My Friend Copperfield

UNLESS the large new editions of Dickens are all bought for the sitting rooms of the vulgar, time has already proved his critics a little smug. That he is no realist has not for our romantic day the import of thirty years ago. And indeed, to insist that Dickens has no inkling of realism is to blink quite too many studies of his in that rendering of life which is the preoccupation of Mr. Hardy. The thirteenth chapter of David Copperfield, for example, has a scene in the very manner : —

“ ‘ What do you mean,’ said the tinker, ‘ by wearing my brother’s silk handkercher ? Give it over here !’ And he had mine off my neck in a moment, and tossed it to the woman.

“ The woman burst into a fit of laughter, as if she thought this a joke, and tossed it back to me, nodded once, as slightly as before, and made the word ‘ Go! ’ with her lips. Before I could obey, however, the tinker seized the handkerchief out of my hand with a roughness that threw me away like a feather, and putting it loosely round his own neck, turned upon the woman with an oath and knocked her down. I never shall forget seeing her fall backward on the hard road, and lie there with her bonnet tumbled off, and her hair all whitened in the dust; nor, when I looked back from a distance, seeing her sitting on the pathway, which was a bank by the roadside, wiping the blood from her face with the corner of her shawl, while he went on ahead.”

But that dust and blood are demonstrably of the accident of Dickens, not of the substance. Blunderstone is said to be in Suffolk ; it might be in Yorkshire, where the Squeers set, for all their jargon, are not at home. The Yarmouth fisher folk are stage properties. Barring a few pieces of amazing verity, Dickens has no local truth. His London is a city of dreams. The glamour on his descriptions — are any more effective ? — is what Ruskin, with a nice perversion of language, calls the pathetic fallacy. As the very watch of Uriah Heep has a “ pale, inexpressive face,” so in the haunting melancholy of the many broodings over Thames every physical detail is warped to the preconceived harmony.

In most of his characters, again, Dickens is even farther from realism. Yet it is uncritical to label them all grotesques. The truth of his best characterization seems none the less secure for not being truth of realism. That gallery of vague and vulgar heroines has yet the distinct and noble sketch of Agnes Wickfield. And not to insist on Betsey Trotwood, Micawber is what we agree to call a creation. Few men of fiction are more essentially human than that spring of hopeful grandiloquence. If the exposure of Heep is melodrama, what comedy is nearer humanity than Micawber’s thrusting of the fork into his shirt front, when the untimely arrival of Littimer chilled the feast in David’s chambers ? That, indeed, is a scene of half-domestic conviviality, — and in the presentation of domestic happiness, as a bourgeois appanage including good cheer, the truth of Dickens has never been much contested; but to say that the Christmas stories are greater, therefore, than the novels is to proceed upon a false assumption. The stories are not superior in accuracy, in truth of detail. That kind of truth may be found here and there, in the novels as often as in the stories ; but in either it is so far from being typical that it is obviously exceptional. What animates the Christmas stories is the feeling for good cheer, the feeling for homely joys, the feeling for homely pathos. And always the truth of Dickens is a sentimental truth. When, at his best, he realizes character, it is through imaginative grasp of feeling; when, in his inferior studies, he fails in character, it is through falsity of feeling. Mr. Peggotty’s wandering search for his niece is a situation common enough on the provincial stage. In detail, in fact, it is false ; but Dickens makes it pathetically true. The truth of Dickens, maintained with inalienable affection by the people that read novels, is truth of emotion.

This is bringing Dickens into great company : the company of Victor Hugo, the company — may her other friends be for a moment civil to the cockney intruder — of Charlotte Brontë. Find in Notre Dame a single piece of actuality. Yet the heart answers. And the two English novelists, essentially different in quality of emotion, are yet essentially alike in that emotion defines the range of their powers. Beyond that they are both at fault. Dickens, indeed, had singular opportunities to know the facts of a certain limited range of life ; but his presentation of facts even within that limited range is highly, sometimes falsely colored, and always devoted, as has been said often enough, to the extraordinary and the picturesque rather than to any consistent rendering of the normal. Charlotte Brontë knew the facts of life as little as any novelist that ever lived. No doubt she had common sense, and could conduct a household ; none the less for that, her ignorance of the actual life of men and women is even ludicrous. Thus, far more than Dickens, but in the same manner, she prevails by imaginative grasp of emotion, as Victor Hugo prevails. Far more than Dickens ; for she had not only less knowledge, but higher imagination. As if to point the distinction, she has no humor, whereas it is commonplace that Dickens is among the great humorists. It is in his humorous situations, eminently, that Dickens brings to bear such experience as he has; it is in her lack of humor, eminently, that Charlotte Brontë reveals the slightness of her hold on real life. There is the contrast; but it is a difference between geniuses essentially akin. The power of both is a poetic power. Charlotte Brontë’s is a higher and especially purer poetry ; but Charles Dickens, cockney or not, had his poetry, too.