Copperfield Text / Essays & Tools / Dickens Resources / Forum / Creative Writing | Donate
|
|
Copperfield Text / Essays & Tools / Dickens Resources / Forum / Creative Writing | Donate |
Page 26
Dickens, our greatest storyteller, may not have discovered the personal happiness in his own marriage that Eugene and John Harmon, the Pip and David of his last completed novel, achieve, but in the end he achieves personal fulfillment through his art. David realizes, in the life of his novel, what Dickens saw represented in Mary Hogarth, and what was not attainable in his own life. That Dickens's own fulfillment is in creating the vision rather than attaining it here may be explained in part by the fact that Dickens is an artist and in part by the kind of artist he is. According to Forster, Not his genius only, but his whole nature, was too exclusively made up of sympathy for, and with, the real in its most intense form, to be sufficiently provided against failure in the realities around him. There was for him no 'city of the mind' against outward ills, for inner consolation and shelter. It was in and from the actual he still stretched forward to find the freedom and satisfaction of an ideal, and by his very attempts to escape the world he was driven back into the thick of it. But what he would have sought there, it supplies to none; and to get the infinite out of anything so finite, has broken many a stout heart.
Dickens has shown us how the real can more nearly approximate his vision of the ideal through his novels. In his later years he told those stories in brilliant public readings from his novels in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and in America, where people stood all night in lines one half mile long to purchase tickets to see him perform.
