Arthur Quiller-Couch

“ I I take up my parable for a few words more upon the point at which I broke off last week—the essential greatness of Dickens. For greatness is a quality in some few men: indefinable perhaps, but yet to be recognised; a certain thing and, by those of us who would traffic with life or literature, not to be overlooked or denied save at our soul’s peril, no matter what standard of artistry or of refined scholarship we may set up: a quality in itself, moreover, and not any addition or multiplication or raising of talent by industry. ”

“ You get little or none of that solemn, sweet rusticity in Dickens: nor of the rush of England in spring with slow country-folk watching it:
The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit;
In every street these tunes our ears do greet—
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
Spring, the sweet Spring! You will remember that Pickwick, in its first conception, was to deal with the adventures and misadventures of a Sporting Club after the fashion of the Handley Cross series by Surtees. ”

“ Gamp?
I grant you that he has not yet passed—as he has not yet had time to pass—the great test of a classical writer; which is that, surviving the day’s popularity and its conditions, his work goes on meaning more, under quite different conditions, to succeeding ages; the great test which Shakespeare has passed more than once or twice, remaining to-day, though quite differently, even more significant than he was to his contemporaries. I grant—as in another lecture I shall be at pains to show—that Dickens’ plots were usually incredible, often monstrous. ”

“ These things work out to this—that in dealing with Dickens we have to lay our account—as in dealing with Shakespeare we have to lay our account—with a genius capable of vast surprises but at any point liable to bolt out of self-control. I have no theories at all of what a genius should be, or of how it ought to behave. Let us take what the gods give and be thankful: and with Dickens as with Shakespeare—both of whom write execrably at times and at times above admiration—we have to accept this inequality as a condition of our arriving at the very best. ”

“ Decent folk, bred in the incurable belief that England, whoever suffers, must pay her debts, sell out and suffer, breaking up old homes, cutting neighbourly ties, disappearing, taxed out of endurance, electing to suffer, for honour’s sake. Succeeds a generation or two which, at school or University, are baptised into the old honourable cult. The gravity of an Englishman, because they are English after all, revives and takes possession of young hearts, made generous by education, forgetful of old woes. ”

“ But set against this, first and in front of it, the great fact that an inventor is great not only because he does a thing well, but because he could do it at all. Disraeli in Coningsby invented the political novel: and I know nothing to compare with that book unless it be his own Endymion in which so touchingly an old man, dejected from political office and power, seeks back with all his worldly wisdom, as one walking out into a garden in a lunar light of memory, to recapture the rose of youth. ”

“ Literary genius may be devoted, as with Milton; nonchalant, as with Congreve; elaborately draped, as with Tennyson. Catullus or Burns may splash your face and run on; but always the unmistakable god has passed your way. In reading Trollope one’s sense of trafficking with genius arises more and more evidently out of his large sincerity—a sincerity in bulk, so to speak; wherefore, to appraise him, you must read him in bulk, taking the good with the bad, even as you must with Shakespeare. ”

“ We may derive solace, if we will, by telling ourselves that those horrible days in the Chandos Street blacking-warehouse were a part of the education of Dickens’ genius, taught it to observe, and so on. But I say to you, as he said of Little Dorrit, that such a shadow of cruelty, induced upon a sensitive boy, must inevitably leave its stain: and I do most earnestly ask you, some of whom may find yourselves trustees for the education of poor children, if you are sure that Dickens himself was the better for a starved childhood? ”

“ Well, to begin with, it is a crowded world, a world that in his imagination positively teems with folk going, coming, hurrying: of innumerable streets where you may knock in (and welcome) at any chance door to find the house in accumulated misery, poverty, woe, or else in a disorder of sausages and squalling children, with a henpecked husband at one end of the table, a bowl of punch in the middle, and at the other end a mortuary woman whose business in life is to make a burden of life to all who live near her and would have her cheerful. ”

“ But if he also created that world of his own, so much the grander creator he!—As if he made men and women walk and talk in it, compelling us to walk with them, and listen, and, above all, open our lungs and laugh, suffer within the tremendous illusion, so much is he the more potent magician! I also feel, in reading Shakespeare, or Dickens—I would add Burke—as I feel with no fourth that I am dealing with a scope of genius quite incalculable ”

“ Now if you accept no more than a much lower estimate of Dickens than I am preaching, you will be apt to dismiss what I have just been saying as “tall talk”: and you will be quite mistaken, because it applies from Shakespeare down to men of infinitesimally less desert than Dickens; to every small artist, in fact, whose conscience will not cease harrying him until he improves on his best: a process which obviously—and, as a matter of history, with the great authors—never stops until they come to the grave. ”

“ I have instanced his fools only, and but a select two or three of these for a test: but you may take, if you will, shrewd men, miserly men, ruffians, doctors, proctors, prisoners, schoolmasters, coachmen, licensed victuallers, teetotallers, thieves, monthly nurses—whatever the choice be, Dickens will shake them out of his sleeve to populate a world for us. For, like Balzac, he has a world of his own and can at call dispense to us of its abundance. ”

“ I have said some hard things, Gentlemen, upon Thackeray and have indicated some dislike of him here and there, or, at least, some impatience. But to the man who could at once so poignantly and so reticently157 bring those two scenes into contrast—with all its meaning—all meaning—modulated to so perfect a balance of heart and intelligence wedded in human speech—well, to that man I conclude by bowing the head, acknowledging a real master: a great melancholy man with his genius running in streaks, often in thin streaks about him but always, when uttered, uttered in liquid lovely prose. ”

“ To this question I oppose for the moment my opinion that, were I asked to choose out of the story of English Literature a short list of the most fecund authors, I should start with Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Dickens, Browning. If compelled to reduce the list to three, choosing the three most lavishly endowed by God with imagination for their fellows’ good, I almost think that among all God’s plenty I should choose, as pre-eminent stars, Shakespeare, Burke and Dickens. ”

“ Smollett’s recipe for a novel is just a rattling picaresque story enlivened by jocular horse-play. Respect Fanny Burney and idolise Jane Austen as we will, they move their plots on a narrow and sheltered stage: while the romantics, working up from Horace Walpole to Scott, call in the past to redress the poverty of the present and the emptiness of a general theory of the arts which, deservedly sovereign in its day, has passed by imitation into convention, and through convention, as always, into mere inanition. ”

“ He had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if in all his life, he never ceased from self-education, but went unswervingly in the pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise.
“Unswervingly”?—no, not unswervingly. No great genius that ever was has marched unswervingly on. As a condition of becoming a great artist he must be more sensitive than his fellows; as a result of that sensitiveness he will doubt, hesitate, draw back to leap the better. ”

“ Mediocrity of circumstance and mediocrity of soul for ever return to the centre of his stage; a more wretched or a grander existence is sometimes broached, but the pendulum swings back, and we return, with the relief with which we put on our slippers after the most romantic excursion, to a golden mediocrity—to mutton and beer, and to love and babies in a suburban villa with one frowsy maid.
Yes, that is true enough, but not all the truth. Dickens entered the theatre by the stage door ”

“ Thackeray held out a hand, which Dickens did not refuse.
Now may I put in here, Gentlemen, and in parenthesis, a word of which I have often wanted to unburden myself?... Some of you—some of the best of you, I hope—may leave Cambridge for Fleet Street, a street which I too have trodden. It is a street of ambitions; but withal the centre of our English Republic of Letters, in the motto of which, though there can be no “Equality,” let us neither exclude the “Liberty” that Milton fought for, nor the “Fraternity” of elder and younger brethren. ”

“ But now let us see what a light this conscious popularity throws upon two important events in Dickens’ career: his visit to the United States in 1842, and his invention, the next year, of the “Christmas Book.”
Dickens went over to America as a great personage: securely, but neither immodestly nor overweeningly conscious of it. He went over also as a great and genuine early-Victorian radical; something better than any politician; an unbribed and unbribable writer, immensely potent, with a pen already dedicated to war against social abuses. ”

“ None the less, and to the end, Dickens the artist is hag-ridden by this business of “plot,” which for him meant “stage-plot.” It hampers him in book after book, as its silly exigencies perpetually get in the way of the reader’s pleasure, even of the reader’s understanding. His genius did not lie that way, any more than did Shakespeare’s. I put in this comparison, for it can never be untimely for a Professor of English Literature to get in a word to damn the school-books which present Shakespeare to you as chasing along his shelves for some Italian novel to provide him with a new plot. ”

“ What a superb and crushing reply to the vulgar insults of such malignant boobies and poetasters as G. H. Lewes and Co. (too numerous a Co.!) is the witness of ... such a man among men!... After all, like will to like—genius will find out genius, and goodness will recognise goodness.
Tolstoy to Dickens.... That is how the tall ships, the grandees of literature, dip their flags and salute as they pass. ”

“ Of Dickens’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules—almost as completely as that created by Carlyle. To readers who have taught themselves to regard language, it must therefore be unpleasant. But the critic is driven to feel the weakness of his criticism when he acknowledges to himself—as he is compelled in all honesty to do—that with the language, such as it is, the writer has satisfied the great mass of the readers of his country. ”

“ I have diverged into advising you as artists in public life: but the advice is not irrelevant, for it echoes that which, repeatedly given to Dickens by his best friends, he repeatedly ignored, yet never without detriment to his art and not seldom with irritating personal consequences. You all know how he came to grief over his caricatures of Landor and Leigh Hunt in Bleak House. Laurence Boythorne was merely a cheap superficial, not ill-natured, portrait. ”

“ For the moment I merely ask you to consider the fact and the further fact that Dickens took it with the seriousness it deserved and endeavoured more and more to make himself adequate to it. He had—as how could he help having?—an enormous consciousness of the power he wielded: a consciousness which in action too often displayed itself as an irritable conscientiousness. For instance, Pickwick is a landmark in our literature: its originality can no more be disputed than the originality (say) of the Divina Commedia. “I thought of Pickwick”—is his classical phrase. ”

“ Chaucer, Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens—their other qualities apart—are grand creators, lords of literature all, by this specific virtue; and, were there sense in challenging, with this quadriga alone we could securely challenge any literature in any living tongue. Note you, moreover: it is to this creative power that other artists less creative, but great and therefore generous, instinctively pay homage: Dryden, for instance, or Byron:
’Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now. ”

“ I put it to you that, if you but set together those two books—Cranford and the Life of Charlotte Brontë—at once you must recognise the operating hand—the quietly operating hand—of genius. But this, even when Mrs. Gaskell’s longer novels are thrown into the scale, has avoided, I think—because she herself is so equable, so temperate—its right recognition. Yes, her very portrait has a Hellenic look, so beautiful it is, so penetrating its calm gaze. ”

“ For defect, as a narrative style, it tells in three or more pages what might as well be told in three sentences and often better. Without insisting that the writers of the ’nineties (of whom I spoke but now) ever managed to justify their painful search for the briefest, most telling phrase, I submit that it is unlikeliest to be found by a man writing against time, for monthly numbers. That (if you will) being granted, we have to ask ourselves why Thackeray’s prose is so beautiful that it moves one so frequently to envy, and not seldom to a pure delight, transcending all envy. ”

“ In the invention of234 Crawley, in his perfect handling of that strong and insane mind, I protest that I am astonished almost as though he had suddenly shown himself capable of inventing a King Lear. In this Trollope, with whom one has been jogging along under a slowly growing conviction that he is by miles a greater artist than he knows or has ever been reckoned, there explodes this character—and out of the kindliest intentions to preach him up, one is awakened in a fright and to a sense of shame at never having recognised the man’s originality or taken the great measure of his power. ”

“ George Gissing—in a critical study of Dickens which cries out for reprinting—imagines a young writer of the ’nineties (as we may imagine a young writer of to-day) coming on that and crying out upon it.
What! a great writer, with a great idea, to stay his hand until he has made grave enquiry whether Messrs. Mudie’s subscribers will approve it or not! The mere suggestion is infuriating.... Look at Flaubert, for example. Can you imagine him in such a sorry plight? Why, nothing would have pleased him better than to know he was outraging public sentiment! ”

“ It is a strange reflection—as one turns the advertisement pages of The Times, or of Country Life, and scans231 the photographs of innumerable “stately homes” to-day on the market—that Trollope’s fame should be reviving just as the society he depicted would seem to be in process of deracination. I use the word “deracination” because that society—with all its faults, stunted offshoots, gnarled prejudices, mossed growth of convention, parasitic ivies—was a tree of ancestry rooted in the countryside, not to be extracted save by wrenching of fibres and with bleeding of infinite homely ties. ”

“ That term has little meaning for me who seldom or never think—can hardly bring myself to think—of great men in class-lists, in terms of a Tripos. (I reserve that somewhat crude method of criticism to practise it upon those who are going to be great men; and even so—if you will credit me—derive scant enjoyment from it.) But I foresaw the objection, and forestalled it by quoting a famous saying of Tasso, and I take my stand on that: as I take not the smallest interest in weighing Chaucer against Pope, Shakespeare against Milton, Scott against Burns, or Dickens against Thackeray. ”