"Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse to constancy confined,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
'Fair, kind, and true' is all my argument,
'Fair, kind, and true' varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent."
But the novelist, when he takes himself too seriously as the man who is to show us "life as it is," is not content to acknowledge his limitations. When he pictures a situation in which there is nothing but a succession of problems and misunderstandings, he asks us to admire his austere faithfulness. Faithful he may be to his Art, as he understands it, but he is not faithful to reality, unless he is able to make us see ordinary people in the act of enjoying themselves.
The most obvious thing in life is that people are seldom as unhappy as their circumstances would lead us to expect. Nobody is happy all the time, and if he were, nobody is enough of a genius to make his undeviating felicity interesting. But a great many people are happy most of the time, and almost everybody has been happy at some time or other. It may have been only a momentary experience, but it was very real, and he likes to think about it. He is excessively grateful to any one who recalls the feeling. The point is that the aggregate of these good times makes a considerable amount of cheerfulness.
Dickens does not attempt the impossible literary feat of showing us one person who is happy all the time, but he does what is more obvious, he makes us see a great many people who have snatches of good cheer in the midst of their humdrum lives. He lets us see another obvious fact, that happiness is more a matter of temperament than of circumstance. It is not given as a reward of merit or as a mark of distinguished consideration. There is one perennial fountain of pleasure. Any one can have a good time who can enjoy himself. Dickens was not above celebrating the kind of happiness which comes to the natural man and the natural boy through what we call the "creature comforts." He could sympathize with the unadulterated self-satisfaction of little Jack Horner when
"He put in his thumb
And pulled out a plum,
And said, 'What a great boy am I!'"
The finding of the plum was not a matter of world-wide importance, but it was a great pleasure for Jack Horner, and he did not care who knew it.
What joy Mr. Micawber gets out of his own eloquence! We cannot begrudge him this unearned increment. We sympathize, as, "much affected, but still intensely enjoying himself, Mr. Micawber folded up his letter and handed it with a bow to my aunt as something she might like to keep."
And R. Wilfer, despite his meagre salary, and despite Mrs. Wilfer, enjoys himself whenever he gets a chance. When he goes to Greenwich with Bella he finds everything as it should be. "Everything was delightful. The Park was delightful; the punch was delightful, the dishes of fish were delightful; the wine was delightful." If that was not happiness, what was it?
Said R. Wilfer: "Supposing a man to go through life, we won't say with a companion, but we will say with a tune. Very good. Supposing the tune allotted to him was the 'Dead March' in 'Saul.' Well. It would be a very suitable tune for particular occasions—none more so—but it would be difficult to keep time with it in the ordinary run of domestic transactions."
It is a matter of common observation that those who have allotted to them the most solemn music do not always keep time with it. In the "ordinary run of domestic transactions" they find many little alleviations. In the aggregate these amount to a considerable blessing. The world may be rough, and many of its ways may be cruel, but for all that it is a joyful sensation to be alive, and the more alive we are, the better we like it. All of which is very obvious, and it is what we want somebody to point out for us again and again.