LORD ROSBERY IN PRAISE OF DICKENS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1108, 22 April 1911, Page 9

LORD ROSBERY IN PRAISE OF DICKENS.

I have ventured to make this long preface to indicate that neither am I going to make a speech about the works of Dickens nor am I going to plead tor a memorial. I am coming for a much more practical object -to an assembly of business men. in the city—an object which I think they will all recognise, i . am here to claim the long overdue payment of a debt. We now to realise that we have ail been rattier shabby fellows in enjoying the works of Dickens. He has given us a pleasure which, I think, none of us can over-estimate, and we have given him uncommonly little in return. It is estimated—these facts are kindly supplied for.my usb this afternoon, I: cannot conceive how they are arrived at, but I give them for what they- are worth—that there a to 25,000,U00 sets of Dickens's works in the world at this moment, making, as my statistician tells me, due allowance for wear and tsar known in literature. But for these great works, for which we owe him a debt which we can never express, and wo can never repay, we gave him very little. I' think ho died wortu between £70,000 and £80,000, and it is calculated that £50,000 of that arose not from these .works, but from his reading of these works on public occasions.'Now 1 think we shallall feel that that is a very inadequate return, as compared with modern returns —with the modern return, for example, of a successful play —to this great genius, for what ho did for us. I am not now,, as I said, going into tho detail of his works. I am not going to appeal to that noble tragedy, "A Talc of Two Cities," which stands on a pedestal by itself, not as being greater than Dickens's other works, which it was not, Hut as being different in kind and texture from them. For it is n tragedy, and his other works were not. I am not going to appeal to that delightful series of stories by which lie resuscitated Christmas as a popular festival. Apart from the religious feast, there are_ chronological circumstances i:i Christmas which make t'fc highly unsuitable for any kind of rejoicing. It is towards tho end of the year when we anticipate with lively apprehension tho delivery of our annual accounts, and, chronologically speaking, from causes apart from our own control, no festival is. so unhappily placed for rejoicing ,'s is the fi'stivahif Christmas. This great genius took up Christmas, lie warmed

its dying embers, and ho" has left ity what I think he did not find it, the great national rejoicing of the year. My claim on you all rests on neither of these things. I am going tp" rest it on only ono claim, and yet the claims are innumerable. Dickens taught us how to laugh. Tho world, when "Pickwick" appeared, was not a very gay world, it was, 1 admit, somewhere about tho time of the coronation of Queen Victoria, but when wc read the literature of that time wo sec- little traces of anything that could amuso anybody. The old jokes, tho jokes of Scarrou and tho Kestoration dramatists, and even tho humour of Fielding and of Goldsmith no longer provoked laughter; but in this island, washed as it is, I think Lord Beaconsheld said, by a melancholy ocean, laughter is a physical necessity. And, after all, am 1 not right in saying that a laugh, a real laugh, at any literary product, except, of course, a comedy "on tho stage, any laugh over a book that you aro reading is almost the rarest luxury which you can enjoy? Well, now, as 1 say, we live under a sunless sky, surrounded by a inelancholv ocean, devoured, as our French friends tell us, by the spleen, and it is a nhysical necessity for the English nation, and even for the Scotch nation and tho-Welsh, «■ faugh. It is the most glorious and the most innucent of all the enjoyments. It exhilarates, all social relations. Was not the laugh of Frank Lockwood something that would mako a.stuffed bird rejoice, and those who have listened to that splendour of merriment which ho could impart by. that laugh realise the intense valuo of that emotional exercise of ours. Nowj as I say, I do not think the literature of tho early days of Queen. Victoria or of the reign of William .IV was very exhilarating; but now any ono who taster. Dickons, and I suppose from the sale of his works tho number of people who taste Dickens must bo almost coterminous with tho races of tho world, and who feels depressed, who feels unhappy, who feels physically unwell, has only got to take down his "Pickwick" and read a few pages possibly that he almost knows by heart already, and he will find himself indulging in that innoroat and healthy exhilaration of which I snokc.