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Page 41
Nor do the obvious exaggerations of Dickens arising from the exuberance
of his fancy interfere with the sense of reality. A truth is not less
true because it is in large print. We recognize creatures who are
prodigiously like ourselves, and we laugh at the difference in scale.
Did not all Lilliput laugh over the discovery of Gulliver? How they
rambled over the vast expanse of countenance, recognizing each
feature--lips, cheek, nose, chin, brow. "How very odd," they would say
to themselves, "and how very like!"
It is to the wholesome obviousness of Dickens that we owe the atmosphere
of good cheer that surrounds his characters. No writer has pictured more
scenes of squalid misery, and yet we are not depressed. There is bad
weather enough, but we are not "under the weather." There are characters
created to be hated. It is a pleasure to hate them. As to the others,
whenever their trials and tribulations abate for an instant, they
relapse into a state of unabashed contentment.
This is unusual in literature, for most literary men are saddest when
they write. The fact is that happiness is much more easy to experience
than to describe, as any one may learn in trying to describe a good time
he has had. One good time is very much like another good time. Moreover,
we are shy, and dislike to express our enthusiasm. We wouldn't for the
world have any one know what simple creatures we are and how little it
takes to make us happy. So we talk critically about a great many things
we do not care very much about, and complain of the absence of many
things which we do not really miss. We feel badly about not being
invited to a party which we don't want to go to.
We are like a horse that has been trained to be a "high-stepper." By
prancing over imaginary difficulties and shying at imaginary dangers he
gives an impression of mettlesomeness which is foreign to his native
disposition.
The story-teller is on the lookout for these eager attitudes. He cannot
afford to let his characters be too happy. There is a literary value in
misery that he cannot afford to lose.
That "the course of true love never did run smooth" is an assertion of
story-tellers rather than of ordinary lovers. The fact is that nothing
is so easy as falling in love and staying there. It is a very common
experience, so common that it attracts little attention. The course of
true love usually runs so smoothly that there is nothing that causes
remark. It is not an occasion of gossip. Two good-tempered and healthy
persons are obviously made for each other. They know it, and everybody
else knows it, and they keep on knowing it, and act, as Joe Gargery
would say, "similar, according."
The trouble is that the literary man finds that this does not afford
exciting material for a best seller. So he must invent hazards to make
the game interesting to the spectators. In a story the course of true
love must not run smooth or no one would read it. The old-time romancer
brought his young people through all sorts of misadventures. When all
the troubles he could think of were over, he left them abruptly at the
church door, murmuring feebly to the gentle reader, "they were happy
ever after."
The present-day novelist is offended at this ending. "How absurd!" he
says. "They are still in the early twenties. The world is all before
them, and they have time to fall into all sorts of troubles which the
romanticist has not thought of. Middle age is just as dangerous a period
as youth, and matrimony has its pitfalls. Let me take up the story and
tell you how they didn't live happily ever afterwards, but, on the
contrary, had a cat-and-dog life of it."
Now I would pardon the novelist if he were perfectly honest and were to
say, "Ladies and gentlemen, I am trying to interest you. I have not the
skill to make a story of placid happiness interesting. So I will do the
next best thing. I will tell you a story of a different kind. It is the
picture of a kind of life that is easier to make readable."
In making such a confession he would be in good company. Even
Shakespeare, with all his dramatic genius, confessed that he could not
avoid monotony in his praise of true love. Its ways were ways of
pleasantness, but did not afford much incentive to originality.
"Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse to constancy confined,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
'Fair, kind, and true' is all my argument,
'Fair, kind, and true' varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent."
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