THE SCHOLARLY PAGES
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Our Mutual Friend is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr. Dickens's works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion. It is wanting in inspiration. For the last ten years it has seemed to us that Mr. Dickens has been unmistakably forcing himself. Bleak House was forced; Little Dorrit was labored; the present work is dug out as with a spade and pickaxe. Of course -- to anticipate the usual argument -- who but Dickens could have written it? Who, indeed? Who else would have established a lady in business in a novel on the admirably solid basis of her always putting on gloves and tieing a handkerchief round her head in moments of grief, and of her habitually addressing her family with "Peace! hold!" It is needless to say that Mrs. Reginald Wilfer is first and last the occasion of considerable true humor. When, after conducting her daughter to Mrs. Boffin's carriage, in sight of all the envious neighbors, she is described as enjoying her triumph during the next quarter of an hour by airing herself on the door-step "in a kind of splendidly serene trance," we laugh with as uncritical a laugh as could be desired of us. We pay the same tribute to her assertions, as she narrates the glories of the society she enjoyed at her father's table, that she has known as many as three copper-plate engravers exchanging the most exquisite sallies and retorts there at one time. But when to these we have added a dozen more happy examples of the humor which was exhaled from every line of Mr. Dickens's earlier writings, we shall have closed the list of the merits of the work before us. To say that the conduct of the story, with all its complications, betrays a long-practised hand, is to pay no compliment worthy the author. If this were, indeed, a compliment, we should be inclined to carry it further, and congratulate him on his success in what we should call the manufacture of fiction; for in so doing we should express a feeling that has attended us throughout the book. Seldom, we reflected, had we read a book so intensely written, so little seen, known, or felt. In all Mr. Dickens's works the fantastic has been his great resource; and while his fancy was lively and vigorous it accomplished great things. But the fantastic, when the fancy is dead, is a very poor business. The movement of Mr. Dickens's fancy in Mrs. Wilfer and Mr. Boffin and Lady Tippins, and the Lammles and Miss Wren, and even in Eugene Wrayburn, is, to our mind, a movement lifeless, forced, mechanical. It is the letter of his old humor without the spirit. It is hardly too much to say that every character here put before us is a mere bundle of eccentricities, animated by no principle of nature whatever. In former days there reigned in Mr.. Dickens's extravagances a comparative consistency; they were exaggerated statements of types that really existed. We had, perhaps, never known a Newman Noggs, nor a Pecksniff, nor a Micawber; but we had known persons of whom these figures were but the strictly logical consummation. But among the grotesque creatures who occupy the pages before us, there is not one whom we can refer to as an existing type. In all Mr. Dickens's stories, indeed, the reader has been called upon, and has willingly consented, to accept a certain number of figures or creatures of pure fancy, for this was the author's poetry. He was, moreover, always repaid for his concession by a peculiar beauty or power in these exceptional characters. But he is now expected to make the same concession with a very inadequate reward. What do we get in return for accepting Miss Jenny Wren as a possible person? This young lady is the type of a certain class of characters of which Mr. Dickens has made a speciality, and with which he has been accustomed to draw alternate smiles and tears, according as he pressed one spring or another. But this is very cheap merriment and very cheap pathos. Miss Jenny Wren is a poor little dwarf, afflicted, as she constantly reiterates, with a "bad back" and "queer legs," who makes dolls' dresses, and is for ever pricking at those with whom she converses, in the air, with her needle, and assuring them that she knows their "tricks and their manners." Like all Mr. Dickens's pathetic characters, she is a little monster; she is deformed, unhealthy, unnatural; she belongs to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and precocious children who have carried on the sentimental business in all Mr. Dickens's novels; the little Nells, the Smikes, the Paul Dombeys. Mr. Dickens goes as far out of the
way for his wicked people as he does for his good ones. Rogue
Riderhood, indeed, in the present story, is villanous with a
sufficiently natural villany; he belongs to that quarter of society
in which the author is most at his ease. But was there ever such
wickedness as that of the Lammles and Mr. Fledgby? Not that people
have not been as mischievous as they; but was any one ever mischievous
in that singular fashion? Did a couple of elegant swindlers ever
take such particular pains to be aggressively inhuman? -- for
we can find no other word for the gratuitous distortions to which
they are subjected. The word humanity strikes us as strangely
discordant, in the midst of these pages; for, let us boldly declare
it, there is no humanity here. Humanity is nearer home than the
Boffins, and the Lammles, and the Wilfers, and the Veneerings.
it is in what men have in common with each other, and not in
what they have in distinction. The people just named have nothing
in common with each other, except the fact that they have nothing
in common with mankind at large. What a world were this world
if the world of Our Mutual Friend were an honest reflection
of it! But a community of eccentrics is impossible. Rules alone
are consistent with each other; exceptions are inconsistent.
Society is maintained by natural sense and natural feeling. We
cannot conceive a society in which these principles are not in
some manner represented. Where in these pages are the depositaries
of that intelligence without which the movement of life would
cease? Who represents nature? Accepting half of Mr. Dickens's
persons as intentionally grotesque, where are those exemplars
of sound humanity who should afford us the proper measure of
their companions' variations? We ought not, in justice to the
author, to seek them among his weaker -- that is, his mere conventional
-- characters; in John Harmon, Lizzie Hexam, or Mortimer Lightwood;
but we assuredly cannot find them among his stronger -- that
is, his artificial creations. Suppose we take Eugene Wrayburn
and Bradley Headstone. They occupy a half-way position between
the habitual probable of nature and the habitual impossible of
Mr. Dickens. A large portion of the story rests upon the enmity
borne by Headstone to Wrayburn, both being in love with the same
woman. Wrayburn is a gentleman, and Headstone is one of the people.
Wrayburn is well-bred, careless, elegant, sceptical, and idle;
Headstone is a high-tempered, hard-working, ambitious young school-master.
There lay in the opposition of these two characters a very good
story. But the prime requisite was that they should be
characters: Mr. Dickens, according to his usual plan, has made
them simply figures, and between them the story that was to be,
the story that should have been, has evaporated. Wrayburn lounges
about with his hands in his pockets, smoking a cigar, and talking
nonsense. Headstone strides about, clenching his fists and biting
his lips and grasping his stick. There is one scene in which
Wrayburn chaffs the schoolmaster with easy insolence, while the
latter writhes impotently under his well-bred sarcasm. This scene
is very clever, but it is very insufficient. If the majority
of readers were not so very timid in the use of words we should
call it vulgar. By this we do not mean to indicate the conventional
impropriety of two gentlemen exchanging lively personalities;
we mean to emphasize the essentially small character of these
personalities. In other words, the moment, dramatically, is great,
while the author's conception is weak. The friction of the two
men, of two characters, of two passions, produces stronger
sparks than Wrayburn's boyish repartees and Headstone's melodramatic
commonplaces. Such scenes as this are useful in fixing the limits
of Mr. Dickens's insight. Insight is, perhaps, too strong a word;
for we are convinced that it is one of the chief conditions of
his genius not to see beneath the surface of things. If we might
hazard a definition of his literary character, we should, accordingly,
call him the greatest of superficial novelists. We are aware
that this definition confines him to an inferior rank in the
department of letters which he adorns; but we accept this consequence
of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence against
humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists. For,
to repeat what we have already intimated, he has created nothing
but figure. He has added nothing to our understanding of human
character. He is master of but two alternatives: he reconciles
us to what is commonplace, and he reconciles us to what is odd.
The value of the former service is questionable; and the manner
in which Mr. Dickens performs it sometimes conveys a certain
impression of charlatanism. The value of the latter service is
incontestable, and here Mr. Dickens is an honest, an admirable
artist. But what is the condition of the truly great novelist?
For him there are no alternatives, for him there are no oddities,
for him there is nothing outside of humanity. He cannot shirk
it; it imposes itself upon him. For him alone, therefore, there
is a true and a false; for him alone it is possible to be right,
because it is possible to be wrong. Mr. Dickens is a great observer
and a great humorist, but he is nothing of a philosopher. Some
people may hereupon say, so much the better; we say, so much
the worse. For a novelist very soon has need of a little philosophy.
In treating of Micawber, and Boffin, and Pickwick, et hoc
genus omne, he can, indeed, dispense with it, for this --
we say it with all deference -- is not serious writing. But when
he comes to tell the story of a passion, a story like that of
Headstone and Wrayburn, he becomes a moralist as well as an artist.
he must know man as well as men, and to know man
is to be a philosopher. The writer who knows men alone, if he
have Mr. Dickens's humor and fancy, will give us figures and
pictures for which we cannot be too grateful, for he will enlarge
our knowledge of the world. But when he introduces men and women
whose interest is preconceived to lie not in the poverty, the
weakness, the drollery of their natures, but in their complete
and unconscious subjection to ordinary and healthy human emotions,
all his humor, all his fancy, will avail him nothing, if, out
of the fulness of his sympathy, he is unable to prosecute those
generalizations in which alone consists the real greatness of
a work of art. This may sound like very subtle talk about a very
simple matter; it is rather very simple talk about a very subtle
matter. A story based upon those elementary passions in which
alone we seek the true and final manifestation of character must
be told in a spirit of intellectual superiority to those passions.
That is, the author must understand what he is talking about.
The perusal of a story so told is one of the most elevating experiences
within the reach of the human mind. The perusal of a story which
is not so told is infinitely depressing and unprofitable. |
"The Dickens review is perhaps the most acute of all of Henry's early writings; he is freeing himself of an early idol and at the same time giving free play to his critical faculties."
Inevitably, when establishing his own stand as a fiction-writer, James reacted strongly against Dickens's methods, but his later criticism has many generous references to him. In 1880, he declined to write the "English Men of Letters" volume on Dickens, preferring to cherish his memories rather than to overhaul them critically. |
