Collected Essays (11 page)

The most fascinating feature of this autobiographical novel – written apparently with the idea of blackmailing Nell’s stubborn parents into returning his mistress whom they had rather roughly taken from him – is a pink ribbon. Nell gave him this to tie round his guitar, and in a fit of jealousy he removed it and substituted a white one, ‘which hung over Nell’, in Dr Tompkins’s words, ‘like a sign of wrath and estrangement, to be removed only by an abasement of devotion’. How we keep our eyes on that guitar! ‘When will the ribbon be changed? how far must she go?’ The answer is – a very long way; every man in that rational and rather lubricious age felt that he had a right to life, liberties, and the pursuit of happiness. An Act and Deed signed and dated by Nell guaranteed Ramble’s sole possession of her body: but the white ribbon remained on the guitar. One day, overcome by a violent fit of toothache when he was walking with Nell, Ramble sought an inn. ‘There was a bed in the room . . .. Situations at
times
are so critical that it is not in the power of us mortals to resist.’ Nevertheless the pink ribbon was not restored, and as the suspense grows the ribbons become identified in our mind with the black and the white sails for which Tristram waited; but this is life – grotesque and comic – not fiction. The ribbon remained white even after her attempted suicide in the Serpentine, after she had scalded her hand to prove the resolution of her love, and after she had borne unflinchingly his murderous assault with a tea knife. Only when she had deserted her parents and deceived her mother did the white ribbon give place to the pink. ‘I made her no answer, but got up directly, and then put the exiled ribbon on my guitar, and showing it to her, I said, look here. – You remember the token.’ But they didn’t marry: as Ramble put it to Mrs Macpherson, ‘Call to mind the delicacy of marrying a Girl too soon after the loss of her honour.’ There is an odd realistic charm about this transparent romance: it emerges from the vivid and surprising ‘properties’ – toothache and Hyde Park, the Serpentine and Pimlico and the pink ribbon and a kettle of boiling water, Nell’s uncle called McClack who was too much for not very brave Ramble, and a poor relation called Mrs Drulin; and like most of the romances in this book it is conveyed to us by Dr Tompkins with elegance and wit.

Indeed we have so much reason for gratitude that it seems surly to complain that the volume has
longueurs;
that there are occasions when Dr Tompkins seems to take a little too seriously the
literary
interest of the Bristol Milkwoman or Mary Hays. She puts as her epigraph a rather unwise remark of G. K. Chesterton, ‘It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet’, and sometimes her investigation of these obscure works becomes too whimsical-serious. The real interest in the bad poet is not literary but psychological – the twist in Dr Downman’s character which induced him to put into blank verse his advice to mothers on ‘rickets, regular meals and a fruit diet’, and we feel Dr Tompkins has struck a wrong note when she observes: ‘A nerve thrilled in him. He has directness of attack – a resonant simplicity in the opening line of a poem, that recalls Sidney.’ And occasionally she is guilty of such a phrase as ‘Downman zealously inverting the garden-mould with his new-found strength.’ It is as though she had been temporarily possessed by her curious by-way writers, with their strenuous euphuism – she will really have to be careful of Ramble.

1938

THE YOUNG DICKENS

A
CRITIC
must try to avoid being a prisoner of his time, and if we are to appreciate
Oliver Twist
at its full value we must forget that long shelf-load of books, all the stifling importance of a great author, the scandals and the controversies of the private life; it would be well too if we could forget the Phiz and the Cruikshank illustrations that have frozen the excited, excitable world of Dickens into a hall of waxworks, where Mr Mantalini’s whiskers have always the same trim, where Mr Pickwick perpetually turns up the tails of his coat, and in the Chamber of Horrors Fagin crouches over an undying fire. His illustrators, brilliant craftsmen though they were, did Dickens a disservice, for no character any more will walk for the first time into our memory as we ourselves imagine him and
our
imagination after all has just as much claim to truth as Cruikshank’s.

Nevertheless the effort to go back is well worth while. The journey is only a little more than a hundred years long, and at the other end of the road is a young author whose sole claim to renown in 1836 had been the publication of some journalistic sketches and a number of comic operettas:
The Strange Gentleman, The Village Coquette, Is She His Wife?
I doubt whether any literary Cortez at that date would have yet stood them upon his shelves. Then suddenly with
The Pickwick Papers
came popularity and fame. Fame falls like a dead hand on an author’s shoulder, and it is well for him when it falls only in later life. How many in Dickens’s place would have withstood what James called ‘the great corrupting contact of the public’, the popularity founded, as it almost always is, on the weakness and not the strength of an author?

The young Dickens, at the age of twenty-five, had hit on a mine that paid him a tremendous dividend. Fielding and Smollett, tidied and refined for the new industrial bourgeoisie, had both salted it; Goldsmith had contributed sentimentality and Monk Lewis horror. The book was enormous, shapeless, familiar (that important recipe for popularity). What Henry James wrote of a long-forgotten French critic applies well to the young Dickens: ‘He is homely, familiar and colloquial; he leans his elbows on his desk and does up his weekly budget into a parcel the reverse of compact. You can fancy him a grocer retailing tapioca and hominy full weight for the price; his style seems a sort of integument of brown paper.’

This is, of course, unfair to
The Pickwick Papers.
The driest critic could not have quite blinkered his eyes to those sudden wide illuminations of comic genius that flap across the waste of words like sheet lightning, but could he have foreseen the second novel, not a repetition of this great loose popular holdall, but a short melodrama, tight in construction, almost entirely lacking in broad comedy, and possessing only the sad twisted humour of the orphan’s asylum?

‘You’ll make your fortune, Mr Sowerberry,’ said the beadle, as he thrust his thumb and forefinger into the proffered snuff-box of the undertaker: which was an ingenious little model of a patent coffin.

Such a development was as inconceivable as the gradual transformation of that thick boggy prose into the delicate and exact poetic cadences, the music of memory, that so influenced Proust.

We are too inclined to take Dickens as a whole and to treat his juvenilia with the same kindness or harshness as his later work.
Oliver Twist
is still juvenilia – magnificent juvenilia: it is the first step on the road that led from
Pickwick
to
Great Expectations
, and we condone the faults of taste in the early book the more readily if we recognize the distance Dickens had to travel. These two typical didactic passages can act as the first two milestones at the opening of the journey, the first from
Pickwick
, the second from
Oliver Twist.

And numerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment. How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight, and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilized nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blest and happy.

The boy stirred and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection he had never known. Thus, a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes that never were in this life; which vanish like a breath; which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have awakened; which no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall.

The first is certainly brown paper: what it wraps has been chosen by the grocer to suit his clients’ tastes, but cannot we detect already in the second passage the tone of Dickens’s secret prose, that sense of a mind speaking to itself with no one there to listen, as we find it in
Great Expectations?

It was fine summer weather again, and, as I walked along, the times when I was a little helpless creature, and my sister did not spare me, vividly returned. But they returned with a gentle tone upon them that softened even the edge of Tickler. For now, the very breath of the beans and clover whispered to my heart that the day must come when it would be well for my memory that others walking in the sunshine should be softened as they thought of me.

It is a mistake to think of
Oliver Twist
as a realistic story: only late in his career did Dickens learn to write realistically of human beings: at the beginning he invented life and we no more believe in the temporal existence of Fagin or Bill Sikes than we believe in the existence of that Giant whom Jack slew as he bellowed his Fee Fi Fo Fum. There were real Fagins and Bill Sikes and real Bumbles in the England of his day, but he had not drawn them, as he was later to draw the convict Magwitch; these characters in
Oliver Twist
are simply parts of one huge invented scene, what Dickens in his own preface called ‘the cold wet shelterless midnight streets of London’, How the phrase goes echoing on through the books of Dickens until we meet it again so many years later in ‘the weary western streets of London on a cold dusty spring night’ which were so melancholy to Pip. But Pip was to be as real as the weary streets, while Oliver was as unrealistic as the cold wet midnight of which he formed a part.

This is not to criticize the book so much as to describe it. For what an imagination this youth of twenty-six had that he could invent so monstrous and complete a legend! We are not lost with Oliver Twist round Saffron Hill: we are lost in the interstices of one young, angry, gloomy brain, and the oppressive images stand out along the track like the lit figures in a Ghost Train tunnel.

Against the wall were ranged, in regular array, a long row of elm boards cut into the same shape, looking in the dim light, like high shouldered ghosts with their hands in their breeches pockets.

We have most of us seen those nineteenth-century prints where the bodies of naked women form the face of a character, the Diplomat, the Miser, and the like. So the crouching figure of Fagin seems to form the mouth, Sikes with his bludgeon the jutting features, and the sad lost Oliver the eyes of one man as lost as Oliver.

Chesterton, in a fine imaginative passage, has described the mystery behind Dickens’s plots, the sense that even the author was unaware of what was really going on, so that when the explanations come and we reach, huddled into the last pages of
Oliver Twist
, a naked complex narrative of illegitimacy and burnt wills and destroyed evidence, we simply do not believe.

The secrecy is sensational; the secret is tame. The surface of the thing seems more awful than the core of it. It seems almost as if these grisly figures, Mrs Chadband and Mrs Clennam, Miss Havisham and Miss Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, were keeping something back from the author as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know their real secret, They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth.

What strikes the attention most in this closed Fagin universe are the different levels of unreality. If, as one is inclined to believe, the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we all share, we can understand why Fagin and Sikes in their most extreme exaggerations move us more than the benevolence of Mr Brownlow or the sweetness of Mrs Maylie – they touch with fear as the others never really touch with love. It was not that the unhappy child, with his hurt pride and his sense of hopeless insecurity, had not encountered human goodness – he had simply failed to recognize it in those streets between Gadshill and Hungerford Market which had been as narrowly enclosed as Oliver Twist’s. When Dickens at this early period tried to describe goodness he seems to have remembered the small stationers’ shops on the way to the blacking factory with their coloured paper scraps of angels and virgins, or perhaps the face of some old gentleman who had spoken kindly to him outside Warren’s factory. He had swum up towards goodness from the deepest world of his experience, and on this shallow level the conscious brain has taken a hand, trying to construct characters to represent virtue and, because his age demanded it, triumphant virtue, but all he can produce are powdered wigs and gleaming spectacles and a lot of bustle with bowls of broth and a pale angelic face. Compare the way in which we first meet evil with his introduction of goodness.

The walls and ceiling of the room were perfectly black with age and dirt. There was a deal table before the fire: upon which were a candle, stuck in a ginger-beer bottle, two or three pewter pots, a loaf and butter, and a plate. In a frying pan, which was on the fire, and which was secured to the mantel-shelf by a string, some sausages were cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare . . . ‘This is him, Fagin,’ said Jack Dawkins: ‘my friend Oliver Twist.’ The Jew grinned; and, making a low obeisance to Oliver, took him by the hand, and hoped he should have the honour of his intimate acquaintance.