That he showed inequality as he wrought at the many books which filled the years between "Pickwick" and the unfinished "Mystery of Edwin Drood," may also be granted. Also may it be confessed that within the bounds of one book there are the extremes of good and bad. It is peculiar to Dickens that often in the very novel we perchance feel called upon to condemn most, occurs a scene or character as memorably great as anything he left the world. Thus, we may regard "Old Curiosity Shop," once so beloved, as a failure when viewed as a whole; and yet find Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness at their immortal game as unforgettable as Mrs. Battle engaged in the same pleasant employment. Nor because other parts of "Little Dorrit" seem thin and artificial, would we forego the description of the debtor's prison. And our belief that the presentation of the labor-capital problem in "Hard Times" is hasty and shallow, does not prevent a recognition of the opening sketch of the circus troop as displaying its author at his happiest of humorous observation. There are thus always redeeming things in the stories of this most unequal man of genius. Seven books there are, novels in form, which are indubitable masterpieces: "Martin Chuzzlewit," "Dombey and Son," "David Copperfield," "Bleak House," "A Tale of Two Cities," "Great Expectations" and "Our Mutual Friend." These, were all the others withdrawn, would give ample evidence of creative power: they have the largeness, variety and inventive verve which only are to be found in the major novelists. Has indeed the same number of equal weight and quality been given forth by any other English writer?
Another proof that the power of Dickens was not dependent exclusively upon the comic, is his production of "A Tale of Two Cities." It is sometimes referred to as uncharacteristic because it lacks almost entirely his usual gallery of comics: but it is triumphantly a success in a different field. The author says he wished for the nonce to make a straight adventure tale with characters secondary. He did it in a manner which has always made the romance a favorite, and compels us to include this dramatic study of the French Revolution among the choicest of his creations. Its period and scene have never—save by Carlyle—been so brilliantly illuminated. Dickens was brooding on this story at a time when, wretchedly unhappy, he was approaching the crisis of a separation from his wife: the fact may help to explain its failure to draw on that seemingly inexhaustible fountain of bubbling fun so familiar in his work. But even subtract humor and Dickens exhibits the master-hand in a fiction markedly of another than his wonted kind. This Novel—or romance, as it should properly be called—reminds us of a quality in Dickens which has been spoken of in the way of derogation: his theatrical tendency. When one declares an author to be dramatic, a compliment is intended. But when he is called theatric, censure is implied. Dickens, always possessed of a strong sense of the dramatic and using it to immense advantage, now and again goes further and becomes theatric: that is, he suggests the manipulating of effects with artifice and the intention of providing sensational and scenic results at the expense of proportion and truth. A word on this is advisable.
Those familiar with the man and his works are aware how close he always stood to the playhouse and its product. He loved it from early youth, all but went on the stage professionally, knew its people as have few of the writing craft, was a fine amateur actor himself, wrote for the stage, helped to dramatize his novels and gave delightful studies of theatrical life in his books. Shall we ever forget Mr. Crummles and his family? He had an instinctive feeling for what was scenic and effective in the stage sense. When he appeared as a reader of his own works, he was an impersonator; and noticeably careful to have the stage accessories exactly right. And when all this, natural and acquired, was applied to fiction, it could not but be of influence. As a result, Dickens sometimes forced the note, favored the lurid, exaggerated his comic effects. To put it in another way, this theater manner of his now and then injured the literature he made. But that is only one side of the matter: it also helped him greatly and where he went too far, he was simply abusing a precious gift. To speak of Dickens' violent theatricality as if it expressed his whole being, is like describing the wart on Cromwell's face as if it were his set of features. Remove from Dickens his dramatic power, and the memorable master would be no more: he would vanish into dim air. We may be thankful—in view of what it produced—that he possessed even in excess this sense of the scenic value of character and situation: it is not a disqualification but a virtue, and not Dickens alone but Dumas, Hugo and Scott were great largely because of it.
In the praise naturally enough bestowed upon a great autobiographical Novel like "David Copperfield," the fine art of a late work like "Great Expectations" has been overlooked or at least minimized. If we are to consider skilful construction along with the other desirable qualities of the novelist, this noble work has hardly had justice done it: moreover, everything considered,—story value, construction, characters, atmosphere, adequacy of style, climactic interest, and impressive lesson, I should name "Great Expectations," published when the author was fifty, as his most perfect book, if not the greatest of Charles Dickens' novels. The opinion is unconventional: but as Dickens is studied more as artist progressively skilful in his craft, I cannot but believe this particular story will receive increasing recognition. In the matter of sheer manipulation of material, it is much superior to the book that followed it two years later, the last complete novel: "Our Mutual Friend." It is rather curious that this story, which was in his day and has steadily remained a favorite with readers, has with equal persistency been severely handled by the critics. What has insured its popularity? Probably its vigor and variety of characterization, its melodramatic tinge, the teeming world of dramatic contrasts it opens, its bait to our sense of mystery. It has a power very typical of the author and one of the reasons for Dickens' hold upon his audience. It is a power also exhibited markedly in such other fictions as "Dombey and Son," "Martin Chuzzlewit" and "Bleak House." I refer to the impression conveyed by such stories that life is a vast, tumultuous, vari-colored play of counter-motives and counter-characters, full of chance, surprise, change and bitter sweet: a thing of mystery, terror, pity and joy. It has its masks of respectability, its frauds of place, its beauty blossoming in the mud, its high and low of luck, its infinite possibilities betwixt heaven and hell. The effect of this upon the sensitive reader is to enlarge his sympathetic feeling for humanity: life becomes a big, awful, dear phantasmagoria in such hands. It seems not like a flat surface, but a thing of length, breadth, height and depth, which it has been a privilege to enter. Dickens' fine gift—aside from that of character creation—is found in this ability to convey an impression of puissant life. He himself had this feeling and he got it into his books: he had, in a happier sense, the joy of life of Ibsen, the life force of Nietzsche. From only a few of the world's great writers does one receive this sense of life, the many-sided spectacle; Cervantes, Hugo, Tolstoy, Sienkiewicz, it is men like they that do this for us.
Another side of Dickens' literary activity is shown in his Christmas stories, which it may be truly said are as well beloved as anything he gave the world in the Novel form. This is assuredly so of the "Christmas Carol," "The Chimes" and "The Cricket on the Hearth." This last is on a par with the other two in view of its double life in a book and on the boards of the theater. The fragrance of Home, of the homely kindness and tenderness of the human heart, is in them, especially in the Carol, which is the best tale of its kind in the tongue and likely to remain so. It permanently altered the feeling of the race for Christmas. Irving preceded him in the use of the Christmas motive, but Dickens made it forever his own. By a master's magic evocation, the great festival shines brighter, beckons more lovingly than it did of old. Thackeray felt this when he declared that such a story was "a public benefit." Such literature lies aside from our main pursuit, that of the Novel, but is mentioned because it is the best example possible, the most direct, simple expression of that essential kindness, that practical Christianity which is at the bottom of Dickens' influence. It is bonhomie and something more. It is not Dickens the reformer, as we get him when he satirizes Dotheboys hall, or the Circumlocution Office or the Chancery Court: but Dickens as Mr. Greatheart, one with all that is good, tender, sweet and true. Tiny Tim's thousand-times quoted saying is the quintessence, the motto for it all and the writer speaks in and through the lad when he says: "God bless us, every one." When an author gets that honest unction into his work, and also has the gift of observation and can report what he sees, he is likely to contribute to the literature of his land. With a sneer of the cultivated intellect, we may call it elementary: but to the heart, such a view of life is royally right.
This thought of Dickens' moral obligation in his work and his instinctive attitude towards his audience, leads to one more point: a main reason for this Victorian novelist's strong hold on the affections of mankind is to be found in the warm personal relation he establishes with the reader. The relationship implies obligation on the part of the author, a vital bond between the two, a recognition of a steady, not a chance, association. There goes with it, too, an assumption that the author believes in and cares much for his characters, and asks the reader for the same faith. This personal relation of author to reader and of both to the imagined characters, has gone out of fashion in fiction-making: in this respect, Dickens (and most of his contemporaries) seem now old-fashioned. The present realist creed would keep the novelist away and out of sight both of his fictive creations and his audience; it being his business to pull the strings to make his puppets dance—up to heaven or down to hell, whatever does it matter to the scientist-novelist? Tolstoy's novel "Resurrection" is as a subject much more disagreeable than Flaubert's "Madame Bovary"; but it is beautiful where the other is horrible, because it palpitates with a Christ-like sympathy for an erring woman, while the French author cares not a button whether his character is lost or not. The healthy-minded public (which can be trusted in heart, if not in head) will instinctively choose that treatment of life in a piece of fiction which shows the author kindly cooperative with fate and brotherly in his position towards his host of readers. That is the reason Dickens holds his own and is extremely likely to gain in the future, while spectacular reputations based on all the virtues save love, continue to die the death. What M. Anatole France once said of Zola, applies to the whole school of the aloof and unloving: "There is in man an infinite need of loving which renders him divine. M. Zola does not know it…. The holiness of tears is at the bottom of all religions. Misfortune would suffice to render man august to man. M. Zola does not know it."
Charles Dickens does know these truths and they get into his work and that work, therefore, gets not so much into the minds as into the souls of his fellow-man. When we recite the sayings which identify his classic creations: when we express ourselves in a Pickwickian sense, wait for something to turn up with Mr. Micawber, drop into poetry with Silas Wegg, move on with little Joe, feel 'umble after the manner of Uriah Heap, are willin' with Barkis, make a note of, in company with Captain Cuttle, or conclude with Mr. Weller, Senior, that it is the part of wisdom to beware of "widders," we may observe that what binds us to this motley crowd of creatures is not their grotesquerie but their common humanity, their likeness to ourselves, the mighty flood-tide of tolerant human sympathy on which they are floated into the safe haven of our hearts. With delightful understanding, Charles Dudley Warner writes: "After all, there is something about a boy I like." Dickens, using the phrasing for a wider application, might have said: "After all, there is something about men and women I like!" It was thus no accident that he elected to write of the lower middle classes; choosing to depict the misery of the poor, their unfair treatment in institutions; to depict also the unease of criminals, the crushed state of all underlings—whether the child in education or that grown-up evil child, the malefactor in prison. He was a spokesman of the people, a democratic pleader for justice and sympathy. He drew the proletariat preferably, not because he was a proletariat but because he was a brother-man and the fact had been overlooked. He drew thousands of these suppressed humans, and they were of varied types and fortunes: but he loved them as though they were one, and made the world love them too: and love their maker. The deep significance of Dickens, perhaps his deepest, is in the social note that swells loud and insistent through his fiction. He was a pioneer in the democratic sympathy which was to become so marked feature in the Novel in the late nineteenth century: and which, as we have already seen, is from the first a distinctive trait of the modern fiction, one of the explanations of its existence.
CHAPTER IX
THACKERAY
The habit of those who appraise the relative worth of Dickens and Thackeray to fall into hostile camps, swearing by one, and at the other, has its amusing side but is to be deprecated as irrational. Why should it be necessary to miss appreciation of the creator of "Vanity Fair" because one happens to like "David Copperfield"? Surely, our literary tastes or standards should be broad enough to admit into pleasurable companionship both those great early Victorian novelists.