A bringer of new things.
IV
Now if you accept no more than a much lower estimate of Dickens than I am preaching, you will be apt to dismiss what I have just been saying as “tall talk”: and you will be quite mistaken, because it applies from Shakespeare down to men of infinitesimally less desert than Dickens; to every small artist, in fact, whose conscience will not cease harrying him until he improves on his best: a process which obviously—and, as a matter of history, with the great authors—never stops until they come to the grave.
At which point my now notorious discursiveness, Gentlemen, also stops and gets back to Dickens. You see, the trouble of the matter is that in these experiments an author can never be sure. He takes an infinite risk, it may be against his own true genius. Where is the critic to correct him?
V
Well, with Dickens, his own adoring public corrected him sharply and, on the whole, with true instinct. To them he was the wand-waving magician, the improvisatore in excelsis who had caught up out of their midst an elderly small gentleman in spectacles and gaiters and shot him suddenly out of Goswell Street into the firmament, to be a star equal with Hercules—
sic fratres Helenae, lucida sidera—
“instead of which” he had turned to making plots so patently theatrical (and of the theatre of Crummles) that the man himself was helping everybody to see through them. So came the revenge; over-proved by the opening chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit, which I suppose to be about the sorriest piece of writing ever perpetrated by a great English writer. Its perusal induces on me at any rate, something like physical misery, not unmixed with the sort of shame any one of us might feel if a parent behaved unbecomingly in public. I want to obey the exhortation on Mrs. Sapsea’s monument and “with a blush retire.”
But, note you, the general reader—that entity often abused, seldom quite the fool that he looks—was quick to mark and punish. Listen to Forster:
Chuzzlewit had fallen short of all the expectations formed of it in regard to sale. By much the most masterly of his writings hitherto, the public had rallied to it in far less numbers than to any of its predecessors.... The primary cause of this, there is little doubt, had been the change to weekly issues in the form of publication of his last two stories.... The forty and fifty thousand purchasers of Pickwick and Nickleby, the sixty and seventy thousand of the early numbers of the enterprises in which The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge appeared had fallen to little over twenty thousand. They rose, somewhat on Martin’s ominous announcement, at the end of the fourth number, that he’d go to America....