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ception to the triviality of his heroes. David Copperfield has some marks of life about him. And it is generally believed that in this novel Mr. Dickens has drawn largely from actual experience.

After all, Mr. Dickens the artist is only subsidiary to Mr. Dickens the philosopher, the moralist, and the politician. We should not have ventured to regard him in this threefold capacity were it not that he expressly claims to have views in some of his prefaces,* and that he insists on those views in his books.

Most people who affect to think have some kind of notion about the world in general. It commonly resolves itself into one of these two propositions: (1), that things are right; (2), that they are not right. The philosophy of Mr. Dickens is contained in the former statement. There is an optimism based on the belief that events are so arranged as to turn out happily in the long run. Upon this hypothesis the facts of life are explained by allowing plenty of time for arrangement, and by pointing out the imperfection of our means of judgment:

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All nature is but art, unknown to thee,

All chance direction that thou canst not see,

All discord harmony not understood,
All partial evil universal good."

This is the optimism of theory, and it
amounts to this, that there is, speaking
strictly, no evil at all in the world.

is, of course, a great deal of want, and wretchedness, and crime; but the poor people are compensated for their poverty by being more cheerful and virtuous than the rich; and the wretchedness and crime are chiefly owing to the absurdity of our government and laws, to our neglect of sanitary improvements, and to the selfishness of the great. A few obvious reforms, such as putting all the right men in the right places, and seeing that the laboring population lived in airy, clean, and well-ventilated houses, would soon put things to rights. This is his theory, and his practice accords with it. The deserving people are rewarded with a uniformity which is exceedingly gratifying. Those who are young enough are married happily-some of the very good ones twice; those who, like Miss Trotwood, the brothers Cheeryble, Mr. Pickwick, and Tom Pinch, could scarcely be married without destroying the romance of the thing, become accessories, before or after the fact, to the marriage of some body else, and live a quasi-domestic life surrounded by their friends' children. No mercy is shown to the Fagins, the Heeps. The rewards of virtue are, it is Quilps, the Pecksniffs, the Squeers, the true, somewhat commonplace, and the highest good of which any example is

much above the level of material comfort. found in these volumes does not rise We believe that if Mr. Dickens were king he would first of all take care that in England seven half penny loaves should be sold for a penny, and he would make it felony to drink small beer.

As a mere matter of political expedi rel with this view. It is what would be ency, we are not at all disposed to quar. called "healthy," and it supplies a motive to that large class of people who insist on taking a commercial view of moral obligations. But it is by no means the

On the other side there is the view which treats misfortune, crime, and what ever makes men miserable, as so much foreign matter introduced, by a kind of divine accident, into an organism expressly constructed for happiness. Those who adopt it do not attempt to explain away the facts, but they insist on the duty of getting rid, as fast as possible, of whatever interferes with the general well being; they also have the peculiarity of believing that they can do so. This is the optimism of practice-the wisdom last word on the subject. When an au of Social Science Associations, of political reformers, and more particularly of Mr. Dickens himself. His theory of life is very complete and comfortable. He believes the world we live in, to be, in the main, a happy world, where virtue is rewarded and vice punished on the strict est principles of poetic justice. There

See particularly the Prefaces to Martin Chuzzlewit, Little Dorrit, and Bleak House.

to write a funny book;" very well: no thor steps forward and says, "I propose one troubles himself to examine his the sent large phases of modern thought and ories. But Mr. Dickens claims to reprehe should have set out with so trivial a life. Therefore we think it a pity that belief as that virtue is usually rewarded and vice usually punished.

His moral and political speculations take their color from the opinions of the

public for whom he works. Like many other novelists, he has two classes of readers. There are those (including, we should think, everybody who has sense to understand a joke,) who admire him greatly for certain special qualities. Then there are those who thoroughly understand and believe in him, and whom he may be said to represent-just as Cambridge men are represented by Mr. Kingsley. This class is not easily defined. It is chiefly made up of the impulsive people who write letters to the Times; of practical, well-to-do men who understand their own business, and see no difficulties elsewhere; and of those to whom it is a pleasure to have their feelings strongly acted upon. That Mr. Dickens must keep constantly before him the requirements of some such class as this, is plain from his manner of dealing with the pathetic, as well as from the freedom with which he constantly expresses himself on subjects which he cannot possibly be supposed to understand.

There is nothing more distinctive of the refinement which proceeds from education than these two qualities-a reluctance to draw conclusions, and a reserve of expression on subjects which nearly concern us. In dealing with practical affairs, all men are indeed equally forced to rely on half truths, to act on experiences which they know to be merely approximate, and to speak of things which they feel are vulgarized by being put into words. But they do so under protest, well knowing that they must either do this or nothing. Were they to wait for the precise juncture which would enable them to act and speak with absolute propriety, they would wait long. Circumstances, so far as they are any help at all, usually favor common purposes, and further every-day ends. Actual life is accordingly a continued sacrifice to opportunity, in which we are obliged to do some violence to ourselves and much violence to our convictions, for the sake of influencing the world around us.

But the novelist is not under the influence of this necessity. It is open to him to arrange events in such a manner that the persons he creates may move in them, may act and be acted on by them, without compromising their better thoughts and feelings. In a book, a speaker is not absolutely bound to talk claptrap. The

hero may pass through his various adventures, he may struggle, be disappointed, and be made supremely happy, without professing to see his way clearly through everything, or having to act on convictions he does not feel. Circumstances. may be artificially constructed so as to favor him thus far. And when a novelist has to describe emotions or passions which call for reticence, he has an unlimited power of indicating their shades and depth inferentially, by the effect they produce, without minute analysis or outspoken description.

No writer with whom we are acquainted has taken less advantage of this happy privilege than Mr. Dickens. He abuses the liberty of dogmatism, and he revels in describing incidents which good taste would carefully conceal. His death-bed scenes exceed in number and variety those of any other author, living or dead. They are arranged in much the same way as they would be put on the stage of the Adelphi Theatre.

It is not distinctive of Mr. Dickens that he minutely analyzes states of mind and feeling that a person who appreciated their meaning would touch with extreme reserve; but it is distinctive of him that he often seeks to make a secondary and still more objectionable use of them by turning them, as it were, into political capital. In one of his novels there are some reflections in a country churchyard. These thoughts are suggested by some poor men's tombs, and they are not very bad, being, in fact, a part of Gray's "Elegy" done into prose. Then we have the clergyman's horse stumbling about and cropping the grass, and close by a lean ass in a pound, who having trespassed in the churchyard "without being qualified and ordained, was looking with hungry eyes on his priestly_neighbor." Now we wonder that Mr. Dickens did not see that there was a want of fitness in this. There is no objection to meditations in a country churchyard, but it is odd that any one who felt the influence of the place sufficiently to care to write about it at all, should have had his attention strongly directed to the difference between rich and poor, and to the exclusive privileges of the clergy. It may be all perfectly true; but it is so out of place that one cannot help suspecting that the scene, with all its accessories the ivy

and the tombs of the "poor humble men" | -is merely introduced to heighten the effect of his little bit of bunkum at the end. And if so, Mr. Dickens has been trifling with the sympathies of his readers for an unworthy purpose.

To the love of melodramatic effect and partiality for violent contrast must be referred a manner of treatment which seriously interferes with the artistic beauty of many of these novels. We allude to the practice of suddenly converting people without showing sufficient reason for the change. To do justice to Mr. Dickens's views, we must rather abuse our privilege of making extracts.

There is Mr. Dombey, in many respects an extremely well-drawn character; a type of the aristocratic pride of commerce. He has his ancestors, his traditions, and an hereditary name, which he is above all things anxious to preserve. He loses his wife, and regrets her after his fashion. Something lay at the bottom of his cold heart, colder and heavier than its ordinary load; but it was more a sense of the child's loss than his own, awakening within him an almost angry sorrow. That the life and progress on which he built such hopes should be endangered in the outset by so mean a want; that Dombey and Son should be tottering for a nurse, was indeed a humiliation." His son dies next; the only result is, that he is more frigid and dignified than before. There is something painful in the obstinate indifference with which he repels the advances of his daughter, not because she thwarts, but because she cannot advance his ambition. He marries a second time, and pays dearly for it. Domestic misery is followed by commercial ruin; but through every change of circumstance Mr. Dombey is still the same. The reader is about to close the book with some admiration for the stoicism with which such a variety of misfortune has been met, when in the last chapter or so, Mr. Dombey suddenly encounters his daughter, who has lately eloped with a man to whom he has a particular objection. A meeting of this kind does not usually bring out the amiable side of the parental character, but it produces a remarkably soothing effect on Mr. Dombey, who instantly becomes.

quite a different person-distinguished for his affectionate qualities and domestic habits; and we take leave of him enjoying a bottle of Madeira in the company of Captain Cuttle.

This is more like the melodrama in Nicholas Nickleby than anything else:

"What do you mean to do for me, old fellow?' asked Mr. Lenville, poking the struggling fire with his walking-stick, and afterwards wiping it on the skirt of his coat; anything in the gruff and grumble way?'

You turn your wife and child out of doors,' said Nicholas; and in a fit of rage and jealousy stab your eldest son in the library.'

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'Do I though?' exclaimed Mr. Lenville. 'That's very good business.'

"After which,' said Nicholas, 'you are troubled with remorse till the last act, and then you make up your mind to destroy yourself. But just as you are raising the pistol to your head, a clock strikes-ten!' "I see,' cried Mr. Lenville. Very good.' 'You pause,' said Nicholas; 'you recollect to have heard a clock strike ten in your infancy. The pistol falls from your handyou are overcome-you burst into tears, and become a virtuous and exemplary character for ever afterwards.'

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Capital!' said Mr. Lenville; 'that's a sure card. Get the curtain down with a touch of nature like that, and it'll be a tri

umphant success.'"

But the most astonishing case of conversion is afforded by the history of Merry Pecksniff. She is introduced in the following description:

"Miss Pecksniff sat upon a stool, because

of her simplicity and innocence, which were great-very great. Miss Pecksniff sat upon a stool because she was all girlishness, and playfulness, and wildness, and kittenish buoyancy. She was the most arch and at the same time the most artless creature, was the youngest Miss Pecksniff, that you can possibly imagine. It was her great charm. She her hair, or to turn it up, or to frizzle it, or was too fresh and guileless to wear combs in to braid it. She wore it in a crop, a loosely flowing crop, which had so many rows of curls in it that the top row was only one curl.”

So she is described throughout the first half of the book. She is a hypocrite, as we should expect a daughter of Mr. Pecksniff to be. Without any deliberately vicious intention, she is simply thoughtless, vain, insolent, and spiteful.

*Nicholas Nickleby, pp. 225, 6.

She perfectly understands her father's game with regard to old Martin Chuzzlewit, and she plays it unhesitatingly and well. At length she meets a man who is, without exception, the most despicable ruffian that Mr. Dickens ever held up to the execration of his readers. He makes love to her sister, and ends by abruptly proposing to herself. He has money, and she accepts him.

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Merry looked down again; and now she tore the grass up by the roots.

"My dear Mr. Chuzzlewit, what shocking words! Of course, I shall quarrel with him; I should quarrel with any husband. Married people always quarrel, I believe. But as to being miserable, and bitter, and all those dreadful things, you know, why I couldn't be absolutely that, unless he always had the best of it; and I mean to have the best of it

Here are her views, a week before her marriage, on the duties and responsibil-myself. I always do now,' cried Merry, nod

ities of that state:

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him at all.'

"I am told that he was at first supposed to be your sister's admirer,' said Martin.

"Oh, good gracious! My dear Mr. Chuzzlewit, it would be very hard to make him, though he is a monster, accountable for other people's vanity,' said Merry. And poor dear Cherry is the vainest darling!'

"It was her mistake then?'

"I hope it was,' cried Merry; 'but all along, the dear child has been so dreadfully jealous, and so cross, that, upon my word and honor, it's impossible to please her, and it's no use trying.'

"Not forced, persuaded, or controlled, said Martin, thoughtfully. And that's true,

I see. There is one chance yet. You may have lapsed into this engagement in very giddiness. It may have been the wanton act of a light head. Is that so?'

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My dear Mr. Chuzzlewit,' simpered Merry, as to lightheadedness, there never was such a feather of a head as mine. It's a perfect balloon, I declare! You never did, you

know!'

"He waited quietly till she had finished, and then said, steadily and slowly, and in a softened voice, as if he would still invite her

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ding her head, and giggling very much; 'for I make a perfect slave of the creature." " They are married. Jonas Chuzzlewit is certainly not a model husband. From the antecedents of the lady we are quite prepared to find that she makes good her promise not to allow him always to have the best of it. But Mr. Dickens appears to have thought that, although he had painted Jonas in the blackest colors, and drawn him in the most repulsive form, that was scarcely enough. He still wanted a little contrast to heighten the effect. And he wished to show how character may be developed independently of circumstances, and may, even on the shortest notice, acquire a bent the very opposite of that which those circumstances would tend to produce. So, to the unbounded astonishment of the reader, and in defiance of all truth and probability, the woman who married her husband chiefly to spite her sister; who, according to the testimony of her friends, had no heart; whose head, as she confesses herself, was a perfect balloon-throwing aside at once the ingrained selfishness and meanness of nearly thirty years, becomes in less than two months a model of uncomplaining endurance and self-denying affection.

The only reason for which change is that she has married a man whom she always despised; who is a coward and a bully, and on the highroad to become a murderer.

We have illustrated at some length the mental habit which is most constantly presented to us in the works of this remarkable writer. His mind is in fragments. To this strongly marked intel lectual quality may be traced both his characteristic excellences and his characteristic defects. Inability to discern the relations of things, aided by a fancy

is all very well meant, but very ignorant.

fertile and plastic in a high degree, has enabled him to summon at will the most ludicrous and grotesque images, and has "Ordinary people," says Addison, given vigor to whatever can be done in "are so dazzled with riches, that they parts-to his isolated sketches, for ex-pay as much deference to the understandample, and to his descriptions of simple ing of a man of estate as of a man of passion. On the other hand, it has pre- learning, and are very hardly brought to vented him from either constructing a regard any truth, how important soever story or penetrating a character. It is it be, which is preached to them, if they due to this that his views, both of life know that there are several people of £500 and morals, are imperfect and of the first a-year who do not believe it." We may impression, being, in fact, just what safely acquit Mr. Dickens of this partic would occur off hand to any ordinary ular form of error. He is so far from warm-hearted person who had not re-thinking a man to be any better because flected on the subject. With these char- he is rich, that he thinks he can hardly acteristics it is particularly unfortunate be good except he be poor. Such an that he should have attempted to ex- opinion, directly and indirectly enforced press himself on questions of State. Mr. by so powerful a writer, cannot fail of Tupper's poetry, Dr. Cumming's theol- harm. We fear that it has helped to ogy, Mr. Samuel Warren's sentiment, widen the breach, already sufficiently are not worse than Mr. Dickens's poli- great, which separates the two classes. tics. And this is saying a good deal. It is scarcely an excuse to say that our He seems, however, to have thought author's bias proceeds from a desire to otherwise. It is difficult to name any help the unfortunate and to relieve the important subject which has arisen with- oppressed. There is no question as to in the last quarter of a century on which the excellence of his intentions. But he has not written something. Imprison- good intentions do not absolve one from ment for Debt, the Poor Laws, the Court the necessity of considering the truth of of Chancery, the Ten Hours' Bill and an opinion or the result of proclaiming the relations of Workman and Employ- it. And sympathy is not exactly the iner, Administrative Reform, the Ecclesias- strument by the use of which a right tical Courts, the Civil Service Examina- judgment is insured on complicated and tions, and National Education, have all difficult questions. Mr. Dickens, howbeen illustrated, criticised, and adjudicat- ever, is so impressed with the impor ed upon. We should be sorry to say that tance of cultivating the feelings, that he he has not pointed out many defects in is led to infer that, if the feelings are the working of these institutions; it was right, the judgment is not likely to be not difficult to do so; but he has uni- wrong. And thus, whatever has the formly overstated the case, he has often appearance of being hard and unsympanot understood it, and never has he thetic, is the object of his most particupointed out any remedy. It may be lar aversion. To people who do not unadded that his criticism has generally derstand the province of political econcome too late. The account of the omy, that science certainly has a someFleet prison in Pickwick was published in what uncompromising and forbidding the year in which the Act for the amend- aspect. Accordingly Mr. Dickens runs ment of the Insolvent Laws was passed. full tilt against it, apparently because it The Poor Laws had just been improved does not happen to be the same thing as when Oliver Twist exposed the horrors moral philosophy. "What is the first of the workhouse system. The descrip- principle of this science?" asks the tion of Mr. Bounderby and the hands schoolmaster in Hard Times. "To do of Coketown closely followed the last unto others as I would they should do' of a series of statutes regulating the unto me," replies the model child; and management of factories. Jarndyce and we are expected to agree with this abJarndyce might or might not have been surd answer. Hard-hearted economists true in the time of Lord Eldon, but it tell us that if a man's means only allow bears about as much relation to the pres- him to keep four children at a certain ent practice of the Court of Chancery level of comfort, he has no right to have as to that of the Star Chamber. It eight. Mr. Dickens immediately de

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