Chapter 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.