If we wish to understand the spirit and the period of _Nicholas Nickleby_ we must endeavour to comprehend and to appreciate the old more decisive remedies, or, if we prefer to put it so, the old more desperate remedies. Our fathers had a plain sort of pity; if you will, a gross and coa.r.s.e pity. They had their own sort of sentimentalism. They were quite willing to weep over Smike. But it certainly never occurred to them to weep over Squeers. Even those who opposed the French war opposed it exactly in the same way as their enemies opposed the French soldiers.
They fought with fighting. Charles Fox was full of horror at the bitterness and the useless bloodshed; but if any one had insulted him over the matter, he would have gone out and shot him in a duel as coolly as any of his contemporaries. All their interference was heroic interference. All their legislation was heroic legislation. All their remedies were heroic remedies. No doubt they were often narrow and often visionary. No doubt they often looked at a political formula when they should have looked at an elemental fact. No doubt they were pedantic in some of their principles and clumsy in some of their solutions. No doubt, in short, they were all very wrong; and no doubt we are the people, and wisdom shall die with us. But when they saw something which in their eyes, such as they were, really violated their morality, such as it was, then they did not cry "Investigate!" They did not cry "Educate!" They did not cry "Improve!" They did not cry "Evolve!" Like Nicholas Nickleby they cried "Stop!" And it did stop.
This is the first mark of the purely romantic method: the swiftness and simplicity with which St. George kills the dragon. The second mark of it is exhibited here as one of the weaknesses of _Nicholas Nickleby_. I mean the tendency in the purely romantic story to regard the heroine merely as something to be won; to regard the princess solely as something to be saved from the dragon. The father of Madeline Bray is really a very respectable dragon. His selfishness is suggested with much more psychological tact and truth than that of any other of the villains that d.i.c.kens described about this time. But his daughter is merely the young woman with whom Nicholas is in love. We do not care a rap about Madeline Bray. Personally I should have preferred Cecilia Bobster. Here is one real point where the Victorian romance falls below the Elizabethan romantic drama. Shakespeare always made his heroines heroic as well as his heroes.
In d.i.c.kens"s actual literary career it is this romantic quality in _Nicholas Nickleby_ that is most important. It is his first definite attempt to write a young and chivalrous novel. In this sense the comic characters and the comic scenes are secondary; and indeed the comic characters and the comic scenes, admirable as they are, could never be considered as in themselves superior to such characters and such scenes in many of the other books. But in themselves how unforgettable they are. Mr. Crummles and the whole of his theatrical business is an admirable case of that first and most splendid quality in d.i.c.kens--I mean the art of making something which in life we call pompous and dull, becoming in literature pompous and delightful. I have remarked before that nearly every one of the amusing characters of d.i.c.kens is in reality a great fool. But I might go further. Almost every one of his amusing characters is in reality a great bore. The very people that we fly to in d.i.c.kens are the very people that we fly from in life. And there is more in Crummles than the mere entertainment of his solemnity and his tedium.
The enormous seriousness with which he takes his art is always an exact touch in regard to the unsuccessful artist. If an artist is successful, everything then depends upon a dilemma of his moral character. If he is a mean artist success will make him a society man. If he is a magnanimous artist, success will make him an ordinary man. But only as long as he is unsuccessful will he be an unfathomable and serious artist, like Mr. Crummles. d.i.c.kens was always particularly good at expressing thus the treasures that belong to those who do not succeed in this world. There are vast prospects and splendid songs in the point of view of the typically unsuccessful man; if all the used-up actors and spoilt journalists and broken clerks could give a chorus, it would be a wonderful chorus in praise of the world. But these unsuccessful men commonly cannot even speak. d.i.c.kens is the voice of them, and a very ringing voice; because he was perhaps the only one of these unsuccessful men that was ever successful.
OLIVER TWIST
In considering d.i.c.kens, as we almost always must consider him, as a man of rich originality, we may possibly miss the forces from which he drew even his original energy. It is not well for man to be alone. We, in the modern world, are ready enough to admit that when it is applied to some problem of monasticism or of an ecstatic life. But we will not admit that our modern artistic claim to absolute originality is really a claim to absolute unsociability; a claim to absolute loneliness. The anarchist is at least as solitary as the ascetic. And the men of very vivid vigour in literature, the men such as d.i.c.kens, have generally displayed a large sociability towards the society of letters, always expressed in the happy pursuit of pre-existent themes, sometimes expressed, as in the case of Moliere or Sterne, in downright plagiarism. For even theft is a confession of our dependence on society. In d.i.c.kens, however, this element of the original foundations on which he worked is quite especially difficult to determine. This is partly due to the fact that for the present reading public he is practically the only one of his long line that is read at all. He sums up Smollett and Goldsmith, but he also destroys them. This one giant, being closest to us, cuts off from our view even the giants that begat him. But much more is this difficulty due to the fact that d.i.c.kens mixed up with the old material, materials so subtly modern, so made of the French Revolution, that the whole is transformed. If we want the best example of this, the best example is _Oliver Twist_.
Relatively to the other works of d.i.c.kens _Oliver Twist_ is not of great value, but it is of great importance. Some parts of it are so crude and of so clumsy a melodrama, that one is almost tempted to say that d.i.c.kens would have been greater without it. But even if he had been greater without it he would still have been incomplete without it. With the exception of some gorgeous pa.s.sages, both of humour and horror, the interest of the book lies not so much in its revelation of d.i.c.kens"s literary genius as in its revelation of those moral, personal, and political instincts which were the make-up of his character and the permanent support of that literary genius. It is by far the most depressing of all his books; it is in some ways the most irritating; yet its ugliness gives the last touch of honesty to all that spontaneous and splendid output. Without this one discordant note all his merriment might have seemed like levity.
d.i.c.kens had just appeared upon the stage and set the whole world laughing with his first great story _Pickwick_. _Oliver Twist_ was his encore. It was the second opportunity given to him by those who had rolled about with laughter over Tupman and Jingle, Weller and Dowler.
Under such circ.u.mstances a stagey reciter will sometimes take care to give a pathetic piece after his humorous one; and with all his many moral merits, there was much that was stagey about d.i.c.kens. But this explanation alone is altogether inadequate and unworthy. There was in d.i.c.kens this other kind of energy, horrible, uncanny, barbaric, capable in another age of coa.r.s.eness, greedy for the emblems of established ugliness, the coffin, the gibbet, the bones, the b.l.o.o.d.y knife. d.i.c.kens liked these things and he was all the more of a man for liking them; especially he was all the more of a boy. We can all recall with pleasure the fact that Miss Petowker (afterwards Mrs. Lillyvick) was in the habit of reciting a poem called "The Blood Drinker"s Burial." I cannot express my regret that the words of this poem are not given; for d.i.c.kens would have been quite as capable of writing "The Blood Drinker"s Burial" as Miss Petowker was of reciting it. This strain existed in d.i.c.kens alongside of his happy laughter; both were allied to the same robust romance. Here as elsewhere d.i.c.kens is close to all the permanent human things. He is close to religion, which has never allowed the thousand devils on its churches to stop the dancing of its bells. He is allied to the people, to the real poor, who love nothing so much as to take a cheerful gla.s.s and to talk about funerals. The extremes of his gloom and gaiety are the mark of religion and democracy; they mark him off from the moderate happiness of philosophers, and from that stoicism which is the virtue and the creed of aristocrats. There is nothing odd in the fact that the same man who conceived the humane hospitalities of Pickwick should also have imagined the inhuman laughter of f.a.gin"s den.
They are both genuine and they are both exaggerated. And the whole human tradition has tied up together in a strange knot these strands of festivity and fear. It is over the cups of Christmas Eve that men have always competed in telling ghost stories.
This first element was present in d.i.c.kens, and it is very powerfully present in _Oliver Twist_. It had not been present with sufficient consistency or continuity in _Pickwick_ to make it remain on the reader"s memory at all, for the tale of "Gabriel Grubb" is grotesque rather than horrible, and the two gloomy stories of the "Madman" and the "Queer Client" are so utterly irrelevant to the tale, that even if the reader remember them he probably does not remember that they occur in _Pickwick_. Critics have complained of Shakespeare and others for putting comic episodes into a tragedy. It required a man with the courage and coa.r.s.eness of d.i.c.kens actually to put tragic episodes into a farce. But they are not caught up into the story at all. In _Oliver Twist_, however, the thing broke out with an almost brutal inspiration, and those who had fallen in love with d.i.c.kens for his generous buffoonery may very likely have been startled at receiving such very different fare at the next helping. When you have bought a man"s book because you like his writing about Mr. Wardle"s punch-bowl and Mr.
Winkle"s skates, it may very well be surprising to open it and read about the sickening thuds that beat out the life of Nancy, or that mysterious villain whose face was blasted with disease.
As a nightmare, the work is really admirable. Characters which are not very clearly conceived as regards their own psychology are yet, at certain moments, managed so as to shake to its foundations our own psychology. Bill Sikes is not exactly a real man, but for all that he is a real murderer. Nancy is not really impressive as a living woman; but (as the phrase goes) she makes a lovely corpse. Something quite childish and eternal in us, something which is shocked with the mere simplicity of death, quivers when we read of those repeated blows or see Sikes cursing the tell-tale cur who will follow his b.l.o.o.d.y foot-prints. And this strange, sublime, vulgar melodrama, which is melodrama and yet is painfully real, reaches its hideous height in that fine scene of the death of Sikes, the besieged house, the boy screaming within, the crowd screaming without, the murderer turned almost a maniac and dragging his victim uselessly up and down the room, the escape over the roof, the rope swiftly running taut, and death sudden, startling and symbolic; a man hanged. There is in this and similar scenes something of the quality of Hogarth and many other English moralists of the early eighteenth century. It is not easy to define this Hogarthian quality in words, beyond saying that it is a sort of alphabetical realism, like the cruel candour of children. But it has about it these two special principles which separate it from all that we call realism in our time. First, that with us a moral story means a story about moral people; with them a moral story meant more often a story about immoral people. Second, that with us realism is always a.s.sociated with some subtle view of morals; with them realism was always a.s.sociated with some simple view of morals.
The end of Bill Sikes exactly in the way that the law would have killed him--this is a Hogarthian incident; it carries on that tradition of startling and shocking plat.i.tude.
All this element in the book was a sincere thing in the author, but none the less it came from old soils, from the graveyard and the gallows, and the lane where the ghost walked. d.i.c.kens was always attracted to such things, and (as Forster says with inimitable simplicity) "but for his strong sense might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism." As a matter of fact, like most of the men of strong sense in his tradition, d.i.c.kens was left with a half belief in spirits which became in practice a belief in bad spirits. The great disadvantage of those who have too much strong sense to believe in supernaturalism is that they keep last the low and little forms of the supernatural, such as omens, curses, spectres, and retributions, but find a high and happy supernaturalism quite incredible. Thus the Puritans denied the sacraments, but went on burning witches. This shadow does rest, to some extent, upon the rational English writers like d.i.c.kens; supernaturalism was dying, but its ugliest roots died last. d.i.c.kens would have found it easier to believe in a ghost than in a vision of the Virgin with angels. There, for good or evil, however, was the root of the old _diablerie_ in d.i.c.kens, and there it is in _Oliver Twist_. But this was only the first of the new d.i.c.kens elements, which must have surprised those d.i.c.kensians who eagerly bought his second book. The second of the new d.i.c.kens elements is equally indisputable and separate. It swelled afterwards to enormous proportions in d.i.c.kens"s work; but it really has its rise here.
Again, as in the case of the element of _diablerie_, it would be possible to make technical exceptions in favour of _Pickwick_. Just as there were quite inappropriate sc.r.a.ps of the gruesome element in _Pickwick_, so there are quite inappropriate allusions to this other topic in _Pickwick_. But n.o.body by merely reading _Pickwick_ would even remember this topic; no one by merely reading _Pickwick_ would know what this topic is; this third great subject of d.i.c.kens; this second great subject of the d.i.c.kens of _Oliver Twist_.
This subject is social oppression. It is surely fair to say that no one could have gathered from _Pickwick_ how this question boiled in the blood of the author of _Pickwick_. There are, indeed, pa.s.sages, particularly in connection with Mr. Pickwick in the debtor"s prison, which prove to us, looking back on a whole public career, that d.i.c.kens had been from the beginning bitter and inquisitive about the problem of our civilisation. No one could have imagined at the time that this bitterness ran in an unbroken river under all the surges of that superb gaiety and exuberance. With _Oliver Twist_ this sterner side of d.i.c.kens was suddenly revealed. For the very first pages of _Oliver Twist_ are stern even when they are funny. They amuse, but they cannot be enjoyed, as can the pa.s.sages about the follies of Mr. Snodgra.s.s or the humiliations of Mr. Winkle. The difference between the old easy humour and this new harsh humour is a difference not of degree but of kind.
d.i.c.kens makes game of Mr. b.u.mble because he wants to kill Mr. b.u.mble; he made game of Mr. Winkle because he wanted him to live for ever. d.i.c.kens has taken the sword in hand; against what is he declaring war?
It is just here that the greatness of d.i.c.kens comes in; it is just here that the difference lies between the pedant and the poet. d.i.c.kens enters the social and political war, and the first stroke he deals is not only significant but even startling. Fully to see this we must appreciate the national situation. It was an age of reform, and even of radical reform; the world was full of radicals and reformers; but only too many of them took the line of attacking everything and anything that was opposed to some particular theory among the many political theories that possessed the end of the eighteenth century. Some had so much perfected the perfect theory of republicanism that they almost lay awake at night because Queen Victoria had a crown on her head. Others were so certain that mankind had hitherto been merely strangled in the bonds of the State that they saw truth only in the destruction of tariffs or of by-laws. The greater part of that generation held that clearness, economy, and a hard common-sense, would soon destroy the errors that had been erected by the superst.i.tions and sentimentalities of the past. In pursuance of this idea many of the new men of the new century, quite confident that they were invigorating the new age, sought to destroy the old sentimental clericalism, the old sentimental feudalism, the old-world belief in priests, the old-world belief in patrons, and among other things the old-world belief in beggars. They sought among other things to clear away the old visionary kindliness on the subject of vagrants. Hence those reformers enacted not only a new reform bill but also a new poor law. In creating many other modern things they created the modern workhouse, and when d.i.c.kens came out to fight it was the first thing that he broke with his battle-axe.
This is where d.i.c.kens"s social revolt is of more value than mere politics and avoids the vulgarity of the novel with a purpose. His revolt is not a revolt of the commercialist against the feudalist, of the Nonconformist against the Churchman, of the Free-trader against the Protectionist, of the Liberal against the Tory. If he were among us now his revolt would not be the revolt of the Socialist against the Individualist, or of the Anarchist against the Socialist. His revolt was simply and solely the eternal revolt; it was the revolt of the weak against the strong. He did not dislike this or that argument for oppression; he disliked oppression. He disliked a certain look on the face of a man when he looks down on another man. And that look on the face is, indeed, the only thing in the world that we have really to fight between here and the fires of h.e.l.l. That which pedants of that time and this time would have called the sentimentalism of d.i.c.kens was really simply the detached sanity of d.i.c.kens. He cared nothing for the fugitive explanations of the Const.i.tutional Conservatives; he cared nothing for the fugitive explanations of the Manchester School. He would have cared quite as little for the fugitive explanations of the Fabian Society or of the modern scientific Socialist. He saw that under many forms there was one fact, the tyranny of man over man; and he struck at it when he saw it, whether it was old or new. When he found that footmen and rustics were too much afraid of Sir Leicester Dedlock, he attacked Sir Leicester Dedlock; he did not care whether Sir Leicester Dedlock said he was attacking England or whether Mr. Rouncewell, the Ironmaster, said he was attacking an effete oligarchy. In that case he pleased Mr. Rouncewell, the Iron-master, and displeased Sir Leicester Dedlock, the Aristocrat. But when he found that Mr. Rouncewell"s workmen were much too frightened of Mr. Rouncewell, then he displeased Mr.
Rouncewell in turn; he displeased Mr. Rouncewell very much by calling him Mr. Bounderby. When he imagined himself to be fighting old laws he gave a sort of vague and general approval to new laws. But when he came to the new laws they had a bad time. When d.i.c.kens found that after a hundred economic arguments and granting a hundred economic considerations, the fact remained that paupers in modern workhouses were much too afraid of the beadle, just as va.s.sals in ancient castles were much too afraid of the Dedlocks, then he struck suddenly and at once.
This is what makes the opening chapters of _Oliver Twist_ so curious and important. The very fact of d.i.c.kens"s distance from, and independence of, the elaborate financial arguments of his time, makes more definite and dazzling his sudden a.s.sertion that he sees the old human tyranny in front of him as plain as the sun at noon-day. d.i.c.kens attacks the modern workhouse with a sort of inspired simplicity as of a boy in a fairy tale who had wandered about, sword in hand, looking for ogres and who had found an indisputable ogre. All the other people of his time are attacking things because they are bad economics or because they are bad politics, or because they are bad science; he alone is attacking things because they are bad. All the others are Radicals with a large R; he alone is radical with a small one. He encounters evil with that beautiful surprise which, as it is the beginning of all real pleasure, is also the beginning of all righteous indignation. He enters the workhouse just as Oliver Twist enters it, as a little child.
This is the real power and pathos of that celebrated pa.s.sage in the book which has pa.s.sed into a proverb; but which has not lost its terrible humour even in being hackneyed. I mean, of course, the everlasting quotation about Oliver Twist asking for more. The real poignancy that there is in this idea is a very good study in that strong school of social criticism which d.i.c.kens represented. A modern realist describing the dreary workhouse would have made all the children utterly crushed, not daring to speak at all, not expecting anything, not hoping anything, past all possibility of affording even an ironical contrast or a protest of despair. A modern, in short, would have made all the boys in the workhouse pathetic by making them all pessimists. But Oliver Twist is not pathetic because he is a pessimist. Oliver Twist is pathetic because he is an optimist. The whole tragedy of that incident is in the fact that he does expect the universe to be kind to him, that he does believe that he is living in a just world. He comes before the Guardians as the ragged peasants of the French Revolution came before the Kings and Parliaments of Europe. That is to say, he comes, indeed, with gloomy experiences, but he comes with a happy philosophy. He knows that there are wrongs of man to be reviled; but he believes also that there are rights of man to be demanded. It has often been remarked as a singular fact that the French poor, who stand in historic tradition as typical of all the desperate men who have dragged down tyranny, were, as a matter of fact, by no means worse off than the poor of many other European countries before the Revolution. The truth is that the French were tragic because they were better off. The others had known the sorrowful experiences; but they alone had known the splendid expectation and the original claims. It was just here that d.i.c.kens was so true a child of them and of that happy theory so bitterly applied. They were the one oppressed people that simply asked for justice; they were the one Parish Boy who innocently asked for more.
OLD CURIOSITY SHOP
Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only redeemed from an utter triviality, surpa.s.sing that of naughts and crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us or the things on the retina of the eye or the enormous irrelevancy of encyclopaedias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come.
All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of d.a.m.nation. The first thing that has to be realised about d.i.c.kens is this ultimate spiritual condition of the man, which lay behind all his creations. This d.i.c.kens state of mind is difficult to pick out in words as are all elementary states of mind; they cannot be described, not because they are too subtle for words, but because they are too simple for words.
Perhaps the nearest approach to a statement of it would be this: that d.i.c.kens expresses an eager antic.i.p.ation of everything that will happen in the motley affairs of men; he looks at the quiet crowd waiting for it to be picturesque and to play the fool; he expects everything; he is torn with a happy hunger. Thackeray is always looking back to yesterday; d.i.c.kens is always looking forward to to-morrow. Both are profoundly humorous, for there is a humour of the morning and a humour of the evening; but the first guesses at what it will get, at all the grotesqueness and variety which a day may bring forth; the second looks back on what the day has been and sees even its solemnities as slightly ironical. Nothing can be too extravagant for the laughter that looks forward; and nothing can be too dignified for the laughter that looks back. It is an idle but obvious thing, which many must have noticed, that we often find in the t.i.tle of one of an author"s books what might very well stand for a general description of all of them. Thus all Spenser"s works might be called _A Hymn to Heavenly Beauty_; or all Mr.
Bernard Shaw"s bound books might be called _You Never Can Tell_. In the same way the whole substance and spirit of Thackeray might be gathered under the general t.i.tle _Vanity Fair_. In the same way too the whole substance and spirit of d.i.c.kens might be gathered under the general t.i.tle _Great Expectations_.
In a recent criticism on this position I saw it remarked that all this is reading into d.i.c.kens something that he did not mean; and I have been told that it would have greatly surprised d.i.c.kens to be informed that he "went down the broad road of the Revolution." Of course it would.
Criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they knew themselves. It exists to say the things about them which they did not know themselves. If a critic says that the _Iliad_ has a pagan rather than a Christian pity, or that it is full of pictures made by one epithet, of course he does not mean that Homer could have said that. If Homer could have said that the critic would leave Homer to say it. The function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only be one function--that of dealing with the subconscious part of the author"s mind which only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the author"s mind, which the author himself can express. Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.
Doubtless the name in this case _Great Expectations_ is an empty coincidence; and indeed it is not in the books of the later d.i.c.kens period (the period of _Great Expectations_) that we should look for the best examples of this sanguine and expectant spirit which is the essential of the man"s genius. There are plenty of good examples of it especially in the earlier works. But even in the earlier works there is no example of it more striking or more satisfactory than _The Old Curiosity Shop_. It is particularly noticeable in the fact that its opening and original framework express the idea of a random experience, a thing come across in the street; a single face in the crowd, followed until it tells its story. Though the thing ends in a novel it begins in a sketch; it begins as one of the _Sketches by Boz_. There is something unconsciously artistic in the very clumsiness of this opening. Master Humphrey starts to keep a sc.r.a.p-book of all his adventures, and he finds that he can fill the whole sc.r.a.p-book with the sequels and developments of one adventure; he goes out to notice everybody and he finds himself busily and variedly occupied only in watching somebody. In this there is a very profound truth about the true excitement and inexhaustible poetry of life. The truth is not so much that eternity is full of souls as that one soul can fill eternity. In strict art there is something quite lame and lumbering about the way in which the benevolent old story-teller starts to tell many stories and then drops away altogether, while one of his stories takes his place. But in a larger art, his collision with Little Nell and his complete eclipse by her personality and narrative have a real significance. They suggest the random richness of such meetings, and their uncalculated results. It makes the whole book a sort of splendid accident.
It is not true, as is commonly said, that the d.i.c.kens pathos as pathos is bad. It is not true, as is still more commonly said, that the whole business about Little Nell is bad. The case is more complex than that.
Yet complex as it is it admits of one sufficiently clear distinction.
Those who have written about the death of Little Nell, have generally noticed the crudities of the character itself; the little girl"s unnatural and staring innocence, her constrained and awkward piety. But they have nearly all of them entirely failed to notice that there is in the death of Little Nell one quite definite and really artistic idea. It is not an artistic idea that a little child should die rhetorically on the stage like Paul Dombey; and Little Nell does not die rhetorically upon the stage like Paul Dombey. But it is an artistic idea that all the good powers and personalities in the story should set out in pursuit of one insignificant child, to repair an injustice to her, should track her from town to town over England with all the resources of wealth, intelligence, and travel, and should all--arrive too late. All the good fairies and all the kind magicians, all the just kings and all the gallant princes, with chariots and flying dragons and armies and navies go after one little child who had strayed into a wood, and find her dead. That is the conception which d.i.c.kens"s artistic instinct was really aiming at when he finally condemned Little Nell to death, after keeping her, so to speak, so long with the rope round her neck. The death of Little Nell is open certainly to the particular denial which its enemies make about it. The death of Little Nell is not pathetic. It is perhaps tragic; it is in reality ironic. Here is a very good case of the injustice to d.i.c.kens on his purely literary side. It is not that I say that d.i.c.kens achieved what he designed; it is that the critics will not see what the design was. They go on talking of the death of Little Nell as if it were a mere example of maudlin description like the death of Little Paul. As a fact it is not described at all; so it cannot be objectionable. It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of Little Nell, that I object to.
In this, in the actual picture of her personality, if you can call it a personality, d.i.c.kens did fall into some of his facile vices. The real objection to much of his pathos belongs really to another part of his character. It is connected with his vanity, his voracity for all kinds of praise, his restive experimentalism and even perhaps his envy. He strained himself to achieve pathos. His humour was inspiration; but his pathos was ambition. His laughter was lonely; he would have laughed on a desert island. But his grief was gregarious. He liked to move great ma.s.ses of men, to melt them into tenderness, to play on the people as a great pianist plays on them; to make them mad or sad. His pathos was to him a way of showing his power; and for that reason it was really powerless. He could not help making people laugh; but he tried to make them cry. We come in this novel, as we often do come in his novels, upon hard lumps of unreality, upon a phrase that suddenly sickens. That is always due to his conscious despotism over the delicate feelings; that is always due to his love of fame as distinct from his love of fun. But it is not true that all d.i.c.kens"s pathos is like this; it is not even true that all the pa.s.sages about Little Nell are like this; there are two strands almost everywhere and they can be differentiated as the sincere and the deliberate. There is a great difference between d.i.c.kens thinking about the tears of his characters and d.i.c.kens thinking about the tears of his audience.
When all this is allowed, however, and the exaggerated contempt for the d.i.c.kens pathos is properly corrected, the broad fact remains: that to pa.s.s from the solemn characters in this book to the comic characters in this book, is to be like some Ulysses who should pa.s.s suddenly from the land of shadows to the mountain of the G.o.ds. Little Nell has her own position in careful and reasonable criticism: even that wobbling old a.s.s, her grandfather, has his position in it; perhaps even the dissipated Fred (whom long acquaintance with Mr. d.i.c.k Swiveller has not made any less dismal in his dissipation) has a place in it also. But when we come to Swiveller and Sampson Bra.s.s and Quilp and Mrs. Jarley, then Fred and Nell and the grandfather simply do not exist. There are no such people in the story. The real hero and heroine of _The Old Curiosity Shop_ are of course d.i.c.k Swiveller and the Marchioness. It is significant in a sense that these two sane, strong, living, and lovable human beings are the only two, or almost the only two, people in the story who do not run after Little Nell. They have something better to do than to go on that shadowy chase after that cheerless phantom. They have to build up between them a true romance; perhaps the one true romance in the whole of d.i.c.kens. d.i.c.k Swiveller really has all the half-heroic characteristics which make a man respected by a woman and which are the male contribution to virtue. He is brave, magnanimous, sincere about himself, amusing, absurdly hopeful; above all, he is both strong and weak. On the other hand the Marchioness really has all the characteristics, the entirely heroic characteristics which make a woman respected by a man. She is female: that is, she is at once incurably candid and incurably loyal, she is full of terrible common-sense, she expects little pleasure for herself and yet she can enjoy bursts of it; above all, she is physically timid and yet she can face anything. All this solid rocky romanticism is really implied in the speech and action of these two characters and can be felt behind them all the time.
Because they are the two most absurd people in the book they are also the most vivid, human, and imaginable. There are two really fine love affairs in d.i.c.kens; and I almost think only two. One is the happy courtship of Swiveller and the Marchioness; the other is the tragic courtship of Toots and Florence Dombey. When d.i.c.k Swiveller wakes up in bed and sees the Marchioness playing cribbage he thinks that he and she are a prince and princess in a fairy tale. He thinks right.
I speak thus seriously of such characters with a deliberate purpose; for the frivolous characters of d.i.c.kens are taken much too frivolously. It has been quite insufficiently pointed out that all the serious moral ideas that d.i.c.kens did contrive to express he expressed altogether through this fantastic medium, in such figures as Swiveller and the little servant. The warmest upholder of d.i.c.kens would not go to the solemn or sentimental pa.s.sages for anything fresh or suggestive in faith or philosophy. No one would pretend that the death of little Dombey (with its "What are the wild waves saying?") told us anything new or real about death. A good Christian dying, one would imagine, not only would not know what the wild waves were saying, but would not care. No one would pretend that the repentance of old Paul Dombey throws any light on the psychology or philosophy of repentance. No doubt old Dombey, white-haired and amiable, was a great improvement on old Dombey brown-haired and unpleasant. But in his case the softening of the heart seems to bear too close a resemblance to softening of the brain. Whether these serious pa.s.sages are as bad as the critical people or as good as the sentimental people find them, at least they do not convey anything in the way of an illuminating glimpse or a bold suggestion about men"s moral nature. The serious figures do not tell one anything about the human soul. The comic figures do. Take anything almost at random out of these admirable speeches of d.i.c.k Swiveller. Notice, for instance, how exquisitely d.i.c.kens has caught a certain very deep and delicate quality at the bottom of this idle kind of man. I mean that odd impersonal sort of intellectual justice, by which the frivolous fellow sees things as they are and even himself as he is; and is above irritation. Mr.
Swiveller, you remember, asks the Marchioness whether the Bra.s.s family ever talk about him; she nods her head with vivacity. ""Complimentary?"
inquired Mr. Swiveller. The motion of the little servant"s head altered.... "But she says," continued the little servant, "that you ain"t to be trusted." "Well, do you know, Marchioness," said Mr.
Swiveller thoughtfully, "many people, not exactly professional people, but tradesmen, have had the same idea. The excellent citizen from whom I ordered this beer inclines strongly to that opinion.""
This philosophical freedom from all resentment, this strange love of truth which seems actually to come through carelessness, is a very real piece of spiritual observation. Even among liars there are two cla.s.ses, one immeasurably better than another. The honest liar is the man who tells the truth about his old lies; who says on Wednesday, "I told a magnificent lie on Monday." He keeps the truth in circulation; no one version of things stagnates in him and becomes an evil secret. He does not have to live with old lies; a horrible domesticity. Mr. Swiveller may mislead the waiter about whether he has the money to pay; but he does not mislead his friend, and he does not mislead himself on the point. He is quite as well aware as any one can be of the acc.u.mulating falsity of the position of a gentleman who by his various debts has closed up all the streets into the Strand except one, and who is going to close that to-night with a pair of gloves. He shuts up the street with a pair of gloves, but he does not shut up his mind with a secret.
The traffic of truth is still kept open through his soul.
It is exactly in these absurd characters, then, that we can find a ma.s.s of psychological and ethical suggestion. This cannot be found in the serious characters except indeed in some of the later experiments: there is a little of such psychological and ethical suggestion in figures like Gridley, like Jasper, like Bradley Headstone. But in these earlier books at least, such as _The Old Curiosity Shop_, the grave or moral figures throw no light upon morals. I should maintain this generalisation even in the presence of that apparent exception _The Christmas Carol_ with its trio of didactic ghosts. Charity is certainly splendid, at once a luxury and a necessity; but d.i.c.kens is not most effective when he is preaching charity seriously; he is most effective when he is preaching it uproariously; when he is preaching it by means of ma.s.sive personalities and vivid scenes. One might say that he is best not when he is preaching his human love, but when he is practising it. In his grave pages he tells us to love men; but in his wild pages he creates men whom we can love. By his solemnity he commands us to love our neighbours. By his caricature he makes us love them.
There is an odd literary question which I wonder is not put more often in literature. How far can an author tell a truth without seeing it himself? Perhaps an actual example will express my meaning. I was once talking to a highly intelligent lady about Thackeray"s _Newcomes_. We were speaking of the character of Mrs. Mackenzie, the Campaigner, and in the middle of the conversation the lady leaned across to me and said in a low, hoa.r.s.e, but emphatic voice, "She drank. Thackeray didn"t know it; but she drank." And it is really astonishing what a shaft of white light this sheds on the Campaigner, on her terrible temperament, on her agonised abusiveness and her almost more agonised urbanity, on her clamour which is nevertheless not open or explicable, on her temper which is not so much bad temper as insatiable, bloodthirsty, man-eating temper. How far can a writer thus indicate by accident a truth of which he is himself ignorant? If truth is a plan or pattern of things that really are, or in other words, if truth truly exists outside ourselves, or in other words, if truth exists at all, it must be often possible for a writer to uncover a corner of it which he happens not to understand, but which his reader does happen to understand. The author sees only two lines; the reader sees where they meet and what is the angle. The author sees only an arc or fragment of a curve; the reader sees the size of the circle. The last thing to say about d.i.c.kens, and especially about books like _The Old Curiosity Shop_, is that they are full of these unconscious truths. The careless reader may miss them. The careless author almost certainly did miss them. But from them can be gathered an impression of real truth to life which is for the grave critics of d.i.c.kens an almost unknown benefit, buried treasure. Here for instance is one of them out of _The Old Curiosity Shop_. I mean the pa.s.sage in which (by a blazing stroke of genius) the dashing Mr. Chuckster, one of the Glorious Apollos of whom Mr. Swiveller was the Perpetual Grand, is made to entertain a hatred bordering upon frenzy for the stolid, patient, respectful, and laborious Kit. Now in the formal plan of the story Mr.
Chuckster is a fool, and Kit is almost a hero; at least he is a n.o.ble boy. Yet unconsciously d.i.c.kens made the idiot Chuckster say something profoundly suggestive on the subject. In speaking of Kit Mr. Chuckster makes use of these two remarkable phrases; that Kit is "meek" and that he is "a sn.o.b." Now Kit is really a very fresh and manly picture of a boy, firm, sane, chivalrous, reasonable, full of those three great Roman virtues which Mr. Belloc has so often celebrated, _virtus_ and _verecundia_ and _pietas_. He is a sympathetic but still a straightforward study of the best type of that most respectable of all human cla.s.ses, the respectable poor. All this is true; all that d.i.c.kens utters in praise of Kit is true; nevertheless the awful words of Chuckster remain written on the eternal skies. Kit is meek and Kit is a sn.o.b. His natural dignity does include and is partly marred by that instinctive subservience to the employing cla.s.s which has been the comfortable weakness of the whole English democracy, which has prevented their making any revolution for the last two hundred years. Kit would not serve any wicked man for money, but he would serve any moderately good man and the money would give a certain dignity and decisiveness to the goodness. All this is the English popular evil which goes along with the English popular virtues of geniality, of homeliness, tolerance and strong humour, hope and an enormous appet.i.te for a hand-to-mouth happiness. The scene in which Kit takes his family to the theatre is a monument of the ma.s.sive qualities of old English enjoyment. If what we want is Merry England, our antiquarians ought not to revive the Maypole or the Morris Dancers; they ought to revive Astley"s and Sadler"s Wells and the old solemn Circus and the old stupid Pantomime, and all the sawdust and all the oranges. Of all this strength and joy in the poor, Kit is a splendid and final symbol. But amid all his masculine and English virtue, he has this weak touch of meekness, or acceptance of the powers that be. It is a sound touch; it is a real truth about Kit. But d.i.c.kens did not know it. Mr. Chuckster did.
d.i.c.kens"s stories taken as a whole have more artistic unity than appears at the first glance. It is the immediate impulse of a modern critic to dismiss them as mere disorderly sc.r.a.p-books with very brilliant sc.r.a.ps.
But this is not quite so true as it looks. In one of d.i.c.kens"s novels there is generally no particular unity of construction; but there is often a considerable unity of sentiment and atmosphere. Things are irrelevant, but not somehow inappropriate. The whole book is written carelessly; but the whole book is generally written in one mood. To take a rude parallel from the other arts, we may say that there is not much unity of form, but there is much unity of colour. In most of the novels this can be seen. _Nicholas Nickleby_, as I have remarked, is full of a certain freshness, a certain light and open-air curiosity, which irradiates from the image of the young man swinging along the Yorkshire roads in the sun. Hence the comic characters with whom he falls in are comic characters in the same key; they are a band of strolling players, charlatans and poseurs, but too humane to be called humbugs. In the same way, the central story of _Oliver Twist_ is sombre; and hence even its comic character is almost sombre; at least he is too ugly to be merely amusing. Mr. b.u.mble is in some ways a terrible grotesque; his apoplectic visage recalls the "fire-red Cherubimme"s face," which added such horror to the height and stature of Chaucer"s Sompnour. In both these cases even the riotous and absurd characters are a little touched with the tint of the whole story. But this neglected merit of d.i.c.kens can certainly be seen best in _The Old Curiosity Shop_.
The curiosity shop itself was a lumber of grotesque and sinister things, outlandish weapons, twisted and diabolic decorations. The comic characters in the book are all like images bought in an old curiosity shop. Quilp might be a gargoyle. He might be some sort of devilish door-knocker, dropped down and crawling about the pavement. The same applies to the sinister and really terrifying stiffness of Sally Bra.s.s.
She is like some old staring figure cut out of wood. Sampson Bra.s.s, her brother, again is a grotesque in the same rather inhuman manner; he is especially himself when he comes in with the green shade over his eye.
About all this group of bad figures in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ there is a sort of _diablerie_. There is also within this atmosphere an extraordinary energy of irony and laughter. The scene in which Sampson Bra.s.s draws up the description of Quilp, supposing him to be dead, reaches a point of fiendish fun. "We will not say very bandy, Mrs.
Jiniwin," he says of his friend"s legs, "we will confine ourselves to bandy. He is gone, my friends, where his legs would never be called in question." They go on to the discussion of his nose, and Mrs. Jiniwin inclines to the view that it is flat. "Aquiline, you hag! Aquiline,"
cries Mr. Quilp, pushing in his head and striking his nose with his fist. There is nothing better in the whole brutal exuberance of the character than that gesture with which Quilp punches his own face with his own fist. It is indeed a perfect symbol; for Quilp is always fighting himself for want of anybody else. He is energy, and energy by itself is always suicidal; he is that primordial energy which tears and which destroys itself.
BARNABY RUDGE
_Barnaby Rudge_ was written by d.i.c.kens in the spring and first flowing tide of his popularity; it came immediately after _The Old Curiosity Shop_, and only a short time after _Pickwick_. d.i.c.kens was one of those rare but often very sincere men in whom the high moment of success almost coincides with the high moment of youth. The calls upon him at this time were insistent and overwhelming; this necessarily happens at a certain stage of a successful writer"s career. He was just successful enough to invite offers and not successful enough to reject them. At the beginning of his career he could throw himself into _Pickwick_ because there was nothing else to throw himself into. At the end of his life he could throw himself into _A Tale of Two Cities_, because he refused to throw himself into anything else. But there was an intervening period, early in his life, when there was almost too much work for his imagination, and yet not quite enough work for his housekeeping. To this period _Barnaby Rudge_ belongs. And it is a curious tribute to the quite curious greatness of d.i.c.kens that in this period of youthful strain we do not feel the strain but feel only the youth. His own amazing wish to write equalled or outstripped even his readers" amazing wish to read.
Working too hard did not cure him of his abstract love of work.
Unreasonable publishers asked him to write ten novels at once; but he wanted to write twenty novels at once. All this period is strangely full of his own sense at once of fertility and of futility; he did work which no one else could have done, and yet he could not be certain as yet that he was anybody.