The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  Whenever he had the portrait of a character in his mind he began to decorate it with those ridiculous appendages, until it very soon ceased to be a man and became a fantastic little mandarin.

  Half his characters have been christened on the altar of burlesque. Fat chuckles gurgle up from this innocent-hearted author when he thinks of a name of the sort that once seemed funny in the schoolroom. One can excuse Becky a good deal of her temper if she had to mix freely with people of the names of:

  The Duchess Dowager of Stilton, Duc de la Gruyère, Marchioness of Cheshire, Marchese Alessandro Strachino, Comte de Brie, Baron Schapsuger and Chevalier Tosti.

  No wonder that Thackeray has been accused—notably by Professor Saintsbury—of hating Becky!

  The strange thing is that Thackeray’s contemporaries, looking at the delicious shadowgraphs which were the animation of his books said “cynic ” when they should have said “clown.” In his own day Thackeray got a reputation for being a ferocious cynic and satirist. That was perhaps because he frequently called his characters “puppets ”—with the suggestion, of course, that the rest of mankind were no more—and often dragged them aside to make room for the fat, pink face and sad, beaming eyes of their author.

  Unfortunately, whenever the big, benevolent head filled the scene it began to say foolish things. Thackeray at times was no better than a pompous schoolmaster, who would interrupt a football match to tell the boys that the harder they strive to win, the sadder it will be if they lose.

  Indeed, if these were the things that Thackeray was really wanting to say, and his air of seriousness at the moment of saying them suggests that his works are little more than elaborate theses designed to illustrate the point that the preacher in Ecclesiastes was trying to make, the reader cannot help wondering why he did not find some simpler and more satisfactory way of making himself heard.

  For Thackeray, within the somewhat strangling limitations of an unreliable vocabulary, a complete lack of any sense of what to omit, and no unique depth of thought, was a natural essayist. He had a mind in which the past was always on tap; a jolt which set it off on full sentimental gush.

  Mr. Chesterton has said that: “Thackeray is everybody’s past, is everybody’s youth.” The truth probably is that the past always simplifies itself into a very simple pattern. And it is because the remembered past of most of us is much the same—a view over the shoulder of things we have done that we ought not to have done, and things left undone that we ought to have done, that Thackeray has come to rule a larger corner of fiction than that to which his intelligence alone would naturally have entitled him.

  Thackeray was little of a thinker himself, and he perpetually wrote for readers who were less. He possessed in remarkable degree the style coulant, a style which seemed to say “mots justes may come, mots justes may go, but I go on for ever.” He left nothing unsaid in two or three easy pages that could be said in a single difficult sentence. And anyone, who would follow, could follow.

  About one-half of Thackeray’s charm as a novelist, indeed, is due to the perfect gossiping ease with which he writes. His novels might have been told to us over the everlasting port at some eternal dinner-table. He is perpetually interesting. The mind of the listener, if not profoundly occupied, is at least always completely absorbed. Thackeray’s pressure of invention is so great that every sentence has its own excuse for being. Every chapter, on the other hand, is twice as long as need be. And the action of the story is often reduced to a precarious competition with the story itself.

  Anthony Trollope was immensely impressed by Thackeray’s realism. “Whoever it is that speaks in his pages,” he wrote, “does it not seem that such a person would certainly have used such words on such an occasion? ” The answer, of course, is that such persons do not exist anywhere save in the bright sunlight of Thackeray’s imagination, where every wrinkle is visible and shadows fall more darkly than in life. Thackeray’s characters speak truly to their types, in just the way in which Charley’s Aunt is more perfectly herself every time she opens her mouth. Thackeray’s are not perfect characters drawn from life, but perfect characters drawn from the stage complete with heighteners, padding and make-up. But when he made the remark Trollope was really comparing Thackeray’s characters with those of Bulwer Lytton, who all talked as though they were descended in direct succession from a champagne bottle.

  If Jane Austen is the novelist of the polite tea-table, Thackeray is the novelist of the polite dinner-table. The difference is approximately the difference between the two centuries. The early nineteenth century was the age of gastronomy. It was the age that made indulgence respectable by making it dignified.

  In the generation which bridged Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli and Thackeray, the cook entered the novel in glory, and remained to preside as an Epicurean deity over fiction, with Brillat-Savarin as his prophet.

  Lord Lytton rapturously devoted a chapter of Pelham to the adoration of the cook Guloseton. Disraeli, the Jew, showed his national taste for good cooking in Tancred, in his chapter on Lattimer. And Thackeray in Pendennis, produces the burlesque “Alcide Mirobolant,” who made love as only an artist, and an artist sure of his public, could:

  Her lovely name is Blanche. The veil of the maiden is white; the wreath of roses which she wears is white. I determined that my dinner should be as spotless as the snow. At her accustomed hour, and instead of the rude gigot à l’eau, which was ordinarily served at her too simple table, I sent her up a little potage à la Reine— à la Reine Blanche I called it—white as her own tint and confectioned with the most fragrant cream and almonds. I then offered up at her shrine a filet de merlanà l’ Agn ès and a delicate plat, which I have designated as Éperlan à la Sainte-Thérèse, and of which my charming Miss partook with pleasure. I followed this with two little entrees of sweetbread and chicken; and the only brown thing which I permitted myself in the entertainment was a little roast of lamb, which I laid in a meadow of spinaches, surrounded with croustillons, representing sheep, and ornamented with daisies and other savage flowers. After this came my second service: a pudding à la Reine Elizabeth (who Madame Fribsbi knows was a maiden princess); a dish of opal-coloured plover’s eggs, which I called Nid de Tour-teraux à la Roucoule; placing in the midst of them two of those tender volatiles, billing each other, and confectioned with butter; a basket containing little gatàaux of apricots, which I know all ladies adore; and a jelly of marasquin, bland, insinuating, intoxicating, as the glance of beauty. This I designated Ambrosie de Calypso à la Souveraine de mon Cœur. And when the ice was brought in—an ice of plombière and cherries—how do you think I shape them, Madame Fribsbi? In the form of two hearts united with an arrow, on which I had laid, before it entered, a bridal veil in cut paper, surmounted by a wreath of virginal orange flowers. I stood at the door to watch the effect of this entry. It was but one cry of admiration. The three young ladies filled their glasses with the sparkling Ay, and carried me in a toast. I heard it—I heard Miss speak of me—I heard her say, “Tell Monsieur Mirobolant that we thank him—we admire him—we love him.” My feet almost failed me as she spoke.

  Thackeray’s comic brilliance in such a passage strangely enough gives us a clue to his great limitation as a novelist. He knew as much about dining as Lord Lytton, and as little about eating as Disraeli. Life when it came to meet him wore a white tie, or an exceedingly dirty one. For Thackeray did know the taverns also. And they gave him such a shocking impression of debauchery—his Cave of Harmony is more like a temperance advocate’s picture of a tavern than a novelist’s—that he receded deeper and yet deeper into his shell in Pall Mall.

  Perhaps it was his slight uneasiness in the modern world that sent him on his voyage of delightful discovery to the world of the Virginians. He did not approach it as a historical novelist would have done, with his nose to the ground for battlefields and the trails of marching men, but in very much the spirit in which a poet might return to Atlantis. There was a formality about life in Old Virginia,
a discipline of dignity, that attracted Thackeray. In his mellow, melancholy masterpiece Esmond he was completely at his ease, as none but the great writers have been at ease with their subjects: and that despite the stilts of rigidly observed history upon which his language walked.

  The one thing that Thackeray really wanted was home life. This he could never have. His young wife had fallen ill and lost her reason. After that, a meaner man might have continued his career with a perpetual grudge against life. But with Thackeray it was different. To the end he remained bruised, a trifle wounded, but on excellent if subdued terms with existence.

  He became the man of clubs, the man of society, the man of letters. Success was placarded over him; and it did not improve him. He grew to look more and more like a fat, pink Sphinx, always just on the point of saying something cleverer than he had ever yet said.

  But even without ever actually saying it, he remains one of the talking giants of his century.

  Charles Dickens

  To pass from Walter Scott to Charles Dickens is to pass from the real founder of the trade of fiction to the first journeyman of genius of modern times.

  Praise of Charles Dickens passed saturation point a generation ago. Most of what has been said since has simply and inevitably sunk to the bottom, till the whole bottle of Dickens criticism needs shaking before using. And to find something to say about Dickens that is at once new enough to be interesting, and true enough to be worth being interested in, has exhausted more critics, perhaps, than the criticism of any other writer in the language, save Shakespeare.

  It would be easy enough to shock people into curiosity by redrawing Dickens’s portraits to show him as a specious and spiteful cynic (who after all is usually only a sentimentalist that has been rather badly snubbed) enjoying the sight of the cracks in the universe. Or to explain him in terms of social sadism, and call up the Smikes and the Little Nells, and the Olivers and the Davids as witnesses for the Crown.

  But some subtler method will have to be found if we are to lead readers up the garden. Even though it is only a bouquet that is to be presented at the end of the path.

  Strangely enough the true secret of Dickens’s genius, to say nothing of his popularity, is to be found, not in any piece of remarkably profound criticism, but in a piece of sheer critical folly.

  I refer to the remark commonly made by those who do not like Dickens, that he was writing down to the public. Such a remark would have astonished Charles Dickens. The wild irony of the little ten-year-old boy sticking labels on pots of blacking and solemnly patronising the great English nation would have delighted Dickens. For, as David Copperfield shows, young Charles Dickens, the baby on the treadmill, was a figure that remained in his imagination throughout his life. And Dickens, the golden, successful author, would take periodical dives out of prosperity back into poverty to look at life again through the eyes of fatigue and failure.

  That memory of worse things, indeed, is about half the secret of his huge and human sympathy.

  But to defend anyone against the charge of “writing down ” is difficult. In the first place, it is not a charge at all; it is a kind of grudging compliment. It implies a consciousness of the supreme importance of one’s words, together with complete unscrupulousness about the use of them. The Parables are examples of the same kind of thing: heavenly truths designed for the consumption of earthly blockheads.

  But Dickens did not speak from a point of isolation. When he emerged, he emerged among the blockheads. Dickens was the product, not of an act of God, but of an Act of Education. There was nothing airy about him: he was of the earth, earthy. He was quite simply and satisfactorily a member of the great British public.

  Dickens has been heralded so long and so loudly as the author of the people that the truth that he never wrote about real people at all has been lost in the general din. If he had written about the poor as they really were, nine-tenths of his contemporaries would have been merely annoyed; and historians, not novel-readers, would have been grateful to-day.

  He wrote, instead, about the poor as they manifestly were not. He condensed the characteristics of eccentricity of a dozen men into a single man, so that if you met any one of the dozen you would declare that Dickens had hit him off. He made his characters entirely entertaining by making them only partly lifelike. He created a world like, even ludicrously like, our own, but with startling differences. It was about as near to the world of real life as the world of Harlequinade is.

  Santayana, in a single sentence, has expressed this by saying that “the secret of this new world of Dickens lies … in the combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy tale unrealism of general atmosphere.”

  Mr. E. M. Forster has found nearly all the people in Dickens “flat characters ”; characters who, like a notice-board, have one obvious purpose, and are meaningless when looked at from anywhere but in front. They are characters, he argues, of remarkable singleness of motive; and singular simplicity of obligation so far as the novel is concerned.

  “Nearly every one of them,” Mr. Forster writes, “can be summed up in a sentence, and yet there is this wonderful feeling of human depth. Probably the immense vitality of Dickens causes his characters to vibrate a little, so that they borrow his life and appear to lead a life of their own. It is a conjuring trick; at any moment we may look at Mr. Pickwick edgeways and find him no thicker than a gramophone record. But we never get the side-way view.” That is quite true. We do not. And for the very reason, that no good actor talks over his shoulder to the audience.

  For Dickens, it should be remembered, was a novelist with all the instincts of a dramatist. And he fitted all his characters with little tags that they could pull out as soon as they came on the stage he built for them. Polonius, Mr. Pickwick, Falstaff, Mr. Micawber, Mr. Surface, Mr. Squeers, are all characters that could exist perhaps better on the stage than in a novel. They have all the qualifications for a good dramatic career. They are instantaneously recognisable, and they are masters of mannerism. They are always splendidly and isolatedly themselves. And because of some obscure vagary of the human intelligence their habit of saying the same thing, or the same sort of thing, with the remorseless iteration of a parrot, further endears them to their audience every time they say it.

  To some extent they are the wastrels of prose fiction, these flat characters. I qualify the extent of their failure because, though it is easy enough to explain their charms away, their remarkable success obstinately remains. It is the flattest characters that often have the fattest reputations.

  But the novel offers possibilities, carrying responsibilities with them, that do not exist in drama. The dramatist, with the supreme advantage of being able to put his characters—or, at least, flesh and blood people that, for a weekly arrangement with the manager, are willing for some hours every day to swear that they are the dramatist’s characters—before his audience, also has to pay the supreme penalty. The field of life that is open before him is no larger than that illumined by an old-fashioned spyglass. He can exhibit everything material about his characters with incomparable ease of conviction. But in reality only a fraction of what happens to a man is capable or necessary of exhibition.

  Indeed, when it comes to understanding the mind, it is a mere distraction to see the body—five feet six inches of it—and a face like someone’s we know. Like a priest in a confessional we need to erect a filter between ourselves and the body of the other soul, so that nothing irrelevant and distracting can penetrate.

  And here the novelist is more fortunate than the dramatist. He can describe. He can remove the mind, by a piece of surgery that is almost invariably fatal in drama, and concern himself and his readers with it alone. He could keep Hamlet in soliloquy for a chapter, or two, or three, or for an entire novel if he wanted, instead of for a mere sixty-six lines. In short, the novelist has incomparable opportunities for providing his characters with a complete armoury of conflicting emotions and fears and ecstasies and sentiments, in
addition to their primal literary motive; of making them real men, capable of failure—even of failure within the limits and intentions of the book; like the characters in a Russian novel that drift, aimless yet accurate, across the pages, and finally swerve right out of sight executing the broad curve of the question mark.

  But with Dickens, as with Scott, his popularity is not so much a matter of present taste as of historic fact. To follow the small boy in the blacking warehouse, merging into the solicitor’s clerk, becoming a parliamentary reporter whose voracious appetite for knowledge drove him into that huge, dull, circular eating-house, the British Museum Reading Room, contributing first his paper, “A Dinner in Poplar Walk ” to the Monthly Magazine, and then his “Sketches by Boz ” to the Evening Chronicle, and finally receiving one hundred and fifty pounds for them on republication, is to follow a young man on a prosperously ascending curve.

  And to continue the curve so far as the publication of the Pickwick Papers is to arrive at a point that establishes Dickens on a unique pedestal of public good favour. The popularity of the Pickwick Papers grew with them. Of the first part 400 copies were bound: of the last 40,000.

  To call the Pickwick Papers an example of the slipshod, shambling work that Dickens produced is to waste criticism. It never was a novel. It was a great bundle of comic sketches published month by month, that comes no nearer to being a novel than a convivial evening’s songs, bound between covers, would come to being a cantata.

  But even if it was not a novel, it anticipated all that was to be characteristic of Dickens’s novels. There was the same verbosity: the same rush of little inventions that go branching off the main stem like the tails on a monkey tree; the dismal clichés; the innocent and irrepressible vulgarity of the comedy.