Letters To Dead Authors LETTER--To Charles Dickens byLang, Andrew
Sir,--It has been said that every man is born a Platonist or an
Aristotelian, though the enormous majority of us, to be sure, live
and die without being conscious of any invidious philosophic
partiality whatever. With more truth (though that does not imply
very much) every Englishman who reads may be said to be a partisan
of yourself or of Mr. Thackeray. Why should there be any
partisanship in the matter; and why, having two such good things as
your novels and those of your contemporary, should we not be
silently happy in the possession? Well, men are made so, and must
needs fight and argue over their tastes in enjoyment. For myself, I
may say that in this matter I am what the Americans do NOT call a
"Mugwump," what English politicians dub a "superior person"--that
is, I take no side, and attempt to enjoy the best of both.
It must be owned that this attitude is sometimes made a little
difficult by the vigour of your special devotees. They have ceased,
indeed, thank Heaven! to imitate you; and even in "descriptive
articles" the touch of Mr. Gigadibs, of him whom "we almost took for
the true Dickens," has disappeared. The young lions of the Press no
longer mimic your less admirable mannerisms--do not strain so much
after fantastic comparisons, do not (in your manner and Mr.
Carlyle's) give people nick-names derived from their teeth, or their
complexion; and, generally, we are spared second-hand copies of all
that in your style was least to be commended. But, though improved
by lapse of time in this respect, your devotees still put on little
conscious airs of virtue, robust manliness, and so forth, which
would have irritated you very much, and there survive some press men
who seem to have read you a little (especially your later works),
and never to have read anything else. Now familiarity with the
pages of "Our Mutual Friend" and "Dombey and Son" does not precisely
constitute a liberal education, and the assumption that it does is
apt (quite unreasonably) to prejudice people against the greatest
comic genius of modern times.
On the other hand, Time is at last beginning to sift the true
admirers of Dickens from the false. Yours, Sir, in the best sense
of the word, is a popular success, a popular reputation. For
example, I know that, in a remote and even Pictish part of this
kingdom, a rural household, humble and under the shadow of a sorrow
inevitably approaching, has found in "David Copperfield" oblivion of
winter, of sorrow, and of sickness. On the other hand, people are
now picking up heart to say that "they cannot read Dickens," and
that they particularly detest "Pickwick." I believe it was young
ladies who first had the courage of their convictions in this
respect. "Tout sied aux belles," and the fair, in the confidence of
youth, often venture on remarkable confessions. In your "Natural
History of Young Ladies" I do not remember that you describe the
Humorous Young Lady. {1} She is a very rare bird indeed, and humour
generally is at a deplorably low level in England.
Hence come all sorts of mischief, arisen since you left us; and it
may be said that inordinate philanthropy, genteel sympathy with
Irish murder and arson, Societies for Badgering the Poor, Esoteric
Buddhism, and a score of other plagues, including what was once
called AEstheticism, are all, primarily, due to want of humour.
People discuss, with the gravest faces, matters which properly
should only be stated as the wildest paradoxes. It naturally
follows that, in a period almost destitute of humour, many
respectable persons "cannot read Dickens," and are not ashamed to
glory in their shame. We ought not to be angry with others for
their misfortunes; and yet when one meets the cretins who boast that
they cannot read Dickens, one certainly does feel much as Mr. Samuel
Weller felt when he encountered Mr. Job Trotter.
How very singular has been the history of the decline of humour! Is
there any profound psychological truth to be gathered from
consideration of the fact that humour has gone out with cruelty? A
hundred years ago, eighty years ago--nay, fifty years ago--we were a
cruel but also a humorous people. We had bull-baitings, and badger-
drawings, and hustings, and prize-fights, and cock-fights; we went
to see men hanged; the pillory and the stocks were no empty "terrors
unto evil-doers," for there was commonly a malefactor occupying each
of these institutions. With all this we had a broad-blown comic
sense. We had Hogarth, and Bunbury, and George Cruikshank, and
Gilray; we had Leech and Surtees, and the creator of Tittlebat
Titmouse; we had the Shepherd of the "Noctes," and, above all, we
had YOU.
From the old giants of English fun--burly persons delighting in
broad caricature, in decided colours, in cockney jokes, in swashing
blows at the more prominent and obvious human follies--from these
you derived the splendid high spirits and unhesitating mirth of your
earlier works. Mr. Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp, and all
the Pickwickians, and Mr. Dowler, and John Browdie--these and their
immortal companions were reared, so to speak, on the beef and beer
of that naughty, fox-hunting, badger-baiting old England, which we
have improved out of existence. And these characters, assuredly,
are your best; by them, though stupid people cannot read about them,
you will live while there is a laugh left among us. Perhaps that
does not assure you a very prolonged existence, but only the future
can show.
The dismal seriousness of the time cannot, let us hope, last for
ever and a day. Honest old Laughter, the true LUTIN of your
inspiration, must have life left in him yet, and cannot die; though
it is true that the taste for your pathos, and your melodrama, and
plots constructed after your favourite fashion ("Great Expectations"
and the "Tale of Two Cities" are exceptions) may go by and never be
regretted. Were people simpler, or only less clear-sighted, as far
as your pathos is concerned, a generation ago? Jeffrey, the hard-
headed shallow critic, who declared that Wordsworth "would never
do," cried, "wept like anything," over your Little Nell. One still
laughs as heartily as ever with Dick Swiveller; but who can cry over
Little Nell?
Ah, Sir, how could you--who knew so intimately, who remembered so
strangely well the fancies, the dreams, the sufferings of childhood-
-how could you "wallow naked in the pathetic," and massacre
holocausts of the Innocents? To draw tears by gloating over a
child's death-bed, was it worthy of you? Was it the kind of work
over which our hearts should melt? I confess that Little Nell might
die a dozen times, and be welcomed by whole legions of Angels, and I
(like the bereaved fowl mentioned by Pet Marjory) would remain
unmoved.
She was more than usual calm,
She did not give a single dam,
wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott. Over
your Little Nell and your Little Dombey I remain more than usual
calm; and probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers.
But about matter of this kind, and the unseating of the fountains of
tears, who can argue? Where is taste? where is truth? What tears
are "manly, Sir, manly," as Fred Bayham has it; and of what
lamentations ought we rather to be ashamed? Sunt lacrymae rerum;
one has been moved in the cell where Socrates tasted the hemlock; or
by the river-banks where Syracusan arrows slew the parched Athenians
among the mire and blood; or, in fiction, when Colonel Newcome says
Adsum, or over the diary of Clare Doria Forey, or where Aramis
laments, with strange tears, the death of Porthos. But over Dombey
(the Son), or Little Nell, one declines to snivel.
When an author deliberately sits down and says, "Now, let us have a
good cry," he poisons the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least
in many breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of "Dombey and Son"
there is little we care to remember except the deathless Mr. Toots;
just as we forget the melodramatics of "Martin Chuzzlewit." I have
read in that book a score of times; I never see it but I revel in
it--in Pecksniff, and Mrs. Gamp, and the Americans. But what the
plot is all about, what Jonas did, what Montagu Tigg had to make in
the matter, what all the pictures with plenty of shading illustrate,
I have never been able to comprehend. In the same way, one of your
most thorough-going admirers has allowed (in the licence of private
conversation) that "Ralph Nickleby and Monk are too steep;" and
probably a cultivated taste will always find them a little
precipitous.
"Too steep:"--the slang expresses that defect of an ardent genius,
carried above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its
grotesque and in its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to
press fantasy too hard, to deepen the gloom with black over the
indigo, that was the failing which proved you mortal. To take an
instance in little: when Pip went to Mr. Pumblechook's, the boy
thought the seedsman "a very happy man to have so many little
drawers in his shop." The reflection is thoroughly boyish; but then
you add, "I wondered whether the flower-seeds and bulbs ever wanted
of a fine day to break out of those jails and bloom." That is not
boyish at all; that is the hard-driven, jaded literary fancy at
work.
"So we arraign her; but she," the Genius of Charles Dickens, how
brilliant, how kindly, how beneficent she is! dwelling by a fountain
of laughter imperishable; though there is something of an alien salt
in the neighbouring fountain of tears. How poor the world of fancy
would be, how "dispeopled of her dreams," if, in some ruin of the
social system, the books of Dickens were lost; and if The Dodger,
and Charley Bates, and Mr. Crinkle, and Miss Squeers and Sam Weller,
and Mrs. Gamp, and Dick Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish with
Menander's men and women! We cannot think of our world without
them; and, children of dreams as they are, they seem more essential
than great statesmen, artists, soldiers, who have actually worn
flesh and blood, ribbons and orders, gowns and uniforms. May we not
almost welcome "Free Education"? for every Englishman who can read,
unless he be an Ass, is a reader the more for you.
P.S.--Alas, how strangely are we tempered, and how strong is the
national bias! I have been saying things of you that I would not
hear an enemy say. When I read, in the criticism of an American
novelist, about your "hysterical emotionality" (for he writes in
American), and your "waste of verbiage," I am almost tempted to deny
that our Dickens has a single fault, to deem you impeccable!
{1} I am informed that the Natural History of Young Ladies is
attributed, by some writers, to another philosopher, the author of
The Art of Pluck.
