THE LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS

Southland Times, Issue 23610, 10 September 1938, Page 14

THE LETTERS OF CHARLES DICKENS

Singular Power Of Vision

(Abridffed from an Address before the Christchurch branch of the Dickens Fellowship.)

By J.

H. E. SCHRODER

The novels are wholly consistent with all the evidence of the letters upon Dickens’s singular force —a word, by the way, that he often applies to himself: “I am in force again.” It is the most obvious truism that the novels express it. But they also conceal it. You could not immediately make out its nature, and the way it worked, from them and from them only. Inductive criticism has not built up Shakespeare, all that he was, all that he meant, from the plays and the poems. “We ask and ask; thou smilest and art still”; it remains the last truth about him. No more do the novels totally reveal, even while they express, Charles Dickens. But once you receive that impression which is to be gained by moving behind the works into the workshop—and that is where the letters take you—then you have an advantage which is as likely to modify as to confirm your estimate of the novels. Does not a sense of this giant, constructive, imaginative, penetrative energy make it harder to fall in with the conventional notion that Dickens invented grotesques and drew caricatures? Is it not strongly suggested, instead, that the novels exhibit less of grotesque invention than of. characteristic discovery, less of caricature than of portraiture, under the authority of an eye that had its own mode and quality of sight? You will see colours brighter or dimmer as your sight lets you; forms sharper or vaguer, features more prominent or less, as your sight allows; and if you are not quick and keen and accurate, you will miss half of what is there and blur the rest. May we not allow Dickens, more generously and justly than we have done, the brilliance and candour and credit of his own sight of the world? THE UNCOMMON OBSERVER Consider what he said in reply to Mrs Trollope, mother of the great Anthony, when she wrote, praising his “American Notes.” She had herself travelled in America and written about her travels; and she must, I think, have told Dickens that she did not agree with current criticism, which found in the “Notes” the terrible faults of exaggeration. For Dickens, in. answer, said this: I do not recollect ever to have seen or heard the charge of exaggeration made against a feeble performance, though, in its feebleness, it may have been most untrue. It seems to me essentially natural, and quite inevitable that common observers should accuse an uncommon one of this fault.

That sentence might serve to check what I think is a vulgar error—or highbrow error; much the same thing —about Dickens’s characterization. As a fact, the letters are full of evidence that suggests, if it does not prove, the point I am putting forward: that Dickens did not impose Dickensian characters upon the world but found them there. You leam in the letters that his life was crowded by Dickensian figures and episodes. (It surprises me, sometimes, to think that nobody has observed this simple fact that the “Sketches by Boz,” which are the work of a young newspaper reporter, describing what he saw, fully prefigure the characterization of the great fictions.) But let us sec- ... .< In 1843 Dickens was entertaining the captain of the ship that had taken him to America:

My little captain, as I call him . . . has been seeing all the lions under my escort. Good heavens! I wish you could have seen certain other mahogany-faced men (also captains) who used to call here in the morning, and bear him off to docks and rivers and all sorts of queer places, whence he always returned late at night, with rum-and-water tear drops in his eyes, and a complication of punchy smells in his mouth! He was better than a comedy to us, having marvellous -ways of tying his pocket-handkerchief round his neck at din-ner-time in a kind of jolly embarrassment, and then forgetting what he had done with it; also of singing songs to wrong tunes, and calling land objects by sea names, and never knowing what o'clock it was, but taking midnight for seven in the evening; with many other sailor oddities, all full of ■honesty, manliness, and good temper. We took him to Drury Lane Theatre to see “Much Ado About Nothing." But I never could find out what he meant by turning round, after he had watched the first two scenes with great attention and inquiring “whether it was a Polish piece.”

Doesn’t it strike you that the embarrassed, simple, incomprehensible captain is very like embarrassed, simple, incomprehensible Joe, on his visit to those _ grand young London gentlemen, Pip and Herbert Pocket? You remember him, nursing his hat and batting and catching it about the room, and coming out with that elastic word, “architectooralooral”? But Joe, the grotesque, was not bom in 1843. CLERICAL PORTRAIT There is, again, that astonishing funeral, attended by Dickens and a friend C., who must be either Cattermole or Cruickshank, and presided over by a nonconformist clergyman:

You know H ’s book, I daresay. Ah! I saw a scene of mingled comicality and seriousness at his funeral some weeks ago, which has choked me at dinner-time ever since. C and I went as mourners; and as he lived, poor fellow, five miles out of town, I drove C down. It was such a day as I hope, for the credit of Nature, is seldom seen in any parts but these—muddy, foggy, wet, dark, cold, and unutterably wretched in every possible respect. Now, C has enormous whiskers which straggle all down his throat in such weather, and stick out in front of him, like a partially unravelled bird’s nest; so that he looks queer even at the best, but when he is very wet, and in a state between jollity (he is always very jolly with me) and the deepest gravity (going to a funeral, you

know), it is utterly impossible to resist him; especially as he makes the strangest remarks the mind of man can conceive, without any intention of being funny, but rather meaning to be philosophical. I really cried with an irresistible sense of his comicality all the way; but when he was dressed out in a black coat and a very long black hat-band by an undertaker (who, as he whispered to me with tears in his eyes—for he had known H many years—was a "character,” and he would like to sketch him”), I thought I should have been obliged to go away. However, we went into a little parlour where the funeral party was, and God knows it was miserable enough, for the widow and children were crying bitterly in one comer, and the other mourners—mere people of ceremony, who cared no more for the dead man than the hearse did—were talking quite coolly and carelessly together in another: and the contrast was as painful and distressing as anything I ever saw. There was an Independent clergyman present, with his bands on and a Bible under his arm, who, as soon as we were seated, addressed C thus, in a loud emphatic voice: "Mr C have you seen a paragraph respecting our departed friend, which has gone the round of the morning papers?” “Yes, sir," says C , “I have,” looking very hard at l me the while, for he had told me with some pride coming down that it was his composition. "Ohl” said the clergyman. “Then you will agree with me, Mr C , that it is not only an insult to me, who am the servant of the Almighty, but an insult to the Almighty, whose servant I am.” "How is that, sir?” said C . "It is stated, Mr C , in that paragraph,” says the minister, “that when Mr H failed in business as a bookseller, he was persuaded by me to try the pulpit; which is false, incorrect, unchristian, in a manner blasphemous, and in all respects contemptible. Let us pray.” With which, my dear Felton, and in the same breath, I give you my word, he knelt down, as we all did, and began a very miserable jumble of an extemporary prayer. I was really penetrated with sorrow for the family, but when C—— (upon his knees, and sobbing for the loss of an old friend) whispered to me, “that if it wasn’t a clergyman, and it wasn’t a funeral, he’d have punched his head,” I felt as if nothing but convulsions could possibly relieve me.

Appropriated to Chadband or some such other full-length study in trainoil and vitriol, this episode would have been censured by the hypercritical— Mrs Malaprop may straighten a difference here—as out of all human drawing and credibility. ITALIAN ADVENTURES

In Italy Dickens sought out some old friends. He found them in a ruined palace, all at sixes and sevens. T., in a pointed beard and a pair of slippers, was smoking a great German pipe; C., his wife, was in a great flush and fluster, painting in oils. What with music, what with painting, the household was upside down. Two little girls, very pale and faint, uncommonly queer little spectacles with their hair fantastically cropped and a little bright bow stuck on top, were learning the multiplication table in the muddle. T., slippered and smoke-clouded, was teaching them—“was teaching the two little girls ... in a disorderly old billiard room with all manner of maps in it.” One thinks of Mrs Jellaby’s house; of Mrs Matthew Pocket, again, and poor Matthew heaving himself out of his seat by tugging at his hair; and—it’s the multiplication table, and the billiard room, and the maps that do it—by a long leap of , association I think of Miss Havisham’s cupboard, where Pip, making it all up to gratify his sister’s curiosity, said he found pistols ... jam .. . and pills. The maddening, philosophical Frenchman had no right to exist outside a novel of Dickens; but in fact Dickens met him in Naples. Dickens was on his way to dine with Mr Lowther, British charge d’affaires, and he lost his way pretty badly, far up a hill:

I got into the strangest places, among the wildest Neapolitans—kitchens, washingplaces, archways, stables, vineyards—was baited by dogs, answered in profoundly unintelligible Neapolitan, from behind lonely locked doors, in cracked female voices, quaking with fear; could hear of no such Englishman or any Englishman. By-and-by I came upon a Polenta-shop in the clouds, where an old Frenchman with an umbrella like a faded tropical leaf (it had not rained for six weeks) was staring at nothing at all, with a snuff-box in his hand. To him I appealed concerning the Signor Larthoor. “Sir,” said he, with the sweetest politeness, "can you speak. French?" “Sir,” said I, “a little." “Sir,” said he, “I presume the Signor Lootheere”—you will observe that he changed the name according to the custom of his country—“is an Englishman.” I admitted that he was the victim of circumstances and had that misfortune. "Sir,” said he, “one word more. Has he a servant with a wooden leg?” “Great Heaven, sir,” said I, "how do I know. I should think not, but it is possible.” “It is always,” said the Frenchman, “possible. Almost all things of the world are always possible.” “Sir," said I—you may imagine my condition and dismal sense of my own absurdity, by this time —“that Is true.” He then took an immense pinch of snuff, wiped the dust off his umbrella, led me to an arch commanding a wonderful view of the bay of Naples, and pointed deep into the earth from which I had mounted “Below there, near the lamp, one finds an Englishman, with a servant with a wooden leg. It is always possible that he is the Signor Lootheere.” CLEAR IMAGE And what of the tremendous inconsequence of poor old Poole, the actor, whom Dickens had loyally befriended, and visited in his extreme decline? Poole still holds out at Kentish Town, and says he is dying of solitude. His memory is astoundingly good. I see him about once in two or three months, and in the meantime he makes notes of questions to ask me when I come. Having fallen in arrear of the time, these generally refer to unknown words he has encountered in the newspapers. His last three (he always reads them with tremendous difficulty through an enormous magnifying-glass were as follows: 1. What’s croquet? 2. What's an Albert chain?

3. Let me know the state of mind of the Queen. When I had delivered a neat exposition of these heads, he turned back to his memoranda, and came to something that the utmost power of the magnifying-glass couldn’t render legible. After quarter of an hour or so, he said: “Oh yes, I know.” And then rose and clasped his hands above his head, and said: "Thank God, I am not a dramdrinker."

Somehow, here I think of that excellent old man, the Aged, Wemmick senior. An idea takes shape, as one reads these letters—ever so obvious, ever so important: that one character is common to all Dickens’s works, the character of Dickens himself—a man whose total strength was mixed of many elements; but we cheat ourselves if we do not recognize among them that singular power of vision, imaging the world, without which it is idle to talk of imagination. Dickens gave back in his novels, imaginatively, the clear image he formed of the world: distinct, individual, unique, but clear. Do not think that the novels distort it. (To be Continued.)