MARK TAPLEY

Evening Star, Issue 20993, 6 January 1932, Page 9

MARK TAPLEY

THE PERSONIFICATION OF GOOD NATURE [By Robebt Lynd, in ‘ John o’ Xondon’s Weekly.’] It is no use asking whether anybody resembling Mark Tapley ever existed in real life. We do not ask whether the fox who complained that the grapes were sour or the boy who cried “ Wolf! iWolf!” ever really existed. We are content to know that the fox and the boy are in some strange fashion liker the people we know than most of the Eoeple we know are. They are sym- , olically true to life, not merely photographically true. Superficially unlike life, they nevertheless show us what life is like.

Dickens in novels never cared twopence whether his characters were superficially like life or not. He was a master of realistic photography, but he knew that realistic photography is only one element in story-telling. He was an entertainer and a moralist as well as being a recorder. He realised, as Homer had done before him, that the object of fiction is to provide us with something livelier than a ' Hansard ’ report _of the human assembly. Hence he claimed the right to mingle fables and fairy tales with reality, and to introduce monsters and angels into the picture of his age, if in this way ho could enrich his stories. At one moment he is of the school of HUsop, at another of the tradition of ‘ The Arabian Nights.’ At another he is descendant of Fielding and Smollett. A MATTER OF TASTE.

To most of us this extraordinary variety of his genius is delightful: to those who care only for single-minded psychology, and precise description, on the other hand, it is the abomination of abominations. To people of this kind Mark Tapley seems a more loathsome character than Jack the Ripper. His optimism, in their favourite phrase, “ makes them sick.” This, I think, is becau.o they have an entirely false conception of the business of fiction. They .would make the imagination a drudge in the cause of realism, and deny it the right to play. They look on fables and fairy tales as amusements for infants. _ There is no need to reply to such critics: one can merely agree with them that Dickens is not their author. As for the rest of us, we are not such aesthetic Puritans as to abjure fables and fairy tales. We enjoy the sense of overflowing vitality in an author, whether he is in mood of the wildest exaggeration or of the most passionate devotion to detail. So that if Dickens tips a Mark Tapley out of his cornucopia, we accept him cheerfully as the half-mythical character Dickens intended him to be. He is the chief character in a fable about the importance of being jolly in the worst possible circumstances, THE MODEL ENGLISHMAN. . I confess frankly that Mark Tapley is not one of my own favourite characters. His good nature is too mechanical in its expression. He has but the one phrase “jolly” to express his ideal, and ho repeats it to the point of monotony. He remains in the memory as a unique figure in literature who at the same time is an impersonation of a queer kind of mystical good nature that is one of the secrets of the English character. It is a moral, not an intellectual quality, and it is a quality which the intellectual sometimes mistakes fox' imbecility. Horace said that the just and resolute man would be fearless even though the heavens fell upon him in ruins. With the ordinary Englishman cheerful good nature takes the place of Roman Stoicism. And, in so far as this is true, Mark Tapley is a model Englishman. NO CREDIT IN IT.

When we meet him first in ‘ Martin Chuzzlewit ’ he is a young man in a fable, about to set out on a journey. Aged twenty-live or twenty-six, he has already a settled philosophy. He believes that a man should be jolly, but he cannot see any credit in being jolly unless tjie circumstances are all against

him. _ He resigns his job at the Dragon in Salisbury, indeed, because there is no credit in being jolly there. A Kentish man by birth, he had originally taken the situation at the Dragon because he had made up his mind that “ it was the dullest little out-of-the-way corner in England, and that there would be some credit in being jolly under such circumstances.” But he had found it far otherwise. “ Lord, there’s no credit in being jolly at the Dragon! Skittles, cricket, quoits, ninepins, comic songs, choruses, company round the chimney corner every winter’s evening —any man could be jolly at the Dragon. There’s no credit in it.” IN SEARCH OF GLOOM. Having thrown up his job and the prospect of marrying Mrs Lupin, the landlady of the Dragon, on these grounds, Mark goes singing on his way m search of adverse circumstances that will test him. He explains to Tom Pinch, who overtakes him, what kind of job he thinks would suit him best. “ I was thinking,” he says, “of something in the grave-digging way.” And, when Tom Pinch protests, he suggests other alternatives. “ Undertaking, now. That’s gloomy. There might be credit to be gained there. A Broker’s man in a poor neighbourhood wouldn’t be bad perhaps. A jailer sees a deal o’ misery.” The psychoanalyst might discover in such a character traces of sadism. But Mark Tapley is as eager to be “tested” by his own sufferings as by the sufferings of others. When Tom Pinch warns him that he ought to be wearing a waistcoat to keep his chest warm Mark merely cries: “Lord love you, sir! You don’t know me. My chest don’t want no warming. Even if it did, what would no waistcoat bring it to? Inflammation of the lungs, perhaps? _Well, there’d be some credit in being jolly with inflammation of the lungs.” A VERY GOOD SIGN. That Mark is no sadist rejoicing in the misfortunes, of others is shown when he discovers his old acquaintance, Martin Chuzzlewit, in London, and tracks him to his lodgings with the determination to become his servant. Cast off by his rich grandfather and unable to marry the girl he loves, Martin is living in such misery as is likely to put Mark’s capacity for jollity to the test. “ Jolly sort of lodgngs,” he comments, looking round the room and rubbing his nose with the knob at the end of the fire shovel, “ that’s a comfort. The rains come through the roof, too. That ain’t bad. A lively old bedstead, I’ll be bound, populated by lots of wampires, no doubt. Come! my spirits is a getting up again. An uncommon ragged nightcap this. A very good sign. We shall do yet!” But rhe real test of Mark’s goodheartedness comes only when he insists on accompanying his impoverished master as a steerage passenger in the emigrant ship, the Screw, to New York. With all the filth and overcrowdedness and misery and general querulousness “ his spirits rose proportionately.” He nursed and washed, the crying infants of overworked mothers. He tended the sick in the intervals of his own almost chronic sea-sickness. “If a gleam of sunshine shone out of the dark sky down Mark tumbled into the cabin, and presently up he came again with a woman in his arms, or half a dozen children, or a man on a bed, or a saucepan, or a basket, or something animate or inanimate that he thought would be the better for the air.” He was no longer the theorist, but the man of action helping lame dogs over stiles till he became the most popular character on board as a result of doing so, and began to ruminate in despair: “If this was going to last, there’d bo no great difference, as I can perceive, between the Screw and the Dragon. I never am to get any credit, I think. I begin to be afraid that the Fate is determined to make the world easy to me.”

THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME. If there are no characters like Mark Tapley in the world it is the world’s loss. He is the great undampable. His spirits “ rise proportionately ” as the sky grows darker. And when, having arrived in New York, he entrusts his savings to Martin and sets out with him to the bogus estate in a feverstricken swamp _ in Eden, and when someone tells him on the evo of his voyage there that no one has ever returned from it alive ho conceals the truth from Martin, _ saying only: “ Never was half as jolly, sir. All right!’’ And, when they arrive at Eden and see that graveyard of dead hopes and ruined shacks, he merely hits himself a thump on the chest and soliloquises: “ Things looking about as bad as they can look, young man. You’ll not have such another opportunity foe

showing your jolly disposition, my fine fellow, as long as you live. And, therefore, Tapley, now’s your time to come out strong: or never!” And Mark certainly comes out strong when, having nursed his young master through fever, _ he himself succumbs and after fighting the malady sinks back on his bed with the remark; “Floored for the present, sir; but jolly!” It may be an exaggeration on the part of Dickens to make this genial hero, in intervals of illness when he was too weak to speak, write the word “ jolly ” on a slate to comfort his master; but what an affectionate exaggeration ! AS FOR PECKSNIFF Mark, indeed, is like a medieval saint reborn into a Victorian public house. _ He brings the fable of invincible kindness into common life, and it is he that Dickens chooses as the final vanquisher of selfishness, wordliness, cruelty, and hypocrisy. As a human being of baser clay one cannot help feeling glad, however, that, having returned with Martin to England and taken Mrs Lupin into his arms, he retained enough of the old Adam not to feel entirely jolly in the presence of Mr Pecksniff. It is_ pleasant to know that after that late interview he felt really malignant towards the master hypocrite. “ I had the door all ready, sir,” he explained to Martin. >“ If Pecksniff had showed his head, or had only so much as listened behind it, I should have caught him like a walnut. He’s the sort of man as would squeeze soft, I know.” Mark’s iolliness had stood almost every test, but Dickens knew too much about human nature to expect it to stand Pecksniff!