Charles Dickens and other Victorians

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

In the brave days when I was twenty-one.

That is good gospel. “Fall in love early, throw your cap over the mill; take an axe, spit on your hands; and, for some one, make the chips fly.”

V

But (say the critics) he was disappointed, soured because—conscious of his powers of “superior” education and certain gifts only to be acquired through education, he felt that Dickens—whom certain foolish people chose to talk of endlessly as his rival—was all the time outstripping him in public favour. Now, as for this, I cannot see how Thackeray, in any wildest dream, could have hoped to catch up with Dickens and pass him in popularity. To begin with, he came to fruition much later than Dickens: in comparison with the precocity of Pickwick Thackeray was in fact thirty-seven before he hit the target’s gold with Vanity Fair. His earlier serious efforts—Catherine, Barry Lyndon, The Book of Snobs—are sour and green stuff, call them what else you will. They deal with acrid characters and (what is more) deal with them acridly. But even supposing them to be masterpieces (which title to two of the three I should certainly deny) where was the audience in comparison with that to which Dickens appealed? Where, outside a few miles’ radius of Club-land, did men and women exist in any numbers to whom Thackeray’s earlier work could, by any possibility, appeal? The dear and maiden lady in Cranford, Miss Jenkyns, as you remember, made allowances for Pickwick in comparison with Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas. “Still perhaps the author is young. Let him persevere, and who knows what he may become, if he will take the Great Doctor for his model.” But what—what on earth would she have made of Barry Lyndon? And what would good Captain Brown himself have made of it? I can almost better see the pair, on the sly, consenting to admire Tristram Shandy.

Now Dickens and Thackeray were both thin-skinned men in their sensitiveness to public approbation. On at least one occasion each made a fool of himself by magnifying a petty personal annoyance into an affair of the world’s concern. As if anybody mattered to that extent!—

Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta

Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt.

But in literary London there are always (I regret to say) busybodies who will estrange great men if they can; and, the cause of quarrel once set up, I still more regret to say that the great men quite as often as not come most foolishly out of it. Thackeray’s estrangement from Dickens happened over an article by a young journalist of twenty-seven—Mr. Edmund Yates, afterwards Editor of The World, a society newspaper—and Thackeray’s foolish insistence, in the teeth of remonstrances by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, that young Yates should be expelled from the Garrick Club. A week before Thackeray’s death, he and Dickens met on the steps of the Athenæum, passed, turned, and looked at each other. Thackeray held out a hand, which Dickens did not refuse.

Now may I put in here, Gentlemen, and in parenthesis, a word of which I have often wanted to unburden myself?... Some of you—some of the best of you, I hope—may leave Cambridge for Fleet Street, a street which I too have trodden. It is a street of ambitions; but withal the centre of our English Republic of Letters, in the motto of which, though there can be no “Equality,” let us neither exclude the “Liberty” that Milton fought for, nor the “Fraternity” of elder and younger brethren. I remember this plea for Fraternity being put up by an eminent man of letters, still with us; and being so much impressed by it that it outlasted even the week-after-next, when I found him taking off the gloves to punish a rival scribe. But these two were musical critics, arguing about music: and I have sometimes, pondering, thought that there must really be something naturally akin between music and prosody (arts of which I know so little), seeing that the professors of both pelt each other in terms of insult so amazingly similar and with a ferocity the likeness of which one has to recognise even while murmuring, “Come, come! What is this all about, after all?” I suppose the average Musical Review in the weekly papers to contain more mud to the square inch than even The Dunciad! And you must acknowledge, Gentlemen, The Dunciad, for all its wit, to be on the whole a pretty wearisome heap of bad breeding. It kicks: but as they say in the country, there is “plenty hair on the hoof.” What I plead is that all we engaged in literature take some warning from the discourtesies of the past, and that you, at any rate, who pass out into literary practice from this Tripos of ours, shall pass out as a confraternity of gentlemen. Consider, if you will, that Literature, our mistress, is a goddess greater than any of us. She is Shakespeare and Ben Jonson too; Milton and Dry den; Swift, Addison, Steele; Berkeley and Goldsmith; Pope and John Gay; Johnson, Gibbon, Burke, Sheridan; Cowper and Burns; Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge; Landor, Scott, Keats, Shelley and Byron; Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, all, says the Preacher, “giving counsel by their understanding and declaring prophecies.” I name but a few of the procession, but all were her knights; and each, in his time, fought for his ideal of her—

Blue is Our Lady’s colour,