"I cannot read Dickens!" How many people make this confession, with a front of brass, and do not seem to know how poor a figure they cut! George Eliot says that a difference of taste in jokes is a great cause of domestic discomfort. A difference of taste in books, when it is decided and vigorous, breaks many a possible friendship, and nips many a young liking in the bud. I would not willingly seem intolerant. A man may not like Sophocles, may speak disrespectfully of Virgil, and even sneer at Herodotus, and yet may be endured. But he or she (it is usually she) who contemns Scott, and "cannot read Dickens," is a person with whom I would fain have no further converse. If she be a lady, and if one meets her at dinner, she must of course be borne with, and "suffered gladly." But she has dug a gulf that nothing can bridge; she may be fair, clever and popular, but she is Anathema. I feel towards her (or him if he wears a beard) as Bucklaw did towards the person who should make inquiries about that bridal night of Lammermoor.
But this admission does not mean that one is sealed of the tribe of Charles--that one is a Dickensite pure and simple, convinced and devout--any more than Mr. Matthew Arnold was a Wordsworthian.
Dickens has many such worshippers, especially (and this is an argument in favour of the faith) among those who knew him in his life. He must have had a wonderful charm; for his friends in life are his literary partisans, his uncompromising partisans, even to this day. They will have no half-hearted admiration, and scout him who tries to speak of Dickens as of an artist not flawless, no less than they scorn him who cannot read Dickens at all. At one time this honourable enthusiasm (as among the Wordsworthians) took the shape of "endless imitation." That is over; only here and there is an imitator of the master left in the land. All his own genius was needed to carry his mannerisms; the mannerisms without the genius were an armour that no devoted David had proved, that none could wear with success.
Of all great writers since Scott, Dickens is probably the man to whom the world owes most gratitude. No other has caused so many sad hearts to be lifted up in laughter; no other has added so much mirth to the toilsome and perplexed life of men, of poor and rich, of learned and unlearned. "A vast hope has passed across the world,"says Alfred de Musset; we may say that with Dickens a happy smile, a joyous laugh, went round this earth. To have made us laugh so frequently, so inextinguishably, so kindly--that is his great good deed. It will be said, and with a great deal of truth, that he has purged us with pity and terror as well as with laughter. But it is becoming plain that his command of tears is less assured than of old, and I cannot honestly regret that some of his pathos--not all, by any means--is losing its charm and its certainty of appeal.
Dickens's humour was rarely too obvious; it was essentially personal, original, quaint, unexpected, and his own. His pathos was not infrequently derived from sources open to all the world, and capable of being drawn from by very commonplace writers. Little Nells and Dombeys, children unhappy, overthrown early in the melee of the world, and dying among weeping readers, no longer affect us as they affected another generation. Mrs. Beecher Stowe and the author of "Misunderstood," once made some people weep like anything by these simple means. Ouida can do it; plenty of people can do it.
Dickens lives by virtue of what none but he can do: by virtue of Sairey Gamp, and Sam Weller, and Dick Swiveller, and Mr. Squeers, with a thousand other old friends, of whom we can never weary. No more than Cleopatra's can custom stale their infinite variety.
I do not say that Dickens' pathos is always of the too facile sort, which plays round children's death-beds. Other pathos he has, more fine and not less genuine. It may be morbid and contemptible to feel "a great inclination to cry" over David Copperfield's boyish infatuation for Steerforth; but I feel it. Steerforth was a "tiger,"--as Major Pendennis would have said, a tiger with his curly hair and his ambrosial whiskers. But when a little boy loses his heart to a big boy he does not think of this. Traddles thought of it. "Shame, J. Steerforth!" cried Traddles, when Steerforth bullied the usher. Traddles had not lost his heart, nor set up the big boy as a god in the shrine thereof. But boys do these things; most of us have had our Steerforths--tall, strong, handsome, brave, good-humoured. Far off across the years I see the face of such an one, and remember that emotion which is described in "David Copperfield,"chap. xix., towards the end of the chapter. I don't know any other novelist who has touched this young and absolutely disinterested belief of a little boy in a big one--touched it so kindly and seriously, that is there is a hint of it in "Dr. Birch's School Days."But Dickens is always excellent in his boys, of whom he has drawn dozens of types--all capital. There is Tommy Traddles, for example.
