Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-13.pdf/775

774 but could be extremely pleasant when he chose. Mrs. Dickens does not seem to have foreseen the future celebrity of her son in his childhood, but she remembered many little circumstances afterward which she was very fond of relating. Once, when Charles was a tiny boy, and the family were staying down at Chatham, the nurse had a great deal of trouble in inducing him to follow her when out for his daily walk. When they returned home, Mrs. Dickens said to her, "Well, how have the children behaved?" "Very nicely indeed, ma'am—all but Master Charley." "What has he done?" "Why, ma'am, he will persist in always going the same road every day." "Charley, Charley, how is this?" "Why, mamma," answered the urchin, "does not the Bible say we must walk in the same path all the days of our life?"

The little Dickenses were all fond of private theatricals, and even as children they constructed a small play-house in which the drama was represented by puppets. Charles was the reader, and his brothers moved the marionettes. Those early years were doubtless very sad, for I know the whole family was in very reduced circumstances; and to one so sensitive and imaginative as Charles deprivations and slights must have been indeed hard to bear. I am of opinion that the troubles he met with in his childhood, and the great success won by his genius in after times, made him anxious to have his home so ordered as in some degree to efface his early impressions; and I fear his father's ungovernable temper prevented his being as often received in his son's house as he might otherwise have been. But, whatever may be said to the contrary, his conduct toward both his father and mother struck me as admirable. Poor old Mrs. Dickens died in 1863. She had been for some time ailing. She sleeps by her husband in Highgate Cemetery. I saw little of her after her husband's death, as I left England two years later for the Continent, and only returned a year or so since.

The same strong magic which drew the child Bettina through countless obstacles to the presence of the wonderful old man whom she had never seen, has worked on the ardent imagination of a young poetess of our own day; and the fond partisanship with which Goethe's view of his higher destiny and immunity from the trammels of ordinary obligation and responsibility is tacitly adopted by Miss Lazarus, betrays an indulgence of the same order as Frederika's and Lili's. No special sympathy with this subjection to the master-mind of modem times need color our views of the performance. There was great risk in taking for a theme a love-passage in the life of a renowned poet—one, too, which had been faultlessly treated by himself in his autobiography—and so elaborating the characters and incidents as to swell the story to the dimensions of a book. Any amplifications supplied by pure invention, any elucidations based upon a theory inconsistent with the simple facts, above all, any ambitious attempt to penetrate deeply into Goethe's character or depict him in the broad full light which the realistic novelist casts upon his figures, would have jarred with the conceptions and offended the taste of a cultivated reader. Yet mistakes of this kind are too common not to render the avoidance of them a matter of just commendation; while the ingenuity and skill with which every hint and suggestion of the original has been worked out in consistent and not top ample detail, merit still warmer praise. Nor is the book