A CRITIC OF DICKENS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CIII, Issue 12157, 22 March 1900, Page 4

A CRITIC OF DICKENS.

We wonder if the Rev Charles Clark lias read Mr James Oliphant's " Victorian Novelists," in Messrs Blackie and Sons' Victorian Era series. It is quite a recent publication, so that possibly it may have escaped him. Ho spoke of Charles Dickens with such fervour and admiration last evening that one was inclined to forget for the moment that there are Dickens-hatens in the world. Mr Oliphant comes in time tc. save us from that manifest error. The many changes of scene and occupation, the misery and poverty of his early days, his life in mean streets and shabby surroundings were of greater benefit to Dickens, according to this critic, than regular schooling could have been. The struggle gave 'him self-reliance, energy and perseverance, but it also developed in him the less admirable qualities of self-assertive-ness and an intolerance of advice and control. Lovers of the "Pickwick Papers," "Bleak House," "David Copper-field," and the rest, will like to think that their author would have been a great writer whatever his training, and it is difficult to believe that regular schooling would not have been of untold value to him in his subsequent career. But Mr Oliphant sees nothing goc.d in the prophet of the middle classes. A "glorified journalist" is the highest praise he can bestow, using the word with a sneer to imply that he was better fitted' to report police court cases than to write "Pickwick." Hp will grant the author " narrative and descriptive power, along with a keen sense of the broader kinds of humour." His'prime defect, we are told, was the lack of insight into character. " The inner core of humanity was to him a sealed book." This is written, it must be remembered, of the man who created David Copperfield, Pickwick, Sam Weller, Mr Micawber, and Mrs Gamp. 'He could scarcely represent character except by caricaturing it," is a criticism that can scarcely apply tc. the creator of Sidney Carton and Dora and Dr Manette. Indeed, Mr Oliphant ventures no single (statement against which there does not rise up a character or a scene from the long roll of novels to prove him wrong. He excels himself when he attacks the "motif" of "Oliver Twist":

Dickens was no thinker, and, carried away by a misplaced sympathy with the pauper, he formed a hasty, superficial, sentimental opinion on the matter, and straightway get about confirming it by scenes and characters evolved out of his own imagination. Could anything be more mischievous? Fortunately for the result, he overreached himself, and failed to exert the influence he intended.

To prove his case Mr Oliphant quotes the scene in which the Board bargains with the chimney-sweep to take Oliver as an apprentice, exclaiming triumphantly : " Now this iis all very good farce; but does the novelist wish us to believe that such a conversation was possible 1 ;" The only answer must be that it is most real to those who know most of the subject. The truth is that the critic can ill conceal his violent antipathy to the author. He forgets that it iis tho pari; of genius to create the type', and Dickens, with his marvellous genius, created actually more types than 'any other novelist of the century. It is urged that he exaggerated a single characteristic to make a character; it would be truer to say that he created the character to illustrate the characteristic. Mr Bumble will live when Mr Oliphant is dead and. forgotten, and we see no cause for regret in that. After all, we are at a loss to know why the Wiume should ever have been published. It adds nothing to our knowledge of Victorian literature, and is in any case ill written and ill composed. What can we think of a critic's judgment when he devotes sixty-five pages to Mr Meredith and seventeen to Thackeray, or ten to Mr Kipling and eight to Sir Walter Scott? That, however, is a minor matter. Regarding Dickens, at least, Mr Oliphant will certainly find his world of readers cold and unsympathetic.