DICKENS THE STYLIST.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17570, 22 June 1925, Page 12

DICKENS THE STYLIST.

WHAT THE CRITICS NEGLECT. (By J. C. SQUIRE in the “Westminster Gazette.”) It is strange that so little substantial criticism has been written about Dick ens. There is a good deal of incidental and gossipy Dickens literature, most of it by unpretentious devotees interested in Dickens’s residences or the missing end of Edwin Drood; there is an admirable “Life,” from the contemporary angle, by his friend Forster; there are excellent short studies by Mr Chesterton, Swinburne, and others. But no critic of standing has yet produced what can be regarded as a standard monograph on Dickens, or even a comprehensive survey of his achievements and characteristics as an artist. Here you have a great writer with a unique position. In his lifetime—and he is still more widely read than any dead novelist—he had the -whole Eng-lish-speaking world as an audience, penetrating to places that no other good artist could reach. And this popularity, a popularity exceeding that of Sir Hall Caine, or Miss Corelli, or Mr Garvice, was enjoyed by a man whom many sober judges have held to be the next 1 greatest figure to Shakespeare in the whole annals of English literature. Almost every critic of eminence halts at his effigy, and salutes; the “tributes” arc numerous and tremendous enough to satisfy anyone. Here now is one more short book—lt is really that, though physically a part of a book—by £jir Arthur Quiller-Couch; and one misses from it precisely what one most wanted. NOT A CARICATURIST. Now that Dickens has receded half a century in time a new biographical study is certainly needed; but, pending a large book, I wish that somebody would write even a small one devoted entirely to his -genius as a stylist and craftsman. “Q” is always good, and he has never been better than in this study of Dickens. He thoroughly belabours the mincing and hyperfastidious people who complain that Dickens was a caricaturist, which he often delightfully was, and that he was “sloppy” which he sometimes was; the people who do not see that so vast a production was bound to be uneven and that so volcanic a creative power was bound sometimes to lead to excess; the people who think that the sun-spots are the most important thing about the sun. He has a fine passage on the quality of greatness and the jealousy of greatness: “Those have steadily sunk who cavilled at Ccesar with Cassius, or over a cigarette chatted admiringly of the rent which envious Caesar made; that anyone with an car learns very surely to distinguish the murmur of the true bee from the morose hum of the drone tvho is no hone}', nor ever will, to the hive.” For the hatred of the great is common: and the hatred of the widely beloved is, alas, common. “Q” shows us how Dick ens became a “National Institution” because he voiced, as great poets voice, ■the thoughts and emotions of the ordinary #man; and voiced them (as great poets do not always) in language which the. ordinary man could understand. He shows also how Dickens felt, ancj tried to li\e up to, the responsibility of his position: endeavouring, in the manner of those Victorians, to appeal to the noblest instincts of his readers. lie defines excellently Dickens’s gift of character creation; and he is excellent on Dickens’s limitations. Dickens's plots arc mostly weak; he repeatedly used a few stale devices; his characters scarcely ever develop; whole section of the community were sealed books to? him; a church was an ancient and mouldering structure where vou might have a delightful talk with an ancient and mouldering pew-opener; science did not exist for him, all the learned professions were mere raw material for Satire. TIIE GENIUS OF EXPRESSION. But lip made a world of his own, vivid, amusing, beautiful, full of creatures more vital than our own friends. All these points V Q” makes, but just as he gets to the question of Dickens’s actual writing he pays a handsome, but. hurried, tribute, and stops. This is where, if he had to be short, ho ought tu have begun; for it is Dickens’s extraordinary genius for expression and his extraordinary dexterity with words that most needs emphasising. The variety and appropriateness of his dialogue is not entirely automatic; there is thought and deliberate art in it. Take at two extremes the conversation of Mrs Finching and that of Harold Skimpolc. Here is the widow: “In times for ever fled, Arthur—pray excuse me, Doyce and Clennam (the name of his firm)—infinitely more correct, and though unquestionably distant still, tis distance lends enchantment to the view, at least I don’t mean that and if I did I suppose it would depend considerably on the nature of the view, but I’m running on again and you put it all out of my head.” This is precisely what Mr James Joyce, after infinite pains, has arrived at as the most faithful mode of expressing human experience: and he has been eulogised for it. But Dickens’s invention never failed, and he could, when he wished, speak any kind of tongue: the talk of Skimpole, elegant, airy, epigrammatic, is as good as the talk of Oscar Wilde, and very like it. In between the dialogues Dickens speaks in his own voice. It may sometimes have an undue degree of sob in it; it may sometimes lapse into th£ hectic passion of the revivalist; but when it is under control*, or forced out of control by a genuine strength of feeling, was there ever one more eloquent, musical, more equipped with tones for every shade of meaning? SOME GREAT PASSAGES. W by* should his worst apostrophes be always quoted, and his most lachrymose descriptions? There arc pages where i, there is hardly a false word: the masrh-sceue in “Great Expectations,’’“and the trial of Magwitch; tho flight Lady Dedlock; that murder in “Martin Chuzzlcwit,” when two men K'£ i n td the wood at sunset and one comes Such scenes as these could not bo surpassed, for combined economy, power, vividness, and rhythm of language,-from any prose that ever was done. This quality in him still needs emphasis and analysis. Jhe critics might let his characters alone for awhile and consider his superb, if spasmodic, genius as a welder of the English language. A genius. I may add, not unconscious; but disciplined and directed more and more as Dickens's life went