A TALE OF TWO CITIES
As an example of d.i.c.kens"s literary work, _A Tale of Two Cities_ is not wrongly named. It is his most typical contact with the civic ideals of Europe. All his other tales have been tales of one city. He was in spirit a c.o.c.kney; though that t.i.tle has been quite unreasonably twisted to mean a cad. By the old sound and proverbial test a c.o.c.kney was a man born within the sound of Bow bells. That is, he was a man born within the immediate appeal of high civilisation and of eternal religion.
Shakespeare, in the heart of his fantastic forest, turns with a splendid suddenness to the c.o.c.kney ideal as being the true one after all. For a jest, for a reaction, for an idle summer love or still idler summer hatred, it is well to wander away into the bewildering forest of Arden.
It is well that those who are sick with love or sick with the absence of love, those who weary of the folly of courts or weary yet more of their wisdom, it is natural that these should trail away into the twinkling twilight of the woods. Yet it is here that Shakespeare makes one of his most arresting and startling a.s.sertions of the truth. Here is one of those rare and tremendous moments of which one may say that there is a stage direction, "Enter Shakespeare." He has admitted that for men weary of courts, for men sick of cities, the wood is the wisest place, and he has praised it with his purest lyric ecstasy. But when a man enters suddenly upon that celestial picnic, a man who is not sick of cities, but sick of hunger, a man who is not weary of courts, but weary of walking, then Shakespeare lets through his own voice with a shattering sincerity and cries the praise of practical human civilisation:
If ever you have looked on better days, If ever you have sat at good men"s feasts, If ever been where bells have knolled to church, If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear Or know what "tis to pity and be pitied.
There is nothing finer even in Shakespeare than that conception of the circle of rich men all pretending to rough it in the country, and the one really hungry man entering, sword in hand, and praising the city.
"If ever been where bells have knolled to church"; if you have ever been within sound of Bow bells; if you have ever been happy and haughty enough to call yourself a c.o.c.kney.
We must remember this distinction always in the case of d.i.c.kens. d.i.c.kens is the great c.o.c.kney, at once tragic and comic, who enters abruptly upon the Arcadian banquet of the aesthetics and says, "Forbear and eat no more," and tells them that they shall not eat "until necessity be served." If there was one thing he would have favoured instinctively it would have been the spreading of the town as meaning the spreading of civilisation. And we should (I hope) all favour the spreading of the town if it did mean the spreading of civilisation. The objection to the spreading of the modern Manchester or Birmingham suburb is simply that such a suburb is much more barbaric than any village in Europe could ever conceivably be. And again, if there is anything that d.i.c.kens would have definitely hated it is that general treatment of nature as a dramatic spectacle, a piece of scene-painting which has become the common mark of the culture of our wealthier cla.s.ses. Despite many fine pictures of natural scenery, especially along the English roadsides, he was upon the whole emphatically on the side of the town. He was on the side of bricks and mortar. He was a citizen; and, after all, a citizen means a man of the city. His strength was, after all, in the fact that he was a man of the city. But, after all, his weakness, his calamitous weakness, was that he was a man of one city.
For all practical purposes he had never been outside such places as Chatham and London. He did indeed travel on the Continent; but surely no man"s travel was ever so superficial as his. He was more superficial than the smallest and commonest tourist. He went about Europe on stilts; he never touched the ground. There is one good test and one only of whether a man has travelled to any profit in Europe. An Englishman is, as such, a European, and as he approaches the central splendours of Europe he ought to feel that he is coming home. If he does not feel at home he had much better have stopped at home. England is a real home; London is a real home; and all the essential feelings of adventure or the picturesque can easily be gained by going out at night upon the flats of Ess.e.x or the cloven hills of Surrey. Your visit to Europe is useless unless it gives you the sense of an exile returning. Your first sight of Rome is futile unless you feel that you have seen it before.
Thus useless and thus futile were the foreign experiments and the continental raids of d.i.c.kens. He enjoyed them as he would have enjoyed, as a boy, a scamper out of Chatham into some strange meadows, as he would have enjoyed, when a grown man, a steam in a police boat out into the fens to the far east of London. But he was the c.o.c.kney venturing far; he was not the European coming home. He is still the splendid c.o.c.kney Orlando of whom I spoke above; he cannot but suppose that any strange men, being happy in some pastoral way, are mysterious foreign scoundrels. d.i.c.kens"s real speech to the lazy and laughing civilisation of Southern Europe would really have run in the Shakespearian words:
but whoe"er you be Who in this desert inaccessible, Under the shade of melancholy boughs Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.
If ever you have looked on better things, If ever been where bells have knolled to church.
If, in short, you have ever had the advantage of being born within the sound of Bow bells. d.i.c.kens could not really conceive that there was any other city but his own.
It is necessary thus to insist that d.i.c.kens never understood the Continent, because only thus can we appreciate the really remarkable thing he did in _A Tale of Two Cities_. It is necessary to feel, first of all, the fact that to him London was the centre of the universe. He did not understand at all the real sense in which Paris is the capital of Europe. He had never realised that all roads lead to Rome. He had never felt (as an Englishman can feel) that he was an Athenian before he was a Londoner. Yet with everything against him he did this astonishing thing. He wrote a book about two cities, one of which he understood; the other he did not understand. And his description of the city he did not know is almost better than his description of the city he did know. This is the entrance of the unquestionable thing about d.i.c.kens; the thing called genius; the thing which every one has to talk about directly and distinctly because no one knows what it is. For a plain word (as for instance the word fool) always covers an infinite mystery.
_A Tale of Two Cities_ is one of the more tragic tints of the later life of d.i.c.kens. It might be said that he grew sadder as he grew older; but this would be false, for two reasons. First, a man never or hardly ever does grow sad as he grows old; on the contrary, the most melancholy young lovers can be found forty years afterwards chuckling over their port wine. And second, d.i.c.kens never did grow old, even in a physical sense. What weariness did appear in him appeared in the prime of life; it was due not to age but to overwork, and his exaggerative way of doing everything. To call d.i.c.kens a victim of elderly disenchantment would be as absurd as to say the same of Keats. Such fatigue as there was, was due not to the slowing down of his blood, but rather to its unremitting rapidity. He was not wearied by his age; rather he was wearied by his youth. And though _A Tale of Two Cities_ is full of sadness, it is full also of enthusiasm; that pathos is a young pathos rather than an old one. Yet there is one circ.u.mstance which does render important the fact that _A Tale of Two Cities_ is one of the later works of d.i.c.kens. This fact is the fact of his dependence upon another of the great writers of the Victorian era. And it is in connection with this that we can best see the truth of which I have been speaking; the truth that his actual ignorance of France went with amazing intuitive perception of the truth about it. It is here that he has most clearly the plain mark of the man of genius; that he can understand what he does not understand.
d.i.c.kens was inspired to the study of the French Revolution and to the writing of a romance about it by the example and influence of Carlyle.
Thomas Carlyle undoubtedly rediscovered for Englishmen the revolution that was at the back of all their policies and reforms. It is an entertaining side joke that the French Revolution should have been discovered for Britons by the only British writer who did not really believe in it. Nevertheless, the most authoritative and the most recent critics on that great renaissance agree in considering Carlyle"s work one of the most searching and detailed power. Carlyle had read a great deal about the French Revolution. d.i.c.kens had read nothing at all, except Carlyle. Carlyle was a man who collected his ideas by the careful collation of doc.u.ments and the verification of references. d.i.c.kens was a man who collected his ideas from loose hints in the streets, and those always the same streets; as I have said, he was the citizen of one city.
Carlyle was in his way learned; d.i.c.kens was in every way ignorant.
d.i.c.kens was an Englishman cut off from France; Carlyle was a Scotsman, historically connected with France. And yet, when all this is said and certified, d.i.c.kens is more right than Carlyle. d.i.c.kens"s French Revolution is probably more like the real French Revolution than Carlyle"s. It is difficult, if not impossible, to state the grounds of this strong conviction. One can only talk of it by employing that excellent method which Cardinal Newman employed when he spoke of the "notes" of Catholicism. There were certain "notes" of the Revolution.
One note of the Revolution was the thing which silly people call optimism, and sensible people call high spirits. Carlyle could never quite get it, because with all his spiritual energy he had no high spirits. That is why he preferred prose to poetry. He could understand rhetoric; for rhetoric means singing with an object. But he could not understand lyrics; for the lyric means singing without an object; as every one does when he is happy. Now for all its blood and its black guillotines, the French Revolution was full of mere high spirits. Nay, it was full of happiness. This actual lilt and levity Carlyle never really found in the Revolution, because he could not find it in himself.
d.i.c.kens knew less of the Revolution, but he had more of it. When d.i.c.kens attacked abuses, he battered them down with exactly that sort of cheery and quite one-sided satisfaction with which the French mob battered down the Bastille. d.i.c.kens utterly and innocently believed in certain things; he would, I think, have drawn the sword for them. Carlyle half believed in half a hundred things; he was at once more of a mystic and more of a sceptic. Carlyle was the perfect type of the grumbling servant; the old grumbling servant of the aristocratic comedies. He followed the aristocracy, but he growled as he followed. He was obedient without being servile, just as Caleb Balderstone was obedient without being servile. But d.i.c.kens was the type of the man who might really have rebelled instead of grumbling. He might have gone out into the street and fought, like the man who took the Bastille. It is somewhat nationally significant that when we talk of the man in the street it means a figure silent, slouching, and even feeble. When the French speak of the man in the street, it means danger in the street.
No one can fail to notice this deep difference between d.i.c.kens and the Carlyle whom he avowedly copied. Splendid and symbolic as are Carlyle"s scenes of the French Revolution, we have in reading them a curious sense that everything is happening at night. In d.i.c.kens even ma.s.sacre happens by daylight. Carlyle always a.s.sumes that because things were tragedies therefore the men who did them felt tragic. d.i.c.kens knows that the man who works the worst tragedies is the man who feels comic; as for example, Mr. Quilp. The French Revolution was a much simpler world than Carlyle could understand; for Carlyle was subtle and not simple. d.i.c.kens could understand it, for he was simple and not subtle. He understood that plain rage against plain political injustice; he understood again that obvious vindictiveness and that obvious brutality which followed.
"Cruelty and the abuse of absolute power," he told an American slave-owner, "are two of the bad pa.s.sions of human nature." Carlyle was quite incapable of rising to the height of that uplifted common-sense.
He must always find something mystical about the cruelty of the French Revolution. The effect was equally bad whether he found it mystically bad and called the thing anarchy, or whether he found it mystically good and called it the rule of the strong. In both cases he could not understand the common-sense justice or the common-sense vengeance of d.i.c.kens and the French Revolution.
Yet d.i.c.kens has in this book given a perfect and final touch to this whole conception of mere rebellion and mere human nature. Carlyle had written the story of the French Revolution and had made the story a mere tragedy. d.i.c.kens writes the story about the French Revolution, and does not make the Revolution itself the tragedy at all. d.i.c.kens knows that an outbreak is seldom a tragedy; generally it is the avoidance of a tragedy. All the real tragedies are silent. Men fight each other with furious cries, because men fight each other with chivalry and an unchangeable sense of brotherhood. But trees fight each other in utter stillness; because they fight each other cruelly and without quarter. In this book, as in history, the guillotine is not the calamity, but rather the solution of the calamity. The sin of Sydney Carton is a sin of habit, not of revolution. His gloom is the gloom of London, not the gloom of Paris.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Charles d.i.c.kens, Circa 1860 Photograph by J. & C. Watkins.]
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
_Great Expectations_, which was written in the afternoon of d.i.c.kens"s life and fame, has a quality of serene irony and even sadness, which puts it quite alone among his other works. At no time could d.i.c.kens possibly be called cynical, he had too much vitality; but relatively to the other books this book is cynical; but it has the soft and gentle cynicism of old age, not the hard cynicism of youth. To be a young cynic is to be a young brute; but d.i.c.kens, who had been so perfectly romantic and sentimental in his youth, could afford to admit this touch of doubt into the mixed experience of his middle age. At no time could any books by d.i.c.kens have been called Thackerayan. Both of the two men were too great for that. But relatively to the other d.i.c.kensian productions this book may be called Thackerayan. It is a study in human weakness and the slow human surrender. It describes how easily a free lad of fresh and decent instincts can be made to care more for rank and pride and the degrees of our stratified society than for old affection and for honour.
It is an extra chapter to _The Book of Sn.o.bs_.
The best way of stating the change which this book marks in d.i.c.kens can be put in one phrase. In this book for the first time the hero disappears. The hero had descended to d.i.c.kens by a long line which begins with the G.o.ds, nay, perhaps if one may say so, which begins with G.o.d. First comes Deity and then the image of Deity; first comes the G.o.d and then the demi-G.o.d, the Hercules who labours and conquers before he receives his heavenly crown. That idea, with continual mystery and modification, has continued behind all romantic tales; the demi-G.o.d became the hero of paganism; the hero of paganism became the knight-errant of Christianity; the knight-errant who wandered and was foiled before he triumphed became the hero of the later prose romance, the romance in which the hero had to fight a duel with the villain but always survived, in which the hero drove desperate horses through the night in order to rescue the heroine, but always rescued her.
This heroic modern hero, this demi-G.o.d in a top-hat, may be said to reach his supreme moment and typical example about the time when d.i.c.kens was writing that thundering and thrilling and highly unlikely scene in _Nicholas Nickleby_, the scene where Nicholas hopelessly denounces the atrocious Gride in his hour of grinning triumph, and a thud upon the floor above tells them that the heroine"s tyrannical father has died just in time to set her free. That is the apotheosis of the pure heroic as d.i.c.kens found it, and as d.i.c.kens in some sense continued it. It may be that it does not appear with quite so much unmistakable youth, beauty, valour, and virtue as it does in Nicholas Nickleby. Walter Gay is a simpler and more careless hero, but when he is doing any of the business of the story he is purely heroic. Kit Nubbles is a humbler hero, but he is a hero; when he is good he is very good. Even David Copperfield, who confesses to boyish tremors and boyish evasions in his account of his boyhood, acts the strict stiff part of the chivalrous gentleman in all the active and determining scenes of the tale. But _Great Expectations_ may be called, like _Vanity Fair_, a novel without a hero. Almost all Thackeray"s novels except Esmond are novels without a hero, but only one of d.i.c.kens"s novels can be so described. I do not mean that it is a novel without a _jeune premier_, a young man to make love; _Pickwick_ is that and _Oliver Twist_, and, perhaps, _The Old Curiosity Shop_. I mean that it is a novel without a hero in the same far deeper and more deadly sense in which _Pendennis_ is also a novel without a hero. I mean that it is a novel which aims chiefly at showing that the hero is unheroic.
All such phrases as these must appear of course to overstate the case.
Pip is a much more delightful person than Nicholas Nickleby. Or to take a stronger case for the purpose of our argument, Pip is a much more delightful person than Sydney Carton. Still the fact remains. Most of Nicholas Nickleby"s personal actions are meant to show that he is heroic. Most of Pip"s actions are meant to show that he is not heroic.
The study of Sydney Carton is meant to indicate that with all his vices Sydney Carton was a hero. The study of Pip is meant to indicate that with all his virtues Pip was a sn.o.b. The motive of the literary explanation is different. Pip and Pendennis are meant to show how circ.u.mstances can corrupt men. Sam Weller and Hercules are meant to show how heroes can subdue circ.u.mstances.
This is the preliminary view of the book which is necessary if we are to regard it as a real and separate fact in the life of d.i.c.kens. d.i.c.kens had many moods because he was an artist; but he had one great mood, because he was a great artist. Any real difference therefore from the general drift, or rather (I apologise to d.i.c.kens) the general drive of his creation is very important. This is the one place in his work in which he does, I will not say feel like Thackeray, far less think like Thackeray, less still write like Thackeray, but this is the one of his works in which he understands Thackeray. He puts himself in some sense in the same place; he considers mankind at somewhat the same angle as mankind is considered in one of the sociable and sarcastic novels of Thackeray. When he deals with Pip he sets out not to show his strength like the strength of Hercules, but to show his weakness like the weakness of Pendennis. When he sets out to describe Pip"s great expectation he does not set out, as in a fairytale, with the idea that these great expectations will be fulfilled; he sets out from the first with the idea that these great expectations will be disappointing. We might very well, as I have remarked elsewhere, apply to all d.i.c.kens"s books the t.i.tle _Great Expectations_. All his books are full of an airy and yet ardent expectation of everything; of the next person who shall happen to speak, of the next chimney that shall happen to smoke, of the next event, of the next ecstasy; of the next fulfilment of any eager human fancy. All his books might be called _Great Expectations_. But the only book to which he gave the name of _Great Expectations_ was the only book in which the expectation was never realised. It was so with the whole of that splendid and unconscious generation to which he belonged.
The whole glory of that old English middle cla.s.s was that it was unconscious; its excellence was entirely in that, that it was the culture of the nation, and that it did not know it. If d.i.c.kens had ever known that he was optimistic, he would have ceased to be happy.
It is necessary to make this first point clear: that in _Great Expectations_ d.i.c.kens was really trying to be a quiet, a detached, and even a cynical observer of human life. d.i.c.kens was trying to be Thackeray. And the final and startling triumph of d.i.c.kens is this: that even to this moderate and modern story, he gives an incomparable energy which is not moderate and which is not modern. He is trying to be reasonable; but in spite of himself he is inspired. He is trying to be detailed, but in spite of himself he is gigantic. Compared to the rest of d.i.c.kens this is Thackeray; but compared to the whole of Thackeray we can only say in supreme praise of it that it is d.i.c.kens.
Take, for example, the one question of sn.o.bbishness. d.i.c.kens has achieved admirably the description of the doubts and vanities of the wretched Pip as he walks down the street in his new gentlemanly clothes, the clothes of which he is so proud and so ashamed. Nothing could be so exquisitely human, nothing especially could be so exquisitely masculine as that combination of self-love and self-a.s.sertion and even insolence with a naked and helpless sensibility to the slightest breath of ridicule. Pip thinks himself better than every one else, and yet anybody can snub him; that is the everlasting male, and perhaps the everlasting gentleman. d.i.c.kens has described perfectly this quivering and defenceless dignity. d.i.c.kens has described perfectly how ill-armed it is against the coa.r.s.e humour of real humanity--the real humanity which d.i.c.kens loved, but which idealists and philanthropists do not love, the humanity of cabmen and costermongers and men singing in a third-cla.s.s carriage; the humanity of Trabb"s boy. In describing Pip"s weakness d.i.c.kens is as true and as delicate as Thackeray. But Thackeray might have been easily as true and as delicate as d.i.c.kens. This quick and quiet eye for the tremors of mankind is a thing which d.i.c.kens possessed, but which others possessed also. George Eliot or Thackeray could have described the weakness of Pip. Exactly what George Eliot and Thackeray could not have described was the vigour of Trabb"s boy. There would have been admirable humour and observation in their accounts of that intolerable urchin. Thackeray would have given us little light touches of Trabb"s boy, absolutely true to the quality and colour of the humour, just as in his novels of the eighteenth century, the glimpses of Steele or Bolingbroke or Doctor Johnson are exactly and perfectly true to the colour and quality of their humour. George Eliot in her earlier books would have given us shrewd authentic sc.r.a.ps of the real dialect of Trabb"s boy, just as she gave us shrewd and authentic sc.r.a.ps of the real talk in a Midland country town. In her later books she would have given us highly rationalistic explanations of Trabb"s boy; which we should not have read. But exactly what they could never have given, and exactly what d.i.c.kens does give, is the _bounce_ of Trabb"s boy. It is the real unconquerable rush and energy in a character which was the supreme and quite indescribable greatness of d.i.c.kens. He conquered by rushes; he attacked in ma.s.ses; he carried things at the spear point in a charge of spears; he was the Rupert of Fiction. The thing about any figure of d.i.c.kens, about Sam Weller or d.i.c.k Swiveller, or Micawber, or Bagstock, or Trabb"s boy,--the thing about each one of these persons is that he cannot be exhausted. A d.i.c.kens character hits you first on the nose and then in the waistcoat, and then in the eye and then in the waistcoat again, with the blinding rapidity of some battering engine. The scene in which Trabb"s boy continually overtakes Pip in order to reel and stagger as at a first encounter is a thing quite within the real competence of such a character; it might have been suggested by Thackeray, or George Eliot, or any realist. But the point with d.i.c.kens is that there is a rush in the boy"s rushings; the writer and the reader rush with him.
They start with him, they stare with him, they stagger with him, they share an inexpressible vitality in the air which emanates from this violent and capering satirist. Trabb"s boy is among other things a boy; he has a physical rapture in hurling himself like a boomerang and in bouncing to the sky like a ball. It is just exactly in describing this quality that d.i.c.kens is d.i.c.kens and that no one else comes near him. No one feels in his bones that Felix Holt was strong as he feels in his bones that little Quilp was strong. No one can feel that even Rawdon Crawley"s splendid smack across the face of Lord Steyne is quite so living and life-giving as the "kick after kick" which old Mr. Weller dealt the dancing and quivering Stiggins as he drove him towards the trough. This quality, whether expressed intellectually or physically, is the profoundly popular and eternal quality in d.i.c.kens; it is the thing that no one else could do. This quality is the quality which has always given its continuous power and poetry to the common people everywhere. It is life; it is the joy of life felt by those who have nothing else but life. It is the thing that all aristocrats have always hated and dreaded in the people. And it is the thing which poor Pip really hates and dreads in Trabb"s boy.
A great man of letters or any great artist is symbolic without knowing it. The things he describes are types because they are truths.
Shakespeare may, or may not, have ever put it to himself that Richard the Second was a philosophical symbol; but all good criticism must necessarily see him so. It may be a reasonable question whether the artist should be allegorical. There can be no doubt among sane men that the critic should be allegorical. Spenser may have lost by being less realistic than Fielding. But any good criticism of _Tom Jones_ must be as mystical as the _Faery Queen_. Hence it is unavoidable in speaking of a fine book like _Great Expectations_ that we should give even to its unpretentious and realistic figures a certain ma.s.sive mysticism. Pip is Pip, but he is also the well-meaning sn.o.b. And this is even more true of those two great figures in the tale which stand for the English democracy. For, indeed, the first and last word upon the English democracy is said in Joe Gargery and Trabb"s boy. The actual English populace, as distinct from the French populace or the Scotch or Irish populace, may be said to lie between those two types. The first is the poor man who does not a.s.sert himself at all, and the second is the poor man who a.s.serts himself entirely with the weapon of sarcasm. The only way in which the English now ever rise in revolution is under the symbol and leadership of Trabb"s boy. What pikes and shillelahs were to the Irish populace, what guns and barricades were to the French populace, that chaff is to the English populace. It is their weapon, the use of which they really understand. It is the one way in which they can make a rich man feel uncomfortable, and they use it very justifiably for all it is worth. If they do not cut off the heads of tyrants at least they sometimes do their best to make the tyrants lose their heads. The gutter boys of the great towns carry the art of personal criticism to so rich and delicate a degree that some well-dressed persons when they walk past a file of them feel as if they were walking past a row of omniscient critics or judges with a power of life and death. Here and there only is some ordinary human custom, some natural human pleasure suppressed in deference to the fastidiousness of the rich. But all the rich tremble before the fastidiousness of the poor.
Of the other type of democracy it is far more difficult to speak. It is always hard to speak of good things or good people, for in satisfying the soul they take away a certain spur to speech. d.i.c.kens was often called a sentimentalist. In one sense he sometimes was a sentimentalist.
But if sentimentalism be held to mean something artificial or theatrical, then in the core and reality of his character d.i.c.kens was the very reverse of a sentimentalist. He seriously and definitely loved goodness. To see sincerity and charity satisfied him like a meal. What some critics call his love of sweet stuff is really his love of plain beef and bread. Sometimes one is tempted to wish that in the long d.i.c.kens dinner the sweet courses could be left out; but this does not make the whole banquet other than a banquet singularly solid and simple.
The critics complain of the sweet things, but not because they are so strong as to like simple things. They complain of the sweet things because they are so sophisticated as to like sour things; their tongues are tainted with the bitterness of absinthe. Yet because of the very simplicity of d.i.c.kens"s moral tastes it is impossible to speak adequately of them; and Joe Gargery must stand as he stands in the book, a thing too obvious to be understood. But this may be said of him in one of his minor aspects, that he stands for a certain long-suffering in the English poor, a certain weary patience and politeness which almost breaks the heart. One cannot help wondering whether that great ma.s.s of silent virtue will ever achieve anything on this earth.
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
_Our Mutual Friend_ marks a happy return to the earlier manner of d.i.c.kens at the end of d.i.c.kens"s life. One might call it a sort of Indian summer of his farce. Those who most truly love d.i.c.kens love the earlier d.i.c.kens; and any return to his farce must be welcomed, like a young man come back from the dead. In this book indeed he does not merely return to his farce; he returns in a manner to his vulgarity. It is the old democratic and even uneducated d.i.c.kens who is writing here. The very t.i.tle is illiterate. Any priggish pupil teacher could tell d.i.c.kens that there is no such phrase in English as "our mutual friend." Any one could tell d.i.c.kens that "our mutual friend" means "our reciprocal friend," and that "our reciprocal friend" means nothing. If he had only had all the solemn advantages of academic learning (the absence of which in him was lamented by the _Quarterly Review_), he would have known better. He would have known that the correct phrase for a man known to two people is "our common friend." But if one calls one"s friend a common friend, even that phrase is open to misunderstanding.
I dwell with a gloomy pleasure on this mistake in the very t.i.tle of the book because I, for one, am not pleased to see d.i.c.kens gradually absorbed by modern culture and good manners. d.i.c.kens, by cla.s.s and genius, belonged to the kind of people who do talk about a "mutual friend"; and for that cla.s.s there is a very great deal to be said. These two things can at least be said--that this cla.s.s does understand the meaning of the word "friend" and the meaning of the word "mutual." I know that for some long time before he had been slowly and subtly sucked into the whirlpool of the fashionable views of later England. I know that in _Bleak House_ he treats the aristocracy far more tenderly than he treats them in _David Copperfield_. I know that in _A Tale of Two Cities_, having come under the influence of Carlyle, he treats revolution as strange and weird, whereas under the influence of Cobbett he would have treated it as obvious and reasonable. I know that in _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ he not only praised the Minor Canon of Cloisterham at the expense of the dissenting demagogue, Honeythunder; I know that he even took the last and most disastrous step in the modern English reaction. While blaming the old Cloisterham monks (who were democratic), he praised the old-world peace that they had left behind them--an old-world peace which is simply one of the last amus.e.m.e.nts of aristocracy. The modern rich feel quite at home with the dead monks.
They would have felt anything but comfortable with the live ones. I know, in short, how the simple democracy of d.i.c.kens was gradually dimmed by the decay and reaction of the middle of the nineteenth century. I know that he fell into some of the bad habits of aristocratic sentimentalism. I know that he used the word "gentleman" as meaning good man. But all this only adds to the unholy joy with which I realise that the very t.i.tle of one of his best books was a vulgarism. It is pleasant to contemplate this last unconscious knock in the eye for the gentility with which d.i.c.kens was half impressed. d.i.c.kens is the old self-made man; you may take him or leave him. He has its disadvantages and its merits.
No university man would have written the t.i.tle; no university man could have written the book.
If it were a mere matter of the accident of a name it would not be worth while thus to dwell on it, even as a preface. But the t.i.tle is in this respect typical of the tale. The novel called _Our Mutual Friend_ is in many ways a real reaction towards the earlier d.i.c.kens manner. I have remarked that _Little Dorrit_ was a reversion to the form of the first books, but not to their spirit; _Our Mutual Friend_ is a reversion to the spirit as well as the form. Compare, for instance, the public figures that make a background in each book. Mr. Merdle is a commercial man having no great connection with the plot; similarly Mr. Podsnap is a commercial man having no great connection with the plot. This is altogether in the spirit of the earlier books; the whole point of an early d.i.c.kens novel was to have as many people as possible entirely unconnected with the plot. But exactly because both studies are irrelevant, the contrast between them can be more clearly perceived.
d.i.c.kens goes out of his way to describe Merdle; and it is a gloomy description. But d.i.c.kens goes out of his way to describe Podsnap, and it is a happy and hilarious description. It recalls the days when he hunted great game; when he went out of his way to entrap such adorable monsters as Mr. Pecksniff or Mr. Vincent Crummles. With these wild beings we never bother about the cause of their coming. Such guests in a story may be uninvited, but they are never _de trop_. They earn their night"s lodging in any tale by being so uproariously amusing; like little Tommy Tucker in the legend, they sing for their supper. This is really the marked truth about _Our Mutual Friend_, as a stage in the singular latter career of d.i.c.kens. It is like the leaping up and flaming of a slowly dying fire. The best things in the book are in the old best manner of the author. They have that great d.i.c.kens quality of being something which is pure farce and yet which is not superficial; an unfathomable farce--a farce that goes down to the roots of the universe.
The highest compliment that can ever be paid to the humour of d.i.c.kens is paid when some lady says, with the sudden sincerity of her s.e.x, that it is "too silly." The phrase is really a perfectly sound and acute criticism. Humour does consist in being too silly, in pa.s.sing the borderland, in breaking through the floor of sense and falling into some starry abyss of nonsense far below our ordinary human life. This "too silly" quality is really present in _Our Mutual Friend_. It is present in _Our Mutual Friend_ just as it is present in _Pickwick_, or _Martin Chuzzlewit_; just as it is not present in _Little Dorrit_ or in _Hard Times_. Many tests might be employed. One is the pleasure in purely physical jokes--jokes about the body. The general dislike which every one felt for Mr. Stiggins"s nose is of the same kind as the ardent desire which Mr. Lammle felt for Mr. Fledgeby"s nose. "Give me your nose, Sir," said Mr. Lammle. That sentence alone would be enough to show that the young d.i.c.kens had never died.
The opening of a book goes for a great deal. The opening of _Our Mutual Friend_ is much more instinctively energetic and light-hearted than that of any of the other novels of his concluding period. d.i.c.kens had always enough optimism to make his stories end well. He had not, in his later years, always enough optimism to make them begin well. Even _Great Expectations_, the saddest of his later books, ends well; it ends well in spite of himself, who had intended it to end badly. But if we leave the evident case of good endings and take the case of good beginnings, we see how much _Our Mutual Friend_ stands out from among the other novels of the evening or the end of d.i.c.kens. The tale of _Little Dorrit_ begins in a prison. One of the prisoners is a villain, and his villainy is as dreary as the prison; that might matter nothing. But the other prisoner is vivacious, and even his vivacity is dreary. The first note struck is sad. In the tale of _Edwin Drood_ the first scene is in an opium den, suffocated with every sort of phantasy and falsehood. Nor is it true that these openings are merely accidental; they really cast their shadow over the tales. The people of _Little Dorrit_ begin in prison; and it is the whole point of the book that people never get out of prison. The story of _Edwin Drood_ begins amid the fumes of opium, and it never gets out of the fumes of opium. The darkness of that strange and horrible smoke is deliberately rolled over the whole story.
d.i.c.kens, in his later years, permitted more and more his story to take the cue from its inception. All the more remarkable, therefore, is the real jerk and spurt of good spirits with which he opens _Our Mutual Friend_. It begins with a good piece of rowdy satire, wildly exaggerated and extremely true. It belongs to the same cla.s.s as the first chapter of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, with its preposterous pedigree of the Chuzzlewit family, or even the first chapter of _Pickwick_, with its immortal imbecilities about the Theory of t.i.ttlebats and Mr. Blotton of Aldgate.
Doubtless the early satiric chapter in _Our Mutual Friend_ is of a more strategic and ingenious kind of satire than can be found in these early and explosive parodies. Still, there is a quality common to both, and that quality is the whole of d.i.c.kens. It is a quality difficult to define--hence the whole difficulty of criticising d.i.c.kens. Perhaps it can be best stated in two separate statements or as two separate symptoms. The first is the mere fact that the reader rushes to read it.
The second is the mere fact that the writer rushed to write it.
This beginning, which is like a burst of the old exuberant d.i.c.kens, is, of course, the Veneering dinner-party. In its own way it is as good as anything that d.i.c.kens ever did. There is the old faculty of managing a crowd, of making character clash with character, that had made d.i.c.kens not only the democrat but even the demagogue of fiction. For if it is hard to manage a mob, it is hardest of all to manage a swell mob. The particular kind of chaos that is created by the hospitality of a rich upstart has perhaps never been so accurately and outrageously described.
Every touch about the thing is true; to this day any one can test it if he goes to a dinner of this particular kind. How admirable, for instance, is the description of the way in which all the guests ignored the host; how the host and hostess peered and gaped for some stray attention as if they had been a pair of poor relations. Again, how well, as a matter of social colour, the distinctions between the type and tone of the guests are made even in the matter of this unguestlike insolence. How well d.i.c.kens distinguishes the ill-bred indifference of Podsnap from the well-bred indifference of Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn. How well he distinguishes the bad manners of the merchant from the equally typical bad manners of the gentleman. Above all, how well he catches the character of the creature who is really the master of all these: the impenetrable male servant. Nowhere in literature is the truth about servants better told. For that truth is simply this: that the secret of aristocracy is hidden even from aristocrats. Servants, butlers, footmen, are the high priests who have the real dispensation; and even gentlemen are afraid of them. d.i.c.kens was never more right than when he made the new people, the Veneerings, employ a butler who despised not only them but all their guests and acquaintances. The admirable person called the a.n.a.lytical Chemist shows his perfection particularly in the fact that he regards all the sham gentlemen and all the real gentlemen with the same gloomy and incurable contempt. He offers wine to the offensive Podsnap or the shrieking Tippins with a melancholy sincerity and silence; but he offers his letter to the aristocratic and unconscious Mortimer with the same sincerity and with the same silence. It is a great pity that the a.n.a.lytical Chemist only occurs in two or three scenes of this excellent story. As far as I know, he never really says a word from one end of the book to the other; but he is one of the best characters in d.i.c.kens.