The Facts of Fiction (18 page)

For Dickens, it should be remembered, was a novelist with all the instincts of a dramatist. And he fitted all his characters with little tags that they could pull out as soon as they came on the stage he built for them. Polonius,
Mr. Pickwick, Falstaff, Mr. Micawber, Mr. Surface, Mr. Squeers, are all characters that could exist perhaps better on the stage than in a novel. They have all the qualifications for a good dramatic career. They are instantaneously recognisable, and they are masters of mannerism. They are always splendidly and isolatedly themselves. And because of some obscure vagary of the human intelligence their habit of saying the same thing, or the same sort of thing, with the remorseless iteration of a parrot, further endears them to their audience every time they say it.

To some extent they are the wastrels of prose fiction, these flat characters. I qualify the extent of their failure because, though it is easy enough to explain their charms away, their remarkable success obstinately remains. It is the flattest characters that often have the fattest reputations.

But the novel offers possibilities, carrying responsibilities with them, that do not exist in drama. The dramatist, with the supreme advantage of being able to put his characters—or, at least, flesh and blood people that, for a weekly arrangement with the manager, are willing for some hours every day to swear that they
are
the dramatist's characters—before his audience, also has to pay the supreme penalty. The field of life that is open before him is no larger than that illumined by an old-fashioned spyglass. He can exhibit everything material about his characters with incomparable ease of conviction. But in reality only a fraction of what happens to a man is capable or necessary of exhibition.

Indeed, when it comes to understanding the mind, it is a mere distraction to see the body—five feet six inches of it—and a face like someone's we know. Like a priest in a confessional we need to erect a filter between
ourselves and the body of the other soul, so that nothing irrelevant and distracting can penetrate.

And here the novelist is more fortunate than the dramatist. He can describe. He can remove the mind, by a piece of surgery that is almost invariably fatal in drama, and concern himself and his readers with it alone. He could keep Hamlet in soliloquy for a chapter, or two, or three, or for an entire novel if he wanted, instead of for a mere sixty-six lines. In short, the novelist has incomparable opportunities for providing his characters with a complete armoury of conflicting emotions and fears and ecstasies and sentiments, in addition to their primal literary motive; of making them real men, capable of failure—even of failure within the limits and intentions of the book; like the characters in a Russian novel that drift, aimless yet accurate, across the pages, and finally swerve right out of sight executing the broad curve of the question mark.

But with Dickens, as with Scott, his popularity is not so much a matter of present taste as of historic fact. To follow the small boy in the blacking warehouse, merging into the solicitor's clerk, becoming a parliamentary reporter whose voracious appetite for knowledge drove him into that huge, dull, circular eating-house, the British Museum Reading Room, contributing first his paper, “A Dinner in Poplar Walk ” to the
Monthly Magazine
, and then his “Sketches by Boz ” to the
Evening Chronicle
, and finally receiving one hundred and fifty pounds for them on republication, is to follow a young man on a prosperously ascending curve.

And to continue the curve so far as the publication of the
Pickwick Papers
is to arrive at a point that establishes Dickens on a unique pedestal of public good favour. The popularity of the
Pickwick Papers
grew with them.
Of the first part 400 copies were bound: of the last 40,000.

To call the
Pickwick Papers
an example of the slipshod, shambling work that Dickens produced is to waste criticism. It never was a novel. It was a great bundle of comic sketches published month by month, that comes no nearer to being a novel than a convivial evening's songs, bound between covers, would come to being a cantata.

But even if it was not a novel, it anticipated all that was to be characteristic of Dickens's novels. There was the same verbosity: the same rush of little inventions that go branching off the main stem like the tails on a monkey tree; the dismal clichés; the innocent and irrepressible vulgarity of the comedy.

That it was the work of a sentimentalist may be seen from the way in which Dickens puts the hands of his clock back to yesterday, the day in which all sentimentalists live. The background of his novels, indeed, was always the background of his own childhood. Coaching was as much out of date in Dickens's time as hansom cabs are now. The inn of escapades and adventures had already given place to the railway hotel of time-tables and propriety. But Dickens, like Smollett and Fielding, set out to erect a memorial to an age that was rapidly slipping out of sight.

Most of Dickens's novels, in fact, were out of date within his lifetime. To-day, when they are definitely antique, it does not worry us that they should once have been old-fashioned. But at the time it did.

One of the earliest critical commentators, Adolphus William Ward, writing in 1882, remarked, with the date stamped large on every word: “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.” But without drawing out the old tag, that human nature remains constant from age to age, we may say that farcical humour remains constant. Dogberry and the watch, and Fielding's watchman and Mr. Samuel Weller and Mr. W. W. Jacobs's nightwatchman are all members of an immutable brotherhood. And it does not matter that the Reform Act has made impossible a second election of Eatanswill. With farcical comedy it is enough that such things should have happened once.

After the
Pickwick Papers
, Dickens's genius split into two halves: art and energy. The first increased: the second diminished.

If
Pickwick
had been written with only as much vivacity and invention as went into
Little Dorrit
, it would have sagged throughout its artless length. If
Little Dorrit
had been as clumsy in construction as
Pickwick
, it would have nothing to commend it. As it is, each has something, and each has enough. For Dickens even in dilution remains unmistakably Dickens. And though
Our Mutual Friend
is poorish Dickens compared with, say,
David Copperfield
, and
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
is quite good Wilkie Collins, both are plainly stamped with the signature of “the Inimitable.”

That his invention wore thin is hardly surprising; he was writing with the printer at his elbow: not once was he a number ahead in the whole course of the periodical publication of
Nicholas Nickleby
.

Dickens has won a false reputation as a social reformer. He was something quite distinct. He was the warmhearted, hot-headed, sentimental humanitarian, with
nerves permanently on edge at the callousness of the rest of the world. His sort are a fair barometer of the feelings of the best; they are never anything to the worst.

Charles Reade, the good Samaritan, stuffed with facts from Blue Books as well as with indignation, was the true reformer; the kind of man to convince an M.P. Dickens's heart was always bleeding for someone; always rebelling against injustice.

This gallant anger was a substitute for much else in his life. His youth had left him insensible to those subtle things that are appreciated most by those who have known them when young. The world of formal beauty was undiscovered by him. Religion was a country that he saw only in passing through, and disliked. Ecstasy in any form was unknown to him. And in his novels he gives as much thought to love between the sexes as a healthy boy of twelve does. He enjoyed the comic gaucheries and pink-and-white tenderness of love-making without appearing even to understand what lay behind it all.

Yet Dickens himself was an exquisite and beautiful lover. It is true that he married the wrong woman. But the right one—his own sister-in-law—was so much to him that perhaps he left any hint of passionate devotion out of his books for the sincere and human reason that he disliked talking about it.

The girl was only seventeen when she died in 1837. “If she were with us now,” Dickens wrote in his Diary, “the same willing, happy, amiable companion, sympathising with all my thoughts and feelings more than anyone I knew ever did or will, I think I should have nothing to wish for but a continuance of such happiness.” And, in a letter to her mother, he wrote: “After she died, I dreamed of her every night for many weeks, and always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant
to me that I never lay down at night without a hope of the vision coming back in one shape or another. And so it did.”

Sooner or later some sublimely confident writer will assess the mystic contribution of Mary Hogarth to the genius of Charles Dickens. Possibly we have assessed it already in saying that he excluded real love from his novels with more than merely a casual disregard for it. For Mary was always in his mind. In his fifty-seventh year he wrote: “She is so much in my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful, and have greatly prospered in anything, that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is.”

Those last years had a sad influence on Dickens. Like Scott, he was trapped in the pit of his own energy. He was impelled through all the exhausting business of daily work, though the excuse for it was entirely absent. Like Scott, again, he rested his mind by walking great distances to tire his body.

But he was consuming his own frame by his restlessness. Even his handwriting shows how cruelly his body was being overdriven. He was naturally a whole platoon of men: but he tried to do the work of an army. To those that met him the essential concentration of vigour, of life even, was at once apparent. Leigh Hunt declared: “What a face is his to meet in a drawing-room! He has the life and soul in it of fifty human beings.”

And in the end, his face of steel—as Mrs. Carlyle called it—led to his destruction. It was such a magnificent headpiece that he could not be persuaded to cease displaying it. Dickens was an actor who had been suffered to escape from the stage. But the love of having all eyes fixed upon him remained.

Up to middle-age he commanded all the attention that he could desire simply by letting the perpetual fountain of his imagination send up its clouds and rainbows across the crowd. But as the fountain began to choke in its depths he adopted other means of attracting notice.

He became like a little god stepped down from his altar and gone off to canvass for new worshippers in the streets. He was as much a national figure as the Great Duke. People would break from the crowd to press his hand and thank him for having been himself: all of which was so gratifying that it led Dickens into giving that tragic series of readings, throughout the length and breadth of the country, that ultimately killed him.

There is something rather chilling to the spirit in the notion of the ageing author abandoning the quietude of his study to become a sort of giant performing flea.

Had it been a lecture tour that ended in tragic failure it would have been easier to approve than was this reading tour that closed in colossal success. The records that Dickens had been making all his life might simply have been gramophone records for the use he made of them. For with nothing new to say—only supreme art in knowing how to say it, how to perform, how to move, how to impress—he was content with proving and re-proving to himself and others that he was a great popular attraction.

With the delicacy of feeling of a box-office manager he records how “Eleven bank-notes were thrust into the paybox … for eleven stalls,” and boasts that “Neither Grisi nor Jenny Lind, nor anything nor anybody seems to make the least effect on the draw of the readings.”

He gave eighty-seven readings in under four months and declared: “I seem to be always either in a railway-carriage, or reading, or going to bed. I get so knocked-up,
whenever I have a minute to remember it, that then I go to bed as a matter of course ”—just as though he were an overworked actor in a provincial stock company. And the extraordinary thing is that Dickens could not see that he was degrading himself.

When the strain of being Dickens finally killed him, there came one of those undignified but well-intentioned competitions for the remains, that mar the decent burial of the great. Dickens had wished to be interred at Gad's Hill, and once had felt a passing desire to be disposed of in a disused graveyard beneath the walls of Rochester Castle.

And because he was a man whose singular cogency of thought had startled the whole world, as soon as he was dead, his wishes were overridden and he was treated as though in life he had not known his own mind.

First, the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral petitioned for the remains. Then, Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster, applied. And Dean Stanley won. Dickens, against his wishes, was buried with all possible decorum in the circumstances, in the Poet's Corner.

It is no profit to say that a brain of the singular brightness of Dickens's is a national property. Dickens directed his entire life on the assumption that it was not, and that he was his own indisputable master; and the whole circumstances of the funeral show that sometimes only those who work in the brightest colours of the comic and fantastic get near to portraying accurately the world of fact.

Imagine the rocket of true genius bursting in the night sky of Victorian prose fiction and you will see the two durable and brilliant suns of Dickens and Thackeray drifting away in opposite directions; an iridescent twin-star that is the Brontës soaring to sudden and magnificent extinction; and a nebula of smaller stars—for this was the golden age of the second-best—glittering and glowing, half of them being blotted out in the moment of their conception.