The American Whig Review

reporter among the crowds that swarm the theatre, who is unable to make such a selection of fresh incidents as to be constantly true to nature and novel to the reader.

fully-it is hardly necessary to dwell upon. Within half-a-dozen years from the date of his first work, he was the pet of the public and the prize of the booksellers. Success, Why, then, is Dombey inferior to Pick- first coy, then compelled, has become at wick or Oliver Twist, and why does Bleak last his involuntary attendant. It has beHouse bid fair to be inferior to them all? come a moral necessity that every thing he Simply because Mr. Dickens has grown care- writes shall be the favorite of the market. less. He has no longer that motive to ex- Let us not be surprised that wares thus ertion which formerly actuated him; there-saleable shall be produced with a degree fore he does not exert himself. His former of carelessness. labor has proved an all-sufficient reason why he should not labor now. Necessity was once the stimulus, now the incentive is removed. He has distanced the competition that applied the spur, and the weakness of human nature has relaxed the effort which the spur provoked. The alliance between the author and the bookseller is intimate and fruitful of influences, and the results that formerly depended in so large a measure upon the quality of what he wrote, now depend upon the quantity of what he is able to produce. In yielding to the weakness of nature, Mr. Dickens has taken a long step backward from his first excellence.

In his earlier career, no man ever worked harder over a given quantity of manuscript than "Boz." Rousseau, composing only four sentences a day, was not more laborious; Bulwer laboring three months on a magazine story was nothing to him. Easy writing is hard reading, and vice versa. Nothing is more easy to read than Pickwick; few books have been harder to write. Oliver Twist represents a greater amount of labor than Copperfield and Dombey together. There was every reason at the time of Dickens's earlier productions why he should labor. He was a young man, and comparatively unknown. He had not been favored with a distinguished birth. He had seen the inside of neither university nor college. The circumstances of his early education seemed indeed to oppose an almost insuperable barrier to his success. Nurtured amid the atmosphere of a police court, and mixing only with the reporters of the daily papers, there was surely nothing in the disposition of his fortunes that indicated a future high position among the first literary men of England.

But the old truth, which nearly every distinguished man has verified, was again instanced in the career of Dickens. How he labored-how diligently and how success

Place yourself, reader, in the case of Charles Dickens. Do not be afraid to assume, for a short time, the person of that talented man. He is flesh and blood like yourself, as fond of ease, as fond of money, as fond of praise, and with all his ambition-in which quality perhaps you are deficient, or you might not now be where you are-no fonder of work. In time past you have been excessively laborious; have sat up late of nights, and have perhaps been neglectful of your family. You have been a very diligent student of books; your shoulders are not as straight as they once were, and you are quite certain you have injured your eyes. You labored, however, with an object, and to good purpose; you wrote books unequalled of their kind, and made for yourself a great name. Your books sold well, and the public, with money in its hand, looks to you for more. Your bookseller promises a fortune with each future volume, and hints of his willingness to secure your productions by cash advances. Write you must. But you have grown fond of society; you like long dinners; and you think of going into public life. It is not so pleasant a thing as formerly, this shutting yourself up in your study six hours a day for an entire year, to compose a single volume: there is no need of it either. Your book will sell as well if written in half or a quarter of this time; and your remaining hours can be spent in a much more comfortable manner. Reflect, reader, what you would do under all these circumstances, and after that do not wonder that Dombey or Copperfield compares with Oliver Twist or Pickwick, as a leader in the morning paper compares with a chapter of Washington Irving, or as that copy of verses which you 66 threw off" last evening for the amusement of a lady friend, compares with Thanatopsis or the Elegy in a Country Church-yard.

Mr. Dickens, too, has acquired a facility

of composition that is deceptive and ruinous. No one can read his later productions without feeling that the author has driven his pen with tremendous rapidity. The kind of writing which Mr. Dickens has most cultivated is perhaps more calculated than any other to provoke, or at least to encourage, haste. There are no rules by which it must be framed. The plot on which the author is engaged is usually very slender, and may be changed or accommodated to circumstances at any time. It admits of infinite episodes and offshoots. Unless the writer has learned how to manage it, it will in the end manage him. It has so far subverted Mr. Dickens's judgment that he frames the conclusions of his plots when his stories are more than half finished; thinks the use of nominatives without verbs, verbs without nominatives, and pronouns without sub stantives, a very euphonious and pardonable error, and is for ever violating that first rule in the literary code which tells us that characters should be made to conform to plot, and not plot to characters.

We have instanced these literary sins with which Mr. Dickens is justly chargeable, because in the popular admiration of his genius there is great danger of their being overlooked. Mr. Dickens ranks among the first of living authors, and is confidently regarded as a hereafter classic. Will the style of contemporary and imitating writers become injured and lowered by his successful example? Will the praise that constantly attends him induce the perpetuation of his growing faults? Will those writers who are faithfully cultivating purity of style and exactness of finish, become depressed by the superior success of a more careless literature? Will the writing of the next generation be modelled upon the style which Mr. Dickens is now associating with literary fame and profit? Will the faults of this wonderful author share the same apotheosis with his virtues? These are questions which in all candor deserve a fair hearing.

nence. The hasty judgment of the world, which allows you to suggest improvements to practical artists in every vocation of industrial life, which permits you, though not a mechanician, to venture suggestions to the engineer, and to advise the brush of the painter though you may never have held the palette, has decided that the successful author is beyond the reach of comment except from those who have attained to still greater success. We shall, therefore, content ourselves with quoting a few sentences which we think hardly up to the mark of a first-rate classic, and which are to be found no where if not in Bleak House.

Penny-a-lining may be styled an impertinent epithet to be applied to what follows; but as we know of no title more appropriate, we must express it, and take our chance:

“London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall in the streets as if the waters had but newly Implacable November weather. As much mud retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, lizard up Holborn hill. Smoke lowering down with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes-gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their another's umbrellas, in a general infection of illFoot passengers, jostling one temper, and losing their foot-hold at streetcorners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking the day broke, (if the day ever broke,) adding new at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulatiug at compound interest.

very

blinkers.

"Fog every where. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down shipping, and the water-side pollutions of a great the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in fingers of his shivering little "prentice boy on deck. his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and banging in the misty clouds,

To remark in detail upon the faults of a writer whom in common with all readers we reverence and admire, is a thankless task. It is infinitely more difficult than to panegyrize, and it is infinitely less acceptable to the general reader. If you escape without Gas looming through the fog in divers places rousing indignation, you will at least bring in the streets, much as the sun may, from the upon yourself the imputation of imperti-spongy fields, be seen to loom by husbandman

that it shall as constantly provoke the mirth of the reader? Let us listen to a few repetitions of this miserable artifice:

and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two | Does Mr. Dickens see an exquisite humor in hours before their time as the gas seems to its constant repetition? Does he imagine know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. "Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it never would get out; well may the stained glass windows lose their color and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owli-h aspect, and by the drawl languidly echoing to the roof from the padded daïs where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it, and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog bank!"

And well, let us add, may Mr. Dickens produce such deuced easy writing and hard reading when he is just as well paid for it as he would be for paragraphs ten times better.

Is or is not the following paragraph worthy of being made part and parcel of a standard work of fiction?

"Says the coroner, 'Is that boy here?' Says the beadle, 'No, sir, he is not here.' Says the coroner, 'Go and fetch him then.' In the absence of the active and intelligent, the coroner converses with Mr Tulkinghorn.

"Oh! here's the boy, gentlemen!" "

Mr. Dickens, how many pages per diem of such stuff can you write before dinner? It is a sure sign that an author's haste is outrunning his invention when he perpetuates some manufactured oddity in a character, and brings his puppet on the stage principally to keep alive that feature of his conversation which is supposed to be so effectively humorous. The "Prodigious!" of Dominie Sampson was intended as a witticism; it is repeated till it becomes an insufferable nuisance. The "when found, make a note of," of Captain Cuttle, was quite enough of a dose; but the exclamations of Mr. Jarndyce touching the locality of the wind are numerous and tedious beyond all precedent. Mr. Jarndyce never utters a sentence without specifying the quarter from which the wind blows. Where, we ask, is the wit or the sense of all this? Is it not enough that he shall display his pet oddity occasionally?

"She means well,' said Mr. Jarndyce hastily. 'The wind's in the east.'

"It was in the north, sir, as we came down,' observed Richard.

"My dear Rick,' said Mr. Jarndyce, poking the fire, I'll take an oath it's either in the east, or going to be. I am always conscious of an uncomfortable sensation now and then when the wind is blowing in the east.'

Rheumatism, sir?' said Richard.

"I dare say it is, Rick. I believe it is. And so the little Jell-I had my doubts about 'em are in a- -O Lord, yes, it's easterly,' said Mr. Jarndyce."

This is but the beginning of it:

"Why, just as you may suppose,' said Mr. Jarndyce; his countenance suddenly falling. It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up. Harold Skimpole's children have tumbled up somehow or other. The wind's getting round again, I am afraid. I feel it rather."

Again:

Mr. Jarndyce, rubbing his head, and walking about

"Oh, dear me, what's this, what's this?' said

with his good-humored vexation. 'What's this they tell me? Rick, my boy, Esther, my dear, what have you been doing? Why did you do it? How could you do it? How much apiece was it? The wind's round again. I feel it all over me!'

"We neither of us quite knew what to answer. "Come, Rick, come! I must settle this before I sleep. How much are you out of pocket? You two made the money up, you know! Why did you? How could you? O Lord, yes, it's due

east-must be!'"

And a few times more:

"Well,' cried Mr. Jarndyce, stopping again, and dlestick in his pocket. I-Here! Take it away, making several absent endeavors to put his canmy dear. I don't know what I am about with it; it's all the wind-invariably has that effect. Í won't press you, Rick; you may be right. But, really-to get hold of you and Esther-and to geeze you like a couple of tender young Saint

for ever!"- -He made no other reply, but shrugging his shoulders till they almost touched his ears, wrapped himself tight in his great-coat, and disappeared.

This is a strange creature," said his friend to Harley.-Man of Feeling, by Henry Mackenzie,

“What sort of a night is it, fellow ?" said he. "It rains, sir, with an easterly wind."- -"Easterly I chap. 21.

We have instanced these literary sins with which Mr. Dickens is justly chargeable, because in the popular admiration of his genius there is great danger of their being overlooked. Mr. Dickens ranks among the first of living authors, and is confidently regarded as a hereafter classic. Will the style of contemporary and imitating writers become injured and lowered by his successful example? Will the praise that constantly attends him induce the perpetuation of his growing faults? Will those writers who are faithfully cultivating purity of style and exactness of finish, become depressed by the superior success of a more careless literature? Will the writing of the next generation be modelled upon the style which Mr. Dickens is now associating with literary fame and profit? Will the faults of this wonderful author share apotheosis with his virtues? questions which in all candon hearing.

To remark in detail writer whom in com reverence and adm It is infinitely mo gyrize, and it is the general rea rousing indi

upon your

1852.

Bleak House, Charles Dickens, and the Copyright