They rose at once by a couple of thousand: but a serial of course can never be easily lifted out of a rut into which it has once dropped. The reasons for this are obvious, and the serial sales of Chuzzlewit never over-topped twenty-three thousand. There was a very different story when Chuzzlewit came to book form. “Its sale, since,” writes Forster, “has ranked next after Pickwick and Copperfield.” In short, Dickens had been, quite conscientiously, in the opening chapters of Chuzzlewit, working against the grain of his genius. His public recalled him to it in the brutal way the public uses. When he sat down to write Chuzzlewit he had never an idea of carrying Martin off to America. Suddenly, in fear of falling sales and many challenges to make good his American Notes, he became the improvisatore again and switched his hero across the Atlantic. Who will deny that the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit are its best and, save for any given chapter upon which Sarah Gamp knocks in, its most memorable?
VI
None the less, and to the end, Dickens the artist is hag-ridden by this business of “plot,” which for him meant “stage-plot.” It hampers him in book after book, as its silly exigencies perpetually get in the way of the reader’s pleasure, even of the reader’s understanding. His genius did not lie that way, any more than did Shakespeare’s. I put in this comparison, for it can never be untimely for a Professor of English Literature to get in a word to damn the school-books which present Shakespeare to you as chasing along his shelves for some Italian novel to provide him with a new plot. Oh, believe me, Gentlemen—after The Comedy of Errors and that sort of thing, Shakespeare never bothered any more about his plots or whence he took them. It is very right indeed for a young author to sweat his soul over “plot” structure. But, through practice, there comes a time—suddenly, it may be, but as sure in his development as puberty in his physical growth—when lo! he has a hundred plots to his hand, if heaven would but grant him time to treat them. I often wonder why men blame the elder Dumas so severely, accepting the allegation that he employed hirelings—viciously termed by the critic his “ghosts” or his “devils.” Why, if you have an imagination teeming, like Dumas’, with stories to make men happier—why, knowing how short is life and that you cannot, on this side of the grave, tell one-fifth of these with your own pen—why go to that grave leaving the world, through that scruple, so much imaginatively the poorer? Only the thing should be done frankly, openly, of course.
VII
I just raise that question. It applies to Dumas and (I think) to most great novelists. But it applies less to Dickens than to most—than to Trollope for instance. And in this very inapplicability lies a secret of Dickens’ weakness which I am to suggest.
His plots are not merely stagey, melodramatic. Carefully examined, they are seen to repeat themselves, under a wealth of disguise, with an almost singular poverty of invention. Let us take one most favourite trick of his—the trick of “the masked battery” as I shall call it: the discomfiture of the villain by the betrayal of his supposed confederate. The characters are artfully assembled for the bad man’s triumph. Of a sudden the confederate rounds on him, gives him away before the audience—usually in a long story, at the end of which the baffled schemer creeps away, usually again to destroy himself. We get this coup as early as in Oliver Twist where Monks blurts out his story. It is repeated in Nickleby when Ralph Nickleby is confronted with the man “Snawley” and by Squeers. In the next novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, we get a double dose; Jonas “given away” by an accomplice; Pecksniff explosively denounced by Old Chuzzlewit after a long course of watchful dissimulation. This idea of a long and careful dissimulation so catches hold of Dickens that he goes on to rope into its service in subsequent stories two men who, on his own showing of them, are about the very last two in the world capable of carrying through a strategy so patient—Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield and Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend. As a portrait, Mr. Boffin ranks pretty high even in Dickens’ gallery, while Micawber ranks with the very best of his best. But who will assert that either of them could have found it in his nature to behave as the plot compels them to behave? To continue—by just the same trick Quilp gets his exposure in The Old Curiosity Shop, Harewood forces the revelation in Barnaby Rudge, Lady Dedlock is hunted down in Bleak House. The more the peripeteia—the reversal of fortune—disguises itself, the more it is the same thing.
VIII
George Santayana—he is so excellent a writer that I dispense with “Doctor” or “Professor” or other prefix to his name—tells us that:
Dickens entered the theatre of this world by the stage door; the shabby little adventures of the actors in their private capacity replace for him the mock tragedies which they enact before a dreaming public. Mediocrity of circumstance and mediocrity of soul for ever return to the centre of his stage; a more wretched or a grander existence is sometimes broached, but the pendulum swings back, and we return, with the relief with which we put on our slippers after the most romantic excursion, to a golden mediocrity—to mutton and beer, and to love and babies in a suburban villa with one frowsy maid.
Yes, that is true enough, but not all the truth. Dickens entered the theatre by the stage door; but he passed through to the front, to turn up the lights, wave his wand and create a new world—a fairy world, let us agree: a theatrical world, as I have been attempting to show. Yet consider—