But let us discriminate. In “drawing from life” much will depend, as Aristotle might say, on (a) the extent, (b) the manner, (c) your intention: as likewise upon (d) the person drawn. I exclude all such portraits as are likely to provoke an action at law; for these come to be assessed under separate rules of criticism: and in general we may say of them that they should be avoided from the instinct of self-preservation rather than on grounds of disinterested aesthetic.
Confining ourselves, then, to portraits which are not actionable, we may take, as an extreme instance, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. For in this book the persons portrayed are the author’s own parents, and he portrays them in a manner and with intention to make them odious, and to any extent: which seems to involve the nice moral question whether a person the best able to do a thing should not sometimes be the person who least ought to do it. And should the injunction against laying hands on your father Parmenides cover Parmenides if he happen to be your maiden aunt?—and maybe, too, she can retort, because you come of a literary family, you know! This power of retort, again, complicates a question which, you perceive, begins to be delicate. Ought you to catch anyone and hit him where he cannot hit back? Parmenides is no longer a relative but (say) a publisher, and you have—or think you have—reason to believe that he has cheated you. (And before you answer that this is incredible, let me say that I am dealing with an actual case, in which, however, I was not a party.) Are you justified in writing a work of fiction which holds him up to public opprobrium under a thin disguise? In my opinion you are not: because it means your attacking the fellow from a plane on which he can get no footing, to retaliate.
But it may be urged against him that Dickens by consent, and pretty well on his own admission, drew portraits of his mother in Mrs. Nickleby, and of his father in Mr. Micawber, and again in old Mr. Dorrit of the Marshalsea—this last, I am sure, the nearest to life. Well, I pass the question of provocation or moral excuse, observing only that Dickens tholed a childhood of culpable, even of damnable, neglect, whereas the parents of Samuel Butler did at least wing, with a Shrewsbury and Cambridge education, the barbs he was to shoot into their dead breasts. Dickens’ parents turned him down, at ten, to a blacking-factory, and, as we saw in our last lecture, when the moment came to release him from the blacking-warehouse his mother tried to insist on his returning.
“I do not,” he records to Forster, “write resentfully or angrily, for I know how all these things have worked together to make me what I am; but I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.”
IV
So there was provocation in plenty, humiliation inflicted on a young and infinitely sensitive mind. But, when we have granted that Dickens borrowed from his mother for Mrs. Nickleby, from his father for Mr. Micawber and the Elder Dorrit, mark you how genius diverges from the mere hint—how far Micawber differs from Dorrit, while both are elemental. Mark you further how and while both are sublimated and Mrs. Nickleby too—how much charity has to do with the chemical process. Who thinks of Mrs. Nickleby but as an amiable noodle? Who of Mr. Micawber, but to enjoy his company? Who of Mr. Dorrit but with a sad ironical pity? Where in any portrait of the three can you trace a stroke of that vindictiveness you find bitten upon page after page of The Way of All Flesh?
Moreover, choosing Old Dorrit, the least sympathetically but the most subtly drawn of the three, I would ask you, studying that character for yourselves, to note how Dickens conveys that, while much of its infirmity is native, much also comes of the punishment of the Marshalsea against which the poor creature’s pomposities are at once a narcotic, and a protest, however futile, of the dignity of a human soul, however abject. Mark especially, at the close of Chapter XXXV, how delicately he draws the shade of the Marshalsea over Little Dorrit herself. He would fain keep her, born and bred in that unwholesome den, its one uncontaminated “prison-flower”—but with all his charity he is (as I tried to show you in a previous lecture) a magisterial artist and the truth compels him. Mark then the workings of this child’s mind on hearing the glad news of her father’s release. Here is the passage:
Little Dorrit had been thinking too. After softly putting his [her father’s] hair aside, and touching his forehead with her lips, she looked towards Arthur, who came nearer to her, and pursued in a low whisper the subject of her thoughts.
“Mr. Clennam, will he pay all his debts before he leaves here?”
“No doubt. All.”