A plain memorial brass on the walls of Rochester Cathedral vindicates the share which the ancient city and its neighbourhood will always have in his fame. But most touching of all it is to think of him under the trees of his own garden on the hill, in the pleasant home where, after so many labours and so many wanderings, he died in peace, and as one who had earned his rest.
CHAPTER VII.
THE FUTURE OF DICKENS’S FAME.
There is no reason whatever to believe that in the few years which have gone by since Dickens’s death the delight taken in his works throughout England and North America, as well as elsewhere, has diminished, or that he is not still one of our few most popular writers. The mere fact that his popularity has remained such since, nearly half a century ago, he, like a beam of spring sunshine, first made the world gay, is a sufficient indication of the influence which he must have exercised upon his age. In our world of letters his followers have been many, though naturally enough those whose original genius impelled them to follow their own course soonest ceased to be his imitators. Amongst these I know no more signal instance than the great novelist whose surpassing merits he had very swiftly recognised in her earliest work. For though in the Scenes of Clerical Life George Eliot seems to be, as it were, hesitating between Dickens and Thackeray as the models of her humorous writing, reminiscences of the former are unmistakable in the opening of Amos Barton, in Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story, in Janet’s Repentance; and though it would be hazardous to trace his influence in the domestic scenes in Adam Bede, neither a Christmas exordium in one of the books of The Mill on the Floss, nor the Sam Weller-like freshness of Bob Wakem in the same powerful story, is altogether the author’s own. Two of the most successful Continental novelists of the present day have gone to school with Dickens: the one the truly national writer whose Debit and Credit, a work largely in the manner of his English model, has, as a picture of modern life, remained unexcelled in German literature;[14] the other, the brilliant Southerner, who may write as much of the History of his Books as his public may desire to learn, but who cannot write the pathos of Dickens altogether out of Jack, or his farcical fun out of Le Nabab. And again—for I am merely illustrating, not attempting to describe, the literary influence of Dickens—who could fail to trace in the Californian studies and sketches of Bret Harte elements of humour and of pathos, to which that genuinely original author would be the last to deny that his great English “master” was no stranger?
Yet popularity and literary influence, however wide and however strong, often pass away as they have come; and in no field of literature are there many reputations which the sea of time fails before very long to submerge. In prose fiction—a comparatively young literary growth—they are certainly not the most numerous, perhaps because on works of this species the manners and style of an age most readily impress themselves, rendering them proportionately strange to the ages that come after. In the works of even the lesser playwrights who pleased the liberal times of Elizabeth, and in lyrics of even secondary merit that were admired by fantastic Caroline cavaliers, we can still take pleasure. But who can read many of the “standard” novels published as lately even as the days of George the Fourth? The speculation is, therefore, not altogether idle, whether Dickens saw truly when labouring, as most great men do labour, in the belief that his work was not only for a day. Literary eminence was the only eminence he desired, while it was one of the very healthiest elements in his character, that whatever he was, he was thoroughly. He would not have told any one, as Fielding’s author told Mr. Booth at the sponging-house, that romance-writing “is certainly the easiest work in the world;” nor, being what he was, could he ever have found it such in his own case. “Whoever,” he declared, “is devoted to an art must be content to give himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it.” And not only did he obey his own labour-laws, but in the details of his work as a man of letters he spared no pains and no exercise of self-control. “I am,” he generously told a beginner, to whom he was counselling patient endeavour, “an impatient and impulsive person myself, but it has been for many years the constant effort of my life to practise at my desk what I preach to you.” Never, therefore has a man of letters had a better claim to be judged by his works. As he expressly said in his will, he wished for no other monument than his writings; and with their aid we, who already belong to a new generation, and whose children will care nothing for the gossip and the scandal of which he, like most popular celebrities, was in his lifetime privileged or doomed to become the theme, may seek to form some definite conception of his future place among illustrious Englishmen.
It would, of course, be against all experience to suppose that to future generations Dickens, as a writer, will be all that he was to his own. Much that constitutes the subject, or at least furnishes the background, of his pictures of English life, like the Fleet Prison and the Marshalsea, has vanished, or is being improved off the face of the land. The form, again, of Dickens’s principal works may become obsolete, as it was in a sense accidental. He was the most popular novelist of his day; but should prose fiction, or even the full and florid species of it which has enjoyed so long-lived a favour ever be out of season, the popularity of Dickens’s books must experience an inevitable diminution. And even before that day arrives not all the works in a particular species of literature that may to a particular age have seemed destined to live, will have been preserved. Nothing is more surely tested by time than that originality which is the secret of a writer’s continuing to be famous, and continuing to be read.
Dickens was not—and to whom in these latter ages of literature could such a term be applied?—a self-made writer, in the sense that he owed nothing to those who had gone before him. He was most assuredly no classical scholar—how could he have been? But I should hesitate to call him an ill-read man, though he certainly was neither a great nor a catholic reader, and though he could not help thinking about Nicholas Nickleby while he was reading the Curse of Kehama. In his own branch of literature his judgment was sound and sure-footed. It was, of course, a happy accident that as a boy he imbibed that taste for good fiction which is a thing inconceivable to the illiterate. Sneers have been directed against the poverty of his book-shelves in his earlier days of authorship; but I fancy there were not many popular novelists in 1839 who would have taken down with them into the country for a summer sojourn, as Dickens did to Petersham, not only a couple of Scott’s novels, but Goldsmith, Swift, Fielding, Smollett, and the British Essayists; nor is there one of these national classics—unless it be Swift—with whom Dickens’s books or letters fail to show him to have been familiar. Of Goldsmith’s books, he told Forster, in a letter which the biographer of Goldsmith modestly suppressed, he “had no indifferent perception—to the best of his remembrance—when little more than a child.” He discusses with understanding the relative literary merits of the serious and humorous papers in The Spectator; and, with regard to another work of unique significance in the history of English fiction, Robinson Crusoe, he acutely observed that “one of the most popular books on earth has nothing in it to make any one laugh or cry.” “It is a book,” he added, which he “read very much.” It may be noted, by-the-way, that he was an attentive and judicious student of Hogarth; and that thus his criticisms of humorous pictorial art rested upon as broad a basis of comparison as did his judgment of his great predecessors in English humorous fiction.
Amongst these predecessors it has become usual to assert that Smollett exercised the greatest influence upon Dickens. It is no doubt true that in David Copperfield’s library Smollett’s books are mentioned first, and in the greatest number, that a vision of Roderick Random and Strap haunted the very wicket-gate at Blunderstone, that the poor little hero’s first thought on entering the King’s Bench prison was the strange company whom Roderick met in the Marshalsea; and that the references to Smollett and his books are frequent in Dickens’s other books and in his letters. Leghorn seemed to him “made illustrious” by Smollett’s grave, and in a late period of his life he criticises his chief fictions with admirable justice. “Humphry Clinker,” he writes, “is certainly Smollett’s best. I am rather divided between Peregrine Pickle and Roderick Random, both extraordinarily good in their way, which is a way without tenderness; but you will have to read them both, and I send the first volume of Peregrine as the richer of the two.” An odd volume of Peregrine was one of the books with which the waiter at the Holly Tree Inn endeavoured to beguile the lonely Christmas of the snowed-up traveller, but the latter “knew every word of it already.” In the Lazy Tour, “Thomas, now just able to grope his way along, in a doubled-up condition, was no bad embodiment of Commodore Trunnion.” I have noted, moreover, coincidences of detail which bear witness to Dickens’s familiarity with Smollett’s works. To Lieutenant Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as to Captain Cuttle, every man was a “brother,” and to the Commodore, as to Mr. Smallweed, the most abusive substantive addressed to a woman admitted of intensification by the epithet “brimstone.” I think Dickens had not forgotten the opening of the Adventures of an Atom when he wrote a passage in the opening of his own Christmas Carol; and that the characters of Tom Pinch and Tommy Traddles—the former more especially—were not conceived without some thought of honest Strap. Furthermore, it was Smollett’s example that probably suggested to Dickens the attractive jingle in the title of his Nicholas Nickleby. But these are for the most part mere details. The manner of Dickens as a whole resembles Fielding’s more strikingly than Smollett’s, as it was only natural that it should. The irony of Smollett is drier than was reconcilable with Dickens’s nature; it is only in the occasional extravagances of his humour that the former anticipates anything in the latter, and it is only the coarsest scenes of Dickens’s earlier books—such as that between Noah, Charlotte, and Mrs. Sowerbery in Oliver Twist—which recall the whole manner of his predecessor. They resemble one another in their descriptive accuracy, and in the accumulation of detail by which they produce instead of obscuring vividness of impression; but it was impossible that Dickens should prefer the general method of the novel of adventure pure and simple, such as Smollett produced after the example of Gil Blas, to the less crude form adopted by Fielding, who adhered to earlier and nobler models. With Fielding’s, moreover, Dickens’s whole nature was congenial; they both had that tenderness which Smollett lacked; and the circumstance that, of all English writers of the past, Fielding’s name alone was given by Dickens to one of his sons, shows how, like so many of Fielding’s readers, he had learnt to love him with an almost personal affection. The very spirit of the author of Tom Jones—that gaiety which, to borrow the saying of a recent historian concerning Cervantes, renders even brutality agreeable, and that charm of sympathetic feeling which makes us love those of his characters which he loves himself—seem astir in some of the most delightful passages of Dickens’s most delightful books. So in Pickwick, to begin with, in which, by the way, Fielding is cited with a twinkle of the eye all his own, and in Martin Chuzzlewit, where a chapter opens with a passage which is pure Fielding: