgrind, and many such cads and curmudgeons as Josiah
Bounderby; but Dickens has made Tom nothing but a whelp and
Bounderby nothing but a curmudgeon and a cad. Now, that is not
the way in which the actual Creator makes people; or, if He very
occasionally does so, these exceptions are not to be used in art by
His imitators in fiction. The elder Gradgrind, on the whole, and
,
especially towards the end, has more verisimilitude; but he him-
self, for a long time, his school and the society of Coketown
generally, with Mrs Sparsit and her visions about Louisa in
particular, have got hopelessly into the world of ugly and pre-
posterous fantasy-a world where, to adapt the classical myth,
Phobetor reigns, his sway untempered by Icelus—upon which
Dickens was too often tempted to draw. The book seems to
have been rather popular with foreign critics, partly because
it has a certain unity of plot and action, and, perhaps, also, partly
because it gives a picture of England unfavourable, indeed, but
rather consistent with the continental view of us. But it is difficult,
from the standpoint of comparative and impartial criticism, not to
put it lowest among Dickens's finished novels.
His work as editor—which, like all his work, he took the
reverse of lightly-and, perhaps, some of the inevitable revenge
which nature exacts for the putting forth of such power as he
had shown for nearly twenty years, rather slackened Dickens's
production after this; and it was not till the close of 1855 that he
began to send Little Dorrit on its usual year and a half, or rather
more, of serial appearance. This novel has been even more variously
judged than Hard Times ; indeed, judgment of it has been known
to vary remarkably, not merely as between different individuals,
but as formed by the same individual at different times. Probably
the general result, at first reading, has been unfavourable. Not
merely the tiresome 'crusade' element, which had made its
appearance in the books immediately preceding, but the tendency
to dwell, and thump, upon particular notes not always very
melodious or satisfying, which, more or less, had been apparent
throughout, are unluckily prominent here. And the newer
feature—that is to say, the attempt at a rather elaborate plot
which adds little or nothing to the real interest of the story-
6


## p. 331 (#347) ############################################

x]
Little Dorrit
331
appears likewise.
Carker's teeth, in Dombey, are excusable
and almost negligible beside the trivial, tedious and exasper-
ating business of Pancks, with his puffings and snortings, and
the outward and visible signs of hypocrisy in his employer
Casby. That employer's daughter Floral is so exceedingly
amusing that one does not care to enquire too closely into
her verisimilitude; and “Mr F. 's aunt' is one of those pure
extravaganzas of the author who justify themselves offhand.
But the Circumlocution office is merely a nuisance of a worse
kind in literature than even its prototype in life; the soured
blood and shabby state of the Gowans as human fringes of
aristocracy might have been hit off admirably in a few touches,
but are spoilt by many. The absence of that calming and restraining
influence which has been noted in Copperfield is felt in every part
of the book except the pure extravaganzas just referred to. The
Marshalsea scenes, which, again, are autobiographic (for Dickens
the elder had been immured there), escape partially because there
is much of this fantastic element with a great deal of real 'busi-
ness. But the Dorrits themselves, especially when the father is
released; that unpoetical and dismal ‘House of Usher' where
the Clennam family and firm abide (of all deplorable heroes
Arthur Clennam is, perhaps, the most deplorable); the con-
trasted Merdle household with its stale social satire (Bar' and
'Physician’escape best); the old toy-theatre villains Rigaud and
Flintwinch (Affery saves herself with Mr F. 's aunt, and one would
like to have heard a conversation between them); even the
Meagles family and the puppet Tattycoram and the villainess'
Miss Wade—all these come under the same curse of fundamental
unreality which derives hardly any benefit from the fantastic
energy expended by the author. And yet it is one of the most
remarkable testimonies to Dickens's really magical power that,
when the faults have become familiar and, thus, cease to tease
much, Little Dorrit remains almost as re-readable as any but the
very best of its companions.
These faults, however, could not escape notice, and they
i Unfavourable critics of Dickens from other than purely literary points of view
have, sometimes, declared that Flora is Dora grown old, and that both had a live
original. It is sufficient to say that the evidence produced for this is quite insufficient;
and that, if it were true, Dickens would have made an artistic blunder almost greater
than the ethical one, and extremely improbable. Flora may have been attractive
enough as a girl, and if Dora had lived she might have lost much of her attraction.