CHARLES DICKENS AS A LETTER-WRITER, AND AS A POET.
I.—AS A LETTER-WRITER.
In the graceful but difficult art of letter-writing Charles Dickens has proved himself as accomplished a master as he has of public speaking, which the two or three specimens given in our Introduction, together with the following extracts from his correspondence with two distinguished friends, Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold, will sufficiently show.
In the spring of 1841, some months before Mr. Dickens had decided upon his first visit to the United States, Washington Irving, who was then personally unknown to him, addressed him a letter, full of warm sympathy and generous acknowledgment of his genius, and of the pleasure Dickens’s writings had afforded him. A few extracts from Mr. Dickens’s reply are given below.
In February, 1842, Mr. Dickens had the gratification of making the personal acquaintance of his illustrious correspondent, who was induced to overcome his objection to public speaking, and to take the chair at a banquet given in Dickens’s honour by some of the citizens of New York. Irving, however, entirely broke down in his speech, and could do little more than propose the toast of the evening.
There were probably never two men of more congenial mind and common sympathies than the author of the “Sketch Book,” and the author of “Pickwick;” and it is pleasant to think that the chance of things should have brought them together for a time in so unexpected a way.
In Mr. Dickens’ reply he tells Washington Irving that:—
“There is no man in the world who could have given me the heartfelt pleasure you have, by your kind note of the 13th of last month. There is no living writer—and there are very few among the dead—whose approbation I should feel so proud to earn. And with everything you have written upon my shelves, and in my thoughts, and in my heart of hearts, I may honestly and truly say so. If you could know how earnestly I write this, you would be glad to read it—as I hope you will be, faintly guessing at the warmth of the hand I autographically hold out to you over the broad Atlantic.
“I wish I could find in your welcome letter some hint of an intention to visit England. I can’t. I have held it at arm’s length, and taken a bird’s-eye view of it, after reading it a great many times, but there is no greater encouragement in it this way than on a microscopic inspection. I should love to go with you—as I have gone, God knows how often—into Little Britain, and Eastcheap, and Green Arbour Court, and Westminster Abbey. I should like to travel with you, outside the last of the coaches, down to Bracebridge Hall. It would make my heart glad to compare notes with you about that shabby gentleman in the oil-cloth hat, and red nose, who sat in the nine-cornered back parlour of the Mason’s Arms; and about Robert Preston, and the tallow-chandler’s widow, whose sitting-room is second nature to me; and about all those delightful places and people that I used to walk about and dream of in the day-time, when a very small and not over-particularly-taken-care-of boy. I have a good deal to say, too, about that dashing Alonzo de Ojeda, that you can’t help being fonder of than you ought to be; and much to hear concerning Moorish legend, and poor, unhappy Boabdil. Diedrich Knickerbocker I have worn to death in my pocket, and yet I should show you his mutilated carcass with a joy past all expression.
“I have been so accustomed to associate you with my pleasantest and happiest thoughts, and with my leisure hours, that I rush at once into full confidence with you, and fall, as it were naturally, and by the very laws of gravity, into your open arms. Questions come thronging to my pen as to the lips of people who meet after long hoping to do so. I don’t know what to say first, or what to leave unsaid, and am constantly disposed to break off and tell you again how glad I am this moment has arrived.
“My dear Washington Irving, I cannot thank you enough for your cordial and generous praise, or tell you what deep and lasting gratification it has given me. I hope to have many letters from you, and to exchange a frequent correspondence. I send this to say so. After the first two or three, I shall settle down into a connected style, and become gradually rational.
“You know what the feeling is, after having written a letter, sealed it, and sent it off. I shall picture you reading this, and answering it, before it has lain one night in the post-office. Ten to one that before the fastest packet could reach New York I shall be writing again.
“Do you suppose the post-office clerks care to receive letters? I have my doubts. They get into a dreadful habit of indifference. A postman, I imagine, is quite callous. Conceive his delivering one to himself, without being startled by a preliminary double knock!”
In the spring of 1842 Mr. Dickens was at Washington, from whence he wrote to Irving:—
“We passed through—literally passed through—this place again to-day. I did not come to see you, for I really have not the heart to say “good-bye” again, and felt more than I can tell you when we shook hands last Wednesday.
“You will not be at Baltimore, I fear? I thought, at the time, that you only said you might be there, to make our parting the gayer. Wherever you go, God bless you! What pleasure I have had in seeing and talking with you, I will not attempt to say. I shall never forget it as long as I live. What would I give, if we could have but a quiet week together! Spain is a lazy place, and its climate an indolent one. But if you have ever leisure under its sunny skies, to think of a man who loves you, and holds communion with your spirit oftener, perhaps, than any other person alive—leisure from listlessness, I mean—and will write to me in London, you will give me an inexpressible amount of pleasure.”
Wishing, in the summer of 1856, to introduce a relation to Irving, Mr. Dickens sent a pleasant letter of introduction, wherein he says:—
“If you knew how often I write to you individually and personally, in my books, you would be no more surprised in seeing this note, than you were in seeing me do my duty by that flowery julep (in what I dreamily apprehend to have been a former state of existence) at Baltimore.
“Will you let me present to you a cousin of mine, Mr. B—, who is associated with a merchant’s house in New York? Of course, he wants to see you, and know you. How can I wonder at that? How can anybody?
“I had a long talk with Leslie at the last Academy dinner (having previously been with him in Paris), and he told me that you were flourishing. I suppose you know that he wears a moustache—so do I, for the matter of that, and a beard too—and that he looks like a portrait of Don Quixote.
“Holland House has four-and-twenty youthful pages in it now—twelve for my lord, and twelve for my lady; and no clergyman coils his leg up under his chair all dinner-time, and begins to uncurve it when the hostess goes. No wheeled chair runs smoothly in, with that beaming face in it; and —’s little cotton pocket-handkerchief helped to make (I believe) this very sheet of paper. A half-sad, half-ludicrous story of Rogers, is all I will sully it with. You know, I daresay, that, for a year or so before his death, he wandered and lost himself, like one of the Children in the Wood, grown up there and grown down again. He had Mrs. Procter and Mrs. Carlyle to breakfast with him one morning—only those two. Both excessively talkative, very quick and clever, and bent on entertaining him. When Mrs. Carlyle had flashed and shone before him for about three-quarters of an hour on one subject, he turned his poor old eyes on Mrs. Procter, and, pointing to the brilliant discourser with his poor old finger, said (indignantly), “Who is she?” Upon this, Mrs. Procter, cutting in, delivered—(it is her own story)—a neat oration on the life and writings of Carlyle, and enlightened him in her happiest and airiest manner; all of which he heard, staring in the dreariest silence, and then said (indignantly as before), “And who are you?”
With few of his literary contemporaries has Mr. Dickens held more cordial and pleasant relations than with the late Douglas Jerrold. During all the years of their intercourse that sympathy and friendship existed between them, which two minds so thoroughly manly and honourable could hardly help feeling for each other. Dickens, though considerably the younger of the two, had won earlier the prizes of his profession. But there was no mean envy and jealousy on the one side, and no mean assumption on the other. The letters that passed between the two men are altogether delightful to read. We shall proceed to give, as far as our space will allow, a few extracts from those of Dickens to Jerrold, [330] with intercalary elucidations explanatory of the circumstances under which they were written.
In the year 1843, Douglas Jerrold wrote to Mr. Dickens from Herne Bay, where he had taken up his abode in “a little cabin, built up of ivy and woodbine, and almost within sound of the sea.”
Mr. Dickens replies:—
“Herne Bay. Hum! I suppose it’s no worse than any other place in this weather, but it is watery, rather, isn’t it? In my mind’s eye, I have the sea in a perpetual state of small-pox, and the chalk running down hill like town milk. But I know the comfort of getting to work ‘in a fresh place,’ and proposing pious projects to one’s self, and having the more substantial advantage of going to bed early, and getting up ditto, and walking about alone. If there were a fine day, I should like to deprive you of the last-named happiness, and to take a good long stroll.”
In the summer of 1844, “Come,” wrote Mr. Dickens temptingly, “come and see me in Italy. Let us smoke a pipe among the vines. I have taken a little house surrounded by them, and no man in the world should be more welcome to it than you.”
Again from Cremona, (November, 1844,) Dickens writes:—
“You rather entertained the notion once, of coming to see me at Genoa. I shall return straight on the ninth of December, limiting my stay in town to one week. Now, couldn’t you come back with me? The journey that way is very cheap, and I am sure the gratification to you would be high. I am lodged in quite a wonderful place, and would put you in a painted room as big as a church, and much more comfortable. There are pens and ink upon the premises; orange trees, gardens, battledores and shuttlecocks, rousing wood fires for evenings, and a welcome worth having.” * * *
In 1846, again, Mr. Dickens is off to Switzerland, and still would tempt Jerrold in his wake. “I wish,” he writes, “you would seriously consider the expediency and feasibility of coming to Lausanne in the summer or early autumn. It is a wonderful place to see; and what sort of welcome you would find I will say nothing about, for I have vanity enough to believe that you would be willing to feel yourself as much at home in my household as in any man’s.”
Arrived at Lausanne, Mr. Dickens writes that he will be ready for his guest in June. “We are established here,” he says, “in a perfect doll’s house, which could be put bodily into the hall of our Italian palazzo. But it is in the most lovely and delicious situation imaginable, and there is a spare bedroom wherein we could make you as comfortable as need be. Bowers of roses for cigar-smoking, arbours for cool punch-drinking, mountain and Tyrolean countries close at hand, piled-up Alps before the windows, &c., &c., &c.” Then follow business-like directions for the journey.
But it could not be. Jerrold was busy with his paper, and with his magazine, and felt unable to abandon them even for a few weeks. Well, could he reach Paris for Christmas, persisted Mr. Dickens, and spend that merry time with his friend.
Early in 1847 Jerrold thought he did see his way clear at last to make a short visit to Paris, where Dickens was still established. “We are delighted at your intention of coming,” writes the latter, giving the most minute details of the manner in which the journey was to be performed; but even this journey was never accomplished. Once only, after all these promises and invitations—and that for but two or three days—did Douglas Jerrold escape from the cares of London literary life, to meet Mr. Dickens at Ostend, on his return from Italy, and have a few days’ stroll about Belgium.
The following is an extract from a curious and interesting letter addressed by Dickens to Douglas Jerrold on the subject of public hanging, respecting which the latter held conservative opinions:—
‘Devonshire Terrace, November 17, 1849.
“In a letter I have received from G. this morning he quotes a recent letter from you, in which you deprecate the ‘mystery’ of private hanging.
“Will you consider what punishment there is, except death, to which ‘mystery’ does not attach? Will you consider whether all the improvements in prisons and punishments that have been made within the last twenty years have or have not, been all productive of ‘mystery?’ I can remember very well when the silent system was objected to as mysterious, and opposed to the genius of English society. Yet there is no question that it has been a great benefit. The prison vans are mysterious vehicles; but surely they are better than the old system of marching prisoners through the streets chained to a long chain, like the galley slaves in Don Quixote. Is there no mystery about transportation, and our manner of sending men away to Norfolk Island, or elsewhere? None in abandoning the use of a man’s name, and knowing him only by a number? Is not the whole improved and altered system, from the beginning to end, a mystery? I wish I could induce you to feel justified in leaving that word to the platform people, on the strength of your knowledge of what crime was, and of what its punishments were, in the days when there was no mystery connected with these things, and all was as open as Bridewell when Ned Ward went to see the women whipped.”