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Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens

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Title: Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens

Author: G. K. Chesterton


        
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Language: English

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Produced by Sigal Alon, LN Yaddanapudi and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
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  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, Circa 1840
  From an oil painting by R. J. Lane.]

APPRECIATIONS AND CRITICISMS OF THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

[Illustration]

1911

LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS, LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

_All rights reserved_




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                             PAGE

     I. INTRODUCTION                   vii
    II. SKETCHES BY BOZ                  1
   III. PICKWICK PAPERS                 13
    IV. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY               26
     V. OLIVER TWIST                    38
    VI. OLD CURIOSITY SHOP              50
   VII. BARNABY RUDGE                   65
  VIII. AMERICAN NOTES                  76
    IX. PICTURES FROM ITALY             87
     X. MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT               90
    XI. CHRISTMAS BOOKS                103
   XII. DOMBEY AND SON                 114
  XIII. DAVID COPPERFIELD              129
   XIV. CHRISTMAS STORIES              140
    XV. BLEAK HOUSE                    148
   XVI. CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND     160
   XVII. HARD TIMES                    169
  XVIII. LITTLE DORRIT                 178
    XIX. A TALE OF TWO CITIES          188
     XX. GREAT EXPECTATIONS            197
    XXI. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND             207
   XXII. EDWIN DROOD                   218
  XXIII. MASTER HUMPHREY'S CLOCK       229
   XXIV. REPRINTED PIECES              239




ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                    PAGE

  CHARLES DICKENS, CIRCA 1840                             _Frontispiece_
    From an oil painting by R. J. Lane.

  CHARLES DICKENS, 1842                                               76
    From a bust by H. Dexter, executed during Dickens's
    first visit to America.

  CHARLES DICKENS, 1844                                               90
    From a miniature by Margaret Gillies.

  CHARLES DICKENS, 1849                                              130
    From a daguerreotype by Mayall.

  CHARLES DICKENS, 1858                                              184
    From a black and white drawing by Baughiet.

  CHARLES DICKENS, 1859                                              188
    From an oil painting by W. P. Frith, R.A.

  CHARLES DICKENS, CIRCA 1860                                        198
    Photograph by J. & C. Watkins.

  CHARLES DICKENS, 1868                                              218
    From a photograph by Gurney.




INTRODUCTION


These papers were originally published as prefaces to the separate books
of Dickens in one of the most extensive of those cheap libraries of the
classics which are one of the real improvements of recent times. Thus
they were harmless, being diluted by, or rather drowned in Dickens. My
scrap of theory was a mere dry biscuit to be taken with the grand tawny
port of great English comedy; and by most people it was not taken at
all--like the biscuit. Nevertheless the essays were not in intention so
aimless as they appear in fact. I had a general notion of what needed
saying about Dickens to the new generation, though probably I did not
say it. I will make another attempt to do so in this prologue, and,
possibly fail again.

There was a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we
watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern
world. We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin
to realise that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe
of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was
called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed
vulgar--all that is itself breaking up like a cloudland. And only the
caricatures of Dickens remain like things carved in stone. This, of
course, is an old story in the case of a man reproached with any excess
of the poetic. Again and again when the man of visions was pinned by the
sly dog who knows the world,

    "The man recovered of the bite,
    The dog it was that died."

To call Thackeray a cynic, which means a sly dog, was indeed absurd; but
it is fair to say that in comparison with Dickens he felt himself a man
of the world. Nevertheless, that world of which he was a man is coming
to an end before our eyes; its aristocracy has grown corrupt, its middle
class insecure, and things that he never thought of are walking about
the drawing-rooms of both. Thackeray has described for ever the
Anglo-Indian Colonel; but what on earth would he have done with an
Australian Colonel? What can it matter whether Dickens's clerks talked
cockney now that half the duchesses talk American? What would Thackeray
have made of an age in which a man in the position of Lord Kew may
actually be the born brother of Mr. Moss of Wardour Street? Nor does
this apply merely to Thackeray, but to all those Victorians who prided
themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions; it applies
to Anthony Trollope and, as much as any one, to George Eliot. For we
have not only survived that present which Thackeray described: we have
even survived that future to which George Eliot looked forward. It is no
longer adequate to say that Dickens did not understand that old world of
gentility, of parliamentary politeness and the balance of the
constitution. That world is rapidly ceasing to understand itself. It is
vain to repeat the complaint of the old Quarterly Reviewers, that
Dickens had not enjoyed a university education. What would the old
Quarterly Reviewers themselves have thought of the Rhodes Scholarships?
It is useless to repeat the old tag that Dickens could not describe a
gentleman. A gentleman in our time has become something quite
indescribable.

Now the interesting fact is this: That Dickens, whom so many considered
to be at the best a vulgar enthusiast, saw the coming change in our
society much more soberly and scientifically than did his better
educated and more pretentious contemporaries. I give but one example out
of many. Thackeray was a good Victorian radical, who seems to have gone
to his grave quite contented with the early Victorian radical
theory--the theory which Macaulay preached with unparalleled luminosity
and completeness; the theory that true progress goes on so steadily
through human history, that while reaction is indefensible, revolution
is unnecessary. Thackeray seems to have been quite content to think that
the world would grow more and more liberal in the limited sense; that
Free Trade would get freer; that ballot boxes would grow more and more
secret; that at last (as some satirist of Liberalism puts it) every man
would have two votes instead of one. There is no trace in Thackeray of
the slightest consciousness that progress could ever change its
direction. There is in Dickens. The whole of _Hard Times_ is the
expression of just such a realisation. It is not true to say that
Dickens was a Socialist, but it is not absurd to say so. And it would
be simply absurd to say it of any of the great Individualist novelists
of the Victorian time. Dickens saw far enough ahead to know that the
time was coming when the people would be imploring the State to save
them from mere freedom, as from some frightful foreign oppressor. He
felt the society changing; and Thackeray never did.

As talking about Socialism and Individualism is one of the greatest
bores ever endured among men, I will take another instance to illustrate
my meaning, even though the instance be a queer and even a delicate one.
Even if the reader does not agree with my deduction, I ask his attention
to the fact itself, which I think a curiosity of literature. In the last
important work of Dickens, that excellent book _Our Mutual Friend_,
there is an odd thing about which I cannot make up my mind; I do not
know whether it is unconscious observation or fiendish irony. But it is
this. In _Our Mutual Friend_ is an old patriarch named Aaron, who is a
saintly Jew made to do the dirty work of an abominable Christian usurer.
In an artistic sense I think the patriarch Aaron as much of a humbug as
the patriarch Casby. In a moral sense there is no doubt at all that
Dickens introduced the Jew with a philanthropic idea of doing justice to
Judaism, which he was told he had affronted by the great gargoyle of
Fagin. If this was his motive, it was morally a most worthy one. But it
is certainly unfortunate for the Hebrew cause that the bad Jew should be
so very much more convincing than the good one. Old Aaron is not an
exaggeration of Jewish virtues; he is simply not Jewish, because he is
not human. There is nothing about him that in any way suggests the
nobler sort of Jew, such a man as Spinoza or Mr. Zangwill. He is simply
a public apology, and like most public apologies, he is very stiff and
not very convincing.

So far so good. Now we come to the funny part. To describe the high
visionary and mystic Jew like Spinoza or Zangwill is a great and
delicate task in which even Dickens might have failed. But most of us
know something of the make and manners of the low Jew, who is generally
the successful one. Most of us know the Jew who calls himself De
Valancourt. Now to any one who knows a low Jew by sight or hearing, the
story called _Our Mutual Friend_ is literally full of Jews. Like all
Dickens's best characters they are vivid; we know them. And we know them
to be Hebrew. Mr. Veneering, the Man from Nowhere, dark, sphinx-like,
smiling, with black curling hair, and a taste in florid vulgar
furniture--of what stock was he? Mr. Lammle, with "too much nose in his
face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much sparkle in his studs and
manners"--of what blood was he? Mr. Lammle's friends, coarse and
thick-lipped, with fingers so covered with rings that they could hardly
hold their gold pencils--do they remind us of anybody? Mr. Fledgeby,
with his little ugly eyes and social flashiness and craven bodily
servility--might not some fanatic like M. Drumont make interesting
conjectures about him? The particular types that people hate in Jewry,
the types that are the shame of all good Jews, absolutely run riot in
this book, which is supposed to contain an apology to them. It looks at
first sight as if Dickens's apology were one hideous sneer. It looks as
if he put in one good Jew whom nobody could believe in, and then
balanced him with ten bad Jews whom nobody could fail to recognise. It
seems as if he had avenged himself for the doubt about Fagin by
introducing five or six Fagins--triumphant Fagins, fashionable Fagins,
Fagins who had changed their names. The impeccable old Aaron stands up
in the middle of this ironic carnival with a peculiar solemnity and
silliness. He looks like one particularly stupid Englishman pretending
to be a Jew, amidst all that crowd of clever Jews who are pretending to
be Englishmen.

But this notion of a sneer is not admissible. Dickens was far too frank
and generous a writer to employ such an elaborate plot of silence. His
satire was always intended to attack, never to entrap; moreover, he was
far too vain a man not to wish the crowd to see all his jokes. Vanity is
more divine than pride, because it is more democratic than pride. Third,
and most important, Dickens was a good Liberal, and would have been
horrified at the notion of making so venomous a vendetta against one
race or creed. Nevertheless the fact is there, as I say, if only as a
curiosity of literature. I defy any man to read through _Our Mutual
Friend_ after hearing this suggestion, and to get out of his head the
conviction that Lammle is the wrong kind of Jew. The explanation lies, I
think, in this, that Dickens was so wonderfully sensitive to that change
that has come over our society, that he noticed the type of the oriental
and cosmopolitan financier without even knowing that it was oriental or
cosmopolitan. He had, in fact, fallen a victim to a very simple fallacy
affecting this problem. Somebody said, with great wit and truth, that
treason cannot prosper, because when it prospers it cannot be called
treason. The same argument soothed all possible Anti-Semitism in men
like Dickens. Jews cannot be sneaks and snobs, because when they are
sneaks and snobs they do not admit that they are Jews.

I have taken this case of the growth of the cosmopolitan financier,
because it is not so stale in discussion as its parallel, the growth of
Socialism. But as regards Dickens, the same criticism applies to both.
Dickens knew that Socialism was coming, though he did not know its name.
Similarly, Dickens knew that the South African millionaire was coming,
though he did not know the millionaire's name. Nobody does. His was not
a type of mind to disentangle either the abstract truths touching the
Socialist, nor the highly personal truth about the millionaire. He was a
man of impressions; he has never been equalled in the art of conveying
what a man looks like at first sight--and he simply felt the two things
as atmospheric facts. He felt that the mercantile power was oppressive,
past all bearing by Christian men; and he felt that this power was no
longer wholly in the hands even of heavy English merchants like Podsnap.
It was largely in the hands of a feverish and unfamiliar type, like
Lammle and Veneering. The fact that he felt these things is almost more
impressive because he did not understand them.

Now for this reason Dickens must definitely be considered in the light
of the changes which his soul foresaw. Thackeray has become classical;
but Dickens has done more: he has remained modern. The grand
retrospective spirit of Thackeray is by its nature attached to places
and times; he belongs to Queen Victoria as much as Addison belongs to
Queen Anne, and it is not only Queen Anne who is dead. But Dickens, in a
dark prophetic kind of way, belongs to the developments. He belongs to
the times since his death when Hard Times grew harder, and when
Veneering became not only a Member of Parliament, but a Cabinet
Minister; the times when the very soul and spirit of Fledgeby carried
war into Africa. Dickens can be criticised as a contemporary of Bernard
Shaw or Anatole France or C. F. G. Masterman. In talking of him one need
no longer talk merely of the Manchester School or Puseyism or the Charge
of the Light Brigade; his name comes to the tongue when we are talking
of Christian Socialists or Mr. Roosevelt or County Council Steam Boats
or Guilds of Play. He can be considered under new lights, some larger
and some meaner than his own; and it is a very rough effort so to
consider him which is the excuse of these pages. Of the essays in this
book I desire to say as little as possible; I will discuss any other
subject in preference with a readiness which reaches to avidity. But I
may very curtly apply the explanation used above to the cases of two or
three of them. Thus in the article on _David Copperfield_ I have done
far less than justice to that fine book considered in its relation to
eternal literature; but I have dwelt at some length upon a particular
element in it which has grown enormous in England after Dickens's death.
Thus again, in introducing the _Sketches by Boz_ I have felt chiefly
that I am introducing them to a new generation insufficiently in
sympathy with such palpable and unsophisticated fun. A Board School
education, evolved since Dickens's day, has given to our people a queer
and inadequate sort of refinement, one which prevents them from enjoying
the raw jests of the _Sketches by Boz_, but leaves them easily open to
that slight but poisonous sentimentalism which I note amid all the
merits of David Copperfield. In the same way I shall speak of _Little
Dorrit_, with reference to a school of pessimistic fiction which did not
exist when it was written, of _Hard Times_ in the light of the most
modern crises of economics, and of _The Child's History of England_ in
the light of the most matured authority of history. In short, these
criticisms are an intrinsically ephemeral comment from one generation
upon work that will delight many more. Dickens was a very great man, and
there are many ways of testing and stating the fact. But one permissible
way is to say this, that he was an ignorant man, ill-read in the past,
and often confused about the present. Yet he remains great and true, and
even essentially reliable, if we suppose him to have known not only all
that went before his lifetime, but also all that was to come after.

From this vanishing of the Victorian compromise (I might say the
Victorian illusion) there begins to emerge a menacing and even monstrous
thing--we may begin again to behold the English people. If that strange
dawn ever comes, it will be the final vindication of Dickens. It will be
proved that he is hardly even a caricaturist; that he is something very
like a realist. Those comic monstrosities which the critics found
incredible will be found to be the immense majority of the citizens of
this country. We shall find that Sweedlepipe cuts our hair and
Pumblechook sells our cereals; that Sam Weller blacks our boots and
Tony Weller drives our omnibus. For the exaggerated notion of the
exaggerations of Dickens (as was admirably pointed out by my old friend
and enemy Mr. Blatchford in a _Clarion_ review) is very largely due to
our mixing with only one social class, whose conventions are very
strict, and to whose affectations we are accustomed. In cabmen, in
cobblers, in charwomen, individuality is often pushed to the edge of
insanity. But as long as the Thackerayan platform of gentility stood
firm all this was, comparatively speaking, concealed. For the English,
of all nations, have the most uniform upper class and the most varied
democracy. In France it is the peasants who are solid to uniformity; it
is the marquises who are a little mad. But in England, while good form
restrains and levels the universities and the army, the poor people are
the most motley and amusing creatures in the world, full of humorous
affections and prejudices and twists of irony. Frenchmen tend to be
alike, because they are all soldiers; Prussians because they are all
something else, probably policemen; even Americans are all something,
though it is not easy to say what it is; it goes with hawk-like eyes and
an irrational eagerness. Perhaps it is savages. But two English cabmen
will be as grotesquely different as Mr. Weller and Mr. Wegg. Nor is it
true to say that I see this variety because it is in my own people. For
I do not see the same degree of variety in my own class or in the class
above it; there is more superficial resemblance between two Kensington
doctors or two Highland dukes. No; the democracy is really composed of
Dickens characters, for the simple reason that Dickens was himself one
of the democracy.

There remains one thing to be added to this attempt to exhibit Dickens
in the growing and changing lights of our time. God forbid that any one
(especially any Dickensian) should dilute or discourage the great
efforts towards social improvement. But I wish that social reformers
would more often remember that they are imposing their rules not on dots
and numbers, but on Bob Sawyer and Tim Linkinwater, on Mrs. Lirriper and
Dr. Marigold. I wish Mr. Sidney Webb would shut his eyes until he _sees_
Sam Weller.

A great many circumstances have led to the neglect in literature of
these exuberant types which do actually exist in the ruder classes of
society. Perhaps the principal cause is that since Dickens's time the
study of the poor has ceased to be an art and become a sort of sham
science. Dickens took the poor individually: all modern writing tends to
take them collectively. It is said that the modern realist produces a
photograph rather than a picture. But this is an inadequate objection.
The real trouble with the realist is not that he produces a photograph,
but that he produces a composite photograph. It is like all composite
photographs, blurred; like all composite photographs, hideous; and like
all composite photographs, unlike anything or anybody. The new
sociological novels, which attempt to describe the abstract type of the
working-classes, sin in practice against the first canon of literature,
true when all others are subject to exception. Literature must always be
a pointing out of what is interesting in life; but these books are
duller than the life they represent. Even supposing that Dickens did
exaggerate the degree to which one man differs from another--that was at
least an exaggeration upon the side of literature; it was better than a
mere attempt to reduce what is actually vivid and unmistakable to what
is in comparison colourless or unnoticeable. Even the creditable and
necessary efforts of our time in certain matters of social reform have
discouraged the old distinctive Dickens treatment. People are so anxious
to do something for the poor man that they have a sort of subconscious
desire to think that there is only one kind of man to do it for. Thus
while the old accounts were sometimes too steep and crazy, the new
became too sweeping and flat. People write about the problem of drink,
for instance, as if it were one problem. Dickens could have told them
that there is the abyss between heaven and hell between the incongruous
excesses of Mr. Pickwick and the fatalistic soaking of Mr. Wickfield. He
could have shown that there was nothing in common between the brandy and
water of Bob Sawyer and the rum and water of Mr. Stiggins. People talk
of imprudent marriages among the poor, as if it were all one question.
Dickens could have told them that it is one thing to marry without much
money, like Stephen Blackpool, and quite another to marry without the
smallest intention of ever trying to get any, like Harold Skimpole.
People talk about husbands in the working-classes being kind or brutal
to their wives, as if that was the one permanent problem and no other
possibility need be considered. Dickens could have told them that there
was the case (the by no means uncommon case) of the husband of Mrs.
Gargery as well as of the wife of Mr. Quilp. In short, Dickens saw the
problem of the poor not as a dead and definite business, but as a living
and very complex one. In some ways he would be called much more
conservative than the modern sociologists, in some ways much more
revolutionary.


LITTLE DORRIT

In the time of the decline and death of Dickens, and even more strongly
after it, there arose a school of criticism which substantially
maintained that a man wrote better when he was ill. It was some such
sentiment as this that made Mr. George Gissing, that able writer, come
near to contending that _Little Dorrit_ is Dickens's best book. It was
the principle of his philosophy to maintain (I know not why) that a man
was more likely to perceive the truth when in low spirits than when in
high spirits.


REPRINTED PIECES

The three articles on Sunday of which I speak are almost the last
expression of an articulate sort in English literature of the ancient
and existing morality of the English people. It is always asserted that
Puritanism came in with the seventeenth century and thoroughly soaked
and absorbed the English. We are now, it is constantly said, an
incurably Puritanic people. Personally, I have my doubts about this. I
shall not refuse to admit to the Puritans that they conquered and
crushed the English people; but I do not think that they ever
transformed it. My doubt is chiefly derived from three historical
facts. First, that England was never so richly and recognisably English
as in the Shakespearian age before the Puritan had appeared. Second,
that ever since he did appear there has been a long unbroken line of
brilliant and typical Englishmen who belonged to the Shakespearian and
not the Puritanic tradition; Dryden, Johnson, Wilkes, Fox, Nelson, were
hardly Puritans. And third, that the real rise of a new, cold, and
illiberal morality in these matters seems to me to have occurred in the
time of Queen Victoria, and not of Queen Elizabeth. All things
considered, it is likely that future historians will say that the
Puritans first really triumphed in the twentieth century, and that
Dickens was the last cry of Merry England.

And about these additional, miscellaneous, and even inferior works of
Dickens there is, moreover, another use and fascination which all
Dickensians will understand; which, after a manner, is not for the
profane. All who love Dickens have a strange sense that he is really
inexhaustible. It is this fantastic infinity that divides him even from
the strongest and healthiest romantic artists of a later day--from
Stevenson, for example. I have read _Treasure Island_ twenty times;
nevertheless I know it. But I do not really feel as if I knew all
_Pickwick_; I have not so much read it twenty times as read in it a
million times; and it almost seemed as if I always read something new.
We of the true faith look at each other and understand; yes, our master
was a magician. I believe the books are alive; I believe that leaves
still grow in them, as leaves grow on the trees. I believe that this
fairy library flourishes and increases like a fairy forest: but the
world is listening to us, and we will put our hand upon our mouth.


OUR MUTUAL FRIEND

One thing at least seems certain. Dickens may or may not have been
socialist in his tendencies; one might quote on the affirmative side his
satire against Mr. Podsnap, who thought Centralisation "un-English"; one
might quote in reply the fact that he satirised quite as unmercifully
state and municipal officials of the most modern type. But there is one
condition of affairs which Dickens would certainly have detested and
denounced, and that is the condition in which we actually stand to-day.
At this moment it is vain to discuss whether socialism will be a selling
of men's liberty for bread. The men have already sold the liberty; only
they have not yet got the bread. A most incessant and exacting
interference with the poor is already in operation; they are already
ruled like slaves, only they are not fed like slaves. The children are
forcibly provided with a school; only they are not provided with a
house. Officials give the most detailed domestic directions about the
fireguard; only they do not give the fireguard. Officials bring round
the most stringent directions about the milk; only they do not bring
round the milk. The situation is perhaps the most humorous in the whole
history of oppression. We force the nigger to dig; but as a concession
to him we do not give him a spade. We compel Sambo to cook; but we
consult his dignity so far as to refuse him a fire.

This state of things at least cannot conceivably endure. We must either
give the workers more property and liberty, or we must feed them
properly as we work them properly. If we insist on sending the menu into
them, they will naturally send the bill into us. This may possibly
result (it is not my purpose here to prove that it will) in the drilling
of the English people into hordes of humanely herded serfs; and this
again may mean the fading from our consciousness of all those elves and
giants, monsters and fantastics whom we are faintly beginning to feel
and remember in the land. If this be so, the work of Dickens may be
considered as a great vision--a vision, as Swinburne said, between a
sleep and a sleep. It can be said that between the grey past of
territorial depression and the grey future of economic routine the
strange clouds lifted, and we beheld the land of the living.

Lastly, Dickens is even astonishingly right about Eugene Wrayburne. So
far from reproaching him with not understanding a gentleman, the critic
will be astonished at the accuracy with which he has really observed the
worth and the weakness of the aristocrat. He is quite right when he
suggests that such a man has intelligence enough to despise the
invitations which he has not the energy to refuse. He is quite right
when he makes Eugene (like Mr. Balfour) constantly right in argument
even when he is obviously wrong in fact. Dickens is quite right when he
describes Eugene as capable of cultivating a sort of secondary and false
industry about anything that is not profitable; or pursuing with passion
anything that is not his business. He is quite right in making Eugene
honestly appreciative of essential goodness--in other people. He is
quite right in making him really good at the graceful combination of
satire and sentiment, both perfectly sincere. He is also right in
indicating that the only cure for this intellectual condition is a
violent blow on the head.


DAVID COPPERFIELD

The real achievement of the earlier part of _David Copperfield_ lies in
a certain impression of the little Copperfield living in a land of
giants. It is at once Gargantuan in its fancy and grossly vivid in its
facts; like Gulliver in the land of Brobdingnag when he describes
mountainous hands and faces filling the sky, bristles as big as hedges,
or moles as big as molehills. To him parents and guardians are not
Olympians (as in Mr. Kenneth Grahame's clever book), mysterious and
dignified, dwelling upon a cloudy hill. Rather they are all the more
visible for being large. They come all the closer because they are
colossal. Their queer features and weaknesses stand out large in a sort
of gigantic domesticity, like the hairs and freckles of a
Brobdingnagian. We feel the sombre Murdstone coming upon the house like
a tall storm striding through the sky. We watch every pucker of
Peggotty's peasant face in its moods of flinty prejudice or whimsical
hesitation. We look up and feel that Aunt Betsey in her garden gloves
was really terrible--especially her garden gloves. But one cannot avoid
the impression that as the boy grows larger these figures grow smaller,
and are not perhaps so completely satisfactory.


CHRISTMAS BOOKS

And there is doubtless a certain poetic unity and irony in gathering
together three or four of the crudest and most cocksure of the modern
theorists, with their shrill voices and metallic virtues, under the
fulness and the sonorous sanity of Christian bells. But the figures
satirised in _The Chimes_ cross each other's path and spoil each other
in some degree. The main purpose of the book was a protest against that
impudent and hard-hearted utilitarianism which arranges the people only
in rows of men or even in rows of figures. It is a flaming denunciation
of that strange mathematical morality which was twisted often unfairly
out of Bentham and Mill: a morality by which each citizen must regard
himself as a fraction, and a very vulgar fraction. Though the particular
form of this insolent patronage has changed, this revolt and rebuke is
still of value, and may be wholesome for those who are teaching the poor
to be provident. Doubtless it is a good idea to be provident, in the
sense that Providence is provident, but that should mean being kind, and
certainly not merely being cold.

_The Cricket on the Hearth_, though popular, I think, with many sections
of the great army of Dickensians, cannot be spoken of in any such
abstract or serious terms. It is a brief domestic glimpse; it is an
interior. It must be remembered that Dickens was fond of interiors as
such; he was like a romantic tramp who should go from window to window
looking in at the parlours. He had that solid, indescribable delight in
the mere solidity and neatness of funny little humanity in its funny
little houses, like doll's houses. To him every house was a box, a
Christmas box, in which a dancing human doll was tied up in bricks and
slates instead of string and brown paper. He went from one gleaming
window to another, looking in at the lamp-lit parlours. Thus he stood
for a little while looking in at this cosy if commonplace interior of
the carrier and his wife; but he did not stand there very long. He was
on his way to quainter towns and villages. Already the plants were
sprouting upon the balcony of Miss Tox; and the great wind was rising
that flung Mr. Pecksniff against his own front door.


TALE OF TWO CITIES

It was well for him, at any rate, that the people rose in France. It was
well for him, at any rate, that the guillotine was set up in the Place
de la Concorde. Unconsciously, but not accidentally, Dickens was here
working out the whole true comparison between swift revolutionism in
Paris and slow evolutionism in London. Sidney Carton is one of those
sublime ascetics whose head offends them, and who cut it off. For him at
least it was better that the blood should flow in Paris than that the
wine should flow any longer in London. And if I say that even now the
guillotine might be the best cure for many a London lawyer, I ask you to
believe that I am not merely flippant. But you will not believe it.


BARNABY RUDGE

It may be said that there is no comparison between that explosive
opening of the intellect in Paris and an antiquated madman leading a
knot of provincial Protestants. The Man of the Hill, says Victor Hugo
somewhere, fights for an idea; the Man of the Forest for a prejudice.
Nevertheless it remains true that the enemies of the red cap long
attempted to represent it as a sham decoration in the style of Sim
Tappertit. Long after the revolutionists had shown more than the
qualities of men, it was common among lords and lacqueys to attribute to
them the stagey and piratical pretentiousness of urchins. The kings
called Napoleon's pistol a toy pistol even while it was holding up their
coach and mastering their money or their lives; they called his sword a
stage sword even while they ran away from it. Something of the same
senile inconsistency can be found in an English and American habit
common until recently: that of painting the South Americans at once as
ruffians wading in carnage, and also as poltroons playing at war. They
blame them first for the cruelty of having a fight; and then for the
weakness of having a sham fight. Such, however, since the French
Revolution and before it, has been the fatuous attitude of certain
Anglo-Saxons towards the whole revolutionary tradition. Sim Tappertit
was a sort of answer to everything; and the young men were mocked as
'prentices long after they were masters. The rising fortune of the South
American republics to-day is symbolical and even menacing of many
things; and it may be that the romance of riot will not be so much
extinguished as extended; and nearer home we may have boys being boys
again, and in London the cry of "clubs."


THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER

_The Uncommercial Traveller_ is a collection of Dickens's memories
rather than of his literary purposes; but it is due to him to say that
memory is often more startling in him than prophecy in anybody else.
They have the character which belongs to all his vivid incidental
writing: that they attach themselves always to some text which is a fact
rather than an idea. He was one of those sons of Eve who are fonder of
the Tree of Life than of the Tree of Knowledge--even of the knowledge of
good and of evil. He was in this profoundest sense a realist. Critics
have talked of an artist with his eye on the object. Dickens as an
essayist always had his eye on an object before he had the faintest
notion of a subject. All these works of his can best be considered as
letters; they are notes of personal travel, scribbles in a diary about
this or that that really happened. But Dickens was one of the few men
who have the two talents that are the whole of literature--and have them
both together. First, he could make a thing happen over again; and
second, he could make it happen better. He can be called exaggerative;
but mere exaggeration conveys nothing of his typical talent. Mere
whirlwinds of words, mere melodramas of earth and heaven do not affect
us as Dickens affects us, because they are exaggerations of nothing. If
asked for an exaggeration of something, their inventors would be
entirely dumb. They would not know how to exaggerate a broom-stick; for
the life of them they could not exaggerate a tenpenny nail. Dickens
always began with the nail or the broom-stick. He always began with a
fact even when he was most fanciful; and even when he drew the long bow
he was careful to hit the white.

This riotous realism of Dickens has its disadvantage--a disadvantage
that comes out more clearly in these casual sketches than in his
constructed romances. One grave defect in his greatness is that he was
altogether too indifferent to theories. On large matters he went right
by the very largeness of his mind; but in small matters he suffered from
the lack of any logical test and ready reckoner. Hence his comment upon
the details of civilisation or reform are sometimes apt to be jerky and
jarring, and even grossly inconsistent. So long as a thing was heroic
enough to admire, Dickens admired it; whenever it was absurd enough to
laugh at he laughed at it: so far he was on sure ground. But about all
the small human projects that lie between the extremes of the sublime
and the ridiculous, his criticism was apt to have an accidental quality.
As Matthew Arnold said of the remarks of the Young Man from the Country
about the perambulator, they are felt not to be at the heart of the
situation. On a great many occasions the Uncommercial Traveller seems,
like other hasty travellers, to be criticising elements and institutions
which he has quite inadequately understood; and once or twice the
Uncommercial Traveller might almost as well be a Commercial Traveller
for all he knows of the countryside.

An instance of what I mean may be found in the amusing article about the
nightmares of the nursery. Superficially read it might almost be taken
to mean that Dickens disapproved of ghost stories--disapproved of that
old and genial horror which nurses can hardly supply fast enough for the
children who want it. Dickens, one would have thought, should have been
the last man in the world to object to horrible stories, having himself
written some of the most horrible that exist in the world. The author of
the Madman's Manuscript, of the disease of Monk and the death of Krook,
cannot be considered fastidious in the matter of revolting realism or of
revolting mysticism. If artistic horror is to be kept from the young, it
is at least as necessary to keep little boys from reading _Pickwick_ or
_Bleak House_ as to refrain from telling them the story of Captain
Murderer or the terrible tale of Chips. If there was something appalling
in the rhyme of Chips and pips and ships, it was nothing compared to
that infernal refrain of "Mudstains, bloodstains" which Dickens himself,
in one of his highest moments of hellish art, put into _Oliver Twist_.

I take this one instance of the excellent article called "Nurse's
Stories" because it is quite typical of all the rest. Dickens (accused
of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there is foam upon deep
seas) was really deep about human beings; that is, he was original and
creative about them. But about ideas he did tend to be a little
superficial. He judged them by whether they hit him, and not by what
they were trying to hit. Thus in this book the great wizard of the
Christmas ghosts seems almost the enemy of ghost stories; thus the
almost melodramatic moralist who created Ralph Nickleby and Jonas
Chuzzlewit cannot see the point in original sin; thus the great
denouncer of official oppression in England may be found far too
indulgent to the basest aspects of the modern police. His theories were
less important than his creations, because he was a man of genius. But
he himself thought his theories the more important, because he was a
man.




SKETCHES BY BOZ


The greatest mystery about almost any great writer is why he was ever
allowed to write at all. The first efforts of eminent men are always
imitations; and very often they are bad imitations. The only question is
whether the publisher had (as his name would seem to imply) some
subconscious connection or sympathy with the public, and thus felt
instinctively the presence of something that might ultimately tell; or
whether the choice was merely a matter of chance and one Dickens was
chosen and another Dickens left. The fact is almost unquestionable: most
authors made their reputation by bad books and afterwards supported it
by good ones. This is in some degree true even in the case of Dickens.
The public continued to call him "Boz" long after the public had
forgotten the _Sketches by Boz_. Numberless writers of the time speak of
"Boz" as having written _Martin Chuzzlewit_ and "Boz" as having written
_David Copperfield_. Yet if they had gone back to the original book
signed "Boz" they might even have felt that it was vulgar and flippant.
This is indeed the chief tragedy of publishers: that they may easily
refuse at the same moment the wrong manuscript and the right man. It is
easy to see of Dickens now that he was the right man; but a man might
have been very well excused if he had not realised that the _Sketches_
was the right book. Dickens, I say, is a case for this primary query:
whether there was in the first work any clear sign of his higher
creative spirit. But Dickens is much less a case for this query than
almost all the other great men of his period. The very earliest works of
Thackeray are much more unimpressive than those of Dickens. Nay, they
are much more vulgar than those of Dickens. And worst of all, they are
much more numerous than those of Dickens. Thackeray came much nearer to
being the ordinary literary failure than Dickens ever came. Read some of
the earliest criticisms of Mr. Yellowplush or Michael Angelo Titmarsh
and you will realise that at the very beginning there was more potential
clumsiness and silliness in Thackeray than there ever was in Dickens.
Nevertheless there was some potential clumsiness and silliness in
Dickens; and what there is of it appears here and there in the admirable
_Sketches by Boz_.

Perhaps we may put the matter this way: this is the only one of
Dickens's works of which it is ordinarily necessary to know the date. To
a close and delicate comprehension it is indeed very important that
_Nicholas Nickleby_ was written at the beginning of Dickens's life, and
_Our Mutual Friend_ towards the end of it. Nevertheless anybody could
understand or enjoy these books, whenever they were written. If _Our
Mutual Friend_ was written in the Latin of the Dark Ages we should still
want it translated. If we thought that _Nicholas Nickleby_ would not be
written until thirty years hence we should all wait for it eagerly. The
general impression produced by Dickens's work is the same as that
produced by miraculous visions; it is the destruction of time. Thomas
Aquinas said that there was no time in the sight of God; however this
may be, there was no time in the sight of Dickens. As a general rule
Dickens can be read in any order; not only in any order of books, but
even in any order of chapters. In an average Dickens book every part is
so amusing and alive that you can read the parts backwards; you can read
the quarrel first and then the cause of the quarrel; you can fall in
love with a woman in the tenth chapter and then turn back to the first
chapter to find out who she is. This is not chaos; it is eternity. It
means merely that Dickens instinctively felt all his figures to be
immortal souls who existed whether he wrote of them or not, and whether
the reader read of them or not. There is a peculiar quality as of
celestial pre-existence about the Dickens characters. Not only did they
exist before we heard of them, they existed also before Dickens heard of
them. As a rule this unchangeable air in Dickens deprives any discussion
about date of its point. But as I have said, this is the one Dickens
work of which the date _is_ essential. It is really an important part of
the criticism of this book to say that it is his first book. Certain
elements of clumsiness, of obviousness, of evident blunder, actually
require the chronological explanation. It is biographically important
that this is his first book, almost exactly in the same way that it is
biographically important that _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ was his last
book. Change or no change, _Edwin Drood_ has this plain point of a last
story about it: that it is not finished. But if the last book is
unfinished, the first book is more unfinished still.

The _Sketches_ divide themselves, of course, into two broad classes. One
half consists of sketches that are truly and in the strict sense
sketches. That is, they are things that have no story and in their
outline none of the character of creation; they are merely facts from
the street or the tavern or the town hall, noted down as they occurred
by an intelligence of quite exceptional vivacity. The second class
consists of purely creative things: farces, romances, stories in any
case with a non-natural perfection, or a poetical justice, to round them
off. One class is admirably represented, for instance, by the sketch
describing the Charity Dinner, the other by such a story as that of
_Horatio Sparkins_. These things were almost certainly written by
Dickens at very various periods of his youth; and early as the harvest
is, no doubt it is a harvest and had ripened during a reasonably long
time. Nevertheless it is with these two types of narrative that the
young Charles Dickens first enters English literature; he enters it with
a number of journalistic notes of such things as he has seen happen in
streets or offices, and with a number of short stories which err on the
side of the extravagant and even the superficial. Journalism had not
then, indeed, sunk to the low level which it has since reached. His
sketches of dirty London would not have been dirty enough for the modern
Imperialist press. Still these first efforts of his are journalism, and
sometimes vulgar journalism. It was as a journalist that he attacked the
world, as a journalist that he conquered it.

The biographical circumstances will not, of course, be forgotten. The
life of Dickens had been a curious one. Brought up in a family just poor
enough to be painfully conscious of its prosperity and its
respectability, he had been suddenly flung by a financial calamity into
a social condition far below his own. For men on that exact edge of the
educated class such a transition is really tragic. A duke may become a
navvy for a joke, but a clerk cannot become a navvy for a joke.
Dickens's parents went to a debtors' prison; Dickens himself went to a
far more unpleasant place. The debtors' prison had about it at least
that element of amiable compromise and kindly decay which belonged (and
belongs still) to all the official institutions of England. But Dickens
was doomed to see the very blackest aspect of nineteenth-century
England, something far blacker than any mere bad government. He went not
to a prison but to a factory. In the musty traditionalism of the
Marshalsea old John Dickens could easily remain optimistic. In the
ferocious efficiency of the modern factory young Charles Dickens
narrowly escaped being a pessimist. He did escape this danger; finally
he even escaped the factory itself. His next step in life was, if
possible, even more eccentric. He was sent to school; he was sent off
like an innocent little boy in Eton collars to learn the rudiments of
Latin grammar, without any reference to the fact that he had already
taken his part in the horrible competition and actuality of the age of
manufactures. It was like giving a sacked bank manager a satchel and
sending him to a dame's school. Nor was the third stage of this career
unconnected with the oddity of the others. On leaving the school he was
made a clerk in a lawyer's office, as if henceforward this child of
ridiculous changes was to settle down into a silent assistant for a
quiet solicitor. It was exactly at this moment that his fundamental
rebellion began to seethe; it seethed more against the quiet finality of
his legal occupation than it had seethed against the squalor and slavery
of his days of poverty. There must have been in his mind, I think, a dim
feeling: "Did all my dark crises mean only this; was I crucified only
that I might become a solicitor's clerk?" Whatever be the truth about
this conjecture there can be no question about the facts themselves. It
was about this time that he began to burst and bubble over, to insist
upon his own intellect, to claim a career. It was about this time that
he put together a loose pile of papers, satires on institutions,
pictures of private persons, fairy tales of the vulgarity of his world,
odds and ends such as come out of the facility and the fierce vanity of
youth. It was about this time at any rate that he decided to publish
them, and gave them the name of _Sketches by Boz_.

They must, I think, be read in the light of this youthful explosion. In
some psychological sense he had really been wronged. But he had only
become conscious of his wrongs as his wrongs had been gradually righted.
Similarly, it has often been found that a man who can patiently endure
penal servitude through a judicial blunder will nevertheless, when once
his cause is well asserted, quarrel about the amount of compensation or
complain of small slights in his professional existence. These are the
marks of the first literary action of Dickens. It has in it all the
peculiar hardness of youth; a hardness which in those who have in any
way been unfairly treated reaches even to impudence. It is a terrible
thing for any man to find out that his elders are wrong. And this
almost unkindly courage of youth must partly be held responsible for the
smartness of Dickens, that almost offensive smartness which in these
earlier books of his sometimes irritates us like the showy gibes in the
tall talk of a school-boy. These first pages bear witness both to the
energy of his genius and also to its unenlightenment; he seems more
ignorant and more cocksure than so great a man should be. Dickens was
never stupid, but he was sometimes silly; and he is occasionally silly
here.

All this must be said to prepare the more fastidious modern for these
papers, if he has never read them before. But when all this has been
said there remains in them exactly what always remains in Dickens when
you have taken away everything that can be taken away by the most
fastidious modern who ever dissected his grandmother. There remains that
_primum mobile_ of which all the mystics have spoken: energy, the power
to create. I will not call it "the will to live," for that is a priggish
phrase of German professors. Even German professors, I suppose, have the
will to live. But Dickens had exactly what German professors have not:
he had the power to live. And indeed it is most valuable to have these
early specimens of the Dickens work if only because they are specimens
of his spirit apart from his matured intelligence. It is well to be able
to realise that contact with the Dickens world is almost like a physical
contact; it is like stepping suddenly into the hot smells of a
greenhouse, or into the bleak smell of the sea. We know that we are
there. Let any one read, for instance, one of the foolish but amusing
farces in Dickens's first volume. Let him read, for instance, such a
story as that of _Horatio Sparkins_ or that of _The Tuggses at
Ramsgate_. He will not find very much of that verbal felicity or
fantastic irony that Dickens afterwards developed; the incidents are
upon the plain lines of the stock comedy of the day: sharpers who entrap
simpletons, spinsters who angle for husbands, youths who try to look
Byronic and only look foolish. Yet there is something in these stories
which there is not in the ordinary stock comedies of that day: an
indefinable flavour of emphasis and richness, a hint as of infinity of
fun. Doubtless, for instance, a million comic writers of that epoch had
made game of the dark, romantic young man who pretended to abysses of
philosophy and despair. And it is not easy to say exactly why we feel
that the few metaphysical remarks of Mr. Horatio Sparkins are in some
way really much funnier than any of those old stock jokes. It is in a
certain quality of deep enjoyment in the writer as well as the reader;
as if the few words written had been dipped in dark nonsense and were,
as it were, reeking with derision. "Because if Effect be the result of
Cause and Cause be the Precursor of Effect," said Mr. Horatio Sparkins,
"I apprehend that you are wrong." Nobody can get at the real secret of
sentences like that; sentences which were afterwards strewed with
reckless liberality over the conversation of Dick Swiveller or Mr.
Mantalini, Sim Tappertit or Mr. Pecksniff. Though the joke seems most
superficial one has only to read it a certain number of times to see
that it is most subtle. The joke does not lie in Mr. Sparkins merely
using long words, any more than the joke lies merely in Mr. Swiveller
drinking, or in Mr. Mantalini deceiving his wife. It is something in
the arrangement of the words; something in a last inspired turn of
absurdity given to a sentence. In spite of everything Horatio Sparkins
is funny. We cannot tell why he is funny. When we know why he is funny
we shall know why Dickens is great.

Standing as we do here upon the threshold, as it were, of the work of
Dickens, it may be well perhaps to state this truth as being, after all,
the most important one. This first work had, as I have said, the faults
of first work and the special faults that arose from its author's
accidental history; he was deprived of education, and therefore it was
in some ways uneducated; he was confronted with the folly and failure of
his natural superiors and guardians, and therefore it was in some ways
pert and insolent. Nevertheless the main fact about the work is worth
stating here for any reader who should follow the chronological order
and read the _Sketches by Boz_ before embarking on the stormy and
splendid sea of _Pickwick_. For the sea of _Pickwick_, though splendid,
does make some people seasick. The great point to be emphasised at such
an initiation is this: that people, especially refined people, are not
to judge of Dickens by what they would call the coarseness or
commonplaceness of his subject. It is quite true that his jokes are
often on the same _subjects_ as the jokes in a halfpenny comic paper.
Only they happen to be good jokes. He does make jokes about drunkenness,
jokes about mothers-in-law, jokes about henpecked husbands, jokes (which
is much more really unpardonable) about spinsters, jokes about physical
cowardice, jokes about fatness, jokes about sitting down on one's hat.
He does make fun of all these things; and the reason is not very far to
seek. He makes fun of all these things because all these things, or
nearly all of them, are really very funny. But a large number of those
who might otherwise read and enjoy Dickens are undoubtedly "put off" (as
the phrase goes) by the fact that he seems to be echoing a poor kind of
claptrap in his choice of incidents and images. Partly, of course, he
suffers from the very fact of his success; his play with these topics
was so good that every one else has played with them increasingly since;
he may indeed have copied the old jokes, but he certainly renewed them.
For instance, "Ally Sloper" was certainly copied from Wilkins Micawber.
To this day you may see (in the front page of that fine periodical) the
bald head and the high shirt collar that betray the high original from
which "Ally Sloper" is derived. But exactly because "Sloper" was stolen
from Micawber, for that very reason the new generation feels as if
Micawber were stolen from "Sloper." Many modern readers feel as if
Dickens were copying the comic papers, whereas in truth the comic papers
are still copying Dickens.

Dickens showed himself to be an original man by always accepting old and
established topics. There is no clearer sign of the absence of
originality among modern poets than their disposition to find new
themes. Really original poets write poems about the spring. They are
always fresh, just as the spring is always fresh. Men wholly without
originality write poems about torture, or new religions, of some
perversion of obscenity, hoping that the mere sting of the subject may
speak for them. But we do not sufficiently realise that what is true of
the classic ode is also true of the classic joke. A true poet writes
about the spring being beautiful because (after a thousand springs) the
spring really is beautiful. In the same way the true humourist writes
about a man sitting down on his hat, because the act of sitting down on
one's hat (however often and however admirably performed) really is
extremely funny. We must not dismiss a new poet because his poem is
called _To a Skylark_; nor must we dismiss a humourist because his new
farce is called _My Mother-in-law_. He may really have splendid and
inspiring things to say upon an eternal problem. The whole question is
whether he has.

Now this is exactly where Dickens, and the possible mistake about
Dickens, both come in. Numbers of sensitive ladies, numbers of simple
aesthetes, have had a vague shrinking from that element in Dickens which
begins vaguely in _The Tuggses at Ramsgate_ and culminates in
_Pickwick_. They have a vague shrinking from the mere subject matter;
from the mere fact that so much of the fun is about drinking or
fighting, or falling down, or eloping with old ladies. It is to these
that the first appeal must be made upon the threshold of Dickens
criticism. Let them really read the thing and really see whether the
humour is the gross and half-witted jeering which they imagine it to be.
It is exactly here that the whole genius of Dickens is concerned. His
subjects are indeed stock subjects; like the skylark of Shelley, or the
autumn of Keats. But all the more because they are stock subjects the
reader realises what a magician is at work. The notion of a clumsy
fellow who falls off his horse is indeed a stock and stale subject. But
Mr. Winkle is not a stock and stale subject. Nor is his horse a stock
and stale subject; it is as immortal as the horses of Achilles. The
notion of a fat old gentleman proud of his legs might easily be vulgar.
But Mr. Pickwick proud of his legs is not vulgar; somehow we feel that
they were legs to be proud of. And it is exactly this that we must look
for in these _Sketches_. We must not leap to any cheap fancy that they
are low farces. Rather we must see that they are not low farces; and see
that nobody but Dickens could have prevented them from being so.




PICKWICK PAPERS


There are those who deny with enthusiasm the existence of a God and are
happy in a hobby which they call the Mistakes of Moses. I have not
studied their labours in detail, but it seems that the chief mistake of
Moses was that he neglected to write the Pentateuch. The lesser errors,
apparently, were not made by Moses, but by another person equally
unknown. These controversialists cover the very widest field, and their
attacks upon Scripture are varied to the point of wildness. They range
from the proposition that the unexpurgated Bible is almost as unfit for
an American girls' school as is an unexpurgated Shakespeare; they
descend to the proposition that kissing the Book is almost as
hygienically dangerous as kissing the babies of the poor. A superficial
critic might well imagine that there was not one single sentence left of
the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures which this school had not marked with
some ingenious and uneducated comment. But there is one passage at least
upon which they have never pounced, at least to my knowledge; and in
pointing it out to them I feel that I am, or ought to be, providing
material for quite a multitude of Hyde Park orations. I mean that
singular arrangement in the mystical account of the Creation by which
light is created first and all the luminous bodies afterwards. One could
not imagine a process more open to the elephantine logic of the
Bible-smasher than this: that the sun should be created after the
sunlight. The conception that lies at the back of the phrase is indeed
profoundly antagonistic to much of the modern point of view. To many
modern people it would sound like saying that foliage existed before the
first leaf; it would sound like saying that childhood existed before a
baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to most modern
thought, and like many other ideas which are alien to most modern
thought, it is a very subtle and a very sound idea. Whatever be the
meaning of the passage in the actual primeval poem, there is a very real
metaphysical meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun and
stars. It is not barbaric; it is rather Platonic. The idea existed
before any of the machinery which made manifest the idea. Justice
existed when there was no need of judges, and mercy existed before any
man was oppressed.

However this may be in the matter of religion and philosophy, it can be
said with little exaggeration that this truth is the very key of
literature. The whole difference between construction and creation is
exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is
constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the
mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book
exists before the book or before even the details or main features of
the book; the author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic
rapture. He wishes to write a comic story before he has thought of a
single comic incident. He desires to write a sad story before he has
thought of anything sad. He knows the atmosphere before he knows
anything. There is a low priggish maxim sometimes uttered by men so
frivolous as to take humour seriously--a maxim that a man should not
laugh at his own jokes. But the great artist not only laughs at his own
jokes; he laughs at his own jokes before he has made them. In the case
of a man really humorous we can see humour in his eye before he has
thought of any amusing words at all. So the creative writer laughs at
his comedy before he creates it, and he has tears for his tragedy before
he knows what it is. When the symbols and the fulfilling facts do come
to him, they come generally in a manner very fragmentary and inverted,
mostly in irrational glimpses of crisis or consummation. The last page
comes before the first; before his romance has begun, he knows that it
has ended well. He sees the wedding before the wooing; he sees the death
before the duel. But most of all he sees the colour and character of the
whole story prior to any possible events in it. This is the real
argument for art and style, only that the artists and the stylists have
not the sense to use it. In one very real sense style is far more
important than either character or narrative. For a man knows what style
of book he wants to write when he knows nothing else about it.

_Pickwick_ is in Dickens's career the mere mass of light before the
creation of sun or moon. It is the splendid, shapeless substance of
which all his stars were ultimately made. You might split up _Pickwick_
into innumerable novels as you could split up that primeval light into
innumerable solar systems. The _Pickwick Papers_ constitute first and
foremost a kind of wild promise, a pre-natal vision of all the children
of Dickens. He had not yet settled down into the plain, professional
habit of picking out a plot and characters, of attending to one thing at
a time, of writing a separate, sensible novel and sending it off to his
publishers. He is still in the youthful whirl of the kind of world that
he would like to create. He has not yet really settled what story he
will write, but only what sort of story he will write. He tries to tell
ten stories at once; he pours into the pot all the chaotic fancies and
crude experiences of his boyhood; he sticks in irrelevant short stories
shamelessly, as into a scrap-book; he adopts designs and abandons them,
begins episodes and leaves them unfinished; but from the first page to
the last there is a nameless and elemental ecstasy--that of the man who
is doing the kind of thing that he can do. Dickens, like every other
honest and effective writer, came at last to some degree of care and
self-restraint. He learned how to make his _dramatis personae_ assist his
drama; he learned how to write stories which were full of rambling and
perversity, but which were stories. But before he wrote a single real
story, he had a kind of vision. It was a vision of the Dickens world--a
maze of white roads, a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches,
clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering
figures. That vision was _Pickwick_.

It must be remembered that this is true even in connection with the
man's contemporaneous biography. Apart from anything else about it,
_Pickwick_ was his first great chance. It was a big commission given in
some sense to an untried man, that he might show what he could do. It
was in a strict sense a sample. And just as a sample of leather can be
only a piece of leather, or a sample of coal a lump of coal, so this
book may most properly be regarded as simply a lump of Dickens. He was
anxious to show all that was in him. He was more concerned to prove that
he could write well than to prove that he could write this particular
book well. And he did prove this, at any rate. No one ever sent such a
sample as the sample of Dickens. His roll of leather blocked up the
street; his lump of coal set the Thames on fire.

The book originated in the suggestion of a publisher; as many more good
books have done than the arrogance of the man of letters is commonly
inclined to admit. Very much is said in our time about Apollo and
Admetus, and the impossibility of asking genius to work within
prescribed limits or assist an alien design. But after all, as a matter
of fact, some of the greatest geniuses have done it, from Shakespeare
botching up bad comedies and dramatising bad novels down to Dickens
writing a masterpiece as the mere framework for a Mr. Seymour's
sketches. Nor is the true explanation irrelevant to the spirit and power
of Dickens. Very delicate, slender, and _bizarre_ talents are indeed
incapable of being used for an outside purpose, whether of public good
or of private gain. But about very great and rich talent there goes a
certain disdainful generosity which can turn its hand to anything. Minor
poets cannot write to order; but very great poets can write to order.
The larger the man's mind, the wider his scope of vision, the more
likely it will be that anything suggested to him will seem significant
and promising; the more he has a grasp of everything the more ready he
will be to write anything. It is very hard (if that is the question) to
throw a brick at a man and ask him to write an epic; but the more he is
a great man the more able he will be to write about the brick. It is
very unjust (if that is all) to point to a hoarding of Colman's mustard
and demand a flood of philosophical eloquence; but the greater the man
is the more likely he will be to give it to you. So it was proved, not
for the first time, in this great experiment of the early employment of
Dickens. Messrs. Chapman and Hall came to him with a scheme for a string
of sporting stories to serve as the context, and one might almost say
the excuse, for a string of sketches by Seymour, the sporting artist.
Dickens made some modifications in the plan, but he adopted its main
feature; and its main feature was Mr. Winkle. To think of what Mr.
Winkle might have been in the hands of a dull _farceur_, and then to
think of what he is, is to experience the feeling that Dickens made a
man out of rags and refuse. Dickens was to work splendidly and
successfully in many fields, and to send forth many brilliant books and
brave figures. He was destined to have the applause of continents like a
statesman, and to dictate to his publishers like a despot; but perhaps
he never worked again so supremely well as here, where he worked in
chains. It may well be questioned whether his one hack book is not his
masterpiece.

Of course it is true that as he went on his independence increased, and
he kicked quite free of the influences that had suggested his story. So
Shakespeare declared his independence of the original chronicle of
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, eliminating altogether (with some wisdom)
another uncle called Wiglerus. At the start the Nimrod Club of Chapman
and Hall may have even had equal chances with the Pickwick Club of young
Mr. Dickens; but the Pickwick Club became something much better than any
publisher had dared to dream of. Some of the old links were indeed
severed by accident or extraneous trouble; Seymour, for whose sake the
whole had perhaps been planned, blew his brains out before he had drawn
ten pictures. But such things were trifles compared to _Pickwick_
itself. It mattered little now whether Seymour blew his brains out, so
long as Charles Dickens blew his brains in. The work became
systematically and progressively more powerful and masterly. Many
critics have commented on the somewhat discordant and inartistic change
between the earlier part of _Pickwick_ and the later; they have pointed
out, not without good sense, that the character of Mr. Pickwick changes
from that of a silly buffoon to that of a solid merchant. But the case,
if these critics had noticed it, is much stronger in the minor
characters of the great company. Mr. Winkle, who has been an idiot
(even, perhaps, as Mr. Pickwick says, "an impostor"), suddenly becomes a
romantic and even reckless lover, scaling a forbidden wall and planning
a bold elopement. Mr. Snodgrass, who has behaved in a ridiculous manner
in all serious positions, suddenly finds himself in a ridiculous
position--that of a gentleman surprised in a secret love affair--and
behaves in a manner perfectly manly, serious, and honourable. Mr.
Tupman alone has no serious emotional development, and for this reason
it is, presumably, that we hear less and less of Mr. Tupman towards the
end of the book. Dickens has by this time got into a thoroughly serious
mood--a mood expressed indeed by extravagant incidents, but none the
less serious for that; and into this Winkle and Snodgrass, in the
character of romantic lovers, could be made to fit. Mr. Tupman had to be
left out of the love affairs; therefore Mr. Tupman is left out of the
book.

Much of the change was due to the entrance of the greatest character in
the story. It may seem strange at the first glance to say that Sam
Weller helped to make the story serious. Nevertheless, this is strictly
true. The introduction of Sam Weller had, to begin with, some merely
accidental and superficial effects. When Samuel Weller had appeared,
Samuel Pickwick was no longer the chief farcical character. Weller
became the joker and Pickwick in some sense the butt of his jokes. Thus
it was obvious that the more simple, solemn, and really respectable this
butt could be made the better. Mr. Pickwick had been the figure capering
before the footlights. But with the advent of Sam, Mr. Pickwick had
become a sort of black background and had to behave as such. But this
explanation, though true as far as it goes, is a mean and unsatisfactory
one, leaving the great elements unexplained. For a much deeper and more
righteous reason Sam Weller introduces the more serious tone of
Pickwick. He introduces it because he introduces something which it was
the chief business of Dickens to preach throughout his life--something
which he never preached so well as when he preached it unconsciously.
Sam Weller introduces the English people.

Sam Weller is the great symbol in English literature of the populace
peculiar to England. His incessant stream of sane nonsense is a
wonderful achievement of Dickens: but it is no great falsification of
the incessant stream of sane nonsense as it really exists among the
English poor. The English poor live in an atmosphere of humour; they
think in humour. Irony is the very air that they breathe. A joke comes
suddenly from time to time into the head of a politician or a gentleman,
and then as a rule he makes the most of it; but when a serious word
comes into the mind of a coster it is almost as startling as a joke. The
word "chaff" was, I suppose, originally applied to badinage to express
its barren and unsustaining character; but to the English poor chaff is
as sustaining as grain. The phrase that leaps to their lips is the
ironical phrase. I remember once being driven in a hansom cab down a
street that turned out to be a _cul de sac_, and brought us bang up
against a wall. The driver and I simultaneously said something. But I
said: "This'll never do!" and he said: "This is all right!" Even in the
act of pulling back his horse's nose from a brick wall, that confirmed
satirist thought in terms of his highly-trained and traditional satire;
while I, belonging to a duller and simpler class, expressed my feelings
in words as innocent and literal as those of a rustic or a child.

This eternal output of divine derision has never been so truly typified
as by the character of Sam; he is a grotesque fountain which gushes the
living waters for ever. Dickens is accused of exaggeration and he is
often guilty of exaggeration; but here he does not exaggerate: he merely
symbolises and sublimates like any other great artist. Sam Weller does
not exaggerate the wit of the London street arab one atom more than
Colonel Newcome, let us say, exaggerates the stateliness of an ordinary
soldier and gentleman, or than Mr. Collins exaggerates the fatuity of a
certain kind of country clergyman. And this breath from the boisterous
brotherhood of the poor lent a special seriousness and smell of reality
to the whole story. The unconscious follies of Winkle and Tupman are
blown away like leaves before the solid and conscious folly of Sam
Weller. Moreover, the relations between Pickwick and his servant Sam are
in some ways new and valuable in literature. Many comic writers had
described the clever rascal and his ridiculous dupe; but here, in a
fresh and very human atmosphere, we have a clever servant who was not a
rascal and a dupe who was not ridiculous. Sam Weller stands in some ways
for a cheerful knowledge of the world; Mr. Pickwick stands for a still
more cheerful ignorance of the world. And Dickens responded to a
profound human sentiment (the sentiment that has made saints and the
sanctity of children) when he made the gentler and less-travelled
type--the type which moderates and controls. Knowledge and innocence are
both excellent things, and they are both very funny. But it is right
that knowledge should be the servant and innocence the master.

The sincerity of this study of Sam Weller has produced one particular
effect in the book which I wonder that critics of Dickens have never
noticed or discussed. Because it has no Dickens "pathos," certain parts
of it are truly pathetic. Dickens, realising rightly that the whole tone
of the book was fun, felt that he ought to keep out of it any great
experiments in sadness and keep within limits those that he put in. He
used this restraint in order not to spoil the humour; but (if he had
known himself better) he might well have used it in order not to spoil
the pathos. This is the one book in which Dickens was, as it were,
forced to trample down his tender feelings; and for that very reason it
is the one book where all the tenderness there is is quite
unquestionably true. An admirable example of what I mean may be found in
the scene in which Sam Weller goes down to see his bereaved father after
the death of his step-mother. The most loyal admirer of Dickens can
hardly prevent himself from giving a slight shudder when he thinks of
what Dickens might have made of that scene in some of his more expansive
and maudlin moments. For all I know old Mrs. Weller might have asked
what the wild waves were saying; and for all I know old Mr. Weller might
have told her. As it is, Dickens, being forced to keep the tale taut and
humorous, gives a picture of humble respect and decency which is manly,
dignified, and really sad. There is no attempt made by these simple and
honest men, the father and son, to pretend that the dead woman was
anything greatly other than she was; their respect is for death, and for
the human weakness and mystery which it must finally cover. Old Tony
Weller does not tell his shrewish wife that she is already a
white-winged angel; he speaks to her with an admirable good nature and
good sense:

     "'Susan,' I says, 'you've been a wery good vife to me altogether:
     keep a good heart, my dear, and you'll live to see me punch that
     'ere Stiggins's 'ead yet.' She smiled at this, Samivel ... but she
     died arter all."

That is perhaps the first and the last time that Dickens ever touched
the extreme dignity of pathos. He is restraining his compassion, and
afterwards he let it go. Now laughter is a thing that can be let go;
laughter has in it a quality of liberty. But sorrow has in it by its
very nature a quality of confinement; pathos by its very nature fights
with itself. Humour is expansive; it bursts outwards; the fact is
attested by the common expression, "holding one's sides." But sorrow is
not expansive; and it was afterwards the mistake of Dickens that he
tried to make it expansive. It is the one great weakness of Dickens as a
great writer, that he did try to make that sudden sadness, that abrupt
pity, which we call pathos, a thing quite obvious, infectious, public,
as if it were journalism or the measles. It is pleasant to think that in
this supreme masterpiece, done in the dawn of his career, there is not
even this faint fleck upon the sun of his just splendour. Pickwick will
always be remembered as the great example of everything that made
Dickens great; of the solemn conviviality of great friendships, of the
erratic adventures of old English roads, of the hospitality of old
English inns, of the great fundamental kindliness and honour of old
English manners. First of all, however, it will always be remembered for
its laughter, or, if you will, for its folly. A good joke is the one
ultimate and sacred thing which cannot be criticised. Our relations
with a good joke are direct and even divine relations. We speak of
"seeing" a joke just as we speak of "seeing" a ghost or a vision. If we
have seen it, it is futile to argue with us; and we have seen the vision
of _Pickwick_. _Pickwick_ may be the top of Dickens's humour; I think
upon the whole it is. But the broad humour of _Pickwick_ he broadened
over many wonderful kingdoms; the narrow pathos of _Pickwick_ he never
found again.




NICHOLAS NICKLEBY


Romance is perhaps the highest point of human expression, except indeed
religion, to which it is closely allied. Romance resembles religion
especially in this, that it is not only a simplification but a
shortening of existence. Both romance and religion see everything as it
were foreshortened; they see everything in an abrupt and fantastic
perspective, coming to an apex. It is the whole essence of perspective
that it comes to a point. Similarly, religion comes to a point--to the
point. Thus religion is always insisting on the shortness of human life.
But it does not insist on the shortness of human life as the pessimists
insist on it. Pessimism insists on the shortness of human life in order
to show that life is valueless. Religion insists on the shortness of
human life in order to show that life is frightfully valuable--is almost
horribly valuable. Pessimism says that life is so short that it gives
nobody a chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives
everybody his final chance. In the first case the word brevity means
futility; in the second case, opportunity. But the case is even stronger
than this. Religion shortens everything. Religion shortens even
eternity. Where science, submitting to the false standard of time, sees
evolution, which is slow, religion sees creation, which is sudden.
Philosophically speaking, the process is neither slow nor quick since
we have nothing to compare it with. Religion prefers to think of it as
quick. For religion the flowers shoot up suddenly like rockets. For
religion the mountains are lifted up suddenly like waves. Those who
quote that fine passage which says that in God's sight a thousand years
are as yesterday that is passed as a watch in the night, do not realise
the full force of the meaning. To God a thousand years are not only a
watch but an exciting watch. For God time goes at a gallop, as it does
to a man reading a good tale.

All this is, in a humble manner, true for romance. Romance is a
shortening and sharpening of the human difficulty. Where you and I have
to vote against a man, or write (rather feebly) against a man, or sign
illegible petitions against a man, romance does for him what we should
really like to see done. It knocks him down; it shortens the slow
process of historical justice. All romances consist of three characters.
Other characters may be introduced; but those other characters are
certainly mere scenery as far as the romance is concerned. They are
bushes that wave rather excitedly; they are posts that stand up with a
certain pride; they are correctly painted rocks that frown very
correctly; but they are all landscape--they are all a background. In
every pure romance there are three living and moving characters. For the
sake of argument they may be called St. George and the Dragon and the
Princess. In every romance there must be the twin elements of loving and
fighting. In every romance there must be the three characters: there
must be the Princess, who is a thing to be loved; there must be the
Dragon, who is a thing to be fought; and there must be St. George, who
is a thing that both loves and fights. There have been many symptoms of
cynicism and decay in our modern civilisation. But of all the signs of
modern feebleness, of lack of grasp on morals as they actually must be,
there has been none quite so silly or so dangerous as this: that the
philosophers of to-day have started to divide loving from fighting and
to put them into opposite camps. There could be no worse sign than that
a man, even Nietzsche, can be found to say that we should go in for
fighting instead of loving. There can be no worse sign than that a man,
even Tolstoi, can be found to tell us that we should go in for loving
instead of fighting. The two things imply each other; they implied each
other in the old romance and in the old religion, which were the two
permanent things of humanity. You cannot love a thing without wanting to
fight for it. You cannot fight without something to fight for. To love a
thing without wishing to fight for it is not love at all; it is lust. It
may be an airy, philosophical, and disinterested lust; it may be, so to
speak, a virgin lust; but it is lust, because it is wholly
self-indulgent and invites no attack. On the other hand, fighting for a
thing without loving it is not even fighting; it can only be called a
kind of horse-play that is occasionally fatal. Wherever human nature is
human and unspoilt by any special sophistry, there exists this natural
kinship between war and wooing, and that natural kinship is called
romance. It comes upon a man especially in the great hour of youth; and
every man who has ever been young at all has felt, if only for a moment,
this ultimate and poetic paradox. He knows that loving the world is the
same thing as fighting the world. It was at the very moment when he
offered to like everybody he also offered to hit everybody. To almost
every man that can be called a man this especial moment of the romantic
culmination has come. In the first resort the man wished to live a
romance. In the second resort, in the last and worst resort, he was
content to write one.

Now there is a certain moment when this element enters independently
into the life of Dickens. There is a particular time when we can see him
suddenly realise that he wants to write a romance and nothing else. In
reading his letters, in appreciating his character, this point emerges
clearly enough. He was full of the afterglow of his marriage; he was
still young and psychologically ignorant; above all, he was now, really
for the first time, sure that he was going to be at least some kind of
success. There is, I repeat, a certain point at which one feels that
Dickens will either begin to write romances or go off on something
different altogether. This crucial point in his life is marked by
_Nicholas Nickleby_.

It must be remembered that before this issue of _Nicholas Nickleby_ his
work, successful as it was, had not been such as to dedicate him
seriously or irrevocably to the writing of novels. He had already
written three books; and at least two of them are classed among the
novels under his name. But if we look at the actual origin and formation
of these books we see that they came from another source and were really
designed upon another plan. The three books were, of course, the
_Sketches by Boz_, _the Pickwick Papers_, and _Oliver Twist_. It is, I
suppose, sufficiently well understood that the _Sketches by Boz_ are, as
their name implies, only sketches. But surely it is quite equally clear
that the _Pickwick Papers_ are, as their name implies, merely papers.
Nor is the case at all different in spirit and essence when we come to
_Oliver Twist_. There is indeed a sort of romance in _Oliver Twist_, but
it is such an uncommonly bad one that it can hardly be regarded as
greatly interrupting the previous process; and if the reader chooses to
pay very little attention to it, he cannot pay less attention to it than
the author did. But in fact the case lies far deeper. _Oliver Twist_ is
so much apart from the ordinary track of Dickens, it is so gloomy, it is
so much all in one atmosphere, that it can best be considered as an
exception or a solitary excursus in his work. Perhaps it can best be
considered as the extension of one of his old sketches, of some sketch
that happened to be about a visit to a workhouse or a gaol. In the
_Sketches by Boz_ he might well have visited a workhouse where he saw
Bumble; in the _Sketches by Boz_ he might well have visited a prison
where he saw Fagin. We are still in the realm of sketches and
sketchiness. _The Pickwick Papers_ may be called an extension of one of
his bright sketches. _Oliver Twist_ may be called an extension of one of
his gloomy ones.

Had he continued along this line all his books might very well have been
note-books. It would be very easy to split up all his subsequent books
into scraps and episodes, such as those which make up the _Sketches by
Boz_. It would be easy enough for Dickens, instead of publishing
_Nicholas Nickleby_, to have published a book of sketches, one of which
was called "A Yorkshire School," another called "A Provincial Theatre,"
and another called "Sir Mulberry Hawk or High Life Revealed," another
called "Mrs. Nickleby or a Lady's Monologue." It would have been very
easy to have thrown over the rather chaotic plan of the _Old Curiosity
Shop_. He might have merely written short stories called "The Glorious
Apollos," "Mrs. Quilp's Tea-Party," "Mrs. Jarley's Waxwork," "The Little
Servant," and "The Death of a Dwarf." _Martin Chuzzlewit_ might have
been twenty stories instead of one story. _Dombey and Son_ might have
been twenty stories instead of one story. We might have lost all
Dickens's novels; we might have lost altogether Dickens the novelist. We
might have lost that steady love of a seminal and growing romance which
grew on him steadily as the years advanced, and which gave us towards
the end some of his greatest triumphs. All his books might have been
_Sketches by Boz_. But he did turn away from this, and the turning-point
is _Nicholas Nickleby_.

Everything has a supreme moment and is crucial; that is where our
friends the evolutionists go wrong. I suppose that there is an instant
of midsummer as there is an instant of midnight. If in the same way
there is a supreme point of spring, _Nicholas Nickleby_ is the supreme
point of Dickens's spring. I do not mean that it is the best book that
he wrote in his youth. _Pickwick_ is a better book. I do not mean that
it contains more striking characters than any of the other books in his
youth. The _Old Curiosity Shop_ contains at least two more striking
characters. But I mean that this book coincided with his resolution to
be a great novelist and his final belief that he could be one.
Henceforward his books are novels, very commonly bad novels. Previously
they have not really been novels at all. There are many indications of
the change I mean. Here is one, for instance, which is more or less
final. _Nicholas Nickleby_ is Dickens's first romantic novel because it
is his first novel with a proper and dignified romantic hero; which
means, of course, a somewhat chivalrous young donkey. The hero of
_Pickwick_ is an old man. The hero of _Oliver Twist_ is a child. Even
after _Nicholas Nickleby_ this non-romantic custom continued. The _Old
Curiosity Shop_ has no hero in particular. The hero of _Barnaby Rudge_
is a lunatic. But Nicholas Nickleby is a proper, formal, and ceremonial
hero. He has no psychology; he has not even any particular character;
but he is made deliberately a hero--young, poor, brave, unimpeachable,
and ultimately triumphant. He is, in short, the hero. Mr. Vincent
Crummles had a colossal intellect; and I always have a fancy that under
all his pomposity he saw things more keenly than he allowed others to
see. The moment he saw Nicholas Nickleby, almost in rags and limping
along the high road, he engaged him (you will remember) as first walking
gentleman. He was right. Nobody could possibly be more of a first
walking gentleman than Nicholas Nickleby was. He was the first walking
gentleman before he went on to the boards of Mr. Vincent Crummles's
theatre, and he remained the first walking gentleman after he had come
off.

Now this romantic method involves a certain element of climax which to
us appears crudity. Nicholas Nickleby, for instance, wanders through the
world; he takes a situation as assistant to a Yorkshire schoolmaster;
he sees an act of tyranny of which he strongly disapproves; he cries out
"Stop!" in a voice that makes the rafters ring; he thrashes the
schoolmaster within an inch of his life; he throws the schoolmaster away
like an old cigar, and he goes away. The modern intellect is positively
prostrated and flattened by this rapid and romantic way of righting
wrongs. If a modern philanthropist came to Dotheboys Hall I fear he
would not employ the simple, sacred, and truly Christian solution of
beating Mr. Squeers with a stick. I fancy he would petition the
Government to appoint a Royal Commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I
think he would every now and then write letters to newspapers reminding
people that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, there was a
Royal Commission to inquire into Mr. Squeers. I agree that he might even
go the length of calling a crowded meeting in St. James's Hall on the
subject of the best policy with regard to Mr. Squeers. At this meeting
some very heated and daring speakers might even go the length of
alluding sternly to Mr. Squeers. Occasionally even hoarse voices from
the back of the hall might ask (in vain) what was going to be done with
Mr. Squeers. The Royal Commission would report about three years
afterwards and would say that many things had happened which were
certainly most regrettable; that Mr. Squeers was the victim of a bad
system; that Mrs. Squeers was also the victim of a bad system; but that
the man who sold Squeers his cane had really acted with great
indiscretion and ought to be spoken to kindly. Something like this would
be what, after four years, the Royal Commission would have said; but it
would not matter in the least what the Royal Commission had said, for by
that time the philanthropists would be off on a new tack and the world
would have forgotten all about Dotheboys Hall and everything connected
with it. By that time the philanthropists would be petitioning
Parliament for another Royal Commission; perhaps a Royal Commission to
inquire into whether Mr. Mantalini was extravagant with his wife's
money; perhaps a commission to inquire into whether Mr. Vincent Crummles
kept the Infant Phenomenon short by means of gin.

If we wish to understand the spirit and the period of _Nicholas
Nickleby_ we must endeavour to comprehend and to appreciate the old more
decisive remedies, or, if we prefer to put it so, the old more desperate
remedies. Our fathers had a plain sort of pity; if you will, a gross and
coarse pity. They had their own sort of sentimentalism. They were quite
willing to weep over Smike. But it certainly never occurred to them to
weep over Squeers. Even those who opposed the French war opposed it
exactly in the same way as their enemies opposed the French soldiers.
They fought with fighting. Charles Fox was full of horror at the
bitterness and the useless bloodshed; but if any one had insulted him
over the matter, he would have gone out and shot him in a duel as coolly
as any of his contemporaries. All their interference was heroic
interference. All their legislation was heroic legislation. All their
remedies were heroic remedies. No doubt they were often narrow and often
visionary. No doubt they often looked at a political formula when they
should have looked at an elemental fact. No doubt they were pedantic in
some of their principles and clumsy in some of their solutions. No
doubt, in short, they were all very wrong; and no doubt we are the
people, and wisdom shall die with us. But when they saw something which
in their eyes, such as they were, really violated their morality, such
as it was, then they did not cry "Investigate!" They did not cry
"Educate!" They did not cry "Improve!" They did not cry "Evolve!" Like
Nicholas Nickleby they cried "Stop!" And it did stop.

This is the first mark of the purely romantic method: the swiftness and
simplicity with which St. George kills the dragon. The second mark of it
is exhibited here as one of the weaknesses of _Nicholas Nickleby_. I
mean the tendency in the purely romantic story to regard the heroine
merely as something to be won; to regard the princess solely as
something to be saved from the dragon. The father of Madeline Bray is
really a very respectable dragon. His selfishness is suggested with much
more psychological tact and truth than that of any other of the villains
that Dickens described about this time. But his daughter is merely the
young woman with whom Nicholas is in love. We do not care a rap about
Madeline Bray. Personally I should have preferred Cecilia Bobster. Here
is one real point where the Victorian romance falls below the
Elizabethan romantic drama. Shakespeare always made his heroines heroic
as well as his heroes.

In Dickens's actual literary career it is this romantic quality in
_Nicholas Nickleby_ that is most important. It is his first definite
attempt to write a young and chivalrous novel. In this sense the comic
characters and the comic scenes are secondary; and indeed the comic
characters and the comic scenes, admirable as they are, could never be
considered as in themselves superior to such characters and such scenes
in many of the other books. But in themselves how unforgettable they
are. Mr. Crummles and the whole of his theatrical business is an
admirable case of that first and most splendid quality in Dickens--I
mean the art of making something which in life we call pompous and dull,
becoming in literature pompous and delightful. I have remarked before
that nearly every one of the amusing characters of Dickens is in reality
a great fool. But I might go further. Almost every one of his amusing
characters is in reality a great bore. The very people that we fly to in
Dickens are the very people that we fly from in life. And there is more
in Crummles than the mere entertainment of his solemnity and his tedium.
The enormous seriousness with which he takes his art is always an exact
touch in regard to the unsuccessful artist. If an artist is successful,
everything then depends upon a dilemma of his moral character. If he is
a mean artist success will make him a society man. If he is a
magnanimous artist, success will make him an ordinary man. But only as
long as he is unsuccessful will he be an unfathomable and serious
artist, like Mr. Crummles. Dickens was always particularly good at
expressing thus the treasures that belong to those who do not succeed in
this world. There are vast prospects and splendid songs in the point of
view of the typically unsuccessful man; if all the used-up actors and
spoilt journalists and broken clerks could give a chorus, it would be a
wonderful chorus in praise of the world. But these unsuccessful men
commonly cannot even speak. Dickens is the voice of them, and a very
ringing voice; because he was perhaps the only one of these unsuccessful
men that was ever successful.




OLIVER TWIST


In considering Dickens, as we almost always must consider him, as a man
of rich originality, we may possibly miss the forces from which he drew
even his original energy. It is not well for man to be alone. We, in the
modern world, are ready enough to admit that when it is applied to some
problem of monasticism or of an ecstatic life. But we will not admit
that our modern artistic claim to absolute originality is really a claim
to absolute unsociability; a claim to absolute loneliness. The anarchist
is at least as solitary as the ascetic. And the men of very vivid vigour
in literature, the men such as Dickens, have generally displayed a large
sociability towards the society of letters, always expressed in the
happy pursuit of pre-existent themes, sometimes expressed, as in the
case of Moliere or Sterne, in downright plagiarism. For even theft is a
confession of our dependence on society. In Dickens, however, this
element of the original foundations on which he worked is quite
especially difficult to determine. This is partly due to the fact that
for the present reading public he is practically the only one of his
long line that is read at all. He sums up Smollett and Goldsmith, but he
also destroys them. This one giant, being closest to us, cuts off from
our view even the giants that begat him. But much more is this
difficulty due to the fact that Dickens mixed up with the old material,
materials so subtly modern, so made of the French Revolution, that the
whole is transformed. If we want the best example of this, the best
example is _Oliver Twist_.

Relatively to the other works of Dickens _Oliver Twist_ is not of great
value, but it is of great importance. Some parts of it are so crude and
of so clumsy a melodrama, that one is almost tempted to say that Dickens
would have been greater without it. But even if he had been greater
without it he would still have been incomplete without it. With the
exception of some gorgeous passages, both of humour and horror, the
interest of the book lies not so much in its revelation of Dickens's
literary genius as in its revelation of those moral, personal, and
political instincts which were the make-up of his character and the
permanent support of that literary genius. It is by far the most
depressing of all his books; it is in some ways the most irritating; yet
its ugliness gives the last touch of honesty to all that spontaneous and
splendid output. Without this one discordant note all his merriment
might have seemed like levity.

Dickens had just appeared upon the stage and set the whole world
laughing with his first great story _Pickwick_. _Oliver Twist_ was his
encore. It was the second opportunity given to him by those who had
rolled about with laughter over Tupman and Jingle, Weller and Dowler.
Under such circumstances a stagey reciter will sometimes take care to
give a pathetic piece after his humorous one; and with all his many
moral merits, there was much that was stagey about Dickens. But this
explanation alone is altogether inadequate and unworthy. There was in
Dickens this other kind of energy, horrible, uncanny, barbaric, capable
in another age of coarseness, greedy for the emblems of established
ugliness, the coffin, the gibbet, the bones, the bloody knife. Dickens
liked these things and he was all the more of a man for liking them;
especially he was all the more of a boy. We can all recall with pleasure
the fact that Miss Petowker (afterwards Mrs. Lillyvick) was in the habit
of reciting a poem called "The Blood Drinker's Burial." I cannot express
my regret that the words of this poem are not given; for Dickens would
have been quite as capable of writing "The Blood Drinker's Burial" as
Miss Petowker was of reciting it. This strain existed in Dickens
alongside of his happy laughter; both were allied to the same robust
romance. Here as elsewhere Dickens is close to all the permanent human
things. He is close to religion, which has never allowed the thousand
devils on its churches to stop the dancing of its bells. He is allied to
the people, to the real poor, who love nothing so much as to take a
cheerful glass and to talk about funerals. The extremes of his gloom and
gaiety are the mark of religion and democracy; they mark him off from
the moderate happiness of philosophers, and from that stoicism which is
the virtue and the creed of aristocrats. There is nothing odd in the
fact that the same man who conceived the humane hospitalities of
Pickwick should also have imagined the inhuman laughter of Fagin's den.
They are both genuine and they are both exaggerated. And the whole human
tradition has tied up together in a strange knot these strands of
festivity and fear. It is over the cups of Christmas Eve that men have
always competed in telling ghost stories.

This first element was present in Dickens, and it is very powerfully
present in _Oliver Twist_. It had not been present with sufficient
consistency or continuity in _Pickwick_ to make it remain on the
reader's memory at all, for the tale of "Gabriel Grubb" is grotesque
rather than horrible, and the two gloomy stories of the "Madman" and the
"Queer Client" are so utterly irrelevant to the tale, that even if the
reader remember them he probably does not remember that they occur in
_Pickwick_. Critics have complained of Shakespeare and others for
putting comic episodes into a tragedy. It required a man with the
courage and coarseness of Dickens actually to put tragic episodes into a
farce. But they are not caught up into the story at all. In _Oliver
Twist_, however, the thing broke out with an almost brutal inspiration,
and those who had fallen in love with Dickens for his generous
buffoonery may very likely have been startled at receiving such very
different fare at the next helping. When you have bought a man's book
because you like his writing about Mr. Wardle's punch-bowl and Mr.
Winkle's skates, it may very well be surprising to open it and read
about the sickening thuds that beat out the life of Nancy, or that
mysterious villain whose face was blasted with disease.

As a nightmare, the work is really admirable. Characters which are not
very clearly conceived as regards their own psychology are yet, at
certain moments, managed so as to shake to its foundations our own
psychology. Bill Sikes is not exactly a real man, but for all that he is
a real murderer. Nancy is not really impressive as a living woman; but
(as the phrase goes) she makes a lovely corpse. Something quite childish
and eternal in us, something which is shocked with the mere simplicity
of death, quivers when we read of those repeated blows or see Sikes
cursing the tell-tale cur who will follow his bloody foot-prints. And
this strange, sublime, vulgar melodrama, which is melodrama and yet is
painfully real, reaches its hideous height in that fine scene of the
death of Sikes, the besieged house, the boy screaming within, the crowd
screaming without, the murderer turned almost a maniac and dragging his
victim uselessly up and down the room, the escape over the roof, the
rope swiftly running taut, and death sudden, startling and symbolic; a
man hanged. There is in this and similar scenes something of the quality
of Hogarth and many other English moralists of the early eighteenth
century. It is not easy to define this Hogarthian quality in words,
beyond saying that it is a sort of alphabetical realism, like the cruel
candour of children. But it has about it these two special principles
which separate it from all that we call realism in our time. First, that
with us a moral story means a story about moral people; with them a
moral story meant more often a story about immoral people. Second, that
with us realism is always associated with some subtle view of morals;
with them realism was always associated with some simple view of morals.
The end of Bill Sikes exactly in the way that the law would have killed
him--this is a Hogarthian incident; it carries on that tradition of
startling and shocking platitude.

All this element in the book was a sincere thing in the author, but none
the less it came from old soils, from the graveyard and the gallows, and
the lane where the ghost walked. Dickens was always attracted to such
things, and (as Forster says with inimitable simplicity) "but for his
strong sense might have fallen into the follies of spiritualism." As a
matter of fact, like most of the men of strong sense in his tradition,
Dickens was left with a half belief in spirits which became in practice
a belief in bad spirits. The great disadvantage of those who have too
much strong sense to believe in supernaturalism is that they keep last
the low and little forms of the supernatural, such as omens, curses,
spectres, and retributions, but find a high and happy supernaturalism
quite incredible. Thus the Puritans denied the sacraments, but went on
burning witches. This shadow does rest, to some extent, upon the
rational English writers like Dickens; supernaturalism was dying, but
its ugliest roots died last. Dickens would have found it easier to
believe in a ghost than in a vision of the Virgin with angels. There,
for good or evil, however, was the root of the old _diablerie_ in
Dickens, and there it is in _Oliver Twist_. But this was only the first
of the new Dickens elements, which must have surprised those Dickensians
who eagerly bought his second book. The second of the new Dickens
elements is equally indisputable and separate. It swelled afterwards to
enormous proportions in Dickens's work; but it really has its rise here.
Again, as in the case of the element of _diablerie_, it would be
possible to make technical exceptions in favour of _Pickwick_. Just as
there were quite inappropriate scraps of the gruesome element in
_Pickwick_, so there are quite inappropriate allusions to this other
topic in _Pickwick_. But nobody by merely reading _Pickwick_ would even
remember this topic; no one by merely reading _Pickwick_ would know what
this topic is; this third great subject of Dickens; this second great
subject of the Dickens of _Oliver Twist_.

This subject is social oppression. It is surely fair to say that no one
could have gathered from _Pickwick_ how this question boiled in the
blood of the author of _Pickwick_. There are, indeed, passages,
particularly in connection with Mr. Pickwick in the debtor's prison,
which prove to us, looking back on a whole public career, that Dickens
had been from the beginning bitter and inquisitive about the problem of
our civilisation. No one could have imagined at the time that this
bitterness ran in an unbroken river under all the surges of that superb
gaiety and exuberance. With _Oliver Twist_ this sterner side of Dickens
was suddenly revealed. For the very first pages of _Oliver Twist_ are
stern even when they are funny. They amuse, but they cannot be enjoyed,
as can the passages about the follies of Mr. Snodgrass or the
humiliations of Mr. Winkle. The difference between the old easy humour
and this new harsh humour is a difference not of degree but of kind.
Dickens makes game of Mr. Bumble because he wants to kill Mr. Bumble; he
made game of Mr. Winkle because he wanted him to live for ever. Dickens
has taken the sword in hand; against what is he declaring war?

It is just here that the greatness of Dickens comes in; it is just here
that the difference lies between the pedant and the poet. Dickens enters
the social and political war, and the first stroke he deals is not only
significant but even startling. Fully to see this we must appreciate the
national situation. It was an age of reform, and even of radical reform;
the world was full of radicals and reformers; but only too many of them
took the line of attacking everything and anything that was opposed to
some particular theory among the many political theories that possessed
the end of the eighteenth century. Some had so much perfected the
perfect theory of republicanism that they almost lay awake at night
because Queen Victoria had a crown on her head. Others were so certain
that mankind had hitherto been merely strangled in the bonds of the
State that they saw truth only in the destruction of tariffs or of
by-laws. The greater part of that generation held that clearness,
economy, and a hard common-sense, would soon destroy the errors that had
been erected by the superstitions and sentimentalities of the past. In
pursuance of this idea many of the new men of the new century, quite
confident that they were invigorating the new age, sought to destroy the
old sentimental clericalism, the old sentimental feudalism, the
old-world belief in priests, the old-world belief in patrons, and among
other things the old-world belief in beggars. They sought among other
things to clear away the old visionary kindliness on the subject of
vagrants. Hence those reformers enacted not only a new reform bill but
also a new poor law. In creating many other modern things they created
the modern workhouse, and when Dickens came out to fight it was the
first thing that he broke with his battle-axe.

This is where Dickens's social revolt is of more value than mere
politics and avoids the vulgarity of the novel with a purpose. His
revolt is not a revolt of the commercialist against the feudalist, of
the Nonconformist against the Churchman, of the Free-trader against the
Protectionist, of the Liberal against the Tory. If he were among us now
his revolt would not be the revolt of the Socialist against the
Individualist, or of the Anarchist against the Socialist. His revolt was
simply and solely the eternal revolt; it was the revolt of the weak
against the strong. He did not dislike this or that argument for
oppression; he disliked oppression. He disliked a certain look on the
face of a man when he looks down on another man. And that look on the
face is, indeed, the only thing in the world that we have really to
fight between here and the fires of Hell. That which pedants of that
time and this time would have called the sentimentalism of Dickens was
really simply the detached sanity of Dickens. He cared nothing for the
fugitive explanations of the Constitutional Conservatives; he cared
nothing for the fugitive explanations of the Manchester School. He would
have cared quite as little for the fugitive explanations of the Fabian
Society or of the modern scientific Socialist. He saw that under many
forms there was one fact, the tyranny of man over man; and he struck at
it when he saw it, whether it was old or new. When he found that footmen
and rustics were too much afraid of Sir Leicester Dedlock, he attacked
Sir Leicester Dedlock; he did not care whether Sir Leicester Dedlock
said he was attacking England or whether Mr. Rouncewell, the
Ironmaster, said he was attacking an effete oligarchy. In that case he
pleased Mr. Rouncewell, the Iron-master, and displeased Sir Leicester
Dedlock, the Aristocrat. But when he found that Mr. Rouncewell's workmen
were much too frightened of Mr. Rouncewell, then he displeased Mr.
Rouncewell in turn; he displeased Mr. Rouncewell very much by calling
him Mr. Bounderby. When he imagined himself to be fighting old laws he
gave a sort of vague and general approval to new laws. But when he came
to the new laws they had a bad time. When Dickens found that after a
hundred economic arguments and granting a hundred economic
considerations, the fact remained that paupers in modern workhouses were
much too afraid of the beadle, just as vassals in ancient castles were
much too afraid of the Dedlocks, then he struck suddenly and at once.
This is what makes the opening chapters of _Oliver Twist_ so curious and
important. The very fact of Dickens's distance from, and independence
of, the elaborate financial arguments of his time, makes more definite
and dazzling his sudden assertion that he sees the old human tyranny in
front of him as plain as the sun at noon-day. Dickens attacks the modern
workhouse with a sort of inspired simplicity as of a boy in a fairy tale
who had wandered about, sword in hand, looking for ogres and who had
found an indisputable ogre. All the other people of his time are
attacking things because they are bad economics or because they are bad
politics, or because they are bad science; he alone is attacking things
because they are bad. All the others are Radicals with a large R; he
alone is radical with a small one. He encounters evil with that
beautiful surprise which, as it is the beginning of all real pleasure,
is also the beginning of all righteous indignation. He enters the
workhouse just as Oliver Twist enters it, as a little child.

This is the real power and pathos of that celebrated passage in the book
which has passed into a proverb; but which has not lost its terrible
humour even in being hackneyed. I mean, of course, the everlasting
quotation about Oliver Twist asking for more. The real poignancy that
there is in this idea is a very good study in that strong school of
social criticism which Dickens represented. A modern realist describing
the dreary workhouse would have made all the children utterly crushed,
not daring to speak at all, not expecting anything, not hoping anything,
past all possibility of affording even an ironical contrast or a protest
of despair. A modern, in short, would have made all the boys in the
workhouse pathetic by making them all pessimists. But Oliver Twist is
not pathetic because he is a pessimist. Oliver Twist is pathetic because
he is an optimist. The whole tragedy of that incident is in the fact
that he does expect the universe to be kind to him, that he does believe
that he is living in a just world. He comes before the Guardians as the
ragged peasants of the French Revolution came before the Kings and
Parliaments of Europe. That is to say, he comes, indeed, with gloomy
experiences, but he comes with a happy philosophy. He knows that there
are wrongs of man to be reviled; but he believes also that there are
rights of man to be demanded. It has often been remarked as a singular
fact that the French poor, who stand in historic tradition as typical
of all the desperate men who have dragged down tyranny, were, as a
matter of fact, by no means worse off than the poor of many other
European countries before the Revolution. The truth is that the French
were tragic because they were better off. The others had known the
sorrowful experiences; but they alone had known the splendid expectation
and the original claims. It was just here that Dickens was so true a
child of them and of that happy theory so bitterly applied. They were
the one oppressed people that simply asked for justice; they were the
one Parish Boy who innocently asked for more.




OLD CURIOSITY SHOP


Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only
redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and
crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us or the
things on the retina of the eye or the enormous irrelevancy of
encyclopaedias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come.
All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in
some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation. The
first thing that has to be realised about Dickens is this ultimate
spiritual condition of the man, which lay behind all his creations. This
Dickens state of mind is difficult to pick out in words as are all
elementary states of mind; they cannot be described, not because they
are too subtle for words, but because they are too simple for words.
Perhaps the nearest approach to a statement of it would be this: that
Dickens expresses an eager anticipation of everything that will happen
in the motley affairs of men; he looks at the quiet crowd waiting for it
to be picturesque and to play the fool; he expects everything; he is
torn with a happy hunger. Thackeray is always looking back to yesterday;
Dickens is always looking forward to to-morrow. Both are profoundly
humorous, for there is a humour of the morning and a humour of the
evening; but the first guesses at what it will get, at all the
grotesqueness and variety which a day may bring forth; the second looks
back on what the day has been and sees even its solemnities as slightly
ironical. Nothing can be too extravagant for the laughter that looks
forward; and nothing can be too dignified for the laughter that looks
back. It is an idle but obvious thing, which many must have noticed,
that we often find in the title of one of an author's books what might
very well stand for a general description of all of them. Thus all
Spenser's works might be called _A Hymn to Heavenly Beauty_; or all Mr.
Bernard Shaw's bound books might be called _You Never Can Tell_. In the
same way the whole substance and spirit of Thackeray might be gathered
under the general title _Vanity Fair_. In the same way too the whole
substance and spirit of Dickens might be gathered under the general
title _Great Expectations_.

In a recent criticism on this position I saw it remarked that all this
is reading into Dickens something that he did not mean; and I have been
told that it would have greatly surprised Dickens to be informed that he
"went down the broad road of the Revolution." Of course it would.
Criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they knew
themselves. It exists to say the things about them which they did not
know themselves. If a critic says that the _Iliad_ has a pagan rather
than a Christian pity, or that it is full of pictures made by one
epithet, of course he does not mean that Homer could have said that. If
Homer could have said that the critic would leave Homer to say it. The
function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only
be one function--that of dealing with the subconscious part of the
author's mind which only the critic can express, and not with the
conscious part of the author's mind, which the author himself can
express. Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position)
or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that
would have made him jump out of his boots.

Doubtless the name in this case _Great Expectations_ is an empty
coincidence; and indeed it is not in the books of the later Dickens
period (the period of _Great Expectations_) that we should look for the
best examples of this sanguine and expectant spirit which is the
essential of the man's genius. There are plenty of good examples of it
especially in the earlier works. But even in the earlier works there is
no example of it more striking or more satisfactory than _The Old
Curiosity Shop_. It is particularly noticeable in the fact that its
opening and original framework express the idea of a random experience,
a thing come across in the street; a single face in the crowd, followed
until it tells its story. Though the thing ends in a novel it begins in
a sketch; it begins as one of the _Sketches by Boz_. There is something
unconsciously artistic in the very clumsiness of this opening. Master
Humphrey starts to keep a scrap-book of all his adventures, and he finds
that he can fill the whole scrap-book with the sequels and developments
of one adventure; he goes out to notice everybody and he finds himself
busily and variedly occupied only in watching somebody. In this there is
a very profound truth about the true excitement and inexhaustible poetry
of life. The truth is not so much that eternity is full of souls as that
one soul can fill eternity. In strict art there is something quite lame
and lumbering about the way in which the benevolent old story-teller
starts to tell many stories and then drops away altogether, while one of
his stories takes his place. But in a larger art, his collision with
Little Nell and his complete eclipse by her personality and narrative
have a real significance. They suggest the random richness of such
meetings, and their uncalculated results. It makes the whole book a sort
of splendid accident.

It is not true, as is commonly said, that the Dickens pathos as pathos
is bad. It is not true, as is still more commonly said, that the whole
business about Little Nell is bad. The case is more complex than that.
Yet complex as it is it admits of one sufficiently clear distinction.
Those who have written about the death of Little Nell, have generally
noticed the crudities of the character itself; the little girl's
unnatural and staring innocence, her constrained and awkward piety. But
they have nearly all of them entirely failed to notice that there is in
the death of Little Nell one quite definite and really artistic idea. It
is not an artistic idea that a little child should die rhetorically on
the stage like Paul Dombey; and Little Nell does not die rhetorically
upon the stage like Paul Dombey. But it is an artistic idea that all the
good powers and personalities in the story should set out in pursuit of
one insignificant child, to repair an injustice to her, should track her
from town to town over England with all the resources of wealth,
intelligence, and travel, and should all--arrive too late. All the good
fairies and all the kind magicians, all the just kings and all the
gallant princes, with chariots and flying dragons and armies and navies
go after one little child who had strayed into a wood, and find her
dead. That is the conception which Dickens's artistic instinct was
really aiming at when he finally condemned Little Nell to death, after
keeping her, so to speak, so long with the rope round her neck. The
death of Little Nell is open certainly to the particular denial which
its enemies make about it. The death of Little Nell is not pathetic. It
is perhaps tragic; it is in reality ironic. Here is a very good case of
the injustice to Dickens on his purely literary side. It is not that I
say that Dickens achieved what he designed; it is that the critics will
not see what the design was. They go on talking of the death of Little
Nell as if it were a mere example of maudlin description like the death
of Little Paul. As a fact it is not described at all; so it cannot be
objectionable. It is not the death of Little Nell, but the life of
Little Nell, that I object to.

In this, in the actual picture of her personality, if you can call it a
personality, Dickens did fall into some of his facile vices. The real
objection to much of his pathos belongs really to another part of his
character. It is connected with his vanity, his voracity for all kinds
of praise, his restive experimentalism and even perhaps his envy. He
strained himself to achieve pathos. His humour was inspiration; but his
pathos was ambition. His laughter was lonely; he would have laughed on a
desert island. But his grief was gregarious. He liked to move great
masses of men, to melt them into tenderness, to play on the people as a
great pianist plays on them; to make them mad or sad. His pathos was to
him a way of showing his power; and for that reason it was really
powerless. He could not help making people laugh; but he tried to make
them cry. We come in this novel, as we often do come in his novels, upon
hard lumps of unreality, upon a phrase that suddenly sickens. That is
always due to his conscious despotism over the delicate feelings; that
is always due to his love of fame as distinct from his love of fun. But
it is not true that all Dickens's pathos is like this; it is not even
true that all the passages about Little Nell are like this; there are
two strands almost everywhere and they can be differentiated as the
sincere and the deliberate. There is a great difference between Dickens
thinking about the tears of his characters and Dickens thinking about
the tears of his audience.

When all this is allowed, however, and the exaggerated contempt for the
Dickens pathos is properly corrected, the broad fact remains: that to
pass from the solemn characters in this book to the comic characters in
this book, is to be like some Ulysses who should pass suddenly from the
land of shadows to the mountain of the gods. Little Nell has her own
position in careful and reasonable criticism: even that wobbling old
ass, her grandfather, has his position in it; perhaps even the
dissipated Fred (whom long acquaintance with Mr. Dick Swiveller has not
made any less dismal in his dissipation) has a place in it also. But
when we come to Swiveller and Sampson Brass and Quilp and Mrs. Jarley,
then Fred and Nell and the grandfather simply do not exist. There are no
such people in the story. The real hero and heroine of _The Old
Curiosity Shop_ are of course Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness. It is
significant in a sense that these two sane, strong, living, and lovable
human beings are the only two, or almost the only two, people in the
story who do not run after Little Nell. They have something better to do
than to go on that shadowy chase after that cheerless phantom. They have
to build up between them a true romance; perhaps the one true romance in
the whole of Dickens. Dick Swiveller really has all the half-heroic
characteristics which make a man respected by a woman and which are the
male contribution to virtue. He is brave, magnanimous, sincere about
himself, amusing, absurdly hopeful; above all, he is both strong and
weak. On the other hand the Marchioness really has all the
characteristics, the entirely heroic characteristics which make a woman
respected by a man. She is female: that is, she is at once incurably
candid and incurably loyal, she is full of terrible common-sense, she
expects little pleasure for herself and yet she can enjoy bursts of it;
above all, she is physically timid and yet she can face anything. All
this solid rocky romanticism is really implied in the speech and action
of these two characters and can be felt behind them all the time.
Because they are the two most absurd people in the book they are also
the most vivid, human, and imaginable. There are two really fine love
affairs in Dickens; and I almost think only two. One is the happy
courtship of Swiveller and the Marchioness; the other is the tragic
courtship of Toots and Florence Dombey. When Dick Swiveller wakes up in
bed and sees the Marchioness playing cribbage he thinks that he and she
are a prince and princess in a fairy tale. He thinks right.

I speak thus seriously of such characters with a deliberate purpose; for
the frivolous characters of Dickens are taken much too frivolously. It
has been quite insufficiently pointed out that all the serious moral
ideas that Dickens did contrive to express he expressed altogether
through this fantastic medium, in such figures as Swiveller and the
little servant. The warmest upholder of Dickens would not go to the
solemn or sentimental passages for anything fresh or suggestive in faith
or philosophy. No one would pretend that the death of little Dombey
(with its "What are the wild waves saying?") told us anything new or
real about death. A good Christian dying, one would imagine, not only
would not know what the wild waves were saying, but would not care. No
one would pretend that the repentance of old Paul Dombey throws any
light on the psychology or philosophy of repentance. No doubt old
Dombey, white-haired and amiable, was a great improvement on old Dombey
brown-haired and unpleasant. But in his case the softening of the heart
seems to bear too close a resemblance to softening of the brain. Whether
these serious passages are as bad as the critical people or as good as
the sentimental people find them, at least they do not convey anything
in the way of an illuminating glimpse or a bold suggestion about men's
moral nature. The serious figures do not tell one anything about the
human soul. The comic figures do. Take anything almost at random out of
these admirable speeches of Dick Swiveller. Notice, for instance, how
exquisitely Dickens has caught a certain very deep and delicate quality
at the bottom of this idle kind of man. I mean that odd impersonal sort
of intellectual justice, by which the frivolous fellow sees things as
they are and even himself as he is; and is above irritation. Mr.
Swiveller, you remember, asks the Marchioness whether the Brass family
ever talk about him; she nods her head with vivacity. "'Complimentary?'
inquired Mr. Swiveller. The motion of the little servant's head
altered.... 'But she says,' continued the little servant, 'that you
ain't to be trusted.' 'Well, do you know, Marchioness,' said Mr.
Swiveller thoughtfully, 'many people, not exactly professional people,
but tradesmen, have had the same idea. The excellent citizen from whom I
ordered this beer inclines strongly to that opinion.'"

This philosophical freedom from all resentment, this strange love of
truth which seems actually to come through carelessness, is a very real
piece of spiritual observation. Even among liars there are two classes,
one immeasurably better than another. The honest liar is the man who
tells the truth about his old lies; who says on Wednesday, "I told a
magnificent lie on Monday." He keeps the truth in circulation; no one
version of things stagnates in him and becomes an evil secret. He does
not have to live with old lies; a horrible domesticity. Mr. Swiveller
may mislead the waiter about whether he has the money to pay; but he
does not mislead his friend, and he does not mislead himself on the
point. He is quite as well aware as any one can be of the accumulating
falsity of the position of a gentleman who by his various debts has
closed up all the streets into the Strand except one, and who is going
to close that to-night with a pair of gloves. He shuts up the street
with a pair of gloves, but he does not shut up his mind with a secret.
The traffic of truth is still kept open through his soul.

It is exactly in these absurd characters, then, that we can find a mass
of psychological and ethical suggestion. This cannot be found in the
serious characters except indeed in some of the later experiments: there
is a little of such psychological and ethical suggestion in figures like
Gridley, like Jasper, like Bradley Headstone. But in these earlier books
at least, such as _The Old Curiosity Shop_, the grave or moral figures
throw no light upon morals. I should maintain this generalisation even
in the presence of that apparent exception _The Christmas Carol_ with
its trio of didactic ghosts. Charity is certainly splendid, at once a
luxury and a necessity; but Dickens is not most effective when he is
preaching charity seriously; he is most effective when he is preaching
it uproariously; when he is preaching it by means of massive
personalities and vivid scenes. One might say that he is best not when
he is preaching his human love, but when he is practising it. In his
grave pages he tells us to love men; but in his wild pages he creates
men whom we can love. By his solemnity he commands us to love our
neighbours. By his caricature he makes us love them.

There is an odd literary question which I wonder is not put more often
in literature. How far can an author tell a truth without seeing it
himself? Perhaps an actual example will express my meaning. I was once
talking to a highly intelligent lady about Thackeray's _Newcomes_. We
were speaking of the character of Mrs. Mackenzie, the Campaigner, and in
the middle of the conversation the lady leaned across to me and said in
a low, hoarse, but emphatic voice, "She drank. Thackeray didn't know it;
but she drank." And it is really astonishing what a shaft of white light
this sheds on the Campaigner, on her terrible temperament, on her
agonised abusiveness and her almost more agonised urbanity, on her
clamour which is nevertheless not open or explicable, on her temper
which is not so much bad temper as insatiable, bloodthirsty, man-eating
temper. How far can a writer thus indicate by accident a truth of which
he is himself ignorant? If truth is a plan or pattern of things that
really are, or in other words, if truth truly exists outside ourselves,
or in other words, if truth exists at all, it must be often possible for
a writer to uncover a corner of it which he happens not to understand,
but which his reader does happen to understand. The author sees only two
lines; the reader sees where they meet and what is the angle. The author
sees only an arc or fragment of a curve; the reader sees the size of the
circle. The last thing to say about Dickens, and especially about books
like _The Old Curiosity Shop_, is that they are full of these
unconscious truths. The careless reader may miss them. The careless
author almost certainly did miss them. But from them can be gathered an
impression of real truth to life which is for the grave critics of
Dickens an almost unknown benefit, buried treasure. Here for instance is
one of them out of _The Old Curiosity Shop_. I mean the passage in which
(by a blazing stroke of genius) the dashing Mr. Chuckster, one of the
Glorious Apollos of whom Mr. Swiveller was the Perpetual Grand, is made
to entertain a hatred bordering upon frenzy for the stolid, patient,
respectful, and laborious Kit. Now in the formal plan of the story Mr.
Chuckster is a fool, and Kit is almost a hero; at least he is a noble
boy. Yet unconsciously Dickens made the idiot Chuckster say something
profoundly suggestive on the subject. In speaking of Kit Mr. Chuckster
makes use of these two remarkable phrases; that Kit is "meek" and that
he is "a snob." Now Kit is really a very fresh and manly picture of a
boy, firm, sane, chivalrous, reasonable, full of those three great Roman
virtues which Mr. Belloc has so often celebrated, _virtus_ and
_verecundia_ and _pietas_. He is a sympathetic but still a
straightforward study of the best type of that most respectable of all
human classes, the respectable poor. All this is true; all that Dickens
utters in praise of Kit is true; nevertheless the awful words of
Chuckster remain written on the eternal skies. Kit is meek and Kit is a
snob. His natural dignity does include and is partly marred by that
instinctive subservience to the employing class which has been the
comfortable weakness of the whole English democracy, which has prevented
their making any revolution for the last two hundred years. Kit would
not serve any wicked man for money, but he would serve any moderately
good man and the money would give a certain dignity and decisiveness to
the goodness. All this is the English popular evil which goes along with
the English popular virtues of geniality, of homeliness, tolerance and
strong humour, hope and an enormous appetite for a hand-to-mouth
happiness. The scene in which Kit takes his family to the theatre is a
monument of the massive qualities of old English enjoyment. If what we
want is Merry England, our antiquarians ought not to revive the Maypole
or the Morris Dancers; they ought to revive Astley's and Sadler's Wells
and the old solemn Circus and the old stupid Pantomime, and all the
sawdust and all the oranges. Of all this strength and joy in the poor,
Kit is a splendid and final symbol. But amid all his masculine and
English virtue, he has this weak touch of meekness, or acceptance of the
powers that be. It is a sound touch; it is a real truth about Kit. But
Dickens did not know it. Mr. Chuckster did.

Dickens's stories taken as a whole have more artistic unity than appears
at the first glance. It is the immediate impulse of a modern critic to
dismiss them as mere disorderly scrap-books with very brilliant scraps.
But this is not quite so true as it looks. In one of Dickens's novels
there is generally no particular unity of construction; but there is
often a considerable unity of sentiment and atmosphere. Things are
irrelevant, but not somehow inappropriate. The whole book is written
carelessly; but the whole book is generally written in one mood. To take
a rude parallel from the other arts, we may say that there is not much
unity of form, but there is much unity of colour. In most of the novels
this can be seen. _Nicholas Nickleby_, as I have remarked, is full of a
certain freshness, a certain light and open-air curiosity, which
irradiates from the image of the young man swinging along the Yorkshire
roads in the sun. Hence the comic characters with whom he falls in are
comic characters in the same key; they are a band of strolling players,
charlatans and poseurs, but too humane to be called humbugs. In the same
way, the central story of _Oliver Twist_ is sombre; and hence even its
comic character is almost sombre; at least he is too ugly to be merely
amusing. Mr. Bumble is in some ways a terrible grotesque; his apoplectic
visage recalls the "fire-red Cherubimme's face," which added such horror
to the height and stature of Chaucer's Sompnour. In both these cases
even the riotous and absurd characters are a little touched with the
tint of the whole story. But this neglected merit of Dickens can
certainly be seen best in _The Old Curiosity Shop_.

The curiosity shop itself was a lumber of grotesque and sinister things,
outlandish weapons, twisted and diabolic decorations. The comic
characters in the book are all like images bought in an old curiosity
shop. Quilp might be a gargoyle. He might be some sort of devilish
door-knocker, dropped down and crawling about the pavement. The same
applies to the sinister and really terrifying stiffness of Sally Brass.
She is like some old staring figure cut out of wood. Sampson Brass, her
brother, again is a grotesque in the same rather inhuman manner; he is
especially himself when he comes in with the green shade over his eye.
About all this group of bad figures in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ there is
a sort of _diablerie_. There is also within this atmosphere an
extraordinary energy of irony and laughter. The scene in which Sampson
Brass draws up the description of Quilp, supposing him to be dead,
reaches a point of fiendish fun. "We will not say very bandy, Mrs.
Jiniwin," he says of his friend's legs, "we will confine ourselves to
bandy. He is gone, my friends, where his legs would never be called in
question." They go on to the discussion of his nose, and Mrs. Jiniwin
inclines to the view that it is flat. "Aquiline, you hag! Aquiline,"
cries Mr. Quilp, pushing in his head and striking his nose with his
fist. There is nothing better in the whole brutal exuberance of the
character than that gesture with which Quilp punches his own face with
his own fist. It is indeed a perfect symbol; for Quilp is always
fighting himself for want of anybody else. He is energy, and energy by
itself is always suicidal; he is that primordial energy which tears and
which destroys itself.




BARNABY RUDGE


_Barnaby Rudge_ was written by Dickens in the spring and first flowing
tide of his popularity; it came immediately after _The Old Curiosity
Shop_, and only a short time after _Pickwick_. Dickens was one of those
rare but often very sincere men in whom the high moment of success
almost coincides with the high moment of youth. The calls upon him at
this time were insistent and overwhelming; this necessarily happens at a
certain stage of a successful writer's career. He was just successful
enough to invite offers and not successful enough to reject them. At the
beginning of his career he could throw himself into _Pickwick_ because
there was nothing else to throw himself into. At the end of his life he
could throw himself into _A Tale of Two Cities_, because he refused to
throw himself into anything else. But there was an intervening period,
early in his life, when there was almost too much work for his
imagination, and yet not quite enough work for his housekeeping. To this
period _Barnaby Rudge_ belongs. And it is a curious tribute to the quite
curious greatness of Dickens that in this period of youthful strain we
do not feel the strain but feel only the youth. His own amazing wish to
write equalled or outstripped even his readers' amazing wish to read.
Working too hard did not cure him of his abstract love of work.
Unreasonable publishers asked him to write ten novels at once; but he
wanted to write twenty novels at once. All this period is strangely full
of his own sense at once of fertility and of futility; he did work which
no one else could have done, and yet he could not be certain as yet that
he was anybody.

_Barnaby Rudge_ marks this epoch because it marks the fact that he is
still confused about what kind of person he is going to be. He has
already struck the note of the normal romance in _Nicholas Nickleby_; he
has already created some of his highest comic characters in _Pickwick_
and _The Old Curiosity Shop_, but here he betrays the fact that it is
still a question what ultimate guide he shall follow. _Barnaby Rudge_ is
a romantic, historical novel. Its design reminds us of Scott; some parts
of its fulfilment remind us, alas! of Harrison Ainsworth. It is a very
fine romantic historical novel; Scott would have been proud of it. But
it is still so far different from the general work of Dickens that it is
permissible to wonder how far Dickens was proud of it. The book,
effective as it is, is almost entirely devoted to dealings with a
certain artistic element, which (in its mere isolation) Dickens did not
commonly affect; an element which many men of infinitely less genius
have often seemed to affect more successfully; I mean the element of the
picturesque.

It is the custom in many quarters to speak somewhat sneeringly of that
element which is broadly called the picturesque. It is always felt to be
an inferior, a vulgar, and even an artificial form of art. Yet two
things may be remarked about it. The first is that, with few
exceptions, the greatest literary artists have been not only
particularly clever at the picturesque, but particularly fond of it.
Shakespeare, for instance, delighted in certain merely pictorial
contrasts which are quite distinct from, even when they are akin to, the
spiritual view involved. For instance, there is admirable satire in the
idea of Touchstone teaching worldly wisdom and worldly honour to the
woodland yokels. There is excellent philosophy in the idea of the fool
being the representative of civilisation in the forest. But quite apart
from this deeper meaning in the incident, the mere figure of the jester,
in his bright motley and his cap and bells, against the green background
of the forest and the rude forms of the shepherds, is a strong example
of the purely picturesque. There is excellent tragic irony in the
confrontation of the melancholy philosopher among the tombs with the
cheerful digger of the graves. It sums up the essential point, that dead
bodies can be comic; it is only dead souls that can be tragic. But quite
apart from such irony, the mere picture of the grotesque gravedigger,
the black-clad prince, and the skull is a picture in the strongest sense
picturesque. Caliban and the two shipwrecked drunkards are an admirable
symbol; but they are also an admirable scene. Bottom, with the ass's
head, sitting in a ring of elves, is excellent moving comedy, but also
excellent still life. Falstaff with his huge body, Bardolph with his
burning nose, are masterpieces of the pen; but they would be fine
sketches even for the pencil. King Lear, in the storm, is a landscape as
well as a character study. There is something decorative even about the
insistence on the swarthiness of Othello, or the deformity of Richard
III. Shakespeare's work is much more than picturesque; but it is
picturesque. And the same which is said here of him by way of example is
largely true of the highest class of literature. Dante's _Divine Comedy_
is supremely important as a philosophy; but it is important merely as a
panorama. Spenser's _Faery Queen_ pleases us as an allegory; but it
would please us even as a wall-paper. Stronger still is the case of
Chaucer who loved the pure picturesque, which always includes something
of what we commonly call the ugly. The huge stature and startling
scarlet face of the Sompnour is in just the same spirit as Shakespeare's
skulls and motley; the same spirit gave Chaucer's miller bagpipes, and
clad his doctor in crimson. It is the spirit which, while making many
other things, loves to make a picture.

Now the second thing to be remarked in apology for the picturesque is,
that the very thing which makes it seem trivial ought really to make it
seem important; I mean the fact that it consists necessarily of
contrasts. It brings together types that stand out from their
background, but are abruptly different from each other, like the clown
among the fairies or the fool in the forest. And his audacious
reconciliation is a mark not of frivolity but of extreme seriousness. A
man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels or lambs
with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous; for he is taking one
mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it passes. But a man
who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus must have some serious
view of the universe. The man who should write a dialogue between two
early Christians might be a mere writer of dialogues. But a man who
should write a dialogue between an early Christian and the Missing Link
would have to be a philosopher. The more widely different the types
talked of, the more serious and universal must be the philosophy which
talks of them. The mark of the light and thoughtless writer is the
harmony of his subject matter; the mark of the thoughtful writer is its
apparent diversity. The most flippant lyric poet might write a pretty
poem about lambs; but it requires something bolder and graver than a
poet, it requires an ecstatic prophet, to talk about the lion lying down
with the lamb.

Dickens, at any rate, strongly supports this conception: that great
literary men as such do not despise the purely pictorial. No man's works
have so much the quality of illustrating themselves. Few men's works
have been more thoroughly and eagerly illustrated; few men's works can
it have been better fun to illustrate. As a rule this fascinating
quality in the mere fantastic figures of the tale was inseparable from
their farcical quality in the tale. Stiggins's red nose is distinctly
connected with the fact that he is a member of the Ebenezer Temperance
Association; Quilp is little, because a little of him goes a long way.
Mr. Carker smiles and smiles and is a villain; Mr. Chadband is fat
because in his case to be fat is to be hated. The story is immeasurably
more important than the picture; it is not mere indulgence in the
picturesque. Generally it is an intellectual love of the comic; not a
pure love of the grotesque.

But in one book Dickens suddenly confesses that he likes the grotesque
even without the comic. In one case he makes clear that he enjoys pure
pictures with a pure love of the picturesque. That place is _Barnaby
Rudge_. There had indeed been hints of it in many episodes in his books;
notably, for example, in that fine scene of the death of Quilp--a scene
in which the dwarf remains fantastic long after he has ceased to be in
any way funny. Still, the dwarf was meant to be funny. Humour of a
horrible kind, but still humour, is the purpose of Quilp's existence and
position in the book. Laughter is the object of all his oddities. But
laughter is not the object of Barnaby Rudge's oddities. His idiot
costume and his ugly raven are used for the purpose of the pure
grotesque; solely to make a certain kind of Gothic sketch.

It is commonly this love of pictures that drives men back upon the
historical novel. But it is very typical of Dickens's living interest in
his own time, that though he wrote two historical novels they were
neither of them of very ancient history. They were both, indeed, of very
recent history; only they were those parts of recent history which were
specially picturesque. I do not think that this was due to any mere
consciousness on his part that he knew no history. Undoubtedly he knew
no history; and he may or may not have been conscious of the fact. But
the consciousness did not prevent him from writing a _History of
England_. Nor did it prevent him from interlarding all or any of his
works with tales of the pictorial past, such as the tale of the broken
swords in _Master Humphrey's Clock_, or the indefensibly delightful
nightmare of the lady in the stage-coach, which helps to soften the
amiable end of Pickwick. Neither, worst of all, did it prevent him from
dogmatising anywhere and everywhere about the past, of which he knew
nothing; it did not prevent him from telling the bells to tell Trotty
Veck that the Middle Ages were a failure, nor from solemnly declaring
that the best thing that the mediaeval monks ever did was to create the
mean and snobbish quietude of a modern cathedral city. No, it was not
historical reverence that held him back from dealing with the remote
past; but rather something much better--a living interest in the living
century in which he was born. He would have thought himself quite
intellectually capable of writing a novel about the Council of Trent or
the First Crusade. He would have thought himself quite equal to
analysing the psychology of Abelard or giving a bright, satiric sketch
of St. Augustine. It must frankly be confessed that it was not a sense
of his own unworthiness that held him back; I fear it was rather a sense
of St. Augustine's unworthiness. He could not see the point of any
history before the first slow swell of the French Revolution. He could
understand the revolutions of the eighteenth century; all the other
revolutions of history (so many and so splendid) were unmeaning to him.
But the revolutions of the eighteenth century he did understand; and to
them therefore he went back, as all historical novelists go back, in
search of the picturesque. And from this fact an important result
follows.

The result that follows is this: that his only two historical novels are
both tales of revolutions--of eighteenth-century revolutions. These two
eighteenth-century revolutions may seem to differ, and perhaps do
differ in everything except in being revolutions and of the eighteenth
century. The French Revolution, which is the theme of _A Tale of Two
Cities_, was a revolt in favour of all that is now called enlightenment
and liberation. The great Gordon Riot, which is the theme of _Barnaby
Rudge_, was a revolt in favour of something which would now be called
mere ignorant and obscurantist Protestantism. Nevertheless both belonged
more typically to the age out of which Dickens came--the great sceptical
and yet creative eighteenth century of Europe. Whether the mob rose on
the right side or the wrong they both belonged to the time in which a
mob could rise, in which a mob could conquer. No growth of intellectual
science or of moral cowardice had made it impossible to fight in the
streets, whether for the republic or for the Bible. If we wish to know
what was the real link, existing actually in ultimate truth, existing
unconsciously in Dickens's mind, which connected the Gordon Riots with
the French Revolution, the link may be defined though not with any great
adequacy. The nearest and truest way of stating it is that neither of
the two could possibly happen in Fleet Street to-morrow evening.

Another point of resemblance between the two books might be found in the
fact that they both contain the sketch of the same kind of
eighteenth-century aristocrat, if indeed that kind of aristocrat really
existed in the eighteenth century. The diabolical dandy with the rapier
and the sneer is at any rate a necessity of all normal plays and
romances; hence Mr. Chester has a right to exist in this romance, and
Foulon a right to exist in a page of history almost as cloudy and
disputable as a romance. What Dickens and other romancers do probably
omit from the picture of the eighteenth-century oligarch is probably his
liberality. It must never be forgotten that even when he was a despot in
practice he was generally a liberal in theory. Dickens and romancers
make the pre-revolution tyrant a sincere believer in tyranny; generally
he was not. He was a sceptic about everything, even about his own
position. The romantic Foulon says of the people, "Let them eat grass,"
with bitter and deliberate contempt. The real Foulon (if he ever said it
at all) probably said it as a sort of dreary joke because he couldn't
think of any other way out of the problem. Similarly Mr. Chester, a
cynic as he is, believes seriously in the beauty of being a gentleman; a
real man of that type probably disbelieved in that as in everything
else. Dickens was too bracing, one may say too bouncing himself to
understand the psychology of fatigue in a protected and leisured class.
He could understand a tyrant like Quilp, a tyrant who is on his throne
because he has climbed up into it, like a monkey. He could not
understand a tyrant who is on his throne because he is too weary to get
out of it. The old aristocrats were in a dead way quite good-natured.
They were even humanitarians; which perhaps accounts for the extent to
which they roused against themselves the healthy hatred of humanity. But
they were tired humanitarians; tired with doing nothing. Figures like
that of Mr. Chester, therefore, fail somewhat to give the true sense of
something hopeless and helpless which led men to despair of the upper
class. He has a boyish pleasure in play-acting; he has an interest in
life; being a villain is his hobby. But the true man of that type had
found all hobbies fail him. He had wearied of himself as he had wearied
of a hundred women. He was graceful and could not even admire himself in
the glass. He was witty and could not even laugh at his own jokes.
Dickens could never understand tedium.

There is no mark more strange and perhaps sinister of the interesting
and not very sane condition of our modern literature, than the fact that
tedium has been admirably described in it. Our best modern writers are
never so exciting as they are about dulness. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is
never so powerful as when he is painting yawning deserts, aching
silences, sleepless nights, or infernal isolation. The excitement in one
of the stories of Mr. Henry James becomes tense, thrilling, and almost
intolerable in all the half hours during which nothing whatever is said
or done. We are entering again into the mind, into the real mind of
Foulon and Mr. Chester. We begin to understand the deep despair of those
tyrants whom our fathers pulled down. But Dickens could never have
understood that despair; it was not in his soul. And it is an
interesting coincidence that here, in this book of _Barnaby Rudge_,
there is a character meant to be wholly grotesque, who, nevertheless,
expresses much of that element in Dickens which prevented him from being
a true interpreter of the tired and sceptical aristocrat.

Sim Tappertit is a fool, but a perfectly honourable fool. It requires
some sincerity to pose. Posing means that one has not dried up in
oneself all the youthful and innocent vanities with the slow paralysis
of mere pride. Posing means that one is still fresh enough to enjoy the
good opinion of one's fellows. On the other hand, the true cynic has not
enough truth in him to attempt affectation; he has never even seen the
truth, far less tried to imitate it. Now we might very well take the
type of Mr. Chester on the one hand, and of Sim Tappertit on the other,
as marking the issue, the conflict, and the victory which really ushered
in the nineteenth century. Dickens was very like Sim Tappertit. The
Liberal Revolution was very like a Sim Tappertit revolution. It was
vulgar, it was overdone, it was absurd, but it was alive. Dickens was
vulgar, was absurd, overdid everything, but he was alive. The
aristocrats were perfectly correct, but quite dead; dead long before
they were guillotined. The classics and critics who lamented that
Dickens was no gentleman were quite right, but quite dead. The
revolution thought itself rational; but so did Sim Tappertit. It was
really a huge revolt of romanticism against a reason which had grown
sick even of itself. Sim Tappertit rose against Mr. Chester; and, thank
God! he put his foot upon his neck.

  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1842
  From a bust by H. Dexter, executed during Dickens's first visit to
  America.]




AMERICAN NOTES


_American Notes_ was written soon after Dickens had returned from his
first visit to America. That visit had, of course, been a great epoch in
his life; but how much of an epoch men did not truly realise until, some
time after, in the middle of a quiet story about Salisbury and a
ridiculous architect, his feelings flamed out and flared up to the stars
in _Martin Chuzzlewit_. The _American Notes_ are, however, interesting,
because in them he betrays his feelings when he does not know that he is
betraying them. Dickens's first visit to America was, from his own point
of view, and at the beginning, a happy and festive experiment. It is
very characteristic of him that he went among the Americans, enjoyed
them, even admired them, and then had a quarrel with them. Nothing was
ever so unmistakable as his good-will, except his ill-will; and they
were never far apart. And this was not, as some bloodless moderns have
sneeringly insinuated, a mere repetition of the proximity between the
benevolent stage and the quarrelsome stage of drink. It was a piece of
pure optimism; he believed so readily that men were going to be good to
him that an injury to him was something more than an injury: it was a
shock. What was the exact nature of the American shock must, however, be
more carefully stated.

The famous quarrel between Dickens and America, which finds its most
elaborate expression in _American Notes_, though its most brilliant
expression in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, is an incident about which a great
deal remains to be said. But the thing which most specially remains to
be said is this. This old Anglo-American quarrel was much more
fundamentally friendly than most Anglo-American alliances. In Dickens's
day each nation understood the other enough to argue. In our time
neither nation understands itself even enough to quarrel. There was an
English tradition, from Fox and eighteenth-century England; there was an
American tradition from Franklin and eighteenth-century America; and
they were still close enough together to discuss their differences with
acrimony, perhaps, but with certain fundamental understandings. The
eighteenth-century belief in a liberal civilisation was still a dogma;
for dogma is the only thing that makes argument or reasoning possible.
America, under all its swagger, did still really believe that Europe was
its fountain and its mother, because Europe was more fully civilised.
Dickens, under all his disgust, did still believe that America was in
advance of Europe, because it was more democratic. It was an age, in
short, in which the word "progress" could still be used reasonably;
because the whole world looked to one way of escape and there was only
one kind of progress under discussion. Now, of course, "progress" is a
useless word; for progress takes for granted an already defined
direction; and it is exactly about the direction that we disagree. Do
not let us therefore be misled into any mistaken optimism or special
self-congratulation upon what many people would call the improved
relations between England and America. The relations are improved
because America has finally become a foreign country. And with foreign
countries all sane men take care to exchange a certain consideration and
courtesy. But even as late as the time of Dickens's first visit to the
United States, we English still felt America as a colony; an insolent,
offensive, and even unintelligible colony sometimes, but still a colony;
a part of our civilisation, a limb of our life. And America itself, as I
have said, under all its bounce and independence, really regarded us as
a mother country. This being the case it was possible for us to quarrel,
like kinsmen. Now we only bow and smile, like strangers.

This tone, as a sort of family responsibility, can be felt quite
specially all through the satires or suggestions of these _American
Notes_. Dickens is cross with America because he is worried about
America; as if he were its father. He explores its industrial, legal,
and educational arrangements like a mother looking at the housekeeping
of a married son; he makes suggestions with a certain acidity; he takes
a strange pleasure in being pessimistic. He advises them to take note of
how much better certain things are done in England. All this is very
different from Dickens's characteristic way of dealing with a foreign
country. In countries really foreign, such as France, Switzerland, and
Italy, he had two attitudes, neither of them in the least worried or
paternal. When he found a thing in Europe which he did not understand,
such as the Roman Catholic Church, he simply called it an old-world
superstition, and sat looking at it like a moonlit ruin. When he found
something that he did understand, such as luncheon baskets, he burst
into carols of praise over the superior sense in our civilisation and
good management to Continental methods. An example of the first attitude
may be found in one of his letters, in which he describes the
backwardness and idleness of Catholics who would not build a Birmingham
in Italy. He seems quite unconscious of the obvious truth, that the
backwardness of Catholics was simply the refusal of Bob Cratchit to
enter the house of Gradgrind. An example of the second attitude can be
found in the purple patches of fun in _Mugby Junction_; in which the
English waitress denounces the profligate French habit of providing new
bread and clean food for people travelling by rail. The point is,
however, that in neither case has he the air of one suggesting
improvements or sharing a problem with the people engaged on it. He does
not go carefully with a notebook through Jesuit schools nor offer
friendly suggestions to the governors of Parisian prisons. Or if he
does, it is in a different spirit; it is in the spirit of an ordinary
tourist being shown over the Coliseum or the Pyramids. But he visited
America in the spirit of a Government inspector dealing with something
it was his duty to inspect. This is never felt either in his praise or
blame of Continental countries. When he did not leave a foreign country
to decay like a dead dog, he merely watched it at play like a kitten.
France he mistook for a kitten. Italy he mistook for a dead dog.

But with America he could feel--and fear. There he could hate, because
he could love. There he could feel not the past alone nor the present,
but the future also; and, like all brave men, when he saw the future he
was a little afraid of it. For of all tests by which the good citizen
and strong reformer can be distinguished from the vague faddist or the
inhuman sceptic, I know no better test than this--that the unreal
reformer sees in front of him one certain future, the future of his fad;
while the real reformer sees before him ten or twenty futures among
which his country must choose, and may, in some dreadful hour, choose
the wrong one. The true patriot is always doubtful of victory; because
he knows that he is dealing with a living thing; a thing with free will.
To be certain of free will is to be uncertain of success.

The subject matter of the real difference of opinion between Dickens and
the public of America can only be understood if it is thus treated as a
dispute between brothers about the destiny of a common heritage. The
point at issue might be stated like this. Dickens, on his side, did not
in his heart doubt for a moment that England would eventually follow
America along the road towards real political equality and purely
republican institutions. He lived, it must be remembered, before the
revival of aristocracy, which has since overwhelmed us--the revival of
aristocracy worked through popular science and commercial dictatorship,
and which has nowhere been more manifest than in America itself. He knew
nothing of this; in his heart he conceded to the Yankees that not only
was their revolution right but would ultimately be completed everywhere.
But on the other hand, his whole point against the American experiment
was this--that if it ignored certain ancient English contributions it
would go to pieces for lack of them. Of these the first was good manners
and the second individual liberty--liberty, that is, to speak and write
against the trend of the majority. In these things he was much more
serious and much more sensible than it is the fashion to think he was;
he was indeed one of the most serious and sensible critics England ever
had of current and present problems, though his criticism is useless to
the point of nonentity about all things remote from him in style of
civilisation or in time. His point about good manners is really
important. All his grumblings through this book of _American Notes_, all
his shrieking satire in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ are expressions of a grave
and reasonable fear he had touching the future of democracy. And
remember again what has been already remarked--instinctively he paid
America the compliment of looking at her as the future of democracy.

The mistake which he attacked still exists. I cannot imagine why it is
that social equality is somehow supposed to mean social familiarity. Why
should equality mean that all men are equally rude? Should it not rather
mean that all men are equally polite? Might it not quite reasonably mean
that all men should be equally ceremonious and stately and pontifical?
What is there specially Equalitarian, for instance, in calling your
political friends and even your political enemies by their Christian
names in public? There is something very futile in the way in which
certain Socialist leaders call each other Tom, Dick, and Harry;
especially when Tom is accusing Harry of having basely imposed upon the
well-known imbecility of Dick. There is something quite undemocratic in
all men calling each other by the special and affectionate term
"comrade"; especially when they say it with a sneer and smart inquiry
about the funds. Democracy would be quite satisfied if every man called
every other man "sir." Democracy would have no conceivable reason to
complain if every man called every other man "your excellency" or "your
holiness" or "brother of the sun and moon." The only democratic
essential is that it should be a term of dignity and that it should be
given to all. To abolish all terms of dignity is no more specially
democratic than the Roman emperor's wish to cut off everybody's head at
once was specially democratic. That involved equality certainly, but it
was lacking in respect.

Dickens saw America as markedly the seat of this danger. He saw that
there was a perilous possibility that republican ideals might be allied
to a social anarchy good neither for them nor for any other ideals.
Republican simplicity, which is difficult, might be quickly turned into
Bohemian brutality, which is easy. Cincinnatus, instead of putting his
hand to the plough, might put his feet on the tablecloth, and an
impression prevail that it was all a part of the same rugged equality
and freedom. Insolence might become a tradition. Bad manners might have
all the sanctity of good manners. "There you are!" cries Martin
Chuzzlewit indignantly, when the American has befouled the butter. "A
man deliberately makes a hog of himself and _that_ is an Institution."
But the thread of thought which we must always keep in hand in this
matter is that he would not thus have worried about the degradation of
republican simplicity into general rudeness if he had not from first to
last instinctively felt that America held human democracy in her hand,
to exalt it or to let it fall. In one of his gloomier moments he wrote
down his fear that the greatest blow ever struck at liberty would be
struck by America in the failure of her mission upon the earth.

This brings us to the other ground of his alarm--the matter of liberty
of speech. Here also he was much more reasonable and philosophic than
has commonly been realised. The truth is that the lurid individualism of
Carlyle has, with its violent colours, "killed" the tones of most
criticism of his time; and just as we can often see a scheme of
decoration better if we cover some flaming picture, so you can judge
nineteenth-century England much better if you leave Carlyle out. He is
important to moderns because he led that return to Toryism which has
been the chief feature of modernity, but his judgments were often not
only spiritually false, but really quite superficial. Dickens understood
the danger of democracy far better than Carlyle; just as he understood
the merits of democracy far better than Carlyle. And of this fact we can
produce one plain evidence in the matter of which we speak. Carlyle, in
his general dislike of the revolutionary movement, lumped liberty and
democracy together and said that the chief objection to democracy was
that it involved the excess and misuse of liberty; he called democracy
"anarchy or no-rule." Dickens, with far more philosophical insight and
spiritual delicacy, saw that the real danger of democracy is that it
tends to the very opposite of anarchy; even to the very opposite of
liberty. He lamented in America the freedom of manners. But he lamented
even more the absence of freedom of opinion. "I believe there is no
country on the face of the earth," he says, "where there is less freedom
of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad
difference of opinion than in this. There! I write the words with
reluctance, disappointment, and sorrow; but I believe it from the bottom
of my soul. The notion that I, a man alone by myself in America, should
venture to suggest to the Americans that there was one point on which
they were neither just to their own countrymen nor to us, actually
struck the boldest dumb! Washington Irving, Prescott, Hoffman, Bryant,
Halleck, Dana, Washington Allston--every man who writes in this country
is devoted to the question, and not one of them _dares_ to raise his
voice and complain of the atrocious state of the law. The wonder is that
a breathing man can be found with temerity enough to suggest to the
Americans the possibility of their having done wrong. I wish you could
have seen the faces that I saw down both sides of the table at Hartford
when I began to talk about Scott. I wish you could have heard how I gave
it out. My blood so boiled when I thought of the monstrous injustice
that I felt as if I were twelve feet high when I thrust it down their
throats." Dickens knew no history, but he had all history behind him in
feeling that a pure democracy does tend, when it goes wrong, to be too
traditional and absolute. The truth is indeed a singular example of the
unfair attack upon democracy in our own time. Everybody can repeat the
platitude that the mob can be the greatest of all tyrants. But few
realise or remember the corresponding truth which goes along with
it--that the mob is the only permanent and unassailable high priest.
Democracy drives its traditions too hard; but democracy is the only
thing that keeps any traditions. An aristocracy must always be going
after some new thing. The severity of democracy is far more of a virtue
than its liberty. The decorum of a democracy is far more of a danger
than its lawlessness. Dickens discovered this in his great quarrels
about the copyright, when a whole nation acted on a small point of
opinion as if it were going to lynch him. But, fortunately for the
purpose of this argument, there is no need to go back to the forties for
such a case. Another great literary man has of late visited America; and
it is possible that Maxim Gorky may be in a position to state how far
democracy is likely to err on the side of mere liberty and laxity. He
may have found, like Dickens, some freedom of manners; he did not find
much freedom of morals.

Along with such American criticism should really go his very
characteristic summary of the question of the Red Indian. It marks the
combination between the mental narrowness and the moral justice of the
old Liberal. Dickens can see nothing in the Red Indian except that he is
barbaric, retrograde, bellicose, uncleanly, and superstitious--in short,
that he is not a member of the special civilisation of Birmingham or
Brighton. It is curious to note the contrast between the cheery, nay
Cockney, contempt with which Dickens speaks of the American Indian and
that chivalrous and pathetic essay in which Washington Irving celebrates
the virtues of the vanishing race. Between Washington Irving and his
friend Charles Dickens there was always indeed this ironical comedy of
inversion. It is amusing that the Englishman should have been the
pushing and even pert modernist, and the American the stately
antiquarian and lover of lost causes. But while a man of more mellow
sympathies may well dislike Dickens's dislike of savages, and even
disdain his disdain, he ought to sharply remind himself of the admirable
ethical fairness and equity which meet with that restricted outlook. In
the very act of describing Red Indians as devils who, like so much dirt,
it would pay us to sweep away, he pauses to deny emphatically that we
have any right to sweep them away. We have no right to wrong the man, he
means to say, even if he himself be a kind of wrong. Here we strike the
ringing iron of the old conscience and sense of honour which marked the
best men of his party and of his epoch. This rigid and even reluctant
justice towers, at any rate, far above modern views of savages, above
the sentimentalism of the mere humanitarian and the far weaker
sentimentalism that pleads for brutality and a race war. Dickens was at
least more of a man than the brutalitarian who claims to wrong people
because they are nasty, or the humanitarian who cannot be just to them
without pretending that they are nice.




PICTURES FROM ITALY


The _Pictures from Italy_ are excellent in themselves and excellent as a
foil to the _American Notes_. Here we have none of that air of giving a
decision like a judge or sending in a report like an inspector; here we
have only glimpses, light and even fantastic glimpses, of a world that
is really alien to Dickens. It is so alien that he can almost entirely
enjoy it. For no man can entirely enjoy that which he loves; contentment
is always unpatriotic. The difference can indeed be put with approximate
perfection in one phrase. In Italy he was on a holiday; in America he
was on a tour. But indeed Dickens himself has quite sufficiently
conveyed the difference in the two phrases that he did actually use for
the titles of the two books. Dickens often told unconscious truths,
especially in small matters. The _American Notes_ really are notes, like
the notes of a student or a professional witness. The _Pictures from
Italy_ are only pictures from Italy, like the miscellaneous pictures
that all tourists bring from Italy.

To take another and perhaps closer figure of speech, almost all
Dickens's works such as these may best be regarded as private letters
addressed to the public. His private correspondence was quite as
brilliant as his public works; and many of his public works are almost
as formless and casual as his private correspondence. If he had been
struck insensible for a year, I really think that his friends and family
could have brought out one of his best books by themselves if they had
happened to keep his letters. The homogeneity of his public and private
work was indeed strange in many ways. On the one hand, there was little
that was pompously and unmistakably public in the publications; on the
other hand, there was very little that was private in the private
letters. His hilarity had almost a kind of hardness about it; no man's
letters, I should think, ever needed less expurgation on the ground of
weakness or undue confession. The main part, and certainly the best
part, of such a book as _Pictures from Italy_ can certainly be
criticised best as part of that perpetual torrent of entertaining
autobiography which he flung at his children as if they were his readers
and his readers as if they were his children. There are some brilliant
patches of sense and nonsense in this book; but there is always
something accidental in them; as if they might have occurred somewhere
else. Perhaps the most attractive of them is the incomparable
description of the Italian Marionette Theatre in which they acted a play
about the death of Napoleon in St. Helena. The description is better
than that of Codlin and Short's Punch and Judy, and almost as good as
that of Mrs. Jarley's Wax Works. Indeed the humour is similar; for Punch
is supposed to be funny, but Napoleon (as Mrs. Jarley said when asked if
her show was funnier than Punch) was not funny at all. The idea of a
really tragic scene being enacted between tiny wooden dolls with large
heads is delightfully dealt with by Dickens. We can almost imagine the
scene in which the wooden Napoleon haughtily rebukes his wooden jailor
for calling him General Bonaparte--"Sir Hudson Low, call me not thus; I
am Napoleon, Emperor of the French." There is also something singularly
gratifying about the scene of Napoleon's death, in which he lay in bed
with his little wooden hands outside the counterpane and the doctor (who
was hung on wires too short) "delivered medical opinions in the air." It
may seem flippant to dwell on such flippancies in connection with a book
which contains many romantic descriptions and many moral generalisations
which Dickens probably valued highly. But it is not for such things that
he is valued. In all his writings, from his most reasoned and sustained
novel to his maddest private note, it is always this obstreperous
instinct for farce which stands out as his in the highest sense. His
wisdom is at the best talent, his foolishness is genius. Just that
exuberant levity which we associate with a moment we associate in his
case with immortality. It is said of certain old masonry that the mortar
was so hard that it has survived the stones. So if Dickens could revisit
the thing he built, he would be surprised to see all the work he thought
solid and responsible wasted almost utterly away, but the shortest
frivolities and the most momentary jokes remaining like colossal rocks
for ever.

  [Illustration: Charles Dickens, 1844
  From a miniature by Margaret Gillies.]




MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT


There is a certain quality or element which broods over the whole of
_Martin Chuzzlewit_ to which it is difficult for either friends or foes
to put a name. I think the reader who enjoys Dickens's other books has
an impression that it is a kind of melancholy. There are grotesque
figures of the most gorgeous kind; there are scenes that are farcical
even by the standard of the farcical license of Dickens; there is humour
both of the heaviest and of the lightest kind; there are two great comic
personalities who run like a rich vein through the whole story,
Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp; there is one blinding patch of brilliancy, the
satire on American cant; there is Todgers's boarding-house; there is
Bailey; there is Mr. Mould, the incomparable undertaker. But yet in
spite of everything, in spite even of the undertaker, the book is sad.
No one I think ever went to it in that mixed mood of a tired tenderness
and a readiness to believe and laugh in which most of Dickens's novels
are most enjoyed. We go for a particular novel to Dickens as we go for a
particular inn. We go to the sign of the Pickwick Papers. We go to the
sign of the Rudge and Raven. We go to the sign of the Old Curiosities.
We go to the sign of the Two Cities. We go to each or all of them
according to what kind of hospitality and what kind of happiness we
require. But it is always some kind of hospitality and some kind of
happiness that we require. And as in the case of inns we also remember
that while there was shelter in all and food in all and some kind of
fire and some kind of wine in all, yet one has left upon us an
indescribable and unaccountable memory of mortality and decay, of
dreariness in the rooms and even of tastelessness in the banquet. So any
one who has enjoyed the stories of Dickens as they should be enjoyed has
a nameless feeling that this one story is sad and almost sodden. Dickens
himself had this feeling, though his breezy vanity forbade him to
express it in so many words. In spite of Pecksniff, in spite of Mrs.
Gamp, in spite of the yet greater Bailey, the story went lumberingly and
even lifelessly; he found the sales falling off; he fancied his
popularity waning, and by a sudden impulse most inartistic and yet most
artistic, he dragged in the episode of Martin's visit to America, which
is the blazing jewel and the sudden redemption of the book. He wrote it
at an uneasy and unhappy period of his life; when he had ceased
wandering in America, but could not cease wandering altogether; when he
had lost his original routine of work which was violent but regular, and
had not yet settled down to the full enjoyment of his success and his
later years. He poured into this book genius that might make the
mountains laugh, invention that juggled with the stars. But the book was
sad; and he knew it.

The just reason for this is really interesting. Yet it is one that is
not easy to state without guarding one's self on the one side or the
other against great misunderstandings; and these stipulations or
preliminary allowances must in such a case as this of necessity be made
first. Dickens was among other things a satirist, a pure satirist. I
have never been able to understand why this title is always specially
and sacredly reserved for Thackeray. Thackeray was a novelist; in the
strict and narrow sense at any rate, Thackeray was a far greater
novelist than Dickens. But Dickens certainly was the satirist. The
essence of satire is that it perceives some absurdity inherent in the
logic of some position, and that it draws that absurdity out and
isolates it, so that all can see it. Thus for instance when Dickens
says, "Lord Coodle would go out; Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn't come in; and
there being no people to speak of in England except Coodle and Doodle
the country has been without a Government"; when Dickens says this he
suddenly pounces on and plucks out the one inherent absurdity in the
English party system which is hidden behind all its paraphernalia of
Parliaments and Statutes, elections and ballot papers. When all the
dignity and all the patriotism and all the public interest of the
English constitutional party conflict have been fully allowed for, there
does remain the bold, bleak question which Dickens in substance asks,
"Suppose I want somebody else who is neither Coodle nor Doodle." This is
the great quality called satire; it is a kind of taunting
reasonableness; and it is inseparable from a certain insane logic which
is often called exaggeration. Dickens was more of a satirist than
Thackeray for this simple reason: that Thackeray carried a man's
principles as far as that man carried them; Dickens carried a man's
principles as far as a man's principles would go. Dickens in short (as
people put it) exaggerated the man and his principles; that is to say
he emphasised them. Dickens drew a man's absurdity out of him; Thackeray
left a man's absurdity in him. Of this last fact we can take any example
we like; take for instance the comparison between the city man as
treated by Thackeray in the most satiric of his novels, with the city
man as treated by Dickens in one of the mildest and maturest of his.
Compare the character of old Mr. Osborne in _Vanity Fair_ with the
character of Mr. Podsnap in _Our Mutual Friend_. In the case of Mr.
Osborne there is nothing except the solid blocking in of a brutal dull
convincing character. _Vanity Fair_ is not a satire on the City except
in so far as it happens to be true. _Vanity Fair_ is not a satire on the
City, in short, except in so far as the City is a satire on the City.
But Mr. Podsnap is a pure satire; he is an extracting out of the City
man of those purely intellectual qualities which happen to make that
kind of City man a particularly exasperating fool. One might almost say
that Mr. Podsnap is all Mr. Osborne's opinions separated from Mr.
Osborne and turned into a character. In short the satirist is more
purely philosophical than the novelist. The novelist may be only an
observer; the satirist must be a thinker. He must be a thinker, he must
be a philosophical thinker for this simple reason; that he exercises his
philosophical thought in deciding what part of his subject he is to
satirise. You may have the dullest possible intelligence and be a
portrait painter; but a man must have a serious intellect in order to be
a caricaturist. He has to select what thing he will caricature. True
satire is always of this intellectual kind; true satire is always, so
to speak, a variation or fantasia upon the air of pure logic. The
satirist is the man who carries men's enthusiasm further than they carry
it themselves. He outstrips the most extravagant fanatic. He is years
ahead of the most audacious prophet. He sees where men's detached
intellect will eventually lead them, and he tells them the name of the
place--which is generally hell.

Now of this detached and rational use of satire there is one great
example in this book. Even _Gulliver's Travels_ is hardly more
reasonable than Martin Chuzzlewit's travels in the incredible land of
the Americans. Before considering the humour of this description in its
more exhaustive and liberal aspects, it may be first remarked that in
this American part of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, Dickens quite specially
sharpens up his own more controversial and political intelligence. There
are more things here than anywhere else in Dickens that partake of the
nature of pamphleteering, of positive challenge, of sudden repartee, of
pugnacious and exasperating query, in a word of everything that belongs
to the pure art of controversy as distinct not only from the pure art of
fiction but even also from the pure art of satire. I am inclined to
think (to put the matter not only shortly but clumsily) that Dickens was
never in all his life so strictly clever as he is in the American part
of _Martin Chuzzlewit_. There are places where he was more inspired,
almost in the sense of being intoxicated, as, for instance, in the
Micawber feasts of _David Copperfield_; there are places where he wrote
more carefully and cunningly, as, for instance, in the mystery of _The
Mystery of Edwin Drood_; there are places where he wrote very much more
humanly, more close to the ground and to growing things, as in the whole
of that admirable book _Great Expectations_. But I do not think that his
mere abstract acuteness and rapidity of thought were ever exercised with
such startling exactitude as they are in this place in _Martin
Chuzzlewit_. It is to be noted, for instance, that his American
experience had actually worked him up to a heat and habit of argument. A
slave-owner in the Southern States tells Dickens that slave-owners do
not ill-treat their slaves, that it is not to the interest of
slave-owners to ill-treat their slaves. Dickens flashes back that it is
not to the interest of a man to get drunk, but he does get drunk. This
pugnacious atmosphere of parry and riposte must first of all be allowed
for and understood in all the satiric excursus of Martin in America.
Dickens is arguing all the time; and, to do him justice, arguing very
well. These chapters are full not merely of exuberant satire on America
in the sense that Dotheboys Hall or Mr. Bumble's Workhouse are exuberant
satires on England. They are full also of sharp argument with America as
if the man who wrote expected retort and was prepared with rejoinder.
The rest of the book, like the rest of Dickens's books, possesses
humour. This part of the book, like hardly any of Dickens's books,
possesses wit. The republican gentleman who receives Martin on landing
is horrified on hearing an English servant speak of the employer as "the
master." "There are no masters in America," says the gentleman. "All
owners are they?" says Martin. This sort of verbal promptitude is out of
the ordinary scope of Dickens; but we find it frequently in this
particular part of _Martin Chuzzlewit_. Martin himself is constantly
breaking out into a controversial lucidity, which is elsewhere not at
all a part of his character. When they talk to him about the
institutions of America he asks sarcastically whether bowie knives and
swordsticks and revolvers are the institutions of America. All this (if
I may summarise) is expressive of one main fact. Being a satirist means
being a philosopher. Dickens was not always very philosophical; but he
had this permanent quality of the philosopher about him, that he always
remembered people by their opinions. Elijah Pogram was to him the man
who said that "his boastful answer to the tyrant and the despot was that
his bright home was the land of the settin' sun." Mr. Scadder and Mr.
Jefferson Brick were to him the men who said (in cooperation) that "the
libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood." And in these
chapters more than anywhere else he falls into the extreme habit of
satire, that of treating people as if there were nothing about them
except their opinions. It is therefore difficult to accept these pages
as pages in a novel, splendid as they are considered as pages in a
parody. I do not dispute that men have said and do say that "the
libation of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood," that "their
bright homes are the land of the settin' sun," that "they taunt that
lion," that "alone they dare him," or "that softly sleeps the calm ideal
in the whispering chambers of imagination." I have read too much
American journalism to deny that any of these sentences and any of these
opinions may at some time or other have been uttered. I do not deny
that there are such opinions. But I do deny that there are such people.
Elijah Pogram had some other business in life besides defending
defaulting postmasters; he must have been a son or a father or a husband
or at least (admirable thought) a lover. Mr. Chollop had some moments in
his existence when he was not threatening his fellow-creatures with his
sword-stick and his revolver. Of all this human side of such American
types Dickens does not really give any hint at all. He does not suggest
that the bully Chollop had even such coarse good-humour as bullies
almost always have. He does not suggest that the humbug Elijah Pogram
had even as much greasy amiability as humbugs almost invariably have. He
is not studying them as human beings, even as bad human beings; he is
studying them as conceptions, as points of view, as symbols of a state
of mind with which he is in violent disagreement. To put it roughly, he
is not describing characters, he is satirising fads. To put it more
exactly, he is not describing characters; he is persecuting heresies.
There is one thing really to be said against his American satire; it is
a serious thing to be said: it is an argument, and it is true. This can
be said of Martin's wanderings in America, that from the time he lands
in America to the time he sets sail from it he never meets a living man.
He has travelled in the land of Laputa. All the people he has met have
been absurd opinions walking about. The whole art of Dickens in such
passages as these consisted in one thing. It consisted in finding an
opinion that had not a leg to stand on, and then giving it two legs to
stand on.

So much may be allowed; it may be admitted that Dickens is in this sense
the great satirist, in that he can imagine absurd opinions walking by
themselves about the street. It may be admitted that Thackeray would not
have allowed an absurd opinion to walk about the street without at least
tying a man on to it for the sake of safety. But while this first truth
may be evident, the second truth which is the complement of it may
easily be forgotten. On the one hand there was no man who could so much
enjoy mere intellectual satire apart from humanity as Dickens. On the
other hand there was no man who, with another and more turbulent part of
his nature, demanded humanity, and demanded its supremacy over
intellect, more than Dickens. To put it shortly: there never was a man
so much fitted for saying that everything was wrong; and there never was
a man who was so desirous of saying that everything was right. Thus,
when he met men with whom he violently disagreed, he described them as
devils or lunatics; he could not bear to describe them as men. If they
could not think with him on essentials he could not stand the idea that
they were human souls; he cast them out; he forgot them; and if he could
not forget them he caricatured them. He was too emotional to regard them
as anything but enemies, if they were not friends. He was too humane not
to hate them. Charles Lamb said with his inimitable sleek pungency that
he could read all the books there were; he excluded books that obviously
were not books, as cookery books, chessboards bound so as to look like
books, and all the works of modern historians and philosophers. One
might say in much the same style that Dickens loved all the men in the
world; that is he loved all the men whom he was able to recognise as
men; the rest he turned into griffins and chimeras without any serious
semblance to humanity. Even in his books he never hates a human being.
If he wishes to hate him he adopts the simple expedient of making him an
inhuman being. Now of these two strands almost the whole of Dickens is
made up; they are not only different strands, they are even antagonistic
strands. I mean that the whole of Dickens is made up of the strand of
satire and the strand of sentimentalism; and the strand of satire is
quite unnecessarily merciless and hostile, and the strand of
sentimentalism is quite unnecessarily humanitarian and even maudlin. On
the proper interweaving of these two things depends the great part of
Dickens's success in a novel. And by the consideration of them we can
probably best arrive at the solution of the particular emotional enigma
of the novel called _Martin Chuzzlewit_.

_Martin Chuzzlewit_ is, I think, vaguely unsatisfactory to the reader,
vaguely sad and heavy even to the reader who loves Dickens, because in
_Martin Chuzzlewit_ more than anywhere else in Dickens's works, more
even than in _Oliver Twist_, there is a predominance of the harsh and
hostile sort of humour over the hilarious and the humane. It is absurd
to lay down any such little rules for the testing of literature. But
this may be broadly said and yet with confidence: that Dickens is always
at his best when he is laughing at the people whom he really admires. He
is at his most humorous in writing of Mr. Pickwick, who represents
passive virtue. He is at his most humorous in writing of Mr. Sam
Weller, who represents active virtue. He is never so funny as when he is
speaking of people in whom fun itself is a virtue, like the poor people
in the Fleet or the Marshalsea. And in the stories that had immediately
preceded _Martin Chuzzlewit_ he had consistently concerned himself in
the majority of cases with the study of such genial and honourable
eccentrics; if they are lunatics they are amiable lunatics. In the last
important novel before _Martin Chuzzlewit_, _Barnaby Rudge_, the hero
himself is an amiable lunatic. In the novel before that, _The Old
Curiosity Shop_, the two comic figures, Dick Swiveller and the
Marchioness, are not only the most really entertaining, but also the
most really sympathetic characters in the book. Before that came _Oliver
Twist_ (which is, I have said, an exception), and before that
_Pickwick_, where the hero is, as Mr. Weller says, "an angel in
gaiters." Hitherto, then, on the whole, the central Dickens character
had been the man who gave to the poor many things, gold and wine and
feasting and good advice; but among other things gave them a good laugh
at himself. The jolly old English merchant of the Pickwick type was
popular on both counts. People liked to see him throw his money in the
gutter. They also liked to see him throw himself there occasionally. In
both acts they recognised a common quality of virtue.

Now I think it is certainly the disadvantage of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ that
none of its absurd characters are thus sympathetic. There are in the
book two celebrated characters who are both especially exuberant and
amusing even for Dickens, and who are both especially heartless and
abominable even for Dickens--I mean of course Mr. Pecksniff on the one
hand and Mrs. Gamp on the other. The humour of both of them is
gigantesque. Nobody will ever forget the first time he read the words
"Now I should be very glad to see Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg."
It is like remembering first love: there is still some sort of ancient
sweetness and sting. I am afraid that, in spite of many criticisms to
the contrary, I am still unable to take Mr. Pecksniff's hypocrisy
seriously. He does not seem to me so much a hypocrite as a rhetorician;
he reminds me of Serjeant Buzfuz. A very capable critic, Mr. Noyes, said
that I was wrong when I suggested in another place that Dickens must
have loved Pecksniff. Mr. Noyes thinks it clear that Dickens hated
Pecksniff. I cannot believe it. Hatred does inde

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