SOME THOUGHTS ANENT DICKENS AND NOVEL WRITING. BY ERNEST EVERON. Most of the great works of literary genius have been achieved at no great distance from the starting point of a nation's literary career. Poetry is especially subject to this law. She springs into existence complete at once in majesty and beauty, as the old poets told that Minerva rose from the forehead of Jove, or Aphrodite from the waves of the Mediterranean. The Iliad is at once the first of epic poems, and the greatest. Only two hundred years elapsed from the first rude strains of Livius Andronicus till the Latin language reached its zenith in Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. It took nearly six hundred to descend to Cassiodones. Dante may be said to have formed the Italian language, of which he was the greatest ornament. The Spanish drama may almost be said to have begun with Lopes de Vega: none of his followers surpassed him one alone was his rival. The same may be affirmed of Corneille and Racine in France; and in our own country, the unrivalled names of Shakspeare and Milton shine from an early page of our book of fame. : If this is true of separate nations, it is no less true, in many respects, of the world in general. Few, if any, modern historians, can be said to have surpassed Herodotus and Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus. The greatest of modern orators cannot be ranked above Cicero or Demosthenes. It is not that modern times have altogether declined, but because science and utilitarian art are plants whose petals expand at every moment of the day of Civilization; the Beautiful is a morning-flower. But there is one branch of composition in which nearly every successive century has been a century of progress. Prose fiction was almost unknown to the polished citizens of Athens and Rome. Perhaps this may be partially accounted for by the fact, that the ladies of antiquity were for the most part no great readers, and so the delineation of individual life was not so much in request. In truth, the only attempts of ancient times in this direction appear to have been the romance of Theagenes and Chariclea, and a few others of a like description, in which the hero and heroine are satisfactorily married, after innumerable perils and hair - breadth escapes; incident is everything, character is nothing. As we descend through the middle ages, an improvement is noticeable in the romances of chivalry, and such collections of stories as the Gesta Romanorum; and in the east, which has ever been the home of romantic fiction, the thousand wonderful nights of Arabia and Persia. Two, indeed, of the first novels of Spain and England, "Don Quixote" and "Robinson Crusoe," will never be surpassed. But the knight-errant of Cervantes, and the shipwrecked mariner of De Foe, are each the head of his own peculiar department, and have little in common with the ordinary objects of fiction. The works of many of the early English novelists are objectionable in several respects; yet they generally possess that observation of manner by which fiction becomes an invaluable auxiliary to history. For true history is not a mere chronicle of battles and sieges; its object shoud be to trace the social condition and progress of respective ages and respective nations. The historian of the next century will find an inexhaustible mine in the fiction of this. If the Greeks and Romans had written novels, our antiquarians would have had an easy task. During the reign of the three first Georges, the advance of fiction was not rapid; but in this she only kept pace with her other sisters of literature. Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield" was a great work, when we consider the time that produced it. Miss Edgeworth's novels are clever, especially when she depicts the Irish of the lower classes. But it was not till the early part of the present century that Sir Walter Scott, in the Waverley series, showed what a mighty engine the novel might become in the hands of a master. The historical novel owed its origin to his genius. Although perhaps Bulwer surpasses him in depth of thought, and Dickens in his vivid, life-like pictures-sometimes even in power and pathos-yet in the universality of his genius, and the truth and natural action of his characters, Scott has never since been equalled. His success called into existence a host of imita tors. The great majority of whose productions were only fit to line portmanteaus, and have long since been drowned in the oblivion they deserved. But, in the social novel, the English language has never possessed, at one and the same time, so many writers of fiction of acknowledged eminence as at present. It is useless to specify names. Among the first stand forward Thackeray, Mrs. Stowe, and Bulwer Lytton, in his two last works, The Caxtons" and 66 My Novel." But foremost among the leaders, the most universal genius, who is at home at once in the city and the country-who can sketch all the varying shades of life, whether in the drawingrooms of the great, the fire-sides of the middle classes, or the hovels of the poor, and can paint all well, is CHARLES DICKENS. His birth took place at Portsmouth, in the month of February, 1812. His father was at that time a clerk in the Navy Pay Office; at a later period he went up to London, and became a reporter for the press. The future novelist, after his education had been completed, was articled to an attorney. Hence evidently arises the familiarity with the law which is especially noticeable in David Copperfield and Bleak House. Before, however, the time fixed in his articles had expired, he left the law; perhaps the history of this part of Dickens's life may be best learned from the pages of David Copper U field, which probably may be considered at | Dickens is only excelled by Shakspeare and several periods in the light of an autobiography. Scott. And these personages are not mere lifeHe became a reporter, first to the True Sun, a paper which no longer exists, and afterwards to the Morning Chronicle. In this last journal appeared those pictures of London Life which were afterwards published together, under the name of "Sketches, by Boz," a curious diminutive for Moses, which was used by a younger brother. These, when collected, were published by Macrone. Several years afterwards, when Macrone died, and his widow and children were left in embarrassed circumstances, Dickens, grateful to the memory of his first publisher, originated and superintended a scheme, by which the various authors, whose works had issued under the auspices of Macrone, wrote each an article for the benefit of his widow. less statues. Some authors can describe well; their characters are good images, and we feel that their works are interesting narratives. But Dickens does more. His characters are real live men and women; we feel that we know them; they live in our presence. No author, living or dead, has ever possessed this individualising and life-giving power to a greater extent. His representations soon become to us like old friends, and when once well known, can never be forgotten. His characters may sometimes be exaggerated; but they are true to themselves, and live as no other beings did in books. With him even inanimate nature lives. The river lives; the city lives; and every separate house, and every separate stone-each has its own character, and all is life and action. But there are many who say, “Dickens indeed is a good painter of external nature; but he is wanting in the highest path of fiction-he cannot furnish a single mental portrait. He can tell what a man says and does, but not what he thinks." Now, it is true enough that this is the course which Dickens usually prefers; but it is also the most rational and the most natural. Dickens attempts to make his characters as lifelike as possible, so that we may as it were think of them as alive. To effect this, the advantage possessed by his method is plain. We are much more inclined to believe when we hear what a man said or what he did, than when we hear what he thought. In real life we may guess at what another person thinks; but we never know. No man, however wise, can absolutely understand the whole heart of another-all its bad feelings and all its good feelings; all its weak The object of every writer of fiction, so far as regards other people, should be at once to amuse and instruct; not to amuse | only, as is unfortunately too often the case. To instruct, not by tagging on a moral reflection to the end of a chapter, nor by mixing homœopathically a drop of historical fact with a sea of impossibilities; but by the feelings and tone by which the work is pervaded, and the manners of the times, or descriptions of the scenery, that form the frame of the picture. This instruction must relate either to the external world, or the internal world of character and motive. Many works, like good historical novels, and those whose scene is laid in lands with which we are unacquainted, have an evident tendency to enlarge the sphere of our information, and impress upon our minds the life and manners of those times or regions more firmly than is possible in any other way. Thus the spirit of the feudal times, or even of later pe-kness, and all its power; all the thousand little riods, is much better understood from Sir Walter Scott's novels than from the weary disquisitions of some dull history; and Persian or Swedish life is easier known from the tales of Mr. Baillie Fraser and Miss Bremer, than from any travels whatever. But these bear a small proportion to the vast mass of fiction. The great majority represent life in our own land, and sometimes in circumstances similar to our own. In former times, when lords and ladies were the only readers of novels, the hero had to be an earl, or a baronet at least. But in our days the greater number of readers are to be found in the middle classes; and so, after the time of Scott, but especially since Dickens arose, the writers of fiction have chosen their subjects in general from the firesides of ordinary life. Yet in the writings of such an universal society-painter as Dickens, we enter scenes, and visit circles, which may exist within a mile of our dwelling, and yet of which we may be as, or more, ignorant, than of the tents of the Arabs, or the kraals of the Hottentots. From Lady Dedlock, in her sumptuous mansion, leading the fashion of London, down to poor Joe, the wretched boy who sweeps the crossings, all the intermediate persons stand forth with the reality of life. In the vastness of his field, and the variety of his personages, reasons and motives, which, far more than the great ones, form the moving springs of existence. A man may, or rather should, know his own heart; probably he does not. But seldom, if ever, since the beginning of the world, has one mind exactly appreciated and understood every feeling in the other. So the novelist who, like Dickens, confines himself chiefly to the external expression of language, appearance, and action, makes his personages tell their own characters, and we gradually come to comprehend them, just as we should do in real life. Another fruitful source of debate concerning the works of Dickens, is with reference to their truth. Paradoxical as the doctrine may seem, it is the duty of every writer of works of fiction to write the truth. This certainly does not apply to those tales, which, like the fairy legends of our childhood, are exclusively addressed to the imagination, and rather avoid, than seek, the regions of the probable and the possible. But in all works which profess to depict human life in any of its phases-to tell the stories of men and women who lived and died on this world; how they fought and jostled their way through the noise and bustle of the ever-shifting society which seldom turned to cast a glance at their joys or their sorrows; or how they spent their | lives by quiet home firesides, and the peaceful sunlight of the country fields, till the same hour came round at last to all, and they slept in the bosom of their universal mother;-the author who paints life as it is not, who introduces manners and customs which have no existence, events which could never happen, and descriptions which possess no counterpart in nature, is wilfully deceiving; he is conveying false impressions, which may do, and have done, much injury to the young and inexperienced, who know that the persons in a novel are not real, but take for granted that all else is. Such an author is performing unworthily the part he has undertaken. For the part of the novelist is in truth great and honourable. Rightly fulfilling it, he is the fellow-labourer of the historian and the biographer. All three tell the tale of human life. The historian considers life in the mass: the rise and decline of nations, the foundation and fall of empires, the greater vicissitudes of society, and the progress of civilization. The biographer has for his subject the narrative of an individual life, from the cradle to the grave. But it is seldom, very seldom, that he can do more than indicate the more marked events. He has rarely room for a minute account of the little occurrences and conversations of any particular day, even supposing that he remembers them, which is next to impossible. And so it is, that when we finish the last page of a biography, we seldom know how the man lived. If a biographer could possess a sort of verbal daguerrotype, on which conversations-even those of a trivial nature-wrote themselves down as soon as they were uttered, along with their accompanying looks, gestures, and actions; the narrative of a few days taken from different periods of a man's life, if derived from such a source, would generally make us better acquainted with his character, his manner of living, and the times he lived in, than the whole of an ordinary biography. The nearer the book sometimes approaches to this minuteness, the more vividly do we know the man. Thus Dr. Johnson stands forward in relief from the pages of Boswell, and Napoleon is most intimately known from the gossiping, amusing volumes of Madame D'Abrantes. Now the peculiar province of the novelist is just this-the minute narration of individual life; the description how men live. By his means we are introduced to the various circles of life; the life of the nobleman and the life of the artizan; the life of the statesman, and the life of the student; professional life, commercial life, the life of the town and the life of the country. The novelist ought to be well acquainted with the society about which he intends to write. If he is not, he has no business to write at all. That he is working for his livelihood, is no more of an excuse for him than it would be for a stock-broker who made his country believe that Sebastopol was taken, for the sake of a rise in the funds, for his own individual advantage. But if he is so acquainted, and possesses the requisite ability and observation, the characters and events of his work have, no doubt, never possessed a particular separate existence; but the sketch, nevertheless, is true. We would never quarrel with a landscape-painter, because, in a sunset picture of an Alpine valley, surrounded by snowy summits, he chose to paint in the foreground a peasant-boy bringing his cattle home, and to fill the western sky with floating purple clouds, although when he laid the colours on his canvass no boy or herd was near, and the sky was clear and cloudless. The picture is true; these things might have been; they may be at this moment. All that we expect to be exactly correct is taken from nature as it then was; the valley, the streams, the everlasting hills. Very similar to this is the case of the novelist. To display life fully, and truly, he must display it by means of fictitious characters. of composition, It is no real objection to this species that so many false impressions and evil influences have been communicated by the wilful perversion of some authors, and the ignorance and inability of others. The same objection might be raised each has its evil and its ignorant teachers; against philosophy, history, and biography; under each head there are plenty of hurtful books for those who choose to read them. Yet, it may be said, more harm is done by novels than by any other class of books. Perhaps this is true: both good and evil are easiest felt from a story of human life. Man is generally more interested with the life of man than with aught else in the creation. Other books may influence our speculative opinions; this tends directly to influence our actions. The example of living men has the greatest power over the natural mind; the novel, which resembles it most, has the second. Every day the true nature of the novel is becoming more acknowledged. In the works of our best authors, love no longer occupies the exaggerated position which it formerly held. It takes its true place as a part of life, but by no means the most important. Thus, in "Uncle Tom's Cabin"-the most popular novel of our day-and in Dickens's "Pickwick," "Oliver Twist," and "Old Curiosity Shop," there is scarcely any love whatever; and in the rest of Dickens's works, the most of Thackeray's, and Sir E. Bulwer Lytton's "Caxtons," and "My Novel "-which are as different from his other writings as light from darkness-love takes its proper share of life, and no more. But to return to the truth of the writings of Dickens in particular: it is said that all his characters are exaggerated; that his good beings are angels, his bad demons; and that all are either caricatures or idealities; that there never was a Pickwick, a Quilp, a Swiveller, a little Nell, a Sally Brass, an Edith Dombey, a Jonas Chuzzlewit, an Agnes, a Dora, a Jarndice, a Boythorn, a Krook, an Esther Summerson-in short, that there was hardly ever in real life such a being as any whom | Thackeray; one quarter good in everybody, one Dickens has portrayed. Now, it is undoubtedly true, that in the life of the most perfect human character there are wrong actions, little weaknesses, and hasty words; and in that of the worst character there is something good: and in this point Thackeray is perhaps truer to ordinary human nature than Dickens. Thackeray's human nature, however, is human nature in the bustle of society-seldom the human nature of home; so he often misses the best specimens; and if he does chance to meet with one, he generally makes us laugh at it, although his present work, the "Newcomes," is imbued with a more kindly spirit. But there is such a thing as extraordinary human nature. A man who walks through the streets of a great city, seeking for something to put down in his next book, is naturally most struck with those circumstances which are strange, and those individual peculiarities which are odd and singular, and remembers such things best; while the ordinary pass comparatively unnoticed, just because they are ordinary. Dickens, we believe, takes all these peculiarities from nature. We have no doubt that men exist in the world, quite as odd and strange as those in his books. But his mistake, in reference to such fantastic characters, lies in this-that though they exist in the world, they do not exist in juxta-position with one another: they are generally scattered far apart. In so much, therefore, that in Dickens's works-in "Bleak House," for example, the most faulty of all in this respect Skimpole, Boythorn, Grandfather Smallweed, Krook, and several others of the same description, are all collected into one focus, the book is unreal and untrue. And it must also be remarked, that in real existence, though these peculiarities might be the first points to strike a temporary observer, they would not occupy so much of the canvass of life as they do in Dickens's novels. - quarter bad in everybody, and two quarters ridiculous. To search after beauty, say they, is to follow the vapour-lantern of the marshes into vain delusions and unreal dreams. But there is one great truth which these men do not see. They forget that the ultimate standard by which all human works must be weighed is their influence for good or evil on the rest of men. To this their truth is but subsidiary. The faculties by which we know, are but the servants of those by which we feel, and by which we determine to act. A book may not impart much absolute information, and yet do a great deal of good, provided that it does not actually give erroneous impressions. A book or painting may be very true, and yet do a great deal of evil. The minute description, in the history of Suetonius, of the wickedness of Tiberius, may be all very true, and yet very polluting. Moore's Life of Byron may be all very true, and yet very dangerous. And, though in an infinitely lesser degree, Thackeray's clear, hard representations of all the little follies and weaknesses of human nature may have a tendency to drag his readers down below their original level, rather than to fill them with an earnest desire and resolve to aim ever upwards at a higher standard, seeking some loftier position, where they may breathe a purer air. Are we to be satisfied with the thought that everybody is as foolish as ourselves, and therefore we are wise enough and good enough for this world? or, that it is impossible to be without faults, since the best have them; therefore ours are not of so much consequence, and therefore we may let them alone? No! It cannot be that God intended his creatures to pass through life contented with their present level, without one loftier aspiration. He gave them the spirit to rise; he implanted in them that trust in something nobler, that longing for a more perfect holiness and loveliness, never to be completely satisfied on earth, which has given rise to all our imaginations of moral and material beauty. Thus it is that many of the great masters of literature and art sketch at times a little above nature. The Max Piccolomini of Schiller-the Agnes, the Esther, the little Nell of Dickens-the Eva St. Clare, or Uncle Tom of Mrs. Stowe-are to the most of human characters what some of the old Greek statues, the Antinous or Apollo Belvidere, are to ordinary mortals, glorified types of humanity-the same, yet not the same; humanity, not as it is, but as it might be, and even nobler and better than which, by the grace of God, it yet shall be. Thus far we have considered the odd characters; but there still remain those which, like little Nell, Agnes, and Esther Summerson, are said to be exalted above nature. These, say the objectors, are utterly untrue, and ought to be rejected. We have already spoken of the necessity of truth in the description of external life; but there still remains a doubtful point-the truth and possible degree of excellence of human character. Here we have arrived at the most disputed position of all, in the great battlefield, that has been fought over in all ages, and is fought over now. The great question of truth agitates not only literature, but all the sister arts. Yet novelists should be careful in drawing Truth--absolute, unvarnished, unmitigated, un- such characters. They may be above man, so selected truth-is inscribed on the banners of that he may feel that he has something to rise those who follow Thackeray in fiction, and the to; but not quite so far above him as to make pre-Raphaelites in painting. Be rather worse him feel that it is impossible to rise towards than better; keep within the limits. When you them, and so give up the attempt in despair. paint a dead king, Mr. Ruskin tells us in his Though glorified types, they should still be Edinburgh Lectures, paint him in all the ghastly types; they should represent real men and horror of decaying mortality, with the by-women. Indeed, the greatest triumph of all, standers holding their noses. Sketch human and the method which of all others would have nature exactly as it is, say some disciples of the most powerful influence on the heart for good, though it has been too rarely followed, would be to paint a heart in which there were all human weaknesses and wrong feelings, yet striving against them, fighting against them; sometimes struck down, but always renewing the battle, less confident in itself, and more in its great Deliverer; and so by His strength alone, and by His might, eventually victorious; rising, it may be, like the tide, only at every ninth wave, but still for ever rising, rising, rising. Much has been said, and truly said, about the ungrammatical character of Dickens's writings, his sentences without verbs, his beginnings without ends, and ends without beginnings. Though this often increases the vividness and picturesqueness of the description, it is hardly a practice which should be encouraged. But when Dickens chooses, there is no living author who can excel him in the music of his language. When he becomes pathetic, his prose often runs into a strain of melody, as truly modulated as the finest poetry. The spirit which all the works of Dickens breathe is action. Action in himself action in his readers, whom he would stir up to act with him; for he has always some aim. Thackeray sees the good on both sides of a question, and the evil on both sides; doubts which is the best, and so seems always undecided how to act. Dickens catches at the main points, decides at once, often right, sometimes undoubtedly wrong, and then strikes into the hottest of the battle, the fearless champion of the side he has chosen. Is there an evil to be overcome, or a crying injustice to be remedied, Dickens attacks it fiercely with his whole might; perhaps exaggerating the evil which he seeks to vanquish. On the other hand, merit unrewarded and virtue unknown are sure to meet with his cordial eulogy. With him, praise and blame never go by halves. Finally: it has often been affirmed that the tendency of Dickens's writings is irreligious; that they hold up clergymen and pious people to derision, and that, though they admit in a dreamy manner the truth of Christianity, they ignore practical and everyday religion. With reference to the first charge, the real fault in the works of Dickens lies more in the want of truly religious people than in the unreality of those characters whom he does depict. There are, unfortunately, far too many hypocrites in the world, and still more self-deceivers; too many, especially in London, who, like the shepherd in Pickwick, or Mr. Chadband in Bleak House, raise up little sects of their own, for their own private emolument; or who, on the other hand, sail down the stream easily with the church of their fathers. But Dickens does harm by not placing real religion by the side of formality and hypocrisy; for many readers must imagine that be is attacking all religious people and all clergymen, and so his blows will fall on those at whom they were never aimed, and many hasty readers be prejudiced either against the pious or against Dickens himself. As to the second charge, it is undoubtedly true that, while a high moral spirit runs through all Dickens's works, and even an appreciation of the beauty of the Gospel injunctions, the perfection that he dreams of is unaccompanied by the vital spirit of religion. Still, before passing a final verdict on Dickens, we should consider what fiction was, and the immense stride which it is now taking in the right direction. Much of the improvement in the morality of novels which has lately taken place must be ascribed to the influence of his works, and their healthy moral tone. If novels have been hitherto considered irreligious, it is because religious writers of great talent have neglected to write them. There has been only one great religious novel ever written; and on the day when the secrets of all are made known, it will probably be found that many, who could have been reached in no other way, were awakened to a knowledge of the great realities of time and eternity by the pen of Harriet Beecher Stowe. If some of our great religious authors-men who, like Rowland Hill or Chalmers, possessed wonderful descriptive and life-giving powers-had written such works, they would have thundered the truth into the ears of hundreds of thousands, in places where even the echoes of their grandest sermons died | unheard away. Ah, say, dost thou remember yet- As dies a passing bell? The music of their chime? Ah, say, dost thou remember yet, When in those days we stray'd, Like to our hearts those flow'rs appear'd, Amid the winter's gloom! Ah, say, dost thou remember yet All beaming with delight? |