THE DEBT TO DICKENS.
THE scheme for selling Dickens stamps, to be placed by all honourable debtors in their copies of Dickens's works, avoids numerous moral difficulties and gives every promise of fulfilling the pious task of bringing comfort to Dickens's descendants. It is therefore an almost perfect scheme, and should be forwarded by everyone who has a single volume of Dickens in his possession. It seems to us, indeed, that this is one of the very few memorials to Dickens which would be permissible. Lord Rosebery, speaking of the Dickens stamps at the Mansion House last week, said that we ware all getting a little weary of memorials. His remarks remind us of the similar words used by Bowen: 'We erect memorials to nobody, and we elaborately celebrate the cen- tenary of nothing." We are not opposed so strongly as some people, we must confess, to the erection of statues (provided that they be good statues) ; for a statue of an interesting or noble man in his birthplace, or in the place chiefly associated with his work, is a challenge to the least curious mind, and makes the earth seem to speak its history. But statues of Dickens, even if they seemed for other reasons to be a desir- able part of a memorial to him, are ruled out. He himself said that he wished for no memorial of that kind. It may be [laid that we should use our discretion in obeying the modest self-depreciations of a genius. Discretion to set Dickens's wishes aside was employed when he was buried in West- minster Abbey. He had said that he would be buried quietly, and that the world should not know the time or place. Statues seem a trivial contradiction of his wishes after that, perhaps. But the family of Dickens are the High Court of judgment in this matter, and they have always deprecated statues. And, after all, while Dickens's works remain, all memorials must appear trivial, if not impertinent. The works are the only true monument. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.
The Dickens stamp, however, avoids all these difficulties. The scheme proposes to discharge, as Lord Rosebery well said, "a debt which is long overdue." What ought to have been one of the greatest literary properties in history was not of great pecuniary worth to the creator of it, and has been of little to his descendants. The details—or rather the estimates —of this literary property are worth thinking over. It is reckoned that there are 25,000,000 sets of Dickens's works in existence. Dickens is supposed to have died worth between £70,000 and £80,000, and of this sum about 250,000 came from his public readings. No one could possibly dispute Lord Rosebery's comment : "Now, I think we shall all feel that that is a very inadequate return as compared with modern returns—with the modern return, for example, of a successful
play—to this great genius, for what he did for us He has left twenty descendants—three children and seventeen grandchildren—who are by no means placed in this world as the descendants of Dickens ought to be. It is not through their own fault. They make no claim and no complaint, but it does seem a debt of honour, from this nation at any rate, to them and to ourselves that we should not let this family of our great genius suffer under any kind of want." When Dickens wrote there was no copyright in the United States. He derived not a penny of profit from all the multitude of his readers in America. Lord Rosebery was certainly well guided in saying that in America, where the readers of Dickens from first to last must be more numerous even than in this country, there would be an enthusiastic readiness to pay off "the debt which is long over- due." The bitterness which Americans felt towards Dickens after the publication of "Martin Chuzzlewit" is dead. It
died in Dickens's lifetime. Even the most resolute resentment must have yielded to the generous acknowledgment of American qualities which Dickens wrote as a preface for the later editions of "Martin Chuzzlewit." But it would require a heavy subscription indeed to overtake the arrears of rent for the Elysian fields which Dickens put at the disposal of the world. Surely there is no more precarious property than literary property, none which brings such uncertain profits or which brings them for so short a time. As Mr. Birrell has said, however long a copyright may last it does not help the author who has sold it outright Authors do not speculate on their books being read maz. years after their death.
What is the character of the peculiar debt we owe to Dickens ? Everyone will put it differently, and so much the better, provided that we all recognise that the debt is a vast sum. Lord Rosebery picked out only one point among many, but it is perhaps the most important. He said that Dickens taught us how to laugh. Dickens came into a world that was not distinguished by its faculty for laughter. "Am I not right in saying," exclaims Lord Rosebery, "that a laugh, a real laugh, at any literary product, except of course a comedy on the stage, any laugh over a book that you are reading, is almost the rarest luxury which you can enjoy ? . . . . Anyone who feels depressed, who feels unhappy, who feels physically unwell, has only got to take down his Pickwick ' and read a few pages, possibly that be knows by heart already, and he will find himself indulging in that innocent and healthy exhilaration of which I spoke."
Dickens, indeed, makes an appeal to our generation different from that of which those who read him in monthly parts were conscious. They laughed, no doubt, but they wept with a more consuming ardour—at all events, with a simple emotion of which we of to-day are scarcely capable. The crowds which struggled to get early copies of the new part wet from the press were moved to profound and lasting gloom by the death of Little Nell or Paul Dombey. They could hardly wait in their impatience to know how the plot developed and whether, let us say, Martin Chuzzlewit married Mary. To-day we are comparatively indifferent to these things ; we recognise that the plots are no plots, or at least do not matter. They all depended on how many more monthly parts the publishers wanted, or whether Dickens already did or did not see his way to a new novel. "Oliver Twist" begins to end, so to speak, over and over again, and takes new life and goes off again at a glorious tangent. "Edwin Drood" almost alone has proportion and form because Dickens sketched out his plot and sat down to write it, knowing exactly in advance how and when he meant to end it. We perceive to-day also that nearly every character of Dickens is a static thing; it does not grow with the plot, nor does the plot depend upon the state of soul—or the resultant action—of anybody in the book. You might lift Pecksniff out of "Martin Chuzzlewit" and put him into "Nicholas Nickleby " and he would figure there just as adequately and no less delightfully The same thing might be said of almost any character in an, of Dickens's works. But the lover of Dickens, every man. who is not a fool in fact, is not affected by these things. He forgets that the chronology of "Martin Chuzzlewit" will not bear examination, and that Jonas cannot have committed the murder when he is said to have committed it. It is nothing to him that the Yorkshire schools have long since been reformed, and that the diabolical system of nursing of which Mrs. Gamp was the archetype no longer exists. He passes quickly over the sentimentality as mere alluvial deposit in which the gold is always to be found. And the gold is not only plentiful but always near the surface — eloquence, laughter, geniality and whimsicality, in a profusion which always seems new. Except perhaps tobacco, for those who feel about it as Kingsley did, there is no solace in the world like Dickens. We begin to laugh as we think of the innumer- able passages which vie in our mind for the position of favourite. You can pay half a guinea for a stall in a theatre and be bored to death. You can buy two hundred thousand words of Dickens for sixpence and pass into a land of delight of which the vision does not fade so long as you read. It is for the purpose of balancing that absurd discrepancy, to take only one illustration, that we are all invited to put Dickens stamps in our books.
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