THE DISPUTE ABOUT THE GENIUS OF DICKENS.
LORD DERBY not long ago recalled to one of his audiences at Liverpool the old definition of Genius, that it is only a power of taking much greater pains about a certain class of subjects than it is in other people to take. In other words, genius, so defined, flows from the labour and concentration of attention, though the taste or predisposition which renders that labour and concentration possible because delightful, may fairly be re- garded as the ultimate root of it. That is a very good defini- tion of a good deal of what the world calls genius. But it would be difficult to imagine any definition which would be fur- ther from the mark of the kind of genius which must be ascribed to Dickens. At least, if the great humourist's genius is to be brought within this definition at all, we must describe all the bright- ness and truth of momentary flashes of perception, and equally momentary humorous combinations, to a power of taking pains, which would certainly be a very eccentric and forced construction of the term. Indeed, it can hardly be said that in any intellectual way Dickens had much power of taking pains in the common sense of that term. It has been observed that if he went down a street, he had more power of telling you what he had seen in that street than all the rest of the passers-by in the whole day would have made out amongst them. He caught character, so far as it could be caught in a glance of the eye, as no other Englishman probably ever yet caught it. Mr. Forster, who in his new volume resents warmly a criticism of Mr. Lewes's on the want of true individual characteristics in Dickens's set types of character,—such as Pecksniff, who is pure humbug ; Micawber, who is "always confident of something turning up, always crushed and rebounding, and always making punch ;" Mrs. Genii), who is always referring to "sicking," and " monthlying," and so forth,—Mr. Forster, we say, rashly maintains that there is nothing of this sort in the earlier tales, especially " Pick- wick " and its immediate followers. Surely Mr. Wardle's fat boy, Sawyer late Kuockemorf, Mr. Jingle, Mr. Tnpman, Mr. Winkle, Mr. Pickwick himself, Mr. Weller, senior, nay, we will say even the great Sam Weller himself, are all types made in keeping with one ruling feature, though Dickens's wonderful fancy and curious store of miscellaneous observations enabled him so to vary the appropriate illustrations of that ruling feature, that something which looked like the variety and ease of life resulted from the variation. It seems to us almost absurd to deny that the power of kaleidoscopic variation and multiplication of the same general characteristic, is the main key to Dickens's humour and power. Even in "Oliver Twist," where Nancy and Sykes at least seem to reach a stage of individualisation-beyond anything that can be thus accounted for, by far the greater part of the book is occupied with sketches which fall under the same general rule, such as those of Noah Claypole, of the Dodger, and Flash Toby Crackit. But not the less do we quite agree with Mr. Forster that Mr. Lewes's mode of explaining Dickens's popularity as the result of a kind of glamour of enthusiasm which he threw over his figures, like that which the child throws over a wooden horse, till it really represents to him an actual horse, is a mere blunder. We should say, on the contrary, that that popularity is due to the wonderful breadth of real life which Dickens was able to lay under contribution for the illus- tration of his various types, and that he had little or no power of throwing a deceptive glamour of enthusiasm over inadequate de- scriptions. All that could be known by the help of astounding capacity for swift, sudden, and keen vision, and through that large sense of humour which brings an indefinite range of analogy and contrast within the field of view at any one moment, Dickens knew and painted. The result was that he easily divined the secret of almost every crotchetty and superficial vein of character that came within his view. Every one tells you that they have met with a real Mrs. Nickleby and with a real Mr. Micawber, and the present writer could quote sayings of a person known to him, far more Micawberish than Micawber's own. So all the secrets of any professional life with which he was familiar, were made by Dickens completely his own. Nothing so perfect as his pawnbrokers and his undertakers, his beadles and hia matrons, his boarding - housekeepers and hie bone-articulators, his dolls' dressmakers, his Yorkshire schoolmasters, his travelling players, and his wax-work men, his fire-eating editors and his Yankee rogues, were ever produced for us before. But then all these characters are photographs from a superficial stratum of real life, which he hardly ever goes beneath, and where, if he does go beneath it, he is apt to fail. While he sticks to his local colour, only varying it as his extraordinary experience in the varieties of local colour taught him to do, he is a wonder and a delight to his readers. Directly he Wee to create anything in which his swift decisive knowledge of detail does not help him, anything in which a general knowledge of the passions and heart • and intellect of man is more needed than a special knowledge of the dialect of a profession or the habits of a class, he too often loses all his certainty of touch, and becomes a painful mannerist.. Compare Nicholas and Kate Nickleby with their mother and little Miss La Creevy. The former are nobodies, the latter great suc- cesses. Compare Mr. Browulow, or Rose Maylie, or any of the ordin- ary human beings in "Oliver Twist," or even Oliver himself when he has ceased to be the terrified little boy, with any of the thieves or scoundrels in that delightful book. Compare the merely human beings in "Martin Chuzzlewit" with the typical beings, and it is always the same. Directly the shaft is sunk beneath the charac- terising stratum of some particular type of manners, the fountain no longer seems bubbling-up with life. It does not follow that Dickens did not produce a vast num'ser of really life-like figures. It rather follows that he did. Not only do eccentricities, who really are moulded on the type of a few remarkable traits, actually exist, but characters so much moulded by class as to breathe, at first at least, all the class-flavour, all the professional bouquet which Dickens attributes to them, actually exist. Sam Weller is hardly more than the distilled life of a sharp, cockney servant, a wit of the lower class, who knows London trickery well, and never loses his temper ; but then such characters, no doubt, have existed ; and the only defect about Sam Weller is one which no one would feel who had not known such a person intimately enough to find out that he had passions and superstitions and affections of his own which would not completely fit into the typical frame- work, which were apt sometimes to break through it. Dickens seems to Us never to fail in this kind of typical sketch, unless he prolongs his story so as to exhaust his stock of illustrations for it, and then he often does fail by harping monotonously on the fundamental string. Every one is sick of Carker's teeth and Susan Nipper's pertness long before the end of "Dombey." Even Toots's packs of cards, "for Mr. Dombey, for Mrs. Dombey, for Miss Dombey," pall upon us. Honest John Browdie's loud Yorkshire jollity grows tiresome before "Nicholas Nickleby " is at an end, and Lord Frederick Verisopht only regains a gleam of individual character at the moment of his death. John Willett's stupid study of the Boiler in " Barnaby Rudge" is exhausted almost before it is begun, and even Miss Miggs's malice and hypocrisy are worked a little too hard before the tale is out. As for the good characters, —the young lady who "points upwards," for instance, in " Cop- perfield,"—they are hardly ever tolerable after their first appear- ance. Dickens had no special store of experience from which to paint them, and his general knowledge of the human heart and mind was by no means profound.
Indeed this is a natural result of his biographer's admission that Dickens had no refuge within himself, no "city of the mind" for inward consolation. Without that it would have been hardly possible for him to gain the command of the deeper secrets of human emotion and passion. No author indeed could draw more power- fully than he the mood of a man hunted by a fixed idea, a shadowy apprehension, a fear, a dream, a remorse. If Dickens had to describe the restlessness of a murderer, or the panic of a man apprehending murder, he did it with a vigour and force that make the blood curdle. But there, again, he was studying in a world of most specific experience. He was a vivid dreamer, and no one knew better the sort of supremacy which a given idea gets over the mind in a dream, and in those waking states of nervous apprehension akin to dreams. Where he utterly fails is in giving the breadth of ordinary life to ordinary characters. He never drew a mere artisan, or a mere labourer or labourer's wife, or a mere shopkeeper, or a mere gentleman or lady, or a mere man or woman of rank. Without something to render such characters peculiar and special, he made the most wooden work of them, simply because he had no field of special experience upon which to draw for their delineation.
But after all, wonderful as are the riches of the various specific worlds which Dickens ransacked for his creations, there is nothing
in him, as the most realistic and picturesque of describers, to equal
his humour. The wealth and subtlety of his contrasts, the fine aim of his exaggerations, the presence of mind (which is the soul of wit) displayed in his satire, the exquisitely professional character
of the sentiments and metaphors which fall from his characters, the combined audacity and microscopic delicacy of his shading in caricature, the quaint flights of his fancy in illustrating a mon- strous absurdity, the suddenness of his strokes at one moment, the cumulative perseverance of his touches at another, all make him such a humourist as many centuries are not likely to re- produce. But then humour of this kind is not necessarily connected with any deep knowledge of the heart and mind of man, and of such a knowledge we can see little trace in
• Dickens. He had a memory which could retain, and an imagina- tion which could sublimate, and a fancy which could indefinitely vary almost any trait which had once fixed itself in his mind ; but the traits which did so fix themselves, were almost always peculiarities, and his human figures are only real so far as they reproduce the real oddities of life, or what to a man in Dickens's rank and class seemed real oddities ; and of course, while there are many real oddities in the world, these are not the staple of our average life,—with which indeed Dickens's genius never dealt either willingly or successfully.
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