In contrast with the Pickwickian method of comic rambles in search of human "curios," Dickens introduced some darker effects and persons of a more or less sensational kind. Some of these are as powerful as anything in modern fiction; and Fagin and Bill Sikes, Smike and Poor Jo, the Gordon riots and the storms at sea, may stand beside some tableaux of Victor Hugo for lurid power and intense realism. But it was only at times and during the first half of his career that Dickens could keep clear of melodrama and somewhat stagey blue fire. And at times his blue fire was of a very cheap kind. Rosa Dartle and Carker, Steerforth and Blandois, Quilp and Uriah Heep, have a melancholy glitter of the footlights over them. We cannot see what the villains want, except to look villainous, and we fail to make out where is the danger to the innocent victims. We find the villain of the piece frantically struggling to get some paper, or to get hold of some boy or girl. But as the scene is in London in the nineteenth century, and not in Naples in the fifteenth century, we cannot see who is in real danger, or why, or of what. And with all this, Dickens was not incapable of bathos, or tragedy suddenly exploding in farce. The end of Krook by spontaneous combustion is such a case; but a worse case is the death of Dora, Copperfield's baby wife, along with that of the lap-dog, Jip. This is one of those unforgotten, unpardonable, egregious blunders in art, in feeling, even in decency, which must finally exclude Charles Dickens from the rank of the true immortals.
But his books will long be read for his wonderful successes, and his weaker pieces will entirely be laid aside as are the failures of so many great men, the rubbish of Fielding, of Goldsmith, of Defoe; which do nothing now to dim the glory of Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, and Robinson Crusoe. The glory of Charles Dickens will always be in his Pickwick, his first, his best, his inimitable triumph. It is true that it is a novel without a plot, without beginning, middle, or end, with much more of caricature than of character, with some extravagant tom-foolery, and plenty of vulgarity. But its originality, its irrepressible drolleries, its substantial human nature, and its intense vitality, place it quite in a class by itself. We can no more group it, or test it by any canon of criticism, than we could group or define Pantagruel or Faust. There are some works of genius which seem to transcend all criticism, of which the very extravagances and incoherences increase the charm. And Pickwick ought to live with Gil Blas and Tristram Shandy. In a deeper vein, the tragic scenes in Oliver Twist and in Barnaby Rudge must long hold their ground, for they can be read and re-read in youth, in manhood, in old age. The story of Dotheboys Hall, the Yarmouth memories of Copperfield, Little Nell, Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, Toots, Captain Cuttle, Pecksniff, and many more will long continue to delight the youth of the English-speaking races. But few writers are remembered so keenly by certain characters, certain scenes, incidental whimsies, and so little for entire novels treated strictly as works of art. There is no reason whatever for pretending that all these scores of tales are at all to be compared with the best of them, or that the invention of some inimitable scenes and characters is enough to make a supreme and faultless artist. The young and the uncritical make too much of Charles Dickens, when they fail to distinguish between his best and his worst. Their fastidious seniors make too little of him, when they note his many shortcomings and fail to see that in certain elements of humour he has no equal and no rival. If we mean Charles Dickens to live we must fix our eye on these supreme gifts alone.
VII
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
They who are still youthful in the nineties can hardly understand the thrill which went through us all in the forties upon the appearance of Jane Eyre, on the discovery of a new genius and a new style. The reputation of most later writers grew by degrees and by repeated impressions of good work. Trollope, George Eliot, Stevenson, George Meredith, did not conquer the interest of the larger public until after many books and by gradual widening of the judgment of experts. But little Charlotte Brontë, who published but three tales in six years and who died at the age of thirty-eight, bounded into immediate fame—a fame that after nearly fifty years we do not even now find to have been excessive.
And then, there was such personal interest in the writer's self, in her intense individuality, in her strong character; there was so much sympathy with her hard and lonely life; there was such pathos in her family history and the tragedy which threw gloom over her whole life, and cut it off in youth after a few months of happiness. To have lived in poverty, in a remote and wild moorland, almost friendless and in continual struggle against sickness, to have been motherless since the age of five, to have lost four sisters and a brother before she was more than thirty-three, to have been sole survivor of a large household, to have passed a life of continual weakness, toil, and suffering—and then to be cut off after nine months of marriage,—all this touched the sympathies of the world as the private life of few writers touches them. And then the shock of her sudden death came upon us as a personal sorrow. Such genius, such courage, such perseverance, such promise—and yet but three books in all, published at intervals of two and of four years! There was meaning in the somewhat unusual form in which Mrs. Gaskell opens her Life of Charlotte Brontë, setting out verbatim in her first chapter the seven memorial inscriptions to the buried family in Haworth Church, and placing on the title-page a vignette of Haworth churchyard with its white tombstones. Charlotte Brontë was a kind of prosaic, most demure and orthodox Shelley in the Victorian literature—with visible genius, an intense personality, unquenchable fire, an early and tragic death. And all this passion in a little prim, shy, delicate, proud Puritan girl!
To this sympathy our great writer, whom she herself called "the first social regenerator of the day," did full justice in that beautiful little piece which he wrote in the Cornhill Magazine upon her death and which is the last of the Roundabout Papers in the twenty-second volume of Thackeray's collected works. It is called The Last Sketch: it is so eloquent, so true, so sympathetic that it deserves to be remembered, and yet after forty years it is too seldom read.
Of the multitude that have read her books, who has not known and deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate? Which of her readers has not become her friend? Who that has known her books has not admired the artist's noble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to speak, of the woman? What a story is that of that family of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors!
He goes on to deplore that "the heart newly awakened to love and happiness, and throbbing with maternal hope, had ceased to beat." He speaks of her "trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes." He speaks of his recollections of her in society, of "the impetuous honesty" which seemed the character of the woman—
I fancied an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us, and rebuking our easy lives, our easy morals. She gave me the impression of being a very pure, and lofty, and high-minded person. A great and holy reverence of right and truth seemed to be with her always. Such, in our brief interview, she appeared to me. As one thinks of that life so noble, so lonely,—of that passion for truth—of those nights and nights of eager study, swarming fancies, invention, depression, elation, prayer; as one reads the necessarily incomplete, though most touching and admirable history of the heart that throbbed in this one little frame—of this one amongst the myriads of souls that have lived and died on this great earth—this great earth?—this little speck in the infinite universe of God—with what wonder do we think of to-day, with what awe await to-morrow, when that which is now but darkly seen shall be clear!