BOOKS.

MR. FORSTER'S LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS.* We have already compared the impressions left upon us by Mr. Forster's life of Dickens and Dickens's autobiographical fiction, " David Copperfield," and explained how essential an element of hardness is missing in Dickens's imaginative—we can hardly call it ideal—picture of his own childhood and youth. The chief deficiency of this able and well-judged volume,—whether it be a * rho Lilo of Charles Dickens. By John Forster. Vol. I. 1812-1842. London : Chapman and Hall.

deficiency in the picture or a deficiency in the man, we have no. adequate evidence, but we suspect the latter,—is the painful

effect of self-centred, we do not mean selfish, interest which the volume conveys. That Mr. Dickens's mind was susceptible of the,

most profound and vivid personal attachments this volume amply

shows, but there is hardly a trace anywhere in it of his interest in any one thought, undertaking, theme, with which he was not. himself in some very close manner mixed up. The only exception of which the book gives evidence is the strong Radicalism with which Dickens threw himself into the election of 1841, at the time of the reaction in favour of Sir Robert Peel and the Conservatives. It seems pretty clear that in that election he took a very hearty interest,. without being in any sense a hero of it. But with that exception,. the whole volume is filled with interests of which Mr. Dickens is. the centre. There is not a letter, hardly a line, to show any literary pleasure which he felt in any writer or book of his own day,— (a curt mention by Mr. Forster of his admiration for Lord Lytton's• novels being, as far as we recollect, the only exception, and by the way, one which seems to show that he admired what was flashy in. other people's writings as well as approving that element in his. own). There is hardly a fragment of intellectual criticism, or of meditative or reflective thought, or an indication of the religions. or theological drift of his convictions, from one end to the other.. The greater part of the book is full of his own direct creations or observations. We do not find a sign in any letter printed here of any favourite essayist or poet (the volume covers the whole time from Dickens's birth in 1812 to 1842),—not a mention of Charles.

Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Coleridge, or Wordsworth, or Byron, or Shelley, —not a reference, we think, to ahy single great English writer but Shakespeare and De Foe,—not a word of Sydney Smith's or Torn Hood's humour, or Macaulay's brilliant historical essays, or of Crabbe's realistic poems (so likely, one would suppose, to interest Dickens),—not &criticism even on the art of those great novelists, of his youthful delight in whom we hear so much, Fielding, Richard- son, and Smollett,—not a word even of the humour of Sam Slick, or- the satiric poems of Moore,—not a sign of Tennyson (then, it is true, comparatively little known),—nay, not a proof that Dickens ever read with eagerness any single branch of the literature of his age.

There is, indeed, incidental proof of his enjoyment of Sir Walter Scott as well as of his boyish delight in the novelists of the last century, but there is an almost incredible absence of anything like- intellectual or literary interests from his correspondence. Perhaps. this is not to be wondered at, considering the circumstances of his

early life, the complete exclusion from them of any but self- developed imaginative interests, and the amazing productiveness. of his early manhood. But certainly the impression left by this volume of biography is so far disappointing ; the extraordinary self-occupation of its subject was hardly to be expected from a. man of such boundless wealth of life, and gives a distressing sense of reflective poverty to balance our amazement at so much pro-

ductive power. It seems as if all the strength of Dickens's nature had flowed into his observing senses and the humour which grew

out of them, and had left nothing over for thought or intellectual.

sympathy.

And even so, one is a little disappointed that so little of the won-

derful humour of his books appears in such of his private letters as are here preserved for us. If we except the series of letters from. America, in which there are not a few humorous touches not to be- found in the American Notes, there is hardly a single letter here of the kind we might expect from so wonderful a humourist,—not one to compare with those letters of inexhaustible playfulness and ten- derness which filled the readers of Talfourd's Memorials and Final' Memorials of Charles Lamb with a sort of rapture of whimsical enthusiasm and regretful laughter. The letters which Mr..

Forster describes as " very humorous " about the little house near Exeter which Mr. Dickens took for his father and mother (pp. 163-7), do not strike us as exhibiting any trace of his peculiar genius though they are written freshly and in an elastic mood ; and as for the only other specimen of the kind, the letter about the whim of a hopeless attachment on his part to the young Queen (then a bride),. we cannot imagine what induced Mr. Forster to quote so utterly un- meaning a freak of extravagant spirits, which, like the nonsense of boys, can have been amusing only in the presence of the enjoyment of which it bore evidence. We will quote the letter, that wo may give our readers the opportunity of judging whether our view of it springs from the dullness in us or in it :— " Turning back from the narrative of his last piece of writing to recall a few occurrences of the year during which it had occupied him, I find him at its opening in one of those humorous moods, and another friend,

with myself, enslaved by its influence. What on earth does it all mean,' wrote poor puzzled Mr. Lander to me, enclosing a letter from him of the date of the 11th of February, the day after the Royal nuptials of that year. In this be had related to our old friend a wonderful hal- lucination arising out of that event, which had then taken entire posses-

sion of him. Society is unhinged here,' thus ran the letter, by ' Her M. ajesty's marriage, and I am sorry to add that I have fallen hopelessly in love with the Queen, and wander up and down with vague and dismal thoughts of running away to some uninhabited island with a maid of honour, to be entrapped by conspiracy for that purpose. Can you suggest any particular young person, serving in such a capacity, who would suit me ? It is too much, perhaps, to ask you to join the band of noble youths (Forster is in it, and Macliae) who are to assist me in this great enterprise, but a man of your energy would be invaluable. I have my eye upon Lady —, principally because she is very beautiful and has no strong brothers. Upon this, and other points of the scheme, however, wo will confer more at large when we meet ; and meanwhile burn this document, that no suspicion may arise or rumour got abroad.' The maid of honour and the uninhabited island were flights of fancy, but the other daring delusion was for a time encouraged to such whim- sical lengths, not alone by him, but (under his influence) by the two friends named, that it took the wildest forms of humorous extravagance, and of the private confidences much interchanged, as well as of the style of open speech in which our joke of despairing unfitness for any further use or enjoyment of life was unflaggingly kept up, to the amazement of .bystanders knowing nothing of what it meant, and believing we had half lost our senses, I permit myself to give from his letters one further illustration. 'I am utterly lost in misery,' he writes to me on the 12th of. February, ' and can do nothing. I have been reading Oliver, Pick- .wtek, and Niekleby to get my thoughts together for the now effort, but all in vain :—

"My heart is at Windsor,

My heart isn't here;

My heart is at Windsor,

A following my dear.

I saw the Responsibilities this morning, and burst into tears. The pre- sence of my wife aggravates me. I loathe my parents. I detest my house. I begin to have thoughts of the Serpentine, of the Regent's Canal, of the razors upstairs, of the chemist's down the street, of poison- ing myself at Mrs. —'s table, of hanging myself upon the pear-tree in the garden, of abstaining from food and starving myself to death, of being bled for my cold and tearing off the bandage, of falling under the feet of cab-horses in the New Road, of murdering Chapman and Hall and becoming great in story (SHE must hoar something of me then—perhaps sign the warrant: or is that a fable?) of turning Chartist, of heading some bloody assault upon the palace and saving her by my single hand, —of being anything but what I have been, and doing anything but what I have done. Your distracted friend, C. D.' The wild derange- ment of asterisks in every shape and form, with which this incohorenco

-closed, cannot hero be given.'

We venture to say with some confidence, that no genuine admirer of Dickens's humour will trace a scrap of it in this bit of forced ex- travagance. By far the best of the letters to Mr. Forster are the American letters, in some of which we come upon the true ore of Dickens's humour. Take this finale, for instance, to a sentimental .serenade given to Mr. and Mrs. Dickens at Hartford, by Mr. Adams the younger and a German friend, who played and sang in the corridor of the hotel outside the room in which the former were sleeping :—

" And when at last we got to bed and were ' going' to fall asleep, the choristers of the college turned out in a body, under the window, and serenaded us I We had had, by the bye, another serenade at Hartford, from a Mr. Adams (a nephew of John Quineey Adams) and a Gorman friend. They were most beautiful singers : and when they began, in the dead of the night, in a long, musical, echoing passage outside our cham- ber door ; singing, in low voices to guitars, about home and absent friends and other topics that they knew would interest us ; we were more moved than I can toll you. In the midst of my sentimentality though, a thought occurred to me which made me laugh so immoderately that I was obliged to cover my face with the bed-clothes. ' Good Heavens!' I said to Kate, ' what a monstrously ridiculous and common- place appearance my boots must have, outside the door!' I never was so impressed with a sense of the absurdity of boots in all my life."

,Or take the following very much more humorous version of a little incident of travel which appears also, but in a poorer form, in the American Notes :— " I think I formerly made a casual remark to you touching the pre- cocity of the youth of this country. When we changed horses on this journey I got down to stretch my legs, refresh myself with a glass of whiskey-and-water, and shake the wet off my great-coat—for it was raining very heavily, and continued to do so, all night. Mounting to my seat again, I observed something lying on the roof of the coach, -which I took to be a rather largo fiddle in a brown bag. In the course of ton miles or so, however, I discovered that it had a pair of dirty shoes at one end, and a glazed cap at the other • and further observation demonstrated it to be a small boy, in a snuff-coloured coat, with his arms .quite pinioned to his sides by deep forcing into his pockets. He was, I presume, a relative or friend of the eoaehaftrri's, as he lay a-top of the luggage, with his face towards tho rain ; and, except when a change of position brought his shoes in contact with my hat, he appeared to be asleep. Sir, when we stopped to water the horses, about two miles from Harrieburgh, this thing slowly uprearod itself to the height of three foot eight, and fixing its eyes on me with a mingled expression of complacency, patronage, national independence, and sympathy for all outer barbarians and foreigners, said, in shrill piping accents, 'tl'ell, now, stranger, I guess you find this, a'most like an English a'ternuon,— hey ?' It is unnecessary to add that I thirsted for hie blood.'" There are several such touches, more or lees fresh to the reader of the American Notes, among the letters in this volume, but we confess to a great disappointment in the poverty of letters of all the early period of Mr. Dickens's life, and the poorness of such as are preserved. It was before the penny post had destroyed the charm of English letter-writing, for in a letter from Brighton it is expressly noted that the postage would be 8d., and a doubt is

expressed by Mr. Dickens whether it would be worth the money. The book, on the whole, gives the general impression of a man of unresting activity, impatient and almost spasmodic, waywardness of purpose, lavishly generous and affectionate, but imperious and self-centred in his relations with friends,—of one

who almost demanded full appreciation from them as a right, and liked to dictate the terms of their common enjoyments. In

return, he was full of an almost womanly wealth of affec- tionate expressions as well as of generous actions ; but to judge from the manner of his notes to Mr. Forster, he must have been a most exigeaut friend, laying his commands on his associates with something of the royal manner, though of course a manner touched with the playfulness which alone would make such a manner from an equal tolerable. Mr. Forster was too heartily attached to Mr. Dickens to feel the tone of magnificent largesse which runs unpleasantly through the note accompanying his gift of a silver claret-jug :—

" ' Accept from me' (July 8th, 1840), ' as a slight memorial of your attached companion, the poor keepsake which accompanies this. My heart is not an eloquent one on matters which touch it most, but sup- pose this claret-jug the urn in which it lies, and believe that its warmest and truest blood is yours. This was the object of my fruitless search, and your curiosity, on Friday. At first I scarcely knew what trifle (you will doom it valuable, I know, for the giver's sake) to send you ; but I thought it would be pleasant to connect it with our jovial moments, and to let it add, to the wino we shall drink from it together, a flavour which the choioest vintage could never impart. Take it from my hand —filled to the brim and running over with truth and earnestness. I have just taken one parting look at it, and it seems the most elegant thing iu the world to rue, for I lose sight of the vase in the crowd of welcome associations that are clustering and wreathing themselves about it.' " Again, the melodrama which disfigures Dickens's novels is not by any means absent from his private life. He makes too much fuss by a great deal about the anguish of mind he felt in killing Little Nell, (whose death, by the way, Mr. Forster has the very great artistic credit of having recommended, as the only natural close to such a story). There is a curious vein of unreality running through the artistic feeling in the following letter :- "' Done ' he wrote back to me on Friday, the 7th, Done!!! Why bless you, I shall not be done till Wednesday night. I only began yesterday, and this part of the story is not to be galloped over, I can tell you. I think it will come famously—bat I am the wrotohedest of the wretched. It casts the most horrible shadow upon me, and it is as much as I can do to hoop moving at all. I tremble to approach the place a great deal more than Kit; a great deal more than Mr. Garland ; a great deal more than the Single Gentleman. I shan't recover it for a long time. Nobody will miss her like I shall. It is such a very painful thing to me, that I really cannot express my sorrow. Old wouuda bleed afresh when I only think of the way of doing it ; what the actual doing it will be, God knows. I can't preach to myself the schoolmaster's con- solation, though I try. Dear Mary died yesterday, when I think of this sad story. I don't know what to say about dining to-morrow—perhaps you'll send up to-morrow morning for news ? That'll be the best way. I have refused several invitations for this week and next, determining to go nowhere till I had done. I am afraid of disturbing the state I have been trying to get into."

A writer who feels that " the state he has been trying to get into " is not unlikely to be disturbed by a dinner party, and not to be easily recoverable after it, is not suffering so very much in his heart of hearts after all. There is a good deal of " making believe very much" in this letter,—of that rhetoric of sentiment which creeps into the 'pathos of the tale itself, powerful as it is, and which mingles with every pathetic scene Mr. Dickens ever wrote, the death of Paul Dombey certainly not excepted, injuring them all with the impression that the writer is cosseting himself for his own deep feelings, and gloating over the holy sensibilities he is so powerfully depicting. We do not deny the power for a moment, but no sensitive ear can avoid noticing the holy rapture which runs through it, and which is so utterly foreign to the deepest pathos of human life.

We seem to have been carping at a book which seems to us nevertheless wonderfully good in workmanship, and as near per- fection as a genuine admirer and friend,—and none other ought to have written it,—could in all probability make it. For our- selves, wo have always held that Mr. Dickens's fame, great as it is on other sides as well as the side of humour, will depend for its permanence and true greatness ou its humour alone, and we have been a little disappointed to find so little fresh illustration of his wonderful genius as a humourist in this volume, and so much of the peremptory and almost inflated self-importance which are the least pleasant of his characteristics. But after all, the volume is full of the keenest interest, and, Lamb alone excepted, we doubt whether of any truly great humourist (certainly any truly great humourist who had to force his way up in the world so completely as Dickens did) a story with less moral alloy in it could be told. He accomplished great things, and if he had a somewhat over- weening opinion of his own powers, and hardly knew where they stopped suddenly short, so well as he knew how great they were, that is one of the natural fruits of self-educated genius and of sudden and bewildering success.