II
So I broke off, or almost, upon a saying of Tasso’s—you may find it repeated in Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries—that in this world none deserves the name of Creator save God himself and the Poet—by “Poet” meaning, of course, the great imaginative artist whether working in restricted verse or in “that other harmony of prose.”
And you may be thinking—I don’t doubt, a number will be thinking—that in a discourse on Dickens, I am putting the claim altogether too high. I can feel your minds working, I think—working to some such tune as this “Dickens and Virgil, now—Dickens and Dante—Oh, heaven alive!”
You cannot say that I have shirked it—can you?
Well now, fair and softly! If I had said “Dickens and Shakespeare,” it would have given you no such shock: and if I had said “Shakespeare and Dante,” or “Dickens and Molière,” it would have given you no shock at all. I am insisting, you understand, that the first test of greatness in an imaginative writer is his power to create: and I propose to begin with that which, if there should by any chance happen to be a fool in this apparently representative gathering, he will infallibly despise for the easiest thing in the world, the creation of a fool. I beg to reassure him and, so far as I can, restore his self-respect. It is about the hardest thing in the world, to create a fool and laugh at him. It is a human, nay, even a Godlike function (so and not by others shared) to laugh. Listen, before we go further, to these stanzas on divine laughter:
Nay, ’tis a Godlike function; laugh thy fill!
Mirth comes to thee unsought:
Mirth sweeps before it like a flood the mill
Of languaged logic: thought
Hath not its source so high;
The will
Must let it by:
For, though the heavens are still,
God sits upon His hill
And sees the shadows fly:
And if He laughs at fools, why should He not?
“Yet hath the fool a laugh”—Yea, of a sort;
God careth for the fools;
The chemic tools
Of laughter He hath given them, and some toys
Of sense, as ’twere a small retort
Wherein they may collect the joys
Of natural giggling, as becomes their state:
The fool is not inhuman, making sport
For such as would not gladly be without
That old familiar noise:
Since, though he laugh not, he can cachinnate—
This also is of God, we may not doubt.
Shakespeare, as we know, delighted in a fool, and revelled in creating one. (I need hardly say that I am not talking of the professionals, such as Touchstone or the Fool in Lear, who are astute critics rather, ridiculing the folly of their betters by reflexion by some odd facet of common sense, administering hellebore to minds diseased and so in their function often reminding us of the Chorus in Greek tragedy.) I mean, of course, the fool in his quiddity, such as Dogberry, or Mr. Justice Shallow, or Cousin Abraham Slender. Hearken to Dogberry:
Dog. Come hither, neighbour Seacole. God hath blessed you with a good name: to be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.
Sec. Watch. Both which, master Constable—
Dog. You have: I knew it would be your answer. Well, for your favour, sir, why, give God thanks, and make no boast of it; and for your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity.
Why, it might be an extract from the Geddes Report—or so much of it as deals with Education!
And now to Slender, bidden in by sweet Anne Page to her father’s dinner-table:
Anne. Will it please your worship to come in, sir?
Slender. No—I thank you, forsooth—heartily. I am very well.
Anne. The dinner attends you, sir.
Slender. I am not a-hungry, I thank you, forsooth....
Anne. I may not go in without your worship; they will not sit till you come.
Slender. I’faith, I’ll eat nothing: I thank you as much as though I did.
Anne. I pray you, sir, walk in.
Slender. I had rather walk here—I thank you. I bruised my shin th’ other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of fence—three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes—and, I with my ward defending my head, he shot my shin, and by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.... Why do your dogs bark so? Be there bears in town?
Anne. I think there are, sir. I heard them talked of.
Slender. I love the sport well, but I shall as soon quarrel at it as any man in England.... You are afraid, if you see a bear loose, are you not?
Anne. Ay, indeed, sir.
Slender. That’s meat and drink to me, now: I have seen Sackerson loose—twenty times, and have taken him by the chain.... But women, indeed, cannot abide ’em—they are very ill-favoured rough things.
“Othello,” as Hartley Coleridge noted, “could not brag more amorously”: and, as I wrote the other day in an introduction to The Merry Wives, when Anne finally persuades him to walk before her into the house, my fellow-editor and I had written (but afterwards in cowardice erased) the stage-direction, He goes in: she follows with her apron spread, as if driving a goose. Yes, truly, Slender is a goose to say grace over and to be carved “as a dish fit for the gods.” “A very potent piece of imbecility,” writes Hazlitt, and adds, “Shakespeare is the only writer who was as great in describing weakness as strength.”
Well, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens came after, to confirm Hazlitt’s observation. No one seeks in Jane Austen for examples of strength: and you will find none in Dickens to compare with Othello or Cleopatra or (say) with Mr. Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. But, like Charles Lamb, Jane Austen and Dickens both “loved a fool”: Jane Austen delicately, Dickens riotously: witness the one’s Miss Bates, the other’s Mr. Toots. But observe, pray: the fools they delight in are always—like Slender, like Miss Bates, like Mr. Toots—simple fools, sincere fools, good at heart, good to live with, and in their way, the salt of the earth. Miss Bates herself bears unconscious witness to this in one of her wisest foolishest remarks—“It is such a happiness when good people get together—and they always do.” (Consoling thought for you and me at this very moment.) With the fool who is also a humbug, a self-deceiver, Dickens could find no patience in his heart; and this impatience of his you may test again and again, always to find it—if I may say so with reverence—as elementary as our Lord’s. I am not speaking of conscious, malignant hypocrites—your Stiggins’s, Pecksniffs, Chadbands—on whom Dickens waged war, his life through; but of the self-deceiving fool whom we will agree with him in calling an “ass”—Uncle Pumblechook, for instance, in Great Expectations, Mr. Sapsea in Edwin Drood; on whom, or on whose kind, as he grew older, he seems (most of all in his last book, whenever handling Mr. Sapsea) to lose his artistic self-control, to savage them. But of kind fools, lovable fools, good fools, God’s fools, Dickens’ heaven will open any moment at call and rain you down half-a-dozen, all human, each distinct. You may count half-a-dozen in his most undeservedly misprised book, Little Dorrit, omitting Mr. F.’s Aunt: who is an eccentric, rather, though an unforgettable one and has left her unforgettable mark on the world in less than 200 words. She stands apart: for the others, apart from foolishness, share but one gift in common, a consanguinity (as it were) in flow of language or determination of words to the mouth. Shall we select the vulgar, breathless, good-natured widow, Flora Finching, ever recalling the past (without so much pause as a comma’s) to her disillusioned first lover?—
In times for ever fled Arthur pray excuse me Doyce and Clennam (the name of his firm) infinitely more correct and though unquestionably distant still ’tis distance lends enchantment to the view, at least I don’t mean that and if I did I suppose it would depend considerably on the nature of the view, but I’m running on again and you put it all out of my head.
She glanced at him tenderly and resumed:
In times for ever fled I was going to say it would have sounded strange indeed for Arthur Clennam—Doyce and Clennam naturally quite different—to make apologies for coming here at any time, but that is past and what is past can never be recalled except in his own case as poor Mr. F. said when in spirits Cucumber and therefore never ate it.... Papa is sitting prosingly, breaking his new laid egg over the City article, exactly like the Woodpecker Tapping, and need never know that you are here....
The withered chaplet is then perished the column is crumbled and the pyramid is standing upside down upon its what’s-his-name call it not giddiness call it not weakness call it not folly I must now retire into privacy and looking upon the ashes of departed joys no more but taking the further liberty of paying for the pastry which has formed the humble pretext for our interview, will for ever say Adieu!
Mr. F’s Aunt who had eaten her pie with great solemnity ... and who had been elaborating some grievous scheme of injury in her mind, took the present opportunity of addressing the following sibyllic apostrophe to the relict of her late nephew: “Bring him for’ard, and I’ll chuck him out o’ winder!”