THE GENIUS OF DICKENS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 710, 1 September 1870, Page 4

THE GENIUS OF DICKENS.

♦ (From the Spectator.) While all English-speaking peoples to whom the telegraph has as yet carried the aad news of the death of Dickens are realising for the first time how vast a fund of enjoyment they owe to him, and how much happier than their fathers they have been in living in the time when Dickens gave a new province to English literature and new resources to English speech, it is the natural time to ask ourselves how we should all be mourning if, with the final vanishing of bis figure from amongst us, it were inevitable for the innumerable crowd of Dickens's whimsical creations to be totally obliterated from our minds. Let any man seriously number the acquaintances the continued right of personal intercourse with whom he would buy at the cost of renouncing for ever the acquaintance of Dickens's best creations, and he will soon become conscious of the greatness of the sacrifice which would be required of him. How many of our friends should we not, give up before letting loose our hold on Mrs Mckleby and the old gentleman who tossed Vegetable marrows over her garden wall ? How many of our servants would receive warning before we consented to discharge " the Marchioness" from our memory, and forfeited for ever our vested right in Sam Weller and Job Trotter ? How many schoolmasters would retain their schools if parents had to choose between their closing their doors and the final breaking-up of Dr Blimber's and his successor in their minds ? Where is the caller whose cards we would not consent never to see again, rather than lose the picture of the pack Mr Toots used to leave " for Mr Dombey," for Mrs Dombey," « for Miss Dombey " ? Would not London sacrifice fifty real boarding-houses without a sigh, rather than lose its " Todgers's " ? And •where is the popular preacher, however large his tabernacle, whom England would not surrender with resignation rather than surrender the memory, — fragrant of much rarer and more delightful odours than vine-apple rum-and-water,— of the immortal Shepherd ? Which of our thieves and housebreakers should we not be inclined to pardon by acclamation rather than sentence either Charley Bates or the Dodger to intellectual transportation for life ? Would not even America, — libelled America,— part with many an eminent candidate for the next Presidency rather than lose its Pogram, or its Hominy, or its Jefferson Brick ? How long we might go on with bucli a list of alternatives we dare not even try to calculate, but we are certain that we are speaking well within the mark when we say that there are at least a hundred of Dickens' figures in every reading Englishman's mind, no one of whom would he consent to lose to keep the acquaintance of one half of the living men whom he •would speak to with friendly greeting if he met them in the streets. And if you add to the definite loss of typical forms, the even greater indefinite loss in the sense of humour •which these creations have stimulated, or even generated, in otherwise dull-minded, matter-of-fact Britons, the debt of ever-accu-mulating mental wealth which we owe to the works of the great man who has just left ua becomes immeasurable. What was the secret,— if it be possible in any brief way to describe the secret,— of a genius so rich to overflowing in the creation of English types of humour ? Mainly it was, we think, due to three great literary gifts combined — a sense of humour as delicate as Chnrks Lamb's, and much more inventive and active, which was at the basis of Dickens' genius, and by which he sorted his conceptions; a power of observation so enormous that he could photograph almost everything he saw ; and, perhaps partly as the result of these two powers in combination, but partly, it may be, of some others, a marvellous faculty of multiplying at will, and yet with an infinity of minute variety, new illustrations of any trait, the type of which he had once well mastered. Indeed, just as the great mystery of physiology is said to. be how a single living cell multiplies itself into a tissue composed of an indefinite number of similar cells, so the great intellectual mystery of Dickens' fertile genius was his power of reduplicating a single humourous conception of Character into an elaborate structure of strictly analogous conceptions. His greatest successes have always been gained on types of some complexity, such as that smart impudent cockney, be it serving boy, or serving man, or adventurer, which is the lasis of such characters as Bailey Junior's, Sam Weller's, Jingle's, and several others— and his greatest failures have been made on attempts to convert individual peculiarities, like Mr Jagger's habit of biting his thumb, or Mr Carker's of showing his teeth, into the key-note of a character. But take which of his books you will, from the first to the one of which the publication had only just ri ached its third number at his death, and you will find the same secret of success and failure, — the former, the secret of success, inexhaustible power of illustrating an adequately-conceived physical type of character, such as Mrs Gamp, or Mr Pecksniff, or Mr Squeers, or either of the Welters, or Mr Winkle, or the Marchioness, or Miss Miggs, or Mr Toots, or Mrs Pipchin, or Noah Claypole, or Bradley Headstone, or Mr Venus, — the latter, the secret of failure, a monotonous repetition of some trait too individual to admit of any adequate variety, and ■which consequently becomes the mere incarnation of a bodily habit or trick, such as the Fat Boy, and Joe Willett, and the brothers Cheery ble, and Cousin Feenix, and Mr Jaggers, and " the Analytical Chemist," and a number of others. But whether a success or a failure, Mr Dickens's characters are invariably structures raised by his humour on a single physical aspect. Sam Weller is always the smart or impudent cockne-y serving-man, —everything he says corresponds exactly with Mr Dickens's first description of him as the sharp boots in the Borough inn, with a loose, red, neck-handkerchie t round his neck,

and an old white hat stuck awry on his head ; Mrs Gamp is always th< snuffy old monthly nurse; the Marchionesß always the keen-witted, stunted, childservant; Mr Pecksniff always the candid hypocrite looking over a high wall of collar; and so on with all his characers. There is not, as far as we renr.ember, a singl--Bucce6Bful character in all Dickens' works of which you could conceive more than cne aspect. Mr Swiveller i 3 always roystering, good-natured, and sentimental ; Mr Toots always nervous, good-natured, and idiotic ; Dr Blimber always pompous, patronising, and schoolmaster ish ; Miss Miggs always spiteful, vain, and cunning ; Mr Silas Wegg always sly, calculating, and quoting sentimental ballads ; Mr Venus always lowspirited, weak-eyed, and anatomical ; and so forth. The great and unfailing wonder is how any novel-writer who gives so absolutely identical a tone to all the characters he conceives, manages to make them so full to overflowing of fresh vitality and infinite humour. No one ever gets tired of Dick Swiveller, or Bailey Junior, or Mr Pecksniff, or Mrs Gamp, or old Mr Weller, or Fanny fc'queerp, or Mr Lillyviek, or Sawyer late Kiioukemorf, or Barnaby Budge and his raven, or Simon Tappertit, or even of Jenny Wren. And it is marvellous that it should be so, for all these are always precisely consistent with the first glimpse we get of them ; and with any genius lets rich in variations on the same air than Dkkens 1 we should be sick of them in no time. But then no writer ever had the power which Dickens had of developing the same fundamental conception in so infinitely humorous a variety of form. Hunt through all Mrs Gamp's monthly-nurse disquisition, and you will never find there a repetition, — excepting always in those great landmarks of the conception, the vast selfishness and selfadmiration, the permanent desire to have the bottle left on " the chimney piece " for use "when so dispoged," and the mutual confidence between her and her mythical friend Mrs Harris. With these necessary exceptions there is not one single repetition of a speech or maxim. The central cell, as we may call it, of the character has multiplied itself a thousandfold without a single echo of on old idea. The marvel of Dickens is the exquisite ease, perfect physical cons-istency, and yet wonderful variety of path by which he always makes his characters glide back into their leading trait. His great characters are perfect labyrinths of novel autobiographical experience, all leading back to the same central cell. Mrs Gamp, for instance, is barely introduced before she introduces also to the reader her great and original contrivance for praising herself and intimating decently to all the world the various stipulations on which alone she agrees to " sick or monthly," — that intimate friend whose sayings cannot be verified by direct reference to herself, because she is in reality only the reflex form of No. I,— Mrs Harris. » « Mrs Gamp,'" says this imaginary lady, as reported by Mrs Gamp herself, '"if ever there was a sober creetur to be got at eighteenpence a day ior working people and three-and-six for gentlefolks, — nigbtwatching,' said Mrs Gamp, with emphasis, * being an extra charge, — you are that lnwnkble person.' 'Mrs Harris,' I says to her, ' don't name the charge, for if 1 could afford to lay all myjeller creeturs\ out for nothink, I would gladly do it, sech is the love I bears 'em.'" But ihis, we need hardly say, is a great humourist's creation on a hint from human life, and not human life itself. Any actual Mrs Gamp no doubt might have invented sayings for actual f riends of her own, but would never have indulged in the intellectual audacity of reproducing herself as her own best f-iend, and investing her with another name and a great variety of imaginary babies. And s-->, too, it is the great humorist, nnd not Mrs Gamp, who answers so generously for her willingness "to lay all my fellow-crecturs out for nothink, sech is the love I bears 'em." Note, too, the inexhaustible humour with which Dickens makes her slide bnck with the utmost naturalness and quite involuntarily into the provision for her own wants and the recollection of her own history, when she is apparently consulting the comfort of others, the is making tea for Mrs Jonas Chuzzlewit : — " • And quite a family it is to make tea for,' B<.H Mrs Gamp, ' and wot a happiness to do it ! My good young woman,' to the servant girl, ' p'raps somebody would like to try a new-laid egg or two not biled too hard. Likeways a few rounds of buttered toast, first cutlin' off the crust, in consequence of Under teeth, which Gamp himself, Mrs Chi.zzlewit, at one blow, being in liquor, struck out four, two single and two double, as was took by Mrs Harris for a keepsake, and is carried in her pocket at the present hour, along with two cramp bones, a bit of ginger, and a grater, like a blessed infant's shoe, in tin, with a little heel to put the nutmeg in, os many times I've seen and said and used fur candle when required within the month.'" 'ihe infinite number of avenues by which Mr Dickens makes Mrs Gamp, as Hegel would say, return into herself, and the absolutely inexhaustible number of physical illustrations of all the monthly-nurse kind by which she effects it, are the key-notes to his genius. Watch him with Mr Pecksniff, or Bailey Junior, or old Welltr the coadiman — a perfectly typical instance is his wonderful account of his second wife's death, "paying the last pike at a quarter-past six," and of the condign punishment administered to Mr Stiggins— or watch him with Mr Venus, or Mr Honeythunder, or where you will, you always note the same method, a central type out of which his mind creates all sorts of conceivable, and, to any one but himself, inconceivable, but always consistent, varieties, each and all of them full of the minutest knowledge of life and therefore never wearying the reader. His power is like that of a moral kaleidoscope, all the various fragment* of colour being supplied by actual experience, so that when you turn and turn it and get ever new combinations, you never seem to

get away from actual life, but always to be concerned with the most common-place o common-place realities. All the •while, however, you are really running the changes on a Bi'ngle conception, but with so vast a power of illustration from the minutest experience, that you are deceived into thinking that you are dealing with a real being; Of course, no man ever re illy pretended to be so scrupulously candid as Mr Pecksniff when he complftiued, " I have been struck this day with a walking-stick, which I have every reason to believe has knobs on it, on that exquisite and delicate portion of the human anatomy, the brain;" nor was there ever anyone so persistently desiroua of finding disagreeable circumstances under which it would be a credit to be jolly, as Mark Tapley. This is the idealism of the author, idealism only disguised by tho infinite resource of common physical detail with which he illustrates it. How little of a realist Dickens really was in his creations of character, may be seen whenever he attempts to deal with an ordinary man or woman, like Nicholas or Kate Nickel by, or again David Copperfield, who is to us quite as little real as Nicholas Nickclby, even though intended, as has always been said, for the author himself. Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, in " Our Mutual Friend," are deplorable failures, and the worthy minor Canon in " The Mystery of Edwin Drood," promised to be so too. The infinite multiplication of detailed illustrations of a single humorous type has always been Mr Dickens' real secret of power. A realist as regards human nature he never was at all. But it will be asked where, then, is the secret of Dickens' pathos, such pathos as that with which he describes little Paul Dombey's death, or Nancy's murder. Can that really come under such a rationale of his genius as we have given ? In the first place, we do not believe that Dickens's pathos is by any means bis strong side. He spoils h ; s best touches by his heavy hand in harping on them. Even in the death of little Paul, a great deal too much is made of a very natural touch in itself, — the child's languid interest in the return of the golden ripple to the wall at sunset, and his fancy that he was floating with the river to the sea. Dickens i 9 so obviously delighted with himself for this picturesque piece of fentiment, that lie quite fondles bis own conception. He used to give it even more of the same effect of high-strung sentimental melodrama, in reading or reciting it, than the written story itself contains. We well remember the mode in which he used to read, " The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing else stirred in the room. The old, old fashion 1 The fashion that came in with our first garments and will last unchanged till our race has run its course, and the wide firmament is rolled up like a scroll. The o'.d, old fashion— Death ! Oh, thauk God, nil who see it, for that older fashion yet of Immortality I And look upon us, angels of young children, with regards not quite estranged when the swift river bears us to the ojean." It was precisely the pathos of the Adelphi Theatre, and made the most painful impression of pathos feasting on itself. We more than doubt, then, whether Dickens can be called a great master of pathos at all. There is no true lyrical, no poetic touch, about his pathos; it is, in the main, the overstrained pathos of melodrama. And that precisely agrees with our estimate of what he was greatest in. He could always abstract any single trait of human life, and collect round it all sorts of natural physical details. Just so, he describes the pity excited by little Paul's death, and frames his death-bed, as it were, in those gradual changes from light to shade, and shade to light, which take up so much of the perceptive power of a dying child. Of course, however, in all Dickens's attempts to describe, ho describes with the intetsity of genius. No one can fail to feel honor at the description of Sikes's feelings as he wanders about with ha dog after the murder of Nancy. In the delineation of remorse he is, too, much nearer the truth of nature than in the delineation of grief. True grief needs the most delicate hand to delineate truly. A touch too much, and you perceive an affectation, and, therefore, miss the whole effect of bereavement. But remorse when it is genuine is one of the simplest of passions, and the most difficult to overpaint. Dickens, with his singular power of lavishing himself on one mood, has given some vivid pictures of this passion which deserve to live. Still this is the exception which proves the rule. He can delineate remorse for murder because there is so little limit to the feeling, so little danger of passing from the true to the falsetto tone. In general there is no delicate painting of emotion in Dickens. His lovepassages are simply detestable. By far his greatest success, here, is the mixture of profound love with worship which poor Smike feels from afar for the sister of his friend, because in that picture a certain amount of restraint was imposed on the somewhat vulgar tenderness in which his heroes and heroines otherwise delight. But this failure to depict auy of the subtler emotions, in their purest form, like his failure to depict a single teal character as distinguished from his impersonation of a certain abstract type, B u rely confirms the impression that it is as a humourist, and as a humourist alone, that Dickens will be immortal. He drew one or two real moods of feeling with singular intensity, but fell into melodrama where delicacy of discrimination was requisite ; but he could always accumulate round a single abstract type the most wonderful wealth of humourous illustration iv the utmost detail, and it is his figures of this kind which will live for ever, not as men, but as impersonations. Molicre'B Tartuffe is poor and thin compared with Dickens's Pecksniff.

" Alas !" said a moralising bachelor, within earshot of a witty young lady of the com•pany, *' this world is at best but a gloomy prison 1" " Yee," 6ighed the merciless minx, " especially to the poor creatures doomed to solitary confinement."

• Canada. — The Canadian Parliament was prorogued on the 12th of May. The Gover- • nor-General in his speech, referring to the annexation of new territories, and the measures passed for the government of the province of Manitobah, said : — " The just and reasonable conditions which you have sanctioned in favour of their inhabitants cannot fail to remove every trace of misapprehensions which unhappily existed, and to plant instead a feeling of confidence in your good will, and the increasing advantages to be derived from joining the Dominion. The military expedition, which it is necessary to send, will gratify and give confidence to all loyal and well-disposed persons. Her Majesty's troops go forth on an errand of peace, and will serve as an assurance to the inhabitants of the Red River settlement, and the numerous Indian tribes that occupy the North-West, that they have a place in the regard and councils of England, and may rely on the important protection of the British sceptre." After thanking the House for the readiness with which the necessary supplies for public service have been granted, he continued: — " Information which reached my Government from many quarters as to the designs of parties styled ' Fenians,' armed and openly ; drilled in various parts of the neighbouring States, rendering it incumbent on me to apply to Parliament to pass an Act to suspend 1 the force of the Habeas Corpus Act, as well as call out an armed force for the defence 1 of the frontier, the vigorous steps resorted to, and the laudable promptitude with which 1 the active militia responded to the call to arms, chilled the hopes of the invaders, and 1 averted menaced outrage, so that I now en- < tertain the sanguine hope that I shall not be '< placed under the necessity of exercising the power intrusted to me." After alluding to i the provisions for taking the census simul--1 taneously in all Her Majesty's British North American possessions in 1871, he concluded i as follows :— " I sincerely hope that the preparations that have been matured for the protection of the Canadian fisheries will be effectual. Every care will be taken to com- ■ bine the maintenance of the undisputed rights of our fishermen with the regard due to the just claims of foreigners; and you will, I am persuaded, ac- ■ knowledge with gratitude the countenance ' ond moral support which Her Majesty's Government has announced her intention of affording. The general tone of your i debates and the uniform expression of the prevalent opinion indicate that the 1 people of Canada are sensible of the advantages arising from the existing form of Rovernment. I trust their contentment may be of long continuance, and I take leave of you for the present with^the earnest wish that the determination and "efforts of the country to preserve the blessings which it enjoys may be crowned with the protection and distinguished favour of Providence." " What has been your business ?" said a judge to a prisoner at the bar. lf Why, your honor, I used to be a dentist's assistant ; now lam a pugilist. Then I put teeth in ; noiir I knock 'em out."