There we have the confession of a Cockney-bred boy, more happily placed than was Dickens at the same age or for many years later. Lamb had his hardships, his tragedy or tragedies, in life: but in the childhood of Dickens, most sensitively resentful, penury and shameful occupation bit down to the bone. What other vision of beauty had he—a born actor, as all contemporaries report—but that which Drury Lane or Covent Garden supplied? Love, says a late Roman singer, was born in a field:
Ipse Amor, puer Dionae, rure natus dicitur—
Pleasure planteth a field; it conceives under Pleasure, the pang of its joy:
In a field was Dione in labour delivered of Cupid the boy:
And the field to her lap, to her fostering breast, took the rascal; he drew
Mother’s milk from the delicate kisses of flowers and he prospered and grew—
Now learn ye to love who loved never: now ye who have loved, love anew!
The bad early and mid-Victorian stage hurt more than one Victorian novelist of genius. It seriously hurt Charles Reade, for example, who habitually sought the advice of Egeria from a fourth-rate actress: and that should bring tears to the eyes of any critic who knows Reade’s strong country nurture and has sized his genius. But, with Dickens—think of that forlorn child, plotting to snatch his soul’s sustenance in the shilling gallery of Drury Lane—at intervals how rare! Is it any wonder that—to convert a famous phrase—coming to power, he invoked out of the theatre a new world, to redress the balance of his old?
IX
Moreover—and mind you this—you will never understand Charles Dickens until you realise how exquisitely, how indignantly the genius in this child of the blacking-warehouse felt the shame of its lot. Dickens was never a snob: but a prouder spirit never inhabited flesh. This shepherd boy was not one to sing in the Valley of Humiliation. For years after success came to him he kept his mouth closed like a steel trap upon past agonies. At length he confided something to Forster (Life, Volume 1, Chapter 2), and few sadder reflections have ever been implied by a grown man upon his parents: