Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2362 page)

The other properties of these letters are quite subordinate to this main fact that the man who wrote them is thus perfectly seen in them. But they do not lessen the estimate of his genius. Admiration rises higher at the writer’s mental forces, who, putting so much of himself into his work for the public, had still so much overflowing for such private intercourse. The sunny health of nature in them is manifest; its largeness, spontaneity, and manliness; but they have also that which highest intellects appreciate best. “I have read them,” Lord Russell wrote to me, “with delight and pain. His heart, his imagination, his qualities of painting what is noble, and finding diamonds hidden far away, are greater here than even his works convey to me. How I lament he was not spared to us longer. I shall have a fresh grief when he dies in your volumes.” Shallower people are more apt to find other things. If the bonhommie of a man’s genius is obvious to all the world, there are plenty of knowing ones ready to take the shine out of the genius, to discover that after all it is not so wonderful, that what is grave in it wants depth, and the humour has something mechanical. But it will be difficult even for these to look over letters so marvellous in the art of reproducing to the sight what has once been seen, so natural and unstudied in their wit and fun, and with such a constant well-spring of sprightly runnings of speech in them, point of epigram, ingenuity of quaint expression, absolute freedom from every touch of affectation, and to believe that the source of this man’s humour, or of whatever gave wealth to his genius, was other than habitual, unbounded, and resistless.

There is another consideration of some importance. Sterne did not more incessantly fall back from his works upon himself than Dickens did, and undoubtedly one of the impressions left by the letters is that of the intensity and tenacity with which he recognised, realized, contemplated, cultivated, and thoroughly enjoyed, his own individuality in even its most trivial manifestations. But if any one is led to ascribe this to self-esteem, to a narrow exclusiveness, or to any other invidious form of egotism, let him correct the impression by observing how Dickens bore himself amid the universal blazing-up of America, at the beginning and at the end of his career. Of his hearty, undisguised, and unmistakeable enjoyment of his astonishing and indeed quite bewildering popularity, there can be as little doubt as that there is not a particle of vanity in it, any more than of false modesty or grimace.
While realising fully the fact of it, and the worth of the fact, there is not in his whole being a fibre that answers falsely to the charmer’s voice. Few men in the world, one fancies, could have gone through such grand displays of fireworks, not merely with so marvellous an absence of what the French call
pose
, but unsoiled by the smoke of a cracker. No man’s strong individuality was ever so free from conceit.

Other personal incidents and habits, and especially some matters of opinion of grave importance, will help to make his character better known. Much questioning followed a brief former reference to his religious belief, but, inconsistent or illogical as the conduct described may be, there is nothing to correct or to modify in my statement of it;
and, to what otherwise appeared to be in doubt, explicit answer will be afforded by a letter, written upon the youngest of his children leaving home in September 1868 to join his brother in Australia, than which none worthier appears in his story. “I write this note to-day because your going away is much upon my mind, and because I want you to have a few parting words from me, to think of now and then at quiet times. I need not tell you that I love you dearly, and am very, very sorry in my heart to part with you. But this life is half made up of partings, and these pains must be borne. It is my comfort and my sincere conviction that you are going to try the life for which you are best fitted. I think its freedom and wildness more suited to you than any experiment in a study or office would have been; and without that training, you could have followed no other suitable occupation. What you have always wanted until now, has been a set, steady, constant purpose. I therefore exhort you to persevere in a thorough determination to do whatever you have to do, as well as you can do it. I was not so old as you are now, when I first had to win my food, and to do it out of this determination; and I have never slackened in it since. Never take a mean advantage of any one in any transaction, and never be hard upon people who are in your power. Try to do to others as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better for you that they should fail in obeying the greatest rule laid down by Our Saviour than that you should. I put a New Testament among your books for the very same reasons, and with the very same hopes, that made me write an easy account of it for you, when you were a little child. Because it is the best book that ever was, or will be, known in the world; and because it teaches you the best lessons by which any human creature, who tries to be truthful and faithful to duty, can possibly be guided. As your brothers have gone away, one by one, I have written to each such words as I am now writing to you, and have entreated them all to guide themselves by this Book, putting aside the interpretations and inventions of Man. You will remember that you have never at home been harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities. I have always been anxious not to weary my children with such things, before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them. You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but heartily respect it. Only one thing more on this head. The more we are in earnest as to feeling it, the less we are disposed to hold forth about it. Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it. I hope you will always be able to say in after life, that you had a kind father. You cannot show your affection for him so well, or make him so happy, as by doing your duty.” They who most intimately knew Dickens will know best that every word there is written from his heart, and is radiant with the truth of his nature.

To the same effect, in the leading matter, he expressed himself twelve years before, and again the day before his death; replying in both cases to correspondents who had addressed him as a public writer. A clergyman, the Rev. R. H. Davies, had been struck by the hymn in the Christmas tale of the Wreck of the Golden Mary (
Household Words
, 1856). “I beg to thank you” Dickens answered (Christmas Eve, 1856) “for your very acceptable letter — not the less gratifying to me because I am myself the writer you refer to. . . . There cannot be many men, I believe, who have a more humble veneration for the New Testament, or a more profound conviction of its all-sufficiency, than I have. If I am ever (as you tell me I am) mistaken on this subject, it is because I discountenance all obtrusive professions of and tradings in religion, as one of the main causes why real Christianity has been retarded in this world; and because my observation of life induces me to hold in unspeakable dread and horror, those unseemly squabbles about the letter which drive the spirit out of hundreds of thousands.” In precisely similar tone, to a reader of
Edwin Drood
(Mr. J. M. Makeham), who had pointed out to him that his employment as a figure of speech of a line from Holy Writ in his tenth chapter might be subject to misconstruction, he wrote from Gadshill on Wednesday the eighth of June, 1870. “It would be quite inconceivable to me, but for your letter, that any reasonable reader could possibly attach a scriptural reference to that passage. . . . I am truly shocked to find that any reader can make the mistake. I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of our Saviour; because I feel it; and because I re-wrote that history for my children — every one of whom knew it, from having it repeated to them, long before they could read, and almost as soon as they could speak. But I have never made proclamation of this from the house tops.”

A dislike of all display was rooted in him; and his objection to posthumous honours, illustrated by the instructions in his will, was very strikingly expressed two years before his death, when Mr. Thomas Fairbairn asked his help to a proposed recognition of Rajah Brooke’s services by a memorial in Westminster Abbey. “I am very strongly impelled” (24th of June 1868) “to comply with any request of yours. But these posthumous honours of committee, subscriptions, and Westminster Abbey are so profoundly unsatisfactory in my eyes that — plainly — I would rather have nothing to do with them in any case. My daughter and her aunt unite with me in kindest regards to Mrs. Fairbairn, and I hope you will believe in the possession of mine until I am quietly buried without any memorial but such as I have set up in my lifetime.” Asked a year later (August 1869) to say something on the inauguration of Leigh Hunt’s bust at his grave in Kensal-green, he told the committee that he had a very strong objection to speech-making beside graves. “I do not expect or wish my feelings in this wise to guide other men; still, it is so serious with me, and the idea of ever being the subject of such a ceremony myself is so repugnant to my soul, that I must decline to officiate.”

His aversion to every form of what is called patronage of literature
was part of the same feeling. A few months earlier a Manchester gentleman
wrote for his support to such a scheme. “I beg to be excused,” was his reply, “from complying with the request you do me the honour to prefer, simply because I hold the opinion that there is a great deal too much patronage in England. The better the design, the less (as I think) should it seek such adventitious aid, and the more composedly should it rest on its own merits.” This was the belief Southey held; it extended to the support by way of patronage given by such societies as the Literary Fund, which Southey also strongly resisted; and it survived the failure of the Guild whereby it was hoped to establish a system of self-help, under which men engaged in literary pursuits might be as proud to receive as to give. Though there was no project of his life into which he flung himself with greater eagerness than the Guild, it was not taken up by the class it was meant to benefit, and every renewed exertion more largely added to the failure. There is no room in these pages for the story, which will add its chapter some day to the vanity of human wishes; but a passage from a letter to Bulwer Lytton at its outset will be some measure of the height from which the writer fell, when all hope for what he had so set his heart upon ceased. “I do devoutly believe that this plan, carried by the support which I trust will be given to it, will change the status of the literary man in England, and make a revolution in his position which no government, no power on earth but his own, could ever effect. I have implicit confidence in the scheme — so splendidly begun — if we carry it out with a stedfast energy. I have a strong conviction that we hold in our hands the peace and honour of men of letters for centuries to come, and that you are destined to be their best and most enduring benefactor. . . . Oh what a procession of new years may walk out of all this for the class we belong to, after we are dust.”

These views about patronage did not make him more indulgent to the clamour with which it is so often invoked for the ridiculously small. “You read that life of Clare?” he wrote (15th of August 1865). “Did you ever see such preposterous exaggeration of small claims? And isn’t it expressive, the perpetual prating of him in the book as
the Poet?
So another Incompetent used to write to the Literary Fund when I was on the committee: ‘This leaves the Poet at his divine mission in a corner of the single room. The Poet’s father is wiping his spectacles. The Poet’s mother is weaving’ — Yah!’“ He was equally intolerant of every magnificent proposal that should render the literary man independent of the bookseller, and he sharply criticized even a compromise to replace the half-profits system by one of royalties on copies sold. “What does it come to?” he remarked of an ably-written pamphlet in which this was urged (10th of November 1866): “what is the worth of the remedy after all? You and I know very well that in nine cases out of ten the author is at a disadvantage with the publisher because the publisher has capital and the author has not. We know perfectly well that in nine cases out of ten money is advanced by the publisher before the book is producible — often, long before. No young or unsuccessful author (unless he were an amateur and an independent gentleman) would make a bargain for having that royalty, to-morrow, if he could have a certain sum of money, or an advance of money. The author who could command that bargain, could command it to-morrow, or command anything else. For the less fortunate or the less able, I make bold to say — with some knowledge of the subject, as a writer who made a publisher’s fortune long before he began to share in the real profits of his books — that if the publishers met next week, and resolved henceforth to make this royalty bargain and no other, it would be an enormous hardship and misfortune because the authors could not live while they wrote. The pamphlet seems to me just another example of the old philosophical chess-playing, with human beings for pieces. ‘Don’t want money.’ ‘Be careful to be born with means, and have a banker’s account.’ ‘Your publisher will settle with you, at such and such long periods according to the custom of his trade, and you will settle with your butcher and baker weekly, in the meantime, by drawing cheques as I do.’ ‘You must be sure not to want money, and then I have worked it out for you splendidly.’“

Less has been said in this work than might perhaps have been wished, of the way in which his editorship of
Household Words
and
All the Year Round
was discharged. It was distinguished above all by liberality; and a scrupulous consideration and delicacy, evinced by him to all his contributors, was part of the esteem in which he held literature itself. It was said in a newspaper after his death, evidently by one of his contributors, that he always brought the best out of a man by encouragement and appreciation; that he liked his writers to feel unfettered; and that his last reply to a proposition for a series of articles had been: “Whatever you see your way to, I will see mine to, and we know and understand each other well enough to make the best of these conditions.” Yet the strong feeling of personal responsibility was always present in his conduct of both journals; and varied as the contents of a number might be, and widely apart the writers, a certain individuality of his own was never absent. He took immense pains (as indeed was his habit about everything) with numbers in which he had written nothing; would often accept a paper from a young or unhandy contributor, because of some single notion in it which he thought it worth rewriting for; and in this way, or by helping generally to give strength and attractiveness to the work of others, he grudged no trouble.
“I have had a story” he wrote (22nd of June 1856) “to hack and hew into some form for
Household Words
this morning, which has taken me four hours of close attention. And I am perfectly addled by its horrible want of continuity after all, and the dreadful spectacle I have made of the proofs — which look like an inky fishing-net.” A few lines from another letter will show the difficulties in which he was often involved by the plan he adopted for Christmas numbers, of putting within a framework by himself a number of stories by separate writers to whom the leading notion had before been severally sent. “As yet” (25th of November 1859), “not a story has come to me in the least belonging to the idea (the simplest in the world; which I myself described in writing, in the most elabourate manner); and everyone of them turns, by a strange fatality, on a criminal trial!” It had all to be set right by him, and editorship on such terms was not a sinecure.