A Pickwick Holiday

...The anniversary of Mr...

...The resources of fiction, as based upon these, have been so painstakingly surveyed by the modern critic, that there should be no question about its scope and power...

...But here the whole conscious attitude and experiment, as well as the ingrowing scorn and despair, seem to deny the presence of ultimate truth and grandeur...

...But in going' on to extend and amplify the initial vision the trials of writing come...

...Not only does it hesitate to risk itself among the assertions of absolutism and dogma...

...The heights of invention are scaled...

...Pickwick, Snodgrass, Tupman, and Winkle started out on their mad, amazing, irrelevant journey, to become enrolled upon the records of immortality...

...The twentieth-century writers we think of most often as specialists: in romantic fancy, like De la Mare, Barrie, and Hewlett, as well as David Garnett and Miss Townsend Warner...

...Pickwick did...

...Santayana has found him giving, there is in his achievement a substance and a sympathetic power which it will take many years and tremendous changes in taste and tradition to deny...

...That youthful masterpiece still rises before us in all its vagrant, miscellaneous, casual beauty, imbued with the fragrance of affection and young ardor, constantly renewed in life by the imperishable liveliness every page provides...

...The old glories and beauties still wait for constant re-discovery by young readers for whom the delights of tradition are most carefully perpetuated...

...Pickwick employs them all, and in and around the myriad incidents and swarming characters there is a vitality which gives to the mass a constant, nervous impulse...

...Its basis is the direct sympathy and the simple faith we are daily forced to acknowledge, no matter how much changing modes in art and thought ask us to discredit and disregard them...

...We remember it all and come back to our old praises of Dickens with the knowledge that however much his mastery has suffered through time's analysis, the permanent breadth and ecstasy, the unfailing zest and faith that were his, are still his today...

...But in his first great triumph he so combined sympathy with fabulous occasion and truth with absurdity that the balance becomes one of the greatest and surest indicators of what he achieved...

...This marks almost every English novel of the last twenty years and in the trait there is a wisdom...

...Qualification of motive, cool-headed and scientific caution, comparative freedom from the dangers of distortion and error, a greater logic and truth—in these the superiority of the modern mind is said to be found...

...they balance, with ghost and spectre and allegory, against the saner humor and provide a practical source-book of Anglo-Saxon narrative...

...Around us today writing has come to present itself with many virtues and oft-asserted advantages...

...THAT famous "first ray of light which illumines the gloom and converts into dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved," actually slanted down out of the heavens just a hundred years ago...

...Beyond his limitations (so often charged to self-education) in judgment and discernment, beyond his anaemic heroines and teeth-grinding villains, beyond the exaggerations and short-sightedness his many stories betray, beyond even that "comfort" Mr...

...That world seems almost as different from ours as were the worlds Odysseus traveled through, Don Quixote thought to relieve, or Dante pondered on...

...It has been called the "last of the great epics," and if one remembers the old phrase which stated that world epics, in addition to grandeur and heroism, must possess two unfailing attributes, impossibility and triviality, one grants the truth of the contention...

...The haphazardly introduced stories do more than suggest derivations and influences...

...Reviewers today are constantly obliged to point out in novels the bareness of concept and the meagreness of the disguise provided for it...

...These exquisite and intangible qualities often seem impossible for modern civilized art to grasp...

...Yet the measuring-stick of old mastery has never been discarded by the wise...

...Yet just as unquestionably, there has been created a! confining, limiting caution...

...in realism, like Anderson, Powys, and Dreiser...

...Others, in self-conscious attempts to enlarge upon their skill, enter, unsuccessfully, strange fields...

...Pickwick bows along with Don Quixote and Gil Bias, wandering Meister and troubled Hamlet, mystic Arthur and darkling Roland...

...to that reluctance have been adjusted the very forms of art themselves...

...Around him the visions and thoughts of dreamers have associated themselves, and he is forever one of the heroes whose names are rock-hewn in the memory and affection of mankind...

...But the general temper of the time too much sanctions an indulgence in tentatives...

...For all the claims of the later verisimilitude, the fecundity of Fielding has been missed as much as the free play of fancy in the roman tics...

...It fails in many of the opportunities its action brushed up against...

...Already we have allowed to settle around it (for all its dark background of industrial riot, parliamentary difiiculties, and international dispute) the aura of a romantic glory...

...The good in him has never been assailed, as have, at various times, the most salient merits of his contemporaries...

...Accepted at all, he is accepted as his first readers welcomed him...

...But it is, nevertheless, the thing which The Pickwick Papers so undeniably have...

...For what has been gained in form, credibility, and sureness of method, there has been, somehow, a loss...

...What is lacking in these different instances does not, for us now, detract from the insight and power with which we have credited the later narrators...

...All the eighteenth-century variety of irony, humor, and realism is embraced, and the growths of the new century are anticipated...

...Not even Vanity Fair found an absolute and faithful guide through the maelstrom...

...The anniversary of his first appearance suggests, then, as most important, a stock-taking of all his coming into the fellowship of the immortals has marked...

...The beautiful, beloved page still opens unerringly to the caress of the faithful hand, and the matchless story begins: That punctual servant of all work, the sun, had just risen and begun to strike a light on the morning of the thirteenth of May, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven, when Mr...

...To enclose within the space of a narrative today as much variety and observation, and yet to do it in surprising ways, it has become almost necessary to adopt the method of Ulysses, probably the one modern instance of a work freely credited with having all the scope and resource of mastery...

...Surtees with Jorrocks, TroUope with the Barset milieu, Thackeray among the snobs, Stevenson in the rich fields of romance, and Wells in his amazingly responsive lower-middle class all showed an unstinting zeal in creation...

...in analysis, like James and Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson...

...The psychological novel and the method it employs have been gains in literature, but even in the hands of masters like Meredith and James the overplay of analysis and diagnosis has marred the beauty and freedom of the play we expect life to show...

...Current dismissal of those who claim that the giants among the arts are dead is too well-warranted to need a reprimand...

...The dryness of Arnold Bennett testifies to it, the dullness of Masters, Dreiser, and the realists shows it...

...It was a world of costermongers and crying hawkers, of tally-hos and discreet sedans, of link-boys and paraflin-venders, of church-bells ringing people up the Strand and coach-horns punctuating the staccato of hooves along the pleasant travel-routes of the land, of sunny gardens and sparkling winters in friendly open-hearted country homes—an easily moving pageant of drama and delight over every scene of which there presided, in truth, an intimate faith in mankind and a trust in human loving-kindness which the literature of a later day testifies to with self-confessed rarity...

...But the necessary enthusiasm for making masterpieces is more difficult to find...

...Between him and humanity there forever "exists a steady and reciprocal attachment which nothing but death will terminate...

...Yet for a century it has probably been the canon of Pickwick which has enabled us most effectively to evaluate literary invention...

...To him we are all faithful Sams...

...Pickwick calls particularly for observance, for no work was ever written in a more dauntless spirit of festivity and occasion than his saga...

...It was on May 13, 1827, that Mr...

...While we stop to look at what the recollection of that beloved history may mean for us and our modern view of literature, there should be no moment's hesitation about jubilant dancing and a joyful raising of glasses in one vast unanimous toast...

...Fulfilled with the glow of promise and the warmth of yet unrendered meanings, the work stands in the company it has so long won: benevolent, alarmed, rosy-cheeked Mr...

...Even Dickens did not bear the test strongly...

...Around the ancient travel device of the timeless epics he built, in solid, sound, yet graceful, fanciful terms...

...Since then, many forms of beauty and nobility have been created in literature, and many wise and troubling things have happened to find reflection here...

...It was on May 12, 1827, that the first discoverable entries were made into the minutes of the Pickwick Club, telling of the delivery of a paper by Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, entitled Speculations on the Source of Hampstead Ponds, with Some Observations on the Theory of Tittle Bats, and the projecting of a tour by the corresponding committee...

...Samuel Pickwick burst like another sun from his slumbers, threw open his chamber window, and looked out upon the world beneath...

...Pickwick, in its very large design, isi written all over life...

...It is the roundness of viewpoint, the firm hold on life, the inability to see things by halves, and the power of rendering forth experience in terms which actually possess all the control and range of the concept behind...

...It lacks many of the materials the eventful century was to make available...

...Novelists once promising (those of W. L. George's disappointing prophecy of 1913, for instance) have slumped into pitiful repetition...

...in satirical appraisal, like Aldous Huxley) and his various imitators...

...And whenever the critic embarks on Dickensian analysis, he makes, almost involuntarity, a preliminary reservation in favor of Pickwick...

...It is abundance: this quality of great imaginative masterpieces whereby they seem to seize life perfectly by building up structures endless in detail, authentic with humorous and tragic truth, immortally sound through all their distractions and cluttered merits, because at the bottom lies a creative force whereon each bit and fraction draws for life...

...This abundance works itself out in different ways in great fiction: in humor, satire, adventure, mystery, homeliness, misadventure, sympathy, and idealization of motive...

...How Dickens managed to fasten on to them so surely may be due to various causes: his youth, his impudent delight in life, his unharnessed intellect...

...But here, during the winding tour, accretions come and come...

...The sun that saw his first momentous appearance still shines with meaning on all he represents to us now...

...For attitudes toward him have not, essentially, changed as much as one mighC suppose...

...To see life fully, feeling every impulse in it accurately, is the first great task of the, creative artist...

...Seeing the human comedy was, in different ways, their task...

...And for all of this The Pickwick Papers may well constitute a focal point, a summarizing agency...

...But its author, somehow knowing his limitations, substituted for them a true sense of universals, the very key to world-mastery...