DICKENS IN ELEGANT EXTRACTS.* Ix is not very easy to

conjecture what was Mr. Kent's object in setting himself his latest literary task. True, there has of late years been a revival of the taste for what used to be called in the last century "elegant extracts," and many recent volumes of " selections " are among the pleasantest companions of our solitude; but it is a mistake to suppose that because the works of any eminent writer are in their entirety admirable and enjoyable they must necessarily be equally admirable and en- joyable when cut up into little snippets labelled wit or wisdom, humour or pathos. A lump of coal may give a perfectly adequate idea of the quality of a coal-mine, but it has often been remarked that a brick does not satisfactorily serve as a sample of a house; and, so far as its illustrative value is con- cerned, this volume unfortunately bears a closer resemblance to a hod of bricks than to a sack of coal,

it is, indeed, to a considerable extent inevitable that this should be so. The novel, like the epic poem, is or ought to be an artistic unity, and it refuses to be "sampled" after the manner of the sampling favoured by Mr. Kent. The magnificent invo- cation in Paradise Lost beginning "Hail, holy light!" is one of perhaps half-a-dozen passages in that poem which do nbt suffer much by being torn from their context, and, if the comparison be not irreverent, the trial scene in Pickwick—dear to low-comedy elocutionists—can also stand alone ; but editors who make selections from Milton admit, by their practice, that the two epics are not a happy hunting-ground, and if Mr. Kent had taken a hint from them, he would have spared himself the trouble of producing a book which strikingly fails to justify its own existence. We cannot even say that the volume is as good

• The Humour and Pathos of Charles Dickens. Selected by Charles Kent. London: Chapman and

as it might be, though from our point of view, even that

verdict would be very faint praise. While frankly admitting that in making selections of this kind, individual taste must be allowed considerable liberty, we may not forget that there is such a thing as a recognised standard of merit; and against this standard Mr. Kent has sinned, both in the way of omission and of commission. For some of Dickens's best bits we search in vain, while the pages are crowded with many passages characterised only by vulgarity or inanity, and with others which are devoid of any character at all. Mr. Kent fails to give a single speci- men of the delightfully inconsequential conversation of Mrs. Nickleby, while the immortal Micawber, and the equally immortal Pecksniff are so inadequately represented, that

they might as well have been altogether ignored. We miss the exquisitely humorous symposium of Dick Swiveller and "the marchioness " in The Old Curiosity Shop, the meeting of the Watertoast Sympathisers, and the Pogram /euge in Martin Chuzzlewit, Mr. Chadband's discourse upon " Teruth " in Bleak House, the examinationof the school in Hard Times—one of the best examples of Dickens's humorous satire—and the literary negotiations between Mr. Boffin and Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend. On the other hand, we have the description of David Copperfield's intoxication, which is simply vulgar ; of Mrs. Skewton's paralysis, which is simply unpleasant ; of the spon- taneous combustion episode in Bleak House, which is simply nauseating ; and, in addition to these positive offences against healthy taste, our latest gleaner of elegant extracts has gathered together a number of miscellaneous clippings which, as they stand here, are destitute not merely of merit, but of meaning. If Mr. Kent really thinks that Dickens said something worth

quoting when he spoke of tears as "rain upon the blinding dust of earth overlying our hard hearts," he may possibly be right, and we, who hold very strongly the opposite opinion, may pos- sibly be wrong ; but surely he cannot find a single reader to agree with him in thinking that the following is a fine, or a characteristic, or even an intelligible passage :—

"About eleven or twelve at night comes back the governor in a chaise, along with Mr. Walmers and an elderly lady. Mr. Walmers looks amused and very serious, both at once, and says to oar misses, - 'We are mach indebted to you, ma'am, for your kind care of our

children, which we can never sufficiently acknowledge. Pray, in where is my boy ?' Our missus says,—' Cobbs has the dear charge, Sir. Cobbs, show Forty !' Then he says to Cobbs,

Ah Cobl s I am glad to see you ! I understood you was here.' And Cobbs says,—' Yes, Sir. Your most obedient, Sir.' I may be surprised to bear Boots say it, perhaps, bat Boots assures me that his heart beat like a hammer going upstairs. I beg your pardon, Sir,' says he, while unlocking the door, I hope you are not angry with Master Harry. For Master Harry is a fine boy, Sir, aud will do you credit and honour.' And Boots signifies to me that, if the fine boy's father had contradicted him in the daring ktate of mind in which be then was, he thinks he should have fetched him a crack' and taken the consequences."

In the place to which it belongs—the latter part of the little story, Boots at the Holly Tree Ian—this passage, if somewhat jerky, as Dickens was wont to be at times, is as intelligible and harmless as any other passage; but that is all that can possibly

be said of it, and to those who do not know the story, it will be not merely without point but without meaning. The worst of it is that this is not an exceptional slip, for the whole book is full of examples of similarly slovenly editorial work ; and the inevitable consequence is that, as a presentation of the author's prominent artistic qualities, it is a melancholy failure.

But we have said enough, perhaps too much, of Mr. Kent's editorial imperfections, which- are, after all, of comparatively

little importance. The greatest sufferer by them is Dickens himself, for while this selection casts the great writer's strong points into shadow, it places his weaknesses in "that fierce light which beats upon "—an elegant extract. It has more than once been remarked in these columns that there is in Dickens's pathos a certain unpleasant strain, a want of true spontaneity, and therefore of real passion. There is a story of how Macready, when he had to rush upon the stage in a state of furious anger, worked himself up to the proper pitch behind the scenes by violently shaking a ladder fastened against a wall; and Dickens followed Macready's example, with this difference, that he shook his ladder in full view of his audience. To change the figure, he seemed to say to himself, "Go to, I will be pathetic," and he allowed his readers to overhear the soliloquy, with the inevit- able consequence that instead of being touched they are simply irritated. This, as we have said, has been already made matter of comment ; but we think it has not been as distinctly pointed out that Dickens's humour, at any rate in his later works, is

affected with the same disease as his pathos. It was only in the early days, before he had become a victim to literary sell-con- sciousness, that his fun had that real laughter-producing quality which depends as much upon high spirits in the producer as

upon the presence of the intellectual elements of humour in the

product. Half the enjoyment felt by people who read Pickwick is a reflection of the enjoyment that Dickens felt in writing it ; and this latter enjoyment was entirely simple and objective—a delight in his creations rather than in his power of creating. This literary simplicity was, however, soon corrupted. After Martin Chuzzlewit, he produced no entirely natural and spon- taneous work, and even Mark Tapley suggests the forcing-

frame. In the early days the humorous conceptions crowded round him unsought. Then came a time when they occasionally

had to be searched for, and when found to be made the most of ; and there are even instances in which the result of the search in not humorous at all, but has to be made to seem so by that literary sleight-of-hand of which Dickens was so great a master. Take, for example, the passage from Great Expecta- tions, which Mr. Kent gives under the heading "Joe's Hat.'

Joe Gargery is paying a visit to Herbert, and we read that

"Joe, being invited to sit down to table, looked all round the room for a suitable spot OD which to deposit his hat—as if it were only on some few rare substances in nature that it could find a resting-place —and ultimately stood (sic) it on an extreme corner of the chimney. piece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at intervals."

The course of the conversation through the next few sentences

takes us away from the hat, but it is not forgotten, for its pos- sibilities are as yet unexhaasted. Herbert asks his visitor,—

" Have you seen anything of London yet ?'—' Why, yes, sir,' said Joe; 'me and Wopsle went off straight to look at the Blacking- Ware'us. But we didn't find that it come up to its likeness in the red bills at the shop-doors : which I meantersay,' added Joe, in an explanatory manner, 'as it is there drawd too architectoomlooral: I really believe Joe would have prolonged this ?word (mightily ex- pressive, to my mind, of some architecture that I know) into a perfect chorus, but for his attention being providentially attracted by his hat, which was toppling. Indeed, it demanded from him a constant attention, and a quickness of eye and band, very like that exacted by wicket-keeping. He made extraordinary play with it, and showed the greatest skill ; now rushing at it, and catching it neatly as it dropped; now, merely stopping it midway, beating it up, and humouring it in various parts of the room and against a good deal of the pattern of the paper of the wall, before he felt safe to close with it; finally, splashing it into the slop-basin, where I took the liberty of laying hands upon it."

There is a good deal of this kind of stuff in Dickens's later work, and we take it that it is not humour at all, but rather what Carlyle would have called a ghastly simulacrum of humour—a laboured straining after an effect which can never be produced by straining, but which is produced without any strain when the necessary conditions are present. We have read

nonsense-verses so cleverly constructed that a careless listener might easily imagine them to be perfectly sensible though a little obscure, and to such jeux d'esprit passages like this bear a strong resemblance. The words are manipulated so cleverly that there is a general "look " of humour, just as in the verses there is a similar " look " of intelligibility. Dickens's great humorous triumphs are, like all achievements of genius, essen- tially inimitable ; this kind of thing could be imitated ad libituns by any writer who had acquired the requisite knack. Dickens, in a letter to Mr. Kent, doubted whether he had anywhere a more genial reader, and we are quite willing to accept the testi- monial; but, in compiling a book like this, geniality is of less

consequence than critical tact, and Mr. Kent's lack of the latter quality is proved by the fact that Dickens, as represented in the majority of his pages, seems little more than an exceedingly clever literary conjuror.