Charles Dickens as a Reader Part 9

The very Prince of Cheap Jacks, surely, is this Doctor Marigold! And, more than that, one who makes good his claim to the t.i.tle of wit, humorist, satirist, philanthropist, and philosopher.

As for his philosophic contentment, what can equal that as implied in his summing up of his own humble surroundings? "A roomy cart, with the large goods hung outside, and the bed slung underneath it when on the road; an iron-pot and a kettle, a fireplace for the cold weather, a chimney for the smoke, a hanging-shelf and a cupboard, a dog and a horse. What more do you want? You draw off on a bit of turf in a green lane or by the roadside, you hobble your old horse and turn him grazing, you light your fire upon the ashes of the last visitors, you cook your stew, and you wouldn't call the Emperor of France your father."

As for his wit, hear him describe--"What? Why, I'll tell you! It's made of fine gold, and it's not broke, though there's a hole in the middle of it, and it's stronger than any fetter that was ever forged. What else is it? I'll tell you. It's a hoop of solid gold wrapped in a silver curl-paper that I myself took off the shining locks of the ever-beautiful old lady in Threadneedle Street, London city. I wouldn't tell you so, if I hadn't the paper to show, or you mightn't believe it even of me. Now, what else is it? It's a man-trap, and a hand-cuff, the parish stocks and a leg-lock, all in gold and all in one. Now, what else is it? It's a wedding-ring!"

As for something far better than any mere taste of his skill as a satirist, see the whole of his delectable take off--in contradistinction to himself, the itinerant Cheap Jack--of the political Dear Jack in the public marketplace.

As for his philanthropy, it is un.o.btrusively proclaimed by the drift of his whole narrative, and especially by two or three among the more remarkable of its closing incidents.

As for his powers as a humorist, they may be found there _pa.s.sim_, being scattered broadcast all through his autobiographic recollections.

To those recollections are we not indebted for a whole gallery of inimitable delineations? The Cheap Jack's very dog, for instance, who had taught himself out of his own head to growl at any person in the crowd that bid as low as sixpence! Or Pickleson the giant, with a little head and less in it. Of whom, observes Doctor Marigold, "He was a languid young man, which I attribute to the distance betwixt his extremities." About whom, when a sixpence is given to him by Doctor Marigold, the latter remarks in a preposterous parenthesis, "(for he was kept as short as he was long!)" As for d.i.c.kens's high falsetto, when speaking in the person of this same Pickleson, with a voice that, as Doctor Marigold says, seemed to come from his eyebrows, it was only just a shade more excruciatingly ridiculous than his guttural and growling objurgations in the character of the giant's proprietor, the fe-rocious Mim.

With all his modest appet.i.te for the simpler pleasures of existence, Doctor Marigold betrays in one instance, by the way, the taste of a _gourmet_. "I knocked up a beefsteak-pudding for one," he says, "with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a couple of mushrooms thrown in:"

adding, with a fine touch of nature drawn from experience, "It's a pudding to put a man in good humour with everything, except the two bottom b.u.t.tons of his waistcoat."

Incomparably the finest portion of all this wonderfully original sketch of Doctor Marigold, both in the Writing and in the Reading, was that in which the poor Cheap Jack is represented as going through his customary patter on the foot-board with his poor little Sophy--the first of the three Sophies, his own by birth, and not simply by adoption--the while she is slowly dying on his shoulder. Thackeray was right when he said of the humour of d.i.c.kens, "It is a mixture of love and wit." Laughter and tears, with him, lay very near--speaking of him as an author, we may say by preference--lie very near indeed together. It is in those pa.s.sages in which they come in astonishingly rapid alternation, and at moments almost simultaneously, that he is invariably at his very best. The incident here alluded to is one of these more exquisite descriptions, and it was one, that, by voice and look and manner, he himself most exquisitely delineated. When the poor Cheap Jack, with Sophy holding round his neck, steps out from the shelter of the cart upon the foot-board, and the waiting crowd all set up a laugh on seeing them--"one chuckle-headed Joskin (that I hated for it) making a bid 'tuppence for her!'"--Doctor Marigold begins his tragi-comic allocution.

It is sown thickly all through with the most whimsical of his conceits, but it is interrupted also here and there with infinitely pathetic touches of tenderness.

Fragmentary ill.u.s.trations of either would but dimly shadow forth, instead of clearly elucidating, what is here meant in the recollection of those who can still recall this Reading of "Doctor Marigold" to their remembrance. Those who never heard it as it actually fell from the Author's lips, by turning to the original sketch, and running through that particular portion of it to themselves, may more readily conjecture than by the aid of mere piecemeal quotation, all that the writer of those riant and tearful pages would be capable of accomplishing by its utterance, bringing to its delivery, as he could, so many of the rarer gifts of genius, and so many also of the rarest accomplishments of art.

SIKES AND NANCY.

On Sat.u.r.day, the 14th of November, 1868, there were a.s.sembled together in front of the great platform in St. James's Hall, Piccadilly, as fit audience, but few, somewhere about fifty of the critics, artists, and literary men of London. A card of invitation, stamped with a facsimile of the well-known autograph of Charles d.i.c.kens, and countersigned by the Messrs. Chappell and Company, had, with a witty significance, bidden them to that rendezvous for a "Private Trial of the Murder in Oliver Twist." The occasion, in point of fact, was a sort of experimental rehearsal of the last and most daring of all these vividly dramatic Readings by the popular Novelist.

Conscious himself that there was a certain amount of audacity in his adventuring thus upon a delineation so really startling in its character, he was not unnaturally desirous of testing its fitness for representation before the public, first of all in the presence of those who were probably the best qualified to p.r.o.nounce a perfectly dispa.s.sionate opinion. It certainly appeared somewhat dubious at the first, that question as to the suitability for portrayal before mixed a.s.semblages, of one of the most powerfully tragic incidents ever depicted by him in the whole range of his voluminous contributions to imaginative literature. The pa.s.sages selected to this end from his famous story of Oliver Twist were those relating more particularly to the Murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes. A ghastlier atrocity than that murder could hardly be imagined. In the book itself, as will be remembered, the crime is painted as with a brush dipped in blood rather than pigment.

The infamous deed is there described in language worthy of one of the greatest realists in fict.i.tious narrative. Henri de Balzac, even in his more sanguinary imaginings, never showed a completer mastery of the horrible.

Remembering all this, and feeling perfectly a.s.sured at the same time, that the scene then about to be depicted by the Author in person, would most certainly lose nothing of its terror in the representation, the acknowledgment may here be made by the writer of these pages, that, on entering the Hall that evening, he was in considerable doubt as to what might be the result of the experiment. Compared with the size of the enormous building, the group of those a.s.sembled appeared to be the merest handful of an audience cl.u.s.tered together towards the front immediately below the platform of the orchestra. Standing at the back of this group, the writer recalls to mind, in regard to that evening, a circ.u.mstance plainly enough indicating how fully his own unexpressed uncertainty was akin to that of the Author-Reader himself. The circ.u.mstance, namely, that Charles d.i.c.kens, immediately on entering the hall, before taking his place at his reading-desk upon the platform, came round, and after exchanging a few words with him, uttered this earnest Aside,--"I want you to watch this particularly, for I am very doubtful about it myself!" Before that Experimental Reading was half over, however, all doubt upon the matter was utterly dissipated. In the powerful effect of it, the murder-scene immeasurably surpa.s.sed anything he had ever achieved before as an impersonator of his own creations. In its climax, it was as splendid a piece of tragic acting as had for many years been witnessed.

What, in effect, was Macready's comment upon it some months afterwards, when, with an especial eye to the great tragedian's opinion, "Sikes and Nancy" was given at Cheltenham? It was laconic enough, but it afforded a world of pleasure to the Author-Actor when his old friend--himself the hero of so many tragic triumphs--summed up his estimate, by saying, characteristically, "Two Macbeths!"

Four of the imaginary beings of the novel were introduced, or, it should rather be said, were severally produced before us as actual embodiments.

Occasionally, during one of the earlier scenes, it is true that the gentle voice of Rose Maylie was audible, while a few impressive words were spoken there also at intervals by Mr. Brownlow. But, otherwise, the interlocutors were four, and four only: to wit--Nancy, Bill Sikes, Morris Bolter, otherwise Noah Claypole, and the Jew f.a.gin. Than those same characters no four perhaps in the whole range of fiction could be more widely contrasted. Yet, widely contrasted, utterly dissimilar, though they are, in themselves, the extraordinary histrionic powers of their creator, enabled him to present them to view, with a rapidity of sequence or alternation, so astonishing in its mingled facility and precision, that the characters themselves seemed not only to be before us in the flesh, but sometimes one might almost have said were there simultaneously. Each in turn as portrayed hy him--meaning portrayed hy him not simply in the hook hut hy himself in person--was in its way a finished masterpiece.

Looking at the Author as he himself embodied these creations--f.a.gin, the Jew, was there completely, audibly, visibly before us, by a sort of transformation! Here, in effect--as several years previously in the midst of his impersonation of Wilmot in Lord Lytton's comedy of Not so Bad as we Seem, namely, where, in the garret, the young patrician affects for a while to be Edmund Curll the bookseller--the impersonator's very stature, each time f.a.gin opened his lips, seemed to be changed instantaneously. Whenever he spoke, there started before us--high-shouldered, with contracted chest, with birdlike claws, eagerly antic.i.p.ating hy their every movement the pa.s.sionate words fiercely struggling for utterance at his lips--that most villainous old tutor of young thieves, receiver of stolen goods, and very devil incarnate: his features distorted with rage, his penthouse eyebrows (those wonderful eyebrows!) working like the antennae of some deadly reptile, his whole aspect, half-vulpine, half-vulture-like, in its hungry wickedness.

Whenever _he_ spoke, again, Morris Bolter--quite as instantly, just as visibly and as audibly--was there upon the platform. Listening to him, though we were all of us perfectly conscious of doing, through the Protean voice, and looking at him through the variable features of the Novelist, we somehow saw, no longer the Novelist, but--each time Noah Clay-pole said a word--that chuckle-headed, long-limbed, clownish, sneaking varlet, who is the spy on Nancy, the tool of f.a.gin, and the secret evil-genius of Sikes, hounding the latter on, as he does, unwittingly, to the dreadful deed of homicide.

As for the Author's embodiment of Sikes--the burly ruffian with thews of iron and voice of Stentor--it was only necessary to hear that infuriated voice, and watch the appalling blows dealt by his imaginary bludgeon in the perpetration of the crime, to realise the force, the power, the pa.s.sion, informing the creative mind of the Novelist at once in the original conception of the character, and then, so many years afterwards, in its equally astonishing representation.

It was in the portrayal of Nancy, however, that the genius of the Author-Actor found the opportunity, beyond all others, for its most signal manifestation. Only that the catastrophe was in itself, by necessity so utterly revolting, there would have been something exquisitely pathetic in many parts of that affecting delineation. The character was revealed with perfect consistency throughout--from the scene of suppressed emotion upon the steps of London Bridge, when she is scared with the eltrich horror of her forebodings, down to her last gasping, shrieking apostrophes, to "Bill, clear Bill," when she sinks, blinded by blood, under the murderous blows dealt upon her upturned face by her brutal paramour.

Then, again, the horror experienced by the a.s.sa.s.sin afterwards! So far as it went, it was as grand a reprehension of all murderers as hand could well have penned or tongue have uttered. It had about it something of the articulation of an avenging voice not against Sikes only, but against all who ever outraged, or ever dreamt of outraging, the sanct.i.ty of human life. And it was precisely this which tended to sublimate an incident otherwise of the ghastliest horror into a homily of burning eloquence, the recollection of which among those who once saw it revealed through the lips, the eyes, the whole aspect of Charles d.i.c.kens will not easily be obliterated. The moral drawn from it--and there was this moral interpenetrating or impregnating the whole--became appreciable, it might even have been by Sikes himself, from the first moment the ruffian realised that the crime had been actually accomplished. It spoke trumpet-tongued from the very instant when he recoiled from "it!" Nancy no more, but thenceforth flesh and blood--"But such flesh, and so much blood!" Nevertheless, in that Experimental Reading of the 14th of November, 1868, the effect of all this appeared, in the estimation of the present writer, to have been in a great measure marred by the abruptness with which, almost the instant after the crime had been committed, the Reading was terminated. Sikes burnt upon the hearth the blood-stained weapon with which the murder had been perpetrated---was startled for a moment by the hair upon the end of the club shrinking to a light cinder and whirling up the chimney--and then, dragging the dog (whose very feet were b.l.o.o.d.y) after him, and locking the door, left the house. There, the Experimental Reading abruptly terminated. It seemed not only insufficient, but a lost opportunity.

Insomuch, that the writer, on the following day, remonstrated with the Novelist as earnestly as possible, urging him to append to the Reading as it then stood some fragmentary portion, at least, of the chapter descriptive of the flight, so that the remorseful horror of Sikes might be more fully realised. Of the reasonableness of this objection, however, d.i.c.kens himself was so wholly unconvinced, that, in the midst of his arguments against it, he wrote, in a tone of good-humoured indignation, "My dear fellow, believe me that no audience on earth could be held for ten minutes after the girl's death. Give them time, and they would be revengeful for having had such a strain put upon them. Trust me to be right. I stand there, and I know." Than this nothing could very well have been more strongly expressed, as indicative of the conclusion at which he had deliberately arrived.

So frankly open to conviction was he, nevertheless, that, not disdaining to defer to the judgment of another when his own had been convinced, the Reading was eventually, after all, lengthened out by a very remarkable addition. The printed copy of this fragment of Oliver Twist, artistically compacted together as "A Reading," has, appended to it, in blue ink, three pages of ma.n.u.script in the Novelist's familiar handwriting, in which, with a cunning mastery of all the powers of condensation, he has compacted together in a few sentences what he always gave with wonderful effect before the public, the salient incidents of the murderer's flight, ending with his own destruction, and even his dog's, from the housetop.

Nothing that could most powerfully realise to the audience the ruffian's sense of horror and abhorrence has been there overlooked. The ghastly figure follows him everywhere. He hears its garments rustling in the leaves. "If _he_ stopped, _it_ stopped. If _he_ ran, _it_ followed."

Turning at times to beat the phantom off, though it should strike him dead, the hair rises on his head, and his blood stands still, for it has turned with him and is behind him! Throwing himself on his back upon the road--"At his head it stood, silent, erect, and still: a human gravestone with its epitaph in Blood."

What is as striking as anything in all this Reading, however--that is, in the Reading copy of it now lying before us as we write--is the ma.s.s of hints as to byplay in the stage directions for himself, so to speak, scattered up and down the margin. "f.a.gin raised his right hand, and shook his trembling forefinger in the air," is there, on p. 101, in print. Beside it, on the margin in MS., is the word "Action." Not a word of it was said. It was simply _done_. Again, immediately below that on the same page--Sikes' loquitur--"'Oh! you haven't, haven't you?' pa.s.sing a pistol into a more convenient pocket ['Action,' again, in MS. on the margin.]' That's lucky for one of us--which one that is don't matter.'"

Not a word was said about the pistol--the marginal direction was simply attended to. On the opposite page, in print, "f.a.gin laid his hand upon the bundle, and locked it in the cupboard. But he did not take his eyes off the robber for an instant." On the margin in MS., oddly but significantly underlined, are the words, "Cupboard Action." So again afterwards, as a rousing self-direction, one sees notified in ma.n.u.script, on p. 107, the grim stage direction, "Murder Coming."

As certainly as the "Trial from Pickwick" was the most laughter-moving of all the Readings, and as the "Story of Little Dombey," again, was the most pathetic, "Sikes and Nancy" was in all respects the most powerfully dramatic and, in the grand tragic force of it, in many ways, the most impressive and remarkable.

THE FAREWELL READING.

In recording the incident of his Farewell Reading, there comes back to us a yet later recollection of the great Novelist; and ill.u.s.trating, as it does, his pa.s.sionate love for the dramatic art, it may here be mentioned not inappropriately.

It relates simply to a remark suddenly made by him--and which had been suggested, so far as we can remember, by nothing we had been talking about previously--towards the close of our very last suburban walk together. Going round by way of Lambeth one afternoon in the early summer of 1870, we had skirted the Thames along the Surrey bank, had crossed the river higher up, and on our way back were returning at our leisure through Westminster; when, just as we were approaching the shadow of the old Abbey at Poet's Corner, under the roof-beams of which he was so soon to be laid in his grave, with a rain of tears and flowers, he abruptly asked--

"What do you think would be the realisation of one of my most cherished day-dreams?" Adding, instantly, without waiting for airy answer, "To settle down now for the remainder of my life within easy distance of a great theatre, in the direction of which I should hold supreme authority. It should be a house, of course, having a skilled and n.o.ble company, and one in every way magnificently appointed. The pieces acted should be dealt with according to my pleasure, and touched up here and there in obedience to my own judgment; the players as well as the plays being absolutely under my command. There," said he, laughingly, and in a glow at the mere fancy, "_that's_ my daydream!"

d.i.c.kens's delighted enjoyment, in fact, of everything in any way connected with the theatrical profession, was second only to that shown by him in the indulgence of the master-pa.s.sion of his life, his love of literature.

The way in which he threw himself into his labours, as a Reader, was only another indication of his intense affection for the dramatic art.

For, as we have already insisted, the Readings were more than simply Readings, they were in the fullest meaning of the words singularly ingenious and highly elaborated histrionic performances. And his sustained success in them during fifteen years altogether, and, as we have seen, through as many as five hundred representations, may be accounted for in the same way as his still more prolonged success, from the beginning of his career as a Novelist down to its very close, from the Pickwick Papers to Edwin Drood, otherwise, during an interval of four-and-thirty consecutive years, as the most popular author of his generation.

The secret of his original success, and of the long sustamment of it in each of these two careers--as Writer and as Reader--is in a great measure discoverable in this, that whatever powers he possessed he applied to their very uttermost. Whether as Author or as Impersonator, he gave himself up to his appointed task, not partially or intermittingly, but thoroughly and indefatigably.

His rule in life, in this way, he has himself clearly explained in the forty-second chapter of David Copperfield. What he there says about David's industry and perseverance, applies as directly to himself, as what he also relates in regard to his young hero's earlier toils as a parliamentary reporter, and his precocious fame as a writer of fiction.

Speaking at once for David and for himself, he there writes for both or for either, "Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; in great aims and in small I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no subst.i.tute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was, I find now to have been my golden rules." What is there said applies far more recognisably to the real Charles d.i.c.kens than to the imaginary David Copperfield.

Attestations of the truth of this were discoverable, at every turn, in regard to his regular system, his constant method, nay, his minutest tricks of habit, so to speak, both as Reader and as Novelist. It was so when as an Author, for example, note was taken, now of his careful forecast of a serial tale on as many slips as there were to be green monthly numbers; now of his elaborately corrected and recorrected ma.n.u.scripts; now of the proof-sheets lying about, for revision at any and every spare moment, during the month immediately before publication.

Or, when, on the other hand, in his capacity as a Reader, regard was had to the scrupulous exact.i.tude with which the seemingly trivial minutiae of what one might call the mere accompaniments, were systematically cared for or methodised. Announced to read, for instance, for the first time in some town he had never before visited for that purpose, or in some building in which his voice had never before been raised, he would go down to the empty hall long before the hour appointed for the Reading, to take the bearings, as he would say, or, in other words, to familiarise himself with the place beforehand. His interest in his audience, again, was something delightful. He was hardly less keenly observant of them than they of him. Through a hole in the curtain at the side, or through a c.h.i.n.k in the screen upon the platform, he would eagerly direct your attention to what never palled upon his own, namely, the effect of the suddenly brightened sea of faces on the turning up of the gas, immediately before the moment of his own appearance at the reading-desk.

The evening at length came for his very last appearance at that familiar little reading-desk, on Tuesday, the 15th of March, 1870, on the platform of the St. James's Hall, Piccadilly. The largest audience ever a.s.sembled in that immense building, the largest, as already intimated, that ever can be a.s.sembled there for purely Reading purposes, namely, when the orchestra and the upper end of the two side-galleries have necessarily to be barred or curtained off from the auditorium, were collected together there under the radiant pendants of the glittering ceiling, every available nook and corner, and all the ordinary gangways of the Great Hall being completely occupied. The money value of the house that night was 422. Crowds were unable to obtain admittance at the entrances in the Quadrant and in Piccadilly, long before the hour fixed for the Farewell Reading. Inside the building 2034 persons were seated there, eagerly awaiting the Novelist's appearance. The enthusiasm of his reception when eight o'clock came, and he advanced to the centre of the platform, of itself told plainly enough, as plainly as the printed hills announcing the fact in red, back, and yellow, that it was his last appearance.

The Readings selected were, as the very best that could have been chosen, his own favourites--"The Christmas Carol," and the "Trial from Pickwick." He never read better in his life than he did on that last evening. Evidently enough, he was nerved to a crowning effort. And by sympathy his audience--his last audience--responded to him throughout by their instant and intense appreciation. Not a point was lost. Every good thing told to the echo, that is, through the echoing laughter. Scrooge, Fezziwig, the Fiddler, Topper, every one of the Cratchits, everybody in "The Carol," including the Small Boy who is so great at repartee, all were welcomed in turn, as became them, with better than acclamations. It was the same exactly with the "Trial from Pickwick"--Justice Stareleigh, Serjeant Buzfuz, Mr. Winkle, Mrs. Cluppins, Sam Weller, one after another appearing for a brief interval, and then disappearing for ever, each of them a delightfully humorous, one of them in particular, the Judge, a simply incomparable impersonation.

Then came the moment of parting between the great Author and his audience--that last audience who were there as the representatives of his immense public in both hemispheres. When the resounding applause that greeted the close of that Final Reading had died out, there was a breathless hush as Charles d.i.c.kens, who had for once lingered there upon the platform, addressed to his hearers, with exquisitely clear articulation, but with unmistakably profound emotion, these few and simple words of farewell:--

"Ladies and Gentlemen,--It would be worse than "idle, for it would be hypocritical and unfeeling, if I "were to disguise that I close this episode in my life "with feelings of very considerable pain. For some "fifteen years in this hall, and in many kindred places, "I have had the honour of presenting my own che- "rished ideas before you for your recognition, and in "closely observing your reception of them have en- "joyed an amount of artistic delight and instruction, "which perhaps it is given to few men to know. In "this task and in every other I have ever undertaken "as a faithful servant of the public, always imbued "with the sense of duty to them, and always striving "to do his best, I have been uniformly cheered by the "readiest response, the most generous sympathy, and "the most stimulating support. Nevertheless, I have "thought it well, at the full flood-tide of your favour, "to retire upon those older a.s.sociations between us, "which date from much further back than these, "thenceforth to devote myself exclusively to the art "that first brought us together. Ladies and gentle- "men, in two short weeks from this time I hope that "you may enter, in your own homes, on a new series "of readings at which my a.s.sistance will be indispen- "sable ; but from these garish lights I vanish now for "evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and "affectionate fare well."

The manly, cordial voice only faltered once at the very last. The mournful modulation of it in the utterance of the words, "From these garish lights I vanish now for evermore" lingers to this moment like a haunting melody in our remembrance. Within a few weeks afterwards those very words were touchingly inscribed on the Funeral Card distributed at the doors of Westminster Abbey on the day of the Novelist's interment in Poet's Corner. As he moved from the platform after the utterance of the last words of his address and, with his head drooping in emotion, pa.s.sed behind the screen on his way to his retiring-room, a cordial hand was placed for one moment with a sympathetic grasp upon his shoulder. The popularity won by Charles d.i.c.kens, even among the million who never saw him or spoke with him, amounted to nothing less than personal affection.

Among his friends and intimates no great author has ever been more truly or more tenderly beloved. The prolonged thunder of applause that followed him to his secluded room at the back of the platform, whither he had withdrawn alone, recalled him after the lapse of some minutes for another instant into the presence of his last audience, from whom, with a kiss of his hand, he then indeed parted for evermore.

THE END.