The boy stirred and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection he had never known. Thus, a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes that never were in this life; which vanish like a breath; which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have awakened; which no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall.
The first is certainly brown paper: what it wraps has been chosen by the grocer to suit his clients’ tastes, but cannot we detect already in the second passage the tone of Dickens’s secret prose, that sense of a mind speaking to itself with no one there to listen, as we find it in Great Expectations?
It was fine summer weather again, and, as I walked along, the times when I was a little helpless creature, and my sister did not spare me, vividly returned. But they returned with a gentle tone upon them that softened even the edge of Tickler. For now, the very breath of the beans and clover whispered to my heart that the day must come when it would be well for my memory that others walking in the sunshine should be softened as they thought of me.
It is a mistake to think of Oliver Twist as a realistic story: only late in his career did Dickens learn to write realistically of human beings: at the beginning he invented life and we no more believe in the temporal existence of Fagin or Bill Sikes than we believe in the existence of that Giant whom Jack slew as he bellowed his Fee Fi Fo Fum. There were real Fagins and Bill Sikes and real Bumbles in the England of his day, but he had not drawn them, as he was later to draw the convict Magwitch; these characters in Oliver Twist are simply parts of one huge invented scene, what Dickens in his own preface called ‘the cold wet shelterless midnight streets of London’, How the phrase goes echoing on through the books of Dickens until we meet it again so many years later in ‘the weary western streets of London on a cold dusty spring night’ which were so melancholy to Pip. But Pip was to be as real as the weary streets, while Oliver was as unrealistic as the cold wet midnight of which he formed a part.
This is not to criticize the book so much as to describe it. For what an imagination this youth of twenty-six had that he could invent so monstrous and complete a legend! We are not lost with Oliver Twist round Saffron Hill: we are lost in the interstices of one young, angry, gloomy brain, and the oppressive images stand out along the track like the lit figures in a Ghost Train tunnel.
Against the wall were ranged, in regular array, a long row of elm boards cut into the same shape, looking in the dim light, like high shouldered ghosts with their hands in their breeches pockets.
We have most of us seen those nineteenth-century prints where the bodies of naked women form the face of a character, the Diplomat, the Miser, and the like. So the crouching figure of Fagin seems to form the mouth, Sikes with his bludgeon the jutting features, and the sad lost Oliver the eyes of one man as lost as Oliver.
Chesterton, in a fine imaginative passage, has described the mystery behind Dickens’s plots, the sense that even the author was unaware of what was really going on, so that when the explanations come and we reach, huddled into the last pages of Oliver Twist, a naked complex narrative of illegitimacy and burnt wills and destroyed evidence, we simply do not believe.
The secrecy is sensational; the secret is tame. The surface of the thing seems more awful than the core of it. It seems almost as if these grisly figures, Mrs Chadband and Mrs Clennam, Miss Havisham and Miss Flite, Nemo and Sally Brass, were keeping something back from the author as well as from the reader. When the book closes we do not know their real secret, They soothed the optimistic Dickens with something less terrible than the truth.
What strikes the attention most in this closed Fagin universe are the different levels of unreality. If, as one is inclined to believe, the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we all share, we can understand why Fagin and Sikes in their most extreme exaggerations move us more than the benevolence of Mr Brownlow or the sweetness of Mrs Maylie – they touch with fear as the others never really touch with love. It was not that the unhappy child, with his hurt pride and his sense of hopeless insecurity, had not encountered human goodness – he had simply failed to recognize it in those streets between Gadshill and Hungerford Market which had been as narrowly enclosed as Oliver Twist’s. When Dickens at this early period tried to describe goodness he seems to have remembered the small stationers’ shops on the way to the blacking factory with their coloured paper scraps of angels and virgins, or perhaps the face of some old gentleman who had spoken kindly to him outside Warren’s factory. He had swum up towards goodness from the deepest world of his experience, and on this shallow level the conscious brain has taken a hand, trying to construct characters to represent virtue and, because his age demanded it, triumphant virtue, but all he can produce are powdered wigs and gleaming spectacles and a lot of bustle with bowls of broth and a pale angelic face. Compare the way in which we first meet evil with his introduction of goodness.
The walls and ceiling of the room were perfectly black with age and dirt. There was a deal table before the fire: upon which were a candle, stuck in a ginger-beer bottle, two or three pewter pots, a loaf and butter, and a plate. In a frying pan, which was on the fire, and which was secured to the mantel-shelf by a string, some sausages were cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare . . . ‘This is him, Fagin,’ said Jack Dawkins: ‘my friend Oliver Twist.’ The Jew grinned; and, making a low obeisance to Oliver, took him by the hand, and hoped he should have the honour of his intimate acquaintance.
Fagin has always about him this quality of darkness and nightmare. He never appears on the daylight streets. Even when we see him last in the condemned cell, it is in the hours before the dawn. In the Fagin darkness Dickens’s hand seldom fumbles. Hear him turning the screw of horror when Nancy speaks of the thoughts of death that have haunted her:
‘Imagination,’ said the gentleman, soothing her.
‘No imagination,’ replied the girl in a hoarse voice. ‘I’ll swear I saw “coffin” written in every page of the book in large black letters, – aye, and they carried one close to me, in the streets tonight.’
‘There is nothing unusual in that,’ said the gentleman. ‘They have passed me often.’
‘Real ones,’ rejoined the girl. ‘This was not.’
Now turn to the daylight world and our first sight of Rose:
The younger lady was in the lovely bloom and springtime of womanhood: at that age, when, if ever angels be for God’s good purposes enthroned in mortal forms, they may be, without impiety, supposed to abide in such as hers. She was not past seventeen. Cast in so slight and exquisite a mould; so mild and gentle; so pure and beautiful; that earth seemed not her element, nor its rough creatures her fit companions.
Or Mr Brownlow as he first appeared to Oliver:
Now, the old gentleman came in as brisk as need be; but he had no sooner raised his spectacles on his forehead, and thrust his hands behind the skirts of his dressing-gown to take a good long look at Oliver, than his countenance underwent a very great variety of odd contortions . . . The fact is, if the truth must be told, that Mr Brownlow’s heart, being large enough for any six ordinary old gentlemen of humane disposition, forced a supply of tears into his eyes by some hydraulic process which we are not sufficiently philosophical to be in a condition to explain.
How can we really believe that these inadequate ghosts of goodness can triumph over Fagin, Monks, and Sikes? And the answer, of course, is that they never could have triumphed without the elaborate machinery of the plot disclosed in the last pa
ges. This world of Dickens is a world without God; and as a substitute for the power and the glory of the omnipotent and omniscient are a few sentimental references to heaven, angels, the sweet faces of the dead, and Oliver saying, ‘Heaven is a long way off, and they are too happy there to come down to the bedside of a poor boy.’ In this Manichaean world we can believe in evil-doing, but goodness wilts into philanthropy, kindness, and those strange vague sicknesses into which Dickens’s young women so frequently fall and which seem in his eyes a kind of badge of virtue, as though there were a merit in death.
But how instinctively Dickens’s genius recognized the flaw and made a virtue out of it. We cannot believe in the power of Mr Brownlow, but nor did Dickens, and from his inability to believe in his own good character springs the real tension of his novel. The boy Oliver may not lodge in our brain like David Copperfield, and though many of Mr Bumble’s phrases have become and deserve to have become familiar quotations we can feel he was manufactured: he never breathes like Mr Dorrit; yet Oliver’s predicament, the nightmare fight between the darkness, where the demons walk, and the sunlight, where ineffective goodness makes its last stand in a condemned world, will remain part of our imaginations forever. We read of the defeat of Monks, and of Fagin screaming in the condemned cell, and of Sikes dangling from his self-made noose, but we don’t believe. We have witnessed Oliver’s temporary escapes too often and his inevitable recapture: there is the truth and the creative experience. We know that when Oliver leaves Mr Brownlow’s house to walk a few hundred yards to the bookseller, his friends will wait in vain for his return. All London outside the quiet shady street in Pentonville belongs to his pursuers; and when he escapes again into the house of Mrs Maylie in the fields beyond Shepperton, we know his security is false. The seasons may pass, but safety depends not on time but on daylight. As children we all knew that: how all day we could forget the dark and the journey to bed. It is with a sense of relief that at last in twilight we see the faces of the Jew and Monks peer into the cottage window between the sprays of jessamine. At that moment we realize how the whole world, and not London only, belongs to these two after dark. Dickens, dealing out his happy endings and his unreal retributions, can never ruin the validity and dignity of that moment. ‘They had recognized him, and he them; and their look was as firmly impressed upon his memory, as if it had been deeply carved in stone, and set before him from his birth.’
‘From his birth’ – Dickens may have intended that phrase to refer to the complicated imbroglios of the plot that lie outside the novel, ‘something less terrible than the truth’. As for the truth, is it too fantastic to imagine that in this novel, as in many of his later books, creeps in, unrecognized by the author, the eternal and alluring taint of the Manichee, with its simple and terrible explanation of our plight, how the world was made by Satan and not by God, lulling us with the music of despair?
1950
HANS ANDERSEN
THERE are men whose lives seem arguments for the existence of a conscious providence, lives fashioned as it were deliberately for one purpose with a cruelty that has deprived them of any obscure and friendly retreat. Hans Andersen is one of these, and there is a sense of unusual brutality in the ingenuity which providence expended for so small a result, a few volumes of children’s stories and a shelf of poetic dramas without merit.
To fashion this writer what was required? First and foremost a raw sensibility, a bundle of shrieking nerves which barred the possessor hopelessly from any easy comfort. The son of a cobbler of unbalanced mind, the grandson of a lunatic, Andersen might as easily have become a madman as an artist. When he was a child, his parents tried to cure his nerves at the holy well of St Regisse on St John’s Eve; but during the night which he spent by the spring he was woken by a thunderstorm and the screams of a lunatic girl who had been sleeping at his feet. It is possible that one thought saved the boy and the man from madness: ‘I am going to be famous. First you suffer the most awful things, and then you get to be famous.’ The same idea is expressed again and again in his work. ‘All who see you,’ the witch says to the mermaid who seeks a human form, ‘will say that you are the most beautiful child of man they have ever seen. You will keep your gliding gait, no dancer will rival you, but every step you take will be as if you were treading upon sharp knives, so sharp as to draw blood. If you are willing to suffer all this I am ready to help you.’ And in the story of The Wild Swans the heroine to save her brothers has to weave eleven shirts from stinging-nettles. ‘The sea is indeed softer than your hands, and it moulds the hardest stone, but it does not feel the pain your fingers will feel. It has no heart and does not suffer the pain and anguish you must feel.’
Andersen has been held up as an example of supreme egotism, because everything which he and those he loved suffered he related to his own future, wondering of his family’s early bitter disappointment at a failure to find a livelihood on a country estate whether God had not ruined their hopes to save him from becoming a mere farmer. But this was not egotism; it was an artist’s parallel to the Catholic ideal of the acceptance of pain for a spiritual benefit. If he had not found a reason to accept pain, his mind might well have broken; he might have been happy in the manner of his grandfather who wandered singing and wreathed in flowers through the streets of Odense or of his father who imagined himself on his deathbed one of Napoleon’s captains, instead of the broken private that he was, and cried aloud, ‘Hats off, you whelps, when the Emperor rides by.’
His nerves, too, supplied what fate next demanded in completing the artist – persistence, an inability to find happiness even when he had won his fame. In Sweden, when the students of Lund marched in a body to acclaim him, he could not believe in their sincerity; he thought they were making game of him and searched their faces for smiles. When he left Odense for Copenhagen, at the age of fourteen, without work or friends, a wise woman had declared that one day his native place would be illuminated in his honour, so that when, 48 years later, he returned to receive the freedom of the city, it might have been expected that he would enjoy a few moments of unmixed happiness. But at night, as he watched from the City Hall the torches and the lamps and the crowd singing in his honour in the square, the cold wind touched a tooth into almost unbearable pain, so that he could only count the verses still remaining and long for the programme to end. It is impossible, at times, not be convinced of the actuality of this purposeful fate; for it was an extraordinary coincidence, if it was not a malignant providence, which caused him to overhear, as he stood at his window in Copenhagen, just returned from his triumphal visit to England, a man say to his companion: ‘Look, there is our orang-outang who is so famous abroad.’
Most men have one earth into which they can creep to rest the nerves, but for Andersen it was stopped. He was deprived even of the satisfaction of sex. Again his life was curiously of a piece, as if no opportunity was to be wasted to warp his nature to the required shape. As a boy alone in Copenhagen, chance found him lodgings in a street of red lights. His surroundings must have continually aroused desires which he had not the money to satisfy. And they were never satisfied. He was as passionate as most men, three times he tried to marry, but he retained the exhausting innocence which, to quote Miss Toksvig,*3 ‘he described himself as the kind which reads the Bible and always finds the Song of Songs; the innocence that ruins sleep’.
There remained for fate to limit and define his range as an artist. The son of a washerwoman and a cobbler Andersen inherited the folk, tradition; his earliest fairy stories were transcripts of tales he had heard as a child. Witches were part of his everyday life; they were called in by his mother to foretell his future, to heal his father’s sickness, and the little medieval court of Odense supplied one of the commonest ingredients of his tales, the ease with which a poor child can talk with royalty. Odense had only 7,000 inhabitants, but it had a palace and a governor and a regiment of dragoons, and the cobbler’s son was admitted to audience. But Andersen did not submit easily to the
claims of this environment. It was his ambition to be a dramatic poet; with extraordinary persistence he followed this aim to the end of his life, and because his plays almost invariably failed he was convinced that he was not appreciated in his own country.
Miss Toksvig’s is a most satisfying biography of this unhappy man in all his curious glassy transparency. She writes with sympathy and without sentimentality; and it is a pleasure to watch her masterly choice and arrangement of incident into a story which is always exciting. One can only wish that she had not confined herself to Andersen’s life. She throws off suggestions for a new estimate of his work, which I should like to have seen pursued. ‘In Hans Christian,’ Miss Toksvig writes, ‘the Unconscious was made flesh and dwelt unashamed and bewildered among men,’ and perhaps the chief importance of Hans Andersen today to adult readers lies in the frequency with which he allowed his unconscious mind to take control of his pen. There are passages in The Snow Queen which anticipate the method of the Surréalistes. His contemporaries complained that his stories contained no moral, but it is in their occasional passages of pure fantasy, as when the flowers speak their irrelevant messages to Gerda, that his stories have their greatest importance for the contemporaries of M. Philippe Soupault.
1933
[3]
FRANÇOIS MAURIAC
AFTER the death of Henry James a disaster overtook the English novel; indeed long before his death one can picture that quiet, impressive, rather complacent figure, like the last survivor on a raft, gazing out over a sea scattered with wreckage. He even recorded his impressions in an article in the Times Literary Supplement, recorded his hope – but was it really hope or only a form of his unconquerable oriental politeness? – in such young novelists as Mr Compton Mackenzie and Mr David Herbert Lawrence, and we who have lived after the disaster can realize the futility of those hopes.
Collected Essays Page 9