Part 2

“To be presented to a Pogram,” said Miss Codger, “by a Hominy, indeed a thrilling moment is it in its impressiveness on what we call our feelings. But why we call them so, and why impressed they are, or if impressed they are at all, or if at all we are, or if there really is, oh gasping one! a Pogram or a Hominy, or any active principle to which we give those titles is a topic, Spirit searching, light-abandoned, much too vast to enter on, at this unlooked-for Crisis.” “Mind and Matter,” said the lady in the wig, “glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination. To hear it, sweet it is. But then outlaughs the stern philosopher, and saith to the Grotesque, ‘What ho! arrest for me that agency! Go bring it here! And so the vision fadeth.’”

I will not take oath that I have not heard faint echoes of that sort of talk at literary gatherings within a mile or so of this very spot. But if it be not to some extent endemic in America even to-day, then all I can say is that certain American authors (Mrs. Edith Wharton for one) have misrepresented it far more cruelly than ever did Charles Dickens, or certainly than I, with no knowledge at all, have any wish to do.

But what brought Dickens up with a round turn was his discovery (as he believed) that in this land of freedom no man was free to speak his thought.

“I believe,” he wrote to Forster on Feb. 24th, “there is no country on the face of the earth where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference of opinion than in this.... There!--I write the words with reluctance, disappointment and sorrow: but I believe it from the bottom of my soul.”

He did believe it, and it shocked him inexpressibly. “Very well,” it may be answered; “but there were obligations. A man should not publicly criticise a country in which he is an honoured guest.” Yes, but he had gone out to the States with intent to discuss the question of copyright, or rather of literary piracy, in which American law and practice were so flagrantly immoral that he had never a doubt of getting both rectified by a little heart-to-heart talk (as we call it now) with some of their public men and lawgivers. Dickens was always a good man of business. As the most widely-read of British authors, and therefore the chief of sufferers, he could speak authoritatively on behalf of his poorer brethren. He went, and received on a grand scale that shock which on a far modester scale many of us have experienced in our time, with the sort of embarrassment one feels (let us say) in sitting down to Bridge with a very delightful person whose code in the matter of revoking is rather notoriously “off colour.” Let me illustrate this by the remark of a just man at Washington in the debate preceding the latest copyright enactment. A member of Congress had pleaded for the children of the backwoods--these potential Abraham Lincolns devouring education by the light of pine-knot fires--how desirable that these little Sons of Liberty should be able to purchase their books (as he put it) “free of authorial expenses!” “Hear, hear!” retorted my just man. “And the negroes of the South too--so fond of chicken free of _farmer-ial_ expenses!”--A great saying!

And yet Dickens was wrong: in my opinion wrong as an English Gentleman, being America’s Guest. On the balance I hold that he should have thought what he thought and, thinking it, have shortened his visit and come silently away.

Well, Dickens discussed the matter with Washington Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant, Dana and others, and found that while every writer in America was agreed upon the atrocious state of the law, not a man of them dared to speak out. The suggestion that an American could be found with temerity enough to hint that his country was possibly wrong struck the boldest dumb. “Then,” said Dickens, “I shall speak out”: and he did. “I wish you could have seen,” he writes home, “the faces that I saw, down both sides of the table at Hartford, when I began to talk about Scott.” [Remember, please, this is my interjection, Gentlemen, that, on a small portion of his dues, on a 10 per cent. (say) of his plundered sales, the great Sir Walter Scott would have died in calm of mind and just prosperity.] “I wish you could have heard how I gave it out. My blood so boiled as I thought of the monstrous injustice that I felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their throats.”

The violence of the reaction upon Dickens you can of course study in _American Notes_ and _Martin Chuzzlewit_. But the real import of these two books and the violence of resentment they raised, we shall not understand without realising that Dickens went over, was feasted: was disappointed, then outraged, and spoke his mind, from first to last _as a representative of the democracy of this country_, always conscious of a great, if undefined, responsibility and, under disappointment, resolute to be brave, at whatever cost of favour.

VII

The same grand consciousness seems to me to have been the true inspiration of his “Christmas Books.” For a private confession, I dislike them: I find them--_A Christmas Carol_, _The Chimes_, _The Cricket on the Hearth_, _The Battle of Life_, _The Haunted Man_--grossly sentimental and as grossly overcharged with violent conversions to the “Christmas Spirit.” For a further confession I greatly prefer several of his later Christmas Stories in _Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_--_The Wreck of the “Golden Mary”_ for instance, or _Dr. Marigold’s Prescriptions_ or _The Holly-Tree Inn_--to this classic five which are still separated in the collected editions under the title of “Christmas Books.” He himself confessed, in a general preface of less than a dozen lines, his inability to work out character in the limits he assigned himself--a hundred pages or so. “My chief purpose,” he says of _A Christmas Carol_, “was, in a whimsical kind of masque which the good humour of the season justified, to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land.” But he took it as a mission, and quite seriously. Christmas to England had always meant, and should mean, a festival of neighbourly goodwill and robust hospitality. Listen to the old Carols:

Now thrice welcome, Christmas, Which brings us good cheer, Minced pies and plum porridge, Good ale and strong beer; With pig, goose and capon, The best that may be, So well doth the weather And our stomachs agree.

Or

Now that the time is come wherein Our Saviour Christ was born, The larders full of beef and pork, The garners fill’d with corn....

Or

Bring us in good ale, and bring us in good ale; For our blessed Lady’s sake, bring us in good ale.

These out of a score or more verses I might quote from _Poor Robin’s Almanack_ and the like. But take Campion’s more aristocratic Muse:

Now winter nights enlarge The number of their hours, And clouds their storms discharge Upon the airy towers. Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine; Let well-attuned words amaze With harmony divine. Now yellow waxen lights Shall wait on honey love, While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights Sleep’s leaden spell remove.

Carry this again down to Frederick Tennyson’s _The Holy Tide_:

The days are sad, it is the Holy tide; The Winter morn is short, the Night is long; So let the lifeless Hours be glorified With deathless thoughts and echo’d in sweet song: And through the sunset of this purple cup They will resume the roses of their prime, And the old Dead will hear us and wake up, Pass with dim smiles and make our hearts sublime.

“An Englishman’s house is his Castle,” said an immortal farmer at a Fat Stock Dinner. “The storms may assail it and the winds whistle round it, but the King himself cannot do so.” Dickens saw always the Englishman’s house as his castle, fortified and provisioned against the discharge of snow and sleet: always most amply provisioned! Witness his picture of Christmas at Manor Farm, Dingley Dell--Old Wardle with his friends, neighbours, poor relations, and his farm-labourers too, all sitting down together to a colossal supper “and a mighty bowl of wassail something smaller than an ordinary washhouse copper, in which the hot apples were hissing and bubbling with a rich look and jolly sound that were perfectly irresistible.”

Old Wardle, in fact, is in the direct line of succession to Chaucer’s Frankeleyne--

Withoute bake mete was never his hous, Of fish and flesh, and that so plenteous, It snewed in his hous of mete and drink.

Dickens, I repeat to you, was always, in the straight line of Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Fielding, a preacher of man’s dignity in his full appetite; and quite consciously, as a national genius, he preached the doctrine of Christmas to his nation.

VIII

But you will say perhaps “Granted his amazing popularity--granted, too, his right to assume on it--was it really deserved?” To this question I oppose for the moment my opinion that, were I asked to choose out of the story of English Literature a short list of the most fecund authors, I should start with Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Dickens, Browning. If compelled to reduce the list to three, choosing the three most lavishly endowed by God with imagination for their fellows’ good, I almost think that among all God’s plenty I should choose, as pre-eminent stars, Shakespeare, Burke and Dickens. Milton, of course, will stand apart always, a solitary star: and Chaucer for his amazing invention, less even for what he did than for that he did it at all; Keats for infinity of promise; and to exclude Scott seems almost an outrage on human kindness. Yet if it come to the mere wonder-work of genius--the creation of men and women, on a page of paper, who are actually more real to us than our daily acquaintances, as companionable in a crowd as even our best selected friends, as individual as the most eccentric we know, yet as universal as humanity itself, I do not see what English writer we can choose to put second to Shakespeare save Charles Dickens. I am talking of sheer creative power, as I am thinking of Tasso’s proud saying that, next to God himself, no one but the poet deserves the name of Creator. You feel of Dickens as of Shakespeare that anything may happen: because it is not with them as with other authors: it is not they who speak. Falstaff or Hamlet or Sam Weller or Mr. Micawber: it is the god speaking:

Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα.

They are as harps upon which the large wind plays: and as that is illimitable there is no limit to their utterances. It was so with Charles Dickens from the Sam Weller of his lost youth down to the last when, in pain and under the shadow of death, he invented the Billickin.

In another lecture I propose to show you (if I can) that Dickens’ characters belong to a world of his own, rather than to this one. But if he also created that world of his own, so much the grander creator he!--As if he made men and women walk and talk in it, compelling us to walk with them, and listen, and, above all, open our lungs and laugh, suffer within the tremendous illusion, so much is he the more potent magician! I also feel, in reading Shakespeare, or Dickens--I would add Burke--as I feel with no fourth that I am dealing with a scope of genius quite incalculable; that while it keeps me proud to belong to their race and nation and to inherit their speech, it equally keeps me diffident because, at any turn of the page may occur some plenary surprise altogether beyond my power or scope of guessing. With these three writers, as with no fourth, _I_ have the sensation of a certain _faintness_ of enjoyment, of surrender, to be borne along as on vast wings. Yet of Dickens, as of Shakespeare, the worst work can be incredibly bad. Sorrier stuff could scarcely be written, could scarcely conceivably have ever been written, than the whole part of Speed in _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ unless it be the first chapter of _Martin Chuzzlewit_. Yet in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ you get Mrs. Gamp: and I ask you, How much the poorer should we not all be, lacking Mrs. Gamp?

I grant you that he has not yet passed--as he has not yet had time to pass--the _great_ test of a classical writer; which is that, surviving the day’s popularity and its conditions, his work goes on meaning more, under quite different conditions, to succeeding ages; the great test which Shakespeare has passed more than once or twice, remaining to-day, though quite differently, even more significant than he was to his contemporaries. I grant--as in another lecture I shall be at pains to show--that Dickens’ plots were usually incredible, often monstrous. But he invented a world: he peopled it with men and women for our joy: and my confidence in the diuturnity of his fame rests even on more than this--on the experience that, test this genius by whatever standard a critic may, he has by and by to throw down his measure and admit that, while Dickens was always a learner, out of his prodigality he could have at any moment knocked the critic over by creating a new world with new and delectable lasting characters to take it in charge.

DICKENS (II)

I

I take up my parable for a few words more upon the point at which I broke off last week--the essential _greatness_ of Dickens. For greatness is a quality in some few men: indefinable perhaps, but yet to be recognised; a certain thing and, by those of us who would traffic with life or literature, not to be overlooked or denied save at our soul’s peril, no matter what standard of artistry or of refined scholarship we may set up: a _quality_ in itself, moreover, and not any addition or multiplication or raising of talent by industry. For an illustration of the peril: I was reading, the other day, a history of French Literature by the late M. Ferdinand Brunetière, and, coming to the time of Alexandre Dumas the elder, I found that the historian, disapproving of Dumas, has just left him out! Now that, I contend (saving M. Brunetière’s eminence), is to write oneself down a pedant, outside the catholic mind. Dumas lived a scandalous life, wrote much execrable French, and encouraged--even employed--some of his fellows to write worse. But the author of _The Three Musketeers_, _Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_, _La Reine Margot_--Dumas, “the seven-and-seventy times to be forgiven,” is not to be treated so, by your leave: or only so, I repeat, at the critic’s peril. Or let me take an Englishman--John Dryden. I suspect I shall not misrepresent or misreport the attitude of many in this room towards Dryden when I say that we find a world of slovenly sorry stuff in his dramas, and in his poems a deal of wit and rhetoric which our later taste--such as it is, good or bad, true or false--refuses to pass for poetry at all. Now if I merely wanted to prove to you that Dryden at his best could write finely, exquisitely--that out of the strong could come forth sweetness--I could content myself with asking you to listen to these verses:

No, no, poor suffering heart, no change endeavour, Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her; My ravish’d eyes behold such charms about her, I can die with her, but not live without her One tender sigh of her, to see me languish, Will more than pay the price of my past anguish; Beware, O cruel fair, how you smile on me, ’Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me.

_Love_ has in store for me one happy minute, And she will end my pain, who did begin it; Then no day, void of bliss, of pleasure, leaving, Ages shall slide away without perceiving: _Cupid_ shall guard the door, the more to please us, And keep out _Time_ and _Death_, when they would seize us: _Time_ and _Death_ shall depart, and say in flying, “Love has found out a way to live--by dying.”

There, obviously, is a _virtuoso_ who commands his keyboard. But if I were talking about Dryden to you for your soul’s good, I should rather show you the man with all his imperfections on his head, then turn and challenge you to deny his greatness. Why, you can scarcely read a page, even of his prose--say, for choice, the opening of his _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_--without recognising the tall fellow of his hands, the giant among his peers,

ψυχἠ ... ... μακρὰ βιβᾶσα κατ’ ἀσφοδελὸν λειμῶνα,

“pacing with long stride the asphodel meadow” where, let us say, Samuel Johnson walks, and Handel, and Hugo, nor are they abashed to salute the very greatest--Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare.

I repeat, Gentlemen, that at all risk of appearing exorbitant I should preach this to you for your souls’ good. For I do most earnestly want you, before all else, to recognise this _quality_ of greatness and respond to it. In so far as, in your fleeting generation, you give me your confidence and honour me (shall I say?) with a personal hope for A or B or C, I would warn you of what I have experimentally proved to be true of my contemporaries--that the man is most fatally destined to be great himself who learns early to enlarge his heart to the great masters; that those have steadily sunk who cavilled at Caesar with Cassius, or over a cigarette chatted admiringly of the rent which envious Casca made: that anyone with an ear learns very surely to distinguish the murmur of the true bee from the morose hum of the drone who is bringing no honey, nor ever will, to the hive. In my own time of apprenticeship--say in the ’nineties--we were all occupied--after the French novelists--with style: in seeking the right word, _le mot juste_, and with “art for art’s sake,” etc. And we were serious enough, mind you. We cut ourselves with knives. To-day, if I may diagnose your more youthful sickness, you are occupied rather with lyricism, curious and recondite sensations, appositions of unrelated facts with magenta-coloured adjectives. The craze has spread to the shop-fronts, to curtains, bedspreads, as the craze for Byronic collars spread in its day: and “Hell is empty!” cried Ferdinand, plunging overboard: but you can still find psycho-analysis rampant, with any amount of Birth Control, among the geese on Golder’s Green. But if from this desk I have preached incessantly on a text, it is this--that all spirit being mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually attractive, is an ultimate fact: and that therefore we shall grow the greater and better critics as we surrender ourselves to the great writers and without detraction, at least until we have, in modesty of mind, proved them: since, to apply a word of Emerson’s:

Heartily know-- When half-gods go, The gods arrive.

II

So I broke off, or almost, upon a saying of Tasso’s--you may find it repeated in Ben Jonson’s _Timber, or Discoveries_--that in this world none deserves the name of Creator save God himself and the Poet--by “Poet” meaning, of course, the great imaginative artist whether working in restricted verse or in “that other harmony of prose.”

And you may be thinking--I don’t doubt, a number will be thinking--that in a discourse on Dickens, I am putting the claim altogether too high. I can feel your minds working, I think--working to some such tune as this “Dickens and Virgil, now--Dickens and Dante--Oh, heaven alive!”

You cannot say that I have shirked it--can you?

Well now, fair and softly! If I had said “Dickens and Shakespeare,” it would have given you no such shock: and if I had said “Shakespeare and Dante,” or “Dickens and Molière,” it would have given you no shock at all. I am insisting, you understand, that the first test of greatness in an imaginative writer is his power to create: and I propose to begin with that which, if there should by any chance happen to be a fool in this apparently representative gathering, he will infallibly despise for the easiest thing in the world, the creation of a fool. I beg to reassure him and, so far as I can, restore his self-respect. It is about the hardest thing in the world, to create a fool and laugh at him. It is a human, nay, even a Godlike function (so and not by others shared) to laugh. Listen, before we go further, to these stanzas on divine laughter:

Nay, ’tis a Godlike function; laugh thy fill! Mirth comes to thee unsought: Mirth sweeps before it like a flood the mill Of languaged logic: thought Hath not its source so high; The will Must let it by: For, though the heavens are still, God sits upon His hill And sees the shadows fly: And if He laughs at fools, why should He not? “Yet hath the fool a laugh”--Yea, of a sort; God careth for the fools; The chemic tools Of laughter He hath given them, and some toys Of sense, as ’twere a small retort Wherein they may collect the joys Of natural giggling, as becomes their state: The fool is not inhuman, making sport For such as would not gladly be without That old familiar noise: Since, though he laugh not, he can cachinnate-- This also is of God, we may not doubt.

Shakespeare, as we know, delighted in a fool, and revelled in creating one. (I need hardly say that I am not talking of the professionals, such as Touchstone or the Fool in _Lear_, who are astute critics rather, ridiculing the folly of their betters by reflexion by some odd facet of common sense, administering hellebore to minds diseased and so in their function often reminding us of the Chorus in Greek tragedy.) I mean, of course, the fool in his _quiddity_, such as Dogberry, or Mr. Justice Shallow, or Cousin Abraham Slender. Hearken to Dogberry:

_Dog._ Come hither, neighbour Seacole. God hath blessed you with a good name: to be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.

_Sec. Watch._ Both which, master Constable--

_Dog._ You have: I knew it would be your answer. Well, for your favour, sir, why, give God thanks, and make no boast of it; and for your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity.

Why, it might be an extract from the Geddes Report--or so much of it as deals with Education!

And now to Slender, bidden in by sweet Anne Page to her father’s dinner-table:

_Anne._ Will it please your worship to come in, sir?

_Slender._ No--I thank you, forsooth--heartily. I am very well.

_Anne._ The dinner attends you, sir.

_Slender._ I am not a-hungry, I thank you, forsooth....

_Anne._ I may not go in without your worship; they will not sit till you come.

_Slender._ I’faith, I’ll eat nothing: I thank you as much as though I did.

_Anne._ I pray you, sir, walk in.

_Slender._ I had rather walk here--I thank you. I bruised my shin th’ other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of fence--three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes--and, I with my ward defending my head, he shot my shin, and by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.... Why do your dogs bark so? Be there bears in town?

_Anne._ I think there are, sir. I heard them talked of.

_Slender._ I love the sport well, but I shall as soon quarrel at it as any man in England.... _You_ are afraid, if you see a bear loose, are you not?

_Anne._ Ay, indeed, sir.

_Slender._ That’s meat and drink to me, now: I have seen Sackerson loose--twenty times, and have taken him by the chain.... But women, indeed, cannot abide ’em--they _are_ very ill-favoured rough things.