Dickens suffered from too little of what some of us have too much of—criticism. His work met with too little resistance to call forth his powers. Too often his pathos sinks to bathos, and this not from want of skill, but from want of care. It is difficult to believe that the popular writer who allowed his sentimentality—or rather the public’s sentimentality—to run away with him in such scenes as the death of Paul Dombey and Little Nell was the artist who painted the death of Sidney Carton and of Barkis, the willing. The death of Barkis, next to the passing of Colonel Newcome, is, to my thinking, one of the most perfect pieces of pathos in English literature. No very deep emotion is concerned. He is a commonplace old man, clinging foolishly to a commonplace box. His simple wife and the old boatmen stand by, waiting calmly for the end. There is no straining after effect. One feels death enter, dignifying all things; and touched by that hand, foolish old Barkis grows great.
In Uriah Heap and Mrs. Gummidge, Dickens draws types rather than characters. Pecksniff, Podsnap, Dolly Varden, Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Gamp, Mark Tapley, Turveydrop, Mrs. Jellyby—these are not characters; they are human characteristics personified.
We have to go back to Shakespeare to find a writer who, through fiction, has so enriched the thought of the people. Admit all Dickens’ faults twice over, we still have one of the greatest writers of modern times. Such people as these creations of Dickens never lived, says your little critic. Nor was Prometheus, type of the spirit of man, nor was Niobe, mother of all mothers, a truthful picture of the citizen one was likely to meet often during a morning’s stroll through Athens. Nor grew there ever a wood like to the Forest of Arden, though every Rosalind and Orlando knows the path to glades having much resemblance thereto.
Steerforth, upon whom Dickens evidently prided himself, I must confess, never laid hold of me. He is a melodramatic young man. The worst I could have wished him would have been that he should marry Rose Dartle and live with his mother. It would have served him right for being so attractive. Old Peggotty and Ham are, of course, impossible. One must accept them also as types. These Brothers Cheeryble, these Kits, Joe Gargeries, Boffins, Garlands, John Peerybingles, we will accept as types of the goodness that is in men—though in real life the amount of virtue that Dickens often wastes upon a single individual would by more economically minded nature, be made to serve for fifty.
To sum up, “David Copperfield” is a plain tale, simply told; and such are all books that live. Eccentricities of style, artistic trickery, may please the critic of a day, but literature is a story that interests us, boys and girls, men and women. It is a sad book; and that, again, gives it an added charm in these sad later days. Humanity is nearing its old age, and we have come to love sadness, as the friend who has been longest with us. In the young days of our vigour we were merry. With Ulysses’ boatmen, we took alike the sunshine and the thunder with frolic welcome. The red blood flowed in our veins, and we laughed, and our tales were of strength and hope. Now we sit like old men, watching faces in the fire; and the stories that we love are sad stories—like the stories we ourselves have lived.
CREATURES THAT ONE DAY SHALL BE MEN.
I ought to like Russia better than I do, if only for the sake of the many good friends I am proud to possess amongst the Russians. A large square photograph I keep always on my mantel-piece; it helps me to maintain my head at that degree of distention necessary for the performance of all literary work. It presents in the centre a neatly-written address in excellent English that I frankly confess I am never tired of reading, around which are ranged some hundreds of names I am quite unable to read, but which, in spite of their strange lettering, I know to be the names of good Russian men and women to whom, a year or two ago, occurred the kindly idea of sending me as a Christmas card this message of encouragement. The individual Russian is one of the most charming creatures living. If he like you he does not hesitate to let you know it; not only by every action possible, but, by what perhaps is just as useful in this grey old world, by generous, impulsive speech.
We Anglo-Saxons are apt to pride ourselves upon being undemonstrative. Max Adeler tells the tale of a boy who was sent out by his father to fetch wood. The boy took the opportunity of disappearing and did not show his face again beneath the paternal roof for over twenty years. Then one evening, a smiling, well-dressed stranger entered to the old couple, and announced himself as their long-lost child, returned at last.
“Well, you haven’t hurried yourself,” grumbled the old man, “and blarm me if now you haven’t forgotten the wood.”
I was lunching with an Englishman in a London restaurant one day. A man entered and took his seat at a table near by. Glancing round, and meeting my friend’s eyes, he smiled and nodded.