Books of the Day Charles Dickens

By BONAMY DOBRgE

THERE are probably very few people who are altogether happy in the company of Charles Dickens, at all events among those .who have any power to discriminate. Mr. Chesterton holds the mistaken view that some persons dislike

Dickens because he was popular, on the theory that in

literature the voice of the people is the voice of the devil. But that is not the reason. The reason is that however much you may admire certain qualities -in Dickens, his marvellous power of evoking a scene—take the London fog at the beginning of Bleak House—or his genius in pre- senting a comic figure—take Mr. ('hadband at tea—at times, at so many times, he makes you feel uncomfortable. Some- times it is in his scenes of appalling sentimentality, some- times in the reiteration of a phrase, such as the " Better than a gig" of Mania Chu=lezeil, and often it is in the

sense of falsity which seems to pervade pages on end.

. It is even sometimes given to the reader to wonder whether Dickens was a great man at all, in any definite sense of the word, for though he had this almost unique power of evoca- tion, and a capacity for observation which one might claim was really unique ; though his capacity for caricature is unrivalled, and he possessed that abundant energy which enables great qualities to spangle and shine in a confused world, he never contributed a single thought to the heritage of humanity, never presented a new aspect of feeling. Of course he was popular : his thoughts are mob thoughts, his emotions mob emotions, in all their glory and rightness, in ' all their meanness and confusion. Bagehot was quite clear on this :

• " The truth is (he wrote) Mr. Dickens . . . is utterly deficient in the faculty of reasoning. . . . He is often troubled with the idea that ho must reflect, and his reflections are perhaps the worst reading in the world. There is a sentimental confusion about them ; we never find the consecutive precision of mature theory, or the cold distinctness of dear thought. Vivid facts stand out in his imagination ; and a fresh illustrative style brings them home to the imagination of his readers ; but his continuous philosophy utterly fails in the attempt to harmonise them, . . . his abstract understanding is so far inferior to his picturesque imagination as to give even to his beat works a sense of jar and incompleteness. • ."

A man, however natural an artist he may be in all other respects, cannot be a great artist unless he has some philo- sophy. , What was it in Dickens, we ask ourselves, in Dickens who was so richly endowed in the qualities which go to the make-up of a great artist, which prevented him being one ? We may leave it at that ; but if we are curious we will go on to ask, Why had he no philosophy ? What was wrong with

the man ?

This is the question Mr. Kingsmill sets himself to answer in his extremely interesting book, of which the sub-title is

A Life of Charles Dickens." Ile jumps with pleasant agility from the life- to the books, and back again from the books to the life, now and again shrewdly taking a hint from Forster, whose honest laboriousness is always valuable. It is a book which could not have been written thirty years agu. before the advent of what we have come to call " the new psychology," but Mr. Kingsmill is careful not to strain

any theory too far. This is in no way an extravagant book. That is not to say that the method is not dangerous : it is not always safe to say that such and such a passage is auto, biographical, or the giving way to certain emotions a com- pensation for something else. Here and there we may feel

a little dubious ; now and again it does not seem that Mr. :Kingsmill has made his case ; but on the whole what he has to say commands assent, and if sometimes the explanation seems too good to be true, it never has that facile glibness

which arouses suspicion.

Early in his book, Mr. Kingsmill tells us how the problem • presents itself to him :

" Had he been able to harmonise his comic genius and his emotions he would have been a writer of the first order. But

The Sentimental Journey. By Hugh Kingsmill. (Wishart. 10s. 6c1.) the opposition between them ass innate and irreconcilable, with the two-fold result that his emotions were =purged by his humour. and his humour, except in occasional sudden flashes, was unen- riched by his emotions. His restlessness, his over-emphasis both in life and literature, his extremea of sensibility and callousness. all sprang from this conflict, which never ceased and was never resolved."

But why this conflict ? How did it arise ? Originally, it would seem, from the unhappiness -which came into his life from " the poor way of living " into which the Dickens family was forced, when Charles " degenerated " as he put it, into cleaning his own and his father's boots in the morning, and, instead of going to school, went to serve in a ware-

house. The vision of himself as " this poor little drudge " seems never to have deserted Dickens ; self-pity is to be traced in a good many of his scenes and characters :

"His self-idolatry exposed him to a double agony, the illusion that he had been cheated of a happiness which he could not see to be unattainable in this life, and the mixture of guilt and self-pity which this exclusion from happiness stirred in him."

This is to put Mr. Kingsmill's analysis too crudely, for he does not reach this point without a good deal of subtle deduction. This may bring us to another issue.

Mr. Kingsmill quotes with approval what Mr. Chesterton said about the minor comic figures : " We have them only for an instant but they have us for ever." They are, Mr. Kingsmill argues, his best :

" His important characters. those whom he tried to elaborate or interpret, turned to dummies on his hands. becoming merely the vehicle of his unpurified emotionalism. His living characters are those he sketched rapidly in the heat of his comic inspiration."

In fact before he began that attempt at thought, the result of which Bagehot so much deplored, his evocative genius had full play. Take Augustus Moddle. What matter if he was " a caricature of Dickens' self-pity, and desire to escape

from life " ? " I love another. She is another's. Every- thing appears to be somebody else's," is superbly comic, but it means something, as Thine guessed. It means Maria Beadnell, who was another's, it means Kate Hogarth, it means that Dickens felt baffled of everything ; but luckily the meaning was below the level of his consciousness.

For there was another thing about Dickens—his failure to grow up emotionally, to accept life for what it was. Nothing shows this more clearly than, first, his clinging to his childish idea of himself. and secondly his treatment of women, his behaviour to his wife and his sister-in-law, his mean " social " reasons for not separating sooner from his wife, his repulsive attitude towards pregnancy. Everywhere he felt that he was being cheated of something, with the

rage of a child who begins to discover that the universe was not created solely on his account. He also had an adolescent love of horror, which he never got rid of. Further, as Mr. Kingsmill points out, he does not seem to love his comic characters as Shakespeare loved Falstaff : if he strove to better the conditions of the poor, it was because he regarded the poor as disgusting and faintly ridiculous, rather than felt compassion for them. He hated his own past in them and his attitude towards the real Fagin was abominable.

It should be made clear that this hook is not an attempt to " debunk " Dickens. Nobody thinks Dickens a perfect man, and few would ' d his relations with Miss Tertian and other light-o'-loves had Dickens not set up as a model of family chastity. We do not particularly want our great men to be saints, unless it is as sairts that they are great. -No, it is not debunking. It is a very careful, thoughtful, and in the main solid study of a profoundly interesting personality, whose stature as a comic writer Mr. Kingsmill avows as loudly as anybody. It is because Mr. Kingsmill feels that Dickens is so eminently worth study that he has written this book ; and that is why those who think with him will read it, now with exhilaration, now with distress, but always with attention.