Charles Dickens and other Victorians

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

II

So, between a discussion of Dickens’ plots—which we examined a fortnight ago and found wanting—at once stagey and ill-knit and, at that, repetitive, poor in invention; and of his characters, which teemed from his brain in a procession closed only by their author’s death, so inexhaustibly various and withal so individual, vivid and distinct, that the critic can scarcely help telling himself, “Here, and only here, must lie the secret of the man’s genius”; I shall interpose to-day a few words upon this world of Dickens, with its atmosphere.

For it is a strange world, with an atmosphere of its own, as strange as itself.

I have already noted some things of that world of his—that it was a crowded world: a world of the city, of the streets; that his novels, when they visit the country, take us at a violent rate in post-chaises to find, with Shenstone,

The warmest welcome at an inn.

For one moment, at the term of Little Nell’s wanderings, in the quiet of the old schoolmaster’s garden, we almost touch a sense of country rest and repose. But of real country, of solid growth in rest, of sport, of gardens, of farms and tenantry, of harvests, of generations rooted, corroborated in old grudges, old charities; of all that England stood for in Dickens’ day and, of its sap, fed what Cobbett had already called the “Great Wen” of London, our author had about as much sense as Mr. Winkle of a horse, or a snipe.

Now I wish to be rather particularly scrupulous just here: for we are dealing with a peculiarly, an unmistakably genuine, English writer; who, himself a child of the streets, acquainted, by eyesight and daily wont, with an industrial England into which the old agricultural England—what with railway and factory, gas, and everything extractible from coal—was rapidly converting itself; did yet by instinct seize on the ancient virtues. Take away the hospitality, the punch and mistletoe, from Dingley Dell, and what sort of a country house is left? Why, the Handley Cross series, for which Messrs. Chapman and Hall intended Pickwick as a stale challenge, could give Pickwick ten and a beating from the first. As the season comes round you play cricket at Dingley Dell, or you skate, or you mix the bowl and turn the toe. But the stubble-fields are not there, nor the partridges; nor the turnips, nor the gallops to hounds, nor the tillage and reaping, nor the drowsed evenings with tired dogs a-stretch by the hearth. Of all this side of England Dickens knew, of acquaintance, nothing. I am not speaking, you will understand, of any Wordsworthian intimacy with natural scenery tender or sublime, of anything imparted or suggested to the imagination by a primrose or in the “sounding cataract” haunting it “like a passion.” I am speaking rather of human life as lived in rural England in Dickens’ time and in some corners yet surviving the week-end habit. Of these Sabine virtues, of these Sabine amenities and hardships, of the countryman’s eye on the weather-glass for “snow and vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling His word,” Dickens (I repeat) had no sense, having no tradition, of field life, of that neighbourliness which existed in quiet places and persisted around ancient houses:

The summer air of this green hill

’Va-heaved in bosoms now all still,

And all their hopes and all their tears

Be unknown things of other years....

So, if ’twere mine, I’d let alone

The great old House of mossy stone.

Dickens loved the old stage-coaches and travel by them. What he thought of the new railways and their effect upon landscape, you may read in Dombey and Son. He lived, moreover, to undergo the chastening experience of a railway collision. But his actual sense of the country you may translate for yourself from the account, in Bleak House, of the country life of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock. It is worse than stupid: it is vapid: or, rather, it is not there at all. Will you conceive Dickens, closing one of those Adelphi-Dedlock chapters and running his head suddenly into Mr. Wilfrid Blunt’s ballad of The Old Squire?

I like the hunting of the hare

Better than that of the fox;

The new world still is all less fair

Than the old world it mocks....

I leave my neighbours to their thought;

My choice it is, and pride,

On my own lands to find my sport,

In my own fields to ride....

Nor has the world a better thing

Though one should search it round,

Than thus to live, one’s own sole king

Upon one’s own sole ground.

I like the hunting of the hare;

It brings me, day by day,

The memory of old days as fair

With dead men past away.

To these, as homeward still I ply

And pass the churchyard gate

Where all are laid as I must lie,

I stop and raise my hat.

I like the hunting of the hare;

New sports I hold in scorn.

I like to be as my fathers were

In the days e’er I was born.

For a figure like that—hopelessly conservative, if you will, but conceived of truth, Dickens could only substitute a week-ender (as we should say nowadays) and make him a pompous ass. By one touch or two, of understanding what “the stately homes of England” really stood for—their virtue along with their stupidity—by one touch of Jane Austen’s wit, shall we say?—Dickens might have made some sort of a fist of it. As it is, when he wanders anywhere into the country, he is a lost child, mooning incuriously along the hedgerows with an impercipience rivalling that of a famous Master of Trinity who once confessed that his ignorance of botany was conterminous with all Solomon’s knowledge, since it ranged from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows in the wall. Dickens’ favourite flower (we have it on record) was a scarlet geranium!

Still, I would be fair, and must mention a fact which I have experimentally discovered for myself and tested of late in the slow process of compiling a Book of English Prose (an “Oxford Book,” if you will forgive me), that, while our poetry from the very first—from “Sumer is icumen in; Lhude sing cuccu!”—positively riots in country scenes, sounds, scents, country delights:

—all foison, all abundance,

and soothes us with the deep joy of it, with music and “the herb called heart’s-ease,” of all such joy, even of all such perception, our prose, until we come to the middle of the last century, is correspondently barren. Consider what a unique thing, and unique for generations, was The Compleat Angler! Try of your memory to match it. An Essay of Temple’s? a few pages of Bunyan, of Evelyn? The Sir Roger de Coverly papers?—charming; but of the town, surely, and with something of Saturday-to-Monday patronage not only in pose but in raison d’être? Fielding understood the country better—witness his Squire Allworthy. But on the whole, and in fairness, if Dickens’ pages exhibit—and they do—a thin theatrical picture of rural England, without core or atmosphere, against his childhood’s disinheritance—against the mean streets and the Marshalsea—we must balance (if I may use a paradoxical term) the weight of traditional vacuity.