VI
But now let us see what a light this conscious popularity throws upon two important events in Dickens’ career: his visit to the United States in 1842, and his invention, the next year, of the “Christmas Book.”
Dickens went over to America as a great personage: securely, but neither immodestly nor overweeningly conscious of it. He went over also as a great and genuine early-Victorian radical; something better than any politician; an unbribed and unbribable writer, immensely potent, with a pen already dedicated to war against social abuses. He landed at Boston, fully expecting to see Liberty in realisation under the star-spangled banner. He found Colonel Diver and Mr. Jefferson Brick, Mr. La Fayette Kettle and the Honourable Elijah Pogram. He found, of course, a fervent and generous hospitality that sprang, in Forster’s words, “from feelings honourable both to giver and receiver,” and was bestowed sincerely, if with a touch of bravado and challenge—“We of the New World want to show you, by extending the kind of homage that the Old World reserves for kings and conquerors, to a young man with nothing to distinguish him but his heart and his genius, what it is we think in these parts worthier of honour than birth or wealth, a title or a sword.” These are Forster’s words again, and they do well enough. The hospitality included no doubt a good deal of the ridiculous: food for innocent caricature of the kind provided in the great Pogram levee where the two Literary Ladies are presented to the Honourable Elijah by the Mother of the Modern Gracchi.
“To be presented to a Pogram,” said Miss Codger, “by a Hominy, indeed a thrilling moment is it in its impressiveness on what we call our feelings. But why we call them so, and why impressed they are, or if impressed they are at all, or if at all we are, or if there really is, oh gasping one! a Pogram or a Hominy, or any active principle to which we give those titles is a topic, Spirit searching, light-abandoned, much too vast to enter on, at this unlooked-for Crisis.” “Mind and Matter,” said the lady in the wig, “glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination. To hear it, sweet it is. But then outlaughs the stern philosopher, and saith to the Grotesque, ‘What ho! arrest for me that agency! Go bring it here! And so the vision fadeth.’”
I will not take oath that I have not heard faint echoes of that sort of talk at literary gatherings within a mile or so of this very spot. But if it be not to some extent endemic in America even to-day, then all I can say is that certain American authors (Mrs. Edith Wharton for one) have misrepresented it far more cruelly than ever did Charles Dickens, or certainly than I, with no knowledge at all, have any wish to do.
But what brought Dickens up with a round turn was his discovery (as he believed) that in this land of freedom no man was free to speak his thought.
“I believe,” he wrote to Forster on Feb. 24th, “there is no country on the face of the earth where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference of opinion than in this.... There!—I write the words with reluctance, disappointment and sorrow: but I believe it from the bottom of my soul.”
He did believe it, and it shocked him inexpressibly. “Very well,” it may be answered; “but there were obligations. A man should not publicly criticise a country in which he is an honoured guest.” Yes, but he had gone out to the States with intent to discuss the question of copyright, or rather of literary piracy, in which American law and practice were so flagrantly immoral that he had never a doubt of getting both rectified by a little heart-to-heart talk (as we call it now) with some of their public men and lawgivers. Dickens was always a good man of business. As the most widely-read of British authors, and therefore the chief of sufferers, he could speak authoritatively on behalf of his poorer brethren. He went, and received on a grand scale that shock which on a far modester scale many of us have experienced in our time, with the sort of embarrassment one feels (let us say) in sitting down to Bridge with a very delightful person whose code in the matter of revoking is rather notoriously “off colour.” Let me illustrate this by the remark of a just man at Washington in the debate preceding the latest copyright enactment. A member of Congress had pleaded for the children of the backwoods—these potential Abraham Lincolns devouring education by the light of pine-knot fires—how desirable that these little Sons of Liberty should be able to purchase their books (as he put it) “free of authorial expenses!” “Hear, hear!” retorted my just man. “And the negroes of the South too—so fond of chicken free of farmer-ial expenses!”—A great saying!
And yet Dickens was wrong: in my opinion wrong as an English Gentleman, being America’s Guest. On the balance I hold that he should have thought what he thought and, thinking it, have shortened his visit and come silently away.
Well, Dickens discussed the matter with Washington Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant, Dana and others, and found that while every writer in America was agreed upon the atrocious state of the law, not a man of them dared to speak out. The suggestion that an American could be found with temerity enough to hint that his country was possibly wrong struck the boldest dumb. “Then,” said Dickens, “I shall speak out”: and he did. “I wish you could have seen,” he writes home, “the faces that I saw, down both sides of the table at Hartford, when I began to talk about Scott.” [Remember, please, this is my interjection, Gentlemen, that, on a small portion of his dues, on a 10 per cent. (say) of his plundered sales, the great Sir Walter Scott would have died in calm of mind and just prosperity.] “I wish you could have heard how I gave it out. My blood so boiled as I thought of the monstrous injustice that I felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their throats.”
The violence of the reaction upon Dickens you can of course study in American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit. But the real import of these two books and the violence of resentment they raised, we shall not understand without realising that Dickens went over, was feasted: was disappointed, then outraged, and spoke his mind, from first to last as a representative of the democracy of this country, always conscious of a great, if undefined, responsibility and, under disappointment, resolute to be brave, at whatever cost of favour.