The withered chaplet is then perished the column is crumbled and the pyramid is standing upside down upon its what’s-his-name call it not giddiness call it not weakness call it not folly I must now retire into privacy and looking upon the ashes of departed joys no more but taking the further liberty of paying for the pastry which has formed the humble pretext for our interview, will for ever say Adieu!
Mr. F’s Aunt who had eaten her pie with great solemnity ... and who had been elaborating some grievous scheme of injury in her mind, took the present opportunity of addressing the following sibyllic apostrophe to the relict of her late nephew: “Bring him for’ard, and I’ll chuck him out o’ winder!”
III
Mr. Chesterton, selecting another fool from the gallery—Young Mr. Guppy, of Bleak House—observes very wisely, that we may disapprove of Mr. Guppy, but we recognise him as a creation flung down like a miracle out of an upper sphere: we can pull him to pieces, but we could not have put him together. And this (says he) is the pessimists’ disadvantage in criticising any creation. Even in their attacks on the Universe they are always under this depressing disadvantage.
“A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard the hippopotamus as an enormous mistake: but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such a mistake.”
Well, that is, of course, our difficulty in criticising all creative genius. We tell ourselves how we could have suggested to Shakespeare—or to Dickens—his doing this or that better than he did; but the mischief is, we could not have done it at all. And in this matter of Mr. Guppy, Mr. Chesterton continues: “Not one of us could have invented Mr. Guppy. But even if we could have stolen Mr. Guppy from Dickens, we have still to confront the fact that Dickens would have been able to invent another quite inconceivable character to take his place.”
IV
Here we get to it. I have instanced his fools only, and but a select two or three of these for a test: but you may take, if you will, shrewd men, miserly men, ruffians, doctors, proctors, prisoners, schoolmasters, coachmen, licensed victuallers, teetotallers, thieves, monthly nurses—whatever the choice be, Dickens will shake them out of his sleeve to populate a world for us. For, like Balzac, he has a world of his own and can at call dispense to us of its abundance.
What sort of a world is it out of which Dickens so enriches ours?
Well, to begin with, it is a crowded world, a world that in his imagination positively teems with folk going, coming, hurrying: of innumerable streets where you may knock in (and welcome) at any chance door to find the house in accumulated misery, poverty, woe, or else in a disorder of sausages and squalling children, with a henpecked husband at one end of the table, a bowl of punch in the middle, and at the other end a mortuary woman whose business in life is to make a burden of life to all who live near her and would have her cheerful. (There was never such a man as Dickens for depicting the blight induced by one ill-tempered person—usually a woman—upon a convivial gathering.) The henpecked husband dispensing the punch is, likely as not, a city clerk contriving a double debt to pay, a slave during office hours, bound to a usurious master: a sort of fairy—a Puck, a Mr. Wemmick, as soon as he sheds his office-coat and makes for somewhere in the uncertain gaslight of the suburbs, “following darkness like a dream.”