The life of Dickens was purely literary, and was diversified by few incidents. But he was liable to overstrain, as men of great nervous energy are apt to be, and was consequently forced to allow himself occasional holidays. During one of these, in 1842, he visited America, and wrote, in consequence, the not very wise or generous American Notes. This journey bore fruit in Martin Chuzzlewit. Two years later he made a journey to Italy, and subsequently he was several times on the continent and once again in America. The influence of the continental journeys can be traced in A Tale of Two Cities, though the story is rather due to Carlyle’s French Revolution than to the personal observation of Dickens. A more serious interruption than any holiday he ever allowed himself was his indulgence, for so it may be described, in public readings. They increased his wealth, and they gratified the vanity which, in spite of his biographer, was one of the weaknesses of Dickens; but they impaired his literary work, and in all probability they hastened his death. Besides these readings, the nervous strain of which was very great, Dickens encumbered himself with editorial work. He conducted Household Words from its start in 1850; and when it stopped in 1859 he started All the Year Round, with which he was connected till his death. Through these various distractions both the quantity and the quality of his original work declined. Probably after David Copperfield he never wrote anything altogether first-rate. His health too gave way under the strain, and he died at the age of 58, on June 9th, 1870.
Dickens has enjoyed a popularity probably unparalleled among English writers. Forster has calculated that during the twelve years succeeding his death no fewer than 4,239,000 volumes of his works were sold in Britain. The secret was in the first place originality. Dickens had lived the life he depicted. With a strong memory and keen powers of observation he had been storing up from early boyhood information which in his maturer years served him well. ‘Sam’s knowledge of London was extensive and peculiar,’ he writes of Weller, when Mr. Pickwick addresses him with a sudden query about the nearest public house; and he illustrates Sam’s knowledge by making him answer without a moment’s hesitation. Dickens himself, if put down suddenly in any quarter of London, could probably have answered the question with equal readiness. He was emphatically a man of cities, was restless when he was long away from streets, and loved above all things the streets of London.
But he was still more an observer of persons than an observer of places. Even in boyhood he judged men with great accuracy; and after he had won fame he asserted that he had never seen cause to change the secret impression of his boyhood with regard to anyone whom he had known then. Moreover, he never forgot. In his troubled and wretched boyhood, therefore, he was ‘making himself,’ though involuntarily and in an unpleasant fashion, as much as Scott was by his Liddesdale raids.
It is however the something added to observation that gives literary value; and had Dickens added nothing he would have been far on the way to oblivion now. Shakespeare may have based Falstaff on observation; but probably no man, except Shakespeare himself, was ever quite as humorous as the fat knight. Similarly, it is safe to assert that Dickens never met a Londoner with all the wit and resource of Sam Weller. ‘The little more, and how much it is.’ What the artist adds creates the character. Incidents he has seen, phrases he has heard, are only the raw material for his imagination. Humour is practically non-existent unless it is understood; and, as a more recent humourist has whimsically insisted, there may be here a kind of division of labour, the humour being lodged in one mind and the comprehension of it in another. It is so with Dickens. He sympathises, appreciates, interprets, and thus in part creates. He frequently makes the fun by his own keen sense of it.
But while Dickens was excellent within his own sphere, that sphere was comparatively small. He was good only as a painter of his own generation and of what had come under his own experience. Living in the days of the historical novel, Dickens nevertheless felt that his talent lay in the delineation of contemporary manners. Neither his education nor the bent of his mind fitted him to excel in the historical romance. Twice he tried the experiment—in Barnaby Rudge, and in A Tale of Two Cities; but on both occasions he wisely kept pretty close to his own time. Barnaby Rudge is, by general consent, second-rate, and whatever may be the true value of A Tale of Two Cities, its merit is not essentially of the historical kind. It is Scott who has written the history of the Porteous riot and of the rebellion of ’45; and our most vivid impression of society in Queen Anne’s time comes from Esmond. But there is no danger of Carlyle’s French Revolution being superseded by A Tale of Two Cities.
Neither has Dickens command over a wide range of character. He is completely at home only in one grade of society, and, as a rule, the farther he moves from the lower ranks of Londoners the more he falls short of excellence. Coachmen, showmen, servants of all kinds, beadles, self-made men of imperfect education, he could depict with wonderful force and vivacity; but his triumphs in the higher ranks are few. The reason lies partly in the character of the experience he had acquired, partly in his manner of conception. Dickens was theatrical and had a tendency to farce; above all, he was by nature a caricaturist. If anyone, man or woman, presented some conspicuous peculiarity, whether of disposition, or of physical appearance, or of dress, Dickens was happy and made the most of it. But education and social convention tend to smooth away angularities and prominences, and hence among the classes influenced by them he rarely found the material he needed.
The characters of Dickens, then, are personified humours, his method is the method not of Shakespeare, but of Ben Jonson. Pecksniff is just another name for hypocrisy, Jonas Chuzzlewit for avarice, Quilp for cruelty. The result is excellent of its kind. The repetitions and catch-words are, within limits, highly effective. Sometimes they are genuinely illuminative; but sometimes, on the other hand, they reveal nothing and are used to weariness. The ‘waiting for something to turn up’ of the Micawber family goes to the root of their character. But ‘ain’t I volatile?’ ‘Donkeys, Janet,’ the sleepiness of the Fat Boy, Pecksniff and Salisbury Cathedral, even the jollity of Mark Tapley, are worn threadbare. Mrs. Harris herself is heard of rather too often. Exaggeration has no law, it is rather the abrogation of law; and the writer who adopts the method of exaggeration pays the price in losing all check upon himself.
In exaggeration too we find the defect of Dickens’s highest quality. His humour, like the humour of the country he at first satirised so bitterly, rests too much on exaggeration. It is ready, copious, irresistible; but, while it wins and deserves admiration, it rarely provokes the exclamation, ‘how natural,’ or ‘how true.’ Micawber is one of the most comical characters in fiction, but we are not struck by his fidelity to nature. Though he is drawn from the life he is not representative, but rather belongs to the class of curiosities whose natural resting-place is a museum.
The mannerism of which this is one form runs through the whole of the work of Dickens, affecting style as well as substance, the description of nature as well as the delineation of character. The English is nervous and vivid, but little regard is paid to proportion. The minutest detail, if it happens to strike the writer’s fancy, is elaborated as if it were vital to the story. The moaning of the sea, the freaks of the wind, the fluttering of a leaf, are dilated upon in paragraph after paragraph. It is the romantic method liberated from all restraint. There is no poetry more heavily charged with the ‘pathetic fallacy’ than the prose of Dickens; and in prose it is more dangerous because of the absence of the trammels of verse.
The dangers of this style and this manner of conception become more conspicuous when we turn to other manifestations of them. Dickens was in his own time thought to be a master of the pathetic equally with the mirthful strain. It was correct taste to weep over little Nell; and Jeffrey, no very indulgent critic of contemporaries, declared that there had been nothing so good since Cordelia. Dickens has been dead only a quarter of a century, but few critics would pronounce such a judgment now. His humour so far retains its power; but the veneer has already worn off his pathos. Little Nell and little Emily may still draw tears, more tears perhaps than were ever shed for the fate of Cordelia. But this is not the best test of the quality of pathos. That which, from Homer to Shakespeare, has conquered the suffrages of the world, is solemnising and saddening, rather than tear-compelling. Tears are within the range of a very ordinary writer, but to produce a tragic Cordelia or Antigone is only possible to a Shakespeare or a Sophocles. The truth is that the faults of Dickens, apparent in his humour but pardonable there, become offensive in his pathos. His touch is not sufficiently delicate, he does not know when to leave off, he unduly prolongs the agony. The death-scene of Cordelia and Lear, perhaps the most tragically pathetic in all literature, occupies some sixty or seventy lines. How different from this are the scenes relating to the death of Little Nell! Their very diffuseness has contributed to their popularity, but it damages them as literature.