The tragedy of love is in love, not in marriage. There is not unhappy marriage that might not be an equally unhappy concubinage, or a far more unhappy seduction. Whether the tie be legal or no, matters something to the faithless party; it matters nothing to the faithful one. The pathos reposes upon the perfectly simple fact that if any one deliberately provokes either passions or affections, he is responsible for them as long as they go on, as the man is responsible for letting loose a flood or setting fire to a city. His remedy is not to provoke them, like the hermit. His punishment, when he deserves punishment, is to spend the rest of his life in trying to undo any ill he has done. His escape is despair — which is called, in this connection, divorce. For every healthy man feels one fundamental fact in his soul. He feels that he must have a life, and not a series of lives. He would rather the human drama were a tragedy than that it were a series of Music-hall Turns and Potted Plays. A man wishes to save the souls of all the men he has been: of the dirty little schoolboy; of the doubtful and morbid youth; of the lover; of the husband. Re-incarnation has always seemed to me a cold creed; because each incarnation must forget the other. It would be worse still if this short human life were broken up into yet shorter lives, each of which was in its turn forgotten.

  If you are a democrat who likes also to be an honest man — if (in other words) you want to know what the people want and not merely what you can somehow induce them to ask for — then there is no doubt at all that this is what they want. You can only realise it by looking for human nature elsewhere than in election reports, but when you have once looked for it you see it and you never forget it. From the fact that every one thinks it natural that young men and women should carve names on trees, to the fact that every one thinks it unnatural that old men and women should be separated in work houses, millions and millions of daily details prove that people do regard the relation as normally permanent; not a vision, but as a vow.

  Now for the exceptions, true or false. I would note a strange and even silly oversight in the discussion of such exceptions, which has haunted most arguments for further divorce. The ordinary emancipated prig or poet who urges this side of the question always talks to one tune. “Marriage may be the best for most men,” he says, “but there are exceptional natures that demand a more undulating experience; constancy will do for the common herd, but there are complex natures and complex cases where no one could recommend constancy. 1 do not ask (at the present Stage of Progress) for the abolition of marriage; I hereby ask that it may be remitted in such individual and extreme examples.”

  Now it is perfectly astounding to me that any one who has walked about this world should make such a blunder about the breed we call mankind. Surely it is plain enough that if you ask for dreadful exceptions, you will get them — too many of them. Let me take once again a rough parable. Suppose I advertised in the papers that I had a place for any one who was too stupid to be a clerk. Probably I should receive no replies; possibly one. Possibly also (nay, probably) it would be from the one man who was not stupid at all. But suppose I had advertised that I had a place for any one who was too clever to be a clerk. My office would be instantly besieged by all the most hopeless fools in the four kingdoms. To advertise for exceptions is simply to advertise for egoists. To advertise for egoists is to advertise for idiots. It is exactly the bore who does think that his case is interesting. It is precisely the really common person who does think that his case is uncommon. It is always the dull man who does think himself rather wild. To ask solely for strange experiences of the soul is simply to let loose all the imbecile asylums about one’s ears. Whatever other theory is right, this theory of the exceptions is obviously wrong — or (what matters more to our modern atheists) is obviously unbusinesslike. It is, moreover, to any one with popular political sympathies, a very deep and subtle sort of treason. By thus putting a premium on the exceptional we grossly deceive the unconsciousness of the normal. It seems strangely forgotten that the indifference of a nation is sacred as well as its differences. Even public apathy is a kind of public opinion — and in many cases a very sensible kind. If I ask every body to vote about Mineral Meals and do not get a single ballot-paper returned, I may say that the citizens have not voted. But they have.

  The principle held by the populace, against which this plutocratic conspiracy is being engineered, is simply the principle expressed in the Prayer Book in the words “for better, for worse.” It is the principle that all noble things have to be paid for, even if you only pay for them with a promise. One does not take one’s interest out of England as one takes it out of Consols. A man is not an Englishman unless he can endure even the decay and death of England. And just as every citizen is a potential soldier, so every wife or husband is a potential hospital nurse — or even asylum attendant. For though we should all approve of certain tragedies being mitigated by a celibate separation — yet the more real love and honour there has been in the marriage, the less real mitigation there will be in the parting. But this sound public instinct both about patriotism and marriage also insists that the first vow or obligation shall be mitigated, not merely erased and forgotten. Many a good woman has loved and refused a doubtful man, with the proviso that she would marry no one else; the old institution of marriage has the same feeling about the tragedy that is post-matrimonial. The thing remains real; it binds one to something. If I am exiled from England I will go and live on an island somewhere and be as jolly as I can. I will not become a patriot of any other land.

  DICKENS (ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA ARTICLE)

  DICKENS, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870), certainly the most popular and perhaps the greatest of the great English novelists, was born in Landport, a division of Portsea; in a house in Mile End terrace, Commercial road. The house can be identified and is in some sense a popular shrine or memorial, enabling the sightseer to link up in one journey two of the most romantic national names, associating Dickens with Portsea and Nelson with Portsmouth. But beyond this symbolic and almost legendary local interest, the actual address indicates little more than the drifting and often decaying fortunes of the class and family from which he came. It would be an exaggeration to compare it to Lant street, in the Borough, of which, it will be remembered, “the inhabitants were migratory, disappearing usually towards the verge of quarter-day.” But there is the note of something nomadic about the social world to which he belonged. We talk of the solid middle class; he belonged, one might almost say, to the liquid middle class; certainly to the insecure middle class. His father, John Dickens, was a clerk in the Navy-Pay Office, and all through life a man of wavering and unstable status, partly by his misfortunes and partly by his fault. It is said that Dickens sketched him in a lighter spirit as Micawber and in a sadder and more realistic aspect as Dorrit. The contrast between the two men, as well as the two moods, should be a warning against the weakness of taking too literally the idea of Dickensian “originals.” The habit has done grave injustice to many people, such as Leigh Hunt; and it may involve a grave injustice to John Dickens; and perhaps an even greater injustice to Mrs. John Dickens, nee Elizabeth Barrow, whom a similar rumour reports as the real Mrs. Nickleby. Some may question, not without grief, whether there really could be a real Mrs. Nickleby. But in any case there certainly could not be a man who was both Dorrit and Micawber. The truth is that we shall misunderstand from the beginning the nature of the Dickensian imagination, if we suppose these things to be mechanical portraits in black and white, taken by “the profeel machine,” as Mr. Weller said. It is the whole point of Dickens that he took hints from human beings; and turned them, one may say, into superhuman beings. But it is true that John Dickens was of the type that is often shifted from place to place; and this is the chief significance of Charles Dickens’s connection with Portsea, or rather of his lack of connection with it. He can only have been two years old when the household moved for a short time to London and then for a longer time to Chatham. It was perhaps lucky that the formative period of his first childhood was also the most fortunate period of his not very fortunate family. The dockyard of Chatham, the towers of Rochester, the gardens and the great roads of Kent remained to him through life as the only normal memory of a nursery and a native soil; his house in later years looked down on the great road from Gads hill and the cathedral tower rose again in his last vision, in the opium dream called “Edwin Drood.” Here he had leisure to learn a little from books, who was so soon to learn only from life; first in the stricter sense of school-books, from a Mr. Giles, a Baptist minister in Chatham; and second, and probably with greater profit, from a random heap of old novels that included much of the greatest English literature and even more of the type of literature from which he could learn most; Roderick Random and Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones and The Vicar of Wakefield.

  He can hardly have been ten years old when the household was once more upon the march. John Dickens had fallen heavily into debt; he continued the tendency to change his private address; and his next private address was the Debtors’ Prison of the Marshalsea. His wife, the mother of eight children of whom Charles was the second, had to encamp desolately in Camden Town and open a dingy sort of “educational establishment.” Meanwhile the unfortunate Charles was learning his lessons at a very different sort of educational establishment. After helping his mother in every sort of menial occupation, he was thrown forth to earn his own living by tying and labelling pots of blacking in a blacking warehouse at Old Hungerford Stairs. The blacking was symbolical enough; Dickens never doubted that this piece of his childhood was the darkest period of his life; and he seems indeed to have been in a mood to black himself all over, like the Othello of the Crummles Company. Of his pessimistic period, of the heartrending monotony and ignominy, he has given little more than a bitter abbreviation in David Copperfield. But he was storing up much more than bitterness; it is obvious that he had already developed an almost uncanny vigilance and alertness of attention. By the time his servitude came to an end, by his father falling into a legacy as he had fallen into a jail (there was really a touch of Micawber in the way in which things turned up and turned down for him) the boy was no longer a normal boy, let alone a child. He called his wandering parent “the Prodigal Father”; and there was something of the same fantastic family inversion in the very existence of so watchful and critical a son. We are struck at once with an almost malicious maturity of satire; some of the best passages of the prison life of the Pickwicks and the Dorrits occur in private letters about his own early life. He had shared, of course, the improvement in the family condition; which was represented in his case by a period of service as a clerk to a Mr. Blackmore, a Grays Inn solicitor, and afterwards in the equally successful, and much more congenial, occupation of a newspaper reporter and ultimately a Parliamentary reporter. His father had taken up the trade; but his son was already making a mark in it, as reporter to The True Sun, The Mirror of Parliament and The Morning Chronicle. In all these aspects and attitudes, at this time, he appears as alert, sharp-witted and detached; recalling that sort of metallic brightness which an observer at this period so often saw flash upon his face. It is worthy of note, because certain healthy social emotions which he always championed have somewhat falsified his personality in the eyes of the prigs whom he loved to rap over the head. He was a genuine champion of geniality; but he was not always genial; certainly not only genial. One of his earliest sketches, published not long after this time, was a defence of the Christian festivity of Christmas against the Puritans and the Utilitarians; it was called “Christmas Under Three Heads.” All his life he defended valiantly the pleasures of the poor; and insisted that God had given ale and rum, as well as wine, to make glad the heart of man. But all this has clouded his character with fumes of mere conviviality and irresponsibility which were very far from being really characteristic. Even in youth, which is the period of irresponsibility, Dickens appears in some ways as highly responsible. He was in sharp reaction against the futility of his family; he was both ambitious and industrious; and there were some who even found him hard. In many moods he had as angry a dislike of the Skimpoles as of the Gradgrinds.

  Indeed he had come in more ways than one to the high turning-point of his fortunes. His marriage and his first real literary work can be dated at about the same time. He had already begun to write sketches, chiefly in The Old Monthly Magazine, which were in the broadest sense caricatures, of the common objects of the street or the market-place. They were illustrated by Cruikshank; and in these early stages of the story the illustrator is often more important than the author. This was notoriously true of his next and perhaps his greatest experiment; but it is typical in any case of his time and his time of life. The prose sketches were signed “Boz” and the signature had become a recognized pseudonym when Messrs. Chapman and Hall, the publishers, approached him with the suggestion of a larger scheme. A well known humorous artist of that epoch, Seymour, was to produce a series of plates illustrating the adventures, or misadventures, of the Nimrod Club, a group of amateur sportsmen, destined to dwindle and yet to grow infinitely greater in the single figure of Mr. Nathaniel Winkle. Dickens consented to write the letter-press, which was little more than a running accompaniment like an ornamental border around the drawings; and in that strange fashion, secondary, subordinate and even trivial, first formed itself in the human fancy the epic and pantomime of Pickwick (1837). Dickens persuaded the publishers to let the Pickwick Club represent more varied interests or eccentricities, retained Mr. Winkle to represent or misrepresent the original notion of sport; and by that one stroke of independence cut himself free from a stale fashion and started a new artistic adventure and revolution. He gave as one of his reasons the fact that he had no special knowledge of sports or games, and proceeded to drive his argument home triumphantly by his description of the cricket-match at Dingley Dell. And yet that cricket-match alone might illustrate exactly the game which Dickens so gloriously won; and why that wild and ill-instructed batsman has had so many thousand runs and is not out. What did a few mistakes in the description of cricket, or even in the description of real life, matter in a man who could invent that orator at the cricket-dinner, who complimented the defeated eleven by saying, with the gesture of Alexander, “If I were not Dumkins, I would be Luffey; if I were not Podder, I would be Struggles”? Men do not read that sort of thing to learn about cricket, or even about life, but to find something more living than either. There had broken through the entanglements of that trumpery bargain a force of comic genius which swallowed up its own origin and excuses; a wild animal big enough to eat all its direction labels. People forgot about Seymour; forgot about sport; forgot about the Nimrod Club; soon forgot about the Pickwick Club. They forgot all that he forgot and followed whatever he followed; much bigger and wilder game than any aimed at by the mere gun of Mr. Winkle. The track of the story wandered; the tone of the story changed; a servant whom Pickwick found cleaning boots in an inn-yard took the centre of the stage and towered even over Pickwick; Pickwick from being a pompous buffoon became a generous and venerable old English gentleman; and the world still followed that incredible transformation-scene and wishes there were more of it to this day. This was the emergence of Dickens into literature. It had, of course, many secondary effects in life. One was the first and almost the most bitter of his quarrels; Seymour may be excused for having been annoyed at the relations of artist and author being thus turned upside down in a whirlwind; but Seymour was not therefore necessarily justified in saying, as he did say and his widow long continued to say, that Dickens had gained glory from another man’s ideas. Nobody, we may well imagine, believes that the oration of Sergeant Buzfuz or the poem of Mrs. Leo Hunter, were Mr. Seymour’s ideas. Dickens had an inexhaustible torrent of such ideas; and no man on earth could pretend to have provided them. But it is true that in this quarrel, as in others, some found a touch of sharpness and acid self-defence in Dickens; and he was never without his enemies. His ideal was certainly the leisure and geniality of Pickwick; but he was fighting rather too hard for his own hand and had too much at stake and too pressing a knowledge of poverty to be anything but practical.

  As Pickwick was the foundation of his public life, his marriage was naturally the foundation of his private life; and in this also he has been an object of criticism as he was certainly an object of sympathy. Very little good is done by making guesses about a story of which the spiritual balance and proportion were probably never known to more than three or four people. It is sufficiently significant that those who were nearest to it, and who survive to speak or rather to be silent, agree in laying no very heavy blame upon anyone involved. One of the principals of the Morning Chronicle, George Hogarth, had been so much struck by the “Boz” sketches as to insist on an improvement in the payment of the writer; he introduced Dickens to his family and especially (we may say) to his daughters, with all of whom the young journalist seems to have been on very friendly and even affectionate terms. One of them, Catherine, he married, and certainly married for love; but not perhaps with the sort of love which gives a man a full and serious realization of what he is doing. It is the pathos of the story that in a sense the friendship outlasted the love; for another sister, who understood him better, remained his friend long after his marriage had become a prolonged misunderstanding. All this, however, happened long afterwards; for the moment his marriage may be taken as marking his step into security and success; especially as he was probably stimulated and, as it were, intoxicated, by a romance that brought him into more refined social surroundings than his own. From that moment he was launched as a popular writer and a power in the world; and he never went back, until he died of popularity thirty years afterwards.