THE REPORTER IN MR. DICKENS.

AT the dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund on Saturday last Mr. Dickens gave a very amusing reminiscence of his life as a reporter for The Morning Chronicle during the six or seven years—the years, we conclude, from 1829 to 1836, or there- abouts—previous to the success of his Sketches by Boz and the

consequent recognition of his original .genius by the English

pleblic. The brief autobiographic sketch had more, we think, than the ad captandum interest of recommending to the generosity of

the public a profession which had been distinguished by once

numbering a man of genius in its ranks; it throws some light on the merits and defects of his own great powers as an author. ' He

speaks of his old profession as inspiring him (then a boy) with a

sort of passion, by its adventurous character in those years and the call it made on his energy and skill. " Returning home," he

and eager form which in those days of few conveniences it assumed.

There is probably no other novelist in English literature who

can catalogue all the minutia) of every scene he wishes to describe with anything like the accuracy and effect of Mr. Dickens. It has been said that if he goes down a street he will note involun- tarily every piece of orange-peel or loose paper which he passes in.that street, but he uses this power with nothing of the tedious- ness of literal observation, and also with nothing of that kind of not infrequent art which uses outward associations as the mere paints with which to externalize an inwa'rd mood. What Mr. Dickens does in painting is, to let the impression of a scene fill his mental retina, and then selecting any distinguishing feature, whether fog, or drizzle, or rapid motion, or squalor, or cold, or what you will—which gives a character and unity of effect to the whole—to throw all the emphasis of his descrip- tion on that, and make all the subsidiary touches centre in that and return into that. He is in this only an ideal reporter, whose business it is to keep strictly to what he sees, and yet introduce if he can sufficient perspective into his picture to prevent his sketch from falling into an auctioneer's catalogue. In general Mr. Dickens is wonderfully effective in this sort of work. No one who has ever read the description of a London Christmas Eve in his Christmas Carol will be likely to forget his picture of the gaslit streets and their plethora of preparation for high feeding ; and still better is the picture of the utter dismalness of Snow Hill and the neighbourhood of the Saracen's Head on a wet Sunday. Is fact the examples of admirable realistic reporting of this kind in his works are almost innumerable. But there are not a few cases in which the reporter's instinct for getting a point of sight, a centre, for his picture, has not been corrected by any artistic instinct, and the consequence is a vulgar sort of emphasis on some one external string, caught at in a hurry, as it were, and twanged at with a triumphant sort of pertinacity till, as he makes Mrs. Gamp say, "fiddle-strings is weakness to expredge my nerves this night." For example, there is the famous drive in Martin Chuzzlewit, when Tom Pinch goes up to town outside the coach, and Mr. Dickens considering that fast motion and high spirits were the true leading features to dominate the variety of that changing picture, insisted upon putting ' Yoho!' before every sentence for a•matter of three close pages of description, after this fashion :—" Yoho past hedges, gates, and trees, past cottages and barns, and people going home from work. Yoho past donkey- chaises drawn aside into the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses whipped up at a bound upon the little watercourses and held

by struggling carters close to the five-barred gate until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the road. Yoho by churches

dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks," and so on, and so on, polio ad infinitum. Now, if any one will try to read this passage aloud he will feel so heartily abashed and humiliated at about the third or fourth yoho that he will, we venture to say, break down long before he gets through the thirty or forty to which the author condemns him for the sake of this artificial effect. The same fault may be remembered in the passage where " the Temple foun- tain sparkles " with such damned iteration " in the sun " to keep time to Ruth Pinch's love-making. If Mr. Dickens throws far more than the art of the reporter into most of his scenery, he throws far more than his artificial trickery into a few scenes, where his genius is merged in 4 mere glaring trade-effects of the catchword style of description. There is a very marked predominance of this worst feature of his external descriptiveness, in his most recent work,— the one still in course of publication. Here is the description of- a dinner-party as reflected in a big mirror in the dining-room,—the central feature being no really characteristic effect at all, only that very remarkable physical property of the human body, liability to reflection in looking-glasses "The great looking-glass above the sideboard, reflects the table and the company. Reflects the new Veneering crest, in gold and eke in silver, frosted and also thawed, a camel of all work. The Heralds' College found out a Crusading ancestor for Veneering who bore a camel on his shield (or might have done it if he had thought of it), and a caravan of camels take charge of the fruits and flowers and candles, and kneel down to be loaded with the salt. Reflects Veneering forty, wavy-haired, dark, tending to corpulence, sly, mysterious, filmy—a kind of sufficiently well-looking veiled-prophet, not prophesying. Re- flects Mrs. Veneering ; fair, aquiline-nosed and fingered, not so much ' light hair as she might have, gorgeous in raiment and jewels, enthusias- tic, propitiatory, conscious that a corner of her husband's veil is over herself. Reflects Podanap; prosperously feeding, two little light- coloured wiry wings, one on either side of his else bald head, looking as like his hairbrushes as his hair, dissolving view of red beads on his forehead, large allowance for crumpled shirt-collar up behind. Reflects Mrs. Podsnap ; fine woman for Professor Owen, quantity of bone, neck and nostrils like a rocking-hors; hard feature; majestic head-dress h2 which Podanap has hung golden offerings. Reflects Twemlow; grey, dry, polite, susceptible to east wind, First-Gentleman-in-Europe collar and cravat, cheeks drawn in as if he had made a great effort to retire into himself some years ago, and had got so far and had never got any farther. Reflects mature young lady ; raven locks, and complexion that lights up well when well powdered—as it is—carrying on consider- ably in the captivation of mature young gentleman ; with too much nose in his face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much torso in his waist- coat, too mush sparkle in his studs, his eyes, his buttons, his talk, and his teeth. Reflects charming old Lady Tippins on Veneering's right ; with an immense obtuse drab oblong face, like a face in a tablespoon ; and a dyed Long Walk up the top of her head, as a convenient public ap- proach to the bunch of false hair behind, pleased to patronize Mrs. Veneering opposite, who is pleased to be patronized. Reflects a certain ' Mortimer,' another of Veneering's oldest friends; who never was in the house before, and appears not to want to come again, who sits discon- solate on Mrs. Veneering's left, and who was inveigled by Lady Tipping (a friend of his boyhood) to come to these people's and talk, and who won't talk. Reflects Eugene, friend of Mortimer; buried alive in the back of his chair, behind a shoulder—with a powdered epaulette on it—of the mature young lady, and gloomily resorting to the champagne chalice whenever proffered by the Analytical Chemist. Lastly, the looking-glass reflects Boots and Brewer, and two other staffed Buffers interposed between the rest of the company and possible accidents."

This is no doubt clever reporters' art, very artificial, and woven together by a trick of mechanical perspective both fatiguing and disagreeable.

In higher matters, too, than mere external description you see both the good and bad influence of Mr. Dickens's old profession upon his genius; though probably its good predominates. In sketching a personal character, wherever the sketch is worth any, thing the key-note is uniformly some mere external mark or peculiarity by which a reporter would label a passing figure and again recognize it. The examples are so numerous that it is scarcely worth while even to recall any instances beyond those of the

above extract. In all Mr. Dickens's novels there is the same trick of labelling characters either by wry legs which carry them in

unexpected directions, or by a habit of biting the thumb, or by malicious dwarfishness, or a pokerish stiffness of bearing, or by peculiar cotton umbrellas, or by the loss of an eye, or by some other of the thousand trade-marks Mr. Dickens stamps on his dramatis persona. With an ordinary novelist this practice would be a pure evil. With Mr. Dickens (though often abused by him) it proves the secret of a great power. For he is not in any sense a painter of human nature,—he is a great humourist in human affairs, and it is round this personal label which he fixes on his figures that he accumulates all possible or conceivable illustrations and variations of the same characteristic till it becomes magnified to the most ludicrous dimensions. Hence the reporter's habit of affixing a sort of graphic personal note to each principal figure in any scene he is describing becomes in Mr. Dickens's hands the medium of most happy and humorous caricature, as well as of a little dull and over-emphatic exaggeration. Nothing would be more tedious than the harping on an obvious personal peculiarity if Mr. Dickens had not so large a power of humour, but with this, he makes it the centre of a world of grotesque eimilarities and contrasts. The hurried reporter's note becomes a mere hint for the accumulation of a host of novel situations, all gathered from real life, but all related to the particular pattern suggested by the initial trait. Yet there is always that total absence of judg- ment and reflecting power which one would expect from the hasty superficial survey of life requisite to get graphic effects out of hurried and pre-occupied observation. Whenever Mx. Dickens puts an idea into his novels, it is a crade, broad, hasty, claptrap idea, such as his crusade against Chancery in Bleak House. His eye catches traits far more quickly than his imagination deciphers their real meaning as traits of character, but then thatdoes not matter; for, the basis of a picture once given him, the superstruc- ture is alll fiction supplied by his own deep sense of humour and his enormous scrag-book of illustrations, not fact at all. There is a certain flavour of humour, too, in the mere idea which Mr. Dickens Carries with him more or lees into all his stories, that he is a sort of invisible reporter, taking graphic notes for the world of the actions of his own fictitious figures: From this cause he never seems inside even his own creations, but always watching them and their peculiarities from outside, like one engaged to look after them. He even writes at times as if he had all the associations of a public meeting around him, he being in the reporters' gallery,—as when he says of some poor woman chastising her child in the primitive manner, that she inflicted "a rapid succession of sharp sounds resembling applause, and then left him on the coolest paving-stone in the court weeping bitterly and loudly lamenting." A keen-eyed reporter of the universe, who sees hastily and then fetches illustra- tions from all quarters of the horizon with the utmost fertility' of humour, to create a conception in conformity with the figure that just flashed for a moment across his field of view—such is Mr. Dickens.