The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

That it was the work of a sentimentalist may be seen from the way in which Dickens puts the hands of his clock back to yesterday, the day in which all sentimentalists live. The background of his novels, indeed, was always the background of his own childhood. Coaching was as much out of date in Dickens’s time as hansom cabs are now. The inn of escapades and adventures had already given place to the railway hotel of time-tables and propriety. But Dickens, like Smollett and Fielding, set out to erect a memorial to an age that was rapidly slipping out of sight.

  Most of Dickens’s novels, in fact, were out of date within his lifetime. To-day, when they are definitely antique, it does not worry us that they should once have been old-fashioned. But at the time it did.

  One of the earliest critical commentators, Adolphus William Ward, writing in 1882, remarked, with the date stamped large on every word: “It would, of course, be against all experience to suppose that to future generations Dickens, as a writer, will be all that he was to his own. Much that constitutes the subject, or at least furnishes the background, of his pictures of English life, like the Fleet Prison and the Marshalsea, has vanished, or is being improved off the face of the land.” But without drawing out the old tag, that human nature remains constant from age to age, we may say that farcical humour remains constant. Dogberry and the watch, and Fielding’s watchman and Mr. Samuel Weller and Mr. W. W. Jacobs’s nightwatchman are all members of an immutable brotherhood. And it does not matter that the Reform Act has made impossible a second election of Eatanswill. With farcical comedy it is enough that such things should have happened once.

  After the Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s genius split into two halves: art and energy. The first increased: the second diminished.

  If Pickwick had been written with only as much vivacity and invention as went into Little Dorrit, it would have sagged throughout its artless length. If Little Dorrit had been as clumsy in construction as Pickwick, it would have nothing to commend it. As it is, each has something, and each has enough. For Dickens even in dilution remains unmistakably Dickens. And though Our Mutual Friend is poorish Dickens compared with, say, David Copperfield, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood is quite good Wilkie Collins, both are plainly stamped with the signature of “the Inimitable.”

  That his invention wore thin is hardly surprising; he was writing with the printer at his elbow: not once was he a number ahead in the whole course of the periodical publication of Nicholas Nickleby.

  Dickens has won a false reputation as a social reformer. He was something quite distinct. He was the warmhearted, hot-headed, sentimental humanitarian, with nerves permanently on edge at the callousness of the rest of the world. His sort are a fair barometer of the feelings of the best; they are never anything to the worst.

  Charles Reade, the good Samaritan, stuffed with facts from Blue Books as well as with indignation, was the true reformer; the kind of man to convince an M.P. Dickens’s heart was always bleeding for someone; always rebelling against injustice.

  This gallant anger was a substitute for much else in his life. His youth had left him insensible to those subtle things that are appreciated most by those who have known them when young. The world of formal beauty was undiscovered by him. Religion was a country that he saw only in passing through, and disliked. Ecstasy in any form was unknown to him. And in his novels he gives as much thought to love between the sexes as a healthy boy of twelve does. He enjoyed the comic gaucheries and pink-and-white tenderness of love-making without appearing even to understand what lay behind it all.

  Yet Dickens himself was an exquisite and beautiful lover. It is true that he married the wrong woman. But the right one—his own sister-in-law—was so much to him that perhaps he left any hint of passionate devotion out of his books for the sincere and human reason that he disliked talking about it.

  The girl was only seventeen when she died in 1837. “If she were with us now,” Dickens wrote in his Diary, “the same willing, happy, amiable companion, sympathising with all my thoughts and feelings more than anyone I knew ever did or will, I think I should have nothing to wish for but a continuance of such happiness.” And, in a letter to her mother, he wrote: “After she died, I dreamed of her every night for many weeks, and always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to me that I never lay down at night without a hope of the vision coming back in one shape or another. And so it did.”

  Sooner or later some sublimely confident writer will assess the mystic contribution of Mary Hogarth to the genius of Charles Dickens. Possibly we have assessed it already in saying that he excluded real love from his novels with more than merely a casual disregard for it. For Mary was always in his mind. In his fifty-seventh year he wrote: “She is so much in my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful, and have greatly prospered in anything, that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is.”

  Those last years had a sad influence on Dickens. Like Scott, he was trapped in the pit of his own energy. He was impelled through all the exhausting business of daily work, though the excuse for it was entirely absent. Like Scott, again, he rested his mind by walking great distances to tire his body.

  But he was consuming his own frame by his restlessness. Even his handwriting shows how cruelly his body was being overdriven. He was naturally a whole platoon of men: but he tried to do the work of an army. To those that met him the essential concentration of vigour, of life even, was at once apparent. Leigh Hunt declared: “What a face is his to meet in a drawing-room! He has the life and soul in it of fifty human beings.”

  And in the end, his face of steel—as Mrs. Carlyle called it—led to his destruction. It was such a magnificent headpiece that he could not be persuaded to cease displaying it. Dickens was an actor who had been suffered to escape from the stage. But the love of having all eyes fixed upon him remained.

  Up to middle-age he commanded all the attention that he could desire simply by letting the perpetual fountain of his imagination send up its clouds and rainbows across the crowd. But as the fountain began to choke in its depths he adopted other means of attracting notice.

  He became like a little god stepped down from his altar and gone off to canvass for new worshippers in the streets. He was as much a national figure as the Great Duke. People would break from the crowd to press his hand and thank him for having been himself: all of which was so gratifying that it led Dickens into giving that tragic series of readings, throughout the length and breadth of the country, that ultimately killed him.

  There is something rather chilling to the spirit in the notion of the ageing author abandoning the quietude of his study to become a sort of giant performing flea.

  Had it been a lecture tour that ended in tragic failure it would have been easier to approve than was this reading tour that closed in colossal success. The records that Dickens had been making all his life might simply have been gramophone records for the use he made of them. For with nothing new to say—only supreme art in knowing how to say it, how to perform, how to move, how to impress—he was content with proving and re-proving to himself and others that he was a great popular attraction.

  With the delicacy of feeling of a box-office manager he records how “Eleven bank-notes were thrust into the paybox … for eleven stalls,” and boasts that “Neither Grisi nor Jenny Lind, nor anything nor anybody seems to make the least effect on the draw of the readings.”

  He gave eighty-seven readings in under four months and declared: “I seem to be always either in a railway-carriage, or reading, or going to bed. I get so knocked-up, whenever I have a minute to remember it, that then I go to bed as a matter of course ”—just as though he were an overworked actor in a provincial stock company. And the extraordinary thing is that Dickens could not see that he was degrading himself.

  When the strain of being Dickens finally killed him, there came one of those undignified but well-intentioned competitions for the remains, that mar the decen
t burial of the great. Dickens had wished to be interred at Gad’s Hill, and once had felt a passing desire to be disposed of in a disused graveyard beneath the walls of Rochester Castle.

  And because he was a man whose singular cogency of thought had startled the whole world, as soon as he was dead, his wishes were overridden and he was treated as though in life he had not known his own mind.

  First, the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral petitioned for the remains. Then, Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster, applied. And Dean Stanley won. Dickens, against his wishes, was buried with all possible decorum in the circumstances, in the Poet’s Corner.

  It is no profit to say that a brain of the singular brightness of Dickens’s is a national property. Dickens directed his entire life on the assumption that it was not, and that he was his own indisputable master; and the whole circumstances of the funeral show that sometimes only those who work in the brightest colours of the comic and fantastic get near to portraying accurately the world of fact.

  The Best of the Second-Best

  Imagine the rocket of true genius bursting in the night sky of Victorian prose fiction and you will see the two durable and brilliant suns of Dickens and Thackeray drifting away in opposite directions; an iridescent twin-star that is the Brontës soaring to sudden and magnificent extinction; and a nebula of smaller stars—for this was the golden age of the second-best—glittering and glowing, half of them being blotted out in the moment of their conception.

  Attach names to them and you have among the bright glittering ones Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli; among the red-hot, glowing ones, Kingsley, George Eliot and Charles Reade; and among those neither bright nor burning, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Gaskell—though in Ruth she burned as brightly as any of them—and those two untiring and unenterprising historians who posed as novelists, G. P. R. James and Harrison Ainsworth.

  Leaving the hair-oil and damask group, and the pamphlet-and-platform party, for a moment, the most considerable artists we meet are George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, the best of the second-best.

  George Eliot, née Mary Ann Evans, is conspicuous as the novelist of sanity and common sense. If you like the manner of the female preacher and continuation-school teacher you will like George Eliot. She is religious and confident and independent.

  Adam Bede, for instance, is the best protest in all fiction against the Chadband type of Dickens caricature of Nonconformity. Dinah Morris, despite her permanent, unblinking, Salvationist smile is a living woman, the first of a long line. Indeed, George Eliot’s heroines, such as Dorothea from Middlemarch, are better drawn than those of any other woman novelist. That was because George Eliot was perfectly unsentimental; she was masculine in mind as well as in the name she assumed. That George Eliot’s mind was such a calm, moderate mind, Leslie Stephen has suggested, was due to the calm, moderate Warwickshire countryside in which she was brought up. It may have been. I am doubtful of these geographical explanations. What we can safely say is that the differences between George Eliot and the Brontës are as the differences in their native landscapes.

  So far as the present generation is concerned, George Eliot’s clerics have aged more rapidly than those of Anthony Trollope. He has come in as she has gone out.

  Trollope nearly became a second Jane Austen; but not knowing, only imagining, the world of which he wrote, he was kinder, and so lost the opportunity.

  The coral structure of life within the bright glass-case of the novels is the same; and within the limitations of the circumscribing rim their measure of success is very much the same.

  Trollope, like his friend Thackeray, faced middle-age with his soul in good, charitable working condition, but slightly battered from ill-usage in youth. And it was not until after middle-age that he wrote his best. Unlike the scream-till-someone-hears-us band of social reformers, who invaded fiction about this time, he used his novels not as a protest against persecution but as a precaution against poverty. And to his unromantic and logical mind the one was the other.

  He simply wrote the best novels that he could write, and sold them as Scott did his for the highest figure that he could get. But once the truth got about that he had the acumen of a tradesman as well as the art of an author, everyone forgot the latter in utter disgust at the former. His contemporaries could never quite forgive the penniless, dirty-faced little boy who contrived to make £70,000 by his pen.

  Trollope’s Autobiography is the kind of reminiscent volume that a successful butcher might have written had he suddenly grown perfectly and persuasively articulate. I suppose without doubt it is vulgar, supremely vulgar, this record of a huge horseman riding roughshod over other people’s heads.

  It is a strangely stunted production: from it is excluded even a glimpse of the worlds of beauty, or passion, or anything higher than ambition. It is the story of a man’s backing himself heavily in the race of life and winning. It reminds one of the dream that is embodied in Smiles’s Self-Help, pleasantly and plentifully come true.

  My marriage was like the marriage of other people, and of no special interest to anyone except my wife and me. It took place at Rotherham in Yorkshire, where her father was the manager of a bank. We were not rich, having about £400 a year on which to live. Many people would say that we were two fools to encounter such poverty together. I can only reply that since that day I have never been without money in my pocket, and that I soon acquired the means of paying what I owed.

  The marriage “was like the marriage of other people”—that is the remark of a verger not of a bridegroom. And the rest of the quotation shows a mind as little affected by the sentimentalities of marriage as Jane Austen’s, and as fully aware of the economics. But throughout the Autobiography there is one quality even more apparent than its vulgarity. And that is its honesty. Trollope’s Autobiography says all those things that one suspects other authors of having felt, and left unsaid.

  Trollope extracted as much pleasure from the business of success as Arnold Bennett did. Both men were impressed by themselves, and both men loved conveying the impression. There was always a look-first-at-this-picture-and-then-on-that invitation in Trollope’s personal writing. This is the diptych:

  I remember well, when I was still the junior boy in the school, Dr. Butler, the headmaster, stopping me in the street, and asking me, with all the clouds of Jove upon his brow and all the thunder in his voice, whether it was possible that Harrow School was disgraced by so disreputably dirty a little boy as I.

  That was when he was seven, the helpless child of ruined parents. And this is when he was sixty-three; fat, defiant and captain of his fate.

  It may interest some if I state that during the last twenty years I have made by literature something near £70,000. As I have said before in these pages, I look upon the result as comfortable, but not splendid. … If the rustle of a woman’s petticoat has ever stirred my blood; if a cup of wine has been a joy to me; if I have thought tobacco at midnight in pleasant company to be one of the elements of an early paradise; if now and again I have somewhat recklessly fluttered a £5 note over a card-table—of what matter is that to any reader? I have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought me to no sorrow. It has been the companionship of smoking that I have loved, rather than the habit. I have never desired to win money, and I have lost none. To enjoy the excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill effects—to have the sweet and leave the bitter untasted—that has been my study. The preachers tell us that this is impossible. It seems to me that hitherto I have succeeded fairly well.

  There is about that passage and, indeed, about the whole of the Autobiography the self-satisfied glee of the schoolboy who has managed to break all the rules without being punished.

  Trollope, cheating his father’s bailiffs at fifteen and living within his income at fifty like a squire, is truly and typically the pattern of a Victorian author, as Fielding or Smollett, tracing the reverse course through life, is of the eighteenth century.

  When Trollo
pe left school his contemporaries went to the University and he went into the Post Office. His contemporaries are all forgotten by now, partly no doubt because the life they found there fitted them like a glove and they wanted to do nothing but wear it. The Post Office fitted Trollope like a thumbscrew and he spent years trying to fling it off. He regarded the years spent at St. Martin’s-le-Grand merely as a particularly barren patch of the great Sahara that spread across his early life. The truth probably is that they comprised his imaginative Garden of Eden, out of which a river flowed. It must have been there, as inescapably surrounded by the society of his fellows as a monk, that Trollope learned with tears of boredom the comic littleness of man.

  It may seem puzzling why Trollope did not write the supreme novel of the Civil Service. And the puzzle is perhaps most satisfactorily solved by saying that he could not because he disliked it too much. If he had attempted it he would have been looking round the whole time for faces to punch instead of for noses to pull. And pulling clerical noses was what he did to perfection in the Barchester novels. When he tried in The Three Clerks to write the novel of the Civil Service he failed as unmistakably as he succeeded in The Warden.

  Indeed, Trollope, after he left the Post Office, may be regarded as the complete novelist, his mind driven back into itself by unhappiness, and with a digested store of humorous observation ready for delivery. All that he needed to begin his writing was a similar restricted scene of society in which to let his little comedy be played. And he found it in Salisbury.

  When Trollope took the train to Salisbury, Fortune drove the engine and Mischief rode in the van. “I visited Salisbury,” he wrote, “and whilst wandering there one midsummer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral, I conceived the story of The Warden, from whence came that series of novels of which Barchester with its bishops, deans and archdeacons was the central site”; and he added, “I never lived in any cathedral city except London, never knew anything of any Close, and at that time had enjoyed no peculiar intimacy with any clergyman.”