Part 7

But Landor and Leigh Hunt, you may say, were literary men of their hands, well able to defend themselves. Well, then, take down your _David Copperfield_ and compare the Miss Mowcher of Chapter XXII with the Miss Mowcher of Chapter XXXII. You will see at once that something very queer has happened; that the Miss Mowcher of the earlier chapter, obviously meant to be an odious little go-between in the Steerforth plot, has changed into a decent little creature at once pathetic and purposeless. Why? The answer is that the deformed original, recognising her portrait, had in the interim addressed to Dickens a poignant letter of remonstrance. Dickens, writing the story in monthly numbers, apologised and hastily readjusted his plot.

These things work out to this--that in dealing with Dickens we have to lay our account--as in dealing with Shakespeare we have to lay our account--with a genius capable of vast surprises but at any point liable to bolt out of self-control. I have no theories at all of what a genius should be, or of how it ought to behave. Let us take what the gods give and be thankful: and with Dickens as with Shakespeare--both of whom write execrably at times and at times above admiration--we have to accept this inequality as a condition of our arriving at the very best. Even if we allow that a stricter schooling would have spoilt both, and is indeed the bane of originality: still let us keep our heads and tell ourselves that a great part of _Oliver Twist_ is execrable stuff and no less, as the talk of Speed in _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ or of Lucio in _Measure for Measure_ is execrable stuff and no less. By all means let us keep in mind that these flagrancies are human and, if you will, a necessary part of any Shakespeare, of any Dickens. But let us be quite clear in judging them as counterweights, and tell ourselves that a Virgil or a Dante--yes, or a Cervantes--would never need to ask such forgiveness from us.

VI

_Corruptio optimi pessima_ is one of those orotund sayings which impress for the moment but are liable to have their wisdom very considerably spokeshaved (so to speak) as soon as we apply the Socratic knife. Is _Tarzan of the Apes_, after all, a corruption of the best? And, if so, from what incalculable height did Lucifer plunge, and how many days did he take before he broke the roof of the railway station and scattered himself over the bookstalls? We may derive solace, if we will, by telling ourselves that those horrible days in the Chandos Street blacking-warehouse were a part of the education of Dickens’ genius, taught it to _observe_, and so on. But I say to you, as he said of Little Dorrit, that such a shadow of cruelty, induced upon a sensitive boy, must inevitably leave its stain: and I do most earnestly ask you, some of whom may find yourselves trustees for the education of poor children, if you are sure that Dickens himself was the better for a starved childhood? For my part I can give that starvation little credit for his achievement, reading its effect rather into his many faults of taste and judgment.

VII

It is usual to class among the first of these faults a defective sense of English prose: and the commonest arraignment lies against his use of blank verse in moments of pathos or of deep emotion. Well, but let us clear our minds of cant about English prose, and abstain from talking about it as if the Almighty had invented its final pattern somewhere in the eighteenth century. Prose--and Poetry too, for that matter--is a way of putting things worth record into memorable speech. English writers of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century found, with some measure of consent, an admirable fashion of doing this, and have left a tradition: and it is a tradition to which I, personally, would cling if I could, admiring it as I do, and admiring so much less many pages of Dickens and a thousand of pages of Carlyle. After all, so long as the thing gets itself said, and effectively, and memorably, who are we to prescribe rules or parse sentences? What, for example, could that mysterious body, the College of Preceptors, do to improve the grammar of _Antony and Cleopatra_, even if they persuaded one another “Well, apparently they have come to stay, and perhaps we had better call upon them, my dear”?

VIII

Having, then, no preconceived notions about prose, and few prejudices save against certain locutions of which I confess I dislike them mainly because I dislike the sort of person who employs them--I assert that Dickens, aiming straight at his purpose, wrote countless pages of quite splendid prose. I defy you, for example, to suggest how a sense of the eeriness of the Woolwich marshes with an apprehension of horror behind the fog could be better conveyed in words than Dickens conveys them in the opening chapters of _Great Expectations_; as I ask you how the earliest impressions of a sensitive child can be better conveyed in language than they are in the early chapters of _David Copperfield_.

IX

But even this apologia--sufficient as I think it--does not cover the whole defence. We have picked up a habit of consenting with critics who tell us that Dickens’ prose is careless and therefore not worth studying. Believe me, you are mistaken if you believe these critics. Dickens sometimes wrote execrably: far oftener he penned at a stretch page upon page of comment and conversation that brilliantly effect their purpose and are, _therefore_, good writing. You will allow, I dare say, his expertness in glorifying the loquacity that comes of a well-meaning heart and a rambling head. Recall, for example--casually chosen out of hundreds--Mrs. Chivery on her son John, nursing his love-lornness amid the washing in the back-yard: and remark the _idiom_ of it:

“It’s the only change he takes,” said Mrs. Chivery, shaking her head afresh. “He won’t go out, even to the back-yard, when there’s no linen: but when there’s linen to keep the neighbours’ eyes off, he’ll sit there, hours. Hours he will. Says he feels as if it was groves.... Our John has everyone’s good word and everyone’s good wish. He played with her as a child when in that yard she played. He has known her ever since. He went out upon the Sunday afternoon when in this very parlour he had dined, and met her, with appointment or without appointment which I do not pretend to say. He made his offer to her. Her brother and sister is high in their views and against Our John. ‘No, John, I cannot have you, I cannot have any husband, it is not my intentions ever to become a wife, it is my intentions to be always a sacrifice, farewell. Find another worthy of you and forget me!’ This is the way in which she is doomed to be a constant slave, to them that are not worthy that a constant slave unto them she should be. This is the way in which Our John has come to find no pleasure but in taking cold among the linen....”

Is _that_ not prose? Of course it is prose _for its purpose_: and, strictly for her purpose--strictly, mind you for their purpose--Mrs. Chivery’s parallelisms of speech will match those of the prophet Jeremiah at his literary best. “Ah,” say you, “but Dickens is dealing out humorous reported speech. Can he write prose of his own?” Well, yes, and yes most certainly. If you will search and study his passages of deliberate writing you will scarcely miss to see how he derives in turn of phrase as in intonation from the great eighteenth-century novelists and translators whose works, if you remember, were the small child’s library in the beautiful fourth chapter of _David Copperfield_:

My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs ... which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company....

The whole passage, if you will turn to it, you will recognise as delicate English prose. But it is also a faithful, if translated, record. From this line of English writers, the more you study him, the more clearly you will recognise Dickens as standing in the direct descent of a pupil. He brings something of his own, of course, to infuse it, as genius will: and that something is usually a hint of pathos which the eighteenth-century man avoided. But (this touch of pathos excepted) you will find little, say, to distinguish Fielding’s sketch of Squire Allworthy on his morning stroll from this sketch, which I take casually from _The Old Curiosity Shop_, of an aged woman punctually visiting the grave of her husband who had died in his prime of twenty-three:

“Yes, I was his wife. Death doesn’t change no more than life, my dear.”... And now that five-and-fifty years were gone, she spoke of the dead man as if he had been her son or grandson, with a kind of pity for his youth growing out of her own old age, and an exalting of his strength and manly beauty, as compared with her own weakness and decay; and yet she spoke of him as her husband too, and thinking of herself in connection with him, as she used to be and not as she was now, talked of their meeting in another world, as if he were dead but yesterday, and she, separated from her former self, were thinking of the happiness of that comely girl who seemed to have died with him.

X

No, we can none of us afford to despise Dickens’ prose. This passage comes from one of his earliest books: if you would learn how he (ever a learner) learned to consolidate his style, study that neglected work of his, _The Uncommercial Traveller_--study such essays as that on “Wapping Workhouse” or that on “The City Churchyards”--study them with Thackeray’s _Roundabout Papers_--and tell me if these two great Victorian novelists, after shaking the dust of an _Esmond_ or a _David Copperfield_ off their palms, cannot, as a parergon, match your Augustans--your Steele or your Addison--on their own ground. Few recognise it, this pair being otherwise so great: but it is so.

And because you will probably disbelieve me at first going-off, I shall add the testimony of one you will be apter to trust--that of George Gissing. I have spoken of one chapter in _David Copperfield_, to commend it.

But, says Gissing:

In the story of David Copperfield’s journey on the Dover road we have as good a piece of narrative prose as can be found in English. Equally good, in another way, are those passages of rapid retrospect in which David tells us of his later boyhood, a concentration of memory perfumed with the sweetest humour. It is not an easy thing to relate, with perfect proportion of detail, with interest that never for a moment drops, the course of a year or two of wholly uneventful marriage: but read the chapter entitled _Our Domestic Life_ and try to award adequate praise to the great artist who composed it. One can readily suggest how the chapter could have been spoiled; ever so little undue satire, ever so little excess of sentiment; but who can point to a line in which it might be bettered? It is perfect writing: one can say no more and no less.

XI

I am glad, Gentlemen, on the verge of concluding these talks about Dickens, to quote this from Gissing--a genuine genius, himself an author of what Dr. Johnson would have described as “inspissated gloom.” There is, I daresay, some heaven of recognition in which all true artists meet; and at any rate it pleases one to think that the author of _The New Grub Street_ should, in this sublunary sphere, have been comforted on his way (it would even seem, entranced) by such children of joy as Sam Weller and Mr. Toots. And I, at any rate, who admired Gissing in life, like to think of him who found this world so hard, now, by virtue of his love for Dickens, reconciled to look down on it from that other sphere, with tolerant laughter--upon this queer individual England, at least. For Providence has made and kept this nation a comfortable nation, even to this day: and if you take its raciest literature from Chaucer down, you may assure yourselves that much of its glorious merit rests on the “triple pillar” of common-sense, religious morality and hearty laughter. I for my part hold that we shall help a great deal to restore our commonwealth by seeking back to that last “Godlike function” and re-learning it. To promote that laughter, with good sense and good morality, was ever Dickens’ way, as to kill wherever he could what he once called “this custom of putting the natural demand for amusement out of sight, as some untidy housekeepers put dust, and pretending that it was swept away.” And I think of Dickens as a great Englishman not least in this, that he was a man of his hands, with a great laugh scattering humbug to make place for mirth and goodwill; “a clean hearth and [to adapt Mrs. Battle] the _spirit_ of the game.”

XII

I conclude these lectures on Dickens with a word or two casually uttered in conversation by a great man--possibly the greatest--of the generation that succeeded Dickens; himself a superb novelist, and a ruthless thinker for the good of his kind; a Russian, moreover, to whom the language alone of Sam Weller or of Mrs. Gamp must have presented difficulties well-nigh inconceivable by us. Some nineteen years ago a friend of mine visited Tolstoy at his home and, the talk falling upon Dickens, this is what Tolstoy said:

All his characters are my personal friends. I am constantly comparing them with living persons, and living persons with them. And what a _spirit_ there was in all he wrote!

This having been reported to Swinburne, here is a part of Swinburne’s answer:

What a superb and crushing reply to the vulgar insults of such malignant boobies and poetasters as G. H. Lewes and Co. (too numerous a Co.!) is the witness of ... such a man among men!... After all, like will to like--genius will find out genius, and goodness will recognise goodness.

Tolstoy to Dickens.... _That_ is how the tall ships, the grandees of literature, dip their flags and salute as they pass. Gentlemen, let us leave it at that!

THACKERAY (I)

I

Among many wise sayings left behind him by the late Sir Walter Raleigh--_our_ Sir Walter and Oxford’s of whom his pupils there would say, “But Raleigh is a prince”--there haunts me as I begin to speak of Thackeray, a slow remark dropped as from an afterthought upon those combatants who are for ever extorting details of Shakespeare’s private life out of the Plays and the Sonnets, and those others (Browning, for example, and Matthew Arnold) who in revulsion have preached Shakespeare up for the grand impersonal artist who never unlocked his heart, who smiles down upon all questioning and is still

Out-topping knowledge.

Such a counter-claim may be plausible--is at any rate excusable if only as an oath upon the swarm of pedlars who infest Shakespeare and traffic in obscure hints of scandal. Yet, it will not work. “It would never be entertained,” says Raleigh, “by an artist, and would have had short shrift from any of the company that assembled at the Mermaid Tavern. No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow. No dramatist can create live characters save by bequeathing the best of himself to the children of his art, scattering among them a largess of his own qualities, giving, it may be, to one his wit, to another his philosophic doubt, to another his love of action, to another the simplicity and constancy that he finds deep in his own nature. There is no thrill of feeling communicated from the printed page but has first been alive in the mind of the author: there was nothing alive in his mind that was not intensely and sincerely felt. Plays like Shakespeare’s cannot be written in cold blood; they call forth the man’s whole energies, and take toll of the last farthing of his wealth of sympathy and experience.”

II

_No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow._ That is the sentence, of truly Johnsonian common-sense, which bears most intimately on our subject this morning. The story runs that Thackeray, one day tapping impatiently upon the cover of some adulatory memoir of somebody, warm from the press, enjoined upon his family, “None of this nonsense about me, after my death”: and the injunction was construed by his daughter, Lady Ritchie, most piously beyond a doubt, perhaps too strictly, for certain not with the happiest results. For this denial of any authoritative biography--of a writer and a clean-living English gentleman who might, if any human being can or could, have walked up to the Recording Angel and claimed his _dossier_ without a blush--has not only let in a flood of spurious reminiscences, anecdotes, sayings he most likely never uttered or at least never uttered with meaning or accent to give pain that, as reported, they convey. It has led to a number of editions with gossipy prefaces and filial chat (I fear I must say it) none the more helpful for being tinctured by affection and qualified by reserve.

This happens to be the more unfortunate of Thackeray since, as I suppose, no writer of the Victorian age walked abroad more sturdily on his own tall shadow, or trusted more on it. It was a shadow, too: dark enough for any man’s footstep. I do not wish--nor is it necessary--to break in upon any reticence. But you probably know the main outline of the story--of a Cambridge youth, of Trinity, who living moderately beyond his means (as undergraduates will) lost his affluence, lost the remains of it when, bolting to London, he dared to run a newspaper--two newspapers. _The National Standard_ had soon (in his own phrase) to be hauled down, and _The Constitutional_ belied its title by a rapid decline and decease. Thus he lost a moderate patrimony, and we find him next as a roving journalist in Paris, divided between pen and pencil, with an almost empty pocket. There, in August, 1836, at the British Embassy, he made a most imprudent but happy marriage--most happy, that is for a while. Years afterwards he wrote to a young friend:

I married at your age with £400 paid by a newspaper which failed six months afterwards, and always love to hear of a young man testing his fortune in that way. Though my marriage was a wreck, as you know, I would do it over again, for behold Love is the crown and completion of all earthly good.... The very best and pleasantest house I ever knew in my life had but £300 to keep it.

Here, then, comes in the tragedy of Thackeray’s life. Daughters were born to him amid those pleasures and anxieties which only they can taste fully who earn their daily bread in mutual love on the future’s chance. As he beautifully wrote, long after, in _Philip_:

I hope, friend, you and I are not too proud to ask for our daily bread, and to be grateful for getting it? Mr. Philip had to work for his, in care and trouble, like other children of men:--to work for it, and I hope to pray for it too. It is a thought to me awful and beautiful, that of the daily prayer, and of the myriads of fellow-men uttering it, in care and in sickness, in doubt and in poverty, in health and in wealth. _Panem nostrum da nobis hodie._ Philip whispers it by the bedside where wife and child lie sleeping, and goes to his early labour with a stouter heart: as he creeps to his rest when the day’s labour is over, and the quotidian bread is earned, and breathes his hushed thanks to the bountiful Giver of the meal. All over this world what an endless chorus is singing of love, and thanks, and prayer. Day tells to day the wondrous story, and night recounts it unto night. How do I come to think of a sunrise which I saw near twenty years ago on the Nile when the river and sky flushed with the dawning light and, as the luminary appeared, the boatmen knelt on the rosey deck and adored Allah? So, as thy sun rises, friend, over the humble housetops round about your home, shall you wake many and many a day to duty and labour. May the task have been honestly done when the night comes; and the steward deal kindly with the labourer.

Always this refrain in Thackeray--the text which Dr. Johnson once had inscribed on his watch, _ΝΥΞ ΓΑΡ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ_, “For the night cometh.”

With the birth of her third child, however, Mrs. Thackeray fell under a mental disease not violent at first, but deepening until it imperatively required removal and restraint.

III

I have been as short over this as could be: but the simple fact must be taken into account if we would understand Thackeray at all. Without knowledge of it, for instance, how can we interpret the ache behind his jolly _Ballad of Bouillabaisse_?

This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is-- A sort of soup, or broth, or brew, Or hotchpotch, of all sorts of fishes, That Greenwich never could outdo; Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffern, Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace; All these you eat at Terré’s tavern, In that one dish of Bouillabaisse...

Ah me! how quick the days are flitting! I mind me of a day that’s gone, When here I’d sit, as now I’m sitting, In this same place--but not alone. A fair young form was nestled near me, A dear, dear face looked fondly up, And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me --There’s no one now to share my cup.

If you wish, taking him at his best, to envisage Thackeray in the days of his assured triumph, you must understand him as a desolated man; as a man who, having built a fine house for himself in Kensington Palace Gardens, could never fit it for a real home. If he built himself a house, he could not sit and write in it; scarcely a page of _The Newcomes_ was written but on Club paper or at a hotel. It would seem as if the very anguish of the hearth drove this soul, so domestic by instinct, into the waste of Club-land, Pall Mall, the Reform Club, where his portrait now so pathetically hangs. For above all (let _The Rose and the Ring_ with its delightful and delicate occasion attest) Thackeray was born to be beloved of a nursery--the sort of great fellow to whom on entrance every child, as every dog, takes by instinct. In the nursery, quite at home, he rattles off the gayest unforgettable verses:

Did you ever hear of Miss Symons? She lives at a two-penny pieman’s: But when she goes out To a ball or a rout Her stomacher’s all covered with di’monds.

Or, for elder taste,

In the romantic little town of Highbury, My father kept a Succulating Libary. He followed in his youth the Man immortal who Conquered the Frenchman on the plains of Waterloo

--with similar fooling. Some men at Cambridge had the gift of this fooling--in Tennyson’s day, too--and not the least of them was Edward Lear, incomparable melodist of nonsense--nursery Mozart of the Magic Flute--to whom, on his Travels in Greece, Tennyson dedicated those very lovely stanzas beginning:

Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls Of water, sheets of summer glass, The long divine Peneian pass, The vast Acroceraunian walls....

He must be an unsympathetic critic (I think) and therefore an incomplete critic, if indeed a critic at all, who feels any real incongruity as in his mind he lets those lines fade off into

Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live, etc.;

for as Shelley once assured us, more or less:

Many a green isle needs must be In the deep wide sea of--Philistie,

and to anyone who remembers the imaginary horizons of his nursery I dare say the Blessed Isles of Nonsense and the land where the Bong tree grows lie not far from Calypso’s grot, or the house of Circe