CHAPTER 1 THE DICKENS PERIOD Much of our modern difficulty in religion and other things arises merely from this, that we confuse the word indefinable with the word vague. If someone speaks of a spiritual fact as indefinable, we promptly picture something misty, a cloud within determinate edges. But this is an error even in commonplace logic. The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing, the primary fact. It is our arms and legs, our pots and pans that are indefinable. The indefinable is the indisputable. The man next door is indefinable because he is too actual to be defined. And there are some to whom spiritual things have the same fierce and practical proximity, some to whom God is too actual to be defined. But there is a third class of primary terms. There are popular expressions which everyone uses and no one can explain, which the wise man will accept and reverence as he reverences desire or darkness or any elemental thing. The prigs of the debating club will demand that he should define his terms, and being a wise man he will flatly refuse. This first inexplicable term is the most important term of all. The word that has no definition is the word that has no substitute. If a man falls back again and again on some such word as vulgar or manly, do you not suppose that the word means nothing because he cannot say what it means? If he could say what the word means, he would say what it means instead of saying the word. When the game chicken, that fine thinker, kept on saying to Mr. Toots, it's mean, that's what it is, it's mean. He was using language in the wisest possible way. For what else could he say? There is no word for mean, except mean. A man must be very mean himself before he comes to defining meanness. Precisely because the word is indefinable, the word is indispensable. In everyday talk, or in any of our journals, we find the loose but important phrase, why have we no great men today? Why have we no great men like Thackeray or Kalyle or Dickens? Do not let us dismiss this expression because it appears loose or arbitrary. Great does mean something, and the test of its actuality is to be found by noting how instinctively and decisively we do apply it to some men and not to others. Of all, how instinctively and decisively we do apply it to four or five men in the Victorian era, four or five men of whom Dickens was not the least. The term is found to fit a definite thing. Whatever the word great means, Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous critical exasperation would use the word of him without stopping to think. They feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a good writer. He is treated as a classic, that is, as a king who may now be deserted but who cannot now be dethroned. The atmosphere of this word clings to him, and the curious thing is that we cannot get it to cling to any of the men of our own generation. Great is the first adjective which the most supercilious modern critic would apply to Dickens, and great is the last adjective that the most supercilious modern critic would apply to himself. We dare not claim to be great men even when we claim to be superior to them. Is there, then, any vital meaning in this idea of greatness or in our laments over its absence in our own time? Some people say, indeed, that this sense of mass is but a mirage of distance, and that men always think dead men great and live men small. They seem to think that the law of perspective in the mental world is the precise opposite to the law of perspective in the physical world. They think that figures grow larger as they walk away. But this theory cannot be made to correspond with the facts. We do not lack great men in our own day because we decline to look for them in our own day. On the contrary, we are looking for them all day long. Not as a matter of fact mere examples of those who stone the prophets and leave it to their posterity to build their sepulchres. If the world would only produce our perfect prophet, solemn, searching, universal, nothing would give us keener pleasure than to build his sepulcher. In our eagerness we might even bury him alive. Nor is it true that the great men of the Victorian era were not called great in their own time. By many they were called great from the first. Charlotte Bronte held this heroic language about Zachary. Ruskin held it about Carlisle. A definite school regarded Dickens as a great man from the first days of his fame, Dickens certainly belonged to this school. In reply to this question, why have we no great men today? Many modern explanations are offered. Advertisement, cigarette smoking, the decay of religion, the decay of agriculture, too much humanitarianism, too little humanitarianism, the fact that people are educated insufficiently, the fact that they are educated at all, all these reasons are given. If I give my own explanation, it's not for its intrinsic value. It's because the answer to the question, why have we no great men, is a short way of stating the deepest and most catastrophic difference between the age in which we live and the early 19th century, the age under the shadow of the French Revolution, the age in which Dickens was born. The soundest of the Dickens critics, a man of genius, Mr George Gissing, opens his criticism by remarking that the world in which Dickens grew up was a hard and cruel world. He notes its gross feeding, its fierce sports, its fighting and foul humour, and all this he summarizes in the words hard and cruel. It is curious how different are the impressions of men. To me this old English world seems infinitely less hard and cruel than the world described in Gissing's own novels. Course external customs are merely relative and easily assimilated. A man soon learnt to harden his hands and harden his head. As with the world of Gissing he can do little but harden his heart. But the fundamental difference between the beginning of the 19th century and the end of it is a different simple but enormous.  The second period, the Fandesiecle, was even full in some sense of good things. But it was occupied in asking what was the good of good things. Joy itself became joyless, and the fighting of cobbett was happier than the feasting of water-pater. The men of cobbett's day were sturdy enough to endure and inflict brutality, but they were also sturdy enough to alter it. This hard and cruel age was, after all, the age of reform. The gibbet stood up black above them, but it was black against the dawn. This dawn against which the gibbet and all the old cruelties stood out so black and clear was the developing idea of liberalism, the French Revolution. It was a clear and happy philosophy. And only a gank such philosophies to evils appear evident at all. The optimist is a better reformer than the pessimist, and the man who believes life to be excellent is the man who autos it most. It seems a paradox, yet the reason of it is very plain. The pessimist can be enraged at evil, but only the optimist can be surprised at it. From the reformer is required a simplicity of surprise. He must have the faculty of a violent and virgin astonishment. It is not enough that he should think injustice distressing. He must think injustice absurd and anomaly in existence, a matter less for tears than for a shattering laughter. On the other hand, the pessimists at the end of the century could hardly curse even the blackest thing, for they could hardly see it against its black and eternal background. Nothing was bad, because everything was bad. Life in prison was infamous, like life anywhere else. The fires of persecution were vile, like the stars. We perpetually find this paradox of a contented discontent. Dr. Johnson takes too sad a view of humanity, but he's also too satisfied a conservative. Rousseau takes too rosy a view of humanity, but he causes a revolution. Swift is angry, but atory. Shelly is happy and rebel. Dickens, the optimist, satirizes the fleet, and the fleet is gone. Gissing, the pessimist, satirizes suburbia, and suburbia remains. Mr. Gissing's error, then, about the early Dickens period, we may put thus. In calling it hard and cruel, he emits the wind of hope and humanity that was blowing through it.  And this humanitarianism was very much the better, in my view, because it was rough and even rowdy humanitarianism. It was free from all the faults that cling to the name. It was, if you will, a coarse humanitarianism. It was a shouting, fighting, drinking philanthropy, a noble thing. But in any case, this atmosphere was the atmosphere of the revolution. And its main idea was the idea of human equality. I am not concerned here to defend the egalitarian idea against the Solomon babyish attacks made upon it by the rich and learned of today. I am merely concerned to state one of its practical consequences. One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men. I would say superior men, only that the hero thinks of himself as great, but not as superior. This has been hidden from us of late by a foolish worship of sinister and exceptional men, men without comradeship or any infectious virtue. This type of Caesar does exist. There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great. The spirit of the early century produced great men because it believed that men were great. It made strong men by encouraging weak men. Its education, its public habits, its rhetoric were all addressed towards encouraging the greatness in everybody. And by encouraging the greatness in everybody, it naturally encouraged superlative greatness in some. Superiority came out of the high rapture of equality. It is precisely in this sort of passionate unconsciousness and bewildering community of thought that men do become more than themselves. No man by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature. But a man may add many cubits to his stature by not taking thought. The best men of the revolution were simply common men at their best. This is why our age can never understand Napoleon. Because he was something great and triumphant, we suppose that he must have been something extraordinary, something inhuman. Some say he was the devil. Some say he was the Superman. Was he a very, very bad man? Was he a good man with some great immoral code? We strive in vain to invent the mysteries behind that immortal mask of brass. The modern world with all its subtleness will never guess his strange secret, for his strange secret was that he was very like other people. And almost without exception, all the great men have come out of this atmosphere of equality. Great men may make despotisms, but democracies make great men. The other main factory of heroes besides the revolution is a religion. And a religion again is a thing which, by its nature, does not think of men as more or less valuable, but of men as all intensively and painfully valuable, a democracy of eternal danger. For religion, all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the king. This fact has been quite insufficiently observed in the study of religious heroes. Piety produces intellectual greatness, precisely because piety in itself is quite indifferent to intellectual greatness. The strength of Cromwell was that he cared for religion. But the strength of religion was that it did not care for Cromwell, did not care for him, that is, any more than for anybody else. He and his footmen were equally welcome to warm places in the hospitality of hell. It has often been said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary. But it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary. Carlisle killed the heroes. There have been none since his time. He killed the heroic, which he sincerely loved, by forcing upon each man this question, am I strong or weak? To which the answer from any honest man, whatever, yes, from Caesar or Bismarck, would weak. He asked for candidates for a definite aristocracy, for men who should hold themselves consciously above their fellows. He advertised for them, so to speak. He promised them glory. He promised them omnipotence. They have not appeared yet. They never will. For the real heroes of whom he wrote had appeared out of an ecstasy of the ordinary. I have already instanced such a case as Cromwell. But there's no need to go through all the great men of Carlisle. Carlisle himself was as great as any of them. And if ever there was a typical child of the French Revolution, it was he. He began with the wildest hopes from the reform bill, and although he soured afterwards, he had been made and moulded by those hopes. He was disappointed with equality, but equality was not disappointed with him. Equality is justified of all her children. But we, in the post-Colayam period, have become fastidious about great men. Every man examines himself. Every man examines his neighbours, to see whether they or he quite come up to the exact line of greatness. The answer is naturally no. And many a man calls himself contentedly a minor poet, who would then have been inspired to be a major prophet. We are hard to please and of little faith. We can hardly believe that there is such a thing as a great man. They could hardly believe that there was such a thing as a small one. But we are always praying that our eyes may behold greatness, instead of praying that our hearts may be filled with it. Thus, for instance, the Liberal Party, to which I belong, was in its period of exile always saying, Oh, for a Gladstone and such things. We were always asking that it might be strengthened from above, instead of ourselves strengthening it from below, with our hope and our anger and our youth. Every man was waiting for a leader. Every man ought to be waiting for a chance to lead. If a God does come upon the earth, He will descend at the sight of the brave. Our prostrations and litanies are of no avail. Our new moons and our Sabbaths are an abomination. The great man will come when all of us are feeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at some splendid moment, when we all feel that we could do without him. We are then able to answer in some manner the question, Why have we no great men? We have no great men, chiefly because we're always looking for them. We are connoisseurs of greatness. And connoisseurs can never be great. We are fastidious, that is, we are small. When Diogenes went about with the lantern looking for an honest man, I'm afraid he had very little time to be honest himself. And when anybody goes about in his hands and knees, looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great. Now the error of Diogenes is evident. The error of Diogenes lay in the fact that he omitted to notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest man. Diogenes looked for his honest man inside every crypt and cavern, but he never thought of looking inside the thief. And that is where the founder of Christianity found the honest man. He found him on a gibbet and promised him paradise. Just as Christianity looked for the honest man inside the thief, democracy looked for the wise man inside the fall. It encouraged the fall to be wise. We can call this thing sometimes optimism, sometimes equality. The nearest name for it is encouragement. It had its exaggerations, failure to understand original sin, notions that education would make all men good, the childlike yet pedantic philosophies of human perfectibility. But the whole was full of a faith in the infinity of human souls, which is in itself not only Christian but orthodox, and this we have lost amid the limitations of a pessimistic science. Christianity said that any man could be a saint if he chose, democracy that any man could be a citizen if he chose. The note of the last few decades in art and ethics has been that a man is stamped with an irrevocable psychology, and is cramped for perpetuity in the prison of his skull. It was a world that expected everything of every body. It was a world that encouraged anybody to be anything. And in England and literature its living expression was dickens. We shall consider dickens in many other capacitors, but let us put this one first. He was the voice in England of this humane intoxication and expansion, this encouraging of anybody to be anything. His best books are a carnival of liberty, and there is more of the real spirit of the French Revolution in Nicholas Nicolby than in The Tale of Two Sitters. His work has the great glory of the Revolution, the bidding of every man to be himself. It also has the revolutionary deficiency. It seems to think that this mere emancipation is enough. No man encouraged his characters so much as dickens.  He was not only an affectionate father. He was an overindulgent father. The children of his fancy are spoiled children. They shake the house like heavy and shouting schoolboys. They smash the story to pieces, like so much furniture. When we moderns write stories, our characters are better controlled. But alas, our characters are rather easier to control. We are in no danger from the gigantic gambles of creatures like mantleidia macabre. We are in no danger of giving our readers too much weller or wag. We've not got it to give. When we experience the ungovernable sense of life, which goes along with the old dickens sense of liberty, we experience the best of the revolution. We're filled with the first of all democratic doctrines that all men are interesting. Dickens tried to make some of his people appear dull people, but he couldn't keep them dull. He could not make a monotonous man. The boars in his books are brighter than the wits in other books. I've put this position first for a defined reason. It is useless for us to attempt to imagine dickens in his life unless we are able at least to imagine this old atmosphere of a democratic optimism, a confidence in common men. Dickens depends upon such a comprehension in a rather unusual manner, a manner worth explanation or at least remark. The disadvantage under which dickens has fallen, both as an artist and a moralist, is very plain. His misfortune is that neither of the two last movements in literary criticism has done him any good. He has suffered a like from his enemies and from the enemies of his enemies. The facts to which I refer are familiar. When the world first awoke from the mere hypnotism of dickens, from the direct tyranny of his temperament, there was, of course, a reaction. At the head of it came the realists with their documents like misflight. They declared that scenes and types in dickens were wholly impossible in which they were perfectly right, and on this rather paradoxical ground, objected to them as literature. They were not like life, and there they thought was an end of the matter. The realist for a time prevailed. But realists did not enjoy their victory if they enjoyed anything very long. A more symbolic school of criticism soon arose. Men saw that it was necessary to give a much deeper and more delicate meaning to the expression like life. Streets are not life. Cities and civilisations are not life. Faces and even voices are not life itself. Life is within, and no man have seen it at any time. As for our meals and our manners and our daily dress, these are things exactly like sonnets. They are random symbols of the soul. One man tries to express himself in books, another in boots. Both probably fail. Our solid houses and square meals are in the strict sense fiction. They are things made up to typify our thoughts. The coat a man wears may be wholly fictitious. The movement of his hands may be quite unlike life. This much the intelligence of man soon perceived, and by this much Dickens' fame should have greatly profited. For Dickens is like life in the truer sense, in the sense that he is akin to the living principle in us and in the universe. He is like life, at least in this detail, that he is alive. His art is like life, because like life it cares for nothing outside itself and goes on its way rejoicing. Both produce monsters with a kind of carelessness, like enormous by-products, life producing the rhinoceros and art Mr. Bumsby. Art indeed copies life in not copying life, for life copies nothing. Dickens' art is like life because like life it is irresponsible, because like life it is incredible. Yet the return of this realisation has not greatly profited Dickens. The return of romance has been almost useless to this great romantic. He has gained as little from the fall of the realists as from their triumph. There has been a revolution, there has been a counter-revolution, there has been no restoration. And the reason of this brings us back to that atmosphere of popular optimism of which I spoke, and the shortest way of expressing the more recent neglect of Dickens is to say that for our time and taste he exaggerates the wrong thing. Exaggeration is the definition of art, that both Dickens and the Mordens understood. Art is, in its inmost nature, fantastic. Time brings queer revenges, and while the realists were yet living the art of Dickens was justified by Aubrey Beardsley. But men like Aubrey Beardsley were allowed to be fantastic, because the mood which they overstrained and overstated was a mood which their period understood. Dickens overstrains and overstates a mood our period does not understand. The truth he exaggerates is exactly this old revolution's sense of infinite opportunity and boisterous brotherhood, and we resent his undue sense of it, because we ourselves have not even a due sense of it. We feel troubled with too much where we have too little. We wish he would keep it within bounds, for we are all exact and scientific on the subjects we do not care about. We all immediately detect exaggeration in an exposition of Mormonism or patriotic speech from Paraguay. We all require sobriety on the subject of the sea serpent. But the moment we begin to believe a thing ourselves, that moment we begin easily to overstate it, and the moment our souls become serious, our words become a little wild, and certain moderns are thus placed towards exaggeration. They permit any writer to emphasise doubts, for instance, for doubts are their religion, but they permit no man to emphasise dogmas. If a man be the mildest Christian, they smell cant. But he can be a raving windmill of pessimism, and they call it temperament. If a moralist paints a wild picture of immorality, they doubt its truth. They say that devils are not as black as they are painted. But if a pessimist paints a wild picture of melancholy, they accept the whole horrible psychology, and they never ask if devils are as blue as they are painted. It is evident, in short, why even those who admire exaggeration do not admire dickens. He is exaggerating the wrong thing. They know what it is to feel a sadness so strange and deep that only impossible characters can express it. They do not know what it is to feel the joy so vital and violent that only impossible characters can express that. They know that the soul can be so sad as to dream naturally of the blue faces of the corpses of Baudelaire. They do not know that the soul can be so cheerful as to dream naturally of the blue face of Major Backstock. They know that there is a point of depression at which one believes in Tentazil. They do not know that there is a point of exhilaration at which one believes in Mr. Weg. To them the impossibilities of dickens seem much more impossible than they really are because they're already attuned to the opposite impossibilities of Metalink. For every mood there is an appropriate impossibility, a decent and tactful impossibility fitted to the frame of mind. Every train of thought may end in an ecstasy and all roads lead to Elfland. But few now walk far enough along the street of dickens to find the place where the cockney villas grow so comic that they become poetical. People do not know how far mere good spirits will go. For instance, we never think as the old folklore did of good spirits reaching to the spiritual world. We see this in the complete absence from modern popular supernaturalism of the old popular mirth. We hear plenty today of the wisdom of the spiritual world, but we do not hear, as our fathers did, of the folly of the spiritual world, of the tricks of the gods and the jokes of the patron saints.  We do not understand the dark and transcendental sympathy between fairies and fools.  Yet a farcical occultism is the very essence of the Midsummer Night's dream. It is also the right incredible essence of the Christmas Carol. Whether we understand it depends on whether we can understand that exhilaration is not a physical accident, but a mystical fact, that exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow, that a joke can be so big that it breaks the roof of the stars. By simply going on being absurd, a thing can become godlike. There is but one step from the ridiculous to the sublime. Dickens was great because he was moderately possessed with all this. If we are to understand him at all, we must also be moderately possessed with it. We must understand this old limitless hilarity and human confidence at least enough to be able to endure it when it is pushed a great deal too far. For Dickens did push it too far. He did push the hilarity to the point of incredible character drawing. He did push the human confidence to the point of an unconvincing sentimentalism. You can trace, if you will, the revolutionary joy till it reaches the incredible Sapsie epitaph. You can trace the revolutionary hope till it reaches the repentance of Dombe. There is plenty to carp at in this man if you are inclined to carp. You may easily find him vulgar if you cannot see that he is divine and if you cannot laugh with Dickens, undoubtedly you can laugh at him. I believe myself that this braver world of his will certainly return for I believe that it is bound up with the realities like morning and the spring. But for those who beyond remedy regarded as an error I put this appeal before any other observations on Dickens. First let us sympathize, if only for an instant, with the hopes of the Dickens period, with that cheerful trouble of change. If democracy has disappointed you, do not think of it as a burst bubble, but at least as a broken heart, an old love affair. Do not sneer at the time when the creed of humanity was on its honeymoon, treat it with the dreadful reverence that is due to youth. For you perhaps, Adreria philosophy has covered and eclipsed the earth. The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, abandon hope or ye who enter here, over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of today have written it across the gates of this world. But if we are to understand the story which follows, we must raise that apocalyptic writing, if only for an hour. We must recreate the faith of our fathers, if only as an artistic atmosphere. If then you are a pessimist in reading this story, forgo for a little the pleasures of pessimism. Dream for one mad moment that the grass is green. Unlearn that sinister learning that you think so clear, deny that deadly knowledge that you think you know. Surrender the very flower of your culture, give up the very jewel of your pride, abandon hopelessness or ye who enter here. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Charles Dickens was born at Landport in Portsea on February 7th, 1812. His father was a clerk in the Navy pay office and was temporarily on duty in the neighborhood. Very soon after the birth of Charles Dickens, however, the family moved for a short period to Norfolk Street, Bloomsbury, and then for a long period to Chatham, which thus became the real home, and for all serious purposes the native place of Dickens. The whole story of his life moves like a canterbury pilgrimage along the great roads of Kent. John Dickens, his father, was, as stated, a clerk. But such mere terms of trade tell us little of the tone or status of a family. Browning's father, to take an instance at random, would also be described as a clerk and a man of the middle class. But the Browning family and the Dickens family have the color of two different civilizations. The difference cannot be conveyed merely by saying that Browning stood many strata above Dickens. It must also be conveyed that Browning belonged to that section of the middle class, which tens, in the small social sense, to rise. The Dickens is to that section which tens in the same sense to fall. If Browning had not been a poet he would have been a better clerk than his father, and his son probably a better and richer clerk than he. But if they had not been lifted in the air by the enormous accident of a man of genius, the Dickens's, I fancy, would have appeared in poorer and poorer places, as inventory clerks, as caretakers, as addresses of envelopes, until they melted into the masses of the poor. Yet at the time of Dickens's birth and childhood, this weakness in their worldly destiny was in no way apparent. Especially it was not apparent to the little Charles himself. He was born and grew up in a paradise of small prosperity. He fell into the family, so to speak, during one of its comfortable periods, and he never in those early days thought of himself as anything but as a comfortable middle-class child, the son of a comfortable middle-class man. The father whom he found provided for him was one from whom comfort drew forth his most pleasant and reassuring qualities, though not perhaps his most interesting and peculiar. John Dickens seemed, most probably, a hardy and kindly character, a little florid of speech, a little careless of duty in some details, notably in the detail of education.  But even in this earlier and easier period what records there are of John Dickens give out the air of a somewhat idle and irresponsible fatherhood. He exhibited towards his son that contradiction in conduct which is always shown by the two thoughtless parent to the two thoughtful child. He contrived at once to neglect his mind and also to overstimulate it. There are many recorded tales and traits of the author's infancy, but one small fact seems to me more than any other to strike the note and give the key to his whole strange character. His father found it more amusing to be an audience than to be an instructor, and instead of giving the child intellectual pleasure called upon him almost before he was out of petticoats to provide it. Some of the earliest glimpses we have of Charles Dickens shows him to us perched on some chair or table singing comic songs in an atmosphere of perpetual applause. So almost as soon as he can toddle he steps into the glare of the footlights. He never stepped out of it until he died. He was a good man, as men go in this bewildering world of ours. Brave, transparent, tender-hearted, scrupulously independent and honourable. He was not a man whose weaknesses should be spoken of without some delicacy and doubt. But there did mingle with his merits all his life this theatrical quality, this atmosphere of being shone off. A sort of hilarious self-consciousness. His literary life was a triumphal procession. He died drunken with glory.  And this precocious pleasure explains much, too, in the moral way. Dickens had all his life the thoughts of the little boy, who was kept up too late at night. The boy in such a case exhibits a psychological paradox.  Dickens was always a little too irritable because he was a little too happy. Like the overwrought child in society, he was splendidly sociable. And yet suddenly quarrelsome. In all the practical relations of his life was what the child is in the last hours of an evening party, genuinely delighted, genuinely delightful, genuinely affectionate and happy, and yet in some strange way fundamentally exasperated and dangerously close to tears. There was another touch about the boy which made his case more peculiar, and perhaps his intelligence more fervid, the touch of ill health. It could not be called more than a touch, for he suffered from no formidable malady, and could always through life endure a great degree of exertion, even if it was only the exertion of walking violently all night. Still the streak of sickness was sufficient to take him out of the common unconscious life of the community of boys, and for good or evil that withdrawal is always a matter of deadly importance to the mind.  In his own unvaryingly vivid way he has described how he crawled up into an unconsidered garret, and there found, in a dusty heap, the undying literature of England. The books he mentions chiefly are Hunt Free Clinker and Tom Jones. When he opened those two books in the garret he caught hold of the only past with which he is at all connected, the great comic writers of England of whom he was destined to be the last. It must be remembered, as I have suggested before, that there was something about the country in which he lived, and the great roads along which he travelled that sympathized with and stimulated his pleasure in this old Picker-esque literature. The groups that came along the road, that passed through his own town out of it, were of the motley laughable type that tumbled into ditches or beat down the doors of taverns under the escort of Smollett and Fielding. In our time the main roads of Kent have upon them very often a perpetual procession of tramps and tinkers, unknown on the quiet hills of Sussex, and it may have been so also in Dickens boyhood. In his neighborhood were definite memorials of yet older and yet greater English comedy. From the height of Gads Hill, at which he stared unceasingly there, looked down upon him the monstrous ghost of Falstaff. Falstaff, who might well have been the spiritual father of all Dickens' adorable naves, Falstaff the great mountain of English laughter and English sentimentalism, the great healthy humane English humbug not to be matched among the nations. At this eminence of Gads Hill Dickens used to stare even as a boy, with the steady purpose of someday making it his own. It is characteristic of the consistency which underlies the superficially erratic career of Dickens that he actually did live to make it his own. The truth is that he was a precocious child, precocious not only on the more poetical but on the more prosaic side of life. He was ambitious as well as enthusiastic. No one can ever know what visions they were that crowded into the head of the clever little brat as he ran about the streets of Chatham or stood glouring at Gads Hill. But I think that quite mundane visions had a very considerable share in the matter. He longed to go to school, a strange wish, to go to college, to make a name, nor did he merely aspire to these things. The great number of them he also expected. He regarded himself as a child of good position, just about to enter on a life of good luck. He thought his home and family a very good springboard or jumping off-place from which to fling himself to the positions which he desired to reach. And almost as he was about to spring the whole structure broke under him, and he, and all that belonged to him, disappeared into a darkness far below. Everything had been struck down as with the finality of a thunderbolt. His lordly father was a bankrupt, and in the Marshall Lee prison, his mother was in a mean home in the north of London, wildly proclaiming herself the principal of a girl's school, a girl's school to which nobody would go. And he himself, the conqueror of the world, and the prospective purchaser of Gads Hill, passed some distracted and bewildering days impawning the household necessity to fagans in foul shops, and then found himself somehow or other one of a row of ragged boys in a great dreary factory, pasting the same kinds of labels onto the same kinds of blacking bottles from morning till night. Although it seemed sudden enough to him, the disintegration had, as a matter of fact, of course, been going on for a long time. He had only heard from his father dark and melodramatic illusions to a deed which, from the way it was mentioned, might have been a claim to the crown or a compact with the devil, but which was in truth an unsuccessful documentary attempt on the part of John Dickens to come to a composition with his creditors. And now, in the lurid light of his sunset, the character of John Dickens began to take on those purple colors which have made him under another name, absurd and immortal. It required a tragedy to bring out this man's comedy. So long as John Dickens was in easy circumstances, he seemed only an easy man, a little long and luxuriant in his phrases, a little careless in his business routine. He seemed only a wordy man, who lived on bread and beef like his neighbors, but as bread and beef were successfully taken away from him, it was discovered that he lived on words. For him to be involved in a calamity only meant to be cast for the first part in a tragedy. For him, blank ruin was only a subject for blank phrase. Henceforth we feel scarcely inclined to call him John Dickens at all. We feel inclined to call him by the name through which his son celebrated this preposterous and sublime victory of the human spirit over circumstances. Dickens, in David Copperfield, called him Wilkins Macalber. In his personal correspondence he called him the prodigal father. Young Charles had been hurriedly flung into the factory by the more or less careless good nature of James Lamert, a relation of his mother's. It was a blacking factory, supposed to be run as a rival to Warren's by another and original Warren, both practically conducted by another of the Lamert's. It was situated near Hungerford Market. Dickens worked there drearily, like one stunned with disappointment. To a child excessively intellectualized, and at this time, I fear, excessively egotistical, the coarseness of the whole thing, the work, the rooms, the boys, the language, was a sort of bestial nightmare. Not only did he scarcely speak of it then, but he scarcely spoke of it afterwards. Years later, in the fullness of his fame, he heard from Forrester that a man had spoken of knowing him. On hearing the name, he somewhat curtly acknowledged it, and spoke of having seen the man once. Forrester, in his innocence, answered that the man said he had seen Dickens many times in a factory by Hungerford Market. Dickens was suddenly struck with a long and extraordinary silence. Then he invited Forrester, as his best friend, to a particular interview, and with every appearance of difficulty and distress, told him the whole story for the first and the last time. A long while after that he told the world some part of the matter in the account of Murdstone and Grimby's in David Copperfield. He never spoke of the whole experience except once or twice, and he never spoke of it otherwise than as a man might speak of hell. It need not be suggested, I think, that this agony of the child was exaggerated by the man. It is true that he was not incapable of the vice of exaggeration, if it be a vice. There was about him much vanity and a certain virulence in his version of many things. Upon the whole, indeed, it would hardly be too much to say that he would have exaggerated any sorrow he talked about. But this was a sorrow with a very strange position in Dickens' life. It was a sorrow he did not talk about. Upon this particular dark spot he kept a sort of deadly silence for twenty years. An accident revealed part of the truth to the dearest of all his friends. He then told the whole truth to the dearest of all his friends. He never told anybody else. I do not think that this arose from any social sense of disgrace. If he had it slightly at the time, he was far too self-satisfied a man to have taken it seriously in afterlife. I really think that his pain at this time was so real and ugly that the thought of it filled him with the sort of impersonal but unbearable shame with which we are filled, for instance, by the notion of physical torture, of something that humiliates humanity. He felt that such agony was something obscene. Moreover, there are two other good reasons for thinking that his sense of hopelessness was very genuine. First of all, this starless outlook is common in the calamities of boyhood. The bitterness of boyish distresses does not lie in the fact that they are large. It lies in the fact that we do not know that they are small. About any early disaster there is a dreadful finality. A lost child can suffer like a lost soul. It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly. But I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is preeminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic. But youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged. God has kept the good wine until now. It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst. There is nothing that so much mystifies the young as the consistent frivolity of the old. They have discovered their indestructibility. They are in their second and clearer childhood. And there is a meaning in the merriment of their eyes. They have seen the end of the end of the world. First, then, the desolate finality of Dickens' childish mood makes me think it was a real one. And there is another thing to be remembered. Dickens was not a saintly child. After the style of little Dorot or little Nail, he had not, at this time, at any rate, set his heart wholly upon higher things, even upon things such as personal tenderness or loyalty. He had been and was, unless I am very much mistaken, sincerely, stubbornly, bitterly ambitious. He had, I fancy, a fairly clear idea previous to the downfall of all his family's hopes of what he wanted to do in the world, and of the mark that he meant to make there. If no dishonorable sense, but still, in a definite sense, he might in early life be called worldly, and the children of this world are in their generation infinitely more sensitive than the children of light. A saint after repentance will forgive himself for a sin. A man about town will never forgive himself for a faux pas. There are ways of getting absolved for murder. There are no ways of getting absolved for upsetting the soup. This thin-skinned quality in all very mundane people is a thing too little remembered, and it must not be wholly forgotten in connection with a clever, restless lad who dreamed of a destiny. That part of his distress which concerned himself and his social standing was among the other parts of it the least noble. But perhaps it was the most painful. For pride is not only, as the modern world fails to understand, a sin to be condemned. It is also, as it understands even less, a weakness to be very much commiserated. A very vitalizing touch is given in one of his own reminiscences. His most unendurable moment did not come in any bullying in the factory or any famine in the streets. It came when he went to see his sister Fanny take a prize at the Royal Academy of Music. I could not bear to think of myself, beyond the reach of all such honorable emulation and success. The tears ran down my face. I felt as if my heart were rent. I prayed when I went to bed that night to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which I was. I never had suffered so much more. There was no envy in this. I do not think that there was, though the poor little rich could hardly have been blamed if there had been. There was only a furious sense of frustration. A spirit like a wild beast in a cage. It was only a small matter in the external and obvious sense. It was only Dickens prevented from being Dickens. If we put these facts together, that the tragedy seemed final and that the tragedy was concerned with the super-sensitive matters of the ego and the gentleman, I think we can imagine a pretty genuine case of internal depression. And when we add to the case of internal depression, the case of the external oppression, the case of the material circumstances by which he was surrounded, we have reached a sort of midnight. All day he worked on insufficient food at a factory. It is sufficient to say that it afterwards appeared in his works at Murdstone and Grimby's. At night he returned disconsolately to a lodging-house for such lads, kept by an old lady. It is sufficient to say that she appeared afterwards as Mrs. Pipchin. Once a week only he saw anybody for whom he cared a straw. That was when he went to the Marshall Seath prison, and that gave his juvenile pride half manly and half snobbish a bitter annoyance of another kind. Add to this, finally, that physically he was always very weak and never very well. Once he was struck down in the middle of his work with sudden bodily pain. The boy who worked next to him, a coarse and heavy lad named Bob Fagan, who had often attacked Dickens on the most unreasonable ground of his being a gentleman, suddenly showed that enduring sanity of compassion which Dickens had destined to show so often in the characters of the common and unclean, Fagan made a bed for his sick companion out of the straw in the work room, and filled empty blacking bottles with hot water all day. When the evening came and Dickens was somewhat recovered, Bob Fagan insisted on escorting the boy home to his father. The situation was as poignant as a sort of tragic farce. Fagan and his wooden-headed chivalry would have died in order to take Dickens to his family. Dickens, in his bitter gentility, would have died rather than let Fagan know that his family were in the Marshall Seath. So these two young idiots tramped the tedious streets, both stubborn, both suffering for an idea. The advantage certainly was with Fagan, who was suffering for a Christian compassion, while Dickens was suffering for a pagan pride. At last Dickens flung off his friend with desperate farewell and thanks, and dashed up the steps of a strange house on the Surrey side. He knocked and rang as Bob Fagan, his benefactor and his incubus, disappeared round the corner. And when the servant came to open the door, he asked, apparently with gravity, whether Mr. Robert Fagan lived there. It is a strange touch. The immortal Dickens woken him for an instant in that last wild joke of that weary evening. Next morning, however, he was again well enough to make himself ill again, and the wills of the great factory went on. They manufactured a number of bottles of Warren's Blacking, and in the course of the process they manufactured also the greatest optimist of the nineteenth century. This boy, who dropped down groaning at his work, who was hungry four or five times a week, whose best feelings and worst feelings were alike, flayed alive, was the man on whom two generations of comfortable critics have visited the complaint that his view of life was too rosy to be anything but unreal. Afterwards, and in its proper place, I shall speak of what is called the optimism of Dickens, and of whether it was really too cheerful or too smooth. But this boyhood of his may be recorded now as a mere fact. If he was too happy, this was where he learnt it. If his school of thought was a vulgar optimism, this is where he went to school. If he learnt to whitewash the universe, it was in a Blacking factory that he learnt it. As a fact there is no shred of evidence to show that those who have had sad experiences tend to have a sad philosophy. There are numberless points upon which Dickens is spiritually at one with the poor. That is, with the great mass of mankind. But there is no point in which he is more perfectly at one with them than in showing that there is no kind of connection between a man being unhappy and a man being pessimistic. Sorrow and pessimism are indeed, in a sense, opposite things, since sorrow is founded on the value of something and pessimism upon the value of nothing. And in practice we find that those poets or political leaders who come from the people and whose experiences have really been searching and cruel are the most sanguine people in the world. These men out of the old agony are always optimist. They are sometimes offensive optimists. A man like Robert Burns, whose father, like Dickens' father, goes bankrupt, whose whole life is a struggle against miserable external powers and internal weaknesses yet more miserable.  Burns does not merely sing about the goodness of life, he positively rants and cants about it. Rousseau whom all his friends and acquaintances treated almost as badly as he treated them. Rousseau does not grow merely eloquent. He grows gushing and sentimental about the inherent goodness of human nature. Charles Dickens, who was most miserable at the receptive age when most people are most happy, is afterwards happy when all men weep. Circumstances break men's bones. It has never been shown that they break men's optimism. These great popular leaders do all kinds of desperate things under the immediate scourge of tragedy. They become drunkards. They become demagogues. They become morphemaniacs. They never become pessimists. Most unquestionably there are ragged and unhappy men who we could easily understand being pessimists. But as a matter of fact they are not pessimists. Most unquestionably there are whole-dim hordes of humanity whom we should promptly pardon if they cursed God. But they don't. The pessimists are aristocrats like Byron. The men who curse God are aristocrats like Swinburne. But when those who starve and suffer speak for a moment they do not profess merely an optimism, they profess a cheap optimism. They are too poor to afford a dear one. They cannot indulge in any detailed or merely logical defense of life. That would be to delay the enjoyment of it. These higher optimists of whom Dickens was one do not approve of the universe. They do not even admire the universe. They fall in love with it. They embrace life too close to criticize or even see it. Existence to such men has the wild beauty of a woman, and those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause. Existence to such men has the wild beauty of a woman, and those who love her with most intensity who love her with least cause. There are popular phrases so picturesque that even when they are intentionally funny they are unintentionally poetical. I remember to take one instance out of many, hearing a heated secularist in Hyde Park apply to some person or other the exquisite expression a sky pilot. Subsequent inquiry has taught me that the term is intended to be comic and even contemptuous, but in the first freshness of it I went home repeating it to myself like a new poem. Few of the pious legends have conceived so strange and yet celestial a picture as this of a pilot in the sky leaning on his helm above the empty heavens and carrying his cargo of souls higher than the loneliest cloud. The phrase is like a lyric of Shelley or to take another instance from another language the French have an incomparable idiom for a boy playing truant. How admirably this accidental expression the bushy school not to be lightly confounded with the art school at bushy. How admirably this bushy school expresses half the modern notions of a more natural education. The two words express the whole poetry of Wordsworth the whole philosophy of Thoreau and are quite as good literature as either. Now among a million of such scraps of inspired slang there is one which describes a certain side of Dickens better than pages of explanation. The phrase appropriately enough occurs at least once in his works and that on a fitting occasion. When Job Trotterly is sent by Sam on a wild chase after Mr. Perker the Solicitor, Mr. Perker's clerk condols with Job upon the lateness of the hour and the fact that all habitable places are shut up. My friend, said Mr. Perker's clerk, you've got the key of the street. Mr. Perker's clerk who was a flippant and scornful young man may perhaps be pardoned if he used this expression in a flippant and scornful sense but let us hope that Dickens did not. Let us hope that Dickens saw the strange yet satisfying imaginative justice of the words for Dickens himself had in the most sacred and serious sense of the term the key of the street.   Few of us understand the street even when we step into it as into a house or room of strangers. Few of us see through the shining riddle of the street, the strange folk that belong to the street only, the streetwalker or the street Arab, the nomads who generation after generation have kept their ancient secrets in the full blaze of the sun. Of the street at night many of us know even less. The street at night is a great house locked up but Dickens had if ever man had the key of the street. His stars were the lamps of the street. His hero was the man in the street. He could open the inmost door of his house, the door that leads into that secret passage which is lined with houses and roofed with stars. This silent transformation into a citizen of the street took place during those dark days of boyhood when Dickens was drudging at the factory. Whenever he had done drudging he had no other resource but drifting and he drifted over half London. He was a dreamy child thinking mostly of his own dreary prospects yet he saw and remembered much of the streets and squares he passed. Indeed as a matter of fact he went the right way to work unconsciously to do so. He did not go in for observation, a priggish habit. He did not look at Sharon Cross to improve his mind or count the lampposts in Hallborn to practice his arithmetic but unconsciously he made all these places the scenes of the monstrous drama in his miserable little soul. He walked in darkness under the lamps of Hallborn and was crucified at Sharon Cross. So for him ever afterwards these places had the beauty that only belongs to battlefields. For our memory never fixes the facts which we have merely observed. The only way to remember a place forever is to live in the place for an hour and the only way to live in the place for an hour is to forget the place for an hour. The undying scenes we can all see if we shut our eyes are not the scenes that we have stared at under the direction of guidebooks. The scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not look at all. The scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about something else about a sin or a love affair or some childish sorrow. We can see the background now because we did not see it then. So Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind. He stamped his mind on these places. For him ever afterwards these streets were mortally romantic. They were dipped in the purple dyes of youth and its tragedy and rich with irrevocable sunsets. Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions, a window or a railing or the keel of a door which he endows with demonic life. The things seem more actual than things really are. Indeed that degree of realism does not exist in reality. It is the unbearable realism of a dream and this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place. It cannot be gained by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiae grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffee shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St. Martin's Lane quote of which I only recollect it stood near the church and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with coffee room painted on it addressed to its the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee room now but where there is an inscription on glass and read it backwards on the wrong side more e-fog as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie a shock goes through my blood end quote that wild word more e-fog is the motto of all effective realism it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact and that elfish kind of realism dickens adopted everywhere his world was alive with inanimate object the date on the door danced over mr gruegesus the knocker grinned at mr scrooge the roman on the ceiling pointed down at mr tokenhorn the elderly armchair leered at tom smart these are all more e-fog-ish things a man sees them because he does not look at them and so the little dickens dickensized london he prepared the way for all his personages into whatever cranny of our city his characters might crawl dickens had been there before them however wild with the events he narrated as outside him they could not be wilder than the things that had gone on within however queer a character of dickens might be he could hardly be queerer than dickens was the whole secret of his afterwritings is sealed up in those silent years of which no written word remains those years the dim harm perhaps as his biographer forster has thoughtfully suggested by sharpening a certain fierce individualism in him which once or twice during his genial life fleshed like a half hidden knife he was always generous but things had gone too hardly with him for him to be always easygoing he was always kindhearted he was not always good-humored those years may also in their strange mixture of morbidity and reality have increased in him his tendency to exaggeration but we can scarcely lament this in a literary sense exaggeration is almost a definition of art and it is entirely the definition of dickens' art those years may have given him many moral and mental wounds from which he never recovered but they gave him the key of the street there's a weird contradiction in the soul of the born optimist he can be happy and unhappy at the same time with dickens the practical depression of his life at this time did nothing to prevent him from laying up those hilarious memories of which all his books are made no doubt he was genuinely unhappy in the poor place where his mother kept school nevertheless it was there that he noticed the unfathomable quaintness of the little servant whom he made into the Marchioness no doubt he was comfortable enough at the boarding house of mrs roylance but he perceived with a dreadful joy that mrs roylance's name was pipchin there seems to be no incompatibility between taking in tragedy and giving out comedy they are able to run parallel in the same personality one incident which he described in his unfinished autobiography and which he afterwards transferred almost verbatim to david copperfield was peculiarly rich and impressive it was the inauguration of a petition to the king for a bounty drawn up by a committee of the prisoners in the marshall sea a committee of which dickens's father was the president no doubt in virtue of his oratory and also the scribe no doubt in virtue of his genuine love of literary flights quote as many of the principal officers of this body as could be gotten to a small room without filling it up supported him in front of the petition and my old friend captain porter who'd watched himself to the honor to sow solemn an occasion stationed himself close to it to read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents the door was then thrown open and they began to come in in a long file several waiting on the landing outside while one entered affixed his signature and went out to everybody in succession captain porter said would you like to hear it read if he weekly showed the least disposition to hear it captain porter in a loud sonorous voice gave him every word of it i remember a certain luscious role he gave to such words as majesty gracious majesty your gracious majesty's unfortunate subjects your majesty's well-known munificence as if the words were something real in his mouth and delicious to taste my poor father meanwhile listening with a little of an author's vanity and contemplating not severely the spike on the opposite wall whatever was comical or pathetic in this scene i sincerely believe i perceived in my corner whether i demonstrated it or not quite as well as i should perceive it now i made out my own little character and story for every man who put his name to the sheet of paper and quote here we see very plainly that dickens did not merely look back in after days and see that these humans had been delightful he was delighted at the same moment that he was desperate the two opposite things existed in him simultaneously and each in its full strength his soul was not a mixed color like gray and purple caused by no component color being quite itself his soul was like a shot silk of black and crimson a shot silk of misery and joy seen from the outside his little pleasures and extravagances seem more pathetic than his grief once the solemn little figure went into a public house in parliament street and addressed the man behind the bar in the following terms what is your very best the very best ale glass the man replied tuppence then said the infant just draw me a glass of that if you please with a good head to it the landlord says dickens in telling the story looked at me in return over the bar from head to foot with a strange smile on his face and instead of drawing the beer looked around the screen and said something to his wife who came out from behind it with her work in her hand and joined him in surveying me they asked me a good many questions as to what my name was how all i was where i lived how i was employed etc etc to all of which that i might commit nobody i invented appropriate answers they served me with the ale though i suspect it was not the strongest on the preferences and the landlord's wife opening the little half door and bending down gave me a kiss end quote here he touches that other side of common life which he was chiefly to champion he was to show that there is no ale like the ale of a poor man's festival and no pleasures like the pleasures of the poor at other places of refreshment he was yet more majestic i remember he says tucking my own bread which i'd brought from home in the morning under my arm wrapped up in a piece of paper like a book and going into the best dining room in johnson's alamot beefhouse in clerical jewelry lane and magnificently ordering a small plate of alamot beef to eat with it what the waiter thought of such a strange little apparition coming in all alone i don't know but i can see him now staring at me as i ate my dinner and bringing up the other waiter to look i gave him a happening and i wish now that he hadn't taken it end quote for the boy individually the prospect seemed to be growing drarier and drarier this phrase indeed hardly expresses the fact for as he felt it it was not so much a run of worsening luck as the closing in of a certain and quiet calamity like the coming on of twilight and dark he felt that he would die and be buried in blacking through all this he does not seem to have said much to his parents of his distress they who were in prison had certainly a much jollier time than he who was free but of all the strange ways in which the human being proves that he's not a rational being whatever else he is no case is so mysterious and unaccountable as the secrecy of childhood we learn of the cruelty of some school or child factory from journalists we learn it from inspectors we learn it from doctors we learned even from shame-stricken school masters and repented sweaters but we never learn it from the children we never learn it from the victims it would seem as if a living creature had to be taught like an art of culture the art of crying out when it is heard it would seem as if patients were the natural thing it would seem as if inpatients were an accomplishment like wist however this may be it is wholly certain that dickens might have dredged and died dredging and buried the unborn pickwick but for an external accident he was as has been said in the habit of visiting his father at the marshall sea every week the talks between the two must have been a comedy at once more cruel and more delicate than dickens ever described meredith might picture the comparison between the child whose troubles were so childish but who felt them like a damned spirit and the middle-aged man whose trouble was final ruin and who felt it no more than a baby once it would appear the boy broke down altogether perhaps under the unbearable buoyancy of his oratorical papa and implored to be freed from the factory implored it i fear with a precautious and almost horrible eloquence the old optimist was astounded too much astounded to do anything in particular whether the incident had really anything to do with what followed cannot be decided but ostensibly it had not ostensibly the cause of trials's ultimate liberation was a quarrel between his father and lamard the head of the factory dickens the elder who had at last left the marshall sea could no doubt conduct a quarrel with the magnificence of a macoba the result of his talent at the early raid was to leave mr. lamard in a towering rage he had a stormy interview with charles in which he tried to be good tempered to the boy but could hardly master his tongue about the boy's father finally he told him he must go and with every observance the little creature was solemnly expelled from hell his mother with a touch of strange harshness was for patching up the quarrel and sending him back perhaps with the fierce feminine responsibility she felt that the first necessity was to keep the family out of debt but old john dickens put his foot down here put his foot down with that ringing but very rare decision with which once in ten years and often on some trivial matter the weakest man will overwhelm the strongest woman the boy was miserable the boy was clever the boy should go to school the boy went to school he went to the wellington house academy mornington place it was an odd experience for anyone to go from the world to his school instead of going from school to the world dickens we may say had his boyhood after his youth he had seen life at its courses before he began his training for it and knew the worst words in the english language probably before the best this odd chronology it will be remembered he retained in a semi-autobiographical account of the adventures of david copperfield who went into the business of murchson and grimby's before he went to the school kept by dr strong david copperfield also went to be carefully prepared for a world they had seen already outside david copperfield the records of dickens at this time reduced themselves to a few glimpses provided by accidental companions of his school days and little can be deduced from them about his personality beyond the general impression of sharpness and perhaps of bravado of bright eyes and bright speeches probably the young creature was recuperating himself for his misfortunes was making the most of his liberty was flapping the wings of that wild spirit that had just not been broken we hear of things that sound suddenly juvenile after his mature troubles of a secret language sounding like mere gibberish and of a small theater with paint and red fire such as that which stevensson loved it was not an accident that dickens and stevensson loved it it is a stage unsuited for psychological realism the cardboard characters cannot analyze each other with any effect but it is a stage almost divinely suited for making surroundings for making that situation and background which belongs peculiarly to romance a toy theater in fact is the opposite of private theatricals in the letter you can do anything with the people if you do not ask much from the scenery in the former you can do anything in scenery if you do not ask much from the people in a toy theater you could hardly manage a modern dialogue on marriage but the day of judgment would be quite easy after leaving school dickens found employment as a clerk to mr blackmore a solicitor as one of those inconspicuous underclarks whom he afterwards turned to many grotesque uses here no doubt he met lauten and swivella truckster and wobbler insofar as such sacred creatures ever had embodiments on this lower earth but it is typical of him that he had no fancy at all to remain a solicitous clerk the resolution to rise which had glowed in him even as a dawdling boy when he gazed at Gats Hill which had been darkened but not quite destroyed by his fall into the factory routine which had been released again by his return to normal boyhood and the boundaries of school was not likely to contend itself now with the copying out of agreements he said to work without any advice or help to learn to be a reporter he worked all day at law and all night at shorthand it is an art which can only be affected by time and he had to affect it by overtime but learning the thing under every disadvantage without a teacher without the possibility of concentration or complete mental force without ordinary human sleep he made himself one of the most rapid reporters then alive there is a curious contrast between the casualness of the mental training to which his parents and others subjected him and the savage seriousness of the training to which he subjected himself somebody once asked old John Dickens where his son Charles was educated well really said the great creature in a spacious way he may be said to have educated himself he might indeed this practical intensity of Dickens is worth our dwelling on because it illustrates an elementary antithesis in his character or what appears as an antithesis in our modern popular psychology we are always talking about strong man against weak man but Dickens was not only both a weak man and a strong man he was a very weak man and also a very strong man he was everything that we currently call a weak man he was a man hung on wires he was a man who might at any moment cry like a child he was so sensitive to criticism that one may say that he lacked a skin he was so nervous that he allowed great tragedies in his life to arise only out of nerves but in the matter where all ordinary strong men are miserably weak in the matter of concentrated toil and clear purpose and unconquerable worldly courage he was like a straight salt mrs carlyle who in her human epithets often hit the right nail so that it rang said of him once he has a face made of steel this was probably felt in a flash when she saw in some social crowd the clear eager face of dickens cutting through those near him like a knife any people who had met him from year to year would each year have found a man weakly troubled about his worldly decline and each year they would have found him higher up in the world his was a character very hard for any man of slow and placable temperament to understand he was the character whom anybody can hurt and nobody can kill when he began to report in the house of commons he was still only nineteen his father who had been released from his prison a short time before trials had been released from his had also become among many other things a reporter but old john dickens could enjoy doing anything without any particular respiration after doing it well but charles was of a very different temple he was as i've said consumed with an enduring and almost angry thirst to excel he learned shorthand with a dark self-devotion as if it were a sacred hieroglyph of this self-instruction as of everything else he has left humorous and illuminating phrases he describes how after he had learned the whole exact alphabet quote there then appeared a procession of new horrors called arbitrary characters the most despotic characters i've ever known who insisted for instance that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant expectation and that a pan and ink skyrocket suit for disadvantages end quote he concludes it was almost heartbreaking but it is significant that somebody else a colleague of his concluded there never was such a shorthand writer dickens succeeded in becoming a shorthand writer succeeded in becoming a reporter succeeded ultimately in becoming a highly effective journalist he was appointed as a reporter of the speeches in parliament first by the true son then by the mirror of parliament and last by the morning chronicle he reported the speeches very well and if we must analyze his internal opinions much better than they deserved for it must be remembered that this lad went into the reporter's gallery full of the triumphant radicalism which was then the rising tide of the world he was it must be confessed very little overpowered by the dignity of the mother of parliaments he regarded the house of commons much as he regarded the house of lords as a sort of venerable joke it was perhaps while he watched pale with weariness from the reporter's gallery that they're sank into him a thing that never left him his unfathomable contempt for the british constitution then perhaps he heard from the government benches the immortal apologies of the circumlocution office quote then with the noble lord or right honorable gentleman in whose department it was to defend the circumlocution office put an oranges in his pocket and make a regular field day of the occasion then would he come down to that house with a slap up on the table and meet the honorable gentleman foot to foot then would he be there to tell that honorable gentleman that the circumlocution office was not only blameless in this matter but was commendable in this matter was extollable to the skies in this matter then would he be there to tell that honorable gentleman that although the circumlocution office was invariably right and wholly right it never was so right in this matter then would he be there to tell the honorable gentleman that it would have been more to his honor more to his credit more to his good taste more to his good sense more to half the dictionary of common places if he had left the circumlocution office alone and never approached this matter then would he keep one eye upon a coach or grammar from the circumlocution office below the bar and smash the honorable gentleman with the circumlocution office account of this matter and although one of two things always happened namely either that the circumlocution office had nothing to say and said nothing or that it had something to say of which the noble lord or right honorable gentleman blundered one half and forgot the other the circumlocution office was always voted immaculate by an accommodating majority end quote we are now generally told that dickens has destroyed these abuses and that this is no longer a true picture of public life such at any rate is a circumlocution office account of this matter but dickens has a good radical would i fancy much prefer that we should continue his battle than that we should celebrate his triumph especially when it has not come england is still ruled by the great barnacle family parliament is still ruled by the great barnacle trinity the solemn old barnacle who knew that the circumlocution office was protection the sprightly young barnacle who knew that it was a fraud and the bewildered young barnacle who knew nothing about it from these three types our cabinets are still exclusively recruited people talk of the tyrannies and anomalies which dickens denounced as things to past like a star chamber they believe that the days of the old stupid optimism and the old brutal indifference are gone forever in truth this very belief is only the countenance of the old stupid optimism and the old brutal indifference we believe in a free england than a pure england because we still believe in the circumlocution office account of this matter undoubtedly our serenity is widespread we believe that england is really reformed we believe that england is really democratic we believe that english politics are free from corruption but this general satisfaction of ours does not show that dickens has beaten the barnacles it only shows that the barnacles have beaten dickens it cannot be too often said then that we must read into young dickens and his works this old radical tone towards institutions that tone was a sort of happy impatience and when dickens had to listen for hours to the speech of the noble lord and defense of the circumlocution office when that is he had to listen to what he regarded as the last vaporings of a vanishing oligarchy the impatience rather predominated over the happiness his incurably restless nature found more pleasure in the wandering side of journalism he went about wildly imposed chases to report political meetings for the morning chronicle and what gentleman they were to serve he exclaimed in such things as the old morning chronicle great or small it did not matter i've had to charge for half a dozen breakdowns at half a dozen times as many miles i've had to charge for the damage of a great code from the drippings of a blazing wax scandal in writing through the smallest hours of the night in a swift flying carriage and pair and quote and again quote i've often transcribed for the printer from my shorthand notes important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising writing on the palm of my hand by the light of a dark lantern in a post-chase and fall galloping through a wild country and through the dead of the night at the then surprising raid of 15 miles an hour end quote the whole of dickens's life goes with the throb of that nocturnal gallop all its real wildness shot through with an imaginative wickedness he afterwards uttered in the drive of jonas chasawit through the storm all this time and indeed from a time of which no measure can be taken the creative part of his mind had been in a stir or even a fever while still a small boy he had written for his own amusement some sketches of queer people he had met notably one of his uncle's barber whose principal hobby was pointing out what napoleon ought to have done in the matter of military tactics he had a notebook full of such sketches yet sketches not only of persons but of places which were to him almost more personal than persons in the december of 1833 he published one of these fragments in the old monthly magazine this was followed by nine others in the same paper and when the paper which was a romantically radical venture run by a veteran soldier of bolivar itself collapsed dickens continued the series in the evening chronicle an offshoot of the morning paper of the same name these were the pieces afterwards published and known as the sketches by boz and with them dickens enters literature he also enters upon many things about this time he enters manhood and among other things marriage a friend of his on the chronicle george hogarth had several daughters with all of them dickens appears to have been on terms of great affection this sketch is holy literary and i do not feel it necessary to do more than touch upon such incidents at his marriage just as i shall do no more than touch upon the tragedy that ultimately overtook it but it may be suggested here that the final misfortunes were in some degree due to the circumstances attending the original action a very young man fighting his way and excessively poor with no memories for years past they were not monotonous and mean and with its strongest and most personal memories quite ignominious and unendurable was suddenly thrown into the society of a whole family of girls i think it does not overstate his weakness and i think it partly constitutes his excuse to say that he fell in love with a chance of love as sometimes happens in the undeveloped youth an abstract femininity simply intoxicated him in what came afterwards he was enormously to blame but i do not think that his was a case of cold division from a woman who made once seriously and singly loved he'd been bewildered in a burning haze i will not say even a first love but a first flirtations the whole family stimulated him before he fell in love with one of them and it continued to stimulate him long after he'd quarreled with her for causes that did not even destroy his affection for her this view is strikingly supported by all the details of his attitude towards all the other members of the sacred house of hogarth one of the sisters remained of course his dearest friend till death another who had died he worshiped like a saint and he always asked to be buried in her grave he was married on april 2nd 1836 Forster remarks that the few days before the announcement of their marriage in the times the same paper contained another announcement that on the 31st would be published the first number of a work called the posthumous papers of the pickwick club it is the beginning of his career the sketches apart from splendid splashes of humor here and there are not manifestations of the man of genius we might almost say that this book is one of the few books by dickens which would not standing alone have made his fame and yet standing alone it did make his fame his contemporaries could see a new spirit in it where we familiar with the larger fruits of that spirit can only see a continuation of the prosaic and almost wooden wit of the comic books of that day but in any case we should hardly look in the man's first book for the fullness of his contribution to letters youth is almost everything else but it is hardly ever original we read of young man bursting on the old world with a new message but youth and actual experience is the period of imitation and even of obedience subjectively its emotions may be furious and headlong but its only external outcome is a furious imitation and a headlong obedience as we grow older we learn the special thing we have to do as a man goes on towards the grave he discovers gradually a philosophy he can really call fresh a style he can really call his own and as he becomes an older man he becomes a new writer ipson in his youth wrote almost classic plays about vikings it was in his old age that he began to break windows and throw fireworks the only fault it was said of browning's first poems was that they had too much beauty of imagery and too little wealth of thought the only fault that is of browning's first poems was that they were not brownings in one way however the sketches by boss do stand out very symbolically in the life of dickens they constitute in a manner the dedication of him to his special task the sympathetic and yet exaggerated painting of the poor middle class he was to make men feel that this dull middle class was actually a kind of elf land but here again the work is rude and undeveloped and this is shown in the fact that it is a great deal more exaggerated than it is sympathetic we are not of course concerned with the kind of people who say that they wish that dickens was more refined if those people are ever refined it will be by fire but there is in this earliest work an element which almost vanished in later ones an element which is typical of the middle classes in england and which is in a more real sense to be called vulgar i mean that in these little farses there is a trace in the author as well as in the characters of the petty sense of social precedence that hubbub of little unheard of olacockeys which is the only serious sin of bourgeoisie of britain it may seem pragmatical for example to instance such rowdy fars as the story of Horatio Sparkens which tells how a tough hunting family entertained a rhetorical youth thinking he was a lord and found he was a draper's assistant no doubt they were very snobbish in thinking that the lord must be eloquent but we cannot help feeling that dickens is almost equally snobbish in feeling it is so very funny that a draper's assistant should be eloquent a free man one would think would despise the family quite as much if Horatio had been a peer here and here only there is just a touch of the vulgarity of the only vulgarity of the world out of which dickens came for the only element of loneness that there really is in our populace is exactly that they are full of superiorities and the very conscious of class shades imperceptible to the eyes of others but as hard and haughty as a brahmin caste separate one kind of char one from another kind of char woman dickens was destined to show with inspired symbolism all the immense virtues of the democracy he was to show them as the most humorous part of our civilization which they certainly are he was to show them as the most promptly and practically compassionate part of our civilization which they certainly are the democracy has a hundred exuberant good qualities the democracy has only one outstanding sin it is not democratic end of chapter three