Part 3

“Othello,” as Hartley Coleridge noted, “could not brag more amorously”: and, as I wrote the other day in an introduction to _The Merry Wives_, when Anne finally persuades him to walk before her into the house, my fellow-editor and I had written (but afterwards in cowardice erased) the stage-direction, _He goes in: she follows with her apron spread, as if driving a goose._ Yes, truly, Slender is a goose to say grace over and to be carved “as a dish fit for the gods.” “A very potent piece of imbecility,” writes Hazlitt, and adds, “Shakespeare is the only writer who was as great in describing weakness as strength.”

Well, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens came after, to confirm Hazlitt’s observation. No one seeks in Jane Austen for examples of strength: and you will find none in Dickens to compare with Othello or Cleopatra or (say) with Mr. Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. But, like Charles Lamb, Jane Austen and Dickens both “loved a fool”: Jane Austen delicately, Dickens riotously: witness the one’s Miss Bates, the other’s Mr. Toots. But observe, pray: the fools they delight in are always--like Slender, like Miss Bates, like Mr. Toots--simple fools, sincere fools, good at heart, good to live with, and in their way, the salt of the earth. Miss Bates herself bears unconscious witness to this in one of her wisest foolishest remarks--“It is such a happiness when good people get together--and they always do.” (Consoling thought for you and me at this very moment.) With the fool who is also a humbug, a self-deceiver, Dickens could find no patience in his heart; and this impatience of his you may test again and again, always to find it--if I may say so with reverence--as elementary as our Lord’s. I am not speaking of conscious, malignant hypocrites--your Stiggins’s, Pecksniffs, Chadbands--on whom Dickens waged war, his life through; but of the self-deceiving fool whom we will agree with him in calling an “ass”--Uncle Pumblechook, for instance, in _Great Expectations_, Mr. Sapsea in _Edwin Drood_; on whom, or on whose kind, as he grew older, he seems (most of all in his last book, whenever handling Mr. Sapsea) to lose his artistic self-control, to savage them. But of kind fools, lovable fools, good fools, God’s fools, Dickens’ heaven will open any moment at call and rain you down half-a-dozen, all human, each distinct. You may count half-a-dozen in his most undeservedly misprised book, _Little Dorrit_, omitting Mr. F.’s Aunt: who is an eccentric, rather, though an unforgettable one and has left her unforgettable mark on the world in less than 200 words. She stands apart: for the others, apart from foolishness, share but one gift in common, a consanguinity (as it were) in flow of language or determination of words to the mouth. Shall we select the vulgar, breathless, good-natured widow, Flora Finching, ever recalling the past (without so much pause as a comma’s) to her disillusioned first lover?--

In times for ever fled Arthur pray excuse me Doyce and Clennam (the name of his firm) infinitely more correct and though unquestionably distant still ’tis distance lends enchantment to the view, at least I don’t mean that and if I did I suppose it would depend considerably on the nature of the view, but I’m running on again and you put it all out of my head.

She glanced at him tenderly and resumed:

In times for ever fled I was going to say it would have sounded strange indeed for Arthur Clennam--Doyce and Clennam naturally quite different--to make apologies for coming here at any time, but that is past and what is past can never be recalled except in his own case as poor Mr. F. said when in spirits Cucumber and therefore never ate it.... Papa is sitting prosingly, breaking his new laid egg over the City article, exactly like the Woodpecker Tapping, and need never know that you are here....

The withered chaplet is then perished the column is crumbled and the pyramid is standing upside down upon its what’s-his-name call it not giddiness call it not weakness call it not folly I must now retire into privacy and looking upon the ashes of departed joys no more but taking the further liberty of paying for the pastry which has formed the humble pretext for our interview, will for ever say Adieu!

Mr. F’s Aunt who had eaten her pie with great solemnity ... and who had been elaborating some grievous scheme of injury in her mind, took the present opportunity of addressing the following sibyllic apostrophe to the relict of her late nephew: “Bring him for’ard, and I’ll chuck him out o’ winder!”

III

Mr. Chesterton, selecting another fool from the gallery--Young Mr. Guppy, of _Bleak House_--observes very wisely, that we may disapprove of Mr. Guppy, but we recognise him as a creation flung down like a miracle out of an upper sphere: we can pull him to pieces, but we could not have put him together. And this (says he) is the pessimists’ disadvantage in criticising any creation. Even in their attacks on the Universe they are always under this depressing disadvantage.

“A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard the hippopotamus as an enormous mistake: but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such a mistake.”

Well, that is, of course, our difficulty in criticising all creative genius. We tell ourselves how we could have suggested to Shakespeare--or to Dickens--his doing this or that better than he did; but the mischief is, _we_ could not have done it at all. And in this matter of Mr. Guppy, Mr. Chesterton continues: “Not one of us could have invented Mr. Guppy. But even if we could have stolen Mr. Guppy from Dickens, we have still to confront the fact that Dickens would have been able to invent another quite inconceivable character to take his place.”

IV

Here we get to it. I have instanced his fools only, and but a select two or three of these for a test: but you may take, if you will, shrewd men, miserly men, ruffians, doctors, proctors, prisoners, schoolmasters, coachmen, licensed victuallers, teetotallers, thieves, monthly nurses--whatever the choice be, Dickens will shake them out of his sleeve to populate a world for us. For, like Balzac, he has a world of his own and can at call dispense to us of its abundance.

What sort of a world is it out of which Dickens so enriches ours?

Well, to begin with, it is a crowded world, a world that in his imagination positively teems with folk going, coming, hurrying: of innumerable streets where you may knock in (and welcome) at any chance door to find the house in accumulated misery, poverty, woe, or else in a disorder of sausages and squalling children, with a henpecked husband at one end of the table, a bowl of punch in the middle, and at the other end a mortuary woman whose business in life is to make a burden of life to all who live near her and would have her cheerful. (There was never such a man as Dickens for depicting the blight induced by one ill-tempered person--usually a woman--upon a convivial gathering.) The henpecked husband dispensing the punch is, likely as not, a city clerk contriving a double debt to pay, a slave during office hours, bound to a usurious master: a sort of fairy--a Puck, a Mr. Wemmick, as soon as he sheds his office-coat and makes for somewhere in the uncertain gaslight of the suburbs, “following darkness like a dream.”

Yes, this world is of the streets; in which Dickens was bred and from which he drew the miseries and consolations of his boyhood. A world “full of folk,” but not, like Piers Plowman’s, a “_field_ full of folk.” His understanding of England is in many ways as deep as Shakespeare’s; but it is all, or almost all, of the urban England which in his day had already begun to kill the rural. I ask you to consider any average drawing of Phiz’s; the number of figures crowded into a little room, the many absurd things all happening at once, and you will understand why Phiz was Dickens’ favourite illustrator. A crowded world: an urban world, largely a middle-class and lower-class London world--what else could we expect as outcome of a boyhood spent in poverty and in London? Of London his knowledge is indeed, like Sam Weller’s, “extensive and peculiar”: with a background or distance of the lower Thames, black wharves peopled by waterside loafers or sinister fishers in tides they watch for horrible traffic; rotting piles such as caught and held the corpse of Quilp. Some sentiment, indeed, up Twickenham-way: a handful of flowers, taken from the breast and dropped at the river’s brink, to be floated down, pale and unreal, in the moonlight; “and thus do greater things that once were in our breasts and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal seas.” But before they reach the eternal seas they must pass Westminster Bridge whence an inspired dalesman saw the City wearing the beauty of dawn as a garment.

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples ... and Waterloo Bridge, Hood’s dark arch of tragedy; and London Bridge, hymned of old by Dunbar. Dickens’ bridge is the old Iron one by Hungerford, and under it the Thames runs down to ghastly flats, convict-haunted, below Woolwich.

Shakespeare knew his London, his Eastcheap, its taverns. But when you think of Shakespeare you think (I will challenge you) rather of rural England, of Avon, of Arden, of native wood-notes wild. I hold it doubtful that Falstaff on his death-bed babbled o’ green fields: but I will take oath that when he got down to Gloucestershire he smelt the air like a colt or a boy out of school. And Justice Shallow is there--always there!

_Silence._ This Sir John, cousin, that comes hither anon about soldiers?

_Shallow._ The same Sir John, the very same. I saw him break Skogan’s head at the court-gate, when a’ was a crack not thus high: and the very same day did I fight with one Sampson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray’s Inn. Jesu, Jesu, the mad days I have spent! and to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead!

_Silence._ We shall all follow, cousin.

_Shallow._ Certain, ’tis certain; very sure, very sure: death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair?

_Silence._ By my troth, I was not there.

_Shallow._ Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet?

_Silence._ Dead, sir.

_Shallow._ Jesu, Jesu, dead! a’ drew a good bow: and dead! a’ shot a fine shoot: John a Gaunt loved him well, and betted much money on his head. Dead!--a’ would have clapped i’ the clout at twelve score; and carried you a forehand shaft a fourteen and fourteen and a half, that it would have done a man’s heart good to see. How a score of ewes now?

_Silence._ Thereafter as they be: a score of good ewes may be worth ten pounds.

_Shallow._ And is old Double dead?

You get little or none of that solemn, sweet rusticity in Dickens: nor of the rush of England in spring with slow country-folk watching it:

The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet, Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit; In every street these tunes our ears do greet-- _Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!_ Spring, the sweet Spring!

You will remember that _Pickwick_, in its first conception, was to deal with the adventures and misadventures of a Sporting Club after the fashion of the _Handley Cross_ series by Surtees. Now Surtees--not a great writer but to this day (at any rate to me) a most amusing one--was, although like Dickens condemned to London and the law, a north-country sportsman, and could ride and, it is reported, “without riding for effect usually saw a deal of what the hounds were doing.” The Pickwickian sportsmen had to decline _that_ competition very soon.

V

But they, and a host of Dickens’ characters, are very devils for post-chaises.

“If I had no duties, and no deference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman,” said Dr. Johnson. “There are milestones on the Dover Road,” and we spin past them. You will remember that Dickens in his apprenticeship spent a brief but amazingly strenuous while as reporter for the _Morning Chronicle_, scouring the country after political meetings by road-vehicles in all weathers. As he told his audience, twenty years later, at the annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund:

I have often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been, to a young man, severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.... Returning home from exciting political meetings in the country (and it might be from Exeter west, or Manchester north) to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated in miry by-roads, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication....

So, you see, this world Dickens imagined was more than crowded; it was a hurrying, a breathless one. This sense of speed in travel, of the wind in one’s face; of weight and impetus in darkness, with coach lamps flaring through the steam from your good horses’ hindquarters, runs as an inspiration through much of the literature of the early nineteenth century. De Quincey has hymned it magnificently in _The English Mail Coach_, and you may enjoy a capital drive of the sort in _Tom Brown’s School Days_: and always the rush of air whets your appetite for the hot rum-and-water at the stage hostelry or the breakfast of kidney-pie. Dickens saw the invasion of the railway train, and lived to be disastrously mixed up in a railway collision. But railway-train travelling at sixty miles an hour or over, has a static convenience. For the pleasures of inconvenient travel, without a time-table, I have recourse to a sailing-boat: but I can well understand my fellow-creature who prefers a car or a motor-bicycle to the motion of four horses at a stretch gallop. With the wind of God in his face he gets there (wherever it is) before the dew is dry, does his business, swallows his bun and Bovril and is home again with an evening paper for the cosy gas-cooked meal, ere yet Eve has drawn over his little place in the country her gradual dusky veil.

Rapid travel, as Dickens well knew it and how to describe it--with crime straining from what it fears--is one of his most potent resources. Read the flight of Carker in _Dombey and Son_.

VI

His is a crowded world then, tumultuous and full of fierce hurry: but a world (let us grant it) strangely empty of questioning ideas, subtle nuisances that haunt many thoughtful men’s souls, through this pass of existence “still clutching the inviolable shade.” He wrote far better novels than _John Inglesant_, novels far, far, better than _Robert Ellesmere_; but you cannot conceive him as interested in the matter of these books--which yet is serious matter. Still less, or at least as little, can you imagine him pursuing the track of so perplexed a spirit as Prince André in Tolstoy’s _War and Peace_. Churches annoyed him. He will, of a christening or a marriage service (let be a funeral), make the mouldiest ceremony in the world. We offer the baby up; we give the blushing bride away; but in the very act we catch ourselves longing for that subsequent chat with the pew-opener which he seldom denies us for reward. Dickens, in short, had little use for religious forms or religious mysteries: for he carried his own religion about with him and it was the religion of James--so annoying alike to the mystic and the formalist--“to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” This again belongs to his “universality.” Is it not the religion of most good fellows not vocal? It is observable how many of his heroes and heroines--his child heroes and heroines especially--pass through his thronged streets and keep themselves unspotted.

But, if careless of mysteries, Dickens had a hawk’s eye for truth of morals. You never find him mocking a good or condoning an evil thing: here his judgment and its resultant passion of love or of hate, I dare to say, never went wrong. Sinners--real sinners--in Dickens have the very _inferno_ of a time: the very forces of Nature--“fire and hail, snow and vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling God’s word”--hunt the murderer to the pit that yawns; till he perishes, and the sky is clear again over holy and humble men of heart. Again, witness, here, the elemental flight of Jonas Chuzzlewit. Carlyle never said an unjuster thing (and that is saying a deal) than when he accused Dickens’ theory of life as entirely wrong. “He thought men ought to be buttered up ... and all sorts of fellows have turkey for their Christmas dinner.” It is false. Dickens had a keener eye for sin than Carlyle ever had; and a relentless eye: “a military eye,” said Henry James of it, recalling his first introduction to the great man--“a _merciless_ military eye.” “A field-punishment eye,” _I_ say!

VII

But this world of Dickens, you may object, was an unreal world, a phantasmagoric world. Well, I hope to discuss that--or rather the inference from it--in my next lecture, which shall deal, in Aristotelian order, with his plots first and his characters next. But, for the moment, if you will, Yes: his world was like nothing on earth: yes, it is liker to Turner’s sunset to which the critic objected “he never saw a sunset like that,” and was answered, “Ah, but don’t you wish you could?” Yes, for Dickens made his world--as the proud parent said of his son’s fiddle--“he made it, sir, entirely out of his own head!”

“Night is generally my time for walking” (thus begins Master Humphrey, in _The Old Curiosity Shop_) “although I am an old man.”

So in that crowded phantasmagoric city of London, which is in his mind, Dickens walks by night--not like Asmodeus, lifting the roofs and peering into scandals: but like the good Caliph of his favourite _Arabian Nights_, intent to learn the life of the poor and oppressed, and as a monarch to see justice done them: a man patterning his work on the great lines of Fulke Greville, sometime of Jesus College, in this town; with which let me conclude to-day:

The chief use, then, in man, of that he knows, Is his painstaking for the good of all: Not fleshly weeping for our own-made woes, Not laughing from a melancholy gall, Not hating from a soul that overflows With bitterness, breath’d out from inward thrall: But sweetly rather to ease, loose, or bind, As need requires, this frail, fall’n humankind.

DICKENS (III)

I

I left you, Gentlemen, with a promise to say something on Dickens’ plots and Dickens’ characters, taking them in that Aristotelian order. Now why Aristotle, speaking of drama, prefers Plot to Character; if his reasons are sound; if they are all the reasons; and, anyhow, if they can be transferred from drama and applied to the Novel; are questions which some of you have debated with me “in another place,” and, if without heat, yet with all the vigour demanded by so idle a topic. But, for certain, few of you will dissent when I say of Dickens that he is memorable and to be loved (if loved at all) for his characters rather than for his plots. You have (say) a general idea of _Dombey and Son_, a vivid recollection of Captain Cuttle, Mr. Toots, Susan Nipper, perhaps a vivid recollection of Carker’s long, hunted flight and its appalling end, when the pursuer, recovering from a swoon--

saw them bringing from a distance something covered ... upon a board, between four men, and saw that others drove some dogs away that sniffed upon the road, and soaked his blood up, with a train of ashes.

Or you have a general idea of _Our Mutual Friend_, and your memory preserves quite a sharp impression of Silas Wegg, Mr. Boffin, the Doll’s Dressmaker. But if suddenly asked how Carker’s flight came about, why Boffin practised his long dissimulation, and what precisely Wegg or the Doll’s Dressmaker had to do with it--could you, off-hand, supply a clear answer? Some votaries can, no doubt: but I ask it of the ordinary reader. Myself indeed may claim to be something of a votary, with an inexplicably soft spot in my heart for _Little Dorrit_: yet, and often as I have read that tale, I should be gravelled if asked, at this moment, to tell you just what was the secret of the old house, or just what Miss Wade and Tattycoram have to do with the story. Somehow, in retrospect, such questions do not seem to matter.

In truth, as I see it--and foresee it as a paradox, to be defended--Dickens was at once, like Shakespeare in the main, careless of his plots, and, unlike Shakespeare, over-anxious about them. I shall stress this second point, which stabs (I think) to the truth beneath the paradox, by and by.

But first I ask you to remember that Dickens habitually published a novel in monthly numbers or instalments; starting it, indeed, upon a plan, but often working at white heat to fulfil the next instalment, and improvising as he went. Thackeray used the same method, with the printer’s devil ever infesting the hall when the day for delivery came around. This method of writing masterpieces may well daunt their successors, even in this journalistic age of internal combustion with the voice of Mr. H. G. Wells insistent that the faster anyone travels the nearer he is _ex hypothesi_ to that New Jerusalem in which there shall be no night (and therefore, I presume, not a comfortable bed to be hired), but the eternal noise of elevators and daylight-saving made perfect. It did not daunt our forefathers: who were giants of their time, undertook a _Pendennis_ or a _Dombey and Son_, and having accomplished a chapter or so, cheerfully went to bed and slept under that dreadful imminent duty. You all know, who have studied _Pickwick_, that _Pickwick_ began (so to speak) in the air; that it took the narrative, so desultory in conception, some numbers before it found a plot at all. But how admirable is the plot, once found or--to say better--once happened on! For a double peripeteia who could ask better art than the charitable turn of Pickwick on Jingle in the debtor’s prison, and the incarceration and release of Mrs. Bardell? Consider the first. Insensibly, without premonition of ours and I dare to say, of no long prepared purpose in the author, the story finds a climax:

“Come here, Sir,” said Mr. Pickwick, trying to look stern, with four large tears running down his waistcoat. “Take that, Sir.”

Take what? In the ordinary acceptation of such language, it should have been a blow. As the world runs, it ought to have been a sound hearty cuff: for Mr. Pickwick had been duped, deceived, and wronged by the destitute outcast who was now wholly in his power. Must we tell the truth? It was something from Mr. Pickwick’s waistcoat pocket which chinked as it was given into Job’s hand....