Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens — Nicholas Nickleby Part 1

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY

Romance is perhaps the highest point of human expression, except indeed religion, to which it is closely allied.

Romance resembles religion especially in this, that it is not only a simplification but a shortening of existence.

Both romance and religion see everything as it were foreshortened; they see everything in an abrupt and fantastic perspective, coming to an apex.

It is the whole essence of perspective that it comes to a point.

Similarly, religion comes to a point--to the point.

Thus religion is always insisting on the shortness of human life.

But it does not insist on the shortness of human life as the pessimists insist on it.

Pessimism insists on the shortness of human life in order to show that life is valueless.

Religion insists on the shortness of human life in order to show that life is frightfully valuable--is almost horribly valuable.

Pessimism says that life is so short that it gives nobody a chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives everybody his final chance.

In the first case the word brevity means futility; in the second case, opportunity.

But the case is even stronger than this.

Religion shortens everything.

Religion shortens even eternity.

Where science, submitting to the false standard of time, sees evolution, which is slow, religion sees creation, which is sudden.

Philosophically speaking, the process is neither slow nor quick since we have nothing to compare it with.

Religion prefers to think of it as quick.

For religion the flowers shoot up suddenly like rockets.

For religion the mountains are lifted up suddenly like waves.

Those who quote that fine passage which says that in God's sight a thousand years are as yesterday that is passed as a watch in the night, do not realise the full force of the meaning.

To God a thousand years are not only a watch but an exciting watch.

For God time goes at a gallop, as it does to a man reading a good tale.

All this is, in a humble manner, true for romance.

Romance is a shortening and sharpening of the human difficulty.

Where you and I have to vote against a man, or write (rather feebly) against a man, or sign illegible petitions against a man, romance does for him what we should really like to see done.

It knocks him down; it shortens the slow process of historical justice.

All romances consist of three characters.

Other characters may be introduced; but those other characters are certainly mere scenery as far as the romance is concerned.

They are bushes that wave rather excitedly; they are posts that stand up with a certain pride; they are correctly painted rocks that frown very correctly; but they are all landscape--they are all a background.

In every pure romance there are three living and moving characters.

For the sake of argument they may be called St. George and the Dragon and the Princess.

In every romance there must be the twin elements of loving and fighting.

In every romance there must be the three characters: there must be the Princess, who is a thing to be loved; there must be the Dragon, who is a thing to be fought; and there must be St. George, who is a thing that both loves and fights.

There have been many symptoms of cynicism and decay in our modern civilisation.

But of all the signs of modern feebleness, of lack of grasp on morals as they actually must be, there has been none quite so silly or so dangerous as this: that the philosophers of to-day have started to divide loving from fighting and to put them into opposite camps.

There could be no worse sign than that a man, even Nietzsche, can be found to say that we should go in for fighting instead of loving.

There can be no worse sign than that a man, even Tolstoi, can be found to tell us that we should go in for loving instead of fighting.

The two things imply each other; they implied each other in the old romance and in the old religion, which were the two permanent things of humanity.

You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it.

You cannot fight without something to fight for.

To love a thing without wishing to fight for it is not love at all; it is lust.

It may be an airy, philosophical, and disinterested lust; it may be, so to speak, a virgin lust; but it is lust, because it is wholly self-indulgent and invites no attack.

On the other hand, fighting for a thing without loving it is not even fighting; it can only be called a kind of horse-play that is occasionally fatal.

Wherever human nature is human and unspoilt by any special sophistry, there exists this natural kinship between war and wooing, and that natural kinship is called romance.

It comes upon a man especially in the great hour of youth; and every man who has ever been young at all has felt, if only for a moment, this ultimate and poetic paradox.

He knows that loving the world is the same thing as fighting the world.

It was at the very moment when he offered to like everybody he also offered to hit everybody.

To almost every man that can be called a man this especial moment of the romantic culmination has come.

In the first resort the man wished to live a romance.

In the second resort, in the last and worst resort, he was content to write one.

Now there is a certain moment when this element enters independently into the life of Dickens.

There is a particular time when we can see him suddenly realise that he wants to write a romance and nothing else.

In reading his letters, in appreciating his character, this point emerges clearly enough.

He was full of the afterglow of his marriage; he was still young and psychologically ignorant; above all, he was now, really for the first time, sure that he was going to be at least some kind of success.

There is, I repeat, a certain point at which one feels that Dickens will either begin to write romances or go off on something different altogether.

This crucial point in his life is marked by _Nicholas Nickleby_.

It must be remembered that before this issue of _Nicholas Nickleby_ his work, successful as it was, had not been such as to dedicate him seriously or irrevocably to the writing of novels.

He had already written three books; and at least two of them are classed among the novels under his name.

But if we look at the actual origin and formation of these books we see that they came from another source and were really designed upon another plan.

The three books were, of course, the _Sketches by Boz_, _the Pickwick Papers_, and _Oliver Twist_.

It is, I suppose, sufficiently well understood that the _Sketches by Boz_ are, as their name implies, only sketches.

But surely it is quite equally clear that the _Pickwick Papers_ are, as their name implies, merely papers.

Nor is the case at all different in spirit and essence when we come to _Oliver Twist_.

There is indeed a sort of romance in _Oliver Twist_, but it is such an uncommonly bad one that it can hardly be regarded as greatly interrupting the previous process; and if the reader chooses to pay very little attention to it, he cannot pay less attention to it than the author did.

But in fact the case lies far deeper.

_Oliver Twist_ is so much apart from the ordinary track of Dickens, it is so gloomy, it is so much all in one atmosphere, that it can best be considered as an exception or a solitary excursus in his work.

Perhaps it can best be considered as the extension of one of his old sketches, of some sketch that happened to be about a visit to a workhouse or a gaol.

In the _Sketches by Boz_ he might well have visited a workhouse where he saw Bumble; in the _Sketches by Boz_ he might well have visited a prison where he saw Fagin.

We are still in the realm of sketches and sketchiness.

_The Pickwick Papers_ may be called an extension of one of his bright sketches.

_Oliver Twist_ may be called an extension of one of his gloomy ones.

Had he continued along this line all his books might very well have been note-books.

It would be very easy to split up all his subsequent books into scraps and episodes, such as those which make up the _Sketches by Boz_.

It would be easy enough for Dickens, instead of publishing _Nicholas Nickleby_, to have published a book of sketches, one of which was called "A Yorkshire School," another called "A Provincial Theatre," and another called "Sir Mulberry Hawk or High Life Revealed," another called "Mrs. Nickleby or a Lady's Monologue."

It would have been very easy to have thrown over the rather chaotic plan of the _Old Curiosity Shop_.

He might have merely written short stories called "The Glorious Apollos," "Mrs. Quilp's Tea-Party," "Mrs. Jarley's Waxwork," "The Little Servant," and "The Death of a Dwarf."

_Martin Chuzzlewit_ might have been twenty stories instead of one story.

_Dombey and Son_ might have been twenty stories instead of one story.

We might have lost all Dickens's novels; we might have lost altogether Dickens the novelist.

We might have lost that steady love of a seminal and growing romance which grew on him steadily as the years advanced, and which gave us towards the end some of his greatest triumphs.

All his books might have been _Sketches by Boz_.

But he did turn away from this, and the turning-point is _Nicholas Nickleby_.