Dickens Part 3

CHAPTER IV.

"DAVID COPPERFIELD."

[1847-1851.]

The five years, reckoned roughly, from the beginning of 1847 to the close of 1851, were most a.s.suredly the season in which the genius of d.i.c.kens produced its richest and rarest fruit. When it opened he was still at work upon _Dombey and Son_; towards its end he was already engaged upon the earliest portions of _Bleak House_. And it was during the interval that he produced a book cherished by himself with an affection differing in kind, as well as in degree, from the common fondness of an author for his literary offspring, and a pearl without a peer amongst the later fictions of our English school--_David Copperfield_. To this period also belong, it is true, not a few lesser productions of the same ready pen; for the last of his Christmas books was written in 1848, and in 1850 his weekly periodical, _Household Words_, began to run its course. There was much play too in these busy years, but all more or less of the kind which his good-humoured self-irony afterwards very correctly characterised:

"'Play!' said Thomas Idle. 'Here is a man goes systematically tearing himself to pieces, and putting himself through an incessant course of training, as if he were always under articles to fight a match for the champion's belt, and he calls it "Play." Play!' exclaimed Thomas Idle, scornfully contemplating his one boot in the air; 'you can't play. You don't know what it is. You make work of everything!'"

"A man," added the same easy philosopher, "who can do nothing by halves appears to me to be a fearful man." And as at all times in d.i.c.kens's life, so most emphatically in these years when his physical powers seemed ready to meet every demand, and the elasticity of his mind seemed equal to every effort, he did nothing by halves. Within this short s.p.a.ce of time not only did he write his best book, and conduct a weekly journal of solid merit through its most trying stage, but he also established his reputation as one of the best "unpolitical" speakers in the country; and as an amateur actor and manager successfully weathered what may be called three theatrical seasons, to the labours and glories of which it would be difficult to find a parallel even in the records of that most exacting of all social amus.e.m.e.nts. One likes to think of him in these years of vigorous manhood, no longer the fair youth with the flowing locks of Maclise's charming portrait, but not yet, I suppose, altogether the commanding and rather stern presence of later years. Mr. Frith's portrait was not painted till 1859, by which time the face occasionally had a more set expression, and the entire personality a more weather-beaten appearance, than this well-known picture suggests. But even eight years before this date, when d.i.c.kens was acting in Lord Lytton's comedy the part of a young man of _mode_, Mr. Sala's well-known comparison of his outward man to "some prosperous sea-captain home from a sea-voyage," was thought applicable to him by another shrewd observer, Mr. R. H. Horne, who says that, fashionable "make-up" notwithstanding, "he presented a figure that would have made a good portrait of a Dutch privateer after having taken a capital prize." And in 1856 Ary Scheffer, to whom when sitting for his portrait he had excused himself for being a difficult subject, "received the apology as strictly his due, and said, with a vexed air, 'At this moment, _mon cher_ d.i.c.kens, you look more like an energetic Dutch admiral than anything else;' for which I apologised again." In 1853, in the sympathetic neighbourhood of Boulogne, he was "growing a mustache," and, by 1856, a beard of the _Henri Quatre_ type had been added; but even before that time we may well believe that he was, as Mr. Sala says, "one of the few men whose individuality was not effaced by the mournful conventionality of evening-dress." Even in morning-dress he unconsciously contrived, born actor as he was, to have something unusual about him; and, if report speaks the truth, even at the sea-side, when most prodigal of ease, he was careful to dress the character.

The five years of which more especially I am speaking brought him repeatedly face to face with the public, and within hearing of the applause that was becoming more and more of a necessity to him. They were thus unmistakably amongst the very happiest years of his life. The shadow that was to fall upon his home can hardly yet have been visible even in the dim distance. For this the young voices were too many and too fresh around him behind the garden-wall in Devonshire Terrace, and amongst the autumnal corn on the cliffs at Broadstairs. "They are all in great force,"

he writes to his wife, in September, 1850, and "much excited with the expectation of receiving you on Friday;" and I only wish I had s.p.a.ce to quote the special report sent on this occasion to the absent mother concerning her precocious three-year-old. What sorrowful experiences he in these years underwent were such as few men escape amongst the chances of life. In 1848 he lost the sister who had been the companion of his earliest days, and three years later his father, whom he had learned to respect as well as love. Not long afterwards his little Dora, the youngest of his flock, was suddenly taken from him. Meanwhile, his old friends clung to him. Indeed, I never heard that he lost the affection of any one who had been attached to him; and though the circle of his real intimates was never greatly widened, yet he was on friendly or even familiar terms with many whose names belong to the history of their times. Amongst these were the late Lord Lytton--then Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton--whose splendid abilities were still devoted mainly to literary labours, and between whom and d.i.c.kens there were more points of contrast than might at first sight appear. Of Thackeray, too, he seems to have been coming to know more; and with Leech, more especially during a summer sojourn of both their families at Bonchurch, in 1849, he grew intimate. Mr. Monckton Milnes--then, and since as Lord Houghton, _semper amicus, semper hospes_ both to successful merit and to honest endeavour--Lord Carlisle, and others who adorned the great world under more than one of its aspects, were, of course, welcome friends and acquaintances; and even Carlyle occasionally found his way to the house of his staunch admirer, though he might declare that he was, in the language of Mr. Peggotty's house-keeper, "a lorn lone creature, and everything went contrairy with him."

It is not very easy to describe the personal habits of a man who is found seeing the spring in at Brighton and the autumn out at Broadstairs, and in the interval "strolling" through the chief towns of the kingdom at the head of a large company of ladies and gentlemen, according to the description which he put into Mrs. Gamp's mouth, "with a great box of papers under his arm, a-talking to everybody wery indistinct, and exciting of himself dreadful." But since under ordinary circ.u.mstances he made, even in outward matters and arrangements of detail, a home for himself wherever he was, and as a rule cared little for the society of companions whose ideas and ways of life were foreign to his own, certain habits had become second nature to him, and to others he adhered with sophistical tenacity.

He was an early riser, if for no other reason, because every man in whose work imagination plays its part must sometimes be alone; and d.i.c.kens has told us that there was to him something incomparably solemn in the still solitude of the morning. But it was only exceptionally, and when hard-pressed by the necessities of his literary labours, that he wrote before breakfast; in general he was contented with the ordinary working hours of the morning, not often writing after luncheon, and, except in early life, never in the evening. Ordinarily, when engaged on a work of fiction, he considered three of his not very large MS. pages a good, and four an excellent, day's work; and, while very careful in making his corrections clear and unmistakable, he never rewrote what a morning's labour had ultimately produced. On the other hand, he was frequently slow in beginning a story, being, as he himself says, affected by something like despondency at such times, or, as he elsewhere humorously puts it, "going round and round the idea, as you see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches it." A temperate liver, he was at the same time a zealous devotee of bodily exercise. He had not as yet given up riding, and is found, in 1848, spending the whole of a March day, with Forster, Leech, and Mark Lemon, in riding over every part of Salisbury Plain. But walking exercise was at once his forte and his fanaticism. He is said to have constructed for himself a theory that, to every portion of the day given to intellectual labour should correspond an equal number of hours spent in walking; and frequently, no doubt, he gave up his morning's chapter before he had begun it, "entirely persuading himself that he was under a moral obligation" to do his twenty miles on the road. By day he found in the London thoroughfares stimulative variety, and at a later date he states it to be "one of his fancies that even his idlest walk must have its appointed destination;" and by night, in seasons of intellectual excitement, he found in these same streets the refreshment of isolation among crowds. But the walks he loved best were long stretches on the cliffs or across the downs by the sea, where, following the track of his "breathers," one half expects to meet him coming along against the wind at four and a half miles an hour, the very embodiment of energy and brimful of life.

And besides this energy he carried with him, wheresoever he pitched his tent, what was the second cause of his extraordinary success in so much of the business of life as it fell to him to perform. He hated disorder as Sir Artegal hated injustice; and if there was anything against which he took up his parable with burning indignation, it was slovenliness, and half-done work, and "shoddiness" of all kinds. His love of order made him always the most regular of men. "Everything with him," Miss Hogarth told me, "went as by clock-work; his movements, his absences from home, and the times of his return were all fixed beforehand, and it was seldom that he failed to adhere to what he had fixed." Like most men endowed with a superfluity of energy, he prided himself on his punctuality. He could not live in a room or in a house till he had put every piece of furniture into its proper place, nor could he begin to work till all his writing-gear was at hand, with no item missing or misplaced. Yet he did not, like so many, combine with these habits and tendencies a saving disposition. "No man,"

he said of himself, "attaches less importance to the possession of money, or less disparagement to the want of it, than I do." His circ.u.mstances, though easy, were never such as to warrant a display to which, perhaps, certain qualities of his character might have inclined him; even at a much later date he described himself--rather oddly, perhaps--as "a man of moderate savings, always supporting a very expensive public position."

But, so far as I can gather, he never had a reasonable want which he could not and did not satisfy, though at the same time he cared for very few of the pursuits or amus.e.m.e.nts that are apt to drain much larger resources than his. He never had to think twice about country or sea-side quarters; wherever it might suit his purpose or fancy to choose them, at one of his south-coast haunts or, for his wife's health, at Malvern, thither he went; and when the whim seized him for a trip _en garcon_ to any part of England or to Paris, he had only to bid the infallible Anne pack his trunk. He was a provident as well as an affectionate father; but the cost of educating his numerous family seems to have caused him no serious anxiety. In 1849 he sent his eldest son to Eton. And while he had sworn a kind of _vendetta_ against begging-letter writers, and afterwards used to parry the attacks of his pertinacious enemies by means of carefully-prepared written forms, his hand seems to have been at all times open for charity.

Some of these personal characteristics of d.i.c.kens were to be brought out with remarkable vividness during the period of his life which forms the special subject of the present chapter. Never was he more thoroughly himself than as a theatrical manager and actor, surrounded by congenial a.s.sociates. He starred it to his heart's content at the country seat of his kind Lausanne friends, Mr. and Mrs. Watson. But the first occasion on which he became publicly known in both the above-mentioned capacities was the reproduction of the amateur performance of _Every Man in his Humour_.

This time the audiences were to be in Manchester and Liverpool, where it was hoped that a golden harvest might be reaped for Leigh Hunt, who was at that time in sore straits. As it chanced, a civil-list pension was just about this time--1847--conferred upon the most unaffectedly graceful of all modern writers of English verse. It was accordingly resolved to divert part of the proceeds of the undertaking in favour of a worthy playwright, the author of _Paul Pry_. The comedy was acted with brilliant success at Manchester, on July 26, and at Liverpool two days later; and then the "managerial miseries," which d.i.c.kens had enjoyed with his whole heart and soul, were over for the nonce. Already, however, in the following year, 1848, an excellent reason was found for their recommencement; and nine performances of Ben Jonson's play, this time alternated with _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, were given by d.i.c.kens's "company of amateurs"--the expression is his own--at the Haymarket, and in the theatres of five of the largest towns in the kingdom, for the benefit of Sheridan Knowles.

Nothing could have been more honourable than d.i.c.kens's readiness to serve the interests of an actor with whom, but for his own generous temper, he would only a few months before have been involved in a wordy quarrel. In _The Merry Wives_, the manager acted Justice Shallow to Mark Lemon's Falstaff. Dame Quickly was played by Mrs. Cowden Clarke, who speedily became a favourite correspondent of d.i.c.kens. But the climax of these excitements arrived in the year of wonders, 1851, when, with a flourish of trumpets resounding through the world of fashion as well as of letters, the comedy _Not so Bad as We Seem_, written for the occasion by Bulwer Lytton, was performed under d.i.c.kens's management at Devonshire House, in the presence of the Queen, for the benefit of the Guild of Literature and Art. The object was a n.o.ble one, though the ultimate result of the scheme has been an almost pitiable failure; and nothing was spared, by the host or the actors, to make the effect worthy of it. While some of the most popular men of letters took parts in the clever and effective play, its scenery was painted by some of the most eminent among the English artists.

d.i.c.kens was fired by the ardour of the enterprise, and, proceeding on his principle that the performance could not possibly "be a success if the smallest pepper-corn of arrangement were omitted," covered himself and his a.s.sociates with glory. From Devonshire House play and theatre were transferred to the Hanover Square Rooms, where the farce of _Mr.

Nightingale's Diary_ was included in the performance, of which some vivid reminiscences have been published by one of the few survivors of that n.o.ble company, Mr. R. H. Horne. Other accounts corroborate his recollections of the farce, which was the triumph of "gag," and would have been reckoned a masterpiece in the old _commedia dell' arte_. The characters played by d.i.c.kens included Sam Weller turned waiter; a voluble barrister by the name of Mr. Gabblewig; a hypochondriac suffering from a prescription of mustard and milk; the Gampish mother of a charity-boy (Mr. Egg); and her brother, a stone-deaf old s.e.xton, who appeared to be "at least ninety years of age." The last-named a.s.sumption seems to have been singularly effective:

"After repeated shoutings ('It's of no use whispering to me, young man') of the word 'buried'--'_Brewed!_ Oh yes, sir, I have brewed many a good gallon of ale in my time. The last batch I brewed, sir, was finer than all the rest--the best ale ever brewed in the county. It used to be called in our parts here "Samson with his hair on!" in allusion'--here his excitement shook the tremulous frame into coughing and wheezing--'in allusion to its great strength.' He looked from face to face to see if his feat was duly appreciated, and his venerable jest understood by those around; and then, softly repeating, with a glimmering smile, 'in allusion to its great strength,' he turned about, and made his exit, like one moving towards his own grave while he thinks he is following the funeral of another."

From London the company travelled into the country, where their series of performances was not closed till late in the succeeding year, 1852.

d.i.c.kens was from first to last the manager, and the ruling spirit of the undertaking. Amongst his latest recruits Mr. Wilkie Collins is specially mentioned by Forster. The acquaintance which thus began soon ripened into a close and lasting friendship, and became, with the exception of that with Forster himself, the most important of all d.i.c.kens's personal intimacies for the history of his career as an author.

Speech-making was not in quite the same sense, or to quite the same degree, as amateur acting and managing, a voluntary labour on d.i.c.kens's part. Not that he was one of those to whom the task of occasionally addressing a public audience is a pain or even a burden. Indeed, he was a born orator; for he possessed both that strong and elastic imaginative power which enables a man to place himself at once in sympathy with his audience, and that gift of speech, pointed, playful, and where necessary impetuous, which pleads well in any a.s.sembly for any cause. He had moreover the personal qualifications of a handsome manly presence, a sympathetic eye, and a fine flexible voice, which, as his own hints on public speaking show, he managed with care and intelligence. He had, he says, "fought with beasts (oratorically) in divers arenas." But though a speaker in whom ease bred force, and force ease, he was the reverse of a mere builder of phrases and weaver of periods. "Mere holding forth," he declared, "I utterly detest, abominate, and abjure." His innate hatred of talk for mere talk's sake had doubtless been intensified by his early reporting experiences, and by what had become his stereotyped notion of our parliamentary system. At the Administration Reform meeting in 1855 he stated that he had never before attended a public meeting. On the other hand, he had been for already several years in great request for meetings of a different kind, concerned with the establishment or advancement of educational or charitable inst.i.tutions in London and other great towns of the country. His addresses from the chair were often of remarkable excellence; and this not merely because crowded halls and increased subscription-lists were their concomitants, and because the happiness of his humour--never out of season, and even on such occasions often singularly prompt--sent every one home in good spirits. In these now forgotten speeches on behalf of Athenaeums and Mechanics' Inst.i.tutes, or of actors' and artists' and newsmen's charities, their occasional advocate never appears occasional. Instead of seeming to have just mastered his brief while the audience was taking its seats, or to have become for the first time deeply interested in his subject in the interval between his soup and his speech, the cause which d.i.c.kens pleads never has in him either an imperfectly informed or a half-indifferent representative.

Amongst many charming ill.u.s.trations of a vein of oratory in which he has been equalled by very few if by any public men of his own or the succeeding generation, I will instance only one address, though it belongs to a considerably later date than the time of _David Copperfield_.

Nothing, however, that d.i.c.kens has ever written--not even _David Copperfield_ itself--breathes a tenderer sympathy for the weakness of unprotected childhood than the beautiful little speech delivered by him on February 9, 1858, on behalf of the London Hospital for Sick Children.

Beginning with some touches of humour concerning the spoilt children of the rich, the orator goes on to speak of the "spoilt children" of the poor, ill.u.s.trating with concrete directness both the humorous and the pathetic side of his subject, and after a skilfully introduced sketch of the capabilities and wants of the "infant inst.i.tution" for which he pleads, ending with an appeal, founded on a fancy of Charles Lamb, to the support of the "dream-children" belonging to each of his hearers: "the dear child you love, the dearer child you have lost, the child you might have had, the child you certainly have been." This is true eloquence, of a kind which aims at something besides opening purse-strings. In 1851 he had spoken in the same vein of mixed humour and pathos on behalf of his clients, the poor actors, when, unknown to him, a little child of his own was lying dead at home. But in these years of his life, as indeed at all times, his voice was at the service of such causes as had his sympathy; it was heard at Birmingham, at Leeds, at Glasgow; distance was of little moment to his energetic nature; and as to trouble, how could he do anything by halves?

There was yet a third kind of activity, distinct from that of literary work pure and simple, in which d.i.c.kens in these years for the first time systematically engaged. It has been seen how he had long cherished the notion of a periodical conducted by himself, and marked by a unity of design which should make it in a more than ordinary sense his own paper.

With a genius like his, which attached itself to the concrete, very much depended at the outset upon the choice of a t.i.tle. _The Cricket_ could not serve again, and for some time the notion of an omnipresent _Shadow_, with something, if possible, tacked to it "expressing the notion of its being cheerful, useful, and always welcome," seemed to promise excellently. For a rather less ambitious design, however, a rather less ambitious t.i.tle was sought, and at last fortunately found, in the phrase, rendered proverbial by Shakspeare, "_Household Words_." "We hope," he wrote a few weeks before the first number appeared, on March 30, 1850, "to do some solid good, and we mean to be as cheery and pleasant as we can." But _Household Words_, which in form and in cost was to be a paper for the mult.i.tude, was to be something more than agreeable and useful and cheap. It was to help in casting out the many devils that had taken up their abode in popular periodical literature, the "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds of the Mountain," and the foul fiends who dealt in infamous scurrility, and to do this with the aid of a charm more potent than the most lucid argument and the most abundant facts. "In the bosoms of the young and old, of the well-to-do and of the poor," says the _Preliminary Word_ in the first number, "we would tenderly cherish that light of fancy which is inherent in the human breast." To this purpose it was the editor's constant and deliberate endeavour to bind his paper. "KEEP 'HOUSEHOLD WORDS' IMAGINATIVE!" is the "solemn and continual Conductorial Injunction" which three years after the foundation of the journal he impresses, with the artful aid of capitals, upon his faithful coadjutor, Mr. W. H. Wills. In his own contributions he was not forgetful of this maxim, and the most important of them, the serial story, _Hard Times_, was written with the express intention of pointing it as a moral.

There are, I suppose, in addition to the many mysterious functions performed by the editor of a literary journal, two of the very highest significance; in the first place, the choice of his contributors, and then, if the expression may be used, the management of them. In both respects but one opinion seems to exist of d.i.c.kens's admirable qualities as an editor. Out of the many contributors to _Household Words_, and its kindred successor, _All the Year Round_--some of whom are happily still among living writers--it would be invidious to select for mention a few in proof of the editor's discrimination. But it will not be forgotten that the first number of the earlier journal contained the beginning of a tale by Mrs. Gaskell, whose name will long remain a household word in England, both North and South. And a periodical could hardly be deemed one-sided which included among its contributors scholars and writers of the distinction belonging to the names of Forster and Mr. Henry Morley, together with humorous observers of men and things such as Mr. Sala and Albert Smith. On the other hand, _Household Words_ had what every literary journal ought to have, an individuality of its own; and this individuality was, of course, that of its editor. The mannerisms of d.i.c.kens's style afterwards came to be imitated by some among his contributors; but the general unity perceptible in the journal was the natural and legitimate result of the fact that it stood under the independent control of a vigorous editor, a.s.sisted by a sub-editor--Mr. W. H. Wills--of rare trustworthiness. d.i.c.kens had a keen eye for selecting subjects from a definite field, a ready skill for shaping, if necessary, the articles accepted by him, and a genius for providing them with expressive and attractive t.i.tles. Fiction and poetry apart, these articles have mostly a social character or bearing, although they often deviate into the pleasant paths of literature or art; and usually, but by no means always, the scenes or a.s.sociations with which they connect themselves are of England, English.

Nothing could surpa.s.s the unflagging courtesy shown by d.i.c.kens towards his contributors, great or small, old or new, and his patient interest in their endeavours, while he conducted _Household Words_, and afterwards _All the Year Round_. Of this there is evidence enough to make the records of the office in Wellington Street a pleasant page in the history of journalism. He valued a good workman when he found him, and was far too reasonable and generous to put his own stamp upon all the good metal that pa.s.sed through his hands. Even in his Christmas Numbers he left the utmost possible freedom to his a.s.sociates. Where he altered or modified it was as one who had come to know the pulse of the public; and he was not less considerate with novices, than he was frank and explicit with experts, in the writer's art. The articles in his journal being anonymous, he was not tempted to use names as baits for the public, though many who wrote for him were men or women of high literary reputation. And he kept his doors open. While some editors deem it their duty to ward off would-be contributors, as some ministers of state think it theirs to get rid of deputations, d.i.c.kens sought to ignore instead of jealously guarding the boundaries of professional literature. Nothing in this way ever gave him greater delight than to have welcomed and published several poems sent to him under a feigned name, but which he afterwards discovered to be the first-fruits of the charming poetical talent of Miss Adelaide Procter, the daughter of his old friend "Barry Cornwall."

In the preparation of his own papers, or of those which, like the Christmas Numbers, he composed conjointly with one or more of his familiars, he spared no labour and thought no toil too great. At times, of course, he, like all periodical writers who cannot be merry every Wednesday or caustic every Sat.u.r.day, felt the pressure of the screw. "As to two comic articles," he exclaims on one occasion, "or two any sort of articles, out of me, that's the intensest extreme of no-goism." But, as a rule, no great writer ever ran more gaily under his self-imposed yoke. His "Uncommercial Travels," as he at a later date happily christened them, familiarised him with whatever parts or aspects of London his long walks had still left unexplored; and he was as conscientious in hunting up the details of a complicated subject as in finding out the secrets of an obscure pursuit or trade. Accomplished antiquarians and "commissioners"

a.s.sisted him in his labours; but he was no _roi faineant_ on the editorial sofa which he so complacently describes. Whether he was taking _A Walk in a Workhouse_, or knocking at the door of another with the supernumerary waifs in Whitechapel, or _On_ (night) _Duty with Inspector Field_ among the worst of the London slums, he was always ready to see with his own eyes; after which the photographic power of his pen seemed always capable of doing the rest. Occasionally he treats topics more properly journalistic, but he is most delightful when he takes his ease in his _English_ or his _French Watering-place_, or carries his readers with him on _A Flight to Paris_, bringing before them, as it were, in breathless succession, every inch of the familiar journey. Happiest of all is he when, with his friend Mr. Wilkie Collins--this, however, not until the autumn of 1857--he starts on _The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices_, the earlier chapters of which furnish some of the best specimens of his most humorous prose. Neither at the same time does he forget himself to enforce the claim of his journal to strengthen the imaginary side of literature.

In an a.s.sumed character he allows a veteran poet to carry him _By Rail to Parna.s.sus_, and even good-humouredly banters an old friend, George Cruikshank, for having committed _Frauds on the Fairies_ by re-editing legendary lore with the view of inculcating the principle of total abstinence.

Such, then, were some of the channels in which the intense mental and physical energy of d.i.c.kens found a congenial outlet in these busy years.

Yet in the very midst of this multifarious activity the mysterious and controlling power of his genius enabled him to collect himself for the composition of a work of fiction which, as I have already said, holds, and will always continue to hold, a place of its own among its works. "Of all my books," he declares, "I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child--and his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD!" He parted from the story with a pang, and when in after life he returned to its perusal, he was hardly able to master the emotions which it recalled; perhaps even he hardly knew what the effort of its production had cost him.

The first number of _David Copperfield_ was published in May, 1849--the last in November, 1850. To judge from the difficulty which d.i.c.kens found in choosing a t.i.tle for his story--of which difficulty plentiful evidence remains in MS. at South Kensington--he must have been fain to delay longer even than usual on the threshold. In the end the name of the hero evolved itself out of a series of transformations, from Trotfield and Trotbury to Copperboy, Copperstone--"Copperfull" being reserved as a _lectio varians_ for Mrs. Crupp--and _Copperfield_. Then at last the pen could fall seriously to work, and, proceeding slowly at first--for the first page of the MS. contains a great number of alterations--dip itself now into black, now into blue ink, and in a small writing, already contrasting with the bolder hand of earlier days, produce page upon page of an incomparable book. No doubt what so irresistibly attracted d.i.c.kens to _David Copperfield_, and what has since fascinated many readers, more or less conscious of the secret of the charm, is the autobiographical element in the story. Until the publication of Forster's _Life_ no reader of _Copperfield_ could be aware of the pang it must have cost d.i.c.kens to lay bare, though to unsuspecting eyes, the story of experiences which he had hitherto kept all but absolutely secret, and to which his own mind could not recur without a quivering sensitiveness. No reader could trace, as the memory of d.i.c.kens always must have traced, some of the most vivid of those experiences, imbued though they were with the tints of a delightfully playful humor, in the doings and dealings of Mr. Wilkins Micawber, whose original, by a strange coincidence, was pa.s.sing tranquilly away out of life, while his comic counterpart was blossoming into a whimsical immortality. And no reader could divine, what very probably even the author may hardly have ventured to confess to himself, that in the lovely little idyl of the loves of Doady and Dora--with Jip, as Dora's father might have said, intervening--there were, besides the reminiscences of an innocent juvenile amour, the vestiges of a man's unconfessed though not altogether unrepressed disappointment--the sense that "there was always something wanting." But in order to be affected by a personal or autobiographical element in a fiction or poem, it is by no means necessary to be aware of its actual bearing and character, or even of its very existence. _Amelia_ would gain little by ill.u.s.trative notes concerning the experiences of the first Mrs. Fielding. To excite in a work of fiction the peculiar kind of interest of which I am speaking the existence of an autobiographical substratum need not be apparent in it, nor need its presence be even suspected. Enough, if it be _there_. But it had far better be away altogether, unless the novelist has so thoroughly fused this particular stream of metal with the ma.s.s filling his mould that the result is an integral artistic whole. Such was, however, the case with _David Copperfield_, which of all d.i.c.kens's fictions is on the whole the most perfect as a work of art. Personal reminiscences which lay deep in the author's breast are, as effects, harmonised with local a.s.sociations old and new. Thus, Yarmouth, painted in the story with singular poetic truthfulness, had only quite recently been seen by d.i.c.kens for the first time, on a holiday trip. His imagination still subdued to itself all the elements with which he worked; and, whatever may be thought of the construction of this story, none of his other books equals it in that harmony of tone which no artist can secure unless by recasting all his materials.

As to the construction of _David Copperfield_, however, I frankly confess that I perceive no serious fault in it. It is a story with a plot, and not merely a string of adventures and experiences, like little Davy's old favourites upstairs at Blunderstone. In the conduct of this plot blemishes may here and there occur. The boy's flight from London, and the direction which it takes, are insufficiently accounted for. A certain amount of obscurity, as well perhaps as of improbability, pervades the relations between Uriah and the victim, round whom the unspeakably slimy thing writhes and wriggles. On the other hand, the mere conduct of the story has much that is beautiful in it. Thus, there is real art in the way in which the scene of Barkis's death--written with admirable moderation--prepares for the "greater loss" at hand for the mourning family. And in the entire treatment of his hero's double love story d.i.c.kens has, to my mind, avoided that discord which, in spite of himself, jars upon the reader both in _Esmond_ and in _Adam Bede_. The best constructed part of _David Copperfield_ is, however, unmistakably the story of Little Emily and her kinsfolk. This is most skilfully interwoven with the personal experiences of David, of which--except in its very beginnings--it forms no integral part; and throughout the reader is haunted by a presentiment of the coming catastrophe, though unable to divine the tragic force and justice of its actual accomplishment. A touch altered here and there in Steerforth, with the Rosa Dartle episode excluded or greatly reduced, and this part of _David Copperfield_ might challenge comparison as to workmanship with the whole literature of modern fiction.

Of the idyl of Davy and Dora what shall I say? Its earliest stages are full of the gayest comedy. What, for instance, could surpa.s.s the history of the picnic--where was it? perhaps it was near Guildford. At that feast an imaginary rival, "Red Whisker," made the salad--how could they eat it?--and "voted himself into the charge of the wine-cellar, which he constructed, _being an ingenious beast_, in the hollow trunk of a tree."

Better still are the backward ripples in the course of true love; best of all the deep wisdom of Miss Mills, in whose nature mental trial and suffering supplied, in some measure, the place of years. In the narrative of the young house-keeping David's real trouble is most skilfully mingled with the comic woes of the situation; and thus the idyl almost imperceptibly pa.s.ses into the last phase, where the clouds dissolve in a rain of tears. The genius which conceived and executed these closing scenes was touched by a pity towards the fict.i.tious creatures of his own imagination, which melted his own heart; and thus his pathos is here irresistible.

The inventive power of d.i.c.kens in none of his other books indulged itself so abundantly in the creation of eccentric characters, but neither was it in any so admirably tempered by taste and feeling. It contains no character which could strictly be called grotesque, unless it be little Miss Mowcher. Most of her outward peculiarities d.i.c.kens had copied from a living original; but receiving a remonstrance from the latter, he good-humouredly altered the use he had intended to make of the character, and thereby spoiled what there was in it--not much, in my opinion--to spoil. Mr. d.i.c.k belongs to a species of eccentric personages--mad people, in a word--for which d.i.c.kens as a writer had a curious liking; but though there is consequently no true humour in this character, it helps to bring out the latent tenderness in another. David's Aunt is a figure which none but a true humourist such as Sterne or d.i.c.kens could have drawn, and she must have sprung from the author's brain armed _cap-a-pie_ as she appeared in her garden before his little double. Yet even Miss Betsey Trotwood was not altogether a creation of the fancy, for at Broadstairs the locality is still pointed out where the "one great outrage of her life" was daily renewed. In the other chief characters of this story the author seems to rely entirely on natural truthfulness. He must have had many opportunities of noting the ways of seamen and fishermen, but the occupants of the old boat near Yarmouth possess the typical characteristics with which the experience and the imagination of centuries have agreed to credit the "salt" division of mankind. Again, he had had his own experience of shabby-genteel life, and of the struggle which he had himself seen a happy and a buoyant temperament maintaining against a sea of trouble. But Mr.

Micawber, whatever features may have been transferred to him, is the type of a whole race of men who will not vanish from the face of the earth so long as the hope which lives eternal in the human breast is only temporarily suspended by the laws of debtor and creditor, and is always capable of revival with the aid of a bowl of milk-punch. A kindlier and a merrier, a more humorous and a more genuine character was never conceived than this; and if anything was wanted to complete the comicality of the conception, it was the wife of his bosom with the twins at her own, and her mind made up _not_ to desert Mr. Micawber. Delightful too in his way, though of a cla.s.s more common in d.i.c.kens, is Tommy Traddles, the genial picture of whose married life in chambers in Gray's Inn, with the dearest girl in the world and her five sisters, including the beauty, on a visit, may have been suggested by kindly personal reminiscences of youthful days.

In contrast to these characters, the shambling, fawning, villanous hypocrisy of Uriah Heep is a piece of intense and elaborate workmanship, almost cruelly done without being overdone. It was in his figures of hypocrites that d.i.c.kens's satirical power most diversely displayed itself; and by the side of Uriah Heep in this story, literally so in the prison-scene at the close, stands another species of the race, the valet Littimer, a sketch which Thackeray himself could not have surpa.s.sed.

Thus, then, I must leave the book, with its wealth of pathos and humour, with the glow of youth still tinging its pages, but with the gentler mood of manhood pervading it from first to last. The _reality_ of _David Copperfield_ is, perhaps, the first feature in it likely to strike the reader new to its charms; but a closer acquaintance will produce, and familiarity will enhance, the sense of its wonderful _art_. Nothing will ever destroy the popularity of a work of which it can truly be said that, while offering to his muse a gift not less beautiful than precious, its author put into it his life's blood.

CHAPTER V.

CHANGES.

[1852-1858.]

I have spoken of both the intellectual and the physical vigour of Charles d.i.c.kens as at their height in the years of which the most enduring fruit was the most delightful of all his fictions. But there was no break in his activity after the achievement of this or any other of his literary successes, and he was never harder at work than during the seven years of which I am about to speak, although in this period also occasionally he was to be found hard at play. Its beginning saw him settled in his new and cheerfully-furnished abode at Tavistock House, of which he had taken possession in October, 1851. At its close he was master of the country residence which had been the dream of his childhood, but he had become a stranger to that tranquillity of mind without which no man's house is truly his home. Gradually, but surely, things had then, or a little before, come to such a pa.s.s that he wrote to his faithful friend: "I am become incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I am in that way Nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed."

Early in 1852 the youngest of his children had been born to him--the boy whose babyhood once more revived in him a tenderness the depth of which no eccentric humours and fantastic _sobriquets_ could conceal. In May, 1858, he had separated from the mother of his children; and though self-sacrificing affection was at hand to watch over them and him, yet that domestic life of which he had become the prophet and poet to hundreds of thousands was in its fairest and fullest form at an end for himself.

In the earlier of these years d.i.c.kens's movements were still very much of the same kind, and varied much after the same fashion, as in the period described in my last chapter. In 1852 the series of amateur performances in the country was completed; but time was found for a summer residence in Camden Crescent, Dover. During his stay there, and during most of his working hours in this and the following year--the spring of which was partly spent at Brighton--he was engaged upon his new story, _Bleak House_, published in numbers dating from March, 1852, to September, 1853.

"To let you into a secret," he had written to his lively friend, Miss Mary Boyle, from Dover, "I am not quite sure that I ever did like, or ever shall like, anything quite so well as _Copperfield_. But I foresee, I think, some very good things in _Bleak House_." There is no reason to believe that, by the general public, this novel was at the time of its publication a whit less favourably judged or less eagerly read than its predecessor. According to the author's own testimony it "took extraordinarily, especially during the last five or six months" of its issue, and "retained its immense circulation from the first, beating dear old _Copperfield_ by a round ten thousand or more." To this day the book has its staunch friends, some of whom would perhaps be slow to confess by which of the elements in the story they are most forcibly attracted. On the other hand, _Bleak House_ was probably the first of d.i.c.kens's works which furnished a suitable text to a cla.s.s of censors whose precious balms have since descended upon his head with constant reiteration. The power of amusing being graciously conceded to the "man of genius," his book was charged with "absolute want of construction," and with being a heterogeneous compound made up of a meagre and melodramatic story, and a number of "odd folks that have to do with a long Chancery suit." Of the characters themselves it was a.s.serted that, though in the main excessively funny, they were more like caricatures of the stage than studies from nature. Some approval was bestowed upon particular figures, but rather as types of the influence of externals than as real individualities; and while the character of the poor crossing-sweeper was generously praised, it was regretted that d.i.c.kens should never have succeeded in drawing "a man or woman whose lot is cast among the high-born or wealthy." He belonged, unfortunately, "in literature to the same cla.s.s as his ill.u.s.trator, Hablot Browne, in design, though he far surpa.s.ses the ill.u.s.trator in range and power." In other words, he was essentially a caricaturist.

As applied to _Bleak House_, with which I am at present alone concerned, this kind of censure was in more ways than one unjust. So far as constructive skill was concerned, the praise given by Forster to _Bleak House_ may be considered excessive; but there can be no doubt that, as compared, not with _Pickwick_ and _Nickleby_, but with its immediate predecessor, _David Copperfield_, this novel exhibits a decided advance in that respect. In truth, d.i.c.kens in _Bleak House_ for the first time emanc.i.p.ated himself from that form of novel which, in accordance with his great eighteenth-century favourites, he had hitherto more or less consciously adopted--the novel of adventure, of which the person of the hero, rather than the machinery of the plot, forms the connecting element.

It may be that the influence of Mr. Wilkie Collins was already strong upon him, and that the younger writer, whom d.i.c.kens was about this time praising for his unlikeness to the "conceited idiots who suppose that volumes are to be tossed off like pancakes," was already teaching something to, as well as learning something from, the elder. It may also be that the criticism which as editor of _Household Words_ d.i.c.kens was now in the habit of judiciously applying to the fictions of others, unconsciously affected his own methods and processes. Certain it is that from this point of view _Bleak House_ may be said to begin a new series among his works of fiction. The great Chancery suit and the fortunes of those concerned in it are not a disconnected background from which the mystery of Lady Dedlock's secret stands forth in relief; but the two main parts of the story are skilfully interwoven as in a Spanish double-plot.

Nor is the success of the general action materially affected by the circ.u.mstance that the tone of Esther Summerson's diary is not altogether true. At the same time there is indisputably some unevenness in the construction of _Bleak House_. It drags, and drags very perceptibly, in some of its earlier parts. On the other hand, the interest of the reader is strongly revived when that popular favourite, Mr. Inspector Bucket, appears on the scene, and when, more especially in the admirably vivid narrative of Esther's journey with the detective, the nearness of the catastrophe exercises its exciting influence. Some of the machinery, moreover--such as the Smallweed family's part in the plot--is tiresome; and particular incidents are intolerably horrible or absurd--such as on the one hand the spontaneous combustion (which is proved possible by the a.n.a.logy of historical facts!), and on the other the intrusion of the oil-grinding Mr. Chadband into the solemn presence of Sir Leicester Dedlock's grief. But in general the parts of the narrative are well knit together; and there is a subtle skill in the way in which the two main parts of the story converge towards their common close.

The idea of making an impersonal object like a great Chancery suit the centre round which a large and manifold group of characters revolves, seems to savour of a drama rather than of a story. No doubt the theme suggested itself to d.i.c.kens with a very real purpose, and on the basis of facts which he might well think warranted him in his treatment of it; for, true artist though he was, the thought of exposing some national defect, of helping to bring about some real reform, was always paramount in his mind over any mere literary conception. _Prima facie_, at least, and with all due deference to Chancery judges and eminent silk gowns like Mr.

Blowers, the length of Chancery suits was a real public grievance, as well as a frequent private calamity. But even as a mere artistic notion the idea of Jarndyce _v._ Jarndyce as diversely affecting those who lived by it, those who rebelled against it, those who died of it, was, in its way, of unique force; and while d.i.c.kens never brought to any other of his subjects so useful a knowledge of its external details--in times gone by he had served a "Kenge and Carboys" of his own--hardly any one of those subjects suggested so wide a variety of aspects for characteristic treatment.

For never before had his versatility in drawing character filled his canvas with so mult.i.tudinous and so various a host of personages. The legal profession, with its servitors and hangers-on of every degree, occupies the centre of the picture. In this group no figure is more deserving of admiration than that of Mr. Tulkinghorn, the eminently respectable family solicitor, at whose very funeral, by a four-wheeled affliction, the good-will of the aristocracy manifests itself. We learn very little about him, and probably care less; but he interests us precisely as we should be interested by the real old family lawyer, about whom we might know and care equally little, were we to find him alone in the twilight, drinking his ancient port in his frescoed chamber in those fields where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop. (Mr.

Forster, by-the-way, omitted to point out to his readers, what the piety of American research has since put on record, that Mr. Tulkinghorn's house was a picture of the biographer's own residence.) The portrait of Mr.

Vholes, who supports an una.s.sailable but unenviable professional reputation for the sake of "the three dear girls at home," and a father whom he has to support "in the Vale of Taunton," is less attractive; but nothing could be more in its place in the story than the clammy tenacity of this legal ghoul and his "dead glove." Lower down in the great system of the law we come upon Mr. Guppy and his fellows, the very quintessence of c.o.c.kney vulgarity, seasoned with a flavour of legal sharpness without which the rankness of the mixture would be incomplete. To the legal group Miss Flite, whose original, if I remember right, used to haunt the Temple as well as the precincts of the Chancery courts, may likewise be said to belong. She is quite legitimately introduced into the story--which cannot be said of all d.i.c.kens's madmen--because her madness a.s.sociates itself with its main theme.

Much admiration has been bestowed upon the figures of an eccentric by or under plot in this story, in which the family of the Jellybys and the august Mr. Turveydrop are, actively, or by pa.s.sive endurance, engaged. The philanthropic section of _le monde ou l'on s'ennuie_ has never been satirised more tellingly, and, it must be added, more bitterly. Perhaps at the time of the publication of _Bleak House_ the activity of our Mrs.

Jellybys took a wider and more cosmopolitan sweep than in later days; for we read at the end of Esther's diary how Mrs. Jellyby "has been disappointed in Borrioboola Gha, which turned out a failure in consequence of the King of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody--who survived the climate--for rum; but she has taken up with the rights of women to sit in Parliament, and Caddy tells me it is a mission involving more correspondence than the old one." But Mrs. Jellyby's interference in the affairs of other people is after all hurtful only because in busying herself with theirs she forgets her own. The truly offensive benefactress of her fellow-creatures is Mrs. Pardiggle, who, maxim in mouth and tract in hand, turns everything she approaches to stone. Among her victims are her own children, including Alfred, aged five, who has been induced to take an oath "never to use tobacco in any form."

The particular vein of feeling that led d.i.c.kens to the delineation of these satirical figures was one which never ran dry with him, and which suggested some forcible-feeble satire in his very last fiction. I call it a vein of feeling only; for he could hardly have argued in cold blood that the efforts which he ridicules were not misrepresented as a whole by his satire. When poor Jo on his death-bed is "asked whether he ever knew a prayer," and replies that he could never make anything out of those spoken by the gentlemen who "came down Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin'," but who "mostly sed as the t'other wuns prayed wrong," the author brings a charge which he might not have found it easy to substantiate. Yet--with the exception of such isolated pa.s.sages--the figure of Jo is in truth one of the most powerful protests that have been put forward on behalf of the friendless outcasts of our streets. Nor did the romantic element in the conception interfere with the effect of the realistic. If Jo, who seems at first to have been intended to be one of the main figures of the story, is in d.i.c.kens's best pathetic manner, the Bagnet family is in his happiest vein of quiet humour. Mr. Inspector Bucket, though not altogether free from mannerism, well deserves the popularity which he obtained. For this character, as the pages of _Household Words_ testify, d.i.c.kens had made many studies in real life. The detective police-officer had at that time not yet become a standing figure of fiction and the drama, nor had the detective of real life begun to destroy the illusion.