Charles Dickens and other Victorians

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

But this admirable plot, with all the Bardell versus Pickwick business, and the second most excellent “reversal of fortune” when Mrs. Bardell, the prosecutrix, herself gets cast into prison by Dodson and Fogg whose tool she has been, and there, confronted by her victim and theirs, finds herself (O wonder!) pardoned—with the simple, sudden, surprising, yet most natural and (when you come to think of it) most Christian story of Sam Weller’s loyalty and Mr. Weller’s aiding and abetting, so absurdly and withal so delicately done—all this grew, as everyone knows, with the story’s growth and grew out of fierce, rapid, improvisation. You can almost see the crucible with the fire under it, taking heat, reddening, exhaling fumes of milk-punch; and then, with Sam Weller and Jingle cast into it for ingredients, boiling up and precipitating the story, to be served

as a dish

Fit for the gods

—“served,” not “carved.” You cannot carve the dish of your true improvisatore. You cannot articulate a story of Dickens—or, if you can, “the less Dickens he”: you may be sure it is one of his worst. A Tale of Two Cities has a deft plot: well-knit but stagey: and, I would add, stagey because well-knit, since (as we shall presently see) Dickens, cast back upon plot, ever conceived it in terms of the stage; of the stage, moreover, at its worst—of the early-Victorian stage, before even a Robertson had preluded better things. So, when I talk to any man of Dickens, and he ups with his first polite concession that A Tale of Two Cities is a fine story, anyhow, I know that man’s case to be difficult, for that he admires what is least admirable in Dickens. Why, Gentlemen, you or I could with some pains construct as good a plot as that of A Tale of Two Cities; as you or I could with some pains construct a neater plot than Shakespeare invented for The Merry Wives of Windsor or even hand out some useful improvements on the plot of King Lear. The trouble with us is that we cannot write a Merry Wives, a Lear; cannot touch that it which, achieved, sets the Merry Wives and Lear, in their degrees, above imperfection, indifferent to imperfections detectable even by a fool. Greatness is indefinable, whether in an author or a man of affairs: but had I to attempt the impossibility, no small part of my definition would set up its rest on indifference—on a grand carelessness of your past mistakes, involving a complete unconcern for those who follow them, to batten on the bone you have thrown over your shoulder.

II

Dickens was a great novelist—as I should contend, the greatest of English novelists—and certainly among the greatest of all the greatest European novelists. His failing was that he did not quite trust his genius for the novel, but was persuaded that it could be bettered by learning from the drama—from the bad drama of his time. But I want you to see, Gentlemen, how honourable was the artist’s endeavour; how creditable, if mistaken, to the man. He was a born improvisatore. Pickwick, under your eyes, takes a shape—conceives it, finds it—as the story goes on. Then shape he must struggle for; the idea of “shape” has, against his genius, taken hold on him. So Pickwick is not finished before he begins a new story, never thinking to repeat, by similar methods, Pickwick’s overwhelming success. No, the responsibility of that success weighs on him; but it is a responsibility to improve. The weakness of Pickwick, undertaken as a series of mock-sporting episodes, lies in its desultoriness. This time we will have a well-knit plot. And so we get Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, each with any amount of plot, but of plot in the last degree stagey; so stagey, indeed, that in Nickleby the critic gasps at the complacency of an author who, having created that “nurseling of immortality” Mr. Vincent Crummles, together with a world and the atmosphere of that world in which Crummles breathes and moves and has his being, can work the strings of the puppet with so fine a finger, detect its absurdities with so sure an instinct and reveal them with so riotous a joy; yet misses to see that he himself is committing absurdities just as preposterous, enormities of the very same category, on page after page. The story of Lord Frederick Verisopht and Sir Mulberry Hawke, for example, is right Crummles from beginning to end. Crummles could have composed it in his sleep,—and to say this, mind you, is to convey in the very censure an implicit compliment—or, shall I use a more modest word and say implicit homage? Crummles could have written a great part of Nickleby: but Crummles could only have written it after Dickens had made him. I seem to hear the two arguing it out in some Dialogue of the Dead.

Auctor. “My dear Crummles, however did you contrive to be what you are?”

Crummles. “Why, don’t you see, Mr. Dickens? You created me in your image.” (sotto voce) “And, he doesn’t know it, poor great fellow, but it seems to me I’ve been pretty smart in returning the compliment.”

III

I have said, in a previous lecture, that Dickens, from first to last, strove to make himself a better artist; quoting to you a sentence of Henley’s, which I repeat here because you have almost certainly forgotten it: