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Page 40
It is the minor characters of Dickens that are remembered. And we
remember them for the same reason that we remember certain faces which
we have seen in a crowd. There is some salient feature or trick of
manner which first attracts and then holds our attention. A person must
have some tag by which he is identified, or, so far as we are concerned,
he becomes one of the innumerable lost articles. There are persons who
are like umbrellas, very useful, but always liable to be forgotten. The
memory is an infirm faculty, and must be humored. It often clings to
mere trifles. The man with the flamboyant necktie whom you saw on the
8.40 train may also be the author of a volume of exquisite lyrics; but
you never saw the lyrics, and you did see the necktie. In the scale of
being, the necktie may be the least important parcel of this good man's
life, but it is the only thing about him which attracts your attention.
When you see it day after day at the same hour you feel that you have a
real, though perhaps not a deep, acquaintance with the man behind it. It
is thus we habitually perceive the human world. We see things, and infer
persons to correspond. One peculiarity attracts us. It is not the whole
man, but it is all of him that is for us. In all this we are very
Dickensy.
We may read an acute character study and straightway forget the person
who was so admirably analyzed; but the lady in the yellow curl-papers is
unforgettable. We really see very little of her, but she is real, and
she would not be so real without her yellow curl-papers. A
yellow-curl-paper-less lady in the Great White Horse Inn would be as
unthinkable to us as a white-plume-less Henry of Navarre at Ivry.
In ecclesiastical art the saints are recognized by their emblems. Why
should not the sinners have the same means of identification? Dickens
has the courage to furnish us these necessary aids to recollection.
Micawber, Mrs. Gummidge, Barkis, Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep, Betsy Trotwood,
Dick Swiveiler, Mr. Mantalini, Harold Skimpole, Sairey Gamp, always
appear with their appropriate insignia. We should remember that it is
for our sakes.
According to the canons of literary art, a fact should be stated clearly
once and for all. It would be quite proper to mention the fact that
Silas Wegg had a wooden leg; but this fact having been made plain, why
should it be referred to again? There is a sufficient reason based on
sound psychology. If the statement were not repeated, we should forget
that Mr. Wegg had a wooden leg, and by and by we should forget Silas
Wegg himself. He would fade away among the host of literary gentlemen
who are able to read "The Decline and Fall," but who are not able to
keep themselves out of the pit of oblivion. But when we repeatedly see
Mr. Wegg as Mr. Boffin saw him, "the literary gentleman _with_ a wooden
leg," we feel that we really have the pleasure of his acquaintance.
There is not only perception of him, but what the pedagogical people
call apperception. Our idea of Mr. Wegg is inseparably connected with
our antecedent ideas of general woodenness.
Again, we are introduced to "a large, hard-breathing, middle-aged man,
with a mouth like a fish, dull, staring eyes, and sandy hair standing
upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had been choked and had
at that moment come to." This is Mr. Pumblechook. He does not emerge
slowly like a ship from below the horizon. We see him all at once, eyes,
mouth, hair, and character to match. It is a case of falling into
acquaintance at first sight. We are now ready to hear what Mr.
Pumblechook says and see what he does. We have a reasonable assurance
that whatever he says and does it will be just like Mr. Pumblechook.
We enter a respectable house in a shady angle adjoining Portman Square.
We go out to dinner in solemn procession. We admire the preternatural
solidity of the furniture and the plate. The hostess is a fine woman,
"with neck and nostrils like a rocking-horse, hard features and majestic
headdress." Her husband, large and pompous, with little light-colored
wings "more like hairbrushes than hair" on the sides of his otherwise
bald head, begins to discourse on the British Constitution. We now know
as much of Mr. Podsnap as we shall know at the end of the book. But it
is a real knowledge conveyed by the method that gives dinner-parties
their educational value. We forgive Dickens his superfluous discourse on
Podsnappery in general. For his remarks are precisely of the kind which
we make when the party is over, and we sit by the fire generalizing and
allegorizing the people we have met.
That Mr. Thomas Gradgrind was unduly addicted to hard facts might have
been delicately insinuated in the course of two hundred pages. We might
have felt a mild pleasure in the discovery which we had made, and then
have gone our way forgetting what manner of man he was. What is
Gradgrind to us or we to Gradgrind? Dickens introduces him to us in all
his uncompromising squareness--"square coat, square legs, square
shoulders, nay, his very neckcloth is trained to take him by the throat
with an unaccommodating grasp." We are made at once to see "the square
wall of a forehead which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes
found commodious cellarage in the two dark caves overshadowed by the
wall." Having taken all this in at a glance, there is nothing more to be
done in the development of the character of Mr. Gradgrind. He takes his
place among the obvious facts of existence. But in so much as we were
bound to find him out sometime, shall we quarrel with Dickens because we
were enabled to do so in the first chapter?
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