OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
287
haps, but valid enough in an anemic age that squeaks and sips the
strong blood of the dead artist. Perhaps our safest answer must be
that whoever has made a masterpiece must have known what he was
doing, fully as well as
his
critics. What knowledge we gain of Dickens
through his novels reveals a complicated soul, bitterly aware of the
causes for despairing, obsessed with death and decay, fascinated
by the sordid, the evil, and the grotesque to such an extent that he
brings
his
greatest gusto as a writer to their description. But even
to the blackest of these descriptions he gives a tone of wry surface
levity, a playfulness of language, that makes the horror of his subject
both more ghastly and more supportable. He stands smiling at our
elbow and points to the savagery and injustice. Indeed he is almost
too
much
at our elbow, warning us what to feel, addressing us in
lachrymose or heated perorations, clucking ruefully over
his
pathetic
contrivances. Often he comes very close to spoiling
his
effects by this
intrusion, but the thing to be felt is there, and even he (unlike
Thackeray with
his
thumb in our buttonhole) cannot take it from us.
But in opposition to the pessimistic darkness, Dickens also exposes
an almost childlike faith in Low Church goodness. He sets high
value on kindness, patience, the innocence and elation of youth, the
power of love to move aside dead mountains, or at least to make their
weight bearable. And besides, he is the funniest writer in the world,
with more
kinds
of fun than any other, from the broadest burlesque,
through all gradations of the comedy of character, situation, manners,
speech, parody, cruel and gentle wit, to the final subtlety of the
tear-stained smile.
He has many ways of being serious as well, although he never
produces in us the exaltation of high tragedy-partly because in these
vast, many-peopled entertainments no single character is allowed to
reach heroic proportions. The tears are the tears of pathos, and fall
for a dying child, for shabby courage and humble fidelity. The tragic
issue is simply the general contest of man with his own nature and
the nature of things, for Dickens' belief in positive evil is implicit,
and ,all of his characters either struggle against evil, or founder in it,
or were born its creatures. But Dickens raises no protagonist of great
intellectual, moral, or emotional stature to do battle. Is it because of
this that he is usually esteemed in our time as a lesser figure than
certain other nineteenth-century novelists? And yet, in its great
