OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
which is the goal of moot contemporary wntrng since Tolstoy and
Maupassant. The interest, the meaning, of Dickens' novels lies else–
where, and
if
we are moved, we are moved
in
the serener regions of
the spirit where poetry and folk tale make their appeal to under–
standing. No other major novelist builds
his
books so frankly by
the poet's method.
As
a poet he warns of Paul Dombey's death
in
symbolic
terms
of the sea's murmurings, for as a poet he deals everywhere in symbols
and
suggestive images and chanted repetitions and protracted fancies
with an abandon denied to the prosier scribes of daily life--and
therein lie both the freedom and the
order
of
his
writing. But as a
poet he is far from the sad lyricism of Virginia WooH or the melo–
mania of D.
H.
Lawrence, although he touches them both at points;
he more nearly resembles Chaucer and the robust poet-dramatists of
the Elizabethan age. Yet (since it is hard to say anything "true"
of Dickens) this too is a false picture- for whom does he
not
resem–
ble
one way or another?
Perhaps it is because of the detachment of the poetic method
that Dickens' novels can be read again without loss of pleasure, for,
~
in
a well-loved poem, the sequence is largely independent of the
kind of time
in
which suspense draws us on. Since we have never
been invited to identify ourselves passionately with the fate of the
characters, and have not lived through their story as
if
it were our
own, we do not return to
Dickens
as we are likely to return even to
Tolstoy, with a sense of chill, of lost magic and shrunken dimension.
For there are certain books as difficult to recapture in their essence
as
an old love, as difficult to relive as a passage in our past, simply
because they
were
our love and our past, and their truth for us has
been assimilated and has actually modified our present. Dickens'
books
are not of this kind; like a sonnet, or Jack and the Beanstalk,
their rewards belong to a perpetual present.
