The Life of Charles Dickens. By John Forster.

Vol. II. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.

Beginning with Dickens's return from America in 1842, this volume covers a period of less than ten years, the most productive, and apparently the happiest, of his life. It brings out in even stronger relief than the preceding volume his strong individuality, a trait which, whether it attracts or repels—and on most persons we think it produces alternately each of these effects—is full of interest, worthy of study and fruitful of suggestions. Its superabundant energy seemed to create demands in order that it might expend itself in satisfying them. Its persistence was toughened by failure as much as by success. Its vivacity, verging upon boisterousness, was incapable of being chilled. Its strenuousness knew no lassitude, and needed no repose. In play as in work, in physical exercise as in mental labor, in all his projects, purposes and performances, Dickens seems to have been in a perpetual state of tension that allowed of no reaction. His was a mind not morbidly self-conscious, but ever aglow with the consciousness of power and the ardor of its achievement, in-sensible of waste and undisturbed by critical introspection.

The excitement into which he was thrown by the composition of his books exceeds anything of the kind recorded in literary history, and stands in strong contrast with the self-contained tranquillity with which Scott performed an equal or greater amount of labor. Yet it does not, like similar ebullitions in other men, suggest any notion of weakness or of a talent strained beyond its capacity. It was coupled with an enormous facility of execution and the ability to pass with undiminished freshness from one field of action to another. It sprang from the intensity with which every idea was conceived, and which belonged equally to his smallest with his greatest undertakings. "The book," he writes of the Chimes, "has made my face white in a foreign land. My cheeks, which were beginning to fill out, have sunk again; my eyes have grown immensely large; my hair is very lank, and the head inside the hair is hot and giddy. Read the scene at the end of the third part twice. I wouldn't write it twice for something.... Since I conceived, at the beginning of the second part, what must happen in the third, I have undergone as much sorrow and agitation as if the thing were real, and have wakened up with it at night. I was obliged to lock myself in when I finished it yesterday, for my face was swollen for the time to twice its proper size, and was hugely ridiculous." The little book was written at Genoa; and having finished it, he must make a winter journey to London, "because," as he writes to Forster, "of that unspeakable restless something which would render it almost as impossible for me to remain here, and not see the thing complete, as it would be for a full balloon, left to itself, not to go up." A further reason was to try the effect of the story upon a circle of listeners, to be assembled for the purpose: "Carlyle, indispensable, and I should like his wife of all things; her judgment would be invaluable. You will ask Mac, and why not his sister? Stanny and Jerrold I should particularly wish. Edwin Landseer, Blanchard perhaps Harness; and what say you to Fonblanque and Fox?" After this it is amusing to read that the book "was not one of his greatest successes, and it raised him up some objectors;" but the reading was the germ of those which afterward brought him into such close relations with his public.

Of another Christmas story he writes, "I dreamed all last week that the Battle of Life was a series of chambers, impossible to be got to rights or got out of, through which I wandered drearily all night. On Saturday night I don't think I slept an hour. I was perpetually roaming through the story, and endeavoring to dovetail the revolution here into the plot. The mental distress quite horrible." Here we have, perhaps, a clear case of the effects of overwork. But in general the details of his plots, the names of the characters, above all, the titles of the stories, were evolved with an amount of thought and discussion that might have sufficed for the plan and the preparations for a battle. "Martin Chuzzlewit" is not a name suggestive of long and serious deliberation: one might rather suppose that it had turned up accidentally and been accepted simply as being as good as another. Yet it was not adopted till after many others had been discussed and rejected. "Martin was the prefix to all, but the surname varied from its first form of Sweezleden, Sweezleback and Sweeztewag, to those of Chuzzletoe, Chuzzleboy, Chubblewig and Chuzzlewig." David Copperfield was preceded by a still longer list of abortions, and Household Words, as a mere title, was the result of a parturition far exceeding in length and severity any throes of travail known to natural history.

All this was unaccompanied by any of the doubts and misgivings, the fits of depression and intervals of lassitude, which are the ordinary tortures of authorship. Nor had it any connection with the weaknesses of the craft, its small vanities and jealousies. "It was," as Mr. Forster well remarks, "part of the intense individuality by which he effected so much to set the high value which in general he did upon what he was striving to accomplish." Hence, too, no half-formed and then abandoned projects were among the stepping-stones of his career. A plan or an idea, once conceived, was certain to be shaped, developed and matured; and whatever the result, it left up disheartening effect, no feeling of distrust, to cripple a subsequent undertaking.

Nor was Dickens so absorbed in his work as to leave it reluctantly, or to find no fullness of satisfaction in occupations or enjoyments of a different kind. On the contrary, no man ever threw himself so heartily and entirely into the business of the hour, or more eagerly sought diversion and change. Dinners, private and public, excursions in chosen companionship, amateur theatricals, schemes of charity or benevolence, occupied a large portion of his time, and were entered into with an ardor which never flagged or needed to be stimulated. His correspondence—an unfailing barometer to indicate the state of the mental atmosphere—is always full of life, overflowing, for the most part, with animal spirits, often vivid in description both of places and people, turning discomforts and embarrassments into subjects of lively narrative or indignant protest. The letters from Genoa and Lausanne are especially copious and entertaining, and form, we think, the most interesting portion of the book. The later chapters, giving the final year of his residence in Devonshire Terrace, are less satisfactory. We would fain have had a picture of that circle of which Dickens was one of the most prominent figures; but though his own personality is revealed in the fullest light, the group in the background is left indistinct, most of its members being barely visible, and none of them adequately portrayed.