turns Magwitch into a sort of pantomime wicked uncle, or, if one sees him
through the child's eyes, into an appalling monster. Later in the book he
is to be represented as neither, and his exaggerated gratitude, on which
the plot turns, is to be incredible because of just this speech. As
usual, Dickens's imagination has overwhelmed him. The picturesque details
were too good to be left out. Even with characters who are more of a
piece than Magwitch he is liable to be tripped up by some seductive
phrase. Mr. Murdstone, for instance, is in the habit of ending David
Copperfield's lessons every morning with a dreadful sum in arithmetic.
'If I go into a cheesemonger's shop, and buy four thousand
double-Gloucester cheeses at fourpence halfpenny each, present payment',
it always begins. Once again the typical Dickens detail, the
double-Gloucester cheeses. But it is far too human a touch for Murdstone;
he would have made it five thousand cashboxes. Every time this note is
struck, the unity of the novel suffers. Not that it matters very much,
because Dickens is obviously a writer whose parts are greater than his
wholes. He is all fragments, all details--rotten architecture, but
wonderful gargoyles--and never better than when he is building up some
character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently.
Of course it is not usual to urge against Dickens that he makes his
characters behave inconsistently. Generally he is accused of doing just
the opposite. His characters are supposed to be mere 'types', each
crudely representing some single trait and fitted with a kind of label by
which you recognize him. Dickens is 'only a caricaturist'--that is the
usual accusation, and it does him both more and less than justice. To
begin with, he did not think of himself as a caricaturist, and was
constantly setting into action characters who ought to have been purely
static. Squeers, Micawber, Miss Mowcher,[Note, below] Wegg, Skimpole,
Pecksniff and many others are finally involved in 'plots' where they are
out of place and where they behave quite incredibly. They start off as
magic-lantern slides and they end by getting mixed up in a third-rate
movie. Sometimes one can put one's finger on a single sentence in which
the original illusion is destroyed. There is such a sentence in DAVID
COPPERFIELD. After the famous dinner-party (the one where the leg of
mutton was underdone), David is showing his guests out. He stops Traddles
at the top of the stairs:
[Note: Dickens turned Miss Mowcher into a sort of heroine because the
real woman whom he had caricatured had read the earlier chapters and
was bitterly hurt. He had previously meant her to play a villainous part.
But ANY action by such a character would seem incongruous. (Author's
footnote)]
'Traddles', said I, 'Mr. Micawber don't mean any harm, poor fellow: but
if I were you I wouldn't lend him anything.'
'My dear Copperfield', returned Traddles, smiling, 'I haven't got
anything to lend.'
'You have got a name, you know,' I said.
At the place where one reads it this remark jars a little though
something of the kind was inevitable sooner or later. The story is a
fairly realistic one, and David is growing up; ultimately he is bound to
see Mr. Micawber for what he is, a cadging scoundrel. Afterwards, of
course, Dickens's sentimentality overcomes him and Micawber is made to
turn over a new leaf. But from then on, the original Micawber is never
quite recaptured, in spite of desperate efforts. As a rule, the 'plot' in
which Dickens's characters get entangled is not particularly credible,
but at least it makes some pretence at reality, whereas the world to
which they belong is a never-never land, a kind of eternity. But just
here one sees that 'only a caricaturist' is not really a condemnation.
The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he
was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of
his genius. The monstrosities that he created are still remembered as
monstrosities, in spite of getting mixed up in would-be probable
melodramas. Their first impact is so vivid that nothing that comes
afterwards effaces it. As with the people one knew in childhood, one
seems always to remember them in one particular attitude, doing one
particular thing. Mrs. Squeers is always ladling out brimstone and
treacle, Mrs. Gummidge is always weeping, Mrs. Gargery is always banging
her husband's head against the wall, Mrs. Jellyby is always scribbling
fixed up for ever like little twinkling miniatures painted on snuffbox
lids, completely fantastic and incredible, and yet somehow more solid and
infinitely more memorable than the efforts of serious novelists. Even by
the standards of his time Dickens was an exceptionally artificial writer.
As Ruskin said, he 'chose to work in a circle of stage fire.' His
characters are even more distorted and simplified than Smollett's. But
there are no rules in novel-writing, and for any work of art there is
only one test worth bothering about--survival. By this test Dickens's
characters have succeeded, even if the people who remember them hardly
think of them as human beings. They are monsters, but at any rate they
exist.
But all the same there is a disadvantage in writing about monsters. It
amounts to this, that it is only certain moods that Dickens can speak to.
There are large areas of the human mind that he never touches. There is
no poetic feeling anywhere in his books, and no genuine tragedy, and even
sexual love is almost outside his scope. Actually his books are not so
sexless as they are sometimes declared to be, and considering the time in
which he was writing, he is reasonably frank. But there is not a trace in
him of the feeling that one finds in MANON LESCAUT, SALAMMB�, CARMEN,
WUTHERING HEIGHTS. According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said
that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of
Dickens. There are whole worlds which he either knows nothing about or
does not wish to mention. Except in a rather roundabout way, one cannot
learn very much from Dickens. And to say this is to think almost
immediately of the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. Why
is it that Tolstoy's grasp seems to be so much larger than
Dickens's--why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more ABOUT
YOURSELF? It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last
analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about people who
are growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas
Dickens's are already finished and perfect. In my own mind Dickens's
people are present far more often and far more vividly than Tolstoy's,
but always in a single unchangeable attitude, like pictures or pieces of
furniture. You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens
character as you can with, say, Peter Bezoukhov. And this is not merely
because of Tolstoy's greater seriousness, for there are also comic
characters that you can imagine yourself talking to--Bloom, for
instance, or Pecuchet, or even Wells's Mr. Polly. It is because
Dickens's characters have no mental life. They say perfectly the thing
that they have to say, but they cannot be conceived as talking about
anything else. They never learn, never speculate. Perhaps the most
meditative of his characters is Paul Dombey, and his thoughts are mush.
Does this mean that Tolstoy's novels are 'better' than Dickens's? The
truth is that it is absurd to make such comparisons in terms of 'better'
and 'worse'. If I were forced to compare Tolstoy with Dickens, I should
say that Tolstoy's appeal will probably be wider in the long run,
because Dickens is scarcely intelligible outside the English-speaking
culture; on the other hand, Dickens is able to reach simple people,
which Tolstoy is not. Tolstoy's characters can cross a frontier, Dickens
can be portrayed on a cigarette-card. But one is no more obliged to
choose between them than between a sausage and a rose. Their purposes
barely intersect.
VI
If Dickens had been merely a comic writer, the chances are that no one
would now remember his name. Or at best a few of his books would survive
in rather the same way as books like FRANK FAIRLEIGH, MR. VERDANT GREEN
and MRS. CAUDLE'S CURTAIN LECTURES, as a sort of hangover of the
Victorian atmosphere, a pleasant little whiff of oysters and brown stout.
Who has not felt sometimes that it was 'a pity' that Dickens ever
deserted the vein of PICKWICK for things like LITTLE DORRIT and HARD
TIMES? What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall
write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would
write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is
not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward
curve is implied in the upper one. Joyce has to start with the frigid
WAKE, but ULYSSES and PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST are part of the trajectory.
The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which he was
not really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember him, was
simply the fact that he was a moralist, the consciousness of 'having
something to say'. He is always preaching a sermon, and that is the final
secret of his inventiveness. For you can only create if you can CARE.
Types like Squeers and Micawber could not have been produced by a hack
writer looking for something to be funny about. A joke worth laughing at
always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is
able to go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and
authority is always there to be laughed at. There is always room for one
more custard pie.
His radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that it
is there. That is the difference between being a moralist and a
politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of
the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception
that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, 'Behave decently',
which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so shallow as it
sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine
that everything can be put right by altering the SHAPE of society; once
that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any
other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of
his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What he is out against is
not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it, 'an expression
on the human face.' Roughly speaking, his morality is the Christian
morality, but in spite of his Anglican upbringing he was essentially a
Bible-Christian, as he took care to make plain when writing his will. In
any case he cannot properly be described as a religious man. He
'believed', undoubtedly, but religion in the devotional sense does not
seem to have entered much into his thoughts [Note, below]. Where he is
Christian is in his quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against
the oppressors. As a matter of course he is on the side of the underdog,
always and everywhere. To carry this to its logical conclusion one has
got to change sides when the underdog becomes an upper-dog, and in fact
Dickens does tend to do so. He loathes the Catholic Church, for instance,
but as soon as the Catholics are persecuted (BARNABY RUDGE) he is on
their side. He loathes the aristocratic class even more, but as soon as
they are really overthrown (the revolutionary chapters in A TALE OF TWO
CITIES) his sympathies swing round. Whenever he departs from this
emotional attitude he goes astray. A well-known example is at the ending
of DAVID COPPERFIELD, in which everyone who reads it feels that something
has gone wrong. What is wrong is that the closing chapters are pervaded,
faintly but not noticeably, by the cult of success. It is the gospel
according to Smiles, instead of the gospel according to Dickens. The
attractive, out-at-elbow characters are got rid of, Micawber makes a
fortune, Heep gets into prison--both of these events are flagrantly
impossible--and even Dora is killed off to make way for Agnes. If you
like, you can read Dora as Dickens's wife and Agnes as his sister-in-law,
but the essential point is that Dickens has 'turned respectable' and done
violence to his own nature. Perhaps that is why Agnes is the most
disagreeable of his heroines, the real legless angel of Victorian
romance, almost as bad as Thackeray's Laura.
[Note: From a letter to his youngest son (in 1868): 'You will remember that
you have never at home been harassed about religious observances, or mere
formalities. I have always been anxious not to weary my children with
such things, before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them.
You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress
upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from
Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you
humbly but heartily respect it...Never abandon the wholesome practice of
saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never
abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it.' (Author's footnote)]
No grown-up person can read Dickens without feeling his limitations, and
yet there does remain his native generosity of mind, which acts as a kind
of anchor and nearly always keeps him where he belongs. It is probably
the central secret of his popularity. A good-tempered antinomianism
rather of Dickens's type is one of the marks of Western popular culture.
One sees it in folk-stories and comic songs, in dream-figures like Mickey
Mouse and Pop-eye the Sailor (both of them variants of Jack the
Giant-killer), in the history of working-class Socialism, in the popular
protests (always ineffective but not always a sham) against imperialism,
in the impulse that makes a jury award excessive damages when a rich
man's car runs over a poor man; it
is the feeling that one is always on
the wrong side of the underdog, on the side of the weak against the
strong. In one sense it is a feeling that is fifty years out of date. The
common man is still living in the mental world of Dickens, but nearly
every modern intellectual has gone over to some or other form of
totalitarianism. From the Marxist or Fascist point of view, nearly all
that Dickens stands for can be written off as 'bourgeois morality'. But
in moral outlook no one could be more 'bourgeois' than the English
working classes. The ordinary people in the Western countries have never
entered, mentally, into the world of 'realism' and power-politics. They
may do so before long, in which case Dickens will be as out of date as
the cab-horse. But in his own age and ours he has been popular chiefly
because he was able to express in a comic, simplified and therefore
memorable form the native decency of the common man. And it is important
that from this point of view people of very different types can be
described as 'common'. In a country like England, in spite of its
class-structure, there does exist a certain cultural unity. All through
the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the
Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is
only an IDEA, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society. The most
atrocious injustices, cruelties, lies, snobberies exist everywhere, but
there are not many people who can regard these things with the same
indifference as, say, a Roman slave-owner. Even the millionaire suffers
from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton.
Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally
to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code which was and on
the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it. It is
difficult otherwise to explain why he could be both read by working
people (a thing that has happened to no other novelist of his stature)
and buried in Westminster Abbey.
When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the
impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not
necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with
Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though
in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not
want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer OUGHT to have.
Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of
Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of
about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a
touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the
face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in
the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is GENEROUSLY
ANGRY--in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free
intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little
orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.
CHARLES READE (1940)
Since Charles Reade's books are published in cheap editions one can
assume that he still has his following, but it is unusual to meet anyone
who has voluntarily read him. In most people his name seems to evoke, at
most, a vague memory of 'doing' THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH as a school
holiday task. It is his bad luck to be remembered by this particular
book, rather as Mark Twain, thanks to the films, is chiefly remembered by
A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT. Reade wrote several dull
books, and THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH is one of them. But he also wrote
three novels which I personally would back to outlive the entire works of
Meredith and George Eliot, besides some brilliant long-short stories such
as A JACK OF ALL TRADES and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A THIEF.
What is the attraction of Reade? At bottom it is the same charm as one