The Obviousness Of Dickens

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Title:     The Obviousness Of Dickens
Author: Samuel McChord Crothers [More Titles by Crothers]

In the college world it is a point of honor for the successive classes to treat each other with contumely. The feud between freshman and sophomore goes on automatically. Only when one has become a senior may he, without losing caste, recognize a freshman as a youth of promise, and admit that a sophomore is not half bad. Such disinterested criticism is tolerated because it is evidently the result of the mellowing influence of time.

The same tendency is seen in literary and artistic judgments. It is never good taste to admit the good taste of the generation that immediately precedes us. Its innocent admirations are flouted and its standards are condemned as provincial. For we are always emerging from the dark ages and contrasting their obscurity with our marvelous light. The sixteenth century scorned the fifteenth century for its manifold superstitions. Thomas Fuller tells us that his enlightened contempories in the seventeenth century treated the enthusiasms of the sixteenth century with scant respect. The price of martyrs' ashes rises and falls in Smithfield market. At a later period Pope writes,--

"We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow:
Our wiser sons, perhaps, will think us so."

He need not have put in the "perhaps."

The nineteenth century had its fling at the artificiality of the eighteenth century, and treated it with contempt as the age of doctrinaires. And now that the twentieth century is coming to the age of discretion, we hear a new term of reproach, Mid-Victorian. It expresses the sum of all villainies in taste. For some fifty years in the nineteenth century the English-speaking race, as it now appears, was under the sway of Mrs. Grundy. It was living in a state of most reprehensible respectability, and Art was tied to the apron-strings of Morality. Everybody admired what ought not to be admired. We are only now beginning to pass judgment on the manifold mediocrity of this era.

All this must, for the time, count against Dickens; for of all the Victorians he was the midmost. He flourished in that most absurd period of time--the time just before most of us were born. And how he did flourish! Grave lord chancellors confessed to weeping over Little Nell. A Mid-Victorian bishop relates that after administering consolation to a man in his last illness he heard him saying, "At any rate, a new 'Pickwick Paper' will be out in ten days."

Everywhere there was a wave of hysterical appreciation. Describing his reading in Glasgow, Dickens writes: "Such pouring of hundreds into a place already full to the throat, such indescribable confusion, such rending and tearing of dresses, and yet such a scene of good humor, I never saw the slightest approach to.... Fifty frantic men got up in all parts of the hall and addressed me all at once. Other frantic men made speeches to the wall. The whole B family were borne on the top of a wave and landed with their faces against the front of the platform. I read with the platform crammed with people. I got them to lie down upon it, and it was like some impossible tableau, or gigantic picnic,--one pretty girl lying on her side all night, holding on to the legs of my table."

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.

Now, there is a certain justification for this. A psychologist may show us aspects of character which we could not see by ourselves, as the X-rays will reveal what is not visible to the naked eye. But if the insides of things are real, so also are the outsides. Surfaces and forms are not without their importance.

It may be said in extenuation of Dickens that the blemish of obviousness is one which he shared with the world he lived in. It would be too much to say that all realities are obvious. There is a great deal that we do not see at the first glance; but there is a great deal that we do see. To reproduce the freshness and wonder of the first view of the obvious world is one of the greatest achievements of the imagination.

The reason why the literary artist shuns the obvious is that there is too much of it. It is too big for the limited resources of his art. In the actual world, realities come in big chunks. Nature continually repeats herself. She hammers her facts into our heads with a persistency which is often more than a match for our stupidity. If we do not recognize a fact to-day, it will hit us in the same place to-morrow.

We are so used to this educational method of reiteration that we make it a test of reality. An impression made upon us must be repeated before it has validity to our reason. If a thing really happened, we argue that it will happen again under the same conditions. That is what we mean by saying that we are under the reign of law. There is a great family resemblance between happenings.

We make acquaintance with people by the same method. The recognition of identity depends upon the ability which most persons have of appearing to be remarkably like themselves. The reason why we think that the person whom we met to-day is the same person we met yesterday is that he seems the same. There are obvious resemblances that strike us at once. He looks the same, he acts the same, he has the same mannerisms, the same kind of voice, and he answers to the same name. If Proteus, with the best intention in the world, but with an unlimited variety of self-manifestations, were to call every day, we should greet him always as a stranger. We should never feel at home with so versatile a person. A character must have a certain degree of monotony about it before we can trust it. Unexpectedness is an agreeable element in wit, but not in friendship. Our friend must be one who can say with honest Joe Gargery, "It were understood, and it are understood, and it ever will be similar, according."

But in the use of this effective method of reiteration there is a difference between nature and a book. Nature does not care whether she bores us or not: she has us by the buttonhole, and we cannot get away. Not so with a book. When we are bored, we lay it down, and that brings the interview to an end. It is from the fear of our impatience that most writers abstain from the natural method of producing an impression.

And they are quite right. It is only now and then that an audience will grant an extension of time to a speaker in order that he may make his point more clear. They would rather miss the point. And it is still more rare for the reader to grant a similar extension in order that the author may tell again what he has told before. It is much easier to shut up a book than to shut up a speaker.

The criticism of Dickens that his characters repeat themselves quite misses the mark. As well object to an actor that he frequently responds to an encore. If indicted for the offense, he could at least insist that the audience be indicted with him as accessory before the fact.

Dickens tells us that when he read at Harrogate, "There was a remarkably good fellow of thirty or so who found something so very ludicrous in Toots that he could not compose himself at all, but laughed until he sat wiping his eyes with his handkerchief, and whenever he felt Toots coming again he began to laugh and wipe his eyes afresh."

"Whenever he felt Toots coming again"--there you have the whole philosophy of the matter. The young fellow found Toots amusing when he first laid eyes on him. He wanted to see him again, and it must always be the same Toots.

It is useless to cavil at an author because of the means by which he produces his effects. The important thing is that he does produce an effect. That the end justifies the means may be a dangerous doctrine in ethics, but much may be said for it in literature. The situation is like that of a middle-aged gentleman beset by a small boy on a morning just right for snowballing. "Give me leave, mister?" cries the youthful sharpshooter. The good-natured citizen gives leave by pulling up his coat-collar and quickening his pace. If the small boy can hit him, he is forgiven, if he cannot hit him, he is scorned. The fact is that Dickens with a method as broad and repetitious as that of Nature herself does succeed in hitting our fancy. That is, he succeeds nine times out of ten.

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?

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."

But the novelist, when he takes himself too seriously as the man who is to show us "life as it is," is not content to acknowledge his limitations. When he pictures a situation in which there is nothing but a succession of problems and misunderstandings, he asks us to admire his austere faithfulness. Faithful he may be to his Art, as he understands it, but he is not faithful to reality, unless he is able to make us see ordinary people in the act of enjoying themselves.

The most obvious thing in life is that people are seldom as unhappy as their circumstances would lead us to expect. Nobody is happy all the time, and if he were, nobody is enough of a genius to make his undeviating felicity interesting. But a great many people are happy most of the time, and almost everybody has been happy at some time or other. It may have been only a momentary experience, but it was very real, and he likes to think about it. He is excessively grateful to any one who recalls the feeling. The point is that the aggregate of these good times makes a considerable amount of cheerfulness.

Dickens does not attempt the impossible literary feat of showing us one person who is happy all the time, but he does what is more obvious, he makes us see a great many people who have snatches of good cheer in the midst of their humdrum lives. He lets us see another obvious fact, that happiness is more a matter of temperament than of circumstance. It is not given as a reward of merit or as a mark of distinguished consideration. There is one perennial fountain of pleasure. Any one can have a good time who can enjoy himself. Dickens was not above celebrating the kind of happiness which comes to the natural man and the natural boy through what we call the "creature comforts." He could sympathize with the unadulterated self-satisfaction of little Jack Horner when

"He put in his thumb
And pulled out a plum,
And said, 'What a great boy am I!'"

The finding of the plum was not a matter of world-wide importance, but it was a great pleasure for Jack Horner, and he did not care who knew it.

What joy Mr. Micawber gets out of his own eloquence! We cannot begrudge him this unearned increment. We sympathize, as, "much affected, but still intensely enjoying himself, Mr. Micawber folded up his letter and handed it with a bow to my aunt as something she might like to keep."

And R. Wilfer, despite his meagre salary, and despite Mrs. Wilfer, enjoys himself whenever he gets a chance. When he goes to Greenwich with Bella he finds everything as it should be. "Everything was delightful. The Park was delightful; the punch was delightful, the dishes of fish were delightful; the wine was delightful." If that was not happiness, what was it?

Said R. Wilfer: "Supposing a man to go through life, we won't say with a companion, but we will say with a tune. Very good. Supposing the tune allotted to him was the 'Dead March' in 'Saul.' Well. It would be a very suitable tune for particular occasions--none more so--but it would be difficult to keep time with it in the ordinary run of domestic transactions."

It is a matter of common observation that those who have allotted to them the most solemn music do not always keep time with it. In the "ordinary run of domestic transactions" they find many little alleviations. In the aggregate these amount to a considerable blessing. The world may be rough, and many of its ways may be cruel, but for all that it is a joyful sensation to be alive, and the more alive we are, the better we like it. All of which is very obvious, and it is what we want somebody to point out for us again and again.

[The end]
Samuel McChord Crothers's essay: Obviousness Of Dickens

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