Charles Dickens And Other Victorians

By Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, M.A.

Fellow of Jesus College King Edward VII Professor of English Literature in the University of Cambridge

G.P. Putnam’s Sons New York & London The Knickerbocker Press 1925

Copyright, 1925 by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

The Knickerbocker Press New York

Made in the United States of America

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PREFACE

All save one of the papers here collected were written as lectures and read from a desk at Cambridge; the exception being that upon Trollope, contributed to The Nation and the Athenaeum and pleasantly provoked by a recent edition of the “Barsetshire” novels. To these it almost wholly confines itself. But a full estimate of Trollope as one of our greatest English novelists—and perhaps the raciest of them all—is long overdue, awaiting a complete edition of him. His bulk is a part of his quality: it can no more be separated from the man than can Falstaff’s belly from Falstaff. He will certainly come to his own some day, but this implies his coming with all his merits and all his defects: and this again cannot happen until some publisher shows enterprise. The expensive and artificial vogue of the three-volume-novel did wonders for Trollope in one generation, to kill him for another: since no critic can talk usefully about books to many of which his hearers have no access. But we shall see Trollope reanimated.

The papers on Dickens and Thackeray attempt judgment on them as full novelists. Those on Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell merely take a theme, and try to show how one theme, taking possession, will work upon two very different minds. Much more could have been said generally upon both authors, and generically upon the “idea” of a novel.

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As usual, with a few corrections, I leave these lectures as they were written and given, at intervals and for their purpose. They abound therefore with repetitions and reminders which the reader must try to forgive.

ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH.

January 5, 1925.

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Charles Dickens and Other Victorians

3

DICKENS (I)

I

If anything on this planet be great, great things have happened in Westminster Hall: which is open for anyone, turning aside from London’s traffic, to wander in and admire. Some property in the oak of its roof forbids the spider to spin there, and now that architects have defeated the worm in beam and rafter it stands gaunt and clean as when William Rufus built it: and I dare to say that no four walls and a roof have ever enclosed such a succession of historical memories as do these, as no pavement—not even that lost one of the Roman Forum—has been comparably trodden by the feet of grave men moving towards grave decisions, grand events.

The somewhat cold interior lays its chill on the imagination. A romantic mind can, like the spider, spin its cobwebs far more easily in the neighbouring Abbey, over the actual dust to which great men come—

But in the Abbey is finis rerum, and our contemplation there the common contemplation of mortality which,4 smoothing out place along with titles, degrees and even deeds, levels the pyramids with the low mounds of a country churchyard and writes the same moral over Socrates as over our Unknown Soldier—Vale, vale, nos te in ordine quo natura permittet sequamur. In Westminster Hall (I am stressing this with a purpose) we walk heirs of events in actual play, shaping our destiny as citizens of no mean country: in this covered rood of ground have been compacted from time to time in set conflict the high passions by which men are exalted to make history. Here a king has been brought to trial, heard and condemned to die; under these rafters have pleaded in turn Bacon, Algernon Sidney, Burke, Sheridan. Here the destinies of India were, after conflict, decided for two centuries. Through that great door broke the shout, taken up, reverberated by gun after gun down the river, announcing the acquittal of the Seven Bishops.

II

So, if this tragic comedy we call life be worth anything more than a bitter smile: if patriotism mean anything to you, and strong opposite wills out of whose conflict come great issues in victory or defeat, the arrest, the temporary emptiness of Westminster Hall—a sense of what it has seen and yet in process of time may see—will lay a deeper solemnity on you than all the honoured dust in the Abbey.

But, as men’s minds are freakish, let me tell you of a solitary figure I see in Westminster Hall more vividly even than the ghosts of Charles I and Warren Hastings bayed around by their accusers: the face and figure of a youth, not yet twenty-two, who has just bought a5 copy of the Magazine containing his first appearance in print as an author. “I walked down to Westminster Hall,” he has recorded, “and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride that they could not bear the street and were not fit to be seen there.”

Now the paper which opened the fount of these boyish tears (here, if you will, is bathos) was entitled A Dinner at Poplar Walk. You may find it to-day under another title, “Mr. Minns and his Cousin” among Sketches by Boz: reading it, you may pronounce it no great shakes; and anyhow you may ask why anyone’s imagination should select this slight figure, to single it out among the crowd of ghosts. Well, to this I might make simple and sufficient answer, saying that the figure of unbefriended youth, with its promise, a new-comer alone in the market-place, has ever been one of the most poignant in life, and, because in life, therefore in literature. Dickens himself, who had been this figure and remembered all too well the emotion that choked its heart, has left us a wonderful portrait-gallery of these lads. But indeed our literature—every literature, all legend, for that matter—teems with them: with these youngest brothers of the fairy-tales, these Oedipus’s, Jasons, these Dick Whittingtons, Sindbads, Aladdins, Japhets in search of their

Fathers; this Shakespeare holding horses for a groat, that David comely from the sheepfold with the basket of loaves and cheeses. You remember De Quincey and the stony waste of Oxford Street? or the forlorn and invalid boy in Charles Lamb’s paper on The Old Margate Hoy who “when we asked him whether he had any friends where he was going,” replied, “he had no friends.” Solitariness is ever the appeal of such a6 figure; an unbefriendedness that “makes friends,” searching straight to our common charity: this and the attraction of youth, knocking—so to speak—on the house-door of our own lost or locked-away ambitions. “Is there anybody there?” says this Traveller, and he, unlike the older one (who is oneself), gets an answer. The mid-Victorian Dr. Smiles saw him as an embryonic Lord Mayor dazed amid the traffic on London Bridge but clutching at his one half-crown for fear of pick-pockets. I myself met him once in a crowded third-class railway carriage. He was fifteen and bound for the sea: and when we came in sight of it he pushed

past our knees to the carriage window and broke into a high tuneless chant, all oblivious of us. Challenge was in it and a sob of desire at sight of his predestined mistress and adversary. For the sea is great, but the heart in any given boy may be greater: and

III

But I am a Professor, and ought to have begun by assuring you that this figure in Westminster Hall has a real historical interest in connexion with your studies “on the subject of English Literature.”

Well, then, it has. The date of the apparition is New Year’s Day, 1834, and by New Year’s Day, 1838, Charles Dickens was not only the most popular of living authors, but in a fair way to become that which he remained until the end in 1870—a great National Institution.

I use no exaggerated term. Our fathers of the nineteenth7 century had a way (and perhaps not altogether a bad way) of considering their great writers as national institutions; Carlyle was one, Ruskin another. It was a part of their stout individualism, nowadays derided. And it was, if you will consider, in the depths of its soul [say, if you will, its Manchester Soul] a high-polite retort upon such a sworn enemy as Ruskin. “Curse us, Sir: but we and no Government make you a demigod.” You will never understand your fathers, Gentlemen, until you understand their proud distrust of Government save by consent. Take a favourite term of theirs—say “The Liberty of the Press.” By that they meant liberty from interference by Government. We, using that term to-day, should mean nothing of the sort. We should mean “liberty from control by capitalists.”

I interrogate my youthful memories and am confident that, in a modest country household these men—Carlyle, Ruskin—were, with decent reverence, though critically, read for prophets. Tennyson, too, and Browning had their sacred niches; and Darwin and Huxley, and Buckle, who perished young attempting a History of Civilisation in Europe: John Stuart Mill, also, and Kingsley, Maurice, George Eliot, and Thackeray. These names leap to memory as names of household gods. A few weeks ago, rummaging over some family papers I came upon the following entry:

1848, June 20. I received a visit from Mr. Alfred Tennyson, the Poet. He came into Cornwall along the North Coast, and from about Camelford crossed over to Fowey, where I called on him on the 19th. He came to Polperre in a boat, with Mr. Peach and others; and after viewing our scenery in all directions and taking tea at our house,8 they all rowed back to Fowey late in the evening. I find him well-informed and communicative. I believe a good Greek scholar with some knowledge of Hebrew. His personal appearance is not prepossessing; having a slouch in his gait and rather slovenly in his dress tho’ his clothes were new and good. He confesses to this. He admired the wildness of our scenery, deprecated the breaking in of improvements, as they are termed. He enquired after traditions, especially of the great Arthur: his object in visiting the County being to collect materials for a poem on that Chief. But he almost doubted his existence. He show’d me a MS. sketch of a history of the Hero: but it was prolix and modern.

You see, hinted in this extract from a journal, how our ancestors, in 1848 and the years roundabout, and in remote parts of England, welcomed these great men as gods: albeit critically, being themselves stout fellows. But above all these, from the publication of Pickwick—or, to be precise, of its fifth number, in which (as Beatrice would say) “there was a star danced” and under it Sam Weller was born—down to June 14, 1870, and the funeral in Westminster Abbey, Dickens stood exalted, in a rank apart. Nay, when he had been laid in the grave upon which, left and right, face the monuments of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dryden, and for days after the grave was closed, the stream of unbidden mourners went by. “All day long,” wrote Dean Stanley on the 17th, “there was a constant pressure on the spot, and many flowers were strewn on it by unknown hands, many tears shed from unknown eyes.”

Without commenting on it for the moment, I want you to realise this exaltation of Dickens in the popular mind, his countrymen’s and countrywomen’s intimate,9 passionate pride in him; in the first place because it is an historical fact, and a fact (I think) singular in our literary history; but also because, as a phenomenon itself unique—unique, at any rate, in its magnitude—it reacted singularly upon the man and his work, and you must allow for this if you would thoroughly understand either.

IV

To begin with, you must get it out of your minds that it resembled any popularity known to us, in our day: the deserved popularity of Mr. Kipling, for example. You must also (of this generation I may be asking a hard thing, but it is necessary) get it out of your minds that Dickens was, in any sense at all, a cheap artist playing to the gallery. He was a writer of imperfect, or hazardous, literary education: but he was also a man of iron will and an artist of the fiercest literary conscience. Let me enforce this by quoting two critics whom you will respect. “The faults of Dickens,” says William Ernest Henley,

were many and grave. He wrote some nonsense; he sinned repeatedly against taste; he could be both noisy and vulgar; he was apt to be a caricaturist where he should have been a painter; he was often mawkish and often extravagant; and he was sometimes more inept than a great writer has ever been. But his work, whether good or bad, has in full measure the quality of sincerity. He meant what he did; and he meant it with his whole heart. He looked upon himself as representative and national—as indeed he was; he regarded his work as a universal possession; and he determined to do nothing that for lack of pains should prove unworthy of his function. If he10 sinned, it was unadvisedly and unconsciously; if he failed it was because he knew no better. You feel that as you read....

He had enchanted the public without an effort: he was the best beloved of modern writers almost from the outset of his career. But he had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if all his life he never ceased from self-education, but went unswervingly in pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise.

Now let me add this testimony from Mr. G. K. Chesterton:

Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For the kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted.... Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked up to the people. He approached the people like a deity and poured out his riches and his blood. He had not merely produced something they could understand, but he took it seriously, and toiled and agonised to produce it. They were not only enjoying one of the best writers, they were enjoying the best he could do. His raging and sleepless nights, his wild walks in the darkness, his note-books crowded, his nerves in rags, all this extraordinary output was but a fit sacrifice to the ordinary man.

“The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens,” wrote Carlyle of him, on hearing the news of his death,—“every inch of him an honest man.” “What a face it is to meet,” had said Leigh Hunt, years before; and Mrs. Carlyle, “It was as if made of steel.”

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V

I shall endeavour to appraise with you, by and by, the true worth of this amazing popularity. For the moment I merely ask you to consider the fact and the further fact that Dickens took it with the seriousness it deserved and endeavoured more and more to make himself adequate to it. He had—as how could he help having?—an enormous consciousness of the power he wielded: a consciousness which in action too often displayed itself as an irritable conscientiousness. For instance, Pickwick is a landmark in our literature: its originality can no more be disputed than the originality (say) of the Divina Commedia. “I thought of Pickwick”—is his classical phrase. He thought of Pickwick—and Pickwick was. But just because the ill-fated illustrator, Seymour—who shot himself before the great novel had found its stride—was acclaimed by some as its inventor, Dickens must needs charge into the lists with the hottest, angriest, most superfluous, denials. Even so, later on, when he finds it intolerable to go on living with his wife, the world is,

somehow or other, made acquainted with this distressing domestic affair as though by a papal encyclical. Or, even so, when he chooses (in Bleak House) to destroy an alcoholised old man by “spontaneous combustion”—quite unnecessarily—a solemn preface has to be written to explain that such an end is scientifically possible. This same conscientiousness made him (and here our young novelist of to-day will start to blaspheme) extremely scrupulous about scandalising his public—I use the term in its literal sense of laying a stumbling-block, a cause of offence. For example, while engaged upon Dombey and Son, he has an idea12 (and a very good idea too, though he abandoned it) that instead of keeping young Walter the unspoilt boyish lover that he is, he will portray the lad as gradually yielding to moral declension, through hope deferred—a theme which, as you will remember, he afterwards handled in Bleak House: and he seriously writes thus about it to his friend Forster:

About the boy, who appears in the last chapter of the first number—I think it would be a good thing to disappoint all the expectations that chapter seems to raise of his happy connection with the story and the heroine, and to show him gradually and naturally trailing away, from that love of adventure and boyish light-heartedness, into negligence, idleness, dissipation, dishonesty and ruin. To show, in short, that common, every day, miserable declension of which we know so much in our ordinary life: to exhibit something of the philosophy of it, in great temptations and an easy nature; and to show how the good turns into the bad, by degrees. If I kept some notion of Florence always at the bottom of it, I think it might be made very powerful and very useful. What do you think? Do you think it may be done without making people angry?

George Gissing—in a critical study of Dickens which cries out for reprinting—imagines a young writer of the ’nineties (as we may imagine a young writer of to-day) coming on that and crying out upon it.

What! a great writer, with a great idea, to stay his hand until he has made grave enquiry whether Messrs. Mudie’s subscribers will approve it or not! The mere suggestion is infuriating.... Look at Flaubert, for example. Can you imagine him in such a sorry plight? Why, nothing would have pleased him better than to know he was outraging public sentiment! In fact, it is only13 when one does so that one’s work has a chance of being good.

All which, adds Gissing, may be true enough in relation to the speaker. As regards Dickens, it is irrelevant. And Gissing speaks the simple truth; “that he owed it to his hundreds of thousands of readers to teach them a new habit of judgment Dickens did not see or begin to see.” But that it lay upon him to deal with his public scrupulously he felt in the very marrow of his bones. Let me give you two instances:

When editing Household Words he receives from a raw contributor a MS. impossible as sent, in which he detects merit. “I have had a story,” he writes to Forster, “to hack and hew into some form this morning, which has taken me four hours of close attention.” “Four hours of Dickens’ time,” comments Gissing, “in the year 1856, devoted to such a matter as this!—where any ordinary editor, or rather his assistant, would have contented himself with a few blottings and insertions, sure that ‘the great big stupid heart of the public,’ as Thackeray called it, would be no better pleased, toil how one might.”