Charles Dickens as a Man of Letters

THE purely literary character of a greatly popular writer is apt to be neglected ; or at least to remain a matter of lax or irresponsible opinion. His admirers have one reason, his detractors another, for leaving it in abeyance; both classes seem to consider it hardly worth attention. In England there has long been a middle public, — a class still sufficiently large, — lettered readers who do not set Dickens aside, and yet who cannot be said to study him; and their tendency is to make light, without much examination, of his specific power as a writer. Men have the habit of saving their reputation as readers by disavowing his literature even while they confess the amplitude of its effects. There is laughter for his humor, tears for his pathos, praise for his spirit, and contempt for his authorship. The least every man holds himself urged to say is that he need not say he prefers Thackeray.

Dickens, however, was very much a craftsman. He had a love of his métier, and the genius for words, which the habitual indifference of his time, of his readers, and of his contemporaries in letters could not quench. To read him after a modern man who had the like preoccupation, displayed it, and was applauded for it phrase by phrase, — Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, — is to undergo a new conviction of his authorship, of the vitality of his diction, of a style that springs, strikes, and makes a way through the burden of custom. Of the great exceptions to that custom — the writers who made a conscious choice of a worthy vocabulary — I need not speak. Few of them were read by Dickens in the years when his own literature was taking shape. He had Fielding and Smollett for his authors as a boy, and nothing read thus by one so ardent is without influence. But his contemporaries — all the journalists, all the novelists of the hour — were not men who cared for the spirit, precision, or nobility of a phrase, or gave much time to any other century than that which was then plodding on a foot neither jocund nor majestic. The daily leading article in the Times newspaper (little altered) shows us still what was the best effect looked for in that day from the journeymen of literature. The language had to serve a certain purpose of communication; but as to the nobler, or the fuller, or the more delicate sense of words, it meant as little as was possible to any human tongue.

Refuse words, too emphatic, but with a worn, an abused emphasis; strained rhetoric that had lost its elasticity; grave phrases dimmed and dulled — authors worked with these as with the English of their inheritance, sufficiently well content. The phrase filled the mouth, though there were dregs in the mouthful. In the work of Dickens also there are passages of such English, neither gentle nor simple. He wrote thus as a mere matter of use and custom. But his own lively genius proved itself to be a writer’s genius, not only here and there, or suddenly, but often. It had its way of revealing the authentic writer in the springs and sources of his work. For the authentic author is an author throughout. His art is lodged so deeply within as to be beforehand with his emotions and his passions, especially the more vehement. He does not clothe his feeling in poetry or prose, for clothing is assumed. It would be better to say that his thought and feeling are incarnated, not dressed, and that in poetry it wears already the spiritual body. According to this theory of language no man can possibly have a true style who has not something to write, something for the sake of which he writes. This should not need to be said — it is so simple, and seems so plain. Yet authors are found to aspire to style for its own sake, and to miss it as happiness is missed. The writer who has taken captive the fancy and the cheaper emotions — not the imagination and the graver passions — of modern Italy is surely to be very simply and obviously described as an ambitious and a careful author who has little or nothing to say. Against such as he the coming reaction toward blunt and homely writing is as just as a “movement ” can ever be. And it is only against such as he that the insults “precious ” and “preciosity ” are justifiably to be used. The style of Dickens is assuredly not great. It has life enough for movement, but not life enough for peace. That it has life, whether restless or at rest, is the fact which proves its title to the name of style. To write much about style is, unfortunately, to tamper somewhat with that rare quality; if only because such writing has suggested to too many the addition of “style” to all their other literary offenses — the last addition, like that of the “architecture ” which was to be added to the rich man’s new house as soon as he should get it built. Let us, however, leave this mere fashion out of sight; it will soon pass. Already a reaction is beginning, and those who praised what they called style will soon be scorning it, in chorus. Which way such a weak current of criticism may chance to turn between to-day and tomorrow matters nothing. The style that is the life and value of English literature suffers no lasting injury or change ; and all who have written well, whether in the greater manner or the lesser which Dickens practiced, have their share in the laws and the constitution of Letters. It cannot be necessary to insist upon Dickens’s sense of words. He had his craft at heart, and made instant appropriations of words that describe and define. This felicity is style in a humble form. It even fulfills that ancient demand for a frequent “slight surprise,” which, so stated, is in itself an example, as well as a precept, of Greek style. See, for an instance of Dickens’s felicity, the brief phrase that gives us Mr. Micawber as he sat by to hear Captain Hopkins read the petition in the prison “from His Most Gracious Majesty’s unfortunate subjects.” Mr. Micawber listened, Dickens tells us, “with a little of an author’s vanity, contemplating (not severely) the spikes upon the opposite wall.” The happy parenthesis! And here is another masterly phrase: “ It went from me with a shock, like a ball from a rifle,” says David Copperfield, after the visit of a delirious impulse; and what other writer has named that blow of departure, the volley of passion as it goes ?

In comedy again: “Mr. Micawber ” (he was making punch) “resumed his peeling with a desperate air.” We had read but a moment before that he had made a “random but expressive flourish with the knife ” in reference to his own prospects and to those of his disastrous family. Traddles, in the same book, with his hair standing on end, “looked as though he had seen a cheerful ghost.” And if the heart-easing humor of this little phrase, which sets laughter free, should be accused of a lower intelligence than that of wit, has Dickens not wit in a phrase, as well as humor? Is it not witty to say of the man who had held a sinecure office against all protest, “He died with his drawn salary in his hand ” ?

Is it not witty, too, to banter the worst English of his day by an imitation that shows an author’s sense of its literary baseness ? The mere words, “gratifying emotions of no common description,” do this to admiration. It is Mr. Micawber again (excellent figure of comedy — there are no heights of humorous literature whereon Mr. Micawber has not the right to stand with the greatest of companions) — it is he who writes that portly phrase. “ Tinged with the prismatic hues of memory ” is another sentence in the same paragraph, but this is something more farcical, whereas “gratifying emotions of no common description ” hits the whole language as it were with one sure arrow. The thickness of the words, as when Charlotte Brontë, at her primmest, writes of “establishing an eligible connection, ” and of “an institution on the Continent, ” has not escaped the ear of Dickens the writer. Try as one may to describe a certain kind of English, one is easily outdone by him with a single phrase, invented for an example, such as this of Mr. Micawber’s — “gratifying emotions of no common description.”

Comedy in literature is evidently of three kinds, and the kinds are named respectively, humor, wit, and derision. Humor is in the phrase that describes Traddles with his hair — Traddles who looked as though he had seen a cheerful ghost. Wit is in the phrase about the drawn salary. And derision is in that sentence of Mr. Micawber’s composition.

In all this — the humor of authorship, its wit and its derision, cited here successively, in representative phrases that had to be chosen among thousands of their kind — the idea is inseparable from the phrase. Nevertheless, perhaps a student might be willing to find so important a thing as style elsewhere, in deliberate description, such as this: The autumn leaves fall thick, “ but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness.” Here, again, is a noble piece of writing which a classic English name might well have signed: “ I held my mother in my embrace, and she held me in hers; and among the still woods in the silence of the summer day there seemed to be nothing but our two troubled minds that was not at peace.”

Again, how simple and fine is this: “Now the woods settle into great masses as if they were one profound tree: ” not only admirably choice in words, but a lesson in vision, a lesson for a painter. It instructs the sense of sight, so that a master of landscape painting could not put a better lesson into words. And this, also simple, also good, seems to instruct the sense of hearing — the scene is in the Court of Chancery on a London November day: “Leaving this address ringing in the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog knows him no more.” Again: “ Mr. Vholes here emerged into the silence he could hardly be said to have broken, so stifled was his tone.” Here again are hearing and vision in admirable words : “Within the grill-gate of the chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the fast darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and falling in a cracked monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard . . . until the organ and the choir burst forth and drowned it in a sea of music. Then the sea fell, and the dying voice made another feeble effort; and then the sea rose high and beat its life out, and lashed the roof, and surged among the arches, and pierced the heights of the great tower; and then the sea was dry and all was still.”

Take another example: This is how a listener overheard men talking in the cathedral hollows: “The word ‘ confidence, ' shattered by the echoes, but still capable of being pieced together, is uttered.”

In another passage, moreover, Dickens stops at the mere sense of vision, and confirms that intent impression by instantly using a certain word where a writer of lesser vigilance would have used another; thus: “ Mr. Vholes gauntly stalked to the fire, and warmed his funereal gloves.” A less simple and less subtle author — a less admirable impressionist — would have surely said “hands ” where Dickens, stopping at the sense of vision — as though he did nothing but see — says “gloves.” This is the purest and most perfect “ impressionism, ” yet it does not bind Dickens to impressionism as a formula. He uses that manner precisely when he needs it, and only then. There is another similar and excellent passage, where Dickens writes of Mr. Vholes’s “ sleeve, ” and writes so with a peculiar appropriateness to the inscrutable person he is describing. “‘I thank you,’ said Mr. Vholes, putting out his long black sleeve, to check the ringing of the bell, ‘ not any. ’ ” And here is the expression of a sense that is hardly either sight or hearing: “Beyond was a burial ground in which the night was very slowly stirring. ” How subtle a phrase for the earliest dawn!

Then there is the description of the gesture of little David Copperfield at the end of his journey, when he first confronts his aunt: “A movement of my hands, intended to show her ray ragged state, and to call it to witness that I had suffered something. ” If the sense of hearing is opened and urged, and struck to greater life by one phrase ; and the sense of vision by another; both are quickened by the storm in David Copperfield; and the sense of touch is roused by the touches of that tempest. “ I dream of it, ” says the narrator, “sometimes, though at lengthened and uncertain intervals, to this hour.” “There had been a wind all day, and it was rising then, with an extraordinary great sound. ... We found a cluster of people in the market place.” That last phrase, in all its simplicity, marks the strange day. “Long before we saw the sea its spray was on our lips. . . . The water was out, over miles and miles of the flat country; and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had its stress of little breakers setting heavily towards us. When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore, with towers and buildings. When at last we got into the town, the people came out to their doors all aslant, and with streaming hair. I went down to look at the sea, staggering along the street, which was strewn with sand and seaweed, and with flying blotches of sea foam.” Here, again, is the storm in the morning light: “The wind by this time might have lulled a little, though not more sensibly than if the cannonading I had dreamed of had been diminished by the silencing of half a dozen guns out of hundreds.” Wonderful here, again, is the perception of things silenced within the stress of sound. Then read all that follows, in the unrelaxed urgency of that great chapter, to the end.

Whoever would try to do Dickens this tardy justice (and I have space for no more than an indication of the way of it) must choose passages that have the quality of dignity. They are not so very few. Elegance he has not, but his dignity is clear to readers who prize this quality too much to be hasty to deny it.

In estimating Charles Dickens’s capacity for a prose style of dignity we ought to bear in mind his own singular impatience of antiquity of almost all degrees, and also the sense of fresh life he had — his just conviction of his own new leadership. He had read the eighteenth-century novelists in his boyhood, but when he became a man and a master, he broke with the past, and his renouveau was somewhat too stimulating to his own genius. It was in spite of this, in spite of his popularity, and in spite of a public that was modern, excitable, boastful of the age, boastful about steam and trade, eager to frolic with a new humorist, and yet more eager to weep with a new sentimentalist, that Dickens possessed himself, in no infrequent passages, of a worthy and difficult dignity.

His people, his populace, and the first critic of his day at the head of all classes, pushed him further and yet further on the way of abandonment — the way of easy extremes; by praise, by popularity, by acclamation they sent their novelist in search of yet more occasion for laughter and tears, for caricature and intemperate pathos.

Moreover, as has just been said, Dickens was urged by his own modern conviction, and excused by his splendid sense of words. He was tempted everywhere. As you read him, you learn to understand how his vitality was at work, how it carried him through his least worthy as well as his most worthy moments, and justified his confidence where a weaker man had confessed unconsciously the ignominies of false art and luxurious sentiment. Charles Dickens seems to defy us to charge him with these. None the less do we accuse him — at Little Paul’s death, for example. Throughout this child’s life — admirably told — the art is true, but at the very last few lines the writer seems to yield to applause and to break the strengthening laws of nature down. We may indeed say the strengthening laws; because in what Hamlet calls the modesty of nature there is not only beauty, not only dignity, but an inimitable strength. The limitations of nature, and of natural art, are bracing. A word or two astray in this death scene; a phrase or two put into the mouth of the dying child, — “the light about the head, ” “shining on me as I go, ” phrases that no child ever spoke, and that make one shrink as though with pain by their untruthfulness, — and the sincerity of literature is compromised.

But it is not with such things that the work of Dickens is beset; it is rather filled with just felicities — so filled that on our search for passages of composure and dignity we are tempted to linger rather among excellent words that are to be praised merely because they are the words of precision — arms of precision — specific for his purpose. Two proper names are worthy to be placed among these, — that of Vholes, for the predatory yet not fraudulent lawyer in Bleak House, and that of Tope, for the cathedral verger in Edwin Drood: something dusty and dusky, with wings, is Vholes ; something like a church mouse, silent and a little stealthy, is Tope.

Mr. and Mrs. Tope. There is naturally a pair engaged about the cathedral stalls and the hassocks — within the “precincts” generally. It is Christmas; and Mr. and Mrs. Tope, Dickens tells us, “are daintily sticking sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces of the cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the coat-buttonholes of the Dean and Chapter.” From the same book comes this fine description of the young Eurasians: “a certain air upon them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the objects of the chase, rather than the followers. ” The words may lack elegance, but they are vivid; and these follow: “An indefinable kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face and form.” What enterprising words ! How gallantly Dickens sets forward to describe, and how buoyantly!

Fancy, in Charles Dickens, is the most vigilant elf that ever lurked in brilliant human senses. Fancy has her own prose style; doubtless that greater faculty, Imagination, inspires more of the ultimate peace — the continent of peace — that seems to contain the tempests of great tragedies. But if Imagination is capable of peace, Fancy is capable of movement. And amongst the words of Fancy some are vulgarly, and some are finely mobile and alert. Fancy has a vulgar prose and a finer; the finer assuredly is his. Instead of charging him with the vulgar alertness of the street (and this seems to be the accusation used by those who aver that they can no longer read him), we ought to acknowledge the Ariel-delicacy of images and allusions, and the simplicity of his caprice, resembling the simplicity of an unpreoccupied child.

Compare this sense of autumn with that of a writer who has had to pause for secondary words: “There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools in the cracked, uneven flagstones. . . . Some of the leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary within the low-arched cathedral door; but two men coming out resist them, and cast them out with their feet. ”

Less simple and less subtle, but full of the words of perception, is this last description of Volumnia, the elderly, but sprightly Dedlock, in Bleak House. The Dedlocks, by the way, are mere convention; but yet Dickens contrives to see even these creatures of tradition with a living eye: “Then, indeed,” he says, “does the tuckered sylph . . . proceed to the exhausted old assembly room, fourteen heavy miles off. Then does she twirl and twine, a pastoral nymph of good family, through the mazes of the dance. Then is she kind and cruel, stately and unassuming, various, beautifully willful.” “Fourteen heavy miles off.” There is the very genius of antithesis in that disheartened phrase, in its exquisite contrast with poor Volumnia’s gayeties.

It is appropriately in the passages of childhood — veritable childhood, in which the famous Little Nell seems to me, I must reluctantly confess, to have little or no part — that Dickens writes those words of perception of which literature would do well to be proud. Take the passages of several of the novels in which the heart of a child is uttered by the humorist, in whose heart nothing ceases to live. These passages are too full for citation. But here, in the last word of the phrase, is a most characteristic stroke of literature. Pip, in Great Expectations, as every one knows, has taken food to give to his convict; and he goes to church on Christmas morning: Dickens puts these words into his mouth: —

“Under the weight of my wicked secret, I pondered whether the Church would be powerful enough to shield me from the vengeance of the terrible young man, if I divulged to that establishment.” The word “establishment” is precisely the one that proves the hopelessness of such a project. A child confessing to an “establishment”! Another word of precision is this: “Trabb’s boy, when I had entered, was sweeping the shop; and he had sweetened his labors by sweeping over me.” Here is another, and it repeats the effect of Mr. Vholes’s sleeve, in a child’s apprehension: “Miss Murdstone, who was busy at her writing-desk, gave me her cold finger-nails.” Then there is “a sobbing gaslight;” and, again, Mrs. Wilfer’s “darkling state,” and “lurid indications of the better marriages she might have made ” (wherewith she celebrates her silver wedding) — these serve to remind a reader of the thousands of their kind.

I cannot think that the telling of a violent action (most difficult of narrative writing) could be done more dramatically than it is done in the passage that tells the murder in Martin Chuzzlewit. So with the half-told murder in Edwin Drood. As by strong dramatic drawing in a picture the thing is held. These passages of extreme action are never without dignity. Literary dignity is rarer in the pathetic mood; but it is frequent in landscape. Here is an example: “All beyond his figure was a vast dark curtain, in solemn movement towards one quarter of the heavens.”

Nor is dignity absent from this composed thought of Esther Summerson, in that passage of her life where she had resolved to forego an unavowed love: “ There was nothing to be undone; no chain for him to drag, or for me to break.” This has a quality not unworthy of Bolingbroke, and resembling him by nobility. For when Bolingbroke says of the gifts and benefits of Fortune, that she might take, but that she should not snatch, them from him, meaning that his own detaining hold upon them should not be violent, he uses a phrase hardly more majestic than that of Dickens. Thus it is to an eighteenth-century classic, and a master of style; it is to the friend of Pope, and the inspirer of the Essay on Man, that we may liken Dickens the man of letters. And this is the author whom so many readers have charged with vulgarity. The vulgarity that is attributable to his early ignorance of social manners is a very unimportant thing in comparison with the high literary distinction of authorship. The pathetic writer, the humorist, the observer, the describer, we all know, but surely the world has not yet done justice to the man of letters and the man of style, who has not only told us stories, but has borne the responsibilities of English authorship.

It is surely worth mentioning that on the point of grammar Dickens is above criticism. Ignorant of those languages which are held to furnish the foundations of grammatical construction he assuredly was. Nevertheless, he knew how to construct. He grasped the language, as it were, from within. I believe that throughout all those volumes of his there is not one example, I will not say of bad grammar, but of weak grammar. Hardly another author is thus infallible. Those critics who think Thackeray to be, in some sort, more literary than Dickens, would be dismayed if they compared the two authors upon this point. No comparison of any kind, perhaps, need be made between them; but it is the Thackeray party that is to blame for first making a kind of rivalry. And I intend no disrespect to that truly great author when I note that Thackeray’s grammar is often strangely to seek. Not only so, but he puts, all unconsciously, a solecism into the mouth of Dr. Johnson himself, in the course of the few words which he makes Johnson speak, in his novel, The Virginians.

Security of grammar is surely much more than a mere correctness and knowledge of the rules of a language. It is strength, it is logic. It even proves imagination; because loose sentences nearly always imply vagueness of image, — visual and mental uncertainty, something merely rhetorical or ready made. Strong grammar is like strong drawing, and proves a capable grasp of the substance of things. In this matter Dickens is on the heights of authorship. When Dickens was learning to write, English prose, as commonly printed, was in bad condition. There were the great exceptions, as Americans remember, but one does not think of them as coming Dickens’s way. The writer at once popular and literary was Macaulay. But in the matter of style Macaulay was little else than an energetic follower of Gibbon; and the following of Gibbon became, through the fine practice of Macaulay, a harmful habit in English prose. Macaulay unfortunately had not the copyright. And as the authors of the articles of the English Church speak, in theology, of a corrupt following of the Apostles, so also was there a corrupt following of Gibbon. The style of Mr. Micawber himself was a corrupt following of Gibbon, and the style of the daily paper and the style of the grocer’s circular to-day are also a corrupt following of Gibbon. Gibbon was a master, but it was through a second-hand admiration that Gibbon was placed where he eclipsed the past, so that the early eighteenth century and the seventeenth century were neglected for his sake. It was to the broad face of astonishment that Gibbon addressed his phrase. The shortened sentence (for it was he and not Macaulay who introduced the frequent full stop, the pause for historical surprise) was Gibbon’s. His was the use, at once weak and rigid, of “the latter and the former,” which the corrupt follower at once adopted: “Oh, do not doom me to the latter! ” says a lover in one of Mrs. Inchbald’s stories after presenting to his mistress the alternative of his hopes and fears. The grocer to-day diffuses (Gibbon himself would write “diffuses”) the last ruins of the master’s prose by post; and when the author of a work, recently published, on the Divine Comedy, says that Paolo and Francesca were to receive from Dante “such alleviation as circumstances would allow, ” this also is a distant, a shattered Gibbon, a drift of Gibbon.

That last is the innocent burlesque of the far-off corrupt follower. The burlesque so gayly undertaken by Dickens rallies a lofty and a distant Gibbon less innocently, and with an exquisite intelligence. And our admiration of Dickens’s warm, living, and unrhetorical writing should surely be increased by our remembrance of the fact that this wreck of a master’s style strewed the press in his day. It was everywhere. Dickens not only was clear of the wreckage — he saw it to be the refuse it was; he laughed at it, and even as he laughed he formed a Style.

Alice Meynell.