by Unknown
Dickens’s method suited him because he had humor sufficient to supply a nation. All of us have some foible (which may be what makes us lovable), and Dickens saw it, and made a man of it. Where he misses its comic aspect his failure is utter, and now and again he does fail dolefully, through insisting on making that comic which is not comic. His humorous way of looking at things, which has been the joy of millions, occasionally undid him. He felt compelled to produce comic copy, and when he had no milk he sold water. The first chapter of “Martin Chuzzlewit” is about the most melancholy reading in fiction. In all Dickens there is nothing else quite so forced, though often we are asked to laugh and cannot. To dwell on the occasions where Dickens’s humor failed him is, however, to waste our words, for he succeeds a hundred times for every failure.
But few seek to dispute Dickens’s pre-eminence as a humorist, except such as do not know how to laugh. It is only to be noted in passing that perhaps once a year a man is born who has the sense of humor and yet does not enjoy Dickens. Disraeli was one of these. When we come, however, to the discussion of Dickens’s pathos we take sides. We may revel in “Pickwick,” and yet find Paul Dombey sickening. Dickens’s pathos, indeed, is usually of the cheapest kind, for it is forced and deliberate, because he is determined to make us cry as loud as he can make us laugh. He introduces children into his stories that he may kill them to slow music. He may be compared to the actors who, if they think they are good at dying, insist on making an act of it. He tells us himself that he wept over little Paul’s death, and it is certain that thousands have wept over it since, especially if it was read aloud by some skilled reader who knew when to let his voice break. But it is a maudlin chapter, and betrays a weakness in the author who shows a readiness to dabble in this morbid manner. We would not think the better of a doctor who invited us, for a treat, to step into an infirmary and watch a little boy dying. This is what Dickens does, and he also requests us to observe how prettily he can drop into poetry over the bedside. Here essentially you find a wide divergence in the novels of Sir Walter Scott. The Wizard of the North was naturally incapable of the sickly sentimentality which casts a blemish on many of Dickens’s pages. A healthy nature rebels against it, and there is certainly something unmanly in Dickens’s fondness for such scenes.
Many times, of course, Dickens is most tender, as in numberless passages in the boyhood of David Copperfield. Were he not, we would have to allow that the connection between humor and pathos is less close than had been thought. It is only the punsters of the comic papers who can be funny often and serious never. They are not real humorists; at the best they are merely wits. Humor and pathos are the children of sympathy (which only produces twins), and Dickens was one of the most sympathetic of men; certainly the most sympathetic of the great English novelists. The reason why his humor is better than his pathos is that he was a caricaturist. With him everything is larger than life. Now humor may be of the best kind though it exaggerates, but pathos can never be larger than life - size. Where Dickens’s pathos is subdued it rings true, but where he casts a strong light on it it is lurid in the colors of melodrama.
The later works of Dickens are much better constructed than their predecessors; the writing is more artistic, and the thread of the story less broken. They are, therefore, some hold, better books. But surely this is not true. “Pickwick” is flung together “anyhow,” so that we could still enjoy it though we began at the last chapter and journeyed onward to the first. There are hundreds of pages in “Martin Chuzzlewit” and “Nicholas Nickleby” that could be cut out without interfering with the plot. But it is these incidental details that give us Dickens at his best. They are the immortal part of him. What the hostler at the inn or the man on the coach said is for reading every year, while the murder and what led to it interest us but once. Jonas Chuzzlewit gives us sensation and a headache, but Mark Tapley gives us a friend for life and Pecksniff haunts our mirthful moments in common with Pickwick. Thus, though as stories the later books are more ingenious, they do not compensate for the lack of humorous detail. The earlier novels had less art, but they were fresher.
In one respect Dickens and Scott may be compared. They are the most wholesome of the novelists. No other writers of fiction in this country have done so much good. Neither was “deep.” Their optimism was at times, doubtless, somewhat shallow, but they were great men, who loved their fellow-creatures and ever used their capacities to a noble purpose.
GRETNA GREEN REVISITED.
THE one bumpy street of Springfield, despite its sparse crop of grass, presents to this day a depressed appearance, a relic of the time when it doubled up under a weight of thundering chariots. At the well-remembered, notorious Queen’s Head I stood in the gathering gloaming, watching the road run yellow, until the last draggled hen had spluttered through the pools to roost, and the mean row of whitewashed, shrunken houses across the way had sunk into the sloppy ground, as they have been doing slowly for half a century, or were carried away in a rush of rain. Soaking weed hung in lifeless bunches over the hedges of spears that line the road from Gretna; on sodden Canobie Lea, where Lochinvar’s steed would to-day have had to wade through yielding slush, dirty piles of congealed snow were still reluctant to be gone; and gnarled treetrunks, equally with palings that would have come out of the ground with a sloppy gluck, showed a dank and cheerless green. Yesterday the rooks dinned the air, and the parish of Gretna witnessed such a marrying and giving in marriage as might have flung it back fifty years. Elsewhere such a solemn cawing round the pulpit on the tree-tops would denote a court of justice, but in the vicinity of Springfield, it may be presumed, the thoughts of the very rooks run on matrimony.
A little while ago Willum Lang, a postman’s empty letter-bag on his back, and a glittering drop trembling from his nose, picked his way through the puddles, his lips pursed into a portentous frown, and his gray head bowed professionally in contemplation of a pair of knock-kneed but serviceable shanks. A noteworthy man Willum, son of Simon, son of David, grandson by marriage of Joseph Paisley, all famous “blacksmiths” of Gretna Green. For nigh a century Springfield has marked time by the Langs, and still finds “In David Lang’s days” as forcible as “when Plancus was consul.” Willum’s predecessors in office reserved themselves for carriage runaways, and would shake the lids from their coffins if they knew that Willum had to marry the once despised “pedestrians.”
“Even Elliot,” David Lang would say, “could join couples who came on foot,” and that, of course, was very hard on the poor pedestrian, for greater contempt no man ever had for rival than David for Elliot, unless, indeed, it was Elliot’s for David. But those were the great clattering days, when there were four famous marrying shops: the two rival inns of Springfield, that washed their hands of each other across the street; Mr. Linton’s aristocratic quarters at Gretna Hall, and the toll-bar on the right side of the Sark. A gentleman who had requisitioned the services of the toll-keeper many years ago recently made a journey across the border to shake his fist at the bar, and no one in Gretna Green can at all guess why. Far-seeing Murray, the sometime priest of Gretna Hall, informed me, succeeded Beattie at the toll-house in 1843, and mighty convenient friends in need they both proved for the couples who dashed across the border with foaming fathers at their coaches’ wheels. The stone bridge flashed fire to rushing hoofs, the exulting pursuers, knowing that a half-mile brae still barred the way to Springfield, saw themselves tearing romantic maidens from adventurers’ arms, when Beattie’s lamp gleamed in the night, the horses stopped as if an invisible sword had cleft them in twain, the maid was whisked like a bundle of stolen goods into the toll-bar, and her father flung himself in at the door in time to be introduced to his son-in-law. Oh, Beattie knew how to do his work expeditiously, and fat he waxed on the proceeds. In his later days marrying became the passion of his life, and he never saw a man and a maid together without creeping up behind them and beginning the marriage service. In Springfield there still are men and women who hav
e fled from him for their celibacy, marriage in Scotland being such an easy matter that you never know when they may not have you. In joining couples for the mere pleasure of the thing, Simon brought high fees into disrepute, and was no favorite with the rest of the priesthood. That half-mile nearer the border, Jardine admits, gave the toll-bar a big advantage, but for runaways who could risk another ten minutes, Gretna Hall was the place to be married at.
Willum Lang’s puckered face means business. He has been sent for by a millworker from Langholm, who, having an hour to spare, thinks he may as well drop in at the priest’s and get spliced; or by an innocent visitor wandering through the village in search of the mythical smithy; or by a lawyer who shakes his finger threateningly at Willum (and might as well have stayed at home with his mother). From the most distant shores letters reach him regarding Gretna marriages, and if Willum dislikes monotony he must be getting rather sick of the stereotyped beginning, “I think your charges very extortionate.” The stereotyped ending, “but the sum you asked for is enclosed,” is another matter. It is generally about midnight that the rustics of the county rattle Willum’s door off it’s snib and, bending over his bed, tell him to arise and marry them. His hand is crossed with silver coin, for gone are the bridegrooms whose gold dribbled in a glittering cascade from fat purses to a horny palm; and then, with a sleepy neighbor, a cold hearth, and a rattling cynic of a window for witnesses, he does the deed. Elsewhere I have used these words to describe the scene: “The room in which the Gretna Green marriages have been celebrated for many years is a large rude kitchen, but dimly lighted by a small ‘bole’ window of lumpy glass that faces an ill-fitting back door. The draught generated between the two cuts the spot where the couples stand, and must prove a godsend to flushed and flurried bridegrooms. A bed — wooden and solid, ornamented with divers shaped and divers colored clothes dependent from its woodwork like linen hung on a line to dry — fills a lordly space. The monster fireplace retreats bashfully before it into the opposite wall, and a grimy cracked ceiling looks on a bumpy stone floor, from which a cleanly man could eat his porridge. One shabby wall is happily hid by the drawers in which Lang keeps his books; and against the head of the bed an apoplectic Mrs. Langtry in a blue dress and yellow stockings, reminding the public that Simon Lang’s teas are the best, shudders at her reflection in the looking glass that dangles opposite her from a string.” The signboard over a snuffy tavern that attempted to enter into rivalry with the Queen’s Head depicts the priest on his knees going through the church marriage services, but the Langs have always kept their method of performing the ceremony a secret between themselves and the interested persons, and the artist in this case was doubtless drawing on his imagination. The picture is discredited by the scene of the wedding being made in a smithy, when it is notorious that the “blacksmith” has cut the tobacco plug, and caught fish in the Solway, and worked at* the loom, the last, and the toll-bar, but never wielded Vulcan’s hammer. The popular term is thus a mystery, though a witness once explained, in a trial, to Brougham, that Gretna marriages were a welding of heat. Now the welding of heat is part of a blacksmith’s functions.
It is not for Willum Lang to censure the Langholm millworkers, without whose patronage he would be as a priest superannuated, but if they could be got to remember whom they are married to, it would greatly relieve his mind. When standing before him they are given to wabbling unsteadily on their feet, and to taking his inquiry whether the maiden on their right is goodly in their sight for an offer of another “mutchkin:” and next morning they sometimes mistake somebody else’s maiden for their own. When one of the youth of the neighborhood takes to him a helpmate at Springfield his friend often whiles away the time by courting another, and when they return to Langholm things are sometimes a little mixed up. The priest, knowing what is expected of him, is generally able when appealed to, to “assign to each bridegroom his own;” but one shudders to think what complications may arise when Willum’s eyes and memory go. These weddings are, of course, as legal as though Lang were Archbishop of Canterbury, but the clergymen shake their heads, and sometimes — as indeed was the case even in the great days — a second marriage by a minister is not thought amiss.
About the year 1826, the high road to Scotland ran away from Springfield. Weeds soon afterward sprouted in the street, and though the place’s reputation died hard, its back had been broken. Runaways skurried by oblivious of its existence, and at a convenient point on the new road shrewd John Linton dropped Gretna Hall. Springfield’s convenient situation had been its sole recommendation, and when it lost that it was stranded. The first entry in the Langs’ books dates back to 1771, when Joseph Paisley represented the priesthood, but the impetus to Gretna marriages had been given by the passing of Lord Hardwicke’s act, a score of years before. Legend speaks of a Solway fisherman who taught tobacconist Paisley the business. Prior to 1754, when the law put its foot down on all unions not celebrated by ministers of the Church of England, there had been no need to resort to Scotland, for the chaplains of the fleet were anticipating the priests of Gretna Green, and doing a roaring trade. Broadly speaking, it was as easy between the Reformation and 1745 to get married in the one country as in the other. The Marriage Act changed all that. It did a real injustice to non-members of the Established Church, and only cured the disease in one place to let it break out in another. Lord Hardwicke might have been a local member of Parliament, pushing a bill through the House “for the promotion of Larceny and Rowdyism at Gretna Green.” For the greater part of a century, there was a whirling of coaches and a clattering of horses across the border, after which came marriage in England before a registrar, and an amendment of the Scotch law that required residence north of the Sark, on the part of one of the parties, for twenty-one days before the ceremony took place. After that the romance of Gretna Green was as a tale that was told. The latter half of the last century, and the first twenty years of this, were thus the palmy days of Springfield, for after Gretna Hall hung out its signboard, the Langs were oftener seen at the “big house” than in the double-windowed parlor of the Queen’s Head.
The present landlord of this hostelry, a lightsome host, troubled with corns, who passes much of his time with a knife in one hand and his big toe in the other, is nephew of that Beattie who saw his way to bed by the gleam of post-boy’s lamps, and spent his days unsnibbing the Queen’s Head door to let runaways in, and barring it to keep their pursuers out. Much depends on habit, and Beattie slept most soundly to the drone of the priest in his parlor, and the rub-a-dub of baffled parents on his window-sills. His nephew, also a Beattie, brings his knife with him into the immortal room, where peers of the realm have mated with country wenches, and fine ladies have promised to obey their father’s stable-boys, and two Lord Chancellors of England with a hundred others have blossomed into husbands, and one wedding was celebrated of which neither Beattie nor the world takes any account. There are half a dozen tongues in the inn — itself a corpse now that wearily awaits interment — to show you where Lord Erskine gambolled in a tablecloth, while David Lang united him in the bonds of matrimony with his housekeeper, Sarah Buck. There is the table at which he composed some Latin doggerel in honor of the event, and the doubtful signature on a cracked pane of glass. A strange group they must have made — the gaping landlord at the door, Mrs. Buck, the superstitious, with all her children in her arms, David Lang rebuking the Lord Chancellor for posing in the lady’s bonnet, Erskine in his tablecloth skipping around the low-roofed room in answer, and Christina Johnstone, the female witness, thinking sadly that his lordship might have known better. Here, too, Lord Eldon galloped one day with his “beloved Bessy;” and it is not uninteresting to note that though he came into the world eighteen months after Lord Erskine, he paid Gretna Green a business visit nearly fifty years before him. Lang’s books are a veritable magic-lantern, and the Queen’s Head the sheet on which he casts his figures. The slides change. Joseph Paisley sees his shrewd assistant.
