VIII
George Santayana—he is so excellent a writer that I dispense with “Doctor” or “Professor” or other prefix to his name—tells us that:
Dickens entered the theatre of this world by the stage door; the shabby little adventures of the actors in their private capacity replace for him the mock tragedies which they enact before a dreaming public. Mediocrity of circumstance and mediocrity of soul for ever return to the centre of his stage; a more wretched or a grander existence is sometimes broached, but the pendulum swings back, and we return, with the relief with which we put on our slippers after the most romantic excursion, to a golden mediocrity—to mutton and beer, and to love and babies in a suburban villa with one frowsy maid.
Yes, that is true enough, but not all the truth. Dickens entered the theatre by the stage door; but he passed through to the front, to turn up the lights, wave his wand and create a new world—a fairy world, let us agree: a theatrical world, as I have been attempting to show. Yet consider—
Most of us in this room have childish recollections of green fields, running brooks, woods in leaf, birds’ nests, cattle at pasture, all that pageant of early summer which is going on at this moment a few furlongs from this desk—this dead piece of timber—and at the thought of which (if you will not think me impolite) I long to be somewhere else at this moment. With some of us elders, not specially imaginative, the early habit persists even after long servitude to city life: so that still by habit our first instinct on rising from bed is to go to the window and con the weather—how the day is making, from what quarter the wind sets—“Is it too strong for the fruit blossom?” “Will it be a good day for the trout?” Again, of my experience I appeal to some of you—to those who, aware in childhood or boyhood (quite suddenly, it may be, made aware) of the beauty underlying this world (yes, and clothing it too), have been as suddenly afflicted with the hopeless yearning to express it, was not that yearning awakened, quickened in you, you knew not how, by some casual sight—an open glade between woods, a ship with all canvas spread, or, through the hazels,
the nesting throstle’s shining eye,
or the fish darting in the deep of a pool? Was it not some similar moment that, though you have never yet arrived at putting it and its underthought into words, yet so touched you that for the rest of your days you will understand what was in Coleridge’s heart when he wrote:
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gush’d from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware.
Yes, and I dare say your first visit to the theatre brought you a like delicious shock. (I can recall to this day, very distinctly, the gods and goddesses who, between the acts of my first pantomime, danced on the blue ceiling with baskets and festoons of roses.)
But now, bethink you that Dickens struggled through a childhood to which green fields, trees, birds, cattle, brooks and pools, were all denied: that the child was condemned to a squalid lodging; to spend his days washing bottles in a dreadful blacking factory, his hours “off” in visiting his parents in the yet more dreadful Marshalsea prison to which his father had been committed for debt: and you will understand not only that he had to enter the theatre of this world by the stage door, but that the lighted theatre, when he could pay a few pence and get to the gallery, was his one temple of beauty: that only there—if we except a hint or two picked up in the street—from a shabby acrobat or a stray Punch and Judy show—could he drink the romance for which his young spirit thirsted. You have all read, I doubt not, Charles Lamb’s paper on “My First Play,” first contributed to the London Magazine in December, 1821, afterwards reprinted in Elia:
But when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain that veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed—the breathless anticipations I endured! I had seen something like it in the plate prefixed to Troilus and Cressida in Rowe’s Shakespeare—the tent scene with Diomede—and a sight of that plate can always bring back in a measure the feeling of that evening—The boxes at that time, full of well-dressed women of quality, projected over the pit; and the pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling—a homely fancy—but I judged it to be sugar-candy—yet, to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy!—The orchestra lights at length arose, those ‘fair Auroras’! Once the bell sounded. It was to ring out yet once again—and, incapable of anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in a sort of resignation upon the maternal lap. It rang the second time. The curtain drew up—I was not past six years old—and the play was Artaxerxes!
There we have the confession of a Cockney-bred boy, more happily placed than was Dickens at the same age or for many years later. Lamb had his hardships, his tragedy or tragedies, in life: but in the childhood of Dickens, most sensitively resentful, penury and shameful occupation bit down to the bone. What other vision of beauty had he—a born actor, as all contemporaries report—but that which Drury Lane or Covent Garden supplied? Love, says a late Roman singer, was born in a field:
Ipse Amor, puer Dionae, rure natus dicitur—
Pleasure planteth a field; it conceives under Pleasure, the pang of its joy:
In a field was Dione in labour delivered of Cupid the boy:
And the field to her lap, to her fostering breast, took the rascal; he drew
Mother’s milk from the delicate kisses of flowers and he prospered and grew—
Now learn ye to love who loved never: now ye who have loved, love anew!
The bad early and mid-Victorian stage hurt more than one Victorian novelist of genius. It seriously hurt Charles Reade, for example, who habitually sought the advice of Egeria from a fourth-rate actress: and that should bring tears to the eyes of any critic who knows Reade’s strong country nurture and has sized his genius. But, with Dickens—think of that forlorn child, plotting to snatch his soul’s sustenance in the shilling gallery of Drury Lane—at intervals how rare! Is it any wonder that—to convert a famous phrase—coming to power, he invoked out of the theatre a new world, to redress the balance of his old?