Boz
Dickens : A Portrait in Pencil. By Ralph Straus. (Gol- lanez. 16s.) This Side Idolatry. By Ephesian. (Mills and Boon. 7s. 6d.) Ma. CHESTERTON in a flash of peerless intuition once told us that " Mr. Pickwick was a fairy," and thereby lit an imperishable candle of criticism which illuminated not only Mr. Pickwick, nor only the multitudinous companies of Charles Dickens's devising, but Dickens himself. All the characters whom, for the purposes of fiction, Dickens models in mortal clay—Pickwick and Mrs. Gamp, Ralph Nickleby and Oliver Twist, Wegg and Miss Squeers and Scrooge, Betsy Trotwood and Pecksniff and Micawber, Jasper and the Peltiroguses and the Kenwigs family—all these are fairies, and have no real kinship with the human race.
We would give anything to meet men and women who could possibly be mistaken for these entrancing elves, but we know we never shall. They have a vitality, a gusto and a consistency with themselves far beyond the range of mutable and vacillating human beings, of whom the worst sometimes are swayed by generous impulses, the best by mean motives and the ridiculous by instincts of dignity. Not so is it with these fairies of Dickens ; never for a moment does Squeers relax into kindliness or Micawber cease to be absurd. They have a fiery reality of their own which is a standing protest against what is called realism, and they are the true offspring of the fairy-mind of their creator.
Dickens, in fact, was a fairy himself, and often a most trying one. As Mr. Straus points out, he habitually used human models for his fairies, and cruelly caricatured friends and relations without compunction. He spared nobody : Leigh Hunt was etched into Harold Skimpole ; Maria Beadnell, the girl to whom his first boyish passion was dedicated, stood, as Dickens himself stated, for Dora Spenlow, but she also stood, far more vividly and brutally, when after the lapse of years he met her again, for Flora Pinching. " Flora whom he had left a lily had become a peony : Flora who had seemed enchanting in all she said and thought was diffuse and silly : Flora who had been spoiled and artless years ago was determined to be spoiled and artless now ! " Not less impiously Dickens made his father stand for Micawber, and his mother for Mrs. Nickleby, for, though a Mosaic ordinance forbids the seething of a kid in its mother's milk, no scruple, Judaic or Christian, deterred him from seething both his parents in their kid's vitriol. Yet, somehow, no lover of Dickens is shocked at such heartlessness : they realize that Dickens as a man cannot be judged by normal standards because he was a fairy himself.
Mr.. Straus, I fancy, shares this feeling, for though in his Dickens he builds up a grave indictment against •him, he refrains from judging and condemning, and, moreover, lays constant stress on the compelling attraction that Dickens exercised over almost all those who came across him. He broke faith with his publishers, he was incredibly vain, he grabbed at money, he pilloried his friends, he starved for the limelight, but he had a charm, a breeziness which was irresistible. This charm was no superficial quality ; it was rooted in the very heart of the man and made him beloved, and Mr. Straus manages to convey this true but elusive impression. In some ways his book is irritating : it is written in a chatty colloquial style, intolerable in so sub- stantial a volume, ,as if he was talking Dickens over with his reader.
" How," he asks, " is one expected to relate clearly the amazing events of the next eighteen months ? " The reader doesn't know, but it is Mr. Straus's business to do so, and not ask such questions. In general, our author owes much to Foister's life, but he has had access, as he states, to much unpublished material, and it is a pity that his personal objection to footnotes has caused him to incorporate such in his text without telling us what it is or when he uses it. For this reason the book lacks authority : though some of Mr. Straus's theories may be founded on indisputable evidence, every serious reader wants to kriow what the evidence is. The illustrations—some of which, such as the facsimile of a play-bill to show that Dickens appeared on the boards, are hardly worth reproduction even for the first time—contain one priceless picture of him reading to his daughters, a scene of matchless Victorianism and fairyland. Admirable also is Mt. Straus's insistence on Dickens being not only a supreme novelist but a supreme showman, and on his conviction, which he unfalteringly followed, that he was the servant of the public, and must supply them with what they needed. Alas, that sometimes they needed Little Nell !
Simultaneously, Mr. Bechhofer Roberts publishes This Side Idolatry, based in bulk and detail on biographies of Dickens, and on his letters. It is not a life of Dickens, but a novel in which he and his circle of friends and relations, under their own names, form the characters. In self-. justification, apparently, the author has prefaced his story by a quotation from Dickens's own preface to Nicholas Nickleby, in which he says : " If Nicholas be not always found to be blameless and agreeable, he is not always intended to be so . . . and I saw no reason why he should be lifted out of nature." But, though we cordially agree that justification is sorely needed for this book, we find none in this quotation, for, while Dickens states that he is not lifting an imaginary character out of nature, Mr. Roberts is doing so in the case of a real person.
He has studied all Dickens's failures and defects, his vanity, his selfishness, his greed for money, his boisterous foolerieS, and out of these and these alone he has constructed a cad and a bounder without any trait that is not repulsive and contemptible. Never once in these pages does Dickens appear other than a vulgar idiotic egoist, who continually talks in the style of Sam Weller (Von't the Quarterly be aggerawated . . . Vot ho !), and who " hisses " in the ear of a girl with whom he is dancing on the beach at Broadstairs, " Behold the tide riseth ! Already the wavelets kiss thy toothsome feet." Never does Mr. Roberts attempt to reproduce a spark of Dickens's charm, or of his impetuous compassions and liberalities, and by the complete omission of such his Charles Dickens is a puppet who bears no real resemblance to the man after whom he was named.
Mr. Roberts, of course, is well aware that Dickens used his father as a model for Micawber, and, greatly daring, attempts to make the John Dickens in his book talk like Micawber. A hazardous feat, surely, the success of which the reader may estimate from the following quotation : " Think of your father cowering here beneath the bludgeons of fate, my dear Charles, as you trifle with the viands ; think of his moistening Barmecidal bread with suicidal tears as you raise your brimming goblet. . . ." Indeed, it is dangerous to wave the wand of the wizard : Mr. Roberts would have been wiser to leave it alone, and wave his
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