Charles Dickens as a Reader Part 8

Even the immortal Boots at the White Hart, Borough, who was first revealed to us in a coa.r.s.e striped waistcoat with black calico sleeves and blue gla.s.s b.u.t.tons, drab breeches and gaiters, and who answered to the name of Sam, would not, we are certain, have disdained to have been put in friendly relations with Cobbs, as one in every way worthy of his companionship. The Boots at the Holly Tree Inn, though more lightly sketched, was quite as much of an original creation in his way as that other Christmas friend of ours, the warm-hearted and loquacious Cheap Jack, Doctor Marigold. And each of those worthies, it should be added, had really about him an equal claim to be regarded, as an original creation, as written, or as impersonated by the Author. As a character orally portrayed, Cobbs was fully on a par with Doctor Marigold.

Directly the Reader opened his lips, whether as the Boots or as the Cheap Jack, the Novelist seemed to disappear, and there instead, talking glibly to us from first to last just as the case might happen to be, was either the patterer on the cart footboard or honest Cobbs touching his hair with a bootjack. His very first words not only lead up to his confidences, but in the same breath struck the key-note of his character. "Where had he been? Lord, everywhere! What had he been? Bless you, everything a'most. Seen a good deal? Why, of course he had. Would be easier for him to tell what he hadn't seen than what he had. Ah! A deal, it would. What was the curiosest thing he'd seen? Well! He didn't know--couldn't name it momently--unless it was a Unicorn, and he see _him_ over at a Fair. But"--and here came the golden retrospect, a fairy tale of love told by a tavern Boots, and told all through, moreover, as none but a Boots could tell it--"Supposing a young gentleman not eight year'old, was to run away with a fine young woman of seven, might I think _that_ a queer start? Certainly! Then, that was a start as he himself had had his blessed eyes on--and he'd cleaned the shoes they run away in--and they was so little he couldn't get his hand into 'em."

Whereupon, following up the thread of his discourse, Boots would take his crowd of hearers, quite willingly on their part, into the heart of the charming labyrinth.

The descriptive powers of Cobbs, it will be admitted, were for one thing very remarkable. Master Harry Walmers' father, for instance, he hits off to a nicety in a phrase or two. "He was a gentleman of spirit, and good looking, and held his head up when he walked, and had what you may call Fire about him:" adding, that he wrote poetry, rode, ran, cricketed, danced and acted, and "done it all equally beautiful." Another and a very significant touch, by the way, was imparted to that same portraiture later on, just, in point of fact before the close of Cobbs's reminiscence, and one so lightly given that it was conveyed through a mere pa.s.sing parenthesis--namely, where the young father was described by Boots as standing beside Master Harry Walmers' bed, in the Holly Tree Inn, looking down at the little sleeping face, "looking wonderfully like it," says Cobbs, who adds, "(they do say as he ran away with Mrs.

Walmers)." Although Boots described Master Harry's father from the first as "uncommon proud of him, as his only child, you see," the worthy fellow took especial care at once to add, that "he didn't spoil him neither." Having a will of his own, and a eye of his own, and being one that would be minded, while he never tired of hearing the fine bright boy "sing his songs about Young May Moons is beaming, love, and When he who adores thee has left but the name, and that: still," said Boots, "he kept the command over the child, and the child _was_ a child, and it's very much to be wished more of 'em was." At the particular period referred to in this portion of his narrative, Boots informed us pleasantly, that he came to know all about it by reason of his being in his then capacity as Mr. Wahners' under-gardener, always about in the summer time, near the windows, on the lawn "a-mowing and sweeping, and weeding and pruning, and this and that"--with his eyes and ears open, of course, we may presume, in a manner befitting his intelligence.

Perhaps, there was after all nothing better in the delivery of the whole of this Reading, than the utterance of the two words italicised below in the first dialogue, reported by Boots as having taken place between himself and Master Harry Walmers, junior, when "that mite," as Boots calls him, stops one day, along with the fine young woman of seven already mentioned, where Boots (then under-gardener, remember) was hoeing weeds in the gravel:--

"'Cobbs,' he says, 'I like _you._' 'Do you, sir? I'm proud to hear it.'

'Yes, I do, Cobbs. Why do I like you, do you think, Cobbs?' 'Don't know, Master Harry, I'm sure.' 'Because Norah likes you, Cobbs.' 'Indeed, sir?

That's very gratifying.' 'Gratifying, Cobbs? It is better than millions of the brightest diamonds, to be liked by Norah?' '_Certainly_, sir.'"

Confirmed naturally enough in his good opinion of Cobbs by this thorough community of sentiment, Master Harry, who has been given to understand from the latter that he is going to leave, and, further than that, on inquiring, that he wouldn't object to another situation "if it was a good 'un," observes, while tucking that other mite in her little sky-blue mantle under his arm, "Then, Cobbs, you shall be our head gardener when we are married." Boots, thereupon, in the person of the Reader, went on to describe how "the babies with their long bright curling hair, their sparkling eyes, and their beautiful light tread, rambled about the garden deep in love," sometimes here, sometimes there, always under his own sympathetic and admiring observation, until one day, down by the pond, he heard Master Harry say, "Adorable Norah, kiss me and say you love me to distraction." Altogether Cobbs seemed exactly, and with delicious humour, to define the entire situation when he declared, that "on the whole the contemplation of them two babies had a tendency to make him feel as if he was in love himself--only he didn't know who with!"

The delightful gravity of countenance (with a covert sparkle in the eye where the daintiest indications of fun were given by the Reader) lent a charm of its own to the merest nothing, comparatively, in the whimsical dialogues he was reporting. Master Harry, for example, having confided to Cobbs one evening, when the latter was watering the flowers, that he was going on a visit to his grandmama at York--"'Are you indeed, sir? I hope you'll have a pleasant time. I'm going into Yorkshire myself, when I leave here.' 'Are you going to your grandmama's, Cobbs?' 'No, sir.

I haven't got such a thing.' 'Not as a grandmama, Cobbs?' 'No, sir.'"

Immediately after which, on the boy observing to his humble confidant, that he shall be so glad to go because "Norah's going," Cobbs, naturally enough, as it seemed, took occasion to remark, "You'll be all right then, sir, with your beautiful sweetheart by your side." Whereupon we realised more clearly than ever the delicate whimsicality of the whole delineation, when we saw, as well as heard, the boy return a-flushing, "Cobbs, I never let anybody joke about that when I can prevent them,"

Cobbs immediately explaining in all humility, "It wasn't a joke, sir--wasn't so meant." No wonder, Boots had exclaimed previously: "And the courage of that boy! Bless you, he'd have throwed off his little hat and tucked up his little sleeves and gone in at a lion, he would--if they'd happened to meet one, and she [Norah] had been frightened." At the close of Boots's record of this last-quoted conversation with Master Harry, came one of the drollest touches in the Reading--"'Cobbs,' says that boy, 'I'll tell you a secret. At Norah's house, they have been joking her about me, and [with a wondering look] pretending to laugh at our being engaged! Pretending to make game of it, Cobbs!' 'Such, sir,' I says, 'is the depravity of human natur.'" A glance during the utterance of which words, either at the Reader himself or at his audience, was something enjoyable.

Hardly less inspiriting in its way was the incidental mention, directly after this by Cobbs, of the manner in which he gave Mr. Walmers notice, not that he'd anything to complain of--"'Thanking you, sir, I find myself as well sitiwated here as I could hope to be anywheres. The truth is, sir, that I'm a going to seek my fortun.' 'O, indeed, Cobbs?' he says, 'I hope you may find it.'" Boots hereupon giving his audience the a.s.surance, with the characteristic touch of the bootjack to his forehead, that "he hadn't found it yet!"

Then came the delectable account of the elopement--full, true, and particular--from the veracious lips of Cobbs himself, at that time, and again some years afterwards, when he came to call up his recollections, Boots at the Holly Tree Inn. Pa.s.sages here and there in his description of the incident were irrisistibly laughable. Master Harry's going down to the old lady's in York, for example, "which old lady were so wrapt up in that child as she would have give that child the teeth in her head (if she had had any)." The arrival of "them two children," again at the Holly Tree Inn, he, as bold as bra.s.s, tucking her in her little sky-blue mantle under his arm, with the memorable dinner order, "Chops and cherry pudding for two!" Their luggage, even, when gravely enumerated--the lady having "a parasol, a smelling bottle, a round and a half of cold b.u.t.tered toast, eight peppermint drops, and a doll's hair-brush;" the gentleman having "about half a dozen yards of string, a knife, three or four sheets of writing paper folded up surprisingly small, a orange, and a chaney mug with his name on it." Several of the little chance phrases, the merest atoms of exclamation here and there, will still be borne in mind as having had an intense flavour of fun about them, as syllabled in the Reading. Boots's "Sir, to you," when his governor, the hotel-keeper, proposes to run over to York to quiet their friends' minds, while Cobbs keeps his eye upon the innocents! Master Harry's replying to Boots'

suggestion, that they should wile away the time by a walk down Love-lane--"'Get out with you, Cobbs!'--that was that there boy's expression." The glee of the children was prettily told too on their finding "Good Cobbs! Dear Cobbs!" among the strangers around them at their temporary halting-place. They themselves appearing smaller than ever in his eyes, by reason of his finding them "with their little legs entirely off the ground, of course--and it really is not possible to express how small them children looked!--on a e-normous sofa;" immense at any time, but looking like a Great Bed of Ware then by comparison.

How, during the governor's absence in search of their friends, Cobbs, feeling himself all the while to be "the meanest rascal for deceiving 'em, that ever was born," gets up a c.o.c.k and a bull story about a pony he's acquainted with, who'll take them on nicely to Gretna Green--but who was not at liberty the first day, and the next was only "half clipped, you see, and couldn't be took out in that state for fear it should strike to his inside"--was related with the zest of one who had naturally the keenest relish possible for every humorous particular.

Finding the lady in tears one time when Boots goes to see how the runaway couple are getting on, "Mrs. Harry Walmers, junior, fatigued, sir?" asks Cobbs. "Yes, she is tired, Cobbs; but she is not used to be away from home, and she has been in low spirits again. Cobbs, do you think you could bring a biffin, please?"--"I ask your pardon, sir, What was it you ------?" "I think a Norfolk biffin would rouse her, Cobbs."

Restoratives of that kind, Boots would seem to have regarded as too essential to Mrs. Harry Walmers junior's happiness. Hence, when he comes upon the pair over their dinner of "biled fowl and bread-and-b.u.t.ter pudding," Boots privately owns that "he could have wished to have seen her more sensible to the woice of love, and less abandoning of herself to the currants in the pudding." According to Cobbs's own account of the gentleman, however, it should be added that _he_ too could play his part very effectively at table, for--having mentioned another while, how the two of them had ordered overnight sweet milk-and-water and toast and currant jelly for breakfast--when Cobbs comes upon them the next morning at their meal, he describes Master Harry as sitting behind his breakfast cup "a tearing away at the jelly as if he had been his own father!"

Remorseful in the thought of betraying them, Boots at one moment declared, that rather than combine any longer against them, he would by preference "have had it out in half-a-dozen rounds with the governor!"

And at another time, when the said governor had returned from York, "with Mr. Walmers and a elderly lady," Boots, while conducting Mr.

Walmers upstairs, could not for the life of him help pausing at the room door, with, "I beg your pardon, sir, I hope you are not angry with Master Harry. For Master Harry's a fine boy, sir, and will do you credit and honour." Boots signifying while he related the circ.u.mstance, that "if the fine boy's father had contradicted him in the state of mind in which he then was, he should have 'fetched him a crack' and took the consequences." As for the appreciation of Master Harry by the female dependents at the Holly Tree, there were two allusions to _that_--one general, as may be said, the other particular--that were always the most telling hits, the two chief successes of the Reading. Who that once heard it, for example, has forgotten the Author's inimitable manner of saying, as the Boots--"The way in which the women of that house--_without_ exception--_every_ one of 'em--married _and_ single--took to that boy when they heard the story, is surprising. It was as much as could be done to keep 'em from dashing into the room and kissing him. They climbed up all sorts of places, at the risk of their lives, to look at him through a pane of gla.s.s. _They was seven deep at the key-hole!_" The climax of fun came naturally at the close, however, when, having described how Mr. Walmers lifted his boy up to kiss the sleeping "little warm face of little Mrs. Harry Walmers, junior," at the moment of their separation, Boots, that is the Reader, cried out in the shrill voice of one of the chambermaids, "_It's a shame to part 'em!_"

Two reflections indulged in by Boots during the course of his narrative, being among the pleasantest in connection with this most graceful of all the purely comic Readings, may here, while closing these allusions to it, be recalled to mind not inappropriately. One--where Cobbs "wished with all his heart there was any impossible place where them two babies could have made an impossible marriage, and have lived impossibly happy ever afterwards." The other--where, with genial sarcasm, Boots propounds this brace of opinions by way of general summing up--"Firstly, that there are not many couples on their way to be married who are half as innocent as them two children. Secondly, that it would be a jolly good thing for a great many couples on their way to be married, if they could only be stopped in time, and brought back separate." With which cynical scattering of sugar-plums in the teeth, of married and single, the blithe Reading was laughingly brought to its conclusion.

BARBOX BROTHERS.

n.o.body but the writer of this little freak of fancy could possibly have rendered the Reading of it in public worthy even of toleration. Perhaps no Reading that could be selected presents within the same compa.s.s so many difficulties to the audience who are listening, and to the Reader who is hardy enough to adventure upon its delivery. The closing incidents of the narrative are in themselves so improbable, we had all but said so impossible! Polly, at once so quaint and so captivating, when her words are perused upon the printed page, is so incapable of having her baby-prattle repeated by anybody else, without the imminent risk, the all but certainty, of its degenerating into mere childishness.

It can scarcely be wondered, therefore, that "Barbox Brothers," though it actually was Read, and Read successfully, was hardly ever repeated.

Everybody who has once looked into the story will bear in mind how, quite abruptly, almost haphazard, it comes to be narrated.

The lumbering, middle-aged, grey-headed hero of it, in obedience to the whim of a moment, gets out of a night train at the great central junction of the whole railway system of England. A drenching rain-storm and a windy platform, darkness and solitude are, to begin with, the agreeable surroundings of this eccentric traveller. He is stranded there, not high and dry, anything but that--on the contrary, soaked through and through, and at very low level indeed--during what the local officials regard as their deadest time in all the twenty-four hours: what one of them, later on, terms emphatically their deadest and buriedest time.

Already, even here, before the tale itself is in any way begun, the Author of it, in his capacity as Reader, somehow, by the mere manner of his delivery of a descriptive sentence or two, contrived to realise to his hearers in a wonderfully vivid way the strange incidents of the traffic in a scene like this, at those blackest intervals between midnight and daybreak. Now revealing--"Mysterious goods trains, covered with palls, and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying themselves guiltily away, as if their freight had come to a secret and unlawful end." Now, again--"Half miles of coal pursuing in a Detective manner, following when they led, stopping when they stopped, backing when they backed." One while the spectacle, conjured up by a word or two was that of--"Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white characters." Another, with startling effect, it was--"An earthquake, with thunder and lightning, going up express to London."

Here it is that Barbox Brothers, in the midst of these ghostly apparitions, is eventually extricated from the melancholy plight in which he finds himself saturated and isolated in the middle of a spiderous web of railroads.

His extricator is--Lamps! A worthy companion portrait to that of cinderous Mr. Toodles, the stoker, familiar to the readers of Dombey.

Characters, those two, quite as typical, after their fashion, of the later railway period of d.i.c.kens, as even Sam Weller, the boots, and Old Weller, the coachman, were of his earlier coaching period in the days of Pickwick. To see him, in his capacity as Lamps, when excited, take what he called "a rounder"--that is to say, giving himself, with his oily handkerchief rolled up in the form of a ball, "an elaborate smear from behind the right ear, up the cheek, across the forehead, and down the other cheek, behind his left ear," after which operation he is described as having shone exceedingly--was to be with him, again, at once, in his greasy little cabin, which was suggestive to the sense of smell of a cabin in a whaler. How it came to pa.s.s that Lamps sang comic songs, of his own composition, to his bed-ridden daughter Phoebe, by way of enlivening her solitude, and how Phoebe, while manipulating the threads on her lace-pillow, as though she were playing a musical instrument, taught her little band of children to chant to a pleasant tune the multiplication-table, and so fix it and other useful knowledge indelibly upon the tablets of their memory, the Author-Reader would then relate, as no other Reader, however gifted, who was not also the Author, would have been allowed to do, supposing this latter had had the hardihood to attempt the relation.

As the Reading advanced, the difficulties not only increased, they became tenfold, immediately upon the introduction of Polly. d.i.c.kens, however, conquered them all somehow. But to anybody else, setting forth the story histrionically, impersonating the characters as they appeared, these difficulties would by necessity have been insuperable or simply overwhelming. Catching the very little fair-haired girl's Christian name readily enough, when she comes up to him in the street, with the surprising announcement, "O! if you please, I am lost!" Barbox Brothers can't for the life of him conjecture what her surname is,--carefully imitating, though he does, the sound that comes from the childish lips, each time on its repet.i.tion. Hazarding "Trivits," first of all, then "Paddens," then "Tappi-tarver." Eventually, when the two arrive hand-in-hand at Barbox Brothers' hotel, n.o.body there could make out her name as she set it forth, "except one chambermaid, who said it was Constantinople--which it wasn't."

No wonder Barbox feels bigger and heavier in person every minute when he is being catechised by Polly! Asked by her if he knows any stories, and compelled to answer, "No! What a dunce you must be, mustn't you?" says Polly. Frightened nearly out of his wits at the dinner-table, when they are feasting together, by her getting on her feet upon her chair to reward him with a kiss, and then toppling forward among the dishes--he himself crying out in dismay, "Gracious angels! Whew! I thought we were in the fire, Polly!"--"What a coward you are, ain't you?" says Polly, when replaced.

Upon the next morning, when brought down to breakfast, after a comfortable night's sleep, pa.s.sed by the child in a bed shared with "the Constantinopolitan chambermaid," Polly, "by that time a mere heap of dimples," poses poor, unwieldy Barbox by asking him, in a wheedling manner, "What are we going to do, you dear old thing?" On his suggesting their having a sight, at the Circus, of two long-tailed ponies, speckled all over--"No, no, no!" cries Polly, in an ecstasy. When he afterwards throws out a proposition that they shall also look in at the toy-shop, and choose a doll--"Not dressed," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es Polly; "No, no, no--not dressed!" Barbox replying, "Full dressed; together with a house, and all things necessary for housekeeping!" Polly gives a little scream, and seems in danger of falling into a swoon of bliss. "What a darling you are!" she languidly exclaims, leaning back in her chair: "Come and be hugged." All this will indicate plainly enough the difficulties investing every sentence of this Reading, capped as they all are by the astounding _denouement_ of the plot--Polly turning out to be (sly little thing!) the purposely-lost daughter of Barbox Brothers' old love, Beatrice, and of her husband, Tresham, for whom Barbox had not only been jilted, but by whom Barbox had been simultaneously and rather heavily defrauded.

Perhaps the pleasantest recollection of the whole Reading is, not Polly--the small puss turns out to be such a cunningly reticent little emissary--but her Doll, a "lovely specimen of Circa.s.sian descent, possessing as much boldness of beauty as was reconcileable with extreme feebleness of mouth," and combining a sky-blue pelisse with rose-coloured satin trousers, and a black velvet hat, "the latter seemingly founded on the portraits of the late d.u.c.h.ess of Kent." One is almost reconciled to Polly, however,--becoming oblivious for the moment of her connivance in her mother's secret device, and reminiscent only of her own unsophisticated mixture of prattle and impertinence--on learning, immediately after this elaborate description of the gorgeous doll of her choice, that "the name of this distinguished foreigner was (on Polly's authority) Miss Melluka."

THE BOY AT MUGBY.

Several _gamins_ have been contributed to our literature by d.i.c.kens--quite as typical and quite as truthful in their way, each of them, as Hugo's Gavroche. There is Jo the poor crossing-sweeper. There is the immortal Dodger. There is his pal the facetious Charley Bates.

And there is that delightful boy at the end of "The Carol," who conveys such a world of wonder through his simple reply of "Why, Christmas Day!"

The boy who is "as big," he says himself, as the prize turkey, and who gets off at last quicker than a shot propelled by the steadiest hand at a trigger! Scattered up and down the Boz fictions, there are abundant specimens of a _genus_ that, in one instance, is actually termed by the Humorist, "a town-made little boy"--this is in the memorable street scene where Squeers hooks Smike by the coat-collar with the handle of his umbrella. He is always especially great in his delineation of what one might call the human c.o.c.k-sparrows of London. Kit, at the outset of his career, is another example; and Tom Scott yet another.

Sloppy carries us away into the suburbs, thereby taking us in a manner off the stones, and otherwise represents in his own proper person, b.u.t.tons and all, less one of the dapper urchins we are now more particularly referring to, than the shambling hobbledehoy. Even in the unfinished story with which the Author's voluminous writings were closed, there was portrayed an entirely novel specimen, one marked by the most grotesque extravagance, in the shape of that impish malignant, "the Deputy," whose pastime at once and whole duty in life seemed to be making a sort of vesper c.o.c.k-shy of Durdles and his dinner-bundle.

Conspicuous among these comic boys of d.i.c.kens may be remembered one who, instead of being introduced in any of the Novelist's larger works, from the Pickwick Papers clown to Edwin Drood, interpolates himself, as may be said, among one of the groups of Christmas stories, through the medium of a shrill monologue. "The Boy at Mugby," to wit, the one exhilarated and exhilarating appreciate of the whole elaborate system of Refreshmenting in this Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free, by which he means to say Britannia.

Laconically, "I am the Boy at Mugby," he announces. "That's about what _I_ am." His exact location he describes almost with the precision of one giving lat.i.tude and longitude--explaining to a nicety where his stand is taken. "Up in a corner of the Down Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction," in the height of twenty-seven draughts [he's counted 'em, he tells us parenthetically, as they brush the First Cla.s.s, hair twenty-seven ways], bounded on the nor'-west by the beer, and so on. He himself, he frankly informs you--in the event of your ever presenting yourself there before him at the counter, in quest of nourishment of any kind, either liquid or solid--will seem not to hear you, and will appear "in a absent manner to survey the Line through a transparent medium composed of your head and body," determined evidently not to serve you, that is, as long as you can possibly bear it! "That's me!" cries the Boy at Mugby, exultantly,--adding, with an intense relish for his occupation, "what a delightful lark it is!" As for the eatables and drinkables habitually set forth upon the counter, by what he generally speaks of as the Refreshmenters, quoth the Boy at Mugby, in a _naif_ confidence, addressed to you in your capacity at once as applicant and victim, "when you're telegraphed, you should see 'em begin to pitch the stale pastry into the plates, and chuck the sawdust sang-wiches under the gla.s.s covers, and get out the--ha, ha!--the sherry--O, my eye, my eye!--for your refreshment." Once or twice in a way only, "The Boy at Mugby" was introduced among the Readings, and then merely as a slight stop-gap or interlude. Thoroughly enjoying the delivery of it himself, and always provoking shouts of laughter whenever this colloquial morsel was given, the Novelist seemed to be perfectly conscious himself that it was altogether too slight and trivial of its kind, to be worthy of anything like artistic consideration; that it was an "airy nothing" in its way, to which it was scarcely deserving that he should give more than name and local habitation.

Critically regarded, it had its inconsistencies too, both as a writing and as a Reading. There was altogether too much precocity for a genuine boy, in the nice discrimination with which the Boy at Mugby hit off the contrasting nationalities. The foreigner, for example, who politely, hat in hand, "beseeched Our Young Ladies, and our Missis," for a "leetel gloss hoif prarndee," and who, after being repelled, on trying to help himself, exclaims, "with hands clasped and shoulders riz: 'Ah! is it possible this; that these disdaineous females are placed here by the administration, not only to empoisen the voyagers, but to affront them!

Great Heaven! How arrives it? The English people. Or is he then a slave?

Or idiot?'" Hardly would a veritable boy, even an urchin so well "to the fore" with his epoch, as the Boy at Mugby, depict so accurately, much less take off, with a manner so entirely life-like, the astounded foreigner, any more than he would the thoroughly wide-awake and gaily derisive American. The latter he describes as alternately trying and spitting out first the sawdust and then the--ha, ha!--the sherry, until finally, on paying for both and consuming neither, he says, very loud, to Our Missis, and very good tempered, "I tell Yew what 'tis ma'arm. I la'af. Theer! I la'af, I Dew. I oughter ha' seen most things, for I hail from the unlimited side of the Atlantic Ocean, and I haive travelled right slick over the Limited, head on, through Jeerusalem and the East, and likeways France and Italy, Europe, Old World, and I am now upon the track to the Chief European Village; but such an Inst.i.tution as Yew and Yewer fixins, solid _and_ liquid, afore the glorious Tarnal I never did see yet! And if I hain't found the eighth wonder of Monarchical Creation, in finding Yew and Yewer fixins, solid and liquid, in a country where the people air not absolute Loo-naticks, I am Extra Double Darned with a nip and frizzle to the innermost grit!

Wheerfore--Theer!--I la'af! I Dew, ma'arm. I la'af!" A calotype, or rather, literally, a speaking likeness, so true to the life as that, would be a trifle, we take it, beyond the mimetic powers and the keenly observant faculties even of a Boy whose senses had been wakened up by the twenty-seven cross draughts of the Refreshment Room at Mugby.

As to the fun made of the bandolining by Our Young Ladies, and of Our Missis's lecture on Foreign Refreshmenting, and of Sniff's corkscrew and his servile disposition, it is intentionally fooling, no doubt, but it is--excellent fooling! As was admirably said in the number of _Macmillan_ for January, 1871, by the anonymous writer of a Reminiscence of the Amateur Theatricals at Tavistock House,--the remark following immediately after Charles d.i.c.kens's version of the Ghost's Song in Henry Fielding's burlesque of Tom Thumb,--"Nonsense, it may be said, all this; but the nonsense of a great genius has always something of genius in it." Had not Swift his "little language" to Stella, to "Stellakins," to "roguish, impudent, pretty M. D.?" Than some of which little language, quoth Thackeray, in commenting upon it, "I know of nothing more manly, more tender, more exquisitely touching." Again, had not Pope, in conjunction with the Dean, his occasional unbending also as a _farceur_, in the wilder freaks and oddities of Martinus Scriblerus? So was it here with one who was beyond all doubt, more intensely a Humorist than either, when he wrote or read such harmless sarcasms and innocent whimsicalities, as those alternately underlying, and overlaying the boyish fun of this juvenile Refreshmenter at Mugby Junction.

DOCTOR MARIGOLD.

Already mention has been made of the extraordinary care lavished, as a general rule, by the Novelist upon the preparation of these Readings before they were, each in turn, submitted for the first time to public scrutiny. A strikingly ill.u.s.trative instance of this may be here particularised. It occurred upon the occasion of a purely experimental Reading of "Doctor Marigold," which came off privately, on the evening of the 18th of March, 1866, in the drawing-room of Charles d.i.c.kens's then town residence, in Southwick Place, Tyburnia. Including, among those present, the members of his own home circle, his entire audience numbered no more than ten persons altogether. Four, at any rate, of that party may be here identified, each of whom doubtless still bears the occasion referred to vividly in his remembrance,--Robert Browning the poet, Charles Fechter the actor, Wilkie Collins the novelist, and John Forster the historian of the Commonwealth. Even in private, d.i.c.kens had never Read "Doctor Marigold" until that evening. Often as he Read it afterwards, he never Read it with a more contagious air of exhilaration.

He hardly ever, in fact, gave one of his almost wholly comic and but incidentally pathetic Readings _so_ effectively. In every sentence there was a zest or relish that was irresistible. The volubility of the "poor chap in the sleeved-waistcoat" sped the Reading on with a rapidity quite beyond antic.i.p.ation, when the time, which had been carefully marked at the commencement of the Reading, came to be notified at its conclusion.

That the merest first rehearsal should have run off thus glibly seemed just simply incomprehensible. With the sense of this surprise still fresh upon us, the tentative Reading being at the time only a few seconds completed, everything was explained, however, by a half-whispered remark made, to the present writer, in pa.s.sing, by the Novelist--made by him half-weariedly, yet half-laughingly--"There! If I have gone through that already to myself once, I have gone through it two--hundred--times!" It was not lightly or carelessly therefore, as may now be seen, that Charles d.i.c.kens, in his later capacity--not pen-in-hand, or through green monthly numbers, but standing at a reading-desk upon a public platform--undertook the office of a popular entertainer.

Resolved throughout his career as a Reader to acquit himself of those newly-a.s.sumed responsibilities to the utmost of his powers, to the fullest extent of his capabilities, both physical and intellectual, he applied his energies to the task, with a zeal that, it is impossible not to recognise now, amounted in the end to nothing less than (literally) self-sacrifice. But for the devotion of his energies thus unstintingly to the laborious task upon which he had adventured--a task involving in its accomplishment an enormous amount of rapid travelling by railway, keeping him for months together, besides, in one ceaseless whirl of bodily and mental excitement--his splendid const.i.tution, sustained and strengthened as it was by his wholesome enjoyment of out-of-door life, and his habitual indulgence in bathing and pedes-trianism, gave him every reasonable hope of reaching the age of an octogenarian.

Bearing in mind in addition to the wear-and-tear of the Readings in England and America, the nervous shock of that terrible railway accident at Staplehurst, on the 9th of June, 1865, the lamentable catastrophe of exactly five years afterwards to the very day, that of the 9th of June, 1870, becomes readily comprehensible. Because of his absorption in his task, however, all through, he was unconscious for the most part of the wasting influence of his labours, or, if he was so at all towards the close of his career, he was so, even then, only fitfully and at the rarest intervals. Precisely in the same way, it may be remarked, in regard to those who watched his whole course as a Reader, that so facile and so pleasureable to himself, as well as to them, appeared to be the novel avocation which had come of late years to be alternated with his more accustomed toil as an author, that it rendered even the most observant amongst them unconscious in their turn of the disastrously exhausting influence of this unnatural blending together of two professions. A remorseful sense of this comes back upon us now, when it is all too late, in our remembrance of that remark made by the Novelist immediately after the Private Reading of "Doctor Marigold," a remark then regarded as simply curious and interesting, but now having about it an almost painful significance. Never was work more thoroughly or more conscientiously done, from first to last, than in the instance of these Readings.

In the minute elaboration of the care with which they were prepared, in the vivacity with which they were one and all of them delivered, in the punctuality with which, whirled like a shuttle in a loom, to and fro, hither and thither, through all parts of the United Kingdom and of the United States, the Reader kept, link by link, an immensely-lengthened chain of appointments, until the first link was broken suddenly at Preston--one can recognise at length the full force of those simple words uttered by him upon the occasion of his Farewell Reading, where he spoke of himself as "a faithful servant of the public, always imbued with a sense of duty to them, and always striving to do his best."

Among the many radiant ill.u.s.trations that have been preserved of how thoroughly he did his best, not the least brilliant in its way was this eminently characteristic Reading of "Doctor Mari-gold."

All through it, from the very beginning down to the very end of his Confidences, the Cheap Jack, in his belcher neckcloth and his sleeved-waistcoat with the mother-o'-pearl b.u.t.tons, was there talking to us, as only he could talk to us, from the foot-board of his cart. He remained thus before us from his first mention of his own father having always consistently called himself Willum to the moment when little Sophy--the third little Sophy--comes clambering up the steps, and reveals that she at least is not deaf and dumb by crying out to him, "Grandfather!" As for the patter of Doctor Marigold, it is among the humorous revelations of imaginative literature. Hear him when he is perhaps the best worth listening to, when he is in his true rostrum, when his bluchers are on his native foot-board, and his name is, more intensely than ever, Doctor Marigold! Don't we all remember him there, for example, on a Sat.u.r.day night in the market-place--"Here's a pair of razors that'll shave you closer than the board of guardians; here's a flat-iron worth its weight in gold; here's a frying-pan artificially flavoured with essence of beefsteaks to that degree that you've only got for the rest of your lives to fry bread and dripping in it and there you are replete with animal food; here's a genuine chronometer-watch, in such a solid silver case that you may knock at the door with it when you come home late from a social meeting, and rouse your wife and family and save up your knocker for the postman; and here's half a dozen dinner-plates that you may play the cymbals with to charm the baby when it's fractious. Stop! I'll throw you in another article, and I'll give you that, and it's a rolling-pin; and if the baby can only get it well into it's mouth when its teeth is coming, and rub the gums once with it, they'll come through double in a fit of laughter equal to being tickled." And so on, ringing the changes on a thousand wonderful conceits and whimsicalities that come tumbling out one after another in inexhaustible sequence and with uninterrupted volubility.