Part 5

Moreover--and mind you this--you will never understand Charles Dickens until you realise how exquisitely, how indignantly the genius in this child of the blacking-warehouse felt the shame of its lot. Dickens was never a snob: but a prouder spirit never inhabited flesh. This shepherd boy was not one to sing in the Valley of Humiliation. For years after success came to him he kept his mouth closed like a steel trap upon past agonies. At length he confided something to Forster (_Life_, Volume 1, Chapter 2), and few sadder reflections have ever been implied by a grown man upon his parents:

It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion on me--a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally--to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a Grammar School, and going to Cambridge.

Terrible words those: the more terrible for being, after long repression, uttered so judicially.

And again:

I suppose my lodging was paid for by my father: I certainly did not pay it myself, and I certainly had no other assistance whatever--the making of my clothes, I think, excepted--from Monday morning until Saturday night. No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God!

Nor did his parents’ neglect end with starving his heart’s affection, his brain’s activity. It starved the weak little body into spasms through malnutrition. He had a boy friend in the warehouse, one Bob Fagin. Dickens writes of this time:

Bob Fagin was very good to me on the occasion of a bad attack of my old disorder. I suffered such excruciating pain that they made a temporary bed of straw in my old recess in the counting-house, and I rolled about on the floor, and Bob filled empty blacking-bottles with hot water, and applied relays of them to my side half the day. I got better and quite easy towards evening; but Bob (who was much bigger and older than I) did not like the idea of my going home alone, and took me under his protection. _I was too proud to let him know about the prison_; and after making several efforts to get rid of him, to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark Bridge on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece of reality, in case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman opened it, was that Mr. Robert Fagin’s house?

_O caeca pectora!_ Dickens had hard streaks in him, and I confess to a curious wonderment how, afterwards, he could have used that name of Fagin--how he _could_ have used it as he did--_in Oliver Twist_.

But I end by repeating my question--Is it any wonder that this street-boy of genius, coming to his own, invoked out of the theatre a new world, to redress the balance of his old?

Of that new world I propose to say something, Gentlemen, a fortnight hence.

DICKENS (IV)

PREFACE

I think it meet, Gentlemen, that before we resume our subject to-day, a word should be said on a loss that has befallen English letters in general and our sister-University in particular, since I last addressed you.

Walter Raleigh was an authentic son of Cambridge: and although he spent the most of his life teaching in other places the better understanding of a literature--our own literature--which in his undergraduate days had not found adequate recognition here, yet Cambridge had been his pasture, and he carried everywhere the mettle of that pasture: yes, and unmistakably, and although by the gay sincerity of his nature he would win men to like him, wherever he went.

Personal affection may count for too much in my faith that he will some day be recognised, not only for a true son of Cambridge, but for a great one in his generation. I put, however, that reckoning on one side. He did, very gaily and manfully and well, all the work that fell to his hand; and his end was in this wise. He had, in the first and second weeks of August, 1914, been eye-witness at Oxford of one of two amazing scenes--the other simultaneously passing here--when in these precincts, in these courts of unconscious preparation, by these two sacred streams, all on a sudden the spirit of youth was a host incorporate.

Χρυσῷ δ’ ἄρα Δῆλος ἅπασα ἤνθησ’, ὡς ὅτε τε ῥίον οὔρεος ἄνθεσιν ὕλης.

“Then Delos broke in gold, as a mountain spur is canopied in season with the flowering bush.”

“The mettle of your pasture” ... “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision” ... and the host, so suddenly gathered, as suddenly in motion, gone, for their country’s sake challenging the scythe. Raleigh saw that with his eyes, and could not forget.

* * * * *

The Dean of St. Paul’s returned, the other day, to a rightly respectful Cambridge, to deliver a Rede Lecture to us on _The Victorian Age_. Now he is a fool who denies or doubts Dean Inge to be a great man of our time--though he may now and then be a little too apt to regard himself as the only widow of another. Dean Inge, at any rate, felt himself strong enough to tell you he had no doubt that, to the historian of the future, the Elizabethan and Victorian Ages will appear as “the twin peaks in which English civilisation culminated.”

Now I have been talking to you--already through three lectures--upon the best-beloved writer of that Victorian Age--its most representative writer, perhaps--and preaching his eminence. But I should be nervous of claiming quite all that! It seems to me, if I may put it so without offence, a somewhat complacent view for _us_ to take of an Age in which we were born--he, to unseal the vials of prophecy, I, just to happen along with the compensation of a more sanguine temperament. He admits that he has “no wish to offer an unmeasured panegyric on an age which after all cannot be divested of the responsibility for making our own inevitable.” He admits that “the twentieth century will doubtless be full of interest, and may even develop some elements of greatness.” But as regards this country, “the signs are that our work on a grand scale, with the whole world as our stage, is probably nearing its end.” Well, I dare to say that such talk from a man of the Dean’s age or mine is more than unhopeful; is ungrateful:

Difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti....

Would he but go back in memory to the _tempus actum_ of August, 1914, it may dawn upon him that “fears may be liars” and the likelier for that some hopes were not dupes: that some men less gifted, less eloquent, than he, in those August days of 1914 saw this vision as of a farther Pacific:

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Raleigh at any rate saw it: I would not use extravagant language, but I verily believe Raleigh, from that hour, saw the assembled chivalry of those boys of 1914 as a meadow of cloth-of-gold spreading past all known or prophetical horizons--a prairie, the scent over which was a scent of sacrifice, at once holy and intolerable. Let me repeat--for one does not ring changes on the loss of a friend--the mourning bell strikes once and repeats itself--let me repeat some words written, the other night, under durance on returning from his funeral:

In his last few years, under an invincible inward compulsion, he turned from his life’s trade, in which he had vindicated himself as one of the best few, to become a child again and learn to be a valiant soldier. The sacrifice of the young in 1914–18, about which so many talk so easily, was a torture to him: it cut to the bone, the marrow. It was matter for indignation that he should survive these many boys.... Some of us, who noted, almost from the first, the operation of the War upon Raleigh’s soul, foreboded that in some way or other it would cut short his span, or, at least, that it menaced him. His converse again and again would wander away from the old writers, once his heart-fellows, to machinery, air-fights, anything.... When I last talked with him he was full of his History of the Air Service in the War, the first volume of which is in the press, I believe. For the second he went out to survey, from the air, the fields of campaign in Mesopotamia, took typhoid in Baghdad, and came home just in time to die.

It is a purely simple story: of a great teacher who saw his pupils go from him on a call more instant than his teaching, and followed their shades with no thought of

So were I equall’d with them in renown

but the thought only to overtake them in service.

* * * * *

Forgive the length of my discourse, Gentlemen. It is right, I think, that our sister-Universities should feel one for the other’s pride, one for the other’s wound.

I

To take up our tale--

It has already been objected against these lectures on Dickens--or against such parts of them as the newspapers honour me by quoting--that they treat Dickens as a genius of the first class. That term has little meaning for me who seldom or never think--can hardly bring myself to think--of great men in class-lists, in terms of a Tripos. (I reserve that somewhat crude method of criticism to practise it upon those who are _going to be_ great men; and even so--if you will credit me--derive scant enjoyment from it.) But I foresaw the objection, and forestalled it by quoting a famous saying of Tasso, and I take my stand on that: as I take not the smallest interest in weighing Chaucer against Pope, Shakespeare against Milton, Scott against Burns, or Dickens against Thackeray. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens--their other qualities apart--are grand creators, lords of literature all, by this specific virtue; and, were there sense in challenging, with this _quadriga_ alone we could securely challenge any literature in any living tongue. Note you, moreover: it is to this creative power that other artists less creative, but great and therefore generous, instinctively pay homage: Dryden, for instance, or Byron:

’Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we image, even as I do now. What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou, Soul of my thought!...

(_Childe Harold_, III. 6.)

Or again:

The mind can make Substance, and people planets of its own With beings brighter than have been, and give A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh....

(_The Dream_, st. 1.)

Note you particularly, if you will, the words “planets of its own....” We talk too often, perhaps (I have talked in this fashion myself unheedingly), as if these men had been makers of picture-galleries, lining their walls with lively characters, brilliant portraits. But in truth neither Chaucer’s _Prologue_ nor Shakespeare’s succession of women, neither _Redgauntlet_ nor _David Copperfield_, is a gallery of characters; but a planet rather, with its own atmosphere which the characters breathe; in which as proper inhabitants they move easily and have their natural being: while for us all great literature is a catholic hostelry, in which we seat ourselves at the board with Falstaff, Dugald Dalgetty, Sam Weller, the Wife of Bath, Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Quickly, and wonder how soon Don Quixote, My Uncle Toby, or The Three Musketeers will knock in to share the good meat and the wine.

II

So, between a discussion of Dickens’ plots--which we examined a fortnight ago and found wanting--at once stagey and ill-knit and, at that, repetitive, poor in invention; and of his characters, which teemed from his brain in a procession closed only by their author’s death, so inexhaustibly various and withal so individual, vivid and distinct, that the critic can scarcely help telling himself, “Here, and only here, _must_ lie the secret of the man’s genius”; I shall interpose to-day a few words upon this world of Dickens, with its atmosphere.

For it is a strange world, with an atmosphere of its own, as strange as itself.

I have already noted some things of that world of his--that it was a crowded world: a world of the city, of the streets; that his novels, when they visit the country, take us at a violent rate in post-chaises to find, with Shenstone,

The warmest welcome at an inn.

For one moment, at the term of Little Nell’s wanderings, in the quiet of the old schoolmaster’s garden, we almost touch a sense of country rest and repose. But of _real_ country, of solid growth in rest, of sport, of gardens, of farms and tenantry, of harvests, of generations rooted, corroborated in old grudges, old charities; of all that England stood for in Dickens’ day and, of its sap, fed what Cobbett had already called the “Great Wen” of London, our author had about as much sense as Mr. Winkle of a horse, or a snipe.

Now I wish to be rather particularly scrupulous just here: for we are dealing with a peculiarly, an unmistakably genuine, English writer; who, himself a child of the streets, acquainted, by eyesight and daily wont, with an industrial England into which the old agricultural England--what with railway and factory, gas, and everything extractible from coal--was rapidly converting itself; did yet by instinct seize on the ancient virtues. Take away the hospitality, the punch and mistletoe, from Dingley Dell, and what sort of a country house is left? Why, the _Handley Cross_ series, for which Messrs. Chapman and Hall intended _Pickwick_ as a stale challenge, could give _Pickwick_ ten and a beating from the first. As the season comes round you play cricket at Dingley Dell, or you skate, or you mix the bowl and turn the toe. But the stubble-fields are not there, nor the partridges; nor the turnips, nor the gallops to hounds, nor the tillage and reaping, nor the drowsed evenings with tired dogs a-stretch by the hearth. Of all this side of England Dickens knew, of acquaintance, nothing. I am not speaking, you will understand, of any Wordsworthian intimacy with natural scenery tender or sublime, of anything imparted or suggested to the imagination by a primrose or in the “sounding cataract” haunting it “like a passion.” I am speaking rather of human life as lived in rural England in Dickens’ time and in some corners yet surviving the week-end habit. Of these Sabine virtues, of these Sabine amenities and hardships, of the countryman’s eye on the weather-glass for “snow and vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling His word,” Dickens (I repeat) had no sense, having no tradition, of field life, of that _neighbourliness_ which existed in quiet places and persisted around ancient houses:

The summer air of this green hill ’Va-heaved in bosoms now all still, And all their hopes and all their tears Be unknown things of other years.... So, if ’twere mine, I’d let alone The great old House of mossy stone.

Dickens loved the old stage-coaches and travel by them. What he thought of the new railways and their effect upon landscape, you may read in _Dombey and Son_. He lived, moreover, to undergo the chastening experience of a railway collision. But his actual sense of the country you may translate for yourself from the account, in _Bleak House_, of the country life of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock. It is worse than stupid: it is vapid: or, rather, it is not there at all. Will you conceive Dickens, closing one of those Adelphi-Dedlock chapters and running his head suddenly into Mr. Wilfrid Blunt’s ballad of _The Old Squire_?

I like the hunting of the hare Better than that of the fox; The new world still is all less fair Than the old world it mocks....

I leave my neighbours to their thought; My choice it is, and pride, On my own lands to find my sport, In my own fields to ride....

Nor has the world a better thing Though one should search it round, Than thus to live, one’s own sole king Upon one’s own sole ground.

I like the hunting of the hare; It brings me, day by day, The memory of old days as fair With dead men past away.

To these, as homeward still I ply And pass the churchyard gate Where all are laid as I must lie, I stop and raise my hat.

I like the hunting of the hare; New sports I hold in scorn. I like to be as my fathers were In the days e’er I was born.

For a figure like that--hopelessly conservative, if you will, but conceived of truth, Dickens could only substitute a week-ender (as we should say nowadays) and make him a pompous ass. By one touch or two, of understanding what “the stately homes of England” really stood for--their virtue along with their stupidity--by one touch of Jane Austen’s wit, shall we say?--Dickens might have made some sort of a fist of it. As it is, when he wanders anywhere into the country, he is a lost child, mooning incuriously along the hedgerows with an impercipience rivalling that of a famous Master of Trinity who once confessed that his ignorance of botany was conterminous with all Solomon’s knowledge, since it ranged from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows in the wall. Dickens’ favourite flower (we have it on record) was a scarlet geranium!

Still, I would be fair, and must mention a fact which I have experimentally discovered for myself and tested of late in the slow process of compiling a Book of English Prose (an “Oxford Book,” if you will forgive me), that, while our poetry from the very first--from “Sumer is icumen in; Lhude sing cuccu!”--positively riots in country scenes, sounds, scents, country delights:

--all foison, all abundance,

and soothes us with the deep joy of it, with music and “the herb called heart’s-ease,” of all such joy, even of all such perception, our prose, until we come to the middle of the last century, is correspondently barren. Consider what a unique thing, and unique for generations, was _The Compleat Angler_! Try of your memory to match it. An Essay of Temple’s? a few pages of Bunyan, of Evelyn? The Sir Roger de Coverly papers?--charming; but of the town, surely, and with something of Saturday-to-Monday patronage not only in pose but in _raison d’être_? Fielding understood the country better--witness his Squire Allworthy. But on the whole, and in fairness, if Dickens’ pages exhibit--and they do--a thin theatrical picture of rural England, without core or atmosphere, against his childhood’s disinheritance--against the mean streets and the Marshalsea--we must balance (if I may use a paradoxical term) the weight of traditional vacuity.

III

But I fear we have a great deal more to empty out of this world of his.

To begin with, we must jettison religion; or at any rate all religion that gets near to definition by words in a _Credo_. Religious formulae I think we may say that he hated; and equally that he had little use for ministers of religion. I can recall but one sympathetic portrait of an Anglican parson--the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle, Minor Canon of Cloisterham--and that in his last book, and with scarcely a shadow of a quality impinged upon it by his vocation, by Holy Orders: Crisparkle, Minor Canon and muscular Christian, well visualised, is a good fellow just as Tartar in the same story is a good fellow: nothing more. George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, who disliked ecclesiastics, have to give them understanding, even sympathy, in some degree. Dickens merely neglects them. Unaccredited missionaries of the Gospel are humbugs all, in Dickens; uneducated Pharisees, Stiggins’s, Chadbands; devourers of widows’ (and widowers’) houses; spongers on the kindness and credulity of poor folk just a little more ignorant than they, while far more innocent. As for sacred edifices--cathedrals, churches--Dickens uses them as picturesque, romantic, mouldy, just as suits his convenience--a last harbourage for Little Nell or an object with a steeple suggesting to Mr. Wemmick--“Hullo! here’s a church!... let’s get married!” If Dickens ever conceives of a church as a tabernacle of any faith, I have yet to find the passage.

You must remember that, while Dickens wrote, Tractarian Movements, Unitarian Movements, Positivist Movements--Wiseman’s claim, Newman’s secession, the Gorham judgment, Bishop Colenso’s heresies--Darwin’s hypothesis, Huxley’s agnostic rejection of doctrine, and so on--that all these were agitating men’s thoughts as with a succession of shocks of earthquake. But all these passed Dickens by, as little observed as felt by him: simply disregarded.

IV

Of political thought, again, his world is almost as empty. He was, in his way, an early-Victorian Radical. When he saw a legal or political hardship which hurt or depressed the poor, conventions injurious to the Commonwealth--the Poor Laws, Debtors’ Prisons, the Court of Chancery, the Patent (or Circumlocution) Office and so forth, with the people who batten on such conventions, taking them for granted as immutable--Dickens struck hard and often effectively. But he struck at what he saw under his own eyes. Beyond this immediate indignation he had no reasoned principles of political or social reform. I have to hand, at this moment, no evidence to confirm a guess which I will nevertheless hazard, that he hated Jeremy Bentham and all his works. Certainly the professional, bullying, committee-working philanthropists--Mrs. Jellaby and Mr. Honeythunder, whose successors pullulate in this age--were the very devil to him. His simple formula ever was--in an age when Parliament carried a strong tradition of respect--“Yes, my Lords and Gentlemen, look on this waif, this corpse, this broken life. Lost, broken, dead, my Lords and Gentlemen, and all through your acquiescence, your misfeasance, your neglect!” To the immediate reader his message ran simply, “Take into your heart God’s most excellent gift of Charity: by which I mean let Charity begin at home, in that kingdom of God which is within you, let it operate in your own daily work; let it but extend to your own neighbours who need your help; and so--and only so--will the city of God be established on earth.”

V

I perceive, Gentlemen, that in my hurry I have let slip a great part of the secret, and so will add but this in hasty summary, catching up, before retreat, my cloak of _advocatus diaboli_:

(1) In the first place, Dickens’ world was not a world of ideas at all, but a city “full of folk.” Compared with the world as Carlyle saw it, or Clough, or Martineau, or Newman, or Arnold, it is void of ideas, if not entirely unintellectual.

(2) Moreover, and secondly, it is a vivid hurrying world; but the characters in it--until you come to Pip, say, in _Great Expectations_--are all quite curiously static; and, as the exception proves the rule, I am not afraid to back this assertion against _Martin Chuzzlewit_, for example, in which young Martin is, of set purpose, to be converted out of the family selfishness. Things happen to Mr. Pecksniff, to Little Nell, to Mr. Micawber, to Mr. Dombey, to Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wraybourne, to Sally Brass and her brother: but, _as the rule_, these things do not happen _within them_, as such things happen in the soul of any protagonist in a novel by Tolstoy or Dostoievsky, or as they are intended and traced as happening (say) in _Romola_. Dombey’s conversion is a mere stage-trick; and, for Micawber’s apotheosis as a prosperous colonist, let him believe it who will.

VI