CHARLES DICKENS'S LETTERS.* [SECOND NOTICE.] IN politics, Dickens professed to

be a strong Radical, but his Radicalism was founded rather on strong sympathy with the poor, and a certain contempt for the conventional Conservatism, of purse-proud property and so-called economical doctrine, than any very strong grasp of political principle. Such Radicalism as was deepest in him is poured forth, in rather sentimental and incoherent fashion, in The Chimes, and consists in a just and indignant protest against the sweeping misjudgment of the poor by the rich, and against the absurd confusion between certain economical calculations and the doctrinaire maxims which a few narrow-minded persons choose to found upon them. This • The Leiters qf Charts, Dickens. Edited by his Sister-in-Law and hie Eldest Daughter. In 2 vole. London: Chapman and Hall.

kind of Radicalism finds very powerful expression in the following characteristic letter :—

"Oh Heaven, if you could have been with me at a hospital dinner last Monday ! There were men there who made such speeches and expressed such sentiments as any moderately intelligent dustman would have blushed through his cindery bloom to have thought of. Sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, over-fed, apoplectic, snorting cattle, and the auditory leaping up in their delight I never saw such an illustration of the power of purse, or felt so degraded and debased by its contemplation, since I have had eyes and ears. The absurdity of the thing was too horrible to laugh at. It was per- fectly overwhelming. But if I could have partaken it with anybody who would have felt it as you would have done, it would have had quite another aspect ; or would at least, like a ' classic mask' (oh d-- that word !) have had one funny side to relieve its dismal features."

But when we emerge from the life of hearty sympathy with the poor and their difficulties, which, in Dickens's case, was very genuine and vivid, into what may be more truly called the world of politics, we do not find his Radicalism worth very much. Thus, in the great American struggle between North and South, which he, if any man, ought to have thoroughly. understood, his sympathies are always on the wrong side, and his predictions as 'unfortunate as his sympathies are false. Thus, on February 1st, 1861, before Mr. Lincoln had assumed the Presidency, Charles Dickens writes :—" The American busi- ness is the greatest English sensation here at present. I venture to predict that the struggle of violence will be a very short one, and will be soon succeeded by some new compact between the Northern and Southern States." That this prediction showed a singular misapprehension of the depth of the conflicting principles at work, every one now knows. But the curious thing is, that the longer the struggle lasted, the more blind Dickens became. On December 3rd, in the first year of the war, at the time of the misunderstanding between England and America in relation to the Trent ' affair, Dickens sent this answer to a question of his daughter's, evidently under the impression, very common in England at that time, that the North would seize that occasion to quarrel with England, either from a complete infatuation, which implied their utter incapacity to measure their resources and gauge the magnitude of the struggle in which they were engaged, or else as an excuse for patching up a peace with the South on some such terms as he had prophesied in the sentence we have already quoted :—" To her question, Will there be war with America ?' I answer Yes ;' I fear the North to be utterly mad, and war to be unavoidable." Again he was not only quite wrong, but wrong for just the same reason as before,—that he utterly failed to understand the earnestness of the North, and the genuine and deep principle which inspired those amongst the people of the North who really dictated the lines on which the struggle was conducted. The next notice of Dickens's view of the war shows a still deeper

perversion of his judgment. It is in a letter dated May 28th, 1863, i.e., before Vicksburg was taken, and at the darkest hour of the struggle for the North. This is the passage :—" A very in- telligent German friend, just home from America, maintains that the conscription will succeed in the North, and that the war will be indefinitely prolonged. I say, No,' and that how- ever mad and villainous the North is, the war will finish by reason of its not supplying soldiers. We shall see. The more

they brag, the more I don't believe in them." We notice in

that not merely the old, false conception of the struggle, but that positive hatred of the Northern cause which has now ripened so much that ho actually calls the people "villainous,"—as opposed, we suppose, to the South, who were the martyrs and victims of this "villainy." But the worst of all the criticisms which this noble struggle on behalf of freedom elicited from Dickens, is that contained in a letter at the end of 1865, after Mr. Lincoln's assassination, and

the complete victory of the Northern cause. In this letter he

says, "With a settled animosity towards the French usurper [Louis Napoleon], I believe him to have been always sound in his desire to divide the States against themselves, and that we were unsound and wrong in letting I dare not, wait upon I would.'" That is, he would have plunged us into the most iniquitous project of modern times,—a war for the cause of slavery, its motive being our jealousy of the union and strength of a great Anglo-Saxon people. In this same letter is contained

a curious little indication of the indifference felt by Dickens,—

in conjunction, no doubt, with a great many other persons of suffi- cient weight of political character,—to the cause of justice, when

the consideration in one scale was the " Imperial " policy in Eng-

land, and in the other, the lives and liberty of a mere crowd of negroes. In reference to Godernor Eyre, and the Jamaica court- martials, he writes :—" The Jamaica insurrection is another hopeful piece of business. That platform sympathy with the black--or the native, or the devil—afar off, and that platform indifference to our own countrymen at enormous odds in the midst of bloodshed and savagery, makes me stark-wild_ Only the other day here was a meeting of jawbones of asses at Manchester, to censure the Jamaica Governor for his manner of putting down the insurrection." Evidently Dickens's violent prejudices clouded his usual accuracy of observation. Governor Eyre was blamed, and very justly blamed, for what he did—not while he was in clanger, but after he was quite safe, and when the cruelties he sanctioned were the mere excesses of a panic- stricken caste. Dickens's social Radicalism, so far as it consisted in hearty sympathy with the poor, and a deem knowledge of them, was sound and noble. His political Liberal- ism was very like the late Mr. Roebuck's, liable to fail him just at the pinch when Liberalism most needed his support.

But we must not conclude our notice of a book which, though twice too long, and especially too long in the tedious egotism of the letters on his public readings, is full of charm, by dwell-. ing on the weaker side of our great humomist. Let us give, in conclusion, first, a delightful letter describing the persecution which his well-known generosity brought upon him from all charit-. able associations, and then two very amusing letters, written at very different times, on an incident in the story of his most won- derful creation, "Mrs. Harris." Here is the letter on the martyr- dom to which the great charities exposed him, at the time he was living in Tavistock Square :—

"My DEAR YATES' —For a good many years I have suffered a great m deal from charities, but never anything like what I suffer now. The amount of correspondence they inflict upon me is really incredible. But this is nothing. Benevolent men get behind the piers of the gates, lying in wait for my going out ; and when I peep shrinkingly from my study-windows, I see their pot-bellied shadows projected on the gravel. Benevolent bullies drive up in hansom cabs (with en- graved portraits of their benevolent institutions hanging over the- aprons, like banners on their outward walls), and stay long at the door. Benevolent area-sneaks get lost in the kitchens and are found to impede the circulation of the knife-cleaning machine. My man, has been hoard to say (at The Burton Arms) 'that if it was a wicious place, well and good— that met door work ; but that wen all the Christian wirtuea is always a-shoulderin' and a-holberin 'on you in the 'all, a-tryite to git past you and cut upstairs into master's room, why no wages as you couldn't name wouldn't make it up to you,'—Persecuted ever."

And here are the letters on the demeanour of Mrs. Harris after the birth of "the Princess Royal of the house of Harris ";— " DEAR SIR,—Mrs. Harris being in that delicate state (just con- fined and made comfortable,' in fact), hears some sounds below, which she fancies may be the owls (or howls) of the husband to- whom she is devoted. They ease her mind by informing her that these sounds are only organs. By 'they' I mean the gossips and attendants. By ' organs ' I mean instrumental boxes with barrels. in them, which are commonly played by foreigners under the windows of people of sedentary pursuits, on a speculation of being bribed to leave the street. Mrs. Harris, being of a confiding nature, believed in this pious fraud, and was fully satisfied that his owls- was organs."

"My DEAR YATES —Your quotation is, as I supposed, all wrong. The text is not 'which his 'owls was organs.' When Mr. Harris went into an empty dog-kennel, to spare his sensitive nature the anguish of overhearing Mrs. Harris's exclamations on the occasion of the birth of her first child (the Princess Royal of the Harris family), he never. took his hands away from his ears, or came out once, till he was showed the baby.' On encountering that spectacle, be was (being of a weakly constitution) took with fits.' For this distressing corn-. plaint he was medically treated ; the doctor 'collared him, and laid him on his back upon the airy stones,'—please to observe what follows—' and she was told, to ease her mind, his 'owls; was organs.' That is to say, Mrs. Harris, lying exhausted on her bed, in the first sweet relief of freedom from pain, merely covered with the counter- pane, and not yet 'put comfortable,' bears a noise apparently pro- ceeding from the back-yard, and says, in a flushed and hysterical manner : What 'owls are those ? Who is a.'owling ? Not my ugebond ? ' Upon which the doctor, looking round one of the bottom posts of the bed, and taking Mrs. Harris's pulse in a re- assuring manner, says, with much admirable presence of mind Howls, my dear madam no, no, no ! What are we thinking of ? Bowls, my dear Mrs. Harris ? Ha, ha, ha! Organs, ma'am, organs. Organs in the streets, Mrs. Harris; no howls.'—Yours faithfully."

The book is full of rather restless vitality from beginning to end,—so restless, that we feel the full force of a remark made in a letter to Macready, in one of the most trying years of Dickens's life, the year 1858 :—" What a dream it is, this work and strife,.

and how little we do in the dream, after all! Only last night,. in my sleep, I was getting over a perspective of barriers with my hands and feet bound. Pretty much what We are all about,. waking, I think." Certainly, there have been few men of great genius less capable of rest in the deeper sense, than Charles Dickens,—few men whose genius would have been more enriched by the capacity for rest, had only that capacity been consistent, —which in this condition of existence it pro- bably was not, —with the marvellous powers which were kept at full tension from his earliest youth to the day of his death.