For it is a strange world, with an atmosphere of its own, as strange as itself.
I have already noted some things of that world of his—that it was a crowded world: a world of the city, of the streets; that his novels, when they visit the country, take us at a violent rate in post-chaises to find, with Shenstone,
The warmest welcome at an inn.
For one moment, at the term of Little Nell’s wanderings, in the quiet of the old schoolmaster’s garden, we almost touch a sense of country rest and repose. But of real country, of solid growth in rest, of sport, of gardens, of farms and tenantry, of harvests, of generations rooted, corroborated in old grudges, old charities; of all that England stood for in Dickens’ day and, of its sap, fed what Cobbett had already called the “Great Wen” of London, our author had about as much sense as Mr. Winkle of a horse, or a snipe.
Now I wish to be rather particularly scrupulous just here: for we are dealing with a peculiarly, an unmistakably genuine, English writer; who, himself a child of the streets, acquainted, by eyesight and daily wont, with an industrial England into which the old agricultural England—what with railway and factory, gas, and everything extractible from coal—was rapidly converting itself; did yet by instinct seize on the ancient virtues. Take away the hospitality, the punch and mistletoe, from Dingley Dell, and what sort of a country house is left? Why, the Handley Cross series, for which Messrs. Chapman and Hall intended Pickwick as a stale challenge, could give Pickwick ten and a beating from the first. As the season comes round you play cricket at Dingley Dell, or you skate, or you mix the bowl and turn the toe. But the stubble-fields are not there, nor the partridges; nor the turnips, nor the gallops to hounds, nor the tillage and reaping, nor the drowsed evenings with tired dogs a-stretch by the hearth. Of all this side of England Dickens knew, of acquaintance, nothing. I am not speaking, you will understand, of any Wordsworthian intimacy with natural scenery tender or sublime, of anything imparted or suggested to the imagination by a primrose or in the “sounding cataract” haunting it “like a passion.” I am speaking rather of human life as lived in rural England in Dickens’ time and in some corners yet surviving the week-end habit. Of these Sabine virtues, of these Sabine amenities and hardships, of the countryman’s eye on the weather-glass for “snow and vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling His word,” Dickens (I repeat) had no sense, having no tradition, of field life, of that neighbourliness which existed in quiet places and persisted around ancient houses:
The summer air of this green hill
’Va-heaved in bosoms now all still,
And all their hopes and all their tears
Be unknown things of other years....
So, if ’twere mine, I’d let alone