Life of Charles Dickens Part 3

CHAPTER VII.

With the return from America began the old life of hard work and hard play. There was much industrious writing of "American Notes," at Broadstairs and elsewhere; and there were many dinners of welcome home, and strolls, doubtless, with Forster and Maclise, and other intimates, to old haunts, as Jack Straw's Castle on Hampstead Heath, and similar houses of public entertainment. And then in the autumn there was "such a trip ... into Cornwall," with Forster, and the painters Stanfield and Maclise for travelling companions. How they enjoyed themselves to be sure, and with what bubbling, bursting merriment. "I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey,"

writes d.i.c.kens, "... I was choking and gasping ... all the way. And Stanfield got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were often obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him." Immediately on their return, refreshed and invigorated by this wholesome hilarity and enjoyment, he threw himself into the composition of his next book, and the first number of "Martin Chuzzlewit" appeared in January, 1843.

"Martin Chuzzlewit" is unquestionably one of d.i.c.kens' great works. He himself held it to be "in a hundred points" and "immeasurably"

superior to anything he had before written, and that verdict may, I think, be accepted freely. The plot, as plot is usually understood, can scarcely indeed be commended. But then plot was never his strong point. Later in life, and acting, as I have always surmised, under the influence of his friend, Mr. Wilkie Collins, he endeavoured to construct ingenious stories that turned on mysterious disappearances, and the subst.i.tution of one person for another, and murders real or suspected. All this was, to my mind, a mistake. d.i.c.kens had no real gift for the manufacture of these ingenious pieces of mechanism. He did not even many times succeed in disposing the events and marshalling the characters in his narratives so as to work, by seemingly unforced and natural means, to a final situation and climax.

Too often, in order to hold his story together and make it move forward at all, he was compelled to make his personages pursue a line of conduct preposterous and improbable, and even antagonistic to their nature. Take this very book. Old Martin Chuzzlewit is a man who has been accustomed, all through a long life, to have his own way, and to take it with a high hand. Yet he so far sets aside, during a course of months, every habit of his life, as to simulate the weakest subservience to Pecksniff--and that not for the purpose of unmasking Pecksniff, who wanted no unmasking, but only in order to disappoint him. Is it believable that old Martin should have thought Pecksniff worth so much trouble, personal inconvenience, and humiliation? Or take again Mr. Boffin in "Our Mutual Friend." Mr. Boffin is a simple, guileless, open-hearted, open-handed old man. Yet, in order to prove to Miss Bella Wilfer that it is not well to be mercenary, he, again, goes through a long course of dissimulation, and does some admirable comic business in the character of a miser. I say it boldly, I do not believe Mr. Boffin possessed that amount of histrionic talent. Plots requiring to be worked out by such means are ill-constructed plots; or, to put it in another way, a man who had any gift for the construction of plots would never have had recourse to such means. Nor would he, I think, have adopted, as d.i.c.kens did habitually and for all his stories, a mode of publication so destructive of unity of effect, as the publication in monthly or weekly parts. How could the reader see as a whole that which was presented to him at intervals of time more or less distant? How, and this is of infinitely greater importance, how could the writer produce it as a whole? For d.i.c.kens, it must be remembered, never finished a book before the commencement of publication. At first he scarcely did more than complete each monthly instalment as required; and though afterwards he was generally some little way in advance, yet always he wrote by parts, having the interest of each separate part in his mind, as well as the general interest of the whole novel. Thus, however desirable in the development of the story, he dared not risk a comparatively tame and uneventful number. Moreover, any portion once issued was unalterable and irrevocable. If, as sometimes happened, any modification seemed desirable as the book progressed, there was no possibility of changing anything in the chapters already in the hands of the public, and so making them harmonize better with the new.

But of course, with all this, the question still remains how far d.i.c.kens' comparative failure as a constructor of plots really detracts from his fame and standing as a novelist. To my mind, I confess, not very much. Plot I regard as the least essential element in the novelist's art. A novel can take the very highest rank without it.

There is not any plot to speak of in Lesage's "Gil Blas," and just as little in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," and only a very bad one in Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield." Coleridge admired the plot of "Tom Jones," but though one naturally hesitates to differ from a critic of such superb mastery and power, I confess I have never been struck by that plot, any more than by the plots, such as they are, in "Joseph Andrews," or in Smollett's works. Nor, if I can judge of other people's memories by my own, is it by the mechanism of the story, or by the intrigue, however admirably woven and unravelled, that one remembers a work of fiction. These may exercise an intense pa.s.sing interest of curiosity, especially during a first perusal. But afterwards they fade from the mind, while the characters, if highly vitalized and strong, will stand out in our thoughts, fresh and full coloured, for an indefinite time. Scott's "Guy Mannering" is a well-constructed story. The plot is deftly laid, the events are prepared for with a cunning hand; the coincidences are so arranged as to be made to look as probable as may be. Yet we remember and love the book, not for such excellences as these, but for Dandie Dinmont, the Border farmer, and Pleydell, the Edinburgh advocate, and Meg Merrilies, the gipsy. The book's life is in its flesh and blood, not in its plot. And the same is true of d.i.c.kens' novels. He crowds them so full of human creatures, each with its own individuality and character, that we have no care for more than just as much story as may serve to show them struggling, joying, sorrowing, loving. If the incidents will do this for us we are satisfied. It is not necessary that those incidents should be made to go through cunning evolutions to a definite end. Each is admirable in itself, and admirably adapted to its immediate purpose. That should more than suffice.

And d.i.c.kens sometimes succeeds in reaching a higher unity than that of mere plot. He takes one central idea, and makes of it the soul of his novel, animating and vivifying every part. That central idea in "Martin Chuzzlewit" is the influence of selfishness. The Chuzzlewits are a selfish race. Old Martin is selfish; and so, with many good qualities and possibilities of better things, is his grandson, young Martin. The other branch of the family, Anthony Chuzzlewit and his son Jonas, are much worse. The latter especially is a horrible creature.

Brought up to think of nothing except his own interests and the main chance, he is only saved by an accident from the crime of parricide, and afterwards commits a murder and poisons himself. As his career is one of terrible descent, so young Martin's is one of gradual regeneration from his besetting weakness. He falls in love with his cousin Mary--the only unselfish member of the family, by the bye--and quarrels about this love affair with his grandfather, and so pa.s.ses into the hard school of adversity. There he learns much. Specially valuable is the teaching which he gets as a settler in the swampy backwoods of the United States in company with Mark Tapley, jolliest and most helpful of men. On his return, he finds his grandfather seemingly under the influence of Pecksniff, the hypocrite, the English Tartuffe. But that, as I have already mentioned, is only a ruse. Old Martin is deceiving Pecksniff, who in due time receives the reward of his deeds, and all ends happily for those who deserve happiness. Such is something like a bare outline of the story, with the beauty eliminated. For what makes its interest, we must go further, to the household of Pecksniff with his two daughters, Charity and Mercy, and Tom Pinch, whose beautiful, unselfish character stands so in contrast to that of the grasping self-seekers by whom he is surrounded; we must study young Martin himself, whose character is admirably drawn, and without d.i.c.kens' usual tendency to caricature; we must laugh in sympathy with Mark Tapley; we must follow them both through the American scenes, which, intensely amusing as they are, must have bitterly envenomed the wounds inflicted on the national vanity by "American Notes," and, according to d.i.c.kens' own expression, "sent them all stark staring raving mad across the water;" we must frequent the boarding establishment for single gentlemen kept by lean Mrs.

Todgers, and sit with Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig as they hideously discuss their avocations, or quarrel over the shadowy Mrs. Harris; we must follow Jonas Chuzzlewit on his errand of murder, and note how even his felon nature is appalled by the blackness and horror of his guilt, and how the ghastly terror of it haunts and cows him. A great book, I say again, a very great book.

Yet not at the time a successful book. Why Fortune, the fickle jade, should have taken it into her freakish head to frown, or half frown, on d.i.c.kens at this particular juncture, who shall tell? He was wooing her with his very best work, and she turned from him. The sale of "Pickwick" and "Nicholas Nickleby" had been from forty to fifty thousand copies of each part; the sale of _Master Humphrey's Clock_ had risen still higher; the sale of even the most popular parts of "Martin Chuzzlewit" fell to twenty-three thousand. This was, as may be supposed, a grievous disappointment. d.i.c.kens' personal expenditure had not perhaps been lavish in view of what he thought he could calculate on earning; but it had been freely based on that calculation. Demands, too, were being made upon his purse by relations,--probably by his father, and certainly by his brother Frederic, which were frequent, embarra.s.sing, and made in a way which one may call worse than indelicate. Any permanent loss of popularity would have meant serious money entanglements. With his father's career in full view, such a prospect must have been anything but pleasant. He cast about what he should do, and determined to leave England for a s.p.a.ce, live more economically on the Continent, and gather materials in Italy or Switzerland for a new travel book. But before carrying out this project, he would woo fortune once again, and in a different form.

During the months of October and November, 1843, in the intervals of "Chuzzlewit," he wrote a short story that has taken its place, by almost universal consent, among his masterpieces, nay, among the masterpieces of English literature: "The Christmas Carol."

All d.i.c.kens' great gifts seem reflected, sharp and distinct, in this little book, as in a convex mirror. His humour, his best pathos, which is not that of grandiloquence, but of simplicity, his bright poetic fancy, his kindliness, all here find a place. It is great painting in miniature, genius in its quintessence, a gem of perfect water. We may apply to it any simile that implies excellence in the smallest compa.s.s. None but a fine imagination would have conceived the supernatural agency that works old Scrooge's moral regeneration--the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and to come, that each in turn speaks to the wizened heart of the old miser, so that, almost unwittingly, he is softened by the tender memories of childhood, warmed by sympathy for those who struggle and suffer, and appalled by the prospect of his own ultimate desolation and black solitude. Then the episodes: the scenes to which these ghostly visitants convey Scrooge; the story of his earlier years as shown in vision; the household of the Cratchits, and poor little crippled Tiny Tim; the party given by Scrooge's nephew; nay, before all these, the terrible interview with Marley's Ghost. All are admirably executed. Sacrilege would it be to suggest the alteration of a word. First of the Christmas books in the order of time, it is also the best of its own kind; it is in its own order perfect.

Nor did the public of Christmas, 1843, fail to appreciate that something of very excellent quality had been brought forth for their benefit. "The first edition of six thousand copies," says Forster, "was sold" on the day of publication, and about as many more would seem to have been disposed of before the end of February, 1844. But, alas, d.i.c.kens had set his heart on a profit of 1,000, whereas in February he did not see his way to much more than 460,[18] and his unpaid bills for the previous year he described as "terrific." So something, as I have said, had to be done. A change of front became imperative. Messrs. Bradbury and Evans advanced him 2,800 "for a fourth share in whatever he might write during the ensuing eight years,"--he purchased at the Pantechnicon "a good old shabby devil of a coach," also described as "an English travelling carriage of considerable proportions"; engaged a courier who turned out to be the courier of couriers, a very conjurer among couriers; let his house in Devonshire Terrace; and so started off for Italy, as I calculate the dates, on the 1st of July, 1844.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] The profit at the end of 1844 was 726.

CHAPTER VIII.

Ah, those eventful, picturesque, uncomfortable old travelling days, when railways were unborn, or in their infancy; those interminable old dusty drives, in diligence or private carriage, along miles and miles of roads running straight to the low horizon, through a line of tall poplars, across the plains of France! What an old-world memory it seems, and yet, as the years go, not so very long since after all. The party that rumbled from Boulogne to Ma.r.s.eilles in the old "devil of a coach" aforesaid, "and another conveyance for luggage," and I know not what other conveyances besides, consisted of d.i.c.kens himself; Mrs.

d.i.c.kens; her sister, Miss Georgina Hogarth, who had come to live with them on their return from America; five children, for another boy had been born some six months before; Roche, the prince of couriers; "Anne," apparently the same maid who had accompanied them across the Atlantic; and other dependents: a somewhat formidable troupe and cavalcade. Of their mode of travel, and what they saw on the way, or perhaps, more accurately, of what d.i.c.kens saw, with those specially keen eyes of his, at Lyons, Avignon, Ma.r.s.eilles, and other places--one may read the master's own account in the "Pictures from Italy." Ma.r.s.eilles was reached on the 14th of July, and thence a steamer took them, coasting the fairy Mediterranean sh.o.r.es, to Genoa, their ultimate destination, where they landed on the 16th.

The Italy of 1844 was like, and yet unlike the Italy of to-day. It was the old disunited Italy of several small kingdoms and princ.i.p.alities, the Italy over which lowered the shadow of despotic Austria, and of the Pope's temporal power, not the Italy which the genius of Cavour has welded into a nation. It was a land whose interest came altogether from the past, and that lay as it were in the beauty of time's sunset.

How unlike the United States! The contrast has always, I confess, seemed to me a piquant one. It has often struck me with a feeling of quaintness that the two countries which d.i.c.kens specially visited and described, were, the one this lovely land of age and h.o.a.r antiquity, and the other that young giant land of the West, which is still in the garish strong light of morning, and whose great day is in the future.

Nor, I think, before he had seen both, would d.i.c.kens himself have been able to tell on which side his sympathies would lie. Thoroughly popular in his convictions, thoroughly satisfied that to-day was in all respects better than yesterday, it is clear that he expected to find more pleasure in the brand new Republic than his actual experience warranted. The roughness of the strong, uncultured young life grated upon him. It jarred upon his sensibilities. But of Italy he wrote with very different feeling. What though the places were dirty, the people shiftless, idle, unpunctual, unbusinesslike, and the fleas as the sand which is upon the sea-sh.o.r.e for mult.i.tude? It mattered not while life was so picturesque and varied, and manners were so full of amenity. Your inn might be, and probably was, ill-appointed, untidy, the floors of brick, the doors agape, the windows banging--a contrast in every way to the palatial hotel in New York or Washington. But then how cheerful and amusing were mine host and hostess, and how smilingly determined all concerned to make things pleasant. So the artist in d.i.c.kens turned from the new to the old, and Italy, as she is wont, cast upon him her spell.

First impressions, however, were not altogether satisfactory. d.i.c.kens owns to a pang when he was "set down" at Albaro, a suburb of Genoa, "in a rank, dull, weedy courtyard, attached to a kind of pink jail, and told he lived there." But he immediately adds: "I little thought that day that I should ever come to have an attachment for the very stones in the streets of Genoa, and to look back upon the city with affection, as connected with many hours of happiness and quiet." In sooth, he enjoyed the place thoroughly. "Martin Chuzzlewit" had left his hands. He was fairly ent.i.tled for a few weeks to the luxury of idleness, and he threw himself into doing nothing, as he was accustomed to throw himself into his work, with all energy. And there was much to do, much especially to see. So d.i.c.kens bathed and walked; and strolled about the city hither and thither, and about the suburbs and about the surrounding country; and visited public buildings and private palaces; and noted the ways of the inhabitants; and saw Genoese life in its varied forms; and wrote light glancing letters about it all to friends at home; and learnt Italian; and, in the end of September, left his "pink jail," which had been taken for him at a disproportionate rent, and moved into the Palazzo Peschiere, in Genoa itself: a wonderful palace, with an entrance-hall fifty feet high, and larger than "the dining-room of the Academy," and bedrooms "in size and shape like those at Windsor Castle, but greatly higher," and a view from the windows over gardens where the many fountains sparkled, and the gold fish glinted, and into Genoa itself, with its "many churches, monasteries, and convents pointing to the sunny sky," and into the harbour, and over the sapphire sea, and up again to the encircling hills--a view, as d.i.c.kens declared, that "no custom could impair, and no description enhance."

But with the beginning of October came again the time for work; and beautiful beyond all beauty as were his surroundings, the child of London turned to the home of his heart, and pined for the London streets. For some little s.p.a.ce he seemed to be thinking in vain, and cudgelling his brains for naught, when suddenly the chimes of Genoa's many churches, that seemed to have been clashing and clanging nothing but distraction and madness, rang harmony into his mind. The subject and t.i.tle of his new Christmas book were found. He threw himself into the composition of "The Chimes."

Earnest at all times in what he wrote, living ever in intense and pa.s.sionate sympathy with the world of his imagination, he seems specially to have put his whole heart into this book. "All my affections and pa.s.sions got twined and knotted up in it, and I became as haggard as a murderer long before I wrote 'the end,'"--so he told Lady Blessington on the 20th of November; and to Forster he expressed the yearning that was in him to "leave" his "hand upon the time, lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the ma.s.s of toiling people that nothing could obliterate." This was the keynote of "The Chimes." He intended in it to strike a great and memorable blow on behalf of the poor and down-trodden. His purpose, so far as I can make it out, was to show how much excuse there is for their shortcomings, and how in their errors, nay even in their crimes, there linger traces of goodness and kindly feeling. On this I shall have something to say when discussing "Hard Times," which is somewhat akin to "The Chimes"

in scope and purpose. Meanwhile it cannot honestly be affirmed that the story justifies the pa.s.sion that d.i.c.kens threw into its composition. The supernatural machinery is weak as compared with that of the "Carol." Little Trotty Veck, dreaming to the sound of the bells in the old church tower, is a bad subst.i.tute for Scrooge on his midnight rambles. Nor are his dreams at all equal, for humour or pathos, to Scrooge's visions and experiences. And the moral itself is not clearly brought out. I confess to being a little doubtful as to what it exactly is, and how it follows from the premises furnished. I wish, too, that it had been carried home to some one with more power than little Trotty to give it effect. What was the good of convincing that kindly old soul that the people of his own cla.s.s had warm hearts?

He knew it very well. Take from the book the fine imaginative description of the goblin music that leaps into life with the ringing of the bells, and there remain the most excellent intentions--and not much more.

Such, however, was very far from being d.i.c.kens' view. He had "undergone," he said, "as much sorrow and agitation" in the writing "as if the thing were real," and on the 3rd of November, when the last page was written, had indulged "in what women call a good cry;" and, as usually happens, the child that had cost much sorrow was a child of special love.[19] So, when all was over, nothing would do but he must come to London to read his book to the choice literary spirits whom he specially loved. Accordingly he started from Genoa on the 6th of November, travelled by Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice--where, such was the enchantment of the place, that he felt it "cruel not to have brought Kate and Georgy, positively cruel and base";--and thence again by Verona, Mantua, Milan, the Simplon Pa.s.s, Strasbourg, Paris, and Calais, to Dover, and wintry England. Sharp work, considering all he had seen by the way, and how effectually he had seen it, for he was in London on the evening of the 30th of November, and, on the 2nd of December, reading his little book to the choice spirits aforesaid, all a.s.sembled for the purpose at Forster's house. There they are: they live for us still in Maclise's drawing, though Time has plied his scythe among them so effectually, during the forty-two years since flown, that each has pa.s.sed into the silent land. There they sit: Carlyle, not the s.h.a.ggy Scotch terrier with the melancholy eyes that we were wont to see in his later days, but close shaven and alert; and swift-witted Douglas Jerrold; and Laman Blanchard, whose name goes darkling in the literature of the last generation; and Forster himself, journalist and author of many books; and the painters Dyce, Maclise, and Stanfield; and Byron's friend and school companion, the clergyman Harness, who, like Dyce, pays to the story the tribute of his tears.

d.i.c.kens can have been in London but the fewest of few days, for on the 13th of December he was leaving Paris for Genoa, and that after going to the theatre more than once. From Genoa he started again, on the 20th of January, 1845, with Mrs. d.i.c.kens, to see the Carnival at Rome.

Thence he went to Naples, returning to Rome for the Holy Week; and thence again by Florence to Genoa. He finally left Italy in the beginning of June, and was back with his family in Devonshire Terrace at the end of that month.

To what use of a literary kind should he turn his Italian observations and experiences? In what form should he publish the notes made by the way? Events soon answered that question. The year 1845 stands in the history of Queen Victoria's reign as a time of intense political excitement. The Corn Law agitation raged somewhat furiously. d.i.c.kens felt strongly impelled to throw himself into the strife. Why should he not influence his fellow-men, and "battle for the true, the just," as the able editor of a daily newspaper? Accordingly, after all the negotiations which enterprises of this kind necessitate, he made the due arrangements for starting a new paper, _The Daily News_. It was to be edited by himself, to "be kept free," the prospectus said, "from personal influence or party bias," and to be "devoted to the advocacy of all rational and honest means by which wrong may be redressed, just rights maintained, and the happiness and welfare of society promoted."

His salary, so I have seen it stated, was to be 2,000 a year; and the first number came out on the morning of the 21st of January, 1846. He held the post of editor three weeks.

The world may, I think, on the whole, be congratulated that he did not hold it longer. Able editors are more easily found than such writers as d.i.c.kens. There were higher claims upon his time. But to return to the Italian Notes: it was in the columns of _The Daily News_ that they first saw the light. They were among the baby attractions and charms, if I may so speak, of the nascent paper, which is now, as I need not remind my readers, enjoying a hale and vigorous manhood. And admirable sketches they are. Much, very much has been written about Italy. The subject has been done to death by every variety of pen, and in every civilized tongue. But amid all this writing, d.i.c.kens' "Pictures from Italy" still holds a high and distinctive position. That the descriptions, whether of places and works of art, or of life's pageantry, and what may be called the social picturesque, should be graphic, vivid, animated, was almost a matter of course. But _a priori_, I think one might have feared lest he should "chaff" the place and its inhabitants overmuch, and yield to the temptation of making merriment over matters which h.o.a.r age and old a.s.sociations had hallowed. We can all imagine the kind of observation that would occur to Sam Weller in strolling through St. Mark's at Venice, or the Vatican; and, guessing beforehand, guessing before the "Pictures"

were produced, one might, I repeat, have been afraid lest d.i.c.kens should go through Italy as a kind of educated Sam Weller. Such prophecies would have been falsified by the event. The book as a whole is very free from banter or _persiflage_. Once and again the comic side of some situation strikes him, of course. Thus, after the ceremony of the Pope washing the feet of thirteen poor men, in memory of our Lord washing the feet of the Apostles, d.i.c.kens says: "The whole thirteen sat down to dinner; grace said by the Pope; Peter in the chair." But these humorous touches are rare, and not in bad taste; while for the historic and artistic grandeurs of Italy he shows an enthusiasm which is _individual_ and discriminating. We feel, in what he says about painting, that we are getting the fresh impressions of a man not specially trained in the study of the old masters, but who yet succeeds, by sheer intuitive sympathy; in appreciating much of their greatness. His criticism of the paintings at Venice, for instance, is very decidedly superior to that of Macaulay. In brief the "Pictures,"

to give to the book the name which d.i.c.kens gave it, are painted with a brush at once kindly and brilliant.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] He read "The Chimes" at his first reading as a paid reader.

CHAPTER IX.

The publication of the "Pictures," though I have dealt with it as a sort of complement to d.i.c.kens' sojourn in Italy, carries us to the year 1846. But before going on with the history of that year, there are one or two points to be taken up in the history of 1845. The first is the performance, on the 21st of September, of Ben Jonson's play of "Every Man in his Humour," by a select company of amateur actors, among whom d.i.c.kens held chief place. "He was the life and soul of the entire affair," says Forster. "I never seem till then to have known his business capabilities. He took everything on himself, and did the whole of it without an effort. He was stage director, very often stage carpenter, scene arranger, property man, prompter, and band-master.

Without offending any one, he kept every one in order. For all he had useful suggestions.... He adjusted scenes, a.s.sisted carpenters, invented costumes, devised playbills, wrote out calls, and enforced, as well as exhibited in his own proper person, everything of which he urged the necessity on others." d.i.c.kens had once thought of the stage as a profession, and was, according to all accounts, an amateur actor of very unusual power. But of course he only acted for his amus.e.m.e.nt, and I don't know that I should have dwelt upon this performance, which was followed by others of a similar kind, if it did not, in Forster's description, afford such a signal instance of his efficiency as a practical man. The second event to be mentioned as happening in 1845, is the publication of another very pretty Christmas story, "The Cricket on the Hearth."

Though d.i.c.kens had ceased to edit _The Daily News_ on the 9th of February, 1846, he contributed to the paper for some few weeks longer.

But by the month of May his connection with it had entirely ceased; and on the 31st of that month, he started, by Belgium and the Rhine, for Lausanne in Switzerland, where he had determined to spend some time, and commence his next great book, and write his next Christmas story.

A beautiful place is Lausanne, as many of my readers will know; and a beautiful house the house called Rosemont, situated on a hill that rises from the Lake of Geneva, with the lake's blue waters stretching below, and across, on the other side, a magnificent panorama of snowy mountains, the Simplon, St. Gothard, Mont Blanc, towering to the sky.

This delightful place d.i.c.kens took at a rent of some 10 a month. Then he re-arranged all the furniture, as was his energetic wont. Then he spent a fortnight or so in looking about him, and writing a good deal for Lord John Russell on Ragged Schools, and for Miss Coutts about her various charities; and finally, on the 28th of June, as he announced to Forster in capital letters, BEGAN DOMBEY.

But as the Swiss pine with home-sickness when away from their own dear land, so did this Londoner, amid all the glories of the Alps, pine for the London streets. It seemed almost as if they were essential to the exercise of his genius. The same strange mental phenomenon which he had observed in himself at Genoa was reproduced here. Everything else in his surroundings smiled most congenially. The place was fair beyond speech. The shifting, changing beauty of the mountains entranced him. The walks offered an endless variety of enjoyment. He liked the people. He liked the English colony. He had made several dear friends among them and among the natives. He was interested in the politics of the country, which happened, just then, to be in a state of peculiar excitement and revolution. Everything was charming;--"but," he writes, "the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that magic-lantern (of the London streets) is IMMENSE!" It literally knocked him up. He had "bad nights," was "sick and giddy," desponding over his book, more than half inclined to abandon the Christmas story altogether for that year. However, a short trip to Geneva, and the dissipation of a stroll or so in its thoroughfares, to remind him, as it were, of what streets were like, and a week of "idleness" "rusting and devouring," "complete and unbroken," set him comparatively on his legs again, and before he left Lausanne for Paris on the 16th of November, he had finished three parts of "Dombey," and the "Battle of Life."

Of the latter I don't know that I need say anything. It is decidedly the weakest of his Christmas books. But "Dombey" is very different work, and the first five numbers especially, which carry the story to the death of little Paul, contain pa.s.sages of humour and pathos, and of humour and pathos mingled together and shot in warp and woof, like some daintiest silken fabric, that are scarcely to be matched in the language. As I go in my mind through the motherless child's short history--his birth, his christening, the engagement of the wet-nurse, the time when he is consigned to the loveless care of Mrs. Pipchin, his education in Dr. Blimber's Academy under the cla.s.sic Cornelia, and his death--as I follow it all in thought, now smiling at each well-remembered touch of humour, and now saddened and solemnized as the shadow of death deepens over the frail little life, I confess to something more than critical admiration for the writer as an artist. I feel towards him as towards one who has touched my heart. Of course it is the misfortune of the book, regarding it as a whole, that the chapters relating to Paul, which are only an episode, should be of such absorbing interest, and come so early. d.i.c.kens really wrote them too well. They dwarf the rest of the story. We find a difficulty in resuming the thread of it with the same zest when the child is gone.

But though the remainder of the book inevitably suffers in this way, it ought not to suffer unduly. Even apart from little Paul the novel is a fine one. Pride is its subject, as selfishness is that of "Martin Chuzzlewit." Mr. Dombey, the city merchant, has as much of the arrogance of caste and position as any blue-blooded hidalgo. He is as proud of his name as if he had inherited it from a race of princes.

That he neglects and slights his daughter, and loves his son, is mainly because the latter will add a sort of completeness to the firm, and make it truly Dombey _and Son_, while the girl, for all commercial purposes, can be nothing but a cipher. And through his pride he is struck to the heart, and ruined. Mr. Carker, his confidential agent and manager, trades upon it for all vile ends, first to feather his own nest, and then to launch his patron into large and unsound business ventures. The second wife, whom he marries, certainly with no affection on either side, but purely because of her birth and connections, and because her great beauty will add to his social prestige--she, with ungovernable pride equal to his own, revolts against his authority, and, in order to humiliate him the more, pretends to elope with Carker, whom in turn she scorns and crushes. Broken thus in fortune and honour, Mr. Dombey yet falls not ign.o.bly. His creditors he satisfies in full, reserving to himself nothing; and with a softened heart turns to the daughter he had slighted, and in her love finds comfort. Such is the main purport of the story, and round it, in graceful arabesques, are embroidered, after d.i.c.kens' manner, a whole world of subsidiary incidents thronged with all sorts of characters. What might not one say about Dr.

Blimber's genteel academy at Brighton; and the Toodles family, so humble in station and intellect and so large of heart; and the contrast between Carker the manager and his brother, who for some early dishonest act, long since repented of, remains always Carker the junior; and about Captain Cuttle, and that poor, muddled nautical philosopher, Captain Bunsby, and the Game Chicken, and Mrs. Pipchin, and Miss Tox; and Cousin Feenix with wilful legs so little under control, and yet to the core of him a gentleman; and the apoplectic Major Bagstock, the Joey B. who claimed to be "rough and tough and devilish sly;" and Susan Nipper, as swift of tongue as a rapier, and as sharp? Reader, don't you know all these people? For myself, I have jostled against them constantly any time the last twenty years. They are as much part of my life as the people I meet every day.

But there is one person whom I have left out of my enumeration, not certainly because I don't know him, for I know him very well, but because I want to speak about him more particularly. That person is my old friend, Mr. Toots; and the special point in his character which induces me to linger is the slight touch of craziness that sits so charmingly upon him. M. Taine, the French critic, in his chapters on d.i.c.kens, repeats the old remark that genius and madness are near akin.[20] He observes, and observes truly, that d.i.c.kens describes so well because an imagination of singular intensity enables him to _see_ the object presented, and at the same time to impart to it a kind of visionary life. "That imagination," says M. Taine, "is akin to the imagination of the monomaniac." And, starting from this point, he proceeds to show, here again quite truly, with what admirable sympathetic power and insight d.i.c.kens has described certain cases of madness, as in Mr. d.i.c.k. But here, having said some right things, M.

Taine goes all wrong. According to him, these portraits of persons who have lost their wits, "however amusing they may seem at first sight,"

are "horrible." They could only have been painted by "an imagination such as that of d.i.c.kens, excessive, disordered, and capable of hallucination." He seems to be not far from thinking that only our splenetic and melancholy race could have given birth to such literary monsters. To speak like this, as I conceive, shows a singular misconception of the instinct or set purpose that led d.i.c.kens to introduce these characters into his novels at all. It is perfectly true that he has done so several times. Barnaby Rudge, the hero of the book of the same name, is half-witted. Mr. d.i.c.k, in "David Copperfield," is decidedly crazy. Mr. Toots is at least simple. Little Miss Flite, in "Bleak House," haunting the Law Courts in expectation of a judgment on the Day of Judgment, is certainly not _compos mentis_. And one may concede to M. Taine that some element of sadness must always be present when we see a human creature imperfectly gifted with man's n.o.blest attribute of reason. But, granting this to the full, is it possible to conceive of anything more kindly and gentle in the delineation of partial insanity than the portraits which the French critic finds horrible? Barnaby Rudge's lunatic symptoms are compatible with the keenest enjoyment of nature's sights and sounds, fresh air and free sunlight, and compatible with loyalty and high courage. Many men might profitably change their reason for his unreason. Mr. d.i.c.k's flightiness is allied to an intense devotion and grat.i.tude to the woman who had rescued him from confinement in an asylum; there lives a world of kindly sentiments in his poor bewildered brains. Of Mr. Toots, Susan Nipper says truly, "he may not be a Solomon, nor do I say he is, but this I do say, a less selfish human creature human nature never knew." And to this one may add that he is entirely high-minded, generous, and honourable. Miss Flite's crazes do not prevent her from being full of all womanly sympathies.

Here I think lies the charm these characters had for d.i.c.kens. As he was fond of showing a soul of goodness in the ill-favoured and uncouth, so he liked to make men feel that even in a disordered intellect all kindly virtues might find a home, and a happy one. M.

Taine may call this "horrible" if he likes. I think myself it would be possible to find a better adjective.

d.i.c.kens was at work on "Dombey and Son" during the latter part of the year 1846, and the whole of 1847, and the early part of 1848. We left him on the 16th of November, in the first of these years, starting from Lausanne for Paris, which he reached on the evening of the 20th.

Here he took a house--a "preposterous" house, according to his own account, with only gleams of reason in it; and visited many theatres; and went very often to the Morgue, where lie the unowned dead; and had pleasant friendly intercourse with the notable French authors of the time, Alexandre Dumas the Great, most prolific of romance writers; and Scribe of the innumerable plays; and the poets Lamartine and Victor Hugo; and Chateaubriand, then in his sad and somewhat morose old age.