In another lecture I propose to show you (if I can) that Dickens’ characters belong to a world of his own, rather than to this one. But if he also created that world of his own, so much the grander creator he!—As if he made men and women walk and talk in it, compelling us to walk with them, and listen, and, above all, open our lungs and laugh, suffer within the tremendous illusion, so much is he the more potent magician! I also feel, in reading Shakespeare, or Dickens—I would add Burke—as I feel with no fourth that I am dealing with a scope of genius quite incalculable; that while it keeps me proud to belong to their race and nation and to inherit their speech, it equally keeps me diffident because, at any turn of the page may occur some plenary surprise altogether beyond my power or scope of guessing. With these three writers, as with no fourth, I have the sensation of a certain faintness of enjoyment, of surrender, to be borne along as on vast wings. Yet of Dickens, as of Shakespeare, the worst work can be incredibly bad. Sorrier stuff could scarcely be written, could scarcely conceivably have ever been written, than the whole part of Speed in The Two Gentlemen of Verona unless it be the first chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit. Yet in Martin Chuzzlewit you get Mrs. Gamp: and I ask you, How much the poorer should we not all be, lacking Mrs. Gamp?
I grant you that he has not yet passed—as he has not yet had time to pass—the great test of a classical writer; which is that, surviving the day’s popularity and its conditions, his work goes on meaning more, under quite different conditions, to succeeding ages; the great test which Shakespeare has passed more than once or twice, remaining to-day, though quite differently, even more significant than he was to his contemporaries. I grant—as in another lecture I shall be at pains to show—that Dickens’ plots were usually incredible, often monstrous. But he invented a world: he peopled it with men and women for our joy: and my confidence in the diuturnity of his fame rests even on more than this—on the experience that, test this genius by whatever standard a critic may, he has by and by to throw down his measure and admit that, while Dickens was always a learner, out of his prodigality he could have at any moment knocked the critic over by creating a new world with new and delectable lasting characters to take it in charge.
DICKENS (II)
I
I take up my parable for a few words more upon the point at which I broke off last week—the essential greatness of Dickens. For greatness is a quality in some few men: indefinable perhaps, but yet to be recognised; a certain thing and, by those of us who would traffic with life or literature, not to be overlooked or denied save at our soul’s peril, no matter what standard of artistry or of refined scholarship we may set up: a quality in itself, moreover, and not any addition or multiplication or raising of talent by industry. For an illustration of the peril: I was reading, the other day, a history of French Literature by the late M. Ferdinand Brunetière, and, coming to the time of Alexandre Dumas the elder, I found that the historian, disapproving of Dumas, has just left him out! Now that, I contend (saving M. Brunetière’s eminence), is to write oneself down a pedant, outside the catholic mind. Dumas lived a scandalous life, wrote much execrable French, and encouraged—even employed—some of his fellows to write worse. But the author of The Three Musketeers, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, La Reine Margot—Dumas, “the seven-and-seventy times to be forgiven,” is not to be treated so, by your leave: or only so, I repeat, at the critic’s peril. Or let me take an Englishman—John Dryden. I suspect I shall not misrepresent or misreport the attitude of many in this room towards Dryden when I say that we find a world of slovenly sorry stuff in his dramas, and in his poems a deal of wit and rhetoric which our later taste—such as it is, good or bad, true or false—refuses to pass for poetry at all. Now if I merely wanted to prove to you that Dryden at his best could write finely, exquisitely—that out of the strong could come forth sweetness—I could content myself with asking you to listen to these verses:
No, no, poor suffering heart, no change endeavour,
Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her;
My ravish’d eyes behold such charms about her,
I can die with her, but not live without her
One tender sigh of her, to see me languish,