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Page 38
In New York eager seekers after fiction would "lie down on the pavement
the whole of the night before the tickets were sold, generally taking up
their position about ten." There would be free fights, and the police
would be called to quell the riot.
Such astonishing actions on the part of people who were unfortunate
enough to live in the middle of the nineteenth century put us on our
guard. It could not have been a serious interest in English literature
that evoked the mob spirit. Dickens must have been writing the kind of
books which these people liked to hear read. We remember with some
misgivings that in the days of our youth we wept over Little Nell, just
as the lord chancellor did. The question which disturbs us is, Ought we
to have done so?
Let us by a soft answer turn away the wrath of the critic. Doubtless we
ought not to have done so. Our excuse is that, at the time, we could not
help it. We may make the further plea, common to all soft-hearted
sinners, that if we hadn't wept, other people would, so that no great
harm was done, after all.
But letting bygones be bygones, and not seeking to justify the
enthusiasms of the nineteenth century, one may return to Dickens as to
the home of one's childhood. How do the old scenes affect us? Does the
charm remain? When thus we return to Dickens, we are compelled to
confess the justice of the latter-day criticism. In all his writings he
deals with characters and situations which are wholly obvious; at least
they are obvious after he deals with them. Not only is he without the
art which conceals art, but, unlike some novelists of more recent fame,
he is without the art that conceals the lack of art He produces an
impression by the crude method of "rubbing it in." There are no
subtleties to pique our curiosity, no problems left us for discussion,
no room for difference of opinion. There is no more opportunity for
speculation than in a one-price clothing store where every article is
marked in plain figures. To have heartily disliked Mr. Pecksniff and to
have loved the Cheeryble Brothers indicates no sagacity on our part. The
author has distinctly and repeatedly told us that the one is an odious
hypocrite and that the others are benevolent to an unusual degree. Our
appreciation of Sam Weller does not prove that we have any sense of
humor save that which is common to man. For Mr. Weller's humor is a
blessing that is not in disguise. It is a pump which needs no priming.
There is no denying that the humor, the pathos, and the sentiment of
Dickens are obvious.
All this, according to certain critics, goes to prove that Dickens lacks
distinction, and that the writing of his novels was a commonplace
achievement. This judgment seems to me to arise from a confusion of
thought. The _perception_ of the obvious is a commonplace achievement;
the _creation_ of the obvious, and making it interesting, is the work of
genius. There is no intellectual distinction in the enjoyment of "The
Pickwick Papers"; to write "The Pickwick Papers" would be another
matter.
It is only in the last quarter of a century that English literature has
been accepted not as a recreation, but as a subject of serious study.
Now, the first necessity for a study is that it should be "hard." Some
of the best brains in the educational world have been enlisted in the
work of giving a disciplinary value to what was originally an innocent
pleasure. It is evident that one cannot give marks for the number of
smiles or tears evoked by a tale of true love. The novel or the play
that is to hold its own in the curriculum in competition with
trigonometry must have some knotty problem which causes the harassed
reader to knit his brows in anxious thought.
In answer to this demand, the literary craftsman has arisen who takes
his art with a seriousness which makes the "painful preacher" of the
Puritan time seem a mere pleasure-seeker. Equipped with instruments of
precision drawn from the psychological laboratory, he is prepared to
satisfy our craving for the difficult By the method of suggestion he
tries to make us believe that we have never seen his characters before,
and sometimes he succeeds. He deals in descriptions which leave us with
the impression of an indescribable something which we should recognize
if we were as clever as he is. As we are not nearly so clever, we are
left with a chastened sense of our inferiority, which is doubtless good
for us. And all this groping for the un-obvious is connected with an
equally insistent demand for realism. The novel must not only be as real
as life, but it must be more so. For life, as it appears in our ordinary
consciousness, is full of illusions. When these are stripped off and the
residuum is compressed into a book, we have that which is at once
intensely real and painfully unfamiliar.
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