Companionable Books

by Henry Van Dyke

The same personal quality may be noted in his ardour as a reformer. No writer of fiction has ever done more to better the world than Charles Dickens. But he did not do it by setting forth programmes of legislation and theories of government. As a matter of fact, he professed an amusing “contempt for the House of Commons,” having been a Parliamentary reporter; and of Sir Robert Peel, who emancipated the Catholics, enfranchised the Jews, and repealed the Corn Laws, he thought so little that he caricatured him as Mr. Pecksniff.

Dickens felt the evils of the social order at the precise point where the shoe pinched; he did not go back to the place where the leather was tanned or the last designed. It was some practical abuse in poorhouses or police-courts or prisons; it was some hidden shame in the conduct of schools, or the renting of tenements; it was some monumental absurdity in the Circumlocution Office, some pompous and cruel delay in the course of justice, that made him hot with indignation. These were the things that he assailed with Rabelaisian laughter, or over which he wept with a deeper and more sincere pity than that of Tristram Shandy. His idea was that if he could get people to see that a thing was both ridiculous and cruel, they would want to stop it. What would come after that, he did not clearly know, nor had he any particularly valuable suggestions to make, except the general proposition that men should do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.

He took no stock in the doleful predictions of the politicians that England was in an awful state merely because Lord Coodle was going out of office, and Sir Thomas Doodle would not come in, and each of these was the only man to save the country. The trouble seemed to him deeper and more real. It was a certain fat-witted selfishness, a certain callous, complacent blindness in the people who were likely to read his books. He conceived that his duty as a novelist was done when he had shown up the absurd and hateful things, and made people laugh at their ugliness, weep over their inhumanity, and long to sweep them away.

In this attitude, I think, Dickens was not only natural, and true to his bringing-up, but also wise as a great artist in literature. For I have observed that brilliant writers, while often profitable as satirists to expose abuses, are seldom judicious as legislators to plan reforms.

Before we leave this subject of the effects of Dickens’s early poverty and sudden popularity, we must consider his alleged lack of refinement. Some say that he was vulgar, others that he was ungrateful and inconsiderate of the feelings of his friends and relations, others that he had little or no taste. I should rather say, in the words of the old epigram, that he had a great deal of taste, and that some of it was very bad.

Take the matter of his caricaturing real people in his books. No one could object to his use of the grotesque insolence of a well-known London magistrate as the foundation of his portrait of Mr. Fang in Oliver Twist. That was public property. But the amiable eccentricities of his own father and mother, the airy irresponsible ways of his good friend Leigh Hunt, were private property. Yet even here Dickens could not reasonably be blamed for observing them, for being amused by them, or for letting them enrich his general sense of the immense, incalculable, and fantastic humour of the world. Taste, which is simply another name for the gusto of life, has a comic side; and a man who is keenly sensitive to everything cannot be expected to be blind to the funny things that happen among his family and friends. But when Dickens used these private delights for the public amusement, and in such a form that the partial portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, Mrs. Nickleby, and Harold Skimpole were easily identified, all that we can say is that his taste was still there, but it had gone bad. What could you expect? Where, in his early years, was he likely to have learned the old-fashioned habit of reserve in regard to private affairs, which you may call either a mark of good manners, or a sign of silly pride, according to your own education?

Or take his behavior during his first visit to America in 1842, and immediately after his return to England. His reception was enough to turn anybody’s head. “There never was a king or emperor,” wrote Dickens to a friend, “so cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained at splendid balls and dinners, and waited upon by public bodies of all kinds.” This was at the beginning. At the end he was criticized by all, condemned by many, and abused by some of the newspapers. Why? Chiefly because he used the dinners given in his honour as occasions to convict the Americans of their gross national sin of literary piracy, and because when he got home he wrote a book of American Notes, containing some very severe strictures upon the country which had just entertained him so magnificently.

Mr. Chesterton defends Dickens for his attack upon the American practice of book-stealing which grew out of the absence of an International Copyright Law. He says that it was only the new, raw sensibility of the Americans that was hurt by these speeches. “Dickens was not in the least desirous of being thought too ‘high-souled’ to want his wages.... He asked for his money in a valiant and ringing voice, like a man asking for his honour.” And this, Mr. Chesterton leaves us to infer, is what any bold Englishman, as distinguished from a timidly refined American, would do.

Precisely. But if the bold Englishman had been gently-bred would he have accepted an invitation to dinner in order that he might publicly say to his host, in a valiant and ringing voice, “You owe me a thousand pounds”? Such procedure at the dinner-table is contrary not only to good manners but also to good digestion. This is what Mr. Chesterton’s bold British constitution apparently prevents him from seeing. What Dickens said about international copyright was right. But he was wretchedly wrong in his choice of the time and place for saying it. The natural irritation which his bad taste produced was one of the causes which delayed for fifty years the success of the efforts of American authors to secure copyright for foreign authors.

The same criticism applies to the American Notes. Read them again and you will see that they are not bad notes. With much that he says about Yankee boastfulness and superficiality, and the evils of slavery, and the dangers of yellow journalism, every sane American will agree to-day. But the occasion which Dickens took for making these remarks was not happily chosen. It was as if a man who had just been entertained at your house should write to thank you for the pleasure of the visit, and improve the opportunity to point out the shocking defects of your domestic service and the exceedingly bad tone which pervaded your establishment. Such a “bread-and-butter letter” might be full of good morals, but their effect would be diminished by its bad manners. Of this Dickens was probably quite unconscious. He acted spontaneously, irrepressibly, vivaciously, in accordance with his own taste; and it surprised and irritated him immensely that people were offended by it.