Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 585
Yet the contributors included such people as Mrs. Gaskell (whose Mary Barton appeared in the magazine): Miss Harriet Martineau: Mrs. Crowe of the Night Thoughts that haunted Victorian bedsides: Adelaide Procter, Leigh Hunt, and Wilkie Collins.
But all said and done, the world may well regret that Charles Dickens ever took to editing. It has been often said, and no doubt he himself often thought, that he helped to train up a school of rising young writers; that he educated not only the public but also the aspirants in literature. Yet such a claim is greatly exaggerated. There were a thousand and one traditions and institutions in England, many of them centuries old, for forming the minds of youthful writers, — the schools, the universities, the press, a reading public numbered in millions and a galaxy of great writers of world-wide fame. There was no need for Charles Dickens to play the part of Alfred the Great. In Canada or Natal it would have been a public service: in England it wasn’t necessary. Indeed many of Dickens’s authors fell into servile imitation, or attempt at imitation, of his own style, — a fault which aggravated him to a high degree. ‘Her imitation of me is too glaring,’ he writes of one of his lady coadjutors. ‘I never saw anything so curious. She takes the very words in which Esther Summerson speaks, without seeming to know it.’
And, of course, from first to last, the editorial work interrupted, impeded, — and later on impaired, — his real work in literature. Reference has already been made to David Copperfield in this respect. The same was true of Bleak House, — just at the absorbing moments of its composition, bundles of second-rate manuscripts and hours of trivial correspondence blocked the way. From Boulogne he writes in the summer of 1853: ‘If I can write an article this week, I will. But I am so full of the close of Bleak House that I can’t, for the life of me, get at a good subject for H.W. as yet.’ Again, a few days later: ‘Can’t possibly write autographs until I have written Bleak House. My work has been very hard since I have been here. And when I throw down my pen for a day, I throw down myself and can take up neither article.’
So it went on from then until Dickens’s death: overwork, over-correspondence, over-effort: and half of it thrown away. Dickens always lived under the conviction that he was indispensable for everything.
Yet Household Words, as a popular magazine, was a great success. It took over the idea of the Christmas books in the form of special Christmas numbers. It made plenty of money.
It only came to an end, as will be seen, as a result of Dickens’s separation from his wife and the quarrel with Bradbury and Evans which arose out of it. Even when the journal then ended (1859) it merely gave place to All the Year Round, which followed Dickens to the grave, and his memory beyond.
But these editorial labours were but a running accompaniment, or a fixed background to many other activities. During two years of this middle period, as has been seen, Dickens was busy with Bleak House, and over-busy with the strain of it. From this pressure he had escaped to France for a summer at Boulogne, — the first phase of a residence in France which lasted off and on for years. In France he found the rest and the restfulness no longer possible for him in England. It became for these years his second home.
In the first summer at Boulogne (1853) he rented for himself and family a charming suburban retreat, — in the country, but only ten minutes’ walk from the post office, — called Château des Moulineaux (Rue Beaurepaire). Dickens delighted in the place. He called it ‘the best doll’s house of many rooms, in the prettiest French grounds in the most charming situation I have ever seen.’ He seems to have found in French houses, French towns, and French scenery the same charming and provoking refusal to be English that delighted him in the French people. Especially was he fascinated with his landlord, the owner of the château, an old soldier of Napoleon who had named it all with French magnificence. It was just a little place, but he called it ‘la propriété,’ and waved his hand at it as if it extended for miles. It had a little grove of trees, — he called that ‘the forest,’ and in the forest over a gorge a few feet wide was a ‘Bridge of Austerlitz’ leading to a ‘Château of the Old Guard.’
Here was a Dickens house without the trouble of creation, and here in the landlord a Dickens character all ready for the pages of a book. Dickens did write him down, but only in a little sketch now forgotten but findable in his complete works, and called Our French Watering-Place. There is no more attractive character in all his pages than that of the old soldier Monsieur Loyal, — drawn in two pages, with the touch of genius.
The old soldier of Napoleon! To us now what an interest would lie in this living contact with the Napoleonic age and the Napoleonic legend. But perhaps it was all too recent. It still needed retrospect. At any rate, it has little hold upon the mind of Dickens.
Consider this:— ‘Three years ago there were three weazened old men, one bearing a frayed red ribbon in his threadbare button-hole, always to be found walking together among the children on the charming walk arched and shaded by trees on the old walls that form the four sides of the High Town. They were stooping, blear-eyed, dull old men, slipshod and shabby . . . and yet with a ghost of gentility hovering in their company. . . . They looked as if they might have been politically discontented if they had had vitality enough. Once we overheard the red ribbon complain feebly to the other two that somebody was “a robber,” and they all three set their mouths so that they would have ground their teeth if they had any. . . . The ensuing winter gathered red-ribbon unto the great company of faded ribbons . . . another winter came and another old man went, and so, this present year, the last of the triumvirate left off walking — it was no good now, — and sat by himself on a solitary bench with the hoops and dolls as lively as ever all about him.’
But in France, as said above, Dickens found rest and, what is harder to find, restfulness. Under the influence of the fresh sea air, of the beauty and repose of his surroundings, he fairly sprang back into health and energy in his first summer at Boulogne. One turns with a sigh to-day from reading his descriptions of his French watering-place: for those of us who live in the cities or even in the country of the present age, it is the vision of a vanished world. No wonder that Dickens spent three summers (1853, 1854, 1856) in such a charming retreat as the Boulogne of last century.
Dickens never understood France. It was always half comic to him. But he had grown to love it and, from now on, his French residences were a part of his life. For French politics he knew and cared nothing. They bored him as much as did the British House of Commons. The Napoleonic legend left him cold: it was just a matter of old men and faded ribbons.
But the place fascinated him in his own way. It seemed like something out of his own books. The French talked and acted as ‘characters’ ought to act: and Dickens loved them for it. He was entranced with the way they mutilated the English language. He wrote home to his actor friend Macready during this first Boulogne summer a joyful description of a French presentation of Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘In it,’ he says, ’is a poet named Willyim Shay Kes Peer who gets drunk in company with Sir John Foil Stayffe and fights a noble ‘night Lor Latimeer, who is in love with a maid of honour you may have read of in history, Mees Oleevia.’
Dickens loved France, but never understood it. In the same way, the French never understood Dickens’s books, but loved them. Pickwick had hardly run its course in its paper numbers when a French translation appeared. After that Dickens’s books were translated into French practically as soon as they came out. The earlier translations were undertaken in a haphazard fashion by different people for different firms without any consent or control, or pecuniary profit on the part of the author. They were as literal or as loose as they liked. They improved on Dickens, or parodied him, or missed him altogether. Pickwick, translated (1838) by Mme. Niboyet (a French suffragette born out of her time), appears Le Club des Pickwistes, Roman Comique par Charles Dickens. After that comes Nicholas Nickleby (1840), and then Oliver Twist, ou L’Orphelin du Dépôt de Mendicité (1841), and Le Marchand d’Antiquités, translated this time by a really competent man, A. J. B. Defauconpret, who is said to have translated several hundred books, including the novels of Walter Scott, Fielding and Bulwer Lytton.
But the first Dickens books were at best only a qualified success in France. French readers could sit with Walter Scott at mediaeval tournaments or tread the stones of Pompeii with Bulwer Lytton, but they saw no reason to distress themselves with ‘la misère et la dégradation de la basse classe anglaise.’ Their feelings at the time were expressed with forcible brutality by a forcible brute, — fat, jovial, and emphatic, called Jules Janin, — leading critic of Paris before Hippolyte Taine appeared. He undertook to sweep all Dickens’s earlier works into the gutter where they belonged.
‘Picture to yourself,’ — so he shouted in the Journal des Débats (1842) in talking of Nicholas Nickleby, ‘a mass of childish inventions in which everything that is horrible alternates with everything that is simple: here pass, in a flood of tears, people so good that they are absolutely silly: further on, rushing round and blaspheming, are all sorts of robbers, crooks, thieves and paupers, so repulsive that one cannot conceive how any society containing them can last for twenty-four hours. It is the most sickening mixture you can imagine of hot milk and sour beer, of fresh eggs and salt beef, rags and embroidered coats, gold sovereigns and penny pieces, roses and dandelions. They fight, they kiss and make it up, they swear at one another, they get drunk, they die of starvation. Do you like stale tobacco, garlic, the taste of fresh pork and the noise of a tin pan beaten against a cracked copper saucepan? Then try to read this last book of Dickens.’
With calm insular superiority, a writer in Fraser’s Magazine demanded in reply by what right an ignoramus like Janin could claim to judge the English and their works: he might, added the writer, about as well undertake to lecture on the literature of the Hottentots. The form of reproof is scarcely happy.
So the translations came to a stop for four or five years. But after 1847 they started up again, including the intervening volumes and the little Christmas books, so that there were no less than eight Dickens books launched in that one year. After that they never stopped. David Copperfield appeared in its own place as Le Neveu de Ma Tante, or L’histoire personelle de David Copperfield.
But the real contact of Dickens with the literary life of France was during his winter spent in Paris (1855-56) just before his third summer at Boulogne. He had already on various occasions made transient visits to the French capital. He had even, as already seen, taken a house there for a time in the winter of 1846 while working on Dombey and Son. Now he came back for a more prolonged residence. After a trial of one or two unsuitable lodgments he settled down in the Avenue des Champs Elysées, where he lived till the spring of 1850.
During his residence in Paris, Dickens’s great delight was in the French theatre, at that time flourishing in the sunlight of an imperial court and the new opulence of the second empire. Dickens’s knowledge of French was always imperfect for writing and speaking but was ample for the full appreciation of the drama: while his native affinity for the stage, his knowledge of its technique and his own power as a dramatic writer, put him in a class by himself. The long letters which he wrote to England about the plays he saw in Paris evince the intensity of his interest. His letters are full of praise, — of the marvellous acting of Lemaître and of the marvellous power of the dramatist Scribe. Only when it comes to French presentations of English scenes does he find occasion for ridicule, — for example, of a play in which a character Lord William Falkland is called throughout by all the actors Milor Williams Fack Lorn: and a presentation of As You Like It, as Comme Il Vous Plaira, ‘in which,’ he said, ‘nobody has anything to do but to sit down as often as possible on as many stones and trunks of trees as possible.’
Meantime the world of art and letters vied in entertaining Dickens. He met all the great actors and playwrights. In particular he was a frequent guest at the house of Scribe, — the most prolific dramatist of the day, still going strong, so Dickens tells us, after writing four hundred pieces, great and small!
Dickens, indeed, saw more of social entertainment, at least of entertainment in other people’s houses, than he was accustomed to accept at home. He was greatly impressed by Lamartine. He met the famous Georges Sand, who looked to him ‘the kind of woman whom you might suppose to be the Queen’s monthly nurse.’ He was entertained in the princely style of that lavish period by Emile de Girardin at a banquet of Oriental extravagance: the host said to his guests: ‘Ce petit dîner n’est que pour faire la connaissance de Monsieur Dickens: il ne compte pas: ce n’est rien.’
The moment was, of course, propitious for the entertainment of an English celebrity in Paris. It was the winter of the Crimean War, the height of the entente cordiale that had ripened into military alliance. But the war, as seen through Dickens’s eyes in his letters to Forster and others, was not popular. The people were not thrilled with it. As for Dickens himself, the war never reached him one way or the other either to horrify or to exalt. No war ever did. But he chronicles for us an interesting picture of the Paris of the Crimean War.
‘It was cold this afternoon,’ he writes (January 30, 1856), ‘as bright as Italy, and these Elysian Fields crowded with carriages, riders, and foot passengers. All the fountains were playing, all the Heavens shining. Just as I went out at 4 o’clock, several regiments that had passed out at the Barrière in the morning to exercise in the country, came marching back, in the straggling French manner, which is far more picturesque and real than anything you can imagine in that way. Alternately great storms of drums played, and then the most delicious and skilful bands. Trovatore music, Barber of Seville music, all sorts of music with well-marked melody and time. All bloused Paris (led by the Inimitable, and a poor cripple who works himself up and down all day in a big-wheeled car) went at quick march down the avenue in a sort of hilarious dance. If the colours with the golden eagle on the top had only been unfurled, we should have followed them anywhere, in any cause — much as the children follow Punches in the better cause of Comedy. Napoleon on the top of the Column seemed up to the whole thing, I thought.’
But what pleased Dickens most in Paris was that he found himself now quite a well-known author for the ordinary people of France — he himself says a ‘celebrated’ author, but French politeness may have had something to do with that. His story Martin Chuzzlewit was running in French as a daily serial in the Moniteur of 1855. Celebrity in foreign lands has a special appeal, and Dickens writes to Wills (October 24, 1855) with pardonable pride:
You cannot think how pleasant it is to me to find myself generally known and liked here. If I go into a shop to buy anything and give my card, the officiating priest or priestess brightens up, and says: ‘Ah! C’est l’écrivain célèbre! Monsieur porte un nom très distingué. Mais! Je suis honoré et intéressé de voir Monsieur Dick-in. Je lis un des livres de Monsieur tous les jours.’ (In the Moniteur.) And a man who brought some little vases home last night said, ‘On connâit bien, en France, que Monsieur Dickin prend sa position sur la dignité de la Littérature. Ah! C’est grande chose! Et ses caractères (this was to Georgina while he unpacked) ‘sont si spirituellement tournés! Cette Madame Tojair (Todgers). Ah! Qu’elle est drôle, et précisément comme une dame que je connais à Calais!’ Ever faithfully,
C. D.
Indeed, during this second residence the translation of Dickens’s books took on a new and definite form. The illustrious house of Hachette undertook the publication of all Dickens’s works. A special staff of translators was engaged. For the first time the author himself was to get some money out of it, the contract calling for £440 in ten monthly instalments. This, where no legal obligation existed, was generous enough. Dickens himself sat in conference with his translators, fascinated with his new rôle.
In later times, the Hachette translations have been much criticized. The chief people employed on the work were a distinguished lot, — distinguished for everything except translation. The bulk of the work was done in a hurry at low prices, and with little realization of the extraordinary nicety of translation. Works on humour, more than any others, depend on the peculiar idioms, the slang, and the conventions of the language concerned. It is not possible to put Sam Weller into French without Mr. Weller being reborn in France. When Mrs. Gamp says ‘widge’ or ‘dispoge’ and calls the steamer to Antwerp the ‘Ankworks package’ — how are we to tell a Frenchman that?
But at least the Hachette edition brought Dickens widely to the knowledge of the French people. The rising generation of the second empire heard Dickens’s books read aloud at home, just as their English cousins of the day heard and read Victor Hugo. The give-and-take of literature was part of the new entente of Queen Victoria and Louis Napoleon, of Cobden and Bastiat, of Monsieur Guizot and Lord Macaulay. Perhaps in the long run Dickens had more to do with politics, French and English, than he ever imagined. The silken skein of thought binds tighter than the chains of diplomacy.
Even at that, it is still doubtful how far Dickens’s work was sympathetic to the French mind. The rude denunciation of Jules Janin was presently replaced by the brilliant analysis of Hippolyte Taine, who had the insight to devote to Dickens in his English Literature a place and prominence not usually awarded to an author still alive. But Dickens puzzles Taine. He seems a little crazy. His rush of images, his fantastic comparisons, baffle and fatigue. And this touch of commonness, — Ruth Pinch (in Martin Chuzzlewit), charming in her handling of a beef-steak pudding, — but why not a rose?
‘And Dickens,’ says Taine, ‘like all English novelists, is hopelessly respectable (in the English sense). He and his fellows work under a formula: “Be moral. All your novels must be such as may be read by young girls. We are practical minds, and we would not have literature corrupt practical life. We believe in family life, and we would not have literature paint the passions which attack family life. We are Protestants, and we have preserved something of the severity of our fathers against enjoyment and the passions. Among these love is the worst.” ’
