Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 1085
It is notable that his next work was Oliver Twist (1838); which might be meant for a contrast to Pickwick. If the first trick had succeeded, nobody could accuse the conjurer of trying the same trick twice. He was probably proud of proving his range; but he was certainly courageous in testing his popularity. It is true that Oliver Twist consists of a queer mixture of melodrama and realism; but both the realism and the melodrama are deliberately dark and grim. Nevertheless it is fortunate that with his second book he thus brought into play what may be called his second talent. It is too common to compare his humour with his pathos; for indeed there is no comparison. But there really is a comparison between his humour and his horror; and he really had a talent for a certain sort of horror, which is exactly rendered by the popular phrase of supping on horrors. For there is a sort of lurid conviviality that accompanies the panic; as if the nightmare could accompany and not follow the heavy meal. This suppressed vitality is due to his never for an instant losing the love of life; the love of death, which is despair and pessimism, was meaningless to him till he died. The sort of horror which afterwards conceived the death of Krook is already found in Oliver Twist; as in that intolerable repetition throbbing in the murderer’s ears; “will wash out mud-stains, blood-stains” and so on. For the rest, the plot is preposterous and the flashes of fun excellent but few; yet there is another aspect of the book which makes it important in the story of Dickens. It is not only the first of his nightmare novels, but also the first of his social tracts. Something of social protest could be read between the lines of Pickwick in prison; but the prison of Pickwick was very mild compared with the charitable almshouse of Oliver. Dickens is witness, with Hood and Cobbett and many others, that the workhouse was felt by all generous people as something quite unnaturally new and hard and inhuman. It is sometimes said that he killed Bumble; it would be easier to say that, by making Bumble live, he created something by which it will always be possible to kill bureaucracies.
Whether we call the transition from Pickwick to Oliver Twist a change from comedy to tragedy, or merely a change from farce to melodrama, it is notable that the next act of Dickens is to mix the two in about equal proportions. Having shown how much he can vary, he tries to show how well he can combine. It is worth noting because it explains much of the failure as well as the success of his art as a whole. We may even say that, to the last, this sort of exhibition of power remained his principal weakness. When the critics, like those of The Quarterly, called him vulgar, it meant nothing except that the critics themselves were snobbish. There is nothing vulgar about drinking beer or describing the drinking of beer, or enjoying the humours of really humorous people who happen to black boots, like Sam Weller. But there is something just a little vulgar about professing to be a Universal Provider; a man who writes not only something that he wants to write, but anything that anybody wants to read. Anything in his work that can really be called failure is very largely due to this appetite for universal success. There is nothing wrong about the jester laughing at his own jokes; indeed they must be very poor jokes if even he cannot laugh at them. Dickens, in one of those endless private letters which are almost more entertaining than his published novels, describes himself as “a if he thought he was very funny indeed”; and so he was. But when he set out to prove that he was not only very funny, but very pathetic, very tragic, very powerful, he was not always enjoying the sense of power over his work, he was enjoying the sense of power over his audience. He was an admirable actor in private theatricals; and sometimes, unfortunately, they were public theatricals. And on this side of his character he had the proverbial itch of Toole to act Hamlet. When he was rendering the humours of the crowd, he was that rather rare thing, a real democrat. But when he was trying to command the tears and thrills of the crowd, he was something of a demagogue; that is, not one mingling with the crowd, but one trying to dazzle and to drive it. One of the ways in which he displayed this attribute, if not of vulgarity at least of vanity, was in his habit, from this time onwards, of running side by side in the same book about five different stories in about five different styles. It pleased the actor in him to show his versatility and his ease in turning from one to the other. He did not realize clearly enough that in some of the parts he was a first-rate actor and in some a second-rate and in some a fifth-rate actor. He did not remind himself that though he turned to each topic with equal ease, he did not turn to each with equal effect. But, whatever the disadvantages of the universal ambition, it definitely dates from the period of his next book. Pickwick has a prevailing tint of gaiety and Oliver Twist of gravity, not to say grimness; but with Nicholas Nickleby (1839) we have the new method, which is like a pattern of bright and dark stripes. The melodrama is if possible even more melodramatic than in Oliver Twist; but what there is of it is equally black and scowling. But the comedy or farce has already displayed the rapid ripening of his real genius in letters. There is no better company in all literature than the strolling company of Mr. Vincent Crummles; though it is to be hoped that in any convivial meeting of it, Miss Snevellicci will remember to invite her incomparable papa. Mr. Mantalini also is one of the great gifts of Dickens to the enduring happiness of humanity. For the rest, it is very difficult to take the serious part of the story seriously. There is precious little difference between the rant and claptrap of the Crummles plays, which Dickens makes fun of, and the rant and claptrap of Ralph Nickleby and Mulberry Hawke which Dickens gravely narrates to us. All that, however, was of little consequence either immediate or permanent. Dickens was not proving that he could write smooth and probable narratives, which many people could do. He was proving that he could create Mantalini and Snevellicci, which nobody could do.
Nevertheless, this pretence of providing for all tastes, which produced the serio-comic novel, is also the explanation of the next stage of his career. There runs or recurs throughout his whole life a certain ambition to preside over a more or less complex or many-sided publication; a large framework for many pictures; a system of tales within tales like the Arabian Nights or the tales of the Tabard. It is the ambition that he afterwards gratified by becoming the editor of two magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round. But there is here something of a shadow of the original meaning of the word magazine, in the sense of a shop; and another hint of that excessive desire to keep a shop that sells everything. He had been for a time editor of something of the sort in Bentley’s Miscellany, but the final form taken by this mild and genial megalomania (if we may so describe it) was the plan which Dickens formed immediately after the success of Nicholas Nickleby. The serial scheme was to be called, “Master Humphrey’s Clock,” and was to consist of different stories told by a group of friends. With the idea of making them the more friendly he turned some of them into old friends; reintroducing Mr. Pickwick and the two Wellers, though these characters were hardly at their best, the author’s mind being already on other things. One of these things was a historical novel, perhaps conceived more in the romantic manner of Scott than the prosaic manner of Smollett, which Dickens generally followed. It was called Barnaby Rudge (1840) and the most interesting part of it perhaps is the business of the Gordon Riots; and the mob that has a madman for its mascot and penny-dreadful prentice for its comic relief. But there is also a plot as complicated as, though rather clearer than, that of Oliver Twist; a plot that intensely interested the detective mind of Poe. Barnaby Rudge, however, is not so directly Dickensian as the romance that preceded or the romance that followed it. The second story, somewhat insecurely wedged into the framework of Master Humphrey’s Clock, was The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), as the opening and some of the references in the story still vaguely attest. The public reception of this story very sharply illustrates what has been said about the double character of his success. On the one side was his true success as a craftsman carving figures of a certain type, generally gargoyles and grotesques. On the other side was his inferior success as a jack-of-all-trades tending only too much to be a cheapjack. As a matter of fact, The Old Curiosity Shop contains some of the most attractive and imaginative humour in all his humorous work; there is nothing better anywhere than Mr. Swiveller’s imitation of the brigand or Mr. Brass’s funeral oration over the dwarf. But in general gossip and association, everything else in the story is swallowed up in the lachrymose subject of Little Nell. There can be no doubt that this unfortunate female had a most unfortunate effect on Dickens’s whole conception of his literary function. He was flattered because silly people wrote him letters imploring him not to let Little Nell die; and forgot how many sensible people there were, only hoping that the Marchioness would live for ever. Little Nell was better dead, but she was an unconscionable long time dying; and we cannot altogether acquit Dickens of keeping her lingering in agony as an exhibition of his power. It tended to fix him in that unfortunate attitude, of something between a showman and a magician, which explains almost all the real mistakes of his life.
About this time a very determining event interrupted his purely literary development, his first visit to America. It was destined to have, apart from any other results, a direct effect upon his next book, which was Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). There were, of course, many purely practical and personal elements in the criticism which he directed against the western democracy. An unjust copyright law, or one which he at any rate thought very unjust, had enabled Americans to pirate his most popular works; and it would seem that the people he met were, in their breezy way, but little inclined to apologize for the anomaly. But it would be very unjust to Dickens to deny that his sense and sensibility were alike irritated by some real divisions in the international relation. There were things in the American culture, or lack of culture, which he could not be expected to understand but which he might reasonably be expected to dislike. His English law-abiding liberalism would in any case have been startled by a certain streak of ferocity and persecution that there really is in the Americans; just as he might have recoiled from the same fierceness in the Irish or the Italians. But in the Americans it was also connected with something crude and incomplete in the society, and was not softened by tradition or romance. He was also both annoyed and amused at the American habit of uttering solemn idealistic soliloquies and of using rhetoric very rhetorically. But all these impressions are important chiefly as they changed the course of his next important narrative; and illustrated a certain condition or defect of his whole narrative method.
All these early books of Dickens, from Pickwick onward, appeared, it must always be remembered, serially and in separate parts. They were anticipated eagerly like bulletins; and they were often written up to time almost as hastily as newspaper reports. One effect of this method was that it encouraged the novelist in a sort of opportunism and something of a hand to mouth habit of work. And a character that always belonged, in varying degrees, to his novels is first and most sharply illustrated in Martin Chuzzlewit. The earlier numbers, though they contained the two superb caricatures called Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp, had not for some reason been so popular as the caricatures called Pickwick and Miss Squeers. Dickens was already beginning to show something of that feverish fatigue which was the natural reaction of his fervid industry. He feared that the public was bored with the book; he became perhaps subconsciously a little bored with it himself. He conceived the bold idea of breaking the story in the middle and putting in a purple patch woven from his wild memories of the Yankees. It was completely successful, in the comedy sense; but it is worth noting that Dickens did something curiously Dickensian in thus suddenly sending Martin Chuzzlewit across the sea to America. It is not easy to imagine Thackeray suddenly hurling Pendennis from Mayfair into the middle of Australia; or George Eliot dislodging Felix Holt and flinging him as far as the North Pole. The difference was partly the result of the Dickensian temper and partly of the method of publication. But it will be well to remember it: for there is more than one example of what looks like a positive change of plan in the Dickens stories, made more possible by this early habit of not producing the work of art as a whole. Some have suggested that the degeneration of Boffin was originally meant to be real, and his rather clumsy plot an afterthought: and the same idea has figured in the reconstructions of Edwin Drood.
At this point there is a break in the life of Dickens, in more ways than one. It is represented by his decision to live abroad for a time, chiefly on grounds of economy; the last lingering results of the relative failure of Martin Chuzzlewit. He took a villa in the neighbourhood of Genoa in 1844; and he and his family, already a fairly large one, settled down there with a certain air of finality that deserved for a time the name of exile. But it is curious to note that the literary work done there has something of the character of an interlude, and indeed of a rather incongruous interlude. For it was in that Italian landscape that he concentrated on a study so very domestic, insular and even cockney as The Chimes (1845); and industriously continued the series of short Christmas stories which had recently begun in the very London fog of A Christmas Carol (1843). Whatever be the merits or demerits of the Christmas Carol, it really is a carol; in the sense of being short and direct and having the same chorus throughout. The same is true in another way of The Chimes; and of most things that occupied him in his Italian home. He had not settled down to another long and important book; and it soon became apparent that he had not settled down at all. He returned to London, the landscape which for him was really the most romantic and even historic; and did something so ominously typical of the place and time as almost to seem like tempting Providence. He became the first editor of the Daily News, a paper started to maintain those Liberal, if not Radical opinions of which he always shared the confident outlook and the humane simplicity. He did not long remain attached to the editorial chair or even to the metropolis, for this was the most restless period in all his restless life. He immediately went back to Lausanne and immediately wanted to go back to London. It seems probable that this break in his social life corresponded to a break in his artistic life: which was in a sense just about to begin all over again and begin at the other end. He did indeed write one more full-size novel of the earlier type, Dombey and Son (1846-48); but it has very much the character of the winding up of an old business, like the winding up of the Dombey firm at the end of it. It is comic as the earlier books were comic, and no praise can be higher; it is conventional as the earlier plots were conventional, and never really pretended to be anything else; it contains a dying child upon the pattern of Little Nell; it contains a very amusing major much improved from the pattern of Mr. Dowler. But underneath all this easy repetition of the old dexterity and the old clumsiness the mind of the conjurer is already elsewhere. Dombey and Son was more successful in a business sense than Martin Chuzzlewit; though really less successful in many others. Dickens settled again in England in a more prosperous style; sent his son to Eton and, what was more sensational, took a rest. It was after a long holiday at Broadstairs, in easier circumstances more favourable to imaginative growth and a general change of view, that there appeared in 1849 an entirely new novel in an entirely new style.
There is all the difference between the life and adventures of David Copperfield and the life and adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, that there is between the life of Charles Dickens and the life of Amadis of Gaul. The latter is a good or bad romance; the former is a romantic biography, only the more realistic for being romantic. For romance is a very real part of life and perhaps the most real part of youth. Dickens had turned the telescope round or was looking through the other end of it; looking perhaps into a mirror, looking in any case out of a new window. It was life as he saw it, which was somewhat fantastically; but it was his own life as he knew it, and even as he had lived it. In other words, it is fanciful but it is not fictitious; because not merely invented in the manner of fiction. In Pickwick or Nickleby he had in a sense breathed fresh imaginative life into stock characters, but they were still stage characters; in the new style he may be extravagant, but he is not stagey. That vague glow of exaggeration and glamour which lies over all the opening chapters of David Copperfield, which dilates some figures and distorts others, is the genuine sentimentalism and suppressed passion of youth; it is no longer a convention or tradition of caricature. There are men like Steerforth and girls like Dora; they are not as boys see them; but boys do see them so. This passionate autobiography, though it stiffens into greater conventionality at the real period of passion, is really, in the dismally battered phrase, a human document. But something of the new spirit, more subtle and sympathetic but perhaps less purely creative, belongs to all the books written after this date. The next of the novels in point of time was Bleak House (1853), a satire chiefly directed against Chancery and the law’s delay, but containing some brilliant satire on other things, as on the philanthropic fool whose eyes are in the ends of the earth. But the description of the feverish idleness of Rick has the new note of one for whom a well-meaning young man is no longer merely a “first walking gentleman.” After a still more severe phase in Hard Times (1854) (historically important as the revolt of a Radical against the economic individualism which was originally identified with Radicalism) he continued the same tendency in Little Dorrit (1857), the tone of which is perhaps as sad as anything illustrated by Dickensian humours can be; broke off into an equally serious and more sensational experiment in historical romance in The Tale of Two Cities (1859), largely an effect of the influence of Carlyle; and finally reached what was perhaps the height of his new artistic method in a purely artistic sense. He never wrote anything better, considered as literature, than the first chapters of Great Expectations (1861). But there is, after all, something about Dickens that prevents the critic from being ever quite content with criticizing his work as literature. Something larger seems involved, which is not literature, but life; and yet the very opposite of a mere recorded way of living. And he who remembers Pickwick and Pecksniff, creatures like Puck or Pan, may sometimes wonder whether the work had not most life when it was least lifelike.
