Views and Reviews | Page 2

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.' Nor is this all. He is almost prepared to
welcome 'free education,' since 'every Englishman who can read, unless
he be an Ass, is a reader the more' for Dickens. Does it not give one
pause to reflect that the writer of this charming eulogy can only read
the half of Dickens, and is half the ideal of his own denunciation.

His Method.
Dickens's imagination was diligent from the outset; with him
conception was not less deliberate and careful than development; and
so much he confesses when he describes himself as 'in the first stage of

a new book, which consists in going round and round the idea, as you
see a bird in his cage go about and about his sugar before he touches it.'
'I have no means,' he writes to a person wanting advice, 'of knowing
whether you are patient in the pursuit of this art; but I am inclined to
think that you are not, and that you do not discipline yourself enough.
When one is impelled to write this or that, one has still to consider:
"How much of this will tell for what I mean? How much of it is my
own wild emotion and superfluous energy--how much remains that is
truly belonging to this ideal character and these ideal circumstances?" It
is in the laborious struggle to make this distinction, and in the
determination to try for it, that the road to the correction of faults lies.
[Perhaps I may remark, in support of the sincerity with which I write
this, that I am an impatient and impulsive person myself, but that it has
been for many years the constant effort of my life to practise at my
desk what I preach to you.]' Such golden words could only have come
from one enamoured of his art, and holding the utmost endeavour in its
behalf of which his heart and mind were capable for a matter of simple
duty. They are a proof that Dickens--in intention at least, and if in
intention then surely, the fact of his genius being admitted, to some
extent in fact as well--was an artist in the best sense of the term.

His Development.
In the beginning he often wrote exceeding ill, especially when he was
doing his best to write seriously. He developed into an artist in words
as he developed into an artist in the construction and the evolution of a
story. But his development was his own work, and it is a fact that
should redound eternally to his honour that he began in newspaper
English, and by the production of an imitation of the novela
picaresca--a string of adventures as broken and disconnected as the
adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes or Peregrine Pickle, and went on to
become an exemplar. A man self-made and self-taught, if he knew
anything at all about the 'art for art' theory--which is doubtful--he may
well have held it cheap enough. But he practised Millet's dogma--Dans
l'art il faut sa peau--as resolutely as Millet himself, and that, too, under
conditions that might have proved utterly demoralising had he been less

robust and less sincere. He began as a serious novelist with Ralph
Nickleby and Lord Frederick Verisopht; he went on to produce such
masterpieces as Jonas Chuzzlewit and Doubledick, and Eugene
Wrayburn and the immortal Mrs. Gamp, and Fagin and Sikes and
Sydney Carton, and many another. The advance is one from positive
weakness to positive strength, from ignorance to knowledge, from
incapacity to mastery, from the manufacture of lay figures to the
creation of human beings.

His Results.
His faults were many and grave. He wrote some nonsense; he sinned
repeatedly against taste; he could be both noisy and vulgar; he was apt
to be a caricaturist where he should have been a painter; he was often
mawkish and often extravagant; and he was sometimes more inept than
a great writer has ever been. But his work, whether bad or good, has in
full measure the quality of sincerity. He meant what he did: and he
meant it with his whole heart. He looked upon himself as representative
and national--as indeed he was; he regarded his work as a universal
possession; and he determined to do nothing that for lack of pains
should prove unworthy of his function. If he sinned it was unadvisedly
and unconsciously; if he failed it was because he knew no better. You
feel that as you read. The freshness and fun of Pickwick--a comic
middle- class epic, so to speak--seem mainly due to high spirits; and