there are four kinds of novels.
first, those that are easy to read and hard to remember: the well-told tales of no consequence, the cream-puffs of perishable fiction.
second, those that are hard to read and hard to remember: the purpose-novels which are tedious sermons in disguise, and the love-tales in which there is no one with whom it is possible to fall in love.
third, those that are hard to read and easy to remember: the books with a crust of perverse style or faulty construction through which the reader must break in order to get at the rich and vital meaning.
fourth, those that are easy to read and easy to remember: the novels in which stories worth telling are well-told, and characters worth observing are vividly painted, and life is interpreted to the imagination
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in enduring forms of literary art. these are the best-sellers which do not go out of print—everybody’s books.
in this fourth class healthy-minded people and unprejudiced critics put the novels of charles dickens. for millions of readers they have fulfilled what dr. johnson called the purpose of good books, to teach us to enjoy life or help us to endure it. they have awakened laughter and tears. they have enlarged and enriched existence by revealing the hidden veins of humour and pathos beneath the surface of the every-day world, and by giving “the freedom of the city” to those poor prisoners who had thought of it only as the dwelling-place of so many hundred thousand inhabitants and no real persons.
what a city it was that dickens opened to us! london, of course, in outward form and semblance,—the london of the early victorian epoch, with its reeking seven dials close to its perfumed piccadilly, with its grimy river-front and its musty inns of court and its mildly rural suburbs, with its rollicking taverns and its deadly solemn residential squares and its gloomy debtors’ prisons and its gaily insanitary
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markets, with all its consecrated conventions and unsuspected hilarities,—vast, portentous, formal, merry, childish, inexplicable, a wilderness of human homes and haunts, ever thrilling with sincerest passion, mirth, and pain,—london it was, as the eye saw it in those days, and as the curious traveller may still retrace some of its vanishing landmarks and fading features.
but it was more than london, after dickens touched it. it was an enchanted city, where the streets seemed to murmur of joy or fear, where the dark faces of the dens of crime scowled or leered at you, and the decrepit houses doddered in senility, and the new mansions stared you down with stolid pride. everything spoke or made a sign to you. from red-curtained windows jollity beckoned. from prison-doors lean hands stretched toward you. under bridges and among slimy piers the river gurgled, and chuckled, and muttered unholy secrets. across trim front-yards little cottages smiled and almost nodded their good-will. there were no dead spots, no deaf and dumb regions. all was alive and significant. even the real estate
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became personal. one felt that it needed but a word, a wave of the wand, to bring the buildings leaping, roistering, creeping, tottering, stalking from their places.
it was an enchanted city, and the folk who filled it and almost, but never quite, crowded it to suffocation, were so intensely and supernaturally human, so blackly bad, so brightly good, so touchingly pathetic, so supremely funny, that they also were creatures of enchantment and seemed to come from fairy-land.
for what is fairy-land, after all? it is not an invisible region, an impossible place. it is only the realm of the hitherto unobserved, the not yet realized, where the things we have seen but never noticed, and the persons we have met but never known, are suddenly “translated,” like bottom the weaver, and sent forth upon strange adventures.
that is what happens to the dickens people. good or bad they surpass themselves when they get into his books. that rotund brownie, mr. pickwick, with his amazing troupe; that gentle compound of hop-o’-my-thumb and a babe in the
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wood, oliver twist, surrounded by wicked uncles, and hungry ogres, and good fairies in bottle-green coats; that tender and lovely red riding-hood, little nell; that impetuous hans-in-luck, nicholas nickleby; that intimate cinderella, little dorrit; that simple-minded aladdin, pip; all these, and a thousand more like them, go rambling through dickensopolis and behaving naturally in a most extraordinary manner.
things that have seldom or never happened, occur inevitably. the preposterous becomes the necessary, the wildly improbable is the one thing that must come to pass. mr. dombey is converted, mr. krook is removed by spontaneous combustion, mr. micawber performs amazing feats as an amateur detective, sam weller gets married, the immortally absurd epitaphs of young john chivery and mrs. sapsea are engraved upon monuments more lasting than brass.
the fact is, dickens himself was bewitched by the spell of his own imagination. his people carried him away, did what they liked with him. he wrote of little nell: “you can’t imagine how exhausted
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i am to-day with yesterday’s labours. i went to bed last night utterly dispirited and done up. all night i have been pursued by the child; and this morning i am unrefreshed and miserable. i don’t know what to do with myself.... i think the close of the story will be great.” again he says: “as to the way in which these characters have opened out [in martin chuzzlewit], that is to me one of the most surprising processes of the mind in this sort of invention. given what one knows, what one does not know springs up; and i am as absolutely certain of its being true, as i am of the law of gravitation—if such a thing is possible, more so.”
precisely such a thing (as dickens very well understood) is not only possible, but unavoidable. for what certainty have we of the law of gravitation? only by hearsay, by the submissive reception of a process of reasoning conducted for us by sir isaac newton and other vaguely conceived men of science. the fall of an apple is an intense reality (especially if it falls upon your head); but the law which regulates its speed is for you an intellectual
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abstraction as remote as the idea of a “combination in restraint of trade,” or the definition of “art for art’s sake.” whereas the irrepressible vivacity of sam weller, and the unctuous hypocrisy of pecksniff, and the moist humility of uriah heep, and the sublime conviviality of dick swiveller, and the triumphant make-believe of the marchioness are facts of experience. they have touched you, and you cannot doubt them. the question whether they are actual or imaginary is purely academic.
another fairy-land feature of dickens’s world is the way in which minor personages of the drama suddenly take the centre of the stage and hold the attention of the audience. it is always so in fairy-land.
in the tempest, what are prospero and miranda, compared with caliban and ariel? in a midsummer night’s dream, who thinks as much of oberon and titania, as of puck, and bottom the weaver? even in an historical drama like henry iv, we feel that falstaff is the most historic character.
dickens’s first lady and first gentleman are often less memorable than his active supernumeraries.
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a hobgoblin like quilp, a good old nurse like peggotty, a bad old nurse like sairey gamp, a volatile elf like miss mowcher, a shrewd elf and a blunder-headed elf like susan nipper and mr. toots, a good-natured disreputable sprite like charley bates, a malicious gnome like noah claypole, a wicked ogre like wackford squeers, a pair of fairy-godmothers like the cheeryble brothers, a dandy ouphe like mr. mantalini, and a mischievous, wooden-legged kobold like silas wegg, take stronger hold upon us than the harry maylies and rose flemings, the john harmons and bella wilfers, for whose ultimate matrimonial felicity the business of the plot is conducted. even the more notable heroes often pale a little by comparison with their attendants. who remembers martin chuzzlewit as clearly as his servant mark tapley? is pip, with his great expectations, half as delightful as his clumsy dry-nurse joe gargery? has even the great pickwick a charm to compare with the unique, immortal sam weller?
do not imagine that dickens was unconscious of this disarrangement of rôles, or that it was an evidence
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of failure on his part. he knew perfectly well what he was doing. great authors always do. they cannot help it, and they do not care. homer makes agamemnon and priam the kings of his tale, and paris the first walking gentleman and helen the leading lady. but achilles and ajax and hector are the bully boys, and ulysses is the wise jester, and thersites the tragic clown. as for helen,—
the face that launched a thousand ships,
and burnt the topless towers of ilium—
her reputed pulchritude means less to us than the splendid womanhood of andromache, or the wit and worth of the adorable matron penelope.
now this unconventionality of art, which disregards ranks and titles, even those of its own making, and finds the beautiful and the absurd, the grotesque and the picturesque, the noble and the base, not according to the programme but according to the fact, is precisely the essence of good enchantment.
good enchantment goes about discovering the ass in the lion’s skin and the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the princess in the goose-girl and the wise man under
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the fool’s cap, the pretender in the purple robe and the rightful heir in rags, the devil in the belfry and the redeemer among the publicans and sinners. it is the spirit of revelation, the spirit of divine sympathy and laughter, the spirit of admiration, hope, and love—or better still, it is simply the spirit of life.
when i call this the essence of good enchantment i do not mean that it is unreal. i mean only that it is unrealistic, which is just the opposite of unreal. it is not in bondage to the beggarly elements of form and ceremony. it is not captive to names and appearances, though it revels in their delightful absurdity. it knows that an idol is nothing, and finds all the more laughter in its pompous pretence of being something. it can afford to be merry because it is in earnest; it is happy because it has not forgotten how to weep; it is content because it is still unsatisfied; it is humble in the sense of unfathomed faults and exalted in the consciousness of inexhaustible power; it calls nothing common or unclean; it values life for its mystery, its surprisingness, and its divine reversals of human prejudice,—just like
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beauty and the beast and the story of the ugly duckling.
this, i say, is the essence of good enchantment; and it is also the essence of true religion. “for god hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the mighty, and base things of the world and things which are despised, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things which are.”
this is also the essence of real democracy, which is not a theory of government but a state of mind.
no one has ever expressed it better than charles dickens did in a speech which he made at hartford, connecticut, seventy years ago. “i have faith,” said he, “and i wish to diffuse faith in the existence—yes, of beautiful things, even in those conditions of society which are so degenerate, so degraded and forlorn, that at first sight it would seem as though it could only be described by a strange and terrible reversal of the words of scripture—god said let there be light, and there was none. i take it that we are born, and that we hold
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our sympathies, hopes, and energies in trust for the many and not the few. that we cannot hold in too strong a light of disgust and contempt, before our own view and that of others, all meanness, falsehood, cruelty, and oppression of every grade and kind. above all, that nothing is high because it is in a high place; and that nothing is low because it is in a low place. this is the lesson taught us in the great book of nature. this is the lesson which may be read alike in the bright track of the stars, and in the dusty course of the poorest thing that drags its tiny length upon the ground.”
this was the creed of dickens; and like every man’s creed, conscious or unconscious, confessed or concealed, it made him what he was.
it has been said that he had no deep philosophy, no calmly reasoned and clearly stated theory of the universe. perhaps that is true. yet i believe he hardly missed it. he was too much interested in living to be anxious about a complete theory of life. perhaps it would have helped him when trouble came, when domestic infelicity broke up his home, if he could have climbed into some philosopher’s
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ivory tower. perhaps not. i have observed that even the most learned and philosophic mortals, under these afflictions, sometimes fail to appreciate the consolations of philosophy to any noticeable extent. from their ivory towers they cry aloud, being in pain, even as other men.
but it was certainly not true (even though his biographer wrote it, and it has been quoted a thousand times), that just because dickens cried aloud, “there was for him no ‘city of the mind’ against outward ills, for inner consolation and shelter.” he was not cast out and left comfortless. faith, hope, and charity—these three abode with him. his human sympathy, his indomitable imagination, his immense and varied interest in the strange adventures of men and women, his unfaltering intuition of the truer light of god that burns
in this vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,
heart, or whatever else——
these were the celestial powers and bright serviceable angels that built and guarded for him a true “city of refuge,” secure, inviolate, ever open to the fugitive in the day of his calamity. thither he
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could flee to find safety. there he could ungird his heart and indulge
love and the thoughts that breathe for humankind;
there he could laugh and sing and weep with the children, the dream-children, which god had given him; there he could enter into his work-shop and shut the door and lose himself in joyous labour which should make the world richer by the gift of good books. and so he did, even until the end came and the pen fell from his fingers, he sitting safe in his city of refuge, learning and unfolding the mystery of edwin drood.
o enchanted city, great asylum in the mind of man, where ideals are embodied, and visions take form and substance to parley with us! imagination rears thy towers and fancy populates thy streets; yet art thou a city that hath foundations, a dwelling eternal though unseen. ever building, changing, never falling, thy walls are open-gated day and night. the fountain of youth is in thy gardens, the treasure of the humble in thy storehouses. hope is thy doorkeeper, and faith thy warden, and love thy lord. in thee the wanderer may take shelter
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and find himself by forgetting himself. in thee rest and refreshment are waiting for the weary, and new courage for the despondent, and new strength for the faint. from thy magic casements we have looked upon unknown horizons, and we return from thy gates to our task, our toil, our pilgrimage, with better and braver hearts, knowing more surely that the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear, and that the imperishable jewels of the universe are in the souls of men. o city of good enchantment, for my brethren and companions’ sakes i will now say: peace be within thee!
