Charles Dickens (Gissing, 1898)/Chapter 12

It is the privilege of a great writer to put into his work the finest qualities of his heart and brain, to make permanent the best part of himself, and through that to influence the world. In speaking of Dickens's triumphs as an author, I have felt that the most fervent praise could not err by excess; every time I open his books, as the years go on, it is with ever more of wonder, delight, admiration, and love. To point out his shortcomings as a man could give little satisfaction to one who thus thinks of him; merely for the sake of completeness in my view of his life and works, I feel it necessary to glance at those disastrous latter years which show him as a "public entertainer," all true peace and leisure at an end, shortening his life that he might be able to live without pecuniary anxiety. Carlyle said that the story of Charles Dickens's doings in America "transcended in tragic interest, to a thinking reader, most things one has seen in writing." We ​see plainly enough what a deplorable mistake it was, and men such as Forster, Dickens's true friends, not only saw it at the time, but did their utmost in protest. He himself had no misgiving—or would confess none. In the words with which he prefaced his first paid reading (1858) he said he had satisfied himself, that to adopt this career could involve no possible compromise of the credit and independence of literature, and that whatever brought a public man and his public face to face, on terms of mutual confidence and respect, was of necessity a good thing. Both assertions may be contested. Carlyle, and many another man of letters, saw very grave objections to semi-theatrical "touring" on the score of the credit of literature; and as to the relations between "a public man" and his admirers, it is very doubtful whether a novelist should bear that title at all. But Dickens's intimate relations with the theatre made it impossible for him to give due weight to these objections. Moreover he was a very keen man of business, and could not resist the temptation of enriching himself by means which, in themselves, were thoroughly congenial to him.

For he enjoyed those readings. The first he ever gave—that of his Christmas Carol to a little group of friends—was arranged on his ​own suggestion, and he read several times for charitable purposes before he began to do so for profit. Not without reason he felt that all who knew him in his books were as personal friends to him, and he to them; he delighted in standing before those vast audiences, and moving them to laughter or to tears. Opinions differ as to his merits as a reader, but it is plain that the public thought him insurpassable. He had always wished to shine as an actor; as a "reader" (it was in truth recitation, and not reading) he came very near to that—especially in such efforts as the murder scene from Oliver Twist. The life, too, one of ceaseless travel and excitement, suited him at the time when he was making grave changes in his domestic circumstances; changes which may or may not have been inevitable, but which doubtless helped to urge him along the fatal course. Forster's Biography makes it clear that, from 1857 onwards, Dickens suffered somewhat in character from the effects of this public life; nothing like so much as in health, but he was no longer quite the man of his best literary years. Remember the intensely practical strain in his nature. As a very young man, he allowed himself to be put at a disadvantage with publishers; but this was soon, and energetically, set right; afterwards, he transacted the ​business of his books with high commercial aptitude. It was the same in everything; subtract his genius, and we have a most capable, upright, vigorous man of business—the very ideal (so much better than all but a few actual examples) of commercial England. It is a surprising combination; such qualities united with those which characterized the author Charles Dickens. To minds of a certain type, there appears to be the utmost satisfaction in pointing out that Shakespeare made money, and built "the trimmest house in Stratford town;" but who can seriously suggest that, even mutatis mutandis, Shakespeare business aptitudes and success were comparable with those of Dickens? The author of Hamlet indubitably had common sense, but, most happily, business as it is understood among us nowadays had not been dreamt of in Elizabethan England, and one may very safely assert that Shakespeare was no distinguished merchant even in the sense of that day. Dickens might easily have become a great capitalist; and his generosity would have secured him against any self-reproach when treading the ways of capitalism. He reflected with annoyance on the serious loss occasioned him by the lack of American copyright; granted the opportunity, he could ​have drawn up an international arrangement in this matter which would have been a model of clear-headed justice. After all, what was the financial result of his brilliant and laborious life? He had a large family; his expenses were considerable; he bought himself a country house, which became to him, as an occupation of his leisure, a small Abbotsford. And at his death he leaves an estimated total of £93,000. The merest bagatelle, from a commercial point of view. His readings seem to have brought him, altogether, a matter of some £40,000. What man of business, with a world-wide reputation, would be content to toil to the detriment of his health for such results? I go into these details merely to suggest how a man such as Dickens must have felt regarding the pecuniary question. Save in reference to American copyright, he did not complain; that would have been ignoble, and inconsistent with his habits of mind. But it seemed to him indispensable that he should gain more money than would arrive from his literary work. His sons must go forth into the world as English gentlemen—a term implying so much; his daughters must be made independent; his own mode of life must be on a scale recognized as "respectable" by middle-class England. One need not be much of an ​optimist to foresee that, as in days gone by, so in a time to come, the spectacle of such a man so beset will be altogether impossible, and the record of such a life will become a matter for wonder and sad smiling.

With the utmost precision of punctuality in all details of daily life, he combined a character of sanguine impulsiveness, and as a result thereof could not endure restraints and burdens which ordinary men accept as a matter of course. If he desired a thing, he must at once obtain it; or at all events aim at obtaining it, and with all his energy. He could work day after day—the kind of work which demands a patience, an assiduity, a self-control unintelligible to the mass of mankind; could exhibit in himself, and exact from others, a rare conscientiousness in things small and great; but when it came to any kind of constraint which was not imposed by his own temperament he failed at once. The moralist may remark, in his dry way, that no man can receive so much of the good things of life, and remain unspoilt; that Dickens, moreover, was a very unlikely man to go through the ordeal of world-wide flattery, and draw from it moral benefit. The wonder is that Dickens was spoilt so little. In a day when there exists no writer of supreme acceptance, we are in danger of forgetting what ​his popularity meant. I suppose that for at least five-and-twenty years of his life, there was not an English-speaking household in the world, above the class which knows nothing of books, where his name was not as familiar as that of any personal acquaintance, and where an allusion to characters of his creating could fail to be understood. When seeking a title for the periodical eventually called Household Words—it was in 1849—he seriously suggested "Charles Dickens: Conducted by Himself." It was, he admitted, "a strange idea, but with decided advantages." In any other writer then living, the idea would have been strange indeed, and of anything but decided advantage. Dickens could entertain it without egoism, without ridicule; far and wide, at home and abroad, hands would have clutched eagerly at the magazine bearing such a superscription. He passed it over; but whatever the title of the paper he edited, Household Words or All the Year Round, the name it bore in all minds was no other than "Charles Dickens."

It is easy to distinguish between the British characteristic of practicality, and the unpleasant attribute of worldliness; but the intensely practical man seldom escapes a tincture of that neighbouring vice. In dismissing as "fanciful" every intrusion of the pure idea, the English ​guard themselves against certain risks, and preserve a pretty even current of national life; but they pay a penalty, understood or not. Dickens is an illustration of it. I cannot do better than copy the words written on this subject by his most intimate friend; they occur in the chapter which tells all that need be told about his domestic troubles. "Not his genius only, but his whole nature, was too exclusively made up of sympathy for, and with, the real in its most intense form, to be sufficiently provided against failure in the realities around him. There was for him no city of the mind' against outward ills for inner consolation and shelter. . . . By his very attempts to escape the world, he was driven back into the thick of it. But what he would have sought there, it supplies to none; and to get the infinite out of anything so finite, has broken many a stout heart."

This, observe, is spoken of a man who was not only "good" in most meanings of the word, but had a profound feeling for the moral significance of the religion he professed. We see the type of nineteenth-century Englishman; the breed of men who established a commercial supremacy which is (or very lately was) the wonder, the envy, and the jest of the outer world. You cannot create Lancashire and Yorkshire if at the same time you have to ​guard a "city of the mind;" much too embarrassing would be the multitude of uneasy questions rushing in at every new step. This typical Englishman has no "detachment." In work or play, he must press onward by the world's highroad. In 1857 Dickens wrote to Forster: "I have now no relief but in action. I am become incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, going. What I am in that way, nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed." It was a moment of peculiar stress, but that was not needed to explain the letter. As I said in the early pages of this essay, a better education might have done much for Dickens; yet it could hardly have helped him to that "removed ground" where some few men, even in thriving England, were able to possess their souls in peace.

His life was ceaseless activity, mental and physical. After an ailing childhood, he grew into health which perhaps was never robust, but which allowed him to expend the energy of three ordinary mortals. He thought nothing of a twenty-mile walk in the odd hours before dinner, and would not be deterred from it by rain or snow. His position obliged him to give a great deal of time to social and public ​engagements; yet they never interfered with his literary tasks. He was always ready to take the chair at a meeting for any charitable purpose with which he sympathized, and his speeches on these occasions were masterpieces of their kind. Three of them are worthy of a permanent place among his writings: that spoken on behalf of the Child's Hospital; that in which, at the dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund, he gave his recollections of life as a reporter; that for the Theatrical Fund, in which he sketches, as no other man ever did or could have done, the whole world of the stage, with the drollest humour and the kindliest note of pathos. With a popular audience on such occasions he was most perfectly in touch. Never for a moment did his style or thought rise above their heads; never was there a suspicion of condescending. He knew how to bestow pleasant flattery, without ever passing the limits of tact and taste. If ladies were among his hearers, he always put in a word of jesting gallantry which was exactly what they liked and expected. Withal, his talk invariably made appeal to the good and unselfish instincts; it was always admirable common-sense; it was always morally profitable.

The power he had of pursuing his imaginative tasks amid distractions which most men ​would find fatal, is especially interesting. Read Forster's description of the state of things in Dickens's house just before the Christmas of 1856, whilst Little Dorrit was being written. "Preparations for the private play had gone on incessantly, and in turning the schoolroom into a theatre sawing and hammering worthy of Babel continued for weeks." The novelist became stage carpenter as well as stage manager. "All day long," he writes in a letter, "a labourer heats size over the fire in a great crucible. We eat it, drink it, breathe it, and smell it. Seventy paint pots (which came in a van) adorn the stage." The private play was acted night after night to overflowing audiences, and not till the 20th of January was the house clear and quiet. But fiction-writing went on as usual, with never a hint at difficulty owing to circumstances.

In his letter-writing alone, Dickens did a life's literary work. Nowadays no one thinks of writing such letters; I mean, letters of such length and detail, for the quality is Dickens's own. He evidently enjoyed this use of the pen. Page after page of Forster's "Life" is occupied with transcription from private correspondence, and never a line of this but is thoroughly worthy of print and preservation. If he makes a tour in any part of the British ​Isles, he writes a full description of all he sees, of everything that happens, and writes it with such gusto, such mirth, such strokes of fine picturing, as appear in no other private letters ever given to the public. Naturally buoyant in all circumstances, a holiday gave him the exhilaration of a school-boy. See how he writes from Cornwall, when on a trip with two or three friends, in 1843. "Heavens! if you could have seen the necks of bottles, distracting in their immense variety of shape, peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the postboys, the maniac glee of the waiters! If you could have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy sea-shore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights, where the unspeakably green water was roaring, I don't know how many hundred feet below! . . . I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and gasping and bursting the buckle off the back of my stock, all the way. And Stanfield"—the painter—"got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him."

​The mention of "bottles, distracting in their immense variety," leads one to speak of the convivial temper so constantly exhibited in Dickens's letters and books. It might be easily imagined that he was a man of large appetite and something of a toper. Nothing of the kind; when it came to actual eating and drinking, no man was more habitually moderate. I am not much in the way of attending "temperance" meetings, and cannot say whether the advocates of total abstinence make a point of holding up Dickens's works to reprobation; but I should hardly think they look upon him with great favour. Indeed, it is an odd thing that, writing so much of the London poor, he so seldom refers to the curse of drunkenness. Of drinking there is any amount, but its results serve only for gaiety or comic extravagance. One remembers "Mr. Dolls" in Our Mutual Friend, a victim to the allurements of gin; he is a pitiful creature, and Jenny, the doll's dressmaker, suffers much from his eccentricities; for all that, we are constrained to laugh at him. A tragedy of drink Dickens never gives us. Criticizing Cruikshank's pictured morality, "The Bottle," he points out, truly enough, that the artist had seriously erred in making the habit of drunkenness arise from mere ​conviviality in persons well-to-do; drink, as a real curse, being commonly the result of overwork, semi-starvation, vile dwellings, and lack of reasonable entertainment. Nowadays he would necessarily have viewed the subject in a graver light. The national habits in this matter have been so greatly changed during the last half century, that it would now be impossible to glorify the flowing bowl as Dickens does in all his most popular writing. His works must have had a great part in promoting that Christmas joviality which of later years is manifestly on the decline. Whatever the perils of strong drink, his imagination could not dispense with it. One is amused to find him writing to his friend from America: "I wish you drank punch, dear Forster. It's. a shabby thing not to be able to picture you with that cool green glass." How it happened that John Forster, after many years of such intimacy, did not make at all events a show of handling the "cool green glass," passes our comprehension. We hear in Dickens's words a note of humorous, yet true, regret; it seemed impossible to him that a man could be in the enjoyment of his fireside if no alcoholic comfort stood at his elbow. Scott, by the by, though as hearty and hospitable a man as ever lived, and in youth no shirker of the ​bottle, always speaks with grave disapprobation of excessive conviviality. Possibly a difference of rank accounts for this; whilst the upper classes were learning to live with prudence and decency, the lower clung to their old habits. Be that as it may, Dickens could not throw his weight on the side of teetotalism. He held that, if social reforms such as he advocated could only be set in motion, the evils of drink would tend to disappear of themselves. He was right; the tendency showed itself beyond dispute; and if, as some think, drunkenness is again increasing among us, the cause must be sought in the social conditions of a new time—a civilization fraught, perhaps, with quite as many evils as those of the old order.

But not only in holiday time did Dickens live with extraordinary gusto; at his desk he was often in the highest spirits. Behold how he pictured himself, one day at Broadstairs, when he was writing Chuzzlewit. "In a bay window in a one-pair sits, from nine o'clock to one, a gentleman with rather long hair and no neckcloth, who writes and grins, as if he thought he were very funny indeed. At one he disappears, presently emerges from a bathing-machine, and may be seen, a kind of salmon-colour porpoise, splashing about in the ocean. After that, he may be viewed in another bay window ​on the ground floor eating a strong lunch; and after that walking a dozen miles or so, or lying on his back on the sand reading a book. Nobody bothers him, unless they know he is disposed to be talked to, and I am told he is very comfortable indeed. He's as brown as a berry, and they do say he is as good as a small fortune to the innkeeper, who sells beer and cold punch." Here is the secret of such work as that of Dickens; it is done with delight—done (in a sense) easily, done with the mechanism of mind and body in splendid order. Even so did Scott write, though more rapidly and with less conscious care; his chapter finished before the world had got up to breakfast. Later, Dickens produced novels less excellent with much more of mental strain. The effects of age could not have shown themselves so soon, but for the unfortunate loss of energy involved in his non-literary labours.

Travel was always a great enjoyment to him, and when on the Continent he largely appreciated the spirit of life dissimilar to that of England. His Pictures from Italy are not of great value either for style or information; there are better things in his private letters written whilst he travelled than in any volume. For Italy he had no intellectual preparation; he saw everything merely with the eyes of intelligence and ​good-humour. Switzerland and France gave him a better opportunity. Very noticeable is the justice he does to the French character. As a proof of this, and of the fact that his genius did not desert him when he crossed the Channel, nothing could be better than his description of M. Beaucourt, the proprietor of a house he rented at Boulogne. It is a picture—to be put together out of various anecdotes and sketches—really wonderful for its charm. In this little French bourgeois the great novelist had found a man after his own heart—loyal, mirthful, sweet-natured, and made only more likeable by traits especially amusing to an Englishman. "I see little of him now, as, all things being bien arrangées, he is delicate of appearing. His wife has been making a trip in the country during the last three weeks, but (as he mentioned to me with his hat in his hand) it was necessary that he should remain here, to be continually at the disposition of the tenant of the property. (The better to do this, he has had roaring dinner-parties of fifteen daily; and the old woman who milks the cows has been fainting up the hill, under vast burdens of champagne.)" And what could be more apt, more beautiful, than the words which describe M. Beaucourt as he retires from Dickens's presence, after a little dialogue in ​which he has shown all the gentle goodness of his heart? "He backed himself down the avenue with his cap in his hand, as if he were going to back himself straight into the evening star, without the ceremony of dying first."

This was at the time of the Anglo-French alliance in the Russian war. How just he could be under less favourable circumstances, and how strongly in contrast with that peculiarly offensive type, the supercilious Englishman abroad, appears in an account of his experiences in leaving Italy by the Austrian frontier. "The Austrian police are very strict, but they really know how to do business, and they do it. And if you treat them like gentlemen they will always respond. . . . The thing being done at all, could not be better done, or more politely—though I daresay if I had been sucking a gentish cane all the time, or talking in English to my compatriots, it might not unnaturally have been different." Dickens could always hold his own as a man among men. At all times he was something more than a writer of books; in this respect, as in literary genius, establishing his claim of brotherhood with Fielding and with Scott.

Reading his life, it is with much satisfaction that we come to his last appearance as a public entertainer. The words with which he took ​leave of his audience at St. James's Hall have frequently been quoted; they breathe a sense of relief and hopefulness very pathetic in the knowledge of what followed. "In but two short weeks from this time I hope that you may enter, in your own homes, on a new series of readings at which my assistance will be indispensable; but from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate farewell." The garish lights had done their work upon him, but he did not recognize it; he imagined that he had but to sit down in his house at Gadshill, and resume the true, the honourable occupation of his life, with assurance that before long all would be well with him in mind and body. It was too late, and the book he promised to his hearers remains in our hands a fragment.

Throughout the pages of Edwin Drood there is premonition of the end. Whether it came of feeble health; whether of the melancholy natural in one who has just closed a definite epoch of his life, or merely of the theme he had chosen, there broods over this interrupted writing a shadow of mortality; not oppressive; a shadow as of the summer eventide, descending with peaceful hush. We are in and about the old minster of a quiet English town; among the old graves, to which our ​attention is constantly directed. It is touching to read that final chapter, which must have brought back to the writer's mind the days long past, when, a little boy, he read and dreamt amid the scenes he was now describing. There is no gloom; he shows us such a brilliant morning as, after a lifetime, will yet linger in the memory from days of earliest childhood. He was tired, but not despondent; true to himself, he saw the sunshine above the world's dark places, nourished the hope of something beyond this present. "Changes of glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods, and fields . . . penetrate into the cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection and the Life." It was no form of words; what he wrote in that solemn mood assuredly he believed. Whatever his mistakes and his defects, insincerity had no place among them.

For him, there could be no truer epitaph than the words written by Carlyle on hearing he was dead:

"The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens—every inch of him an honest man."