The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (69 page)

His own life, too, dramatized the conventional values of his time. In conspicuous contrast to Balzac, he was, at least publicly, the loyal husband and playful father. His wife Kate’s activities during their early married life were continually restricted by what he delicately called “an anti-Malthusian
state.” His constant need for money was not due to extravagance, though he lived well and entertained generously, but to the improvidence of his father, the demands of other family members, and the need to support his nine surviving children. His emotional frustrations came from idealizing his wife’s sister, Mary Hogarth, who had lived with his family and whose death was a bitter blow, and from nostalgia for his “first love,” Maria Beadnell. Still, when he met Maria years later he found her fat and dull.

Dickens was widely praised for “his deep reverence for the household gods.” His romps with his children were noted and applauded. But his unhappiness with his wife and his cruelty to her had to be hushed up. His separation from Kate in 1858 became a scandal that would hardly have roused a whisper in a Balzacian salon. The rumored cause was his intimate relation with a pretty young actress, Ellen Ternan, opposite whom Dickens himself had played a passionate role in a benefit performance of an arctic melodrama,
The Frozen Deep
. Despite Victorian reticence he had to justify himself to his audience, and he made matters worse by a notice headed “Personal” on the front page of
Household Words
on June 12, 1858.

Not until 1939 were his daughter Katey’s revelations of Dickens’s family life finally published. “Nothing,” declared Katey, “could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home.” Yet Dickens’s relations with Ellen Ternan remained veiled in hypocrisy or reverence.

Whatever the changing fortunes of Dickens’s marital love, he never ceased courting his one constant love, the public. The warm response of his readers was revealed at his death in 1870. From America, where people had reason to feel otherwise, Longfellow noted that “this whole country is stricken with grief.” Paris mourned “at the thought of all we—his family—have just lost in Charles Dickens.” Carlyle declared that his death had “eclipsed … the harmless gaiety of nations.” And he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

But Dickens was never satisfied with the indirect relation to his beloved public through the printed word. He wanted to see their faces, hear their laughter, share their tears. His hunger for the living audience increased with time, abridged his writing career, and hastened his death. As a child he had delighted in the London Christmas pantomimes; at school he had enjoyed staging plays in toy theaters. By the time he was sixteen he was frequenting
the London theaters with his fellow law clerks. When he had just begun his career as a Parliamentary reporter, he wrote to the manager at the Lyceum Theater requesting an audition. He boasted “a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing what he saw.”

He never lost his fascination with the theater. His favorite form of philanthropy was to stage benefit performances with well-known actors or literary figures, and himself as an actor and director. His roles included Sir Epicure Mammon in
The Alchemist
, Bobedil in
Every Man in His Humour
, Shallow in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, the Ghost of Gaffer Thumb in
Tom Thumb
, and many others in plays no longer remembered. On his American trip he persuaded the withdrawn Kate to act a comic part, and he was surprised at how “devilish well” she did it. It was during a performance of the lurid
Frozen Deep
at Manchester in 1857 that he first played the role of Ellen Ternan’s lover, which he replayed painfully offstage in the years to come.

It took very little to turn Dickens’s interest in acting into the obsession that conquered his last years. When he returned to London from Italy in 1845, he read his sequel to
A Christmas Carol
, called
The Chimes
, to ten friends at a dinner given by Forster on the night of December 3. It was a smashing, in retrospect we might say a disastrous, success. Subtitled “A Goblin Story,”
The Chimes
is the sentimental tale of a messenger, Trotty Veck, down on his luck, who has visions of the evils of London life and the misfortunes of his daughter. The famous Shakespearean actor William Macready (1793–1873) had been at the reading, as Dickens observed. “If you had seen Macready last night, undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa as I read, you would have felt, as I did, what a thing it is to have power.”

Dickens’s taste for power over an audience, not just as one actor in a stage play, but as the lone reader of his own words, became a fatal addiction. The public readings from his own work were profitable. Under different managers he eventually offered 423 paid public readings, for which he received a total of some £45,000, an average of more than £100 per reading. This would amount to nearly half the £93,000, which was the whole value of his estate at his death. At the Christmas season, 1853, his first public reading from his own books at a benefit in the Birmingham Town Hall to an audience of two thousand was successful beyond all his hopes. On December 27, when he read
A Christmas Carol
(of course unaided by any public address system) he kept listeners electrified for three hours. Then on December 29 he read
The Cricket on the Hearth
. A second reading of the
Carol
on December 30 attracted twenty-five hundred working people at reduced prices. “They lost nothing, misinterpreted nothing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried.… I felt as if we were all bodily going up into the clouds together.”

Dickens seized the multiplying opportunities to embrace his audience in
public. On his second trip to America, in Boston in December 1867, when he read
A Christmas Carol
and the trial scene from
Pickwick
, Dickens reported, “Success last night beyond description or exaggeration, the whole city is quite frantic about it today, and it is impossible that prospects could be more brilliant.” John Greenleaf Whittier confirmed that “Those marvellous characters of his come forth … as if their original creator had breathed new life into them.… you must beg, borrow, or steal a ticket to hear him. Another such star-shower is not to be expected in one’s lifetime.”

After his London series Dickens made strenuous reading tours across England, to Ireland and Scotland. He improved his technique, too, cutting the
Christmas Carol
from the three hours of his first reading down to two. In Paris, where his Christmas story of the year had sold nearly two hundred thousand copies, he reached his beloved public across the language barrier. “The Reading so stuns and oversets the Parisians,” Dickens reported of his reading for charity at the British embassy in January 1863, “that I shall have to do it again. Blazes of Triumph!… They are so extraordinarily quick to understand a face and gesture, going together … that people who don’t understand English, positively understand the Readings!”

The trials of the reading circuit were often painful. On April 10, 1866, when Dickens did his first reading of “Doctor Marigold,” adapted from his last Christmas story (which had sold more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies), he had already rehearsed it two hundred times. Then Dickens read to overflow crowds from St. James Hall, London, to Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, ending at Portsmouth in late May. On this tour Dickens suffered the custody and cuisine of a manager whom Mark Twain (who followed Dickens’s example in his own profitable lecture tours) knew as “a gladsome gorilla.” Far from carrying him “into the clouds,” Dickens’s obsessive public readings were carrying him to his grave. He never allowed the pains of a sore throat or the tortures of his swollen foot in the years after 1867 to delay or cancel a reading. Once, when it was rumored that his gout would force him to cancel a tour, he insisted that he was suffering from nothing but “periodical paragraph disease,” and had “not had so much as a headache for twenty years.”

Appropriately, he took leave of his beloved public not in cold type but in their warm presence. In January 1870, suffering from gout and exhaustion, repeatedly warned by his doctor that his readings would be his death, he began a suicidal series of twelve readings a week. His pulse had risen dangerously, during intermissions he had to be laid on a sofa, and sometimes ten minutes would pass before he could speak a sentence. When he bungled with Pickswick, Picnic, and Peckwicks, before he could manage “Pickwick,” this too seemed to amuse him. His hand was swelling painfully. But he completed his engagement on March 15, 1870, again reading
A
Christmas Carol
and the trial from
Pickwick
. In the enthusiastic audience of two thousand, his granddaughter Mekitty, who had never heard him before, was frightened at “the dreadful moment when he cried.” With tears streaming down his cheeks, as he limped off the stage he declared, “From these garish lights I now vanish forevermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate farewell.”

T
HE
first Western artist to bring painted Christian archetypes to life was also the first to be brought to life by his admirers. Giotto di Bondone (1267?–1337) was a legend in his own time. A young man of twenty-four when Giotto died, Boccaccio featured him in a story in the
Decameron
. “Giotto was a man of such genius that there was nothing in Nature … that he could not paint with his stylus, pen, or brush, making it so much like its original in Nature that it seemed more like the original than a reproduction. Many times, in fact, while looking at paintings by this man, the observer’s visual sense was known to err, taking what was painted to be the very thing itself.” In his “Purgatory,” Dante, Giotto’s contemporary, meets those suffering from the endemic sin of artists:

It is not surprising that Dante’s praise for Giotto was so grudging. He must have envied the artist newcomer who had been acclaimed in the native Florence from which Dante had been so early and so unjustly exiled.

Giotto’s phenomenal native talent was still celebrated in the sixteenth century by Vasari, the biographer of Renaissance artists. One day in the late thirteenth century, he reports, as Cimabue (1240–1302), the master painter of Florence, passed on the road to nearby Vespignano, he was surprised to find a young shepherd “portraying a sheep from nature on a flat and polished slab, with a stone slightly pointed, without having learnt any method of doing this from others, but only from nature.” This was the boy Giotto. Not one to hesitate, “Cimabue, standing fast all in a marvel, asked him if he wished to go to live with him. The child answered that, his father consenting, he would go willingly.” When Giotto’s father “lovingly” consented, the boy accompanied Cimabue to Florence, and “in a short time, assisted by nature and taught by Cimabue, the child not only equaled the manner of his master, but became so good an imitator of nature that he
banished completely that rude Greek manner and revived the modern and good art of painting, in producing the portraying well from nature of living people, which had not been used for more than two hundred years.”

A young immigrant to the city, Giotto throughout his life prospered from the good opinion and the profitable commissions of the rich and famous. And one of his first important commissions was the chapel for the family of the notorious Paduan usurer Scrovegni, whom Dante consigned to the burning sands of the seventh level of Hell. On that chapel Giotto spent two years and there left some of his best work. We know of no occasion when Giotto refused to profit by embellishing his own adopted city or any others that could pay his price. The nostalgic Dante stood for old-village virtues, while Giotto prospered with the growing commercial metropolis. Himself reputed to be a usurer, Giotto hired out looms to weavers and sued debtors if they did not repay him promptly and with interest. He served the Bardi and Peruzzi, powerful bankers of Florence, moneylenders to the pope and the king of England; he worked for the Visconti of Milan and embraced the patronage of Robert of Anjou, king of Naples.