BOOKS.

DICKENS'S LETTERS.* [Finn NOTION.]

ONE volume would have been better. At least half these letters only diminish the effect,—which is great,—of the other half. And Dickens, of all writers, bears dilution, even dilution by himself, worst. He is nothing, if not intense, if not high-strung- His was a mind always as tense as whipcord at its tensest, and yet, of course, even his every-day notes about nothing in particu- lar, fixing perhaps the date for a rehearsal or avisit, do not properly express such a state of mind, or so far as they do, express it by in- dications which reappear in much more striking and interesting forms in letters of greater intrinsic interest. There is something, no doubt, in the terse precision with which Dickens makes the com- monest engagement, prearranging every detail with the utmost vivacity, that is really expressive of the man. But then this is the sort of expressiveness which reappears in the most effective letters, and which does not need to be reflected back, as in an "endless gallery," from the common mass of business 4. The Leiters of Charles Dickens. Edited by hie tileter-in.Law and Eldeat Daughter. In 2 vols. Loudon; Chapman and Null.

notes. About half these letters,—certainly not more,—are de- lightful additions to the rich materials we already have for forming a picture of Dickens. The other half should have been suppressed, and by their suppression would have given much additional effect to those which remained.

With this exception, it is hard to say too much in praise of the letters. Their nonsense is, not quite always, but almost always, de- lightful; the vividness and vivacity of their descriptiveness are unique, and theirpace is something marvellous. One seldom reads any of these letters without the feeling that the stream of Dicken's life, mental and physical, was more nearly what seafaring men call a "race," than even a current. One's head grows giddy some- times with the dash and tension at which he lived. As a natural consequence, there is hardly any reflectiveness in his letters, and when a touch of reflectiveness comes—as, for in- stance, in the following, written when he had just returned from

a most successful tour of private theatricals—one appreciates it all the more. It is from a letter to a friend in whose neighbour- hood he had spent much time one Bummer, near LalIRMIlle :— "Were you all in Switzerland ? I don't believe I ever was. It is such a dream now. I wonder sometimes whether I ever disputed with a Haldimand ; whether I ever drank mulled wino on the top of the Great St. Bernard, or was jovial at the bottom with company that have stolen into my affection ; whether I ever was merry and happy in that valley on the Lake of Geneva, or saw you one evening (when I didn't know you) walking down among the green trees out- side Elysee, arm-in-aria with a gentleman in a white hat. I am quite clear that there is no foundation for those visions. But I should like to go somewhere, too, and t7 it all over again. I don't know how it

i is, but the ideal world n which my lot is cast has an odd effect on the

real one, and makes it chiefly precious for such remembrances. I get quite melancholy over them sometimes, especially when, as now, those great piled-up semicircles of bright faces, at which I have lately been looking—all laughing, earnest, and intent—have faded away like dead people. They seem a ghostly moral of everything in life to me."

B at even such brief reflectiveness as this is rare. For the most part, these letters represent a life always much too eager for the next interest in view, to pause for any longer period than was neces- sary just to photograph the interest that was passing. But this Dickens did, apparently, all the more, instead of the less, effectu- ally, that he did it at such high speed. People sometimes talk of -writing so large, that "he who runs may read." Dickens seems to teach us that there are some things so small that only he who runs can read them,—that it is only one whose life drives on at a great rate who can really catch, and then only by a sort of

sympathy, some of the most transient features of the life around

him. Whatever wanted a meditative kind of observation, Dickens did not describe well. What he saw,—and he saw much,—that nobody could have described at all without a throng of appropriate sensations rushing through his mind, he described as no one else could have described it. Take, for instance, this description of the anxiety displayed by his son and some other Eton companions as to the possible effect of the weather on the proposed festivity which Dickens was to give them on the river, and of their subsequent demeanour. No man could have caught the details of that description as Dickens catches them, who had not had in his own expenece all the " cues" for interpreting what he saw, so that a small compendium of the Eton boy's anxiety and hopes passed rapidly through his mind as he stopped at the Slough station :— "To go to the opposite side of life, let me tell you that a week or so ago I took Charley and three of his schoolfellows down the river gipsying. I secured the services of Charley's godfather (an old friend of mine, and a noble fellow with boys), and went down to Slough, accompanied by two immense hampers from Fortnum and Mason, on (I believe) the wettest morning ever seen out of the tropics. It cleared before we got to Slough; but the boys, who had got up at four (we being due at eleven), had horrible misgivings that we might not come, in consequence of which we saw them looking into the carriages before us, all face. They seemed to have no bodies what- eier, but to be all face ; their countenances lengthened to that sur- prising extent. When they saw us, their faces shut up as if they were upon strong springs, and their waistcoats developed themselves in the usual places. When the first hamper °lime out of the luggage- van, I wae conscious of their dancing behind the guard ; when tho second came out with bottles in it, they all stood wildly on one leg. We then got a couple of flys to drive to the boat-house. I put them in the first, but they could not sit still a moment, and were perpetu- ally flying up and down like the toy figures in the sham snuff-boxes. In this order we wont on to Tom Brown's, the tailor's,' where they all dressed in aquatic costume, and then to the boat.houso, whore they all cried in shrill chorus for Mahogany '—a gentleman, so called by reason of his sunburnt complexion, a waterman by profes; sion. (He was likewise called during the day ' Hog ' and Hogany, and seemed to be unconscious of any proper name whatsoever.) We em- barked, the sun shining now, in a galley with a striped awning, which I had ordered for the purpose, And all rowing hard, wont down the river. We dined in a field ; what I suffered for fear those boys should get drunk, the struggles I underwent in a contest of feeling between hospitality and prudence, must ever remain untold. I feel, even now, old with the anxiety of that tremendous hour. They were very good, however. The speech of one became thick, and his eyes too like lobsters' to be comfortable, but only temporarily. He recovered, and I suppose outlived the salad he took. 1 have heard nothing to the contrary, and I imagine I should have been implicated on the inquest, if there had been one We had tea and rashers of bacon at a public-house, and came home, the last five or six miles in a prodigious thunderstorm. This was the great success of the day, which they certainly enjoyed more than anything else. The dinner had been great, and Mahogany had informed them, after a bottle of light champagne, that he never would come up the river with ginger com- pany ' any more. But the getting so completely wet through was the culminating part of the entertainment. You never in your life saw such objects as they were ; and their perfect unconsciousness that it was at all advisable to go home and change, or that there was anything to prevent their standing at the station two mortal hours to see me off, was wonderful, As to getting them to their dames with any sort of sense that they wore damp, I abandoned the idea. I thought it a success when they went down the street as civilly as if they were just up and newly dressed, though they really looked as if you could have rubbed them to rags with a touch, like saturated curl- PflPer-" It was the rapidity and vividness of Dickens's own life which enabled him to catch and read off all those minute shades of expression in the boys' faces with so much brilliance. Or take this admirable—and let us add, certainly somewhat over- coloured—picture of the strong contrasts and abrupt changes in the effects of Italian landscape,—a picture which clearly borrows not a little from the temperament of the letter-writer, and is painted with the more vividness for reflecting more or less the life he himself lived. It is in a letter to Maclise, the

painter :—

"Apropos of blue. In a certain picture, called The Serenade,' you painted a sky. If you ever have occasion to paint the Mediter- ranean, lot it be exactly that colour. It lies before me now, as deeply and intensely blue. But no such colour is above me. Nothing like it. In the south of France—at Avignon, at Aix, at Marseilles— I saw deep-blue skies (not so deep though—oh Lord, no !), and also in America; but the sky above me is familiar to my sight. Is it heresy to say that I have seen its twin-brother shining through the window of Jack Straw's—that down in Devonshire I have soon a better sky ? I daresay it is ; but like a great many other heresies, it is truo. But such green—green—green—as flutters in the vine- yard down below the windows, That I never saw ; nor yet such lilac and such purple as float between me and the distant hills; nor yet— in anything—picture, book, or verbal boredom—such awful, solemn, impenetrable blue, as is that same sea. It has such an absorbing, silent, deep, profound effect, that I can't help thinking it suggested the idea of Styx. It looks as if a draught of it—only so much as you could scoop up on the beach, in the hollow of your hand—would wash out everything else, and make a groat blue blank of your in- tellect. When the sun sots clearly, then, by Heaven, it is majestic ! From any one of eleven windows here, or from a terrace overgrown with grapes, you may behold the broad son; villas, houses, mountains, forts, strewn with rose-leaves—strewn with thorns—stifled in thorns I Dyed through and through and through. For a moment. No more. The sun is impatient and fierce, like everything else in these parts, and goes down headlong. Run to fetch your bat—and it's sight. Wink at the right time of black night—and it's morning. Everything is in extremes. There is an insect here (I forget its name, and Fletcher and Roche are both out) that chirps all day. There is one outside the window now. The chirp is very loud, something like a Brobdingna- gian grasshopper. The creature is born to chirp—to progress in chirping—to chirp louder, louder, louder—till it gives one tremendous chirp, and bursts itself. That is its life and death. 'Everything is in a concatenation accordingly.' The day gets brighter, brighter, brighter, till it's night. The summer gets hotter, hotter, hotter, till it bursts. • The fruit gets riper, riper, riper, till it tumbles down and rots."

With regard to the nonsense of these letters, it is good or bad, —generally very good,—almost in direct proportion to the ten- dency to extravagance which it contains. When Dickens is ex- travagant, he is always good. It is hardly possible for him to fail when he is in an extravagant humour. On the other hand, when lie attempts anything in the vein of subdued humour— the vein of Charles Lamb—ho sometimes fails sadly. It is quite impossible, for instance, to laugh at this, written to Macready, after his retirement from the stage :— " Ah ! you country gentlemen, who live at home at ease, how little do you think of us among the London fleas ! But they toll me you are coming in for Dorsetshire. You must be very careful, when you come to town, to attend to your Parliamentary duties, never to ask your way of people in the streets. They will misdirect you for what

the vulgar call lark,' meaning, in this connection, a jest at your expense. Always go into seine respectable shop or apply to a police- man. You will know him by his being dressed in blue, with very dull silver buttons, and by the top of his hat being made of sticking- plaster. You may perhaps see in sonic odd place an intelligent-look- ing man, with a curious little wooden table before him and three thimbles en it. Ho will want you to bet, but don't do it. He really desires to cheat you. And don't buy at auctions where the best plated goods are being knocked down for next to nothing. These, too, are delusions. If you wish to go to the play to see real good acting (though a little more subdued than perfect tragsly should be),

I would recommend you to soo at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Anybody will show it to you. It is near the. Strand, and you may know it by seeing no company whatever at any of the doors. Cab fares are eightpence a mile. A mile London measure is half a Dorsetshire mile, recollect. Porter is twopence per pint ; what is called stout is fonrpence. The Zoological Gardens are in the Regent's Park, and the price of admission is one shilling. Of the streets, I would recommend you to see Regent Street and the Quadrant, Bond- Street, Piccadilly, Oxford Street, and Cheapsido. I think those will please you after a time, though the tumult and bustle will at first bewilder you. If I can servo you in any way, pray command me. And with my best regards to your happy family, so remote from this Babel,—Believe me, my dear Friend, ever affectionately yours.— P.8.—I forgot to mention just now that the black equestrian figure you will see at Charing Cross, as you go down to the House, is a statue of King Charles the First.',

Compare with that very forced performance, either the very humorous letter to the boy who took so much interest in

Nicholas Nichleby as to suggest how poetical justice required that Squeers and others should be dealt with in the close of that story, or the still more amusing description, written to

the artist Staufleld—who was half a sailor—of the weather at Genoa, in the form of an apocryphal addition to Black-Eyed Susan, Mr. Stanfield being asked to suppose himself the im- aginary Admiral of that nautical play :—

"We have had weather here, since fivo o'clock this morning, after your own heart. Suppose yourself the Admiral in Black-eyed Susan' after the acquittal of William, and when it was possible to be on friendly terms with him. I am T. P. My trousers arc very full at the ankles, my black neckerchief is tied in the regular style, the name of my ship is painted round my glazed bat, I have a red waistcoat on, and the seams of my blue jacket are paid '—permit me to dig you in the ribs when I make use of this nautical expression —with white. In my hand I hold the very box connected with the story of Sandomingerbilly. I lift up my eyebrows as far as I can (on the T. P. model), take a quid from the box, screw the lid on again.(chewing at the same time, and looking pleasantly at the pit), brush it with my right elbow, take up my right leg, scrape my right foot on the ground, hitch up my trousers, and in reply to a question of yours, namely, 'Indeed, what weather, William I' I deliver myself as follows : Lord love your honour ! Weather ! Such weather as would set all hands to the pumps aboard one of your fresh-water cockboats, and sot the purser to his wits' ends to stow away, for the use of the ship's Company, the ()asks and casks fall of blue water as would come power- ing in over the gunnel! The dirtiest night, your honour, as ever you see 'atweon Spithead at gun-fire and the Bay of Biscay! The wind sou'-west, and your house dead in the wind's eye ; the breakers running up high upon the rocky beads, the light'us no more looking through the fog than Davy Jones's sarser eye through the blue sky of heaven in a calm, or the blue toplights of your honour's lady cast down in a modest overhauling of her eathemls : avast ! (whistling) my dear eyes ; here am I a-goin' head on to the breakers (bowing). Admiral (smiling). No, William ! I admire plain-speaking, as you know, and so does old England, William, and old England's Queen. But you were saying— William. Aye, aye, your honour (scratching his head). I've lost my reckoning. Demme !—I ask pardon—but won't your honour throw a hencoop or any old end of towline to a man as is overboard ?

Admiral (smiling still). You wore saying, William, that the wind— William (again cocking his leg, and slapping the thighs very hard). Avast heaving, your honour ! I see your honour's signal fluttering in the breeze, without a glass. As I was a-saying, your honour, the wind was blowin' from the sou'-west, due sou'-west, your honour, not a pint to larboard nor a pint to starboard ; the clouds a-gatherin' in the distance for all the world like Beachy Head in a fog, the sea a-rowling in, in heaps of foam, and making higher than the mainyard arm, the craft a.seuddin' by all taught, and under storms'ils, for the harbour ; not a blessed star a-twinklin' out aloft--aloft, your honour, in the little cherubs' native country—and the spray is flying like the white foam from the Jolly's lips, when Poll of Portsea took him for a tailor ! (laughs.) Admiral (laughing also). You have described it well, William, and I thank you. But who are these ?

[Enter Supers, in calico jackets to look like cloth, some in brown- holland petticoat-trousers and big boots, all with very largo buckles. Last Super rolls on a cask, and pretends to keep it. Other Supers apply their mugs to the bunghole and drink, previously holding them upside down.] William (after shaking hands with everybody). Who arc these, your honour ! Mesarnates as staunch and true as ever broke biscuit. Ain't you, my lads?

All. Aye, aye, William. That we are! that we are !

Admiral (much affected). Oh, England, what wonder that—! But I will no longer detain you from your sports, my humble friends (Annfar, speaks very low, and looks hard at the orchestra, this being the cue for the dance)—from your sports, my humble friends. Farewell!

All. Hurrah! hurrah ! EE.Vit ADMIRAL. Voice behind. Suppose the dance, Mr. Stanfield. Are you all ready ? Go then !'

"My dear Stanfield, I wish you would come this way, and see me in that Palazzo Peachier° ! Was ever man so welcome as I would make

you ? What a truly gentlemanly action it would be to bring Mrs. Stanfield and the baby. And how Kate and her sister would wave Pocket-handkerchiefs from the wharf in joyful welcome ! Ah, what a glorious proceeding."

When Dickens once began to rattle, he was always delightful.. But in the more twilight moods, he was not even up to a high mark. His genius revelled in high lights, strong colours, rapid movement, and intense effects.

Nor did Dickens know when such effects were in place, and: when out of place, for he could generally produce a strong impression on the mass of his readers even when the effect was melodramatic and contrary to all sound principles of taste ;—and this misled him. It is very curious to read, for instance, his correspondence about The Chimes, the Christmas tale written at Genoa, which, at the time, he, certainly thought the masterpiece of his life. He writes to Mr. Thomas Milton, "I believe I have written a tremendous book that will knock the Carol out of the field. It will make a great uproar, I have no doubt." And it had a very great temporary effect. When he read it to Macready, Macready " undisguisedly sobbed and cried on the sofa ;" and this, he says to his wife, made him feel "what a thing it is to have power?' But really it is one of the slightest and the commonest evidences of power—not necessarily of great power—to be able to make people cry over a story. You may cry over a story at the very time you are feeling to the core how false the whole machinery of the story is, and so, we dare say, many of the readers of Dickens's Chimes must have felt. It is one of the thinnest and poorest of his works, with hardly an indication of his true genius in it, though written, no doubt, in a great fever of enthusiasm, in the hope of increasing the sym- pathy of the educated classes with the troubles of the poor. But it is so full of self-conscious sentiment and of glaring melodrama, that its enduring effect on any mind on which it could produce an enduring effect at all, would be to pre- judice it against the screaming sentiment which pervades the' whole, Hardly anything that had a " purpose " in it which Dickens ever did, was done well. His astonishing genius, his unfathomable stores of humour, his quaint and wild power of caricature, were all apt to go terribly astray directly they were- put in harness by that—in his case—most destructive agency, a. moral purpose ; and even in these letters we never feel his want of a reflective mind so keenly as when he is planting what he calls heavy blows in the face of " Cant," or even when he is assailing a real injustice, like the piracy of copyright. In such cases, he never seems to ask himself what is the position of the foe whom he has to meet. He only strikes out wildly, like a. man who disdains even to look at that which he feels it a solemn duty to detest.