Part 6

Further--and to conclude on this point--over and beyond its infertility of thought, Dickens’ is a world in which technical or professional skill never comes into play to promote anything on earth. We have spoken of his clergy. His innumerous lawyers, from the Lord Chancellor to Messrs. Dodson and Fogg (assisted by his own personal experience in the Law’s service), draw their money for exculpating the guilty or slowly killing the righteous through hope deferred:

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office--

Equally with lawyers (readers of epitaphs and of _David Copperfield_ will take the allusion) “physicians are in vain.” It would be interesting [I do not suggest it as a subject of research for a Ph.D. degree] to count the number of births in Dickens’ novels and discover an _accoucheur_ who did not contrive to lose either the mother or the child, or both.

VII

What remains, then, of a world thus emptied of religion, thought, science?

I reserve the answer for a minute or two.

But I start my approach to it thus: Be the world of Dickens what you will, he had the first demiurgic gift, of entirely believing in what he created. The belief may be as frantic as you will: for any true artist it is the first condition. Well, this remains: nobody has ever doubted that, in the preface to _David Copperfield_, he wrote the strict truth:

It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the end of a two-years’ imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of all the creatures of his brain are going from him forever. Yet I had nothing else to tell, unless indeed I were to confess (which might be of less moment still) that no one can ever believe this Narrative in the reading more than I believed it in the writing.

Well, there, Gentlemen--just there, and so simply--you have the first condition of a work of art--its own creator is so possessed that he thoroughly believes in it. As Henry James once said to me (I recall the words as nearly as I can), “Ah, yes, how jollily the little figures dance under the circle of the lamp, until _Good-bye_, and off they go, to take their chance of the dark!”

VIII

Having that, you have artistic sincerity: of which I wonder, as experience enlarges, how many faults it cannot excuse--or indeed _what is the fault it cannot excuse_.

All that remains of the merely artistic secret has been summarised by Mr. Saintsbury:

It cannot have taken many people of any competence in criticism very long to discover where, at least in a general way, the secret of this “new world” of Dickens lies. _It lies, of course, in the combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-tale unrealism of general atmosphere._ The note of one or the other or both, is sometimes forced and then there is a jar: in the later books this is frequently the case. But in _Pickwick_ it hardly ever occurs; and therefore, to all happily fit persons, the “suspension of disbelief,” to adopt and shift Coleridge’s great dictum from verse to prose fiction, is, except in the case of some of the short inset stories, never rudely broken. Never, probably, was there a writer who knew or cared less about Aristotle than Dickens did. If he had spoken of the father of criticism, he would probably have talked--one is not certain that he has not sometimes come near to talking--some of his worst stuff. But certainly, when he did master it (which was often) nobody ever mastered better than Dickens, in practice, the Aristotelian doctrine of the impossibility rendered probable or not improbable.

Well, there you have the artistic secret of Dickens’ world accurately given, and not by me. _It lies in the combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-tale unrealism of general atmosphere._

Let me give you, to illustrate this, a single instance out of many. In his Christmas story, _The Perils of Certain English Prisoners_--an adventurous story of the sort that Stevenson loved and some of you make the mistake of despising--a handful of a British garrison with their women and children in a stockaded fort in South America tensely await an attack of pirates hopelessly outnumbering them. Now listen to one paragraph:

(It is a corporal of Marines who tells it.)

“Close up here, men, and gentlemen all!” said the sergeant. “A place too many in the line.”

The pirates were so close upon us at this time that the foremost of them were already before the gate. More and more came up with a great noise, and shouting loudly. When we believed from the sound that they were all there, we gave three English cheers. The poor little children joined, and were so fully convinced of our being at play, that they enjoyed the noise, and were heard clapping their hands in the silence that followed.

Defoe within his limits does that sort of thing to perfection: but then Defoe’s world observes the limits of the “real” (as we absurdly call everything that is not spiritual), has little emotion, scintillates scarce a glimmer of humour. Dickens handles it in a phantasmagoric world, charged even to excess with emotion, and is not in the least afraid to employ it--I quote Mr. Saintsbury again:

Of invading those confines of nonsense which Hazlitt proudly and wisely claimed as the appanage and province of every Englishman.

I need but to instance a writer whose acquaintance Hazlitt had not the joy to make, nor Lamb--woe upon these divisions of time!--Lewis Carroll, in whom both would have revelled for his insane logicality of detail--or, if you prefer it, I will fall back upon Lear’s Nonsense Books or even upon _A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_--to convince you that, as a nation, we have this appanage: and if it bewilder a foreigner, or he deride it, why then we will give him a look, and pass.

IX

Yes, but there is something else.

What else--no mere artistic secret--ties this phantasmagoric world to ours and makes it universal with ours, conterminous, and so real?

It is no dodge or trick of artistry that can work so incredible a feat--that can open our hearts to such beings as Dick Swiveller and Mrs. Gamp (whom in private life you or I would avoid like the plague)--to enjoy their company, to hang on every word they utter. It must be some very simple catholic gift, thus to unite the unreal with the real, thus to make brothers and sisters of all men and women, high or low.

It is: nor shall I delay you by elaborate pretence to search for it. For I know; and you know, or will recognise it as soon as I utter the word. It is _Charity_; the inestimable gift of Charity that Dickens flings over all things as his magic mantle: so that, whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away; and whether there be little critics tormented about Dickens’ style, in the folds of that mantle they shall be folded and hushed:

That it may please Thee to preserve all that travel by land or by water, all women labouring of child, sick persons, and young children; and to shew Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives.

That it may please Thee to defend, and provide for, the fatherless children, and widows, and all that are desolate and oppressed.

_That_ is the last secret of Dickens: and _that_ is what George Santayana means when he writes:

If Christendom should lose everything that is now in the melting-pot, human life would still remain amiable and quite adequately human. I draw this comforting assurance from the pages of Dickens.

DICKENS (V)

I

“I remember,” says Henry James in a wise little Essay on _The Art of Fiction_--

I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having, once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a _pasteur_, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience.

I wish I could make you promise, Gentlemen, to bear this little story in mind whenever some solemn fellow assures you that a man rustically born and bred could not have written _Hamlet_ or _The Tempest_; “he would never have seen this, learned or experienced that” and so on: the simple answer being that under such disadvantage _they_ would never have written _Hamlet_ or _The Tempest_. They are, in fact, not even Shakespeares to the extent of understanding how an artist creates, how the imaginative mind operates.

Henry James, who was an artist and understood that operation, simply comments on his anecdote that the lady had caught her direct personal impression and it was enough:

She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism: she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French, so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality.

Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it--this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most different stages of education.

Yes, Mr. James, for the purpose of your immediate argument “this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.” But for our argument it does, and accurately, constitute imaginative genius. It is the gift that taught Xenophanes, watching the stars, to catch the whole piece from the pattern and cry out “All is one--” the gift that suddenly hitches the particular upon the universal and gives us a Falstaff, a Don Quixote, a Tartuffe, My Uncle Toby, the Vicar of Wakefield--

Forms more real than living man.

You know--you must know--that none of these is a photographic portrait of a living person--of a certain eccentric lodger whom Dickens had studied in Goswell Street, of a certain bibulous nurse resident in Kingsgate Street, High Holborn, “at a bird-fancier’s, next door but one to the celebrated mutton-pie shop”--but children of imagination begotten upon it by some such observant moment as was vital to Mr. James’s lady novelist. What, in fact, was the genesis of Mr. Pickwick? Dickens, you recall, was to write the letterpress accompaniment to a series of humorous sporting sketches by Seymour. The publisher Mr. Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, has left this uncontradicted record:

As this letter is to be historical, I may as well claim what little belongs to me in the matter, and that is the figure of Pickwick. Seymour’s first sketch was of a long, thin man. The present immortal one he made from my description of a friend of mine at Richmond--a fat old beau who would wear, in spite of the ladies’ protests, drab tights and black gaiters. His name was John Foster.[1]

[1] Is there not a blend of Mr. Tracy Tupman here?

Seymour drew the figure from Mr. Chapman’s description: Dickens put life into it--yet more life--and made it a “nurseling of immortality.” That, believe me, is how it happens; just so, and in no other way: and the operative power is called Genius. Remind yourselves of this when learned men, discussing Shakespeare, assure you they have fished the particular murex up which dyed Hamlet’s inky cloak. Themselves are the cuttle, and only theirs is the ink.

II

But we talk of Dickens: and the trouble with Dickens is that he--whose brain in creating personage I suppose to be the most fecund that ever employed itself on fiction--to the end of his days kept a curious distrust of himself and a propensity for this childish expedient of “drawing from the life.” It is miserable, to me, to think of this giant who could turn off a Pickwick, a Sam Weller, a Dick Swiveller, a Mark Tapley, a Sarah Gamp, Captain Cuttle, Mr. Dick, Mr. Toots, Mr. Crummles, Mr. Mantalini, Dodson and Fogg, Codlin and Short, Spenlow and Jorkins, Mrs. Jellaby, Mrs. Billickin, Mrs. Gargery, Mrs. Wilfer, Mr. Twemlow, Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Mr. Sapsea, Silas Wegg, and indeed anyone you take into your own experience of life--from Mr. Chadband to the Dolls’ Dressmaker, with hundreds of lesser characters no less distinct--it is miserable to me, I say, that a Genius with all this largess to mint and scatter should have taxed his acquaintance to stamp their effigies upon poorer coin.

III

But let us discriminate. In “drawing from life” much will depend, as Aristotle might say, on (_a_) the extent, (_b_) the manner, (_c_) your intention: as likewise upon (_d_) the person drawn. I exclude all such portraits as are likely to provoke an action at law; for these come to be assessed under separate rules of criticism: and in general we may say of them that they should be avoided from the instinct of self-preservation rather than on grounds of disinterested aesthetic.

Confining ourselves, then, to portraits which are not actionable, we may take, as an extreme instance, Samuel Butler’s _The Way of All Flesh_. For in this book the persons portrayed are the author’s own parents, and he portrays them in a manner and with intention to make them odious, and to any extent: which seems to involve the nice moral question whether a person the best able to do a thing should not sometimes be the person who least ought to do it. And should the injunction against laying hands on your father Parmenides cover Parmenides if he happen to be your maiden aunt?--and maybe, too, she can retort, because you come of a literary family, you know! This power of retort, again, complicates a question which, you perceive, begins to be delicate. Ought you to catch anyone and hit him where he cannot hit back? Parmenides is no longer a relative but (say) a publisher, and you have--or think you have--reason to believe that he has cheated you. (And before you answer that this is incredible, let me say that I am dealing with an actual case, in which, however, I was not a party.) Are you justified in writing a work of fiction which holds him up to public opprobrium under a thin disguise? In my opinion you are not: because it means your attacking the fellow from a plane on which he can get no footing, to retaliate.

But it may be urged against him that Dickens by consent, and pretty well on his own admission, drew portraits of his mother in Mrs. Nickleby, and of his father in Mr. Micawber, and again in old Mr. Dorrit of the Marshalsea--this last, I am sure, the nearest to life. Well, I pass the question of provocation or moral excuse, observing only that Dickens tholed a childhood of culpable, even of damnable, neglect, whereas the parents of Samuel Butler did at least wing, with a Shrewsbury and Cambridge education, the barbs he was to shoot into their dead breasts. Dickens’ parents turned him down, at ten, to a blacking-factory, and, as we saw in our last lecture, when the moment came to release him from the blacking-warehouse his mother tried to insist on his returning.

“I do not,” he records to Forster, “write resentfully or angrily, for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am; but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.”

IV

So there was provocation in plenty, humiliation inflicted on a young and infinitely sensitive mind. But, when we have granted that Dickens borrowed from his mother for Mrs. Nickleby, from his father for Mr. Micawber and the Elder Dorrit, mark you how genius diverges from the mere hint--how far Micawber differs from Dorrit, while both are elemental. Mark you further how and while both are sublimated and Mrs. Nickleby too--how much charity has to do with the chemical process. Who thinks of Mrs. Nickleby but as an amiable noodle? Who of Mr. Micawber, but to enjoy his company? Who of Mr. Dorrit but with a sad ironical pity? Where in any portrait of the three can you trace a stroke of that vindictiveness you find bitten upon page after page of _The Way of All Flesh_?

Moreover, choosing Old Dorrit, the least sympathetically but the most subtly drawn of the three, I would ask you, studying that character for yourselves, to note how Dickens conveys that, while much of its infirmity is native, much also comes of the punishment of the Marshalsea against which the poor creature’s pomposities are at once a narcotic, and a protest, however futile, of the dignity of a human soul, however abject. Mark especially, at the close of Chapter XXXV, how delicately he draws the shade of the Marshalsea over Little Dorrit herself. He would fain keep her, born and bred in that unwholesome den, its one uncontaminated “prison-flower”--but with all his charity he is (as I tried to show you in a previous lecture) a magisterial artist and the truth compels him. Mark then the workings of this child’s mind on hearing the glad news of her father’s release. Here is the passage:

Little Dorrit had been thinking too. After softly putting his [her father’s] hair aside, and touching his forehead with her lips, she looked towards Arthur, who came nearer to her, and pursued in a low whisper the subject of her thoughts.

“Mr. Clennam, will he pay all his debts before he leaves here?”

“No doubt. All.”

“All the debts for which he has been imprisoned here, all my life and longer?”

“No doubt.”

There was something of uncertainty and remonstrance in her look; something that was not all satisfaction. He wondered to detect it, and said:

“You are glad that he should do so?”

“Are you?” asked Little Dorrit wistfully.

“Am I? Most heartily glad!”

“Then I know I ought to be.”

“And are you not?”

“It seems to me hard,” said Little Dorrit, “that he should have lost so many years and suffered so much, and at last pay all the debts as well. It seems to me hard that he should pay in life and money both.”

“My dear child----” Clennam was beginning.

“Yes, I know I am wrong,” she pleaded timidly. “Don’t think any worse of me; it has all grown up with me here.”

The prison, which could spoil so many things, had tainted Little Dorrit’s mind no more than this. Engendered as the confusion was, in compassion for the poor prisoner, her father, it was the first speck Clennam had ever seen, it was the last speck Clennam ever saw, of the prison atmosphere upon her.

Now I call that, Gentlemen, the true novelist’s stroke; rightly divined, so suddenly noted that we, who had not expected it, consent at once with a “Yes, yes--of course it happened so.”

V

But what I wish you to grasp is--in a man who could play strokes like that by the score and conjure up out of his vasty deeps anything from Dick Swiveller to Uncle Pumblechook, from the Marchioness to Mrs. Joe Gargery--the silliness of diffidence which drove him again and again to mere copying “from the life.” The superstition was idle, even when it did no harm. Having, in _Oliver Twist_, to describe a harsh and insolent Magistrate, Dickens (who could invent a Mr. Nupkins at will) took pains to be introduced to the Hatton Garden Police Court over which a certain Mr. Laing presided. He took these pains scrupulously, through an official channel (as they say), with the double result that we get Mr. Fang in the novel and that the Home Secretary very soon found it convenient to remove Mr. Laing from the Bench--and this, maybe, was all for the good--but you see how our author has already mixed up his conception of Charles Dickens as an author with that of Charles Dickens as a popular institution.

We will suppose that this Mr. Laing got his deserts. None the less Dickens was hitting him on a pitch where he had no standing and could not hit back. And I would warn you of this, Gentlemen--that if, trained here, you go forth to do battle with wrongdoing, one of two methods is equally fair, and no other. Either you must persuade men generally that such and such a principle should govern their actions, or, if you have to take a particular wrongdoer by the throat, you should in the first place be absolutely sure of your facts, and, in the second, take him preferably on his own ground: so that his defeat will be righteous and plain to all, and he can excuse nothing on your advantage of position.

I have diverged into advising you as artists in public life: but the advice is not irrelevant, for it echoes that which, repeatedly given to Dickens by his best friends, he repeatedly ignored, yet never without detriment to his art and not seldom with irritating personal consequences. You all know how he came to grief over his caricatures of Landor and Leigh Hunt in _Bleak House_. Laurence Boythorne was merely a cheap superficial, not ill-natured, portrait. Landor, who never condescended to notice it, might well have shrugged his tall shoulders and said, “Is this the friend who visited Fiesole for my sake, and sent me home the only gift I demanded--an ivy-leaf from my old Villa there ... and is _this_ what he knows of me, or even what I seemed to him?” (The ivy-leaf was found wrapped away among Landor’s papers, twenty years later.) But nothing--least of all its verisimilitude--can excuse the outrage perpetrated upon Leigh Hunt in the mask of Harold Skimpole: for, as Forster observes, to this character in the plot itself of _Bleak House_ is assigned a part which no fascinating foibles or gaieties of speech could redeem from contempt. Hunt, who (with all his faults) never lacked generosity, had been among the first to hail and help Dickens, was (as often happens) the last to recognise himself for the intended victim: but when some kind friend drew his attention to the calculated wound, it went deep. Dickens apologised in a letter which did its best, but could, in the nature of things, amount to no more than kindly evasiveness. He was guilty, and he knew it. Hunt had been wounded in the house of his friend. It was all very well, or ill, for Dickens to plead (as he did) that in Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby he had played a like trick on his own father and mother. The first and most obvious answer to that is, “Well, if you did, you ought to have known better”--the second, “And, anyhow, why should that make it any the more agreeable to _me_?” But Mrs. Nickleby and Mr. Micawber (as we saw) are kindly, even lovable characters. Harold Skimpole is at once abject and mischievous: and as Forster very justly remarks:

The kindly or unkindly impression makes all the difference where liberties are taken with a friend; and even this entirely favourable condition will not excuse the practice to many, where near relatives are concerned.