born again in good thoughts of his Maker I sincerely believe. That it is expedient for every hound to say so in a certain snuffling form of words to which he attaches no good meaning, I do not believe. I take it there is no difference between us.* The letters abound in playful allusions to any peculiarities of manner or habits which he noted in his friends and acquaintance. Thus, in a letter to Macready in America he refers to some common friend unnamed as “elaborately explaining everything in creation is a joint-stock company,' and describes Macready himself "as unwinding something slowly round and round your chest which is so long that no man can see the end of it." From the same letter we take this pleasant and characteristic description of the relations between Dickens and Macready and their families: sentimental lady at the kitchen door. The Montagues used to live some two or three miles off in the country. It does not appear quite clear whether they ever inhabited Verona itself. . . . But there is a village bearing that name to this day, and traditions of the quarrels of the two families are still as nearly alive as anything can be in such a drowsy neighborhood. I was rather shocked yesterday (I am not strong in geographical details) to find that That is the distance between Mantua and Romeo was only banished twenty-five miles. Verona. The latter is a quaint old place with great houses in it that are now solitary and shut up-exactly the place it ought to be. The former has a great many apothecaries at this moment who could play this part to the life. For of all the stagnant ponds I ever beheld it is the greenest and weediest. I went to see the old palace of the Capulets, which is Oh, that you had been at Clarence Terrace still distinguished by their cognizance (a hat on Nina's birthday! Good God! how we carved in stone on the courtyard wall). It is missed you, talked of you, drank your health, a miserable inn. The court was full of crazy and wondered what you were doing! Perhaps coaches, carts, geese, and pigs, and was ankle you are Falkland enough (I swear I suspect deep in mud and dung. The garden is walled you of it) to feel rather sore-just a little bit, off and built on. There was nothing to conyou know, the merest trifle in the world- -onnect it with its old inhabitants, and a very unhearing that Mrs. Macready looked brilliant, blooming, young and handsome, and that she danced a country dance with the writer hereof (Acres to your Falkland) in a thorough spirit of becoming good humor and enjoyment. Now, you don't like to be told that? Nor do you quite like to hear that Forster and I conjured bravely; that a plum pudding was produced from an empty saucepan held over a blazing fire kindled in Stanfield's hat without damage to the lining; that a box of bran was changed into a live guinea-pig which ran between my godchild's feet, and was the cause of such a shrill uproar and clapping of hands that you might have heard it (and I dare say did) in America; that three half-crowns being taken from Major Burns and put into a tumbler-glass before his eyes did then and there give jingling answers to the questions asked of them by me, and knew where you were and what you were doing, to the unspeakable admiration of the whole assembly. Neither do you quite like to be told that we are going to do it again next Saturday, with the addition of demoniacal dresses from the masquerade shop; nor that Mrs. Macready for her gallant bearing always and her best sort of best affection is the best creature I know. Never mind; no man shall gag me, and these are my opinions.t In a letter to Douglas Jerrold, written from Cremona, during Dickens's residence in Italy, 1844, he writes-and it is an excellent example of his peculiar style: Vol. i., pp. 88, 89. ↑ Ibid., pp. 96, 97. While in Italy he wrote one of his best Christmas books, "The Chimes." How he threw himself into it appears from the following extract: I have worn myself to death in the month I have been at work. None of my usual reliefs have been at hand. I have not been able to divest myself of the story, have suffered very much in my sleep in consequence, and am so shaken by such work in this trying climate that I am as nervous as a man who is dying of drink, and haggard as a murderer.* In this book he endeavored, he writes to Macready, to plant an indignant right-hander on the eye of certain wicked cant that makes my blood boil which I hope will not only cloud that eye with black and blue, but many a gentle one with crystal of the finest sort. God forgive me, but I think there are good things in the little story.t His hopes were realized. Vol. i., p. 122. ↑ Ibid., p. 130. Anybody [he writes to his wife] who has heard it has been moved in the most extraordinary manner. Forster read it for dramatic purposes to A'Beckett. He cried so much and so painfully that Forster didn't know whether to go on or stop; and he called next day to say that any expression of his feeling was beyond his power, but that he believed it and felt it to be- I won't say what. If [he adds in a postscript] you had seen Macready last night undisguisedly sobbing and crying on the sofa as I read, you would have felt, as I did, what a thing it is to have power.* To how wonderful a degree Dickens possessed this power of affecting his hearers by his reading of his own writings, those who, like ourselves, are privileged to remember the effect produced by his reading of the shipwreck scene in David Copperfield" can bear witness. Like Mr. Bright, Dickens must sometimes have felt that if Sir Rowland Hill's postal reforms had been postponed until he was no longer connected with public life, it would have been fortunate for him.† Do look [he writes to his friend and colleague on Household Words, Mr. Wills] at the enclosed from Mrs. What's-her-name. For a surprising audacity it is remarkable even to me who am positively bullied and all but beaten by these people.... If I were the wealthiest nobleman in England I could not keep pace with one-twentieth part of the demands on me. [He, notwithstanding, complied liberally with many of these demands.] That purse [he writes to Mr. Wills] which I could never keep shut in my life makes mouths at me, saying, "See how empty I am." Then I fill it, and it looks very rich indeed. Applications for employment seem to have been as frequent as those for money. In the same letter he writes, "As to employment I do in my soul believe that if I were lord chancellor of England I should have been aground long ago for the patronage of a messenger's place. "The letter from Nelson Square (he writes to the same friend on another occasion) is a very manly and touching one. But I am more helpless in such a case as that than in any other, having really fewer means of helping such a gentleman to employment than I have of firing off the guns in the Tower. Such appeals come to me here in scores upon scores." + During a stay at Paris (1846), he thus writes Walter Savage Landor, the godfather of one of his sons, who bore Landor's name : YOUNG MAN,-I will not go there if I can help it; I have not the slightest confidence in the value of your introduction to the devil. I can't help thinking that it would be of better use "the other way, the other way," but I won't try there either at present if I can help it. Your godson says, is that your duty? and he begs me to enclose a blush newly blushed for you. I have been writing a little Christmas book besides expressly for you. I am not to be trifled with. I write from Paris we are all well and happy, and they send loves to you by the bushel. We are in the agonies of house-hunting. The people are frightfully civil and grotesquely extortionate. One man (with a house to let) told me yesterday that he loved the Duke of Wellington like a brother. The same gentleman wanted to hug me round the neck with one hand and pick my pocket with the other. If you were the man I took you for when I took you (as a godfather) for better or worse, you would come to Paris and amaze the weak walls of the house I haven't found yet with that steady door of your bedroom in Devonshire Terrace, snore of yours which I once heard piercing the reverberating along the bell-wires in the hall, so getting into the street, playing Eolian harps New Road like the blast of a trumpet. among the area railings, and going down the From a letter to the Hon. R. Watson we take Dickens's description of the house he at length succeeded in finding. It is in his best descriptive style. I am proud to express my belief that we are lodged at last in the most preposterous house in the world†.. The like of it cannot, and so far as my knowledge goes does not, exist in any other part of the globe. The bedrooms are like opera-boxes. The dining-rooms, staircases, and passages quite inexplicable. The dining-room is a sort of cavern, painted (ceiling and all) to represent a grove, with unaccountable bits of looking-glass sticking in There is a among the branches of the trees. gleam of reason in the drawing-room. But it is approached through a series of small chambers, like the joints in a telescope, which are hung with inscrutable drapery. The maddest man in Bedlam having the material given him would be likely to devise such a suite suppos ing his case to be hopeless and quite incur. able.‡ In another letter, written during his stay in Paris, he mentions a dramatized version of "Clarissa Harlowe " as being the rage at one of the Parisian theatres. The Battle of Life. † It was No. 48, Rue de Courcelles, St. Honoré. Vol. i,, pp. 159, 160. T 2 2 There are some things in it [he says] rather dicate Boswell's character against the calculated to astonish the ghost of Richardson, severe, but strictly just, sentence of conbut Clarissa is very admirably played and dies demnation passed on it by Lord Macaubetter than the original, to my thinking; but lay. Richardson is no great favorite of mine, and never seems to take his top-boots off whatever he does. Several pieces are in course of representation involving rare portraits of the English. In one, a servant called "Tom Bob," who wears a particularly English waistcoat, trimmed with gold lace and concealing his ankles, does very good things indeed. "Sir Fokson" is one of the characters in another play, "English to the Core;" and I saw a lord mayor of London at one of the small theatres the other night, looking uncommonly well in a stage coachman's waistcoat, the Order of the Garter, and a very low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat, not unlike a dustman's. As a picture of the time I really think it impossible to give it too much praise. It seems to me to be the very essence of all about the time that I have ever seen in biography or fiction presented in most wise and human lights, and in a thousand new and just aspects. I have never liked Johnson half so well. Nobody's contempt for Boswell ought to be capa ble of increase; but I have never seen him in my mind's eye half so plainly. The introduction of him is quite a masterpiece. I should point to that, if I did not know the author, as being done by somebody with a remarkably vivid conception of what he narrated, and a most admirable and fanciful power of communicating it to another. All about Reynolds is charming, and the first account of the Literary Club and of Boswell's introduction to it is as excellent a piece of description as ever I read in my life. But to read the book is to be in the time. It lives again in as fresh and lively a manner as if it were presented on an impossibly good stage by the very best actors that ever lived, only the real actors come out of their graves on purpose. I was at Geneva at the time of the Revolution (1846). The moderation and mildness of the successful party were beyond all prajse. Their appeals to the people of all parties printed and pasted on the walls-have no I question very much whether it would have parallel that I know of in history for their real been a good thing for every great man to have good sterling Christianity and tendency to had his Boswell, as I think that two Boswells promote the happiness of mankind. My sym- or three, at most-would have made great pathy is strongly with the Swiss Radicals. men extraordinarily false, and would have set They know what Catholicity is. They see in them on always playing a part, and would have some of their own valleys the poverty, igno-made distinguished people about them forever rance, misery, and bigotry it always brings in its train wherever it is triumphant, and they would root it out of their children's way at any price. I fear the end of the struggle will be that some Catholic power will step in to I will never hear the biography compared crush the dangerously well-educated republic with Boswell's, except under vigorous protest. (very dangerous to such neighbors), but there For I do say that it is mere folly to put into is a spirit in the people, or I very much mis-opposite scales a book, however amusing and take them, that will trouble the Jesuits there many years, and shake their altar steps for them.* In the early days of the French republic of 1848, he expressed a hope which was doomed to be disappointed"I think Lamartine so far one of the best fellows in the world, and I have great hopes of that great people establishing a noble republic." + On the publication of Forster's "Life of Oliver Goldsmith" Dickens wrote to his friend and future biographer a letter of strong commendation from which we make the following extracts, which we particularly commend to the attention of those who have of late endeavored to vin Vol. i., pp. 174, 175. ↑ Ibid., p. 187. restless and distrustful. I can imagine a succession of Boswells bringing about a tremendous state of falsehood in society, and playing the very devil with confidence and friendship. curiously written by an unconscious coxcomb like that, and one which surveys and grandly understands the characters of all the illustrious company that move in it. My dear Forster, I cannot sufficiently say how proud I am of what you have done, or how sensible I am of being so tenderly connected with it.* When I look over this note I feel as if I had said no part of what I think; and yet if I were to write another I should say no more, for I can't get it out. I desire no better for my fame, when my personal destiorder than such a biographer and such a critic. nies shall be past the control of my love of And again I say most solemnly that literature in England has never had, and probably never will have, such a champion as you are in right of this book.t It will be remembered that Forster's "Life of Goldsmith is dedicated to Charles Dickens. ↑ Vol. i., p. 188, et seq. In his letters Dickens not unfrequently, and always unreservedly, expresses his religious feelings. He was brought up, we believe, under Unitarian influences, and for some years, we think, was a member of an Unitarian Church. For many years he had relinquished any formal connection with the Unitarian body, and his children apparently were not educated as Unitarians; but we think he himself never formally joined any other communion or professed any orthodox creed. We have heard that difference of religious opinion was the origin of the unhappy dissensions which arose between him and his wife, who held the orthodox creed. It is abundantly clear from his letters that Dickens might have said as one said of himself, but in Dickens's case it would have been said with far greater truth, "that he had not much religion, but that the little he had was of the best sort." * Nowhere does his religious faith find stronger expression than in the singularly beautiful letters he wrote to his friends on any occasion of a death in their families. We give an extract from his letter to his friend, the Rev. James White, who had lately lost a child. I reserve the more serious part of my letter until the last, my dear White, because it comes from the bottom of my heart. None of your friends have thought and spoken oftener of you and Mrs. White than we have these many weeks past. I should have written to you, but was timid of intruding on your sorrow. What you say, and the manner in which you tell me I am connected with your recollection of your dear child, now among the angels of God, gives me courage to approach your grief to say what sympathy we have felt with it, and how we have not been unimaginative of those deep sources of consolation to which you have had recourse. The traveller who travelled in fancy from this world to the next was struck to the heart to find the child he had lost many years before building him a tower in heaven. Our blessed Christian hopes do not shut out the belief of love and remembrance still enduring there, but irradiate it and make it sacred. Who should know that better than you do? Who more deeply feel the touching truths and comforts of that story in the older Book when the bereaved mother is asked, "Is it well with the child?" She answers, "It is well."† We also give an extract from a letter to his friend the Hon. Mrs. Watson on the death of her husband. We have thought of you every day and every hour; we think of you now in the dear old house, and know how right it is for his dear children's sake that you should have bravely their father's memory, and within the same set up your rest in the place consecrated by summer shadows that fall upon his grave. We try to look on through a few years and to see the children brightening it, and George a comfort and a pride and an honor to you, and although it is hard to think of what we have lost, we know how something of it will be restored by your example and endeavors, and the blessing that will descend upon them. We know how the time will come when some reflection of that cordial, unaffected, most affecand never would forget if we couldtionate presence, which we can never forget, such is God's great mercy-will shine out of your boy's eyes, upon you, his best friend and his last consoler, and fill the void there is now. May God, who has received into his rest through this affliction as good a man as ever I can know and love and mourn for on this earth, be good to you, dear friend, through these coming years. May all those compassionate and hopeful lessons of the Great Teacher, full comfort to you! I have no fear of that, who shed divine tears for the dead, bring their my confidence is certainty.* In the same year in which Dickens lost his friend Watson, his friend Macready lost his wife. We cannot refrain from making this extract from Dickens's letter on the sad event. MY DEAR FRIEND, - I have known her so well, have been so happy in her regard, have been so lighthearted with her, have interchanged so many tender remembrances of you with her when you were far away, and have seen her ever so simply and truly anxious to be worthy of you, that I cannot write as I would, and as I know I ought. As I would press your hand in your distress I let this note go from me. I understand your grief, I deeply feel the reason that there is for it, yet in that very feeling find a softening consolation that must spring up a hundred thousandfold for you. May Heaven prosper it in your breast, and spirits that have gone before from the regions of mercy to which they have been called smooth the path that you have to tread alone! dren are left you. Your good sister (God bless her) is by your side. You have devoted friends, and more reasons than most men to be self-reliant and steadfast. Something is gone that never in this world can be replaced, but much is left, and it is a part of her life, her death, her immortality.t Chil Even stronger evidence of Dickens's real but unobtrusive religion is given by the letters written to his sons on their passing from boyhood to active life. We * Vol. i., pp. 282, 283. † lbid., pp. 284, 285. have space for only one illustration. To one of his sons, who had just entered at Cambridge, he writes: As your brothers have gone away one by one, I have written to each of them what I am now going to write to you. You know you have never been hampered with religious forms of restraint, and that with mere unmeaning forms I have no sympathy. But I most strongly and affectionately impress upon you the priceless value of the New Testament, and the study of that book as the one unfailing guide in life. Deeply respecting it, and bowing down before the character of our Saviour as separated from the vain constructions and inventions of men, you cannot go very wrong, and will always preserve at heart a true spirit of veneration and humility. Similarly, I impress upon you the habit of saying a Christian prayer every night and morning. These things have stood by me all through my life; and remember that I tried to render the New Testament intelligible to you, and lovable by you when you were a mere baby.* His tender, but wise and judicious, affection for all his children appears in every one of his letters to them. We can give one example only. To his eldest daughter he writes: I am not engaged in the evening of your birthday. But even if I had an engagement of the most particular kind I should excuse my self from keeping it so that I might have the pleasure of celebrating at home, and among my children, the day that gave me such a dear and good daughter as you.† From a letter to his friend Mr. Cergat, of Lansanne, we gain an intimation of the purpose he had in view in writing the history of "Little Emily" in "Copper field." bug in all their diversified forms, which in his works is everywhere candidly and unreservedly expressed. This brought on him the suspicion and dislike of brethren of "the straitest sect of our religion," and from them many critical letters, mostly of the anonymous sort. nameless ones] on your attention with one I venture to trespass [writes one of these serious query touching a sentence in the last number of "Bleak House." Do the supporters of Christian missions really deserve the Joe seated in his anguish on the doorstep of attack that is conveyed in the sentence about the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts? The allusion is severe, but is it just? Are such boys as Joe neglected? What are ragged school town missions and many of those societies, I regret to see, sneered at in the last number of Household Words? This drew from Dickens a reply, the opinion in which it is noteworthy had been formerly expressed by Dr. Arnold.* There was a long time during which benevolent societies were spending immense sums on missions abroad, when there was no such thing as a ragged school in England, or any kind of associated endeavor to penetrate to those horrible domestic depths in which such schools are now to be found, and where they were, to my most certain knowledge, neither placed nor discovered by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. If you think the balance between the home mission and the foreign mission justly held at the present time, I do not. I abstain from drawing the strange comparison that might be drawn between the sums even now expended and degradation from our very doors, because in endeavors to remove the darkest ignorance I have some respect for mistakes that may be founded in a sincere wish to do good. But I present a general suggestion of the still exyou sting state of things (in such a paragraph as that which offends you) in the hope of inducing some people to reflection on this matter, am decidedly of the opinion that the two works, and to adjust the balance more correctly. I the home and the foreign, are not conducted with an equal hand, and that the home claim of the two. is by far the stronger and the more pressing I had previously observed much of what say about the poor girls. In all you suggest with so much feeling about their return to virtue being cruelly cut off, I concur with a sore heart. I have been turning it over in my mind for some time, and hope in the history of Little Emily (who must fall, there is no hope for her) to put it before the thoughts of people in a new and pathetic way, and perhaps to do some good. You will be glad to hear, I know, that " Copperfield" is a great success. I think it is better liked than any of my other books.‡ Coexistent with this deep and sincere religious feeling there was, it is to all his readers and who is not one of them? almost too trite an observation, an equally deep and sincere hatred of cant and hum Indeed, I have very great doubts whether a great commercial country, holding communi. cation with all parts of the world, can better Christianize the benighted portions of it than by the bestowal of its wealth and energy in the making of good Christians at home, and on the removal of neglected and untaught childhood from its streets before it wanders elsewhere. For if it steadily persist in this work, working downwards to the lowest, the travellers of all grades whom it sends abroad will *Stanley's Arnold, vol. ii., p. 66. |