Charles Dickens and other Victorians

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

VI

Corruptio optimi pessima is one of those orotund sayings which impress for the moment but are liable to have their wisdom very considerably spokeshaved (so to speak) as soon as we apply the Socratic knife. Is Tarzan of the Apes, after all, a corruption of the best? And, if so, from what incalculable height did Lucifer plunge, and how many days did he take before he broke the roof of the railway station and scattered himself over the bookstalls? We may derive solace, if we will, by telling ourselves that those horrible days in the Chandos Street blacking-warehouse were a part of the education of Dickens’ genius, taught it to observe, and so on. But I say to you, as he said of Little Dorrit, that such a shadow of cruelty, induced upon a sensitive boy, must inevitably leave its stain: and I do most earnestly ask you, some of whom may find yourselves trustees for the education of poor children, if you are sure that Dickens himself was the better for a starved childhood? For my part I can give that starvation little credit for his achievement, reading its effect rather into his many faults of taste and judgment.

VII

It is usual to class among the first of these faults a defective sense of English prose: and the commonest arraignment lies against his use of blank verse in moments of pathos or of deep emotion. Well, but let us clear our minds of cant about English prose, and abstain from talking about it as if the Almighty had invented its final pattern somewhere in the eighteenth century. Prose—and Poetry too, for that matter—is a way of putting things worth record into memorable speech. English writers of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century found, with some measure of consent, an admirable fashion of doing this, and have left a tradition: and it is a tradition to which I, personally, would cling if I could, admiring it as I do, and admiring so much less many pages of Dickens and a thousand of pages of Carlyle. After all, so long as the thing gets itself said, and effectively, and memorably, who are we to prescribe rules or parse sentences? What, for example, could that mysterious body, the College of Preceptors, do to improve the grammar of Antony and Cleopatra, even if they persuaded one another “Well, apparently they have come to stay, and perhaps we had better call upon them, my dear”?

VIII

Having, then, no preconceived notions about prose, and few prejudices save against certain locutions of which I confess I dislike them mainly because I dislike the sort of person who employs them—I assert that Dickens, aiming straight at his purpose, wrote countless pages of quite splendid prose. I defy you, for example, to suggest how a sense of the eeriness of the Woolwich marshes with an apprehension of horror behind the fog could be better conveyed in words than Dickens conveys them in the opening chapters of Great Expectations; as I ask you how the earliest impressions of a sensitive child can be better conveyed in language than they are in the early chapters of David Copperfield.

IX

But even this apologia—sufficient as I think it—does not cover the whole defence. We have picked up a habit of consenting with critics who tell us that Dickens’ prose is careless and therefore not worth studying. Believe me, you are mistaken if you believe these critics. Dickens sometimes wrote execrably: far oftener he penned at a stretch page upon page of comment and conversation that brilliantly effect their purpose and are, therefore, good writing. You will allow, I dare say, his expertness in glorifying the loquacity that comes of a well-meaning heart and a rambling head. Recall, for example—casually chosen out of hundreds—Mrs. Chivery on her son John, nursing his love-lornness amid the washing in the back-yard: and remark the idiom of it:

“It’s the only change he takes,” said Mrs. Chivery, shaking her head afresh. “He won’t go out, even to the back-yard, when there’s no linen: but when there’s linen to keep the neighbours’ eyes off, he’ll sit there, hours. Hours he will. Says he feels as if it was groves.... Our John has everyone’s good word and everyone’s good wish. He played with her as a child when in that yard she played. He has known her ever since. He went out upon the Sunday afternoon when in this very parlour he had dined, and met her, with appointment or without appointment which I do not pretend to say. He made his offer to her. Her brother and sister is high in their views and against Our John. ‘No, John, I cannot have you, I cannot have any husband, it is not my intentions ever to become a wife, it is my intentions to be always a sacrifice, farewell. Find another worthy of you and forget me!’ This is the way in which she is doomed to be a constant slave, to them that are not worthy that a constant slave unto them she should be. This is the way in which Our John has come to find no pleasure but in taking cold among the linen....”

Is that not prose? Of course it is prose for its purpose: and, strictly for her purpose—strictly, mind you for their purpose—Mrs. Chivery’s parallelisms of speech will match those of the prophet Jeremiah at his literary best. “Ah,” say you, “but Dickens is dealing out humorous reported speech. Can he write prose of his own?” Well, yes, and yes most certainly. If you will search and study his passages of deliberate writing you will scarcely miss to see how he derives in turn of phrase as in intonation from the great eighteenth-century novelists and translators whose works, if you remember, were the small child’s library in the beautiful fourth chapter of David Copperfield: