Joe.”
Later this was his great indictment of the Cubists also, well known to his friends in the Club.
The following letter is to the same correspondent written during the last year of his life and in much more satisfied mood on the subject of his hero.
Hastings, 1915.
“My Dear,——
It gave me delight to get your letter—the greater in that you talk to me of Dickens. I never tire of him nor of talking of him. But I was not unprepared for your enthusiasm. I remember only the last time we touched on the topic it was already brewing. I am struck above all by what you feel about the composer’s gift in him, that unconscious power of massing and moulding his material, the instructive adjustment of varying currents in the narrative, so that—as he traces the courses in which they run, we recognise in wonderment that they are confluent streams though often seeming for the time to flow so far asunder. Even the most modest of us are, I think, sometimes aware that there is a force outside ourselves which holds the reins of our fancy and that we must needs obey; but the exercise of that faculty in Dickens approaches the miraculous. At times it would almost seem as if he threw down the gauntlet to himself, directly challenging his own powers of artistic control by flinging at his own feet the unsifted harvest of the most prodigal invention with which man was ever endowed and defying the artist in him to reduce it to order and harmony.
And yet the artist invariably wins and by a victory so complete as to cheat us into the belief that every obstacle he subdues was an integral feature of the original design. Inexhaustible invention and unfailing control, these are the things that always seem to me to set Dickens on an eminence which he shares with no one in his own time and with only a few in our creative literature of any time. Shakespeare stands there—as he stands everywhere, no matter what the quality to be appraised or what the arena in which it finds exercise, above all rivalry; and Walter Scott most surely and securely too; and ... well, I don’t feel able to be certain about any others!...
I am not disposed to quarrel about Bleak House, I do not like it; but that story and Little Dorrit have always been my stumbling blocks.
On the other hand I heartily agree about Our Mutual Friend; I think it illustrates a giant’s way with Nature which becomes a fawning slave before the tyranny of genius.
Yours ever,