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"In general, 1 believe, most people have the wrong idea about Dickens, as if they
imagine him in real life to have the same amount of sensitivity and humour as
overflows in his writings. Just as speculative philosophers are abstract thinkers,
Dickens was an abstract fantasy man. He is not the one laughing or crying in his
novels, only his imagination."
Busken Huet expanded this approach in his article and came to some hard
conclusions about Dickens. Dickens was a born actor and his writings brilliantly
incorporate histrionic effects. His world is a continual exchange of personnel, décors
and costumes. Everything, even the lifeless, lives. But the human beings he creates
are stage heroes in the most negative sense of the word, virtually puppets. They each
have their own tic, stronger even than their character. Dickens wants
"to create strong sensations in more than one direction. People should howl when
reading his books; howl with laughter, howl with pain. You are always in a theatre,
where thrilling melodramas and infectious comedies are played. He is not unfolding
scenes from human life but tales from the Arabian nights."
Dickens used these exceptional magical talents, according to BuskenHuet, not only
to entertain the people, but also to reform society. Dickens was more of an apostle of
the people than a priest of the arts. Dickens offered the common people 'harmless
reading matter', even for children, but the danger was that that reading matter
'created a fantastic ideology at the cost of the truth'. Dickens was a dangerous drug.
Once again in Busken Huet we see the contradiction between the stage (unreality)
and truth (reality), that Calvinist search for the 'man behjnd the actor'. Thus he
comes to a remarkable final conclusion: Dickens is an inimitable storyteller, a poetic
magician, a real virtuoso, but there's no depth in his novels.
"With Dickens you move through a fantastic world, where both the good and the bad
deeds take on supernatural proportions. He is not a pearl diver, descending to the
depths of the spirit, but a fine, dear eyed recorder of externals."
On this basis, Busken Huet considered George Eliot to be a greater writer, in whose
golden glow Dickens's silver star loses its shine. He also predicts that future
generations will not devour the novels with the same hunger as contemporaries
have; most of them are too etailed, too mannered, too stagy, not substantial enough.
One book by Dickens was an exception, however: the Pickwick Papers. This was a
triumph, something that even the greatest writers of all times only achieve once in a
lifetime.
Moral reality
1 would like to concentrate on one observation in Busken Huet's portrait in more
detail, his repeated remarks that Dickens's characters have no depth, that they are
figures on the stage, 'almost puppets': 'He is not unfolding scenes from human life
but from the Arabian Nights, displayed with the help of the magic lantern of an
English humorist.'Elsewhere he is even more cutting:
