THE DINNER TO DICKENS.

Southland Times, Issue 898, 12 February 1868, Page 3

THE DINNER TO DICKENS.

(By the Toiler, in the London Review^ Not. 9.)

The great event of the week has been the dinner to Charles Dickens — an event surely — for looked at in one way at least, in a way much greater than the insouciant reader of this column at the club may think, Charles Dickens is a messenger of peace between two countries ; he will lay down happily — 'tis no idle boast of his — a third cable between that land whose hearty alliance we most covet, and this large-burdened, staggering, overworked noble old land of ours, dear mother England. Lord Lytt'on was the chairman, and altogether inefficient chairman, too, save for his name. One who never gave any heartiness to his personifications, and who threw a lurid air of shame over the whole proceedings, although underneath there lay an immeasurable depth of feeling. The newspapers don't give you this idea, because they are to polite, but this is the real view seen from one of the many phases of the matter. And not the only phase, too, as this admirably clever picture of the noble chairman, written for the Daily JPost, will testify. I cut it out, and quote it because there is real truth in it. It presents also a portrait of Lytton Bulwer a thousand times more truthful than that by Daniel Maelise, or even by the photographs themselves : — Let me say unreservedly, that of all the dull, prosy chairmen ever put into a chair, Sir E. Bulwer Lytton is the worst. Of course I know this is heresy to start with. ' People talk of the respect due to genius, and that sort of thing. Respect to fiddlesticks ! If genius can't drive a coach and six, it should not risk other people's necks ; if it cannot talk after dinner, it should not bore intelligent people who can. Here was a great intellectual gathering — men of brains, presided over by a man of brains, who was as tedious an old fogy as ever twaddled at a teatable, who had learned off a high-fault-ing speech by heart, which he delivered with false emphasis, with ridiculous, even grotesque and ludicrous gesture, in an altogether comical and more than painfully tedious manner. Vestrymen, however, must not think his tediousness was like unto theirs. He was not vulgar, nor common, nor foolish, but quite otherwise. His speech was that of a Don Quixote, and he himself looked as the immortal Don might have looked if he had been woke suddenly in the night, and called to address the College of Salamanca. His eyes, awake with wonder, their orbits not yet settled, and at cross purposes ; iis eyebrows elevated and awry, his — well, his hair — tumbled ; his face, like to a monument of genius, with the inscription very much effaced ; but, withal, his air, manner, gesture, that of a ludicrous dandy exquisite, man of honor, and genius, grown old, fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, and only to be pitied because it strives to keep up its appearance of youth, and to be what it is not." As for Mr Dickens's speech, which was in its way a masterpiece, my impression at the time was that it was learned by heart and not impromptu, and that the emotion he showed he kept purposely down, so that he might recollect his lesson. The opening sentences, " exquisitely constructed," says our previously quoted friend, " were intended to express profound emotion, and the great author was too obviously repeating a lesson — too certainly drawing on his memory to produce the effect." Yet every word told, and one or two had the o]d ring. The row after the dinner, the heart-burning 3, jealousies, the fierce love and admiration for their chief, the subservience to sham yet hate of sham, have not been depicted anywhere. Here were the true rulers of men, and only the literary lords among them. Here was not one living genius, but twenty, and no

Prince of Wales or man of state to be at the gathering. Dickens made an untrue assertion about literary men meeting no lions — no, his were shorn and de-clawed for him, were toothless, tame, and fawning ; but others have had them. I quote again from the JBirmingham JPost, of which let me say that I am not the writer, apropos of " lions in the path and writers being written down." It says : — " Thackeray and Trollope were unknown till they were nearly fifty. Dickens was famous at five-and-twenty.- Men, whomto name would be invidious, but ceaseless workers and benefactors of their race, as historians or scholars, have no celebrity or honor now, which is worth calling a name. There are dragons though Pilgrim has not met them, and the real lions have been put lambs in his path. In that room were many who had once answered to the title of men with dirty shirts and the look of a poet — such men as Sala, whom Thackeray himself once called a snob of a fellow; once painter's assistant in a theatre greatly jealous of future fame, with true literary ambition coursing in his veins ; now like unto Bardolph, broad and burly, scarred andseamedinmany fights — a man of a thousand, with a visage of a million, but always a man. Landseer — once the engravers son — now the first painter in the world, courtier, and friend of princes ; Cockburn-. the keen, in-significant-looking junior, friendless and poor, but now the glory of his generation, Ac,, and so on an infintium." Enough of this. The dinner is not nearly so great now as it will be in the chronicles of that which lives the longest — the fine story of literature in the days to come.