IV
So there was provocation in plenty, humiliation inflicted on a young and infinitely sensitive mind. But, when we have granted that Dickens borrowed from his mother for Mrs. Nickleby, from his father for Mr. Micawber and the Elder Dorrit, mark you how genius diverges from the mere hint—how far Micawber differs from Dorrit, while both are elemental. Mark you further how and while both are sublimated and Mrs. Nickleby too—how much charity has to do with the chemical process. Who thinks of Mrs. Nickleby but as an amiable noodle? Who of Mr. Micawber, but to enjoy his company? Who of Mr. Dorrit but with a sad ironical pity? Where in any portrait of the three can you trace a stroke of that vindictiveness you find bitten upon page after page of The Way of All Flesh?
Moreover, choosing Old Dorrit, the least sympathetically but the most subtly drawn of the three, I would ask you, studying that character for yourselves, to note how Dickens conveys that, while much of its infirmity is native, much also comes of the punishment of the Marshalsea against which the poor creature’s pomposities are at once a narcotic, and a protest, however futile, of the dignity of a human soul, however abject. Mark especially, at the close of Chapter XXXV, how delicately he draws the shade of the Marshalsea over Little Dorrit herself. He would fain keep her, born and bred in that unwholesome den, its one uncontaminated “prison-flower”—but with all his charity he is (as I tried to show you in a previous lecture) a magisterial artist and the truth compels him. Mark then the workings of this child’s mind on hearing the glad news of her father’s release. Here is the passage:
Little Dorrit had been thinking too. After softly putting his [her father’s] hair aside, and touching his forehead with her lips, she looked towards Arthur, who came nearer to her, and pursued in a low whisper the subject of her thoughts.
“Mr. Clennam, will he pay all his debts before he leaves here?”
“No doubt. All.”
“All the debts for which he has been imprisoned here, all my life and longer?”
“No doubt.”
There was something of uncertainty and remonstrance in her look; something that was not all satisfaction. He wondered to detect it, and said:
“You are glad that he should do so?”
“Are you?” asked Little Dorrit wistfully.
“Am I? Most heartily glad!”
“Then I know I ought to be.”
“And are you not?”
“It seems to me hard,” said Little Dorrit, “that he should have lost so many years and suffered so much, and at last pay all the debts as well. It seems to me hard that he should pay in life and money both.”
“My dear child——” Clennam was beginning.
“Yes, I know I am wrong,” she pleaded timidly. “Don’t think any worse of me; it has all grown up with me here.”
The prison, which could spoil so many things, had tainted Little Dorrit’s mind no more than this. Engendered as the confusion was, in compassion for the poor prisoner, her father, it was the first speck Clennam had ever seen, it was the last speck Clennam ever saw, of the prison atmosphere upon her.
Now I call that, Gentlemen, the true novelist’s stroke; rightly divined, so suddenly noted that we, who had not expected it, consent at once with a “Yes, yes—of course it happened so.”