OTHER DICKENS
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the part of the letter-writer. The creator of the fantastic Mrs.
Gamp and the fantastic Circumlocution Office is able to convey
the assurance that he doesn't fancify facts in his letters. Nor do the
facts require embroidering; they are fantastic in themselves.
With the years his fame only increases, reaching a high point
when at last he takes to the road as a reader from his works, face
to face with his tumultuous public. Meanwhile the letters testify to
a sort of counter-development in him, a growing consciousness of
his inner self and its unappeasable desires. The "one happiness I
have missed in life" begins to haunt him and make him fearfully
restless. The one happiness is several things: sex, easy companion–
ship, freedom from the self-imposed restraints of his impregnable
personal empire, freedom to write in defiance of the Victorian
taboos that he himself has done much to establish. All of these and
more: he knows the intrinsic sense of loss of the supreme genius
who is outwearing the possibilities of his culture, of his very condi–
tion as a human being. Dickens does not respond to this tragic pro–
cess as Tolstoy does, by a flight, magnificent and quixotic, into the
infinite. A man of action to the end, he meets the situation as he
can-by putting his wife away, secretly taking a mistress, going on
the road, amassing stilI more fame and money. On the question of
literary freedom he is assailed by a sort of angry incoherence that
is very untypical of him. He blames the English morality, blames
those who find fault with it, and does nothing except to avail him–
self more and more of the greater personal freedom of Paris.
His
flight is limited by geography; and the scrutiny of his inner self,
carried on in letters to Forster and others, has compara:ble limits. He
undertakes it not as one who makes a practice of introspection but
as one who is driven to it by a great need and rises gallantly to the
occasion. Thus the risks run by the confirmed introspective are, at
least, not Dickens's risks. He is in no danger of talking himself
morosely and glibly out of existence. In his unprecedented-for him
-confession to Maria Winter, despite all the sad things he con–
fesses to, there is the exhilaration of discovery, the freshness of a
relatively untried passion and idiom.
His pleasure in friendship never lessens, however, and he adds
to his acquaintances the rather racy and adventurous-one gathers
