Charles Dickens as a Reader Part 5

Quite as exhilarating in its way as the all-but dramatised report of the great breach of promise case tried before Mr. Justice Stareleigh, was that other condensation of a chapter from "Pickwick," descriptive of Mr. Bob Sawyer's Party. It was a Reading, in the delivery of which the Reader himself had evidently the keenest sense of enjoyment. As a humorous description, it was effervescent with fun, being written throughout in the happiest, earliest style of the youthful genius of Boz, when the green numbers were first shaking the sides of lettered and unlettered Englishmen alike with Homeric laughter. Besides this, when given by him as a Reading, it comprised within it one of his very drollest impersonations. If only as the means of introducing us to Jack Hopkins, it would have been most acceptable. But, inimitable though Jack was, he was, at the least, thoroughly well companioned.

As a relish of what was coming, there was that preliminary account of the locality in which the festivities were held, to wit, Lant Street, in the borough of Southwark, the prevailing repose of which, we were told, "sheds a gentle melancholy upon the soul"--fully justifying its selection as a haven of rest by any one who wished "to abstract himself from the world, to remove himself from the reach of temptation, to place himself beyond the possibility of any inducement to look out of window!" As specimens of animated nature, familiarly met with in the neighbourhood, "the pot-boy, the m.u.f.fin youth, and the baked potato man," had about them a perennial freshness. Whenever we were reminded, again, in regard to the princ.i.p.al characteristics of the population that it was migratory, "usually disappearing on the verge of quarter-day, and generally by night," her Majesty's revenues being seldom collected in that happy valley, its rents being p.r.o.nounced dubious, and its water communication described as "frequently cut off," we found in respect to the whole picture thus lightly-sketched in, that age did not wither nor custom stale its infinite comicality.

It was when the familiar personages of the story were, one after another, introduced upon the scene, however, that the broad Pickwickian humour of it all began in earnest to be realised. After we had listened with chuckling enjoyment to the ludicrously minute account given of the elaborate preparations made for the reception of the visitors, even in the approaches to Mr. Bob Sawyer's apartment, down to the mention of the kitchen candle with a long snuff, that "burnt cheerfully on the ledge of the staircase window," we had graphically rendered the memorable scene between poor, dejected Bob and his little spitfire of a landlady, Mrs.

Raddle. _So_ dejected and generally suppressed was Bob in the Reading, however, that we should hardly have recognised that very archetype of the whole _genus_ of rollicking Medical Students, as originally described in the pages of Pickwick, where he is depicted as attired in "a coa.r.s.e blue coat, which, without being either a great-coat or a surtout, partook of the nature and qualities of both," having about him that sort of slovenly smartness and swaggering gait peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, and shout and scream in the same by night, calling waiters by their Christian names, and altogether bearing a resemblance upon the whole to something like a dissipated Robinson Crusoe. Habited, Bob still doubtless was, in the plaid trousers and the large, rough coat and double-breasted waistcoat, but as for the "swaggering gait" just mentioned not a vestige of it remained. Nor could that be wondered at, indeed, for an instant, beholding and hearing, as we did, the shrill ferocity with which Mrs. Raddle had it out with him about the rent immediately before the arrival of his guests.

It is one of the distinctive peculiarities of Charles d.i.c.kens as a humorous Novelist, that the cream or quintessence of a jest is very often given by him quite casually in a parenthesis. It was equally distinctive of his peculiarities as a Reader, that the especial charm of his drollery was often conveyed by the merest aside. Thus it was with him in reference to Mrs. Raddle's "confounded little bill," when--in between Ben Allen's inquiry, "How long has it been running?" and Bob Sawyer's reply, "Only about a quarter and a month or so"--the Reader parenthetically remarked, with a philosophic air, "A bill, by the way, is the most extraordinary locomotive engine that the genius of man ever produced: it would keep on running during the longest lifetime without ever once stopping of its own accord." Thus also was it, when he added meditatively to Bob's hesitating explanation to Mrs. Raddle, "the fact is that I have been disappointed in the City to-day"--"Extraordinary place that City: astonishing number of men always _are_ getting disappointed there." Hereupon it was that that fiercest of little women, Mrs. Raddle, who had entered "in a tremble with pa.s.sion and pale with rage," fairly let out at her lodger. Her incidental bout with Mr. Ben Allen, when he soothingly(!) interpolated, "My good soul," was, in the Reading, in two senses, a memorable diversion. Beginning with a sarcastic quivering in her voice, "I am not _aweer_, sir, that you have any right to address your conversation to _me_. I don't think I let these apartments to _you_, sir--" Mrs. Raddle's anger rose through an indignant _crescendo_, on Ben Allen's remonstrating, "But you are such an unreasonable woman"--to the sharp and biting interrogation, "I beg your parding, young man, but will you have the goodness to call me that again, sir?"

Ben Allen, meekly and somewhat uneasy on his own account,--"I didn't make use of the word in any invidious sense, ma'am."

Landlady, louder and more imperatively,--"I beg your parding, young man, but _who_ do you call a woman? Did you make that remark to me, sir?"

"_Why, bless my heart!_"

"Did you apply that name to me, I ask of you, sir?"

On his answering, Well, of course he did!--then, as she retreated towards the open room-door, came the last outburst of her invectives, high-pitched in their voluble utterance, against him, against them both, against everybody, including Mr. Raddle in the kitchen--"a base, faint-hearted, timorous wretch, that's afraid to come upstairs and face the ruffinly creaturs--that's _afraid_ to come--that's afraid!"

Ending with her screaming descent of the stairs in the midst of a loud double-knock, upon the arrival just then of the Pickwickians, when, "in an uncontrollable burst of mental agony," Mrs. Raddle threw down all the umbrellas in the pa.s.sage, disappearing into the back parlour with an awful crash. In answer to the cheerful inquiry from Mr. Pickwick,--"Does Mr. Sawyer live here?" came the lugubrious and monotonously intoned response, all on one note, of the aboriginal young person, the gal Betsey (one of the minor characters in the original chapter, and yet, as already remarked, a superlatively good impersonation in the Reading)--"Yes; first-floor. It's the door straight afore you when you get's to the top of the stairs"--with which the dirty slipshod in black cotton stockings disappeared with the candle down the kitchen stair-case, leaving the unfortunate arrivals to grope their way up as they best could. Welcomed rather dejectedly by Bob on the first-floor landing, where Mr. Pickwick put, not, as in the original work, his hat, but, in the Reading, "his foot" in the tray of gla.s.ses, they were very soon followed, one after another, by the remainder of the visitors.

Notably by a sentimental young gentleman with a nice sense of honour, and, most notably of all (with a heavy footstep, very welcome indeed whenever heard) by Jack Hopkins. Jack was at once the Hamlet and the Yorick of the whole entertainment--all-essential to it--whose very look (with his chin rather stiff in the stock), whose very words (short, sharp, and decisive) had about them a drily and all-but indescribably humorous effect. As spoken by the Novelist himself, Jack Hopkins's every syllable told to perfection. His opening report immediately on his arrival, of "rather a good accident" just brought into the casualty ward--only, it was true, a man fallen out of a four-pair-of-stairs window; but a very fair case, _very_ fair case indeed!--was of itself a dexterous forefinger between the small ribs to begin with. Would the patient recover? Well, no--with an air of supreme indifference--no, he should rather say he wouldn't. But there must be a splendid operation, though, on the morrow--magnificent sight if Slasher did it! Did he consider Mr. Slasher a good operator? "Best alive: took a boy's leg out of the socket last week--boy ate five apples and a gingerbread cake exactly two minutes after it was all over;--boy said he wouldn't lie there to be made game of; and he'd tell his mother if they didn't begin." To hear d.i.c.kens say this in the short, sharp utterances of Jack Hopkins, to see his manner in recounting it, stiff-necked, and with a glance under the drooping eyelids in the direction of Mr. Pickwick's listening face, was only the next best thing to hearing him and seeing him, still in the person of Jack Hopkins, relate the memorable anecdote about the child swallowing the necklace--p.r.o.nounced in Jack Hopkins's abbreviated articulation of it, _neck-luss_--a word repeated by him a round dozen times at the least within a few seconds in the reading version of that same anecdote. How characteristically and comically the abbreviations were multiplied for the delivery of it, by the very voice and in the very person, as it were, of Jack Hopkins, who shall say! As, for example--"Sister, industrious girl, seldom treated herself to bit of finery, cried eyes out, at loss of--neck-luss; looked high and low for--neck-luss. Few days afterwards, family at dinner--baked, shoulder of mutton and potatoes, child wasn't hungry, playing about the room, when family suddenly heard devil of a noise like small hail-storm."

How abbreviated pa.s.sages like these look, as compared with the original--could only be rendered comprehensible upon the instant, by giving in this place a facsimile of one of the pages relating to Jack Hopkins's immortal story about the--neck-luss, exactly as it appears in the marked copy of the Reading of "Mr. Bob Sawyer's Party," a page covered all over, as will be observed, with minute touches in the Novelist's own handwriting.

Nothing at all in the later version of this Reading was said about the prim person in cloth boots, who unsuccessfully attempted all through the evening to make a joke. Of him the readers of "Pickwick" will very well remember it to have been related that he commenced a long story about a great public character, whose name he had forgotten, making a particularly happy reply to another ill.u.s.trious individual whom he had never been able to identify, and, after enlarging with great minuteness upon divers collateral circ.u.mstances distantly connected with the anecdote, could not for the life of him recollect at that precise moment what the anecdote was--although he had been in the habit, for the last ten years, of telling the story with great applause! While disposed to regret the omission of this preposterously natural incident from the revised version of the Reading, and especially Bob Sawyer's concluding remark in regard to it, that he should very much like to hear the end of it, for, _so far as it went_, it was, without exception, the very best story he had ever heard--we were more than compensated by another revisive touch, by which Mr. Hopkins, instead of Mr. Gunter, in the pink shirt, was represented as one of the two interlocutors in the famous quarrel-scene: the other being Mr. Noddy, the s...o...b..tic youth, with the nice sense of honour. Through this modification the ludicrous effect of the squabble was wonderfully enhanced, as where Mr. Noddy, having been threatened with being "pitched out o' window" by Mr. Jack Hopkins, said to the latter, "I should like to see you do it, sir," Jack Hopkins curtly retaliating--"You shall _feel_ me do it, sir, in half a minute."

The reconciliation of the two attained its climax of absurdity in the Reading, when Mr. Noddy, having gradually allowed his feelings to overpower him, professed that he had ever entertained a devoted personal attachment to Mr. Hopkins. Consequent upon this, Mr. Hopkins, we were told, replied, that, "on the whole, he rather preferred Mr. Noddy to his own _mother_"--the word standing, of course, as "brother" in the original. Summing it all up, the Reader would then add, with a rise and fall of the voice at almost every other word in the sentence, the mere sound of which was inexpressibly ludicrous--"Everybody said the whole dispute had been conducted in a manner" (here he would sometimes gag) "that did equal credit to the head and heart of both parties concerned."

Another gag, of which there is no sign in the marked copy, those who attended any later delivery of this Reading will well remember he was fond of introducing. This was immediately after Mrs. Raddle had put an end to the evening's enjoyment in the very middle of Jack Hopkins' song (with a chorus) of "The King, G.o.d bless him," carolled forth by Jack to a novel air compounded of the "Bay of Biscay" and "A Frog he would a-wooing go"--when poor, discomfited Bob (after turning pale at the voice of his dreaded landlady, shrilly calling out, "Mr. Saw-yer! Mr.

Saw-yer!") turned reproachfully on the over-boisterous Jack Hopkins, with, "I _thought_ you were making too much noise, Jack. You're such a fellow for chorusing! You're always at it. You came into the world chorusing; and I believe you'll go out of it chorusing." Through their appreciation of which--more even than through their remembrance of Mrs. Raddle's withdrawal of her nightcap, with a scream, from over the staircase banisters, on catching sight of Mr. Pickwick, saying, "Get along with you, you old wretch! Old enough to be his grandfather, you willin! You're worse than any of 'em!"--the hearers paid to the Reader of Bob Sawyer's Party their last tribute of laughter.

THE CHIMES.

As poetical in its conception, and also, intermittently, in its treatment, as anything he ever wrote, this Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, was, in those purely goblin, or more intensely imaginative portions of it, one of the most effective of our Author's Readings. Hence its selection by him for his very first Reading on his own account in St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre.

Listening, as we did, then and afterwards, to the tale, as it was told by his own sympathetic lips, much of the incongruity, otherwise no doubt apparent in the narrative, seemed at those times to disappear altogether. The incongruity, we mean, observable between the queer little ticket-porter and the elfin phantoms of the belfry; between Trotty Veck, in his "breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed, stony-toed, tooth-chattering" stand-point by the old church-door, and the Goblin Sight beheld by him when he had clambered up, up, up among the roof-beams of the great church-tower. As the story was related in its original form, it was rung out befittingly from the Chimes in four quarters. As a Reading it was subdivided simply into three parts.

Nothing whatever was preserved (by an error as it always seemed to us) of the admirable introduction. The story-teller piqued no one into attention by saying--to begin with--"There are not many people who would care to sleep in a church." Adding immediately, with delightful particularity, "I don't mean at sermon time in warm weather (when the thing has actually been done once or twice), but in the night, and alone." Not a word was uttered in the exordium of the Reading about the dismal trick the night-wind has in those ghostly hours of wandering round and round a building of that sort, and moaning as it goes; of its trying with a secret hand the windows and the doors, fumbling for some crevice by which to enter, and, having got in, "as one not finding what it seeks, whatever that may be," of its wailing and howling to issue forth again; of its stalking through the aisles and gliding round and round the pillars, and "tempting the deep organ;" of its soaring up to the roof, and after striving vainly to rend the rafters, flinging itself despairingly upon the stones below, and pa.s.sing mutteringly into the vaults! Anon, coming up stealthily--the Christmas book goes on to say--"It has a ghostly sound, lingering within the Altar, where it seems to chant in its wild way of Wrong and Murder done, and false G.o.ds worshipped, in defiance of the Tables of the Law, which look so fair and smooth, but are so flawed and broken. Ugh! Heaven preserve us, sitting snugly round the fire!--it has an awful voice that Wind at Midnight, singing in a church!" Of all this and of yet more to the like purpose, not one syllable was there in the Reading, which, on the contrary, began at once point-blank: "High up in the steeple of an old church, far above the town, and far below the clouds, dwelt the 'Chimes' I tell of." Directly after which the Reader, having casually mentioned the circ.u.mstance of their just then striking twelve at noon, gave utterance to Trotty Yeck's ejaculatory reflection: "Dinner-time, eh? Ah! There's nothing more regular in its coming round than dinner-time, and there's nothing less regular in its coming round than dinner." Followed by his innocently complacent exclamation: "I wonder whether it would be worth any gentleman's while, now, to buy that observation for the Papers, or the Parliament!" The Reader adding upon the instant, with an explanatory aside, that "Trotty was only joking," striving to console himself doubtless for the exceeding probability there was before him, at the moment, of his going, not for the first time, dinnerless.

In the thick of his meditations Trotty was startled--those who ever attended this Reading will remember how pleasantly--by the unlooked-for appearance of his pretty daughter Meg. "And not alone!" as she told him cheerily. "Why you don't mean to say," was the wondering reply of the old ticket-porter, looking curiously the while at a covered basket carried in Margaret's hand, "that you have brought------"

Hadn't she! It was burning hot--scalding! He must guess from the steaming flavour what it was! Thereupon came the by-play of the Humorist--after the fashion of Munden, who, according to Charles Lamb, "understood a leg of mutton in its quiddity." It was thus with the Reader when he syllabled, with watering lips, guess after guess at the half-opened basket. "It ain't--I suppose it ain't polonies? [sniffing].

No. It's--it's mellower than polonies. It's too decided for trotters.

Liver? No. There's a mildness about it that don't answer to liver.

Pett.i.toes? No. It ain't faint enough for pett.i.toes. It wants the stringiness of c.o.c.k's heads. And I know it ain't sausages. I'll tell you what it is. No, it isn't, neither. Why, what am I thinking of! I shall forget my own name next. It's tripe!" Forthwith, to reward him for having thus. .h.i.t it off at last so cleverly, Meg, as she expressed it, with a flourish, laid the cloth, meaning the pocket-handkerchief in which the basin of tripe had been tied up, and actually offered the sybarite who was going to enjoy the unexpected banquet, a choice of dining-places! "Where will you dine, father? On the post, or on the steps? How grand we are: two places to choose from!" The weather being dry, and the steps therefore chosen, those being rheumatic only in the damp, Trotty Veck was not merely represented by the Reader as feasting upon the tripe, but as listening meanwhile to Meg's account of how it had all been arranged that she and her lover Eichard should, upon the very next day, that is, upon New Year's Day, be married.

In the midst of this agreeable confabulation--Richard himself having in the interim become one of the party--the little old ticket-porter, the pretty daughter, and the st.u.r.dy young blacksmith, were suddenly scattered. The Reader went on to relate how this happened, with ludicrous accuracy, upon the abrupt opening of the door, around the steps of which they were gathered--a flunkey nearly putting his foot in the tripe, with this indignant apostrophe, "Out of the vays, here, will you? You must always go and be a settin' on our steps, must you? You can't go and give a turn to none of the neighbours never, can't you?"

Adding, even, a moment afterwards, with an aggrieved air of almost affecting expostulation, "You're always a being begged and prayed upon your bended knees, you are, to let our door-steps be? Can't you let 'em be?" Nothing more was seen or heard of that footman, and yet in the utterance of those few words of his the individuality of the man somehow was thoroughly realised. Observing him, listening to him, as he stood there palpably before us, one seemed to understand better than ever Thackeray's declaration in regard to those same menials in plush breeches, that a certain delightful "quivering swagger" of the calves about them, had for him always, as he expressed it, "a frantic fascination!" Immediately afterwards, however, as the Reader turned a new leaf, in place of the momentary apparition of that particular flunkey, three very different persons appeared to step across the threshold on to the platform. Low-spirited, Mr. Filer, with his hands in his trousers-pockets. The red-faced gentleman who was always vaunting, under the t.i.tle of the "good old times," some undiscoverable past which he perpetually lamented as his deceased Millennium. And finally--as large as life, and as real--Alderman Cute. As in the original Christmas book, so also in the Reading, the one flagrant improbability was the consumption by Alderman Cute of the last lukewarm tid-bit of tripe left by Trotty Veck down at the bottom of the basin--its consumption, indeed, by any alderman, however prying or gluttonous. Barring that, the whole of the first scene of the "Chimes" was alive with reality, and with a curious diversity of human character. In the one that followed, and in which Trotty conveyed a letter to Sir Joseph Rowley, the impersonation of the obese hall-porter, later on identified as Tugby, was in every way far beyond that of the pompous humanitarian member of parliament. A hall-porter this proved to be whose voice, when he had found it--"which it took him some time to do, for it was a long way off, and hidden under a load of meat"--was, in truth, as the Author's lips expressed it, and as his pen had long before described it in the book, "a fat whisper."

Afterwards when re-introduced, Tugby hardly, as it appeared to us, came up to the original description. When the stout old lady, his supposit.i.tious wife, formerly, or rather really, all through, Mrs.

Chickenstalker, says, in answer to his inquiries as to the weather, one especially bitter winter's evening, "Blowing and sleeting hard, and threatening snow. Dark, and very cold"--Tugby's almost apoplectic reply was delicious, no doubt, in its suffocative delivery. "I'm glad to think we had m.u.f.fins for tea, my dear. It's a sort of night that's meant for m.u.f.fins. Likewise crumpets; also Sally Lunns." But, for all that, we invariably missed the sequel--which, once missed, could hardly be foregone contentedly. We recalled to mind, for example, such descriptive particulars in the original story as that, in mentioning each successive kind of eatable, Tugby did so "as if he were musingly summing up his good actions," or that, after this, rubbing his fat legs and jerking them at the knees to get the fire upon the yet unroasted parts, he laughed as if somebody had tickled him! We bore distinctly enough in remembrance, and longed then to have heard from the lips of the Reader--in answer to the dream-wife's remark, "You're in spirits, Tugby, my dear!"--Tugby's fat, gasping response, "No,--No. Not particular. I'm a little elewated. The m.u.f.fins came so pat!" Though, even if that addition had been vouchsafed, we should still, no doubt, have hungered for the descriptive particulars that followed, relating not only how the former hall-porter chuckled until he was black in the face--having so much ado, in fact, to become any other colour, that his fat legs made the strangest excursions into the air--but that Mrs.

Tugby, that is, Chickenstalker, after thumping him violently on the back, and shaking him as if he were a bottle, was constrained to cry out, in great terror, "Good gracious, goodness, lord-a-mercy, bless and save the man! What's he a-doing?" To which all that Mr. Tugby can faintly reply, as he wipes his eyes, is, that he finds himself a little "elewated!"

Another omission in the Reading was, if possible, yet more surprising, namely, the whole of Will Fern's finest speech: an address full of rustic eloquence that one can't help feeling sure would have told wonderfully as d.i.c.kens could have delivered it. However, the story, foreshortened though it was, precisely as he related it, was told with a due regard to its artistic completeness. Margaret and Lilian, the old ticket-porter and the young blacksmith, were the princ.i.p.al interlocutors. Like the melodrama of Victorine, it all turned out, of course, to be no more than "the baseless fabric of a vision," the central incidents of the tale, at any rate, being composed of "such stuff as dreams are made of." How it all came to be evolved by the "Chimes" from the slumbering brain of the queer, little old ticket-porter was related more fully and more picturesquely, no doubt, in the printed narrative, but in the Reading, at the least, it was depicted with more dramatic force and pa.s.sion. The merest glimmering, however, was afforded of the ghostly or elfin spectacle, as seen by the "mind's eye" of the dreamer, and which in the book itself was so important an integral portion of the tale, as there unfolded, const.i.tuting, as it did, for that matter, the very soul or spirit of what was meant by "The Chimes."

Speaking of the collective chimes of a great city, Victor Hugo has remarked in his prose masterpiece that, in an ordinary way, the noise issuing from a vast capital is the talking of the city, that at night it is the breathing of the city, but that when the bells are ringing it is the singing of the city. Descanting upon this congenial theme, the poet-novelist observes, in continuation, that while at first the vibrations of each bell rise straight, pure, and in a manner separate from that of the others, swelling by degrees, they blend, melt, and amalgamate in magnificent concert until they become at length one ma.s.s of sonorous vibrations, which, issuing incessantly from innumerable steeples, float, undulate, bound, whirl over the city, expanding at last far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of their oscillations. What has been said thus superbly, though it may be somewhat extravagantly, by Hugo, in regard to "that _tutti_ of steeples, that column of sound, that cloud or sea of harmony," as he variously terms it, has been said less extravagantly, but quite as exquisitely, by Charles d.i.c.kens, in regard to the chimes of a single belfry. After this New Year's tale of his was first told, there rang out from the opposite sh.o.r.es of the Atlantic, that most wonderful tintinnabulation in all literature, "The Bells" of Edgar Poe--which is, among minor poems, in regard to the belfry, what Southey's "Lodore" is to the cataract, full, sonorous, and exhaustive.

And there it is, in that marvellous little poem of "The Bells," that the American lyrist, as it has always seemed to us, has caught much of the eltrich force and beauty and poetic significance of "The Chimes" as they were originally rung forth in the prose-poetry of the English novelist:--

"And the people--ah, the people-- They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who tolling, tolling, tolling, In that m.u.f.fled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On [or from] the human heart a stone-- They are neither man nor woman-- They are neither brute nor human-- They are Ghouls: And their king it is who tolls; And he rolls, rolls, rolls, Rolls A paean from the h.e.l.ls."

Charles d.i.c.kens, in his beautiful imaginings in regard to the Spirits of the Bells--something of the grace and goblinry of which, Maclise's pencil shadowed forth in the lovely frontispiece to the little volume in the form in which it was first of all published--has exhausted the vocabulary of wonder in his elvish delineation of the Goblin Sight beheld in the old church-tower on New Year's Eve by the awe-stricken ticket-porter.

In the Reading one would naturally have liked to have caught some glimpse at least of the swarmmg out to view of the "dwarf-phantoms, spirits, elfin creatures of the Bells;" to have seen them "leaping, flying, dropping, pouring from the Bells," unceasingly; to have realised them anew as a listener, just as the imaginary dreamer beheld them all about him in his vision--"round him on the ground, above him in the air, clambering from him by the ropes below, looking down upon him from the ma.s.sive iron-girded beams, peeping in upon him through the c.h.i.n.ks and loopholes in the walls, spreading away and away from him in enlarging circles, as the water-ripples give place to a huge stone that suddenly comes plashing in among them." In their coming and in their going, the sight, it will be remembered, was equally marvellous. Whether--as the Chimes rang out--we read of the dream-haunted, "He saw them [these swarming goblins] ugly, handsome, crippled, exquisitely formed. He saw them young, he saw them old, he saw them kind, he saw them cruel, he saw them merry, he saw them grim, he saw them dance, he heard them sing, he saw them tear their hair, and heard them howl"--diving, soaring, sailing, perching, violently active in their restlessness--stone, brick, slate, tile, transparent to the dreamer's gaze, and pervious to their movements--the bells all the while in an uproar, the great church tower vibrating from parapet to bas.e.m.e.nt! Or, whether--when the Chimes ceased--there came that instantaneous transformation! "The whole swarm fainted; their forms collapsed, their speed deserted them; they sought to fly, but in the act of falling died and melted into air. One straggler," says the book, "leaped down pretty briskly from the surface of the Great Bell, and alighted on his feet, but he was dead and gone before he could turn round." After it has been added that some thus gambolling in the tower "remained there, spinning over and over a little longer," becoming fainter, fewer, feebler, and so vanishing--we read, "The last of all was one small hunchback, who had got into an echoing corner, where he twirled and twirled, and floated by himself a long time; showing such perseverance, that at last he dwindled to a leg, and even to a foot, before he finally retired; but he vanished in the end, and then the tower was silent." Nothing of this, however, was given in the Reading, the interest of which was almost entirely restricted to the fancied fluctuation of fortunes among the human characters. All of the pathetic and most of the comic portions of the tale were happily preserved. When, in the persons of the Tugbys, "fat company, rosy-cheeked company, comfortable company," came to be introduced, there was an instant sense of exhilaration among the audience.

A roar invariably greeted the remark, "They were but two, but they were red enough for ten." Similarly p.r.o.nounced was the reception of the casual announcement of the "stone pitcher of terrific size," in which the good wife brought her contribution of "a little flip" to the final merry-making. "Mrs. Chicken-stalker's notion of a little flip did honour to her character," elicited a burst of laughter that was instantly renewed when the Reader added, that "the pitcher reeked like a volcano," and that "the man who carried it was faint." The Drum, by the way--braced tight enough, as any one might admit in the original narrative--seemed rather slackened, and was certainly less effective, in the Reading. One listened in vain for the well-remembered parenthesis indicative of its being the man himself, and not the instrument. "The Drum (who was a private friend of Trotty's) then stepped forward, and" offered--evidently with a hiccough or two--his greeting of good fellowship, "which," as we learn from the book, "was received with a general shout." The Humorist added thereupon, in his character as Storyteller, not in his capacity as Reader, "The Drum was rather drunk, by-the-bye; but never mind." A band of music, with marrow-bones and cleavers and a set of hand-bells--clearly all of them under the direction of the Drum--then struck up the dance at Meg's wedding.

But, after due mention had been made of how Trotty danced with Mrs.

Chickenstalker "in a step unknown before or since, founded on his own peculiar trot," the story closed in the book, and closed also in the Reading, with words that, in their gentle and harmonious flow, seemed to come from the neighbouring church-tower as final echoes from "The Chimes" themselves.

THE STORY OF LITTLE DOMBEY.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Little-Dombey.jpg]

The hushed silence with which the concluding pa.s.sages of this Reading were always listened to, spoke more eloquently than any applause could possibly have done, of the sincerity of the emotions it awakened. A cursory glance at the audience confirmed the impression produced by that earlier evidence of their rapt and breathless attention. It is the simplest truth to say that at those times many a face ill.u.s.trated involuntarily the loveliest line in the n.o.blest ode in the language, where Dryden has sung even of a warrior--

"And now and then a sigh he heaved, And tears began to flow."

The subdued voice of the Reader, moreover, accorded tenderly with one's remembrance of his own acknowledgment ten years after his completion of the book from which this story was extracted, that with a heavy heart he had walked the streets of Paris alone during the whole of one winter's night, while he and his little friend parted company for ever! Charles Young's son, the vicar of Ilminster, has, recently, in his own Diary appended to his memoir of his father, the tragedian, related a curious anecdote, ill.u.s.trative, in a very striking way, of the grief--the profound and overwhelming grief--excited in a mind and heart like those of Lord Jeffrey, by the imaginary death of another of these dream-children of Charles d.i.c.kens. The editor of the _Edinburgh Review_, we there read, was surprised by Mrs. Henry Siddons, seated in his library, with his head on the table, crying. "Delicately retiring," we are then told, "in the hope that her entrance had been unnoticed," Mrs.

Siddons observed that Jeffrey raised his head and was kindly beckoning her back. The Diary goes on: "Perceiving that his cheek was flushed and his eyes suffused with tears, she apologised for her intrusion, and begged permission to withdraw. When he found that she was seriously intending to leave him, he rose from his chair, took her by both hands, and led her to a seat." Then came the acknowledgment prefaced by Lord Jeffrey's remark that he was "a great goose to have given way so."

Little Nell was dead! The newly published number of "Master Humphrey's Clock" (No. 44) was lying before him, in which he had just been reading of the general bereavement!

Referring to another of these little creatures' deaths, that of Tiny Tim, Thackeray wrote in the July number of _Fraser_, for 1844, that there was one pa.s.sage regarding it about which a man would hardly venture to speak in print or in public "any more than he would of any other affections of his private heart."

It has been related, even of the burly demagogue, O'Connell, that on first reading of Nell's death in the Old Curiosity Shop, he exclaimed--his eyes running over with tears while he flung the leaves indignantly out of the window--"he should not have killed her--he should not have killed her: she was too good!"

Finally, another Scotch critic and judge, Lord c.o.c.kburn, writing to the Novelist on the very morrow of reading the memorable fifth number of "Dombey and Son," in which the death of Little Paul is so exquisitely depicted--offering his grateful acknowledgments to the Author for the poignant grief he had caused him--added, "I have felt my heart purified by those tears, and blessed and loved you for making me shed them."

Hardly can it be matter for wonder, therefore, remarking how the printed pages would draw such tokens of sympathy from men like c.o.c.kburn, and Jeffrey, and Thackeray, and O'Connell, that a mixed audience showed traces of emotion when the profoundly sympathetic voice of d.i.c.kens himself related this story of the Life and Death of Little Dombey. Yet the pathetic beauty of the tale, for all that, was only dimly hinted at throughout,--the real pathos of it, indeed, being only fully indicated almost immediately before its conclusion. Earlier in the Reading, in fact, the drollery of the comic characters introduced--of themselves irresistible--would have been simply paramount, but for the incidental mention of the mother's death, when clinging to that frail spar within her arms, her little daughter, "she drifted out upon the dark and unknown sea that rolls round all the world." Paul's little wistful face looked out every now and then, it is true, from among the fantastic forms and features grouped around him, with a growing sense upon the hearer of what was really meant by the child being so "old-fashioned."

But the ludicrous effect of those surrounding characters was nothing less than all-mastering in its predominance.

There was Mrs. Pipchin, for example, that grim old lady with a mottled face like bad marble, who acquired an immense reputation as a manager of children, by the simple device of giving them everything they didn't like and nothing that they did! Whose const.i.tution required mutton chops hot and hot, and b.u.t.tered toast in similar relays! And with whom one of Little Dombey's earliest dialogues in the Reading awakened invariably such bursts of hearty laughter! Seated in his tall, spindle-legged arm-chair by the fire, staring steadily at the exemplary Pipchin, Little Paul, we were told, was asked [in the most snappish voice possible], by that austere female, What he was thinking about?

"You," [in the gentlest childlike voice] said Paul, without the least reserve.

"And what are you thinking about me?"

"I'm--thinking--how old--you must be."

"You mustn't say such things as that, young gentleman. That'll never do."