Dickens and His Audience
Evari the profusest outbursts of original talent are incorporated into the tenor of life. They enter our experience. It becomes almost-impossible for us to put ourselves back intd a time before they had occurred ; to see them in their full, astonishing novelty. So it is with Dickens. When he first wrote, he was read with an unparalleled avidity. Now he is in the substance of our literature; it calls for a jerk of sphit to" see him as if for the first time.
But genius, as distinct from the greatest talent, retains the power to come as a shock. If Dickens passed over into an influence, it was in the humour of Gogol and the tenderness of Dostoevsky. He retains, none the less, his originality. He is still inimitable. No one writes as he wrote. No one can bring it off again. We can analyse his limitations and short- comings as much as we like ; we cannot do it ourselves, not by fathoms, not by an infinity.
Perhaps the most central and important mark of his genius is his speech. It was once the fashion in literary manuals to treat Dickens's prose style as if it were a little coarse and vulgar ; as if, indeed, he were a bad writer. But the truth is that with all his oddities, facetiae, violent and mad artificiali- ties, his bound-breaking, impermissible feats, he is a stylist above all things. This is what it means to have a style. Words tumble over each other ; they are all of them true and penetrating words. They add ; they accumulate ; we feel they are never to be stopped in their rolling and tumbling ; but they are good, sound, image-creating speech, inexhaustibly full of life.
- His words, too, were of a piece with himself. His biographers tell us that he "overflowed with animal spirits." He engaged in mimicries and jests and charades like a child. He took the problems of writing with an innocent seriousness, which made work itself its own reward. We know, too, how he laughed and cried with his characters and was as much concerned how a story should end as any of his readers.
By ordinary standards it is puzzling to understand how he reached all this fullness and spontaneity of achievement. ." After success came to him," says Gissing, " (and it came so early) he never had much time for reading, and probably never any great inclination. Few really great men can have had so narrow an intellectual scope." But here we touch the very centre of his secret. His originality is founded, as originality must always be, on the fact that he was intimately In touch with a concrete world. Even his vocabulary, even his metaphors, are drawn from his encounters with life, from his long hurried journeys through the whole of England when he was a young reporter, anxious to capture every impression that met him ; chatting in inn parlours, riding in mail coaches, overturned in ditches ; always looking around him with those very bright eyes as if to master and reduce to his use the whole visible world, the whole world of persons, types, characters, the whole odd, unintelligible, and problematic human race. • Moreover, his readers were a reality to him as they have hardly ever been to another writer. When we read in Forster's
Life of Dickens the continual tale of his preoccupation with money, numbers of copies- Sold, 'doubts whether the new -becik will be less of -a success than the old, it may ‘see-111 at first that Dickens had. an ignoble striving for material When we find him aslcifig-of an idea for the development of a story : " Do you think it might be done, without making people angry ? " it may seem that he was lacking in the conscience of an artist. He wrote for instant applause, a dangerous thing to do. But here, too, we touch the secret of his greatness.
" The sympathy of his readers," to quote Gissing again, " was to him the very breath of life. The more complete that sympathy, the better did he esteem his work." He could stand out against his readers when he felt that in the bottom of their hearts they thought, or would come to think, as he did. Yet they; his immediate readers, were his judges. He never wrote down to them, but they were the real living objective standards that determined his work. In short, he was a part of the communal life of his age. His writing reflects from it, his genius enriches him with it. At both ends—in the material of his novels, his observation, and in the judgment of them, his effect on his readers—he had con- stant poles of reference, the people among whom he lived.
Does anything make more clear the place, the limitations, and the triumphs of literature ? Here is a man whose unhappy childhood has withdrawn him from the contact of his fellows. He was a small and sickly boy, who felt left out from the life of his comrades. He would occupy himself in watching their games and wishing that he could take part in them. At his home he found himself overlooked, alienated from the affections of his casual and unrealistic father, his worried and determined mother. He fed his thoughts on the fantasies of the English novelists, Fielding and Smollett, and the luxurious visions of the Arabian Nights. But it was his hope to re-enter that intimacy with his fellows to which he felt himself attracted. The road opened for him was literature, and literature was his mode of regaining touch with the human world.
Forster's Life remains the great storehouse from which we draw our knowledge of Dickens as a man. It is illuminating to see him, as Forster allows us to, in his business relations, in his method of work, his plotting of books, his concern for lecture tours and readingsf). rtbey are all of the greatest value in our estimate of Dickens : they show us so clearly how he conceived himself, and where he had placed his aims. At times we feel a vacuum in Dickens. We have little intimacy with him in his inner stresses, in the private life of his affections. We hear and no more than hear of his domestic troubles. We hear and no more than hear of his father and mother, of his life with his own family. For it was also the fate of Dickens that his observation of humanity should be fully exhausted in his novels. This is the peril, perhaps the inevitable tragedy, of genius in literature ; the writer re-enters life with his fellows by his art and is exiled from the fullness of ordinary human and intimate contacts.
The new edition which Mr. Ley has prepared of Forster's Life of Dickens contains new explorations. Most of Forster's notes are kept ; but Mr. Ley has added greatly to them. The volume is cumbrous ; not very attractive to handle or to read. Moreover, a concentration upon one literary figure seems often to forbid knowledge of others ; editors become too obvious partisans. It is to be- hoped that, if a new edition of the book is called for, Mr. Ley will see his way to alter his note on John Clare ; it is both unsympathetic and
inaccurate. ALAN PORTER.
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