Collected Essays (12 page)

Fagin has always about him this quality of darkness and nightmare. He never appears on the daylight streets. Even when we see him last in the condemned cell, it is in the hours before the dawn. In the Fagin darkness Dickens’s hand seldom fumbles. Hear him turning the screw of horror when Nancy speaks of the thoughts of death that have haunted her:

‘Imagination,’ said the gentleman, soothing her.

‘No imagination,’ replied the girl in a hoarse voice. ‘I’ll swear I saw “coffin” written in every page of the book in large black letters, – aye, and they carried one close to me, in the streets tonight.’

‘There is nothing unusual in that,’ said the gentleman. ‘They have passed me often.’

‘Real ones,’ rejoined the girl. ‘This was not.’

Now turn to the daylight world and our first sight of Rose:

The younger lady was in the lovely bloom and springtime of womanhood: at that age, when, if ever angels be for God’s good purposes enthroned in mortal forms, they may be, without impiety, supposed to abide in such as hers. She was not past seventeen. Cast in so slight and exquisite a mould; so mild and gentle; so pure and beautiful; that earth seemed not her element, nor its rough creatures her fit companions.

Or Mr Brownlow as he first appeared to Oliver:

Now, the old gentleman came in as brisk as need be; but he had no sooner raised his spectacles on his forehead, and thrust his hands behind the skirts of his dressing-gown to take a good long look at Oliver, than his countenance underwent a very great variety of odd contortions . . . The fact is, if the truth must be told, that Mr Brownlow’s heart, being large enough for any six ordinary old gentlemen of humane disposition, forced a supply of tears into his eyes by some hydraulic process which we are not sufficiently philosophical to be in a condition to explain.

How can we really believe that these inadequate ghosts of goodness can triumph over Fagin, Monks, and Sikes? And the answer, of course, is that they never could have triumphed without the elaborate machinery of the plot disclosed in the last pages. This world of Dickens is a world without God; and as a substitute for the power and the glory of the omnipotent and omniscient are a few sentimental references to heaven, angels, the sweet faces of the dead, and Oliver saying, ‘Heaven is a long way off, and they are too happy there to come down to the bedside of a poor boy.’ In this Manichaean world we can believe in evil-doing, but goodness wilts into philanthropy, kindness, and those strange vague sicknesses into which Dickens’s young women so frequently fall and which seem in his eyes a kind of badge of virtue, as though there were a merit in death.

But how instinctively Dickens’s genius recognized the flaw and made a virtue out of it. We cannot believe in the power of Mr Brownlow, but nor did Dickens, and from his inability to believe in his own good character springs the real tension of his novel. The boy Oliver may not lodge in our brain like David Copperfield, and though many of Mr Bumble’s phrases have become and deserve to have become familiar quotations we can feel he was manufactured: he never breathes like Mr Dorrit; yet Oliver’s predicament, the nightmare fight between the darkness, where the demons walk, and the sunlight, where ineffective goodness makes its last stand in a condemned world, will remain part of our imaginations forever. We read of the defeat of Monks, and of Fagin screaming in the condemned cell, and of Sikes dangling from his self-made noose, but we don’t believe. We have witnessed Oliver’s temporary escapes too often and his inevitable recapture:
there
is the truth and the creative experience. We know that when Oliver leaves Mr Brownlow’s house to walk a few hundred yards to the bookseller, his friends will wait in vain for his return. All London outside the quiet shady street in Pentonville belongs to his pursuers; and when he escapes again into the house of Mrs Maylie in the fields beyond Shepperton, we know his security is false. The seasons may pass, but safety depends not on time but on daylight. As children we all knew that: how all day we could forget the dark and the journey to bed. It is with a sense of relief that at last in twilight we see the faces of the Jew and Monks peer into the cottage window between the sprays of jessamine. At that moment we realize how the whole world, and not London only, belongs to these two after dark. Dickens, dealing out his happy endings and his unreal retributions, can never ruin the validity and dignity of that moment. ‘They had recognized him, and he them; and their look was as firmly impressed upon his memory, as if it had been deeply carved in stone, and set before him from his birth.’

‘From his birth’ – Dickens may have intended that phrase to refer to the complicated imbroglios of the plot that lie outside the novel, ‘something less terrible than the truth’. As for the truth, is it too fantastic to imagine that in this novel, as in many of his later books, creeps in, unrecognized by the author, the eternal and alluring taint of the Manichee, with its simple and terrible explanation of our plight, how the world was made by Satan and not by God, lulling us with the music of despair?

1950

HANS ANDERSEN

T
HERE
are men whose lives seem arguments for the existence of a conscious providence, lives fashioned as it were deliberately for one purpose with a cruelty that has deprived them of any obscure and friendly retreat. Hans Andersen is one of these, and there is a sense of unusual brutality in the ingenuity which providence expended for so small a result, a few volumes of children’s stories and a shelf of poetic dramas without merit.

To fashion this writer what was required? First and foremost a raw sensibility, a bundle of shrieking nerves which barred the possessor hopelessly from any easy comfort. The son of a cobbler of unbalanced mind, the grandson of a lunatic, Andersen might as easily have become a madman as an artist. When he was a child, his parents tried to cure his nerves at the holy well of St Regisse on St John’s Eve; but during the night which he spent by the spring he was woken by a thunderstorm and the screams of a lunatic girl who had been sleeping at his feet. It is possible that one thought saved the boy and the man from madness: ‘I am going to be famous. First you suffer the most awful things, and
then
you get to be famous.’ The same idea is expressed again and again in his work. ‘All who see you,’ the witch says to the mermaid who seeks a human form, ‘will say that you are the most beautiful child of man they have ever seen. You will keep your gliding gait, no dancer will rival you, but every step you take will be as if you were treading upon sharp knives, so sharp as to draw blood. If you are willing to suffer all this I am ready to help you.’ And in the story of
The Wild Swans
the heroine to save her brothers has to weave eleven shirts from stinging-nettles. ‘The sea is indeed softer than your hands, and it moulds the hardest stone, but it does not feel the pain your fingers will feel. It has no heart and does not suffer the pain and anguish you must feel.’

Andersen has been held up as an example of supreme egotism, because everything which he and those he loved suffered he related to his own future, wondering of his family’s early bitter disappointment at a failure to find a livelihood on a country estate whether God had not ruined their hopes to save him from becoming a mere farmer. But this was not egotism; it was an artist’s parallel to the Catholic ideal of the acceptance of pain for a spiritual benefit. If he had not found a reason to accept pain, his mind might well have broken; he might have been happy in the manner of his grandfather who wandered singing and wreathed in flowers through the streets of Odense or of his father who imagined himself on his deathbed one of Napoleon’s captains, instead of the broken private that he was, and cried aloud, ‘Hats off, you whelps, when the Emperor rides by.’

His nerves, too, supplied what fate next demanded in completing the artist – persistence, an inability to find happiness even when he had won his fame. In Sweden, when the students of Lund marched in a body to acclaim him, he could not believe in their sincerity; he thought they were making game of him and searched their faces for smiles. When he left Odense for Copenhagen, at the age of fourteen, without work or friends, a wise woman had declared that one day his native place would be illuminated in his honour, so that when, 48 years later, he returned to receive the freedom of the city, it might have been expected that he would enjoy a few moments of unmixed happiness. But at night, as he watched from the City Hall the torches and the lamps and the crowd singing in his honour in the square, the cold wind touched a tooth into almost unbearable pain, so that he could only count the verses still remaining and long for the programme to end. It is impossible, at times, not be convinced of the actuality of this purposeful fate; for it was an extraordinary coincidence, if it was not a malignant providence, which caused him to overhear, as he stood at his window in Copenhagen, just returned from his triumphal visit to England, a man say to his companion: ‘Look, there is our orang-outang who is so famous abroad.’

Most men have one earth into which they can creep to rest the nerves, but for Andersen it was stopped. He was deprived even of the satisfaction of sex. Again his life was curiously of a piece, as if no opportunity was to be wasted to warp his nature to the required shape. As a boy alone in Copenhagen, chance found him lodgings in a street of red lights. His surroundings must have continually aroused desires which he had not the money to satisfy. And they were never satisfied. He was as passionate as most men, three times he tried to marry, but he retained the exhausting innocence which, to quote Miss Toksvig,
*3
‘he described himself as the kind which reads the Bible and always finds the Song of Songs; the innocence that ruins sleep’.

There remained for fate to limit and define his range as an artist. The son of a washerwoman and a cobbler Andersen inherited the folk, tradition; his earliest fairy stories were transcripts of tales he had heard as a child. Witches were part of his everyday life; they were called in by his mother to foretell his future, to heal his father’s sickness, and the little medieval court of Odense supplied one of the commonest ingredients of his tales, the ease with which a poor child can talk with royalty. Odense had only 7,000 inhabitants, but it had a palace and a governor and a regiment of dragoons, and the cobbler’s son was admitted to audience. But Andersen did not submit easily to the claims of this environment. It was his ambition to be a dramatic poet; with extraordinary persistence he followed this aim to the end of his life, and because his plays almost invariably failed he was convinced that he was not appreciated in his own country.

Miss Toksvig’s is a most satisfying biography of this unhappy man in all his curious glassy transparency. She writes with sympathy and without sentimentality; and it is a pleasure to watch her masterly choice and arrangement of incident into a story which is always exciting. One can only wish that she had not confined herself to Andersen’s life. She throws off suggestions for a new estimate of his work, which I should like to have seen pursued. ‘In Hans Christian,’ Miss Toksvig writes, ‘the Unconscious was made flesh and dwelt unashamed and bewildered among men,’ and perhaps the chief importance of Hans Andersen today to adult readers lies in the frequency with which he allowed his unconscious mind to take control of his pen. There are passages in
The Snow Queen
which anticipate the method of the Surréalistes. His contemporaries complained that his stories contained no moral, but it is in their occasional passages of pure fantasy, as when the flowers speak their irrelevant messages to Gerda, that his stories have their greatest importance for the contemporaries of M. Philippe Soupault.

1933

[3]

FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

A
FTER
the death of Henry James a disaster overtook the English novel; indeed long before his death one can picture that quiet, impressive, rather complacent figure, like the last survivor on a raft, gazing out over a sea scattered with wreckage. He even recorded his impressions in an article in the
Times Literary Supplement
, recorded his hope – but was it really hope or only a form of his unconquerable oriental politeness? – in such young novelists as Mr Compton Mackenzie and Mr David Herbert Lawrence, and we who have lived after the disaster can realize the futility of those hopes.

For with the death of James the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act. It was as if the world of fiction had lost a dimension: the characters of such distinguished writers as Mrs Virginia Woolf and Mr E. M. Forster wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin. Even in one of the most materialistic of our great novelists – in Trollope – we are aware of another world against which the actions of the characters are thrown into relief. The ungainly clergyman picking his black-booted way through the mud, handling so awkwardly his umbrella, speaking of his miserable income and stumbling through a proposal of marriage, exists in a way that Mrs Woolf’s Mr Ramsay never does, because we are aware that he exists not only to the woman he is addressing but also in a God’s eye. His unimportance in the world of the senses is only matched by his enormous importance in another world.

The novelist, perhaps unconsciously aware of his predicament, took refuge in the subjective novel. It was as if he thought that by mining into layers of personality hitherto untouched he could unearth the secret of ‘importance’, but in these mining operations he lost yet another dimension. The visible world for him ceased to exist as completely as the spiritual. Mrs Dalloway walking down Regent Street was aware of the glitter of shop windows, the smooth passage of cars, the conversation of shoppers, but it was only a Regent Street seen by Mrs Dalloway that was conveyed to the reader: a charming whimsical rather sentimental prose poem was what Regent Street had become: a current of air, a touch of scent, a sparkle of glass. But, we protest. Regent Street too has a right to exist; it is more real than Mrs Dalloway, and we look back with nostalgia towards the chop houses, the mean courts, the still Sunday streets of Dickens. Dickens’s characters were of immortal importance, and the houses in which they loved, the mews in which they damned themselves were lent importance by their presence. They were given the right to exist as they were, distorted, if at all, only by their observer’s eye – not further distorted at a second remove by an imagined character.