Letters to Dead Authors | Page 7

massacre holocausts of
the Innocents? To draw tears by gloating over a child's death-bed, was
it worthy of you? Was it the kind of work over which our hearts should
melt? I confess that Little Nell might die a dozen times, and be
welcomed by whole legions of Angels, and I (like the bereaved fowl
mentioned by Pet Marjory) would remain unmoved.
She was more than usual calm, She did not give a single dam,
wrote the astonishing child who diverted the leisure of Scott. Over your
Little Nell and your Little Dombey I remain more than usual calm; and

probably so do thousands of your most sincere admirers. But about
matter of this kind, and the unsealing of the fountains of tears, who can
argue? Where is taste? where is truth? What tears are 'manly, Sir,
manly,' as Fred Bayham has it; and of what lamentations ought we
rather to be ashamed? Suntlacrymaererum; one has been moved in the
cell where Socrates tasted the hemlock; or by the river-banks where
Syracusan arrows slew the parched Athenians among the mire and
blood; or, in fiction, when Colonel Newcome said Adsum, or over the
diary of Clare Doria Forey, or where Aramis laments, with strange
tears, the death of Porthos. But over Dombey (the Son), or Little Nell,
one declines to snivel.
When an author deliberately sits down and says, 'Now, let us have a
good cry,' he poisons the wells of sensibility and chokes, at least in
many breasts, the fountain of tears. Out of 'Dombey and Son ' there is
little we care to remember except the deathless Mr. Toots; just as we
forget the melodramatics of 'Martin Chuzzlewit.' I have read in that
book a score of tinms; I never see it but I revel in it--in Pecksniff, and
Mrs. Gamp, and the Americans. But what the plot is all about, what
Jonas did, what Montagu Tigg had to make in the matter, what all the
pictures with plenty of shading illustrate, I have never been able to
comprehend. In the same way, one of your most thorough-going
admirers has al-lowed (in the licence of private conver-sation) that
'Ralph Nickleby and Monk are too steep;' and probably a cultivated
taste will always find them a little precipitous.
'Too steep:'--the slang expresses that defect of an artlent genius,
carried above itself, and out of the air we breathe, both in its grotesque
and in its gloomy imaginations. To force the note, to press fantasy too
hard, to deepen the gloom with black over the indigo, that was the
failing which proved you mortal. To take an instance in little: when Pip
went to Mr. Pumblechook's, the boy thought the seedsman 'a very
happy man to have so many little drawers in his shop.' The reflection is
thoroughly boyish; but then you add, 'I wondered whether the flower.
seeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails
and bloom.' That is not boyish at all; that is the hard-driven, jaded
literary fancy at work.

'So we arraign her; but she,' the Genius of Char]es Dickens, how
brilliant, how kindly, how beneficent she is! dwelling by a fountain of
laughter imperishable; though there is something of an alien salt in the
neighbouring fountain of tears. How poor the world of fancy would be,
how 'dispeopled of her dreams,' if, in some ruin of the social system,
the books of Dickens were lost; and if The Dodger, and Charley Bates,
and Mr. Crinkle, and Miss Squeers, and Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp,
and Dick Swiveller were to perish, or to vanish with Menander's men
and women! We cannot think of our world without them; and, children
of dreams as they are, they seem more essential than great statesmen,
artists, soldiers, who have actually worn flesh and blood, ribbons and
orders, gowns and uniforms. May we not almost welcome 'Free
Education'? for every Englishman who can read, unless he be an Ass,
is a reader the more for you.

III.
To Pierre de Ronsard (Prince of Poets.)

Master and Prince of Poets,--As we know what choice thou madest of a
sepulchre (a choice how ill fulfilled by the jealousy of Fate), so we
know well the manner of thy chosen immortality. In the Plains Elysian,
among the heroes and the ladies of old song, there was thy Love with
thee to enjoy her paradise in an eternal spring.
La' du plaisant Avril la saison imortelle Sans eschange le suit, La terre
sans labeur, de sa grasse mamelle, Tout chose y produit; D'enbas la
troupe sainte autrefois amoureuse, Nous honorant sur tous, Viendra
nous saluer, s'estimant bien-heureuse De s'accointer de nous.
There thou dwellest, with the learned lovers of old days, with Belleau,
and Du Bellay, and Bai'f,