CHARLES DICKENS'S VERSE.

1N the January number of the Gentleman's Magazine there is a

paper of some interest by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, in which the principal specimens of Charles Dickens's verse are collected together. Dickens does not seem to have written as much verse as Thackoray, nor is there among his efforts of this kind any piece which even approaches in merit some half-dozen or more of Thackeray's little poems,—and we say this without taking into account at all the humorous poems in which verse is only used by Thackeray as a means of enhancing the grotesque effects of his story. No doubt the reason is to be found in the habitual motive of the two great novelists. Dickens was one of the greatest humourists who ever lived, if you mean by a humorist ens who could accumulate round the thread of a par- ticular grotesque idea an unrivalled wealth of apt and ever- brightening illustration, partly drawn from his enormous rapidity and accuracy of observation, but still more from the whimsical fancy which made observation in him completely subservient to his keen sense of the ridiculous. In the deepest sense of the word " humour,"—the humour which springs from the subtler paradoxes of feeling,—Dickens was not really a creator of any- thing like the first order. His finest touches are subtle indeed, but they are subtle rather in the mode in which he gives ex- pression to what is intrinsically ridiculous, than in the- shades of emotion with which he deals. When, for instance, he makes Mrs. Gamp propose to cut bread and butter for others, and then makes her wander off into reasons for cutting off the crust which show that what she is thinking of is her own " tender teeth," and not any one else's, the exquisite ludicrousness of her speech is due not to any subtle dealing with human emotions, but to the accumulation of external detail with which he embellishes the disclosure of her self-regarding appetites. In his own way, Dickens surpassed any humorist whom England, or perhaps the world, has produced. But then that way was a peculiar way, and depended much more on illimitable resources for harping on the same string without ever saying the same thing a second time, and this without ever swerv- ing from his original idea, than on any fineness of insight into the dissolving colours of human emotion. Now this vast wealth of fancy for the skilful and various illustration of selfishness, or hypocrisy, or childish perplexity, or professional enthusiasm,—in which last Dickens was a greater master than in anything else,—is hardly a qualification for any kind of even comic poetry, and accordingly excepting, perhaps, Mr. Weller's song concerning the Bishop's murder and robbery by Dick Turpin on Hounslow Heath, there is no comic poetry of his worth notice. What remains of Dickens's poetry is, almost without exception, picturesque or pathetic in its motive ; and whether in the picturesque or in the pathetic vein, Dickens was apt to be so sell-conscious that he almost always fell into melodramatic pictures or melodramatic sentiment ; and it is this which spoils his poetry, whether his poetic prose or his verse itself. Perhaps the most deservedly popular of all his few poems is the one called " The Ivy Green " in " Pickwick," which is really graceful, but has a conventional sort of plaintive ness that does not ring like true feeling :-

" Oh a dainty plant is tho ivy green,

That oreopeth o'or ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals, I wen, In his cell so lone and cold.

The wall must be crumbled, the steno decayed, To pleasure his dainty whim: And the mouldering duet that years have made Is a merry meal for him.

Creeping where no life is soon, A rare old plant is the ivy green.

Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings, And a staunch old heart has ho.

How closely ho twinoth, how tight he clings, To his friend the huge Oak Tree I And slily he traileth along tho ground, And his leaves ho gently waves, As be joyously hugs and orawleth round The rich mould of dead men's graves. Creeping whore grim death bath boon, A rare old plant is the ivy green.

Whole ages have fled, and their works decayed, Aud nations have spattered boon ; But the stout old ivy shall never fade

The half-murderous and ogreish temper attributed to the ivy in that song is, however, a pure bit of common-place. As the ivy is seen in its richest life where there is most decay, it would occur to any one to depict it as feeding on time and death, and this idea is worked out in every verse. But if that were really the most natural idea suggested, we should regard ivy with more dis- gust than pleasure,—much as we regard the rank and noxious weeds which really suggest neglect as well as age ; and we need not say that that is not really the sentiment with which a plant is regarded that we all cultivate so carefully, and are so glad to see covering bare walls and enveloping the most beautiful and stately of buildings. In fact, Dickens fastened on a common- place idea which was not really appropriate to his subject, and then worked it out with his usual skill and smartness. But if this bit of verse is hardly true in its sentiment, still less so, we think, are the passages of so-called poetical prose for which his tales are famous. Mr. Fitzgerald says :—

" Mr. Horne, the author of 'Orion,' was the first, we believe, to

point out that many tender passages of Dickens's prose writings were virtually blank verse, a theory well supported by those specimens from

4 The Old Curiosity Shop :'—

" ' And now the boll—the boll She had so often hoard by night and day, And listened to with solemn pleasure,

E'en as a living voice—

Rung its remorseless toll for her, So young, so beautiful, and good.

Decrepit ago and vigorous life, And blooming youth and helpless infancy Poured forth—on crutches, in the pride of strength And health, in the full blush

Of promise, the mere dawn of life—

To gather round her torah. Old men wore there Whose eyes were dim And senses failing, Grandames who might have died ton years ngo And still been old—the deaf, the blind, the lame : The living dead in many shapes and forms, To see the closing of this early grave.

What was the death it would shut in, To that which still could crawl and creep above it I Along the crowded path they bore her now ; Pure as the new-fall'n snow That covered it ; whose day on earth Had been as fleeting.

Under that porch, where she had sat when Heaven In mercy brought her to that peaceful spot, She passed again, and the old church Received her in its quiet shade.'

Throughout the whole of the above, only two unimportant words have boon omitted, in and its, and " grandames" has been substituted for "grandmothers." All that remains is exactly as in the original, not a single word transposed, and the punctuation the same to a comma. Again, take the brief homily that concludes the funeral:--

' Oh it is hard to take to heart The lesson that such deaths will teach, But lot no man reject it, For it is one that all must learn, And is a mighty, universal truth. When Death strikes down the innocent and young, For every fragile form from which he lots The parting spirit free, A hundred virtues rise, In shapes of mercy, charity, and love, To walk the world and bless it.'

So also in ' Nicholas Nickloby':--

' The grass was green above the dead boy's grave, Trodden by feet so small and light, That not a daisy drooped its head Beneath their pressure.

Through all the spring and summer time Garlands of fresh flowers, wreathed by infant hands, Rested upon the stone."

But these passages suggest to our minds much more the self- consciousness of feeling exulting in its own beauty, than the unstudied pathos of natural emotion. We confess we are unable to enjoy the rhythm which seems to mark that artificial state of mind. Compare these passages with one of Thackeray's most truly pathetic passages, and we see at once how much truer a lyrical " cry " there is in it than in Dickens's solemn and sonorous—we might almost say funeral-sermonlike—grief. We will take the passage where Esmond meets Lady Castlewood after the evening service in Winchester Cathedral :-

"' And now we are drawing near to home,',. she continued ; 'I knew you would come, Henry, it it was but to forgive one for having spoken

From its hale and hearty green. The bravo old plant, in its lonely days, Shall fatten upon the past: For the stateliest building man can raise Is the ivy's food at last.

Creeping on, where time has been, A rare old plant is the ivy green."

unjustly to you after that horrid—horrid misfortune. I was half frantic with grief when I saw you. And I know now,—they have told me. That wroth—whose name I can never mention even—has said it; how you tried to avert the quarrel, and would have taken it on pureed!, my poor child I but it was God's will that I should be punished, and that my doer lord should fall.'—' He gave mo his blessing on his death bed,' Esmond said ; thank God for that legacy,' —'Amen; amen, dear Henry says the lady, pressing his arm; I knew it. Mr. Atterbury of St. Bride's, who was called to him, told me so. And I thanked God, too, and in my prayers ever since remembered it.' —4 You had spared me many a bitter night had you told me sooner,' Mr. Esmond said.—'I know it, I know it,' she answered, in a tone of such sweet humility as made Esmond regret that ho should ever have dared to reproach her. ' I know how wicked my heart has been ; and I have suffered, too, my dear. I confessed to Mr. Atterbury— I must not toll you any more. He—I said I would not write to you, or go to you ; and it was better even that, having parted, we should part. But I knew you would come back—I own that ; that is no one's fault. And to-day, Henry, in the anthem, when they sang it,—" When the Lord turned the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream," I thought, yes, like them that dream,—them that dream, And then it went, "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy ;" and " he that goeth forth and weopeth shall doubtless come home again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him ;" I looked up from the book, and saw you. I was not surprised when I saw you. I know you would come, my dear, and saw the gold sunshine round your head.' She smiled an almost wild smile as she looked np at him. The moon was up by this time, glittering keen in the frosty sky. Ho could see for the first time now clearly her sweet, careworn face."

Here is the very highest kind of pathos,—the true lyrical cry,— though without the sonorous rhythm which gives so artificial an effect to Dickens's pathos. The truth is, that Dickens's poetry, like his humour, is due to fancy working on the suggestion of external circumstances. He feels the melancholy of a sweet child's death or a neglected boy's early fate, and immediately his fancy sets to work to accumulate round such a theme all the thoughts which conventional associations suggest. But he had little real dramatic insight, no command of those strange rushes of human feeling which defy the presentiment of the world, and therefore the secret of true poetic pathos, which depends on holding the key to these strange ebbs and flows of human feeling, was denied him. Even the passage in which Dickens comes nearest to such lyrical feeling,—the description of little Paul Dombey's death,—is disfigured by the exalte tone peculiar to this formal and, as it were, bespoken grief,—the grief which is expressed on the stage by what are called " tears in the voice."

But in so wonderful and original a humorist as Dickens, one certainly would have expected something of the playful vein in which not only Thackeray, but Hood even more especially, is so great. Yet in point of fact, Dickens has no playful mood, either in prose or verse. He is delightfully, charmingly, inimitably ridiculous ; and he is often excessively jovial ; but he is never playful. The nearest thing to playfulness, perhaps, is contained in the squib on Southey for his political fickleness, which Mr.

Percy Fitzgerald thus records :—

" Mrs. S. C. Hall, as is well known, possesses a very remarkable album, filled with contributions, extempore and otherwise, of the most famous persona of the time. On one page Southey had written, in allusion to the autographs of Joseph Bonaparte and Daniel O'Connell, which were inscribed on the next leaf :—

'Birds of a feather flock together,

But vide the opposite page•,

And thence you may gather I'm not of a feather With some of the birds in this cage.'

Later, when Dickens furnished his little contribution, he wrote, in allusion to Southey's change of opinion :—

Now, if I don't make The oompletest mistake That over put man in a rage, This bird of two weathers Has moulted his feathers, And left them in some other cage.'"

But that is not playfulness ; it is sarcasm. In a playful humour you cannot be sarcastic, and you cannot be mirthful. You may be either glad or sad, but you cannot be savage, or exultant, or miserable. It is a mood in which you are inclined to make innocent experiments to bring out the paradoxes of your own, or some one else's, nature, a mood of half-lights, in which you hardly know whether you are most amused by the play of feeling, or most inclined to indulge your sympathy with it. Dickens has no such mood of half-lights. He either piles up the ludicrous till you scream with laughter, or the agonies till you resent them as unnatural, or else he is as jovial as men who have well drunk. Such a mood as Thackeray gives us in making his gold pen describe the things it had written for him for three years back, is unknown to Dickens :-

" I've helped him to pen many a line for bread ; To joke, with sorrow aching in his head, And make your laughter when his own heart bled. I've spoke with mon of all degree and sort— Peers of the land and ladies of the Court; .0h l but I have chronicled a deal of sport Feasts that were ate a thousand days ago, Biddings to wine that long hath ceased to flow, Gay meetings with good fellows long laid low ; 'Summons to bridal, banquet, burial, ball, -Tradesman's polite reminder, of his small Account duo Christmas last,—I've answered all.

Poor Diddler's tenth petition for a half- Guinea ; Miss Bunyan's for an autograph; So I refuse, accept, lament, or laugh, Condole, congratulate, invite, praise, scoff, Day after day still dipping in my trough, And scribbling pages after pages off."

On the whole, we think Dickens's verse best, when he intends to be neither pathetic nor amusing, but to point a moral with some sharpness. He might have written verse of the didactic-epigram- matic kind, we suspect, with much success. The prologue to Mr. Westland Marston's "Patrician's Daughter" is dignified and vigorous, and the following "parable in verse" is keen, if not quite fair in its drift :- "They have a superstition in the East

That Allah,' written on a piece of paper, Is better unction than can come of priest, Of rolling incense, and of lighted taper ; Holding that any scrap which bears the name In any characters its front impressed on, Shall help the finder through the purging flame, And give his toasted feet a plaeo to rest on.

Accordingly they make a mighty fuse With every wretched tract and fierce oration, And hoard the leaves—for they are not like us,

A highly civilised and thinking nation : And always stooping in the miry ways To look for matter of this earthly leaven, 'They seldom, in their dust-exploring days,

Have any leisure to look up to Heaven.

So have I known a country on the earth Where darkness sat upon the living waters, And brutal ignorance, and toil, and dearth Wore the hard portion of its sons and daughters: And yet, where they who should have oped the door Of charity and light, for all men's finding, Squabbled for words upon the altar-floor, And rent The Book, in struggles for the binding.

The gentlest man among those pious Turks God's living image ruthlessly defaces ; 'Their best High-Churchman, with no faith in works, Bowstrings the virtues in the market-places. The Christian Pariah, whom both sects curse (They curse all other mon and curse each other), Walks thro' the world, not very much the worse, Does all the good he can, and loves his brother."

`That is, we think, the nearest thing to success, Dickens over achieved with verse. He bad not the finely modulated mind needful for a lyric poet ; nor the knowledge of the heart needful for a dramatic poet, and in satire he was apt to be vulgar,—as for instance, in the dreadfully vulgar invective against the British Lion which Mr. Fitzgerald quotes. But he had a strong didactic impulse, and keen wit to give it edge and incisiveness.