CHARLES DICKENS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 116, 12 November 1938, Page 29

CHARLES DICKENS

HE HAS TAKEN HIS PLACE

No one can question the popularity of Charles Dickens in his own day; few would deny- his classic standing now (says the London "Times" in its literary supplement). But it is amusing to see how, in the Dictionary of National Biography, Leslie Stephen, after enumerating, with some relish, one feels, the faults which "more severe critics" had found in him, cautiously leaves the decision between' these and "more eulogistic opinions" to the judgment of the future. He was writing eighteen years after Dickens's death, and from that zone of silence which so often surrounds for a while a once resounding name. Then the voice begins to make itself heard again: the faithful take heart, until they see, with some misgiving, the great man becoming the vogue. But that phase is brief, because fashion is fickle; and then comes the time when to read him is neither a scholastic nor a social duty, to enjoy him neither an affectation nor a task. He has taken his place.

And when that time has come, that place has been taken, there is no call any longer for apology or excuse for self-deception. We , need not deny that there is an intolerable deal of tongue-wagging/in Plato; that Dante's notion of the comic is exceedingly crude; that Shakespeare is sometimes horribly slapdash, Keats lush, Byron boring, Dickens—and all the old censures ban be brought forth again, and all are true: facile pathos, shallow thinking, shrill vehemence, tedious iteration. But even those more severe critics allowed "his fun to be irresistible." It is, and is there any reason to suppose it will not always be; or that there will ever be a time when fit souls will not respond to his gigantic faculty of comic apprehension, his mastery of the macabre and the grotesque, in nature, character, and life; and, with no surrender of critical judgment, will not give themselves, judgment and all, to be borne away on the surging, inebriating flood of his creative fancy?

I The moral, and the comfort, to be drawn from the career and achievement of Dickens is this: that there is no mode of human discourse, however popular, common, or even vulgar it may be, that the hand of genius cannot fashion into literature: and in seasons of dearth, or noisy vacancy, we must simply wait, contented with the past, until that hand puts forth its power again. Dickens chose the mode, congenial to his age and, as his letters show, peculiarly congenial to himself, of comic narrative, packed with fine and ludicrous observation and brightened and darkened with tales of scenes of tenderness, violence, and horror. This was his world. True, there are times when he seems unable to find the gateway; or, entering, is at a stand, turning mechanically in search of pathos, once so familiar, then lost or overgrown. On such times detraction will fasten and expatiate. But Dickens who would not have fancied the company, need not regard the censure of the Minute Philosophers of literature. The world has given its judgment: He is with Aristophanes. j