VIII
Having that, you have artistic sincerity: of which I wonder, as experience enlarges, how many faults it cannot excuse—or indeed what is the fault it cannot excuse.
All that remains of the merely artistic secret has been summarised by Mr. Saintsbury:
It cannot have taken many people of any competence in criticism very long to discover where, at least in a general way, the secret of this “new world” of Dickens lies. It lies, of course, in the combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-tale unrealism of general atmosphere. The note of one or the other or both, is sometimes forced and then there is a jar: in the later books this is frequently the case. But in Pickwick it hardly ever occurs; and therefore, to all happily fit persons, the “suspension of disbelief,” to adopt and shift Coleridge’s great dictum from verse to prose fiction, is, except in the case of some of the short inset stories, never rudely broken. Never, probably, was there a writer who knew or cared less about Aristotle than Dickens did. If he had spoken of the father of criticism, he would probably have talked—one is not certain that he has not sometimes come near to talking—some of his worst stuff. But certainly, when he did master it (which was often) nobody ever mastered better than Dickens, in practice, the Aristotelian doctrine of the impossibility rendered probable or not improbable.
Well, there you have the artistic secret of Dickens’ world accurately given, and not by me. It lies in the combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-tale unrealism of general atmosphere.
Let me give you, to illustrate this, a single instance out of many. In his Christmas story, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners—an adventurous story of the sort that Stevenson loved and some of you make the mistake of despising—a handful of a British garrison with their women and children in a stockaded fort in South America tensely await an attack of pirates hopelessly outnumbering them. Now listen to one paragraph:
(It is a corporal of Marines who tells it.)
“Close up here, men, and gentlemen all!” said the sergeant. “A place too many in the line.”
The pirates were so close upon us at this time that the foremost of them were already before the gate. More and more came up with a great noise, and shouting loudly. When we believed from the sound that they were all there, we gave three English cheers. The poor little children joined, and were so fully convinced of our being at play, that they enjoyed the noise, and were heard clapping their hands in the silence that followed.
Defoe within his limits does that sort of thing to perfection: but then Defoe’s world observes the limits of the “real” (as we absurdly call everything that is not spiritual), has little emotion, scintillates scarce a glimmer of humour. Dickens handles it in a phantasmagoric world, charged even to excess with emotion, and is not in the least afraid to employ it—I quote Mr. Saintsbury again:
Of invading those confines of nonsense which Hazlitt proudly and wisely claimed as the appanage and province of every Englishman.
I need but to instance a writer whose acquaintance Hazlitt had not the joy to make, nor Lamb—woe upon these divisions of time!—Lewis Carroll, in whom both would have revelled for his insane logicality of detail—or, if you prefer it, I will fall back upon Lear’s Nonsense Books or even upon A Midsummer-Night’s Dream—to convince you that, as a nation, we have this appanage: and if it bewilder a foreigner, or he deride it, why then we will give him a look, and pass.