After Scrooge's inhuman retort of “Bah! humbug!” not a word was added of the descriptive sentence immediately following. Admirable though every word of it is, however, one could hardly regret its suppression. Is it asked why? Well then, for this simple reason—the force of which will be admitted by anyone who ever had the happiness of grasping Charles Dickens's hand in friendship—that his description of Scrooge's Nephew was, quite unconsciously but most accurately, in every word of it, a literal description of himself, just as he looked upon any day in the blithest of all seasons, after a brisk walk in the wintry streets or on the snowy high road. “He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this Nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.” The Novelist himself was depicted there to a nicety. No need, therefore, was there for even one syllable of this in the Reading. Scrooge's Nephew was visibly before us, without a word being uttered.
To our thinking, it has always seemed as if the one chink through which Scrooge's sympathies are got at and his heart-strings are eventually touched, is discernable in his keen sense of humour from the very outset. It is precisely through this that there seems hope, from the very beginning, of his proving to be made of “penetrable stuff.” When, after his monstrous “Out upon merry Christmas!” he goes on to say, “If I had my will every idiot who goes about with 'merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly in his heart: he should!” one almost feels as if he were laughing in his sleeve from the very commencement. Instance, as yet more strikingly to the point in respect to what we are here maintaining, the wonderfully comic effect of the bantering remarks addressed by him to the Ghost of Jacob Marley all through their confabulation, even when the spectre's voice, as we are told, was disturbing the very marrow in his bones. True, it is there stated that, all through that portentous dialogue, he was only trying to be smart “as a means of distracting his own attention.” But the jests themselves are too delicious, one would say, for mere make-believes. Besides which, hear his laugh at the end of the book! Hardly that of one really so long out of practice—“a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh, the father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!” A laugh, one might suppose, as contagious as that of his own Nephew when he was “so inexpressibly tickled that he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp!” Speaking of which our author writes so delectably, “If you should happen by any unlikely chance to know a man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge's Nephew, all I can say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I'll cultivate his acquaintance.” At which challenge one might almost have been tempted anticipatively to say at a venture—Scrooge! Good-humoured argument apart, however, what creatures were those who, one by one—sometimes, it almost seemed, two or three of them together—appeared and disappeared upon the platform, at the Reader's own good-will and pleasure!
After Scrooge's “Good afternoon!”—delivered with irresistibly ludicrous iteration—we caught something more than a distant glimpse of the Clerk in the tank, when—on Scrooge's surly interrogation, if he will want all day to-morrow?—the Reader replied in the thinnest and meekest of frightened voices, “If quite convenient, sir!” It brought into full view instantaneously, and for the first time, the little Clerk whom one followed in imagination with interest a minute afterwards on his “going down a slide at the end of a lane of boys twenty times in honour of Christmas, and then, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no greatcoat) running home as hard as he could pelt to play at blind man's buff.” Instantly, upon the heels of this, we find noted on the margin, p. 18, “Tone to mystery.” The spectral illusion of the knocker on Scrooge's house-door, looking for all the world not like a knocker, but like Marley's face, “with a dismal light about it like a bad lobster in a dark cellar,” prepared the way marvellously for what followed. Numberless little tid-bits of description that anybody else would have struck out with reluctance, as, for instance, that of Scrooge looking cautiously behind the street door when he entered, “as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall,” were unhesitatingly erased by the Reader, as, from his point of view, not necessarily to the purpose. Then, after the goblin incident of the disused bell slowly oscillating until it and all the other bells in the house rang loudly for a while—afterwards becoming in turn just as suddenly hushed—we got to the clanking approach, from the sub-basement of the old building, of the noise that at length came on through the heavy door of Scrooge's apartment! “And”—as the Reader said with startling effect, while his voice rose to a hurried outcry as he uttered the closing exclamation—“upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, 'I know him! Marley's Ghost!'” The apparition, although the description of it was nearly stenographically abbreviated in the Reading, appeared to be, in a very few words, no less startlingly realised. “Same face, usual waistcoat, tights, boots,” even to the spectral illusion being so transparent that Scrooge (his own marrow, then, we may presume, becoming sensitized) looking through his waistcoat “could see the two back buttons on the coat behind”—with the incorrigible old joker's cynical reflection to himself that “he had often heard Marley spoken of as having no bowels, but had never believed it until then.” The grotesque humour of his interview with the spectre seemed scarcely to have been realised, in fact, until their colloquy was actually listened to in the Reading.
Scrooge's entreaty addressed to the Ghost, when the latter demanded a hearing, “Don't be flowery, Jacob, pray!” was only less laughable, for example, than the expression of the old dreamer's visage when Marley informed him that he had often sat beside him invisibly! Promised a chance and hope in the fixture—a chance and hope of his dead partner's procuring—Scrooge's “Thank 'ee!”—full of doubt—was a fitting prelude to his acknowledgment of the favour when explained. “You will be haunted,” quoth the Ghost, “by three Spirits.” The other faltering, “I—I think I'd rather not:” and then quietly hinting afterwards, “Couldn't I take 'em all at once, and have it over, Jacob?”
As for the revelations made to Ebenezer Scrooge by those three memorable Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, who can ever hope to relate them and impersonate them as they were related and impersonated by the Author himself of this peerless ghost-story! Fezziwig, for example, with his calves shining like moons, who, after going through all the intricacies of the country dance, bow, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place, cut—“cut so deftly that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger!” The very Fiddler, who “went up to the lofty desk and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches!” Master Peter Cratchit, again, arrayed in his father's shirt collars, who, rejoicing to find himself so gallantly attired, at one moment “yearned to show his linen in the fashionable parks,” and at another, hearing his sister Martha talk of some lord who “was much about as tall as Peter, pulled up his collars so high that you couldn't have seen him if you had been there.” As for the pathetic portions of the narrative, it is especially observable in regard to those, that they were anything rather than made too much of. There, more particularly, the elisions were ruthless. Looking through the marked copy, it really would appear that only a very few indeed of the salient points were left in regard to the life and death of Tiny Tim. Bob's visit to the death-bed was entirely unmentioned. Even the words “Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from God!” were never uttered. Two utterances there were, however, the one breathing an exquisite tenderness, the other indicative of a long-suppressed but passionate outburst of grief, that thrilled to the hearts of all who heard them, and still, we doubt not, haunt their recollection. The one—where the mother, laying her mourning needlework upon the table, put her hand up to her face. “'The colour hurts my eyes,' she said. The colour? Ah! poor Tiny Tim!” The other, where the father, while describing the little creature's grave, breaks down in a sudden agony of tears. “It would have done you good to see how green a place it is. But you'll see it often. I promised him that I would walk there on a Sunday—My little, little child! My little child!” It was a touch of nature that made the Reader and his world of hearers, upon the instant, kin. The tearful outcry brimmed to the eyes of those present a thousand visible echoes. “He broke down all at once. He couldn't help it,” said the Reader, adding in subdued accents the simple words, “If he could have helped it, he and his child would have been further apart perhaps than they were.” With that ended all reference to the home-grief at Bob Cratchit's. Everything else in relation to the loss of Tiny Tim was foregone unhesitatingly.
The descriptive passages were cut out by wholesale. While the Christmas dinner at Scrooge's Clerk's, and the Christmas party at Scrooge's Nephew's, were left in almost in their entirety, the street-scenes and shop-window displays were obliterated altogether. Nothing at all was said about the “great round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen lolling at the doors and tumbling into the streets in their apoplectic opulence.” Nothing about the ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and “winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe.” Nothing about the canisters of tea and coffee “rattled up and down like juggling tricks,” or about the candied fruits, “so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint, and subsequently bilious.”
Nay, we were denied even a momentary glimpse, on the snow-crusted pavement at nightfall, of that group of handsome girls, all hooded and fur-booted, and all chattering at once, tripping lightly off to some near neighbour's house, “where, woe upon the single man who saw them enter—artful witches, well they knew it—in a glow!” Topper was there, however, and the plump sister in the lace tucker, and the game of Yes-and-No, the solution to which was, “It's your uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!” Happiest of all these non-omissions, as one may call them, there was that charming picture of Scrooge's niece by marriage, which—as brightly, exquisitely articulated by the lips of her imaginer—was like the loveliest girl-portrait ever painted by Greuze. “She was very pretty, exceedingly pretty. With a dimpled, surprised-looking, capital face; a ripe little mouth, that seemed made to be kissed—as no doubt it was; all kinds of good little dots about her chin, that melted into one another when she laughed; and the sunniest pair of eyes you ever saw in any little creature's head. Altogether she was what you would have called provoking, you know; but satisfactory, too. Oh, perfectly satisfactory.” The grave face and twinkling eyes with which this cordial acquiescence in the conclusion arrived at was expressed were irresistibly exhilarating. Just in the same way there was a sort of parenthetical smack of the lips in the self-communing of Scrooge when, at the very close of the story, after hesitating awhile at his Nephew's door as to whether he should knock, he made a dash and did it. “Is your master at home, my dear?” said Scrooge. “Nice girl! very.” Then, as to the cordiality of his reception by his Nephew, what could by possibility have expressed it better than the look, voice, manner of the Reader. “'Will you let me in, Fred?' Let him in! It is a mercy he didn't shake his arm off.” The turkey that “never could have stood upon its legs, that bird,” but must have “snapped 'em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax!”—the remarkable boy who was just about its size, and who, when told to go and buy it, cried out “Walk-ER!”—Bob Cratchit's trying to overtake nine o'clock with his pen on his arriving nearly twenty minutes afterwards; his trembling and getting a little nearer the ruler when regenerated Scrooge talks about raising his salary, prior to calling him Bob, and, with a clap on the back, wishing him a merry Christmas!—brought, hilariously, the whole radiant Reading of this wonderful story to its conclusion. It was a feast of humour and a flow of fun, better than all the yule-tide fare that ever was provided—fuller of good things than any Christmas pudding of plums and candied fruit-peel—more warming to the cockles of one's heart, whatever those may be, than the mellowest wassail-bowl ever brimmed to over-flowing. No wonder those two friends of Thackeray, who have been already mentioned, and who were both of them women, said of the Author of the “Carol,” by way of criticism, “God bless him!” This being exclaimed by them, as will be remembered, simply after reading it to themselves. If only they had heard him read it!
THE TRIAL FROM PICKWICK.
Reader and audience about equally, one may say, revelled in the “Trial from Pickwick.” Every well-known person in the comic drama was looked for eagerly, and when at last Serjeant Buzfuz, as we were told, “rose with more importance than he had yet exhibited, if that were possible, and said, 'Call Samuel Weller,'” a round of applause invariably greeted the announcement of perhaps the greatest of all Dickens's purely humorous characters. The Reading copy of this abbreviated report of the great case of Bardell v. Pickwick has, among the complete set of Readings, one very striking peculiarity. Half-bound in scarlet morocco like all the other thin octavos in the collection, its leaves though yellow and worn with constant turning like the rest, are wholly unlike those of the others in this, that the text is untouched by pen or pencil. Beyond the first condensation of that memorable 34th chapter of Pickwick, there is introduced not one single alteration by way of after-thought. Struck off at a heat, as it was, that first humorous report of the action for breach of promise of marriage brought by Martha Bardell against Samuel Pickwick admitted in truth in no way whatever of improvement. Anything like a textual change would have been resented by the hearers—every one of them Pickwickian, as the case might be, to a man, woman, or child—as in the estimation of the literary court, nothing less than a high crime and misdemeanour. Once epitomised for the Reading, the printed version, at least of the report, was left altogether intact. Nevertheless, strange to say, there was perhaps no Reading out of the whole series of sixteen, in the delivery of which the Author more readily indulged himself with an occasional gag. Every interpolation of this kind, however, was so obviously introduced on the spur of the moment, so refreshingly spontaneous and so ludicrously apropos, that it was always cheered to the very echo, or, to put the fact not conventionally but literally, was received with peals of laughter. Thus it was in one instance, as we very well remember, in regard to Mr. Justice Stareleigh—upon every occasion that we saw him, one of the Reader's most whimsical impersonations. The little judge—described in the book as “all face and waistcoat”—was presented to view upon the platform as evidently with no neck at all (to speak of), and as blinking with owl-like stolidity whenever he talked, which he always did under his voice, and with apparently a severe cold in the head. On the night more particularly referred to, Sam Weller, being at the moment in the witness-box, had just replied to the counsel's suggestion, that what he (Sam) meant by calling Mr. Pickwick's “a very good service” was “little to do and plenty to get.”—“Oh, quite enough to get, sir, as the soldier said ven they ordered him three hundred and fifty lashes.” Thereupon—glowering angrily at Sam, and blinking his eyes more than ever—Mr. Justice Stareleigh remarked, with a heavier cold in the head than hitherto, in a severe monotone, and with the greatest deliberation, “You must not tell us what the soldier says unless the soldier is in court, unless that soldier comes here in uniform, and is examined in the usual way—it's not evidence.” Another evening, again, we recall quite as clearly to mind, when the Reader was revelling more even than was his wont, in the fun of this representation of the trial-scene, he suddenly seemed to open up the revelation of an entirely new phase in Mr. Winkle's idiosyncrasy. Under the badgering of Mr. Skimpin's irritating examination, as to whether he was or was not a particular friend of Mr. Pickwick the defendant, the usually placable Pickwickian's patience upon this occasion appeared gradually and at last utterly to forsake him. “I have known Mr. Pickwick now, as well as I can recollect at this moment, nearly——”