Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions

by John Cowper Powys

DICKENS

It is absurd, of course, to think that it is necessary to "hold a brief" for Dickens. But sometimes, when one comes across charming and exquisite people who "cannot read him," one is tempted to give one's personal appreciation that kind of form.

Dickens is one of the great artists of the world, and he is so, in spite of the fact that in certain spheres, in the sphere of Sex, for instance, or the sphere of Philosophy, he is such a hopeless conventionalist. It is because we are at this hour so preoccupied with Sex, in our desire to readjust the conventions of Society and Morality towards it, that a great artist, who simply leaves it out altogether, or treats it with a mixture of the conventionality of the preacher and the worst foolishness of the crowd, is an artist whose appeal is seriously handicapped.

Yet, given this "lacuna," this amazing "gap" in his work, a deprivation much more serious than his want of "philosophy," Dickens is a writer of colossal genius, whose originality and vision puts all our modern "literateurs" to shame. One feels this directly one opens any volume of his. Only a great creative genius could so dominate, for instance, his mere "illustrators," as to mesmerize them completely into his manner. And certainly his illustrators are drugged with the Dickens atmosphere. Those hideous-lovely persons, whose legs and arms are so thin that it is impossible to suppose they ever removed their clothes; do they not strut and leer and ogle and grin and stagger and weep, in the very style of their author?

Remembering my "brief" and the sort of jury, among my friends, I have to persuade, I am not inclined in this sketch to launch out into panegyrics upon Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Gamp and Mr. Pecksniff and Betsy Trotwood and Bill Sikes and Dick Swiveller and Bob Sawyer and Sam Weller and Mark Tapley and Old Scrooge. The mere mention of these names, which, to some, would suggest the music of the spheres, to others would suggest forced merriment, horrible Early Victorian sentiment, and that sort of hackneyed "unction" of sly moral elders, which is youth's especial Hell. Much wiser were it, as it seems to me, to indicate what in Dickens—in his style, his method, his vision, his art—actually appeals to one particular mind. I think it is to be found in his childlike Imagination. Now, the modern cult for children has reached such fantastic limits that one has to be very careful when one uses that word. But Dickens is childlike, not as Oscar Wilde—that Uranian Baby—or as Paul Verlaine—that little "pet lamb" of God—felt themselves to be childlike, or as the artificial-minded Robert Louis Stevenson fooled his followers into thinking him. He is really and truly childlike. His imagination and vision are literally the imagination and vision of children. We have not all played at Pirates and Buccaneers. We have not all dreamed of Treasure-Islands and Marooned sailors. We have not all "believed in Fairies." These rather tiresome and over-rung-upon aspects of children's fancies are, after all, very often nothing more than middle-aged people's damned affectations. The children's cult at the present day plays strange tricks.

But Dickens, from beginning to end, has the real touch, the authentic reaction. How should actual and living children, persecuted by "New Educational Methods," glutted with toys, depraved by "understanding sympathy," and worn out by performances of "Peter Pan," believe—really and truly—in fairies any more? But, in spite of sentimental Child-worshippers, let us not hesitate to whisper: "It doesn't matter in the least if they don't!" The "enlightened" and cultivated mothers, who grow unhappy when they find their darlings cold to Titania and Oberon and to the more "poetic" modern fairies, with the funny names, may rest in peace. If the house they inhabit and the street they inhabit be not sanitarized and art-decorated beyond all human interest, they may let their little ones alone. They will dream their dreams. They will invent their games. They will talk to their shadows. They will blow kisses to the Moon. And all will go well with "the Child in the House," even if he has not so much as even heard of "the Blue Bird"!

If these uncomfortably "childlike" people read Dickens, they would know how a child really does regard life, and perhaps they would be a little shocked. For it is by no means only the "romantic" and "aesthetic" side of things that appeals to children. They have their nightmares, poor imps, and such devils follow them as older people never dream of. Dickens knew all that, and in his books the thrill of the supernatural, as it hovers over chairs and tables and pots and pans, is never far away. It lurks, that repelling-alluring Terror, in a thousand simple places. It moves in the darkness of very modern cupboards. It hides in the recesses of very modern cellars. It pounces out from the eaves of quite modern attics. It is there, halfway up the Staircase. It is there, halfway down the Passage. And God knows whither it comes or where it goes!

To endow the little every-day objects that surround us—a certain picture in a certain light, a certain clock or stove in a certain shadow, a certain corner of the curtain when the wind moves it—with the fetish-magic of natural "animism"; that is the real childlike trick, and that is what Dickens does. It is, of course, something not confined to people who are children in years. It is the old, sweet Witch-Hag, Mystery, that, sooner or later, has us all by the throat!

And that is why, to me, Dickens is so great a writer. Since men have come to live so much in cities; since houses and streets and rooms and passages and windows and basements have come to mean more to them than fields and woods, it is essential that "the Old Man covered with a Mantle," the Ancient of Ancients, the Disturber of Rational Dreams, should move into the town, too, and mutter and murmur in its shadows!

How hard a thing is it, to put into words the strange attraction and the strange terror which the dwellings of mortal men have the power of exciting! To drift at nightfall into an unknown town, and wander through its less frequented ways, and peep into its dark, empty churches, and listen to the wind in the stunted trees that grow by its Prison, and watch some flickering particular light high up in some tall house—the light of a harlot, a priest, an artist, a murderer—surely there is no imaginative experience equal to this! Then, the things one sees, by chance, by accident, through half-open doors and shutter-chinks and behind lifted curtains! Verily the ways of men upon earth are past finding out, and their madness beyond interpretation!