BOOKS.
MR. WARD'S "DICKENS."*
WE cannot say that we think Mr. Ward successful in his esti- mate of Dickens. He is moderate in his praise and moderate in his blame,—rather conventionally moderate,—but neither praise nor blame seem to us strong enough, or distributed with discrimination. Dickens was, in our opinion, at once a • Dian.. By Augustus William Ward. London: Macmillan and Co. much more wonderful humonrist, and a much worse painter of human character, than Mr. Ward finds in him. He was both more subtle and more vulgar, both more fascinating and more repellent, than Mr. Ward paints him. As a humourist, we can hardly conceive his superior, in breadth and subtlety alike. And here Mr. Ward sometimes seems to us to do him much less than justice, and now and then real injustice, as he does him much more than justice as a painter of the human heart. For example, in that praiseworthy attempt to be even- handed which distinguishes Mr. Ward's criticism, he is severe, though not nearly severe enough, on the unfortunate and vulgar attempts to satirise the conventionalities of society which gave rise to the Veneering, Lammle, and Podsnap group in the story called Our Mutual Friend. But Mr. Ward adds to the much too mild censure with which he speaks of this showy and dismal failure, 4' The whole Boffin, Wegg, and Venus business—if the term may pass—is extremely wearisome; the character of Mr. Venus in particular seems altogether unconnected or unarticulated with the general plot, in which, indeed, it is but an accidental excrescence." Now, we venture to assert that no one with a true insight into comic humour of the extravagant kind would have made that remark. With but few exceptions, "the Boffin, Wegg, and Venus business "—an excellent phrase, for which Mr. Ward need not have excused himself—is the very best part of the tale ; and as for Mr. Venus himself, we hardly know any- thing in all Dickens's writings more delightful in its humour than that gentleman's personal reference in pointing to the ribs of a Frenchman which it had been his duty to articu- late, while Mr. Wegg looks up with a start and a sort of " sense of being introduced." The " Boffin, Wegg, and Venus business" is no doubt full of farce, but of farce so excellent, so genuinely laughable, that it would take us back almost as far as Martin Chuzzlewit to come upon anything of Dickens's production more admirable after its kind. On the other hand, Mr. Ward is not half severe enough when he says, " What sphere or section of society would feel itself especially caricatured in the Veneerings or in their associates,—the odious Lady Tippins, the impossibly brutal Podsnap, Fascination Fledgeley, and the Lammles, a couple which suggests nothing but antimony and the Chamber of Horrors. Caricature such as this, representing no society that has ever, in any part of the world, pretended to be good, corresponds to the wild rhetoric of the superfluous Betty Higden episode against the gospel according to Podsnappery ;' but it is in truth satire from which both the wit and humour have gone out. An angry, often spasmodic, mannerism has to supply their place." That is true enough, as far as it goes, but it does not express half adequately the sense of disgust which this ostentatiously self- righteous bit of vulgar and flaunting moral satire produces on the mind. It is not merely that it is so bad, but that the author is so pleased with himself, almost in such rapture with himself, for every dull or heavy stroke of his brush. He gives himself all the airs of a noble evangelist, while he shows up the vulgarity of this sleekly-bad society in a travesty at least as dreary and purblind as the conventional selfishness and hard-heartedness which he was seeking to expose. There is something in Dickens, when he abandons his part of humourist to play that of a spiritual purifier, which is to our mind beyond measure repellent. More than self-confident, at once showy and shabby in his moral make-up, at once proud of his spiritual functions, and without even an incidental flash of that self-sus- picion and self-distrust which could alone have enabled him to ful- fil them, Dickens always forces on our minds, in these moods of his, the memory of the rebuke to those who were so anxious to take the mote out of their brother's eye, before they had qualified themselves to see clearly by taking the beam out of their own eye. Dickens was very fond of exposing mere respectabilities which were Pharisaisms in disguise, but he hardly ever does so without that ineffable air of "Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other men are," which makes the exposure morally im- potent. He would have limited himself to his proper part of a humourist, if he had had any self-knowledge. While he is honestly laughing at Mr. Pecksniff, he is what he was so proud of calling himself, "inimitable." So soon as he takes upon himself the airs of a moralist, he betrays at once that total absence of true self-knowledge, and of the self-distrust which belongs to self-knowledge, without which no one can safely venture to preach to his fellow-men.
Mr, Ward's criticism of Dickens's powers is singularly vacillating. He indulges himself occasionally in a balanced antithesis, intended to look like the paradox of truth, but of which one assents to only one-half; and resents the other. Take, for example, the following remark on Pickwick :—" Its many genuinely comic characters are as broadly marked as the heroes of the least refined of sporting novels, and as true to nature as the most elaborated products of Addison's art." If we under- stand that rightly, we should say the first half of the paradox was quite true, and the last half quite false, but that neither half suggests the true charm of Pickwick. We hardly know a character in that delightful book that is true to any nature deeper than the funny surface of things, nor is it even that amount of truth which gives the book its charm, but••
the prodigality of the humour with which he varies and illus- trates, and places in a thousand new and dazzling lights, the- superficial oddity which almost any one might have seen. Again, Mr. Ward says several times that there is a resemblance between the style of Dickens and of Goldsmith. We cannot imagine two styles more opposite. Dickens, as restless as he is trenchant, is always at full stretch, and never, even when he is describing a restful scene, gives us the atmosphere or attitude of rest. Again, even when he is most powerful in description, he is never poetical,—never gives us the liquid light of true poetry. Goldsmith is the very antithesis of him in both re- spects; he is as resting as Dickens is fatiguing, as poetical in his wonderful idyls as Dickens is exciting and melodramatic. There is not a passage in all Dickens's works that a man familiar with Goldsmith could mistake for Goldsmith's, not a touch of pathos that in the least resembles the pathos of Goldsmith. In an unusually restless period of his life, Dickens described himself
as "a free-and-easy sort of superior vagabond." Goldsmith, too, had some of the vagabond ways about him, and knew what vagabondage meant. But what different capacities for vaga- bondage theirs were. Goldsmith was the easy-going Irishman of genius, really adapting himself to everything he met ; while Dickens was the sharply-straining London gamin, adapting everything he met to himself. We should find it hard to- imagine two men of genius more contrasted than the author of the Deserted Village and the author of the Christmas: Carol or the Chimes. All the genius of the one man is reflective; all the genius of the other, active and manipulative,. even to the straining of nature into all sorts of exquisitely humorous knots or painfully melodramatic complications of
cordage. Imagine how utterly impossible it would have been for Goldsmith to write, for instance, as follows :—
" Oh, cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hest at thy command, for this is thy Dominion ! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, then. canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released ; it is not that the heart and pulse are still ; but that the hand wes open, generous, and true ; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, shadow, strike ! And see- his good deeds springing from the wound to sow the world with life- immortal."
That was Dickens's nearest approach to poetry, and very bad and strained poetry it is,—the poetry of a poorish melodrama- tist. Goldsmith, on the other hand, was a genuine poet at• heart, though vastly inferior as a humourist to Dickens.. When Mr. Ward speaks of Dickens's Christmas tales as being
"tender with the tenderness of Cowper, playful with the play- fulness of Goldsmith, natural with the naturalness of the- author of Amelia," we can only wonder. We hardly know what he can have been reading. Even the tale of the "Boots
at the Holly-tree Inn," which is the prettiest and most idyllic of these Christmas tales, is told in that excitable manner which is always making express demands on your feelings, and so• separates itself entirely from that of the authors here re- ferred to. While Mr. Ward seems to us to have no sufficient appreciation of the painfully melodramatic element in Dickens,—which never suffered him really to conceive any human character as a whole, or as distinct from the particular attitude in which he had determined to present it,—he makes a great deal too little of the extraordinary wealth of active and manipulative humour,—humour not merely of insight,. but of positive creation,—which constituted the fascination of all Dickens's better books, and the sufficient excuse for even his worst.
Mr. Ward talks of " sweet Ruth Pinch," who, with her rump-steak pudding, affects most people like a dose of ipecacuanha wine; and
yet he never once mentions the great Augustus Moddle, who "blew a great deal into a flute, and very little out of it," and who entreated Miss Pecksniff " to become the bride of a ducal coronet, and forget him ;" or Bailey Junior, or Poll Sweedlepipes, or Elijah Pogram,
or the Mother of the Modern Gracchi, or the two ladies who in- troduced themselves to Martin Chuzzlewit as " transcendental." It is the same with the other books. For instance, Mr. Ward dilates on the didactic and melodramatic elements in Nicholas Nickleby at some length, but seems quite unconscious of the highest touches of humour in the book; of Squeers's delight at the totally new experience of thrashing a boy in a hackney coach, of his unctuous reflections on the con- dition of little Wackford's flesh, of Fanny Squeers's descrip- tion of her father's downfall, when "2 forms were steepled in his gore," or of Mr. Lillyvick's courtship of the fair Henrietta Petowker, whose performance in dancing "the Blood-Drinker's Burial" was " absorbing, fairy-like, toomultuous." So in Oliver Twist, the richness of the humour is about the only thing lightly passed over by Mr. Ward ; and the same may be said of every one of Dickens's works. In his criticism of Dombey and Son there is not a trace of appreciation of the humorous side of any one, except Captain Cattle and Susan Nipper, who are oertaiuly not the most humorous figures in the book, while Mr. Ward devotes a good deal of pains to the melodramatic rubbish concerning Mr. Dombey's pride, and Mr. Carker's falseness. On the whole, it seems to us that Mr. Ward has found in Dickens what we are wholly unable to find in him,—a great master of the .secrets of human nature and character ; and has hardly found in him, what seem s to us far the greatestquality Dickens had,—the power of multiplying the humorous aspects of human life in the wonderful moral kaleidoscope of his own mind, till he made the English world almost a new one, so full has it become of the magic of his whimsical extravagance, and the subtlety of his inexhaustible store of ludicrous resemblances and contrasts.
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