Chapter L: Sterne.’ (4)

The penetrating power of this remarkable genius among all classes at home is not inferior to its diffusive energy abroad. The phrase ‘household book’ has, when applied to the works of Mr. Dickens, a peculiar propriety. There is no contemporary English writer, whose works are read so generally through the whole house, who can give pleasure to the servants as well as to the mistress, to the children as well as to the master. Mr. Thackeray without doubt exercises a more potent and plastic fascination within his sphere, but that sphere is limited. It is restricted to that part of the middle class which gazes inquisitively at the ‘Vanity Fair’ world. The delicate touches of our great satirist have, for such readers, not only the charm of wit, but likewise the interest of valuable information; he tells them of the topics which they want to know. But below this class there is another and far larger, which is incapable of comprehending the idling world, or of appreciating the accuracy of delineations drawn from it,—which would not know the difference between a picture of Grosvenor Square by Mr. Thackeray and the picture of it in a Minerva-Press novel,—which only cares for or knows of its own multifarious, industrial, fig-selling world,—and over these also Mr. Dickens has power.

It cannot be amiss to take this opportunity of investigating, even slightly, the causes of so great a popularity. And if, in the course of our article, we may seem to be ready with over-refining criticism, or to be unduly captious with theoretical objections, we hope not to forget that so great and so diffused an influence is a _datum_ for literary investigation,—that books which have been thus _tried_ upon mankind and have thus succeeded, must be books of immense genius,—and that it is our duty as critics to explain, as far as we can, the nature and the limits of that genius, but never for one moment to deny or question its existence.

Men of genius may be divided into regular and irregular. Certain minds, the moment we think of them, suggest to us the ideas of symmetry and proportion. Plato’s name, for example, calls up at once the impression of something ordered, measured, and settled: it is the exact contrary of everything eccentric, immature, or undeveloped. The opinions of such a mind are often erroneous, and some of them may, from change of time, of intellectual _data_, or from chance, seem not to be quite worthy of it; but the mode in which those opinions are expressed, and (as far as we can make it out) the mode in which they are framed, affect us, as we have said, with a sensation of symmetricalness. It is not very easy to define exactly to what peculiar internal characteristic this external effect is due: the feeling is distinct, but the cause is obscure; it lies hid in the peculiar constitution of great minds, and we should not wonder that it is not very easy either to conceive or to describe. On the whole, however, the effect seems to be produced by a peculiar proportionateness, in each instance, of the mind to the tasks which it undertakes, amid which we see it, and by which we measure it. Thus we feel that the powers and tendencies of Plato’s mind and nature were more fit than those of any other philosopher for the due consideration and exposition of the highest problems of philosophy, of the doubts and difficulties which concern man as man. His genius was adapted to its element; any change would mar the delicacy of the thought, or the polished accuracy of the expression. The weapon was fitted to its aim. Every instance of proportionateness does not, however, lead us to attribute this peculiar symmetry to the whole mind we are observing. The powers must not only be suited to the task undertaken, but the task itself must also be suited to a human being, and employ all the marvellous faculties with which he is endowed. The neat perfection of such a mind as Talleyrand’s is the antithesis to the symmetry of genius; the niceties neither of diplomacy nor of conversation give scope to the entire powers of a great nature. We may lay down as the condition of a regular or symmetrical genius, that it should have the exact combination of powers suited to graceful and easy success in an exercise of mind great enough to task the whole intellectual nature.

On the other hand, men of irregular or unsymmetrical genius are eminent either for some one or some few peculiarities of mind, have possibly special defects on other sides of their intellectual nature, at any rate want what the scientific men of the present day would call the _definite proportion_ of faculties and qualities suited to the exact work they have in hand. The foundation of many criticisms of Shakespeare is, that he is deficient in this peculiar proportion. His overteeming imagination gives at times, and not unfrequently, a great feeling of irregularity: there seems to be confusion. We have the tall trees of the forest, the majestic creations of the highest genius; but we have, besides, a bushy second growth, an obtrusion of secondary images and fancies, which prevent our taking an exact measure of such grandeur. We have not the sensation of intense simplicity, which must probably accompany the highest conceivable greatness. Such is also the basis of Mr. Hallam’s criticism on Shakespeare’s language, which Mr. Arnold has lately revived. ‘His expression is often faulty,’ because his illustrative imagination, somewhat predominating over his other faculties, diffuses about the main expression a supplement of minor metaphors which sometimes distract the comprehension, and almost always deprive his style of the charm that arises from undeviating directness. Doubtless this is an instance of the very highest kind of irregular genius, in which all the powers exist in the mind in a very high, and almost all of them in the very highest measure, but in which from a slight excess in a single one, the charm of proportion is lessened. The most ordinary cases of irregular genius are those in which single faculties are abnormally developed, and call off the attention from all the rest of the mind by their prominence and activity. Literature, as the ‘fragment of fragments,’ is so full of the fragments of such minds that it is needless to specify instances.

Possibly it may be laid down that one of two elements is essential to a symmetrical mind. It is evident that such a mind must either apply itself to that which is theoretical or that which is practical, to the world of abstraction or to the world of objects and realities. In the former case the deductive understanding, which masters first principles, and makes deductions from them, the thin ether of the intellect,—the ‘mind itself by itself,’—must evidently assume a great prominence. To attempt to comprehend principles without it, is to try to swim without arms, or to fly without wings. Accordingly, in the mind of Plato, and in others like him, the abstract and deducing understanding fills a great place; the imagination seems a kind of eye to descry its data; the artistic instinct an arranging impulse, which sets in order its inferences and conclusions. On the other hand, if a symmetrical mind busy itself with the active side of human life, with the world of concrete men and real things, its principal quality will be a practical sagacity, which forms with ease a distinct view and just appreciation of all the mingled objects that the world presents,—which allots to each its own place, and its intrinsic and appropriate rank. Possibly no mind gives such an idea of this sort of symmetry as Chaucer’s. Every thing in it seems in its place. A healthy sagacious man of the world has gone through the world; he loves it, and knows it; he dwells on it with a fond appreciation; every object of the old life of ‘merry England’ seems to fall into its precise niche in his ordered and symmetrical comprehension. The _Prologue to the Canterbury Tales_ is in itself a series of memorial tablets to mediæval society; each class has its tomb, and each its apt inscription. A man without such an apprehensive and broad sagacity must fail in every extensive delineation of various life; he might attempt to describe what he did not penetrate, or if by a rare discretion he avoided that mistake, his works would want the _binding element_; he would be deficient in that distinct sense of relation and combination which is necessary for the depiction of the whole of life, which gives to it unity at first, and imparts to it a mass in the memory ever afterwards. And eminence in one or other of these marking faculties,—either in the deductive abstract intellect, or the practical seeing sagacity,—seems essential to the mental constitution of a symmetrical genius, at least in man. There are, after all, but two principal all-important spheres in human life—thought and action; and we can hardly conceive of a masculine mind symmetrically developed, which did not evince its symmetry by an evident perfection in one or other of those pursuits, which did not leave the trace of its distinct reflection upon the one, or of its large insight upon the other of them. Possibly it may be thought that in the sphere of pure art there may be room for a symmetrical development different from these; but it will perhaps be found, on examination of such cases, either that under peculiar and appropriate disguises one of these great qualities is present, or that the apparent symmetry is the narrow perfection of a limited nature, which may be most excellent in itself, as in the stricter form of sacred art, but which, as we explained, is quite opposed to that broad perfection of the thinking being, to which we have applied the name of the symmetry of genius.

If this classification of men of genius be admitted, there can be no hesitation in assigning to Mr. Dickens his place in it. His genius is essentially irregular and unsymmetrical. Hardly any English writer perhaps is much more so. His style is an example of it. It is descriptive, racy, and flowing; it is instinct with new imagery and singular illustration; but it does not indicate that due proportion of the faculties to one another which is a beauty in itself, and which cannot help diffusing beauty over every happy word and moulded clause. We may choose an illustration at random. The following graphic description will do:

‘If Lord George Gordon had appeared in the eyes of Mr. Willet,
overnight, a nobleman of somewhat quaint and odd exterior,
the impression was confirmed this morning, and increased a
hundredfold. Sitting bolt upright upon his bony steed, with
his long, straight hair dangling about his face and fluttering
in the wind; his limbs all angular and rigid, his elbows stuck
out on either side ungracefully, and his whole frame jogged and
shaken at every motion of his horse’s feet; a more grotesque
or more ungainly figure can hardly be conceived. In lieu of
whip, he carried in his hand a great gold-headed cane, as
large as any footman carries in these days; and his various
modes of holding this unwieldy weapon—now upright before his
face like the sabre of a horse-soldier, now over his shoulder
like a musket, now between his finger and thumb, but always
in some uncouth and awkward fashion—contributed in no small
degree to the absurdity of his appearance. Stiff, lank, and
solemn, dressed in an unusual manner, and ostentatiously
exhibiting—whether by design or accident—all his peculiarities
of carriage, gesture, and conduct, all the qualities, natural
and artificial, in which he differed from other men, he might
have moved the sternest looker-on to laughter, and fully
provoked the smiles and whispered jests which greeted his
departure from the Maypole Inn.

‘Quite unconscious, however, of the effect he produced, he
trotted on beside his secretary, talking to himself nearly all
the way, until they came within a mile or two of London, when
now and then some passenger went by who knew him by sight, and
pointed him out to some one else, and perhaps stood looking
after him, or cried in jest or earnest as it might be, “Hurrah,
Geordie! No Popery!” At which he would gravely pull off his
hat, and bow. When they reached the town and rode along the
streets, these notices became more frequent; some laughed, some
hissed, some turned their heads and smiled, some wondered who
he was, some ran along the pavement by his side and cheered.
When this happened in a crush of carts and chairs and coaches,
he would make a dead stop, and pulling off his hat, cry,
“Gentlemen, No Popery!” to which the gentlemen would respond
with lusty voices, and with three times three; and then, on he
would go again with a score or so of the raggedest, following
at his horse’s heels, and shouting till their throats were
parched.

‘The old ladies too—there were a great many old ladies in the
streets, and these all knew him. Some of them—not those of the
highest rank, but such as sold fruit from baskets and carried
burdens—clapped their shrivelled hands, and raised a weazen,
piping, shrill “Hurrah, my lord.” Others waved their hands or
handkerchiefs, or shook their fans or parasols, or threw up
windows, and called in haste to those within, to come and see.
All these marks of popular esteem he received with profound
gravity and respect; bowing very low, and so frequently that
his hat was more off his head than on; and looking up at the
houses as he passed along, with the air of one who was making a
public entry, and yet was not puffed-up or proud.’

No one would think of citing such a passage as this, as exemplifying the proportioned beauty of finished writing; it is not the writing of an evenly developed or of a highly cultured mind; it abounds in jolts and odd turns; it is full of singular twists and needless complexities: but, on the other hand, no one can deny its great and peculiar merit. It is an odd style, and it is very odd how much you read it. It is the overflow of a copious mind, though not the chastened expression of an harmonious one.

The same quality characterises the matter of his works. His range is very varied. He has attempted to describe every kind of scene in English life, from quite the lowest to almost the highest. He has not endeavoured to secure success by confining himself to a single path, nor wearied the public with repetitions of the subjects by the delineation of which he originally obtained fame. In his earlier works he never writes long without saying something well; something which no other man would have said; but even in them it is the characteristic of his power that it is apt to fail him at once; from masterly strength we pass without interval to almost infantine weakness,—something like disgust succeeds in a moment to an extreme admiration. Such is the natural fate of an unequal mind employing itself on a vast and variegated subject. In writing on the ‘Waverley Novels,’ we ventured to make a division of novels into the ubiquitous,—it would have been perhaps better to say the miscellaneous,—and the sentimental: the first, as its name implies, busying itself with the whole of human life, the second restricting itself within a peculiar and limited theme. Mr. Dickens’s novels are all of the former class. They aim to delineate nearly all that part of our national life which can be delineated,—at least, within the limits which social morality prescribes to social art; but you cannot read his delineation of any part without being struck with its singular incompleteness. An artist once said of the best work of another artist, ‘Yes, it is a pretty patch.’ If we might venture on the phrase, we should say that Mr. Dickens’s pictures are graphic scraps; his best books are compilations of them.

The truth is, that Mr. Dickens wholly wants the two elements which we have spoken of, as one or other requisite for a symmetrical genius. He is utterly deficient in the faculty of reasoning. ‘Mamma, what shall I think about?’ said the small girl. ‘My dear, don’t think,’ was the old-fashioned reply. We do not allege that in the strict theory of education this was a correct reply; modern writers think otherwise; but we wish some one would say it to Mr. Dickens. He is often troubled with the idea that he must reflect, and his reflections are perhaps the worst reading in the world. There is a sentimental confusion about them; we never find the consecutive precision of mature theory, or the cold distinctness of clear thought. Vivid facts stand out in his imagination; and a fresh illustrative style brings them home to the imagination of his readers; but his continuous philosophy utterly fails in the attempt to harmonise them,—to educe a theory or elaborate a precept from them. Of his social thinking we shall have a few words to say in detail; his didactic humour is very unfortunate: no writer is less fitted for an excursion to the imperative mood. At present, we only say, what is so obvious as scarcely to need saying, that his abstract understanding is so far inferior to his picturesque imagination as to give even to his best works the sense of jar and incompleteness, and to deprive them altogether of the crystalline finish which is characteristic of the clear and cultured understanding.

Nor has Mr. Dickens the easy and various sagacity which, as has been said, gives a unity to all which it touches. He has, indeed, a quality which is near allied to it in appearance. His shrewdness in some things, especially in traits and small things, is wonderful. His works are full of acute remarks on petty doings, and well exemplify the telling power of minute circumstantiality. But the minor species of perceptive sharpness is so different from diffused sagacity, that the two scarcely ever are to be found in the same mind. There is nothing less like the great lawyer, acquainted with broad principles and applying them with distinct deduction, than the attorney’s clerk who catches at small points like a dog biting at flies. ‘Over-sharpness’ in the student is the most unpromising symptom of the logical jurist. You must not ask a horse in blinkers for a large view of a landscape. In the same way, a detective ingenuity in microscopic detail is of all mental qualities most unlike the broad sagacity by which the great painters of human affairs have unintentionally stamped the mark of unity on their productions. They show by their treatment of each case that they understand the whole of life; the special delineator of fragments and points shows that he understands them only. In one respect the defect is more striking in Mr. Dickens than in any other novelist of the present day. The most remarkable deficiency in modern fiction is its omission of the business of life, of all those countless occupations, pursuits, and callings in which most men live and move, and by which they have their being. In most novels money _grows_. You have no idea of the toil, the patience, and the wearing anxiety by which men of action provide for the day, and lay up for the future, and support those that are given into their care. Mr. Dickens is not chargeable with this omission. He perpetually deals with the pecuniary part of life. Almost all his characters have determined occupations, of which he is apt to talk even at too much length. When he rises from the toiling to the luxurious classes, his genius in most cases deserts him. The delicate refinement and discriminating taste of the idling orders are not in his way; he knows the dry arches of London Bridge better than Belgravia. He excels in inventories of poor furniture, and is learned in pawnbrokers’ tickets. But, although his creative power lives and works among the middle class and industrial section of English society, he has never painted the highest part of their daily intellectual life. He made, indeed, an attempt to paint specimens of the apt and able man of business in _Nicholas Nickleby_; but the Messrs. Cheeryble are among the stupidest of his characters. He forgot that breadth of platitude is rather different from breadth of sagacity. His delineations of middle-class life have in consequence a harshness and meanness which do not belong to that life in reality. He omits the relieving element. He describes the figs which are sold, but not the talent which sells figs well. And it is the same want of diffused sagacity in his own nature which has made his pictures of life so odd and disjointed, and which has deprived them of symmetry and unity.

The _bizarrerie_ of Mr. Dickens’s genius is rendered more remarkable by the inordinate measure of his special excellences. The first of these is his power of observation in detail. We have heard,—we do not know whether correctly or incorrectly,—that he can go down a crowded street, and tell you all that is in it, what each shop was, what the grocer’s name was, how many scraps of orange-peel there were on the pavement. His works give you exactly the same idea. The amount of detail which there is in them is something amazing,—to an ordinary writer something incredible. There are single pages containing telling _minutiæ_, which other people would have thought enough for a volume. Nor is his sensibility to external objects, though omnivorous, insensible to the artistic effect of each. There are scarcely anywhere such pictures of London as he draws. No writer has equally comprehended the artistic material which is given by its extent, its aggregation of different elements, its mouldiness, its brilliancy.

Nor does his genius—though, from some idiosyncrasy of mind or accident of external situation, it is more especially directed to City life—at all stop at the Citywall. He is especially at home in the picturesque and obvious parts of country life, particularly in the comfortable and (so to say) mouldering portion of it. The following is an instance; if not the best that could be cited, still one of the best:—

‘They arranged to proceed upon their journey next evening, as a
stage-wagon, which travelled for some distance on the same road
as they must take, would stop at the inn to change horses, and
the driver for a small gratuity would give Nell a place inside.
A bargain was soon struck when the wagon came; and in due time
it rolled away; with the child comfortably bestowed among the
softer packages, her grandfather and the schoolmaster walking
on beside the driver, and the landlady and all the good folks
of the inn screaming out their good wishes and farewells.

‘What a soothing, luxurious, drowsy way of travelling, to lie
inside that slowly-moving mountain, listening to the tinkling
of the horses’ bells, the occasional smacking of the carter’s
whip, the smooth rolling of the great broad wheels, the rattle
of the harness, the cheery goodnights of passing travellers
jogging past on little short-stepped horses—all made pleasantly
indistinct by the thick awning, which seemed made for lazy
listening under, till one fell asleep! The very going to sleep,
still with an indistinct idea, as the head jogged to and fro
upon the pillow, of moving onward with no trouble or fatigue,
and hearing all these sounds like dreamy music, lulling to the
senses—and the slow waking up, and finding one’s self staring
out through the breezy curtain half-opened in the front, far up
into the cold bright sky with its countless stars, and downward
at the driver’s lantern dancing on like its namesake Jack of
the swamps and marshes, and sideways at the dark grim trees,
and forward at the long bare road rising up, up, up, until it
stopped abruptly at a sharp high ridge as if there were no more
road, and all beyond was sky—and the stopping at the inn to
bait, and being helped out, and going into a room with fire
and candles and winking very much, and being agreeably reminded
that the night was cold, and anxious for very comfort’s sake to
think it colder than it was! What a delicious journey was that
journey in the wagon!

‘Then the going on again—so fresh at first, and shortly
afterwards so sleepy. The waking from a sound nap as the mail
came dashing past like a highway comet, with gleaming lamps
and rattling hoofs, and visions of a guard behind, standing up
to keep his feet warm, and of a gentleman in a fur cap opening
his eyes and looking wild and stupefied—the stopping at the
turnpike, where the man was gone to bed, and knocking at the
door until he answered with a smothered shout from under the
bed-clothes in the little room above, where the faint light was
burning, and presently came down, night-capped and shivering,
to throw the gate wide open, and wish all wagons off the road
except by day. The cold sharp interval between night and
morning—the distant streak of light widening and spreading,
and turning from grey to white, and from white to yellow, and
from yellow to burning red—the presence of day, with all its
cheerfulness and life—men and horses at the plough—birds in
the trees and hedges, and boys in solitary fields frightening
them away with rattles. The coming to a town—people busy in
the market; light carts and chaises round the tavern yard;
tradesmen standing at their doors; men running horses up and
down the streets for sale; pigs plunging and grunting in the
dirty distance, getting off with long strings at their legs,
running into clean chemists’ shops and being dislodged with
brooms by ’prentices; the night-coach changing horses—the
passengers cheerless, cold, ugly, and discontented, with
three months’ growth of hair in one night—the coachmen fresh
as from a bandbox, and exquisitely beautiful by contrast:—so
much bustle, so many things in motion, such a variety of
incidents—when was there a journey with so many delights as
that journey in the wagon!’

Or, as a relief from a very painful series of accompanying characters, it is pleasant to read and remember the description of the fine morning on which Mr. Jonas Chuzzlewit does not reflect. Mr. Dickens has, however, no feeling analogous to the nature-worship of some other recent writers. There is nothing Wordsworthian in his bent; the interpreting inspiration (as that school speak) is not his. Nor has he the erudition in difficult names which has filled some pages in late novelists with mineralogy and botany. His descriptions of nature are fresh and superficial; they are not sermonic or scientific.

Nevertheless, it may be said that Mr. Dickens’s genius is especially suited to the delineation of City life. London is like a newspaper. Everything is there, and everything is disconnected. There is every kind of person in some houses; but there is no more connection between the houses than between the neighbours in the lists of ‘births, marriages, and deaths.’ As we change from the broad leader to the squalid police-report, we pass a corner and we are in a changed world. This is advantageous to Mr. Dickens’s genius. His memory is full of instances of old buildings and curious people, and he does not care to piece them together. On the contrary, each scene, to his mind, is a separate scene,—each street a separate street. He has, too, the peculiar alertness of observation that is observable in those who live by it. He describes London like a special correspondent for posterity.

A second most wonderful special faculty which Mr. Dickens possesses is what we may call his _vivification_ of character, or rather of characteristics. His marvellous power of observation has been exercised upon men and women even more than upon town or country; and the store of human detail, so to speak, in his books is endless and enormous. The boots at the inn, the pickpockets in the street, the undertaker, the Mrs. Gamp, are all of them at his disposal; he knows each trait and incident, and he invests them with a kind of perfection in detail which in reality they do not possess. He has a very peculiar power of taking hold of some particular traits, and making a character out of them. He is especially apt to incarnate particular professions in this way. Many of his people never speak without some allusion to their occupation. You cannot separate them from it. Nor does the writer ever separate them. What would Mr. Mould be if not an undertaker? or Mrs. Gamp if not a nurse? or Charley Bates if not a pickpocket? Not only is human nature in them subdued to what it works in, but there seems to be no nature to subdue; the whole character is the idealisation of a trade, and is not in fancy or thought distinguishable from it. Accordingly, of necessity, such delineations become caricatures. We do not in general contrast them with reality; but as soon as we do, we are struck with the monstrous exaggerations which they present. You could no more fancy Sam Weller, or Mark Tapley, or the Artful Dodger really existing, walking about among common ordinary men and women, than you can fancy a talking duck or a writing bear. They are utterly beyond the pale of ordinary social intercourse. We suspect, indeed, that Mr. Dickens does not conceive his characters to himself as mixing in the society he mixes in. He sees people in the street, doing certain things, talking in a certain way, and his fancy petrifies them in the act. He goes on fancying hundreds of reduplications of that act and that speech; he frames an existence in which there is nothing else but that aspect which attracted his attention. Sam Weller is an example. He is a man-servant, who makes a peculiar kind of jokes, and is wonderfully felicitous in certain similes. You see him at his first introduction:—

‘“My friend,” said the thin gentleman.

‘“You’re one o’ the adwice gratis order,” thought Sam, “or
you wouldn’t be so werry fond o’ me all at once.” But he only
said—“Well, sir?”

‘“My friend,” said the thin gentlemen, with a conciliatory
hem—“Have you got many people stopping here, now? Pretty busy?
Eh?”

‘Sam stole a look at the inquirer. He was a little high-dried
man, with a dark squeezed-up face, and small restless black
eyes, that kept winking and twinkling on each side of his
little inquisitive nose, as if they were playing a perpetual
game of peep-bo with that feature. He was dressed all in black,
with boots as shiny as his eyes, a low white neckcloth, and a
clean shirt with a frill to it. A gold watch-chain, and seals,
depended from his fob. He carried his black kid gloves _in_
his hands, not _on_ them; and as he spoke, thrust his wrists
beneath his coat-tails, with the air of a man who was in the
habit of propounding some regular posers.

‘“Pretty busy, eh?” said the little man.

‘“Oh, werry well, sir,” replied Sam, “we shan’t be bankrupts,
and we shan’t make our fort’ns. We eats our biled mutton
without capers, and don’t care for horse-radish ven ve can get
beef?”

‘“Ah,” said the little man, “you’re a wag, ain’t you?”

‘“My eldest brother was troubled with that complaint,” said
Sam, “it may be catching—I used to sleep with him.”

‘“This is a curious old house of yours,” said the little man,
looking round him.

‘“If you’d sent word you was a coming, we’d ha’ had it
repaired,” replied the imperturbable Sam.

‘The little man seemed rather baffled by these several
repulses, and a short consultation took place between him and
the two plump gentlemen. At its conclusion, the little man took
a pinch of snuff from an oblong silver box, and was apparently
on the point of renewing the conversation, when one of the
plump gentlemen, who, in addition to a benevolent countenance,
possessed a pair of spectacles and a pair of black gaiters,
interfered—

‘“The fact of the matter is,” said the benevolent gentleman,
“that my friend here” (pointing to the other plump gentleman)
“will give you half a guinea, if you’ll answer one or two—”

‘“Now, my dear sir—my dear sir,” said the little man, “pray
allow me—my dear sir, the very first principle to be observed
in these cases is this: if you place a matter in the hands of a
professional man, you must in no way interfere in the progress
of the business; you must repose implicit confidence in him.
Really, Mr. (he turned to the other plump gentleman, and
said)—I forget your friend’s name.”

‘“Pickwick,” said Mr. Wardle, for it was no other than that
jolly personage.

‘“Ah, Pickwick—really Mr. Pickwick, my dear sir, excuse me—I
shall be happy to receive any private suggestions of yours,
as _amicus curiæ_, but you must see the impropriety of your
interfering with my conduct in this case, with such an _ad
captandum_ argument as the offer of half a guinea. Really, my
dear sir, really,” and the little man took an argumentative
pinch of snuff, and looked very profound.

‘“My only wish, sir,” said Mr. Pickwick, “was to bring this
very unpleasant matter to as speedy a close as possible.”

‘“Quite right—quite right,” said the little man.

‘“With which view,” continued Mr. Pickwick, “I made use of the
argument which my experience of men has taught me is the most
likely to succeed in any case.”

‘“Ay, ay,” said the little man, “very good, very good indeed;
but you should have suggested it to _me_. My dear sir,
I’m quite certain you cannot be ignorant of the extent of
confidence which must be placed in professional men. If any
authority can be necessary on such a point, my dear sir, let me
refer you to the well-known case in Barnwell and—”

‘“Never mind George Barnwell,” interrupted Sam, who had
remained a wondering listener during this short colloquy;
“everybody knows vat sort of a case his was, tho’ it’s always
been my opinion, mind you, that the young ’ooman deserved
scragging a precious sight more than he did. Hows’ever, that’s
neither here nor there. You want me to except of half a guinea.
Werry well, I’m agreeable: I can’t say no fairer than that, can
I, sir? (Mr. Pickwick smiled.) Then the next question is, what
the devil do you want with me, as the man said wen he see the
ghost?”

‘“We want to know—” said Mr. Wardle.

‘“Now, my dear sir—my dear sir,” interposed the busy little man.

‘Mr. Wardle shrugged his shoulders, and was silent.

‘“We want to know,” said the little man, solemnly; “and we
ask the question of you, in order that we may not awaken
apprehensions inside—we want to know who you’ve got in this
house at present.”

‘“Who there is in the house!” said Sam, in whose mind the
inmates were always represented by that particular article of
their costume, which came under his immediate superintendence.
“There’s a wooden leg in number six; there’s a pair of Hessians
in thirteen; there’s two pair of halves in the commercial;
there’s these here painted tops in the snuggery inside the bar;
and five more tops in the coffee-room.”

‘“Nothing more?” said the little man.

‘“Stop a bit,” replied Sam, suddenly recollecting himself.
“Yes; there’s a pair of Wellingtons a good deal worn, and a
pair o’ lady’s shoes, in number five.”

‘“What sort of shoes?” hastily inquired Wardle, who, together
with Mr. Pickwick, had been lost in bewilderment at the
singular catalogue of visitors.

‘“Country make,” replied Sam.

‘“Any maker’s name?”

‘“Brown.”

‘“Where of?”

‘“Muggleton.”

‘“It _is_ them,” exclaimed Wardle. “By Heavens, we’ve found
them.”

‘“Hush!” said Sam. “The Wellingtons has gone to Doctors
Commons.”

‘“No,” said the little man.

‘“Yes, for a license.”

‘“We’re in time,” exclaimed Wardle. “Show us the room; not a
moment is to be lost.”

‘“Pray, my dear sir—pray,” said the little man; “caution,
caution.” He drew from his pocket a red silk purse, and looked
very hard at Sam as he drew out a sovereign.

‘Sam grinned expressively.

‘“Show us into the room at once, without announcing us,” said
the little man, “and it’s yours.”’

One can fancy Mr. Dickens hearing a dialogue of this sort,—not nearly so good, but something like it,—and immediately setting to work to make it better and put it in a book; then changing a little the situation, putting the boots one step up in the scale of service, engaging him as footman to a stout gentleman (but without for a moment losing sight of the peculiar kind of professional conversation and humour which his first dialogue presents), and astonishing all his readers by the marvellous fertility and magical humour with which he maintains that style. Sam Weller’s father is even a stronger and simpler instance. He is simply nothing but an old coachman of the stout and extinct sort: you cannot separate him from the idea of that occupation. But how amusing he is! We dare not quote a single word of his talk; because we should go on quoting so long, and every one knows it so well. Some persons may think that this is not a very high species of delineative art. The idea of personifying traits and trades may seem to them poor and meagre. Anybody, they may fancy, can do that. But how would they do it? Whose fancy would not break down in a page—in five lines? Who could carry on the vivification with zest and energy and humour for volume after volume? Endless fertility in laughter-causing detail is Mr. Dickens’s most astonishing peculiarity. It requires a continuous and careful reading of his works to be aware of his enormous wealth. Writers have attained the greatest reputation for wit and humour, whose whole works do not contain so much of either as are to be found in a very few pages of his.

Mr. Dickens’s humour is indeed very much a result of the two peculiarities of which we have been speaking. His power of detailed observation and his power of idealising individual traits of character—sometimes of one or other of them, sometimes of both of them together. His similes on matters of external observation are so admirable that everybody appreciates them, and it would be absurd to quote specimens of them; nor is it the sort of excellence which best bears to be paraded for the purposes of critical example. Its off-hand air and natural connection with the adjacent circumstances are inherent parts of its peculiar merit. Every reader of Mr. Dickens’s works knows well what we mean. And who is not a reader of them?

But his peculiar humour is even more indebted to his habit of vivifying external traits, than to his power of external observation. He, as we have explained, expands traits into people; and it is a source of true humour to place these, when so expanded, in circumstances in which only people—that is complete human beings—can appropriately act. The humour of Mr. Pickwick’s character is entirely of this kind. He is a kind of incarnation of simple-mindedness and what we may call obvious-mindedness. The conclusion which each occurrence or position in life most immediately presents to the unsophisticated mind is that which Mr. Pickwick is sure to accept. The proper accompaniments are given to him. He is a stout gentleman in easy circumstances, who is irritated into originality by no impulse from within, and by no stimulus from without. He is stated to have ‘retired from business.’ But no one can fancy what he was in business. Such guileless simplicity of heart and easy impressibility of disposition would soon have induced a painful failure amid the harsh struggles and the tempting speculations of pecuniary life. As he is represented in the narrative, however, nobody dreams of such antecedents. Mr. Pickwick moves easily over all the surface of English life from Goswell Street to Dingley Dell, from Dingley Dell to the Ipswich elections, from drinking milk-punch in a wheelbarrow to sleeping in the approximate pound, and no one ever thinks of applying to him the ordinary maxims which we should apply to any common person in life, or to any common personage in a fiction. Nobody thinks it is wrong in Mr. Pickwick to drink too much milk-punch in a wheelbarrow, to introduce worthless people of whom he knows nothing to the families of people for whom he really cares; nobody holds him responsible for the consequences; nobody thinks there is anything wrong in his taking Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Benjamin Allen to visit Mr. Winkle, senior, and thereby almost irretrievably offending him with his son’s marriage. We do not reject moral remarks such as these, but they never occur to us. Indeed, the indistinct consciousness that such observations are possible, and that they are hovering about our minds, enhances the humour of the narrative. We are in a conventional world, where the mere maxims of common life do not apply, and yet which has all the amusing detail, and picturesque elements, and singular eccentricities of common life. Mr. Pickwick is a personified ideal; a kind of amateur in life, whose course we watch through all the circumstances of ordinary existence, and at whose follies we are amused just as really skilled people are at the mistakes of an amateur in their art. His being in the pound is not wrong; his being the victim of Messrs. Dodson is not foolish. ‘Always shout with the mob,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘But suppose there are two mobs,’ said Mr. Snodgrass. ‘Then shout with the loudest,’ said Mr. Pickwick. This is not in him weakness or time-serving, or want of principle, as in most even of fictitious people it would be. It is his way. Mr. Pickwick was expected to say something, so he said ‘Ah!’ in a grave voice. This is not pompous as we might fancy, or clever as it might be, if intentionally devised; it is simply his way. Mr. Pickwick gets late at night over the wall behind the back-door of a young-ladies’ school, is found in that sequestered place by the schoolmistress and the boarders and the cook, and there is a dialogue between them. There is nothing out of possibility in this; it is his way. The humour essentially consists in treating as a moral agent a being who really is not a moral agent. We treat a vivified accident as a man, and we are surprised at the absurd results. We are reading about an acting thing, and we wonder at its scrapes, and laugh at them as if they were those of the man. There is something of this humour in every sort of farce. Everybody knows these are not real beings acting in real life, though they talk as if they were, and want us to believe that they are. Here, as in Mr. Dickens’s books, we have exaggerations pretending to comport themselves as ordinary beings, caricatures acting as if they were characters.

At the same time it is essential to remember, that however great may be and is the charm of such exaggerated personifications, the best specimens of them are immensely less excellent, belong to an altogether lower range of intellectual achievements, than the real depiction of actual living men. It is amusing to read of beings _out_ of the laws of morality, but it is more profoundly interesting, as well as more instructive, to read of those whose life in its moral conditions resembles our own. We see this most distinctly when both representations are given by the genius of one and the same writer. Falstaff is a sort of sack-holding paunch, an exaggerated over-development which no one thinks of holding down to the commonplace rules of the ten commandments and the statute-law. We do not think of them in connection with him. They belong to a world apart. Accordingly, we are vexed when the king discards him and reproves him. Such a fate was a necessary adherence on Shakespeare’s part to the historical tradition; he never probably thought of departing from it, nor would his audience have perhaps endured his doing so. But to those who look at the historical plays as pure works of imaginative art, it seems certainly an artistic misconception to have developed so marvellous an _un_moral impersonation, and then to have subjected it to an ethical and punitive judgment. Still, notwithstanding this error, which was very likely inevitable, Falstaff is probably the most remarkable specimen of caricature-representation to be found in literature. And its very excellence of execution only shows how inferior is the kind of art which creates only such representations. Who could compare the genius, marvellous as must be its fertility, which was needful to create a Falstaff with that shown in the higher productions of the same mind in Hamlet, Ophelia, and Lear? We feel instantaneously the difference between the aggregating accident which rakes up from the externalities of life other accidents analogous to itself, and the central ideal of a real character which cannot show itself wholly in any accidents, but which exemplifies itself partially in many, which unfolds itself gradually in wide spheres of action, and yet, as with those we know best in life, leaves something hardly to be understood, and after years of familiarity is a problem and a difficulty to the last. In the same way, the embodied characteristics and grotesque exaggerations of Mr. Dickens, notwithstanding all their humour and all their marvellous abundance, can never be for a moment compared with the great works of the real painters of essential human nature.

There is one class of Mr. Dickens’s pictures which may seem to form an exception to this criticism. It is the delineation of the outlaw, we might say the anti-law, world in _Oliver Twist_. In one or two instances Mr. Dickens has been so fortunate as to hit on characteristics which, by his system of idealisation and continual repetition, might really be brought to look like a character. A man’s trade or profession in regular life can only exhaust a very small portion of his nature; no approach is made to the essence of humanity by the exaggeration of the traits which typify a beadle or an undertaker. With the outlaw world it is somewhat different. The bare fact of a man belonging to that world is so important to his nature, that if it is artistically developed with coherent accessories, some approximation to a distinctly natural character will be almost inevitably made. In the characters of Bill Sykes and Nancy this is so. The former is the skulking ruffian who may be seen any day at the police-courts, and whom anyone may fancy he sees by walking through St. Giles’s. You cannot attempt to figure to your imagination the existence of such a person without being thrown into the region of the passions, the will, and the conscience; the mere fact of his maintaining, as a condition of life and by settled profession, a struggle with regular society necessarily brings these deep parts of his nature into prominence; great crime usually proceeds from abnormal impulses or strange effort. Accordingly, Mr. Sykes is the character most approaching to a coherent man who is to be found in Mr. Dickens’s works. We do not say that even here there is not some undue heightening admixture of caricature,—but this defect is scarcely thought of amid the general coherence of the picture, the painful subject, and the wonderful command of strange accessories. Miss Nancy is a still more delicate artistic effort. She is an idealisation of the girl who may also be seen at the police-courts and St. Giles’s; as bad, according to occupation and common character, as a woman can be, yet retaining a tinge of womanhood, and a certain compassion for interesting suffering, which under favouring circumstances might be the germ of a regenerating influence. We need not stay to prove how much the imaginative development of such a personage must concern itself with our deeper humanity; how strongly, if excellent, it must be contrasted with everything conventional or casual or superficial. Mr. Dickens’s delineation is in the highest degree excellent. It possesses not only the more obvious merits belonging to the subject, but also that of a singular delicacy of expression and idea. Nobody fancies for a moment that they are reading about anything beyond the pale of ordinary propriety. We read the account of the life which Miss Nancy leads with Bill Sykes without such an idea occurring to us: yet, when we reflect upon it, few things in literary painting are more wonderful than the depiction of a professional life of sin and sorrow, so as not even to startle those to whom the deeper forms of either are but names and shadows. Other writers would have given as vivid a picture: Defoe would have poured out even a more copious measure of telling circumstantiality, but he would have narrated his story with an inhuman distinctness, which if not impure is _un_pure; French writers, whom we need not name, would have enhanced the interest of their narrative by trading on the excitement of stimulating scenes. It would be injustice to Mr. Dickens to say that he has surmounted these temptations; the unconscious evidence of innumerable details proves that, from a certain delicacy of imagination and purity of spirit, he has not even experienced them. Criticism is the more bound to dwell at length on the merits of these delineations, because no artistic merit can make _Oliver Twist_ a pleasing work. The squalid detail of crime and misery oppresses us too much. If it is to be read at all, it should be read in the first hardness of the youthful imagination, which no touch can move too deeply, and which is never stirred with tremulous suffering at the ‘still sad music of humanity.’ The coldest critic in later life may never hope to have again the apathy of his boyhood.

It perhaps follows from what has been said of the characteristics of Mr. Dickens’s genius, that it would be little skilled in planning plots for his novels. He certainly is not so skilled. He says in his preface to the _Pickwick Papers_ ‘that they were designed for the introduction of diverting characters and incidents; that no ingenuity of plot was attempted, or even at that time considered feasible by the author in connection with the desultory plan of publication adopted;’ and he adds an expression of regret that ‘these chapters had not been strung together on a thread of more general interest.’ It is extremely fortunate that no such attempt was made. In the cases in which Mr. Dickens has attempted to make a long connected story, or to develop into scenes or incidents a plan in any degree elaborate, the result has been a complete failure. A certain consistency of genius seems necessary for the construction of a consecutive plot. An irregular mind naturally shows itself in incoherency of incident and aberration of character. The method in which Mr. Dickens’s mind works, if we are correct in our criticism upon it, tends naturally to these blemishes. Caricatures are necessarily isolated; they are produced by the exaggeration of certain conspicuous traits and features; each being is enlarged on its greatest side; and we laugh at the grotesque grouping and the startling contrast. But that connection between human beings on which a plot depends is rather severed than elucidated by the enhancement of their diversities. Interesting stories are founded on the intimate relations of men and women. These intimate relations are based not on their superficial traits, or common occupations, or most visible externalities, but on the inner life of heart and feeling. You simply divert attention from that secret life by enhancing the perceptible diversities of common human nature, and the strange anomalies into which it may be distorted. The original germ of _Pickwick_ was a ‘Club of Oddities.’ The idea was professedly abandoned; but traces of it are to be found in all Mr. Dickens’s books. It illustrates the professed grotesqueness of the characters as well as their slender connection.