Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2365 page)

It was not a feeling confined to the relatives whom he had thus taught to have such exclusive dependence on him. Among the consolations addressed to those mourners came words from one whom in life he had most honoured, and who also found it difficult to connect him with death, or to think that he should never see that blithe face anymore. “It is almost thirty years,” Mr. Carlyle wrote, “since my acquaintance with him began; and on my side, I may say, every new meeting ripened it into more and more clear discernment of his rare and great worth as a brother man: a most cordial, sincere, clear-sighted, quietly decisive, just and loving man: till at length he had grown to such a recognition with me as I have rarely had for any man of my time. This I can tell you three, for it is true and will be welcome to you: to others less concerned I had as soon
not
speak on such a subject.” “I am profoundly sorry, for
you
,” Mr. Carlyle at the same time wrote to me; “and indeed for myself and for us all. It is an event world-wide; a
unique
of talents suddenly extinct; and has ‘eclipsed,’ we too may say, ‘the harmless gaiety of nations.’ No death since 1866 has fallen on me with such a stroke. No literary man’s hitherto ever did. The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens, — every inch of him an Honest Man.”

Of his ordinary habits of activity I have spoken, and they were doubtless carried too far. In youth it was all well, but he did not make allowance for years. This has had abundant illustration, but will admit of a few words more. To all men who do much, rule and order are essential; method in everything was Dickens’s peculiarity; and between breakfast and luncheon, with rare exceptions, was his time of work. But his daily walks were less of rule than of enjoyment and necessity. In the midst of his writing they were indispensable, and especially, as it has often been shown, at night. Mr. Sala is an authority on London streets, and, in the eloquent and generous tribute he was among the first to offer to his memory, has described himself encountering Dickens in the oddest places and most inclement weather, in Ratcliffe-highway, on Haverstock-hill, on Camberwell-green, in Gray’s-inn-lane, in the Wandsworth-road, at Hammersmith Broadway, in Norton Folgate, and at Kensal New Town. “A hansom whirled you by the Bell and Horns at Brompton, and there he was striding, as with seven-league boots, seemingly in the direction of North-end, Fulham. The Metropolitan Railway sent you forth at Lisson-grove, and you met him plodding speedily towards the Yorkshire Stingo. He was to be met rapidly skirting the grim brick wall of the prison in Coldbath-fields, or trudging along the Seven Sisters-road at Holloway, or bearing, under a steady press of sail, underneath Highgate Archway, or pursuing the even tenor of his way up the Vauxhall-bridge-road.” But he was equally at home in the intricate byways of narrow streets and in the lengthy thoroughfares. Wherever there was “matter to be heard and learned,” in back streets behind Holborn, in Borough courts and passages, in city wharfs or alleys, about the poorer lodging-houses, in prisons, workhouses, ragged-schools, police-courts, rag-shops, chandlers’ shops, and all sorts of markets for the poor, he carried his keen observation and untiring study. “I was among the Italian Boys from 12 to 2 this morning,” says one of his letters. “I am going out to-night in their boat with the Thames Police,” says another. It was the same when he was in Italy or Switzerland, as we have seen; and when, in later life, he was in French provincial places. “I walk miles away into the country, and you can scarcely imagine by what deserted ramparts and silent little cathedral closes, or how I pass over rusty drawbridges and stagnant ditches out of and into the decaying town.” For several consecutive years I accompanied him every Christmas Eve to see the marketings for Christmas down the road from Aldgate to Bow; and he had a surprising fondness for wandering about in poor neighbourhoods on Christmas-day, past the areas of shabby genteel houses in Somers or Kentish Towns, and watching the dinners preparing or coming in. But the temptations of his country life led him on to excesses in walking. “Coming in just now,” he wrote in his third year at Gadshill, “after twelve miles in the rain, I was so wet that I have had to change and get my feet into warm water before I could do anything.” Again, two years later: “A south-easter blowing, enough to cut one’s throat. I am keeping the house for my cold, as I did yesterday. But the remedy is so new to me, that I doubt if it does me half the good of a dozen miles in the snow. So, if this mode of treatment fails to-day, I shall try that to-morrow.” He tried it perhaps too often. In the winter of 1865 he first had the attack in his left foot which materially disabled his walking-power for the rest of his life. He supposed its cause to be overwalking in the snow, and that this had aggravated the suffering is very likely; but, read by the light of what followed, it may now be presumed to have had more serious origin. It recurred at intervals, before America, without any such provocation; in America it came back, not when he had most been walking in the snow, but when nervous exhaustion was at its worst with him; after America, it became prominent on the eve of the occurrence at Preston which first revealed the progress that disease had been making in the vessels of the brain; and in the last year of his life, as will immediately be seen, it was a constant trouble and most intense suffering, extending then gravely to his left hand also, which had before been only slightly affected.

It was from a letter of the 21st of February 1865 I first learnt that he was suffering tortures from a “frost-bitten” foot, and ten days later brought more detailed account. “I got frost-bitten by walking continually in the snow, and getting wet in the feet daily. My boots hardened and softened, hardened and softened, my left foot swelled, and I still forced the boot on; sat in it to write, half the day; walked in it through the snow, the other half; forced the boot on again next morning; sat and walked again; and being accustomed to all sorts of changes in my feet, took no heed. At length, going out as usual, I fell lame on the walk, and had to limp home dead lame, through the snow, for the last three miles — to the remarkable terror, by-the-bye, of the two big dogs.” The dogs were Turk and Linda. Boisterous companions as they always were, the sudden change in him brought them to a stand-still; and for the rest of the journey they crept by the side of their master as slowly as he did, never turning from him. He was greatly moved by the circumstance, and often referred to it. Turk’s look upward to his face was one of sympathy as well as fear, he said; but Linda was wholly struck down.

The saying in his letter to his youngest son that he was to do to others what he would that they should do to him, without being discouraged if they did not do it; and his saying to the Birmingham people that they were to attend to self-improvement not because it led to fortune, but because it was right; express a principle that at all times guided himself. Capable of strong attachments, he was not what is called an effusive man; but he had no half-heartedness in any of his likings. The one thing entirely hateful to him, was indifference. “I give my heart to very few people; but I would sooner love the most implacable man in the world than a careless one, who, if my place were empty to-morrow, would rub on and never miss me.” There was nothing he more repeatedly told his children than that they were not to let indifference in others appear to justify it in themselves. “All kind things,” he wrote, “must be done on their own account, and for their own sake, and without the least reference to any gratitude.” Again he laid it down, while he was making some exertion for the sake of a dead friend that did not seem likely to win proper appreciation from those it was to serve. “As to gratitude from the family — as I have often remarked to you, one does a generous thing because it is right and pleasant, and not for any response it is to awaken in others.” The rule in another form frequently appears in his letters; and it was enforced in many ways upon all who were dear to him. It is worth while to add his comment on a regret of a member of his family at an act of self-devotion supposed to have been thrown away: “Nothing of what is nobly done can ever be lost.” It is also to be noted as in the same spirit, that it was not the loud but the silent heroisms he most admired. Of Sir John Richardson, one of the few who have lived in our days entitled to the name of a hero, he wrote from Paris in 1856. “Lady Franklin sent me the whole of that Richardson memoir; and I think Richardson’s manly friendship, and love of Franklin, one of the noblest things I ever knew in my life. It makes one’s heart beat high, with a sort of sacred joy.” (It is the feeling as strongly awakened by the earlier exploits of the same gallant man to be found at the end of Franklin’s first voyage, and never to be read without the most exalted emotion.) It was for something higher than mere literature he valued the most original writer and powerful teacher of the age. “I would go at all times farther to see Carlyle than any man alive.”

Of his attractive points in society and conversation I have particularized little, because in truth they were himself. Such as they were, they were never absent from him. His acute sense of enjoyment gave such relish to his social qualities that probably no man, not a great wit or a professed talker, ever left, in leaving any social gathering, a blank so impossible to fill up. In quick and varied sympathy, in ready adaptation to every whim or humour, in help to any mirth or game, he stood for a dozen men. If one may say such a thing, he seemed to be always the more himself for being somebody else, for continually putting off his personality. His versatility made him unique. What he said once of his own love of acting, applied to him equally when at his happiest among friends he loved; sketching a character, telling a story, acting a charade, taking part in a game; turning into comedy an incident of the day, describing the last good or bad thing he had seen, reproducing in quaint, tragical, or humorous form and figure, some part of the passionate life with which all his being overflowed. “Assumption has charms for me so delightful — I hardly know for how many wild reasons — that I feel a loss of Oh I can’t say what exquisite foolery, when I lose a chance of being some one not in the remotest degree like myself.” How it was, that, from one of such boundless resource in contributing to the pleasure of his friends, there was yet, as I have said, so comparatively little to bring away, may be thus explained. But it has been also seen that no one at times said better things, and to happy examples formerly given I will add one or two of a kind he more rarely indulged. “He is below par on the Exchange,” a friend remarked of a notorious puffing actor; “he doesn’t stand well at Lloyds.” “Yet no one stands so well with the under-writers,” said Dickens; a pun that Swift would have envied. “I call him an Incubus!” said a non-literary friend, at a loss to express the boredom inflicted on him by a popular author. “Pen-and-ink-ubus, you mean,” interposed Dickens. So, when Stanfield said of his mid-shipman son, then absent on his first cruise, “the boy has got his sea-legs on by this time!” “I don’t know,” remarked Dickens, “about his getting his sea-legs on; but if I may judge from his writing, he certainly has not got his A B C legs on.”

Other agreeable pleasantries might be largely cited from his letters. “An old priest” (he wrote from France in 1862), “the express image of Frederic Lemaitre got up for the part, and very cross with the toothache, told me in a railway carriage the other day, that we had no antiquities in heretical England. ‘None at all?’ I said. ‘You have some ships however.’ ‘Yes; a few.’ ‘Are they strong?’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘your trade is spiritual, my father: ask the ghost of Nelson.’ A French captain who was in the carriage, was immensely delighted with this small joke. I met him at Calais yesterday going somewhere with a detachment; and he said — Pardon! But he had been so limited as to suppose an Englishman incapable of that bonhommie!” In humouring a joke he was excellent, both in letters and talk; and for this kind of enjoyment his least important little notes are often worth preserving. Take one small instance. So freely had he admired a tale told by his friend and solicitor Mr. Frederic Ouvry, that he had to reply to a humorous proposal for publication of it, in his own manner, in his own periodical. “Your modesty is equal to your merit. . . . I think your way of describing that rustic courtship in middle life, quite matchless. . . . A cheque for £1000 is lying with the publisher. We would willingly make it more, but that we find our law charges so exceedingly heavy.” His letters have also examples now and then of what he called his conversational triumphs. “I have distinguished myself” (28th of April 1861) “in two respects lately. I took a young lady, unknown, down to dinner, and, talking to her about the Bishop of Durham’s nepotism in the matter of Mr. Cheese, I found she was Mrs. Cheese. And I expatiated to the member for Marylebone, Lord Fermoy, generally conceiving him to be an Irish member, on the contemptible character of the Marylebone constituency and Marylebone representation.”

Among his good things should not be omitted his telling of a ghost story. He had something of a hankering after them, as the readers of his briefer pieces will know; and such was his interest generally in things supernatural that, but for the strong restraining power of his common sense, he might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism. As it was, the fanciful side of his nature stopped short at such pardonable superstitions as those of dreams, and lucky days, or other marvels of natural coincidence; and no man was readier to apply sharp tests to a ghost story or a haunted house, though there was just so much tendency to believe in any such, “well-authenticated,” as made perfect his manner of telling one. Such a story is related in the 125th number of
All the Year Round
, which before its publication both Mr. Layard and myself saw at Gadshill, and identified as one related by Lord Lytton. It was published in September, and in a day or two led to what Dickens will relate. “The artist himself who is the hero of that story” (to Lord Lytton, 15th of September 1861) “has sent me in black and white his own account of the whole experience, so very original, so very extraordinary, so very far beyond the version I have published, that all other like stories turn pale before it.” The ghost thus reinforced came out in the number published on the 5th of October; and the reader who cares to turn to it, and compare what Dickens in the interval (17th of September) wrote to myself, will have some measure of his readiness to believe in such things. “Upon the publication of the ghost story, up has started the portrait-painter who saw the phantoms! His own written story is out of all distance the most extraordinary that ever was produced; and is as far beyond my version or Bulwer’s, as Scott is beyond James. Everything connected with it is amazing; but conceive this — the portrait-painter had been engaged to write it elsewhere as a story for next Christmas, and not unnaturally supposed, when he saw himself anticipated in
All the Year Round
, that there had been treachery at his printer’s. ‘In particular,’ says he, ‘how else was it possible that the date, the 13th of September, could have been got at? For I never told the date, until I wrote it.’ Now,
my
story had no date; but seeing, when I looked over the proof, the great importance of having
a
date, I (C. D.) wrote in, unconsciously, the exact date on the margin of the proof!” The reader will remember the Doncaster race story; and to other like illustrations of the subject already given, may be added this dream. “Here is a curious case at first-hand” (30th of May 1863). “On Thursday night in last week, being at the office here, I dreamed that I saw a lady in a red shawl with her back towards me (whom I supposed to be E.). On her turning round I found that I didn’t know her, and she said ‘I am Miss Napier.’ All the time I was dressing next morning, I thought — What a preposterous thing to have so very distinct a dream about nothing! and why Miss Napier? for I never heard of any Miss Napier. That same Friday night, I read. After the reading, came into my retiring-room, Mary Boyle and her brother, and
the
Lady in the red shawl whom they present as ‘Miss Napier!’ These are all the circumstances, exactly told.”